It is close upon the witching hour of midnight. I, of womankind and something-and-twenty years, sit alone in my little blue and white room, fallow and eke somewhat forlorn. I am surrounded by the silence of West Park street, than which the vast stillnesses of the everlasting hills to the southwest are not more profound. It sets somberly upon me for I, who imagined myself built for silences, solitudes, sunsets, still gray dawns - I am longing for little old New York.

New York - oh, New York - the mere thought of it fills me with a subtle restlessness, a half-insane emotion of far desire. Its name calls up a throng of turbulent memories, of mingled mournfulness and the utter reckless joy of living such as nothing but a dweller in New York can know.

All - all that is in the soul, the body, the mind, the heart of a human being, New York, the vampire, the cruel and much-loved, drags out. It demands the last fluttering gasp of breath, the last drop of blood, the last thrill of the worn nerves. While there's left one glimmer of light in one's mind, or one conscious nerve in one's body, the lips of the vampire are pressed close upon one's human lips, passionate, insatiate, mad until all is over and one lies abandoned, cold and dead.

There's nothing, nothing, nothing that New York gathers in and holds as it does youth. The mind and the body in the fullness of their youth are the food of the vampire. It devours, but, oh, it gives in exchange - life!

All the life, the youth; all the brain, such as it is, and all the restless heart; all the wild, nameless vitalities that make me human, every treasured thing I have to give, I waft at this moment, over frozen river and snow-clad hill - a thousand leagues - to New York, the exquisite vampire, merciless, bewitching.

I know New York as I know Butte-Montana, for exactly what it is. I have no roseate illusions about it. It has lodged me not as a transient bird of passage, but as one of the four million who call it home. I well know that it is no place to go to gather lilies. Its paving stones are the paving stones of hell. But on them walk people who are more wonderful than lilies. And the lesson it teaches is the adamant truth itself.

I first went to New York in the summer of 1902, at the age of 19, when I was a crude but successful child, guarded and looked-after and chaperoned to the point of atrophy. New York seemed to me then a vast, tiresome Babel, with a mingled atmosphere of skyscrapers and of alcoholic beverages, which latter continually were being offered me and which I did not like. I last went to New York at the age of five-and-twenty, when I was cast into it as into a seething whirlpool, "broke," at the time, heavy-hearted, and alone. My little body, like Juliet's, was already aweary of this great world. But what it and the heart in it had to suffer before they caught the meaning and the pace of the seething whirlpool only the silent gods know. I may one day write it or I may keep it, a black memory, locked fast within me. But this much let me say for myself, that I bore misfortune in solitude and with cold disdain for its slings and arrows, and New York, though it has got everything else out of me that I could give it, wrung not one salt tear from my tired eyes. It gives me infinite satisfaction to be able to say it now and before I left New York, but a little time ago - yet, I remembered even that crucial time as a precious and informing experience. Also before I left I could gauge New York - I could grasp it, as I now grasp Butte, in the hollow of my hand. Nothing in it could faze or frighten me. The skyscrapers had become something attractive and beloved, and the quick fire of the alcoholic things, absinthe, vermouth, chartreuse, had run a thousand times, a negative passion, in my veins. In short, on the altar of the exquisite vampire I had offered up, madly and gladly, what was left of the first half of my youth. I am conscious as I sit here, in the chaste silence of West Park street, in my blue and white room, of but just entering on the second half of my youth - which is a fuller half than the first, if less radiant; light-hearted and care-freer, if less innocent - and by those tokens I fain would haste with it to where the North and East rivers wash the glittering shores of the Isle of Treacherous Delights - to lay it upon the same broad altar, already piled high with a million like gifts.

There is nothing at all in New York that is not fascinating to those who love it. For them there is poetry in every seething subway station, in every low-down Italian, with his banana cart on the Third and Fourth avenue corners, in the Siegel and Macy and Wanamaker department stores, as well as in the wonderful shops on the avenue, in the vaudeville theaters, and even in the piano-organs that awaken the echoes and the dwellers in the apartment buildings on the side streets. To them the look of New York is beautiful. No turreted castle overlooking a desolate sea could show more picturesque than the Flatiron building at sunset, with the dying lights on its battlements, and the Twenty-third street mob, like scurrying insects, at its base. And close to it is another thing of beauty which to me typifies the spirit of all New York - the great bronze Diana of St Gaudens, which rests a-tiptoe on the Madison Square tower. She suggests youth in its gay and triumphant freedom.

