Part 6

What a sight was Delancey Street, with its five lines of naphtha-lit stalls, its array of tubs of fish and heaps of cranberries, its pavements slippery with scales, the air heavy with the odour of fish!

On one of the first of my nights out in the New York streets I came on a most wonderful sight. After prolonging a journey that started in the centre of the city I found myself suddenly plunging downward among dark and wretched streets. I was following out my zigzag plan, and came at last to a cul-de-sac. This was at the end of East Ninth Street. It was very dark and forbidding; there were no shops, only warehouses and yards. There were no people. I expected to find a new turning to the left, and was rather fearsome of taking it even should I find it. But at length I saw I had come to the East River. At the end of the street the water lapped against a wooden landing-stage, and there I saw a picture of wonder and mystery.

High over the glimmering water stood Brooklyn Bridge, with its long array of blazing electric torches and its procession of scores of little car-lights trickling past. The bridge hung from the high heaven by dark shadows. It was the brightest ornament of the night. I sat on an overturned barrow and looked out. Up to me and past me came stalking majestic ferry-boats, all lights and white or shadowy faces. Far away on the river lay anchored boats with red and green lights, and beyond all were the black silhouettes of the building and shipping on Long Island Shore.

* * * * * * *

It was interesting to me to participate in the Russian Easter in New York, having lived in the Protestant and Roman Catholic Easters a whole month before on the emigrant ship on the day we reached New York. I came to the diminutive Russian cathedral in East Ninety-Fifth Street on Easter Eve at midnight. I had been at a fancy-dress party in the evening, and as fortune would have it, had gone in Russian attire; that is, in a blue blouse like a Moscow workman. What was my astonishment to find myself the only person so dressed in the great throng of Russians surging in and out of the cathedral and the side street where the overflow of them talked and chattered. They were all in bowler hats, and wore collars and ties and American coats and waistcoats. They even looked askance at me for coming in a blouse; they thought I might be a Jew or a German, or a foolish spy trying to gain confidences.

I shall never forget the inside of the cathedral at one in the morning, the vociferous singing, the beshawled peasant girls, the tear-stained faces. Priest after priest came forward and praised the Orthodox Church and the Russian people, and appealed to the worshippers to remember that all over the Russian world the same service was being held, not only in the great cathedrals and monasteries, but in the village churches, in the far-away forest settlements, at the shrines in lonely Arctic islands, in the Siberian wildernesses, on the Urals, in the fastnesses of the Caucasus, on the Asian deserts, in Jerusalem itself. It was pathetic to hear the priests exhort these young men and women to remain Russians--they were all young, and they all or nearly all looked to America as their new home. On all ordinary occasions they longed to be Americans and to be called Americans; but this night a flood of feeling engulfed them, and in the New York night they set sail and looked hungrily to the East whence they came. They held tapers. They had tenderly brought their cakes, their chickens and joints of pork, to be sprinkled with holy water and blessed by the priest for their Easter _breakfast_. It was sad to surmise how few had really fasted through Lent, and yet to see how they clung to departing tradition.

Coming out of the cathedral we each received a verbose revolutionary circular printed in the Russian tongue: "Keep holy the First of May! Hail to the war of the Classes! Hurrah for Socialism! Workmen of all classes, combine!"--and so on. In Russia a person distributing such circulars would be rushed off to gaol at once. In New York it is different, and "influences" of all kinds are in full blast. I looked over the shoulders of many groups outside the cathedral on Easter Day and found them reading those New York rags, which are conceived in ignorance and dedicated to anarchism. It seems the Russian who comes to New York is at once grabbed by the existent Social-Democratic organisations, and though he go to church still, he begins to be more and more attached to revolutionism. It is strange that these organisations are directed, not against the Tsar and the officialdom of Russia, but against the Government of the United States and the commercial machine. There is no question of America being a refuge for the persecuted Russian. The latter is assured at once that America is a place of even worse tyranny than the land he has come from. But if he does not take other people's word he soon comes to that conclusion on his own account. For he finds himself and his brothers working like slaves and drinking themselves to death through sheer boredom, and he finds his sisters in the "sweat-shops" of the garment-workers, or loses them in houses of evil.

* * * * * * *

I shall long remember the Night Court on Sixth Avenue, and several occasions when I entered there after midnight and found the same shrewd, tireless Irish judge nonchalantly fining and sentencing negresses and white girls found in the streets under suspicious circumstances. Many a poor Russian girl was brought forward, and called upon to defend herself against the allegations of the soulless spies and secret agents of the American Police. I listened to their sobs and cries, their protests of innocence, their promises of repentance, till I was ready to rise in Court and rave aloud and shriek, and be pounced upon by the great fat pompous usher who represses even the expression on your features. "Why," I wanted to cry aloud, "it is America that ought to be tried, and not these innocent victims of America--they are the evidence of America's guilt and not the committers of her crimes!" But I was fixed in silence, like the reporters doing their jobs in the front bench, and the unmoved, hard-faced attendants and police by whom the order of the Court was kept.

