Respectable West Eleventh street was already settling down. Most of the outer doors were closed, and many bedroom windows showed rectangles of an agreeable apricot light filtering through the lowered shades. Wilfred had turned East, seeking life. At the corner of Fifth Avenue he was struck by the effect of the new arc lights. Hanging two to a pole, the mellow pinkish globes stretched far into the distance in two gradually converging lines. Like insect lights they climbed the Thirty-Fourth street hill at last and disappeared. Fruit of Night, Wilfred whispered to himself.
In Washington Square this mild October night there were still many couples sitting on the benches. The sight of them left Wilfred cold; he merely wondered at their static attitudes; hours, apparently, without moving or speaking. But once as he passed such a couple, a girl whose face was hidden in a man’s neck, laughed softly in her throat, and Wilfred’s breast was acutely disturbed by the sound. It suggested that that private nightmare of his might be a loveliness when shared; that it was the means whereby two human hearts might open to each other. Never for me! he thought with a needle in his heart; and hurried away from the sound.
Through Washington Place across Broadway; through Astor Place and down the Bowery. The bulk of Cooper Union loomed like a whale against the sky. The sight of it, brought the slightly fœtid smell of the reading-room into Wilfred’s nostrils. It was a place where you could go. The bums never looked at you. He breasted the Bowery like a swimmer. No early-to-bed habits here. He edged along close to the store-fronts, looking at everybody; entering into them; thieves, prostitutes, drunken men, sporting characters, and the great unclassified. So many and such queer souls each peeping suspiciously out of a pair of eyes. With the shuffling of the people, the four track line of electric cars in the middle of the street, and the steam cars of the Elevated railway immediately over the sidewalk, the uproar was at once distracting and stimulating.
There were certain store windows that Wilfred always looked into; the florist’s full of green wire frames to serve as a foundation for funeral pieces; a musical instrument dealer’s exhibiting a gigantic brass horn and a doll’s horn beside it to show the range of the stock; an animal and bird store with cages of monkeys. Something furtive and ugly in the eyes of the people watching the monkeys made Wilfred exquisitely uneasy. As you went on the stores became less reputable in character. Besides the crowding saloons, there were the auction sales, celebrated in the popular song; the dime museums and side shows with faded banners; an anatomical museum, free “for men only.” All the shows had a free lobby to tempt you in. The most innocent were those with ranks of Edison’s phonographs inside; but Wilfred recoiled from the little bone pieces you had to stick in your ears.
Glancing into a store window where mirrors were displayed, he saw repeated from every angle, the figure of a boy that his eyes embraced all over in a flash. A boy approaching sixteen, tall for his age; dressed in a shapeless snuff-colored suit, with trousers that flapped almost as if there were no legs within them. He walked with a long step having a funny little dip in the middle. He had wavy, light brown hair, a lock of which escaped untidily under the visor of his cap to sweep his forehead. His eyes, somewhat deep-set, were grey-blue in color, and had a look at once haunted, secretive and top-lofty—Wilfred’s word. A wide mouth with uneven lips like a crimson gash across his white face. There was a something awkward about him; something self-centered and peculiar that set him apart from other boys. A boy to be jeered at. In that flash Wilfred saw it clearly.
Why . . . that’s me, he thought, with self-consciousness winging back, making the picture hateful. Oh Lord! what a dub! The picture remained fixed in his mind amongst the multitude of pictures capable of turning up at any odd moment.
At Rivington Street he turned East again, entering another populous world quite different in style from that of the Bowery. Here, on a mild night the family life of the East side, predominantly Jewish, was revealed. This was Wilfred’s objective. His solitariness was comforted by the vicarious sharing in many households. A narrow street hemmed in on either side by tall sooty tenements. The fronts of the houses were decorated with webs of rusty fire-escapes, the platforms of which were heaped with the overflow of goods from the crowded rooms within. From web to web criss-cross, everywhere ran the clotheslines with their fluttering damp burdens. In Rivington Street even the air was crowded.
The narrow sidewalk was maggoty with people. The inner side was lined by humble shops, the outer by an endless line of gay pushcarts like boats anchored alongside the curb, stretching for block after block and displaying every manner of goods. The low stoops between the shops were crowded, mostly with women of a complete, unconfined fatness; nearly every one of them suckling an infant. These mothers surveyed the scene with an equanimity that arrested Wilfred. To have a whole lot of children must be one way of solving the riddle. He liked these featherbed women; because . . . it was difficult for him to find the word for his thought; they didn’t fidget; they bore their fruit as inevitably as orchard trees. From the windows overhead leaned other fat women, comfortably supporting their forearms on pillows laid across the sills. Their faces expressed a great content.
Wilfred yielded himself to the scene of life. He had the sensation of straining open like petals. This was the pleasure they couldn’t take away from him; a pleasure that left a sweet taste in the mind.—The lavish set-out of goods under the brown canvas shelters; apples floating in brine and unwholesome-looking preserved fish; rows upon rows of ratty fur neckpieces and muffs; bolts of printed cottons; gay garters and suspenders; jewelry; dazzling tinware. The pushcarts were lighted by smoking kerosene torches that threw leaping, ruddy lights and sooty shadows on the scene. I must notice everything; Wilfred would say to himself; and forthwith begin to enumerate a catalogue in his mind. But his darting eyes could not wait for the names of things; they flew ahead and he forgot the catalogue. Presently he would come to consciousness thinking: I am not noticing anything!
The people! The dirty, savage, robust children shouldering their way through the crowd, shrieking to each other. To these children grown-ups were no more than bushes obstructing their hunting paths. Then there were the young people; the scornful, comely youths flaunting their masculinity, and the pretty girls undismayed by it. Empty and hard these young people were; what of it? They were aware of their beauty, and of their desirability in each other’s eyes; they were proud with youth; it was fine to see.