WE PROSPECT
We were lucky in getting into a new tenement and lucky in securing the
top floor. This gave us easy access to the flat roof five stories
above the street. From here we not only had a magnificent view of the
harbor, but even on the hottest days felt something of a sea breeze.
Coming down here in June we appreciated that before the summer was
over.
The street was located half a dozen blocks from the waterfront and was
inhabited almost wholly by Italians, save for a Frenchman on the
corner who ran a bake-shop. The street itself was narrow and dirty
enough, but it opened into a public square which was decidedly
picturesque. This was surrounded by tiny shops and foreign banks, and
was always alive with color and incident. The vegetables displayed on
the sidewalk stands, the gay hues of the women's gowns, the gaudy
kerchiefs of the men, gave it a kaleidoscopic effect that made it as
fascinating to us as a trip abroad. The section was known as Little
Italy, and so far as we were concerned was as interesting as Italy
itself.
There were four other families in the house, but the only things we
used in common were the narrow iron stairway leading upstairs and the
roof. The other tenants, however, seldom used the latter at all except
to hang out their occasional washings. For the first month or so we
saw little of these people. We were far too busy to make overtures,
and as for them they let us severely alone. They were not noisy, and
except for a sick baby on the first floor we heard little of them
above the clamor of the street below. We had four rooms. The front
room we gave to the boy, the next room we ourselves occupied, the
third room we used for a sitting-and dining-room, while the fourth was
a small kitchen with running water. As compared with our house the
quarters at first seemed cramped, but we had cut down our furniture to
what was absolutely essential, and as soon as our eyes ceased making
the comparison we were surprised to find how comfortable we were. In
the dining-room, for instance, we had nothing but three chairs, a
folding table and a closet for the dishes. Lounging chairs and so
forth we did away with altogether. Nor was there any need of making
provision for possible guests. Here throughout the whole house was the
greatest saving. I took a fierce pleasure at first in thus caring for
my own alone.
The boy's room contained a cot, a chair, a rug and a few of his
personal treasures; our own room contained just the bed, chair and
washstand. Ruth added a few touches with pictures and odds and ends
that took off the bare aspect without cluttering up. In two weeks
these scant quarters were every whit as much home as our tidy little
house had been. That was Ruth's part in it. She'd make a home out of a
prison.
On the second day we were fairly settled, and that night after the boy
had gone to bed Ruth sat down at my side with a pad and pencil in her
hand.
"Billy," she said, "there's one thing we're going to do in this new
beginning: we're going to save--if it's only ten cents a week."
I shook my head doubtfully.
"I'm afraid you can't until I get a raise," I said.
"We tried waiting for raises before," she answered.
"I know, but--"
"There aren't going to be any buts," she answered decidedly.
"But six dollars a week--"
"Is six dollars a week," she broke in. "We must live on five-fifty,
that's all."
"With steak thirty cents a pound?"
"We won't have steak. That's the point. Our neighbors around here
don't look starved, and they have larger families than ours. And they
don't even buy intelligently."
"How do you know that?"
"I've been watching them at the little stores in the square. They pay
there as much for half-decayed stuff as they'd have to pay for fresh
odds and ends at the big market."
She rested her pad upon her knee.
"Now in the first place, Billy, we're going to live much more simply."
"We've never been extravagant," I said.
"Not in a way," she answered slowly, "but in another way we have. I've
been doing a lot of thinking in the last few days and I see now where
we've had a great many unnecessary things."
"Not for the last few weeks, anyhow," I said.
"Those don't count. But before that I mean. For instance there's
coffee. It's a luxury. Why we spent almost thirty cents a week on that
alone."
"I know but--"
"There's another but. There's no nourishment in coffee and we can't
afford it. We'll spend that money for milk. We must have good milk and
you must get it for me somewhere up town. I don't like the looks of
the milk around here. That will be eight cents a day."
"Better have two quarts," I suggested.
She thought a moment.
"Yes," she agreed, "two quarts, because that's going to be the basis
of our food. That's a dollar twelve cents a week."
She made up a little face at this. I smiled grandly.
"Now for breakfast we must have oatmeal every morning. And we'll get
it in bulk. I've priced it and it's only a little over three cents a
pound at some of the stores."
"And the kind we've always had?"
"About twelve when it's done up in packages. That's about the
proportion by which I expect to cut down everything. But you'll have
to eat milk on it instead of cream. Then we'll use a lot of potatoes.
