Cordelia Angeline Mahoney was dressing, as she would say, "to keep a
date" with a beau, who would soon be waiting on the corner nearest her
home in the Big Barracks tenement-house. She smiled as she heard the
shrill catcall of a lad in Forsyth Street. She knew it was Dutch
Johnny's signal to Chrissie Bergen to come down and meet him at the
street doorway. Presently she heard another call--a birdlike
whistle--and she knew which boy's note it was, and which girl it called
out of her home for a sidewalk stroll. She smiled, a trifle sadly, and
yet triumphantly. She had enjoyed herself when she was no wiser and
looked no higher than the younger Barracks girls, who took up the boys
of the neighborhood as if there were no others.
She was in her own little dark inner room, which she shared with only
two others of the family, arranging a careful toilet by kerosene-light.
The photograph of herself in trunks and tights, of which we heard in the
story of Elsa Muller's hopeless love, was before her, among several
portraits of actresses and salaried beauties. She had taken them out
from under the paper in the top drawer of the bureau. She always kept
them there, and always took them out and spread them in the lamp-light
when she was alone in her room. She glanced approvingly at the portrait
of herself as a picture of which she had said to more than one girlish
confidante that it showed as neat a figure and as perfectly shaped limbs
as any actress's she had ever seen. But the suggestion of a frown
flitted across her brow as she thought how silly she was to have once
been "stage-struck"--how foolish to have thought that mere beauty could
quickly raise a poor girl to a high place on the stage. Julia Fogarty's
case proved that. Julia and she were stage-struck together, and where
was Julia--or Corynne Belvedere, as she now called herself? She started
well as a figurante in a comic opera company up-town, but from that she
dropped to a female minstrel troupe in the Bowery, and now, Lewy Tusch
told Cordelia, she was "tooing ter skirt-tance in ter pickernic parks
for ter sick-baby fund, ant passin' ter hat arount afterwarts." And evil
was being whispered of her--a pretty high price to pay for such small
success; and it must be true, because she sometimes came home late at
night in cabs, which are devilish, except when used at funerals.
It was Cordelia who attracted Elsa Muller's sweetheart, Yank Hurst, to
her side, and left Elsa to die yearning for his return. And it was
Cordelia who threw Hurst aside when he took to drink and stabbed the
young man who, during a mere walk from church, took his place beside
Cordelia. And yet Cordelia was only ambitious, not wicked. Few men live
who would not look twice at her. She was not of the stunted tenement
type, like her friends Rosie Mulvey and Minnie Bechman and Julia
Moriarty. She was tall and large and stately, and yet plump in every
outline. Moreover, she had the "style" of an American girl, and looked
as well in five dollars' worth of clothes--all home-made, except her
shoes and stockings--as almost any girl in richer circles. It was too
bad that she was called a flirt by the young men, and a stuck-up thing
by the girls, when in fact she was merely more shrewd and calculating
than the others, who were content to drift out of the primary schools
into the shops, and out of the shops into haphazard matrimony. Cordelia
was not lovable, but not all of us are who may be better than she. She
was monopolized by the hope of getting a man; but a mere alliance with
trousers was not the sum of her hope; they must jingle with coin.
It was strange, then, that she should be dressing to meet Jerry Donahue,
who was no better than gilly to the Commissioner of Public Works,
drawing a small salary from a clerkship he never filled, while he served
the Commissioner as a second left hand. But if we could see into
Cordelia's mind we would be surprised to discover that she did not
regard herself as flesh-and-blood Mahoney, but as romantic Clarice
Delamour, and she only thought of Jerry as James the butler. The
voracious reader of the novels of to-day will recall the story of
_Clarice, or Only a Lady's-Maid,_ which many consider the best of the
several absorbing tales that Lulu Jane Tilley has written. Cordelia had
read it twenty times, and almost knew it by heart. Her constant dream
was that she could be another Clarice, and shape her life like hers.
The plot of the novel needs to be briefly told, since it guided
Cordelia's course.
