[217]
“Come on!” said Verba, making to cross the sidewalk.
“Come on where?” asked Offutt.
“We’re going to University Place—you and me,” said Verba, quickened and alive all over with his inspiration. “We’re going down to Scudder’s Theatre. Didn’t know there was such a theatre as Scudder’s, did you? Well, there is—what’s left of it. We’re going down there to find Old Bird Bateman. That’s where he was, last accounts. And if the booze hasn’t got him he’s going to play that damn grandfather in this show of yours.”
“Can he do it?”
Verba halted with one foot in the taxi.
“Can he do it? Watch him, boy—that’s all! Just watch him. Say, it’s a notion—digging that old boy out of the graveyard.
“You never heard of him and I’d forgotten him; but you take a lot of these old-timers who don’t think there’ve been any actors since Fanny Davenport and Billy Florence—they’ll remember him. And you bet they’ll come to see him. We’ll give this town a sensation—and that’s what it loves, this town—sensations.”
Once upon a time—that was when he was a green reporter newly come to town—Offutt had known, more or less minutely, almost every prowlable inch of the tip of the long seamy tongue of rock that is called Manhattan Island. Now, as a story-writer and a play-writer, he only went down there when he sought for local [218] colour in Greenwich Village, or around Washington Square or on the lower East Side. As for Verba, he found his local colour, ready-mixed, in scene-painters’ pots and make-up boxes. Being a typical New Yorker—if there is such a thing—he was as insular, as provincial, as closely bound to his own briefened ranging ground as none but a typical New Yorker can be. To him this wasn’t a metropolis of five boroughs, many bridges and five-and-a-half millions. To him this was a strip of street, something less than two miles long, with shorter stretches of street meeting it at right angles, east and west, as ribs meet a spine. His map of New
York would have resembled a codfish’s skeleton, its head aiming toward far-away Harlem, the fork in its tail pointing to the distant Battery. To him therefore Twenty-third Street was Farthest South. What might lie below was in the Antarctic Circle of community life.
They crossed Twenty-third Street and invaded a district grown strange to his eyes—a district where tall loft buildings, the successors to the sweatshops of an earlier, but not very much earlier, day, mounted, floor by floor, above the humbler roofs of older houses. They crossed Fourteenth, the taxi weaving a way through dense masses of men who gabbled in strange tongues among themselves, for lunch-time had come and the garment workers, the feather-workers and the fur-workers, deserting [219] their work benches for an hour, had flocked into the open, packing the sidewalks and overflowing upon the asphalt, to chaffer and gossip and take the air. Just below Fourteenth Street they swung eastward and turned into University Place, which is a street of past memories and present acute activities, and, in a minute, obeying Verba’s instructions, their driver brought them to a standstill before a certain number.