March not to go near any
sort of crowd, under penalty of having her bring the children and
go with me.
sort of crowd, under penalty of having her bring the children and
go with me.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v13 - Her to Hux
All abroad burned the fierce white light of
the sun, in which not only the earth seemed to parch and thirst,
but the very air withered, and was faint and thin to the troubled
respiration. Their train was full of people who had come long
journeys from broiling cities of the West, and who were dusty
and ashen and reeking in the slumbers at which some of them
still vainly caught. On every one lay an awful languor. Here
and there stirred a fan, like the broken wing of a dying bird;
now and then a sweltering young mother shifted her hot baby
from one arm to another; after every station the desperate con-
ductor swung through the long aisle and punched the ticket,
which each passenger seemed to yield him with a tacit maledic-
tion; a suffering child hung about the empty tank, which could
only gasp out a cindery drop or two of ice-water. The wind
buffeted faintly at the windows; when the door was opened, the
clatter of rails struck through and through the car like a de-
moniac yell.
Yet when they arrived at the station by the ferry-side, they
seemed to have entered its stifling darkness from fresh and vig-
orous atmosphere, so close and dead and mixed with the carbonic
breath of the locomotives was the air of the place. The thin old
wooden walls that shut out the glare of the sun transmitted an
intensified warmth; the roof seemed to hover lower and lower,
and in its coal-smoked, raftery hollow to generate a heat deadlier
than that poured upon it from the skies.
In a convenient place in the station hung a thermometer,
before which every passenger, on going aboard the ferry-boat,
paused as at a shrine, and mutely paid his devotions. At the
altar of this fetich our friends also paused, and saw that the
mercury was above ninety; and, exulting with the pride that sav
ages take in the cruel might of their idols, bowed their souls to
the great god Heat.
On the boat they found a place where the breath of the
sea struck cool across their faces, and made them forget the
## p. 7662 (#476) ###########################################
7662
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
thermometer for the brief time of the transit. But presently
they drew near that strange irregular row of wooden buildings
and jutting piers which skirts the river on the New York side;
and before the boat's motion ceased the air grew thick and warm
again, and tainted with the foulness of the street on which the
buildings front. Upon this the boat's passengers issued, passing
up through the gangway, on one side of which a throng of
return passengers was pent by a gate of iron bars, like a herd
of wild animals. They were streaming with perspiration, and
according to their different temperaments had faces of deep crim-
son or deadly pallor.
"Now the question is, my dear," said Basil, when free of the
press they lingered for a moment in the shade outside, "whether
we had better walk up to Broadway, at an immediate sacrifice of
fibre, and get a stage there, or take one of these cars here and
be landed a little nearer, with half the exertion. By this route
we shall have sights and smells which the other can't offer us,
but whichever we take we shall be sorry. "
"Then I say take this," decided Isabel. "I want to be sorry
upon the easiest possible terms, this weather. "
They hailed the first car that passed, and got into it. Well
for them both if she could have exercised this philosophy with
regard to the whole day's business, or if she could have given
up her plans for it with the same resignation she had practiced
in regard to the day boat! It seems to me a proof of the small
advance our race has made in true wisdom, that we find it so
hard to give up doing anything we have meant to do. It matters
very little whether the affair is one of enjoyment or of business,
we feel the same bitter need of pursuing it to the end. The
mere fact of intention gives it a flavor of duty; and dutiolatry, as
one may call the devotion, has passed so deeply into our life that
we have scarcely a sense any more of the sweetness of even a
neglected pleasure. We will not taste the fine, guilty rapture
of a deliberate dereliction; the gentle sin of omission is all but
blotted from the calendar of our crimes. If I had been Colum-
bus, I should have thought twice before setting sail, when I was
quite ready to do so; and as for Plymouth Rock, I should have
sternly resisted the blandishments of those twin sirens, Starvation
and Cold, who beckoned the Puritans shoreward, and as soon as
ever I came into sight of their granite perch should have turned
back to England. But it is now too late to repair these errors;
## p. 7663 (#477) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7663
and so, on one of the hottest days of last year, behold my obdu-
rate bridal pair, in a Tenth or Twentieth Avenue horse-car, setting
forth upon the fulfillment of a series of intentions, any of which
had wiselier been left unaccomplished.
Isabel had said they
would call upon certain people in Fiftieth Street, and then shop
slowly down, ice-creaming and staging and variously cooling and
calming by the way, until they reached the ticket office on
Broadway, whence they could indefinitely betake themselves to
the steamboat an hour or two before her departure. She felt
that they had yielded sufficiently to circumstances and conditions.
already on this journey, and she was resolved that the present
half-day in New York should be the half-day of her original
design.
It was not the most advisable thing, as I have allowed; but it
was inevitable, and it afforded them a spectacle which is by no
means wanting in sublimity, and which is certainly unique,— the
spectacle of that great city on a hot day, defiant of the elements.
and prospering on, with every form of labor and at a terrible
cost of life. The man carrying the hod to the top of the walls,
that rankly grow and grow as from his life's blood, will only lay
down his load when he feels the mortal glare of the sun blaze
in upon heart and brain; the plethoric millionaire for whom he
toils will plot and plan in his office till he swoons at the desk;
the trembling beast must stagger forward while the flame-faced
tormentor on the box has strength to lash him on: in all those
vast palaces of commerce there are ceaseless sale and purchase,
packing and unpacking, lifting up and laying down, arriving and
departing loads; in thousands of shops is the unspared and
unsparing weariness of selling; in the street, filled by the hurry
and suffering of tens of thousands, is the weariness of buying.
Their afternoon's experience was something that Basil and
Isabel could, when it was past, look upon only as a kind of vis-
ion, magnificent at times, and at other times full of indignity and
pain. They seemed to have dreamed of a long horse-car pilgrim-
age through that squalid street by the river-side; where presently
they came to a market, opening upon the view hideous vistas of
carnage, and then into a wide avenue, with processions of cars
like their own coming and going up and down the centre of a
foolish and useless breadth, which made even the tall buildings
(rising gauntly up among the older houses of one or two stories)
on either hand look low, and let in the sun to bake the dust
## p. 7664 (#478) ###########################################
7664
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
that the hot breaths of wind caught up and sent swirling into
the shabby shops. Here they dreamed of the eternal demolition
and construction of the city, and farther on of vacant lots full of
granite bowlders, clambered over by goats. In their dream they
had fellow-passengers, whose sufferings made them odious, and
whom they were glad to leave behind when they alighted from
the car, and running out of the blaze of the avenue quenched
themselves in the shade of the cross street. A little strip of
shadow lay along the row of brown-stone fronts, but there were
intervals where the vacant lots cast no shadow.
With great
bestowal of thought they studied hopelessly how to avoid these
spaces, as if they had been difficult torrents or vast expanses
of desert sand; they crept slowly along till they came to such a
place, and dashed swiftly across it, and then, fainter than before,
moved on.
They seemed now and then to stand at doors, and to
be told that people were out, and again that they were in; and
they had a sense of cool dark parlors, and the airy rustling of
light-muslined ladies, of chat and of fans and ice-water, and then
they came forth again; and evermore
"The day increased from heat to heat. "
At last they were aware of an end of their visits, and of a
purpose to go down-town again, and of seeking the nearest car
by endless blocks of brown-stone fronts, which with their eter-
nal brown-stone flights of steps, and their handsome, intolerable
uniformity, oppressed them like a procession of houses trying
to pass a given point and never getting by. Upon these streets
there was seldom a soul to be seen; so that when their ringing
at a door had evoked answer, it had startled them with vague,
sad surprise. In the distance on either hand they could see cars
and carts and wagons toiling up and down the avenues, and on
the next intersecting pavement sometimes a laborer with his
jacket slung across his shoulder, or a dog that had plainly made
up his mind to go mad. Up to the time of their getting into
one of those phantasmal cars for the return down-townwards they
had kept up a show of talk in their wretched dream. They had
spoken of other hot days that they had known elsewhere; and
they had wondered that the tragical character of heat had been
so little recognized. They said that the daily New York murder
might even at that moment be somewhere taking place, and that
no murder of the whole homicidal year could have such proper
## p. 7665 (#479) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7665
circumstance; they morbidly wondered what that day's murder
would be, and in what swarming tenement-house, or den of the
assassin streets by the river-sides,- if indeed it did not befall in
some such high, close-shuttered, handsome dwelling as those they
passed, in whose twilight it would be so easy to strike down the
master, and leave him undiscovered and unmourned by the fam-
ily ignorantly absent at the mountains or the seaside. They
conjectured of the horror of midsummer battles, and pictured the
anguish of shipwrecked men upon a tropical coast, and the grimy
misery of stevedores unloading shiny cargoes of anthracite coal
at city docks. But now at last, as they took seats opposite one
another in the crowded car, they seemed to have drifted infinite
distances and long epochs asunder. They looked hopelessly across
the intervening gulf, and mutely questioned when it was and
from what far city they or some remote ancestors of theirs had
set forth upon a wedding journey. They bade each other a tacit
farewell, and with patient, pathetic faces awaited the end of the
world.
