on Sunday afternoon; and none the less was he on his way down to Wall
Street to take out for a walk the one girl in New York who seemed to him
to have the unpretending simplicity of the girls of the Southwest. What
did he care, he asked himself, whether or not it was fashionable to call
on girls Sunday afternoon? What right had the New-Yorkers, anyhow, to
assume that their way of doing things was the only right and proper
way?
Having propounded these questions to himself, he answered them with a
smile, for he had a saving sense of humor, and even a tendency towards
self-analysis, and he had long ago detected his own pride in living in
New York. In his earliest letters home he had expressed his delight in
that he was now at the headquarters of the whole country; and he had
written these letters on broad sheets of paper bought in the German
quarter, and adorned with outline views of the sights of the city,
picked out in the primary colors. He had sent missives thus decorated
not only to his family and to his old friends, but even to mere
acquaintances of his boyhood, for whom he cared little or nothing,
except that they should know him to be settled in the metropolis. He
could not but suspect that if he were now to go back to the village of
his birth, he would seem as stuck-up to the natives as the New-Yorkers
had seemed to him the first few weeks he was in the city.
The car slipped down Seventh Avenue, and stumbled into Broadway, and
sped along sometimes with a smooth swiftness and again with a jerky
hesitation. Gayly dressed family groups got on and got off, and the car
had almost emptied itself by the time it came to Madison Square. Filson
Shelby was greatly interested in the manners of two handsomely gowned
girls who sat opposite to him, and who did not know each other very
well. It struck him that one of them--the prettier of the two, as it
happened--was a little uneasy in the other's company, and yet pleased to
be seen with her. To his regret, both of them alighted at Grace Church,
leaving only half a dozen people in the long car as it started again on
its journey down-town.
He set down the plainer of the two as a member of the strange society
known as the "Four Hundred," about which he had heard so much since he
had been reading the Sunday papers. If he were right in this ascription,
and if he were to judge by this sample, the girls of the Four Hundred
were not a very good-looking lot, for all they were so stylishly
dressed. It struck him, too, that this girl's manners were somehow
offensive, although he could not state precisely where the offence lay.
He was glad that the one girl in New York whom he knew at all well had
the easy good manners which spring from a naturally good heart. She was
as well educated as the two girls who had just left the car; perhaps
better, for she was going to graduate from the Normal College in two or
three months; and yet she was unaffected and unassuming. As he phrased
it in his mind, "she didn't put on any frills." He could chat with her
just as easily as he used to talk to the girls who had gone to school
with him at home. And yet when he considered how unlike she was really
to these friends of his childhood he wondered why it was he and she had
got along so well, and his thoughts went back to the occasion of his
first meeting with her.
The car was now speeding swiftly down Broadway, obstructed by no
carriages, no carts, no tracks, no wagons, and no drays. Below Astor
Place the sidewalks were as bare as the street itself was empty. The
shades were down in the windows of the many-storied buildings which
towered above the deserted thoroughfare, and the flamboyant signs made
their incessant appeals in vain. For a mile or more it was almost as
though he were being carried through the avenues of an abandoned city.
The one evidence of life, other than the cars themselves, was an
infrequent bicyclist "riding the cable slot" up from the South Ferry. If
only he had first arrived in New York in the restful quiet of a Sunday,
so the young Southwesterner found himself thinking, perhaps the
metropolis might not have seemed to him so overwhelming. As it was, it
had been a shock to him to be plunged suddenly into the vortex of the
immense city.
A telegrapher in the little town near which he was born, Filson Shelby
had gone beyond his duty to oblige a New-Yorker who had chanced to be
detained there for a fortnight, and the New-Yorker had repaid his
courtesy by the proffer of a position as private operator in the office
of a Wall Street friend. The young man had accepted eagerly, having no
ties to bind him to his home; and yet he had felt desperately homesick
more than once during his first three months in New York. Indeed, it was
not until he had come to know Edna Leisler that he had reconciled
himself to the great town, which was so crowded, and in which he was so
alone. He was slow to form friendships, but he had made a few
acquaintances.