But, however, it's not for those chaste delights alone I'm longing in the midst of West Park street's remote gloom. One can not live on even Flatiron buildings, and Diana, though she's inspiring, is not satisfying to the emotions she rouses. Besides, she's bronze.

But the quality that is so distinctively New Yorkish, and which Butte-Montana conspicuously lacks (having in its place the deadly thrall we all wot of), is the quality of deep and intimate humanness. It is that and not the glitter which makes people, after a half-year of living in it, fall so abandonedly in love with New York; it is that which makes New York people think there's no other town in the world. They may tell you it's the glitter of the gay white way, or the cafes, or the theaters, or the Fifth avenue parade, or what not, but those are only the delectable setting. It's the subtle freemasonry among the millions, the silent recognition and understanding of each other's humanness and the half suggestion of intimacy that one feels toward all or any of the persons one meets and passes on Broadway - it's that that's all the glitter and enchantment of it. And, too, it's that together with the glitter of the white way that is the most alluring and treacherous and annihilating of all the attributes of the vampire. In truth, it is that quality that is the vampire. For it's intimacy with human beings and all that it betokens - the exchanging of bits of one's personality for bits of another's, the idiosyncrasies of friendship, the nerve-racking experience of being in love, the hypnotic effects of one personality upon another, the utter throwing to the winds of all one's reserves of body and soul before the compelling magnetisms of some, and the lesser intoxication of knowing one's domination of others - it is all these things that devour flesh and blood and nerve. They eat their way from the outer wall that guards the crude human being to the inmost keep of the citadel. One's loves and friendships have effects on one's slim young body and one's wayward mind that are more malignant than cocaine and more subtle than absinthe. But it's all so exquisitely and poetically and seductively worth while. Not one affair of the heart - and even friendships with me seem to be affairs of the heart - that New York has given me, though they left me, times, battered, stung, wounded, a bundle of frazzled nerves - not one would I exchange for any non-human treasure that life could bring. If there's one tenet that I cling to with sincerity and faith, it's that which enjoins absolute freedom of action, to follow not the precepts but the impulses, to grasp one's heart's desires, to mulate the surging voice of all New York in its wild cry, "More Life, More Life!" - to turn everything outward, to let slip all one's emotions, all one's glimmering passion, all one's dormant lights-o'-love.

That's what you do in New York. And it's that that makes the deadly thrall of Butte seem deadlier and the stillness of West Park street more deep. No solitary cell at Sing Sing could rival my little blue and white room at this moment for aloofness, for there's no such thing as human intimacy in this young, young town.

I did not know that when I lived in Butte before I had myself no intimate friendships, but I knew that I was entirely abnormal, anyway. But since I've been gone from it I realize that the people in Butte are all abnormal in that they form no real intimacies.The are as shy as wild sea-fowl with each other, and absolutely dead-locked in iron-bound personal isolation. They have what they call friendships, and there are little clubs of women who foregather, and people take drinks together and that - but with it all they are not, they seemingly can't be, intimate with each other. They think they exchange bits of their personalities, when they are really exchanging only talk. They exchange kisses and hand-clasps and even lingering caresses, but all in the deadly thrall way. I idly wonder as I sit here whether there would be anything intimate about even the doing of a murder in Butte. "But no," I think to myself, "there would be more of passion, let loose, in New York in a mere brushing together of finger-tips, or in gazing into eyes across a little table, than in anything that's done in Butte. It's the way you do them in New York."

Butte's way is without doubt the wiser of the two, but what's that to do with it? Butte's way makes for more strength in that since one turns nothing outward, one's resources are husbanded, but what's the use? What do we do with our strength after we husband it? There's no development where there's no intimacy. One barely begins to live only after one has rubbed hard against at least two live people, with nerves in their finger-ends and lights in their eyes.

