Cheerful By Request by Edna Ferber

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But Terry freed herself with a final jerk and whipped around the
counter. The two, who had been talking together in an undertone, turned
to welcome her. "We've got a half hour. Come on. It's just over to Clark
and up a block or so."

If you know Chicago at all, you know the University Inn, that gloriously
intercollegiate institution which welcomes any graduate of any school
of experience, and guarantees a post-graduate course in less time than
any similar haven of knowledge. Down a flight of stairs and into the
unwonted quiet that reigns during the hour of low potentiality, between
five and six, the three went, and seated themselves at a table in an
obscure corner. A waiter brought them things in little glasses, though
no order had been given. The woman who had been Ruby Watson was so
silent as to be almost wordless. But the man talked rapidly. He talked
well, too. The same quality that enabled him, voiceless though he was,
to boost a song to success, was making his plea sound plausible in
Terry's ears now.

"I've got to go and make up in a few minutes. So get this. I'm not going
to stick down in this basement eating house forever. I've got too much
talent. If I only had a voice--I mean a singing voice. But I haven't.
But then, neither has Georgie Cohan, and I can't see that it's wrecked
his life any. Look at Elsie Janis! But she sings. And they like it! Now
listen. I've got a song. It's my own. That bit you played for me up at
Gottschalk's is part of the chorus. But it's the words that'll go big.
They're great. It's an aviation song, see? Airship stuff. They're
yelling that it's the airyoplanes that're going to win this war. Well,
I'll help 'em. This song is going to put the aviator where he belongs.
It's going to be the big song of the war. It's going to make 'Tipperary'
sound like a Moody and Sankey hymn. It's the--"

Ruby lifted her heavy-lidded eyes and sent him a meaning look. "Get
down to business, Leon. I'll tell her how good you are while you're
making up."

He shot her a malignant glance, but took her advice. "Now what I've been
looking for for years is somebody who has got the music knack to give me
the accompaniment just a quarter of a jump ahead of my voice, see? I can
follow like a lamb, but I've got to have that feeler first. It's more
than a knack. It's a gift. And you've got it. I know it when I see it. I
want to get away from this cabaret thing. There's nothing in it for a
man of my talent. I'm gunning for vaudeville. But they won't book me
without a tryout. And when they hear my voice they--Well, if me and you
work together we can fool 'em. The song's great. And my makeup's one of
these av-iation costumes to go with the song, see? Pants tight in the
knee and baggy on the hips. And a coat with one of those full skirt
whaddyoucall'ems--"

"Peplums," put in Ruby, placidly.

"Sure. And the girls'll be wild about it. And the words!" he began to
sing, gratingly off-key:

"Put on your sky clothes,
Put on your fly clothes
And take a trip with me.
We'll sail so high
Up in the sky
We'll drop a bomb from Mercury."

"Why, that's awfully cute!" exclaimed Terry. Until now her opinion of
Mr. Sammett's talents had not been on a level with his.

"Yeh, but wait till you hear the second verse. That's only part of the
chorus. You see, he's supposed to be talking to a French girl. He says:

I'll parlez-vous in Francais plain,
You'll answer, '_Cher Americain_,
We'll both. . . . . . . . . . ."

The six o'clock lights blazed up, suddenly. A sad-looking group of men
trailed in and made for a corner where certain bulky, shapeless bundles
were soon revealed as those glittering and tortuous instruments which go
to make a jazz band.

"You better go, Lee. The crowd comes in awful early now, with all those
buyers in town."

Both hands on the table he half rose, reluctantly, still talking. "I've
got three other songs. They make Gottschalk's stuff look sick. All I
want's a chance. What I want you to do is accompaniment. On the stage,
see? Grand piano. And a swell set. I haven't quite made up my mind to
it. But a kind of an army camp room, see? And maybe you dressed as
Liberty. Anyway, it'll be new, and a knock-out. If only we can get away
with the voice thing. Say, if Eddie Foy, all those years never had a--"

The band opened with a terrifying clash of cymbal, and thump of drum.
"Back at the end of my first turn," he said as he fled. Terry followed
his lithe, electric figure. She turned to meet the heavy-lidded gaze of
the woman seated opposite. She relaxed, then, and sat back with a little
sigh. "Well! If he talks that way to the managers I don't see--"

Ruby laughed a mirthless little laugh. "Talk doesn't get it over with
the managers, honey. You've got to deliver."

"Well, but he's--that song _is_ a good one. I don't say it's as good as
he thinks it is, but it's good."

"Yes," admitted the woman, grudgingly, "it's good."

"Well, then?"

