That's Marriage

That's Marriage

Theresa Platt (she had been Terry Sheehan) watched her husband
across the breakfast table with eyes that smoldered. But Orville
Platt was quite unaware of any smoldering in progress. He was
occupied with his eggs. How could he know that these very eggs
were feeding the dull red menace in Terry Platt's eyes?

When Orville Platt ate a soft-boiled egg he concentrated on it.
He treated it as a great adventure. Which, after all, it is.
Few adjuncts of our daily life contain the element of chance that
is to be found in a three-minute breakfast egg.

This was Orville Platt's method of attack: first, he chipped off
the top, neatly. Then he bent forward and subjected it to a
passionate and relentless scrutiny. Straightening--preparatory
to plunging his spoon therein--he flapped his right elbow. It
wasn't exactly a flap; it was a pass between a hitch and a flap,
and presented external evidence of a mental state. Orville Platt
always gave that little preliminary jerk when he was
contemplating a serious step, or when he was moved, or
argumentative. It was a trick as innocent as it was maddening.

Terry Platt had learned to look for that flap--they had been
married four years--to look for it, and to hate it with a morbid,
unreasoning hate. That flap of the elbow was tearing Terry
Platt's nerves into raw, bleeding fragments.

Her fingers were clenched tightly under the table, now. She was
breathing unevenly. "If he does that again," she told herself,
"if he flaps again when he opens the second egg, I'll scream.
I'll scream. I'll scream! I'll sc----"

He had scooped the first egg into his cup. Now he picked up the
second, chipped it, concentrated, straightened, then--up went the
elbow, and down, with the accustomed little flap.

The tortured nerves snapped. Through the early-morning quiet of
Wetona, Wisconsin, hurtled the shrill, piercing shriek of Terry
Platt's hysteria.

"Terry! For God's sake! What's the matter!"

Orville Platt dropped the second egg, and his spoon. The egg
yolk trickled down his plate. The spoon made a clatter and flung
a gay spot of yellow on the cloth. He started toward her.

Terry, wild-eyed, pointed a shaking finger at him. She was
laughing, now, uncontrollably. "Your elbow! Your elbow!"

"Elbow?" He looked down at it, bewildered, then up, fright in
his face. "What's the matter with it?"

She mopped her eyes. Sobs shook her. "You f-f-flapped it."

"F-f-f----" The bewilderment in Orville Platt's face gave way
to anger. "Do you mean to tell me that you screeched like that
because my--because I moved my elbow?"

"Yes."

His anger deepened and reddened to fury. He choked. He had
started from his chair with his napkin in his hand. He still
clutched it. Now he crumpled it into a wad and hurled it to the
center of the table, where it struck a sugar bowl, dropped back,
and uncrumpled slowly, reprovingly. "You--you----" Then
bewilderment closed down again like a fog over his countenance.
"But why? I can't see----"

"Because it--because I can't stand it any longer. Flapping.
This is what you do. Like this."

And she did it. Did it with insulting fidelity, being a clever
mimic.

"Well, all I can say is you're crazy, yelling like that, for
nothing."

"It isn't nothing."

"Isn't, huh? If that isn't nothing, what is?" They were
growing incoherent. "What d'you mean, screeching like a maniac?

Like a wild woman? The neighbors'll think I've killed you. What
d'you mean, anyway!"

"I mean I'm tired of watching it, that's what. Sick and
tired."

"Y'are, huh? Well, young lady, just let me tell YOU
something----"

He told her. There followed one of those incredible quarrels, as
sickening as they are human, which can take place only between
two people who love each other; who love each other so well that
each knows with cruel certainty the surest way to wound the
other; and who stab, and tear, and claw at these vulnerable spots
in exact proportion to their love.

Ugly words. Bitter words. Words that neither knew they knew
flew between them like sparks between steel striking steel.

From him: "Trouble with you is you haven't got enough to do.
That's the trouble with half you women. Just lay around the
house, rotting. I'm a fool, slaving on the road to keep a
good-for-nothing----"

"I suppose you call sitting around hotel lobbies slaving! I
suppose the house runs itself! How about my evenings? Sitting
here alone, night after night, when you're on the road."

Finally, "Well, if you don't like it," he snarled, and lifted
his chair by the back and slammed it down, savagely, "if you
don't like it, why don't you get out, hm? Why don't you get
out?"

And from her, her eyes narrowed to two slits, her cheeks scarlet:

"Why, thanks. I guess I will."

Ten minutes later he had flung out of the house to catch the 8:19
for Manitowoc. He marched down the street, his shoulders
swinging rhythmically to the weight of the burden he carried--his
black leather handbag and the shiny tan sample case,
battle-scarred, both, from many encounters with ruthless porters
and busmen and bellboys. For four years, as he left for his
semi-monthly trip, he and Terry had observed a certain little
ceremony (as had the neighbors). She would stand in the doorway,
watching him down the street, the heavier sample case banging
occasionally at his shin. The depot was only three blocks away.
Terry watched him with fond but unillusioned eyes, which proves
that she really loved him. He was a dapper, well-dressed fat
man, with a weakness for pronounced patterns in suitings, and
addicted to derbies. One week on the road, one week at home.
That was his routine. The wholesale grocery trade liked Platt,
and he had for his customers the fondness that a traveling
salesman has who is successful in his territory. Before his
marriage to Terry Sheehan his little red address book had been
overwhelming proof against the theory that nobody loves a fat
man.

