Cordelia’s Night of Romance
By Julian Ralph
Cordelia Angeline Mahoney was dressing, as she would say, “to keep a date” with a beau, who would soon be waiting on the corner nearest her home in the Big Barracks tenement-house. She smiled as she heard the shrill catcall of a lad in Forsyth Street. She knew it was Dutch Johnny’s signal to Chrissie Bergen to come down and meet him at the street doorway. Presently she heard another call—a birdlike whistle—and she knew which boy’s note it was, and which girl it called out of her home for a sidewalk stroll. She smiled, a trifle sadly, and yet triumphantly. She had enjoyed herself when she was no wiser and looked no higher than the younger Barracks girls, who took up the boys of the neighborhood as if there were no others.
She was in her own little dark inner room, which she shared with only two others of the family, arranging a careful toilet by kerosene-light. The photograph of herself in trunks and tights, of which we heard in the story of Elsa Muller’s hopeless love, was before her, among several portraits of actresses and salaried beauties. She had taken them out from under the paper in the top drawer of the bureau. She always kept them there, and always took them out and spread them in the lamp-light when she was alone in her room. She glanced approvingly at the portrait of herself as a picture of which she had said to more than one girlish confidante that it showed as neat a figure and as perfectly shaped limbs as any actress’s she had ever seen. But the suggestion of a frown flitted across her brow as she thought how silly she was to have once been “stage-struck”—how foolish to have thought that mere beauty could quickly raise a poor girl to a high place on the stage. Julia Fogarty’s case proved that. Julia and she were stage-struck together, and where was Julia—or Corynne Belvedere, as she now called herself? She started well as a figurante in a comic opera company up-town, but from that she dropped to a female minstrel troupe in the Bowery, and now, Lewy Tusch told Cordelia, she was “tooing ter skirt-tance in ter pickernic parks for ter sick-baby fund, ant passin’ ter hat arount afterwarts.” And evil was being whispered of her—a pretty high price to pay for such small success; and it must be true, because she sometimes came home late at night in cabs, which are devilish, except when used at funerals.
It was Cordelia who attracted Elsa Muller’s sweetheart, Yank Hurst, to her side, and left Elsa to die yearning for his return. And it was Cordelia who threw Hurst aside when he took to drink and stabbed the young man who, during a mere walk from church, took his place beside Cordelia. And yet Cordelia was only ambitious, not wicked. Few men live who would not look twice at her. She was not of the stunted tenement type, like her friends Rosie Mulvey and Minnie Bechman and Julia Moriarty. She was tall and large and stately, and yet plump in every outline. Moreover, she had the “style” of an American girl, and looked as well in five dollars’ worth of clothes—all home-made, except her shoes and stockings—as almost any girl in richer circles. It was too bad that she was called a flirt by the young men, and a stuck-up thing by the girls, when in fact she was merely more shrewd and calculating than the others, who were content to drift out of the primary schools into the shops, and out of the shops into haphazard matrimony. Cordelia was not lovable, but not all of us are who may be better than she. She was monopolized by the hope of getting a man; but a mere alliance with trousers was not the sum of her hope; they must jingle with coin.
It was strange, then, that she should be dressing to meet Jerry Donahue, who was no better than gilly to the Commissioner of Public Works, drawing a small salary from a clerkship he never filled, while he served the Commissioner as a second left hand. But if we could see into Cordelia’s mind we would be surprised to discover that she did not regard herself as flesh-and-blood Mahoney, but as romantic Clarice Delamour, and she only thought of Jerry as James the butler. The voracious reader of the novels of to-day will recall the story of Clarice, or Only a Lady’s-Maid, which many consider the best of the several absorbing tales that Lulu Jane Tilley has written. Cordelia had read it twenty times, and almost knew it by heart. Her constant dream was that she could be another Clarice, and shape her life like hers. The plot of the novel needs to be briefly told, since it guided Cordelia’s course.
