Out of the subway they emerged into a noisy tenement street. Roger had
known such streets as this, but only in the night-time, as picturesque and
adventurous ways in an underground world he had explored in search of
strange old glittering rings. It was different now. Gone were the Rembrandt
shadows, the leaping flare of torches, the dark surging masses of weird
uncouth humanity. Here in garish daylight were poverty and ugliness, here
were heaps of refuse and heavy smells and clamor. It disgusted and repelled
him, and he was tempted to turn back. But glancing at Deborah by his side
he thought of the night she had been through. No, he decided, he would go
on and see what she was up to here.
They turned into a narrower street between tall dirty tenements, and in a
twinkling all was changed. For the street, as far as he could see, was gay
with flaunting colors, torrents of bobbing hats and ribbons, frocks and
blouses, shirts and breeches, vivid reds and yellows and blues. It was
deafening with joyous cries, a shrill incessant chatter, chatter, piercing
yells and shrieks of laughter. Children, swarms of children, children of
all sizes passed him, clean and dirty, smiling, scowling, hurrying,
running, pummeling, grabbing, whirling each other 'round and 'round--till
the very air seemed quivering with wild spirits and new life!
He heard Deborah laughing. Five hilarious small boys had hold of her hands
and were marching in triumph waving their caps. "Heigh there--heigh there!
Heigh--heigh--heigh!"
The school was close in front of them. An enormous building of brick and
tile wedged into a disordered mass of tenements, shops and factories, it
had been built around a court shut out from the street by a high steel
fence. They squeezed into the gateway, through which a shouting punching
mob of urchins were now pushing in; and soon from a balcony above Roger
looked down into the court, where out of a wild chaos order was appearing.
Boys to the right and girls to the left were forming in long sinuous lines,
and three thousand faces were turned toward the building. In front appeared
the Stars and Stripes. Then suddenly he heard a crash from underneath the
balcony, and looking down he saw a band made up of some thirty or forty
boys. Their leader, a dark Italian lad, made a flourish, a pass with his
baton, and the band broke into a blaring storm, an uproarious, booming
march. The mob below fell into step, and line after line in single file the
children marched into their school.
"Look up! Look all around you!" He heard Deborah's eager voice in his ear.
And as he looked up from the court below he gave a low cry of amazement. In
hundreds of windows all around, of sweatshops, tenements, factories, on
tier upon tier of fire escapes and even upon the roofs above, silent
watchers had appeared. For this one moment in the day the whole congested
neighborhood had stopped its feverish labor and become an amphitheater with
all eyes upon the school. And the thought flashed into Roger's mind:
"Deborah's big family!"
He had a strange confusing time. In her office, in a daze, he sat and heard
his daughter with her two assistant principals, her clerk and her
stenographer, plunge into the routine work of the day. What kind of school
teacher was this? She seemed more like the manager of some buzzing factory.
Messages kept coming constantly from class-rooms, children came for
punishment, and on each small human problem she was passing judgment
quickly. Meanwhile a score of mothers, most of them Italians with colored
shawls upon their heads, had straggled in and taken seats, and one by one
they came to her desk. For these women who had been children in peasant
huts in Italy now had children of their own in the great city of New York,
and they found it very baffling. How to keep them in at night? How to make
them go to the priest? How to feed and clothe them? How to live in these
tenement homes, in this wild din and chaos? They wanted help and they
wanted advice. Deborah spoke in Italian, but turning to her father she
would translate from time to time.
A tired scowling woman said, "My boy won't obey me. His father is dead.
When I slap him he only jumps away. I lock him in and he steals the key, he
keeps it in his pocket. He steals the money that I earn. He says I'm from
the country." And a flabby anxious woman said, "My girl runs out to dance
halls. Sometimes she comes back at two in the morning. She is fifteen and
she ought to get married. But what can I do? A nice steady man who never
dances comes sometimes to see her--but she makes faces and calls him a
fatty, she dances before him and pushes him out and slams the door. What
can I do?"
