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JERSEY STREET
AND JERSEY LANE
URBAN AND SUBURBAN SKETCHES
BY
H. C. BUNNER
ILLUSTRATED BY
A. B. FROST, B. WEST CLINEDINST, IRVING R. WILES
AND KENNETH FRAZIER
[Illustration: A TANGLED PATH]
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1896
COPYRIGHT, 1893, 1894, 1895, 1896, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Press of J. J. Little & Co.
Astor Place, New York
* * * * *
TO
A. L. B.
* * * * *
CONTENTS
JERSEY AND MULBERRY 1
TIEMANN'S TO TUBBY HOOK 33
THE BOWERY AND BOHEMIA 67
THE STORY OF A PATH 99
THE LOST CHILD 135
A LETTER TO TOWN 175
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
"_A tangled path_" FRONTISPIECE
"_The old lady sat down and wrote that letter_" 6
"_Sometimes a woman with a shawl over her head * * * exchanges
a few words with him_" 9
"_And down in the big, red chair big sister plunks little sister_" 12
"_Then there is Mamie, the pretty girl in the window_" 14
"_And plays on the Italian bagpipes_" 16
"_A Jewish sweater with coats on his shoulder_" 20
"_Glass-put-in man_" 21
"_Poor woman with market-basket_" 21
"_A Chinaman who stalks on with no expression at all_" 24
"_The children are dancing_" 25
"_The girl you loved was * * * really grown up and too old for you_" 36
"_A few of the old family estates were kept up after a fashion_" 40
"_A random goat of poverty_" 41
"_The paint works that had paid for its building_" 45
"_A mansion imposing still in spite of age_" 49
"_She wound the great, tall, white columns with these strips_" 53
"_Here also was a certain dell_" 57
"_The railroad embankment beyond which lay the pretty, blue Hudson_" 59
"_The wreck of the woods where I used to scramble_" 60
"_A little enclosure that is called a park_" 63
"_It was a very pretty young lady who opened the door_" 64
"_An old gentleman from Rondout-on-the-Hudson_" 70
"_Young gentlemen sitting in a pot-house at high noon_" 72
"_A gentleman permanently in temporary difficulties_" 74
"_A jackal is a man generally of good address_" 81
"_The Bowery is the most marvellous thoroughfare in the world_" 85
"_More and stranger wares than uptown people ever heard of_" 89
"_Probably the edibles are in the majority_" 91
"_The Polish Jews with their back-yards full of chickens_" 93
"_The Anarchist Russians_" 94
"_The Scandinavians of all sorts who come up from the wharfs_" 96
"_Through the rich man's country_" 108
"_A convenient way through the woods_" 112
"_The lonely old trapper who had dwelt on that mountain_" 114
"_Malvina Dodd * * * took the winding track that her husband
had laid out_" 118
"_Here the old man would sit down and wait_" 120
"_He did a little grading with a mattock_" 121
"_The laborers found it and took it_" 125
"_The tinkers * * * and the rest of the old-time gentry of
the road_" 128
"_I used to go down that path on the dead run_" 131
"_'I'm Latimer,' said the man on the horse_" 139
"_That boy of Penrhyn's--the little one with the yellow hair_" 143
"_Lanterns and hand lamps dimly lit up faces_" 149
"_The river, the river,--oh, my boy_!" 152
"_The father leaned forward and clutched the arms of his chair_" 155
"_They had just met after a long beat_" 164
"_Half a dozen men naked to the waist scrubbing themselves_" 167
"_The mother knew that her lost child was found_" 173
"_The desperate young men of the bachelor apartments_" 180
"_The hot, lifeless days of summer in your town house_" 183
"_'That's no Johnny-jumper!'_" 185
"_Other local troubles_" 189
"_You send for Pat Brannigan_" 192
"_A little plain strip of paper headed 'Memorandum of sale'_" 200
JERSEY AND MULBERRY
I found this letter and comment in an evening paper, some time ago, and
I cut the slip out and kept it for its cruelty:
TO THE EDITOR OF THE EVENING ----.
SIR: In yesterday's issue you took occasion to speak of the
organ-grinding nuisance, about which I hope you will let me ask you
the following questions: Why must decent people all over town
suffer these pestilential beggars to go about torturing our senses,
and practically blackmailing the listeners into paying them to go
away? Is it not a most ridiculous excuse on the part of the police,
when ordered to arrest these vagrants, to tell a citizen that the
city license exempts these public nuisances from arrest? Let me
ask, Can the city by any means legalize a common-law misdemeanor?
If not, how can the city authorities grant exemption to these
sturdy beggars and vagrants by their paying for a license? The
Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure, it seems, provide
for the punishment of gamblers, dive-keepers, and other disorderly
persons, among whom organ-grinders fall, as being people who beg,
and exhibit for money, and create disorder. If this is so, why can
the police not be forced to intervene and forbid them their
outrageous behavior?--for these fellows do not only not know or
care for the observance of the city ordinance, which certainly is
binding on them, but, relying on a fellow-feeling of vulgarity with
the mob, resist all attempts made to remove them from the exercise
of their most fearful beggary, which is not even tolerated any
longer at Naples.
