Part Three: Gwen

PART THREE

GWEN

Williamsburg

Spring, 1898

1

FITZ, WITH HIS SOFT DRAWL AND SLOUCHING, GRACEFUL CARRIAGE, professed to have become a sure-’nough Yankee after nearly a year in New York. He was waiting on the dock with Cabot and Eden to welcome his cousins home.

A little in the background there hovered a fourth figure which Fitz dragged forward affectionately, saying, “You remember Johnny Malone, Cousin Sue,” and Sue said she did and gave her hand to a young man in a soft hat who seized it gratefully, mangled it in his, and murmured something embarrassed and complimentary. She then recalled having seen him about now and then during the flurried days before they had sailed in the spring, and supposed that he worked on Cabot’s newspaper too.

“Well, Johnny!” Virginia was crying in an astonishment too well done to be quite convincing. “Whatever are you doing here?”

Johnny Malone blushed, swallowed, and started to explain that he had just happened to come down to the docks to see about a fire—

“That’s a lie, Ginny,” said Fitz gently. “He’s been meeting this boat ever since she sailed from Liverpool. All I could do to keep him from swimming down to Sandy Hook. And will you all please note his alarming state of sobriety at this time of day?”

Virginia laughed happily and patted Johnny’s sleeve with light gloved finger-tips.

“Never you mind him, Johnny, I appreciate your coming down here no end,” she said, and her long eyelashes lifted intimately to Johnny’s enraptured gaze. “My, it’s good to see some dyed-in-the-wool New Yorkers

again, after what I’ve been through!” she added, and cast herself devotedly on Cabot’s chest.

There were two carriages waiting. But somehow when they rolled away from the dock Johnny Malone, after being tirelessly helpful about the luggage, was not in either one of them.

“It must be pretty tough to be in love with the Boss’s daughter,” Fitz remarked thoughtfully when Johnny’s tactful absence was discovered. “If it ever happened to me I’d just cut my throat and rest in peace.”

“Johnny will live through it, I think,” said Eden kindly. “He’s a very impressionable young man.”

Eden knew that no young man, however impressionable, but with the good reporter’s capacity and affection for hard liquor which Johnny had, stood a ghost of a chance of marrying any daughter of hers. Cabot was not a snob, and Johnny was a good news hound who had manfully served his stiff apprenticeship in the police courts, with the fire department, and among the obituaries, several years before Fitz started to work in the same office.

Johnny had risen to forty a week now, on the gaudy Tenderloin beat which he loved the best, among the theatres and all-night restaurants, where the chorus girls and the crooks and the politicians were as likely to make him their confidant as to resent his vocation, and where he had learned more than enough professional secrets to get him shot any day, except for his cast-iron discretion, drunk or sober. Johnny had Cabot’s promise—they called it a threat—of a by-line before long if he behaved himself. But he would never make the City Editor’s desk at the rate he was drinking.

Johnny drank whisky the way a baby guzzles milk, with an artless joy and the most harmless results. Johnny was in fact very funny when he was drunk. It didn’t make him quarrelsome, he seldom picked fights, and he was never disgusting or demoralized. He simply got delightfully, blissfully soused and he stayed that way for hours, sometimes it seemed for days. It rarely interfered with his work, and he remained quite coherent even on the telephone if it became necessary to dictate a story back to the office. But it did not recommend him as a possible suitor for the Boss’s daughter.

Cabot had viewed with approval the firm friendship which grew up between the neophyte Fitz and Johnny Malone, particularly as Fitz showed no inclination to try to keep up with Johnny’s drinking. (Fitz mostly stuck to beer.) Johnny knew the ropes around the City Room, knew the map of

New York like the palm of his hand, knew all the most useful policemen on all the best beats, knew the bar-keeps by name from the Bowery to the Forty-second Street Reservoir, and—it came first from Fitz—Johnny was always ready to go to a music hall show.

In Johnny’s company Fitz saw them all—the Atlantic Gardens on the Bowery, which had a female baritone and a ladies’ orchestra in white dresses who drank beer between times with the customers; Prospect Gardens on Fourteenth Street where the prima donna was the wife of the proprietor and must be treated as such; the Winter Garden whose female patrons were not exactly ladies, though its owner called it a family resort, and it often sheltered on its big-hearted bill some hard-luck act which otherwise would have been laid off and which gratefully drew a maximum fifteen dollars a week; Tony Pastor’s which was respectable, and the Alhambra just across the way which was barely so, and the Haymarket on Sixth Avenue which was far, far otherwise and had gambling rooms and other more private apartments upstairs; and many more unsavoury holes-in-the-wall where the beer was good and the company quite bad and the music so-so, and where there was seldom a dull moment.

