Part 4

We carried our luggage out at eight, and in a pushing crowd prepared to disembark. At 8.30 we were quick-marched out of the ship to the Customs Wharf and there ranged in six or seven long lines. All the officials were running and hustling, shouting out, "Come on!" "Hurry!" "Move along!" and clapping their hands. Our trunks were examined and chalk-marked on the run--no delving for diamonds--and then we were quick-marched further to a waiting ferry-boat. Here for the time being hustle ended. We waited three-quarters of an hour in the seatless ferry, and every one was anxiously speculating on the coming ordeal of medical and pocket examination. At a quarter to ten we steamed for Ellis Island. We were then marched to another ferry-boat, and expected to be transported somewhere else, but this second vessel was simply a floating waiting-room. We were crushed and almost suffocated upon it. A hot sun beat upon its wooden roof; the windows in the sides were fixed; we could not move an inch from the places where we were awkwardly standing, for the boxes and baskets were so thick about our feet; babies kept crying sadly, and irritated emigrants swore at the sound of them. All were thinking--"Shall I get through?" "Have I enough money?" "Shall I pass the doctor?" and for a whole hour, in the heat and noise and discomfort, we were kept thinking thus. At a quarter-past eleven we were released in detachments. Every twenty minutes each and every passenger picked up his luggage and tried to stampede through with the party, a lucky few would bolt past the officer in charge, and the rest would flood back with heart-broken desperate looks on their faces. Every time they failed to get included in the outgoing party the emigrants seemed to feel that they had lost their chance of a job, or that America was a failure, or their coming there a great mistake. At last, at a quarter-past twelve, it was my turn to rush out and find what Fate and America had in store for me.

Once more it was "Quick march!" and hurrying about with bags and baskets in our hands, we were put into lines. Then we slowly filed up to a doctor who turned our eyelids inside out with a metal instrument. Another doctor scanned faces and hands for skin diseases, and then we carried our ship-inspection cards to an official who stamped them. We passed into the vast hall of judgment, and were classified and put into lines again, this time according to our nationality. It was interesting to observe at the very threshold of the United States the mechanical obsession of the American people. This ranging and guiding and hurrying and sifting was like nothing so much as the screening of coal in a great breaker tower.

It is not good to be like a hurrying, bumping, wandering piece of coal being mechanically guided to the sacks of its type and size, but such is the lot of the immigrant at Ellis Island.

But we had now reached a point in the examination when we could rest. In our new lines we were marched into stalls, and were allowed to sit and look about us, and in comparative ease await the pleasure of officials. The hall of judgment was crowned by two immense American flags. The centre, and indeed the great body of the hall, was filled with immigrants in their stalls, a long series of classified third-class men and women. The walls of the hall were booking-offices, bank counters, inspectors' tables, stools of statisticians. Up above was a visitors' gallery where journalists and the curious might promenade and talk about the melting-pot, and America, "the refuge of the oppressed." Down below, among the clerks' offices, were exits; one gate led to Freedom and New York, another to quarantine, a third to the railway ferry, a fourth to the hospital and dining-room, to the place where unsuitable emigrants are imprisoned until there is a ship to take them back to their native land.

Somewhere also there was a place where marriages were solemnised. Engaged couples were there made man and wife before landing in New York. I was helping a girl who struggled with a huge basket, and a detective asked me if she were my sweetheart. If I could have said "Yes," as like as not we'd have been married off before we landed. America is extremely solicitous about the welfare of women, especially of poor unmarried women who come to her shores. So many women fall into the clutches of evil directly they land in the New World. The authorities generally refuse to admit a poor friendless girl, though there is a great demand for female labour all over the United States, and it is easy to get a place and earn an honest living.

It was a pathetic sight to see the doubtful men and women pass into the chamber where examination is prolonged, pathetic also to see the Russians and Poles empty their purses, exhibiting to men with good clothes and lasting "jobs" all the money they had in the world.

At half-past two I gave particulars of myself and showed the coin I had, and was passed.

"Have you ever been arrested?" asked the inspector.

Well, yes, I had. I was not disposed to lie. I had been arrested four or five times. In Russia you can't escape that.

"For a crime involving moral turpitude?" he went on.

"No, no."

"Have you got a job in America?" (This is a dangerous question; if you say 'Yes' you probably get sent back home; it is against American law to contract for foreign labour.)

I explained that I was a tramp.

This did not at all please the inspector. He would not accept that definition of my occupation, so he put me down as author.

"Are you an anarchist?"

"No."

"Are you willing to live in subordination to the laws of the United States?"

"Yes."

"Are you a polygamist?"

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"Do you believe a man may possess more than one wife at a time?"

