Vistas of New York Part 11

[Ill.u.s.tration: An Idyl of Central Park]

It was nearly five o'clock on an afternoon early in May when Dr. Richard Demarest bicycled up Fifth Avenue and into Central Park. He looked at his watch to make sure of the hour, and then he dismounted on the western side of the broad drive, whence he could see everybody who might seek to enter the Park long before they were likely to discover him. He had reason to believe that Miss Minnie Contoit, who had refused to marry him only a fortnight before, and whom he had not seen since, was going to take a little turn on her wheel in the Park that afternoon.

As it had happened, he had gone into the club to lunch that morning, and he had met her only brother, with whom he had always carefully maintained the most pleasant relations. By ingeniously pumping Ralph Contoit he had ascertained that the girl he loved was going out at five with her father and her grandfather. The brother had been even franker than brothers usually are.

"I say," he had declared, "I don't know what has come over Minnie this last ten days; she's been as cross as two sticks, and generally she's pretty even-tempered for a girl, you know. But she's been so touchy lately; she nearly took my head off this morning! I guess you had better have Dr. Cheever come around and prescribe for her. Cocaine for a bad temper is what she needs now, I can tell you!"

Although he was a rejected lover, he was not melancholy. In the springtime youth feels the joy of living, and Richard Demarest took delight in the beauty of the day. The foliage was everywhere fresh and vigorous after the persistent rains of April, and a scent of young blossoms came to him from a clump of bushes behind the path. A group of half a dozen girls flashed past him on their wheels, laughing lightly as they sped along home, each of them with a bunch of fragrant lilacs lashed to her handle-bar.

He followed them with his eye till they turned out of the Park; and then at the entrance he saw the girl he was waiting for riding her bicycle carefully across the car-tracks in Fifty-ninth Street. Her father and grandfather were with her, one on each side.

Dr. Demarest sprang on his wheel and sped on ahead. When he came to the foot of the Mall he swerved to the westward. Then he turned and retraced his path, reaching the branching of the ways just as General Contoit with his son and granddaughter arrived there.

The General was nearly seventy, but he sat his wheel with a military stiffness, holding himself far more carefully than his son, the Professor. Between them came Miss Minnie Contoit, a slim slip of a girl, in a light-brown cloth suit, with her pale, blond hair coiled tightly under a brown alpine hat. They had just come up a hill, and the General's face was ruddy, but the girl's was as colorless as ever.

Demarest had often wondered why it was that no exercise ever brought a flush to her ivory cheeks.

He watched her now as her grandfather caught sight of him, and cried out: "h.e.l.lo, Doctor! Out for a spin?"

He saw her look up, and then she glanced away swiftly, as though to choose her course of conduct before she acknowledged his greeting.

"Good afternoon, General; how well you are looking this spring!" said Demarest. "Good afternoon, Professor. And you, too, Miss Contoit. Going round the Park, are you? May I join you?" He looked at her as he asked the question.

It was her grandfather who answered: "Come along, come along! We shall be delighted to have you!"

She said nothing. They were all four going up on the east side of the Mall, and they had already left behind them the bronze ma.s.s-meeting of misshapen celebrities which disfigures that broad plateau. A Park omnibus was loitering in front of them, and they could not pa.s.s it four abreast.

"Come on, papa," cried the girl; "let's leave grandpa and Dr. Demarest to take care of each other! We had better go ahead and show them the way!"

It struck Dr. Demarest that she was glad to get away from him, as though her sudden flight was an instinctive shrinking from his wooing. He smiled and held this for a good sign. He was in no hurry to have his talk out with her, and he did not mean to begin it until a proper opportunity presented itself. He was glad to have her in front of him, where he could follow her movements and get delight out of the play of the sunshine through the branches as it fell molten on her fine, light hair. It pleased him to watch her firm strokes as they came to a hill and to see that she rode with no waste of energy.

The General had done his duty in the long years of the war, and he liked to talk about what he had seen. Dr. Demarest was a good listener, and perhaps this was one reason why the old soldier was always glad of his company. The young doctor was considerate, also, and he never increased his pace beyond the gait most comfortable for his elder companion; and as they drew near to the Metropolitan Museum he guided the General away to the Fifth Avenue entrance and thence back to the main road, by which excursion they avoided the long and steep hill at the top of which stands Cleopatra's Needle. And as they had ridden on the level rather rapidly they almost caught up with the General's son and granddaughter.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "I'M SURE HE'D RATHER TALK TO YOU, MY DEAR, SO YOU CAN RUN ALONG TOGETHER"]

The two couples were close to each other as they went around the reservoir, along the shaded road on the edge of the Park, with the sidewalk of Fifth Avenue down below. Everywhere the gra.s.s was fresh and fragrant; and everywhere the squirrels were frequent and impertinent, cutting across the road almost under the wheels, or sitting up on the narrow sward in impudent expectation of the nuts gently thrown to them from the carriages.

