Cheerful By Request by Edna Ferber

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Sometimes they gathered round Moran and he told them tales they only
half believed. He had been in places whose very names were exotic and
oriental, breathing of sandalwood, and myrrh, and spices and aloes. They
were places over which a boy dreams in books of travel. Moran bared the
vivid tattooing on hairy arms and chest--tattooing representing anchors,
and serpents, and girls' heads, and hearts with arrows stuck through
them. Each mark had its story. A broad-swathed gentleman indeed, Gunner
Moran. He had an easy way with him that made you feel provincial and
ashamed. It made you ashamed of not knowing the sort of thing you used
to be ashamed of knowing.

Visiting day was the worst. They grew savage, somehow, watching the
mothers and sisters and cousins and sweethearts go streaming by to the
various barracks. One of the boys to whom Tyler had never even spoken
suddenly took a picture out of his blouse pocket and showed it to Tyler.
It was a cheap little picture--one of the kind they sell two for a
quarter if one sitter; two for thirty-five if two. This was a twosome.
The boy, and a girl. A healthy, wide-awake wholesome looking small-town
girl, who has gone through high school and cuts out her own shirtwaists.

"She's vice-president of the Silver Star Pleasure Club back home," the
boy confided to Tyler. "I'm president. We meet every other Saturday."

Tyler looked at the picture seriously and approvingly. Suddenly he
wished that he had, tucked away in his blouse, a picture of a
clear-eyed, round-cheeked vice-president of a pleasure club. He took out
his mother's picture and showed it.

"Oh, yeh," said the boy, disinterestedly.

The dragging weeks came to an end. The night of Tyler's restlessness was
the last night of quarantine. To-morrow morning they would be free. At
the end of the week they were to be given shore leave. Tyler had made up
his mind to go to Chicago. He had never been there.

Five thirty. Reveille.

Tyler awoke with the feeling that something was going to happen.
Something pleasant. Then he remembered, and smiled. Dabney Courtney, in
the next hammock, was leaning far over the side of his perilous perch
and delivering himself of his morning speech. Tyler did not quite
understand this young southern elegant. Monicker had two moods, both of
which puzzled Tyler. When he awoke feeling gay he would lean over the
extreme edge of his hammock and drawl, with an affected English accent:

"If this is Venice, where are the canals?"

In his less cheerful moments he would groan, heavily, "There ain't no
Gawd!"

This last had been his morning observation during their many weeks of
durance vile. But this morning he was, for the first time in many days,
enquiring about Venetian waterways.

Tyler had no pal. His years of companionship with his mother had bred in
him a sort of shyness, a diffidence. He heard the other boys making
plans for shore leave. They all scorned Waukegan, which was the first
sizable town beyond the Station. Chicago was their goal. They were like
a horde of play-hungry devils after their confinement. Six weeks of
restricted freedom, six weeks of stored-up energy made them restive as
colts.

"Goin' to Chicago, kid?" Moran asked him, carelessly. It was Saturday
morning.

"Yes. Are you?" eagerly.

"Kin a duck swim?"

At the Y.M.C.A. they had given him tickets to various free amusements
and entertainments. They told him about free canteens, and about other
places where you could get a good meal, cheap. One of the tickets was
for a dance. Tyler knew nothing of dancing. This dance was to be given
at some kind of woman's club on Michigan Boulevard. Tyler read the card,
glumly. A dance meant girls. He knew that. Why hadn't he learned to
dance?

Tyler walked down to the station and waited for the train that would
bring him to Chicago at about one o'clock. The other boys, in little
groups, or in pairs, were smoking and talking. Tyler wanted to join
them, but he did not. They seemed so sufficient unto themselves,
with their plans, and their glib knowledge of places, and amusements,
and girls. On the train they all bought sweets from the train
butcher--chocolate maraschinos, and nut bars, and molasses kisses--and
ate them as greedily as children, until their hunger for sweets was
surfeited.

Tyler found himself in the same car with Moran. He edged over to a
seat near him, watching him narrowly. Moran was not mingling with the
other boys. He kept aloof, his sea-blue eyes gazing out at the flat
Illinois prairie. All about him swept and eddied the currents and
counter-currents of talk.

"They say there's a swell supper in the Tower Building for fifty cents."

"Fifty nothing. Get all you want in the Library canteen for nix."

"Where's this dance, huh?"

"Search _me_."

"Heh, Murph! I'll shoot you a game of pool at the club."

"Naw, I gotta date."

Tyler's glance encountered Moran's, and rested there. Scorn curled the
Irishman's broad upper lip. "Navy! This ain't no navy no more. It's a
Sunday school, that's what! Phonographs, an' church suppers, an' pool
an' dances! It's enough t' turn a fella's stomick. Lot of Sunday school
kids don't know a sail from a tablecloth when they see it."