R.
NEW YORK, _February_ 20th.
[Our correspondent's appeal should be addressed to the Board of
Aldermen and the Mayor. They consented to the licensing of the
grinders in the face of a popular protest.--ED. EVENING ----.]
Now certainly that was not a good letter to write, and is not a pleasant
letter to read; but the worst of it is, I am afraid that you can never
make the writer of it understand why it is unfair and unwise and
downright cruel.
For I think we can figure out the personality of that writer pretty
easily. She is a nice old or middle-aged lady, unmarried, of course;
well-to-do, and likely to leave a very comfortable fortune behind her
when she leaves all worldly things; and accustomed to a great deal of
deference from her nephews and nieces. She is occasionally subject to
nervous headaches, and she wrote this letter while she had one of her
headaches. She had been lying down and trying to get a wink of sleep
when the organ-grinder came under the window. It was a new organ and
very loud, and its organ-grinder was proud of it and ground it with all
his might, and it was certainly a very annoying instrument to delicate
ears and sensitive nerves.
Now, she might have got rid of the nuisance at once by a very simple
expedient. If she had sent Abigail, her maid, down to the street, with a
dime, and told her to say: "Sicka lady, no playa," poor Pedro would have
swung his box of whistles over his shoulder and trudged contentedly on.
But, instead, she sent Abigail down without the dime, and with
instructions to threaten the man with immediate arrest and imprisonment.
And Abigail went down and scolded the man with the more vigor that she
herself had been scolded all day on account of the headache. And so
Pedro just grinned at her in his exasperating furrin way, and played on
until he got good and ready to go. Then he went, and the old lady sat
down and wrote that letter, and gave it to Abigail to post.
[Illustration]
Later in the afternoon the old lady drove out, and the fresh air did her
a world of good, and she stopped at a toy store and bought some trifles
for sister Mary's little girl, who had the measles. Then she came home,
and after dinner she read Mr. Jacob Riis's book, "How the Other Half
Lives;" and she shuddered at the picture of the Jersey Street slums on
the title page, and shuddered more as she read of the fourteen people
packed in one room, and of the suffering and squalor and misery of it
all. And then she made a memorandum to give a larger check to the
charitable society next time. Then she went to bed, not forgetting first
to read her nightly chapter in the gospel of the carpenter's son of
Nazareth. And she had quite forgotten all about the coarse and
unchristian words she had written in the letter that was by that time
passing through the hands of the weary night-shift of mail-clerks down
in the General Post-office. And when she did read it in print, she was
so pleased and proud of the fluency of her own diction, and so many of
her nephews and nieces said so many admiring things about what she might
have done if she had only gone in for literature, that it really never
occurred to her at all to think whether she had been any more just and
charitable than the poor ignorant man who had annoyed her.
She was especially pleased with the part that had the legal phraseology
in it, and with the scornful rebuke of the police for their
unwillingness to disobey municipal ordinances. That was founded partly
on something that she had heard nephew John say once, and partly on a
general idea she has that the present administration has forcibly
usurped the city government.
Now, I have no doubt that when that organ-grinder went home at night, he
and his large family laid themselves down to rest in a back room of the
Jersey Street slum, and if it be so, I may sometimes see him when I look
out of a certain window of the great red-brick building where my office
is, for it lies on Mulberry Street, between Jersey and Houston. My own
personal and private window looks out on Mulberry Street. It is in a
little den at the end of a long string of low-partitioned offices
stretching along the Mulberry Street side; and we who tenant them have
looked out of the windows for so many years that we have got to know, at
least by sight, a great many of the dwellers thereabouts. We are almost
in the very heart of that "mob" on whose "fellow-feeling of vulgarity"
the fellows who grind the organ rely to sustain them in their outrageous
behavior. And, do you know, as we look out of those windows, year after
year, we find ourselves growing to have a fellow-feeling of vulgarity
with that same mob.
[Illustration]
The figure and form which we know best are those of old Judge
Phoenix--for so the office-jester named him when we first moved in,
and we have known him by that name ever since. He is a fat old Irishman,
with a clean-shaven face, who stands summer and winter in the side
doorway that opens, next to the little grocery opposite, on the
alley-way to the rear tenement. Summer and winter he is buttoned to his
chin in a faded old black overcoat. Alone he stands for the most part,
smoking his black pipe and teetering gently from one foot to the other.
But sometimes a woman with a shawl over her head comes out of the
alley-way and exchanges a few words with him before she goes to the
little grocery to get a loaf of bread, or a half-pint of milk, or to
make that favorite purchase of the poor--three potatoes, one turnip,
one carrot, four onions, and the handful of kale--a "b'ilin'." And
there is also another old man, a small and bent old man, who has some
strange job that occupies odd hours of the day, who stops on his way to
and from work to talk with the Judge. For hours and hours they talk
together, till one wonders how in the course of years they have not come
to talk themselves out. What can they have left to talk about? If they
had been Mezzofanti and Macaulay, talking in all known languages on all
known topics, they ought certainly to have exhausted the resources of
conversation long before this time.