"Certainly not."

"Have you any friends in New York?"

"Acquaintances, yes."

"Give me the address."

I gave him an address.

"How much money have you got?" ... "Show me, please!" ... And so on. I was let go.

At three in the afternoon I stood in another ferry-boat, and with a crowd of approved immigrants passed the City of New York. Success had melted most of us, and though we were terribly hungry, we had words and confidences for one another on that ferry-boat. We were ready to help one another to any extent in our power. That is what it feels like to have passed the Last Day and still believe in Heaven, to pass Ellis Island and still believe in America.

Two or three of us hastened to a restaurant. I sat down at a little table, and waited. So did the others, but we were making a mistake, for there were no waiters. We had as yet to learn the mechanism of a "Quick Lunch" shop; there was a certain procedure to be observed and followed, we must learn it if we wanted a dinner. I watched the first American citizen who came in, and did as he did. First I went to the cashier and got a paper slip on which were printed many numbers 5, 10, 15, 25, and so on in intervals of fives. These represented cents, and were so arranged for convenience in adding and for solid profit. At this restaurant nothing cost less than five cents (twopence halfpenny), and there were no intermediaries between five and ten, ten and fifteen, and so forth. The unit then was five cents, and not as in England two cents (one penny). Obviously this means enormous increase of takings in the long run. That five-cent unit is part of the foundation of American prosperity. I obtained my slip so numbered. Then I took a tray from a stack of trays and a glass from an array of glasses, a fork and a knife from the fork basket, and I went to the roast chicken counter and asked for roast chicken. A plate of hot roast chicken was put on my tray, and the white-hatted cook punched off twenty-five cents on my slip. I went to another counter and received a plate of bread and butter, and to yet another and sprinkled pepper and salt from the general sprinklers. I went and drew iced water. Then, like the slave of the lamp working for himself, I put the whole on my little table. When I had finished my first course I put my plate aside and took my tray to the cook and received a second, and when I had finished that I fetched my coffee.

"Well," thought I, looking round, "no waiters, that means no tips; there is not even a superfluous mendicant boy in charge of the swinging doors." So I began to learn that in America the working man pays no tips.

My companions at the other tables were getting through with their dinners and looking across at one another with congratulatory smiles. We would have sat together, but in this shop one table accommodated one customer only--an unsociable arrangement. I waited for them to finish, so that we could go out together.

Whilst doing so a man came up to me from another table and said very quietly:

"Just come over?"

"This morning," I replied.

He brightened up and asked:

"Looking for a job?"

"You don't mean to say I am being offered one already?" said I.

"That's about it, two dollars."

"Two dollars a day?"

"That's the idea."

"What's the work?"

"Brick-making."

It was brick-making up country for some Trust Company. I said I was staying in New York, couldn't go just yet. He might try my acquaintances. I pointed them out.

One of them, a Pole, said he would go. The contractor went out with us, and we accompanied him to his office. We took a street car. The fare was five cents, a "nickel," and it was necessary to put the coin in the slot of the conductor's money-box before entering. The conductor stood stiff, like an intelligent bit of machinery, and we were to him fares not humans. The five cents would take me to the other end of the city if I wished it, but there was no two-cent fare in case I wished to go a mile. That five-cent unit again!

We sat in the car and looked out of the windows, interested in every sight and sound. First we had glimpses of the East Side streets, all push-carts and barrows, like Sukhareva at Moscow. Then we saw the dark overhead railway and heard the first thunder of the Elevated train. We went up the Bowery, unlike any other street in the world; we noted that it was possible to get a room there for twenty cents a night. We stared curiously at the life-sized carved and painted Indians outside the cigar stores, and at the gay red-and-white stripe of the barbers' revolving poles.

We alighted just by a barber's shop. The agent showed us his office and told us to come in if we changed our minds and would like the job. There we left the Pole, and indeed saw him no more.

There were two others beside myself--a Russian and a Russian Jew. As the Jew and I both wanted a shave we all went into the barber's shop. We were still carrying our bags, and were rather a strange party to enter a shop together. But the barbers, a pleasant array of close-shaven smiling Italians, were not put out in the least. They were ready to shave any living thing. Their job was to shave and take the cash, and not to be amused at the appearance of the customers.

In America the barber's shop has a notice outside stating the number of barbers. If the number is high it is considerable recommendation. Then the briskly revolving pole suggests that it's your turn next and no waiting.

