 STORY X. THE HONELY HEROIN. Millie Whitcomb, of the fancy goods and notions, beckoned me with her finger. I had been standing at Kate O'Malley's counter pretending to admire her new basket-weave suitings, but in reality, reveling in her drolled account of how, in the train coming up from Chicago, Mrs. Judge Porterfield had won the Negro porter's coat off her chilly shoulders in mistake for her husband's. Kate O'Malley can tell a funny story in a way to make the after-dinner pleasantries of a Washington diplomat sound like the clumsy jests told around the village grocery stove. I wanted to tell you that I read that last story of yours, set Millie sociably, when I had strolled over to her counter, and I liked it, all but the heroine. She had an adorable throat and hair that waved away from her white brow, and eyes that now were blue, now gray. Say, why did you write a story about an ugly girl? My land, protested I. It's bad enough trying to make them accept my stories as it is. That last heroine was a raving beauty, but she came back eleven times before the editor of Blakely succumbed to her charms. Millie's fingers were busy straightening the contents of a tray of combs and imitation jet barrettes. Millie's fingers were not intended for that task. They are slender, tapering fingers, pink-tipped, and sensitive. I should thank, mused she, webbing a cloudy piece of jet barrettes with a bit of soft cloth. These goddesses are so cloying. Millie Whitcomb's black hair is touched with softness of gray, and she wears lavender shirt-waists and white stocks, edged with lavender. There is a colonial air about her that has nothing to do with celluloid combs and imitation jet barrettes. It breathes of dim old rooms, rich with the tones of mahogany and old brass, and Millie in the midst of it gray-gowned, a soft white fissue crossed upon her breast. In our town the clerks are not the pert and gum-chewing young persons that story writers are want to describe. The girls at Baskham's are institutions. They know us all by our first names, and our lives are as an open book to them. Kate O'Malley, who has been at Baskham's for so many years that she is rumored to have stock in the company, may be said to govern the fashions of our town. She is wont to say when we express a fancy for gray as the color of our new spring suit. Oh, now, Nellie, don't get gray again. You had it year before last, and don't you think it was just the least little bit trying? Let me show you that green that came in yesterday. I said the minute I clapped my eyes on it that it was just the color for you, with your brown hair and all, and we end by deciding on the green. The girls at Baskham's are not gossips. They are too busy for that. But they may be said to be delightfully well-informed. How could they be otherwise when we go to Baskham's for our wedding dresses and party favors and baby flannels? There is news at Baskham's that our daily paper never hears of, and wouldn't dare print if it did. The one Millie Woodcombe of the Fancy Goods and Oceans expressed her hunger for a homely heroine. I did not present a suggestion. On the contrary, it sent me home in thoughtful mood. For Millie Woodcombe has acquired a knowledge of human nature in the dispensing of her Fancy Goods and Oceans. It set me casting about for a really homely heroine. There has never been a really ugly heroine in fiction. Authors have started bravely out to write of an unlovely woman, but they never have had the courage to allow her to remain plain. On page 237 she puts on a black lace dress and red roses, and the combination brings out unexpected tawny lights in her hair and olive tints in her cheeks, and there she is, the same old beautiful heroine. Even in the Duchess books one finds the simple Irish girl, on donning a green corduroy gown cut square at the neck, transformed into a wild rose-beauty, at sight of whom a ballroom is hushed into admiring awe. There's the case of Jane Eyre, too. She is constantly described as plain and mouse-like, but there are covert hints as to her gray eyes and slender figure and clear skin, and we have a sneaking notion that she wasn't such a fright, after all. Therefore, when I tell you that I am choosing Pearly Schultz as my leading lady, you are to understand that she is ugly, not only when the story opens, but to the bitter end. In the first place, Pearly is fat, not plump or rounded or dimpled or deliciously curved, but fat. She bulges in all the wrong places, including her chin. Sister, who has a way of snooping over my desk in my absence, says that I may as well drop this now, because nobody would ever read it, anyway, at least of all, any sane editor. I protest when I discover that Cis has been over my papers, but bothers me. But she says you have to do these things when you have a genius in the house, and cites the case of Kipling's recessional, which was rescued from the depths of his wastebasket by his wife. Pearly Schultz used to sit on the front porch summer evenings, and watch the couples stroll by and weep in her heart. A fat girl with a fat girl's soul is a comedy, but a fat girl with a thin girl's soul is a tragedy. Pearly, in spite of her two hundred pounds, had the soul of a willow wand. The walk in front of Pearly's house was guarded by a row of big trees that cast kindly shadows. The strolling couples used to step gratefully into the embrace of these shadows, and from them into other embraces. Pearly, sitting on the front porch, could see them dimly, although they could not see her. She could not help remarking that these strolling couples were strangely lacking in sprightly conversation. Their remarks were but fragmentary, disjointed affairs, spoken in low tones with a queer, tremulous note in them. The strolling couples almost always stopped, and then there came a quick movement, and a little smothered cry from the girl, and then a sound, and then a silence. Pearly, sitting alone on the porch in the dark, listened to these things and blushed furiously. Pearly had never strolled into the kindly shadows with a little beating of the heart, and she had never been surprised with a quick arm about her, and eager lips pressed warmly against her own. In the daytime, Pearly worked as public stenographer at the Burke Hotel. She rose at seven in the morning, and rolled for fifteen minutes, and lay on her back and elevated her heels in the air, and stood stiff-kneed while she touched the floor with her fingertips one hundred times, and went without her breakfast. At the end of each month she usually found that she weighed three pounds more than she had the month before. The folks at home never joked with Pearly about her weight. Even one's family has respect for a life sorrow. Whenever Pearly asked that inevitable question of the fat woman, am I as bad as she is? Her mother always answered, You, well, I should hope not. You're looking really peaked lately, Pearly, and your blue skirt just ripples in the back. It's getting so big for you. Of such blessed stuff her mother's made. But if the gods had denied Pearly all charms of face or form, they had been decent enough to bestow on her one gift. Pearly could cook like an angel. No, better than an angel, for no angel could be a really clever cook and wear those flowing kimono-like