MARTIN DISEMBARKS FROM THAT NOBLE AND FAST-SAILING LINE-OF-PACKET SHIP, ‘THE SCREW’, AT THE PORT OF NEW YORK, IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. HE MAKES SOME ACQUAINTANCES, AND DINES AT A BOARDING-HOUSE. THE PARTICULARS OF THOSE TRANSACTIONS Some trifling excitement prevailed upon the very brink and margin of the land of liberty; for an alderman had been elected the day before; and Party Feeling naturally running rather high on such an exciting occasion, the friends of the disappointed candidate had found it necessary to assert the great principles of Purity of Election and Freedom of opinion by breaking a few legs and arms, and furthermore pursuing one obnoxious gentleman through the streets with the design of hitting his nose. These good-humoured little outbursts of the popular fancy were not in themselves sufficiently remarkable to create any great stir, after the lapse of a whole night; but they found fresh life and notoriety in the breath of the newsboys, who not only proclaimed them with shrill yells in all the highways and byways of the town, upon the wharves and among the shipping, but on the deck and down in the cabins of the steamboat; which, before she touched the shore, was boarded and overrun by a legion of those young citizens.
‘Here’s this morning’s New York Sewer!’ cried one. ‘Here’s this morning’s New York Stabber! Here’s the New York Family Spy! Here’s the New York Private Listener! Here’s the New York Peeper! Here’s the New York Plunderer! Here’s the New York Keyhole Reporter! Here’s the New York Rowdy Journal! Here’s all the New York papers! Here’s full particulars of the patriotic locofoco movement yesterday, in which the whigs was so chawed up; and the last Alabama gouging case; and the interesting Arkansas dooel with Bowie knives; and all the Political, Commercial, and Fashionable News. Here they are! Here they are! Here’s the papers, here’s the papers!’
‘Here’s the Sewer!’ cried another. ‘Here’s the New York Sewer! Here’s some of the twelfth thousand of to-day’s Sewer, with the best accounts of the markets, and all the shipping news, and four whole columns of country correspondence, and a full account of the Ball at Mrs White’s last night, where all the beauty and fashion of New York was assembled; with the Sewer’s own particulars of the private lives of all the ladies that was there! Here’s the Sewer! Here’s some of the twelfth thousand of the New York Sewer! Here’s the Sewer’s exposure of the Wall Street Gang, and the Sewer’s exposure of the Washington Gang, and the Sewer’s exclusive account of a flagrant act of dishonesty committed by the Secretary of State when he was eight years old; now communicated, at a great expense, by his own nurse. Here’s the Sewer! Here’s the New York Sewer, in its twelfth thousand, with a whole column of New Yorkers to be shown up, and all their names printed! Here’s the Sewer’s article upon the Judge that tried him, day afore yesterday, for libel, and the Sewer’s tribute to the independent Jury that didn’t convict him, and the Sewer’s account of what they might have expected if they had! Here’s the Sewer, here’s the Sewer! Here’s the wide-awake Sewer; always on the lookout; the leading Journal of the United States, now in its twelfth thousand, and still a-printing off:—Here’s the New York Sewer!’
‘It is in such enlightened means,’ said a voice almost in Martin’s ear, ‘that the bubbling passions of my country find a vent.’
Martin turned involuntarily, and saw, standing close at his side, a sallow gentleman, with sunken cheeks, black hair, small twinkling eyes, and a singular expression hovering about that region of his face, which was not a frown, nor a leer, and yet might have been mistaken at the first glance for either. Indeed it would have been difficult, on a much closer acquaintance, to describe it in any more satisfactory terms than as a mixed expression of vulgar cunning and conceit. This gentleman wore a rather broad-brimmed hat for the greater wisdom of his appearance; and had his arms folded for the greater impressiveness of his attitude. He was somewhat shabbily dressed in a blue surtout reaching nearly to his ankles, short loose trousers of the same colour, and a faded buff waistcoat, through which a discoloured shirt-frill struggled to force itself into notice, as asserting an equality of civil rights with the other portions of his dress, and maintaining a declaration of Independence on its own account. His feet, which were of unusually large proportions, were leisurely crossed before him as he half leaned against, half sat upon, the steamboat’s bulwark; and his thick cane, shod with a mighty ferule at one end and armed with a great metal knob at the other, depended from a line-and-tassel on his wrist. Thus attired, and thus composed into an aspect of great profundity, the gentleman twitched up the right-hand corner of his mouth and his right eye simultaneously, and said, once more:
‘It is in such enlightened means that the bubbling passions of my country find a vent.’
