THE SPIRIT OF THE CITY
All clad in mail he rode for Christ,
And his strait pathway trod;
Nor scorned he to be sacrificed
For his most jealous God.
JOHN HARTLEY, "The Broken Knight."
Our Manhattans of the mind always have their Boweries of the
blood.--"The Silver Poppy."
"Wonderful, isn't it?" cried Hartley, leaning out of the wide-silled
studio window where Repellier sat smoking wearily. He sniffed eagerly at
the warm night air, with its mingled odors of asphalt and dust and
cooling masonry.
The last of the evening's guests were gone. Hartley had been only too
glad to linger on for a while with Repellier alone, seizing as an excuse
the chance for one last look at his Motherhood picture, which was to be
carried off to Paris by the next steamer. It was a canvas in the
artist's newest style, a Hester Street mother suckling her child in the
dusk of a little shaded doorstep, brooding there grave-eyed,
deep-bosomed, and calm-souled, while the turgid life of the slums flowed
back and forth about her, unfelt, unthought of, unseen.
Now they both looked down in silence to where the city lay beneath them,
a garden of glimmering lights--pearl and opal and amethyst, with a
flickering ruby or two in the remoter velvety blackness.
"Yes," said the older man, "it _is_ wonderful."
"And what a place you have here to work! Where one can be alone, and yet
dip into life, just as one would dip one's wrist into a stream."
The dull sounds of the midnight streets, broken, as they looked, by the
sharp clanging of an ambulance bell, the rumbling of car-wheels mingled
with the rattle of a pavement sweeper and the intermittent patter of
hoofs on the asphalt came up faintly through the odorous, calm air.
There was a mysterious charm about the great, incongruous, huddled city,
picturesque in its very defiance of symmetry and beauty.
"That's Broadway, isn't it," said Hartley, pointing with his finger,
"still looking like a Milky Way of lights?"
"Yes; and those glowing crowns of light are the roof-gardens; and
there's Fifth Avenue, spangled with its twin rows of white electric
globes, for all the world like a double thread of pearls hanging down
the breast of the city. Those crawling snakes with the golden scales are
the L trains. That cobweb of light is Brooklyn Bridge, and those little
ruby fireflies are the ferries on the North River."
"And that crown of old gold and rose stands over Brooklyn, I know, and
the lower bay."
An unknown city had always held vague terrors for Hartley; once, even,
as a child, he had burst into sudden tears over an old atlas of the
world; "it was so big and lonesome," he had tried to tell his
uncomprehending nurse. But now, as he followed Repellier's finger with
his eyes, he was dimly conscious of that sense of fugitive terror
lifting and drifting away from the sea of scattered lights beneath him.
For a moment he felt more drawn toward the city than of old, though his
first vivid, photographic impression of it floated mockingly back
through his mind.
The smell of the willows of the Isis and the hyacinths of Holywell had
scarcely fallen from him as he walked those first few miles of the New
World--a New World which seemed to his timid and homesick eyes to be but
streets of chaotic turbulence through which pulsed the ceaseless cry of
Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! He recalled the blind beggar with his quick, shrill
cry of "Please help the blind! Please help the blind!" tapping hideously
along the crowded pavement. He remembered the groups of sallow-faced
men, young, yet already old, lounging about the entrances of what seemed
countless hotels; the cluster of swarthy, foreign-looking workmen
tearing up the asphalt under the strong glare of gasoline torches; the
cars and hansoms that rattled past; the two express-wagons that crashed
together and locked wheels amid curses and loud cries; the pedlers and
news-boys and fruit-venders barking and crying through the streets; the
bilious-hued moon shining brokenly down through air heavy with dust; the
serrated line of the distant sky-scrapers that seemed to bite up at the
darkness like teeth; and the white glare of the electric lights bunched
so alluringly about the gilt-lettered, gaudy-faced corner saloons. It
was not until afterward that he found he had traversed but one rough
rind of the city itself; but it had all seemed so glaring, so blatant,
so hopelessly unlovely to his bewildered eyes, that with the bitterness
of a second Job he had asked: Is this, then, the soul of their
republicanism? Is this the America of which the Old World had dreamed
such envious, foolish, happy dreams?
Leaning there out of the lofty studio window, the young alien sighed
with the burden of his youthful disappointments and his great things
still undone. He looked less hopelessly down at the lights of a city
which he had grown, in a softer mood, to think of as more beautiful.
Then he glanced at Repellier once more. This quiet man beside him, he
felt, must have dreamed his way even more slowly into the heart of that
turbulent life. For from a withered old hack writer on his news bureau
Hartley had picked up a fragmentary story to the effect that Repellier
had first come to New York a broken-hearted man, in search of a runaway
sister. She had killed herself, he remembered the story went, when
Repellier had tried to take her home, for she had passed through things
that are seldom forgiven, and never forgotten. Recalling this, Hartley
peered through the gloom at the other man, as though to read his face
more closely. But the past seemed to have left no trace.
"That disorderly, happy-go-lucky tangle and snarl of lights on your
left," his companion was saying quietly, "is your East Side, and that
sinister scar of brighter light across it like a sword-gash is the
Bowery itself. You can see how different they are to these prim rows on
the West Side!"
"Which stand for happiness, and, accordingly, more or less for dulness."