Terry, standing in the doorway, always knew that when he reached
the corner just where Schroeder's house threatened to hide him
from view, he would stop, drop the sample case, wave his hand
just once, pick up the sample case and go on, proceeding backward
for a step or two until Schroeder's house made good its threat.
It was a comic scene in the eyes of the onlooker, perhaps because
a chubby Romeo offends the sense of fitness. The neighbors,
lurking behind their parlor curtains, had laughed at first. But
after a while they learned to look for that little scene, and to
take it unto themselves, as if it were a personal thing.
Fifteen-year wives whose husbands had long since abandoned
flowery farewells used to get a vicarious thrill out of it, and
to eye Terry with a sort of envy.

This morning Orville Platt did not even falter when he reached
Schroeder's corner. He marched straight on, looking steadily
ahead, the heavy bags swinging from either hand. Even if he had
stopped--though she knew he wouldn't--Terry Platt would not have
seen him. She remained seated at the disordered breakfast table,
a dreadfully still figure, and sinister; a figure of stone and
fire, of ice and flame. Over and over in her mind she was
milling the things she might have said to him, and had not. She
brewed a hundred vitriolic cruelties that she might have flung in
his face. She would concoct one biting brutality, and dismiss it
for a second, and abandon that for a third. She was too angry to
cry--a dangerous state in a woman. She was what is known as cold
mad, so that her mind was working clearly and with amazing
swiftness, and yet as though it were a thing detached; a thing
that was no part of her.

She sat thus for the better part of an hour, motionless except
for one forefinger that was, quite unconsciously, tapping out a
popular and cheap little air that she had been strumming at the
piano the evening before, having bought it downtown that same
afternoon. It had struck Orville's fancy, and she had played it
over and over for him. Her right forefinger was playing the
entire tune, and something in the back of her head was following
it accurately, though the separate thinking process was going on
just the same. Her eyes were bright, and wide, and hot.
Suddenly she became conscious of the musical antics of her
finger. She folded it in with its mates, so that her hand became
a fist. She stood up and stared down at the clutter of the
breakfast table. The egg--that fateful second egg--had congealed
to a mottled mess of yellow and white. The spoon lay on the
cloth. His coffee, only half consumed, showed tan with a cold
gray film over it. A slice of toast at the left of his plate
seemed to grin at her with the semi-circular wedge that he had
bitten out of it.

Terry stared down at these congealing remnants. Then she
laughed, a hard high little laugh, pushed a plate away
contemptuously with her hand, and walked into the sitting room.
On the piano was the piece of music (Bennie Gottschalk's great
song hit, "Hicky Boola") which she had been playing the night
before. She picked it up, tore it straight across, once, placed
the pieces back to back, and tore it across again. Then she
dropped the pieces to the floor.

"You bet I'm going," she said, as though concluding a train of
thought. "You just bet I'm going. Right now!" And Terry went.
She went for much the same reason as that given by the ladye of
high degree in the old English song--she who had left her lord
and bed and board to go with the raggle-taggle gipsies-O! The
thing that was sending Terry Platt away was much more than a
conjugal quarrel precipitated by a soft-boiled egg and a flap of
the arm. It went so deep that it is necessary to delve back to
the days when Theresa Platt was Terry Sheehan to get the real
significance of it, and of the things she did after she went.

When Mrs. Orville Platt had been Terry Sheehan, she had played
the piano, afternoons and evenings, in the orchestra of the Bijou
Theater, on Cass Street, Wetona, Wisconsin. Anyone with a name
like Terry Sheehan would, perforce, do well anything she might
set out to do. There was nothing of genius in Terry, but there
was something of fire, and much that was Irish. Which meant that
the Watson Team, Eccentric Song and Dance Artists, never needed a
rehearsal when they played the Bijou. Ruby Watson used merely to
approach Terry before the Monday performance, sheet music in
hand, and say, "Listen, dearie. We've got some new business I
want to wise you to. Right here it goes `TUM dee-dee DUM dee-dee
TUM DUM DUM.' See? Like that. And then Jim vamps. Get me?"

Terry, at the piano, would pucker her pretty brow a moment.
Then, "Like this, you mean?"

"That's it! You've got it."

"All right. I'll tell the drum."

She could play any tune by ear, once heard. She got the spirit
of a thing, and transmitted it. When Terry played a martial
number you tapped the floor with your foot, and unconsciously
straightened your shoulders. When she played a home-and-mother
song you hoped that the man next to you didn't know you were
crying (which he probably didn't, because he was weeping, too).

At that time motion pictures had not attained their present
virulence. Vaudeville, polite or otherwise, had not yet been
crowded out by the ubiquitous film. The Bijou offered
entertainment of the cigar-box-tramp variety, interspersed with
trick bicyclists, soubrettes in slightly soiled pink, trained
seals, and Family Fours with lumpy legs who tossed each other
about and struck Goldbergian attitudes.

Contact with these gave Terry Sheehan a semiprofessional tone.
The more conservative of her townspeople looked at her askance.
There never had been an evil thing about Terry, but Wetona
considered her rather fly. Terry's hair was very black, and she
had a fondness for those little, close-fitting scarlet turbans.
Terry's mother had died when the girl was eight, and Terry's
father had been what is known as easygoing. A good-natured,
lovable, shiftless chap in the contracting business. He drove
around Wetona in a sagging, one-seated cart and never made any
money because he did honest work and charged as little for it as
men who did not. His mortar stuck, and his bricks did not
crumble, and his lumber did not crack. Riches are not acquired in
the contracting business in that way. Ed Sheehan and his
daughter were great friends. When he died (she was nineteen)
they say she screamed once, like a banshee, and dropped to the
floor.

