Post Impressions Part 6

--"Well, so long, Johnny," swam off in the direction of a star where Johnny Bannon had seen a flashlight.

And as it turned out, it was, indeed, a flashlight, and Dillon was pulled out of the water to go on stoking and accelerating the process of national decadence.

"My last letter," continued Cooper, "was written in October, 1912, in the Tombs. The author was one Frank Cirofici, known to the patrons of educational moving-picture shows all over the country as Dago Frank. It was addressed to one Big Jack Zelig, a distinguished ornament of our Great White Way, cut down before his time by a bullet from behind.

Cirofici wrote:

"I know the night I heard Jip and Lefty were arrested I cried like a little baby.--Dear pal, I have more faith in you than in any living being in this country. I tell you the truth right from my heart. I don't know you long, Jack, and I think if it wasn't for you, I don't know what would happen to me. Being I am a Dago, of course, you don't know what I know."

"Please," said Harding, "please don't knock a hole into your own argument by asking us to shed tears over the undefiled wells of purity that lie deep in the soul of the Bowery gunman. You won't contend that Dago Frank, when he leaves us, will be a loss to the nation."

"It would be an act of delusion on my part," said Cooper, "to expect you to see what I am driving at without going to the trouble of spelling it out for you, Harding, even if you do belong to the cla.s.ses of superior social worth. What I want to express is the justifiable wrath which possesses me at this silly habit of taking a pile of figures and adding them up and dividing by three and deducing therefrom scarlet visions of Decadence and the fall of Rome and Trafalgar, and all that rot. What if empires, and republics, and incomes, and the size of families do rise and fall? Does the soul of man decay? Do the primitive loyalties decay?

As long as we have men like Charles Crawl and Samuel Howard, do you think I care whether or not Harvard graduates neglect to reproduce their kind? The soul of man, as embodied in Dillon with his 'So long, Johnny,'

is as sound to-day as it was ten thousand years ago, before the human race entered on its decline by putting on clothes. And Cirofici, pouring his soul out to his 'pal,' crying like a child over those poor lambs, Lefty Lewis and Gyp the Blood--"

"If that's what you mean," said Harding with suspicious humility, "I quite agree with you. You know, I have often--"

"Once you agree with me," said Cooper, "I don't see why it is necessary for you to continue."

XI

ROMANCE

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 circ.u.mstances 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 ma.s.s 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 a.s.sistant 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 t.i.tle 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.

"a.s.suredly," 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 pa.s.sengers grinned. One of the most amusing things in the world is a tardy pa.s.senger who tries to fling himself through a car door and flattens his nose against the gla.s.s. 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.

XII

WANDERl.u.s.t

April sunlight on the river and the liners putting out to sea. Paris!

Florence! the Alps! the Mediterranean! I turned away and let my thoughts run back to the time when Emmeline and I were in the habit of making, once a year, the trip to Prospect Park South.