A very strange thing about Mr. McCann was this: that he could only know time and space and circumstances in relation to himself. As thus: Seventh Avenue was not Seventh Avenue to him, a muscular, grimy street that plodded for a space on the west side of Manhattan, crashed northward through the Twenties, galloped toward Forty-second, crossed Broadway recklessly, and at Fifty-ninth met the armed front of the park, died. To Mr. McCann it was only an artery that crossed his street. Also, winter was not winter, not the keenness of frost, the tumbling, swirling miracle of the snow, but just the time when he put on his overcoat. Nor did summer mean the blossoming of the boughs to him nor the happy population on the river and the beach, and the little Italians with their ice-cream carts, nor children crooning over great segments of watermelon, but just a time when it was oppressively hot. And great national events only marked points in his life. He would not say, for instance, that he was married about the time of the war with Spain, but that the Maine was sunk about the time he was married.
All his life was under his eyes, like a map one knows perfectly—a rectangular pattern. There were no whorls, no arabesques. There were no delicate shadings, no great purple splash, but precise black and white. There were no gaps he had jumped, to be a mystery in his latter years. All was evident.
He could see himself in his boyhood on the Irish hills, among the plain farmer family he was born of. He could place his father, plain old tiller of the soil, always smoking a clay pipe; his mother, warm-hearted, bustling, a great one for baking bread; his brothers and sisters, honest clods. But he himself seemed to have been born superior, was superior. There was no mystery. It was a fact. He accepted it. And from him his mother accepted it.
And by his mother it was impressed on the whole family that their son and brother Dennis was superior. For him better clothes, easier work, and when he decided that farm life was not for him, no objection was made to the sending of him to college in Cork. But after a couple of years there he had made no progress with studies, and it seemed to him that the studies were not worth while. And he returned home.
They had tried to get a government office for him then, a very small one. But that also required examinations, which he did not seem able to pass. So that a great contempt for books grew up within him. And then he grew convinced that Ireland had not enough opportunity for him. And the family got the money to send him to America.
The years at the college in Cork had intensified his sense of superiority so that when he came to America he felt that the Irish he met there were a very inferior people. And nothing about the city pleased him; everything was much better in Ireland, he decided, and he said Ireland was a wonderful country—the only thing wrong with it was the people. And the queer thing about it was that the Irish in New York agreed with him. His few years at Cork gave them the impression he had accumulated learning, and the race has a medieval respect for books and writing.
"True for you, Mr. McCann, true for you," they would answer his remarks on the inferiority of the Irish Irish. "But what can you expect and the centuries of oppression they have been under?"
"If they had independence enough, there would have been no oppression." "Ay, there 's a lot in what you say, Mr. McCann."
His superiority disarmed them, cowed them. If one of themselves, or a foreigner had uttered the words, I can imagine the rush, the dull thud, the door being taken from its hinges, the mournful procession to the widow's house.
This aloofness, this superiority helped him, or, rather, made him, in the business he had chosen—life-insurance. The wisdom he uttered about life and death to a race who considers life only as the antechamber of eternity impressed his hearers, and they were afraid, too, not to take out policies from this superior, frigid, and evidently authoritative young man.