As we drew near to New York I was at first amused, and then somewhat
staggered, by the cautious and the grisly tales that went the round. You
would have thought we were to land upon a cannibal island. You must
speak to no one in the streets, as they would not leave you till you were
rooked and beaten. You must enter a hotel with military precautions; for
the least you had to apprehend was to awake next morning without money or
baggage, or necessary raiment, a lone forked radish in a bed; and if the
worst befell, you would instantly and mysteriously disappear from the
ranks of mankind.
I have usually found such stories correspond to the least modicum of
fact. Thus I was warned, I remember, against the roadside inns of the
Cévennes, and that by a learned professor; and when I reached Pradelles
the warning was explained—it was but the far-away rumour and
reduplication of a single terrifying story already half a century old,
and half forgotten in the theatre of the events. So I was tempted to
make light of these reports against America. But we had on board with us
a man whose evidence it would not do to put aside. He had come near
these perils in the body; he had visited a robber inn. The public has an
old and well-grounded favour for this class of incident, and shall be
gratified to the best of my power.
My fellow-passenger, whom we shall call M’Naughten, had come from New
York to Boston with a comrade, seeking work. They were a pair of
rattling blades; and, leaving their baggage at the station, passed the
day in beer saloons, and with congenial spirits, until midnight struck.
Then they applied themselves to find a lodging, and walked the streets
till two, knocking at houses of entertainment and being refused
admittance, or themselves declining the terms. By two the inspiration of
their liquor had begun to wear off; they were weary and humble, and after
a great circuit found themselves in the same street where they had begun
their search, and in front of a French hotel where they had already
sought accommodation. Seeing the house still open, they returned to the
charge. A man in a white cap sat in an office by the door. He seemed to
welcome them more warmly than when they had first presented themselves,
and the charge for the night had somewhat unaccountably fallen from a
dollar to a quarter. They thought him ill-looking, but paid their
quarter apiece, and were shown upstairs to the top of the house. There,
in a small room, the man in the white cap wished them pleasant slumbers.
It was furnished with a bed, a chair, and some conveniences. The door
did not lock on the inside; and the only sign of adornment was a couple
of framed pictures, one close above the head of the bed, and the other
opposite the foot, and both curtained, as we may sometimes see valuable
water-colours, or the portraits of the dead, or works of art more than
usually skittish in the subject. It was perhaps in the hope of finding
something of this last description that M’Naughten’s comrade pulled aside
the curtain of the first. He was startlingly disappointed. There was no
picture. The frame surrounded, and the curtain was designed to hide, an
oblong aperture in the partition, through which they looked forth into
the dark corridor. A person standing without could easily take a purse
from under the pillow, or even strangle a sleeper as he lay abed.
M’Naughten and his comrade stared at each other like Vasco’s seamen,
‘with a wild surmise’; and then the latter, catching up the lamp, ran to
the other frame and roughly raised the curtain. There he stood,
petrified; and M’Naughten, who had followed, grasped him by the wrist in
terror. They could see into another room, larger in size than that which
they occupied, where three men sat crouching and silent in the dark. For
a second or so these five persons looked each other in the eyes, then the
curtain was dropped, and M’Naughten and his friend made but one bolt of
it out of the room and downstairs. The man in the white cap said nothing
as they passed him; and they were so pleased to be once more in the open
night that they gave up all notion of a bed, and walked the streets of
Boston till the morning.
No one seemed much cast down by these stories, but all inquired after the
address of a respectable hotel; and I, for my part, put myself under the
conduct of Mr. Jones. Before noon of the second Sunday we sighted the
low shores outside of New York harbour; the steerage passengers must
remain on board to pass through Castle Garden on the following morning;
but we of the second cabin made our escape along with the lords of the
saloon; and by six o’clock Jones and I issued into West Street, sitting
on some straw in the bottom of an open baggage-wagon. It rained
miraculously; and from that moment till on the following night I left New
York, there was scarce a lull, and no cessation of the downpour. The
roadways were flooded; a loud strident noise of falling water filled the
air; the restaurants smelt heavily of wet people and wet clothing.
It took us but a few minutes, though it cost us a good deal of money, to
be rattled along West Street to our destination: ‘Reunion House, No. 10
West Street, one minutes walk from Castle Garden; convenient to Castle
Garden, the Steamboat Landings, California Steamers and Liverpool Ships;
Board and Lodging per day 1 dollar, single meals 25 cents, lodging per
night 25 cents; private rooms for families; no charge for storage or
baggage; satisfaction guaranteed to all persons; Michael Mitchell,
Proprietor.’ Reunion House was, I may go the length of saying, a humble
hostelry. You entered through a long bar-room, thence passed into a
little dining-room, and thence into a still smaller kitchen. The
furniture was of the plainest; but the bar was hung in the American
taste, with encouraging and hospitable mottoes.
