Jean stood aside and waited for him to pass. "Catherine's upstairs, but I don't think she's going out."
Philip paid no attention and closed the door behind Jean. At the click, Jean thought she heard a noise at Catherine's window, but when she looked up there was only the white curtain, limp in the heat.
Philip did not ask whether she objected to his coming but strolled along beside her in one of his quiet moods, so that, after a few blocks, she did not mind his being there. From time to time he made some quiet comment, surprising in its keen appreciation of the color and drama about them. He saw none of the squalor and dirt and tragedy in the swarming streets, but like Herrick, long ago on that first walk through Barbary Coast, a beauty, that Jean, too, saw when it was pointed out.
Suddenly, as if they had risen from the litter, a gnarled old man and a woman with an orange handkerchief about her withered brown face came dragging a hurdy-gurdy. The man dropped the shafts and began to turn the handle. "Back To Our Mountains" wailed to the night. As the old woman fawned forward with her tambourine, Philip dropped in a dollar.
"Do you always do things as rash as that?"
"Sometimes," Philip answered quietly, and Jean was ashamed. Perhaps there was some memory connected with this melody for which Philip would pay any price. The man had hidden spots of sensitiveness like this love of music, especially thin, tuneful music, for pictures of simple scenes, and poetry, the lyric poetry of emotion and beautiful sound.
Jean surprised Philip by sitting down on the nearest step. He took a place on the step below; children gathered about them, dirty, dark-eyed children of another race. Philip and Jean were far away in another land. He scarcely heard the tunes wheezed out, one after another, twice around the repertoire. It was a mist through which he moved with Jean. He wanted Jean as he had never wanted anything in all his life, and his hour was come. It frightened him a little.
At last the old man got between the shafts of his cart, the old woman pulling feebly on one. Smiling and nodding to the two on the steps they stumbled away. The children plunged again into their games.
Half an hour later, Jean found herself sitting opposite Philip in an East Side tea-house. The table was covered with dirty oilcloth and the sawdust on the floor reeked with sour dampness. Shabby men with broad Slavic faces drank Russian tea from tall glasses and argued of life and death and government. In one corner a black bearded Russian in peasant clothes strummed a balalaika, and a small boy in flaming red and with a tinsel cap, stamped and writhed in a Cossack dance.
"It's great, isn't it?"