Chapter III (1)

There are those whose ardor for humanity finds a congenial vent in the denouncement of all they see about them,--all the institutions of their country, all the laborious processes of civilization. Sociologists of this type speak and write of an ordinary American city in terms which Dante might have envied. Nobody, it would seem, is ever cured in its hospitals; they only lie on 'cots of pain.' Nobody is ever reformed in its reformatories. Nobody is reared to decency in its asylums. Nobody is--apparently--educated in its schools. Its industries are ravenous beasts, sucking the blood of workers; its poor are 'shackled slaves'; its humble homes are 'dens.' I have heard a philanthropic lecturer talk to the poor upon the housing of the poor. She threw on a screen enlarged photographs of narrow streets and tenement rooms which looked to me unspeakably dreary, but which the working-women around me gazed at in mild perplexity, seeing nothing amiss, and wondering that their residences should be held up to this unseemly scorn. They did not do as did the angry Italians of a New Jersey town,--smash the invidious pictures which shamed their homes; they sat in stolid silence and discomfiture, dimly conscious of an unresented insult.

It is hard to grasp a point of view immeasurably remote from our own; but what can we understand of other lives unless we do this difficult thing? Old women in the out-wards of an almshouse (of all earthly abodes the saddest) have boasted to me that their floors were scrubbed every other day, and their sheets changed once a week; and this braggart humor stunned my senses until I called to mind the floor and the bed of one of them (an extraordinarily dirty old woman) whom I had known in other years. Last winter the workers in a settlement house were called upon at midnight to succor a woman who had been kicked and beaten into unconsciousness by a drunken husband. The poor creature was all one bleeding bruise. When she was revived, her dim eyes traveled over the horrified faces about her. 'It's pretty bad,' she gasped, 'it's mighty bad'; and then, with another look at the group of protecting, pitying spinsters, 'but it must be something fierce to be an old maid.'

The city is a good friend to the poor. It gives them day nurseries for their babies, kindergartens for their little children, schools for their boys and girls, playgrounds, swimming-pools, recreation piers, reading-rooms, libraries, churches, clubs, hospitals, cheap amusements, open-air concerts, employment agencies, the companionship of their kind, and the chance of a friend at need. In return, the poor love the city, and cling to it with reasonable but somewhat stifling affection. They know that the hardest thing in life is to be isolated,--'unrelated,' to use Carlyle's apt word; and they escape this fate by eschewing the much-lauded fields and farms. They know also that in the country they must stand or fall by their own unaided efforts, they must learn the hard lesson of self-reliance. Many of them propose to live, as did the astute author of _Piers Plowman_, 'in the town, and on the town as well.' Moreover, pleasure means as much to them as it does to the rest of us. We hardly needed Mr. Chesterton to tell us that a visit to a corner saloon may be just as exciting an event to a tenement-house dweller, as a dinner at a gold-and-marble hotel is to the average middle-class citizen; and that the tenement-house dweller may be just as moderate in his potations:--

Merrily taking twopenny rum, and cheese with a pocket knife.

Poverty, we are assured, is an 'error,' like ill-health and crime. It is an anachronism in civilization, a stain upon a wisely governed land. But into our country which, after a human fashion, is both wise and foolish, pours the poverty of Europe. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants with but a few dollars between them and want; with scant equipment, physical or mental, for the struggle of life; with an inheritance of feebleness from ill-nourished generations before them,--this is the problem which the United States faces courageously, and solves as best she can. What she cannot do is miraculously to convert poverty into plenty,--certainly not before the next year doubles, and the third year trebles the miracle-seeking multitude. She cannot properly house or profitably employ a million of immigrants before the next million is clamoring at her doors. Nor is she even given a fair chance to accomplish her giant task. The demagogues who are employed in the congenial sport of railroad baiting, and who are enjoying beyond measure the fun of chivying business interests into dusty corners, are the ones to lift up their voices in shrill appeal for the army of the unemployed. They refuse to connect one phenomenon with the other. The notion that crippling industries will benefit the industrious is not so new as it seems. Æsop must have had a clear insight into its workings when he wrote the fable of the goose that laid the golden egg.

The City of New York expends, according to a recent report of the Hospital Investigating Committee, more than a million of dollars a year for the care of sick, defective, and otherwise helpless aliens. It expended in 1913 nearly four hundred thousand dollars for the care of aliens who had been in this country less than five years. This is the record of our greatest city, the one in which the astute immigrant takes up his abode. The education she gives her little foreign-born children comprises for the most part manual and vocational training, clinics for the defective, schools for the incorrigible, free or cost-price lunches, doctoring, dentistry, the care of trained nurses, and a score of similar attentions unknown to an earlier generation, undreamed of in the countries whence these children come. In return for such fostering care, New York is held up to execration because she has the money to pay the taxes which are expended in this fashion, because she lays the golden egg which benefits the poor of twenty nations. Her unemployed (reinforced hugely from less favored communities) riot in her streets and churches, and agitators curse her for a thing of evil, a city of palaces and slums, corroded with the

Shame of lives that lie
Couched in ease, while down the streets
Pain and want go by.

