three, sometimes for six months, and sometimes for ten days, according to
how he and Denny and the justice felt about it. In the spell between trips
to the island, Denny was a regular pensioner of the policeman, who let him
have a quarter or so when he had so little money as to be next to
desperate. He never did get quite to that point. Perhaps the policeman's
quarters saved him. His nickname of "the Robber" was given to him on the
same principle that dubbed the neighborhood he haunted the Pig
Market--because pigs are the only ware not for sale there. Denny never
robbed anybody. The only thing he ever stole was the time he should have
spent in working. There was no denying it, Denny was a loafer. He himself
had told Schultz that it was because his wife and children put him out of
their house in Madison street five years before. Perhaps if his wife's
story had been heard it would have reversed that statement of facts. But
nobody ever heard it. Nobody took the trouble to inquire. The O'Neil
family--that was understood to be the name--interested no one in Jewtown.
One of its members was enough. Except that Mrs. O'Neil lived in Madison
street, somewhere "near Lundy's store," nothing was known of her.
"That I will, Denny," repeated the policeman, heartily, slipping him a
dime for luck. "You come around to-morrow, and I will run you in. Now go
along."
But Denny didn't go, though he had the price of two "balls" at the
distillery. He shifted thoughtfully on his feet, and said:
"Say, Schultz, if I should die now,--I am all full o' rheumatiz, and
sore,--if I should die before, would you see to me and tell the wife?"
"Small fear of yer dying, Denny, with the price of two drinks," said the
policeman, poking him facetiously in the ribs with his club. "Don't you
worry. All the same, if you will tell me where the old woman lives, I will
let her know. What's the number?"
But the Robber's mood had changed under the touch of the silver dime that
burned his palm. "Never mind, Schultz," he said; "I guess I won't kick; so
long!" and moved off.
* * * * *
The snow drifted wickedly down Suffolk street Christmas morning, pinching
noses and ears and cheeks already pinched by hunger and want. It set
around the corner into the Pig Market, where the hucksters plodded
knee-deep in the drifts, burying the horseradish man and his machine, and
coating the bare, plucked breasts of the geese that swung from countless
hooks at the corner stand with softer and whiter down than ever grew
there. It drove the suspender-man into the hallway of a Suffolk-street
tenement, where he tried to pluck the icicles from his frozen ears and
beard with numb and powerless fingers.
As he stepped out of the way of some one entering with a blast that set
like a cold shiver up through the house, he stumbled over something, and
put down his hand to feel what it was. It touched a cold face, and the
house rang with a shriek that silenced the clink of glasses in the
distillery, against the side door of which the something lay. They crowded
out, glasses in hand, to see what it was.
"Only a dead tramp," said some one, and the crowd went back to the warm
saloon, where the barrels lay in rows on the racks. The clink of glasses
and shouts of laughter came through the peep-hole in the door into the
dark hallway as Policeman Schultz bent over the stiff, cold shape. Some
one had called him.
"Denny," he said, tugging at his sleeve. "Denny, come. Your time is up. I
am here." Denny never stirred. The policeman looked up, white in the face.
"My God!" he said, "he's dead. But he kept his date."
And so he had. Denny the Robber was dead. Rum and exposure and the
"rheumatiz" had killed him. Policeman Schultz kept his word, too, and had
him taken to the station on a stretcher.
"He was a bad penny," said the saloon-keeper, and no one in Jewtown was
found to contradict him.
JOHN GAVIN, MISFIT
John Gavin was to blame--there is no doubt of that. To be sure, he was out
of a job, with never a cent in his pockets, his babies starving, and
notice served by the landlord that day. He had traveled the streets till
midnight looking for work, and had found none. And so he gave up. Gave up,
with the Employment Bureau in the next street registering applicants; with
the Wayfarers' Lodge over in Poverty Gap, where he might have earned fifty
cents, anyway, chopping wood; with charities without end, organized and
unorganized, that would have referred his case, had they done nothing
else. With all these things and a hundred like them to meet their wants,
the Gavins of our day have been told often enough that they have no
business to lose hope. That they will persist is strange. But perhaps
this one had never heard of them.
