The gods, lying beside their nectar on 'Lympus and peeping over the edge
of the cliff, perceive a difference in cities. Although it would seem
that to their vision towns must appear as large or small ant-hills
without special characteristics, yet it is not so. Studying the habits
of ants from so great a height should be but a mild diversion when
coupled with the soft drink that mythology tells us is their only
solace. But doubtless they have amused themselves by the comparison of
villages and towns; and it will be no news to them (nor, perhaps, to
many mortals), that in one particularity New York stands unique among
the cities of the world. This shall be the theme of a little story
addressed to the man who sits smoking with his Sabbath-slippered feet
on another chair, and to the woman who snatches the paper for a moment
while boiling greens or a narcotized baby leaves her free. With these I
love to sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of Kings.
New York City is inhabited by 4,000,000 mysterious strangers; thus
beating Bird Centre by three millions and half a dozen nine's. They
came here in various ways and for many reasons--Hendrik Hudson, the art
schools, green goods, the stork, the annual dressmakers' convention, the
Pennsylvania Railroad, love of money, the stage, cheap excursion rates,
brains, personal column ads., heavy walking shoes, ambition, freight
trains--all these have had a hand in making up the population.
But every man Jack when he first sets foot on the stones of Manhattan
has got to fight. He has got to fight at once until either he or his
adversary wins. There is no resting between rounds, for there are no
rounds. It is slugging from the first. It is a fight to a finish.
Your opponent is the City. You must do battle with it from the time the
ferry-boat lands you on the island until either it is yours or it has
conquered you. It is the same whether you have a million in your pocket
or only the price of a week's lodging.
The battle is to decide whether you shall become a New Yorker or turn
the rankest outlander and Philistine. You must be one or the other. You
cannot remain neutral. You must be for or against--lover or enemy--bosom
friend or outcast. And, oh, the city is a general in the ring. Not only
by blows does it seek to subdue you. It woos you to its heart with the
subtlety of a siren. It is a combination of Delilah, green Chartreuse,
Beethoven, chloral and John L. in his best days.
In other cities you may wander and abide as a stranger man as long
as you please. You may live in Chicago until your hair whitens, and
be a citizen and still prate of beans if Boston mothered you, and
without rebuke. You may become a civic pillar in any other town but
Knickerbocker's, and all the time publicly sneering at its buildings,
comparing them with the architecture of Colonel Telfair's residence in
Jackson, Miss., whence you hail, and you will not be set upon. But in
New York you must be either a New Yorker or an invader of a modern Troy,
concealed in the wooden horse of your conceited provincialism. And this
dreary preamble is only to introduce to you the unimportant figures of
William and Jack.
They came out of the West together, where they had been friends. They
came to dig their fortunes out of the big city.
Father Knickerbocker met them at the ferry, giving one a right-hander on
the nose and the other an upper-cut with his left, just to let them know
that the fight was on.
William was for business; Jack was for Art. Both were young and
ambitious; so they countered and clinched. I think they were from
Nebraska or possibly Missouri or Minnesota. Anyhow, they were out for
success and scraps and scads, and they tackled the city like two
Lochinvars with brass knucks and a pull at the City Hall.
Four years afterward William and Jack met at luncheon. The business man
blew in like a March wind, hurled his silk hat at a waiter, dropped into
the chair that was pushed under him, seized the bill of fare, and had
ordered as far as cheese before the artist had time to do more than nod.
After the nod a humorous smile came into his eyes.
"Billy," he said, "you're done for. The city has gobbled you up. It has
taken you and cut you to its pattern and stamped you with its brand. You
are so nearly like ten thousand men I have seen to-day that you couldn't
be picked out from them if it weren't for your laundry marks."
"Camembert," finished William. "What's that? Oh, you've still
got your hammer out for New York, have you? Well, little old
Noisyville-on-the-Subway is good enough for me. It's giving me mine.
And, say, I used to think the West was the whole round world--only
slightly flattened at the poles whenever Bryan ran. I used to yell
myself hoarse about the free expense, and hang my hat on the horizon,
and say cutting things in the grocery to little soap drummers from
the East. But I'd never seen New York, then, Jack. Me for it from the
rathskellers up. Sixth Avenue is the West to me now. Have you heard this
fellow Crusoe sing? The desert isle for him, I say, but my wife made me
go. Give me May Irwin or E. S. Willard any time."
