he shifted the position of his cart nervously, moving it forward a
few feet. Finding himself undisturbed, he remained there. Presently,
however, a heavy ice-wagon lumbered up from the west and swung in with
a reckless disregard of the persons, property and privileges of the
vendors who were thus unobtrusively grouped together. At the same time
the young Irish-American driver raised his voice in a mighty bellow:
“Get out of there! Move on out! What the hell d’ye want to block up the
street for, anyway? Go on!”
With facile manipulation of his reins he threw his wagon tongue
deliberately among them and did his best to cause some damage in order
to satisfy his own passing irritation.
All three vendors jumped to the task of extricating their carts, but I
could not help distinguishing the oldest of the three for the dexterity
with which he extricated his and the peaceful manner in which he pushed
it away. The lines of his face remained practically undisturbed. All
his actions denoted a remarkable usedness to difficulty. Not once did
he look back, either to frown or complain. Instead, his only concern
was to discover the whereabouts of the policeman. For him he searched
the great crowd in every direction, even craning his neck a little.
When he had satisfied himself that the coast was clear, he pushed in
close to the sidewalk again and began his wait for customers.
While he was thus waiting the condition of his cart and the danger of
an unobserved descent on the part of a policeman engaged his entire
attention. Some few peaches had fallen awry, and these he busily
straightened. One pile of those which he was selling “two for five”
had now become low and this he replenished from baskets of hitherto
undisturbed peaches, carefully dusting the fuzz off each one with
a small brush in order to heighten their beauty and add to the
attractiveness of the pile. Incidentally his eye was upon the crowd,
for every once in a while his arm would stretch out in a most dramatic
manner, inviting a possible purchaser with his subtle glance.
[Illustration: The Push-cart Man]
“Peaches! Fine! Peaches! Fine! Fine!”
Whenever a customer came close enough, these words were called to him
in a soft, persuasive tone. He would bend gracefully forward, pick up
a peach as if the mere lifting of it were a sufficient inducement,
take up a paper bag as if the possible transaction were an assured
thing, and look engagingly into the passerby’s eyes. When it was really
settled that a purchase was intended, no word, however brief, could
fail to convey to him the import of the situation and the number of
peaches desired.
“Five--ten.” The mention of a sum of money. “These,” or your hand held
up, would bring quickly what you desired.
Grace was the perfect word with which to describe this man’s actions.
From one until seven o’clock of this sweltering afternoon, every moment
of his time was occupied. The police made it difficult for him to earn
his living, for the simple reason that they were constantly making him
move on. Not only the regular policemen of the beat, but the officers
of the crossing, and the wandering wayfarers from other precincts all
came forward at different times and hurried him away.
“Get out, now!” ordered one, in a rough and even brutal tone. “Move on.
If I catch you around here any more to-day I’ll lock you up.”
The old Italian lowered his eyes and hustled his cart out into the sun.
“And don’t you come back here any more,” the policeman called after
him; then turning to me he exclaimed: “Begob, a man pays a big license
to keep a store, and these dagos come in front of his place and take
all his business. They ought to be locked up--all of them.”
“Haven’t they a right to stand still for a moment?” I inquired.
“They have,” he said, “but they haven’t any right to stand in front of
any man’s place when he don’t want them there. They drive me crazy,
keeping them out of here. I’ll shoot some of them yet.”
I looked about to see what if any business could be injured by their
stopping and selling fruit, but found only immense establishments
dealing in dry goods, drugs, furniture and the like. Some one may have
complained, but it looked much more like an ordinary case of official
bumptiousness or irritation.
At that time, being interested in such types, I chose to follow this
one, to see what sort of a home life lay behind him. It was not
difficult. By degrees, and much harried by the police, his cart with
only a partially depleted stock was pushed to the lower East Side,
in Elizabeth Street, to be exact. Here he and his family--a wife and
three or four children--occupied two dingy rooms in a typical East Side
tenement. Whether he was at peace with his swarthy, bewrinkled old
helpmate I do not know, but he appeared to be, and with his several
partially grown children. On his return, two of them, a boy and a
girl, greeted him cheerfully, and later, finding me interested and
following him, and assuming that I was an officer of the law, quickly
explained to me what their father did.
