HEART OF THE CITY

THE dining-room was green, as green could be. Under the orange-colored candle-light, the walls, rugs, ceiling, draperies, ferns, glowed verdant, mysterious, intense, like night woods arching round a camp fire. Into this fervid, pastoral verdure the round white table, sparkling with silver, limpid with wine-lights, seemed to roll forth resplendent and incongruous as a huge, tinseled s...o...b..ll.

Outside, like fire engines running on velvet wheels, the automobiles went humming along the pavement. Inside, the soft, narrow, ribbony voice of a violin came whimpering through the rose-scented air.

It was the midst of dinner-party time. In the oak-paneled hallway a shadowy, tall clock swallowed gutturally on the verge of striking nine.

The moment was distinctly nervous. The _entree_ course was late, and the Hostess, gesticulating tragically to her husband, had slipped one chalky white shoulder just a fraction of an inch too far out of its jeweled strap. The Host, conversing every second with exaggerated blandness about the squirrels in Central Park, was striving frantically all the while with a desperately surrept.i.tious, itchy gesture to signal to his mate. Worse than this, a prominent Sociologist was audibly discussing the American penal system with a worried-looking lady whose brother was even then under indictment for some banking fraud. Some one, trying to kick the Sociologist's ankle bone, had snagged his own foot gashingly through the Woodland Girl's skirt ruffle, and the Woodland Girl, blush-blown yet with country breezes, clear-eyed as a trout pool, sweet-breathed as balsam, was staring panic-stricken around the table, trying to locate the particular man's face that could possibly connect boot-wise with such a horridly profane accident. The sudden, grotesque alertness of her expression attracted the laggard interest of the young Journalist at her left.

"What brought you to New York?" the Journalist asked abruptly. "You're the last victim in from the country, so you must give an account of yourself. Come 'fess up! What brought you to New York?"

The Journalist's smile was at least as conscientious as the smile of daylight down a city airshaft, and the Woodland Girl quickened to the brightening with almost melodramatic delight, for all previous conversational overtures from this neighbor had been about actors that she had never heard of, or operas that she could not even p.r.o.nounce, and before the man's scrutinizing, puzzled amazement she had felt convicted not alone of mere rural ignorance, but of freckles on her nose.

"What brought me to New York?" she repeated with vehement new courage.

"Do you really want to know? It's quite a speech. What brought me to New York? Why, I wanted to see the 'heart of the city.' I'm twenty years old, and I've never in all my life been away from home before. Always and always I've lived in a log bungalow, in a wild garden, in a pine forest, on a green island, in a blue lake. My father is an invalid, you know, one of those people who are a little bit short of lungs but inordinately long of brains. And I know Anglo-Saxon and Chemistry and Hindoo History and Sunrises and Sunsets and Mountains and Moose, and such things. But I wanted to know People. I wanted to know Romance. I wanted to see for myself all this 'heart of the city' that you hear so much about--the great, blood-red, eager, gasping heart of the city. So I came down here last week to visit my uncle and aunt."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "The lone, accentuated figure of a boy violinist"]

Her mouth tightened suddenly, and she lowered her voice with ominous intensity. "But there _isn't_ any heart to, your city--no!--there is no heart at all at the center of things--just a silly, pretty, very much decorated heart-shaped box filled with candy. If you shake it hard enough, it may rattle, but it won't throb. And I hate--hate--hate your old city. It's utterly, hopelessly, irremediably jejune, and I'm going home to-morrow!" As she leaned toward the Journalist, the gold locket on her prim, high-necked gown swung precipitously forth like a wall picture in a furious little earthquake.

The Journalist started to laugh, then changed his mind and narrowed his eyes speculatively toward something across the room. "No heart?" he queried. "No Romance?"

The Woodland Girl followed his exploring gaze. Between the plushy green _portieres_ a dull, cool, rose-colored vista opened forth refreshingly, with a fragment of bookcase, the edge of a stained gla.s.s window, the polished gleam of a grand piano, and then--lithe, sinuous, willowy, in the shaded lamplight--the lone, accentuated figure of a boy violinist.

In the amazing mellow glow that smote upon his face, the Woodland Girl noted with a crumple at her heart the tragic droop of the boy's dark head, the sluggish, velvet pa.s.sion of his eyes, the tortured mouth, the small chin fairly worn and burrowed away against his vibrant instrument. And the music that burst suddenly forth was like scalding water poured on ice--seething with anguish, shuddering with ecstasy, flame at your heart, frost at your spine.

