Lemuel entered a lighted doorway from a bricked courtyard, and found
himself with twenty or thirty houseless comrades in a large, square
room, with benching against the wall for them to sit on. They were all
silent and quelled-looking, except a young fellow whom Lemuel sat down
beside, and who, ascertaining that he was a new-comer, seemed disposed
to do the honours of the place. He was not daunted by the reserve native
to Lemuel, or by that distrust of strangers which experience had so soon
taught him. He addressed him promptly as mate, and told him that the
high, narrow, three-sided tabling in the middle of the room was where
they would get their breakfast, if they lived.
“And I guess I shall live,” he said. “I notice I 'most always live till
breakfast-time, whatever else I do, or I don't do; but sometimes it
don't seem as if I _could_ saw my way through that quarter of a cord
of wood.” At a glance of inquiry which Lemuel could not forbear, he
continued: “What I mean by a quarter of a cord of wood is that they let
you exercise that much free in the morning, before they give you your
breakfast: it's the doctor's orders. This used to be a school-house, but
it's in better business now. They got a kitchen under here, that beats
the Parker House; you'll smell it pretty soon. No whacking on the
knuckles here any more. All serene, I tell you. You'll see. I don't know
how I should got along without this institution, and I tell the manager
so, every time I see him. That's him, hollering 'Next,' out of that room
there. It's a name he gives all of us; he knows it's a name we'll answer
to. Don't you forget it when it comes your turn.”
He was younger than Lemuel, apparently, but his swarthy, large-mouthed,
droll eyed face affirmed the experience of a sage. He wore a blue
flannel shirt, with loose trousers belted round his waist, and he
crushed a soft felt hat between his hands; his hair was clipped close
to his skull, and as he rubbed it now and then it gave out a pleasant
rasping sound.
The tramps disappeared in the order of their vicinity to the manager's
door, and it came in time to this boy and Lemuel.
“You come along with me,” he said, “and do as I do.” When they entered
the presence of the manager, who sat at a desk, Lemuel's guide nodded to
him, and handed over his order for a bed.
“Ever been here before?” asked the manager, as if going through the form
for a joke.
“Never.” He took a numbered card which the manager gave him, and stood
aside to wait for Lemuel, who made the same answer to the same question,
and received his numbered card.
“Now,” said the young fellow, as they passed out of another door, “we
ain't either of us 'Next,' any more. I'm Thirty-nine, and you're
Forty, and don't you forget it. All right, boss,” he called back to
the manager; “I'll take care of him! This way,” he said to Lemuel. “The
reason why I said I'd never been here before,” he explained on the way
down, “was because you got to say something, when he asks you. Most of
'em says last fall or last year, but I say never, because it's just
as true, and he seems to like it better. We're going down to the
dressing-room now, and then we're going to take a bath. Do you know
why?”
“No,” said Lemuel.
“Because we can't help it. It's the doctor's orders. He thinks it's the
best thing you can do, just before you go to bed.”
The basement was brightly lighted with gas everywhere, and a savoury
odour of onion-flavoured broth diffused itself through the whole place.
“Smell it? You might think that was supper, but it ain't. It's
breakfast. You got a bath and a night's rest as well as the quarter of a
cord of wood between you and that stew. Hungry?”
“Not very,” said Lemuel faintly.
“Because if you say you are they'll give you all the bread and water you
can hold, now. But I ruther wait.”
“I guess I don't want anything to-night,” said Lemuel, shrinking from
the act of beggary.
“Well, I guess you won't lose anything in the long run,” said the other.
“You'll make it up at breakfast.”
They turned into a room where eight or ten tramps were undressing; some
of them were old men, quite sodden and stupefied with a life of vagrancy
and privation; others were of a dull or cunning middle-age, two or three
were as young as Lemuel and his partner, and looked as if they might be
poor fellows who had found themselves in a strange city without money
or work. But it was against them that they had known where to come for a
night's shelter, Lemuel felt.
There were large iron hooks hanging from the walls and ceiling, and his
friend found the numbers on two of them corresponding to those given
Lemuel and himself, and brass checks which they hung around their necks.
“You got to hang your things on that hook, all but your shoes and
stockings, and you got to hang on to _them_, yourself. Forty's your
number, and forty's your hook, and they give you the clothes off'n it in
the morning.”
He led the way through the corridor into a large room where a row
of bath-tubs flanked the wall, half of them filled with bathers, who
chatted in tones of subdued cheerfulness under the pleasant excitement
of unlimited hot and cold water. As each new-comer appeared, a black
boy, perched on a windowsill, jumped down and dashed his head from a
large bottle which he carried.
“Free shampoo,” explained Lemuel's mate. “Doctor's orders. Only you have
to do the rubbing yourself. I don't suppose _you_ need it, but some the
pardners here couldn't sleep without it,” he continued, as Lemuel
shrank a little from the bottle, and then submitted. “It's a regular
night-cap.”
The tramps recognised the humour of the explanation by a laugh, intended
to be respectful to the establishment in its control, which spread along
their line, and the black boy grinned.
“There ain't anything mean about the Wayfarer's Hotel,” said the mate,
and they all laughed again, a little louder.
Each man, having dried himself from his bath, was given a coarse linen
night-gown; sometimes it was not quite whole, but it was always clean;
and then he gathered up his shoes and stockings and went out.
