The big town - Quick Returns - (2)

“People!” I said. “Who and the hell voted for Prohibition if it wasn’t the people?”
    “The people of where?” he says. “A lot of small-time hicks that couldn’t buy a drink if they wanted it.”
    “Including the hicks,” I says, “that’s in the New York State legislature.”
    “But not the people of New York City,” he said. “And you can’t tell me it’s fair to spring a thing like this without warning on men that’s got their fortunes tied up in liquor that they can’t never get rid of now, only at a sacrifice.”
    “You’re right,” I said. “They ought to give them some warning. Instead of that they was never even a hint of what was coming off till Maine went dry seventy years ago.”
    “Maine?” he said. “What the hell is Maine?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “Only they was a ship or a boat or something named after it once, and the Spaniards sunk it and we sued them for libel or something.”
    “You’re a smart Aleck,” he said. “But speaking about war, where was you?”
    “In the shipyards at South Bend painting a duck boat,” I says. “And where was you?”
    “I’d of been in there in a few more weeks,” he says. “They wasn’t no slackers in the Big Town.”
    “No,” said I, “and America will never forget New York for coming in on our side.”
    By this time the gals was both giving me dirty looks, and we’d eat all we could get, so we paid our checks and went back in our car and I felt kind of apologetic, so I dug down in the old grip and got out a bottle of bourbon that a South Bend pal of mine, George Hull, had give me the day before; and Griffin and I went in the washroom with it and before the evening was over we was pretty near ready to forget national boundaries and kiss.
    The old bourb’ helped me save money the next morning, as I didn’t care for no breakfast. Ella and Kate went in with Griffin and you could of knocked me over with a coupling pin when the Mrs. come back and reported that he’d insisted on paying the check. “He told us all about himself,” she said. “His name is Francis Griffin and he’s in Wall Street. Last year he cleared twenty thousand dollars in commissions and everything.”
    “He’s a piker,” I says. “Most of them never even think under six figures.”
    “There you go!” said the Mrs. “You never believe nothing. Why shouldn’t he be telling the truth? Didn’t he buy our breakfast?”
    “I been buying your breakfast for five years,” I said, “but that don’t prove that I’m knocking out twenty thousand per annum in Wall Street.”
    Francis and Katie was setting together four or five seats ahead of us.
    “You ought to of seen the way he looked at her in the diner,” said the Mrs. “He looked like he wanted to eat her up.”
    “Everybody gets desperate in a diner these days,” I said. “Did you and Kate go fifty-fifty with him? Did you tell him how much money we got?”
    “I should say not!” says Ella. “But I guess we did say that you wasn’t doing nothing just now and that we was going to New York to see Life, after being cooped up in a small town all these years. And Sis told him you’d made us put pretty near everything in bonds, so all we can spend is eight thousand a year. He said that wouldn’t go very far in the Big Town.”
    “I doubt if it ever gets as far as the Big Town,” I said. “It won’t if he makes up his mind to take it away from us.”
    “Oh, shut up!” said the Mrs. “He’s all right and I’m for him, and I hope Sis is too. They’d make a stunning couple. I wished I knew what they’re talking about.”
    “Well,” I said, “they’re both so reserved that I suppose they’re telling each other how they’re affected by cucumbers.”
    When they come back and joined us Ella said: “We was just remarking how well you two young things seemed to be getting along. We was wondering what you found to say to one another all this time.”
    “Well,” said Francis, “just now I think we were discussing you. Your sister said you’d been married five years and I pretty near felt like calling her a fibber. I told her you looked like you was just out of high school.”
    “I’ve heard about you New Yorkers before,” said the Mrs. “You’re always trying to flatter somebody.”
    “Not me,” said Francis. “I never say nothing without meaning it.”
    “But sometimes,” says I, “you’d ought to go on and explain the meaning.”
    Along about Schenectady my appetite begin to come back. I’d made it a point this time to find out when the diner was going to open, and then when it did our party fell in with the door.
    “The wife tells me you’re on the stock exchange,” I says to Francis when we’d give our order.
    “Just in a small way,” he said. “But they been pretty good to me down there. I knocked out twenty thousand last year.”
    “That’s what he told us this morning,” said Ella.
    “Well,” said I, “they’s no reason for a man to forget that kind of money between Rochester and Albany, even if this is a slow train.”
    “Twenty thousand isn’t a whole lot in the Big Town,” said Francis, “but still and all, I manage to get along and enjoy myself a little on the side.”
    “I suppose it’s enough to keep one person,” I said.