The only people who take short views of life are the poor, the poor whose daily wage is spent on their daily needs. Clerks and bookkeepers and small tradesmen (toilers upon whose struggle for decency and independence nobody ever wastes a word of sympathy) may fret over the uncertainty of their future, the narrow margin which lies between them and want. But the workman and his family have a courage of their own, the courage of the soldier who does not spend the night before battle calculating his chances of a gun-shot wound, or of a legless future. It is exasperating to hear a teamster's wife cheerfully announce the coming of her tenth baby; but the calmness with which she faces the situation has in it something human and elemental. It is exasperating to see the teamster risk illness and loss of work (he might at least pull off his wet clothes when he gets home); but he tells you he has not gone to his grave with a cold _yet_, and this careless confidence saves him as much as it costs. I read recently an economist's sorrowful complaint that families, in need of the necessities of life, go to moving-picture shows; that women, with their husbands' scanty earnings in their hands, take their children to these blithesome entertainments instead of buying the Sunday dinner. It sounds like the citizens who buy motor cars instead of paying off the mortgages on their homes, and it is an error of judgment which the working man is little likely to condone; but that the pleasure-seeking impulse--which social workers assign exclusively to the spirit of youth--should mutiny in a matron's bones suggests survivals of cheerfulness, high lights amid the gloom.

The deprecation of earthly anxiety taught by the Gospels, the precedence given to the poor by the New Testament, the value placed upon voluntary poverty by the Christian Church,--these things have for nineteen hundred years helped in the moulding of men. There still remain some leaven of courage, some savor of philosophy, some echoes of ancient wisdom (heard oftenest from uneducated men), some laughter loud and careless as the laughter of the Middle Ages, some slow sense of justice, not easy to pervert. These qualities are perhaps as helpful as the 'divine discontent' fostered by enthusiasts for sorrow, the cowardice bred by insistence upon trouble and anxiety, the rancor engendered by invectives against earth and heaven. No lot is bettered by having its hardships emphasized. No man is helped by the drowning of his courage, the destruction of his good-will, the paralyzing grip of

Envy with squinting eyes,
Sick of a strange disease, his neighbor's health.

Entertaining the Candidate

By Katharine Baker

Bag in hand, brother stops in for fifteen minutes, from campaigning, to get some clean shirts. He says the candidate will be in town day after to-morrow. Do we want him to come here, or shall he go to a hotel?

We want him, of course. But we deprecate the brevity of this notice. Also the cook and chambermaid are new, and remarkably inexpert. Brother, however, declines to feel any concern. His confidence in our power to cope with emergencies is flattering if exasperating.

There is nothing in the markets at this time of year. Guests have a malignant facility in choosing such times. We scour the country for forty miles in search of green vegetables. We confide in the fishmonger, who grieves sympathetically over the 'phone, because all crabs are now cold-storage, and he'd be deceiving us if he said otherwise.

Still we are determined to have luncheon prepared in the house. Last time the august judge dined with us we summoned a caterer from a hundred miles away, and though the caterer's food was good, it was late. We love promptness, and we are going to have it. Ladies knew all about efficiency long before Mr. Frederick Taylor. Only they couldn't teach it to servants, and he would find he couldn't either. But every mistress of a house knows how to make short cuts, and is expert at 'record production' in emergencies.

The casual brother says there will be one or two dozen people at luncheon. He will telephone us fifteen minutes before they arrive. Yes, really, that's the best he can do.

So we prepare for one or two dozen people, and they must sit down to luncheon because men hate a buffet meal. We struggle with the problem, how many chickens are required for twelve or twenty-four people? The answer, however, is really obvious. Enough for twenty-four will be enough for twelve.

Day after to-morrow arrives. The gardener comes in to lay hearth-fires and carry tables. We get out china and silver. We make salad and rolls, fruit-cup and cake. We guide the cook's faltering steps over the critical moments of soup and chicken. We do the oysters in our own particular way, which we fancy inimitable. We arrange bushels of flowers in bowls, vases, and baskets, and set them on mantels, tables, book-cases, everywhere that a flower can find a footing. The chauffeur comes in proudly with the flower-holder from the limousine, and we fill it in honor of the distinguished guest.

Then we go outside to see that the approach to the house is satisfactory. The bland old gardener points to the ivy-covered wall, and says with innocent joy, '---- it, ain't that ivory the prettiest thing you ever saw in your life?' And we can't deny that the lawn looks well, with ivy, and cosmos, and innumerable chrysanthemums.

The cook and chambermaid will have to help wait on the table. The chambermaid, who is what the butler contemptuously calls 'an educated nigger,' and so knows nothing useful, announces that she has no white uniform. All she has is a cold in her head. We give her a blouse and skirt, wondering why Providence doesn't eliminate the unfit.

We run upstairs to put on our costliest shoes and stockings, and our most perishable gown. The leisurely brother gets us on the wire to say that there will be twenty guests in ten minutes.

Descending, we reset the tables to seat twenty guests, light the wood-fires, toss together twenty mint-juleps, and a few over for luck, repeat our clear instructions to the goggling chambermaid, desperately implore the butler to see that she keeps on the job, drop a last touch of flavoring in the soup, and are sitting by the fire with an air of childish gayety and carelessness when the train of motor-cars draws up to the door.

