Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

“Then, why do you think about it?”

  “I don’t. It thinks about itself. Do you know that poem of Longfellow’s, ‘The Challenge’?”

  “No, I never heard of it.”

  “Well, it begins in his sweet old way, about some Spanish king, who was killed before a city he was besieging, and one of his knights sallies out of the camp, and challenges the people of the city, the living and the dead, as traitors. Then the poet breaks off, apropos de rien:

  ‘There is a greater army

  That besets us round with strife,

  A numberless, starving army,

  At all the gates of life.

  The poverty-stricken millions

  Who challenge our wine and bread.

  And impeach us all for traitors,

  Both the living and the dead.

  And whenever I sit at the banquet,

  Where the feast and song are high,

  Amid the mirth and the music

  I can hear that fearful cry.

  And hollow and haggard faces

  Look into the lighted hall,

  And wasted hands are extended

  To catch the crumbs that fall.

  For within there is light and plenty,

  And odors fill the air;

  But without there is cold and darkness,

  And hunger and despair.

  And there, in the camp of famine,

  In wind and cold and rain,

  Christ, the great Lord of the Army,

  Lies dead upon the plain.’”

  “Ah,” said the facetious gentleman, “that is fine! We really forget how fine Longfellow was. It is so pleasant to hear you quoting poetry, Mrs. Strange. That sort of thing has almost gone out; and it’s a pity.”

  IX.

  New York, December 15, 1893.

  My dear Cyril:

  In answer to the inquiry in your last letter concerning the large shops here, I cannot say they are very attractive, and as I have told you, they are not so many as we have been led to suppose. There are, perhaps, fifty, at most, on Broadway and the different avenues. They are vast emporiums, sometimes occupying half a city-block, and multiplying their acreage of floor space by repeated stories, one above another, reached by elevators perpetually lifting and lowering the throngs of shoppers. But I do not find any principle of taste governing the arrangement of their multitudinous wares; and they have always a huddled and confused effect. I miss the precious and human quality of individuality in them. I meet no one who seems to have a personal interest in the goods or the customers; it is a dry and cold exchange of moneys and wares; and the process is made the more tedious by the checks used to keep the salesmen and saleswomen from robbing their employers. They take your money, but it must be sent with their written account and your purchase to a central bureau, where the account is audited and returned with your purchase, after a vexatious delay. But in the system of things here, fully a fifth of the people seem employed in watching that the rest do not steal, and fully a fifth of the time is lost.

  You have perhaps imagined these great stores like our Regionic bazaars, where we go with our government orders to supply our needs, or indulge our fancies. But they are not at all like these, except in their vastness and variety. I cannot say that there is no aim at beauty in their display, but the sordid motive of advertising running through it all destroys this. You are not pressed to buy, here, any more than with us, and the salespeople are not allowed to misrepresent the quality of the goods, for that would be bad business; but the affair is a purely business transaction. That friendly hospitality which our bazaars show all comers, and that cordial endeavor to seek out and satisfy their desires are wholly unknown here. What you experience is the working of a vast, very intricate, and rather clumsy money-making machine, with yourself as a part of the mechanism.

  For this reason I prefer the smaller shops where I can enter into some human relation with the merchant, if it is only for the moment. I have already tried to give you some notion of the multitude of these; and I must say now that they add much -in their infinite number and variety to such effect of gaiety as the city has. They are especially attractive at night, where, under favor of the prevailing dark, the shapeless monster is able to hide something of its deformity. Then the brilliant lamps, with the shadows they cast, unite to an effect of gaiety which the day will not allow.

  The great stores contribute nothing to this, however, for they all close at six o’clock in the evening. On the other hand, they do not mar such poor beauty as the place has with the multitude of signs that the minor traffic renders itself so offensive with. One sign, rather simple and unostentatious, suffices for a large store; a little store will want half a dozen, and will have them painted and hung all over its façade, and stood about in front of it as obtrusively as the police will permit. The effect is bizarre and grotesque beyond expression. If one thing in the business streets makes New York more hideous than another it is the signs, with their discordant colors, their infinite variety of tasteless shapes. If by chance there is any architectural beauty in a business edifice, it is spoiled, insulted, outraged by these huckstering appeals; while the prevailing unsightliness is emphasized and heightened by them. A vast, hulking, bare brick wall, rising six or seven stories above the neighboring buildings, you would think bad enough in all conscience: how, then, shall I give you any notion of the horror it becomes when its unlovely space is blocked out in a ground of white with a sign painted on it in black letters ten feet high?

  But you could not imagine the least offensive of the signs that deface American cities, where they seem trying to shout and shriek each other down, wherever one turns; they cover the fronts and sides and tops of the edifices; they deface the rocks of the meadows and the cliffs of the rivers; they stretch on long extents of fencing in the vacant suburban lands, and cover the roofs and sides of the barns. The darkness does not shield you from them, and by night the very sky is starred with the electric bulbs that spell out, on the roofs of the lofty city edifices, the frantic announcement of this or that business enterprise.

