Loe raamatut: «The Trufflers», lehekülg 14
CHAPTER XXX – FIFTY MINUTES FROM BROADWAY
THE Worm sat on a wooden chair, an expression of puzzled gravity on his usually whimsical face. The room was a small kitchen. The two screened windows gave a view of a suburban yard, bounded by an alley and beyond the alley other yards; beyond these a row of small frame houses. There were trees; and the scent of a honeysuckle vine.
Sue Wilde, her slim person enveloped in a checked apron, knelt by the old-fashioned coal range. The lower door was open, the ash-pan drawn half out. There were ashes on the floor about her knees.
Henry Bates absently drew out his old caked brier pipe; filled and lighted it. Meditatively he studied the girl – her apron, the flush on her face, the fascinating lights in her tousled hair – telling himself that the scene was real, that the young rebel soul he had known in the Village was this same Sue Wilde. The scent of the honeysuckle floated thickly to his nostrils. He stared out at the row of little wooden houses. He slowly shook his head; and his teeth closed hard on the pipe stem.
“Henry,” she cried softly, throwing out her fine hands, “don’t you understand! I had a conscience all the time. That’s what was the matter!”
“I think I understand well enough, Sue,” said he. “It’s the” – he looked again about the kitchen and out the window – “it’s the setting! I hadn’t pictured you as swinging so far to this extreme Though, as you know, there in the Village, I have been rather conservative in my feelings about you.”
“I know, Henry.” She settled back on her heels. He saw how subdued she was. The tears were not far from her eyes. “I’ve been all wrong.”
“Wrong, Sue?”
“Absolutely. In all I said and tried to do in the Village.” He was shaking his head; but she continued: “I was cutting at the roots of my own life. I disowned every spiritual obligation. I put my faith in Nietzsche and the Russian crowd, in egotism. Henry”’ – her eyes unmistakably filled now’; her voice grew unsteady – “once my father came over into the Village after me. He tried to get me to come home. I was playing at the Crossroads then.”
“Yes,” said he shortly, “I remember that time.”
“I had on my boy costume. He came straight to the theater and I had to go out front and talk with him. We quarreled – ”
“I know,” said he quickly, “I was there.”
He saw that she was in the grip of an emotional revulsion and wished he could stop her. But he couldn’t. Suddenly she seemed like a little girl.
“Don’t you see, Henry!” She threw out her hands. “Do you think it would be any good – now – to tell me I’m not partly responsible. If I – if – ” she caught herself, stiffened up; there was a touch of her old downrightness in the way she came out with, “Henry, he wouldn’t have – killed himself!” Her voice was a whisper. “He wouldn’t!”
The Worm smoked and smoked. He couldn’t tell her that he regarded her father as a hypocritical old crook, and that her early revolt against the home within which the man had always wished to confine her had, as he saw it, grown out of a sound instinct. You couldn’t expect her, now, to get all that into any sort of perspective. Her revolt dated back to her girlish struggle to get away to school and later, to college. Sue was forgetting now how much of this old story she had let him see in their many talks. Why, old Wilde had tried to change the course of her college studies to head her away from modernism into the safer channels of pietistic tradition. The Worm couldn’t forgive him for that. And then, the man’s dreadful weekly, and his curious gift of using his great emotional power to draw immense sums of money from thousands of faithful readers in small towns and along country lanes, he hadn’t killed himself on Sue’s account.
It was known, now, that the man had lived in an awful fear. It was known that he had the acid right at hand in both office and home, the acid he had finally drunk… She was speaking.
The Worm smoked on.
“I wonder if you really know what happened.”
“What happened?” he repeated, all at sea.
“You must have seen the drift of it – of what I didn’t tell you at one time or another.” He saw now that she was talking of her own experiences. He had to make a conscious struggle to bring his mind up out of those ugly depths and listen to her. She went on. “It has been fine, Henry, the way I could always talk to you. Our friendship – ”
She began in another way. “It’s the one thing I owe to Jacob Zanin. He told me the blunt truth – about myself. It did hurt, Henry. But even then I knew it for the truth… You know how he feels about marriage and the home” – she glanced up at the bare kitchen walls – “all that.”
He nodded.
“Well, he – Henry, he wanted to have an affair with me.” She said this rather hurriedly and low, not at all with the familiar frankness of the Village in discussing the old forbidden topics. “He knew I was all confused, that I had got into an impasse. He made me see that I’d been talking and thinking a kind of freedom that I hadn’t the courage to go in for, really – in living.”
