(From _Harper's Magazine_)
"Stories of New York life preferable."
Well, then, here is a story of New York. A tale of the night heart of
the city, where the vein of Forty-Second touches the artery of Broadway;
where, amid the constellations of chewing-gum ads and tooth paste and
memory methods, rise the incandescent façades of "dancing academies"
with their "sixty instructresses," their beat of brass and strings,
their whisper of feet, their clink of dimes.--Let a man not work away
his strength and his youth. Let him breathe a new melody, let him draw
out of imagination a novel step, a more fantastic tilt of the pelvis, a
wilder gesticulation of the deltoid. Let him put out his hand to the
Touch of Gold.--
It is a tale of this New York. That it didn't chance to happen in New
York is beside the point. Where? It wouldn't help you much if I told
you. Taai. That island. Take an imaginary ramrod into Times Square, push
it straight down through the center of the earth; where it comes out on
the other side will not be very many thousand miles wide of that earth
speck in the South Seas. Some thousands, yes; but out here a few
thousand miles and a month or so by schooner make less difference than
they do where the trains run under the ground.--
"Glauber's Academy"--"Einstein's Restaurant"--"Herald Square"--
I can't tell you how bizarrely those half-fabulous names fell from
Signet's lips in the turquoise and gold of the afternoon. It was like
the babble of some monstrous and harmless mythology. And all the while,
as he kicked his bare heels on the deckhouse and harassed me with his
somnolent greed for "talk," one could see him wondering, wondering, in
the back of his mind. So he would have been wondering through all the
hours of weeks, months--it had come to the dignity of years, on the
beach, in the bush--wondering more than ever under the red iron roof of
the Dutchman: "What in hell am I doing here? What in hell?"
A guttersnipe, pure and simple. That's to say, impure and unpleasantly
complex. It was extraordinary how it stuck. Even with nothing on but a
pair of cotton pants swimming out to me among the flashing bodies of the
islanders, men, women, girls, youths, who clung to the anchor cable and
showed their white teeth for pilot biscuit, condensed milk, and
gin--especially gin--even there you could see Signet, in imagination,
dodging through the traffic on Seventh Avenue to pick the _Telegraph
Racing Chart_ out of the rubbish can under the Elevated.--
I hadn't an idea who the fellow was. He burst upon me unheralded. I sail
out of west-coast ports, but once I had been in New York. That was
enough for him. He was "pals" in ten minutes; in fifteen, from his
eminence on the deckhouse, with a biscuit in one hand and a tumbler of
much-diluted Hollands in the other, he gazed down at his erstwhile beach
fellows with almost the disdainful wonder of a tourist from a white
ship's rail.--
"Gi' me an article you can retail at a nickel--any little thing
everybody needs--or gi' me a song with a catchy chorus--something you
can turn out on them ten-cent records.--That makes _me_. Don't want any
Wall Street stuff. That's for Rockefeller and the boobs. But just one
time le' me catch on with one little old hunch that'll go in vaudeville
or the pi'tures--get Smith and Jones diggin' for the old nickel.--That
makes _me_. Then the line can move up one. That's the thing about New
York. Say, man, len' me a cigarette.--But that's the thing about
Broadway. When you make, you make _big_. I know a guy turned out a
powder-puff looked like a lor'nette--a quarter of a dollar. You know how
the Janes'll fall for a thing like that--"
It was completely preposterous, almost uncomfortable. It made a man look
around him. On the schooner's port side spread the empty blue of the
South Pacific; the tenuous snowdrift of the reef, far out, and the
horizon. On the starboard hand, beyond the little space of the
anchorage, curved the beach, a pink-white scimitar laid flat. Then the
scattering of thatched and stilted huts, the red, corrugated-iron store,
residence and godowns of the Dutch trader, the endless Indian-file of
coco palms, the abrupt green wall of the mountain.--A twelve-year-old
girl, naked as Eve and, I've no doubt, thrice as handsome, stood
watching us from the mid-decks in a perfection of immobility, an empty
milk tin propped between her brown palms resting on her breast. Twenty
fathoms off a shark fin, blue as lapis in the shadow, cut the water
soundlessly. The hush of ten thousand miles was disturbed by nothing but
that grotesque, microscopic babbling:
"Say you play in bad luck. Well, you can't play in bad luck _f'rever_.
Not if you're wise. One time I get five good wheezes. Good ones! Sure
fire! One of 'em was the old one about the mother-'n-law and the doctor,
only it had a perfectly novel turn to it. Did I make? I did not. Why?
Well, a good friend o' mine lifts them five wheezes, writes a vaudeville
turn around 'em, and makes big. Big! What does that learn me? Learns me
to go bear on friendship. So next time I get an idea--"
The girl had put the milk tin down between her toes on deck and turned
her head.
"Digger!" I called to the mate. "Clear the vessel! Shove them all
overboard! Here comes the Dutchman!"
