The radiator was concealed by a j.a.p screen, and over the top of this some Arab scarfs were flung. There was a superabundance of clocks. China pugs guarded the hearth; a bra.s.s sunflower smiled from the top of either andiron, and a bra.s.s peac.o.c.k spread its tail before them inside a high filigree fender; on one side was a coalhod in "repousse" bra.s.s, and on the other a wrought iron wood-basket. Some red j.a.panese bird-kites were stuck about in the necks of spelter vases, a crimson j.a.p umbrella hung opened beneath the chandelier, and each globe had a shade of yellow silk.
March, when he had recovered his self-command a little in the presence of the agglomeration, comforted himself by calling the bric-a-brac Jamescracks, as if this was their full name.
The disrespect he was able to show the whole apartment by means of this joke strengthened him to say boldly to the superintendent that it was altogether too small; then he asked carelessly what the rent was.
"Two hundred and fifty."
The Marches gave a start, and looked at each other.
"Don"t you think we could make it do?" she asked him, and he could see that she had mentally saved five hundred dollars as the difference between the rent of their house and that of this flat. "It has some very pretty features, and we could manage to squeeze in, couldn"t we?"
"You won"t find another furnished flat like it for no two-fifty a month in the whole city," the superintendent put in.
They exchanged glances again, and March said, carelessly, "It"s too small."
"There"s a vacant flat in the Herodotus for eighteen hundred a year, and one in the Thucydides for fifteen," the superintendent suggested, clicking his keys together as they sank down in the elevator; "seven rooms and bath."
"Thank you," said March; "we"re looking for a furnished flat."
They felt that the superintendent parted from them with repressed sarcasm.
"Oh, Basil, do you think we really made him think it was the smallness and not the dearness?"
"No, but we saved our self-respect in the attempt; and that"s a great deal."
"Of course, I wouldn"t have taken it, anyway, with only six rooms, and so high up. But what prices! Now, we must be very circ.u.mspect about the next place."
It was a janitress, large, fat, with her arms wound up in her ap.r.o.n, who received them there. Mrs. March gave her a succinct but perfect statement of their needs. She failed to grasp the nature of them, or feigned to do so. She shook her head, and said that her son would show them the flat. There was a radiator visible in the narrow hall, and Isabel tacitly compromised on steam heat without an elevator, as the flat was only one flight up. When the son appeared from below with a small kerosene hand-lamp, it appeared that the flat was unfurnished, but there was no stopping him till he had shown it in all its impossibility.
When they got safely away from it and into the street March said: "Well, have you had enough for to-night, Isabel? Shall we go to the theatre now?"
"Not on any account. I want to see the whole list of flats that Mr.
Fulkerson thought would be the very thing for us." She laughed, but with a certain bitterness.
"You"ll be calling him my Mr. Fulkerson next, Isabel."
"Oh no!"
The fourth address was a furnished flat without a kitchen, in a house with a general restaurant. The fifth was a furnished house. At the sixth a pathetic widow and her pretty daughter wanted to take a family to board, and would give them a private table at a rate which the Marches would have thought low in Boston.
Mrs. March came away tingling with compa.s.sion for their evident anxiety, and this pity naturally soured into a sense of injury. "Well, I must say I have completely lost confidence in Mr. Fulkerson"s judgment. Anything more utterly different from what I told him we wanted I couldn"t imagine. If he doesn"t manage any better about his business than he has done about this, it will be a perfect failure."
"Well, well, let"s hope he"ll be more circ.u.mspect about that," her husband returned, with ironical propitiation. "But I don"t think it"s Fulkerson"s fault altogether. Perhaps it"s the house-agents". They"re a very illusory generation. There seems to be something in the human habitation that corrupts the natures of those who deal in it, to buy or sell it, to hire or let it. You go to an agent and tell him what kind of a house you want. He has no such house, and he sends you to look at something altogether different, upon the well-ascertained principle that if you can"t get what you want you will take what you can get. You don"t suppose the "party" that took our house in Boston was looking for any such house? He was looking for a totally different kind of house in another part of the town."
"I don"t believe that!" his wife broke in.
"Well, no matter. But see what a scandalous rent you asked for it."
"We didn"t get much more than half; and, besides, the agent told me to ask fourteen hundred."
"Oh, I"m not blaming you, Isabel. I"m only a.n.a.lyzing the house-agent and exonerating Fulkerson."
"Well, I don"t believe he told them just what we wanted; and, at any rate, I"m done with agents. Tomorrow I"m going entirely by advertis.e.m.e.nts."
VIII.
Mrs. March took the vertebrate with her to the Vienna Coffee-House, where they went to breakfast next morning. She made March buy her the Herald and the World, and she added to its spiny convolutions from them. She read the new advertis.e.m.e.nts aloud with ardor and with faith to believe that the apartments described in them were every one truthfully represented, and that any one of them was richly responsive to their needs. "Elegant, light, large, single and outside flats" were offered with "all improvements--bath, ice-box, etc."--for twenty-five to thirty dollars a month. The cheapness was amazing. The Wagram, the Esmeralda, the Jacinth, advertised them for forty dollars and sixty dollars, "with steam heat and elevator," rent free till November. Others, attractive from their air of conscientious scruple, announced "first-cla.s.s flats; good order; reasonable rents." The Helena asked the reader if she had seen the "cabinet finish, hard-wood floors, and frescoed ceilings" of its fifty-dollar flats; the Asteroid affirmed that such apartments, with "six light rooms and bath, porcelain wash-tubs, electric bells, and hall-boy," as it offered for seventy-five dollars were unapproached by compet.i.tion. There was a sameness in the jargon which tended to confusion. Mrs. March got several flats on her list which promised neither steam heat nor elevators; she forgot herself so far as to include two or three as remote from the down-town region of her choice as Harlem. But after she had rejected these the nondescript vertebrate was still voluminous enough to sustain her buoyant hopes.
