Jimmie and the old woman listened long in the hall. Above the muffled
roar of conversation, the dismal wailings of babies at night, the
thumping of feet in unseen corridors and rooms, mingled with the sound
of varied hoarse shoutings in the street and the rattling of wheels
over cobbles, they heard the screams of the child and the roars of the
mother die away to a feeble moaning and a subdued bass muttering.
The old woman was a gnarled and leathery personage who could don, at
will, an expression of great virtue. She possessed a small music-box
capable of one tune, and a collection of "God bless yehs" pitched in
assorted keys of fervency. Each day she took a position upon the
stones of Fifth Avenue, where she crooked her legs under her and
crouched immovable and hideous, like an idol. She received daily a
small sum in pennies. It was contributed, for the most part, by
persons who did not make their homes in that vicinity.
Once, when a lady had dropped her purse on the sidewalk, the gnarled
woman had grabbed it and smuggled it with great dexterity beneath her
cloak. When she was arrested she had cursed the lady into a partial
swoon, and with her aged limbs, twisted from rheumatism, had almost
kicked the stomach out of a huge policeman whose conduct upon that
occasion she referred to when she said: "The police, damn 'em."
"Eh, Jimmie, it's cursed shame," she said. "Go, now, like a dear an'
buy me a can, an' if yer mudder raises 'ell all night yehs can sleep
here."
Jimmie took a tendered tin-pail and seven pennies and departed. He
passed into the side door of a saloon and went to the bar. Straining
up on his toes he raised the pail and pennies as high as his arms would
let him. He saw two hands thrust down and take them. Directly the
same hands let down the filled pail and he left.
In front of the gruesome doorway he met a lurching figure. It was his
father, swaying about on uncertain legs.
"Give me deh can. See?" said the man, threateningly.
"Ah, come off! I got dis can fer dat ol' woman an' it 'ud be dirt teh
swipe it. See?" cried Jimmie.
The father wrenched the pail from the urchin. He grasped it in both
hands and lifted it to his mouth. He glued his lips to the under edge
and tilted his head. His hairy throat swelled until it seemed to grow
near his chin. There was a tremendous gulping movement and the beer
was gone.
The man caught his breath and laughed. He hit his son on the head with
the empty pail. As it rolled clanging into the street, Jimmie began to
scream and kicked repeatedly at his father's shins.
"Look at deh dirt what yeh done me," he yelled. "Deh ol' woman 'ill be
raisin' hell."
He retreated to the middle of the street, but the man did not pursue.
He staggered toward the door.
"I'll club hell outa yeh when I ketch yeh," he shouted, and disappeared.
During the evening he had been standing against a bar drinking whiskies
and declaring to all comers, confidentially: "My home reg'lar livin'
hell! Damndes' place! Reg'lar hell! Why do I come an' drin' whisk'
here thish way? 'Cause home reg'lar livin' hell!"
Jimmie waited a long time in the street and then crept warily up
through the building. He passed with great caution the door of the
gnarled woman, and finally stopped outside his home and listened.
He could hear his mother moving heavily about among the furniture of
the room. She was chanting in a mournful voice, occasionally
interjecting bursts of volcanic wrath at the father, who, Jimmie
judged, had sunk down on the floor or in a corner.
"Why deh blazes don' chere try teh keep Jim from fightin'? I'll break
her jaw," she suddenly bellowed.
The man mumbled with drunken indifference. "Ah, wha' deh hell. W'a's
odds? Wha' makes kick?"
"Because he tears 'is clothes, yeh damn fool," cried the woman in
supreme wrath.
The husband seemed to become aroused. "Go teh hell," he thundered
fiercely in reply. There was a crash against the door and something
broke into clattering fragments. Jimmie partially suppressed a howl
and darted down the stairway. Below he paused and listened. He heard
howls and curses, groans and shrieks, confusingly in chorus as if a
battle were raging. With all was the crash of splintering furniture.
The eyes of the urchin glared in fear that one of them would discover
him.
Curious faces appeared in doorways, and whispered comments passed to
and fro. "Ol' Johnson's raisin' hell agin."
Jimmie stood until the noises ceased and the other inhabitants of the
tenement had all yawned and shut their doors. Then he crawled upstairs
with the caution of an invader of a panther den. Sounds of labored
breathing came through the broken door-panels. He pushed the door open
and entered, quaking.
A glow from the fire threw red hues over the bare floor, the cracked
and soiled plastering, and the overturned and broken furniture.
In the middle of the floor lay his mother asleep. In one corner of the
room his father's limp body hung across the seat of a chair.
The urchin stole forward. He began to shiver in dread of awakening his
parents. His mother's great chest was heaving painfully. Jimmie
paused and looked down at her. Her face was inflamed and swollen from
drinking. Her yellow brows shaded eyelids that had brown blue. Her
tangled hair tossed in waves over her forehead. Her mouth was set in
the same lines of vindictive hatred that it had, perhaps, borne during
the fight. Her bare, red arms were thrown out above her head in
positions of exhaustion, something, mayhap, like those of a sated
villain.
The urchin bended over his mother. He was fearful lest she should open
her eyes, and the dread within him was so strong, that he could not
forbear to stare, but hung as if fascinated over the woman's grim face.
Suddenly her eyes opened. The urchin found himself looking straight
into that expression, which, it would seem, had the power to change his
blood to salt. He howled piercingly and fell backward.
The woman floundered for a moment, tossed her arms about her head as if
in combat, and again began to snore.
Jimmie crawled back in the shadows and waited. A noise in the next
room had followed his cry at the discovery that his mother was awake.
He grovelled in the gloom, the eyes from out his drawn face riveted
upon the intervening door.
He heard it creak, and then the sound of a small voice came to him.
"Jimmie! Jimmie! Are yehs dere?" it whispered. The urchin started.
The thin, white face of his sister looked at him from the door-way of
the other room. She crept to him across the floor.
The father had not moved, but lay in the same death-like sleep. The
mother writhed in uneasy slumber, her chest wheezing as if she were in
the agonies of strangulation. Out at the window a florid moon was
peering over dark roofs, and in the distance the waters of a river
glimmered pallidly.
The small frame of the ragged girl was quivering. Her features were
haggard from weeping, and her eyes gleamed from fear. She grasped the
urchin's arm in her little trembling hands and they huddled in a
corner. The eyes of both were drawn, by some force, to stare at the
woman's face, for they thought she need only to awake and all fiends
would come from below.
They crouched until the ghost-mists of dawn appeared at the window,
drawing close to the panes, and looking in at the prostrate, heaving
body of the mother.