Ain't Angie Awful!/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE FASCINATING FACE
IT was Spring in New York. Don’t you just love stories that begin that way—or do you prefer Autumn? It was spring in New York, nevertheless. It was Spring, also, on Avenue B. Indeed it often is, at that time of year. Bright red flannels were burgeoning on the clothes lines, and on the fire-escapes the milk bottles lent their vivid note of blue. Aye, it was Spring for kiddies and frisky puppy dogs; but it was Spring no more for the late Tom-cat in the area. Alas, he had not yet been removed by the Board of Health!
What was Angela Bish thinking of as she gazed so perpendicularly out the casement? Was it of love or lobsters, of lingerie, or Charlie Chaplin? No. There was only one thing Angie ever thought much about—nothing. She was thinking about it now. She had been thinking about it so long that her wrist was asleep.
Angie was quite a young lady, now. She was a quarter to eighteen. Her feet by this time were fully grown, and in other ways she was getting a figure. Occasionally for a whole minute at a time her mouth was not ajar. Beautiful? Well, hardly that. Angie looked too much as if she had been packed all the winter in a trunk, with camphor balls to keep the moths out of her circulation. Still, if anyone liked that sort of girl, Angie was just about the sort of girl one would simply hate.
The trouble was that nobody seemed to like that sort of girl. They wanted one with fewer elbows, and more eyelashes—one who didn’t boil over with frenzied yearning whenever a man passed her way. No one had ever made love to Angie, no one had ever even proposed. Angie always managed to propose first. No, Angie had never been hugged; she showed it plainly in every gesture. Yet she had the temperament of a mustard plaster. You see, if any man had ever hugged Angie, he would be hugging her yet. She would never have let go. But instead, he is hugging some other girl, less Angelic, someone with removable fins.
All these things had made Angie a woman-hater. But what true womanly woman is not?
Angie had had no breakfast that morning, Angie had not had, and she was feeling a little tropical in the inskirts of her equator. Late the evening before she had found, outside the inside of Delmonico’s, lo, a bill-of-fare, thrown out the window, probably, by some bill-collector. Hungry and worried, she had devoured the whole menu from the date to the final period. . . . It must have been the Chignons sous cloche that had disagreed with her. Undoubtedly the dinner card had not been quite fresh.
So Angie had to walk down town on an empty stomach. If it had been anyone’s else stomach it wouldn’t have been so hard; but to have to walk on her own—without rubbers—was very rough on a proud, sensitive girl, especially when slightly cross-eyed.
A demonstrator of mackintoshes was Angie. All day long she sat in a red one and a happy smile under a shower of real water in a shop window, regarding the passers-by. It was a bit damp, the mackintoshes not being really as waterproof as they were advertised, but as Angie already had water on the knees she didn’t mind it. She sat and just thought about zeros, and how soon she’d get married. How many, many husbands peered at her through the plate glass and longed for a wife as silent as Angie! But Angie never knew. If she had she would have burst a blood vessel.
For this work Angie received two dollars a week and all the water she wanted to drink, free. Seeing so many men, she was never lonely. The only thing she disliked about it was having to sleep on the radiator all night; but she simply had to get dry enough to go to work the next morning, and after all, her radiator was one of the softest in New York. Every situation, however, has its little drawbacks anyway; even a Bank President has to get used to the drafts.
Now among the faces that stared at Angie, wondering if indeed she were human, or only a gently smiling vegetable, was one so covered with whiskers that at first she could hardly tell whether it was a man or a woman. But oh, those eyes! Angie thought them capital I’s. Gazing at them, she felt just as if she were going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Then she would wake up to find her mackintosh was leaking in a new place, and she was only half drowned, after all.
Now, to some, Love comes slowly, like a coat of tan growing ever deeper. But to others it strikes as suddenly as lightning, permeating one’s whole being like a sneeze. To Angie love came not only quickly but always; and, if denied expression it soon developed into convulsions which often proved fatal.
The third time she saw The Face, Angie plunged through the plate glass window with a nice scream and threw herself into his arms. But, alas, he had already disappeared!
This depressed her; she felt like a chocolate éclair that has fallen into an ash barrel—that is, almost as bad—as bad as a vanilla éclair, at any rate. She would be revenged; she would find that Face and face it. Then she would woo him like a siren, only not quite so loud, and when at last he was acclimated to her vampire love she would sit on him hard. Perhaps, indeed, she might begin by sitting on him—it would depend upon what else he had on his lap. Anyway, she would make him suffer even as she had suffered, even if she had to marry him to do it.
But where was the Face? That was the interrogation point!
For weeks she searched—but it was like trying to find a needle in a smokestack. There seemed to be so many, many whiskers in New York, but they never had that Certain Something that made her feel so all-overish. She was, therefore, in no very gilded frame of mind when, one evening, she sat down on a Fifth Avenue curbstone to rest. She simply had to get rested or arrested—she didn’t care which.
For a while she was so amused watching the children and old gentlemen getting run over by automobiles that she didn’t see the person seated beside her. Except for his eyebrows his face was quite nude. His hands also were naked, and he was thoughtfully eating unsalted five-dollar bills.
Such rich food might disagree with him, thought Angie; but she didn’t really care. One gets so used to gluttony in a large city that one takes it quite easily. And strangely, too, she felt no vertigo such as usually overcame her when she found herself in the same block with a live man. Her heart was broken. If only that Face were broken, instead!
And still he said no word; his face was too full of currency. It was not till he began speaking that he spoke.
“I am a stranger in Manhattan,” he remarked, “and this is the cheapest and best meal I have eaten here for several years. I was enjoying it in my simple Flushing fashion till you came. But you have taken away my appetite. If you don’t return it, I’ll call a policeman.”
No man had ever spoken to her so kindly, few had ever spoken at all. There was something, too, about the way he shoved her into the gutter that moved her strangely. But she was in no mood for flirtation, or, indeed, for anything mere. At another time she might have loved that man—in a gondola, perhaps, or an obbligato or an arpeggio, or, in fact, in any of those picturesque places you see in the movies. But it was not so to be. She heard only these cruel whiskers that had deceived her; she saw only that lying voice.
But already a policeman was approaching her on care-worn feet.
Blushing to the roots of her tonsils, Angie fled, she knew not where.
Hardly had she got there, however, when a sudden thought struck her like a falling safe. Wasn’t there something strangely familiar about that man—or was there? The way he had aimed his nose at her—the way he had sighed through his ears—what was it? Or wasn’t it? And if not, why not?
And then it all came over her and overcame her. . . . She stopped, looked, listened. But alas, two alases! He was gone. In acute despair she leaned sadly against a newspaper and began to weep—great, wonderful weeps.
He, who had seemed so vice versâ, was he not, indeed, by way of being The Face? She had, in fact, almost recognized it. Why why, now!
It was a close shave!