First Harvests: An Episode in the Life of Mrs. Levison Gower
9781465676993
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
On the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-second Street, just where the long rise of the avenue begins, and vanishes in higher perspective like the stage of a theatre, its long slope always dotted with a multitude of yellow carriages, cabs, and dark-green private broughams, there stands a large brown-stone house of irreproachable respectability. The steps in front of the door are also of brown-stone; and the columns on either side terminate in the hollow globes of iron, painted green, common to a thousand other houses in New York. Upon the first floor above the basement are three windows and a door; in the second story are four windows, one above the door; and in the third, four others again. The windows are all of the same size; but those of the second and third stories are plain, while the lowest have above them an oval design with flowery, curved ornaments. What the original designer of these windows sought to express in them is not clear; but subsequent builders, not seeing the need of expressing anything in window-caps, but supposing some adornment proper in that place, have copied them without deviation, much as a lady ties a bow-knot on her lapdog’s tail. Yet, such as it is, this square brown box contains a flower of American civilization. And flowers are gay, conspicuous, noteworthy in themselves; but the more noteworthy as bearing the seeds that shall be multiplied in next year’s crop. No one would perhaps think that this house, standing unadorned and unnoteworthy on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-second Street, was so rare a possession, or contained in itself so much; that this square box, valued solely because of its proximity to other similar square boxes, represented the American social apotheosis—the pure spheres of perfect democratic joy, the acme, in this republic of terrestrial success. Yet of the fact there can be no question. That little vertebral ridge named Fifth Avenue, with its one or two similar ridges, its few timid excursions and venturings in by-streets to the east and west, represents the flower and the crown of things; only those there live who can command at least wealth or power at will; neither blood nor brains nor breeding can maintain themselves upon that vantage-coin unaided and alone. So have we seen some bed of oysters, planted at just the proper level of the shoal, look down with superiority and scorn upon those below, cumbered with the sea-weed, and those above, left awash at low spring tides. Merely to own this house, and not to live in it; to own it only as some miser owns a picture or a rare gem, for the pleasure of possession—would cost, in interest and taxes, the labor of some score of able-bodied men each year. To live in it, with servants trained to feudal manners and address, with the necessary wines and equipage and flowers and feathers that attend so rare a gem, would cost the earnings of an army. Has the fortunate possessor of the house such an army at his call? Surely; else how could he keep it? We shall see them shortly. And what of the inside of the house?—is it suited to the high position of the inmates? Softly, my good madam; a stranger can hardly know how difficult it is to gain access to this mansion, and how exclusive is the set which Mrs. Gower leads. For the pedestrians on the pavement look up to No. 2002 with an air of respect. Few of them but know the house as Mrs. Levison Gower’s. And even the pedestrians on the pavement, in this select spot, are of a picked and chosen class.
