Vistas of New York Part 20

"He got it every day," answered the doctor, "until he said he didn't want any more. I remember another man who--"

But now, with many a jolt and jar, the car was rattling noisily across Sixth Avenue under the dripping shadow of the station of the elevated railway. Harry Brackett rose to his feet, and as he did so he glanced again at the man opposite to him, to see if, even then, at the eleventh hour, he did intend to pay his fare. But the man caught Harry Brackett's eye hardily, and looked him in the face, with a curiously knowing smile.

There was something very odd about the expression of the man's face, so Harry Brackett thought, as he left the car and began to mount the steps which led to the station of the elevated railroad. He could not help thinking that there was a queer suggestion in that smile--a suggestion of a certain complicity on his part: it was as though the owner of the smile had ventured to hint that they were birds of a feather.

"Confound his impudence!" said Harry Brackett to himself, as he stood before the window of the ticket-agent.

Then he put his fingers into the little pocket in his overcoat and took from it a ten-cent piece and a five-cent piece. And he knew at once why the man opposite had smiled so impertinently--it was the smile of the pot at the kettle.

(1886)

[Ill.u.s.tration: In the Small Hours]

Suddenly he found himself wide awake. He had been lost in sleep, dreamless and s.p.a.celess; and now, without warning, his slumber had left him abruptly and for no reason that he could guess. Although he strained his ear, he caught the echo of no unusual sound. He listened in vague doubt whether there might not be some one moving about in the apartment; but he could hear nothing except the shrill creak of the brakes of a train on the elevated railroad nearly a block away. Wilson Carpenter was in the habit of observing his own feelings, and he was surprised to note that he did not really expect to detect any physical cause for his unexpected awakening. Sleep had left him as inexplicably as it had swiftly.

He lay there in bed with no restlessness; he heard the regular breathing of his wife, who was sleeping at his side; he saw the faint illumination from the door open into the next room where the baby was also asleep. He looked toward the window, but no ray of light was yet visible; and he guessed it to be about four o'clock in the morning, perhaps a little earlier. In that case he had not been in bed more than two or three hours at the most. He wondered why he had waked thus unexpectedly, since he had had a fatiguing day. Perhaps it was the excitement--there was no doubt that he had had his full share of excitement that evening--and he thrilled again as he recalled the delicious sensation of dull dread yielding at last to the certainty of success.

He had played for a heavy stake and he had won. That was just what he had been doing--gambling with fate, throwing dice with fortune itself.

That was what every dramatic author had to do every time he brought out a new play. The production of a piece at an important New York theater was a venture as aleatory almost as cutting a pack of cards, and the odds were always against the dramatist. And as the young man quietly recalled the events of the evening it seemed to him that the excitement of those who engineer corners in Wall Street must be like his own anxiety while the future of his drama hung in the balance, only theirs could not but be less keen than his, less poignant, for he was playing his game with men and women, while what they touched were but inanimate stocks. His winning depended upon the actors and actresses who had bodied forth his conception. A single lapse of memory or a single slip of the tongue, and the very sceptical audience of the first night might laugh in the wrong place, and so cut themselves off from sympathy; and all his labor would shrivel before his eyes. Of a truth it is the ordeal by fire that the dramatist must undergo; and there had been moments that long, swift evening when he had felt as though he were tied to the stake and awaiting only the haggard squaw who was to apply the torch.

Now the trial was over and the cause was gained. There had been too many war-pieces of late, so the croakers urged, and the public would not stand another drama of the Rebellion. But he had not been greatly discouraged, for in his play the military scenes were but the setting for a story of everyday heroism, of human conflict, of man's conquest of himself. It was the simple strength of this story that had caught the spectators before the first act was half over and held them breathless as situation followed situation. At the adroitly s.p.a.ced comic scenes the audience had gladly relaxed, joyously relieving the emotional strain with welcome laughter. The future of the play was beyond all question; of that the author felt a.s.sured, judging not so much by the mere applause as by the tensity of the interest aroused, and by the long-drawn sigh of suspense he had heard so often in the course of the evening. He did not dread the acrid criticisms he knew he should find in some of the morning papers, the writers of which would be bitterer than usual, since the writer of the new play had been a newspaper man himself.

