It is an empty street. The hose is wheeled away over the glistening asphalt. The watchman disappears—he has a cozy nook beyond the ken of time-clocks. The last human pigmy seeks his pillow, to hide a diminished head. With man accounted for, night sighs its completion and creeps to the west. Then, untrammeled of heaven or minion, the buildings have their moment. Each tower stretches his proud height to the morning. The stones give out their spirit; their music is unsealed.
II
Fifth Avenue stands serene and still, but it cannot hold the virgin morning forever. Its windows may be blank, its sidewalks vacant. Behind the walls there is a magnet drawing back its human life.
“Give us this day our daily bread.” A saintly venerable horse seems to know the injunction. Emerging from nowhere, ambling to nowhere, it usurps the innocent morning in answer to the Lord.
And not by bread alone. There is nothing in the prayer about clams, but some one in Mount Vernon is destined to have them quickly. Out of the mysterious south, racing against time, a little motor flits onward with gaping barrels of clams. At a decent interval comes a heavier load of fish. Great express wagons follow, commissarial giants. The honest uses of Fifth Avenue begin.
Butchers and bakers are out before fine ladies. The grocer and the greengrocer are early on their rounds. But an empty American News truck confesses that eternal vigilance is the price of circulation. Its gait is swifter than the gait of milkman or fruit-and-vegetable man. Dust and dew are on the florist’s wheels: he has come whistling by the swamps of Flushing. His flimsy automobile runs lightly past the juggernauts that crush down.
Uncle Sam is in haste at six in the morning. His trucks hurl from Grand Central to make the substations. But his is not the pride of place. Nor is it coal or farmers’ feed that appropriates the middle of the street. The noblest wagons, a long parade of them, announce the greater glory of beer. The temperance advocate may shudder at the desecration of the morning. He may observe “Hell Gate Brewery” and nod his sickly nod. But there is something about this large preparedness for thirst that stills the carping worm of conscience. It is good to see what solid, ample caravans are required to replenish man with beer. It is not the single glass that is glorious. It is not even the single car-load. It is the steady, deliberate, ponderous procession that streams through the early hours. Once it seemed as if Percherons alone were worthy of beer-wagons. It satisfied the faith that there was Design in creation, but the Percheron is not needed. There is the same institutional impressiveness about a motor-truck piled to the sky with beer.
III
“Number, please?” She is anonymous, that inquirer. But behind her anonymity there is humanity. Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street caught a glimpse of her at six forty-five A. M.
She was up at five in the morning. She had a pang as she put on her check suit, slightly darker than her check coat lined with pink. Her little hat, however, was smart and new. Her mother cooked breakfast while she set the table. Then she walked to the Third Avenue “L” with her friend. They got off the express at Forty-second Street, rode to Fourth Avenue on the short spur line, and walked along Forty-second Street in time for them to do a brief window-shopping as they passed the shirtwaists at Forsythe’s. Her friend’s bronze shoes she envied as they crossed the little park back of the Library. On Sixth Avenue they inspected the window at Bernstein’s. A slight argument engrossed them. They hovered over the window, chirping not unlike the sparrows in Bryant Park. Then, in a flurry of punctuality, they raced for the telephone company to begin their “Number, please.”