knights thrust tremendous javelins at red and green dragons under
astonished willows, was made in Paterson, N. J. What of that? The colors
are not therefore less bright. James is not a purchaser, he is merely a
spectator of the greatest raree-show in the world. It is well for him to
be deceived in the splendors displayed before him. Not so many years ago
he would prefer a red glass ball to the Kohinoor and a hand organ with a
monkey to a piano with Paderewski. James yet retains a receptivity
almost infantile; but it would pain him to be told so.
They are not gregarious, at noon, these young discoverers of New York.
They are selfish in their adventuring, for a vision shared is only half
a vision. James, I know, is annoyed when he finds an acquaintance
gobbling a sandwich at his luncheon counter or staring in a jeweler's
window that he has come to regard as his own private property. On
Sundays he is sociable enough; he is glad of a companion on his journeys
across and up and down Manhattan, among the Italians and negroes of the
upper west side, through the loud ghetto and speciously weird Chinatown,
in the deliberate sylvanity of Central Park and the Bronx Gardens. In
the evening, too, he is not at all a recluse. But at noon he has no
appetite for conversation; he would not have his attention taken from
the strange streets by an accustomed human being.
James has never ridden on a London bus, yet I believe in the truth of
his unspoken thought, that a Fifth Avenue bus is the most excellent
vehicle in the world. The London bus depends for its charm on a number
of non-essential qualities; on the humor of its driver (are the
chauffeurs of London's electric buses also masters of epigram?), on the
quaintness and antiquity of the thoroughfare, on the military efficiency
of the traffic policemen, on the philmayishness of the passengers. The
Fifth Avenue bus has one reason for existence: it shows its passengers
Fifth Avenue. No bus can do more.
So one may (if one is young enough to be so foolish and so wise) ride,
like the Gaikwar of Baroda in his swaying howdah, high above the people
for a golden hour. He may start at uneasy Washington Square, where
ancient respectability wars with young bohemianism. Soon he looks down
on the throngs of new Americans that tramp the once proud pavement. From
his high seat he sees them, the small, dark men and women who, like him,
are for a time released from labor. They move slowly in great crowds,
they eat frugal meals, the wares of curb-side peddlers, they talk and
gesture incessantly. What does James think of them? I do not believe
that his opinion is worth knowing.
But he enjoys, I know, the tour through the traffic-filled intersection
of Broadway and Twenty-third Street, and he is not old enough to notice
with regret the gradual deterioration of the latter street. Freed from
the close company of baser vehicles, how triumphantly the bus whirrs up
the broad street past the square, among the splendid shops and clubs and
churches--the true New Yorker, I think, names them in this order. But
James must not give too much attention to the lovely Gothic lines of St.
Thomas's, or the lovely Byzantine lines of that pink chiffon lady in the
landau--the luncheon hour draws to a close, and punctuality, he still
believes, is a business virtue.
The brevity of this recess is essential to it. If the time be
indefinitely increased, if the young adventurer be allowed all the
morning and all the afternoon for his wandering, then all the zest goes
out of the adventure. There is that trusted veteran employee in the
corner of the office. He receives fabulous sums on pay day and may go
out to luncheon whenever he desires, with no time clerk to censor him.
He knows New York less than does James. But does his curiosity urge him
forth to long adventures? Over his stale morning's paper in the deserted
office, seated before his familiar task, he eats his sordid and
wife-made luncheon!
But the noon adventurer is not limited to Fifth Avenue. The antique
shops of Fourth Avenue charm him with pewter and brass, they cheer his
heart with sun dials from English rose gardens and crucifixes from
convents of Dante's land and time. At Twenty-third Street stalls he
reads bits of forgotten writings and breathes the pleasant scent of worn
calfskin. Perhaps on the 15-cent rack he comes upon a prize. Here is a
little book of English verse by a Japanese poet. What is this faded
inscription? "To Mary McLane from Yone Noguchi." The adventurer buys it,
as the late Mr. Morgan would buy a Nuremburg Bible, and salves his
economical conscience by rolling his own cigarettes for a while.
