I
Wilfred Pell stole down-stairs carrying his shoes. With infinite care he
turned the handle of the front door, his heart in his mouth. When one
pressed down a catch in the lock, it permitted the outside handle to
turn; and one could come in again. He sat down in the vestibule to put
on his shoes. There was also an outer door, closed when the family went
to bed. This had an ordinary lock, and the key was in it. It had been
Wilfred’s intention to lock this door, and carry the key with him; but
in the act of doing so the thought struck him: Suppose there was a fire?
How would his Aunts get out?
He had not much of an opinion of the presence of mind of those ladies.
They might very well stand there rattling the door, and burn up before
they recollected the basement door. Or the way to the basement might be
cut off. He pictured flames billowing up the basement stairs. No! let
them take the chance of robbery in preference to incineration. He left
both doors unlocked behind him. Sometimes the policeman on beat tried
the basement gates as he passed through the block; but Wilfred had never
seen him mount the stoops to try the front doors. On the sidewalk there
was a horrible moment as he passed within range of Aunt May’s windows
over the drawing-room, then safety.
This was not his first sortie at ten o’clock. It was a way of release
from the torment of his thoughts that he had discovered. That is, if he
remembered it in time. Once the misery had him fairly in its grip he was
helpless. It was this business of becoming a man. Sometimes he went for
a walk early in the morning; but everybody knew about that; he could not
hug the secret deliciously to his breast. Anyhow morning walks were for
light hearts, he thought, with a gentle swell of self-pity. Night for
him! How wistfully he looked back towards the cool zone of childhood.
What happened to you was not pleasant. He had noticed a funny thing; if
he had said to himself during the day: To-night I will sneak out—there
was no virtue in it; he carried his earthiness with him. But if while he
was in his bed he yielded suddenly to the impulse; and arose and
dressed; a sort of miracle occurred; he forgot himself.
It was so to-night. The night took him. He was thrilled by the double
line of still houses fronting each other; each house with its windows
fixed unswervingly on its adversary across the street; the oblique stoop
rails like beards; the cornices like eyebrows. And overhead the stars,
deathless flowers in a meadow. Wilfred felt that he belonged. He was as
much the street’s as that cat creeping across, its belly hugging the
asphalt. Like the cat he was all eyes, ears and nose; the thinking part
of him had stopped working. He made a feint at the cat; and chuckled
aloud at the creature’s precipitate loss of dignity. Gee! how good it
was to be out!
Respectable West Eleventh street was already settling down. Most of the
outer doors were closed, and many bedroom windows showed rectangles of
an agreeable apricot light filtering through the lowered shades. Wilfred
had turned East, seeking life. At the corner of Fifth Avenue he was
struck by the effect of the new arc lights. Hanging two to a pole, the
mellow pinkish globes stretched far into the distance in two gradually
converging lines. Like insect lights they climbed the Thirty-Fourth
street hill at last and disappeared. Fruit of Night, Wilfred whispered
to himself.
In Washington Square this mild October night there were still many
couples sitting on the benches. The sight of them left Wilfred cold; he
merely wondered at their static attitudes; hours, apparently, without
moving or speaking. But once as he passed such a couple, a girl whose
face was hidden in a man’s neck, laughed softly in her throat, and
Wilfred’s breast was acutely disturbed by the sound. It suggested that
that private nightmare of his might be a loveliness when shared; that it
was the means whereby two human hearts might open to each other. Never
for me! he thought with a needle in his heart; and hurried away from the
sound.
Through Washington Place across Broadway; through Astor Place and down
the Bowery. The bulk of Cooper Union loomed like a whale against the
sky. The sight of it, brought the slightly fœtid smell of the
reading-room into Wilfred’s nostrils. It was a place where you could go.
The bums never looked at you. He breasted the Bowery like a swimmer. No
early-to-bed habits here. He edged along close to the store-fronts,
looking at everybody; entering into them; thieves, prostitutes, drunken
men, sporting characters, and the great unclassified. So many and such
queer souls each peeping suspiciously out of a pair of eyes. With the
shuffling of the people, the four track line of electric cars in the
middle of the street, and the steam cars of the Elevated railway
immediately over the sidewalk, the uproar was at once distracting and
stimulating.