I have in Butte two deadly, thrall friendships - or are they a love and a friendship, I don't myself quite know - upon which I've been bold enough, since I've been back, to try out the methods in favor on and hard-by the white way. It's fascinating to watch their effects, which are to one-third perplex, one-third frighten, and one-third allure. I get nothing of the kind myself in return, since the wild sea-bird shyness is fast upon them and I have all the advancing to do, but, withal, I have at least the pleasure of making two people writhe at the unusualness, in Butte, of friendship in the nude. But pungent though it is, it is not a wholly satisfying pursuit and the half-lenient gods, after all, do not limit me to those two. There are one or two people in Butte who have themselves lived on the Isle of Trea- cherous Delights. I find they know the game as it's played there, and they go to it with a recognizing, if shy, eagerness. But - this is Butte-Montana, where the on-lookers make scarlet mountains of drab mole hills - and when all's said I believe I, M. MacLane, am the one citizen Butte will ever have who is absolutely undisturbed and undeterred by the whispering tongues. Contempt is the word which correctly pictures my attitude toward them. And contempt is the correct attitude to maintain. Why should they judge me? Why should any one judge any one else? Which brings me back to little old New York, where no one judges any one else. How much better to be living than slowly drying up inwardly. How much better to be in New York, where people are really let live. How I long at this witching hour of midnight, with the staid quietness of West Park street oppressing me, and at the threshold of my second half of youth, to feel once more the lips of the vampire very close against mine.

On the corner of Fifth avenue and Twenty-sixth street, close to where the bronze Diana stands, poised against the blue, is the Cafe Martin, where the Dry Martini is more palely golden than anywhere else on the Isle, where the people are more attractive and all the delights more bewitchingly treacherous. It has been the scene of more new and well nigh insane adventures for me - and a million other feminine youths - than probably any cafe could be outside London. It is swagger, extremely French (for America), and cordial in its welcome to unescorted women before the bell tolls six in the evening. The place is so pallidly, prettily decorated, the music is so thin and sensuous, the women such high wrought things. It is lilies or half-wilted jonquils. They are all in the clutch of the vampire. The mark of the vampire is upon their delicately-rouged and faintly-drooping lips, in the glint of their all-knowing eyes, upon their insolent brows and in the movements of their slender hands. Their hearts and bodies are weary from the ceaseless glitter of the world and from their endless pursuit of Pleasure - a Pleasure like an ignis fatuus that is always a little way beyond, that never, never waits. I have seen it myself around corners, behind doors, at the top of flights of stairs - always beyond, never in my hands or by my side. I have sat, times, in the Martin, with some delectable companion, twirling the stem of my absinthe glass with my thumb and finger and with my chin on my hand, and looked about at the gay-hearted company and wondered if they knew they had never caught up with the ignis fatuus Pleasure, and never would - and if they did that the flavor of the Grape would become wormwood on their lips, and the daylight shadowed, and the music stilled.

But no, assuredly they never think of it at all. The generality of the amblers down the primrose path are happily not given to introspection. That is a seething curse peculiar to those to whom the birth-stars are not kind, with whom it plays perennial mischief. And if one is both lured by the primrose path and, too, given to introspection - so much the more grievous the curse - so much the more.

For as one sits here, in the aforesaid silence, it comes over one like a cold, distracting breath, and the look of all of life makes one but shudder. One's longing for the Isle of Delights falls away like a mantle - that mad utter folly, that dedication of all things to life at its last and utmost tension, that picture of the flower-faces, of tired youth, in the Cafe Martin - float across one's mind with a suggestion of blackness like death itself.

One wants no human intimacy either in the marts of New York or the little by-ways of Butte. One sees one's portion in an aloofness and isolation far beyond what even Butte can give. For the having fed at the flesh-pots in the Isle of the Delights one pays a heavy, heavy reckoning - and to introspection that does it all. It once made the Delights more seductive, and it now makes the heavy reckoning so much the more heavy - so much the more, and -

"The Flower that once has bloomed forever dies."

New York or Butte-Montana, is it worth while - or isn't it? I ask me, with my hands pressed upon my eyes.

works index
maclane index
domain index