That Sunday morning in his single, dark, narrow room, Hermann
Hoffmann, the erstwhile driver of a brewery-wagon and the coming
Second Avenue barkeeper, arose with the dawn, just as if it had been
a workday morning, and set about his elaborate toilet, whistling.
To the casual eye there would have seemed little in his surroundings
to inspire any lyric joy. The cell-like apartment, which was the
only spot on earth that Hermann might call his home, was a back room
on the top floor of a damp and gloomy tenement in a filthy court
running off Houston Street near Avenue A. Only at noon did the pale
sunlight strain into that court, crowded all morning with malarious
dogs and dirty, toddling babies solemnly, but vainly, trying to learn
how to play, and echoing all through the black night now to the
curses of scarred, slinking tiger-cats, now to the staggering
footsteps or the brawling oaths of drunkards reeling homeward through
the evil-smelling darkness, and again to the piercing cry of a woman
in mortal agony or mortal fear.
Robbins's Row was no place for a policeman after nightfall, and
scarcely a safer place for a stranger by day. From its sagging file
of dirty, paper-patched windows, more or less feminine shapes leaned
out, calling gossip to their neighbors, and hauling at the pullied
ropes that, crossing the street, spread above the pedestrians a
tossing, parti-colored canopy of "wash." You entered it by climbing
three rotting wooden steps, by stumbling through a wet hall, where a
blue-burning gas-jet accentuated the sense of perpetual midnight, and
you could reach the room of Hermann Hoffmann only by a perilous climb
of six flights of stairs.
That room was as bare as any in the building. It looked out, by a
single slit in the wall, upon a light-shaft, strangely misnamed. Its
only furniture was a cot, a wooden-seated chair, a washstand, and,
bearing comb and brushes and shaving-utensils, one of those pine
bureaus the drawers of which may be opened in ten minutes, and
closed, if you are lucky, in fifteen. Yet the note of the place was
the note of order and of neatness; the bare floor was clean, and,
against the fresh and brightly papered wall, there hung here a calico
curtain that hid the tenant's wardrobe and there a single shelf
bearing only, as if it were an altar consecrated to one holy object,
a thumbed and dog's-eared copy of "Das Kapital."
Hermann plunged his ruddy face, whistling, into a bowl of water and
drew it out, more ruddy and whistling still. Even the author of that
portentous volume on the book-shelf used to sing "Strausbourg," and
Hermann's single anthem was "Die Wacht Am Rhein."
Still pursuing that inspiring music, he turned to the bureau and
began to shave the yellow down from his cheeks and chin. Thrust
between the exaggerating mirror and its frame were two
photographs--the one, a trifle faded, of a matronly, kindly woman of
his own race, perhaps fifty years old, stiffly arrayed in a silk
dress rigorously American, and the other, a new one, that of a young
girl in a great hat and unmistakably Manhattan dress, a young girl
with a pretty, piquant face of that distinctively American type--the
Irish. Perhaps these photographs distracted the German's attention;
perhaps it was only that no man living can successfully whistle and
shave at one and the same time. At any rate, his hand shook, and the
razor cut a light gash in his upper lip.
He flung the offending blade from him, and it struck the mirror,
cracking the glass across one corner.
"Ach, Gott," he smiled, as he staunched the blood with a heavy
pressure through a rough towel; and then, in the English that he used
even in his soliloquies: "Dey say now dot means bad luck fer seven
year. Lucky is't dot I am not suberstitious!"
And then, undisturbed, he quietly resumed his whistling, finished
shaving, sleeked down his rebellious tow-colored curls, got into a
newly pressed brown suit and yellow shirt, donned a high collar and
salmon tie, and, setting a carefully brushed derby upon his head,
descended to the narrow street, the strains of "Die Wacht Am Rhein"
lingering behind him through the darkened hallway.
To accomplish the purpose of his early rising, he took the Third
Avenue elevated to the Forty-second Street station. There he bought
two bouquets of carnations--one pink and the other white--and boarded
a suburban train, which bore him, at last, to one of those little
stations that New York, which has so small time for remembrance, has
selected for the hiding of its dead.
In the warm sunlight of the spring morning, Hermann picked his
certain way among the green grass and the white-roofed habitations of
the sleepers, until he came upon a little plot, by no means the
cheapest or more obscure in the burying-ground, and there, his lips
still pursed, but silent now, took off his shining derby and paused
before the solitary white stone. With much that was unaffectedly
reverent, he knelt, according to his weekly custom, and placed the
white carnations on the grave, and with a great deal that was just as
unaffectedly proud, he read, also according to that custom, the
inscription cut upon the white stone that he had purchased with what,
when he paid the bill, happened to be his last dollar:
Here In Peace
Lies The Body Of
WlLHELMINA HOFFMANN,
Widow Of Ludwig Hoffmann,
Of Andernach, Rhenish Prussia,
Who Dep't'd This Life, Jan. 10, 1907.