Here is the judge, courteous and authoritative. Here is his assiduous suite. The room fills with faces well known in every country that an illustrated newspaper can penetrate. From the Golden Gate and the Rio Grande, from New York and Alabama, these men have come together, intent on wresting to themselves the control of the Western Hemisphere. Now they are a sort of highly respectable guerillas. To-morrow, very likely, they will be awe-inspiring magnates.

Theoretically we are impressed. Actually they have mannerisms, and some of them wear spectacles. We reflect that the triumvirs very likely had mannerisms, too, and Antony himself might have been glad to own spectacles. We try to feel reverence for the high calling of these men. We hope they'll like our luncheon.

The butler brings in the juleps and we maintain a detached look, as though those juleps were just a happy thought of the butler himself, and we were as much surprised as anybody. The judge won't have one, but most everybody else will. The newspaper men look love and gratitude at the butler.

That earnest youth is the judge's secretary. The huge, iron-gray man expects to be a governor after November fifth, if dreams come true. The amiable old gentleman who never leaves the judge's side, has come two thousand miles out of pure political enthusiasm, to protect the candidate from assassins. He can do it, too, we conclude, when we look past his smiling mouth into his steely eyes.

Here is the campaign manager, business man and man-of-the-world.

This pretty little newspaper-woman from Utah implores us to get an utterance on suffrage from the judge. Just a word. It will save him thousands of votes. Well, she's a dear little thing, but we can't take advantage of our guest.

Luncheon is announced. Brother, slightly apologetic, murmurs that there are twenty-three. Entirely unforeseen. He babbles incoherently.

But it's all right. We women won't come to the table. Voting and eating and things like that are better left to the men anyway. Why should women want to do either, when they have fathers and brothers to do it for them? We can sit in the gallery and watch. It's very nice for us. And exclusive. Nothing promiscuous. Yes, go on. We'll wait.

Whoever is listening to our conversation professes heartbreak at our decision, and edges toward the rapidly filling dining-room.

We sit down to play lady of leisure, in various affected attitudes. We are not going near the kitchen again. The luncheon is simple. Everything is perfectly arranged. The servants can do it all. It's mere machine work.

From afar we observe the soup vanishing. Then one by one we stammer,--'The mayonnaise--'--'I wonder if the rolls are hot--'--'Cook's coffee is impossible,'--fade silently up the front stair, and scurry down the kitchen-way.

We cover the perishable gown with a huge white apron, we send up a fervent prayer for the costly shoes, and go where we are needed most.

We save the day for good coffee. With the precision of a juggler we rescue plates from the chambermaid, who is overcome by this introduction to the great world and dawdles contemplatively through the pantry door. Charmed with our proficiency, she stands by our side, and watches us clear a shelf of china in the twinkling of an eye. If she could find a stool, she would sit at our feet, making motion studies. But she couldn't find it if it were already there. She couldn't find anything. We order her back to the dining-room, where she takes up a strategic position by the window, from which she can idly survey the mob outside, and the hungry men within.

The last coffee-cup has passed through the doorway. Cigars and matches are circulating in the butler's capable hands. No more need for us.

We shed the enveloping aprons, disappear from the kitchen, and materialize again, elegantly useless, in the drawing-room. Nobody can say that luncheon wasn't hot and promptly served.

Chairs begin to clatter. They are rising from the table. A brass band outside bursts into being.

Brother had foretold that band to us, and we had expressed vivid doubts. He said it would cost eighty dollars. Now eighty dollars in itself is a respectable sum, a sum capable even of exerting some mild fascination, but eighty dollars viewed in relation to a band becomes merely ludicrous.

We said an eighty-dollar band was a thing innately impossible, like free-trade, or a dachshund. Brother attested that the next best grade of band would demand eight hundred. We justly caviled at eight hundred. We inquired, Why any band? Brother claimed that it would make a cheerful noise, and we yielded.

So at this moment the band begins to make a noise. We perceive at once that the price was accurately gauged. It is unquestionably an eighty-dollar band. We begin to believe in dachshunds.

To these supposedly cheerful strains the gentlemen stream into the drawing-room. They beam repletely. They tell us what a fine luncheon it was. They are eloquent about it. All the conditions of their entertainment were ideal, they would have us believe. They imply that we are mighty lucky, in that our men can provide us with such a luxurious existence. They smile with majestic benignity at these fair, but frivolous pensioners on masculine bounty. American women are petted, helpless dolls, anyway. Foreigners have said so. They clasp our useless hands in fervent farewells. They proceed in state to the waiting cars. They hope we will follow them to the meeting. Oh, yes, we will come, though incapable of apprehending the high problems of government.

Led by the honest band, surrounded by flags, followed by cheers, they disappear in magnificent procession. Now we may straggle to the dining-room and eat cold though matchless oysters, tepid chicken, and in general whatever there is any left of.

The chambermaid has broken a lovely old Minton plate. We are glad we didn't use the coffee-cups that were made in France for Dolly Madison. She would have enjoyed wrecking those.

We hurry, because we don't want to miss the meeting altogether. We think enviously of the men. In our secret souls, we'd like to campaign. We love to talk better than anything else in the world, and we could make nice speeches, too. But we must do the oysters and the odd jobs, and keep the hearth-fires going, like responsible vestal virgins. It's woman's sphere. Man gave it to her because he didn't want it himself.

