think necessary, but he didn’t miss them, because he had never had them.
He belonged to no clubs, visited no houses, had no studio friends, and he
ate his dinner alone in some decent little restaurant, even on Christmas
and New Year’s. For days together he talked to nobody but his dog and the
janitress and the lame oysterman.
After he shut the door and settled down to his paradise fish on that
first Tuesday in May, Hedger forgot all about his new neighbour. When the
light failed, he took Caesar out for a walk. On the way home he did his
marketing on West Houston Street, with a one-eyed Italian woman who
always cheated him. After he had cooked his beans and scallopini, and
drunk half a bottle of Chianti, he put his dishes in the sink and went up
on the roof to smoke. He was the only person in the house who ever went
to the roof, and he had a secret understanding with the janitress about
it. He was to have “the privilege of the roof,” as she said, if he opened
the heavy trapdoor on sunny days to air out the upper hall, and was
watchful to close it when rain threatened. Mrs. Foley was fat and dirty
and hated to climb stairs,—besides, the roof was reached by a
perpendicular iron ladder, definitely inaccessible to a woman of her
bulk, and the iron door at the top of it was too heavy for any but
Hedger’s strong arm to lift. Hedger was not above medium height, but he
practised with weights and dumb-bells, and in the shoulders he was as
strong as a gorilla.
So Hedger had the roof to himself. He and Caesar often slept up there on
hot nights, rolled in blankets he had brought home from Arizona. He
mounted with Caesar under his left arm. The dog had never learned to
climb a perpendicular ladder, and never did he feel so much his master’s
greatness and his own dependence upon him, as when he crept under his arm
for this perilous ascent. Up there was even gravel to scratch in, and a
dog could do whatever he liked, so long as he did not bark. It was a kind
of Heaven, which no one was strong enough to reach but his great,
paint-smelling master.
On this blue May night there was a slender, girlish looking young moon in
the west, playing with a whole company of silver stars. Now and then one
of them darted away from the group and shot off into the gauzy blue with
a soft little trail of light, like laughter. Hedger and his dog were
delighted when a star did this. They were quite lost in watching the
glittering game, when they were suddenly diverted by a sound,—not
from the stars, though it was music. It was not the Prologue to
Pagliacci, which rose ever and anon on hot evenings from an Italian
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
