yards, smaller bands of boys and girls were busy rolling huge balls
into a mighty snow man with a broom for a gun and bits of purloined
coal for eyes and nose, and making mock assaults upon it and upon one
another, just as the dainty little darlings in curls and leggings were
doing in the up-town streets, but with ever so much more zest in their
play. Their screams of delight rose to the many windows in the
tenements, from which the mothers were exchanging views with next-door
neighbors as to the probable duration of the "spell o' weather," and
John's or Pat's chance of getting or losing a job in consequence. The
snow man stood there till long after all doubts were settled on these
mooted points, falling slowly into helpless decrepitude in spite of
occasional patching. But long before that time the frost succeeding
the snow had paved the way for coasting in the hilly streets, and
discovered countless "slides" in those that were flat, to the huge
delight of the small boy and the discomfiture of his unsuspecting
elders. With all the sedateness of my fifty years, I confess that I
cannot to this day resist a "slide" in a tenement street, with its
unending string of boys and girls going down it with mighty whoops. I
am bound to join in, spectacles, umbrella, and all, at the risk of
literally going down in a heap with the lot.
There is one over on First Avenue, on the way I usually take when I go
home. It begins at a hydrant, which I suspect has had something to do
in more than one way with its beginning, and runs down fully half a
block. If some of my dignified associates on various committees of
sobriety beyond reproach could see me "take it" not once, but two or
three times, with a ragged urchin clinging to each of the skirts of my
coat, I am afraid--I am afraid I might lose caste, to put it mildly.
But the children enjoy it, and so do I, nearly as much as the little
fellows in the next block enjoy their "skating on one" in the gutter,
with little skids of wood twisted in the straps to hold the skate on
tight.
In sight of my slide I pass after a big storm between towering walls
of snow in front of a public school which for years was the only one
in the city that had an outdoor playground. It was wrested from the
dead for the benefit of the living, by the condemnation of an old
burying-ground, after years of effort. The school has ever since been
one of the brightest, most successful in town. The snowbanks exhibit
the handiwork of the boys, all of them from the surrounding tenements.
They are shaped into regular walls with parapets cunningly wrought and
sometimes with no little artistic effect. One winter the walls were
much higher than a man's head, and the passageways between them so
narrow that a curious accident happened, which came near being fatal.
A closed wagon with a cargo of ginger-beer was caught between them and
upset. The beer popped, and the driver's boy, who was inside and
unable to get out, was rescued only with much trouble from the double
peril of being smothered and drowned in the sudden flood.
But the coasting! Let any one who wishes to see real democratic New
York at play take a trip on such a night through the up-town streets
that dip east and west into the great arteries of traffic, and watch
the sights there when young America is in its glory. Only where there
is danger from railroad crossings do the police interfere to stop the
fun. In all other blocks they discreetly close an eye, or look the
other way. New York is full of the most magnificent coasting-slides,
and there is not one of them that is not worked overtime when the snow
is on the ground. There are possibilities in the slopes of the
"Acropolis" and the Cathedral Parkway as yet undeveloped to their full
extent; but wherever the population crowds, it turns out without stint
to enjoy the fun whenever and as soon as occasion offers.
There is a hill over on Avenue A, near by the East River Park, that
is typical in more ways than one. To it come the children of the
tenements with their bob-sleds and "belly-whoppers" made up of bits of
board, sometimes without runners, and the girls from the fine houses
facing the park and up along Eighty-sixth Street, in their toboggan
togs with caps and tassels, and chaperoned by their young fellows,
just a little disposed to turn up their noses at the motley show. But
they soon forget about that in the fun of the game. Down they go, rich
and poor, boys and girls, men and women, with yells of delight as the
snow seems to fly from under them, and the twinkling lights far up the
avenue come nearer and nearer with lightning speed. The slide is lined
on both sides with a joyous throng of their elders, who laugh and
applaud equally the poor sled and the flexible flyer of prouder
pedigree, urging on the returning horde that toils panting up the
steep to take its place in the line once more. Till far into the young
day does the avenue resound with the merriment of the people's winter
carnival.
