V
TOM RENNARD and his sister stood under a house with a high straight stoop like a dozen alongside it. They looked up. Behind them their passing through Stuyvesant Square. The sky was very deep and warm on the moldering housetops, beyond the cool clouds. These skimmed their shadows across the Park’s shut green. They threw small puffs of gray on the gleaming creepers of the Church. They dropped to the squat red meeting-house of the Friends and lightened its brick with their dark. They went westering over the bleak dense City.
“This is the number.”
They mounted the stoop.
Each had a hand on the iron rail that rusted under crumbling paint.
A piercing rumble lay in the Park. Jangle of horse-cars, stir and laughter of children, the dry gasp of life hot over the Park from four dense sides, as over a cool well. And the Square merging with these the distances it caught on its church-steeple: hoot of river craft, gashes of dull speed echoing into sharpness as an elevated train passed through muffled houses. All of it funneled down the narrow eastward street that fell from the Square to the River: rose above the shoulders of these two: flattened back against the reticence of brownstone walls.
“Not a bad house,” said Tom. “Relic of Knickerbocker glory. Some less brilliant Stuyvesant cousin may have lived in it once.” He pulled a bell-handle: its call pierced and lingered in the old mansion’s depths. The house stood unmoved like a ventriloquist.
He turned. The sun was aflame in the Eastern windows. He faced the Park. Slow swarms of men and women crawling and scattering like bugs. These drew away his thoughts from the house and Cornelia. She stood laughing at the ornamented vestibule: its florid crimson plaster.
“Strange, isn’t it?” she said. “When they tried to add beauty to their houses they made them hideous. Why is it?...”
Tom’s new partner, Gilbert Lomney, who was a cousin of the President of the Fidelity Bank, who was a nephew of the General Manager of a great Railroad System, who was among the loyal stags of Mrs. Astor’s balls, who was a fellow with no moral and no professional sense—he wondered how he was going to get along with him. He brought in business well enough. But Tom had misgivings. He thought about them now. Lomney’s most brilliant feature was his glasses: his best achievement was his neckties. His glasses had a way of catching the sun whenever there was any sun around. His neckties were striped and of three colors. Without his glasses, Lomney was dull. Without his neckties, he would be naked. His eyes were flat. His complexion was habitually gray. About his mouth were the heavy lines, the puffing pucker that denote a sluggish kinetic system. One thing, to be sure: Lomney’s head was long—what Tom knew to be a generous head. But he was not sure of the brows that seemed dissociate from his eyes. Well: this was his partner. That day there had been a rub in the office.