The woman beckoned a waiter; he nodded and vanished, and reappeared with
a glass that was twin to the one she had just emptied. "Does he look
like he knew French? Or could make a rhyme?"

"But didn't he? Doesn't he?"

"The words were written by a little French girl who used to skate down
here last winter, when the craze was on. She was stuck on a Chicago kid
who went over to fly for the French."

"But the music?"

"There was a Russian girl who used to dance in the cabaret and she--"

Terry's head came up with a characteristic little jerk. "I don't believe
it!"

"Better." She gazed at Terry with the drowsy look that was so different
from the quick, clear glance of the Ruby Watson who used to dance so
nimbly in the Old Bijou days. "What'd you and your husband quarrel
about, Terry?"

Terry was furious to feel herself flushing. "Oh, nothing. He
just--I--it was--Say, how did you know we'd quarrelled?"

And suddenly all the fat woman's apathy dropped from her like a garment
and some of the old sparkle and animation illumined her heavy face. She
pushed her glass aside and leaned forward on her folded arms, so that
her face was close to Terry's.

"Terry Sheehan, I know you've quarrelled, and I know just what it was
about. Oh, I don't mean the very thing it was about; but the kind of
thing. I'm going to do something for you, Terry, that I wouldn't take
the trouble to do for most women. But I guess I ain't had all the
softness knocked out of me yet, though it's a wonder. And I guess I
remember too plain the decent kid you was in the old days. What was the
name of that little small-time house me and Jim used to play? Bijou,
that's it; Bijou."

The band struck up a new tune. Leon Sammett--slim, sleek, lithe in his
evening clothes--appeared with a little fair girl in pink chiffon. The
woman reached across the table and put one pudgy, jewelled hand on
Terry's arm. "He'll be through in ten minutes. Now listen to me. I left
Jim four years ago, and there hasn't been a minute since then, day or
night, when I wouldn't have crawled back to him on my hands and knees if
I could. But I couldn't. He wouldn't have me now. How could he? How do I
know you've quarrelled? I can see it in your eyes. They look just the
way mine have felt for four years, that's how. I met up with this boy,
and there wasn't anybody to do the turn for me that I'm trying to do for
you. Now get this. I left Jim because when he ate corn on the cob he
always closed his eyes and it drove me wild. Don't laugh."

"I'm not laughing," said Terry.

"Women are like that. One night--we was playing Fond du Lac; I remember
just as plain--we was eating supper and Jim reached for one of those big
yellow ears, and buttered and salted it, and me kind of hanging on to
the edge of the table with my nails. Seemed to me if he shut his eyes
when he put his teeth into that ear of corn I'd scream. And he did. And
I screamed. And that's all."

Terry sat staring at her with a wide-eyed stare, like a sleep walker.
Then she wet her lips, slowly. "But that's almost the very--"

"Kid, go on back home. I don't know whether it's too late or not, but go
anyway. If you've lost him I suppose it ain't any more than you deserve,
but I hope to God you don't get your desserts this time. He's almost
through. If he sees you going he can't quit in the middle of his song to
stop you. He'll know I put you wise, and he'll prob'ly half kill me for
it. But it's worth it. You get."

And Terry--dazed, shaking, but grateful--fled. Down the noisy aisle, up
the stairs, to the street. Back to her rooming house. Out again, with
her suitcase, and into the right railroad station somehow, at last. Not
another Wetona train until midnight. She shrank into a remote corner of
the waiting room and there she huddled until midnight watching the
entrances like a child who is fearful of ghosts in the night.

The hands of the station clock seemed fixed and immovable. The hour
between eleven and twelve was endless. She was on the train. It was
almost morning. It was morning. Dawn was breaking. She was home! She had
the house key clutched tightly in her hand long before she turned
Schroeder's corner. Suppose he had come home! Suppose he had jumped a
town and come home ahead of his schedule. They had quarrelled once
before, and he had done that.

Up the front steps. Into the house. Not a sound. She stood there a
moment in the early morning half-light. She peered into the dining room.
The table, with its breakfast debris, was as she had left it. In the
kitchen the coffee pot stood on the gas stove. She was home. She was
safe. She ran up the stairs, got out of her clothes and into crisp
gingham morning things. She flung open windows everywhere. Down-stairs
once more she plunged into an orgy of cleaning. Dishes, table, stove,
floor, rugs. She washed, scoured, flapped, swabbed, polished. By eight
o'clock she had done the work that would ordinarily have taken until
noon. The house was shining, orderly, and redolent of soapsuds.