“Courage, Sue?”
“Yes, courage – or taste – or something! Henry, you know as well as I that the freedom we talk in the Village leads straight to – well, to complete unmorality, to – to promiscuity, to anything.”
“Perhaps,” said he, watching her and wondering with a little glow suddenly warming his heart, at her lack of guile. He thought of a phrase he had once formulated while hearing this girl talk – “Whom among women the gods would destroy they first make honest.”
“When I was put to the test – and I was put to the test, Henry; I found that I was caught in my own philosophy, was drifting down with it – if turned out that I simply didn’t believe the things I’d been saying. I even” – she faltered here, but rushed on – “I very nearly rushed into a crazy marriage with Peter. Just to save myself. Oh, I see it now! It would have been as dishonest a marriage as the French-heeledest little suburbanite ever planned.”
“You’re severe with yourself,” he said.
She, lips compressed, shook her head.
“I suppose,” he mused aloud, “there’s a lot of us radicals who’d be painfully put to it if we were suddenly called on to quit talking and begin really living it out. Lord, what would we do!” And mentally he added: “Damn few of us would make the honest effort to find ourselves that you’re making right now.” Then, aloud: “What are you going to do?”
She dropped her eyes. “I’m going to take these ashes down cellar.”
“I’ll do that,” said he.
When the small task was accomplished, she said more gently:
“Henry, please understand! I count on you. This thing is a tragedy. I’m deep in it. I don’t even want to escape it. I’ll try not to sink into those morbid thoughts – but he was my father, and he was buried yesterday. His wife, this one, is not my mother, but – but she was his wife. She is crushed, Henry. I have never before been close to a human being who was shattered as she is shattered. There are the children – two of them. And no money.”
“No money?”
“Father’s creditors have seized the paper and the house in Stuyvesant Square. Everything is tied up. There is to be an investigation. My Aunt Matilda is here – this is her house – but we can’t ask her to support us. Henry, here is something you can do! Betty is staying at my old rooms. Try to see her to-day. Could you?”
He nodded. “Surely.”
“Have her get some one to come in with her – take the place off my hands. Every cent of the little I have is needed here. She’ll be staying. That marriage of hers didn’t work. She couldn’t keep away from the Village, anyway. And please have her pack up my things and send them out. I only brought a hand-bag. Betty will pitch in and do that for me. She’s got to. I haven’t even paid this month’s rent yet. Have her send everything except my books – perhaps she could sell those. It would help a little.”
They heard a step on the uncarpeted back stairs. A door swung open. On the bottom step, framed in the shadowed doorway, stood a short round-shouldered woman. Lines drooped downward from her curving mouth. Her colorless eyes shifted questioningly from the girl to the man and back to the girl again. It was an unimaginative face, rather grim, telling its own story of fifty-odd years of devotion to petty household and neighborhood duties; the face of a woman all of whose girlhood impulses had been suppressed until they were converted into perverse resentments.
The Worm, as he rose, hardly aware of the act, knocked the ashes from his pipe into the coal hod. Then he saw that her eyes were on those ashes and on his pipe. He thrust the pipe into his pocket. And glancing from the woman to the girl, he momentarily held his breath at the contrast and the thoughts it raised. It was youth and crabbed age. The gulf between them was unbridgeable, of course; but he wondered – it was a new thought – if age need be crabbed. Didn’t the new sprit of freedom, after all, have as much to contribute to life, as the puritan tradition? Were the risks of letting yourself go any greater, after all, than the risks of suppression? Weren’t the pseudo-Freudians at least partly right?
“Aunt Matilda,” Sue was saying (on her feet now) – “this is an old friend, Mr. Bates.”
The woman inclined her head.
Henry Bales, his moment of speculation past, felt his spirit sinking. He said nothing, because he could think of nothing that could be said to a woman who looked like that. She brought with her the close air of the stricken chamber at the top of the stairs. By merely opening the door and appearing there she had thrust a powerful element of hostility into the simple little kitchen. Her uncompromising eyes drew Sue within the tragic atmosphere of the house as effectively and definitely as it thrust himself without it.
Sue’s next remark was even more illuminating than had been his own curious haste to conceal his pipe.
“Oh,” murmured Sue, “have we disturbed” – she hesitated, fought with herself, came out with it – “mother?”
“Well, the smoke annoys her.” Aunt Matilda did not add the word “naturally,” but the tone and look conveyed it. “And she can hear your voices.”
