第72章

I used to yell myself hoarse about the free expense, and hang my hat on the horizon, and say cutting things in the grocery to little soap drummers from the East.But I'd never seen New York, then, Jack.Me for it from the rathskellers up.Sixth Avenue is the West to me now.Have you heard this fellow Crusoe sing? The desert isle for him, I say, but my wife made me go.Give me May Irwin or E.S.

Willard any time."

"Poor Billy," said the artist, delicately fingering a cigarette.

"You remember, when we were on our way to the East how we talked about this great, wonderful city, and how we meant to conquer it and never let it get the best of us? We were going to be just the same fellows we had always been, and never let it master us.It has downed you, old man.You have changed from a maverick into a butterick.""Don't see exactly what you are driving at," said William."I don't wear an alpaca coat with blue trousers and a seersucker vest on dress occasions, like I used to do at home.You talk about being cut to a pattern--well, ain't the pattern all right? When you're in Rome you've got to do as the Dagoes do.This town seems to me to have other alleged metropolises skinned to flag stations.According to the railroad schedule I've got in mind, Chicago and Saint Jo and Paris, France, are asterisk stops--which means you wave a red flag and get on every other Tuesday.I like this little suburb of Tarrytown-on-the-Hudson.There's something or somebody doing all the time.I'm clearing $8,000 a year selling automatic pumps, and I'm living like kings-up.Why, yesterday, I was introduced to John W.Gates.I took an auto ride with a wine agent's sister.

I saw two men run over by a street car, and I seen Edna May play in the evening.Talk about the West, why, the other night I woke everybody up in the hotel hollaring.I dreamed I was walking on a board sidewalk in Oshkosh.What have you got against this town, Jack? There's only one thing in it that I don't care for, and that's a ferryboat."The artist gazed dreamily at the cartridge paper on the wall."This town," said he, "is a leech.It drains the blood of the country.

Whoever comes to it accepts a challenge to a duel.Abandoning the figure of the leech, it is a juggernaut, a Moloch, a monster to which the innocence, the genius, and the beauty of the land must pay tribute.Hand to hand every newcomer must struggle with the leviathan.You've lost, Billy.It shall never conquer me.I hate it as one hates sin or pestilence or--the color work in a ten-cent magazine.I despise its very vastness and power.It has the poorest millionaires, the littlest great men, the lowest skyscrapers, the dolefulest pleasures of any town I ever saw.It has caught you, old man, but I will never run beside its chariot wheels.It glosses itself as the Chinaman glosses his collars.Give me the domestic finish.I could stand a town ruled by wealth or one ruled by an aristocracy; but this is one controlled by its lowest ingredients.

Claiming culture, it is the crudest; asseverating its pre-eminence, it is the basest; denying all outside values and virtue, it is the narrowest.Give me the pure and the open heart of the West country.

I would go back there to-morrow if I could."

"Don't you like this _filet mgnon_?" said William."Shucks, now, what's the use to knock the town! It's the greatest ever.Icouldn't sell one automatic pump between Harrisburg and Tommy O'Keefe's saloon, in Sacramento, where I sell twenty here.And have you seen Sara Bernardt in 'Andrew Mack' yet?""The town's got you, Billy," said Jack.

"All right," said William."I'm going to buy a cottage on Lake Ronkonkoma next summer."At midnight Jack raised his window and sat close to it.He caught his breath at what he saw, though he had seen and felt it a hundred times.

Far below and around lay the city like a ragged purple dream.The irregular houses were like the broken exteriors of cliffs lining deep gulches and winding streams.Some were mountainous; some lay in long, desert ca~nons.Such was the background of the wonderful, cruel, enchanting, bewildering, fatal, great city.But into this background were cut myriads of brilliant parallelograms and circles and squares through which glowed many colored lights.And out of the violet and purple depths ascended like the city's soul sounds and odors and thrills that make up the civic body.There arose the breath of gaiety unrestrained, of love, of hate, of all the passions that man can know.There below him lay all things, good or bad, that can be brought from the four corners of the earth to instruct, please, thrill, enrich, despoil, elevate, cast down, nurture or kill.Thus the flavor of it came up to him and went into his blood.

There was a knock on his door.A telegram had come for him.It came from the West, and these were its words:

"Come back and the answer will be yes.

"DOLLY."

He kept the boy waiting ten minutes, and then wrote the reply:

"Impossible to leave here at present." Then he sat at the window again and let the city put its cup of mandragora to his lips again.

After all it isn't a story; but I wanted to know which one of the heroes won the battle against the city.So I went to a very learned friend and laid the case before him.What he said was: "Please don't bother me; I have Christmas presents to buy."So there it rests; and you will have to decide for yourself.