Clarice was maid to a wealthy society dowager. James the butler fell in love with Clarice when she first entered the household, and she, hearing the servants’ gossip about James’s savings and salary, had encouraged his attentions. He pressed her to marry him. But young Nicholas Stuyvesant came home from abroad to find his mother ill and Clarice nursing her. Every day he noticed the modest rosy maid moving noiselessly about like a sunbeam. Her physical perfection profoundly impressed him. In her presence he constantly talked to his mother about his admiration for healthy women. Each evening Clarice reported to him the condition of the mother, and on one occasion mentioned that she had never known ache, pain, or malady in her life. The young man often chatted with her in the drawing-room, and James the butler got his congé. Mr. Stuyvesant induced his mother to make Clarice her companion, and then he met her at picture exhibitions, and in Central Park by chance, and next—every one will recall the exciting scene—he paid passionate court to her “in the pink sewing-room, where she had reclined on soft silken sofa pillows, with her tiny slippers upon the head of a lion whose skin formed a rug before her.” Clarice thought him unprincipled, and repulsed him. When the widow recovered her health and went to Newport, the former maid met all society there. A gifted lawyer fell a victim to Clarice’s charms, and, on a moonlit porch overlooking the sea, warned her against young Stuyvesant. On learning that the roué had already attempted to weaken the girl’s high principles, to rescue her he made her his wife. He was soon afterward elected Mayor of New York, but remained a suitor for his beautiful wife’s approbation, waiting upon her in gilded halls with the fidelity of a knight of old.
Cordelia adored Clarice and fancied herself just like her—beautiful, ambitious, poor, with a future of her own carving. Of course such a case is phenomenal. No other young woman was ever so ridiculous.
“You have on your besht dresh, Cordalia,” said her mother. “It’ll soon be wore out, an’ ye’ll git no other, wid your father oidle, an’ no wan airnin’ a pinny but you an’ Johnny an’ Sarah Rosabel. Fwhere are ye goin’?”
“I won’t be gone long,” said Cordelia, half out of the hall door.
“Cordalia Angeline, darlin’,” said her mother, “mind, now, doan’t let them be talkin’ about ye, fwherever ye go—shakin’ yer shkirts an’ rollin’ yer eyes. It doan’t luk well for a gyurl to be makin’ hersel’ attractive.”
“Oh, mother, I’m not attractive, and you know it.”
With her head full of meeting Jerry Donahue, Cordelia tripped down the four flights of stairs to the street door. As Clarice, she thought of Jerry as James the butler; in fact, all the beaux she had had of late were so many repetitions of the unfortunate James in her mind. All the other characters in her acquaintance were made to fit more or less loosely into her romance life, and she thought of everything she did as if it all happened in Lulu Jane Tilley’s beautiful novel. Let the reader fancy, if possible, what a feat that must have been for a tenement girl who had never known what it was to have a parlor, in our sense of the word, who had never known courtship to be carried on indoors, except in a tenement hallway, and who had to imagine that the sidewalk flirtations of actual life were meetings in private parks, that the wharves and public squares and tenement roofs where she had seen all the young men and women making love were heavily carpeted drawing-rooms, broad manor, house verandas, and the fragrant conservatories of luxurious mansions! But Cordelia managed all this mental necromancy easily, to her own satisfaction. And now she was tripping down the bare wooden stairs beside the dark greasy wall, and thinking of her future husband, the rich Mayor, who must be either the bachelor police captain of the precinct, or George Fletcher, the wealthy and unmarried factory-owner near by, or, perhaps, Senator Eisenstone, the district leader, who, she was forced to reflect, was an unlikely hero for a Catholic girl, since he was a Hebrew. But just as she reached the street door and decided that Jerry would do well enough as a mere temporary James the butler, and while Jerry was waiting for her on the corner, she stepped from the stoop directly in front of George Fletcher.
“Good evening,” said the wealthy, young employer.
“Good evening, Mr. Fletcher.”
“It’s very embarrassing,” said Mr. Fletcher: “I know your given name—Cordelia, isn’t it?—but your last na—Oh, thank you—Miss Mahoney, of course. You know we met at that very queer wedding in the home of my little apprentice, Joe—the line-man’s wedding, you know.”
“Te he!” Cordelia giggled. “Wasn’t that a terrible strange wedding? I think it was just terrible.”
“Were you going somewhere?”
“Oh, not at all, Mr. Fletcher,” with another nervous giggle or two. “I have no plans on me mind, only to get out of doors. It’s terrible hot, ain’t it?”
“May I take a walk with you, Miss Mahoney?”
It seemed to her that if he had called her Clarice the whole novel would have come true then and there.