It was one of these casual acquaintances who had taken him one day to
the top of an old office building not far from the Stock Exchange. Here
the janitor lived, and was allowed to use one of the rooms allotted to
him as a lunch-room. The janitor's wife was a good cook, and Filson
Shelby returned there again and again. One Saturday, when the room
happened to be more crowded than usual, the rawboned and ruddy Irish
girl was unable to serve everybody, and some time after he had given his
order Filson Shelby was waited upon by a young lady in a neat brown
dress. He was observant, and he saw a red spot burning on each cheek,
and he noted that the lips were tightly set. It seemed to him that she
was acting as waitress unwillingly, and yet at the same time that she
was doing it of her own accord. He did not like to stare at her, and yet
he could hardly take his eyes from her while she was in the room. She
was not beautiful exactly, for she was but a slim slip of a girl, and
she had coppery hair; and he had always been taught that red hair was
ugly. Yet something about her took his fancy; perhaps it was her
independent manner, perhaps it was rather her perky self-possession;
perhaps, after all, it was the humorous expression which lurked in her
eyes and at the corner of her mouth.
He had lingered over his luncheon that noon as long as he could, and
then he was rewarded. The man who had first brought him there entered
and took a seat beside him. When the young lady in brown came for his
order the new-comer shook hands with her cordially, and called her "Miss
Edna."
"She used to go to school with my sister," he explained to the young
Southwesterner. "She's up at the Normal College now, and I've never seen
her here in the dining-room before. But she has a holiday, and I suppose
she thought she ought to help her mother out. It's her mother who cooks,
you know--and boss cooking it is, too, isn't it?--real home sort of
flavor about it."
Filson Shelby had still delayed his departure; and as Edna Leisler
brought bread and butter, and went back again to the kitchen, his
friend's chatter had streamed along.
"Red-hot hair, hasn't she?" was the next remark. "If there was half a
dozen more of her you'd think it was a torchlight procession, wouldn't
you? But it suits her style, don't it? Fact is, she's the only
red-haired girl I ever saw I didn't hate at sight."
It seemed as though he had expected Filson to respond to this, and so
the young Southwesterner hesitated, and cleared his throat, and
admitted that her hair was red.
"Well, it _is_ just," the other returned. "I guess her barber has to
wear asbestos gloves, eh? But she's a good girl, Edna is, if she is a
brand from the burning. My sister used to be very fond of her, and I
like her myself, though she isn't in our set exactly. I'll introduce
you, if you like?"
The cable-car now came to a halt sharply to set down passengers for
Brooklyn by way of the bridge, but Filson Shelby was wholly unconscious
of this. He was busy with the recollection of that winter day when he
had stood up with bashful awkwardness and had heard Edna Leisler say
that she was pleased to meet him. He had the memory also of the next
Saturday, when he had gone back to the little low eating-room under the
roof in the hope of seeing her again, and of the unaffected frankness of
her manner towards him when he met her on the stairway.
He remembered how simply she had accepted his invitation to go to
Central Park to lunch on Washington's Birthday, the first holiday when
they were both free, and he remembered, too, what a good time they had
up there. It was on that Washington's Birthday that he had first found
out that in the eyes of some people red hair was not a blemish, but a
beauty. The omnibus in which they came down-town had been so crowded
that they were separated, and he heard one well-dressed man say to his
companion: "Did you ever see such stunning hair as that girl has? It is
like burnished copper--except when the sun glints on it, and then it's
like spun gold."
Hitherto he had been willing to overlook her aggressive locks in
consideration of her good qualities, but thereafter he came rapidly to
accept the view of the well-dressed man in the omnibus, and to look upon
her red hair as a crown of glory. She did not seem any more attractive
to him than she did at first meeting, but he knew now that other men
might be attracted also. He wondered whether there were any other men
whom she knew as well as she knew him. It seemed to him that they had
taken to each other at the start, and they were now very good friends
indeed. But there was no reason why she should not have other friends
also.
The current of his retrospection was not so sweeping that he could not
follow the course of the cable-car in which he was seated, and just then
he saw the brown spire of Trinity Church and heard the clock strike
three. He signalled to the conductor, and the car stopped before the
church door and at the head of Wall Street.
