I smiled, we talked, and in my heart I doubted he would come, but he did. Alas now for the train of circumstances! He came, and he is lost.
I was waiting in the harbor and he was in the city. It is so perhaps still. I was answering once more those endless questions: "Are you in favor of subverting existing government by force?" "Only in such a case as that of Colombia in 1902," I reply. That will not be taken as an answer. "Am I a polygamist?" "Ever been deported?"--
The questioning is interrupted by the discovery of an abduction case--hours pass. It was nearly eight when I got free.
As I walked out of the dock gate in white coat, riding breeches, and knapsack on my shoulders an impatient cabman cried out--"Now the caballeros are coming." But I hastened to a street car and then to Forty-second Street and the Hotel Commodore, that Temple of the Calf, in which my poet had chosen to stay. And he knew where Ewart was staying. So we were joined again, the three of us, as we had been in London two years before.
Vachel, at that time engrossed by classic Art and modern American politics, was an enigma to Ewart. The American's enthusiasms were bewildering to the Englishman just fresh from our "no-enthusiasm-for-anything-that-matters" atmosphere of England. One thing, however, both admired, and that was Broadway at night all lit up from the color reflections on the road-crowds to the stars in the sky. But they admired it in different ways. Ewart admitted the grandness of America but never felt its greatness. For New York he obtained an admiration which had not learned its bounds. He knew it as the greatest piece of human magnificence he had seen. Central Park was his favorite haunt, and many an afternoon he walked there and watched, in the evening, the fade-out in the dusk, and then the lighting, the starring, the flaming, the rising of the brightness, and then at last the fast-pouring floods of electric illumination.
Life for me in a giddy New York week changed incredibly from the languor of the tropics to the ardor of the North. It was meetings at luncheon, meetings at dinner, theater every night, business letters, telephone messages in consecutive half dozens, rolling about in "overheads" and "undergrounds" and cabs. I knew I should be glad to get away.