I GO TO THE CITY
“Surely man is a wonderfull divers and varying subject: It is very hard
to ground and directly constant and uniforme judgement upon him.”
Though I live most of the time in the country, as I love best to do,
sometimes I go to the city and find there much that is strange and
amusing. I like to watch the inward flow of the human tide in the
morning, and the ebb at evening, and sometimes in the slack tide of
noon I drift in one of the eddies where the restless life of the city
pauses a moment to refresh itself. One of the eddies I like best of all
is near the corner of Madison Square, where the flood of Twenty-third
Street swirls around the bulkhead of the Metropolitan tower to meet the
transverse currents of Madison Avenue. Here, of a bright morning when
Down-at-Heels is generously warming himself on the park benches, and
Old Defeat watches Young Hurry striding by, one has a royal choice of
refreshment: a “red-hot” enfolded in a bun from the dingy sausage wagon
at the curb, or a plum for a penny from the Italian with the trundle
cart, or news of the world in lurid gulps from the noon edition of the
paper—or else a curious idea or so flung out stridently over the heads
of the crowd by a man on a soap box.
I love this corner of the great city; I love the sense of the warm
human tide flowing all about me. I love to look into the strange, dark,
eager, sensitive, blunt faces.
The other noon, drifting there in that human eddy, I stopped to listen
to a small, shabby man who stood in transitory eminence upon his soap
box, half his body reaching above the knobby black soil of human heads
around him—black, knobby soil that he was seeking, there in the spring
sunshine, to plough with strange ideas. He had ruddy cheeks and a tuft
of curly hair set like an upholstery button on each side of his bald
head. The front teeth in his upper jaw were missing, and as he opened
his mouth one could see the ample lining of red flannel.
He raised his voice penetratingly to overcome the noise of the world,
straining until the dark-corded veins of his throat stood out sharply
and perspiration gleamed on his bald forehead. As though his life
depended upon the delivery of his great message he was explaining to
that close-packed crowd that there was no God.
From time to time he offered for sale pamphlets by R.G. Ingersoll and
Frederic Harrison, with grimy back numbers of a journal called the
“Truth-Seeker.”
By the slant and timbre of his speech he was an Englishman; he had a
gift of vigorous statement, and met questioners like an intellectual
pugilist with skilful blows between the eyes: and his grammar was bad.
I stood for some time listening to him while he proved with excellent
logic, basing his reasoning on many learned authorities, that there was
no God. His audience cheered with glee his clever hits, and held up
their hands for the books he had for sale.
“Who is this speaker?” I asked the elbowing helper who came through the
crowd to deliver the speaker’s wares and collect the silver for them.
“Who is this speaker who says there is no God?”
“Henry Moore,” he responded.
“And who,” I asked, “is Henry Moore?”
“He is an Englishman and was brought up a Presbyterian—but he seen the
light.”
“And no longer thinks there is any God?”
“Nope.”
“And these books prove the same thing?”
“Yep.”
So I bought one of them, thinking it wonderful that proof of so
momentous a conclusion could be had for so small a sum.
This Henry Moore could fling arguments like thunderbolts; he could
marshall his authorities like an army; he could talk against the roar
of the city and keep his restless audience about him; and if he did not
believe in God he had complete faith in Haeckel and Jacques Loeb, and
took at face value the lightest utterances of John Stuart Mill.
I enjoyed listening to Henry Moore. I enjoyed looking into the faces
all around me—mostly keen foreign or half-foreign faces, and young
faces, and idle faces, and curious faces, and faces that drank in, and
faces that disdainfully rejected.
After a time, however, I grew unaccountably weary of the vehemence of
Henry Moore and of the adroit helper who hawked his books. And suddenly
I looked up into the clear noon blue of the ancient sky. A pigeon was
flying across the wide open spaces of the square, the sunlight glinting
on its wings. I saw the quiet green tops of the trees in the park, and
the statue of Roscoe Conkling, turning a nonchalant shoulder toward the
heated speaker who said there was no God. How many strange ideas,
contradictory arguments, curious logic, have fallen, this last quarter
century, upon the stony ears of Roscoe Conkling! Far above me the
Metropolitan tower, that wonder work of men, lifted itself grandly to
the heavens, and all about I suddenly heard and felt the roar and surge
of the mighty city, the mighty, careless, busy city, thousands of
people stirring about me, souls full of hot hopes and mad desires,
unsatisfied longings, unrealized ideals. And I stepped out of the group
who were gathered around the man who said there was no God....
