vainly seeking entry to others; had gilded with equal impartiality the
spires of five hundred churches and the tin cornices of thirty
thousand tenements, with their million tenants and more; had smiled
courage and cheer to patient mothers trying to make the most of life
in the teeming crowds, that had too little sunshine by far; hope to
toiling fathers striving early and late for bread to fill the many
mouths clamoring to be fed.
The brief December day was far spent. Now its rays fell across the
North River and lighted up the windows of the tenements in Hell's
Kitchen and Poverty Gap. In the Gap especially they made a brave show;
the windows of the crazy old frame-house under the big tree that sat
back from the street looked as if they were made of beaten gold. But
the glory did not cross the threshold. Within it was dark and dreary
and cold. The room at the foot of the rickety, patched stairs was
empty. The last tenant was beaten to death by her husband in his
drunken fury. The sun's rays shunned the spot ever after, though it
was long since it could have made out the red daub from the mould on
the rotten floor.
Upstairs, in the cold attic, where the wind wailed mournfully through
every open crack, a little girl sat sobbing as if her heart would
break. She hugged an old doll to her breast. The paint was gone from
its face; the yellow hair was in a tangle; its clothes hung in rags.
But she only hugged it closer. It was her doll. They had been friends
so long, shared hunger and hardship together, and now--
Her tears fell faster. One drop trembled upon the wan cheek of the
doll. The last sunbeam shot athwart it and made it glisten like a
priceless jewel. Its glory grew and filled the room. Gone were the
black walls, the darkness, and the cold. There was warmth and light
and joy. Merry voices and glad faces were all about. A flock of
children danced with gleeful shouts about a great Christmas tree in
the middle of the floor. Upon its branches hung drums and trumpets and
toys, and countless candles gleamed like beautiful stars. Farthest up,
at the very top, her doll, her very own, with arms outstretched, as if
appealing to be taken down and hugged. She knew it, knew the
mission-school that had seen her first and only real Christmas, knew
the gentle face of her teacher, and the writing on the wall she had
taught her to spell out: "In His name." His name, who, she had said,
was all little children's friend. Was He also her dolly's friend, and
would He know it among the strange people?
The light went out; the glory faded. The bare room, only colder and
more cheerless than before, was left. The child shivered. Only that
morning the doctor had told her mother that she must have medicine and
food and warmth, or she must go to the great hospital where papa had
gone before, when their money was all spent. Sorrow and want had laid
the mother upon the bed he had barely left. Every stick of furniture,
every stitch of clothing on which money could be borrowed, had gone to
the pawnbroker. Last of all, she had carried mamma's wedding-ring to
pay the druggist. Now there was no more left, and they had nothing to
eat. In a little while mamma would wake up, hungry.
The little girl smothered a last sob and rose quickly. She wrapped the
doll in a threadbare shawl as well as she could, tiptoed to the door,
and listened a moment to the feeble breathing of the sick mother
within. Then she went out, shutting the door softly behind her, lest
she wake her.
Up the street she went, the way she knew so well, one block and a
turn round the saloon corner, the sunset glow kissing the track of her
bare feet in the snow as she went, to a door that rang a noisy bell as
she opened it and went in. A musty smell filled the close room.
Packages, great and small, lay piled high on shelves behind the worn
counter. A slovenly woman was haggling with the pawnbroker about the
money for a skirt she had brought to pledge.
"Not a cent more than a quarter," he said, contemptuously, tossing the
garment aside. "It's half worn out it is, dragging it back and forth
over the counter these six months. Take it or leave it. Hallo! What
have we here? Little Finnegan, eh? Your mother not dead yet? It's in
the poorhouse ye will be if she lasts much longer. What the--"
He had taken the package from the trembling child's hand--the precious
doll--and unrolled the shawl. A moment he stood staring in dumb
amazement at its contents. Then he caught it up and flung it with an
angry oath upon the floor, where it was shivered against the coal-box.