Clarice was maid to a wealthy society dowager. James the butler fell in
love with Clarice when she first entered the household, and she, hearing
the servants' gossip about James's savings and salary, had encouraged
his attentions. He pressed her to marry him. But young Nicholas
Stuyvesant came home from abroad to find his mother ill and Clarice
nursing her. Every day he noticed the modest rosy maid moving
noiselessly about like a sunbeam. Her physical perfection profoundly
impressed him. In her presence he constantly talked to his mother about
his admiration for healthy women. Each evening Clarice reported to him
the condition of the mother, and on one occasion mentioned that she had
never known ache, pain, or malady in her life. The young man often
chatted with her in the drawing-room, and James the butler got his
_congé_. Mr. Stuyvesant induced his mother to make Clarice her companion,
and then he met her at picture exhibitions, and in Central Park by
chance, and next--every one will recall the exciting scene--he paid
passionate court to her "in the pink sewing-room, where she had
reclined on soft silken sofa pillows, with her tiny slippers upon the
head of a lion whose skin formed a rug before her." Clarice thought him
unprincipled, and repulsed him. When the widow recovered her health and
went to Newport, the former maid met all society there. A gifted lawyer
fell a victim to Clarice's charms, and, on a moonlit porch overlooking
the sea, warned her against young Stuyvesant. On learning that the
_roué_ had already attempted to weaken the girl's high principles, to
rescue her he made her his wife. He was soon afterward elected Mayor of
New York, but remained a suitor for his beautiful wife's approbation,
waiting upon her in gilded halls with the fidelity of a knight of old.
Cordelia adored Clarice and fancied herself just like her--beautiful,
ambitious, poor, with a future of her own carving. Of course such a case
is phenomenal. No other young woman was ever so ridiculous.
"You have on your besht dresh, Cordalia," said her mother. "It'll soon
be wore out, an' ye'll git no other, wid your father oidle, an' no wan
airnin' a pinny but you an' Johnny an' Sarah Rosabel. Fwhere are ye
goin'?"
"I won't be gone long," said Cordelia, half out of the hall door.
"Cordalia Angeline, darlin'," said her mother, "mind, now, doan't let
them be talkin' about ye, fwherever ye go--shakin' yer shkirts an'
rollin' yer eyes. It doan't luk well for a gyurl to be makin' hersel'
attractive."
"Oh, mother, I'm not attractive, and you know it."
With her head full of meeting Jerry Donahue, Cordelia tripped down the
four flights of stairs to the street door. As Clarice, she thought of
Jerry as James the butler; in fact, all the beaux she had had of late
were so many repetitions of the unfortunate James in her mind. All the
other characters in her acquaintance were made to fit more or less
loosely into her romance life, and she thought of everything she did as
if it all happened in Lulu Jane Tilley's beautiful novel. Let the reader
fancy, if possible, what a feat that must have been for a tenement girl
who had never known what it was to have a parlor, in our sense of the
word, who had never known courtship to be carried on indoors, except in
a tenement hallway, and who had to imagine that the sidewalk flirtations
of actual life were meetings in private parks, that the wharves and
public squares and tenement roofs where she had seen all the young men
and women making love were heavily carpeted drawing-rooms, broad manor,
house verandas, and the fragrant conservatories of luxurious mansions!
But Cordelia managed all this mental necromancy easily, to her own
satisfaction. And now she was tripping down the bare wooden stairs
beside the dark greasy wall, and thinking of her future husband, the
rich Mayor, who must be either the bachelor police captain of the
precinct, or George Fletcher, the wealthy and unmarried factory-owner
near by, or, perhaps, Senator Eisenstone, the district leader, who, she
was forced to reflect, was an unlikely hero for a Catholic girl, since
he was a Hebrew. But just as she reached the street door and decided
that Jerry would do well enough as a mere temporary James the butler,
and while Jerry was waiting for her on the corner, she stepped from the
stoop directly in front of George Fletcher.
"Good evening," said the wealthy, young employer.
"Good evening, Mr. Fletcher."
"It's very embarrassing," said Mr. Fletcher: "I know your given
name--Cordelia, isn't it?--but your last na--Oh, thank you--Miss
Mahoney, of course. You know we met at that very queer wedding in the
home of my little apprentice, Joe--the line-man's wedding, you know."
"Te he!" Cordelia giggled. "Wasn't that a terrible strange wedding? I
think it was just terrible."
"Were you going somewhere?"
"Oh, not at all, Mr. Fletcher," with another nervous giggle or two. "I
have no plans on me mind, only to get out of doors. It's terrible hot,
ain't it?"
"May I take a walk with you, Miss Mahoney?"
It seemed to her that if he had called her Clarice the whole novel would
have come true then and there.
