Chapter II: Part 2

He looked up at me with an inquisitive grimace. I suggested that I knew what it was to part with a girl I loved, and a mother and friends and comforts, and to go to a strange country where I knew no one, and thought I had no friends. At the mention of parting with the girl he seemed to freeze, but curiosity tempted him and he let me tell him some of my story.

"I reckon that England's pretty well played out," said he.

"Not whilst it sends its sons out into the world--you to America, and me to Russia," said I with a smile. "It will only be played out when we haven't the courage to go."

"Well," said he, "I reckon I _had_ to go, there wasn't anything else for me to do. It wasn't courage on my part. I didn't want to go. I reckon there ought to be room in England for the likes of me. It isn't as if I had no guts. I'm as fit as they make them, only no good at figures. I think I had the right to a place in England and a decent screw, and England might be proud of me. I should always have been ready to fight against the Germans for her. I joined the Territorials, I learned to shoot, I can ride a horse."

"Why didn't you go into the army?"

"That's not the place for a decent fellow. Besides, my people wouldn't allow it, and my girl's folks would be cut up. And I reckon there's something better to do than be drilled and wait for a war. My people wanted me to be something respectable, to go into the Civil Service, or a bank, or an insurance office, or even into the wholesale fruit business. I was put into Jacob's, the fruit firm, but I couldn't work their rate. I've been hunting for work the last five months. That takes it out of you, don't it? How mean I felt! Everybody looked at me in such a way--you know, as much as to say 'You loafer, you lout, you good-for-nothing,' so that I jolly well began to feel I was that, too, especially when my clothes got shabby and I had nothing decent to put on to see people."

As my acquaintance talked he rapidly became simpler, more child-like, confiding, and tears stole down his cheek. The reserved and surly lad became a boy. "What a life," said he, "to search work all day, beg a shilling or so from my mother in the evening, meet my girl, tell her all that's happened, then at night to finish the day lying in bed trying to imagine what I'd do if I had a thousand a year!

"I reckon I could have earned a living with my hands, but my people were too proud; yes, and I was too proud also, and my girl might not have liked it. Still, I'd have done anything to earn a sovereign and take her to the theatre, or go out with her to the country for a day, or make her a nice present and prove I wasn't mean. I used to be generous. When I had a job I gave plenty of presents; but you can't give things away when you have to borrow each day. You even walk instead of taking a car, and you are mean, mean, mean--mean all day. Then in the evening you talk of marrying a girl, of having a little home, and you dare to kiss her as much as you can or she will let, and all the while you have in the wide world only a few coppers--and a mother."

We went and leaned over the ship and stared down at the sea.

Tears! I suppose millions had come there before and made that great salt ocean of them.

The boy now lisped his confidence to me hurriedly, happily, tenderly.

"But I reckon I've got a good mother, eh? She loved me more than I dreamed. How she cried on Friday! how she cried! It was wild. Sometimes I used to say I hated her. I used to shout out angrily at her that I'd run away and never come back. That was when she said hasty things to me, or when she wouldn't give me money. I used to think I'd go and be a tramp, and pick up a living here and there in the country, and live on fruit and birds' eggs, sleeping anywhere. It would be better than feeling so mean at home. But then, my girl--every night I had to see her. I felt I could not go away like that, never to come home with a fortune--never, never to be able to marry her. Every night she put her arms round my neck and kissed me, and called me her old soldier, her dear one--all sorts of sweet things. I reckon we didn't miss one night all this last year.

"Her father's all right. I had thought he would be different. I was a bit afraid of what he'd say if he got to hear. But she told him on her own, and one night she took me home. They had fixed it up themselves without asking me, and he was very kind. I told him I wanted a job, and I thought p'raps he was going to get me one. But no; he was a queer sort, rather. 'I'm going to wipe out that story of yours,' he says. Then he goes to his bureau and writes a note and puts it in an envelope and addresses it to me. 'Here you are, young man,' says he. I opened the envelope and read one word on a slip of paper--AMERICA. 'Millions have told your story before,' says he, 'and have had that word given them in answer. You get ready to go to America; I'll find you your passage-money and something to start you off in the new country. You'll do well; you'll make good, my boy,' and he slapped me on the back.

"You bet I felt excited. He saw my mother and told her his plan. She said she couldn't stand in my way. I got the _Government Handbook on the United States_, and the emigration circular. I read up America at the public library. I wonder I hadn't thought of it before. America is a great country, eh? They look at you differently, I bet, and a strong young man's worth something there. My word, when I come back....

"I wonder if I shall come back or if she'll come out to me. I wonder if her father would let her. I guess he would....

"She loves me. My word, how she loves me! I didn't dream of it before. I used to think the harder you kissed, the more it meant; but she kissed me in a new way, so softly, so differently. She said I was hers, that I would be safe wherever I went in the wide world, and I was never to feel afraid. I've got to do without her now. I reckon no other girl is going to mean much to me."

