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TITLE: GASLIGHT SONATAS
AUTHOR: FANNIE HURST
EBOOK: E00091 (O'Briens Book Cellar)

[Illustration: They walked, thus guided by an obsequious waiter, through a 
light _confetti_ of tossed greetings.] 
 
GASLIGHT SONATAS 
 
BY 
 
FANNIE HURST 
 
1918 
 
[Dedication: To my mother and my father] 
 
CONTENTS 
 
I.   BITTER-SWEET 
 
II.  SIEVE OF FULFILMENT 
 
III. ICE-WATER, PL--! 
 
IV.  HERS _NOT_ TO REASON WHY 
 
V.   GOLDEN FLEECE 
 
VI.  NIGHTSHADE 
 
VII. GET READY THE WREATHS 
 
GASLIGHT SONATAS 
 
I 
 
BITTER-SWEET 
 
Much of the tragical lore of the infant mortality, the malnutrition, and 
the five-in-a-room morality of the city's poor is written in statistics, 
and the statistical path to the heart is more figurative than literal. 
 
It is difficult to write stylistically a per-annum report of 1,327 
curvatures of the spine, whereas the poor specific little vertebra of Mamie 
O'Grady, daughter to Lou, your laundress, whose alcoholic husband once 
invaded your very own basement and attempted to strangle her in the 
coal-bin, can instantly create an apron bazaar in the church vestry-rooms. 
 
That is why it is possible to drink your morning coffee without nausea for 
it, over the head-lines of forty thousand casualties at Ypres, but to 
push back abruptly at a three-line notice of little Tony's, your corner 
bootblack's, fatal dive before a street-car. 
 
Gertie Slayback was statistically down as a woman wage-earner; a typhoid 
case among the thousands of the Borough of Manhattan for 1901; and her 
twice-a-day share in the Subway fares collected in the present year of our 
Lord. 
 
She was a very atomic one of the city's four millions. But after all, what 
are the kings and peasants, poets and draymen, but great, greater, or 
greatest, less, lesser, or least atoms of us? If not of the least, Gertie 
Slayback was of the very lesser. When she unlocked the front door to her 
rooming-house of evenings, there was no one to expect her, except on 
Tuesdays, which evening it so happened her week was up. And when she left 
of mornings with her breakfast crumblessly cleared up and the box of 
biscuit and condensed-milk can tucked unsuspectedly behind her camisole in 
the top drawer there was no one to regret her. 
 
There are some of us who call this freedom. Again there are those for whom 
one spark of home fire burning would light the world. 
 
Gertie Slayback was one of these. Half a life-time of opening her door upon 
this or that desert-aisle of hall bedroom had not taught her heart how not 
to sink or the feel of daily rising in one such room to seem less like a 
damp bathing-suit, donned at dawn. 
 
The only picture--or call it atavism if you will--which adorned Miss 
Slayback's dun-colored walls was a passe-partout snowscape, night closing 
in, and pink cottage windows peering out from under eaves. She could 
visualize that interior as if she had only to turn the frame for the smell 
of wood fire and the snap of pine logs and for the scene of two high-back 
chairs and the wooden crib between. 
 
What a fragile, gracile thing is the mind that can leap thus from nine 
bargain basement hours of hairpins and darning-balls to the downy business 
of lining a crib in Never-Never Land and warming No Man's slippers before 
the fire of imagination. 
 
There was that picture so acidly etched into Miss Slayback's brain that she 
had only to close her eyes in the slit-like sanctity of her room and in the 
brief moment of courting sleep feel the pink penumbra of her vision begin 
to glow. 
 
Of late years, or, more specifically, for two years and eight months, 
another picture had invaded, even superseded the old. A stamp-photograph 
likeness of Mr. James P. Batch in the corner of Miss Slayback's mirror, 
and thereafter No Man's slippers became number eight-and-a-half C, and the 
hearth a gilded radiator in a dining-living-room somewhere between the 
Fourteenth Street Subway and the land of the Bronx. 
 
How Miss Slayback, by habit not gregarious, met Mr. Batch is of no 
consequence, except to those snug ones of us to whom an introduction is the 
only means to such an end. 
 
At a six o'clock that invaded even Union Square with heliotrope dusk, Mr. 
James Batch mistook, who shall say otherwise, Miss Gertie Slayback, as 
she stepped down into the wintry shade of a Subway kiosk, for Miss 
Whodoesitmatter. At seven o'clock, over a dish of lamb stew _a la_ White 
Kitchen, he confessed, and if Miss Slayback affected too great surprise and 
too little indignation, try to conceive six nine-hour week-in-and-week-out 
days of hair-pins and darning-balls, and then, at a heliotrope dusk, James 
P. Batch, in invitational mood, stepping in between it and the papered 
walls of a dun-colored evening. To further enlist your tolerance, Gertie 
Slayback's eyes were as blue as the noon of June, and James P. Batch, in a 
belted-in coat and five kid finger-points protruding ever so slightly and 
rightly from a breast pocket, was hewn and honed in the image of youth. His 
the smile of one for whom life's cup holds a heady wine, a wrinkle or two 
at the eye only serving to enhance that smile; a one-inch feather stuck 
upright in his derby hatband. 
 
