Especially Dance Hall Women

Long Jim Briggs wandered into Al’s Dance Hall one night when “Captain Mac” was drunk and throwing things.

She had splendid deep red hair and a skin as white as blanched almonds, and he admired her extravagantly. As a child admires a Christmas tree. And differently, too—very differently. He had even given up prospecting now and then and made good money as a carpenter so that he could spend it on her. He had spent it all, and he knew her very well, but he had never seen her drunk before. He had been in such places a good deal, but he hadn’t got used to seeing women drunk. It hurt him.

He was about to wander on out again when he heard one of the other girls say:

“She’s gonna pay for this all right! Al will make ’er come acrost with the expenses of the whole damn’ place for a month for that big mirror she broke!”

Long Jim hesitated and then started toward her. She took a saucer from one of the little tables and sailed it like a clay pigeon. It curved and hit him over the eye. The blood ran down his cheek and everybody laughed. He wiped it away with his handkerchief and put his hand on her arm just as she was going to throw another saucer.

“Why, Rosie—” he said reproachfully, in his soft, rumbling bass, and stopped helplessly. His soft black eyes looked out kindly above his soft brown mustache and his great soft brown beard, and said what his tongue couldn’t find the words for.

Captain Mac was madder than she was drunk. All her sensations and her thoughts were combined in one ache, like the ache in a tooth, and she was biting upon it savagely and taking a kind of satisfaction in the keen shoots of her pain. She could have knifed Al that night out of hand and seen through stoically whatever might have come of it, but Jim Briggs’ voice and his eyes were the kind of things she had forgotten the existence of, and they slipped in under her guard and pierced the quick of her.

She didn’t throw the other saucer, but suddenly Rosie Ellen McCarthy, a decent Irish girl, looked out of her eyes and said with a flash of passionate appeal—

“For God’s sake, Jim, take me out o’ this!”

Jim didn’t expect it. It touched him so deeply that he could only gulp and nod his head. With his great height and bent shoulders and baggy clothes he looked uncouth and awkward, standing beside painted, half nude Captain Mac in her spangled dress. He looked around helplessly for something to cover her shoulders with.

“This’ll do,” she said, stretching out her hand for a yellow scarf on the top of a gilded upright piano.

She took it with one strong pull, slinging heedlessly along the floor in a rain of broken bits half a dozen pieces of bric-a-brac that had rested upon it.

Jim folded the gaudy stuff clumsily about her and took her by the arm and started to go out, when Al came up and stood in front of him, dapper, suave and touched with cynicism.

“There’s money owing me,” he said politely, “and she ain’t going nowhere till it’s paid, see?”

The red surged into Jim’s cheeks, pale from working underground, and his voice rose dangerously out of its soft rumble.

“There’s a hell of a lot more than money owing you, you God-forgotten little skunk, and if you don’t get out o’ my way I’m liable to pay you the part of it you ain’t lookin’ for!”

He kept his eye on the other’s hands and his muscles braced. If you started things in Al’s place you finished them swiftly, or they finished you.

The white hairy fingers twitched into the expected signal and Jim swung the bony mass of his fist against Al’s ear as he would have swung a pick into a stubborn conglomeration of quartz. But that was incidental. He didn’t even notice where the little man rolled. Jerked forward by Al’s signal, a very different antagonist was coming on the jump—Hard Pan Schmitz, the dance hall bouncer.

Jim Briggs was no match for him and knew it. Almost as if he had followed through the blow that sent Al spinning, he snatched up a heavy lighted lamp, whirled it above his head and flung it. It struck Schmitz’s raised forearm, smashed down his guard and covered him with broken glass and burning oil.

In the stunned second before the racket began Jim took Rosie by the wrist and broke through to the street. Behind them the place seethed like an ants’ nest laid open by a spade.

He pulled her around the first corner. They pelted through the snow as fast as she could run. He zigzagged his way through the town, taking alleys when he could. They came at length to the door of a wooden shack below the level of the sidewalk, on an unlighted street. Its unpainted boards were warped, it listed heavily and, in common with all the other houses in the block, it looked deserted. But Jim jumped down to it, key in hand, and by the time Rosie had descended the rickety steps that led from the sidewalk he had opened the door.

He shut it behind her, struck a match and led the way into a room furnished with a stove, a camp cot, a chair and a small pine table with a smoke blackened lamp on it. He lighted the lamp. Rosie fell into the chair, breathing in big painful gulps. She wasn’t used to running. The great altitude—ten thousand feet—had played havoc with her breath. Jim had swung a pick there too long to be much affected. They looked at each other in the dim light.

