“The burden of all the wrong in the world comes on the poor,” said the boy. “Every sort of fraud and swindling hurts them the worst. The city wastes the money it’s paid to clean the streets with, and the poor have to suffer, for they can’t afford to pay twice, like the rich.”
March stopped short. “Hallo, Tom! Is that your wisdom?”
“It’s what Mr. Lindau says,” answered the boy, doggedly, as if not pleased to have his ideas mocked at, even if they were secondhand.
“And you didn’t tell him that the poor lived in dirty streets because they liked them, and were too lazy and worthless to have them cleaned?”
“No; I didn’t.”
“I’m surprised. What do you think of Lindau, generally speaking, Tom?”
“Well, sir, I don’t like the way he talks about some things. I don’t suppose this country is perfect, but I think it’s about the best there is, and it don’t do any good to look at its drawbacks all the time.”
“Sound, my son,” said March, putting his hand on the boy’s shoulder and beginning to walk on. “Well?”
“Well, then, he says that it isn’t the public frauds only that the poor have to pay for, but they have to pay for all the vices of the rich; that when a speculator fails, or a bank cashier defaults, or a firm suspends, or hard times come, it’s the poor who have to give up necessaries where the rich give up luxuries.”
“Well, well! And then?”
“Well, then I think the crank comes in, in Mr. Lindau. He says there’s no need of failures or frauds or hard times. It’s ridiculous. There always have been and there always will be. But if you tell him that, it seems to make him perfectly furious.”
March repeated the substance of this talk to his wife. “I’m glad to know that Tom can see through such ravings. He has lots of good common sense.”
It was the afternoon of the same Sunday, and they were sauntering up Fifth Avenue, and admiring the wide old double houses at the lower end; at one corner they got a distinct pleasure out of the gnarled elbows that a pollarded wistaria leaned upon the top of a garden wall—for its convenience in looking into the street, he said. The line of these comfortable dwellings, once so fashionable, was continually broken by the façades of shops; and March professed himself vulgarized by a want of style in the people they met in their walk to Twenty-third Street.
“Take me somewhere to meet my fellow-exclusives, Isabel,” he demanded. “I pine for the society of my peers.”
He hailed a passing omnibus, and made his wife get on the roof with him. “Think of our doing such a thing in Boston!” she sighed, with a little shiver of satisfaction in her immunity from recognition and comment.
“You wouldn’t be afraid to do it in London or Paris?”
“No; we should be strangers there—just as we are in New York. I wonder how long one could be a stranger here.”
“Oh, indefinitely, in our way of living. The place is really vast, so much larger than it used to seem, and so heterogeneous.”
When they got down very far uptown, and began to walk back by Madison Avenue, they found themselves in a different population from that they dwelt among; not heterogeneous at all; very homogeneous, and almost purely American; the only qualification was American Hebrew. Such a well-dressed, well-satisfied, well-fed looking crowd poured down the broad sidewalks before the handsome, stupid houses that March could easily pretend he had got among his fellow-plutocrats at last. Still he expressed his doubts whether this Sunday afternoon parade, which seemed to be a thing of custom, represented the best form among the young people of that region; he wished he knew; he blamed himself for becoming of a fastidious conjecture; he could not deny the fashion and the richness and the indigeneity of the spectacle; the promenaders looked New Yorky; they were the sort of people whom you would know for New Yorkers elsewhere—so well equipped and so perfectly kept at all points. Their silk hats shone, and their boots; their frocks had the right distension behind, and their bonnets perfect poise and distinction.
The Marches talked of these and other facts of their appearance, and curiously questioned whether this were the best that a great material civilization could come to; it looked a little dull. The men’s faces were shrewd and alert, and yet they looked dull; the women’s were pretty and knowing, and yet dull. It was, probably, the holiday expression of the vast, prosperous commercial class, with unlimited money, and no ideals that money could not realize; fashion and comfort were all that they desired to compass, and the culture that furnishes showily, that decorates and that tells; the culture, say, of plays and operas, rather than books.
Perhaps the observers did the promenaders injustice; they might not have been as common-minded as they looked. “But,” March said, “I understand now why the poor people don’t come up here and live in this clean, handsome, respectable quarter of the town; they would be bored to death. On the whole, I think I should prefer Mott Street myself.”
In other walks the Marches tried to find some of the streets they had wandered through the first day of their wedding journey in New York, so long ago. They could not make sure of them; but once they ran down to the Battery, and easily made sure of that, though not in its old aspect. They
