第60章 PART SECOND(26)

He went over to Third Avenue and took the Elevated down to Chatham Square.He found the variety of people in the car as unfailingly entertaining as ever.He rather preferred the East Side to the West Side lines,because they offered more nationalities,conditions,and characters to his inspection.They draw not only from the up-town American region,but from all the vast hive of populations swarming between them and the East River.He had found that,according to the hour,American husbands going to and from business,and American wives going to and from shopping,prevailed on the Sixth Avenue road,and that the most picturesque admixture to these familiar aspects of human nature were the brilliant eyes and complexions of the American Hebrews,who otherwise contributed to the effect of well-clad comfort and citizen-self-satisfaction of the crowd.Now and then he had found himself in a car mostly filled with Neapolitans from the constructions far up the line,where he had read how they are worked and fed and housed like beasts;and listening to the jargon of their unintelligible dialect,he had occasion for pensive question within himself as to what notion these poor animals formed of a free republic from their experience of life under its conditions;and whether they found them practically very different from those of the immemorial brigandage and enforced complicity with rapine under which they had been born.But,after all,this was an infrequent effect,however massive,of travel on the West Side,whereas the East offered him continual entertainment in like sort.The sort was never quite so squalid.For short distances the lowest poverty,the hardest pressed labor,must walk;but March never entered a car without encountering some interesting shape of shabby adversity,which was almost always adversity of foreign birth.New York is still popularly supposed to be in the control of the Irish,but March noticed in these East Side travels of his what must strike every observer returning to the city after a prolonged absence:the numerical subordination of the dominant race.If they do not outvote them,the people of Germanic,of Slavonic,of Pelasgic,of Mongolian stock outnumber the prepotent Celts;and March seldom found his speculation centred upon one of these.The small eyes,the high cheeks,the broad noses,the puff lips,the bare,cue-filleted skulls,of Russians,Poles,Czechs,Chinese;the furtive glitter of Italians;the blonde dulness of Germans;the cold quiet of Scandinavians --fire under ice--were aspects that he identified,and that gave him abundant suggestion for the personal histories he constructed,and for the more public-spirited reveries in which he dealt with the future economy of our heterogeneous commonwealth.It must be owned that he did not take much trouble about this;what these poor people were thinking,hoping,fearing,enjoying,suffering;just where and how they lived;who and what they individually were--these were the matters of his waking dreams as he stared hard at them,while the train raced farther into the gay ugliness--the shapeless,graceful,reckless picturesqueness of the Bowery.

There were certain signs,certain facades,certain audacities of the prevailing hideousness that always amused him in that uproar to the eye which the strident forms and colors made.He was interested in the insolence with which the railway had drawn its erasing line across the Corinthian front of an old theatre,almost grazing its fluted pillars,and flouting its dishonored pediment.The colossal effigies of the fat women and the tuft-headed Circassian girls of cheap museums;the vistas of shabby cross streets;the survival of an old hip-roofed house here and there at their angles;the Swiss chalet,histrionic decorativeness of the stations in prospect or retrospect;the vagaries of the lines that narrowed together or stretched apart according to the width of the avenue,but always in wanton disregard of the life that dwelt,and bought and sold,and rejoiced or sorrowed,and clattered or crawled,around,below,above--were features of the frantic panorama that perpetually touched his sense of humor and moved his sympathy.Accident and then exigency seemed the forces at work to this extraordinary effect;the play of energies as free and planless as those that force the forest from the soil to the sky;and then the fierce struggle for survival,with the stronger life persisting over the deformity,the mutilation,the destruction,the decay of the weaker.The whole at moments seemed to him lawless,godless;the absence of intelligent,comprehensive purpose in the huge disorder,and the violent struggle to subordinate the result to the greater good,penetrated with its dumb appeal the consciousness of a man who had always been too self-enwrapped to perceive the chaos to which the individual selfishness must always lead.

But there was still nothing definite,nothing better than a vague discomfort,however poignant,in his half recognition of such facts;and he descended the station stairs at Chatham Square with a sense of the neglected opportunities of painters in that locality.He said to himself that if one of those fellows were to see in Naples that turmoil of cars,trucks,and teams of every sort,intershot with foot-passengers going and coming to and from the crowded pavements,under the web of the railroad tracks overhead,and amid the spectacular approach of the streets that open into the square,he would have it down in his sketch-book at once.