I was put into an immense, velvet-bottomed adjustable chair, my legs were steadied on a three-foot stand, and the barber turning a handle caused the back of the chair to collapse gently so that my head and body pointed towards the doorway like the cannon mouth. Then the shave commenced, and the barber twirled my head about and around as if it were on a revolving hinge. And how laborious he was! In America, quick lunch and slow shave; in England quick shave and slow lunch. And fifteen cents for a shave, and thirty-five for a hair-cut.

"That's a high price," said I.

"Union rate," said he. "We are now protected against the public."

The Jew, however, paid five cents less; he had bargained beforehand. He said it was the last cent he'd pay for a shave in that country; he'd buy a safety razor. The Russian smiled; he hadn't shaved yet, and didn't intend to, ever.

At this point the Jew parted company with us. He was going to find a friend of his in Stanton Street. The Russian and I made for a lodging-house in Third Avenue. At a place ticketed "Rooms by the day or month," we rang the bell, rang the bell and waited, rang again. We were to be initiated into another mystery of New York, the mechanical door, the door which has almost an intelligence of its own. Down came a German woman at last, and gave us a rare scolding. Why hadn't we turned the handle and come in? Why had we brought her down so many flights of stairs?

It appeared that by turning a handle in her room on the second floor she liberated the catch in the lock, and all the visitor had to do was to turn the handle and walk in.

"I heard a rattle in the lock," said I. "I wondered what it meant."

"How long've you been in America?" she asked.

"A few hours. We want rooms for a few days while we look about."

"Days? My lodgers take rooms for years. I haven't any one staying less than six months."

This was just "boosting" her rooms, but I didn't know. I took it for a good sign. If her tenants stayed long terms the place must be very clean. But it was only "boosting." Still the rooms looked decent, and we took them. They were the same price as similar rooms in the centre of London, ten shillings a week, but dearer than in Moscow where one would pay fifteen roubles (seven and a half dollars or thirty shillings) a month for such accommodation. The floors were carpeted, the sheets were white, there was a good bathroom for each four lodgers, no children, and all was quiet. Laundry was collected, there was no charge for the use of electric light, you received a latch-key on the deposit of twenty-five cents, and could come in any hour of the day or night. In signing the registration book I saw I was the only person of Anglo-Saxon name, all were Germans, Swedes, Italians, Russians. With British caution I hid a twenty-five dollar bill in the binding of one of the most insignificant of my books, so that if I were robbed of the contents of my pocket-book I should still have a stand-by. But my suspicions were begotten only of ignorance. My fellow-lodgers were all hard working, self-absorbed New Yorkers, who took no thought of their neighbours, either for good or evil.

III

THE PASSION OF AMERICA AND THE TRADITION OF BRITAIN

I came to America to see men and women and not simply bricks and mortar, to understand a national life rather than to moan over sooty cities and industrial wildernesses. Hundreds of thousands of healthy Europeans passed annually to America. I wanted to know what this asylum or refuge of our wanderers actually was, what was the life and hope it offered, what America was doing with her hands, what she was yearning for with her heart. I wished to know also what was her despair.

On my second day in New York I was deploring the sky-scraper, when a young American lifted her arms above her head in yearning and aspiration saying, "Have you seen the Woolworth Building? It is a bird's flight of stone right away up into the sky, it is higher and newer than anything else in New York, its cream-coloured walls are pure and undefiled. It is a commercial house, to be let to ten thousand business tenants. But it is like a cathedral; its foundations are on the earth, but its spire is up among the stars; if you go to it at sundown and look upward you will see the angels ascending and descending, and hear the murmur of Eternity about it."

I had always thought of the sky-scraper as a black grimy street-front that went up to an unearthly height, a Noah's Ark of sodden and smoky bricks. That is what a sky-scraper would tend to be in London. I had forgotten the drier, cleaner atmosphere of New York.

I went to see the Woolworth Building, and I found it something new. It was beautiful. It was even awe-inspiring.

In the evening I asked an American literary man whom I met at a club what he thought was the _raison d'être_ of the Woolworth; was it not simply the desire to build higher than all other houses--the wish to make a distinct commercial hit?

He "put me wise."

"First of all," said he, "New York is built on the little island of Manhattan. The island is all built over, and so, as we cannot expand outward we've got to build upward. Ground rent, too, has become so high that we must build high for economy's sake."

I remarked on the number of men who lost their lives in the building of sky-scrapers. "For every minute of the day there was a man injured in some town or other of the United States," so I had read in an evening paper.

He said the Americans were playing large, and must expect to lose a few men in the game. He expected the America of the future would justify all sacrifices made just now, and he gave me in the course of a long talk his view of the passion of America.

"The Woolworth Building is only an inadequate symbol of our faith," said he. "You British and the Germans and French are working on a different principle, you are playing the small game, and playing it well. You stake your efficiency on the perfection of details. In the German life, for instance, nothing is too small to be thought unmeriting of attention."

