The Duel
The gods, lying beside their nectar on 'Lympus and peeping over the
edge of the cliff, perceive a difference in cities. Although it
would seem that to their vision towns must appear as large or small
ant-hills without special characteristics, yet it is not so.
Studying the habits of ants frm so great a height should be but a
mild diversion when coupled with the soft drink that mythology tells
us is their only solace. But doubtless they have amused themselves
by the comparison of villages and towns; and it will be no news to
them (nor, perhaps, to many mortals), that in one particularity
New York stands unique among the cities of the world. This shall be
the theme of a little story addressed to the man who sits smoking
with his Sabbath-slippered feet on another chair, and to the woman
who snatches the paper for a moment while boiling greens or a
narcotized baby leaves her free. With these I love to sit upon the
ground and tell sad stories of the death of Kings.
New York City is inhabited by 4,000,000 mysterious strangers; thus
beating Bird Centre by three millions and half a dozen nine's. They
came here in various ways and for many reasons--Hendrik Hudson, the
art schools, green goods, the stork, the annual dressmakers'
convention, the Pennsylvania Railroad, love of money, the stage,
cheap excursion rates, brains, personal column ads., heavy walking
shoes, ambition, freight trains--all these have had a hand in making
up the population.
But every man Jack when he first sets foot on the stones of Manhattan
has got to fight. He has got to fight at once until either he or his
adversary wins. There is no resting between rounds, for there are no
rounds. It is slugging from the first. It is a fight to a finish.
Your opponent is the City. You must do battle with it from the time
the ferry-boat lands you on the island until either it is yours or
it has conquered you. It is the same whether you have a million in
your pocket or only the price of a week's lodging.
The battle is to decide whether you shall become a New Yorker or
turn the rankest outlander and Philistine. You must be one or the
other. You cannot remain neutral. You must be for or against--
lover or enemy--bosom friend or outcast. And, oh, the city is a
general in the ring. Not only by blows does it seek to subdue you.
It woos you to its heart with the subtlety of a siren. It is a
combination of Delilah, green Chartreuse, Beethoven, chloral and
John L. in his best days.
In other cities you may wander and abide as a stranger man as long
as you please. You may live in Chicago until your hair whitens,
and be a citizen and still prate of beans if Boston mothered you,
and without rebuke. You may become a civic pillar in any other
town but Knickerbocker's, and all the time publicly sneering at
its buildings, comparing them with the architecture of Colonel
Telfair's residence in Jackson, Miss., whence you hail, and you
will not be set upon. But in New York you must be either a New
Yorker or an invader of a modern Troy, concealed in the wooden
horse of your conceited provincialism. And this dreary preamble
is only to introduce to you the unimportant figures of William
and Jack.
They came out of the West together, where they had been friends.
They came to dig their fortunes out of the big city.
Father Knickerbocker met them at the ferry, giving one a right-
hander on the nose and the other an upper-cut with his left, just
to let them know that the fight was on.
William was for business; Jack was for Art. Both were young and
ambitious; so they countered and clinched. I think they were from
Nebraska or possibly Missouri or Minnesota. Anyhow, they were out
for success and scraps and scads, and they tackled the city like
two Lochinvars with brass knucks and a pull at the City Hall.
Four years afterward William and Jack met at luncheon. The business
man blew in like a March wind, hurled his silk hat at a waiter,
dropped into the chair that was pushed under him, seized the bill
of fare, and had ordered as far as cheese before the artist had time
to do more than nod. After the nod a humorous smile came into
his eyes.
"Billy," he said, "you're done for. The city has gobbled you up.
It has taken you and cut you to its pattern and stamped you with
its brand. You are so nearly like ten thousand men I have seen
to-day that you couldn't be picked out from them if it weren't for
your laundry marks."
"Camembert," finished William. "What's that? Oh, you've still
got your hammer out for New York, have you? Well, little old
Noisyville-on-the-Subway is good enough for me. It's giving me
mine. And, say, I used to think the West was the whole round
world--only slightly flattened at the poles whenever Bryan ran.
I used to yell myself hoarse about the free expense, and hang my
hat on the horizon, and say cutting things in the grocery to little
soap drummers from the East. But I'd never seen New York, then,
Jack. Me for it from the rathskellers up. Sixth Avenue is the West
to me now. Have you heard this fellow Crusoe sing? The desert isle
for him, I say, but my wife made me go. Give me May Irwin or E. S.
Willard any time."
"Poor Billy," said the artist, delicately fingering a cigarette.