Henry Bates had to struggle with a rising anger. There were implications in that queerly hostile look that reflected on Sue as on himself. But they were and remained unspoken. They could not be met.
The only possible course was to go; and to go with the miserable feeling that he was surrendering Sue to the enemy.
He turned to her now, speaking with quiet dignity; little realizing that even this dignity aroused resentment and suspicion in the unreceptive mind behind those eyes on the stairs – that it looked brazen coming from a young man whose sandy hair straggled down over his ears and close to his suspiciously soft collar, whose clothes were old and wrinkled, whose mild studious countenance exhibited nothing of the vigor and the respect for conformity that are expected of young men in suburbs who must go in every morning on the seven-thirty-six and come out every evening on the five-fifty-two, and who, therefore, would naturally be classed with such queer folk as gipsies and actors.
“If you like, Sue,” he said, “I’ll get Betty to hurry so I can bring a suit-case out to-night.”
She waited a brief moment before answering; and in that moment was swept finally within Aunt Matilda’s lines. “Oh, no,” she said, speaking with sudden rapidity, “don’t do that. To-morrow will do – just send them.”
Then aware that she was dismissing him indefinitely, her eyes brimming again (for he had been a good friend), she extended her hand.
The Worm gripped it, bowed to the forbidding figure on the stairs and left.
CHAPTER XXXI – A PAIR OF RED BOOTS
THE pleasant days of quiet reading and whimsical reflection were over for the Worm, poor devil! Life caught him up without warning – that complex fascinating life of which he had long been a spectator – and swept him into swift deep currents. He was to be a mere spectator no longer.
Washington Square glowed with June. The trees had not yet assumed the faded, dispirited gray-green of midsummer. The bus tops were crowded with pleasure riders, and a crowd of them pressed about the open-air terminal station held in check by uniformed guards. On the wide curves of asphalt hundreds of small Italians danced to the hurdy-gurdy or played hopscotch or roller-skated. Perambulators lined the shady walks; nurses, slim and uniformed, fat and unformed, lined the benches. Students hurried west, south and north (for it was afternoon – Saturday afternoon, as it happened). Beggars, pedlers, lovers in pairs, unkempt tenement dwellers, a policeman or two, moved slowly about, but not so slowly as they would move a few weeks later when the heat of July would have sapped the vitality of every living thing in town.
But the Worm, standing near the marble arch where Fifth Avenue splendidly begins, felt not June in his heart. He walked on through the Square to the old red-brick building where for three years he and Hy Lowe and Pcter Ericson Mann had dwelt in bachelor comfort. The dingy studio apartment on the seventh floor had been his home. But it was a haunt of discord now.
He found the usually effervescent Hy pacing the lower hall like a leopard in a cage. Hy wore an immaculately pressed suit of creamy gray flannel, new red tie, red silk hosiery visible above the glistening low-cut tan shoes, a Panama hat with a fluffy striped band around it. In his hand was a thin bamboo stick which he was swinging savagely against his legs. His face worked with anger.
He pounced upon the Worm.
“Wanted to see you,” he said in a voice that was low but of quavering intensity. “Before I go. Got to run.”
At this point the elevator came creaking down. A messenger boy stepped out, carrying Hy’s suit-case and light overcoat.
“Excuse me,” breathed Hy, “one minute.” He whispered to the boy, pressed a folded dollar bill into his hand, hurried him off. “This thing has become flatly impossible – ”
“What thing?” The Worm was moodily surveying him.
“Pete. He’s up there now. I’m through. I shan’t go into those rooms again if he – look here! I’ve found a place for you and me, over in the Mews. Eight dollars less than this and more light. Tell Pete. I. can’t talk to him. My God, the man’s a – ”
“He’s a what?” asked the Worm.
“Well, you know what he did! As there’s a God in the Heavens he killed old Wilde.”
“Killed your aunt!” observed the Worm, and soberly considered his friend. Hy’s elaborate get-up suggested the ladies, a particular lady. The Worm looked him over again from the fluff-bound Panama to the red silk socks. A very particular lady! And he was speaking with wandering eyes and an unreal sort of emphasis; as if his anger, though doubtless genuine enough, were confused with some other emotion regarding which he was not explicit.
“Where are you going now – over to the Mews?”
Hy started at the abrupt question, took the Worm’s elbow, became suddenly confidential.
