Quality Street

...She is very beautiful, a princess of romance, slender and tall, with a wealth of sun-kissed hair, big blue eyes like bits of the sky--indeed, a veritable goddess to the child who stands watching, though in those days he has never heard of goddesses...

...And there on the lawn, in a softly-cushioned chair under the magnolia tree pink with abundant blossoms, sits Edmond's little crippled sister, with her poor little withered legs but with very big bright eyes, beckoning the boy and smiling eagerly...

...The boy goes to her and says good morning, for he is very sorry for little Yvonne, and she takes his hand in hers and holds it elaspingly and tells the boy that Edmond has gone down the street...

...The house was beautifully illuminated with the same sort of light that was diffused around us, but streaming from its windows in an intenser glow...

...For Quality Street knows nothing of eugenics in the garden of Eden, and considers a big family a big bless- ing...

...for it goes clean against a pet theory of mine that a dream is always suggested by some incident in the humdrum of the twenty-four hours preceding it...

...But the wish to dream doesn't bring the dream after the heart's desire, unless one be a Peter Ibbetsen, who had only to lie down with hands under his head, and crossed feet, to pass through the portals of sleep into the magic of dreamland to the idyllic companionship of his beloved...

...His grey moustache is waxed to an exquisite point...

...As I trod its ancient pavements with plodding feet-- how different when my feet were winged with unal- loyed joy a half century ago---and paused here and there at some familiar spot, memory engulfed me in its benignant flood, and I was again a child under the spell of its charm...

...I won't say precisely, for that would be to confess to more years than I am willing to proclaim to an unsympathetic world...

...It happens that the boy's parents are among the guests, and this gives him the opportunity to slip out and surreptitiously come to Quality Street...

...I went along the street, but I wasn't walking...

...Yvonne waved to me and smiled, and threw a rose back toward me, which fell floating down into the valley...

...This the boy does not know, but somehow feels as his ravished eyes watch the ladies sweep to the ground in profound courtesy, and the gentlemen bend in cavalier-like obeisance in response, all in perfect rhythm which beats in the boy's blood--the grace of noble motion wedded to perfect music...

...While I realized that it had changed, that its soul had fled and that I was gazing on death (for its houses are old~ and dilapidated and decayed, and a frayed humanity...

...Presently the door opened and out came Mam'selle Isbelle on the arm of a hand- some young man, and she was looking rapturously up into his face and he down into hers--for though she was tall for a woman, he was a very tall man...

...I was very happy and had not the least sense of strangeness about it...

...ing between the columns of the great porch...

...There are lights in the houses on either side, but there is a great illumination in the Villacour house, every window streaming a yellow flood on the lawn in front, and festoons of colored lanterns swing...

...gant, smiling, happy, courteous, polished and re-strained...

...Quality Street ran for some six blocks from the corner where stood our parish church, to the sharp indine which falls away to the valley below where dwelt humbler folk and where the railroad flung its ribbed ribbon of steel westward to the far and perilous land of Indians and adventure...

...We were just in front of Mam'selle IsbeUe's house, and Colonel Fortier and Edmond and Yvonne were gazing intently toward it...

...Something held me back, though I ardently strove to glide over with the others...

...Time is not of the soul--only the body knows vicissitude...

...It was as it should be, and as I had resolved it would be--for this was surely Mam'selle Isbelle's lost lover...

...Fashion Place took up some four blocks of imposing mansions which the plutocracy of the day displayed in clamorous architecture to the bewildered eyes of citizens who no doubt envied while they critidzed...

...and the soul of Quality Street which has never died, looked eye to eye with my soul in that timeless duration which we call eternitypin the phrase of the old schoolmen, sub specie eternitatis...

...One of these she took from the bouquet and handed it to me with a smile that was radiantly beautiful-- and then the strange, quiet music which I seemed only to feel, grew in intensity...

...I was alone--at the end of Quality Street...

...Everything about me seemed permanent...

...Or was it only a bit of an old man's fancy...

...Its homes were not pretentious, but in my childish eyes, they possessed quality--as indeed did the whole street, whose dwellers seemed to me the haut ton of assured aristocracy with a halo of romance...

...Mam'selle Isbelle stands gazing a moment, and then turns dreaming down the street in the other direction...

...No, Quality Street was not that kind of street...

...Now Quality Street was a real street in "auld lang syne...

...She smiles sweetly in greeting the Colonel but the child thinks there is an inetiable sad- ness in her smile, for he has heard his elders talk, and Mam'selle's lover has gone away and never returned...

...December 22, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL x79 QUALITY STREET By CONDI~ B. PALLEN I T CAME back to me in a dream after a lapse of more than half a century...

...A great and heroic resolution surges in the heart of the boy to go seek Mam'selle's lover for her, when he gets big enough, down the great river whose tawny, turbulent flood sweeps past his city to far-off New Orleans, and out into the vast Gulf beyond, where perhaps Monsieur Louis, for that is his name, has been captured by pirates and languishes in loneliness, marooned like Robinson Crusoe upon some uninhabited island very far away...

