Joan Thursday: A Novel

She rose and strode angrily back to the cubicle she shared with Edna. In a fit of unreasoning rage, snatching her hat from its hook, she impaled it upon her hair with hatpins that stabbed viciously. It had grown too dark to see more than a vague white shape moving on the surface of the mirror. But she did not stop to light the gas to make sure she was armoured against the public eye. In another moment, bag in hand, coat over her arm, she was letting herself out into the hallway.

Time enough tomorrow morning to fret her mother and sister with news of her misfortune: tonight she was in the humour to make a bold move toward freedom…

But on the door-stoop she checked, a trifle dashed by apprehension of the impending storm, which she had quite forgotten. She drew back into the vestibule: she could hardly afford to subject her only decent waist and skirt to danger of a drenching.

An atmosphere if anything more dense than that of the day blanketed heavily the city. Even the gutter-children seemed to feel its influence, and instead of making the evening hideous with screams and rioting, moved with an uncommon lethargy, or stood or squatted apart in little groups, their voices hushed and querulous. The roar of the trains on the nearby Elevated seemed muted, the clangour of the Third Avenue surface cars blunted, and Joan fancied that the street lamps burned with an added lustre. Wayfarers moved slowly if near home, otherwise briskly, with a spirit as unwilling as unwonted: one and all with frequent glances skyward.

Overhead, a low-hung bosom of dusky vapour borrowed a dull blush from the fires of life that blazed beneath. In the west, beyond the silhouetted structure of the Elevated and the less distinct profile of buildings on the far side of Central Park, the clouds blazed luridly with their own dread fires – a fitful, sheeted play athwart gigantic curtains, to an accompaniment of dull and intermittent grumbles.

A soft, warm breath sighed down the breathless street, and sighing, died. Another, more cool and brusque, swept sharp upon the heels of the first, played with the littered rubbish of the pavements, caressed with a grateful touch flesh still stinging with the heat of day, and drove on, preceded by a cloud of acrid dust. A few drops of lukewarm water maculated the sidewalks with spots as big as dollars. There followed a sharper play of fire, and one more near. Children ran shrieking to shelter, and men and women dodged into convenient doorways or scudded off clumsily. The wind freshened, grew more chill… Then, so suddenly that there might as well have been no warning, on the wings of the howling blast, laced continually with empyrean fire, timed by the rolling detonations of heavy artillery now near, now far, a shining deluge sluiced the streets and made its gutters brawling rivulets.

A lonely, huddled figure, standing back in the entry, well out of the spray from the spattering drops, Joan waited the passing of the storm with neither fascination nor fear. Self-absorbed, her mood almost altogether introspective, she weighed her reckless plans. The crisis bellowed overhead in a series of tremendous, shattering explosions, bathing the empty street in wave after wave of blinding violet light, without seriously disturbing the slow, steady processes of the girl's mentality.

Then she became aware of a young man who had emerged from the darksome backwards of the tenement, so quietly that Joan had no notion how long he might have been standing there, regarding her with interest and amusement in his grey eyes and on his broad, good-humoured countenance. He had a long, strong body poised solidly on sturdy legs, short arms with large and efficient hands; and bore himself with a careless confidence that did much to dissemble the negligence of his mode of dress – the ill-fitting coat and trousers, the common striped "outing shirt," the rusty derby set aslant on his round, close-cropped head. Joan knew him as Ben Austin, one of the few admirers whose attentions she was wont to suffer: by occupation a stage-hand at the Hippodrome; a steady young man, who lived with his mother in one of the rear flats.

He greeted her with a broadening grin and a "Hello, Joan!"

She said with indifference: "Hello, Ben."

"Waitin' for the rain to let up?"

"No, foolish; I'm posing for a statue of Patience by a sculptor who's going to be born tomorrow."

This answer was brilliantly in accord with the humour of the day. Austin chuckled appreciatively.

"I thought maybe you was waitin' for Jeems to bring around your limousine, Miss Thursby."

"I was, but he won't be here till day before yesterday."

The strain of such repartee proved too much for Austin; he felt himself outclassed and, shuffling to cover his discomfiture, sought another subject.

"Whacha doing tonight, Joan? Anythin' special?"

"I've got an engagement to pass remarks on the weather with the Dook de Bonehead," the girl returned with asperity. "He ain't late, either."

"I guess that was one off the griddle, all right," said Austin pensively. "Excuse me for livin'."

There fell a pause, Joan contemptuously staring away through the glimmering rain-drops, Austin desperately casting about for a conversational opening less calculated than its predecessors to educe rebuffs.

"Say, Joan, lis'en – "

"Move on," the girl interrupted: "you're blocking the traffic."

"Nah – serious': howja like to go to a show tonight?"

She turned incredulous eyes to him. "What show?" she drawled.

"I gotta pass for Ziegfield's Follies – N'Yawk Roof. Wanta go?"

"Quit your kidding," she replied after a brief pause devoted to analysis of his sincerity. "Y' know you've got to work."

"Nothin' like that!" he insisted. "The Hip closed last Sat'dy and I got a coupla weeks lay-off while they're gettin' ready to rehearse the new show. On the level, now: will you go with me?"

"Will I!" The girl drew a long, ecstatic breath. Then her face darkened as she glanced again at the street: "But we'll get all wet!"

"No, we won't: I'll get an umbrella. Besides, it's lettin' up."

With this Austin vanished, to return in a few minutes with a fairly presentable umbrella. The shower was, in fact, fast passing on over Long Island, leaving in its wake a slackening drizzle amid deep-throated growls at constantly lengthening intervals.

