chapter 17

It had become habit, leaving the Dakota, to walk out and back into the winter of 1882. I was used to the process now; there were no longer any doubts that it would happen lingering in my mind. Without questioning it I simply knew I was back and accepted it. So it seemed natural, stepping up onto the curb into Central Park—it had snowed during the day—to see horse-drawn sleighs, dozens and dozens and endless more dozens of then, gliding along every park roadway as far as I could see. It was a great sight, and walking along the path I felt that every sense was stirred and I was suddenly keenly aware of the winter actuality of it. My face felt the sharp clean air press onto my cheeks as I walked, and my lungs tasted it, clear and cold. Nearly every passing horse carried harness bells, and the winter air was bright with their sound, the drum of hoofs and the hiss of runners electrically exciting. And there was a special quality, a happy nostalgia, in the sound— high and faintly muffled—of voices outdoors in new snow. A maroon-enameled sleigh, passing close, had side panels painted with winter scenes, some of the horses wore whisks of dyed horsehair or feathers, and I swear that the eyes of every man and woman and child who jingled past me were smiling with the pleasure of the moment. I stopped on the path and made a quick sketch of the scene. Much later I finished it, working very carefully in the style of the period because it seemed appropriate. It's on the next page. You can see the Dakota in the background, and I wish you could hear the silvery sound of the wonderfully elaborate harness bells mounted on the horses' backs. Off across the park as I approached they were skating on the pond, and everywhere the park swarmed with kids, belly-flopping onto low wooden sleds, smaller kids bundled to the ears on high spraddle-runnered sleds pulled by older sisters, brothers, or adults. One such passed me pulled by a white-bearded man whose clothes—gaiters, very skinny pants, a strange dull-silk top hat that flared out at the top—were years out of fashion. He must have been far into his seventies, pulling that sled through the snow, and he was smiling; like everyone else I could see in the entire park, he was having fun. So was I, and I was suddenly happy to be alive here in this place at this time and moment; I was happy, I realized, to be back. But I didn't look forward to returning to 19 Gramercy Park; this was Sunday, and Jake Pickering could be home. So I stopped at a saloon on West Fifty-seventh Street—its front door waslocked, in deference to the Sunday closing law, I learned, after following two men in through a side door. There I had some soup and two huge sandwiches; I wanted to keep the greetings and questions and especially my first encounter with Jake as brief as possible, going up to my room immediately afterward, and saying I wasn't hungry at suppertime. But when I turned the corner, two big sleighs stood before the house. Felix Grier and a girl I didn't know sat in the front seat of the first one, Felix holding the reins, the girl with Felix's new birthday camera cradled in her lap; Byron Doverman was just helping a young woman into the rear seat. Julia was coming down the steps, carefully because of a layer of new snow, and right beside her Jake, in top hat and dark overcoat with a lamb's-wool collar, held her elbow. Maud Torrence was just behind them, and up on the stoop Aunt Ada stood locking the front door. They saw me before I could turn away; calling and beckoning. Felix, out of his mind with excitement—over the girl, I imagined—yelled down the street at me. "Welcome home! Just in time for the sleighing party! Mr. Pickering's rented two sleighs!" Waving back feebly, trying to smile as I walked on toward them, I was slamming together an excuse in my mind: tired out; long train ride; coming down with la grippe. Because of course I couldn't ride, the fifth wheel, with the two bachelors and their dates; and to ride in the other sleigh, Pickering glowering, then doing God only knew what crazy thing, was impossible. They surrounded me then, Felix leaping out of his sleigh to grab my free hand, the questions popping—how was my brother, how was my family?