even by the tenement was their hope, as it was her capital. Perhaps
her spiteful tread upon the stairs heralded the coming protest of the
free-born American against slavery, industrial or otherwise, in which
their day of deliverance was dawning. It may be so. They didn't see
it. How should they? They were not Americanized; not yet.
However that might be, Rose came to the end that was to be expected.
The judgment of the tenement was, for the time, borne out by
experience. This was the way of it:--
Rose's mother had bought several pounds of kosher meat and put it into
the ice-box--that is to say, on the window-sill of their fifth-floor
flat. Other ice-box these East Side sweaters' tenements have none. And
it does well enough in cold weather, unless the cat gets around, or,
as it happened in this case, it slides off and falls down. Rose's
breakfast and dinner disappeared down the air-shaft, seventy feet or
more, at 10.30 P.M.
There was a family consultation as to what should be done. It was
late, and everybody was in bed, but Rose declared herself equal to the
rousing of the tenants in the first floor rear, through whose window
she could climb into the shaft for the meat. She had done it before
for a nickel. Enough said. An expedition set out at once from the top
floor to recover the meat. Mrs. Baruch, Rose, and Jake, the boarder,
went in a body.
Arrived before the Knauff family's flat on the ground floor, they
opened proceedings by a vigorous attack on the door. The Knauffs woke
up in a fright, believing that the house was full of burglars. They
were stirring to barricade the door, when they recognized Rose's voice
and were calmed. Let in, the expedition explained matters, and was
grudgingly allowed to take a look out of the window in the air-shaft.
Yes! there was the meat, as yet safe from rats. The thing was to get
it.
The boarder tried first, but crawled back frightened. He couldn't
reach it. Rose jerked him impatiently away.
"Leg go!" she said. "I can do it. I was there wunst. You're no good."
And she bent over the window-sill, reaching down until her toes barely
touched the floor, when all of a sudden, before they could grab her
skirts, over she went, heels over head, down the shaft, and
disappeared.
The shrieks of the Knauffs, of Mrs. Baruch, and of Jake, the boarder,
were echoed from below. Rose's voice rose in pain and in bitter
lamentation from the bottom of the shaft. She had fallen fully fifteen
feet, and in the fall had hurt her back badly, if, indeed, she had not
injured herself beyond repair. Her cries suggested nothing less. They
filled the tenement, rising to every floor and appealing at every
bedroom window.
In a minute the whole building was astir from cellar to roof. A dozen
heads were thrust out of every window, and answering wails carried
messages of helpless sympathy to the once so unpopular Rose. Upon this
concert of sorrow the police broke in with anxious inquiry as to what
was the matter.
When they found out, a second relief expedition was organized. It
reached Rose through the basement coal-bin, and she was carried out
and sent to the Gouverneur Hospital. There she lies, unable to move,
and the tenement wonders what is amiss that it has lost its old
spirits. It has not even anything left to swear at.
The cat took the kosher meat.
NIBSY'S CHRISTMAS
It was Christmas Eve over on the East Side. Darkness was closing in on
a cold, hard day. The light that struggled through the frozen windows
of the delicatessen store and the saloon on the corner, fell upon men
with empty dinner-pails who were hurrying homeward, their coats
buttoned tightly, and heads bent against the steady blast from the
river, as if they were butting their way down the street.
The wind had forced the door of the saloon ajar, and was whistling
through the crack; but in there it seemed to make no one afraid.
Between roars of laughter, the clink of glasses and the rattle of dice
on the hardwood counter were heard out in the street. More than one of
the passers-by who came within range was taken with an extra shiver in
which the vision of wife and little ones waiting at home for his
coming was snuffed out, as he dropped in to brace up. The lights were
long out when the silent streets reëchoed his unsteady steps toward
home, where the Christmas welcome had turned to dread.
But in this twilight hour they burned brightly yet, trying hard to
pierce the bitter cold outside with a ray of warmth and cheer. Where
the lamps in the delicatessen store made a mottled streak of
brightness across the flags, two little boys stood with their noses
flattened against the window. The warmth inside, and the lights, had
made little islands of clear space on the frosty pane, affording
glimpses of the wealth within, of the piles of smoked herring, of
golden cheese, of sliced bacon and generous, fat-bellied hams; of the
rows of odd-shaped bottles and jars on the shelves that held there was
no telling what good things, only it was certain that they must be
good from the looks of them.