"I can't be out very late, Mr. Fletcher," said she, with a giggle of
delight.
"Are you sure I am not disarranging your plans? Had you no engagements?"
"Oh no," said she; "I was only going out with me lonely."
"Let us take just a short walk, then," said Fletcher; "only you must be
the man and take me in charge, Miss Mahoney, for I never walked with a
young lady in my life."
"Oh, certainly not; you never did--I _don't_ think."
"Upon my honor, Miss Mahoney, I know only one woman in this city--Miss
Whitfield, the doctor's daughter, who lives in the same house with you;
and only one other in the world--my aunt, who brought me up, in
Vermont."
Well indeed did Cordelia know this. All the neighborhood knew it, and
most of the other girls were conscious of a little flutter in their
breasts when his eyes fell upon them in the streets, for it was the
gossip of all who knew his workmen that the prosperous ladder-builder
lived in his factory, where his had spent the life of a monk, without
any society except of his canaries, his books, and his workmen.
"Well, I declare!" sighed Cordelia. "How terrible cunning you men are,
to get up such a story to make all the girls think you're romantic!"
But, oh, how happy Cordelia was! At last she had met her prince--the
future Mayor--her Sultan of the gilded halls. In that humid, sticky,
midsummer heat among the tenements, every other woman dragged along as
if she weighed a thousand pounds, but Cordelia felt like a feather
floating among clouds.
The babel--did the reader ever walk up Forsyth Street on a hot night,
into Second Avenue, and across to Avenue A, and up to Tompkins Park?
The noise of the tens of thousands on the pavements makes a babel that
drowns the racket of the carts and cars. The talking of so many persons,
the squalling of so many babies, the mothers scolding and slapping every
third child, the yelling of the children at play, the shouts and loud
repartee of the men and women--all these noises rolled together in the
air makes a steady hum and roar that not even the breakers on a hard
sea-beach can equal. You might say that the tenements were empty, as
only the very sick, who could not move, were in them. For miles and
miles they were bare of humanity, each flat unguarded and unlocked, with
the women on the sidewalks, with the youngest children in arms or in
perambulators, while those of the next sizes romped in the streets; with
the girls and boys of fourteen giggling in groups in the doorways (the
age and places where sex first asserts itself), and only the young men
and women missing; for they were in the parks, on the wharves, and on
the roofs, all frolicking and love-making.
And every house front was like a Russian stove, expending the heat it
had sucked from the all-day sun. And every door and window breathed bad
air--air without oxygen, rich and rank and stifling.
But Cordelia was Clarice, the future Mayoress. She did not know she was
picking a tiresome way around the boys at leap-frog, and the mothers and
babies and baby-carriages. She did not notice the smells, or feel the
bumps she got from those who ran against her. She thought she was in the
blue drawing-room at Newport, where a famous Hungarian count was
trilling the soft prelude to a _csárdás_ on the piano, and Mr.
Stuyvesant had just introduced her to the future Mayor, who was
spellbound by her charms, and was by her side, a captive. She reached
out her hand, and it touched Mr. Fletcher's arm (just as a ragamuffin
propelled himself head first against her), and Mr. Fletcher bent his
elbow, and her wrist rested in the crook of his arm. Oh, her dream was
true; her dream was true!
Mr. Fletcher, on the other hand, was hardly in a more natural relation.
He was trying to think how the men talked to women in all the literature
he had read. The myriad jokes about the fondness of girls for ice-cream
recurred to him, and he risked everything on their fidelity to fact.
"Are you fond of ice-cream?" he inquired.
"Oh no; I _don't_ think," said Cordelia. "What'll you ask next? What
girl ain't crushed on ice-cream, I'd like to know?"
"Do you know of a nice place to get some?"
"Do I? The Dutchman's, on the av'noo, another block up, is the finest in
the city. You get mo--that is, you get everything 'way up in G there,
with cakes on the side, and it don't cost no more than anywhere else."
So to the German's they went, and Clarice fancied herself at the Casino
in Newport. All the girls around her, who seemed to be trying to swallow
the spoons, took on the guise of blue-blooded belles, while the noisy
boys and young men (calling out, "Hully gee, fellers! look at Nifty
gittin' out der winder widout payin'!" and, "Say, Tilly, what kind er
cream is dat you're feedin' your face wid?") seemed to her so many
millionaires and the exquisite sons thereof. To Mr. Fletcher the
German's back-yard saloon, with its green lattice walls, and its rusty
dead Christmas trees in painted butter-kegs, appeared uncommonly
brilliant and fine. The fact that whenever he took a swallow of water
the ice-cream turned to cold candle-grease in his mouth made no
difference. He was happy, and Cordelia was in an ecstasy by the time he
had paid a shock-headed, bare-armed German waiter, and they were again
on the avenue side by side. She put out her hand and rested it on his
arm again--to make sure she was Clarice.