Then, not far along the same road in which the Night Court stands, I came one evening into a wax-work show of venereal disease. It was quite by chance I went in, for there was nothing outside to indicate what was within. Only the spirit of adventure, which prompted me to go in and look round wherever I saw an open door, betrayed me to this chamber of horrors. There I saw, in pink and white and red, the human body in the loathsome inflammation and corruption of the city's disease. Chief of all I remember the queen of the establishment, a hypnotic-seeming corpse of wax, lying full-length in a shroud in a glass case. Just enough of the linen was held aside to show or suggest the terrible cause of her decease. The show was no more than a doctor's advertisement, and it was open in the name of science, but it was an unforgettable vision of death at the heart of this great city pulsating with life.

* * * * * * *

Then the splendour of Broadway, the great White Way, "calling moths from leagues, from hundreds of leagues," as O. Henry wrote. What a city of enchantment and wonder New York must seem to the traveller from some dreary Russian or Siberian town, if seen aright. It is a thrilling spectacle. Now that I have looked at it I say to myself, "Fancy any man having lived and died in this era without having seen it!" Five hundred years ago the island was dark and empty, with the serene stars shining over it; but now the creatures of the earth have found it and built this city on it, lit by a myriad lights. Thousands of years hence it will be dark again belike, and empty, and uninhabited, and once more the serene stars will shine over the island.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] In Russia the average wage of the shop-girl is 12 roubles a month (_i.e._, 1½ dollars, or 6s. a week), but then she is a humble creature and lives simply.

V

THE AMERICAN ROAD

Out in the country was a different America. The maples were all red, the first blush of the dawn of summer. In the gardens the ficacia was shooting her yellow arrows, in the woods the American dogwood tree was covered with white blossoms like thousands of little dolls' nightcaps. Down at Caldwell, New Jersey, I picked many violets and anemones--large blue fragrant violets. The bride's veil was in lovely wisps and armfuls of white. The unfolding oak turned all rose, like the peach tree in bloom. Each morning when I awakened and went out into the woods I found something new had happened overnight,--thus I discovered the sycamore in leaf, fringing and fanning, and then the veils which the naked birch trees were wearing. The birches began to look like maidens doing their hair. The fern fronds and azalea buds opened their hands. The chestnut tree lit up her many candles. The shaggy hickory, the tree giant whose bark hangs in rags and clots, had looked quite dead, but with the coming of May it was seen to be awaking tenderly. In the glades the little columbines put on their pink bonnets. Only the pines and cedars were dark and changeless, as if grown old in sin beside the tender innocence of the birches.

It is very pleasant living in the half-country--living, that is, in the outer suburbs of the great American city or in the ordinary suburbs of the small city. New York has very little corresponding to our Walthamstow, Enfield, Catford, Ilford, Camberwell, and all those dreary congested parishes that lie eight to ten miles from the centre of London. The American suburbs are garden cities without being called so. Each house is detached from its neighbour, there is a stretch of greenest lawn in front of it, there is a verandah on which are fixed hammocks and porch-swings, there are flower-beds, blossoming shrubs, the shade of maples and cherry trees. There are no railings or fences, and the people on the verandah look down their lawn to the road and take stock of all the people passing to and fro.

Working men and women live a long way out, and are content to spend an hour or an hour and a half a day in trains and cars if only to be quite free of the city when work is over.

Twelve miles of garden city is very wearisome to the pedestrian; but he tramps them gaily when he remembers that the country is ahead, and that he has not simply to retrace his footsteps to a town-dwelling which for the time being he calls home.

I set off for Chicago in the beginning of May--not in a Pullman car, but on my own feet; for in order to understand America it is necessary to go to America, and the only way she can be graciously approached is humbly, on one's feet. I travelled just in the same way as I have done the last four years in Russia--viz. with a knapsack on my back, a staff in my hand, and a stout pair of boots on my feet. I carried my pot, I had matches, and I reckoned to buy my own provisions as I went along, and to cook what was necessary over my own fire by the side of the road. At night I proposed to sleep at farmhouses in cold weather, and under the stars when it was warm. I was ready in mind and body for whatever might happen to me. If the farmers proved to be inhospitable, and would not take me in on cold or rainy nights, I would quite cheerfully tramp on till I came to a hotel, or a barn, or a cave, or a bridge, or any place where man, the wanderer, could reasonably find shelter from the elements.

