Whereupon the old man, having finished his story, wiped the noses of the children, not forgetting the youngest one with the fat legs, and sent them off to bed.
The Crowded Curb.
RECENTLY I came on an urchin in the crowded city, pitching pennies by himself, in the angle of an abutment. Three feet from his patched seat—a gay pattern which he tilted upward now and then—there moved a thick stream of shoppers. He was in solitary contest with himself, his evening papers neglected in a heap, wrapped in his score, unconscious of the throng that pressed against him. He was resting from labor, as a greater merchant takes to golf for his refreshment. The curb was his club. He had fetched his recreation down to business, to the vacancy between editions. Presently he will scoop his earnings to his pocket and will bawl out to his advantage our latest murder.
How mad—how delightful our streets would be if all of us followed as unreservedly, with so little self-consciousness or respect of small convention, our innocent desires!
Who of us even whistles in a crowd?—or in the spring goes with a skip and leap?
A lady of my acquaintance—who grows plump in her early forties—tells me that she has always wanted to run after an ice-wagon and ride up town, bouncing on the tail-board. It is doubtless an inheritance from a childhood which was stifled and kept in starch. A singer, also, of bellowing bass, has confided to me that he would like above all things to roar his tunes down town on a crowded crossing. The trolley-cars, he feels, the motors and all the shrill instruments of traffic, are no more than a sufficient orchestra for his lusty upper register. An old lady, too, in the daintiest of lace caps, with whom I lately sat at dinner, confessed that whenever she has seen hop-scotch chalked in an eddy of the crowded city, she has been tempted to gather up her skirts and join the play.
But none of these folk obey their instinct. Opinion chills them. They plod the streets with gray exterior. Once, on Fifth Avenue, to be sure, when it was barely twilight, I observed a man, suddenly, without warning, perform a cart-wheel, heels over head. He was dressed in the common fashion. Surely he was not an advertisement. He bore no placard on his hat. Nor was it apparent that he practiced for a circus. Rather, I think, he was resolved for once to let the stiff, censorious world go by unheeded, and be himself alone.
On a night of carnival how greedily the crowd assumes the pantaloon! A day that was prim and solemn at the start now dresses in cap and bells. How recklessly it stretches its charter for the broadest jest! Observe those men in women's bonnets! With what delight they swing their merry bladders at the crowd! They are hard on forty. All week they have bent to their heavy desks, but tonight they take their pay of life. The years are a sullen garment, but on a night of carnival they toss it off. Blood that was cold and temperate at noon now feels the fire. Scratch a man and you find a clown inside. It was at the celebration of the Armistice that I followed a sober fellow for a mile, who beat incessantly with a long iron spoon on an ash-can top. Almost solemnly he advanced among the throng. Was it joy entirely for the ending of the war? Or rather was he not yielding at last to an old desire to parade and be a band? The glad occasion merely loosed him from convention. That lady friend of mine, in the circumstance, would have bounced on ice-wagons up to midnight.