He looked rather scornfully at a troop of pretty Swedes who had invaded our sanctuary.

"It is queer how sure I feel of good luck because of her and what she did. I feel as if everything must turn my way. Downstairs yesterday they challenged me to play a game of cards, and I won fifty cents; but I felt it was wrong to spend my luck that way. The chap wouldn't play any more; he said I was in a lucky vein. He was quite right. Whatever I turn my hand to, I'm bound to have unexpected good luck. I feel so sure I'm going to get a job, and a real good one, too. I shan't play any more cards this journey."

The sun had come out, and the bright light blazed through our smoke, and I felt that the boy's faith was blazing just that way through his regrets.

The sun crept on and overtook us on his own path, and then at last went down in front of us, far away in the waste of waters.

My acquaintance and I went away to the last meal of the day, to the strangely mixed crowd of prospective Americans at the table, where men sat and ate with their hats on, and where no grace was said. "What matter that they throw the food at us?" I asked. "We are men with stout hearts in our bosoms; we are going to a great country, where a great people will look at us with creative eyes, making the beautiful out of the ugly, the big and generous out of the little and mean, the headstone out of the rock that the builders rejected."

After supper I left my friend and went upstairs alone. The weather had changed, and the electric lights of the ship were blazing through the rain, the decks were wet and windswept, and the black smoke our funnels were belching forth went hurrying back into the murky evening sky. The vessel, however, went on.

Downstairs some were dancing, some singing, some writing home laboriously, others gossiping, others lying down to sleep in the little white cabins. There was a satisfaction in hearing the throbbing of the engines and feeling the pulse of the ship. We were idle, we passed the time, but we knew that the ship went on.

Going above once more at nine, I found the rain had passed, the sky was clear and the night full of stars. In the sea rested dim reflections of the stars, like the sad faces we see reflected in our memory several days after we have gone from home. I stood at the vessel's edge and looked far over the glimmering waves to the horizon where the stars were walking on the sea. "What will it be like in America?" whispered the foolish heart. "What will it be like for him?" Then sadness came--the long, long thoughts of a boy. I whispered the Russian verse:

"There is a road to happiness,
But the way is afar."

And yet, next morning, I saw the Englishman dancing for hours with a pretty Russian girl from a village near Kiev--Phrosia, the sister of Maxim Holost, a fine boy of eighteen going out to North Dakota. I had noticed the Englishman looking on at the dancing, and then suddenly, to my surprise, at a break in the tinkling of the accordion, he offered his arm to the Russian and took her down the middle as the music resumed....

I was much in demand among the Russians on Friday and Saturday, for they wanted to take the English language by storm at the week-end. I taught Alexy by writing out words for him, and six or seven peasants had copied from him and were busy conning "man," "woman," "farm," "work," "give me," "please," "bread," "meat," "is," "Mister," "show," "and," "how much," "like," "more," "half," "good," "bad," the numbers, and so on. They pronounced these words with willing gusto, and made phrases for themselves, calling out to me:

"Show me worrk, pleez."

"Wer is Meester Stamb?"

"Khao match eez bread?"

"Give mee haaf."

Alexy tried his English on one of the waiters at dinner time.

"Littel meet, _littel_, give mee more meet."

The steward grinned appreciatively, and told him to lie down and be quiet.

Maxim and his sister were accompanied by a grizzled peasant of sixty or so, wearing a high sugar-loaf hat sloping back from an aged, wrinkled brow. This was Satiron Federovitch, the only old man on deck. His black cloak, deep lined with wadding, was buttoned up to his throat, and the simplicity of his attire and the elemental lines of his face gave him a look of imperturbable calm. Asked why he was going to America, he said that almost every one else in the village had gone before him. A Russian village had as it were vanished from the Russian countryside and from the Russian map and had transplanted itself to Dakota. Poor old greybeard, he didn't want to go at all, but all his friends and relatives had gone, and he felt he must follow.

Holost told every one how at Libau the officials doubted the genuineness of his passport, and he had to telegraph to his village police, at his own expense, to verify his age and appearance. The authorities didn't relish the idea of such a fine young man being lost by any chance to the army. If only they had as much care for the villages as they have for their legions!

Fedya. Satiron. Alexy. Yoosha. Karl. Maxim Holost.]

I was up betimes on Saturday morning and watched the vessel glide out of the darkness of night into the dusk of the dawn. The electric light up in the mainmast, the eye of the mast, squinted lividly in the half-light, and the great phantom-like ship seemed as if cut out of shiny-white and blood-red cardboard as it moved forward toward the west. The smoke from the funnels lay in two long streamers to the horizon, and the rising sun made a sooty shadow under it on the gleaming waves. As the night-cloud vanished a great wind sprang up, blowing off America. Old Satiron was coming laboriously upstairs, and he slipped out on to the deck incautiously.

