Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells
Page 1522
“Come!” we said. “This is beginning to be something like.”
“In November,” our friend said, taking breath for a fresh spurt of praise, “there were a good many sympathetic afternoons which lent themselves to motor-bus progress up that magnificent avenue, and if you mounted to your place on top, about three o’clock, you looked up or down the long vista of blue air till it turned mirk at either vanishing-point under a sky of measureless cloudlessness. That dimness, almost smokiness at the closes of the prospect, was something unspeakably rich. It made me think, quite out of relation or relevance, of these nobly mystical lines of Keats:
‘His soul shall know the sadness of her night,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.’”
We closed our eyes in the attempt to grope after him. “Explain, O Howadji!”
“I would rather not, as you say when you can’t,” he replied. “But I will come down a little nearer earth, if you prefer. Short of those visionary distances there are features of the prospect either way in which I differently rejoice. One thing is the shining black roofs of the cabs, moving and pausing like processions of huge turtles up and down the street; obeying the gesture of the mid-stream policemen where they stand at the successive crossings to stay them, and floating with the coming and going tides as he drops his inhibitory hand and speeds them in the continuous current. That is, of course, something you get in greater quantity, though not such intense quality, in a London ‘block,’ but there is something more fluent, more mercurially impatient, in a New York street jam, which our nerves more vividly partake. Don’t ask me to explain! I would rather not!” he said, and we submitted.
He went on to what seemed an unjustifiable remove from the point. “Nothing has struck me so much, after a half-year’s absence, in this novel revelation of sublimity in New York, as the evident increase on the street crowds. The city seems to have grown a whole new population, and the means of traffic and transportation have been duplicated in response to the demand of the multiplying freights and feet.” Our friend laughed in self-derision, as he went on. “I remember when we first began to have the electric trolleys—”
“Trams, we believe you call them,” we insinuated.
“Not when I’m on this side,” he retorted, and he resumed: “I used to be afraid to cross the avenues where they ran. At certain junctions I particularly took my life in my hand, and my ‘courage in both hands.’ Where Sixth Avenue flows into Fifty-ninth Street, and at Sixth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, and at Dead Man’s Curve (he has long been resuscitated) on Fourteenth Street, I held my breath till I got over alive, and I blessed Heaven for my safe passage at Forty-second and Twenty-third streets, and at divers places on Third Avenue. Now I regard these interlacing iron currents with no more anxiety than I would so many purling brooks, with stepping-stones in them to keep my feet from the wet: they are like gentle eddies — soft, clear, slow tides — where one may pause in the midst at will, compared with the deadly expanses of Fifth Avenue, with their rush of all manner of vehicles over the smooth asphalt surface. There I stand long at the brink; I look for a policeman to guide and guard my steps; I crane my neck forward from my coign of vantage and count the cabs, the taxicabs, the carriages, the private automobiles, the motor-buses, the express-wagons, and calculate my chances. Then I shrink back. If it is a corner where there is no policeman to bank the tides up on either hand and lead me over, I wait for some bold, big team to make the transit of the avenue from the cross-street, and then in its lee I find my way to the other side. As for the trolleys, I now mock myself of them, as Thackeray’s Frenchmen were said to say in their peculiar English. (I wonder if they really did?) It is the taxicabs that now turn my heart to water. It is astonishing how they have multiplied — they have multiplied even beyond the ratio of our self-reduplicating population. There are so many already that this morning I read in my paper of a trolley-car striking a horse-cab! The reporter had written quite unconsciously, just as he used to write horseless carriage. Yes, the motor-cab is now the type, the norm, and the horse-cab is the — the — the — —”
He hesitated for the antithesis, and we proposed “Abnorm?”
“Say abnorm! It is hideous, but I don’t know that it is wrong. Where was I?”
“You had got quite away from the sublimity of New York, which upon the whole you seemed to attribute to the tall buildings along Fifth Avenue. We should like you to explain again why, if ‘The Heart of New York,’ with its sky-scrapers, made you think of scrap-iron, the Flatiron soothed your lacerated sensibilities?”
