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The trouble with America is that every one is so busy thinking of clean streets, clean garbage-cans, the possibilities of disease contained in impure food, that much of the beauty and comfort of life is lost. Life is not all in length. Well, as I say, with our visit to the bazaar reserved for the end of the afternoon, we went into the Chinese City in search of camel's-hair blankets.
The coffee boilers along the side of the room would be boiling over and sending streams of water over the charwomen. The dirty dishes would be piled into large tin tubs with a clatter, and pulled out rasping over the floor. The charwomen would beg the waiters to clear the tables, which looked as if garbage-cans had been emptied upon them. The steward could not enforce his authority.
This was something which Orme had not expected. He ran forward and peered down the dark, unpleasant passage. There was his man, barely visible, picking a careful way through the ash-heaps and avoiding the pestilential garbage-cans.
It's you they want. Yes, sir, I worked." Again he scanned their faces anxiously. "I'm a scullery-maid." "What?" "That's what I said. I've rustled garbage-cans till the smell of food gives me a cold sweat. I'm as hungry as a starving Cuban, and yet the sight of a knife and fork turns my stomach." He wheeled suddenly upon Alton Clyde, whose burst of shrill laughter offended him. "Don't cry.
Myriads of fruits in every stage of development and disintegration, haggled bits of meat, the hundred sights and sounds and smells one hurries past suggest that Panama may even have outdone Central America before Uncle Sam came with his garbage-cans and his switch. Further on, down at the old harbor, lingers a hint of the picturesqueness of Panama in pre-canal days.
He got it. The result was that never again did any of the serial of janitors, which ran continuously next door, empty garbage-cans in the court. Rendered jubilant by this victory, we confidently prepared to meet the agents of our building. But before we could arrange this, Considine, the novelist who had come to New York for the winter, called.
She knew some of its trails; but once there, was unpleasantly surprised to find the place swarming with Cats that, like herself, were driven from their old grounds, and when the garbage-cans came out there were several Slummers at each. It meant a famine in the land, and Pussy, after standing it a few days, was reduced to seeking her other home on Fifth Avenue.
For example, the janitor of the apartment-house which stood next had a pleasant little habit of three times a day emptying some dozen or more metal garbage-cans in the stone-paved court, and as these with their lids and handles merrily jingled back into place, a roar as if from a boiler factory rose, reverberating between the high buildings until, when it reached the sensitive ears of the Jardines, it created pandemonium.
This sounds difficult, but it isn't. Like the mosquito, the fly can only breed in one particular kind of place, and that place is a heap of dirt, preferably horse manure, but, at a pinch, dust-bins, garbage-cans, sweepings under porches or behind furniture, vaults, anywhere that dirt is allowed to remain undisturbed for more than a week at a stretch.
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