During nearly the whole month that now passed before the date of sailing
it seemed to March that in some familiar aspects New York had never been
so interesting. He had not easily reconciled himself to the place after
his many years of Boston; but he had got used to the ugly grandeur, to
the noise and the rush, and he had divined more and more the careless
good-nature and friendly indifference of the vast, sprawling, ungainly
metropolis. There were happy moments when he felt a poetry unintentional
and unconscious in it, and he thought there was no point more favorable
for the sense of this than Stuyvesant Square, where they had a flat.
Their windows looked down into its tree-tops, and across them to the
truncated towers of St. George's, and to the plain red-brick,
white-trimmed front of the Friends' Meeting House; he came and went
between his dwelling and his office through the two places that form the
square, and after dinner his wife and he had a habit of finding seats by
one of the fountains in Livingston Place, among the fathers and mothers
of the hybrid East Side children swarming there at play. The elders read
their English or Italian or German or Yiddish journals, or gossiped, or
merely sat still and stared away the day's fatigue; while the little ones
raced in and out among them, crying and laughing, quarrelling and
kissing. Sometimes a mother darted forward and caught her child from the
brink of the basin; another taught hers to walk, holding it tightly up
behind by its short skirts; another publicly nursed her baby to sleep.
While they still dreamed, but never thought, of going to Europe, the
Marches often said how European all this was; if these women had brought
their knitting or sewing it would have been quite European; but as soon
as they had decided to go, it all began to seem poignantly American. In
like manner, before the conditions of their exile changed, and they still
pined for the Old World, they contrived a very agreeable illusion of it
by dining now and then at an Austrian restaurant in Union Square; but
later when they began to be homesick for the American scenes they had not
yet left, they had a keener retrospective joy in the strictly New York
sunset they were bowed out into.
The sunsets were uncommonly characteristic that May in Union Square. They
were the color of the red stripes in the American flag, and when they
were seen through the delirious architecture of the Broadway side, or
down the perspective of the cross-streets, where the elevated trains
silhouetted themselves against their pink, they imparted a feeling of
pervasive Americanism in which all impression of alien savors and
civilities was lost. One evening a fire flamed up in Hoboken, and burned
for hours against the west, in the lurid crimson tones of a conflagration
as memorably and appealingly native as the colors of the sunset.
The weather for nearly the whole month was of a mood familiar enough in
our early summer, and it was this which gave the sunsets their vitreous
pink. A thrilling coolness followed a first blaze of heat, and in the
long respite the thoughts almost went back to winter flannels. But at
last a hot wave was telegraphed from the West, and the week before the
Norumbia sailed was an anguish of burning days and breathless nights,
which fused all regrets and reluctances in the hope of escape, and made
the exiles of two continents long for the sea, with no care for either
shore.