Truly it was a good night’s work, and everything had operated as though on greased wheels.
CHAPTER XVI
ANNE WENTWORTH ANSWERS AN AD.
ANNE WENTWORTH, in her cheerless rear room on West Huron Street, stared puzzledly at the want-ad. which headed the list of those she had been anxiously scanning in the Chicago paper, dated Monday, September 19. It read:
WANTED: 1,200 MEN WITH SUITCASES, AGED FROM 18 to 60, Tuesday morning, promptly at 7.30, for one half-hour’s light, easy and simple employment. Wages 10 dollars per man. Paid promptly at 8 a.m. Apply at the big tent, Irving Park Boulevard and North 60th Court.
“What a munificent sum,” she commented to herself, half-bitterly, half-enviously, “for only a half-hour’s work. Oh, why can’t I be a man or a boy for just to-morrow morning?”
But the reflection that stared back at her from the cracked mirror of the bureau showed something quite other than a boy or man, the picture of a girl who partook of the opposite sex only in her slim boyish build, whose red lips were the lips of a woman, red kissable lips.
She sat where she was a moment longer, then her ruminations were rudely broken into by a measured and ominous rapping on the door. She bit her lip and stepping across the room threw open the door.
On the threshold stood a woman of fifty, with streaked grey hair about her thin temples and tiny sour lines around the corners of her mouth. She was clad in dirty apron, and her arms were akimbo.
“Miss Wentworth — ” she began, but Anne motioned her to come in, and closed the door carefully behind her.
“Miss Wentworth, I’ve had an offer for your room this mornin’ from a gent what sleeps days, and I’ll have to ask you to find another place. I can’t go along no longer waitin’ f’r my money this way, and I’d rather lose what little you owe me than get deeper in the hole.”
Anne Wentworth looked at the woman, the very embodiment of hardness and coldness.
“Mrs. Capsum, I — I wish I could ask you not to rent the room over my head. The fact of the matter is that I’m terribly embarrassed for money. If you put me out, I haven’t the price even to rent another room, and — and I don’t know what to do. I realize of course that you’re a poor woman, with this rooming-house to take care of and pay rent for. And I — ”
“Why for,” inquired Emma Capsum acidly, “did you get yourself into such a condition regardin’ money? It seems t’ me you been aworkin’ long enough for that there rich lady on the Lake Shore Drive you was tellin’ me about. She musta paid you big money,” she added.
Anne Wentworth’s face clouded. “No, Mrs. Capsum. Mrs. Hester Cornell, the lady I told you about, didn’t pay me much money. Mr. Cornell is on a year’s trip through South America in connection with his business, and what Mrs. Cornell paid me came purely out of her personal allowance for spending money. I will be frank with you, Mrs. Capsum. Mrs. Cornell paid me the sum of ten dollars a week. For that amount I have read to her and helped her with her social correspondence and all such duties. It isn’t much as salaries go, but it has given me the use of her library and her home, and still better the cultured society of an educated and refined woman. That was the reason I was glad of the opportunity, even though the salary was only 10 dollars a week.”
Mrs. Capsum’s eyes wandered over the tiny room with a sense of proprietorship, such as a landlady uses when she is figuring the date when she must next decorate at the ruinous prices decorators charge. Finally her eyes came to rest upon Anne again.
“Wouldn’t this here Mrs. Cornell advance you some money?” she queried hopefully.
Anne pushed back the ringlets from her forehead. She went to the creaking bureau drawer and drew from it a tiny gold-edged envelope, which she opened before the eyes of Mrs. Capsum. That lady’s eyes became a trifle larger as Anne took from it a salmon-coloured slip of crisp paper. As for the note it contained, Anne handed that to her. Mrs. Capsum found a pair of silver-rimmed glasses somewhere on the back of her grey topknot and adjusted them on her flat nose. The note which Anne had given her to read, ran as follows:
DEAR ANNE:
I entirely forgot to tell you when you were here yesterday that I am going out of the city to-day for an indefinite time. I want you to still feel that you are working for me as my little reading lady, as well as my little writing lady, and having just received my delayed allowance from Mr. Cornell to-day, am enclosing you a cheque for 100 dollars which is to cover your rather meagre wages for the past three weeks and the next seven weeks to come. Dear girl, I do not anticipate that I shall be gone for anything like that time, but I wish to feel that I have not left you without some money which I know you require. Now I want you to keep in daily touch with the Lake Shore Drive residence, and as soon as I am back I shall want you, if you are still agreeable, to resume your little duties just as before.
