Do you who are reading these life-lines know what it is to be alone in
a world none too mindful of anyone, even if he be somebody? Never to
experience after the day's work the rest and joy of home-coming to
one's own?
Do you know what it is to acknowledge no tie of blood that binds one
life to another and makes for a common interest in joy or sorrow? To
ask yourself: Do I belong here? To wonder, perhaps, why, in fact, you
are here? To feel your isolation in a crowded thoroughfare, your
remoteness in the midst of an alien family life? To feel, in truth, a
stranger on this earth?
If you have known this, if you have experienced this, or, even if, at
times, you have been only dimly conscious of this for another, then you
will understand these my life-lines, and it may be they will interpret
something of yourself to yourself.
Delia Beaseley walked with me as far as the Bowery. There I insisted
on her leaving me. I assured her I was used to the streets of New York
in the evening. However, she waited with me for the car.
When I said good night to the woman, who twenty-six years ago saved
another woman, "one who had missed her footing",--those words seem to
ring constantly in my ears,--in order that I, Marcia Farrell, that
stranger's child, might become the living fact I am, I began to realize
that during the last hour I had been acting a part, and acting it well;
that, without sacrificing the truth at any stage of the evening's
developments, I had been able to obtain all this information, which
pointed to a crisis in my life, yet had given but little return in
kind. I felt justified in withholding it.
Now, as soon as I had left her and entered the car, there was a
reaction from the intensity of my emotion. I felt a strange elation of
spirit, a rising courage to face the new conditions in that other
country, and a consequent physical recuperation. The lassitude that
had burdened me since my long illness seemed to have left me. My mind
was alert. I felt I had been able to take advantage of a promising
circumstance and, in so doing, the mental inertia from which I had been
suffering for three months was overcome.
Without being able to find any special reason for it, my life began to
assume importance in my thoughts. I suppose this is the normal
condition of youth; only, I never felt that I had had much youth. With
the thought of this new future, unknown, untried as it was, opening
before me, I experienced an unaccountable security, an unwonted
serenity of existence. All these thoughts and feelings crowded upon me
as I rode up through the noisy Bowery.
All my life hitherto had been undefined to me on the side of expansion;
only its limitations impressed me as being ever present, sharply
outlined, hedging me in with memories that gave no scope for
anticipation. Sometimes it seemed to me as if I had always been old;
the seven years in New York, my daily encounter with metropolitan life
and its problem of "keep" had intensified this feeling.
When I came down to the city to look for work I was nearly twenty. I
had left what to me was a makeshift for a home--and I regretted
nothing. I had done my whole duty there in caring for my grandfather,
imbecile for years, and my aunt, the last of my family, until they
died. Then I was free.
After paying all the debts, I found I had just thirty dollars of my
own. With these I started for the city. On my arrival this amount was
diminished by nine.
At twenty I was facing life for the first time alone, unfriended, in
new conditions; poor, too, but that I had always been. I knew that
money must be had somehow, must be forthcoming in a few days at most.
But at that time my spirit was indomitable, my courage high. I was my
own mistress; and my only feeling, as I sat in the Grand Central
Station on that morning of my arrival, reading through the various
columns of "wants" in the early newspapers, was that I had escaped, at
last, from all associations that were hateful to me.
I was thinking of all this as the car passed with frequent haltings
along the noisy Bowery, and of that first experience of this city: its
need-driven herds of human beings, the thoroughfares crowded with
traffic, its nightmare crossings, the clank and deafening roar of the
overhead railroad, when, suddenly, mingled with the steam rising from
the pavements, that were cooling rapidly after the recent shower, I
smelt the acrid heaviness of fresh printer's ink. That smell
visualized for me the column of leaded "Wants," the dismal
waiting-room, the uncompromising daylight that spared no wrinkle, no
paint, no moth-spot on the indifferent faces about me. That was nearly
seven years ago--and now--
I found I was at Union Square, and got out; walked a block to Broadway
and waited on the corner for an uptown car. During that minute of
waiting, a woman spoke to me:
"If I take a car here can I get up to West Sixty-first street?"
"Yes." My answer was short and sharp. I had heard the kind of
question put in that oily voice too many times to pay any further heed
to it. I stepped out into the street to take the car.
"If you 're going up that way I might as well go 'long too. I like
comp'ny," said the woman, keeping abreast of me and nudging me with an
elbow.
The car was nearly full, and the crowd waiting for it made a running
assault upon the few vacancies. Just before it stopped I saw some one
leave the seat behind the motor-man; I made a rush to secure the place.
