is not a wide river, but one populous with boats and teeming with all
the mercantile life of a great city. Its current is swift, its bottom
deep; it carries on its glassy bosom the freight of a thousand--of
ten thousand merchants. Only the conception of something supernally
wonderful haunts me as I cross it, and I gaze at the picture of its
boats and barges, its spars and sails, spellbound by their beauty.
The boats on this little river--the Harlem--traverse the seven seas.
You may stand and see them go by: vessels loaded with brick and stone,
with lumber and cement, with coal, iron, lime, oil--a great gamut of
serviceable things which the world needs and which is here forever
being delivered or carried away. These boats come from the Hudson
and the Chesapeake, from Maine, Florida, the Gulf of Mexico, Europe,
Asia, Africa and the rest of the world. They tie up to these small
docks in friendly rows and nose the banks in silence, while human
beings, honored only by being allowed to guide and direct their stately
proportions, clamber over them.
[Illustration: The Wonder of the Water]
It is not so much these boats, however, as it is the water which curls
under them, which sips and eddies about the docks and posts, and
circles away in spinning rings, which takes my fancy. This water, which
flows here so swiftly, comes from so far. It has been washing about
the world, lo, these many centuries--for how long the imagination of
man cannot conceive. And here it is running pleasantly at my feet, the
light of the morning sun warming it with amethystine beams and giving
it a luster which the deeps of the sea cannot have.
This water, as it comes before me now, gives me the impression of
having been a hundred and a thousand things, maybe--the torrent
from the height, bounding ecstatically downward into the depths of
some cavern, rolling in gloom under the immensity of the volume of
the sea, or a tiny cloudlet hanging like a little red island in the
sky, a dark thundercloud pouring its fury and wrath upon a luckless
multitude. It may have been a cup of water, a glass of wine, a tear,
a gush of blood--anything in the whole gamut of human experience, or
out of it--and yet here for this hour at least it lies darkling and
purling, murmuring cheerfully about these docks and piers. When you
think of the steam that is made of it by heat, floating over our whole
civilization like plumes; the frost of the windowpanes spread in such
tropical luxury of a winter morning; the snow, in its forms of stars
and flowers; the rich rains of summer, falling with such rhythmic
persistence; and then the ice, the fog, the very atmosphere we breathe,
infiltrated by this wonderful medium and were ourselves almost entirely
composed of it, you see how almost mystic it becomes. We owe all our
forms to it; the beauty of the flowers, the stateliness of the trees,
the shape and grandeur of the mountains, all, in fact--our minds and
bodies, so much water and so little substance.
And here it is under our bridge, hurrying away. It may be that it has
mind, that in its fluid depths lie all the religions and philosophies
of the world. Sweep us away, and out of it might rise new shapes and
forms, more glorious, more radiant. We may not even guess the alpha of
its powers.
I do not know what this green fluid is that runs between green banks
and past docks and factories and the habitations of men. It has a life
quality, and mayhap a soul quality, which I cannot fathom, but with
each turn of its ripples and each gurgle of its tide the heart of me
leaps like a voice in song. I can reason no more. It is too colorful,
too rhythmic, too silent, not to call forth that which is deemed
exaltation by the world, and I stand spellbound, longing for I know not
what, nor why.
THE MAN ON THE BENCH
It is nine o’clock of a summer’s night. The great city all about is
still astir, active, interested, apparently comfortable. Lights gleam
out from stores lazily. The cars go rumbling by only partially filled,
as is usual at this time of night. People stroll in parks in a score of
places throughout the city, enjoying the cool of the night, such as it
is.
In any one of these, as the evening wanes, may be witnessed one of the
characteristic spectacles of the town: the gathering of the “benchers.”
Here, while one strolls about for an hour’s amusement or sits on a
bench, may be seen the man whom the city has beaten, seeking a place to
sleep.
What a motley company! What a port of missing men! This young one who
slips by me in shabby, clay-colored clothes and a worn, dirty straw
hat, is only temporarily down on his luck, for he has youth. It may be
a puling youth, half-witted, with ill-conceived understanding of things
as they are, but it is youth, with some muscle and some activity, and
as such it is salable. Some one will buy it for something for a little
while.