FIFTH AVENUE FROM THE TOP OF A MOTOR-BUS
“The Flatiron is an incident, an accent merely, in the mighty music of the Avenue, a happy discord that makes for harmony. It is no longer nefarious, or even mischievous, now the reporters have got done attributing a malign meteorological influence to it. I wish I could say as much for the white marble rocket presently soaring up from the east side of Madison Square, and sinking the beautiful reproduction of the Giralda tower in the Garden half-way into the ground. As I look at this pale yellowish brown imitation of the Seville original, it has a pathos which I might not make you feel. But I would rather not look away from Fifth Avenue at all. It is astonishing how that street has assumed and resumed all the larger and denser life of the other streets. Certain of the avenues, like Third and Sixth, remain immutably and characteristically noisy and ignoble; and Fifth Avenue has not reduced them to insignificance as it has Broadway. That is now a provincial High Street beside its lordlier compeer; but I remember when Broadway stormed and swarmed with busy life. Why, I remember the party-colored ‘buses which used to thunder up and down; and I can fancy some Rip Van Winkle of the interior returning to the remembered terrors and splendors of that mighty thoroughfare, and expecting to be killed at every crossing — I can fancy such a visitor looking round in wonder at the difference and asking the last decaying survivor of the famous Broadway Squad what they had done with Broadway from the Battery to Madison Square. Beyond that, to be sure, there is a mighty flare of electrics blazoning the virtues of the popular beers, whiskeys, and actresses, which might well mislead my elderly revisitor with the belief that Broadway was only taken in by day, and was set out again after dark in its pristine — I think pristine is the word; it used to be — glory. But even by night that special length of Broadway lacks the sublimity of Fifth Avenue, as I see it or imagine it from my motor-bus top. I knew Fifth Avenue in the Lincolnian period of brick and brownstone, when it had a quiet, exclusive beauty, the beauty of the unbroken sky-line and the regularity of facade which it has not yet got back, and may never get. You will get some notion of it still in Madison Avenue, say from Twenty-eighth to Forty-second streets, and perhaps you will think it was dull as well as proud. It is proud now, but it is certainly not dull. There is something of columnar majesty in the lofty flanks of these tall shops and hotels as you approach them, which makes you think of some capital decked for a national holiday. But in Fifth Avenue it is always holiday—”
“Enough of streets!” we cried, impatiently. “Now, what of men? What of that heterogeneity for which New York is famous, or infamous? You noticed the contrasting Celtic and Pelasgic tribes in Boston. What of them here, with all the tribes of Israel, lost and found, and the ‘sledded Polack,’ the Czech, the Hun, the German, the Gaul, the Gothic and Iberian Spaniard, and the swart stranger from our sister continent to the southward, and the islands of the seven seas, who so sorely outnumber us?”
Our friend smiled thoughtfully. “Why, that is very curious! Do you know that in Fifth Avenue the American type seems to have got back its old supremacy? It is as if no other would so well suit with that sublimity! I have not heard that race-suicide has been pronounced by the courts amenable to our wise State law against felo de se, but in the modern Fifth Avenue it is as if our stirp had suddenly reclaimed its old-time sovereignty. I don’t say that there are not other faces, other tongues than ours to be seen, heard, there; far from it! But I do say
it is a sense of the American face, the American tongue, which prevails. Once more, after long exile in the streets of our own metropolis, you find yourself in an American city. Your native features, your native accents, have returned in such force from abroad, or have thronged here in such multitude from the prospering Pittsburgs, Cincinnatis, Chicagos, St. Louises, and San Franciscos of the West, that you feel as much at home in Fifth Avenue as you would in Piccadilly, or in the Champs Elysées, or on the Pincian Hill. Yes, it is very curious.”
“Perhaps,” we suggested, after a moment’s reflection, “it isn’t true.”
X
CHEAPNESS OF THE COSTLIEST CITY ON EARTH
“One of my surprises on Getting Back,” the more or less imaginary interlocutor who had got back from Europe said in his latest visit to the Easy Chair, “is the cheapness of the means of living in New York.”
At this the Easy Chair certainly sat up. “Stay not a moment, Howadji,” we exclaimed, “in removing our deep-seated prepossession that New York is the most expensive place on the planet.”
But instead of instantly complying our friend fell into a smiling muse, from which he broke at last to say: “I have long been touched by the pathos of a fact which I believe is not yet generally known. Do you know yourself, with the searching knowledge which is called feeling it in your bones, that a good many Southerners and Southerly Westerners make this town their summer resort?” We intimated that want of penetrating statistics which we perceived would gratify him, and he went on. “They put up at our hotels which in the ‘anguish of the solstice’ they find invitingly vacant. As soon as they have registered the clerk recognizes them as Colonel, or Major, or Judge, but gives them the rooms which no amount of family or social prestige could command in the season, and there they stay, waking each day from unmosquitoed nights to iced-melon mornings, until a greater anguish is telegraphed forward by the Associated Press. Then they turn their keys in their doors, and flit to the neighboring Atlantic or the adjacent Catskills, till the solstice recovers a little, and then they return to their hotel and resume their life in the city, which they have almost to themselves, with its parks and drives and roof-gardens and vaudevilles, unelbowed by the three or four millions of natives whom we leave behind us when we go to Europe, or Newport, or Bar Harbor, or the Adirondacks. Sometimes they take furnished flats along the Park, and settle into a greater permanency than their hotel sojourn implies. They get the flats at about half the rent paid by the lessees who sublet them, but I call it pathetic that they should count it joy to come where we should think it misery to stay. Still, everything is comparative, and I suppose they are as reasonably happy in New York as I am in my London lodgings in the London season, where I sometimes stifle in a heat not so pure and clear as that I have fled from.”
“Very well,” we said, dryly, “you have established the fact that the Southerners come here for the summer and live in great luxury; but what has that to do with the cheapness of living in New York, which you began by boasting?”
