Chapter IV: Part 4

Down here, and all through this peculiar world, the police are everything. They regulate the conduct, adjudicate the quarrels, interfere with the evil-doers. The terror of them keeps many a child studying in the school-room where otherwise it would be toiling in the chamber at home or the shop outside. Still the struggle is against them, and most of them grow up without any of those advantages so common to others.

At the same time, there are many institutions established to reach these people. One sees Hebrew and Legal Aid Societies in large and imposing buildings. Outdoor recreation leagues, city playgrounds, schools, and university settlements--all are here; and yet the percentage of opportunity is not large. Parents have to struggle too hard. Their ignorant influence upon the lives of the young ones is too great.

I know a lawyer, though, of considerable local prestige, who has worked his way out of these conditions; and Broadway from Thirty-fourth Street south, to say nothing of many other streets, is lined with the signs of those who have overcome the money difficulty of lives begun under these conditions. Unfortunately the money problem, once solved, is not the only thing in the world. Their lives, although they reach to the place where they have gold signs, automobiles and considerable private pleasures, are none the more beautiful. Too often, because of these early conditions, they remain warped, oppressive, greedy and distorted in every worthy mental sense by the great fight they have made to get their money.

Nearly the only ideal that is set before these strugglers still toiling in the area, is the one of getting money. A hundred thousand children, the sons and daughters of working parents whose lives are as difficult as that of the Hungarian portrayed and whose homes are as unlovely, are inoculated in infancy with the doctrine that wealth is all,--the shabbiest and most degrading doctrine that can be impressed upon anyone.

THE END OF A VACATION

It was the close of summer. The great mountain and lake areas to the north of New York were pouring down their thousands into the hot, sun-parched city. Vast throngs were coming back on the steamboats of the Hudson. Vaster throngs were crowding the hourly trains which whirled and thundered past the long lane of villages which stretches between Albany and New York City. The great station at Albany was packed with a perspiring mass. The several fast expresses running without stop to New York City were overwhelmed. Particularly was the Empire State Express full. In the one leaving Albany at eight in the evening passengers were standing in the aisles.

It was a little, dark, wolf of a man who fought his way and that of his wife behind him to the car steps, and out of the scrambling, pushing throng rescued a car seat. He put his back against those who were behind and stood still until his wife could crowd in. Then he took his place beside her and looked grimly around. For her part, she arranged herself indifferently and looked wearily out of the window. She was dark, piquant, petite, attractive.

Behind these two there came another person, who seemed not so anxious for a seat. While others were pushing eagerly he stepped to one side, holding his place close to the little wolf man yet looking indifferently about him. He was young, ruddy, stalwart, an artist’s ideal of what a summer youth ought to be. And now and then he looked in the direction of the wolf man’s wife. But there appeared to be nothing of common understanding between them.

The train pulled out with a slow clacking sound. It gained in headway, and lights of yard engines and those of other cars, as well as street lamps and houses, flashed into view and out again. Then came the long darkness of the open country and the river bank, and the people settled to endure the several hours in such comfort as they could. Some read newspapers, some books. The majority stared wearily out of the window, not attempting to talk. They were tired. The joys of their vacations were behind them. Why talk, with New York and early work ahead?

In the midst of these stood the young athlete, ruminating. In his seat before him sat the wolf man, studying a notebook. Beside him, the young wife, dark, piquant, nervously restless, kept her face to the window, arranging her back hair now and then with a jeweled hand, and occasionally turning her face inward to look at the car. It was as if a vast gulf lay between her and her spouse, as if they were miles and miles apart, and yet they were obviously married. You could see that by the curt, gruff questions he addressed to her, by the quick, laconic, uninterpretative replies. She was weary and so was he.

The train neared Poughkeepsie. For the twentieth or more time the jeweled hand had felt the back of her dark piled-up hair. For the fourth or fifth time the elbow had rested on the back of the seat, the hand falling lazily toward her cheek. Just once it dropped full length along the back ridge, safely above and beyond her husband’s head and toward the hand of the standing athlete, who appeared totally unconscious of the gesture. Then it was withdrawn. A stir of interest seemed to go with it, a quick glance. There was something missing. The athlete was not looking.