After they had straightened out the muddle of books in Ed
Sheehan's gritty, dusty little office Terry turned her
piano-playing talent to practical account. At twenty-one she was
still playing at the Bijou, and into her face was creeping the
first hint of that look of sophistication which comes from daily
contact with the artificial world of the footlights.

There are, in a small Midwest town like Wetona, just two kinds of
girls. Those who go downtown Saturday nights, and those who
don't. Terry, if she had not been busy with her job at the Bijou,
would have come in the first group. She craved excitement.
There was little chance to satisfy such craving in Wetona, but
she managed to find certain means. The traveling men from the
Burke House just across the street used to drop in at the Bijou
for an evening's entertainment. They usually sat well toward the
front, and Terry's expert playing, and the gloss of her black
hair, and her piquant profile as she sometimes looked up toward
the stage for a signal from one of the performers caught their
fancy, and held it.

She found herself, at the end of a year or two, with a rather
large acquaintance among these peripatetic gentlemen. You
occasionally saw one of them strolling home with her. Sometimes
she went driving with one of them of a Sunday afternoon. And she
rather enjoyed taking Sunday dinner at the Burke Hotel with a
favored friend. She thought those small-town hotel Sunday
dinners the last word in elegance. The roast course was always
accompanied by an aqueous, semifrozen concoction which the bill
of fare revealed as Roman Punch. It added a royal touch to the
repast, even when served with roast pork.

Terry was twenty-two when Orville Platt, making his initial
Wisconsin trip for the wholesale grocery house he represented,
first beheld her piquant Irish profile, and heard her deft
manipulation of the keys. Orville had the fat man's sense of
rhythm and love of music. He had a buttery tenor voice, too, of
which he was rather proud.

He spent three days in Wetona that first trip, and every evening
saw him at the Bijou, first row, center. He stayed through two
shows each time, and before he had been there fifteen minutes
Terry was conscious of him through the back of her head. Orville
Platt paid no more heed to the stage, and what was occurring
thereon, than if it had not been. He sat looking at Terry, and
waggling his head in time to the music. Not that Terry was a
beauty. But she was one of those immaculately clean types. That
look of fragrant cleanliness was her chief charm. Her clear,
smooth skin contributed to it, and the natural penciling of her
eyebrows. But the thing that accented it, and gave it a last
touch, was the way in which her black hair came down in a little
point just in the center of her forehead, where hair meets brow.
It grew to form what is known as a cowlick. (A prettier name for
it is widow's peak.) Your eye lighted on it, pleased, and from
it traveled its gratified way down her white temples, past her
little ears, to the smooth black coil at the nape of her neck.
It was a trip that rested you.

At the end of the last performance on the night of his second
visit to the Bijou, Orville waited until the audience had begun
to file out. Then he leaned forward over the rail that separated
orchestra from audience.

"Could you," he said, his tones dulcet, "could you oblige me
with the name of that last piece you played?"

Terry was stacking her music. "George!" she called to the
drum. "Gentleman wants to know the name of that last piece."
And prepared to leave.

"`My Georgia Crackerjack,'" said the laconic drum.

Orville Platt took a hasty side step in the direction of the door
toward which Terry was headed. "It's a pretty thing," he said
fervently. "An awful pretty thing. Thanks. It's beautiful."

Terry flung a last insult at him over her shoulder: "Don't
thank ME for it. I didn't write it."

Orville Platt did not go across the street to the hotel. He
wandered up Cass Street, and into the ten-o'clock quiet of Main
Street, and down as far as the park and back. "Pretty as a
pink! And play! . . . And good, too. Good."

A fat man in love.

At the end of six months they were married. Terry was surprised
into it. Not that she was not fond of him. She was; and
grateful to him, as well. For, pretty as she was, no man had
ever before asked Terry to be his wife. They had made love to
her. They had paid court to her. They had sent her large boxes
of stale drugstore chocolates, and called her endearing names as
they made cautious declarations such as:

"I've known a lot of girls, but you've got something different.
I don't know. You've got so much sense. A fellow can chum
around with you. Little pal."

Wetona would be their home. They rented a comfortable,
seven-room house in a comfortable, middle-class neighborhood, and
Terry dropped the red velvet turbans and went in for picture
hats. Orville bought her a piano whose tone was so good that to
her ear, accustomed to the metallic discords of the Bijou
instrument, it sounded out of tune. She played a great deal at
first, but unconsciously she missed the sharp spat of applause
that used to follow her public performance. She would play a
piece, brilliantly, and then her hands would drop to her lap.
And the silence of her own sitting room would fall flat on her
ears. It was better on the evenings when Orville was home. He
sang, in his throaty, fat man's tenor, to Terry's expert
accompaniment.

"This is better than playing for those ham actors, isn't it,
hon?" And he would pinch her ear.

"Sure"--listlessly.

But after the first year she became accustomed to what she termed
private life. She joined an afternoon sewing club, and was
active in the ladies' branch of the U.C.T. She developed a knack
at cooking, too, and Orville, after a week or ten days of hotel
fare in small Wisconsin towns, would come home to sea-foam
biscuits, and real soup, and honest pies and cake. Sometimes, in
the midst of an appetizing meal he would lay down his knife and
fork and lean back in his chair, and regard the cool and
unruffled Terry with a sort of reverence in his eyes. Then he
would get up, and come around to the other side of the table, and
tip her pretty face up to his.