And the heavenly smell of spices and things that reached the boys
through the open door each time the tinkling bell announced the coming
or going of a customer! Better than all, back there on the top shelf
the stacks of square honey-cakes, with their frosty coats of sugar,
tied in bundles with strips of blue paper.
The wind blew straight through the patched and threadbare jackets of
the lads as they crept closer to the window, struggling hard by
breathing on the pane to make their peep-holes bigger, to take in the
whole of the big cake with the almonds set in; but they did not heed
it.
"Jim!" piped the smaller of the two, after a longer stare than usual;
"hey, Jim! them's Sante Claus's. See 'em?"
"Sante Claus!" snorted the other, scornfully, applying his eye to the
clear spot on the pane. "There ain't no ole duffer like dat. Them's
honey-cakes. Me 'n' Tom had a bite o' one wunst."
"There ain't no Sante Claus?" retorted the smaller shaver, hotly, at
his peep-hole. "There is, too. I seen him myself when he cum to our
alley last--"
"What's youse kids a-scrappin' fur?" broke in a strange voice.
Another boy, bigger, but dirtier and tougher looking than either of
the two, had come up behind them unobserved. He carried an armful of
unsold "extras" under one arm. The other was buried to the elbow in
the pocket of his ragged trousers.
The "kids" knew him, evidently, and the smallest eagerly accepted him
as umpire.
"It's Jim w'at says there ain't no Sante Claus, and I seen him--"
"Jim!" demanded the elder ragamuffin, sternly, looking hard at the
culprit; "Jim! yere a chump! No Sante Claus? What're ye givin' us?
Now, watch me!"
With utter amazement the boys saw him disappear through the door under
the tinkling bell into the charmed precincts of smoked herring, jam,
and honey-cakes. Petrified at their peep-holes, they watched him, in
the veritable presence of Santa Claus himself with the fir-branch,
fish out five battered pennies from the depths of his pocket and pass
them over to the woman behind the jars, in exchange for one of the
bundles of honey-cakes tied with blue. As if in a dream they saw him
issue forth with the coveted prize.
"There, kid!" he said, holding out the two fattest and whitest cakes
to Santa Claus's champion; "there's yer Christmas. Run along, now, to
yer barracks; and you, Jim, here's one for you, though yer don't
desarve it. Mind ye let the kid alone."
"This one'll have to do for me grub, I guess. I ain't sold me
'Newses,' and the ole man'll kick if I bring 'em home."
Before the shuffling feet of the ragamuffins hurrying homeward had
turned the corner, the last mouthful of the newsboy's supper was
smothered in a yell of "Extree!" as he shot across the street to
intercept a passing stranger.
As the evening wore on, it grew rawer and more blustering still.
Flakes of dry snow that stayed where they fell, slowly tracing the
curb-lines, the shutters, and the door-steps of the tenements with
gathering white, were borne up on the storm from the water. To the
right and left stretched endless streets between the towering
barracks, as beneath frowning cliffs pierced with a thousand glowing
eyes that revealed the watch-fires within--a mighty city of
cave-dwellers held in the thraldom of poverty and want.
Outside there was yet hurrying to and fro. Saloon doors were slamming,
and bare-legged urchins, carrying beer-jugs, hugged the walls close
for shelter. From the depths of a blind alley floated out the
discordant strains of a vagabond brass band "blowing in" the yule of
the poor. Banished by police ordinance from the street, it reaped a
scant harvest of pennies for Christmas cheer from the windows opening
on the back yard. Against more than one pane showed the bald outline
of a forlorn little Christmas tree, some stray branch of a hemlock
picked up at the grocer's and set in a pail for "the childer" to dance
around, a dime's worth of candy and tinsel on the boughs.
From the attic over the way came, in spells between, the gentle tones
of a German song about the Christ-child. Christmas in the East Side
tenements begins with the sunset on the "Holy Eve," except where the
name is as a threat or a taunt. In a hundred such homes the whir of
many sewing-machines, worked by the sweater's slaves with weary feet
and aching backs, drowned every feeble note of joy that struggled to
make itself heard above the noise of the great treadmill.
