AND so this romance ended for me. At the time, of course, I did not know
it; on leaving her I was under the impression that I was more than ever
attached to her. In the face of this postponement, life took on a grayer
and more disappointing aspect. To be forced to wait when at that moment,
if ever, was the time!
And yet I told myself that better days were surely in store. I would
return East and in some way place myself so that soon we might be
reunited. It was a figment of hope. By the time I was finally capable of
maintaining her economically, my earlier mood had changed. That hour
which we had known, or might have known, had gone forever. I had seen
more of life, more of other women, and although even then she was by no
means unattractive the original yearning had vanished. She was now but
one of many, and there were those who were younger and more
sophisticated, even more attractive.
And yet, before I left her, what days! The sunshine! The lounging under
the trees! The drowsy summer heat! The wishing for what might not be!
Having decided that her wish was genuine and my impulse to comply with
it wise, I stood by it, wishing that it might be otherwise. I consoled
myself thinly with the thought that the future must bring us together,
and then left, journeying first to St. Louis and later to New York. For
while I was here that letter from my brother which urged me once more to
come to New York was forwarded to me. Just before leaving Pittsburgh I
had sent him a collection of those silly “features” I had been writing,
and he also was impressed. I must come to New York. Some metropolitan
paper was the place for me and my material. Anyhow, I would enjoy
visiting there in the summer time more than later. I wired him that I
would arrive at a certain time, and then set out for St. Louis and a
visit among my old newspaper friends there.
I do not know how most people take return visits, but I have often noted
that it has only been as I have grown older and emotionally less mobile
that they have become less and less significant to me. In my earlier
years nothing could have been more poignant or more melancholy than my
thoughts on any of these occasions. Whenever I returned to any place in
which I had once lived and found things changed, as they always were, I
was fairly transfixed by the oppressive sense of the evanescence of
everything; a mood so hurtful and dark and yet with so rich if sullen a
luster that I was left wordless with pain. I was all but crucified at
realizing how unimportant I was, how nothing stayed but all changed.
Scenes passed, never to be recaptured. Moods came and friendships and
loves, and were gone forever. Life was perpetually moving on. The
beautiful pattern of which each of us, but more especially myself, was a
part, was changing from day to day, so that things which were an anchor
and a comfort and delight yesterday were tomorrow no more. And though
perhaps innately I desired change, or at least appropriate and agreeable
changes for myself, I did not wish this other, this exterior world to
shift, and that under my very eyes.
The most haunting and disturbing thought always was that hourly I was
growing older. Life was so brief, such a very little cup at best, and so
soon, whatever its miserable amount or character, it would be gone. Some
had strength or capacity or looks or fortune, or all, at their command,
and then all the world was theirs to travel over and explore. Beauty and
ease were theirs, and love perhaps, and the companionship of interesting
and capable people; but I, poor waif, with no definite or arresting
skill of any kind, not even that of commerce, must go fumbling about
looking in upon life from the outside, as it were. Beautiful women, or
so I argued, were drawn to any but me. The great opportunities of the
day in trade and commerce were for any but me. I should never have a
fraction of the means to do as I wished or to share in the life that I
most craved. I was an Ishmael, a wanderer.
In St. Louis I was oppressed beyond words. Of the newspaper men who had
been living on the same floor with me in Broadway there was not one
left. At the _Globe-Democrat_ already reigned a new city editor. My two
friends, Wood and McCord, while delighted to see me, told me of those
who had already gone and seemed immersed in many things that had arisen
since I had gone and were curious as to why I should have returned at
all. I hung about for a day or two, wondering all the while why I did
so, and then took the train going East.
