A Top-Floor Idyl

by George Van Schaick

"Frances is going upstairs with me," announced Frieda. "You had better not wait for us, for we might be detained a little. I'll bring her home, and we shall be perfectly safe. You go right back and smoke your old pipe till we return."

"Don't hurry," I told her. "I might as well wait here as anywhere else. It is an interesting street. If I get tired of waiting, I'll stroll home; take your time."

So they went up the stairs, Frieda panting behind, and I leaned against a decrepit iron railing. A few steps away some colored men were assembled about a lamppost, their laughter coming explosively, in repeated peals. Opposite me, within an exiguous front yard, a very fat man sat on a rickety chair, the back resting against the wall, and gave me an uncomfortable sense of impending collapse of the spindly legs. Boys, playing ball in the middle of the street, stopped suddenly and assumed an air of profound detachment from things terrestrial as a policeman went by, majestic and leisurely, swinging his club. Somewhere west of me an accordion was whining variations on Annie Laurie, but, suddenly, its grievous voice was drowned by a curtain lecture addressed to a deep bass by an exasperated soprano. To the whole world his sins were proclaimed with a wealth of detail and an imagery of expression that excited my admiration. Then the clamor ceased abruptly and a man's head appeared at the window. I speculated whether he was contemplating self-destruction, but he vanished, to appear a moment later in the street, garmented in trousers, carpet-slippers and undershirt and armed with an empty beer-pail. With this he faded away in the corner saloon, to come forth again with his peace-offering.

With such observations I solaced myself and whiled away the time. Humanity in the rough is to me fully as interesting as the dull stones picked up in Brazil or the Cape Colony. Some are hopelessly flawed, while others need but patient grinding to develop into diamonds of the first water.

Nearly a half an hour had gone by, and I had seated myself upon the railing, in a position once dear to me when I shared a fence with Sadie Briggs, aged fourteen, and thought that the ultimate had come to me in the way of love and passion. Fortunate Sadie! She afterwards married a blacksmith and did her duty to the world by raising a large family, while I pounded typewriter keys and wrote of imaginary loves, in shirt-sleeves and slippers, lucky in the egotistic peace of the enviable mortal responsible for no human being's bread and butter but his own.

Then Frieda and Frances appeared. The latter held her baby in her arms, surely feeling that it had received enough vicarious attention.

"Why, Dave!" exclaimed the former. "I'm awfully sorry you waited so long. Our little darling was sleeping ever so comfy, like a blessed angel, and we sat down, while Madame Boivin rested from her ironing, and we just talked about starch and cockroaches and things, and then Paul awoke and we were afraid he might cry in the street and it was nearly time anyway and—and he was ever so greedy. And now he's sleeping again."

I reflected that, gastronomically, Master Paul had probably enjoyed himself better than ourselves. He had not been hurried. His little lips had not been scalded, nor had he been compelled to hasten over a ravigote that should have been eaten in seemly leisure and respect. I wished he had been able to realize the compensations he was getting now for whatever might come later on. For him I trust there will be little of sorrow, and yet there must be some, since pain and shadow are indispensable, in this world, to the appreciation of light and of ease.

I noticed how well the young mother walked with her burden. It appeared to lend her form added grace and to complete her beauty.

On the steps leading to the front door of Mrs. Milliken's refuge nearly all the lodgers were assembled, taking the cool of the evening. The two girls who sold candy clamored for a view of little Paul. The old lady looked at us in stern disapproval and said the baby should have been in bed for hours. The landlady, mindful of her interests, maintained a neutral attitude. One of the young men assured Mrs. Dupont that her baby was a corker.