Suddenly, Quincy found that he had left the bridge and was standing upon
a street in Brooklyn. He struck down its dingy length. He wondered if
the wealth that had raised all the glories he had just observed was in
some manner parent to this squalor. For not more than fifteen minutes,
he searched the swart, hovelled depths below the Bridge. He saw a
ferry-boat at the foot of a street, relieved with plants and romping
boys, which had been turned into a consumptives’ home. He was not used
to stinking court-ways, houses that leered, rank saloons advertising rum
and sidewalks crumbling with neglect. He looked up at the span of
bridge. It seemed an unattainable pathway. His nerves told him he would
be better looking down at Brooklyn. So he returned.
The whole world had become another world in half an hour. Quincy
surveyed the sky, the river, distant Manhattan. It came to him with a
thrill that nothing was the same--that everything was radically
something else. It was night--boldly, suddenly, entirely. If New York
had a tongue of its own, would there be a word in it for evening?
What impressed Quincy at once was that night was not falling, as poetry
books would have it, but ascending; and ascending, not in a steady
advance like the shadows on a mountain, but in sudden starts, in
impulsive sallies, like clouds of guerilla warriors pressing up, free of
each other, repulsed here, there held at bay, and here again triumphant.
In the north, Manhattan was already dark. It loomed up, loftier yet more
subdued in mist that was forever turning thicker and more sombre. Not a
light pierced the haze to Quincy’s eye. He seemed now to be looking down
upon an illimitable graveyard. Each house was become a tomb-stone, each
towering building, in the light of day a sentinel of progress, appeared
now a monument to some great death. Below the liquid green of the two
uptown bridges, the East River was opaque amethyst, streaked here and
there where some boat had cut a swathe. The moiling tenements glowed
forth like coral. Poverty, catching a deflected ray, turned lurid.
Now, as he marched on, Quincy observed the south. The arm of Liberty,
wisp-like in the mist, pointed to a blood-orange ball of sun. The nearer
island lay in a deeper purple; its trees waved through a thicker film.
But the waters were in shadow as if night had been an emanation from
them, pushing the sun relentlessly back across the rim of the world.
Above the harbor, was a deep pall, night’s advance guard in its grey,
the sun’s resistance in its orange fretting. The pall fell and the
waters grew more brackish. The sun plunged down against the mists,
pouring a frenzy of disparted color that shot about the buildings of
South Manhattan. And now, a sheet of gold cloud came underneath it.
Slowly, yet visibly, the gold turned to yellow, to lemon, to silver--and
went grey. Steeped as if in its own blood, the sun sank through the
mists, and disappeared.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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