Did the reader ever realize how important a part the ferry and the ford
have played in human affairs? How differently would history read without
its Caesar crossing the Rubicon, its Xerxes crossing the Hellespont, and
its Washington crossing the Delaware, its Paul Revere wherried across
the Charles, and its Burr and Hamilton ferried over to Weehawken,--not
to speak of the Hebrews going over Jordan, Jacob at the brook Jabbok,
and John the Baptist at the fords of Bethabara! The ancients conceived
of death under the figure of a ferry, and transmitted it to us with such
vividness that we are still half pagan in our imagination. And I can
easily believe that the battle of life may be essentially influenced by
having a river to cross each day. The change from land to water, from
narrow and stony streets to the wide, free outlook and uplook of a great
river, the varied life of a crowded ferry-boat and of a busy harbor, the
magnetic sympathies of a multitude let loose from toil and perforce at a
stand-still for the time,--all this insures a transition of mind as well
as transfer of body. I could appreciate the exclamation of an impulsive
English girl while waiting one sultry day on a North-River pier, as she
spread open her arms and rushed to the edge of the dock: "I feel as if
I'd like to take a barth!" It was not the dirty scum under the piles
that set her longing, but the general sense of refreshment which the
broad and breezy river suggested to her imagination. Why should not
those tides wash out some of the lines which a day in the city has left
to deepen on a man's mind and brow?--especially if he pushes on to
"sweet fields beyond the swelling flood" and enters "that dear hut," his
home, under a vine-wreathed porch and along a gravel walk through a
grassy lawn, and not down "area steps," or even through the ponderous
and marble jaws of some city "palace." Therefore it is that the suburban
hath the promise, above his mewed-up fellow-citizen, that his days shall
be long in the land which the Lord God giveth him. And hence even the
narrow-neckedness of land which distinguishes New York and pushes most
of its population over the sides may have its compensations.
The ferry makes itself felt long before one gets there. There is a sort
of undertow in the city tides far up from the river-front. There is a
greater tangle of travel as you approach the streets leading to the
ferry. There is a perceptible assimilation of trade to the supposed
demands of householders living out of town. The retail Mammon dethrones
his proud wholesale rival. The sidewalk- or gutter-stand thrusts itself
out in advance of the store. The peripatetic dealer in small wares, the
newsboy, the apple-woman, the bootblack, and the mendicant marshal you
the way. The whole vicinity acquires the look and stir of a bazaar.
Baskets and paper parcels and travelling-bags are conspicuous and
general. Perhaps you find yourself on the greasy edge of some huge
market. The hacks accumulate like croton-bugs about a kitchen sink. You
feel as if you were being sucked into some valve or vortex.
There is a test of character in the mode of going to the ferry. It is
almost impossible not to be in a hurry, such is the swirl of the tide in
which you find yourself. In my three years of almost daily transit I
never ceased to revere the moral superiority of the admirable few who
day after day could proceed with leisurely step and serene brow amid
the heated, breathless, tugging, anxious multitude. It seemed to
indicate a steadiness of nerve, a systematic habit, a wise and
deliberate forecast, a self-control and self-confidence, and a belief in
their watches, to which I never hope to attain this side of Old Charon's
ferry itself. And yet somebody is nearly always late. Quite as likely,
however, it is somebody who is too early,--because he really belongs to
the next boat, and not to the one which is just leaving the dock as he
tears into the ferry-house.
There is a good deal of condensed life and human nature to be found at a
ferry by one who himself is in no hurry to cross. Take your stand just
where you can see up the street and at the same time can command the
whole interior. The waiting-room is deserted, except by some such
lounger as yourself, or a passenger left by the last boat or "too
previous" for the next. Well for you if you are sufficiently respectable
to pass muster with the official whose duty it is to see that no one
secures a day's lodging for two cents. There is a slow dribble of
wayfarers, who seldom spend their time in the dismal and dingy
waiting-room unless in very cold weather or to stand guard over their
parcels which they have piled upon the seats. But all at once
(especially if the next boat is to connect with some train on the other
side) you observe a thickening of the living current far up the
sidewalk, as when the gutters are swollen by the turning on of a
hydrant. Down comes the hurrying mass, fretting at the manifold
obstructions, its component parts struggling together and almost seeming
to go over each other's heads. No time now for the small courtesies, or
even charities, of life. The sturdy and malodorous beggar knows too well
to run alongside with his "Help a poor boy; I'm a stranger in the city."
