Читать книгу The Dust Flower - Basil King - Страница 4

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While Allerton and Miss Walbrook had been conducting this debate a dissimilar yet parallel scene was enacted in a mean house in a mean street on the other side of the Park. Viewed from the outside, the house was one of those survivals of more primitive times which you will still run across in the richest as well as in the poorest districts of New York. A tiny wooden structure of two low stories, it connected with the sidewalk by a flight of steps of a third of the height of the whole façade. Flat-roofed and clap-boarded, it had once been painted gray with white facings, but time, weather, and soot had defaced these neat colors to a hideous pepper-and-salt.

Within, a toy entry led directly to a toy stairway, and by a door on the left into a toy living-room. In the toy living-room a man of forty-odd was saying to a girl of perhaps twenty-three,

“So you’ll not give it up, won’t you?”

The girl cringed as the man stood over her, but pressing her hand over something she had slipped within the opening at the neck of her cheap shirtwaist, she maintained her ground. The face she raised to him was at once terrified and determined, tremulous with tears and yet defiant with some new exercise of will power.

“No, I’ll not give it up.”

“We’ll see.”

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He said it quietly enough, the menace being less in his tone than in himself. He was so plainly the cheap sport bully that there could have been nothing but a menace in his personality. Flashy male good looks got a kind of brilliancy from a set of big, strong teeth the whiter for their contrast with a black, brigand-like mustache. He was so well dressed in his cheap sport way as to be out of keeping with the dilapidation of the room, in which there was hardly a table or a chair which stood firmly on its legs, or a curtain or a covering which didn’t reek with dust and germs. A worn, thin carpet gaped in holes; what had once been a sofa stood against a wall, shockingly disemboweled. Through a door ajar one glimpsed a toy kitchen where the stove had lost a leg and was now supported by a brick. It was plain that the master of the house was one of those for whom any lair is sufficient as a home as long as he can cut a dash outside.

Quiveringly, as if in terror of a blow, the girl explained herself breathlessly: “The castin’ director sent for me just as I was makin’ tracks for home. He ast me if this was the on’y suit I had. When I ’lowed it was, he just said he couldn’t use me any more till I got a new one.”

The man took the tone of superior masculine knowledge. “That wasn’t nothin’ but bull. What if he does chuck you? I know every movin’ picture studio round N’York. I’ll get you in somewheres else. Come now, Letty. Fork out. I need the berries. I owe some one. I was only waitin’ for you to come home.”

She clutched her breast more tightly. “I gotta have a new suit anyhow.”

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“Well, I’ll buy you a new suit when I get the bones. Didn’t I give you this one?”

She continued, still breathlessly: “Two years ago—a marked-down misses’ it was even then—all right if I was on’y sixteen—but now when I’m near twenty-three—and it’s in rags anyhow—and all out of style—and in pitchers you’ve gotta be––”

“They’se plenty pitchers where they want that character—to pass in a crowd, and all that.”

“To pass in a crowd once or twice, yes; but when all you can do is to pass in a crowd, and wear the same old rig every time you pass in it––”

He cut her protests short by saying, with an air of finality: “Well, anyhow I’ve got to have the bucks. Can’t go out till I get ’em. So hand!”

With lips compressed and eyes swimming, she shook her head.

“Better do it. You’ll be sorry if you don’t. I can pass you that tip straight now.”

“If you was laughed at every time you stepped onto the lot––”

“There’s worse things than bein’ laughed at. I can tell you that straight now.”

“Nothin’s worse than bein’ laughed at, not for a girl of my age there ain’t.”

Watching his opportunity he caught her off her guard. Her eyes having wandered to the coat she had just taken off, a worn gray thing with edgings of worn gray squirrel fur, he wrenched back with an unexpected movement the hand that clutched something to her breast, thrust two fingers of his other hand within her corsage, and extracted her pay-envelope.

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It took her by such surprise that she was like a mad thing, throwing herself upon him and battling for her treasure, though any possibility of her getting it back from him was hopeless. It was so easy for him to catch her by the wrists and twist them that he laughed while he was doing it.

“You little cat! You see what you bring on yourself. And you’re goin’ to get worse. I can tell you that straight now.”

Still twisting her arms till she writhed, though without a moan or a cry, he backed her toward the disemboweled sofa, on whose harsh, exposed springs she fell. Then he sprang on her a new surprise.

“How dare you wear them rings? They was your mother’s rings. I bought and paid for ’em. They’re mine.”

“Oh, don’t take them off,” she begged. “You can keep the money––”

“Sure I can keep the money,” he grinned, wrenching from her fingers the plain gold band he had given her mother as a wedding ring, as well as another, bigger, broader, showier, and set with two infinitesimal white points claiming to be diamonds.

Though he had released her hands, she now stretched them out toward him pleadingly. “Aw, give ’em back to me. They’se all I’ve got in the world to care about—just because she wore ’em. You can take anything else I’ve got––”

“All right, then. I’ll take this.”

With a deftness which would have done credit to a professor of legerdemain he unbuckled the strap of her little wrist-watch, putting the thing into his pocket.

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“I give that to your mother too. You don’t need it, and it may be useful to me. What else have you got?”

