Antennae

Wilfred Pell stole down-stairs carrying his shoes. With infinite care he turned the handle of the front door, his heart in his mouth. When one pressed down a catch in the lock, it permitted the outside handle to turn; and one could come in again. He sat down in the vestibule to put on his shoes. There was also an outer door, closed when the family went to bed. This had an ordinary lock, and the key was in it. It had been Wilfred’s intention to lock this door, and carry the key with him; but in the act of doing so the thought struck him: Suppose there was a fire? How would his Aunts get out?

He had not much of an opinion of the presence of mind of those ladies. They might very well stand there rattling the door, and burn up before they recollected the basement door. Or the way to the basement might be cut off. He pictured flames billowing up the basement stairs. No! let them take the chance of robbery in preference to incineration. He left both doors unlocked behind him. Sometimes the policeman on beat tried the basement gates as he passed through the block; but Wilfred had never seen him mount the stoops to try the front doors. On the sidewalk there was a horrible moment as he passed within range of Aunt May’s windows over the drawing-room, then safety.

This was not his first sortie at ten o’clock. It was a way of release from the torment of his thoughts that he had discovered. That is, if he remembered it in time. Once the misery had him fairly in its grip he was helpless. It was this business of becoming a man. Sometimes he went for a walk early in the morning; but everybody knew about that; he could not hug the secret deliciously to his breast. Anyhow morning walks were for light hearts, he thought, with a gentle swell of self-pity. Night for him! How wistfully he looked back towards the cool zone of childhood. What happened to you was not pleasant. He had noticed a funny thing; if he had said to himself during the day: To-night I will sneak out—there was no virtue in it; he carried his earthiness with him. But if while he was in his bed he yielded suddenly to the impulse; and arose and dressed; a sort of miracle occurred; he forgot himself.

It was so to-night. The night took him. He was thrilled by the double line of still houses fronting each other; each house with its windows fixed unswervingly on its adversary across the street; the oblique stoop rails like beards; the cornices like eyebrows. And overhead the stars, deathless flowers in a meadow. Wilfred felt that he belonged. He was as much the street’s as that cat creeping across, its belly hugging the asphalt. Like the cat he was all eyes, ears and nose; the thinking part of him had stopped working. He made a feint at the cat; and chuckled aloud at the creature’s precipitate loss of dignity. Gee! how good it was to be out!

Respectable West Eleventh street was already settling down. Most of the outer doors were closed, and many bedroom windows showed rectangles of an agreeable apricot light filtering through the lowered shades. Wilfred had turned East, seeking life. At the corner of Fifth Avenue he was struck by the effect of the new arc lights. Hanging two to a pole, the mellow pinkish globes stretched far into the distance in two gradually converging lines. Like insect lights they climbed the Thirty-Fourth street hill at last and disappeared. Fruit of Night, Wilfred whispered to himself.

In Washington Square this mild October night there were still many couples sitting on the benches. The sight of them left Wilfred cold; he merely wondered at their static attitudes; hours, apparently, without moving or speaking. But once as he passed such a couple, a girl whose face was hidden in a man’s neck, laughed softly in her throat, and Wilfred’s breast was acutely disturbed by the sound. It suggested that that private nightmare of his might be a loveliness when shared; that it was the means whereby two human hearts might open to each other. Never for me! he thought with a needle in his heart; and hurried away from the sound.

Through Washington Place across Broadway; through Astor Place and down the Bowery. The bulk of Cooper Union loomed like a whale against the sky. The sight of it, brought the slightly fœtid smell of the reading-room into Wilfred’s nostrils. It was a place where you could go. The bums never looked at you. He breasted the Bowery like a swimmer. No early-to-bed habits here. He edged along close to the store-fronts, looking at everybody; entering into them; thieves, prostitutes, drunken men, sporting characters, and the great unclassified. So many and such queer souls each peeping suspiciously out of a pair of eyes. With the shuffling of the people, the four track line of electric cars in the middle of the street, and the steam cars of the Elevated railway immediately over the sidewalk, the uproar was at once distracting and stimulating.

There were certain store windows that Wilfred always looked into; the florist’s full of green wire frames to serve as a foundation for funeral pieces; a musical instrument dealer’s exhibiting a gigantic brass horn and a doll’s horn beside it to show the range of the stock; an animal and bird store with cages of monkeys. Something furtive and ugly in the eyes of the people watching the monkeys made Wilfred exquisitely uneasy. As you went on the stores became less reputable in character. Besides the crowding saloons, there were the auction sales, celebrated in the popular song; the dime museums and side shows with faded banners; an anatomical museum, free “for men only.” All the shows had a free lobby to tempt you in. The most innocent were those with ranks of Edison’s phonographs inside; but Wilfred recoiled from the little bone pieces you had to stick in your ears.

