III The End of the Apprenticeship as Greenhorn
The visions of Princeton persisted in my mind like after effects of strong light upon the retina. That gentle youth’s suggestion that he might some day see me enrolled as a student at Princeton kept ringing in my ears, and sounded like mockery. A peasant boy from a Serb village who a little over two years previously was wearing a peasant’s sheepskin coat and cap to become a fellow student of those youths who looked like young aristocrats seemed impossible. A European aristocrat would never have suggested such a thing, and that puzzled me. I saw an endless chain of difficult things between me and my enrolment as a student at Princeton, the home for gentle American youth. Social unpreparedness, I felt, was a much more serious difficulty than unpreparedness in things which one can learn from books. This difficulty could not be overcome by associating with people east of the Bowery, and I was heading that way. The nearer the train approached New York the less anxious I was to return to it. From Nassau Hall to the Bowery was too abrupt a change, and from the Bowery to Nassau Hall the change would have been even more abrupt. I compromised and looked up Christian’s home on West Street.
Christian was still in Cleveland, but his father received me with open arms and promised to find me a job. In less than a week he found me one in a famous cracker factory on Cortlandt Street. An acquaintance of his with the name Eilers, a Frieslander and distant relative of a famous German writer of that name, was employed there; he steered me during my first experiences in the factory. A place was given me in a squad of boys and girls who punched the firm’s name upon a particular kind of biscuit. The job was easy from the point of view of physical strength, but it required much manual dexterity. In spite of my ambition to advance to a high place in the squad I progressed very slowly. I soon discovered that in manual dexterity the American boys and girls stood very high; my hands moved fairly rapidly after some practice, but theirs vibrated. I made up my mind that America was not a field in which I should gather many laurels by efforts requiring much manual dexterity. That idea had occurred to me before, when I first observed Christian handling his lathe. One day I was at the delivery desk of the Cooper Union Library, showing my library check to a youth behind the desk who countersigned it before a book was delivered to me. I noticed that he wrote rapidly, using sometimes his right hand and sometimes his left with equal ease and with much skill. “How can I ever compete with American boys,” said I, “when they can write with either hand better than I can write with my right hand!”
There never was a doubt in my mind that American adaptability which I observed on every occasion was in a great measure due to manual training which young people used to get here. Christian’s suggestion, mentioned above, that “a boy can learn anything quickly and well enough to earn a living if he will only try,” I saw in a new light, when I watched the work of those boys and girls in the factory. Yes, American boys can, but not European, thought I. Lack of early manual training was a handicap which I felt on every step during my early progress in America. My whole experience confirmed me in the belief that manual training of the youth gives them a discipline which school-books alone can never give. I discovered later that three of the greatest characters in American history, Franklin, Jefferson, and Lincoln, excelled in practical arts requiring dexterity, and that the constructive genius of the American nation can, in part, be traced to the discipline which one gets from early manual training.
The great opportunities which, according to my good friends on the Delaware farm, awaited me in this country were certainly not in the direction of arts requiring great manual dexterity. The country of baseball offered, I thought, very few opportunities in this direction to a foreign-born boy. I was convinced of that every time I made a comparison between myself and the other boys who were doing the same manual work in the factory that I did. They were my superiors. In one thing, however, I thought I was their superior. They did not know much about the latest things described in the Scientific American, nor in the scientific supplements of the Sunday Sun, which I read assiduously with the aid of a pocket dictionary. The educational opportunities in the factory also escaped them. Jim, the boiler-room engineer and fireman of the factory, became interested in my scientific reading and encouraged me by paying several compliments to my interest in these things. He once suggested that some day, perhaps, I might become his scientific assistant in the boiler-room, if I did not mind shovelling coal and attending to the busy fires. He was joking, but I took him seriously. Every morning before the factory started I was with Jim, who was getting the steam up and preparing to blow the whistle and start the wheels going. I volunteered to assist him “shovelling coal and attending to the busy fires,” and after a time I understood the manipulations in the boiler-room quite well, according to Jim. The steam-engine excited my liveliest interest. It was the first opportunity that I had ever had to study at close range the operations of a steam-engine, and I made the most of it, thanks to Jim’s patient interest in my thirst for new information. He was my first professor in engineering.
One exceptionally hot afternoon during that summer found Jim prostrated by heat and I volunteered to run the boiler-room until he got well. I did it during the rest of that afternoon, much to the surprise of everybody, but was not allowed to continue, because a fireman’s license was required for that. When Jim returned I urged him to help me get a license, but he answered that an intelligent boy, eager to learn, should not cross the Atlantic for the purpose of becoming a fireman. “You must aim higher, my lad,” said Jim, and he added that if I continued to make good use of my pocket dictionary and of my scientific reading I should soon outgrow the opportunities offered by the New England Cracker Factory in Cortlandt Street. He never missed a chance to encourage me and to promise new successes for new efforts. In that respect he reminded me much of my mother.