The author of _A Bold Stroke_ knew what its success meant to him. It meant a fortune. The play would perhaps run the season out in New York, and this was only the middle of October. With matinees on Wednesday as well as on Sat.u.r.day, two hundred performances in the city were not impossible. Then next season there would be at least two companies on the road. He ought to make $25,000 by the piece, and perhaps more. The long struggle just to keep his head above water, just to get his daily bread, just to make both ends meet--that was over forever. He could move out of the little Harlem flat to which he had brought his bride two years before; and he could soon get her the house she was longing for somewhere in the country, near New York, where the baby could grow up under the trees.

The success of the play meant more than mere money, so the ambitious young author was thinking as he lay there sleepless. It meant praise, too--and praise was pleasant. It meant recognition--and recognition was better than praise, for it would open other opportunities. The money he made by the play would give him a home, and also leisure for thought and for adequate preparation before he began his next piece. He had done his best in writing the war-drama; he had spared no pains and neglected no possibility of improvement; it was as good as he could make it. But there were other plays he had in mind, making a different appeal, quieter than his military piece, subtler; and these he could now risk writing, since the managers would believe in him after the triumph of A Bold Stroke.

It would be possible for him hereafter to do what he wanted to do and what he believed himself best fitted to do. It had always seemed to him that New York opened an infinity of vistas to the dramatist. He intended to seize some of this opulent material and to set on the stage the life of the great city as he had seen it during his five years of journalism.

He knew that it did a man good to be a reporter for a little while, if he had the courage to cut himself loose before it was too late, before journalism had corroded its stigma. His reporting had taken him into strange places now and again; but it had also taken him into the homes of the plain people who make New York what it is. Society, as Society was described in the Sunday papers, he knew little about, and he cared less; he was not a sn.o.b, if he knew himself. But humanity was unfailingly interesting and unendingly instructive; and it was more interesting and more instructive in the factories and in the tenements than it was in the immense mansions on Lenox Hill.

His work as a reporter had not only sharpened his eyes and broadened his sympathies; it had led him to see things that made him think. He had not inherited his New England conscience for nothing; and his college studies in sociology, that seemed so bare to him as an undergraduate, had taken on a new aspect since he had seen for himself the actual working of the inexorable laws of life. To sneer at the reformers who were endeavoring to make the world better had not been easy for him, even when he was straining to achieve the false brilliance of the star reporter; and now that he was free to say what he thought, he was going to seize the first opportunity to help along the good cause, to show those rich enough to sit in the good seat in the theater that the boy perched up in the gallery in his shirt-sleeves was also a man and a brother.

The young playwright held that a play ought to be amusing, of course, but he held also that it might give the spectators something to think about after they got home. He was going to utilize his opportunity to show how many failures there are, and how many there must be if the fittest is to survive, and how hard it is to fail, how bitter, how pitiful! With an effort he refrained from saying out loud enough to waken his wife the quotation that floated back to his memory:

Whether at Naishapur or Babylon, Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run, The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop, The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.

His own success, now it had come, found him wondering at it. He was a modest young fellow at bottom, and he really did not know why he had attained the prize so many were striving to grasp. Probably it was due to the st.u.r.diness of the stock he came from; and he was glad that his ancestors had lived cleanly and had left him a healthy body and a sober mind. His father and his mother had survived long enough to see him through college and started in newspaper work in New York. They had been old-fashioned in their ways, and he was aware that they might not have approved altogether of his choice of a profession, since it would have seemed very strange to them that a son of theirs should earn his living by writing plays. Yet he grieved that they had gone before he was able to repay any of the sacrifices they had made for him; it was the one blot on his good-fortune that he could not share it with them in the future.

The future! Yes, the future was in his power at last. As he lay there in the darkness he said to himself that all his ambitions were now almost within his grasp. He was young and well educated; he had proved ability and true courage; he had friends; he had a wife whom he loved and who loved him; his first-born was a son, already almost able to walk. Never before had his prospects appeared so smiling, and never before had he foreseen how his hopes might be fulfilled. And yet now, as he thought of the future, for the first time his pulse did not beat faster. When it was plain to him that he might soon have the most of the things he cared for, he found himself asking whether, after all, he really did care for them so much. He was happy, but just then his happiness was pa.s.sive.

The future might be left to take care of itself all in good time. He was wide awake, yet he had almost the languor of slumber; it surprised him to find himself thus unenergetic and not wanting to be roused to battle, even if the enemy were in sight. He thought of the Nirvana that the Oriental philosophers sought to gain as the final good; and he asked himself if perhaps the West had not still something to learn from the East.