Judge Phoenix must be a man of independent fortune, for he toils not,
neither does he spin, and the lilies of the field could not lead a more
simple vegetable life, nor stay more contentedly in one place. Perhaps
he owns the rear tenement. I suspect so, for he must have been at one
time in the labor-contract business. This, of course, is a mere guess,
founded upon the fact that we once found the Judge away from his post
and at work. It was at the time they were repaving Broadway with the
great pavement. We discovered the Judge at the corner of Bleecker Street
perched on a pile of dirt, doing duty as sub-section boss. He was
talking to the drivers of the vehicles that went past him, through the
half-blockaded thoroughfare, and he was addressing them, after the true
professional contractor's style, by the names of their loads.
"Hi there, sand," he would cry, "git along lively! Stone, it's you the
boss wants on the other side of the street! Dhry-goods, there's no place
for ye here; take the next turn!" It was a proud day for the old Judge,
and I have no doubt that he talks it over still with his little bent old
crony, and boasts of vain deeds that grow in the telling.
Judge Phoenix is not, however, without mute company. Fair days and
foul are all one to the Judge, but on fair days his companion is brought
out. In front of the grocery is a box with a sloping top, on which are
little bins for vegetables. In front of this box, again, on days when it
is not raining or snowing, a little girl of five or six comes out of the
grocery and sets a little red chair. Then she brings out a smaller girl
yet, who may be two or three, a plump and puggy little thing; and down
in the red chair big sister plunks little sister, and there till next
mealtime little sister sits and never so much as offers to move. She
must have been trained to this unchildlike self-imprisonment, for she is
lusty and strong enough. Big sister works in the shop, and once in a
while she comes out and settles little sister more comfortably in her
red chair; and then little sister has the sole moment of relief from a
monotonous existence. She hammers on big sister's face with her fat
little hands, and with such skill and force does she direct the blows
that big sister often has to wipe her streaming eyes. But big sister
always takes it in good part, and little sister evidently does it, not
from any lack of affection, but in the way of healthy exercise. Then big
sister wipes little sister's nose and goes back into the shop. I suppose
there is some compact between them.
[Illustration]
Of course there is plenty of child life all up and down the sidewalk on
both sides, although little sister never joins in it. My side of the
street swarms with Italian children, most of them from Jersey Street,
which is really not a street, but an alley. Judge Phoenix's side is
peopled with small Germans and Irish. I have noticed one peculiar thing
about these children: they never change sides. They play together most
amicably in the middle of the street or in the gutter, but neither
ventures beyond its neutral ground.
Judge Phoenix and little sister are by far the most interesting
figures to be seen from my windows, but there are many others whom we
know. There is the Italian barber whose brother dropped dead while
shaving a customer. You would never imagine, to see the simple and
unaffected way in which he comes out to take the air once in a while,
standing on the steps of his basement, and twirling his tin-backed comb
in idle thought, that he had had such a distinguished death in his
family. But I don't let him shave me.
[Illustration]
Then there is Mamie, the pretty girl in the window with the
lace-curtains, and there is her epileptic brother. He is insane, but
harmless, and amusing, although rather trying to the nerves. He comes
out of the house in a hurry, walks quickly up the street for twenty or
thirty feet, then turns suddenly, as if he had forgotten something, and
hurries back, to reappear two minutes later from the basement door, only
to hasten wildly in another direction, turn back again, plunge into the
basement door, emerge from the upper door, get half way down the block,
forget it again, and go back to make a new combination of doors and
exits. Sometimes he is ten or twenty minutes in the house at one time.
Then we suppose he is having a fit. Now, it seems to me that that
modest retirement shows consideration and thoughtfulness on his part.
In the window next to Mamie's is a little, putty-colored face, and a
still smaller white face, that just peeps over the sill. One belongs to
the mulatto woman's youngster. Her mother goes out scrubbing, and the
little girl is alone all day. She is so much alone, that the sage-green
old bachelor in the second den from mine could not stand it, last
Christmas time, so he sent her a doll on the sly. That's the other face.
Then there is the grocer, who is a groceress, and the groceress's
husband. I wish that man to understand, if his eye ever falls upon this
page--for wrapping purposes, we will say--that, in the language of
Mulberry Street, I am on to him. He has got a job recently, driving a
bakery wagon, and he times his route so that he can tie up in front of
his wife's grocery every day at twelve o'clock, and he puts in a solid
hour of his employer's time helping his wife through the noonday rush.
But he need not fear. In the interests of the higher morality I suppose
I ought to go and tell his employer about it. But I won't. My morals
are not that high.
Of course we have many across-the-street friends, but I cannot tell you
of them all. I will only mention the plump widow who keeps the
lunch-room and bakery on the Houston Street corner, where the boys go
for their luncheon. It is through her that many interesting details of
personal gossip find their way into this office.
