purpose. In life Nigger Martha had one enemy whom she hated--cock-eyed
Grace. Like all of her kind, Nigger Martha was superstitious. Grace's evil
eye ever brought her bad luck when she crossed her path, and she shunned
her as the pestilence. When inadvertently she came upon her, she turned as
she passed and spat twice over her left shoulder. And Grace, with white
malice in her wicked face, spurned her.
"I don't want," Nigger Martha had said one night in the hearing of Sheeny
Rose--"I don't want that cock-eyed thing to look at my body when I am
dead. She'll give me hard luck in the grave yet."
And Sheeny Rose was there to see that cock-eyed Grace didn't come to the
wake.
She did come. She labored up the long stairs, and knocked, with no one
will ever know what purpose in her heart. If it was a last glimmer of
good, of forgiveness, it was promptly squelched. It was Sheeny Rose who
opened the door.
"You can't come in here," she said curtly. "You know she hated you. She
didn't want you to look at her stiff."
Cock-eyed Grace's face grew set with anger. Her curses were heard within.
She threatened fight, but dropped it.
"All right," she said as she went down. "I'll fix you, Sheeny Rose!"
It was in the exact spot where Nigger Martha had sat and died that Grace
met her enemy the night after the funeral. Lizzie La Blanche, the Marine's
girl, was there; Elsie Specs, Little Mame, and Jack the Dog, toughest of
all the girls, who for that reason had earned the name of "Mayor of the
Bowery." She brooked no rivals. They were all within reach when the two
enemies met under the arc light.
Cock-eyed Grace sounded the challenge.
"Now, you little Sheeny Rose," she said, "I'm goin' to do ye fer shuttin'
of me out o' Nigger Martha's wake."
With that out came her hatpin, and she made a lunge at Sheeny Rose. The
other was on her guard. Hatpin in hand, she parried the thrust and lunged
back. In a moment the girls had made a ring about the two, shutting them
out of sight. Within it the desperate women thrust and parried, backed and
squared off, leaping like tigers when they saw an opening. Their hats had
fallen off, their hair was down, and eager hate glittered in their eyes.
It was a battle for life; for there is no dagger more deadly than the
hatpin these women carry, chiefly as a weapon of defense in the hour of
need.
They were evenly matched. Sheeny Rose made up in superior suppleness of
limb for the pent-up malice of the other. Grace aimed her thrusts at her
opponent's face. She tried to reach her eye. Once the sharp steel just
pricked Sheeny Rose's cheek and drew blood. In the next turn Rose's hatpin
passed within a quarter-inch of Grace's jugular.
But the blow nearly threw her off her feet, and she was at her enemy's
mercy. With an evil oath the fiend thrust full at her face just as the
policeman, who had come through the crowd unobserved, so intent was it
upon the fight, knocked the steel from her hand.
At midnight two disheveled hags with faces flattened against the bars of
adjoining cells in the police station were hurling sidelong curses at each
other and at the maddened doorman. Nigger Martha's wake had received its
appropriate and foreordained ending.
A CHIP FROM THE MAELSTROM
"The cop just sceert her to death, that's what he done. For Gawd's sake,
boss, don't let on I tole you."
The negro, stopping suddenly in his game of craps in the Pell-street back
yard, glanced up with a look of agonized entreaty. Discovering no such
fell purpose in his questioner's face, he added quickly, reassured:
"And if he asks if you seed me a-playing craps, say no, not on yer life,
boss, will yer?" And he resumed the game where he left off.
An hour before he had seen Maggie Lynch die in that hallway, and it was of
her he spoke. She belonged to the tenement and to Pell street, as he did
himself. They were part of it while they lived, with all that that
implied; when they died, to make part of it again, reorganized and closing
ranks in the trench on Hart's Island. It is only the Celestials in Pell
street who escape the trench. The others are booked for it from the day
they are pushed out from the rapids of the Bowery into this maelstrom that
sucks under all it seizes. Thenceforward they come to the surface only at
intervals in the police courts, each time more forlorn, but not more
hopeless, until at last they disappear and are heard of no more.