sleeves. They'd get into the soup. Pearly could take a piece of rump and some suet and an onion and a cup or so of water, and evolve a pot roast that you could cut with a fork. She could turn out a surprisingly good cake with surprisingly few eggs, all covered with white icing and bearing cunning little jelly figures on its snowy bosom. She could beat up biscuits that fell apart at the lightest pressure, revealing little pools of golden butter within. Oh, Pearly could cook. On weekdays, Pearly rattled the typewriter keys. But on Sunday she shoot her mother out of the kitchen. Her mother went, protesting faintly. Now, Pearly, don't fuss so for dinner. You ought to get your rest on Sunday instead of stewing over a hot stove all morning. Hot fiddle sticks, ma. Pearly would say cheerly. It ain't hot. Because it's a gas stove. And I'll only get fat if I sit around. You put on your black and white and go to church, call me when you've got as far as your corsets, and I'll puff your hair for you in the back. In her capacity of public stenographer at the Burke Hotel, it was Pearly's duty to take letters dictated by traveling men and beginning, yours at the tenth at hand, in reply would say, or enclosed, please find, et cetera. As clenching proof of her plainness, it may be stated that none of the traveling men, not even Max Baum, who was so fresh that the girl of the cigar counter actually had to squelch him, ever called Pearly Baby Doll, or tried to make a date with her. Not that Pearly would ever have allowed them to, but she never had had to prove them. During pauses and dictation, she had a way of peering nearsightedly over her glasses at the dapper, well-dressed traveling salesman who was rolling off the items on his sail-bill. That is a trick which would make the prettiest kind of a girl look owlish. On the night that Sam Miller strolled up to talk to her, Pearly was working late. She had promised to get out a long and intricate bill for Max Baum, who travels for Coon and Klingman, so that he might take the nine o'clock evening train. The irrepressible Max had departed with much eclat and clatter, and Pearly was preparing to go home when Sam approached her. Sam had just come in from the Gayety Theatre across the street, whether he had gone in a vain search for amusement after supper. He had come away in disgust. A soiled sobrette, with orange-coloured hair and baby socks, had swept her practised eye over the audience, and, attracted by Sam's good-looking blonde head in the second row, had selected him as the target of her song. She had run up to the extreme edge of the footlights at the risk of teetering over, and had informed Sam, through the medium of song, to the huge delight of the audience, and to Sam's red-faced discomforter, that she liked his smile. And he was just her style, and just as cute as he could be, and just the boy for her. On reaching the chorus she had whipped out a small round mirror and, assisted by the calcium light man in the rear, had thrown a wretched little spotlight on Sam's head. Ordinarily Sam would not have minded it, but that evening, in the vest pocket just over the place where he supposed his heart to be, reposed his girl's daily letter. They were to be married on Sam's return to New York from his first long trip. In the letter near his heart she had written prettily and seriously about travelling men, and travelling men's wives, and her little code for both. The fragrant girlish grave little letter had caused Sam to sour on the efforts of the soiled soubrette. As soon as possible he had fled up the aisle and across the street to the hotel waiting room. There he had spied Perley's good-humoured, homely face, and its contrast with the silly red and white countenance of the unlaundered soubrette had attracted his homesick heart. Perley had taken some letters from him earlier in the day. Now, in his hunger for companionship, he strolled up to her desk just as she was putting her typewriter to bed. Gee, this is a lonesome town, said Sam, smiling down at her. Perley glanced up at him over her glasses. I guess you must be from New York, she said. I've heard a real New Yorker can get bored in Paris. In New York the sky is bluer, and the grass is greener, and the girls are prettier, and the stakes are thicker, and the buildings are higher, and the streets are wider, and the air is finer than the sky, or the grass or the girls, or the stakes or the air of any place else in the world, ain't they? Oh, now, protested Sam, quit kidding me. You'd be lonesome for the little old town, too, if you'd been born and dragged up in it, and hadn't seen it for four months. New to the road, aren't you? Asked Perley. Sam blushed a little. How did you know? Well, you generally can tell. They don't know what to do with themselves evenings, and they look rebellious when they go into the dining room. The old timers just look resigned. You've picked up a thing or two around here, haven't you? I wonder if the time will ever come when I'll look resigned to a hotel dinner after four months of them. Why, girl, I've got so I just eat the things that are covered up like baked potatoes in the shell and soft boiled eggs and baked apples and oranges that I can peel and nuts. Why, you poor kid, breathed Perley her pale eyes fixed on him and mutteredly pity. You ought to do that. You'll get so thin that your girl won't know you. Sam looked up quickly. Oh, and thunderation, did you know? Perley was pinning on her hat and she spoke succinctly, her hat pins between her teeth. You've been here two days now, and I noticed you dictate all your letters except the longest one. And you write that one off in a corner of the writing room all by yourself with your cigar just glowing like a live coal. And you squint up through the smoke and grin to yourself. Say, would you mind if I walked home with you? Ask Sam. If Perley was surprised, she was woman enough not to show it. She picked up her gloves and handbag, locked her drawer with a click, and smiled her acquiescence. And when Perley smiled, she was awful. It was a glorious evening in the early summer, moonless, velvety and warm. As they strolled homeward, Sam told her all about the girl as is the way of traveling men the world over. He told her about the tiny apartment they had taken and how he would be on the road only a couple of years more as this was just a tryout that the firm always insisted on. And they stopped under an arc light while Sam showed her the picture and his watch as is also the way of traveling men since time immemorial. Perley made an excellent listener. He was so boyish and so much in love and so pathetically eager to make good with the firm and so happy to have someone in whom to confide. But as the dog's life after all reflected Sam again after the fashion of all traveling men, any fellow on the road earns his salary these days, you bet I used to think it was all getting up when you felt like it and sitting in the big front window of the hotel smoking a cigar and watching the pretty girls go by. I wasn't wise to the packing and the unpacking and the rotten train service and the grouchy customers and the canceled bills and the grub. Perley nodded understandingly. A man told me once that twice a week regularly he dreamed of the way his wife cooked