hope, and in the midst of it all she weeps as if her heart would
break. Even when the nurse pulls one of the unresisting muttonheads,
and it emits a loud "Baa-a," she stops only just for a second or two
and then wails again. The sheep look rather surprised, as they have a
right to. They have come to be little Annie's steady company, hers and
her fellow-sufferers' in the mixed-measles ward. The triangular lawn
upon which they are browsing is theirs to gambol on when the sun
shines, but cross the walk that borders it they never can, any more
than the babies with whom they play. Sumptuary law rules the island
they are on. Habeas corpus and the constitution stop short of the
ferry. Even Comstock's authority does not cross it: the one exception
to the rule that dolls and sheep and babies shall not visit from ward
to ward is in favor of the rubber dolls, and the etiquette of the
island requires that they shall lay off their woollen jackets and go
calling just as the factory turned them out, without a stitch or
shred of any kind on.
As for the rest, they are assigned, babies, nurses, sheep, rattles,
and railroad trains, to their separate measles, scarlet fever, and
diphtheria lawns or wards, and there must be content to stay. A sheep
may be transferred from the scarlet-fever ward with its patron to the
mixed-measles or diphtheria, when symptoms of either of these diseases
appear, as they often do; but it cannot then go back again, lest it
carry the seeds of the new contagion to its old friends.
Even the fairies are put under the ban of suspicion by such evil
associations, and, once they have crossed the line, are not allowed to
go back to corrupt the good manners of the babies with only one
complaint.
Pauline Meyer, the bigger of the two girls on the mixed-measles
stoop,--the other is friendless Annie,--has just enough strength to
laugh when her sheep's head is pulled. She has been on the limits of
one ward after another these four months, and has had everything,
short of typhus fever and smallpox, that the island affords.
It is a marvel that there is one laugh left in her whole little
shrunken body after it all; but there is, and the grin on her face
reaches almost from ear to ear, as she clasps the biggest fairy in an
arm very little stouter than a boy's bean blower, and hears the lamb
bleat. Why, that one smile on that ghastly face would be thought worth
his fifty dollars by the children's friend, could he see it. Pauline
is the child of Swedish emigrants. She and Annie will not fight over
their lambs and their dolls, not for many weeks. They can't. They
can't even stand up.
One of the railroad trains, drawn by a glorious tin engine, with the
name "Union" painted on the cab, is making across the stoop for the
little boy with the whooping-cough in the next building. But it won't
get there; it is quarantined. But it will have plenty of exercise.
Little hands are itching to get hold of it in one of the cribs inside.
There are thirty-six sick children on the island just now, about half
of them boys, who will find plenty of use for the balls and things as
soon as they get about. How those base-balls are to be kept within
bounds is a hopeless mystery the doctors are puzzling over.
Even if nines are organized in every ward, as has been suggested, it
is hard to see how they can be allowed to play each other, as they
would want to, of course, as soon as they could toddle about. It would
be something, though, a smallpox nine pitted against the scarlets or
the measles, with an umpire from the mixed ward!
The old woman that lived in a shoe, being of rubber, is a privileged
character, and is away on a call in the female scarlet, says the
nurse. It is a good thing that she was made that way, for she is very
popular. So are Mother Goose and her ten companion rubber toys. The
bear and the man that strike alternately a wooden anvil with a ditto
hammer are scarcely less exciting to the infantile mind; but, being of
wood, they are steady boarders permanently attached each to his ward.
The dominos fell to the lot of the male scarlets. That ward has half a
dozen grown men in it at present, and they have never once lost sight
of the little black blocks since they first saw them.
The doctor reports that they are getting better just as fast as they
can since they took to playing dominos. If there is any hint in this
to the profession at large, they are welcome to it, along with
humanity.
A little girl with a rubber doll in a red woollen jacket--a
combination to make the perspiration run right off one with the
humidity at 98--looks wistfully down from the second-story balcony of
the smallpox pavilion, as the doctor goes past with the last sheep
tucked under his arm.
But though it baa-a ever so loudly, it is not for her. It is bound for
the white tent on the shore, shunned even here, where sits a solitary
watcher gazing wistfully all day toward the city that has passed out
of his life. Perchance it may bring to him a message from the far-away
home where the birds sang for him, and the waves and the flowers spoke
to him, and "Unclean" had not been written against his name. Of all on
the Pest Island he alone is hopeless. He is a leper, and his sentence
is that of a living death in a strange land.