He relapsed into contemptuous silence.

Tyler, who but a moment before had been envying them their familiarity
with these very things now nodded and smiled understanding at Moran.
"That's right," he said. Moran regarded him a moment, curiously. Then he
resumed his staring out of the window. You would never have guessed that
in that bullet head there was bewilderment and resentment almost
equalling Tyler's, but for a much different reason. Gunner Moran was of
the old navy--the navy that had been despised and spat upon. In those
days his uniform alone had barred him from decent theatres, decent
halls, decent dances, contact with decent people. They had forced him to
a knowledge of the burlesque houses, the cheap theatres, the shooting
galleries, the saloons, the dives. And now, bewilderingly, the public
had right-about faced. It opened its doors to him. It closed its saloons
to him. It sought him out. It offered him amusement. It invited him to
its home, and sat him down at its table, and introduced him to its
daughter.

"Nix!" said Gunner Moran, and spat between his teeth. "Not f'r me. I
pick me own lady friends."

Gunner Moran was used to picking his own lady friends. He had picked
them in wicked Port Said, and in Fiume; in Yokohama and Naples. He had
picked them unerringly, and to his taste, in Cardiff, and Hamburg, and
Vladivostok.

When the train drew in at the great Northwestern station shed he was
down the steps and up the long platform before the wheels had ceased
revolving.

Tyler came down the steps slowly. Blue uniforms were streaming past
him--a flood of them. White leggings twinkled with the haste of their
wearers. Caps, white or blue, flowed like a succession of rippling waves
and broke against the great doorway, and were gone.

In Tyler's town, back home in Marvin, Texas, you knew the train numbers
and their schedules, and you spoke of them by name, familiarly and
affectionately, as Number Eleven and Number Fifty-five. "I reckon
Fifty-five'll be late to-day, on account of the storm."

Now he saw half a dozen trains lined up at once, and a dozen more tracks
waiting, empty. The great train shed awed him. The vast columned waiting
room, the hurrying people, the uniformed guards gave him a feeling of
personal unimportance. He felt very negligible, and useless, and alone.
He stood, a rather dazed blue figure, in the vastness of that shining
place. A voice--the soft, cadenced voice of the negro--addressed him.

"Lookin' fo' de sailors' club rooms?"

Tyler turned. A toothy, middle-aged, kindly negro in a uniform and red
cap. Tyler smiled friendlily. Here was a human he could feel at ease
with. Texas was full of just such faithful, friendly types of negro.

"Reckon I am, uncle. Show me the way?"

Red Cap chuckled and led the way. "Knew you was f'om de south minute Ah
see yo'. Cain't fool me. Le'ssee now. You-all f'om--?"

"I'm from the finest state in the Union. The most glorious state in
the--"

"H'm--Texas," grinned Red Cap.

"How did you know!"

"Ah done heah 'em talk befoh, son. Ah done heah 'em talk be-foh."

It was a long journey through the great building to the section that had
been set aside for Tyler and boys like him. Tyler wondered how any one
could ever find it alone. When the Red Cap left him, after showing him
the wash rooms, the tubs for scrubbing clothes, the steam dryers, the
bath-tubs, the lunch room, Tyler looked after him regretfully. Then he
sped after him and touched him on the arm.

"Listen. Could I--would they--do you mean I could clean up in there--as
much as I wanted? And wash my things? And take a bath in a bathtub, with
all the hot water I want?"

"Yo' sho' kin. On'y things look mighty grabby now. Always is Sat'days.
Jes' wait aroun' an' grab yo' tu'n."

Tyler waited. And while he waited he watched to see how the other boys
did things. He saw how they scrubbed their uniforms with scrubbing
brushes, and plenty of hot water and soap. He saw how they hung them
carefully, so that they might not wrinkle, in the dryers. He saw them
emerge, glowing, from the tub rooms. And he waited, the fever of
cleanliness burning in his eye.

His turn came. He had waited more than an hour, reading, listening to
the phonograph and the electric piano, and watching.

Now he saw his chance and seized it. And then he went through a ceremony
that was almost a ritual. Stella Kamps, could she have seen it, would
have felt repaid for all her years of soap-and-water insistence.