“I can’t be out very late, Mr. Fletcher,” said she, with a giggle of delight.
“Are you sure I am not disarranging your plans? Had you no engagements?”
“Oh no,” said she; “I was only going out with me lonely.”
“Let us take just a short walk, then,” said Fletcher; “only you must be the man and take me in charge, Miss Mahoney, for I never walked with a young lady in my life.”
“Oh, certainly not; you never did—I don’t think.”
“Upon my honor, Miss Mahoney, I know only one woman in this city—Miss Whitfield, the doctor’s daughter, who lives in the same house with you; and only one other in the world—my aunt, who brought me up, in Vermont.”
Well indeed did Cordelia know this. All the neighborhood knew it, and most of the other girls were conscious of a little flutter in their breasts when his eyes fell upon them in the streets, for it was the gossip of all who knew his workmen that the prosperous ladder-builder lived in his factory, where his had spent the life of a monk, without any society except of his canaries, his books, and his workmen.
“Well, I declare!” sighed Cordelia. “How terrible cunning you men are, to get up such a story to make all the girls think you’re romantic!”
But, oh, how happy Cordelia was! At last she had met her prince—the future Mayor—her Sultan of the gilded halls. In that humid, sticky, midsummer heat among the tenements, every other woman dragged along as if she weighed a thousand pounds, but Cordelia felt like a feather floating among clouds.
The babel—did the reader ever walk up Forsyth Street on a hot night, into Second Avenue, and across to Avenue A, and up to Tompkins Park? The noise of the tens of thousands on the pavements makes a babel that drowns the racket of the carts and cars. The talking of so many persons, the squalling of so many babies, the mothers scolding and slapping every third child, the yelling of the children at play, the shouts and loud repartee of the men and women—all these noises rolled together in the air makes a steady hum and roar that not even the breakers on a hard sea-beach can equal. You might say that the tenements were empty, as only the very sick, who could not move, were in them. For miles and miles they were bare of humanity, each flat unguarded and unlocked, with the women on the sidewalks, with the youngest children in arms or in perambulators, while those of the next sizes romped in the streets; with the girls and boys of fourteen giggling in groups in the doorways (the age and places where sex first asserts itself), and only the young men and women missing; for they were in the parks, on the wharves, and on the roofs, all frolicking and love-making.
And every house front was like a Russian stove, expending the heat it had sucked from the all-day sun. And every door and window breathed bad air—air without oxygen, rich and rank and stifling.
But Cordelia was Clarice, the future Mayoress. She did not know she was picking a tiresome way around the boys at leap-frog, and the mothers and babies and baby-carriages. She did not notice the smells, or feel the bumps she got from those who ran against her. She thought she was in the blue drawing-room at Newport, where a famous Hungarian count was trilling the soft prelude to a csárdás on the piano, and Mr. Stuyvesant had just introduced her to the future Mayor, who was spellbound by her charms, and was by her side, a captive. She reached out her hand, and it touched Mr. Fletcher’s arm (just as a ragamuffin propelled himself head first against her), and Mr. Fletcher bent his elbow, and her wrist rested in the crook of his arm. Oh, her dream was true; her dream was true!
Mr. Fletcher, on the other hand, was hardly in a more natural relation. He was trying to think how the men talked to women in all the literature he had read. The myriad jokes about the fondness of girls for ice-cream recurred to him, and he risked everything on their fidelity to fact.
“Are you fond of ice-cream?” he inquired.
“Oh no; I don’t think,” said Cordelia. “What’ll you ask next? What girl ain’t crushed on ice-cream, I’d like to know?”
“Do you know of a nice place to get some?”
“Do I? The Dutchman’s, on the av’noo, another block up, is the finest in the city. You get mo—that is, you get everything ’way up in G there, with cakes on the side, and it don’t cost no more than anywhere else.”
So to the German’s they went, and Clarice fancied herself at the Casino in Newport. All the girls around her, who seemed to be trying to swallow the spoons, took on the guise of blue-blooded belles, while the noisy boys and young men (calling out, “Hully gee, fellers! look at Nifty gittin’ out der winder widout payin’!” and, “Say, Tilly, what kind er cream is dat you’re feedin’ your face wid?”) seemed to her so many millionaires and the exquisite sons thereof. To Mr. Fletcher the German’s back-yard saloon, with its green lattice walls, and its rusty dead Christmas trees in painted butter-kegs, appeared uncommonly brilliant and fine. The fact that whenever he took a swallow of water the ice-cream turned to cold candle-grease in his mouth made no difference. He was happy, and Cordelia was in an ecstasy by the time he had paid a shock-headed, bare-armed German waiter, and they were again on the avenue side by side. She put out her hand and rested it on his arm again—to make sure she was Clarice.
