Here now!"
The room seemed to empty like a wash-bowl.
A policeman fast-grappled in the corner released his hold on his soldier antagonist and started him with a shove toward the door.
The deep voice continued.
Edith perceived now that it came from a bull-necked police captain standing near the door.
"Here now!
This is no way!
One of your own sojers got shoved out of the back window an' killed hisself!"
"Henry!" called Edith,
"Henry!"
She beat wildly with her fists on the back of the man in front of her; she brushed between two others; fought, shrieked, and beat her way to a very pale figure sitting on the floor close to a desk.
"Henry," she cried passionately, "what's the matter?
What's the matter?
Did they hurt you?"
His eyes were shut.
He groaned and then looking up said disgustedly -- --
"They broke my leg.
My God, the fools!"
"Here now!" called the police captain.
"Here now!
Here now!"
IX
"Childs', Fifty-ninth Street," at eight o'clock of any morning differs from its sisters by less than the width of their marble tables or the degree of polish on the frying-pans.
You will see there a crowd of poor people with sleep in the comers of their eyes, trying to look straight before them at their food so as not to see the other poor people.
But Childs', Fifty-ninth, four hours earlier is quite unlike any Childs' restaurant from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine.
Within its pale but sanitary walls one finds a noisy medley of chorus girls, college boys, dUbutantes, rakes, filles de joie --a not unrepresentative mixture of the gayest of Broadway, and even of Fifth Avenue.
In the early morning of May the second it was unusually full.
Over the marble-topped tables were bent the excited faces of flappers whose fathers owned individual villages.
They were eating buckwheat cakes and scrambled eggs with relish and gusto, an accomplishment that it would have been utterly impossible for them to repeat in the same place four hours later.
Almost the entire crowd were from the Gamma Psi dance at Delmonico's except for several chorus girls from a midnight revue who sat at a side table and wished they'd taken off a little more make-up after the show.
Here and there a drab, mouse-like figure, desperately out of place, watched the butterflies with a weary, puzzled curiosity.
But the drab figure was the exception.
This was the morning after May Day, and celebration was still in the air.
Gus Rose, sober but a little dazed, must be classed as one of the drab figures.
How he had got himself from Forty-fourth Street to Fifty-ninth Street after the riot was only a hazy half-memory.
He had seen the body of Carrol Key put in an ambulance and driven off, and then he had started up town with two or three soldiers.
Somewhere between Forty-fourth Street and Fifty-ninth Street the other soldiers had met some women and disappeared.
Rose had wandered to Columbus Circle and chosen the gleaming lights of Childs' to minister to his craving for coffee and doughnuts.
He walked in and sat down.
All around him floated airy, inconsequential chatter and high-pitched laughter.
At first he failed to understand, but after a puzzled five minutes he realized that this was the aftermath of some gay party.
Here and there a restless, hilarious young man wandered fraternally and familiarly between the tables, shaking hands indiscriminately and pausing occasionally for a facetious chat, while excited waiters, bearing cakes and eggs aloft, swore at him silently, and bumped him out of the way.
To Rose, seated at the most inconspicuous and least crowded table, the whole scene was a colorful circus of beauty and riotous pleasure. He became gradually aware, after a few moments, that the couple seated diagonally across from him, with their backs to the crowd, were not the least interesting pair in the room.
The man was drunk.
He wore a dinner coat with a dishevel led tie and shirt swollen by spillings of water and wine.
His eyes, dim and blood-shot, roved unnaturally from side to side.
His breath came short between his lips.
"He's been on a spree!" thought Rose.
The woman was almost if not quite sober.
She was pretty, with dark eyes and feverish high color, and she kept her active eyes fixed on her companion with the alertness of a hawk.