— welcoming me back, Byron grabbing my hand next, everyone so plainly glad to see me that I felt my eyes smart. And then my hand was grabbed again, and Jake was pumping it, happily grinning at me! I was trying to respond: My brother was unexpectedly much better; all was well at home; glad to be back! But I was staring at Jake, astounded: His big brown eyes were warm and friendly and his smile as he stood shaking my hand was real, as obviously sincere as the others. Julia was smilingat me, so really pleased my heart jumped. She shook my hand, so did Maud, and when Aunt Ada took my hand, she leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. And with that, I suddenly wanted to go with these people, wanted nothing else more. Aunt Ada took my bag, to unlock the door and set it inside, and Byron and Felix introduced me to their dates: Felix's very young and pretty; Byron's older, and though her face was pocked, an attractive woman, looking quietly intelligent. They politely asked me to ride with them but before I could reply Jake was saying no, I had to ride with them, taking me by the elbow, urging me to climb in; and when Julia suggested I ride up front with them, Jake agreed enthusiastically, asking if I wanted "the ribbons," meaning the reins, I realized. I simply gave up trying to figure out what was happening. Jake, I assumed, was a manic-depressive, an emotional pendulum, and I was glad and relieved to let it go at that. He took the reins after I refused with thanks; the horses would have turned and laughed if I'd tried to drive them. Maud and Aunt Ada sat in back, Julia in front between Jake and me. There'something keenly intimate, I discovered, in being pressed snugly against a girl, waist to knees,(s) underneath a robe. Tucking the robe in on my side, I glanced at Jake but he was grinning, hands on the reins ready to go. It wasn't quite comfortable, pressed shoulder to shoulder, and I brought up my left arm and laid it along the back of the seat behind Julia. But I was careful not to actually touch her; there was no point, no future, in dwelling on how nice it was this close beside her, and I made myself think of the scene, the snow-mounded black-iron fence and trees and shrubbery of little Gramercy Park beside us. "Ready?" Felix yelled over his shoulder, and Jake exuberantly shouted back that he was. Their reins snapped simultaneously, both teams dug in, and the harness bells came to life. The runners sliding easily, the horses eased back; then at a second snap of the reins as we rounded the corner onto Twenty-first Street, they tossed their heads, snorting jets of warm breath, and began to trot, obviously enjoying themselves, and now the harness bells sang. All I can really tell you about the rest of that day and the evening is that it was magical. A dream. The white streets of Manhattan were filled with sleighs; the air everywhere was alive with the music of their bells. And if that sounds overly lyrical I can't help it. The weekday wagons and vans were gone, even the horse-drawn buses and cars were rare; the streets and sidewalks were given over to people. On the walks they were pulling kids on sleds, throwing snowballs, making snowmen; children, adults, old men and women, laughing, calling to each other. And in the streets we passed and were passed by every kind of sleigh, and we called to them and they to us. We raced them sometimes; once, going up Fifth Avenue, we raced three teams abreast, drivers on their feet, whips cracking, girls shrieking, for nearly two blocks before—sleighs coming the other way—we had to fall into single file cheering and shouting. Heading north somewhere in the Fifties, Felix's sleigh half a block behind, Jake turned impulsively into a cross street just as a sleigh coming south swung in, too. Bells jingling, we trotted along side by side, grinning at each other.