The Street

By Simeon Strunsky

It is two short blocks from my office near Park Row to the Subway station where I take the express for Belshazzar Court. Eight months in the year it is my endeavor to traverse this distance as quickly as I can. This is done by cutting diagonally across the street traffic. By virtue of the law governing right-angled triangles I thus save as much as fifty feet and one fifth of a minute of time. In the course of a year this saving amounts to sixty minutes, which may be profitably spent over a two-reel presentation of 'The Moonshiner's Bride,' supplemented by an intimate picture of Lumbering in Saskatchewan. But with the coming of warm weather my habits change. It grows more difficult to plunge into the murk of the Subway.

A foretaste of the languor of June is in the air. The turnstile storm-doors in our office building, which have been put aside for brief periods during the first deceptive approaches of spring, only to come back triumphant from Elba, have been definitively removed. The steel-workers pace their girders twenty floors high almost in mid-season form, and their pneumatic hammers scold and chatter through the sultry hours. The soda-fountains are bright with new compounds whose names ingeniously reflect the world's progress from day to day in politics, science, and the arts. From my window I can see the long black steamships pushing down to the sea, and they raise vague speculations in my mind about the cost of living in the vicinity of Sorrento and Fontainebleau. On such a day I am reminded of my physician's orders, issued last December, to walk a mile every afternoon on leaving my office. So I stroll up Broadway with the intention of taking my train farther up-town, at Fourteenth Street.

The doctor did not say stroll. He said a brisk walk with head erect, chest thrown out, diaphragm well contracted, and a general aspect of money in the bank. But here enters human perversity. The only place where I am in the mood to walk after the prescribed military fashion is in the open country. Just where by all accounts I ought to be sauntering without heed to time, studying the lovely texts which Nature has set down in the modest type-forms selected from her inexhaustible fonts,--in the minion of ripening berries, in the nonpareil of crawling insect life, the agate of tendril and filament, and the 12-point diamond of the dust,--there I stride along and see little.

And in the city, where I should swing along briskly, I lounge. What is there on Broadway to linger over? On Broadway, Nature has used her biggest, fattest type-forms. Tall, flat, building fronts, brazen with many windows and ribbed with commercial gilt lettering six feet high; shrieking proclamations of auction sales written in letters of fire on vast canvasses; railway posters in scarlet and blue and green; rotatory barber-poles striving at the national colors and producing vertigo; banners, escutcheons, crests, in all the primary colors--surely none of these things needs poring over. And I know them with my eyes closed. I know the windows where lithe youths in gymnasium dress demonstrate the virtue of home exercises; the windows where other young men do nothing but put on and take off patent reversible near-linen collars; where young women deftly roll cigarettes; where other young women whittle at sticks with miraculously stropped razors. I know these things by heart, yet I linger over them in flagrantly unhygienic attitudes, my shoulders bent forward and my chest and diaphragm in a position precisely the reverse of that prescribed by the doctor.

Perhaps the thing that makes me linger before these familiar sights is the odd circumstance that in Broadway's shop-windows Nature is almost never herself, but is either supernatural or artificial. Nature, for instance, never intended that razors should cut wood and remain sharp; that linen collars should keep on getting cleaner the longer they are worn; that glass should not break; that ink should not stain; that gauze should not tear; that an object worth five dollars should sell for $1.39; but all these things happen in Broadway windows. Williams, whom I meet now and then, who sometimes turns and walks up with me to Fourteenth Street, pointed out to me the other day how strange a thing it was that the one street which has become a synonym for 'real life' to all good suburban Americans is not real at all, but is crowded either with miracles or with imitations.

The windows on Broadway glow with wax fruits and with flowers of muslin and taffeta drawn by bounteous Nature from her storehouses in Parisian garret workshops. Broadway's ostrich feathers have been plucked in East Side tenements. The huge cigars in the tobacconist's windows are of wood. The enormous bottles of champagne in the saloons are of cardboard, and empty. The tall scaffoldings of proprietary medicine bottles in the drug shops are of paper. 'Why,' said Williams, 'even the jewelry sold in the Japanese auction stores is not genuine, and the sellers are not Japanese.'

This bustling mart of commerce, as the generation after the Civil War used to say, is only a world of illusion. Artificial flowers, artificial fruits, artificial limbs, tobacco, rubber, silks, woolens, straws, gold, silver. The young men and women who manipulate razors and elastic cords are real, but not always. Williams and I once stood for a long while and gazed at a young woman posing in a drug-shop window, and argued whether she was alive. Ultimately she winked and Williams gloated over me. But how do I know her wink was real? At any rate the great mass of human life in the windows is artificial. The ladies who smile out of charming morning costumes are obviously of lining and plaster. Their smug Herculean husbands in pajamas preserve their equanimity in the severest winter weather only because of their wire-and-plaster constitution. The baby reposing in its beribboned crib is china and excelsior. Illusion everywhere.

But the Broadway crowd is real. You only have to buffet it for five minutes to feel, in eyes and arms and shoulders, how real it is. When I was a boy and was taken to the circus it was always an amazing thing to me that there should be so many people in the street moving in a direction away from the circus. Something of this sensation still besets me whenever we go down in the Subway from Belshazzar Court to hear Caruso. The presence of all the other people on our train is simple enough. They are all on their way to hear Caruso. But what of the crowds in the trains that flash by in the opposite direction? It is not a question of feeling sorry for them. I try to understand and I fail. But on Broadway on a late summer afternoon the obverse is true. The natural thing is that the living tide as it presses south shall beat me back, halt me, eddy around me. I know that there are people moving north with me, but I am not acutely aware of them. This onrush of faces converges on me alone. It is I against half the world.