"Get out o' here, ye Finnegan brat," he shouted; "I'll tache ye to
come a-guyin' o' me. I'll--"
The door closed with a bang upon the frightened child, alone in the
cold night. The sun saw not its home-coming. It had hidden behind the
night clouds, weary of the sight of man and his cruelty.
Evening had worn into night. The busy city slept. Down by the wharves,
now deserted, a poor boy sat on the bulwark, hungry, foot-sore, and
shivering with cold. He sat thinking of friends and home, thousands of
miles away over the sea, whom he had left six months before to go
among strangers. He had been alone ever since, but never more so than
that night. His money gone, no work to be found, he had slept in the
streets for nights. That day he had eaten nothing; he would rather die
than beg, and one of the two he must do soon.
There was the dark river rushing at his feet; the swirl of the unseen
waters whispered to him of rest and peace he had not known since--it
was so cold--and who was there to care, he thought bitterly. No one
would ever know. He moved a little nearer the edge, and listened more
intently.
A low whine fell on his ear, and a cold, wet face was pressed against
his. A little crippled dog that had been crouching silently beside him
nestled in his lap. He had picked it up in the street, as forlorn and
friendless as himself, and it had stayed by him. Its touch recalled
him to himself. He got up hastily, and, taking the dog in his arms,
went to the police station near by, and asked for shelter. It was the
first time he had accepted even such charity, and as he lay down on
his rough plank he hugged a little gold locket he wore around his
neck, the last link with better days, and thought with a hard sob of
home. In the middle of the night he awoke with a start. The locket was
gone. One of the tramps who slept with him had stolen it. With bitter
tears he went up and complained to the Sergeant at the desk, and the
Sergeant ordered him to be kicked out into the street as a liar, if
not a thief. How should a tramp boy have come honestly by a gold
locket? The doorman put him out as he was bidden, and when the little
dog showed its teeth, a policeman seized it and clubbed it to death on
the step.
* * * * *
Far from the slumbering city the rising moon shines over a wide
expanse of glistening water. It silvers the snow upon a barren heath
between two shores, and shortens with each passing minute the shadows
of countless headstones that bear no names, only numbers. The breakers
that beat against the bluff wake not those who sleep there. In the
deep trenches they lie, shoulder to shoulder, an army of brothers,
homeless in life, but here at rest and at peace. A great cross stands
upon the lonely shore. The moon sheds its rays upon it in silent
benediction and floods the garden of the unknown, unmourned dead with
its soft light. Out on the Sound the fishermen see it flashing white
against the starlit sky, and bare their heads reverently as their
boats speed by, borne upon the wings of the west wind.
MIDWINTER IN NEW YORK
The very earliest impression I received of America's metropolis was
through a print in my child's picture-book that was entitled "Winter
in New York." It showed a sleighing party, or half a dozen such,
muffled to the ears in furs, and racing with grim determination for
some place or another that lay beyond the page, wrapped in the mystery
which so tickles the childish fancy. For it was clear to me that it
was not accident that they were all going the same way. There was
evidently some prize away off there in the waste of snow that beckoned
them on. The text gave me no clew to what it was. It only confirmed
the impression, which was strengthened by the introduction of a
half-naked savage who shivered most wofully in the foreground, that
New York was somewhere within the arctic circle and a perfect paradise
for a healthy boy, who takes to snow as naturally as a duck takes to
water. I do not know how the discovery that they were probably making
for Gabe Case's and his bottle of champagne, which always awaited the
first sleigh on the road, would have struck me in those days. Most
likely as a grievous disappointment; for my fancy, busy ever with
Uncas and Chingachgook and Natty Bumppo, had certainly a buffalo hunt,
or an ambush, or, at the very least, a big fire, ready at the end of
the road. But such is life. Its most cherished hopes have to be
surrendered one by one to the prosy facts of every-day existence. I
recall distinctly how it cut me to the heart when I first walked up
Broadway, with an immense navy pistol strapped around my waist, to
find it a paved street, actually paved, with no buffaloes in sight and
not a red man or a beaver hut.