“He’s a peddler,” said the boy. “He peddles fruit.”
“And where does he get his fruit?” I asked.
“Over by the Wallabout. He goes over in the morning.”
I recalled seeing the long procession of vendors beating a devious way
over the mile or more of steel bridge that spans the East River at
Delancey Street, at one and two and three of a winter morning. Could
this old man be one of these tramping over and tramping back before
daylight?
“Do you mean to say that he goes over every day?”
“Sure.”
The old gentleman, by now sitting by a front window waiting for his
dinner and gazing down into the sun-baked street not at all cooled by
the fall of night, looked down and for some reason smiled. I presume he
had seen me earlier in the afternoon. He could not know what we were
talking about, however, but he sensed something. Or perhaps it was
merely a feeling of the need of being pleasant.
Upon making my way to the living room and kitchen, as I did, knowing
that I could offer a legal pretext, I found the same shabby and dark,
but not dirty. An oil stove burned dolefully in the rear. Mrs. Pushcart
Man was busy about the evening meal.
The smirks. The genuflections.
“And how much does your father make a day?” I finally asked, after some
other questions.
This is a lawless question anywhere. It earned its own reward. The son
inquired of the father in Italian. The latter tactfully shrugged his
shoulders and held out his hands. His wife laughed and shrugged her
shoulders.
“‘One, two dollars,’ he says,” said the boy.
There was no going back of that. He might have made more. Why should he
tell anybody--the police or any one else?
And so I came away.
But the case of this one seemed to me to be so typical of the lot
of many in our great cities. All of us are so pushed by ambition as
well as necessity. Yet all the feelings and intuitions of the average
American-born citizen are more or less at variance with so shrewd an
acceptance of difficulties. We hurry more, fret and strain more, and
yet on the whole pretend to greater independence. But have we it? I am
sure not. When one looks at the vast army of clerks and underlings,
pushing, scheming, straining at their social leashes so hopelessly
and wearing out their hearts and brains in a fruitless effort to be
what they cannot, one knows that they are really no better off and one
wishes for them a measure of this individual’s enduring patience.
A VANISHED SEASIDE RESORT
At Broadway and Twenty-third Street, where later, on this and some
other ground, the once famed Flatiron Building was placed, there stood
at one time a smaller building, not more than six stories high, the
northward looking blank wall of which was completely covered with a
huge electric sign which read:
SWEPT BY OCEAN BREEZES
THE GREAT HOTELS
PAIN’S FIREWORKS
SOUSA’S BAND
SEIDL’S GREAT ORCHESTRA
THE RACES
NOW--MANHATTAN BEACH--NOW
Each line was done in a different color of lights, light green for the
ocean breezes, white for Manhattan Beach and the great hotels, red for
Pain’s fireworks and the races, blue and yellow for the orchestra and
band. As one line was illuminated the others were made dark, until
all had been flashed separately, when they would again be flashed
simultaneously and held thus for a time. Walking up or down Broadway
of a hot summer night, this sign was an inspiration and an invitation.
It made one long to go to Manhattan Beach. I had heard as much or more
about Atlantic City and Coney Island, but this blazing sign lifted
Manhattan Beach into rivalry with fairyland.
“Where is Manhattan Beach?” I asked of my brother once on my first
coming to New York. “Is it very far from here?”
“Not more than fifteen miles,” he replied. “That’s the place you ought
to see. I’ll take you there on Sunday if you will stay that long.”
Since I had been in the city only a day or two, and Sunday was close at
hand, I agreed. When Sunday came we made our way, via horse-cars first
to the East Thirty-fourth Street ferry and then by ferry and train,
eventually reaching the beach about noon.
Never before, except possibly at the World’s Fair in Chicago, had I
ever seen anything to equal this seaward-moving throng. The day was hot
and bright, and all New York seemed anxious to get away. The crowded
streets and ferries and trains! Indeed, Thirty-fourth Street near the
ferry was packed with people carrying bags and parasols and all but
fighting each other to gain access to the dozen or more ticket windows.
The boat on which we crossed was packed to suffocation, and all such
ferries as led to Manhattan Beach of summer week-ends for years
afterward, or until the automobile arrived, were similarly crowded.
