VERY night at midnight, or a little after, the fire dies out of New York's heart and leaves it cold and pitiless. The last red lobster has perished; the last taxicab meter has sold its short story for a tidy sum; the last sight-seeing automobile has crept down Broadway, carrying Little Rock, Peoria, Akron, and Fargo, to investigate the midnight wickedness of the Bowery.
The electric fire on the big street fades, and the great city, looming gray in the half-light, stares cruelly down upon the haggard army that lingers homeless in its parks.
And with the naked hate in their eyes, such of the army as cannot wrap the mockery of their benches about them and lie down to pleasant dreams, stare back. In the great, gray city's stolid face they shake their angry fists. Whereupon the city mingles with its stare a well-bred sneer.
Shaking such a metaphorical fist, Jimmy Merrick sat on a bench in the quietest corner of Madison Square. He was scorned of the city. With a long distance sneer it had regarded the two leather-bound, typewritten tragedies he held in his lap, and the third, which he held in his heart.
You, sir, with your gout, and I with my dyspepsia, might have looked into Jimmy Merrick's strong young face and denied him that tragedy in his heart, as fancy-waistcoated managers had denied him the two in the leather covers. But that would not have made it any less real to Jimmy. For he was young, and he thought he was suffering for the cause of , which the compositor will be careful to set upper-case.
He shook that metaphorical fist once more in the face of the heartless town. Only that evening the town had spoken, through a landlady, and, because of a little matter of unpaid gold, had deprived him of the shelter of his room—all because he chose to linger in the purple twilight of tragedy, rather than gather news for a subsidized daily of national reputation. Jimmy stuck out also, a metaphorical tongue. Then he lurched disconsolately in his seat, his long legs stretching far over the gravel path.
A little man, with the sloop of dejection in his shoulders and the slouch of gloom in his hat, wandered down the path and fell absently over the Merrick feet.
“Pardon, Monsieur,” he said in French, and then dropped to the bench as if the apology were but begun.
The little man looked also at the gray town, and in his eyes dejection mingled with the hatred.
Jimmy Merrick slid quickly along the bench and laid his hand on a brother's shoulder.
“Misery,” he said bitterly, “is as lonesome as merit on Broadway. The city has spurned you, too, my friend?”
With renewed energy the little man leaped to his feet, and made belligerent motions toward the giant scrapers of the sky.
“My grievance,” he cried, “is against a city of degenerate tastes. Where once I bowed to applauding thousands, ballet dancers kick up their soiled pink heels. Aged acrobats oust me from the boards. The doors of the managers, that open so readily to her of the green tights who has cribbed a dance from classic literature, are forever barred to me—the artist!”
Jimmy Merrick hugged tightly the manuscripts of two great, unacted tragedies.
“Our sorrow is the same,” he said. “But for that very degeneracy of taste, a brass bed and not an iron bench would receive me to-night. The efforts of schoolboys are flaunted in electric letters, while men of parts stand in the bread line. And your name—Monsieur?”
“You have seen,” responded the little man, “that name on a thousand bills, both here and at home, in Paris. A great headliner, Monsieur—but oh, so long ago. The king of vaudeville. They recognized me—in those days—oui, at a glance. Professor Alphonse Perrin. So, you have seen it on the bills?”
“And your act—?”
“Mon Dieu—you also have forgotten. I, Monsieur, am a trainer of that noble beast, the elephant. Think—have you not seen them—my beloved children—Mark and Miranda? The two performing elephants—the most clever ever before the public? But no—why is it that I ask? We have played nothing better than Hoboken in ten years. And now—homeless—forgotten—but you, Monsieur? What is your act?”
“I,” said Mr. James Merrick, dignity, “am a writer of plays. Not ordinary plays. Not such plays as your ash-man, or your butcher, or your elevator-boy, toil over in the long night. Not such plays as the sordid mechanicians of Broadway construct for gleaming gold. In my work is the soul of Art laid bare.”
He stood up and pointed a long, lean finger at the city.
“And what do they tell me?” he cried. “They tell me to go. 'Be off, you and your plays,' they sneer. 'On your way! Beat it!'”