Part 7 (2/2)

At the northwest corner of Ninth Street there is a brownish-green building erected in the long, long ago to serve as a domicile of the Brevoort family, which had once exercised pastoral sway over so many acres of this region. Later it became the home of the De Rhams. But to Richard Harding Davis, then a reporter on the ”Evening Sun,” it had nothing of the flavour of the Patroons. It was simply the house where young Cortlandt Van Bibber, returning from Jersey City where he had witnessed the ”go” between ”Dutchy” Mack and a coloured person professionally known as the Black Diamond, found his burglar. There is no mistaking the house, which ”faced the avenue,” nor the stone wall that ran back to the brown stable which opened on the side street, nor the door in the wall, that, opening cautiously, showed Van Bibber the head of his quarry. ”The house was tightly closed, as if some one was lying inside dead,” was a line of Mr. Davis's description. Many years after the writing of ”Van Bibber's Burglar,” another maker of fiction a.s.sociated with New York was standing before the Ninth Street house, of the history of which he knew nothing. ”Grim tragedy lives there, or should live there,” said Owen Johnson, ”I never pa.s.s here without the feeling that there is some one lying dead inside.”

Van Bibber's presence in the neighbourhood was in no wise surprising, for it was one of his favourite haunts when he was not engaged farther up the Avenue, in his daily labour, which was, as he explained to the chance acquaintance met at the ball in Lyric Hall described in ”Cinderella,” ”mixing c.o.c.ktails at the Knickerbocker Club.” Only a few doors distant from the Ninth Street house there is an apartment hotel known as the Berkeley, and it was to a Berkeley apartment that Van Bibber, as related in ”Her First Appearance,” took the child that he had practically kidnapped to restore her to her father and to be rewarded for his intrusion by being sensibly called a well-meaning fool. But there is another apartment house at the south-west corner of the Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street which better fits the description, which tells how Van Bibber, from the windows, could see the many gas lamps of Broadway where it crossed the Avenue a few blocks away, and the bunches of light on Madison Square Garden.

Edgar Fawcett was hardly of the generation of the Flora McFlimseys. As a matter of fact he was a small boy in knickerbockers when the famous William Allen Butler poem, ”Nothing to Wear,” first appeared in the pages of ”Harper's Weekly.” But Miss McFlimsey was an enduring young lady, who, for many years was accepted as symbolizing the foibles of Madison Square, and she was in a measure in Fawcett's mind when he wrote, in ”A Gentleman of Leisure,” that vigorous description contrasting socially the stretch of the Avenue below Fourteenth Street with the later development a dozen blocks to the north. In another Fawcett novel, ”Olivia Delaplaine,” we find the home of the heroine's husband in Tenth Street, just off the Avenue; and, reverting to ”A Gentleman of Leisure,” Clinton Wainwright, the gentleman in question, lived, like a ”visiting Englishman,” at the Brevoort.

There have been many Delmonicos. But for the purposes of fiction there has never been one just like the establishment that occupied a corner at the junction of the Avenue and Fourteenth Street. It was a more limited town in those days. The novelist wis.h.i.+ng to depict his hero doing the right thing in the right way by his heroine did not have the variety of choice he has now. Two squares away, the Academy of Music was, theatrically and operatically, the social centre, so to carry on the narrative with a proper regard for the conventions, the preceding dinner or the following supper was necessarily at the old Delmonico's. They were good trenchermen and trencherwomen, those heroes and heroines of yesterday! Many oyster-beds were depleted, and bins of rare vintage emptied to satisfy the healthy appet.i.tes of the inked pages. Somehow the mouth waters with the memory. When Delmonico's moved on to Twenty-sixth Street, and from its terraced tables its patrons could look up at graceful Diana, there were many famous dinners of fiction, such as the one, for example, consumed by the otherwise faultless Walters, for a brief period in the service of Mr. Van Bibber--the menu selected: ”Little Neck clams first, with chablis, and pea-soup, and caviare on toast, before the oyster crabs, with Johannisberger Cabinet; then an _entree_ of calves' brains and rice; then no roast, but a bird, cold asparagus with French dressing, Camembert cheese, and Turkish coffee,”

may be accepted as indicating the gastronomical taste of the author in the days when youth meant good digestion--but with the departure from the old Fourteenth Street corner something of the flavour of the name pa.s.sed forever.

If New York has never had another restaurant that meant to the novelist just what the traditional Delmonico's meant, there has also never been another hotel like the old Fifth Avenue. In actual life the so-called ”Ladies' Parlour” on the second floor, reached, if I remember rightly, by means of an entrance on the Twenty-third Street side, was dreary enough; but turn to the pages of the romance of the sixties and seventies and eighties, and on the heavily upholstered sofas enamoured couples sat in furtive meeting, and words of endearment were whispered, and all the stock intrigue of fiction was set in motion. Then, on the ground floor, was the Amen Corner, without which no tale of political life was complete, and the various rooms for more formal gatherings, such as the one in which took place ”The Great Secretary of State Interview,” as narrated by Jesse Lynch Williams many years ago.