But this other thing that comes shambling toward me, dirty, dust in its
ears, dust in its eyes, dust in its hair, a meager recollection of a
hat, dull, hopeless, doglike eyes--what has it to offer life? Nothing?
Practically so. An appetite which life will not satisfy, a racked and
thin-blooded body which life cannot use, a rusty, cracked and battered
piece of machinery which is fit only for the scrap-heap. And yet it
lingers on, clings on, hoping for what? And this third thing--a woman,
if you please, in rags and tatters, a gray cape for a shawl, a queer,
flat, shapeless thing which she wears on her head for a hat, shoes that
are not shoes but cracked strips of leather, a skirt that is a bag
only, hands, face, skin wrinkled and dirty, yet who seeks to rest or
sleep here the night through. And now she is stuffing old newspapers
between her dress and her breast to keep warm. And enveloping her hands
in her rag of a shawl!
Yet she and those others make but three of many, so grim, so strange,
so shabby a company. What, in God’s name, has life done to them that
they are so cracked and bruised and worthless?
No heart, or not a good one perhaps, in any of these bodies; no
stomach, or a mere bundle of distorted viscera; no liver or kidneys
worthy the name, but only botched or ill-working organs of these names
in their place; eyes poor; hearing possibly defective; hair fading;
skin clammy. Merciful God! is it to this condition that we come, you
and I, if life be not merciful?
I am not morbid. I know that men must make good. I know that to be
useful to the world they must have a spark of divine fire. But who
is to provide the fire? Who did, in the first place? Where is it
now? What blew it out? The individual himself? Not always. Man is
not really responsible for his actions. Society? Society is not
really responsible for itself or for its individuals. Nature? God?
Very likely, although there is room for much discussion and much
illumination here.
[Illustration: The Man on the Bench]
But before we point the finger of scorn or shrug the shoulder of
indifference, one word: Life does provide the divine fire, and that
free and unasked, to many. It does provide a fine constitution, and
that free and unasked, to many. It does provide beauty--aye it pours
it into the lap of some. Life works in the clay of its interests,
fashioning, fashioning. With some handfuls it fashions lovingly,
joyously, radiantly. It gives one girl, for instance, a passion for
art, an ear for music, a throat for singing, a joy in humor and
beauty, which grows and becomes marvelous and is irresistible. Into
the seed of a boy it puts strength, suppleness, facility of thought,
facility of expression, desire. It not infrequently puts a wild surging
determination to do and be in his brain which carries him like powder a
bullet, straight to the mark.
But what or who provided the charge of powder behind that bullet? Who
fashioned the chorded throat? Who worked over this face of flowerlike
expression, until men burn with wild passion and lay kingdoms and
hierarchies and powers at its feet? We palaver so much of personal
effort. We say of this one and that: He did not try. I ask you this:
had he tried, what of it? How far would his little impulse have carried
him? What would it have overcome? Would it have placed him above the
level of a coal-stoker or a sand-hog? Would it have fitted him to
contend with even these? Would it have matched his ideas, or his ideas
have matched it? Who? What? How? Dark thoughts!
“Ah!” but I hear you say, “that is not the question. Effort is the
question, not where his effort will carry him.” True. Who gave him his
fitness for effort, or his unfitness? Who took away his courage? Why
could it be taken? Dark thought, and still more dark the deeps behind
it.
Here they are, though, pale anæmic weeds or broken flowers, slipping
about looking for a bench to sleep on in our park. They are wondering
where the next meal is coming from, the next job, the next bed. They
are wondering whither they are going to go, what they are going to
do, who is going to say something to them. Or maybe they are past
wondering, past dreaming, past thinking over lost battles and lost
life. Oh, nature! where now in your laboratory of dark forces, you plan
and weave, be merciful. For these, after all, are of you, your clay;
they need not be destroyed.
Yet meantime the city sings of its happiness, the lights burn, the
autos honk; there are great restaurants agleam with lights and
merriment. See, that is where strength is!