At Yonkers the crowd was already beginning to stir and pull itself together. At Highbridge it was dragging satchels from the bundle racks and from beneath the seats. The little wolf man was closing up his notebook, looking darkly around. For the thirtieth time the jeweled hand felt of the dark hair, the elbow rested on the seat-top, and then for the second time the arm slipped out and rested full length, the hand touching an elbow which was now resting wearily, holding the shoulder and supporting the chin of the man who was standing. There was the throb as of an electric contact. The elbow rose ever so slightly and pressed the fingers. The eyes of the wolf’s wife met the eyes of her summer ideal, and there stood revealed a whole summer romance, bright sun-shades, lovely flowers, green grass, trysting-places, a dark, dangerous romance, with a grim, unsuspecting wolf in the background. The arm was withdrawn, the hair touched, the window turned to wearily. All was over.

And yet you could see how it might continue, could feel that it would. In the very mood of the two was indicated ways and means. But now this summer contact was temporarily over. The train rolled into Grand Central Station. The crowd arose. There was a determined shuffle forward of the wolf man, with his wife close behind him, and both were gone. The athlete followed respectfully after. He gave the wolf man and his wife a wide berth. He followed, however, and looked and thought--backward into the summer, no doubt, and forward.

THE TRACK WALKER

If you have nothing else to do some day when you are passing through the vast network of subway or railway tracks of any of the great railways running northward or westward or eastward out of New York, give a thought to the man who walks them for you, the man on whom your safety, in this particular place, so much depends.

He is a peculiar individual. His work is so very exceptional, so very different from your own. While you are sitting in your seat placidly wondering whether you are going to have a pleasant evening at the theater or whether the business to which you are about to attend will be as profitable as you desire, he is out on the long track over which you are speeding, calmly examining the bolts that hold the shining metals together. Neither rain nor sleet may deter him. The presence of intense heat or intense cold or dirt or dust is not permitted to interfere with his work. Day after day, at all hours and in all sorts of weather, he may be seen quietly plodding these iron highways, his wrench and sledge crossed over his shoulders, and if it be night, or in the subway, a lantern over one arm, his eyes riveted on the rails, carefully watching to see if any bolts are loose or any spikes sprung. In the subway or the New York Central Tunnel, upward of two hundred cannon-ball flyers rush by him each day, on what might be called a four-track or ten-track bowling alley, and yet he dodges them all for perhaps as little as any laborer is paid. If he were not watchful, if he did not perform his work carefully and well, if he had a touch of malice or a feeling of vengefulness, he could wreck your train, mangle your body and send you praying and screaming to your Maker. There would be no sure way of detecting him.

Death lurks on the path he travels--subway or railway. Here, if anywhere, it may be said to be constantly lurking. What with the noise, which, in some places, like the subway and the various tunnels, is a perfect and continuous uproar, the smoke, which hangs like a thick, gloomy pall over everything, and the weak, ineffective lights which shine out on your near approach like will-o’-the-wisps, the chances of hearing and seeing the approach of any particular train are small. Side arches, or small pockets in the walls, in some places, are provided for the protection of the men, but these are not always to be reached in time when a train thunders out of the gloom. If you look sharp you may sometimes see a figure crouching in one of these as you scurry past. He is so close to the grinding wheels that the dust and soot of them are flung over him like a spray.

And yet for all this, the money that is paid these men is beggarly small. The work they do is not considered exceptionally valuable. Thirty to thirty-five cents an hour is all they are paid, and this for ten to twelve hours’ work every day. That their lives are in constant danger is not a factor in the matter. They are supposed to work willingly for this, and they do. Only when one is picked off, his body mangled by a passing train, is the grimness of the sacrifice emphasized, and then only for a moment. The space which such accidents receive in the public prints is scarcely more than a line.