"Gee whizz!" The mocking American wind caught his astrakhan hat and gave it to the sea. Poor old Satiron, he'll turn up in Dakota with a derby on, perhaps.

Saturday was a day of preparation. We packed our things, we wrote letters to catch the mail, we were medically inspected--some of us were vaccinated. All the girls had to take off their blouses and the young men their coats, and we filed past a doctor and two assistants. One man washed each bare arm with a brush and some acid. The doctor looked and examined. The other assistant stood with lymph and lancet and rapidly jabbed us. The operation was performed at an amazing pace, and was only an unpleasant formality. Many of those who were thus vaccinated got their neighbours to suck out the vaccine directly they returned to their cabins. This was what the boy who had left the dog behind him did. He didn't want blood-poisoning, he said. Nearly all the Russians had been vaccinated five or six times already. In Russia there is much disease and much faith in medicine. In England good drainage, many people not vaccinated, little smallpox; in Russia, no drains, much vaccination, and much of the dread disease.

On Saturday night there was a concert, at which all the steerage were present, and in which any one who liked took part. But English music-hall songs had all the platform--no foreign musicians participated.

Sunday was Easter Day, and I was up in the dark hours of the morning and saw the dawn. Sunrise showed the clouds in the east, but in north and south and west the other clouds still lay asleep. Up on the after-deck of the great tireless steamer little groups of cloaked and muffled emigrants stood gazing over the now familiar ocean. We knew it was our last day on the ship, and that before the dawn on the morrow we should be at the American shore. How fittingly was it Easter, first day of resurrection, festive day of spring, day of promise and hope, the anniversary of happy days, of first communions!

In the wan east the shadowy wings of gulls were flickering. The blood-red sun was just coming into view, streaked and segmented with blackest cloud. He was striving with night, fighting, and at last gaining the victory. High above the east and the wide circle of glory stood hundreds of attendant cloudlets, arrayed by the sun in robes of lovely tinting, and they fled before him with messages for us. Then, astonishing thing, the sun disappeared entirely into shadow. Night seemed to have gotten the victory. But we knew night could not win.

The sun reappeared almost at once, in resplendent silver, now a rim, in a moment a perfect shield. The shield had for a sign a maiden, and from her bosom a lovely light flooded forth upon the world. We felt that we ourselves, looking at it, were growing in stature in the morning. The light enveloped us--it was divine.

But the victory still waited. All the wavelets of the eastern sea were living in the morning, dancing and mingling, bewildering, baffling, delighting, but the west lay all unconquered, a great black ocean of waves, each edged with signs of foam, as if docketed and numbered. All seemed fixed and rigid in death. The sun disappeared again and reappeared anew, and this time he threw into the world ochre and fire. The wide half-circle of the east steamed an ochreous radiance to the zenith. The sun was pallid against the beauty he had shed; the lenses of the eye fainted upon the unearthly whiteness. It was hard to look upon the splendid one, but only at that moment might he be seen with the traces of his mystery upon him. Now he was in his grave-clothes, all glistening white, but at noon he would be sitting on the right hand of God.

Easter!

"Will there be any service in the steerage to-day?"

"No, there will only be service for first and second-class passengers."

"Is that because they need it more than we?"

There was no answer to that impolite remark. Still it was rather amusing to find that the Church's office was part of the luxury of the first and second class.

The third class played cards and danced and sang and flirted much as usual. They had need of blessing.

So at night a Baptist preacher organised a prayer-meeting on his own account, and the English-speaking people sang "Onward, Christian soldiers," in a rather half-hearted way at eight o'clock, and "Jesus, lover of my soul, let me to Thy Bosom fly," at nine; and there was a prayer and a sermon.

A few hours after I had lain down to sleep Maxim Holost put his head in at my cabin and cried out:

"America! Come up and see the lights of America."

And without waiting for me to follow, he rushed away to say the same thing to others, "America! America!"

II

THE ARRIVAL OF THE IMMIGRANT

The day of the emigrants' arrival in New York was the nearest earthly likeness to the final Day of Judgment, when we have to prove our fitness to enter Heaven. Our trial might well have been prefaced by a few edifying reminders from a priest.

It was the hardest day since leaving Europe and home. From 5 A.M., when we had breakfast, to three in the afternoon, when we landed at the Battery, we were driven in herds from one place to another, ranged into single files, passed in review before doctors, poked in the eyes by the eye-inspectors, cross-questioned by the pocket-inspectors, vice detectives, and blue-book compilers.

Nobody had slept the night before. Those who approached America for the first time stood on the open deck and stared at the lights of Long Island. Others packed their trunks. Lovers took long adieus and promised to write one another letters. There was a hum of talking in the cabins, a continual pattering of feet in the gangways, a splashing of water in the lavatories where cleanly emigrants were trying to wash their whole bodies at hand-basins. At last the bell rang for breakfast: we made that meal before dawn. When it was finished we all went up on the forward deck to see what America looked like by morning light. A little after six we were all chased to the after-deck and made to file past two detectives and an officer. The detectives eyed us; the officer counted to see that no one was hiding.

