rustled in the draught. Some one going out said, "A Merry Christmas to
you all!" in a big, hearty voice. I awoke from my revery to find
myself back in New York with a glad glow at the heart. It was not
true. I had only forgotten. It was myself that had changed, not
Christmas. That was here, with the old cheer, the old message of
good-will, the old royal road to the heart of mankind. How often had I
seen its blessed charity, that never corrupts, make light in the
hovels of darkness and despair! how often watched its spirit of
self-sacrifice and devotion in those who had, besides themselves,
nothing to give! and as often the sight had made whole my faith in
human nature. No! Christmas was not of the past, its spirit not dead.
The lad who fixed the sprig of holly on the stairs knew it; my
reporter's note-book bore witness to it. Witness of my contrition for
the wrong I did the gentle spirit of the holiday, here let the book
tell the story of one Christmas in the tenements of the poor:--
It is evening in Grand Street. The shops east and west are pouring
forth their swarms of workers. Street and sidewalk are filled with an
eager throng of young men and women, chatting gayly, and elbowing the
jam of holiday shoppers that linger about the big stores. The
street-cars labor along, loaded down to the steps with passengers
carrying bundles of every size and odd shape. Along the curb a string
of pedlers hawk penny toys in push-carts with noisy clamor, fearless
for once of being moved on by the police. Christmas brings a two
weeks' respite from persecution even to the friendless street-fakir.
From the window of one brilliantly lighted store a bevy of mature
dolls in dishabille stretch forth their arms appealingly to a troop of
factory-hands passing by. The young men chaff the girls, who shriek
with laughter and run. The policeman on the corner stops beating his
hands together to keep warm, and makes a mock attempt to catch them,
whereat their shrieks rise shriller than ever. "Them stockin's o'
yourn 'll be the death o' Santa Claus!" he shouts after them, as they
dodge. And they, looking back, snap saucily, "Mind yer business,
freshy!" But their laughter belies their words. "They giv' it to ye
straight that time," grins the grocer's clerk, come out to snatch a
look at the crowds; and the two swap holiday greetings.
At the corner, where two opposing tides of travel form an eddy, the
line of push-carts debouches down the darker side street. In its gloom
their torches burn with a fitful glare that wakes black shadows among
the trusses of the railroad structure overhead. A woman, with worn
shawl drawn tightly about head and shoulders, bargains with a pedler
for a monkey on a stick and two cents' worth of flitter-gold. Five
ill-clad youngsters flatten their noses against the frozen pane of the
toy-shop, in ecstasy at something there, which proves to be a milk
wagon, with driver, horses, and cans that can be unloaded. It is
something their minds can grasp. One comes forth with a penny goldfish
of pasteboard clutched tightly in his hand, and, casting cautious
glances right and left, speeds across the way to the door of a
tenement, where a little girl stands waiting. "It's yer Chris'mas,
Kate," he says, and thrusts it into her eager fist. The black doorway
swallows them up.
Across the narrow yard, in the basement of the rear house, the lights
of a Christmas tree show against the grimy window pane. The hare
would never have gone around it, it is so very small. The two children
are busily engaged fixing the goldfish upon one of its branches. Three
little candles that burn there shed light upon a scene of utmost
desolation. The room is black with smoke and dirt. In the middle of
the floor oozes an oil-stove that serves at once to take the raw edge
off the cold and to cook the meals by. Half the window panes are
broken, and the holes stuffed with rags. The sleeve of an old coat
hangs out of one, and beats drearily upon the sash when the wind
sweeps over the fence and rattles the rotten shutters. The family
wash, clammy and gray, hangs on a clothes-line stretched across the
room. Under it, at a table set with cracked and empty plates, a
discouraged woman sits eying the children's show gloomily. It is
evident that she has been drinking. The peaked faces of the little
ones wear a famished look. There are three--the third an infant, put
to bed in what was once a baby carriage. The two from the street are
pulling it around to get the tree in range. The baby sees it, and
crows with delight. The boy shakes a branch, and the goldfish leaps
and sparkles in the candle-light.
"See, sister!" he pipes; "see Santa Claus!" And they clap their hands
in glee. The woman at the table wakes out of her stupor, gazes around
her, and bursts into a fit of maudlin weeping.