I like this fact of the man on the bench, as sad as it is. It is the
evidence of the grimness of life, its subtlety, its indifference. Men
pass them by. The world is elsewhere. And yet I know that below all
this awaits after all the unescapable chemistry of things. They are
not out of nature. They cannot escape it really. They are of it--an
integral part of the great mystery and beauty--even they. They fare ill
here, now, perhaps--very. Yet it is entirely possible that they need
only wait, and life will eventually come round to them. They cannot
escape it; it must use them. The potter has but so much clay. He cannot
but mold it again and again. And as for the fire, He cannot ultimately
prevent it. It goes, somewhat wild or mild, into all He does.
THE MEN IN THE DARK
It is not really dark in the accepted sense of the word, for a great,
yellow, electric lamp sputtering overhead casts a wide circle of gold,
but it is one-fifteen of a cold January morning, and this light is
all the immediate light there is. The offices of the great newspaper
center, the sidewalk in front of one of which constitutes the stage of
this scene, are dark and silent. The great presses in every newspaper
building hereabouts are getting ready to whir mightily, and if only
the passers-by would cease their shuffling you could hear the noises
of preparation. A little later, when they are actually in motion, you
can hear them, a sound of rushing, dim and muffled, but audible--the
cataract of news which the world waits for, its daily mental stimulus,
not unlike the bread that is left at your door for your body.
But who are these peculiar individuals who seem to be gathering here
at this time in the morning? You did not notice any one a few minutes
ago, but now there are three or four over there discussing the reasons
for the present hard times, and here in the shadow of this great arch
of a door are three or four more. And now you look about you and they
are coming from all directions, slipping in out of the shadow toward
this light, where sits a fat old Irish woman beside an empty news-stand
waiting to tend it, for as yet there is nothing on it. They all seem
at first to be men of one type, small and underweight and gaunt. But a
little later you realize that they are not so much alike in height and
weight as you first thought, and of differing nationalities. But they
are all cold, though, that is certain, and a little impatient. They are
constantly shifting and turning and looking at the City Hall clock,
where its yellow face shows the hour, or looking down the street, and
sometimes murmuring, but not much. There is very little said.
“What is all the trouble?” you ask of some available bystander, who
ought to be fairly _en rapport_ with the situation, since he has been
standing here for some time.
“Nothin’,” he retorts. “They’re waitin’ for the mornin’ papers. They’re
lookin’ to see which can git to a job first.”
“Oh!” you exclaim, a great light breaking. “So they’re here to get a
good start. They wait all night, eh? That’s pretty tough, isn’t it?”
“Oh, I don’t know. They’re mostly Swedes and Germans.” This last as
though these two nationalities, and no doubt some others, were beyond
the need of human consideration. “They’re waiters and cooks and order
men and dishwashers. There’s some other kinds, too, but they’re mostly
waiters.”
“Would you say that that old man over there--that fellow with a white
beard--was a waiter?”
“Aw, naw! He ain’t no waiter. I don’t know what he is--pan-handler,
maybe. They wouldn’t have the likes of him. It’s these other fellows
that are waiters, these young ones.”
You look, and they are young in a way, lean, with thin lips and narrow
chests and sallow faces, a little shabby, all of them, and each has a
roll of something wrapped up in a newspaper or a brown paper and tucked
under his arm--an apron, maybe.
You begin speculating for yourself, and, with the aid of your friend
to supply occasional points, you piece the whole thing together. This
is really a very great, hard, cold city, and these men are creatures
at the bottom of the ladder, temporarily, anyhow. And these columns
of ads in the successful morning papers attract them as a chance. And
they come here thus early in the cold in order to get a good start on a
given job before any one else can get ahead of them. First come, first
served.
And while you are waiting, speculating, another creature edges near
you. He is not quite so prosperous looking as the last one you talked
to; he seems thinner, more emaciated.
“Take a look at that, boss,” he says, opening his palm and shoving
something bright toward you. It looks like gold.
“No,” you answer nervously. (You have been held up before.) “No, I
don’t want to look at it.”
“Take a look at it,” he insists.
“No,” you retort irritably, but you do it in a half-hearted, objecting
way and see that it is a gold ring with an initial carved in the seal
plate.
[Illustration: The Men in the Dark]
He closes his thin hand and puts it back in his pocket. He is
inclined to go away, and then another idea strikes him.
“Are you lookin’ fer a job?” he asks.
“No.”
“Ain’t you a cook?”
“No.”
“Gee! I thought you was some swell chef--they come here now and then.”