“It’s jest a place to sleep,” he said awkwardly. “Nobody knows I own it. Feller gave it to me that struck it rich an’ went away. Mostly I’m in the hills anyhow. So wouldn’t anybody look for us here.”

And then:

“The sheriff and the marshal’s both down on Al. If we can get away without bein’ noticed, it ain’t likely anybody’ll foller.”

“Maybe it’d be safe for you to stay, then,” said Rosie, when she had breath enough to say anything.

“Maybe. But I was aimin’ to go anyhow. Why don’t you go with me, an’—an’ stay with me?”

She looked at him steadily.

“I ain’t fit.”

“You’re as fit as I am,” he said quietly, in the soft, rumbling, reassuring bass that seemed kin to rivers and winds. “What d’you say to a clean break an’ a new start together?” He lingered on the last word wistfully. “I’ve been pretty lonesome, you know, a-knockin’ round from one prospect hole to another an’ livin’ like a pack rat.”

She got up and came close and looked at him intently. The yellow piano scarf that covered her befrizzled red head like an incongruous cowl and clashed crudely with her red dress; her silver slippers, her spangles, the bunch of cotton roses at her waist, her rouged cheeks and scarlet lips and half-bared heaving breasts contrasted strangely with her honest eyes.

“Do you want it for yourself, Jim?”

“For myself—more’n anything.”

“You’re not lying to me?”

“So help me God.”

He had expected her arms about his neck, but she gave him her hand like a man.

“I’ll never let you down,” she said shortly. “Let’s go.”

They went out under a sky of faint, clean blue, where a frosty moon queened it amidst a scattering of small pale stars, and found a man who was driving out of town in a wagon and went with him.

By one means and another they made their way into the Gray Dome country and Jim built a cabin there.

Fifteen years later, Rosie Briggs stood in the door of it and watched Jim climb down the steep trail toward his latest prospect hole.

There was a fresh sprinkling of snow, so light and dry that the faint wind started bits of it to rolling like feathers. Beneath it the smells of spruce and pine and juniper and little silver mountain sage were dormant. The cold, clean, thin air of early morning was stripped for the odor of Long Jim’s pipe, and it drifted up, rank and acrid. Rosie liked it, at that hour and in that place.

She watched him until he waved his hand far below like a tiny marionette before he took the fork of the trail under the big Engelmann spruce and disappeared for the day. She waved back and turned to her tubs. Every week she washed the clothes of four families in Gray Dome, the mining town down the main road just around the next bend. It was hard work, but she didn’t mind it much.

She didn’t think about it. Besides, she only worked four days a week. The other three she rested—sewed a little, crocheted a little, knit a little—sweaters and stockings and mittens for Jim and herself, and kept her diminutive house as clean as a chemist’s scales; or sat quietly out in front in summer or inside by the stove in winter and let the long waves of peace wash deeper and deeper in. Peace is good after a life like Rosie’s. She lay in it thankfully, as in a bath, and soaked old stains away.

On the side of Gray Dome Mountain, with the sheer drop of the cañon at her feet and the range spread out beyond; in the midst of cleanness and silence unbroken since that old rocky backbone of the continent thrust itself up into the sun, she had risen slowly out of the shards of the life of Captain Mac and come, late but surely, into her heritage of womanliness and dignity. The years had chipped away her prettiness, but in its place was beauty for those who could see it. The smooth face had been sculptured into something fine and strong and self-directed, something steadfast and serene. She wasn’t blown about by tantrums any more.

She had a stake in the game of life now, and she played to hold it. She had steadied to meet the responsibilities thrust upon her by Jim. He was as kind and patient as the seasons, and as unreliable. And she was like a cottonwood tree; she put out the leaves of her affection and confidence surely and abundantly, but with tireless caution and she rarely got nipped. She controlled him where he could be controlled, and where he couldn’t she accepted him as she did the weather. Her knowledge of men was empirical, unhampered by theories.

Jim would give anybody anything she had—he possessed nothing himself—and be perennially surprized if she objected. Usually she didn’t, but if it was something she wanted she went after it and got it back if she could. Any bum or crook or sharper could win his friendship and pick his mind or his pocket if either happened to have anything in it.

But Rosie’s mind was her own, and instead of a pocket she used the Conifer County Savings Bank. She met him at all points as shrewdly as if he had been an opponent—which in a sense he was—but she loved him. And she knew that he loved her, and counted on it, but only for what it was worth.