And now, what would you say of men who would do this work for so little? What estimate would you put on their mental capacity? Would you say that they are worth only what they can be made to work for? One of these men, an intelligent type of laborer, not a drinker nor one who even smoked, attracted my attention once by the punctuality with which he crossed a given spot on his beat. He was a middle-aged man, married, and had three children. Day after day, week after week, he used to arrive at this particular spot, his eye alert, his step quick, and when a train approached he seemed to become aware of it as if by instinct. When finally asked by me why he did not get something better to do, he said: “I have no trade. Where could I get more?”

This man was killed by a train. Sure as was his instinct and keen his eye, he was nevertheless caught one evening, and at the very place where he deemed himself most sure. His head was completely obliterated, and he had to be identified by his clothes. When he was removed, another eager applicant was given his place, and now he is walking the same tunnel with a half-dozen others. If you question these men they will all tell you the same story. They do not want to do what they are doing, but it is better than nothing.

Rough necessity, a sense of duty, and behold, we are as bricks and stones, to be put anywhere in the wall, at the bottom of the foundation in the dark, or at the top in the light. And who chooses for us?

THE REALIZATION OF AN IDEAL

Any quality to which the heart of man aspires it may attain.
Would you have virtue in the world, establish it yourself.
Would you have tenderness, be tender. It is only by acting
in the name of that which you deem to be an ideal that its
realization is brought to pass.

In the crowded section of the lower East Side of New York, where poverty reigns most distressingly, there stands a church which is a true representative of the religion of the poor. It is an humble building, crowded in among the flats and tenements that make the homely neighborhood homelier, and sends a crude and distorted spire soaring significantly toward the sky. There is but little light inside, for that which the crowded flat-buildings about does not shut out is weakened by the dusty stained-glass windows through which it has to pass. An arched and dark-angled ceiling lends a sense of dignity to it and over it all broods the solemn atmosphere of simplicity and faith.

It is in this church (and no doubt others of a similar character elsewhere) that is constantly recurring the miracle of earthly faith. Here it is, hour after hour, that one sees entering out of the welter and the din of the streets those humble examples of the poor and ignorant, who come here out of the cares of many other states to rest a while and pray.

Near the door, between two large, gloomy pillars, there is a huge wooden cross, whereon is hung a life-size figure of the Christ. The hands and feet are pierced with the customary large forty-penny weight nails. The side is opened with an appalling gash, the forehead is crowned with the undying crown of thorns, which is driven down until the flesh is made to bleed.

Before this figure you may see kneeling, any day, not one but many specimens of those by whom the world has dealt very poorly. Their hands are rough, their faces worn and dull; on the gnarled and weary bodies are hung clothes of which you and I would be ashamed. Some carry bags, others huge bundles. With hands extended upward, their faces bearing the imprint of unquestioning faith, they look into the soft, pain-exhausted face of the Christ, imploring that aid and protection which the ordinary organization of society does not and cannot afford. It is in this church, as it seems to me, that the hour’s great lesson of tenderness is given.

I call the world’s attention to this picture with the assurance that this is the great, the beautiful, and the important lesson. If there be those who do not see in the body-racked figure of Christ an honest reiteration of an actual event, who cannot honestly admit that such a thing could have reasonably occurred, there is still a lesson just as impressive and just as binding as though it had. These people whom you see kneeling here and lifting up their hands present an actuality of faith which cannot be denied. This Christ, if to you and to me a myth, is to them a reality. And in so far as He is real to them He implies an ardent desire on the part of the whole human race for tenderness and mercy which it may be as well not to let go unanswered. For if Christ did not suffer, if His whole life-story was a fiction and a delusion, then all the yearning and all the faith of endless millions of men, who have lived believing and who died adoring, only furnishes proof that the race really needs such an ideal--that it must have tenderness and mercy to fly to or it could not exist.