And the man whose abridged and distorted legs are his stock in trade
waits for the return-tide to enact his shrewd and pantomimic
morality-play by a hurried shuffle up and down the pavement. The
news-dealers--even the enterprising female who summons mercy to the aid
of commerce by her absurdly lugubrious visage--have the paper and the
change all ready to thrust into their customer's hand. The scene at the
crossing of the street baffles description. Talk of the day of miracles
being past! One who can watch this scene of scare and scamper and
hair-breadth escape and not believe in a particular Providence must be
incorrigibly heterodox.
The tide reaches the outer gate in a state of lively congestion. The
person in front of you as you pass the toll-taker's booth is quite sure
to have forgotten his ticket, and has to set down his parcels while he
fumbles through all his pockets for it. You are sure you hear the inner
gate closing. You dash through the ferry-house in the most undignified
manner and unphilosophic mood--to find that you have five minutes to
spare! And you take your stand beside your double, who has been all this
time enjoying the little woes and absurdities of others,--including
yourself.
The current has hardly slackened when the long gate begins to roll to.
The last passenger has to edge himself through sideways, at some peril
of his packages if not of himself, and at the tender mercy of the
gate-keeper. Not the last would-be passenger, however; for a frantic
form is seen to dart through the narrow and tortuous pass from the
street and fling itself upon the closed barrier, appealing in eloquent
indignation to the inexorable Cerberus, and then gazing, with face
against the lattice, in imbecile despair at the receding boat.
Simultaneous with the thud of the shutting gate is the clank of chains
and the rattle of clamps and clogs, as of the striking off of fetters
and handcuffs, an asthmatic jingle of a bell somewhere in the body of
the boat, a slight slush of revolving paddle-wheels, and the great
brute, as steady as a spirit-level and as powerful as a battering-ram,
separates itself from the dock like the opening blade of a penknife. You
recall the good old days when there were no cruelly-humane gates, and
when this stage of the proceeding was marked by a wild leap of belated
forms across the widening chasm, with now and then the souse of a
miscalculating passenger into the yeasty brine. The scene is less
picturesque and exciting now, but it is decidedly more satisfactory.
If you have a wise regard for your sanitary well-being, you will remain
on deck, alike to saturate your lungs with torrents of oxygen and to let
your weary eye and mind disport themselves like sea-gulls on the broad
waters of the bay. What so fresh and cool and clean and still and
sparkling and in perfect contrast to the stern and stony and resounding
streets! As you lean over the taffrail, looking down into the clear,
gliding wave, you can readily conceive why the poor unfortunates to whom
life has become a stern and stony street are so often tempted to bury
their sorrows in that great calm grave.
I never grow tired of watching the wake of the vessel. It revives some
of my earliest impressions,--all the more if it be upon the venerable
Wiehawken, or James Rumsey, or some other veteran of the Hoboken line,
that used to convey me across the Hudson in my childish days. A
ferry-boat then meant to me a country boy's visit to the great city, or,
a little later, a city boy's holiday-excursion to the Elysian Fields.
The long vibrations of the laboring boat bring back the old thrill of
excited expectation. Even the discordant clank of the dock-gear is
musical in memory's ear. And at any time of life there is a real
fascination in watching the smooth and soapy track unrolling behind us,
with its sharp division-line in the centre and its upturned depths of
glossy green.
Every harbor has its characteristic features. The harbor of New York
gives, first of all, the impression of amplitude. This means not only
plenty of "elbow-room" upon the water, but of shore-room. The depots of
a continent could be conveniently clustered here, and its fleets perform
their tactics. There was nothing mean in Nature's mood when she planned
the harbor of New York. And, after all that mellow time and
consecrating tradition, the traveller's enthusiasm, the poet's fancy,
and the painter's sleight have done for the beauties of the Bosphorus,
the Bay of Naples, the harbor of Rhodes, and other "fine old ports" and
"gems of the first water," I know of few more picturesque effects,
whether of color or of grouping, than that which the North-River
ferry-boat affords its passengers as midway in the stream they look up
the broad palisaded river, or down the islanded bay, or across on either
side at populous and steepled shores, on a golden October afternoon or
in the breezy light of a winter morning. Here is, at least, none of the
monotony of charm, like the stereotyped features of a placid and
passionless beauty, which characterizes your standard harbor-scenes. New
York may not be as classic or correct as her languishing rivals on the
Hellespont or the blue waters of the Mediterranean, but she has the
fascination arising from mobility of feature, endless variety of
expression, and vivacity of mood. One who daily crosses the North River
for a year will have seemed to belt the globe and voyaged through all
zones. He will have danced upon the sparkling waves of the AEgean, groped
through the fogs of Liverpool, sweltered in the sultry glare of Tunis,
skirted the ice-clad shores of Scandinavia, sickened in the surges of
the Channel, lain glassed in the watery mirror of the China Sea. And he
will have observed striking features peculiar to this latitude of the
Atlantic coast. I recall an atmospheric effect in springtime resembling
a light pearl-colored mist, which had none of the qualities of a fog,
but rather lent a weird transparency to the air. It gave the impression
of sunlight faded or washed of its golden particles, or of a picture
drawn on pearl. There was a statuesque stillness about the water, a near
and yet a far look about the entire scene, which imparted a sense of
unreality, almost of the supernatural.