Anyway, Gavin is dead. But yesterday he was the father of six children,
running from May, the eldest, who was thirteen and at school, to the baby,
just old enough to poke its little fingers into its father's eyes and crow
and jump when he came in from his long and dreary tramps. They were as
happy a little family as a family of eight could be with the wolf
scratching at the door, its nose already poking through. There had been no
work and no wages in the house for months, and the landlord had given
notice that at the end of the week out they must go, unless the back rent
was paid. And there was about as much likelihood of its being paid as of a
slice of the February sun dropping down through the ceiling into the room
to warm the shivering Gavin family.
It began when Gavin's health gave way. He was a lather and had a steady
job till sickness came. It was the old story: nothing laid away--how could
there be, with a houseful of children?--and nothing coming in. They talk
of death-rates to measure the misery of the slum by, but death does not
touch the bottom. It ends the misery. Sickness only begins it. It began
Gavin's. When he had to drop hammer and nails, he got a job in a saloon as
a barkeeper; but the saloon didn't prosper, and when it was shut up, there
was an end. Gavin didn't know it then. He looked at the babies and kept up
spirits as well as he could, though it wrung his heart.
He tried everything under the sun to get a job. He traveled early and
traveled late, but wherever he went they had men and to spare. And
besides, he was ill. As they told him bluntly, sometimes, they didn't have
any use for sick men. Men to work and earn wages must be strong. And he
had to own that it was true.
Gavin was not strong. As he denied himself secretly the nourishment he
needed that his little ones might have enough, he felt it more and more.
It was harder work for him to get around, and each refusal left him more
downcast. He was yet a young man, only thirty-four, but he felt as if he
was old and tired--tired out; that was it.
The feeling grew on him while he went his last errand, offering his
services at saloons and wherever, as he thought, an opening offered. In
fact, he thought but little about it any more. The whole thing had become
an empty, hopeless formality with him. He knew at last that he was looking
for the thing he would never find; that in a cityful where every man had
his place he was a misfit with none. With his dull brain dimly conscious
of that one idea, he plodded homeward in the midnight hour. He had been on
the go since early morning, and excepting some lunch from the saloon
counters, had eaten nothing.
The lamp burned dimly in the room where May sat poring yet over her books,
waiting for papa. When he came in she looked up and smiled, but saw by his
look, as he hung up his hat, that there was no good news, and returned
with a sigh to her book. The tired mother was asleep on the bed, dressed,
with the baby in her arms. She had lain down to quiet it and had been
lulled to sleep with it herself.
Gavin did not wake them. He went to the bed where the four little ones
slept, and kissed them, each in his turn, then came back and kissed his
wife and baby.
May nestled close to him as he bent over her and gave her, too, a little
hug.
"Where are you going, papa?" she asked.
He turned around at the door and cast a look back at the quiet room,
irresolute. Then he went back once more to kiss his sleeping wife and
baby softly.
But however softly, it woke the mother. She saw him making for the door,
and asked him where he meant to go so late.
"Out, just a little while," he said, and his voice was husky. He turned
his head away.
A woman's instinct made her arise hastily and go to him.
"Don't go," she said; "please don't go away."
As he still moved toward the door, she put her arm about his neck and drew
his head toward her.
She strove with him anxiously, frightened, she hardly knew herself by
what. The lamplight fell upon something shining which he held behind his
back. The room rang with the shot, and the baby awoke crying, to see its
father slip from mama's arms to the floor, dead.
For John Gavin, alive, there was no place. At least he did not find it;
for which, let it be said and done with, he was to blame. Dead, society
will find one for him. And for the one misfit got off the list there are
seven whom not employment bureau nor woodyard nor charity register can be
made to reach. Social economy the thing is called; which makes the eighth
misfit.
IN THE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL
The fact was printed the other day that the half-hundred children or more
who are in the hospitals on North Brother Island had no playthings, not
even a rattle, to make the long days skip by, which, set in smallpox,
scarlet fever, and measles, must be longer there than anywhere else in the
world. The toys that were brought over there with a consignment of nursery
tots who had the typhus fever had been worn clean out, except some
fish-horns which the doctor frowned on, and which were therefore not
allowed at large. Not as much as a red monkey on a yellow stick was there
left on the island to make the youngsters happy.