She put more trust in his poverty. Every day, of course, he expected to strike it. And for a while she had thought he might. But gradually as the days lay themselves down in long, pleasantly monotonous rows until the sum of them made many years, she came to know that he wouldn’t. And that, far more than his love, was the foundation of her content. While he was poor he was hers—wholly, unqualifiedly, unthinkingly hers.

Poor was scarcely the word, though. Jim lived in a moneyless world. Out of the little she made she supplied the simple necessities of both of them, and he was willing to wait for everything else until he struck it. “Then—! Then—!” was what he thought of as he made his slow way up and down the mountainside. To him the thought was roseate, luminous, rejuvenescent.

But Rosie hated it. If for nothing else, because it held the seeds of possible change. After a chancy life, she valued most, of things attainable by human beings, a life that was free from chances.

On this morning in spring an eagle slanted down the sky on wide, still wings; the ice broke up and tinkled in Little Cub Creek in the cañon; the orange and yellow shoots of the willows swelled out toward catkins; and Rosie washed her clothes contentedly, secure in the knowledge that there was no “then”; while over in his hole in the side of Old Baldy Jim broke up her world with quick excited blows of a short-handled miner’s pick.

She was hanging out the clothes on the squawberry bushes at the back when she heard the impatient crash of his elk hide boots. She went quickly through the house and stopped in the front door at sight of him.

When he swung up his heavy bag of samples for a signal, she knew. Knew before she heard his whoop. And when it cut across the stillness like the whistle of a locomotive it struck her cold. It chilled the core of her spirit, as an icy wind loosed in the tropics would chill a naked native.

“Struck it, by thunder! Two hundred dollars to the ton, if it’s worth a cent! An’ the vein as plain as a layer ’o choc’late in a cake!”

He fell into a chair on the porch. Rosie stood and stared at him. The one thing he knew was ore. He had the kind of knowledge that men had been willing to pay for when he’d sell it. His “then” had come. The realization went through her consciousness in widening rings. Whatever else it meant, it meant the end of this; the beginning of uncertainty.

He caught her in his arms and swept her into the cabin and danced her about until the place shook.

“Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I say you’d ride in your own auto yet? It had to come, old lady, it jest nacherally had to come!”

He gave her a hug and turned her loose.

“I knowed it,” he said solemnly. “I’ve allus knowed it. Away down deep in there—” he tapped his breast—“I’ve had a hunch.”

He flung himself into a chair and looked at her hard. “‘Ain’t you glad?” he said suddenly.

She was like a boat that has luffed into the wind. For a moment her mental sails hung flapping. Then they filled and strained and she set out before this new cold breeze. She told him as best she could that she was glad.

“To look at you a feller might think you was kinder sorry like,” he said quizzically. “What’s the matter?”

“I was thinkin’ a little about how happy we’d been right here—just you and me and the house you made yourself.”

“’Twarn’t a patch on what it’s gonna be,” he said, and jumped up and was off with his samples to the assayer’s in Gray Dome. He stepped strongly, as a young man does. Half the stoop was gone from his shoulders.

Rosie turned back slowly and sat down heavily at the kitchen table, her occupation gone. Jim didn’t need a grubstaker now. She sat there a long time, while memories of other miners who had got rich swarmed in her brain like little devils that fell over each other in their eagerness to stab her: Senator Sherrill, and Tom Potts, the hotel man, and Hooker Bates, who took his flier in Wall Street; and Mike Watson, who divorced his wife for Dora Schoonmaker, and a dozen others. They made their money and then were gathered in by women like the Schoonmakers. She had seen so many of them. They always left the women they had picked up when they were poor. Especially dance hall women. Even when they were their wives.

And she and Jim had never been married.

But Rosie Briggs wasn’t a quitter. Little in her life had gone by default. When the terms of the sale of the mine had been arranged and everybody in Conifer County knew that Jim was going to be a rich man, she capped his plans with hers and squared about to meet what was coming. She went over her clothes and spruced up as much as she could to match her new station. And very carefully she laid down a program of buying to be carried out as soon as the money came in.

Among her things she found a picture that she had clipped from a fashion magazine twelve years ago—a colored picture of an electric-blue plush dress of a style that she had admired. She felt a twinge of sadness as she wondered how many other things that she had wanted and gone without would look as queer as that now.