“No,” he said, “not exactly. You see – everything’s gone to smash. The creditors of the paper won’t keep me on. They’ll put in a country preacher with a string tie, and he’ll bring his own staff. That’s what Pete’s done to me! That’s what he’s done. I wouldn’t go off this way, right now, if it wasn’t for the awful depression I feel. I didn’t sleep a wink last night. Honest, not a wink! A man’s got to have some sympathy in his life. Damn it, in a crisis like this – ”
“Perhaps you can tell me with even greater lucidity when you are coming back,” said the Worm dryly.
Hy gulped, stared blankly at his friend, uttered explosively the one word, “Monday!” Then he glanced at his watch and hurried out of the building.
The Worm slowly shook his head and took the elevator.
The long dim studio was quite as usual, with its soft-toned walls, dilapidated but comfortable furniture, Hy’s piano, the decrepit flat-top desk, the two front windows from which you could see all of the Square and the mile of roofs beyond it, and still beyond, the heights of New Jersey. The coffee percolator stood on the bookcase – on the empty bookcase where once had been the Worm’s library. In this room he had studied and written the hundreds of futile book reviews that nobody ever heard of, that had got him precisely nowhere. In this room he had lived in a state of soul near serenity until he met Sue Wilde. Now it brought heartache. Merely to push open the door and step within was to stir poignantly haunting memories of a day that was sharply gone. It was like opening old letters. The scent of a thoughtlessly happy past was faintly there.
Something else was there – a human object, sprawled abjectly in the Morris chair, garbed in slippers and bathrobe, hair disheveled, but black-rimmed eye-glasses still on his nose, the conspicuous black ribbon still hanging from them down the long face. It was that well-known playwright, Peter Ericson Mann, author of The Buzzard, Odd Change and Anchored; and, more recently, of the scenario for Jacob Zanin’s Nature him. Author, too, of the new satirical comedy. The Triffler, written at Sue Wilde and booked for production in September at the Astoria Theater.
The Worm had not told Hy that he had just seen Sue. Now, standing motionless, the thousand memory-threads that bound the old rooms to his heart clinging there like leafless ivy, he looked down at the white-faced man in the Morris chair and knew that he was even less likely to mention the fact to Peter. He thought – “Why, we’re not friends! That’s what it means!”
Peter’s hollow eyes were on him.
“You, Worm!” he said huskily, and tried to smile. “I’m rather ill, I think. It’s shock. You know a shock can do it.”
“What shocked you?” asked Henry Bates rather shortly, turning to the window.
“Hy. He’s crazy, I think. It’s the only possible explanation. He said I was a” – Peter’s expressive voice dropped, more huskily still, into the tragic mood – “a murderer. It was a frightful experience. The boy has gone batty. It’s his fear of losing his job, of course. But the experience has had a curious effect on me. My heart is palpitating.” His right hand was feeling for the pulse in his left wrist. “And I have some, difficulty in breathing.” Now he pressed both hands to his chest.
The Worm stared out the window. Peter would act until his dying day; even then. One pose would follow another, prompted by the unstable emotions of genius, guided only by an egotism so strong that it would almost certainly weather every storm of brain or soul. In a very indirect way Pete had murdered the old boy. No getting around that. An odd sort of murder – sending Sumner Smith to ask that question. Peter himself, away down under his egotism, knew it. Hence the play for sympathy.
Peter was still talking. “It really came out of a clear sky. Until very lately I should have said that Hy and I were friends. As you know, we had many points of contact. Last fall, when – ”
The Worm turned. “Passing lightly over the next eight months,” he remarked, “what do you propose to do now?”
Peter shrank back a little. The Worm’s manner was hardly ingratiating. “Why – ” he said, “why, I suppose I’ll stay on here. You and I have always got on, Henry. We’ve been comfortable here. And to tell the truth, I’ve been getting tired of listening to the history in detail of Hy’s amours. He wants to look out, that fellow. He’s had a few too many of ‘em. He’s getting careless. Now you and I, we’re both sober, quiet. We were the backbone of the Seventh-Story Men. We can go on – ”
The Worm, though given to dry and sometimes cryptic ways, was never rude. That is he never had been. But at this point he walked out of the apartment and closed the door behind him. He had come in with the intention of using the telephone. Instead now he walked swiftly through the Square and on across Sixth Avenue, under the elevated road into Greenwich Village, where the streets twist curiously, and the hopeless poor swarm in the little triangular parks, and writers and painters and sculptors and agitators and idea-venders swarm in the quaint tumble-down old houses and the less quaint apartment buildings.
