Chapter 9
SAKURAI, ICHISAKU: Member of the Niigata City Council; Director of the Niigata Gas Co., Niigata Savings Bank. Born June, 1872, Studied Japanese and Chinese classics and arithmetic. At present also he connects with the Niigata Orphanage and various other philanthropic bodies. Was imprisoned by acting contrary to the act of explosive compound for seven years. Recreations: reading, Western wine.
Relying on my apparent similarity to the average undergrad, I plunged into the sancta of Houston Hall and bought a copy of the _Punch Bowl_. What that sprightly journal calls "A little group of Syria's thinkers" was shooting pool. The big fireplaces, like most fireplaces in American colleges, don't seem to be used. They don't even show any traces of ever having been used, a curious contrast to the always blazing hearths of English colleges. The latter, however, are more necessary, as in England there is usually no other source of warmth. A bitter skirmish of winds, carrying powdered snow dust, nipped round the gateways of the dormitories and Tait McKenzie's fine statue of Whitefield stood sharply outlined against a cold blue sky. I lunched at a varsity hash counter on Spruce Street and bought tobacco in a varsity drug store, where a New York tailor, over for the day, was cajoling students into buying his "snappy styles" in time for Christmas. There is no more interesting game than watching a lot of college men, trying to pick out those who may be of some value to the community in future--the scientists, poets, and teachers of the next generation. The well-dressed youths one sees in the varsity drug stores are not generally of this type.
The Evans School of Dentistry at Fortieth and Spruce is a surprising place. Its grotesque gargoyles, showing (with true medieval humour) the sufferings of tooth patients, are the first thing one notices. Then one finds the museum, in which is housed Doctor Thomas W. Evans's collection of paintings and curios brought back from France. Unfortunately there seems to be no catalogue of the items, so that there is no way of knowing what interesting associations belong to them. But most surprising of all is to find the travelling carriage of the Empress Eugenie in which she fled from France in the fatal September days of 1870. She spent her last night in France at the home of Doctor Evans, and there is a spirited painting by Dupray showing her leaving his house the next morning, ushered into the carriage by the courtly doctor. The old black barouche, or whatever one calls it, seems in perfect condition still, with the empress's monogram on the door panel. Only the other day we read in the papers that the remarkable old lady (now in her ninety-fourth year) has been walking about Paris, revisiting well-known scenes. How it would surprise her to see her carriage again here in this University building in West Philadelphia. The whole museum is delightfully French in flavour; as soon as one enters one seems to step back into the curiously bizarre and tragic extravagance of the Second Empire.
One passes into the dignified and placid residence section of Spruce and Pine streets, with its distinctly academic air. Behind those quiet walls one suspects bookcases and studious professors and all the delightful passions of the mind. On Baltimore Avenue the wintry sun shone white and cold; in Clark Park, Charles Dickens wore a little cap of snow, and Little Nell looked more pathetic than ever. There is a breath of mystery about Baltimore Avenue. What does that large sign mean, in front of a house near Clark Park--THE EASTERN TRAVELLERS? Then one comes to the famous shop of S. F. Hiram, the Dodoneaean Shoemaker he calls himself. This wise coloured man has learned the advertising advantages of the unusual. His placard reads:
Originator of that famous Dobrupolyi System of repairing.
When one enters and asks to know more about this system, he points to another placard, which says:
It assumes the nature and character of an appellative noun, and carries the article The System.
His shop contains odd curios as well as the usual traffic of a cobbler. "The public loves to be hood-winked," he adds sagely.
HORACE TRAUBEL
We wait with particular interest to hear what Philadelphia will have to say about the passing of Horace Traubel. Traubel was the official echo of the Great Voice of Camden, and in his obituary one may discern the vivacity of the Whitman tradition. This is a matter of no small concern to the curators of the Whitman cult. The soul of Philadelphia cannot be kept alive by conventions and statistics alone. Such men as Traubel have helped.