"You remember, when we were on our way to the East how we talked
about this great, wonderful city, and how we meant to conquer it
and never let it get the best of us? We were going to be just the
same fellows we had always been, and never let it master us. It
has downed you, old man. You have changed from a maverick into a
butterick."
"Don't see exactly what you are driving at," said William. "I don't
wear an alpaca coat with blue trousers and a seersucker vest on
dress occasions, like I used to do at home. You talk about being
cut to a pattern--well, ain't the pattern all right? When you're in
Rome you've got to do as the Dagoes do. This town seems to me to
have other alleged metropolises skinned to flag stations. According
to the railroad schedule I've got in mind, Chicago and Saint Jo and
Paris, France, are asterisk stops--which means you wave a red flag
and get on every other Tuesday. I like this little suburb of
Tarrytown-on-the-Hudson. There's something or somebody doing all
the time. I'm clearing $8,000 a year selling automatic pumps, and
I'm living like kings-up. Why, yesterday, I was introduced to
John W. Gates. I took an auto ride with a wine agent's sister.
I saw two men run over by a street car, and I seen Edna May play
in the evening. Talk about the West, why, the other night I woke
everybody up in the hotel hollaring. I dreamed I was walking on a
board sidewalk in Oshkosh. What have you got against this town,
Jack? There's only one thing in it that I don't care for, and
that's a ferryboat."
The artist gazed dreamily at the cartridge paper on the wall. "This
town," said he, "is a leech. It drains the blood of the country.
Whoever comes to it accepts a challenge to a duel. Abandoning the
figure of the leech, it is a juggernaut, a Moloch, a monster to which
the innocence, the genius, and the beauty of the land must pay
tribute. Hand to hand every newcomer must struggle with the
leviathan. You've lost, Billy. It shall never conquer me. I hate
it as one hates sin or pestilence or--the color work in a ten-cent
magazine. I despise its very vastness and power. It has the poorest
millionaires, the littlest great men, the lowest skyscrapers, the
dolefulest pleasures of any town I ever saw. It has caught you, old
man, but I will never run beside its chariot wheels. It glosses
itself as the Chinaman glosses his collars. Give me the domestic
finish. I could stand a town ruled by wealth or one ruled by an
aristocracy; but this is one controlled by its lowest ingredients.
Claiming culture, it is the crudest; asseverating its pre-eminence,
it is the basest; denying all outside values and virtue, it is the
narrowest. Give me the pure and the open heart of the West country.
I would go back there to-morrow if I could."
"Don't you like this _filet mgnon_?" said William. "Shucks, now,
what's the use to knock the town! It's the greatest ever. I
couldn't sell one automatic pump between Harrisburg and Tommy
O'Keefe's saloon, in Sacramento, where I sell twenty here. And
have you seen Sara Bernardt in 'Andrew Mack' yet?"
"The town's got you, Billy," said Jack.
"All right," said William. "I'm going to buy a cottage on Lake
Ronkonkoma next summer."
At midnight Jack raised his window and sat close to it. He caught
his breath at what he saw, though he had seen and felt it a hundred
times.
Far below and around lay the city like a ragged purple dream. The
irregular houses were like the broken exteriors of cliffs lining deep
gulches and winding streams. Some were mountainous; some lay in
long, desert ca~nons. Such was the background of the wonderful,
cruel, enchanting, bewildering, fatal, great city. But into this
background were cut myriads of brilliant parallelograms and circles
and squares through which glowed many colored lights. And out of the
violet and purple depths ascended like the city's soul sounds and
odors and thrills that make up the civic body. There arose the breath
of gaiety unrestrained, of love, of hate, of all the passions that man
can know. There below him lay all things, good or bad, that can be
brought from the four corners of the earth to instruct, please,
thrill, enrich, despoil, elevate, cast down, nurture or kill. Thus
the flavor of it came up to him and went into his blood.
There was a knock on his door. A telegram had come for him. It came
from the West, and these were its words:
"Come back and the answer will be yes.
"DOLLY."
He kept the boy waiting ten minutes, and then wrote the reply:
"Impossible to leave here at present." Then he sat at the window
again and let the city put its cup of mandragora to his lips again.
After all it isn't a story; but I wanted to know which one of the
heroes won the battle against the city. So I went to a very learned
friend and laid the case before him. What he said was: "Please
don't bother me; I have Christmas presents to buy."
So there it rests; and you will have to decide for yourself.
-THE END-
[William Sidney Porter]O Henry's short story: The Duel
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