V
LUNCHEON AT SHARPE’S
RICHARD COBDEN and John Higgins were lunching at Sharpe’s Chop House. It was one-thirty, and at the height of the day’s business. The tables were packed close.
“You were telling me about that Asiatic landlady down in the Village,” Higgins said, lifting his spectacles to wipe his red-rimmed eyes.
“I wasn’t telling you much,” said Dicky. “She’s too deep for me—looks to thrive on coffee and cigarettes—eyes that have seen too much, a lot of laughter in them, but no hope.... And what would you think of a basement room, with flowers in winter and a fireplace with hickory embers, a Byzantine jar in the corner and a cabinet of porcelain which I haven’t seen the like of on this side?”
“Go on—don’t mind me,” said John Higgins.
“... Little old Harrow Street,” Dicky mused. “Harrow Street curves, you know. There is quite a mass of rooming houses on each side, and number Fifty-four, with a green front, is Miss Claes’ house. And our Mr. Naidu works there with his hands; only they call him Nagar in that house—spelled with an ‘a’ but pronounced ‘nog.’... By the way, he told me twice, yesterday, that it isn’t a fiction story we’ve bought, but a handling of things that actually happened in Africa—Little Man an actual human being named Gandhi or something of the sort.”
“Can’t be done. Fiction and life are different,” said John Higgins.
Dicky resumed: “Some of Miss Claes’ lodgers happened in for the tea party. No one barred apparently. I must have seen most of the houseful: couple of girl-pals; one works in a restaurant to support the other who is to become a prima donna; a couple of decayed vaudeville artists looking for a legacy—a regular houseful, but I don’t believe all of them pay, as they would have to in other houses.”
“Landlady supports those who can’t?”
“That’s the way I see it. The green front in Harrow Street took hold of me. I must have stayed over two hours. Our Mr. Naidu made some coffee to go with that cabinet of porcelain. Also there was a little girl—from Los Angeles, I think they said—red head, brown wool dress and eyes of a blue you see on illumined vellum out of Italy——”
“Some cerulean,” said John Higgins.
“They weren’t large, particularly,” Dicky went on at his literary best, “but that extraordinary blue like the ocean. Ruffled on top, but calm and still in the depth! Never saw such eyes. They come back to me now——”
“They do to me, Dicky.”
“You’re not getting all I mean, John. Uptown here, we think we’re the center of the world, the heart of New York yanking up toward the Park—but down there those old rooming houses are filling up with the boys and girls from all the States west, and the second growths from the families of European immigrants—filling up because they are cheap, with the boys and girls who will do the surgery ten years from now, and the painting and writing and acting——”
“I’ve heard about all that,” said John Higgins. “You’ll do a big story yourself one day.”
“I’m not so sure of it, since yesterday. I couldn’t take their chances. I couldn’t sit down and do a novel and not know how I was going to eat my way through. I couldn’t scrub tenement-house floors for the privilege of writing a book.... Oh, I love books all right. I rise up and yell when a big short story comes in the office, or breaks out anywhere. I think I know a real one, but a man’s got to do a whole lot of appreciating before he gets to doing. I’m not bred somehow as those people are. I’m the first of the Cobdens to break out of trade. They call me a dreamer, my people do—yet compared to those boys and girls in Harrow Street, I’m a basket of fish with only a wiggle at the bottom——”
“Get out,” said John Higgins. “The first thing you know, you’ll be going down there again.”
“I will,” said Dicky. “I’m going down there to live.”
“Eh?”
The younger man nodded seriously. “They’re crazy, perhaps, but I’m convinced from yesterday of one thing: One can’t be sane as I am, and ever find the Big Story, much less write it.”
“Therefore the first thing to do is to go insane.”
“It isn’t like that,” Dicky said gently. “I’ve been brought up to think I know New York, belong and breathe in New York. You see, my family has lived here a hundred years. But yesterday I saw New York for the first time. She isn’t an old Dutch frump, as we thought, John. She’s a damsel! She’s a new moon——”
“Blue eyes?” said John Higgins.
“No, that’s the little girl from Los Angeles. It’s the landlady, of course, who’s the spirit of the place. I figured out afterward that it was because she was there that I liked everybody and had a good time. Wouldn’t be surprised to hear she was a priestess of some sort. I asked if she were Hindu, and she said ‘Yes,’ but she talks as if she were out of an English convent. Of course, most of her lodgers don’t get her. One old actor, out of a job, leaned across the table to me yesterday when Miss Claes left the room. He tapped his forehead, whispering, ‘Lovely, eh, but got the Ophelias.’”
“Is she young?” John Higgins asked presently.
“Moreover,” Dicky added, lost in thought, “I believe Miss Claes knows that they think her cracked and doesn’t mind.... Young? Say, I don’t know, John. You don’t think of her with years, somehow—rather as one who has reached the top of herself and decided to stay there.”
John Higgins leaned back, drained his coffee cup and stared with eyes that smarted at the steaming ceiling. “Is Naidu going to do us another story?”
“We didn’t get to that, but they gave me a novel manuscript to read.”
“His?”
“No, I didn’t get it straight whose it was. Miss Claes handed it over, suggesting I look at it for a serial. Some one in the house had written it or left it there.”
“We’d better be going back to the office. Have you read into the novel?”
“Started, but didn’t get really going. It’s back-age France stuff, and I was a little lost last night on the subject of 54 Harrow Street.”
“You’re a little lost yet, Dicky, I should say—for a Cobden.... So you’re going to lead a double life? Rich young New Yorker, quarters in Fiftieth Street under the eaves of St. Patrick’s, vanishing into life down in Greenwich.”
Dicky’s eyes were keen with memory.