silent and would say no more.
I went out, curious as to what sort of a business this was, anyhow, and
leaving him to himself.
But one morning, months later, turning a corner near there, a region
of empty lots and some old sealed and untenanted storehouses, I
found a crowd of boys following and stoning an old man who, on my
coming near and then running to his rescue, I found to be this old
dealer. He was attempting to hide behind a signboard which adjoined
one of the storehouses. His face and hands were already cut by
stones and bleeding. He was breathless and very much exhausted and
frightened, but still angry and savage. “They stoned me, the little
devils--eck--eck--eck. They hit me with rocks--eck--eck--eck. I’ll
have the law on ’em, I will--eck--eck--eck. I’ll get the police after
’em--eck--eck--eck. They’re always trying to break into my place and I
won’t let ’em--eck--eck--eck.”
I wondered who could break into that place with those dogs loose, who
would attempt it.
But that, as I found out later in conversation with boys of the
vicinity, was just the trouble. At various times they had sought to
enter to recover a tossed ball, possibly to steal something, and he had
set the dogs (which were always unchained in his absence) on them; or,
they had been attacked by the dogs and in turn had attempted to work
him and them some injury.
Yet for a period of three years after this, to my knowledge, he
continued to live there in that solitary place, harassed no doubt in
this way. If he ever did any business I did not see it. The gates were
nearly always closed, himself rarely to be seen.
Then one day a really terrible thing happened. Some children--not these
same wicked boys but others less familiar with the neighborhood, I
believe--were playing ball in an open space adjoining, and a fly being
struck, the ball fell into the junk-yard. Three of the more courageous
ones, as the papers stated afterwards, mounted the fence to see if they
could get the ball, and one of them, more courageous than the others,
actually leaped into the yard and was literally torn to bits by these
same dogs, all but eaten alive. And there was no one to save him before
he was dead. Old Clampitt was not there.
The horror was of course immediately reported to the police, who
came and killed the dogs and then arrested Clampitt. A newspaper
and police investigation of his life revealed nothing save that he
was assumed to be an old junk-dealer who was eccentric, a solitary,
without relatives or friends. He claimed to have kept the dogs for
protection, also that he had been set upon by youths of the vicinity
and stoned, which was true. Even so, he was held for weeks in jail
pending this investigation of his connections. No past crimes being
found, apparently he was released. But so terrified was he then by the
furore his savage dogs had aroused that he disappeared from this region
and was heard of no more. His old rag yard was abandoned. But I often
wondered about him afterwards, the years he spent there alone.
* * * * *
And then _Old Ragpicker_, whom I have described in _Plays of the
Natural and the Supernatural_, and who was as described.
And Hurstwood.
* * * * *
As interesting a type as I ever knew was an old hunchback who, as I
understood, had had a small music business in the Bowery, years and
years ago when that street was still a vaudeville center, a sort
of theatrical Broadway. Through experience he had come by a little
knowledge of popular songs and songbooks and had engaged in the
manufacture and sale of these things. But times changed and public
taste varied and he was not able to keep up with it all. From little
business to no business was an easy step, and then he failed and took
lodgings in one of the side streets off the Bowery, below Fourth
Street, eking out a precarious existence, heaven only knows how.
Age had hounded him even more than ill success. His naturally dark
skin darkened still further and his black eyes retreated into gloomy
sockets. I used to see him at odd times, at a period when I lived in
a vicinity near the Bowery, wending a lonely way through the crowded
streets there, but never until he accosted me one night in the dark
did I realize that he had become a beggar. A mumbled apology about
hunger, a deprecating, shamefaced cough, and he was off again, the
richer for a dime. In this case, time, to say nothing of life, had
worked one of those disturbing grotesqueries which arrest one. He
was so very somber, furtive, misshapen and lean, a veritable masque
of a man whose very glance indicated inconsolable disappointment and
whose presence, to many, would most certainly have come as an omen of
failure. A hall-bedroom, a lodging-house cot, an occasional meal, some
hidden corner in which to be at peace, in which to brood, and then a
few years later he was found dead, alone, seated before a small table,
his head leaning upon his arms in the shabby little room in which he
dwelt. I know this to be true, for from time to time I made effort to
hear of him. What, think you, would he have to say to his Creator if he
might?
* * * * *
And yet another character. One day I was walking in Brooklyn in a very
conservative neighborhood, when I saw what I fancied I never should
see, in America, a woman furtively picking a piece of bread out of a
garbage can. I had read of such things in Balzac, Hugo, Dickens--but
where else? And she was not absolutely wretchedly dressed, though her
appearance was far from satisfactory, and she had a tense expression
about her face which betokened stress of some kind. My astonishment
was such that I walked deliberately up to her and asked: “What is the
matter with you--are you hungry?”