...It is rarely after nightfall that the boy comes to Quality Street, but it chances one evening he is there with a great, yellow moon shining through the maple leaves and weaving a golden checkered pattern on the sidewalks...

...Through the French windows, the boy sees the graceful figures of smiling dancers weaving the gracious paces of the minuet, as Xarpe's violins flood the scene with stately cadences, to which kings and queens and princesses and chevaliers across the seas had so often, in the long ago, tripped in restrained measures...

...The world then was all magic, fresh and eternally young, and made for me...

...Care, sorrow, responsibility, lay slumbering and inert in the cocoon of time to come...

...Time was not, for eternity abides...

...As I glided along, I met Colonel Fortier, very sprighqy in his manner, and he seemed to be gliding as I was...

...I was in Eden, and knew nothing of the land that lay out beyond the gates...

...The Colonel stops and lifts his high hat with a sweeping flourish to his waist, his ebony cane in his left hand, in salutation to the exquisite demoiselle who greets him with a sweet smile, as she stands there with her gloved hand on the half-opened gate...

...Strange to say, al- though it did not seem strange at all to me then, they did not go down into the valley, but glided straight over to the top of the hill beyond where there was a great light, like an aurora borealis shooting up to the heavens...

...It sinks into his soul never to pass away...

...Fifty years were spanned in less time than Puck puts his girdle around the earth--and I was once more a child amid the wonders of Quality Street...

...I stood watch- ing them with aching heart as the music died away, and the light of the heavens on the other side faded out...

...They were hand in hand, smiling at each other, and it seemed to me, were speaking of me--although I did not know what they were saying...

...It seems to me that I knew it always...

...Yes, that is Colonel Fortier coming down the street with sedate pace, in high, white hat with its curved brim, and in his closely buttoned frock-coat, his flowing I8o THE COMMONWEAL December 22, x926 bow-cravat almost hiding his stock, gravely swinging his gold-headed ebony cane, looking neither to the right nor to the left--an upright and severely contained soldierly figure...

...I don't know why, but I alone remained behind...

...I inherited the earth and the beauty thereof...

...From the house came the music that heretofore I had only felt, but now audible as if played on golden viols, soft and full and exceedingly sweet...

...On the other side of the hedge, between the Colom...

...O slender incident of the long ago, how beautifully and sweetly you still bloom after half a century in this ancient heart, when the setting of its scene has crumbled into dust...

...I only hint it here in a phrase I have already used...

...Why I should have dreamed, after so long an in-terval, of what I call Quality Street, to use an epithet from the vocabulary of the household darky of the ancient Southland, by which he distinguished with subtle prescience between the aristocracy of his world and the commonality, I do not know...

...Presently Edmond and little Yvonne came along, and little Yvonne was no longer lame, but on a sturdy pair of straight legs...

...we live in time, but the soul abides in eternity...

...Colonel Fortier leading, with Mam'selle Isbelle and the tail young man following arm in arm, and Edmond and Yvonne and myself hand in hand behind them, moved down the street to the Villacour house...

...Just as I have a pet theory of what suggests dreams, so I have another pet theory of what dreams---not all dream~ are made on...

...The Colonel gaUantly raises her hand to his lips and then holds it, patting it gently and says some- thing which the child cannot overhear...

...Change was beyond my untutored vision...

...Then out of the door came all of.Quality Street, to the rhythm of the minuet, ever gaming in volume and sweetness, and as they passed us, greeting and smiling (they seemed especially to be greeting me) we joined in with them and moved, glid- ing, down the street in rhythmical procession to the top of the incline into the valley...

...I cannot recall when first I wandered along the shaded thoroughfare of Quality Street with its double row of spreading maples...

...Laughter and the murmur of voices float out into the golden night with streams of music from Xarpe's famous orchestra...

...So let an indefinite half century, which the poet tells us is better than a cycle of Cathay, stand for that bright backward and fulness of time which has sped under the bridge between the actuality of that far dis- tant experience of boyhood, and its recurrence in a dream tryst...

...Be that as it may, I could find no connect- ing link in the near present to account suggestively for my dream...

...Then the vision of memory faded and I stood in a drab street whose glory has long departed, and turned my leaden footsteps elsewhere...

...Mam'selle smiles her sad, sweet smile again and nods her beauti- ful head with a suspicion of tears in her sky-blue eyes...

...And then Yvonne left Edmond and came up to me, and her eyes were bigger and brighter than ever, and she carried a great bouquet of white roses luminous in their whiteness...

...The boy walks up the street, a little way behind Mam'selle Isbelle, in the elation of his stirring resolution, and strongly tempted to tell Mam'selle Isbelle about it, until he comes to the Colombier house, where he stops and leans against the iron picket-fence and whistles for his friend Edmond, of his own age, and the youngest of the innumerable Colombier brood...

...He looked at me and nodded and smiled, aU the old austerity gone...

...and Yvonne takes a flower, and with her big, black, bright eyes smiling up at him--Yvonne's eyes are very big and very bright--hands it to the boy who bows his best childish bow to the little lady, after the manner of Colonel Fortier--for that is ever the way with Quality Street, courtesy and remembrance always--and thanks her...

