Hints to Pilgrims Part 1

Hints to Pilgrims.

by Charles Stephen Brooks.

Hints to Pilgrims.

When a man's thoughts in older time were set on pilgrimage, his neighbors came forward with suggestions. One of them saw that his boots were freshly tapped. Another was careful that his hose were darned with honest wool--an oldish aunt, no doubt, with beeswax and thimble and gla.s.ses forward on her nose. A third sly creature fetched in an embroidered wallet to hold an extra shift, and hinted in return for a true nail from the holy cross. If he were a bachelor, a tender garter was offered him by a lonely maiden of the village, and was acknowledged beneath the moon. But the older folk who had made the pilgrimage took the settle and fell to argument on the merit of the inns. They scrawled maps for his guidance on the hearth, and told him the sights that must not be missed. Here he must veer off for a holy well. Here he must beware a treacherous bog. Here he must ascend a steeple for the view.

They cautioned him to keep upon the highway. Was it not Christian, they urged, who was lost in By-path Meadow? Again they talked of thieves and warned him to lay a chair against the door. Then a honey syllabub was drunk in clinking cups, and they made a night of it.

Or perhaps our pilgrim belonged to a guild which--by an agreeable precedent--voted that its members walk with him to the city's gate and present from each a half-penny to support him on the journey. The greasy pockets yield their treasure. He rattles on both sides with generous copper. Here, also, is a salve for man and beast--a receipt for a fever-draught. We may fancy now the pilgrim's mule plowing up the lazy dust at the turn of the road as he waves his last farewell. His thoughts already have leaped the valley to the misty country beyond the hills.

And now above his dusty road the sun climbs the exultant noon. It whips its flaming chariot to the west. On the rim of twilight, like a traveler who departs, it throws a golden offering to the world.

But there are pilgrims in these later days, also,--strangers to our own fair city, script in wallet and staff in hand,--who come to place their heavy tribute on our shrine. And to them I offer these few suggestions.

The double stars of importance--as in Baedeker--mark our restaurants and theatres. Dear pilgrim, put money in thy purse! Persuade your guild to advance you to a penny! They mark the bridges, the shipping, the sharp canyons of the lower city, the parks--limousines where silk and lace play nurse to lap dogs--Bufo on an airing, the precious spitz upon a scarlet cushion. They mark the parade of wealth, the shops and glitter of Fifth Avenue on a winter afternoon. "If this is Fifth Avenue,"--as I heard a dazzled stranger comment lately on a bus-top,--"my G.o.d! what must First Avenue be like!"

And then there are the electric signs--the mammoth kitten rolling its ball of silk, ginger-ale that forever issues from a bottle, a fiery motor with a flame of dust, the Wrigley triplets correcting their sluggish livers by exercise alongside the Astor roof. Surely letters despatched home to Kalamazoo deal excitedly with these flashing portents. And of the railroad stations and the Woolworth Tower with its gothic pinnacles questing into heaven, what pilgrim words are adequate!

Here, certainly, Kalamazoo is baffled and must halt and bite its pen.

Nor can the hotels be described--toppling structures that run up to thirty stories--at night a clatter in the bas.e.m.e.nt and a clatter on the roof--sons of Belial and rich folk from Akron who are spending the profit on a few thousand hot-water bottles and inner tubes--what mad pursuit! what pipes and timbrels! what wild ecstasy! Do we set a noisy bard upon our towers in the hope that our merriment will sound to Mars?

Do we persuade them that jazz is the music of the spheres? But at morning in these hotels are thirty stories of snoring bipeds--exhausted trousers across the bed-post, frocks that have been rumpled in the hubbub--tier on tier of bipeds, with sleepy curtains drawn against the light. Boniface, in the olden time, sunning himself beneath his bush and swinging dragon, watching the dust for travelers, how would he be amazed at the advancement of the inn! Dear pilgrim, you must sag and clink for entrance to the temples of our joyous G.o.ds. Put money in thy purse and wire ahead!

On these streets there is a roar of traffic that Babylon never heard.

