On Saturday afternoon at 3.35 the Harlem contingent, carrying their
armor under one arm, their tickets given into the conductor's own hand
by the lieutenant, Fleming, entrained at the One Hundred and
Twenty-fifth Street station of the New York Central and Hudson River
Railroad.
Ten minutes later they arrived at the Grand Central Station. And as the
first pair of sandwiches descended, the waiting band burst into a joyous
welcome.
The exits were crowded. Martial music and parading men always draw
crowds. So long as there is no charge, gaping audiences automatically
supply themselves in New York.
And so, along Forty-second Street, following the musicians, himself
followed by his starving sandwiches, Hendrik Rutgers walked into Fifth
Avenue and into history at one and the same time.
The procession turned southward. The band played Chopin's "Funeral
March." Hendrik Rutgers at the head of his pauperized cohorts, anger in
his heart, light in his soul, defiance in his eyes, marched down Fifth
Avenue with an effect as of a man in armor treading on prostrate
millionaires as over so many railroad-ties. Men who had money in their
pockets for a minute felt the wind squeezed out of them by his foot. And
as they saw the led sandwiches they looked thoughtful.
The first of Rutgers's infantry was an old man. His long, gray beard was
dirty and ragged, like his clothes and the rest of him. In his eyes you
saw the unutterable weariness of a man who has lived fifty suffering
years too long. Underneath his eyes were dark rings; from the sidewalk
his sockets looked finger-deep. On his cheeks was the pallor of death.
H. Rutgers, fighting for fairness and justice, had justly picked out the
old fellow to be his Exhibit "A." Society must see what it did to human
beings! Therefore the old man slid one foot along the asphalt and let
the other follow it, with a spent, mechanical movement, as an engine,
after the power is turned off, keeps on going from the momentum of
years. The legs seemed to move from force of habit--a corpse on foot,
with a concealed galvanic battery somewhere.
And on the breastplate and backplate of this armored corpse, printed in
funereal black, beautiful women and intellectual men on Fifth Avenue,
where the unforgivable crime is to be poor and show it, read:
Yesterday I walked 19 miles.