fit leader for the band of hirelings he had organized with no small
skill. His position was not unlike that of the _condottieri_ of the
foreign mercenaries in the mediaeval quarrels of the Italian republics.
Like them, he led a compact body, prompt to obey orders so long as it
received the pay and had hopes of the plunder for which it was
organized. Although he belonged nominally to one of the two great
parties which contended for the control of the nation, he was always
ready to turn his forces against it if his pay and his proportion of the
spoils of office failed to satisfy himself and his men-at-arms; or even
in revenge for a slight, and in hope of higher remuneration from the
other side.
For me, as I stood on the corner under Farragut's statue and watched the
veterans file past, the knowledge of this man's career, and the sight of
his presence among those who had fought a good fight for a high motive,
seemed to tarnish the sacred occasion and to stain the glory of the
morning. Again I looked up at the window where I had seen the lady with
her two sons. She was still there, leaning forward a little, as though
in involuntary excitement, and one hand clinched the arm of the
soldierly young fellow at her right. The sight of those three refreshed
me, for I knew who they were, and what they stood for in the history of
our country--a shining example in the past and a beacon of hope for the
future. The widow's cap which crowns the brow of that mother brought up
before me the memory of a deed as noble as it was simple.
A fife-and-drum corps of boys dressed as sailors preceded a model of a
monitor mounted on wheels and artfully adorned with flowers and wreaths.
Behind this came the scanty score of old sailors who had formed
themselves into Post Rodman R. Hardy. When they came abreast of the
window where the lady stood with her two sons, they looked up and
cheered. The eyes of Captain Hardy's widow had filled with tears when
she caught sight of his old comrades; and when they cheered her and her
boys her face flushed and the arm which rested on her son's trembled.
She bowed, the two young men raised their hats, and the Post passed on
down the Avenue to perform their sad office; though they might not deck
with flowers the grave of their old commander, for he lies buried at the
bottom of the sea, and great guns were firing many a salute with shot
and shell when his body was lowered into its everlasting resting-place.
I have heard it said that a soldier's trade is learning how to kill and
how to die, and that how he lives is little matter. Captain Hardy lived
like a man, like a gentleman, like a Christian; and he died like a hero.
He came of a generation of sailors. His great-grandfather had sailed
with the fleet under Amherst when Louisburg was taken in 1758. His
grandfather had been a midshipman with Paul Jones in the _Bonhomme
Richard_. His father served on "Old Ironsides" when the _Constitution_
captured the _Guerriere_. He himself had gone to sea in time to take
part in the siege of Vera Cruz. When the war broke out he had been
married but three years. He was on the _Cumberland_ when the _Merrimac_
sank her. While the new monitors were building he had a few brief weeks
with his wife and his two baby boys. When the _Onteora_ was finished he
was a captain, and he was appointed to take command.
And there was no monitor which did better service or had more hard work
than the _Onteora_. Just before the grand attack on Fort Davis he ran
under the guns of a Confederate battery to shell a cruiser which had
retreated up the river behind the strip of land on which the earthworks
stood. Regardless of the fire from the battery, which bade fair to
hammer his ship till it might become unmanageable, he trained his guns
on the cruiser. He had no more than got the range when a fog settled
down and hid the combatants from each other. The battery ceased firing
or aimed wildly a few chance shots. The monitor, relying on the accuracy
of its gunners, continued to send shell after shell through the thick
wall of fog to the invisible place where the enemy's ship lay. When the
fog lifted, the cruiser was on fire; and then the monitor fell back out
of the range of the guns of the battery, having done the work Captain
Hardy had set it to do.
The next day came the grand assault on Fort Davis. The admiral ordered
the _Onteora_ to follow the flag-ship in the attack. The channel was
defended not only by the cannon of the fort itself and of its supporting
earthworks and by a flotilla of gunboats, but also by hidden torpedoes,
the position of which was wholly unknown even to the pilots, Union men
of the port who had volunteered to guide our vessels through the
tortuous windings of the entrance. The iron ship was made ready for
battle; its deck was sunk level with the surface of the sea; and nothing
projected but the revolving turret, with its two huge guns. In the
little box of a pilot-house Captain Hardy took his place with the pilot.
The admiral gave the signal to advance, and the _Onteora_ followed in
the wake of the flag-ship.