"I'll bet I'll wake up, someday, and find out it's all a dream.
You know this kind of thing doesn't really happen--not to a dub
like me."

One year; two; three; four. Routine. A little boredom. Some
impatience. She began to find fault with the very things she had
liked in him: his superneatness; his fondness for dashing suit
patterns; his throaty tenor; his worship of her. And the flap.
Oh, above all, that flap! That little, innocent, meaningless
mannerism that made her tremble with nervousness. She hated it
so that she could not trust herself to speak of it to him. That
was the trouble. Had she spoken of it, laughingly or in earnest,
before it became an obsession with her, that hideous breakfast
quarrel, with its taunts, and revilings, and open hate, might
never have come to pass.

Terry Platt herself didn't know what was the matter with her.
She would have denied that anything was wrong. She didn't even
throw her hands above her head and shriek: "I want to live! I
want to live! I want to live!" like a lady in a play. She only
knew she was sick of sewing at the Wetona West End Red Cross
shop; sick of marketing, of home comforts, of Orville, of the
flap.

Orville, you may remember, left at 8:19. The 11:23 bore Terry
Chicago-ward. She had left the house as it was--beds unmade,
rooms unswept, breakfast table uncleared. She intended never to
come back.

Now and then a picture of the chaos she had left behind would
flash across her order-loving mind. The spoon on the tablecloth.

Orville's pajamas dangling over the bathroom chair. The
coffeepot on the gas stove.

"Pooh! What do I care?"

In her pocketbook she had a tidy sum saved out of the
housekeeping money. She was naturally thrifty, and Orville had
never been niggardly. Her meals when Orville was on the road had
been those sketchy, haphazard affairs with which women content
themselves when their household is manless. At noon she went
into the dining car and ordered a flaunting little repast of
chicken salad and asparagus and Neapolitan ice cream. The men in
the dining car eyed her speculatively and with appreciation.
Then their glance dropped to the third finger of her left hand,
and wandered away. She had meant to remove it. In fact, she had
taken it off and dropped it into her bag. But her hand felt so
queer, so unaccustomed, so naked, that she had found herself
slipping the narrow band on again, and her thumb groped for it,
gratefully.

It was almost five o'clock when she reached Chicago. She felt no
uncertainty or bewilderment. She had been in Chicago three or
four times since her marriage. She went to a downtown hotel. It
was too late, she told herself, to look for a less expensive room
that night. When she had tidied herself she went out. The
things she did were the childish, aimless things that one does
who finds herself in possession of sudden liberty. She walked up
State Street, and stared in the windows; came back, turned into
Madison, passed a bright little shop in the window of which
taffy-white and gold-- was being wound endlessly and
fascinatingly about a double-jointed machine. She went in and
bought a sackful, and wandered on down the street, munching.

She had supper at one of those white-tiled sarcophagi that
emblazon Chicago's downtown side streets. It had been her
original intention to dine in state in the rose-and-gold dining
room of her hotel. She had even thought daringly of lobster.
But at the last moment she recoiled from the idea of dining alone
in that wilderness of tables so obviously meant for two.

After her supper she went to a picture show. She was amazed to
find there, instead of the accustomed orchestra, a pipe organ
that panted and throbbed and rumbled over lugubrious classics.
The picture was about a faithless wife. Terry left in the middle
of it.

She awoke next morning at seven, as usual, started up wildly,
looked around, and dropped back. Nothing to get up for. The
knowledge did not fill her with a rush of relief. She would have
her breakfast in bed. She telephoned for it, languidly. But
when it came she got up and ate it from the table, after all.

That morning she found a fairly comfortable room, more within her
means, on the North Side in the boardinghouse district. She
unpacked and hung up her clothes and drifted downtown again,
idly. It was noon when she came to the corner of State and
Madison Streets. It was a maelstrom that caught her up, and
buffeted her about, and tossed her helplessly this way and that.

The thousands jostled Terry, and knocked her hat awry, and dug
her with unheeding elbows, and stepped on her feet.

"Say, look here!" she said once futilely. They did not stop to
listen. State and Madison has no time for Terrys from Wetona.
It goes its way, pell-mell. If it saw Terry at all it saw her
only as a prettyish person, in the wrong kind of suit and hat,
with a bewildered, resentful look on her face.

Terry drifted on down the west side of State Street, with the
hurrying crowd. State and Monroe. A sound came to Terry's ears.

A sound familiar, beloved. To her ear, harassed with the roar
and crash, with the shrill scream of the whistle of the policeman
at the crossing, with the hiss of feet shuffling on cement, it
was a celestial strain. She looked up, toward the sound. A
great second-story window opened wide to the street. In it a
girl at a piano, and a man, red-faced, singing through a
megaphone. And on a flaring red and green sign:

BERNIE GOTTSCHALK'S MUSIC HOUSE!

COME IN! HEAR BERNIE GOTTSCHALK'S LATEST HIT!
THE HEART-THROB SONG THAT HAS GOT 'EM ALL!
THE SONG THAT MADE THE SQUAREHEADS CRAWL!

"I COME FROM PARIS, ILLINOIS, BUT OH! YOU PARIS, FRANCE!
I USED TO WEAR BLUE OVERALLS BUT NOW IT'S KHAKI PANTS."

COME IN! COME IN!