It was a big, green-enameled swan's-neck affair, a beautiful sleigh. They were five kids in their late teens and early twenties, and one of the girls, in a red-and-white knitted cap tied under her chin, began singing: Dashing through the snow! In a one-horse open sleigh! O'er the field we go! And then all ten of us, everyone but me knowing all the words, came in on Laughing all the way! To the exact rhythm of our horses' hoofs and the jounce of our bells, we lined it out: Bells on bobtail ring! Making spirits bright! What fun it is to ride and sing—and it was; oh, Lord, it was—a sleighing song tonight! Then we roared it: Jingle bells, jingle bells! Jingle all the way! Oh, what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh! For two blocks—people on the walks calling out to us, kids throwing snowballs at us—we sang. Beside me Julia's voice was high, a soprano, very clear, very sweet and lovely, the white mist of her breath punctuating every phrase. Maud was nearly inaudible, Aunt Ada surprisingly youthful and good, Jake a rumbling baritone; and I guess I was a sort of lost-in-the-shuffle tenor. At the corner the kids swung south. Waving and yelling at each other, we headed north toward Central Park, both sleighs continuing to sing as long as each could hear the other. Felix caught up with us, and in the Park he took the lead, and we all flew along the curving roads with hundreds of other sleighs. Fast as we moved, sleighs raced past us, hoofs drumming, the runners on one side sometimes actually lifting from the snow on the curves. Some of the drivers carried what the others said were fish horns: brass horns they occasionally raised and blew into, producing a single mournful yet somehow exciting blast of brassy sound that hung in the air for a moment afterward. Ahead, Felix pulled over for a shot of the roadway, and we waited behind him as he focused the big red-leather-and-varnished-wood camera, the brass fittings gleaming in the winter light. It came out good, and when I saw it later I asked him for a copy, which he gave me. This is it, and I can't even look at it without smiling with pleasure. Half a mile farther on Felix saw another shot he-wanted, and as we waited behind him and I saw what he was taking—the shot below—I agreed; he had a good eye. They didn't notice us; themother was getting out a handkerchief for the boy on the sleigh; and I heard the child in the carriage call the older woman "Nanny." While Felix was taking the shot I walked over to their sleigh. When he finished I told him I'd seen an apartment building across the Park at Seventy-second Street that I admired, and asked if he'd take a picture of it for me. "The Dakota," he said. "Sure! Only you take it," and he handed me the camera. I hesitated, but I did want to use it and thanked him, and he showed me how to load in a new dry-plate. Halfway across the park I asked Jake to stop, and—Felix helping—I took the photo on the opposite page. I like it; it shows how alone the Dakota was. But I didn't allow too well for reflected light from the ice, and, embarrassingly, it's overexposed. There was a man in the middle foreground, for example, wearing a silk topper, and I don't know if you can see him. We moved on, closer to the Dakota, and—it was a simple camera, really, and a good one—I set it on a stone pillar for a time exposure because the light was failing, and I got a beauty: this one. I couldn't do better with a Leica, Graflex, or anything else, in fact.
On through the park then, and out, and far up past it out into actual open countryside— astoundingly, still on Manhattan Island—until finally we stopped at a big wooden inn called Gabe Case's. It was full dark now, the inn brilliant with light, shining out on the snow in long quartered rectangles, and the place was filled; there were surely fifty sleighs in a great outside shed, the horses tethered and blanketed.
Inside, every table was occupied, the place jammed, the roar of voices and laughter so loud it was almost impossible to talk. Felix had called to me, and I worked my way over to his group, losing mine. We had sandwiches and hot wine, standing up—there wasn't a table empty—talking a little over the roar, but mostly just grinning at each other out of sheer sparkling excitement and joy. It was an extraordinary afternoon and night, worth a news story in the Times next morning, headed "ON THE ROAD" THOUSANDS OF MERRY REVELERS ENJOYING THE SLEIGHING, and it said: Those persons who owned cutters, ancient sleighs, old piano-box sleds, or any kind of a conveyance on runners, and those who could afford to hire them and were able to sit in them yesterday behind high-bred trotters horses of low degree, had an opportunity to enjoy themselvesafterafashionoftheirowno(or) ver the driveways in the Central Park or on the splendid avenues leading out of it. The sleighing was good through Broadway, Fifth-avenue, and all the avenues in the city where there are no street car tracks. The snow-fall gave to the roads the best covering of the season for sleighing, and thousands took advantage of it. A large number of noted horses were on the road, and