Part 4 (1/2)
It is full of romance. You cannot escape it, no matter how hard you try to be practical. You start off on some commonplace stroll enough--or you tell yourself it will be so; you are in the middle of cable car lines and hustling people and shouting truck drivers, and street cleaners and motors and newsboys, and all the component parts of a modern and seemingly very sordid city--when, lo and behold, a step to the right or left has taken you into another country entirely--I had well-nigh said another world. Where did it come from--that quaint little house with the fanlight over the door and the flower-starred gra.s.splot in front? Did it fall from the skies or was it built in a minute like the delectable little house in ”Peter Pan”?
Neither. It has stood there right along for half or three-quarters of a century, only you didn't happen to know it. You have stepped around the corner into Greenwich Village, that's all.
”In spots there is an unwonted silence, as though one were in some country village,” says Joseph Van d.y.k.e. ”... There are sc.r.a.ps of this silence to be found about old houses, old walls, old trees.”
Here, as in the fairy tales, all things become possible. You know that a lady in a mob-cap and panniers is playing inside that shyly curtained window. Hark! You can hear the thin, delicate notes quite plainly: this is such a quiet little street. A piano rather out of tune? Perish the thought! Dear friend, it is a spinet,--a harpsichord.
Almost you can smell pot-pourri.
Perhaps it was of such a house that H.C. Bunner wrote:
_”We lived in a cottage in old Greenwich Village, With a tiny clay plot that was burnt brown and hard; But it softened at last to my girl's patient tillage, And the roses sprang up in our little backyard;”_
The garden hunger of the Village! It is something pathetic and yet triumphant, pitiful and also splendid. It is joyous life and growth hoping in the most unpromising surroundings: it is eager and gallant hope exulting in the very teeth of defeat. Do you remember John Reed's--
_”Below's the barren, gra.s.sless, earthen ring Where Madame, with a faith unwavering Planted a wistful garden every spring,-- Forever hoped-for,--never blossoming.”_
Yet they do blossom, those hidden and usually unfruitful garden-places. Sometimes they bloom in real flowers that anyone can see and touch and smell. Sometimes they come only as flowers of the heart--which, after all, will do as well as another sort,--in Greenwich Village, where they know how to make believe.
Here is how Hugh Macatamney describes Greenwich:
”A walk through the heart of this interesting locality--the American quarter, from Fourteenth Street down to Ca.n.a.l, west of Sixth Avenue--will reveal a moral and physical cleanliness not found in any other semi-congested part of New York; an individuality of the positive sort transmitted from generation to generation; a picturesqueness in its old houses, 'standing squarely on their right to be individual'
alongside those of modern times, and, above all else, a truly American atmosphere of the pure kind.”
He adds:
”Please remember, too, that in 1816 Greenwich Village had individualism enough to be the terminus of a stage line from Pine Street and Broadway, the stages 'running on the even hours from Greenwich and the uneven hours from Pine Street.'”
You walk on through Greenwich Village and you will expect romance to meet you. Even the distant clang of a cable car out in the city will not break the spell that is on you now. And if you have a spark of fancy, you will find your romance. You cannot walk a block in Greenwich without coming on some stony wall, suggestive alley, quaint house or vista or garden plot or tree. Everything sings to you there; even the poorest sections have a quaint glamour of their own. It gleams out at you from the most forbidding surroundings. Sometimes it is only a century-old door knocker or an ancient vine-covered wall--but it is a breath from the gracious past.
And as you cannot go a step in the Village without seeing something picturesque so you cannot read a page of the history of Greenwich without stumbling upon the trail of romance or adventure. As, for example, the tale of that same Sir. Peter Warren, whose name we have encountered more than once before, as proper a man as ever stepped through the leaves of a Colonial history and the green purlieus of Old Greenwich!
CHAPTER III
_The Gallant Career of Sir. Peter Warren_
”... Affection with truth must say That, deservedly esteemed in private life, And universally renowned for his public conduct, The judicial and gallant Officer Possessed all the amiable qualities of the Friend, the Gentleman, and the Christian....”
--_From the epitaph written for Sir. Peter's tomb in Westminster Abbey by Dr. Samuel Johnson._
The sea has always made a splendid romantic setting for a gallant hero. Even one of moderate attainments and inconsiderable adventures may loom to proportions that are quite picturesque when given a background of tossing waves, ”all sails set,” and a few jolly tars to sing and fight and heave the rope. And when you have a hero who needs no augmenting of heroism, no spectacular embellishment as it were,--what a gorgeous figure he becomes, to be sure!
Peter Warren, fighting Irish lad, venturesome sailor, sometime Admiral and Member of Parliament, and at all times a merry and courageous soldier of the high seas, falls heir to as pretty and stirring a reputation as ever set a gilded aureole about the head of a man.
Though he was in the British navy and a staunch believer in ”Imperial England,” he was so closely a.s.sociated with New York for so many years that no book about the city could be written without doing him some measure of honour. No figure is so fit as Sir. Peter's to represent those picturesque Colonial days when the ”Sons of Liberty” had not begun to a.s.semble, and this New York of ours was well-nigh as English as London town itself. So, resplendent in his gold-laced uniform and the smartly imposing hat of his rank and office, let him enter and make his bow,--Admiral Sir. Peter Warren, by your leave, Knight of the Bath, Member of Parliament, destined to lie at last in the stately gloom of the Abbey, with the rest of the ill.u.s.trious English dead.
He came of a long line of Irishmen, and certainly did that fine fighting race the utmost credit. From his boyhood he was always hunting trouble; he dearly loved a fight, and gravitated into the British navy as inevitably as a duck to water. He was scarcely more than an urchin when he became a fighting sailor, and indeed one could expect no less, for both his father and grandfather had been officers in the service, and goodness knows how many l.u.s.ty Warrens before them!
For our friend Peter was a Warren of Warrenstown, of the County Meath just west of Dublin, and let me tell you that meant something!
The Warrens got their estates in the days of ”Strongbow,” and held them through all the vicissitudes of olden Ireland. They were a house called ”English-Irish,” and ”inside the pale,” which means that they stood high in British favour, and contributed heroes to the army or navy from each of their hardy generations. They had no t.i.tle, but to be The Warren of Warrenstown, Meath, was to be ent.i.tled to look down with disdain upon upstart baronets and newly created peers. Sir.
Christopher Aylmer's daughter, Catherine, was honoured to marry Captain Michael Warren, and her brother, Admiral Lord Aylmer, only too glad to take charge of her boy Peter later on.