I have spoken of fogs on the river. Their prevalence differs greatly in
different years, also their density and darkness. The East River, from
its narrowness, its crowded condition, and its rapid current, is far
more obstructed by them; but the Bridge has changed all that. The fogs
are to be charged to the serious discount of suburban life; still more
the snow-storms, which are more deadening to sound and less capable of
illumination. But the use of electric light and the vast capacities of
the steam-whistle and fog-horn, not to speak of the more than Indian
expertness to which a pilot's eye and ear can be trained, have reduced
the inconvenience to a minimum. There is, however, to the imaginative
traveller a compensating, albeit an awful, charm. It is like exploring
some dim and echoing cave resounding with an organ-concert played by
Titans on the very instruments of AEolus himself. The whole river makes
one think of a vast shell, full of the boomings and sighings of an
infinite sea.
But such experiences on the North River are rare, even in times of fog
or snow. For the most part the climate of New York harbor is singularly
clear, and its autumns are beginning to be recognized as a
meteorological masterpiece. And its vast and varied commerce offers
exhaustless entertainment for one who has an eye for the picturesque or
a sympathetic imagination for the living freight.
As we look up and down the bay we realize how thoroughly steam has
cleared the water of sails, sadly to the sacrifice of beauty. Here and
there, however, there is a lingering sloop or schooner, engaged in
river- or coasting-trade. Decidedly old-fashioned they look, like the
white turban and neckerchief of our grandmothers. As they lie off there,
nestling so confidingly in the arms of the great river-god, we seem to
get a glimpse of a simpler and serener age, when life glided rather than
pushed, waited on the heavenly influences and trusted not its own
impulse. I know that the life of a deck-hand will not bear a very close
examination for aesthetic purposes. But, as I watch these vessels
drifting down through the golden afternoon, or cheerily beating up
against the tide on a breezy morning, the man at the wheel is a very
model of unconscious grace and almost effortless ascendency; and his
shipmates, grouped about him like floating lotos-eaters, have ever a
touch of the fine old Ulyssean vagrancy. Now and then there stands out
before the breeze and the sunlight a great canvassed ship, like some
living thing fluttering and glowing and careering under their thrilling
touch. And sometimes a fleet of sailing-yachts, more beautiful and swift
than sea-gulls, will hover on the horizon.
It is with something of sadness, if not of regret, that we turn our eyes
from these lovely and now almost phantom forms to the monstrosities of
steam navigation. I think we are passing through a sort of saurian epoch
in this age of steam. When we have outgrown this clumsy, noisy, perilous
agent, and have adjusted ourselves to electricity or some still more
subtile and commodious force, we may be able to restore somewhat of the
graces of form and motion. And we shall then look back upon the hideous
and awkward craft of this day very much as we now gaze upon a
reproduction of the misshapen and unwieldy monsters of the palaeozoic
ages. The river swarms with ferry-boats. Was ever utility attained at so
great a sacrifice of taste? Their model must have been a toad with a
stick thrust through it (three of which, so impaled and hung up in the
sun to dry, Luther recommended as the best cure for all manner of
"pestilent humors"). At any rate, the difference between their aspect
and that of the sail-boat is that of a beetle and a butterfly. The acme
of ugliness is reached in the freight ferry-boats, floating fragments of
railroad, whose cars look like the joints of a monstrous creeping worm.