Of all my journeys thus far this to New York was the most impressive. It
took on at once, the moment I left St. Louis, the character of a great
adventure, for it was all unknown and enticing. For years my mind had
been centered on it. True to the law of gravitation, its pull was in
proportion to its ever increasing size. As a boy in Indiana, and later
in Chicago, I had read daily papers sent on from New York by my sister
E——, who lived there. In Chicago, owing to a rivalry which existed on
Chicago’s part (not on New York’s, I am sure), the papers were studded
with invidious comments which, like all poorly based criticism, only
served to emphasize the salient and impressive features of the greater
city. It had an elevated road that ran through its long streets on
stilts of steel and carried hundreds of thousands if not millions in the
miniature trains drawn by small engines. It was a long, heavily
populated island surrounded by great rivers, and was America’s ocean
door to Europe. It had the great Brooklyn Bridge, then unparalleled
anywhere, Wall Street, Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, a huge company
of millionaires. It had Tammany Hall, the Statue of Liberty, unveiled
not so many years before (when I was a boy in Southern Indiana), Madison
Square Garden, the Metropolitan Opera House, the Horse Show. It was the
center and home of fashionable society, of all fixed and itinerant
actors and actresses. All great theatrical successes began there. Of
papers of largest circulation and greatest fame, it had nearly all. As
an ignorant understrapper I had often contended, and that noisily, with
various passing atoms of New York, as condescending as I was ignorant
and stubborn, as to the relative merits of New York and Chicago, New
York and St. Louis! There could not be so much difference! There were
many great things in these minor places! Some day, surely, Chicago would
outstrip New York!... Well, I lived to see many changes and things, but
not that. Instead I saw the great city grow and grow, until it stood
unrivaled, for size and force and wealth at least, anywhere.
And now after all these tentative adventurings I was at last to enter
it. Although I was moderately well-placed in Pittsburgh and not coming
as a homeless, penniless seeker, still even now I was dreadfully afraid
of it—why, I cannot say. Perhaps it was because it was so immense and
mentally so much more commanding. Still I consoled myself with the
thought that this was only a visit and I was to have a chance to explore
it without feeling that I had to make my way then and there.
I recall clearly the hot late afternoon in July when, after stopping off
at Pittsburgh to refresh myself and secure a change of clothing, I took
the train for New York. I noted with eager, hungry eyes a succession of
dreary forge and mining towns, miles of blazing coke ovens paralleling
the track and lighting these regions with a lurid glow after dusk, huge
dark hills occasionally twinkling with a feeble light or two. I spent a
half-wakeful night in the berth, dreaming and meditating in a nervous
chemic way. Before dawn I was awake and watching our passage through
Philadelphia, then Trenton, New Brunswick, Metuchen, Menlo Park, Rahway,
Elizabeth and Newark. Of all of these, save only Menlo Park, the home of
Edison, who was then invariably referred to by journalists and
paragraphers as “The Wizard of Menlo Park,” I knew nothing.
As we neared New York at seven the sky was overcast, and at Newark it
began to drizzle. When I stepped down it was pouring, and there at the
end of a long train-shed, the immense steel and glass affair that once
stood in Jersey City opposite Cortlandt Street of New York, awaited my
fat and smiling brother, as sweet-faced and gay and hopeful as a child.
At once, he began as was his way, a patter of jests and inquiries as to
my trip, then led me to a ferry entrance, one of a half dozen in a row,
through which, as through the proscenium arch of a stage, I caught my
first glimpse of the great Hudson. A heavy mist of rain was suspended
over it through which might be seen dimly the walls of the great city
beyond. Puffing and squatty tugs, as graceful as fat ducks, attended by
overhanging plumes of smoke, chugged noisily in the foreground of water.
At the foot of the outline of the city beyond, only a few skyscrapers
having as yet appeared, lay a fringe of ships and docks and ferry
houses. No ferry boat being present, we needs must wait for one labeled
Desbrosses, as was labeled the slip in which we stood.