He entered one of the latter, pressed one of a row of buttons under a row of brass mouthpieces. The door clicked. He opened it; walked through to the rear door on the right.
This door opened slowly, disclosing a tall young woman, very light in coloring, of a softly curving outline, seeming to bend and sway even as she stood quietly there; charming to the eye even in the half-light, fresh of skin, slow, non-committal in speech and of quietly yielding ways; a young woman with large, almost beautiful, inexpressive eyes. She wore hat and gloves and carried a light coat.
“You just caught me,” she said.
On the floor by the wall was a hand-bag. Henry Bates eyed this. “Oh,” he murmured, distrait, “going away!”
“Why – yes. You wanted me?”
“Yes. It’s about Sue Wilde.”
She hesitated; then led him into the half-furnished living-room.
“Where is Sue, anyway?”
“When I left her she wras trying to make a fire in a kitchen range. Out in Jersey.”
“But what on earth – ”
“Trouble was she didn’t understand about the damper in the pipe. I fixed that.”
Betty glanced covertly at her wrist watch. “I don’t want to appear unsympathetic,” she said, “but I don’t see why she undertakes to shoulder that family. It’s – it’s quixotic. It’s not her sort of thing. She’s got her own life to live.”
The Worm, very calm but a little white about the mouth, confronted her. Betty moved restlessly.
“She wants you to pack up her things,” he said. “Sent me to ask.”
Betty knit her brows. “Oh,” she murmured, “isn’t that too bad. I really haven’t a minute. You see – it’s a matter of catching a train. I could do it Monday. Or you might call up one of the other girls. I’m awfully sorry. But it’s something very important.” Her eyes avoided his. Her color rose a little. She turned away. “Of course,” she was murmuring, “I hate terribly to fail Sue at a time like this – ”
She moved irresolutely toward the little hall, glanced again at her watch; and suddenly in confusion picked up her bag and hurried out.
He could hear her light step in the outer corridor; then the street door. All at sea, he started to follow. At the apartment door he paused. Her key was in the lock; she had not even thought to take it. He removed it, put it in his pocket; then wandered back into the living-room and stood over the telephone, trying to think of some one he could call in. But his rising resentment made clear thinking difficult. He sank into the armchair, crossed his long legs, clasped his hands behind his head, stared at the mantel. On it were Sue’s books, in a haphazard row – a few Russian novels (in English translations), Havelock Ellis’s Sex in Relation to Society, Freud on Psychanalysis and Dreams, two volumes of Schnitzler’s plays, Brieux’s plays with the Shaw preface, a few others.
His gaze roved from the books to the bare walls. They were bare; all Sue’s pictures were pinned up on the burlap screen that hid a corner of the room – half a dozen feminist cartoons from The Masses, a futuristic impression of her own head by one of the Village artists, two or three strong rough sketches by Jacob Zanin of costumes for a playlet at the Crossroads, an English lithograph of Mrs. Pankhurst.
Henry Bates slowly, thoughtfully, filled and lighted his pipe. His brows were knit. The room, in its unfeminine bareness as well as in its pictures and books, breathed of the modern unsubmissive girl. No one had wasted a minute here on “housekeeping.” Here had lived the young woman who, more, perhaps, than any other of the recent lights of the old Village, had typified revolt. She had believed, like the Village about her, not in patriotism but in internationalism, not in the home but in the individual, not in duty and submission, but in experiment and self-expression. Already, like all the older faiths of men, this new religion had its cant, its intolerance of opposition, its orthodoxy. His pipe went out while he sat there flunking about it; the beginnings of the summer twilight softened the harsh room and dimmed the outlines of back fences and rear walls without the not overclean windows.
Finally he got up, turned on the lights, took off his coat, found Sue’s trunk behind the burlap screen and dragged it to the middle of the room. He began with the coverings of the couch-bed; then went into the bedroom and folded blankets, coverlet, sheets and comforter. Sue did not own a great variety of clothing; but what was hanging in the closet he brought out, folded and packed away. He took down the few pictures and laid them flat within the upper tray of the trunk. In an hour living-room, bedroom and closet were bare. The books he piled by the door; first guessing at the original cost of each and adding the figures in his head.