  The strangest part of all this is, no one finds it offensive, or at least no one says that it is offensive. It is, indeed, a necessary phase of the economic warfare in which this people live, for the most as unconsciously as people lived in feudal cities, while the nobles fought out their private quarrels in the midst of them. No one dares relax his vigilance or his activity in the commercial strife, and in the absence of any public opinion, or any public sentiment concerning them, it seems as if the signs might eventually hide the city. That would not be so bad if something could then be done to hide the signs.

  Nothing seems so characteristic of this city, after its architectural shapelessness, as the eating and drinking constantly going on in it. I do not mean, now, the eating and drinking in society alone, though from the fact that some sort of repast is made the occasion of nearly every social meeting, you might well suppose that society was altogether devoted to eating and drinking, and that this phase of the feasting might altogether occupy one. But I was thinking of the restaurants and hotels, of every kind and quality, and the innumerable saloons and bars. There may not be really more of them in New York, in proportion to the population than in other great plutocratic cities, but there are apparently more; for in this, as in all her other characteristics, New York is very open; her virtues and her vices, her luxury and her misery, are in plain sight, so that no one can fail of them; and I fancy that a famishing man must suffer peculiarly here from the spectacle of people everywhere visible at sumptuous tables.

  Many of the finest hotels, if not most of them, have their dining-rooms on the level of the street, and the windows, whether curtained or uncurtained, reveal the continual riot within. I confess that the effect upon some hungry passer is always so present to my imagination that I shun the places near the windows; but the Americans are so used to the perpetual encounter of famine and of surfeit in their civilization, that they do not seem to mind it; and one of them very
logically made me observe when he conceived my reluctance, that I was not relieving anybody’s want when I chose an uncomfortable place on the dark side of the room. It was, indeed, an instance of the unavailing self-denial so frequent here. Still, I prefer either the restaurants in the basements or on the second floor; and these are without number, too, though I do not think they are so many as the others; at least they do not make as much effect. But of every sort, as I say, there is an immense variety, because New York is so largely a city of strangers, whose pleasures or affairs call them here by whole populations. Every day the trains and boats fetch and carry hundreds of thousands of visitors, who must be somehow housed and fed, and who find shelter in the hotels, and food wherever they happen to be at the moment of lunch or dinner.

  But the restaurants have to cater besides to the far vaster custom of the business men who live at such a distance from their shops and offices that they never take the midday meal with their families except on Sunday. So far they are like the workingmen, whom you see seated on piles of rubbish in the street, with their dinner-pails between their knees; but I need not tell you that the business men are not so simple or so sparing in the satisfaction of their hunger. I am not sure that they are always much more comfortable; and in fine weather I think I would rather sit out doors on a heap of brick or lumber than on a bracketed stool-top before a lunch - counter amidst a turmoil of crockery and cookery that I should in vain try to give you a sense of. These lunch-counters abound everywhere, and thousands throng them every day, snatching the meat and drink pushed across the counter to them by the waiters from the semi-circle within, and then making room for others. But of late, a new kind of lunchroom has come into fashion, which I wish you could see, both for the sake of the curious spectacle it affords, and the philosophy it involves. You would find yourself in a long room, if you came with me, where you would see rows of large chairs, each with one arm made wide enough to hold a cup and saucer, and a plate. At a convenient place in the room is a counter or table, with cups for tea and coffee set out on it, and plates of pie, sandwiches, and such viands as need not be cut with a knife, and may be gathered up in the fingers. Each corner goes up to the counter, and takes from it what he likes and carries it off to some chair, where he eats his lunch in peace, and then goes back to the counter and pays for it. His word is implicitly taken as to what he has had; he goes as he came, without question; and the host finds his account in the transaction; for even if he is now and then cheated, he saves the cost of a troop of waiters by letting his guests serve themselves, and he is able for the same reason to afford his provisions at half the price they must pay elsewhere. His experience is that he is almost never cheated, and the Altrurian theory of human nature, that if you will use men fairly and trust them courageously, they will not betray you, finds practical endorsement in it.

  Most of the better class of clerks and small business men frequent the chop-houses, which affect the back rooms of old - fashioned dwellings, and the basement restaurants in the cellarways of business buildings, down town. Some of the lofty edifices which deform that quarter of the city have restaurants in them on a grand scale, as to prices and fare, and all the appointments of the table; these are for a still better sort of lunchers, or richer sort (you always say better when you mean richer, in America), and these often have lunch clubs, of difficult membership, and with rooms luxuriously appointed, where, if they choose, people can linger over their claret and cigars as quietly as if they were in their own houses. Sometimes a whole house is fitted up with all the comforts of a club, which is frequented by its members, or the greater part of them, only for luncheon. Others, of the kind which form effectively the home of their members, are resorted to at midday by all who do business within easy reach of them; though the breakfasting and dining goes on there, too, day in and day out, as constantly as at private houses. In fact, the chief use of the clubs is through their excellent kitchens.

