spoken in half a lifetime, and so astonished me that I nearly fell off my
chair. Sheep, peat-stacks, cairn, and hills all vanished together, and in
place of the sweet heather there was the table with the tiresome papers. I
reached out yearningly after the heath; I had not seen it for such a long
time,--how long it did seem!--and--but in the same breath it was all there
again in the smile that lighted up Frands's broad face like a glint of
sunlight from a leaden sky.
"Joesses, jou," he laughed, "no ka a da saa grou godt."[1]
[1] My exclamation on finding myself so suddenly translated back to
Denmark was an impatient "Why, don't you understand me?" His answer
was, "Lord, yes, now I do, indeed."
It was the first honest Danish word he had heard since he came to this
bewildering land. I read it in his face, no longer heavy or dull; saw it
in the way he followed my speech--spelling the words, as it were, with his
own lips, to lose no syllable; caught it in his glad smile as he went on
telling me about his journey, his home, and his homesickness for the
heath, with a breathless kind of haste, as if, now that at last he had a
chance, he were afraid it was all a dream, and that he would presently
wake up and find it gone. Then the officer pulled my sleeve.
He had coughed once or twice, but neither of us had heard him. Now he held
out a paper he had brought, with an apologetic gesture. It was an
agreement Frands was to sign, if he was going to Florida. I glanced at it.
Florida? Yes, to be sure; oh, yes, Florida. I spoke to the officer, and it
was in the Jutland dialect. I tried again, with no better luck. I saw him
looking at me queerly, as if he thought it was not quite right with me,
either, and then I recovered myself, and got back to the office and to
America; but it was an effort. One does not skip across thirty years and
two oceans, at my age, so easily as that.
And then the dull look came back into Frands's eyes, and he nodded
stolidly. Yes, he would go to Florida. The papers were made out, and off
he went, after giving me a hearty hand-shake that warranted he would come
out right when he became accustomed to the new country; but he took
something with him which it hurt me to part with.
* * * * *
Frands is long since in Florida, growing up with the country, and little
Yette is a young woman. So long ago was it that the current which sucked
her under cast her up again, that there lives not in the whole street any
one who can recall her loss. I tried to find one only the other day, but
all the old people were dead or had moved away, and of the young, who were
very anxious to help me, scarcely one was born at that time. But still the
maelstrom drags down its victims; and far away lies my Danish heath under
the gray October sky, hidden behind the seas.
THE SLIPPER-MAKER'S FAST
Isaac Josephs, slipper-maker, sat up on the fifth floor of his
Allen-street tenement, in the gray of the morning, to finish the task he
had set himself before Yom Kippur. Three days and three nights he had
worked without sleep, almost without taking time to eat, to make ready the
two dozen slippers that were to enable him to fast the fourth day and
night for conscience' sake, and now they were nearly done. As he saw the
end of his task near, he worked faster and faster, while the tenement
slept.
Three years he had slaved for the sweater, stinted and starved himself,
before he had saved enough to send for his wife and children, awaiting his
summons in the city by the Black Sea. Since they came they had slaved and
starved together; for wages had become steadily less, work more grinding,
and hours longer and later. Still, of that he thought little. They had
known little else, there or here, and they were together now. The past was
dead; the future was their own, even in the Allen-street tenement, toiling
night and day at starvation wages. To-morrow was the feast, their first
Yom Kippur since they had come together again,--Esther, his wife, and Ruth
and little Ben,--the feast when, priest and patriarch of his own house, he
might forget his bondage and be free. Poor little Ben! The hand that
smoothed the soft leather on the last took a tenderer, lingering touch as
he glanced toward the stool where the child had sat watching him work till
his eyes grew small. Brave little Ben, almost a baby yet, but so patient,
so wise, and so strong!
The deep breathing of the sleeping children reached him from their crib.
He smiled and listened, with the half-finished slipper in his hand. As he
sat thus, a great drowsiness came upon him. He nodded once, twice; his
hands sank into his lap, his head fell forward upon his chest. In the
silence of the morning he slept, worn out with utter weariness.
