Chapter 9

Spring in the Square! The central fountain is playing again its rainbow jet of spray, the tulips are a jaunty ring about it, the benches have put forth a strange, sad foliage of humanity (you must not think too much of the benches nor look at them too long!), the shrill children are everywhere, the green 'busses are gay with sight-seers atop, and as you stand by the fountain and look northward through the Washington Arch, you see that an amazing thing has come to pass. The great arch spans the vista of the Avenue, lined here with red brick dwellings and the sunny white bulk of the old Brevoort House. Far off, the sky-scrapers begin to loom, whipping out flags and steam plumes. It is a treeless vista, yet it is hazed with spring! Imagination, you scoff--and dust. Yet you look again, and it is not imagination, and it is not dust. It is the veil of spring, cast with delicate hand over the city. These laughing sight-seers atop the green 'bus now going under the arch feel it, too. These children screaming round your feet, as they dash through the wind-borne fountain spray, are aware of it. There is an answering benignity in the calm, red brick dwellings up the vista of the Avenue. Wait for a few hours, let the sun sink behind the heights of Hoboken, and then wander once more into the Square. Twilight, a warm, balmy twilight, is upon your spirit. Look through the arch southward now. There is still plenty of light left in the sky, but the great, springing, Roman masonry is dusky. It frames the sweeping curve of the asphalt around the fountain, and beyond that the Judson Memorial tower, graceful, Italian, bearing its electric cross against the failing day like a cluster of timid evening stars. It is a tower from the plains of Lombardy, or from an island in the Tiber, seen through an arch of ancient Rome. Do you object to that in an American city? I cannot argue the point. I only know that when I see them so, the one framing the other, in the spring twilight, or in the early dusk of a winter day, my heart is very glad, and my spirit feels a touch of that peace and calm the poet felt among the Roman ruins,

"Where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles Miles on miles...."

How often in New York it is a tower which gathers the picture together! Ours is a city of towers. We hide Trinity spire in a well, and Henry Arthur Jones, the playwright, once complained that the windows of his hotel room on the Avenue looked down upon the pinnacle of a church steeple. Yet our towers rise just the same, new ones leaping up as far above the new three-hundred-foot sky-line as Trinity steeple once lifted above lower Broadway. We aspire still. Nor is the old Judson tower on Washington Square yet dwarfed. How many red sunsets have I seen glow through its belfry windows, while the tower itself was a black silhouette against the sky, and down in the shadowy Square the night lamps began to come out, or the asphalt, drenched by a shower, shone as if molten copper had been rained upon it! In how many deep, starlit nights have I thrown open my window for a fresher breath and a moment of meditation, to see the deserted Square below me, its white arch faintly gleaming in the radiation of the arc lamps, the long stretch of city roofs beyond, the twinkling lamps on the far heights of Hoboken, and there in the centre of the picture the dark, silent tower, keeping quiet watch and bearing its steady cross like a star-cluster in the night! Many a time I have gone to bed with its beautiful image behind my eyelids.

The Metropolitan tower in Madison Square is less intimate. It has its moods, but they are the moods of the mountain. It has dwarfed the graceful, Spanish tower of the Madison Square Garden, without a doubt, and taken the proud Diana down a peg. But there are compensations in its mightiness. Have you ever seen it on a foggy day going up out of sight into the driving vapors? Have you stood in ancient Gramercy Park--still a bit of the old, domestic New York of the '70's--and seen it booming up over the red brick dwellings, white and confident into the sun? Have you ever come down through Madison Square late at night, when the relic of a moon was rising behind the tower, and the ghostly shaft stood up tremendous against the pale, racing cloud-rack? Have you seen it with the last pink glow of sunset upon it, and upon the western wall of the Flatiron Building, and upon nothing else, all lower buildings being in shadows of obscuring twilight? That is one of its delicate mountain moods, when it seems to lift above our earth-bound vision and look over those western cloud ranges into the Land Beyond the Sunset.

Have you seen it, too, down Madison Avenue in the mysterious twilight hour of blue and gold when all New York is beautiful? The street lamps have come on; the dark figures of home-going pedestrians hurry past you; there are lamps in the windows of houses. A filmy blue veil of twilight obscures the distances, so that they are soft, alluring. The tower is pale, almost ethereal, at the end of the vista. Its great clock, pricked out with golden lamps, seems scarce a third of the way up its side. The white walls rise on, and on, with here and there a spot of gold, and taper into nothing. They are lost in the gloom of coming night. But still they must go on, for far aloft you see the lantern glowing like a star, hung between earth and heaven. In this twilight hour of blue and gold the tower is the mighty guardian spirit of the scene, sending down sonorous word of the hours as they pass, and lifting our eyes, like its steady lantern, toward the watch-towers of Eternity. Must we be forever reminded that those glowing window squares up its flanks denote lawyers toiling late at their briefs, or mining stock promoters planning a new cast of the net? Must we be forever told that this is not a spire in praise of God but a monument in praise of Mammon? Aspiration is in its lines, beauty in its sky-borne shaft of blue and gold, wonder in its shrouded summit.