Very hastily,
HESTER CORNELL.
“Well, that’s fine,” said Mrs. Capsum, melting like the Martian snowcap in the terrestrial summer time. “A hundred dollars — ”
“But — wait, Mrs. Capsum,” interrupted Anne wearily. “Mrs. Cornell in the confusion of leaving the city forgot to sign the cheque. It is drawn on her own little account in the Northside Cosmopolitan Bank. It’s plain that she thinks she signed it — but she didn’t. And it isn’t any more good to me than the paper it is written on.”
Mrs. Capsum lost no time in freezing up. “In which case,” she said gelidly, “you ain’t got no money after all to pay me the nine dollars you owe me for them three weeks’ rent.” She rose. “Well, all I’m a-sayin,’ Miss Wentworth, is that this gent is comin’ to-morrow afternoon to pay his deposit, an’ as I gotta make my living I’ll have to ask you to get new quarters. In other words, I’ll stand to lose the nine dollars, and call it a bad bargain all round.”
“You won’t lose the nine dollars,” was Anne’s weak response. “You’ll get fully paid up, Mrs. Capsum, no matter what happens.” She gazed ruefully at the cheque. “Oh, I’m so sorry that this mistake had to happen. I have kept thinking each day that Mrs. Cornell would write me, letting me know her new address, but no word from her. And I might not hear for a week or two weeks.”
A long peal at the doorbell down below roused Mrs. Capsum to rooming-house-keeper activities. “Well, I got to get down an’ answer that door,” she said. “Don’t forget, Miss Wentworth, to pack up to-morrow.” And she was gone.
Again Anne found herself fascinatedly perusing that leading ad., which advertised for twelve hundred men and boys with suitcases to work only a half-hour for 10 dollars.
Ten dollars! Why, only half of that amount would appease Mrs. Capsum’s suddenly achieved thirst for money, and the other half, Anne knew, would carry her a week, at the expiration of which time Mrs. Cornell must surely have written either her or Uncle Mose. She needed 10 dollars as she had never needed 10 dollars before in her life.
First she went to the tiny closet of the room and peered in. They were there, the young man’s suit and heavy woollen check cap which had been left behind by some former lodger, and which Mrs. Capsum had asked Anne’s permission to keep where it was hanging, blithely informing her that by that subterfuge she could legally charge the former roomer “fifty cents a week for storage,” if not full rent of the room, did she wish to be mean.
Anne took out the suit and examined it. The pockets were empty and the cap, she saw at a trial, would well cover her soft locks when they were neatly and tightly pinned to her head. The next step to fit herself out was the suitcase.
Downstairs she went and there she found Mrs. Capsum rocking away in her ill-kept, littered back-parlour.
“Mrs. Capsum,” she said friendly, eagerly, “I think by perhaps noontime to-morrow I’ll be able to fix you up upon the matter of money. First, however, could you loan me a suitcase to use in the morning?”
Mrs. Capsum’s face looked a little less sour at the mention of money. “Yes, I think I can.” She arose creakingly, and shook a warning fore
finger. “But don’t you lose it, young lady.”
From a rack out in the hall she pulled down a neat-looking suitcase of a rare colour as suitcases go — black — and with dustcloth, which hung on a nearby broom, dusted it off and opened it up.
“What fer you need a suitcase?” asked that lady casually, as she flicked the dustcloth over it.
“For — for to do some work,” said Anne.
“Goin’ to try some canvassin’, eh?” ventured Mrs. Capsum. She nodded her head approvingly. “A bright young girl like you could make good at canvassin’, all right.”
Anne smiled back at her and ascended the battered-up stairway to her room once more. And there, now supplied with all the essentials for participation in this remarkable ten-dollar job, she proceeded to set her dollar alarm clock for 5-30 sharp in the morning, and began undressing.