merchants, bankers, politicians, and professional horsemen passed each other in jolly good humor. Commissioner of Public Works Hubert O. Thompson, in a delicate cutter, was an object of much interest as he drove in a gentle manner a powerful horse. Commissioner of Jurors George Caulfield, driving a sorrel horse, showed Mr. Thompson the way into Gabe Case's shed, and the latter stepped from his cutter, and seemed to thank Mr. Caulfield for saving his life. Police Justice J. Henry Ford flew over the snow in a stylish cutter drawn by a fast horse, and was not persuaded to stop. John Murphy, the professional driver, sat behind his bay mare Modesty, and flew by like the wind. He was followed by Frank Work, with his team Edward and Swiveller; Joseph Doyle, with his wonderful mare Annie Pond; William Vassar, with Red and Black and Keno; John De Mott, in the most handsome cutter on the road, drawn by the bay gelding Charley; Samuel Sniffen, with his Blackwood Queen; Gen. J. Nay, with his Garryowen; Salvine Bradley, with his team Jack Slote and Hen Seaman; Ike Woodruff, with his Dan Smith; James Kelly, with his brown mare Codfish; Robert J. Dean, with a party in a large sleigh; and John Barry, with his sorrel gelding Gossip. After dark, when the whole country was white and bright in the moonlight, and the street lamps for miles around seemed like so many lightning-bugs on parade, the fun was at its height, and great sleighs, crowded with laughing and singing young men and women, were rapidly moving in all directions.... We drove home through that night—the others had been waiting for me when we came out of Gabe Case's—and though a wind had come up and it was turning colder, we were snug under ourrobes, and we sang softly, "The Spanish Cavalier" and, very softly and slowly, "Bring Back My Bonnie to Me." In the park the snow sparkled, and below it the buildings of Fifth Avenue were awash and mysterious with moonlight, and we drove down through the city marveling. One scene we passed stayed in my mind, and much later I made a watercolor of it; on the opposite page is the scene as I remember it, and I wish I could really show the wonderful actuality of it. Past the great walls, presently, of the reservoir at Fifth and Forty-second where someday I knew, but the others did not, that the main Public Library would stand; down Fifth, past Madison Square and—I wished there had been light enough for Felix to photograph it—the right arm of the Statue of Liberty, the knuckles of the hand and the tip of the flame mounded with new snow. Then we swung east on Twenty-third Street toward Gramercy Park, and I said, "Mr. Pickering, thank you; it's been one of the finest evenings I ever spent." He nodded; he was smoking a cigar now, and whenever he puffed, the smoke flowed in a long thinned-out ribbon over one shoulder. He said, "You're welcome, Morley. It was by way of a celebration, you know." Yes, I know, I thought; celebrating your chance to get rich through blackmail. Politely, I said, "No, I didn't." He nodded again, and leaned forward to get a good look at me across Julia's lap, and I saw something smug and self-satisfied in his eyes. "Yes," he said slowly. He'd postponed this deliberately for most of the evening, I realized later, prolonging the anticipation; now he wastasting the pleasure of saying it. "We looked for you at Gabe's; I wanted you to join us in a toast." The cigar in one corner of his mouth, he grinned at the puzzlement in my face, waiting so long to answer it that Julia—impatiently, I think, though her voice didn't show it—said it instead. "Mr. Pickering and I have become engaged to be married." After a moment I said the right things, forming the proper facial expressions. Smiling, I reached across Julia to shake Jake's hand, congratulating him. Still smiling, I agreed with Aunt Ada and Maud that it was wonderful news. Then I grinned at Julia, but as I said, "I hope you'll be very happy," I felt the grin disappear from my eyes, and Julia saw it, and merely nodded shortly, her lips compressing angrily. I asked when and where they were to be married, and sat as though listening to Jake and Aunt Ada respond, but I didn't hear them. Instead, during the few minutes before we pulled up at the curb before 19 Gramercy Park, I thought about several things. I thought about the tattooed letters still healing on his chest that marked Jake for life with Julia's name. I'd never been a threat to his future with Julia; that wasn't possible. But he didn't know it, and maybe I might have been if things had been different; that much he'd sensed. Now—his chin and beard lifted high, grinning complacently, cigar smoke trailing over his shoulder—Jake finally had her. To him, I understood, this engagement was a binding contract; she was safe from all threats now, forever his. He really had been glad— triumphantly glad—to see me. But more than Pickering, I thought about Julia, silent here beside me. I didn't believe she was a girl who wanted to be possessed the way Jake thought he possessed her. And I knew, knew, she couldn't live out her life and be happy with the kind of degraded