Man is a hopeful animal. He lives by the belief that some good must accrue to him or that his life is not worth the living. It is this faith then, that in disaster or hours of all but unendurable misery causes him to turn in supplication to a higher power, and unless these prayers are in some measure answered, that faith can and will be destroyed, and life will and does become a shambles indeed. Hence, if one would balance peace against danger and death it becomes necessary for each to act as though the ideals of the world are in some sense real and that he in person is sponsor for them.

These prayers that are put up, and these supplications, if not addressed to the actual Christ, are nevertheless sent to that sum of human or eternal wisdom or sympathy as you will of which we are a part. If you believe that hope is beautiful and that mercy is a virtue, if you would have the world more lovely and its inhabitants more kind, if you would have goodness triumph and sorrow laid aside, then you must be ready to make good to such supplicants and supplications as fall to you the virtues thus pathetically appealed to. You must act in the name of tenderness. If you cannot or will not, by so much is the realization of human ideals, the possibility of living this life at all decently by any, made less.

THE PUSHCART MAN

One of the most appealing and interesting elements in city life, particularly that metropolitan city life which characterizes New York, is the pushcart man. This curious creature of modest intellect and varying nationality infests all the highways of the great city without actually dominating any of them except a few streets on the East Side. He is as hard-working, in the main, as he is ubiquitous. His cart is so shabby, his stock in trade so small. If he actually earns a reasonable wage it is by dint of great energy and mere luck, for the officers of the law in apparently every community find in the presence of this person an alluring source of profit and he is picked and grafted upon as is perhaps no other member of the commonplace brotherhood of trade.

I like to see them trundling their two-wheeled vehicles about the city, and I like to watch the patience and the care with which they exercise their barely tolerated profession of selling. You see them everywhere; vendors of fruit, vegetables, chestnuts on the East Side, selling even dry goods, hardware, furs and groceries; and elsewhere again the Greeks selling neckwear, flowers and curios, the latter things at which an ordinary man would look askance, but which the lower levels of society somehow find useful.

I have seen them tramping in long files across Williamsburg Bridge at one, two and three o’clock in the morning to the Wallabout Market in Brooklyn. And I have seen them clambering over hucksters’ wagons there and elsewhere searching for the choicest bits, which they hope to sell quickly. The market men have small consideration for them and will as lief strike or kick at them as to reach a bargain with them.

For one thing, I remember watching an old pushcart vendor one sweltering afternoon in summer from one o’clock in the afternoon to seven the same evening, and I was never more impressed with the qualities which make for success in this world, qualities which are rare in American life, or in any life, for that matter, for patience and good nature and sturdy charitable endurance are not common qualities anywhere.

He had his stand at Sixth Avenue and Twenty-third Street, New York, then the center of the shopping life of the city--or I had better say that he attempted to keep it there, for he was not altogether successful. He was a dark, gray-headed, grizzle-cheeked “guinea” or “dago,” as he was scornfully dubbed by the Irish policeman who made his life a burden. His eye was keen, his motion quick, his general bodily make-up active, despite the fact that he was much over fifty years of age.

“That’s a good one,” the Irish policeman observed to me in passing, noting that I was looking at him. “He’s a fox. A fine time I have keeping my eye on him.”

The old Italian seemed to realize that we were talking about him for 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.

“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----!

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.”

“Maybe they will, and maybe they won’t,” the other muttered. “Them Frenchmen ain’t strong for Jews.”

The passing of a Broadway car awakens a vague idea of progress, and some one remarks: “They’ll have them things runnin’ by compressed air before we know it.”

“I’ve driv’ mule-cars by here myself,” replies another.

