They entered lower Broadway, random flowers on the foul truck-strewn flood, advancing by inches, surrounded by polyglot sounds, traversing revolted Europe in a block, closing their ears against the shrieking cries of imprisoned industries, the sordid struggle in the streets, the conflict in the air, where stone flights strove for supremacy.
All at once she remembered—this roaring entrance. She remembered the evening, not two years before, when she herded from the ferry, satchel in hand, oppressed by the jargon of a thousand tongues, she had arrived, hustled and jostled, barely making head against the outflowing tide of humanity which flushed the street in its roaring homeward scramble.
That first breathless impression of New York! How she had feared it, that first dusky evening, when, shrinking in a doorway before the onrush of driven multitudes, she had felt the very air dragged from her nostrils, obliterating her individuality, routing her courage, stunning her senses. She had stood a long time, clinging to her meager sheltering, disheartened at the fury at her feet, awed by the flaming ladders to the impending stars—no inanimate stones, but living rocks, endlessly climbing, which must end by toppling over on her in an obliterating crash. New York! How different from what she had imagined in the tugging, liberty-seeking aspirations of her soul!
She had never lacked courage before, in all her adventurous progress toward the Mecca of her dreams; but that night she had been defeated, overwhelmed before the issue, even. She had come, sublimely confident in a fanciful project she had conceived, a series of impressions—A Western Girl in New York—a western girl arriving undaunted, satchel in hand, ten dollars in her purse, to seek fortune in the great city of Mammon—surely a daring story to fill a woman's column. And she had gone to the same Free Press, standing in the outer office, talking to a tired sub-editor, vainly striving to interest him, to revive in herself a necessary spark of enthusiasm and audacity which had expired in that first brutal confrontation of the world in terms of thousands. Yes, she had lost even before she had opened her plea, convinced of the futility of making an impression on those frantic halls, where her voice was pitched not alone against the tired indifference of a routine mind, but against the invading storm of outer sounds, the clang of brazen bells, the honk of automobiles, the shaking rush of invisible iron forces tearing through the air, the grinding roll of traffic over the complaining cobblestones, the mammoth roar of the populace endlessly washing reverberating shores.
She had talked and talked, without interruption, clenching her fist, growing weaker and weaker, stumbling in her phrases, until at last, convinced, without waiting for an objection, she had stopped short, saying: "It's no use, is it?"
Then he had gone to a file of papers, and returning, spread before her a gaily colored page, placing his finger on another face in silhouette, gay, jaunty. Another had had the same idea! How many others? She was no longer an individual—only one of a thousand who came, with the same ideas, to face the same struggle.
That first leaden closing of the doors of hope, as if no other doors remained! And now she was to enter that same Free Press, no longer daunted, clinging to a satchel, but rolling luxuriously, triumphant: no longer a suppliant, but amused, at the insistent invitation of the chief, the genius of the machine, whom once she had clamored so fruitlessly to see. Then and now.... Harrigan Blood—society itself, on which she was to take a delicious revenge. She forgot Massingale, remembering only a hopeless little figure, ready for tears, standing, a tiny black dot against the electric windows of the press, gazing into the wilderness of the strident crowded unknown.
A quick descent, a sudden volcanic propulsion upward, and they were transferred a hundred feet above strife, into a noisy anteroom, gazing down at the gray-and-white tapestry of the spread city.
"Hello! What are you doing here?"