A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

I Knew Her When—

At six-fifteen an alarm clock sounded vigorously in Mrs. Delaney’s dark silent bedroom. Mrs. Delaney’s own voice answered it. “All right, creature, I heard ye the first time.” The alarm clock nevertheless continued to signal raucously. “Shh, that’s enough now!” Mrs. Delaney commanded it. It was several moments, however, before the light flashed on and revealed Mrs. Delaney in person. She had miraculously attired herself in the dark, for the light like the clock was at quite some distance from the bed, and every minute counted. The alarm by now was running down anyway. It had sunk to a metallic growling. Mrs. Delaney interrupted the tying of an apron about her slim figure to reach out and silence it with a click of her thumb. “Y’d go on all day if I didn’t stop ye,” she commented. With this remark all conversation between herself and the clock was over until the following day.

She now passed into the adjoining room and proceeded to do a number of things at once yet far from noiselessly. A coffee-pot that had evidently been filled the night before began to simmer over a blue gas-flame, two eggs started to hiss in the preliminary stages of frying, and a knife, fork, spoon, cup and saucer, one of each, appeared in tinkling, crashing succession on the white enameled table-top. When this much had been accomplished, Mrs. Delaney paused her first pause of the day to brush the back of her hand before her forehead and remove the slight moisture that her efforts had accumulated thereon.

She next returned to the threshold of her own room and called sonorously through it:

“Jerry! Be getting a move on.” A door opened and her young and good-looking husband appeared, attired in trousers and shirt and blinking his eyes. “That’s the bye,” Mrs. Delaney remarked encouragingly, and returned to her duties.

When he joined her presently, he was buttoning a dark blue coat over the trousers. A coat with brass buttons in two rows down the front. A coat that was more than a coat. A coat that was a badge of distinction, a symbol of authority and competency that set him apart from the common herd, that empowered him to tell people that South Ferry trains did not go to Brooklyn and to stand aside please, don’t shove, and watch your step. The coat that proclaimed this, and the visored cap he had brought in with him and thrown on the seat of a chair, the cap that bore on a metal disc the numerals 01629, were to Mrs. Delaney objects of justifiable pride.

She loved them. They were to her what a silver tea-service would have been to other women, or an invitation to a ball, or the mention of one’s name in the society column. With the thought of them in mind she could tilt her chin in air and say to Mrs. Ross across the fire-escape, “Oh, haven’t you heard? My husband works for the Interborough,” and say to Marco, the greengrocer on the next corner, with an air of conscious superiority and patronage, “Twenty cents for a pound of string-beans? The life of me! What’ll you be asking next?”

She flounced around her husband, giving the sacrosanct coat a tug of the hem in back to straighten it, smoothing down each shoulder with a little sliding caress.

“It needs pressing,” she said sadly. “I’ll have the iron out when ye come back tonight.”

“Inspection don’t come again until March,” he reminded her, miraculously speaking through his coffee-cup. Jerry Delaney’s ideas on the subject may have erred on the side of indifference; he had been lukewarm as regarded his occupation and the prestige attendant on it for many months now, even going so far as to remark upon his return in the evening: “Whew! I’m glad that’s over for today.” A point of view which Mrs. Delaney failed utterly to share. It wasn’t much, no; but just think if he had been on the night-shift, or on one of those surface cars that stopped at every other corner. “Then ye’d have something to kick about.”

Young Mr. Delaney groped for a metaphor with which to answer this. A come-back was the designation he applied mentally. “All I do is get a look at the sun at New Lots Avenue; then I gotta go all the way back to Van Cortlandt before I see it again.” Which was geographically inaccurate; the sun was visible from Dyckman Street on. When there was a sun.

“Sure!” countered Mrs. Delaney with affectionate raillery. “And if ye were on the night-shift, it would be the moon you were missing.”