The Girl began to shiver. "Oh, yes, I know," she whispered. "He plays, of course, as though he knew all sorrows by their first names, but that's Genius, isn't it, not Romance? He's such a little lad. He can hardly have experienced much really truly emotion as yet beyond a--stomach ache--or the loss of a Henty book."

"A stomach ache! A Henty book!" cried the Journalist, with a bitter, convulsive sort of mirth. "Well, I'm ready to admit that the boy is scarcely eighteen. But he happens to have lost a wife and a son within the past two months! While some of us country-born fellows of twenty-eight or thirty were asking our patient girls at home to wait even another year, while we came over to New York and tried our fortunes, this little youngster of scarcely eighteen is already a husband, a father, and a widower.

"He's a Russian Jew--you can see that--and one of our big music people picked him up over there a few months ago and brought him jabberingly to America. But the invitation didn't seem to include the wife and baby--genius and family life aren't exactly guaranteed to develop very successfully together--and right there on the dock at the very last sailing moment the little chap had to choose between a small, wailing family and a great big, clapping New York--just temporarily, you understand, a mere matter of immediate expediency; and families are supposed to keep indefinitely, you know, and keep sweet, too, while everybody knows that New York can go sour in a single night, even in the coldest weather. And just as the youngster was trying to decide, wavering first one way and then the other, and calling on high every moment to the G.o.d of all the Russias, the old steamer whistle began to blow, and they rustled him on board, and his wife and the kid pegged back alone to the province where the girl's father lived, and they got snarled up on the way with a band of Cossack soldiers, and the little chap hasn't got any one now even as far off as Russia to hamper his musical career.... So he's playing jig-tunes to people like us that are trying to forget our own troubles, such as how much we owe our tailors or our milliners. But sometimes they say he screams in the night, and twice he has fainted in the midst of a concert.

"No heart in the city? No Romance? Why, my dear child, this whole city fairly teems with Romance. The automobiles throb with it. The great, roaring elevated trains go hustling full of it. There's Romance--Romance--Romance from dawn to dark, and from dark to dawn again. The sweetness of the day-blooming sunshine, the madness of the night-blooming electric lights, the crowds, the colors, the music, the perfume--why, the city is _Romance-mad_! If you stop anywhere for even half an instant to get your breath, Romance will run right over you.

It's whizzing past you in the air. It's whizzing past you in the street.

It's whizzing past you in the sensuous, ornate theaters, in the jaded department stores, in the calm, gray churches. Romance?--Love?

"The only trouble about New York Romance lies just in the fact that it is so whizzingly premature. You've simply got to grab Love the minute before you've made up your mind--because the minute after you've made up your mind, it won't be there. Grab it--or lose it. Grab it--or lose it. That's the whole Heart-Motto of New York. Sinner or Saint--RUSH--RUSH--RUSH--like h.e.l.l!"

"Grab it--or lose it. Grab it, or--l-o-s-e it." Like the impish raillery of a tortured devil, the violin's pa.s.sionate, wheedling tremolo seemed to catch up the phrase, and mouth it and mock it, and tear it and tease it, and kiss it and curse it--and SMASH it at last into a great, screeching crescendo that rent your eardrums like the crash of steel rails.

With strangely parched lips, the Woodland Girl stretched out her small brown hand to the fragile, flower-stemmed gla.s.s, and tasted for the first time in her life the sweety-sad, molten-gold magic of champagne.

"Why, what is it?" she asked, with the wonder still wet on her lips.

"Why, what is it?"

The Journalist raised his own gla.s.s with staler fingers, and stared for a second through narrowing eyes into the shimmering vintage. "What is it?" he repeated softly. "This particular brand? The Italians call it '_Lacrymae Christi_.' So even in our furies and our follies, in our cafes and carousals, in our love and all our laughter--we drink--you see--the--'Tears of Christ.'" He reached out suddenly and covered the Girl's half-drained gla.s.s with a quivering hand. "Excuse me," he stammered. "Maybe--our thirst is partly of the soul; but '_Lacrymae Christi_' was never meant for little girls like you. _Go back to your woods!_"

Scuttle as it might, the precipitate, naked pa.s.sion in his voice did not quite have time to cover itself with word-clothes. A little gasping breath escaped. And though the Girl's young life was as shiningly empty as an unfinished house, her brain-cells were packed like an attic with all the inherent experiences of her mother's mother's mother, and she flinched instinctively with a great lurch of her heart.

"Oh, let's talk about something--dressy," she begged. "Let's talk about Central Park. Let's talk about the shops. Let's talk about the subway."

