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Buttered Side Down

E >> Edna Ferber >> Buttered Side Down



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BUTTERED SIDE DOWN

STORIES BY

EDNA FERBER





MARCH, 1912


FOREWORD


"And so," the story writers used to say, "they lived happily
ever after."

Um-m-m--maybe. After the glamour had worn off, and the glass
slippers were worn out, did the Prince never find Cinderella's
manner redolent of the kitchen hearth; and was it never necessary
that he remind her to be more careful of her finger-nails and
grammar? After Puss in Boots had won wealth and a wife for his
young master did not that gentleman often fume with chagrin because
the neighbors, perhaps, refused to call on the lady of the former
poor miller's son?

It is a great risk to take with one's book-children. These
stories make no such promises. They stop just short of the phrase
of the old story writers, and end truthfully, thus: And so they
lived.

E. F.




CONTENTS



I. THE FROG AND THE PUDDLE
II. THE MAN WHO CAME BACK
III. WHAT SHE WORE
IV. A BUSH LEAGUE HERO
V. THE KITCHEN SIDE OF THE DOOR
VI. ONE OF THE OLD GIRLS
VI. MAYMEYS FROM CUBA
VIII. THE LEADING LADY
IX. THAT HOME-TOWN FEELING
X. THE HOMELY HEROINE
XI. SUN DRIED
XII. WHERE THE CAR TURNS AT 18TH




BUTTERED SIDE DOWN




I


THE FROG AND THE PUDDLE


Any one who has ever written for the magazines (nobody could
devise a more sweeping opening; it includes the iceman who does a
humorous article on the subject of his troubles, and the neglected
wife next door, who journalizes) knows that a story the scene of
which is not New York is merely junk. Take Fifth Avenue as a
framework, pad it out to five thousand words, and there you have
the ideal short story.

Consequently I feel a certain timidity in confessing that I do
not know Fifth Avenue from Hester Street when I see it, because
I've never seen it. It has been said that from the latter to the
former is a ten-year journey, from which I have gathered that they
lie some miles apart. As for Forty-second Street, of which musical
comedians carol, I know not if it be a fashionable shopping
thoroughfare or a factory district.

A confession of this kind is not only good for the soul, but
for the editor. It saves him the trouble of turning to page two.

This is a story of Chicago, which is a first cousin of New
York, although the two are not on chummy terms. It is a story of
that part of Chicago which lies east of Dearborn Avenue and south
of Division Street, and which may be called the Nottingham curtain
district.

In the Nottingham curtain district every front parlor window
is embellished with a "Rooms With or Without Board" sign. The
curtains themselves have mellowed from their original
department-store-basement-white to a rich, deep tone of Chicago
smoke, which has the notorious London variety beaten by several
shades. Block after block the two-story-and-basement houses
stretch, all grimy and gritty and looking sadly down upon the five
square feet of mangy grass forming the pitiful front yard of each.
Now and then the monotonous line of front stoops is broken by an
outjutting basement delicatessen shop. But not often. The
Nottingham curtain district does not run heavily to delicacies. It
is stronger on creamed cabbage and bread pudding.

Up in the third floor back at Mis' Buck's (elegant rooms $2.50
and up a week. Gents preferred) Gertie was brushing her hair for
the night. One hundred strokes with a bristle brush. Anyone who
reads the beauty column in the newspapers knows that. There was
something heroic in the sight of Gertie brushing her hair one
hundred strokes before going to bed at night. Only a woman could
understand her doing it.

Gertie clerked downtown on State Street, in a gents' glove
department. A gents' glove department requires careful dressing on
the part of its clerks, and the manager, in selecting them, is
particular about choosing "lookers," with especial attention to
figure, hair, and finger nails. Gertie was a looker. Providence
had taken care of that. But you cannot leave your hair and finger
nails to Providence. They demand coaxing with a bristle brush and
an orangewood stick.

Now clerking, as Gertie would tell you, is fierce on the feet.
And when your feet are tired you are tired all over. Gertie's feet
were tired every night. About eight-thirty she longed to peel off
her clothes, drop them in a heap on the floor, and tumble,
unbrushed, unwashed, unmanicured, into bed. She never did it.

Things had been particularly trying to-night. After washing
out three handkerchiefs and pasting them with practised hand over
the mirror, Gertie had taken off her shoes and discovered a hole
the size of a silver quarter in the heel of her left stocking.
Gertie had a country-bred horror of holey stockings. She darned
the hole, yawning, her aching feet pressed against the smooth, cool
leg of the iron bed. That done, she had had the colossal courage
to wash her face, slap cold cream on it, and push back the cuticle
around her nails.

