HE
“The old man clawed and spat at me through the moldyair, and barked things in his throat as he swayed with the yellowcurtain he clutched.”
I saw him on a sleepless night when I was walking desperately tosave my soul and my vision. My coming to New York had been amistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder andinspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twistendlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts tocourts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in theCyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonianunder waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror andoppression which threatened to master, paralyze, and annihilate me.
The disillusion had been gradual. Coming for the first time upon thetown, I had seen it in the sunset from a bridge, majestic above itswaters, its incredible peaks and pyramids rising flowerlike anddelicate from pools of violet mist to play with the flaming goldenclouds and the first stars of evening. Then it had lighted up windowby window above the shimmering tides where lanterns nodded andglided and deep horns bayed weird harmonies, and had itself become astarry firmament of dream, redolent of faery music, and one with themarvels of Carcassonne and Samarcand and El Dorado and all gloriousand half-fabulous cities. Shortly afterward I was taken throughthose antique ways so dear to my fancy—narrow, curving alleys andpassages where rows of red Georgian brick blinked with small-paneddormers above pillared doorways that had looked on gilded sedans andpaneled coaches—and in the first flush of realization of theselong-wished things I thought I had indeed achieved such treasures aswould make me in time a poet.
But success and happiness were not to be. Garish daylight showedonly squalor and alienage and the noxious elephantiasis of climbing,spreading stone where the moon had hinted of loveliness and eldermagic; and the throngs of people that seethed through the flumelikestreets were squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narroweyes, shrewd strangers without dreams and without kinship to thescenes about them, who could never mean aught to a blue-eyed man ofthe old folk, with the love of fair green lanes and white NewEngland village steeples in his heart.
So instead of the poems I had hoped for, there came only ashuddering blankness and ineffable loneliness; and I saw at last afearful truth which no one had ever dared to breathe before—theunwhisperable secret of secrets—the fact that this city of stone andstridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London isof Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quitedead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested withqueer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was inlife. Upon making this discovery I ceased to sleep comfortably;though something of resigned tranquillity came back as I graduallyformed the habit of keeping off the streets by day and venturingabroad only at night, when darkness calls forth what little of thepast still hovers wraithlike about, and old white doorways rememberthe stalwart forms that once passed through them. With this mode ofrelief I even wrote a few poems, and still refrained from going hometo my people lest I seem to crawl back ignobly in defeat.
Then, on a sleepless night’s walk, I met the man. It was in agrotesque hidden courtyard of the Greenwich section, for there in myignorance I had settled, having heard of the place as the naturalhome