I could not get paid for my afternoons at the school, which I ought to have paid for considering the education they were to me, without making another discovery. The pay came monthly from the City in the form of a warrant, or so I believe it is called. As I have explained that I had never been possessed of money of my own, some allowance will be made for my stupidity in thinking it necessary to cash the warrant in person. It never occurred to me to open a bank account or to ask my Father to exchange the warrant for money. I went myself to the office in the big, new, unfinished City Hall—how well I remember, when I was kept waiting which was always, my conscientiousness in jotting down elaborate notes of windows and doors and upholstery and decoration: Zola in France and Howells at home having made Realism the literary fashion, and Realism, I gathered, being achieved only by way of jotting down endless notes in every situation in which I found myself; especially as J. had brought back from Italy exemplary and inspiring tales of Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) and Mary Robinson (Mme. Duclaux), with whom he had worked and travelled, filling blank books with memoranda collected from the windows of every train they took and every hotel in which they stayed.
I am glad I was stupid, such a good thing for me was this going in person, such a suggestive lesson in City Government which I learned was as little of an automatic arrangement as education and the newspaper, and not necessarily something that all decent people should be ashamed of being mixed up with, the way my Father and the old-fashioned Philadelphian of his type looked upon it and every other variety of Government. It was just another huge, busy, striving, toiling organization, so huge as to fit with difficulty into the enormous ugly new buildings, then recently set down for it in Penn Square with complete indifference to Penn's plan for his green country town, or to get its work done in the maze of courts and passages and offices by the hordes of big and little officials no less preoccupied in City Government than journalists in their newspaper, or teachers in their school, or—outrageous as it may sound—society in the Assembly and Dancing Class and the things which I had been brought up to believe the beginning and end of existence on this earth.
BROAD STREET, LOOKING SOUTH FROM ABOVE ARCH STREET
My new knowledge of Philadelphia was widened in various other directions as time went on. My Uncle's experiment, when it took practical shape, attracted attention and he was asked to lecture on it in places like the Franklin Institute—there was no keeping away very long from Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia once I got to know anything about Philadelphia—and to visit institutions like Moyamensing Prison or Kirkbride's Insane Asylum that he might consider the advisability of introducing his scheme of manual work for the benefit of the insane and the criminal. I usually accompanied him on these occasions, and before he had got through his rounds I had seen a number of different phases of Philadelphia activity and enterprise and power of organization. I had been given some idea of the armies of doctors and nurses and scientists who had made Kirkbride's a model throughout the land, while Dr. Albert Smith had helped me to an additional insight into the hospitals that set as excellent an example. I had been given an idea of the armies of judges and juries and police and governors and warders and visiting inspectors,—of whom my Father was one, with a special tenderness for murderers whom he used to take his family to visit—at Moyamensing. And from the combination of all my new experiences I had gained further knowledge of the energies at work beyond the limits of "Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce and Pine" to make Philadelphia what it was.
VI
I ought to have needed no guide to the knowledge and appreciation of these things, it may be said. I admit it. But the happy mortals who are born observant do not picture to themselves the tortures gone through by those who must have observation thrust upon them before they begin to use their eyes. I had not been born to observe, I had not been trained to observe, and to become observant I had to go through the sort of practical course Mr. Squeers set to his boys. His method, denounce it as you will, has its merits. The students of Dotheboys Hall could never have forgotten what a window is or what it means to clean it. I had grown up to accept life as a pageant for me to look on at, with no part to play in it. After my initiation into work, I could never forget, in the quietest, emptiest sections of the town, not even in placid little backwaters like Clinton Street and De Lancey Place, the machinery forever crashing and grinding and roaring to produce the pageant, to weave for Philadelphia the beautiful serenity it wore like a garment. I could never forget that, insignificant as my share in the machinery might be, all the same I was contributing something to make it go. I could never be sure that everybody I met, however calm in appearance, might not be as mixed up in the great machine of work as I was beginning to be.
CLINTON STREET, WITH THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL AT ITS END