------
"_Wait thou, wait thou; soon thou shall rest also._"
The inscription was in English, but when he had finished reading it,
the dead woman's son said, under his breath, the Lord's Prayer in the
language of Luther, as she had taught it him.
"She liked me to pray," he shamefacedly explained to the
circumambient atmosphere, as if prayer in any tongue were a
compromise with his principles. "Und vhile I'm aboud it, I mighd as
vell use de old langwage. If the Herr Gott listens at all, He'd hear
it some besser in de vay She said it."
And then he resumed his hat and his anthem, and returned to town.
Katie Flanagan was waiting for him as he came hurrying up the steps
from the subway at Park Place--the piquant, pretty girl of the
photograph, in black, because her parents had died not long since,
but in black just as elaborate as her slender purse would permit,
because she knew the full value of her raven hair and blossoming
cheeks and tender eyes of Irish blue.
"Ach," gasped Hermann, "hof I kep' you a long time vaitin'?"
"Only about as long as you mostly do," she answered. Her voice was
like her eyes, and she spoke with but the charming hint of a Galway
brogue.
The German's cheeks burned with humiliation.
"I'm sorry," he apologized. "I god up early to be on dime, bud de
train vas lade from the cem't'ry in."
She understood and smiled.
"It's only five minutes I've been here," she confessed.
"Und I brought you a few bosies, Katie. I d'ought maybe----"
"Oh!" she seized the carnations with a laugh of delight, and buried
her nose in them. "It's good y'are to think of such things,
Hermann--and a bad lad that y'are to spend the money so!"
They were making their way toward the Bridge, the sturdy Hoffmann
shouldering a passage through the momentarily swelling Sunday morning
crowd.
"Dot liddle makes nussing," he proudly protested. "To-morrow I begin
ad my new tshob."
"But that," said Katie, "won't pay you hardly wan dollar a week
more'n the brewery did. I dunno, but I think----"
There, however, her protest, for the moment, ended. They were
caught, clinging together, in the whirlpool of the entrance; carried
nearly off their feet, rushed by the ticket-window with a quick
exchange of small coin, and, a few minutes later, were battling their
way among the press into a waiting Coney Island train.
In the last charge, Hermann, his lips puckered in the battle-hymn,
did heroic service. While Katie hung tightly to one arm, he used
manfully the elbow of the other; pushed a guard to the right; shoved
two cigarette-smoking youths to the left; wriggled through the
already crowded platform and shot into one of the coveted
"cross-seats." Much of the park would not be open for a month or
more to come, but New York was already clamoring for its playground.
Katie, flushed and triumphant, sank beside him, and busied herself
with the task of straightening her big black hat. Hermann watched
her in frank admiration as she sat there, her arms raised to her
head, in that pose which, of all others, is the most becoming to her
sex.
"What are you lookin' at?" she archly wondered, casting a smiling,
sidelong, blue glance at him.
But before her the strong man was a timid child.
"Ad de brettiest bicture in a whole vorld," he stammered.
Katie laughed again.
"Och," she said in gratified disapproval, "there sure must be a
Castle Blarney somewhere on the Rhine. What favor are you wantin' to
ask me now, I wonder."
Once he had started, Hermann was too dogged thus to be retarded.
"It's chust de same old fafor," he pleaded, as, with a great creaking
of brakes, the train began to swing upon the Bridge. "Now I god my
new tshob, Katie, there gan't for nod hafin' our veddin' be no good
reason, gan dere?"
"There's one," she said, still delighting in her coquetry; "there's
one reason."
"Vat is 't?"
"Its name is Father Kelly."
"Katie, you von't led dot gount!"
"I will so."
"Und I haf to gome into your church, und--und all dem d'ings?"
"You do that."
Hermann squirmed; but he knew of old that from this point she was
neither to be persuaded nor driven. It was a discussion that they
had held many a time before, and every time she would give him no
answer to his suit until he should surrender in this particular.
Now, however, he considered himself about to set foot upon the
highroad to prosperity, and the prosperous can ill afford to skimp
magnanimity.
"_All_ righd," he at last somewhat ruefully conceded, though with
certain mental reservations into which it seemed then unnecessary to
enter: "I'm a strong von, und hof stood a lot a'ready, so I t'ink I
gan stand dot too. I'll do it."
He took her by surprise.
"Promise?" she asked.