The dress she had worn when Jim took her out of the dance hall—the red dress with the spangles on it—looked queerer, but that night while Jim was in the village on an errand after supper she put it on and sat waiting for him by the fire, determined to play such cards as she had.

When he came in he stopped at the door of the little sitting room with a whistle of surprize.

“I ain’t seen that for ten years. Didn’t know you had it.”

“It isn’t much—” she said, smoothing the skirt.

She had lengthened and renovated it as best she could. It was the only piece of finery she owned.

“It’s all right. Lord, how purty I uster think it was!”

The windows were open to the night. The weather had turned suddenly warm that day, as if the old earth had decided to start life all over again with the Briggses. There was a moon, and the new tender leaves of the aspens about the cabin made patterns on it that twinkled. You could almost feel the soft wooly anemones thrusting up their oval spear points outside.

The feel of it all had got into Rosie’s heart and driven out some of her fears. She even had her old banjo in her lap. She wanted to prove to him that she meant to help him to be happy. She touched the strings and began to sing.

She knew only the songs that had been popular a good while ago—“Daisy”, “Two Little Girls in Blue”, “Sweet Rosie O’Grady” and one or two more of the same sort. These, to her, were “music”—all there was of it. She sang:

and felt a load slipping from her heart as the snow slips from the summit of Gray Dome Mountain when warm weather comes.

“Gosh!” Jim murmured. “You ain’t sung that sence—”

He let the sentence die. His eyes smiled above his grizzling brown mustache and beard. She wanted to put down the banjo and go to him and touch his hand. But she went on singing, pleased that she remembered the tune so well, that her voice rang out so clear and true, and Jim came and sat close beside her.

A strange, deliciously sweet odor crept in under the smells of growing things and wet earth out there on the dripping mountainside. She felt just then that Jim was as steadfast and as sure to stand by as the huge silver spruce that the cabin was built against. She let her cheek rest on the shoulder of his coat.

The odor came more strongly. It was like orange flowers. She smiled at the sentimental notion. Orange flowers on the side of Gray Dome—

The odor came from Jim’s coat.

It said suddenly, “Lorraine Schoonmaker,” as plainly as Jim’s lips could have said it. To smell it was to see the girl standing behind the counter in the Gray Dome Dry Goods Company’s store. Probably there was no one in town who would have failed to connect her with that perfume.

A knife seemed to unfold inside of Rosie. It cut her song off in the middle of the line and brought her upright in her chair with a gasp.

“What’s the matter?” Jim said, startled.

She got to her feet. She almost came straight out with it. That would have been like her. It was what she wanted to do. But for the first time in many years she was afraid. She stared at Jim with deep revulsion. Suddenly he was part of an elemental horror that she had climbed out of long ago and that now was closing around her again.

“I—I hadn’t ought to’ve sung that,” she said thickly. “It—makes me think too much of the old days,” and went stumbling off to the bedroom.

He followed her and stood around, saying things to comfort her, and finally she pretended that her mood had passed. But when she lay still at last by his side and thought about Lorraine Schoonmaker, hard lines pulled at the corners of her mouth that hadn’t been there for fifteen years. Long after all traces of it had vanished, she fancied that the air was faintly touched with the perfume of orange flowers.

“Women” would have been bad enough, but he would have tired of them and come back. There’d be no coming back from this girl of twenty-one, clever and hard of mind and soft and pink of body, with the first taste of what money could do fresh in her mouth.

Men didn’t come back from the Schoonmaker women. Behind Lorraine, with her sleek black pomaded hair, her short tight pussy-willow taffeta one piece gown, her chiffon stockings and high-heeled satin pumps with rhinestone buckles, her vanity case almost as big as a traveling bag, her jeweled wrist watch and swinging bead girdle, Rosie saw Ally Schoonmaker, her older sister, who had married Timothy Bund practically on his death-bed for his house and his shares in the North Star Mine. And behind Ally, up the ladder of the years a rung or two, Dora Schoonmaker, breaking up the Watson home when Mike Watson’s mine began to pay, and somehow juggling him into a divorce from the woman who had seen him through the lean grim years of penury and into marriage with her and then carrying him off East. And Effie, the oldest of the four, who had run away with Perce Williams, nearly two decades her junior, when he came into his father’s money, and held him grimly to her side ever since.

Yes, and even Bertha Schoonmaker, the mother, with her wig and her dirty chiffon blouses and her painted cheeks and brown teeth and pink-lined hats with floating pink veils, playing the man-game still, at sixty-four. Their lean, rapacious Schoonmaker hands were all alike. If Lorraine took Jim, she’d take him to keep. At the altar. For very definite financial ends of her own.