He was whistling as he left her and went down the long dim stairs, the visor of his cap jauntily over his eyes. He had stopped being Jerry Delaney now and was simply 01629. It was only beginning to grow light when he emerged onto the street, but it was doing it slowly and beautifully, as though it had purposely waited until he appeared to show him what he was missing every day of his life. But he gave no heed to the pink that had started to creep down the upper stories of the tenements nor the attenuated white of his breath as it escaped in little steam-drifts with every step he took. At 125th and Broadway he climbed the subway stairs, climbed not descended, for it bridged the street at this point above the level of the rooftops. One of the incalculable advantages of his occupation as Mrs. Delaney saw it at once became evident, for scorning the turnstiles, he simply loosed a chain that barred his way and passed through unhampered.

At the end of the line, more prosaically known as 242nd Street, he got up, stretched himself, thrust the delightful tabloid into his pocket, and stepped off the train. He removed a small pass-book from his rear pocket, made his presence known to the gentleman who made up and detailed off, out of his own unaided creative ability and good judgment, mind you, the personnel of the various southbound trains, and this rite — “shenanigans” Jerry termed it — attended to, joined a group of his mates sprawled about on benches until the necessary ten minutes preceding his assumption of duty had elapsed. At precisely seven-twenty he stepped into the waiting line of cars that would soon be a vehicle and placed himself exactly over the coupling-irons of the second and third cars from the end, one foot on either platform like an Atlas astride his own little world. A small group of passengers entered and dispersed themselves over the seats, seats made doubly welcome by the knowledge that after the first station or two they would be unobtainable. The signal was given and Jerry bore manfully down on the pneumatic lever. Six doors in all, three to the left of him and three to the right, slid sibilantly closed. He plucked at a cord overhead to relay the knowledge to the next guard in line, two cars away. When it had reached the motorman, the train began to move. The day had begun.

The last seat in any of the cars went immediately after the third station had been reached. That was simply a preliminary to what was to follow. Long before the train sought subterranean darkness at Dyckman Street, the aisles were crowded with rhythmically swaying bodies. At Ninety-sixth Street the overflow from the locals — Jerry’s train now took on the dignity and questionable alacrity of an express — was waiting to get on. Most of them did, too. No individual passenger on the train was now free from contact at some point with the body of another. Which is putting it mild. Jerry himself, wedged solidly on the brink of the two cars between a prickly pony-coat and a caracul one that smelt of recent mothballs, received the benefit of their shouted remarks with great, not to say painful, distinctness. His eyes took on a fixed blank stare as he learned all the details of “What sort of a time ja have with Al las’ night?”

At Seventy-second Street it had become a sheer physical impossibility for any additional people to enter the train at any point. But there was nothing to prevent them from trying. The few unfortunates obliged to get off here had to bore their way writhingly toward the direction in which they last remembered having seen the doors, with agonized supplications of “Getting off! Getting off!”

Forty-second Street brought a measure of relief. They streamed out through the doors. The pony-skin coat had gone with cyclonic adieux. The caracul one was powdering its nose and getting Jerry’s coat-sleeve all white. At Pennsylvania the great garment industry called to its devotees. Fourteenth Street helped too. But the real improvement came with the last Manhattan stations, Fulton and Wall. The aisles were cleared, seats shyly appeared here and there. It was over until tomorrow.

His ears hummed a little as the train plunged him below the waters of the East River for the first time that day. Beyond there it was all velvet; the tide was going the other way. Once more he sprawled comfortably on the seat nearest the door, lost to the world. The amount of reading he accomplished in the course of the day’s routine would have provided a liberal education in itself. Especially topics that had not the slightest bearing upon himself and his surroundings, such as storms at sea, airplane mishaps, and the birth of three-legged roosters at Wichita, Kansas. Mechanically, he rose at last and reversed the stenciled slats in the end-windows of the car announcing its destination, stepped out as it reached there with a sigh, and went upstairs for a breath of air and a look around.