Afar, in the silence of the night, he heard the faint clang of an ambulance-bell, and he began to think of the huge city now sunk in slumber all around him. He had nearly four million fellow-citizens; and in an hour or two or three they would awaken and go forth to labor. They would fill the day with struggle, vying one with another, each trying to make his footing secure; and now and again one of them would fall and be crushed to the ground. They would go to bed again at night, wearied out, and they would sleep again, and waken again, and begin the battle again.

Most of them would take part in the combat all in vain, since only a few of them could hope to escape from the fight unvanquished. Most of them would fall by the wayside or be trampled under foot on the highroad.

Most of them would be beaten in the battle and would drop out of the fight, wounded unto death. And for the first time all this ceaseless turmoil and unending warfare seemed to him futile and purposeless.

What was victory but a chance to engage again in the combat? To win to-day was but to have a right to enter the fray again to-morrow. His triumph that evening in the theater only opened the door for him; and if he was to hold his own he must make ready to wrestle again and again.

Each time the effort would be harder than the last. And at the end, what? He would be richer in money, perhaps, but just then money seemed to have no absolute value. He would do good, perhaps; but perhaps also he might do harm, for he knew himself not to be infallible. He would not be more contented, he feared, for he had discovered already that although success is less bitter than failure, it rarely brings complete satisfaction. If it were contentment that he really was seeking, why not be satisfied now with what he had won? Why not quit? Why not step out of the ranks and throw down his musket and get out of the way and leave the fighting to those who had a stomach for it?

As he asked himself these questions a gray shroud of melancholy was wrapped about him and all the brightness of youth was quenched in him.

Probably this was the inevitable reaction after the strain of his long effort. But none the less it left him looking forward to the end of his life, and he saw himself withered and racked with pain; he saw his young wife worn and ugly, perhaps dead--and the ghastly vision of the grave glimpsed before him; he saw his boy dead also, dead in youth; and he saw himself left alone and lonely in his old age, and still struggling, struggling, struggling in vain and forever.

Then he became morbid even, and he felt he was truly alone now, as every one of us must be always. He loved his wife and she loved him, and there was sympathy and understanding between them; but he doubted if he really knew her, for he felt sure she did not really know him. There were thoughts in his heart sometimes that he was glad she did not guess; and no doubt she had emotions and sentiments she did not reveal to him.

After all, every human being must be a self-contained and repellent ent.i.ty; and no two of them can ever feel alike or think alike. He and his wife came of different stocks, with a different training, with a different experience of life, with different ideals; and although they were united in love, they could not but be separate and distinct to all eternity. And as his wife was of another s.e.x from his, so his boy was of another generation, certain to grow up with other tastes and other aspirations.

Wilson Carpenter's marriage had been happy, and his boy was all he could wish,--and yet--and yet--Is this all that life can give a man? A little joy for the few who are fortunate, a little pleasure, and then--and then--For the first time he understood how it was that a happy man sometimes commits suicide. And he smiled as he thought that if he wished to choose death at the instant of life when the outsider would suppose his future to be brightest, now was the moment. He knew that there ought to be a revolver in the upper drawer of the table at the side of the bed. He turned gently; and then he lay back again, smiling bitterly at his own foolishness.

A heavy wagon rumbled along down the next street, and he heard also the whistle of a train on the river-front. These signs of returning day did not interest him at that moment when--so it seemed to him, although he was aware this was perfectly unreasonable--when he was at a crisis in his life.

Then there came to him another quatrain of Omar's, a quatrain he had often quoted with joy in its stern vigor and its lofty resolve:

So when the Angel of the darker Drink At last shall find you by the river-brink, And, offering his Cup, invite your Soul Forth to your Lips to quaff--you shall not shrink.

And youth came to his rescue again, and hope rose within him once more; and his interest in the eternal conflict of humanity sprang up as keen as ever.

The mood of craven surrender pa.s.sed from him as abruptly as it had come, leaving him older, and with a vague impression as though he had had a strange and unnatural experience. He knew again that life is infinitely various, and that it is worth while for its own sake; and he wondered how it was that he had ever doubted it. Even if struggle is the rule of our existence in this world, the fight is its own reward; it brings its own guerdon; it gives a zest to life; and sometimes it even takes the sting from defeat. The ardor of the combat is bracing; and fate is a foeman worthy of every man's steel.