"Poor Billy," said the artist, delicately fingering a cigarette. "You
remember, when we were on our way to the East how we talked about this
great, wonderful city, and how we meant to conquer it and never let it
get the best of us? We were going to be just the same fellows we had
always been, and never let it master us. It has downed you, old man. You
have changed from a maverick into a butterick."
"Don't see exactly what you are driving at," said William. "I don't wear
an alpaca coat with blue trousers and a seersucker vest on dress
occasions, like I used to do at home. You talk about being cut to a
pattern--well, ain't the pattern all right? When you're in Rome you've
got to do as the Dagoes do. This town seems to me to have other alleged
metropolises skinned to flag stations. According to the railroad
schedule I've got in mind, Chicago and Saint Jo and Paris, France, are
asterisk stops--which means you wave a red flag and get on every other
Tuesday. I like this little suburb of Tarrytown-on-the-Hudson. There's
something or somebody doing all the time. I'm clearing $8,000 a year
selling automatic pumps, and I'm living like kings-up. Why, yesterday, I
was introduced to John W. Gates. I took an auto ride with a wine agent's
sister. I saw two men run over by a street car, and I seen Edna May
play in the evening. Talk about the West, why, the other night I woke
everybody up in the hotel hollering. I dreamed I was walking on a board
sidewalk in Oshkosh. What have you got against this town, Jack? There's
only one thing in it that I don't care for, and that's a ferryboat."
The artist gazed dreamily at the cartridge paper on the wall. "This
town," said he, "is a leech. It drains the blood of the country. Whoever
comes to it accepts a challenge to a duel. Abandoning the figure of the
leech, it is a juggernaut, a Moloch, a monster to which the innocence,
the genius, and the beauty of the land must pay tribute. Hand to hand
every newcomer must struggle with the leviathan. You've lost, Billy. It
shall never conquer me. I hate it as one hates sin or pestilence or--the
color work in a ten-cent magazine. I despise its very vastness and
power. It has the poorest millionaires, the littlest great men, the
lowest skyscrapers, the dolefulest pleasures of any town I ever saw. It
has caught you, old man, but I will never run beside its chariot wheels.
It glosses itself as the Chinaman glosses his collars. Give me the
domestic finish. I could stand a town ruled by wealth or one ruled by
an aristocracy; but this is one controlled by its lowest ingredients.
Claiming culture, it is the crudest; asseverating its pre-eminence,
it is the basest; denying all outside values and virtue, it is the
narrowest. Give me the pure and the open heart of the West country.
I would go back there to-morrow if I could."
"Don't you like this _filet mignon_?" said William. "Shucks, now, what's
the use to knock the town! It's the greatest ever. I couldn't sell
one automatic pump between Harrisburg and Tommy O'Keefe's saloon, in
Sacramento, where I sell twenty here. And have you seen Sara Bernhardt
in 'Andrew Mack' yet?"
"The town's got you, Billy," said Jack.
"All right," said William. "I'm going to buy a cottage on Lake
Ronkonkoma next summer."
At midnight Jack raised his window and sat close to it. He caught his
breath at what he saw, though he had seen and felt it a hundred times.
Far below and around lay the city like a ragged purple dream. The
irregular houses were like the broken exteriors of cliffs lining deep
gulches and winding streams. Some were mountainous; some lay in long,
desert caņons. Such was the background of the wonderful, cruel,
enchanting, bewildering, fatal, great city. But into this background
were cut myriads of brilliant parallelograms and circles and squares
through which glowed many colored lights. And out of the violet and
purple depths ascended like the city's soul sounds and odors and
thrills that make up the civic body. There arose the breath of gaiety
unrestrained, of love, of hate, of all the passions that man can know.
There below him lay all things, good or bad, that can be brought from
the four corners of the earth to instruct, please, thrill, enrich,
despoil, elevate, cast down, nurture or kill. Thus the flavor of it came
up to him and went into his blood.
There was a knock on his door. A telegram had come for him. It came from
the West, and these were its words:
"Come back and the answer will be yes.
"DOLLY."
He kept the boy waiting ten minutes, and then wrote the reply:
"Impossible to leave here at present." Then he sat at the window again
and let the city put its cup of mandragora to his lips again.
After all it isn't a story; but I wanted to know which one of the heroes
won the battle against the city. So I went to a very learned friend and
laid the case before him. What he said was: "Please don't bother me; I
have Christmas presents to buy."
So there it rests; and you will have to decide for yourself.
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