But I still drifted in the eddy, thinking how wonderful and strange all
these things were, and came thus to another group, close gathered at
the curb. It was much smaller than the other, and at the centre stood a
patriarchal man with a white beard, and with him two women. He was
leaning against the iron railing of the park, and several of the
free-thinker’s audience, freshly stuffed with arguments, had engaged
him hotly. Just as I approached he drew from his pocket a worn,
leather-covered Bible, and said, tapping it with one finger:
“For forty years I have carried this book with me. It contains more
wisdom than any other book in the world. Your friend there can talk
until he is hoarse—it will do no harm—but the world will continue to
follow the wisdom of this book.”
A kind of exaltation gleamed in his eye, and he spoke with an
earnestness equal to that of Henry Moore. He, too, was a street
speaker, waiting with his box at his side to begin. He would soon be
standing up there to prove, also with logic and authority, that there
was a God. He, also, would plough that knobby black soil of human heads
with the share of his vehement faith. The two women were with him to
sing their belief, and one had a basket to take up a collection, and
the other, singling me out as I listened with eagerness, gave me a
printed tract, a kind of advertisement of God.
I looked at the title of it. It was called: “God in His World.”
“Does this prove that God is really in the world?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Will you read it?”
“Yes,” I said, “I am glad to get it. It is wonderful that so great a
truth can be established in so small a pamphlet, and all for nothing.”
She looked at me curiously, I thought, and I put the tract by the side
of the pamphlet I had bought from the freethinker, and drifted again in
the eddy.
The largest crowd of all was close packed about a swarthy young chap
whose bushy hair waved in response to the violence of his oratory. He,
too, was perspiring with his ideas. He had a marvellous staccato method
of question and answer. He would shoot a question like a rifle bullet
at the heads of his audience, and then stiffen back like a wary boxer,
both clenched hands poised in a tremulous gesticulation, and before any
one could answer his bullet-like question, he was answering it himself.
As I edged my way nearer to him I discovered that he, also, had a
little pile of books at his feet which a keen-eyed assistant was busily
selling. How well-established the technic of this art of the city
eddies! How well-studied the psychology!
I thought this example the most perfect of them all, and watched with
eagerness the play of the argument as it was mirrored in the intent
faces all about me. And gradually I grew interested in what the man was
saying, and thought of many good answers I could give to his
questionings if he were not so cunning with answers of his own.
Finally, in the midst of one of his loftiest flights, he demanded,
hotly:
“Are you not, every one of you, a slave of the capitalist class?”
It was perfectly still for a second after he spoke, and before I knew
what I was doing, I responded:
“Why, no, I’m not.”
It seemed to astonish the group around me: white faces turned my way.
But it would have been difficult to dash that swarthy young man. He was
as full of questions as a porcupine is full of quills.
“Well, sir,” said he, “if I can prove to you that you are a slave, will
you believe it?”
“No,” I said, “unless you make me feel like a slave, too! No man is a
slave who does not feel slavish.”
But I was no match for that astonishing young orator; and he had the
advantage over me of a soap box! Moreover, at that moment, the
keen-eyed assistant, never missing an opportunity, offered me one of
his little red books.
“If you can read this without feeling a slave,” he remarked, “you’re
John D. himself in disguise.”
I bought his little red book and put it with the pamphlet of the
freethinker, and the tract of the God-fearing man, and stepped out of
that group, feeling no more servile than when I went in. And I said to
myself:
“This, surely, is a curious place to be in.”
For I was now strangely interested in these men of the eddy.
“There are more gods preached here,” I said, “than ever were known on
the Acropolis.”
Up the square a few paces I saw a covered wagon with a dense crowd
around it. And in front of it upon a little platform which raised the
speaker high above the heads of the audience stood a woman, speaking
with shrill ardour. Most of the hearers were men; and she was telling
them with logic and authority that the progress of civilization waited
upon the votes of women. The army of the world stood still until the
rear rank of its women could be brought into line! Morals languished,
religion faded, industries were brutalized, home life destroyed! If
only women had their rights the world would at once become a beautiful
and charming place! Oh, she was a powerful and earnest speaker; she
made me desire above everything, at the first opportunity, to use my
share of the power in this Government to provide each woman with a
vote. And just as I had reached this compliant stage there came a girl
smiling and passing her little basket. The sheer art of it! So I
dropped in my coin and took the little leaflet she gave me and put it
side by side with the other literature of my accumulating library.
And so I came away from those hot little groups with their perspiring
orators, and felt again the charm of the tall buildings and the wide
sunny square, and the park with Down-at-Heels warming his ragged
shanks, and the great city clanging heedlessly by. How serious they all
were there in their eddies! Is there no God? Will woman suffrage or
socialism cure all the evils of this mad world which, ill as it is, we
would not be without? Is a belief for forty years in the complete
wisdom of the Book the final solution? Why do not all of the seeking
and suffering thousands flowing by in Twenty-third Street stop here in
the eddies to seek the solution of their woes, the response to their
hot desires?
