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. But it is like a cathedral; its foundations are on the earth, but its spire is up among the stars; if you go to it at sundown and look upward you will see the angels ascending and descending, and hear the murmur of Eternity about it."
I had always thought of the sky-scraper as a black grimy street-front that went up to an unearthly height, a Noah's Ark of sodden and smoky bricks. That is what a sky-scraper would tend to be in London. I had forgotten the drier, cleaner atmosphere of New York.
I went to see the Woolworth Building, and I found it something new. It was beautiful. It was even awe-inspiring.
In the evening I asked an American literary man whom I met at a club what he thought was the raison d'être of the Woolworth; was it not simply the desire to build higher than all other houses—the wish to make a distinct commercial hit?
He "put me wise."
"First of all," said he, "New York is built on the little island of Manhattan. The island is all built over, and so, as we cannot expand outward we've got to build upward. Ground rent, too, has become so high that we must build high for economy's sake."
I remarked on the number of men who lost their lives in the building of sky-scrapers. "For every minute of the day there was a man injured in some town or other of the United States," so I had read in an evening paper.
He said the Americans were playing large, and must expect to lose a few men in the game. He expected the America of the future would justify all sacrifices made just now, and he gave me in the course of a long talk his view of the passion of America.
"The Woolworth Building is only an inadequate symbol of our faith," said he. "You British and the Germans and French are working on a different principle, you are playing the small game, and playing it well. You stake your efficiency on the perfection of details. In the German life, for instance, nothing is too small to be thought unmeriting of attention."
I told him the watchword of the old chess champion Steinitz, "I do not vant to vin a pawn; it is enough if I only veakens a pawn."
"You play chess?" said he, laughing. "That's it exactly. He did not care to sacrifice pieces; he was entirely on the defensive in his chess, eh? And in life he would be the same, hoarding his pennies and his dollars, and economising and saving. That's just how the American is different. He doesn't mind taking great risks; he is playing the large game, sacrificing small things, hurrying on, building, destroying,
