The accounts of the thing's coming to New York are almost numberless,
and it is from one of these, that of Edward Worley, that we find what
is perhaps our most vivid picture of the thing. Worley's account, to
which he has given the somewhat banal title of _My Experiences in the
Life Horror_, not only gives us a description of the first coming of
the horror at New York, but summarizes in fact the action of the thing
over all the world. For as it was in New York that night, so it was in
a thousand seaside cities in that same hour, and what Worley saw in its
streets was seen by millions of horror-stricken men in that same night.
The magnitude of the thing was greater at New York, but the horror was
the same, as Worley indeed points out.
This Edward Worley figures unconsciously in his own narrative as a
somewhat commonplace individual, a middle-aged person, the greater part
of whose days had been spent in the adding and subtracting of figures
in a Broad Street broker's office. To avoid crowded subways, as he
tells us, Worley had taken rooms in one of the narrow lodging-houses
jammed in here and there east of the financial section, at Manhattan's
lower extremity. It was this fact that conspired with circumstances to
project Worley into the very heart of the terror's first coming. For,
a half-hour before midnight on that fateful night of the 27th, he had
decided that a short stroll through the warm spring air would be a
pleasant one, and his steps had led him southward toward the Battery's
little open park.
It was an hour, that just before midnight, when the southern end of
that great island-mass of structures that is New York lies beneath a
silence and a loneliness supernatural, almost. So it seemed to Worley,
at least, strolling southward in the warm spring night through the
silent streets, from one pool of corner lamplight to another, between
the towering, vast buildings that loomed into the darkness on either
side. Those buildings, the center of unparalleled activity in the hours
of day, lay as silent beneath the white spring stars as though they
were the still unbroken ruins of some mighty, deserted city. Northward,
from the midtown section, a glow of light against the sky told of the
life that still surged through the crowded streets there, but Worley,
strolling on, met none save an occasional policeman who eyed him keenly
beneath the corner lights. Then within moments more puffs of fresh salt
air came to his nostrils, and he was passing out between the last of
the great buildings, out beneath the looming tracks of the elevated
and into the silent little park.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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