human spirit that is able to blackmail. Yet I had to let it happen. Knowing what I knew about Jake Pickering, I had to smile and act pleased, and let this warm, lovely angry girl beside me marry him, and—it would happen —destroy her life. Dr. Danziger! I said silently, across the years that separated us. Do I have to? But I knew what the answer was: You cannot interfere. It wasn't possible to just walk into the house, when we reached it, and go upstairs and to sleep. I hopped out of the sleigh to help Julia, her aunt, and Maud Torrence down, and they walked up the stairs calling good-nights. Felix snapped his reins, and he and Byron left in their sleigh to drive their dates home or wherever they were going. Jake stayed in his sleigh to return it to the livery stable, and I think the women assumed I was riding with him. But when the door closed behind them, I made a little saluting gesture of farewell to Jake, and turned toward the stairs. When Jake flicked his reins and drove off, I turned back and walked quickly on to Third Avenue. I didn't know where I was going, I only knew I had to think, and I walked along down Third, dark and very nearly deserted, for several blocks. But the wind was much stiffer now, the temperature sharply lower and still dropping, I thought. It was snowing again but now it was a hard pelletlike snow, nicking into my face with the wind, gritty underfoot. It wasn't a good night for walking, and at Sixteenth Street I looked back over my shoulder, and a streetcar was trundlingalong toward me, the horse's head bent to the wind, the kerosene lanterns flickering at the front of the car. It stopped for me, I got on the front platform, and the horse leaned into his collar, his metal-shod hoofs slipping and sliding heavily in the snow till we got rolling again. Tonight, in this kind of weather with very few passengers, it was a bobtail car, a term I'd heard Byron Doverman use, meaning there was no conductor. Here on the open platform where the driver could watch it hung a fare box, and I dropped in my nickel, opened the door, and stepped in, closing the door against the wind. There was only one other passenger, a derby-hatted, walrus-mustached man reading the Evening Sun. I walked down the aisle, crunching dirty wet straw under my feet, and sat down. The tin-shaded lamp hanging from the ceiling smoked badly, and the kerosene smell was very strong. We rolled along through the windy night and I sat staring absently out at the shabby little Third Avenue stores, a few with dim gaslights far back in the interiors, many with hitching posts and tin-roofed canopies over the walks; some of the blocks we passed through looked like sets in a Western movie. I'd seen all this before and in a way it wasn't much to look at. And yet I stared, never really tired of looking at, never entirely losing the thrill and wonder at being here in, this strange New York. I once talked with a friend who'd spent a vacation in Paris; like most people he'd loved the city, walking it every day till his legs trembled, pleased with nearly everything he saw. But it wasn't till he'd been there nearly two weeks that one morning Paris and its people suddenly became something more than a background for his vacation, He was sitting in a cafe, out on the walk, having a tiny cup of Paris-tasting, Paris-smelling coffee, watching traffic stream by, pleased as always with the countless people on bikes expertly threading their way between and around the cars and buses and trucks. Then a traffic light changed, the stream stopped and waited, and a man on a bike, one foot on the pavement, lifted his arm and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. And he turned real. In that instant he was no longer a quaint part of a charming background; he turned into a real man, tired from pumping that bike, and for the first time it occurred to my friend that there was a reason so many people picturesquely rode bikes through the heavy traffic, and the reason was to save bus fare and because they couldn't afford cars. After that, for the few days that were left to him there, my friend continued to enjoy Paris. But now it was no longer an immense travel poster but a real city, because now so were its people. Here in the Third Avenue car, my feet ankle-deep in dirty straw but still cold, toes a little numb, I caught a glimpse—through the window of the closed door ahead—of the driver as he drew back on the reins to bring the car to a stop. A middle-aged woman, her face as Irish as an anti-Irish cartoon on a back page of most any Harper's Weekly, climbed aboard. She wore a heavy knitted shawl over her gray hair that covered her shoulders too; she had no other coat; she carried a basket on one arm. As she opened the door, the cold air rolling in and stirring the straw in the aisle, I heard the horse's hoofs slipping and clattering for a purchase, heard the crack of the driver's whip, and just as the door closed I saw the driver's body move as he stamped his feet, hearing the muffled sound of it, and he suddenly turned real for me as I understood how cold he must be out there on that open platform.
