The darkly stained floor of hardwood was, of course, modern. So were
the new and very hideous oriental rugs made in Hoboken, and the
aniline pink wall-paper, and the brand new furniture still smelling of
department store varnish. Hideous, too, were the electric fixtures,
the gas-log in the old-time fireplace, and the bargain counter
bric-a-brac geometrically spaced upon the handsome old mantel.
But there were possibilities in the big, square room facing south and
in the two smaller bed chambers fronting the north. A modern bathroom
connected these.
To find an entire top floor in New York at such a price was as
amazing as it was comfortable to the girl who had not expected to be
able to afford more than a small bedroom.
* * * * *
She had a little money left, enough to purchase food and a few pots
and pans to cook it over the gas range in one of the smaller rooms.
And here she and Hafiz had their first meal on the long world-trail
stretching away before her. After which she sat for a while by the
window in a stiff arm-chair, thinking of Clive and of his silence, and
of the young girl he was one day to marry.
Southward, the lights of the city began to break out and sparkle
through the autumn haze; tall towers, hitherto invisible, suddenly
glimmered against the sky-line. A double vista of lighted street lamps
stretched east and west below her.
The dusty-violet light of evening softened the shabby street below,
veiling ugliness and squalor and subtly transmuting meanness and
poverty to picturesqueness--as artists, using only the flattering
simplicity of essentials, show us in etching and aquarelle the romance
of the commonplace. And so the rusty iron balconies of a chop suey
across the street became quaint and curious: dragon and swinging
gilded sign, banner and garish fretwork grew mellow and mysterious
under the ruddy Hunter's Moon sailing aloft out of the city's haze
like a great Chinese lantern.
From an unseen steeple or two chimes sounded the hour. Farther away in
the city a bell answered. It is not a city of belfries and chimes;
only locally and by hazard are bell notes distinguishable above the
interminable rolling monotone of the streets.
And now, the haze thickening, distant reverberations, deep, mellow,
melancholy, grew in the night air: fog horns from the two rivers and
the bay.
Leaning both elbows on the sill of the opened window Athalie gazed
wearily into the street where noisy children shrilled at one another
and dodged vehicles like those quick tiny creatures whirling on ponds.
Here and there, the flare of petroleum torches lighted push-carts
piled with fruit or laden with bowls of lemonade and hokey-pokey.
Sidewalks were crowded with shabby people gossiping in groups or
passing east and west--about what squalid business only they could
know.