If any spot on the globe can be found where even Spring has lost the
sweet trick of making herself charming, a cynic in search of an
opportunity for some such morose discovery might thank his baleful stars
were chance to drift him upon Greenpoint. Whoever named the place in
past days must have done so with a double satire; for Greenpoint is not
a point, nor is it ever green. Years ago it began by being the sluggish
suburb of a thriftier and smarter suburb, Brooklyn. By degrees the
latter broadened into a huge city, and soon its neighbor village
stretched out to it arms of straggling huts and swampy river-line, in
doleful welcome. To-day the affiliation is complete. Man has said let it
all be Brooklyn, and it is all Brooklyn. But the sovereign dreariness of
Greenpoint, like an unpropitiated god, still remains. Its melancholy,
its ugliness, its torpor, its neglect, all preserve an unimpaired
novelty. It is very near New York, and yet in atmosphere, suggestion,
vitality, it is leagues away. Our noble city, with its magnificent
maritime approaches, its mast-thronged docks, its lordly encircling
rivers, its majesty of traffic, its gallant avenues of edifices, its
loud assertion of life, and its fine promise of riper culture, fades
into a dim memory when you have touched, after only a brief voyage, upon
this forlorn opposite shore.
No Charon rows you across, though your short trip has too often the most
funereal associations. You take passage in a squat little steamboat at
either of two eastern ferries, and are lucky if a hearse with its
satellite coaches should fail to embark in your company; for, curiously,
the one enlivening fact associable with Greenpoint is its close nearness
to a famed Roman Catholic cemetery. It is doubtful if the unkempt child
wading in the muddy gutter ever turns his frowzy head when these dismal
retinues stream past him. They are always streaming past him; they are
as much a part of this lazy environ as the big, ghostly geese that
saunter across its ill-tended cobblestones, the dirty goats that nibble
at the placards on its many dingy fences, or the dull-faced Germans that
plod its semi-paven streets. Death, that is always so bitter a
commonplace, has here become a glaring triteness. Watched, along the
main thoroughfare, from porches of liquor-shops and windows of
tenement-houses, death has perhaps gained a sombre popularity with not a
few shabby gazers. It rides in state, at a dignified pace; it has
followers, too, riding deferentially behind it. Sometimes it has martial
music, and the pomp of military escort. Life seldom has any of this, in
Greenpoint. It cannot ride, or rarely. It must walk, and strain to keep
its strength even for that. One part of it drudges with the needle,
fumes over the smoky stove, sighs at the unappeasable baby; another part
takes by dawn the little dwarfish ferry-boat, and hies to the great
metropolis across the river, returning jaded from labor by nightfall.
No wonder, here, if death should seem to possess not merely a mournful
importance but a gloomy advantage as well, or if for these toilful
townsfolk philosophy had reversed itself, and instead of the paths of
glory leading to the grave, it should look as if the grave were forever
leading to some sort of peculiar and comfortable glory.
But Greenpoint, like a hardened conscience, still has her repentant
surprises. She is not quite a thing of sloth and penury. True, the broad
street that leads from steamboat to cemetery is lined with squalid
homes, and the mourners who are so incessantly borne along to Calvary
must see little else than beer-sellers standing slippered and coatless
beside their doorways, or thin, pinched women haggling with the venders
of sickly groceries. But elsewhere one may find by-streets lined with
low wooden dwellings that hint of neatness and suggest a better grade of
living. A yellowish drab prevails as the hue of these houses; they seem
all to partake of one period, like certain homogeneous fossils. But they
do not breathe of antiquity; they are fanciful with trellised piazzas
and other modern embellishments of carpentry; sometimes they possess
miniature Corinthian pillars, faded by the trickle of rain between their
tawny flutings, as if stirred with the dumb desire to be white and
classic. Scant gardens front them, edged with a few yards of ornamental
fence. Their high basement windows stare at you from a foundation of
brick. They are very prosaic, chiefly from their lame effort to be
picturesque; and when you look down toward the river, expecting to feel
refreshed by its gleam, you are disheartened at the way in which
lumber-yards and sloop-wharves have quite shut any glimpse of it from
your eyes.