To these what was Christmas but the name for suffering, reminder of
lost kindred and liberty, of the slavery of eighteen hundred years,
freedom from which was purchased only with gold. Ay, gold! The gold
that had power to buy freedom yet, to buy the good-will, ay, and the
good name, of the oppressor, with his houses and land. At the thought
the tired eye glistened, the aching back straightened, and to the
weary foot there came new strength to finish the long task while the
city slept.
Where a narrow passageway put in between two big tenements to a
ramshackle rear barrack, Nibsy, the newsboy, halted in the shadow of
the doorway and stole a long look down the dark alley.
He toyed uncertainly with his still unsold papers--worn dirty and
ragged as his clothes by this time--before he ventured in, picking his
way between barrels and heaps of garbage; past the Italian cobbler's
hovel, where a tallow dip, stuck in a cracked beer-glass, before a
picture of the "Mother of God," showed that even he knew it was
Christmas and liked to show it; past the Sullivan flat, where blows
and drunken curses mingled with the shriek of women, as Nibsy had
heard many nights before this one.
He shuddered as he felt his way past the door, partly with a
premonition of what was in store for himself, if the "old man" was at
home, partly with a vague, uncomfortable feeling that somehow
Christmas Eve should be different from other nights, even in the
alley; down to its farthest end, to the last rickety flight of steps
that led into the filth and darkness of the tenement. Up this he
crept, three flights, to a door at which he stopped and listened,
hesitating, as he had stopped at the entrance to the alley; then, with
a sudden, defiant gesture, he pushed it open and went in.
A bare and cheerless room; a pile of rags for a bed in the corner,
another in the dark alcove, miscalled bedroom; under the window a
broken candle and an iron-bound chest, upon which sat a sad-eyed woman
with hard lines in her face, peeling potatoes in a pan; in the middle
of the room a rusty stove, with a pile of wood, chopped on the floor
alongside. A man on his knees in front fanning the fire with an old
slouch hat. With each breath of draught he stirred, the crazy old pipe
belched forth torrents of smoke at every joint. As Nibsy entered, the
man desisted from his efforts and sat up, glaring at him--a villanous
ruffian's face, scowling with anger.
"Late ag'in!" he growled; "an' yer papers not sold. What did I tell
yer, brat, if ye dared--"
"Tom! Tom!" broke in the wife, in a desperate attempt to soothe the
ruffian's temper. "The boy can't help it, an' it's Christmas Eve. For
the love o'--"
"The devil take yer rot and yer brat!" shouted the man, mad with the
fury of passion. "Let me at him!" and, reaching over, he seized a
heavy knot of wood and flung it at the head of the boy.
Nibsy had remained just inside the door, edging slowly toward his
mother, but with a watchful eye on the man at the stove. At the first
movement of his hand toward the woodpile he sprang for the stairway
with the agility of a cat, and just dodged the missile. It struck the
door, as he slammed it behind him, with force enough to smash the
panel.
Down the three flights in as many jumps he went, and through the
alley, over barrels and barriers, never stopping once till he reached
the street, and curses and shouts were left behind.
In his flight he had lost his unsold papers, and he felt ruefully in
his pocket as he went down the street, pulling his rags about him as
much from shame as to keep out the cold.
Four pennies were all he had left after his Christmas treat to the two
little lads from the barracks; not enough for supper or for a bed; and
it was getting colder all the time.
On the sidewalk in front of the notion store a belated Christmas party
was in progress. The children from the tenements in the alley and
across the way were having a game of blind-man's-buff, groping blindly
about in the crowd to catch each other. They hailed Nibsy with shouts
of laughter, calling to him to join in.
"We're having Christmas!" they yelled.
Nibsy did not hear them. He was thinking, thinking, the while turning
over his four pennies at the bottom of his pocket. Thinking if
Christmas was ever to come to him, and the children's Santa Claus to
find his alley where the baby slept within reach of her father's cruel
hand. As for him, he had never known anything but blows and curses. He
could take care of himself. But his mother and the baby--And then it
came to him with shuddering cold that it was getting late, and that he
must find a place to sleep.