There are great sights for him, now and then. People who seemed, not so
long ago, as legendary as Cuchulain and Cinderella appear to him on
these noon expeditions, most startlingly human and real. He sees Mr.
Roosevelt leave the Charities Building to enter a waiting taxicab. He
visits the bootblack and in the chair next to him sits Mr. Bliss
Carman, crowned with the huge black hat that is the livery of
Vagabondia. On Fourteenth Street a big black-haired man and a little
spectacled woman stop to laugh at the fortune-telling paroquets. With a
delicious thrill the adventurer recognizes Mr. Ben Reitman and Miss Emma
Goldman.
Nor are his adventures confined to seeing. There is plenty of action,
sometimes. Once, as he stared into the windows of an Oriental rug shop,
he was aware of a thin, hunted-looking man who demanded his attention.
"I beg your pardon, Sir," said the hunted-looking man, "but can you tell
me where I can find a parnbroker?"
I do not know why the hunted-looking man said "parnbroker," instead of
"pawnbroker," but James always tells the story this way.
"No," said James, truthfully, "I can't."
"The reason I wanna know is," said the hunted-looking man very rapidly,
"I gotta very fine stone here. I got into a little trouble in a hotel
uptown; I gotta sell it right away very cheap."
And from a dirty pasteboard box he drew what seemed to be a large
diamond ring.
Now was the thoroughly interested James aware of yet another stranger
who sought his attention, a prosperous-looking man, who smoked a fat
cigar and flourished a silver-headed stick, who seemed trying to caution
James against buying the diamond.
James had only 35 cents in his pocket, and was not a buyer, but a
spectator of jewelry anyway. The hunted-looking man withdrew slowly.
Then said the prosperous-looking man to James:
"Excuse me for buttin' in, old man, but I didn't want to see you stung.
Sometimes these here fellers got real stones, sometimes they got fakes.
Now I'm a professional jeweler and I got my microscope that I look at
diamonds with in my pocket. Now, you call that guy back and tell him I'm
a friend of yours and I'll examine that stone and tell you if it's any
good."
The hunted-looking man gave rather too dramatic a start of surprise when
called back by the suspicious but curious James.
"It's worth $500," he said, "but I'll sell it for $50. I got into a
little trouble at a hotel uptown, and I gotta sell it cheap."
Professionally, elaborately, impressively, the prosperous-looking man
screwed a glass into his eye and squinted at the stone. Then, taking
James several yards away from the hunted-looking man, he said: "That's
a genuine stone worth easy $500 if it's worth a cent. I know a place
they'll give us $500 for it this afternoon on account of me being in the
trade. Now, you keep him here while I go round the corner and get $25
from my bank and then we'll buy that stone together and make $225 apiece
before two hours is gone. I'll be right back."
And the prosperous-looking man vanished.
Then--as might have been expected--the hunted-looking man offered James
the diamond for $25. "You can put one over on that big-guy," he said.
"Slip me $25 and we beat it before he gets back. You can clean up $450
on it. I'm afraid of that big guy; I think he's gone after a cop."
Now, these two confidence men had worked hard with James. He should not
have taken such delight in their discomfiture as he climbed the steps of
a bus and bade them farewell.
When he met the hunted-looking man and the prosperous-looking man
together on Broadway a few days later they cut him, and I do blame them.
But they gave him a real adventure, at any rate, an adventure not to be
met by those who squander their noon hour sitting dully in sedate
restaurants.
Then there was the adventure of the picture gallery. James went on one
occasion to a futurist exhibition in a tiny room not far from Madison
Square. Galleries are not crowded at noon, but from the room that James
approached came sounds not to be accounted for even by the crazy
canvases on its walls. Of course James went in, and found a futurist
painter wrestling with the agent of a collection agency. The combatants
rose, and demanded James's name and address, that he might be summoned
to court as a witness to assault and battery. But he never received
either summons. Perhaps it was because he gave his name as Henry Smith
of Yonkers.
Episodes like these have little charm for the middle-aged or for young
men prematurely aged by spending their childhood in New York. These have
their compensations, no doubt; their lives are not utterly bleak. But
not for them is the daily romance of the young man who has just come to
the city, who enjoys the proud novelty of working for wage, to whom
every noon come sweet and strange the streets' compelling voices.