    “Well,” says Francis, “they say two can live as cheap as one.”
    Then him and Kate and Ella all giggled, and the waiter brought in a part of what he thought we’d ordered and we eat what we could and ast for the check. Francis said he wanted it and I was going to give in to him after a long hard struggle, but the gals reminded him that he’d paid for breakfast, so he said all right, but we’d all have to take dinner with him some night.
    I and Francis set a wile in the washroom and smoked, and then he went to entertain the gals, but I figured the wife would go right to sleep like she always does when they’s any scenery to look out at, so I stuck where I was and listened to what a couple of toothpick salesmen from Omsk would of done with the League of Nations if Wilson had of had sense enough to leave it to them.
    Pulling into the Grand Central Station, Francis apologized for not being able to steer us over to the Baldwin and see us settled, but said he had to rush right downtown and report on his Chicago trip before the office closed. To see him when he parted with the gals you’d of thought he was going clear to Siberia to compete in the Olympic Games, or whatever it is we’re in over there.
    Well, I took the heiresses to the Baldwin and got a regular Big Town welcome. Ella and Kate set against a pillar wile I tried different tricks to make an oil-haired clerk look at me. New York hotel clerks always seem to of just dropped something and can’t take their eyes off the floor. Finally I started to pick up the register and the guy give me the fish eye and ast what he could do for me.
    “Well,” I said, “when I come to a hotel I don’t usually want to buy a straw hat.”
    He ast me if I had a reservation and I told him no.
    “Can’t do nothing for you then,” he says. “Not till to-morrow morning anyway.”
    So I went back to the ladies.
    “We’ll have to go somewheres else,” I said. “This joint’s a joint. They won’t give us nothing till to-morrow.”
    “But we can’t go nowheres else,” said the Mrs. “What would Mr. Griffin think, after recommending us to come here?”
    “Well,” I said, “if you think I’m going to park myself in a four-post chair all night just because we got a tip on a hotel from Wall Street you’re Queen of the Cuckoos.”
    “Are you sure they haven’t anything at all?” she says.
    “Go ask them yourself!” I told her.
    Well, she did, and in about ten minutes she come back and said everything was fixed.
    “They’ll give us a single room with bath and a double room with bath for fifteen dollars a day,” she said.
    “‘Give us’ is good!” said I.
    “I told him we’d wired for reservations and it wasn’t our fault if the wire didn’t get here,” she said. “He was awfully nice.”
    Our rooms was right close to each other on the twenty-first floor. On the way up we decided by two votes to one that we’d dress for dinner. I was still monkeying with my tie when Katie come in for Ella to look her over. She had on the riskiest dress she’d bought in Chi.
    “It’s a pretty dress,” she said, “but I’m afraid maybe it’s too daring for just a hotel dining room.”
    Say, we hadn’t no sooner than set down in the hotel dining room when two other gals come in that made my team look like they was dressed for a sleigh ride with Doc Cook.
    “I guess you don’t feel so daring now,” I said. “Compared to that baby in black you’re wearing Jess Willard’s ulster.”
    “Do you know what that black gown cost?” said Ella. “Not a cent under seven hundred dollars.”
    “That would make the material twenty-one hundred dollars a yard,” I says.
    “I’d like to know where she got it,” said Katie.
    “Maybe she cut up an old stocking,” said I.
    “I wished now,” said the Mrs., “that we’d waited till we got here before we bought our clothes.”
    “You can bet one thing,” says Katie. “Before we’re ast out anywheres on a real party we’ll have something to wear that isn’t a year old.”
    “First thing to-morrow morning,” says the Mrs., “we’ll go over on Fifth Avenue and see what we can see.”
    “They’ll only be two on that excursion,” I says.
    “Oh, we don’t want you along,” said Ella. “But I do wished you’d go to some first-class men’s store and get some ties and shirts and things that don’t look like an embalmer.”
    Well, after a wile one of the waiters got it in his head that maybe we hadn’t came in to take a bath, so he fetched over a couple of programs.
    “Never mind them,” I says. “What’s ready? We’re in a hurry.”
    “The Long Island Duckling’s very nice,” he said. “And how about some nice au gratin potatoes and some nice lettuce and tomato salad with Thousand Island dressing, and maybe some nice French pastry?”
    “Everything seems to be nice here,” I said. “But wait a minute. How about something to drink?”
    He give me a mysterious smile.
    “Well,” he said, “they’re watching us pretty close here, but we serve something we call a cup. It comes from the bar and we’re not supposed to know what the bartender puts in it.”
    “We’ll try and find out,” I said. “And rush this order through, as we’re starved.”