He weighed in his mind the merits of two or three places where he was
in the habit of hiding from the "cops" when the alley got to be too
hot for him.
There was the hay barge down by the dock, with the watchman who got
drunk sometimes, and so gave the boys a chance. The chances were at
least even of its being available on Christmas Eve, and of Santa Claus
having thus done him a good turn after all.
Then there was the snug berth in the sand-box you could curl all up
in. Nibsy thought with regret of its being, like the hay barge, so far
away and to windward, too.
Down by the printing-offices there were the steam gratings, and a
chance corner in the cellars, stories and stories underground, where
the big presses keep up such a clatter from midnight till far into the
day.
As he passed them in review, Nibsy made up his mind with sudden
determination, and, setting his face toward the south, made off down
town.
* * * * *
The rumble of the last departing news-wagon over the pavement, now
buried deep in snow, had died away in the distance, when, from out of
the bowels of the earth there issued a cry, a cry of mortal terror and
pain that was echoed by a hundred throats.
From one of the deep cellar-ways a man ran out, his clothes and hair
and beard afire; on his heels a breathless throng of men and boys;
following them, close behind, a rush of smoke and fire.
The clatter of the presses ceased suddenly, to be followed quickly by
the clangor of hurrying fire-bells. With hooks and axes the firemen
rushed in; hose was let down through the manholes, and down there in
the depths the battle was fought and won.
The building was saved; but in the midst of the rejoicing over the
victory there fell a sudden silence. From the cellar-way a grimy,
helmeted figure arose, with something black and scorched in his arms.
A tarpaulin was spread upon the snow and upon it he laid his burden,
while the silent crowd made room and word went over to the hospital
for the doctor to come quickly.
Very gently they lifted poor little Nibsy--for it was he, caught in
his berth by a worse enemy than the "cop" or the watchman of the hay
barge--into the ambulance that bore him off to the hospital cot, too
late.
Conscious only of a vague discomfort that had succeeded terror and
pain, Nibsy wondered uneasily why they were all so kind. Nobody had
taken the trouble to as much as notice him before. When he had thrust
his papers into their very faces they had pushed him roughly aside.
Nibsy, unhurt and able to fight his way, never had a show. Sick and
maimed and sore, he was being made much of, though he had been caught
where the boys were forbidden to go. Things were queer, anyhow, and--
The room was getting so dark that he could hardly see the doctor's
kindly face, and had to grip his hand tightly to make sure that he was
there; almost as dark as the stairs in the alley he had come down in
such a hurry.
There was the baby now--poor baby--and mother--and then a great blank,
and it was all a mystery to poor Nibsy no longer. For, just as a
wild-eyed woman pushed her way through the crowd of nurses and doctors
to his bedside, crying for her boy, Nibsy gave up his soul to God.
* * * * *
It was very quiet in the alley. Christmas had come and gone. Upon the
last door a bow of soiled crape was nailed up with two tacks. It had
done duty there a dozen times before, that year.
Upstairs, Nibsy was at home, and for once the neighbors, one and all,
old and young, came to see him.
Even the father, ruffian that he was, offered no objection. Cowed and
silent, he sat in the corner by the window farthest from where the
plain little coffin stood, with the lid closed down.
A couple of the neighbor-women were talking in low tones by the stove,
when there came a timid knock at the door. Nobody answering, it was
pushed open, first a little, then far enough to admit the shrinking
form of a little ragamuffin, the smaller of the two who had stood
breathing peep-holes on the window pane of the delicatessen store the
night before when Nibsy came along.
He dragged with him a hemlock branch, the leavings from some Christmas
tree at the grocery.
"It's from Sante Claus," he said, laying it on the coffin. "Nibsy
knows." And he went out.
Santa Claus had come to Nibsy, after all, in his alley. And Nibsy
knew.
IN THE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL
The fact was printed the other day that the half-hundred children or
more who are in the hospitals on North Brother Island had no
playthings, not even a rattle, to make the long days skip by, which,
set in smallpox, scarlet fever, and measles, must be longer there than
anywhere else in the world. The toys that were brought over there with
a consignment of nursery tots who had the typhus fever had been worn
clean out, except some fish horns which the doctor frowned on, and
which were therefore not allowed at large. Not as much as a red monkey
on a yellow stick was there left on the island to make the youngsters
happy.
