II
The view from the hospital window shows the bridge on the right; in front, the row of cheap tenement houses and streets abutting on the river front from the forties to the sixties; and on the left, looming out of the city-scape, appears the Metropolitan tower. Behind the innumerable painted signs on the river front, the Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, the Plaza Hotel and the St. Regis can be seen distinctly; the Times Building is also vaguely outlined. In the daytime the sight is commonplace; but after the sun, like an enormous ball of fire, has dipped behind the city line back of the streets in the fifties, the scene becomes inspiring to a painter.
The shadows, full of greens and purples, cover as with a charitable veil all the ugly details of the river front; the skyline becomes darker, as if cut out with monster scissors; the sky appears more resplendent and luminous with gorgeous tints, until the fiery blaze slowly dies out, and bluish tints, gray and purple predominate; and then the city lights, those on the bridge and in the Metropolitan tower, shimmer like innumerable stars.
Sometimes with a clear sky, sometimes in fog, in a snow storm, in rain or in clear moonlight, every night for ten months I have watched an ever recurring picturesque metamorphosis.
Through the north window I have watched the dawn come up behind the Queensboro bridge, and seen the sun appear like an enormous Japanese lantern of pure vermilion—a sight to gladden the heart of a Claude Monet.
Boats pass constantly by, day and night; they are the one great source of amusement of the patients. The little, swift-sailing tug-boats announce their passage by angry and piercing whistles; the graceful yachts of the multi-millionaires sound melodious notes; the large excursion boats announce themselves by their stronger and more ringing whistlings; the largest ones, on their way to Portland, are heard in the distance grunting like sonorous leviathans.
But the most amusing of all is the tiny boat that plies between the dock of the penitentiary and the foot of 54th Street. The distance is about two or three minutes, but this diminutive craft goes two or three blocks up the river and comes back down the same number of blocks, to show that if it tried it really could navigate on the high seas.
Should any vessel larger than this microcosm be seen from a distance trying to pass our little boat, it would start a series of angry, piercing toots, repeated in quick succession. We used to wonder and laugh—oh, we laugh, even in prison; how else could we live?—at the impertinence of this minnow of the river of New York, until we discovered that after a large boat like the Yale passed by, the waves left in its wake almost upset the little craft, and it took all the efforts of the brave pilot to bring it tossing like a champagne cork on top of the waves, back safe to the dock.
In summer time the excursion boats, returning home with crowded decks, with all the lights lit, and the band playing and the passengers singing, "The Island of Blackwell," make us home-sick and pensive with longing for life and the world we are shut away from.