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Page 65
Atlantic Avenue, by the way, always seems to us an ideal place for
the beginning of a detective story. (Speaking of that, a very jolly
article in this month's _Bookman_, called "How Old Is Sherlock
Holmes?" has revived our old ambition to own a complete set of all
the Sherlock Holmes tales, and we are going to set about scouring
the town for them). Every time we pass through the Atlantic Avenue
maelstrom, which is twelve times a week, we see, as plain as print,
the beginning of two magazine tales.
One begins as the passengers are streaming through the gate toward
the 5:27 train. There is a very beautiful damsel who always sits on
the left-hand side of the next to last car, by an open window. On
her plump and comely white hand, which holds the latest issue of a
motion picture magazine, is a sparkling diamond ring. Suddenly all
the lights in the train go out. Through the open window comes a
brutal grasp which wrenches the bauble from her finger. There are
screams, etc., etc. When the lights go on again, of course there is
no sign of the criminal. Five minutes later, Mr. Geoffrey Dartmouth,
enjoying a chocolate ice cream soda in the little soft-drink alcove
at the corner of the station, is astonished to find a gold ring, the
stone missing, at the bottom of his paper soda container.
The second story begins on the Atlantic Avenue platform of the
Lexington Avenue subway. It is 9 A.M., and a crowded train is
pulling out. Just before the train leaves a young man steps off one
of the cars, leaving behind him (though not at once noticed) a
rattan suitcase. This young man disappears in the usual fashion,
viz., by mingling with the crowd. When the train gets to the
end of the run the unclaimed suitcase is opened, and found to
contain--_continued on page_ 186.
* * * * *
Every now and then we take a stroll up Irving Place. It is changing
slowly, but it still has much of the flavour that Arthur Maurice had
in mind when he christened It "the heart of O. Henry land." Number
55, the solid, bleached brownstone house where O. Henry once lived,
is still there: it seems to be some sort of ecclesiastical
rendezvous, if one may judge by the letters C.H.A. on the screen and
the pointed carving of the doorway. Number 53, next door, always
interests us greatly: the windows give a glimpse of the most
extraordinary number of cages of canaries.
The old German theatre seems to have changed its language: the
boards speak now in Yiddish. The chiropractor and psycho-analyst has
invaded the Place, as may be seen by a sign on the eastern side. O.
Henry would surely have told a yarn about him if he had been there
fifteen years ago. There are still quite a number of the old brown
houses, with their iron railings and little patches of grass. The
chocolate factory still diffuses its pleasant candied whiff. At
noontime the street is full of the high-spirited pupils of the
Washington Irving High School. As for the Irving house itself, it is
getting a new coat of paint. The big corset works, we dare say, has
come since O. Henry's time. We had quite an adventure there once. We
can't remember how it came about, but for some reason or other we
went to that building to see the chief engineer. All we can remember
about it was that he had been at sea at one time, and we went to see
him on some maritime errand. We found that he and his family lived
in a comfortable apartment on the roof of the factory, and we
remember making our way, with a good many blushes, through several
hundred or thousand young ladies who were industriously working away
at their employer's business and who seemed to us to be giggling
more than necessary. After a good deal of hunting we found our way
to a secret stair and reached our seafaring engineer of the corset
factory in his eyrie, where (we remember) there were oil paintings
of ships on the walls and his children played about on the roof as
though on the deck of a vessel.
Irving Place is also very rich in interesting little
shops--laundries, tailors, carpenters, stationers, and a pleasant
bookshop. It is a haunt of hand-organ men. The cool tavern at the
corner of Eighteenth, where Con Delaney tended the bar in the days
when O. Henry visited it, is there still. All along the little byway
is a calm, genteel, domestic mood, in spite of the encroachments of
factories and apartment houses. There are window boxes with flowers,
and a sort of dim suffusion of conscious literary feeling. One has a
suspicion that in all those upper rooms are people writing short
stories. "Want to see a freak?" asks the young man in the bookshop
as we are looking over his counters. We do, of course, and follow
his animated gesture. Across the street comes a plump young woman,
in a very short skirt of a violent blue, with a thick mane of bobbed
hair, carrying her hat in her hand. She looks rather comfortable and
seemly to us, but something about her infuriates the bookseller. He
is quite Freudian in his indignation that any young woman should
habit herself so. We wonder what the psycho-analyst a few blocks
below would say about it. And walking a few paces further, one comes
upon the green twitter, the tended walks and pink geranium beds of
Gramercy Park.
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