Part 3

"Though you do not know it, I have a soul. Behold, across the way, my library. When the night shrouds those lions and the fresh young trees shake out their greenery against the white stonework, do you not catch a suggestion of atmosphere, something of a mood? And the black cliffs around, with the janitress lights making jeweled bars the width of them, are they not monuments? I cleave brilliantly, up and down this dormant city. It is for you, late wayfarer. Pay no heed to the plodding milk-wagon or the hatless young maiden speeding her lover's motor. Heed my long silences, my slim tall darknesses. My human tide has ebbed. My buildings come about me to muse and to commune. Receive, for once on Fifth Avenue, the soul that is imprisoned in my stone and steel."

It is not for the respectable, this polite communication. Theatre and club and restaurant have long since disgorged these. New York has masticated their money. They have done as they should and are restored uptown. Even the old newswoman, she who had spent starving months in the Russian woods, caught in the first eddies of the war, she has tottered from her stand down by the station. The Hungarian waiter in Childs' is still there, still assuaging the deep nocturnal need for buckwheat cakes, but that is off the avenue. It is three, the avenue is nearly empty. It is ready to disclose its soul.

But before this subtle performance there is a preliminary. It is a very self-respecting avenue and at three on a pleasant morning, when no one is around to disturb it, it proceeds to take its bath. Perhaps a few motors go by--a taxi rolling north, heavy with night thoughts, a tired white face framed in its black depth; or a Wanamaker truck clanking loosely home in the other direction, delivered of its suburban chores. The Italian acolytes are impartial. They spray the wheels of a touring car with gusto, ignored by its linked lovers, or drive a powerful stream under the hubs of a Nassau News wagon trundling to a train. The avenue must be refreshed, the brave green of the library trees nodding approval, the sparrows expecting it. It must be prepared for the sun, under bold lamps and timid stars.

A fine young morning, the watchman promises. A bit of wind whiffles the water that is shot out from the white-wing's hose, but it is clearing up above and looks well for the day. The hour beckons memories for the watchman--fine young mornings he used to have long ago, in Ireland, a boy on his first adventure and he driving with the barley to Ross.

It is an empty street. The hose is wheeled away over the glistening asphalt. The watchman disappears--he has a cozy nook beyond the ken of time-clocks. The last human pigmy seeks his pillow, to hide a diminished head. With man accounted for, night sighs its completion and creeps to the west. Then, untrammeled of heaven or minion, the buildings have their moment. Each tower stretches his proud height to the morning. The stones give out their spirit; their music is unsealed.

II

Fifth Avenue stands serene and still, but it cannot hold the virgin morning forever. Its windows may be blank, its sidewalks vacant. Behind the walls there is a magnet drawing back its human life.

"Give us this day our daily bread." A saintly venerable horse seems to know the injunction. Emerging from nowhere, ambling to nowhere, it usurps the innocent morning in answer to the Lord.

And not by bread alone. There is nothing in the prayer about clams, but some one in Mount Vernon is destined to have them quickly. Out of the mysterious south, racing against time, a little motor flits onward with gaping barrels of clams. At a decent interval comes a heavier load of fish. Great express wagons follow, commissarial giants. The honest uses of Fifth Avenue begin.

Butchers and bakers are out before fine ladies. The grocer and the greengrocer are early on their rounds. But an empty American News truck confesses that eternal vigilance is the price of circulation. Its gait is swifter than the gait of milkman or fruit-and-vegetable man. Dust and dew are on the florist's wheels: he has come whistling by the swamps of Flushing. His flimsy automobile runs lightly past the juggernauts that crush down.