So long as a man does his best always, his pay is secure; and the ultimate success or failure matters little after all, for, though he be the sport of circ.u.mstance, he is the master of himself. To be alone--in youth or in age--is not the worst thing that can befall, if the man is not ashamed of the companionship of his own soul. If his spirit is unafraid and ready to brave the bludgeon of chance, then has man a stanch friend in himself, and he can boldly front whatever the future has in store for him. Only a thin-blooded weakling casts down his weapons for nothing and flees around the arena; the least that a man of even ordinary courage can do is to stand to his arms and to fight for his life to the end.

Wilson Carpenter had no idea how long it was that he had been lying awake motionless, staring at the ceiling. There were signs of dawn now, and he heard a cart rattle briskly up to the house next door.

Perhaps his wife heard this also, for she turned and put out one arm caressingly, smiling at him in her sleep. He took her hand in his gently and held it. Peace descended upon him, and his brain ceased to torment itself with the future or with the present or with the past.

He was conscious of no effort not to think, nor indeed of any unfulfilled desire on his part. It seemed to him that he was floating lazily on a summer sea, not becalmed, but bound for no destination. And before he knew it, he was again asleep.

(1899)

[Ill.u.s.tration: Her Letter

to His Second Wife]

She was gayly humming a lilting tune as she flitted about the s.p.a.cious sitting-room, warm with the mellow sunshine of the fall. From the broad bow-window she looked down on the reddened maples in Gramercy Park, where a few lingering leaves were dancing in the fitful autumn breeze.

Turning away with a graceful, bird-like movement, she floated across to the corner and glanced again into a tall and narrow mirror set in the door of a huge wardrobe. She smiled back at the pretty face she saw there reflected. Then she laughed out merrily, that she had caught herself again at her old trick. Yet she did not turn away until she had captured two or three vagrant wisps of her pale-gold hair, twisting them back into conformity with their fellows. When at last she glided off with a smile still lingering on her dainty little mouth, the whole room seemed to be illuminated by her exuberant happiness.

And this was strong testimony to the brightness of the bride herself, for there was nothing else attractive in that sitting-room or in the rest of the house. The furniture was stiff and old-fashioned throughout, and the hangings were everywhere heavy and somber. The mantelpiece was of staring white marble; and on each side of this was a tall bookcase of solid black walnut highly varnished and overladen with misplaced ornament. The rectangular chairs were covered with faded maroon reps.

The window curtains were of raw silk, thickly lined and held back by cords with black-walnut ta.s.sels. The least forbidding object in the room was a shabby little desk, of which the scratched white paint contrasted sharply with the dull decorum of the other furniture.

The bride had brought this desk from the home of her youth to her husband's house, and she cherished it as a possession of her girlhood.

By the side of it was a low, cane-backed rocking-chair, and in this she sat herself down at last. A small rectangular package was almost under her hand on the corner of the desk; and she opened it eagerly and blushed prettily as she discovered it to contain her new visiting-cards--"Mrs. John Blackstock." She repeated the name to herself with satisfaction at its sonorous dignity. _John Blackstock_ seemed to her exactly the name that suited her husband, with his gentleness and his strength. Next to the cards was another package, a belated present from a schoolmate; it contained a silver-mounted calendar. She held it in her hand and counted back the days to her wedding--just twenty, and it seemed to her hardly a week. Then she remarked that in less than a fortnight it would be Thanksgiving; and she thought at once of the many blessings she would have to give thanks for this year, many more than ever before--above all, for John!

Suddenly it struck her that a year could make startling changes in a woman's life--or even half a year. Twelve months ago in the New England mill-town where her parents lived she had no thought of ever coming to New York to stay or of marrying soon. Last Thanksgiving she had never seen John; and indeed, it was not till long after Decoration Day that she had first heard his name; and now there was a plain gold ring on her finger, and John and she were man and wife. If she had not accepted Mary Morton's invitation she might never have met John! She shuddered at the fatal possibility; and she marveled how the long happiness of a woman's life might hang on a mere chance. When the Mortons had asked her to go to Saratoga with them to spend the Fourth of July she had hesitated, and she came near refusing after Mary had said that Mr. Blackstock was going to be there, and that he was a widower now, and that there was a chance for her. She detested that kind of talk and thought it was always in bad taste. But then Mary Morton was a dear, good girl; and it was natural that Mr. Morton should be interested in Mr. Blackstock, since Mr.

Blackstock was the head of the New York house that took all the output of the Morton mills. She had decided to go to Saratoga at last, partly because her father thought it would amuse her, and partly just to show Mary Morton that she was not the kind of girl to be thrown at a man's head.