"But I don't find so much misery in New York.I don't suppose there's any more suffering here to the population than there is in the country.
And they're so gay about it all.I think the outward aspect of the place and the hilarity of the sky and air must get into the people's blood.
The weather is simply unapproachable;and I don't care if it is the ugliest place in the world,as you say.I suppose it is.It shrieks and yells with ugliness here and there but it never loses its spirits.That widow is from the country.When she's been a year in New York she'll be as gay--as gay as an L road."He celebrated a satisfaction they both had in the L roads."They kill the streets and avenues,but at least they partially hide them,and that is some comfort;and they do triumph over their prostrate forms with a savage exultation that is intoxicating.
Those bends in the L that you get in the corner of Washington Square,or just below the Cooper Institute--they're the gayest things in the world.
Perfectly atrocious,of course,but incomparably picturesque!And the whole city is so,"said March,"or else the L would never have got built here.New York may be splendidly gay or squalidly gay;but,prince or pauper,it's gay always.""Yes,gay is the word,"she admitted,with a sigh."But frantic.
I can't get used to it.They forget death,Basil;they forget death in New York.""Well,I don't know that I've ever found much advantage in remembering it.""Don't say such a thing,dearest."
He could see that she had got to the end of her nervous strength for the present,and he proposed that they should take the Elevated road as far as it would carry them into the country,and shake off their nightmare of flat-hunting for an hour or two;but her conscience would not let her.
She convicted him of levity equal to that of the New-Yorkers in proposing such a thing;and they dragged through the day.She was too tired to care for dinner,and in the night she had a dream from which she woke herself with a cry that roused him,too.It was something about the children at first,whom they had talked of wistfully before falling asleep,and then it was of a hideous thing with two square eyes and a series of sections growing darker and then lighter,till the tail of the monstrous articulate was quite luminous again.She shuddered at the vague deion she was able to give;but he asked,"Did it offer to bite you?""No.That was the most frightful thing about it;it had no mouth."March laughed."Why,my dear,it was nothing but a harmless New York flat--seven rooms and a bath.""I really believe it was,"she consented,recognizing an architectural resemblance,and she fell asleep again,and woke renewed for the work before them.
IX.
Their house-hunting no longer had novelty,but it still had interest;and they varied their day by taking a coupe,by renouncing advertisements,and by reverting to agents.Some of these induced them to consider the idea of furnished houses;and Mrs.March learned tolerance for Fulkerson by accepting permits to visit flats and houses which had none of the qualifications she desired in either,and were as far beyond her means as they were out of the region to which she had geographically restricted herself.They looked at three-thousand and four-thousand dollar apartments,and rejected them for one reason or another which had nothing to do with the rent;the higher the rent was,the more critical they were of the slippery inlaid floors and the arrangement of the richly decorated rooms.They never knew whether they had deceived the janitor or not;as they came in a coupe,they hoped they had.
They drove accidentally through one street that seemed gayer in the perspective than an L road.The fire-escapes,with their light iron balconies and ladders of iron,decorated the lofty house fronts;the roadway and sidewalks and door-steps swarmed with children;women's heads seemed to show at every window.In the basements,over which flights of high stone steps led to the tenements,were green-grocers'shops abounding in cabbages,and provision stores running chiefly to bacon and sausages,and cobblers'and tinners'shops,and the like,in proportion to the small needs of a poor neighborhood.Ash barrels lined the sidewalks,and garbage heaps filled the gutters;teams of all trades stood idly about;a peddler of cheap fruit urged his cart through the street,and mixed his cry with the joyous screams and shouts of the children and the scolding and gossiping voices of the women;the burly blue bulk of a policeman defined itself at the corner;a drunkard zigzagged down the sidewalk toward him.It was not the abode of the extremest poverty,but of a poverty as hopeless as any in the world,transmitting itself from generation to generation,and establishing conditions of permanency to which human life adjusts itself as it does to those of some incurable disease,like leprosy.
The time had been when the Marches would have taken a purely aesthetic view of the facts as they glimpsed them in this street of tenement-houses;when they would have contented themselves with saying that it was as picturesque as a street in Naples or Florence,and with wondering why nobody came to paint it;they would have thought they were sufficiently serious about it in blaming the artists for their failure to appreciate it,and going abroad for the picturesque when they had it here under their noses.It was to the nose that the street made one of its strongest appeals,and Mrs.March pulled up her window of the coupe.
"Why does he take us through such a disgusting street?"she demanded,with an exasperation of which her husband divined the origin.
