CHELSEA Village has never had the aggressive exclusiveness of Greenwich. It exists to-day, and vaguely knows itself by name, close to the heart of the great city that has swallowed it up; but it is in nowise such a distinct entity as the brave little tangle of crooked streets a few blocks to the south. Greenwich has always been Greenwich, and the Ninth Ward has been the centre of civilization to the dwellers therein. But Chelsea has tried to be fashionable, has opened its doors to foreign invaders, and has even had an attack of Anglomania, and branched out into Terraces in the true London style. And so it has lost homogeneity and originality, and it has only a peculiar and private air of ambitionless and uninviting gloom to set it apart as a special quarter of New York. But Chelsea certainly does look like the inhabitants of its own boarding-houses—most respectable people, who have only tried too hard at elegant gentility for their own comfort or prosperity. And the place has one other strong individuality. I do not know that there are very many ailanthus-trees in Chelsea; but there is, to me, a pervading odor of that gruesome exotic in all the streets, and I think an imaginative person might detect the smell even in the midwinter blasts that howl up from the North River.
Contemplation of one Chelsea street had a depressing effect upon Miss Celia Leete, as she sat by her window at five o'clock of a summer Saturday afternoon. Her room was in the front of a third story of a comfortable white wooden house, one of a little squad that stood well back from the street, the first two stories all but hidden by green-latticed verandas.
Miss Celia Leete looked through the thin and dusty Leaves of the horse-chestnut-tree on the sidewalk, and her gaze roved idly up and down the hue of boarding-houses across the way. They were boarding-houses with certain aspirations. They had also high stoops and elaborate cast-iron balconies. Yet, somehow, they did not look like even the second-cousins of those lordlier structures within the sacred one block's space east and west from Fifth Avenue. Perhaps this was partly because right next to them came the little tailor's shop, red brick, painted redder yet, ten feet wide and one story high, with the German tailor's wife forever standing in the door-way, holding her latest baby in her bare red arms.
The children of shabby and not over clean gentility were playing in shrill-voiced chorus on the sidewalk in front of the high-stoop houses. Occasionally one of them would recognize a home-returning father, and, without pausing in the merry round of Spanish Fly or Par, would give his parent the hail of easy equality, "H'lo, Pa!"
The heads of families in the boarding-house colony were sometimes employed in the wholesale houses down-town; but oftener were clerks or floor-walkers in large dry-goods shops, or proprietors of smaller establishments on the West-side avenues. One of these gentlemen arrived at his domicile as Miss Celia Leete looked out of her window. He mechanically took his night-key from his pocket, but he replaced it, for the door was open, and most of the ladies of the house were disposed about the steps, in all the finery that the "bargain counters" of Fourteenth Street could furnish. Then this conversation fell sharply upon the dull and sultry air:
"Why, Mr. Giddens, that you? Early to-night, ain't you? Wasn't it awful hot down-town?"
By a delicate convention of the place, even the boarder who was in charge of the Gent's Furnishing Goods Department of Messrs. Sonnenschein and Regenschirm, a mile up Eighth Avenue, was supposed to transact bis business "down-town."
"Hot enough for me [a responsive ripple of merriment]. I ain't a hog, Miss Seavey. Why, Miss Wicks, you down again? Haven't seen yon in three days. Quite a stranger. How's the neuralger?"
"Better now, thank you, Mr. Giddens; but I had an awfle siege of it this time. I was most afraid to show myself, I've run down so."
"Idersed you'd run up, 'stid 'f down. Never saw you lookin' better."
"Oh, Mr. GKddens, you're so gallant! I wonder your wife ain't jealous of you, you're so gallant to all the ladies. There, you go right along to her, or she'll say somethin' to me, I know she will." And with a gentle push, and amid much tittering, Mr. Giddens disappeared in the dark door-way.
Celia Leete turned from her window. She was sick of life, of the place, of herself—of something, she could not quite tell what.
And yet her ailment was common enough, and simple enough, and she defined her longing sufficiently well when she said to herself, as she sometimes did: "I wish I was someone else."
