BURROWING IN
My going to live in the tenements came about in a roundabout way. While
existing in the Jane Leonard I let it be known that I was looking for a
small flat in a tenement. The only one offered me was that of a young
artist who had been called to Washington City by the government. It was
in a “model tenement,” had two rooms, a kitchen, electric lights, gas
for cooking, steam-heat, hot and cold water, and the windows of the
comfortably large living-room overlooked East River and Blackwell’s
Island.
“What more can you expect for the money?” Miss Stafford, who had learned
of the place and insisted on taking me to see it, exclaimed pettishly
when told that it was not what I wanted. “Five dollars and twenty cents
a week! It really is remarkable. The furniture is fit for Fifth Avenue,
real antique. They say Mr. Howard spent thousands furnishing it. On
account of the river view, you know.”
She lifted a window and with a flourish of her chubby hand indicated the
sluggishly flowing river. And with another flourish the almshouse on
Blackwell’s Island.
“The house is so well kept,” she assured me, as she turned from the
window. “Such nice people live here. The agent is a lady of the old
school. She told me herself that she never accepted a tenant without a
thorough personal examination. I really can’t see what more you want,
since you have set your heart on living in a tenement.”
The truth of the matter was that I did not want so much. To any one with
even a superficial knowledge of tenement conditions the rent of the flat
told the story. I had already learned enough about the private affairs
of my fellow workers to know that none of them lived in such expensive
quarters. For the sake of getting sufficient room for their family they
were forced to do without conveniences. At the premium station the girls
had looked at me with awe when told that I paid two dollars and a half a
week for one room. They lived in flats of from five to seven rooms, the
rental of which was from ten to fifteen dollars a month. One of them,
describing her home, said:
“We’ve got seven rooms, real large rooms, and only one is dark. It’s a
cold-water flat. What you want a hot-water flat for?—pay for hot water
and never get it. Mother says it’s better to have seven rooms and pay
for gas when you needs hot water than to be packed in five rooms paying
for hot water that you can never get.”
At that time the tenement-dweller who paid above twenty dollars a month
rent either received an exceptionally high wage or had several children
working. My experience had taught me that my neighbors in the model
tenement would be of the lesser professional class and well paid office
workers. I not only did not wish to live among such people, but I was
dead set against having a lady-of-the-old-school agent. I wished to
learn the truth about tenement conditions. However, I realized the
uselessness of trying to explain to Miss Stafford. Though I talked all
day she would not understand.
It was because I felt sure that Hildegarde Hook would understand that I
went to live in the Greenwich Village rooming-house in which she spent
her winters. But my faith in her understanding began a rapid evaporation
the evening after I moved in.
Hildegarde was busy cleaning, with a grubbing-hoe, the basement in which
she afterward conducted her tea-room. She invited me to dine with her.
On learning that this, my first meal, was to be cooked in her basement,
I accepted with the proviso that I pay for all materials.
After my winter with Alice and observing the economies of the
hat-trimmer, Hildegarde’s manner of buying seemed nothing short of
reckless extravagance. At one of the most expensive stalls in Jefferson
Market she bought lettuce, tomatoes, and hothouse cucumbers at a price
that would have fed Alice and me for days. At yet another high-priced
place she selected and I paid for a large loaf of bread, which she
declared to be the only kind she ever ate. Next came salad dressing,
unsalted butter, sugar, fresh cream cheese.
Sure that this would be all, I carefully folded and stored in the bottom
of my bag the remains of my five-dollar bill. I did not know Hildegarde.
Declaring that the grade of foodstuffs carried in the Jefferson Market
was a disgrace to the city, she led me to a meat-shop on a cross street.
Tenderloin steak! My hair almost stood on end. Three pounds! What on
earth was she going to do with it? Then I had a happy thought. Such a
cheerful solution. The next day being Sunday she planned for me to take
all three meals with her. Though I cannot be sure that while paying for
that steak I wore a smiling countenance, I am sure that I was not so
glum as I most certainly would have been had I known what was to become
of it.
Hildegarde ate it—two pounds and three-quarters of underdone steak, at
one sitting. When I said that I only wished a small piece, she gave me
the bone. And she ate that red dripping meat without bread, potatoes, or
vegetable of any sort—two pounds and three-quarters of underdone steak.
It was not an appetizing sight. When she had swallowed the last mouthful
she explained that, being a meat-eater, she only ate other things for
the sake of filling up. When she finished that process the provisions
which I had believed would last us both through Sunday had all
disappeared—the last of the quarter of a pound of sweet butter together
with the last of the pound of granulated sugar on the last slice of
bread.