At seven o'clock our boat lifted anchor and we glided up the still waters of the harbour. The whole prow was a black mass of passengers staring at the ferry-boats, the distant factories, and sky-scrapers. Every point of vantage was seized, and some scores of emigrants were clinging to the rigging. At length we came into sight of the green-grey statue of Liberty, far away and diminutive at first, but later on, a celestial figure in a blaze of sunlight. An American waved a starry flag in greeting, and some emigrants were disposed to cheer, some shed silent tears. Many, however, did not know what the statue was. I heard one Russian telling another that it was the tombstone of Columbus.

We carried our luggage out at eight, and in a pushing crowd prepared to disembark. At 8.30 we were quick-marched out of the ship to the Customs Wharf and there ranged in six or seven long lines. All the officials were running and hustling, shouting out, "Come on!" "Hurry!" "Move along!" and clapping their hands. Our trunks were examined and chalk-marked on the run--no delving for diamonds--and then we were quick-marched further to a waiting ferry-boat. Here for the time being hustle ended. We waited three-quarters of an hour in the seatless ferry, and every one was anxiously speculating on the coming ordeal of medical and pocket examination. At a quarter to ten we steamed for Ellis Island. We were then marched to another ferry-boat, and expected to be transported somewhere else, but this second vessel was simply a floating waiting-room. We were crushed and almost suffocated upon it. A hot sun beat upon its wooden roof; the windows in the sides were fixed; we could not move an inch from the places where we were awkwardly standing, for the boxes and baskets were so thick about our feet; babies kept crying sadly, and irritated emigrants swore at the sound of them. All were thinking--"Shall I get through?" "Have I enough money?" "Shall I pass the doctor?" and for a whole hour, in the heat and noise and discomfort, we were kept thinking thus. At a quarter-past eleven we were released in detachments. Every twenty minutes each and every passenger picked up his luggage and tried to stampede through with the party, a lucky few would bolt past the officer in charge, and the rest would flood back with heart-broken desperate looks on their faces. Every time they failed to get included in the outgoing party the emigrants seemed to feel that they had lost their chance of a job, or that America was a failure, or their coming there a great mistake. At last, at a quarter-past twelve, it was my turn to rush out and find what Fate and America had in store for me.

Once more it was "Quick march!" and hurrying about with bags and baskets in our hands, we were put into lines. Then we slowly filed up to a doctor who turned our eyelids inside out with a metal instrument. Another doctor scanned faces and hands for skin diseases, and then we carried our ship-inspection cards to an official who stamped them. We passed into the vast hall of judgment, and were classified and put into lines again, this time according to our nationality. It was interesting to observe at the very threshold of the United States the mechanical obsession of the American people. This ranging and guiding and hurrying and sifting was like nothing so much as the screening of coal in a great breaker tower.

It is not good to be like a hurrying, bumping, wandering piece of coal being mechanically guided to the sacks of its type and size, but such is the lot of the immigrant at Ellis Island.

But we had now reached a point in the examination when we could rest. In our new lines we were marched into stalls, and were allowed to sit and look about us, and in comparative ease await the pleasure of officials. The hall of judgment was crowned by two immense American flags. The centre, and indeed the great body of the hall, was filled with immigrants in their stalls, a long series of classified third-class men and women. The walls of the hall were booking-offices, bank counters, inspectors' tables, stools of statisticians. Up above was a visitors' gallery where journalists and the curious might promenade and talk about the melting-pot, and America, "the refuge of the oppressed." Down below, among the clerks' offices, were exits; one gate led to Freedom and New York, another to quarantine, a third to the railway ferry, a fourth to the hospital and dining-room, to the place where unsuitable emigrants are imprisoned until there is a ship to take them back to their native land.

Somewhere also there was a place where marriages were solemnised. Engaged couples were there made man and wife before landing in New York. I was helping a girl who struggled with a huge basket, and a detective asked me if she were my sweetheart. If I could have said "Yes," as like as not we'd have been married off before we landed. America is extremely solicitous about the welfare of women, especially of poor unmarried women who come to her shores. So many women fall into the clutches of evil directly they land in the New World. The authorities generally refuse to admit a poor friendless girl, though there is a great demand for female labour all over the United States, and it is easy to get a place and earn an honest living.

It was a pathetic sight to see the doubtful men and women pass into the chamber where examination is prolonged, pathetic also to see the Russians and Poles empty their purses, exhibiting to men with good clothes and lasting "jobs" all the money they had in the world.

At half-past two I gave particulars of myself and showed the coin I had, and was passed.

"Have you ever been arrested?" asked the inspector.

Well, yes, I had. I was not disposed to lie. I had been arrested four or five times. In Russia you can't escape that.

"For a crime involving moral turpitude?" he went on.

"No, no."