But for the full flavour of the romance of this section of Fifth Avenue it is not necessary to go back to the leisurely novelists of the eighties and before. Recall the work of a man who, a short ten years ago, was turning out from week to week the mirth-provoking, amazement-provoking tales dealing with the life of what he termed his ”Little Old Bagdad on-the-Subway,” his ”Noisyville on-the-Hudson,” his ”City of Chameleon Changes.” For the Avenue as the expression of the city's wealth and magnificence and aristocracy the late O. Henry had little love. The glitter and pomp and pageantry were not for ”the likes of him.” He preferred the more plebeian trails, the department-store infested thoroughfare to the west, with the clattering ”El” road overhead; or Fourth Avenue to the east, beginning at the statue of ”George the Veracious,” running between the silent and terrible mountains, finally, with a shriek and a crash, to dive headlong into the tunnel at Thirty-fourth Street, and never to be seen again; or even some purlieu of the great East Side, where he could sit listening at ease in the humble shop of Fitbad the Tailor.

There was, however, one portion of land belonging to the Avenue where he felt himself thoroughly at home. When, of a summer's evening, darkness had fallen, and the leaves were fluttering in the warm breeze, and high overhead Diana's light was twinkling, and the derelicts were gathered on the Park benches, the world was full of delightful mystery and magic.

Close to the curb, at one corner of the Square, a low grey motor-car with engine silent. Then whimsical fancy and a haunting memory of Robert Louis Stevenson's ”New Arabian Nights” builded up the story ”While the Auto Waits.” Or perhaps the sight of a car swiftly moving with its emergency tire dangerously loose, and to that fertile brain were flashed the ingredients of ”The Fifth Wheel.” ”There is an aristocracy of the public parks and even of the vagabonds who use them for their private apartments,” wrote Sidney Porter in ”The Shocks of Doom.” Vallance of the story felt rather than knew this, but when he stepped down out of his world into chaos his feet brought him directly to Madison Square.

Probably Sherard Plumer, the down-and-out artist, was another to recognize its quality even before he fell in with Carson Chalmers, as outlined in ”A Madison Square Arabian Night”; and also Marcus Clayton of Roanoke County, Virginia, and Eva Bedford, of Bedford County of the same State; and the disreputable Soapy, of ”The Cop and the Anthem,” when he sought a park bench on which to ponder over just what violation of the law would insure his deportation to Blackwell's Island, which was his Palm Beach and Riviera for the winter months. Here, to O. Henry, was the common ground of all, the happy and the unfortunate, the just and the unjust, the Caliph and the cad; and far above, against the sky, was the dainty G.o.ddess who presided over the destinies of all, Miss Diana, who, according to the opinion expressed by Mrs. Liberty in ”The Lady Higher Up,” has the best job for a statue in the whole town, with the Cat-Show, and the Horse-Show, and the military tournaments where the privates ”look grand as generals, and the generals try to look grand as floorwalkers,” and the Sportsman's Show, and above all, the French Ball, ”where the original Cohens and the Robert Emmet-Sangerbund Society dance the Highland fling with one another.”

Other figures of fiction, in fancy, flit across the Square, or throng the near-by streets. In that dense, pus.h.i.+ng, alien-tongued mult.i.tude that at the noon hour congests the sidewalks of the Avenue to the south of Twenty-third Street, one may catch a glimpse of Mr. Montague Gla.s.s's Abe Potash and Morris Perlmutter, long since moved uptown from their original loft in Division Street in the stories, and in Leonard Street in fact. The crowd is thickest at the Twenty-first Street corner, where, in the novels of other days, the mature burghers used to watch the pa.s.sing ladies from the windows of the Union Club. But there is little inclination to tarry long there. The environment of the Square is a pleasanter environment. When Delmonico's was at the Twenty-sixth Street corner, the hero of one of Brander Matthews's ”Vignettes of Manhattan”

pointed out of one of its windows and confessed that, failure in life as he was, he would die out of sight of the tower of the Madison Square Garden. A reminiscent sign or two is all that is left of the old Hotel Brunswick, which, among the hostelries of other days, yielded precedence only to the Fifth Avenue and the Brevoort as a factor in fiction.

