第101章 PART FOURTH(9)
The Marches paid the charming prospects a willing duty,and rejoiced in it as generously as if it had been their own.Perhaps it was,they decided.He said people owned more things in common than they were apt to think;and they drew the consolations of proprietorship from the excellent management of Castle Garden,which they penetrated for a moment's glimpse of the huge rotunda,where the immigrants first set foot on our continent.It warmed their hearts,so easily moved to any cheap sympathy,to see the friendly care the nation took of these humble guests;they found it even pathetic to hear the proper authority calling out the names of such as had kin or acquaintance waiting there to meet them.No one appeared troubled or anxious;the officials had a conscientious civility;the government seemed to manage their welcome as well as a private company or corporation could have done.In fact,it was after the simple strangers had left the government care that March feared their woes might begin;and he would have liked the government to follow each of them to his home,wherever he meant to fix it within our borders.He made note of the looks of the licensed runners and touters waiting for the immigrants outside the government premises;he intended to work them up into a dramatic effect in some sketch,but they remained mere material in his memorandum-book,together with some quaint old houses on the Sixth Avenue road,which he had noticed on the way down.
On the way up,these were superseded in his regard by some hip-roof structures on the Ninth Avenue,which he thought more Dutch-looking.
The perspectives of the cross-streets toward the river were very lively,with their turmoil of trucks and cars and carts and hacks and foot passengers,ending in the chimneys and masts of shipping,and final gleams of dancing water.At a very noisy corner,clangorous with some sort of ironworking,he made his wife enjoy with him the quiet sarcasm of an inn that called itself the Home-like Hotel,and he speculated at fantastic length on the gentle associations of one who should have passed his youth under its roof.
III.
First and last,the Marches did a good deal of travel on the Elevated roads,which,he said,gave you such glimpses of material aspects in the city as some violent invasion of others'lives might afford in human nature.Once,when the impulse of adventure was very strong in them,they went quite the length of the West Side lines,and saw the city pushing its way by irregular advances into the country.Some spaces,probably held by the owners for that rise in value which the industry of others providentially gives to the land of the wise and good,it left vacant comparatively far down the road,and built up others at remoter points.It was a world of lofty apartment houses beyond the Park,springing up in isolated blocks,with stretches of invaded rusticity between,and here and there an old country-seat standing dusty in its budding vines with the ground before it in rocky upheaval for city foundations.But wherever it went or wherever it paused,New York gave its peculiar stamp;and the adventurers were amused to find One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street inchoately like Twenty-third Street and Fourteenth Street in its shops and shoppers.The butchers'shops and milliners'shops on the avenue might as well have been at Tenth as at One Hundredth Street.
The adventurers were not often so adventurous.They recognized that in their willingness to let their fancy range for them,and to let speculation do the work of inquiry,they were no longer young.Their point of view was singularly unchanged,and their impressions of New York remained the same that they had been fifteen years before:huge,noisy,ugly,kindly,it seemed to them now as it seemed then.The main difference was that they saw it more now as a life,and then they only regarded it as a spectacle;and March could not release himself from a sense of complicity with it,no matter what whimsical,or alien,or critical attitude he took.A sense of the striving and the suffering deeply possessed him;and this grew the more intense as he gained some knowledge of the forces at work-forces of pity,of destruction,of perdition,of salvation.He wandered about on Sunday not only through the streets,but into this tabernacle and that,as the spirit moved him,and listened to those who dealt with Christianity as a system of economics as well as a religion.He could not get his wife to go with him;she listened to his report of what he heard,and trembled;it all seemed fantastic and menacing.She lamented the literary peace,the intellectual refinement of the life they had left behind them;and he owned it was very pretty,but he said it was not life--it was death-in-life.She liked to hear him talk in that strain of virtuous self-denunciation,but she asked him,"Which of your prophets are you going to follow?"and he answered:"All-all!And a fresh one every Sunday."And so they got their laugh out of it at last,but with some sadness at heart,and with a dim consciousness that they had got their laugh out of too many things in life.