When Maggie Lynch turned the corner no one there knows. The street keeps
no reckoning, and it doesn't matter. She took her place unchallenged, and
her "character" was registered in due time. It was good. Even Pell street
has its degrees and its standard of perfection. The standard's strong
point is contempt of the Chinese, who are hosts in Pell street. Maggie
Lynch came to be known as homeless, without a man, though with the
prospects of motherhood approaching, yet she "had never lived with a
Chink." To Pell street that was heroic. It would have forgiven all the
rest, had there been anything to forgive. But there was not. Whatever else
may be, cant is not among the vices of Pell street.
And it is well. Maggie Lynch lived with the Cuffs on the top floor of No.
21 until the Cuffs moved. They left an old lounge they didn't want, and
Maggie. Maggie was sick, and the housekeeper had no heart to put her out.
Heart sometimes survives in the slums, even in Pell street, long after
respectability has been hopelessly smothered. It provided shelter and a
bed for Maggie when her only friends deserted her. In return she did what
she could, helping about the hall and stairs. Queer that gratitude should
be another of the virtues the slum has no power to smother, though dive
and brothel and the scorn of the good do their best, working together.
There was an old mattress that had to be burned, and Maggie dragged it
down with an effort. She took it out in the street, and there set it on
fire. It burned and blazed high in the narrow street. The policeman saw
the sheen in the windows on the opposite side of the way, and saw the
danger of it as he came around the corner. Maggie did not notice him till
he was right behind her. She gave a great start when he spoke to her.
"I've a good mind to lock you up for this," he said as he stamped out the
fire. "Don't you know it's against the law?"
The negro heard it and saw Maggie stagger toward the door, with her hand
pressed upon her heart, as the policeman went away down the street. On
the threshold she stopped, panting.
"My Gawd, that cop frightened me!" she said, and sat down on the
door-step.
A tenant who came out saw that she was ill, and helped her into the hall.
She gasped once or twice, and then lay back, dead.
Word went around to the Elizabeth-street station, and was sent on from
there with an order for the dead-wagon. Maggie's turn had come for the
ride up the Sound. She was as good as checked off for the Potter's Field,
but Pell street made an effort and came up almost to Maggie's standard.
Even while the dead-wagon was rattling down the Bowery, one of the tenants
ran all the way to Henry street, where he had heard that Maggie's father
lived, and brought him to the police station. The old man wiped his eyes
as he gazed upon his child, dead in her sins.
"She had a good home," he said to Captain Young. "But she didn't know it,
and she wouldn't stay. Send her home, and I will bury her with her
mother."
The Potter's Field was cheated out of a victim, and by Pell street. But
the maelstrom grinds on and on.
SARAH JOYCE'S HUSBANDS
Policeman Muller had run against a boisterous crowd surrounding a drunken
woman at Prince street and the Bowery. When he joined the crowd it
scattered, but got together again before it had run half a block, and
slunk after him and his prisoner to the Mulberry-street station. There
Sergeant Woodruff learned by questioning the woman that she was Mary
Donovan and had come down from Westchester to have a holiday. She had had
it without a doubt. The sergeant ordered her to be locked up for
safe-keeping, when, unexpectedly, objection was made.
A small lot of the crowd had picked up courage to come into the station to
see what became of the prisoner. From out of this, one spoke up: "Don't
lock that woman up; she is my wife."
"Eh," said the sergeant, "and who are you?"
The man said he was George Reilly and a salesman. The prisoner had given
her name as Mary Donovan and said she was single. The sergeant drew Mr.
Reilly's attention to the street door, which was there for his
accommodation, but he did not take the hint. He became so abusive that he,
too, was locked up, still protesting that the woman was his wife.
She had gone on her way to Elizabeth street, where there is a matron, to
be locked up there; and the objections of Mr. Reilly having been silenced
at last, peace was descending once more upon the station-house, when the
door was opened, and a man with a swagger entered.
"Got that woman locked up here?" he demanded.
"What woman?" asked the sergeant, looking up.
"Her what Muller took in."
"Well," said the sergeant, looking over the desk, "what of her?"
"I want her out; she is my wife. She--"
The sergeant rang his bell. "Here, lock this man up with that woman's
other husband," he said, pointing to the stranger.
The fellow ran out just in time, as the doorman made a grab for him. The
sergeant drew a tired breath and picked up the ruler to make a red line in
his blotter. There was a brisk step, a rap, and a young fellow stood in
the open door.
"Say, serg," he began.
The sergeant reached with his left hand for the inkstand, while his right
clutched the ruler. He never took his eyes off the stranger.