They are very good baked for breakfast. And with them you may have
salt fish--oh, there are a dozen nice ways of fixing that. And you may
have griddle cakes and--you wait and see the things I'll give you for
breakfast. You'll have to have a good luncheon of course, but we'll
have our principal meal when you get back from work at night. But you
won't get steak. When we do get meat we'll buy soup bones and meat we
can boil. And instead of pies and cakes we'll have nourishing puddings
of cornstarch and rice. There's another good point--rice. It's cheap
and we'll have a lot of it. Look at how the Japanese live on it day
after day and keep fat and strong. Then there's cheap fish; rock cod
and such to make good chowders of or to fry in pork fat like the bass
and trout I used to have back home. Then there's baked beans. We ought
to have them at least twice a week in the winter. But this summer
we'll live mostly on fish and vegetables. I can get them fresh at the
market."
"It sounds good," I said.
"Just you wait," she cried excitedly. "I'll fatten up both you and the
boy."
"And yourself, little woman," I reminded her. "I'm not going to take
the saving out of you."
"Don't you worry about me," she answered. "This will be easier than
the other life. I shan't have to worry about clothes or dinners or
parties for the boy. And it isn't going to take any time at all to
keep these four rooms clean and sweet."
I took the rest of the week as a sort of vacation and used it to get
acquainted with my new surroundings. It's a fact that this section of
the city which for twenty years had been within a short walk of my
office was as foreign to me as Europe. I had never before been down
here and all I knew about it was through the occasional head-lines in
the papers in connection with stabbing affrays. For the first day or
two I felt as though I ought to carry a revolver. Whenever I was
forced to leave Ruth alone in the house I instructed her upon no
circumstances to open the door. The boy and I arranged a secret
rap--an idea that pleased him mightily--and until she heard the single
knock followed by two quick sharp ones, she was not to answer. But in
wandering around among these people it was difficult to think of them
as vicious. The Italian element was a laughing, indolent-appearing
group; the scattered Jewish folk were almost timid and kept very much
to themselves. I didn't find a really tough face until I came to the
water front where they spoke English.
On the third morning after a breakfast of oatmeal and hot
biscuit--and, by the way, Ruth effected a fifty per cent. saving right
here by using the old-fashioned formula of soda and cream of tartar
instead of baking powder--and baked potatoes, Ruth and the boy and
myself started on an exploring trip. Our idea was to get a line on
just what our opportunities were down here and to nose out the best
and cheapest places to buy. The thing that impressed us right off was
the big advantage we had in being within easy access of the big
provision centres. We were within ten minutes' walk of the market,
within fifteen of the water front, within three of the square and
within twenty of the department stores. At all of these places we
found special bargains for the day made to attract in town those from
a distance. If one rose early and reached them about as soon as they
were opened one could often buy things almost at cost and sometimes
below cost. For instance, we went up town to one of the largest but
cheaper grade department stores--we had heard its name for years but
had never been inside the building--and we found that in their grocery
department they had special mark-downs every day in the week for a
limited supply of goods. We bought sugar this day at a cent a pound
less than the market price and good beans for two cents a quart less.
It sounds at first like rather picayune saving but it counts up at the
end of the year. Then every stall in the market had its bargain of
meats--wholesome bits but unattractive to the careless buyer. We
bought here for fifty cents enough round steak for several good meals
of hash. We couldn't have bought it for less than a dollar in the
suburbs and even at that we wouldn't have known anything about it for
the store was too far for Ruth to make a personal visit and the
butcher himself would never have mentioned such an odd end to a member
of our neighborhood.
We enjoyed wandering around this big market which in itself was like a
trip to another land. Later one of our favorite amusements was to
come down here at night and watch the hustling crowds and the lights
and the pretty colors and confusion. It reminded Ruth, she said, of a
country fair. She always carried a pad and pencil and made notes of
good places to buy. I still have those and am referring to them now as
I write this.
"Blanks," she writes (I omit the name), "nice clean store with
pleasant salesman. Has good soup bones."
Again, "Blank and Blank--good place to buy sausage."
Here too the market gardeners gathered as early as four o'clock with
their vegetables fresh from the suburbs. They did mostly a wholesale
business but if one knew how it was always possible to buy of them a
cabbage or a head of lettuce or a few apples or a peck of potatoes.
