I

It was a filthy night. The February harpy had lost her wind brats and was running wide in the avenues, railing, calling, tearing her hair; and her demented brood was brawling in the by-ways.

Empty ash-cans were overturning, rolling, bumbling, saying scandal. Gray streaks of feline terror. Sounds of grating, snapping, creaking, whamming, unholding, unfastening, all for an instant swallowed up suddenly in deep holes of stillness. An electric gong unable to stop. A female shriek, the same for murder or the loss of a hat. Then the din again.

Not a night for holding an intellectual tryst out of doors with nature. As well importune a wild jade in tantrums. Yet there at the top of Washington Square stood a tall red-bearded figure fixed in meditation. He seemed vertical without effort, a neutral fact in vorticular confusion, like the hypothetical perpendicular in chaos.

This grand absurdity was the mind’s triumph. The cold wind whipped his thin serge garments, exposed the unvoluptuous sculpture of his long, solitary legs; his thoughts were of the infinite, touching the cosmic hubbub.

He was looking back through Fifth Avenue. The commotion was no part of that view, or the least part; he was hardly aware of it. As before so many times, now again, having descended upon this spot in a certain way and turning to look back he had almost seized that simple, astonishing word-image which was to reveal a metaphysical truth to the senses. He was repeating, like an invocation, this formula: Idea the only reality. Idea is without substance. Therefore substance is unreal.

For the high jargon of metaphysics he had thoughts of deep scorn. Incanting it he hated it. He hated word-images, too. So much silly use had been made of them. Alas! access to truth had immemorially been by fatuous means, bubbles and toys, superstitions and tricks. That was not his fault. None the less it was stultifying, like having to woo one’s goddess in the guise of a clown.

Others before him had resolved the nature of reality. The difficulty was that nobody could prove it. Appearances were apparitional. Things were illusions. It-ness, this-ness and that-ness among things, all signs of identity, were illusory, proceeding from contrast, and contrast was the basic illusion, since no form or aspect of phenomenal existence could be other than a movement of one infinite idea. Existence was a limitation. Infinity was limitless. Ergo, infinity, although it was, did not exists; and the finite symbol for reality was 0.

This was apprehensible to the intellect. Quite. But the opposite of it also was apprehensible, or any pontifical nonsense. The intellect, as he had written, was more gullible than the senses, mainly intent upon deducing by logic what the emotional self had wished beforehand to believe in a mystical manner.

What he had undertaken to do with this truth was to bring it down to the senses, prove it like a physical fact, like relativity. To his own senses first. He himself must be able to apprehend it in that original way. Did not Einstein see relativity as Newton saw gravity, first with the eyes?

Almost he could see it. He had only to establish one vital contact of the illusion that was substance with the reality that was idea, by means of an image—a word-image known to the senses—and the doors of understanding would burst, just as bringing negative and positive together from the two poles of matter had flooded the world with electric power.

Becoming of a sudden conscious that he was consciously thinking he adopted the method of the despised word-imagists, who consciously think of nothing in order that something may unconsciously think of itself. But nothing did think of itself. Then he began to trample and bully his mind; the more he did that the worse it behaved, until he, Angus Phlyn Fitzjerald, searching the universe for its simplest image and the February harpy seeking her brats were both in one frenzy, the same and equal, two movements of one infinitely extravagant idea, non-existent.

Now idea in the aspect of some hard, foreign substance entered his right eye. Another in the aspect of an alley cat walked through his legs in the figure eight.

With a Greek oath for its satisfying sound he took up his way, which lay diagonally across the Square; he walked as one who well knew the neighborhood, looking at nothing. Turning into Jones street he did not see the idea that passed, hesitated, then turned and made after him to ask a question. Physical irritation, above the displeasure he had taken against his mind, made him blind and politely ferocious. The wind had become offensive in a personal manner.

A little girl with a long loaf of bread held babywise in her arms was running before it with her head down. He did not see her either. Suddenly she veered to miss a barrel of kindling wood that stood on the sidewalk above a fuel vendor’s cellar. It went over, spilling, just in front of her. She was agile and should have got round it safely. What wrecked her was a loop of twine that slipped itself from one of the kindling bundles and lassoed her feet.

Fitzjerald and the man wishing to accost him were coming against the wind, walking rapidly in the middle of the street. They were almost abreast as the girl fell headlong, casting the loaf of bread. Her body tripped Fitzjerald, his legs tripped the other man, and they all went down in a heap.

Fitzjerald was the first to rise. He lifted the child and tried her on her feet. Seeing she was unhurt he left her standing and picked up the bread. As she took it from him she looked at the other man. He was bent over, brushing himself angrily with a pocket broom. Then she looked up at the taller man with a scowl that changed slowly to a friendly grin. He neither spoke nor smiled, but gave her knitted cap a tug, as he might have thought either to straighten it or to settle it tighter, then turned her by the shoulders until she was true on the wind again and let her go. As he came about on his own course the other man stood facing him.