That afternoon a big, hearty-looking man came into the office with the
paper in his hand, and demanded to see the editor. He had come, he
said, to see to it that those sick youngsters got the playthings they
were entitled to; and a regular Santa Claus he proved to the
friendless little colony on the lonely island; for he left a crisp
fifty-dollar note behind when he went away without giving his name.
The single condition was attached to the gift that it should be spent
buying toys for the children on North Brother Island.
Accordingly, a strange invading army took the island by storm three or
four nights ago. Under cover of the darkness it had itself ferried
over from One Hundred and Thirty-eighth Street in the department yawl,
and before morning it was in undisputed possession. It has come to
stay. Not a doll or a sheep will ever leave the island again. They may
riot upon it as they please, within certain well-defined limits, but
none of them can ever cross the channel to the mainland again, unless
it be the rubber dolls who can swim, so it is said. Here is the
muster-roll:--
Six sheep (four with lambs), six fairies (big dolls in street dress),
twelve rubber dolls (in woollen jackets), four railroad trains,
twenty-eight base-balls, twenty rubber balls, six big painted (Scotch
plaid) rubber balls, six still bigger ditto, seven boxes of blocks,
half a dozen music-boxes, twenty-four rattles, six bubble (soap) toys,
twelve small engines, six games of dominos, twelve rubber toys (old
woman who lived in a shoe, etc.), five wooden toys (bad bear, etc.),
thirty-six horse reins.
As there is only one horse on the island, and that one a very
steady-going steed in no urgent need of restraint, this last item
might seem superfluous, but only to the uninstructed mind. Within a
brief week half the boys and girls on the island that are out of bed
long enough to stand on their feet will be transformed into ponies and
the other half into drivers, and flying teams will go cavorting around
to the tune of "Johnny, Get your Gun," and the "Jolly Brothers
Gallop," as they are ground out of the music-boxes by little fingers
that but just now toyed feebly with the balusters on the golden stair.
That music! When I went over to the island it fell upon my ears in
little drops of sweet melody, as soon as I came in sight of the
nurses' quarters. I listened, but couldn't make out the tune. The
drops seemed mixed. When I opened the door upon one of the nurses, Dr.
Dixon, and the hospital matron, each grinding his or her music for all
there was in it, and looking perfectly happy withal, I understood why.
They were all playing different tunes at the same time, the nurse
"When the Robins Nest Again," Dr. Dixon "Nancy Lee," and the matron
"Sweet Violets." A little child stood by in open-mouthed admiration,
that became ecstasy when I joined in with "The Babies on our Block."
It was all for the little one's benefit, and she thought it beautiful
without a doubt.
The storekeeper, knowing that music hath charms to soothe the breast
of even a typhus-fever patient, had thrown in a dozen boxes as his own
gift. Thus one good deed brings on another, and a good deal more than
fifty dollars' worth of happiness will be ground out on the island
before there is an end of the music.
There is one little girl in the measles ward already who will eat only
when her nurse sits by grinding out "Nancy Lee." She cannot be made to
swallow one mouthful on any other condition. No other nurse and no
other tune but "Nancy Lee" will do--neither the "Star-Spangled Banner"
nor "The Babies on our Block." Whether it is Nancy all by her
melodious self, or the beautiful picture of her in a sailor's suit on
the lid of the box, or the two and the nurse and the dinner together,
that serve to soothe her, is a question of some concern to the island,
since Nancy and the nurse have shown signs of giving out together.
Three of the six sheep that were bought for the ridiculously low price
of eighty-nine cents apiece, the lambs being thrown in as makeweight,
were grazing on the mixed-measles lawn over on the east shore of the
island, with a fairy in evening dress eying them rather disdainfully
in the grasp of tearful Annie Cullum. Annie is a foundling from the
asylum temporarily sojourning here. The measles and the scarlet fever
were the only things that ever took kindly to her in her little life.
They tackled her both at once, and poor Annie, after a six or eight
weeks' tussle with them, has just about enough spunk left to cry when
anybody looks at her.