noodle soup. My folks are German, explained Sam, and my mother can she cook. Well, I just don't seem to be able to get her potato pancakes out of my mind. And her roast beef tasted and looked like roast beef and not like a wet red flannel rag. At this moment, Perley was seized with a brilliant idea. Tomorrow's Sunday. You're going to Sunday here, aren't you? Come over and eat your dinner with us. If you have forgotten the taste of real food, I can give you a dinner that'll jog your memory. Oh, really, protested Sam, you're awfully good, but I couldn't think that I you needn't be afraid. I'm not letting you in for anything. I may be homelier than an English suffragette. And I know my lines are all bumps. But there's one thing you can't take away from me. And that's my cooking hand. I can cook boy in a way to make your mother Sunday dinner with company expected look like Mrs. newlyweds first attempt at Riz biscuits. And I don't mean any disrespect to your mother when I say it. I'm going to have noodle soup and fried chicken and hot biscuits and cream beans from our own garden and strawberry shortcake with real hush shouted Sam if I ain't there you'll know that I passed away during the night and you can telephone the clerk to break in my door. The Grim Reaper spared him and Sam came and was introduced to the family and ate. He put himself in a class with Dr. Johnson and Ben Brust and Gargantua only that his table manners were better. He almost forgot to talk during the soup and he came back three times for chicken. And by the time the strawberry shortcake was half consumed he was looking at pearly with a sort of awe in his eyes. That night he came over to say goodbye before taking his train out for Ish Pemming. He and pearly strolled down as far as the park and back again. I don't need any supper, said Sam. It would have been sacrilege after that dinner of yours. Honestly, I don't know how to thank you being so good to a stranger like me. When I come back next trip I expect to have the kid with me. And I don't want you to meet her by George. She's a winner and a pippin, but she wouldn't know whether a porterhouse was stued or frapped. I'll tell her about you, you bet. In the meantime, if there's anything I can do for you, I'm yours to command. Pearly turned to him suddenly. You see that clump of thick shadows ahead of us? Were those big trees stand in front of our house? Sure, replied Sam. Well, when we step into that deepest black shadow right in front of our porch, I want you to reach up and put your arm around me and kiss me on the mouth just once. And when you get back to New York, you can tell your girl I asked you to. They broke from him a little involuntary exclamation. It might have been a pity. And it might have been a surprise. It had in it something of both, but nothing of mirth. And as they stepped into the depths of the soft black shadows, he took off his smart straw sailor, which was so different from the sailors that the boys in our town were. And there was in the gestures something of reverence. Millie Whitcombe didn't like the story of the only heroine after all. She says that a steady diet of such literary fare would give her blue indigestion. Also, she objects on the ground that no one got married. That is, the heroine didn't. And she says that a heroine who does not get married isn't a heroine at all. She thinks she prefers the pink cheeked goddess kind in the end. End of story 10. The only heroine of Buttered Side Down. Story 11. Sun dried of Buttered Side Down. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Madeira. Buttered Side Down by Edna Ferber. There come those times in the life of every woman when she feels that she must wash her hair at once. And then she does it. The feeling may come upon her suddenly without warning at any hour of the day or night. Or its approach may be slow and insidious, so that the victim does not at first realize what it is that fills her with that sensation of unrest. But once in the clutches of the idea, she knows no happiness, no peace until she has donned a kimono, gathered up two bath towels, a spray, and the green soap, and she breathes again only when head dripping she makes for the backyard, the sitting room radiator, or the side porch, depending on her place of residence and the time of year. Mary Louise was seized with the feeling at ten o'clock on a joyous June morning. She tried to fight it off because she had got to that stage in the construction of her story where her hero was beginning to talk and act a little more like a real life man, and a little less like a clothing store dummy. By the way, they don't seem to be using those pink and white black mustachioed figures any more. Another good simile gone. Mary Louise had been battling with that hero for a week. He wouldn't make love to the heroine. In vain had Mary Louise striven to instill red blood into his watery veins. He and the beauteous heroine were as far apart as they had been on page one of the typewritten manuscript. Mary Louise was developing nerves over him. She had bitten her fingernails and twisted her hair into corkscrews over him. She had risen every morning at the chaste hour of seven, breakfasted hurriedly, tidied the tiny two-room apartment, and sat down in the unromantic morning light to wrestle with her stick of a hero. She had made her heroine a creature of grace, witch, and loveliness. But thus far the hero had not once clasped her to him fiercely, or pressed his lips to her hair, her eyes, her cheeks. Nay, as the story writers would put it, he hadn't even devoured her with his gaze. This morning, however, he had begun to show some signs of life. He was developing possibilities. Whereupon, at this critical stage in the story-writing game, the hair-washing mania seized Mary Louise. She tried to dismiss the idea. She pushed it out of her mind and slammed the door. It only popped in again. Her fingers wandered to her hair, her eyes wandered to the dune sunshine outside. The hero was left poised, arms outstretched, an unquenchable love-light burning in his eyes, while Mary Louise mused thus, it certainly feels sticky. It's been six weeks, at least. And I could sit here by the window, in the sun, and dry it. With a jerk she brought her straying fingers away from her hair, and her wandering eyes away from the sunshine, and her runaway thoughts back to the typewritten page. For three minutes, the snap of the little discs crackled through the stillness of the tiny apartment. Then suddenly, as though succumbing to an irresistible force, Mary Louise rose, walked across the room, a matter of six steps, removing hairpins as she went, and shoved aside the screen which hid the stationery wash bowl by day. Mary Louise turned on a faucet and held her finger under it, while an agonized expression of doubt and suspense overspread her features. Slowly the look of suspense gave way to a smile of beatific content. A sigh, deep soul-filling, satisfied, welled up from Mary Louise's breast. The water was hot. Half an hour later, head swathed, turban fashion in a towel. Mary Louise rolled over to the window. Then she stopped aghast. In that half hour, the sun had slipped just around the corner, and was now beating brightly and uselessly against the brick wall a few inches