A Top-Floor Idyl.

by George van Schaick.

CHAPTER I

THE NIGHT ALARM

I smiled at my friend Gordon, the distinguished painter, lifting up my gla.s.s and taking a sip of the _table d'hote_ claret, which the Widow Camus supplies with her famed sixty-five cent repast. It is, I must acknowledge, a somewhat turbid beverage, faintly harsh to the palate, and yet it may serve as a begetter of pleasant illusions. While drinking it, I can close my eyes, being of an imaginative nature, and permit its flavor to bring back memories of ever-blessed _tonnelles_ by the Seine, redolent of fried gudgeons and mirific omelettes, and felicitous with gay laughter.

"Well, you old stick-in-the-mud," said my companion, "what are you looking so disgruntled about? I was under the impression that this feast was to be a merry-making to celebrate your fortieth birthday. Something like a grin just now pa.s.sed over your otherwise uninteresting features, but it was at once succeeded by the mournful look that may well follow, but should not be permitted to accompany, riotous living."

At this I smiled again.

"Just a moment's wool-gathering, my dear fellow," I answered. "I was thinking of our old feasts, and then I began to wonder whether the tune played by that consumptive-looking young man at the piano might be a wild requiem to solemnize that burial of two-score years, or a song of triumphant achievement."

"I think it's what they call a fox-trot," remarked Gordon, doubtfully.

"Your many sere and yellow years have brought you to a period in the world's history when the joy of the would-be young lies chiefly in wild contortion to the rhythm of barbaric tunes. I see that they are getting ready to clear away some of the tables and, since we are untrained in such new arts and graces, they will gradually push us away towards the doors. The bottle, I notice, is nearly half empty, which proves our entire sobriety; had it been _Pommard_, we should have paid more respectful attention to it. Give me a light, and let us make tracks."

We rose and went out. A few couples were beginning to gyrate among the fumes of spaghetti and _vin ordinaire_. Gordon McGrath, unlike myself, lives in one of the more select quarters of the city, wherefore we proceeded towards Fifth Avenue. The partial solitude of Washington Square enticed us, and we strolled towards it, sitting of common accord upon one of the benches, in the prelude of long silence resulting from philosophic bent and indulgence in rather tough veal. It was finally broken by Gordon; being younger, speech is more necessary to him.

"What about that sarcophagus you've lately selected for yourself?" he asked me.

"They are pleasant diggings," I answered. "Being on the top floor, they are remote as possible from hand-organs and the fragrance of Mrs.

Milliken's kitchen. The room is quite large and possesses a bath. It gives me ample s.p.a.ce for my books and mother's old piano."

"Wherefore a piano?" he asked, lighting another cigarette. "You can't even play with one finger."

"Well, my sister Jane took out nearly all the furniture, and the remainder went to a junkman, with the exception of the piano. Jane couldn't use it; no room for it in her Weehawken bungalow, besides which she already has a phonograph, purchased at the cost of much saving. You see, Gordon, that old Steinway was rather more intimately connected with my mother, in my memory, than anything else she left. She played it for us when we were kiddies. You have no idea of what a smile that dear woman had when she turned her head towards us and watched us trying to dance! Later on, when she was a good deal alone, it was mostly 'Songs without Words,' or improvisations such as suited her moods. Dear me! She looked beautiful when she played! So, of course, I took it, and it required more room, so that I moved. I've had it tuned; the man said that it was in very good condition yet."

"You were always a silly dreamer, Dave."

"I don't quite see," I began, "what----"

"I'll enlighten your ignorance. Of course you don't. David, old man, you've had the old rattle-trap tuned because of the hope that rises eternal. Visions keep on coming to you of a woman, some indistinct, shadowy, composite creature of your imagination. You expect her to float into your room, in the dim future and in defiance of all propriety, and sit down before that ancient spinet.

"You keep it ready for her; it awaits her coming. To tell you the truth, I'm glad you had it tuned. It shows that you still possess some human traits. I'll come, some day, and we'll go over and capture Frieda Long.

We will take her to dinner at Camus, and give her a benedictine and six cups of black coffee. After that we'll get a derrick and hoist her to your top floor, and she'll play Schubert, till the cows come home or the landlady puts us out. She's a wonder!"

"She's a great artist and a dear, lovable woman," I declared.

"That's probably why she never had a love story," conjectured Gordon.

"Always had so much affection for the general that she could never descend to the particular. By the way, I went to her studio for a look at her portrait of Professor Burberry."

"It's good, isn't it?"

"Man alive! It's so good, I should think the old fellow would be offended. Through her big dabs of paint he's shown up to the life. You can see his complacency bursting out like a flaming sunflower. Upon his homely mug are displayed all the plat.i.tudes of Marcus Aurelius. He is instinct with ignorance that Horace was a drummer for Italian wines and an agent for rural residences, just a smart advertiser, a precursor of the fellows who write verse for the Road of Anthracite or canned soup, and Burberry has never found it out. He would buy splinters from the wooden horse of Troy, and only avoids gold bricks because they're modern. It's a stunning picture!"