As he looked at Martin, and nobody else was by, Martin inclined his head, and said:
‘You allude to—?’
‘To the Palladium of rational Liberty at home, sir, and the dread of Foreign oppression abroad,’ returned the gentleman, as he pointed with his cane to an uncommonly dirty newsboy with one eye. ‘To the Envy of the world, sir, and the leaders of Human Civilization. Let me ask you sir,’ he added, bringing the ferule of his stick heavily upon the deck with the air of a man who must not be equivocated with, ‘how do you like my Country?’
‘I am hardly prepared to answer that question yet,’ said Martin ‘seeing that I have not been ashore.’
‘Well, I should expect you were not prepared, sir,’ said the gentleman, ‘to behold such signs of National Prosperity as those?’
He pointed to the vessels lying at the wharves; and then gave a vague flourish with his stick, as if he would include the air and water, generally, in this remark.
‘Really,’ said Martin, ‘I don’t know. Yes. I think I was.’
The gentleman glanced at him with a knowing look, and said he liked his policy. It was natural, he said, and it pleased him as a philosopher to observe the prejudices of human nature.
‘You have brought, I see, sir,’ he said, turning round towards Martin, and resting his chin on the top of his stick, ‘the usual amount of misery and poverty and ignorance and crime, to be located in the bosom of the great Republic. Well, sir! let ‘em come on in shiploads from the old country. When vessels are about to founder, the rats are said to leave ‘em. There is considerable of truth, I find, in that remark.’
‘The old ship will keep afloat a year or two longer yet, perhaps,’ said Martin with a smile, partly occasioned by what the gentleman said, and partly by his manner of saying it, which was odd enough for he emphasised all the small words and syllables in his discourse, and left the others to take care of themselves; as if he thought the larger parts of speech could be trusted alone, but the little ones required to be constantly looked after.
‘Hope is said by the poet, sir,’ observed the gentleman, ‘to be the nurse of young Desire.’
Martin signified that he had heard of the cardinal virtue in question serving occasionally in that domestic capacity.
‘She will not rear her infant in the present instance, sir, you’ll find,’ observed the gentleman.
‘Time will show,’ said Martin.
The gentleman nodded his head gravely; and said, ‘What is your name, sir?’
Martin told him.
‘How old are you, sir?’
Martin told him.
‘What is your profession, sir?’
Martin told him that also.
‘What is your destination, sir?’ inquired the gentleman.
‘Really,’ said Martin laughing, ‘I can’t satisfy you in that particular, for I don’t know it myself.’
‘Yes?’ said the gentleman.
‘No,’ said Martin.
The gentleman adjusted his cane under his left arm, and took a more deliberate and complete survey of Martin than he had yet had leisure to make. When he had completed his inspection, he put out his right hand, shook Martin’s hand, and said:
‘My name is Colonel Diver, sir. I am the Editor of the New York Rowdy Journal.’
Martin received the communication with that degree of respect which an announcement so distinguished appeared to demand.
‘The New York Rowdy Journal, sir,’ resumed the colonel, ‘is, as I expect you know, the organ of our aristocracy in this city.’
‘Oh! there is an aristocracy here, then?’ said Martin. ‘Of what is it composed?’
‘Of intelligence, sir,’ replied the colonel; ‘of intelligence and virtue. And of their necessary consequence in this republic—dollars, sir.’
Martin was very glad to hear this, feeling well assured that if intelligence and virtue led, as a matter of course, to the acquisition of dollars, he would speedily become a great capitalist. He was about to express the gratification such news afforded him, when he was interrupted by the captain of the ship, who came up at the moment to shake hands with the colonel; and who, seeing a well-dressed stranger on the deck (for Martin had thrown aside his cloak), shook hands with him also. This was an unspeakable relief to Martin, who, in spite of the acknowledged supremacy of Intelligence and virtue in that happy country, would have been deeply mortified to appear before Colonel Diver in the poor character of a steerage passenger.
‘Well cap’en!’ said the colonel.
‘Well colonel,’ cried the captain. ‘You’re looking most uncommon bright, sir. I can hardly realise its being you, and that’s a fact.’
‘A good passage, cap’en?’ inquired the colonel, taking him aside,
‘Well now! It was a pretty spanking run, sir,’ said, or rather sung, the captain, who was a genuine New Englander; ‘considerin’ the weather.’
‘Yes?’ said the colonel.
