第25章 PART FIRST(23)

"Not a thing,"she said."And I'm just going back to Boston,and leaving Mr.March here to do anything he pleases about it.He has 'carte blanche.'""But freedom brings responsibility,you know,Fulkerson,and it's the same as if I'd no choice.I'm staying behind because I'm left,not because I expect to do anything.""Is that so?"asked Fulkerson."Well,we must see what can be done.Isupposed you would be all settled by this time,or I should have humped myself to find you something.None of those places I gave you amounts to anything?""As much as forty thousand others we've looked at,"said Mrs.March.

"Yes,one of them does amount to something.It comes so near being what we want that I've given Mr.March particular instructions not to go near it."She told him about Mrs.Grosvenor Green and her flats,and at the end he said:

"Well,well,we must look out for that.I'll keep an eye on him,Mrs.

March,and see that he doesn't do anything rash,and I won't leave him till he's found just the right thing.It exists,of course;it must in a city of eighteen hundred thousand people,and the only question is where to find it.You leave him to me,Mrs.March;I'll watch out for him."Fulkerson showed some signs of going to the station when he found they were not driving,but she bade him a peremptory good-bye at the hotel door.

"He's very nice,Basil,and his way with you is perfectly charming.

It's very sweet to see how really fond of you he is.But I didn't want him stringing along with us up to Forty-second Street and spoiling our last moments together."At Third Avenue they took the Elevated for which she confessed an infatuation.She declared it the most ideal way of getting about in the world,and was not ashamed when he reminded her of how she used to say that nothing under the sun could induce her to travel on it.She now said that the night transit was even more interesting than the day,and that the fleeing intimacy you formed with people in second and third floor interiors,while all the usual street life went on underneath,had a domestic intensity mixed with a perfect repose that was the last effect of good society with all its security and exclusiveness.He said it was better than the theatre,of which it reminded him,to see those people through their windows:a family party of work-folk at a late tea,some of the men in their shirt-sleeves;a woman sewing by a lamp;a mother laying her child in its cradle;a man with his head fallen on his hands upon a table;a girl and her lover leaning over the window-sill together.What suggestion!what drama?what infinite interest!At the Forty-second Street station they stopped a minute on the bridge that crosses the track to the branch road for the Central Depot,and looked up and down the long stretch of the Elevated to north and south.The track that found and lost itself a thousand times in the flare and tremor of the innumerable lights;the moony sheen of the electrics mixing with the reddish points and blots of gas far and near;the architectural shapes of houses and churches and towers,rescued by the obscurity from all that was ignoble in them,and the coming and going of the trains marking the stations with vivider or fainter plumes of flame-shot steam-formed an incomparable perspective.They often talked afterward of the superb spectacle,which in a city full of painters nightly works its unrecorded miracles;and they were just to the Arachne roof spun in iron over the cross street on which they ran to the depot;but for the present they were mostly inarticulate before it.They had another moment of rich silence when they paused in the gallery that leads from the Elevated station to the waiting-rooms in the Central Depot and looked down upon the great night trains lying on the tracks dim under the rain of gas-lights that starred without dispersing the vast darkness of the place.What forces,what fates,slept in these bulks which would soon be hurling themselves north and south and west through the night!Now they waited there like fabled monsters of Arab story ready for the magician's touch,tractable,reckless,will-less--organized lifelessness full of a strange semblance of life.

The Marches admired the impressive sight with a thrill of patriotic pride in the fact that the whole world perhaps could not afford just the like.

Then they hurried down to the ticket-offices,and he got her a lower berth in the Boston sleeper,and went with her to the car.They made the most of the fact that her berth was in the very middle of the car;and she promised to write as soon as she reached home.She promised also that,having seen the limitations of New York in respect to flats,she would not be hard on him if he took something not quite ideal.Only he must remember that it was not to be above Twentieth Street nor below Washington Square;it must not be higher than the third floor;it must have an elevator,steam heat,hail-boys,and a pleasant janitor.These were essentials;if he could not get them,then they must do without.

But he must get them.

XI.

Mrs.March was one of those wives who exact a more rigid adherence to their ideals from their husbands than from themselves.Early in their married life she had taken charge of him in all matters which she considered practical.She did not include the business of bread-winning in these;that was an affair that might safely be left to his absent-minded,dreamy inefficiency,and she did not interfere with him there.