As I sat down the woman mounted the step.
"You don't get rid of me so easy, duckie," she said with a leer.
I turned squarely to her, looking beneath the wide brim of the tawdry
bedraggled hat to find her eyes; her gin-laden breath was hot on my
cheek.
"You go your way and I 'll go mine," I said in a low hard voice.
With a curse the woman swung off the step just as the two signal bells
rang.
I took off my hat. The night was cooling rapidly after the tempest.
The motion of the car created a movement of air against my face. It
was grateful to me. I drew a long breath of relief; these evening
rides in the open cars were one of my few recreations.
As the car sped along the broad thoroughfare, now so long familiar to
me, so wonderful and alluring to my country eyes in those early years,
so drearily artificial and depressing in the later ones, I found myself
dwelling again on that first experience in this city; I recalled the
first time I was accosted by a woman pander. It was when I was reading
the wants that morning of my arrival. I looked up to find her taking a
seat beside me--a woman who tried by every dives' art of which she was
possessed to entice me to go with her on leaving the station. Oh, she
was awful, that woman! I never knew there were such till then.
The searchlight of memory struck full upon my thought at that time: And
they said my mother was like this!
That thought, horrible as it was to me, was my safeguard then and has
been ever since. Such as they said my mother was, I would never be.
Nor am I aware that any moral factor was the lever in this decision.
Rather it was my pride that had been scourged for many years by a
girl's half knowledge of her mother's career, my sensitiveness that was
ever ready at the least outside touch to make me close in upon myself,
the horror of thinking it might be possible that my name could be used
as I had heard my mother's, that had panoplied my nature and warped it
until that nature had narrowed to its armor. I was proud, sensitive,
cold, or thought I was--and I was glad of it.
It had come to a point, at last, now when I was nearly twenty-six, that
in what I termed my strength, lay my weakness. But of this I was, as
yet, unaware.
I shut my eyes as the car sped onwards that I might not see the swift
succession of glaring lights--the many flashing, changing,
nerve-tormenting electric signs and advertisements, the brilliant
globes, stars, and whirligigs of all kinds. How they tired me now!
And the summer theatre throngs streaming in under the entrance arches
picked out in glowing red and white, the saloons flashing a well-known
signal to customers--I knew it all and was glad to close my eyes to it
all. Now and then I caught a strain of music from the orchestra of
some roof-garden.
At Seventy-second Street I changed for Amsterdam Avenue. I wanted to
get away to the heights. The air was becoming fresher and I needed
more of it. Another twenty minutes and the car stopped near the brow
of the hill. I left it and walked a cross block till I came to
Morningside Heights, the small, irregular, but beautiful promenade
behind St. Luke's.
I leaned on the massive stone coping that crowns the wall of the
escarpment; below me the hill sloped sharply to the flats of the
Harlem. I looked off over the city.
East, and north-east in the direction of the Sound, great cloud masses,
the wrack of the tempest, were piled high towards the zenith; but
beneath them there was a clear zone near the city's level. A moon
nearly two thirds to the full, was heralding its appearance above them
by lighted rifts, bright-rimmed haloes, and the marvellous play of
direct shaft light that struck downwards behind the clouds into the
clear space above the city and shot white radiance upon its roofs. The
sky, also, while yet the moon was invisible, was radiant, but with
starlight.
Against this background, I watched the glow-worm lights of the elevated
trains winding along the high invisible trestle-work. Beneath me lay
Morningside Park, the foliage and its shadows blackened in masses
beneath the glaring white of the arc-lights; and beyond, in seemingly
interminable perspective, the long converging lines of parallel street
lights led my gaze across the city to some large, unknown, uncertain
flarings somewhere near the East River shore.
And from all this wide-stretching housing-place of a vast population,
there rose into my ears a continuous, dull, peculiar sound, as of the
magnified stertorous breathing of a hived and stifled humanity.
I had come here many times in the last four years, at all seasons, at
all times. I drew strength and inspiration from this view in all its
aspects, until my almost fatal illness in the late spring. After that
there came upon me a powerful longing for change. I wanted to get away
from this city, its sights and sounds; to escape from the conditions
that were sapping my life. And the way was, at last, opened. How I
exulted in this thought!
There were others on the promenade, and I was withdrawn from thought of
myself by hearing voices, a man's and a woman's, below me on the
winding walk that leads down the slope past the poplars to the level of
the Harlem streets. The woman's was pleading, strident from
excitement; it broke at last in a dry hard sob. The man's was hateful;
the tones and accents like a vicious snarl.