The old Major, a little out of breath from the stairs, was glad of the
chance to sit down and recover himself. He was also glad that he had
found the roughly scrawled “Back at Two” sign on the door and the studio
still empty, for when Teddie was about there was always small chance of
studying anything beyond Teddie herself.
So, having returned to a normal manner of respiration, he proceeded to a
quiet but none the less critical examination of the premises. He was
disturbed, on the whole, by the baldness of the dingy-walled old studio
with its broken and paint-spattered floor and its big north window
entirely out of alignment. There was a long cherrywood table pretty well
littered with brushes and paint-tubes and boxes of pastels and a wooden
manikin and various disjointed portions of the human figure reproduced
in plaster-of-paris. And there was an easel, and an armchair draped in
faded brown velvet, and a number of hammered brass things, and a
castered model-platform, and a bedraggled blue canvas blouse over a
chair-back, and many drawings of very lean ladies and very muscular
young gentlemen thumb-tacked to the walls. And behind the studio, to the
right, was a much more orderly kitchenette, and, to the left, a rather
nun-like little sleeping-alcove with a couch-bed about as wide as a
tombstone.
Uncle Chandler sighed with relief, for he had resolutely keyed himself
up to expect what he’d called “a goulash of the Oriental stuff,” with
ruby lanterns and draped divans and punk-sticks in jade bowls. But Uncle
Chandler found himself in what looked more like a workshop than a
palm-reader’s parlor, and the frown of trouble lightened a little on his
wrinkled old forehead. He even took up an oblong of draughting-board and
was studying a pea-green omnibus going under a _café-au-lait_ Washington
Arch which veered a trifle to the right when the door opened and Teddie
herself came in with a big pigskin portfolio under her arm.
“Hello there, Teddie,” he said guardedly, as he watched her unspear a
turban-thing of twisted velvet from her bobbed hair.
“Hello, Uncle Chandler,” she rather indifferently responded as she put
the pigskin portfolio on the cherrywood table. “How’s the _haute monde_
and your sciatica?”
“How’s _l’art pour l’art_?” almost tartly responded her uncle, noting,
however, with undivulged satisfaction the clear crispness of her
movements and that she was thinner than usual, with an adorable little
Lina-Cavaliera hollow in the center of the cheek where the
butternut-brown had once more blanched into a magnolia-white.
Teddie laughed, without deigning an answer.
“How about some tea?” she said instead. And without waiting for his
reply she lifted out a battered old samovar and pushed the cigarettes
toward his end of the table as she proceeded, somewhat more deftly than
her visitor had anticipated, with the business in hand.
“About those peaches and truffles, Uncle Chandler,” she said as she
stooped to adjust the flickering blue flame. “I sent them back because
I’m out of the flapper class now. It was kind of you, of course. But I’m
no longer a schoolgirl. I’ve cut out that boarding-school stuff. I
intend to be something more than a Strasbourg goose, and if I’m
suffering from any sort of hunger, it’s more a hunger of the soul than
of the body.”
This was a new note from Teddie, and not unlike most newnesses, it came
with a slight sense of shock.
“My dear girl, I was only trying to get even with you for that—that
delightful little water-color of the Palisades above Fort Lee. It was
clever, my dear, and I always did like our Hudson River scenery.”
Teddie stood up straight. She stood inspecting him with a cold and
slightly combative eye.
“That was the Flatiron Building in a snow-storm,” she somewhat frigidly
explained.
“Ah!” said the astute old Major, settling into the brown velvet
armchair. “That’s what I said, all along. That’s precisely what I told
Higginson. And Higginson, who is always a bit bullheaded, y’ understand,
insisted that it was Palisades, saying he’d lived on ’em all his life
and ought to know. But I didn’t come here to talk about Higginson. I
came here to find out how you’re getting along.”
This was a question which Teddie found necessary to sit back and
consider carefully.
“You see, Uncle Chandler, I’ve so much to unlearn! You can’t keep a girl
under glass most of her life and then expect her to horn in where the
dairy-lunchers learned the game in their infancy.”
The Major winced a little. Here was still another newness to disturb
him, a newness not so much of phraseology as of outlook.
“This is a new life,” Teddie gravely continued, “and I’ve got to get in
step with it or get walked over. There are people down here who have the
gift of making poverty romantic, people who can turn an empty pocketbook
into a sort of adventure. They can eat onion soup and _spaghetti au
gratin_ and wash cold-storage capon down with that _eau-de-quinine_
stuff they drink and be happy on it because they know they are free,
free to express themselves as they want to express themselves, free to
work and live and think, and come and go as they like. And that’s
wonderful, Uncle Chandler, when you come to think of it.”
Uncle Chandler sat thinking this over, with no ponderable amount of
enthusiasm on his face.
“And just how do you intend expressing yourself?” he asked as the
samovar began to bubble.
“I think it will be in color,” said Teddie with the utmost solemnity. “I
began with modeling, but it was rather messy, and I didn’t make much
headway. I’m beginning to feel that pastel or dry-point is more my
_penchant_. Raoul Uhlan is giving me three lessons a week.”
“That big stiff!” ejaculated the philistine old Major.