‘Well! It was, sir,’ said the captain. ‘I’ve just now sent a boy up to your office with the passenger-list, colonel.’
‘You haven’t got another boy to spare, p’raps, cap’en?’ said the colonel, in a tone almost amounting to severity.
‘I guess there air a dozen if you want ‘em, colonel,’ said the captain.
‘One moderate big ‘un could convey a dozen champagne, perhaps,’ observed the colonel, musing, ‘to my office. You said a spanking run, I think?’
‘Well, so I did,’ was the reply.
‘It’s very nigh, you know,’ observed the colonel. ‘I’m glad it was a spanking run, cap’en. Don’t mind about quarts if you’re short of ‘em. The boy can as well bring four-and-twenty pints, and travel twice as once.—A first-rate spanker, cap’en, was it? Yes?’
‘A most e—tarnal spanker,’ said the skipper.
‘I admire at your good fortun, cap’en. You might loan me a corkscrew at the same time, and half-a-dozen glasses if you liked. However bad the elements combine against my country’s noble packet-ship, the Screw, sir,’ said the colonel, turning to Martin, and drawing a flourish on the surface of the deck with his cane, ‘her passage either way is almost certain to eventuate a spanker!’
The captain, who had the Sewer below at that moment, lunching expensively in one cabin, while the amiable Stabber was drinking himself into a state of blind madness in another, took a cordial leave of his friend the colonel, and hurried away to dispatch the champagne; well knowing (as it afterwards appeared) that if he failed to conciliate the editor of the Rowdy Journal, that potentate would denounce him and his ship in large capitals before he was a day older; and would probably assault the memory of his mother also, who had not been dead more than twenty years. The colonel being again left alone with Martin, checked him as he was moving away, and offered in consideration of his being an Englishman, to show him the town and to introduce him, if such were his desire, to a genteel boarding-house. But before they entered on these proceedings (he said), he would beseech the honour of his company at the office of the Rowdy Journal, to partake of a bottle of champagne of his own importation.
All this was so extremely kind and hospitable, that Martin, though it was quite early in the morning, readily acquiesced. So, instructing Mark, who was deeply engaged with his friend and her three children, that when he had done assisting them, and had cleared the baggage, he was to wait for further orders at the Rowdy Journal Office, Martin accompanied his new friend on shore.
They made their way as they best could through the melancholy crowd of emigrants upon the wharf, who, grouped about their beds and boxes, with the bare ground below them and the bare sky above, might have fallen from another planet, for anything they knew of the country; and walked for some short distance along a busy street, bounded on one side by the quays and shipping; and on the other by a long row of staring red-brick storehouses and offices, ornamented with more black boards and white letters, and more white boards and black letters, than Martin had ever seen before, in fifty times the space. Presently they turned up a narrow street, and presently into other narrow streets, until at last they stopped before a house whereon was painted in great characters, ‘Rowdy Journal.’
The colonel, who had walked the whole way with one hand in his breast, his head occasionally wagging from side to side, and his hat thrown back upon his ears, like a man who was oppressed to inconvenience by a sense of his own greatness, led the way up a dark and dirty flight of stairs into a room of similar character, all littered and bestrewn with odds and ends of newspapers and other crumpled fragments, both in proof and manuscript. Behind a mangy old writing-table in this apartment sat a figure with a stump of a pen in its mouth and a great pair of scissors in its right hand, clipping and slicing at a file of Rowdy Journals; and it was such a laughable figure that Martin had some difficulty in preserving his gravity, though conscious of the close observation of Colonel Diver.
The individual who sat clipping and slicing as aforesaid at the Rowdy Journals, was a small young gentleman of very juvenile appearance, and unwholesomely pale in the face; partly, perhaps, from intense thought, but partly, there is no doubt, from the excessive use of tobacco, which he was at that moment chewing vigorously. He wore his shirt-collar turned down over a black ribbon; and his lank hair, a fragile crop, was not only smoothed and parted back from his brow, that none of the Poetry of his aspect might be lost, but had, here and there, been grubbed up by the roots; which accounted for his loftiest developments being somewhat pimply. He had that order of nose on which the envy of mankind has bestowed the appellation ‘snub,’ and it was very much turned up at the end, as with a lofty scorn. Upon the upper lip of this young gentleman were tokens of a sandy down; so very, very smooth and scant, that, though encouraged to the utmost, it looked more like a recent trace of gingerbread than the fair promise of a moustache; and this conjecture, his apparently tender age went far to strengthen. He was intent upon his work. Every time he snapped the great pair of scissors, he made a corresponding motion with his jaws, which gave him a very terrible appearance.
