Through the Eye of the Needle | Page 7

you ring up the occupant and talk to him as many
stories off as he happens to be. But people who can afford to indulge
their pride will not live in this sort of apartment-house, and the rents in
them are much lower than in the finer sort. The finer sort are vulgarly
fine for the most part, with a gaudy splendor of mosaic pavement,
marble stairs, frescoed ceilings, painted walls, and cabinet wood-work.
But there are many that are fine in a good taste, in the things that are
common to the inmates. Their fittings for housekeeping are of all
degrees of perfection, and, except for the want of light and air, life in
them has a high degree of gross luxury. They are heated throughout
with pipes of steam or hot water, and they are sometimes lighted with
both gas and electricity, which the inmate uses at will, though of course
at his own cost. Outside, they are the despair of architecture, for no
style has yet been invented which enables the artist to characterize them
with beauty, and wherever they lift their vast bulks they deform the
whole neighborhood, throwing the other buildings out of scale, and
making it impossible for future edifices to assimilate themselves to the
intruder.
There is no end to the apartment-houses for multitude, and there is no
street or avenue free from them. Of course, the better sort are to be
found on the fashionable avenues and the finer cross-streets, but others
follow the course of the horse-car lines on the eastern and western
avenues, and the elevated roads on the avenues which these have
invaded. In such places they are shops below and apartments above,
and I cannot see that the inmates seem at all sensible that they are
unfitly housed in them. People are born and married, and live and die in
the midst of an uproar so frantic that you would think they would go
mad of it; and I believe the physicians really attribute something of the
growing prevalence of neurotic disorders to the wear and tear of the
nerves from the rush of the trains passing almost momently, and the
perpetual jarring of the earth and air from their swift transit. I once
spent an evening in one of these apartments, which a friend had taken
for a few weeks last spring (you can get them out of season for any
length of time), and as the weather had begun to be warm, we had the
windows open, and so we had the full effect of the railroad operated
under them. My friend had become accustomed to it, but for me it was

an affliction which I cannot give you any notion of. The trains seemed
to be in the room with us, and I sat as if I had a locomotive in my lap.
Their shrieks and groans burst every sentence I began, and if I had not
been master of that visible speech which we use so much at home I
never should have known what my friend was saying. I cannot tell you
how this brutal clamor insulted me, and made the mere exchange of
thought a part of the squalid struggle which is the plutocratic
conception of life; I came away after a few hours of it, bewildered and
bruised, as if I had been beaten upon with hammers.
Some of the apartments on the elevated lines are very good, as such
things go; they are certainly costly enough to be good; and they are
inhabited by people who can afford to leave them during the hot season
when the noise is at its worst; but most of them belong to people who
must dwell in them summer and winter, for want of money and leisure
to get out of them, and who must suffer incessantly from the noise I
could not endure for a few hours. In health it is bad enough, but in
sickness it must be horrible beyond all parallel. Imagine a mother with
a dying child in such a place; or a wife bending over the pillow of her
husband to catch the last faint whisper of farewell, as a train of five or
six cars goes roaring by the open window! What horror! What
profanation!

IV
The noise is bad everywhere in New York, but in some of the finer
apartment-houses on the better streets you are as well out of it as you
can be anywhere in the city. I have been a guest in these at different
times, and in one of them I am such a frequent guest that I may be said
to know its life intimately. In fact, my hostess (women transact society
so exclusively in America that you seldom think of your