My View

ON entering my tiny apartment recently a charming little lady exclaimed with real enthusiasm, ‘Why, this is like being aboard ship, an air-ship!' And as our little group looked down upon miles of vari-colored houses and bridges and pointed church-spires, and the distant, glittering Sound, instinctively we waited to feel that floating, slightly rocking sensation known to the traveler on shipboard, whether he be traveling over land or sea.

This very rare lady, possessed of the grace of tact, said other pretty things about my high, green-lined nook; yet she came from a real house of her own in a town of houses and lawns, where the happy citizens merely read in the magazines concerning that horror, the modern apartment-house! And still, in the voice of my guest there was no hint of pity for me as she surveyed my minute domain. She looked at my books, at my few and dear pictures on the woodland-green walls, at my divan and easy-chair set deep in the windowniches, and then she turned again to the panorama spread ever before my eyes and said, with a little sigh of pleasure, ‘ How restful a view is, a big outlook, like this! How far you seem from all the hurly-burly, and yet how close to the heart of life!’

Really this dear lady almost took away my breath; for you see I am used to the guerdon of thinly veiled sympathy for the misfortune of living where I live.

Some of my visitors come from Jersey, where they have brown earth to dig in, and fresh vegetables in the spring, and the comfort of roomy porches, inclosed in wire netting! And others come from houses down town, real private houses, with white colonial doorways, and beautiful old stairs, and back yards, and butlers, — but of course without such a superfluity as a real view, for people living in their own houses do not yearn for such trifles, and besides, what would the butler do with it anyhow?

Or again my friend comes from a tenroom-and-three-bath apartment in the most fashionable apartment-house section in the city. There also the inhabitant has no need of a view, since he looks out upon a wide, modern, sanitary court; opposite is the immaculate tiled kitchen and picturesque Japanese cook of his prosperous neighbor, while many feet below is the clean asphalt pavement; the court containing by way of ornament a geranium bed in summer, and, the year round, four prim and architecturally correct evergreens! But inside the apartment are wonderful floors of polished wood, and built-in mahogany book-cases, and decorative private telephones, and convenient mail-shutes, and burglar-proof jeweland-silver safes, and beautiful electric lamps, and marble baths as splendid as the baths of Imperial Rome!

Certainly these various friends of mine have a right to pity me, for my bathtub is a trivial affair, as there is not one bit of genuine marble in this whole ramshackle house, none of the many tenants have butlers, and not all of us possess even so much as a maid-of-allwork.

In short, we are impecunious, everyday folk, city-bound, living in an oblong brick box that fronts on a dusty, prosaic street. What, then, is the real use of living at ail, and why emphasize our woes to the extent of writing about them ?

Dear reader, this is my compensation, the reason why I envy my friends neither their trim gardens, nor their men-servants, nor their spacious rooms, nor even the bliss of many closets! This ugly, box-like structure is builded on a high hill, and the hill overlooks on its eastern side a great, conglomerate, mysterious city, a city which by night becomes an enchantment, and by dawn a vision of pearl and gold and amethyst , and by noon a clear stretch of irregular roof-tops and churches and arching bridges, and again, at dusk, once more vague, illusive, a wonderland sketched in purple shadow and fiery light, everywhere traces of sheer magic, the magic of man’s handiwork under God’s sky.

Your clean, pure country, — I love it. Your gardens and hedges and pink babies digging up the outraged flowerbeds, — I envy you these joys. Even marble tubs possess for me a poetic charm, and the English man-servant and the Japanese butler summon before me visions of luxurious, beatific inaction! But that which I need, on which my spirit leans, is an outlook containing, or seeming to contain, all things: leagues of sky, leagues of peopled city, leagues of far, shining water outlining the whole picture, great splashes of hillside, green or brown, and color, color everywhere!

To-day it rains; my windows are blurred; the lights are gray, not gold. Yet when I turn my head from my chat - tering typewriter, I see through halfclosed eyes emerging shapes, a tall spire here and there, blotches of pure color gleaming through the mist, and in the foreground a group of preening pigeons fluttering against a golden-brown wall. Blocks and blocks away I hear the grumbling of the elevated trains, and occasionally I see a moving dot which from this distance and height looks like a child’s abandoned toy.

At the moment there is little in my view of obvious charm — unless a purply-silver haze and spirals of blowing smoke and the delight of distance fascinate you — as they do me! To-day my view is like a fair woman, in street-gown and hat and veil. Only the woman’s lover there by her side knows the possibility of that form and face, remembers the gleam of bright hair when the scoop hat is flung away, the white, curved arms under the heavy coat, — arms which only last night were relieved by the delicate contrast of glittering silk, — knows also the poise of the slim throat and the smile of the sweet mouth, now so discreet, so unsmiling, as the lady sits in the subway train beside her discreet, unsmiling escort.

So with my view: to-day it is disguised, to-night it will gleam like a court beauty in jewels and lace; to-day it is gracious, but subdued; I have seen it passionate in summer lightning, icily magnificent in December snows. And if only the sun would come out now for one brief moment there would be a rainbow arch over my half of Heaven, as I have seen it many times, curving like some Titanic necklace of gems across the streets, the houses, the bridges, the kind green hills, and that far gleam of water.

Commuters, you have your gardens, your velvet turf, your shady trees, your country club, and your divine quiet. But I have a little eyrie hanging over the wonder city from which you hasten each day in weariness and scorn. And this eyrie is a home, because those who dwell within possess the two essentials for happiness: love of one’s kind, and a vision of the splendor of the earth!