"EX NEW YORK"

Evening Star, Issue 21220, 29 September 1932, Page 11

"EX NEW YORK"

SAILING AT MIDNIGHT FOR ENGLAND It had been iiot in New York, and nightfall had brought little relief. The ship was to sail at midnight. The taxi ran down Park avenue with only a split second tft spare as successive crossings before the warning lights turned to red (writes “E.R.5.,” in an exchange). The railed gardens in the middle of the road flashed by, leaving an impression of a thick blurred line of the curious unnatural shade which green assumes under artificial light. Sharp right across Broadway and the great avenues; then the grubbiness of the side streets near the pier; clammily perspiring families sitting on the doorsteps ip a vain hope of getting cool, all ages down to babies in arms. The pier entrance brings another patch of bright lights under the elevated motor way. They are reflected downwards on the drab grey walls of the pier sheds. Lifts to the top level of the pier are crowded with people, confirming stories told by experienced travellers of half New York coming on board to bid the other half farewell. The ship is a restless, noisy jumble of New Yorkers; here and there a phlegmatic officer stands watching the ebb and flow of humanity-; stewards strain along the corridors laden with baggage. Third and tourist class have the freedom of the first-class quarters. Full evening dress edges politely and perhaps a little gingerly past a crowd in very ordinary day clothes. Raucous laughter in this or that corner proclaims the bootlegger’s co-operation in the night’s programme. There is no privacy with all this hot multitude at liberty to pry into every secret place in the ship, and fully determined to do so. What a gusto this people brings to tho social observances! If it is a party, then let it be a party; if a reunion, let there be no doubting of the heartiness of the old-time friendship; if it is farewell before an ocean trip, let it be said with flowers, with candles, with all the casual witnesses who can bo roped in, with songs and laughter, with waving, shouting, crying, hugging, kissing—with all tho energy of a young people intensely proud of their energy. Ana if an Englishman stands aside, is he entitled to be proud of his preference for standing aside or contemptuous of their modes? THE LAST FAREWELLS. That gong which is sounding means that all but passengers must go ashore. Farewells must bo crystallised into a positively last embrace. How hot everybody is! What crowds go trooping down the gangways! “A thousand passengers and five thousand visitors,” says a cynical steward. Always the same here; but wait till you see them on tho pier end.” They gather there, in an uncovered square of jetty, which they fill to overflowing. Under the arc lights they become a solid block of upturned faces, broken only by white arms raising handkerchiefs to wave good-bye. Such a clatter of shouts and cheers they raise, as though to struggle against the diminuendo of disstance which the slow moving of the ship makes inevitable, A hundred yards separates tiie pier from us. We are off. That multitude must soon begin to fade away. One by one they must, trickle back to apartments and suburban houses, back by way of the elevated or the subway, by car or train, or perhaps on foot, back to tho hotness of a June night in New \ork. They should envy ns with a breeze on our faces promising more and fresher air to come. As the groat ship glides down tho river the up-town skyscrapers twinkle an indifferent farewell. The topmost tower of tho Em jure State Building appears ns a shaft of white light separated from the main structure,, standing alone in tlie night sky. ” Anybody strange would think it was a Tower of God in Heaven,” says a solemn little miss of ten or eleven to her grown-up brother. 11 Come on, kid, and see the other parts, ’ says he, hurriedly, not quite at ease with the thought of heavenly Empire State Building. The ship goes on past tho dark outlines ol hall a hundred piers. You can roughly count the '-(reets from Nineteenth, where you started, until you

come opposite the down-town towers—the Manhattan Bank and the Irving Trust rising above their older and less ambitious neighbours. “ You can’t beat it,” says the short, quick-moving little man, who is fanning himself with his hat. “ I’ll tall the world there’s no- , where in the whole earth like New [ York.” THE STATUE OF LIBERTY, i A rising moon over on the west side, - orange-red with promise of more hot i weather, silhouettes the black outlines i of the great buildings at the tip of > Manhattan Island. Surely they are all ; offices down there, yet half the windows > have lights although it is after mid--1 night. Approaching now is the floodlit figure of Liberty, curiously squat in : the bright beams cast upward from the water level. Cooler calm descends on ■ the ship; quiet groups on the upper 1 deck begin to talk of what they have seen or left behind in New York. Somebody makes the inevitable sneer at the Statue of Liberty and the lack of liberty in the country at whose threshold she stands. Somebody else, more respectfully, wonders what the population of New York is and how many distinct races it includes. . . . How darkly cool those vast blocks stand out against the faint radiance'of the sky! Have the babies been taken inside yet, or are they still scrambling on the steps of the houses iiv the mean streets near the piers? Up in Harlem, what has taken the place of the gay crowds of dark-skinned children who were lurking there six hours ago? What happens at midnight in that extraordinary spot where Park avenue abruptly stops being a row of rich apartments and becomes a jumble of squalid market stalls, clustering under the arches of the New York Central Railroad as it emerges from its underground track and becomes an elevated one? Is Paul Whiteman’s band still playing in the roof restaurant at the Hotel Biltmore, and are the fashionable dancers very warm with their dancing? In what hot attic is sleep being courted by that stony-faced Chinaman your taxi nearly knocked down this afternoon? You might ask yourself very similar questions ns you left many another great world city, if you felt in the mood. But elsewhere you probably wouldn’t, because there would be nothing like the masses of stone and steel, serenely rearing themselves into the sky to trouble you with vague wonderings. The enigma of the sweating activity of human life is not elsewhere so dramatically contrasted with the stillness of inanimate but man-made things.