During all this time she had been listening, listening, with her
sub-conscious ear. Listening for something she had refused to name
definitely in her mind, but listening, just the same; waiting.

And then, at eight o'clock, it came. The rattle of a key in the lock.
The boom of the front door. Firm footsteps.

He did not go to meet her, and she did not go to meet him. They came
together and were in each other's arms. She was weeping.

"Now, now, old girl. What's there to cry about? Don't, honey; don't.
It's all right."

She raised her head then, to look at him. How fresh, and rosy, and big
he seemed, after that little sallow, yellow restaurant rat.

"How did you get here? How did you happen--?"

"Jumped all the way from Ashland. Couldn't get a sleeper, so I sat up
all night. I had to come back and square things with you, Terry. My mind
just wasn't on my work. I kept thinking how I'd talked--how I'd
talked--"

"Oh, Orville, don't! I can't bear--Have you had your breakfast?"

"Why, no. The train was an hour late. You know that Ashland train."

But she was out of his arms and making for the kitchen. "You go and
clean up. I'll have hot biscuits and everything in fifteen minutes. You
poor boy. No breakfast!"

She made good her promise. It could not have been more than twenty
minutes later when he was buttering his third feathery, golden brown
biscuit. But she had eaten nothing. She watched him, and listened, and
again her eyes were sombre, but for a different reason. He broke open
his egg. His elbow came up just a fraction of an inch. Then he
remembered, and flushed like a schoolboy, and brought it down again,
carefully. And at that she gave a little tremulous cry, and rushed
around the table to him.

"Oh, Orville!" She took the offending elbow in her two arms, and bent
and kissed the rough coat sleeve.

"Why, Terry! Don't, honey. Don't!"

"Oh, Orville, listen--"

"Yes."

"Listen, Orville--"

"I'm listening, Terry."

"I've got something to tell you. There's something you've got to know."

"Yes, I know it, Terry. I knew you'd out with it, pretty soon, if I just
waited."

She lifted an amazed face from his shoulder then, and stared at him.
"But how could you know? You couldn't! How could you?"

He patted her shoulder then, gently. "I can always tell. When you have
something on your mind you always take up a spoon of coffee, and look at
it, and kind of joggle it back and forth in the spoon, and then dribble
it back into the cup again, without once tasting it. It used to get me
nervous when we were first married watching you. But now I know it just
means you're worried about something, and I wait, and pretty soon--"

"Oh, Orville!" she cried, then. "Oh, Orville!"

"Now, Terry. Just spill it, hon. Just spill it to daddy. And you'll feel
better."

VI

THE WOMAN WHO TRIED TO BE GOOD

Before she tried to be a good woman she had been a very bad woman--so
bad that she could trail her wonderful apparel up and down Main Street,
from the Elm Tree Bakery to the railroad tracks, without once having a
man doff his hat to her or a woman bow. You passed her on the street
with a surreptitious glance, though she was well worth looking at--in
her furs and laces and plumes. She had the only full-length sealskin
coat in our town, and Ganz' shoe store sent to Chicago for her shoes.
Hers were the miraculously small feet you frequently see in stout women.

Usually she walked alone; but on rare occasions, especially round
Christmas time, she might have been seen accompanied by some silent,
dull-eyed, stupid-looking girl, who would follow her dumbly in and out
of stores, stopping now and then to admire a cheap comb or a chain set
with flashy imitation stones--or, queerly enough, a doll with yellow
hair and blue eyes and very pink cheeks. But, alone or in company, her
appearance in the stores of our town was the signal for a sudden jump in
the cost of living. The storekeepers mulcted her; and she knew it and
paid in silence, for she was of the class that has no redress. She
owned the House With the Closed Shutters, near the freight depot--did
Blanche Devine. And beneath her silks and laces and furs there was a
scarlet letter on her breast.

In a larger town than ours she would have passed unnoticed. She did not
look like a bad woman. Of course she used too much perfumed white
powder, and as she passed you caught the oversweet breath of a certain
heavy scent. Then, too, her diamond eardrops would have made any woman's
features look hard; but her plump face, in spite of its heaviness, wore
an expression of good-humoured intelligence, and her eyeglasses gave
her somehow a look of respectability. We do not associate vice with
eyeglasses. So in a large city she would have passed for a well-dressed
prosperous, comfortable wife and mother, who was in danger of losing her
figure from an overabundance of good living; but with us she was a town
character, like Old Man Givins, the drunkard, or the weak-minded Binns
girl. When she passed the drug-store corner there would be a sniggering
among the vacant-eyed loafers idling there, and they would leer at each
other and jest in undertones.

