had played in the old village as a boy; all my childhood was bound up
in its memories. For many years now I had not heard its name--not
since boyhood days--spoken as he spoke it. Perhaps it was because I
was tired: the office faded away, desk, Headquarters across the
street, boy, officer, business, and all. In their place were the brown
heath I loved, the distant hills, the winding wagon track, the peat
stacks, and the solitary sheep browsing on the barrows. Forgotten the
thirty years, the seas that rolled between, the teeming city! I was at
home again, a child. And there he stood, the boy, with it all in his
dull, absent look. I read it now as plain as the day.
"Hua er et no? Ka do ett fostó hua a sejer?"
It plumped out of me in the broad Jutland dialect I had neither heard
nor 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]
[Footnote 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.
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 from 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 modelling-clay were
brought in, and the children were told to mould 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
travelling 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 grottos 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.
They came with the police, and by and by the partly wrecked train was
hauled up to the platform. When the wounded had been taken to the
hospital, they bore from the train the body of a youth, clutching yet
in his hand a torn, blood-stained paper, tied about with a purple
ribbon. It was Paolo. The awakening had come. Brighter skies than
those of sunny Italy had dawned upon him in the gloom and terror of
the great crash. Paolo was at home, waiting for his mother.
THE LITTLE DOLLAR'S CHRISTMAS JOURNEY
"It is too bad," said Mrs. Lee, and she put down the magazine in which
she had been reading of the poor children in the tenements of the
great city that know little of Christmas joys; "no Christmas tree! One
of them shall have one, at any rate. I think this will buy it, and it
is so handy to send. Nobody would know that there was money in the
letter." And she enclosed a coupon in a letter to a professor, a
friend in the city, who, she knew, would have no trouble in finding
the child, and had it mailed at once. Mrs. Lee was a widow whose not
too great income was derived from the interest on some four per cent
government bonds which represented the savings of her husband's life
of toil, that was none the less hard because it was spent in a
counting-room and not with shovel and spade. The coupon looked for all
the world like a dollar bill, except that it was so small that a
baby's hand could easily cover it. The United States, the printing on
it said, would pay on demand to the bearer one dollar; and there was
a number on it, just as on a full-grown dollar, that was the number of
the bond from which it had been cut.
The letter travelled all night, and was tossed and sorted and bunched
at the end of its journey in the great gray beehive that never sleeps,
day or night, and where half the tears and joys of the land, including
this account of the little dollar, are checked off unceasingly as
first-class matter or second or third, as the case may be. In the
morning it was laid, none the worse for its journey, at the
professor's breakfast plate. The professor was a kindly man, and he
smiled as he read it. "To procure one small Christmas tree for a poor
tenement," was its errand.
"Little dollar," he said, "I think I know where you are needed." And
he made a note in his book. There were other notes there that made him
smile again as he saw them. They had names set opposite them. One
about a Noah's ark was marked "Vivi." That was the baby; and there was
one about a doll's carriage that had the words "Katie, sure," set over
against it. The professor eyed the list in mock dismay.
"How ever will I do it?" he sighed, as he put on his hat.
"Well, you will have to get Santa Claus to help you, John," said his
wife, buttoning his greatcoat about him. "And, mercy! the duckses'
babies! don't forget them, whatever you do. The baby has been talking
about nothing else since he saw them at the store, the old duck and
the two ducklings on wheels. You know them, John?"
But the professor was gone, repeating to himself as he went down the
garden walk, "The duckses' babies, indeed!" He chuckled as he said it,
why I cannot tell. He was very particular about his grammar, was the
professor, ordinarily. Perhaps it was because it was Christmas eve.