Читать книгу The Siege of the Seven Suitors - Meredith Nicholson - Страница 7

Wiggins's strange conduct and Jewett's dark hints so disturbed me that the very next afternoon I again sought the Asolando Tea-Room, feeling that in its atmosphere I might best weigh the few facts I possessed touching my friend's love-affairs.

Those who care for details in these matters may be interested to know that the Asolando is tucked away among print-shops and exclusive haberdashers, a stone's throw from Fifth Avenue. The Asolando Tea-Room has a history of its own, but it is not the office of this chronicler to record it. Weightier matters are ahead of us; and it must suffice that the Asolando is sacred to wooers of the flute of Pan, secession photographers, and confident believers in an early revival of the poetic drama. One of my friends, who has probably done more to popularize Nietzsche than any other American, had frequently urged me to visit the Asolando, where, he declared, the daintiest imaginable luncheons could be obtained at nominal prices; but I should not have paid this second visit had it not been for Jewett's history.

It was common gossip in studios where I loafed between my professional engagements, that the monthly deficit at the Asolando was cared for by a retired banker whose weakness is sonnet-sequences. As to the truth of this I have no opinion. It will suffice if I convey in the fewest possible lines a suggestion of the tranquillity, the charming cloistral peace of the little room, with its Arts and Crafts chairs and tables, its racks of books, its portraits of Browning, Rossetti, Burne-Jones and kindred spirits; nor should I fail to mention the delightful inadvertence with which neatly framed excerpts from the bright page of British song are scattered along the walls. Nowhere else, many had averred, was one so likely to learn of the latest Celtic poet, or of a newly-discovered Keats letter; and lest injustice be done in these suggestions to the substantial scholarly attainments of the habitués, I must record that it was over a cup of tea in the Asolando that Bennett made the first notes for his revolutionary essay on the Sapphic fragments in a dog-eared text still treasured among the Room's memorabilia.

I chose a table, sat down, and suggested (one does not order at the Asolando) a few articles from the card an attendant handed me.

"We 're out of the Paracelsus ginger-cookies," she replied, "but I recommend a Ruskin sandwich with our own special chocolate. The whipped cream is unusually fine to-day."

She eyed me with a severity to which I was not accustomed, and I acquiesced without parley in her suggestion. Before leaving me she placed on my table the latest minor poet, in green and gold.

It was nearly three o'clock, and there were few customers in the Asolando. At the next table two women were engaged in conversation in the subdued tones the place compelled. I surmised from the amount and variety of their impedimenta and their abstracted air, peculiar to those who partake of lobster salad with an eye on the 4.18, that they were suburbanites. One of them drew from her net shopping-bag several sheets of robin's-egg blue note-paper and began to read. By the jingle of the rhymes and the flow of the rhythm it was clear even to my ignorant lay mind that her offering was a chant-royale. When she had concluded her reading her friend silently pressed her hand, and after a subdued debate for possession of the check, they took their departure, bound, I surmised, for some muse-haunted Lesbos among the hills of New Jersey.

I was now alone in the Asolando. The attending deities in their snowy gowns had vanished behind the screen at the rear of the room; the food and drink with which I had been promptly served proved excellent; even the minor poet in green and gold had held my attention, though imitations of Coventry Patmore's odes bore me as a rule. Near the street, half-concealed behind a mosque-like grill, sat the cashier, reading. A bundle of joss-sticks in a green jar beside this young woman sent a thin smoke into the air. Her head was bent above her book in quiet attention; the light from an electric lamp made a glow of her golden hair. She was an incident of the general picture, a part of a scene that contained no jarring note. A man who could devise, in the heart of the great city, a place so instinct with repose, so lulling to all the senses, was not less than a public benefactor, and I resolved on the spot to purchase and read, at any sacrifice, the sonnet-sequences of the reputed angel of the Asolando.

It was at this moment that the adventure—for it shall have no meaner name—actually began. My eyes were still enjoying the Rossetti-like vision in the cashier's tiny booth, when a figure suddenly darkened the street door just beyond her. The girl lifted her head. On the instant the lamp-key clicked as she extinguished her light, and the aureoled head ceased to be. And coming toward me down the shop I beheld a lady, a lady of years, who passed the cashier's desk with her eyes intent upon the room's inner recesses. Her gown, of a new fashionable gray, was of the severest tailor cut. Her hat was a modified fedora, gray like the gown, and adorned with a single gray feather. She was short, slight, erect, and moved with a quick bird-like motion, pausing and glancing at the vacant tables that lay between me and the door. Her air of abstraction became her, and she merged pleasantly into the color-scheme of the room. As her glance ranged the wall I thought that she searched for some favorite flower of song among the framed quotations, but I saw now that her gaze was bent too low for this. She appeared to be engaged in a calculation of some sort, and she raised a lorgnette to assist her in counting the tables. The cashier passed behind her unseen and vanished. I heard the newcomer reciting:—

"One, two, three, four, five, six, seven;" and at seven her eyes rested upon me with a look that mingled surprise and annoyance. She took a step toward me, and I started to rise, but she said quickly:—

"I beg your pardon, but this seems to be the seventh table."