"They builded better than they knew-- The conscious stone to beauty grew."

It is enough. Let us wonder and be glad.

There are many odd views of the tower to be had for a little searching, spots where its peak appears in unexpected places, or with unusual suggestion. There is just one point in Union Square, for example, about halfway round "dead man's curve," where you see the tapering pyramid and the golden lantern overtopping the high buildings between. You do not see it again, if you are walking up Broadway, till you are close to Madison Square. Then, if you lift your eyes, you are suddenly aware of it looming far aloft over the cornice-line to your right, shredding the mists on a stormy day, or by night lifting its lantern up with the stars. There is always an added impressiveness about a tower when we cannot see the base. The sheer drop of its sides is left to our imagination, and the human imagination may generally be trusted to embroider fact. For that reason alone, the view of the tower from a certain point on East Thirty-first Street, between Madison and Fourth Avenues, would be worth the searching out. But it has another and unique charm. If you will walk along Thirtieth Street toward Fourth Avenue you will see, tucked in between larger and more modern buildings on the south side, a little two-story-and-a-half wooden cottage, set back a few feet behind an iron fence. It must have stood there many years, for the wooden age in New York was long, long ago. It is a quaint little dwelling, with quaint pseudo-Gothic ornamentations, and until recently was used as an antique shop. A large weather-stained Venus stood upon the front porch, ironically beside a spinning-wheel! Now the house is untenanted, so that you lift your eyes the sooner to look above and beyond it. It occupies, of course, a slit between higher buildings. Through that slit, as you stand on the opposite curb, you look over a few spindly black chimney-stacks in the foreground directly to the Metropolitan Tower, booming up suddenly and unexpectedly. You see only that for a moment, because of its Titanic size and white impressiveness. Then you notice something outlined against it, a lower tower, much more slender, a mere tracery of delicate shafts and belfries, and crowning it, her bow forever poised, the lovely limbed Diana. Whence either of these towers come, you see not. They merely spring up into the vision over the roof of the little wooden house, the darker one outlined against the other for comparison. Between and around them steam plumes from unseen buildings drift like clouds. Diana turns a little, and points her shaft into the wind anew. The might of the new tower is mightier for this close comparison. Yet the other tower, too, does not suffer, its femininity is the more alluring. But lift your eyes as you walk through this commonplace cross-street of New York, and you may see as picturesque a vista, over the quaint wooden cottage, as any city, anywhere, affords--forty stories looking down on two and a half, and between them, in intermediate flight, St. Gaudens' bronze Diana.

Snow in the city! We in New York think of bespattered boots, of horses falling down, of dirty piles, more black than white, lining the streets like igloos till the tip-carts come and carry them off. "The frolic architecture" of the snow is a thing of memory, not of present fact. Like Whittier, we recall the hooded well-sweep or fantastic pump, and the great drifts by the pasture wall. Yet, once again, it is the seeing eye we lack, nor do we need even to enter the Park to discover the snow at its artistic handiwork. Let Sixty-fifth Street enter the Park for you, from the east, and do you stand upon Fifth Avenue and note the conversion from ugliness to beauty of a paved road, dipping into a dugway between dirty stone walls. The soiled pavement is hidden now, each rough stone on the bounding walls is softly outlined with white, not far into the Park a graceful stone foot-bridge spans the sunken street, supporting a second and more graceful arch of snow, and the street curves alluringly into the trees which rise beyond, a gray wall of misty shadow, the eye is satisfied with a clean, well-composed, strongly lined picture, and the imagination almost deluded into a belief of its rusticity.

I remember once walking down Broadway late at night, after an evening at some tiresome play and supper at some yet more tiresome and tawdry restaurant. I had been having what is popularly supposed to be a "good time," and I was bored. There had been a recent deep fall of snow. The night was clear and cold. Below Herald Square I met comparatively few pedestrians, and those few were not of the sort to dispel my despondent mood.

"Back home," I thought, "the moon should be shining on the white, clean hills, and underneath my boots the snow-crust would squeak. Perhaps a screech-owl would whistle his plaintive call in the ghostly orchard. How beautiful there the night would be! But here--" and I flung out my arm instinctively toward the walls which hemmed me in.

