Part 4 (1/2)

The hunted-looking man gave rather too dramatic a start of surprise when called back by the suspicious but curious James.

”It's worth $500,” he said, ”but I'll sell it for $50. I got into a little trouble at a hotel uptown, and I gotta sell it cheap.”

Professionally, elaborately, impressively, the prosperous-looking man screwed a gla.s.s into his eye and squinted at the stone. Then, taking James several yards away from the hunted-looking man, he said: ”That's a genuine stone worth easy $500 if it's worth a cent. I know a place they'll give us $500 for it this afternoon on account of me being in the trade. Now, you keep him here while I go round the corner and get $25 from my bank and then we'll buy that stone together and make $225 apiece before two hours is gone. I'll be right back.”

And the prosperous-looking man vanished.

Then--as might have been expected--the hunted-looking man offered James the diamond for $25. ”You can put one over on that big-guy,” he said.

”Slip me $25 and we beat it before he gets back. You can clean up $450 on it. I'm afraid of that big guy; I think he's gone after a cop.”

Now, these two confidence men had worked hard with James. He should not have taken such delight in their discomfiture as he climbed the steps of a bus and bade them farewell.

When he met the hunted-looking man and the prosperous-looking man together on Broadway a few days later they cut him, and I do blame them.

But they gave him a real adventure, at any rate, an adventure not to be met by those who squander their noon hour sitting dully in sedate restaurants.

Then there was the adventure of the picture gallery. James went on one occasion to a futurist exhibition in a tiny room not far from Madison Square. Galleries are not crowded at noon, but from the room that James approached came sounds not to be accounted for even by the crazy canvases on its walls. Of course James went in, and found a futurist painter wrestling with the agent of a collection agency. The combatants rose, and demanded James's name and address, that he might be summoned to court as a witness to a.s.sault and battery. But he never received either summons. Perhaps it was because he gave his name as Henry Smith of Yonkers.

Episodes like these have little charm for the middle-aged or for young men prematurely aged by spending their childhood in New York. These have their compensations, no doubt; their lives are not utterly bleak. But not for them is the daily romance of the young man who has just come to the city, who enjoys the proud novelty of working for wage, to whom every noon come sweet and strange the streets' compelling voices.

SIGNS AND SYMBOLS

Those people whom an hostile fate has made both athletes and reformers have among their aversions one which they proclaim with an enthusiasm so intense as to be almost infectious. They dislike pa.s.sionately the harmless, unnecessary sign board when it has been so placed as to become a feature of the rural landscape. Wooden cows silhouetted against the sunset only irritate them by their gentle celebrations of malted milk; the friendliest invitation to enjoy a cigarette, a corset or a digestive tablet fills them with anger if it comes from the face of a sea-shadowing cliff or from among the ancient hemlocks of a lofty mountain.

There is, of course, a modic.u.m of reason in their att.i.tude. It is wrong to paint the lily at all; it is doubly wrong to paint ”Wear Rainproof Socks” across its virgin petals. It is wrong to mar beauty; that is an axiom of all aesthetics and of all ethics. It would be wrong, for example (although it would be highly amusing), to throw by means of a magic lantern great colored phrases against Niagara's sheet of foam; it would be wrong to carve (as many earnest readers of our magazines believe has been done), an insurance company's advertis.e.m.e.nt on the Rock of Gibraltar.

But the aesthete-reformer, in condemning such monstrosities as these, condemns merely an hypothesis. And since the hypothesis obviously is condemnable, he starts a crusade against the innocent facts upon which the purely hypothetical evil is based. It is wrong to mar the snowy splendor of the Alps; therefore, he says, the Jersey meadows must not bear upon their damp bosom the jubilant banner of an effective safety-razor. The sylvan fastness of our continent must be saved from the vandal; therefore, he says, you may not advertise breakfast food on a h.o.a.rding in the suburbs of Paterson.

If the aesthete-reformers in question would examine the subject dispa.s.sionately they would see that there is really nothing in the sign board as it stands to-day about which they may justly complain.

Advertisers do not deliberately annoy the public; they would not be so foolish as to seek to attract people by spoiling what was beautiful. It must be remembered that a landscape may be rustic and yet not beautiful.