Returning Manhattanward, the cars filled slowly. There were matrons bent on shopping (and the Roxy), and those whose occupations called for no such stated regularity of hours, such as radio repairmen, piano tuners, picture-house ushers, employees of the Consolidated Gas Company starting out to read meters, a Western Union messenger, and a prosperous professional beggar or two on their way to their morning beats. They chose the midtown street-corners, being wise, where the dimes were thickest and where they would practice standing on one foot and then the other for the balance of the day. The majority of these vanished at Times Square. Into Jerry’s car in their stead came a gentleman with a beard, two chattering Puerto Rican damsels, a somnolent Negro bellboy in a dark green uniform, a rounded gentleman in plus fours with a bag of golf-sticks bound for the public links at Van Cortlandt, a fatigued youth who had ladled orangeade all night, and a very pretty girl carrying a suitcase.

She selected the seat next to the door as though her stay was to be a short one. Several times she made a false move to get up. Jerry sensed an impending inquiry and sighed resignedly. At length, as the train proceeded uninterruptedly on its way, she made up her mind, did get up, and presented herself before him, suitcase still in hand.

“When do we get to Forty-second Street?” she said. She had to shout to make herself heard.

He had expected something not particularly brilliant, none of these requests for information were, but this was the worst he had heard in months.

“What’s the matter, you asleep?” he said gruffly. “We just passed it.”

“But that was Times Square,” she said innocently. “I got on there.”

His sense of the fitness of things rose in rebellion at this. “Are you trying to kid me?” he demanded pugnaciously. Was nothing sacred in the eyes of these people, not even the uniform of a guard? But her eyes were so startled at the tone he had used, and at the same time so limpidly ingenuous, that he decided after a moment that she was more to be pitied than censured. She was a greenhorn; and not just a pale green one, but one of the deepest dye. “Where d’ye want to go?” he said with impersonal brusqueness.

“Here,” she said. “I have it right here.” She extracted an envelope from her handbag and held it before him. On the back of it was penciled a name. Also an address. A Forty-second Street address. “This gentleman’s going to put me in a show,” she explained happily. Jerry studied her gravely, without comment. Just where, he was wondering, had he heard this story before? “When he was staying at my Uncle Ed’s hotel up at Patchouli last summer,” she informed him, “he told me any time I was in New York to look him up and he’d put me in a show. So here I am!” This last with a triumphant toss of the head.

“Well,” said Jerry, who found boredom had strangely departed from him during the last few minutes, “as long as you’re going into a show, you’d better change at Seventy-second for a downtown train.” He said it almost regretfully.

She thanked him and took back the envelope. They arrived. The doors slid open and she turned to go. Then catastrophe! A lady who would have been the pride and joy of any side-show was waiting to get on. She did, too, sweeping everything before her. She was rotund, monumental; when she died, she would have to be lowered out of the window like a piano. She filled the doorway from side to side; not a crevice remained. Not even a moth could have made its way out. The future stage performer was obliterated, satchel and all. When the living mountain had gone by, she reappeared in its wake, gasping for breath. She had been turned completely around, so that she faced the other way, away from the door. Meanwhile the door had closed upon her once more, doubly imprisoning her. Had she stood still and simply let him reopen it for her once more, all would have been well. But involuntarily, she took a step toward him, to call his attention to the fact that she was still on the train (he was leaning far out in the space between the two cars, craning his neck and wondering where she had gone to so quickly), and as she did so, the sound of rending silk came to all ears. She paused horror-stricken, with dreadful surmise written on her face. Surmise turned to certainty as she turned to look. The rear end of her dress had been guillotined by the door. What was left now resembled an apron in reverse, revealing the seams of two silk stockings up to where the stockings ended, and after that an inch or two of unblemished skin, quickly followed, in the nick of time, by some intimate apparel trimmed with lace. She gave a bleat of inexpressible woe and shrank back, with her back to the wall of the vestibule.

The train meanwhile was under way again, and Jerry descended from his perch and stepped back inside the car. His eyes opened in astonishment as he saw her still there. Pleasant, gratified astonishment. He even went so far as to beam at her, probably the first guard to beam at a passenger in the twenty-five-odd years the line had been in operation.

“Oh, you changed your mind, did you?” he said.