There were certain store windows that Wilfred always looked into; the
florist’s full of green wire frames to serve as a foundation for funeral
pieces; a musical instrument dealer’s exhibiting a gigantic brass horn
and a doll’s horn beside it to show the range of the stock; an animal
and bird store with cages of monkeys. Something furtive and ugly in the
eyes of the people watching the monkeys made Wilfred exquisitely uneasy.
As you went on the stores became less reputable in character. Besides
the crowding saloons, there were the auction sales, celebrated in the
popular song; the dime museums and side shows with faded banners; an
anatomical museum, free “for men only.” All the shows had a free lobby
to tempt you in. The most innocent were those with ranks of Edison’s
phonographs inside; but Wilfred recoiled from the little bone pieces you
had to stick in your ears.
Glancing into a store window where mirrors were displayed, he saw
repeated from every angle, the figure of a boy that his eyes embraced
all over in a flash. A boy approaching sixteen, tall for his age;
dressed in a shapeless snuff-colored suit, with trousers that flapped
almost as if there were no legs within them. He walked with a long step
having a funny little dip in the middle. He had wavy, light brown hair,
a lock of which escaped untidily under the visor of his cap to sweep his
forehead. His eyes, somewhat deep-set, were grey-blue in color, and had
a look at once haunted, secretive and top-lofty—Wilfred’s word. A wide
mouth with uneven lips like a crimson gash across his white face. There
was a something awkward about him; something self-centered and peculiar
that set him apart from other boys. A boy to be jeered at. In that flash
Wilfred saw it clearly.
Why . . . that’s me, he thought, with self-consciousness winging back,
making the picture hateful. Oh Lord! what a dub! The picture remained
fixed in his mind amongst the multitude of pictures capable of turning
up at any odd moment.
At Rivington Street he turned East again, entering another populous
world quite different in style from that of the Bowery. Here, on a mild
night the family life of the East side, predominantly Jewish, was
revealed. This was Wilfred’s objective. His solitariness was comforted
by the vicarious sharing in many households. A narrow street hemmed in
on either side by tall sooty tenements. The fronts of the houses were
decorated with webs of rusty fire-escapes, the platforms of which were
heaped with the overflow of goods from the crowded rooms within. From
web to web criss-cross, everywhere ran the clotheslines with their
fluttering damp burdens. In Rivington Street even the air was crowded.
The narrow sidewalk was maggoty with people. The inner side was lined by
humble shops, the outer by an endless line of gay pushcarts like boats
anchored alongside the curb, stretching for block after block and
displaying every manner of goods. The low stoops between the shops were
crowded, mostly with women of a complete, unconfined fatness; nearly
every one of them suckling an infant. These mothers surveyed the scene
with an equanimity that arrested Wilfred. To have a whole lot of
children must be one way of solving the riddle. He _liked_ these
featherbed women; because . . . it was difficult for him to find the
word for his thought; they didn’t fidget; they bore their fruit as
inevitably as orchard trees. From the windows overhead leaned other fat
women, comfortably supporting their forearms on pillows laid across the
sills. Their faces expressed a great content.
Wilfred yielded himself to the scene of life. He had the sensation of
straining open like petals. This was the pleasure they couldn’t take
away from him; a pleasure that left a sweet taste in the mind.—The
lavish set-out of goods under the brown canvas shelters; apples floating
in brine and unwholesome-looking preserved fish; rows upon rows of ratty
fur neckpieces and muffs; bolts of printed cottons; gay garters and
suspenders; jewelry; dazzling tinware. The pushcarts were lighted by
smoking kerosene torches that threw leaping, ruddy lights and sooty
shadows on the scene. I must notice everything; Wilfred would say to
himself; and forthwith begin to enumerate a catalogue in his mind. But
his darting eyes could not wait for the names of things; they flew ahead
and he forgot the catalogue. Presently he would come to consciousness
thinking: I am not noticing anything!
The people! The dirty, savage, robust children shouldering their way
through the crowd, shrieking to each other. To these children grown-ups
were no more than bushes obstructing their hunting paths. Then there
were the young people; the scornful, comely youths flaunting their
masculinity, and the pretty girls undismayed by it. Empty and hard these
young people were; what of it? They were aware of their beauty, and of
their desirability in each other’s eyes; they were proud with youth; it
was fine to see.
