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The Making of an American

J >> Jacob A. Riis >> The Making of an American




Yet again, it was too soon, too soon. I banished the thought with
angry impatience. But in the still night watches it came and knocked
again. Jacob need not come home just now. We might write and get
acquainted, and get used to the idea of each other, and his old
people could look forward to the joy of having him return in a year
or two.

At last, one night, I got up at two o'clock, sat down at my desk,
and wrote to him in perfect sincerity all that was in my mind
concerning him, and that if he still would have me, I was willing to
go with him to America if he would come for me some time. Strange
to say, Jacob's mother had never sent the letter in which I refused
him a second time. Perhaps she thought his constancy and great
love would at last touch my heart, longing as it was for somebody
to cling to. So that he got my last letter first. But instead of
waiting several years, he came in a few weeks. He was always that
way.

And now, after twenty-five happy years--

ELISABETH. [Footnote: That is right. Up to this the printer has
had his way. Now we will have ours, she and I, and spell her name
properly. Together we shall manage him.]

I cut the rest of it off, because I am the editor and want to begin
again here myself, and what is the use of being an editor unless
you can cut "copy"? Also, it is not good for woman to allow her
to say too much. She has already said too much about that letter.
I have got it in my pocket, and I guess I ought to know. "Your own
Elisabeth"--was not that enough? For him, with his poor, saddened
life, peace be to its memory! He loved her. That covers all. How
could he help it?

If they did not think I had lost my senses before, they assuredly
did when that telegram reached Ribe. Talk about the privacy of the
mails (the telegraph is part of the post-office machinery there),
official propriety, and all that--why, I don't suppose that telegraph
operator could get his coat on quick enough to go out and tell the
amazing news. It would not have been human nature, certainly not
Ribe human nature. Before sundown it was all over town that Jacob
Riis was coming home, and coming for Elisabeth. Poor girl! It was
in the Christmas holidays, and she was visiting there. She had
been debating in her own mind whether to tell her mother, and how;
but they left her precious little time for debate. In a neighborhood
gathering that night one stern, uncompromising dowager transfixed
her with avenging eye.

"They say Jacob Riis is coming home," she observed. Elisabeth
knitted away furiously, her cheeks turning pink for all she made
believe she did not hear.

"They say he is coming back to propose to a certain young lady
again," continued the dowager, pitilessly, her voice rising. There
was the stillness of death in the room. Elisabeth dropped a stitch,
tried to pick it up, failed, and fled. Her mother from her seat
observed with never-failing dignity that it blew like to bring on
a flood. You could almost hear the big cathedral bell singing in
the tower. And the subject was changed.

But I will warrant that Ribe got no wink of sleep that night, the
while I fumed in a wayside Holstein inn. In my wild rush to get home
I had taken the wrong train from Hamburg, or forgot to change, or
something. I don't to this day know what. I know that night coming
on found me stranded in a little town I had never heard of, on a
spur of the road I didn't know existed, and there I had to stay,
raging at the railroad, at the inn, at everything. In the middle
of the night, while I was tossing sleepless on the big four-poster
bed, a drunken man who had gone wrong fell into my room with the
door and a candle. That man was my friend. I got up and kicked him
out, called the landlord and blew him up, and felt much better. The
sun had not risen when I was posting back to the junction, counting
the mile-posts as we sped, watch in hand.

If mother thought we had all gone mad together, there was certainly
something to excuse her. Here she had only a few weeks before
forwarded with a heavy heart to her son in America Elisabeth's flat
refusal to hear him, and when she expected gloom and despair, all
at once his letters overflowed with a hysterical happiness that
could only hail from a disordered mind. To cap it all, Christmas
Eve brought her the shock of her life. Elisabeth, sitting near her
in the old church and remorsefully watching her weep for her buried
boys, could not resist the impulse to steal up behind, as they
were going out, and whisper into her ear, as she gave her a little
vicarious hug: "I have had news from Jacob. He is _very_ happy."
The look of measureless astonishment on my mother's face, as she
turned, recalled to her that she could not know, and she hurried
away, while mother stood and looked after her, for the first
time in her life, I verily believe, thinking hard things of a
fellow-being--and of her! Oh, mother! could you but have known that
that hug was for your boy!