First he washed out the stationary tub with soap, and brush, and
scalding water. Then he scalded the brush. Then the tub again. Then,
deliberately, and with the utter unconcern of the male biped he divested
himself, piece by piece, of every stitch of covering wherewith his body
was clothed. And he scrubbed them all. He took off his white leggings
and his white cap and scrubbed those, first. He had seen the other boys
follow that order of procedure. Then his flapping blue flannel trousers,
and his blouse. Then his underclothes, and his socks. And finally he
stood there, naked and unabashed, slim, and pink and silver as a
mountain trout. His face, as he bent over the steamy tub, was very red,
and moist and earnest. His yellow hair curled in little damp ringlets
about his brow. Then he hung his trousers and blouse in the dryers
without wringing them (wringing, he had been told, wrinkled them). He
rinsed and wrung, and flapped the underclothes, though, and shaped his
cap carefully, and spread his leggings, and hung those in the dryer,
too. And finally, with a deep sigh of accomplishment, he filled one of
the bathtubs in the adjoining room--filled it to the slopping-over point
with the luxurious hot water, and he splashed about in this, and
reclined in it, gloriously, until the waiting ones threatened to pull
him out. Then he dried himself and issued forth all flushed and rosy. He
wrapped himself in a clean coarse sheet, for his clothes would not be
dry for another half hour. Swathed in the sheet like a Roman senator he
lay down on one of the green velvet couches, relics of past Pullman
glories, and there, with the rumble and roar of steel trains overhead,
with the smart click of the billiard balls sounding in his ears, with
the phonograph and the electric piano going full blast, with the boys
dancing and larking all about the big room, he fell sound asleep as only
a boy cub can sleep.

When he awoke an hour later his clothes were folded in a neat pile by
the deft hand of some jackie impatient to use the drying space for his
own garments. Tyler put them on. He stood before a mirror and brushed
his hair until it glittered. He drew himself up with the instinctive
pride and self respect that comes of fresh clean clothes against the
skin. Then he placed his absurd round hat on his head at what he
considered a fetching angle, though precarious, and sallied forth on the
streets of Chicago in search of amusement and adventure.

He found them.

Madison and Canal streets, west, had little to offer him. He sensed that
the centre of things lay to the east, so he struck out along Madison,
trying not to show the terror with which the grim, roaring, clamorous
city filled him. He jingled the small coins in his pocket and strode
along, on the surface a blithe and carefree jackie on shore leave; a
forlorn and lonely Texas boy, beneath.

It was late afternoon. His laundering, his ablutions and his nap had
taken more time than he had realised. It was a mild spring day, with
just a Lake Michigan evening snap in the air. Tyler, glancing about
alertly, nevertheless felt dreamy, and restless, and sort of melting,
like a snow-heap in the sun. He wished he had some one to talk to. He
thought of the man on the train who had said, with such easy confidence,
"I got a date." Tyler wished that he too had a date--he who had never
had a rendezvous in his life. He loitered a moment on the bridge. Then
he went on, looking about him interestedly, and comparing Chicago,
Illinois, with Marvin, Texas, and finding the former sadly lacking. He
passed LaSalle, Clark. The streets were packed. The noise and rush
tired him, and bewildered him. He came to a moving picture theatre--one
of the many that dot the district. A girl occupied the little ticket
kiosk. She was rather a frowsy girl, not too young, and with a certain
look about the jaw. Tyler walked up to the window and shoved his money
through the little aperture. The girl fed him a pink ticket without
looking up. He stood there looking at her. Then he asked her a question.
"How long does the show take?" He wanted to see the colour of her eyes.
He wanted her to talk to him.

"'Bout a hour," said the girl, and raised wise eyes to his.

"Thanks," said Tyler, fervently, and smiled. No answering smile curved
the lady's lips. Tyler turned and went in. There was an alleged comic
film. Tyler was not amused. It was followed by a war picture. He left
before the show was over. He was very hungry by now. In his blouse
pocket were the various information and entertainment tickets with which
the Y.M.C.A. man had provided him. He had taken them out, carefully,
before he had done his washing. Now he looked them over. But a dairy
lunch room invited him, with its white tiling, and its pans of baked
apples, and browned beans and its coffee tank. He went in and ate a
solitary supper that was heavy on pie and cake.

When he came out to the street again it was evening. He walked over to
State Street (the wrong side). He took the dance card out of his pocket
and looked at it again. If only he had learned to dance. There'd be
girls. There'd have to be girls at a dance. He stood staring into the
red and tin-foil window display of a cigar store, turning the ticket
over in his fingers, and the problem over in his mind.

Suddenly, in his ear, a woman's voice, very soft and low. "Hello,
Sweetheart!" the voice said. His nickname! He whirled around, eagerly.

The girl was a stranger to him. But she was smiling, friendlily, and she
was pretty, too, sort of. "Hello, Sweetheart!" she said, again.