But as I drew near Madison Square, and lifted my eyes to the soaring ship's-prow of the Flatiron Building, I noted suddenly that its upper stories were bathed in a pale, golden glow; and coming full into the square, I saw the moon, riding small and high beyond the white tower. The next strip of canyon street shut it out once more, but at Union Square it was waiting to greet me, and as I entered the slit of Broadway to the south and drew near Eleventh street, I was aware of the snow-covered northward pitch of Grace Church roof gleaming in its light, a great rectangle of pale radiance at the bend of the street. Above the roof the Gothic spire stood up serenely. There were no passers at the moment, not even a trolley-car. The greatest traffic artery in town was hushed as death. The high buildings about were dark and shadowy. At the angle commanding the vista in either direction the church slept in the moonlight.

"Deep on the convent roof the snows Are sparking to the moon."

Tennyson's lines came to me instinctively, for here in the heart of town was their very picture and their simple magic. A little shamefaced for my sceptic blindness, I passed on toward home.

Somebody, probably Emerson, said that we bring from Europe only what we take to it. But need one go to Europe to demonstrate the principle? We in New York, who are often our city's harshest critics, find pretty much what we look for. We do not look for beauty, and we do not find it. Then, too, man is no less conventional about beauty than about other things. If he believes that the beauty of a city lies in a level cornice-line, converging vistas, malls of trees, "civic centres," of what use to tell him that there may be a beauty as well of non-conformity, when the magic veil of twilight wraps the city round, and twinkling lamps climb unbelievable heights and all the town is a mighty nocturne in blue and gold? We would not be thought to say that New York is always beautiful, or that a great deal of it is not much of the time ugly beyond hope. But there is not a street of it from end to end but has some point of pictorial charm, whence one may see a span of the Brooklyn Bridge leaping over the tenements, or the scholastic Gothic spire of the City College chapel crowning the rocks at the close of the vista, or just a rosy sunset over the Hoboken hills. And there are parks and squares of almost constant charm, though it be a charm not of the old world, but the new, of the uprearing steel city of the twentieth century. And finally there are certain hours when kindly Nature takes a hand at coloring our drab mortar piles and softening out distances and making our forests of masonry no less wonderful to look upon than her own forests of timber. Such an hour is the blue twilight, such an hour may be the wet evening when the pavements shine with molten gold and the electric signs along upper Broadway, like King Arthur's dragoned helmet, make "all the night a steam of fire," and round the tall tower of the Times Building the vapour clouds drift, now concealing, now revealing some beam of light from a window high aloft. After all, it is no great credit to any of us to find the ugliness in New York. The ugliness is rather obvious. To find the beauty is a worthier task, and might make us more keen to cherish and to expand it. It is there for the seeing eye.

_Spring in the Garden_

No daffodils "take the winds of March with beauty" in our Berkshire gardens. What daffodils we have in that month of alternate slush and blizzard bloom in pots, indoors. But one sign of spring the gardens holds no less plain to read, even if some people may not regard it as so poetic--over across the late snow, close to the hotbed frames, a great pile of fresh stable manure is steaming like a miniature volcano. To the true gardener, that sight is thrilling, nay, lyric! I have always found that the measure of a man's (and more especially a woman's) garden love was to be found in his (or her) attitude toward the manure pile. For that reason I put the manure pile in the first paragraph of my praise of gardens in the spring.

That yellowish-brown, steaming volcano above the slushy snow of March promises so much! I will not offend sensitive garden owners who hire others to do their dirty work, by singing the joy of turning it over with a fork, once, twice, perhaps three times, till it is "working" evenly all through. Yet there is such joy, accentuated on the second day by the fact that the thermometer has taken a sudden jump upwards, the snow is melting fast, and in the shrubs and evergreen hedge the song-sparrows are singing, and the robins. Last year, I remember, I paused with the steaming pile half turned, first to roll up my sleeves and feel the warm sun on my arms--most delicious of early spring sensations--and then to listen to the love-call of a chickadee, over and over the three notes, one long and two short a whole tone lower. I answered him, he replied, and we played our little game for two or three minutes, till he came close and detected the fraud. Then a bluebird flashed through the orchard, a jay screamed, as I bent to my toil again. Beside me were the hotbed frames, the glasses newly washed, the winter bedding of leaves removed, and behind them last year's contents rotted into rich loam. Another day or two, and they would be prepared for seeding--if I only could bring myself to work hard enough until then!