It is a doubtful compliment but better than nothing. You soften a
little.
“I’m a waiter,” he confides, now that he has your momentary interest.
“I am, I mean, when I’m in good health. I’m run down some now. The best
I can get is dishwashing now. But I am a waiter, and I’ve been an order
clerk. There’s nothin’ much to say of this bunch, though. They all work
for the cheap joints. Saturday nights they gits drunk mostly, and if
they’re not there on the dot Sunday they’re gone. The boss gits a new
one. Then they come here Sunday night or Monday.”
You are inclined to agree that this description fits in pretty well
with your observation of a number of them, but what of these others who
look like family men, who look worried and harried?
“Sure, there’s lots others,” prompts your adviser. “There’s three
columns every day callin’ for painters. There’s a column most every day
of printers. People paints houses all the year round. There’s general
help wanted. There’s carpenters. It gits some. Cooks and waiters and
dishwashers in the big pull, though.”
You have been wondering if this is really true, but it sounds
plausible enough. These men are obviously, in a great many cases, cooks
and waiters. Their search calls for an early start, for the restaurants
and hotels usually keep open all night. It may be.
And all the time you have been wondering why the papers do not come.
It seems a shame that these men should have to stand here so long.
There’s a great crowd now, between two and three hundred. A policeman
is tramping up and down, keeping an open passageway. He is not in any
friendly mood.
“Stand back,” he orders angrily. “I’m tellin’ ye fer the last time,
now!”
A great passageway opens.
Now of a sudden comes a boy running with a great bundle of the most
successful morning paper, a most staggering load. Actually the crowd
looks as though it would seize him and tear his bundle away from him,
but instead it only closes in quickly behind. When he reaches the Irish
woman’s stand there is a great struggling, grabbing circle formed. “The
----,” is the cry. “Gimme a ----,” and for the space of a half-dozen
minutes a thriving, exciting business is done in morning papers. Then
these men run with their papers like dogs run with a bone. They hurry,
each to some neighboring light, and glance up and down the columns.
Sometimes they mark something, and then you see them hurry on again.
They have picked their prospect.
It is a pitiful spectacle from one point of view, a decidedly grim
one from another. Your dishwasher (or ex-waiter) confides that most
of these positions, apart from tips, pay only five dollars a week and
board. And he admits that the board is vile. While you are talking you
recognize some gentlemanly newspaper man, well-salaried, taking his
belated way home. What a contrast! What a far cry!
“And say,” says your dishwasher friend, “I thought I’d git a job
to-night. I thought somebody’d buy this ring. It’ll bring $1.75 in the
pawnshop in the mornin’. I ain’t got carfare or I wouldn’t mention it.
I usually soaks it early in the week and gits it out Saturday. I’ll
soak it to-morrow, and git another chance to-morrow night.”
What a story! What a predicament!
You go down in your pocket and produce a quarter. You buy him a paper.
“On your way,” you say cheerily--but the misery! The depths! To think
that any one of us should come to this!
As he goes you watch the others going, and then the silence settles
down and the night. There is no sense of traffic here now, no great
need of light. The old Irish woman sinks to the dismal task of waiting,
for morning, I presume. Now and then some passing pedestrian will buy a
paper, but not often. But these others--they have gone in the direction
of the four winds of heaven; they are applying at the shabby doors of
restaurants, in Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx, Hoboken, Staten Island;
they are sitting on stoops, holding their own at shop doors. They
have the right to ask first, the right to be first, because they are
first--noble privilege.
And you and I--well, we turn in our dreams and rest. The great world
wags on. Our allotted portion is not this. We are not of these men in
the dark.
THE MEN IN THE STORM
It is a winter evening. Already, at four o’clock, the somber hues of
night are over all. A heavy snow is falling, a fine, picking, whipping
snow, borne forward by a swift wind in long, thin lines. The street is
bedded with it, six inches of cold, soft carpet, churned brown by the
crush of teams and the feet of men. Along the Bowery men slouch through
it with collars up and hats pulled over their ears.
Before a dirty, four-story building gathers a crowd of men. It begins
with the approach of two or three, who hang about the closed wooden
door and beat their feet to keep them warm. They make no effort to go
in, but shift ruefully about, digging their hands deep in their pockets
and leering at the crowd and the increasing lamps. There are old men
with grizzled beards and sunken eyes; men who are comparatively young
but shrunken by disease; men who are middle-aged.