And then suddenly out of the surge of faces one leaps out at me. It is Williams, whose doctor has told him that the surest way of fighting down the lust for tobacco is to walk down from his office to the ferry every afternoon. Williams and I salute each other after the fashion of Broadway, which is to exchange greetings backward over the shoulder. This is the first step in an elaborate minuet. Because we have passed each other before recognition came, our hands fly out backward. Now we whirl half around, so that I who have been moving north face the west, while Williams, who has been traveling south, now looks east. Our clasped hands strain at each other as we stand there poised for flight after the first greeting. A quarter of a minute perhaps, and we have said good-bye.

But if the critical quarter of a minute passes, there ensues a change of geographical position which corresponds to a change of soul within us. I suddenly say to myself that there are plenty of trains to be had at Fourteenth Street. Williams recalls that another boat will leave Battery Place shortly after the one he is bound for. So the tension of our outstretched arms relaxes. I, who have been facing west, complete the half circle and swing south. Williams veers due north, and we two men stand face to face. The beat and clamor of the crowd fall away from us like a well-trained stage mob. We are in Broadway, but not of it.

'Well, what's the good word?' says Williams.

When two men meet on Broadway the spirit of optimism strikes fire. We begin by asking each other what the good word is. We take it for granted that neither of us has anything but a chronicle of victory and courage to relate. What other word but the good word is tolerable in the lexicon of living, upstanding men? Failure is only for the dead. Surrender is for the man with yellow in his nature. So Williams and I pay our acknowledgments to this best of possible worlds. I give Williams the good word. I make no allusion to the fact that I have spent a miserable night in communion with neuralgia; how can that possibly concern him? Another manuscript came back this morning from an editor who regretted that his is the most unintelligent body of readers in the country. The third cook in three weeks left us last night after making vigorous reflections on my wife's good nature and my own appearance. Only an hour ago, as I was watching the long, black steamers bound for Sorrento and Fontainebleau, the monotony of one's treadmill work, the flat unprofitableness of scribbling endlessly on sheets of paper, had become almost a nausea. But Williams will know nothing of this from me. Why should he? He may have been sitting up all night with a sick child. At this very moment the thought of the little parched lips, the moan, the unseeing eyes, may be tearing at his entrails; but he in turn gives me the good word, and many others after that, and we pass on.

But sometimes I doubt. This splendid optimism of people on Broadway, in the Subway and in the shops and offices--is it really a sign of high spiritual courage, or is it just lack of sensibility? Do we find it easy to keep a stiff upper lip, to buck up, to never say die, because we are brave men, or simply because we lack the sensitiveness and the imagination to react to pain? It may be even worse than that. It may be part of our commercial gift for window-dressing, for putting up a good front.

Sometimes I feel that Williams has no right to be walking down Broadway on business when there is a stricken child at home. The world cannot possibly need him at that moment as much as his own flesh and blood does. It is not courage; it is brutish indifference. At such times I am tempted to dismiss as mythical all this fine talk about feelings that run deep beneath the surface, and bruised hearts that ache under the smile. If a man really suffers he will show it. If a man cultivates the habit of not showing emotion he will end by having none to show. How much of Broadway's optimism is--But here I am paraphrasing William James's _Principles of Psychology_, which the reader can just as well consult for himself in the latest revised edition of 1907.

Also, I am exaggerating. Most likely Williams's children are all in perfect health, and my envelope from the editor has brought a check instead of a rejection slip. It is on such occasions that Williams and I, after shaking hands the way a locomotive takes on water on the run, wheel around, halt, and proceed to buy something at the rate of two for a quarter. If any one is ever inclined to doubt the spirit of American fraternity, it is only necessary to recall the number of commodities for men that sell two for twenty-five cents. In theory, the two cigars which Williams and I buy for twenty-five cents are worth fifteen cents apiece. As a matter of fact they are probably ten-cent cigars. But the shopkeeper is welcome to his extra nickel. It is a small price to pay for the seal of comradeship that stamps his pair of cigars selling for a single quarter. Two men who have concluded a business deal in which each has commendably tried to get the better of the other may call for twenty-five cent perfectos or for half-dollar Dreadnoughts. I understand there are such. But friends sitting down together will always demand cigars that go for a round sum, two for a quarter or three for fifty (if the editor's check is what it ought to be).

When people speak of the want of real comradeship among women, I sometimes wonder if one of the reasons may not be that the prices which women are accustomed to pay are individualistic instead of fraternal. The soda fountains and the street cars do not dispense goods at the rate of two items for a single coin. It is infinitely worse in the department stores. Treating a friend to something that costs $2.79 is inconceivable. But I have really wandered from my point.

'Well, be good,' says Williams, and rushes off to catch his boat.

The point I wish to make is that on Broadway people pay tribute to the principle of goodness that rules this world, both in the way they greet and in the way they part. We salute by asking each other what the good word is. When we say good-bye we enjoin each other to be good. The humorous assumption is that gay devils like Williams and me need to be constantly warned against straying off into the primrose paths that run out of Broadway.