And then the city, too, turned real, this car no longer a quaint museum piece of the future, but of the here and now: solid, scarred, uncomfortable, dirty because the straw on the floor was stained with tobacco spit, driven by a harassed overworked man and pulled by a badly treated animal. It was cold out on that platform, I knew that, but I got up, walked up front, slid open the door, and stepped out, pulling the door closed behind me. I had to talk to this man. I had the sense not to start right in. I stood there at his right staring ahead over the horse's swaying rump down the cobbled street under the gloom of the overhead El tracks. My eyes were squinted against the steady pressure of air from our forward motion, and it was so cold they instantly began watering. There were frequent little gusts of a nasty crosswind, and I watched it sift little creeping skims of hard snow onto and off the car tracks. The driver had glanced at me suspiciously; why would I come out here when I didn't have to? And I'd glanced back at him, smiling slightly. He wore a flat-topped round cloth cap with a flap that covered his neck and ears, and over it a ragged knitted tan muffler tied under his chin; he had an immense drooping mustache. He wore a heavy tan cloth coat, very worn; one big pocket, in which a bandanna was stuffed, was half torn off. He had heavy boots, heavy encrusted mittens, and as many clothes, obviously, as he could fit under that coat, so that his body was shapeless. The wavering light from the lanterns hanging from the front of the car shone upward onto his face, and it took me a minute or so after I'd glanced at him to realize that he wasn't old; but his face was permanently gorged, threaded with tiny broken veins, the color of uncooked old beef. He just stood there, reins loose in his hands most of the time, facing the cold; I couldn't understand why the platform should be open. Ahead, a light delivery van with a lighted lantern hung under its rear axle trundled onto Third from a cross street, and, its wheels finding the smoother going of the tracks, settled down into them. It moved a bit slower than we; the car driver clanged his foot bell, and the wagon speeded up. "Cold," I said then, hunching my shoulders momentarily; it wasn't really a stupid comment but just a word uttered aloud in recognition of his presence. "Yep. It's cold," he said sardonically. I was silent for half a dozen hoofbeats. "Do you ever get used to it?" I said then. "After a while? I don't think I could stand it myself." "Used to it? Well, I should smile." He thought about that for a second or two. "Nah, you don't get used to it. You just get so you can stand it, that's all. If you want to get an idea of what real cold is, just hire yourself out to drive a streetcar in winter. If I was getting up an expedition to the North Pole and wanted a lot of men who could stand the climate, I'd take them from the drivers on the surface roads. Because a man who can stand this sort of service can stand anything." It was a burst of talk; I had the feeling I was the first passenger in a while to give him the chance. He stood silent for half a block; then at a cross street a blast of wind just shrieked across the platform, so impossibly cold the horse actually staggered, and I simply turned my back to it, shoulders hunched, and suffered; I didn't think I could take it, and wanted to go back inside but didn't.