"Why, how-do, ma'am," said Tyler, Texas fashion.

"Where you going, kid?" she asked.

Tyler blushed a little. "Well, nowhere in particular, ma'am. Just kind
of milling around."

"Come on along with me," she said, and linked her arm in his.

"Why--why--thanks, but--"

And yet Texas people were always saying easterners weren't friendly. He
felt a little uneasy, though, as he looked down into her smiling face.
Something--

"Hello, Sweetheart!" said a voice, again. A man's voice, this time. Out
of the cigar store came Gunner Moran, the yellow string of a tobacco bag
sticking out of his blouse pocket, a freshly rolled cigarette between
his lips.

A queer feeling of relief and gladness swept over Tyler. And then Moran
looked sharply at the girl and said, "Why, hello, Blanche!"

"Hello yourself," answered the girl, sullenly.

"Thought you was in 'Frisco."

"Well, I ain't."

Moran shifted his attention from the girl to Tyler. "Friend o' yours?"

Before Tyler could open his lips to answer the girl put in, "Sure he is.
Sure I am. We been around together all afternoon."

Tyler jerked. "Why, ma'am, I guess you've made a mistake. I never saw
you before in my life. I kind of thought when you up and spoke to me you
must be taking me for somebody else. Well, now, isn't that funny--"

The smile faded from the girl's face, and it became twisted with fury.
She glared at Moran, her lips drawn back in a snarl. "Who're you to go
buttin' into my business! This guy's a friend of mine, I tell yuh!"

"Yeh? Well, he's a friend of mine, too. Me an' him had a date to meet
here right now and we're goin' over to a swell little dance on Michigan
Avenoo. So it's you who's buttin' in, Blanche, me girl."

The girl stood twisting her handkerchief savagely. She was panting a
little. "I'll get you for this."

"Beat it!" said Moran. He tucked his arm through Tyler's, with a little
impelling movement, and Tyler found himself walking up the street at a
smart gait, leaving the girl staring after them.

Tyler Kamps was an innocent, but he was not a fool. At what he had
vaguely guessed a moment before, he now knew. They walked along in
silence, the most ill-sorted pair that you might hope to find in all
that higgledy-piggledy city. And yet with a new, strong bond between
them. It was more than fraternal. It had something of the character of
the feeling that exists between a father and son who understand each
other.

Man-like, they did not talk of that which they were thinking.

Tyler broke the silence.

"Do you dance?"

"Me! Dance! Well, I've mixed with everything from hula dancers to geisha
girls, not forgettin' the Barbary Coast in the old days, but--well, I
ain't what you'd rightly call a dancer. Why you askin'?"

"Because I can't dance, either. But we'll just go up and see what it's
like, anyway."

"See wot wot's like?"

Tyler took out his card again, patiently. "This dance we're going to."

They had reached the Michigan Avenue address given on the card, and
Tyler stopped to look up at the great, brightly lighted building. Moran
stopped too, but for a different reason. He was staring, open-mouthed,
at Tyler Kamps.

"You mean t' say you thought I was goin'--"

He choked. "Oh, my Gawd!"

Tyler smiled at him, sweetly. "I'm kind of scared, too. But Monicker
goes to these dances and he says they're right nice. And lots of--of
pretty girls. Nice girls. I wouldn't go alone. But you--you're used to
dancing, and parties and--girls."

He linked his arm through the other man's. Moran allowed himself to be
propelled along, dazedly. Still protesting, he found himself in the
elevator with a dozen red-cheeked, scrubbed-looking jackies. At which
point Moran, game in the face of horror, accepted the inevitable. He
gave a characteristic jerk from the belt.

"Me, I'll try anything oncet. Lead me to it."

The elevator stopped at the ninth floor. "Out here for the jackies'
dance," said the elevator boy.

The two stepped out with the others. Stepped out gingerly, caps in hand.
A corridor full of women. A corridor a-flutter with girls. Talk.
Laughter. Animation. In another moment the two would have turned and
fled, terrified. But in that half-moment of hesitation and bewilderment
they were lost.

A woman approached them hand outstretched. A tall, slim, friendly
looking woman, low-voiced, silk-gowned, inquiring.

"Good-evening!" she said, as if she had been haunting the halls in the
hope of their coming. "I'm glad to see you. You can check your caps
right there. Do you dance?"

Two scarlet faces. Four great hands twisting at white caps in an agony
of embarrassment. "Why, no ma'am."

"That's fine. We'll teach you. Then you'll go into the ball room and
have a wonderful time."

"But--" in choked accents from Moran.