Glancing into a store window where mirrors were displayed, he saw repeated from every angle, the figure of a boy that his eyes embraced all over in a flash. A boy approaching sixteen, tall for his age; dressed in a shapeless snuff-colored suit, with trousers that flapped almost as if there were no legs within them. He walked with a long step having a funny little dip in the middle. He had wavy, light brown hair, a lock of which escaped untidily under the visor of his cap to sweep his forehead. His eyes, somewhat deep-set, were grey-blue in color, and had a look at once haunted, secretive and top-lofty—Wilfred’s word. A wide mouth with uneven lips like a crimson gash across his white face. There was a something awkward about him; something self-centered and peculiar that set him apart from other boys. A boy to be jeered at. In that flash Wilfred saw it clearly.

Why . . . that’s me, he thought, with self-consciousness winging back, making the picture hateful. Oh Lord! what a dub! The picture remained fixed in his mind amongst the multitude of pictures capable of turning up at any odd moment.

At Rivington Street he turned East again, entering another populous world quite different in style from that of the Bowery. Here, on a mild night the family life of the East side, predominantly Jewish, was revealed. This was Wilfred’s objective. His solitariness was comforted by the vicarious sharing in many households. A narrow street hemmed in on either side by tall sooty tenements. The fronts of the houses were decorated with webs of rusty fire-escapes, the platforms of which were heaped with the overflow of goods from the crowded rooms within. From web to web criss-cross, everywhere ran the clotheslines with their fluttering damp burdens. In Rivington Street even the air was crowded.

The narrow sidewalk was maggoty with people. The inner side was lined by humble shops, the outer by an endless line of gay pushcarts like boats anchored alongside the curb, stretching for block after block and displaying every manner of goods. The low stoops between the shops were crowded, mostly with women of a complete, unconfined fatness; nearly every one of them suckling an infant. These mothers surveyed the scene with an equanimity that arrested Wilfred. To have a whole lot of children must be one way of solving the riddle. He liked these featherbed women; because . . . it was difficult for him to find the word for his thought; they didn’t fidget; they bore their fruit as inevitably as orchard trees. From the windows overhead leaned other fat women, comfortably supporting their forearms on pillows laid across the sills. Their faces expressed a great content.

Wilfred yielded himself to the scene of life. He had the sensation of straining open like petals. This was the pleasure they couldn’t take away from him; a pleasure that left a sweet taste in the mind.—The lavish set-out of goods under the brown canvas shelters; apples floating in brine and unwholesome-looking preserved fish; rows upon rows of ratty fur neckpieces and muffs; bolts of printed cottons; gay garters and suspenders; jewelry; dazzling tinware. The pushcarts were lighted by smoking kerosene torches that threw leaping, ruddy lights and sooty shadows on the scene. I must notice everything; Wilfred would say to himself; and forthwith begin to enumerate a catalogue in his mind. But his darting eyes could not wait for the names of things; they flew ahead and he forgot the catalogue. Presently he would come to consciousness thinking: I am not noticing anything!

The people! The dirty, savage, robust children shouldering their way through the crowd, shrieking to each other. To these children grown-ups were no more than bushes obstructing their hunting paths. Then there were the young people; the scornful, comely youths flaunting their masculinity, and the pretty girls undismayed by it. Empty and hard these young people were; what of it? They were aware of their beauty, and of their desirability in each other’s eyes; they were proud with youth; it was fine to see.

Wilfred turned North at last into a side street to find another way home. Dark streets had a different sort of attraction. No doubt the black houses were just as full of tenants as the others, but here, people were not drawn to the windows, nor down-stairs to the forbidding sidewalks. Only a group of men was to be seen here and there, on the steps, or loitering half-concealed in a vestibule. Night-birds, Wilfred thought with an intense thrill; cutthroats. How stirring to think of men who were restrained by nothing! Through each house there ran a narrow arched passage to a yard in the rear, where there was always, he knew, a second house hidden from the street. There would be a gaslight in the yard, and you would get a glimpse of greenish flagstones. By day or by night these passages teased Wilfred; but he had never dared to enter. In such dens Oliver Twist had been taught to steal; Nancy Sikes had been choked by the brutal Bill.

Wilfred soared like a bird. This was one of his “moments.” Why they came sometimes and not other times he did not know. His breast hummed like harpstrings. The seat of his intense feeling seemed to be somewhere at the back of his palate. It was almost the same as a pain, but it was rare! At such a moment nothing was changed; everything became more intensely itself. He was still Wilfred, but a Wilfred made universal. He entered into everything and became a part of it. At such a moment all tormenting questions were laid; it was sufficient that things were. Life was painted in such high colors that he was dazzled. The feeling of pain was due to the fact that he couldn’t take it all in. He had the actual sensations of soaring; he stretched his nostrils to get sufficient oxygen. Mixed with pure exaltation was the feeling: How wonderful of me to be feeling this way!