Our sightseeing began on a narrow street both crooked and short. Keeping
pace with Hildegarde’s eager steps I entered at one end and walking
rapidly halted near the centre of the block.
“Sniff,” panted Hildegarde. “Sniff.”
“Why, it’s a stench,” I replied indignantly, and instead of sniffing I
held my nose. “What on earth is it?”
“Cesspools,” she assured me. “Those houses are awfully old. There is not
a drain in this street. Typhoid in the summer, croup and pneumonia in
the winter—people die like flies. Jack Harland says we may have a few
cases of Asiatic cholera here this fall if the hot weather will only
continue long enough.”
I stared at her—a tall, voluptuously developed woman of twenty-six. Her
eyes were large, blue-gray, and expressive. Her brows were dark and well
defined, her mouth like a buttonhole. Her nose, though not large, curved
over it, and reminded me of the beak of a parrot. Nature, as though
begrudging the generous amount of material used in making one woman, had
not only skimped her chin but taken a snip out of the middle of it.
“Don’t you love it?” she panted, her face shining with enjoyment. “Don’t
you love it?”
“I think it is horrible that people have to live in such holes.”
“W-e-e-ll, if you _will_ look at it from a utilitarian point of view,”
my guide drawled patronizingly. Then she added with gusto: “From the
point of the artist it is colossal. Swarms of ’em come here—for types,
you know. The starving children of Belgium and famine sufferers—colossal
studies!”
“Do you think they actually suffer for food?”
“My dear!” Hildegarde stopped on the corner and catching me by the
shoulder brought me to a sudden stand-still. “I talked to a little girl
who lived in that fifth house. The most desperate-looking child I ever
saw. She told me she never had anything for breakfast before going to
school except the dregs from a can of beer and a left-over potato, or a
crust of bread. Sometimes she didn’t get the beer—that depended on how
drunk her parents were when they fell asleep. Colossal! Think of the
literary atmosphere!”
“You come here for atmosphere?” I inquired, thinking that the effrontery
needed to commercialize the misfortunes of that child was what was
colossal.
“Not often,” she replied, puckering her lips and drawing her brows
together. “To tell the truth these people are too—too prosperous for me,
for my purpose.” Here squinting her eyes she thrust her face nearer
mine. “To let you into a secret—I’m specializing on the underworld,
crooks and their sort. My burglar took me to a joint on the East Side
kept by one of the most famous crooks in New York,—in the whole world.
All his customers are crooks. Colossal!”
Had I been a profane woman I would have called her a damned fool.
“It may not be safe for you—not exactly,” Hildegarde told me, panting
eagerly. “But if you’ve got the pep I’m willing to take you. A policeman
wouldn’t dare go there alone. With me, having been introduced by my
burglar, it’s different. Would you like to go to-night?”
“Not to-night, thank you. I must be getting back.”
“I’ll go with you as far as Bleecker Street. It’s on my way to the East
Side joint to meet my burglar,” she agreed, and we turned toward
Washington Square.
“Have you written many stories about crooks?” I inquired, for, though
she always spoke of herself as an author and of everything she did, even
the tea-room she was planning, as a means of getting material for her
“real work,” she had never mentioned the names of her stories.
“Not yet.” She panted so vigorously and her eyes shone so eagerly that I
was sure of having touched a subject she liked. “You see I specialize on
one type at a time. My last before taking up crooks was newsboys.”
“You wrote a newsboy story?”
“Newsboys who had made a fortune of one hundred thousand dollars and
over. It was colossal. The editor told a friend of mine that it was the
greatest spread that ever appeared in ——”
“Spread?” I interrupted. “I thought you said you wrote short stories.”
“Story-writing as you understand it is a dead art,” she assured me
solemnly. “Pictures! The future of the picture story is colossal.”
That night before I fell asleep for the first time in my new quarters, I
decided that Hildegarde was not one who would understand my
determination to live in the tenements. I never confided in her.
During the months that followed, working day after day in the tenements,
from eight-thirty in the morning to five of an afternoon, I never lost
sight of that determination. Having decided to sublet a small furnished
flat, I was continually on the lookout for it. Before I finally found
such a flat, Miss O’Brien had demanded my room.
“Miss Porter, Miss Porter.” She was standing on the parlor floor as she
shouted up the stairs to me on the top floor. “I want your room, an’ I
want it at onct. An’ I want you should know I’m a lady—I’ll not be
insulted in my own house.”
