Instead he inquired casually,--"Where is Reinhard staying? The same
place?" and when his brother replied,--"He's got an apartment somewhere
up town. They'll know at the club--he's been very successful,"--Bragdon
merely nodded. And the next morning after breakfast he sallied from the
hotel, leaving Milly to dispose of herself and the child as she would.
For several days she hardly saw him. He had caught the key of the New
World symphony at once, and had set forth on the warpath without losing
time to get the Job. He succeeded without much difficulty in securing
the illustration of Reinhard's new piece of popular sentimentality and
also put himself in touch with the editors of a new magazine. Then to
work, not his own work, but the world's work,--what it apparently
wanted, at least would pay well for. And the first step was to find some
sort of abiding-place where his family could live less expensively than
at the hotel. Here Milly came in.
The one distinct memory Milly kept of that first year in New York was of
hunting apartments and moving. It seemed to her that she must have
looked at a cityful of dark, noisy rooms ambitiously called apartments,
each more impossible than the others. (As long as they lived in New York
she never gave up the desire for light and quiet,--the two most
expensive luxuries in that luxurious metropolis.) They settled
temporarily in a small furnished "studio-apartment" near Washington
Square, where they were constantly in each other's way. Milly called it
a tenement. Although they had done very well in two rooms in Brittany,
it required much more space than the studio-apartment offered to house
two people with divided hearts. So in the spring they moved farther
up-town to a larger and more expensive apartment without a studio.
Bragdon preferred, anyway, to do his work outside and shared a studio
with a friend. Milly regarded this new abode as merely temporary--they
had taken it for only one year--and they talked intermittently of
moving.
Once or twice Jack suggested going to one of the innumerable suburbs or
abandoning the city altogether for some small country place, as other
artists had done. It would be cheaper, and they could have a house,
their own patch of earth, and some quiet. Milly received this suggestion
in silence. Indeed they both shrank from facing each other in suburban
solitude. They were both by nature and training cockneys. Milly
especially had rather perch among the chimney-pots and see the
procession go by from the roof than possess all that Nature had to
offer. And they were still young, she felt: much might happen in the
city, "if they didn't give up." But she said equivocally,--
"Your work keeps you so much in the city; you have to see people."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account