It was not so bad during the cold weather, but suddenly, without the slightest warning, the cold gave place to burning heat. There was no spring. That lovely transition period in which all is soft, both in air and in colours, did not exist in that American year. The summer burst fiercely over the city and scorched it in a few days. It grilled the pavements; it grilled the houses; it multiplied and magnified the noises of horse and elevated cars, of street-hawkers and yelling children—and these noises in turn seemed to accentuate the heat. Every morning I took the Sixth Avenue elevated train at Twenty-Third Street, and all the way to the Battery there was hardly a tree or a blade of grass to meet the tired eye, to soothe the over-wrought nerves, nothing but ugly buildings—ugly and dirty. And as the train whizzed along, the glimpses I had of the people inside these buildings were even more disheartening than the ugliness and dirtiness of the buildings themselves.
And this was my America, the country of the promised land. It seemed to me then as if my golden dream had turned into a hideous nightmare of fact—a nightmare which threatened to engulf me and cast me into that unrecognizable mass continually forming by the failures of life. That I did not sink down into it was, because, in spite of the hideous reality, I remained a dreamer, and those who live in dreams are rarely quelled by reality. In that fearful, hot, New York summer I began to dream another dream which made the heat more tolerable. Daily, as the elevated train noised its way to the Battery, I imagined myself having succeeded, having amassed wealth, from which I made gifts to the thousands of toilers in that scorched city. I planted trees for them everywhere, along the streets, along the avenues; and wherever there was a little vacant plot of land I converted it into a tiny park. There I saw the people sitting under the shade of my trees, and so real did my dream become that I began actually to live it, and suffered less from the heat myself; for I was constantly on the look out for new spots where I could plant more trees.
At luncheon time I used to go out for a little stroll on the Battery, and there I used to see immigrant women, dressed partially in their native costumes, and surrounded by numbers of their little ones, jabbering in their own lingo. One day I sat down near a solitary woman, unmistakably an Italian peasant.
“Hot to-day, isn’t it?” I said in her own tongue.
From the sea, slowly she raised her eyes to me. I smiled at her, but received no response.
“You look very tired,” I said, “and so am I. I suppose you are thinking of your own country, of fields and trees, are you not?”
“How did you know?” she demanded sullenly.
“Because I do the same myself. I also am an immigrant. You look across the sea with the same yearning in your eyes as is in my heart, for we are both homesick.”
She was no longer cross, after this, and because another woman was sharing in her misery that misery became lighter. She began to tell me of her sorrow. She had buried her second baby in two weeks, because of the heat. Her lap was now empty. She spat viciously on the water. “That is what I have in my heart for America—that!” and again she spat.
I volunteered an account of my own disillusionment about America; and there we sat at the edge of the Battery, two sad immigrants, telling each other of the beauties we had left behind, and of the difficulties we had to fight in the present. If I had then known a little of the history of America, I might have told her of the first immigrants, of how much they had to suffer and endure, and for what the present Thanksgiving Day stood. I might have told her more of their hardships, and how they had had to plant corn on the graves of their dear ones, so that the Indians should not find out how many of them had died—but I was as ignorant as she, and we only knew of our own homesickness and misery.