away. Slowly Mary Louise unwound the towel, meant double in the contortionistic attitude that women assume on such occasions, and watched with melancholy eyes while the drops trickled down to the ends of her hair, and fell unsunned to the floor. If only, thought Mary Louise bitterly, there was such a thing as a back yard in this city, a back yard where I could squat at the grass and the sunshine and the breeze. Maybe there is. Alas! the janitor. She bound her hair in the turban again, and opened the door. At the far end of the long, dim hallway, Charlie, the janitor, was doing something to the floor with a mop, and a great deal of sloppy water, whistling the while with a shrill abandon that had announced his presence to Mary Louise. Oh, Charlie, called Mary Louise. Charlie, can you come here just a minute? You bet, answered Charlie with the accent on the you and came. Charlie, is there a backyard or something where the sun is, you know, some nice grassy place where I can sit and dry my hair and let the breezes blow it? Backyard? Grin, Charlie, I guess you're new to New York, all right. With ground costing a million or so a foot, not much. They ain't no back yard. Unless you give that name to an ash barrel and the dump heap or so and a crappatin cans, I wouldn't invite a goat to set in it. Disappointment curved Mary Louise's mouth. It was a lovely enough mouth at any time. But when it curved in disappointment, genitors are but human after all. So you what though, said Charlie, I'll let you up on the roof. And ain't long on grassy spots up there, but say breeze like a summer resort. On a clear day, you can see way over five eight Avenue, only for the love of Mike. Don't blabber to the other women folk in the building or all have the whole works of amusing the roof for a general sun massage and beauty parlor. Come on. I'll never breathe it to a soul. promised Mary Louise Oh, wait a minute. She turned back into her room appearing again in a moment with something green in her hand. What's that? Ask Charlie suspiciously. Mary Louise speeding down the narrow hallway after Charlie blushed a little. It's it's parsley. She faltered parsley exploded Charlie. Well, what the Well, you see, I'm from the country explained Mary Louise and in the country at this time of year when you dry your hair in the backyard, you get the most wonderful scent of green and growing things not only of flowers, you know, but of the new things just coming up in the vegetable garden. And and well, this parsley happens to be the only really gardening thing I have. So I thought I'd bring it along and sniff it once in a while and make believe it's the country up there on the roof. Halfway up the perilous little flight of stairs that led to the roof. Charlie the janitor turned to gaze down at Mary Louise, who was just behind and keeping fearfully out of the way of Charlie's heels. Women observed Charlie the janitor was nothing but little girls in long skirts and their heads on up. I know it giggled Mary Louise and sprang up on the roof looking with her towel swath head like a lady a Latin leaping from her underground grotto. The two stood there a moment looking up at the blue sky and all about at the June sunshine. If you go up high enough, observed Mary Louise, the sunshine is almost the same as it is in the country. Isn't it? I shouldn't wonder, said Charlie. The Calvary cemetery is about as near as I live against the country. Say you can get up here in the soapbox and let your feet hang down. Last janitor's wife used to hang her wash and appear, I guess. I'll leave the door open. See, you're so kind. Smile, Mary Louise. Can you blame me? Roofed toward it the gallant Charles and vanished. Mary Louise perched on the soapbox, unwound her turban, draped the damp towel over her shoulders and shook out the wet masses of her hair. Now the average girl shaking out the wet masses of her hair looks like a drowned rat, but nature had been kind to Mary Louise. She had given her hair that curled in little ringlets when wet and that waved in all the right places when dry. Just now it hung in damp shining strands on either side of her face so that she looked most remarkably like one of those oval-faced, great-eyed, red-lipped women that the old Italian artists were so fond of painting. Below her, blazing in the sun, lay the great stone in Iron City. Mary Louise shook out her hair idly, with one hand sniffed her parsley, shut her eyes through back her head, and began to sing, beating time with her heel against the soapbox and forgetting all about the letter that had come that morning, stating that it was not from any lack of merit, et cetera. She sang and sniffed her parsley, and waggled her hair in the breeze, and beat time idly with the heel of her little boot when, holy cats, exclaimed a man's voice. What is this anyway, a Coney Island concession gone wrong? Mary Louise's eyes unclosed in a flash, and Mary Louise gazed upon an irate-looking, youngish man who wore shabby slivers and no-collar with a full dress air. I presume that you are the janitor's beautiful daughter, growled the colorless man. Well, not precisely, answered Mary Louise sweetly. Are you the scrub-lady stalwart son? Ha! exploded the man. But then all women look alike with their hair down. I ask your pardon, though. Not at all, replied Mary Louise. For that matter all men look like picked chickens with their colors off. At that the colorless man, who until now had been standing on the top step that led up to the roof, came slowly forward, stepped languidly over a skylight or two, draped his handkerchief over a convenient chimney, and sat down, hugging his long, lean legs to him. Nice up here, isn't it? He remarked. It was, said Mary Louise. Ha! exploded he again. Then, where's your mirror? He demanded. Mirror? echoed Mary Louise. Certainly. You have the hair, the comb, the attitude, and the general laurel-eye effect. Also, your singing lured me to your shores. You didn't look lured, retorted Mary Louise. You looked lurid. What's that stuff in your hand? Next, demanded he. He really was a most astonishingly rude young man. Parsley. Parsley? shouted he, much as Charlie had done. Well, what the? Back home. Elucidated Mary Louise once more patiently. After you've washed your hair, you dried in the backyard, sitting on the grass and the sunshine and the breeze, and the garden smells come to you. The nasturtiums and the pansies and the geraniums, you know, and even that clean grass smell, and the pungent vegetable odor, and there are ants and bees and butterflies. Go on. Urge the young man eagerly. And Mrs. Nextdoor comes out to hang up a few stockings and a jab at her, so in a couple of baby dresses that she's just rubbed through when she calls out to you, wash your hair. Yes, you say. It was something awful, and I wanted it nice for Tuesday night, but I suppose I won't be able to do a thing with it. And then Mrs. Nextdoor stands there a minute on the clothes-reel platform, with the wind whipping her skirts about her and the fresh smell of the growing things coming to her. And suddenly she says, I guess I'll wash mine, too, while the baby's asleep. The colorless young man rose from his chimney, picked up his handkerchief, and moved to the chimney just next to Mary Louise's soapbox. Live