As he stood looking down the crooked street, washed white by the rain
and looking clean in the April sunshine, he asked himself why he was
going to meet Edna Leisler--and especially why it was his heart had
slowed up at the suggestion that perhaps other men were as attentive to
her as he was. He was not in love with her, was he? That she had made
New York tolerable to him he was ready to admit, and also that he liked
her better than any girl he had ever met. But if he was jealous of her,
did not that prove that he loved her?
These were the questions he propounded as he walked from Broadway to the
old building on the top floor of which the Leislers lived. When Edna
Leisler came down-stairs to meet him, with her new Easter hat, he knew
the answers to these questions; he knew that he would be miserable if he
were to lose the privilege of her society; he knew furthermore that he
had loved her since the first day he had seen her, even though he had
not hitherto suspected it. He knew also that he would never have a
better chance to tell her that he loved her than he would have that
afternoon; and while they were shaking hands he made up his mind that
before he took her back to her mother's he would get her promise to
marry him.
With this resolve fixed, he took refuge in the commonplace.
"Am I late?" he asked.
"Five minutes," she answered. "I didn't know but what you were going to
April-fool me."
"Oh, Miss Edna," he cried, "you know I wouldn't do that!"
"I didn't think you would really," she laughed back. "And I felt sure I
could get even with you if you did."
Thus lightly chatting, they came to the corner of Broad Street.
"Shall we go down to the Battery?" he suggested, thinking that he might
find a chance there to say what was in his heart.
"Yes," she assented; "it'll be first-rate to get a whiff of the salt
breeze. It's as warm as spring to-day, isn't it?"
In front of the Stock Exchange, and for two or three blocks below, Broad
Street was absolutely bare, except for a little knot of men working over
a man-hole of the electrical conduit. The ten-story buildings lifted
themselves aloft on both sides of the street, without any evidence of
life from window or doorway; they were as silent and seemingly empty as
though they belonged to a deserted city of the plains. Bar-rooms in
cellars had bock-beer placards before their closed portals. On the glass
panel of the swing-door which admitted the week-day passer-by to the
Business Men's Quick Lunch there was wafered the bill of fare of the day
before, but the door itself was closed tight. So were the entrances to
more pretentious restaurants.
But as Filson Shelby and Edna Leisler went on farther down-town, Broad
Street slowly changed its character. There were not so many office
buildings and more retail shops; there were a few wholesale warehouses;
there were even cheap flat-houses; and there were more signs of life.
Children began to fill the roadway and the sidewalks. There were boys on
tri-cycles, and there were Little Mothers pushing perambulators in which
babies lay asleep. There were girls on roller-skates; and one of these,
a tall, lanky child, had a frolicsome black poodle, which pulled her
quickly along the sidewalk.
Seeing some of these things, and not seeing others, and being taken up
wholly by their own talk, the young Southwesterner and the New York girl
passed through Whitehall Street and came out on the Battery. They walked
to the edge of the water, and looked across the waves to the Statue of
Liberty holding her torch aloft. An Italian steamer full of immigrants
was just coming up from Quarantine. The afternoon was clear, after the
rain of the night before, and yet there was a haze on the horizon. The
huge grain-elevators over on the Jersey shore stood out against the sky
defiantly.
A fringe of men and women sat on the seats around the grass-plots and
along the sea-wall. Many of the women had children in their arms or at
their skirts. Most of the men were reading the gaudily illustrated
Sunday newspapers; some of them were smoking. The sea-breeze blew
mildly, with a foretaste of warm weather. The grass-plots were
brownish-gray, with but the barest touch of green at the edges, and
there was never a bud yet on any of the skeleton trees. None the less
did every one know that the winter was gone for good, and that any day
almost the spring might come in with a rush.
As Filson Shelby looked about him he saw more than one young couple
sitting side by side on the benches or sauntering languidly along the
winding walks, and he knew that he was not the only young fellow who
felt the stirring of the season. No one of the other girls was as
good-looking as Edna, nor as stylish; he saw this at half a glance. With
every minute his desire grew to tell her how dear she was to him, and
still he put it off and put it off. Once or twice when she spoke to him
he left her remark unanswered, and then hastily begged her pardon for
his rudeness. He did not quite know what he was saying, and he feared
that she must think him a fool. He was restless, too, and it seemed to
him quite impossible to ask her to marry him in such an exposed place as
the Battery.