Counting hours no longer, but minutes, till I should claim it
myself, I sat straining my eyes in the dark for the first glimmer
of lights in the old town, when my train pulled up at a station a
dozen miles from home. The guard ran along and threw open the doors
of the compartments. I heard voices and the cry:--

"This way, Herr Doctor! There is room in here," and upon the step
loomed the tall form of our old family physician. As I started up
with a cry of recognition, he settled into a seat with a contented--

"Here, Overlaerer, is one for you," and I was face to face with my
father, grown very old and white. My heart smote me at the sight
of his venerable head.

[Illustration: "I was face to face with my father."]

"Father!" I cried, and reached out for him. I think he thought he
saw a ghost. He stood quite still, steadying himself against the
door, and his face grew very pale. It was the doctor, ever the most
jovial of men, who first recovered himself.

"Bless my soul!" he cried, "bless my soul if here is not Jacob,
come back from the wilds as large as life! Welcome home, boy!" and
we laughed and shook hands. They had been out to see a friend in
the country and had happened upon my train.

At the door of our house, father, who had picked up two of my
brothers at the depot, halted and thought.

"Better let me go in first," he said, and, being a small man, put
the door of the dining-room between me and mother, so that she
could not see me right away.

"What do you think--" he began, but his voice shook so that mother
rose to her feet at once. How do mothers know?

"Jacob!" she cried, and, pushing past him, had me in her embrace.

That was a happy tea-table. If mother's tears fell as she told of
my brothers, the sting was taken out of her grief. Perhaps it was
never there. To her there is no death of her dear ones, but rejoicing
in the midst of human sorrow that they have gone home where she
shall find them again. If ever a doubt had arisen in my mind of that
home, how could it linger? How could I betray my mother's faith,
or question it?

Perfectly happy were we; but when the tea-things were removed and
I began to look restlessly at my watch and talk of an errand I must
go, a shadow of anxiety came into my father's eyes. Mother looked
at me with mute appeal. They were still as far from the truth as
ever. A wild notion that I had come for some other man's daughter
had entered their minds, or else, God help me, that I had lost
mine. I kissed mother and quieted her fears.

"I will tell you when I come back;" and when she would have sent
my brothers with me: "No! this walk I must take alone. Thank God
for it."

So I went over the river, over the Long Bridge where I first met
Her, and from the arch of which I hailed the light in her window,
the beacon that had beckoned me all the years while two oceans
surged between us; under the wild-rose hedge where I had dreamed
of her as a boy, and presently I stood upon the broad stone steps
of her father's house, and rang the bell.

An old servant opened the door, and, with a grave nod of recognition,
showed me into the room to the left,--the very one where I had
taken leave of her six years before,--then went unasked to call
"Miss Elisabeth." It was New Year's Eve, and they were having a
card party in the parlor.

"Oh, it isn't--?" said she, with her heart in her mouth, pausing on
the threshold and looking appealingly at the maid. It was the same
who years before had told her how I kept vigil under her window.

"Yes! it is!" she said, mercilessly, "it's him," and she pushed
her in.

[Illustration: Bringing the Loved up Flowers]

I think it was I who spoke first.

"Do you remember when the ice broke on the big ditch and I had you
in my arms, so, lifting you over?"

"Was I heavy?" she asked, irrelevantly, and we both laughed.

Father's reading-lamp shone upon the open Bible when I returned.
He wiped his spectacles and looked up with a patiently questioning
"Well, my boy?" Mother laid her hand upon mine.

"I came home," I said unsteadily, "to give you Elisabeth for a
daughter. She has promised to be my wife."

Mother clung to me and wept. Father turned the leaves of the book
with hands that trembled in spite of himself, and read:--

"Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto Thy name give glory
for thy mercy--"

His voice faltered and broke.

The old town turned out, to the last man and woman, and crowded
the Domkirke on that March day, twenty-five years ago when I bore
Her home my bride. From earliest morning the street that led to
"the Castle" had seen a strange procession of poor and aged women
pass, carrying flowers grown in window-gardens in the scant sunlight
of the long Northern winter--"loved up," they say in Danish for
"grown"; in no other way could it be done. They were pensioners
on her mother's bounty, bringing their gifts to the friend who was
going away. And it was their flowers she wore when I led her down
the church aisle my wife, my own.