The insult referred to was a note left on the hat-rack at the front door
that morning on my way to work. In it I objected to having a strange man
sleep in my bed during the day, while I was at work.
In Greenwich Village, when the origin of tobacco-smoke is feminine, it
is invariably accompanied by crums of face-powder and smudges of rouge.
There were no such marks on my bureau. But the odor of tobacco-smoke in
the sheets of the bed! The signs of soot and grease grimed hands on my
towels! I was paying four dollars and a half for my room, small with a
slanting roof and a half-window on the top floor. I had no intention of
sharing it with an unknown man even for the sake of helping my grunting,
groaning landlady.
In more ways than one Miss O’Brien was out of the ordinary. Her name,
her religion, and her brogue to the contrary, she boasted of being
English. As a consequence she was not descended from an Irish king nor
did she have a saint in her family. She was red-hot for suffrage,
because she wanted a law passed to force women working outside the home
to make their own beds and clean their own rooms.
“’Tain’t right for women in business not to do their share of the
housework,” she would tell me, while leaning on a stub of a broom or
wiping my mirror with a dirty rag. “I don’t mind doin’ for men—it’s only
right I should, they bein’ men an’ payin’ me.”
“The women pay you. I pay a half-dollar more than the man who vacated it
without giving you notice. You told me so yourself.”
“I ain’t sayin’ you don’t pay all the room’s worth,” she assured me, and
maybe by this time having smeared my mirror to her satisfaction she
would be propped against the facing of my door. “What I says an’ what I
stands by is that it ain’t right for you and Hildegarde Hook not to do
your rooms regular—you bein’ women an’ not men. No, it ain’t right, Miss
Porter. You hadn’t oughter treat no woman like that.”
When she found that I intended to take her at her word and give her her
room, she became repentant and offered to let me “stay on.”
Unfortunately for her good intentions the atmosphere of Greenwich
Village had become boring. Even a woman’s hotel, the only vacancy to be
found at that season, promised a welcome relief.
My stay in that Adamless purgatory was not very long. Before I had been
there one week an old woman occupying the room to the left of me
objected to my using my typewriter between seven and eight in the
evening. Before the end of my second week an old woman at my right
positively forbade me to touch it mornings before eleven, and before I
had completed my third week an old woman in front of me entered a
violent protest against my using it at all. God defend me from idle
women!
In a fit of I’ll-take-anything-I-can-get I applied to the agent of the
Phipps tenements. She had no vacancy, but on my second call, seeing that
I was near desperation, she suggested that I go talk to a Mrs. Campbell
who lived in another house owned by the same company. Mrs. Campbell was
taking her sick daughter to Staten Island for the summer.
For five dollars a week, one dollar and sixty cents above what she was
paying for her flat unfurnished, she sublet to me for the summer. There
were three small rooms, a minute clothes-closet, a toilet, gas, and both
hot and cold water.
On East Thirty-second Street between First and Second Avenues, this
place was within walking distance of the A. S. P. C. A., and so saved
both car-fare and time. Built around a court each of the forty-eight
flats was so arranged that it opened on both the street and the court.
As a consequence the ventilation was excellent. Four of the flats on
each floor opened on a little balcony, and I was lucky enough to get
one.
When I mentioned that there was no bath, Mrs. Campbell looked pensive.
After a pause her daughter explained.
“There are two baths—one for men and the other for women. They are in
the basement. Sundays people stand in line, taking turns at using them.”
She paused and glanced at her mother, who was still gazing pensively
into space. “We always—” She paused and again glanced at her mother.
“We always make out with the set tubs,” the older woman told me. “It’s
not very handy, stooping under the china-closet, but it’s better than
bathing in a tub used by so many.”
Glancing at the set tubs I realized the advantage of being small. It
seemed an easy matter for these two little women to step on a chair and
then into the tub, but how about big me? Yet I managed it somehow. That
summer the only thing in the way of bathing I did was in that set tub;
crouching under the built-in china cupboard, I splashed the water over
various parts of my anatomy. Once you make up your mind you can do
almost anything.
Unlike the model tenement in which the artist lived, this place was a
slice of tenement life in New York City. Of the two blind sons of the
Irishwoman who had the flat next mine, one went out daily with his
little tin cup, while the other, who was not totally blind, made brooms
in a workshop for the blind. Their unmarried sister was a trained nurse.