One would like to know whether, in the breasts of such as these, familiar environment exerts any remarkable influence. If so, it could have been in but one direction. For that part of town was one vast nursery. Everywhere, on every side, were the swarming babies—a baby for every flag-stone in the pavements. Babies and babies, and little besides babies, except larger children and the mothers. Perambulators with two, even three, baby passengers; mothers with as many as five children trailing after them; babies in broad baggy laps, babies at the breast, babies creeping, toppling, screaming, overflowing into the gutters. Such was the unbroken scene from the Big Barracks to Tompkins Square; ay, to Harlem and to the East River, and almost to Broadway. In the park, as if the street scenes had been merely preliminary, the paths were alive, wriggling, with babies of every age, from the new-born to the children in pigtails and knickerbockers—and, lo! these were already paired and practising at courtship. The walk that Cordelia was taking was amid a fever, a delirium, of maternity—a rhapsody, a baby’s opera, if one considered its noise. In that vast region no one inquired whether marriage was a failure. Nothing that is old and long-beloved and human is a failure there.
In Tompkins Park, while they dodged babies and stepped around babies and over them, they saw many happy couples on the settees, and they noticed that often the men held their arms around the waists of their sweethearts. Girls, too, in other instances, leaned loving heads against the young men’s breasts, blissfully regardless of publicity. They passed a young man and a woman kissing passionately, as kissing is described by unmarried girl novelists. Cordelia thought it no harm to nudge Mr. Fletcher and whisper:
“Sakes alive! They’re right in it, ain’t they. ‘It’s funny when you feel that way,’ ain’t it?”
As many another man who does not know the frankness and simplicity of the plain people might have done, Mr. Fletcher misjudged the girl. He thought her the sort of girl he was far from seeking. He grew instantly cold and reserved, and she knew, vaguely, that she had displeased him.
“I think people who make love in public should be locked up,” said he.
“Some folks wants everybody put away that enjoys themselves,” said Cordelia. Then, lest she had spoken too strongly, she added, “Present company not intended, Mr. Fletcher, but you said that like them mission folks that come around praising themselves and tellin’ us all we’re wicked.”
“And do you think a girl can be good who behaves so in public?”
“I know plenty that’s done it,” said she; “and I don’t know any girls but what’s good. They ’ain’t got wings, maybe, but you don’t want to monkey with ’em, neither.”
He recollected her words for many a year afterward and pondered them, and perhaps they enlarged his understanding. She also often thought of his condemnation of love-making out-of-doors. Kissing in public, especially promiscuous kissing, she knew to be a debatable pastime, but she also knew that there was not a flat in the Big Barracks in which a girl could carry on a courtship. Fancy her attempting it in her front room, with the room choked with people, with the baby squalling, and her little brothers and sisters quarrelling, with her mother entertaining half a dozen women visitors with tea or beer, and with a man or two dropping in to smoke with her father! Parlor courtship was to her, like precise English, a thing only known in novels. The thought of novels floated her soul back into the dream state.
“I think Cordelia’s a pretty name,” said Fletcher, cold at heart but struggling to be companionable.
“I don’t,” said Cordelia. “I’m not at all crushed on it. Your name’s terrible pretty. I think my three names looks like a map of Ireland when they’re written down. I know a killin’ name for a girl. It’s Clarice. Maybe some day I’ll give you a dare. I’ll double dare you, maybe, to call me Clarice.”
Oh, if he only would, she thought—if he would only call her so now! But she forgot how unelastic his strange routine of life must have left him, and she did not dream how her behavior in the park had displeased him.
“Cordelia is a pretty name,” he repeated. “At any rate, I think we should try to make the most and best of whatever name has come to us. I wouldn’t sail under false colors for a minute.”
“Oh!” said she, with a giggle to hide her disappointment; “you’re so terrible wise! When you talk them big words you can pass me in a walk.”