On the railroad streets the storekeeper is still battling "between
calls" with the last of the day's fall, fervently wishing it may be
the last of the season's, when whir! comes the big sweeper along the
track, raising a whirlwind of snow and dirt that bespatters him and
his newly cleaned flags with stray clods from its brooms, until, out
of patience, and seized at last, in spite of himself, by the spirit of
the thing, he drops broom and shovel and joins the children in pelting
the sweeper in turn. The motorman ducks his head, humps his shoulders,
and grins. The whirlwind sweeps on, followed by a shower of snowballs,
and vanishes in the dim distance.
One of the most impressive sights of winter in New York has gone with
so much else that was picturesque, in this age of results, and will
never be seen in our streets again. The old horse-plough that used to
come with rattle and bang and clangor of bells, drawn by five spans of
big horses, the pick of the stables, wrapped in a cloud of steam, and
that never failed to draw a crowd where it went, is no more. The rush
and the swing of the long line, the crack of the driver's mighty whip
and his warning shouts to "Jack" or "Pete" to pull and keep step, the
steady chop-chop thud of the sand-shaker, will be seen and heard no
more. In the place of the horse-plough has come the electric sweeper,
a less showy but a good deal more effective device.
The plough itself is gone. It has been retired by the railroads as
useless in practice except to remove great masses of snow, which are
not allowed to accumulate nowadays, if it can be helped. The share
could be lowered only to within four or five inches of the ground,
while the wheel-brooms of the sweeper "sweep between every stone,"
making a clean job of it. Lacking the life of the horse-plough, it is
suggestive of concentrated force far beyond anything in the elaborate
show of its predecessor.
The change suggests, not inaptly, the evolution of the old ship of the
line under full canvas into the modern man-of-war, sailless and grim,
and the conceit is strengthened by the warlike build of the electric
sweeper. It is easy to imagine the iron flanges that sweep the snow
from the track to be rammers for a combat at close quarters, and the
canvas hangers that shield the brushes, torpedo-nets for defence
against a hidden enemy. The motorman on the working end of the sweeper
looks like nothing so much as the captain on the bridge of a
man-of-war, and he conducts himself with the same imperturbable calm
under the petty assaults of the guerillas of the street.
From the moment a storm breaks till the last flake has fallen, the
sweepers are run unceasingly over the tracks of the railroads, each in
its own division, which it is its business to keep clear. The track is
all the companies have to mind. There was a law, or a rule, or an
understanding, nobody seems to know exactly which, that they were to
sweep also between the tracks, and two feet on each side, in return
for their franchises; but in effect this proved impracticable. It was
never done. Under the late Colonel Waring the Street-Cleaning
Department came to an understanding with the railroad companies under
which they clear certain streets, not on their routes, that are
computed to have a surface space equal to that which they would have
had to clean had they lived up to the old rule. The department in its
turn removes the accumulations piled up by their sweepers, unless a
providential thaw gets ahead of it.
Removing the snow after a big storm from the streets of New York, or
even from an appreciable number of them, is a task beside which the
cleaning of the Augean stables was a mean and petty affair. In dealing
with the dirt, Hercules's expedient has sometimes been attempted, with
more or less success; but not even turning the East River into our
streets would rid them of the snow. Though in the last severe winter
the department employed at times as many as four thousand extra men
and all the carts that were to be drummed up in the city, carting
away, as I have said, the enormous total of more than a million and a
half cubic yards of snow, every citizen knows, and testified loudly at
the time, that it all hardly scratched the ground. The problem is one
of the many great ones of modern city life which our age of invention
must bequeath unsolved to the dawning century.
In the Street-Cleaning Department's service the snow-plough holds yet
its ancient place of usefulness. Eleven of them are kept for use in
Manhattan and the Bronx alone. The service to which they are put is to
clear at the shortest notice, not the travelled avenues where the
railroad sweepers run, but the side streets that lead from these to
the fire-engine and truck-houses, to break a way for the apparatus for
the emergency that is sure to come. Upon the paths so made the engines
make straight for the railroad tracks when called out, and follow
these to the fire.
