The Skylight Room
First Mrs.
Parker would show you the double parlours. You would not dare to interrupt her
description of their advantages and of the merits of the gentleman who had
occupied them for eight years. Then you would manage to stammer forth the
confession that you were neither a doctor nor a dentist. Mrs. Parker's manner
of receiving the admission was such that you could never afterward entertain
the same feeling toward your parents, who had neglected to train you up in one
of the professions that fitted Mrs. Parker's parlours.
Next you
ascended one flight of stairs and looked at the second- floor-back at $8.
Convinced by her second-floor manner that it was worth the $12 that Mr.
Toosenberry always paid for it until he left to take charge of his brother's
orange plantation in Florida near Palm Beach, where Mrs. McIntyre always spent
the winters that had the double front room with private bath, you managed to
babble that you wanted something still cheaper.
If you
survived Mrs. Parker's scorn, you were taken to look at Mr. Skidder's large
hall room on the third floor. Mr. Skidder's room was not vacant. He wrote plays
and smoked cigarettes in it all day long. But every room-hunter was made to
visit his room to admire the lambrequins. After each visit, Mr. Skidder, from
the fright caused by possible eviction, would pay something on his rent.
Then--oh,
then--if you still stood on one foot, with your hot hand clutching the three
moist dollars in your pocket, and hoarsely proclaimed your hideous and culpable
poverty, nevermore would Mrs. Parker be cicerone of yours. She would honk
loudly the word" Clara," she would show you her back, and march
downstairs. Then Clara, the coloured maid, would escort you up the carpeted
ladder that served for the fourth flight, and show you the Skylight Room. It
occupied 7x8 feet of floor space at the middle of the hall. On each side of it
was a dark lumber closet or storeroom.
In it was an
iron cot, a washstand and a chair. A shelf was the dresser. Its four bare walls
seemed to close in upon you like the sides of a coffin. Your hand crept to your
throat, you gasped, you looked up as from a well--and breathed once more.
Through the glass of the little skylight you saw a square of blue infinity.
"Two
dollars, suh," Clara would say in her half-contemptuous, half-
Tuskegeenial tones.
One day Miss
Leeson came hunting for a room. She carried a typewriter made to be lugged
around by a much larger lady. She was a very little girl, with eyes and hair
that had kept on growing after she had stopped and that always looked as if
they were saying: "Goodness me ! Why didn't you keep up with us?"
Mrs. Parker
showed her the double parlours. "In this closet," she said, "one
could keep a skeleton or anaesthetic or coal "
"But I
am neither a doctor nor a dentist," said Miss Leeson, with a shiver.
Mrs. Parker
gave her the incredulous, pitying, sneering, icy stare that she kept for those
who failed to qualify as doctors or dentists, and led the way to the second
floor back.
"Eight
dollars?" said Miss Leeson. "Dear me! I'm not Hetty if I do look
green. I'm just a poor little working girl. Show me something higher and
lower."
Mr. Skidder
jumped and strewed the floor with cigarette stubs at the rap on his door.
"Excuse
me, Mr. Skidder," said Mrs. Parker, with her demon's smile at his pale
looks. "I didn't know you were in. I asked the lady to have a look at your
lambrequins."
"They're
too lovely for anything," said Miss Leeson, smiling in exactly the way the
angels do.
After they
had gone Mr. Skidder got very busy erasing the tall, black-haired heroine from
his latest (unproduced) play and inserting a small, roguish one with heavy,
bright hair and vivacious features.
"Anna
Held'll jump at it," said Mr. Skidder to himself, putting his feet up
against the lambrequins and disappearing in a cloud of smoke like an aerial
cuttlefish.
Presently
the tocsin call of "Clara!" sounded to the world the state of Miss
Leeson's purse. A dark goblin seized her, mounted a Stygian stairway, thrust
her into a vault with a glimmer of light in its top and muttered the menacing
and cabalistic words "Two dollars!"
