“Good night, Joe.”
The last waitress was just going out and had spoken to the waiter as she passed the table. She was a blonde, slender girl, neatly dressed Her voice was quiet and full of the casual familiarity of her daily work and association; it was a pleasant voice, and it was a little tired. Her face, as she paused a moment, was etched in light and shadow, and there were little pools of violet beneath her clear grey eyes. Her face had the masklike fragility and loveliness, the almost hair-drawn fine-MSS, that one often sees in young people who have lived in the great city and who have never had wholly enough of anything except work and their own hard youth. One felt instantly sorry for the girl, because one knew that her face would not long be what it was now.
The waiter, interrupted in the flood of his impassioned argument, had been alittle startled by the casual intrusion of the girl’s low voice turned towards her. When he saw who it was, his manner changed at once, and his own seamed face softened a little with instinctive and unconscious friendliness.
“Oh, hello, Billie. Good night, kid.”
She went out, and the sound of her brisk little heels clacked away on the hard pavement. For a moment more the waiter continued to look after her, and then, turning back to his sole remaining customer with a queer, indefinable little smile hovering in the hard lines about his mouth, he said very quietly and casually, in the tone men use to speak of things done and known and irrecoverable:
“Did you see that kid?...She came in here about two years ago and got a job. I don’t know where she came from, but it was some little hick town somewhere. She’d been a chorus girl—a hoofer in some cheap road show—until her legs gave out…You find a lot of ‘em in this game—the business is full of ‘em…Well, she worked here for about a year, and then she began going with a cheap gigolo who used to come in here. You know the kind—you can smell ‘em a mile off—they stink. I could’ve told her! But, hell, what’s the use? They won’t listen to you—you only get yourself in dutch all round—they got to find out for themselves—you can’t teach ‘em. So I left it alone—that’s the only way…Well, six or eight months ago, some of the girls found out she was pregnant. The boss let her out. He’s not a bad guy—but, hell, what can you expect? You can’t keep ‘em round a place like this when they’re in that condition, can you?...She had the kid three months ago, and then she got her job back. I understand she’s put the kid in a home somewhere. I’ve never seen it, but they say it’s a swell kid, and Billie’s crazy about it—goes out there to see it every Sunday…She’s a swell kid, too.”
The waiter was silent for a moment, and there was a far-off look of tragic but tranquil contemplation in his eyes. Then, quietly, wearily, he said:
“Hell, if I could tell you what goes on here every day—the things you see and hear—the people you meet and all that happens. Jesus, I get sick and tired of it. Sometimes I’m so fed up with the whole thing that I don’t care if I never see the joint again. Sometimes I get to thinking how swell it would be not to have to spend your whole life waiting on a lot of mugs—just standing round and waiting on ‘em and watching ‘em come in and out…and feeling sorry for some little kid who’s fallen for some dope you wouldn’t wipe your feet on…and wondering just how long it’ll be before she gets the works…Jesus, I’m fed up with it!”
Again he was silent. His eyes looked off into the distance, and his face was set in that expression of mildly cynical regret and acceptance that one often notices in people who have seen much of life, and experienced its hard and seamy side, and who know that there is very little they can do or say. At last he sighed deeply, shook himself, threw off the mood, and resumed his normal manner.
“Gee, Mr. Webber,” he said with a return of his former eagerness, “it must be great to be able to write books and stories—to have the gift of gab—all that flow of language—to go anywhere you like—to work when you want to! Now, take that story I was telling you about,” he said earnestly. “I never had no education—but if I could only get some guy like you to help me—to write it down the way it ought to be—honest, Mr. Webber, it’s a great chance for somebody—there’s a fortune in it—I’d go fifty-fifty!” His voice was pleading now. “A guy I knew one time, he told it to me—and me and him are the only two that knows it. The guy was an Armenian, like I said, and the whole thing happened over there…There’d be a gold mine in it if I only knew how to do it.”
It was long after midnight, and the round disc of the moon was sinking westward over the cold, deserted streets of slumbering Manhattan.