"There's a good deal of nonsense talked and written about the slums,
Hartley, and they're wept and prayed and shuddered over, through
lorgnettes, but, after all, you hear about as much laughing on Hester
Street as you do on West End Avenue."
Hartley recalled the sounds that crept up to his little tenement room of
a hot midsummer night. "And quite as much weeping."
"Perhaps a little more, for the Submerged Tenth has never been taught to
nurse its sorrows in silence. But it's all taught me one big
lesson--it's a truth so obvious that it puzzles me to think it should
come so late in life. Wherever it beats," and here the older man's voice
dropped into a sudden deeper tone of earnestness, "the old unchanging
human heart runs with the same old unchanging human blood, and aches
with the same old unchanging human aches. It's such a simple old truth,
though, the world never accepts it."
The younger man shook his head in vague dissent. The even, dispassionate
tones of this man who had looked deep into life fell like a cold hand
on the throat of his lighter-pinioned ideality.
"The slum sins most," he protested, "and therefore suffers most."
"It sins openly, and suffers openly."
The younger man, looking down over the dim city, with his chin on his
hand, did not reply. He was saying to himself that they had not taught
them these things over in Oxford, and was wondering how often, ages and
ages ago, in old Athenian gardens, some young Platonist and some aged
Aristotelian had wrangled over the same ancient problem. Through the
murmurous night air he dreamily noted the creeping hansoms and the
crawling L trains and the street-cars, the minute corpuscles of the now
languid life-blood with which the huge city would soon run so
feverishly.
The unrest, the haste, the movement of the momentarily lulled life
beneath him took on a strangeness, a mystery, an inscrutable element
that filled him with a wordless disquiet. What was the end of it all?
And what did it all stand for? And whither was it trending? His mind
went back to one calm night when he and another stood under the white
Italian stars, up under the olives and chestnuts of Fiesole, and asked
the same questions of life. Then his thoughts drifted again to his last
days in Oxford, when he and a young scholar of Magdalen went out by
night to Boars Hill to listen to the nightingales. From the shadowy
hillside of the quiet wood they had watched the lights of Oxford
swarming luminously in the dark little valley of the Isis below,
glimmering through the humid English spring night like pearls in a
goblet of wine. How strangely full and deep and good life had seemed to
them that lyric night, as they walked home through the moonlight, with
all the world before them!
But to Hartley the great restless New World city seemed so bewilderingly
different. The spirit of it was so elusive! It so engulfed one with its
passionate movement! It made man such a microscopic unit! It held life
so cheap, and youth so lightly! He had been nearly four months in New
York; it had swallowed him up as a maelstrom might, and he had
accomplished nothing, or what stood as good as nothing. He remembered
half bitterly how he had broken disconsolately away from the twilight
languor of his sleepy old university town, and with his few carefully
hoarded pounds had turned to America, young yet already old, hopeful and
yet already heart-weary, in search of more strenuous effort and
struggle. That London evening paper which at times printed his copy, he
recalled, had rather grandiloquently announced that Mr. John Hartley,
M.A., was to do for the East Side of New York what Besant had done for
the East Side of London, and even ventured to prophesy that a great
number of Mr. Hartley's friends and admirers would await his book with
interest. From the first he felt that there had been something ominous
in that initial deception. And now he had foundered in the very sea from
which he was to sweep both gold and glory--even, as he told himself,
after tossing overboard his jetsam of undergraduate dreams. Now, indeed,
he was thankful enough for his daily bread; and there were, he knew,
hundreds and thousands like him--thousands of aspiring men and women
whom the great city had called from the towns and farms of the West,
from the wide Dominion above the Lakes, from the South, from the Old
World itself.
As he gazed wonderingly down through the darkness he thought of the
friendlier, more intimate voice that had groped out through the housetop
gloom to him that night. He wondered into what corner of the sleeping
vastness of the city that wistful voice had crept. The mere thought and
memory of it seemed to give a warm spot to the meaningless, shadowy
solitude beneath him, like one small ember in a waste of ashes.
He turned to Repellier.
"Who is Cordelia Vaughan?" he asked.
Repellier drew back from the window and stood in the dim light of the
studio lamps.
"Miss Vaughan--Cordelia Vaughan--is a young Kentucky woman who writes
books, and I understand one of her dramatized novels is soon to be put
on the stage. People are petting her--petting her a good deal too much,
this season--but still, she seems to stand it well."
"I suppose she has written quite a bit?" Hartley casually inquired.
"I've known her only since last year, and I don't read, you know. But
they tell me she's clever--when she writes, I mean, for most of these
bookish women, unfortunately, are trimmed back and stunted for the sake
of the fruit."
Hartley looked round at Repellier, missing from the other's voice some
note of enthusiasm which he had expected to be there. The older man's
succeeding question, however, bridging as it apparently did some
disrupted line of thought, adequately accounted for his judicial
coldness of tone.
"Are you getting broken in to work over here, Hartley--to good, hard
work?"
The younger man smiled. With him Euterpe and Eros, obviously, must not
house together.
"Jolly well broken in," was all he answered.
"Work is our eternal redemption," Repellier said, with his hand on the
younger man's shoulder. Then he sighed wearily. "But to a good many of
us Americans a life of hurry, I guess, has become the only life of
ease."