She had hidden the bread under her shawl as I approached and may have
dropped it as we walked, for I did not see it again though her hands
appeared. Yet she refused to indulge in any conversation which would
explain.
“I’m all right,” she replied.
“But I saw you taking a piece of bread out of that can?”
“No.”
“Don’t you want any money?”
“No.”
She appeared to be confused and walked away from me, edging toward the
lines of fences to avoid contact. I put my hand in my pocket to offer
a coin, but she hurried on. There was nothing to do but let her go her
way--a thing which seemed intensely cruel, though there was apparently
nothing else to do. I have often thought of this one, dark, tense,
dreary, and half wondered whether it was all a dream or whether I
really saw it.
* * * * *
But the city for me, in my time, has been flecked with these shadows of
disaster in the guise of decayed mortals who stared at me out of hollow
eyes in the midst of the utmost gayety. You turn a corner laughing amid
scenes of enthusiasm and activity, perhaps, and here comes despair
along, hooded and hollow-eyed, accusing you of undue levity. You dine
at your table, serene in your moderate prosperity, and in looks want,
thin-lipped, and pale, asking how can you eat when she is as she is.
You feel the health and vigor of your body, warmly clad, and lo, here
comes illness or weakness, thin and pining, and with cough or sigh
or halting step, cries: “See how I suffer--and you--you have health!”
Weakness confronts strength, poverty wealth, health sickness, courage
cowardice, fortune the very depths of misfortune, and they know each
other not--or defy each other. Of a truth, they either despise or fear,
the one the other.
THE BEAUTY OF LIFE
The beauty of life is involved very largely with the outline of its
scenery. There are many other things which make up the joy of our world
for us, but this is one of the most salient of its charms. The stretch
of a level valley, the graceful rise of a hill, water running, a clump
or a forest of trees--these add to the majesty of our being and show us
how great a thing our world really is.
The significance of scenes in general which hold and bind our lives
for us, making them sweet or grim according to the sharpness of our
perceptions, is a wonderful thing. We are passing among them every
moment. A new arrangement is had with every move we make. If we but
lift our eyes we see a variation which is forever interesting and
forever new.
The fact significant is that every scene possesses that vital
instability which is the charm of existence. It is forever changing.
The waters are running, the winds blowing, the light waxing and waning,
and in the very ground such currents are at work as produce and modify
all the visible life and color that we know. Great forces are at work,
strong ones, and our own little lives are but a shadow of something
that wills activity and enjoys it, that wills beauty and is beauty. The
scenes that we see are purely representative of that.
[Illustration: The Beauty of Life]
But how, in the picturing of itself to itself, is the spirit of
the universe revealed to us? Here are forces which at bottom might be
supposed to be anything--grim, deadly, terrible--but on the surface
how fair is their face. The trees are beautiful--you would not
suppose there was anything deadly at work to create them. The water
is mellifluent, sweet--you could hardly assume that it was grim in
purpose or design. Every aspect of the scene reveals something pleasing
which could scarcely have been the result of a cruel tendency, and yet
we know that cruelty exists, or if not cruelty at least a tendency
to contention--one thing striving with another and wearing it away,
feeding upon it, destroying it which is productive of pain. And this
element of contention represents all the cruelty there is. And this is
not what is generally revealed in any scene.
Before such a picture of combined beauty and contentiousness--however
graceful--life living upon life, in order to produce at least a part of
this beauty--the mind pauses, wondering. It is so useless to quarrel
with an order which is compulsory and produces all that we know of
either joy or pain. This scene, as we look at it, is one of the joys,
one of the compensations, of our existence which we must take whether
we will or no, and which satisfies us whether or not we are aware
of the contentiousness beneath. Even the contentiousness cannot be
wholly sneered at or regretted, for at worst it produces the change
which produces the other scenes and variations of which our world is
full, and at worst it gives our life the edge of drama and tragedy,
to say nothing of those phases of our moods which make our world seem
beautiful.
Pity the mind for whom the immediate scene, involved as it is with
change and decay and contentiousness, has no direct appeal, for whom
the clouds hanging in the heavens, the wind stirring in the trees, the
genial face of the earth, spread before the eye, has no meaning. Here
are the birds daily circling in the air; here are the waters running
in a thousand varied forms; here are the houses, the churches, the
factories, and all their curious array of lines, angles, circles,
cones, or towers, shafts and pinnacles which form ever new and pleasing
combinations to which the mind, confused by other phases of life,
can still turn for both solace and delight. For one not so mentally
equipped a world of imagery is closed, with all that that implies:
poetry, art, literature--one might almost say religion, for upon so
much that is beautiful in nature does religion depend. To be dull to
the finer beauties of line and curve that are forever beating upon
the heart and mind--in earth, in air, in water, in sky or space--how
deadly! The dark places of the world are full of that. Its slums and
depths reek with the misery that knows no response to the physical
beauty of nature, the wonder of its forms. To perceive these, to see
the physical face of life as beautiful, to respond in feeling to the
magnificent panoramas from which the eye cannot escape, is to be at
once strong and wise mentally and physically, to have in the very blood
and brain the beauty, glory and power of all that ever was or will be
here on this earth.
