One bright morning in May, divinely early, two persons of very different
appearance and nature came out of two houses of very different
appearance and nature at precisely the same moment, and started to move
toward each other by methods of locomotion no less different than were
the appearances of the respective persons or the respective houses from
which they emerged.
The house from which the one issued was of speckless white marble, and
looked from the advantageous corner of Sixty-something Street and Fifth
Avenue upon the purple and white lilacs and the engaging spring greens
of Central Park.
The other came out of a dark house at the angle of a narrow street in
the shadow of Brooklyn Bridge, whose door, crossed by dingy gilt
lettering, violently clanged a bell at opening and closing. The first
person stepped with the long clean strides of youth and liberty. The
second person cannot be said to have stepped at all. The first person,
meeting a policeman, smiled and said: "Good morning, Kelly." The second,
similarly meeting with an officer of the law, scowled upward, and said:
"Do it again, and I'll break you." The first person came out of the
uptown palace like a fairy from a grotto; the second emerged from the
downtown rookery like some prehistoric monster from a cave.
At a distance you might have mistaken him for an electrician or a
sewer-expert coming into view through one of those round holes in the
sidewalk by which access is provided to the subterranean apparatus of
cities. But, drawing nearer, you perceived that he was but half a man,
who stood upon the six-inch stubs of what had once been a pair of legs.
But what nature could do for what was left of him nature had done. He
had the neck, the arms, and the torso of a Hercules. His coat, black,
threadbare, shining, and unpleasantly spotted, seemed on the point of
giving way here and there to a system of restless and enormous muscles.
But that these should serve no better purpose than ceaselessly to turn
the handle of an unusually diminutive and tuneless street-organ might
have roused in the observer's mind doubts as to the wisdom and vigilance
of that divine providence which is so much better understood and trusted
by the healthy and fortunate than by the wretched, the maimed, and
the diseased.
For the most part the legless man went about the business of begging
among the business men of the city, since from the congested slum into
which he disappeared at night it was no great feat for a man of his
power to reach the more northern streets of that circle in whose midst
the finances of the nation by turns simmer, boil, and boil over. It was
not unusual, during the noon-time rush of self-centred individuals, for
the legless man to get himself stridden into and bowled clean over upon
his face or back, since nothing is more loosening to purse-strings than
the average man's horror at having injured some creature already maimed;
nor was it unusual for him at such times to scramble up smiling with a
kind of invincible cheerfulness that more potently stirred the
generosity of the man who had knocked him down than ever groans and
complaints could have done.
If the weather was fine and conducive to bodily comfort, the beggar
sometimes turned north and worked his way to Washington Square or the
lower blocks of Fifth Avenue. Sometimes, having agreed to pose for the
head and trunk to some young art student, he left his hand-organ behind,
and permitted himself the extravagance of riding in a surface car. His
boarding of a street-car was a feat of pure gymnastics, swift and
virile; so, too, was his ascending or descending of a flight of steps,
or the high platform on which he was to pose. Incessant practice, added
to natural skill and balance, enabled him to accomplish, without legs,
feats which might have balked a man with a capable and energetic pair of
them. He could travel upon his crutches for the length of a city block
almost as fast as the average man can run, and if it came to climbing a
rope or a rain-duct he was more ape than human. In his own dwelling he
had for his own use, instead of the laborious stairs needed by its other
inmates, a system of knotted ropes by which he could ascend from cellar
to attic, and polished poles by whose aid he could accomplish the most
lightning-like descending slides.
Marrow Lane, shaped like a dog's hind leg, is one of those crooked and
narrow thoroughfares which the approaches and anchorings of the Brooklyn
Bridge have cast into gloom and darkness. There are spots upon which the
sun will not shine again until the great bridge has perished; there are
corners in which drafts strong as a heaven-born wind whistle from one
year's end to the other. There are thousands of children in the region,
and in the more purely tenement settlements to the north, who have yet
to see a green field or to handle a flower.
At the very crook of the dog's leg, on the north side of Marrow Lane, a
narrow door, half glazed and sometimes burnished by the sun, has printed
across it in dingy gilt letters: