"Yes," said the older man, "it is wonderful."
"And what a place you have here to work! Where one can be alone, and yet dip into life, just as one would dip one's wrist into a stream."
The dull sounds of the midnight streets, broken, as they looked, by the sharp clanging of an ambulance bell, the rumbling of car-wheels mingled with the rattle of a pavement sweeper and the intermittent patter of hoofs on the asphalt came up faintly through the odorous, calm air. There was a mysterious charm about the great, incongruous, huddled city, picturesque in its very defiance of symmetry and beauty.
"That's Broadway, isn't it," said Hartley, pointing with his finger, "still looking like a Milky Way of lights?"
"Yes; and those glowing crowns of light are the roof-gardens; and there's Fifth Avenue, spangled with its twin rows of white electric globes, for all the world like a double thread of pearls hanging down the breast of the city. Those crawling snakes with the golden scales are the L trains. That cobweb of light is Brooklyn Bridge, and those little ruby fireflies are the ferries on the North River."
"And that crown of old gold and rose stands over Brooklyn, I know, and the lower bay."
An unknown city had always held vague terrors for Hartley; once, even, as a child, he had burst into sudden tears over an old atlas of the world; "it was so big and lonesome," he had tried to tell his uncomprehending nurse. But now, as he followed Repellier's finger with his eyes, he was dimly conscious of that sense of fugitive terror lifting and drifting away from the sea of scattered lights beneath him. For a moment he felt more drawn toward the city than of old, though his first vivid, photographic impression of it floated mockingly back through his mind.
The smell of the willows of the Isis and the hyacinths of Holywell had scarcely fallen from him as he walked those first few miles of the New World—a New World which seemed to his timid and homesick eyes to be but streets of chaotic turbulence through which pulsed the ceaseless cry of Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! He recalled the blind beggar with his quick, shrill cry of "Please help the blind! Please help the blind!" tapping hideously along the crowded pavement. He remembered the groups of sallow-faced men, young, yet already old, lounging about the entrances of what seemed countless hotels; the cluster of swarthy, foreign-looking workmen tearing up the asphalt under the strong glare of gasoline torches; the cars and hansoms that rattled past; the two express-wagons that crashed together and locked wheels amid curses and loud cries; the pedlers and news-boys and fruit-venders barking and crying through the streets; the bilious-hued moon shining brokenly down through air heavy with dust; the serrated line of the distant sky-scrapers that seemed to bite up at the darkness like teeth; and the white glare of the electric lights bunched so alluringly about the gilt-lettered, gaudy-faced corner saloons. It was not until afterward that he found he had traversed but one rough rind of the city itself; but it had all seemed so glaring, so blatant, so hopelessly unlovely to his bewildered eyes, that with the bitterness of a second Job he had asked: Is this, then, the soul of their republicanism? Is this the America of which the Old World had dreamed such envious, foolish, happy dreams?
Leaning there out of the lofty studio window, the young alien sighed with the burden of his youthful disappointments and his great things still undone. He looked less hopelessly down at the lights of a city which he had grown, in a softer mood, to think of as more beautiful.
Then he glanced at Repellier once more. This quiet man beside him, he felt, must have dreamed his way even more slowly into the heart of that turbulent life. For from a withered old hack writer on his news bureau Hartley had picked up a fragmentary story to the effect that Repellier had first come to New York a broken-hearted man, in search of a runaway sister. She had killed herself, he remembered the story went, when Repellier had tried to take her home, for she had passed through things that are seldom forgiven, and never forgotten. Recalling this, Hartley peered through the gloom at the other man, as though to read his face more closely. But the past seemed to have left no trace.