William Dean Howells, 1837--, was born in Belmont County. Ohio. In boyhood
he learned the printer's trade, at which he worked for several years. He
published a volume of poems in 1860, in connection with John J. Piatt.
From 1861 to 1865 he was United States Consul at Venice. On his return he
resided for a time in New York City, and was one of the editors of the
"Nation." In 1871 he was appointed editor in chief of the "Atlantic
Monthly." He held the position ten years, and then retired in order to
devote himself to his own writings. Since then, he has been connected with
other literary magazines. Mr. Howells has written several books: novels
and sketches: his writings are marked by an artistic finish, and a keen
but subtile humor. The following selection is an extract from "Their
Wedding Journey."
###
When they alighted, they took their way up through one of the streets of
the great wholesale businesses, to Broadway. On this street was a throng
of trucks and wagons, lading and unlading; bales and boxes rose and sank
by pulleys overhead; the footway was a labyrinth of packages of every
shape and size; there was no flagging of the pitiless energy that moved
all forward, no sign of how heavy a weight lay on it, save in the reeking
faces of its helpless instruments.
It was four o'clock, the deadliest hour of the deadly summer day. The
spiritless air seemed to have a quality of blackness in it, as if filled
with the gloom of low-hovering wings. One half the street lay in shadow,
and one half in sun; but the sunshine itself was dim, as if a heat greater
than its own had smitten it with languor. Little gusts of sick, warm wind
blew across the great avenue at the corners of the intersecting streets.
In the upward distance, at which the journeyers looked, the loftier roofs
and steeples lifted themselves dim out of the livid atmosphere, and far up
and down the length of the street swept a stream of tormented life.
All sorts of wheeled things thronged it, conspicuous among which rolled
and jarred the gaudily painted stages, with quivering horses driven each
by a man who sat in the shade of a branching, white umbrella, and suffered
with a moody truculence of aspect, and as if he harbored the bitterness of
death in his heart for the crowding passengers within, when one of them
pulled the strap about his legs, and summoned him to halt.
Most of the foot passengers kept to the shady side, and to the
unaccustomed eyes of the strangers they were not less in number than at
any other time, though there were fewer women among them. Indomitably
resolute of soul, they held their course with the swift pace of custom,
and only here and there they showed the effect of the heat.
One man, collarless, with waistcoat unbuttoned, and hat set far back from
his forehead, waved a fan before his death-white, flabby face, and set
down one foot after the other with the heaviness of a somnambulist.
Another, as they passed him, was saying huskily to the friend at his side,
"I can't stand this much longer. My hands tingle as if they had gone to
sleep; my heart--" But still the multitude hurried on, passing, repassing,
encountering, evading, vanishing into shop doors, and emerging from them,
dispersing down the side streets, and swarming out of them.
It was a scene that possessed the beholder with singular fascination, and
in its effect of universal lunacy, it might well have seemed the last
phase of a world presently to be destroyed. They who were in it, but not
of it, as they fancied--though there was no reason for this--looked on it
amazed, and at last their own errands being accomplished, and themselves
so far cured of the madness of purpose, they cried with one voice that it
was a hideous sight, and strove to take refuge from it in the nearest
place where the soda fountain sparkled.
It was a vain desire. At the front door of the apothecary's hung a
thermometer, and as they entered they heard the next comer cry out with a
maniacal pride in the affliction laid upon mankind, "Ninety-seven
degrees!" Behind them, at the door, there poured in a ceaseless stream of
people, each pausing at the shrine of heat, before he tossed off the
hissing draught that two pale, close-clipped boys served them from either
side of the fountain. Then, in the order of their coming, they issued
through another door upon the side street, each, as he disappeared,
turning his face half round, and casting a casual glance upon a little
group near another counter.
The group was of a very patient, half-frightened, half-puzzled looking
gentleman who sat perfectly still on a stool, and of a lady who stood
beside him, rubbing all over his head a handkerchief full of pounded ice,
and easing one hand with the other when the first became tired. Basil
drank his soda, and paused to look upon this group, which he felt would
commend itself to realistic sculpture as eminently characteristic of the
local life, and, as "The Sunstroke," would sell enormously in the hot
season.
"Better take a little more of that," the apothecary said, looking up from
his prescription, and, as the organized sympathy of the seemingly
indifferent crowd, smiling very kindly at his patient, who thereupon
tasted something in the glass he held.
"Do you still feel like fainting?" asked the humane authority. "Slightly,
now and then," answered the other, "but I'm hanging on hard to the bottom
curve of that icicled S on your soda fountain, and I feel that I'm all
right as long as I can see that. The people get rather hazy occasionally,
and have no features to speak of. But I do n't know that I look very
impressive myself," he added in the jesting mood which seems the natural
condition of Americans in the face of an embarrassments.
"Oh, you'll do!" the apothecary answered, with a laugh; but he said, in an
answer to an anxious question from the lady, "He mustn't be moved for an
hour yet," and gayly pestled away at a prescription, while she resumed her
office of grinding the pounded ice round and round upon her husband's
skull. Isabel offered her the commiseration of friendly words, and of
looks kinder yet, and then, seeing that they could do nothing, she and
Basil fell into the endless procession, and passed out of the side door.
"What a shocking thing," she whispered. "Did you see how all the people
looked, one after another, so indifferently at that couple, and evidently
forgot them the next instant? It was dreadful. I should n't like to have
you sun-struck in New York."
"That's very considerate of you; but place for place, if any accident must
happen to me among strangers, I think I should prefer to have it in New
York. The biggest place is always the kindest as well as the cruelest
place. Amongst the thousands of spectators the good Samaritan as well as
the Levite would be sure to be. As for a sunstroke, it requires peculiar
gifts. But if you compel me to a choice in the matter, then I say give me
the busiest part of Broadway for a sunstroke. There is such experience of
calamity there that you could hardly fall the first victim to any
misfortune."