At home,generally,they found that the children had not missed them,and were perfectly safe.It was one of the advantages of a flat that they could leave the children there whenever they liked without anxiety.They liked better staying there than wandering about in the evening with their parents,whose excursions seemed to them somewhat aimless,and their pleasures insipid.They studied,or read,or looked out of the window at the street sights;and their mother always came back to them with a pang for their lonesomeness.Bella knew some little girls in the house,but in a ceremonious way;Tom had formed no friendships among the boys at school such as he had left in Boston;as nearly as he could explain,the New York fellows carried canes at an age when they would have had them broken for them by the other boys at Boston;and they were both sissyish and fast.It was probably prejudice;he never could say exactly what their demerits were,and neither he nor Bella was apparently so homesick as they pretended,though they answered inquirers,the one that New York was a hole,and the other that it was horrid,and that all they lived for was to get back to Boston.In the mean time they were thrown much upon each other for society,which March said was well for both of them;he did not mind their cultivating a little gloom and the sense of a common wrong;it made them better comrades,and it was providing them with amusing reminiscences for the future.They really enjoyed Bohemianizing in that harmless way:though Tom had his doubts of its respectability;he was very punctilious about his sister,and went round from his own school every day to fetch her home from hers.The whole family went to the theatre a good deal,and enjoyed themselves together in their desultory explorations of the city.
They lived near Greenwich Village,and March liked strolling through its quaintness toward the waterside on a Sunday,when a hereditary Sabbatarianism kept his wife at home;he made her observe that it even kept her at home from church.He found a lingering quality of pure Americanism in the region,and he said the very bells called to worship in a nasal tone.He liked the streets of small brick houses,with here and there one painted red,and the mortar lines picked out in white,and with now and then a fine wooden portal of fluted pillars and a bowed transom.The rear of the tenement-houses showed him the picturesqueness of clothes-lines fluttering far aloft,as in Florence;and the new apartment-houses,breaking the old sky-line with their towering stories,implied a life as alien to the American manner as anything in continental Europe.In fact,foreign faces and foreign tongues prevailed in Greenwich Village,but no longer German or even Irish tongues or faces.
The eyes and earrings of Italians twinkled in and out of the alleyways and basements,and they seemed to abound even in the streets,where long ranks of trucks drawn up in Sunday rest along the curbstones suggested the presence of a race of sturdier strength than theirs.March liked the swarthy,strange visages;he found nothing menacing for the future in them;for wickedness he had to satisfy himself as he could with the sneering,insolent,clean-shaven mug of some rare American of the b'hoy type,now almost as extinct in New York as the dodo or the volunteer fireman.When he had found his way,among the ash-barrels and the groups of decently dressed church-goers,to the docks,he experienced a sufficient excitement in the recent arrival of a French steamer,whose sheds were thronged with hacks and express-wagons,and in a tacit inquiry into the emotions of the passengers,fresh from the cleanliness of Paris,and now driving up through the filth of those streets.
Some of the streets were filthier than others;there was at least a choice;there were boxes and barrels of kitchen offal on all the sidewalks,but not everywhere manure-heaps,and in some places the stench was mixed with the more savory smell of cooking.One Sunday morning,before the winter was quite gone,the sight of the frozen refuse melting in heaps,and particularly the loathsome edges of the rotting ice near the gutters,with the strata of waste-paper and straw litter,and egg -shells and orange peel,potato-skins and cigar-stumps,made him unhappy.
He gave a whimsical shrug for the squalor of the neighboring houses,and said to himself rather than the boy who was with him:"It's curious,isn't it,how fond the poor people are of these unpleasant thoroughfares?
You always find them living in the worst streets.""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 second-hand.
"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?"