Terry accepted,

She followed the sound of the music. Around the corner. Up a
little flight of stairs. She entered the realm of Euterpe;
Euterpe with her hair frizzed; Euterpe with her flowing white
robe replaced by soiled white shoes; Euterpe abandoning her flute
for jazz. She sat at the piano, a red- haired young lady whose
familiarity with the piano had bred contempt. Nothing else could
have accounted for her treatment of it. Her fingers, tipped with
sharp-pointed and glistening nails, clawed the keys with a
dreadful mechanical motion. There were stacks of music sheets on
counters and shelves and dangling from overhead wires. The girl
at the piano never ceased playing. She played mostly by request.

A prospective purchaser would mumble something in the ear of one
of the clerks. The fat man with the megaphone would bawl out,
"Hicky Boola, Miss Ryan!" And Miss Ryan would oblige. She
made a hideous rattle and crash and clatter of sound.

Terry joined the crowds about the counter. The girl at the piano
was not looking at the keys. Her head was screwed around over
her left shoulder and as she played she was holding forth
animatedly to a girl friend who had evidently dropped in from
some store or office during the lunch hour. Now and again the
fat man paused in his vocal efforts to reprimand her for her
slackness. She paid no heed. There was something gruesome,
uncanny, about the way her fingers went their own way over the
defenseless keys. Her conversation with the frowzy little girl
went on.

"Wha'd he say?" (Over her shoulder.)

"Oh, he laffed."

"Well, didja go?"

"Me! Well, whutya think I yam, anyway?"

"I woulda took a chanst."

The fat man rebelled.

"Look here! Get busy! What are you paid for? Talkin' or
playin'? Huh?"

The person at the piano, openly reproved thus before her friend,
lifted her uninspired hands from the keys and spake. When she
had finished she rose.

"But you can't leave now," the megaphone man argued. "Right
in the rush hour."

"I'm gone," said the girl. The fat man looked about,
helplessly. He gazed at the abandoned piano, as though it must
go on of its own accord. Then at the crowd.

"Where's Miss Schwimmer?" he demanded of a clerk.

"Out to lunch."

Terry pushed her way to the edge of the counter and leaned over.
"I can play for you," she said.

The man looked at her. "Sight?"

"Yes."

"Come on."

Terry went around to the other side of the counter, took off her
hat and coat, rubbed her hands together briskly, sat down, and
began to play. The crowd edged closer.

It is a curious study, this noonday crowd that gathers to sate
its music hunger on the scraps vouchsafed it by Bernie
Gottschalk's Music House. Loose-lipped, slope-shouldered young
men with bad complexions and slender hands. Girls whose clothes
are an unconscious satire on present-day fashions. On their
faces, as they listen to the music, is a look of peace and
dreaming. They stand about, smiling a wistful half smile. The
music seems to satisfy a something within them. Faces dull, eyes
lusterless, they listen in a sort of trance.

Terry played on. She played as Terry Sheehan used to play. She
played as no music hack at Bernie Gottschalk's had ever played
before. The crowd swayed a little to the sound of it. Some kept
time with little jerks of the shoulder--the little hitching
movement of the dancer whose blood is filled with the fever of
syncopation. Even the crowd flowing down State Street must have
caught the rhythm of it, for the room soon filled.

At two o'clock the crowd began to thin. Business would be slack,
now, until five, when it would again pick up until closing time
at six. The fat vocalist put down his megaphone, wiped his
forehead, and regarded Terry with a warm blue eye. He had just
finished singing "I've Wandered Far from Dear Old Mother's
Knee." (Bernie Gottschalk Inc. Chicago. New York. You can't
get bit with a Gottschalk hit. 15 cents each.)

"Girlie," he said, emphatically, "you sure--can--play!" He
came over to her at the piano and put a stubby hand on her
shoulder. "Yessir! Those little fingers----"

Terry just turned her head to look down her nose at the moist
hand resting on her shoulder. "Those little fingers are going
to meet your face if you don't move on."

"Who gave you your job?" demanded the fat man.

"Nobody. I picked it myself. You can have it if you want it."

"Can't you take a joke?"

"Label yours."

As the crowd dwindled she played less feverishly, but there was
nothing slipshod about her performance. The chubby songster
found time to proffer brief explanations in asides. "They want
the patriotic stuff. It used to be all that Hawaiian dope, and
Wild Irish Rose stuff, and songs about wanting to go back to
every place from Dixie to Duluth. But now seems it's all these
here flag wavers. Honestly, I'm so sick of 'em I got a notion to
enlist to get away from it."

Terry eyed him with withering briefness. "A little training
wouldn't ruin your figure."

She had never objected to Orville's embonpoint. But then,
Orville was a different sort of fat man; pink-cheeked, springy,
immaculate.

At four o'clock, as she was in the chorus of "Isn't There
Another Joan of Arc?" a melting masculine voice from the other
side of the counter said "Pardon me. What's that you're
playing?"

Terry told him. She did not look up. "I wouldn't have known
it. Played like that--a second `Marseillaise.' If the
words----What are the words? Let me see a----"

"Show the gentleman a `Joan,'" Terry commanded briefly, over
her shoulder. The fat man laughed a wheezy laugh. Terry glanced
around, still playing, and encountered the gaze of two melting
masculine eyes that matched the melting masculine voice. The
songster waved a hand uniting Terry and the eyes in informal
introduction.

