The unwelcome man

by Waldo David Frank

Quincy too was cold. Instinctively, he turned south. The sun was very ineffectual against the lower city with its escarpments of wrought stone. There was a cruelty about these that laughed at the falling sun. The tall buildings were ugly—fearfully so. They lacked grace and color. One of them was a titanic telescope done in cake and sugar. A huge structure farther north—ridiculous with a flounce as a flank and its tiny turrets—reminded him of building-blocks. And this brought to Quincy the idea of giant babies, sportively responsible for it all. But there was tragedy as well as farce. The vaster buildings rose all white and impervious and cool from the wallow of unlit mediocrity below. Monsters indeed, they seemed to have sucked the strength for rising from the nondescript ruck that they submerged. Ferocious, sapping prodigies they seemed, now, to Quincy—the sort to which men are sacrificed and that make slaves of their creators.

All of this was like the blow of a mailed fist to the boy. It made him turn toward Brooklyn. The borough of homes appeared shabby and foul, a neglected step-sister unworthy the name of Cinderella. For here was no virtue under the spell of persecution. Brooklyn also was sinister enough. Merely, she had been less successful. Homes, evidently, counted little.

Suddenly, Quincy found that he had left the bridge and was standing upon a street in Brooklyn. He struck down its dingy length. He wondered if the wealth that had raised all the glories he had just observed was in some manner parent to this squalor. For not more than fifteen minutes, he searched the swart, hovelled depths below the Bridge. He saw a ferry-boat at the foot of a street, relieved with plants and romping boys, which had been turned into a consumptives’ home. He was not used to stinking court-ways, houses that leered, rank saloons advertising rum and sidewalks crumbling with neglect. He looked up at the span of bridge. It seemed an unattainable pathway. His nerves told him he would be better looking down at Brooklyn. So he returned.

The whole world had become another world in half an hour. Quincy surveyed the sky, the river, distant Manhattan. It came to him with a thrill that nothing was the same—that everything was radically something else. It was night—boldly, suddenly, entirely. If New York had a tongue of its own, would there be a word in it for evening?

What impressed Quincy at once was that night was not falling, as poetry books would have it, but ascending; and ascending, not in a steady advance like the shadows on a mountain, but in sudden starts, in impulsive sallies, like clouds of guerilla warriors pressing up, free of each other, repulsed here, there held at bay, and here again triumphant.

In the north, Manhattan was already dark. It loomed up, loftier yet more subdued in mist that was forever turning thicker and more sombre. Not a light pierced the haze to Quincy’s eye. He seemed now to be looking down upon an illimitable graveyard. Each house was become a tomb-stone, each towering building, in the light of day a sentinel of progress, appeared now a monument to some great death. Below the liquid green of the two uptown bridges, the East River was opaque amethyst, streaked here and there where some boat had cut a swathe. The moiling tenements glowed forth like coral. Poverty, catching a deflected ray, turned lurid.

Now, as he marched on, Quincy observed the south. The arm of Liberty, wisp-like in the mist, pointed to a blood-orange ball of sun. The nearer island lay in a deeper purple; its trees waved through a thicker film. But the waters were in shadow as if night had been an emanation from them, pushing the sun relentlessly back across the rim of the world. Above the harbor, was a deep pall, night’s advance guard in its grey, the sun’s resistance in its orange fretting. The pall fell and the waters grew more brackish. The sun plunged down against the mists, pouring a frenzy of disparted color that shot about the buildings of South Manhattan. And now, a sheet of gold cloud came underneath it. Slowly, yet visibly, the gold turned to yellow, to lemon, to silver—and went grey. Steeped as if in its own blood, the sun sank through the mists, and disappeared.

Quincy shuddered as if he had been witness to a tragedy. Then, huddled in his coat, he pressed on toward Manhattan.

The lower buildings had receded into shadow. The upper turrets were still shooting white against a shrill blue sky. Below, Manhattan was retreating; in the higher line, it still advanced. Quincy thought that the tall buildings slanted forward, that they must topple into the river. And throughout the long expanse, came streaks of smoke, all pointing north, all twining with harmonious measure into the sky.

But now, was the most startling change of all. The phalanx of white smoke seemed to hesitate, broke and scattered. With the sun had gone the wind; and with it, given up to the play of a thousand lesser currents, the smoke eddied forth, curled back and reverted in formless disarray.