He faced uptown. He had dined at a well-known eating place on Grand Street. His idea was to run the gamut of the City. Now, he was on the Bowery.
The night was bitterly, humidly cold. It ate into his face and hands like innumerable pointed icicles. Clotted throngs of revelers—pale boys, daubed girls—shouting, pushing, scrambling past him. Pied horns at their mouths, feather mops to tickle with in their unsavory hands. A crass atmosphere of roughness, ugly and strained and starved. The dingy Bowery rolled ahead with its sepulchral lodging-houses, its crashing elevated structure, its glint of drink. Squalid eating shops in a pathetic holiday regalia: American flags, red ruching, vari-colored placards bidding “Happy New Year!” enflamed the dirty windows like paint on a grey visage. Turkeys, apples, meat-pies swelled the decoration. Prices and meretricious welcomes were iced together on the panes. All of it laughed gutturally.
A mob before the theater, sweating within, frozen without—pushing, cursing, empty. Clouds of boys, dark like flies in the glitter of an arc-lamp before the lurid posters of the “movies.” A cry with a laugh encased. Quincy felt nothing.
Then a dismal stretch of darkness—Broadway below the section of it that is aflame with life. Huge dead buildings here, cars echoing back from the grey walls as lambent metal would fall if thrown against them. Sparse passers-by, hurrying, freezing, absent. The cold air seemed to shiver, to splinter like powdered glass. A derelict, coatless and gloveless, shuffled uptown as an injured moth sways toward a lamp.
And then, beyond, between the gaping walls of the chill orifice, the gleam of fire, the light-limned towers, the flaring incandescence—Broadway that lives.
In the open square was a vast Christmas tree, gawdy and colorless with varicolored electric lamps. Deep about it lay the shadow of humanity. Under its paltry dazzle of illumination that the chill air crushed inward was an open stand. A band spluttered religious music. Upon a wide sheet aloft, the words of an old hymn were lanterned. Beyond, stood a great tower, dim and frigid, topped by a clock and an electric star. The sheltered volunteers cried out the song after the band. Their voices were hard, laggard, frozen also. A stray voice rose in scanty concord from the crowd. But for the most part, the crowd was silent—murmurously, sullenly watchful. A leader exhorted the mass to sing. The arc-lamps crashed against the cold. The police shredded the thick maze of humans into shape. The band blared. Quincy felt nothing.
He stood and watched the heavy silence that sank below the music like a fearful shadow beneath a troubled boat in a deep lake. He watched the dumb buildings and the clamorous lights and the cut of the air and the spiritless, sordid mass—a swarm of insects pressed against a window that shut them out.
The exhorter bullied for voices that did not exist.
Then Quincy heard some one speak beside him:
“For some folk, religion seems to be simply this: put off till tomorrow what you can’t have to-day.”