A cold snap inevitably brings a "run" of fires in its train. Stoves
are urged to do their utmost all day, and heaped full of coal to keep
overnight. The fire finds at last the weak point in the flue, and
mischief is abroad. Then it is that the firemen are put upon their
mettle, and then it is, too, that they show of what stuff they are
made. In none of the three big blizzards within the memory of us all
did any fire "get away" from them. During the storm of 1888, when the
streets were nearly impassable for three whole days, they were called
out to fight forty-five fires, any one of which might have threatened
the city had it been allowed to get beyond control; but they smothered
them all within the walls where they started. It was the same in the
bad winter I spoke of. In one blizzard the men of Truck 7 got only
four hours' sleep in four days. When they were not putting out fires
they were compelled to turn in and shovel snow to help the paralyzed
Street-Cleaning Department clear the way for their trucks. Their
plight was virtually that of all the rest.
What Colonel Roosevelt said of his Rough Riders after the fight in the
trenches before Santiago, that it is the test of men's nerve to have
them roused up at three o'clock in the morning, hungry and cold, to
fight an enemy attacking in the dark, and then have them all run the
same way,--forward,--is true of the firemen as well, and, like the
Rough Riders, they never failed when the test came. The firemen going
to the front at the tap of the bell, no less surely to grapple with
lurking death than the men who faced Mauser bullets, but with none of
the incidents of glorious war, the flag, the hurrah, and all the
things that fire a soldier's heart, to urge them on,--clinging, half
naked, with numb fingers to the ladders as best they can while trying
to put on their stiff and frozen garments,--is one of the sights that
make one proud of being a man. To see them in action, dripping icicles
from helmet and coat, high upon the ladder, perhaps incased in solid
ice and frozen to the rungs, yet holding the stream as steady to its
work as if the spray from the nozzle did not fall upon them in showers
of stinging hail, is very apt to make a man devoutly thankful that it
is not his lot to fight fires in winter. It is only a few winters
since, at the burning of a South Street warehouse, two pipemen had to
be chopped from their ladder with axes, so thick was the armor of ice
that had formed about and upon them while they worked.
The terrible beauty of such a sight is very vivid in my memory. It was
on the morning when Chief Bresnan and Foreman Rooney went down with
half a dozen of their men in the collapse of the roof in a burning
factory. The men of the rank and file hewed their way through to the
open with their axes. The chief and the foreman were caught under the
big water-tank, the wooden supports of which had been burned away, and
were killed. They were still lying under the wreck when I came. The
fire was out. The water running over the edge of the tank had frozen
into huge icicles that hung like a great white shroud over the bier of
the two dead heroes. It was a gas-fixture factory, and the hundreds of
pipes, twisted into all manner of fantastic shapes of glittering ice,
lent a most weird effect to the sorrowful scene. I can still see Chief
Gicquel, all smoke-begrimed, and with the tears streaming down his
big, manly face,--poor Gicquel! he went to join his brothers in so
many a hard fight only a little while after,--pointing back toward the
wreck with the choking words, "They are in there!" They had fought
their last fight and won, as they ever did, even if they did give
their lives for the victory. Greater end no fireman could crave.
Winter in New York has its hardships and toil, and it has its joys as
well, among rich and poor. Grim and relentless, it is beautiful at all
times until man puts his befouling hand upon the landscape it paints
in street and alley, where poetry is never at home in summer. The
great city lying silent under its soft white blanket at night, with
its myriad of lights twinkling and rivalling the stars, is beautiful
beyond compare. Go watch the moonlight on forest and lake in the park,
when the last straggler has gone and the tramp of the lonely
policeman's horse has died away under the hill; listen to the whisper
of the trees, all shining with dew of Boreas's breath: of the dreams
they dream in their long sleep, of the dawn that is coming, the warm
sunlight of spring, and say that life is not worth living in America's
metropolis, even in winter, whatever the price of coal, and I shall
tell you that you are fit for nothing but treason, stratagem, and
spoils; for you have no music in your soul.
A CHIP FROM THE MAELSTROM
"The cop just sceert her to death, that's what he done. For Gawd's
sake, boss, don't let on I tole you."
The negro, stopping suddenly in his game of craps in the Pell Street
back yard, glanced up with a look of agonized entreaty. Discovering no
such fell purpose in his questioner's face, he added quickly,
reassured:--
"And if he asks if you seed me a-playing craps, say no, not on yer
life, boss, will yer?" And he resumed the game where he left off.