The aesthete does not dislike, instead he hails with enthusiasm, a worn stone bearing the dim inscription ”18 Mil. To Ye Cittye of London.” Why then should he shudder when he sees a bright placard which shouts ”18 Miles to the White Way Shoe Bazaar, Paterson's Pride”? To my mind there is a vivacity and a humanness about the second announcement utterly lacking in the first. The aesthete dotes upon the swinging boards which with crude paintings announce the presence of British inns. If ”The Purple Cow, by Geoffrey Pump. Entertainment for Man and Beast” delights his soul, why does he turn in angry sorrow from ”Stop at the New Mammoth Hotel when you are in Omaha--500 Rooms and Baths--$1.50 up--All Fireproof”? It is a cheerful invitation, and it should bring to jaded travelers through the track-pierced wastes a comfortable sense of approaching welcome and companions.h.i.+p.

There are many things which might be said in favor of urban sign boards, especially in favor of those elaborate arrangements in colored lights which make advertis.e.m.e.nts of table waters and dress fabrics as alluringly lovely as the electrical splendor of the first act of Dukas'

”Ariane et Barbe Bleu.” But in the city the sign board is always something supererogatory; it may be decorative, but it is not necessary.

One does not need a six-yard announcement of a beer's merit when there are three saloons across the street; even the placards of plays line almost uselessly the thoroughfares of a district in which the theaters are conspicuous.

But in the country the sign boards are no luxuries but stern necessities. This the aesthete-reformers fail to see because they lack a sense of the unfitness of things. It is their incongruity which gives to rustic sign boards the magic of romance. The deliberately commercial announcement, firmly set in an innocent meadow or among the eternal hills, has exactly the same charm as a b.u.t.tercup in a city street or a gray wood-dove fluttering among the stern eaves of an apartment house.

What a benefaction to humanity these rural sign boards are! To the farmer they are (in addition to being a source of revenue) a piquant suggestion of the wise and wealthy city. He loves and fears the city, as mankind always loves and fears the unknown. Once he thought that it was paved with gold. He must have thought so, otherwise how could he have accounted for the existence of gold bricks? He is less credulous now, but still the big signs down where the track cuts across the old pasture pleasantly thrill his fancy.

And what would a railway journey be without these gay and civilizing reminders? They hide the shame of black and suicidal bogs with cheery hints of vaudeville beyond, they throw before the privacy of farmhouses a decent veil of cigarette advertis.e.m.e.nts. He who speeds vacation-ward from the city is glad of them, for they remind him that he is where factories and huge shops may come only in this pictured guise, thin painted ghosts of their noisy selves. He who gladly speeds back to domesticity and the ordered comforts of metropolitan life sees them as welcoming seneschals, glorious advance-posts of civilization. They are the least commercial of all commercial things, they are as human and as delightful as explorers or valentines.

THE GREAT NICKEL ADVENTURE

Whenever I read Mr. Chester Firkins' excellent poem ”On a Subway Express” I am filled with amazement. It is not strange that Mr. Firkins turned the subway into poetry, it is strange that the subway does not turn every one of its pa.s.sengers into a poet.

There are, it is true, more comfortable means of locomotion than the subway; there are conveyances less crowded, better ventilated, cooler in Summer, warmer in Winter. A little discomfort, however, is an appropriate accompaniment of adventure. And subway-riding is a splendid adventure, a radiant bit of romance set in the gray fabric of the work-a-day world.

The aeroplane has been celebrated so enthusiastically in the course of its brief life that it must by now be a most offensively conceited machine. Yet an aeroplane ride, however picturesque and dangerous, has about it far less of essential romance than a ride in the subway. He who sails through the sky directs, so nearly as is possible, his course; he handles levers, steers, goes up or down, to the left or the right. Or if he is a pa.s.senger, he has, at any rate, full knowledge of what is going on around him, he sees his course before him, he can call out to the man at the helm: ”Look out for that cornet's hair! Turn to the left or the point of that star will puncture our sail!”

Now, unseen dangers are more thrilling than those seen; the aeroplane journey has about it inevitably something prosaic. This is the great charm of the subway, that the pa.s.sengers, the guards, too, for that matter, give themselves up to adventure with a blind and beautiful recklessness. They leave the accustomed sunlight and plunge into subterranean caverns, into a region far more mysterious than the candid air, into a region which since mankind was young has been a.s.sociated with death. Before an awed and admiring crowd, the circus acrobat is shut into a hollow ball and catapulted across the rings; with not even a sense of his own bravado, the subway pa.s.senger is shut into a box and shot twenty miles through the earth.