“He’s one of the cleverest painters in New York,” Teddie calmly
explained.
“And a professional tame-robin who gets portrait commissions, I
understand, because he can dance like a stage acrobat!”
“I know nothing about his dancing,” remarked Teddie, with her eyebrows
up. “But I _do_ know it’s sinful the way the children of our idle rich
are kept cooped up and shut away from real life. They’re hemmed in with
a lot of silly old taboos. They’re laced up in a straight-jacket of
social laws until they’re too flabby to face a personal dilemma that an
East Side shop-girl could decide before she’d finished powdering her
nose.”
Uncle Chandler took up his teacup and then put it down again.
“I rather fail to see what the personal predicaments of shop-girls have
got to do with the matter,” he said with some acerbity. “You’re a
Hayden, the third wealthiest woman in Orange County, and a girl who’s
had every comfort that money and machinery can give her. Yet you leave a
home that cost about two-thirds of a million—without counting those
cross-eyed marble lions your mother brought over from Florence for the
Sunken Gardens!—and come down here into this moth-eaten backyard of the
Eighth Ward and live on macaroni and red ink and dream that raw life is
being dished up to you on the half-shell. You talk about liberty and
expressing yourself, and all you’re doing is slumming, just slumming!”
Teddie smiled. It was a languid smile and a superior one.
“Uncle Chandler,” she remarked, “you really don’t know what you’re
talking about. In the first place, I’ve decided that in one day you can
see more life, real life, out of that crooked old window there than you
could discern in Tuxedo Park in a century.” She ushered him toward the
casement in question. “Look at that Italian woman with the bundle of
clothes on her head. And those kids crowding about the hokey-pokey man.
And that gray-headed old candy-seller with the feather-duster in his
hand. And that white hearse with the white angel kneeling on the top and
that line of bareheaded Dago mourners marching along just as you’d see
them in Naples or Ancona. And look at that wagon-load of crated geese
that have just come from the Gansevoort Market, with their necks craned
out between the slats. Why, those poor things are fighting for liberty
just about the same as I’ve been fighting for it!”
“And about as effectively,” remarked Uncle Chandler.
“Well, whose funeral is it, anyway?” demanded Teddie, with her first
touch of impatience. “This happens to be my show, and I happen to be
running it in my own way. I know what’s ahead of me, and I’m going
straight for it.”
Teddie’s uncle was able to smile at the uncompromising ardor of youth.
But there was a touch of impatience in his movements as he crossed over
to what he hoped might prove a more comfortable chair. He had no
intention of letting a snip of a girl Cook’s-guide him about his own
city, the city he’d lived in for some sixty-odd years. And he wasn’t
such a stranger to Greenwich Village as she imagined, for through the
mists of time he could still remember Ned Harrigan and Perry Street, and
Sim Sharp and certain Tough Club chowders of the olden and golden days.
“So you’re going straight, are you?” he snapped out, with only the light
in his kindly old eyes to contradict the bruskness of his speech. “Well,
all I have to say is that you’re a wonder if you can go straight in a
district like this. Good gad, ma’am, even the streets don’t go straight
down here. They’re as deluded as the benzine-daubers who tramp them. And
it may be none of my business, but I’ve an itch to know what’s going to
happen to a high-spirited girl who’s veering dead south when she dreams
she’s heading due west.”
“And that means,” suggested Teddie, “that you propose to hang around to
see what’s going to happen?”
“On the contrary, young lady, I’m going down to Hot Springs to-morrow
morning to get some of the acid steamed out of my knee-joints. You’re
old enough to do as you like. I’ve always admitted that. And I’ve talked
to Trummie about it, before he got away. I’ve talked to your dad. And he
remarked that it wasn’t a matter of such tremendous importance, after
all, since he has just figured out that the planet on which we at
present subsist will be completely obliterated in some six million
years. And he seems to be more interested in Betelgeuse, at the moment,
than he is in Greenwich Village. But I repeat that you’ve come into a
crooked part of this old Island for any straight-cuts to freedom. You’ll
do just what the streets do down here: you’ll get all twisted up. Just
look at ’em! Look at ’em, I say. You’ve got Tenth Street doubling round
and running into Fourth Street, and Waverley Place going in four
directions at once—the same as the folks who live in it! They don’t
know where they’re at, none of ’em. And even the upper side of your
Square here is not only Washington Square North, but also Sixth Street,
and at the same time also Waverley Place again. And the east side of
your same old Square is University Place down as far as Fourth Street,
and then without rhyme or reason it calls itself Wooster Street. And
your south side is really Fourth Street, but on Fourth Street proper the
numbers increase from east to west, but on what is really the same
street called Washington Square South your numbers increase from west to
east. And your Square isn’t even a square, but a rectangle. And if you
can straighten all that out in your beautiful little bean you know your
old New York a trifle better than I do—and that, I acknowledge, would
be going some.”
“But I’m not interested in the streets and the mail-directory numbers,”
Teddie patiently explained. “What I’ve been talking about is the spirit
of the place, its aura.”
“Yes, I got a sniff of it as I came through that Italian settlement,”
acknowledged Uncle Chandler. “And it was quite a penetrating aura.”