Jim was a humble fireman and boiler-room engineer; his early education was scanty, so that he was not much on books; but he stood in awe in the presence of books. Referring to my habit of carrying a pocket dictionary in my hip pocket and looking up in it the meaning and the pronunciation of every word which was new to me, he would exclaim, jokingly, “Look in the book,” whenever some obscure points arose in our boiler-room discussions. His admiration for books was much increased when I related to him the story of James Watt and his experiments with the steam-engine, a story which I had dug out in an old encyclopædia in the Cooper Union Library. When I told him that James Watt had perfected his steam-engine and thus started the development of the modern steam-engine several years before the Declaration of Independence, he dropped a remark which I never forgot. He said: “The English made us write the Declaration of Independence, and they also gave us the steam-engine with which we made our independence good.” Jim was not much on learning but he was brimful of native practical philosophy.
Jim had a relative attending classes at Cooper Union and encouraged me to join several of its evening classes, which I did. I reported to him regularly the new things which I learned there. This practice benefited me even more than it did Jim, because in trying to explain to him the laws of heat phenomena, which were explained to me in the evening lectures at Cooper Union, I got a very much better hold of them. The first ideas of sound and light I caught on the pasture-lands of my native village; the first ideas of the phenomena of heat I caught in the boiler-room in Cortlandt Street and at Cooper Union lectures. These lectures, supplemented by Jim’s boiler-room demonstrations, proved much more effective than the instruction which I had received from my teacher Kos, in Panchevo. Kos was a Slovene, a native of that beautiful valley in Carniola, in the very bosom of the Dolomites; it is nearer to being an ideal dreamland than any other spot in Europe. To Kos, as to every true Slav, and particularly to the Slovenes of Carniola, the poetical side of physical phenomena appealed most strongly. Hence his patient listening to my enthusiastic professions of the belief that sound and light were different forms of the language of God. But as I watched the busy flames under Jim’s boilers, and understood how they were sustaining the strenuous efforts of steam to supply every hustling wheel in the factory with driving power, I understood for the first time that there is also a prose in physics not a bit less impressive than its poetry. It is this prose which interested Jim, the fireman, just as it did the Cooper Union lecturer. Their chief concern was what heat can do and not what it is. My Slavonic craving for knowing what heat is was soon satisfied by reading a poem in prose concerning the nature of heat. But of that later.
During my very first visits to the Cooper Union Library I saw a great painting hung up in the northwest corner of its large reading-room. It was called “Men of Progress,” and represented a group of very learned-looking men. I admired the painting, but took no pains to find out its meaning. One day, while reading in the Cooper Union Library, I saw quite near me an old gentleman standing and carefully scrutinizing what was going on. I imagined, at first, that he had stepped out of that painting. I looked again and found that the figure in the painting which I fancied had walked out was still there and that the old gentleman near me was undoubtedly the original from which the artist had painted that figure. The ambidextrous youth behind the library-desk told me afterward that the old gentleman was Peter Cooper, the founder of Cooper Union, and that he was one of the group of famous men represented in the great painting. He looked as I imagined the Patriarch of Karlovci must have looked. He was a striking resemblance to St. Sava, the Educator, as he is represented on an ikon in our church in Idvor. The same snowy locks and rosy complexion of saintly purity, and the same benevolent look from two luminous blue eyes. Peter Cooper was then eighty-five years of age, but he looked as lively as if he were going to live another eighty-five years. His personality as revealed by his appearance inspired me with awe, and I read everything I could lay my hands on concerning his life; then I read about the lives of the other great men who were associated with Peter Cooper in that historical painting. Some of these men were: Morse, the first promoter of the electric telegraph; Joseph Henry, the great physicist, head of the Smithsonian Institution, and founder of scientific bureaus in Washington; McCormick, the inventor of the reaper; Howe, the inventor of the sewing-machine; Ericsson, the engineer of the Monitor, and so forth. My study of their lives was a timely preparation for my visit to Philadelphia, to see the Centennial Exposition, the preparatory work for which I had seen two years prior to that time, when, returning from the Delaware farm, I stopped at Philadelphia to search for opportunities.
The work of those great captains of industry forming the group in the great painting, “Men of Progress,” was in evidence in every nook and corner of the Centennial Exposition. This great show impressed me as a splendid glorification of all kinds of wonderful mechanisms, driven by steam and animal power, which helped to develop the great resources of the United States. All scientific efforts exhibited there concerned themselves with the question of what things can do, rather than what they are. The show was also a glorification of the great men who first formulated, clearly stated, and fought for the ideals of the United States. I saw that fact proclaimed in many of the historical features of the exposition, and I did not fail to understand clearly that the show took place in Philadelphia because the Liberty Bell and the Declaration of Independence were first heard in Philadelphia. When I left Philadelphia and its show I carried away in my head a good bit of American history. The Americanization process which was going on within me was very much speeded up by what I saw at the Centennial Exposition.