Simple, humorous, average American man! You have left your suburban couch in time to walk half a mile to the station and catch the 7.59 for the city. You have read your morning paper; discussed the weather, the tariff, and the prospects for lettuce with your neighbor; and made the office only a minute late. You have been fastened to your desk from nine o'clock to five, with half an hour for lunch, which you have eaten in a clamorous, overheated restaurant while you watched your hat and coat. At odd moments during the day the thought of doctor's bills, rent bills, school bills, has insisted on receiving attention. At the end of the day, laden with parcels from the market, from the hardware store, from the seedman, you are bound for the ferry to catch the 5.43, when you meet Smith, who, having passed the good word, sends you on your way with the injunction to be good--not to play roulette, not to open wine, not to turkey-trot, not to joy-ride, not to haunt the stage door. Be good, O simple, humorous, average suburban American!

I take back that word suburban. The Sunday Supplement has given it a meaning which is not mine. I am speaking only of the suburban in spirit, of a simplicity, a meekness which is of the soul only. Outwardly there is nothing suburban about the crowd on lower Broadway. The man in the street is not at all the diminutive, apologetic creature with side whiskers whom Mr. F. B. Opper brought forth and named Common People, who begat the Strap-Hanger, who begat the Rent-Payer and the Ultimate Consumer. The crowd on lower Broadway is alert and well set up. Yes, though one hates to do it, I must say 'clean-cut.' The men on the sidewalk are young, limber, sharp-faced, almost insolent young men. There are not very many old men in the crowd, though I see any number of gray-haired young men. Seldom do you detect the traditional signs of age, the sagging lines of the face, the relaxed abdominal contour, the tamed spirit. The young, the young-old, the old-young, but rarely quite the old.

I am speaking only of externals. Clean-cut, eager faces are very frequently disappointing. A very ordinary mind may be working behind that clear sweep of brow and nose and chin. I have known the shock of young men who look like kings of Wall Street and speak like shoe clerks. They are shoe clerks. But the appearance is there, that athletic carriage which is helped out by our triumphant, ready-made clothing. I suppose I ought to detest the tailor's tricks which iron out all ages and all stations into a uniformity of padded shoulders and trim waist-lines and hips. I imagine I ought to despise our habit of wearing elegant shoddy where the European chooses honest, clumsy woolens. But I am concerned only with externals, and in outward appearances a Broadway crowd beats the world. Æsthetically we simply are in a class by ourselves when compared with the Englishman and the Teuton in their skimpy, ill-cut garments. Let the British and German ambassadors at Washington do their worst. This is my firm belief and I will maintain it against the world. The truth must out. _Ruat coelum. Ich kann nicht anders. J'y suis, j'y reste._

Williams laughs at my lyrical outbursts. But I am not yet through. I still have to speak of the women in the crowd. What an infinitely finer thing is a woman than a man of her class! To see this for yourself you have only to walk up Broadway until the southward-bearing stream breaks off and the tide begins to run from west to east. You have passed out of the commercial district into the region of factories. It is well on toward dark, and the barracks that go by the unlovely name of loft buildings, are pouring out their battalions of needle-workers. The crowd has become a mass. The nervous pace of lower Broadway slackens to the steady, patient tramp of a host. It is an army of women, with here and there a flying detachment of the male.

On the faces of the men the day's toil has written its record even as on the women, but in a much coarser hand. Fatigue has beaten down the soul of these men into brutish indifference, but in the women it has drawn fine the flesh only to make it more eloquent of the soul. Instead of listlessness, there is wistfulness. Instead of vacuity you read mystery. Innate grace rises above the vulgarity of the dress. Cheap, tawdry blouse and imitation willow-plume walk shoulder to shoulder with the shoddy coat of the male, copying Fifth Avenue as fifty cents may attain to five dollars. But the men's shoddy is merely a horror, whereas woman transfigures and subtilizes the cheap material. The spirit of grace which is the birthright of her sex cannot be killed--not even by the presence of her best young man in Sunday clothes. She is finer by the heritage of her sex, and America has accentuated her title. This America which drains her youthful vigor with overwork, which takes from her cheeks the color she has brought from her Slavic or Italian peasant home, makes restitution by remoulding her in more delicate, more alluring lines, gives her the high privilege of charm--and neurosis.

Williams and I pause at the Subway entrances and watch the earth suck in the crowd. It lets itself be swallowed up with meek good-nature. Our amazing good-nature! Political philosophers have deplored the fact. They have urged us to be quicker-tempered, more resentful of being stepped upon, more inclined to write letters to the editor. I agree that only in that way can we be rid of political bosses, of brutal policemen, of ticket-speculators, of taxi-cab extortioners, of insolent waiters, of janitors, of indecent congestion in travel, of unheated cars in the winter and barred-up windows in summer. I am at heart with the social philosophers. But then I am not typical of the crowd. When my neighbor's elbow injects itself into the small of my back, I twist around and glower at him. I forget that his elbow is the innocent mechanical result of a whole series of elbows and backs extending the length of the car, to where the first cause operates in the form of a station-guard's shoulder ramming the human cattle into their stalls. In the faces about me there is no resentment. Instead of smashing windows, instead of raising barricades in the Subway and hanging the train-guards with their own lanterns about their necks, the crowd sways and bends to the lurching of the train, and young voices call out cheerfully, 'Plenty of room ahead.'

