With Poor Immigrants in America. Stephen Graham
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unit then was five cents, and not as in England two cents (one penny). Obviously this means enormous increase of takings in the long run. That five-cent unit is part of the foundation of American prosperity. I obtained my slip so numbered. Then I took a tray from a stack of trays and a glass from an array of glasses, a fork and a knife from the fork basket, and I went to the roast chicken counter and asked for roast chicken. A plate of hot roast chicken was put on my tray, and the white-hatted cook punched off twenty-five cents on my slip. I went to another counter and received a plate of bread and butter, and to yet another and sprinkled pepper and salt from the general sprinklers. I went and drew iced water. Then, like the slave of the lamp working for himself, I put the whole on my little table. When I had finished my first course I put my plate aside and took my tray to the cook and received a second, and when I had finished that I fetched my coffee.
"Well," thought I, looking round, "no waiters, that means no tips; there is not even a superfluous mendicant boy in charge of the swinging doors." So I began to learn that in America the working man pays no tips.
My companions at the other tables were getting through with their dinners and looking across at one another with congratulatory smiles. We would have sat together, but in this shop one table accommodated one customer only—an unsociable arrangement. I waited for them to finish, so that we could go out together.
Whilst doing so a man came up to me from another table and said very quietly:
"Just come over?"
"This morning," I replied.
He brightened up and asked:
"Looking for a job?"
"You don't mean to say I am being offered one already?" said I.
"That's about it, two dollars."
"Two dollars a day?"
"That's the idea."
"What's the work?"
"Brick-making."
It was brick-making up country for some Trust Company. I said I was staying in New York, couldn't go just yet. He might try my acquaintances. I pointed them out.
One of them, a Pole, said he would go. The contractor went out with us, and we accompanied him to his office. We took a street car. The fare was five cents, a "nickel," and it was necessary to put the coin in the slot of the conductor's money-box before entering. The conductor stood stiff, like an intelligent bit of machinery, and we were to him fares not humans. The five cents would take me to the other end of the city if I wished it, but there was no two-cent fare in case I wished to go a mile. That five-cent unit again!
We sat in the car and looked out of the windows, interested in every sight and sound. First we had glimpses of the East Side streets, all push-carts and barrows, like Sukhareva at Moscow. Then we saw the dark overhead railway and heard the first thunder of the Elevated train. We went up the Bowery, unlike any other street in the world; we noted that it was possible to get a room there for twenty cents a night. We stared curiously at the life-sized carved and painted Indians outside the cigar stores, and at the gay red-and-white stripe of the barbers' revolving poles.
We alighted just by a barber's shop. The agent showed us his office and told us to come in if we changed our minds and would like the job. There we left the Pole, and indeed saw him no more.
There were two others beside myself—a Russian and a Russian Jew. As the Jew and I both wanted a shave we all went into the barber's shop. We were still carrying our bags, and were rather a strange party to enter a shop together. But the barbers, a pleasant array of close-shaven smiling Italians, were not put out in the least. They were ready to shave any living thing. Their job was to shave and take the cash, and not to be amused at the appearance of the customers.
In America the barber's shop has a notice outside stating the number of barbers. If the number is high it is considerable recommendation. Then the briskly revolving pole suggests that it's your turn next and no waiting.
I was put into an immense, velvet-bottomed adjustable chair, my legs were steadied on a three-foot stand, and the barber turning a handle caused the back of the chair to collapse gently so that my head and body pointed towards the doorway like the cannon mouth. Then the shave commenced, and the barber twirled my head about and around as if it were on a revolving hinge. And how laborious he was! In America, quick lunch and slow shave; in England quick shave and slow lunch. And fifteen cents for a shave, and thirty-five for a hair-cut.
"That's a high price," said I.
"Union rate," said he. "We are now protected against the public."
The Jew, however, paid five cents less; he had bargained beforehand. He said it was the last cent he'd pay for a shave in that country; he'd buy a safety razor. The Russian smiled; he hadn't shaved yet, and didn't intend to, ever.
At this point the Jew parted company with us. He was going to find a friend of his in Stanton Street. The Russian and I made for a lodging-house in Third Avenue. At a place ticketed "Rooms by the day or month," we rang the bell, rang the bell and waited, rang again. We were to be initiated into another mystery of New York, the mechanical door, the door which has almost an intelligence of its own. Down came a German woman at last, and gave us a rare scolding. Why hadn't we turned the handle and come in? Why had we brought her down so many flights of stairs?
It appeared that by turning a handle in her room on the second floor she liberated the catch in the lock, and all the visitor had to do was to turn the handle and walk in.
"I heard a rattle in the lock," said I. "I wondered what it meant."
"How long've you been in America?" she asked.
"A few hours. We want rooms for a few days while we look about."
"Days? My lodgers take rooms for years. I haven't any one staying less than six months."
This was just "boosting" her rooms, but I didn't know. I took it for a good sign. If her tenants stayed long terms the place must be very clean. But it was only "boosting." Still the rooms looked decent, and we took them. They were the same price as similar rooms in the centre of London, ten shillings a week, but dearer than in Moscow where one would pay fifteen roubles (seven and a half dollars or thirty shillings) a month for such accommodation. The floors were carpeted, the sheets were white, there was a good bathroom for each four lodgers, no children, and all was quiet. Laundry was collected, there was no charge for the use of electric light, you received a latch-key on the deposit of twenty-five cents, and could come in any hour of the day or night. In signing the registration book I saw I was the only person of Anglo-Saxon name, all were Germans, Swedes, Italians, Russians. With British caution I hid a twenty-five dollar bill in the binding of one of the most insignificant of my books, so that if I were robbed of the contents of my pocket-book I should still have a stand-by. But my suspicions were begotten only of ignorance. My fellow-lodgers were all hard working, self-absorbed New Yorkers, who took no thought of their neighbours, either for good or evil.
III THE PASSION OF AMERICA AND THE TRADITION OF BRITAIN
I came to America to see men and women and not simply bricks and mortar, to understand a national life rather than to moan over sooty cities and industrial wildernesses. Hundreds of thousands of healthy Europeans passed annually to America. I wanted to know what this asylum or refuge of our wanderers actually was, what was the life and hope it offered, what America was doing with her hands, what she was yearning for with her heart. I wished to know also what was her despair.
On my second day in New York I was deploring the sky-scraper, when a young American lifted her arms above her head in yearning and aspiration saying, "Have you seen the Woolworth Building? It is a bird's flight of stone right away up into the sky, it is higher and newer than anything else in New York, its cream-coloured walls are pure and undefiled. It is a commercial house, to be let to ten thousand business tenants.