  There are foreign restaurants in all parts of the town, — French, German, Italian, Spanish, — where you can have your lunch served in courses at a fixed sum for the whole. The Hebrews, who are so large and so prosperous an element of the commercial body of New York, have restaurants of this sort, where they incur no peril of pork, or meat of any kind that is not kosher. Signs in Hebrew give them warrant of the fact that nothing unclean, or that has been rendered unlawful by hanging from a nail, is served within; and the Christian, if he sits down at a table, is warned that he can have neither milk nor butter with his meat, since this is against their ancient and most wholesome law.

  Far round on the East side, and in all the poorer quarters of the town, there are eating-houses and cook-shops of lower and lower grade, which are resorted to by those workingmen who do not bring their dinners with them in pails, or who would rather take their drink and their food together. But these are seldom the older-fashioned laborers, of Irish or American descent; the frequenters of such places are Germans or Italians, or of the newer immigrations from eastern Europe, who find there some suggestions of their national dishes, and some touch of art in the cookery, no matter how common and vile the material. This, as you see it in the butcher-shops and the greengrocers of those parts, is often revolting and unwholesome enough — pieces of loathsome carnage, and bits of decaying vegetation. It is to be supposed that the poorer restaurants supply themselves from the superfluity of the better sort and of the hotels, but this is not always the case. In many cases, the hotels cast this into the great heap of offal, which the garbage carts of the city dump into the vessels used to carry it out to sea, so that not even the swine may eat of it, much less the thousands of hungering men and women and children, who never know what it is to have quite enough. But this is only one phase of the wilful waste that in manifold ways makes such woeful want in plutocratic conditions. Every comfortable family in this city throws away at every meal the sustenance of some other family; or, if not that then, so much at least as would keep it from starvation. The predatory instinct is very subtle, and people who live upon each other, instead of for each other, have shrewdly contrived profit within profit until it is hard to say whether many things you consume have any value in themselves at all. If they could be brought at once to the consumer they would cost infinitely little, almost nothing; but they reach him only after half a dozen sterile agencies have had their usury of them; and then they are most wonderfully, most wickedly wasted in the system of each household having its own black, noisy, unwholesome kitchen, with a cook in it chiefly skilled to spoil God’s gifts.

  From time to time, there is great talk in the newspapers of abolishing the middlemen, as the successive hucksters are called; but there is no way of doing this, short of abolishing the whole plutocratic system, for the middleman is the business man, and the business man is the cornerstone of this civilization; if, indeed, a civilization which seems poised in air by studying the trick of holding itself from the ground by the waistband, can be said to have any foundation whatever.

  There is not so much hope of the middleman’s going as there is of the individual kitchen’s, which really seems threatened, at times, by the different new ways of living which Mrs. Makely, you remember, told me of. It is, in fact, a survival of the simpler time when the housewife prepared the food of her family herself; but that time is long past, with the well-to-do Americans, and what was once the focal center of the home, has no longer any just place in it, and only forms the great rent through which half the husband’s earnings escape. Yet, if I tell them of our cooperative housekeeping, they make the answer which they seem to think serves all occasions, and say that such a system will do very well for Altruria, but that it is contrary to human nature, and it can never be made to work in America. They much prefer to go on wasting into the kitchen, and wasting out of it; the housewife either absolutely neglects her duty, or else she maddens herself with the care of it, and harries the poor drudge who slaves her life away in its heat and glare, and fails, with all her toil, of results which we have for a tithe
of the cost and suffering.

  But whenever I touch one of the points of economic contrast with ourselves, I feel as if I were giving it undue importance, for I think at once of a hundred others which seem to prove as conclusively that, as yet, the life of the Americans, in what most nearly concerns them, is not reasoned. They are where they are because some one else had arrived there before them, and they do most of the things that they do because the English do something like them. In a wholly different climate, a climate which touches both arctic and tropic extremes, they go on living as their ancestors lived in the equable seasons of the British Isles. They have not yet philosophized their food, or dress, or shelter, for their blazing summers, and swelter through them with such means of comfort as the ignorant usage of the mother-country provides.

  In fact, the Americans have completed their reductio ad absurdum in pleasure as well as in business. Eating and drinking no longer suffice to bring people together, and the ladies say that if you want any one to come now, you must have something special to entertain your guests. You must have somebody sing, or recite, or play; I believe it has not yet come to a demand for hired dancing, as it presently will, if it does in London. Only very primitive people would now think of giving an afternoon tea without some special feature, though the at-homes still flourish, as a means of paying off the debts ladies owe one another for visits. Luncheons and dinners are given with a frequency that would imply the greatest financial prosperity, and the gayest social feeling as well as unlimited leisure, and unbounded hospitality. But these must always have some raison d’étre, such as we do not dream of offering, who in our simplicity think it reason enough to ask our friends to join us at meat if we wish for their company. Here, apparently, no one wishes for your company personally, the individual is as completely lost in the social as he is in the economic scheme. You are invited as a factor in the problem which your hostess wishes to work out, and you are invited many days in advance, and sometimes several weeks; for every one is supposed to be in great request, and it is thought to be a sort of slight to bid a guest for any entertainment under a week, so that people excuse themselves for doing it.