"Just a minute. Miss Hall!" She beckoned a diminutive blonde in blue.
"Miss Hall, this is Mr.--ah--Mr. Moran. Thanks. And Mr.?--yes--Mr.
Kamps. Tyler Kamps. They want to learn to dance. I'll turn them right
over to you. When does your class begin?"

Miss Hall glanced at a toy watch on the tiny wrist. Instinctively and
helplessly Moran and Tyler focused their gaze on the dials that bound
their red wrists. "Starting right now," said Miss Hall, crisply. She
eyed the two men with calm appraising gaze. "I'm sure you'll both make
wonderful dancers. Follow me."

She turned. There was something confident, dauntless, irresistible about
the straight little back. The two men stared at it. Then at each other.
Panic was writ large on the face of each. Panic, and mutiny. Flight was
in the mind of both. Miss Hall turned, smiled, held out a small white
hand. "Come on," she said. "Follow me."

And the two, as though hypnotised, followed.

A fair-sized room, with a piano in one corner and groups of fidgeting
jackies in every other corner. Moran and Tyler sighed with relief at
sight of them. At least they were not to be alone in their agony.

Miss Hall wasted no time. Slim ankles close together, head held high,
she stood in the centre of the room. "Now then, form a circle please!"

Twenty six-foot, well-built specimens of manhood suddenly became
shambling hulks. They clumped forward, breathing hard, and smiling
mirthlessly, with an assumption of ease that deceived no one, least of
all, themselves. "A little lively, please. Don't look so scared. I'm not
a bit vicious. Now then, Miss Weeks! A fox trot."

Miss Weeks, at the piano, broke into spirited strains. The first
faltering steps in the social career of Gunner Moran and Tyler Kamps had
begun.

To an onlooker, it might have been mirth-provoking if it hadn't been,
somehow, tear-compelling. The thing that little Miss Hall was doing
might have seemed trivial to one who did not know that it was
magnificent. It wasn't dancing merely that she was teaching these
awkward, serious, frightened boys. She was handing them a key that would
unlock the social graces. She was presenting them with a magic something
that would later act as an open sesame to a hundred legitimate delights.

She was strictly business, was Miss Hall. No nonsense about her.
"One-two-three-four! And a _one_-two _three_-four. One-two-three-four!
And a _turn_-two, _turn_-four. Now then, all together. Just four
straight steps as if you were walking down the street. That's it!
One-two-three-four! Don't look at me. Look at my feet. And a _one_-two
_three_-four."

Red-faced, they were. Very earnest. Pathetically eager and docile. Weeks
of drilling had taught them to obey commands. To them the little
dancing teacher whose white spats twinkled so expertly in the tangle of
their own clumsy clumping boots was more than a pretty girl. She was
knowledge. She was power. She was the commanding officer. And like
children they obeyed.

Moran's Barbary Coast experience stood him in good stead now, though the
stern and watchful Miss Hall put a quick stop to a certain tendency
toward shoulder work. Tyler possessed what is known as a rhythm sense.
An expert whistler is generally a natural dancer. Stella Kamps had
always waited for the sound of his cheerful whistle as he turned the
corner of Vernon Street. High, clear, sweet, true, he would approach his
top note like a Tettrazini until, just when you thought he could not
possibly reach that dizzy eminence he did reach it, and held it, and
trilled it, bird-like, in defiance of the laws of vocal equilibrium.

His dancing was much like that. Never a half-beat behind the
indefatigable Miss Weeks. It was a bit laboured, at first, but it was
true. Little Miss Hall, with the skilled eye of the specialist, picked
him at a glance.

"You've danced before?"

"No ma'am."

"Take the head of the line, please. Watch Mr. Kamps. Now then, all
together, please."

And they were off again.

At 9.45 Tyler Kamps and Gunner Moran were standing in the crowded
doorway of the ballroom upstairs, in a panic lest some girl should ask
them to dance; fearful lest they be passed by. Little Miss Hall had
brought them to the very door, had left them there with a stern
injunction not to move, and had sped away in search of partners for
them.

Gunner Moran's great scarlet hands were knotted into fists. His Adam's
apple worked convulsively.

"Le's duck," he whispered hoarsely. The jackie band in the corner
crashed into the opening bars of a fox trot.

"Oh, it don't seem--" But it was plain that Tyler was weakening. Another
moment and they would have turned and fled. But coming toward them was
little Miss Hall, her blonde head bobbing in and out among the swaying
couples. At her right and left was a girl. Her bright eyes held her two
victims in the doorway. They watched her approach, and were helpless to
flee. They seemed to be gripped by a horrible fascination. Their limbs
were fluid.

A sort of groan rent Moran. Miss Hall and the two girls stood before
them, cool, smiling, unruffled.

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