The first turning of the channel was made safely, and the monitor was at
last full under the fire of the fort. The turret revolved slowly, and
both guns were discharged against a pert gunboat which had ventured out
beyond the protection of the fort. The second shot struck the
steam-chest of the gunboat, and it blew up and drifted at the mercy of
the current. Still the admiral advanced, and the _Onteora_ followed.
Then a sudden shock was felt, there was a dull roar, the monitor
shivered from stem to stern, and began to settle. A torpedo had blown a
hole in the bottom of the boat, and the _Onteora_ was sinking. Almost at
the same time a shot from Fort Davis struck the turret, and a fragment
smote Captain Hardy and tore off his right arm. In the scant seconds
after the explosion of the torpedo, before the shuddering ship lurched
down, half a score of men escaped from the turret and flung themselves
into the river. The captain had barely time to climb into the open air
when his ship went down beneath him. When he arose from the vortex of
whirling waters his unwounded hand grasped a chance fragment of wood,
which served to sustain him despite the weakness from his open wound. He
found himself by the side of the pilot, who was struggling vainly with
the waves, his strength almost spent.
"Can't you swim?" asked Captain Hardy.
"Only a little," answered the pilot; "and I am almost gone now, I fear."
"Take this bit of wood," said the sailor.
The pilot reached out his arm and with despairing fingers gripped the
broken plank. It was too small to support two men, and Captain Hardy
released his hold. He sought to sustain himself with one hand, and for a
little he succeeded. Then his strength failed him, and at last he went
under almost where the _Onteora_ had sunk beneath him. The battle raged
above; shell from ship after ship answered shell from the fort and the
batteries; another ironclad took up the work of the _Onteora_; brave
hearts and quick heads were at work on sea and on shore; but Rodman
Hardy was dead at the bottom of the river, leaving to his widow and his
sons the heritage of a manly death.
The widow's cap which the young wife took that night she has never
discarded to this day. His sons she has brought up to follow in their
father's footsteps. One has already begun to make his mark in the navy,
having been graduated from Annapolis, high up in his class. The other is
a lawyer, who is solving for himself the problem of the scholar in
politics. Although not yet thirty, he has spent two terms in the
Legislature of the State, where he has done yeoman service for the city.
The parade was over at last--for the Rodman R. Hardy Post had been one
of the latest in line--and I turned away across the square. The sight
of the widow with her two sons had cleansed the atmosphere from the
miasma that trailed behind the politician as he rode by me in his vulgar
barouche. The memory of a great deed is an oasis in the vista of life,
and the recollection of Captain Hardy's death made the day seem fairer.
The sunshine flooded the streets with molten gold. A pair of young
sparrows flitted across the park before me and alighted on a bough above
my head. From over the house-tops came floating echoes of "John Brown's
Body" and "Marching through Georgia."
(1890.)
IN SEARCH OF LOCAL COLOR
The novelist stood at the corner of Rivington Street and the Bowery,
trying to find fit words to formulate his impression of the most
characteristic of New York streets as it appeared on a humid morning in
June. The elevated trains clattered past over his head and he gave no
heed to them, so intent was he in making a mental record of the types
which passed before him. Suddenly he was almost thrown off his feet. A
young man, slipping on the peel of a banana cast away carelessly upon
the sidewalk, had stumbled heavily against him.
"I beg your pardon," cried the young man as he recovered himself.
"I--why, Mr. De Ruyter!" he exclaimed, recognizing the author.
"John Suydam!" returned Rupert de Ruyter, holding out his hand
cordially. "Well, this is good-fortune! Do you know, I was on my way to
the University Settlement to look you up."
"You would have found me there in ten minutes," Suydam answered. "This
is my week to be in residence; in fact, I think I shall be here for the
summer now. You see, I passed my A.M. examination at Columbia last
week--"
"So they examine you for it now, eh?" the novelist queried. "In my time
we got it almost for the asking--at least, I did--and that was only
twenty years ago. What are you going to do with it, now you've got it? I
heard you were to study for the ministry."
"I had thought of the Church," answered Suydam. He was a tall, spare
young fellow, with straight brown hair and a resolute chin. "But I don't
know now what I shall do. I have a little money, you know--enough to
live on, if I choose. So I may stay here at the Settlement; the work is
very interesting."
