O Henry

The Voice of the City O Henry

Twenty-five years ago the school children used to chant their lessons. The manner oftheir delivery was a singsong recitative between the utterance of an Episcopal minister andthe drone of a tired sawmill. I mean no disrespect. We must have lumber and sawdust. I remember one beautiful and instructive little lyric that emanated from the physiologyclass. The most striking line of it was this: "The shin-bone is the long-est bone in the hu-man bod-y."What an inestimable boon it would have been if all the corporeal and spiritual factspertaining to man had thus been tunefully and logically inculcated in our youthful minds!But what we gained in anatomy, music and philosophy was meagre. The other day I became confused. I needed a ray of light. I turned back to those schooldays for aid. But in all the nasal harmonies we whined forth from those hard benches Icould not recall one that treated of the voice of agglomerated mankind. In other words, of the composite vocal message of massed humanity. In other words, of the Voice of a Big City. Now, the individual voice is not lacking. We can understand the song of the poet, theripple of the brook, the meaning of the man who wants $5 until next Monday, theinscriptions on the tombs of the Pharaohs, the language of flowers, the "step lively" of theconductor, and the prelude of the milk cans at 4 A. M. Certain large-eared ones even assertthat they are wise to the vibrations of the tympanum produced by concussion of the airemanating from Mr. H. James. But who can comprehend the meaning of the voice of thecity?I went out for to see. First, I asked Aurelia. She wore white Swiss and a hat with flowers on it, and ribbonsand ends of things fluttered here and there."Tell me," I said, stammeringly, for I have no voice of my own, "what does this big-er-enormous-er-whopping city say? It must have a voice of some kind. Does it ever speakto you? How do you interpret its meaning? It is a tremendous mass, but it must have a key.""Like a Saratoga trunk?" asked Aurelia