Harvey J. O'Higgins

“ His imagination had leaped to her suggestion like a child to a new toy. To earn his living by writing plays! It would be a game of "pretend" such as he had used to play with Frankie. It would be played in this glittering world of the theatre, away from office drudgery and the slavery of business, above all the deceits and conventions and sufferings and vices of real life, looking down on the work-a-day world—as he had looked down from the top of the Fifth Avenue stage—with Margaret beside him, in an endless happiness. ”

“ Annie came white from her room. She blundered from pan to pan in the fat-smoke of the kitchen, helping the cook. Dazed and stupid, in the glare of the dining-room, she served greasy food to the tables and poured ice-water in a dream. Swaying over the pan of steaming dishes—at the sink where the roaches gathered to the sound of trickling water—she washed a thousand glasses, cups and saucers, plates and spoons, knives, forks, pans and pots, deaf to the kindly garrulity of the cook who helped her. ”

“ And with her entrance our movie melodrama became, at once, the tragedy of beauty and dignity and poignant repression.
She was draped in some sort of flowing dressing-gown that made her appear matronly and classical. Her hair had been hastily gathered up in a coiled disorder high on her head. She came in from the darkness to our light noiselessly, and found him with a slow, set look that pitied him and suffered for him and stood firm. It was a look of irrevocable judgment and unmerciful compassion; and it made her most movingly beautiful to see. ”

“ And imagine Port Derby a mere cluster of houses at the mouth of Catfish Creek, with orchards and corn-fields behind them, a rotting wharf at the water's edge, some boats drawn up on the sands, and a number of great pound nets, raised on poles in a shore meadow, waiting to be mended. Imagine the little village lying in a hollow so quiet and so hidden that the hills of the shore-line seemed to cuddle it in the crook of an arm, with a haze veiling it against the midday sun and all Lake Erie glittering before it and all Lake Erie's little waves rustling quietly on the beach shingle. ”

“ But I know this: hearing those two, watching them, seeing the deep and smiling trust of their way of looking at each other while they spoke and listened and remembering that weedy life of poverty and ignorance and murder and kleptomania from which he came—I felt that I could believe any miracle of the immortal spirit, any mysticism of the creative intelligence, any hope of the transcending soul. Science may say what it pleases of Benjamin McNeil Murdock. ”

“ It was an experience of life for which Don's books had not prepared him. It was a lesson from life itself, and not the colourless argument of a theory of life. And confused by the thousand changing incidents that repeated the question incessantly around him, touched in his sympathies and revolted in his ideals, he went about his "boosting" as if bewildered by the noises of the street, staring and distracted.
Tower did not come on that second afternoon to see him "started," and he worked alone, without any smiling companionship to disguise from him the hypocrisy of his employment. ”

“ Certainly Judson Street, at any hour, in any season, was not beautiful. It was given over to butchers' stalls and stale bakery windows, shoddy dry-goods “emporiums,” and corner saloons—and to the tenement-house poor who crowded the human burrows above the shops. On such a night as this, two days after a heavy snowfall, it was as untidy as a back lane, clogged with a churned mass of mud and frozen slush as coarse as butcher's salt. And yet little Nellie Moore had come back from her convent boarding-school, to spend her Christmas holidays in Judson Street, as glad as any other exile to be home. ”

“ A bright explosion of lightning that burst the sky showed a blanched world of rock and field in gray greens, the woods before him lashed and reeling, the road ankle-deep in a muddy torrent. It was all blotted out instantly in a roar of thunder. When the next stab of lightning cut the darkness, the auto had vanished down the mountain-side and Barney was hidden by the woods. ”

“ The friendliness of her smile was only the sparkle of sunlight on very deep water; he knew it; he knew that no amount of peering would give him a sight of what lay below that dazzle; and it was with the intention of clouding it over, that he repeated, with his persistent frown: "What are you doing here?
"Living," she said. "Don't you like it?"
It was a blue-and-white kitchen, with blue-and-white curtains on the windows, blue-and white china on the shelves, blue-and-white linoleum on the floor. ”

“ Sitting in his room of an evening, he pictured her, in the midst of light and company, charming everybody with her piano-playing and accepting their congratulations with an unembarrassed smile. Working at his studies in the college library, worried by the uncertain prospect of his future, she seemed one of those happy aristocrats of art and leisure whose duty it is to adorn life, to give pleasure, and to be happy that they may make others so. Sullied with his own disbeliefs, he thought of her innocent faith as something sweet and pure. ”

“ Barney grabbed it eagerly. “This is no day to be in school, is it?” Babbing said to him at the door. And Barney’s throat was so choked with excitement that he could only gulp and grin.
Snider, seeing them go, had the puzzled eyebrows and the doubtful smile of the man who does not believe that you can do it but would like to know how you propose to begin. To find, in the city of New York, a swindler whom you have never seen, of whom you have no accurate description, who may not have come to New York at all, and who will be carefully concealing himself if he has come! ”

“ He knew only that he would not return in the morning to sweep up the dirtied sawdust and sprinkle the floor with fresh; that he would not roll out the barrel of herrings, and set the baskets of vegetables on the benches outside the window, and fill the twine boxes, and hang the paper bags on their hooks under the shelves. And he had so long looked out on the world from Mrs. Moore's doorway—the routine of his work there had been, for so long, the routine of life itself—that he felt himself lost, unsettled, miserably outcast. ”