Johnny called most of the soubrettes by their first names and they addressed him in even more intimate terms. From Johnny Fitz learned the rules and customs of each house, and sat night after night under the dim, smoky lights drinking cool dark Münchner while the band played Viennese waltzes and modern ragtime and two-steps; learned to josh the waiters, buy drinks for the musicians, and pay lurid compliments to the specialty ladies in flesh-coloured tights and brief spangled costumes with a discreet fringe which came half-way down the thigh. From Johnny he learned that the girls got cold tea when you bought them a drink, and that most of them would give you their eye-teeth for a pair of silk stockings; and that if you could get a popular soubrette to plug your song and it caught on and the audiences took up the choruses with her and went away whistling it, you might get it published with Introduced by— on the cover, and then if it went into the bill at Pastor’s or Koster and Bail’s the royalties started rolling in, and the first thing you knew you had money, and then those who had looked askance on song-writing as an occupation were confounded and you could afford to be magnanimous and buy them presents with you’re earnings….

Johnny had been impressed when he discovered that Fitz wrote songs.

Anybody could hold down a forty-a-week newspaper job, but only talented people could read music, much less write it. Such an accomplishment ensured that Fitz would never have to live and die a rum-soaked reporter, said Johnny with awe, and added that he trusted when Fitz’s tunes had become as well known as Daisy Bell and The Little Lost Child and were being sung every week by Lottie Gilson and Della Fox, and maybe with slides, too, he trusted that then, Johnny would repeat, raising the slow, emphatic forefinger which assisted his utterance as his sentences became more and more involved, trusted that then the wealthy composer would remember who his old friends were, even when his sales had reached fabulous figures in the piano trade.

Thus, over Fitz’s Münchner and Johnny’s perpetual rock and rye, they would map out Fitz’s profitable future. Fitz also had a responsibility during those tours of the lesser music halls and beer-gardens. For whereas Johnny could take care of himself with the soubrettes and the ladies’ orchestras, who never seemed to expect from him anything but the most casual amenities, Fitz must never by any chance allow his friend to stray upstairs to where the gambling-rooms were. Because if ever this did happen, the results were dire and went on all night, leaving Johnny with nothing to pay his rent or even buy his lunch with the next day.

Fitz was seeing life with Johnny. At first his contacts with the New York underworld had been purely in the line of business and he had considered them quite revolting. His gentle breeding and rural background had not prepared Fitz for the metropolitan night courts, where the human soul sometimes appears at its nakedest, or the morgue, whose sights are not for the squeamish, but both were included in the regular beat of a cub reporter on a New York daily. Fitz set his teeth and schooled himself to Johnny’s philosophical acceptance of the baser aspects of humanity. Gradually Fitz grew his own callouses, so that the sight of a nameless man done violently to death no longer made him retch, and he could view the ageing, painted, hopeless faces of streetwalkers picked up on minor charges of thievery and vagrancy with only an impersonal compassion, and could refrain from giving away his last dollar to hideous beggars who displayed their deformities as their chief stock in trade.

Finally he ceased to feel strange and apprehensive in the sinister backwaters west of Fifth Avenue, and accustomed himself to Johnny’s catholic acquaintance with characters the police were looking for—or should be looking for, if it had not been made worth their while to be blind.

Theodore Roosevelt had been called to Washington to act as President McKinley’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and under Tammany rule New York was relaxing again into its old easy ways before he had been Police Commissioner. The clean-up was over. The town was bulging wide open again. Anything could happen almost unquestioned, and most of it did.

Johnny’s friends included gamblers, cab-drivers, firemen, beer-hall proprietors, vaudeville actors, cheap politicians, barflies in general, strong-arm men who carried guns and felt free to use them, women who lived precariously and died young—Johnny mingled with them all, and in his company Fitz witnessed as bad or worse in his leisure hours as on his routine newspaper assignments. But they were not required to write it up, except that Johnny sometimes used it under the guise of fiction, as Richard Harding Davis did. Fitz no longer winced at language, nor blushed when shameless women made jocular love to him. He held his tongue when it wasn’t his quarrel or Johnny’s, and he ducked automatically when a gun went off in the middle distance. But he had never learned to control the pit of his stomach. He never quite lost the impulse and the desire to be somewhere else when a ruckus began. Which only went to show, Johnny would point out sadly, that he was not a born reporter.

It was a Cinderella-like existence Fitz lived anyway. Each day he left Cabot’s brownstone mansion on Madison Avenue for the grubby environs of Park Row, spent his working hours recording the sordid aftermath of everything from pocket-picking to Chinatown murder, and returned again—

often with the most heartfelt relief—to the sane and usual world presided over by his beautiful Aunt Eden, where one dressed for dinner and occupied a box at the theatre, and people’s more private and violent emotions were kept decently hidden.

“The Shop” over which Cabot Murray presided as owner and editor of the New York Evening Star was not the picturesque madhouse which was becoming fashionable with some rival newspaper offices which considered themselves more live and up-and-coming. There were almost no office politics at the Star, or personal feuds and jealousies. There was no visible

excitement as the time for going to press drew near, and no frantic last-minute endeavour. The greater the pressure and the higher the tension over a big story, the quieter and more efficient the City Room became.