Uncle Sam is in haste at six in the morning. His trucks hurl from Grand Central to make the substations. But his is not the pride of place. Nor is it coal or farmers' feed that appropriates the middle of the street. The noblest wagons, a long parade of them, announce the greater glory of beer. The temperance advocate may shudder at the desecration of the morning. He may observe "Hell Gate Brewery" and nod his sickly nod. But there is something about this large preparedness for thirst that stills the carping worm of conscience. It is good to see what solid, ample caravans are required to replenish man with beer. It is not the single glass that is glorious. It is not even the single car-load. It is the steady, deliberate, ponderous procession that streams through the early hours. Once it seemed as if Percherons alone were worthy of beer-wagons. It satisfied the faith that there was Design in creation, but the Percheron is not needed. There is the same institutional impressiveness about a motor-truck piled to the sky with beer.

III

"Number, please?" She is anonymous, that inquirer. But behind her anonymity there is humanity. Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street caught a glimpse of her at six forty-five A. M.

She was up at five in the morning. She had a pang as she put on her check suit, slightly darker than her check coat lined with pink. Her little hat, however, was smart and new. Her mother cooked breakfast while she set the table. Then she walked to the Third Avenue "L" with her friend. They got off the express at Forty-second Street, rode to Fourth Avenue on the short spur line, and walked along Forty-second Street in time for them to do a brief window-shopping as they passed the shirtwaists at Forsythe's. Her friend's bronze shoes she envied as they crossed the little park back of the Library. On Sixth Avenue they inspected the window at Bernstein's. A slight argument engrossed them. They hovered over the window, chirping not unlike the sparrows in Bryant Park. Then, in a flurry of punctuality, they raced for the telephone company to begin their "Number, please."

An hour earlier laborers with dinner-pails had crossed Fifth Avenue, and hatless Polish girls on their way to scrub. By seven o'clock the negro porters and laborers were giving way to white-collar strap-hangers on the elevateds and in the subway. It was getting to be the hour of salesmen and salesgirls and office-boys and shop-subordinates and clerks. The girls back of the scenes at the milliner's, they go up Fifth Avenue at seven, to take one side-street or another. The girl who sells you a toothbrush in the drug-store hurries by the shop windows, herself as neat as a model. Is it early? Myriads of men are pouring down already. Besides, "'S use of kickin'? If you don't like it, you can walk out!"

The night-watchman is going home, and an old attendant from the Grand Central. "Tired, Pop?" "Yeh, p'tty tired." "What right've you to git tired workin' for a big corporation?" The oppressed wage-slave bellows, "Ha, ha."

IV

Of these things Fifth Avenue is innocent at five in the afternoon. The diastole of travelers had spread all morning from Grand Central; the systole is active at five. As the great muscle contracts in the afternoon, atoms are pulled frantically to the suburbs, tearing their way through the weaker streams that are drawn up by the neighboring shops and clubs and bars and hotels. The Biltmore and Sherry's and Delmonico's and the Manhattan and the Belmont are no longer columnar monuments, holding secret vigil. They are secondary to the human floods which they suck in and spray out. The street itself is lost to memory and vision. A swollen stream, dammed at moments while chosen people are permitted to walk dry-shod across, bears on its restless bosom the freight of curiosity and pride and favor. One might fancy, to gaze on this mad throng of motors, that a new religious sect had conquered the universe, worshipers of a machine.

It is the hour of white gloves and delicate profiles, the feminine hour. A little later there will be more leaves than blossoms, the men coming from work giving a duller tone. But one is permitted to believe for this period that Fifth Avenue has a personality, parti-colored, decorative, flashing, frivolous, composed of many styles and many types. The working world intersects it rudely at Forty-second Street, but scarcely infiltrates it. A qualification distinguishes those who turn up and down the Avenue. It is not leisure that distinguishes them, or money, but their sense that there is romance in the appearance of money and leisure. Many of the white gloves are cotton. Many of the gloves are not white. But it is May-time, the afternoon, Fifth Avenue. One may pretend the world is gay.

They seem chaotic and impulsive, these crowds on Fifth Avenue. They move as by personal will. But dawn and sunset, morning and evening, common attractions govern them. There is a rhythm in these human tides.