"Have you got a job in America?" (This is a dangerous question; if you say 'Yes' you probably get sent back home; it is against American law to contract for foreign labour.)

I explained that I was a tramp.

This did not at all please the inspector. He would not accept that definition of my occupation, so he put me down as author.

"Are you an anarchist?"

"No."

"Are you willing to live in subordination to the laws of the United States?"

"Yes."

"Are you a polygamist?"

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"Do you believe a man may possess more than one wife at a time?"

"Certainly not."

"Have you any friends in New York?"

"Acquaintances, yes."

"Give me the address."

I gave him an address.

"How much money have you got?" ... "Show me, please!" ... And so on. I was let go.

At three in the afternoon I stood in another ferry-boat, and with a crowd of approved immigrants passed the City of New York. Success had melted most of us, and though we were terribly hungry, we had words and confidences for one another on that ferry-boat. We were ready to help one another to any extent in our power. That is what it feels like to have passed the Last Day and still believe in Heaven, to pass Ellis Island and still believe in America.

Two or three of us hastened to a restaurant. I sat down at a little table, and waited. So did the others, but we were making a mistake, for there were no waiters. We had as yet to learn the mechanism of a "Quick Lunch" shop; there was a certain procedure to be observed and followed, we must learn it if we wanted a dinner. I watched the first American citizen who came in, and did as he did. First I went to the cashier and got a paper slip on which were printed many numbers 5, 10, 15, 25, and so on in intervals of fives. These represented cents, and were so arranged for convenience in adding and for solid profit. At this restaurant nothing cost less than five cents (twopence halfpenny), and there were no intermediaries between five and ten, ten and fifteen, and so forth. The unit then was five cents, and not as in England two cents (one penny). Obviously this means enormous increase of takings in the long run. That five-cent unit is part of the foundation of American prosperity. I obtained my slip so numbered. Then I took a tray from a stack of trays and a glass from an array of glasses, a fork and a knife from the fork basket, and I went to the roast chicken counter and asked for roast chicken. A plate of hot roast chicken was put on my tray, and the white-hatted cook punched off twenty-five cents on my slip. I went to another counter and received a plate of bread and butter, and to yet another and sprinkled pepper and salt from the general sprinklers. I went and drew iced water. Then, like the slave of the lamp working for himself, I put the whole on my little table. When I had finished my first course I put my plate aside and took my tray to the cook and received a second, and when I had finished that I fetched my coffee.

"Well," thought I, looking round, "no waiters, that means no tips; there is not even a superfluous mendicant boy in charge of the swinging doors." So I began to learn that in America the working man pays no tips.

My companions at the other tables were getting through with their dinners and looking across at one another with congratulatory smiles. We would have sat together, but in this shop one table accommodated one customer only--an unsociable arrangement. I waited for them to finish, so that we could go out together.

Whilst doing so a man came up to me from another table and said very quietly:

"Just come over?"

"This morning," I replied.

He brightened up and asked:

"Looking for a job?"

"You don't mean to say I am being offered one already?" said I.

"That's about it, two dollars."

"Two dollars a day?"

"That's the idea."

"What's the work?"

"Brick-making."

It was brick-making up country for some Trust Company. I said I was staying in New York, couldn't go just yet. He might try my acquaintances. I pointed them out.

One of them, a Pole, said he would go. The contractor went out with us, and we accompanied him to his office. We took a street car. The fare was five cents, a "nickel," and it was necessary to put the coin in the slot of the conductor's money-box before entering. The conductor stood stiff, like an intelligent bit of machinery, and we were to him fares not humans. The five cents would take me to the other end of the city if I wished it, but there was no two-cent fare in case I wished to go a mile. That five-cent unit again!

We sat in the car and looked out of the windows, interested in every sight and sound. First we had glimpses of the East Side streets, all push-carts and barrows, like Sukhareva at Moscow. Then we saw the dark overhead railway and heard the first thunder of the Elevated train. We went up the Bowery, unlike any other street in the world; we noted that it was possible to get a room there for twenty cents a night. We stared curiously at the life-sized carved and painted Indians outside the cigar stores, and at the gay red-and-white stripe of the barbers' revolving poles.

We alighted just by a barber's shop. The agent showed us his office and told us to come in if we changed our minds and would like the job. There we left the Pole, and indeed saw him no more.

There were two others beside myself--a Russian and a Russian Jew. As the Jew and I both wanted a shave we all went into the barber's shop. We were still carrying our bags, and were rather a strange party to enter a shop together. But the barbers, a pleasant array of close-shaven smiling Italians, were not put out in the least. They were ready to shave any living thing. Their job was to shave and take the cash, and not to be amused at the appearance of the customers.

In America the barber's shop has a notice outside stating the number of barbers. If the number is high it is considerable recommendation. Then the briskly revolving pole suggests that it's your turn next and no waiting.