An hour before he had seen Maggie Lynch die in that hallway, and it
was of her he spoke. She belonged to the tenement and to Pell Street,
as he did himself. They were part of it while they lived, with all
that that implied; when they died, to make part of it again,
reorganized and closing ranks in the trench on Hart's Island. It is
only the Celestials in Pell Street who escape the trench. The others
are booked for it from the day they are pushed out from the rapids of
the Bowery into this maelstrom that sucks under all it seizes.
Thenceforward they come to the surface only at intervals in the police
courts, each time more forlorn, but not more hopeless, until at last
they disappear and are heard of no more.
When Maggie Lynch turned the corner no one there knows. The street
keeps no reckoning, and it doesn't matter. She took her place
unchallenged, and her "character" was registered in due time. It was
good. Even Pell Street has its degrees and its standard of perfection.
The standard's strong point is contempt of the Chinese, who are hosts
in Pell Street. Maggie Lynch came to be known as homeless, without a
man, though with the prospects of motherhood approaching, yet she "had
never lived with a Chink." To Pell Street that was heroic. It would
have forgiven all the rest, had there been anything to forgive. But
there was not. Whatever else may be, cant is not among the vices of
Pell Street.
And it is well. Maggie Lynch lived with the Cuffs on the top floor of
No. 21 until the Cuffs moved. They left an old lounge they didn't
want, and Maggie. Maggie was sick, and the housekeeper had no heart to
put her out. Heart sometimes survives in the slums, even in Pell
Street, long after respectability has been hopelessly smothered. It
provided shelter and a bed for Maggie when her only friends deserted
her. In return she did what she could, helping about the hall and
stairs. Queer that gratitude should be another of the virtues the slum
has no power to smother, though dive and brothel and the scorn of the
good do their best, working together.
There was an old mattress that had to be burned, and Maggie dragged it
down with an effort. She took it out in the street, and there set it
on fire. It burned and blazed high in the narrow street. The policeman
saw the sheen in the windows on the opposite side of the way, and saw
the danger of it as he came around the corner. Maggie did not notice
him till he was right behind her. She gave a great start when he spoke
to her.
"I've a good mind to lock you up for this," he said as he stamped out
the fire. "Don't you know it's against the law?"
The negro heard it and saw Maggie stagger toward the door, with her
hand pressed upon her heart, as the policeman went away down the
street. On the threshold she stopped, panting.
"My Gawd, that cop frightened me!" she said, and sat down on the
door-step.
A tenant who came out saw that she was ill, and helped her into the
hall. She gasped once or twice, and then lay back, dead.
Word went around to the Elizabeth Street station, and was sent on from
there with an order for the dead-wagon. Maggie's turn had come for
the ride up the Sound. She was as good as checked for the Potter's
Field, but Pell Street made an effort and came up almost to Maggie's
standard.
Even while the dead-wagon was rattling down the Bowery, one of the
tenants ran all the way to Henry Street, where he had heard that
Maggie's father lived, and brought him to the police station. The old
man wiped his eyes as he gazed upon his child, dead in her sins.
"She had a good home," he said to Captain Young, "but she didn't know
it, and she wouldn't stay. Send her home, and I will bury her with her
mother."
The Potter's Field was cheated out of a victim, and by Pell Street.
But the maelstrom grinds on and on.
SARAH JOYCE'S HUSBANDS
Policeman Muller had run against a boisterous crowd surrounding a
drunken woman at Prince Street and the Bowery. When he joined the
crowd it scattered, but got together again before it had run half a
block, and slunk after him and his prisoner to the Mulberry Street
station. There Sergeant Woodruff learned by questioning the woman that
she was Mary Donovan and had come down from Westchester to have a
holiday. She had had it without a doubt. The Sergeant ordered her to
be locked up for safe-keeping, when, unexpectedly, objection was made.
A small lot of the crowd had picked up courage to come into the
station to see what became of the prisoner. From out of this, one
spoke up: "Don't lock that woman up; she is my wife."
"Eh," said the Sergeant, "and who are you?"
The man said he was George Reilly and a salesman. The prisoner had
given her name as Mary Donovan and said she was single. The Sergeant
drew Mr. Reilly's attention to the street door, which was there for
his accommodation, but he did not take the hint. He became so abusive
that he, too, was locked up, still protesting that the woman was his
wife.
