Hints to Pilgrims. Charles Brooks
en Brooks
Hints to Pilgrims
Hints to Pilgrims
WHEN a man's thoughts in older time were set on pilgrimage, his neighbors came forward with suggestions. One of them saw that his boots were freshly tapped. Another was careful that his hose were darned with honest wool – an oldish aunt, no doubt, with beeswax and thimble and glasses forward on her nose. A third sly creature fetched in an embroidered wallet to hold an extra shift, and hinted in return for a true nail from the holy cross. If he were a bachelor, a tender garter was offered him by a lonely maiden of the village, and was acknowledged beneath the moon. But the older folk who had made the pilgrimage took the settle and fell to argument on the merit of the inns. They scrawled maps for his guidance on the hearth, and told him the sights that must not be missed. Here he must veer off for a holy well. Here he must beware a treacherous bog. Here he must ascend a steeple for the view. They cautioned him to keep upon the highway. Was it not Christian, they urged, who was lost in By-path Meadow? Again they talked of thieves and warned him to lay a chair against the door. Then a honey syllabub was drunk in clinking cups, and they made a night of it.
Or perhaps our pilgrim belonged to a guild which – by an agreeable precedent – voted that its members walk with him to the city's gate and present from each a half-penny to support him on the journey. The greasy pockets yield their treasure. He rattles on both sides with generous copper. Here, also, is a salve for man and beast – a receipt for a fever-draught. We may fancy now the pilgrim's mule plowing up the lazy dust at the turn of the road as he waves his last farewell. His thoughts already have leaped the valley to the misty country beyond the hills.
And now above his dusty road the sun climbs the exultant noon. It whips its flaming chariot to the west. On the rim of twilight, like a traveler who departs, it throws a golden offering to the world.
But there are pilgrims in these later days, also, – strangers to our own fair city, script in wallet and staff in hand, – who come to place their heavy tribute on our shrine. And to them I offer these few suggestions.
The double stars of importance – as in Baedeker – mark our restaurants and theatres. Dear pilgrim, put money in thy purse! Persuade your guild to advance you to a penny! They mark the bridges, the shipping, the sharp canyons of the lower city, the parks – limousines where silk and lace play nurse to lap dogs – Bufo on an airing, the precious spitz upon a scarlet cushion. They mark the parade of wealth, the shops and glitter of Fifth Avenue on a winter afternoon. "If this is Fifth Avenue," – as I heard a dazzled stranger comment lately on a bus-top, – "my God! what must First Avenue be like!"
And then there are the electric signs – the mammoth kitten rolling its ball of silk, ginger-ale that forever issues from a bottle, a fiery motor with a flame of dust, the Wrigley triplets correcting their sluggish livers by exercise alongside the Astor roof. Surely letters despatched home to Kalamazoo deal excitedly with these flashing portents. And of the railroad stations and the Woolworth Tower with its gothic pinnacles questing into heaven, what pilgrim words are adequate! Here, certainly, Kalamazoo is baffled and must halt and bite its pen.
Nor can the hotels be described – toppling structures that run up to thirty stories – at night a clatter in the basement and a clatter on the roof – sons of Belial and rich folk from Akron who are spending the profit on a few thousand hot-water bottles and inner tubes – what mad pursuit! what pipes and timbrels! what wild ecstasy! Do we set a noisy bard upon our towers in the hope that our merriment will sound to Mars? Do we persuade them that jazz is the music of the spheres? But at morning in these hotels are thirty stories of snoring bipeds – exhausted trousers across the bed-post, frocks that have been rumpled in the hubbub – tier on tier of bipeds, with sleepy curtains drawn against the light. Boniface, in the olden time, sunning himself beneath his bush and swinging dragon, watching the dust for travelers, how would he be amazed at the advancement of the inn! Dear pilgrim, you must sag and clink for entrance to the temples of our joyous gods. Put money in thy purse and wire ahead!