Seated huddled on the side of her thin little iron bed, Gertie
was brushing her hair bravely, counting the strokes somewhere in
her sub-conscious mind and thinking busily all the while of
something else. Her brush rose, fell, swept downward, rose, fell,
rhythmically.

"Ninety-six, ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety -- Oh, darn
it! What's the use!" cried Gertie, and hurled the brush across the
room with a crack.

She sat looking after it with wide, staring eyes until the
brush blurred in with the faded red roses on the carpet. When she
found it doing that she got up, wadded her hair viciously into a
hard bun in the back instead of braiding it carefully as usual,
crossed the room (it wasn't much of a trip), picked up the brush,
and stood looking down at it, her under lip caught between her
teeth. That is the humiliating part of losing your temper and
throwing things. You have to come down to picking them up, anyway.

Her lip still held prisoner, Gertie tossed the brush on the
bureau, fastened her nightgown at the throat with a safety pin,
turned out the gas and crawled into bed.

Perhaps the hard bun at the back of her head kept her awake.
She lay there with her eyes wide open and sleepless, staring into
the darkness.

At midnight the Kid Next Door came in whistling, like one
unused to boarding-house rules. Gertie liked him for that. At the
head of the stairs he stopped whistling and came softly into his
own third floor back just next to Gertie's. Gertie liked him for
that, too.

The two rooms had been one in the fashionable days of the
Nottingham curtain district, long before the advent of Mis' Buck.
That thrifty lady, on coming into possession, had caused a flimsy
partition to be run up, slicing the room in twain and doubling its
rental.

Lying there Gertie could hear the Kid Next Door moving about
getting ready for bed and humming "Every Little Movement Has a
Meaning of Its Own" very lightly, under his breath. He polished
his shoes briskly, and Gertie smiled there in the darkness of her
own room in sympathy. Poor kid, he had his beauty struggles, too.

Gertie had never seen the Kid Next Door, although he had come
four months ago. But she knew he wasn't a grouch, because he
alternately whistled and sang off-key tenor while dressing in the
morning. She had also discovered that his bed must run along the
same wall against which her bed was pushed. Gertie told herself
that there was something almost immodest about being able to hear
him breathing as he slept. He had tumbled into bed with a little
grunt of weariness.

Gertie lay there another hour, staring into the darkness.
Then she began to cry softly, lying on her face with her head
between her arms. The cold cream and the salt tears mingled and
formed a slippery paste. Gertie wept on because she couldn't help
it. The longer she wept the more difficult her sobs became, until
finally they bordered on the hysterical. They filled her lungs
until they ached and reached her throat with a force that jerked
her head back.

"Rap-rap-rap!" sounded sharply from the head of her bed.

Gertie stopped sobbing, and her heart stopped ,beating. She
lay tense and still, listening. Everyone knows that spooks rap
three times at the head of one's bed. It's a regular high-sign
with them.

"Rap-rap-rap!"

Gertie's skin became goose-flesh, and coldwater effects chased
up and down her spine.

"What's your trouble in there?" demanded an unspooky voice so
near that Gertie jumped. "Sick?"

It was the Kid Next Door.

"N-no, I'm not sick," faltered Gertie, her mouth close to the
wall. Just then a belated sob that had stopped halfway when the
raps began hustled on to join its sisters. It took Gertie by
surprise, and brought prompt response from the other side of the
wall.

"I'll bet I scared you green. I didn't mean to, but, on the
square, if you're feeling sick, a little nip of brandy will set you
up. Excuse my mentioning it, girlie, but I'd do the same for my
sister. I hate like sin to hear a woman suffer like that, and,
anyway, I don't know whether you're fourteen or forty, so
it's perfectly respectable. I'll get the bottle and leave it
outside your door."

"No you don't!" answered Gertie in a hollow voice, praying
meanwhile that the woman in the room below might be sleeping. "I'm
not sick, honestly I'm not. I'm just as much obliged, and I'm dead
sorry I woke you up with my blubbering. I started out with the
soft pedal on, but things got away from me. Can you hear me?"

"Like a phonograph. Sure you couldn't use a sip of brandy
where it'd do the most good?"

"Sure."

"Well, then, cut out the weeps and get your beauty sleep, kid.
He ain't worth sobbing over, anyway, believe me."

"He!" snorted Gertie indignantly. "You're cold. There never
was anything in peg-tops that could make me carry on like the
heroine of the Elsie series."