She pointed despairingly to the detached fragment of dress-goods that had remained caught in the door.

Jerry whistled. “Well, you can’t go to the show that way,” he said.

“I can’t even get off the train now,” she wailed, and her eyes shone wetly under the electric lights.

His official manner had become a thing of the past. He indicated the grip.

“Haven’t you got anything in there you could put around you?”

“Only some pictures of me when I was in the school show up home. I–I came away in a hurry.”

“Can’t you even pin it until you get home?” he queried commiseratingly.

“But my home’s upstate in Patchouli,” she explained wanly. “I just got off the train a little while ago and started straight for the show.”

“Oh, devil take the show!” he exclaimed with strange irritability. “You should never have left Pa — what is it, now?”

“Patchouli,” she said helpfully, with a little sob.

“Now, don’t be crying,” he commanded, and lifted his cap to facilitate the scratching of the back of his head. At length a gem of thought seemed to result from this friction. “You could go around to the little lady,” he remarked, “and see what she can do for you. She’s a great one with the needle,” he added proudly.

“What little lady?”

“My little lady, who did you think?” He leaned toward her confidentially. “Tell her Jerry sent you and show her what’s happened to you and tell her he says will she please baste it up for you so they won’t be arresting you walking on the streets.” Then, reluctantly, he began unbuttoning the brass buttons of his jacket. “You get out at 125th,” he said. “Delaney is the name; it’s four flights up in the rear — you can’t miss it.” The coat was off now, and but for the visored cap he would have been no better than any mere passenger on the train. The heart of “the little lady” would have been wrung at the sight of him stripped of his glory and insignia. “Put this over you till you get there,” he said, and passed it to her. “And be sure you leave it behind you at the flat or I’ll be out of a job in the morning.”

She hurriedly thrust an arm into each of the ample armholes and buttoned it around her. “Oh, thanks again and again,” she said gratefully. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if it hadn’t been for you, Mr. — Mr. Delaney.” The result was somewhat as though a blue-serge tent had suddenly deepened and enveloped her. The bottom of the coat came below her knees, hiding all traces of her own mutilated costume, and her hands were lost somewhere above the cuffs, not a fingertip visible.

Jerry himself had not been appreciably improved by the exchange either. He now consisted largely of dangling arms in shirtsleeves, girdled with crocheted blue garters. He scowled defiantly at the curious stare a newsboy passing from car to car flashed him. 125th Street bore down upon them. He turned to the muffled figure beside him.

“This is yours,” he said, and carefully gave her the house-number, then with most un-Walter-Raleigh-like pessimism added: “I’m taking a chance on you. But I guess the coat’s safe enough with anyone who would believe the first traveling salesman who told her he could get her in a show.”

“I’ll take good care of the coat, Mr. Delaney,” she promised. She thrust forth one enveloping cuff and pumped his hand grotesquely. “I–I’ll see you later,” she said, picked up her grip, and scurried off the train. At the turnstile, oblivious of the attention her outfit was attracting, she turned and waved her appreciation to him.

“Don’t forget the number, four flights up. Go straight there!” he bawled after her as he manipulated the doors shut. The rest of his ride was spent in a rosy haze. Little unseen cupids rode with him perched on the roofs of the subway cars.

It was not without misgivings that, several round-trips later, he presented himself before the agent at 242nd Street, passbook in hand. That individual, fortunately a personal acquaintance of his and one who had more than once in the past partaken of Mrs. Delaney’s corned beef and cabbage, took in the shirtsleeves and crocheted armbands with wholehearted and not unfriendly curiosity.

“Warm, Delaney?” he was moved to ask. “Where’s your coat?”

Jerry smiled inscrutably. “I’ve hung it up on the top of the car to dry.”

His overlord nudged him in the ribs. “So at last ye’ll own up to being all wet, will ye?”