In one of these two-storied wooden houses, not many years ago, dwelt a
family of three people,--a Mr. Francis Twining, his wife, and their only
child, a girl, named Claire. Mr. Twining was an Englishman by birth;
many years had passed since he first landed on these shores. He had come
here nearly penniless, but with proud hopes. He was then only
three-and-twenty. He had sprung from a good country family, had been
fitted at Eton for Oxford, and had seen one year at the famed
University. Then sharp financial disaster had overtaken his father,
whose death soon followed. Francis was a younger son, but even to the
heir had fallen a shattered patrimony, and to himself merely a slender
legacy. With this, confident and undaunted as though it were the purse
of Fortunio, Francis had taken voyage for New York. At first he had
shown a really splendid energy. Slim of figure, with a pale, womanish
face lit by large, soft blue eyes, he gave slight physical sign of force
or even will. But though possessed of both, he proved one of those
ill-fated beings whom failure never tires of rebuffing. His mental
ability was unquestioned; he shrank with sensitive disgust from all
vice; he had plenty of ambition, and the instinct of solid industry.
Yet, as years passed on, both secured him but meagre recompense for
struggle. He had begun his career with a clerkship; now, at fifty-three,
he was a clerk still. All his hope had fled; he had undergone bitter
heart-burnings; he had striven to solve the problem of his own defeat.
Meanwhile its explanation was not difficult. He had a boyish trust in
his fellow-creatures that no amount of stern experience seemed to
weaken. Chicanery had made him its sport. Five separate times he had
been swindled mercilessly by men in whom he had reposed implicit faith.
There had lain his rock of ruin: he was always reposing implicit faith
in everybody. His life had been one long pathos of over-credulity. He
could think, reason, reflect, analyze, but he was incapable of doubting.
A fool could have deceived him, and naturally, on repeated occasions,
knaves had not found it difficult. At fifty-three his last hard-earned
savings had been wormed from him by the last plausible scamp. And now he
had accepted himself as the favorite of misfortune; over the glow of his
spirit disappointment had cast its dulling spell, like the deep film of
ash that sheathes a spent ember. He had now one aim--to keep his wife
and child from indigence while he lived, and one despair--that he could
not keep them from indigence after he was dead. But his really lovely
optimism still remained. He had been essentially amiable and complaisant
in all intercourse with his kind, and this quality had not lost a ray of
its fine former lustre. With ample excuse for the worst cynic feeling,
he continued a gentle yet unconscious philanthropist. There was
something piteously sweet in the obstinacy with which he still saw only
the bright side of humanity. His delicate person had grown more slim;
his rusty clothes hung about him with a mournful looseness; his oval
face, worn by worriment, had taken keener lines; but his large blue eyes
still kept their liquid sparkle, and kindled in prompt unison with his
alert smile. The flaxen growth that had always fringed his lips and chin
with cloudy lightness, had now become of a frosty gray. Seen passingly,
no one would have called him, as the current phrase goes, a gentleman.
His wearied mien forbade the suggestion of leisure, while his broadcloth
spoke of long wear and speedy purchase. But a close gaze might have
caught the unperished refinement that still clung to him with sad
persistence, and was evident in such minor effects of personal detail as
a glimpse of cleanly linen about throat and wrist, a cheap yet careful
lustre of the often jaded boot, a culture and purity of the hand, or
even a choice nicety of the finger-nail.