Martin was not long in determining within himself that this must be Colonel Diver’s son; the hope of the family, and future mainspring of the Rowdy Journal. Indeed he had begun to say that he presumed this was the colonel’s little boy, and that it was very pleasant to see him playing at Editor in all the guilelessness of childhood, when the colonel proudly interposed and said:
‘My War Correspondent, sir—Mr Jefferson Brick!’
Martin could not help starting at this unexpected announcement, and the consciousness of the irretrievable mistake he had nearly made.
Mr Brick seemed pleased with the sensation he produced upon the stranger, and shook hands with him, with an air of patronage designed to reassure him, and to let him blow that there was no occasion to be frightened, for he (Brick) wouldn’t hurt him.
‘You have heard of Jefferson Brick, I see, sir,’ quoth the colonel, with a smile. ‘England has heard of Jefferson Brick. Europe has heard of Jefferson Brick. Let me see. When did you leave England, sir?’
‘Five weeks ago,’ said Martin.
‘Five weeks ago,’ repeated the colonel, thoughtfully; as he took his seat upon the table, and swung his legs. ‘Now let me ask you, sir which of Mr Brick’s articles had become at that time the most obnoxious to the British Parliament and the Court of Saint James’s?’
‘Upon my word,’ said Martin, ‘I—’
‘I have reason to know, sir,’ interrupted the colonel, ‘that the aristocratic circles of your country quail before the name of Jefferson Brick. I should like to be informed, sir, from your lips, which of his sentiments has struck the deadliest blow—’
‘At the hundred heads of the Hydra of Corruption now grovelling in the dust beneath the lance of Reason, and spouting up to the universal arch above us, its sanguinary gore,’ said Mr Brick, putting on a little blue cloth cap with a glazed front, and quoting his last article.
‘The libation of freedom, Brick’—hinted the colonel.
‘—Must sometimes be quaffed in blood, colonel,’ cried Brick. And when he said ‘blood,’ he gave the great pair of scissors a sharp snap, as if they said blood too, and were quite of his opinion.
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This done, they both looked at Martin, pausing for a reply.
‘Upon my life,’ said Martin, who had by this time quite recovered his usual coolness, ‘I can’t give you any satisfactory information about it; for the truth is that I—’
‘Stop!’ cried the colonel, glancing sternly at his war correspondent and giving his head one shake after every sentence. ‘That you never heard of Jefferson Brick, sir. That you never read Jefferson Brick, sir. That you never saw the Rowdy Journal, sir. That you never knew, sir, of its mighty influence upon the cabinets of Europe. Yes?’
‘That’s what I was about to observe, certainly,’ said Martin.
‘Keep cool, Jefferson,’ said the colonel gravely. ‘Don’t bust! oh you Europeans! After that, let’s have a glass of wine!’ So saying, he got down from the table, and produced, from a basket outside the door, a bottle of champagne, and three glasses.
‘Mr Jefferson Brick, sir,’ said the colonel, filling Martin’s glass and his own, and pushing the bottle to that gentleman, ‘will give us a sentiment.’ ‘Well, sir!’ cried the war correspondent, ‘Since you have concluded to call upon me, I will respond. I will give you, sir, The Rowdy Journal and its brethren; the well of Truth, whose waters are black from being composed of printers’ ink, but are quite clear enough for my country to behold the shadow of her Destiny reflected in.’
‘Hear, hear!’ cried the colonel, with great complacency. ‘There are flowery components, sir, in the language of my friend?’
‘Very much so, indeed,’ said Martin.
‘There is to-day’s Rowdy, sir,’ observed the colonel, handing him a paper. ‘You’ll find Jefferson Brick at his usual post in the van of human civilization and moral purity.’
The colonel was by this time seated on the table again. Mr Brick also took up a position on that same piece of furniture; and they fell to drinking pretty hard. They often looked at Martin as he read the paper, and then at each other. When he laid it down, which was not until they had finished a second bottle, the colonel asked him what he thought of it.
‘Why, it’s horribly personal,’ said Martin.
The colonel seemed much flattered by this remark; and said he hoped it was.
‘We are independent here, sir,’ said Mr Jefferson Brick. ‘We do as we like.’
‘If I may judge from this specimen,’ returned Martin, ‘there must be a few thousands here, rather the reverse of independent, who do as they don’t like.’
