第18章 PART FIRST(16)

VIII.

Mrs.March took the vertebrate with her to the Vienna Coffee-House,where they went to breakfast next morning.She made March buy her the Herald and the World,and she added to its spiny convolutions from them.She read the new advertisements aloud with ardor and with faith to believe that the apartments described in them were every one truthfully represented,and that any one of them was richly responsive to their needs."Elegant,light,large,single and outside flats"were offered with "all improvements--bath,ice-box,etc."--for twenty-five to thirty dollars a month.The cheapness was amazing.The Wagram,the Esmeralda,the Jacinth,advertised them for forty dollars and sixty dollars,"with steam heat and elevator,"rent free till November.Others,attractive from their air of conscientious scruple,announced "first-class flats;good order;reasonable rents."The Helena asked the reader if she had seen the "cabinet finish,hard-wood floors,and frescoed ceilings"of its fifty-dollar flats;the Asteroid affirmed that such apartments,with "six light rooms and bath,porcelain wash-tubs,electric bells,and hall-boy,"as it offered for seventy-five dollars were unapproached by competition.

There was a sameness in the jargon which tended to confusion.Mrs.March got several flats on her list which promised neither steam heat nor elevators;she forgot herself so far as to include two or three as remote from the down-town region of her choice as Harlem.But after she had rejected these the nonde vertebrate was still voluminous enough to sustain her buoyant hopes.

The waiter,who remembered them from year to year,had put them at a window giving a pretty good section of Broadway,and before they set out on their search they had a moment of reminiscence.They recalled the Broadway of five,of ten,of twenty years ago,swelling and roaring with a tide of gayly painted omnibuses and of picturesque traffic that the horsecars have now banished from it.The grind of their wheels and the clash of their harsh bells imperfectly fill the silence that the omnibuses have left,and the eye misses the tumultuous perspective of former times.

They went out and stood for a moment before Grace Church,and looked down the stately thoroughfare,and found it no longer impressive,no longer characteristic.It is still Broadway in name,but now it is like any other street.You do not now take your life in your hand when you attempt to cross it;the Broadway policeman who supported the elbow of timorous beauty in the hollow of his cotton-gloved palm and guided its little fearful boots over the crossing,while he arrested the billowy omnibuses on either side with an imperious glance,is gone,and all that certain processional,barbaric gayety of the place is gone.

"Palmyra,Baalbec,Timour of the Desert,"said March,voicing their common feeling of the change.

They turned and went into the beautiful church,and found themselves in time for the matin service.Rapt far from New York,if not from earth,in the dim richness of the painted light,the hallowed music took them with solemn ecstasy;the aerial,aspiring Gothic forms seemed to lift them heavenward.They came out,reluctant,into the dazzle and bustle of the street,with a feeling that they were too good for it,which they confessed to each other with whimsical consciousness.

"But no matter how consecrated we feel now,"he said,"we mustn't forget that we went into the church for precisely the same reason that we went to the Vienna Caf?for breakfast--to gratify an aesthetic sense,to renew the faded pleasure of travel for a moment,to get back into the Europe of our youth.It was a purely Pagan impulse,Isabel,and we'd better own it.""I don't know,"she returned."I think we reduce ourselves to the bare bones too much.I wish we didn't always recognize the facts as we do.

Sometimes I should like to blink them.I should like to think I was devouter than I am,and younger and prettier.""Better not;you couldn't keep it up.Honesty is the best policy even in such things.""No;I don't like it,Basil.I should rather wait till the last day for some of my motives to come to the top.I know they're always mixed,but do let me give them the benefit of a doubt sometimes.""Well,well,have it your own way,my dear.But I prefer not to lay up so many disagreeable surprises for myself at that time."She would not consent."I know I am a good deal younger than I was.

I feel quite in the mood of that morning when we walked down Broadway on our wedding journey.Don't you?""Oh yes.But I know I'm not younger;I'm only prettier."She laughed for pleasure in his joke,and also for unconscious joy in the gay New York weather,in which there was no 'arriere pensee'of the east wind.They had crossed Broadway,and were walking over to Washington Square,in the region of which they now hoped to place themselves.The 'primo tenore'statue of Garibaldi had already taken possession of the place in the name of Latin progress,and they met Italian faces,French faces,Spanish faces,as they strolled over the asphalt walks,under the thinning shadows of the autumn-stricken sycamores.They met the familiar picturesque raggedness of Southern Europe with the old kindly illusion that somehow it existed for their appreciation,and that it found adequate compensation for poverty in this.March thought he sufficiently expressed his tacit sympathy in sitting down on one of the iron benches with his wife and letting a little Neapolitan put a superfluous shine on his boots,while their desultory comment wandered with equal esteem to the old-fashioned American respectability which keeps the north side of the square in vast mansions of red brick,and the international shabbiness which has invaded the southern border,and broken it up into lodging-houses,shops,beer-gardens,and studios.