I was put into an immense, velvet-bottomed adjustable chair, my legs were steadied on a three-foot stand, and the barber turning a handle caused the back of the chair to collapse gently so that my head and body pointed towards the doorway like the cannon mouth. Then the shave commenced, and the barber twirled my head about and around as if it were on a revolving hinge. And how laborious he was! In America, quick lunch and slow shave; in England quick shave and slow lunch. And fifteen cents for a shave, and thirty-five for a hair-cut.

"That's a high price," said I.

"Union rate," said he. "We are now protected against the public."

The Jew, however, paid five cents less; he had bargained beforehand. He said it was the last cent he'd pay for a shave in that country; he'd buy a safety razor. The Russian smiled; he hadn't shaved yet, and didn't intend to, ever.

At this point the Jew parted company with us. He was going to find a friend of his in Stanton Street. The Russian and I made for a lodging-house in Third Avenue. At a place ticketed "Rooms by the day or month," we rang the bell, rang the bell and waited, rang again. We were to be initiated into another mystery of New York, the mechanical door, the door which has almost an intelligence of its own. Down came a German woman at last, and gave us a rare scolding. Why hadn't we turned the handle and come in? Why had we brought her down so many flights of stairs?

It appeared that by turning a handle in her room on the second floor she liberated the catch in the lock, and all the visitor had to do was to turn the handle and walk in.

"I heard a rattle in the lock," said I. "I wondered what it meant."

"How long've you been in America?" she asked.

"A few hours. We want rooms for a few days while we look about."

"Days? My lodgers take rooms for years. I haven't any one staying less than six months."

This was just "boosting" her rooms, but I didn't know. I took it for a good sign. If her tenants stayed long terms the place must be very clean. But it was only "boosting." Still the rooms looked decent, and we took them. They were the same price as similar rooms in the centre of London, ten shillings a week, but dearer than in Moscow where one would pay fifteen roubles (seven and a half dollars or thirty shillings) a month for such accommodation. The floors were carpeted, the sheets were white, there was a good bathroom for each four lodgers, no children, and all was quiet. Laundry was collected, there was no charge for the use of electric light, you received a latch-key on the deposit of twenty-five cents, and could come in any hour of the day or night. In signing the registration book I saw I was the only person of Anglo-Saxon name, all were Germans, Swedes, Italians, Russians. With British caution I hid a twenty-five dollar bill in the binding of one of the most insignificant of my books, so that if I were robbed of the contents of my pocket-book I should still have a stand-by. But my suspicions were begotten only of ignorance. My fellow-lodgers were all hard working, self-absorbed New Yorkers, who took no thought of their neighbours, either for good or evil.

III

THE PASSION OF AMERICA AND THE TRADITION OF BRITAIN

I came to America to see men and women and not simply bricks and mortar, to understand a national life rather than to moan over sooty cities and industrial wildernesses. Hundreds of thousands of healthy Europeans passed annually to America. I wanted to know what this asylum or refuge of our wanderers actually was, what was the life and hope it offered, what America was doing with her hands, what she was yearning for with her heart. I wished to know also what was her despair.

On my second day in New York I was deploring the sky-scraper, when a young American lifted her arms above her head in yearning and aspiration saying, "Have you seen the Woolworth Building? It is a bird's flight of stone right away up into the sky, it is higher and newer than anything else in New York, its cream-coloured walls are pure and undefiled. It is a commercial house, to be let to ten thousand business tenants. But it is like a cathedral; its foundations are on the earth, but its spire is up among the stars; if you go to it at sundown and look upward you will see the angels ascending and descending, and hear the murmur of Eternity about it."

I had always thought of the sky-scraper as a black grimy street-front that went up to an unearthly height, a Noah's Ark of sodden and smoky bricks. That is what a sky-scraper would tend to be in London. I had forgotten the drier, cleaner atmosphere of New York.

I went to see the Woolworth Building, and I found it something new. It was beautiful. It was even awe-inspiring.

In the evening I asked an American literary man whom I met at a club what he thought was the _raison d'être_ of the Woolworth; was it not simply the desire to build higher than all other houses--the wish to make a distinct commercial hit?

He "put me wise."

"First of all," said he, "New York is built on the little island of Manhattan. The island is all built over, and so, as we cannot expand outward we've got to build upward. Ground rent, too, has become so high that we must build high for economy's sake."

I remarked on the number of men who lost their lives in the building of sky-scrapers. "For every minute of the day there was a man injured in some town or other of the United States," so I had read in an evening paper.

He said the Americans were playing large, and must expect to lose a few men in the game. He expected the America of the future would justify all sacrifices made just now, and he gave me in the course of a long talk his view of the passion of America.

"The Woolworth Building is only an inadequate symbol of our faith," said he. "You British and the Germans and French are working on a different principle, you are playing the small game, and playing it well. You stake your efficiency on the perfection of details. In the German life, for instance, nothing is too small to be thought unmeriting of attention."