“But you’re only croaking out of a swamp of prejudices,” contended
Teddie. “You don’t understand our ways of living or looking at life. You
try to gauge Greenwich Village, which was once good enough for Poe and
Masefield, by Fifth Avenue standards, and you get your numbers mixed.”
She looked up at him with a more commiserative light in her earnest
young eyes. “But if you want to see us as we are, why not take chow with
me at the Blue Pigeon to-night?”
“Not muchee!” averred Uncle Chandler, with great alacrity. “I’ve
altogether too much respect for my Fifth-Avenuey Little Mary. I’ve seen
’em before, those futuristic smoke-boxes with a tinned sardine rolled up
in a pimento-skin and _Mimis_ from Waterbury and up-State Villons who
muss their hair and get mixed up on the garlic and free-verse. So, much
as I love you, Teddie, I’ll toddle along to my benighted old Nasturtium
Club and deaden my soul on Green Turtle clear and Terrapin, Philadelphia
style, and breast of Chicken _Fincise_ with sweet potatoes Dixie, and
new peas _Saute_, and an ice and coffee to end up with.”
Teddie tried to look indifferent. But it took a struggle. For her Uncle
Chandler had rather disdainfully picked up an oblong of cardboard and
sat inspecting it with a none too approving eye.
What he inspected was a crayon sketch of an extremely muscular right arm
and shoulder, a right arm and shoulder which at least demanded some
qualified respect. But his grizzled old eyebrows were closer together as
he looked up at Teddie again.
“Did you say you drew from models?” he casually inquired.
“Of course,” acknowledged Teddie, pausing long enough to answer her
telephone and explain that she and not the landlord had ordered the new
glass for the skylight.
“You don’t mean to say you have men come up here and—and expose their
muscles for this sort of thing?” demanded Uncle Chandler, with a gesture
toward the ample biceps in crayon.
Teddie laughed.
“Oh, no, that wasn’t a professional model. That’s the arm of Gunboat
Dorgan, the prize-fighter. I sketched that the other afternoon when he
was up here with Ruby Reamer, one of my regular models. He’s Ruby’s
steady, as she calls it. She’s very proud of him, and had him showing me
some of his stunts. So I thought it would be a good chance to get a
study of an arm like that. And Gunnie—that’s what Ruby calls him—isn’t
a bit like what I thought a prize-fighter would be. He’s rather a
bright-minded boy, and a little shy, and if he wins the lightweight bout
from Slim Britton, the English boxer, he’s going to marry Ruby and take
a flat down on Second Avenue.”
“But you say he’s a fighter, a ring-fighter?”
“Yes, that’s how he makes his living. He’s quite serious about it all,
and trains hard, and plans about working his way up, just as a man in
any other profession would.”
Uncle Chandler sat thinking this over. He would have done considerably
more thinking if he’d been in possession of the information that his
niece had already allowed this same prize-fighter to pilot her and Ruby
and the wine-colored roadster out to a sea-food dinner at a Sound
road-house. But even as it was, Uncle Chandler seemed sufficiently
upset.
“Say, Teddikins,” he somewhat grimly remarked out of the silence that
had fallen over the darkening studio, “what d’you suppose your mother
would think about all this?”
“I’m not in the least interested in what mother thinks about it,” was
Teddie’s altogether irresponsible and wilful rejoinder.
The old Major, who had already risen to go, turned this speech over,
turned it over with great deliberation. Then he sat down again.
“It’s not so much Lydia, my dear,” he said. “It’s what poor old Lydia
embodies, the organized entrenchments that surround young girls, the
machinery of service that may shut you in, but at the same time does
things for you and gives you something to fall back on when the pinch
comes!”
“But I don’t understand what you mean by the pinch,” Teddie told him,
straightening the gardenia that stood so stiff and straight in his
coat-lapel. For she liked her Uncle Chandler, and she liked him a lot.
And she was a little disturbed by the look of anxiety that had come into
his worldly-wise old face.
He stared at her for a moment, shrugged his shoulders, and took up his
hat and stick.
“You’re all right, Teddie,” he announced with decision as he solemnly
kissed her on the cheek-bone. “But—but I wish somebody was looking
after you when I’m down there being boiled out.”
This made Teddie laugh. She not only laughed, but she extended her arms,
like a traffic-officer stopping a jay-driver, or a young eagle trying
its wings.
“But I don’t need any one to look after me, thank heaven! _I’m free!_”
The old Major stopped at the door.
“And you feel that you can manage it all right? That you can——”
For reasons entirely his own he did not finish the sentence.
“I _am_ managing it,” the girl quietly asserted.
And Uncle Chandler, in finally taking his departure, experienced at
least a qualified relief. The girl was wrong, all wrong. And what was
worse, she was much too lovely to the eye to remain unmolested by
predaceous man. But she had a will of her own, had Teddie. And, what was
more, she might have gone to Paris to “express herself,” as she called
it. Or she might have tried to find her soul by going on the stage. And
the Major knew well enough what that would have meant. After all, the
girl would learn to scratch for herself. She would have to. And as old
Stillman had intimated, it might do her a world of good!