When the alarm clock jangled in the grey dawn of the early morning, she was far from feeling rested. She dressed slowly, but this time she evolved into a young man, with slightly worn yet neat clothing which fitted her fairly well. Her long silky hair she pinned tightly to her head, and putting the soft woollen cap well down over it, found by gazing at her reflection in the mirror with half-closed eyes that she looked somewhat masculine.
Empty suitcase in hand, clamped together by its brass fastenings, she peered out on the second floor landing before she made her hasty escape. The coast was clear, and drawing her door softly to behind her she flew down the inner stairs, outside the main door, and on to Huron Street.
Once on the street she paused, panic-stricken. She would have given everything she had in the world to be back in her room — to be in feminine clothing once more; but a little girl passing her with a bagful of hot rolls, and a labouring man hurrying on to work in overalls with his pick and shovel over his shoulder, both giving her the merest glance on the nearly deserted street, reassured her.
So on she went, trying to walk briskly like a man, to Clark Street, where she boarded a car and made her way inside and dropped uneasily into an end seat. Irving Park Boulevard, she knew, was a long distance to the north, and North 60th Court was almost an equally interminable journey to the west. Transfer in her pocket, she rode the long distance northward, and long before the conductor called out Irving Park she noticed the car filling up with men of various ages carrying a dozen varieties of luggage from the old-fashioned grey telescope to rickety yellow valises.
It was when, transfer in hand, she was ascending the tiny old-fashioned Irving Park car which went far to the north-western outskirts of the city, that she became acquainted with the odd individual who was thereafter to be her self-constituted cavalier, whose keen laughing Irish eye was to pierce her slender disguise instantly.
Broad of shoulder, ungainly and big-jointed, his face as homely as the homeliest man she had ever seen, arms long, eyes an Irish sea-blue and one ear cauliflowered as though its owner had participated in a number of ring battles, he slid down into the end seat on the Irving Park car close to her.
“How far does it be to North 60th Court?” he asked her politely.
In as gruff a voice as she could muster, Anne replied: “A — a good ways out. I’m — I’m going there myself.”
“An’ so I t’ot, little lady,” he said calmly, grinning a bit. “I t’ot so. Say” — he lowered his voice — “I knowed ye wur a gur-rl when I first spotted ye. ‘Tis with ye I’m goin’ to arn some of this easy money that’s bein’ paid out at the place mintioned in the paper?”
“Yes.” She smiled radiantly at him. And as she looked at this young Irish plug-ugly whose eyes reflected only polite admiration, she felt a strange sense of protection. “I’m trying to earn that 10 dollars — because — because I need it badly.”
And that was how the conversation during the long ride to North 60th Court began, and long before she had finished she had learned that he was Mike McGann, a teamster, out on strike from the Patterson Coal Yards, unmarried, and sometimes known about the prizefighting fields of Hammond, Indiana, as Battling Mike, and the Irish Terror. As the little yellow car rattled westward, the buildings grew fewer and farther apart on either side of the street; more empty lots greeted the eye; rail fences began to be common instead of oddities, and everywhere the earmarks of the outskirts were visible, and the air seemed clearer, fresher, cleaner, purer.
It was seven-fifteen in the morning by her new-found acquaintance’s nickel-plated watch when the car stopped at North 60th Court and every man-jack on it piled out, Anne and the Irish youth the last of them all. There, on a grass-grown lot which was one of four making up the corner, the nearest house a full block away, was a huge striped tent big enough to contain an old-fashioned one-ring country circus. But unlike most circus tents there was not a line of advertising anywhere about it. Anne looked from the hurrying stream of men and boys with suitcases of all hues to her companion who stuck tight to her side. There was a fighting gleam in the Irishman’s eye.
“Faith,” he muttered, “miss, but I’ll wallop somebody hard if this is any scheme f’r pullin’ anny dollars out o’ me pocket.”
An energetic-looking man with beady black eyes, stationed on a ticket-seller’s raised platform at the one entrance of the tent, was operating a mechanical counter with one hand and cupping his lips with the other. He was saying in a loud voice: “All right. Pass in. Take your seats anywhere in the tent. You’re goin’ to see a show an’ get well paid for seein’ it. Take any seat. Pass in.” And thus he droned and droned as the human contents of a new Irving Park car which had been running close behind the one on which Anne had travelled came up and paused uncertainly near the opening of the tent.
