A Man's Man

by Ian Hay

If all good Americans go to Paris when they die, it may safely be predicted that all the bad ones will be booked through to Coney Island.

So much may be inferred from the regularity and zeal with which the Toughs, Hoboes, Bowery Boys, and other fearful wildfowl of the New York proletariat, accompanied by the corresponding females of the species, betake themselves every Sabbath by trolley-car or steamer to this haunt of ancient peace (which, by the way, is not to all appearances an island and harbours no conies).

Take Margate and Douglas and Blackpool, and pile them into an untidy heap; throw in a dozen Fun-Cities from Olympia and half a score of World's Fairs from the Agricultural Hall; add some of the less reputable features of Earl's Court and Neuilly Fair; include a race-course of the baser sort; case the whole in wood, and people it with sallow gentlemen in striped jerseys and ladies answering exclusively to such names as Hattie, Sadie, and Mamie, reared up apparently upon an exclusive diet of peanuts and clam-chowder; keep the whole multitude duly controlled and disciplined by a police force which, if appearances go for anything, has been recruited entirely from the criminal classes; and you will be able faintly to realise what Coney Island can do when it tries on a fine Sunday in summer.

So thought Hughie Marrable. He had been wandering round the world for nine years now; but not even a previous acquaintance with the Devil Dancers of Ceylon, the unhallowed revels of Port Said, or the refinements of a Central African Witch-Hunt (with full tom-tom accompaniment), had quite prepared him for this. Still, it was part and parcel of Life, and Life was what he had left England to see.

He had arrived in New York from San Francisco two days ago. But let it not be imagined that he had been conveyed thither by any Grand-Trunk-Ocean-to-Ocean-Limited, or other refinement of an effete modernity. His transcontinental journey had occupied just three years. Since the day on which he steamed through the Golden Gate on a tramp-freighter from Yokohama he had been working his way eastward by easy stages, acquiring experience (as Jimmy Marrable had directed) of the manner in which the other half of the world lives. Incidentally he had mixed cocktails behind a Nevada bar; learned to fire a revolver without taking it out of his pocket; accompanied a freight train over the Rockies in the capacity of assistant brakeman—his duties being chiefly confined to standing by with a coupling-pin, to discourage the enterprise of those gentlemen of the road who proposed to travel without tickets; and once, in a Southern State, he had been privileged to be present at that ennobling spectacle to which the brightest nation on earth occasionally treats the representatives of an older civilisation—the lynching of a negro.

In a few days Hughie would sail for England, on board the mighty Apulia. It was not often that he travelled in such ostentatious luxury: the primitive man in him leaned towards something damp and precarious on board a sailing-ship or a collier; but he happened to know that the Apulia intended going for the ocean record this trip; and since the third engineer happened to be a friend of his, Hughie had decided that four-and-a-half days and nights down among the humming turbines and the spirits that controlled them would be cheap at the price of an expensively upholstered state-room many decks above, in which he would leave his baggage and occasionally sleep.

For all that he had cast a regretful eye only that very morning on a battered little tramp-steamer which was loading up with cargo alongside a wharf at Hoboken—due to sail for Europe, so a stevedore told him, in about two days' time.

To-morrow he was to be taken yachting in New York harbour by an old P. and O. acquaintance, whom he had faithfully "looked up," in accordance with a two-year-old promise, at his city office that morning. In the evening, at the invitation of an American actor to whom he had once been of service in Calcutta, he was to dine at the Lambs' Club,—the New York equivalent of the Garrick and Green Room, with a dash of the Eccentric thrown in,—and the next day he was to pay a flying visit to Atlantic City.

Meanwhile he was putting in a few off-hours at Coney Island. He had watched the islanders bathing, had witnessed a display of highly—not to say epileptically—Animated Pictures, had spent half-an-hour in an open café-chantant, where a bevy of tired-looking girls in short skirts pranced about with mechanical abandon at the back of the small stage, shouting the chorus of a ditty which a wheezy lady (who looked like the mother of all chorus-girls) was singing at the front; and had declined a pressing invitation from the keeper of an Anatomical Museum to step inside and "have a dollar's worth for a dime."

Finally he drifted into a small theatre, where a melodrama of distinctly British flavour (seasoned to the Coney Island palate by a few distinctly local interpolations) was unfolding itself to a closely packed and hard-breathing audience.