They were a genial, ruddy-cheeked lot and after a while they came to
know Ruth. Often I'd go up there with her before work and she with a
basket on her arm would buy for the day. It was always, "Good morning,
miss," in answer to her smile. They were respectful whether I was
along or not. But for that matter I never knew anyone who wasn't
respectful to Ruth. They used to like to see her come, I think, for
she stood out in rather marked contrast to the bowed figures of the
other women. Later on they used to save out for her any particularly
choice vegetable they might have. She insisted however in paying them
an extra penny for such things.
From the market we went down a series of narrow streets which led to
the water front. Here the vessels from the Banks come in to unload.
The air was salty and though to us at first the wharves seemed dirty
we got used to them, after a while, and enjoyed the smell of the fish
fresh from the water.
Seeing whole push carts full of fish and watching them handled with a
pitch fork as a man tosses hay didn't whet our appetites any, but when
we remembered that it was these same fish--a day or two older,--for
which we had been paying double the price charged for them here the
difference overcame our scruples. The men here interested me. I found
that while the crew of every schooner numbered a goodly per cent. of
foreigners, still the greater part were American born. The new comers
as a rule bought small launches of their own and went into business
for themselves. The English speaking portion of the crews were also
as a rule the rougher element. The loafers and hangers-on about the
wharves were also English speaking. This was a fact that later on I
found to be rather significant and to hold true in a general way in
all branches of the lower class of labor.
The barrooms about here--always a pretty sure index of the men of any
community--were more numerous and of decidedly a rougher character
than those about the square. A man would be a good deal better
justified in carrying a revolver on this street than he would in
Little Italy. I never allowed Ruth to come down here alone.
From here we wandered back and I found a public playground and
bathhouse by the water's edge. This attracted me at once. I
investigated this and found it offered a fine opportunity for bathing.
Little dressing-rooms were provided and for a penny a man could get a
clean towel and for five cents a bathing suit. There was no reason
that I could see, however, why we shouldn't provide our own. It was
within an easy ten minutes of the flat and I saw right then where I
would get a dip every day. It would be a great thing for the boy,
too. I had always wanted him to learn to swim.
On the way home we passed through the Jewish quarter and I made a note
of the clothing offered for sale here. The street was lined with
second hand stores with coats and trousers swinging over the sidewalk,
and the windows were filled with odd lots of shoes. Then too there
were the pawnshops. I'd always thought of a pawnshop as not being
exactly respectable and had the feeling that anyone who secured
anything from one of them was in a way a receiver of stolen goods. But
as I passed them now, I received a new impression. They seemed, down
here, as legitimate a business as the second hand stores. The windows
offered an assortment of everything from watches to banjoes and guns
but among them I also noticed many carpenter's tools and so forth.
That might be a useful thing to remember.
It was odd how in a day our point of view had changed. If I had
brought Ruth and the boy down through here a month before, we would
all, I think, have been more impressed by the congestion and the
picturesque details of the squalor than anything else. We would have
picked our way gingerly and Ruth would have sighed often in pity and,
comparing the lives of these people with our own, would probably have
made an extra generous contribution to the Salvation Army the next
time they came round. I'm not saying now that there isn't misery
enough there and in every like section of every city, but I'll say
that in a great many cases the same people who grovel in the filth
here would grovel in a different kind of filth if they had ten
thousand a year. At that you can't blame them greatly for they don't
know any better. But when you learn, as I learned later, that some of
the proprietors of these second hand stores and fly-blown butcher
shops have sons in Harvard and daughters in Wellesley, it makes you
think. But I'm running ahead.
The point was that now that we felt ourselves in a way one of these
people and viewed the street not from the superior height of
native-born Americans but just as emigrants, neither the soiled
clothes of the inhabitants nor the cluttered street swarming with
laughing youngsters impressed us unfavorably at all. The impassive men
smoking cigarettes at their doors looked contented enough, the women
were not such as to excite pity, and if you noticed, there were as
many children around the local soda water fountains as you'd find in a
suburban drug store. They all had clothes enough and appeared well fed
and if some of them looked pasty, the sweet stuff in the stores was
enough to account for that.
At any rate we came back to our flat that day neither depressed nor
discouraged but decidedly in better spirits. Of course we had seen
only the surface and I suspected that when we really got into these
lives we'd find a bad condition of things. It must be so, for that was
the burden of all we read. But we would have time enough to worry
about that when we discovered it for ourselves.