So, knowing Blanche Devine as we did, there was something resembling a
riot in one of our most respectable neighbourhoods when it was learned
that she had given up her interest in the house near the freight depot
and was going to settle down in the white cottage on the corner and be
good. All the husbands in the block, urged on by righteously indignant
wives, dropped in on Alderman Mooney after supper to see if the thing
could not be stopped. The fourth of the protesting husbands to arrive
was the Very Young Husband, who lived next door to the corner cottage
that Blanche Devine had bought. The Very Young Husband had a Very Young
Wife, and they were the joint owners of Snooky. Snooky was
three-going-on-four, and looked something like an angel--only healthier
and with grimier hands. The whole neighbourhood borrowed her and tried
to spoil her; but Snooky would not spoil.

Alderman Mooney was down in the cellar fooling with the furnace. He was
in his furnace overalls--a short black pipe in his mouth. Three
protesting husbands had just left. As the Very Young Husband, following
Mrs. Mooney's directions, cautiously descended the cellar stairs,
Alderman Mooney looked up from his tinkering. He peered through a haze
of pipe-smoke.

"Hello!" he called, and waved the haze away with his open palm. "Come on
down! Been tinkering with this blamed furnace since supper. She don't
draw like she ought. 'Long toward spring a furnace always gets balky.
How many tons you used this winter?"

"Oh--ten," said the Very Young Husband shortly. Alderman Mooney
considered it thoughtfully. The Young Husband leaned up against the side
of the cistern, his hands in his pockets. "Say, Mooney, is that right
about Blanche Devine's having bought the house on the corner?"

"You're the fourth man that's been in to ask me that this evening. I'm
expecting the rest of the block before bedtime. She's bought it all
right."

The Young Husband flushed and kicked at a piece of coal with the toe of
his boot.

"Well, it's a darned shame!" he began hotly. "Jen was ready to cry at
supper. This'll be a fine neighbourhood for Snooky to grow up in! What's
a woman like that want to come into a respectable street for anyway? I
own my home and pay my taxes--"

Alderman Mooney looked up.

"So does she," he interrupted. "She's going to improve the place--paint
it, and put in a cellar and a furnace, and build a porch, and lay a
cement walk all round."

The Young Husband took his hands out of his pockets in order to
emphasize his remarks with gestures.

"What's that got to do with it? I don't care if she puts in diamonds for
windows and sets out Italian gardens and a terrace with peacocks on it.
You're the alderman of this ward, aren't you? Well, it was up to you to
keep her out of this block! You could have fixed it with an injunction
or something. I'm going to get up a petition--that's what I'm going--"

Alderman Mooney closed the furnace door with a bang that drowned the
rest of the threat. He turned the draft in a pipe overhead and brushed
his sooty palms briskly together like one who would put an end to a
profitless conversation.

"She's bought the house," he said mildly, "and paid for it. And it's
hers. She's got a right to live in this neighbourhood as long as she
acts respectable."

The Very Young Husband laughed.

"She won't last! They never do."

Alderman Mooney had taken his pipe out of his mouth and was rubbing his
thumb over the smooth bowl, looking down at it with unseeing eyes. On
his face was a queer look--the look of one who is embarrassed because he
is about to say something honest.

"Look here! I want to tell you something: I happened to be up in the
mayor's office the day Blanche signed for the place. She had to go
through a lot of red tape before she got it--had quite a time of it, she
did! And say, kid, that woman ain't so--bad."

The Very Young Husband exclaimed impatiently:

"Oh, don't give me any of that, Mooney! Blanche Devine's a town
character. Even the kids know what she is. If she's got religion or
something, and wants to quit and be decent, why doesn't she go to
another town--Chicago or some place--where nobody knows her?"

That motion of Alderman Mooney's thumb against the smooth pipebowl
stopped. He looked up slowly.

"That's what I said--the mayor too. But Blanche Devine said she wanted
to try it here. She said this was home to her. Funny--ain't it? Said
she wouldn't be fooling anybody here. They know her. And if she moved
away, she said, it'd leak out some way sooner or later. It does, she
said. Always! Seems she wants to live like--well, like other women. She
put it like this: She says she hasn't got religion, or any of that. She
says she's no different than she was when she was twenty. She says that
for the last ten years the ambition of her life has been to be able to
go into a grocery store and ask the price of, say, celery; and, if the
clerk charged her ten when it ought to be seven, to be able to sass
him with a regular piece of her mind--and then sail out and trade
somewhere else until he saw that she didn't have to stand anything from
storekeepers, any more than any other woman that did her own marketing.
She's a smart woman, Blanche is! She's saved her money. God knows I
ain't taking her part--exactly; but she talked a little, and the mayor
and me got a little of her history."

