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----"




readonlinefreebook.com Copyright 2016 - 2024