The door falls to. Five flights up, another opens upon a bare attic
room which a patient little woman is setting to rights. There are only
three chairs, a box, and a bedstead in the room, but they take a deal
of careful arranging. The bed hides the broken plaster in the wall
through which the wind came in; each chair-leg stands over a rat-hole,
at once to hide it and to keep the rats out. One is left; the box is
for that. The plaster of the ceiling is held up with pasteboard
patches. I know the story of that attic. It is one of cruel desertion.
The woman's husband is even now living in plenty with the creature for
whom he forsook her, not a dozen blocks away, while she "keeps the
home together for the childer." She sought justice, but the lawyer
demanded a retainer; so she gave it up, and went back to her little
ones. For this room that barely keeps the winter wind out she pays
four dollars a month, and is behind with the rent. There is scarce
bread in the house; but the spirit of Christmas has found her attic.
Against a broken wall is tacked a hemlock branch, the leavings of the
corner grocer's fitting-block; pink string from the packing-counter
hangs on it in festoons. A tallow dip on the box furnishes the
illumination. The children sit up in bed, and watch it with shining
eyes.
"We're having Christmas!" they say.
The lights of the Bowery glow like a myriad twinkling stars upon the
ceaseless flood of humanity that surges ever through the great highway
of the homeless. They shine upon long rows of lodging-houses, in which
hundreds of young men, cast helpless upon the reef of the strange
city, are learning their first lessons of utter loneliness; for what
desolation is there like that of the careless crowd when all the world
rejoices? They shine upon the tempter setting his snares there, and
upon the missionary and the Salvation Army lass, disputing his catch
with him; upon the police detective going his rounds with coldly
observant eye intent upon the outcome of the contest; upon the wreck
that is past hope, and upon the youth pausing on the verge of the pit
in which the other has long ceased to struggle. Sights and sounds of
Christmas there are in plenty in the Bowery. Balsam and hemlock and
fir stand in groves along the busy thoroughfare, and garlands of green
embower mission and dive impartially. Once a year the old street
recalls its youth with an effort. It is true that it is largely a
commercial effort; that the evergreen, with an instinct that is not of
its native hills, haunts saloon-corners by preference; but the smell
of the pine woods is in the air, and--Christmas is not too
critical--one is grateful for the effort. It varies with the
opportunity. At "Beefsteak John's" it is content with artistically
embalming crullers and mince-pies in green cabbage under the window
lamp. Over yonder, where the mile-post of the old lane still
stands,--in its unhonored old age become the vehicle of publishing the
latest "sure cure" to the world,--a florist, whose undenominational
zeal for the holiday and trade outstrips alike distinction of creed
and property, has transformed the sidewalk and the ugly railroad
structure into a veritable bower, spanning it with a canopy of green,
under which dwell with him, in neighborly good-will, the Young Men's
Christian Association and the Jewish tailor next door.
In the next block a "turkey-shoot" is in progress. Crowds are trying
their luck at breaking the glass balls that dance upon tiny jets of
water in front of a marine view with the moon rising, yellow and big,
out of a silver sea. A man-of-war, with lights burning aloft, labors
under a rocky coast. Groggy sailormen, on shore leave, make unsteady
attempts upon the dancing balls. One mistakes the moon for the target,
but is discovered in season. "Don't shoot that," says the man who
loads the guns; "there's a lamp behind it." Three scared birds in the
window recess try vainly to snatch a moment's sleep between shots and
the trains that go roaring overhead on the elevated road. Roused by
the sharp crack of the rifles, they blink at the lights in the street,
and peck moodily at a crust in their bed of shavings.
The dime museum gong clatters out its noisy warning that "the lecture"
is about to begin. From the concert hall, where men sit drinking beer
in clouds of smoke, comes the thin voice of a short-skirted singer,
warbling, "Do they think of me at home?" The young fellow who sits
near the door, abstractedly making figures in the wet track of the
"schooners," buries something there with a sudden restless turn, and
calls for another beer. Out in the street a band strikes up. A host
with banners advances, chanting an unfamiliar hymn. In the ranks
marches a cripple on crutches. Newsboys follow, gaping. Under the
illuminated clock of the Cooper Institute the procession halts, and
the leader, turning his face to the sky, offers a prayer. The passing
crowds stop to listen. A few bare their heads. The devoted group, the
flapping banners, and the changing torch-light on upturned faces, make
a strange, weird picture. Then the drum-beat, and the band files into
its barracks across the street. A few of the listeners follow, among
them the lad from the concert hall, who slinks shamefacedly in when
he thinks no one is looking.