The three supported the mother, who, being Irish, like Lot’s wife was
continually looking back and weeping over past glories.
The flat beyond this family was occupied by the matron of one of the
city courts; next came two more women, a Swede and Hollander. The first
was a forewoman in a shirt-waist factory, the other before becoming a
helpless cripple from rheumatism had been a dressmaker.
Across the court on the same floor was an Italian tailor with nine
children, an undertaker’s assistant, a clerk in a Second Avenue grocery,
and the driver of a milk-wagon. Occupying other flats in the house were
a stevedore, a Greek peddler, an Italian who helped in a coal-and-ice
cellar, a Hungarian street-sweeper, a man who drove a dump-cart, a
baker, a butcher, several factory workers, a cook, an incapacitated
nurse, two Russians whose business nobody knew, and myself, who because
of my khaki frock was called by the children the “army nurse.”
Of June evenings, when I first moved in I used to sit on my doorstep,
with my feet on the little balcony overlooking the court, and try to
untangle the conversations being carried on around me in eleven foreign
languages. As the days wore on, the July sun beat down on the tenements.
When there was a breeze it was to be avoided, not enjoyed. Though hot
and prickly in its feel, worse, many times worse, were the odors with
which it was laden—the odors of decaying garbage and the filth of
unwashed streets.
Those torrid summer nights! Instead of trying to untangle foreign
tongues, I used to try to stop my ears against the wails of sick
children, the weak frettings of a baby too far gone to make louder
protests. When at last, worn out by hard work and lack of sleep, I would
doze off, it was only to be wakened by the shriek of the baby’s
mother—never again in this world would her baby disturb her neighbors.
Or when by chance I managed to sleep through the first part of the
night, the “French girl” would have a brainstorm and arouse the whole
house. The nightmare scene that followed! Men, women, and children would
rush out on their little balconies in their night-clothes. The more
amiable would remonstrate with her, reminding her of the sick and
sleeping children. A few, the two Russians and an Irishman, would curse
the girl and threaten to call the police.
Though this girl was born in the United States, the daughter of native
Germans, she persisted in calling herself French. Her mother was a cook
in a private family and the girl herself had been trained as a lady’s
maid. Getting “notions” in her head, so the mother explained, she had
proclaimed her intention of devoting herself to moving pictures.
Her brain-storms were caused by her parents suggesting that she return
to her old job and earn her own living. The loud curses and abuse she
hurled at them! When the pleadings and threats of their neighbors failed
to stop this row, the musicians of the tenement would fetch out their
instruments and practise usually for the rest of the night.
Hideous as this may sound, the blast of the cornet, the pipings of a
flute and two piccolos, and the groans of a bass violin were no worse
than the curses of the men and the wailings of the women and children.
When the musicians kept at it long enough the “French girl” was shamed
into silence or indistinct grumbling.
Then there were nights when there would be no sleep—only subdued
cursing, complaints, and stench—the stench of unmoved garbage, of the
unwashed streets, of the laundry opposite, and several other
unclassified stenches. I used to get up in the mornings feeling worse
than a wet rag—like a wet dish-rag saturated with stench.
All day long I trudged the streets, such filthy streets, with
overflowing garbage-cans that had not been emptied for days and days.
How I longed to possess the power which the people because of my khaki
attributed to me!
“Lady, my baby is so sick. The landlord’s done cut off the water, and I
has to go up and down six flight of stairs to get every drop of water we
use. Won’t you please speak to the landlord, lady? My baby is so sick.”
This was a little Italian woman on lower First Avenue, the mother of six
small children.
When I reminded her that I was not a city employee, that I had no
authority, she came back at me with the statement that I was educated,
the landlord would listen to me. By actual count I found forty-nine
children living on that top floor of that six-story flat-house. Not one
of them looked to be above eight years old. Several of them were sick,
and the mother of one family ill in bed.
Because the law forbade the owner of the house to raise the rent any
higher on these, his regular tenants, he had hit on the happy idea of
cutting off the water. He was out when I got his office on the wire. I
left word with the woman’s voice claiming to be his secretary that if
the water was still cut off at four o’clock I would report the house to
the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
This society may have been as helpless in the matter as the one I
represented, but I didn’t know of any other threat to make. It had the
desired effect.
Hardly a day passed without at least one such appeal being made to me.
It almost seemed that people had the idea that heartless landlords, dead
horses, and deader cats were my specialty.