"Mr. Leon Sammett, the gentleman who sings the Gottschalk songs
wherever songs are heard. And Mrs.--that is--and Mrs.
Sammett----"

Terry turned. A sleek, swarthy world-old young man with the
fashionable concave torso, and alarmingly convex bone-rimmed
glasses. Through them his darkly luminous gaze glowed upon
Terry. To escape their warmth she sent her own gaze past him to
encounter the arctic stare of the large blonde who had been
included so lamely in the introduction. And at that the
frigidity of that stare softened, melted, dissolved.

"Why, Terry Sheehan! What in the world!"

Terry's eyes bored beneath the layers of flabby fat. "It's--why,
it's Ruby Watson, isn't it? Eccentric Song and Dance----"

She glanced at the concave young man and faltered. He was not
Jim, of the Bijou days. From him her eyes leaped back to the
fur-bedecked splendor of the woman. The plump face went so
painfully red that the make-up stood out on it, a distinct layer,
like thin ice covering flowing water. As she surveyed that bulk
Terry realized that while Ruby might still claim eccentricity,
her song-and-dance days were over. "That's ancient history, m'
dear. I haven't been working for three years. What're you doing
in this joint? I'd heard you'd done well for yourself. That you
were married."

"I am. That is I--well, I am. I----"

At that the dark young man leaned over and patted Terry's hand
that lay on the counter. He smiled. His own hand was incredibly
slender, long, and tapering.

"That's all right," he assured her, and smiled. "You two
girls can have a reunion later. What I want to know is can you
play by ear?"

"Yes, but----"

He leaned far over the counter. "I knew it the minute I heard
you play. You've got the touch. Now listen. See if you can get
this, and fake the bass."

He fixed his somber and hypnotic eyes on Terry. His mouth
screwed up into a whistle. The tune--a tawdry but haunting
little melody--came through his lips. Terry turned back to the
piano. "Of course you know you flatted every note," she said.

This time it was the blonde who laughed, and the man who
flushed. Terry cocked her head just a little to one side, like a
knowing bird, looked up into space beyond the piano top, and
played the lilting little melody with charm and fidelity. The
dark young man followed her with a wagging of the head and little
jerks of both outspread hands. His expression was beatific,
enraptured. He hummed a little under his breath and anyone who
was music-wise would have known that he was just a half beat
behind her all the way.

When she had finished he sighed deeply, ecstatically. He bent
his lean frame over the counter and, despite his swart coloring,
seemed to glitter upon her--his eyes, his teeth, his very
fingernails.

"Something led me here. I never come up on Tuesdays. But
something----"

"You was going to complain," put in his lady, heavily, "about
that Teddy Sykes at the Palace Gardens singing the same songs
this week that you been boosting at the Inn."

He put up a vibrant, peremptory hand. "Bah! What does that
matter now! What does anything matter now! Listen
Miss--ah--Miss----?"

"Pl-Sheehan. Terry Sheehan."

He gazed off a moment into space. "Hm. `Leon Sammett in Songs.

Miss Terry Sheehan at the Piano.' That doesn't sound bad. Now
listen, Miss Sheehan. I'm singing down at the University Inn.
The Gottschalk song hits. I guess you know my work. But I want
to talk to you, private. It's something to your interest. I go
on down at the Inn at six. Will you come and have a little
something with Ruby and me? Now?"

"Now?" faltered Terry, somewhat helplessly. Things seemed to
be moving rather swiftly for her, accustomed as she was to the
peaceful routine of the past four years.

"Get your hat. It's your life chance. Wait till you see your
name in two- foot electrics over the front of every big-time
house in the country. You've got music in you. Tie to me and
you're made." He turned to the woman beside him. "Isn't that
so, Rube?"

"Sure. Look at ME!" One would not have thought there could be
so much subtle vindictiveness in a fat blonde.

Sammett whipped out a watch. "Just three quarters of an hour.
Come on, girlie."

His conversation had been conducted in an urgent undertone, with
side glances at the fat man with the megaphone. Terry approached
him now.

"I'm leaving now," she said.

"Oh, no, you're not. Six o'clock is your quitting time."

In which he touched the Irish in Terry. "Any time I quit is my
quitting time. She went in quest of hat and coat much as the
girl had done whose place she had taken early in the day. The
fat man followed her, protesting. Terry, putting on her hat,
tried to ignore him. But he laid one plump hand on her arm and
kept it there, though she tried to shake him off.

"Now, listen to me. That boy wouldn't mind grinding his heel on
your face if he thought it would bring him up a step. I know'm.
See that walking stick he's carrying? Well, compared to the
yellow stripe that's in him, that cane is a Lead pencil. He's a
song tout, that's all he is." Then, more feverishly, as Terry
tried to pull away: "Wait a minute. You're a decent girl. I
want to--Why, he can't even sing a note without you give it to
him first. He can put a song over, yes. But how? By flashing
that toothy grin of his and talking every word of it. Don't
you----"

But Terry freed herself with a final jerk and whipped around the
counter. The two, who had been talking together in an undertone,
turned to welcome her. "We've got a half-hour. Come on. It's
just over to Clark and up a block or so."

The University Inn, that gloriously intercollegiate institution
which welcomes any graduate of any school of experience, was
situated in the basement, down a flight of stairs. Into the
unwonted quiet that reigns during the hour of low potentiality,
between five and six, the three went, and seated themselves at a
table in an obscure corner. A waiter brought them things in
little glasses, though no order had been given. The woman who
had been Ruby Watson was so silent as to be almost wordless. But
the man talked rapidly. He talked well, too. The same quality
that enabled him, voiceless though he was, to boost a song to
success was making his plea sound plausible in Terry's ears now.