I told him the watchword of the old chess champion Steinitz, "I do not vant to vin a pawn; it is enough if I only veakens a pawn."

"You play chess?" said he, laughing. "That's it exactly. He did not care to sacrifice pieces; he was entirely on the defensive in his chess, eh? And in life he would be the same, hoarding his pennies and his dollars, and economising and saving. That's just how the American is different. He doesn't mind taking great risks; he is playing the large game, sacrificing small things, hurrying on, building, destroying, building again, conquering, dreaming. We are always selling out and re-investing. You are concentrating on yourselves as you are; we want to leave our old bodies and conditions behind and jump to a new humanity. If an American youth could inherit the whole world he would not care to improve it if he saw a chance of selling it to some one and getting something better."

"The spirit of business," I suggested.

"Call it what you will."

"But," said I, "does not this merely result in a town full of a hustling, mannerless crowd; trolley-cars dashing along at life-careless speed; a nation at work with loosely constructed machinery; callous indifference on the part of the living towards those whom they kill in their rush to the goal?"

My new acquaintance looked at me in a way that seemed to say "You--Britisher." He was a great enthusiast for his country, and I had been sent to him by friends in London who wanted me to get to the heart of America, and not simply have my teeth set on edge by the bitter rind.

"You think the end will justify the proceedings?" I added.

"Oh yes," he said. "You know we've only been fifty years on this job; there's nothing in modern America more than fifty years old. Think of what we've done in the time--clearing, building, engineering; think of the bridges we've built, the harbours, the canals, the great factories, the schools. We've been taxed to the last limit of physical strength, and only to put down the pavement and the gas-pipes so to speak, the things you found ready made for you when you were born, but which we had to lay on the prairie. We are only now beginning to look round and survey the foundations of civilisation. Still most of us are hurrying on, but the end will be worth the trials by the way; we

"Are whirling from heaven to heaven And less will be lost than won."

"But is it not a miserable, heartless struggle for the individual?" said I. "For instance, to judge by the story of _The Jungle_ I should gather that the lot of a Russian family come fresh to Chicago was terrible."

"Oh, you mustn't take Sinclair literally. He is a Socialist who wants to show that society, as it is at present constituted, is so bad that there is no hope except in revolution. There is heartbreak often, but the struggle is not heartless. It is amazingly full of hope. If you go into the worst of our slums you'll find the people hopeful, even in extremity. I've been across to London, and I never saw such hopeless-looking people as those who live in your East Ham and West Ham and Poplar and the rest of them."

"There is hope with us too," I protested. "The people in our slums are very rebellious, they look forward to the dictatorship of Will Thorne or George Lansbury."

"Ah well," my friend assented, "that's your kind of hope--rebelliousness, hatred of the splendid and safe machine. That's just it. We haven't your rebelliousness and quarrelsomeness. The new-come immigrant is always quarrelling with his neighbours. It is only after a while that America softens him and enriches his heart. The vastness of America, the abundance of its riches, is infectious; it makes the heart larger. The immigrant feels he has room, life is born in him."

"But," said I, "the great machine is here as in Europe. A man is known by his job here just as much as with us, isn't he? He is labelled and known, he fills a fixed place and has a definite rotation. Every man says to him 'I see what you are, I know what you are; you are just what I see and no more.' His neighbour takes him for granted thus. Out of that horrible taking-for-granted springs rebelliousness and hate of the great machine. You must be as rebellious as we are."

"No, no." My companion wouldn't have it. "We don't look at people that way in America. But you're right about looks. It's looks that make people hate. It's eyes that make them curse and swear and hate. Every day hundreds and thousands of eyes look at one. I think eyes have power to create. If thousands and thousands of people pass by a man and look at him with their eyes they almost change him into what they see. If in the course of years millions of eyes look at an individual and see in him just some little bolt in a great machine, then his tender human heart wants to turn into iron. The ego of that man has a forlorn and terrible battle to fight. He thinks he is fighting himself; he is really fighting the millions of creative eyes who by faith are changing flesh and blood into soulless machinery."

"And here?" I queried.

He laughed a moment, and then said seriously, "Here it is different. Here we are playing large. Oh, the dwarfing power, the power to make you mean, that the millions of eyes possess in a country that is playing the small game! They make you feel mean and little, and then you become mean. They kill your heart. Your dead little heart withdraws the human films and the tenderness and imaginativeness from your eyes, and you also begin to look out narrowly, dwarfingly, compellingly. You eye the people in the streets, in the cars, in the office, and they can't help becoming what you are."

"But some escape," said I.