Wilfred turned North at last into a side street to find another way
home. Dark streets had a different sort of attraction. No doubt the
black houses were just as full of tenants as the others, but here,
people were not drawn to the windows, nor down-stairs to the forbidding
sidewalks. Only a group of men was to be seen here and there, on the
steps, or loitering half-concealed in a vestibule. Night-birds, Wilfred
thought with an intense thrill; cutthroats. How stirring to think of men
who were restrained by nothing! Through each house there ran a narrow
arched passage to a yard in the rear, where there was always, he knew, a
second house hidden from the street. There would be a gaslight in the
yard, and you would get a glimpse of greenish flagstones. By day or by
night these passages teased Wilfred; but he had never dared to enter. In
such dens Oliver Twist had been taught to steal; Nancy Sikes had been
choked by the brutal Bill.
Wilfred soared like a bird. This was one of his “moments.” Why they came
sometimes and not other times he did not know. His breast hummed like
harpstrings. The seat of his intense feeling seemed to be somewhere at
the back of his palate. It was almost the same as a pain, but it was
rare! At such a moment nothing was changed; everything became more
intensely itself. He was still Wilfred, but a Wilfred made universal. He
entered into everything and became a part of it. At such a moment all
tormenting questions were laid; it was sufficient that things were. Life
was painted in such high colors that he was dazzled. The feeling of pain
was due to the fact that he couldn’t take it all in. He had the actual
sensations of soaring; he stretched his nostrils to get sufficient
oxygen. Mixed with pure exaltation was the feeling: How wonderful of me
to be feeling this way!
Impressions were bitten into his consciousness as with an acid. That
frowning perspective of the confined street with its different planes of
blacknesses; granite paving stones, flagged sidewalks, brick tenements;
the whole was like a dead scale upon the living earth, which
nevertheless one apprehended quivering underfoot. It was there, though
it was not seen, the fertile earth capable of bringing forth forests. At
either end of the block an arc light casting its unnatural beams
horizontally through, picking out the ash cans and empty boxes grouped
along the curb in fantastic disorder. Everywhere the bold shadows, black
and sinister. Whether beautiful or ugly, it thrilled him through and
through. Half way through the block, the door of a closely shuttered
place was thrown open, letting out a startling shaft of light and a
babel of voices; then sharply pulled to again. Oh, life, how marvellous!
At the approaching corner there was a saloon; and its side door, the
“Family Entrance,” protected by the usual fancy porch of wood and glass,
lay in Wilfred’s path. A discreet radiance came through the frosted
glass. In the corner formed by this porch with the main building Wilfred
beheld a group of six or eight boys standing with their shoulders
pressed together in a circle, heads lowered. Their stillness, their
uneasy looks over their shoulders, conveyed an intimation. He paused,
all aghast inside as if he had been surprised by a wound. His spirit
came diving down like a broken-winged bird. Little scorching flames were
lighted in the pit of his stomach, and he tasted the bitterness of
wormwood.
He walked on, trying to look unconscious. One of the boys was his own
age, the others varying sizes smaller. As he came by, the big boy cast a
wary look over his shoulder. Seeing Wilfred’s stricken face, the boy
instantly knew how it was with him, and Wilfred knew that he knew. He
felt as if he must die with shame. The boy’s face broke up in a horrid
triumphant leer. Wilfred was never to forget any detail of the look of
that boy. He wore ribbed cotton stockings faded to a greenish hue, and
button shoes much too big for him with fancy cloth tops and run-over
heels; around his neck was wound a white cotton cloth, hideously soiled,
suggesting that he had had a sore throat weeks before. His
face—close-set sharp black eyes; longish nose; lips suggesting the beak
of a predatory bird; was all lighted up by that all-knowing, zestful
leer. A wicked, dirty, comely face; it was the zest expressed there that
dishonored Wilfred.
Without turning around, the boy with a slight derisive cock of his head
conveyed an invitation to Wilfred to join the circle. Wilfred, gasping,
hastened by with lowered head, a hot tide pouring up and scorching his
cheeks and forehead. The boy’s mocking laughter pursued him.
“Hey, wait a minute, Kid!”
Wilfred darted around the corner.
He made his way home with head down, averting his sight from the sordid
streets, and the disgusting beings that frequented them. He knew of
course that the change was in himself. He had lost his talisman in the
mud. He felt sodden. What’s the use? he asked himself in the last
bitterness of spirit; I can’t climb a little way out of the muck, but my
foul nature drags me back again. I am the same as that rotten boy. He
saw it. . . . Oh God! if I could only forget the look of that boy!