One woman trailed me three successive mornings in a house-to-house
search from East Seventy-first Street to East Seventy-ninth and Exterior
Streets. The first day she found me I was sitting on the river-wall in
the shade of a derrick, eating my lunch—two Georgia peaches.
“It’s just a chance I seen you,” she called, as she crossed from the
corner. “I told my daughter if I found you I know’d you’d do it, and I
set out to find you.” Halting in front of me she wiped the streaming
perspiration from her purple and crimson blotched face.
“Sit down and tell me about it,” I invited, making room for her in the
scanty shade of the derrick. Though I had no recollection of her face, I
knew she belonged in some one of the hundreds of homes that I had
visited during the past few days.
“My grandbaby’s got the browncreeters,” she told me, as taking her seat
at my side, she began to fan her face with her apron.
“Bronchitis is pretty serious for a young baby,” I admitted; not knowing
in what other way I could be of use to her I asked: “Do you want me to
have it taken to Bellevue?”
She shook her head. “It’s the dead horse, corner of Avenue A. You seen
it the day you was at my daughter’s about her dog, a French poodle.”
If she had not mentioned the dead horse I certainly would not have
remembered her daughter’s dog. All white woolly dogs in the tenements,
and about twenty-five per cent are white and woolly, are dignified by
the name of French poodle. I did remember the dead horse.
“I promised your daughter to telephone the Health Department about that
horse, and I did so,” I replied, a bit nettled by her having chased me
down after I had explained to her daughter and numerous others in the
vicinity of that dead horse that I was not a city employee, had no
authority to get dead animals moved.
“She knows you did. She watched and seen you go in the drug-store on the
corner. Last night when her baby was took so bad her husband went after
medicine, and the drug-store man told ’im you’d called up about the
horse.” In her eagerness to conciliate she stopped fanning and placed
her hot hand on my arm. “They never done nothin’. This sun makes it
worse—all swelled up and we’s afraid it’ll bust.”
What could I say? I had done my best and nothing had come of it. Living
in the tenements I knew how hideous night could be made by a stench.
This dead horse was worse than anything that I had had to endure.
“I thought if I paid for the telephone you wouldn’t mind speakin’
again.” Gouging down in her stocking she brought up a rusty leather
pocketbook. “My grandbaby’s awful sick!”
There was no use trying to reason with her, trying to explain. Besides,
it was a very small favor to ask for a sick baby.
She followed me to the nearest drug-store, stood at the door of the
telephone-booth, and listened while I begged for the removal of the dead
horse—called attention to the number of children in the vicinity, and
made special mention of her sick grandbaby.
The next day but one I saw her coming toward me across the hot sun-baked
playground of John Jay Park. There were deep circles under her eyes, and
in spite of the heat her heavy cheeks were only slightly colored.
“I hunted for you yesterday, everywhere, but I missed you,” she
reproached, as I met her in the middle of the scorching-hot playground.
“That dead horse— It’s terrible and the dogs——”
“Come on,” I interrupted, leading the way to the drug-store. “Now that
the dogs are after it I can get it moved. That’s what the society is
for—protecting dogs.”
Back in the same telephone-booth I called up the same city department,
was answered by the same operator, who gave me the same official. After
telling him that I was an inspector for the A. S. P. C. A., I told him
of the dead horse, the number of days it had been on the street, and
that the dogs were after it.
“You must give us time,” he drawled. “New York is a good big city, you
know, and——”
“Yes, and you get a good big salary,” I clipped in, imitating his drawl,
and making my voice as insolent as possible. “I don’t care a whoop about
your time. It’s my business to protect the health of the dogs in this
district. I report at Society headquarters every afternoon at five. On
my way I shall make a point of passing that corner. If I see any dogs
around that dead horse I shall report it to our manager, Mr. Horton.
He’ll know what to do.” I hung up the receiver with a snap.
As I stepped out of the booth the boy at the soda-fountain spoke to me.
“Telephoning about that dead horse, lady?” He shook his head as he
filled a glass with fizz. “Wastin’ good money. Must’ve been a hundred
people in here in the last three days telephonin’ about that horse.”
“My grandbaby’s so sick,” the woman at my side wailed. “Seems like——”
“Much they care about sick babies!” the stouter of two young women for
whom the boy was mixing drinks sneered, and she eyed me insolently.
“They’re too busy sweeping Park and Fifth Avenues—afraid the dust’ll
speck the white marble palaces of the millionaires.”
She was good-looking, well dressed, and judging by her features and
coloring a daughter of foreign parents, though she spoke without accent.
Her manner was so pointedly offensive, so evidently aimed at me, that
the woman at my side resented it.
“’Tain’t the lady’s fault,” she reproved the girl. “She’s done all she
could to get the dead horse took away.”
“Sure she’s done all she _could_,” the girl retorted, taking her eyes
off me long enough to wink at her thin companion. “But I’ve noticed that
social workers never do anything that the rich don’t want done. Oh, I’m
not blaming you,” she added, addressing me directly in the same sneering
tone. “If I made my living distributing crumbs from millionaires’ tables
I’d do just as you do—perhaps.”
“Perhaps you might,” I consented cheerfully, glad to get a candid
opinion of social workers from the class among whom they work. “But, as
it happens, you’ve missed your guess. I’m an inspector for the A. S. P.
C. A. That dead horse is a menace to the dogs in my district.”
“Menace to dogs!” the thin girl giggled, and she broke the straw through
which she was drinking. “Thinks they’ll do more for dogs than children!”
“She thinks dead right. The animal society’s got a lot of rich swells
behind it,” the soda boy asserted.
“That oughtn’t to surprise you,” the stout girl remarked, turning on her
thin friend. “You heard that lady from Park Avenue”—how she sneered the
word _lady_—“call that bow-legged little boy a monster because she
thought he was mistreating a yellow pup.”
With her soda-water still untasted she turned back to me. “Little
bow-legs said he was seven, but he didn’t look to be more than five.
He’d been playing in the park with his younger brother and sister, and
was taking them home. One of the younger ones was leading the pup, had a
string in its collar. They’d got as far as Park Avenue when madame
pounced on them. The names she called those three kids!”
“The pup was a poor, dear helpless doggie,” the thin girl giggled.
“She said the pup was half-starved,” the stout girl went on. “I believe
she was right about that. The children didn’t look as if either of them
had ever had a square meal.”
“That’s the way they all are—those rich women,” asserted a man in
overalls, who was standing at the prescription-counter. “They think more
of animals than of their own kind. What did youse say to the jane?”
“Who, us?” the thin girl giggled between draws on her straw. “We kept
out of her sight. We work in a specialty shop on Fifth Avenue, and she
was one of our regular customers.”
“’Fraid of you job,” the man in overalls commented. “Knockin’ the bread
out your own mouth wouldn’t help the kids none.”
“It would help the kids if we’d make the city government clean the
tenement streets instead of wasting time dusting in front of vacant
houses. They don’t get much more than dust, and those houses are vacant
ten months in the year,” the stout girl asserted, as staring at me she
waited for me to reply.
“If we lived up to our national professions,” I said, putting into words
the thought that had been in my mind since the first day I began to work
in the tenements, “the street-cleaners would begin in the tenements,
where the greatest number would be benefited. In a democracy where the
majority is supposed to rule, human life should be considered before
property—babies should be more valuable than empty houses.”
“I see ’em starting to clean the streets in the tenements!” the thin
girl jeered.
“If they don’t you’ll see tenement people living in those palaces, and
the people from the palaces living in the tenements,” the stout girl
retorted passionately. “They done it in Russia and we’ll do it here.
Within ten years; I’m giving it to you straight.”
“Youse said it,” the man in overalls agreed emphatically.
I glanced into the faces of the six persons about me. The prescription
clerk’s features wore the mask of those whose mental attitude is
I-hold-my-tongue-and-let-you-do-the-talking. The eyes of the pale boy at
the soda-fountain were like smouldering fires ready to flame with any
powerful emotion. The square jaw of the man in overalls reminded me of a
bull-dog. Of the three women the stout girl alone possessed the faculty
for logical reasoning, yet the other two, once their emotions were
aroused, would outstrip her, run ahead of her, leading a mob to burn,
kill, destroy.
“They’ve done it in Russia; we’ll do it here.” It was entirely evident
that the five agreed with her assertion.
Ten years between our present condition and revolution! Her one
alternative?—that the government stop sacrificing the masses in the
interest of the classes. The reign of terror in France, the red horror
in Russia—what would it be in the United States when our turn came?
On my way to the offices of the A. S. P. C. A. that afternoon I saw that
the dead horse had been removed and the asphalt carefully washed clean.
“The animal society’s got rich swells behind it. Our children ain’t got
nobody.” The words of the slumbrous-eyed boy at the soda-counter rang in
my ears.
At that time influenza hung like a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand
over New York City, from which it would spread over the whole Union.