The Star had one of the finest newspaper plants in the world, modestly housed in the basement whence the throb of the presses and the smell of printers’ ink rose comfortably to the effective serenity of the editorial floor.

Cabot did not believe in beating the big drum for himself or his plant, but he was one of the first to install speaking-tubes in order to eliminate shouting, and typewriters in order to eliminate bad handwriting, just as he had been one of the first to utilize telephones, and the cables while they were still expensive, to eliminate delay, and to run a leased wire straight from Washington into the office. He hated noise and confusion, even as he hated sloppy writing. He read every line of his paper every day and knew who had written it, and bestowed praise as generously for a bright three inches about a lost child as for a breakneck scoop on a crime case. His pitiless blue pencil developed in Star men a trenchant, hard-hitting style all their own which was studied all over the country. Whenever a reporter lifted his eyes from his desk they encountered a sign which carried in large letters the only slogan the Star ever employed: DON’T BORE THEM.

Cabot usually wrote the leader himself, and every other editorial line had to pass his inspection. It was an era when most of the big newspapers reflected the personalities of the men who owned and edited them—

magnetic, colourful, fearless personalities with the gift of words, who said what they chose and stood by it, and could make and unmake legislators and even Cabinets by the weight and passion of their opinions. He wielded a brillant and a stringent pen, himself. People who bought the paper seldom said, “What’s in the Star?” but rather, “What’s Murray got today?” He could always cover a big assignment better than his star reporters and they knew it.

Cabot had bought the New York paper after the death of his father who during the ’60’s had owned a contentious, froth-at-the-mouth Republican organ in Trenton. The Star was then a prosy sheet devoid of interest and policy. Within a remarkably short time Cabot turned it into a vital, newsy, highly profitable property which bore the imprint of his own personality on every page. He had a genius for hiring the right subordinates and a profound conviction that a newspaper’s first business was news, and not

professional crusading nor circulation stunts. His word in the Shop was law, his policy the only one, and his wrath when something went wrong was swift and terrible. Yet he was accessible all day long to anybody from the Managing Editor to the office boy with toothache, and you were likely at any minute to be called into his private office and praised for something you hardly knew you had done, or fired for something you hoped nobody had noticed. But if you made good at the Star, and behaved yourself, and tried always to do better still, you had a job for life if you wanted it.

Cabot’s splendid height and rugged good looks made him recognized wherever he went, to say nothing of the trademark he possessed in a beautiful red-haired wife who knew how to dress. His hospitality was famous, and celebrities from all over the world came to his dinner-table in Madison Avenue. It was rumoured that he had been urged to run for Congress but preferred his job at the Star, and that he had refused the Ambassadorship to the Court of St. James for the same reason. His children were much travelled at an early age, yet were singularly unspoiled by their father’s wealth, although their precocity had caused raised eyebrows all over Europe for years.

Unlike the Tribune, the Star under Murray ownership had no aversion to college men as cub reporters. The Boss’s son had graduated from Princeton full of Greek and Latin at twenty, the youngest in his class, and had gone to work as a leg-man the same summer, learning from the beginning. Two years later a mining disaster in Tennessee gave him his chance, and his story of the families waiting at the pithead, the touching colloquial vignettes gathered in sympathetic conversation with weeping women and frightened children who broke down and willingly told him all, established him as a first-class reporter.

The Star believed that a reporter with a clean collar and good manners not only upheld the dignity of the paper but was also likely to get into places where the traditional break-in newspaper man would have got thrown out, especially in crime cases. It also believed that reporters were born and not made, and that a nose for news and a story sense could not be begged, bought, borrowed, or stolen, but had to arrive mysteriously along with your milk-teeth; that the best reporters had a sixth sense which always told them when they were being lied to; and that part of the job was cajoling

facts out of people unwilling to talk, instead of trying to bully or bribe them out.

This was the atmosphere which was Bracken’s birthright, and it was here that Fitz had quietly, without presumption or push, made a place for himself. He may have lacked something of Johnny Malone’s single-minded genius for chasing the fire-engines. But he had tact, and an unobtrusive way of asking the most embarrassing questions, and a shy-seeming goodwill which disarmed the most reluctant interviewer, and—somehow—he brought back the story.

2

ON an evening in May along about the time Virginia had been making her curtsey at Buckingham Palace, Fitz and Johnny were attending a low performance at a questionable resort on West Thirty-fourth Street near Sixth Avenue, where a slightly passée specialty lady named Fay Lea had agreed to plug a song Fitz had written. Its title had caught her ear. It seemed to Fay, who was billed as a female baritone, that a song called Dusk Until Dawn might have possibilities, but the lyric had not lived up to her expectations.

