Tea for two at the Gondolier, that newest and quotation-marked
“Quaintest” of Village tea rooms. The chief points in the Gondolier's
“quaintness” seem to be that it is chopped up into as many little
partitions as a roulette wheel and that all food has to be carried up
from a cellar that imparts even to orange marmalade a faint persuasive
odor of somebody else's wash. Still, during the last eight months, the
Gondolier has been a radical bookstore devoted to bloody red pamphlets,
a batik shop full of strange limp garments ornamented with decorative
squiggles, and a Roumanian Restaurant called “The Brodska” whose menu
seemed to consist almost entirely of old fish and maraschino cherries.
The wispy little woman from Des Moines who conducts the Gondolier at
present in a series of timid continual flutters at actually leading the
life of the Bohemian untamed, and who gives all the young hungry-looking
men extra slices of toast because any one of them might be Vachel
Lindsay in disguise, will fail in another six weeks and then the
Gondolier may turn into anything from a Free Verse Tavern to a Meeting
Hall for the Friends of Slovak Freedom. But at present, the tea is much
too good for the price in spite of its inescapable laundry tang,
and there is a flat green bowl full of Japanese iris bulbs in the
window--the second of which pleases Mrs. Severance and the first Ted.
Besides like most establishments on the verge of bankruptcy, it is such
a quiet place to talk--the only other two people in it are a boy with
startled hair and an orange smock and a cigaretty girl called Tommy, and
she is far too busy telling him that that dream about wearing a necklace
of flying-fish shows a dangerous inferiority complex even to comment
caustically on strangers from uptown who _will_ intrude on the dear
Village.
“Funny stuff--dreams,” says Ted uneasily, catching at overheard phrases
for a conversational jumping-off place. His mind, always a little on
edge now with work and bad feeding, has been too busy since they came in
comparing Rose Severance with Elinor Piper, and wondering why, when one
is so like a golden-skinned August pear and the other a branch of winter
blackberries against snow just fallen, it is not as good but somehow
warmer to think of the first against your touch than the second, to
leave him wholly at ease.
“Yes--funny stuff,” Mrs. Severance's voice is musically quiet. “And
then you tell them to people who pretend to know all about what they
mean--and then--” She shrugs shoulders at the Freudian two across the
shoulder-high partition.
“But you don't believe in all this psycho-analysis tosh, do you?”
She hesitates. “A little, yes. Like the old woman and ghosts. I may not
believe in it but I'm afraid of it, rather.”
She gives him a steady look--her eyes go deep. It is not so much the
intensity of the look as its haltingness that makes warmth go over him.
“Shall we tell our dreams--the favorite ones, I mean? Play fair if we
do, remember,” she adds slowly.
“Not if you're really afraid.”
“I? But it's just because I am afraid that I really should, you know.
Like going into a dark room when you don't want to.”
“But they can't be as scary as _that_, surely.” Ted's voice is a little
false. Both are watching each other intently now--he with a puzzled
sense of lazy enveloping firelight.
“Well, shall I begin? After all this _is_ tea in the Village.”
“I should be very much interested indeed, Mrs. Severance,” says Ted
rather gravely. “Check!” “How official you sound--almost as if you had
a lot of those funny little machines all the modern doctors use and were
going to mail me off to your pet sanatorium at once because you'd asked
me what green reminded me of and I said 'cheese' instead of 'trees.'
And anyhow, I never have any startling dreams--only silly ones--much too
silly to tell--”
“Please go on.” Ted's voice has really become quite clinical.
“Oh very well. They don't count when you only have them once--just when
they keep coming back and back to you--isn't that it?”
“I believe so.”
Mrs. Severance's eyes waver a little--her mouth seeking for the proper
kind of dream.
“It's not much but it comes quite regularly--the most punctual,
old-fashioned-servant sort of a dream.
“It doesn't begin with sleep, you know--it begins with waking. At
least it's just as if I were in my own bed in my own apartment and then
gradually I started to wake. You know how you can feel that somebody
else is in the room though you can't see them--that's the feeling.