Jones was well known; we were received warmly; and two minutes afterwards
I had refused a drink from the proprietor, and was going on, in my plain
European fashion, to refuse a cigar, when Mr. Mitchell sternly
interposed, and explained the situation. He was offering to treat me, it
appeared, whenever an American bar-keeper proposes anything, it must be
borne in mind that he is offering to treat; and if I did not want a
drink, I must at least take the cigar. I took it bashfully, feeling I
had begun my American career on the wrong foot. I did not enjoy that
cigar; but this may have been from a variety of reasons, even the best
cigar often failing to please if you smoke three-quarters of it in a
drenching rain.
For many years America was to me a sort of promised land; ‘westward the
march of empire holds its way’; the race is for the moment to the young;
what has been and what is we imperfectly and obscurely know; what is to
be yet lies beyond the flight of our imaginations. Greece, Rome, and
Judæa are gone by forever, leaving to generations the legacy of their
accomplished work; China still endures, an old-inhabited house in the
brand-new city of nations; England has already declined, since she has
lost the States; and to these States, therefore, yet undeveloped, full of
dark possibilities, and grown, like another Eve, from one rib out of the
side of their own old land, the minds of young men in England turn
naturally at a certain hopeful period of their age. It will be hard for
an American to understand the spirit. But let him imagine a young man,
who shall have grown up in an old and rigid circle, following bygone
fashions and taught to distrust his own fresh instincts, and who now
suddenly hears of a family of cousins, all about his own age, who keep
house together by themselves and live far from restraint and tradition;
let him imagine this, and he will have some imperfect notion of the
sentiment with which spirited English youths turn to the thought of the
American Republic. It seems to them as if, out west, the war of life was
still conducted in the open air, and on free barbaric terms; as if it had
not yet been narrowed into parlours, nor begun to be conducted, like some
unjust and dreary arbitration, by compromise, costume, forms of procedure,
and sad, senseless self-denial. Which of these two he prefers, a man
with any youth still left in him will decide rightly for himself. He
would rather be houseless than denied a pass-key; rather go without food
than partake of stalled ox in stiff, respectable society; rather be shot
out of hand than direct his life according to the dictates of the world.
He knows or thinks nothing of the Maine Laws, the Puritan sourness, the
fierce, sordid appetite for dollars, or the dreary existence of country
towns. A few wild story-books which delighted his childhood form the
imaginative basis of his picture of America. In course of time, there is
added to this a great crowd of stimulating details—vast cities that grow
up as by enchantment; the birds, that have gone south in autumn,
returning with the spring to find thousands camped upon their marshes,
and the lamps burning far and near along populous streets; forests that
disappear like snow; countries larger than Britain that are cleared and
settled, one man running forth with his household gods before another,
while the bear and the Indian are yet scarce aware of their approach; oil
that gushes from the earth; gold that is washed or quarried in the brooks
or glens of the Sierras; and all that bustle, courage, action, and
constant kaleidoscopic change that Walt Whitman has seized and set forth
in his vigorous, cheerful, and loquacious verses.
Here I was at last in America, and was soon out upon New York streets,
spying for things foreign. The place had to me an air of Liverpool; but
such was the rain that not Paradise itself would have looked inviting.
We were a party of four, under two umbrellas; Jones and I and two Scots
lads, recent immigrants, and not indisposed to welcome a compatriot.
They had been six weeks in New York, and neither of them had yet found a
single job or earned a single halfpenny. Up to the present they were
exactly out of pocket by the amount of the fare.
The lads soon left us. Now I had sworn by all my gods to have such a
dinner as would rouse the dead; there was scarce any expense at which I
should have hesitated; the devil was in it, but Jones and I should dine
like heathen emperors. I set to work, asking after a restaurant; and I
chose the wealthiest and most gastronomical-looking passers-by to ask
from. Yet, although I had told them I was willing to pay anything in
reason, one and all sent me off to cheap, fixed-price houses, where I
would not have eaten that night for the cost of twenty dinners. I do not
know if this were characteristic of New York, or whether it was only
Jones and I who looked un-dinerly and discouraged enterprising
suggestions. But at length, by our own sagacity, we found a French
restaurant, where there was a French waiter, some fair French cooking,
some so-called French wine, and French coffee to conclude the whole. I
never entered into the feelings of Jack on land so completely as when I
tasted that coffee.
I suppose we had one of the ‘private rooms for families’ at Reunion
House. It was very small, furnished with a bed, a chair, and some
clothes-pegs; and it derived all that was necessary for the life of the
human animal through two borrowed lights; one looking into the passage,
and the second opening, without sash, into another apartment, where three
men fitfully snored, or in intervals of wakefulness, drearily mumbled to
each other all night long. It will be observed that this was almost
exactly the disposition of the room in M’Naughten’s story. Jones had the
bed; I pitched my camp upon the floor; he did not sleep until near
morning, and I, for my part, never closed an eye.
At sunrise I heard a cannon fired; and shortly afterwards the men in the
next room gave over snoring for good, and began to rustle over their
toilettes. The sound of their voices as they talked was low and like
that of people watching by the sick. Jones, who had at last begun to
doze, tumbled and murmured, and every now and then opened unconscious
eyes upon me where I lay. I found myself growing eerier and eerier, for
I dare say I was a little fevered by my restless night, and hurried to
dress and get downstairs.