He awoke with a guilty start to find the first rays of the dawn struggling
through his window, and his task yet undone. With desperate energy he
seized the unfinished slipper to resume his work. His unsteady hand upset
the little lamp by his side, upon which his burnishing-iron was heating.
The oil blazed up on the floor and ran toward the nearly finished pile of
work. The cloth on the table caught fire. In a fever of terror and
excitement, the slipper-maker caught it in his hands, wrung it, and tore
at it to smother the flames. His hands were burned, but what of that? The
slippers, the slippers! If they were burned, it was ruin. There would be
no Yom Kippur, no feast of Atonement, no fast--rather, no end of it;
starvation for him and his.
He beat the fire with his hands and trampled it with his feet as it burned
and spread on the floor. His hair and his beard caught fire. With a
despairing shriek he gave it up and fell before the precious slippers,
barring the way of the flames to them with his body.
The shriek woke his wife. She sprang out of bed, snatched up a blanket,
and threw it upon the fire. It went out, was smothered under the blanket.
The slipper-maker sat up, panting and grateful. His Yom Kippur was saved.
The tenement awoke to hear of the fire in the morning, when all Jewtown
was stirring with preparations for the feast. The slipper-maker's wife was
setting the house to rights for the holiday then. Two half-naked children
played about her knees, asking eager questions about it. Asked if her
husband had often to work so hard, and what he made by it, she shrugged
her shoulders and said: "The rent and a crust."
And yet all this labor and effort to enable him to fast one day according
to the old dispensation, when all the rest of the days he fasted according
to the new!
PAOLO'S AWAKENING
Paolo sat cross-legged on his bench, stitching away for dear life. He
pursed his lips and screwed up his mouth into all sorts of odd shapes with
the effort, for it was an effort. He was only eight, and you would
scarcely have imagined him over six, as he sat there sewing like a real
little tailor; only Paolo knew but one seam, and that a hard one. Yet he
held the needle and felt the edge with it in quite a grown-up way, and
pulled the thread just as far as his short arm would reach. His mother sat
on a stool by the window, where she could help him when he got into a
snarl,--as he did once in a while, in spite of all he could do,--or when
the needle had to be threaded. Then she dropped her own sewing, and,
patting him on the head, said he was a good boy.
Paolo felt very proud and big then, that he was able to help his mother,
and he worked even more carefully and faithfully than before, so that the
boss should find no fault. The shouts of the boys in the block, playing
duck-on-a-rock down in the street, came in through the open window, and he
laughed as he heard them. He did not envy them, though he liked well
enough to romp with the others. His was a sunny temper, content with what
came; besides, his supper was at stake, and Paolo had a good appetite.
They were in sober earnest working for dear life--Paolo and his mother.
"Pants" for the sweater in Stanton street was what they were making;
little knickerbockers for boys of Paolo's own age. "Twelve pants for ten
cents," he said, counting on his fingers. The mother brought them once a
week--a big bundle which she carried home on her head--to have the buttons
put on, fourteen on each pair, the bottoms turned up, and a ribbon sewed
fast to the back seam inside. That was called finishing. When work was
brisk--and it was not always so since there had been such frequent strikes
in Stanton street--they could together make the rent-money, and even more,
as Paolo was learning and getting a stronger grip on the needle week by
week. The rent was six dollars a month for a dingy basement room, in which
it was twilight even on the brightest days, and a dark little cubbyhole,
where it was always midnight, and where there was just room for a bed of
old boards, no more. In there slept Paolo with his uncle; his mother made
her bed on the floor of the "kitchen," as they called it.
The three made the family. There used to be four; but one stormy night in
winter Paolo's father had not come home. The uncle came alone, and the
story he told made the poor home in the basement darker and drearier for
many a day than it had yet been. The two men worked together for a padrone
on the scows. They were in the crew that went out that day to the
dumping-ground, far outside the harbor. It was a dangerous journey in a
rough sea. The half-frozen Italians clung to the great heaps like so many
frightened flies, when the waves rose and tossed the unwieldy scows about,
bumping one against the other, though they were strung out in a long row
behind the tug, quite a distance apart. One sea washed entirely over the
last scow and nearly upset it. When it floated even again, two of the
crew were missing, one of them Paolo's father. They had been washed away
and lost, miles from shore. No one ever saw them again.