"No doubt," the novelist responded, readily; "you must see many curious
cases. I wish I could cut loose for a while, and spend a month with you
here."
"Why don't you?" suggested Suydam, eagerly.
"Oh, I have too much on hand," De Ruyter replied. "I've got to read the
Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard next week; and besides, I've promised to
finish a series of New York stories for the _Metropolis_. That is why I
was on my way to find you this morning. I want you to help me."
"But I never wrote a story in my life," said the young man, promptly.
"I don't want you to write the stories," De Ruyter retorted. "Of course
I can do that for myself. But I thought that you could help me to a
little local color."
"Local color?" echoed Suydam, doubtfully.
"Yes," the novelist went on, "local color--that's what I want--fresh
impressions."
"I don't quite see--" the young man began, hesitatingly.
"Oh, I can explain what I want," Rupert de Ruyter interrupted. "You see,
I'm a New-Yorker born, as you are, and I've lived here all my life, and
I know the city pretty well--that is, I know certain aspects of it
thoroughly. I can do the Patriarchs, or a Claremont tea, or any other
function of the smart set; I know the way men talk in clubs; I've
studied the painters and the literary men and the journalists; I can
describe a first night at the theatre or a panic in the Street; but I've
pretty nearly exhausted the people I know, and I thought I would come
down here and get introduced to a set I didn't know."
"I shall be glad to take you to the Settlement," Suydam responded,
"and--"
"It isn't the Settlement I want, thank you," De Ruyter interrupted. "The
people in the Settlement are variants of types I know already. The
people I want to meet are people I don't know anything about--the very
poor people, the tenement-house people, the people who work for the
sweaters. Do you know any of those?"
"Yes," Suydam answered, "I know many of them. But they are not half so
picturesque and so pathetic as the sensational newspapers make them
out. Wouldn't you rather go and see the Chinese quarter?"
"That isn't what I want," the novelist made answer. "The Chinese quarter
is barbarous; it is exotic; it is extraneous; it is a mere accidental
excrescence on New York. But the tenement-house people have come to
stay; they are an integral and a vital part of the city. I don't care
about Chinatown, and I do care about Mulberry Bend. Now, Suydam, you
know Mulberry Bend, don't you?"
"Yes," Suydam returned. "I know Mulberry Bend."
"Do you know any tenement-house in the Bend, or near it, which is
characteristic--which is typical of the worst that the Bend has to
show?" De Ruyter asked.
"Yes," Suydam responded again. "I think I could find a tenement of that
kind."
"Then take me there now, if you can spare me an hour or two," said the
novelist.
"I can put off my errand till this afternoon," the young man answered.
"I think I can show you what you want. Come with me."
They had been standing where they had met, at the corner of the Bowery
and Rivington Street. Now, under John Suydam's guidance, they walked a
little way up the Bowery, beneath the single track of the elevated
railroad. Then they turned into a side street, and pushed their way
westward.
Whenever they came to a crossing De Ruyter remarked that three of the
corners always, and four of them sometimes, were saloons. The broad gilt
signs over the open doors of these bar-rooms bore names either German or
Irish, until they came to a corner where one of the saloons called
itself the Caffe Cristoforo Colombo. A wooden stand, down the side
street, and taking up a third of the width of the walk, had a sign
announcing ice-cold soda-water at two cents a glass with fruit syrups;
with chocolate and cream, the price was three cents. Right on the corner
of the curb stood a large wash-tub half filled with water, in which
soaked doubtful young cabbages and sprouts; its guardian was a thin slip
of a girl with a red handkerchief knotted over her head.
At this corner Suydam turned out of the side street, and went down a
street no wider perhaps, but extending north and south in a devious and
hesitating way not common in the streets of New York. The sidewalks of
this sinuous street were inconveniently narrow for its crowded
population, and they were made still narrower by tolerated encroachments
of one kind or another. Here, for instance, from the side of a small
shop projected a stand on which unshelled pease wilted under the strong
rays of the young June sun. There, for example, were steps down to the
low basement, and in a corner of the hollow at the foot of these stairs
there might be a pail with dingy ice packed about a can of alleged
ice-cream, or else a board bore half a dozen tough brown loaves, also
proffered for sale to the chance customer. Here and there, again, the
dwellers in the tall tenements had brought chairs to the common door,
and were seated, comfortably conversing with their neighbors, regardless
of the fact that they thus blocked the sidewalk, and compelled the
passer-by to go out into the street itself.