‘Well! They yield to the popular mind of the Popular Instructor, sir,’ said the colonel. ‘They rile up, sometimes; but in general we have a hold upon our citizens, both in public and in private life, which is as much one of the ennobling institutions of our happy country as—’
‘As nigger slavery itself,’ suggested Mr Brick.
‘En—tirely so,’ remarked the colonel.
‘Pray,’ said Martin, after some hesitation, ‘may I venture to ask, with reference to a case I observe in this paper of yours, whether the Popular Instructor often deals in—I am at a loss to express it without giving you offence—in forgery? In forged letters, for instance,’ he pursued, for the colonel was perfectly calm and quite at his ease, ‘solemnly purporting to have been written at recent periods by living men?’
‘Well, sir!’ replied the colonel. ‘It does, now and then.’
‘And the popular instructed—what do they do?’ asked Martin.
‘Buy ‘em:’ said the colonel.
Mr Jefferson Brick expectorated and laughed; the former copiously, the latter approvingly.
‘Buy ‘em by hundreds of thousands,’ resumed the colonel. ‘We are a smart people here, and can appreciate smartness.’
‘Is smartness American for forgery?’ asked Martin.
‘Well!’ said the colonel, ‘I expect it’s American for a good many things that you call by other names. But you can’t help yourself in Europe. We can.’
‘And do, sometimes,’ thought Martin. ‘You help yourselves with very little ceremony, too!’
‘At all events, whatever name we choose to employ,’ said the colonel, stooping down to roll the third empty bottle into a corner after the other two, ‘I suppose the art of forgery was not invented here sir?’
‘I suppose not,’ replied Martin.
‘Nor any other kind of smartness I reckon?’
‘Invented! No, I presume not.’
‘Well!’ said the colonel; ‘then we got it all from the old country, and the old country’s to blame for it, and not the new ‘un. There’s an end of that. Now, if Mr Jefferson Brick and you will be so good as to clear, I’ll come out last, and lock the door.’
Rightly interpreting this as the signal for their departure, Martin walked downstairs after the war correspondent, who preceded him with great majesty. The colonel following, they left the Rowdy Journal Office and walked forth into the streets; Martin feeling doubtful whether he ought to kick the colonel for having presumed to speak to him, or whether it came within the bounds of possibility that he and his establishment could be among the boasted usages of that regenerated land.
It was clear that Colonel Diver, in the security of his strong position, and in his perfect understanding of the public sentiment, cared very little what Martin or anybody else thought about him. His high-spiced wares were made to sell, and they sold; and his thousands of readers could as rationally charge their delight in filth upon him, as a glutton can shift upon his cook the responsibility of his beastly excess. Nothing would have delighted the colonel more than to be told that no such man as he could walk in high success the streets of any other country in the world; for that would only have been a logical assurance to him of the correct adaptation of his labours to the prevailing taste, and of his being strictly and peculiarly a national feature of America.
They walked a mile or more along a handsome street which the colonel said was called Broadway, and which Mr Jefferson Brick said ‘whipped the universe.’ Turning, at length, into one of the numerous streets which branched from this main thoroughfare, they stopped before a rather mean-looking house with jalousie blinds to every window; a flight of steps before the green street-door; a shining white ornament on the rails on either side like a petrified pineapple, polished; a little oblong plate of the same material over the knocker whereon the name of ‘Pawkins’ was engraved; and four accidental pigs looking down the area.
The colonel knocked at this house with the air of a man who lived there; and an Irish girl popped her head out of one of the top windows to see who it was. Pending her journey downstairs, the pigs were joined by two or three friends from the next street, in company with whom they lay down sociably in the gutter.
‘Is the major indoors?’ inquired the colonel, as he entered.
‘Is it the master, sir?’ returned the girl, with a hesitation which seemed to imply that they were rather flush of majors in that establishment.
‘The master!’ said Colonel Diver, stopping short and looking round at his war correspondent.
‘Oh! The depressing institutions of that British empire, colonel!’ said Jefferson Brick. ‘Master!’
‘What’s the matter with the word?’ asked Martin.
‘I should hope it was never heard in our country, sir; that’s all,’ said Jefferson Brick; ‘except when it is used by some degraded Help, as new to the blessings of our form of government, as this Help is. There are no masters here.’
‘All “owners,” are they?’ said Martin.
Mr Jefferson Brick followed in the Rowdy Journal’s footsteps without returning any answer. Martin took the same course, thinking as he went, that perhaps the free and independent citizens, who in their moral elevation, owned the colonel for their master, might render better homage to the goddess, Liberty, in nightly dreams upon the oven of a Russian Serf............