The City of Comrades

by Basil King

The plans I had in mind still kept me from making headway as the crow flies. I went far up the Avenue; I crossed into Madison Avenue; I went up that again; I crossed into Park Avenue. I crossed and recrossed and crisscrossed and descended, and at last found myself strolling by a house toward which I scarcely dared to turn my eyes, feeling that even for looking at it I might be arrested.

I slackened my pace so as to verify all the points which experts had underscored in my hearing. There was the vacant lot which the surrounding buildings rendered so dark at night. There was the low, red-brown fence inclosing the back premises, over which a limber, long-legged fellow like me could leap in a second. There were the usual numerous windows—to kitchen, scullery, pantry, laundry—of any good-sized American house, some one of which was pretty sure to be left unguarded on a summer night. There were the neighboring yards, with more low fences, offering excellent cover in a get-away, with another vacant lot leading out on another street a little farther down.

I had so many times strolled by the house as I was doing now, and had so many times rehearsed its characteristics, that I made the final review with some exactitude before passing on my way.

My way was not far. There was nothing to do but to go back into the Park. As it was nearly six o’clock, it was too late to search for a job that day, and I should have had no heart for doing so in any case. I had found a job that morning—that of handling big packing-cases in a warehouse—but I was too exhausted for the work. When in the effort to lift one onto a truck I collapsed and nearly fainted, I was told in a choice selection of oaths to beat it as no good.

I sat on a bench, therefore, waiting for the dark and thinking of the house of which I had just inspected the outside. It was not a house picked at random. It was one that had possessed an interest for me during all the three years I had been in New York. I had, in fact, brought a letter of introduction to its owner from the man under whom I had worked in Montreal. Chiefly through my own carelessness, nothing came of that, but I never failed, when I passed this way, to stare at the dwelling as one in which I might have had a footing.

The occupant was also a well-known architect in New York. In the architects’ offices in which I found employment I heard him praised, criticized, condemned. His work was good or bad according to the speaker’s point of view. I thought it tolerably good, with an over-emphasis on ornament.

It was an odd fact that, in starting out on what was clear in my mind as a new phase in my career, no other house suggested itself as a field of operations. As to this one I felt documented, and that was all. I had no sense of horror at what I was about to do; no remorse from the position from which I had fallen. I suppose my mind was too sick for that, and my body too imperatively clamorous. I had said to Lovey that I didn’t have to live—but I did. I had seen that very morning that I did. I had stood at the edge of Greeley’s Slip and watched the swirling of the brown-green water with a view to making an end of it. One step and I should be out of all this misery and disgrace! The world would be rid of me; my family would be rid of me; I should be rid of myself, which would be best of all. Had I been quite sure as to the last point, I think I could have done it. But I wasn’t quite sure. I was far from quite sure. I could imagine the step over the edge of Greeley’s Slip as a step into conditions worse than those I was enduring now; and so I had drawn back. I had drawn back and wandered up-town, in the hope of securing a job that would give me a breakfast.

I wonder if you have ever done that? I wonder if you have ever gone from dock to station and from station to shop and from shop to warehouse, wherever heavy, unskilled labor may be in demand, and extra hands are treated with a brutality that slaves would kick against, in the hope of earning fifty cents? I wonder if in your grown-up life you have ever known a minute when fifty cents stood for your salvation? I wonder if with fifty cents standing for your salvation you ever saw the day when you couldn’t get it? No? Then you will hardly understand how natural, how much a matter of course, the thing had become which I was resolved to do.

It was no sudden idea. I had been living in the company of men who took such feats for granted. Their talk had amazed me at first, but I had grown used to it. I had grown used to the thing. I had come to find a piquancy in the thought of it.

Then Lovey’s suggestions had not been thrown away on me. True, he was out for small game, while I, if I went in for it, would want something bigger and more exciting; but the basic idea was the same. Lovey could make a haul and live for weeks on the fruit of it; I might do the same and live for months. And if I didn’t pull it off successfully, if I was nabbed and sent away—why, then there would be some let-up in the struggle which had become so infernal. Even if I got a shot through the heart—and the tales I heard were full of such accidents—the tragedy would not lack its element of relief. It might be out of one hell into another—but it would at least be out of one.