There are two kinds of rebels. By their neckties you may know them. Walt Whitman was of the kind that wears no necktie at all. Then there is the lesser sort, of which Traubel was one--the rebel who wears a flowing black bow tie with long trailers. Elbert Hubbard wore one of these. It is a mild rebellion of which this is symbol. It often goes with shell spectacles.
We never knew Horace Traubel, though he was the man we most wanted to meet when we came to Philadelphia. We have heard men of all conditions speak of him with affection and respect. He was dedicated from boyhood to the Whitman cause. From Walt himself he caught the habit of talking about Walt, and he carried it on with as much gusto and happiness as Walt did. Only recently he said in his little magazine _The Conservator_:
When I was quite small I used to want to be a great man. But in my observations of the old man's better than great way of meeting the gifts as well as the reverses of fate I didn't want to be a great man. I only wanted to stay unannexed to any institution as he was. No college ever decorated him. For the best of reasons. No college could. He could decorate them.
So Traubel remained unannexed. He was fired from a bank because he happened to take issue in public with one of the bank's chief depositors. He floated about happily, surrounded by young Whitman disciples, carrying on his guerrilla for what his leader called the "peerless, passionate, good cause" of human democracy. His little magazine led a precarious life, supported by good friends. His protest against iniquities was an honest, good-humoured protest.
Horace Traubel will be remembered, as he wished to be remembered, as the biographer of Whitman. Whitman also, we may add, wished Traubel to be so remembered. In his careful record of the Camden sage's utterances and pulse-beats he approached (as nearly as any one) the devoted dignity of Boswell. We were about to say the self-effacing devotion of Boswell; but the beauty of biography is that the biographer cannot wholly delete himself from the book. One is always curious about the recording instrument. When we see a particularly fine photograph our first question is always, "What kind of camera was it taken with?"
It seems to us--speaking only by intuition, for we never knew him--that Traubel was a happy man. He was untouched by many of the harassing ambitions that make the lives of prosperous men miserable. He was touched in boyhood by one simple and overmastering motive--to carry on the Whitman message and spread it out for the younger world. Much of the dunnage of life he cast overboard. He was too good a Whitman disciple to estimate success in the customary terms. When he left his job in the bank he opened an account in the Walt Whitman philosophy--and he kept a healthy balance there to the end.
TALES OF TWO CITIES
II. NEW YORK
THE ANATOMY OF MANHATTAN
She is the only city whose lovers live always in a mood of wonder and expectancy. There are others where one may sink peacefully, contentedly into the life of the town, affectionate and understanding of its ways. But she, the woman city, who is bold enough to say he understands her? The secret of her thrilling and inscrutable appeal has never been told. How could it be? She has always been so much greater than any one who has lived with her. (Shall we mention Walt Whitman as the only possible exception? O. Henry came very near to her, but did he not melodramatize her a little, sometimes cheapen her by his epigrammatic appraisal, fit her too neatly into his plot? Kipling seemed to see her only as the brutal, heedless wanton.) Truly the magic of her spell can never be exacted. She changes too rapidly, day by day. Realism, as they call it, can never catch the boundaries of her pearly beauty. She needs a mystic.
No city so challenges and debilitates the imagination. Here, where wonder is a daily companion, desire to tell her our ecstasy becomes at last only a faint pain in the mind. If you would mute a poet's lyre, put him on a ferry from Jersey City some silver April morning; or send him aboard at Liberty Street in an October dusk. Poor soul, his mind will buzz (for years to come) after adequate speech to tell those cliffs and scarps, amethyst and lilac in the mingled light; the clear topaz chequer of window panes; the dull bluish olive of the river, streaked and crinkled with the churn of the screw! Many a poet has come to her in the wooing passion. Give him six months, he is merely her Platonist. He lives content with placid companionship. Where are his adjectives, his verbs? That inward knot of amazement, what speech can unravel it?