On my return to New York I told Jim, the fireman, that he was right when he said: “The English made us write the Declaration of Independence, and they also gave us the steam-engine with which we made our independence good.” But, instructed by my study of the lives of men who were represented in the painting “Men of Progress,” and by what I learned at the Philadelphia exposition of these men and of the leaders of the American Revolution, I suggested to Jim that the steam-engine without great men behind it would have been of little avail. “Yes,” said Jim, “the Declaration of Independence without men of character and brains behind it would also have been of little avail; and the great aims of the Civil War without men like Lincoln and Grant behind them would have ended in a foolish fizzle. This country, my lad,” exclaimed Jim with much warmth, “is a monument to the lives of the men of brains and character and action who made it.” Jim threw out this chunk of wisdom with the same ease and in the same offhand manner which he displayed when he threw a few shovelfuls of coal upon the busy fires under his boilers. To him it was an obvious truth; to a lad like myself, who was accustomed to look upon countries as monuments to kings and princes and their victorious armies, it was a revelation; and I said so. This brought from Jim another epigrammatic remark to the effect that my trip to America would teach me nothing if it did not teach me first to squeeze out of my mind all foolish European notions and make room for new ideas which I might pick up here and there in this new world. Jim’s sayings were always short and to the point and their record in my mind never faded.
Jim was very popular with everybody in the factory, and the fact that he thought well of me improved my standing much. A Mr. Paul, the youngest and most active member of the New England Cracker Factory in Cortlandt Street, paid frequent visits to the boiler-room. I had an idea that Jim’s views of things interested him just as much as the operations of the boiler-room. One morning he made a very early visit before the steam-whistle had blown and the steam-engine had started on its daily routine, and he found me in the boiler-room, a busy volunteer fireman. Jim introduced me to him in a jocular way as a student who found his way from Princeton to Cortlandt Street, where in daytime I was rapidly learning every trick of the biscuit industry while in the evening I was absorbing all the wisdom of Cooper Union. A few days later Mr. Paul informed me that my fame as a painter of baker-wagons and of basements on Lexington Avenue, and also my record as a student in mechanical drawing in the evening classes of Cooper Union, had reached the board of directors of the New England Cracker Factory, and that they had resolved to offer me a new job. I was advanced to the position of assistant to the shipping clerk. It meant not only more pay but also social advancement. I was no longer a workman in the factory, who worked for wages; I was a clerk who received a salary. I felt as people in England probably feel when peerage is conferred upon them. My fellow workers in the factory, including Eilers, who first got me the job, showed no envy. They agreed with Jim, who told them that I was “smart.” Jim used the same word which my Vila on the banks of the Delaware had used whenever I made a good recitation in English, and I saw in it a good omen. Jim and Vila and Christian of West Street were my authorities, who expressed what I considered a competent opinion upon my apprenticeship as greenhorn, and that opinion was favorable. I felt assured that the apprenticeship was soon coming to an end.
My duties as assistant to the shipping clerk were to superintend the packing of biscuits, to help address with brush and paint the boxes in which they were packed, and to see to it that they were shipped on time. A squad of some thirty girls did the packing and they seemed at first inclined to file objections whenever I found fault with their packing. They seemed to resent being bossed by an immigrant youth whose foreign accent would “stop a train,” as they sometimes expressed it. I found out from Jim that the principal object of their resentment was to make me angry, because when my Serbian temper was up my accent became most atrocious and that furnished them a most hilarious amusement. I soon became convinced that my success as assistant to the shipping clerk demanded a perfect control of my temper and a speedy improvement of my accent, each of them a most difficult task.
My efforts to control my temper were frequently put to severe tests. Now and then a biscuit, well aimed, would hit me on the head, and my Serbian blood would rush to my cheeks and I would look daggers at the supposed offender. “Look at the bashibozouk,” one of the girls would sing out on these occasions, and another would add: “Did you ever see such a Bulgarian atrocity?” These words were in everybody’s mouth at that time and they referred to the incidents of the Balkan War of 1876–1878, which Serbia, Montenegro, and Russia were waging against the Turks. A third girl would stick her tongue out and make funny faces at me in response to my savage glare. She evidently tried to make me laugh, and I did laugh. Then a fourth girl would sing out: “Oh, look at the darling now; I just love him when he smiles.” Then they all would sing:
“Smile, Michael, smile,
I love your sunny style.”
I did smile, and every day I smiled more and more, after I had discovered that the girls did not really dislike me, but just loved to tease me whenever I showed any signs of a European greenhorn. I dropped the airs put on by European superiors in authority and gradually the girls became friendly and began to call me by my first name instead of mockingly addressing me as “Mister” as they addressed the old shipping clerk. “You are getting on swimmingly, my lad,” said Jim one day, and he added something like this: “The girls are calling you Michael, just as they call me Jim. We are popular, my boy, but don’t let this popularity mislead you into foolish notions. Just watch me; I have enjoyed this popularity for twenty years, and here I am still a bachelor, and an old bachelor at that. You have controlled your temper well, but how about controlling your heart, my lad?” Jim grinned and winked and placed his index finger in front of his forehead, as if to indicate that many a wise experience is stored in the practical head of a canny old fireman. I understood his meaning, but did I heed its warning? I knew that it contained a warning, and I suspected strongly that Jim had discovered one of my deepest secrets.
There was one girl among the thirty biscuit-packers who, in my opinion, never made a mistake in packing. I never took pains to inspect her work, and why should I when I was sure of her perfection? But I watched her and feasted my eyes upon her whenever I had spare time and was sure that nobody was observing me. She became conscious of it and every now and then she would suddenly look up and catch my admiring but cautious gaze. A bashful blush would give me away in spite of my efforts to hide my thoughts and feelings. She guessed them and she smiled as if greatly pleased and much amused, but she cleverly avoided giving me an opportunity to make a confession. I might have done it in spite of my extreme bashfulness. My note-books were full of her pictures, which I drew and signed under them her name, Jane Macnamara. Perhaps Jim had seen these pictures among my many sketches of the boiler-room and its contents, and hence his warning to me.