After some prodding by Johnny and a little coaching by Fay, Fitz had written in some new words, to which Fay added a few graphic gestures and expressed herself as satisfied. This was the night.

Fitz and Johnny arrived early and sat with the usual tall glasses on the table in front of them, watching the name-cards at the side of the stage change one by one towards Fay’s, which as the star turn was due about ten-thirty. There was an animal act to open, and a ventriloquist, and a family of contortionists—all very boring. They hardly noticed when a new card came on, reading: DON AND GWEN LASALLE, The Dancing Wonders.

The music for the new turn was catchy and gay. The patter of the girl’s feet was expert as she began the act alone, dressed in blue spangles and tights, with a provocative shining fringe across her slender thighs, high laced shoes, and a curled blue ostrich plume in the pert hat above her dark hair. Her voice was rich and low when she began to sing, without the loud, strident notes that Fay Lea used.

Johnny was nodding peacefully above his glass and Fitz kicked him on the shin and said, “That’s a good tune She can sing, too. I’d rather have that

girl plug my songs than Fay. Wake up, Johnny, do you know that girl up there?”

Johnny woke up politely and squinted through the haze at the name-card.

“Don and Gwen LaSalle,” he spelled out with some difficulty. “N-never heard of ’em.” He buried his face in his glass.

“Now, watch this, Johnny. She’s better than Fay by a damn’ sight.”

“But she hasn’t got the pull,” Johnny said sleepily, and shifted himself in his chair and focussed patiently on the blue-spangled figure on the stage.

“Mm-hm,” he murmured after a minute. “Nice legs too. Not too fat. ’S

funny, I don’t seem to like ’em fat. N-not any more. I m-must have outgrown that.”

“Not a bad chorus, either,” said Fitz, listening critically. “I wonder who writes her songs. Could we get an introduction after the show?”

“Sure.” Johnny waved a careless hand. “You watch out, though. Mustn’t go off-fending Fay now that she f-feels kindly towards you. She can do a lot to get your songs started.” He paused. His sleepy gaze grew more alert.

“That’s very s-strange,” he said. “She’s given him his cue twice and he doesn’t show up. S-sing it again, kid, we don’t care if he never comes!”

The girl had begun the chorus for the third time, still dancing alone. But now her red-lipped smile was a little fixed, and her eyes kept going back anxiously to the left wings from where she had made her entrance and where the other half of the team was overdue. Faintly, above the brassy music, angry voices could be heard back stage where some sort of brawl was going on.

Johnny sat up.

“Trouble,” he said, sniffing with his experienced reporter’s nose, and a woman screamed in the wings, off left.

The girl in spangles glanced down at the orchestra leader. A signal passed between them. The music wound up with a crash and a blare on the next bar and the curtain came down.

“Let’s go see what happened,” said Johnny, rising.

“None of our business, maybe,” said Fitz, sitting still.

“When will you learn that you are a reporter and not a gentleman?”

Johnny inquired severely. “Come on.”

With that well-known queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach, Fitz followed Johnny through the pass-door and out on to the stage behind the curtain. Another canvas drop bumped down beside them—Fay’s—as they crossed the platform towards the white-faced stage-manager who was saying curtly, “Clear the stage, please—next number, please—orchestra, Jim—all right, Fay, get out there and sing—clear the stage, everybody—let

’em have it, Fay—curtain up, Jim—”

“What went wrong?” Johnny asked casually, easing off into the wings after the stage-manager.

“Fellow shot himself. Busted up the act.”

“May we talk to the girl?” asked Johnny.

“Seen you before, haven’t I? You from the papers or the police?”

“The Star. Tell Jake Malone is here.”

“Oh, all right, so long as you aren’t flatfoots. Jake’s been sent for a’ready.” The stage-manager gestured impatiently towards the end of the stage, where the dressing-rooms were, and Johnny moved on with Fitz at his heels.

A knot of frightened-looking performers in various stages of undress and make-up huddled round the open door of one of the rooms avoiding each other’s eyes or whispering among themselves. Johnny and Fitz filtered through and Fitz leaned against the door-casing, watching a man in a shabby, ill-fitting suit who knelt beside the body of a man on the floor, his hands busy with its clothing. The girl in blue spangles stood over him, silent and motionless, waiting.

“Are you Mrs. LaSalle?” Johnny asked her gently, getting out his notebook and pencil in an unnoticeable sort of way. “I was out front and noticed something was wrong. Can you suggest any reason for your husband’s shooting himself in the middle of a performance?”

“He’s my brother,” said the girl without raising her eyes. “And the name is Murphy. Won’t somebody please find a doctor?”

“There’s no need for a doctor now,” said the man who bent above the thing on the floor, and as he looked round at them Fitz saw that he wore false whiskers and a funny nose, as part of the comic Dutch turn still to go on. He rose, brushed off his knees, and added kindly as the girl only stood watching him with a look of dazed, terrified disbelief—“He’s dead, Gwen.