However, life has its compensations also. At fifty I am as willing to
surrender the arctic circle as I was hopeful of it at ten, with the
price of coal in the chronic plight of my little boy when he has a
troublesome hitch in his trousers: "O dear me! my pants hang up and
don't hang down." And Gabe Case's is a most welcome exchange to me for
the ambush, since I have left out the pistol and the rest of the
armament. I listen to the stories of the oldest inhabitant, of the
winters when "the snow lay to the second-story windows in the Bowery,"
with the fervent wish that they may never come back, and secretly
gloat over his wail that the seasons have changed and are not what
they were. The man who exuberantly proclaims that New York is getting
to have the finest winter-resort climate in the world is my friend,
and I do not care if I never see another snowball. Alas, yes! though
Deerslayer and I are still on the old terms, I fear the evidence is
that I am growing old.
In the midst of the rejoicing comes old Boreas, as last winter, for
instance, and blows down my house of cards. Just when we thought
ourselves safe in referring to the great blizzard as a monstrous,
unheard-of thing, and were dwelling securely in the memory of how we
gathered violets in the woods out in Queens and killed mosquitoes in
the house in Christmas week, comes grim winter and locks the rivers
and buries us up to the neck in snow, before the Thanksgiving dinner
is cold. Then the seasons when Gabe's much-coveted bottle stood
unclaimed on the shelf in its bravery of fine ribbons till far into
the New Year, and was won then literally "by a scratch" on a road
hardly downy with white, seem like a tale that is told, and we realize
that latitude does not unaided make temperature. It is only in
exceptional winters, after all, that we class for a brief spell with
Naples. Greenland and the polar stream are never long in asserting
their claim and Santa Claus's to unchecked progress to our hearths.
And now, when one comes to think of it, who would say them nay for
the sake of a ton of coal, or twenty? If one grows old, he is still
young in his children. There is the smallest tot at this very moment
sliding under my window with shrieks of delight, in the first fall of
the season, though the November election is barely a week gone, and
snowballing the hired girl in quite the fashion of the good old days,
with the grocer's clerk stamping his feet at the back gate and roaring
out his enjoyment at her plight in a key only Jack Frost has in
keeping. A hundred thousand pairs of boys' eyes are stealing anxious
glances toward school windows to-day, lest the storm cease before they
are let out, and scant attention is paid to the morning's lessons, I
will warrant. Who would exchange the bob-sled and the slide and the
hurricane delights of coasting for eternal summer and magnolias in
January? Not I, for one--not yet. Human nature is, after all, more
robust than it seems at the study fire. I never declared in the board
of deacons why I stood up so stoutly for the minister we called that
winter to our little church,--with deacons discretion is sometimes
quite the best part of valor,--but I am not ashamed of it. It was the
night when we were going home, and neighbor Connery gave us a ride on
his new bob down that splendid hill,--the whole board, men and
women,--that I judged him for what he really was--that resolute leg
out behind that kept us on our course as straight as a die, rounding
every log and reef with the skill of a river pilot, never flinching
once. It was the leg that did it; but it was, as I thought, an index
to the whole man.
Discomfort and suffering are usually the ideas associated with deep
winter in a great city like New York, and there is a deal of
it--discomfort to us all and suffering among the poor. The mere
statement that the Street-Cleaning Department last winter carted away
and dumped into the river 1,679,087 cubic yards of snow at thirty
cents a yard, and was then hotly blamed for leaving us in the slush,
fairly measures the one and is enough to set the taxpayer to thinking.
