Authors -- Fiction; Canadian fiction; Impostors and imposture -- Fiction; New York (N.Y.) -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
The wind chilled him, so he turned southward and walked aimlessly down
through what had ever seemed to him the veritable backyard of all New
York. The desolation of those quiet streets drove him Eastward, and
dragging his way down the light-spangled, wave-like rise and fall of
Amsterdam Avenue, he plodded onward until the flaring sign of a
restaurant caught his eye. He went inside and sat down at a little
table, and there he ate ravenously--he scarcely remembered what.
Then his spirit of unrest came over him again, and as he wore his way
southward he felt that he should like to see Chatham Square once more; a
caprice to smell the air of the slums came over him. But his old
quarters, he remembered, were too far away to be seen that night. So he
turned down into lower Fifth Avenue, and wandered idly on, gazing at
times up at the quiet stars, and the great white cross of light that
shone from the Mission House, over the Arch and tangled tree tops of
Washington Square. Then the lure of lights to the south caught his eye,
and he drifted into Thompson Street, turning once more erratically
eastward, while for a moment a sudden dizziness came over him and he had
to lean against an iron railing for support. Before him the clustered
globes of an Italian music-hall chanced to flare its invitation to all
passers-by, and he stumbled in, glad of an opportunity to rest. He
groped his way to the half-underground ill-smelling bar and asked for
wine. There he drank three glasses of acid and biting Chianti, and felt
better. He was still weak and dazed, however, so he stepped into the
crowded music-hall at the rear, and sank limply into one of the vacant
chairs.
The odor of tobacco and garlic reeked in the air, and an orchestra of a
half-dozen pieces was crashing out a medley of operatic selections.
Olive-skinned venders of fruit, stoop-shouldered ragpickers, hard-handed
organ-grinders, all sat and looked with rapt faces toward the diminutive
proscenium-arch at the end of the hall, beyond which was a lurid
painting of the Bay of Naples. When Signorina Elisa Venezia came to the
footlights and sang a Venetian boat-song--it took Hartley back to the
night of Repellier's birthday party--a low-browed Neapolitan sitting
next to him pounded on the table with his beer-glass, and the sudden
applause and shouting was deafening, volcanic. He wondered at the fire
of their Latin enthusiasm. An ape-like old man tottered and mumbled
through the gesticulating crowd, selling meal-cakes. When a corpulent
woman in a tawdry yellow costume, swaying her huge body to the throb of
the music, sang an Italian love-song that seemed familiar to the crowd,
the ape-like old man crouched down on the edge of his blackened basket
and listened to the end, with fixed, filmy, eager eyes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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