It made him smile a little, made him talk again, when he saw I wasn't going in. "Feels pretty cold, don't it? I see you stamp your feet, and put your hands in your pockets. You stay here very long, and you'll be pretty well frozen out, and glad to get near a stove to warm yourself. But I have to do this all day long; stand out here and face the wind and sleet till my hands are frozen so stiff I can't feel the reins, and my nose has no more feeling in it than an icicle." "How long do you work?" "Fourteen hours a day is my working time, and sometimes longer, after the car is washed out and everything attended to. Don't give a fellow much chance to see his family, does it?" I said no, it didn't, and he nodded, and said, "How much do you think we make?" The dam was gone now, the torrent loose; I just shook my bead. "A dollar and ninety cents a day. Or a little more for the long routes to Harlem; that is the best we can possibly do. We're supposed to make seven trips a day at twenty-seven-and-one-seventh cents a trip. If the cars are blocked and we don't make so many trips, it is so much out of our pay. You just think about supporting a wife and children on a dollar and ninety cents a day. Most of us work on Sundays; poor people can't afford to rest on the Sabbath in a great city like this. Sometimes when I do have a Sunday off I go to church and take my wife and the children. It seems respectable, somehow, to go. And then the minister gets up and talks about the gratitude we ought to feel to God for all the blessings he gives us, and how thankful we ought to be that we live through his mercy. It may be very true as far as he is concerned, but I often think—and I don't mean to be ungrateful or irreverent—that most people in this world have very little to be thankful for, and very little reason to thank God for life at all. Nine tenths of the people in New York find scarcely a moment in their lives which they can call their own, and see mighty little but misery from one year's end to the other." He was troubled, deeply; his voice showed it; there was an almost inadmissible yet inescapable contradiction he couldn't get out of his mind. "How is it possible for me to thank God in my heart for the food he gives me and for life, while every morsel I eat I earn with my toil and even suffering? There may be a Providence for the rich man, but every poor man must be his own Providence. As for the value of life, we poor folks don't live for ourselves at all; we live for other people. I often wonder if the rich man who owns great blocks of stock in the road and reckons his wealth in the millions does not sometimes think, as he sits at his well-filled table and looks at the happy faces of his children, of the poor car driver who toils for his benefit for a dollar and ninety cents a day, and is lucky if he tastes meat twice a week and can give the little ones at home warm clothes and blankets for the winter. "Cold, you say. Well, people can get used to anything, I suppose, and we get so used to the cold after a while that maybe we don't mind it much. They used to let us sit down, but a couple of winters ago a man was frozen to death. The car came into the depot, and the driver was found on his stool stiff and stark, with one hand on the brake, and the reins in the other. He had dozed off, and he never woke up. He was a lucky man. The worst place he could go to was warm at least, though I've heard the Eskimos think hell is a cold place. Anyway, he never was obliged to drive a car again at a dollar and ninety cents a day. After that what did the company do: close in the platforms? No, that costs money. A rule was passed that employees should not be allowed to sit down, lest they go to sleep and freeze to death. They say it's a very pleasant way to die, and I believe it, for more than once I've felt myself dozing off and becoming insensible to the cold. But Iroused myself and stamped to keep awake, for I thought of the little ones; at least they don't sleep in the hay barges, as they might have to if I was gone." "Hay barges?" He looked at me angrily for not knowing. "Where do you think the boys—and yes, the girls, too—who shine your shoes and sell you papers in the daytime sleep at night? They're orphans, most of them, or kids nobody wants, and left to shift for themselves. A few of them sleep in the newsboys' homes and the like, but most sleep anywhere they can. Go down to the East River right now, and shine a light on the hay barges, hundreds of them, tied along the docks and shore. And you'll see the boys—some say thousands, and I think so, too, though nobody rightly knows— curled up in little nests they scratch up for themselves, and some of them not five years old. So I learn to stand the cold for the sake of my own. Sometimes I try to keep warm by an occasional dram of whiskey, but I find the reaction makes you feel all the colder afterward." Up ahead a man in a derby, wearing a heavy pullover sweater, the top of his gray winter underwear visible at the neck, came