SIGNS AND SYMBOLS
Those people whom an hostile fate has made both athletes and reformers
have among their aversions one which they proclaim with an enthusiasm so
intense as to be almost infectious. They dislike passionately the
harmless, unnecessary sign board when it has been so placed as to become
a feature of the rural landscape. Wooden cows silhouetted against the
sunset only irritate them by their gentle celebrations of malted milk;
the friendliest invitation to enjoy a cigarette, a corset or a digestive
tablet fills them with anger if it comes from the face of a
sea-shadowing cliff or from among the ancient hemlocks of a lofty
mountain.
There is, of course, a modicum of reason in their attitude. It is wrong
to paint the lily at all; it is doubly wrong to paint "Wear Rainproof
Socks" across its virgin petals. It is wrong to mar beauty; that is an
axiom of all aesthetics and of all ethics. It would be wrong, for example
(although it would be highly amusing), to throw by means of a magic
lantern great colored phrases against Niagara's sheet of foam; it would
be wrong to carve (as many earnest readers of our magazines believe has
been done), an insurance company's advertisement on the Rock of
Gibraltar.
But the aesthete-reformer, in condemning such monstrosities as these,
condemns merely an hypothesis. And since the hypothesis obviously is
condemnable, he starts a crusade against the innocent facts upon which
the purely hypothetical evil is based. It is wrong to mar the snowy
splendor of the Alps; therefore, he says, the Jersey meadows must not
bear upon their damp bosom the jubilant banner of an effective
safety-razor. The sylvan fastness of our continent must be saved from
the vandal; therefore, he says, you may not advertise breakfast food on
a hoarding in the suburbs of Paterson.
If the aesthete-reformers in question would examine the subject
dispassionately they would see that there is really nothing in the sign
board as it stands to-day about which they may justly complain.
Advertisers do not deliberately annoy the public; they would not be so
foolish as to seek to attract people by spoiling what was beautiful. It
must be remembered that a landscape may be rustic and yet not
beautiful.
The aesthete does not dislike, instead he hails with enthusiasm, a worn
stone bearing the dim inscription "18 Mil. To Ye Cittye of London." Why
then should he shudder when he sees a bright placard which shouts "18
Miles to the White Way Shoe Bazaar, Paterson's Pride"? To my mind there
is a vivacity and a humanness about the second announcement utterly
lacking in the first. The aesthete dotes upon the swinging boards which
with crude paintings announce the presence of British inns. If "The
Purple Cow, by Geoffrey Pump. Entertainment for Man and Beast" delights
his soul, why does he turn in angry sorrow from "Stop at the New Mammoth
Hotel when you are in Omaha--500 Rooms and Baths--$1.50 up--All
Fireproof"? It is a cheerful invitation, and it should bring to jaded
travelers through the track-pierced wastes a comfortable sense of
approaching welcome and companionship.
There are many things which might be said in favor of urban sign boards,
especially in favor of those elaborate arrangements in colored lights
which make advertisements of table waters and dress fabrics as
alluringly lovely as the electrical splendor of the first act of Dukas'
"Ariane et Barbe Bleu." But in the city the sign board is always
something supererogatory; it may be decorative, but it is not necessary.
One does not need a six-yard announcement of a beer's merit when there
are three saloons across the street; even the placards of plays line
almost uselessly the thoroughfares of a district in which the theaters
are conspicuous.
But in the country the sign boards are no luxuries but stern
necessities. This the aesthete-reformers fail to see because they lack a
sense of the unfitness of things. It is their incongruity which gives to
rustic sign boards the magic of romance. The deliberately commercial
announcement, firmly set in an innocent meadow or among the eternal
hills, has exactly the same charm as a buttercup in a city street or a
gray wood-dove fluttering among the stern eaves of an apartment house.
What a benefaction to humanity these rural sign boards are! To the
farmer they are (in addition to being a source of revenue) a piquant
suggestion of the wise and wealthy city. He loves and fears the city, as
mankind always loves and fears the unknown. Once he thought that it was
paved with gold. He must have thought so, otherwise how could he have
accounted for the existence of gold bricks? He is less credulous now,
but still the big signs down where the track cuts across the old
pasture pleasantly thrill his fancy.