When they alighted, they took their way up through one of
the streets of the great wholesale businesses, to Broadway. On
this street was a throng of trucks and wagons lading and unlad-
ing; bales and boxes rose and sank by pulleys overhead; the
footway was a labyrinth of packages of every shape and size:
there was no flagging of the pitiless energy that moved all
forward, no sign of how heavy a weight lay on it, save in the
reeking faces of its helpless instruments. But when the wedding-
journeyers emerged upon Broadway, the other passages and inci-
dents of their dream faded before the superior fantasticality of
the spectacle. It was four o'clock, the deadliest hour of the
deadly summer day. The spiritless air seemed to have a quality
of blackness in it, as if filled with the gloom of low-hovering
wings. One half the street lay in shadow, and one half in sun;
but the sunshine itself was dim, as if a heat greater than its own
had smitten it with languor. Little gusts of sick, warm wind
blew across the great avenue at the corners of the intersecting
streets. In the upward distance, at which the journeyers looked,
the loftier roofs and steeples lifted themselves dim out of the
livid atmosphere, and far up and down the length of the street
swept a stream of tormented life. All sorts of wheeled things
thronged it, conspicuous among which rolled and jarred the gaud-
ily painted stages, with quivering horses driven each by a man
XIII-480
## p. 7666 (#480) ###########################################
7666
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
It
who sat in the shade of a branching white umbrella, and suffered
with a moody truculence of aspect, and as if he harbored the bit-
terness of death in his heart for the crowding passengers within,
when one of them pulled the strap about his legs and sum-
moned him to halt. Most of the foot passengers kept to the
shady side; and to the unaccustomed eyes of the strangers they
were not less in number than at any other time, though there
were fewer women among them. Indomitably resolute of soul,
they held their course with the swift pace of custom, and only
here and there they showed the effect of the heat.
One man,
collarless, with waistcoat unbuttoned and hat set far back from
his forehead, waved a fan before his death-white flabby face, and
set down one foot after the other with the heaviness of a som-
nambulist. Another, as they passed him, was saying huskily to
the friend at his side, "I can't stand this much longer. My
hands tingle as if they had gone to sleep; my heart—" But
still the multitude hurried on, passing, repassing, encountering,
evading, vanishing into shop-doors and emerging from them, dis-
persing down the side streets and swarming out of them.
was a scene that possessed the beholder with singular fascination,
and in its effect of universal lunacy it might well have seemed
the last phase of a world presently to be destroyed. They who
were in it but not of it, as they fancied,- though there was no
reason for this,-looked on it amazed; and at last, their own
errands being accomplished, and themselves so far cured of the
madness of purpose, they cried with one voice that it was a hid-
eous sight, and strove to take refuge from it in the nearest place
where the soda fountain sparkled. It was a vain desire. At the
front door of the apothecary's hung a thermometer, and as they
entered they heard the next comer cry out, with a maniacal pride
in the affliction laid upon mankind, "Ninety-seven degrees! "
Behind them at the door there poured in a ceaseless stream of
people, each pausing at the shrine of heat before he tossed off
the hissing draught that two pale, close-clipped boys served them
from either side of the fountain. Then in the order of their
coming they issued through another door upon the side street;
each, as he disappeared, turning his face half round, and casting
a casual glance upon a little group near another counter. The
group was of a very patient, half frightened, half puzzled looking
gentleman who sat perfectly still on a stool, and of a lady who
stood beside him, rubbing all over his head a handkerchief full
## p. 7667 (#481) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7667
of pounded ice, and easing one hand with the other when the
first became tired. Basil drank his soda and paused to look
upon this group, which he felt would commend itself to realistic
sculpture as eminently characteristic of the local life, and as "The
Sunstroke" would sell enormously in the hot season.
« Better
take a little more of that," the apothecary said, looking up from
his prescription, and at the organized sympathy of the seemingly
indifferent crowd smiling very kindly at his patient, who there-
upon tasted something in the glass he held. "Do you still feel
like fainting? " asked the humane authority. "Slightly, now and
then," answered the other; "but I'm hanging on hard to the
bottom curve of that icicled S on your soda fountain, and I feel
that I'm all right as long as I can see that. The people get
rather hazy occasionally, and have no features to speak of. But
I don't know that I look very impressive myself," he added, in
the jesting mood which seems the natural condition of Ameri-
cans in the face of all embarrassments.
"Oh, you'll do! " the apothecary answered with a laugh; but
he said, in answer to an anxious question from the lady, "He
mustn't be moved for an hour yet," and gayly pestled away at a
prescription, while she resumed her office of grinding the pounded
ice round and round upon her husband's skull. Isabel offered
her the commiseration of friendly words, and of looks kinder yet;
and then, seeing that they could do nothing, she and Basil fell
into the endless procession, and passed out of the side door.
"What a shocking thing! " she whispered. "Did you see how
all the people looked, one after another, so indifferently at that
couple, and evidently forgot them the next instant?
It was
dreadful. I shouldn't like to have you sunstruck in New York. ”
"That's very considerate of you; but place for place, if any
accident must happen to me among strangers, I think I should
prefer to have it in New York. The biggest place is always the
kindest as well as the cruelest place. Amongst the thousands of
spectators the good Samaritan as well as the Levite would be
sure to be. As for a sunstroke, it requires peculiar gifts. But
if you compel me to a choice in the matter, then I say, give
me the busiest part of Broadway for a sunstroke. There is such
experience of calamity there that you could hardly fall the first
victim to any misfortune. Probably the gentleman at the apothe-
cary's was merely exhausted by the heat, and ran in there for
revival. The apothecary has a case of the kind on his hands
## p. 7668 (#482) ###########################################
7668
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
every blazing afternoon, and knows just what to do. The crowd
may be a little ennuyé of sunstrokes, and to that degree indif-
ferent; but they most likely know that they can only do harm by
an expression of sympathy, and so they delegate their pity as
they have delegated their helpfulness, to the proper authority, and
go about their business. If a man was overcome in the middle
of a village street, the blundering country druggist wouldn't know
what to do, and the tender-hearted people would crowd about so
that no breath of air could reach the victim. "
"Maybe so, dear," said the wife pensively; "but if anything
did happen to you in New York, I should like to have the spec-
tators look as if they saw a human being in trouble. Perhaps
I'm a little exacting. "
"I think you are.
Nothing is so hard as to understand that
there are human beings in this world besides one's self and
one's set. But let us be selfishly thankful that it isn't you and
I there in the apothecary's shop, as it might very well be; and
let us get to the boat as soon as we can, and end this horrible
midsummer-day's dream. We must have a carriage," he added
with a tardy wisdom, hailing an empty hack, "as we ought to
have had all day; though I'm not sorry, now the worst's over, to
have seen the worst. "
THE STREET-CAR STRIKE
From A Hazard of New Fortunes. Copyright 1889, by W. D. Howells
THE
HE tide of his confused and aimless revery had carried him
far down-town, he thought; but when he looked up from it
to see where he was, he found himself on Sixth Avenue,
only a little below Thirty-ninth Street, very hot and blown,-
that idiotic fur overcoat was stifling. He could not possibly walk
down to Eleventh; he did not want to walk even to the Elevated
station at Thirty-fourth; he stopped at the corner to wait for a
surface car, and fell again into his bitter fancies. After a while
he roused himself and looked up the track, but there was no car
coming. He found himself beside a policeman, who was lazily
swinging his club by its thong from his wrist.
"When do you suppose a car will be along? " he asked, rather
in a general sarcasm of the absence of the cars than in any spe-
cial belief that the policeman could tell him.
## p. 7669 (#483) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7669
The policeman waited to discharge his tobacco juice into the
gutter. "In about a week," he said, nonchalantly.
"What's the matter? " asked Beaton, wondering what the joke
could be.
"Strike," said the policeman. His interest in Beaton's ig-
norance seemed to overcome his contempt of it. "Knocked off
everywhere this morning except Third Avenue and one or two
cross-town lines. " He spat again, and kept his bulk at its
incline over the gutter to glance at a group of men on the cor-
ner below. They were neatly dressed, and looked like something
better than workingmen, and they had a holiday air of being in
their best clothes.
"Some of the strikers? " asked Beaton.
The policeman nodded.
"Any trouble yet? "
"There won't be any trouble till we begin to move the cars,"
said the policeman.
Beaton felt a sudden turn of his rage toward the men whose
action would now force him to walk five blocks and mount the
stairs of the Elevated station. "If you'd take out eight or ten of
those fellows," he said ferociously, "and set them up against a
wall and shoot them, you'd save a great deal of bother. "
"I guess we shan't have to shoot much," said the policeman,
still swinging his locust. "Anyway, we shan't begin it. If it
comes to a fight, though," he said, with a look at the men under
the scooping rim of his helmet, "we can drive the whole six
thousand of 'em into the East River without pullin' a trigger. "
"Are there six thousand in it? "
« About. "
"What do the infernal fools expect to live on? "
"The interest of their money, I suppose," said the officer, with
a grin of satisfaction in his irony. "It's got to run its course.
