No Man’s Land, A Romance

A GENTLEMAN who, leaving his offices on lower Broadway a trifle after four, presently ensconced himself in a corner seat of a Subway express and opened before him a damp afternoon paper (with an eye for the market reports) was surprised when the train crashed heavily into the Fourteenth Street station, to find himself afoot and making for the door: this. However, he had intended to alight at Grand Central. Thus, it may be that the trickster in us all, which we are accustomed vaguely to denominate the subconscious mind, directs our actions to an end predestined.

Surprised, he hesitated, and for that, he was rewarded by having his heels trodden by the passenger behind. This decided him, absurdly enough, and he went on and out, solacing himself with a muttered something, hardly definite, about a stroll benefiting him. So, transferring to a local train, he alighted at Twenty-third Street, climbed the stairs, and proceeded briskly west, buffeted by a rowdy wind.

Striking diagonally across Madison Square Park, past the drearily jetting fountain and between arrays of empty benches scarcely beggarly (since that class had deserted them for warmer lounging places), he turned northward on Fifth Avenue, threading the early evening crowds with a spring of impatience in his stride to distance casual competition; and received upon a mind still impressionable, for all that it had ample food for meditation and nursed a private grievance, a variety of pleasurable suggestions.

Dusk, the early violet dusk of late November, brooded over the city, blurring its harsh contours, subduing its too blatant youth, lending an illusion resembling the dim enchantment of antiquity. In the west, a cloudless sunset had faded to an afterglow of amethyst which, shading insensibly into mauve, toward the zenith blended with the deep purple of the shrouded east. Against this lucent curtain bulked monstrous walls with a broken skyline, now low, now lofty, dotted here and there on high with glittering windows, below rendered brilliant by a dado of illuminated plate-glass shielding covetable wares, the whole cut at regular intervals by the gullies of crosstown streets. Northward were strung parallel lines of opalescent arc lamps, swelling over the generous rise of Murray Hill like twin chains of luminous pearls upon a woman’s bosom.