Down at the foot of the Bowery is the "pan-handlers' beat," where the
saloons elbow one another at every step, crowding out all other
business than that of keeping lodgers to support them. Within call of
it, across the square, stands a church which, in the memory of men yet
living, was built to shelter the fashionable Baptist audiences of a
day when Madison Square was out in the fields, and Harlem had a
foreign sound. The fashionable audiences are gone long since. To-day
the church, fallen into premature decay, but still handsome in its
strong and noble lines, stands as a missionary outpost in the land of
the enemy, its builders would have said, doing a greater work than
they planned. To-night is the Christmas festival of its
English-speaking Sunday-school, and the pews are filled. The banners
of United Italy, of modern Hellas, of France and Germany and England,
hang side by side with the Chinese dragon and the starry flag--signs
of the cosmopolitan character of the congregation. Greek and Roman
Catholics, Jews and joss-worshippers, go there; few Protestants, and
no Baptists. It is easy to pick out the children in their seats by
nationality, and as easy to read the story of poverty and suffering
that stands written in more than one mother's haggard face, now
beaming with pleasure at the little ones' glee. A gayly decorated
Christmas tree has taken the place of the pulpit. At its foot is
stacked a mountain of bundles, Santa Claus's gifts to the school. A
self-conscious young man with soap-locks has just been allowed to
retire, amid tumultuous applause, after blowing "Nearer, my God, to
Thee" on his horn until his cheeks swelled almost to bursting. A
trumpet ever takes the Fourth Ward by storm. A class of little girls
is climbing upon the platform. Each wears a capital letter on her
breast, and has a piece to speak that begins with the letter; together
they spell its lesson. There is momentary consternation: one is
missing. As the discovery is made, a child pushes past the doorkeeper,
hot and breathless. "I am in 'Boundless Love,'" she says, and makes
for the platform, where her arrival restores confidence and the
language.
In the audience the befrocked visitor from up-town sits cheek by jowl
with the pigtailed Chinaman and the dark-browed Italian. Up in the
gallery, farthest from the preacher's desk and the tree, sits a Jewish
mother with three boys, almost in rags. A dingy and threadbare shawl
partly hides her poor calico wrap and patched apron. The woman shrinks
in the pew, fearful of being seen; her boys stand upon the benches,
and applaud with the rest. She endeavors vainly to restrain them.
"Tick, tick!" goes the old clock over the door through which wealth
and fashion went out long years ago, and poverty came in.
Tick, tick! the world moves, with us--without; without or with. She is
the yesterday, they the to-morrow. What shall the harvest be?
Loudly ticked the old clock in time with the doxology, the other day,
when they cleared the tenants out of Gotham Court down here in Cherry
Street, and shut the iron doors of Single and Double Alley against
them. Never did the world move faster or surer toward a better day
than when the wretched slum was seized by the health officers as a
nuisance unfit longer to disgrace a Christian city. The snow lies deep
in the deserted passageways, and the vacant floors are given over to
evil smells, and to the rats that forage in squads, burrowing in the
neglected sewers. The "wall of wrath" still towers above the buildings
in the adjoining Alderman's Court, but its wrath at last is wasted.
It was built by a vengeful Quaker, whom the alderman had knocked down
in a quarrel over the boundary line, and transmitted its legacy of
hate to generations yet unborn; for where it stood it shut out
sunlight and air from the tenements of Alderman's Court. And at last
it is to go, Gotham Court and all; and to the going the wall of wrath
has contributed its share, thus in the end atoning for some of the
harm it wrought. Tick! old clock; the world moves. Never yet did
Christmas seem less dark on Cherry Hill than since the lights were put
out in Gotham Court forever.