V

For eighty years Henri Fabre watched the insects. He stayed with his friend the spider the round of the clock. Time, that reveals the spider, is also eloquent of man in his city. Time is the scene-shifter and the detective. Some day we should pitch a metropolitan observatory at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street,--some day, if we can find the time.

AS AN ALIEN FEELS

Twenty-five years ago I knew but dimly that the United States existed. My first dream of it came, as well as I remember, from the strange gay flag that blew above a circus tent on the Fair Green. It was a Wild West Show, and for years I associated America with the intoxication of the circus and, for no reason, with the tang of oranges. "Two a penny, two a penny, large penny oranges! Buy away an' ate away, large penny oranges!" They were oranges from Seville then, but the odor of them and the fumes of circus excitement gave me a first gay ribald sense of the United States.

The next allied sense was gathered from a scallawag uncle. He had sought his fortune in America--sought it, as I infer now, on the rear end of a horse-car. When he came home he was full of odd and delicious oaths. "Gosh hell hang it" was his chief touch of American culture. He was a "Yank" in local parlance, a frequently drunken Yank. His fine drooping mustache too often drooped with porter. Once, a boy of nine, I steadied him home under the October stars and absorbed a long alcoholic reverie on the Horseshoe Falls. As we slept together that night in the rat-pattering loft, and as he absently appropriated all the horse-blanket, I had plenty of chance to shiver over the wonderments of the Horseshoe Falls.

This, with an instilled idea that America and America alone could offer "work," foreshadowed the American landscape. It is the bald hope of work that finally magnetizes us hither. But every dream and every loyalty was with the unhappy land from which I came.

For many months the music of New York harbor spoke only of home. Every outgoing steamer that opened its throat made me homesick. America was New York, and New York was down town, and down town was a vortex of new duties. There I learned the bewildering foreign tongue of earning a living, and the art of eating at Childs'. At night the hall-bedroom near Broadway, and the resourceless promenade up and down Broadway for amusement. The only women to say "dear," the women who say it on the street.

In Chicago, not in New York, I found the United States. The word "settlement" gave me my first puzzled intimation that there was somewhere a clew to this grim struggle down town. I had looked for it in boarding-houses. I had looked for it in stenographic night-schools. I had sought it in the blotchy Sunday newspaper, in Coney Island, in long jaunts up the Palisades. I had looked for it among the street-walkers, the first to proffer intimacy. And of course, not being clever enough, I had overlooked it. But in Chicago, as I say, I came on it at home.

America dawned for me in a social settlement. It dawned for me as a civilization and a faith. In all my first experiences of my employers I got not one glimpse of American civilization. Theirs was the language of smartness, alertness, brightness, success, efficiency, and I tried to learn it, but it was a difficult and alien tongue. Some of them were lawyers, but they were interested in penmanship and ability to clean ink-bottles. Some of them were business men, but they were interested in ability to typewrite and to keep the petty cash. It was not their fault. Ours was not an affair of the heart. But if it had not been for the social settlement, I should still be an alien to the bone.

Till I knew a social settlement the American flag was still a flag on a circus-tent, a gay flag but cheap. The cheapness of the United States was the message of quick-lunch and the boarding-house, of vaudeville and Coney Island and the Sunday newspaper, of the promenade on Broadway. In the social settlement I came on something entirely different. Here on the ash-heap of Chicago was a blossom of something besides success. The house was saturated in the perfume of the stockyards, to make it sweet. A trolley-line ran by its bedroom windows, to make it musical. It was thronged with Jews and Greeks and Italians and soulful visitors, to make it restful. It was inhabited by high-strung residents, to make it easy. But it was the first place in all America where there came to me a sense of the intention of democracy, the first place where I found a flame by which the melting-pot melts. I heard queer words about it. The men, I learned, were mollycoddles, and the women were sexually unemployed. The ruling class spoke of "unsettlement workers" with animosity, the socialists of a mealy-mouthed compromise. Yet in that strange haven of clear humanitarian faith I discovered what I suppose I had been seeking--the knowledge that America had a soul.

