The Mercury Waltz Read Online Free

gaze meeting that of the man inside—a professionally handsome gentleman, thick pomade and Latinate, in no way the matron’s husband—who instantly blanches and slams the door. The porters fumble with the luggage as the young man steps back into the crowd, palming as he goes the matron’s bracelet of heart-shaped sapphires and “That’s got you,” he says pleasantly to no one, “you liverish bitch—”
    —as the urchin pops up grinning like a jack-in-the-box alongside another, wide-eyed boy and “Here,” says the young man, two coins to the false tea boy and one to the real. “Spiff play, both of you.”
    “Ta, Haden!” chirps the urchin, handing back to the other boy his official cap and tray, turning to the chestnut kiosk to slap down the price—“Hot bag, quick it!” —as “That’s Haden St.-Mary?” the real tea boy asks. “You work for him?”
    “Fucking right I do,” says the urchin proudly. “An’t he pay bona? And he can kick the piss out of a wooden horse.”
    Meanwhile the young man, who calls himself Haden St.-Mary, has passed back beneath the god’s column through a drifting litter of ticket stubs, lost gloves, chestnut hulls, and pigeon shit, the noon sun lighting his way through a rusting ironwork arch as he flags the first hack waiting, down the nudge and roll of the congested avenue, patchwork of cobblestones and concrete, larch and faintly greening elm, muddy Carousel Park and the beggars in their aprons crying “ Pitié, pitié ” and squinting their liquor-bright eyes. As he goes he yawns—the night just past was a long one, dealing faro till dawn in a French laundry, a boy on his lap tipping him sips from a brandy flask—and whistles through his teeth “ Qu’a-t-il fait? ”, all the boys of the avenue are singing it just now. His whistle is slightly marred by the scar that cleaves the sulky fullness of his lips, a scar he gnaws when he is anxious or angry, a scar a discarded bedmate once called the mark of Venus, revenge from the jealous goddess of love upon a man who loves no one at all.
    If he, or for that matter the pedestaled god, had turned his head only a few degrees, he might have noted a family trio dodging a trolley at the curb: a dark young man in second-best businessman’s suit shepherding an older couple, rabbit-fur mantle and muff for the mamma, tightly held train tickets and nervous checking of the pocket watch by the papa, somber then to shake hands: “The time is too short. I should have liked to meet your employers, who work a young man so strenuously.”
    “Especially,” sighs the mamma, “since they won’t allow you to travel—Cousin Albertine will miss you at her wedding! And to speak of weddings,” squeezing his arm, “we must set the date. Dear Marie has been so patient.”
    The dark young man bites the inside of his cheek: “I know, Mamma,” at a kind of loss, “we will. But things are always so busy here,” as her face puckers, then smooths, she smooths one plump hand down his coat front, a futile, loving gesture, then is led away into the surge of the station crowd by her husband, already on the lookout for sly snatchpockets and other city-dwelling ne’er-do-wells.
    Released, the dark young man turns back for the street, the nearest milk-and-tea shop, where he treats himself to gebackene Mäuse, “baked mice,” and a cup of caravan tea, reading, while he eats, the theatre column in the Clarion, a putative colleague whose tastes in entertainment are only slightly less offensive than his prose: For an evening of sheerest delight, one shouldst see again She Wouldst Not ! The church bells begin to ring from St. Mary of Dolors; he bows his head a moment, eyes closed, then puts aside his emptied plate and hurries out past some shouting street boys, checkered scarves and dirty hands—
    “Give a penny, sah, give a penny for some tea?”
    “Suck for a fiver, sah? Half a fiver? Come on, fucking cheapjack!”
    —to merge like a native into