













BUTTERED SIDE DOWN


STORIES

BY

EDNA FERBER





MARCH, 1912




FOREWORD


"And so," the story writers used to say, "they lived happily ever after."

Um-m-m--maybe.  After the glamour had worn off, and the glass slippers
were worn out, did the Prince never find Cinderella's manner redolent of
the kitchen hearth; and was it never necessary that he remind her to be
more careful of her finger-nails and grammar?  After Puss in Boots had
won wealth and a wife for his young master did not that gentleman often
fume with chagrin because the neighbors, perhaps, refused to call on the
lady of the former poor miller's son?

It is a great risk to take with one's book-children.  These stories make
no such promises.  They stop just short of the phrase of the old story
writers, and end truthfully, thus:  And so they lived.

E. F.




CONTENTS


    I.  THE FROG AND THE PUDDLE
   II.  THE MAN WHO CAME BACK
  III.  WHAT SHE WORE
   IV.  A BUSH LEAGUE HERO
    V.  THE KITCHEN SIDE OF THE DOOR
   VI.  ONE OF THE OLD GIRLS
  VII.  MAYMEYS FROM CUBA
 VIII.  THE LEADING LADY
   IX.  THAT HOME-TOWN FEELING
    X.  THE HOMELY HEROINE
   XI.  SUN DRIED
  XII.  WHERE THE CAR TURNS AT 18TH




BUTTERED SIDE DOWN


I

THE FROG AND THE PUDDLE

Any one who has ever written for the magazines (nobody could devise a
more sweeping opening; it includes the iceman who does a humorous article
on the subject of his troubles, and the neglected wife next door, who
journalizes) knows that a story the scene of which is not New York is
merely junk.  Take Fifth Avenue as a framework, pad it out to five
thousand words, and there you have the ideal short story.

Consequently I feel a certain timidity in confessing that I do not know
Fifth Avenue from Hester Street when I see it, because I've never seen
it.  It has been said that from the latter to the former is a ten-year
journey, from which I have gathered that they lie some miles apart.  As
for Forty-second Street, of which musical comedians carol, I know not if
it be a fashionable shopping thoroughfare or a factory district.

A confession of this kind is not only good for the soul, but for the
editor.  It saves him the trouble of turning to page two.

This is a story of Chicago, which is a first cousin of New York, although
the two are not on chummy terms.  It is a story of that part of Chicago
which lies east of Dearborn Avenue and south of Division Street, and
which may be called the Nottingham curtain district.

In the Nottingham curtain district every front parlor window is
embellished with a "Rooms With or Without Board" sign.  The curtains
themselves have mellowed from their original
department-store-basement-white to a rich, deep tone of Chicago smoke,
which has the notorious London variety beaten by several shades.  Block
after block the two-story-and-basement houses stretch, all grimy and
gritty and looking sadly down upon the five square feet of mangy grass
forming the pitiful front yard of each.  Now and then the monotonous line
of front stoops is broken by an outjutting basement delicatessen shop.
But not often.  The Nottingham curtain district does not run heavily to
delicacies.  It is stronger on creamed cabbage and bread pudding.

Up in the third floor back at Mis' Buck's (elegant rooms $2.50 and up a
week.  Gents preferred) Gertie was brushing her hair for the night.  One
hundred strokes with a bristle brush.  Anyone who reads the beauty column
in the newspapers knows that.  There was something heroic in the sight of
Gertie brushing her hair one hundred strokes before going to bed at
night.  Only a woman could understand her doing it.

Gertie clerked downtown on State Street, in a gents' glove department.  A
gents' glove department requires careful dressing on the part of its
clerks, and the manager, in selecting them, is particular about choosing
"lookers," with especial attention to figure, hair, and finger nails.
Gertie was a looker.  Providence had taken care of that.  But you cannot
leave your hair and finger nails to Providence.  They demand coaxing with
a bristle brush and an orangewood stick.

Now clerking, as Gertie would tell you, is fierce on the feet.  And when
your feet are tired you are tired all over.  Gertie's feet were tired
every night.  About eight-thirty she longed to peel off her clothes, drop
them in a heap on the floor, and tumble, unbrushed, unwashed,
unmanicured, into bed.  She never did it.

Things had been particularly trying to-night.  After washing out three
handkerchiefs and pasting them with practised hand over the mirror,
Gertie had taken off her shoes and discovered a hole the size of a silver
quarter in the heel of her left stocking.  Gertie had a country-bred
horror of holey stockings.  She darned the hole, yawning, her aching feet
pressed against the smooth, cool leg of the iron bed.  That done, she had
had the colossal courage to wash her face, slap cold cream on it, and
push back the cuticle around her nails.

Seated huddled on the side of her thin little iron bed, Gertie was
brushing her hair bravely, counting the strokes somewhere in her
sub-conscious mind and thinking busily all the while of something else.
Her brush rose, fell, swept downward, rose, fell, rhythmically.

"Ninety-six, ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety----  Oh, darn it!  What's
the use!" cried Gertie, and hurled the brush across the room with a crack.

She sat looking after it with wide, staring eyes until the brush blurred
in with the faded red roses on the carpet.  When she found it doing that
she got up, wadded her hair viciously into a hard bun in the back instead
of braiding it carefully as usual, crossed the room (it wasn't much of a
trip), picked up the brush, and stood looking down at it, her under lip
caught between her teeth.  That is the humiliating part of losing your
temper and throwing things.  You have to come down to picking them up,
anyway.