here? He asked in his impolite way. If I did not, do you think that I would choose this as the one spot in all New York in which to dry my hair? When I said live here, I didn't mean just that. I meant, who are you? And why are you here? And where do you come from? And do you sign your real name to your stuff, or use a nom de plume? Why, how did you know? gasped Mary Louise. Give me five minutes more, grinned the keen-eyed young man. And I'll tell you what maker typewriter is and where the last rejection slip came from. Oh, said Mary Louise again, that you are the scrub lady stalwart son, and you've been ransacking my waistbasket. Quite unheating, the colorless man went on. And so you thought you could write, and you came on to New York. You know, one doesn't just travel to New York, or ride to it, or come to it. One comes on to New York. And now you're not so sure about the writing, hmm? And back home, what did you do? Back home, I taught school, and hated it. But I kept on teaching until I'd saved $500. Every other school man in the world teaches until she has saved $500, and then she packs two suitcases and goes to Europe from June until September. But I saved my $500 for New York. I've been here six months now. And the $500 has shrunk to almost nothing. And if I don't break into the magazines pretty soon, then, then, said Mary Louise with a quaver in her voice, I'll have to go back and teach 37 young devils that six times five is 30, put down the knot and carry six, and that the French are a gay people fond of dancing and light wines. But I'll scrimp on everything from hairpins to shoes and back again, including pretty collars and gloves and hats until I've saved up another 500. And then I'll try it all over again because I can write from the depths of one capacious pocket, the inquiring man took a small black pipe from another a bag of tobacco from another match, the long deft fingers made a brief task. I didn't ask you, he said after the first puff, because I could see that you weren't the fool kind that objects. Then with amazing suddenness, no any of the editors know them. If camping on their doorsteps and haunting the office buildings and conjoaling and fighting the secretaries and office boys and assistants and things constitutes knowing them, then we're chums. What makes you think you can write? Sneered the thin man, Mary Louise gathered up her brush and comb and towel and parsley and jumped off the soapbox. She pointed belligerently at her tormentor with the hand that held the brush. Being the scrub ladies, dullward son, you wouldn't understand. But I can write. I shan't go under. I'm going to make this town count me in as the four million and one. Sometimes I get so tired of being nobody at all with not even enough cleverness in me to rest a living from this big city that I long to stand out at the edge of the curbing and take off my hat and wave it and shout, say you four million uncaring people. I'm Mary Louise Moss from Escanaba, Michigan. And I like your town. And I want to stay here. Won't you please pay some slight attention to me? No one knows I'm here except myself and the rent collector. And I put in the rude young man. Oh, you sneered Mary Louise equally rude. You don't count. The colorless young man in the shabby slippers smiled a curious little twisted smile. You never can tell. He grinned. I might. Then quite suddenly he stood up, knocked the ash out of his pipe and came over to Mary Louise who was preparing to descend the steep little flight of stairs. Look here, Mary Louise Moss from Escanaba, Michigan. You stop trying to write the slop you're writing now. Stop it. Drop the love tales that are like the stuff that everybody else writes. Stop trying to write about New York. You don't know anything about it. Listen, you get back to work and write about Mrs. Next Door and the hair washing and the vegetable garden and bees in the backyard. Understand? You write the way you talk to me and then you send your stuff into Cecil Reeves. Reeves mocked Mary Louise Cecil Reeves of the earth. He wouldn't dream of looking at my stuff. And anyway, it really isn't your affair and began to descend the stairs. Well, you know, you brought me up here kicking with your heels and singing at the top of your voice. I couldn't work. So it's really your fault. Then just as Mary Louise had almost disappeared down the stairway, he put his last astonishing question. How often do you wash your hair? He demanded. Well, back home, confessed Mary Louise. Every six weeks or so was enough, but not here, put in the rude young man briskly. Never. That's all very well for the country, but it won't do in the city. Once a week at least and on the roof. Cleanliness demands it. But if I'm going back to the country, replied Mary Louise, it won't be necessary. But you're not calmly said the colorless young man, just as Mary Louise vanished from sight. Down at the other end of the hallway on Mary Louise's floor, Charlie, the janitor was doing something to the windows now with a rag and a pail of water. Get it dry? He called out sociably. Yes, thank you answered Mary Louise and turned to enter her own little apartment. Then hesitatingly she came back to Charlie's window. There, there was a man up there, a very tall, very thin, very rude, very, that is rather nice, youngish, oldish man and slippers and no collar. I wonder, oh, him snorted Charlie. They don't show himself on in a blue moon. None of the other tenants knows he's up there as the whole top floor to himself and shut himself up there for weeks at a time writing books or something such truck. That guy, he owns the building. Oh, it's the building, said Mary Louise faintly. Why, he looked, he looked. Sure. Grin, Charlie. lesson. Name's Reeves, Cecil Reeves, saying that a devil of a name. End of story 11. Sun dried from buttered side down. Story 12. Where the car turns at 18th of buttered side down. This Lieberbox recordings in the public domain. Recording by Madeira. Buttered side down by Edna Ferber. Story 12. Where the car turns at 18th. This will be a homing pigeon story. Though I sent it ever so far, though its destination be the office of a home and fireside magazine, or one of the kind with a French story in the back, it will return to me. After each flight, its feathers will be a little more rumpled, its wings more weary, its course more wavering, until battered, spent, broken, it will flutter to rest in the wastebasket. And yet, though its message may never be delivered, it must be sent because well, because you know where the car turns at 18th. There you see a glaringly attractive billboard poster. It depicts groups of smiling white clad men standing on tropical shores with waving palms overhead, and a glimpse of blue sea in the distance. The wording beneath the picture runs something like this. Young men wanted an unusual opportunity for travel, education and advancement. Good pay. No expenses. When the car turns at 18th, and I see that, I remember Eddie Houghton back home. And when I remember Eddie Houghton, I see red. The day after Eddie Houghton finished high school, he went to work. In our town, we don't take a job. We accept a position. Our paper had it that Edwin Houghton had accepted a position as clerk and assistant chemist at the Kuntz Drugstore