    So he frisked out and was back again in less than an hour with another guy to help carry the stuff, though Lord knows he could of parked the three ducklings on one eyelid and the whole meal on the back of his hand. As for the cup, when you tasted it they wasn’t no big mystery about what the bartender had put in it--a bottle of seltzer and a prune and a cherry and an orange peel, and maybe his finger. The check come to eighteen dollars and Ella made me tip him the rest of a twenty.
    Before dinner the gals had been all for staying up a wile and looking the crowd over, but when we was through they both owned up that they hadn’t slept much on the train and was ready for bed.
    Ella and Kate was up early in the morning. They had their breakfast without me and went over to stun Fifth Avenue. About ten o’clock Francis phoned to say he’d call round for us that evening and take us to dinner. The gals didn’t get back till late in the afternoon, but from one o’clock on I was too busy signing for packages to get lonesome. Ella finally staggered in with some more and I told her about our invitation.
    “Yes, I know,” she said.
    “How do you know?” I ast her.
    “He told us,” she said. “We had to call him up to get a check cashed.”
    “You got plenty nerve!” I said. “How does he know your checks is good?”
    “Well, he likes us,” she said. “You’ll like us too when you see us in some of the gowns we bought.”
    “Some!” I said.
    “Why, yes,” said the Mrs. “You don’t think a girl can go round in New York with one evening dress!”
    “How much money did you spend to-day?” I ast her.
    “Well,” she said, “things are terribly high--that is, nice things. And then, of course, there’s suits and hats and things besides the gowns. But remember, it’s our money. And as I told you, it’s an investment. When young Mister Wall Street sees Kate to-night it’ll be all off.”
    “I didn’t call on you for no speech,” I says. “I ast you how much you spent.”
    “Not quite sixteen hundred dollars.”
    I was still out on my feet when the phone rung. Ella answered it and then told me it was all right about the tickets.
    “What tickets?” I said.
    “Why, you see,” she says, “after young Griffin fixing us up with that check and inviting us to dinner and everything we thought it would be nice to take him to a show to-night. Kate wanted to see Ups and Downs, but the girl said she couldn’t get us seats for it. So I ast that nice clerk that took care of us yesterday and he’s fixed it.”
    “All right,” I said, “but when young Griffin starts a party, why and the hell not let him finish it?”
    “I suppose he would of took us somewheres after dinner,” says the Mrs., “but I couldn’t be sure. And between you and I, I’m positive that if he and Kate is throwed together a whole evening, and her looking like she’ll look to-night, we’ll get mighty quick returns on our investment.”
    Well, to make a short story out of it, the gals finally got what they called dressed, and I wished Niles, Michigan, or South Bend could of seen them. If boxers wore bathing skirts I’d of thought I was in the ring with a couple of bantams.
    “Listen!” I said. “What did them two girdles cost?”
    “Mine was three hundred and Kate’s three hundred and fifty,” said the Mrs.
    “Well,” I says, “don’t you know that you could of went to any cut-rate drug store and wrapped yourself up just as warm in thirty-two cents’ worth of adhesive tape? Listen!” I said. “What’s the use of me paying a burglar for tickets to a show like Ups and Downs when I could set round here and look at you for nothing?”
    Then Griffin rung up to say that he was waiting and we went downstairs. Francis took us in the same dining room we’d been in the night before, but this time the waiters all fought each other to get to us first.
    I don’t know what we eat, as Francis had something on the hip that kind of dazed me for a wile, but afterwards I know we got a taxi and went to the theater. The tickets was there in my name and only cost me thirteen dollars and twenty cents.
    Maybe you seen this show wile it was here. Some show! I didn’t read the program to see who wrote it, but I guess the words was by Noah and the music took the highest awards at the St. Louis Fair. They had a good system on the gags. They didn’t spring none but what you’d heard all your life and knew what was coming, so instead of just laughing at the point you laughed all the way through it.
    I said to Ella, I said, “I bet the birds that run this don’t want prohibition. If people paid $3.30 apiece and come in here sober they’d come back the next night with a machine gun.”
    “I think it’s dandy,” she says, “and you’ll notice every seat is full. But listen! Will you do something for me? When this is over suggest that we go up to the Castle Roof for a wile.”
    “What for?” I said. “I’m sleepy.”
    “Just this once,” she says. “You know what I told you about quick returns!”
    Well, I give in and made the suggestion, and I never seen people so easy coaxed. I managed to get a ringside table for twenty-two bucks. Then I ast the boy how about getting a drink and he ast me if I knew any of the head waiters.
