Achmed Abdullah

“ And then Jabez Massingham walked upstairs to his room and killed himself; and, even after his death, he could still feel Broadway creeping in from the corner like a stony jungle, overwhelming him with its rank exuberance of concrete and steel and pinchbeck stucco. ”

“ Good old Broadway is sure growing some, ain’t she?”
“Yes,” said Jabez Massingham, very gravely.
He understood that he had no time to lose. Broadway was creeping in, creeping in—that he must gird his loins and fight and vanquish this jungle as he had fought and vanquished the other in Africa. And, since in all the world’s fights there is only the choice between two weapons, steel and gold, he chose the stronger of the two—gold. ”

“ And since to be a poet is to be an unconscious logician, he knew from the beginning that it would be useless to hunt for his wife. It was only out of respect for public opinion that he set the necessary machinery into motion. The police, the newspapers, and the man in the street had their usual theories; they talked glibly about other women who had disappeared, to turn up, years later, in some drab house of ill-fame. They mentioned accidents and sudden loss of memory.
But Jabez Massingham knew that it was Broadway itself, and not its people, that had stolen his wife. ”

“ The jungle hates you and me, because we—you and I—have enslaved it and its people, because we have cut through its stinking heart with rope and sword, and the chain of the slaver’s gang, and the crimson torch licking over the villages in the clearings. ”

“ Waited for her forty years; then got tired of waiting, and—bang!”
He gave an involuntary shudder. He looked through the window, out at Broadway, at the tortured contours of roof and steeple and dome that etched a skyline of cold, elfin green, up at the moon that seemed stabbed on the pretentious flagpole of a motion-picture theater—fluttering there, like a helpless, gutted thing.
It made a pleasantly sensational, pleasantly tragic little tale in the next day’s newspaper. It was good for John W. Beatty’s reputation and pocketbook. And, we repeat, it might have been true. ”

“ He meant to stop the Broadway jungle from growing in his direction, from stretching out its slimy tentacles, from catching him and sucking him under; and, remembering his old African jungle lore, he realized that, to do this, he must make a barrier, a clearing which Broadway could not span. ”

“ He perceived a man with a scrawny, red neck stooping to tie his boot-lace; a girl with dark hair and strange violet-blue eyes stopping suddenly and looking at the moon with an expression of rather silly beatitude; a tall, thin man in black serge and a chocolate-brown bowler hat walking into a saloon with the undulating motion of a snake ”

“ It was not enough to acquire, gradually, as he raised the money, the houses that ran from the Hotel Marquis to the corner, and those across the street, as well as those behind the hotel. He must, furthermore, destroy them, raze them to the ground, create a barren desert so as to give the jungle no point of support and leverage around which—and, later on, from which—to throw its choking lianas of steel and cement. ”

“ To pay, he would at times be forced to sell land instead of buying. Then Broadway would gain a foot here, a foot there—would sweep from the corner with an exuberance of masonry—and he would have to build a second line of defense, to buy more houses and raze them, to decrease his income again and again. ”

“ On his return from the honeymoon, instead of going to his residence on lower Fifth Avenue, which was being redecorated, he had taken a suite at the Hotel Marquis, in the Forties near Broadway—the little stuffy old hotel which, in those days, had been the last word in perfect service, up-to-date appointments, and proper pot-pourri of periods, from Saracenic to Italian Renaissance.
“Forty years ago to-day,” said Beatty, “they returned from their honeymoon; and that very night he lost her.”
“Must have died suddenly,” said the girl. ”

“ Under the benevolent gaze of an ancient waiter with amazing pepper-and-salt side-whiskers, he reached across and patted her capable hand. “Just because I’m in love with you, I ought to respect other people’s emotions. ”

“ Like Nero and Aaron Burr and Tamerlane and John Brown, he was a poet who lives his poems instead of writing them. For nobody except a poet would have plunged into the African jungles and traded there with gorgeous things like slaves and ivory and gold ”