A few moments before twelve a great box of bread is pushed outside the door, and exactly on the hour a portly, round-faced German takes his position by it, and calls: “Ready!” The whole line at once, like a well-drilled company of regulars, moves quickly, in good marching time, diagonally across the sidewalk to the inner edge and pushes, with only the noise of tramping feet, past the box. Each man reaches for a loaf and, breaking line, wanders off by himself. Most of them do not even glance at their bread but put it indifferently under their coats or in their pockets. They betake themselves heaven knows where--to lodging houses, park benches (if it be summer), hall-bedrooms possibly, although in most cases it is doubtful if they possess one, or to charitable missions of the poor. It is a small thing to get, a loaf of dry bread, but from three hundred to four hundred men will gather nightly from one year’s end to the other to get it, and so it has its significance.

The thing that I protest against is that it endures. It would be so easy, as it seems to me, in a world of even moderate organization to do something that would end a spectacle of this kind once and for all, if it were no more than a law to destroy the inefficient. I say this not in cruelty but more particularly with the intention of awakening thought. There is so much to do. In America the nation’s roads have not even begun to be made. Over vast stretches of the territory of the world the land is not tilled. There is not a tithe made of what the rank and file could actually use. Most of us are wanting strenuously for something.

A rule that would cause the arrest of a man in this situation would be merciful. A compulsory labor system that would involve regulation of hours, medical treatment, restoration of health, restoration of courage, would soon put an end to the man who is “down and out.” He would of course be down and out to the extent that he had fallen into the clutches of this machine, but he would at least be on the wheel that might bring him back or destroy him utterly. It is of no use to say that life cannot do anything for the inefficient. It can. It does. And the haphazard must, and in the main does, give way to the well-organized. And the injured man need not be allowed to bleed to death. If a man is hurt accidentally a hospital wagon comes quickly. If he is broken in spirit, moneyless, afraid, nothing is done. Yet he is in far greater need of the hospital wagon than the other. The treatment should be different, that is all.

OUR RED SLAYER

If you wish to see an exemplification of the law of life, the survival of one by the failure and death of another, go some day to any one of the great abattoirs which to-day on the East River, or in Jersey City, or elsewhere near the great metropolis receive and slay annually the thousands and hundreds of thousands of animals that make up a part of the city’s meat supply. And there be sure and see, also, the individual who, as your agent and mine, is vicariously responsible for the awful slaughter. You will find him in a dark, red pit, blood-covered, standing in a sea of blood, while hour after hour and day after day there passes before him a line of screaming animals, hung by one leg, head down, and rolling steadily along a rail, which is slanted to get the benefit of gravity, while he, knife in hand, jabs unweariedly at their throats, the task of cutting their throats so that they may die of bleeding and exhaustion having become a wearisome and commonplace labor, one which he scarcely notices at all. He is a blood-red slayer, this individual, a butcher by trade, big, brawny, muscular, but clothed from head to foot in a tarpaulin coat and cap, which from long spattering by the blood of animals he has slain, have become this darksome red. Day after day and month after month here you may see him--your agent and mine--the great world wagging its way, the task of destroying life never becoming less arduous, the line of animals never becoming less thin.

A peculiar life to lead, is it not? One would think a man of any sensibility would become heartsick, or at the least, revolted and disgusted; but this man does not seem to be. Rather, he takes it as a matter of course, a thing which has no significance, any more than the eating of his food or the washing of his hands. Since it is a matter of business or of living, and seeing that others live by his labor, he does not care.

But it has significance. These creatures we see thus automatically and hopelessly trundling down a rail of death are really not so far removed from us in the scale of existence. You will find them but a little way down the ladder of mind, climbing slowly and patiently towards those heights to which we think we have permanently attained. There is a force back of them, a law which wills their existence, and they do not part with it readily. There is a terror of death for them as there is for us, and you will see it here exemplified, the horror that makes them run cold with the knowledge of their situation.

You will hear them squeal, the hogs; you will hear them baa, the sheep; you will hear the grinding clank of the chains and see the victims dropping: hogs, half-alive, into the vats of boiling water; the sheep into the range of butchers and carvers who flay them half-alive; while our red representative--yours and mine--stands there, stabbing, stabbing, stabbing, that we who are not sheep or hogs and who pay him for his labor may live and be merry and not die. Strange, isn’t it?