The suffering in the tenements of the poor is as real, but even their
black cloud is not without its silver lining. It calls out among those
who have much as tender a charity as is ever alive among those who
have little or nothing and who know one another for brothers without
needing the reminder of a severe cold snap or a big storm to tell them
of it. More money was poured into the coffers of the charitable
societies in the last big cold snap than they could use for emergency
relief; and the reckless advertising in sensational newspapers of the
starvation that was said to be abroad called forth an emphatic protest
from representatives of the social settlements and of the Charity
Organization Society, who were in immediate touch with the poor. The
old question whether a heavy fall of snow does not more than make up
to the poor man the suffering it causes received a wide discussion at
the time, but in the end was left open as always. The simple truth is
that it brings its own relief to those who are always just on the
verge. It sets them to work, and the charity visitor sees the effect
in wages coming in, even if only for a brief season. The far greater
loss which it causes, and which the visitor does not see, is to those
who are regularly employed, and with whom she has therefore no
concern, in suspending all other kinds of outdoor work than
snow-shovelling.
Take it all together, and I do not believe even an unusual spell of
winter carries in its trail in New York such hopeless martyrdom to the
poor as in Old World cities, London for instance. There is something
in the clear skies and bracing air of our city that keeps the spirits
up to the successful defiance of anything short of actual hunger.
There abides with me from days and nights of poking about in dark
London alleys an impression of black and sooty rooms, and discouraged,
red-eyed women blowing ever upon smouldering fires, that is
disheartening beyond anything I ever encountered in the dreariest
tenements here. Outside, the streets lay buried in fog and slush that
brought no relief to the feelings.
Misery enough I have seen in New York's tenements; but deep as the
shadows are in the winter picture of it, it has no such darkness as
that. The newsboys and the sandwich-men warming themselves upon the
cellar gratings in Twenty-third Street and elsewhere have oftener than
not a ready joke to crack with the passer-by, or a little jig step to
relieve their feelings and restore the circulation. The very tramp who
hangs by his arms on the window-bars of the power-house at Houston
Street and Broadway indulges in safe repartee with the engineer down
in the depths, and chuckles at being more than a match for him. Down
there it is always July, rage the storm king ever so boisterously up
on the level. The windows on the Mercer Street corner of the building
are always open--or else there are no windows. The spaces between the
bars admit a man's arm very handily, and as a result there are always
on cold nights as many hands pointing downward at the engineer and his
boilers as there are openings in the iron fence. The tramps sleep, so
suspended the night long, toasting themselves alternately on front and
back.
The good humor under untoward circumstances that is one of the traits
of our people never comes out so strongly as when winter blocks river
and harbor with ice and causes no end of trouble and inconvenience to
the vast army of workers which daily invades New York in the morning
and departs again with the gathering twilight. The five-minute trip
across sometimes takes hours then, and there is never any telling
where one is likely to land, once the boat is in the stream. I have,
on one occasion, spent nearly six hours on an East River ferry-boat,
trying to cross to Fulton Street in Brooklyn, during which time we
circumnavigated Governor's Island and made an involuntary excursion
down the bay. It was during the Beecher trial, and we had a number of
the lawyers on both sides on board, so that the court had to adjourn
that day while we tried the case among the ice-floes. But though the
loss of time was very great, yet I saw no sign of annoyance among the
passengers through all that trip. Everybody made the best of a bad
bargain.
Many a time since, have I stood jammed in a hungry and tired crowd on
the Thirty-fourth Street ferry for an hour at a time, watching the
vain efforts of the pilot to make a landing, while train after train
went out with no passengers, and have listened to the laughter and
groans that heralded each failure. Then, when at last the boat
touched the end of the slip and one man after another climbed upon the
swaying piles and groped his perilous way toward the shore, the cheers
that arose and followed them on their way, with everybody offering
advice and encouragement, and accepting it in the same good-humored
way!