"I've got to go and make up in a few minutes. So get this. I'm
not going to stick down in this basement eating house forever.
I've got too much talent. If I only had a voice--I mean a singing
voice. But I haven't. But then, neither had Georgie Cohan, and
I can't see that it wrecked his life any. Now listen. I've got a
song. It's my own. That bit you played for me up at
Gottschalk's is part of the chorus. But it's the words that'll
go big. They're great. It's an aviation song, see? Airplane
stuff. They're yelling that it's the airyoplanes that're going
to win this war. Well, I'll help 'em. This song is going to put
the aviator where he belongs. It's going to be the big song of
the war. It's going to make `Tipperary' sound like a Moody and
Sankey hymn. It's the----"

Ruby lifted her heavy-lidded eyes and sent him a meaning look.
"Get down to business, Leon. I'll tell her how good you are
while you're making up."

He shot her a malignant glance, but took her advice. "Now what
I've been looking for for years is somebody who has got the music
knack to give me the accompaniment just a quarter of a jump ahead
of my voice, see? I can follow like a lamb, but I've got to have
that feeler first. It's more than a knack. It's a gift. And
you've got it. I know it when I see it. I want to get away from
this night-club thing. There's nothing in it for a man of my
talent. I'm gunning for bigger game. But they won't sign me
without a tryout. And when they hear my voice they---- Well, if
me and you work together we can fool 'em. The song's great. And
my make-up's one of these aviation costumes to go with the song,
see? Pants tight in the knee and baggy on the hips. And a coat
with one of those full-skirt whaddyoucall- 'ems----"

"Peplums," put in Ruby, placidly.

"Sure. And the girls'll be wild about it. And the words!" He
began to sing, gratingly off key:

Put on your sky clothes,
Put on your fly clothes,
And take a trip with me.
We'll sail so high
Up in the sky
We'll drop a bomb from Mercury.

"Why, that's awfully cute!" exclaimed Terry. Until now her
opinion of Mr. Sammett's talents had not been on a level with
his.

"Yeah, but wait till you hear the second verse. That's only
part of the chorus. You see, he's supposed to be talking to a
French girl. He says:

`I'll parlez-vous in Francais plain
You'll answer, "Cher Americain,"
We'll both . . .'"

The six-o'clock lights blazed up suddenly. A sad-looking group
of men trailed in and made for a corner where certain bulky,
shapeless bundles were soon revealed as those glittering and
tortuous instruments which go to make a jazz band.

"You better go, Lee. The crowd comes in awful early now, with
all these buyers in town."

Both hands on the table, he half rose, reluctantly, still
talking. "I've got three other songs. They make Gottschalk's
stuff look sick. All I want's a chance. What I want you to do
is accompaniment. On the stage, see? Grand piano. And a swell
set. I haven't quite made up my mind to it. But a kind of an
army camp room, see? And maybe you dressed as Liberty. Anyway,
it'll be new, and a knockout. If only we can get away with the
voice thing. Say, if Eddie Foy, all those years never had
a----"

The band opened with a terrifying clash of cymbal and thump of
drum. "Back at the end of my first turn," he said as he Red.
Terry followed his lithe, electric figure. She turned to meet
the heavy-lidded gaze of the woman seated opposite. She relaxed,
then, and sat back with a little sigh. "Well! If he talks that
way to the managers I don't see----"

Ruby laughed a mirthless little laugh. "Talk doesn't get it
over with the managers, honey. You've got to deliver."

"Well, but he's--that song is a good one. I don't say it's as
good as he thinks it is, but it's good."

"Yes," admitted the woman, grudgingly, "it's good."

"Well, then?"

The woman beckoned a waiter; he nodded and vanished, and
reappeared with a glass that was twin to the one she had just
emptied. "Does he look like he knew French? Or could make a
rhyme?"

"But didn't he? Doesn't he?"

"The words were written by a little French girl who used to
skate down here last winter, when the craze was on. She was
stuck on a Chicago kid who went over to fly for the French."

"But the music?"

"There was a Russian girl who used to dance in the cabaret and
she----"

Terry's head came up with a characteristic little jerk. "I
don't believe it!"

"Better." She gazed at Terry with the drowsy look that was so
different from the quick, clear glance of the Ruby Watson who
used to dance so nimbly in the old Bijou days. "What'd you and
your husband quarrel about, Terry?"

Terry was furious to feel herself flushing. "Oh, nothing. He
just--I--it was---- Say, how did you know we'd quarreled?"

And suddenly all the fat woman's apathy dropped from her like a
garment and some of the old sparkle and animation illumined her
heavy face. She pushed her glass aside and leaned forward on her
folded arms, so that her face was close to Terry's.

"Terry Sheehan, I know you've quarreled, and I know just what it
was about. Oh, I don't mean the very thing it was about; but the
kind of thing. I'm going to do something for you, Terry, that I
wouldn't take the trouble to do for most women. But I guess I
ain't had all the softness knocked out of me yet, though it's a
wonder. And I guess I remember too plain the decent kid you was
in the old days. What was the name of that little small-time
house me and Jim used to play? Bijou, that's it; Bijou."