The tacit bargain between Long Jim and Rosie had never got itself into words; they hadn’t felt the need of them. He had pulled her out of hell. The strength of her allegiance to him couldn’t be increased by the mere saying of words, however sacred, or the giving of a ring. Marriage would have added nothing to her side of it. Nor, she had thought, to his. She wished now that she had it, but it had not occurred to her to wish it before. She had had something so much solider in poverty. Marriage might hold and it might not, but while he had been dependent upon her for his food and clothes, there had been no doubt.

She went back to that over and over that night, seeing the placid years in the little house as very beautiful through a mist of pain. She had a feeling that, pulling at the almost forgotten cadences of the song, she had brought the past down about her ears. She felt the old trapped fatalistic despair and sick rage, without the old vigor. Something began banking up inside of her, steadily, relentlessly. She was terribly afraid of it. It seemed to her that it was a great bubble of black blood in her brain, and that when it burst— She tried to keep from thinking to ease the strain on it, but her thoughts streamed out swiftly from oubliettes in obscure corners of her mind.

They were hideous thoughts and really not hers at all. It seemed that some devil sent them to torture her. The unfairness of it gagged in her throat. She had fought her way out of filth and blackness to cleanness and the sun, and now, without volition, the old horror came on her again from within—clicked through her brain like yards and yards of cinema film. The current of her life had swept past its one clean tranquil place and was swirling along muddied and normal. The familiar ache was in her heart, and Rosie was herself again—Captain Mac, of Al’s Dance Hall. You didn’t get away from things like that.

Well, there were things that Captain Mac knew how to do that Rosie Briggs had forgotten. She had whipped a can along the street once with revolver bullets as a child whips a hoop to the admiration of every idle man in town, and ended the demonstration by shooting a stranger’s plug hat off his head without disturbing his hair. Her whirling thoughts showed her Jim’s old .44 in the left-hand end of the bottom drawer of the dresser.

She must wait, she told herself—and her heart gave a great bound—she must wait until she had them together! She laughed out with sudden raucous cruelty in the still cool night. Jim stirred in his sleep but didn’t waken. She raised herself on one elbow and looked down at him, while her thoughts raced and danced, piling themselves into the bubble.

And then it burst and left her weak with compassion, seeing them together in her mind’s eye; seeing them as clearly as the daylight that was climbing over Gray Dome Mountain. That fragile, empty, smart little thing and Long Jim Briggs! Gaunt, weathered, grizzled old Jim—and her! She’d no more be able to shoot than to enter into her dead mother’s womb and be born again.

Feeling as old as the granite hills that ramparted the cañon, and with something too of their plain ineluctable dignity, she arose and dressed herself and built the breakfast fire in the stove.

When Jim came out to her she got slowly to her feet, closed the damper and faced him.

“Jim,” she said, “that girl don’t want you. Take a good look at yourself in the mirror over there, and then think of her. She’ll throw you away like a sucked orange when the money’s gone.”

Long Jim Briggs stood up with his head in the rafters of the tiny room and stared like an idiot.

“I smelled her perfumery on your coat,” said Rosie shortly, and comprehension dawned slowly in his face.

“Holy jumping June bugs!” he said from somewhere down in his boots. “So that’s what you thought! Wait a minute. I was hidin’ it in the wood house. I wanted to surprize you.”

In a moment he returned with a package. With awkward swift movements he ripped off the wrapping paper and shook out the folds of a brilliant electric blue plush dress of a fashion fallen into forgotten desuetude ten years before.

He displayed it pridefully down the front of his long person, head a-cock and a twinkle in his eye.

“That’s all there was between us! Smell it!” The room reeked of orange blossoms. “She made it for me nights, to make some extra money. It’s the kind you kep’ a picture of from a fashion book. I got it off your dresser. Do you—do you like it, Rosie?”

She tried to speak, but could only nod her head. He patted her shoulder awkwardly. The dress swam before her eyes like a pane of blue glass in the rain.

“It’s goin’ to be the swellest weddin’,” he said huskily, “that little old Gray Dome ever seen. An’ then—” he cleared his throat with a rumble like summer thunder—“we’re goin’ to Denver an’ buy a house on Capitol Hill an’ the finest auto in town, an’ a nigger to run it an’ drive around an’ tell ’em all to go to hell!”