where he would take up his new duties Monday. His new duty seemed at first to consist of opening the store in the morning, sweeping out, and whizzing about town on a bicycle with an unnecessarily insistent bell, delivering prescriptions which had been telephoned for. But by the time the summer had really set in, Eddie was installed back of the soda fountain. There never was anything better looking than Eddie Houghton in his white duck coat. He was one of those misleadingly golden pink and white men. I say misleadingly because you usually associate pink and whiteness with such words as sissy and molly cuddle. Eddie was neither. He played quarterback every year from his freshman year, and he could put shot and cut classes with the best of them. But in that white duck coat with the braiding and frogs, he had any musical comedy white flannel tenor lieutenant whose duty it is to march down to the edge of the footlights, snatch out his sword and warble about his country's flag, looking like a flat-nosed blue-gummed igoracht. Coombs' soda-water recipients swelled to double their usual size, and the girl's complexions were something awful that summer. I've known Nelly Donovan to take as many as three ice-cream sodas and two phosphates a day when Eddie was mixing. He had a way of throwing in a good-natured smile, and an easy flow of conversation with every drink. While indulging in a little airy purse of flage, the girls had a great little trick of purcing their mouths into rosebud shapes over their soda straws and casting their eyes upward at Eddie. They all knew the trick, and its value, so that at night Eddie's dreams were haunted by whole rows of rosely pursed lips and seas of upturned, adoring eyes. Of course we all noticed that on those rare occasions, when Josie Morehouse came into Coombs'—her glass was heaved higher with ice-cream than that of any of the other girls—and that Eddie's usually easy flow of talk was interspersed with certain stammerings and stutterings. But Josie didn't come in often. She had a lot of dignity for a girl of eighteen. Besides, she was taking the teacher's examinations that summer when the other girls were playing tennis and drinking sodas. Eddie really hated the soda water end of the business, as every soda clerk in the world does. But he went about it good-naturedly. He really wanted to learn the drug business, but the boss knew he had a drawing card, and insisted that Eddie go right on concocting fairy queens and strawberries Sundays, and Nectar's and Coombs' specials. One Saturday, when he happened to have on hand an oversupply of bananas that would have spoiled over Sunday, he invented a mess and called it the Eddie Extra, and the girls swarmed on it like flies around a honey-pot. That kind of thing would have spoiled most boys. But Eddie had a sensible mother. On those nights when he used to come home nauseated with dealing out chop-sui sundaes and orange aides, and saying that there was no future for a fellow in our dead little hole, his mother would give him something rather special for supper, and set him hoeing and watering the garden. So Eddie stuck to his job and waited, and all the time he was saying, with a melting look, to the last silly little girl who was drinking her third soda, somebody looks mighty sweet and pink today. Or while he was doping to my own ball-game with one of the boys who dropped in for cigar, he was thinking of bigger things, and longing for a man-sized job. The man-sized job loomed up before Eddie's dazzled eyes when he least expected it. It was at the close of a particularly hot day when it seemed to Eddie that everyone in town had had everything from birch-beer to peach ice-cream. On his way home to supper, he stopped at the post office with a handful of letters that old man couldn't send giving him to mail. His mother had told him that they would have corn out of their own garden for supper that night, and Eddie was in something of a hurry. He and his mother were great pals. In one corner of the dim little post office lobby, a man was busily tacking up posters. The white-washed walls bloomed with them. They were gay, attractive looking posters, done in red, in blue, in green. And after Eddie had dumped his mail into the slot and had called up, �Hello, Jake!� to the stamp clerk, whose back was turned to the window, he strolled idly over to where the man was putting the finishing touches to his work. The man was dressed in a sailor suit of blue with a picturesque silk scarf knotted at his hairy chest. He went right on tacking posters. They certainly were attractive pictures. Some showed groups of stalwart, immaculately clad young gods lolling indolently on tropical shores with a splendor of palms overhead and a sparkling blue sea in the distance. Others depicted a group of white-clad men wading knee-deep in the surface they laughingly landed a cutter on the sandy beach. There was a particularly fascinating one showing two bare-footed young chaps on a wave-swept raft engaged in that delightfully perilous task known as signalling. Another showed the keen-eyed gunners busy about the big guns. Eddie studied them all. The man finished his task and looked up quite casually. �Hello, kid�, he said. �Hello� answered Eddie, then. �That�s some picture gallery you�re giving us.� The man in the sailor suit fell back a pace or two and surveyed his work with a critical but satisfied eye. �Petters�, he said. �Don�t do it, Justice. We�ve opened a recruiting office here, looking for young men with brains and muscle and ambition. That�s a great chance. We don�t get to these here little towns much.� He placed a hand-bill in Eddie�s hand. Eddie glanced down at it sheepishly. �I�ve heard,� he said, �that it�s a hard life.� The man in the sailor suit threw back his head and laughed, just laying a great deal of hairy throat and chest. �Hard�, he cheered and slapped one of the gay-colored posters with the back of his hand. �You see that? Well, it ain�t a bit exaggerated, not a bit. I don�t know. It�s the only life for a young man, especially for a guy in a little town. There�s no chance here for a bright young man, and if he goes to the city, what does he get? The city�s jamful of kids that flock there in the spring and fall, looking for jobs and thinking the city�s sitting up waiting for them. And where do they stand? In the dime-lodging houses. That�s where. In the Navy, you see the world, and it don�t cost you a cent. A guy is a fool to bury himself alive in a hole like this. You could be seeing the world, traveling by sea from port to port, from country to country, from ocean to ocean, amid ever-changing scenery and climatic conditions, to see and study the habits and conditions of the strange races. It rolled off his tongue with fascinating glibness,� Eddie glanced at the folder in his hand. �I always did like the water,� he said. �Sure,� agreed the hairy man heartily. �What young fellow don�t? I�ll tell you what. Come on over to the office with me, and I�ll show you some real stuff.� �That�s my supper time,� hesitated Eddie. �I guess I better not.� �Oh, supper!� laughed the man. �You come on and have supper with me, kid.� Eddie�s pink cheeks went three shades pinker. �Gee, that�d be great, but my mother, that is she. The man and the sailor should laugh again, a laugh with a sting in it.