That afternoon a big, hearty-looking man came into the office with the
paper in his hand, and demanded to see the editor. He had come, he said,
to see to it that those sick youngsters got the playthings they were
entitled to; and a regular Santa Claus he proved to the friendless little
colony on the lonely island, for he left a crisp fifty-dollar note behind
when he went away without giving his name. The single condition was
attached to the gift that it should be spent buying toys for the children
on North Brother Island.
Accordingly, a strange invading army took the island by storm three or
four nights ago. Under cover of the darkness it had itself ferried over
from One Hundred and Thirty-eighth street in the department yawl, and
before morning it was in undisputed possession. It has come to stay. Not a
doll or a sheep will ever leave the island again. They may riot upon it as
they please, within certain well-defined limits, but none of them can ever
cross the channel to the mainland again, unless it be the rubber dolls who
can swim, so it is said. Here is the muster-roll:
Six sheep (four with lambs), six fairies (big dolls in street-dress),
twelve rubber dolls (in woolen jackets), four railroad-trains,
twenty-eight base-balls, twenty rubber balls, six big painted (Scotch
plaid) rubber balls, six still bigger ditto, seven boxes of blocks, half a
dozen music-boxes, twenty-four rattles, six bubble (soap) toys, twelve
small engines, six games of dominoes, twelve rubber toys (old woman who
lived in a shoe, etc.), five wooden toys (bad bear, etc.), thirty-six
horse-reins.
As there is only one horse on the island, and that one a very steady-going
steed in no urgent need of restraint, this last item might seem
superfluous, but only to the uninstructed mind. Within a brief week half
the boys and girls on the island that are out of bed long enough to stand
on their feet will be transformed into ponies and the other half into
drivers, and flying teams will go cavorting around to the tune of "Johnny,
Get your Gun," and the "Jolly Brothers Gallop," as they are ground out of
the music-boxes by little fingers that but just now toyed feebly with the
balusters on the golden stair.
That music! When I went over to the island it fell upon my ears in little
drops of sweet melody, as soon as I came in sight of the nurses' quarters.
I listened, but couldn't make out the tune. The drops seemed mixed. When I
opened the door upon one of the nurses, Dr. Dixon, and the hospital
matron, each grinding his or her music for all there was in it, and
looking perfectly happy withal, I understood why.
They were all playing different tunes at the same time, the nurse "When
the Robins Nest Again," Dr. Dixon "Nancy Lee," and the visitor "Sweet
Violets." A little child stood by in open-mouthed admiration, that became
ecstasy when I joined in with "The Babies on our Block." It was all for
the little one's benefit, and she thought it beautiful without a doubt.
The storekeeper, knowing that music hath charms to soothe the breast of
even a typhus-fever patient, had thrown in a dozen as his own gift. Thus
one good deed brings on another, and a good deal more than fifty dollars'
worth of happiness will be ground out on the island before there is an end
of the music.
There is one little girl in the measles ward already who will eat only
when her nurse sits by grinding out "Nancy Lee." She cannot be made to
swallow one mouthful on any other condition. No other nurse and no other
tune but "Nancy Lee" will do--neither the "Star-Spangled Banner" nor "The
Babies on our Block." Whether it is Nancy all by her melodious self, or
the beautiful picture of her in a sailor's suit on the lid of the box, or
the two and the nurse and the dinner together, that serve to soothe her,
is a question of some concern to the island, since Nancy and the nurse
have shown signs of giving out together.
Three of the six sheep that were bought for the ridiculously low price of
eighty-nine cents apiece, the lambs being thrown in as make-weight, were
grazing on the mixed-measles lawn over on the east shore of the island,
with a fairy in evening dress eying them rather disdainfully in the grasp
of tearful Annie Cullum. Annie is a foundling from the asylum temporarily
sojourning here. The measles and the scarlet fever were the only things
that ever took kindly to her in her little life. They tackled her both at
once, and poor Annie, after a six or eight weeks' tussle with them, has
just about enough spunk left to cry when anybody looks at her.