One would like to know whether, in the breasts of such as these,
familiar environment exerts any remarkable influence. If so, it could
have been in but one direction. For that part of town was one vast
nursery. Everywhere, on every side, were the swarming babies--a baby for
every flag-stone in the pavements. Babies and babies, and little besides
babies, except larger children and the mothers. Perambulators with two,
even three, baby passengers; mothers with as many as five children
trailing after them; babies in broad baggy laps, babies at the breast,
babies creeping, toppling, screaming, overflowing into the gutters. Such
was the unbroken scene from the Big Barracks to Tompkins Square; ay, to
Harlem and to the East River, and almost to Broadway. In the park, as if
the street scenes had been merely preliminary, the paths were alive,
wriggling, with babies of every age, from the new-born to the children
in pigtails and knickerbockers--and, lo! these were already paired and
practising at courtship. The walk that Cordelia was taking was amid a
fever, a delirium, of maternity--a rhapsody, a baby's opera, if one
considered its noise. In that vast region no one inquired whether
marriage was a failure. Nothing that is old and long-beloved and human
is a failure there.
In Tompkins Park, while they dodged babies and stepped around babies and
over them, they saw many happy couples on the settees, and they noticed
that often the men held their arms around the waists of their
sweethearts. Girls, too, in other instances, leaned loving heads against
the young men's breasts, blissfully regardless of publicity. They passed
a young man and a woman kissing passionately, as kissing is described by
unmarried girl novelists. Cordelia thought it no harm to nudge Mr.
Fletcher and whisper:
"Sakes alive! They're right in it, ain't they. 'It's funny when you feel
that way,' ain't it?"
As many another man who does not know the frankness and simplicity of
the plain people might have done, Mr. Fletcher misjudged the girl. He
thought her the sort of girl he was far from seeking. He grew instantly
cold and reserved, and she knew, vaguely, that she had displeased him.
"I think people who make love in public should be locked up," said he.
"Some folks wants everybody put away that enjoys themselves," said
Cordelia. Then, lest she had spoken too strongly, she added, "Present
company not intended, Mr. Fletcher, but you said that like them mission
folks that come around praising themselves and tellin' us all we're
wicked."
"And do you think a girl can be good who behaves so in public?"
"I know plenty that's done it," said she; "and I don't know any girls
but what's good. They 'ain't got wings, maybe, but you don't want to
monkey with 'em, neither."
He recollected her words for many a year afterward and pondered them,
and perhaps they enlarged his understanding. She also often thought of
his condemnation of love-making out-of-doors. Kissing in public,
especially promiscuous kissing, she knew to be a debatable pastime, but
she also knew that there was not a flat in the Big Barracks in which a
girl could carry on a courtship. Fancy her attempting it in her front
room, with the room choked with people, with the baby squalling, and her
little brothers and sisters quarrelling, with her mother entertaining
half a dozen women visitors with tea or beer, and with a man or two
dropping in to smoke with her father! Parlor courtship was to her, like
precise English, a thing only known in novels. The thought of novels
floated her soul back into the dream state.
"I think Cordelia's a pretty name," said Fletcher, cold at heart but
struggling to be companionable.
"I don't," said Cordelia. "I'm not at all crushed on it. Your name's
terrible pretty. I think my three names looks like a map of Ireland when
they're written down. I know a killin' name for a girl. It's Clarice.
Maybe some day I'll give you a dare. I'll double dare you, maybe, to
call me Clarice."
Oh, if he only would, she thought--if he would only call her so now! But
she forgot how unelastic his strange routine of life must have left him,
and she did not dream how her behavior in the park had displeased him.
"Cordelia is a pretty name," he repeated. "At any rate, I think we
should try to make the most and best of whatever name has come to us. I
wouldn't sail under false colors for a minute."
"Oh!" said she, with a giggle to hide her disappointment; "you're so
terrible wise! When you talk them big words you can pass me in a walk."