How much hope goes into a hotbed in late March, or early April! How much warmth the friendly manure down under the soil sends up by night to germinate the seeds, though the weather go back to winter outside--as it invariably does in our mountains! Last year, for example, we had snow on the ninth of April, and again on the twenty-third and twenty-ninth, while the year before, on the ninth, six inches fell. In the lowland regions gardening is easier, perhaps, but yet there is a certain joy in this fickle spring weather of ours,--the joy of going out in the morning across a white garden and sweeping the snow from hotbed mats, lifting the moist, steaming glass, and catching from within, strong against your face, the pungent warmth and aroma of the heated soil and the delicate fragrance of young seedlings. How fast the seeds come--some of them! Others come so slowly that the amateur gardener is in despair, and angrily decides to try a new seed house next year. The vegetable frames are sown in rows--celery, tomatoes, cauliflowers, lettuce, radishes, peppers, coming up in tiny green ribbons, the radishes racing ahead. The flower frames, however, are sown in squares, each about a foot across, and each labeled and marked off with a thin strip of wood. These are the early plantings of the annuals, for we cannot sow out-of-doors till the first or even the second week in May in our climate. Sometimes, indeed, we do not dare to sow even in the frames till well into April. The asters are usually up first, racing the weeds. The little squares make, in a week or so, a green checker-board, each promising its quota of color to the garden, and very soon the early cosmos, thinned to the strongest plants, has shot up like a miniature forest, towering over the lowlier seedlings, sometimes bumping its head against the glass before it can be transplanted to the open ground in May. But most prolific, most promising, and most bothersome, are the squares labeled "antirrhinum," coral red, salmon pink, white, dark maroon, and so on; tiny seeds scattered on the ground and sprinkled with a little sand, they come up by the hundred, and each seedling has to go into a pot before it goes into the ground.

There is work for an April day! I sit on a board by the hotbed, cross-legged like a Turk, while the sun is warm on my neck and I feel my arms tanning, and removing a mass of the seedlings on a flat mason's trowel, I lift each strong plant between thumb and finger, its long, delicate white root dangling like a needle, and pot it in a small paper pot. When two score pots are ready, I set them in a cold-frame, sprinkle them, stretch the kink out of my back, listen to the wood-thrush a moment (he came on the fourteenth and is evidently planning to nest in our pines), and then return to my job. Patience is required to pot four or five hundred snapdragons; but patience is required, after all, in most things that are rightly performed. I think as I work of the glory around my sundial in July, I arrange and rearrange the colors in my mind--and presently the job is done.

But the steaming manure pile is not the only sign of spring, nor the hotbeds the only things to be attended to. If they only were, how much easier gardening would be--and how much less exciting! There is always work to be done in the orchard, for instance, some pruning and scraping. I always go into the orchard on the first really warm, spring-like March day, with a common hoe, and scrape a little, not so much for the good of the trees as for the good of my soul. The real scraping for the scale spray was, of course, done earlier. There is a curious, faintly putrid smell to old or bruised apple wood, which is stirred by my scraping, and that smell sweeps over me a wave of memories, memories of childhood in a great yellow house that stood back from the road almost in its orchard, and boasted a cupola with panes of colored glass which made the familiar landscape strange; memories of youth in that same house, too, dim memories "of sweet, forgotten, wistful things." My early spring afternoons in the orchard are very precious to me now, and when the weather permits I always try to burn the rubbish and dead prunings on Good Friday, the incense of the apple wood floating across the brown garden like a prayer, the precious ashes sinking down to enrich the soil.

The bees, too, are always a welcome sign of the returning season, hardly less than the birds, though the advent of the white-throated sparrow (who delayed till April twenty-first last year) is always a great event. He is first heard most often before breakfast, in an apple tree close to the sleeping-porch, his flute-like triplets sweetly penetrating my dreams and bringing me gladly out of bed--something he alone can do, by the way, and not even he after the first morning! But the bees come long before. The earliest record I have is March thirty-first, but there must be dates before that which I have neglected to put down. Some house plant, a hyacinth possibly, is used as bait, and when the ground is thawing out beneath a warm spring sun we put the plant on the southern veranda and watch. Day after day nothing happens, then suddenly, some noon, it has scarcely been set on the ground when its blossoms stir, and it is murmurous with bees. Then we know that spring indeed has come, and we begin to rake the lawns, wherever the frost is out, wheeling great crate loads of leaves and rubbish upon the garden, and filling our neighbors' houses with pungent smoke.

There is a certain spot between the thumb and first finger which neither axe nor golf-club nor saw handle seems to callous. The spring raking finds it out, and gleefully starts to raise a blister. My hands are perpetually those of a day-laborer, yet I expect that blister every spring. Indeed, I am rather disappointed now if I don't get it, I feel as if I weren't doing my share of work. The work is worth the blister. I know of few sensations more delightful than that of seeing the lawn emerging green and clean beneath your rake, the damp mould baring itself under the shrubbery, the paths, freshly edged, nicely scarrowed with tooth marks; then of feeling the tug of the barrow handles in your shoulder sockets; and finally, as the sun is sending long shadows over the ground, of standing beside the rubbish pile with your rake as a poker and hearing the red flames crackle and roar through the heap, while great puffs of beautiful brown smoke go rolling away across the garden and the warmth is good to your tired body. Clearing up is such a delight, indeed, that I cannot now comprehend why I so intensely disliked to do it when I was half my present age. Perhaps it was because at that time clearing up was put to me in the light of a duty, not a pleasure.