A sneer appeared on the face of the Very Young Husband. He had been
known before he met Jen as a rather industrious sower of that seed known
as wild oats. He knew a thing or two, did the Very Young Husband, in
spite of his youth! He always fussed when Jen wore even a V-necked
summer gown on the street.

"Oh, she wasn't playing for sympathy," west on Alderman Mooney in
answer to the sneer. "She said she'd always paid her way and always
expected to. Seems her husband left her without a cent when she was
eighteen--with a baby. She worked for four dollars a week in a cheap
eating house. The two of 'em couldn't live on that. Then the baby--"

"Good night!" said the Very Young Husband. "I suppose Mrs. Mooney's
going to call?"

"Minnie! It was her scolding all through supper that drove me down to
monkey with the furnace. She's wild--Minnie is." He peeled off his
overalls and hung them on a nail. The Young Husband started to ascend
the cellar stairs. Alderman Mooney laid a detaining finger on his
sleeve. "Don't say anything in front of Minnie! She's boiling! Minnie
and the kids are going to visit her folks out West this summer; so I
wouldn't so much as dare to say 'Good morning!' to the Devine woman.
Anyway a person wouldn't talk to her, I suppose. But I kind of thought
I'd tell you about her."

"Thanks!" said the Very Young Husband dryly.

In the early spring, before Blanche Devine moved in, there came
stonemasons, who began to build something. It was a great stone
fireplace that rose in massive incongruity at the side of the little
white cottage. Blanche Devine was trying to make a home for herself. We
no longer build fireplaces for physical warmth--we build them for the
warmth of the soul; we build them to dream by, to hope by, to home by.

Blanche Devine used to come and watch them now and then as the work
progressed. She had a way of walking round and round the house, looking
up at it pridefully and poking at plaster and paint with her umbrella or
fingertip. One day she brought with her a man with a spade. He spaded up
a neat square of ground at the side of the cottage and a long ridge near
the fence that separated her yard from that of the very young couple
next door. The ridge spelled sweet peas and nasturtiums to our
small-town eyes.

On the day that Blanche Devine moved in there was wild agitation among
the white-ruffled bedroom curtains of the neighbourhood. Later on
certain odours, as of burning dinners, pervaded the atmosphere. Blanche
Devine, flushed and excited, her hair slightly askew, her diamond
eardrops flashing, directed the moving, wrapped in her great fur
coat; but on the third morning we gasped when she appeared out-of-doors,
carrying a little household ladder, a pail of steaming water and sundry
voluminous white cloths. She reared the little ladder against the side
of the house mounted it cautiously, and began to wash windows: with
housewifely thoroughness. Her stout figure was swathed in a grey sweater
and on her head was a battered felt hat--the sort of window-washing
costume that has been worn by women from time immemorial. We noticed
that she used plenty of hot water and clean rags, and that she rubbed
the glass until it sparkled, leaning perilously sideways on the ladder
to detect elusive streaks. Our keenest housekeeping eye could find no
fault with the way Blanche Devine washed windows.

By May, Blanche Devine had left off her diamond eardrops--perhaps it was
their absence that gave her face a new expression. When she went down
town we noticed that her hats were more like the hats the other women in
our town wore; but she still affected extravagant footgear, as is right
and proper for a stout woman who has cause to be vain of her feet. We
noticed that her trips down town were rare that spring and summer. She
used to come home laden with little bundles; and before supper she would
change her street clothes for a neat, washable housedress, as is our
thrifty custom. Through her bright windows we could see her moving
briskly about from kitchen to sitting room; and from the smells that
floated out from her kitchen door, she seemed to be preparing for her
solitary supper the same homely viands that were frying or stewing or
baking in our kitchens. Sometimes you could detect the delectable scent
of browning hot tea biscuit. It takes a brave, courageous, determined
woman to make tea biscuit for no one but herself.

Blanche Devine joined the church. On the first Sunday morning she came
to the service there was a little flurry among the ushers at the
vestibule door. They seated her well in the rear. The second Sunday
morning a dreadful thing happened. The woman next to whom they seated
her turned, regarded her stonily for a moment, then rose agitatedly and
moved to a pew across the aisle. Blanche Devine's face went a dull red
beneath her white powder. She never came again--though we saw the
minister visit her once or twice. She always accompanied him to the door
pleasantly, holding it well open until he was down the little flight of
steps and on the sidewalk. The minister's wife did not call--but, then,
there are limits to the duties of a minister's wife.

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