In "The Bend" the philanthropist undertaker who "buries for what he
can catch on the plate" hails the Yule-tide season with a pyramid of
green made of two coffins set on end. It has been a good day, he says
cheerfully, putting up the shutters; and his mind is easy. But the
"good days" of The Bend are over, too. The Bend itself is all but
gone. Where the old pigsty stood, children dance and sing to the
strumming of a cracked piano-organ propelled on wheels by an Italian
and his wife. The park that has come to take the place of the slum
will curtail the undertaker's profits, as it has lessened the work of
the police. Murder was the fashion of the day that is past. Scarce a
knife has been drawn since the sunlight shone into that evil spot, and
grass and green shrubs took the place of the old rookeries. The
Christmas gospel of peace and good-will moves in where the slum moves
out. It never had a chance before.
The children follow the organ, stepping in the slush to the music,
bareheaded and with torn shoes, but happy; across the Five Points and
through "the Bay,"--known to the directory as Baxter Street,--to "the
Divide," still Chatham Street to its denizens, though the aldermen
have rechristened it Park Row. There other delegations of Greek and
Italian children meet and escort the music on its homeward trip. In
one of the crooked streets near the river its journey comes to an end.
A battered door opens to let it in. A tallow dip burns sleepily on the
creaking stairs. The water runs with a loud clatter in the sink: it is
to keep it from freezing. There is not a whole window pane in the
hall. Time was when this was a fine house harboring wealth and
refinement. It has neither now. In the old parlor downstairs a knot of
hard-faced men and women sit on benches about a deal table, playing
cards. They have a jug between them, from which they drink by turns.
On the stump of a mantel-shelf a lamp burns before a rude print of the
Mother of God. No one pays any heed to the hand-organ man and his wife
as they climb to their attic. There is a colony of them up
there--three families in four rooms.
"Come in, Antonio," says the tenant of the double flat,--the one with
two rooms,--"come and keep Christmas." Antonio enters, cap in hand. In
the corner by the dormer-window a "crib" has been fitted up in
commemoration of the Nativity. A soap-box and two hemlock branches are
the elements. Six tallow candles and a night-light illuminate a
singular collection of rarities, set out with much ceremonial show. A
doll tightly wrapped in swaddling-clothes represents "the Child." Over
it stands a ferocious-looking beast, easily recognized as a survival
of the last political campaign,--the Tammany tiger,--threatening to
swallow it at a gulp if one as much as takes one's eyes off it. A
miniature Santa Claus, a pasteboard monkey, and several other articles
of bric-a-brac of the kind the tenement affords, complete the outfit.
The background is a picture of St. Donato, their village saint, with
the Madonna "whom they worship most." But the incongruity harbors no
suggestion of disrespect. The children view the strange show with
genuine reverence, bowing and crossing themselves before it. There are
five, the oldest a girl of seventeen, who works for a sweater, making
three dollars a week. It is all the money that comes in, for the
father has been sick and unable to work eight months and the mother
has her hands full: the youngest is a baby in arms. Three of the
children go to a charity school, where they are fed, a great help, now
the holidays have come to make work slack for sister. The rent is six
dollars--two weeks' pay out of the four. The mention of a possible
chance of light work for the man brings the daughter with her sewing
from the adjoining room, eager to hear. That would be Christmas
indeed! "Pietro!" She runs to the neighbors to communicate the joyful
tidings. Pietro comes, with his new-born baby, which he is tending
while his wife lies ill, to look at the maestro, so powerful and good.
He also has been out of work for months, with a family of mouths to
fill, and nothing coming in. His children are all small yet, but they
speak English.
"What," I say, holding a silver dime up before the oldest, a smart
little chap of seven--"what would you do if I gave you this?"
"Get change," he replies promptly. When he is told that it is his own,
to buy toys with, his eyes open wide with wondering incredulity. By
degrees he understands. The father does not. He looks questioningly
from one to the other. When told, his respect increases visibly for
"the rich gentleman."
They were villagers of the same community in southern Italy, these
people and others in the tenements thereabouts, and they moved their
patron saint with them. They cluster about his worship here, but the
worship is more than an empty form. He typifies to them the old
neighborliness of home, the spirit of mutual help, of charity, and of
the common cause against the common enemy. The community life survives
through their saint in the far city to an unsuspected extent. The sick
are cared for; the dreaded hospital is fenced out. There are no
Italian evictions. The saint has paid the rent of this attic through
two hard months; and here at his shrine the Calabrian village gathers,
in the persons of these three, to do him honor on Christmas eve.