Young Lochinvar returning home from the wars, or wherever it was he returned from, had nothing on the youthful Mr. Delaney as he stalked up 125th Street a short while later, whistling ebulliently. If it occurred to people that it was still rather early in the year to be without a coat, they wisely kept their thoughts to themselves. “He’s lost his job,” commented a lady on a fire-escape to a lady shelling peas at the window below. “It don’t seem to bother him none,” replied the latter.

His ascent of the four murky flights of stairs completed, he stopped abruptly at the rather intimate sight that presented itself when he had flung open the door unannounced. Mrs. Delaney, ensconced in her favorite rocker, was busily rocking and stitching at a garment lying across her lap. Opposite, legs tucked up under her, sat the late wearer of his uniform jacket, wearing it no longer. She now boasted his Rosemary’s bathrobe instead, which fitted her rather better.

“Go in and watch the sausages, Jerry,” Rosemary commanded, “until I get through with Peggy’s dress. Peggy’s staying to supper.”

He whistled with the ardor of a whole cageful of birds as he turned the sausages over and over with a fork— So her name was Peggy and she was staying to supper, was she?

She helped Rosemary with the dishes afterward, as any well-bred guest should, and then the three of them sat talking in the homey little living-room. Or rather she did most of the talking; Jerry and Rosemary just sat and listened. All her dreams, all her plans.

“I want to get somewhere, be somebody. I want to be a big star and have my name up in lights. Peggy Parker, for all the world to see. Oh, I know it won’t be easy. I know there are disappointments and heartaches ahead, but I’ll buck them all and I’ll get there, you’ll see. I was born unknown but I’m not going to die that way, and that’s about all anyone can do for themselves in this life.”

It was like a breath from another world; what did they know about those things, the two of them? The little blue-eyed, red-haired Irish housewife whose interests were the price of string beans and the blue uniform jacket; the handsome dark-haired boy she’d married, whose half-articulate grumblings at his lot would soon be beaten down by habit? Yet it was thrilling to listen to, like something said on a movie-screen. Although the words might be strange, the language of youth needed no translation. The animation, the gestures, the bright determination in her eyes, the confidence that had not yet met its first setback.

Then finally she said, “My goodness! It’s after ten already, and I’m sitting here jabbering away. I’ll have to get out and find myself a room—”

Rosemary said quite firmly: “See if ye can rig up that old cot in here, Jerry, so it won’t fold up under her. I’m keeping her here this night. ’Tis no town for a girl to be walking around looking for lodgings by herself.”

While she was inside hunting up sheets and a pillowcase, Peggy confided above the noise of the hammer-blows with which he was whacking the cot into shape: “I think your wife’s the sweetest thing I ever knew. And up home they always said New Yorkers were inhospitable!”

“And is she the only one in the family you’ve a word of thanks for?” he probed, with typical Celtic humor.

She smiled shyly without answering, but an unseen warning spark seemed to crackle in the air between them.

The last thing Rosemary did, after she and Jerry had gone to their room, was tiptoe out again with one of her own nightdresses folded over her arm for the use of her guest. The poor always make the most generous hosts.

In the morning, before he left for work, Jerry drew Rosemary out of earshot into the hall. “She’s going to come back here this afternoon and cry her eyes out when she goes down to that place and finds it was all a lot of blarney. Do what ye can for her. Tell her — tell her it don’t amount to so much; she can be happy without being in a show.”

Rosemary Delaney gave a keen searching look at the wall before her as though she had just seen something there. As a matter of fact, it was perfectly blank. But maybe she had seen handwriting on it. She didn’t answer him.

Peggy wasn’t there when he got back that evening.

“Maybe she isn’t coming,” said the preoccupied Rosemary presently. “Should we go ahead and eat?”

“She left her bag,” he pointed out. “Maybe she’s ashamed to come and tell us. Maybe she’s walking the streets this very minute, not knowing which way to turn. It hits them hard when they’ve got the acting-bug that bad.”

“Acting — or love — they do hit hard, now,” said Rosemary, addressing the platter of steaming cabbage she was carrying in. A rattle of light, hurried footsteps echoed on the stairs outside. There was the briefest tap on the door, then it pushed inward. Jerry stood up hastily. Rosemary braced one slim shoulder for possible weeping upon. In came Peggy. She was breathless with something she had to tell and had been saving all the way uptown with no one to tell it to.