"Suppose we go up to Trinity Church?" he suggested. "It's always quiet
enough in the graveyard there."
"Isn't it quiet enough here?" she asked, as they turned their footsteps
away from Castle Garden.
"It isn't really noisy, I'll admit," he responded; "but I get mighty
tired of those elevated trains snorting along over the back of my head,
don't you?"
She gave him a queer little look out of the corner of her eye, and then
she laughed lightly.
"Oh, well," she replied, "if you think Trinity Church Yard is a better
place, I don't mind."
Then her cheeks suddenly flamed crimson, and she turned away her head.
They were now crossing the barren space under the elevated railroad,
and, as it happened, the young man did not see her swift blush.
As they skirted the oval of Bowling Green the girl nodded to a
gray-coated policeman on guard over the little park.
"Who's that?" asked the young man, acutely jealous, although he saw that
the officer was not less than fifty years old.
"That's Mr. O'Rourke," she explained. "He's Rose O'Rourke's father. She
was graduated from the Normal College only two years ago, and then she
went on the stage. She's getting on splendidly, too. She played Queen
Elizabeth last year--and didn't she look it? I'm sure she's a great deal
handsomer than that old Queen was."
"But that old Queen," he returned, "wasn't the daughter of a
sparrow-cop--that's what you call them, don't you?"
"I don't call them so," she responded, "for I think it's vulgar to talk
slang."
"But the boys do call a park policeman a sparrow-cop, don't they?" he
persisted.
"The little boys do," she answered, "but I know Mr. O'Rourke doesn't
like it."
"I can understand that," he replied. "If I had Queen Elizabeth for a
daughter, I think I should want to be a king myself."
"Well," the girl went on to explain, "Rose did want him to give up his
appointment. She said she was earning enough for her father not to work.
But he wouldn't, for all she urged him. She's a kind girl, is Rose, and
not a bit stuck-up. She came up to the college last year and recited for
us. You should have heard her do 'Curfew shall not ring to-night'; I
tell you she was splendid."
"I don't believe she did it any better than you could," he declared.
"Oh, don't you?" she returned, heartily; "that's only because you didn't
hear her. And she was very nice to me, too. She complimented me on my
piece."
"What did you speak?" he asked.
"Oh, I always choose something fiery and patriotic. I spoke 'Sheridan's
Ride' first, and then, when the girls encored me, I spoke 'Old
Ironsides'--but I like 'Sheridan's Ride' best; and Rose O'Rourke said I
got more out of it than anybody she had ever heard. But then she always
was so complimentary."
"I reckon she knows it's lucky for her you don't go on the stage," the
lover asserted. "It would be a cold day for her if you did. I haven't
seen her, but I'm sure she isn't such a good looker as you are!"
"Thank you for the compliment," the girl answered. "If we weren't here
in Broadway, in front of Trinity Church, I'd drop you a courtesy. But
you wouldn't say that if you had seen her, for she's as pretty as a
picture."
"Do you mean that she is as fresh as paint?" he asked.
"That's real mean of you," she retorted, "for Rose doesn't need to paint
at all, even on the stage; she has just the loveliest complexion."
"She's not the only girl in New York who has a lovely complexion," he
declared; and again the color rose swiftly on her cheek, and then as
swiftly faded.
They had now come to the gates of Trinity Church, and they saw a little
stream of men and women pouring in to attend the afternoon service.
"You must not be down on Rose," the girl said, as they turned away from
Broadway and began to ramble slowly amid the tombstones. "She's a good
friend of mine. She said she'd get me an engagement if I'd go on the
stage--"
"But you are not going to?" he broke in, earnestly.
"I'd love to," she answered, calmly. "But I'm too big a coward. I'd
never dare stand up before the people in a great big theatre and feel
they were all looking at me."
"I'm glad you're not going to," he declared.