And what would a railway journey be without these gay and civilizing
reminders? They hide the shame of black and suicidal bogs with cheery
hints of vaudeville beyond, they throw before the privacy of farmhouses
a decent veil of cigarette advertisements. He who speeds vacation-ward
from the city is glad of them, for they remind him that he is where
factories and huge shops may come only in this pictured guise, thin
painted ghosts of their noisy selves. He who gladly speeds back to
domesticity and the ordered comforts of metropolitan life sees them as
welcoming seneschals, glorious advance-posts of civilization. They are
the least commercial of all commercial things, they are as human and as
delightful as explorers or valentines.
THE GREAT NICKEL ADVENTURE
Whenever I read Mr. Chester Firkins' excellent poem "On a Subway
Express" I am filled with amazement. It is not strange that Mr. Firkins
turned the subway into poetry, it is strange that the subway does not
turn every one of its passengers into a poet.
There are, it is true, more comfortable means of locomotion than the
subway; there are conveyances less crowded, better ventilated, cooler in
Summer, warmer in Winter. A little discomfort, however, is an
appropriate accompaniment of adventure. And subway-riding is a splendid
adventure, a radiant bit of romance set in the gray fabric of the
work-a-day world.
The aeroplane has been celebrated so enthusiastically in the course of
its brief life that it must by now be a most offensively conceited
machine. Yet an aeroplane ride, however picturesque and dangerous, has
about it far less of essential romance than a ride in the subway. He who
sails through the sky directs, so nearly as is possible, his course; he
handles levers, steers, goes up or down, to the left or the right. Or if
he is a passenger, he has, at any rate, full knowledge of what is going
on around him, he sees his course before him, he can call out to the man
at the helm: "Look out for that cornet's hair! Turn to the left or the
point of that star will puncture our sail!"
Now, unseen dangers are more thrilling than those seen; the aeroplane
journey has about it inevitably something prosaic. This is the great
charm of the subway, that the passengers, the guards, too, for that
matter, give themselves up to adventure with a blind and beautiful
recklessness. They leave the accustomed sunlight and plunge into
subterranean caverns, into a region far more mysterious than the candid
air, into a region which since mankind was young has been associated
with death. Before an awed and admiring crowd, the circus acrobat is
shut into a hollow ball and catapulted across the rings; with not even a
sense of his own bravado, the subway passenger is shut into a box and
shot twenty miles through the earth.
Once there lived on West One Hundred and Eighty-second Street a man of
uncompromising practicality, a stern rationalist. He was as advanced as
anything! He believed in the materialistic interpretation of history,
economic determinism, and radium; this, he said, with some pride, was
his Creed. Often he expressed his loathing for "flesh-food," more
frequently for "Middle Class morality," most frequently for faith.
"Faith is stupidity," he would say. "Look before you leap! It makes me
sick to see the way people have been humbugged in all ages. The
capitalist class has told them something was true, something nobody
could understand, and they've--blindly accepted it, the idiots! I
believe in what I see--I don't take chances. I don't trust anybody but
myself."
Yet every day this man would give himself up to the subway with a sweet
and child-like faith. As he sat in the speeding car, he could not see
his way, he had no chance of directing it. He trusted that the train
would keep to its route, that it would stop at Fourteenth Street and let
him off. He could not keep it from taking him under the river and
hurling him out into some strange Brooklyn desert. When he started for
home in the evening, he read the words "Dyckman Street" on the car
window with a medieval simplicity, and on the guarantee of these printed
words, placed there by minions of the capitalist class, he gave up the
privilege of directing his course. The train, he believed, would not at
Ninety-sixth Street be switched off to a Bronx track; the sign told him
that he was safe, and he believed it.
So the subway caused him to exercise the virtue of faith, made him, for
a time, really a human being. Perhaps it is the sharing of this faith
that makes a subway crowd so democratic. Surely there is some subtly
powerful influence at work, changing men and women as soon as they take
their seats, or straps.