Then they'll come back with their heads tied up and their tails
between their legs, and plead to be taken on again. "
"If I was a manager of the roads," said Beaton, thinking of
how much he was already inconvenienced by the strike, and ob-
scurely connecting it as one of the series with the wrongs he had
suffered at the hands of Mrs. Horn and Mrs. Mandel, "I would
see them starve before I'd take them back-every one of them. "
"Well," said the policeman, impartially, as a man might whom
the companies allowed to ride free, but who had made friends.
## p. 7670 (#484) ###########################################
7670
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
with a good many drivers and conductors in the course of his
free riding, "I guess that's what the roads would like to do if
they could; but the men are too many for them, and there ain't
enough other men to take their places. "
"No matter," said Beaton, severely. "They can bring in men
from other places. "
"Oh, they'll do that fast enough," said the policeman.
A man came out of the saloon on the corner where the strik-
ers were standing, noisy drunk, and they began, as they would
have said, to have some fun with him. The policeman left Bea-
ton, and sauntered slowly down toward the group as if in the
natural course of an afternoon ramble. On the other side of
the street Beaton could see another officer sauntering up from
the block below. Looking up and down the avenue, so silent of
its horse-car bells, he saw a policeman at every corner. It was
rather impressive.
THE strike made a good deal of talk in the office of Every
Other Week - that is, it made Fulkerson talk a good deal. He
congratulated himself that he was not personally incommoded by
it, like some of the fellows who lived up-town and had not every-
thing under one roof, as it were. He enjoyed the excitement of
it, and he kept the office-boy running out to buy the extras
which the newsmen came crying through the street almost every
hour with a lamentable, unintelligible noise. He read not only
the latest intelligence of the strike, but the editorial comments
on it, which praised the firm attitude of both parties, and the
admirable measures taken by the police to preserve order. Ful-
kerson enjoyed the interviews with the police captains and the
leaders of the strike; he equally enjoyed the attempts of the
reporters to interview the road managers, which were so graphi-
cally detailed, and with such a fine feeling for the right use of
scare-heads, as to have almost the value of direct expression from
them, though it seemed that they had resolutely refused to speak.
He said, at second-hand from the papers, that if the men behaved
themselves and respected the rights of property, they would
have public sympathy with them every time; but just as soon as
they began to interfere with the roads' right to manage their
own affairs in their own way, they must be put down with an
iron hand: the phrase "iron hand" did Fulkerson almost as much
## p. 7671 (#485) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7671
good as if it had never been used before. News began to come
of fighting between the police and the strikers when the roads
tried to move their cars with men imported from Philadelphia,
and then Fulkerson rejoiced at the splendid courage of the police.
At the same time he believed what the strikers said, and that
the trouble was not made by them, but by gangs of roughs act-
ing without their approval.
In this juncture he was relieved by the arrival of the State
Board of Arbitration, which took up its quarters with a great
many scare-heads, at one of the principal hotels, and invited the
roads and the strikers to lay the matter in dispute before them;
he said that now we should see the working of the greatest piece
of social machinery in modern times. But it appeared to work
only in the alacrity of the strikers to submit their grievance.
The roads were as one road in declaring that there was nothing
to arbitrate, and that they were merely asserting their right to
manage their own affairs in their own way. One of the presi-
dents was reported to have told a member of the Board, who per-
sonally summoned him, to get out and to go about his business.
Then, to Fulkerson's extreme disappointment, the august tri-
bunal, acting on behalf of the sovereign people in the interest
of peace, declared itself powerless and got out, and would no
doubt have gone about its business if it had had any. Fulker-
son did not know what to say, perhaps because the extras did
not; but March laughed at this result.
"It's a good deal like the military manœuvre of the King of
France and his forty thousand men.
suppose somebody told
him at the top of the hill that there was nothing to arbitrate,
and to get out and go about his business, and that was the rea-
son he marched down after he had marched up with all that
ceremony. What amuses me is to find that in an affair of this
kind the roads have rights and the strikers have rights, but the
public has no rights at all. The roads and the strikers are
allowed to fight out a private war in our midst, as thoroughly
and precisely a private war as any we despise the Middle Ages
for having tolerated, as any street war in Florence or Verona,-
and to fight it out at our pains and expense; and we stand by
like sheep and wait till they get tired. It's a funny attitude for
a city of fifteen hundred thousand inhabitants. "
"What would you do? " asked Fulkerson, a good deal daunted
by this view of the case.
―――
――
## p. 7672 (#486) ###########################################
7672
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
"Do? Nothing. Hasn't the State Board of Arbitration de-
clared itself powerless? We have no hold upon the strikers; and
we're so used to being snubbed and disobliged by common car-
riers that we have forgotten our hold on the roads, and always
allow them to manage their own affairs in their own way, quite
as if we had nothing to do with them, and they owed us no serv-
ices in return for their privileges. "
"That's a good deal so," said Fulkerson, disordering his hair.
"Well, it's nuts for the Colonel nowadays. He says if he was
boss of this town he would seize the roads on behalf of the peo-
ple, and man 'em with policemen, and run 'em till the managers
had come to terms with the strikers; and he'd do that every time
there was a strike. "
"Doesn't that rather savor of the paternalism he condemned
in Lindau? " asked March.
"I don't know. It savors of horse-sense. "
"You are pretty far gone, Fulkerson. I thought you were the
most engaged man I ever saw; but I guess you're more father-
in-lawed. And before you're married too. "
"Well, the Colonel's a glorious old fellow, March. I wish he
had the power to do that thing, just for the fun of looking on
while he waltzed in. He's on the keen jump from morning till
night, and he's up late and early to see the row. I'm afraid he'll
get shot at some of the fights; he sees them all: I can't get any
show at them; haven't seen a brickbat shied or a club swung
yet. Have you? "
“No: I find I can philosophize the situation about as well
from the papers, and that's what I really want to do, I suppose.
Besides, I'm solemnly pledged by Mrs.
March not to go near any
sort of crowd, under penalty of having her bring the children and
go with me. Her theory is that we must all die together; the
children haven't been at school since the strike began. There's
no precaution that Mrs. March hasn't used. She watches me
whenever I go out, and sees that I start straight for this office. "
Fulkerson laughed, and said, "Well, it's probably the only
thing that's saved your life. Have you seen anything of Beaton
lately? "
"No. You don't mean to say he's killed! "
«< Not if he knows it. But I don't know- What do you say,
March? What's the reason you couldn't get us up a paper on
the strike? ”
-
## p. 7673 (#487) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7673
"I knew it would fetch round to Every Other Week some-
how. "
"No, but seriously. There'll be plenty of newspaper accounts.
But you could treat it in the historical spirit-like something
that happened several centuries ago; Defoe's 'Plague of London'
style. Heigh? What made me think of it was Beaton. If I
could get hold of him, you two could go round together and take
down its æsthetic aspects. It's a big thing, March, this strike is.
I tell you it's imposing to have a private war, as you say, fought
out this way, in the heart of New York, and New York not
minding it a bit. See? Might take that view of it.
With your
descriptions and Beaton's sketches-well, it would be just the
greatest card! Come! What do you say? "
"Will you undertake to make it right with Mrs. March if I'm
killed, and she and the children are not killed with me?
>>
"Well, it would be difficult. I wonder how it would do to get
Kendricks to do the literary part? "
"I've no doubt he'd jump at the chance. I've yet to see
the form of literature that Kendricks wouldn't lay down his life
for. "
"Say! " March perceived that Fulkerson was about to vent
another inspiration, and smiled patiently. "Look here! What's
the reason we couldn't get one of the strikers to write it up for
us ? »
"Might have a symposium of strikers and presidents," March
suggested.
"No: I'm in earnest. They say some of those fellows-
especially the foreigners-are educated men. I know one fellow,
a Bohemian, that used to edit a Bohemian newspaper here. He
could write it out in his kind of Dutch, and we could get Lin-
dau to translate it. "
"I guess not," said March, dryly.
"Why not? He'd do it for the cause, wouldn't he? Suppose
you put it up on him, the next time you see him. "
"I don't see Lindau any more," said March. He added, "I
guess he's renounced me along with Mr. Dryfoos's money. "
"Pshaw! You don't mean he hasn't been round since? "
"He came for a while, but he's left off coming now. -I don't
feel particularly gay about it," March said, with some resentment
of Fulkerson's grin. "He's left me in debt to him for lessons to
the children. "
## p. 7674 (#488) ###########################################
7674
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
Fulkerson laughed out.
"Well, he is the greatest old fool!
Who'd 'a' thought he'd 'a' been in earnest with those 'brincibles'
of his ? But I suppose there have to be just such cranks; it
takes all kinds to make a world. "
"There has to be one such crank, it seems," March partially
assented. "One's enough for me. "
"I reckon this thing is nuts for Lindau, too," said Fulkerson.