It didn’t hurt—he’s dead.”

Her face quivered. Her eyes filled with tears, and the heavy mascara beading on her lashes began to dissolve and smear. Her crimsoned lips twisted, but she made no sound, and still stood looking at the whiskered man in the false nose. Fitz saw that she was shaking from head to foot so that the spangles winked in the gaslight, and the bright fringe rippled and shone against her thighs. He reached for the chair at the dressing-table behind her, turned it round, and holding her by the shoulders guided her into it. Her knees gave way and she sat limply on the seat. Slowly her eyes travelled back to the body which lay almost at her feet. She stared at it, the tears running down her face, while no sound escaped her.

Fay’s strident singing came in strongly through the open door from the stage, borne on the brassy music, and the thump of the drum was like a big heart beating, as the show went on. They were playing Dusk Until Dawn.

Fay was plugging his song. But the spangled, weeping girl in the chair had the right voice for the song, not Fay. It was her brother, dead on the floor.

Name of Murphy. Fitz glanced round the room for Johnny, who was in a corner with the stage-manager. Johnny was making occasional notes in the little dog-eared book he carried—getting the story for the paper. That meant it must be a good one, this time.

The woman from the contortionist act, wearing a dirty kimono which gaped to show her dirty white tights, slipped into the room and bent to lay a towel smeared with grease-paint across the dead man’s face. One by one the rest of them drifted away from the door. and the music went on.

Fitz was still standing close to the chair, but Gwen remained unaware of him. She sat with her hands locked together on her knees, her eyes fixed on the smeary towel while the endless tears slid down her cheeks, making black rivulets of mascara through the powder. Fitz couldn’t bear it. He took out his clean white handkerchief and knelt down beside the chair and began to wipe the girl’s cheeks, rather gingerly because of the way the stuff ran, and he began talking to her soothingly, as he used to talk to his sister Phoebe when she was little and cried.

“There, now, don’t you cry like this, honey, you’ll drown sure ’nough unless you can swim,” he began in his softest drawl whence all his final r’s had fled. “Nothin’ I say can help much, I know—but is there anything I can do to make things easier for you tonight, have you got some parents, maybe, you’ve got to break the news to, and you want me to do it for you?

I’ve got the rest of the evenin’, you know, if I can be of any use to you. My name’s Sprague, I saw your act as far as it went, you’re new here, aren’t you? You sure got a lovely voice, maybe I could get you to plug one of my songs some time, huh? Now, don’t you cry like that, you’ll be sick—you just count on us for anything you need done, Johnny, there, he knows the ropes—you got friends, honey, hear what I say?”

Her eyes had come round slowly to inspect him with a sort of wondering curiosity. As he knelt beside her chair his face was almost on a level with hers, and for a long moment they looked at each other straightly while she took stock. Even with the smeared mascara and the hard line of the rouge on her mouth she was beautiful, with a fresh young beauty the gas-glare and make-up could not dim.

“Where did you come from?” she asked finally.

“I was out front, like I said just now.”

“You’re not from the police?”

“Who, me?” He grinned apologetically. “I just write songs,” he said.

“Why did you come here? What do you want?”

“Well, we saw something was wrong, and we—thought we might help out in some way.” He glanced again around the small room, which was empty now except for the two of them and the still figure on the floor.

Johnny had moved outside the door with the stage-manager and was listening to another man, the one known as Jake, who wore a dress suit and gesticulated as he talked. Beyond them the music shrilled to a climax and there was applause. The curtain fell with a bump and rose again with a rustle. The music was resumed. “Your other friends around here don’t seem to be very—friendly,” he murmured, puzzled.

“Friends? I haven’t any. He saw to that.” Her eyes went back to the towel.

“How do you mean?”

“We had to stick together. I knew he was wrong, but I had to stand by him. Nobody else dared to, finally.”

“Why not?”

She looked at him, a slow, searching look.

“It’s a long story,” she said, and her lips closed on it.

He laid one warm, strong hand on hers where they rested, locked together, on her knees, and he realized again that she was trembling

throughout all her body, as though she was very cold, or as though—

“What are you scared of?” he demanded, and the question was surprised out of him before his natural tact could operate.

“I’m not.”

“You’ve got nothin’ to be afraid of, honey, we’ll look after you.”

“I wish you’d go,” she said.

“Sure, we’ll all go.” He rose, still holding her hand. “You get dressed, Johnny and I are going to see that you get home all right.”

“No, I—I’d rather you didn’t get mixed up in this.”

“But we are mixed up in it. You don’t think we’re going to just walk out now and forget all about it, do you?”

“It would be better if you did.”

There was more applause and the curtain swished down again and Fay Lea swung masterfully into the little room, bringing with her an aura of musk and orris.

“Hey, you Dixie, get out there and call off your news-hound,” she commanded briskly.