One Monday morning Jane did not appear at her usual place in the packing-room; her friend, another packing girl, told me that Jane had been married on the previous Saturday. I tried my best to appear as if I received the news with indifference, but failed. The girls observed a change; I neither smiled nor did I frown, but I thought a lot, and the girls seemed to take quite an interest in my thoughtfulness, but studiously avoided annoying me. Only now and then one of the girls would whisper to me: “Penny for your thoughts, Michael.” Jim, I was sure, also observed the change, but said nothing, as if he had observed nothing. One day he introduced me to an acquaintance of his whom he called Fred, who looked like a middle-aged man. He had wonderful deep furrows in his face, and his hands were large and very bony and looked as if the daily toil had rubbed off all the superfluous flesh and fat from them. Jim told me that Fred was far from middle age, but barely over thirty, and that some twelve years before he had plans and ambitions just as big as mine, backed by at least as much brains as he thought I had. Fred’s friends expected big things from him, said Jim, but suddenly Fred lost his heart and married and raised a big family of children somewhere in Jersey City. “To-day,” said Jim, “Fred is mentally just where he was twelve years ago, and if he did not have the contract of making the wooden packing-boxes for this factory he would look even older than he is looking now,” and then he added, in his usual offhand manner by way of illustration, that corn-stalks cease to grow as soon as the ears of corn appear and all the sap of the corn-stalk is served to the ears. Referring to Fred’s numerous children, Jim finished his picture by saying that Fred looked like a withering corn-stalk with many small ears of corn on it, and that he hoped that the withering corn-stalk would hold out until the numerous ears of corn had ripened. He admitted, however, that he himself was a withering corn-stalk with no ears of corn at all; that his life was the other extreme from Fred’s, and that neither he nor Fred had in their younger days studied and applied in practice the controlling regulators of life. Jim’s sermons on self-control always hit the mark; and when, referring to his advice to me to control my temper, my heart, and my speech, I suggested that according to him life was a series of all kinds of controls difficult to manage, he answered that nothing is difficult when it becomes a habit. “Just examine my boiler-room,” he said, “and you will find that everything is controlled. The centrifugal governor controls the speed of the engine; the safety-valve limits the pressure of steam; every fire has a regulator of its air draft, and every oven has a temperature indicator. I know them all and I watch their operations without knowing that I am doing it. Practice makes perfect, my lad, and perfection knows no difficulties even in a boiler-room as full of all kinds of tricks as human life is.” Jim’s sermons were always short and far ahead of anything I had ever heard in the churches in Delaware City, or in Dayton, New Jersey, or in the Bowery Mission, or in any other church which up to that time I had visited in this country; and, moreover, they were not accompanied by congregational singing, which bored me. I understood why so many blacksmiths and other people of small learning made a great success as preachers in this country, whereas in my native village the priest, who prided himself upon his learning, was obliged to read those sermons only which were sent to him by the bishop of the diocese. I suggested to Jim in a jocular way to quit the boiler-room and become a preacher, and he answered that the boys and girls of the New England Cracker Factory in Cortlandt Street furnished a sufficiently large field for his religious and educational mission. Jim’s assistance helped me much to let the dream about Jane fade away gradually and make room in my imagination for the dreams which I first saw at Princeton under that elm-tree in front of Nassau Hall.
The factory in Cortlandt Street was in many respects a college in which Jim was the chaplain; and it had a professor who should be mentioned here. It also had a dormitory; several of the young fellows employed in the factory lived on the top floor of the building. I was one of them, and I did not change my quarters when I was advanced to the position of assistant to the shipping clerk. Two great attractions kept me there. One was that the other fellows were out every evening visiting theatres and music-halls, so that I had the whole loft, and, in fact, the whole factory all to myself and to a chum of mine, who was much older than I in years but not in his position in the factory. His name was Bilharz, and he was the second attraction. He was the opposite to Jim and to every human being I had ever met. He knew nothing of nor did he care for the concrete or practical things of life, but always lived in dreams about things which happened centuries ago. He knew Latin and Greek and all kinds of literatures, but never made any attempts to make any use of his knowledge. Factory work of the humblest kind was good enough for him, and I believed that he would have been satisfied to work for his board only, if pay had been refused him. He informed me once by an accidental slip of the tongue that he had studied theology at the University of Freiburg, in southern Germany, and would have become a priest if an unfortunate love-affair had not put an end to his ecclesiastical aspirations. He had no other aims when he came to America, he said, than to work for a modest living and to lead a life of profound obscurity, until the Lord called him away from this valley of tears, as he expressed it. He used a German expression and called the earth a “Thraenenthal.” Although a German he spoke English well, being a finished scholar and having lived in America for a number of years, and having a memory for sound which impressed me as most remarkable. He sang like a nightingale, but only on evenings when we were all alone. Ecclesiastical music was his favorite, and during many an evening the strains of “Gloria in Excelsis Deo,” “Ave Maria,” and “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth” rang forth from the spacious lofts of the New England Cracker Factory and lost themselves in the silence of night among the deserted buildings of Cortlandt Street, which were alive in daytime only. I never tired listening to his recitations of Latin and Greek poetry, although I did not understand it, and of selected passages from Shakespeare and Goethe, which I did understand. He loved the art of articulate speech and of melody, and he thought of things only that happened three thousand years ago when Homer sang and the Olympian gods guided the destinies of men, but he cared for nothing else. The steam-engine and every other kind of mechanism were to him a deadly prose which, in his opinion, Satan had invented for the purpose of leading astray the spirit of man. “They are the weapons by which people like you are keeping in slavery people like me,” he said once, jokingly, referring to my interest in the boiler-room operations and to my admiration of the great captains of industry whose lives I studied and whose work I had seen and admired at the Philadelphia exposition. I sometimes suspected that he felt alarmed by what he considered my worship of false gods, and that this impelled him to do everything he could for my redemption from heathenism. My admiration for his learning was great, but my sympathy for his misfortunes was even greater. His hands were once caught in a machine and most of his fingers had become stiff and crooked so that they looked like the talons of a falcon. His sharp features, a crooked nose and protruding eyes, supported this suggestion of a falcon, but his awkward, flat-footed walk suggested a falcon with broken wings; to say nothing of his other misfortunes which made him in spirit also a falcon with broken wings.
