A Top-Floor Idyl | Page 6

studio, shared with another woman, is farther uptown. Finally she opened the door, clad in a hoary dressing-gown and blinking, for she had not been able to find her spectacles.
"Who is it?" she demanded placidly, as if being awakened at two fifteen in the morning had been a common incident of her life.
"It's Dave, just Dave Cole," I answered. "I want you, Frieda-that is to say, a woman wants you badly, at my house-taking her share of the primal curse. Don't know who she is, but Mrs. Milliken's away. She's alone with a little half-hatched doctor, and-and--"
"Come in. Sit there in the front room. Cigarettes on that table. I'll close the door and be with you in five minutes," she assured me tranquilly.
I tried to smoke, but the thing tasted like Dead Sea fruit and I pitched it out of the open window. An amazingly short time afterwards Frieda was ready, bespectacled and wearing an awful hat. I think she generally picks them out of rag bags.
As we walked along, she entertained me with her latest idea for a picture. It would be a belted Orion pursuing the daughters of Pleione, who would be changing into stars. She explained some of the difficulties and beauties of the subject, and her conception of it, while I looked at her in wonder. I must say that, from her stubby, capable fingers, there flow pure poetry of thought and exquisiteness of coloring. Her form, reminding one of a pillow tied none too tightly in the middle, her tousled head containing a brain masculine in power and feminine in tenderness, her deep contralto, might be appanages of some back-to-the-earth female with an uncomfortable mission. But she's simply the best woman in the world.
She panted to the top floor and, at my desire, followed me into my room, where I had left the door open and the gas burning. She gave a swift glance around the place, and her eyes manifested disapproval.
"I wonder how you can ever find anything on that desk," she reproved me, as I searched in a bureau drawer. To my utter terror she began to put some papers in order.
"Here's an unopened letter from Paisley's Magazine," she announced.
I pounced upon it and tore it open, to discover a check for eighty dollars.
"Good!" I exclaimed. "I'd forgotten that story. It was called 'Cynthia's Mule'; I wonder what possessed me to write about a mule? Don't know anything about them."
"That's why it sold, most likely," said Frieda. "The public prefers poetry to truth in its prose. What are you wasting time for, fooling in that drawer?"
"I have it. It's a twenty-dollar bill," I told her. "I put it among my socks so that I shouldn't spend it. Might be very handy, you know. She might need something, and you could go out and buy it."
"Can you afford it, Dave?" she asked me.
"Of course, and you forget the check I've just received. Mrs. Milliken will cash it for me at her butcher's. He's very obliging."
Just then we heard something. Frieda stuffed the bill in some part of her ample bosom and ran away. I heard her knock at the door and go in.
There was nothing for me to do but to look at the nearly finished page that was still in the embrace of my typewriter. For some silly reason my gorge rose at the idea of the virtuous dog, but I remembered, as I was about to pull out and lacerate the paper, that my mind sometimes plays me scurvy tricks. When I am interrupted in the beginning of a story, and look over it again, it always seems deplorably bad. Another day I will look at it more indulgently. Moreover, what was the use of thinking about such trivialities when the world's great problem was unfolding itself, just seven steps away over the worn strip of Brussels on the landing.
So I settled down in my old Morris chair to ponder over the matter of babies coming to the just and the unjust, provided with silver spoons or lucky to be wrapped up in an ancient flannel petticoat. The most beautiful gift of a kindly Nature or its sorriest practical joke, welcome or otherwise, the arriving infant is entitled to respect and commiseration. I wondered what might be the fate of this one. In a few hours it will be frowned down upon by Mrs. Milliken, who will consider it as an insult to the genus landlady. The mother, naturally, will smile upon the poor little thing; she will dote upon it as women do on the ordinarily useless articles they purchase with money or pain at the bargain counter of life. This wee white and pink mite, since its daddy's away fighting and the mother is poor, must prove a tragedy, I