He had followed her; he stood with his arm circling her shoulder.
She begged, "No. Please no. I'm frightened. Let's--oh, let's have a walk
or something before you scamper home."
"Look! My dear! Let's run away, and explore the town, and not come back
till late evening."
"Yes. Let's."
They walked from Queen Anne Hill through the city to the docks. There
was nothing in their excited, childish, "Oh, see that!" and "There's a
dandy car!" and "Ohhhhh, that's a Minnesota license--wonder who it is?"
to confess that they had been so closely, so hungrily together.
They swung along a high walk overlooking the city wharf. They saw a
steamer loading rails and food for the government railroad in Alaska.
They exclaimed over a nest of little, tarry fishing-boats. They watched
men working late to unload Alaska salmon.
They crossed the city to Jap Town and its writhing streets, its dark
alleys and stairways lost up the hillsides. They smiled at black-eyed
children, and found a Japanese restaurant, and tried to dine on raw fish
and huge shrimps and roots soaked in a very fair grade of light-medium
motor oil.
With Milt for guide, Claire discovered a Christianity that was not of
candles and shifting lights and insinuating music, nor of carpets and
large pews and sound oratory, but of hoboes blinking in rows, and girls
in gospel bonnets, and little silver and crimson placards of Bible
texts. They stopped on a corner to listen to a Pentecostal brother, to
an I. W. W. speaker, to a magnificent negro who boomed in an operatic
baritone that the Day of Judgment was coming on April 11, 1923, at three
in the morning.
In the streets of Jap Town, in cheap motion-picture theaters, in hotels
for transient workmen, she found life, running swift and eager and
many-colored; and it seemed to her that back in the house of
four-posters and walls of subdued gray, life was smothered in the very
best pink cotton-batting. Milt's delight in every picturesque dark
corner, and the colloquial eloquence of the street-orators, stirred her.
And when she saw a shopgirl caress the hand of a slouching beau in
threadbare brown, her own hand slipped into Milt's and clung there.
But they came shyly up to the Gilson hedge, and when Milt chuckled,
"Bully walk; let's do it again," she said only, "Oh, yes, I did like it.
Very much."
He had abruptly dropped his beautiful new felt hat. He was clutching her
arms, demanding, "Can you like me? Oh my God, Claire, I can't play at
love. I'm mad--I just live in you. You're my blood and soul. Can I
become--the kind of man you like?"
"My dear!" She was fiercely addressing not him alone but the Betzes and
Coreys and Gilsons and Jeff Saxtons, "don't you forget for one moment
that all these people--here or Brooklyn either--that seem so aloof and
amused, are secretly just plain people with enamel on, and you're to
have the very best enamel, if it's worth while. I'm not sure that it
is----"