A WAYPLACE OF THE FALLEN
In the center of what was once a fashionable section of New York, but
is now a badly deteriorated tenement region, stands a hotel which to
me is one of the curiosities of New York. It is really not a hotel at
all, in one sense, and yet in another it is, a hybrid or cross between
a hotel and a charity, one of those odd philanthropies of the early
years following nineteen hundred, which were supposed to bridge with
some form of relief the immense gap that existed between the rich and
the poor; a gap that was not supposed to exist in a republic devoted to
human brotherhood and the equality of man.
Let that be as it will. Exteriorly at least it is really a handsome
affair, nine stories in height, with walls of cream-colored brick and
gray stone trimmings, and a large, overhanging roof of dark-red curved
tiles which suggests Florence and the South. Set apart in an open
space it would be admirable. It is not, however, as its appearance
would indicate, a hotel of any distinction of clientele, for it was
built for an entirely different purpose. And, despite the aim and the
dreams of those who sought to reach those who might be only temporarily
embarrassed, rather than whose who were permanently so, and who might
use this as a wayplace on their progress upward rather than on their
way downward, still it is more the latter who frequent it most. It is
really a rendezvous for those who are “down and out.”
About the time that it was built, or a little after, I myself was
in a bad way. It was not exactly that I was financially helpless or
that I could not have come by relief in one and another form, if my
pride would have let me, as that my pride and a certain psyche which,
like a fever or a passion, must take its course, would not permit
me to do successfully any of the things that normally I could and
would have done. I was nervous, really very sick mentally, and very
depressed. Life to me wore a somber and at most times a forbidding air,
as though, indeed, there were furies between me and the way I would
go. Yet, return I would not. And courage not lacking, a certain grim
stubbornness that would not permit me to retreat nor yet to ask for
help, at last for a brief period I took refuge here, as might one beset
by a raging gale at sea take refuge in some seemingly quiet harbor, any
port indeed, in order to forfend against utter annihilation.
[Illustration: A Wayplace of the Fallen]
And a strange, sad harbor I found it to be indeed, a nondescript and
fantastic affair, sheltering a nondescript and quite fantastic throng.
The thin-bodied and gray-bearded old men loitering out their last
days here, and yet with a certain something about them that suggested
courage or defiance, or at least a vague and errant will to live. The
lean and down-at-heels and erratic-looking young men, with queer,
restless, nervous eyes, and queer, restless, deceptive and nervous
manners. And the chronic ne’er-do-wells, and bums even, pan-handlers,
street fiddle and horn players, street singers, street cripples and
beggars of one kind and another. Some of them I had even encountered
in the streets in my more prosperous hours and had given them
dimes, and here I encountered them again. They were all so poor, if
not physically or materially at least spiritually, or so nearly all,
as to make contact with them disconcerting, if not offensive. For they
walked, the most of them, with an air of rundown, hopeless inadequacy
that was really disturbing to look upon. All of them were garbed in
clothing which was not good and yet which at all times could not be
said to be absolutely ragged. Rather, in many cases it was more of
an intermediate character, such as you might expect to find on a
person who was out of a job but who was still struggling to keep up
appearances.
You would find, for instance, those whose suits were in a fair state
of preservation but whose shoes were worn or torn. Again, there were
those whose hats and shoes were good but whose trousers were worn and
frayed. Still others would show a good pair of trousers or a moderately
satisfactory coat, but such a gleam of wretched linen or so poor and
faded a tie, that one was compelled to notice it. And the mere sight
of it, as they themselves seemed to realize by their furtive efforts
at concealment, was sufficient to convict them of want or worse.
Between these grades and conditions there were so many other little
gradations, such as the inadvertently revealed edge of a cotton shirt
under a somewhat superior suit, the exposed end of a rag being used for
a handkerchief, the shifting edge of a false shirt front, etc., so that
by degrees one was moved to either sympathy or laughter, or both.
And the nature of the life here. It was such as to preclude any
reasonable classification from the point of view, say, of happiness or
comfort. For all its exterior pretentiousness and inner spaciousness,
it offered nothing really except two immense lounging-rooms or courts
about which the various tiers or floors of rooms were built and which
rose, uninterrupted, to the immense glass roofs or coverings nine
stories above. There were several other large rooms--a reading-room,
a smoking-room--equipped with chairs and tables, but which could only
be occupied between 9 a.m. and 10 p.m., and which were watched over by
as surly and disagreeable a type of orderly or guard as one would find
anywhere--such orderlies or guards, for instance, as a prison or an
institution of charity might employ. In fact, I never encountered an
institution in which a charge was made for service which seemed to me
more barren of courtesy, consideration or welcome.