"It would be too delightful for anything!" she asserted; "but I'd never
have the courage. I know I wouldn't, so I've given up the idea. I'll
finish my course at the college, and get my diploma, and then I'll be a
teacher--that is, if I can get an appointment. But it isn't easy if you
haven't any influence; and father doesn't take any interest in politics,
and he doesn't know any of the trustees of this district, and I can't
see how I'm ever to get into a school. Now Mr. O'Rourke could help me if
he wanted--"
"The sparrow-cop?" interrupted the young Southwesterner. "Why, what has
he got to do with the public schools?"
"Mr. O'Rourke has a great deal of influence in this ward, I can tell you
that," she returned. "He has a pull on more than one of the trustees. If
he were to back me, I'd get my position sure! And maybe I had better go
to Rose and ask her for her father's influence."
They were now almost in the centre of that part of the church-yard which
lies above the church, and behind the monument to the American prisoners
who died during the British occupancy of New York. The afternoon service
was about to begin, and the solemn tones of the organ were audible where
they stood.
It seemed to Filson Shelby that the time had come for him to speak.
He swallowed a lump in his throat, and began.
"Miss Edna," he said, hesitatingly, "why do you want to be a
school-teacher?"
"To earn my living, to be sure!" she answered, calmly enough, although
the color was rising again on her cheeks.
"But you don't need ever so many scholars to earn your living, do you?"
he asked, gaining courage slowly.
"What do you mean?" she returned, forcing herself to look him in the
face.
"I mean," he responded, "that I don't see why you couldn't earn your
living just as well by having only one scholar--"
"Only one scholar?" she echoed.
"Yes--only one scholar," he declared; "but you could take him for life.
And you could teach him everything that was good and true and
beautiful--and he would work hard for you, and try and make you happy."
The color ebbed from her cheeks, but she said nothing. The low notes of
the organ were dying away, and on the elevated railroad just behind the
young couple a train came hissing along wreathed in swirling steam.
"I'm not worthy of you, Edna; I know that only too well; but you can
make me ever so much better if you'll only try," he urged. "I love you
with my whole heart--that's what I've been trying to say. Will you marry
me?"
She raised her eyes to his and simply answered,
"Yes."
An hour later, as they were going through the dropping twilight down
Wall Street to the old office building, on the top floor of which she
lived with her parents, they were still talking of each other, of their
united future, and of their separate past.
When they came to the door and stood at the foot of the five flights of
stairs that led up to the janitor's apartment, they had still many
things to say to each other.
What seemed to Filson Shelby most astonishing was that he should now be
engaged to be married, when that very morning he was not even aware of
his love for her. And being a very young fellow, and, moreover, being
very much in love, he could not keep this astonishing thing to himself,
but must needs tell her.
"Do you know, Edna," he began, "that I must have been in love with you a
long while without knowing it? Isn't that most extraordinary? And it was
only this morning that I found it out!"
Standing on the stairs above him, and just out of his reach, she broke
into a merry little laugh, and the tendrils of red hair quivered around
her broad brow.
"What are you laughing at?" he asked.
"Oh, nothing," she answered, and then she laughed again. "At least, not
much. It is only because men are so much slower to see things than women
are."
"What do you mean?" he asked again.
"Well," she returned, laughing once more, and retreating two or three
steps higher up the stairs, "I mean that you say you only found out this
morning that you were in love with me--"
"Yes?"
"Well," she continued, making ready for flight, "I found it out more
than two months ago."
(1895.)
A SPRING FLOOD IN BROADWAY
As he came down the steps of his sister's little house, that first
Saturday in May, he saw before him the fresh greenery of the grass in
Stuyvesant Square and the delicate blossoms on its sparse bushes and the
young leaves on its trees; and he felt in himself also the subtle
influences of the spring-tide. The sky was cloudless, serene, and
unfathomably blue. The sun shone clearly, and the shadows it cast were
already lengthening along the street. The gentle breeze blew
hesitatingly. He heard the inarticulate shriek of the hawker bearing a
tray containing a dozen square boxes of strawberries and walking near a
cart piled high with crates. When he crossed Third Avenue he noticed
that a white umbrella had flowered out over the raised chair of the
Italian boot-black at the corner. A butcher-boy, with basket on arm, was
lingering at a basement door in lively banter with a good-looking Irish
cook. A country wagon, full of growing plants, crawled down the street
while the vender bawled forth the cheapness of his wares.