That's one reason why I am so fond of Gordon. He's a great portraitist, and far more successful than Frieda, but he is genuine in his admiration of good work. He is rather too cynical, of course, but at the bottom of it there usually lies good advice to his friends. I'm very proud he continues to stick to me.

"I understand he was greatly pleased," I told him, "and I was awfully glad that Frieda got the commission. She needed it."

"Yes, I told her that she ought to go off for a rest in the country," he remarked, "but it seems she has one of her other queer ideas that must be worked out at once. She itched to be at it, even while she was painting Burberry. Mythological, I think, as usual, that latest notion of hers. Some demiG.o.d whispering soft nothings to a daughter of men.

Showed me a dozen charcoal compositions for it, all deucedly clever. And how are the other animals in the menagerie you live in now?"

That's a way Gordon has. From one subject he leaps to another like a canary hopping on the sticks of his cage; but there is method in his madness. He swiftly exhausts the possibilities of a remark and goes to another without losing time.

"The animals," I answered, "are a rather dull and probably uninteresting lot. First, come two girls who live in a hall bedroom, together."

"It shows on their part an admirable power of concentration."

"I suppose so; their conversation is chiefly reminiscent and plentifully dotted with 'says I' and 'says she' and 'says he.' They are honest young persons and work in a large candy-shop. Hence they must be surfeited with sweets at a deplorably early age."

"Not with all of them; they will find some hitherto untasted, but just as cloying in the end," remarked Gordon.

"I hope not. There is also an elderly couple living on the bounty of a son who travels in collars and cuffs. Sells them, you know. Then I've seen three men who work somewhere and occasionally comment upon what they see in the newspaper. Murders fill them with joy, and, to them, accidents are beer and skittles. I suspect that they esteem themselves as what they are pleased to call 'wise guys,' but they are of refreshing innocence and sterling honesty. One of them borrowed a dollar from me, the other day, to take the two girls to the movies. He returned it on next pay day."

"Look out, David, he may be trying to establish a credit," Gordon warned me. "You are such an easy mark!"

"I'll be careful," I a.s.sured him. "Then we have a poor relation of the landlady. He looks out for the furnace in winter and is a night watchman in a bank. An inoffensive creature who reads the papers the other boarders throw away."

"Altogether it makes up a beautiful and cheering totality of inept.i.tude, endowed with the souls of shuttles or cogwheels," opined Gordon.

"Well, as Shylock says, if you p.r.i.c.k them, they bleed," I protested. "At any rate they must have some close affinity with the general scheme of Nature."

"Nature, my dear Dave, is a dustbin in which a few ragmen succeed in finding an occasional crust of dry bread wherewith to help fill the pot and make their hearts glad. It is a horribly wasteful organization by which a lady cod produces a million eggs that one fish may possibly reach maturity and chowder. Four trees planted on a hill commonly die, but, if you stick in a few thousands, there may be a percentage of survivals, besides nuts for the squirrels. Humanity represents a few tall trees and a host of scrubs."

Thus does Gordon always lay down the law, to which I generally listen with some amus.e.m.e.nt. He is dogmatic and incredulous, though he lacks scepticism in regard to his own opinions.

"Then all honor to the scrubs, my dear Gordon!" I interjected. "I admire and revere the courage and persistency with which they keep on growing, seeking a bit of sunlight here and there, airing their little pa.s.sions, bearing their trials bravely. But I forgot to mention another inmate of my caravanserai. She's only there for a day or two, in a room opposite mine, hitherto vacant and only tenanted yesterday. I met her as she was coming up the stairs. She walked heavily, poor thing. I could only see her by the dim light of the gas-jet on the landing. It was a young face, deeply lined and unhappy. Downstairs I came across Mrs. Milliken, my landlady, who explained that the person I had met expected to go next day to a hospital. The Milliken woman had known her husband. He went off to the war, months ago, and the young wife's been teaching French and giving piano lessons, till she couldn't work any longer. The French government allows her twenty-five or thirty cents a day."

"I'm glad it keeps a paternal eye on the wives of its brave defenders,"

remarked Gordon.

"It does, to that extent, but it doesn't go very far in this country.

She has a remarkable face; looks a good deal like that Madonna of Murillo's in the Louvre."

"That's a back number at this stage of the world's history. Most of us prefer snub noses. I notice that you said she plays the piano."

"I don't see what----"

"Well, you've just had yours tuned. Oh! I forgot you said she was going off to the hospital. Never mind, Dave, they come out again, so don't worry. I've known you to be disturbed for a whole week over somebody's sick dog and to go two blocks out of your way to steer a strayed and unpleasantly ragged blind man. What is it, appendicitis?"

"Mrs. Milliken darkly hinted, I think, that it was an expected baby."

"Oh! Well, I suppose a baby had to go with a Murillo; the picture would have been incomplete. I'm glad that this particular case appears to be a perfectly safe one."