"I'll
take it!" sighed Miss Leeson, sinking down upon the squeaky iron bed.
Every day
Miss Leeson went out to work. At night she brought home papers with handwriting
on them and made copies with her typewriter. Sometimes she had no work at
night, and then she would sit on the steps of the high stoop with the other
roomers. Miss Leeson was not intended for a sky-light room when the plans were
drawn for her creation. She was gay-hearted and full of tender, whimsical
fancies. Once she let Mr. Skidder read to her three acts of his great
(unpublished) comedy, "It's No Kid; or, The Heir of the Subway."
There was
rejoicing among the gentlemen roomers whenever Miss Leeson had time to sit on
the steps for an hour or two. But Miss Longnecker, the tall blonde who taught
in a public school and said, "Well, really!" to everything you said,
sat on the top step and sniffed. And Miss Dorn, who shot at the moving ducks at
Coney every Sunday and worked in a department store, sat on the bottom step and
sniffed. Miss Leeson sat on the middle step and the men would quickly group
around her.
Especially
Mr. Skidder, who had cast her in his mind for the star part in a private, romantic
(unspoken) drama in real life. And especially Mr. Hoover, who was forty-five,
fat, flush and foolish. And especially very young Mr. Evans, who set up a
hollow cough to induce her to ask him to leave off cigarettes. The men voted
her "the funniest and jolliest ever," but the sniffs on the top step
and the lower step were implacable.
* * * * * *
I pray you
let the drama halt while Chorus stalks to the footlights and drops an epicedian
tear upon the fatness of Mr. Hoover. Tune the pipes to the tragedy of tallow,
the bane of bulk, the calamity of corpulence. Tried out, Falstaff might have
rendered more romance to the ton than would have Romeo's rickety ribs to the
ounce. A lover may sigh, but he must not puff. To the train of Momus are the
fat men remanded. In vain beats the faithfullest heart above a 52-inch belt.
Avaunt, Hoover! Hoover, forty-five, flush and foolish, might carry off Helen
herself; Hoover, forty-five, flush, foolish and fat is meat for perdition.
There was never a chance for you, Hoover.
As Mrs.
Parker's roomers sat thus one summer's evening, Miss Leeson looked up into the
firmament and cried with her little gay laugh:
"Why,
there's Billy Jackson! I can see him from down here, too."
All looked
up--some at the windows of skyscrapers, some casting about for an airship,
Jackson-guided.
"It's
that star," explained Miss Leeson, pointing with a tiny finger. "Not
the big one that twinkles--the steady blue one near it. I can see it every night
through my skylight. I named it Billy Jackson."
"Well,
really!" said Miss Longnecker. "I didn't know you were an astronomer,
Miss Leeson."
"Oh,
yes," said the small star gazer, "I know as much as any of them about
the style of sleeves they're going to wear next fall in Mars."
"Well,
really!" said Miss Longnecker. "The star you refer to is Gamma, of
the constellation Cassiopeia. It is nearly of the second magnitude, and its
meridian passage is--"
"Oh,"
said the very young Mr. Evans, "I think Billy Jackson is a much better
name for it."
"Same
here," said Mr. Hoover, loudly breathing defiance to Miss Longnecker.
"I think Miss Leeson has just as much right to name stars as any of those
old astrologers had."
"Well,
really!" said Miss Longnecker.
"I
wonder whether it's a shooting star," remarked Miss Dorn. "I hit nine
ducks and a rabbit out of ten in the gallery at Coney Sunday."
"He
doesn't show up very well from down here," said Miss Leeson. "You
ought to see him from my room. You know you can see stars even in the daytime
from the bottom of a well. At night my room is like the shaft of a coal mine,
and it makes Billy Jackson look like the big diamond pin that Night fastens her
kimono with."
There came a
time after that when Miss Leeson brought no formidable papers home to copy. And
when she went out in the morning, instead of working, she went from office to
office and let her heart melt away in the drip of cold refusals transmitted
through insolent office boys. This went on.
