The unwelcome man

by Waldo David Frank

“Then you know less of New York than the immigrant who lands at South Ferry from Ellis Island. He at least has been receptive to the real welcome—attack, if you will. With you, inevitably, the home you lived in and the hordes of people you knew must have interfered.”

Quincy smiled at these “hordes.” But he resolved to meet New York without the fact or reservation of his family within his mind.

Garsted had summarized: “Knowing a city is being open to the vibrance of its crowds and buildings. A family stops these apertures.”

The time was early in November. Fraternity elections had just placed a mark upon Quincy’s lack of favor. They had thrown him into a gloom. But what really harassed the boy was not the disapproval of his class, so much as the palpable weakness which he read into the fact that this had troubled him. This was the source of real misgivings. If he was what he was, had done with conscience that which he had done, the results should have been powerless to distress him. They were not. His unpopularity, now brutally concreted, gave him periods of despond. And seeing this, he rebelled at his own self-styled fatuity and thereby fixed his mood.

It was in such a mood that he set out to meet New York. The thrill of real adventure shot through him as he stepped forth, under these new auspices, upon the crashing street. The power of suggestion had availed. It seemed indeed as if he had never before known the great city.

He plunged at once into the subway and alighted at Brooklyn Bridge. There had been no plan in this. But it had seemed the natural tendency. Quincy had merely flowed along. Here was one channel of the city’s life that had happened to catch him in. Since he was there to invite and to enhance this receptivity, it would have been wrong to choose.

So Quincy reached the street from the subway. At once, he was washed along like a splinter of wood on a rising wave, into a screaming welter of humanity and trolley-cars. He was in the terminal whence soars the incline pathway rising to the Manhattan Tower of Brooklyn Bridge.

It was not yet four o’clock. And the sparse stream of early hurriers about him was as nothing against his feeling of solitude. He recalled almost vaguely now the packed recesses whence he had emerged—the delirium of cars churning the crowds, the hammer of the outlying city.

Before him swept the bridge. He felt that every cable of the web-like maze was vibrant with stress and strain. With these things he was alone. Yet he felt no insecurity, such as the crowds inspired. Beyond, through the net-work of steel, huddled Brooklyn. And below his very feet, tumbled together as if some giant had tipped the city eastward and sent all the houses pell-mell toward the down-tilted corner, lay the wharves and slums of Manhattan. It seemed to Quincy that he was being caught upon a monstrous swing and swept with its pulsed lilt above the grovelling life of the metropolis. Suddenly, the fancy flashed upon him that from his perch of shivering steel the power should indeed come to poise and judge the swarm above which he rocked. The bridge that reeled beyond him seemed an arbiter. It bound the city. It must know the city’s soul since it was so close to the city’s breath. In its throbbing cables there must be a message. In its lacings and filigrees of steel, there must be subtle words!...

He was already above the river. The sun was cold. The waters of the harbor cut out like sapphire fretted with gleam. Beyond, Brooklyn was in shadow—shadow that sprang rather from its nature than the sun’s lack. Quincy turned north where the great East Side crowded out under two bridges, stifling the river to an inlet. The city rose in a blue haze. Quincy recalled the words of the man in the Park: “Blue’s her color.” It was all like the piled ascent of some brobdingnagian ant-hill. He scrutinized it carefully,—from the stall-like wharves to the tower, turreted and carved in ice at the hill’s crest. It seemed ugly. And yet, as his eyes went back over the mazy whole, down from the notched skyline to the turmoiled streets that fell brown and grey into the water, it seemed beautiful as well. Quincy was puzzled. He did not know that in this flaunting grandeur, building from myriad misery and ugliness, lay the nature of New York.