...There was a curious palpitating rhythm in the air like the cadence of the minuet--though I heard no sound...

...I was again a little boy in Quality Street...

...Perhaps...

...It ran at right angles to the street I lived on...

...Monsieur December 22, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL I8X et Madame Villacour are giving a coming-out party for their youngest daughter, and all Quality Street and others besides, are there...

...The day was all sunshine and the night the myriad brightness of the constant stars...

...But little Yvonne's big eyes are so wistful, and though she doesn't ask him in words to stay, the boy hasn't the heart to go...

...A word, a look, a gesture, a strain of music, or a revived memory im- pinges, even for only a fleeting and unobserved instant, upon the delicate intricacy of this human compound, and loi out of the profundity of slumber, a vast kaleidoscope of fantastic vision is evoked and accepted as actuality to the mind's eye...

...and indeed, by some strange haunting of the spirit, it is still as it always was, though I am well aware--for it was only recently that, prompted by mY dream, I visited it in the flesh--that time has physically eaten it up and left an empty husk...

...I wonder if my dream tryst in Quality Street was not perhaps an adventure on the fringe of the other world---and if Colonel Fortier and Mam'selle Isbelle and Edmond and Yvonne did not really greet me on the mystical shore where the ebbing waves of time beat themselves away on the invisible coast of eternity...

...It was not Quality Street, at least to me, until some two blocks away from the intersection...

...He does not notice the child who stands gazing at him in hushed awe as he passes (it is said that he had once fought a duel and killed his manl) He wends his way in dignified ambulation as far as the great, red brick house with its many- paned windows, where Mam'selle Isbelle Gamier lives, and there pauses--for Mam'selle Isbelle herself is coming down the lawn...

...Any sober relation to space and time is blotted out, and the dreaming soul dwells in the eerie region of make-believe in contented credulity...

...So he steals onto the lawn in the shadow of the shrubbery and rapturously gazes at the gay scene inside...

...It is the perfect symbol of Quality Street, the grace and rhythm of life--ele...

...It was neither day nor night, yet everything was dis-tinct with a crystal clearness...

...bier's lawn and next door, Madame la Comtesse de Chateaugai, a fragrant survival of the old rrgime, whose father had come from France at the time of the Revolution, moves about among her flowers, a silken shawl about her fragile shoulders, and a bit of point Valenciennes--the boy, of course, doesn't know its name--delicately resting on her silver hair...

...There was a strange diffused light along the whole street which came not from the sun or any luminary in the heavens...

...When I say Quality Street, I do not mean Fashion Street, or rather Fashion Place, just one street back of our house...

...In my dream, my body was not awake, but my soul was...

...It would be a wonderful and stirring adventure, thinks the boy, whose imagination is crowded with the pictured scene...

...I know now what then I only felt--but felt with a subtle intuition out of the uncomprehending innocence of childhood, for the wonder and glamour of life were about me "trailing douds of glory," which have since greyed under the sombre touch of soberer years...

...The boy stands much embarrassed with little Yvonne clasping his hand and looking up into his face, for he knows she wants him to stay with her a bit, and he is eager to hasten off in search of Edmond...

...in keeping with their ruined estate now dwells in them) it was somehow inexplicably Quality Street still--the street that I loved in the pristine wonder of life, linked imperishably with my soul, and in spite of the evi-dence of physical sight, abiding in the beauty and love- liness and charm of those who went in and out over its thresholds when I was yet in the garden of Eden...

...and the Colonel, with another stately bow, places his high, white hat back on his head and goes up the street through ~che flecked sunlight under the maple trees...

...First, however, he will stop at Bloody Island just below the city in the river, where all the duels are fought, and where no doubt the Colonel had killed his man...

...I seemed to float along without effort...

...Yes, we dwell in time, but abide in eternity...

...She is rich and he is poor, and he is gone to find a fortune, for he is too proud to wed her without a fortune to match hers, and it has been a very long time now...

...It is only as I look back with maturer mind that I see what then was only a vague wonder in the heart of a child...

...So he stays, and little Yvonne holds his hand in both of hers in happy grati- tude, something which the boy doesn't understand at the time, but understands quite well now, and is thank- ful in his soul that he did not, with the impetuous selfishness of the child, break away from helpless little Yvonne in search of Edmond...

...Presently she comes to the hedge with a bouquet of flowers gath- ered from her garden, and beckons the boy to bring them to little Yvonne, and Yvonne cries out, "Merci, Madame la Comtesse," and blows kisses with both hands to Madame, and Madame blows kisses back...

...The Colonel and Edmond and Yvonne nodded in turn, smil- ing to me...

...It is only in a dream tryst, in the mystical chambers of sIeep, that I shall ever see it again--if indeed it come again, as in that dream tryst I mentioned in the beginning, when Quality Street was once again Quality Street, and yet something more than memory...

...It was an exquisite dream--a dream that urges one to sing with another sentimental poet, "If this be dreaming, let me dream again...