“Ah, I was coming back to that,” the Howadji said, with a glow of inspiration. “I have been imagining, in the relation which you do not see, that New York can be made the inexpensive exile of its own children as it has been made the summer home of those sympathetic Southerners. If I can establish the fact of its potential cheapness, as I think I can, I shall deprive them of some reasons for going abroad, though I’m not sure they will thank me, when the reasons for Europe are growing fewer and fewer. Culture can now be acquired almost as advantageously here as there. Except for the ‘monuments,’ in which we include all ancient and modern masterpieces in the several arts, we have no excuse for going to Europe, and even in these masterpieces Europe is coming to us so increasingly in every manner of reproduction that we allege the monuments almost in vain. The very ruins of the past are now so accurately copied in various sorts of portable plasticity that we may know them here with nearly the same emotion as on their own ground. The education of their daughters which once availed with mothers willing to sacrifice themselves and their husbands to the common good, no longer avails. The daughters know the far better time they will have at home, and refuse to go, as far as daughters may, and in our civilization this, you know, is very far. But it was always held a prime reason and convincing argument that Dresden, Berlin, Paris, Rome, and even London, were so much cheaper than New York that it was a waste of money to stay at home.”
“Well, wasn’t it?” we impatiently demanded.
“I will not say, for I needn’t, as yet. There were always at the same time philosophers who contended that if we lived in those capitals as we lived at home, they would be dearer than New York. But what is really relevant is the question whether New York isn’t cheaper now.”
“We thought it had got past a question with you. We thought you began by saying that New York is cheaper.”
“I can’t believe I was so crude,” the Howadji returned, with a fine annoyance. “That is the conclusion you have characteristically jumped to without looking before you leap. I was going to approach the fact much more delicately, and I don’t know but what by your haste you have shattered my ideal of the conditions. But I’ll own that the great stumbling-block to my belief that the means of living in New York are cheaper than in the European capitals is that the house rents here are so incomparably higher than they are there. But I must distinguish and say that I mean flat-rents, for, oddly enough, flats are much dearer than houses. You can get a very pretty little house, in a fair quarter, with plenty of light and a good deal of sun, for two-thirds and sometimes one-half what you must pay for a flat with the same number of rooms, mostly dark or dim, and almost never sunny. Of course, a house is more expensive and more difficult to ‘run,’ but even with the cost of the greater service and of the furnace heat the rent does not reach that of a far less wholesome and commodious flat. There is one thing to be said in favor of a flat, however, and that is the women are in favor of it. The feminine instinct is averse to stairs; the sex likes to be safely housed against burglars, and when it must be left alone, it desires the security of neighbors, however strange the neighbors may be; it likes the authority of a janitor, the society of an elevator-boy. It hates a lower door, an area, an ash-barrel, and a back yard. But if it were willing to confront all these inconveniences, it is intimately, it is osseously, convinced that a house is not cheaper than a flat. As a matter of fact, neither a house nor a flat is cheap enough in New York to bear me out in my theory that New York is no more expensive than those Old World cities. To aid efficiently in my support I must invoke the prices of provisions, which I find, by inquiry at several markets on the better avenues, have reverted to the genial level of the earlier nineteen-hundreds, before the cattle combined with the trusts to send them up. I won’t prosily rehearse the quotations of beef, mutton, pork, poultry, and fish; they can be had at any dealer’s on demand; and they will be found less, on the whole, than in London, less than in Paris, less even than in Rome. They are greater no doubt than the prices in our large Western cities, but they are twenty per cent. less than the prices in Boston, and in the New England towns which hang upon Boston’s favor for their marketing. I do not know how or why it is that while we wicked New-Yorkers pay twenty-five cents for our beefsteak, these righteous Bostonians should have to pay thirty, for the same cut and quality. Here I give twenty-eight a pound for my Java coffee; in the summer I live near an otherwise delightful New Hampshire town where I must give thirty-eight. It is strange that the siftings of three kingdoms, as the Rev. Mr. Higginson called his fellow-Puritans, should have come in their great-grandchildren to a harder fate in this than the bran and shorts and middlings of such harvestings as the fields of Ireland and Italy, of Holland and Hungary, of Poland and Transylvania and Muscovy afford. Perhaps it is because those siftings have run to such a low percentage of the whole New England population that they must suffer, along with the refuse of the mills — the Mills of the Gods — abounding in our city and its dependencies.
“We know,” we derisively murmured. “So few of our visitors can afford it.”
“I can’t afford it myself,” our friend said. “But I save a little by breakfasting there, and lunching and dining elsewhere. Or, I did till the eggs got so bad that I had to go out for my breakfast, too. Now I get perfect eggs, of the day before, for half the price that the extortionate hens laying for the Universe exact for their last week’s product. At a very good Broadway hotel, which simple strangers from Europe think first class, I get a ‘combination’ breakfast of fresh eggs, fresh butter, and fresh rolls, with a pot of blameless Souchong or Ceylon tea, for thirty cents; if I plunge to the extent of a baked apple, I pay thirty-five. Do you remember what you last paid in Paris or Rome for coffee, rolls, and butter?”