But there was something of the stoic in his make-up. He bore it as best he could, grimly chewing the cud of Repellier's advice that it would all prove a good antidote for Oxford. He still kept a keen eye open for the more picturesque elements in the life about him, and often took a quiet delight in his neighbors' somber gaiety. For with all its long hours of work Hartley had noticed that the tenement was not without its scenes of fleeting merriment. If the hive had its dark days little Pietro Salvatore still whistled away as merrily as ever while he sewed his buttons on boys' knickerbockers, fourteen to the piece, hemmed and ribboned at the back, for eleven cents the pair. And there were sly meetings and coy love-makings and gay marryings, and singing in many different tongues, and the feast-days and the christenings and the noisy enough children always playing about the dim corridors, and pale-faced girls flirting from the little wooden balconies, and the strains of concertinas and fiddles from open windows at night, and shrill laughter through the gloom when the midsummer heat drove the sleepers, men and women and children alike, up on the roof top in search of a breath of air—but always, everywhere, the dull undertone of the machines that buzzed so feverishly away. And there were little parties that sallied forth, all decked in hired finery, for a chowder party on the Sound, and there were excursions off to Paradise Park on a bright Sunday, and every now and then wonderful spreads of which the outside world knew nothing—feasts of green peppers, and grated Parmesan, and freckled bologna, and salame, and lupine beans, and macaroni cooked in oil, and spiced Neapolitan meal cakes, with maraschino sometimes, and fine rat-tail cigars, at a penny apiece, for the men at the finish.
Yes, indeed, there were feasts at times, wonderful feasts, that many a night made the disconsolate young scholar on the top floor envy his humbler-minded neighbors. And there were gardens, too—gardens that could be taken in when the policeman ordered it—tufts and shreds of green in tin cans and starch-boxes, as green almost as the grass in the Park. And there was color, bless you—color enough to dazzle one's eyes—on a windy Monday morning, when the pulley-lines that stretched from the windows fluttered and swayed with the week's myriad-tinted washings. But it was all strangely and sadly new to Hartley.
CHAPTER VI
THE TWO VOICES
And so he lost, for like a sword
Still in his bosom prest
Her perilous face, and each soft word
Like thorns still tore his breast.
John Hartley, "The Broken Knight."
It's in the lulls of life that great things are lost and won.... You struggle against the tides that beset you, and you hold your own; but those tides never rest, and in the hour that you wait to call for peace—then the waters shall carry you back.—"The Silver Poppy."
Hartley dined frugally, though somewhat late, that night. Time had slipped away unnoticed in his close little room till he woke to the fact that he was extremely hungry. He was glad to get out into the open night air, but as he sniffed at it gingerly on his way back to his room once more there came to him, with a sudden pang, a memory of the evening odors that hung over the far-away valley of the Isis.