Anne and the Irish Terror passed on in. Inside a buzz, like that which would come from a great hive of bees, showed Anne that many there must have been who had sat there since the early breaking of day lest they lose a chance to earn a wage which, for men of the calibre she had seen that morning, meant pay for three days’ hard labour. Seats down in front near the arena were thickly covered, and jokes and catcalls were being bandied back and forth incessantly.
“ ‘Tis a boonch o’ roofnecks,” commented the Irish Terror disapprovingly. “Better take me advice, miss, and we’ll take a seat up here w’ere there’s not so miny. I’m thinkin’ we can see all we can see from here. Faith, an’ did ye ever lamp so miny suitcases in yer life. There’s green ones, yellow ones, or’nge ones — faith, iverything but a nice neat black one like yer own.”
Making room for her suitcase at her feet, she looked about her. In the centre of the arena was a curious contrivance of painted wood. It consisted of a little platform built on a wooden tower which looked down upon the seats from far up near the top of the tent, and from this platform dropped a steep incline or track of wood, perhaps two feet wide, with a single black painted stripe running along its entire middle. On the platform lay a bicycle with frame made of thick heavy tubing gilded a bright silver, and the lower end of the inclined path which terminated abruptly some fifteen above the ground held a most impudent upward curve. At a level perhaps ten feet lower than the nose of this impudent curve was a broad wooden platform about twenty feet square, and separated from the end of the inclined path by a gap of at least ten yards. The whole structure seemed to be held taut by heavy steel guy wires. There was no artificial lighting in this tent, the only illumination coming down from the sky through great skylights of celluloid in the roof of the canvas, and this gave a weird effect to the whole interior.
At last, promptly at seven-thirty by Mike McGann’s frequently consulted watch, the man in the doorway drew in his stool and motioned with his hand to the back of the arena where a great canvas curtain cut off what would ordinarily be the performers’ part of the tent. A second later, from the hidden regions back of the curtain, two men stepped forth, one a tall, cadaverous-looking individual with swallow-tail coat who looked like a travelling medicine show-doctor, the other a smaller, shorter and stockier individual of decided blond type, clad in pink
tights topped by a pair of trunks of vivid red, white and blue, and spangled with gold stars. In the hands of the cadaverous-looking man was a huge black megaphone. At length he spoke, using the megaphone. His words came clear and distinct, with the drawn-out intonation of the old-time circus barker.
“Gentlemen, you have been called here to-day for a peculiar piece of work which is to net each and every one of you the princely sum of 10 dollars for less than one half-hour of his time. Twelve hundred men were advertised for, and some thirteen hundred and twenty responded. On your way out you will receive a cheque for 10 dollars, signed in the lower right-hand corner. This cheque is not good until it is further countersigned on the dotted line at the end. The man who will countersign these cheques for each and every one of you is at Irving Park and Broadway, in a small real estate shack. This is the end of the car-line. In order to get your cheques countersigned you must have your street-car transfer with you. Now is it all clear? You must get your cheque countersigned before it is good. Show your transfer and your cheque to the man in the real estate shack at Irving Park and Broadway. He will do the rest. Cash your cheque at the downtown bank or wherever you please.”
He paused for breath, looking about him. Then he went on:
“And now, gentlemen, I have the pleasure of introducing to you Gus Chevalo, the most daring trick cyclist and gap jumper in the world, who has perfected for the first time in history the so-called double loopless loop-the-loop, in which he loses his neck if he fails. Two moving-picture machines, placed beneath the grandstand, are focused upon the space where Mr. Chevalo will perform his unparalleled feat. You thirteen hundred and twenty men constitute what is known in technical show circles as an audience. To any newspaper reporters scattered among this audience, I can only state that no further details can be given out than have already been stated.” He bowed slightly to the man at his side. “Gentlemen, I present Mr. Gus Chevalo, champion trick cyclist of the world.”
The Amazing Web Page 18