Where the old Africa has been made over into a modern Italy, since
King Humbert's cohorts struck the up-town trail, three hundred of the
little foreigners are having an uproarious time over their Christmas
tree in the Children's Aid Society's school. And well they may, for
the like has not been seen in Sullivan Street in this generation.
Christmas trees are rather rarer over here than on the East Side,
where the German leavens the lump with his loyalty to home traditions.
This is loaded with silver and gold and toys without end, until there
is little left of the original green. Santa Claus's sleigh must have
been upset in a snow-drift over here, and righted by throwing the
cargo overboard, for there is at least a wagon-load of things that can
find no room on the tree. The appearance of "teacher" with a double
armful of curly-headed dolls in red, yellow, and green Mother-Hubbards,
doubtful how to dispose of them, provokes a shout of approval, which
is presently quieted by the principal's bell. School is "in" for the
preliminary exercises. Afterward there are to be the tree and
ice-cream for the good children. In their anxiety to prove their title
clear, they sit so straight, with arms folded, that the whole row
bends over backward. The lesson is brief, the answers to the point.
"What do we receive at Christmas?" the teacher wants to know. The
whole school responds with a shout, "Dolls and toys!" To the question,
"Why do we receive them at Christmas?" the answer is not so prompt.
But one youngster from Thompson Street holds up his hand. He knows.
"Because we always get 'em," he says; and the class is convinced: it
is a fact. A baby wails because it cannot get the whole tree at once.
The "little mother"--herself a child of less than a dozen winters--who
has it in charge, cooes over it, and soothes its grief with the aid of
a surreptitious sponge-cake evolved from the depths of teacher's
pocket. Babies are encouraged in these schools, though not originally
included in their plan, as often the one condition upon which the
older children can be reached. Some one has to mind the baby, with all
hands out at work.
The school sings "Santa Lucia" and "Children of the Heavenly King,"
and baby is lulled to sleep.
"Who is this King?" asks the teacher, suddenly, at the end of a verse.
Momentary stupefaction. The little minds are on ice-cream just then;
the lad nearest the door has telegraphed that it is being carried up
in pails. A little fellow on the back seat saves the day. Up goes his
brown fist.
"Well, Vito, who is he?"
"McKinley!" pipes the lad, who remembers the election just past; and
the school adjourns for ice-cream.
It is a sight to see them eat it. In a score of such schools, from the
Hook to Harlem, the sight is enjoyed in Christmas week by the men and
women who, out of their own pockets, reimburse Santa Claus for his
outlay, and count it a joy, as well they may; for their beneficence
sometimes makes the one bright spot in lives that have suffered of all
wrongs the most cruel,--that of being despoiled of their childhood.
Sometimes they are little Bohemians; sometimes the children of refugee
Jews; and again, Italians, or the descendants of the Irish stock of
Hell's Kitchen and Poverty Row; always the poorest, the shabbiest, the
hungriest--the children Santa Claus loves best to find, if any one
will show him the way. Having so much on hand, he has no time, you
see, to look them up himself. That must be done for him; and it is
done. To the teacher in the Sullivan Street school came one little
girl, this last Christmas, with anxious inquiry if it was true that he
came around with toys.
"I hanged my stocking last time," she said, "and he didn't come at
all." In the front house indeed, he left a drum and a doll, but no
message from him reached the rear house in the alley. "Maybe he
couldn't find it," she said soberly. Did the teacher think he would
come if she wrote to him? She had learned to write.
Together they composed a note to Santa Claus, speaking for a doll and
a bell--the bell to play "go to school" with when she was kept home
minding the baby. Lest he should by any chance miss the alley in spite
of directions, little Rosa was invited to hang her stocking, and her
sister's, with the janitor's children's in the school. And lo! on
Christmas morning there was a gorgeous doll, and a bell that was a
whole curriculum in itself, as good as a year's schooling any day!
Faith in Santa Claus is established in that Thompson Street alley for
this generation at least; and Santa Claus, got by hook or by crook
into an Eighth Ward alley, is as good as the whole Supreme Court
bench, with the Court of Appeals thrown in, for backing the Board of
Health against the slum.