Of these things Fifth Avenue is innocent at five in the afternoon. The
diastole of travelers had spread all morning from Grand Central; the
systole is active at five. As the great muscle contracts in the
afternoon, atoms are pulled frantically to the suburbs, tearing their
way through the weaker streams that are drawn up by the neighboring
shops and clubs and bars and hotels. The Biltmore and Sherry's and
Delmonico's and the Manhattan and the Belmont are no longer columnar
monuments, holding secret vigil. They are secondary to the human floods
which they suck in and spray out. The street itself is lost to memory
and vision. A swollen stream, dammed at moments while chosen people are
permitted to walk dry-shod across, bears on its restless bosom the
freight of curiosity and pride and favor. One might fancy, to gaze on
this mad throng of motors, that a new religious sect had conquered the
universe, worshipers of a machine.
It is the hour of white gloves and delicate profiles, the feminine hour.
A little later there will be more leaves than blossoms, the men coming
from work giving a duller tone. But one is permitted to believe for this
period that Fifth Avenue has a personality, parti-colored, decorative,
flashing, frivolous, composed of many styles and many types. The working
world intersects it rudely at Forty-second Street, but scarcely
infiltrates it. A qualification distinguishes those who turn up and down
the Avenue. It is not leisure that distinguishes them, or money, but
their sense that there is romance in the appearance of money and
leisure. Many of the white gloves are cotton. Many of the gloves are not
white. But it is May-time, the afternoon, Fifth Avenue. One may pretend
the world is gay.
They seem chaotic and impulsive, these crowds on Fifth Avenue. They move
as by personal will. But dawn and sunset, morning and evening, common
attractions govern them. There is a rhythm in these human tides.
V
For eighty years Henri Fabre watched the insects. He stayed with his
friend the spider the round of the clock. Time, that reveals the spider,
is also eloquent of man in his city. Time is the scene-shifter and the
detective. Some day we should pitch a metropolitan observatory at the
corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street,--some day, if we can
find the time.