The Castle opened its doors hospitably at last to the carpenter's
lad. When they fell to behind us, with father, mother, and friends
waving tearful good-bys from the steps, and the wheels of the
mail-coach rattled over the cobblestones of the silent streets where
old neighbors had set lights in their windows to cheer us on the
way,--out into the open country, into the wide world,--our life's
journey had begun. Looking steadfastly ahead, over the bleak moor
into the unknown beyond, I knew in my soul that I should conquer.
For her head was leaning trustfully on my shoulder and her hand
was in mine; and all was well.

[Illustration: "Out into the open country into the wide world--our
life's journey had begun."]




CHAPTER VIII

EARLY MARRIED LIFE; I BECOME AN ADVERTISING BUREAU; ON THE "TRIBUNE"



It was no easy life to which I brought home my young wife. I felt
it often with a secret pang when I thought how few friends I had
to offer her for those she had left, and how very different was the
whole setting of her new home. At such times I set my teeth hard
and promised myself that some day she should have the best in the
land. She never with word or look betrayed if she, too, felt the
pang. We were comrades for better or worse from the day she put
her hand in mine, and never was there a more loyal and faithful
one. If, when in the twilight she played softly to herself the old
airs from home, the tune was smothered in a sob that was not for my
ear, and shortly our kitchen resounded with the most tremendously
energetic housekeeping on record, I did not hear. I had drunk
that cup to the dregs, and I knew. I just put on a gingham apron
and turned in to help her. Two can battle with a fit of homesickness
much better than one, even if never a word is said about it. And
it can very rarely resist a man with an apron on. I suppose he
looks too ridiculous.

Besides, housekeeping in double harness was a vastly different
matter from going it single. Not that it was plain sailing by any
manner of means. Neither of us knew anything about it; but we were
there to find out, and exploring together was fine fun. We started
fair by laying in a stock of everything there was in the cook-book
and in the grocery, from "mace," which neither of us knew what
was, to the prunes which we never got a chance to cook because we
ate them all up together before we could find a place where they
fitted in. The deep councils we held over the disposal of those
things, and the strange results which followed sometimes! Certain
rocks we were able to steer clear of, because I had carefully charted
them in the days of my bachelorhood. In the matter of sago, for
instance, which swells so when cooked. You would never believe it.
But there were plenty of unknown reefs. I mind our first chicken.
I cannot to this day imagine what was the matter with that strange
bird. I was compelled to be at the office that afternoon, but
I sent my grinning "devil," up to the house every half-hour for
bulletins as to how it was getting on. When I came home in the
gloaming, it was sizzling yet, and my wife was regarding it with a
strained look and with cheeks which the fire had dyed a most lovely
red. I can see her now. She was just too charming for anything.
With the chicken something was wrong. As I said, I don't know what
it was, and I don't care. The skin was all drawn tight over the
bones like the covering on an umbrella frame, and there was no
end of fat in the pan that we didn't know what to do with. But our
supper of bread and cheese that night was a meal fit for a king. My
mother, who was a notable cook, never made one so fine. It is all
stuff about mothers doing those things better. Who cares, anyhow?
Have mothers curls of gold and long eyelashes, and have they arch
ways? And do they pout, and have pet names? Well, then, are not these
of the very essence of cookery, all the dry books to the contrary
notwithstanding? Some day some one will publish a real cook-book for
young housekeepers, but it will be a wise husband with the proper
sense of things, not a motherly person at all, who will write it.
They make things that are good enough to eat, but that is not the
best part of cooking by long odds.

There is one housekeeping feat of which Elisabeth says she is ashamed
yet. I am not. I'll bet it was fine. It was that cake we took so
much trouble with. The yeast went in all right, but something else
went wrong. It was not put to soak, or to sizzle, in the oven, or
whatever it was. Like my single-blessed pancake, it did not rise,
and in the darkness before I came home she smuggled it out of the
house; only to behold, with a mortification that endures to this
day, the neighbor-woman who had taken such an interest in our
young housekeeping, examining it carefully in the ash-barrel next
morning. People _are_ curious. But they were welcome to all they
could spy out concerning our household. They discovered there, if
they looked right, the sweetest and altogether the bravest little
housekeeper in all the world. And what does a cake matter, or a
hen, or twenty, when only the housekeeper is right?