I felt that he knew a great deal more about the Jane incident than he cared to disclose to me. One day I referred to her as the Minnehaha of Cortlandt Street. “Minnehaha, laughing water,” exclaimed Bilharz: “where did you ever get that, you boiler-room bug?” and he laughed as if he had never heard a funnier thing in his life. “From Jim, the boiler-room hermit, to Longfellow, one of the greatest of American poets, is a tremendous jump, a salto mortale, as they call it in a circus,” said Bilharz; and then, growing more serious and thoughtful, he added something like this: “It is really wonderful what the eyes of a woman can do! They are just like the stars in the heavens, encouraging us poor mortals to aim at celestial heights. But many a sky-rocket seemed to be sailing for the stars and suddenly it found itself buried in mud. I am one of these sky-rockets,” said Bilharz; “you are not, thanks to the timely intervention of a kindly divinity.” He meant Jim. Then, continuing in his usual dramatic manner, he recited in Latin an ode of Horace, in which the poet speaks of a youth trusting to the beaming countenance of his lady-love as a mariner trusting to the sunlit ripples of a calm sea who is suddenly upset by a treacherous squall and, being rescued, gratefully offers his wet garments in sacrifice to Neptune, the god of the sea. After translating the ode and explaining its meaning to me he urged me to hang my best clothes in the boiler-room as a sacrifice to Jim, the divinity which had rescued me from the treacherous waves of “Minnehaha, laughing water.” “You are the luckiest of mortals, my boy,” said Bilharz to me; “some day you will provoke the envy of the gods and then look out for stern Nemesis!” I did not understand the full meaning of these classical allusions, but he assured me that some day I should. I told Bilharz that my luck, of which he spoke so often, was mostly due to my being so near to a man of his learning, and that I thought he ought to be a professor in Nassau Hall at Princeton. He declined the honor, but offered to prepare me for it, and I accepted.
Bilharz was very moody and for days and days he had nothing to say to anybody, not even to me! Nobody else cared, because nobody understood him, but I did care. When he discovered that I sincerely admired his learning and was interested in his puzzling personality he became more communicative, sometimes almost human. His English accent was excellent, and I asked his opinion about my accent and he assured me with childlike frankness that it was rotten, but that it could be fixed up if I submitted to a course of training prescribed for me by my Vila on the Delaware farm. “I could not be your Vila, deformed as I am,” said he, referring to his crippled fingers and to his awkward walk, “but I will gladly be your satyr and teach you how to imitate not only the sounds of human language but also, if you wish it, the melodies of birds and the chirping of bugs. The satyrs are great in that.” I knew that he could, because many an evening while I was on the dormitory loft of the factory reading the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, Patrick Henry’s and Daniel Webster’s speeches, and Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg, Bilharz, in another part of the building, would be imitating sounds of all kinds of birds and bugs, after he had grown tired reciting Greek and Latin poetry and singing ecclesiastical songs. That was his only amusement, and he enjoyed it when he was sure that nobody was listening; he made an exception in my case. We finally made the start in what he called my preparation for Nassau Hall. In the course of less than a month I finished reciting to Bilharz the Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, and Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg, submitting to many corrections and making many efforts to give each word its proper pronunciation, and finally he accepted my performance as satisfactory. By that time I knew these documents by heart and so did Bilharz, and he, in spite of himself, liked them so well that he accused me of conspiring to make an American out of him. “You are sinking rapidly, my boy, in the whirlpool of American democracy, and you are dragging me down with you,” said Bilharz one evening, when I objected to some of the amendments which he offered in order to harmonize the American theory of freedom with the principles of German socialism. He admitted that he, a loyal Roman Catholic, did not care much for German social democracy, but that he often wondered why the American enthusiasts for democracy did not take German social democracy and save themselves the trouble of writing the Declaration of Independence. I called his attention to the fact that American democracy is much older than German social democracy, and he, somewhat irritated by that suggestion and by my defense of American democracy, as I understood it, suggested that he should resign his position as my teacher and become my pupil. His flippant criticism of American democracy and my stiff defense of it helped me much to see things which otherwise I should have missed, but these discussions threatened the entente cordiale between Bilharz and myself. Finally we compromised and changed our course of reading, dropping things relating to political theories and taking up poetry. Longfellow’s and Bryant’s poetry were my favorites. “The Village Blacksmith” and “Thanatopsis” I knew by heart and enjoyed reciting to Bilharz, who was greatly pleased whenever in these recitations I avoided making a single serious break in my pronunciation. After reading some of Shakespeare’s dramas which Booth and other famous actors like Lawrence Barrett and John McCullough were playing at that time, I visited the theatre often, and from my modest gallery seat I would analyze