“Hold on a minute,” said the mate to Lemuel, when they left the
bath-room. “You ought to see the kitchen,” and in his night-gown,
with his shoes in his hand, he led Lemuel to the open door which that
delicious smell of broth came from. A vast copper-topped boiler was
bubbling within, and trying to get its lid off. The odour made Lemuel
sick with hunger.
“Refrigerator in the next room,” the mate lectured on. “Best beef-chucks
in the market; fish for Fridays--we don't make any man go against his
religion, in _this_ house; pots of butter as big as a cheese,--none of
your oleomargarine,--the real thing, every time; potatoes and onions
and carrots laying around on the floor; barrels of hard-tack; and bread,
like sponge,--bounce you up if you was to jump on it,--baked by the
women at the Chardon Street Home--oh, I tell you we do things in style
here.”
A man who sat reading a newspaper in the corner looked up sharply.
“Hello, there! what's wanted?”
“Just dropped in to wish you good night, Jimmy,” said Lemuel's mate.
“You clear out!” said the man good-humouredly, as if to an old
acquaintance, who must not be allowed to presume upon his familiarity.
“All right, Jimmy,” said the boy. He set his left hand horizontally on
its wrist at his left shoulder and cut the air with it in playful menace
as the man dropped his eyes again to his paper. “They're all just so,
in this house,” he explained to Lemuel. “No nonsense, but good-natured.
_They're_ all right. They know me.”
He mounted two flights of stairs in front of Lemuel to a corridor, where
an attendant stood examining the numbers on the brass checks hung
around tramps' necks as they came up with their shoes in their hands. He
instructed them that the numbers corresponded to the cots they were
to occupy, as well as the hooks where their clothes hung. Some of them
seemed hardly able to master the facts. They looked wistfully, like
cowed animals, into his face as he made the case clear.
Two vast rooms, exquisitely clean, like the whole house, opened on the
right and left of the corridor, and presented long phalanxes of cots,
each furnished with two coarse blankets, a quilt, and a thin pillow.
“Used to be school-rooms,” said Lemuel's mate, in a low tone.
“Cots thirty-nine and forty,” said the attendant, looking at their
checks. “Right over there, in the corner.”
“Come along,” said the mate, leading the way, with the satisfaction of
an _habitué_. “Best berth in the room, and about the last they reach in
the morning. You see, they got to take us as we come, when they call us,
and the last feller in at night's the first feller out in the morning,
because his bed's the nearest the door.”
He did not pull down the blankets of his cot at once, but stretched
himself out in the quilt that covered them. “Cool off a little, first,”
he explained. “Well, this is what I call comfort, mate, heigh?”
Lemuel did not answer. He was watching the attendant with a group of
tramps who could not find their cots.
“Can't read, I suppose,” said the mate, a little disdainfully. “Well,
look at that old chap, will you!” A poor fellow was fumbling with his
blankets, as if he did not know quite how to manage them. The attendant
had to come to his help, and tuck him in. “Well, there!” exclaimed the
mate, lifting himself on his elbow to admire the scene. “I don't suppose
he's ever been in a decent bed before. Hayloft's _his_ style, or a
board-pile.” He sank down again, and went on: “Well, you do see all
kinds of folks here, that's a fact. Sorry there ain't more in to-night,
so 's to give you a specimen. You ought to be here in the winter. Well,
it ain't so lonesome now, in summer, as it used to be. Sometimes I used
to have nearly the whole place to myself, summer nights, before they got
to passin' these laws against tramps in the country, and lockin' 'em
up when they ketched 'em. That drives 'em into the city summers, now;
because they're always sure of a night's rest and a day's board here if
they ask for it. But winter's the time. You'll see all these cots full,
then. They let on the steam-heat, and it's comfortable; and it's always
airy and healthy.” The vast room was, in fact, perfectly ventilated,
and the poor who housed themselves that night, and many well-to-do
sojourners in hotels, had reason to envy the vagrants their free
lodging.
The mate now got under his quilt, and turned his face toward Lemuel,
with one hand under his cheek. “They don't let _every_body into this
room, 's I was tellin' ye. This room is for the big-bugs, you know.
Sometimes a drunk will get in, though, in spite of everything. Why, I've
seen a drunk at the station-house, when I've been gettin' my order for a
bed, stiffen up so 't the captain himself thought he was sober; and then
I've followed him round here, wobblin' and corkscrewin' all over the
sidewalk; and then I've seen him stiffen up in the office again, and go
through his bath like a little man, and get into bed as drunk as a fish;
and may be wake up in the night with the man with the poker after him,
and make things hum. Well, sir, one night there was a drunk in here that
thought the man with the poker was after him, and he just up and jumped
out of this window behind you--three stories from the ground.”
Lemuel could not help lifting himself in bed to look at it. “Did it kill
him?” he asked. “Kill him? _No_! You can't kill a _drunk_. One night
there was a drunk got loose, here, and he run downstairs into the
wood-yard, and he got hold of an axe down there, and it took five men to
get that axe away from that drunk. He was goin' for the snakes.”
“The snakes,” repeated Lemuel. “Are there snakes in the wood-yard?”
The other gave a laugh so loud that the attendant called out, “Less
noise over there!”
“I'll tell you about the snakes in the morning,” said the mate; and he
turned his face away from Lemuel.
The stories of the drunks had made Lemuel a little anxious; but he
thought that attendant would keep a sharp lookout, so that there would
not really be much danger. He was very drowsy from his bath, in spite of
the hunger that tormented him, but he tried to keep awake and think what
he should do after breakfast.