    “I do,” says Francis. “Tell Hector it’s for Frank Griffin’s party.”
    So we ordered four Scotch highballs and some chicken à la King, and then the dinge orchestra tore loose some jazz and I was expecting a dance with Ella, but before she could ask me Francis had ast her, and I had one with Kate.
    “Your Wall Street friend’s a fox,” I says, “asking an old married lady to dance so’s to stand in with the family.”
    “Old married lady!” said Kate. “Sis don’t look a day over sixteen to-night.”
    “How are you and Francis coming?” I ast her.
    “I don’t know,” she says. “He acts kind of shy. He hasn’t hardly said a word to me all evening.”
    Well, they was another jazz and I danced it with Ella; then her and Francis had another one and I danced again with Kate. By this time our food and refreshments was served and the show was getting ready to start.
    I could write a book on what I don’t remember about that show. The first sip of their idear of a Scotch highball put me down for the count of eight and I was practic’lly unconscious till the waiter woke me up with a check for forty bucks.
    Francis seen us home and said he would call up again soon, and when Ella and I was alone I made the remark that I didn’t think he’d ever strain his larnix talking to Kate.
    “He acts gun-shy when he’s round her,” I says. “You seem to be the one that draws him out.”
    “It’s a good sign,” she says. “A man’s always embarrassed when he’s with a girl he’s stuck on. I’ll bet you anything you want to bet that within a week something’ll happen.”
    Well, she win. She’d of win if she’d of said three days instead of a week. It was a Wednesday night when we had that party, and on the Friday Francis called up and said he had tickets for the Palace. I’d been laid up mean wile with the Scotch influenza, so I told the gals to cut me out. I was still awake yet when Ella come in a little after midnight.
    “Well,” I said, “are we going to have a brother-in-law?”
    “Mighty soon,” she says.
    So I ast her what had came off.
    “Nothing--to-night,” she says, “except this: He wrote me a note. He wants me to go with him to-morrow afternoon and look at a little furnished apartment. And he ast me if I could come without Sis, as he wants to pull a surprise on her. So I wondered if you couldn’t think of some way to fix it so’s I can sneak off for a couple of hours.”
    “Sure!” I said. “Just tell her you didn’t sleep all night and you’re wore out and you want to take a nap.”
    So she pulled this gag at lunch Saturday and Katie said she was tired too. She went up to her room and Ella snuck out to keep her date with Francis. In less than an hour she romped into our room again and throwed herself on the bed.
    “Well,” I says, “it must of been a little apartment if it didn’t only take you this long to see it.”
    “Oh, shut up!” she said. “I didn’t see no apartment. And don’t say a word to me or I’ll scream.”
    Well, I finally got her calmed down and she give me the details. It seems that she’d met Francis, and he’d got a taxi and they’d got in the taxi and they hadn’t no sooner than got in the taxi when Francis give her a kiss.
    “Quick returns,” I says.
    “I’ll kill you if you say another word!” she says.
    So I managed to keep still.
    Well, I didn’t know Francis’ home address, and Wall Street don’t run Sundays, so I spent the Sabbath training on a quart of rye that a bell hop picked up at a bargain sale somewheres for fifteen dollars. Mean wile Katie had been let in on the secret and staid in our room all day, moaning like a prune-fed calf.
    “I’m afraid to leave her alone,” says Ella. “I’m afraid she’ll jump out the window.”
    “You’re easily worried,” I said. “What I’m afraid of is that she won’t.”
    Monday morning finally come, as it generally always does, and I told the gals I was going to some first-class men’s store and buy myself some ties and shirts that didn’t look like a South Bend embalmer.
    So the only store I knew about was H. L. Krause & Co. in Wall Street, but it turned out to be an office. I ast for Mr. Griffin and they ast me my name and I made one up, Sam Hall or something, and out he come.
    If I told you the rest of it you’d think I was bragging. But I did bust a few records. Charley Brickley and Walter Eckersall both kicked five goals from field in one football game, and they was a bird named Robertson or something out at Purdue that kicked seven. Then they was one of the old-time ball players, Bobby Lowe or Ed Delehanty, that hit four or five home runs in one afternoon. And out to Toledo that time Dempsey made big Jess set down seven times in one round.
    Well, listen! In a little less than three minutes I floored this bird nine times and I kicked him for eight goals from the field and I hit him over the fence for ten home runs. Don’t talk records to me!
    So that’s what they meant in the clipping about a Hoosier cleaning up in Wall Street. But it’s only a kid, see?
    CHAPTER II