“Oh, I am glad it wasn’t Dantrè!” I breathed to the spring sunset.
Virginia Woodward Cloud.
LONG, LONG AGO
When the brakeman swung back the door and with resonant indifference shouted in Esperanto “Granderantal stashun,” Galbraithe felt like jumping up and gripping the man’s hand. It was five years since he had heard that name pronounced as it should be pronounced, because it was just five years since he had resigned from the staff of a New York daily and left to accept the editorship of a small Kansas weekly. These last years had been big years, full of the joy of hard work, and though they had left him younger than when he went, they had been five years away from New York. Now he was back again for a brief vacation, eager for a sight of the old crowd.
When he stepped from the car he was confused for a minute. In the mining camp at present substituted for the former terminal he was green as a tenderfoot. It took him a second to get his bearings, but as soon as he found himself fighting for his feet in the dear old stream of commuters he knew he was at home again. The heady jostle among familiar types made him feel that he hadn’t been gone five days, although the way the horde swept past him proved that he had lost some of his old-time skill and cunning in a crowd. But he didn’t mind; he was here on a holiday, and they were here on business and had their rights. He recognized every mother’s son of them. Neither the young ones nor the old ones were a day older.
They wore the same clothes, carried the same bundles and passed the same remarks. The solid business man weighted with the burden of a Long Island estate was there; the young man in a broker’s office who pushed his own lawn mower at New Rochelle was there; the man who got aboard at One Hundred and Twenty-eighth Street was there. There was the man with the Van Dyke, the man with a mustache, and the fat, smooth-shaven man, and the wives, the sisters and the stenographers of all these. They were just as Galbraithe had left them—God bless ’em.
Swept out upon Forty-second Street, he took a long, full breath. The same fine New York sky was overhead (the same which roofed Kansas) and the same New York sun shone down upon him (even as in its gracious bounty it shone upon Kansas). The thrill of it made him realize as never before that, though the intervening years had been good to him, New York was in his blood. His eyes seized upon the raw, angular buildings as eagerly as an exiled hill man greets friendly mountain peaks. There are no buildings on earth which look so friendly, once a man gets to know them, as those about the Grand Central. Galbraithe noticed some new structures, but even these looked old. The total effect was exactly as he had left it. That was what he appreciated after his sojourn among the younger cities of the West. New York was permanent—as fixed as the pole star. It was unalterable.
Galbraithe scorned to take cab, car or bus this morning. He wanted to walk—to feel beneath his feet the dear old humpy pavement. It did his soul good to find men repairing the streets in the same old places—to find as ever new buildings going up and old buildings coming down, and the sidewalks blocked in the same old way. He was clumsy at his hurdling, but he relished the exercise.
He saw again with the eyes of a cub reporter every tingling feature of the stirring street panorama, from gutter to roof top, and thrilled with the magic and vibrant bigness of it all. Antlike, men were swarming everywhere bent upon changing, and yet they changed nothing. That was what amazed and comforted him. He knew that if he allowed five years to elapse before returning to his home town in Kansas he wouldn’t recognize the place, but here everything was as he had left it, even to the men on the corners, even to the passers-by, even to the articles in the store windows. Flowers at the florist’s, clothing at the haberdasher’s, jewels at the jeweler’s, were in their proper places, as though during the interval nothing had been sold. It made him feel as eternal as the Wandering Jew. The sight of the completed public library restored him to normal for a moment but, after all, the building looked as though it had been long finished. A public library always does. It is born a century old.
The old Fifth Avenue Hotel was gone, but he wondered if it had ever been. He didn’t miss it—hardly noticed any change. The new building fitted into its niche as perfectly as though it had been from the first ordained for that particular spot. It didn’t look at all the upstart that every new building in Kansas did.