I took the road with great spirits. There is something unusually invigorating in the American air. It is marvellously healthy and strength-giving, this virginal land. Every tree and shrub seems to have a full grasp of life, and outbreathes a robust joy. It is as if the earth itself had greater supplies of unexhausted strength than Europe has--as if, indeed, it were a newer world, and had spent less of the primeval potencies and energies bequeathed to this planet at her birth. How different from tranquil and melancholy Russia!

America is more spacious in New York State than in New York City. The landscape is so broad that could Atlas have held it up, you feel he must have had fine arms. Your eyes, but lately imprisoned so closely by unscalable sky-scrapers, run wild in freedom to traverse the long valleys and forested ridges, waking the imagination to realise the country of the Indians. There is a vast sky over you. The men and women on the road have time to talk to you, and the farmer ambling along in his buggy is interested to give you a lift and ask after your life and your fortunes; and when he puts you down, and you thank him, he answers in an old-fashioned way:

"You're welcome; hand on my heart."

In the city no one has a word to say to you, but in the country every one is curious. It is more neighbourly to be curious and to ask questions. I rejoiced in every scrap of talk, even in such triviality as my chat with Otto Friedrichs, a workman, who hailed me at East Berne.

"Are you an Amarikan?"

"No."

"Sprechen Sie deutsch, mein Herr?"

"No; I'm English."

"That bag on your back is made in Germany."

"Very likely," said I; "I bought it in London."

"You running avay in case dere should be ze war, eh?"

"Well, it would be safer here, even for you."

"What you think of our Kaiser?"

"Fine man," said I.

"Some say ze Kaiser is too English to make ze war. But do you know wat I read in ze newspaper? Der Kaiser cut his hand by accident, zen he hold up his finger--so, viz ze blood on it, and he say, 'Dat is my las' blood of English tropp,' and he ... the blood away."

Not knowing the word for "flicked" Otto told me in dumb show with his fingers.

"Last drop of English blood, eh?" said I.

"Yes."

"So he's quite German now, and ready to fight."

As I sat at the side of the road every passer-by was interested in my fire and my pot. They pitied me when they saw me trudging along the road, and when I told them I was tramping to Chicago they commonly exclaimed:

"Gee! I wouldn't do that for ten thousand dollars."

But when they saw me cooking my meals they stopped and looked at me wistfully--that was their weakness; a hankering, not after the wilderness, but for the manna there. They addressed to me such non-pertinent remarks as:

"So that's how you fix it."

"I say, you'll get burned up."

"Are yer making yer coffee?"

There was a great doubt as to my business, as the following interlocutions will suggest. In Russia I should be asked:

"Where are you going?"

"To Kieff," I might answer.

"To pray," the Russian would conclude. But in America I was most commonly taken to be a pedlar.

"Whar you going?"

"Chicago," I answered.

"Peddling?"

It astonished me to be taken for a pedlar. But I was almost as commonly taken to be walking for a wager. I was walking under certain conditions. I must not take a lift. I must keep up thirty miles a day. I was walking to Chicago on a bet. Some one had betted some one else I wouldn't do it in a certain time. I took only a dollar in my pocket and was supporting myself by my work. I lectured in schoolhouses, mended spades, would lend a hand in the hayfield. Or I was walking to advertise a certain sort of boot. Or I was walking on a certain sort of diet to advertise somebody's patent food. I was repairer of village telephones. I was hawking toothpicks, which I very cunningly made in my fire at the side of the road. I was a tramping juggler, and would give a show in the town next night.

Every one thought I accomplished a prodigious number of miles a day. At least a hundred times I was called upon to state what was my average "hike" for the day. Some were sympathetic and explained that they would like to do the same, to camp out, it was the only way to see America. A girl in a baker's shop told me she had long wanted to tramp to Chicago and sleep out every night, but could get no friend to accompany her. Jews slapped me on the back and told me I was doing fine. Especially I remember a young man who walked by my side through the streets of Wilkes Barre. He told me his average per day had been forty-five miles.

"How long did you keep that up?" I asked.

"A week, we went to Washington."

"That's going some," said I.

"How far do you usually go?" asked he.

"Oh, five or six miles when the weather's fine," said I.

"Yer kiddin us!"

I was told that I wasn't the only person on the road. The great Weston was behind me, patriarch of "hikers," aged seventy-five. He wore ice under his hat and was walking from New York to St. Paul at twenty-five miles a day, and was accompanied by an automobile full of liquid food. Far ahead of me was a woman in high-heeled boots tramping from New York to San Francisco. She carried only a small handbag, walked with incredible rapidity, and was proving for newspaper that it was just as easy to walk in Vienna boots as in any other. Several weeks before me a cripple had passed, wheeling a wheelbarrow full of picture-post-cards of himself, which he sold at a nickel each, thereby supporting himself. He was going from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, but had five years to do it in.