"Why, it must act like a schooner of beer on him all the while,
to see 'gabidal' embarrassed like it is by this strike. It must
make old Lindau feel like he was back behind those barricades
at Berlin. Well, he's a splendid old fellow; pity he drinks, as I
remarked once before. "
When March left the office he did not go home so directly as
he came, perhaps because Mrs. March's eye was not on him. He
was very curious about some aspects of the strike, whose import-
ance as a great social convulsion he felt people did not recog-
nize; and with his temperance in everything, he found its negative
expressions as significant as its more violent phases. He had
promised his wife solemnly that he would keep away from these
and he had a natural inclination to keep his promise; he had no
wish to be that peaceful spectator who always gets shot when
there is any firing on a mob. He interested himself in the ap-
parent indifference of the mighty city, which kept on about its
business as tranquilly as if the private war being fought out in
its midst were a vague rumor of Indian troubles on the frontier;
and he realized how there might once have been a street feud
of forty years in Florence without interfering materially with the
industry and prosperity of the city. On Broadway there was a
silence where a jangle and clatter of horse-car bells and hoofs
had been, but it was not very noticeable; and on the avenues
roofed by the elevated roads this silence of the surface tracks
was not noticeable at all, in the roar of the trains overhead.
Some of the cross-town cars were beginning to run again, with
a policeman on the rear of each; on the Third Avenue line, oper-
ated by non-union men, who had not struck, there were two
policemen beside the driver of every car, and two beside the con-
ductor, to protect them from the strikers. But there were no
strikers in sight, and on Second Avenue they stood quietly about
in groups on the corners. While March watched them at a safe
distance, a car laden with policemen came down the track, but
none of the strikers offered to molest it. In their simple Sunday
## p. 7675 (#489) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7675
best, March thought them very quiet, decent-looking people, and
he could well believe that they had nothing to do with the riot-
ous outbreaks in other parts of the city. He could hardly believe
that there were any such outbreaks; he began more and more to
think them mere newspaper exaggerations, in the absence of any
disturbance or the disposition to it that he could see. He walked
on to the East River: Avenues A, B, and C presented the
same quiet aspect as Second Avenue; groups of men stood on
the corners, and now and then a police-laden car was brought
unmolested down the tracks before them; they looked at it and
talked together, and some laughed, but there was no trouble.
March got a cross-town car, and came back to the west side.
A policeman, looking very sleepy and tired, lounged on the plat-
form.
"I suppose you'll be glad when this cruel war is over," March
suggested as he got in.
The officer gave him a surly glance and made him no answer.
His behavior, from a man born to the joking give-and-take
of our life, impressed March. It gave him a fine sense of the
ferocity of the French troops' putting on toward the populace
just before the coup d'état: he began to feel like populace; but
he struggled with himself and regained his character of philo-
sophical observer. In this character he remained in the car, and
let it carry him by the corner where he ought to have got out
and gone home, and let it keep on with him to one of the fur-
thermost tracks westward, where so much of the fighting was
reported to have taken place. But everything on the way was
as quiet as on the east side.
Suddenly the car stopped with so quick a turn of the brake
that he was half thrown from his seat, and the policeman jumped
down from the platform and ran forward.
DRYFOOS sat at breakfast that morning, with Mrs. Mandel as
usual to pour out his coffee. Conrad had already gone down-
town; the two girls lay abed much later than their father break-
fasted, and their mother had gradually grown too feeble to come
down till lunch. Suddenly Christine appeared at the door. Her
face was white to the edges of her lips, and her eyes were
blazing.
"Look here, father! Have you been saying anything to Mr.
Beaton? "
4
1
## p. 7676 (#490) ###########################################
7676
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
The old man looked up at her across his coffee-cup through
his frowning brows. "No. "
Mrs. Mandel dropped her eyes, and the spoon shook in her
hand.
"Then what's the reason he don't come here any more? "
demanded the girl; and her glance darted from her father to
Mrs. Mandel. -"Oh, it's you, is it? I'd like to know who told
you to meddle in other people's business? "
"I did," said Dryfoos savagely. "I told her to ask him what
he wanted here, and he said he didn't want anything, and he's
stopped coming. That's all. I did it myself. "
"Oh, you did, did you? " said the girl, scarcely less insolently
than she had spoken to Mrs. Mandel. "I should like to know
what you did it for? I'd like to know what made you think I
wasn't able to take care of myself? I just knew somebody had
been meddling, but I didn't suppose it was you. I can manage
my own affairs in my own way, if you please, and I'll thank you
after this to leave me to myself in what don't concern you. "
"Don't concern me? You impudent jade! " her father began.
Christine advanced from the doorway toward the table; she
had her hands closed upon what seemed trinkets, some of
which glittered and dangled from them. She said, "Will you
go to him and tell him that this meddlesome minx here had no
business to say anything about me to him, and you take it all
back? "
་
"No! " shouted the old man.
"And if -"
"That's all I want of you! " the girl shouted in her turn.
"Here are your presents. " With both hands she flung the jewels
-pins and rings and earrings and bracelets-among the break-
fast dishes, from which some of them sprang to the floor. She
stood a moment to pull the intaglio ring from the finger where
Beaton put it a year ago, and dashed that at her father's plate.
Then she whirled out of the room, and they heard her running.
up-stairs.
The old man made a start toward her, but he fell back in
his chair before she was gone, and with a fierce, grinding move-
ment of his jaws controlled himself. "Take-take those things
up," he gasped to Mrs. Mandel. He seemed unable to rise again
from his chair; but when she asked him if he were unwell, he
said no with an air of offense, and got quickly to his feet. He
mechanically picked up the intaglio ring from the table while
## p. 7677 (#491) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7677
he stood there, and put it on his little finger; his hand was not
much bigger than Christine's. "How do you suppose she found
it out? " he asked after a moment.
"She seems to have merely suspected it," said Mrs. Mandel
in a tremor, and with the fright in her eyes which Christine's
violence had brought there.
"Well, it don't make any difference. She had to know some-
how, and now she knows. " He started toward the door of the
library, as if to go into the hall, where his hat and coat always
hung.
"Mr. Dryfoos," palpitated Mrs. Mandel, "I can't remain here,
after the language your daughter has used to me - I can't let
you leave me I-I'm afraid of her- »
"Lock yourself up, then," said the old man rudely. He
added, from the hall before he went out, "I reckon she'll quiet
down now. "
He took the Elevated road. The strike seemed a very far-off
thing, though the paper he bought to look up the stock market
was full of noisy typography about yesterday's troubles on the
surface lines. Among the millionaires in Wall Street there was
some joking and some swearing, but not much thinking about
the six thousand men who had taken such chances in their at-
tempt to better their condition. Dryfoos heard nothing of the
strike in the lobby of the Stock Exchange, where he spent two
or three hours watching a favorite stock of his go up and go
down under the betting. By the time the exchange closed it had
risen eight points, and on this and some other investments he
was five thousand dollars richer than he had been in the morn-
ing. But he had expected to be richer still, and he was by no
means satisfied with his luck. All through the excitement of his
winning and losing had played the dull, murderous rage he felt
toward the child who had defied him, and when the game was
over and he started home, his rage mounted into a sort of frenzy:
he would teach her, he would break her.
He walked a long way
without thinking, and then waited for a car.
hailed a passing coupé.
None came, and he
"What has got all the cars? " he demanded of the driver, who
jumped down from his box to open the door for him and get his
direction.
"Hasn't been any car along
"Been away? " asked the driver.
for a week.
Strike. "
## p. 7678 (#492) ###########################################
7678
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
"Oh yes," said Dryfoos. He felt suddenly giddy, and he re-
mained staring at the driver after he had taken his seat.
The man asked, "Where to? "
Dryfoos could not think of his street or number, and he said
with uncontrollable fury, "I told you once! Go up to West
Eleventh, and drive along slow on the south side; I'll show you
the place. "
He could not remember the number of Every Other Week
office, where he suddenly decided to stop before he went home.
He wished to see Fulkerson, and ask him something about
Beaton: whether he had been about lately, and whether he had
dropped any hint of what had happened concerning Christine;
Dryfoos believed that Fulkerson was in the fellow's confidence.
There was nobody but Conrad in the counting-room, whither
Dryfoos returned after glancing into Fulkerson's empty office.
"Where's Fulkerson? " he asked, sitting down with his hat on.
"He went out a few moments ago," said Conrad, glancing at
the clock. "I'm afraid he isn't coming back again to-day, if you
wanted to see him. "
Dryfoos twisted his head sidewise and upward to indicate
March's room. "That other fellow out, too? "
"He went just before Mr. Fulkerson," answered Conrad.
"Do you generally knock off here in the middle of the after-
noon? " asked the old man.
"No," said Conrad, as patiently as if his father had not been
there a score of times, and found the whole staff of Every Other
Week at work between four and five. "Mr. March, you know,
takes a good deal of his work home with him, and I suppose
Mr. Fulkerson went out so early because there isn't much doing
to-day. Perhaps it's the strike that makes it dull. "
"The strike-yes! It's a pretty piece of business to have
everything thrown out because a parcel of lazy hounds want
a chance to lay off and get drunk. " Dryfoos seemed to think
that Conrad would make some answer to this, but the young
man's mild face merely saddened, and he said nothing. "I've
got a coupé out there now that I had to take because I couldn't
get a car. If I had my way I'd have a lot of those vagabonds
hung. They're waiting to get the city into a snarl, and then
rob the houses-pack of dirty, worthless whelps. They ought to
call out the militia and fire into 'em. Clubbing is too good for
them. "
## p. 7679 (#493) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7679
Conrad was still silent; and his father sneered, "But I reckon.
you don't think so. "
"I think the strike is useless," said Conrad.