"Please come and see our janitor and make him fix our kitchen sink!" an
angry little woman cried. "When I try to wash the dishes the water spouts
all over me!" And then a plump rosy mother said in a soft coaxing voice, "I
have eight little children, all nice and clean. When you tell them to do
anything they always do it quickly. They smile at you, they are like
saints. So could the kind beautiful teacher fix it up with a newspaper to
send them to the country--this summer when it is so hot? The newspaper
could send a man and he could take our pictures."
"Most of us girls used to be in this school," said a bright looking Jewess
of eighteen. "And you taught us how we should live nice. But how can we
live nice when our shop is so rotten? Our boss is trying to kiss the
girls, he is trying to hug them on the stairs. And what he pays us is a
joke, and we must work till nine o'clock. So will you help us, teacher, and
give us a room for our meetings here? We want to have a union."
A truant officer brought in two ragged, frightened little chaps. Found on
the street during school hours, they had to give an account of themselves.
Sullenly one of them gave an address far up in the Bronx, ten miles away.
They had not been home for a week, he said. Was he lying? What was to be
done? Somewhere in the city their homes must be discovered. And the talk of
the truant officer made Roger feel ramifications here which wound out
through the police and the courts to reformatories, distant cells. He
thought of that electric chair, and suddenly he felt oppressed by the heavy
complexity of it all.
And this was part and parcel of his daughter's daily work in school! Still
dazed, disturbed but curious, he sat and watched and listened, while the
bewildering demands of Deborah's big family kept crowding in upon her. He
went to a few of the class-rooms and found that reading and writing,
arithmetic and spelling were being taught in ways which he had never
dreamed of. He found a kindergarten class, a carpenter shop and a printing
shop, a sewing class and a cooking class in a large model kitchen. He
watched the nurse in her hospital room, he went into the dental clinic
where a squad of fifty urchins were having their teeth examined, and out
upon a small side roof he found a score of small invalids in steamer
chairs, all fast asleep. It was a strange astounding school! He heard
Deborah speak of a mothers' club and a neighborhood association; and he
learned of other ventures here, the school doctor, the nurse and the
visitor endlessly making experiments, delving into the neighborhood for
ways to meet its problems. And by the way Deborah talked to them he felt
she had gone before, that years ago by day and night she had been over the
ground alone. And she'd done all this while she lived in his house!
Scattered memories out of the past, mere fragments she had told him, here
flashed back into his mind: humorous little incidents of daily battles she
had waged in rotten old tenement buildings with rags and filth and garbage,
with vermin, darkness and disease. Mingled with these had been accounts of
dances, weddings and christenings and of curious funeral rites. And
struggling with such dim memories of Deborah in her twenties, called forth
in his mind by the picture of the woman of thirty here, Roger grew still
more confused. What was to be the end of it? She was still but a pioneer in
a jungle, endlessly groping and trying new things.
"How many children are there in the public schools?" he asked.
"About eight hundred thousand," Deborah said.
"Good Lord!" he groaned, and he felt within him a glow of indignation rise
against these immigrant women for breeding so inconsiderately. With the mad
city growing so fast, and the people of the tenements breeding, breeding,
breeding, and packing the schools to bursting, what could any teacher be
but a mere cog in a machine, ponderous, impersonal, blind, grinding out
future New Yorkers?
He reached home limp and battered from the storm of new impressions coming
on top of his sleepless night. He had thought of a school as a simple
place, filled with little children, mischievous at times perhaps and some
with dirty faces, but still with minds and spirits clean, unsoiled as yet
by contact with the grim spirit of the town. He had thought of childhood as
something intimate and pure, inside his home, his family. Instead of that,
in Deborah's school he had been disturbed and thrilled by the presence all
around him of something wild, barbaric, dark, compounded of the city
streets, of surging crowds, of rushing feet, of turmoil, filth, disease and
death, of poverty and vice and crime. But Roger could still hear that band.
And behind its blaring crash and din he had felt the vital throbbing of a
tremendous joyousness, of gaiety, fresh hopes and dreams, of leaping young
emotions like deep buried bubbling springs bursting up resistlessly to
renew the fevered life of the town! Deborah's big family! Everybody's
children!
"You will live on in our children's lives." The vision hidden in those
words now opened wide before his eyes.