NIGGER MARTHA'S WAKE
A woman with face all seared and blotched by something that had burned
through the skin sat propped up in the doorway of a Bowery restaurant
at four o'clock in the morning, senseless, apparently dying. A
policeman stood by, looking anxiously up the street and consulting his
watch. At intervals he shook her to make sure she was not dead. The
drift of the Bowery that was borne that way eddied about, intent upon
what was going on. A dumpy little man edged through the crowd and
peered into the woman's face.
"Phew!" he said, "it's Nigger Martha! What is gettin' into the girls
on the Bowery I don't know. Remember my Maggie? She was her chum."
This to the watchman on the block. The watchman remembered. He knows
everything that goes on in the Bowery. Maggie was the wayward daughter
of a decent laundress, and killed herself by drinking carbolic acid
less than a month before. She had wearied of the Bowery. Nigger Martha
was her one friend. And now she had followed her example.
She was drunk when she did it. It is in their cups that a glimpse of
the life they traded away for the street comes sometimes to these
wretches, with remorse not to be borne.
It came so to Nigger Martha. Ten minutes before, she had been sitting
with two boon companions in the oyster saloon next door, discussing
their night's catch. Elsie "Specs" was one of the two; the other was
known to the street simply as Mame. Elsie wore glasses, a thing
unusual enough in the Bowery to deserve recognition. From their
presence Martha rose suddenly, to pull a vial from her pocket. Mame
saw it, and, knowing what it meant in the heavy humor that was upon
Nigger Martha, she struck it from her hand with a pepper-box. It fell,
but was not broken. The woman picked it up, and staggering out,
swallowed its contents upon the sidewalk--that is, as much as went
into her mouth. Much went over her face, burning it. She fell
shrieking.
Then came the crowd. The Bowery never sleeps. The policeman on the
beat set her in the doorway and sent a hurry call for an ambulance. It
came at last, and Nigger Martha was taken to the hospital.
As Mame told it, so it was recorded on the police blotter, with the
addition that she was anywhere from forty to fifty years old. That
was the strange part of it. It is not often that any one lasts out a
generation in the Bowery. Nigger Martha did. Her beginning was way
back in the palmy days of Billy McGlory and Owney Geoghegan. Her first
remembered appearance was on the occasion of the mock wake they got up
at Geoghegan's for Police Captain Foley when he was broken. That was
in the days when dive-keepers made and broke police captains, and made
no secret of it. Billy McGlory did not. Ever since, Martha was on the
street.
In time she picked up Maggie Mooney, and they got to be chummy. The
friendships of the Bowery by night may not be of a very exalted type,
but when death breaks them it leaves nothing to the survivor. That is
the reason suicides there happen in pairs. The story of Tilly Lorrison
and Tricksy came from the Tenderloin not long ago. This one of Maggie
Mooney and Nigger Martha was theirs over again.
In each case it was the younger, the one nearest the life that was
forever past, who took the step first, in despair. The other followed.
To her it was the last link with something that had long ceased to be
anything but a dream, which was broken. But without the dream life was
unbearable, in the Tenderloin and on the Bowery.
The newsboys were crying their night extras when Undertaker Reardon's
wagon jogged across the Bowery with Nigger Martha's body in it. She
had given the doctors the slip, as she had the policeman many a time.
A friend of hers, an Italian in The Bend, had hired the undertaker to
"do it proper," and Nigger Martha was to have a funeral.
All the Bowery came to the wake. The all-nighters from Chatham Square
to Bleecker Street trooped up to the top-floor flat in the Forsyth
Street tenement where Nigger Martha was laid out. There they sat
around, saying little and drinking much. It was not a cheery crowd.
The Bowery by night is not cheerful in the presence of The Mystery.
Its one effort is to get away from it, to forget--the thing it can
never do. When out of its sight it carouses boisterously, as children
sing and shout in the dark to persuade themselves that they are not
afraid. And some who hear think it happy.
Sheeny Rose was the master of ceremonies and kept the door. This for a
purpose. In life Nigger Martha had one enemy whom she hated--cock-eyed
Grace. Like all of her kind, Nigger Martha was superstitious. Grace's
evil eye ever brought her bad luck when she crossed her path, and she
shunned her as the pestilence. When inadvertently she came upon her,
she turned as she passed and spat twice over her left shoulder. And
Grace, with white malice in her wicked face, spurned her.
"I don't want," Nigger Martha had said one night in the hearing of
Sheeny Rose--"I don't want that cock-eyed thing to look at my body
when I am dead. She'll give me hard luck in the grave yet."