But I was talking to my brother and learning of his life here and of
that of my sister E——, with whom he was living. The ferry boat
eventually came into the slip and discharged a large crowd, and we,
along with a vast company of commuters and travelers, entered it. Its
center, as I noted, was stuffed with vehicles of all sizes and
descriptions, those carrying light merchandise as well as others
carrying coal and stone and lumber and beer. I can recall to this hour
the odor of ammonia and saltpeter so characteristic of the ferry boats
and ferry houses, the crowd in the ferry house on the New York side
waiting to cross over once we arrived there, and the miserable little
horse-cars, then still trundling along West Street and between
Fourteenth and Broadway and the ferries, and Gansevoort Market. These
were drawn by one horse, and you deposited your fare yourself.
And this in the city of elevated roads!
But the car which we boarded had two horses. We traveled up West Street
from Desbrosses to Christopher and thence along that shabby old
thoroughfare to Sixth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, where we changed. At
first, aside from the sea and the boats and the sense of hugeness which
goes with immense populations everywhere, I was disappointed by the
seeming meanness of the streets. Many of them were still paved with
cobblestones, like the oldest parts of St. Louis and Pittsburgh. The
buildings, houses and stores alike, were for the most part of a shabby
red in color and varying in height from one to six stories, most of them
of an aged and contemptible appearance. This was, as I soon learned from
my serene and confident brother, an old and shabby portion of the city.
These horse-cars, in fact, were one of the jokes of the city, but they
added to its variety. “Don’t think that they haven’t anything else. This
is just the New York way. It has the new and the old mixed. Wait’ll
you’re here a little while. You’ll be like everybody else—there’ll be
just one place: New York.”
And so it proved after a time.
The truth was that the city then, for the first time in a half century
if not longer, was but beginning to emerge from a frightful period of
misrule at the hands of as evil a band of mercenaries as ever garroted a
body politic. It was still being looted and preyed upon in a most
shameful manner. Graft and vice stalked hand-in-hand. Although Tammany
Hall, the head and center of all the graft and robbery and vice and
crime protection, had been delivered a stunning blow by a reform wave
which had temporarily ousted it and placed reform officials over the
city, still the grip of that organization had not relaxed. The police
and all minor officials, as well as the workmen of all departments were
still, under the very noses of the newly elected officials, perhaps with
their aid, collecting graft and tribute. The Reverend Doctor Parkhurst
was preaching, like Savonarola, the destruction of these corruptions of
the city.
When I arrived, the streets were not cleaned or well-lighted, their ways
not adequately protected or regulated as to traffic. Uncollected garbage
lay in piles, the while the city was paying enormous sums for its
collection; small and feeble gas-jets fluttered, when in other cities
the arc-light had for fifteen years been a commonplace. As we dragged
on, on this slow-moving car, the bells on the necks of the horses
tinkling rhythmically, I stared and commented.
“Well, you can’t say that this is very much.”
“My boy,” cautioned my good and cheerful brother, “you haven’t seen
anything yet. This is just an old part of New York. Wait’ll you see
Broadway and Fifth Avenue. We’re just coming this way because it’s the
quickest way home.”
When we reached Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue I was very
differently impressed. We had traveled for a little way under an
elevated road over which trains thundered, and as we stepped down I
beheld an impressively wide thoroughfare, surging even at this hour in
the morning with people. Here was Macy’s, and northward stretched an
area which I was told was the shopping center of the vast metropolis:
Altman’s, Ehrich’s, O’Neill’s, Adams’, Simpson-Crawford’s, all huge
stores and all in a row lining the west side of the street. We made our
way across Fifteenth Street to the entrance of a narrow brownstone
apartment house and ascended two flights, waiting in a rather
poorly-lighted hall for an answer to our ring. The door was eventually
opened by my sister, whom I had not seen since my mother’s death four
years before. She had become stout. The trim beauty for which a very few
years before she had been notable had entirely disappeared. I was
disappointed at first, but was soon reassured and comforted by an
inherently kindly and genial disposition, which expressed itself in much
talking and laughing.
