Jacob paused to have a modest lunch. And the choice of food made him think of Ferdinand Harrap.
As Rudyard sought to be a dramatist, Ferdinand had tried to write stories. He did not lack the gift of experience, as did Rudyard, who found in all circumstances only a backdrop before which to manifest what he already possessed, his charm, his wit, and his delight in himself. Ferdinand was reserved. He held himself back and he was very much interested in whatever was before him. His stories, however, belonged to a small province, the province of his own life with his mother and his mother’s family. The essential motive of his stories was the disdain and superiority he felt about these human beings of the older generation, and his stories always concerned the contemptuous exchanges of the characters, the witty quarrels which revealed the cruelty and the ignorance of their relationship to each other.
“You have to love human beings,” thought Jacob, “if you want to write stories about them. Or at least you have to want to love them. Or at least you have to imagine the possibility that you might be able to love them. Maybe that’s not true. But it is true that Ferdinand detests everyone but his friends of the circle.”
None of Ferdinand’s stories were published. Unlike Rudyard, he did not persevere, lacking Rudyard’s joy in the process of composition and Rudyard’s belief in himself. For a time he did nothing at all, and then, in helping one of his uncles, Ferdinand perceived the need of an agency which would arrange matters between manufacturers and retail stores. This perception of the usefulness of such an agency required an acute but peculiar intelligence, an intelligence like a squint. Ferdinand was not concerned about becoming rich, as business men were, and thus in helping his uncle, his indifference and his sense of superiority soon made obvious to him what no one else saw. Soon, with a small office and a girl to handle the mail, Ferdinand was making five thousand dollars a year, and had only to go to the office briefly each day to see that the girl was handling matters properly.
As soon as he prospered, Ferdinand’s sense of what was good taste became active. His manners became more stiff and more pointed, and he dressed like a dandy, but strangely, as if he were a dandy of the past. And when he had money to spend, his feeling that he must have the best of everything, or nothing, had to be satisfied. He had to have the best orchestra seats at the theatre and he had to have the best dinner at the best restaurants.
“An only child,” said Jacob to himself, “and the child of a mother divorced from her husband since he was four years of age.”
The best of anything was truly a necessity to Ferdinand and he suffered very much when he was deprived of it. He insisted also that his friends of the circle join with him, accepting his criterion. This was difficult because they had little money or no money at all. Often Ferdinand paid for them, and he always paid for Rudyard, whom he admired very much. But when he did not care to pay for one of the boys, at dinner or at the theatre, and when they suggested that they come at less expense, Ferdinand strictly forbade their coming. He refused to go or he went by himself to the best restaurant and sat in the best seat at the Broadway play. When he was asked by a stranger the reason for his concentration upon dining well, Ferdinand replied in the curt and stern tone he so often used that dinner was extremely important: if one dined well, one felt good; otherwise, one did not.
A severe, private, hardly understood code ruled Ferdinand in all things. He regarded certain acts as good behavior and everything else, every difference, change, or departure as infamous and to be denounced. It was often necessary to prevent Ferdinand from making remarks of virtually insane cruelty to newcomers and strangers who visited the circle, for if they behaved in a way of which he disapproved or in a way indifferent to what he regarded as proper, he was likely to tell them that they were unpardonable fools. Visitors and strangers did not know what it was impossible for them to know, the strict and personal standard by which Ferdinand judged all acts and all remarks. Fortunately Ferdinand’s constraint and stiffness made him speak in a very low voice, so that often enough the most extraordinary insult was left unheard. It was then necessary for Rudyard or Jacob to translate the sentence of final condemnation into a mild euphemism. When Ferdinand said to a stranger: “You must be out of your mind!” Rudyard explained that Ferdinand disagreed with what the stranger had just said, while Ferdinand turned aside, indifferent to the reduction of his insult and feeling that he had made his stand.
Jacob had arrived at Riverside Drive. He looked down on the Hudson River and, feeling the overwhelming presence of the great city, he thought of his friends as citizens of the city and of the city itself in which they lived and were lost.
“In New York,” he said to himself, often concluding his slow tours with such monologues, “there are nineteen thousand horses, three hundred thousand dogs, five hundred thousand cats, one million trees and one million sparrows: more than enough!
“On the other hand, there are at least six million human beings and during holidays there are more than that number. But, in a way, these numbers hardly exist because they cannot be perceived (we all have four or five friends, more or less). No human being can take in such an aggregation: all that we know is that there is always more and more. This is the moreness of which we are aware, no matter what we look upon. This moreness is the true being of the great city, so that, in a way, this city hardly exists. It certainly does not exist as does our family, our friends, and our neighborhood.”
Jacob felt that he had come to a conclusion which showed the shadow in which his friends and he lived. They did not inhabit a true community and there was an estrangement between each human being and his family, or between his family and his friends, or between his family and his school. Worst of all was the estrangement in the fact that the city as such had no true need of any of them, a fact which became more and more clear during the great depression.
“Yet,” thought Jacob, seeking to see the whole truth, “there is the other side, which always exists. They say of New York that it is like an apartment hotel. And they say: ‘It’s fine for a visit, but I would not want to live here.’ They are wrong. It’s fine to live here, but exhausting on a visit.
“Once New York was the small handsome self-contained city of the merchant prince and the Dutch patroon’s great grandsons. And once it was the brownstone city ruled by the victors of the Civil War. Then the millions drawn or driven from Europe transformed the city, making the brownstone mansions defeated rooming houses. Now, in the years of the great depression, it is for each one what he wants it to be, if he has the money. If he has the money! Coal from Pennsylvania, oranges from California, tea from China, films from Hollywood, musicians and doctors of every school! Every kind of motion, bus and car, train and plane, concerto and ballet! And if the luxuries of the sun and the sea are absent, if life in this city seems brittle as glass, every kind of vehicle here performs every kind of motion to take the citizen away from the city, if he has the money! The city in its very nature contains all of the means of departure as well as return. Thus the city gives to the citizen a freedom from itself, and thus one might say that this is the capital of departure. But none of my friends will go away: they are bound to each other. They have too great a need of each other, and all are a part of the being of each.”
Jacob Cohen was through for the day. He had said to himself all that he wanted to say. Thus he had conversed with himself during the years that he had dedicated himself to being the kind of a citizen that he thought he ought to be. And if he seldom uttered these thoughts to anyone, nevertheless their feeling was contained and vivid in all that other human being saw of him. This was the reason that he seemed to some, strange; to some, preoccupied; to some, possessed by secrecy and silence.