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Updated: June 29, 2025
Sometimes he wished that ambition had missed him altogether instead of waiting for so long to strike. Sometimes he wished he could have gone right on being what he once had been. After all, there was nothing wrong in living in cheap hotels and even cheaper rooming houses; there was nothing wrong in being a lackadaisical door-to-door salesman with run-down heels.
For miles they jolted over the execrable roads and through the shiftless, run-down country before they found anything worth while putting in the wagons. "Great country, Pap," said Si suggestively. "Yes; it'd be a great country," said his father disdainfully, "if you could put a wagonload o' manure on every foot and import some Injianny men to take care of it.
He came of generations of Waldensian Protestant ancestry in Italy, this alert, efficient, cultured Italian pastor. He found the parish to which he was assigned composed of several thousand of his countrymen in a Hudson river town; the building to be used for church purposes a dirty, run-down old hall, a part of the most disreputable corner of the town.
Busy folks worry. And so do the idle. The cultured and scholarly touch elbows with the ignorant here. Americans are supposed to be specialists in worrying. The name Americanitis has been given to a certain run-down condition of the nerves. Well, we may possibly have set the pace, and may be making new records. But certainly there are plenty of pushing followers.
Together they explored Chelsea Village section, and the Oxford quadrangles of General Theological Seminary, where quiet meditation dwells in Tudor corridors; upper Greenwich Village, the home of Italian tables d'hôte, clerks, social-workers, and radical magazines, of alley rookeries and the ancient Jewish burying-ground; lower Greenwich Village, where run-down American families with Italian lodgers live on streets named for kings, in wooden houses with gambrel roofs and colonial fanlights.
It was a tawdry, miserable, almost tragic group, the men undersized, be-diamonded, their skulls oddly shaped, their clothes a satire on the fashions for men, their chins unshaven, their loose lips curved contentedly over cigarettes; the women dreadfully unreal with the pitiless light of the early morning sun glaring down on their bedizened faces, their spotted, garish clothes, their run-down heels, their vivid veils, their matted hair.
Afterwards, between the railing that protects the pictures and the line of busts, show-cases and marble tables supported by gilded lions, he came upon the easels of several copyists. They were boys from the School of Fine Arts, or poverty-stricken young ladies with run-down heels and dilapidated hats, who were copying Murillos.
And once more he would begin his explorations, peering with greedy eyes at all the women who passed alone, turning around to follow the course of run-down heels, the flutter of dark and mud-splashed skirts. At last he would start with sudden determination, he would disappear almost on the heel of some woman always of the same appearance.
It was all mystery unplumbable, unbelievable ... that this breath was not to go on forever, that this brain was to be stopped off, this heart cease like a run-down clock, this exultation and sorrow to leave like a mist, scattered in that life that bore it.... That he, Joe Blaine, was to die!
The landscape seemed to smile at him as he sped past. "Isn't this the grandest country on earth, Shorty?" he bubbled over. "It's God's country for a fact. So different from old run-down, rebel-ridden Tennessee. Look at the houses and the farms; look at the people and the live-stock. Look at the towns and the churches. Look at everything. Here's the country where people live.
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