Page:Stringer - Wine of Life.djvu/11



TORROW stared about the empty hotel-room, now denuded of its last appeasing touch of the personal. Then he crossed to the still open window.

As he stood there, vaguely oppressed by the thought of how life was for ever attaching itself to new soil and was for ever being torn up from that rootage, the sound of a hurdy-gurdy floated up through the hot August air. The notes, mellowed by a rampart of intervening roofs and further muffled by the distant drone of Broadway, insinuated themselves into the colouring of Storrow's mood and lent an overtone of wistfulness to his farewell survey of those faded walls cobwebbed with fire-escapes. His week of freedom in that shabby side-street hotel had not been an unhappy one. He had found nothing repugnant in its ugliness, in its gilded slatternliness, in its nocturnal pianos and its noisy house-dogs, in the kimonoed figures that fluttered about a hallway filled with the betraying odours of illicit cookery.

It had at least conferred on Storrow the gift of freedom. And freedom, he knew, was the one thing he would always demand of life. Elbow-room, he felt, must always be his, the right to come and go at his own sweet will, the right to idle or work, to rise or fall, to tool his own personal destinies upward or downward across the Great Divides of life as he chose. He remembered, as he stared idly down at a tarred and gravelled roof littered with orange-peel and empty bottles and cigarette ends, how the easy-going and slipshod atmosphere of this third-rate Tenderloin hotel had appealed to him. Its unruffled and urban self-concernment, its shoddy and casual 1