Her air, when it is typical, is light, dry, cool. It is pale, it is faintly tinctured with pearl and opal. Heaven is unbelievably remote; the city itself daring so high, heaven lifts in a cautious remove. Light and shadow are fantastically banded, striped, and patchworked among her cavern streets; a cool, deep gloom is cut across with fierce jags and blinks of brightness. She smiles upon man who takes his ease in her colossal companionship. Her clean soaring perpendiculars call the eye upward. One wanders as a botanist in a tropical forest. That great smooth groinery of the Pennsylvania Station train shed: is it not the arching fronds of iron palm trees? Oh, to be a botanist of this vivid jungle, spread all about one, anatomist of the ribs and veins that run from the great backbone of Broadway!
To love her, one thinks, is to love one's fellows; each of them having some unknown share in her loveliness. Any one of her streets would be the study and delight of a lifetime. To speak at random, we think of that little world of brightness and sound bourgeois cheer that spreads around the homely Verdi statue at Seventy-third Street. We have a faithful affection for that neighbourhood, for reasons of our own. Within a radius, thereabouts, of a quarter-mile each way, we could live a year and learn new matters every day. They call us a hustling folk. Observe the tranquil afternoon light in those brownstone byways. Pass along leisurely Amsterdam Avenue, the region of small and genial shops, Amsterdam Avenue of the many laundries. See the children trooping upstairs to their own room at the St. Agnes branch of the Public Library. See the taxi drivers, sitting in their cars alongside the Verdi grass plot (a rural breath of new-mown turf sweetening the warm, crisp air) and smoking pipes. Every one of them is to us as fascinating as a detective story. What a hand they have had in ten thousand romances. At this very moment, what quaint and many-stranded destinies may hail them and drive off? But there they sit, placid enough, with a pipe and the afternoon paper. The light, fluttering dresses of enigmatic fair ones pass gayly on the pavement. Traffic flows, divides, and flows on, a sparkling river. Here is that mystery, a human being, buying a cigar. Here is another mystery asking for a glass of frosted chocolate. Why is it that we cannot accost that tempting riddle and ask him to give us an accurate précis of his life to date? And that red-haired burly sage, he who used to bake the bran muffins in the little lunchroom near by, and who lent us his Robby Burns one night--what has become of him?
So she teases us, so she allures. Sometimes, on the L, as one passes along that winding channel where the walls and windows come so close, there is a felicitous sense of being immersed, surrounded, drowned in a great, generous ocean of humanity. It is a fine feeling. All life presses around one, the throb and the problem are close, are close. Who could be weary, who could be at odds with life, in such an embrace of destiny? The great tall sides of buildings fly open, the human hive is there, beautiful and arduous beyond belief. Here is our worship and here our lasting joy, here is our immortality of encouragement. Yes, perhaps O. Henry did say the secret after all: "He saw no longer a rabble, but his brothers seeking the ideal."
VESEY STREET
The first duty of the conscientious explorer is to study his own neighbourhood, so we set off to familiarize ourself with Vesey Street. This amiable byway (perhaps on account of the proximity of Washington Market) bases its culture on a solid appreciation of the virtue of good food, an admirable trait in any street. Upon this firm foundation it erects a seemly interest in letters. The wanderer who passes up the short channel of our street, from the docks to St. Paul's churchyard, must not be misled by the character of the books the bibliothecaries display in their windows. Outwardly they lure the public by Bob Ingersoll's lectures, Napoleon's Dream Book, efficiency encyclopædias and those odd and highly coloured small brochures of smoking-car tales of the Slow Train Through Arkansaw type. But once you penetrate, you may find quarry of a more stimulating kind. For fifteen cents we eloped with a first edition of Bunner's "Love in Old Cloathes," which we were glad to have in memory of the "old red box on Vesey Street" which Banner immortalized in rhyme, and which still stands (is it the same box?) by the railing of St. Paul's. Also, even nobler treasure to our way of thinking, did we not just now find (for fifteen cents) Hilaire Belloc's "Hills and the Sea," that enchanting little volume of essays, which we are almost afraid to read again. Belloc, the rogue--the devil is in him. Such a lusty beguilery moves in his nimble prose that after reading him it is hard not to fall into a clumsy imitation of his lively and frolic manner. There is at least one essayist in this city who fell subject to the hilarious Hilaire years ago. It is an old jape but not such a bad one: our friend Murray Hill will never return to the status quo ante Belloc.
