The Blood Red Dawn

by Charles Caldwell Dobie

There followed a hectic period of prosperity for the Café Ithaca. At once it seemed that everybody in San Francisco knew of it and was determined to lay violent hands upon its cut-to-measure gaiety. The entertainers were changed rapidly. Madge departed one evening in a blaze of wrath because some "fresh guy" laughed at her friend Kit's painful attempts at song. Kit threw herself upon a chair in the dressing-room and sobbed her heart out.

"Don't you care, Kit, he wasn't no gentleman!" It had been pathetic to discover what comfort these two women managed to extract from so frugal a solace.

So this was the gay and frivolous life of the café entertainer at close range! It never really had occurred to Claire to fancy that most of these women were meeting the responsibilities of life with a ghastly smile. Even Madge had her duties. There was a crippled child in some hospital, the sad spawn of a weak relation, that Madge was sponsoring. Claire had heard of this quite by accident one night when Madge's temper caught her off guard. A party of vaudeville performers had come in for a midnight frolic, and in the course of the hilarity one of the women stood up on her chair and sang a tear-starting ballad about a gray-haired mother and a family mortgage and a wayward son who seemed to continue his course merely to provide a becoming background for his mother's silver hair. Quantities of loose change had met this effort, and the lady gathered up the scant folds of her very red dress as she bent over and picked up every coin, to the last penny.

"Can you beat that?" Madge had demanded fiercely of Claire. "I'm getting kinder tired of the way Lycurgus lets this foreign talent walk away with the goods. I don't care for myself, but I need every extra dime I pick up." And she had explained to Claire about this warped fragment of humanity and her responsibility. "I'm its god-mother, and I come through with all the extra money I rake in."

After that Claire found the insolently flung coins assuming new values.

But all the entertainers were not cast in the heroic mold of self-sacrifice. Claire discovered that there was just as much heartlessness, and greed, and middle-class smugness among these people as there was in any other walk of life. In short, Claire was learning something about the law of average, learning to be unsurprised by a flash of gold in the dullest panful, or as equally unmoved when some dazzling bit proved dross.

She began to wonder how long she could stand the new atmosphere of the Café Ithaca. There was a certain irony in discovering herself on the verge of rout by the intrusion of her own countrymen. There was no doubt that a corroding influence was eating out the simplicity of the old life of the quarter. In the coffee-houses the alien customs still persisted, and the men danced their dances of greeting with all the old fervor, sipping their grenadine syrup and Turkish coffee between-times, but in the Café Ithaca rag-time was king, and the Greeks were learning that it was neither necessary nor desirable to leave untouched the fingers of their female partners.

"That, in itself, means nothing," Danilo had said to Claire one evening, as they sat discussing the subject; "but it is dangerous for a people to lose its symbols ... unless there is offered something better, and I cannot say...."

He swept the room with a significant glance.

Claire had to admit that nothing better had been offered, nor anything quite so good. She had practically nothing to do, now. Once in a while some Greek asked her to play one of the old folk tunes, but her efforts fell upon irresponsive ears. She knew, also, that some of the entertainers resented her professional aloofness. Not that she consciously stood apart from them. But they were quick to measure the difference in her attitude, the fact that she appeared to have very little to do, and that she was not expected to cajole the unattached male frequenters into buying drinks. She could not have said just why this last service was not insisted upon, now that she had so little opportunity to earn her salary, but she concluded it was one of those intangible situations which continually put to rout the theory that cold logic sways the world. Measured by every practical standard, Claire should have either earned her way or been dismissed; but Lycurgus for some mysterious reason saw fit to ignore the claims of expediency in Claire's case.