_ XI
Tea for two at the Gondolier, that newest and quotation-marked "Quaintest" of Village tea rooms. The chief points in the Gondolier's "quaintness" seem to be that it is chopped up into as many little partitions as a roulette wheel and that all food has to be carried up from a cellar that imparts even to orange marmalade a faint persuasive odor of somebody else's wash. Still, during the last eight months, the Gondolier has been a radical bookstore devoted to bloody red pamphlets, a batik shop full of strange limp garments ornamented with decorative squiggles, and a Roumanian Restaurant called "The Brodska" whose menu seemed to consist almost entirely of old fish and maraschino cherries.
The wispy little woman from Des Moines who conducts the Gondolier at present in a series of timid continual flutters at actually leading the life of the Bohemian untamed, and who gives all the young hungry-looking men extra slices of toast because any one of them might be Vachel Lindsay in disguise, will fail in another six weeks and then the Gondolier may turn into anything from a Free Verse Tavern to a Meeting Hall for the Friends of Slovak Freedom. But at present, the tea is much too good for the price in spite of its inescapable laundry tang, and there is a flat green bowl full of Japanese iris bulbs in the window--the second of which pleases Mrs. Severance and the first Ted.
Besides like most establishments on the verge of bankruptcy, it is such a quiet place to talk--the only other two people in it are a boy with startled hair and an orange smock and a cigaretty girl called Tommy, and she is far too busy telling him that that dream about wearing a necklace of flying-fish shows a dangerous inferiority complex even to comment caustically on strangers from uptown who
will intrude on the dear Village.
"Funny stuff--dreams," says Ted uneasily, catching at overheard phrases for a conversational jumping-off place. His mind, always a little on edge now with work and bad feeding, has been too busy since they came in comparing Rose Severance with Elinor Piper, and wondering why, when one is so like a golden-skinned August pear and the other a branch of winter blackberries against snow just fallen, it is not as good but somehow warmer to think of the first against your touch than the second, to leave him wholly at ease.
"Yes--funny stuff," Mrs. Severance's voice is musically quiet. "And then you tell them to people who pretend to know all about what they mean--and then--" She shrugs shoulders at the Freudian two across the shoulder-high partition.
"But you don't believe in all this psycho-analysis tosh, do you?"
She hesitates. "A little, yes. Like the old woman and ghosts. I may not believe in it but I'm afraid of it, rather."
She gives him a steady look--her eyes go deep. It is not so much the intensity of the look as its haltingness that makes warmth go over him.
"Shall we tell our dreams--the favorite ones, I mean? Play fair if we do, remember," she adds slowly.
"Not if you're really afraid."
"I? But it's just because I am afraid that I really should, you know. Like going into a dark room when you don't want to."
"But they can't be as scary as
that, surely." Ted's voice is a little false. Both are watching each other intently now--he with a puzzled sense of lazy enveloping firelight.
"Well, shall I begin? After all this
is tea in the Village."
"I should be very much interested indeed, Mrs. Severance," says Ted rather gravely. "Check!" "How official you sound--almost as if you had a lot of those funny little machines all the modern doctors use and were going to mail me off to your pet sanatorium at once because you'd asked me what green reminded me of and I said 'cheese' instead of 'trees.' And anyhow, I never have any startling dreams--only silly ones--much too silly to tell--"
"Please go on." Ted's voice has really become quite clinical.
"Oh very well. They don't count when you only have them once--just when they keep coming back and back to you--isn't that it?"
"I believe so."
Mrs. Severance's eyes waver a little--her mouth seeking for the proper kind of dream.
"It's not much but it comes quite regularly--the most punctual, old-fashioned-servant sort of a dream.
"It doesn't begin with sleep, you know--it begins with waking. At least it's just as if I were in my own bed in my own apartment and then gradually I started to wake. You know how you can feel that somebody else is in the room though you can't see them--that's the feeling. And, of course being a normal American business woman, my first idea is--burglars. And I'm very cowardly for a minute. Then the cowardice passes and I decide to get up and see what it is.
"It
is somebody else--or something--but nobody I think that I ever really knew. And at first I don't want to walk toward it--and then I do because it keeps pulling me in spite of myself. So I go to it--hands out so I won't knock over things.
"And then I touch it--or him--or her--and I'm suddenly very, very happy.
"That's all.
"And now, Dr. Billett, what would you say of my case?"
Ted's eyes are glowing--in the middle of her description his heart has begun to knock to a hidden pulse, insistent and soft as the drum of gloved fingers on velvet. He picks words carefully.
"I should say--Mrs. Severance--that there was something you needed and wanted and didn't have at present. And that you would probably have it--in the end."
She laughs a little. "Rather cryptic, isn't that, doctor? And you'd prescribe?"
"Prescribe? 'It's an awkward matter to play with souls.'"
"'And trouble enough to save your own,'" she completes the quotation. "Yes, that's true enough--though I'm sorry you can't even tell me to use this twice a day in half a glass of water and that other directly after each meal. I think I'll have to be a little more definite when it comes to your turn--if it does come."
"Oh it will." But instead of beginning, he raises his eyes to her again. This time there is a heaviness like sleep on both, a heaviness that draws both together inaudibly and down, and down, as if they were sinking through piled thickness on thickness of warm, sweet-scented grass. Odd faces come into both minds and vanish as if flickered off a film--to Rose Severance, a man narrow and flat as if he were cut out of thin grey paper, talking, talking in a voice as dry and rattling as a flapping windowblind of their "vacation" together and a house with a little garden where she can sew and he can putter around,--to Ted, Elinor Piper, the profile pure as if it were painted on water, passing like water flowing from the earth in springs, in its haughty temperance, its retired beauty, its murmurous quiet--other faces, some trembling as if touched with light flames, some calm, some merely grotesque with longing or too much pleasure--all these pass. A great nearness, fiercer and more slumbrous than any nearness of body takes their place. It wraps the two closer and closer, a spider spinning a soft web out of petals, folding the two with swathes and swathes of its heavy, fragrant silk.
"Oh--mine--isn't anything," says Ted rather unsteadily, after the moment. "Only looking at firelight and wanting to take the coals in my hands."
Rose's voice is firmer than his but her mouth is still moved with content at the thing it has desired being brought nearer.
"I really can't prescribe on as little evidence as that," she says with music come back to her voice in the strength of a running wave. "I can only repeat what you told me. That there was something you needed--and wanted"--she is mocking now--"and didn't have at present. And that you would probably--what was it?--oh yes--have it, in the end."
The wispy little woman has crept up to Ted's elbow with an illegible bill. Rose has spoken slowly to give her time to get there--it is always so much better to choose your own most effective background for really affecting scenes.
"And now I really must be getting back," she cuts in briskly, her fingers playing with a hat that certainly needs no rearrangement, when Ted, after absent-mindedly paying the bill, is starting to speak in the voice of one still sleep-walking.
"But it
was delightful, Mr. Billett--I love talking about myself and you were really very sweet to listen so nicely." She has definitely risen. Ted must, too. "We must do it again some time soon--I'm going to see if there aren't any of those books with long German names drifting around 'Mode' somewhere so that I'll be able to simply stun you with my erudition the next time we talk over dreams."
They are at the door now, she guiding him toward it as imperceptibly and skillfully as if she controlled him by wireless.
"And it isn't fair of me to let you give all the parties--it simply isn't. Couldn't you come up to dinner in my little apartment sometime--it really isn't unconventional, especially for anyone who's once seen my pattern of an English maid--"
Sunlight and Minetta Lane again--and whatever Ted may want to say out of his walking trance--this is certainly no place where any of it can be said. _