"Say," wheedled he, glancing around and seeing no trap, "serg, I say: that
woman w'at's locked up, she's--"
"She's what?" asked the sergeant, getting the range as well as he could.
"My wife," said the fellow.
There was a bang, the slamming of a door, and the room was empty. The
doorman came running in, looked out, and up and down the street. But
nothing was to be seen. There is no record of what became of the third
husband of Mary Donovan.
The first slept serenely in the jail. The woman herself, when she saw the
iron bars in the Elizabeth-street station, fell into hysterics and was
taken to the Hudson Street Hospital.
Reilly was arraigned in the Tombs Police Court in the morning. He paid his
fine and left, protesting that he was her only husband.
He had not been gone ten minutes when Claimant No. 4 entered.
"Was Sarah Joyce brought here?" he asked Clerk Betts.
The clerk couldn't find the name.
"Look for Mary Donovan," said No. 4.
"Who are you?" asked the clerk.
"I am Sarah's husband," was the answer.
Clerk Betts smiled, and told the man the story of the other three.
"Well, I am blamed," he said.
THE CAT TOOK THE KOSHER MEAT
The tenement No. 76 Madison street had been for some time scandalized by
the hoidenish ways of Rose Baruch, the little cloakmaker on the top floor.
Rose was seventeen, and boarded with her mother in the Pincus family. But
for her harum-scarum ways she might, in the opinion of the tenement, be a
nice girl and some day a good wife; but these were unbearable.
For the tenement is a great working hive in which nothing has value unless
exchangeable for gold. Rose's animal spirits, which long hours and low
wages had no power to curb, were exchangeable only for wrath in the
tenement. Her noisy feet on the stairs when she came home woke up all the
tenants, and made them swear at the loss of the precious moments of sleep
which were their reserve capital. Rose was so Americanized, they said
impatiently among themselves, that nothing could be done with her.
Perhaps they were mistaken. Perhaps Rose's stout refusal to be subdued
even by the tenement was their hope, as it was her capital. Perhaps her
spiteful tread upon the stairs heralded the coming protest of the freeborn
American against slavery, industrial or otherwise, in which their day of
deliverance was dawning. It may be so. They didn't see it. How should
they? They were not Americanized; not yet.
However that might be, Rose came to the end that was to be expected. The
judgment of the tenement was, for the time, borne out by experience. This
was the way of it:
Rose's mother had bought several pounds of kosher meat and put it into the
ice-box--that is to say, on the window-sill of their fifth-floor flat.
Other ice-box these East-Side sweaters' tenements have none. And it does
well enough in cold weather, unless the cat gets around, or, as it
happened in this case, it slides off and falls down. Rose's breakfast and
dinner disappeared down the air-shaft, seventy feet or more, at 10:30 P.
M.
There was a family consultation as to what should be done. It was late,
and everybody was in bed, but Rose declared herself equal to the rousing
of the tenants in the first floor rear, through whose window she could
climb into the shaft for the meat. She had done it before for a nickel.
Enough said. An expedition set out at once from the top floor to recover
the meat. Mrs. Baruch, Rose, and Jake, the boarder, went in a body.
Arrived before the Knauff family's flat on the ground floor, they opened
proceedings by a vigorous attack on the door. The Knauffs woke up in a
fright, believing that the house was full of burglars. They were stirring
to barricade the door, when they recognized Rose's voice and were calmed.
Let in, the expedition explained matters, and was grudgingly allowed to
take a look out of the window in the air-shaft. Yes! there was the meat,
as yet safe from rats. The thing was to get it.
The boarder tried first, but crawled back frightened. He couldn't reach
it. Rose jerked him impatiently away.
"Leg go!" she said. "I can do it. I was there wunst. You're no good."
And she bent over the window-sill, reaching down until her toes barely
touched the floor, when all of a sudden, before they could grab her
skirts, over she went, heels over head, down the shaft, and disappeared.
The shrieks of the Knauffs, of Mrs. Baruch, and of Jake, the boarder, were
echoed from below. Rose's voice rose in pain and in bitter lamentation
from the bottom of the shaft. She had fallen fully fifteen feet, and in
the fall had hurt her back badly, if, indeed, she had not injured herself
beyond repair. Her cries suggested nothing less. They filled the tenement,
rising to every floor and appealing at every bedroom window.
