And in the city, where I should swing along briskly, I lounge. What is there on Broadway to linger over? On Broadway, Nature has used her biggest, fattest type-forms. Tall, flat, building fronts, brazen with many windows and ribbed with commercial gilt lettering six feet high; shrieking proclamations of auction sales written in letters of fire on vast canvasses; railway posters in scarlet and blue and green; rotatory barber-poles striving at the national colors and producing vertigo; banners, escutcheons, crests, in all the primary colors—surely none of these things needs poring over. And I know them with my eyes closed. I know the windows where lithe youths in gymnasium dress demonstrate the virtue of home exercises; the windows where other young men do nothing but put on and take off patent reversible near-linen collars; where young women deftly roll cigarettes; where other young women whittle at sticks with miraculously stropped razors. I know these things by heart, yet I linger over them in flagrantly unhygienic attitudes, my shoulders bent forward and my chest and diaphragm in a position precisely the reverse of that prescribed by the doctor.
Perhaps the thing that makes me linger before these familiar sights is the odd circumstance that in Broadway's shop-windows Nature is almost never herself, but is either supernatural or artificial. Nature, for instance, never intended that razors should cut wood and remain sharp; that linen collars should keep on getting cleaner the longer they are worn; that glass should not break; that ink should not stain; that gauze should not tear; that an object worth five dollars should sell for $1.39; but all these things happen in Broadway windows. Williams, whom I meet now and then, who sometimes turns and walks up with me to Fourteenth Street, pointed out to me the other day how strange a thing it was that the one street which has become a synonym for 'real life' to all good suburban Americans is not real at all, but is crowded either with miracles or with imitations.
The windows on Broadway glow with wax fruits and with flowers of muslin and taffeta drawn by bounteous Nature from her storehouses in Parisian garret workshops. Broadway's ostrich feathers have been plucked in East Side tenements. The huge cigars in the tobacconist's windows are of wood. The enormous bottles of champagne in the saloons are of cardboard, and empty. The tall scaffoldings of proprietary medicine bottles in the drug shops are of paper. 'Why,' said Williams, 'even the jewelry sold in the Japanese auction stores is not genuine, and the sellers are not Japanese.'
This bustling mart of commerce, as the generation after the Civil War used to say, is only a world of illusion. Artificial flowers, artificial fruits, artificial limbs, tobacco, rubber, silks, woolens, straws, gold, silver. The young men and women who manipulate razors and elastic cords are real, but not always. Williams and I once stood for a long while and gazed at a young woman posing in a drug-shop window, and argued whether she was alive. Ultimately she winked and Williams gloated over me. But how do I know her wink was real? At any rate the great mass of human life in the windows is artificial. The ladies who smile out of charming morning costumes are obviously of lining and plaster. Their smug Herculean husbands in pajamas preserve their equanimity in the severest winter weather only because of their wire-and-plaster constitution. The baby reposing in its beribboned crib is china and excelsior. Illusion everywhere.
But the Broadway crowd is real. You only have to buffet it for five minutes to feel, in eyes and arms and shoulders, how real it is. When I was a boy and was taken to the circus it was always an amazing thing to me that there should be so many people in the street moving in a direction away from the circus. Something of this sensation still besets me whenever we go down in the Subway from Belshazzar Court to hear Caruso. The presence of all the other people on our train is simple enough. They are all on their way to hear Caruso. But what of the crowds in the trains that flash by in the opposite direction? It is not a question of feeling sorry for them. I try to understand and I fail. But on Broadway on a late summer afternoon the obverse is true. The natural thing is that the living tide as it presses south shall beat me back, halt me, eddy around me. I know that there are people moving north with me, but I am not acutely aware of them. This onrush of faces converges on me alone. It is I against half the world.
And then suddenly out of the surge of faces one leaps out at me. It is Williams, whose doctor has told him that the surest way of fighting down the lust for tobacco is to walk down from his office to the ferry every afternoon. Williams and I salute each other after the fashion of Broadway, which is to exchange greetings backward over the shoulder. This is the first step in an elaborate minuet. Because we have passed each other before recognition came, our hands fly out backward. Now we whirl half around, so that I who have been moving north face the west, while Williams, who has been traveling south, now looks east. Our clasped hands strain at each other as we stand there poised for flight after the first greeting. A quarter of a minute perhaps, and we have said good-bye.
But if the critical quarter of a minute passes, there ensues a change of geographical position which corresponds to a change of soul within us. I suddenly say to myself that there are plenty of trains to be had at Fourteenth Street. Williams recalls that another boat will leave Battery Place shortly after the one he is bound for. So the tension of our outstretched arms relaxes. I, who have been facing west, complete the half circle and swing south. Williams veers due north, and we two men stand face to face. The beat and clamor of the crowd fall away from us like a well-trained stage mob. We are in Broadway, but not of it.
'Well, what's the good word?' says Williams.
When two men meet on Broadway the spirit of optimism strikes fire. We begin by asking each other what the good word is. We take it for granted that neither of us has anything but a chronicle of victory and courage to relate. What other word but the good word is tolerable in the lexicon of living, upstanding men? Failure is only for the dead. Surrender is for the man with yellow in his nature. So Williams and I pay our acknowledgments to this best of possible worlds. I give Williams the good word. I make no allusion to the fact that I have spent a miserable night in communion with neuralgia; how can that possibly concern him? Another manuscript came back this morning from an editor who regretted that his is the most unintelligent body of readers in the country. The third cook in three weeks left us last night after making vigorous reflections on my wife's good nature and my own appearance. Only an hour ago, as I was watching the long, black steamers bound for Sorrento and Fontainebleau, the monotony of one's treadmill work, the flat unprofitableness of scribbling endlessly on sheets of paper, had become almost a nausea. But Williams will know nothing of this from me. Why should he? He may have been sitting up all night with a sick child. At this very moment the thought of the little parched lips, the moan, the unseeing eyes, may be tearing at his entrails; but he in turn gives me the good word, and many others after that, and we pass on.
But sometimes I doubt. This splendid optimism of people on Broadway, in the Subway and in the shops and offices—is it really a sign of high spiritual courage, or is it just lack of sensibility? Do we find it easy to keep a stiff upper lip, to buck up, to never say die, because we are brave men, or simply because we lack the sensitiveness and the imagination to react to pain? It may be even worse than that. It may be part of our commercial gift for window-dressing, for putting up a good front.