running out of a saloon toward the car stop at the corner. As the car slowed for the stop, I decided to get off, and stepped down onto the boarding step wondering what to say to the driver: Good luck? I didn't think so; I didn't think he was ever going to have any. The car stopped, and I looked back over my shoulder at the driver. "Goodbye," I said, and he nodded. "Goodbye." During my time in the army I was taught how to use your eyes at night; you don't look directly at what you're trying to see. Instead you look off to the side at something else; then, from the corner of your eye, what you really want to see will come clearer. Sometimes the mind works in the same indirect way when you let a problem alone, not forcing an answer. I walked over to Broadway, found a hansom at the Metropolitan Hotel, and by the time I got back to Gramercy Park I knew what I had to do. It was a long ride up the dark deserted business section of Broadway, but I was out of the wind, wrapped to the waist in a heavy fur robe that was a little mangy, a little smelly, but after a while cozy and warm. The steady unvarying clap-clop, clap-clop, clap-clop of the horse's hoofs, muffled by the steamed-over window glass, was hypnotic, and the thoughts rose in my mind without effort. The city had been a magical place earlier this evening, filled with sleighs and the sound of singing and genuine laughter. But now late at night I understood that it was also the city of the streetcar driver I'd just talked to. And that while I'd been dashing through Central Park in Jake's sleigh, countless lost children were hunting places to sleep at the bottoms of East River hay barges. And now the city was no longer only an exotic background to my own strange adventure. Now it was real, and now I finally understood that I was really here in these times, and that these people were alive. And that so was Julia. Observe, don't interfere: It was a rule easy to formulate and of obvious necessity at the project ... where the people of this time were only ghosts long vanished from reality, nothing remaining of them but odd-looking sepia photographs lying in old albums or in nameless heapsshoved under antique-store counters in cardboard boxes. But where I was now, they were alive. Where I was now, Julia's life wasn't long since over and forgotten; it still lay ahead. And was as valuable as any other. That was the key: If in my own time I couldn't stand by and allow the life of a girl I knew and liked to be destroyed if I could prevent it, I finally knew that I couldn't do it here either. Would it be destroyed? I thought about it, and the cab swung off Broadway at union Square, toward Fourth Avenue, and I wiped the mist from the window with a sleeve, and saw a theater sign under glowing yellow globes: TONY PASTOR'S NEW 14TH STREET THEATRE, it said, and on easel posters at every entrance PATIENCE; OR, THE STAGE-STRUCK MAIDEN. SEE MISS LILLIAN RUSSELL! A GRATIFYING SUCCESS; AN ARTISTIC GEM, and I had an impulse to stop and see the last of the play, but I had too much to think about. Even though I'd known Julia only a matter of hours, actually, I was certain I knew something about her. If you have the ability to make a true portrait of someone, you will learn more about her in the making of it than you otherwise might over days and even weeks of casual acquaintance. I've always appreciated the story you read now and then about the psychiatrist—he would have been called an alienist then— who stood staring at a portrait painted by Sargent or Whistler, I don't remember which. It was a portrait of a man who had been his patient, and after the alienist had studied it for twenty minutes he nodded, and said, "Now I understand what was wrong with him." Well, I'm not Whistler or Sargent, I haven't their talent or insight. But to capture the person on paper or canvas you must observe more than the camera can see. And—yes, I did know that for the particular person who was Julia Charbonneau, a life as the wife of Jacob Pickering would change the face I drew into one of permanent bitter unhappiness, and I simply was not going to allow that. The consequences to the future of interference with the past? I shrugged: There were always consequences to any future of every act in the past. To affect the course of an event in my own time was to affect still another future unimaginably, yet we all did it every moment of our lives. And now the future which was my own time was going to have to take its chances. Because now I knew that I just wasn't going to let Julia go down the drain as though somehow she didn't matter but we did. I swayed as the cab turned onto Twentieth Street, and then a block later onto Gramercy Park. And as it slowed and stopped before Number 19, I was smiling: I knew now that I was going to find a way somehow to break Julia's engagement to Jake Pickering; and who could say, it had occurred to me, that the consequences to my own time, if any, wouldn't be an improvement? It was a time that could stand some.