Scott and Yanci laughed.
“It’s your bedtime, Father,” she said, her anger struggling with diplomacy.
“Give me my guitar,” he suggested, “and I’ll play you tune.”
Except on such occasions as this, he had not touched his guitar for twenty years. Yanci turned to Scott.
“He’ll be fine now. Thanks a lot. He’ll fall asleep in a minute and when I wake him he’ll go to bed like a lamb.”
“Well——”
They strolled together out the door.
“Sleepy?” he asked.
“No, not a bit.”
“Then perhaps you’d better let me stay here with you a few minutes until you see if he’s all right. Mrs. Rogers gave me a key so I can get in without disturbing her.”
“It’s quite all right,” protested Yanci. “I don’t mind a bit, and he won’t be any trouble. He must have taken a glass too much, and this whisky we have out here—you know! This has happened once before—last year,” she added.
Her words satisfied her; as an explanation it seemed to have a convincing ring.
“Can I sit down for a moment, anyway?” They sat side by side upon a wicker porch settee.
“I’m thinking of staying over a few days,” Scott said.
“How lovely!” Her voice had resumed its die-away note.
“Cousin Pete Rogers wasn’t well today, but tomorrow he’s going duck shooting, and he wants me to go with him.”
“Oh, how thrill-ing! I’ve always been mad to go, and Father’s always promised to take me, but he never has.”
“We’re going to be gone about three days, and then I thought I’d come back here and stay over the next week-end——” He broke off suddenly and bent forward in a listening attitude.
“Now what on earth is that?”
The sounds of music were proceeding brokenly from the room they had lately left—a ragged chord on a guitar and half a dozen feeble starts.
“It’s father!” cried Yanci.
And now a voice drifted out to them, drunken and murmurous, taking the long notes with attempted melancholy:
Sing a song of cities,
Ridin’ on a rail,
A niggah’s ne’er so happy
As when he’s out-a jail.
“How terrible!” exclaimed Yanci. “He’ll wake up everybody in the block.”
The chorus ended, the guitar jangled again, then gave out a last harsh spang! and was still. A moment later these disturbances were followed by a low but quite definite snore. Mr. Bowman, having indulged his musical proclivity, had dropped off to sleep.
“Let’s go to ride,” suggested Yanci impatiently. “This is too hectic for me.”
Scott arose with alacrity and they walked down to the car.
“Where’ll we go?” she wondered.
“I don’t care.”
“We might go up half a block to Crest Avenue—that’s our show street—and then ride out to the river boulevard.”
IV
As they turned into Crest Avenue the new cathedral, immense and unfinished, in imitation of a cathedral left unfinished by accident in some little Flemish town, squatted just across the way like a plump white bulldog on its haunches. The ghosts of four moonlit apostles looked down at them wanly from wall niches still littered with the white, dusty trash of the builders. The cathedral inaugurated Crest Avenue. After it came the great brownstone mass built by R. R. Comerford, the flour king, followed by a half mile of pretentious stone houses put up in the gloomy 90’s. These were adorned with monstrous driveways and porte-cochères which had once echoed to the hoofs of good horses and with huge circular windows that corseted the second stories.
The continuity of these mausoleums was broken by a small park, a triangle of grass where Nathan Hale stood ten feet tall with his hands bound behind his back by stone cord and stared over a great bluff at the slow Mississippi. Crest Avenue ran along the bluff, but neither faced it nor seemed aware of it, for all the houses fronted inward toward the street. Beyond the first half mile it became newer, essayed ventures in terraced lawns, in concoctions of stucco or in granite mansions which imitated through a variety of gradual refinements the marble contours of the Petit Trianon. The houses of this phase rushed by the roadster for a succession of minutes; then the way turned and the car was headed directly into the moonlight which swept toward it like the lamp of some gigantic motorcycle far up the avenue.
Past the low Corinthian lines of the Christian Science Temple, past a block of dark frame horrors, a deserted row of grim red brick—an unfortunate experiment of the late 90’s—then new houses again, bright-red brick now, with trimmings of white, black iron fences and hedges binding flowery lawns. These swept by, faded, passed, enjoying their moment of grandeur; then waiting there in the moonlight to be outmoded as had the frame, cupolaed mansions of lower town and the brownstone piles of older Crest Avenue in their turn.
The roofs lowered suddenly, the lots narrowed, the houses shrank up in size and shaded off into bungalows. These held the street for the last mile, to the bend in the river which terminated the prideful avenue at the statue of Chelsea Arbuthnot. Arbuthnot was the first governor—and almost the last of Anglo-Saxon blood.
All the way thus far Yanci had not spoken, absorbed still in the annoyance of the evening, yet soothed somehow by the fresh air of Northern November that rushed by them. She must take her fur coat out of storage next day, she thought.
“Where are we now?”
As they slowed down Scott looked up curiously at the pompous stone figure, clear in the crisp moonlight, with one hand on a book and the forefinger of the other pointing, as though with reproachful symbolism, directly at some construction work going on in the street.
“This is the end of Crest Avenue,” said Yanci, turning to him. “This is our show street.”
“A museum of American architectural failures.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” he murmured.
“I should have explained it to you. I forgot. We can go along the river boulevard if you’d like—or are you tired?”
Scott assured her that he was not tired—not in the least.
Entering the boulevard, the cement road twisted under darkling trees.
“The Mississippi—how little it means to you now!” said Scott suddenly.
“What?” Yanci looked around. “Oh, the river.”
“I guess it was once pretty important to your ancestors up here.”
“My ancestors weren’t up here then,” said Yanci with some dignity. “My ancestors were from Maryland. My father came out here when he left Yale.”
“Oh!” Scott was politely impressed.
“My mother was from here. My father came out here from Baltimore because of his health.”
“Oh!”
“Of course we belong here now, I suppose”—this with faint condescension—“as much as anywhere else.”
“Of course.”
“Except that I want to live in the East and I can’t persuade Father