The widow's tears flowed for her dead husband, whom she could not even see
laid in a grave which the priest had blessed. The good father spoke to her
of the sea as a vast God's-acre, over which the storms are forever
chanting anthems in his praise to whom the secrets of its depths are
revealed; but she thought of it only as the cruel destroyer that had
robbed her of her husband, and her tears fell faster. Paolo cried, too:
partly because his mother cried; partly, if the truth must be told,
because he was not to have a ride to the cemetery in the splendid coach.
Giuseppe Salvatore, in the corner house, had never ceased talking of the
ride he had when his father died, the year before. Pietro and Jim went
along, too, and rode all the way behind the hearse with black plumes. It
was a sore subject with Paolo, for he was in school that day.
And then he and his mother dried their tears and went to work. Henceforth
there was to be little else for them. The luxury of grief is not among the
few luxuries which Mott-street tenements afford. Paolo's life, after
that, was lived mainly with the pants on his hard bench in the rear
tenement. His routine of work was varied by the household duties, which he
shared with his mother. There were the meals to get, few and plain as they
were. Paolo was the cook, and not infrequently, when a building was being
torn down in the neighborhood, he furnished the fuel as well. Those were
his off days, when he put the needle away and foraged with the other
children, dragging old beams and carrying burdens far beyond his years.
The truant officer never found his way to Paolo's tenement to discover
that he could neither read nor write, and, what was more, would probably
never learn. It would have been of little use, for the public schools
thereabouts were crowded, and Paolo could not have got into one of them if
he had tried. The teacher from the Industrial School, which he had
attended for one brief season while his father was alive, called at long
intervals, and brought him once a plant, which he set out in his mother's
window-garden and nursed carefully ever after. The "garden" was contained
within an old starch-box, which had its place on the window-sill since
the policeman had ordered the fire-escape to be cleared. It was a
kitchen-garden with vegetables, and was almost all the green there was in
the landscape. From one or two other windows in the yard there peeped
tufts of green; but of trees there was none in sight--nothing but the bare
clothes-poles with their pulley-lines stretching from every window.
Beside the cemetery plot in the next block there was not an open spot or
breathing-place, certainly not a playground, within reach of that great
teeming slum that harbored more than a hundred thousand persons, young and
old. Even the graveyard was shut in by a high brick wall, so that a
glimpse of the greensward over the old mounds was to be caught only
through the spiked iron gates, the key to which was lost, or by standing
on tiptoe and craning one's neck. The dead there were of more account,
though they had been forgotten these many years, than the living children
who gazed so wistfully upon the little paradise through the barred gates,
and were chased by the policeman when he came that way. Something like
this thought was in Paolo's mind when he stood at sunset and peered in at
the golden rays falling athwart the green, but he did not know it. Paolo
was not a philosopher, but he loved beauty and beautiful things, and was
conscious of a great hunger which there was nothing in his narrow world to
satisfy.
Certainly not in the tenement. It was old and rickety and wretched, in
keeping with the slum of which it formed a part. The whitewash was peeling
off the walls, the stairs were patched, and the door-step long since worn
entirely away. It was hard to be decent in such a place, but the widow did
the best she could. Her rooms were as neat as the general dilapidation
would permit. On the shelf where the old clock stood, flanked by the best
crockery, most of it cracked and yellow with age, there was red and green
paper cut in scallops very nicely. Garlic and onions hung in strings over
the stove, and the red peppers that grew in the starch-box at the window
gave quite a cheerful appearance to the room. In the corner, under a cheap
print of the Virgin Mary with the Child, a small night-light in a blue
glass was always kept burning. It was a kind of illumination in honor of
the Mother of God, through which the widow's devout nature found
expression. Paolo always looked upon it as a very solemn show. When he
said his prayers, the sweet, patient eyes in the picture seemed to watch
him with a mild look that made him turn over and go to sleep with a sigh
of contentment. He felt then that he had not been altogether bad, and that
he was quite safe in their keeping.