There came
an evening when she wearily climbed Mrs. Parker's stoop at the hour when she
always returned from her dinner at the restaurant. But she had had no dinner.
As she
stepped into the hall Mr. Hoover met her and seized his chance. He asked her to
marry him, and his fatness hovered above her like an avalanche. She dodged, and
caught the balustrade. He tried for her hand, and she raised it and smote him
weakly in the face. Step by step she went up, dragging herself by the railing.
She passed Mr. Skidder's door as he was red-inking a stage direction for Myrtle
Delorme (Miss Leeson) in his (unaccepted) comedy, to "pirouette across
stage from L to the side of the Count." Up the carpeted ladder she crawled
at last and opened the door of the skylight room.
She was too
weak to light the lamp or to undress. She fell upon the iron cot, her fragile
body scarcely hollowing the worn springs. And in that Erebus of the skylight
room, she slowly raised her heavy eyelids, and smiled.
For Billy
Jackson was shining down on her, calm and bright and constant through the
skylight. There was no world about her. She was sunk in a pit of blackness,
with but that small square of pallid light framing the star that she had so
whimsically and oh, so ineffectually named. Miss Longnecker must be right; it
was Gamma, of the constellation Cassiopeia, and not Billy Jackson. And yet she
could not let it be Gamma.
As she lay
on her back she tried twice to raise her arm. The third time she got two thin
fingers to her lips and blew a kiss out of the black pit to Billy Jackson. Her
arm fell back limply.
"Good-bye,
Billy," she murmured faintly. "You're millions of miles away and you
won't even twinkle once. But you kept where I could see you most of the time up
there when there wasn't anything else but darkness to look at, didn't you? . .
. Millions of miles. . . . Good-bye, Billy Jackson."
Clara, the
coloured maid, found the door locked at 10 the next day, and they forced it
open. Vinegar, and the slapping of wrists and burnt feathers proving of no
avail, some one ran to 'phone for an ambulance.
In due time
it backed up to the door with much gong-clanging, and the capable young medico,
in his white linen coat, ready, active, confident, with his smooth face half
debonair, half grim, danced up the steps.
"Ambulance
call to 49," he said briefly. "What's the trouble?"
"Oh,
yes, doctor," sniffed Mrs. Parker, as though her trouble that there should
be trouble in the house was the greater. "I can't think what can be the
matter with her. Nothing we could do would bring her to. It's a young woman, a
Miss Elsie--yes, a Miss Elsie Leeson. Never before in my house--"
"What
room?" cried the doctor in a terrible voice, to which Mrs. Parker was a
stranger.
"The
skylight room. It--
Evidently
the ambulance doctor was familiar with the location of skylight rooms. He was
gone up the stairs, four at a time. Mrs. Parker followed slowly, as her dignity
demanded.
On the first
landing she met him coming back bearing the astronomer in his arms. He stopped
and let loose the practised scalpel of his tongue, not loudly. Gradually Mrs.
Parker crumpled as a stiff garment that slips down from a nail. Ever afterward
there remained crumples in her mind and body. Sometimes her curious roomers
would ask her what the doctor said to her.
"Let
that be," she would answer. "If I can get forgiveness for having
heard it I will be satisfied."
The
ambulance physician strode with his burden through the pack of hounds that
follow the curiosity chase, and even they fell back along the sidewalk abashed,
for his face was that of one who bears his own dead.
They noticed
that he did not lay down upon the bed prepared for it in the ambulance the form
that he carried, and all that he said was: "Drive like h**l, Wilson,"
to the driver.
That is all.
Is it a story? In the next morning's paper I saw a little news item, and the
last sentence of it may help you (as it helped me) to weld the incidents
together.
It recounted
the reception into Bellevue Hospital of a young woman who had been removed from
No. 49 East -- street, suffering from debility induced by starvation. It
concluded with these words:
"Dr.
William Jackson, the ambulance physician who attended the case, says the
patient will recover."
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