The clerk and his prettiest girl, the actress and her admirer, the
actor and his playmate, brokers, small and exclusive tradesmen, men
of obvious political or commercial position, their wives, daughters,
relatives and friends, all were outbound toward this much above the
average resort.
It was some such place, I found, as Atlantic City and Asbury Park are
to-day, yet considerably more restricted. There was but one way to get
there, unless one could travel by yacht or sail-boat, and that was
via train service across Long Island. As for carriage roads to this
wonderful place there were none, the intervening distance being in part
occupied by marsh grass and water. The long, hot, red trains leaving
Long Island City threaded a devious way past many pretty Long Island
villages, until at last, leaving possible home sites behind, the road
took to the great meadows on trestles, and traversing miles of bending
marsh grass astir in the wind, and crossing a half hundred winding and
mucky lagoons where lay water as agate in green frames and where were
white cranes, their long legs looking like reeds, standing in the water
or the grass, and the occasional boat of a fisherman hugging some mucky
bank, it arrived finally at the white sands of the sea and this great
scene. White sails of small yachts, the property of those who used
some of these lagoons as a safe harbor, might be seen over the distant
grass, their sails full spread, as one sped outward on these trains. It
was romance, poetry, fairyland.
And the beach, with its great hotels, held and contained all summer
long all that was best and most leisurely and pleasure-loving in New
York’s great middle class of that day. There were, as I knew all the
time, other and more exclusive or worse beaches, such as those at
Newport and Coney Island, but this was one which served a world which
was plainly between the two, a world of politicians and merchants,
and dramatic and commercial life generally. I never saw so many
prosperous-looking people in one place, more with better and smarter
clothes, even though they were a little showy. The straw hat with
its blue or striped ribbon, the flannel suit with its accompanying
white shoes, light cane, the pearl-gray derby, the check suit, the
diamond and pearl pin in necktie, the silk shirt. What a cool, summery,
airy-fairy realm!
And the women! I was young and not very experienced at the time, hence
the effect, in part. But as I stepped out of the train at the beach
that day and walked along the boardwalks which paralleled the sea,
looking now at the blue waters and their distant white sails, now at
the great sward of green before the hotels with its formal beds of
flowers and its fountains, and now at the enormous hotels themselves,
the Manhattan and the Oriental, each with its wide veranda packed with
a great company seated at tables or in rockers, eating, drinking,
smoking and looking outward over gardens to the blue sea beyond, I
could scarcely believe my eyes--the airy, colorful, summery costumes of
the women who made it, the gay, ribbony, flowery hats, the brilliant
parasols, the beach swings and chairs and shades and the floating
diving platforms. And the costumes of the women bathing. I had never
seen a seaside bathing scene before. It seemed to me that the fabled
days of the Greeks had returned. These were nymphs, nereids, sirens in
truth. Old Triton might well have raised his head above the blue waves
and sounded his spiral horn.
And now my brother explained to me that here in these two enormous
hotels were crowded thousands who came here and lived the summer
through. The wealth, as I saw it then, which permitted this! Some few
Western senators and millionaires brought their yachts and private
cars. Senator Platt, the State boss, along with one or more of the
important politicians of the State, made the Oriental, the larger and
more exclusive of the two hotels, his home for the summer. Along the
verandas of these two hotels might be seen of a Saturday afternoon
or of a Sunday almost the entire company of Brooklyn and New York
politicians and bosses, basking in the shade and enjoying the beautiful
view and the breezes. It was no trouble for any one acquainted with the
city to point out nearly all of those most famous on Broadway and in
the commercial and political worlds. They swarmed here. They lolled and
greeted and chatted. The bows and the recognitions were innumerable. By
dusk it seemed as though nearly all had nodded or spoken to each other.
And the interesting and to me different character of the amusements
offered here! Out over the sea, at one end of the huge Manhattan Hotel,
had been built a circular pavilion of great size, in which by turns
were housed Seidl’s great symphony orchestra and Sousa’s band. Even now
I can hear the music carried by the wind of the sea. As we strolled
along the beach wall or sat upon one or the other of the great verandas
we could hear the strains of either the orchestra or the band. Beyond
the hotels, in a great field surrounded by a board fence, began at
dusk, at which time the distant lighthouses over the bay were beginning
to blink, a brilliant display of fireworks, almost as visible to the
public as to those who paid a dollar to enter the grounds. Earlier in
the afternoon I saw many whose only desire appeared to be to reach the
race track in time for the afternoon races. There were hundreds and
even thousands of others to whom the enclosed beach appeared to be all.
