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When F. V. Morley, brother of thunderer upon the left Christopher Morley, set sail with two friends down the Thames— in their converted ship's lifeboat Wife of Bath he naturally found many such bits of rare Anglicana as the Martyr's epitaph above. Young Morley, like his columnist-novelist brother, is one of those for whom any river will wimple with apt allusion. Half the poets of England creep into Mr. Morley's book, a pat line or stanza from each. And he can himself do such sure telling bits as: "The first lock, by Inglesham Round House, holds two feet of water, of varnished and translucent brown—the brown of old sherry." Though we are here reminded that Elder Brother Morley is prouder of his taste in wine than of his taste in literature—which he takes for granted—the Thames wanderings of Younger Brother Morley are as rich and heady as though the water were turned into brown old wine with the Wife of Bath's passing. An apparently genuine "treasure cipher," its decipherment and what ensued give to the tale an almost spirituous tang.
Manhattan Transport
The Story.— One foggy evening in 1900, a tough barge rat from Haverstraw, N. Y., marvels, as always, at the changing masses of Manhattan's skyline seen from the North River. "Gee," he says. "Gee!" He can neither read nor write. He is 16; name, John Breen; parents, a once-pretty Irish servant and someone other than the grimy bargee she calls their "old man." Entering the East River, in thickening fog and greasy tide-rips, the barge is rammed. Loaded with bricks ("the city's red corpuscles") it plunges under. John Breen struggles out of the greenish-black water to a Manhattan stringpiece. The city claims him.
A ghetto family adopts him, the Lipshitzes. He outpunches the Grogan gang, gets used to elevated trains and a million smells. A Bowery bartender who handles pugilists takes him in tow. Like most successful bartenders, Pug Malone is clean-living, highminded. John Breen serves beer, knocks out bruisers, goes to night school. He becomes Malone's assistant on a country farm where men of paunch and riches submit themselves for renovation. One wealthy man, Gilbert Van Horn, less paunchy than most, discovers he is John Breen's father. John finds out too but neither says anything. Van Horn makes John his ward and pays his way through Columbia. John wants to be, and becomes, an engineer, a servant of his first mistress, the city.
During the construction of the cavernous city aqueduct, John and Van Horn's niece, Josephine, are engaged. But she is rescued from the Titanic disaster by smooth Garrit Rantoul, promoter of the aqueduct. She marries Rantoul instead of grim, underground, somewhat sandhoggish John. John, just promoted, quits engineering and goes on a star-spangled "bust," for three days rampaging the length, width and depth of the island labyrinth he had thought to help reconstruct.