In New York they are not afraid of any humanness. Even when they are in themselves craven-cowardly, cowardly enough to turn their own stomachs, they still turn their humanness unfearfully face-outward like upturned faces of a pack of cards.
An Italian organ-grinder grinding out his loud fierce music in a long deep New York side-street is a human organ-grinder: he bestows his rasped melody widely on everybody in ear-shot, not individually--since all around him is a spreading world of strangers--but jointly. So it feels-like.
A beggar-woman at a subway-entrance with a whine and a dirty face and the deadly black cape and chicken-coopish beggar-odor is a human beggar-woman. She throws out an inner savor of herself like a soiled aura on all collectively who pass her. Each-and-all of New York by tolerating and owning her partakes of her mean human essence.
A stout-hearted worn-bodied Jew factory girl working at a hard greasy little machine day after day gives all New York her bit of young virtue which is hardy and heroic and unaware: the whole Island of looseness and vice has an equal gift of impregnable surprising sordid purity thriving on sixes and sevens of poor dollars-a-week.
All of it is because New York is one Large Condition made of human breaths and the worn scrapings of tired Youth rather than one large town made of individuals and stone houses.
And in that is an odd enchantment for me who am born and grown in the places of Half-fear with an old isolated whole fear always on me.
In New York I am a partaker of that smooth manna of humanness as I am of the air and the sunshine and the little black specks of coal-soot: partly from choice, partly willy-nilly, partly in the sweeping unanalyzable pell-mell-ness of massed human nature.
And it is in New York I have those strangest things of all: human friendships. Not many friendships and not of spent familiarities: for I don’t like actual human beings too much around me. But yet friendships made of the edges of thoughts and vivid pathos and pregnant odds and ends of nervous human flesh and fire.
It is in New York I go to the apartment of a Friend at the end of an afternoon. In the apartment are some persons having tea, men and women. The Friend greets me at the door. She wears maybe a dress of thin dark and light silk, shaped in the quaint outlandish fashion of the hour. And she has shrewd kindly eyes like a Rembrandt portrait, and a worn New-York-ish Latin-ish brain and heart both of which are made of steel, sparkle and the very plain red meat of living. She says, ‘Hello-Mary-Mac-Lane,’ and clasps my hand, and we exchange a glance of no real understanding at all but suggesting warmed challenge of personality, and an oblique sweet call of depth to depth, and of friendship which by mere force of preference and of our separate quality and _calibre_ is true rather than false. So close and no closer may friendship be. And friendship, with-all, is closer than any love. It is the closest human beings ever come to meeting.