In the tapering, cut-glass vase between the two front window-panels of the "box" was a rose—a symbol of the luxury of the twenty millions, evidently put there regularly every morning by direction of their master. Its freshness and color appealed to Jack. He took it out and pressed it to his nostrils.
"Just needs the morning sun and the dew to be perfect," he said to the amazed attendants; "and I will walk if you will take the suit case to the house."
He kept the rose, which he twirled in his fingers as he sauntered across town, now pausing at curb corners to glance back in thoughtful survey, now looking aloft at the peaks of Broadway which lay beyond the foothills of the river-front avenues.
"All to me what the desert is to other folks!" he mused; "desert, without any cacti or mesquite! All the trails cross one another in a maze. A boxed-up desert—boxes and boxes piled on top of one another! Everybody in harness and attached by an invisible, unbreakable, inelastic leash to a box, whither he bears his honey or goes to nurse his broken wings!—so it seems to me and very headachy!"
At Madison Square he was at the base of the range itself; and halting on the corner of Twenty-third Street and the Avenue he was a statue as aloof as the statue of Farragut from his surroundings. Salt sea spray ever whispers in the atmosphere around the old sailor. How St. Gaudens created it and keeps it there in the heart of New York is his secret. Possibly the sculptor put some of his soul into it as young Michael Angelo did into his young David.
It is a great thing to put some of your soul into a thing, whether it is driving a nail or moulding a piece of clay into life. There are men who pause before the old Admiral and see the cutwater of men-of-war's bows and hear the singing of the signal halyards as they rise with the command to close in. Perhaps the Eternal Painter had put a little of his soul into the heart of Jack; for some busy marchers of the Avenue trail as they glanced at him saw the free desert and heard hoof-beats in the sand. Others seeing a tanned Westerner kissing his hand to Diana of Madison Square Garden probably thought him mad. Next, performing another sentimental errand for the Doge of Little Rivers, his gaze rose along the column of the Metropolitan tower. Its heights were half shrouded in mist, through which glowed the gold of the lantern.
"Oh, bully! bully!" he thought. "The only sun in sight a manufactured one, shining on top of a manufactured mountain! It is a big business building a mountain; only, when God Almighty scattered so many ready-made ones about, why take the trouble?" he concluded. "Or so it seems to me," he added, sadly, in due appreciation of the utterly reactionary mood of a man who has been boxed up for a week.
Now he turned toward a quarter which he had, thus far, kept out of the compass of observation. He looked up the jagged range of Broadway where, over a terra-cotta pile, floated a crimson flag with "John Wingfield" in big, white letters.
"My mountain! My box! My millions!" he breathed half audibly.
How the people whom he passed, their faces speaking city keenness of ambition, must envy his position! How little reason they had to envy him, he thought, as he walked around the great building and saw his name glaring at him in gilt letters over the plate-glass windows and on all the delivery wagons, open-mouthed for the packages being wheeled out under the long glass awning.