carefully the articulation of every syllable which Booth and the other actors were reciting. Booth did not have a big voice; it was much smaller than the voice of Lawrence Barrett or of powerful John McCullough, but I understood him better. Bilharz explained it by saying that Booth had a perfect articulation. “Articulation is an art which the Greeks invented; big voice is brute force common among the Russians,” he used to say, protesting whenever he had an opportunity against mere physical strength, which was natural considering his scanty physical resources. He hated both the Russians and the Prussians, because, in his opinion, they both were big brutes. In those days the southern Germans had no love for the Prussians. He never missed a single chance to sing the praises of Greek drama and of the Greek theatre and of everything which flourished during the classical age. He called my attention to the enormous size of Greek theatres and to the necessity of perfect articulation on the part of Greek actors if they were to be heard. “They were great artists,” said he; “our actors are duffers only. We are all duffers! Give me the Greeks, give me Homer, Pindar, Demosthenes, Plato, Praxiteles, Phidias, Sophocles, and hundreds of others who spoke the language of the gods and did things which only the divine spirit in man can do, and you can have your Morse, McCormick, Howe, Ericsson, and the rest of the materialistic crew who ran the show at Philadelphia.” He certainly told many a fine story when he spoke of the great poets, orators, philosophers, and sculptors of Greece, and his stories impressed me much because they were great revelations to me; they were the first to arouse my interest in the great civilization of Greece. They would have impressed me even more if Bilharz had not displayed a glaring tendency to exaggerate, in order to create a strong contrast between what he called the idealism of classical Greece and what he called the realistic materialism of modern America. According to him the first had its seat among the gods on the ethereal top of Mount Olympus and the second one was sinking deeper and deeper through the shafts of coal and iron mines into the dark caverns of material earth. “No action,” said Bilharz, “which needs the assistance of a steam-engine or of any other mechanism can trace its origin to idealism nor can it end in idealism.” I suggested that every animal body is a mechanism and that its continuous evolution seems to indicate that the world is heading for a definite ideal. Bilharz flew up like a hornet when he heard the word evolution.
A lively discussion was going on in those days between the biological sciences and theology, Huxley and many other scientists championing the claims of Darwin’s evolution theory and the theologians defending the claims of revealed religion. I was too young and too untutored to understand much of those learned discussions, but Bilharz followed them with feverish anxiety. His theological arguments did not appeal to me, and so far as I was concerned they lost even the little force they had when Bilharz turned them against what he called American mechanism and materialism, which he tried to make responsible for the alleged materialism of the evolution theory. His political and philosophical theories based upon blind prejudice created a gap between him and me which widened every day. Here are some illustrations of it.
When I described to him the election day of 1876, telling him that I and thousands of others had stood quietly and patiently hours and hours in drenching rain in front of the New York Tribune building waiting for the returns which would tell us whether Hayes or Tilden was to be the supreme executive head of the United States during the coming four years; how the next day some of the newspapers had raised a howl of “fraud,” accusing the Republican party of tampering with the election returns in one of the States, but that the people of New York City and of the whole country had paid no attention, trusting implicitly to the machinery of government to straighten out crookedness if it existed, and how this dignity of American democracy thrilled me when I compared it with the rows and scandals accompanying elections in the countries of the military frontier of Austria-Hungary, he only laughed and ridiculed the whole procedure of electing by ignorant voters the supreme executive head of a nation. He told me a story of Aristides of Athens, who, being requested by a voter to write upon a shell the name of the man who was to be condemned for some crime which was not quite clear to the Athenian voter, wrote down his own name, and Aristides, the just, the noblest character of Athens, was condemned. But the condemnation of this just and noble and innocent man was, according to Bilharz, a condemnation of the Athenian democracy, whose shortcomings brought the downfall of Greek civilization, and he added that the shortcomings of American democracy would bring the downfall of the old European civilization. The Aristides story interested me much, but the inference he drew from it made me think of Christian of West Street, and of his blunt remark: “A European greenhorn must have told you that.” Jim was present at this discussion. He was a strong Presbyterian and ridiculed on every occasion what he called Bilharz’s Roman Catholic views. This time he quoted Lincoln by saying “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Then he added for the edification of Bilharz that religion in the Roman Catholic church is of the church, by the church, for the church, and that this was the real reason why Bilharz, trained in this kind of theology, would never understand American democracy. This shocked me, because I expected a fist fight between my two best friends, but... the fist fight did not take place.
