At 5:15 in the afternoon of an exceptionally sultry day in August, John
P. Wesley, forty-seven years old, in business at No. 634 East
Twenty-sixth Street as a jobber in tools and hardware, was descending
the stairs to the downtown platform of the Subway at Twenty-eighth
Street, when it occurred to him suddenly how odd it was that he should
be going home. His grip tightened on the hand rail and he stopped short
in his tracks, his eyes fixed on the ground in pained perplexity. The
crowd behind him, thrown back upon itself by this abrupt action, halted
only for a moment and flowed on. Cheerful office-boys looked back at him
and asked what was the answer. Stout citizens elbowed him aside without
apology. But Wesley did not mind. He was asking himself why it was that
the end of the day's work should invariably find him descending the
stairs to the downtown platform of the Subway. Was there any reason for
doing that, other than habit? He wondered why it would not be just as
reasonable to cross the avenue and take an uptown train instead.
Wesley had been taking the downtown train at Twenty-eighth Street at
5:15 in the afternoon ever since there was a Subway. At Brooklyn Bridge
he changed to an express and went to the end of the line. At the end of
the line there was a boat which took him across the harbour. At the end
of the boat ride there was a trolley car which wound its way up the hill
and through streets lined with yellow-bricked, easy-payment, two-family
houses, out into the open country, where it dropped him at a cross road.
At the end of a ten minutes' walk there was a new house of stucco and
timber, standing away from the road, its angular lines revealing mingled
aspirations toward the Californian bungalow and the English Tudor. In
the house lived a tall, slender, grey-haired woman who was Wesley's
wife, and two young girls who were his daughters. They always came to
the door when his footsteps grated on the garden path, and kissed him
welcome. After dinner he went out and watered the lawn, which, after his
wife and the girls, he loved most. He plied the hose deliberately, his
eye alert for bald patches. Of late the lawn had not been coming on
well, because of a scorching sun and the lack of rain. A quiet chat with
his wife on matters of domestic economy ushered in the end of a busy
day. At the end of the day there was another day just like it.
* * * * *
And now, motionless in the crowd, Wesley was asking whether right to the
end of life this succession of days would continue. Why always the
south-bound train? He was aware that there were good reasons why. One
was the tall grey-haired woman and the two young girls at home who were
in the habit of waiting for the sound of his footsteps on the garden
path. They were his life. But apparently, too, there must be life along
the uptown route of the Interborough. He wanted to run amuck, to board a
north-bound train without any destination in mind, and to keep on as far
as his heart desired, to the very end perhaps, to Van Cortlandt Park,
where they played polo, or the Bronx, where there was a botanical museum
and a zoo. Even if he went only as far as Grand Central Station, it
would be an act of magnificent daring.
Wesley climbed to the street, crossed Fourth Avenue, descended to the
uptown platform, and entered a train without stopping to see whether it
was Broadway or Lenox Avenue. Already he was thinking of the three women
at home in a remote, objective mood. They would be waiting for him, no
doubt, and he was sorry, but what else could he do? He was not his own
master. Under the circumstances it was a comfort to know that all three
of them were women of poise, not given to making the worst of things,
and with enough work on their hands to keep them from worrying
overmuch.
Having broken the great habit of his life by taking an uptown train at
5:15, Wesley found it quite natural that his minor habits should fall
from him automatically. He did not relax into his seat and lose himself
in the evening paper after his usual fashion. He did not look at his
paper at all, but at the people about him. He had never seen such men
and women before, so fresh-tinted, so outstanding, so electric. He
seemed to have opened his eyes on a mass of vivid colours and sharp
contours. It was the same sensation he experienced when he used to break
his gold-rimmed spectacles, and after he had groped for a day in the
mists of myopia, a new, bright world would leap out at him through the
new lenses.
Wesley did not make friends easily. In a crowd he was peculiarly shy.
Now he grew garrulous. At first his innate timidity rose up and choked
him, but he fought it down. He turned to his neighbour on the right, a
thick-set, clean-shaven youth who was painfully studying the comic
pictures in his evening newspaper, and remarked, in a style utterly
strange to him:
"Looks very much like the Giants had the rag cinched?"
The thick-set young man, whom Wesley imagined to be a butcher's
assistant or something of the sort, looked up from his paper and said,
"It certainly does seem as if the New York team had established its
title to the championship."
Wesley cleared his throat again.
"When it comes to slugging the ball you've got to hand it to them," he
said.
"Assuredly," said the young man, folding up his paper with the evident
design of continuing the conversation.
Wesley was pleased and frightened. He had tasted another new sensation.
He had broken through the frosty reserve of twenty years and had spoken
to a stranger after the free and easy manner of men who make friends in
Pullman cars and at lunch counters. And the stranger, instead of
repulsing him, had admitted him, at the very first attempt, into the
fraternity of ordinary people. It was pleasant to be one of the great
democracy of the crowd, something which Wesley had never had time to be.
But on the other hand, he found the strain of conversation telling upon
him. He did not know how to go on.
The stranger went out, but Wesley did not care. He was lost in a
delicious reverie, conscious only of being carried forward on
free-beating wings into a wonderful, unknown land. The grinding of
wheels and brakes as the train halted at a station and pulled out again
made a languorous, soothing music. The train clattered out of the tunnel
into the open air, and Wesley was but dimly aware of the change from
dark to twilight. The way now ran through a region of vague apartment
houses. There were trees, stretches of green field waiting for the
builder, and here or there a colonial manor house with sheltered
windows, resigned to its fate. Then came cottages with gardens. And in
one of these Wesley, shocked into acute consciousness, saw a man with a
rubber hose watering a lawn. Wesley leaped to his feet.
The train was at a standstill when he awoke to the extraordinary fact
that he was twelve miles away from South Ferry, and going in the wrong
direction. The imperative need of getting home as soon as he could
overwhelmed him. He dashed for the door, but it slid shut in his face
and the train pulled out. His fellow passengers grinned. One of the most
amusing things in the world is a tardy passenger who tries to fling
himself through a car door and flattens his nose against the glass. It
is hard to say why the thing is amusing, but it is. Wesley did not know
that he was being laughed at. He merely knew that he must go home. He
got out at the next station, and when he was seated in a corner of the
south-bound train, he sighed with unutterable relief. He was once more
in a normal world where trains ran to South Ferry instead of away from
it. He dropped off at his road crossing, just two hours late, and found
his wife waiting.
They walked on side by side without speaking, but once or twice she
turned and caught him staring at her with a peculiar mixture of wonder
and unaccustomed tenderness.
Finally he broke out.
"It's good to see you again!"
She laughed and was happy. His voice stirred in her memories of long
ago.
"It's good to have you back, dear," she said.
"But you really look remarkably well," he insisted.
"I rested this afternoon."
"That's what you should do every day," he said. "Look at that old maple
tree! It hasn't changed a bit!"
"No," she said, and began to wonder.
"And the girls are well?"
"Oh, yes."
"I can hardly wait till I see them," he said; and then, to save
himself, "I guess I am getting old, Alice."
"You are younger to-night than you have been for a long time," she said.
Jennie and her sister were waiting for them on the porch. They wondered
why father's kiss fell so warmly on their cheeks. He kissed them twice,
which was very unusual; but being discreet young women they asked no
questions. After dinner Wesley went out to look at the lawn.