But we were speaking of Vesey Street. It looks down to the water, and the soft music of steamship whistles comes tuning on a cold, gusty air. Thoroughly mundane little street, yet not unmindful of matters spiritual, bounded as it is by divine Providence at one end (St. Paul's) and by Providence, R. I. (the Providence Line pier) at the other. Perhaps it is the presence of the graveyard that has startled Vesey Street into a curious reversal of custom. On most other streets, we think, the numbers of the houses run even on the south side, odd on the north. But just the opposite on Vesey. You will find all even numbers on the north, odd on the south. Still, Wall Street errs in the same way.
If marooned or quarantined on Vesey Street a man might lead a life of gayety and sound nourishment for a considerable while, without having recourse to more exalted thoroughfares. There are lodging houses in that row of old buildings down toward the docks; from the garret windows he could see masts moving on the river. For food he would live high indeed. Where will one see such huge glossy blue-black grapes; such enormous Indian River grapefruit; such noble display of fish--scallops, herrings, smelts, and the larger kind with their dead and desolate eyes? There are pathetic rows of rabbits, frozen stiff in the bitter cold wind; huge white hares hanging in rows; a tray of pigeons with their iridescent throat feathers catching gleams of the pale sunlight. There are great sacks of nuts, barrels of cranberries, kegs of olive oil, thick slabs of yellow cheese. On such a cold day it was pleasant to see a sign "Peanut Roasters and Warmers."
Passing the gloomy vista of Greenwich Street--under the "L" is one of those mysterious little vents in the floor of the street from which issues a continual spout of steam--our Vesey grows more intellectual. The first thing one sees, going easterly, is a sign: THE TRUTH SEEKER, _One flight Up_. The temptation is almost irresistible, but then Truth is always one flight higher up, so one reflects, what's the use? In this block, while there is still much doing in the way of food--and even food in the live state, a window full of entertaining chicks and ducklings clustered round a colony brooder--another of Vesey Street's interests begins to show itself. Tools. Every kind of tool that gladdens the heart of man is displayed in various shops. One realizes more and more that this is a man's street, and indeed (except at the meat market) few of the gayer sex are to be seen along its pavements. One of the tool shops has open-air boxes with all manner of miscellaneous oddments, from mouse traps to oil cans, and you may see delighted enthusiasts poring over the assortment with the same professional delight that ladies show at a notion counter. One of the tool merchants, however, seems to have weakened in his love of city existence, for he has put up a placard:
WANTED TO RENT _Small Farm Must Have Fruit and Spring Water_
How many years of repressed yearning may speak behind that modest ambition!
Our own taste for amusement leads us (once luncheon dispatched; you should taste Vesey Street's lentil soup) to the second-hand bookshops. Our imagined castaway, condemned to live on Vesey Street for a term of months, would never need to languish for mental stimulation. Were he devout, there is always St. Paul's, as we have said; and were he atheist, what a collection of Bob Ingersoll's essays greets the faring eye! There is the customary number of copies of "The Pentecost of Calamity"; it seems to the frequenter of second-hand bazaars as though almost everybody who bought that lively booklet in the early days of the war must have sold it again since the armistice. Much rarer, we saw a copy of "Hopkins's Pond," that little volume of agreeable sketches written so long ago by Dr. Robert T. Morris, the well-known surgeon, and if we had not already a copy which the doctor inscribed for us we would certainly have rescued it from this strange exile.