No one, however, can complain of any want of variety in these
steam-craft, whether in size or in shape, from the rather stately
steamships to the little tug-boats that shoot to and fro like gnats upon
the surface of a pool. I say _rather_ stately, for the high and graceful
hull of the steamer comes to a lame and impotent conclusion in its squat
chimney, like a large-faced man with a mayhemed nose, and in its toy
masts and rigging, like a stout woman with curl-papers or a thin wisp of
ringlet. When two or three of these steamships are together down the
harbor, their white volleys of smoke often present quite a lively
picture of a naval engagement. The little puffing pilot-boats have a
trick of getting in the way of us ferry-voyagers, like fussy
custom-house officers among the newly-landed passengers from the
ocean-ferries. There is generally a tug, perhaps with a slow convoy, to
be waited for or circumnavigated ere the "slip" can be entered. And they
run so close in-shore that the pilot has to be wary, and in some cases
to emerge with a series of unearthly steam screeches, lest he step upon
one of them with his great "horseshoe" of a ferry-boat. The steam-yacht
is the most graceful as well as agile of the species, as certainly it
ought to be when as much money is sometimes put into one as would buy a
Raphael or build a Grecian temple. The steam-yacht has doubtless a
thousand comforts for the owner above the sailing-yacht, but we, whose
interest in them is an outside and aesthetic one, cannot help saying, "O
Utility, what crimes are committed in thy name!"
There is no beauty, but a deal of attraction, in the great flotillas of
linked barges and canal-boats which slowly pass like floating and vulgar
Venices. If, as is often the case, they lie across the track, we shall
have plenty of opportunity to observe at our leisure their still life. I
have always thought that canal-life--by reason of its amphibiousness,
its phenomenal slowness, its monotony amid endless change, its solitude
amid busy and peopled scenes which it is always touching but never
entering--must be a unique existence, a _modus vivendi_ quite apart from
other human experiences by land or sea. A distinct type of character and
of habit cannot fail to be evolved, which it might be well for ingenious
novelists at their wits' ends to study, even though it required a trial
of patience and a tribulation of stomach and cuticle for a voyage or
two. Dickens saw its possibilities, and made it an episode in Little
Nell's wanderings, and I am rather surprised that he did not work the
vein farther.
The river-barge is freighted for me with pleasant memories. Like
Cleopatra's,
From the barge
A strange invisible perfume hits the sense.
There are not many of them now that carry passengers, but in my boyhood
they were a common vehicle of travel on the Hudson, several of these
shapeless and unwieldy tubs being lashed to the sides or dragged at the
stern of a tow-boat. They are identified with summer vacations in the
country, than which a boy's memory holds no more honeyed recollections.
The hours before "turning in" (the very fact of an abnormal night and
bed was a joy to the juvenile mind, despite the incessant and unearthly
noises of the live-stock on board) were spent in wandering among the
mountains of "produce," inhaling the savor of Orange County butter and
baled hay and meal-bags, and listening to the plaintive bleat of
comfortless calves and desolate sheep. As night drew on, I would select
some snug little nook, where I could lie and dream as we glided along
the still and starlit river, through the Highlands, perhaps, or the
Palisades. The charm was mainly, of course, in the spell of youthful
fancy and expectancy, which touched and transfigured the homely scene,
as the moonlight touched and transfigured the silent river. But I
associate it all with the barges, and shall ever see in those uncouth
craft
Argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales.
In summer the excursion-boats add picturesqueness and a festive air to
the river, with their gay bunting and bands of music and salutes with
bell or steam-whistle, and, above all, their eager throngs of
Sunday-school children or the liberated denizens of foul and narrow
streets. At times the shipping along the docks and over the bay will
blossom with the flags and streamers of all nations, hung fore and aft
and extending in fluttering lines down the rigging, imparting a gala
aspect to the scene and perhaps thrilling one with patriotic or historic
memories. Perhaps we are crossing at the moment when the great
Sound-steamers are pushing out from their piers. We feel quite
humiliated on our lonely ferry-boat as these leviathans of nautical
architecture sweep past us with an imperious curve far out into the
stream, and then move steadily and statelily down the middle of the
river, like an "ugly duckling" of mammoth proportions. One never gets
over the sensation of that sight, nor its impressions as a type of our
century,--a vast floating hotel, carrying the population of a village
and the luxurious appointments of a palace, gliding as smoothly and
noiselessly as an Indian's canoe, and propelled by an internal force
apparently as vital and secret as that which moves the Indian's arm.
