PART TWO
The night became thickly intense, and all the angular details and flat expanses of each street—neither hideous nor beautiful but vapidly and rigidly perched in between—took on the least touch of glamor. Some semblance of a darkly plaintive heart began to sway and quiver within the scene, as though the essence of all these human beings pacing down the sidewalks and sitting or standing in shops, cars, and restaurants, had joined the night and formed another quality—expectations, illusions, and promises, all electric in the air. The harshly dreamless industries and shallow loiterings of the day were replaced by an effort at romance, soiled but persistent, and a sensual pride preening itself with gallantries, and a confusion of cruel or softly dozing confidences.
The moving-picture theaters, in dots of red, yellow, blue, and green light, made proclamations of spurious, quickly attained love, adventure, and suspense; the United Cigar Stores, framed by red and gold, displayed their mild, brown opiates, while within them deferential clerks catered to jovial or importantly sullen men and women; the restaurants, with food heaped in their windows, and glistening fronts, were filled with people intent upon turning a prosy stuffing into an elaborate, laughing ritual; and even the Greek lunch-rooms, with their stools beside half-dirty glass counters, and nickel coffee-urns, assumed a hang-dog grin.
Taxicabs in all the cardinal colors darted about, like feverish insects serving human masters, and the people in them—lazy, or impatient, or bored, or out for a lark—made a blur of faces sometimes glimpsed more distinctly as the cabs stopped or slowed down. Policemen in dark blue uniforms stood at street-crossings, with tired aggressiveness, looking for a chance to invest their flunky-rôles with a rasping authority. Motor-trucks lurched along like drab monsters barely held in leash. Lights were everywhere—in shops, on iron poles in the streets, mellowly staring from upper windows—desperately seeking to dismiss the darkly fearful mystery of the surrounding night, but never quite overcoming it.
Street-cars and “L” trains crawled on, soddenly packed with under-dogs going to their dab of rest or crude pleasure. A roar was in the air, with immediate, sharp sounds trailing out into it—a complaining, shackled savage floating up from the scene. The large buildings were without individuality, except that some of them rose vertically above the others, and in their dull shades of red, brown, and gray, they would all have presented a yawning, meanly barrack-like effect but for the relieving fancy of their lights. Even the perpendicular strength of the skyscrapers was marred by filigreed and overcorniced lines.
To Blanche, the scene was a mêlée of delightful possibilities always just eluding her, and obnoxious intrusions only too ready to seek her arm. She realized the transforming effect of the night and said to herself: “Say, I’d never do all this walking if it was daytime—funny, how everything gets more attractive when the night trots along. Guess you can’t see things so clear then.... Better chance to kid yourself along.”
As she strolled through the outskirts of Greenwich Village her legs began to feel heavy, and the past hour seemed to be nothing more than a long, senseless walk taken within the confines of a large trap. The light, hazy sensation of searching oozed slowly out of her body and was replaced by the old hopelessness.
She stopped in front of a batik-shop window and looked at the soft, intricately veined gaudiness of the smocks, blouses, and scarves. “Sorta crazy, yes, but she’d like to wear them—they suited her mood.” Another girl was standing beside Blanche, and the other turned her head and said: “Aren’t they beauties, though. I’d just love to buy that purple and green smock there in the corner.”
“I like the blue one better—the one right next to yours,” Blanche answered naturally, but she looked closely at the other girl.
It was not unusual for strange girls to speak to you when they were either lonely or just brightly interested in some little thing, but still you had to be careful—sometimes they were “fast” players with men, in need of a feminine accomplice, or grafters intent on securing some favor or loan. The other girl had a slender torso and almost slender legs, with all of her plumpness crowded in the buttocks and upper thighs. She had singed butterflies on her face and they gave a light, fluttering pain to her smiles. She had the rarity of large blue eyes on a duskily pale brown face, and small, loosely parted lips, and a slight hook on the upper part of her nose, and curly bobbed brown hair. In her tan coat trimmed with dark fur, scarlet turban, and multicolored silk scarf, she seemed to be a dilettantish, chippy girl, just graduated from the flapper class.