16
PARTISAN REVIEW
could still smell the plaster and the paiiJt. The apartment was crowded
with new conveniences. There was running water, not only in the sink,
but in a wash stand in the toilet, which was a flush toilet, and inside
the apartment.
In
the kitchen there was a bathtub where one could also
bathe. They would get new furniture.
They would put down linoleum
on the floor. And if God willed to continue his blessings they might some
day be able to put down carpets and rugs. Then indeed they would be
living at the level of the rich.
The Hymans were not alone in their departure form the slums.
They were drops in a human tide that was rolling upward from the lower
East Side into Harlem, that was soon to continue up into the Bronx, and
was to create, in both places, other slums. For the bath tubs in the kitchen
and the indoor toilet, they paid in reduced backyard space. The neigh-
borhood would soon crowd up, fester into a slum; and then new emigra-
tions would be made into Brooklyn and Queens and the outer parts of
the Bronx; and ·in time new slums would be created, electric lit steam-
heated slums, in small rooms, low ceilings and shoe box back yards, in
which not even the Ailanthus tree, hardy as the surviving slum child, could
breathe and live.
But through all this movement and expansion and hope men felt
themselves to be wanderers in social range as in space; unfixed, not
members of determinate classes.
The difference between the rich and
poor were known, were realities too great to evade; but as yet, they
spurred the poor only to hope for riches, to deny with hysterical revulsion,
their own class, their own destiny.