Nineveh in its golden age could have packed itself with all its splendid luggage in a single building. Athens could have mustered in a street.

Our block-parties that are now the fashion--neighborhood affairs in fancy costumes, with a hot trombone, and banners stretched from house to house--produce as great an uproar as ever arose upon the Acropolis. And lately, when our troops returned from overseas and marched beneath our plaster arches, Rome itself could not have matched the largeness of our triumph. Here, also, men have climbed up to walls and battlements--but to what far dizzier heights!--to towers and windows, and to chimney-tops, to see great Pompey pa.s.s the streets.

And by what contrast shall we measure our tall buildings? Otus and Ephialtes, who contracted once to pile Pelion on top of Ossa, were evidently builders who touched only the larger jobs. They did not stoop to a cottage or a bungalow, but figured entirely on such things as arks and the towers of Jericho. When old Cheops sickened, it is said, and thought of death, they offered a bid upon his pyramid. Noah, if he was indeed their customer, as seems likely, must have fretted them as their work went forward. Whenever a cloud appeared in the rainy east he nagged them for better speed. He prowled around on Sunday mornings with his cubit measure to detect any shortness in the beam. Or he looked for knot-holes in the gopher wood. But Otus and Ephialtes could not, with all their sweating workmen, have fetched enough stones for even the foundations of one of our loftier structures.

The Tower of Babel, if set opposite Wall Street, would squat as low as Trinity: for its top, when confusion broke off the work, had advanced scarcely more than seven stories from the pavement. My own windows, dwarfed by my surroundings, look down from as great a height. Indeed, I fancy that if the famous tower were my neighbor to the rear--on Ninth Street, just off the L--its whiskered masons on the upmost platform could have sc.r.a.ped acquaintance with our cook. They could have gossiped at the noon hour from gutter to sink, and eaten the crullers that the kind creature tossed across. Our whistling grocery-man would have found a rival. And yet the good folk of the older Testament, ignorant of our accomplishment to come, were in amazement at the tower, and strangers came in from Gilead and Beersheba. Trippers, as it were, upon a holiday--staff in hand and pomegranates in a papyrus bag--locusts and wild honey, or manna to sustain them in the wilderness on their return--trippers, I repeat, c.o.c.ked back their heads, and they counted the rows of windows to the top and went off to their far land marveling.

The Bankers Trust Building culminates in a pyramid. Where this narrows to a point there issues a streamer of smoke. I am told that inside this pyramid, at a dizzy height above the street, there is a storage room for gold. Is it too fanciful to think that inside, upon this unsunned heap of metal, there is concealed an altar of Mammon with priests to feed the fire, and that this smoke, rising in the lazy air, is sweet in the nostrils of the greedy G.o.d?

There is what seems to be a chapel on the roof of the Bush Terminal.

Gothic decoration marks our buildings--the pointed arch, mullions and gargoyles. There are few nowadays to listen to the preaching of the church, but its symbol is at least a pretty ornament on our commercial towers.

Nor in the general muster of our sights must I forget the magic view from across the river, in the end of a winter afternoon, when the lower city is still lighted. The cl.u.s.tered windows shine as if a larger constellation of stars had met in thick convention. But it is to the eye of one who travels in the evening mist from Staten Island that towers of finest gossamer arise. They are built to furnish a fantastic dream. The architect of the summer clouds has tried here his finer hand.

It was only lately when our ferry-boat came around the point of Governor's Island, that I noticed how sharply the chasm of Broadway cuts the city. It was the twilight of a winter's day. A rack of sullen clouds lay across the sky as if they met for mischief, and the water was black with wind. In the threatening obscurity the whole island seemed a mightier House of Usher, intricate of many buildings, cleft by Broadway in its middle, and ready to fall prostrate into the dark waters of the tarn. But until the gathering tempest rises and an evil moon peers through the crevice, as in the story, we must judge the city to be safe.

Northward are nests of streets, thick with children. One might think that the old woman who lived in a shoe dwelt hard by, with all of her married sisters roundabout. Children scurry under foot, oblivious of contact. They shoot their marbles between our feet, and we are the moving hazard of their score. They chalk their games upon the pavement.