� �Oh, great big fellow like you ain�t tied to your ma�s apron strings, are you?� �Much I�m not,� retorted Eddie. �I�ll telephone her when I get to your hotel. That�s what I�ll do.� But there were such fascinating things, those new booklets. And the man had such marvelous tales to tell that Eddie forgot trifles like supper and waiting mothers. There were pictures taken on board ship showing frolics and ball games and minstrel shows and glee clubs, and the men at mass and each sailor sleeping snug as a bug in his hammock. There were other pictures showing foreign scenes and strange ports. Eddie�s teak grew cold, and his apple pie and cheese lay untasted on his plate. �Now me� said the recruiting officer. �I�m a married man, but my wife, she wouldn�t have it no other way. �No, sir. She�ll be in the Navy herself, I�ll bet when women vote.� �Why, before I joined the Navy, I didn�t know whether Guam was a vegetable or an island. And Calubra wasn�t in my geography. �Now? Why? Now, I�m as much at home in Puerto Rico as I am in San Francisco. I�m as well acquainted in Valparaiso as I am in Vermont. And I�ve run around Cairo, Egypt, until I know it better than Cairo, Illinois. �It�s the only way to see the world. You travel by sea from port to port, from country to country, from ocean to ocean, amid ever-changing scenery and climactic conditions to sea and study the� And Eddie forgot that it was Wednesday night, which was the prescription clerk�s night off. Forgot that the boss was awaiting his return, that he might go home to his own supper. Forgot his mother and her little treat of green corn out of the garden. Forgot everything in the wonder of this man�s tales of people and scenes such as he never dreamed could exist outside of a Jack Munden story. Now and then Eddie interrupted with a, �Yes, but� that grew more and more infrequent until, finally, they seized all together. Eddie�s man-sized job had come.� �When we heard the news, we all dropped into the drug store to joke with him about it. We had a good deal to say about rolling gates and bell-shaped trousers and anchors and sea-circans tattooed on the arm. One of the boys scored a hit by slapping his dime down on the soda-fountain marble and bellowing for rum and salt-horse. Someone started to tease the little Morehouse girl about sailors having sweethearts in every port, but when they saw the look in her eyes, they changed their mind and stopped. �It�s funny how a girl of twenty is a woman, when a man of twenty is a boy.� Eddie dished out the last of his chocolate ice-cream sodas and cherry phosphates and root-beers, while the girls laughingly begged him to bring them back kimonos from China and scarves from the Orient. And Eddie promised laughing, too, but with a far-off eager look in his eyes. When the time came for him to go, there was quite a little bodyguard of us ready to escort him down to the depot. We picked up two or three more outside of Roarp�s pool room and a couple more from the benches outside the hotel. Eddie walked ahead with his mother. I have said that Mrs. Hotten was a sensible woman. She was never more so than now. Any other mother would have gone into hysterics and begged the recruiting officer to let her boy off, but she knew better. Still, I think Eddie felt some uncomfortable pangs when he looked at her sad face. On the weight of a depot, we had to pass the Agassiz School, where Josie Morehouse was substituting second reader for the Wilson girl who was sick. She was standing in the window as we passed. Eddie took off his cap and waved to her, and she returned the wave as well as she could without having the children see her. That would never have done, seeing that she was the teacher and substituting at that. But when we turned the corner, we noticed that she was still standing at the window and leaning out just a bit, even at the risk of being indiscreet. When the 1015 pulled out, Eddie stood on the bottom step with his cap off, looking, I can't tell you how boyish and straight and clean and handsome with his lips parted and his eyes very bright. The hairy-chested recruiting officer stood just beside him and suffered by contrast. There was a bedlam of goodbyes and last messages in good-natured badmage, but Eddie's mother's eyes never left his face until the train disappeared around the curve in the track. Well, they got a new boy at Kunses. A sandy-haired youth with pimples and no knack at mixing, and we got out of the habit of dropping in there, although those fall months were unusually warm. It wasn't long before we began to get postcards, pictures of the naval training station and the gymnasium and the model camps and of drills and of Eddie in his uniform. His mother insisted on calling it his sailor suit, as though he were a little boy. One day Josie Morehouse came over to Mrs. Houghton's with a group picture in her hand. She handed it to Eddie's mother without comment. Mrs. Houghton looked at it eagerly. Her eyes, selecting her own boy from the group as unerringly as a mother bird, finds her nest in the forest. Oh, Eddie's better looking than that. She cried with a tremulous little laugh. How funny those pants make them look, don't they? And his mouth isn't that way at all. Eddie always had the sweetest mouth from the time he was a baby. Let's see some of these other boys. Why? Why? Then she fell silent, scanning those other faces. Presently Josie bent over her and looked to and the brows of both women knitted in perplexity. They looked for a long, long minute. And the longer they looked, the more noticeable became the cluster of fine little wrinkles that had begun to form about Mrs. Houghton's eyes. When finally they looked up, it was to gaze at one another questioningly. Those other boys, faltered Eddie's mother. They, they don't look like Eddie, do they? I mean, no, they don't. Agreed Josie. They look older and they have such queer looking eyes and jaws and foreheads. But then she finished with mocked cheerfulness. You never can tell in those silly Kodak pictures. Eddie's mother studied the card again inside gently. I hope, she said, that Eddie won't get into bad company. After that, our postcard ceased. I wish that there was some way of telling this story so that the end wouldn't come in the middle. But there is none. In our town, we know the news before the paper comes out. And we only read it to verify what we have heard. So that long before the paper came out in the middle of the afternoon, we had been horrified by the news of Eddie Houghton's desertion and suicide. We stopped one another on Main Street to talk about it, and recall how boyish and handsome he had looked in his white duck coat. And on that last day, just as the 1015 pulled out, it don't seem hardly possible, does it? We demanded of each other. But when Eddie's mother brought out the letters that had come after our postal cards had ceased, we understood. And when they brought him home, and we saw him for the last time, all those of us who had gone to school with him, and to dances and sleigh rides, and hayrack parties and picnics. And when we saw the look on his face, the look of one who walking in a sunny path has stumbled upon something horrible and unclean, we forgave him his neglect of us. We forgave him