Yet Paolo's life was not wholly without its bright spots. Far from it.
There were the occasional trips to the dump with Uncle Pasquale's dinner,
where there was always sport to be had in chasing the rats that overran
the place, fighting for the scraps and bones the trimmers had rescued from
the scows. There were so many of them, and so bold were they, that an old
Italian who could no longer dig was employed to sit on a bale of rags and
throw things at them, lest they carry off the whole establishment. When he
hit one, the rest squealed and scampered away; but they were back again in
a minute, and the old man had his hands full pretty nearly all the time.
Paolo thought that his was a glorious job, as any boy might, and hoped
that he would soon be old, too, and as important. And then the men at the
cage--a great wire crate into which the rags from the ash-barrels were
stuffed, to be plunged into the river, where the tide ran through them
and carried some of the loose dirt away. That was called washing the rags.
To Paolo it was the most exciting thing in the world. What if some day the
crate should bring up a fish, a real fish, from the river? When he thought
of it, he wished that he might be sitting forever on that string-piece,
fishing with the rag-cage, particularly when he was tired of stitching and
turning over, a whole long day.
Besides, there were the real holidays, when there was a marriage, a
christening, or a funeral in the tenement, particularly when a baby died
whose father belonged to one of the many benefit societies. A brass band
was the proper thing then, and the whole block took a vacation to follow
the music and the white hearse out of their ward into the next. But the
chief of all the holidays came once a year, when the feast of St.
Rocco--the patron saint of the village where Paolo's parents had
lived--was celebrated. Then a really beautiful altar was erected at one
end of the yard, with lights and pictures on it. The rear fire-escapes in
the whole row were decked with sheets, and made into handsome
balconies,--reserved seats, as it were,--on which the tenants sat and
enjoyed it. A band in gorgeous uniforms played three whole days in the
yard, and the men in their holiday clothes stepped up, bowed, and crossed
themselves, and laid their gifts on the plate which St. Rocco's namesake,
the saloon-keeper in the block, who had got up the celebration, had put
there for them. In the evening they set off great strings of fire-crackers
in the street, in the saint's honor, until the police interfered once and
forbade that. Those were great days for Paolo always.
But the fun Paolo loved best of all was when he could get in a corner by
himself, with no one to disturb him, and build castles and things out of
some abandoned clay or mortar, or wet sand if there was nothing better.
The plastic material took strange shapes of beauty under his hands. It was
as if life had been somehow breathed into it by his touch, and it ordered
itself as none of the other boys could make it. His fingers were tipped
with genius, but he did not know it, for his work was only for the hour.
He destroyed it as soon as it was made, to try for something better. What
he had made never satisfied him--one of the surest proofs that he was
capable of great things, had he only known it. But, as I said, he did
not.
The teacher from the Industrial School came upon him one day, sitting in
the corner by himself, and breathing life into the mud. She stood and
watched him awhile, unseen, getting interested, almost excited, as he
worked on. As for Paolo, he was solving the problem that had eluded him so
long, and had eyes or thought for nothing else. As his fingers ran over
the soft clay, the needle, the hard bench, the pants, even the sweater
himself, vanished out of his sight, out of his life, and he thought only
of the beautiful things he was fashioning to express the longing in his
soul, which nothing mortal could shape. Then, suddenly, seeing and
despairing, he dashed it to pieces, and came back to earth and to the
tenement.
But not to the pants and the sweater. What the teacher had seen that day
had set her to thinking, and her visit resulted in a great change for
Paolo. She called at night and had a long talk with his mother and uncle
through the medium of the priest, who interpreted when they got to a hard
place. Uncle Pasquale took but little part in the conversation. He sat by
and nodded most of the time, assured by the presence of the priest that
it was all right. The widow cried a good deal, and went more than once to
take a look at the boy, lying snugly tucked in his bed in the inner room,
quite unconscious of the weighty matters that were being decided
concerning him. She came back the last time drying her eyes, and laid both
her hands in the hand of the teacher. She nodded twice and smiled through
her tears, and the bargain was made. Paolo's slavery was at an end.