In my editorial enthusiasm for the new plan there was no doubtful
note. The "beats" got a rest for a season while I transferred my
attention to the boarding-house. My wife teases me yet with those
mighty onslaughts on the new enemy. Having clearly made him out by
the light of our evening lamp, I went for him with might and main,
determined to leave no boarding-house through the length and breadth
of the land, or at least of South Brooklyn. "Ours," I cried, weekly
"to fulfil its destiny, must be a nation of homes. Down with the
boarding-house!" and the politicians applauded. They were glad
to be let alone. So were the beats who were behind in their bills,
and whose champion I had unexpectedly become. A doughty champion,
too, a walking advertisement of my own prescription; for I grew
fat and strong, whereas I had been lean and poor. I was happy, that
was it; very, very happy, and full of faith in our ability to fight
our way through, come what might. Nor did it require the gift of a
prophet to make out that trying days were coming; for my position,
again as the paid editor of my once "owners," the politicians,
was rapidly becoming untenable. It was an agreement entered into
temporarily. When it should lapse, what then? I had pledged myself
when I sold the paper not to start another for ten years in South
Brooklyn. So I would have to begin life over again in a new place.
I gave the matter but little thought. I suppose the old folks,
viewing it all from over there, thought it trifling with fate.
It was not. It was a trumpet challenge to it to come on, all that
could crowd in. Two, we would beat the world.

Before I record the onset that ensued, I must stop to tell of another
fight, one which in my soul I regret, though it makes me laugh even
now. Non-resistance never appealed to me except in the evildoer
who has been knocked down for cause. I suppose it is wicked, but
I promised to tell the truth, and--I always did like Peter for
knocking off the ear of the high priest's servant. If only it had
been the high priest's own ear! And so when the Rev. Mr.--no, I
will not mention names; he was Brother Simmons's successor, that
is what grieves me--when he found fault with the _News_ for being
on sale Sundays, if I remember rightly, and preached about it,
announcing that "never in the most anxious days of the war had
he looked in a newspaper on the Sabbath"; and when ill luck would
have it that on the same Sunday I beheld his Reverence, who was
a choleric man, hotly stoning a neighbor's hen from his garden, I
drew editorial parallels which were not soothing to the reverend
temper. What really ailed Mr.--- was that he was lacking in common
sense, or he would never have called upon me with his whole board
of deacons in the quiet of the Sunday noon, right after church,
to demand a retraction. I have no hope that a sense of the humor
of the thing found its way into the clerical consciousness when I
replied that I never in the most exciting times transacted business
on Sunday; for if it had, we would have been friends for life. But
I know that it "struck in" in the case of the deacons. They went
out struggling with their mirth behind their pastor's back. I think
he restrained himself with difficulty from pronouncing the major
excommunication against me, with bell, book, and candle, then and
there.

About that time I saw advertised for sale a stereopticon outfit,
and bought it without any definite idea of what to do with it. I
suppose it ought to be set down as foolishness and a waste of money.
And yet it was to play an important part in the real life-work that
was waiting for me. Without the knowledge which the possession of
it gave me, that work could not have been carried out as it was.
That is not to say that I recommend every man to have a magic lantern
in his cellar, or the promiscuous purchase of all sorts of useless
things as though the world were a kind of providential rummage sale.
I should rather say that no effort to in any way add to one's stock
of knowledge is likely to come amiss in this world of changes and
emergencies, and that Providence has a way of ranging itself on the
side of the man with the strongest battalions of resources when the
emergency does come. In other words, that to "trust God and keep
your powder dry" is the plan for all time.

The process of keeping mine dry came near blowing up the house. My
two friends, Mackellar and Wells, took a sympathetic interest in
the lantern proceedings, which was well, because, being a druggist,
Wells knew about making the gas and could prevent trouble on that
tack. It was before the day of charged tanks. The gas we made was
contained in wedge-shaped rubber bags, in a frame with weights on
top that gave the necessary pressure. Mackellar volunteered to be
the weight, and sat on the bags, at our first seance, while Wells
superintended the gas and I read the written directions. We were
getting along nicely when I came to a place enjoining great caution
in the distribution of the weight. "You are working," read the text,
"with two gases which, if allowed to mix in undue proportion, have
the force and all the destructive power of a bombshell." Mackellar,
all ear, from fidgeting fell into a tremble on his perch. He had not
dreamed of this; neither had we. I steadied him with an imperative
gesture.