The band struck up a new tune. Leon Sammett--slim, sleek, lithe
in his evening clothes--appeared with a little fair girl in pink
chiffon. The woman reached across the table and put one pudgy,
jeweled hand on Terry's arm. "He'll be through in ten minutes.
Now listen to me. I left Jim four years ago, and there hasn't
been a minute since then, day or night, when I wouldn't have
crawled back to him on my hands and knees if I could. But I
couldn't. He wouldn't have me now. How could he? How do I know
you've quarreled? I can see it in your eyes. They look just the
way mine have felt for four years, that's how. I met up with
this boy, and there wasn't anybody to do the turn for me that I'm
trying to do for you. Now get this. I left Jim because when he
ate corn on the cob he always closed his eyes and it drove me
wild. Don't laugh."

"I'm not laughing," said Terry.

"Women are like that. One night--we was playing Fond du Lac; I
remember just as plain--we was eating supper before the show and
Jim reached for one of those big yellow ears, and buttered and
salted it, and me kind of hanging on to the edge of the table
with my nails. Seemed to me if he shut his eyes when he put his
teeth into that ear of corn I'd scream. And he did. And I
screamed. And that's all."

Terry sat staring at her with a wide-eyed stare, like a
sleepwalker. Then she wet her lips slowly. "But that's almost
the very----"

"Kid, go on back home. I don't know whether it's too late or
not, but go anyway. If you've lost him I suppose it ain't any
more than you deserve; but I hope to God you don't get your
deserts this time. He's almost through. If he sees you going he
can't quit in the middle of his song to stop you. He'll know I
put you wise, and he'll prob'ly half kill me for it. But it's
worth it. You get."

And Terry--dazed, shaking, but grateful--fled. Down the noisy
aisle, up the stairs, to the street. Back to her rooming house.
Out again, with her suitcase, and into the right railroad station
somehow, at last. Not another Wetona train until midnight. She
shrank into a remote corner of the waiting room and there she
huddled until midnight, watching the entrances like a child who
is fearful of ghosts in the night.

The hands of the station clock seemed fixed and immovable. The
hour between eleven and twelve was endless. She was on the
train. It was almost morning. It was morning. Dawn was
breaking. She was home! She had the house key clutched tightly
in her hand long before she turned Schroeder's corner. Suppose
he had come home! Suppose he had jumped a town and come home
ahead of his schedule. They had quarreled once before, and he
had done that.

Up the front steps. Into the house. Not a sound. She stood
there a moment in the early-morning half-light. She peered into
the dining room. The table, with its breakfast debris, was as
she had left it. In the kitchen the coffeepot stood on the gas
stove. She was home. She was safe. She ran up the stairs, got
out of her clothes and into gingham morning things. She flung
open windows everywhere. Downstairs once more she plunged into
an orgy of cleaning. Dishes, table, stove, floor, rugs. She
washed, scoured, swabbed, polished. By eight o'clock she had
done the work that would ordinarily have taken until noon. The
house was shining, orderly, and redolent of soapsuds.

During all this time she had been listening, listening, with her
subconscious ear. Listening for something she had refused to
name definitely in her mind, but listening, just the same;
waiting.

And then, at eight o'clock, it came. The rattle of a key in the
lock. The boom of the front door. Firm footsteps.

He did not go to meet her, and she did not go to meet him. They
came together and were in each other's arms. She was weeping.

"Now, now, old girl. What's there to cry about? Don't, honey;
don't. It's all right." She raised her head then, to look at
him. How fresh and rosy and big he seemed, after that little
sallow restaurant rat.

"How did you get here? How did you happen----?"

"Jumped all the way from Ashland. Couldn't get a sleeper, so I
sat up all night. I had to come back and square things with you,
Terry. My mind just wasn't on my work. I kept thinking how I'd
talked--how I'd talked----"

"Oh, Orville, don't! I can't bear---- Have you had your
breakfast?"

"Why, no. The train was an hour late. You know that Ashland
train."

But she was out of his arms and making for the kitchen. "You go
and clean up. I'll have hot biscuits and everything in no time.
You poor boy. No breakfast!"

She made good her promise. It could not have been more than half
an hour later when he was buttering his third feathery,
golden-brown biscuit. But she had eaten nothing. She watched
him, and listened, and again her eyes were somber, but for a
different reason. He broke open his egg. His elbow came up just
a fraction of an inch. Then he remembered, and flushed like a
schoolboy, and brought it down again, carefully. And at that she
gave a tremulous cry, and rushed around the table to him.

"Oh, Orville!" She took the offending elbow in her two arms,
and bent and kissed the rough coat sleeve.

"Why, Terry! Don't, honey. Don't!"

"Oh, Orville, listen----"

"Yes."

"Listen, Orville----"

"I'm listening, Terry."

"I've got something to tell you. There's something you've got
to know."

"Yes, I know it, Terry. I knew you'd out with it, pretty soon,
if I just waited."

She lifted an amazed face from his shoulder then, and stared at
him. "But how could you know? You couldn't! How could you?"

He patted her shoulder then, gently. "I can always tell. When
you have something on your mind you always take up a spoon of
coffee, and look at it, and kind of joggle it back and forth in
the spoon, and then dribble it back into the cup again, without
once tasting it. It used to get me nervous, when we were first
married, watching you. But now I know it just means you're
worried about something, and I wait, and pretty soon----"

"Oh, Orville!" she cried then. "Oh, Orville!"

"Now, Terry. Just spill it, hon. Just spill it to Daddy. And
you'll feel better."

-THE END-
Edna Ferber's short story: That's Marriage

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