"Oh, you do, do you? Comin' to your senses a little. Gettin'
tired walkin' so much.
the sun, in which not only the earth seemed to parch and thirst,
but the very air withered, and was faint and thin to the troubled
respiration. Their train was full of people who had come long
journeys from broiling cities of the West, and who were dusty
and ashen and reeking in the slumbers at which some of them
still vainly caught. On every one lay an awful languor. Here
and there stirred a fan, like the broken wing of a dying bird;
now and then a sweltering young mother shifted her hot baby
from one arm to another; after every station the desperate con-
ductor swung through the long aisle and punched the ticket,
which each passenger seemed to yield him with a tacit maledic-
tion; a suffering child hung about the empty tank, which could
only gasp out a cindery drop or two of ice-water. The wind
buffeted faintly at the windows; when the door was opened, the
clatter of rails struck through and through the car like a de-
moniac yell.
Yet when they arrived at the station by the ferry-side, they
seemed to have entered its stifling darkness from fresh and vig-
orous atmosphere, so close and dead and mixed with the carbonic
breath of the locomotives was the air of the place. The thin old
wooden walls that shut out the glare of the sun transmitted an
intensified warmth; the roof seemed to hover lower and lower,
and in its coal-smoked, raftery hollow to generate a heat deadlier
than that poured upon it from the skies.
In a convenient place in the station hung a thermometer,
before which every passenger, on going aboard the ferry-boat,
paused as at a shrine, and mutely paid his devotions. At the
altar of this fetich our friends also paused, and saw that the
mercury was above ninety; and, exulting with the pride that sav
ages take in the cruel might of their idols, bowed their souls to
the great god Heat.
On the boat they found a place where the breath of the
sea struck cool across their faces, and made them forget the
## p. 7662 (#476) ###########################################
7662
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
thermometer for the brief time of the transit. But presently
they drew near that strange irregular row of wooden buildings
and jutting piers which skirts the river on the New York side;
and before the boat's motion ceased the air grew thick and warm
again, and tainted with the foulness of the street on which the
buildings front. Upon this the boat's passengers issued, passing
up through the gangway, on one side of which a throng of
return passengers was pent by a gate of iron bars, like a herd
of wild animals. They were streaming with perspiration, and
according to their different temperaments had faces of deep crim-
son or deadly pallor.
"Now the question is, my dear," said Basil, when free of the
press they lingered for a moment in the shade outside, "whether
we had better walk up to Broadway, at an immediate sacrifice of
fibre, and get a stage there, or take one of these cars here and
be landed a little nearer, with half the exertion. By this route
we shall have sights and smells which the other can't offer us,
but whichever we take we shall be sorry. "
"Then I say take this," decided Isabel. "I want to be sorry
upon the easiest possible terms, this weather. "
They hailed the first car that passed, and got into it. Well
for them both if she could have exercised this philosophy with
regard to the whole day's business, or if she could have given
up her plans for it with the same resignation she had practiced
in regard to the day boat! It seems to me a proof of the small
advance our race has made in true wisdom, that we find it so
hard to give up doing anything we have meant to do. It matters
very little whether the affair is one of enjoyment or of business,
we feel the same bitter need of pursuing it to the end. The
mere fact of intention gives it a flavor of duty; and dutiolatry, as
one may call the devotion, has passed so deeply into our life that
we have scarcely a sense any more of the sweetness of even a
neglected pleasure. We will not taste the fine, guilty rapture
of a deliberate dereliction; the gentle sin of omission is all but
blotted from the calendar of our crimes. If I had been Colum-
bus, I should have thought twice before setting sail, when I was
quite ready to do so; and as for Plymouth Rock, I should have
sternly resisted the blandishments of those twin sirens, Starvation
and Cold, who beckoned the Puritans shoreward, and as soon as
ever I came into sight of their granite perch should have turned
back to England. But it is now too late to repair these errors;
## p. 7663 (#477) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7663
and so, on one of the hottest days of last year, behold my obdu-
rate bridal pair, in a Tenth or Twentieth Avenue horse-car, setting
forth upon the fulfillment of a series of intentions, any of which
had wiselier been left unaccomplished.
Isabel had said they
would call upon certain people in Fiftieth Street, and then shop
slowly down, ice-creaming and staging and variously cooling and
calming by the way, until they reached the ticket office on
Broadway, whence they could indefinitely betake themselves to
the steamboat an hour or two before her departure. She felt
that they had yielded sufficiently to circumstances and conditions.
already on this journey, and she was resolved that the present
half-day in New York should be the half-day of her original
design.
It was not the most advisable thing, as I have allowed; but it
was inevitable, and it afforded them a spectacle which is by no
means wanting in sublimity, and which is certainly unique,— the
spectacle of that great city on a hot day, defiant of the elements.
and prospering on, with every form of labor and at a terrible
cost of life. The man carrying the hod to the top of the walls,
that rankly grow and grow as from his life's blood, will only lay
down his load when he feels the mortal glare of the sun blaze
in upon heart and brain; the plethoric millionaire for whom he
toils will plot and plan in his office till he swoons at the desk;
the trembling beast must stagger forward while the flame-faced
tormentor on the box has strength to lash him on: in all those
vast palaces of commerce there are ceaseless sale and purchase,
packing and unpacking, lifting up and laying down, arriving and
departing loads; in thousands of shops is the unspared and
unsparing weariness of selling; in the street, filled by the hurry
and suffering of tens of thousands, is the weariness of buying.
Their afternoon's experience was something that Basil and
Isabel could, when it was past, look upon only as a kind of vis-
ion, magnificent at times, and at other times full of indignity and
pain. They seemed to have dreamed of a long horse-car pilgrim-
age through that squalid street by the river-side; where presently
they came to a market, opening upon the view hideous vistas of
carnage, and then into a wide avenue, with processions of cars
like their own coming and going up and down the centre of a
foolish and useless breadth, which made even the tall buildings
(rising gauntly up among the older houses of one or two stories)
on either hand look low, and let in the sun to bake the dust
## p. 7664 (#478) ###########################################
7664
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
that the hot breaths of wind caught up and sent swirling into
the shabby shops. Here they dreamed of the eternal demolition
and construction of the city, and farther on of vacant lots full of
granite bowlders, clambered over by goats. In their dream they
had fellow-passengers, whose sufferings made them odious, and
whom they were glad to leave behind when they alighted from
the car, and running out of the blaze of the avenue quenched
themselves in the shade of the cross street. A little strip of
shadow lay along the row of brown-stone fronts, but there were
intervals where the vacant lots cast no shadow.
With great
bestowal of thought they studied hopelessly how to avoid these
spaces, as if they had been difficult torrents or vast expanses
of desert sand; they crept slowly along till they came to such a
place, and dashed swiftly across it, and then, fainter than before,
moved on.
They seemed now and then to stand at doors, and to
be told that people were out, and again that they were in; and
they had a sense of cool dark parlors, and the airy rustling of
light-muslined ladies, of chat and of fans and ice-water, and then
they came forth again; and evermore
"The day increased from heat to heat. "
At last they were aware of an end of their visits, and of a
purpose to go down-town again, and of seeking the nearest car
by endless blocks of brown-stone fronts, which with their eter-
nal brown-stone flights of steps, and their handsome, intolerable
uniformity, oppressed them like a procession of houses trying
to pass a given point and never getting by. Upon these streets
there was seldom a soul to be seen; so that when their ringing
at a door had evoked answer, it had startled them with vague,
sad surprise. In the distance on either hand they could see cars
and carts and wagons toiling up and down the avenues, and on
the next intersecting pavement sometimes a laborer with his
jacket slung across his shoulder, or a dog that had plainly made
up his mind to go mad. Up to the time of their getting into
one of those phantasmal cars for the return down-townwards they
had kept up a show of talk in their wretched dream. They had
spoken of other hot days that they had known elsewhere; and
they had wondered that the tragical character of heat had been
so little recognized. They said that the daily New York murder
might even at that moment be somewhere taking place, and that
no murder of the whole homicidal year could have such proper
## p. 7665 (#479) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7665
circumstance; they morbidly wondered what that day's murder
would be, and in what swarming tenement-house, or den of the
assassin streets by the river-sides,- if indeed it did not befall in
some such high, close-shuttered, handsome dwelling as those they
passed, in whose twilight it would be so easy to strike down the
master, and leave him undiscovered and unmourned by the fam-
ily ignorantly absent at the mountains or the seaside. They
conjectured of the horror of midsummer battles, and pictured the
anguish of shipwrecked men upon a tropical coast, and the grimy
misery of stevedores unloading shiny cargoes of anthracite coal
at city docks. But now at last, as they took seats opposite one
another in the crowded car, they seemed to have drifted infinite
distances and long epochs asunder. They looked hopelessly across
the intervening gulf, and mutely questioned when it was and
from what far city they or some remote ancestors of theirs had
set forth upon a wedding journey. They bade each other a tacit
farewell, and with patient, pathetic faces awaited the end of the
world.
