A Cry in the Wilderness

by Mary E. Waller

That thought, horrible as it was to me, was my safeguard then and has been ever since. Such as they said my mother was, I would never be. Nor am I aware that any moral factor was the lever in this decision. Rather it was my pride that had been scourged for many years by a girl's half knowledge of her mother's career, my sensitiveness that was ever ready at the least outside touch to make me close in upon myself, the horror of thinking it might be possible that my name could be used as I had heard my mother's, that had panoplied my nature and warped it until that nature had narrowed to its armor. I was proud, sensitive, cold, or thought I was—and I was glad of it.

It had come to a point, at last, now when I was nearly twenty-six, that in what I termed my strength, lay my weakness. But of this I was, as yet, unaware.

I shut my eyes as the car sped onwards that I might not see the swift succession of glaring lights—the many flashing, changing, nerve-tormenting electric signs and advertisements, the brilliant globes, stars, and whirligigs of all kinds. How they tired me now! And the summer theatre throngs streaming in under the entrance arches picked out in glowing red and white, the saloons flashing a well-known signal to customers—I knew it all and was glad to close my eyes to it all. Now and then I caught a strain of music from the orchestra of some roof-garden.

At Seventy-second Street I changed for Amsterdam Avenue. I wanted to get away to the heights. The air was becoming fresher and I needed more of it. Another twenty minutes and the car stopped near the brow of the hill. I left it and walked a cross block till I came to Morningside Heights, the small, irregular, but beautiful promenade behind St. Luke's.

I leaned on the massive stone coping that crowns the wall of the escarpment; below me the hill sloped sharply to the flats of the Harlem. I looked off over the city.

East, and north-east in the direction of the Sound, great cloud masses, the wrack of the tempest, were piled high towards the zenith; but beneath them there was a clear zone near the city's level. A moon nearly two thirds to the full, was heralding its appearance above them by lighted rifts, bright-rimmed haloes, and the marvellous play of direct shaft light that struck downwards behind the clouds into the clear space above the city and shot white radiance upon its roofs. The sky, also, while yet the moon was invisible, was radiant, but with starlight.

Against this background, I watched the glow-worm lights of the elevated trains winding along the high invisible trestle-work. Beneath me lay Morningside Park, the foliage and its shadows blackened in masses beneath the glaring white of the arc-lights; and beyond, in seemingly interminable perspective, the long converging lines of parallel street lights led my gaze across the city to some large, unknown, uncertain flarings somewhere near the East River shore.

And from all this wide-stretching housing-place of a vast population, there rose into my ears a continuous, dull, peculiar sound, as of the magnified stertorous breathing of a hived and stifled humanity.

I had come here many times in the last four years, at all seasons, at all times. I drew strength and inspiration from this view in all its aspects, until my almost fatal illness in the late spring. After that there came upon me a powerful longing for change. I wanted to get away from this city, its sights and sounds; to escape from the conditions that were sapping my life. And the way was, at last, opened. How I exulted in this thought!

There were others on the promenade, and I was withdrawn from thought of myself by hearing voices, a man's and a woman's, below me on the winding walk that leads down the slope past the poplars to the level of the Harlem streets. The woman's was pleading, strident from excitement; it broke at last in a dry hard sob. The man's was hateful; the tones and accents like a vicious snarl.