And Sheeny Rose was there to see that cock-eyed Grace didn't come to
the wake.
She did come. She labored up the long stairs, and knocked, with no one
will ever know what purpose in her heart. If it was a last glimmer of
good, of forgiveness, it was promptly squelched. It was Sheeny Rose
who opened the door.
"You can't come in here," she said curtly. "You know she hated you.
She didn't want you to look at her stiff."
Cock-eyed Grace's face grew set with anger. Her curses were heard
within. She threatened fight, but dropped it.
"All right," she said as she went down. "I'll fix you, Sheeny Rose!"
It was in the exact spot where Nigger Martha had sat and died that
Grace met her enemy the night after the funeral. Lizzie La Blanche,
the Marine's girl, was there; Elsie Specs, Little Mame, and Jack the
Dog, toughest of all the girls, who for that reason had earned the
name of "Mayor of the Bowery." She brooked no rivals. They were all
within reach when the two enemies met under the arc light.
Cock-eyed Grace sounded the challenge.
"Now, you little Sheeny Rose," she said, "I'm goin' to do ye fer
shuttin' of me out o' Nigger Martha's wake."
With that out came her hatpin, and she made a lunge at Sheeny Rose.
The other was on her guard. Hatpin in hand, she parried the thrust and
lunged back. In a moment the girls had made a ring about the two,
shutting them out of sight. Within it the desperate women thrust and
parried, backed and squared off, leaping like tigers when they saw an
opening. Their hats had fallen off, their hair was down, and eager
hate glittered in their eyes. It was a battle for life; for there is
no dagger more deadly than the hatpin these women carry, chiefly as a
weapon of defence in the hour of need.
They were evenly matched. Sheeny Rose made up in superior suppleness
of limb for the pent-up malice of the other. Grace aimed her thrusts
at her opponent's face. She tried to reach her eye. Once the sharp
steel just pricked Sheeny Rose's cheek and drew blood. In the next
turn Rose's hatpin passed within a quarter-inch of Grace's jugular.
But the blow nearly threw her off her feet, and she was at her
enemy's mercy. With an evil oath the fiend thrust full at her face
just as the policeman, who had come through the crowd unobserved, so
intent was it upon the fight, knocked the steel from her hand.
At midnight two dishevelled hags with faces flattened against the bars
of adjoining cells in the police station were hurling sidelong curses
at each other and at the maddened doorman. Nigger Martha's wake had
received its appropriate and foreordained ending.
WHAT THE CHRISTMAS SUN SAW IN THE TENEMENTS
The December sun shone clear and cold upon the city. It shone upon
rich and poor alike. It shone into the homes of the wealthy on the
avenues and in the up-town streets, and into courts and alleys hedged
in by towering tenements down town. It shone upon throngs of busy
holiday shoppers that went out and in at the big stores, carrying
bundles big and small, all alike filled with Christmas cheer and
kindly messages from Santa Claus.
It shone down so gayly and altogether cheerily there, that wraps and
overcoats were unbuttoned for the north wind to toy with. "My, isn't
it a nice day?" said one young lady in a fur shoulder cape to a
friend, pausing to kiss and compare lists of Christmas gifts.
"Most too hot," was the reply, and the friends passed on. There was
warmth within and without. Life was very pleasant under the Christmas
sun up on the avenue.
Down in Cherry Street the rays of the sun climbed over a row of tall
tenements with an effort that seemed to exhaust all the life that was
in them, and fell into a dirty block, half choked with trucks, with
ash barrels and rubbish of all sorts, among which the dust was whirled
in clouds upon fitful, shivering blasts that searched every nook and
cranny of the big barracks. They fell upon a little girl, barefooted
and in rags, who struggled out of an alley with a broken pitcher in
her grimy fist, against the wind that set down the narrow slit like
the draught through a big factory chimney. Just at the mouth of the
alley it took her with a sudden whirl, a cyclone of dust and drifting
ashes, tossed her fairly off her feet, tore from her grip the
threadbare shawl she clutched at her throat, and set her down at the
saloon door breathless and half smothered. She had just time to dodge
through the storm-doors before another whirlwind swept whistling down
the street.
"My, but isn't it cold?" she said, as she shook the dust out of her
shawl and set the pitcher down on the bar. "Gimme a pint," laying down
a few pennies that had been wrapped in a corner of the shawl, "and
mamma says make it good and full."
"All'us the way with youse kids--want a barrel when yees pays fer a
pint," growled the bartender. "There, run along, and don't ye hang
around that stove no more. We ain't a steam-heatin' the block fer
nothin'."