Before the advance of the trader's canoe, painted vermillion like his
establishment and flying over the water under the paddle strokes of his
six men, Signet took himself hastily overboard with the rest. There was
no question of protest or false pride. Over he went. Rising and treading
water under the taffrail, and seeing the trader still some fathoms off,
he shook the wet from the rag of a beard with which long want of a razor
had blurred his peaked chin and gathered up the ends of the
conversation:
"No, Dole, you can't play in bad luck _f'rever_. One sure-fire hunch,
that's all. That makes _me_. When I get back to Broadway--"
A paddle blade narrowly missed his head. He dived.
The Dutchman told me more about him that evening. I dined at the
trader's house. He was a big-bodied tow-haired man who spoke English
with the accent of a east-coast Scot, drank like a Swede, and viewed
life through the eyes of a Spaniard--that is, he could be diabolical
without getting red in the face.
"No, my dear sir, that Signet shall not 'get back to Broadway.' Too many
have I seen. He is too tired. Quite too tired."
"But how in the world did he ever come here, Mynheer?"
"That is simple. This Signet got drunk in Papeete. He was on his way to
Australia with a pugilist. How should he be in a pugilist's company,
this crab? Because he plays a good game of pinochle--to keep the
pugilist's mind bright. At any event, the steamship stops at Tahiti.
This Signet gets drunk. 'Soused!' And the steamship is gone without him.
No more pinochle for the pugilist, what?--From then, my dear sir, it is
what it shall always be; one island throws him to another island. Here
he shall stay for a while--"
"Till you decide to 'throw' him to another island, eh, Mynheer?"
"No, but I am alone. Sometimes to amuse myself I will invite him to dine
with me. I put on him a suit of the evening clothes which belong to my
nephew who is dead. But I will not allow him the razor, since his absurd
beard is amusing to me. Afterward, however, I take away the evening
clothes and I will kick him out. But he is talking continuously."
"I believe you, Mynheer."
"But at last I will say: 'My dear sir, suppose that you should have the
most brilliant idea; that "hunch" of yours. "Sure-fire." What advantage
will it do you here in the island of Taai? You are not here on Broadway.
You are too many thousand miles. You cannot come here. You are too
tired. It takes money. Now, my dear sir, I am putting a trench about
the godowns. If you wish, I will let you work for me.'"
"What does he say to that, Mynheer?"
"He says, 'Do you take me for an _I_talian?'
"Then I will say: 'No; you see you are too tired. Also you are too soft.
You are a criminal. That's natural to you. But you think of police. You
have a wish, say. Well my dear sir, but would you kill a man--three--ten
men--to have that wish? No, you are too tired, and you must have the
police. But here there are no police. _I_ am the police. Why do you not
kill _me_? Ha-ha-ha! Then you could take my property. Then you would
"make big," as you say. My dear sir, that is a "hunch!" That is "sure
fire!" Ha-ha-ha!'--Then I will kick him out in his coolie cotton pants."
After coffee the trader said: "One gallon of the Hollands which you sent
me ashore has disappeared. The kitchen boys are 'careless.' Also I wink
one eye when a schooner arrives. Of course they will dance tonight,
however. You would care to go up, my dear sir?"
Of course we went. There's no other amusement in an islet like Taai but
the interminable native dance. The Dutchman led the way up a narrow,
bushy ravine, guiding me by sound rather than by sight.
"Up this same very path," I heard him, "has gone one uncle of mine. They
pulled him to the advance with one rope around his arms. Then they cut
him up and ate him. But that was many years ago, my dear sir. Now I am
the law. Maybe there shall come, now and then, a Dutch gunboat to have a
look-in. I raise up that flag. The captain shall dine with me. All is
good. But, my dear sir, I am the law."
The "music" began to be heard, a measured monotone of drums, a breath of
voices in a recitative chant, slightly impassioned by that vanished
gallon. The same old thing, indeed; one of the more than fifty-seven
varieties of the island _hula_. Then that had died away.
The light from the "place" grew among the higher leaves. And the trader,
becoming visible, halted. I saw him standing, listening.
"No, my dear sir, but that is a new thing."
He started forward. He stopped again. I heard it now. Out of the
familiar, hollow tautophony of drumbeats there began to emerge a thread
of actual melody--an untraditional rise and fall of notes--a tentative
attack as it were, on the chromatic scale of the west. No he-goat's skin
stretched on bamboo would do that.
We pushed on, curious. We came out into the "place." The scene under the
candlenut torches was as familiar to us as the Ohio River of Uncle Tom
to the small-town schoolboy; the meager rows of three-quarter naked
Kanakas, yellow with saffron and blue with tattooer's ink; the old women
in the background of sultry lights and enormous shadows compounding
endless balls of _popoi_ for the feast; the local and desceptered
chieftain squatting on his hams and guarding the vanished gallon between
his knees; this was all as it should have been. This was the
convention.--But what was really happening on that sylvan, torchlit
stage that night was something as new as anything can be under the sun,
because it was something that had not happened for ten thousand years.--
We who are worn with novelty can never reconquer for ourselves the
thrill of an unmitigated wonder. We have sold the birthright. But
imagine the toppling of a hundred centuries! You could have seen it in
the eyes of those watchers, in their rapt, rapacious attention, in the
conflict that went on within them visibly; traitorous applause pent and
pitted against all the instinctive protest of an established art.--
"Yes, but this isn't _dancing_!"