Baseball is played, long and thin, between the gutters. Peddlers' carts line the curb--carrots, shoes and small hardware--and there is shrill chaffering all the day. Here are dim restaurants, with truant smells for their advertis.e.m.e.nt. In one of these I was served unleavened bread. Folk from Damascus would have felt at home, and yet the shadow of the Woolworth Tower was across the roof. The loaf was rolled thin, like a chair-pad that a monstrous fat man habitually sits upon. Indeed, I looked sharply at my ample waiter on the chance that it was he who had taken his ease upon my bread. If Kalamazoo would tire for a night of the Beauty Chorus and the Wrigley triplets, and would walk these streets of foreign population, how amazing would be its letters home!

Our Greenwich Village, also, has its sights. Time was when we were really a village beyond the city. Even more remotely there were farms upon us and comfortable burghers jogged up from town to find the peace of country. There was once a swamp where Washington Square now is, and, quite lately, masons in demolishing a foundation struck into a conduit of running water that still drains our pleasant park. When Broadway was a muddy post-road, stretching for a weary week to Albany, ducks quacked about us and were shot with blunderbuss. Yes, and they were doubtless roasted, with apple-sauce upon the side. And then a hundred years went by, and the breathless city jumped to the north and left us a village in its midst.

It really is a village. The grocer gives you credit without question.

Further north, where fashion shops, he would inspect you up and down with a cruel eye and ask a reference. He would linger on any patch or shiny spot to trip your credit. But here he wets his pencil and writes down the order without question. His friendly cat rubs against your bundles on the counter. The shoemaker inquires how your tapped soles are wearing. The bootblack, without lifting his eyes, knows you by the knots in your shoe-strings. I fear he beats his wife, for he has a great red nose which even prohibition has failed to cool. The little woman at the corner offers you the _Times_ before you speak. The cigar man tosses you a package of Camels as you enter. Even the four-corners beyond Berea--unknown, remote, quite off the general travel--could hardly be more familiar with the preference of its oldest citizen. We need only a pump, and a pig and chickens in the street.

Our gossip is smaller than is found in cities. If we had yards and gardens we would talk across the fence on Monday like any village, with clothes-pins in our mouths, and pa.s.s our ailments down the street.

But we are crowded close, wall to wall. I see my neighbor cooking across the street. Each morning she jolts her dust-mop out of the window. I see shadows on a curtain as a family sits before the fire. A novelist is down below. By the frenzy of his fingers on the typewriter it must be a tale of great excitement. He never pauses or looks at the ceiling for a plot. At night he reads his pages to his patient wife, when they together have cleared away the dishes. In another window a girl lies abed each morning. Exactly at 7.45, after a few minutes of sleepy stretching, I see her slim legs come from the coverlet. Once she caught my eye. She stuck out her tongue. Your stockings, my dear, hang across the radiator.

We have odd characters, too, known to everybody, just as small towns have, who, in country circ.u.mstance, would whittle on the bench outside the village store. The father of a famous poet, but himself unknown except hereabouts, has his chair in the corner of a certain restaurant, and he offers wisdom and reminiscence to a coterie. He is our Johnson at the Mitre. Old M----, who lives in the Alley in what was once a hayloft--now a studio,--is known from Fourth to Twelfth Street for his Indian curry and his knowledge of the older poets. It is his pleasant custom to drop in on his friends from time to time and cook their dinner. He tosses you an ancient sonnet as he stirs the pot, or he beats time with his iron spoon to a melody of the Pathetique. He knows Shakespeare to a comma, and discourses so agreeably that the Madison Square clock fairly races up to midnight. Every morning, it is said--but I doubt the truth of this, for a gossiping lady told me--every morning until the general drouth set in, he issued from the Alley for a toddy to sustain his seventy years. Sometimes, she says, old M---- went without tie or collar on these quick excursions, yet with the manners of the Empire and a sweeping bow, if he met any lady of his acquaintance.