“Johnny? He’s getting a story.”

“Not tonight, Dixie. Some other time. Don’t come back here. either, for a while. Take your songs somewhere else, hear me? Go on, scat.”

“Scat yourself, Fay, we’re seein’ Miss Murphy home.”

Johnny put his head in at the door.

“Come on, Dixie,” he said quietly. “Time for us to get a move on.”

“You go ahead if you like,” Fitz said. “I’m goin’ to see Miss Murphy home.”

Johnny caught Fay’s eye and shook his head sadly.

“He’s from Ole Virginny,” he explained. “Sometimes it takes him this way. Doesn’t mean any real harm. The fact is, Dixie, we aren’t wanted around here.”

“Thought you had a story.”

“Reporters, eh?” Gwen spoke suddenly from behind Fitz. “I might have known! Well, none of your sob stuff about my brother, see? Outside, the both of you!”

“Now wait a minute,” Fitz began, rather hurt. “Johnny, here, writes for the papers, I don’t deny. But I’m—”

“Yeh, you told me, you write songs!” Her red mouth was scornful.

“Well, I’m out of a job now, so you can find somebody else to sing ’em. I’m no use to you, see? Don and I worked together. I’m no good as a single, they won’t hire me that way.”

“Well—what are you goin’ to do for a livin’, then?”

“That’s my worry. Will you two get out of here or would you rather be thrown out?”

Fitz gazed at her, aggrieved and incredulous. He hadn’t done anything but dry her eyes and offered her his protection on the way home, and she had turned on him as though he was prying into her personal affairs.

“No need to get sore about it, Miss Murphy, I was only trying to—” he began with dignity, and Fay laid a heavy hand on his shoulder and turned him towards the door where Johnny waited.

“Yeh, we know—helpful Harry! You can’t teach that kid anything, Dixie, she can look after herself.”

“I wasn’t trying to teach her anything, I just—”

Fay straightened her arm without apparent effort and he reeled against the door-casing, and Johnny held him up and led him away through a maze of ropes and stacked-up wings and the gaudy painted furniture of the animal act, to a narrow dark doorway through which they emerged into a dark narrow alley and eventually into West Thirty-fourth Street.

“Look, Johnny, why should they kick us out like that, I only wanted to

—”

“Keep walking, Dixie. It was for your own good.”

Fitz gave him a surprised glance in the ill-lighted street.

“What’s it got to do with me?” he asked.

“I got the whole dirty story from Jake. It wasn’t a healthy place to be tonight, all hell was popping. That boy Don was a very unwholesome piece of work, his pretty sister notwithstanding. It seems he gambled, Dixie, my son—with money that didn’t belong to him, mind you. And then, as though playing with dynamite wasn’t enough, he grabbed off a girl that didn’t belong to him either. And then, just to make sure it wouldn’t go unnoticed, he talked back to the rightful owner of both properties and tried to blackmail him. But he wasn’t quite smart enough to take on Fagan’s gang single-handed. And the girl he stole got cold feet and went back on him.

One of Fagan’s boys came to the dressing-room tonight and told Don Murphy what he could do. He probably gave him the gun to do it with.”

“You mean they forced him to—”

“Well, he saw the jig was up. There wasn’t much else he could do, and his girl had ratted. He should have picked on somebody his size. And that’s not all, either. It’s hands off the sister, Dixie. Fagan’s orders.”

“I see.” They had come down to Sixth Avenue and turned down town.

After a thoughtful silence Fitz said, “What becomes of the sister now?”

“I don’t think,” said Johnny carefully, “that that is a thing which need concern you and me.”

There was more silence while they kept step together down Sixth Avenue.

“So that’s why she was so scared,” Fitz said at last.

“It’s not our funeral, Dixie. Not, that is, if we mind our own business from now on.”

Fitz thought it over for another block.

“I’ve got kind of a funny idea she doesn’t like Fagan,” he said then, and his pace slackened. “She’s an honest girl, Johnny—did you see her eyes?

And she was scared out of her skin.” He drifted to a standstill. “I’m going back there and see that she gets home all right.”

“Now, Dixie, will you listen to reason—”

“You comin’ with me or not?” said Fitz, and Johnny sighed, and they turned around and began to retrace their steps towards Thirty-fourth Street.

3

AS THEY approached the mouth of the alley which led to the stage door, Johnny put out a detaining hand and drew Fitz into an unlighted doorway.

Peering down the street, they could see the glowing end of a cigar patrolling the sidewalk in front of the alley. They waited. The shadowy figure with the cigar moved back and forth deliberately, as though waiting for somebody.

Fitz’s heart beat a little faster.

“Do you think—” he whispered, and Johnny’s tightened fingers hushed him.