I enjoyed taking long walks on Broadway whenever I had free time, going up on one side and coming down on the other, inspecting every window in bookstores and art stores and looking at the latest things in pictorial art, at the titles of the latest things in literature, and at the photographs and engravings of prominent men of the day. This gave me quite an idea of what was going on in the American world of intellect. Bilharz never joined me because, he said, there was nothing worth seeing on these inspection tours of mine. Once during the noon recess I managed to take him around the corner of Cortlandt Street and Broadway trusting to luck to meet a certain great person whom I had seen several times before and recognized because I saw his photograph in the shop-windows of Broadway. I succeeded, for there in the midst of the Broadway crowd appeared before us William Cullen Bryant, the author of “Thanatopsis”! He was then the editor of The Evening Post, which was located on Broadway not far from Cortlandt Street. I pointed him out; Bilharz held his breath and, referring to the wonderful appearance of the great poet, he said: “There is the only man in this materialistic land of reapers and mowing-machines and chattering telephone disks who could take a seat among the gods on Mount Olympus and be welcomed there by the shades of the great idealists of Greece.”
At another time I managed to take him as far as City Hall; it was some holiday, and the papers had announced that President Hayes and his secretary of state, William Evarts, would be at City Hall at noon, and they were there. Bilharz and I stood in a huge crowd, but we had a good view of the President and of his secretary of state, and we heard every word of their short speeches. They were dressed just like everybody else, but their remarkable physiognomies and their scholarly words convinced me that they belonged to the exalted position into which the vote of the people had placed them. The New York Sun was a bitter opponent of President Hayes and published his picture on the editorial page of every one of its issues. In this picture the letters spelling “fraud” were represented as branded across the expansive brow of the President. But as I looked at him standing in front of City Hall and beheld the light which was reflected from his smooth and honest brow I knew that the New York Sun was wrong, and I vowed never to read it again until that picture disappeared from its editorial pages. Bilharz did not understand my admiration of the scene which we had witnessed: the democratic simplicity of the highest officials in the great United States and the very informal reception given to them in the great metropolis, New York, was all due, according to him, to a lack of artistic taste on the part of vulgar democracy. I thought of the multicolored uniforms loaded with shining decorations, of the plumed hats and long sabres, and of the numerous glaring flags with imperial eagles displayed on such occasions in the Austrian Empire, and I told Bilharz that if that monkey business was all due to a profusion of artistic taste, then give me the simplicity of vulgar democracy. Bilharz shrugged his shoulders and pitied me, and I pitied him for having to pass, as he assured me often, the rest of his days in this—to him—the most uninteresting part of the valley of tears, das Thraenenthal, as he called this terrestrial globe.
Such were the many differences of mental attitude which widened the gap between Bilharz and myself. He clung to the notions which were handed down to the Old World from generations long departed; I, following Jim’s suggestion, was trying to pick up wherever I could new ideas in the New World. Much learning hath made him mad, thought I, whenever I analyzed the strange ideas which Bilharz had of the United States of America. I came to the conclusion that his term of apprenticeship as greenhorn would never end. It is a national calamity that the vast majority of our immigrants never see the end of their apprenticeship as greenhorns.
I wished to believe that I was no longer a greenhorn, and I certainly did not wish to listen to opinions of a greenhorn such as were the opinions of Bilharz in matters outside of Greek and Roman history and of the civilization which it described. His eyes were continually turned to a sunset the glory of which had faded long ago; my eyes watched just as eagerly for the daily sunrise as they did on the pasturelands of my native village, and each sunrise showed me something new in this—to me—still unknown land. He contemplated the past, and I explored the present and dreamed about the future. I thought of Jim’s prophecy which said that some day I should outgrow the opportunities of Cortlandt Street, and I felt confident that the day had arrived. My mind was made up to search for new opportunities, but Jim, and Bilharz also, in spite of his shortcomings, were still a great attraction, and I moved slowly.