There are only two of the really necessary delights of life that the Vesey Street maroon would miss. There is no movie, there are no doughnuts. We are wondering whether in any part of this city there has sprung up the great doughnut craze that has ravaged Philadelphia in the past months. As soon as prohibition became a certainty, certain astute merchants of the Quaker City devoted themselves to inoculating the public with a taste for these humble fritters, and now they bubble gayly in the windows of Philadelphia's most aristocratic thoroughfare. It is really a startling sight to see Philadelphia lining up for its noonday quota of doughnuts, and the merchants over there have devised an ingenious method of tempting the crowd. A funnel, erected over the frying sinkers, carries the fragrant fumes out through a transom and gushes it into the open air, so that the sniff of doughnuts is perceptible all down the block. There is a fortune waiting on Vesey Street for the man who will establish a doughnut foundry, and we solemnly pledge our own appetite and that of all our friends toward his success.[2]
At its upper end, perhaps in memory of the vanished Astor House, Vesey Street stirs itself into a certain magnificence, devoting its window space to jewellery and silver-mounted books of prayer. At this window one may regulate his watch at a clock warranted by Charles Frodsham of 84, Strand, to whose solid British accuracy we hereby pay decent tribute. Over all this varied scene lifts the shining javelin-head of the Woolworth Building, seen now and then in an almost disbelieved glimpse of sublimity; and the golden Lightning of the Telephone and Telegraph pinnacle, waving his zigzag brands in the sun.
[2] Since this was written, the lack has been supplied--on Park Row, just above the top of Vesey Street; probably the most luxurious doughnut shop ever conceived.
BROOKLYN BRIDGE
A windy day, one would have said in the dark channels of downtown ways. In the chop house on John Street, lunch-time patrons came blustering in, wrapped in overcoats and mufflers, with something of that air of ostentatious hardiness that men always assume on coming into a warm room from a cold street. Thick chops were hissing on the rosy grill at the foot of the stairs. In one of the little crowded stalls a man sat with a glass of milk. It was the first time we had been in that chop house for several years ... it doesn't seem the same. As Mr. Wordsworth said, it is not now as it hath been of yore. But still,
The homely Nurse doth all she can To make her foster-child, her Inn-mate Man, Forget the glories he hath known.
It's a queer thing that all these imitation beers taste to us exactly as real beer did the first time we tasted it (we were seven years old) and shuddered. "Two glasses of cider," we said to the comely serving maid. Alas
That nature yet remembers What was so fugitive.
There is a nice point of etiquette involved in lunching in a crowded chop house. Does the fact of having bought and eaten a moderate meal entitle one to sit with one's companion for a placid talk and smoke afterward? Or is one compelled to relinquish the table as soon as one is finished, to make place for later comers? These last are standing menacingly near by, gazing bitterly upon us as we look over the card and debate the desirability of having some tapioca pudding. But our presiding Juno has already settled the matter, and made courtesy a matter of necessity. "These gentlemen will be through in a moment," she says to the new candidates. Our companion, the amiable G---- W----, was just then telling us of a brand of synthetic whiskey now being distilled by a famous tavern of the underworld. The superlative charm of this beverage seems to be the extreme rigidity it imparts to the persevering communicant. "What does it taste like?" we asked. "Rather like gnawing furniture," said G---- W----. "It's like a long, healthy draught of shellac. It seems to me that it would be less trouble if you offered the barkeep fifty cents to hit you over the head with a hammer. The general effect would be about the same, and you wouldn't feel nearly so bad in the morning."
A windy day, and perishing chill, we thought as we strolled through the gloomy caverns and crypts underneath the Brooklyn Bridge. Those twisted vistas seen through the archways give an impression of wrecked Louvain. A great bonfire was burning in the middle of the street. Under the Pearl Street elevated the sunlight drifted through the girders in a lively chequer, patterning piles of gray-black snow with a criss-cross of brightness. We had wanted to show our visitor Franklin Square, which he, as a man of letters, had always thought of as a trimly gardened plot surrounded by quiet little old-fashioned houses with brass knockers, and famous authors tripping in and out. As we stood examining the façade of Harper and Brothers, our friend grew nervous. He was carrying under his arm the dummy of an "export catalogue" for a big brass foundry, that being his line of work. "They'll think we're free verse poets trying to get up courage enough to go in and submit a manuscript," he said, and dragged us away.