So I came home to the country, thinking of what I had seen and heard,
asking myself, “What is the truth, after all? What _is_ real?”
And I was unaccountably glad to be at home again. As I came down the
hill through the town road the valley had a quiet welcome for me, and
the trees I know best, and the pleasant fields of corn and tobacco, and
the meadows ripe with hay. I know of nothing more comforting to the
questioning spirit than the sight of distant hills....
I found that Bill had begun the hay cutting. I saw him in the lower
field as I came by in the road. There he was, stationed high on the
load, and John, the Pole, was pitching on. When he saw me he lifted one
arm high in the air and waved his hand—and I in return gave him the
sign of the Free Fields.
“Harriet,” I said, “it seems to me I was never so glad before to get
home.”
“It’s what you always say,” she remarked placidly.
“This time it’s true!” And I put the pamphlets I had accumulated in the
city eddies upon the pile of documents which I fully intend to read but
rarely get to.
The heavenly comfort of an old shirt! The joy of an old hat!
As I walked down quickly into the field with my pitchfork on my
shoulder to help Bill with the hay, I was startled to see, hanging upon
a peach tree at the corner of the orchard, a complete suit of black
clothes. Near it, with the arms waving gently in the breeze, was a
white shirt and a black tie, and at the foot of the tree a respectable
black hat. It was as though the peach tree had suddenly, on that bright
day, gone into mourning.
I laughed to myself.
“Bill,” I said, “what does this mean?”
Bill is a stout jolly chap with cheeks that look, after half a day’s
haying, like raw beef-steaks. He paused on his load, smiling broadly,
his straw hat set like a halo on the back of his head.
“Expected a funeral,” he said cheerfully.
Bill is the undertaker’s assistant, and is always on call in cases of
emergency.
“What happened, Bill?”
“They thought they’d bury ’im this afternoon, but they took an’ kep’
’im over till to-morrow.”
“But you came prepared.”
“Yas, no time to go home in hayin’. The pump fer me, and the black
togs.”
Bill calls the first rakings of the hay “tumbles,” and the scattered
re-rakings, which he despises, he calls “scratchings.” I took one side
of the load and John, the Pole, the other and we put on great forkfuls
from the tumbles which Bill placed skilfully at the corners and sides
of the load, using the scratchings for the centre.
John, the Pole, watched the load from below. “Tank he too big here,” he
would say, or, “Tank you put more there”; but Bill told mostly by the
feel of the load under his feet or by the “squareness of his eye.”
John, the Pole, is a big, powerful fellow, and after smoothing down the
load with his fork he does not bother to rake up the combings, but
gathering a bunch of loose hay with his fork, he pushes it by main
strength, and very quickly, around the load, and running his fork
through the heap, throws it upon the mountain-high load in a
twinkling—an admirable, deft performance.
Hay-making is a really beautiful process: the clicking mower cutting
its clean, wide swath, a man stepping after, where the hay is very
heavy, to throw the windrow back a little. Then, after lying to wilt
and dry in the burning sun—all full of good odours—the horse-rake draws
it neatly into wide billows, and after that, John, the Pole, and I roll
the billows into tumbles. Or, if the hay is slow in drying, as it was
not this year, the kicking tedder goes over it, spreading it widely.
Then the team and rack on the smooth-cut meadow and Bill on the load,
and John and I pitching on; and the talk and badinage that goes on, the
excitement over disturbed field mice, the discussion of the best
methods of killing woodchucks, tales of marvellous exploits of loaders
and stackers, thrilling incidents of the wet year of ’98 when two men
and one team saved four acres of hay by working all night—“with
lanterns, I jing”—much talk of how she goes on, “she” being the hay,
and no end of observations upon the character, accomplishments, faults,
and excesses of the sedate old horses waiting comfortably out in front,
half hidden by the mountain of hay above them and nibbling at the
tumbles as they go by.
Then the proud moment when Bill the driver, with legs apart, almost
pushing on the reins, drives his horses up the hill.
“Go it, Dick. Let ’er out, Daisy. Stiddy, ol’ boy. Whoa, there. Ease
down now. Hey, there, John, block the wheel—block the wheel I tell ye.
Ah-h now, jes’ breathe a bit. I jing, it’s hot.”
And then the barn, the cavernous dark doors, the hoofs of the horses
thundering on the floor, the smell of cattle from below, the pigeons in
the loft whirring startled from their perches. Then the hot, scented,
dusty “pitching off” and “mowing in”—a fine process, an _honest_
process: men sweating for what they get.
As I came in from the field that night the sun was low in the hills,
and a faint breeze had begun to blow, sweetly cool after the burning
heat of the day. And I felt again that curious deep sense I have so
often here in the country, of the soundness and reality of the plain
things of life.
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