I told him the watchword of the old chess champion Steinitz, "I do not vant to vin a pawn; it is enough if I only veakens a pawn."

"You play chess?" said he, laughing. "That's it exactly. He did not care to sacrifice pieces; he was entirely on the defensive in his chess, eh? And in life he would be the same, hoarding his pennies and his dollars, and economising and saving. That's just how the American is different. He doesn't mind taking great risks; he is playing the large game, sacrificing small things, hurrying on, building, destroying, building again, conquering, dreaming. We are always selling out and re-investing. You are concentrating on yourselves as you are; we want to leave our old bodies and conditions behind and jump to a new humanity. If an American youth could inherit the whole world he would not care to improve it if he saw a chance of selling it to some one and getting something better."

"The spirit of business," I suggested.

"Call it what you will."

"But," said I, "does not this merely result in a town full of a hustling, mannerless crowd; trolley-cars dashing along at life-careless speed; a nation at work with loosely constructed machinery; callous indifference on the part of the living towards those whom they kill in their rush to the goal?"

My new acquaintance looked at me in a way that seemed to say "You--Britisher." He was a great enthusiast for his country, and I had been sent to him by friends in London who wanted me to get to the heart of America, and not simply have my teeth set on edge by the bitter rind.

"You think the end will justify the proceedings?" I added.

"Oh yes," he said. "You know we've only been fifty years on this job; there's nothing in modern America more than fifty years old. Think of what we've done in the time--clearing, building, engineering; think of the bridges we've built, the harbours, the canals, the great factories, the schools. We've been taxed to the last limit of physical strength, and only to put down the pavement and the gas-pipes so to speak, the things you found ready made for you when you were born, but which we had to lay on the prairie. We are only now beginning to look round and survey the foundations of civilisation. Still most of us are hurrying on, but the end will be worth the trials by the way; we

"Are whirling from heaven to heaven
And less will be lost than won."

"But is it not a miserable, heartless struggle for the individual?" said I. "For instance, to judge by the story of _The Jungle_ I should gather that the lot of a Russian family come fresh to Chicago was terrible."

"Oh, you mustn't take Sinclair literally. He is a Socialist who wants to show that society, as it is at present constituted, is so bad that there is no hope except in revolution. There is heartbreak often, but the struggle is not heartless. It is amazingly full of hope. If you go into the worst of our slums you'll find the people hopeful, even in extremity. I've been across to London, and I never saw such hopeless-looking people as those who live in your East Ham and West Ham and Poplar and the rest of them."

"There is hope with us too," I protested. "The people in our slums are very rebellious, they look forward to the dictatorship of Will Thorne or George Lansbury."

"Ah well," my friend assented, "that's your kind of hope--rebelliousness, hatred of the splendid and safe machine. That's just it. We haven't your rebelliousness and quarrelsomeness. The new-come immigrant is always quarrelling with his neighbours. It is only after a while that America softens him and enriches his heart. The vastness of America, the abundance of its riches, is infectious; it makes the heart larger. The immigrant feels he has room, life is born in him."

"But," said I, "the great machine is here as in Europe. A man is known by his job here just as much as with us, isn't he? He is labelled and known, he fills a fixed place and has a definite rotation. Every man says to him 'I see what you are, I know what you are; you are just what I see and no more.' His neighbour takes him for granted thus. Out of that horrible taking-for-granted springs rebelliousness and hate of the great machine. You must be as rebellious as we are."

"No, no." My companion wouldn't have it. "We don't look at people that way in America. But you're right about looks. It's looks that make people hate. It's eyes that make them curse and swear and hate. Every day hundreds and thousands of eyes look at one. I think eyes have power to create. If thousands and thousands of people pass by a man and look at him with their eyes they almost change him into what they see. If in the course of years millions of eyes look at an individual and see in him just some little bolt in a great machine, then his tender human heart wants to turn into iron. The ego of that man has a forlorn and terrible battle to fight. He thinks he is fighting himself; he is really fighting the millions of creative eyes who by faith are changing flesh and blood into soulless machinery."

"And here?" I queried.

He laughed a moment, and then said seriously, "Here it is different. Here we are playing large. Oh, the dwarfing power, the power to make you mean, that the millions of eyes possess in a country that is playing the small game! They make you feel mean and little, and then you become mean. They kill your heart. Your dead little heart withdraws the human films and the tenderness and imaginativeness from your eyes, and you also begin to look out narrowly, dwarfingly, compellingly. You eye the people in the streets, in the cars, in the office, and they can't help becoming what you are."

"But some escape," said I.