“I went there—” she gasped, and could go no further. She opened her small mouth to inhale all the air possible, seated herself on the edge of a chair and leaned magnetically toward them. “I went there where the envelope said and — oh, Mrs. Delaney, how could he lie to me like that? — it was nothing but an old park in back of the library.” Young Delaney’s demeanor had become noticeably commiserating; willingness to console shone in his eyes. “So then,” the object of his sympathy went on, “I asked a policeman where the show was rehearsing, and he was very nice and considerate to me. He told me that the only reason they don’t have them out in Bryant Park is because traffic would probably be all tied up and a lot of people trampled to death. And he told me that nowadays they were having them in a theater further up, on Forty-fifth Street, so that the lives and limbs of passersby wouldn’t be in any danger, and so that the old ladies that sell tangerines wouldn’t have to go out of business. Then I threw away the envelope that man had given me and I went to the place where it really was,” she concluded simply. She stood up and removed her hat as though there were nothing further to talk about. “I’ll help you set the table, Mrs. Delaney,” she said. “I’m sorry I was so late.”

The look on Jerry’s face was now a definitely grim one. And how bravely, he marveled to himself, she was taking the dis-appointment. Not a tear, not a whimper. She certainly had — er — stamina.

“But why don’t ye go on?” persisted Rosemary, dealing out plates with mathematical precision. “What happened after that?”

Peggy opened her eyes as though surprised at such a question. What else was there to tell, her attitude seemed to imply. “Nothing,” she said. “They told me to come tomorrow for rehearsal and then I came straight up here.”

There was a squeak from Jerry’s chair as though he had risen above it involuntarily and then come down again.

“Oh, they took you, did they?” Rosemary said.

Peggy looked slightly amazed, as though it had never entered her mind that anyone could doubt this for a moment.

“But I told you they would,” she remonstrated. “He fooled me; I had the wrong address at first, that was all. I’m only in the chorus but by next season maybe— That corned beef smells good,” she added wistfully.

Midway through the meal there was a stentorian bellow from somewhere below-stairs that easily penetrated the thin flat-door. “Mrs. De-laay-ney! Oh, Mrs. De-laaay-ney! Sure your sister from Flatbush is on the phaon!”

“Janitor’s wife,” explained Rosemary, jumping up hastily. “I’ll have to run down a minute.” Her hurried tread descended the four flights to where the only phone in the house was located, the janitor’s apartment, over which all the tenants in the building received their calls. The janitor and his wife didn’t resent this; they even encouraged it; it gave them a very swell opportunity to know everyone else’s business — and then some.

They went ahead eating. “Fifty a week,” she said. “Of course we don’t get paid till after we’ve been rehearsing three weeks, but I’d go into it for nothing if they only knew. It’s the beginning, the start, the springboard.” Her eyes were shining at him like two stars across that tenement meal-table. “Oh, and I looked at all the others; I’ve got something that none of them have! I can’t miss, can’t go wrong! I knew it, felt it in my bones, as I stood there on that stage-apron, holding my skirts up over my knees for the stage-manager to see how I’d look in costume. He was going to turn me down, I could tell that; I’m so green yet, it’s written all over me, I guess. And I’d admitted I had no previous experience of course. He was already starting to motion me over to the left where the unacceptables were grouped and then he looked into my eyes. He seemed to see something there. He just kept looking into my eyes. Then he motioned me over to the right instead, and before I left he came up to me and said such a funny thing. He said: ‘I have a hunch this show we’re doing will be only remembered for one thing, some day. Because a kid like you, half-hidden in the back row of the chorus, was in it, got her professional start in it.’ Wasn’t that a strange thing to say?”

Rosemary came back, breathing from the climb. “It’s Tom again. Oh, the good-for-nothing that he is! Sure he got drunk again, she says, and fell in the gutter! Oh, the shame of it! That me sister should be married to anything like that!”

