Deadline at Dawn

William Irish Deadline at Dawn

“...each hour, each minute

Can hold all Hell or Heaven in it—”

— PAULINE HAVARD

Chapter 1

He was just a pink dance-ticket to her. A used-up one at that, torn in half. Two-and-a-half cents’ worth of commission on the dime. A pair of feet that kept crowding hers before them all over the map, all over the floor, all over the night. A blank, a cipher, that could steer her any which way he wanted until his five minutes were up. Five minutes of hailing, pelting two-quarter-time notes, like a stiff sandstorm hitting an accumulation of empty tin buckets, up there on the bandsmen’s box. And then suddenly silence, as at the cut of a switch, and a sort of tonal deafness for a moment or two after. A couple of free breaths without your ribs being corseted by some stranger’s arm. And then the whole thing over again; another blast of sand, another pink ticket, another pair of feet chasing yours around, another cipher steering you any which way he liked.

That was all any of them were to her. She loved her job so. She loved dancing so. Especially for hire. Sometimes she wished she’d been born with a limp, so she couldn’t manage her two feet alike. Or deaf, so that she’d never have to hear another slide-trombone fingering its nose at the ceiling. That would have kept her out of this. Then she would have probably been bathing somebody’s soiled shirts in a basement-laundry, or scouring somebody’s soiled dishes in a lunchroom scullery. What was the good of wishing, anyway? You didn’t get anything. Well, what was the harm? You didn’t lose anything.

She had only one friend in all this town. It stayed still, it didn’t dance, that was one thing in its favor. And it was always on hand, night after night, seeming to say: “Buck up, kid, you’ve only got another hour to go. You can do it, you’ve done it before.” And then in a little while: “Hang on tight, kid; another thirty minutes now, that’s all. I’m working for you.” And then finally: “Just once more around the floor, kid. Time’s up now. Just one more complete turn, and your sentence has been commuted for tonight. Just once more around, you can last that long, don’t cave in now; look, my minute-hand’s muscling in on my hour-hand. I’ve done it again for you, I’ve gotten you off. By the time you get back this way it’ll be one o’clock.”

It seemed to say those things to her every night. It never let her down. It was the only thing in the whole town that gave her a break. It was the only thing in all New York that was on her side, even if only passively. It was the only thing in all the endless world of her nights that had a heart.

She could only see it from the two end windows on the left, the ones overlooking the side-street, every time she made the circuit down around that way. The ones in front, overlooking the main drag, didn’t show it to her. There was a long row of them on the left, but the last two were the only ones that were any good, the rest were blocked off by buildings in the way. They were always left slanting open, to get in ventilation and to publicize the din up here to the sidewalks below; it might pull strays off the pavement. It was through the end two that she got it. Peering benignly in at her from way up high there, with sometimes a handful of stars scattered around it further back. The stars didn’t help her any, but it did. What good were stars? What good was anything? What good was being born a girl? At least men didn’t have to peddle their feet. They could be low in their own particular ways, but they didn’t have to be low in this way.

It was pretty far-off, but her eyes were good. Glowing softly against the taffeta backdrop of the night. A luminous circle, like a hoop. With twelve luminous notches around the inside of it. And a pair of luminous hands to tell them off, that never jammed, never stopped dead and played a dirty trick on her, always kept plugging for her, kept inching ahead, to get her off and out of here. It was the clock on the tower of the Paramount, all the way across the town from here at Seventh Avenue and Forty-third. Diagonally across, and still visible in here where she was, through some curious canalization of building-tops and angle of perspective. It was like a face — all clocks are. It was like the face of a friend. A funny friend for a slim, red-haired girl of twenty-two to have, but it spelled the difference between endurance and despair.

And another funny thing about it was, she could still see it further over where she roomed, from the windows of her rooming house if she got up on tiptoe and stretched her neck, although it was at an even greater distance there and all the way around in a different direction. But over there, on sleepless nights, it was just a detached onlooker, neither for her nor against her. It was here in the mill, from eight to one, that it really helped her out.