Anxious to display her great conquest to the other girls of the Barracks
neighborhood, Cordelia persuaded Mr. Fletcher to go to what she called
"the dock," to enjoy the cool breath of the river. All the piers and
wharves are called "docks" by the people. Those which are semi-public
and are rented to miscellaneous excursion and river steamers are crowded
nightly.
The wharf to which our couple strolled was a mere flooring above the
water, edged with a stout string-piece, which formed a bench for the
mothers. They were there in groups, some seated on the string-piece with
babes in arms or with perambulators before them, and others, facing
these, standing and joining in the gossip, and swaying to and fro to
soothe their little ones. Those who gave their offspring the breast did
so publicly, unembarrassed by a modesty they would have considered
false. A few youthful couples, boy by girl and girl by boy, sat on the
string-piece and whispered, or bandied fun with those other lovers who
patrolled the flooring of the wharf. A "gang" of rude young
men--toughs--walked up and down, teasing the girls, wrestling,
scuffling, and roaring out bad language. Troops of children played at
leap-frog, high-spy, jack-stones, bean-bag, hop-scotch, and tag. At the
far end of the pier some young men and women waltzed, while a lad on the
string-piece played for them on his mouth-organ. A steady, cool,
vivifying breeze from the bay swept across the wharf and fanned all the
idlers, and blew out of their heads almost all recollection of the
furnacelike heat of the town.
Cordelia forgot her desire to display her conquest. She forgot her true
self. She likened the wharf to that "lordly veranda overlooking the
sea," where the future Mayor begged Clarice to be his bride. She knew
just what she would say when her prince spoke his lines. She and Mr.
Fletcher were just about to seat themselves on the great rim of the
wharf, when an uproar of the harsh, froglike voices of half-grown men
caused them to turn around. They saw Jerry Donahue striding towards
them, but with difficulty, because half a dozen lads and youths were
endeavoring to hold him back.
"Dat's Mr. Fletcher," they said. "It ain't his fault, Jerry. He's dead
square; he's a gent, Jerry."
The politician's gilly tore himself away from his friends. The gang of
toughs gathered behind the others. Jerry planted himself in front of
Cordelia. Evidently he did not know the submissive part he should have
played in Cordelia's romance. James the butler made no out-break, but
here was Jerry angry through and through.
"You didn't keep de date wid me," he began.
"Oh, Jerry, I did--I tried to, but you--" Cordelia was red with shame.
"The hell you did! Wasn't I--"
"Here!" said Mr. Fletcher; "you can't swear at this lady."
"Why wouldn't I?" Jerry asked. "What would you do?"
"He's right, Jerry. Leave him be--see?" said the chorus of Jerry's
friends.
"A-a-a-h!" snarled Jerry. "Let him leave me be, then. Cordelia, I heard
you was a dead fraud, an' now I know it, and I'm a-tellin' you so,
straight--see? I was a-waitin' 'cross der street, an' I seen you come
out an' meet dis mug, an' you never turned yer head to see was I on me
post. I seen dat, an' I'm a-tellin' yer friend just der kind of a racket
you give me, der same's you've give a hundred other fellers. Den, if he
likes it he knows what he's gittin'."
Jerry was so angry that he all but pushed his distorted face against
that of the humiliated girl as he denounced her. Mr. Fletcher gently
moved her backward a step or two, and advanced to where she had stood.
"That will do," he said to Jerry. "I want no trouble, but you've said
enough. If there's more, say it to me."
"A-a-a-h!" exclaimed the gilly, expectorating theatrically over his
shoulder. "Me friends is on your side, an' I ain't pickin' no muss wid
you. But she's got der front of der City Hall to do me like she done.
And say, fellers, den she was goin' ter give me a song an' dance 'bout
lookin' fer me. Ba-a-a! She knows my 'pinion of her--see?"
The crowd parted to let Mr. Fletcher finish his first evening's
gallantry to a lady by escorting Cordelia to her home. It was a chilly
and mainly a silent journey. Cordelia falteringly apologized for Jerry's
misbehavior, but she inferred from what Mr. Fletcher said that he did
not fully join her in blaming the angry youth. Mr. Fletcher touched her
fingertips in bidding her good-night, and nothing was said of a meeting
in the future. Clarice was forgotten, and Cordelia was not only herself
again, but quite a miserable self, for her sobs awoke the little brother
and sister who shared her bed.