In a minute the whole building was astir from cellar to roof. A dozen
heads were thrust out of every window, and answering wails carried
messages of helpless sympathy to the once so unpopular Rose. Upon this
concert of sorrow the police broke in with anxious inquiry as to what was
the matter.
When they found out, a second relief expedition was organized. It reached
Rose through the basement coal-bin, and she was carried out and sent to
the Gouverneur Hospital. There she lies, unable to move, and the tenement
wonders what is amiss that it has lost its old spirits. It has not even
anything left to swear at.
The cat took the kosher meat.
FIRE IN THE BARRACKS
The rush and roar, the blaze and the wild panic, of a great fire filled
Twenty-third street. Helmeted men stormed and swore; horses tramped and
reared; crying women, hurrying hither and thither, stumbled over squirming
hose on street and sidewalk.
The throbbing of a dozen pumping-engines merged all other sounds in its
frantic appeal for haste. In the midst of it all, seven red-shirted men
knelt beside a heap of trunks, hastily thrown up as if for a breastwork,
and prayed fervently with bared heads.
Firemen and policemen stumbled up against them with angry words, stopped,
stared, and passed silently by. The fleeing crowd halted and fell back.
The rush and the roar swirled to the right and to the left, leaving the
little band as if in an eddy, untouched and serene, with the glow of the
fire upon it and the stars paling overhead.
The seven were the Swedish Salvation Army. Their barracks were burning up
in a blast of fire so sudden and so fierce that scant time was left to
save life and goods.
From the tenements next door men and women dragged bundles and
feather-beds, choking stairs and halls, and shrieking madly to be let out.
The police struggled angrily with the torrent. The lodgers in the
Holly-Tree Inn, who had nothing to save, ran for their lives.
In the station-house behind the barracks they were hastily clearing the
prison. The last man had hardly passed out of his cell when, with a
deafening crash, the toppling wall fell upon and smashed the roof of the
jail.
Fire-bells rang in every street as engines rushed from north and south. A
general alarm had called out the reserves. Every hydrant for blocks around
was tapped. Engine crews climbed upon the track of the elevated road,
picketed the surrounding tenements, and stood their ground on top of the
police station.
Up there two crews labored with a Siamese joint hose throwing a stream as
big as a man's thigh. It got away from them, and for a while there was
panic and a struggle up on the heights as well as in the street. The
throbbing hose bounded over the roof, thrashing right and left, and
flinging about the men who endeavored to pin it down like half-drowned
kittens. It struck the coping, knocked it off, and the resistless stream
washed brick and stone down into the yard as upon the wave of a mighty
flood.
Amid the fright and uproar the seven alone were calm. The sun rose upon
their little band perched upon the pile of trunks, victorious and defiant.
It shone upon Old Glory and the Salvation Army's flag floating from their
improvised fort, and upon an ample lake, sprung up within an hour where
yesterday there was a vacant sunken lot. The fire was out, the firemen
going home.
The lodgers in the Holly-Tree Inn, of whom there is one for every day in
the year, looked upon the sudden expanse of water, shivered, and went in.
The tenants returned to their homes. The fright was over with the
darkness.
A WAR ON THE GOATS
War has been declared in Hell's Kitchen. An indignant public opinion
demands to have "something done ag'in' them goats," and there is alarm at
the river end of the street. A public opinion in Hell's Kitchen that
demands anything besides schooners of mixed ale is a sign. Surer than a
college settlement and a sociological canvass, it foretells the end of the
slum. Sebastopol, the rocky fastness of the gang that gave the place its
bad name, was razed only the other day, and now the police have been set
on the goats. Cause enough for alarm.
A reconnaissance in force by the enemy showed some foundation for the
claim that the goats owned the block. Thirteen were found foraging in the
gutters, standing upon trucks, or calmly dozing in doorways. They evinced
no particularly hostile disposition, but a marked desire to know the
business of every chance caller in the block. This caused a passing
unpleasantness between one big white goat and the janitress of the
tenement on the corner. Being crowded up against the wall by the animal,
bent on exploring her pockets, she beat it off with her scrubbing-pail and
mop. The goat, thus dismissed, joined a horse at the curb in apparently
innocent meditation, but with one leering eye fixed back over its shoulder
upon the housekeeper setting out an ash-barrel.