Yonder comes an ocean-steamer, long, low, and black, with a tri-color
flag at the stern, slowly and puffily tugged by a little pilot-boat. The
decks literally swarm with figures in all sorts of outlandish
garb,--gray and blue stuffs, long shaggy ulsters, Scotch caps and
plaids, gay kerchiefs on the women's heads and necks. Some lounge,
smoking or gibbering, over the taffrail, other groups sit picturesquely
on their large rude boxes, but most of them are suggestively silent and
statuesque. And well they may be, for it is the moment of fate to the
poor emigrant as much as for Columbus when he approached the shore of a
new world. A new world, indeed, in far more than the geographical sense;
a new life, or at least a new attempt to live; old things passed away,
and all things to be new--except himself. A great wave of homelessness
in the wide world, and perhaps of sickness for the old home, sweeps over
the poor exile's heart. All is so strange, and so sternly independent of
their forlorn and insignificant selves. Perhaps they are being unladen
from the ship, shunted down the gang-plank along with their chests,
packed on a transfer-boat like so many imported cattle, only not with
the care or tenderness with which a drove of Holsteins or Jerseys would
be handled. A squad of emigrants, just landed on the wharf and waiting
to be transferred to the emigrant-train for another week's voyage by
land to the ends of the continent, is one of the most pathetic sights in
this world, especially if they are foreign to our speech and dress and
modes of life. How wistful and helpless and strayed they look!--a bit of
still and stranded life in the sweep and roar of a world that must seem
to them as wild and as soulless as the ocean they have just left. How
unconsciously they group themselves in picturesque attitudes, which no
artistic eye could improve upon! Their staves, their dangling bundles of
coarse canvas or of tied-up handkerchiefs of various colors, their
quaint and often grotesque attire, their silent posture and vigilant
eyes, their sheep-like dependence on their guides, combined with a
watch-dog solicitude for their miserable traps, their household
groupings and varied ages, from the baby born on shipboard to the old
grandfather come to lay his rheumatic bones in the soil of a strange
land,--I have stood and watched it all many and many a time, ere I
hurried on to my day's business or to my happy home; and the work has
seemed more significant, and the home more sweet, for that sight. Surely
one need cut only a little way into life here in order to touch its
profoundest mysteries and its most far-reaching suggestions.
One who has known New York for a generation or two cannot fail to be
struck with its changed appearance as seen from the ferry-boat. It used
to lie as low and flat as a whale's back, with perhaps a harpoon
sticking out here and there,--to wit, a steeple. The steam elevator has
proved quite an Aladdin's Lamp in its magical feats of architecture, by
developing a vertical in place of a lateral growth of buildings. The
best building-lots are now in the air, and to be had without
ground-rent. Troy had to raise its successive Iliums, Ilioses, and
Trojas, at intervals of ages, and tear or burn each one down before
erecting the next. But we propose to save the Schliemanns of the future
a world of trouble by building our various New Yorks simultaneously, one
on top of the other. Accordingly, the city is becoming crowded with
towering and clumsy structures, especially on the elevated ridge which
runs along Broadway from the City Hall to the Battery, giving it the
appearance of an uncouth acropolis. All over the town manufactories and
public buildings of colossal size stand, like megatheria, knee-deep in a
jungle of houses. The campaniles of modern industry rise slim and tall
into the air. The great buttresses and towers of the Brooklyn Bridge
loom above the house-tops. Grain-elevators, which "take the wind out of
the sails" of Noah's Ark, lie stranded on the docks. The poetic and
picturesque "forest of masts" has fallen before the march of progress
and the axe of steam almost as thoroughly as the primeval woods. The low
and open piers have been enclosed, some of them with considerable
architectural effect, giving a trim and bandbox look to the river-side.
The transformation is even more marked on the adjacent shores. As I
remember Jersey City and Hoboken in my boyhood, they were only small
clusters of buildings, with a ferry-house at the water's edge. Now they
have crept along from the Palisades to the Kill van Kull, overflowed the
Bergen Hills, reared giant structures which rival New York's in
monstrosity, and extended their railroad-wharves and steamship-piers
over the Arcadian haunts of the Elysian Fields and the primitive meadows
of Communipaw and Paulus Hook. And on the East River Brooklyn, joined to
New York by its Siamese ligament of the Bridge, seems the bigger twin of
the two. The contrast at night is still more striking. The river and the
town are brilliant with electric lights, where formerly twinkling lamps
or gas-lights made darkness visible. These have the effect of stars of
the first magnitude; and the great Bridge, seen on a dark night from
the South Ferry, with its lights at regular intervals, suggests that
Orion must have slipped his belt.