A famous lecturer in a fur collar sweeps by me often, with his eyes on the poetic stars. As he takes the air this sunny morning he thinks of new paradoxes to startle the ladies at his matinee. How they love to be shocked by his wicked speech! He is such a daring, handsome fellow--so like a G.o.d of ancient Greece! And of course most of us know T----, who gives a yearly dinner at an a.s.syrian restaurant--sixty cents a plate, with a near-beer extra from a saloon across the way. Any guest may bring a friend, but he must give ample warning in order that the table may be stretched.

The chief poet of our village wears a corduroy suit and goes without his hat, even in winter. If a comedy of his happens to be playing at a little theatre, he himself rings a bell in his favorite restaurant and makes the announcement in true Elizabethan fashion. "Know ye, one and all, there is a conceited comedy this night--" His hair is always tousled. But, as its confusion continues from March into the quieter months, the disarrangement springs not so much from the outer tempest as from the poetic storms inside.

Then we have a kind of Peter Pan grown to shiny middle life, who makes ukuleles for a living. On any night of special celebration he is prevailed upon to mount a table and sing one of his own songs to this accompaniment. These songs tell what a merry, wicked crew we are. He sings of the artists' b.a.l.l.s that ape the Bohemia of Paris, of our genius, our unrestraint, our scorn of all convention. What is morality but a suit to be discarded when it is old? What is life, he sings, but a mad jester with tinkling bells? Youth is brief, and when dead we're buried deep. So let's romp and drink and kiss. It is a pagan song that has lasted through the centuries. If it happens that any folk are down from the uptown hotels, Peter Pan consents to sell a ukulele between his encores. Here, my dear pilgrims, is an entertainment to be squeezed between Ziegfeld's and the Winter Garden.

You are welcome at all of our restaurants--our Samovars, the Pig and Whistle, the Three Steps Down (a crowded room, where you spill your soup as you carry it to a table, but a cheap, honest place in which to eat), the Green Witch, the Simple Simon. The food is good at all of these places. Grope your way into a bas.e.m.e.nt--wherever one of our fantastic signs hangs out--or climb broken stairs into a dusty garret--over a contractor's storage of old lumber and bath-tubs--over the litter of the roofs--and you will find artistic folk with flowing ties, spreading their elbows at bare tables with unkept, dripping candles.

Here is youth that is blown hither from distant villages--youth that was misunderstood at home--youth that looks from its poor valley to the heights and follows a flame across the darkness--youth whose eyes are a window on the stars. Here also, alas, are slim white moths about a candle. And here wrinkled children play at life and art.

Here are radicals who plot the reformation of the world. They hope it may come by peaceful means, but if necessary will welcome revolution and machine-guns. They demand free speech, but put to silence any utterance less red than their own.

Here are seething sonneteers, playwrights bulging with rejected ma.n.u.script, young women with bobbed hair and with cigarettes lolling limply at their mouths. For a cigarette, I have observed, that hangs loosely from the teeth shows an artistic temperament, just as in business circles a cigar that is tilted up until it warms the nose marks a sharp commercial nature.

But business counts for little with us. Recently, to make a purchase, I ventured of an evening into one of our many small shops of fancy wares.

Judge my embarra.s.sment to see that the salesman was entertaining a young lady on his knee. I was too far inside to retreat. Presently the salesman shifted the lady to his other knee and, brushing a lock of her hair off his nose, asked me what I wanted. But I was unwilling to disturb his hospitality. I begged him not to lay down his pleasant burden, but rather to neglect my presence. He thanked me for my courtesy, and made his guest comfortable once more while I fumbled along the shelves. By good luck the price was marked upon my purchase. I laid down the exact change and tip-toed out.