desertion, forgave him the taking of his own life, forgave him the look that he had brought into his mother's eyes. There had never been anything extraordinary about Eddie Houghton. He had had his faults and virtues and good and bad sides, just like other boys of his age. He Oh, I'm using too many words when one slang phrase will express it. Eddie had been just a nice young kid. I think the worst thing he had ever said was damn, perhaps. If he had sworn it was with clean oaths calculated to relieve the mind and feelings. But the men that he shipped with during that year or more, I am sure that he had never dreamed that such men were. He had never stood on the curbing outside of recruiting office on South State Street in the old levee district and watched that tragic panorama move by those nightmare faces. Drink my heart vice guard ruined. I know that he had never seen such faces in all his clean hardworking young boys life spent in our prosperous little country town. I am certain that he had never heard such words as came from the lips of his fellow seaman great mouth filling souls searing words words unclean nauseating unspeakable and yet spoken. I don't say that Eddie Houghton had not taken his drink now then. There were certain dark rumors in our town to the effect that favored ones who dropped into coonces more often than seem needful were privileged to have a thimbleful of something choice in the prescription room back of the partition at the rear of the drugstore. But that was the most devilish thing that Eddie had ever done. I don't say that all crews are like that one. Perhaps he was unfortunate in falling in with that one. But it was an eastern trip. And every port was a port Said. Eddie Houghton's thoughts were not these men's thoughts. His actions were not their actions. His practices were not their practices. To Eddie Houghton, a Chinese woman in a Sampan on the waterfront at Shanghai was something picturesque something about which to write home to his mother and to Josie to those other men. She was possible pray. Those other men saw that he was different. And they pestered him. They ill treated him when they could and made his life a hellish thing. Men do those things. And people do not speak of it. I don't know all of the things that he suffered. But in his mind, day by day, grew the great, overwhelming desire to get away from it all from this horrible life that was such a dreadful mistake. I think that during the long night watches, his mind was filled with thoughts of our decent little town. Of his mother's kitchen, with its Wednesday and Saturday scent of me made bread. Of the shady front porch with its purple climates. Of the smooth front yard, which it was his Saturday duty to mow that it might be trim and sightly for Sunday. Of the boys and girls who used to drop into the drugstore, those clear eyed innocently coquettish giggling, blushing girls and their middy blouses and white skirts, their slender arms and throats brown from tennis and boating, their eyes smiling into his as they sat perched at the fountain after a hot set of tennis. Those slim clean young boys, sun browned, laughing their talk all of swimming and boating in tennis and girls. He did not realize that it was desertion that thought that grew and grew in his mind. In it there was nothing of faithlessness to his country. He was only trying to be true to himself and to the things that his mother had taught him. He only knew that he was deadly sick of these sights of disease and vice. He only knew that he wanted to get away back to his own decent life with the decent people to whom he belonged. And he went. He went as a child runs home when it had tripped and fallen in the mud, not dreaming of wrongdoing or punishment. The first few hundred miles on the train were a dream. But finally Eddie found himself talking to a man, a big, lean, blue-eyed, Western man who regarded Eddie with kindly puzzled eyes. Eddie found himself telling his story in a disjointed, breathless sort of way. When he had finished, the man uncrossed his long, lean legs, took his pipe out of his mouth and sat up. There was something of horror in his eyes as he sat looking at Eddie. Why, kid, he said at last, you're a deserting. You'll get the pen, don't you know that? If they catch you. Where are you going? Going, repeated Eddie, going. Why, I'm going home, of course. Then I don't see what you're gaining, said the man, because they'll sure get you there. Eddie sat staring at the man for a dreadful minute. In that minute, the last of his glorious youth and ambition and zest of life departed from him. He got off the train to the next town, and the Western man offered him some money, which Eddie declined with all his old time sweetness of manner. It was rather a large town with a great many busy people in it. Eddie went to a cheap hotel and took a room and sat on the edge of the thin little bed and stared at the carpet. It was a dusty red carpet. In front of the bureau, many feet had worn a hole so that the bare boards showed through with a tuft of ragged red fringe edging them. Eddie Houghton sat and stared at the worn place with a curiously blank look on his face. He sat and stared and saw many things. He saw his mother, for one thing, sitting on the porch with a gingham apron over her light dress, waiting for him to come home to supper. He saw his own room, a typical boy's room with camera pictures and blueprints stuck in the sides of the dresser mirror, and the boxing gloves on the wall and his tennis racket with one string broken. He had always meant to have that racket restrung. And his track shoes, relics of high school days, flung in one corner, and his gay-coloured school pennants draped to form a fresco, and the cushion that Josie Morehouse had made for him two years ago, at Christmas time, and the dainty whitebread spread that he fussed about because he said it was too sissy for a boy's room. Oh, I can't tell you what he saw as he sat and stared at that worn place in the carpet. But pretty soon it began to grow dark. And at last he rose, keeping his fascinated eyes still on the bare spot, walked to the door, opened it, and backed out clearly, still keeping his eyes on the spot. He was back again in 15 minutes with a bottle in his hand. He should have known better than to choose Karbalik being a druggist, but all men are a little mad at such times. He lay down at the edge of the thin little bed that was little more than a palette, and he turned his face toward the bare spot that could just be seen in the gathering gloom. And when he raised the bottle to his lips, the old-time sweetness of his smile illumined his face. Where the car turns at 18th Street, there was a big, glaring billboard poster showing a group of stalwart young men in white ducks lolling on shores, of tropical splendor with palms waving overhead, and a glimpse of blue sea in the distance. The wording beneath it runs something like this. Young men wanted an unusual opportunity for travel, education, and advancement. Good pay, no expenses. When I see that sign, I think of Eddie Houghton back home. And when I think of Eddie Houghton, I see red. End of Story 12, Where the car turns at 18th, of Buttered Side Down, Recording by Madeira. End of Buttered Side Down by Edna Ferber.