They stood in the added darkness of the doorway for what seemed like hours, while the cigar was thrown away and a new one was lighted. Then

figures began to emerge from the alley. First came the man and the two children from the contortionist act. They passed close to the pair in the doorway without noticing them. Then came a couple who might have been the trainer of the animal act and his girl assistant. They turned in the opposite direction. Fitz and Johnny left the doorway and edged closer to the alley. Two women came next—Gwen and the lady contortionist, a bulky figure beside the girl’s slight one. The cigar made a lighted are into the gutter, and the man who threw it moved purposefully to intercept them.

“Leave her alone, can’t you?” Fitz heard the woman saying. “Wait till tomorrow anyway, for God’s sake.” And the man replied brusquely. “I got orders from Fagan,” as Fitz and Johnny eased in on them.

“Where is he?” Gwen asked tonelessly.

“That’s what I’m here to show you.”

“No. If you won’t tell me where I’m going, I won’t go with you.”

“Won’t, eh?” said the man softly, and—

“Good evening,” Fitz remarked, removing his hat. “It is Miss LaSalle, isn’t it? I’d know that voice, even in the dark. I’m the fellow that spoke to you about my songs, remember?”

“Not tonight, please,” Gwen said rather breathlessly.

“Well, I don’t want to butt in. of course, if you have a previous engagement, but I brought my friend along, he’s very musical, and he’s going to be kind of disappointed if you turn us down. Thursday after the show, you said, and I promised we’d wait for you, and here we are.”

“Well, I—I don’t think I—”

“It’s mighty good of you to take the trouble,” Fitz went on in his gentle voice, and he took her arm on one side and Johnny closed in on the other and they moved off towards Sixth Avenue with Gwen between them, Fitz talking smoothly as they went, while his heart beat a tattoo against his unaccustomed ribs and he anticipated tautly an angry roar of protest or a physical assault from the man they left standing, strangely silent, at the mouth of the alley. “Of course I haven’t had anything published yet, but there has to be a first time for everything, and I thought Introduced by Gwen LaSalle would look kind of pretty on the cover. As soon as I heard you sing I said, ‘That’s the girl I want to plug my songs,’ I said, didn’t I, Johnny, and by the way who wrote that number you open with, it’s not bad.”

“Don wrote all our stuff.”

“That leaves you kind of high and dry, doesn’t it! Well, anything I’ve got that you want you can use to get a new act worked up—”

By now they had reached Sixth Avenue where the lights were brighter and Johnny decided with relief that they were not going to be followed.

Once more they turned downtown, with Gwen between them now, and Fitz, with his hand under her elbow, felt her trembling still. As they came to the Thirty-third Street kerb she gasped and stumbled, and Johnny caught her on the other side. A moment she hung on their hands, till the weakness passed and she raised her head resolutely.

“I’m all right. I—never faint.”

“Sure, you’re all right,” Johnny said encouragingly. “Just keep walking, you’ll get your wind, we’ll hold you up.”

“I don’t know why you bother,” she murmured. “I tried to tip you off to let me alone, it’s only a question of time anyway, with Don out of the way.

They’ll tell you wrong about Don. You mustn’t believe what you hear. Oh, well, that was true too. He did use Fagan’s money and lose it, and he did take Fagan’s girl. But Fagan and Madge were about through anyway. The real reason he hated Don was me. Don always said Fagan would get me over his dead body—” Her teeth were chattering now. “If Don hadn’t said that—”

“He’d still be dead,” Johnny said grimly. “Get that into your head, Gwen. He was a goner before you ever came into it, don’t make any mistake about that.”

“But I’ll never be sure—”

“You can be sure. You must.”

“I f-feel like a murderess—”

“Now, stop it—stop it!” Johnny gave her a little shake. “You couldn’t have saved Don from what was coming to him if you’d gone to Fagan on your knees, and you know it.”

“I g-guess you’re right.”

“You know damn’ well I’m right.”

“They took him to the morgue. There wasn’t any place else.”

“No, there wasn’t any place else,” Johnny agreed kindly. “That’s all over now, see? You must try and let it go and forget it.”

“There’s the funeral—”

“You aren’t going to any funeral.”

“But I’m the only—”

“The only mourner, sure, I know, but he’ll have to do without. You’re going to disappear, Gwen.”

“Ah, Johnny, what a boy!” cried Fitz from her other side. “You leave it to us, Gwen, we’ll see you through. The hell with Fagan, I told you!”

“I don’t want you boys to get into any trouble on my account.”

“Fiddlesticks!” said Johnny clearly, for he was sober as a judge now.

“They don’t know us. He couldn’t see our faces, it was too dark back there.

He’ll wait for you to— Do they know where you live?”

“Of course.”

“Then you aren’t going back there. Not for a while, anyway. You’ve just walked off into limbo, Gwen, with a couple of nut songwriters, that’s all they know. Let’s see, you can sleep at my place tonight, and tomorrow we’ll think this out. I live down this way,” and he swung them eastward into the Twenties. “Are you hungry?” he demanded. “I’m frightfully hungry. Dixie, here’s my key, you and Gwen go along to my room and light up. I know where I can get some sandwiches and beer. Be with you in about ten minutes.”