"Lost your job?"

"No such luck."

"Well, then, what in Sam Hill could make a woman----"

"Lonesome!" snapped Gertie. "And the floorwalker got fresh
to-day. And I found two gray hairs to-night. And I'd give my next
week's pay envelope to hear the double click that our front gate
gives back home."

"Back home!" echoed the Kid Next Door in a dangerously loud
voice. "Say, I want to talk to you. If you'll promise you won't
get sore and think I'm fresh, I'll ask you a favor. Slip on a
kimono and we'll sneak down to the front stoop and talk it over.
I'm as wide awake as a chorus girl and twice as hungry. I've got
two apples and a box of crackers. Are you on?"

Gertie snickered. "It isn't done in our best sets, but I'm
on. I've got a can of sardines and an orange. I'll be ready in
six minutes."

She was, too. She wiped off the cold cream and salt tears
with a dry towel, did her hair in a schoolgirl braid and tied it
with a big bow, and dressed herself in a black skirt and a baby
blue dressing sacque. The Kid Next Door was waiting outside in the
hall. His gray sweater covered a multitude of sartorial
deficiencies. Gertie stared at him, and he stared at Gertie in the
sickly blue light of the boarding-house hall, and it took her
one-half of one second to discover that she liked his mouth, and
his eyes, and the way his hair was mussed.

"Why, you're only a kid!" whispered the Kid Next Door, in
surprise.

Gertie smothered a laugh. "You're not the first man that's
been deceived by a pig-tail braid and a baby blue waist. I could
locate those two gray hairs for you with my eyes shut and my feet
in a sack. Come on, boy. These Robert W. Chambers situations make
me nervous."

Many earnest young writers with a flow of adjectives and a
passion for detail have attempted to describe the quiet of a great
city at night, when a few million people within it are sleeping, or
ought to be. They work in the clang of a distant owl car, and the
roar of an occasional "L" train, and the hollow echo of the
footsteps of the late passer-by. They go elaborately into
description, and are strong on the brooding hush, but the thing has
never been done satisfactorily.

Gertie, sitting on the front stoop at two in the morning, with
her orange in one hand and the sardine can in the other, put it
this way:

"If I was to hear a cricket chirp now, I'd screech. This
isn't really quiet. It's like waiting for a cannon cracker to go
off just before the fuse is burned down. The bang isn't there yet,
but you hear it a hundred times in your mind before it happens."

"My name's Augustus G. Eddy," announced the Kid Next Door,
solemnly. "Back home they always called me Gus. You peel that
orange while I unroll the top of this sardine can. I'm guilty of
having interrupted you in the middle of what the girls call a good
cry, and I know you'll have to get it out of your system some way.
Take a bite of apple and then wade right in and tell me what you're
doing in this burg if you don't like it."

"This thing ought to have slow music," began Gertie. "It's
pathetic. I came to Chicago from Beloit, Wisconsin, because I
thought that little town was a lonesome hole for a vivacious
creature like me. Lonesome! Listen while I laugh a low mirthless
laugh. I didn't know anything about the three-ply,
double-barreled, extra heavy brand of lonesomeness that a big town
like this can deal out. Talk about your desert wastes! They're
sociable and snug compared to this. I know three-fourths of the
people in Beloit, Wisconsin, by their first names. I've lived here
six months and I'm not on informal terms with anybody except Teddy,
the landlady's dog, and he's a trained rat-and-book-agent terrier,
and not inclined to overfriendliness. When I clerked at the
Enterprise Store in Beloit the women used to come in and ask for
something we didn't carry just for an excuse to copy the way the
lace yoke effects were planned in my shirtwaists. You ought to see
the way those same shirtwaist stack up here. Why, boy, the
lingerie waists that the other girls in my department wear make my
best hand-tucked effort look like a simple English country blouse.
They're so dripping with Irish crochet and real Val and Cluny
insertions that it's a wonder the girls don't get stoop-shouldered
carrying 'em around."

"Hold on a minute," commanded Gus. "This thing is uncanny.
Our cases dovetail like the deductions in a detective story. Kneel
here at my feet, little daughter, and I'll tell you the story of my
sad young life. I'm no child of the city streets, either. Say, I
came to this town because I thought there was a bigger field for me
in Gents' Furnishings. Joke, what?"

But Gertie didn't smile. She gazed up at Gus, and Gus gazed
down at her, and his fingers fiddled absently with the big bow at
the end of her braid.

"And isn't there?" asked Gertie, sympathetically.

