John Marvel, Assistant

by Thomas Nelson Page

As I saw more of the city, its vastness, its might and its inhumanity grew on me. It was a world in itself, a world constructed on lines as different from that in which I had lived as if it had been Mars; a city as different from the smaller cities I had known as if it had been Babylon or Nineveh. The contrasts were as great as they could have been in the capitals Sardanapalus built—structures so vast that they must have dwarfed the towers of Sardis—so rich and splendid that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon must have been outshone—reared their stupendous bulk into the smoky air and cast into perpetual shade all that lay near them. Hard beside their towering mass lay a region filled with the wretched tenements of the poor, and a little further off the houses of the well-to-do. And there was not a greater contrast between the vastness of the one and the pitiful squalor of the other than between the life of the owners of the former and that of the denizens of the closely packed tenements which dwindled in their shadow. Splendor and squalor were divided often only by a brick wall. The roar of the tide that swept through the teeming streets drowned the cry of wretchedness, and only the wretched knew how loud it was. I had never seen such wealth, and I had never dreamed of such poverty.

The vulgar make the parade; the refined pass so quietly as scarcely to be observed. The vulgarity of the display of riches began to oppress me. I discovered later the great store of refinement, goodness and sweetness that was hidden in the homes alike of an element of the wealthy, the merely well-to-do and the poor. But for a time it was all eclipsed by the glare of the vulgar and irresponsible rich. Arrogance, discontent, hardness, vulgarity, were stamped in many faces, and spoke in every movement of many of those I saw, even of the most richly dressed.

I think it was more the vulgarity and insolence of those I saw decked in the regalia of wealth than anything else—than even my own poverty—that changed my views and turned me for a time from my easy indifference as to social conditions toward a recognition that those conditions are ridiculously antiquated, a bent I have never quite got over, though I was later drawn back to a more conservative point of view than, under the hatred of sham and the spur of want, I was driven to occupy for some time. They have no traditions and no ideals. They know no standard but wealth, and possess no ability to display it but through parade. They feel it necessary to prove their novel position by continual assertion. They think that wealth has exempted them from decency. They mistake civility for servility and rudeness for gentility. Their best effort is only a counterfeit, a poor imitation of what they imagine to be the manners of the upper class abroad whose indifferent manners they ape.

"Misery loves company," and when I wanted comfort I left the section of splendor and display, of riotous extravagance and glittering wealth, and went to those poorer than myself; a practice I can commend from experience.

When I got so desperate that I could not stand it any longer, and was afraid I might fall down dead or do myself violence, I used to turn my steps in another direction and walk through the poorer part of the city—not the worst part—where there was nothing but dirt and squalor and filth: that sickened me, and I had never had much sympathy with the class that lived there. They always appeared contented enough with their surroundings and rather to enjoy themselves in their own way. And not the successful workman's quarter. There was an assurance and assumption there that offended me. The assumption bred of sudden success, no matter in what class, is everywhere equally vulgar after its kind. It was the part of the city where the people were respectable, but where they could just hold on with all their struggling and striving, that I used to go into; the part where there were patches, not rags; and sometimes an effort to keep down the dirt, and where a bit of a plant in a little pot or a little cheap ornament in a window told of the spark of sentiment that could yet live amid the poverty and hardness about it. They always place them in the windows, partly, no doubt, to get the light, and partly, perhaps, to show passers-by that there is something within better than might be looked for next door. These people on their holidays always make toward the open country; they try to get away from their robuster, more successful brothers, and get back near to Nature—the old mother that cares nothing for success; and repays only according to the love her children bear her. Here I often walked as I grew more wretched.

In this section I used to see people with whom I felt in touch: a man with the badgered look in his eye that made me know that he was at bay; or a woman with that resigned air which hopeless struggling stamps in the face and binds on the shoulders. These drew me nearer to my kind, and made me feel that there were others in a harder case than I, and gave me a desire to help them. I came to know some of them by sight and the houses in which they lived, and sometimes I spoke to them and exchanged a word or two, and the effort to take a cheerful view with them helped me, and sent me back to my little lonely cubby-hole cheered and in some sort comforted and resolute to hold out a little longer. But it was hungry work.

This element composed the great body of the population, but deep down below them lay a yet lower element weltering in an infinite and hopeless misery to which even the poor class I speak of were alien. They were generically spoken of at times as the criminal classes. They were not this at all, though among them were many criminals—driven to crime by necessity—because there was no means for them to subsist, no possible means nor hope outside of their casual and occasional violation of the statute law by which they secure enough for empty bellies and freezing bodies merely to keep alive. They live among and on the poor, and one of the bitterest trials of poverty is the continual presence and preying of these parasites who like other vermin pursue them and cannot be kept off. Their only common crime is desperate, infinite poverty—poverty beyond hope, for they have nothing—not work, nor the hope of work—not even the power to work, if it should be offered them. As the well-to-do look with anxiety to the loss of their property and the consequent sinking to some lower plane of moderate poverty, so the poor look with shuddering or, at last, with despair to sinking into the slough of this hopeless state for which there is no name, because none has been devised adequate to describe its desperate misery. Often but a block, or even but a wall divides the reeking slum where they creep and fester and rot, from the broad, well-lighted, smooth-paved avenue where irresponsible wealth goes clattering by in its wild orgy of extravagance and reckless mirth. The eye of the mangy and starving wolf from his thicket gleams dully at the glittering pageant of heartless irresponsibility and waste. Should the pack ever find a leader bold enough to spring, what will be the end?

At present they are hungry enough, but they have not organized; they are not yet a hunting pack, but only scattered bands, slinking about hungrily, fighting and preying on each other, the larger bands with the bolder leaders driving off the weaker and unorganized. But let them all organize once and the end will not be yet.

Day after day I saw my last few dollars leak away, and, though I replenished my thin purse at times by pawning everything pawnable I had, yet this, too, gradually oozed away. Fortunately I had plenty of clothes, which I had bought in my flush days, so I could still make a respectable appearance.

As money got low all sorts of schemes used to present themselves to me to replenish my pocket. One was to go out as a laborer on the streets, clean bricks, or do anything. I was not lazy. I would have walked around the world for a case. I do not think I was ashamed of it, for I knew it was respectable, but I was afraid some one I knew might pass by; I was afraid that Pushkin or Mrs. Starling might see me, and—yes, that that young girl from the colonial house might recognize me. I had often thought of her violets since I had dropped them into my pocket-book. And now, when this idea came to me, I took them out and looked at them. They still retained a faint fragrance. What would be the result if she should pass by and see me cleaning bricks—me a laborer, and Pushkin—the thoughts came together—should see me? I would win on my own line if it took me all my life.