"Sit still," I commanded. "Listen! 'If, by any wabbling of the
rack, the pressure were to be suddenly relieved, the gas from one
bag might be sucked into the other, with the result of a disastrous
explosion.'"

We stood regarding each other in dumb horror. Mackellar was deathly
pale.

"Let me off, boys," he pleaded faintly. "I've got to go to the
station to turn out the men." He made a motion to climb down.

Wells had snatched the book from me. "Jack! for your life don't
move!" he cried, and pointed to the next paragraph in the directions:--

"Such a thing has happened when the frame has been upset, or the
weight in some other way suddenly shifted."

Mac sat as if frozen to stone. Ed and I sneaked out of the back
door on tiptoe to make for downstairs, three steps at a time. In
less time than it takes to tell it we were back, each with an armful
of paving-stones, which we piled up beside our agonized comrade,
assuring him volubly that there was no danger if he would only sit
still, still as a mouse, till we came back. Then we were off again.
The third trip gave us stones enough, and with infinite care we
piled them, one after another, upon the rack as the Captain eased
up, until at last he stood upon the floor, a freed and saved man.
It was only then that it occurred to us that we might have turned
off the gas in the first place, and so saved ourselves all our
anguish and toil.

I can say honestly that I tried the best I knew how to get along
with the politicians I served, but in the long run it simply could
not be done. They treated me fairly, bearing no grudges. But it is
one thing to run an independent newspaper, quite another to edit
an "organ." And there is no deceiving the public. Not that I tried.
Indeed, if anything, the shoe was on the other foot. We parted
company eventually to our mutual relief, and quite unexpectedly I
found my lantern turning the breadwinner of the family. The notion
of using it as a means of advertising had long allured me. There
was a large population out on Long Island that traded in Brooklyn
stores and could be reached in that way. In fact, it proved to be
so. I made money that fall travelling through the towns and villages
and giving open-air exhibitions in which the "ads" of Brooklyn
merchants were cunningly interlarded with very beautiful colored
views, of which I had a fine collection. When the season was too
far advanced to allow of this, I established myself in a window
at Myrtle Avenue and Fulton Street and appealed to the city crowds
with my pictures. So I filled in a gap of several months, while
our people on the other side crossed themselves at my having turned
street fakir. At least we got that impression from their letters.
They were not to blame. That is their way of looking at things. A
chief reason why I liked this country from the very beginning was
that it made no difference what a man was doing, so long as it was
some honest, decent work. I liked my advertising scheme. I advertised
nothing I would not have sold the people myself, and I gave it to
them in a way that was distinctly pleasing and good for them; for
my pictures were real work of art, not the cheap trash you see
nowadays on street screens.

The city crowds were always appreciative. In the country the hoodlums
made trouble occasionally. We talk a great deal about city toughs.
In nine cases out of ten they are lads of normal impulses whose
resources have all been smothered by the slum; of whom the street
and its lawlessness, and the tenement that is without a home,
have made ruffians. With better opportunities they might have been
heroes. The country hoodlum is oftener what he is because his bent
is that way, though he, too, is not rarely driven into mischief by
the utter poverty--aesthetically I mean--of his environment. Hence
he shows off in his isolation so much worse than his city brother.
It is no argument for the slum. It makes toughs, whereas the other
is one in spite of his country home. That is to say, if the latter
is really a home. There is only one cure then--an almighty thrashing.

There ought to be some ex-hoodlums left in Flushing to echo that
sentiment, even after a quarter of a century. From certain signs I
knew, when I hung my curtain between two trees in the little public
park down by the fountain with the goldfish, that there was going
to be trouble. My patience had been pretty well worn down, and I
made preparations. I hired four stout men who were spoiling for
a fight, and put good hickory clubs into their hands, bidding them
restrain their natural desire to use them till the time came. My
forebodings were not vain. Potatoes, turnips, and eggs flew, not
only at the curtain, but at the lantern and me. I stood it until the
Castle of Heidelberg, which was one of my most beautiful colored
views, was rent in twain by a rock that went clear through the
curtain. Then I gave the word. In a trice the apparatus was gathered
up and thrown into a wagon that was waiting, the horses headed for
Jamaica. We made one dash into the crowd, and a wail arose from
the bruised and bleeding hoodlums that hung over the town like a
nightmare, while we galloped out of it, followed by cries of rage
and a mob with rocks and clubs. But we had the best team in town,
and soon lost them.

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