The noise and shock of blasting rock is incessant. They are blasting all along the Hudson shore and in Central Park. It sounds like cannonading, and the succession of explosions sometimes wakens one before dawn or after midnight with the frightened conviction that a foreign fleet is upon us to force us to reduce the tariff. The blasting occasionally goes a little too far, and breaks windows or brings down pieces of the ceiling. Last week it caved in a house and broke some arms and legs of the occupants. One woman went into convulsions, and was rigid for hours from the shock, but as nobody was killed no action was taken.
Old clothes men are permitted a string of bells on their carts, which all jangle out of tune and at once, while street-cries of all descriptions abound in such numbers and of such a quality that I often wonder that the very babies trundled by in their perambulators do not go into spasms with the confusion of it.
Considine and I stated all this with some excusable heat while the Angel was serving our guests with what their different tastes demanded. It always gives me a feeling of unholy joy seeing Mrs. Jimmie trying to join her husband in his low pleasures. She regarded it as a religious duty to take beer when he did while we were abroad, but in England and here he takes whiskey and soda, so as champagne is not always on tap in people's houses, sometimes she tries to emulate his example.
Have you ever seen anybody take cod-liver oil? Well, that is the look which comes over Mrs. Jimmie's face when the odour of whiskey assails her aristocratic nostrils. Nevertheless she valiantly sits the whole evening through with her long glass in her hand. The ice melts and the whole mess grows warm and nauseous, but she hangs on, sipping at it with an air of determined enjoyment painful to see. If she did as she would like, she would either hold her nose and gulp it all down at once or else she would fling glass and all out of the window.
In vain we all try to make it easy for her to refuse. If we don't offer it she looks hurt, so the kindest thing we can do is to pretend we notice nothing, and to let her believe that she is her husband's boon companion, since that is her futile ambition.
Jimmie crossed his feet, blew a cloud of smoke into the air, and carried on the attack by saying:
"London, Paris, and Berlin all put together cannot furnish the noise of New York, while the roar of Chicago is the stillness of a cathedral compared to it. And most of it, I may be allowed to state, is entirely unnecessary. The papers are full of accounts of nervous collapses, the sanatoria are crowded, while I never heard as much about insanity in the whole of my life elsewhere as I have heard in New York in one year. There is not a day in which the papers do not contain some mention of insane wards in the city hospitals, but people here are so accustomed to it, that no one except a newcomer like yourself would be likely to notice it."
Considine nodded.
"I lay fully one-half of it to the incessant noises which prey upon even strong nerves for nine months of the year without our realizing them," he said, "and these so work upon the nervous system that it only takes a slight shock to bring about a collapse, and then no weeks in the country, no physic, no tonics can avail. It means a rest cure or the insane ward. It is typical of our American civilization. New Yorkers are the most nervous people I ever saw. The children are nervous; little street urchins, who should not know what nerves are, tremble with nervous tension, while the exodus to the country on Friday nights fairly empties the town. Everybody wants to 'get away from the noise,' and it is an undisputed fact that men who have no right to allow themselves the luxury take every Saturday as a holiday, so that in many lines of business so many men are known to be out of town on Saturdays that business is practically suspended on that day except for routine work. This is true to such an extent in no other city that I know of, and why? It is the noise. Distracted nature clamours for a cessation of it, and the unfortunate who cannot afford the luxury must pay the penalty. It is a question for the Board of Health."
"Poor old chap!" said Jimmie. "It comes hard enough on us common people, but how writing chaps like you and Aubrey stand it, I can't see. I should think you'd find New York the very devil to write in."