In the two big snow-storms of a recent winter, when traffic was for a
season interrupted, and in the great blizzard of 1888, when it was
completely suspended, even on the elevated road, and news reached us
from Boston only by cable via London, it was laughing and snowballing
crowds one encountered plodding through the drifts. It was as if real
relief had come with the lifting of the strain of our modern life and
the momentary relapse into the slow-going way of our fathers. Out in
Queens, where we were snow-bound for days, we went about digging one
another out and behaving like a lot of boys, once we had made sure
that the office would have to mind itself for a season.
It is, however, not to the outlying boroughs one has to go if he
wishes to catch the real human spirit that is abroad in the city in a
snow-storm, or to the avenues where the rich live, though the snow to
them might well be a real luxury; or even to the rivers, attractive
as they are in the wild grandeur of arctic festooning from mastheads
and rigging; with incoming steamers, armored in shining white, picking
their way as circumspectly among the floes as if they were navigating
Baffin's Bay instead of the Hudson River; and with their swarms of
swift sea-gulls, some of them spotless white, others as rusty and
dusty as the scavengers whom for the time being they replace
ineffectually, all of them greedily intent upon wresting from the
stream the food which they no longer find outside the Hook. I should
like you well enough to linger with me on the river till the storm is
over, and watch the marvellous sunsets that flood the western sky with
colors of green and gold which no painter's brush ever matched; and
when night has dropped the curtain, to see the lights flashing forth
from the tall buildings in story after story until it is as if the
fairyland of our childhood's dreams lay there upon the brooding waters
within grasp of mortal hands.
Beautiful as these are, it is to none of them I should take you,
nevertheless, to show you the spirit of winter in New York. Not to
"the road," where the traditional strife for the magnum of champagne
is waged still; or to that other road farther east upon which the
young--and the old, too, for that matter--take straw-rides to City
Island, there to eat clam chowder, the like of which is not to be
found, it is said, in or out of Manhattan. I should lead you, instead,
down among the tenements, where, mayhap, you thought to find only
misery and gloom, and bid you observe what goes on there.
All night the snow fell steadily and silently, sifting into each nook
and corner and searching out every dark spot, until when the day came
it dawned upon a city mantled in spotless white, all the dirt and the
squalor and the ugliness gone out of it, and all the harsh sounds of
mean streets hushed. The storekeeper opened his door and shivered as
he thought of the job of shovelling, with the policeman and his
"notice" to hurry it up; shivered more as he heard the small boy on
the stairs with the premonitory note of trouble in his exultant yell,
and took a firmer grip on his broom. But his alarm was needless. The
boy had other feuds on hand. His gang had been feeding fat an ancient
grudge against the boys in the next block or the block beyond, waiting
for the first storm to wipe it out in snow, and the day opened with a
brisk skirmish between the opposing hosts. In the school the plans for
the campaign were perfected, and when it was out they met in the White
Garden, known to the directory as Tompkins Square, the traditional
duelling-ground of the lower East Side; and there ensued such a
battle as Homer would have loved to sing.
Full many a lad fell on the battlements that were thrown up in haste,
only to rise again and fight until a "soaker," wrung out in the gutter
and laid away to harden in the frost, caught him in the eye and sent
him to the rear, a reeling, bawling invalid, but prouder of his hurt
than any veteran of his scars, just as his gang carried the band stand
by storm and drove the Seventh-streeters from the Garden in
ignominious flight. That night the gang celebrated the victory with a
mighty bonfire, while the beaten one, viewing the celebration from
afar, nursed its bruises and its wrath, and recruited its hosts for
the morrow. And on the next night, behold! the bonfire burned in
Seventh Street and not in Eleventh. The fortunes of war are
proverbially fickle. The band stand in the Garden has been taken many
a time since the police took it by storm in battle with the mob in the
seventies, but no mob has succeeded that one to clamor for "bread or
blood." It may be that the snow-fights have been a kind of
safety-valve for the young blood to keep it from worse mischief later
on. There are worse things in the world than to let the boys have a
fling where no greater harm can befall than a bruised eye or a
strained thumb.