[Illustration]
Jersey Street, or at least the rear of it, seems to be given up wholly
to the Italians. The most charming tenant of Jersey Street is the lovely
Italian girl, who looks like a Jewess, whose mission in life seems to be
to hang all day long out of her window and watch the doings in the
little stone-flagged courts below her. In one of these an old man
sometimes comes out, sits him down in a shady corner, and plays on the
Italian bagpipes, which are really more painful than any hand-organ
that ever was made. After a while his wife opens hostilities with him
from her window. I suppose she is reproaching him for an idle devotion
to art, but I cannot follow the conversation, although it is quite loud
enough on both sides. But the handsome Italian girl up at the window
follows the changes of the strife with the light of the joy of battle in
her beautiful dark eyes, and I can tell from her face exactly which of
the old folk is getting the better of it.
But though the life of Jersey and Mulberry Streets may be mildly
interesting to outside spectators who happen to have a fellow-feeling of
vulgarity with the mob, the mob must find it rather monotonous. Jersey
Street is not only a blind alley, but a dead one, so far as outside life
is concerned, and Judge Phoenix and little sister see pretty much the
same old two-and-sixpence every day. The bustle and clamor of Mulberry
Bend are only a few blocks below them, but the Bend is an exclusive
slum; and Police Headquarters--the Central Office--is a block above, but
the Central Office deals only with the refinements of artistic crime,
and is not half so interesting as an ordinary police station. The
priests go by from the school below, in their black robes and tall silk
hats, always two by two, marching with brisk, business-like tread. An
occasional drunken man or woman wavers along, but generally their faces
and their conditions are both familiar. Sometimes two men hurry by,
pressing side by side. If you have seen that peculiar walk before you
know what it means. Two light steel rings link their wrists together.
The old man idly watches them until they disappear in the white marble
building on the next block. And then, of course, there is always a thin
stream of working folk going to and fro upon their business.
In spring and in fall things brighten a little. Those are the seasons of
processions and religious festivals. Almost every day then, and
sometimes half a dozen times in a day, the Judge and the baby may see
some Italian society parading through the street. Fourteen proud sons of
Italy, clad in magnificent new uniforms, bearing aloft huge silk
banners, strut magnificently in the rear of a German band of
twenty-four pieces, and a drum-corps of a dozen more. Then, too, come
the religious processions, when the little girls are taken to their
first communion. Six sturdy Italians struggle along under the weight of
a mighty temple or pavilion, all made of colored candles--not the dainty
little pink trifles with rosy shades of perforated paper, that light our
old lady's dining-table--but the great big candles of the Romish Church
(a church which, you may remember, is much affected of the mob,
especially in times of suffering, sickness, or death); mighty candles,
six and eight feet tall, and as thick as your wrist, of red and blue and
green and yellow, arranged in artistic combinations around a statue of
the Virgin. From this splendid structure silken ribbons stream in all
directions, and at the end of each ribbon is a little girl--generally a
pretty little girl--in a white dress bedecked with green bows. And each
little girl leads by the hand one smaller than herself, sometimes a
toddler so tiny that you marvel that it can walk at all. Some of the
little ones are bare-headed, but most of them wear the square head-cloth
of the Italian peasant, such as their mothers and grandmothers wore in
Italy. At each side of the girls marches an escort of proud parents,
very much mixed up with the boys of the families, who generally appear
in their usual street dress, some of them showing through it in
conspicuous places. And before and behind them are bands and drum-corps,
and societies with banners, and it is all a blare of martial music and
primary colors the whole length of the street.
[Illustration]
But these are Mulberry Street's brief carnival seasons, and when their
splendor is departed the block relapses into workaday dulness, and the
procession that marches and counter-marches before Judge Phoenix and
little sister in any one of the long hours between eight and twelve and
one and six is something like this:
[Illustration]
UP. DOWN.
Detective taking
prisoner to
Central Office.
Chinaman.
Messenger boy. Two house-painters.
Two priests. Boy with basket.
Jewish sweater, Boy with tin
with coats on beer-pails on a
his shoulder. stick.
Carpenter.
Another Chinaman.
Drunken woman
(a regular).
Glass-put-in
man.
[Illustration]
UP. DOWN.
Washer woman
with clothes.
Poor woman
with market-basket.
Drunken man.
Undertaker's
man carrying
trestles.
Butcher's boy.
Two priests. Detective
coming back
from Central
Office
alone.
Such is the daily march of the mob in Mulberry Street near the mouth of
Jersey's blind alley, and such is its outrageous behavior as observed by
a presumably decent person from the windows of the big red-brick
building across the way.
Suddenly there is an explosion of sound under the decent person's
window, and a hand-organ starts off with a jerk like a freight train on
a down grade, that joggles a whole string of crashing notes. Then it
gets down to work, and its harsh, high-pitched, metallic drone makes the
street ring for a moment. Then it is temporarily drowned by a chorus of
shrill, small voices. The person--I am afraid his decency begins to drop
off him here--leans on his broad window-sill and looks out. The street
is filled with children of every age, size, and nationality; dirty
children, clean children, well-dressed children, and children in rags,
and for every one of these last two classes put together a dozen
children who are neatly and cleanly but humbly clad--the children of the
self-respecting poor. I do not know where they have all swarmed from.
