H. R. Edwin Lefèvre
feed the Society of Worms—
POTTER'S FIELD
Under a big foot—property of a popular chiropodist on lower Broadway; terms twenty-five cents per, five for a dollar—was this:
We are the World's Unfortunates:
BORN TO BE KICKED!
Then followed a haggard-faced man who looked like an exaggerated picture of poverty. He carried:
There are poorer than we.
HELP THEM!
A man with the stride of a conqueror bore a banner:
AND STILL WE BELIEVE IN GOD!
The crowd looked puzzled. What the dickens did believing in God have to do with anything? To end the bother of thinking they looked at the next one.
Look at Fifth Avenue!
WHY?
See what we are!
WHY?
They obeyed. They saw Fifth Avenue. Why? They did not know why. And then they saw what the sandwich-men were. And they wondered why the sandwich-men asked why. Why not? Pshaw! The placard that followed was:
If you wish to see
One hundred starving men
Follow us.
YOU WILL REMEMBER IT!
Say, that was something that nobody had seen and therefore everybody could joke about. Every woman had the same remark and the same grin: "Haven't I seen my husband?"
Before the parade had gone half a square Fifth Avenue was blocked. Apart from the interference of the band and the sandwiches with vehicular traffic, there was the paralysis of the pedestrians. The Peacock Parade halted. Slim figures, half-naked, flat-bosomed, stalked swayingly to the curb and stared with eyes in which was the insolent sex challenge that New York males answer with furs and jewels. And as they looked the challenge of sex died in the eyes of the women: the marchers had no sex; anybody could see they had no money!
And the men, too, ceased to look stallion-eyed at the women and gazed on the parade of sandwich-men, who, in the middle of the street, with the machines and the horses, slouched on—almost rubbing valuable varnish on automobiles and carriages, careless beasts!
Presently the hurrying crowds slowed their gait and kept step to Chopin's dirge—slowly! slowly!—until all Fifth Avenue was a vast funeral procession; only the marchers could not have told you what it was that long since had died of gold on Fifth Avenue! Slowly! Slowly! And with the funereal gait other changes came—in the grimace of the over-red lips and the look of the over-bold eyes. But never the slightest change in the color of the cheeks, which was there to stay, in rain, shine, or snow.
"What is it? What is it?" whispered ten thousand people.
From the middle of the street it sounded like the whimper of ten thousand little foamy waves dying on a flat beach. It made the filthy bipeds who marched look at the thronged sidewalks.
They saw the usual Fifth Avenue crowd. They saw the full-fed, clock-hating faces of professional idlers; the drawn features of the busy money-maker with his perennial anxieties; the suddenly immobilized grimaces of millionaires intended to conceal the fear of God knew what; the contemptuous countenances of waiters from fashionable restaurants, who, like ordained priests, knew America at its worst, but, unlike priests, could not pity; healthy American boys with clean faces and the eyes of animals.
And the sexless marchers saw also healthy American girls with delicate features and dreadful, price-quoting eyes, and faces not clean and healthy, but dead-white and dead-crimson; they saw not women's faces, but marble tombstones on which the epitaphs were scarlet letters that told what the price was, so that the professional prostitutes no longer wasted time advertising with the same ink, but used downcast eyes as bait.
There was a gap of about thirty feet between the first detachment of Rutgers's marching advertisements and the next. The spectators, seeking explanations, saw a cadaverous-looking man, hollow-cheeked, sunken-eyed, white-lipped, who stepped as though the avenue were full of puddles of nitroglycerine—uncertainly, fearfully! And this death-on-foot carried a white-cloth board black-bordered like a funeral-card. And thereon money-makers and money-spenders, clubmen and waiters, shop-girls and millionairesses—all Fifth Avenue!—saw this:
HAIL, NEW YORK!
WE WHO ARE ABOUT TO DIE
SALUTE YOU!
There followed another gap of thirty feet, so that the valedictorian of the doomed might be seen of all. Then came eighty-odd sandwich-bearers, appositely legended. From time to time the valedictorian would stagger as you have seen horses do on their last trip to the glue-factory. Whereupon a couple of the non-descripts behind him would shuffle up and endeavor to uphold him. And the others slouched on, deep-eyed, gaunt, famine-stricken, rum-ravaged, disease-smitten—ex-bookkeepers, and superannuated mechanics, and disgraced yeggmen, and former merchants—and former men, too!
At Thirty-ninth Street a young woman dressed richly but in perfect taste stood on the very corner. Her hair had glints of sunshine and her eyes were like twin heavens, clean, and clear, and blue, and infinitely deep. And the Madonna face saw the Death face, looked at the thing that had been a man, and read his salutation. And in one of the pauses of the "Funeral March" a thousand people heard her laugh, and heard her exclaim with a contagious relish, spiced with undisguised admiration:
"If that ain't the limit!"
New York had spoken!
And the chauffeurs near her laughed in sympathy. And gray heads stuck out of limousine windows, and millionaires and their female stood up in their snail-moving touring-cars, and top-hatted coachmen turned impassive heads on neck-hinges long since rusted with the arrogance of menials. And upon their faces and along the ranks that lined both sides of the great avenue a slow grin spread—uncertain, hesitating, dubious! The great American sense of humor was trying to assert itself. Hendrik's joke was not labeled "Joke" plainly enough. Otherwise the spectators would have shown much earlier their ability to laugh at death, hunger, disease, misery, drunkenness, honesty, despair—anything, so long as it was the death, hunger, disease, misery, drunkenness, honesty, and despair of others.
But at Tiffany's corner the traffic policeman stopped the leader of the band; and he stopped the band; and the band stopped Rutgers; and Rutgers stopped his army; and that stopped all traffic on the Avenue up to Forty-second Street.
Hendrik Rutgers hurried forward and explained, calmly: "Here, officer. I am the secretary of the National Street Advertising Men's Association. We have a permit from the Mayor. Here it is."
"Oh, advertising! I see!" said the policeman, and smiled appreciatively. He had feared they might be starving men.
"Yes," said H. Rutgers, quite loudly, "advertising the fact that a man out of a job in New York, who is too proud to beg and too honest to steal, has to become a sandwich-man and make from twenty-five to forty-five cents for ten hours work—not in China or Mexico, but in New York, to-day; men who are willing to work, but are old or sickly or have no regular trade. You know how the Mayor feels about the rights of citizens who are not rich and the duty of paid officials of this city. He and I are opposed to too much law in the way of clubs. So kindly pass the word down the line, officer."
The big traffic policeman, far more impressed by the delivery than by the speech itself, touched his hand to his cap so very respectfully that the grinning crowd at once became serious. Each woman turned on her neighbor and frowned furiously the unuttered scolding for the other's unseemly levity.
"What does it mean?" asked hundreds. All looked toward Hendrik Rutgers for explanation, for