CHAPTER XII
The Vision from the Kills[A]
For a long time that night I lay watching the gem-like glitter of the lights that fringed the eastern horizon. A strong north wind shook the house, sweeping the clouds before it with a contemptuous energy that had in it a promise of frost on the morrow. As the stars rose it was as though the lights of the city themselves were rising into the clear sky, emblems of the vast and serene power that had sent them forth. High above the level constellations soared the two great beacons of the Metropolitan and Woolworth towers, like the masthead lights of some enormous vessel, while away northward, almost hidden by the swinging limbs of our elm, the occulting flash on the Times Building added a disquieting element to the otherwise peaceful scene. For me at least the glamour, the mystery and the beauty of that amazing city had never worn thin. For me, after a day in her roaring streets, after a scramble in her lotteries, there ever comes a recrudescence of that wonder with which I beheld my first view of her from the Jersey shore. The cynical American says, I know not with what truth, that the alien, clutching his bundle and gazing with anxious, frightened eyes toward the mountainous masonry of Manhattan, catching sight of the green sunlit image of Liberty with her benign unfaltering regard, holds his breath and feels within his bosom a fierce but short-lived ecstasy of joy. For one brief instant (I still quote the cynical American) faith and hope flame in his heart and the future lies before him as a shining pathway of industry and peace.
For me, however, the impression that New York had made was neither so unpractical nor so evanescent. For me there was reserved a certain fear of those multitudes and those heaven-kissing towers, an apprehension that even a species of victory after defeat had not sufficed to dethrone. Call it perhaps awe, mingled with homage to the indomitable spirit of the race, rather than fear.
This I felt, and every visit to the heart of the city quickened it, stirring my imagination to some fresh effort, and revealing some new phase of the exhaustless energy of America.
It was only natural that in the course of my musings it should strike me as strange that Mr. Carville displayed no shadow either of reverence or dislike for a place which impressed itself upon me more even than San Francisco or Chicago. It seemed to me strange that a man so sensitive to detail, so conscious of the scant poetry of the commonplace, should have no feeling for that astonishing accident which we call New York City. That he was not aware of her I refused absolutely to credit. If he could feel the beauty of Genoa and the immensity of London, he must necessarily be conscious of the sublimity of Manhattan. I regretted that I had not led him to speak of this. I regretted the possibility of seeing him no more. I felt a pertinacious curiosity about him, as a man who could contemplate with equanimity a spectacle that for me held always an inscrutable problem. To the disgust of the cynical American I always waved aside Washington and even Boston, ignored even that mysterious bourne, the "Middle West," and claimed that he who found the secret of New York had also found the secret of America. As I drowsed that night I registered a vague resolve to see Mr. Carville again and broach the subject to him. I felt sure that in some way or other he would add something to my knowledge, not only of the city, but of himself.
I became aware of Mac's voice in my ear, and struggling to rise, saw that he held in his hand a letter bearing a special-delivery stamp. It is one of the terrors, and no doubt advantages of the American mail, that a letter may descend upon one at unexpected hours. You may be locking up for the night, or enjoying your beauty sleep in the early morn, when a breathless messenger will hammer at your door with a letter, quite possibly containing a bill. Such a missive my friend held over me like a Damocles sword, between thumb and finger, and awaited the news with interest.
It did not, however, contain a bill. It was a request from an advertising agency to proceed to Pleasant Plains, S. I., and interview the president of a realty company who desired what we call tersely enough a "write-up," an essentially modern development of English Literature, in my opinion. Mac maintains with stubborn ingenuity that Doctor Johnson and Goldsmith did "write-ups," just as Shakespeare wrote melodramas, and Turner did "bird's-eye views." I make no such claim. The point is that a write-up brings in fifty dollars, while sonnets are a drug in the market. For this reason I sprang out of bed with unusual alacrity and prepared to catch the eight o'clock express.