Her startled face broke desperately into a smile. "Oh, don't you think the subway is perfectly dreadful," she insisted. "There's so much underbrush in it!" Even as she spoke, her shoulders hunched up the merest trifle, and her head pushed forward, after the manner of people who walk much in the deep woods. The perplexity in her eyes spread instantly to her hands. Among the confusing array of knives and forks and spoons at her plate, her fingers began to snarl nervously like a city man's feet through a tangle of blackberry vines.

With a good-natured shrug of his shoulders, the Journalist turned to his more sophisticated neighbor, and left her quite piteously alone once more. An enamored-looking man and woman at her right were talking transmigration of souls, but whenever she tried to annex herself to their conversation they trailed their voices away from her in a sacred, aloof sort of whisper. Across the table the people were discussing city politics in a most clandestine sort of an undertone. Altogether it was almost half an hour before the Journalist remembered to smile at her again. The very first flicker of his lips started her red mouth mumbling inarticulately.

"Were you going to say something?" he asked.

She shook her head drearily. "No," she stammered. "I've tried and tried, but I can't think of anything at all to say. I guess I don't know any secrets."

The Journalist's keen eyes traveled shrewdly for a second round the cautious, worldly-wise table, and then came narrowing back rather quizzically to the Woodland Girl's flushing, pink and white face.

"Oh, I don't know," he smiled. "You look to me like a little girl who might have a good many secrets."

She shook her head. "No," she insisted, "in all the whole wide world I don't know one single thing that has to be whispered."

"No scandals?" teased the Journalist.

"No!"

"No love affairs?"

"No!"

The Journalist laughed. "Why, what do you think about all day long up in your woods?" he quizzed.

"Anglo-Saxon and Chemistry and Hindoo History and Sunsets and Mountains and Moose," she repeated glibly.

"Now you're teasing me," said the Journalist.

She nodded her head delightedly. "I'm trying to!" she smiled.

The Journalist turned part way round in his chair, and proffered her a perfectly huge olive as though it had been a crown jewel. When he spoke again, his voice was almost as low as the voice of the man who was talking transmigration of souls. But his smile was a great deal kinder.

"Don't you find any Romance at all in your woods?" he asked a bit drawlingly.

"No," said the Girl; "that's the trouble. Of course, when I was small it didn't make any difference; indeed, I think that I rather preferred it lonesome then. But this last year, somehow, and this last autumn especially--oh, I know you'll think I'm silly--but two or three times in the woods--I've hoped and hoped and hoped--at the turn of a trail, or the edge of a brook, or the scent of a camp fire--that I might run right into a real, live Hunter or Fisherman. And--one night I really prayed about it--and the next morning I got up early and put on my very best little hunting suit--all coats and leggings and things just like yours, you know--and I stayed out all day long--tramping--tramping--tramping, and I never saw _any one_. But I did get a fox. Yes!--and then--"

"And then what?" whispered the Journalist very helpfully.

The Girl began to smile, but her lips were quite as red as a blush.

"Well--and--then," she continued softly, "it occurred to me all of a sudden that the probable reason why the Man-Who-Was-Meant-for-Me didn't come was because he--_didn't know I was there_!" She began to laugh, toying all the while a little bit nervously with her ice-cream fork. "So I thought that perhaps--if I came down to New York this winter--and then went home again, that maybe--not probably you know, but just possibly--some time in the spring or summer--I might look up suddenly through the trees and he _would_ be there! But I've been ten days in New York and I haven't seen one single man whom I'd exactly like to meet in the woods--in my little hunting suit."

"Wouldn't you be willing to meet me?" pried the Journalist injudiciously.

The Girl looked up and faltered. "Why, of course," she hurried, "I should be very glad to see you--but I had always sort of hoped that the man whom I met in the woods wouldn't be bald."

The Journalist choked noisily over his salted almonds. His heightened color made him look very angry.

"Oh, I trust I wasn't rude," begged the Woodland Girl. Then as the Journalist's galloping laughter slowed down into the gentlest sort of a single-foot smile, her eyes grew abruptly big and dark with horror.

"Why, I never thought of it," she stammered, "but I suppose that what I have just said about the man in the woods and my coming to New York is--'husband hunting.'"

The Journalist considered the matter very carefully. "N--o," he answered at last, "I don't think I should call it 'husband hunting' nor yet, exactly, 'the search for the Holy Grail'; but, really now, I think on the whole I should call it more of a sacrament than a sport."