Willy laughed, genially and patronizingly. "I've been along here. There aren't any Paris fashions in these windows."
"I want," said Hagar succinctly, "to saunter through the streets of a great city."
They began to walk, their faces turned downtown, staying chiefly upon the avenue, but now and then diverging into side streets where there were lights and people. By degrees they came into congested, poorer quarters. To Willy, not long removed from a loneliness of tidal creeks, vast stretches of tobacco, slow, solitary sandy roads, all and any of New York was exciting, all a show, a stimulus swallowed without discrimination. That day Rachel had found occasion to rage against a certain closed circle of conventions. The subject had come up at the breakfast table, introduced by a headline in the morning paper, and she had so shocked her family that for once they had acted as though the volcano was real. Mrs. Maine had grown moist and pink, and had said precipitately that in her time a young woman—whether she were married or single, that didn't matter!—would as soon have thought of putting her hand in the fire as of mentioning such things! And Powhatan had as nearly thundered as was in his nature to do. Rachel shrugged her shoulders and desisted, but she had gone about all day with defiance written in her small, sombre face. Now to-night, the street, the broad stripes of blackness, the thin stripes of gold light, the sound of voices and of many footfalls, the faces when the light fell upon them and the brushing by of half-seen forms suited her raised, angry, and mutinous mood. As for Hagar, the street and its movement simply became herself. She never lost the child's and the poet's power of coalescence.
It was before the days of Waring. The only White Wings upon this avenue had been the snowflakes which a week ago had fallen thickly, which had been dully scraped over the curbing into the gutter, and which now stayed there in irregular, one to three feet in altitude, begrimed Alpine ranges. The cobblestones of the street between, over which the great dray horses ceaselessly passed, were foul enough, while the sidewalks had their own litter of torn scraps of paper, cheap cigar ends, infinitesimal bits of refuse. The day of the weirdness of electric lighting, of the bizarre come-and-go of motion signs was not yet either. Down here there were occasional arc lights, but gas yet reigned in chief. The shops, that were not shops for millionaires, nor even for the Quite Comfortable, all had their winking gaslights. Below them like chequered walls sprang out the variegated show-windows. The wares displayed were usually small in size, slight of value, and high in colour, a kaleidoscopic barbaric display. Above dark doorways the frequent three golden balls showed up well.
Because the night was so mild and windless many people were abroad—people not well-dressed, and yet not quite poverty-stricken in aspect; others who were so, lounging men with hopeless faces, women wandering by, pinched and lost-looking; then again groups or individuals of a fairly prosperous appearance. The flaring gas showed now and again faces that were evidently alien, or there came a snatch of strange jargon. A crowd had gathered at a street corner. A girl wearing a dark-blue poke bonnet with a red ribbon across it was going from one to the other holding out a tambourine. A few pennies clinked into it. A man standing in the centre of the crowd, raised his arm. "Now, we are going to sing." The women in the bonnets beat upon the tambourines, a man with a drum and another with a cornet gave the opening bars, the women raised shrill, sweet voices,—
"There is a fountain filled with blood,
Drawn from Immanuel's veins,
And sinners, plunged beneath that flood,
Lose all their guilty stains—"
The hymn ended, a woman lifted both hands and prayed with fervour and a strange, natural eloquence. Then the squad gathered up horn and drum and tambourines, and, drawing a part of the crowd with it, moved up the street to another skirmish ground.
Rachel and Willy and Hagar drifted on. The night was still young, the stars glittering above, the gaslamps making a vista, the footfalls on the pavement murmurous as a stream. The clanging of the street-car bell, the rush of a train on the neighbouring Elevated, the abrupt rise and fall of passing voices—all exercised a fascination. The night was coloured, rhythmic. They came to a building, narrow and plain, with lit windows, as of a hall, on the second floor, and with a clean, fairly lighted stair going up from an open street door. Men and women were entering. A care-worn, stooping, workman-looking man stood by the door with handbills or leaflets which he was giving out. "Socialist Meeting," he said. "Good speaking. The Unemployed and the Strikes. Socialist Meeting. Everybody welcome."
Hagar stopped. "Rachel, I want to go in here. Yes, I do! Come now, be good to me, Rachel! Mr. Maine wants to go, too."