“Is this the only Jones street in New York?” he asked.

“Isn’t one enough?” Fitzjerald answered and went straight on. He uttered the words with a rumbling growl. That was his natural voice. But his manner was offensive, and all the more for being oblique and impersonal. The smaller man, at first astonished, reacted with resentment. He quickened his steps to catch up, twisted his body around and tilted his face at Fitzjerald. His chin was thrust out, both hands were clenched, one still holding the pocket broom, which he had forgotten; and he spoke through his teeth.

“As one species to another,” he said, “it was a civil question.”

Fitzjerald suddenly regarded him with interest.

“Civility,” he said, “is an attribute of the species ass.”

His manner, although more offensive than before, had changed. For as they looked at each other a Celtic sign appeared between them. Extremely unlike as types, and by reason of that unlikeness mortally antagonistic, still both were Irish and therefore related in a manner too subtle for non-Celtic understanding. Further offence, if any, would be personal and so intended. That was the difference. And this was a kind of recognition that gave the smaller man a sense of satisfaction.

“It was a civil question,” he repeated.

“Your mother was a dogged woman,” said Fitzjerald.

“A civil question,” said the other.

“It had that grand merit,” said Fitzjerald. “What then?”

“Is it?”

“It’s the only Jones street I ever heard of.”

They were still walking, never having paused at all. The smaller man put his little broom away, saying: “There’s some mistake. I must have both the street and the number wrong.”

“I suggest you have the city wrong,” said Fitzjerald.

This mocking the other ignored, saying aloud to himself: “Jones street, thirteen-and-a-half. Quite plain.”

“We’re just at it,” said Fitzjerald, with a slight increase of interest. “The name there,” he added, “is Saint-Leon.”

“Miss, is it? Miss Jael Saint-Leon?”

“Perfect.”

“Isn’t she supposed to be very rich?”

“I’ve known it to be alleged,” said red beard.

“Why does she live in a street like this?”

“Maybe because it’s the only Jones street there is. I’ll ask her.”

On that, Fitzjerald turned abruptly, crossed the sidewalk and mounted seven stone steps to the doof of a very old Dutch-built house of which three together, all originally alike, had survived in the block. The one to the right of it was let to a junk dealer who used it as it was. The one to the left, on the corner, had been made over on the ground level with plate glass windows and a chamfered front entrance painted red and blue, to an apothecary’s taste. Opposite was a five-story walk-up tenement with the fire-escapes in front, now presenting a much less untidy appearance than usual because such of the lares and penates as the wind had not run off with had been snatched inside. On one side of the tenement was an abandoned livery stable and on the other a Board of Health dispensary.

You could not have passed No. 13¹/₂ without noticing that the door and window frames were painted, that the steps were clean and that the brass knobs on the hand railing were not missing. It was not otherwise distinguished, unless by having curtains at the three second-story windows. The lower windows were bare.

Fitzjerald entered this house without knocking. The pugnacious reality followed him in and closed the door behind them.

The hallway was scarcely more than a vestibule, twice the width of the staircase that took off abruptly. The floor was bare and much walked over, but the stairway, clean and white, had a rich carpet tread and the railing was of polished dark wood. At the right was a door bearing a cardboard sign:

Joining
Turning
Carving
Odd Handicrafts
WALK IN

That would account for the fact that the lower windows were uncurtained. The first floor was a workshop. Beyond this door, against the wall, were two wooden effigies, Dutch sailors, three-quarters life size, such as once were a variation upon the tobacconist’s wooden Indian sign. From their weathered appearance it was evident they were true trophies of that time and manner. Here they served as coat holders. Men’s coats were hanging on their arms, and men’s hats sat carelessly upon their heads. Against the other wall, hanging free by a chain from the ceiling, was a fire gong such as one may see in small villages—a steel band five feet in diameter, weighing at least an eighth of a ton; and hanging by a chain to the wall was a small machine hammer to beat it with.

The only light was from a brass ship’s lantern swinging high over the first step of the stairway. From above came the sound of men and women’s voices mingling—cultivated voices.

Fitzjerald stood for a moment before the wooden sailors; as there was no place left for his coat he threw it over the banister and started up, thereby pointedly casting off what he had let in after him.

“My name is Capuchin,” the man announced. He said it reliantly and with an air of not being magnanimous. It was evident he expected his name to be recognized; also that he expected the tall, superior person to be surprised at the sound of it and a little embarrassed, as one who has behaved badly in a chance encounter with a body who turns out to be of some importance. Fitzjerald did recognize the name; it had been running in newspaper headlines for several months. But he neither paused nor spoke. From the top of the staircase he glanced down, Mr. Capuchin was brushing himself again.