The hundreds of dining-tables along the veranda of the Manhattan facing
the sea seemed to call to still other hundreds. And yet again the walks
among the parked flowers, the wide walk along the sea, and the more
exclusive verandas of the Oriental, which provided no restaurant but
plenty of rocking-chairs, seemed to draw still other hundreds, possibly
thousands.
But the beauty of it all, the wonder, the airy, insubstantial, almost
transparent quality of it all! Never before had I seen the sea, and
here it was before me, a great, blue, rocking floor, its distant
horizon dotted with white sails and the smoke of but faintly visible
steamers dissolving in the clear air above them. Wide-winged gulls were
flying by. Hardy rowers in red and yellow and green canoes paddled
an uncertain course beyond the breaker line. Flowers most artfully
arranged decorated the parapet of the porch, and about us rose a babel
of laughing and joking voices, while from somewhere came the strains of
a great orchestra, this time within one of the hotels, mingling betimes
with the smash of the waves beyond the seawall. And as dusk came on,
the lights of the lighthouses, and later the glimmer of the stars above
the water, added an impressive and to me melancholy quality to it all.
It was so insubstantial and yet so beautiful. I was so wrought up by it
that I could scarcely eat. Beauty, beauty, beauty--that was the message
and the import of it all, beauty that changes and fades and will
not stay. And the eternal search for beauty. By the hard processes
of trade, profit and loss, and the driving forces of ambition and
necessity and the love of and search for pleasure, this very wonderful
thing had been accomplished. Unimportant to me then, how hard some of
these people looked, how selfish or vain or indifferent! By that which
they sought and bought and paid for had this thing been achieved, and
it was beautiful. How sweet the sea here, how beautiful the flowers
and the music and these parading men and women. I saw women and girls
for the favor of any one of whom, in the first flush of youthful
ebullience and ignorance, I imagined I would have done anything. And
at the very same time I was being seized with a tremendous depression
and dissatisfaction with myself. Who was I? What did I amount to?
What must one do to be worthy of all this? How little of all this had
I known or would ever know! How little of true beauty or fortune or
love! It mattered not that life for me was only then beginning, that I
was seeing much and might yet see much more; my heart was miserable.
I could have invested and beleaguered the world with my unimportant
desires and my capacity. How dare life, with its brutal non-perception
of values, withhold so much from one so worthy as myself and give so
much to others? Why had not the dice of fortune been loaded in my favor
instead of theirs? Why, why, why? I made a very doleful companion for
my very good brother, I am sure.
And yet, at that very time I was asking myself who was I that I should
complain so, and why was I not content to wait? Those about me, as
I told myself, were better swimmers, that was all. There was nothing
to be done about it. Life cared no whit for anything save strength
and beauty. Let one complain as one would, only beauty or strength
or both would save one. And all about, in sky and sea and sun, was
that relentless force, illimitable oceans of it, which seemed not to
know man, yet one tiny measure of which would make him of the elect
of the earth. In the dark, over the whispering and muttering waters,
and under the bright stars and in eyeshot of the lamps of the sea, I
hung brooding, listening, thinking; only, after a time, to return to
the hot city and the small room that was mine to meditate on what life
could do for one if it would. The flowers it could strew in one’s path!
The beauty it could offer one--without price, as I then imagined--the
pleasures with which it could beset one’s path.
With what fever and fury it is that the heart seeks in youth. How
intensely the little flame of life burns! And yet where is its true
haven? What is it that will truly satisfy it? Has any one ever
found it? In subsequent years I came by some of the things which my
soul at that time so eagerly craved, the possession of which I then
imagined would satisfy me, but was mine or any other heart ever really
satisfied? No. And again no.
