Vignettes of Manhattan; Outlines in Local Color

by Brander Matthews

"Well," she continued, making ready for flight, "I found it out more than two months ago."

(1895.)

A SPRING FLOOD IN BROADWAY

S 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.

There were other signs of the season at Union Square—the dingy landaus with their tops half open, the flowers bedded out in bright profusion, the aquatic plants adorning the broad basin of the fountain, the pigeons wooing and cooing languidly, the sparrows energetically flirting and fighting, the young men and maidens walking slowly along the curving paths and smiling in each other's faces. To Harry Grant, just home from a long winter in the bleak Northwest, it seemed as though man and nature were alike rejoicing in the rising of the sap and the bourgeoning of spring. It was as though the pulse of the strong city were beating more swiftly and with renewed youth. Harry Grant felt his own heart rejoice that he was back again amid the sights he loved, within a stone's-throw of the house where he was born, within pistol-shot of the residence of the girl he was now going at last to ask to marry him.

It was nearly a year since he had last seen her, but he knew she would greet him as cordially as she had always done. That Winifred was a good friend of his he knew well enough; what he did not know at all was whether or not the friendship had changed to love on her part also. He could hardly recall the time when he had not known her. He could distinctly remember the occasion when he had first told her that he intended to marry her when he was grown up—that was on a spring day like this, and he was seven and she was five, and they were playing together in Gramercy Park while their nurses followed them slowly around the enclosure. Now he was twenty-three and she was twenty-one; and in all these sixteen years there had been no day when he had not looked forward to their marriage. Of course, when he had grown to be a big boy and had been sent away to boarding-school, he had been ashamed to talk about such things. But when he went to college he had gazed ahead four years and almost fixed on the day he intended to propose.

Then his father had died, and the family affairs were left in inexplicable confusion. His uncle had offered to pay Harry's way through Columbia, but he was in a haste to be independent, to make his own path, to have a position which he could ask Winifred to share. He found a place at once in the office of a great dry-goods house; and he had been so successful there that one of their customers had offered him inducements to go out to a swiftly growing city in the new Northwest. Two years had Harry Grant spent out there—two years of hard work amid men who were all toiling mightily and who were capable of appreciating his youthful energy. Now he was back again in New York to act as the Eastern representative of the chief capitalist of the Northwestern city, an old man, who liked Harry, and who saw how useful his address and his character might be. The position was onerous for a man so young; but it was honorable also, and the salary was liberal even from a New York standpoint. At last he was again able to look at life from the point of view of a New-Yorker. At last he was ready to ask her to share his life.

He was in no hurry for the moment, as he could not make sure of finding her at home until nearly five o'clock, and it was now barely four by the transparent dial which Atlas bore on his back in the jeweller's upper window on the opposite side of the square. He crossed Broadway at Fourteenth Street, and there he was caught up at once and swept along by the spring-flood rolling up from down-town that beautiful afternoon in May. The windows of the florists' were lovely with Easter lilies and fragrant with branches of lilac. The windows of the confectioners' were gay with gaudy Easter eggs and with elaborate chocolate rabbits. Young girls pressed giggling through the doors to stand packed beside the soda-water fountains. Elderly men lingered at the street corners to stare at the young women.

Within an hour or two at the most Harry Grant intended to ask Winifred to be his wife, and as he saw the dread question so close before him he could not but wonder what the answer would be. Winifred liked him—that much he felt sure about. Whether she loved him, even a little, that he could not venture to guess. She had sturdy common-sense and she was self-reliant, he knew well, and yet he could not help fearing that perhaps the influence of her grandmother had been more powerful than he wished. It was possible, of course, that the restless and ambitious old lady had inoculated her young granddaughter with some of her own dissatisfaction.