"Girlie, I haven't saved twelve dollars since I came. I'm no
tightwad, and I don't believe in packing everything away into a
white marble mausoleum, but still a gink kind of whispers to
himself that some day he'll be furnishing up a kitchen pantry of
his own."

"Oh!" said Gertie.

"And let me mention in passing," continued Gus, winding the
ribbon bow around his finger, "that in the last hour or so that
whisper has been swelling to a shout."

"Oh!" said Gertie again.

"You said it. But I couldn't buy a secondhand gas stove with
what I've saved in the last half-year here. Back home they used to
think I was a regular little village John Drew, I was so dressy.
But here I look like a yokel on circus day compared to the other
fellows in the store. All they need is a field glass strung over
their shoulder to make them look like a clothing ad in the back of
a popular magazine. Say, girlie, you've got the prettiest hair
I've seen since I blew in here. Look at that braid! Thick as a
rope! That's no relation to the piles of jute that the Flossies
here stack on their heads. And shines! Like satin."

"It ought to," said Gertrude, wearily. "I brush it a hundred
strokes every night. Sometimes I'm so beat that I fall asleep with
my brush in the air. The manager won't stand for any romping curls
or hooks-and-eyes that don't connect. It keeps me so busy being
beautiful, and what the society writers call `well groomed,' that
I don't have time to sew the buttons on my underclothes."

"But don't you get some amusement in the evening?" marveled
Gus. "What was the matter with you and the other girls in the
store? Can't you hit it off?"

"Me? No. I guess I was too woodsy for them. I went out with
them a couple of times. I guess they're nice girls all right; but
they've got what you call a broader way of looking at things than
I have. Living in a little town all your life makes you narrow.
These girls!--Well, maybe I'll get educated up to their plane some
day, but----"

"No, you don't!" hissed Gus. "Not if I can help it."

"But you can't," replied Gertie, sweetly. "My, ain't this a
grand night! Evenings like this I used to love to putter around
the yard after supper, sprinkling the grass and weeding the
radishes. I'm the greatest kid to fool around with a hose. And
flowers! Say, they just grow for me. You ought to have seen my
pansies and nasturtiums last summer."

The fingers of the Kid Next Door wandered until they found
Gertie's. They clasped them.

"This thing just points one way, little one. It's just as
plain as a path leading up to a cozy little three-room flat up
here on the North Side somewhere. See it? With me and you
married, and playing at housekeeping in a parlor and bedroom and
kitchen? And both of us going down town to work in the morning
just the same as we do now. Only not the same, either."

"Wake up, little boy," said Gertie, prying her fingers away
from those other detaining ones. "I'd fit into a three-room flat
like a whale in a kitchen sink. I'm going back to Beloit,
Wisconsin. I've learned my lesson all right. There's a fellow
there waiting for me. I used to think he was too slow. But say,
he's got the nicest little painting and paper-hanging business you
ever saw, and making money. He's secretary of the K. P.'s back
home. They give some swell little dances during the winter,
especially for the married members. In five years we'll own our
home, with a vegetable garden in the back. I'm a little frog, and
it's me for the puddle."

Gus stood up slowly. Gertie felt a little pang of compunction
when she saw what a boy he was.

"I don't know when I've enjoyed a talk like this. I've heard
about these dawn teas, but I never thought I'd go to one," she
said.

"Good-night, girlie," interrupted Gus, abruptly. "It's the
dreamless couch for mine. We've got a big sale on in tan and black
seconds to-morrow."




II


THE MAN WHO CAME BACK

There are two ways of doing battle against Disgrace. You may live
it down; or you may run away from it and hide. The first method is
heart-breaking, but sure. The second cannot be relied upon because
of the uncomfortable way Disgrace has of turning up at your heels
just when you think you have eluded her in the last town but one.

Ted Terrill did not choose the first method. He had it thrust
upon him. After Ted had served his term he came back home to visit
his mother's grave, intending to take the next train out. He wore
none of the prison pallor that you read about in books, because he
had been shortstop on the penitentiary all-star baseball team, and
famed for the dexterity with which he could grab up red-hot
grounders. The storied lock step and the clipped hair effect also
were missing. The superintendent of Ted's prison had been one of
the reform kind.