With the growth of the crowd about the door comes a murmur. It is not
conversation, but a running comment directed at any one. It contains
oaths and slang phrases.
“I wisht they’d hurry up.”
“Look at the cop watchin’.”
“Maybe it ain’t winter, nuther.”
“I wisht I was with Peary.”
[Illustration: The Men in the Storm]
Now a sharper lash of wind cuts down, and they huddle closer.
There is no anger, no threatening words. It is all sullen endurance,
unlightened by either wit or good fellowship.
An automobile goes jingling by with some reclining figure in it. One of
the members nearest the door sees it.
“Look at the bloke ridin’!”
“He ain’t so cold.”
“Eh! eh! eh!” yells another, the automobile having long since passed
out of hearing.
Little by little the night creeps on. Along the walk a crowd hurries on
its way home. Still the men hang around the door, unwavering.
“Ain’t they ever goin’ to open up?” queries a hoarse voice suggestively.
This seems to renew general interest in the closed door, and many gaze
in that direction. They look at it as dumb brutes look, as dogs paw and
whine and study the knob. They shift and blink and mutter, now a curse,
now a comment. Still they wait, and still the snow whirls and cuts them.
A glimmer appears through the transom overhead, where some one is
lighting the light. It sends a thrill of possibility through the
watchers. On the old hats and peaked shoulders snow is piling. It
gathers in little heaps and curves, and no one brushes it off. In the
center of the crowd the warmth and steam melt it and water trickles off
hat-rims and down noses, which the owners cannot reach to scratch. On
the outer rim the piles remain unmelted. Those who cannot get in the
center, lower their heads to the weather and bend their forms.
At last the bars grate inside, and the crowd pricks up its ears. There
is some one who calls: “Slow up there, now!” and then the door opens.
It is push and jam for a minute, with grim, beast silence to prove
its quality, and then the crowd lessens. It melts inward, like logs
floating, and disappears. There are wet hats and shoulders, a cold,
shrunken, disgruntled mass pouring in between bleak walls. It is just
six o’clock, and there is supper in every hurrying pedestrian’s face.
“Do you sell anything to eat here?” one questions of the grizzled old
carpet-slippers who opens the door.
“No, nuthin but beds.”
The waiting throng had been housed for the night.
THE MEN IN THE SNOW
Winter days in a great city bring some peculiar sights. If it snows,
the streets are at once a slushy mess, and the transaction of
business is, to a certain extent, a hardship. In its first flakes it
is picturesque; the air is filled with flying feathers and the sky
lowery with somber clouds. Later comes the slush and dirt, and not
infrequently bitter cold. The city rings with the grind and squeak of
cold-bitten vehicles, and men and women, the vast tide of humanity
which fills its streets, hurry to and fro so as to be through with the
work or need that keeps them out of doors.
In certain sections of the city at a period like this may be found
groups of men who are constituted by nature and conditions to be an
integral part of every storm. They are like the gulls that follow
the schools of fish at sea. Poverty is the bond which makes them kin
and gives them, after a fashion, a class distinction. They are not
only always poor in body, but poor in mind also, and as for earthly
belongings, of course they have not any.
These men, like the gulls and their fish, pick a little something
from the storm. They follow the fortunes of the contractors who make
arrangements with the city for the removal of the snow, and about the
wagon-barns where the implements of snow removal are kept, and where
daily cards of employment are issued they may be seen waiting by
hundreds, and not at such hours and under such conditions as are at all
pleasant to contemplate, either. In the early hours of the morning,
when the work of the day is first being doled out, they may be seen,
cold, overcoatless, often with bare hands and necks, no collar, or, if
so, only a rag of a thing, and hats too battered and timeworn to be
honestly dignified by the name of hat at all.
The city usually pays at the rate of two dollars a day for what
shoveling these men can do. They are not wanted even at that rate by
the contractors, for stray, healthy laborers are usually preferred;
but the pressure under which the contractors are put by the city and
the public makes a showing necessary. So thousands are admitted to
temporary labor who would not otherwise be considered, and these are
they.