The Babylon Arms raised its twelve stories in one of the Eighties just east of Riverside Drive. Among the brownstone fronts of the early part of this century its gaunt sides gave it an overpowering appearance of height, loneliness, even grandeur. In those days great apartments were rare in that part of New York, and the Babylon Arms stood as a solitary outpost of the army of apartment houses which since have ranged their extravagant bulks in a solid face along the North River and eastward to the Park. The Babylon Arms is still there, rather shabby and démodé, a belle of the early nineteen hundreds, out of fashion, overpainted, with electric bulbs fitted into gas brackets and the once somber red walls of its hallways painted over in grotesque imitation of the more ostentatious marble of its newer sisters. But its pride is gone. It stands jostled now and a little battered, like the bedizened women who came in from the streets to flit through its gloomy corridors. It is shabby genteel, like the two old ladies who live in the parlor bed-room of the first floor. It is jolly and good-natured, like the clerk and his family who climb the two flights of worn stairs above the point where the antiquated elevator rocks uncertainly to its final stop. It is comic, respectable, quaint, vulgar, tragic, common and happy ... all these things; and so after a fashion, in the way of old houses, it is like life itself.
But it was new and elegant in the early nineteen hundreds. The Babylon Arms! It was a name known throughout the growing Upper West Side! It was the first of the skyscraping apartment houses. And among the pioneer cliff dwellers were Clarence Murdock and two companions who shared among them the expenses of the apartment two floors above where the elevator jolted uncertainly to a final stop. It was not so expensive—living two floors above the elevator; and the name “Babylon Arms” looked impressive, even a little flamboyant, on one’s card. To Bunce the name signified opulence, a certain grandiose triumph of success; to Clarence it meant that people would say, “Ah, the Babylon Arms! He must have a good background to live there!” To Mr. Wyck, it meant simply that he was keeping up one of the traditions of his name; yet there were times too when he was a little ashamed of the Babylon Arms as an institution touched by vulgarity.
As Clarence on the third day before Christmas closed the door behind him on the bead portières and burnt leather cushions, he left Bunce singing lustily as he rubbed his great healthy body in the chilly air of the bathroom, and Mr. Wyck, still lying in bed, his thin, slightly yellow nose peeping above the blankets against the hour when it would be painfully necessary for him to rise. As the door closed, Bunce’s rendition of “I’m afraid to go home in the dark” was interrupted for an instant while he shouted after Clarence, “Look out now and don’t come home married to that fat, pretty Seton girl!”
At the shout Clarence hastened away, shocked a little by the vulgarity of Bunce. As for Mr. Wyck the words struck terror into his heart. He saw the breaking up of his home. He saw himself, a timid, frightened little man, lost once more among the obscenities of a cheap boarding house.
9
A NUMBER of things made necessary this trip of Clarence; there were the usual customers to be visited; the new equipment of the Junoform Corset Factory was in need of inspection, and finally there was an engagement to spend Christmas and several days of the holiday season as the guest of the Seton family; and this he looked upon with relief because life in hotels had come to weary him inexpressibly. He longed for a home, with a wife who would put by his slippers for him and sit by his fireside. The prospect of one dreary hotel after another burdened his soul; so the acceptance of Mr. Seton’s invitation had been even colored by a subdued enthusiasm.
It was, after all, ambition which had betrayed him into city life and the wretched, fly-by-night existence of a drummer. He was ambitious to be wealthy, to be admired, to be honored in a community.
There were times, but these were rare and isolated moments, when his ambitions rose for an instant beyond even these things, times when, in an ecstasy of intoxication, they soared dizzily among the pinnacles of hope far beyond the reach of one whose place in the structure of life was clearly somewhere in the foundations. It was then that he caught for an instant glimpses of a life in which he saw himself not only wealthy and respectable but distinguished and glamorous, one whose character captured the imagination, who gave himself and his life to the great world.
All this was perhaps not clearly thought out in his mind; yet he sensed its presence a little way beyond his reach as a small boy searches in the darkness of a jam closet for something which he knows is there but cannot see.
In these lurid, almost ecstatic moments, he saw his future wife not so much in the rôle of a domestic paragon, as a brilliant and beautiful creature, fit to walk through the avenues of the great world by the side of a clever and worldly man. To be sure, such things were never mentioned to fellow-drummers, yet they were there, shut up in his heart, quiet save for rare moments. His companions in the smoking car may have had their secrets too. It is impossible to say. If such secrets existed, they were too well hidden beneath their suspicions of each other.