For all and sundry upon the road I had a ready smile and a greeting; almost every one replied to me at least as heartily, and many were ready to talk at length. Some, however, to whom I gave greeting either took me for a disreputable tramp or felt themselves too important in the sight of the Lord. When I said, "How d'ye do?" or "Good morning" they simply stared at me as if I were a cow that had mooed. In my whole journey I encountered no hostility whatever. Only once or twice I would hear a woman in a car say truculently to her husband, "There goes Weary Willie."

I had pleasant encounters innumerable, and many a talk with children. I felt that as I was in search for the emerging American, the American of to-morrow and the day after, I ought to take the children I met rather seriously. It was surprising to me that the grown-ups upon the road said to me always, "How-do?" but the children said, "Hullo." The children always spoke as if they had met me before, or as if they were dying for me to stop and talk to them and tell them all about the road, and who I was and what I was doing.

At a little place called Clarkville I had a breakfast party. Perhaps I had better begin at the beginning. It had been a hard frosty night, and I slept in a barn on two planks beside an old rusty reaping-machine. At five in the morning I made my first fire of the day, and I shared a pot of hot tea with a disreputable tramp, who had come to warm himself at the blaze. By seven o'clock I had walked into the next village, about five miles on, and I was ready for a second breakfast. My first had been for the purpose of getting warm; now I was hungry for something to eat.

It was a beautiful morning; on each side of the road were orchards in full bloom, the gnarled and angular apple trees were showing themselves lovely in myriad outbreaking of blossom, and there were thousands of dandelions in the rank green grass beneath them. The sides of the roadway and the banks of the village stream were deep in grass and clover, and every hollow of the world seemed brimming with sunshine. The sun had been radiant, and he stood over a shoulder of the Catskills and poured warmth on the whole Western world.

On the bank of the stream I spread out my things, emptying out of my pack, pots, cups, provisions, books, paper, pen, and ink. I gathered wisps of last year's weeds, and on a convenient spot started my little fire. I had just put eggs in to boil when the first of my party arrived. This was little Charles van Wie and his friend. Charles was hired to come early to the school-house and light the fire, so that the school would be warm by the time the teacher and the other boys and girls arrived. I did not know that I had pitched my camp just between the village and the school, on the way all the children would have to come. In America the school-house is always some distance from the village--this is so that mothers may not come running in and out every minute, and it is a good arrangement for other reasons. It gives every little boy and girl a walk, and the chance of having upon occasion extraordinary adventures.

Charles and his friend set to work to gather sticks for me, and saved me the trouble of rushing every now and then for fuel to keep up the fire. Then they hurried away to the school-house, but promised, excitedly, to come back as soon as they could.

Charles returned and asked me where I was going to, and what was my name and where I'd come from. I told him, and he took out a pocket-book and pencil and wrote all down.

Then other boys came and watched me make my coffee. The boys--they were all under twelve--had bunches of white lilac fixed in their coats. I sat and ate my food and chattered.

"Is the lilac for your teacher?" I asked of a boy.

"I guess _not_," he replied.

There was a look of disgust on his face.

"Is your teacher strict?"

"Some."

The boys all sat or sprawled on the grass and chaffed one another.

One of them was wearing a badge in his buttonhole, a white enamelled button, on which was printed very distinctly:

Every D A M Booster.

But the DAM, when you looked at it closely, turned out to be "Dayton's Adding Machines."

"What does 'booster' mean?" I asked.

"A feller that makes a job go," it was explained to me.

After breakfast I took a photograph of them sitting in the grass. They were much pleased.

"If Skinny Atlas had been here he'd have broke the camera," said one of them.

An extremely fat boy came into view and approached our party. The others all cried at him "Skinny Atlas," so I asked:

"Is that a nickname? Is his surname Atlas?"

"No," they replied, "his surname is Higgins. But he's so darned fat that we call him Skinny Atlas. We have a saying, 'Put a nickel in the slot and up comes Skinny Atlas.'"

Accordingly all the boys cried out, "Put a nickel in the slot and up comes Skinny Atlas."

The fat boy, wearing a big straw sun-bonnet, came up and walloped several little boys. There was some horseplay round the embers of my fire, but Charles van Wie set an example by giving warning--

"Next person who pushes me I baste."

But it was getting late, and three little girls who had been hovering shyly at a distance cried out that it was time for the boys to go in.

The school had only fifteen pupils, boys and girls together, and they were all in one class, and they learned "the three R's," physiology, and the geography of the county they lived in.

The making of an American citizen is a simple matter in the country. And little Charles van Wie would make one of the best that are turned out, I should think.

Later on in the morning I went along to the school-house and peeped in at the window. There they all were, under the stern sway of a little school-mistress. But they didn't see me.

How useful to the tramp is the custom of hanging in the school-room a map of the county or of the state in which the children live. Often when I have wanted to know where I was I have clambered to the school-house window and consulted the map on the wall.