One day, after leaving Cooper Union library, I walked along the upper Bowery, refreshing my memories of the hard winter of 1874–1875. In Broome Street near the Bowery I saw a store with a sign bearing the name of Lukanitch. The man of that name must be a Serb, thought I, and I walked in, longing to hear the language which I had not heard for over three years. It was a hardware store dealing principally in files and tools made of hardened steel. Behind the desk stood an elderly man, and he, much surprised, answered my Serbian greeting in the Serbian language with an accent reminding me of Kos, my Slovene teacher in Panchevo. Lukanitch told me that he was a Slovene and that in his young days he was a pedler, a Kranyats, as they called the Slovenian pedlers in my native village. His annual summer tours took him to my native Banat. A Kranyats travels on foot hundreds of miles, carrying on his back a huge case with numerous small drawers, each drawer containing a different line of goods: pins, needles, and threads; pens and pencils, cheap jewelry and gaily colored handkerchiefs; cotton, linen, silk, and all kinds of things which the peasants are apt to buy. A Kranyats was a familiar sight in my native village, and he was always welcome there, because he was a Slovene, a near kin to the Serb; and the Serb peasants of the Banat plains loved to hear a Kranyats describe the beauties of the mountainsides of little Slovenia on the eastern slope of the Dolomites. When I disclosed my name to Lukanitch he asked me for my father’s name, and when I told him that it was Constantine and that he lived in Idvor, Banat, his eyes looked like two scintillating stars. He gave me a big hug and a big tear threatened to roll down his cheek when he said: “Ko che ko Bog?” (Who can fathom the will of God?) After relating to me that my father had befriended him nearly thirty years prior to that time and that he had often stayed as guest at my father’s house whenever his annual tours as Kranyats took him through Idvor, he begged me to come to his house on the following Sunday and dine with his family. I did, and there I met his good wife, a fine Slavonic type, and also his son and daughter, who were born in this country and who looked like young Slavs with Americanism grafted upon them. His son was about to graduate from a high school, and his daughter was preparing for Normal College. They were both American in manner and sentiment, but father and mother, although deeply devoted to the United States, the native country of their children, were still sincerely attached to the beautiful customs of the Slovene land. The children preferred to speak English, but they delighted in Slovene music, which they cultivated with much enthusiasm. That made their parents most happy. Their home was a beautiful combination of American and Slovene civilization. Once they invited me to an anniversary party and I found the whole family dressed in most picturesque Slovenian costumes; but everybody in the party, including even old Lukanitch and his wife and all the Slovenian guests, spoke English. Most of the guests were Americans, but they enjoyed the Slovenian dishes and the Slovenian music, singing, and dancing as much as anybody. To my great surprise the American girls, friends of Miss Lukanitch, played Slovenian music exceedingly well, and I thought to myself that a sufficiently frequent repetition of parties of that kind would soon transform the American population in the vicinity of Prince Street into Slovenians. This interaction between two very different civilizations gave me food for thought, which I am still digesting mentally.
Lukanitch and his family became my devoted friends, and they were just as interested in my plans and aspirations as if I had been a member of their family. The old lady had a tender heart, and she shed many a tear listening to bits of my history from the time when I bade good-by to father and mother at the steamboat landing on the Danube, five years before. The disappearance of my roast goose at Karlovci, my first railroad ride from Budapest to Vienna, my dialogues with the train conductor and the gaudy station-master at Vienna, and my free ride in a first-class compartment from Vienna to Prague in company with American friends amused her and her husband hugely. I had to repeat the story many a time for the benefit of her Slovenian friends. She begged me repeatedly to tell the story of my crossing of the Atlantic and of my hardships as greenhorn, being evidently anxious to have her children hear it. I did it several times, scoring much success on each occasion, and as a reward she loaded me with many little gifts and with many enjoyable feasts on Sundays and holidays. My interpretation of the American theory of freedom, which I had derived from reading the lives and the utterances of the great men who made this country and from my three years’ struggles as greenhorn, found a most appreciative audience in the Lukanitch family. They applauded Jim’s sentiment, that this country is a monument to the great men who made it, and not to a single family like the Hapsburgs of Austria-Hungary. Old Lukanitch offered to engage me as his teacher in American history, and young Lukanitch offered to get me an invitation from the principal of his high school to deliver an oration on the Declaration of Independence. The offers were not meant very seriously, but there was enough sincerity in them to make me believe that my training in America was recognized as having substantial value by people whose opinion deserved respect. I saw in it the first real recognition referred to in the prophecy of my fellow passenger on the immigrant ship who said: “No matter who you are or what you know or what you have, you will be a greenhorn when you land in the New World, and a greenhorn has to serve his apprenticeship as greenhorn before he can establish his claim to any recognition.” I said to myself: “Here is my first recognition small as it may be, and I am certainly no longer a greenhorn.”
No longer a greenhorn! Oh, what a confidence that gives to a foreign-born youth who has experienced the hardships of serving his apprenticeship as a greenhorn! Then there were other sources of confidence: I had a goodly deposit in the Union Dime Savings Bank and it was several thousand times as big as the nickel which I brought to Castle Garden when I landed. Besides, I had learned a thing or two in the evening classes at Cooper Union, and my English was considered good not only in vocabulary and grammar, but also in articulation, thanks to Bilharz. Young Lukanitch assured me that my knowledge of English, mathematics, and science would easily take me into college. He even prophesied a most successful college career, pointing at my big chest and broad shoulders and feeling my hard biceps. “You will make a splendid college oarsman,” said he, “and they will do anything for you at Columbia if you are a good oarsman, even if you do not get from Bilharz so very much Greek or Latin.” At that time Columbia stood very high in rowing. One of her crews won in the Henley Regatta, and its picture could be seen in every illustrated paper. I had seen it many a time and remembered the looks of every member of that famous crew. Young Lukanitch was so enthusiastic about it that he would have gone to Columbia himself if his father had not needed him so much in his steel-tool business. He did his best to turn my eyes from Nassau Hall to Columbia. He succeeded, but not so much on account of my prospects in rowing as on account of other things, and among them was the official name of that institution: “Columbia College in the City of New York.” The fact that the college was located in the city of New York carried much weight, because New York appealed to my imagination more than any other place in the world. The impression which it made upon my mind as the immigrant ship moved into New York Harbor on that clear and sunny March day when I first passed through Castle Garden, the Gate of America, never faded. My first victory on American soil was won in New York when I fought for my right to wear the red fez.