Her lip still held prisoner, Gertie tossed the brush on the bureau,
fastened her nightgown at the throat with a safety pin, turned out the
gas and crawled into bed.

Perhaps the hard bun at the back of her head kept her awake.  She lay
there with her eyes wide open and sleepless, staring into the darkness.

At midnight the Kid Next Door came in whistling, like one unused to
boarding-house rules.  Gertie liked him for that.  At the head of the
stairs he stopped whistling and came softly into his own third floor back
just next to Gertie's.  Gertie liked him for that, too.

The two rooms had been one in the fashionable days of the Nottingham
curtain district, long before the advent of Mis' Buck.  That thrifty
lady, on coming into possession, had caused a flimsy partition to be run
up, slicing the room in twain and doubling its rental.

Lying there Gertie could hear the Kid Next Door moving about getting
ready for bed and humming "Every Little Movement Has a Meaning of Its
Own" very lightly, under his breath.  He polished his shoes briskly, and
Gertie smiled there in the darkness of her own room in sympathy.  Poor
kid, he had his beauty struggles, too.

Gertie had never seen the Kid Next Door, although he had come four months
ago.  But she knew he wasn't a grouch, because he alternately whistled
and sang off-key tenor while dressing in the morning.  She had also
discovered that his bed must run along the same wall against which her
bed was pushed.  Gertie told herself that there was something almost
immodest about being able to hear him breathing as he slept.  He had
tumbled into bed with a little grunt of weariness.

Gertie lay there another hour, staring into the darkness.  Then she began
to cry softly, lying on her face with her head between her arms.  The
cold cream and the salt tears mingled and formed a slippery paste.
Gertie wept on because she couldn't help it.  The longer she wept the
more difficult her sobs became, until finally they bordered on the
hysterical.  They filled her lungs until they ached and reached her
throat with a force that jerked her head back.

"Rap-rap-rap!" sounded sharply from the head of her bed.

Gertie stopped sobbing, and her heart stopped beating.  She lay tense and
still, listening.  Everyone knows that spooks rap three times at the head
of one's bed.  It's a regular high-sign with them.

"Rap-rap-rap!"

Gertie's skin became goose-flesh, and coldwater effects chased up and
down her spine.

"What's your trouble in there?" demanded an unspooky voice so near that
Gertie jumped.  "Sick?"

It was the Kid Next Door.

"N-no, I'm not sick," faltered Gertie, her mouth close to the wall.  Just
then a belated sob that had stopped halfway when the raps began hustled
on to join its sisters.  It took Gertie by surprise, and brought prompt
response from the other side of the wall.

"I'll bet I scared you green.  I didn't mean to, but, on the square, if
you're feeling sick, a little nip of brandy will set you up.  Excuse my
mentioning it, girlie, but I'd do the same for my sister.  I hate like
sin to hear a woman suffer like that, and, anyway, I don't know whether
you're fourteen or forty, so it's perfectly respectable.  I'll get the
bottle and leave it outside your door."

"No you don't!" answered Gertie in a hollow voice, praying meanwhile that
the woman in the room below might be sleeping.  "I'm not sick, honestly
I'm not.  I'm just as much obliged, and I'm dead sorry I woke you up with
my blubbering.  I started out with the soft pedal on, but things got away
from me.  Can you hear me?"

"Like a phonograph.  Sure you couldn't use a sip of brandy where it'd do
the most good?"

"Sure."

"Well, then, cut out the weeps and get your beauty sleep, kid.  He ain't
worth sobbing over, anyway, believe me."

"He!" snorted Gertie indignantly.  "You're cold.  There never was
anything in peg-tops that could make me carry on like the heroine of the
Elsie series."

"Lost your job?"

"No such luck."

"Well, then, what in Sam Hill could make a woman----"

"Lonesome!" snapped Gertie.  "And the floorwalker got fresh to-day.  And
I found two gray hairs to-night.  And I'd give my next week's pay
envelope to hear the double click that our front gate gives back home."

"Back home!" echoed the Kid Next Door in a dangerously loud voice.  "Say,
I want to talk to you.  If you'll promise you won't get sore and think
I'm fresh, I'll ask you a favor.  Slip on a kimono and we'll sneak down
to the front stoop and talk it over.  I'm as wide awake as a chorus girl
and twice as hungry.  I've got two apples and a box of crackers.  Are you
on?"

Gertie snickered.  "It isn't done in our best sets, but I'm on.  I've got
a can of sardines and an orange.  I'll be ready in six minutes."

She was, too.  She wiped off the cold cream and salt tears with a dry
towel, did her hair in a schoolgirl braid and tied it with a big bow, and
dressed herself in a black skirt and a baby blue dressing sacque.  The
Kid Next Door was waiting outside in the hall.  His gray sweater covered
a multitude of sartorial deficiencies.  Gertie stared at him, and he
stared at Gertie in the sickly blue light of the boarding-house hall, and
it took her one-half of one second to discover that she liked his mouth,
and his eyes, and the way his hair was mussed.

"Why, you're only a kid!" whispered the Kid Next Door, in surprise.

Gertie smothered a laugh.  "You're not the first man that's been deceived
by a pig-tail braid and a baby blue waist.  I could locate those two gray
hairs for you with my eyes shut and my feet in a sack.  Come on, boy.
These Robert W. Chambers situations make me nervous."

Many earnest young writers with a flow of adjectives