Horribly good-natured! We have taken a phrase which is the badge of our shame and turned it into a jest. Plenty of room ahead! If this were a squat, ill-formed proletarian race obviously predestined to subjection, one might understand. But that a crowd of trim, well-cut, self-reliant Americans, sharp-featured, alert, insolent as I have called them, that they should submit is a puzzle. Perhaps it is because of the fierce democracy of it all. The crush, the enforced intimacies of physical contact, the feeling that a man's natural condition is to push and be pushed, to shove ahead when the opportunity offers and to take it like a man when no chance presents itself--that is equality. A seat in the Subway is like the prizes of life for which men have fought in these United States. You struggle, you win or lose. If the other man wins there is no envy; admiration rather, provided he has not shouldered and elbowed out of reason. That god-like freedom from envy is passing to-day, and perhaps the good-nature of the crowd in the Subway will pass. I see signs of the approaching change. People do not call out, 'Plenty of room ahead,' so frequently as they used to.

Good-natured when dangling from the strap in the Subway, good-natured in front of baseball bulletins on Park Row, good-natured in the face of so much oppression and injustice, where is the supposed cruelty of the 'mob'? I am ready to affirm on oath that the mob is not vindictive, that it is not cruel. It may be a bit sharp-tongued, fickle, a bit mischievous, but in the heart of the crowd there is no evil passion. The evil comes from the leaders, the demagogues, the professional distorters of right thinking and right feeling. The crowd in the bleachers is not the clamorous, brute mob of tradition. I have watched faces in the bleachers and in the grand-stand and seen little of that fury which is supposed to animate the fan. For the most part he sits there with folded arms, thin-lipped, eager, but after all conscious that there are other things in life besides baseball. No, it is the leaders, the baseball editors, the cartoonists, the humorists, the professional stimulators of 'local pride,' with their exaggerated gloatings over a game won, their poisonous attacks upon a losing team, who are responsible. It is these demagogues who drill the crowd in the gospel of loving only a winner--but if I keep on I shall be in politics before I know it.

If you see in the homeward crowd in the Subway a face over which the pall of depression has settled, that face very likely is bent over the comic pictures in the evening paper. I cannot recall seeing any one smile over these long serials of humorous adventure which run from day to day and from year to year. I have seen readers turn mechanically to these lurid comics and pore over them, foreheads puckered into a frown, lips unconsciously spelling out the long legends which issue in the form of little balloons and lozenges from that amazing portrait gallery of dwarfs, giants, shrilling viragos and their diminutive husbands, devil-children, quadrupeds, insects,--an entire zoölogy. If any stimulus rises from these pages to the puzzled brain, the effect is not visible. I imagine that by dint of repetition through the years these grotesque creations have become a reality to millions of readers. It is no longer a question of humor, it is a vice. The Desperate Desmonds, the Newly-weds, and the Dingbats, have acquired a horrible fascination. Otherwise I cannot see why readers of the funny page should appear to be memorizing pages from Euclid.

This by way of anticipation. What the doctor has said of exercise being a habit which grows easy with time is true. It is the first five minutes of walking that are wearisome. I find myself strolling past Fourteenth Street, where I was to take my train for Belshazzar Court. Never mind, Forty-Second Street will do as well. I am now on a different Broadway. The crowd is no longer north and south, but flows in every direction. It is churned up at every corner and spreads itself across the squares and open places. Its appearance has changed. It is no longer a factory population. Women still predominate, but they are the women of the professions and trades which centre about Madison Square--business women of independent standing, women from the magazine offices, the publishing houses, the insurance offices. You detect the bachelor girl in the current which sets in toward the home quarters of the undomesticated, the little Bohemias, the foreign eating-places whose fixed _table d'hôte_ prices flash out in illumined signs from the side streets. Still farther north and the crowd becomes tinged with the current of that Broadway which the outside world knows best. The idlers begin to mingle with the workers, men in English clothes with canes, women with plumes and jeweled reticules. You catch the first heart-beat of Little Old New York.

The first stirrings of this gayer Broadway die down as quickly almost as they manifested themselves. The idlers and those who minister to them have heard the call of the dinner hour and have vanished, into hotel doors, into shabbier quarters by no means in keeping with the cut of their garments and their apparent indifference to useful employment. Soon the street is almost empty. It is not a beautiful Broadway in this garish interval between the last of the matinée and shopping crowd and the vanguard of the night crowd. The monster electric sign-boards have not begun to gleam and flash and revolve and confound the eye and the senses. At night the electric Niagara hides the squalid fronts of ugly brick, the dark doorways, the clutter of fire-escapes, the rickety wooden hoardings. Not an imperial street this Broadway at 6.30 of a summer's afternoon. Cheap jewelry shops, cheap tobacconist's shops, cheap haberdasheries, cheap restaurants, grimy little newspaper agencies and ticket-offices, and 'demonstration' stores for patent foods, patent waters, patent razors.

O Gay White Way, you are far from gay in the fast-fading light, before the magic hand of Edison wipes the wrinkles from your face and galvanizes you into hectic vitality; far from alluring with your tinsel shop windows, with your puffy-faced, unshaven men leaning against door-posts and chewing pessimistic toothpicks, your sharp-eyed newsboys wise with the wisdom of the Tenderloin, and your itinerant women whose eyes wander from side to side. It is not in this guise that you draw the hearts of millions to yourself, O dingy, Gay White Way, O Via Lobsteria Dolorosa!