When they alighted, they took their way up through one of
the streets of the great wholesale businesses, to Broadway. On
this street was a throng of trucks and wagons lading and unlad-
ing; bales and boxes rose and sank by pulleys overhead; the
footway was a labyrinth of packages of every shape and size:
there was no flagging of the pitiless energy that moved all
forward, no sign of how heavy a weight lay on it, save in the
reeking faces of its helpless instruments. But when the wedding-
journeyers emerged upon Broadway, the other passages and inci-
dents of their dream faded before the superior fantasticality of
the spectacle. It was four o'clock, the deadliest hour of the
deadly summer day. The spiritless air seemed to have a quality
of blackness in it, as if filled with the gloom of low-hovering
wings. One half the street lay in shadow, and one half in sun;
but the sunshine itself was dim, as if a heat greater than its own
had smitten it with languor. Little gusts of sick, warm wind
blew across the great avenue at the corners of the intersecting
streets. In the upward distance, at which the journeyers looked,
the loftier roofs and steeples lifted themselves dim out of the
livid atmosphere, and far up and down the length of the street
swept a stream of tormented life. All sorts of wheeled things
thronged it, conspicuous among which rolled and jarred the gaud-
ily painted stages, with quivering horses driven each by a man
XIII-480
## p. 7666 (#480) ###########################################
7666
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
It
who sat in the shade of a branching white umbrella, and suffered
with a moody truculence of aspect, and as if he harbored the bit-
terness of death in his heart for the crowding passengers within,
when one of them pulled the strap about his legs and sum-
moned him to halt. Most of the foot passengers kept to the
shady side; and to the unaccustomed eyes of the strangers they
were not less in number than at any other time, though there
were fewer women among them. Indomitably resolute of soul,
they held their course with the swift pace of custom, and only
here and there they showed the effect of the heat.
One man,
collarless, with waistcoat unbuttoned and hat set far back from
his forehead, waved a fan before his death-white flabby face, and
set down one foot after the other with the heaviness of a som-
nambulist. Another, as they passed him, was saying huskily to
the friend at his side, "I can't stand this much longer. My
hands tingle as if they had gone to sleep; my heart—" But
still the multitude hurried on, passing, repassing, encountering,
evading, vanishing into shop-doors and emerging from them, dis-
persing down the side streets and swarming out of them.
was a scene that possessed the beholder with singular fascination,
and in its effect of universal lunacy it might well have seemed
the last phase of a world presently to be destroyed. They who
were in it but not of it, as they fancied,- though there was no
reason for this,-looked on it amazed; and at last, their own
errands being accomplished, and themselves so far cured of the
madness of purpose, they cried with one voice that it was a hid-
eous sight, and strove to take refuge from it in the nearest place
where the soda fountain sparkled. It was a vain desire. At the
front door of the apothecary's hung a thermometer, and as they
entered they heard the next comer cry out, with a maniacal pride
in the affliction laid upon mankind, "Ninety-seven degrees! "
Behind them at the door there poured in a ceaseless stream of
people, each pausing at the shrine of heat before he tossed off
the hissing draught that two pale, close-clipped boys served them
from either side of the fountain. Then in the order of their
coming they issued through another door upon the side street;
each, as he disappeared, turning his face half round, and casting
a casual glance upon a little group near another counter. The
group was of a very patient, half frightened, half puzzled looking
gentleman who sat perfectly still on a stool, and of a lady who
stood beside him, rubbing all over his head a handkerchief full
## p. 7667 (#481) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7667
of pounded ice, and easing one hand with the other when the
first became tired. Basil drank his soda and paused to look
upon this group, which he felt would commend itself to realistic
sculpture as eminently characteristic of the local life, and as "The
Sunstroke" would sell enormously in the hot season.
« Better
take a little more of that," the apothecary said, looking up from
his prescription, and at the organized sympathy of the seemingly
indifferent crowd smiling very kindly at his patient, who there-
upon tasted something in the glass he held. "Do you still feel
like fainting? " asked the humane authority. "Slightly, now and
then," answered the other; "but I'm hanging on hard to the
bottom curve of that icicled S on your soda fountain, and I feel
that I'm all right as long as I can see that. The people get
rather hazy occasionally, and have no features to speak of. But
I don't know that I look very impressive myself," he added, in
the jesting mood which seems the natural condition of Ameri-
cans in the face of all embarrassments.
"Oh, you'll do! " the apothecary answered with a laugh; but
he said, in answer to an anxious question from the lady, "He
mustn't be moved for an hour yet," and gayly pestled away at a
prescription, while she resumed her office of grinding the pounded
ice round and round upon her husband's skull. Isabel offered
her the commiseration of friendly words, and of looks kinder yet;
and then, seeing that they could do nothing, she and Basil fell
into the endless procession, and passed out of the side door.
"What a shocking thing! " she whispered. "Did you see how
all the people looked, one after another, so indifferently at that
couple, and evidently forgot them the next instant?
It was
dreadful. I shouldn't like to have you sunstruck in New York. ”
"That's very considerate of you; but place for place, if any
accident must happen to me among strangers, I think I should
prefer to have it in New York. The biggest place is always the
kindest as well as the cruelest place. Amongst the thousands of
spectators the good Samaritan as well as the Levite would be
sure to be. As for a sunstroke, it requires peculiar gifts. But
if you compel me to a choice in the matter, then I say, give
me the busiest part of Broadway for a sunstroke. There is such
experience of calamity there that you could hardly fall the first
victim to any misfortune. Probably the gentleman at the apothe-
cary's was merely exhausted by the heat, and ran in there for
revival. The apothecary has a case of the kind on his hands
## p. 7668 (#482) ###########################################
7668
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
every blazing afternoon, and knows just what to do. The crowd
may be a little ennuyé of sunstrokes, and to that degree indif-
ferent; but they most likely know that they can only do harm by
an expression of sympathy, and so they delegate their pity as
they have delegated their helpfulness, to the proper authority, and
go about their business. If a man was overcome in the middle
of a village street, the blundering country druggist wouldn't know
what to do, and the tender-hearted people would crowd about so
that no breath of air could reach the victim. "
"Maybe so, dear," said the wife pensively; "but if anything
did happen to you in New York, I should like to have the spec-
tators look as if they saw a human being in trouble. Perhaps
I'm a little exacting. "
"I think you are.
Nothing is so hard as to understand that
there are human beings in this world besides one's self and
one's set. But let us be selfishly thankful that it isn't you and
I there in the apothecary's shop, as it might very well be; and
let us get to the boat as soon as we can, and end this horrible
midsummer-day's dream. We must have a carriage," he added
with a tardy wisdom, hailing an empty hack, "as we ought to
have had all day; though I'm not sorry, now the worst's over, to
have seen the worst. "
THE STREET-CAR STRIKE
From A Hazard of New Fortunes. Copyright 1889, by W. D. Howells
THE
HE tide of his confused and aimless revery had carried him
far down-town, he thought; but when he looked up from it
to see where he was, he found himself on Sixth Avenue,
only a little below Thirty-ninth Street, very hot and blown,-
that idiotic fur overcoat was stifling. He could not possibly walk
down to Eleventh; he did not want to walk even to the Elevated
station at Thirty-fourth; he stopped at the corner to wait for a
surface car, and fell again into his bitter fancies. After a while
he roused himself and looked up the track, but there was no car
coming. He found himself beside a policeman, who was lazily
swinging his club by its thong from his wrist.
"When do you suppose a car will be along? " he asked, rather
in a general sarcasm of the absence of the cars than in any spe-
cial belief that the policeman could tell him.
## p. 7669 (#483) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7669
The policeman waited to discharge his tobacco juice into the
gutter. "In about a week," he said, nonchalantly.
"What's the matter? " asked Beaton, wondering what the joke
could be.
"Strike," said the policeman. His interest in Beaton's ig-
norance seemed to overcome his contempt of it. "Knocked off
everywhere this morning except Third Avenue and one or two
cross-town lines. " He spat again, and kept his bulk at its
incline over the gutter to glance at a group of men on the cor-
ner below. They were neatly dressed, and looked like something
better than workingmen, and they had a holiday air of being in
their best clothes.
"Some of the strikers? " asked Beaton.
The policeman nodded.
"Any trouble yet? "
"There won't be any trouble till we begin to move the cars,"
said the policeman.
Beaton felt a sudden turn of his rage toward the men whose
action would now force him to walk five blocks and mount the
stairs of the Elevated station. "If you'd take out eight or ten of
those fellows," he said ferociously, "and set them up against a
wall and shoot them, you'd save a great deal of bother. "
"I guess we shan't have to shoot much," said the policeman,
still swinging his locust. "Anyway, we shan't begin it. If it
comes to a fight, though," he said, with a look at the men under
the scooping rim of his helmet, "we can drive the whole six
thousand of 'em into the East River without pullin' a trigger. "
"Are there six thousand in it? "
« About. "
"What do the infernal fools expect to live on? "
"The interest of their money, I suppose," said the officer, with
a grin of satisfaction in his irony. "It's got to run its course.
Then they'll come back with their heads tied up and their tails
between their legs, and plead to be taken on again. "
"If I was a manager of the roads," said Beaton, thinking of
how much he was already inconvenienced by the strike, and ob-
scurely connecting it as one of the series with the wrongs he had
suffered at the hands of Mrs. Horn and Mrs. Mandel, "I would
see them starve before I'd take them back-every one of them. "
"Well," said the policeman, impartially, as a man might whom
the companies allowed to ride free, but who had made friends.