Three woolly sheep and a fairy all at once have robbed her of all hope,
and in the midst of it all she weeps as if her heart would break. Even
when the nurse pulls one of the unresisting mutton heads, and it emits a
loud "Baa-a," she stops only just for a second or two and then wails
again. The sheep look rather surprised, as they have a right to. They have
come to be little Annie's steady company, hers and her fellow-sufferers'
in the mixed-measles ward. The triangular lawn upon which they are
browsing is theirs to gambol on when the sun shines, but cross the walk
that borders it they never can, any more than the babies with whom they
play. Sumptuary law rules the island they are on. Habeas corpus and the
constitution stop short of the ferry. Even Comstock's authority does not
cross it: the one exception to the rule that dolls and sheep and babies
shall not visit from ward to ward is in favor of the rubber dolls, and the
etiquette of the island requires that they shall lay off their woolen
jackets and go calling just as the factory turned them out, without a
stitch or shred of any kind on.
As for the rest, they are assigned, babies, nurses, sheep, rattles, and
railroad-trains, to their separate measles, scarlet-fever, and diphtheria
lawns or wards, and there must be content to stay. A sheep may be
transferred from the scarlet-fever ward with its patron to the
mixed-measles or diphtheria, when symptoms of either of these diseases
appear, as they often do; but it cannot then go back again, lest it carry
the seeds of the new contagion to its old friends.
Even the fairies are put under the ban of suspicion by such evil
associations, and, once they have crossed the line, are not allowed to go
back to corrupt the good manners of the babies with only one complaint.
Pauline Meyer, the bigger of the two girls on the mixed-measles
stoop,--the other is friendless Annie,--has just enough strength to laugh
when her sheep's head is pulled. She has been on the limits of one ward
after another these four months, and has had everything short of typhus
fever and smallpox that the island affords.
It is a marvel that there is one laugh left in her whole little shrunken
body after it all; but there is, and the grin on her face reaches almost
from ear to ear, as she clasps the biggest fairy in an arm very little
stouter than a boy's bean-blower, and hears the lamb bleat. Why, that one
smile on that ghastly face would be thought worth his fifty dollars by the
children's friend, could he see it. Pauline is the child of Swedish
emigrants. She and Annie will not fight over their lambs and their dolls,
not for many weeks. They can't. They can't even stand up.
One of the railroad-trains, drawn by a glorious tin engine, with the name
"Union" painted on the cab, is making across the stoop for the little boy
with the whooping-cough in the next building. But it won't get there; it
is quarantined. But it will have plenty of exercise. Little hands are
itching to get hold of it in one of the cribs inside. There are thirty-six
sick children on the island just now, about half of them boys, who will
find plenty of use for the balls and things as soon as they get about. How
those base-balls are to be kept within bounds is a hopeless mystery the
doctors are puzzling over.
Even if nines are organized in every ward, as has been suggested, it is
hard to see how they can be allowed to play each other, as they would want
to, of course, as soon as they could toddle about. It would be something,
though, a smallpox nine pitted against the scarlets or the measles, with
an umpire from the mixed ward!
The old woman that lived in a shoe, being of rubber, is a privileged
character, and is away on a call in the female scarlet, says the nurse. It
is a good thing that she was made that way, for she is very popular. So
are Mother Goose and her ten companion rubber toys. The bear and the man
that strike alternately a wooden anvil with a ditto hammer are scarcely
less exciting to the infantile mind; but, being of wood, they are steady
boarders permanently attached each to his ward. The dominoes fell to the
lot of the male scarlets. That ward has half a dozen grown men in it at
present, and they have never once lost sight of the little black blocks
since they first saw them.
The doctor reports that they are getting better just as fast as they can
since they took to playing dominoes. If there is any hint in this to the
profession at large, they are welcome to it, along with humanity.
A little girl with a rubber doll in a red-woolen jacket--a combination to
make the perspiration run right off one with the humidity at 98--looks
wistfully down from the second-story balcony of the smallpox pavilion, as
the doctor goes past with the last sheep tucked under his arm.
But though it baa-a ever so loudly, it is not for her. It is bound for the
white tent on the shore, shunned even here, where sits a solitary watcher
gazing wistfully all day toward the city that has passed out of his life.