Each day the sun rises, and with it how few with whom a sense of
contentment dwells! For each how many old dreams unfulfilled, old and
new needs unsatisfied. Onward, onward is the lure; what life may still
do, not what it has done, is the all-important. And to ask of any one
that he count his blessings is but an ungrateful bit of meddling at
best. He will none of it. At twenty, at thirty, at sixty, at eighty,
the lure is still there, however feeble. More and ever more. Only the
wearing of the body, the snapping of the string, the weakening of the
inherent urge, ends the search. And with it comes the sad by-thought
that what is not realized here may never again be anywhere. For if
not here, where is that which could satisfy it as it is here? Of all
pathetic dreams that which pictures a spiritual salvation elsewhere for
one who has failed in his dreams here is the thinnest and palest, a
beggar’s dole indeed. But that youthful day by the sea!
* * * * *
Twenty-five years later I chanced to visit a home on the very site
of one of these hotels, a home which was a part of a new real-estate
division. But of that old, sweet, fair, summery life not a trace. Gone
were the great hotels, the wall, the flowers, the parklike nature of
the scene. In twenty-five years the beautiful circular pavilion had
fallen into the sea and a part of the grounds of the great Manhattan
Hotel had been eaten away by winter storms. The Jersey Coast,
Connecticut, Atlantic City, aided by the automobile, had superseded
and effaced all this. Even the great Oriental, hanging on for a few
years and struggling to accommodate itself to new conditions, had at
last been torn down. Only the beach remained, and even that was changed
to meet new conditions. The land about and beyond the hotels had been
filled in, planted to trees, divided by streets and sold to those who
craved the freshness of this seaside isle.
But of this older place not one of those with whom I visited knew
aught. They had never seen it, had but dimly heard of it. So clouds
gather in the sky, are perchance illuminated by the sun, dissolve, and
are gone. And youth, viewing old realms of grandeur or terror, views
the world as new, untainted, virgin, a realm to be newly and freshly
exploited--as, in truth, it ever is.
But we who were----!
[Illustration]
THE BREAD-LINE
It is such an old subject in New York. It has been here so long. For
thirty-five or forty years newspapers and magazines have discussed the
bread-line, and yet there it is, as healthy and vigorous a feature of
the city as though it were something to be desired. And it has grown
from a few applicants to many, from a small line to a large one. And
now it is a sight, an institution, like a cathedral or a monument.
A curious thing, when you come to think of it. Poverty is not
desirable. Its dramatic aspect may be worth something to those who are
not poor, for prosperous human nature takes considerable satisfaction
in proclaiming: “Lord, I am not as other men,” and having it proved
to itself. But this thing, from any point of view is a pathetic and a
disagreeable thing, something you would feel the city as a corporation
would prefer to avoid. And yet there it is.
For the benefit of those who have not seen it I will describe it again,
though the task is a wearisome one and I have quite another purpose
than that of description in doing so. The scene is the side door of
a bakery, once located at Ninth Street and Broadway, and now moved
to Tenth and Broadway, the line extending toward the west and Fifth
Avenue, where formerly it was to the east and Fourth Avenue. It is
composed of the usual shabby figures, men of all ages, from fifteen
or younger to seventy. The line is not allowed to form before eleven
o’clock, and at this hour perhaps a single figure will shamble around
the corner and halt on the edge of the sidewalk. Then others, for
though they appear to come slowly, some dubiously, they almost all
arrive one at a time. Haste is seldom manifest in their approach.
Figures appear from every direction, limping slowly, slouching
stupidly, or standing with assumed or real indifference, until the end
of the line is reached, when they take their places and wait.
A low murmur of conversation begins after a time, but for the most part
the men stand in stupid, unbroken silence. Here and there may be two
or three talkative ones, and if you pass close enough you will hear
every topic of the times discussed or referred to, except those which
are supposed to interest the poor. Wretchedness, poverty, hunger and
distress are seldom mentioned. The possibilities of a match between
prize-ring favorites, the day’s evidence in the latest murder trial,
the chance of war somewhere, the latest improvements in automobiles, a
flying machine, the prosperity or depression of some other portion of
the world, or the mistakes of the government at Washington--these, or
others like them, are the topics of whatever conversation is held. It
is for the most part a rambling, disconnected conversation.
“Wait until Dreyfus gets out of prison,” said one to his little
black-eyed neighbor one night, years ago, “and you’ll see them guys
fallin’ on his neck.”