"Yes, some go and smash windows and get sent to gaol, some become tramps, and some come to America. In Giant Despair's dungeon poor Christian exclaims, 'What a fool I am to remain here when I have in my heart a key which I am persuaded will unlock any of the doors of this castle. Strange that it has only now occurred to me that all I need to do is to lift my hand and open the door and go away.' Then poor Christian books a passage to America or Australia. He starts for the New World; and the moment he puts his foot on the vessel he begins to outgrow. He was his very smallest and meanest under the pressure of the Old World; when the pressure is removed he begins to expand. He is free. He is on his own. He is sailing to God as himself. The exception has beaten the rule. Now I hold as a personal belief that we are all exceptions, that we take our stand before God as tender human creatures of His, each unique in itself. The emigrant on the boat has the delicious feelings of convalescence, of getting to be himself again. He basks in the sun of freedom. The sun itself seems like the all-merciful Father, the Good Shepherd who cares for each one and knows each by name, leading him out to an earthly paradise."

"That paradise is America, eh?" said I rather mockingly, and then I paused and added, "But America ought to be really a paradise; it is pathetic to think of the difference between America as the Russian thinks it to be and America as it is. It is a shame that your trusts and tariffs and corrupt police should have made America a worse place to live in than the Old World. I know it is the land of opportunity, opportunity to become rich, to get on, to be famous; but for the poor immigrant it is rather the land of opportunism, a land where he himself is the opportunity, which not he but other people have the chance to seize."

My friend was scandalised. "I think it gives every one an opportunity," said he, "even the drunkard and the thief and the embezzler whom you so incharitably hand over to us. You know the saying, 'It takes an ocean to receive a muddy stream without defilement.' The ocean of American life cleanses many a muddy stream of the Old World."

"Still," said I, "not to abandon oneself utterly to ideas, is it not true that Pittsburg actually destroys thousands of Slav immigrants yearly? It utterly destroys them. They have no children who come to anything--they are just wiped out. I gather so much from your Government survey of Pittsburg."

"Well," said he, "that survey is just part of the New America, of the new national conscience. Terrible things do happen, witness the enormous white-slave traffic. You have just come to us at the right moment to see the initiation of sweeping changes. President Wilson is like your David Lloyd George, only he has more power, because he has more people at his back. We are just beginning a great progressive era. On the other hand, America is not the place of the weak. That's why we send so many back home from Ellis Island. We've got something else to do than try and put Humpty Dumpty up on the wall again. When the weaker get past Ellis Island into our fierce national life they are bound to go to the wall. We haven't time even to be sorry, and if questioned we can only answer that we believe the sacrifice will be justified."

I recall to my mind the startling objection of Ivan Karamazof in the greatest of Russian novels. "When God's providence is fulfilled we shall understand all things; we shall see how the pain and death of, for instance, a little child could be necessary. I understand of course what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise, and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud, 'Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed'; but to my mind the pain of one little child were too high a price to pay." Ivan Karamazof would certainly have renounced the grand future of America bought by the exploitation of thousands of weak and helpless ones.

Still I suppose the past must take care of itself, and the America which stands to-day on the threshold of a new era has more thought and tenderness for the victims of its commercial progress. It is making up its mind to save the foreign women and their little babies. For the rest, America plays large, as my friend said. There is a spaciousness with her, there is contrast, there is life and death, virtue and sin, things to laugh over and things to cry over. The little baby buds are taken away and branches are lopped, but the mustard grows a great tree.

There is a chance in America, a chance that you may be a victim, but also a chance that you may be in at the mating of the King.

* * * * * * *

Several months later, when I had tramped some six hundred American miles, and talked to all manner of persons, I realised that America was superlatively a place of hope. I had been continually asking myself, "What _is_ America? What _is_ this new nation? How are they different from us at home in England?" And one morning, sitting under a bush in Indiana, the answer came to me and I wrote it down. They are fundamentally people who have crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and we are stay-at-homes. They are adventurous, hopeful people. They are people who have thrown themselves on the mercy of God and Nature.

We live in a tradition; they live in an expectation. We are remedying the old state; they are building the new. We are loyal to the ideas of our predecessors, they are agape to divine the ideas of generations yet to come.

It is possible to come to Britain and see what Britain is, but if you go to America the utmost you can see is what America is becoming. And when you see the Briton you see a man steadfast at some post of duty, but the American is something to-day but God-knows-what to-morrow. Our noblest epitaph is "He knew his job"; theirs, "He sacrificed himself to a cause."

Observe, "that state of life unto which it shall please God to call me," puts the Briton in a static order of things. He is in his little shop, or at the forge, or in the coal yard. Within his sight is the Norman tower of the village church. He is known to the priest by his name and his job. He is part of the priests' cure of souls. His life is functionised at the village altar and not at the far shrines of ambition. He belongs to the peasant world. Even though he is English he is as the Russian, "one of God's faithful slaves."

Thousands of English, Scotch, and Irish, simple souls, say their prayers to God each night, not because they are pillars of a chapel or have lately been "saved," but because they have been brought up in that way of life and in that relation to God. They pray God sometimes in anguish that they may be helped _to do their duty_. They say the Lord's Prayer, not as a patter, but with the stark simplicity which you associate with the grey wall of the old church.