What a sight was Delancey Street, with its five lines of naphtha-lit stalls, its array of tubs of fish and heaps of cranberries, its pavements slippery with scales, the air heavy with the odour of fish!
On one of the first of my nights out in the New York streets I came on a most wonderful sight. After prolonging a journey that started in the centre of the city I found myself suddenly plunging downward among dark and wretched streets. I was following out my zigzag plan, and came at last to a cul-de-sac. This was at the end of East Ninth Street. It was very dark and forbidding; there were no shops, only warehouses and yards. There were no people. I expected to find a new turning to the left, and was rather fearsome of taking it even should I find it. But at length I saw I had come to the East River. At the end of the street the water lapped against a wooden landing-stage, and there I saw a picture of wonder and mystery.
High over the glimmering water stood Brooklyn Bridge, with its long array of blazing electric torches and its procession of scores of little car-lights trickling past. The bridge hung from the high heaven by dark shadows. It was the brightest ornament of the night. I sat on an overturned barrow and looked out. Up to me and past me came stalking majestic ferry-boats, all lights and white or shadowy faces. Far away on the river lay anchored boats with red and green lights, and beyond all were the black silhouettes of the building and shipping on Long Island Shore.
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It was interesting to me to participate in the Russian Easter in New York, having lived in the Protestant and Roman Catholic Easters a whole month before on the emigrant ship on the day we reached New York. I came to the diminutive Russian cathedral in East Ninety-Fifth Street on Easter Eve at midnight. I had been at a fancy-dress party in the evening, and as fortune would have it, had gone in Russian attire; that is, in a blue blouse like a Moscow workman. What was my astonishment to find myself the only person so dressed in the great throng of Russians surging in and out of the cathedral and the side street where the overflow of them talked and chattered. They were all in bowler hats, and wore collars and ties and American coats and waistcoats. They even looked askance at me for coming in a blouse; they thought I might be a Jew or a German, or a foolish spy trying to gain confidences.
I shall never forget the inside of the cathedral at one in the morning, the vociferous singing, the beshawled peasant girls, the tear-stained faces. Priest after priest came forward and praised the Orthodox Church and the Russian people, and appealed to the worshippers to remember that all over the Russian world the same service was being held, not only in the great cathedrals and monasteries, but in the village churches, in the far-away forest settlements, at the shrines in lonely Arctic islands, in the Siberian wildernesses, on the Urals, in the fastnesses of the Caucasus, on the Asian deserts, in Jerusalem itself. It was pathetic to hear the priests exhort these young men and women to remain Russians—they were all young, and they all or nearly all looked to America as their new home. On all ordinary occasions they longed to be Americans and to be called Americans; but this night a flood of feeling engulfed them, and in the New York night they set sail and looked hungrily to the East whence they came. They held tapers. They had tenderly brought their cakes, their chickens and joints of pork, to be sprinkled with holy water and blessed by the priest for their Easter breakfast. It was sad to surmise how few had really fasted through Lent, and yet to see how they clung to departing tradition.
Coming out of the cathedral we each received a verbose revolutionary circular printed in the Russian tongue: "Keep holy the First of May! Hail to the war of the Classes! Hurrah for Socialism! Workmen of all classes, combine!"—and so on. In Russia a person distributing such circulars would be rushed off to gaol at once. In New York it is different, and "influences" of all kinds are in full blast. I looked over the shoulders of many groups outside the cathedral on Easter Day and found them reading those New York rags, which are conceived in ignorance and dedicated to anarchism. It seems the Russian who comes to New York is at once grabbed by the existent Social-Democratic organisations, and though he go to church still, he begins to be more and more attached to revolutionism. It is strange that these organisations are directed, not against the Tsar and the officialdom of Russia, but against the Government of the United States and the commercial machine. There is no question of America being a refuge for the persecuted Russian. The latter is assured at once that America is a place of even worse tyranny than the land he has come from. But if he does not take other people's word he soon comes to that conclusion on his own account. For he finds himself and his brothers working like slaves and drinking themselves to death through sheer boredom, and he finds his sisters in the "sweat-shops" of the garment-workers, or loses them in houses of evil.
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I shall long remember the Night Court on Sixth Avenue, and several occasions when I entered there after midnight and found the same shrewd, tireless Irish judge nonchalantly fining and sentencing negresses and white girls found in the streets under suspicious circumstances. Many a poor Russian girl was brought forward, and called upon to defend herself against the allegations of the soulless spies and secret agents of the American Police. I listened to their sobs and cries, their protests of innocence, their promises of repentance, till I was ready to rise in Court and rave aloud and shriek, and be pounced upon by the great fat pompous usher who represses even the expression on your features. "Why," I wanted to cry aloud, "it is America that ought to be tried, and not these innocent victims of America—they are the evidence of America's guilt and not the committers of her crimes!" But I was fixed in silence, like the reporters doing their jobs in the front bench, and the unmoved, hard-faced attendants and police by whom the order of the Court was kept.
Then, not far along the same road in which the Night Court stands, I came one evening into a wax-work show of venereal disease. It was quite by chance I went in, for there was nothing outside to indicate what was within. Only the spirit of adventure, which prompted me to go in and look round wherever I saw an open door, betrayed me to this chamber of horrors. There I saw, in pink and white and red, the human body in the loathsome inflammation and corruption of the city's disease. Chief of all I remember the queen of the establishment, a hypnotic-seeming corpse of wax, lying full-length in a shroud in a glass case. Just enough of the linen was held aside to show or suggest the terrible cause of her decease. The show was no more than a doctor's advertisement, and it was open in the name of science, but it was an unforgettable vision of death at the heart of this great city pulsating with life.