Well, when a man begins to moralize it is time to go home. I have walked farther than I intended, and I am soft from lack of exercise, and tired. The romance of the crowd has disappeared. Romance cannot survive that short passage of Longacre Square, where the art of the theatre and of the picture-postcard flourish in an atmosphere impregnated with gasolene. As I glance into the windows of the automobile salesrooms and catch my own reflection in the enamel of Babylonian limousines I find myself thinking all at once of the children at home. They expand and fill up the horizon. Broadway disappears. I smile into the face of a painted promenader, but how is she to know that it is not at her I smile but at the sudden recollection of what the baby said at the breakfast-table that morning? Like all good New Yorkers when they enter the Subway, I proceed to choke up all my senses against contact with the external world, and thus resolving myself into a state of coma, I dip down into the bowels of the earth, whence in due time I am spewed out two short blocks from Belshazzar Court.

Fashions in Men

By Katharine Fullerton Gerould

Never, I fancy, has it been more true than it is to-day, that fiction reflects life. The best fiction has always given us a kind of precipitate of human nature--_Don Quixote_ and _Tom Jones_ are equally 'true' and true, in a sense, for all time; but our modern books give us every quirk and turn of the popular ideal, and fifty years hence, if read at all, may be too 'quaint' for words. And to any one who has been reading fiction for the last twenty years, it is cryingly obvious that fashions in human nature have changed.

My first novel was _Jane Eyre_; and at the age of eight, I fell desperately in love with Fairfax Rochester. No instance could serve better to point the distance we have come. I was not an extraordinary little girl (except that, perhaps, I was extraordinarily fortunate in being permitted to encounter the classics in infancy), and I dare say that if I had not met Mr. Rochester, I should have succumbed to some imaginary gentleman of a quite different stamp. It may be that I should have fallen in love--had time and chance permitted--with 'V. V.' or The Beloved Vagabond. But I doubt it. In the first place, novels no longer assume that it is the prime business of the female heart (at whatever age) to surrender itself completely to some man. Consequently, the men in the novels of to-day are not calculated, as they once were, to hit the fluttering mark. The emotions are the last redoubt to be taken, as modern tactics direct the assault.

People are always telling us that fashions in women have changed: what seems to me almost more interesting is that fashions in men (the stable sex) have changed to match. The new woman (by which I mean the very newest) would not fall in love with Mr. Rochester. It is therefore 'up to' the novelists to create heroes whom the modern heroine will fall in love with. This, to the popular satisfaction, they have done. And not only in fiction have the men changed; in life, too, the men of to-day are quite different. I know, because my friends marry them.

It is immensely interesting, this difference. One by one, the man has sloughed off his most masculine (as we knew them) characteristics. Gone are Mr. Rochester, who fought the duel with the vicomte at dawn, and Burgo Fitzgerald (the only love of that incomparable woman, Lady Glencora Palliser), who breakfasted on curaçao and pâté de foie gras. No longer does Blanche Ingram declare, 'An English hero of the road would be the next best thing to an Italian bandit, and that could only be surpassed by a Levantine pirate.' Blanche Ingram wants--and gets--the Humanitarian Hero; some one who has particular respect for convicts and fallen women, and whose favorite author is Tolstoï. He must qualify for the possession of her hand by long, voluntary residence in the slums; he may inherit ancestral acres only if he has, concerning them, socialistic intentions. He must be too altruistic to kill grouse, and if he is to be wholly up-to-date, he must refuse to eat them. He must never order 'pistols and coffee': his only permitted weapon is benevolent legislation.

I do not mean that he is to be a milk-sop--'muscular Christianity' has at least taught us that it is well for the hero to be in the pink of condition, as he may any day have a street fight on his hands. And he should have the tongue of men and of angels. Gone is the inarticulate Guardsman--gone forever. The modern hero has read books that Burgo Fitzgerald and Guy Livingstone and Mr. Rochester never heard of. He is ready to address any gathering, and to argue with any antagonist, until dawn. He is, preferably, personally unconscious of sex until the heroine arrives; but he is by no means effeminate. He is a very complicated and interesting creature. Some mediæval traits are discernible in him; but the eighteenth century would not have known him for human.

What has he lost, this hero, and what has he gained? How did it all begin? In life, doubtless, it began with a feminine change of taste. Brilliant plumage has ceased to allure; and, I suspect, the peacock's tail, as much as the anthropoid ape's, is destined to elimination. We women of to-day are distrustful of the peacock's tail. We are mortally afraid of being misled by it, and of discovering, too late, that the peacock's soul is not quite the thing. Never has there been among the feminine young more scientific talk about sex, and never among the feminine young such a scientific distrust of it. Before a young woman suspects that she wants to marry a young man, she has probably discussed with him, exhaustively, the penal code, white slavery, eugenics, and race-suicide. The miracle--the everlasting miracle of Nature--is that she should want, in these circumstances, to marry him at all. She probably does not, unless his views have been wholly to her satisfaction. And with those views, what has the perpetual glory of the peacock's tail to do?