How one discovers these things it is hard to put honestly. It is like trying to recall the first fair wind of spring. But I know that slowly and unconsciously the atmosphere of the settlement thawed out the asperity of alienism. There were Americans of many kinds in residence, from Illinois, from Michigan, from New York, English-Americans, Russian-Americans, Austrian-Americans, German-Americans, men who had gone to Princeton and Harvard, women spiritually lavendered in Bryn Mawr. The place bristled with hyphens. But the Americanism was of a kind that opened to the least pressure from without, and never shall I forget the way these residents with their "North Side" friends had managed so graciously to domesticate the annual festival of my own nationality. That, strange though it may seem, is the more real sort of Americanization Day.

From Walt Whitman, eventually, the naturalizing alien breathes in American air, but I doubt if I should have ever known the meaning of Walt Whitman had I not lived in that initiating home. It was easy in later years to see new meanings in the American flag, to stand with Ethiopia Saluting the Colors, but it was in the settlement I found the sources from which it was dyed. For there, to my amazement, one was not expected to believe that man's proper place is on a Procrustean bed of profiteering. A different tradition of America lived there, one in which the earlier faiths had come through, in which the way to heaven was not necessarily up a skyscraper. In New England, later, I found many ideas of which the settlement was symptomatic, but as I imbibed them they were "America" for me.

What it means to come at last into possession of Lincoln, whose spirit is so precious to the social settlement, is probably unintelligible to Lincoln's normal inheritors. To understand this, however, is to understand the birth of a loyalty. In the countries from which we come there have been men of such humane ideals, but they have almost without exception been men beyond the pale. The heroes of the peoples of Europe have not been the governors of Europe. They have been the spokesmen of the governed. But here among America's governors and statesmen was a simple authenticator of humane ideals. To inherit him becomes for the European not an abandonment of old loyalties, but a summary of them in a new. In the microcosm of the settlement perhaps Lincolnism is too simple. Many of one's promptest acquiescences are revised as one meets and eats with the ruling class later on. But the salt of this American soil is Lincoln. When one finds that, one is naturalized.

It is curious how the progress of naturalization becomes revealed to one. I still recollect with a thrill the first time I attended a national political convention and listened to the roll-call of the States. "Alabama! Arizona! Arkansas!" Empty names for many years, at last they were filled with one clear concept, the concept of the democratic experiment. "As I have walk'd in Alabama my morning walk"--the living appeal to each state by name recalled Whitman's generous amusing scope. "Far breath'd land! Arctic braced! Mexican breez'd! The diverse! The compact! The Pennsylvanian! The Virginian! The double Carolinian!" The orotund roll-call was not intended to evoke Whitman. It was intended, as it happened, to evoke votes for Taft and Sherman. But even these men were parts of the democratic experiment. And the vastly peopled hall answered for Walt Whitman, as the empurpled Penrose did not answer. It was they who were the leaves of our grass.

In Whitman, as William James has shown, there is an arrant mysticism which his own Democratic Vistas exposed in cold light. Yet into this credulity as to the virtue and possibilities of the people an alien is likely to enter if his first intimacy with America came in the aliens' creche. A settlement is a creche for the step-children of Europe, and it is hard not to credit America at large with some of the impulses which make the settlement. Such, at any rate, is the tendency I experienced myself.

With this tendency, what of loyalty to the United States? I think of Lincoln and his effected mysticism by Union, union for the experiment, and I feel alive within me a complete identification with this land. The keenest realization of the nation reached me, as I recall, the first time I saw the capitol in Washington. Quite unsuspecting I strolled up the hill from the station, just about midnight, the streets gleaming after a warm shower. The plaza in front of the capitol was deserted. A few high sentinel lamps threw a lonely light down the wet steps and scantily illumined the pillars. Darkness veiled the dome. Standing apart completely by myself, I felt as never before the union of which this strength and simplicity was the symbol. The quietude of the night, the scent of April pervading it, gave to the lonely building a dignity such as I had seldom felt before. It seemed to me to stand for a fine and achieved determination, for a purpose maintained, for a quiet faith in the peoples and states that lay away behind it to far horizons. Lincoln, I thought, had perhaps looked from those steps on such a night in April, and felt the same promise of spring.

SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT

One should not be ashamed to acknowledge the pursuit of the secret of life. That secret, however, is shockingly elusive. It is quite visible to me, somewhere in space. Like a ball swung before a kitten, it taunts my eye. Like a kitten I cannot help making a lunge after it. But tied to the ball there seems to be a mischievous invisible string. My eye fixes the secret of life but it escapes my paw.

During the Russo-Japanese War I thought I had it. It involved a great deal of stern discipline. Physically it meant giving up meat, Boston garters and cigarettes. It seemed largely composed of rice, hot baths followed by rolling in the snow and jiu jitsu. The art of jiu jitsu hinted at the very secret itself. Here was the crude West seeking to slug its way to mastery while the commonest Japanese had only to lay hold of life by the little finger to reduce it to squealing submission. The sinister power of jiu jitsu haunted me. Unless the West could learn it we were putty in Japanese hands. It was the acme of effortless subtlety. A people with such an art, combined with ennobling vegetarianism, must necessarily be a superior people. I privately believed that the Japanese had employed it in sinking the Russian fleet.

Thomas Alva Edison displaced jiu jitsu in my soul and supplanted it with a colossal contempt for sleep. An insincere contempt for food I already protested. No nation could hope to take the field that subsisted on heavy foods--such unclean things as sausages and beer. The secret of world mastery was a diet of rice. "We all eat too much" became a fixed conviction. But Mr. Edison forced a greater conviction--we all sleep too much as well. This thought had first come to me from Arnold Bennett. Sleep was a matter of habit, of bad habit. We sleep ourselves stupid. Who could not afford to lose a minute's sleep? Reduce sleep by a minute a day--who would miss it? And in 500 days you would have got down to the classical forty winks. Mr. Edison did not merely preach this gospel. He modestly indicated his own career to illustrate its successful practicability. To cut down sleep and cut down food was the only way to function like a superman.

Once started on this question of habits I spent a life of increasing turmoil. From Plato I heard the word moderation, but from William Blake I learned that "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." From Benjamin Franklin I gathered the importance of good habits, but William James gleefully told me to avoid all habits, even good ones. And then came Scientific Management.

The concept of scientific management practically wrecked my life. I discovered that there was a right way of doing everything and that I was doing everything wrongly. It was no new idea to me that we were all astray about the simplest things. We did not know how to breathe properly. We did not know how to sit properly. We did not know how to walk properly. We wore a hard hat: it was making us bald. We wore pointed shoes: it was unfair to our little toe. But scientific management did not dawdle over such details. It nonchalantly pointed out that "waste motions" were the chief characteristic of our lives.

One of the most fantastic persons in the world is the public official who, before he can write a postal order or a tax receipt, has to make preliminary curls of penmanship in the air. Observed by the scientific eye, we are much more fantastic ourselves. If our effective motions could be registered on a visual target, our record would be found to resemble that of savages who use ammunition without a sight on their guns. If we think that the ordinary soldier's marksmanship is wasteful, we may well look to ourselves. Our life is peppered with motions that fly wide and wild. It begins on awaking. We stretch our arms--waste motion! We ought to utilize that gesture for polishing our shoes. We rub our eyes--more foolishness. We should rub our eyes on Sunday for the rest of the week. But it is in processes like shaving that scientific management is really needed. Men flatter themselves that they shave with the minimum of gesture. They believe that they complete the operation under five minutes. But, excusing their inaccuracy, do they know that under the inspection of the scientific manager their performance would look as jagged as their razorblade under the microscope? The day will probably arrive when a superman will shave with one superb motion, as delightful to the soul as the uncoiling of an orange-skin in one long unbroken peel.