It was a forelock once stamped a Corsican with the look of emperor. It was 
this hat feather, a cock's feather at that and worn without sense of humor, 
to which Miss Slayback was fond of attributing the consequences of that 
heliotrope dusk. 
 
"It was the feather in your cap did it, Jimmie. I can see you yet, stepping 
up with that innocent grin of yours. You think I didn't know you were 
flirting? Cousin from Long Island City! 'Say,' I says to myself, I says, 'I 
look as much like his cousin from Long Island City, if he's got one, as my 
cousin from Hoboken (and I haven't got any) would look like my sister if I 
had one.' It was that sassy little feather in your hat!" 
 
They would laugh over this ever-green reminiscence on Sunday Park benches 
and at intermission at moving pictures when they remained through it to see 
the show twice. Be the landlady's front parlor ever so permanently rented 
out, the motion-picture theater has brought to thousands of young city 
starvelings, if not the quietude of the home, then at least the warmth and 
a juxtaposition and a deep darkness that can lave the sub-basement throb of 
temples and is filled with music with a hum in it. 
 
For two years and eight months of Saturday nights, each one of them a 
semaphore dropping out across the gray road of the week, Gertie Slayback 
and Jimmie Batch dined for one hour and sixty cents at the White Kitchen. 
Then arm and arm up the million-candle-power flare of Broadway, content, 
these two who had never seen a lake reflect a moon, or a slim fir pointing 
to a star, that life could be so manifold. And always, too, on Saturday, 
the tenth from the last row of the De Luxe Cinematograph, Broadway's Best, 
Orchestra Chairs, fifty cents; Last Ten Rows, thirty-five. The give of 
velvet-upholstered chairs, perfumed darkness, and any old love story moving 
across it to the ecstatic ache of Gertie Slayback's high young heart. 
 
On a Saturday evening that was already pointed with stars at the 
six-o'clock closing of Hoffheimer's Fourteenth Street Emporium, Miss 
Slayback, whose blondness under fatigue could become ashy, emerged from the 
Bargain-Basement almost the first of its frantic exodus, taking the place 
of her weekly appointment in the entrance of the Popular Drug Store 
adjoining, her gaze, something even frantic in it, sifting the passing 
crowd. 
 
At six o'clock Fourteenth Street pours up from its basements, down from its 
lofts, and out from its five-and-ten-cent stores, shows, and arcades, in 
a great homeward torrent--a sweeping torrent that flows full flush to the 
Subway, the Elevated, and the surface car, and then spreads thinly into the 
least pretentious of the city's homes--the five flights up, the two rooms 
rear, and the third floor back. 
 
Standing there, this eager tide of the Fourteenth Street Emporium, thus 
released by the six-o'clock flood-gates, flowed past Miss Slayback. 
White-nosed, low-chested girls in short-vamp shoes and no-carat gold 
vanity-cases. Older men resigned that ambition could be flayed by a 
yard-stick; young men still impatient of their clerkship. 
 
It was into the trickle of these last that Miss Slayback bored her glance, 
the darting, eager glance of hot eyeballs and inner trembling. She was 
not so pathetically young as she was pathetically blond, a treacherous, 
ready-to-fade kind of blondness that one day, now that she had found that 
very morning her first gray hair, would leave her ashy. 
 
Suddenly, with a small catch of breath that was audible in her throat, Miss 
Slayback stepped out of that doorway, squirming her way across the tight 
congestion of the sidewalk to its curb, then in and out, brushing this 
elbow and that shoulder, worming her way in an absolutely supreme anxiety 
to keep in view a brown derby hat bobbing right briskly along with the 
crowd, a greenish-black bit of feather upright in its band. 
 
At Broadway, Fourteenth Street cuts quite a caper, deploying out into Union 
Square, an island of park, beginning to be succulent at the first false 
feint of spring, rising as it were from a sea of asphalt. Across this park 
Miss Slayback worked her rather frenzied way, breaking into a run when 
the derby threatened to sink into the confusion of a hundred others, and 
finally learning to keep its course by the faint but distinguishing fact of 
a slight dent in the crown. At Broadway, some blocks before that highway 
bursts into its famous flare, Mr. Batch, than whom it was no other, turned 
off suddenly at right angles down into a dim pocket of side-street and into 
the illuminated entrance of Ceiner's Cafe Hungarian. Meals at all hours. 
Lunch, thirty cents. Dinner, fifty cents. Our Goulash is Famous. 
 
New York, which expresses itself in more languages to the square block 
than any other area in the world, Babylon included, loves thus to dine 
linguistically, so to speak. To the Crescent Turkish Restaurant for its 

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