“It’s your health, Sara, I’m kicking about. You’re getting as pale and skinny as a goop; and for a month already you’ve been coughing, and never a single evening home to stick your feet in hot water and a mustard plaster on your chest.”
“Didn’t I take the iron tonic and spoil my teeth?”
“My sister Lizzie—that’s the way she started, Sara; right down here in this basement. There never was a prettier little queen down here. Ask any of the old girls. Like you in looks and all; full of vim too. That’s the way she started, Sara. She wouldn’t get out in the country on Sundays or get any air in her lungs walking with me evenings. She was all for dance halls, too, Sara. She—she—Ain’t I told you about her over and over again? Ain’t I?”
“Sh-h-h! Don’t cry, Hat. Yes, yes; I know. She was a swell little kid; all the old girls say so. Sh-h-h!”
“The—the night she died I—I died too; I—”
“Sh-h-h, dearie!”
“I ain’t crying, only—only I can’t help remembering.”
“Listen! That’s the new hit Charley’s playin’—Up to Snuff! Say, ain’t that got some little swing to it? Dum-dum-tum-tee-tum-m-m! Some little quick-step, ain’t it? How that boy reads off by sight! Looka, will you? They got them left-over ribbed undervests we sold last season for forty-nine cents out on the grab table for seventy-four. Looka the mob fighting for ’em! Dum-dum-tum-tee-tum-m-m!”
The day’s tide came in. Slowly at first, but toward noon surging through aisles and round bins, upstairs and downstairs—in, round and out. Voices straining to be heard; feet shuffling in an agglomeration of discords—the indescribable roar of humanity, which is like an army that approaches but never arrives. And above it all, insistent as a bugle note, reaching the basement’s breadth, from hardware to candy, from human hair to white goods, the tinny voice of the piano—gay, rollicking.
At five o’clock the patch of daylight above the red-lighted exit door turned taupe, as though a gray curtain had been flung across it; and the girls, with shooting pains in their limbs, braced themselves for the last hour. Shoppers, their bags bulging and their shawls awry, fumbled in bins for a last remnant; hatless, sway-backed women, carrying children, fought for mill ends. Sara Juke stood first on one foot and then on the other to alternate the strain; her hands were hot and dry as flannel, but her cheeks were pink—very pink.