Nothing remained but the bureau in the bedroom. He stood before this a long moment before he could bring himself to open the top drawer. To Peter, to Zanin, to Hy Howe, the matter would have been simple. Years back those deeply experienced young bachelors had become familiar with all manner of little feminine mysteries; but to Henry Bates these were mysteries still. The color came hotly to his mild countenance; his pulses beat faster and faster. He recalled with painful vividness, the last occasion on which Reason, normally his God, had deserted him. That was the day, not so long ago by the calendar, he had turned against all that had been his life – dropped his books in the North River, donned the costly new suit that Peter’s tailor had made for him and set forth to propose marriage to Sue Wilde. And with chagrin that grew and burned his face to a hotter red he recalled that he had never succeeded in making himself clear to her. To this day she did not know that his reflective, emotionally unsophisticated heart had been torn with love of her. Why, blindly urging marriage, he had actually talked her into that foolish engagement with Peter!.. What was the quality that enabled men to advance themselves – in work, in love? Whatever it might be, he felt he had it not. Peter had it. Zanin had it. Hy had it. Sue herself! Each was a person, something of a force, a positive quality in life. But he, Henry Bates, was a negative thing. For years he had sat quietly among his books, content to watch others forge past him and disappear up the narrow lanes of progress. Until now, at thirty-two, he found himself a hesitant unfruitful man without the gift of success.
“It is a gift,” he said aloud; and then sat on the springs of the stripped bed and stared at his ineffectual face in the mirror. “The trouble with me,” he continued, “is plain lack of character. Better Hy’s trifling conquests; better Zanin’s driving instinct to get first; better Peter’s hideously ungoverned ego; than – nothing!”
His pipe usually helped. He felt for it. It was not in the right-hand coat pocket where he always carried it. Which fact startled him. Then he found it in the left-hand pocket. Not once in ten years before this bitter hour had he misplaced his pipe. “My God,” he muttered, “haven’t I even got any habits!” He was unnerved. “Like Pete,” he thought, “but without even Pete’s excuse.”
He lighted his pipe, puffed a moment, stood erect, drew a few deep breaths, then drove himself at the task of packing the things that were in the bureau. And a task it was! Nothing but the strong if latent will of the man held him to it. There were soft white garments the like of which his hands had never touched before. Reverently, if grimly, he laid them away in the upper trays of the trunk. In the bottom drawer were Sue’s dancing costumes – Russian and Greek. Each one of these brought a vivid picture of the girl as she had appeared at the Crossroads; each was a stab at Henry Bates’ heart. At the bottom, in the corner, were a pair of red leather boots, very light, with metal clicks in the heels. He took them up, stood motionless holding them. His eyes filled. He could see her again, in that difficult crouching Russian step – her costume sparkling with color, her olive skin tinted rose with the spirited exercise of it, her extraordinary green eyes dancing with the exuberant life that was in her. Then, as if by a trick shift of scene, he saw her in a bare kitchen, wearing a checked apron, kneeling by a stove. The tears brimmed over. He lifted the little red boots, stared wildly at them, kissed them over and over.
“My God!” he moaned softly, “oh, my God!”
There was a faint smell of burning. His pipe lay at his feet, sparks had fallen out and were eating their way into the matting. He stepped on them; then picked up the pipe and resolutely lighted it again. The boots he carried into the living-room; found an old newspaper and wrapped them up; laid the parcel by his hat and coat in the hall.
He found a strap in the kitchen closet and strapped the trunk. There was a suit-case that he had filled; he closed this and laid it on the trunk. Then he turned all the lights off and stood looking out the open window. He had had no dinner – couldn’t conceivably eat any. It was evening now; somewhere between eight and nine o’clock, probably. He didn’t care. Nothing mattered, beyond getting trunk and suit-case off to Sue before too late – so that she would surely have them in the morning. The sounds of evening in the city floated to his ears; and he realized that he had not before been hearing them. From an apartment across the area came the song of a talking machine. Blowsy women leaned out of rear windows and visited. There was a faint tinkle from a mechanical piano in the corner saloon. He could hear a street-car going by on Tenth Street.
Then another sound – steps in the corridor; the turning of a knob; fumbling at the apartment door.
He started like a guilty man. In the Village, it was nothing for a man to be in a girl’s rooms or a girl in a man’s. The group was too well emancipated for that – in theory, at least. In fact, of course, difficulties often arose – and gossip. Greathearted phrases were the common tender of Village talk; but not all the talkers were great-hearted. And women suffered while they smiled. He would have preferred not to be found there.
