Читать книгу The World Does Move - Booth Tarkington - Страница 3

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THE thin young man who had come East to seek his fortune stood upon the steamer’s forward deck with the sea breeze blowing upon his eager face and hastening the combustion of the Sweet Caporal cigarette he had just lighted at the spark of its predecessor. Before him the immense castellated skyline that amazed the world swam to meet him as the steamer rushed toward it over the flat water; and, stirred by the wonder of this great sight, he exultantly whispered to himself, “New York! New York! New York!”

There was nothing else like it in the universe; and that startling invention, the skyscraper, gave it the air of being not real, but a prophetic vision of what cities might strangely come to be in the Twentieth and Twenty-first centuries. Yet there the new Cosmopolis was actually before him; and already he knew something of its miracles, learned in holiday visits during his New England school days and in week-ends away from Princeton. These week-ends were not of the long ago, having concluded only a year or so earlier; but at his age a year or so appeared to be a tremendous amount of time; he was returning to the glamorous city after what he felt had been a vast absence.

To him, as to most Westerners, New York meant Fifth Avenue and the Park, with long processions of romantically elegant ladies driving behind noble, sleek horses glitteringly harnessed; it meant an endless choice of theatres, with brilliant new plays done by superb actors; it meant a splendour of restaurants, with oysters and partridge and Burgundy unknown to the “cafés” of the great flat land behind the Alleghanies. It meant the Metropolitan Museum, the opera, the new Waldorf, the Holland House, Delmonico’s, Wall Street, Richard Harding Davis, John Drew, Weber and Fields, Tiffany’s, the Sun editorials and the New York World Building. For that supreme skyscraper floated its dome upon the very clouds; high over all it was the ever-exhilarating, ever-dumbfounding symbolic monument that loomed before the passengers from the West as the Cortlandt Street Ferry carried them across the Hudson from the great terminal station of the Pennsylvania Railroad in Jersey City; and if there were only seven wonders in all the tumultuous great modern world of the fin de siècle, here was surely one of them.

But to the thin young man upon the ferryboat’s forward deck, New York now meant something special that had not concerned him during his school and college adventurings there. Somewhere in the great hazy buildings north of Cortlandt Street there were fateful thresholds inaccessible to him; yet he must try to cross them, for they led to formidable desks where sat men of unlimited power dealing out destiny as coolly as a whist player deals cards. The thin young man’s future was somewhere obscurely shuffled into the pile of destinies at the disposal of these potentates—they were managers who produced plays, editors who produced magazines, and publishers who produced books; and in the young man’s trunk there were the manuscripts of two plays, of an unfinished novel, and of a now-forgotten number of short stories. The arrival in New York of that Cortlandt Street ferryboat, moreover, took place upon the bright morning of an autumn day a little more than thirty years ago; and the thin young man’s name coincided with my own.

I go back to that day now not because I am engaging in an autobiographical writing—for this is not a personal memoir—but because the end of the last century was the beginning of the end of an epoch not coinciding precisely with the calendar years of the Nineteenth Century; it is of the change into the present new epoch that I am writing, and I can but picture the change as it has been visible to the person most familiar to me. That day of his landing at Cortlandt Street with a luggage of hopes and manuscripts was well back into the older age, with its life and thought so different from our lives and thoughts now; and I choose—as they sometimes say in Vermont—to begin there.

We did not know, in those days, that we were approaching a new epoch; we could not possibly have imagined then the change that has come in what is relatively so short a time. In fact, we who have lived in both periods—that of the fin de siècle and that of the Twentieth Century—do not ourselves yet fully realize how profound is the alteration that has taken place. It has been going on from day to day, even from hour to hour, like the growth of a child to manhood; those who live with the child thus growing do not find him startling when, at thirty, he weighs one hundred and sixty pounds instead of the seven that was his weight at their first acquaintance with him. But the Massachusetts life convict who went to prison in 1896 and was pardoned in 1927 came back babbling to the penitentiary gates, clamouring piteously for readmission after a week of freedom, dumbfounded and panic-stricken. From the very moment of his release he might as well have been thrown out upon the surface of another planet.

Not one person alive in the world when that convict was sentenced, or when the thin young man reached New York with his scratchy manuscripts, could possibly have prophesied what America would be like to-day. There were a few fanatics who believed that horseless carriages were coming; there were even some ridiculous star-gazers who thought men would be seen flying overhead within the next five hundred years—perhaps within a hundred; there were devotees of teetotalism who predicted, in the face of general jocose scoffing, that “temperance legislation” would some day be enacted in Washington itself; other devotees predicted something of the kind for “female suffrage”; here and there were persons who foresaw individual advances in science or a coming change in a certain custom or in a certain type of established morality; but there was not on earth a mind that could have foreseen the whole vast change as we are living with it now.

The absence of such a prophet was not a misfortune. A complete view of this future now existing as the present would have staggered the fin de siècle mind, possibly to its unseating. If by some miracle of prevision the world of to-day, completely as it is, could have been seen by the people of that day, there were those among them, particularly among the older clergymen, who, like the friar Captain Brazenhead confessed to, would have “died that same night howling like a wolf”.