## p. 7670 (#484) ###########################################
7670
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
with a good many drivers and conductors in the course of his
free riding, "I guess that's what the roads would like to do if
they could; but the men are too many for them, and there ain't
enough other men to take their places. "
"No matter," said Beaton, severely. "They can bring in men
from other places. "
"Oh, they'll do that fast enough," said the policeman.
A man came out of the saloon on the corner where the strik-
ers were standing, noisy drunk, and they began, as they would
have said, to have some fun with him. The policeman left Bea-
ton, and sauntered slowly down toward the group as if in the
natural course of an afternoon ramble. On the other side of
the street Beaton could see another officer sauntering up from
the block below. Looking up and down the avenue, so silent of
its horse-car bells, he saw a policeman at every corner. It was
rather impressive.
THE strike made a good deal of talk in the office of Every
Other Week - that is, it made Fulkerson talk a good deal. He
congratulated himself that he was not personally incommoded by
it, like some of the fellows who lived up-town and had not every-
thing under one roof, as it were. He enjoyed the excitement of
it, and he kept the office-boy running out to buy the extras
which the newsmen came crying through the street almost every
hour with a lamentable, unintelligible noise. He read not only
the latest intelligence of the strike, but the editorial comments
on it, which praised the firm attitude of both parties, and the
admirable measures taken by the police to preserve order. Ful-
kerson enjoyed the interviews with the police captains and the
leaders of the strike; he equally enjoyed the attempts of the
reporters to interview the road managers, which were so graphi-
cally detailed, and with such a fine feeling for the right use of
scare-heads, as to have almost the value of direct expression from
them, though it seemed that they had resolutely refused to speak.
He said, at second-hand from the papers, that if the men behaved
themselves and respected the rights of property, they would
have public sympathy with them every time; but just as soon as
they began to interfere with the roads' right to manage their
own affairs in their own way, they must be put down with an
iron hand: the phrase "iron hand" did Fulkerson almost as much
## p. 7671 (#485) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7671
good as if it had never been used before. News began to come
of fighting between the police and the strikers when the roads
tried to move their cars with men imported from Philadelphia,
and then Fulkerson rejoiced at the splendid courage of the police.
At the same time he believed what the strikers said, and that
the trouble was not made by them, but by gangs of roughs act-
ing without their approval.
In this juncture he was relieved by the arrival of the State
Board of Arbitration, which took up its quarters with a great
many scare-heads, at one of the principal hotels, and invited the
roads and the strikers to lay the matter in dispute before them;
he said that now we should see the working of the greatest piece
of social machinery in modern times. But it appeared to work
only in the alacrity of the strikers to submit their grievance.
The roads were as one road in declaring that there was nothing
to arbitrate, and that they were merely asserting their right to
manage their own affairs in their own way. One of the presi-
dents was reported to have told a member of the Board, who per-
sonally summoned him, to get out and to go about his business.
Then, to Fulkerson's extreme disappointment, the august tri-
bunal, acting on behalf of the sovereign people in the interest
of peace, declared itself powerless and got out, and would no
doubt have gone about its business if it had had any. Fulker-
son did not know what to say, perhaps because the extras did
not; but March laughed at this result.
"It's a good deal like the military manœuvre of the King of
France and his forty thousand men.
suppose somebody told
him at the top of the hill that there was nothing to arbitrate,
and to get out and go about his business, and that was the rea-
son he marched down after he had marched up with all that
ceremony. What amuses me is to find that in an affair of this
kind the roads have rights and the strikers have rights, but the
public has no rights at all. The roads and the strikers are
allowed to fight out a private war in our midst, as thoroughly
and precisely a private war as any we despise the Middle Ages
for having tolerated, as any street war in Florence or Verona,-
and to fight it out at our pains and expense; and we stand by
like sheep and wait till they get tired. It's a funny attitude for
a city of fifteen hundred thousand inhabitants. "
"What would you do? " asked Fulkerson, a good deal daunted
by this view of the case.
―――
――
## p. 7672 (#486) ###########################################
7672
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
"Do? Nothing. Hasn't the State Board of Arbitration de-
clared itself powerless? We have no hold upon the strikers; and
we're so used to being snubbed and disobliged by common car-
riers that we have forgotten our hold on the roads, and always
allow them to manage their own affairs in their own way, quite
as if we had nothing to do with them, and they owed us no serv-
ices in return for their privileges. "
"That's a good deal so," said Fulkerson, disordering his hair.
"Well, it's nuts for the Colonel nowadays. He says if he was
boss of this town he would seize the roads on behalf of the peo-
ple, and man 'em with policemen, and run 'em till the managers
had come to terms with the strikers; and he'd do that every time
there was a strike. "
"Doesn't that rather savor of the paternalism he condemned
in Lindau? " asked March.
"I don't know. It savors of horse-sense. "
"You are pretty far gone, Fulkerson. I thought you were the
most engaged man I ever saw; but I guess you're more father-
in-lawed. And before you're married too. "
"Well, the Colonel's a glorious old fellow, March. I wish he
had the power to do that thing, just for the fun of looking on
while he waltzed in. He's on the keen jump from morning till
night, and he's up late and early to see the row. I'm afraid he'll
get shot at some of the fights; he sees them all: I can't get any
show at them; haven't seen a brickbat shied or a club swung
yet. Have you? "
“No: I find I can philosophize the situation about as well
from the papers, and that's what I really want to do, I suppose.
Besides, I'm solemnly pledged by Mrs.
March not to go near any
sort of crowd, under penalty of having her bring the children and
go with me. Her theory is that we must all die together; the
children haven't been at school since the strike began. There's
no precaution that Mrs. March hasn't used. She watches me
whenever I go out, and sees that I start straight for this office. "
Fulkerson laughed, and said, "Well, it's probably the only
thing that's saved your life. Have you seen anything of Beaton
lately? "
"No. You don't mean to say he's killed! "
«< Not if he knows it. But I don't know- What do you say,
March? What's the reason you couldn't get us up a paper on
the strike? ”
-
## p. 7673 (#487) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7673
"I knew it would fetch round to Every Other Week some-
how. "
"No, but seriously. There'll be plenty of newspaper accounts.
But you could treat it in the historical spirit-like something
that happened several centuries ago; Defoe's 'Plague of London'
style. Heigh? What made me think of it was Beaton. If I
could get hold of him, you two could go round together and take
down its æsthetic aspects. It's a big thing, March, this strike is.
I tell you it's imposing to have a private war, as you say, fought
out this way, in the heart of New York, and New York not
minding it a bit. See? Might take that view of it.
With your
descriptions and Beaton's sketches-well, it would be just the
greatest card! Come! What do you say? "
"Will you undertake to make it right with Mrs. March if I'm
killed, and she and the children are not killed with me?
>>
"Well, it would be difficult. I wonder how it would do to get
Kendricks to do the literary part? "
"I've no doubt he'd jump at the chance. I've yet to see
the form of literature that Kendricks wouldn't lay down his life
for. "
"Say! " March perceived that Fulkerson was about to vent
another inspiration, and smiled patiently. "Look here! What's
the reason we couldn't get one of the strikers to write it up for
us ? »
"Might have a symposium of strikers and presidents," March
suggested.
"No: I'm in earnest. They say some of those fellows-
especially the foreigners-are educated men. I know one fellow,
a Bohemian, that used to edit a Bohemian newspaper here. He
could write it out in his kind of Dutch, and we could get Lin-
dau to translate it. "
"I guess not," said March, dryly.
"Why not? He'd do it for the cause, wouldn't he? Suppose
you put it up on him, the next time you see him. "
"I don't see Lindau any more," said March. He added, "I
guess he's renounced me along with Mr. Dryfoos's money. "
"Pshaw! You don't mean he hasn't been round since? "
"He came for a while, but he's left off coming now. -I don't
feel particularly gay about it," March said, with some resentment
of Fulkerson's grin. "He's left me in debt to him for lessons to
the children. "
## p. 7674 (#488) ###########################################
7674
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
Fulkerson laughed out.
"Well, he is the greatest old fool!
Who'd 'a' thought he'd 'a' been in earnest with those 'brincibles'
of his ? But I suppose there have to be just such cranks; it
takes all kinds to make a world. "
"There has to be one such crank, it seems," March partially
assented. "One's enough for me. "
"I reckon this thing is nuts for Lindau, too," said Fulkerson.
"Why, it must act like a schooner of beer on him all the while,
to see 'gabidal' embarrassed like it is by this strike. It must
make old Lindau feel like he was back behind those barricades
at Berlin. Well, he's a splendid old fellow; pity he drinks, as I
remarked once before. "
When March left the office he did not go home so directly as
he came, perhaps because Mrs. March's eye was not on him. He
was very curious about some aspects of the strike, whose import-
ance as a great social convulsion he felt people did not recog-
nize; and with his temperance in everything, he found its negative
expressions as significant as its more violent phases. He had
promised his wife solemnly that he would keep away from these
and he had a natural inclination to keep his promise; he had no
wish to be that peaceful spectator who always gets shot when
there is any firing on a mob. He interested himself in the ap-
parent indifference of the mighty city, which kept on about its
business as tranquilly as if the private war being fought out in
its midst were a vague rumor of Indian troubles on the frontier;
and he realized how there might once have been a street feud
of forty years in Florence without interfering materially with the
industry and prosperity of the city. On Broadway there was a
silence where a jangle and clatter of horse-car bells and hoofs
had been, but it was not very noticeable; and on the avenues
roofed by the elevated roads this silence of the surface tracks
was not noticeable at all, in the roar of the trains overhead.