There were only three or four in sight just before the organ came; now
there are several dozen in the crowd, and the crowd is growing. See, the
women are coming out in the rear tenements. Some male passers-by line up
on the edge of the sidewalk and look on with a superior air. The Italian
barber has come all the way up his steps, and is sitting on the rail.
Judge Phoenix has teetered forward at least half a yard, and stands
looking at the show over the heads of a little knot of women hooded with
red plaid shawls. The epileptic boy comes out on his stoop and stays
there at least three minutes before the area-way swallows him. Up above
there is a head in almost every casement. Mamie is at her window, and
the little mulatto child at hers. There are only two people who do not
stop and look on and listen. One is a Chinaman, who stalks on with no
expression at all on his blank face; the other is the boy from the
printing-office with a dozen foaming cans of beer on his long stick. But
he does not leave because he wants to. He lingers as long as he can, in
his passage through the throng, and disappears in the printing-house
doorway with his head screwed half way around on his shoulders. He would
linger yet, but the big foreman would call him "Spitzbube!" and would
cuff his ears.
[Illustration]
The children are dancing. The organ is playing "On the Blue Alsatian
Mountains," and the little heads are bobbing up and down to it in time
as true as ever was kept. Watch the little things! They are really
waltzing. There is a young one of four years old. See her little worn
shoes take the step and keep it! Dodworth or DeGarmo could not have
taught her better. I wonder if either of them ever had so young a pupil.
And she is dancing with a girl twice her size. Look at that ring of
children--all girls--waltzing round hand in hand! How is that for a
ladies' chain? Well, well, the heart grows young to see them. And now
look over to the grocery. Big sister has come out and climbed on the
vegetable-stand, and is sitting in the potatoes with little sister in
her lap. Little sister waves her fat, red arms in the air and shrieks in
babyish delight. The old women with the shawls over their heads are
talking together, crooning over the spectacle in their Irish way:
[Illustration: THE CHILDREN ARE DANCING. THE ORGAN IS PLAYING "ON THE
BLUE ALSATIAN MOUNTAINS"]
"Thot's me Mary Ann, I was tellin' ye about, Mrs. Rafferty, dancin' wid
the little one in the green apron."
"It's a foine sthring o' childher ye have, Mrs. Finn!" says Mrs.
Rafferty, nodding her head as though it were balanced on wires. And so
the dance goes on.
In the centre of it all stands the organ-grinder, swarthy and
black-haired. He has a small, clear space so that he can move the one
leg of his organ about, as he turns from side to side, gazing up at the
windows of the brick building where the great wrought-iron griffins
stare back at him from their lofty perches. His anxious black eyes rove
from window to window. The poor he has always with him, but what will
the folk who mould public opinion in great griffin-decorated buildings
do for him?
I think we will throw him down a few nickels. Let us tear off a scrap of
newspaper. Here is a bit from the society column of the _Evening_ ----.
That will do excellently well. We will screw the money up in that, and
there it goes, _chink_! on the pavement below. There, look at that grin!
Wasn't it cheap at the price?
I wish he might have had a monkey to come up and get the nickels. We
shall never see the organ-grinder's monkey in the streets of New York
again. I see him, though. He comes out and visits me where I live among
the trees, whenever the weather is not too cold to permit him to travel
with his master. Sometimes he comes in a bag, on chilly days; and my own
babies, who seem to be born with the fellow-feeling of vulgarity with
the mob, invite him in and show him how to warm his cold little black
hands in front of the kitchen range.
I do not suppose, even if it were possible to get our good old maiden
lady to come down to Mulberry Street and sit at my window when the
organ-grinder comes along, she could ever learn to look at the mob with
friendly, or at least kindly, eyes; but I think she would learn--and she
is cordially invited to come--that it is not a mob that rejoices in
"outrageous behavior," as some other mobs that we read of have
rejoiced--notably one that gave a great deal of trouble to some very
"decent people" in Paris toward the end of the last century. And I think
that she even might be induced to see that the organ-grinder is
following an honest trade, pitiful as it be, and not exercising a
"fearful beggary." He cannot be called a beggar who gives something that
to him, and to thousands of others, is something valuable, in return for
the money he asks of you. Our organ-grinder is no more a beggar than is
my good friend Mr. Henry Abbey, the honestest and best of operatic
impresarios. Mr. Abbey can take the American opera house and hire Mr.
Seidl and Mr. ---- to conduct grand opera for your delight and mine, and
when we can afford it we go and listen to his perfect music, and, as
our poor contributions cannot pay for it all, the rich of the land meet
the deficit. But this poor, foot-sore child of fortune has only his
heavy box of tunes and a human being's easement in the public highway.
Let us not shut him out of that poor right because once in a while he
wanders in front of our doors and offers wares that offend our finer
taste. It is easy enough to get him to betake himself elsewhere, and, if
it costs us a few cents, let us not ransack our law-books and our moral
philosophies to find out if we cannot indict him for constructive
blackmail, but consider the nickel or the dime a little tribute to the
uncounted weary souls who love his strains and welcome his coming.
