第61章 PART SECOND(27)
He decided simultaneously that his own local studies must be illustrated,and that be must come with the artist and show him just which bits to do,not knowing that the two arts can never approach the same material from the same point.He thought he would particularly like his illustrator to render the Dickensy,cockneyish quality of the,shabby-genteel ballad-seller of whom he stopped to ask his way to the street where Lindau lived,and whom he instantly perceived to be,with his stock in trade,the sufficient object of an entire study by himself.He had his ballads strung singly upon a cord against the house wall,and held down in piles on the pavement with stones and blocks of wood.Their control in this way intimated a volatility which was not perceptible in their sentiment.
They were mostly tragical or doleful:some of them dealt with the wrongs of the working-man;others appealed to a gay experience of the high seas;but vastly the greater part to memories and associations of an Irish origin;some still uttered the poetry of plantation life in the artless accents of the end--man.Where they trusted themselves,with syntax that yielded promptly to any exigency of rhythmic art,to the ordinary American speech,it was to strike directly for the affections,to celebrate the domestic ties,and,above all,to embalm the memories of angel and martyr mothers whose dissipated sons deplored their sufferings too late.March thought this not at all a bad thing in them;he smiled in patronage of their simple pathos;he paid the tribute of a laugh when the poet turned,as he sometimes did,from his conception of angel and martyr motherhood,and portrayed the mother in her more familiar phases of virtue and duty,with the retributive shingle or slipper in her hand.
He bought a pocketful of this literature,popular in a sense which the most successful book can never be,and enlisted the ballad vendor so deeply in the effort to direct him to Lindau's dwelling by the best way that he neglected another customer,till a sarcasm on his absent-mindedness stung hint to retort,"I'm a-trying to answer a gentleman a civil question;that's where the absent-minded comes in."It seemed for some reason to be a day of leisure with the Chinese dwellers in Mott Street,which March had been advised to take first.
They stood about the tops of basement stairs,and walked two and two along the dirty pavement,with their little hands tucked into their sleeves across their breasts,aloof in immaculate cleanliness from the filth around them,and scrutinizing the scene with that cynical sneer of faint surprise to which all aspects of our civilization seem to move their superiority.Their numbers gave character to the street,and rendered not them,but what was foreign to them,strange there;so that March had a sense of missionary quality in the old Catholic church,built long before their incursion was dreamed of.It seemed to have come to them there,and he fancied in the statued saint that looked down from its facade something not so much tolerant as tolerated,something propitiatory,almost deprecatory.It was a fancy,of course;the street was sufficiently peopled with Christian children,at any rate,swarming and shrieking at their games;and presently a Christian mother appeared,pushed along by two policemen on a handcart,with a gelatinous tremor over the paving and a gelatinous jouncing at the curbstones.She lay with her face to the sky,sending up an inarticulate lamentation;but the indifference of the officers forbade the notion of tragedy in her case.
She was perhaps a local celebrity;the children left off their games,and ran gayly trooping after her;even the young fellow and young girl exchanging playful blows in a robust flirtation at the corner of a liquor store suspended their scuffle with a pleased interest as she passed.
March understood the unwillingness of the poor to leave the worst conditions in the city for comfort and plenty in the country when he reflected upon this dramatic incident,one of many no doubt which daily occur to entertain them in such streets.A small town could rarely offer anything comparable to it,and the country never.He said that if life appeared so hopeless to him as it must to the dwellers in that neighborhood he should not himself be willing to quit its distractions,its alleviations,for the vague promise of unknown good in the distance somewhere.
But what charm could such a man as Lindau find in such a place?It could not be that he lived there because he was too poor to live elsewhere:
with a shutting of the heart,March refused to believe this as he looked round on the abounding evidences of misery,and guiltily remembered his neglect of his old friend.Lindau could probably find as cheap a lodging in some decenter part of the town;and,in fact,there was some amelioration of the prevailing squalor in the quieter street which he turned into from Mott.
A woman with a tied-up face of toothache opened the door for him when he pulled,with a shiver of foreboding,the bell-knob,from which a yard of rusty crape dangled.But it was not Lindau who was dead,for the woman said he was at home,and sent March stumbling up the four or five dark flights of stairs that led to his tenement.It was quite at the top of the house,and when March obeyed the German-English "Komm!"that followed his knock,he found himself in a kitchen where a meagre breakfast was scattered in stale fragments on the table before the stove.The place was bare and cold;a half-empty beer bottle scarcely gave it a convivial air.On the left from this kitchen was a room with a bed in it,which seemed also to be a cobbler's shop:on the right,through a door that stood ajar,came the German-English voice again,saying this time,"Hier!"XII.