Jerry didn’t look unduly alarmed. Tom was an old story in the Delaney family circle. “So he’s in jail again?”

“No, this time he’s in the hospital. A milk-wagon went over him lying there and it’s a broken arm he’s got.” She was putting on her hat. “I’ve got to go over there and be with her a while; she’s taking on that bad!”

“We’ll do the dishes for you,” Peggy offered.

Then later on, passing them to him, one by one, to be wiped, in the stuffy little cupboard of a kitchenette, she said: “You know, Jerry, I think you brought me luck. I’m superstitious that way. Ever since I tore my dress yesterday afternoon in your car, everything’s gone right for me. Whatever happens, whatever comes later, I’ll never forget you. After all, you were the first person I met when I got to New York. I may forget your name and I may even forget your face — but I’ll never forget you.”

The dish he was holding shattered on the floor like a firecracker.

“You’ve got that devilish way about you; you’ll go far,” he said huskily. “But oh, before you go too far, out of my reach, here are my arms around you now!”

It happened as suddenly as that. Without either of them meaning, intending it to happen. One minute he was holding the dishcloth, standing beside her, the next they were locked in one another’s arms. For that moment they forgot everything except the amazing fact that they were in love and that love was sweet. There was no Rosemary, no time, no honor, only young love and passion. It passed like a breath.

Then they separated again. She didn’t thrust him from her; they released one another automatically. They weren’t confused, embarrassed. They both seemed to realize it was an impossibility. Two paths had crossed for a moment, the paths of two who could have loved one another, not for long maybe but for a while. But they were two divergent paths, two utterly divergent paths, on different planes, pointing straight away from one another. Polar antitheses.

Somehow, to him, this didn’t seem to have anything to do with Rosemary. Neither sneakiness nor treachery nor disloyalty. It was such a different thing. If it had been some girl of their own kind, living their kind of life, some girl who lived above them or below them or next door — but this was like a man falling in love with a star over his head in the night sky.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled, but without really meaning it.

She put it into words for him. “No, don’t say that! Don’t spoil it. I’m glad you did it. It’s like a seal upon the whole thing.” She touched him friendlily on the arm as she went by. She said: “I’m going now — out to my future. One of the girls in the line-up offered to let me share her room with her until I start getting paid.”

“I’ve driven you out,” he said remorsefully.

“Driven?” she contradicted gently. “Why, what’s pulling me is a magnet stronger than any love that ever flamed!” She picked up the little bag she’d been carrying in the subway when he first saw her. “Thank Rosemary for me,” she said. He went out to the landing after her and saw her start down those grimy stairs. A golden glow, a radiance, almost seemed to come from her, lighting her way. As she turned the corner of the staircase, their eyes met for the last time. But she didn’t see him any longer; the dazzle of what lay ahead was too bright.

He was sitting there alone by the window when Rosemary came in. She looked and saw the broken dish lying on the floor where it had fallen. She seemed to understand. They said the little things that they would say all their lives. After a while she came over and stood behind his chair and her hand strayed fondly in his hair. He reached up and pressed his own upon it with clumsy fondness. They both stared down into the street.

Someone has to buy the string beans. Someone has to open the doors of subway-cars.

That was all long years ago. There’s a theater marquee on Forty-eighth Street now that has in big bright lights PEGGY PARKER, and underneath in smaller letters the name of some play. The play doesn’t matter; the PEGGY PARKER does. It does!

Each season it gets bigger, brighter. Underground the trains still run. And all those funny little hats the wedged-in figures wear are copied from the one Peggy Parker wears.

“What kinnova time d’ja have last night with Eddie?”

“Swell time. He took me to see Peggy Parker, second row inna balcony.”

“Gee, I’m crazy about her, aren’t you?”

And 01629, squeezed between them, just smiles a little and seems to hear a voice in his ear again: “I may forget your name and I may even forget your face, but I’ll never forget you.”

He says to himself: “They can’t take that away from me. Who else in all these seven millions can say as much?”