Say, that was something that nobody had seen and therefore everybody
could joke about. Every woman had the same remark and the same grin:
"Haven't I seen my husband?"
Before the parade had gone half a square Fifth Avenue was blocked. Apart
from the interference of the band and the sandwiches with vehicular
traffic, there was the paralysis of the pedestrians. The Peacock Parade
halted. Slim figures, half-naked, flat-bosomed, stalked swayingly to the
curb and stared with eyes in which was the insolent sex challenge that
New York males answer with furs and jewels. And as they looked the
challenge of sex died in the eyes of the women: the marchers had no sex;
anybody could see they had no money!
And the men, too, ceased to look stallion-eyed at the women and gazed on
the parade of sandwich-men, who, in the middle of the street, with the
machines and the horses, slouched on--almost rubbing valuable varnish on
automobiles and carriages, careless beasts!
Presently the hurrying crowds slowed their gait and kept step to
Chopin's dirge--_slowly! slowly!_--until all Fifth Avenue was a vast
funeral procession; only the marchers could not have told you what it
was that long since had died of gold on Fifth Avenue! Slowly! Slowly!
And with the funereal gait other changes came--in the grimace of the
over-red lips and the look of the over-bold eyes. But never the
slightest change in the color of the cheeks, which was there to stay, in
rain, shine, or snow.
"What is it? What is it?" whispered ten thousand people.
From the middle of the street it sounded like the whimper of ten
thousand little foamy waves dying on a flat beach. It made the filthy
bipeds who marched look at the thronged sidewalks.
They saw the usual Fifth Avenue crowd. They saw the full-fed,
clock-hating faces of professional idlers; the drawn features of the
busy money-maker with his perennial anxieties; the suddenly immobilized
grimaces of millionaires intended to conceal the fear of God knew what;
the contemptuous countenances of waiters from fashionable restaurants,
who, like ordained priests, knew America at its worst, but, unlike
priests, could not pity; healthy American boys with clean faces and the
eyes of animals.
And the sexless marchers saw also healthy American girls with delicate
features and dreadful, price-quoting eyes, and faces not clean and
healthy, but dead-white and dead-crimson; they saw not women's faces,
but marble tombstones on which the epitaphs were scarlet letters that
told what the price was, so that the professional prostitutes no longer
wasted time advertising with the same ink, but used downcast eyes as
bait.
There was a gap of about thirty feet between the first detachment of
Rutgers's marching advertisements and the next. The spectators, seeking
explanations, saw a cadaverous-looking man, hollow-cheeked, sunken-eyed,
white-lipped, who stepped as though the avenue were full of puddles of
nitroglycerine--uncertainly, fearfully! And this death-on-foot carried a
white-cloth board black-bordered like a funeral-card. And thereon
money-makers and money-spenders, clubmen and waiters, shop-girls and
millionairesses--all Fifth Avenue!--saw this: