THE MIDNIGHT PLATOON
William Dean Howells (from
Literature and Life)
Compare this to Stephen Crane's "An Experiment in Misery" and Theodore Dreiser's "Curious Shifts of the Poor," chapter 45 of Sister Carrie
He had often heard of it. Connoisseurs of such matters, young
newspaper men trying to make literature out of life and smuggle it into print
under the guard of unwary editors, and young authors eager to get life into their literature, had recommended it to him as one of the most impressive sights of the city; and he had willingly agreed with them that he ought to see it. He imagined it very dramatic, and he was surprised
to find it in his experience so largely subjective. If there was any drama
at all it was wholly in his own consciousness. But the thing was certainly impressive in its way.
I.
He thought it a great piece of luck that he should come upon it by
chance, and so long after he had forgotten about it that he was surprised
to recognize it for the spectacle he had often promised himself the
pleasure of seeing.
Pleasure is the right word; for pleasure of the painful sort that all
hedonists will easily imagine was what he expected to get from it; though
upon the face of it there seems no reason why a man should delight to
see
his fellow-men waiting in the winter street for the midnight dole of
bread which must in some cases be their only meal from the last midnight
to the next midnight. But the mere thought of it gave him pleasure,
and
the sight of it, from the very first instant. He was proud of
knowing
just what it was at once, with the sort of pride which one has in knowing
an earthquake, though one has never felt one before. He saw the
double
file of men stretching up one street, and stretching down the other
from
the corner of the bakery where the loaves were to be given out on the
stroke of twelve, and he hugged himself in a luxurious content with
his
perspicacity.
It was all the more comfortable to do this because he was in a coup,
warmly shut against the sharp, wholesome Christmas-week weather, and
was
wrapped to the chin in a long fur overcoat, which he wore that night
as a
duty to his family, with a conscience against taking cold and alarming
them for his health. He now practised another piece of self-denial:
he
let the cabman drive rapidly past the interesting spectacle, and carry
him to the house where he was going to fetch away the child from the
Christmas party. He wished to be in good time, so as to save the
child
from anxiety about his coming; but he promised himself to stop, going
back, and glut his sensibility in a leisurely study of the scene.
He got
the child, with her arms full of things from the Christmas-tree, into
the
coup, and then he said to the cabman, respectfully leaning as far over
from his box to listen as his thick greatcoat would let him: "When you
get up there near that bakery again, drive slowly. I want to have
a look
at those men."
"All right, sir," said the driver intelligently, and he found his why
skilfully out of the street among the high banks of the seasonable
Christmas-week snow, which the street-cleaners had heaped up there till
they could get round to it with their carts.
When they were in Broadway again it seemed lonelier and silenter than
it
was a few minutes before. Except for their own coup, the cable-cars,
with their flaming foreheads, and the mechanical clangor of their gongs
at the corners, seemed to have it altogether to themselves. A
tall,
lumbering United States mail van rolled by, and impressed my friend
in
the coup with a cheap and agreeable sense of mystery relative to the
letters it was carrying to their varied destination at the Grand Central
Station. He listened with half an ear to the child's account of
the fun
she had at the party, and he watched with both eyes for the sight of
the
men waiting at the bakery for the charity of the midnight loaves.
He played with a fear that they might all have vanished, and with an
apprehension that the cabman might forget and whirl him rapidly by the
place where he had left them. But the driver remembered, and checked
his
horses in good time; and there were the men still, but in even greater
number than before, stretching farther up Broadway and farther out along
the side street. They stood slouched in dim and solemn phalanx
under the
night sky, so seasonably, clear and frostily atwinkle with Christmas-week
stars; two by two they stood, slouched close together, perhaps for their
mutual warmth, perhaps in an unconscious effort to get near the door
where the loaves were to be given out, in time to share in them before
they were all gone.
II.
My friend's heart beat with glad anticipation. He was really to
see this
important, this representative thing to the greatest possible advantage.
He rapidly explained to his companion that the giver of the midnight
loaves got rid of what was left of his daily bread in that way: the
next
day it could not be sold, and he preferred to give it away to those
who
needed it, rather than try to find his account in it otherwise.
She
understood, and he tried to think that sometimes coffee was given with
the bread, but he could not make sure of this, though he would have
liked
very much to have it done; it would have been much more dramatic.
Afterwards he learned that it was done, and he was proud of having
fancied it.
He decided that when he came alongside of the Broadway file he would
get
out, and go to the side door of the bakery and watch the men receiving
the bread. Perhaps he would find courage to speak to them, and
ask them
about themselves. At the time it did not strike him that it would
be
indecent.
A great many things about them were open to reasonable conjecture.
It
was not probable that they were any of them there for their health,
as
the saying is. They were all there because they were hungry, or
else
they were there in behalf of some one else who was hungry. But
it was
always possible that some of them were impostors, and he wondered if
any
test was applied to them that would prove them deserving or undeserving.
If one were poor, one ought to be deserving; if one were rich, it did
not
so much matter.
It seemed to him very likely that if he asked these men questions they
would tell him lies. A fantastic association of their double files
and
those of the galley-slaves whom Don Quixote released, with the tonguey
Gines de Passamonte at their head, came into his mind. He smiled,
and
then he thought how these men were really a sort of slaves and convicts
--slaves to want and self-convicted of poverty. All at once he
fancied
them actually manacled there together, two by two, a coffle of captives
taken in some cruel foray, and driven to a market where no man wanted
to
buy. He thought how old their slavery was; and he wondered if
it would
ever be abolished, as other slaveries had been. Would the world
ever
outlive it? Would some New-Year's day come when some President
would
proclaim, amid some dire struggle, that their slavery was to be no more?
That would be fine.
III.
He noticed how still the most of them were. A few of them stepped
a
little out of the line, and stamped to shake off the cold; but all the
rest remained motionless, shrinking into themselves, and closer together.
They might have been their own dismal ghosts, they were so still, with
no
more need of defence from the cold than the dead have.
He observed now that not one among them had a fur overcoat on; and at
a
second glance he saw that there was not an overcoat of any kind among
them. He made his reflection that if any of them were impostors,
and not
true men, with real hunger, and if they were alive to feel that stiff,
wholesome, Christmas-week cold, they were justly punished for their
deceit.
He was interested by the celerity, the simultaneity of his impressions,
his reflections. It occurred to him that his abnormal alertness
must be
something like that of a drowning person, or a person in mortal peril,
and being perfectly safe and well, he was obscurely flattered by the
fact.
To test his condition further he took note of the fine mass of the great
dry-goods store on the hither corner, blocking itself out of the blue-
black night, and of the Gothic beauty of the church beyond, so near
that
the coffle of captives might have issued from its sculptured portal,
after vain prayer.
Fragments of conjecture, of speculation, drifted through his mind.
How
early did these files begin to form themselves for the midnight dole
of
bread? As early as ten, as nine o'clock? If so, did the
fact argue
habitual destitution, or merely habitual leisure? Did the slaves
in the
coffle make acquaintance, or remain strangers to one another, though
they
were closely neighbored night after night by their misery? Perhaps
they
joked away the weary hours of waiting; they must have their jokes.
Which
of them were old-comers, and which novices? Did they ever quarrel
over
questions of precedence? Had they some comity, some etiquette,
which a
man forced to leave his place could appeal to, and so get it back?
Could
one say to his next-hand man, "Will you please keep my place?"
and would
this man say to an interloper, "Excuse me, this place is engaged"?
How
was it with them, when the coffle worked slowly or swiftly past the
door
where the bread and coffee were given out, and word passed to the rear
that the supply was exhausted? This must sometimes happen, and
what did
they do then?
IV.
My friend did not quite like to think. Vague, reproachful thoughts
for
all the remote and immediate luxury of his life passed through his mind.
If he reformed that and gave the saving to hunger and cold? But
what was
the use? There was so much hunger, so much cold, that it could
not go
round.
The cabman was obeying his orders too faithfully. He was not only
walking by the Broadway coffle, he was creeping by. His action
caught
the notice of the slaves, and as the coups passed them they all turned
and faced it, like soldiers under review making ready to salute a
superior. They were perfectly silent, perfectly respectful, but
their
eyes seemed to pierce the coupe through and through.
My friend was suddenly aware of a certain quality of representivity;
he
stood to these men for all the ease and safety that they could never,
never hope to know. He was Society: Society that was to be preserved
because it embodies Civilization. He wondered if they hated him
in his
capacity of Better Classes. He no longer thought of getting out
and
watching their behavior as they took their bread and coffee. He
would
have liked to excuse that thought, and protest that he was ashamed of
it;
that he was their friend, and wished them well--as well as might be
without the sacrifice of his own advantages or superfluities, which
he
could have persuaded them would be perfectly useless. He put his
hand on
that of his companion trembling on his arm with sympathy, or at least
with intelligence.
"You mustn't mind. What we are and what we do is all right.
It's what
they are and what they suffer that's all wrong."
V.
"Does that view of the situation still satisfy you?" I asked,
when he
had told me of this singular experience; I liked his apparently not
coloring it at all.
"I don't know," he answered. "It seems to be the only way out."
"Well, it's an easy way," I admitted, "and it's an idea that ought to
gratify the midnight platoon."