Dazedly Gwen allowed Fitz to lead her up the steps of the house where Johnny had a large room at the back with some easy chairs, a dilapidated typewriter on which he wrote his short stories in the Richard Harding Davis manner, a gas ring on which when he was broke he cooked messes he called meals, and a bed and wash-stand in the alcove behind a chintz curtain. She stood passively, like a shy child in strange surroundings, while Fitz lit the gas and her eyes went gravely round the shabby, comfortable place. There was no way of telling by her face that to Gwen it looked like a palace.

“How do you like being kidnapped?” Fitz asked anxiously as he blew out the match. “Better us than Fagan, huh? Johnny’s a great guy. Always knows what to do. Give you the shirt off his back. They don’t come any finer than Johnny. You’ll be all right here, safe as houses. You stopped shakin’ now?”

She nodded, and stood looking at him, her eyes wide and dark in her white face.

“Bet you’d rather have coffee than beer, huh?”

She nodded again, and Fitz burrowed in a cupboard, emerging with a coffee-pot and a paper bag of ground coffee.

“Here’s the makin’s,” he said. “You probably know more about throwin’

’em together than I do.”

With the faintest of smiles Gwen laid down her handbag on the bureau and took charge of the coffee while Fitz looked on with interest.

“The woman’s touch,” he marvelled, as she lighted the gas ring under the pot. “There’s nothing like it, I’ve always heard.”

“You boys bach’ it here together?”

“No, I live with my uncle over the other side of Fifth.” He forebore to mention that it was on Madison Avenue in the expensive East Thirties.

“From the South, aren’t you?”

“Now, how on earth did you guess that?” he drawled, and they grinned at each other and the tension in the room relaxed appreciably.

When Johnny came in with the refreshments in two paper bags he viewed the bubbling coffee-pot with horror.

“At night?” he said. “I wouldn’t sleep a wink!” And he set out large fat bottles of beer, still sweating from the ice-chest at Reilly’s on the corner, and thick well-buttered sandwiches with pink ham slices showing round the edges. Gwen brought plates and glasses and cups from a shelf as though she had done it before, and Johnny stood back to gaze at her, entranced.

“Look,” he said to Fitz. “Look at Gwen being motherly already! That’s what we need around here, Dixie—a mother!”

Gwen, who was accustomed to wait on her menfolk hand and foot, gave them her small one-sided smile and turned away to get the coffee-pot.

“She’d look more at home if she took her hat off,” Fitz suggested, and they stood punctiliously behind their chairs waiting while she paused in front of the mirror on the bureau and removed her hat before joining them at the table.

“And of course her hair ought to be grey,” Johnny remarked captiously as they sat down. “To give the best effect, it ought.”

“That depends on whose mother she is,” Fitz told him. “Mine has brown hair—hardly a bit of grey in it. Your mother’s hair probably turned white in a night long ago.”

“I haven’t got a mother,” said Johnny pathetically, staring at his ham sandwich. “I’m an orphan.”

“Why, that’s terrible, Johnny, when did it happen? You never told me you were an orphan.” Fitz was deeply concerned.

“I’m getting sort of used to it. They died when I was three.”

“Who raised you?”

“Aunt Irma.”

“Maiden lady?”

Johnny nodded. Fitz nodded too.

“Now I see everything,” he said.

“My Aunt Irma always used to say—” Johnny began expansively while Gwen sat before her untasted food, waiting patiently for them to begin.

She was a little uncertain whether she had fallen into the company of high-class wits or just plain downright clowns. Humour was one of the many things which her brother Don had lacked, and laughter was to Gwen a serious business because she was unfamiliar with it. Sheer idiocy for its own sake was something she had never encountered either, and the solemn foolery which passed for conversation between her two knights errant was outside her experience. She trusted them, for she had taught herself long since to judge men by their eyes and the shape of their mouth and hands, rather than by the things they said, but she did not understand these two, not yet. She was hungry, desperately so, and the smell of the coffee curled tantalizingly around her nostrils while she waited.

“Did your Aunt Irma ever tell you to shut up and start eatin’?” Fitz asked pointedly of their host, and at last her teeth met gratefully on the pink ham, which was the kind that melts in your mouth.

She tried not to wolf it, but they were talking and she was not, and her sandwich was gone completely before they had well begun. Fitz laid the untouched half of his on her plate. Without pausing in the flow of his colourful reminiscences of life with Aunt Irma, Johnny did the same. Gwen looked from one to the other of them piteously. It was a little thing, but just that much too much. Tears welled up, spilled over.

“Ah, now, don’t do that, honey, that ham is salt enough already—”

But Gwen put her head down on her arm on the corner of the table and cried. And cried. And cried.