Part 45 (1/2)

The Maison epinay you must quest long, but great is your reward if you find it. Here is no weak remembrance of a lost Paris, but a French-Canadian's desire to express what he believes Paris must be; therefore a super-Paris, all in brown velvet and wicker tables, and at the back a long window edged with boxes red with geraniums, looking to a back-yard garden where rose-beds lead to a dancing-faun terminal in a shrine of ivy.

They sipped grenadine, heavy essence of a thousand berries. They had the place to themselves, save for Tony the waiter, with his smile of benison; and Carl read from Yeats.

He had heard of Yeats at Plato, but never had he known crying curlew and misty mere and the fluttering wings of Love till now.

His hand rested on her gloved hand.... Tony the waiter re-re-rearranged the serving-table.... When Ruth broke the spell with, ”You aren't very reverent with perfectly clean gloves,” they chattered like blackbirds at sunset.

Carl discovered that, being a New-Yorker, she knew part of it as intimately as though it were a village, and nothing about the rest.

She had taught him Fifth Avenue; told him the history of the invasion by shops, the social differences between East and West; pointed out the pictures of friends in photographers' wall-cases. Now he taught her the various New Yorks he had discovered in lonely rambles.

Together they explored Chelsea Village section, and the Oxford quadrangles of General Theological Seminary, where quiet meditation dwells in Tudor corridors; upper Greenwich Village, the home of Italian _tables d'hote_, clerks, social-workers, and radical magazines, of alley rookeries and the ancient Jewish burying-ground; lower Greenwich Village, where run-down American families with Italian lodgers live on streets named for kings, in wooden houses with gambrel roofs and colonial fanlights. From the same small-paned windows where frowsy Italian women stared down upon Ruth, Ruth's ancestors had leaned out to greet General George Was.h.i.+ngton.

On an open wharf near Tenth Street they were bespelled by April. The Woolworth Tower, to the south, was an immortal shaft of ivory and gold against an unwinking blue sky, challenging the castles and cathedrals of the Old World, and with its supreme art dignifying the commerce which built and uses it. The Hudson was l.u.s.trous with sun, and a sweet wind sang from unknown Jersey hills across the river. Moored to the wharf was a coal-barge, with a tiny dwelling-cabin at whose windows white curtains fluttered. Beside the cabin was a garden tended by the bargeman's comely white-browed wife; a dozen daisies and geraniums in two starch-boxes.

Forging down the river a scarred tramp steamer, whose rusty sides the sun turned to damask rose, bobbed in the slight swell, heading for open sea, with the British flag a-flicker and men chanting as they cleared deck.

”I wish we were going off with her--maybe to Singapore or Nagasaki,”

Carl said, slipping his arm through hers, as they balanced on the stringpiece of the wharf, sniffing like deer at the breeze, which for a moment seemed to bear, from distant burgeoning woods, a shadowy hint of burning leaves--the perfume of spring and autumn, the eternal wander-call.

”Yes!” Ruth mused; ”and moonlight in Java, and the Himalayas on the horizon, and the Vale of Cashmir.”

”But I'm glad we have this. Blessed, it's a day planned for lovers like us.”

”Carl!”

”Yes. Lovers. Courting. In spring. Like all lovers.”

”Really, Carl, even spring doesn't quite let me forget the _convenances_ are home waiting.”

”We're not lovers?”

”No, we----”

”Yet you enjoy to-day, don't you?”

”Yes, but----”

”And you'd rather be loafing on a dirty wharf, looking at a tramp steamer, than taking tea at the Plaza?”

”Yes, just now, perhaps----”

”And you're protesting because you feel it's proper to----”

”It----”

”And you really trust me so much that you're having difficulty in seeming alarmed?”

”Really----”

”And you'd rather play around with me than any of the Skull and Bones or Hasty Pudding men you know? Or foreign diplomats with spade beards?”

”At least they wouldn't----”