You had to pass through the rain, which still fell thick and resonant, to
reach a lavatory on the other side of the court. There were three
basin-stands, and a few crumpled towels and pieces of wet soap, white and
slippery like fish; nor should I forget a looking-glass and a pair of
questionable combs. Another Scots lad was here, scrubbing his face with
a good will. He had been three months in New York and had not yet found
a single job nor earned a single halfpenny. Up to the present, he also
was exactly out of pocket by the amount of the fare. I began to grow
sick at heart for my fellow-emigrants.
Of my nightmare wanderings in New York I spare to tell. I had a thousand
and one things to do; only the day to do them in, and a journey across
the continent before me in the evening. It rained with patient fury;
every now and then I had to get under cover for a while in order, so to
speak, to give my mackintosh a rest; for under this continued drenching
it began to grow damp on the inside. I went to banks, post-offices,
railway-offices, restaurants, publishers, booksellers, money-changers,
and wherever I went a pool would gather about my feet, and those who were
careful of their floors would look on with an unfriendly eye. Wherever I
went, too, the same traits struck me: the people were all surprisingly
rude and surprisingly kind. The money-changer cross-questioned me like a
French commissary, asking my age, my business, my average income, and my
destination, beating down my attempts at evasion, and receiving my
answers in silence; and yet when all was over, he shook hands with me up
to the elbows, and sent his lad nearly a quarter of a mile in the rain to
get me books at a reduction. Again, in a very large publishing and
bookselling establishment, a man, who seemed to be the manager, received
me as I had certainly never before been received in any human shop,
indicated squarely that he put no faith in my honesty, and refused to
look up the names of books or give me the slightest help or information,
on the ground, like the steward, that it was none of his business. I
lost my temper at last, said I was a stranger in America and not learned
in their etiquette; but I would assure him, if he went to any bookseller
in England, of more handsome usage. The boast was perhaps exaggerated;
but like many a long shot, it struck the gold. The manager passed at
once from one extreme to the other; I may say that from that moment he
loaded me with kindness; he gave me all sorts of good advice, wrote me
down addresses, and came bareheaded into the rain to point me out a
restaurant, where I might lunch, nor even then did he seem to think that
he had done enough. These are (it is as well to be bold in statement)
the manners of America. It is this same opposition that has most struck
me in people of almost all classes and from east to west. By the time a
man had about strung me up to be the death of him by his insulting
behaviour, he himself would be just upon the point of melting into
confidence and serviceable attentions. Yet I suspect, although I have
met with the like in so many parts, that this must be the character of
some particular state or group of states, for in America, and this again
in all classes, you will find some of the softest-mannered gentlemen in
the world.
I was so wet when I got back to Mitchell’s toward the evening, that I had
simply to divest myself of my shoes, socks, and trousers, and leave them
behind for the benefit of New York city. No fire could have dried them
ere I had to start; and to pack them in their present condition was to
spread ruin among my other possessions. With a heavy heart I said
farewell to them as they lay a pulp in the middle of a pool upon the
floor of Mitchell’s kitchen. I wonder if they are dry by now. Mitchell
hired a man to carry my baggage to the station, which was hard by,
accompanied me thither himself, and recommended me to the particular
attention of the officials. No one could have been kinder. Those who
are out of pocket may go safely to Reunion House, where they will get
decent meals and find an honest and obliging landlord. I owed him this
word of thanks, before I enter fairly on the second {92} and far less
agreeable chapter of my emigrant experience.
II.
COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK
A FRAGMENT
1871
Very much as a painter half closes his eyes so that some salient unity
may disengage itself from among the crowd of details, and what he sees
may thus form itself into a whole; very much on the same principle, I may
say, I allow a considerable lapse of time to intervene between any of my
little journeyings and the attempt to chronicle them. I cannot describe
a thing that is before me at the moment, or that has been before me only
a very little while before; I must allow my recollections to get
thoroughly strained free from all chaff till nothing be except the pure
gold; allow my memory to choose out what is truly memorable by a process
of natural selection; and I piously believe that in this way I ensure the
Survival of the Fittest. If I make notes for future use, or if I am
obliged to write letters during the course of my little excursion, I so
interfere with the process that I can never again find out what is worthy
of being preserved, or what should be given in full length, what in
torso, or what merely in profile. This process of incubation may be
unreasonably prolonged; and I am somewhat afraid that I have made this
mistake with the present journey. Like a bad daguerreotype, great part
of it has been entirely lost; I can tell you nothing about the beginning
and nothing about the end; but the doings of some fifty or sixty hours
about the middle remain quite distinct and definite, like a little patch
of sunshine on a long, shadowy plain, or the one spot on an old picture
that has been restored by the dexterous hand of the cleaner. I remember
a tale of an old Scots minister called upon suddenly to preach, who had
hastily snatched an old sermon out of his study and found himself in the
pulpit before he noticed that the rats had been making free with his
manuscript and eaten the first two or three pages away; he gravely
explained to the congregation how he found himself situated: ‘And now,’
said he, ‘let us just begin where the rats have left off.’ I must follow
the divine’s example, and take up the thread of my discourse where it
first distinctly issues from the limbo of forgetfulness.