The peddlers of our village, our street musicians, our apple men, belong to us. They may wander now and then to the outside world for a silver tribute, yet they smile at us on their return as at their truest friends. Ice creaks up the street in a little cart and trickles at the cracks. Rags and bottles go by with a familiar, jangling bell. Scissors grinders have a bell, also, with a flat, tinny sound, like a cow that forever jerks its head with flies. But it was only the other day that two fellows went by selling brooms. These were interlopers from a noisier district, and they raised up such a clamor that one would have thought that the Armistice had been signed again. The clatter was so unusual--our own merchants are of quieter voice--that a dozen of us thrust our heads from our windows. Perhaps another German government had fallen. The novelist below me put out his s.h.a.ggy beard. The girl with the slim legs was craned out of the sill with excitement. My pretty neighbor below, who is immaculate when I meet her on the stairs, was in her mob-cap.

My dear pilgrim from the West, with your ample house and woodshed, your yard with its croquet set and hammock between the wash-poles, you have no notion how we are crowded on the island. Laundry tubs are concealed beneath kitchen tables. Boxes for clothes and linen are ambushed under our beds. Any burglar hiding there would have to snuggle among the moth b.a.l.l.s. Sitting-room tables are swept of books for dinner. Bookcases are desks. Desks are beds. Beds are couches. Couches are--bless you! all the furniture is at masquerade. Kitchen chairs turn upside down and become step-ladders. If anything does not serve at least two uses it is a slacker. Beds tumble out of closets. Fire escapes are nurseries. A patch of roof is a pleasant garden. A bathroom becomes a kitchen, with a lid upon the tub for groceries, and the milk cooling below with the cold faucet drawn.

A room's use changes with the clock. That girl who lives opposite, when she is dressed in the morning, puts a Bagdad stripe across her couch.

She punches a row of colored pillows against the wall. Her bedroom is now ready for callers. It was only the other day that I read of a new invention by which a single room becomes four rooms simply by pressing a b.u.t.ton. This is the manner of the magic. In a corner, let us say, of a rectangular room there is set into the floor a turntable ten feet across. On this are built four compartments, shaped like pieces of pie.

In one of these is placed a bath-tub and stand, in another a folding-bed and wardrobe, in a third is a kitchen range and cupboard, and in the fourth a bookcase and piano. Must I explain the mystery? On rising you fold away your bed and spin the circle for your tub. And then in turn your stove appears. At last, when you have whirled your dishes to retirement, the piano comes in sight. It is as easy as spinning the caster for the oil and vinegar. A whirling Susan on the supper table is not more nimble. With this device it is estimated that the population of our snug island can be quadruplicated, and that landlords can double their rents with untroubled conscience. Or, by swinging a fifth piece of pie out of the window, a sleeping-porch could be added. When the morning alarm goes off you have only to spin the disk and dress in comfort beside the radiator. Or you could--but possibilities are countless.

Tom Paine died on Grove Street. O. Henry lived on Irving Place and ate at Allaire's on Third Avenue. The Aquarium was once a fort on an island in the river. Later Lafayette was welcomed there. And Jenny Lind sang there. John Masefield swept out a saloon, it's said, on Sixth Avenue near the Jefferson Market, and, for all I know, his very broom may be still standing behind the door. The Bowery was once a post-road up toward Boston. In the stream that flowed down Maiden Lane, Dutch girls did the family washing. In William Street, not long ago, they were tearing down the house in which Alexander Hamilton lived. These are facts at random.

But Captain Kidd lived at 119 Pearl Street. Dear me, I had thought that he was a creature of a nursery book--one of the pirates whom Sinbad fought. And here on Pearl Street, in our own city, he was arrested and taken to hang in chains in London. A restaurant now stands at 119. A bucket of oyster sh.e.l.ls is at the door, and, inside, a clatter of hungry spoons.

But the crowd thickens on these narrow streets. Work is done for the day and tired folk hurry home. Crowds flow into the subway entrances. The streets are flushed, as it were, with people, and the flood drains to the rushing sewers. Now the lights go out one by one. The great buildings, that glistened but a moment since at every window, are now dark cliffs above us in the wintry mist.

It is time, dear pilgrim, to seek your hotel or favorite cabaret.

The Wrigley triplets once more correct by exercise their sluggish livers. The kitten rolls its ball of fiery silk. Times Square flashes with entertainment. It stretches its glittering web across the night.

Dear pilgrim, a last important word! Put money in thy purse!

I Plan a Vacation.