Crossing the ferry by night was always a favorite experience with me. In
sultry weather one can nearly always get a whiff of freshened air,
perhaps from the sea; and the quiet is not less reviving to the heated
brain. Nowhere does the night seem more "stilly," or the sense of
seclusion more profound, than in the middle of the broad bay on a
midsummer night before or after the theatre-goers have crossed. The
cities, veiled in moonlight or dim in the star-light, seem to be
breathing peacefully in giant slumber. The prosaic features of the scene
are hidden, the ragged outlines softened, and the smoke and din
indistinguishable. It seems hardly possible that these dream-like
masses, with their sparkling lights, like reversed heavens, are the
rude, restless, discordant gehennas which they sometimes seem to us by
day. And yet I realize the awfulness and vastness of these great living
creatures far more than in the belittling and disillusionizing daylight.
The anchored or passing vessels only add to the sense of seclusion,--the
former with a solitary lantern at the stern, the latter perhaps a galaxy
of many-colored lights. On a dark night it has the effect of a discharge
of Roman candles arrested in mid-career. The other ferry-boats have a
comical appearance as they whirl and whiz past us. If in the daytime
they are deplorably like pumpkins with a stick thrust through them, at
night they remind us of grotesque lanterns made out of those same
pumpkins with illuminated slits and slashes.
I find no small entertainment and suggestion in watching the
manoeuvres of the skilful pilots. A novice might hastily conclude that
it was a simple matter to steer a boat from one side of the river to
another. But let him try, and see where he will bring up. The process is
as nice a one and as scientific as a game of billiards. The exact stage
of the tide and volume of the current, the velocity and direction of the
wind, the ice on the river, the approaching or anchored vessels, and
all of them in their mutual relations, have to be calculated with
mathematical precision, especially in entering the narrow slip: so that
the directest way is often the longest way around. Is there not here an
object-lesson for those who would live wisely in this narrow transit
which we call life? Keep your eye upon the one point to which you know
the higher powers call you; but do not think that you are going to march
straight there by force of will, or straight there at all. You are in a
world full of cross-purposes and counter-currents and side-winds, of
accumulated conservatisms and masses of mere inertia and oppositions
which straddle or shoulder themselves across your path. You will
probably wreck your undertakings, and will certainly waste your strength
in needless collisions and shovings aside, unless you take all these
things into account. The capacity to do this is wisdom, as distinct from
knowledge or right intentions, in any sphere of life. Herein is
practical statesmanship, effective reform, everything which has to do
with human wills and the course of this world.
But it is not always practicable, even to the most stalwart and seasoned
passenger, to spend his time on the open deck. To stand out on the front
(one can hardly call it a prow, where the periphery is that of an
average wash-tub) or at the stern is to be drowned by rain or sawn
asunder by icy winds or broiled like an oyster, and to cower under the
upper deck is to get a lively sense of the Cave of the Winds. One with a
healthy sense of smell and an instinct for oxygen may well shrink from
entering the cabin, and prefer the perils and discomforts of too much
atmosphere to those of a depleted and poisoned one. David may have been
wise in choosing to be punished for his sins by pestilence rather than
by famine or the sword, but he put it on very doubtful ground when he
thought he was thereby falling into "the hand of the Lord" in some
special manner. For I am confident that bad air is the devil, and that
it is this "power of the air" of which he is "prince." And he has no
more impregnable stronghold than the cabin of a ferry-boat in winter. In
the cars one can brave public opinion and elude the brakeman's eye so as
to open something in his "Black Hole." But the cabin windows are
hermetically sealed and the doors jealously guarded by an unsleeping
dragon. On some of these boats they have an ingenious method of
intensifying the sickening odor by anointing the floors with a rancid
oil, which affords the tender stomach all the advantages of the famous
crossing of the English Channel.
The entire code of the cabin is still to be rescued from the
civilization of the cave-dwellers. The essence of politeness has been
shown to be self-sacrifice in small things. The average American is
naturally as unselfish a being as dwells upon the planet, but he often
appears to disadvantage beside far meaner races by reason of an insane
haste which tramples politeness under its feet. "After you, sir,"--a
phrase which contains in a nutshell the very kernel of all
courtesy,--puts the thing in a shape which is almost a physical
impossibility to the American temperament. Our fellow-citizen will go
ahead of you with the utmost gallantry, though it be to storm a Malakoff
or grapple with a mad dog; but to stand aside and let you get on or off
a ferry-boat before him is a strain upon his manners enough to dislocate
their every limb. Well, remembering that the passive mood comes after
the active in grammatical sequence, we will not despair of a development
of the passive virtues even in the "go-ahead" American. And then the law
of the cabin will no longer be mob-law, nor its motto, "Every man for
himself, and ---- take the ladies."