And the street was as densely packed as the sidewalk. In front of Suydam
and De Ruyter as they picked their way along was a swarthy young fellow
with his flannel shirt open at the throat and rolled up on his tawny
arms; he was pushing before him a hand-cart heaped with gayly colored
calicoes. Other hand-carts there were, from which other men, young and
old, were vending other wares--fruit more often than not; fruit of a
most untempting frowziness. Now and then a huge wagon came lumbering
through the street, heaped high with lofty cases of furniture from a
rumbling and clattering factory near the corner. And before the heavy
horses of this wagon the children scattered, waiting till the last
moment of possible escape. There were countless children, and they were
forever swarming out of the houses and up from the cellars and over the
sidewalks and up and down the street. They were of all ages, from the
babe in the arms of its dumpy, thick-set mother to the sweet-faced and
dark-eyed girl of ten or twelve really, though she might seem a
precocious fourteen. They ran wild in the street; they played about the
knees of their mothers, who sat gossiping in the doorways; they hung
over the railing of the fire-escapes, which gridironed the front of
every tall house.
Everywhere had the Italians treated the balcony of the fire-escape as an
out-door room added to their scant accommodation. They adorned it with
flowers growing in broken wooden boxes; they used its railings to dry
their parti-colored flannel shirts; they sat out on it as though it were
the loggia of a villa in their native land.
Everywhere, also, were noises and smells. The roar of the metropolis was
here sharpened by the rattle of near machinery heard through open
windows, and by the incessant clatter and shrill cries of the multitude
in the street. The rancid odor of ill-kept kitchens mingled with the
mitigated effluvium of decaying fruits and vegetables.
But over and beyond the noises and the smells and the bustling business
of the throng, Rupert de Ruyter felt as though he were receiving an
impression of life itself. It was as if he had caught a glimpse of the
mighty movement of existence, incessant and inevitable. What he saw did
not strike him as pitiful; it did not weigh him down with despondency.
The spectacle before him was not beautiful; it was not even picturesque;
but never for a moment, even, did it strike him as pathetic. Interesting
it was, of a certainty--unfailingly interesting.
"I haven't found anything so Italian as this for years," he said to his
guide, as they picked their way through a tangle of babies sprawling out
of a doorway. "I remember seeing nothing more Italian in my first walk
in Italy--up the hill-side at Menaggio, after we landed from the boat to
Como. Some of the faces here are of a purer Greek type than any you meet
in northern Italy. Did you see that young mother we passed just now?"
"The one nursing the infant?" Suydam returned.
"Yes," De Ruyter went on. "She had the oval face and the olive
complexion the Greeks left behind them in Sicily. She was not pretty, if
you like, but she had the calm beauty of a race of sculptors. Her
profile might have come off a Syracusan coin. And to see such a face
here, in the city that was New Amsterdam and is New York!"
"We haven't time down here to think of Syracuse and New Amsterdam," said
Suydam; "we are too busy thinking about New York. And if we ever do
think of Sicily it is only to remember that the Sicilians we have here
are the hottest tempered of all the Italians, the most revengeful and
vindictive."
"If I didn't know," the novelist remarked, "that the Italians had
developed their mercantile faculty at the expense of all their artistic
impulses, I should wonder how it was that scions of the race of Michael
Angelo and Leonardo da Vinci and Raffael of Urbino could now be willing
to live in a house as hideous as that!" and with a sweep of his hand he
indicated a lofty double tenement, made uglier by much misplaced
ornament. "It isn't even picturesque by decay. In fact, this whole
region is in better repair than I had expected."
"Look at the house behind you," answered his companion.
The house behind them was one of the oldest tenements in the street. The
balconies of its fire-escape were as cluttered as those of the
neighboring dwellings; and every window gave signs that the room behind
was inhabited. Yet the building, as a whole, seemed neglected.
"This house does seem out at elbows and dishevelled," De Ruyter
admitted. "It looks like a tramp, doesn't it?"
"It does not look very clean," said Suydam. "And the back building is
dirtier yet. That's where we are going, if you like."