Her back was barely turned when it was in the barrel, with head and fore
feet exploring its depths. The door of the tenement opened upon the
housekeeper trundling another barrel just as the first one fell and rolled
across the sidewalk, with the goat capering about. Then was the air filled
with bad language and a broomstick and a goat for a moment, and the woman
was left shouting her wrongs.
"What de divil good is dem goats anyhow?" she said, panting. "There's no
housekeeper in de United Shtates can watch de ash-cans wid dem divil's
imps around. They near killed an Eyetalian child the other day, and two
of them got basted in de neck when de goats follied dem and didn't get
nothing. That big white one o' Tim's, he's the worst in de lot, and he's
got only one horn, too."
This wicked and unsymmetrical animal is denounced for its malice
throughout the block by even the defenders of the goats. Singularly
enough, he cannot be located, and neither can Tim. If the scouting-party
has better luck and can seize this wretched beast, half the campaign may
be over. It will be accepted as a sacrifice by one side, and the other is
willing to give it up.
Mrs. Shallock lives in a crazy old frame house, over a saloon. Her kitchen
is approached by a sort of hen-ladder, a foot wide, which terminates in a
balcony, the whole of which was occupied by a big gray goat. There was not
room for the police inquisitor and the goat too, and the former had to
wait till the animal had come off his perch. Mrs. Shallock is a widow. A
load of anxiety and concern overspread her motherly countenance when she
heard of the trouble.
"Are they after dem goats again?" she said. "Sarah! Leho! come right here,
an' don't you go in the street again. Excuse me, sor! but it's all because
one of dem knocked down an old woman that used to give it a paper every
day. She is the mother of the blind newsboy around on the avenue, an' she
used to feed an old paper to him every night. So he follied her. That
night she didn't have any, an' when he stuck his nose in her basket an'
didn't find any, he knocked her down, an' she bruk her arm."
Whether it was the one-horned goat that thus insisted upon his sporting
extra does not appear. Probably it was.
"There's neighbors lives there has got 'em on floors," Mrs. Shallock kept
on. "I'm paying taxes here, an' I think it's my privilege to have one
little goat."
"I just wish they'd take 'em," broke in the widow's buxom daughter, who
had appeared in the doorway, combing her hair. "They goes up in the hall
and knocks on the door with their horns all night. There's sixteen dozen
of them on the stoop, if there's one. What good are they? Let's sell 'em
to the butcher, mama; he'll buy 'em for mutton, the way he did Bill
Buckley's. You know right well he did."
"They ain't much good, that's a fact," mused the widow. "But yere's Leho;
she's follying me around just like a child. She is a regular pet, is
Leho. We got her from Mr. Lee, who is dead, and we called her after him,
Leho [Leo]. Take Sarah; but Leho, little Leho, let's keep."
Leho stuck her head in through the front door and belied her name. If the
widow keeps her, another campaign will shortly have to be begun in
Forty-sixth street. There will be more goats where Leho is.
Mr. Cleary lives in a rear tenement and has only one goat. It belongs, he
says, to his little boy, and is no good except to amuse him. Minnie is her
name, and she once had a mate. When it was sold, the boy cried so much
that he was sick for two weeks. Mr. Cleary couldn't think of parting with
Minnie.
Neither will Mr. Lennon, in the next yard, give up his. He owns the
stable, he says, and axes no odds of anybody. His goat is some good
anyhow, for it gives milk for his tea. Says his wife, "Many is the dime it
has saved us." There are two goats in Mr. Lennon's yard, one perched on
top of a shed surveying the yard, the other engaged in chewing at a
buck-saw that hangs on the fence.
Mrs. Buckley does not know how many goats she has. A glance at the bigger
of the two that are stabled at the entrance to the tenement explains her
doubts, which are temporary. Mrs. Buckley says that her husband "generally
sells them away," meaning the kids, presumably to the butcher for mutton.
"Hey, Jenny!" she says, stroking the big one at the door. Jenny eyes the
visitor calmly, and chews an old newspaper. She has two horns.
"She ain't as bad as they lets on," says Mrs. Buckley.
The scouting party reports the new public opinion of the Kitchen to be of
healthy but alien growth, as yet without roots in the soil strong enough
to stand the shock of a general raid on the goats. They recommend as a
present concession the seizure of the one-horned Billy that seems to have
no friends on the block, if indeed he belongs there, and an ambush is
being laid accordingly.
ROVER'S LAST FIGHT