For one thing, they become alike in appearance. The glare of the
electric light unifies them, modifying swarthy faces and faces
delicately rouged until they are nearly of one hue. Then, the
differences of attitude are lost, and attitudes are great instruments of
subordination. The ragged bootblack does not kneel at the broker's feet;
he sits close beside him, or perhaps, comfortably at rest, watches the
broker clutch a strap and struggle to keep his footing.
"Tired clerks, pale girls, street-cleaners, business men, boys, priests
and sailors, drunkards, students, thieves"--all gain a new sincerity.
Neither the millionaire's imperiousness nor the beggar's professional
humility can make the train go faster, so both are laid aside.
Distinctions of race and caste grow insignificant, as in a company
confronting one peril or one God. This is not theory, it is fact. The
subway passenger purchases a nickel's worth of speed and he must take
with it a nickel's worth of democracy.
Perhaps it is the youthful romanticism of America which makes our
subways so much more exciting than those of Europe. The Englishman is
too cautious and too conservative to trust himself away from the earth's
surface more than two minutes at a time. So the trains that run through
the London tube are tame, cowardly things. They timidly run underground
for half a mile or so and pop their heads out into the air and sunlight
or fog at every station.
But the New York subway train is ready to take a chance. It dives into
the earth and "stays under," like a brave diver, for an hour at a time.
And when it does emerge, what splendor attends its coming! There is a
glimmer of sunshine at the One Hundred and Sixteenth Street Station; the
blue and white of the walls and pillars reflect a light not wholly
artificial. Then there is a brief stretch of fantastically broken
darkness. Passengers in the first car can see ahead of them, at
Manhattan Street, a great door of sunshine. At last there is a strange
change in the rumble of the wheels, for the echoing roof and walls are
gone, and the train leaves its tunnel not to run humbly over the ground,
but to rise higher and higher until it comes to a sudden halt above the
chimneys and tree tops. To say that the grub becomes a butterfly does
not fit the case, for the grub is a slow-moving beast and a butterfly's
course is capricious. Rather, it is as if, by some tremendous magic, a
great snake became a soaring eagle.
And how keenly all the passengers enjoy their few seconds in the open
air! When they hurried down the steps to the train, they were scornful
of the atmosphere they were leaving, they had no thought of tasting wind
and watching sunlight. Now they are become, for the moment, connoisseurs
of these delectable things; they wish the train would linger at
Manhattan Street, not inevitably plunge at once into its roaring cavern.
But the train is wise, it knows brevity is essential to all exquisite
things, so it gives its passengers only an evanescent glimpse of the
glories they have just now learned to appreciate.
This is a part of the great conspiracy of the subway. It is regarded
only as a swift and convenient and uncomfortable carrier, and it has no
wish to be otherwise interpreted. But those who have studied it know
the hidden purposes it constantly and effectively serves. It is showing
our generation the value of mankind's commonest and most precious gifts,
by taking them away.
Now, it is good for man or beast to stand on solid ground in the
sunlight, breathing clean air. Also fellowship is good, and the talk of
friends. We forgot the value of these, we shut ourselves up in dark
rooms and we spared no time to social exercise. Then--to punish and cure
our folly--came the subway, making our journeys things close and dark in
which conversation is a matter of desperate effort. And now how kind and
talkative are people who go home together from the subway station after
their daily disciplinary ride! They are grateful, too--although it may
be subconsciously--for the familiar sights and sounds of the earth, for
houses and streets and light that does not come from a wire in a bottle.
They take gladly the great common things; they are simple, natural,
democratic.
So they spend much of their leisure out of doors, these men and women
who are underground two hours every weekday. In the evenings and on
Sunday afternoons, they walk the pleasant streets with eager delight.
They are curious about the loveliness far beneath which they daily
speed. They have learned something of the art of life.
Of course, the subway has its incidental charms--its gay fresco of
advertisements, for instance, and its faint mysterious thunder when it
runs near the surface of the street on which we stand. But its chief
service to man--perhaps its reason for existence--is that it gives him
adventure. In this adventure he meets the spirit of faith and the spirit
of democracy, which is an aspect of charity. And by their influence he
becomes, surely though but for a time, as a little child.
THE URBAN CHANTICLEER