Terry, standing in the doorway, always knew that when he reached the corner just where Schroeder's house threatened to hide him from view, he would stop, drop the sample case, wave his hand just once, pick up the sample case and go on, proceeding backward for a step or two untilSchroeder's house made good its threat.It was a comic scene in the eyes of the onlooker, perhaps because a chubby Romeo offends the sense of fitness.The neighbors, lurking behind their parlor curtains, had laughed at first.But after a while they learned to look for that little scene, and to take it unto themselves, as if it were a personal thing.Fifteen-year wives whose husbands had long since abandoned flowery farewells used to get a vicarious thrill out of it, and to eye Terry with a sort of envy.
This morning Orville Platt did not even falter when he reached Schroeder's corner.He marched straight on, looking steadily ahead, the heavy bags swinging from either hand.Even if he had stopped--though she knew he wouldn't--Terry Platt would not have seen him.She remained seated at the disordered breakfast table, a dreadfully still figure, and sinister; a figure of stone and fire, of ice and flame.Over and over in her mind she was milling the things she might have said to him, and had not.She brewed a hundred vitriolic cruelties that she might have flung in his face.She would concoct one biting brutality, and dismiss it for a second, and abandon that for a third.She was too angry to cry--a dangerous state in a woman.She was what is known as cold mad, so that her mind was working clearly and with amazing swiftness, and yet as though it were a thing detached; a thing that was no part of her.
She sat thus for the better part of an hour, motionless except for one forefinger that was, quite unconsciously, tapping out a popular and cheap little air that she had been strumming at the piano the evening before, having bought it downtown that same afternoon.It had struck Orville's fancy, and she had played it over and over for him.Her right forefinger was playing the entire tune, and something in the back of her head was following it accurately, though the separate thinking process was going on just the same.Her eyes were bright, and wide, and hot.Suddenly she became conscious of the musical antics of her finger.She folded it in with its mates, so that her hand became a fist.She stood up and stared down at the clutter of the breakfast table.The egg--that fateful second egg--had congealed to a mottled mess of yellow and white.The spoon lay on the cloth.His coffee, only half consumed, showed tan with a cold gray film over it.A slice of toast at the left of his plate seemed to grin ather with the semi-circular wedge that he had bitten out of it.
Terry stared down at these congealing remnants.Then she laughed, a hard high little laugh, pushed a plate away contemptuously with her hand, and walked into the sitting room.On the piano was the piece of music (Bennie Gottschalk's great song hit, "Hicky Boola") which she had been playing the night before.She picked it up, tore it straight across, once, placed the pieces back to back, and tore it across again.Then she dropped the pieces to the floor.
"You bet I'm going," she said, as though concluding a train of thought."You just bet I'm going.Right now!" And Terry went.She went for much the same reason as that given by the ladye of high degree in the old English song--she who had left her lord and bed and board to go with the raggle-taggle gipsies-O! The thing that was sending Terry Platt away was much more than a conjugal quarrel precipitated by a soft-boiled egg and a flap of the arm.It went so deep that it is necessary to delve back to the days when Theresa Platt was Terry Sheehan to get the real significance of it, and of the things she did after she went.
When Mrs.Orville Platt had been Terry Sheehan, she had played the piano, afternoons and evenings, in the orchestra of the Bijou Theater, on Cass Street, Wetona, Wisconsin.Anyone with a name like Terry Sheehan would, perforce, do well anything she might set out to do.There was nothing of genius in Terry, but there was something of fire, and much that was Irish.Which meant that the Watson Team, Eccentric Song and Dance Artists, never needed a rehearsal when they played the Bijou.Ruby Watson used merely to approach Terry before the Monday performance, sheet music in hand, and say, "Listen, dearie.We've got some new business I want to wise you to.Right here it goes `TUM dee- dee DUM dee-dee TUM DUM DUM.' See? Like that.And then Jim vamps.Get me?"Terry, at the piano, would pucker her pretty brow a moment.Then, "Like this, you mean?""That's it!You've got it." "All right.I'll tell the drum."She could play any tune by ear, once heard.She got the spirit of athing, and transmitted it.When Terry played a martial number you tapped the floor with your foot, and unconsciously straightened your shoulders.When she played a home-and-mother song you hoped that the man next to you didn't know you were crying (which he probably didn't, because he was weeping, too).
At that time motion pictures had not attained their present virulence.Vaudeville, polite or otherwise, had not yet been crowded out by the ubiquitous film.The Bijou offered entertainment of the cigar-box-tramp variety, interspersed with trick bicyclists, soubrettes in slightly soiled pink, trained seals, and Family Fours with lumpy legs who tossed each other about and struck Goldbergian attitudes.