He had married after reaching these shores, and his marriage had proved
another instance of misplaced confidence. His wife had been handsome
when a young woman, and she had become Mrs. Twining at about the age of
five-and-twenty. She was personally quite the opposite of her
bridegroom; she was an inch taller than he, and had an aquiline face,
splendid with a pair of very black eyes that she had rolled and flashed
at the other sex since early girlhood. She had rolled and flashed them
at her present husband, and so conquered him. She was a good inch taller
than he, and lapse of time had not diminished the difference since their
union. She had been extremely vulgar as Miss Jane Wray, when Twining had
married her, and she was extremely vulgar still. She had first met him
in a boarding-house in East Broadway, where Twining had secured a room
on his arrival from England. At this period East Broadway wore only a
waning grace of gentility; some few conservative nabobs still lingered
there, obstinately defying plebeian inroads. Its roomy brick mansions,
with their arched, antique doorways devoid of any vestibule; their
prim-railed stoops that guessed not of ornate balusters; and their
many-paned, thin-sashed windows where plate-glass had never glittered,
were already invaded by inmates whose Teuton names and convex noses
prophesied the social decline that must soon grasp this once select
purlieu. Jane Wray was neither German nor Hebrew; she was American in
the least pleasant sense of that word, both as regarded parentage and
breeding. She was an orphan, and the recipient of surly charity from
unprosperous relatives. She wanted very greatly to marry, and Twining
had seemed to her a golden chance. There was much about her from which
he shrank; but she contrived to rouse his pity, and then to lure from
him a promise which he would have despised himself not to keep.
The succeeding years had brought bitter mutual disappointments. Mrs.
Twining had believed firmly in her husband's powers to sound the horn of
luck and slay the giant of adversity. But he had done neither, and it
now looked as if his bones were one day to bleach along the roadway to
success. She became an austere grumbler, forever pricking her
sweet-tempered lord with a tireless little bodkin of reproach. Her
vulgarities had sharpened; her wit, always cruel and acute, had tipped
itself with a harsher venom and fledged itself with a swifter feather;
her bright, coarse beauty had dimmed and soured; she was at present a
gaunt, elderly female, with square shoulders and hard, dark eyes, who
flung sarcasms broadcast with a baleful liberality, and seemed forever
standing toward her own destiny in the attitude of a person who has some
large unsettled claim against a nefarious government.
Claire Twining, the one child who had been born of this ill-assorted
marriage, was now nineteen years old. She bore a striking likeness to
her father; she possessed his blue eyes, a trifle darker in shade, his
broad white forehead, his sloping delicacy of visage, and his erect
though slender frame. From him, too, had come the sunny quality of her
smile, the gold tints in her chestnut hair, the fine symmetry of hands
and feet. Rather from association than heredity she had caught his
kindly warmth of manner; but in Claire the cordial impulse was far less
spontaneous; she had her black list of dislikes, and she took people on
trust with wary prudence. Here spoke her mother's share in the girl's
being, as it spoke also in a certain distinct chiseling of every
feature, that suggested a softened memento of Miss Jane Wray's girlish
countenance, though Claire's coloring no more resembled her mother's of
past time than wild-rose is like peony, or pastel like chromo. But there
was one more maternal imprint set deep within this girl's nature, not to
be thinned or marred by any stress of events, and productive of a trait
whose development for good or ill is the chief cause that her life has
here been chronicled. The birthright was a perilous one; it was a
heritage of discontent; its tendency was perpetual longings for better
environment, for ampler share in the world's good gifts, for higher
place in its esteem and stronger claim to its heed. But what in her
mother had been ambition almost as crudely eager as a boorish
elbow-thrust, was in Claire more decorous and interesting, like the push
of a fragile yet determined hand through a sullen crowd. In both cases
the dissatisfaction was something that is peculiar to the woman of our
land and time--a desire not to try and adorn the sphere in which she is
born, but to try and reach a new sphere held as more suited for her own
adornment. Yet Claire's restless yearning lacked the homely grossness of
her mother's; it reflected a finer flash; it was not all cut from one
piece; it had its subtlety, its enthusiasm, even its justification. It
was not a mere stubborn hunger for advancement; it was a wish to gain
advancement by the passport of proper worthiness. She did not want the
air to lift her away from hated surroundings, but she wanted wings that
would turn the air her willing ally. It was what her father had made her
that touched what her mother had made her with a truly poetic
tenderness. By only a little prouder curve of the neck and a little
happier fullness of the plume, we part the statuesque swan from
considerably more commonplace kindred. Something like this delightful
benison of difference had fallen upon Claire.