"An' pay the same for half an hour's headache that we could get a whole night's dancin' for?"
"I've got to be walking the picket-line all day to-morrow."
"Yes, an' I have to be standin' behind a counter. You haven't got nothin' on me there. Get your wraps together now an' come ahead, Carrie. I hear there's a new place opened on Grand Street."
Carrie knew how to dance—the poorest girl on the East Side knows that, because not to dance is to miss the one amusement obtainable by the very poor—and, like Katie, she was of that relatively small army that can frequent the dance-halls for perhaps as much as a year without contamination. Before she had taken her course at the night-school, she had even danced in the rooms that the Hebrew politicians provide behind their saloons near Houston Street, where she had seen cadets successfully ply their trade among bland-faced immigrant girls whose very language was unknown to them; and she was therefore wholly prepared for the picture that she confronted when, Katie having paid her ten cents for the two admissions, they entered the low-ceilinged basement of a saloon and tenement-house, and came upon the meeting-place of the Danny Delancy Social Club.
Through a veil of dust raised by stamping feet and swirling skirts, through a cloud of heat from a room with every window closed, through a blast of odors compounded of the fumes of alcohol, the scent of tobacco, and the miasma of sweating men and women, there rose, from somewhere, the cries of a beaten piano, struck and thumped into a shrieking likeness to the "Chocolate Soldier" waltz, which only now and then was made at all audible above the rhythmic hubbub. Although the evenings of Saturdays and Sundays were the most popular for dancing, the floor was so crowded that only the expertness of these trained dancers prevented collision and panic. The steam from the bodies of the performers joined with the dry dust in half obscuring the blue-burning gas. The strident laughter of the patrons helped the scraping of their feet in subduing the sounds of the piano. The men gyrated grimly in wet shirt-sleeves, and the women, affecting the most somber shades chosen for the longest wear, spun in their partners' arms with stolid, gum-grinding jaws and lips that were mirthless. Except for the youthful "spielers" admitted without charge, or even hired, to dance with the awkward or make wall-flowers sufficiently happy to insure their return, there were but two types of men among the patrons. There was the native of the quarter, heavy-faced, large-muscled, quick to anger and ready with the fists, a hard-drinking, hard-living sort, no more careful of his neighbor's morals than of his own, yet good-natured, easy-going, pliable. And winding in and out among these, slow and suave, like some sleek species of vulture, were the young men that came there not for pleasure, but for profit, always-smiling young men with manners offensively elaborate, whose shining black hair smelled of oil, whose skin was like decaying dough, and whose entire time was spent in making the acquaintance of new girls, giving dancing-lessons to new girls in crowded corners, and taking new girls into the adjoining back-bar for a drink.
To these types the attending women more or less corresponded. Most of them came alone, or in groups of two or three—a plain girl always befriended by one of more charm—because etiquette demanded that, if a man brought a companion, his companion must give him what dances he wanted, and so she would have few offers from his fellows, who observed a rigid code that forbade poaching upon a friend's preserve. There were some that could afford to wear gay dresses because they were frankly in a business that, of however brief duration, made gay dresses possible as a luxury and necessary as an advertisement, and this appearance of wealth was never absent from the hungry eyes of the young women about them. There were others, also few, who were plainly new either to the country or to this particular form of amusement. But the majority came from the factories and shops, lured by nothing worse than youth's natural craving for its right to pleasure, seeking to forget the exertions of the day in these new exertions of the night, drifting whither they neither knew nor greatly cared, the necessary factors of an industrial system too fatuous to conserve their efficiency.
On every chair along the reeking walls, now trodden underfoot on the floor, and now picked up like dry leaves and twirled about in the little eddies of warm air created by the romping dancers, were cards and handbills—"throwaways" the patrons called them—which, often in curious English, announced special balls and "grand receptions" shortly to be given in this or some similar club. Here one was "cordially invited" to the "third annual dance given by the two well-known friends, Greaser Einstein and Kid Boslair, at New Starlight Hall, Gents Twenty-five and Ladies Fifteen"; there one was cautioned not to miss the "Devil Dance" that would form a part of the forthcoming "reception of the Harry Cronin Association, Young Theo, floor-manager"; and again, one was told that the "Special Extra Event of the Season" would be the ball of the "Ryan McCall Social, Incorporated, Tammany Hall, ticket admit gent including wardrobe, Thirty-five cents; ladies free."
Katie and the shirtwaist-maker got seats near the door, waved and called to half a dozen acquaintances and strained their eyes to see through the swirling mist.
"It looks like old times," said Carrie.
"Smells like 'em," Katie amended; "only I've been away from these places for awhile an' I notice that, new place or old, the faces change pretty quick. Who's the woman in red, with the yellow hair, Carrie?"