The little girl clutched her shawl and the pitcher, and slipped out
into the street where the wind lay in ambush and promptly bore down on
her in pillars of whirling dust as soon as she appeared. But the sun
that pitied her bare feet and little frozen hands played a trick on
old Boreas--it showed her a way between the pillars, and only just her
skirt was caught by one and whirled over her head as she dodged into
her alley. It peeped after her halfway down its dark depths, where it
seemed colder even than in the bleak street, but there it had to leave
her.
It did not see her dive through the doorless opening into a hall where
no sun-ray had ever entered. It could not have found its way in there
had it tried. But up the narrow, squeaking stairs the girl with the
pitcher was climbing. Up one flight of stairs, over a knot of
children, half babies, pitching pennies on the landing, over wash-tubs
and bedsteads that encumbered the next--house-cleaning going on in
that "flat"; that is to say, the surplus of bugs was being turned out
with petroleum and a feather--up still another, past a half-open door
through which came the noise of brawling and curses. She dodged and
quickened her step a little until she stood panting before a door on
the fourth landing that opened readily as she pushed it with her bare
foot.
A room almost devoid of stick or rag one might dignify with the name
of furniture. Two chairs, one with a broken back, the other on three
legs, beside a rickety table that stood upright only by leaning
against the wall. On the unwashed floor a heap of straw covered with
dirty bedtick for a bed; a foul-smelling slop-pail in the middle of
the room; a crazy stove, and back of it a door or gap opening upon
darkness. There was something in there, but what it was could only be
surmised from a heavy snore that rose and fell regularly. It was the
bedroom of the apartment, windowless, airless, and sunless, but rented
at a price a millionnaire would denounce as robbery.
"That you, Liza?" said a voice that discovered a woman bending over
the stove. "Run 'n' get the childer. Dinner's ready."
The winter sun glancing down the wall of the opposite tenement, with a
hopeless effort to cheer the back yard, might have peeped through the
one window of the room in Mrs. McGroarty's "flat," had that window not
been coated with the dust of ages, and discovered that dinner party in
action. It might have found a score like it in the alley. Four unkempt
children, copies each in his or her way of Liza and their mother,
Mrs. McGroarty, who "did washing" for a living. A meat bone, a "cut"
from the butcher's at four cents a pound, green pickles, stale bread
and beer. Beer for the four, a sup all round, the baby included. Why
not? It was the one relish the searching ray would have found there.
Potatoes were there, too--potatoes and meat! Say not the poor in the
tenements are starving. In New York only those starve who cannot get
work and have not the courage to beg. Fifty thousand always out of a
job, say those who pretend to know. A round half-million asking and
getting charity in eight years, say the statisticians of the Charity
Organization. Any one can go round and see for himself that no one
need starve in New York.
From across the yard the sunbeam, as it crept up the wall, fell
slantingly through the attic window whence issued the sound of
hammer-blows. A man with a hard face stood in its light, driving nails
into the lid of a soap box that was partly filled with straw.
Something else was there; as he shifted the lid that didn't fit, the
glimpse of sunshine fell across it; it was a dead child, a little baby
in a white slip, bedded in straw in a soap box for a coffin. The man
was hammering down the lid to take it to the Potter's Field. At the
bed knelt the mother, dry-eyed, delirious from starvation that had
killed her child. Five hungry, frightened children cowered in the
corner, hardly daring to whisper as they looked from the father to the
mother in terror.
There was a knock on the door that was drowned once, twice, in the
noise of the hammer on the little coffin. Then it was opened gently,
and a young woman came in with a basket. A little silver cross shone
upon her breast. She went to the poor mother, and, putting her hand
soothingly on her head, knelt by her with gentle and loving words. The
half-crazed woman listened with averted face, then suddenly burst into
tears and hid her throbbing head in the other's lap.
The man stopped hammering and stared fixedly upon the two; the
children gathered around with devouring looks as the visitor took from
her basket bread, meat, and tea. Just then, with a parting wistful
look into the bare attic room, the sun-ray slipped away, lingered for
a moment about the coping outside, and fled over the housetops.
As it sped on its winter-day journey, did it shine into any cabin in
an Irish bog more desolate than these Cherry Street "homes"? An army
of thousands, whose one bright and wholesome memory, only tradition of
home, is that poverty-stricken cabin in the desolate bog, are herded
in such barracks to-day in New York. Potatoes they have; yes, and meat
at four cents--even seven. Beer for a relish--never without beer. But
home? The home that was home, even in a bog, with the love of it that
has made Ireland immortal and a tower of strength in the midst of her
suffering--what of that? There are no homes in New York's poor
tenements.