Reverting to Mr. Davis, the Tower was one of the staple subjects of conversation of his heroes and heroines when they happened to be in the Congo, or Morocco, or looking longingly from the decks of steamers in South American waters; and the shadowy personage--very probably Van Bibber--who took ”A Walk up the Avenue” started on his journey from the Square. Van Bibber! Of course it was Van Bibber. It must have been Van Bibber. For when he reached Thirty-second Street a half-dozen men nodded to him in that casual manner in which men nod to a pa.s.sing club-mate.

The particular club has since moved some thirty blocks uptown, but to the old building you will find frequent references not only in the Davis stories, but also in the novels of Robert W. Chambers, who was in the habit of indicating it as the Patroon.

Beyond Madison Square the novelists of earlier generations seldom went.

It is to the men of today, above all to those who have been specializing in what may be called the New York ”_novel a la mode_” that we must turn in order to follow farther the trail. Here is the stately street as portrayed in Mr. Chambers's ”The Danger Mark,” or ”The Firing Line,” or ”The Younger Set,” or in any one of a dozen swiftly moving serials of the hour, whether the author be Mr. Rupert Hughes, or Mr. Owen Johnson, or Mr. Gouverneur Morris, or Mr. Rex Beach. The novel may serve its light purpose today and tomorrow be forgotten. But the current of human life up and down the Avenue is ever running more swiftly.

CHAPTER X

_Trails of Bohemia_

Trails of Bohemia--The Avenue and its Tributaries--The ”Musketeers of the Brush”--The Voice of the Ghetto--South Fifth Avenue and the Old French Quarter--The Garibaldi--”A la Ville de Rouen ”--The Restaurant du Grand Vatel--The New Bohemia--The Lane of the Mad Eccentrics--Sheridan Square--”The Pirate's Den”--Absolam, a Slave--Gonfarone's--Maria's.

Once upon a time an over-astute critic found grave fault with the t.i.tle of a novel by Mr. William Dean Howells. There was to his mind at least an unfortunate suggestion in calling a book ”The Coast of Bohemia,” even though ”Bohemia” was used in its figurative sense. What if the t.i.tle had been derived from a line in Shakespeare? That did not alter the fact that ascribing a coast to Bohemia was like giving the Swiss Republic an Admiralty and alluding to Berne as a naval base. What would that censorious critic have to say of the a.s.sociation of Bohemia with stately Fifth Avenue? For to him and his kind it is not given to realize that Bohemia is a state of mind, a period of ardour and exaltation, a reminiscence of youth rather than a material region.

The great stream has its tributaries. To Fifth Avenue belong the side streets that feed it and in turn draw from it flavour and inspiration.

To it belong Was.h.i.+ngton Square, the south side as well as the north side, and the street beyond, that today is known as West Broadway, and yesterday was South Fifth Avenue, and before that, in the remote past, was Laurens Street; and the crossing thoroughfares that const.i.tuted the French Quarter of the late seventies and early eighties; and the northeastern part of Greenwich Village, that was once the ”American Quarter,” and is now masquerading as a super Monmartre, with its ”Vermillion Hounds,” and ”Purple Pups,” and ”Pirates' Dens.”

Nor for the flavour of Bohemia is there actual need of leaving the Avenue itself. It was more than twenty years ago that the writer, turning into Fifth Avenue at Twenty-sixth Street of a suns.h.i.+ny afternoon, was confronted with an apparition, or rather with apparitions, direct from the Latin Quarter of Paris. Three top-hatted young men were walking arm in arm. One, of imposing stature, wore conspicuously the type of side whiskers formerly known as ”Dundrearys.”

The second, of medium height, was adorned by an aggressive beard. The third, small and slight, was smooth shaven. A similar trio was encountered a dozen blocks farther up the Avenue, and, in the neighbourhood of the Plaza, a third trio. It was a time when George Du Maurier's ”Trilby” was in the full swing of its great popularity, when the name of the sinister Svengali was on every lip, and certain young eccentrics found huge delight in attracting attention to themselves by parading the Avenue attired as ”Taffy,” the ”Laird,” and ”Little Billee.”

There is a stretch of the Avenue upon which the Fifth Avenue a.s.sociation frowns; which the native American avoids; and which the old-time New Yorker regards with pa.s.sionate regret as he recalls the departed glories of the Union Club and the jutting brown-stone stoops of yesterday. At the noon hour the sidewalks swarm with foreign faces. There is shrill chatter in alien tongues and the air is laden with strange odours. Even here Bohemia may be. Perhaps, toiling over a machine in one of the sweat-shops of the towering buildings a true poet may be coining his dreams and aspirations and heartaches into plaintive song; another, like the Sidney Rosenfeld of a score of years ago, who, over his work in the Ghetto of the lower East Side, asked and answered:

”Why do I laugh? Why do I weep?

I do not know; it is too deep.”

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