For the editor of the _Evening_ ---- was wrong when he said that the
Board of Aldermen and the Mayor consented to the licensing of the
organ-grinder "in the face of a popular protest." There was a protest,
but it was not a popular protest, and it came face to face with a demand
that _was_ popular. And the Mayor and the Board of Aldermen did rightly,
and did as should be done in this American land of ours, when they
granted the demand of the majority of the people, and refused to heed
the protest of a minority. For the people who said YEA on this question
were as scores of thousands or hundreds of thousands to the thousands of
people who said NAY; and the vexation of the few hangs light in the
balance against even the poor scrap of joy which was spared to
innumerable barren lives.
And so permit me to renew my invitation to the old lady.
TIEMANN'S TO TUBBY HOOK
If you ever were a decent, healthy boy, or if you can make believe that
you once were such a boy, you must remember that you were once in love
with a girl a great deal older than yourself. I am not speaking of the
big school-girl with whom you thought you were in love, for one little
while--just because she wouldn't look at you, and treated you like a
little boy. _She_ had, after all, but a tuppenny temporary superiority
to you; and, after all, in the bottom of your irritated little soul, you
knew it. You knew that, proud beauty that she was, she might have to
lower her colors to her little sister before that young minx got into
the first class and--comparatively--long dresses.
No, I am talking of the girl you loved who was not only really grown up
and too old for you, but grown up almost into old-maidhood, and too old
perhaps for anyone. She was not, of course, quite an old maid, but she
was so nearly an old maid as to be out of all active competition with
her juniors--which permitted her to be her natural, simple self, and to
show you the real charm of her womanhood. Neglected by the men, not yet
old enough to take to coddling young girls after the manner of motherly
old maids, she found a hearty and genuine pleasure in your boyish
friendship, and you--you adored her. You saw, of course, as others saw,
the faded dulness of her complexion; you saw the wee crow's-feet that
gathered in the corners of her eyes when she laughed; you saw the faint
touches of white among the crisp little curls over her temples; you saw
that the keenest wind of Fall brought the red to her cheeks only in two
bright spots, and that no soft Spring air would ever bring her back the
rosy, pink flush of girlhood: you saw these things as others saw
them--no, indeed, you did not; you saw them as others could not, and
they only made her the more dear to you. And you were having one of the
best and most valuable experiences of your boyhood, to which you may
look back now, whatever life has brought you, with a smile that has in
it nothing of regret, of derision, or of bitterness.
[Illustration]
Suppose that this all happened long ago--that you had left a couple of
quarter-posts of your course of three-score-years-and-ten between that
young lover and your present self; and suppose that the idea came to you
to seek out and revisit this dear faded memory. And suppose that you
were foolish enough to act upon the idea, and went in search of her and
found her--not the wholesome, autumn-nipped comrade that you remembered,
a shade or two at most frostily touched by the winter of old age--but a
berouged, beraddled, bedizened old make-believe, with wrinkles plastered
thick, and skinny shoulders dusted white with powder--ah me, how you
would wish you had not gone!
And just so I wished that I had not gone, when, the other day, I was
tempted back to revisit the best beloved of all the homes of my nomadic
boyhood.
I remembered four pleasant years of early youth when my lot was cast in
a region that was singularly delightful and grateful and lovable,
although the finger of death had already touched its prosperity and
beauty beyond all requickening.
It was a fair countryside of upland and plateau, lying between a
majestic hill-bordered river and an idle, wandering, marshy, salt creek
that flowed almost side by side with its nobler companion for several
miles before they came together at the base of a steep, rocky height,
crowned with thick woods. This whole country was my playground, a strip
some four or five miles long, and for the most of the way a mile wide
between the two rivers, with the rocky, wooded eminence for its northern
boundary.
In the days when the broad road that led from the great city was a
famous highway, it had run through a country of comfortable farm-houses
and substantial old-fashioned mansions standing in spacious grounds of
woodland and meadow. These latter occupied the heights along the great
river, like a lofty breastwork of aristocracy, guarding the humbler
tillers of the soil in the more sheltered plains and hollows behind
them. The extreme north of my playground had been, within my father's
easy remembering, a woodland wild enough to shelter deer; and even in my
boyhood there remained patches of forest where once in a while the
sharp-eyed picked up gun-flints and brass buttons that had been dropped
among those very trees by the marauding soldiery of King George III. of
tyrannical memory. There was no deer there when I was a boy. Deer go
naturally with a hardy peasantry, and not naturally, perhaps, but
artificially, with the rich and great. But deer cannot coexist with a
population composed of what we call "People of Moderate Means." It is
not in the eternal fitness of things that they should.
[Illustration]
For, as I first knew our neighborhood, it was a suburb as a physical
fact only. As a body politic, we were a part of the great city, and
those twain demons of encroachment, Taxes and Assessments, had
definitively won in their battle with both the farmers and the
country-house gentry. To the south, the farms had been wholly routed out
of existence. A few of the old family estates were kept up after a
fashion, but it was only as the officers of a defeated garrison are
allowed to take their own time about leaving their quarters. Along the
broad highway some of them lingered, keeping up a poor pretence of
disregarding new grades and levels, and of not seeing the little
shanties that squatted under their very windows, or the more offensive
habitations of a more pretentious poverty that began to range themselves
here and there in serried blocks.