Perchance it may bring to him a message from the far-away home where the
birds sang for him, and the waves and the flowers spoke to him, and
"Unclean" had not been written against his name. Of all on the Pest Island
he alone is hopeless. He is a leper, and his sentence is that of a living
death in a strange land.
NIGGER MARTHA'S WAKE
A woman with face all seared and blotched by something that had burned
through the skin sat propped up in the doorway of a Bowery restaurant at
four o'clock in the morning, senseless, apparently dying. A policeman
stood by, looking anxiously up the street and consulting his watch. At
intervals he shook her to make sure she was not dead. The drift of the
Bowery that was borne that way eddied about, intent upon what was going
on. A dumpy little man edged through the crowd and peered into the woman's
face.
"Phew!" he said, "it's Nigger Martha! What is gettin' into the girls on
the Bowery I don't know. Remember my Maggie? She was her chum."
This to the watchman on the block. The watchman remembered. He knows
everything that goes on in the Bowery. Maggie was the wayward daughter of
a decent laundress, and killed herself by drinking carbolic acid less than
a month before. She had wearied of the Bowery. Nigger Martha was her one
friend. And now she had followed her example.
She was drunk when she did it. It is in their cups that a glimpse of the
life they traded away for the street comes sometimes to these wretches,
with remorse not to be borne.
It came so to Nigger Martha. Ten minutes before she had been sitting with
two boon companions in the oyster saloon next door, discussing their
night's catch. Elsie "Specs" was one of the two; the other was known to
the street simply as Mame. Elsie wore glasses, a thing unusual enough in
the Bowery to deserve recognition. From their presence Martha rose
suddenly to pull a vial from her pocket. Mame saw it, and, knowing what it
meant in the heavy humor that was upon Nigger Martha, she struck it from
her hand with a pepper-box. It fell, but was not broken. The woman picked
it up, and staggering out, swallowed its contents upon the sidewalk--that
is, as much as went into her mouth. Much went over her face, burning it.
She fell shrieking.
Then came the crowd. The Bowery never sleeps. The policeman on the beat
set her in the doorway and sent a hurry call for an ambulance. It came at
last, and Nigger Martha was taken to the hospital.
As Mame told it, so it was recorded on the police blotter, with the
addition that she was anywhere from forty to fifty years old. That was the
strange part of it. It is not often that any one lasts out a generation in
the Bowery. Nigger Martha did. Her beginning was way back in the palmy
days of Billy McGlory and Owney Geoghegan. Her first remembered appearance
was on the occasion of the mock wake they got up at Geoghegan's for Police
Captain Foley when he was broken. That was in the days when dive-keepers
made and broke police captains, and made no secret of it. Billy McGlory
did not. Ever since, Martha was on the street.
In time she picked up Maggie Mooney, and they got to be chummy. The
friendships of the Bowery by night may not be of a very exalted type, but
when death breaks them it leaves nothing to the survivor. That is the
reason suicides there happen in pairs. The story of Tilly Lorrison and
Tricksy came from the Tenderloin not long ago. This one of Maggie Mooney
and Nigger Martha was theirs over again.
In each case it was the younger, the one nearest the life that was forever
past, who took the step first, in despair. The other followed. To her it
was the last link with something that had long ceased to be anything but a
dream, which was broken. But without the dream life was unbearable, in the
Tenderloin and on the Bowery.
The newsboys were crying their night extras when Undertaker Reardon's
wagon jogged across the Bowery with Nigger Martha's body in it. She had
given the doctors the slip, as she had the policeman many a time. A friend
of hers, an Italian in the Bend, had hired the undertaker to "do it
proper," and Nigger Martha was to have a funeral.
All the Bowery came to the wake. The all-nighters from Chatham Square to
Bleecker street trooped up to the top-floor flat in the Forsyth-street
tenement where Nigger Martha was laid out. There they sat around, saying
little and drinking much. It was not a cheery crowd.
The Bowery by night is not cheerful in the presence of The Mystery. Its
one effort is to get away from it, to forget--the thing it can never do.
When out of its sight it carouses boisterously, as children sing and shout
in the dark to persuade themselves that they are not afraid. And some who
hear think it happy.