A girl was passing along the sidewalk as the boy emerged. That was the only reason Lombard happened to notice her, because his eyes were on his departing assistant and she cut between them. Nobody. Nothing. Just a girl. A stray pedestrian. She gave a look in, as she passed the doorway. Then, with just a momentary hesitation, probably caused by curiosity, went on again, passed from view beyond the vacant show window. For a moment, though, he had almost thought she was about to enter.
The lull ended and an antediluvian in beaver-collared coat, black-stringed eyeglasses, and an incredibly high collar came in, walking stick to side. Behind him, to Lombard’s dismay, appeared a cab driver dragging in a small ancient trunk. The visitor halted before the bare wooden table Lombard was using for a desk, and struck a pose so hammy that for a minute Lombard couldn’t believe it was intended seriously, wasn’t just a burlesque.
Lombard rolled his eyes upward. He’d been getting this type all day long. But never with a whole trunkful of them at a time, until now.
“Ah, sir,” began the relic of the gas lit footlights, in a richly resonant voice that would have been something if only he’d kept his hands down, “you are indeed lucky that I read your advertisement. I am in a position to enrich your collection immeasurably. I can add to it as no one else in this city can. I have some rarities here that will warm your heart. From the old Jefferson Playhouse, as far back as—”
Lombard motioned a hasty refusal. “I’m not interested in the Jefferson Playhouse, I’ve got a full set.”
“The Olympia, then. The—”
“Not interested, not interested. I don’t care what else you’ve got, I’m all bought up. I only need one item more before I put out the lights and lock up. Casino, last season. Have you one?”
“Casino, bah!” the old man sputtered in his face, with a little more than just expelled breath. “You say Casino to me? What have I to do with trashy modern revues? I was once: one of the greatest tragedians on the American stage!”
“I can see that,” Lombard said dryly. “I’m afraid we can’t do business with one another.”
The trunk and the cab driver went out again. The trunk’s owner stopped in the doorway long enough to express his contempt by way of the floor. “Casino — thut!” Then he went out too.
Another short hiatus, then an old woman who had the appearance of being a charwoman came in. She had bedecked herself for the occasion with a large floppy hat topped by a cabbagy rose, that looked as though it had either been picked up from an ashcan or taken out of a storage closet where it had lain forgotten for decades. She had applied a circular fever spot of rouge to the leathery skin of each cheek, with the uncertain hand of one trying to indulge in a long-forgotten practice.
As he raised his eyes to her, half compassionately, half unwillingly, he caught sight over her rounded shoulder of the same girl as before, once again passing outside the shop, this time in the opposite direction. Again she turned and glanced in. This time, however, she did more than that. She came to a full halt, if only for a second or two; even went back a single step to bring herself more fully in line with I the open entrance. Then, having scanned the interior, she went on. She was obviously interested in what was going on. Still, he had to admit, there had been enough publicity attending the enterprise to make a chance passerby conscious of it, cause her to give a second look. There had even been photographers sent around early in the event. And she may have simply been coming back from wherever she had been bound the first time she passed; if you went some place, you usually followed the same route on the way back, there was nothing unusual in that.
The old drudge before him was faltering timidly, “Is it on the level, sir? You really pay money for old programs?”
He brought his attention back to her. “Certain ones, yes.”
She fumbled in a knitted market bag hanging over her arm. “I have only a few here, sir. From when I used to be in the chorus myself. I kept them all, they mean a lot to me. The Midnight Rambles, and the Frolics of 1911—” She was trembling with apprehension, as she put them down. She turned one of the yellowed leaves, as though to add to the veracity of her story. “See, this is me here, sir. Dolly Golden, that used to be my name. I played the Spirit of Youth in the final tableau—”
Time, he thought, is a greater murderer than any man or woman. Time is the murderer that never gets punished. He looked at her raw, toilworn hands, not the programs at all. “A dollar apiece,” he said gruffly, feeling for his billfold.
She was nearly overcome with joy. “Oh, bless you, mister! It will come in so handy!” She had swept up his hand before he could stop her and put her lips to it. The rouge started to elongate into pink tears. “I didn’t dream they were worth that much!”
They weren’t. They weren’t worth a plugged nickel. “Here you are, mother,” he said compassionately.
“Oh, now I’m going to eat — I’m going to eat a big dinner—!” She staggered out almost drunk with the unexpected windfall. A younger woman was standing there quietly waiting, as she gave place before him. She must have come in unnoticed behind her just now, he hadn’t seen her enter. It was the same one who had passed the doorway twice already, once in each direction. He was almost sure of it, although the previous optical snapshots he had had of her had been too brief to focus properly.
She had looked younger out there, in the middle distance, than she did now, directly before him at close range. That was because she had retained a slimness of figure, after almost everything else was gone. She was ravaged, almost as ravaged as the charwoman who had just preceded her, if in a different way.
A prickling sensation lightly stirred the fuzz below the hairline on his neck. He tried not to stare at her too blatantly, looked down again after one all-comprehensive sweep of the eyes, so she wouldn’t detect anything on his face.
His composite impression was this: she must have been pretty until just recently. It was rapidly leaving her now. There was an air of sub-surface refinement, perhaps even culture, still emanating from her, but there was a hard crust, a shell of coarseness and cheapening, forming on the outside that would soon smother it, extinguish it for good. Probably it was already too late to save her from the process. It was being accelerated, as far as he could tell at sight, either by alcohol in destructive day-long floods, or by acute and unaccustomed destitution; or perhaps by an attempt to dull the one with the other. There were traces of a third factor still discernible, and this perhaps had been the predecessor, the causative, of the other two, but it seemed to be no longer the determining one, had been superseded by the other two: unbearable distress of mind, mental misery, fear admixed with some sort of guilt, and prolonged endlessly over a period of months. It had left its mark but it was dying out now; the strictly physical dissipations were the current ones. She was jaunty, now, she was rubbery and unbreakable with the resiliency of the gutters and the bars, and of those who can go no lower, and that would suffice to see her through to the end. Probably a gas-tube in some rooming house.
She looked as though she hadn’t been eating regularly. There was a shadowed hollow in each cheek, and the whole bone structure of the face showed through the thin covering. She was entirely in black, but not the black of widowhood nor yet the black of fashion; the rusty black of slovenliness, adhered to because it doesn’t show soil. Even her stockings were black, with a white crescent of hole showing above the back of each shoe.
She spoke. Her voice was ruined, raucous with cheap whisky gulped inordinately all day and night. Yet even here there was a ghost of cultivation left. If she used slang now, it was from choice, from contact with those she associated with, and not because she didn’t know any better. “You got any jack left to pay out on programs, or am I too late?”