"And at the end of the month," I went on, "I intend to discharge that man, I'm tired of his insolences."
"Yes, sir," Benson softly yet fervently agreed.
My nerves were on edge, I knew, but I wasn't looking for sympathy from my hired help. And when I swung the door shut behind me I am afraid it was a movement far from noiseless.
I was glad to get out into the open, glad to get away from old Benson's commiserative eyes, and have space about me, and cool air to breathe, and uncounted miles of pavement to weary my legs on.
I noticed, as I turned, into Fifth Avenue, that the moving finger of light on the Metropolitan clock-dial pointed to an hour past midnight. So I veered about that delta of idleness, where the noontide turbulence of Broadway empties its driftwood into the quietness of the square, and pursued my way up the avenue.
No one can claim to know New York who does not know its avenues in those mystical small hours that fall between the revolving street-sweeper and the robin-call of the first morning paper. Fifth Avenue, above all her sisters, then lies as though tranquillized by Death, as calm as the Coliseum under its Italian moonlight. She seems, under the stars, both medievalized and spiritualized. She speaks then in an intimate whisper foreign to her by day, veiling her earthlier loquacity in a dreaming wonder, softening and sweetening like a woman awaiting her lover. The great steel shafts enclosed in their white marble become turrets crowned with mystery. And the street-floor itself, as clean and polished as a ballroom, seems to undulate off into outer kingdoms of romance. An occasional lonely motor-car, dipping up its gentle slopes like a ship treading a narrow sea-lane buoyed with pearls as huge as pumpkins, only accentuates the midnight solitude.
So up this dustless and odorless and transmuted avenue I wandered, as passively as a policeman on his beat, asking of the quietness when and how I might capture that crown of weariness known as sleep.
I wandered on, mocked at by a thousand drawn blinds, taunted by a thousand somnolently closed doors. I felt, in that city of rest, as homeless as a prairie wolf. The very smugness of those veiled and self-satisfied house-fronts began to get on my nerves. The very taciturnity of the great silent hostelries irritated me; everything about them seemed so eloquent of an interregnum of rest, of relaxed tension, of invisible reservoirs of life being softly and secretly filled.
Yet as I came to the open width of the Plaza, and saw the wooded gloom of Central Park before me, I experienced an even stronger feeling of disquiet. There seemed something repugnant in its autumnal solitudes. That vague agoraphobia peculiar to the neurasthenic made me long for the contiguity of my own kind, however unconscious of me and my wandering they might remain. I found myself, almost without thought, veering off eastward into one of the city's side-streets.
Yet along this lateral valley of quietness I wandered as disconsolately as before. What impressed me now was the monotony of the house-fronts which shouldered together, block by block. Each front seemed of the same Indiana limestone, of the same dull gray, as though, indeed, the whole district were a quarry checker-boarded by eroding cross-currents out of the self-same rock. Each tier of windows seemed backed by the same blinds, each street-step barricaded by the same door. I stopped and looked up, wondering if behind those neutral-tinted walls and blinds were lives as bald and monotonous as the materials that screened them. I wondered if an environment so without distinction would not actually evolve a type equally destitute of individuality.