It is really ridiculous to see the uneasiness and prematureness of most
persons as the boat begins to approach the shore. Though conscious that
it will not bring the boat and the dock any nearer together, there is a
hunger of the eye to seize the latter from afar. Sometimes the movement
of an asphyxiated passenger for the door, or the momentary stoppage of
the boat in mid-stream, will bring half the cabin to its feet. It is the
same impulse which leads passengers, when waiting in the ferry-house, to
glue their faces to the gate for five minutes before the boat arrives,
which throngs the platforms and aisles of a car long before the depot is
entered, which in church varies the closing hymn with an overcoat drill
and causes the benediction to be pronounced amid a rattling discharge of
hymn-books into the book-racks.
Having entered the cabin, it is always an interesting question on which
side we shall sit,--not to say at which end of the boat. I think that
temperament has much to do with the decision of these questions. And it
might be well for some psychologist and sociologist to investigate why
it is that certain persons will instinctively select the rear of the
cabin and others advance to the front; also why some will invariably
take their seats on the outer and others on the inner side of the cabin.
This being with myself not a matter of instinct but of reason, perhaps
my experience is of little value, but I freely and confidentially offer
it in the interests of science. I choose the inner row of seats for the
following reasons: first, they are warmer in winter by reason of the
steam-pipes which run underneath them, and cooler in summer by being
more directly in the draught from the open doors; secondly, because the
boat is steadier there, and one can read one's paper, if so inclined,
with less painful adjustment of the eyes to the shaking type; but
chiefly because in that position one has before one the panorama of the
river, which is the next best thing to being out on deck. One of the
mysteries of human nature is that so large a proportion of
ferry-passengers appear to take no more notice of the glorious scenes
through which they pass twice a day than if it were a tunnel. They will
hurry into the cabin in all weathers, seat themselves with their backs
to the river, and spend the voyage buried in the newspaper or gazing
into vacancy. They do not seem even to appreciate the study of life
afforded by their fellow-passengers. I am sure Dickens would have
revelled in the opportunity and found no end of Quilps and Chadbands,
Swivellers and Turveydrops, Little Nells and Mrs. Nicklebys, Pickwicks
and Artful Dodgers. I have found splendid models for almost every type
of civilization and not a few types of barbarism. And the eccentricities
of dress are hardly less noteworthy.
One learns to enter heartily into the joys and sorrows of the groups,
and even of the individuals, whom he thus watches perhaps from day to
day. He comes to be a mind-reader, and works out many a little
life-story, as did the ingenious Silas Wegg concerning the people who
passed his corner or lived in the houses of the neighborhood. Among the
more familiar types are college-students cramming for the day's
recitation, giggling school-girls, dapper clerks, pert messenger-boys
improving the time by reading a blood-and-thunder story-paper in the
very smallest of type, business-men, all nerve in the morning, and in
the afternoon chatting affably or half asleep, ladies keen for a
shopping-"meet" on Fourteenth Street, housewives with market-baskets,
and workingmen with tin pails. Each hour of the day develops its own
tide and type of travel, beginning with the lowest class of laborer and
ending with the belated reveller. There is a still hour in the morning,
awhile before noon, when the idlers and the dissipated begin to dribble
into or out of the city, and studies of the odd and the sad alike abound
for the Hogarthian pencil and imagination.
The "basket brigade" constitutes a large and regular detachment of the
trans-Hudson army. Pleasant it is (I can hear the parody-fiend murmur),
when things are green and price of meat is low, to move amid the
market-scene, where gourmands stout and housewives lean with baskets
come and go. Tempting too, alike to the dainty and the thrifty. Like
Robinet in the "Evenings at Home," it adds much to the relish of one's
little supper to have selected it one's self out of a whole marketful
and to inhale its imaginary savors all the way home. Then, it is so
nice to surprise the wife with the earliest of the season, or to pour
out upon the table a dozen golden oranges, or to bring a little light
into the invalid's eye by a basket of grapes or a fragrant bunch of
flowers, or to delight Tiny Tim with a trinket, or to let little Jacob
"know what oysters is." Especially on Saturday afternoons does the
basket brigade come out in force, and many a homely little idyl may be
conjured out of the family groups or the purveying parents who throng
and cumber the boat at such times. The capacities of the market-basket,
as then and there revealed, are prodigious, rivalling those of the trunk
of travel; and yet out of the cover will still protrude the legs of
unadjustable "broilers" and the green fringes of garden-stuff, and all
this not counting in the oyster-pail, or the great watermelon which has
to be carried separately by its wooden handle. The epicurean prospect of
the Sunday dinner reflected in the restful face as well as materialized
in the basket can hardly fail to elicit a gentle thought from the
sternest Sabbatarian's heart.