"Well," De Ruyter answered, "if there is local color to be found
anywhere round here, I guess we shall find a fair share of it in this
place."
"This way, then," Suydam said, plunging into a covered alleyway, which
extended under the house, and led into a small yard paved with uneven
flag-stones, and shut in on all four sides by the surrounding buildings.
Even on that sunny pure morning there was a dank chill in the air, and
there were patches of moisture here and there on the pavement.
"The new building laws don't allow back buildings of this sort," Suydam
explained. "But there are thousands of them in the city, put up before
the new laws went into effect. Perhaps we had better try the basement
first."
In one corner of the yard half a dozen steps led down into the basement
of the back building. Followed by the novelist, the young man from the
University Settlement went down these steps and into the cellarlike
room, which occupied about half the space under the back building.
The air in this room was so foul that De Ruyter held his breath for a
moment. The room was not more than twelve feet square; its walls were
unplastered, showing the coarse foundation-stones; its floor was of
earth, trodden to hardness, except where the drippings from the
beer-cans had moistened it; the beams of the floor above seemed rotten.
In the damp heat of this room ten or a dozen men and boys were seated on
old chairs and on broken boxes, smoking, playing cards by the light of a
single foul and flaring kerosene-lamp, and drinking the dregs of
beer-kegs collected in old cans.
The inhabitants of the cellar looked up as Suydam and De Ruyter entered,
and then they resumed their previous occupations, with no further
attention to the intruders.
The man nearest to the door was a powerfully built fellow of fifty,
with gray hair cropped close to his head. He was playing cards. He had a
knife thrust in his leathern belt.
"Good-morning, Giacomo," said Suydam to this grizzled brute. "I haven't
heard of you for a long while now. When did you get off the Island?"
"Las' week," was the gruff answer.
"And where is your wife now?" the young man asked.
"She work," answered Giacomo.
Suydam did not pursue the conversation further. Judging that the
novelist had seen enough, he turned and went up the rickety steps again,
followed by his friend.
"Ouf!" said De Ruyter, drawing a long breath, as they stood again in the
cramped yard. "I don't see how they can breathe that air and live."
"They don't live," answered Suydam--"at least, the weaker are soon
pushed to the wall and die, leaving only the tougher specimens you saw.
Now we will go up-stairs, if you like."
"I'm ready," De Ruyter responded. "This is exactly what I came to see."
In the centre of the back building there was an entry. The door was off
its hinges. Just inside the passage were the stairs, with the railing
broken, and many of the steps dangerously decayed. There was little
light as they went up, and a rank odor of decaying fish accompanied
them.
At the head of the stairs there was a door on either hand. Suydam
knocked at them in turn, and then tried to open them; but they were
locked, and there was no response to the repeated hammerings.
"I say," remarked the novelist, as they went up to the floor above, "do
these people like to have us intrude on them in this way?"
"Some don't," Suydam answered, promptly, "and of course I try never to
intrude. But most of them don't mind. Most of them have no sense of
home. Most of them don't know what privacy means. How could they?"
"True," echoed the novelist. "How could they?"
"Here is an exemplification of what I mean," said the young man from the
Settlement as they came to the next landing.
The door leading into the room on the right was open. The room was
perhaps ten feet square; it contained two beds. On one of the beds a man
sat cross-legged sewing; he glanced up for a moment only as the two
visitors darkened the doorway, and then he went on with his work. On the
other bed were two little children, half naked and asleep; one was a boy
of three, the other a girl of nearly two. On the edge of this bed sat a
tall boy of seventeen, also sewing. In the narrow alley between the two
beds were two sewing-machines, one tended by a girl of fifteen or
sixteen perhaps, a thin, stunted child, with bent shoulders. The other
machine was operated by the mother of these children, a large-framed
woman of forty, with the noble head so often seen among the
Trasteverines.
She knew Suydam, and she smiled.
"Good-mornin'," she said.
"Good-morning," responded Suydam. "I am showing a friend over the
building. You seem a little crowded here."
"Not crowd' now," she answered. "Only one boarder now," and she
indicated the man seated cross-legged on the bed. "Last week two."
"Where is your husband?" asked the young man.
"Oh, he got another girl," she replied, with a vague gesture, apparently
of disapproval.