Down the crooked path of the Mulberry Street Bend the sunlight slanted
into the heart of New York's Italy. It shone upon bandannas and yellow
neckerchiefs; upon swarthy faces and corduroy breeches; upon
black-haired girls--mothers at thirteen; upon hosts of bow-legged
children rolling in the dirt; upon pedlers' carts and rag-pickers
staggering under burdens that threatened to crush them at every step.
Shone upon unnumbered Pasquales dwelling, working, idling, and
gambling there. Shone upon the filthiest and foulest of New York's
tenements, upon Bandit's Roost, upon Bottle Alley, upon the hidden
byways that lead to the tramps' burrows. Shone upon the scene of
annual infant slaughter. Shone into the foul core of New York's slums
that was at last to go to the realm of bad memories because civilized
man might not look upon it and live without blushing.
It glanced past the rag-shop in the cellar, whence welled up stenches
to poison the town, into an apartment three flights up that held two
women, one young, the other old and bent. The young one had a baby at
her breast. She was rocking it tenderly in her arms, singing in the
soft Italian tongue a lullaby, while the old granny listened eagerly,
her elbows on her knees, and a stumpy clay pipe, blackened with age,
between her teeth. Her eyes were set on the wall, on which the musty
paper hung in tatters, fit frame for the wretched, poverty-stricken
room, but they saw neither poverty nor want; her aged limbs felt not
the cold draught from without, in which they shivered; she looked far
over the seas to sunny Italy, whose music was in her ears.
"O dolce Napoli," she mumbled between her toothless jaws, "O suol
beato--"
The song ended in a burst of passionate grief. The old granny and the
baby woke up at once. They were not in sunny Italy; not under
southern, cloudless skies. They were in "The Bend," in Mulberry
Street, and the wintry wind rattled the door as if it would say, in
the language of their new home, the land of the free: "Less music!
More work! Root, hog, or die!"
Around the corner the sunbeam danced with the wind into Mott Street,
lifted the blouse of a Chinaman and made it play tag with his pigtail.
It used him so roughly that he was glad to skip from it down a
cellar-way that gave out fumes of opium strong enough to scare even
the north wind from its purpose. The soles of his felt shoes showed as
he disappeared down the ladder that passed for cellar steps. Down
there, where daylight never came, a group of yellow, almond-eyed men
were bending over a table playing fan-tan. Their very souls were in
the game, every faculty of the mind bent on the issue and the stake.
The one blouse that was indifferent to what went on was stretched on a
mat in a corner. One end of a clumsy pipe was in his mouth, the other
held over a little spirit-lamp on the divan on which he lay. Something
fluttered in the flame with a pungent, unpleasant smell. The smoker
took a long draught, inhaling the white smoke, then sank back on his
couch in senseless content.
Upstairs tiptoed the noiseless felt shoes, bent on some house errand,
to the "household" floors above, where young white girls from the
tenements of The Bend and the East Side live in slavery worse, if not
more galling, than any of the galley with ball and chain--the slavery
of the pipe. Four, eight, sixteen, twenty odd such "homes" in this
tenement, disgracing the very name of home and family, for marriage
and troth are not in the bargain.
In one room, between the half-drawn curtains of which the sunbeam
works its way in, three girls are lying on as many bunks, smoking all.
They are very young, "under age," though each and every one would
glibly swear in court to the satisfaction of the police that she is
sixteen, and therefore free to make her own bad choice. Of these, one
was brought up among the rugged hills of Maine; the other two are from
the tenement crowds, hardly missed there. But their companion? She is
twirling the sticky brown pill over the lamp, preparing to fill the
bowl of her pipe with it. As she does so, the sunbeam dances across
the bed, kisses the red spot on her cheek that betrays the secret her
tyrant long has known,--though to her it is hidden yet,--that the pipe
has claimed its victim and soon will pass it on to the Potter's Field.
"Nell," says one of her chums in the other bunk, something stirred
within her by the flash, "Nell, did you hear from the old farm to home
since you come here?"
Nell turns half around, with the toasting-stick in her hand, an ugly
look on her wasted features, a vile oath on her lips.
"To hell with the old farm," she says, and putting the pipe to her
mouth inhales it all, every bit, in one long breath, then falls back
on her pillow in drunken stupor.
That is what the sun of a winter day saw and heard in Mott Street.