"Sure I bromise."
"No backin' out whatever happens?"
"No packin' oud."
"Well, God bless you then."
There was a catch in her voice as she said it. Into her lonely,
hardworking life, this strong, soft-hearted, poor and cheerful German
had brought about all the sunshine that she had latterly known, and
she could think of nothing better than to give him the answer that he
was so honestly anxious to hear. But, though he had become more and
more to her from the first evening when he had seized her as she was
falling from the platform of a surface-car that had started too
quickly on its way, she had seen enough of the warfare with poverty
in her own family to resolve that she would not marry until she could
contribute her share to the wages of the resulting household, and now
she had neither a position nor the immediate likelihood of obtaining
one. It was hard, but she was used to hardship, and so, because she
must not cry, she smiled.
Hermann tried to grasp her hand, but she easily eluded him.
"Den, vhen do ve say?" he eagerly demanded.
Much as it hurt her to hurt him, she laughed her answer:
"As soon as I get me fingers on a job that'll pay me six dollars a
week, we'll have Father Kelly say the words for us."
"But Katie"--he used to say "Gatie" until she had teased him out of
it--"you don' mean dot! You said--you dold me--you bromise----"
He floundered in the breakers of amazement. She turned her face
away, and looked out of the window at the gigantic mockery of Liberty
in the harbor; but she could not find it in her heart long to remain
silent. She faced him once more.
"It's no use, Hermann," she said, her eyes very big and serious.
"Here y'are goin' to Schleger's place with your first good chance at
a way as'll lead you to somethin' worth workin' for--you said
yourself it might end in a café o' your own--an' to get there you'll
be needin' every blessed cent you can save. Do you think now I could
look at meself in the glass mornin's if I married you an' kep' you
down? No, thank God, I'm not so bad as that."
He sputtered toward a protest, but she waved him down.
"Now don't be tellin' me that two can live as cheap as one," she
said. "I seen that pleasant lie nailed this many a year, an' I know
more about housekeepin' in five minutes than you can learn in a
lifetime. Things was plenty bad five years past, an' now they're
worse yet. What rent is you know, an' what clothes is you can't even
guess. Here's beefsteak at twenty-two cents the pound; veal up to
thirty an' still goin' up. The papers make a fuss an' get the prices
down three cents for three days, an' then the dealers put them up
again when none's lookin'. An' as for eggs, you can pay seventy-five
cents a dozen for them, winters, with the hour an' minute of the
layin' stamped on them, if you're a millionaire, or you can get nine
for a quarter if you hold your nose."
The hopeful Hermann shook his blonde head.
"But Katie," he said, "I don' gare if I neffer ged a gafé off my own.
I don' vant a gafé: I vant you."
She smiled again.
"You flatter me by the choice," she said; "but if we can get along
without the drink, we can't get along without a bite to eat now an'
then. No, Hermann-boy, it's no use, I'm tellin' you. I seen it
tried. Me father swang a pick and me mother took in washin'--when
she could get it--an' even then it wouldn't work: the one would have
starved to death if the third rail hadn't got him, an' poor mother
killed herself tryin' to keep her an' me. It won't work, an' I know
it."
While the train hurried above the dead level of Brooklyn houses, out
through the suburban monstrosities and across the dunes, the
optimist, still an optimist, renewed his endeavors to find the chance
for lodging his own arguments; but all the while Katie continued to
overwhelm him with a flow of errors. They had almost reached the
sandy island before Hermann, still stubbornly hopeful, elected to
drop the subject for the present, and took up, in its stead, the
story of Violet.
He spoke simply, which is to say forcibly, and he had an
understanding, and therefore sympathetic, audience. Katie's face
immediately softened.
"The poor child!" she murmured. "An' don't I know what it is? I've
seen them go under, here one an' there another, hungry or overworked,
every mother's daughter of them. There was Molly Ryan, as good a
girl as you'd find in a day's search of the parish, left alone with
no one to put clothes on her back; an' pretty Agnes Donovan--out of
work for four months--her as died in the City Hospital; an' Giulia
Fortuni, whose father kept a fruit-stand by the Grand Street "L"
station.--What can we do for her, Hermann-boy?"
"Dot's vat I vanted to ask you, Katie," said Hoffmann. "She has to
hof friends und vork first of all."
"Friends she has right here; but work she must have whether or no. I
begin me old search for meself in the mornin', an' I'll keep eye an'
mouth ready to get a job for her."
Cynically hopeless and city-wise in regard to her own chances,
Katie's Celtic soul warmed to something of Hermann's optimism in the
cause of a sister. She began planning at once, and when the train
drew up outside the tunnel-shed, she had the absent Violet
established as a cloak-model in the big Lennox Department-Store, and
engaged to marry a floor-walker.