When they came to McGowan's Pa.s.s he saw the Professor suddenly dismount, and he thought that Minnie was going on alone and that her father had to call her back.

"Shall we rest here for a while, father?" asked the Professor, as the General and the Doctor dismounted.

"Just as you say," the old soldier answered; "just as you say. I'm not at all fatigued, not at all. But don't let us old fogies keep you young folks from your exercise. Minnie, you and the Doctor can ride on--"

"But, grandpa--" she began, in protest.

"I'll stay here a minute or two with your father," the General continued. "The Doctor is very kind to let me talk to him, but I'm sure he'd rather talk to you, my dear; so you two can run along together."

"I shall be delighted to accompany Miss Contoit if she cares to have a little spin," said Dr. Demarest, turning to her.

"Oh, well," she answered, a little ungraciously; then she smiled swiftly, and added: "I always do what grandpa wants. Don't you think I'm a very good little girl?" And with that she started forward, springing lightly to her seat after her bicycle was in motion.

Demarest was jumping on his wheel to follow, when her father called out, "Don't let her ride up-hill too fast, Doctor!"

"Isn't papa absurd?" she asked, laughing; "and grandpa, too? They are always wanting me to take care of myself, just as if I didn't!"

They overtook and pa.s.sed a woman weighing two hundred pounds and full forty years of age, who was toiling along on a bicycle, dressed in a white skirt, a pink shirt-waist, and a straw sailor-hat. The Doctor turned and bowed to this strange apparition, but the plump lady was too fully occupied in her arduous task to be able to do more than gasp out: "Good--after--noon--Doctor."

When they had gone one hundred yards ahead the Doctor's companion expressed her surprise. "You do know the funniest people!" she cried.

"Who on earth was that?"

"That?" he echoed. "Oh, that's a patient of Dr. Cheever's. He advised her to get a bicycle if she wanted to be thinner--"

"And he told me to get one if I wanted to be a little fatter!" the girl interrupted. "Isn't that inconsistent?"

"I don't think so," the young man answered, glad that the conversation had taken this impersonal turn, and yet wondering how he could twist it to the point where he wanted it. "Outdoor exercise helps people to health, you see, and if they are unhealthily fat it tends to thin them down, and if they are very thin it helps them to put on flesh."

"I'd bike fourteen hours a day if I was a porpoise like that," said the girl, glancing back at the plump struggler behind them.

Just then a horn tooted and a coach came around the next turn. There were on it three or four girls in gay spring costumes, and two of them bowed to Dr. Demarest.

Behind the four-in-hand followed a stylish victoria, in which sat a handsome young woman alone. She was in black. Her somber face lighted with a smile as she acknowledged the young doctor's bow.

"I've seen her somewhere," said the girl by his side. "Who is she?"

"That's Mrs. Cyrus Poole," he answered; "the widow of the Wall Street operator who died two years ago."

"What lots of people you know," she commented.

"How is a young doctor to get on unless he knows lots of people?" was his answer.

She said nothing for a minute or two, as they threaded their way through a tangle of vehicles stretching along the northernmost drive of the Park.

Then she asked: "Why is it that most of the women we have pa.s.sed this afternoon sitting back in their carriages look bored to death?"

"I suppose it's because they've got all they want," the Doctor responded. "They have nothing left to live for; they have had everything. That's what makes them so useful to our profession. They send for us because they are bored, and they want sympathy. I suppose everybody likes to talk about himself, especially when he's out of sorts; now, you see, the family doctor can always be sent for, and it's his business to listen to your account of your symptoms. That's what he's paid for."

"I don't think that's a nice way of earning a living, do you?" returned the girl.

"Oh, I don't know," he answered. "Why not? It's our duty to relieve suffering, and these women are just suffering for a chance to describe all their imaginary ailments."

"Women?" she cried, indignantly. "Are all these old fools women?"

"There must be men sometimes, I suppose," he replied; "but most of a family physician's work is with the women, of course."

Then it seemed to him that he saw before him the opportunity he had been awaiting. They were now climbing the hill at the northwestern corner of the Park. He slowed up so that she should not be tempted to overexert herself. He even went so far as to lag a little behind. When they began to go down again gently, he came alongside.

"By the way," he began, "speaking of what a family physician has to do reminds me that I want to ask your advice."

"My advice?" she echoed, with the light little laugh that thrilled through him always. "Why, I don't know anything about medicine."