[Illustration]
Poor people of moderate means! Nobody wants you, except the real estate
speculator, and he wants you only to empty your light pockets for you,
and to leave you to die of cheap plumbing in the poor little sham of a
house that he builds to suit your moderate means and his immoderate
greed. Nowhere are you welcome, except where contractors are digging new
roads and blasting rocks and filling sunken lots with ashes and tin
cans. The random goat of poverty browses on the very confines of the
scanty, small settlement of cheap gentility where you and your
neighbors--people of moderate means like yourself--huddle together in
your endless, unceasing struggle for a home and self-respect. You know
that your smug, mean little house, tricked out with machine-made
scroll-work, and insufficiently clad in two coats of ready-mixed paint,
is an eyesore to the poor old gentleman who has sold you a corner of his
father's estate to build it on. But there it is--the whole hard business
of life for the poor--for the big poor and the little poor, and the
unhappiest of all, the moderately poor. _He_ must sell strip after strip
of the grounds his father laid out with such loving and far-looking
pride. _You_ must buy your narrow strip from him, and raise thereon your
tawdry little house, calculating the cost of every inch of construction
in hungry anxiety of mind. And then you must sit down in your narrow
front-room to stare at the squalid shanty of the poor man who has
squatted right in your sight, on the land condemned for the new avenue;
to wish that the street might be cut through and the unsightly hovel
taken away--and then to groan in spirit as you think of the assessment
you must pay when the street _is_ cut through.
And yet you must live, oh, people of moderate means! You have your loves
and your cares, your tastes and your ambitions, your hopes and your
fears, your griefs and your joys, just like the people whom you envy and
the people who envy you. As much as any of them, you have the capacity
for pain and for pleasure, for loving and for being loved, that gives
human beings a right to turn the leaves of the book of life and spell
out its lesson for themselves. I know this; I know it well; I was
beginning to find it out when I first came to that outpost suburb of New
York, in the trail of your weary army.
But I was a boy then, and no moderateness of earthly means could rob me
of my inheritance in the sky and the woods and the fields, in the sun
and the snow and the rain and the wind, and in every day's weather, of
which there never was any kind made that has not some delight in it to a
healthful body and heart. And on this inheritance I drew such great,
big, liberal, whacking drafts that, I declare, to this very day, some
odd silver pieces of the resultant spending-money keep turning up, now
and then, in forgotten pockets of my mind.
The field of my boyish activity was practically limited by the existing
conditions of the city's growth. With each year there was less and less
temptation to extend that field southward. The Bloomingdale Road, with
its great arching willows, its hospitable old road-houses withdrawn from
the street and hidden far down shady lanes that led riverward--the
splendid old highway retained something of its charm; but day by day the
gridiron system of streets encroached upon it, and day by day the
shanties and the cheap villas crowded in along its sides, between the
old farmsteads and the country-places. And then it led only to the raw
and unfinished Central Park, and to the bare waste and dreary fag-end of
a New York that still looked upon Union Square as an uptown quarter.
Besides that, the lone scion of respectability who wandered too freely
about the region just below Manhattanville, was apt to get his head
most beautifully punched at the hands of some predatory gang of
embryonic toughs from the shanties on the line of the aqueduct.
[Illustration]
That is how our range--mine and the other boys'--was from Tiemann's to
Tubby Hook; that is, from where ex-Mayor Tiemann's fine old house, with
its long conservatories, sat on the edge of the Manhattanville bluff and
looked down into the black mouths of the chimneys of the paint-works
that had paid for its building, up to the little inn near the junction
of Spuyten Duyvil Creek and the Hudson River. Occasionally, of course,
the delight of the river front tempted us farther down. There was an
iron-mill down there (if that is the proper name for a place where they
make pig-iron), whose operations were a perpetual joy to boyhood's
heart. The benevolent lovers of the picturesque who owned this mill had
a most entrancing way of making their castings late in the afternoon, so
as to give a boy a chance to coast or skate, an hour after school
closed, before it was time to slip down to the grimy building on the
river's bank, and peer through the arched doorway into the great, dark,
mysterious cavern with its floor of sand marked out in a pattern of
trenches that looked as if they had been made by some gigantic
double-toothed comb--a sort of right-angled herring-bone pattern. The
darkness gathered outside, and deepened still faster within that gloomy,
smoke-blackened hollow. The workmen, with long iron rods in their hands,
moved about with the cautious, expectant manner of men whose duty brings
them in contact with a daily danger. They stepped carefully about,
fearful of injuring the regular impressions in the smooth sand, and
their looks turned ever with a certain anxiety to the great black
furnace at the northern end of the room, where every now and then, at
the foreman's order, a fiery eye would open itself for inspection and
close sullenly, making everything seem more dark than it was before. At
last--sometimes it was long to wait--the eye would open, and the
foreman, looking into it, would nod; and then a thrill of excitement ran
through the workmen at their stations and the boys in the big doorway;
and suddenly a huge red mouth opened beneath the eye, and out poured the
mighty flood of molten iron, glowing with a terrible, wonderful,
dazzling color that was neither white nor red, nor rose nor yellow, but
that seemed to partake of them all, and yet to be strangely different
from any hue that men can classify or name. Down it flowed upon the
sanded floor, first into the broad trench in front of the furnace, then
down the long dorsals of the rectangular herring-bones, spreading out as
it went into the depressions to right and left, until the mighty pattern
of fire shone in its full length and breadth on the flood of sand; and
the workmen, who had been coaxing the sluggish, lava-like flood along
with their iron rods, rested from their labors and wiped their hot
brows, while a thin cloud of steamy vapor floated up to the begrimed
rafters. Standing in the doorway we could watch the familiar
pattern--the sow and pigs, it was called--die down to a dull rose red,
and then we would hurry away before blackness came upon it and wiped it
clean out of memory and imagination.
