Teddie, as a matter-of-fact girl, had scant patience with the undue
attribution of the romantic to the commonplace. Yet the manner in which
she had first met Raoul Uhlan, it must be admitted, was not without its
touch of the picturesque.
Teddie, still a little intoxicated with her new-found liberty, and
further elated by the sparkling morning sunshine of Fifth Avenue, was
swinging smartly up that slope which an over-busy world no longer
remembers as Murray Hill. She was in a slightly shortened blue serge
skirt that whipped against her slim young knees suggestively akin to the
drapery of the _Nike_ of Samothrace, and was just approaching the
uplands of the Public Library Square when she caught sight of a
violet-peddler.
A glimpse of the seven earthy-smelling clumps of bloom, buskined in
tin-foil and neatly arranged on their little wooden tray, promptly
intrigued the girl into stopping, fumbling in her none too orderly
hand-bag, and passing over to the sloe-eyed Greek a bank-note with
double-X’s imprinted on its silk-threaded surface. And having adjusted
the sword-knotted clump to her belt by means of one of the peddler’s
glass-headed pins, she looked up to see this same peddler contemplating
the bank-note with a frown of perplexity. He was explaining, in broken
English, that his exchequer stood much too limited to make change for a
hill so big. Then, with a smile of inspiration, he placed the tray of
violets in the girl’s hands, pointed toward a near-by store on the
side-street, and plainly implied that he would break the twenty and
return with more negotiable currency.
So Teddie stood patiently holding the tray of violets, in the clear
white light of the sunny Avenue, happy in the flowery perfumes which
were being wafted up to her delicately distended nostril.
But something else was at the same time being wafted in Teddie’s
direction. It was a tall and handsome stranger in tight-fitting tweeds,
carrying a cane and an air of preoccupation. There was lightness in his
step, notwithstanding his size, and any unseemly amplitude of ventral
contour was fittingly corrected by a tightly laced obesity-belt, just as
the somewhat heavy line of the lips was lightened by a short-trimmed and
airily-pointed mustache. For the stranger was Raoul Uhlan, and Raoul
Uhlan was an artist, though any thoughtless motion-picture director who
had dared to flash him on the screen as a type of his profession would
have been held up to ridicule and reproof. But this particular artist,
who was neither dreamy-eyed nor addicted to velveteen jackets, found the
quest of beauty both a professional and a personal necessity. So when he
beheld a young lady of most unmistakable charm standing beside a
gray-stone retaining wall with a street-peddler’s violet-tray in her
hands, he momentarily forgot about the prospective sitter from
Pittsburgh with whom he was to breakfast. He hove-to in the offing, in
fact, for the seemingly innocent purpose of buying a boutonnière. It
would be gracious, he also decided as he soberly inquired the price of
violets that morning, to give the little thing a thrill. For Raoul often
wondered what it was about him that made him so attractive to women.
“One dollar a bunch,” soberly responded the little thing, in answer to
his question, giving scant evidence of being thrilled. She was uncertain
about prices, and her thoughts, in fact, were fixed on the matter of not
cheating the humble and honest tradesman whose wares had been delegated
to her hands. She noticed the strange man’s momentary wince, but never
dreamed it arose from a confrontation with profiteering. She
nonchalantly took his dollar, however, tucked it into one corner of the
tray, and handed him the violets and the essential pin.
She was quite prepared to repeat the operation with a dandified old
gentleman in pearl spats, who was hovering near, when an officer in
uniform sauntered up and, being out of sorts with the world that
morning, confronted her with a lowering and saturnine brow.
“Yuh gotta license t’ peddle them flowers?” he demanded.
Teddie, in no wise disturbed, explained the situation and further
announced that the gentleman who owned the tray would return
immediately.
Her urbanity, however, was wasted on the Avenue air.
“Yuh just made a sale to this guy here, didn’t yuh?” persisted the
officer of the law, with a none too respectful thumb-jerk toward the
immaculately tweeded figure with the over-sized bouquet in his
button-hole.
“Yes, this is the dollar he paid me,” Teddie sweetly acknowledged.
“That’s enough,” averred her persecutor. “Yuh’re street peddlin’ without
a license. So yuh’ll have to come along wit’ me.”
“But, odd as it may seem, I rather want my nineteen dollars,” maintained
Teddie, with an intent gaze down the side-street.
“Your nineteen dollars and seventy-five cents,” corrected the man in
tweeds, not forgetful of a recent extortion.
“Yuh’re likely to clap eyes on that Dago again, ain’t yuh!” The open
scorn of the officer was monumental. “He’ll be spendin’ what’s left of
his days tryin’ to ferret yuh out, I s’pose, wastin’ his young life away
battlin’ to get that easy coin back to yuh! What he’s breakin’ now isn’t
a twenty-dollar bill, my gerrl, but a travelin’ record down to the Third
Ward. And I guess the sooner yuh come along wit’ me, and the quieter yuh
come, the better.”
“But you really can’t do this sort of thing, you know, Officer,” the man
in tweeds interposed. “This girl——”
“Yuh shut your trap,” announced the upholder of law and order, with an
indifferent side-glance at the interloper, “or I’ll gather yuh in wit’
the dame here.”
“That’s an eventuality which I’d rather welcome,” averred the other,
with his blood up.
“All right, then, come along, the both o’ yuh,” was the prompt and easy
response. “And come quick or I’ll make it a double pinch for blockin’
traffic.”
But Raoul Uhlan, clinging to what was left of his dignity, insisted on
calling a taxi-cab (which Teddie paid for when they arrived at the
Forty-Seventh Street station-house) and in transit managed to say many
soothing and valorous things, so that by the time Teddie stood before a
somewhat grim-looking desk in the neighboring receiving depot for
miscreants, her courage had come back to her and she didn’t even resort
to home addresses and influences for a short-cut out of her difficulty.
She soon had the satisfaction, indeed, of seeing her moody patrolman
picturesquely berated by his higher official behind the desk, who
apologized for retaining the dollar bill and the tray of violets and
announced that as there was no case and no charge against her—which any
one but a pin-headed flatty with a double-barreled grouch could have
seen!—she was quite free to enjoy the morning air once more.
So Teddie sallied forth with a great load off her mind and with Raoul
Uhlan at her side. And the latter, instead of breakfasting with the
plutocrat from Pittsburgh who wished to perpetuate his obesity in oils,
sent a polite fib of explanation over the wires which were more or less
inured to such things, and carried Teddie off to luncheon at the
Brevoort, where he learned that she was one of the Haydens of Tuxedo and
had a studio on the fringe of Greenwich Village and wanted to paint. And
before she quite knew how it had all been arranged it was agreed that
Uhlan was to come three times a week and give her lessons in Art, for
the sake of Art.