Attractive, too, is it to consider how founders of tidy undertaking houses have become personages and are held in revered esteem. For they are not, it would seem, like unto those who have established just ordinary businesses. This I will show you:
At a corner of Twenty-third Street, over a telegraph office, is an establishment of some caste. Window legend reads: "Undertakers—Cremations—Night and Day—Interments in all Cemeteries." The last phrase reminds me of the way my old friend James Huneker used to date his letters to me from Brooklyn. They began, "Flatbush by the C—emeteries." But that's not the point. It's a pity the alert English writer who recently visited us and discovered a statue of General Grant in Grant Park, overlooking the Blackstone (where nobody had ever seen one before), and that the huge bust of Washington Irving in Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library, was an effigy of Father George Washington—it's a rotten shame E. V. Lucas missed this corner while here.
Because when you go round this corner you are to look up just above the level of your head. (Though I'm afraid you neglect to do this.) There on a ledge is a grand sight. It's a bust of God. Fact! Anyhow, looks just like pictures of God William Blake used to make. Old gentleman. Noble brow. Patriarchal beard, flowing out in a pattern of rhythmical waves—most realistically mildewed by time and weather.... But, no; inquiry reveals that it's a likeness of the founder of this "old established" undertaking concern.
Then there's that place a short step down Eighth Avenue. It declares on its sign that it is the "original" house bearing the name of the Reverend gentleman who conducts it. When you look through the glass in the door you view just within, displayed on an ornamental easel, a life-size crayon portrait, enlarged from a photograph, of a distinguished-looking person wearing brown Dundreary whiskers and a top hat. One corner of the portrait is gracefully draped in an American flag.
Yes; you'd be surprised how strong undertakers are on patriotism. Hard by here, next door to a dentist advertising "painless extraction," you find a firm of "Funeral Directors" where conspicuous among such ornaments as tall, bronze lamps with big shades, a spittoon, a little model of a casket and an urn, is a large bronze bust of Abraham Lincoln. A plate says: "No Charge for Rooms or Chapels for Funerals." And above stairs is seen a row of somewhat ecclesiastical stained-glass windows. Though we are given to understand by an advertisement that the atmosphere of these chapels is "non-sectarian."
Then over on Third Avenue (where there are lots and lots of undertakers) is a place. Always sitting just within the doorway, very silent, a stout, very solemn individual wearing a large, black derby hat and big, round, green-lens spectacles. Above him on the wall a framed lithograph in colors of George Washington—beside it a thermometer. In the window a rubber-plant. Rubber-plants varying in size from infant to elephant are in the windows of all undertakers. The symbolism of this decoration I know not. Beside the plant an infant's white casket, proclaimed by a poster which leans against it to be composed of "purity metal." In some places the casket, perhaps not of purity metal, is protected by being enclosed in a glass case. The name of the proprietor of this shop, as given on his sign, ends in "skey." Set in the door-frame is the usual "Night Bell." And, as always in undertakers' shops, the card of a "notary public" is displayed. Next door "Family Shoes" are featured.
Only yesterday afternoon I was looking in at the window of an undertaker on Second Avenue, one I had just found. Along the curb before the door a string of rather frayed and wobbly-looking "hacks," with a rusty-black hearse at the head. Horses to these vehicles drowsy in disposition, moth-eaten in effect as to pelt, and in the visibility of their anatomical structure suggesting that they might have been drawn by Albert Dürer in some particularly melancholy mood.
In groups along the edge of the sidewalk, conversing in subdued tones, the Dickensesque drivers of this caravan. Tall and gaunt, some; short and stout, others. Skirt coat on one, "sack" coat on another. Alike in this: frayed and rusty and weather-beaten, all. And hard, very hard of countenance. Each topped by a very tall, and quite cylindrical hat of mussed, shoddy-black, plush texture. Hangovers, so to say, these figures, from New York's hansom-cab days, or the time in London of the "four-wheeler."
No, not altogether. There was something piquant—Villonesque, or jovial—Rabelaisian, about the pickpockets of that tribe. These solemn mummers strike a ghoulish note. But at the same time, out here in the sane and cheerful sunlight, they don't look real. Create an odd impression. Strikes you as about as queer, this bunch, as if a lot of actors from a melodrama should turn up in the street with their makeup on and gravely pretend to belong to real life.
"Perhaps," I thought, "there is a funeral, or something, going on inside, and I should not be gaping in at this window."