It would not require a profound psychologist, knowing who and what Miss Celia Leete was, and knowing also that she had spent one year of the most purely formative period of her young life in a semi-fashionable boarding-school, to deduce from this statement a general idea of what manner of person Miss Celia Leete wished to be, could she he someone other than herself.
Miss Celia Leete was the younger daughter of David Leete, the manufacturer of the once famous "William Riley" baking-powder. There was no levity prepense in the peculiar suggestiveness of this name. Mr. Leete had perhaps never heard of the Celtic Lover who of old time was hidden by his aristocratic lady-love to "rise up" and accompany her to "far Amerikey." But he had bought the receipt for his excellent baking-powder From a clever young Irishman who chanced to be a namesake of the lovelorn emigrant whose tale is told in immortal verse, and he loyally gave the inventor due credit, and stood upon his own merits as an honest manufacturer. It was long ago, in the earlier days of baking-powder, that David Leete put the "William Riley" on the market. It was a great success among those first adventurous housewives who were heretical enough to shake off the thralldom of yeast. Of later years, other baking-powders had crowded between it and the great baking public, yet it still sold much as it had at first, when hundreds only, instead of thousands, put faith in the fermenting powers of the new discovery. The adventurous housewives of the first generation had grown old and conservative, and they clung to the William Riley powder, and thought ill of those giddy young matrons who dallied with more modern compounds.
So David Leete was well-to-do. He might have lived in a much finer house than the white frame cottage; but that was the first house he had ever bought, and thence he had ordered that it should be borne when the time came for him to leave New York forever. For even the truest old New Yorker must now go into exile with Death, and lie down at last in a Brooklyn cemetery or far up in trim Woodlawn.
From the old house, then, he walked to his Houston Street factory every morning at eight o'clock. It had been six o'clock in the baking-powder's first days of struggle, and then it had been seven, and half-past seven, and now that his son Alonzo was old enough to look after the business, he was thinking of making it nine. At half-past twelve he came back for dinner; at six he was home, in his shirt-sleeves and his big slippers, waiting for supper with a good appetite and a clear conscience.
Mr. Leete had a better appetite for his supper than his younger daughter could often muster up. By six o'clock, as a general thing, the day had grown very heavy to this young lady, and she was not tempted by the cold meat, the hot biscuit, the cake and the tea which were good enough for her father and her mother, her brother Alonzo and her sister Dorinda, more commonly called Dodie or Doe.
But then there were many things that Celia did not fancy, in spite of the fact that the rest of the family liked them. Such strange differences of taste will occasionally occur in even the most conservatively regulated households—and the standard-bearer of a new school of domestic ethics has to suffer, as a rule. Were we not well abreast with the world when last we took our bearings, some twenty or thirty years ago? Are we to set our sails now to suit these saucy chits whom we ourselves brought into the world? What was right in our time is right for all time, and there's an end of it.
Celia did not, however, suffer martyrdom because of any ideas which may have stimulated her young imagination. Her mother said she was "a peaky, Miss Nancy sort of a fussy child, not 'tall like Popper Leete, nor like my own folks, neither." Father Leete thought sometimes that she had been "spilte by that highty-tighty boardin'-school." Dorinda considered her "awfle queer," and wished she were "like the other girls," and Alonzo silently disapproved of her ways and manners—saying once, in fact, that he thought she had too many of the latter. Yet they all loved her and indulged and petted her. They did not understand her, of course; but, then, there was no necessity of understanding her. Children are fanciful, and Celia was still the child of the house.
And although these quoted utterances told, in a broad way, the truth about Celia's differences with the family standard of ethics, it is safe to say that no member of the household had anything like a realizing sense of that truth. If they perceived in the young woman an unwise and futile ambition, they misapprehended the nature of the ambition itself, and pictured the aspirant as desirous merely of those material things the possession of which represented to them social superiority. If they had been asked to put their ideas in words, they would have said that Celia wished to live in a house on Fifth Avenue, to drive on that thoroughfare in a fine carriage, to give balls, and to dance the german, whatever that was, and to have her name in the Home Journalshool