Below the foundry, too, there was a point of land whereon were certain
elevations and depressions of turf-covered earth that were by many, and
most certainly by me, supposed to be the ruins of a Revolutionary fort.
I have heard long and warm discussions of the nature and history of
these mounds and trenches, and I believe the weight of authority was
against the theory that they were earthworks thrown up to oppose the
passage of a British fleet. But they were good enough earthworks for a
boy.
Just above Tiemann's, on the lofty, protrudent corner made by the
dropping of the high-road into the curious transverse valley, or swale,
which at 125th Street crosses Manhattan Island from east to west, stood,
at the top of a steep lawn, a mansion imposing still in spite of age,
decay, and sorry days. The great Ionic columns of the portico, which
stood the whole height and breadth of the front, were cracked in their
length, and rotten in base and capital. The white and yellow paint was
faded and blistered. Below the broad flight of crazy front-steps the
grass grew rank in the gravel walk, and died out in brown, withered
patches on the lawn, where only plantain and sorrel throve. It was a sad
and shabby old house enough, but even the patches of newspaper here and
there on its broken window-panes could not take away a certain simple,
old-fashioned dignity from its weather-beaten face.
[Illustration]
Here, the boys used to say, the Crazy Woman lived; but she was not
crazy. I knew the old lady well, and at one time we were very good
friends. She was the last daughter of an old, once prosperous family; a
woman of bright, even brilliant mind, unhinged by misfortune,
disappointment, loneliness, and the horrible fascination which an
inherited load of litigation exercised upon her. The one diversion of
her declining years was to let various parts and portions of her
premises, on any ridiculous terms that might suggest themselves, to any
tenants that might offer; and then to eject the lessee, either on a nice
point of law or on general principles, precisely as she saw fit. She was
almost invariably successful in this curious game, and when she was not,
she promptly made friends with her victorious tenant, and he usually
ended by liking her very much.
Her family, if I remember rightly, had distinguished itself in public
service. It was one of those good old American houses where the
men-children are born with politics in their veins--that is, with an
inherited sense of citizenship, and a conscious pride in bearing their
share in the civic burden. The young man just out of college, who has
got a job at writing editorials on the Purification of Politics, is very
fond of alluding to such men as "indurated professional
office-holders." But the good old gentleman who pays the young
ex-collegian's bills sometimes takes a great deal of pleasure--in his
stupid, old-fashioned way--in uniting with his fellow-merchants of the
Swamp or Hanover Square, to subscribe to a testimonial to some one of
the best abused of these "indurated" sinners, in honor of his
distinguished services in lowering some tax-rate, in suppressing some
nuisance, in establishing some new municipal safeguard to life or
property. This blood in her may, in some measure, account for the vigor
and enthusiasm with which this old lady expressed her sense of the loss
the community had sustained in the death of President Lincoln, in April
of 1865.
Summoning two or three of us youngsters, and a dazed Irish maid fresh
from Castle Garden and a three weeks' voyage in the steerage of an ocean
steamer, she led us up to the top of the house, to one of those vast
old-time garrets that might have been--and in country inns occasionally
were--turned into ballrooms, with the aid of a few lights and sconces.
Here was stored the accumulated garmenture of the household for
generation upon generation; and as far as I could discover, every member
of that family had been born into a profound mourning that had continued
unto his or her latest day, unmitigated save for white shirts and
petticoats. These we bore down by great armfuls to the front portico,
and I remember that the operation took nearly an hour. When at length we
had covered the shaky warped floor of the long porch with the strange
heaps of black and white--linens, cottons, silks, bombazines, alpacas,
ginghams, every conceivable fabric, in fashion or out of fashion, that
could be bleached white or dyed black--the old lady arranged us in
working order, and, acting at once as directress and chief worker, with
incredible quickness and dexterity she rent these varied and multiform
pieces of raiment into broad strips, which she ingeniously twisted, two
or three together, stitching them at the ends to other sets of strips,
until she had formed immensely long rolls of black and white. Mounting a
tall ladder, with the help of the strongest and oldest of her
assistants, she wound the great tall white columns with these strips,
fastening them in huge spirals from top to bottom, black and white
entwined. Then she hung ample festoons between the pillars, and
contrived something painfully ambitious in the way of rosettes for the
cornice and frieze.
[Illustration]