We were all, as I soon found, here on sufferance. During a long day
that began between 9 a.m., at which hour the room you occupied had to
be vacated for the day, and 5 p.m., when it might be reoccupied once
more, and not before, there was nothing to do but walk the streets if
one was out of work, as most of these were, or sit in one or another
of these same rooms filled with these same nondescripts, who looked
and emanated the depression they felt and who were too taciturn or
too evasive or shy or despondent to wish to talk to anybody. And in
addition, neither these nor yourself were really welcome here. For, if
you remained within these lobbies during the hours of nine and five
daylight, these underlings surveyed you, if at all, with looks of
indifference or contempt, as who should say, “Haven’t you anything at
all to do?” and most of those with whom you were in contact could not
help but feel this. It was too obvious to be mistaken.
But to return to the type of person who came here to lodge. Where
did they all come from? one was compelled to ask oneself. How did it
happen that they were so varied as to age, vigor or the lack of it
and the like? For not all were old or sick or poorly dressed. Some
quite the contrary. And yet how did some of them manage to subsist,
even with the aid of such a place as this? What was before them? These
thoughts, somehow, would intrude themselves whether one would or no.
For some of them were so utterly hopeless looking. And others (I told
myself) were the natural idlers of the world, or what was left of them,
men too feeble, too vagrom in thought, or too indifferent to make an
earnest effort in any direction. At least there was the possibility
of many such being here. Again, there were those of better mood and
substance, like myself, say, who were here because of stress, and who
were temporarily driven to this form of economy, wretched as it was.
Others were obviously criminals or drug fiends, or those suffering from
some incurable or wasting disease, who probably had little money and no
strength, or very little, and who were seeking to hide themselves away
here, to rest and content themselves as obscurely and as cheaply as
possible. (The maximum charges for a room and a free bath in the public
bathroom, the same including towels and soap, ranged from twenty-five
to forty cents a day. A meal in the hotel dining-room, such as it was,
was fifteen cents. I ate several there.) Pick-pockets and thugs from
other cities drifted in here, and it was not difficult to pick out an
occasional detective studying those who chose to stay here. For the
rest, they were of the flotsam and jetsam of all metropolitan life--the
old, the young, the middle-aged, the former and the latter having in
the main passed the period of success without achieving anything,
the others waiting and drifting, perhaps until they should come upon
something better. Some of them looked to me to be men who had put up a
good fight, but in vain. Life had worsted them. Others looked as though
they had not put up any fight at all.
And, again, the nature of the rooms here offered (one of which I was
compelled to accept), the air or illusion of cells in an institution or
prison that characterized them! They were really not rooms at all, as
I found, but cells partitioned or arranged in such a way as to provide
the largest amount of renting space and personal supervision and
espionage to the founder and manager but only a bare bed to the guest.
As I have said, they were all arranged either about an inner court or
the exterior walls, so as to have the advantage of interior or exterior
lighting, quite as all hotels and prisons are arranged. But the size of
them and the amazingly small windows through which one looked, either
into one or other of these courts or onto the streets outside! They
were not more than five feet in width by eight in length, and contained
each a small iron bed, a single chair, and a very small closet or
wardrobe where some clothing might be installed, but so little that it
could hardly be called a convenience.
And, again, the walls were really not walls at all, but marble
partitions set upon iron legs or jacks two feet from the floor and
reaching to within three feet of the ceiling, which permitted the
observation of one’s neighbor’s legs from below, if you wished to
observe those conveniences, or of studying his entire chamber if you
chose to climb upon your bed and look over the top. These open spaces
were of course protected by iron screens, which prevented any one
entering save through the door.
It is obvious that any such arrangement would preclude any sense of
privacy. When you were in your cell there came to you from all parts of
the building the sounds of a general activity--the shuffling of feet,
the clearing of throats, the rattling of dominoes in the reading-room
below, voices in complaint or conversation, walkings to and fro, the
slamming of doors here, there and everywhere, and what not. Coupled
with this was the fact that the atmosphere of the whole building was
permeated with tobacco smoke, and tainted or permeated with breaths
in all degrees of strength from that of the drunkard to that of the
drug fiend or consumptive. It was as though one were living in a weird
dream. You were presumed to be alone, and yet you were not, and yet
you were, only there was no sense of privacy, only a sense of being
separated and then neglected and irritated.
And the way these noises and this atmosphere continued into the small
hours of the morning was maddening. There is something, to begin with,
about poverty and squalor that is as depressing and destructive as
a gas or a chemic ferment. Poverty has color and odor and radiation
as strong as any gas or ferment. It speaks. It mourns, and these
radiations are destructive. Hence the instinctive impulse to flee not
only disease but poverty.