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.