You never would have picked Ted for a criminal. He had none
of those interesting phrenological bumps and depressions that
usually are shown to such frank advantage in the Bertillon
photographs. Ted had been assistant cashier in the Citizens'
National Bank. In a mad moment he had attempted a little
sleight-of-hand act in which certain Citizens' National funds were
to be transformed into certain glittering shares and back again so
quickly that the examiners couldn't follow it with their eyes. But
Ted was unaccustomed to these now-you-see-it-and-now-you-don't
feats and his hand slipped. The trick dropped to the floor with an
awful clatter.

Ted had been a lovable young kid, six feet high, and blonde,
with a great reputation as a dresser. He had the first yellow
plush hat in our town. It sat on his golden head like a halo. The
women all liked Ted. Mrs. Dankworth, the dashing widow (why will
widows persist in being dashing?), said that he was the only man in
our town who knew how to wear a dress suit. The men were forever
slapping him on the back and asking him to have a little something.

Ted's good looks and his clever tongue and a certain charming Irish
way he had with him caused him to be taken up by the smart set.
Now, if you've never lived in a small town you will be much amused
at the idea of its boasting a smart set. Which proves your
ignorance. The small town smart set is deadly serious about its
smartness. It likes to take six-hour runs down to the city to fit
a pair of shoes and hear Caruso. Its clothes are as well made, and
its scandals as crisp, and its pace as hasty, and its golf club as
dull as the clothes, and scandals, and pace, and golf club of its
city cousins.

The hasty pace killed Ted. He tried to keep step in a set of
young folks whose fathers had made our town. And all the time his
pocketbook was yelling, "Whoa!" The young people ran largely to
scarlet-upholstered touring cars, and country-club doings, and
house parties, as small town younger generations are apt to. When
Ted went to high school half the boys in his little clique spent
their after-school hours dashing up and down Main street in their
big, glittering cars, sitting slumped down on the middle of their
spines in front of the steering wheel, their sleeves rolled up,
their hair combed a militant pompadour. One or the other of them
always took Ted along. It is fearfully easy to develop a taste for
that kind of thing. As he grew older, the taste took root and
became a habit.

Ted came out after serving his term, still handsome, spite of
all that story-writers may have taught to the contrary. But we'll
make this concession to the old tradition. There was a difference.

His radiant blondeur was dimmed in some intangible, elusive way.
Birdie Callahan, who had worked in Ted's mother's kitchen for
years, and who had gone back to her old job at the Haley House
after her mistress's death, put it sadly, thus:

"He was always th' han'some divil. I used to look forward to
ironin' day just for the pleasure of pressin' his fancy shirts for
him. I'm that partial to them swell blondes. But I dinnaw, he's
changed. Doin' time has taken the edge off his hair an'
complexion. Not changed his color, do yuh mind, but dulled it,
like a gold ring, or the like, that has tarnished."

Ted was seated in the smoker, with a chip on his shoulder, and
a sick horror of encountering some one he knew in his heart, when
Jo Haley, of the Haley House, got on at Westport, homeward bound.
Jo Haley is the most eligible bachelor in our town, and the
slipperiest. He has made the Haley House a gem, so that traveling
men will cut half a dozen towns to Sunday there. If he should say
"Jump through this!" to any girl in our town she'd jump.

Jo Haley strolled leisurely up the car aisle toward Ted. Ted
saw him coming and sat very still, waiting.

"Hello, Ted! How's Ted?" said Jo Haley, casually. And
dropped into the adjoining seat without any more fuss.

Ted wet his lips slightly and tried to say something. He had
been a breezy talker. But the words would not come. Jo Haley made
no effort to cover the situation with a rush of conversation. He
did not seem to realize that there was any situation to cover. He
champed the end of his cigar and handed one to Ted.

"Well, you've taken your lickin', kid. What you going to do
now?"

The rawness of it made Ted wince. "Oh, I don't know," he
stammered. "I've a job half promised in Chicago."

"What doing?"

Ted laughed a short and ugly laugh. "Driving a brewery auto
truck."

Jo Haley tossed his cigar dexterously to the opposite corner
of his mouth and squinted thoughtfully along its bulging sides.

"Remember that Wenzel girl that's kept books for me for the
last six years? She's leaving in a couple of months to marry a New
York guy that travels for ladies' cloaks and suits. After she goes
it's nix with the lady bookkeepers for me. Not that Minnie isn't
a good, straight girl, and honest, but no girl can keep books with
one eye on a column of figures and the other on a traveling man in
a brown suit and a red necktie, unless she's cross-eyed, and you
bet Minnie ain't. The job's yours if you want it. Eighty a month
to start on, and board."

"I--can't, Jo. Thanks just the same. I'm going to try to
begin all over again, somewhere else, where nobody knows me."

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