the rootless rock, meagrely to struggle in its infamous small phlegm along the pavements, feebly to imitate the feeble objects of its base idolatry—of which the most heroic was a gangster, the most sagacious was a pimp, the most witty was some Broadway clown.
How often, have we seen them, heard them, turned away from them with weariness and disgust, as they straggled along at night, a meagre shirt-sleeved band of gangling sizes, each fearful and uneasy in the other’s eye, kicking the ash-cans over as feats of derring-do, trying for approbation with a hoarse call and a pitiable and mirthless striving after repartee, of which the more glittering fragments ran like this:
“Hey-y… Eddy!… Holy Jeez!… Hey-y, youse guys!… Cuh-mahn!”
“Ah-h, what’s yer hurry?… Hey-y! Youse udah guys!… Joe’s in a hurry… Who’s goin’t’pay duh taxi-ride?”
“Holy Jeez! What’s keepin’yuh!… Youse guys, cuh-mahn!”
“Ah-h, guh-wahn…. What’s t’hurry? Where’s duh fire?”
Now in these nights of waning summer, even these raucous voices, the pitiable sterility of these feeble jests, that meagre and constricted speech consisting almost wholly of a few harsh cries and raucous imprecations that recurred intolerably, incredibly through all the repercussions of an idiotic monotony—all of the rootless, fearful, and horrible desolation of these young pavement lives—was somehow caught up in this great and tragic hush and spell of time, transmuted by it, until even their vast unloveliness of youth was given a sorrowful quality of pity and regret.
August came, and with it already a faint and troubling premonition of the autumn—a breath, a fragrance, and an odour—that somehow spoke of summer’s ending, the premonitory thrill and promise of the voyage. What was it? It was one of those very strange and troubling odours known here in America, of which our lives are all compact, which we have lived and breathed and known with our blood, and for which we have no language. It is, somehow—the odour of cities, cities, cities—at the hour of evening, the scorched end of every expiring day—the smell of evening hush and peace and of the sea in harbours. It is the smell of old worn woods, warm, resinous, sultry, getting into our very entrails somehow with its strange and nameless fragrance of sorrow and delight; the smell of the wooden baseball bleachers, of the old worn plankings of an amusement park, passed over by a million feet since morning; and it is the smell of street-cars, car-barns, the faded day-