And, of course being a normal American business woman, my first idea
is--burglars. And I'm very cowardly for a minute. Then the cowardice
passes and I decide to get up and see what it is.
“It _is_ somebody else--or something--but nobody I think that I ever
really knew. And at first I don't want to walk toward it--and then I do
because it keeps pulling me in spite of myself. So I go to it--hands out
so I won't knock over things.
“And then I touch it--or him--or her--and I'm suddenly very, very happy.
“That's all.
“And now, Dr. Billett, what would you say of my case?”
Ted's eyes are glowing--in the middle of her description his heart has
begun to knock to a hidden pulse, insistent and soft as the drum of
gloved fingers on velvet. He picks words carefully.
“I should say--Mrs. Severance--that there was something you needed and
wanted and didn't have at present. And that you would probably have
it--in the end.”
She laughs a little. “Rather cryptic, isn't that, doctor? And you'd
prescribe?”
“Prescribe? 'It's an awkward matter to play with souls.'”
“'And trouble enough to save your own,'” she completes the quotation.
“Yes, that's true enough--though I'm sorry you can't even tell me to use
this twice a day in half a glass of water and that other directly after
each meal. I think I'll have to be a little more definite when it comes
to your turn--if it does come.”
“Oh it will.” But instead of beginning, he raises his eyes to her again.
This time there is a heaviness like sleep on both, a heaviness that
draws both together inaudibly and down, and down, as if they were
sinking through piled thickness on thickness of warm, sweet-scented
grass. Odd faces come into both minds and vanish as if flickered off a
film--to Rose Severance, a man narrow and flat as if he were cut out of
thin grey paper, talking, talking in a voice as dry and rattling as a
flapping windowblind of their “vacation” together and a house with
a little garden where she can sew and he can putter around,--to Ted,
Elinor Piper, the profile pure as if it were painted on water, passing
like water flowing from the earth in springs, in its haughty temperance,
its retired beauty, its murmurous quiet--other faces, some trembling
as if touched with light flames, some calm, some merely grotesque with
longing or too much pleasure--all these pass. A great nearness, fiercer
and more slumbrous than any nearness of body takes their place. It wraps
the two closer and closer, a spider spinning a soft web out of petals,
folding the two with swathes and swathes of its heavy, fragrant silk.
“Oh--mine--isn't anything,” says Ted rather unsteadily, after the
moment. “Only looking at firelight and wanting to take the coals in my
hands.”
Rose's voice is firmer than his but her mouth is still moved with
content at the thing it has desired being brought nearer.
“I really can't prescribe on as little evidence as that,” she says with
music come back to her voice in the strength of a running wave. “I can
only repeat what you told me. That there was something you needed--and
wanted”--she is mocking now--“and didn't have at present. And that you
would probably--what was it?--oh yes--have it, in the end.”
The wispy little woman has crept up to Ted's elbow with an illegible
bill. Rose has spoken slowly to give her time to get there--it is always
so much better to choose your own most effective background for really
affecting scenes.
“And now I really must be getting back,” she cuts in briskly, her
fingers playing with a hat that certainly needs no rearrangement, when
Ted, after absent-mindedly paying the bill, is starting to speak in the
voice of one still sleep-walking.
“But it _was_ delightful, Mr. Billett--I love talking about myself and
you were really very sweet to listen so nicely.” She has definitely
risen. Ted must, too. “We must do it again some time soon--I'm going to
see if there aren't any of those books with long German names drifting
around 'Mode' somewhere so that I'll be able to simply stun you with my
erudition the next time we talk over dreams.”
They are at the door now, she guiding him toward it as imperceptibly and
skillfully as if she controlled him by wireless.
“And it isn't fair of me to let you give all the parties--it
simply isn't. Couldn't you come up to dinner in my little apartment
sometime--it really isn't unconventional, especially for anyone who's
once seen my pattern of an English maid--”
Sunlight and Minetta Lane again--and whatever Ted may want to say out
of his walking trance--this is certainly no place where any of it can be
said.