Buttered Side Down | Page 5

the head of her bed.
Gertie stopped sobbing, and her heart stopped ,beating. She lay tense
and still, listening. Everyone knows that spooks rap three times at the
head of one's bed. It's a regular high-sign with them.
"Rap-rap-rap!"
Gertie's skin became goose-flesh, and coldwater effects chased up and
down her spine.
"What's your trouble in there?" demanded an unspooky voice so near
that Gertie jumped. "Sick?"
It was the Kid Next Door.
"N-no, I'm not sick," faltered Gertie, her mouth close to the wall. Just
then a belated sob that had stopped halfway when the raps began
hustled on to join its sisters. It took Gertie by surprise, and brought
prompt response from the other side of the wall.
"I'll bet I scared you green. I didn't mean to, but, on the square, if you're
feeling sick, a little nip of brandy will set you up. Excuse my
mentioning it, girlie, but I'd do the same for my sister. I hate like sin to
hear a woman suffer like that, and, anyway, I don't know whether
you're fourteen or forty, so it's perfectly respectable. I'll get the bottle
and leave it outside your door."
"No you don't!" answered Gertie in a hollow voice, praying meanwhile
that the woman in the room below might be sleeping. "I'm not sick,
honestly I'm not. I'm just as much obliged, and I'm dead sorry I woke
you up with my blubbering. I started out with the soft pedal on, but
things got away from me. Can you hear me?"

"Like a phonograph. Sure you couldn't use a sip of brandy where it'd do
the most good?"
"Sure."
"Well, then, cut out the weeps and get your beauty sleep, kid. He ain't
worth sobbing over, anyway, believe me."
"He!" snorted Gertie indignantly. "You're cold. There never was
anything in peg-tops that could make me carry on like the heroine of
the Elsie series."
"Lost your job?"
"No such luck."
"Well, then, what in Sam Hill could make a woman----"
"Lonesome!" snapped Gertie. "And the floorwalker got fresh to-day.
And I found two gray hairs to-night. And I'd give my next week's pay
envelope to hear the double click that our front gate gives back home."
"Back home!" echoed the Kid Next Door in a dangerously loud voice.
"Say, I want to talk to you. If you'll promise you won't get sore and
think I'm fresh, I'll ask you a favor. Slip on a kimono and we'll sneak
down to the front stoop and talk it over. I'm as wide awake as a chorus
girl and twice as hungry. I've got two apples and a box of crackers. Are
you on?"
Gertie snickered. "It isn't done in our best sets, but I'm on. I've got a can
of sardines and an orange. I'll be ready in six minutes."
She was, too. She wiped off the cold cream and salt tears with a dry
towel, did her hair in a schoolgirl braid and tied it with a big bow, and
dressed herself in a black skirt and a baby blue dressing sacque. The
Kid Next Door was waiting outside in the hall. His gray sweater
covered a multitude of sartorial deficiencies. Gertie stared at him, and
he stared at Gertie in the sickly blue light of the boarding-house hall,

and it took her one-half of one second to discover that she liked his
mouth, and his eyes, and the way his hair was mussed.
"Why, you're only a kid!" whispered the Kid Next Door, in surprise.
Gertie smothered a laugh. "You're not the first man that's been deceived
by a pig-tail braid and a baby blue waist. I could locate those two gray
hairs for you with my eyes shut and my feet in a sack. Come on, boy.
These Robert W. Chambers situations make me nervous."
Many earnest young writers with a flow of adjectives and a passion for
detail have attempted to describe the quiet of a great city at night, when
a few million people within it are sleeping, or ought to be. They work
in the clang of a distant owl car, and the roar of an occasional "L" train,
and the hollow echo of the footsteps of the late passer-by. They go
elaborately into description, and are strong on the brooding hush, but
the thing has never been done satisfactorily.
Gertie, sitting on the front stoop at two in the morning, with her orange
in one hand and the sardine can in the other, put it this way:
"If I was to hear a cricket chirp now, I'd screech. This isn't really quiet.
It's like waiting for a cannon cracker to go off just before the fuse is
burned down. The bang isn't there yet, but you hear it a hundred times
in