Anxious to display her great conquest to the other girls of the Barracks neighborhood, Cordelia persuaded Mr. Fletcher to go to what she called “the dock,” to enjoy the cool breath of the river. All the piers and wharves are called “docks” by the people. Those which are semi-public and are rented to miscellaneous excursion and river steamers are crowded nightly.
The wharf to which our couple strolled was a mere flooring above the water, edged with a stout string-piece, which formed a bench for the mothers. They were there in groups, some seated on the string-piece with babes in arms or with perambulators before them, and others, facing these, standing and joining in the gossip, and swaying to and fro to soothe their little ones. Those who gave their offspring the breast did so publicly, unembarrassed by a modesty they would have considered false. A few youthful couples, boy by girl and girl by boy, sat on the string-piece and whispered, or bandied fun with those other lovers who patrolled the flooring of the wharf. A “gang” of rude young men—toughs—walked up and down, teasing the girls, wrestling, scuffling, and roaring out bad language. Troops of children played at leap-frog, high-spy, jack-stones, bean-bag, hop-scotch, and tag. At the far end of the pier some young men and women waltzed, while a lad on the string-piece played for them on his mouth-organ. A steady, cool, vivifying breeze from the bay swept across the wharf and fanned all the idlers, and blew out of their heads almost all recollection of the furnacelike heat of the town.
Cordelia forgot her desire to display her conquest. She forgot her true self. She likened the wharf to that “lordly veranda overlooking the sea,” where the future Mayor begged Clarice to be his bride. She knew just what she would say when her prince spoke his lines. She and Mr. Fletcher were just about to seat themselves on the great rim of the wharf, when an uproar of the harsh, froglike voices of half-grown men caused them to turn around. They saw Jerry Donahue striding towards them, but with difficulty, because half a dozen lads and youths were endeavoring to hold him back.
“Dat’s Mr. Fletcher,” they said. “It ain’t his fault, Jerry. He’s dead square; he’s a gent, Jerry.”
The politician’s gilly tore himself away from his friends. The gang of toughs gathered behind the others. Jerry planted himself in front of Cordelia. Evidently he did not know the submissive part he should have played in Cordelia’s romance. James the butler made no out-break, but here was Jerry angry through and through.
“You didn’t keep de date wid me,” he began.
“Oh, Jerry, I did—I tried to, but you—” Cordelia was red with shame.
“The hell you did! Wasn’t I—”
“Here!” said Mr. Fletcher; “you can’t swear at this lady.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Jerry asked. “What would you do?”
“He’s right, Jerry. Leave him be—see?” said the chorus of Jerry’s friends.
“A-a-a-h!” snarled Jerry. “Let him leave me be, then. Cordelia, I heard you was a dead fraud, an’ now I know it, and I’m a-tellin’ you so, straight—see? I was a-waitin’ ‘cross der street, an’ I seen you come out an’ meet dis mug, an’ you never turned yer head to see was I on me post. I seen dat, an’ I’m a-tellin’ yer friend just der kind of a racket you give me, der same’s you’ve give a hundred other fellers. Den, if he likes it he knows what he’s gittin’.”
Jerry was so angry that he all but pushed his distorted face against that of the humiliated girl as he denounced her. Mr. Fletcher gently moved her backward a step or two, and advanced to where she had stood.
“That will do,” he said to Jerry. “I want no trouble, but you’ve said enough. If there’s more, say it to me.”
“A-a-a-h!” exclaimed the gilly, expectorating theatrically over his shoulder. “Me friends is on your side, an’ I ain’t pickin’ no muss wid you. But she’s got der front of der City Hall to do me like she done. And say, fellers, den she was goin’ ter give me a song an’ dance ’bout lookin’ fer me. Ba-a-a! She knows my ’pinion of her—see?”
The crowd parted to let Mr. Fletcher finish his first evening’s gallantry to a lady by escorting Cordelia to her home. It was a chilly and mainly a silent journey. Cordelia falteringly apologized for Jerry’s misbehavior, but she inferred from what Mr. Fletcher said that he did not fully join her in blaming the angry youth. Mr. Fletcher touched her fingertips in bidding her good-night, and nothing was said of a meeting in the future. Clarice was forgotten, and Cordelia was not only herself again, but quite a miserable self, for her sobs awoke the little brother and sister who shared her bed.