Go and see Granville, said the Advertising Agent to her. He’s getting up a booklet for the L or somebody. He might be able to use some of these drawings of yours. And because it was urgent he had given her the address. Her knees were quivery as she turned the bend in the corridor, looking for his number.
It was a sultry day, the door of the little office was open. There was a window, high up at the back of the old building, looking over the Brooklyn Bridge. He was leaning on the sill, the smoke of his pipe drifted outward into that hot tawny light that hangs over the East River on summer afternoons. At first he did not seem to hear her tap on the glass panel; then he turned, glanced at her steadily and without surprise. As he had no idea she was coming she thought perhaps he had mistaken her for someone he knew.
“Look here,” he said, “I want to show you something.”
She put down her folder of drawings and crossed to the sill. He leaned there in his shirt sleeves, pointing with the stem of his pipe, as easily as though they were old friends.
“See those tall lance-headed openings in the piers of the Bridge? Did you ever notice they look just like great cathedral windows? And that pearl-blue light hanging in them, better than any stained glass.”
She was too surprised, too anxious about showing him her drawings, to do more than murmur assent.
“I can tell you about it,” he said, “because I don’t know you. It isn’t safe to tell people you know about beautiful things. Those are the windows of my private cathedral.”
How often she had lived again that first encounter. The ring of feet along the paved corridors, the blunt slam of elevator gates, the steady tick of a typewriter in an adjoining office, telephones trilling here and there in the big building like birds in an aviary, the murmur of the streets rising up to them through warm heavy air. Always, in that city, she was a little mad. Where such steep terraces cut stairways on sky, where every tread falls upon some broken beauty poets are too hurried to pick up, how can one be quite sane? God pity the man (George said once) who has none of that madness in his heart.
I have a cathedral too, I have a cathedral too, she was repeating to herself, but too excited to say it. With bungling fingers she untied the portfolio, rummaged through the drawings, found the one of an aisle of trees in Central Park where the wintry branches lace themselves into an oriel.
He went through all the pictures. He only spoke twice.