She struggled to her feet. He was growing more dangerous than she had ever known him to be even when he had beaten her.

“I ain’t got nothin’ else.”

“Oh, yes, you have. You gotta purse. I seen you with it. Where is it?”

The fear in her eyes sent his toward her jacket, thrown on the chair when she had come in. With an “Ah!” of satisfaction he pounced on it. As he held it upside down and shook it, a little leather wallet clattered to the floor. She sprang for it, but again he was too quick for her.

“So!” he snarled, with his glittering grin. “You thought you’d get it, did you?” He rattled the few coins, copper and silver, into the palm of his hand, and unfolded a one-dollar bill. “You must owe me this money. Who’s give you bed and board for the last ten year, I’d like to know? How much have you ever paid me?”

“Only all I ever earned—which you stole from me.”

“Stole from you, did I? Well, you won’t fling that in my face any more.” He handed her her coat. “Put that on,” he commanded.

“What for?” She held it without obeying the order. “What’s the good o’ goin’ out and me without a cent?”

“Put it on.”

Her lip quivered; she began to suspect his intention. “I do’ wanta.”

“Oh, very well! Please yourself. You got your 19 hat on already.” Seizing her by the shoulders he steered her toward the door. “Now march.”

Though she refused to march, it was not difficult for him to force her.

“This’ll teach you to valyer a good home when you got one. You’ll deserve to find the next one different.”

She almost shrieked: “You’re not going to turn me out?”

“Well, what does it look as if I was doin’?”

“I won’t go! I won’t go! Where can I go?”

“What I’m doin’ ’ll help you to find out.”

He had her now in the entry, where in spite of her struggles he had no difficulty in unlocking the door, pushing her out, and relocking the door behind her.

“Lemme in! Lemme in! Oh, please, lemme in!”

He stood in the middle of the living-room, listening with pleasure and smiling his brigand’s smile. He was not as bad as you might think. He did mean to let her in eventually. His smile and his pleasure sprang purely from the fact that his lesson was so successful. With this in her mind, she wouldn’t withstand him a second time.

She rattled the door by the handle. She beat upon the panels. She implored.

Still smiling, he filled his pipe. Let her keep it up. It would do her good. He remembered that once when he had turned her mother out at night, she had sat on the steps till he let her in at dawn before the police looked round that way. History would repeat itself. The daughter would do the same. He was only giving her the lesson she deserved.

Meanwhile she was experiencing a new sensation, 20 that of outrage. For the first time in her life she was swept by pride in revolt. She hadn’t known that any such emotion could get hold of her. As a matter of fact she hadn’t known that so strong a support to the inner man lay within the depths of human nature. Accustomed to being cowed, she had hardly understood that there was any other way to feel. Only within a day or two had something which you or I would have called spirit, but for which she had no name, disturbed her with unexpected flashes, like those of summer lightning.

While waiting for the camera, for instance, in the street scene in “The Man with the Emerald Eye,” a “fresh thing” had said, with a wink at her companions, “Say, did you copy that suit from a pattern in Chic?”

Letty had so carefully minded her own business and tried to be nice to every one that the titter which went round at her expense hurt her with a wound impelling her to reply, “No; I ordered it at Margot’s. You look as if you got your things there too, don’t you?” Nevertheless, she was so stung by the sarcasm that the commendation she overheard later, that the Gravely kid had a tongue, didn’t bring any consolation.

Without knowing that what she felt now was an intensified form of the same rebellion against scorn, she knew it was not consistent with some inborn sense of human dignity to stand there pleading to be let into a house from which she was locked out, even though it was the only spot on earth she could call home. Still less was it possible when, round the foot of the steps, a crowd began to gather, jeering at her passionate beseechings. For the most part they were children, 21 Slavic, Semitic, Italian. Amid their cries of, “Go it, Sis!” now in English and now in strange equivalents of Latin, or Polish, or even Hebraic origin, she was suddenly arrested by the consciousness of personal humiliation.

She turned from the door to face the street. It was one of those streets not rare in New York which the civic authorities abandon in despair. A gash of children and refuse cut straight from river to Park, it got its chief movement from push-carts of fruit and other foods, while the “wash” of five hundred families blew its banners overhead. Vendors of all kinds uttered their nasal or raucous cries, in counterpoint to the treble screams of little boys and girls.

Letty had always hated it, but it was something more than hatred which she felt for it now. Beyond the children adults were taking a rest from the hawking profession to comment with grins on the sight of a girl locked out of her own home. She was probably a very bad girl to call for that kind of treatment, and therefore one on whom they should spend some derision.

They were spending it as she turned. It was an experience on a large scale of what the girl in the studio had inflicted. She was a thing to be scorned, and of all the hardships in the world scorn, now that she was aware of it, was the one she could least submit to.

So pride came to her rescue. Throwing her coat across her arm she went down the steps, passed through the hooting children, one or two of whom pulled her by the skirt, passed through the bearded 22 Jews, and the bronzed Italians, and the flat-nosed Slavs, passed through the women who had come out on the sidewalk at this accentuation of the daily din, passed through the barrows and handcarts and piles of cabbages and fruit, and went her way.

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