With the excursion-season comes another phase of our little idyllic
studies, as we watch the groups and couples intent upon a picnic at the
sea-side or among the Jersey villages. Here is a representative family
party which I followed with my eyes, and still farther with my
imagination, on their way to Coney Island on a fine, fresh summer
morning. There was the grandma, a bright-eyed, beaming old lady,
beginning to bend somewhat with years, but as pleased with the day's
outing as any of them. There was the mother, sharing her responsibility
with the neat and pretty young-lady daughter. There was a youth,
somewhat of the Abel Garland type, who might have been the young lady's
brother, but who was a happy man even if he was not. There was a small
boy; and who need be told what a day that was for him? Lastly, there
were two charming little ringleted girls, who walked hand in hand in the
prettiest way, with eyes that fairly danced and feet that could hardly
help doing so. There was no baby to utter a discordant note or to hang
as a Damocles' sword of apprehension over the heads of the group. But in
so affectionate and well-regulated a family I am not sure that its
presence would not have constituted a new source of happiness. And by
and by, as the afternoon waned, I could imagine the father meeting them
at the beach, with perhaps the real brother (or would it be the real
not-brother?), and coming home with them in the cool evening and the
sweet moonlight.
On Saturdays there is an earlier current of home-going working-people;
and it is easy to detect a quite different air about them from what they
wear on other days. There is no shadow of next morning impending over
them. One realizes anew the Sabbath as made for man,--the man who
works,--and blesses the Son of Man who is "Lord also of the Sabbath."
This is the evening when they carry home their reading for the week, as
well as their Sunday dinner. I wish more could be said for the general
quality, intellectual or moral, of this literature. But most of it is
better than mental vacancy, and a great advance on the illiteracy in
which these classes were sunk not so very long ago. And it must be borne
in mind that the transient and sensational reading which so many of us
carry in cars and cabins, or buy at news-stands, or take out of
libraries, would misrepresent us if supposed to be all we had or loved
to read. There is in more of these homes than perhaps we suspect a shelf
with its well-thumbed "Pilgrim's Progress," its "Robinson Crusoe" with
one cover gone, its odd volume of Waverley or Dickens, its copy of Burns
or Longfellow, its row of school histories and science, and its pile of
magazines.
At certain hours, when the trains are due, the basket brigade is
reinforced by the carpet-bag battalion; and a crowd of home-coming or
out-going travellers is a never-ending source of sympathetic and
imaginative study to the leisurely looker-on. What an anachronism that
word "carpet-bag" has become, by the way! I saw not long ago on the
ferry-boat a genuine and literal specimen, which carried back my
thoughts for a generation to the day when bags were really made of
carpet and the most fastidious social Bourbon did not disdain to carry
them. They flourished in the age of shawls, and came in not long after
the epoch of "gum" shoes. They were of every conceivable pattern, from
the sober symphony in brown to a gorgeous wealth of color that might vie
with the most audacious wall-paper of an aesthetic age. This "belated
traveller" of a carpet-bag had all the appearance of a faded and
bedraggled gentility,--was, in fact, a veritable tramp among luggage. It
sagged down as it stood on the floor. It ran here and there into
strings, as of shoes untied and coat fastened together by twine in lieu
of buttons. And it was trampy with mouldy discoloration and
travel-stains. It was of vast dimensions, and, as was always the way
with carpet-bags, bulging in all directions with its contents. I was not
surprised to discover, through its orifice, that it had long ceased to
be a receptacle for clothing and was filled with honest workman's tools.
Burglars, the police-reports tell us, affect the carpet-bag for their
jimmies and the like, but in such case it may be depended on to be as
reputable in appearance and as close-mouthed as the last defaulting
treasurer or trustee. The modern luggage is a type of advanced thought,
if not civilization, whether we consider the Saratoga trunk, the
Russia-leather satchel, the school-boy's knapsack, or the commercial
traveller's double-locked valise. There is "nothing like leather:" men
live now in their trunks, and America's proudest contribution to the
world is the railway-check.
But my boat bumps on the shore, and I must pass out, to the marching
music of the rattling chains and the swashing tide, to my
business,--perhaps a "better" one to be "about" than writing these idle
observations on a North-River Ferry.