His friend came the next day and took him away, dressed up in his best
clothes, to a large school where there were many children, not of his own
people, and where he was received kindly. There dawned that day a new life
for Paolo, for in the afternoon trays of modeling-clay were brought in,
and the children were told to mold in it objects that were set before
them. Paolo's teacher stood by, and nodded approvingly as his little
fingers played so deftly with the clay, his face all lighted up with joy
at this strange kind of a school-lesson.
After that he had a new and faithful friend, and, as he worked away,
putting his whole young soul into the tasks that filled it with radiant
hope, other friends, rich and powerful, found him out in his slum. They
brought better-paying work for his mother than sewing pants for the
sweater, and Uncle Pasquale abandoned the scows to become a porter in a
big shipping-house on the West Side. The little family moved out of the
old home into a better tenement, though not far away. Paolo's loyal heart
clung to the neighborhood where he had played and dreamed as a child, and
he wanted it to share in his good fortune, now that it had come. As the
days passed, the neighbors who had known him as little Paolo came to speak
of him as one who some day would be a great artist and make them all
proud. He laughed at that, and said that the first bust he would hew in
marble should be that of his patient, faithful mother; and with that he
gave her a little hug, and danced out of the room, leaving her to look
after him with glistening eyes, brimming over with happiness.
But Paolo's dream was to have another awakening. The years passed and
brought their changes. In the manly youth who came forward as his name was
called in the academy, and stood modestly at the desk to receive his
diploma, few would have recognized the little ragamuffin who had dragged
bundles of fire-wood to the rookery in the alley, and carried Uncle
Pasquale's dinner-pail to the dump. But the audience gathered to witness
the commencement exercises knew it all, and greeted him with a hearty
welcome that recalled his early struggles and his hard-won success. It was
Paolo's day of triumph. The class honors and the medal were his. The bust
that had won both stood in the hall crowned with laurel--an Italian
peasant woman, with sweet, gentle face, in which there lingered the
memories of the patient eyes that had lulled the child to sleep in the old
days in the alley. His teacher spoke to him, spoke of him, with pride in
voice and glance; spoke tenderly of his old mother of the tenement, of his
faithful work, of the loyal manhood that ever is the soul and badge of
true genius. As he bade him welcome to the fellowship of artists who in
him honored the best and noblest in their own aspirations, the emotion of
the audience found voice once more. Paolo, flushed, his eyes filled with
happy tears, stumbled out, he knew not how, with the coveted parchment in
his hand.
Home to his mother! It was the one thought in his mind as he walked
toward the big bridge to cross to the city of his home--to tell her of his
joy, of his success. Soon she would no longer be poor. The day of hardship
was over. He could work now and earn money, much money, and the world
would know and honor Paolo's mother as it had honored him. As he walked
through the foggy winter day toward the river, where delayed throngs
jostled one another at the bridge entrance, he thought with grateful heart
of the friends who had smoothed the way for him. Ah, not for long the fog
and slush! The medal carried with it a traveling stipend, and soon the
sunlight of his native land for him and her. He should hear the surf wash
on the shingly beach and in the deep grottoes of which she had sung to him
when a child. Had he not promised her this? And had they not many a time
laughed for very joy at the prospect, the two together?
He picked his way up the crowded stairs, carefully guarding the precious
roll. The crush was even greater than usual. There had been
delay--something wrong with the cable; but a train was just waiting, and
he hurried on board with the rest, little heeding what became of him so
long as the diploma was safe. The train rolled out on the bridge, with
Paolo wedged in the crowd on the platform of the last car, holding the
paper high over his head, where it was sheltered safe from the fog and the
rain and the crush.
Another train backed up, received its load of cross humanity, and vanished
in the mist. The damp gray curtain had barely closed behind it, and the
impatient throng was fretting at a further delay, when consternation
spread in the bridge-house. Word had come up from the track that something
had happened. Trains were stalled all along the route. While the dread and
uncertainty grew, a messenger ran up, out of breath. There had been a
collision. The last train had run into the one preceding it, in the fog.
One was killed, others were injured. Doctors and ambulances were wanted.