Half-clothed children were seeping in swelling streams from the tenements as the two – Austin holding the umbrella, Joan with a hand on her escort's arm, her skirts gathered high about her trim ankles – splashed through lukewarm puddles toward Third Avenue. A faint and odorous vapour steamed up from wet and darkly lustrous asphalt.

They hurried on in silence: Austin dumbly content with his conquest of the aloof tolerance which the girl had theretofore shown him, and planning bolder and more masterful steps; Joan all ecstatic with the prospect of seeing for the first time a "Broadway show"…

A few minutes before nine they left the cross-town car at Broadway and Forty-second Street.

Though she had lived all her young years within the boundaries of New York, never before had Joan experienced the sensation of being a unit of that roaring flood of life which nightly scours Longacre Square, with scarce a perceptible change in volume, winter or summer. Yet she accepted it with apparently implacable calm. She felt as if she had been born to this, as if she were coming tardily into her birthright – something of which each least detail would in time become most intimate to her.

They were already late, and Austin hurried her. A brief, hasty walk brought them to the theatre, where Austin left her in a corner of the lobby with the promise that he would return in a very few minutes: he had to see a friend "round back," he explained in an undertone. But Joan remained a target for boldly enquiring glances for full ten minutes before he reappeared. Even then, with a nod to her to wait, Austin went to the box-office window. She was not deceived as to the general tenor of his fortunes there – saw him place a card on the ledge and confer inaudibly with the ticket-seller, and then reluctantly remove the card and substitute for it two one-dollar bills, for which he received two slips of pasteboard.

"House 'most sold out," he muttered uncomfortably in her ear as an elevator carried them to the roof. "Best I could get was table seats."

"They're just as good as any," she whispered, with a look of gratitude that temporarily turned his head.

The elevator discharged them into a vast hall with walls and a roof of glass. Artificial wistaria festooned its beams and pillars of steel, palms and potted plants lined the walls. A myriad electric bulbs glimmered dimly throughout the auditorium, brilliantly upon the small stage. Deep banks of chairs radiated back from the footlights, to each its tenant staring greedily in one common direction.

An usher waved the newcomers to the left. Ultimately they found seats at a small table in a far corner of the enclosure.

Austin was disappointed, and made his disappointment known in a public grumble: the table was too far away; they couldn't see nothin' – might's well not've come. Joan smiled his ill-humour away, insisting that the seats were fine. Mollified, he summoned a waiter and ordered beer for himself, for Joan a glass of lemonade – a weirdly decorated and insipid concoction which, nevertheless, Joan absorbed with the keenest relish.

In point of fact, the distance from their seats to the stage offered little obstacle to her complete enjoyment: her senses were all youthful and unimpaired; she saw and heard what many another missed of those in their neighbourhood. Furthermore, Joan brought to an entertainment of this character a point of view fresh, virginal, and innocent of the very meaning of ennui. She sat forward on the extreme edge of her chair, imperceptibly a-quiver with excitement, avid of every sight and sound. All that was tawdry, vulgar, and contemptible escaped her: she was sensitive only to the illusion of splendour and magnificence, and lived enraptured by dream-like music, exquisite wit, and the poetic beauty of femininity but half-clothed, or less, and viewed through a kaleidoscopic play of coloured light.

During the intermission she bent an elbow on the sloppy table-top and chattered at Austin with a vivacity new in his knowledge of her, and for which he had no match…

At one time during the second part of the performance, the auditorium was suddenly darkened, while attention was held to the stage by the antics of a pair of German comedians. But in the shadows that now surrounded them (quite unconscious that Austin had seized this opportunity to capture her warm young hand) Joan became aware of a number of figures issuing from a side-door to the stage. She saw them marshalled in ranks of two – a long double file, vaguely glimmering through the obscurity. And then the comedians darted into the wings, the lights blazed out at full strength all over the enclosure, and a roll of drums crescendo roused the audience to a tremendous and exhilarating novelty: a procession of chorus girls in hip-tights and hussar tunics who, each with a snare-drum at waist, had stolen down the aisle, into the heart of the auditorium.

For a long moment they marked time, drumming skilfully, their leader with her polished baton standing beside Joan. Then the orchestra blared out an accompaniment, and they strode away, turning left and marching up the centre aisle to the stage… Joan marked, with pulses that seemed to beat in tune to the drumming, the wistful beauty of many of the painted faces with their aloof eyes and fixed smiles of conscious self-possession, the richness of their uniforms, their bare powdered arms, the pretty legs in their silken casings. Oblivious to the libidinous glances of the goggling men they passed, she envied them one and all – the meanest and homeliest of them even as the most proud and beautiful – this chance of theirs to act, to be admired, to win the homage of the herd…

She awoke as from idyllic dreams to find herself again in a Third Avenue car, homeward bound. But still her brain was drowsy with memories of the splendour and the glory; fragments of haunting melody ran through her thoughts; and visions haunted her, of herself commanding a similar meed of adoration…

Austin's arm lay along the top of the seat behind her; his fingers rested lightly against the sleeve of her shirtwaist. She did not notice them. To his clumsily playful advances she returned indefinite, monosyllabic answers, accompanied by her charming smile of a grateful child…

On the third landing of their tenement they paused to say good night, visible to one another only in a faint light reflected up from the gas-jet burning low in the hall below. The smell of humanity and its food hung in the clammy air they breathed. A hum of voices from the many cells of the hive buzzed in their ears. But Joan forgot them all.

She hesitated, embarrassed with the difficulty of finding words adequate to express her thanks.

Austin tried awkwardly to help her out: "Well, I guess it's good night, kid."

She said, exclamatory: "O Ben! I've had such a good time!"