“By and by, after they calmed down and I began to catch up with what was doing on the stage, I felt my seat sort of creak forward and then creak back again and I knew the lady had her feet on it and I was in for a good rock. Gosh!” he wiped his pale, narrow brow on which the sweat had gathered thinly, “it was awful. I hope to tell you I wished I’d never come at all. Once I got excited at a show and rocked a man’s chair without knowing it and I was glad when he asked me to stop. But I knew this lady wouldn’t be glad if I asked her. She’d of just rocked harder than ever.”
Some time before, the population of the courtroom had begun stealing glances at the middle-aged lady with yellowish-white hair. She was of a deep, life-like lobster color with rage.
“It got to be near the end of the act,” went on the little pale man, “and I was enjoying it as well as I could, seeing that sometimes she’d push me toward the stage and sometimes she’d let go, and the seat and me would fall back into place. Then all of a sudden she began to talk. She said she had an operation or something—I remember she said she told the doctor that she guessed she knew more about her own stomach than he did. The play was getting good just then—the people next to me had their handkerchiefs out and was weeping—and I was feeling sort of that way myself. And all of a sudden this lady began to tell her friends what she told the plumber about his indigestion. Gosh!” Again he shook his head from side to side; his pale eyes fell involuntarily on Mrs. Robinson—then looked quickly away. “You couldn’t help but hear some and I begun missing things and then missing more things and then everybody began laughing and I didn’t know what they were laughing at and, as soon as they’d leave off, her voice would begin again. Then there was a great big laugh that lasted for a long time and everybody bent over double and kept laughing and laughing, and I hadn’t heard a word. First thing I knew the curtain came down and then I don’t know what happened. I must of been a little crazy or something because I got up and closed my seat, and reached back and pushed the lady in the face.”
As he concluded there was a long sigh in the courtroom as though everyone had been holding in his breath waiting for the climax. Even the judge gasped a little and the three ladies on the witness bench burst into a shrill chatter and grew louder and louder and shriller and shriller until the judge’s gavel rang out again upon his desk.
“Charles Stuart,” said the judge in a slightly raised voice, “is this the only extenuation you can make for raising your hand against a woman of the plaintiff’s age?”
Charles Stuart’s head sank a little between his shoulders, seeming to withdraw as far as it was able into the poor shelter of his body.
“Yes, sir,” he said faintly.
Mrs. Robinson sprang to her feet.
“Yes, judge,” she cried shrilly, “and there’s more than that. He’s a liar too, a dirty little liar. He’s just proclaimed himself a dirty little—”
“Silence!” cried the judge in a terrible voice. “I’m running this court, and I’m capable of making my own decisions!” He paused. “I will now pronounce sentence upon Charles Stuart,” he referred to the register, “upon Charles David Stuart of 212½ West 22nd St.”
The courtroom was silent. The reporter drew nearer—he hoped the sentence would be light—just a few days on the Island in lieu of a fine.
The judge leaned back in his chair and hid his thumbs somewhere under his black robe.
“Assault justified,” he said. “Case dismissed.”
The little man Charles Stuart came blinking out into the sunshine, pausing for a moment at the door of the court and looking furtively behind him as if he half expected that it was a judicial error. Then, sniffling once or twice, not because he had a cold but for those dim psychological reasons that make people sniff, he moved slowly south with an eye out for a subway station.
He stopped at a news-stand to buy a morning paper; then entering the subway was borne south to 18th Street where he disembarked and walked east to Third Avenue. Here he was employed in an all-night restaurant built of glass and plaster white tile. Here he sat at a desk from curfew until dawn, taking in money and balancing the books of T. Cushmael, the proprietor. And here, through the interminable nights, his eyes, by turning a little to right or left, could rest upon the starched linen uniform of Miss Edna Schaeffer.
Miss Edna Schaeffer was twenty-three, with a sweet mild face and hair that was a living example of how henna should not be applied. She was unaware of this latter fact, because all the girls she knew used henna just this way, so perhaps the odd vermilion tint of her coiffure did not matter.
Charles Stuart had forgotten about the color of her hair long ago—if he had ever noticed its strangeness at all. He was much more interested in her eyes, and in her white hands which, as they moved deftly among piles of plates and cups, always looked as if they should be playing the piano. He had almost asked her to go to a matinee with him once, but when she had faced him her lips half-parted in a weary, cheerful smile, she had seemed so beautiful that he had lost courage and mumbled something else instead.
It was not to see Edna Schaeffer, however, that he had come to the restaurant so early in the afternoon. It was to consult with T. Cushmael, his employer, and discover if he had lost his job during his night in jail. T. Cushmael was standing in the front of the restaurant looking gloomily out the plate-glass window, and Charles Stuart approached him with ominous forebodings.
“Where’ve you been?” demanded T. Cushmael.
“Nowhere,” answered Charles Stuart discreetly.
“Well, you’re fired.”
Stuart winced.
“Right now?”
Cushmael waved his hands apathetically.
“Stay two or three days if you want to, till I find somebody. Then”—he made a gesture of expulsion—“outside for you.”
Charles Stuart assented with a weary little nod. He assented to everything. At nine o’clock, after a depressed interval during which he brooded upon the penalty of spending a night among the police, he reported for work.
“Hello, Mr. Stuart,” said Edna Schaeffer, sauntering curiously toward him as he took his place behind the desk. “What became of you last night? Get pinched?”
She laughed, cheerfully, huskily, charmingly he thought, at her joke.
“Yes,” he answered on a sudden impulse, “I was in the 35th Street jail.”
“Yes, you were,” she scoffed.
“That’s the truth,” he insisted, “I was arrested.”
Her face grew serious at once.
“Go on. What did you do?”
He hesitated.
“I pushed somebody in the face.”
Suddenly she began to laugh, at first with amusement and then immoderately.
“It’s a fact,” mumbled Stuart, “I almost got sent to prison account of it.”
Setting her hand firmly over her mouth Edna turned away from him and retired to the refuge of the kitchen. A little later, when he was pretending to be busy at the accounts, he saw her retailing the story to the two other girls.
The night wore on. The little man in the grayish suit with the grayish face attracted no more attention from the customers than the whirring electric fan over his head. They gave him their money and his hand slid their change into a little hollow in the marble counter. But to Charles Stuart the hours of this night, this last night, began to assume a quality of romance. The slow routine of a hundred other nights unrolled with a new enchantment before his eyes. Midnight was always a sort of a dividing point—after that the intimate part of the evening began. Fewer people came in, and the ones that did seemed depressed and tired: a casual ragged man for coffee, the beggar from the street corner who ate a heavy meal of cakes and a beefsteak, a few nightbound street-women and a watchman with a red face who exchanged warning phrases with him about his health.
Midnight seemed to come early tonight and business was brisk until after one. When Edna began to fold napkins at a nearby table he was tempted to ask her if she too had not found the night unusually short. Vainly he wished that he might impress himself on her in some way,