On these streets there is a roar of traffic that Babylon never heard. Nineveh in its golden age could have packed itself with all its splendid luggage in a single building. Athens could have mustered in a street. Our block-parties that are now the fashion – neighborhood affairs in fancy costumes, with a hot trombone, and banners stretched from house to house – produce as great an uproar as ever arose upon the Acropolis. And lately, when our troops returned from overseas and marched beneath our plaster arches, Rome itself could not have matched the largeness of our triumph. Here, also, men have climbed up to walls and battlements – but to what far dizzier heights! – to towers and windows, and to chimney-tops, to see great Pompey pass the streets.
And by what contrast shall we measure our tall buildings? Otus and Ephialtes, who contracted once to pile Pelion on top of Ossa, were evidently builders who touched only the larger jobs. They did not stoop to a cottage or a bungalow, but figured entirely on such things as arks and the towers of Jericho. When old Cheops sickened, it is said, and thought of death, they offered a bid upon his pyramid. Noah, if he was indeed their customer, as seems likely, must have fretted them as their work went forward. Whenever a cloud appeared in the rainy east he nagged them for better speed. He prowled around on Sunday mornings with his cubit measure to detect any shortness in the beam. Or he looked for knot-holes in the gopher wood. But Otus and Ephialtes could not, with all their sweating workmen, have fetched enough stones for even the foundations of one of our loftier structures.
The Tower of Babel, if set opposite Wall Street, would squat as low as Trinity: for its top, when confusion broke off the work, had advanced scarcely more than seven stories from the pavement. My own windows, dwarfed by my surroundings, look down from as great a height. Indeed, I fancy that if the famous tower were my neighbor to the rear – on Ninth Street, just off the L – its whiskered masons on the upmost platform could have scraped acquaintance with our cook. They could have gossiped at the noon hour from gutter to sink, and eaten the crullers that the kind creature tossed across. Our whistling grocery-man would have found a rival. And yet the good folk of the older Testament, ignorant of our accomplishment to come, were in amazement at the tower, and strangers came in from Gilead and Beersheba. Trippers, as it were, upon a holiday – staff in hand and pomegranates in a papyrus bag – locusts and wild honey, or manna to sustain them in the wilderness on their return – trippers, I repeat, cocked back their heads, and they counted the rows of windows to the top and went off to their far land marveling.
The Bankers Trust Building culminates in a pyramid. Where this narrows to a point there issues a streamer of smoke. I am told that inside this pyramid, at a dizzy height above the street, there is a storage room for gold. Is it too fanciful to think that inside, upon this unsunned heap of metal, there is concealed an altar of Mammon with priests to feed the fire, and that this smoke, rising in the lazy air, is sweet in the nostrils of the greedy god?
There is what seems to be a chapel on the roof of the Bush Terminal. Gothic decoration marks our buildings – the pointed arch, mullions and gargoyles. There are few nowadays to listen to the preaching of the church, but its symbol is at least a pretty ornament on our commercial towers.
Nor in the general muster of our sights must I forget the magic view from across the river, in the end of a winter afternoon, when the lower city is still lighted. The clustered windows shine as if a larger constellation of stars had met in thick convention. But it is to the eye of one who travels in the evening mist from Staten Island that towers of finest gossamer arise. They are built to furnish a fantastic dream. The architect of the summer clouds has tried here his finer hand.
It was only lately when our ferry-boat came around the point of Governor's Island, that I noticed how sharply the chasm of Broadway cuts the city. It was the twilight of a winter's day. A rack of sullen clouds lay across the sky as if they met for mischief, and the water was black with wind. In the threatening obscurity the whole island seemed a mightier House of Usher, intricate of many buildings, cleft by Broadway in its middle, and ready to fall prostrate into the dark waters of the tarn. But until the gathering tempest rises and an evil moon peers through the crevice, as in the story, we must judge the city to be safe.
Northward are nests of streets, thick with children. One might think that the old woman who lived in a shoe dwelt hard by, with all of her married sisters roundabout. Children scurry under foot,