tenement on Thompson Street, with the gasps of the corpulent baritone who
got behind it; nor was it the hurdy-gurdy man, who often played at the
corner in the balmy twilight. No, this was a woman’s voice, singing the
tempestuous, over-lapping phrases of Signor Puccini, then comparatively
new in the world, but already so popular that even Hedger recognized his
unmistakable gusts of breath. He looked about over the roofs; all was
blue and still, with the well-built chimneys that were never used now
standing up dark and mournful. He moved softly toward the yellow
quadrangle where the gas from the hall shone up through the half-lifted
trapdoor. Oh yes! It came up through the hole like a strong draught, a
big, beautiful voice, and it sounded rather like a professional’s. A
piano had arrived in the morning, Hedger remembered. This might be a very
great nuisance. It would be pleasant enough to listen to, if you could
turn it on and off as you wished; but you couldn’t. Caesar, with the gas
light shining on his collar and his ugly but sensitive face, panted and
looked up for information. Hedger put down a reassuring hand.
“I don’t know. We can’t tell yet. It may not be so bad.”
He stayed on the roof until all was still below, and finally descended,
with quite a new feeling about his neighbour. Her voice, like her figure,
inspired respect,—if one did not choose to call it admiration. Her door
was shut, the transom was dark; nothing remained of her but the obtrusive
trunk, unrightfully taking up room in the narrow hall.
II
For two days Hedger didn’t see her. He was painting eight hours a day
just then, and only went out to hunt for food. He noticed that she
practised scales and exercises for about an hour in the morning; then she
locked her door, went humming down the hall, and left him in peace. He
heard her getting her coffee ready at about the same time he got his.
Earlier still, she passed his room on her way to her bath. In the evening
she sometimes sang, but on the whole she didn’t bother him. When he was
working well he did not notice anything much. The morning paper lay
before his door until he reached out for his milk bottle, then he kicked
the sheet inside and it lay on the floor until evening. Sometimes
he read it and sometimes he did not. He forgot there was anything of
importance going on in the world outside of his third floor studio.
Nobody had ever taught him that he ought to be interested in other
people; in the Pittsburgh steel strike, in the Fresh Air Fund, in the
scandal about the Babies’ Hospital. A grey wolf, living in a Wyoming
canyon, would hardly have been less concerned about these things than was
Don Hedger.
One morning he was coming out of the bathroom at the front end of the
hall, having just given Caesar his bath and rubbed him into a glow with a
heavy towel. Before the door, lying in wait for him, as it were, stood a
tall figure in a flowing blue silk dressing gown that fell away from her
marble arms. In her hands she carried various accessories of the bath.
“I wish,” she said distinctly, standing in his way, “I wish you wouldn’t
wash your dog in the tub. I never heard of such a thing! I’ve found his
hair in the tub, and I’ve smelled a doggy smell, and now I’ve caught you
at it. It’s an outrage!”
Hedger was badly frightened. She was so tall and positive, and was fairly
blazing with beauty and anger. He stood blinking, holding on to his
sponge and dog-soap, feeling that he ought to bow very low to her. But
what he actually said was:
“Nobody has ever objected before. I always wash the tub,—and, anyhow,
he’s cleaner than most people.”
“Cleaner than me?” her eyebrows went up, her white arms and neck and her
fragrant person seemed to scream at him like a band of outraged nymphs.
Something flashed through his mind about a man who was turned into a dog,
or was pursued by dogs, because he unwittingly intruded upon the bath of
beauty.
“No, I didn’t mean that,” he muttered, turning scarlet under the bluish
stubble of his muscular jaws. “But I know he’s cleaner than I am.”
“That I don’t doubt!” Her voice sounded like a soft shivering of crystal,
and with a smile of pity she drew the folds of her voluminous blue robe
close about her and allowed the wretched man to pass. Even Caesar was
frightened; he darted like a streak down the hall, through the door and
to his own bed in the corner among the bones.
Hedger stood still in the doorway, listening to indignant sniffs and
coughs and a great swishing of water about the sides of the tub. He had
washed it; but as he had washed it with Caesar’s sponge, it was quite
possible that a few bristles remained; the dog was shedding now. The
playwright had never objected, nor had the jovial illustrator who
occupied the front apartment,—but he, as he admitted, “was usually
pye-eyed, when he wasn’t in Buffalo.” He went home to Buffalo sometimes
to rest his nerves.
It had never occurred to Hedger that any one would mind using the tub
after Caesar;—but then, he had never seen a beautiful girl caparisoned
for the bath before. As soon as he beheld her standing there, he realized
the unfitness of it. For that matter, she ought not to step into a tub
that any other mortal had bathed in; the illustrator was sloppy and left
cigarette ends on the moulding.
All morning as he worked he was gnawed by a spiteful desire to get back
at her. It rankled that he had been so vanquished by her disdain. When he
heard her locking her door to go out for lunch, he stepped quickly into
the hall in his messy painting coat, and addressed her.
“I don’t wish to be exigent, Miss,”—he had certain grand words that he
used upon occasion—“but if this is your trunk, it’s rather in the way
here.”
“Oh, very well!” she exclaimed carelessly, dropping her keys into her
handbag. “I’ll have it moved when I can get a man to do it,” and she went
down the hall with her free, roving stride.
Her name, Hedger discovered from her letters, which the postman left on
the table in the lower hall, was Eden Bower.
III
In the closet that was built against the partition separating his room
from Miss Bower’s, Hedger kept all his wearing apparel, some of it on
hooks and hangers, some of it on the floor. When he opened his closet
door now-a-days, little dust-coloured insects flew out on downy wing, and
he suspected that a brood of moths were hatching in his winter overcoat.
Mrs. Foley, the janitress, told him to bring down all his heavy clothes
and she would give them a beating and hang them in the court. The closet
was in such disorder that he shunned the encounter, but one hot afternoon
he set himself to the task. First he threw out a pile of forgotten
laundry and tied it up in a sheet. The bundle stood as high as his middle
when he had knotted the corners. Then he got his shoes and overshoes
together. When he took his overcoat from its place against the partition,
a long ray of yellow light shot across the dark enclosure,—a knot hole,
evidently, in the high wainscoating of the west room. He had never
noticed it before, and without realizing what he was doing, he stooped
and squinted through it.
Yonder, in a pool of sunlight, stood his new neighbour, wholly unclad,
doing exercises of some sort before a long gilt mirror. Hedger did not
happen to think how unpardonable it was of him to watch her. Nudity was
not improper to any one who had worked so much from the figure, and he