The waiter, who remembered them from year to year, had put them at a window giving a pretty good section of Broadway, and before they set out on their search they had a moment of reminiscence. They recalled the Broadway of five, of ten, of twenty years ago, swelling and roaring with a tide of gayly painted omnibuses and of picturesque traffic that the horsecars have now banished from it. The grind of their wheels and the clash of their harsh bells imperfectly fill the silence that the omnibuses have left, and the eye misses the tumultuous perspective of former times.
They went out and stood for a moment before Grace Church, and looked down the stately thoroughfare, and found it no longer impressive, no longer characteristic. It is still Broadway in name, but now it is like any other street. You do not now take your life in your hand when you attempt to cross it; the Broadway policeman who supported the elbow of timorous beauty in the hollow of his cotton-gloved palm and guided its little fearful boots over the crossing, while he arrested the billowy omnibuses on either side with an imperious glance, is gone, and all that certain processional, barbaric gayety of the place is gone.
"Palmyra, Baalbec, Timour of the Desert," said March, voicing their common feeling of the change.
They turned and went into the beautiful church, and found themselves in time for the matin service. Rapt far from New York, if not from earth, in the dim richness of the painted light, the hallowed music took them with solemn ecstasy; the aerial, aspiring Gothic forms seemed to lift them heavenward. They came out, reluctant, into the dazzle and bustle of the street, with a feeling that they were too good for it, which they confessed to each other with whimsical consciousness.
"But no matter how consecrated we feel now," he said, "we mustn"t forget that we went into the church for precisely the same reason that we went to the Vienna Cafe for breakfast--to gratify an aesthetic sense, to renew the faded pleasure of travel for a moment, to get back into the Europe of our youth. It was a purely Pagan impulse, Isabel, and we"d better own it."
"I don"t know," she returned. "I think we reduce ourselves to the bare bones too much. I wish we didn"t always recognize the facts as we do.
Sometimes I should like to blink them. I should like to think I was devouter than I am, and younger and prettier."
"Better not; you couldn"t keep it up. Honesty is the best policy even in such things."
"No; I don"t like it, Basil. I should rather wait till the last day for some of my motives to come to the top. I know they"re always mixed, but do let me give them the benefit of a doubt sometimes."
"Well, well, have it your own way, my dear. But I prefer not to lay up so many disagreeable surprises for myself at that time."
She would not consent. "I know I am a good deal younger than I was. I feel quite in the mood of that morning when we walked down Broadway on our wedding journey. Don"t you?"
"Oh yes. But I know I"m not younger; I"m only prettier."
She laughed for pleasure in his joke, and also for unconscious joy in the gay New York weather, in which there was no "arriere pensee" of the east wind. They had crossed Broadway, and were walking over to Washington Square, in the region of which they now hoped to place themselves. The "primo tenore" statue of Garibaldi had already taken possession of the place in the name of Latin progress, and they met Italian faces, French faces, Spanish faces, as they strolled over the asphalt walks, under the thinning shadows of the autumn-stricken sycamores. They met the familiar picturesque raggedness of Southern Europe with the old kindly illusion that somehow it existed for their appreciation, and that it found adequate compensation for poverty in this. March thought he sufficiently expressed his tacit sympathy in sitting down on one of the iron benches with his wife and letting a little Neapolitan put a superfluous shine on his boots, while their desultory comment wandered with equal esteem to the old-fashioned American respectability which keeps the north side of the square in vast mansions of red brick, and the international shabbiness which has invaded the southern border, and broken it up into lodging-houses, shops, beer-gardens, and studios.
They noticed the sign of an apartment to let on the north side, and as soon as the little bootblack could be bought off they went over to look at it. The janitor met them at the door and examined them. Then he said, as if still in doubt, "It has ten rooms, and the rent is twenty-eight hundred dollars."
"It wouldn"t do, then," March replied, and left him to divide the responsibility between the paucity of the rooms and the enormity of the rent as he best might. But their self-love had received a wound, and they questioned each other what it was in their appearance made him doubt their ability to pay so much.
"Of course, we don"t look like New-Yorkers," sighed Mrs. March, "and we"ve walked through the Square. That might be as if we had walked along the Park Street mall in the Common before we came out on Beacon. Do you suppose he could have seen you getting your boots blacked in that way?"
"It"s useless to ask," said March. "But I never can recover from this blow."
"Oh, pshaw! You know you hate such things as badly as I do. It was very impertinent of him."
"Let us go back and "ecraser l"infame" by paying him a year"s rent in advance and taking immediate possession. Nothing else can soothe my wounded feelings. You were not having your boots blacked: why shouldn"t he have supposed you were a New-Yorker, and I a country cousin?"
"They always know. Don"t you remember Mrs. Williams"s going to a Fifth Avenue milliner in a Worth dress, and the woman"s asking her instantly what hotel she should send her hat to?"