Some of the cross-town cars were beginning to run again, with
a policeman on the rear of each; on the Third Avenue line, oper-
ated by non-union men, who had not struck, there were two
policemen beside the driver of every car, and two beside the con-
ductor, to protect them from the strikers. But there were no
strikers in sight, and on Second Avenue they stood quietly about
in groups on the corners. While March watched them at a safe
distance, a car laden with policemen came down the track, but
none of the strikers offered to molest it. In their simple Sunday
## p. 7675 (#489) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7675
best, March thought them very quiet, decent-looking people, and
he could well believe that they had nothing to do with the riot-
ous outbreaks in other parts of the city. He could hardly believe
that there were any such outbreaks; he began more and more to
think them mere newspaper exaggerations, in the absence of any
disturbance or the disposition to it that he could see. He walked
on to the East River: Avenues A, B, and C presented the
same quiet aspect as Second Avenue; groups of men stood on
the corners, and now and then a police-laden car was brought
unmolested down the tracks before them; they looked at it and
talked together, and some laughed, but there was no trouble.
March got a cross-town car, and came back to the west side.
A policeman, looking very sleepy and tired, lounged on the plat-
form.
"I suppose you'll be glad when this cruel war is over," March
suggested as he got in.
The officer gave him a surly glance and made him no answer.
His behavior, from a man born to the joking give-and-take
of our life, impressed March. It gave him a fine sense of the
ferocity of the French troops' putting on toward the populace
just before the coup d'état: he began to feel like populace; but
he struggled with himself and regained his character of philo-
sophical observer. In this character he remained in the car, and
let it carry him by the corner where he ought to have got out
and gone home, and let it keep on with him to one of the fur-
thermost tracks westward, where so much of the fighting was
reported to have taken place. But everything on the way was
as quiet as on the east side.
Suddenly the car stopped with so quick a turn of the brake
that he was half thrown from his seat, and the policeman jumped
down from the platform and ran forward.
DRYFOOS sat at breakfast that morning, with Mrs. Mandel as
usual to pour out his coffee. Conrad had already gone down-
town; the two girls lay abed much later than their father break-
fasted, and their mother had gradually grown too feeble to come
down till lunch. Suddenly Christine appeared at the door. Her
face was white to the edges of her lips, and her eyes were
blazing.
"Look here, father! Have you been saying anything to Mr.
Beaton? "
4
1
## p. 7676 (#490) ###########################################
7676
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
The old man looked up at her across his coffee-cup through
his frowning brows. "No. "
Mrs. Mandel dropped her eyes, and the spoon shook in her
hand.
"Then what's the reason he don't come here any more? "
demanded the girl; and her glance darted from her father to
Mrs. Mandel. -"Oh, it's you, is it? I'd like to know who told
you to meddle in other people's business? "
"I did," said Dryfoos savagely. "I told her to ask him what
he wanted here, and he said he didn't want anything, and he's
stopped coming. That's all. I did it myself. "
"Oh, you did, did you? " said the girl, scarcely less insolently
than she had spoken to Mrs. Mandel. "I should like to know
what you did it for? I'd like to know what made you think I
wasn't able to take care of myself? I just knew somebody had
been meddling, but I didn't suppose it was you. I can manage
my own affairs in my own way, if you please, and I'll thank you
after this to leave me to myself in what don't concern you. "
"Don't concern me? You impudent jade! " her father began.
Christine advanced from the doorway toward the table; she
had her hands closed upon what seemed trinkets, some of
which glittered and dangled from them. She said, "Will you
go to him and tell him that this meddlesome minx here had no
business to say anything about me to him, and you take it all
back? "
་
"No! " shouted the old man.
"And if -"
"That's all I want of you! " the girl shouted in her turn.
"Here are your presents. " With both hands she flung the jewels
-pins and rings and earrings and bracelets-among the break-
fast dishes, from which some of them sprang to the floor. She
stood a moment to pull the intaglio ring from the finger where
Beaton put it a year ago, and dashed that at her father's plate.
Then she whirled out of the room, and they heard her running.
up-stairs.
The old man made a start toward her, but he fell back in
his chair before she was gone, and with a fierce, grinding move-
ment of his jaws controlled himself. "Take-take those things
up," he gasped to Mrs. Mandel. He seemed unable to rise again
from his chair; but when she asked him if he were unwell, he
said no with an air of offense, and got quickly to his feet. He
mechanically picked up the intaglio ring from the table while
## p. 7677 (#491) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7677
he stood there, and put it on his little finger; his hand was not
much bigger than Christine's. "How do you suppose she found
it out? " he asked after a moment.
"She seems to have merely suspected it," said Mrs. Mandel
in a tremor, and with the fright in her eyes which Christine's
violence had brought there.
"Well, it don't make any difference. She had to know some-
how, and now she knows. " He started toward the door of the
library, as if to go into the hall, where his hat and coat always
hung.
"Mr. Dryfoos," palpitated Mrs. Mandel, "I can't remain here,
after the language your daughter has used to me - I can't let
you leave me I-I'm afraid of her- »
"Lock yourself up, then," said the old man rudely. He
added, from the hall before he went out, "I reckon she'll quiet
down now. "
He took the Elevated road. The strike seemed a very far-off
thing, though the paper he bought to look up the stock market
was full of noisy typography about yesterday's troubles on the
surface lines. Among the millionaires in Wall Street there was
some joking and some swearing, but not much thinking about
the six thousand men who had taken such chances in their at-
tempt to better their condition. Dryfoos heard nothing of the
strike in the lobby of the Stock Exchange, where he spent two
or three hours watching a favorite stock of his go up and go
down under the betting. By the time the exchange closed it had
risen eight points, and on this and some other investments he
was five thousand dollars richer than he had been in the morn-
ing. But he had expected to be richer still, and he was by no
means satisfied with his luck. All through the excitement of his
winning and losing had played the dull, murderous rage he felt
toward the child who had defied him, and when the game was
over and he started home, his rage mounted into a sort of frenzy:
he would teach her, he would break her.
He walked a long way
without thinking, and then waited for a car.
hailed a passing coupé.
None came, and he
"What has got all the cars? " he demanded of the driver, who
jumped down from his box to open the door for him and get his
direction.
"Hasn't been any car along
"Been away? " asked the driver.
for a week.
Strike. "
## p. 7678 (#492) ###########################################
7678
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
"Oh yes," said Dryfoos. He felt suddenly giddy, and he re-
mained staring at the driver after he had taken his seat.
The man asked, "Where to? "
Dryfoos could not think of his street or number, and he said
with uncontrollable fury, "I told you once! Go up to West
Eleventh, and drive along slow on the south side; I'll show you
the place. "
He could not remember the number of Every Other Week
office, where he suddenly decided to stop before he went home.
He wished to see Fulkerson, and ask him something about
Beaton: whether he had been about lately, and whether he had
dropped any hint of what had happened concerning Christine;
Dryfoos believed that Fulkerson was in the fellow's confidence.
There was nobody but Conrad in the counting-room, whither
Dryfoos returned after glancing into Fulkerson's empty office.
"Where's Fulkerson? " he asked, sitting down with his hat on.
"He went out a few moments ago," said Conrad, glancing at
the clock. "I'm afraid he isn't coming back again to-day, if you
wanted to see him. "
Dryfoos twisted his head sidewise and upward to indicate
March's room. "That other fellow out, too? "
"He went just before Mr. Fulkerson," answered Conrad.
"Do you generally knock off here in the middle of the after-
noon? " asked the old man.
"No," said Conrad, as patiently as if his father had not been
there a score of times, and found the whole staff of Every Other
Week at work between four and five. "Mr. March, you know,
takes a good deal of his work home with him, and I suppose
Mr. Fulkerson went out so early because there isn't much doing
to-day. Perhaps it's the strike that makes it dull. "
"The strike-yes! It's a pretty piece of business to have
everything thrown out because a parcel of lazy hounds want
a chance to lay off and get drunk. " Dryfoos seemed to think
that Conrad would make some answer to this, but the young
man's mild face merely saddened, and he said nothing. "I've
got a coupé out there now that I had to take because I couldn't
get a car. If I had my way I'd have a lot of those vagabonds
hung. They're waiting to get the city into a snarl, and then
rob the houses-pack of dirty, worthless whelps. They ought to
call out the militia and fire into 'em. Clubbing is too good for
them. "
## p. 7679 (#493) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7679
Conrad was still silent; and his father sneered, "But I reckon.
you don't think so. "
"I think the strike is useless," said Conrad.
"Oh, you do, do you? Comin' to your senses a little. Gettin'
tired walkin' so much.