She had gone on her way to Elizabeth Street, where there is a matron,
to be locked up there; and the objections of Mr. Reilly having been
silenced at last, peace was descending once more upon the
station-house, when the door was opened, and a man with a swagger
entered.
"Got that woman locked up here?" he demanded.
"What woman?" asked the Sergeant, looking up.
"Her what Muller took in."
"Well," said the Sergeant, looking over the desk, "what of her?"
"I want her out; she is my wife. She--"
The Sergeant rang his bell. "Here, lock this man up with that woman's
other husband," he said, pointing to the stranger.
The fellow ran out just in time, as the doorman made a grab for him.
The Sergeant drew a tired breath and picked up the ruler to make a red
line in his blotter. There was a brisk step, a rap, and a young fellow
stood in the open door.
"Say, Serg," he began.
The Sergeant reached with his left hand for the inkstand, while his
right clutched the ruler. He never took his eyes off the stranger.
"Say," wheedled he, glancing around and seeing no trap, "Serg, I say:
that woman w'at's locked up, she's--"
"She's what?" asked the Sergeant, getting the range as well as he
could.
"My wife," said the fellow.
There was a bang, the slamming of a door, and the room was empty. The
doorman came running in, looked out, and up and down the street. But
nothing was to be seen. There is no record of what became of the third
husband of Mary Donovan.
The first slept serenely in the jail. The woman herself, when she saw
the iron bars in the Elizabeth Street station, fell into hysterics and
was taken to the Hudson Street Hospital.
Reilly was arraigned in the Tombs Police Court in the morning. He paid
his fine and left, protesting that he was her only husband.
He had not been gone ten minutes when Claimant No. 4 entered.
"Was Sarah Joyce brought here?" he asked Clerk Betts.
The clerk couldn't find the name.
"Look for Mary Donovan," said No. 4.
"Who are you?" asked the clerk.
"I am Sarah's husband," was the answer.
Clerk Betts smiled, and told the man the story of the other three.
"Well, I am blamed," he said.
MERRY CHRISTMAS IN THE TENEMENTS
It was just a sprig of holly, with scarlet berries showing against the
green, stuck in, by one of the office boys probably, behind the sign
that pointed the way up to the editorial rooms. There was no reason
why it should have made me start when I came suddenly upon it at the
turn of the stairs; but it did. Perhaps it was because that dingy
hall, given over to dust and draughts all the days of the year, was
the last place in which I expected to meet with any sign of Christmas;
perhaps it was because I myself had nearly forgotten the holiday.
Whatever the cause, it gave me quite a turn.
I stood, and stared at it. It looked dry, almost withered. Probably it
had come a long way. Not much holly grows about Printing-House Square,
except in the colored supplements, and that is scarcely of a kind to
stir tender memories. Withered and dry, this did. I thought, with a
twinge of conscience, of secret little conclaves of my children, of
private views of things hidden from mamma at the bottom of drawers,
of wild flights when papa appeared unbidden in the door, which I had
allowed for once to pass unheeded. Absorbed in the business of the
office, I had hardly thought of Christmas coming on, until now it was
here. And this sprig of holly on the wall that had come to remind
me,--come nobody knew how far,--did it grow yet in the beech-wood
clearings, as it did when I gathered it as a boy, tracking through the
snow? "Christ-thorn" we called it in our Danish tongue. The red
berries, to our simple faith, were the drops of blood that fell from
the Saviour's brow as it drooped under its cruel crown upon the cross.
Back to the long ago wandered my thoughts: to the moss-grown beech in
which I cut my name and that of a little girl with yellow curls, of
blessed memory, with the first jack-knife I ever owned; to the
story-book with the little fir tree that pined because it was small,
and because the hare jumped over it, and would not be content though
the wind and the sun kissed it, and the dews wept over it and told it
to rejoice in its young life; and that was so proud when, in the
second year, the hare had to go round it, because then it knew it was
getting big,--Hans Christian Andersen's story that we loved above all
the rest; for we knew the tree right well, and the hare; even the
tracks it left in the snow we had seen. Ah, those were the Yule-tide
seasons, when the old Domkirke shone with a thousand wax candles on
Christmas eve; when all business was laid aside to let the world make
merry one whole week; when big red apples were roasted on the stove,
and bigger doughnuts were baked within it for the long feast! Never
such had been known since. Christmas to-day is but a name, a memory.