And then Coney--Coney the sweetly reasonable in price and the
extravagantly generous in provision--crowded out of her mind, for
that day, all thoughts save the thought of itself.
A great many years ago--oh, a very great many years ago!--when you
were a little boy, your father took you to the county-fair. You
remember it, even yet, as a purple day in the glad calendar of your
childhood: the blood cattle, the show of farm implements, the prize
pumpkins, the side-shows with their fat ladies and skeleton
gentlemen, and the suave individual that put a bean under a cup and
then, for a dollar, showed your shrewd parent that it was under
another. But above all you remember the crowd. Never before had you
seen so many people in one place, never realized that there were so
many people in the world; and even now, out of the past, you can hear
an awed voice saying:
"There are five thousand persons here."
Well, back home, the county-fair, thank heaven, continues to grow.
Cattle are sleeker and pumpkins larger; the fat ladies weigh more and
the thin gentlemen less; the shell-game, in one form or another, aids
the progress of agriculture by making five dollars grow where only
one grew before. But, in the meantime, the ugly, delightful
"amusement-park" has brought the county-fair to the city-limit, and
nearly three hundred thousand persons go to Coney Island every day.
Early in the season though they were, Katie and Hermann no sooner
stepped upon that Surf Avenue which is at once the heart and the
aorta of the Island, than they felt, as there they always felt, that
they had entered upon the Land of Carnival. The broad, but crowded,
way was dancing with the noise of festival, with the clangor of brass
bands, the cries of venders, the smell of the circus, the tang of the
sea.
Here, from mixed drinks to mixed music, went not the thugs and
blacklegs, the pallid men and the painted women that would have
filled such a place had it been within the borough of Manhattan. In
their stead here drove the cars of generally stolid people of
business and leisure, and here, above all, walked the workers of the
city, the weaker sex and the stronger, seeking holiday. The
full-portion hat on the half-portion girl is as familiar to Surf
Avenue as to the Waldorf palm-room; care is erased from the tablets
of memory. On Coney there is no To-morrow.
The laughter of the hundreds of children rang out no more freely than
did that of the thousands of their elders. Mothers with babies in
their arms were young again. Stately blondes and languorous
brunettes, gracefully seated on the wooden steeds of the score of
merry-go-rounds, rode with a dignity unsurpassed in Hyde Park or the
Bois, and never a cowboy at a round-up was more adventurous than the
young East-Sider mounting a hired horse upon the Pony Track.
Every nook had something to sell, and Katie had her day's work in
keeping Hermann from stopping at each booth. There were miles of
scenic railways on all of which he wished to ride; there were scores
of panorama that tempted him with pictures of every disaster from the
San Francisco fire to the Messina earthquake. There were the
familiar canes waiting to be caught with the familiar ring: there
were the familiar chutes to be shot, and the familiar "galleries"
where the rattle of rifles recalled the battle of the Yalu. Down on
the beach an army was shouting in the surf, and on every hand along
the jostling, good-natured street were peanuts and popcorn,
"crispettes" and "hot dogs." Upon dozens of polished floors dancers
were slowly revolving with a marvelous ability to distinguish between
the time of their own orchestra and that of the band in the café
opposite, and everywhere were picture machines and machines that sang.
Cheap it doubtless was, but cheap also in the sense of small cost.
Except in the larger cafés, the ordinary drinks sold at only five
cents the glass, and the glasses were not an insult to the drinkers'
capacity. Hermann and Katie had their beer at one of the smaller
places. They dined for twenty-five cents apiece, without tips, at
the "Home-Made-Lunch-Room"; they were twirled and buffeted in a
swiftly revolving car down a series of precipitous canvas chasms,
paying five cents apiece for the privilege of the shaking-up that, at
home, Hermann would have resented with a blow; and they chose the
last seat in the last car of a steep gravity railway, where a man
must hold himself aboard with one arm and his shrieking sweetheart
aboard with the other.
It was all blatant, all tawdry, all the apotheosis of the ridiculous,
all essentially America-at-play; but when, at night, in the
electric-train shooting through the warm darkness, the pair returned
citywards, it was toward their own hard-earned and with difficulty
retained places of shelter that they were going, like children after
a strenuous holiday of make-believe with school to begin upon the
morrow; and if, in most of the seats, as in that occupied by Katie
and Hermann, girls slept with their heads resting frankly upon
sleeping masculine shoulders, it was but a rest before conventional
partings at home-doorways, the play-day ended for the lonely couch,
and the work-day soon to begin.