“Why, Theodore, I’m so glad to see you! Take off your things. Did you
have a pleasant trip? George, here’s Theodore. This is my husband,
Theodore. Come on back, you and Paul,” so she rattled on.
I studied her husband, whom I had not seen before, a dark and shrewd and
hawklike person who seemed to be always following me with his eyes. He
was an American of middle-Western extraction but with a Latin complexion
and Latin eyes.
E——’s two children were brought forward, a boy and a girl four and two
years of age respectively. A breakfast table was waiting, at which Paul
had already seated himself.
“Now, my boy,” he began, “this is where you eat real food once more. No
jerkwater hotels about this! No Pittsburgh newspaper restaurants about
this! Ah, look at the biscuit! Look at the biscuit!” as a maid brought
in a creamy plateful. “And here’s steak—steak and brown gravy and
biscuit! Steak and brown gravy and biscuit!” He rubbed his hands in joy.
“I’ll bet you haven’t seen anything like this since you left home. Ah,
good old steak and gravy!” His interest in food was always intense.
“It’s been many a day since I’ve had such biscuit and gravy, E——,” I
observed.
“‘It’s been many a day since I’ve had such biscuit and gravy, E——,’”
mocked my brother.
“Get out, you!” chimed in my sister. “Just listen to him, the old
snooks! I can’t get him out of the kitchen, can I, George? He’s always
eating. ‘It’s been many a day——’ Ho! Ho!”
“I thought you were dieting?” I inquired.
“So I am, but you don’t expect me not to eat this morning, do you? I’m
doing this to welcome you.”
“Some welcome!” I scoffed.
Our chatter became more serious as the first glow of welcome wore off.
During it all I was never free of a sense of the hugeness and
strangeness of the city and the fact that at last I was here. And in
this immense and far-flung thing my sister had this minute nook. From
where I sat I could hear strange moanings and blowings which sounded
like foghorns.
“What is that noise?” I finally asked, for to me it was eerie.
“Boats—tugs and vessels in the harbor. There’s a fog on,” explained H——,
E——’s husband.
I listened to the variety of sounds, some far, some near, some mellow,
some hoarse. “How far away are they?”
“Anywhere from one to ten miles.”
I stopped and listened again. Suddenly the full majesty of the sea
sweeping about this island at this point caught me. The entire city was
surrounded by water. Its great buildings and streets were all washed
about by that same sea-green salty flood which I had seen coming over
from Jersey City, and beyond were the miles and miles of dank salt
meadows, traversed by railroads. Huge liners from abroad were even now
making their way here. At its shores were ranged in rows great vessels
from Europe and all other parts of the world, all floating quietly upon
the bosom of this great river. There were tugs and small boats and
sailing vessels, and beyond all these, eastward, the silence, the
majesty, the deadly earnestness of the sea.
“Do you ever think how wonderful it is to have the sea so close?” I
asked.
“No, I can’t say that I do,” replied my brother-in-law.
“Nor I,” said my sister. “You get used to all those things here, you
know.”
“It’s wonderful, my boy,” said my brother, as usual helpfully
interested. He invariably seemed to approve of all my moods and
approaches to sentiment, and, like a mother who admires and spoils a
child, was anxious to encourage and indulge me. “Great subject, the
sea.”
I could not help smiling, he was so naïf and simple and intellectually
innocent and sweet.
“It’s a great city,” I said suddenly, the full import of it all sweeping
over me. “I think I’d like to live here.”
“Didn’t I tell you! Didn’t I tell you!” exclaimed my brother gayly.
“They all fall for it! Now it’s the ocean vessels that get him. You take
my advice, my boy, and move down here. The quicker the better for you.”
I replied that I might, and then tried to forget the vessels and their
sirens, but could not. The sea! The sea! And this great city! Never
before was I so anxious to explore a city, and never before so much in
awe of one either. It seemed so huge and powerful and terrible. There
was something about it which made me seem useless and trivial. Whatever
one might have been elsewhere, what could one be here?
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