their might. The sergeant's body did not move. Bending over till the
back creaked, it hung over the edge, a weight of two hundred and three
pounds suspended from and holding it down. The cold sweat started upon
his men's foreheads as they tried and tried again, without gaining an
inch. Blood dripped from Sergeant Vaughan's nostrils and ears. Sixty
feet below was the paved courtyard; over against him the window,
behind which he saw the back-draught coming, gathering headway with
lurid, swirling smoke. Now it burst through, burning the hair and the
coats of the two. For an instant he thought all hope was gone.
But in a flash it came back to him. To relieve the terrible
dead-weight that wrenched and tore at his muscles, he was swinging the
man to and fro like a pendulum, head touching head. He could _swing
him up_! A smothered shout warned his men. They crept nearer the edge
without letting go their grip on him, and watched with staring eyes
the human pendulum swing wider and wider, farther and farther, until
now, with a mighty effort, it swung within their reach. They caught
the skirt of the coat, held on, pulled in, and in a moment lifted him
over the edge.
They lay upon the roof, all six, breathless, sightless, their faces
turned to the winter sky. The tumult on the street came up as a faint
echo; the spray of a score of engines pumping below fell upon them,
froze, and covered them with ice. The very roar of the fire seemed far
off. The sergeant was the first to recover. He carried down the man he
had saved, and saw him sent off to the hospital. Then first he noticed
that he was not a negro; the smut had been rubbed from his face.
Monday had dawned before he came to, and days passed before he knew
his rescuer. Sergeant Vaughan was laid up himself then. He had
returned to his work, and finished it; but what he had gone through
was too much for human strength. It was spring before he returned to
his quarters, to find himself promoted, petted, and made much of.
From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a little step. Among the
many who journeyed to the insurance patrol station to see the hero of
the great fire, there came, one day, a woman. She was young and
pretty, the sweetheart of the man on the window-sill. He was a lawyer,
since a state senator of Pennsylvania. She wished the sergeant to
repeat exactly the words he spoke to him in that awful moment when he
bade him jump--to life or death. She had heard them, and she wanted
the sergeant to repeat them to her, that she might know for sure he
was the man who did it. He stammered and hitched--tried subterfuges.
She waited, inexorable. Finally, in desperation, blushing fiery red,
he blurted out "a lot of cuss-words." "You know," he said
apologetically, in telling of it, "when I am in a place like that I
can't help it."
When she heard the words which her fiance had already told her,
straightway she fell upon the fireman's neck. The sergeant stood
dumfounded. "Women are queer," he said.
Thus a fireman's life. That the very horses that are their friends in
quarters, their comrades at the fire, sharing with them what comes of
good and evil, catch the spirit of it, is not strange. It would be
strange if they did not. With human intelligence and more than human
affection, the splendid animals follow the fortunes of their masters,
doing their share in whatever is demanded of them. In the final
showing that in thirty years, while with the growing population the
number of fires has steadily increased, the average loss per fire has
as steadily decreased, they have their full share, also, of the
credit. In 1866 there were 796 fires in New York, with an average loss
of $8075.38 per fire. In 1876, with 1382 fires, the loss was but
$2786.70 at each. In 1896, 3890 fires averaged only $878.81. It means
that every year more fires are headed off than run down--smothered at
the start, as a fire should be. When to the verdict of "faithful unto
death" that record is added, nothing remains to be said. The firemen
know how much of that is the doing of their four-legged comrades. It
is the one blot on the fair picture that the city which owes these
horses so much has not seen fit, in gratitude, to provide comfort for
their worn old age. When a fireman grows old, he is retired on
half-pay for the rest of his days. When a horse that has run with the
heavy engines to fires by night and by day for perhaps ten or fifteen
years is worn out, it is--sold, to a huckster, perhaps, or a
contractor, to slave for him until it is fit only for the bone-yard!
The city receives a paltry two or three thousand dollars a year for
this rank treachery, and pockets the blood-money without a protest.
There is room next, in New York, for a movement that shall secure to
the fireman's faithful friend the grateful reward of a quiet farm, a
full crib, and a green pasture to the end of its days, when it is no
longer young enough and strong enough to "run with the machine."
JOHN GAVIN, MISFIT
John Gavin was to blame--there is no doubt of that. To be sure, he was
out of a job, with never a cent in his pockets, his babies starving,
and notice served by the landlord that day. He had travelled the
streets till midnight looking for work, and had found none. And so he
gave up. Gave up, with the Employment Bureau in the next street
registering applicants; with the Wayfarers' Lodge over in Poverty Gap,
where he might have earned fifty cents, anyway, chopping wood; with
charities without end, organized and unorganized, that would have sat
upon and registered his case, and numbered it properly. With all these
things and a hundred like them to meet their wants, the Gavins of our
day have been told often enough that they have no business to lose
hope. That they will persist is strange. But perhaps this one had
never heard of them.
Anyway, Gavin is dead. But yesterday he was the father of six
children, running from May, the eldest, who was thirteen and at
school, to the baby, just old enough to poke its little fingers into
its father's eyes and crow and jump when he came in from his long and
dreary tramps. They were as happy a little family as a family of eight
could be with the wolf scratching at the door, its nose already poking
through. There had been no work and no wages in the house for months,
and the landlord had given notice that at the end of the week, out
they must go, unless the back rent was paid. And there was about as
much likelihood of its being paid as of a slice of the February sun
dropping down through the ceiling into the room to warm the shivering
Gavin family.
It began when Gavin's health gave way. He was a lather and had a
steady job till sickness came. It was the old story: nothing laid
away--how could there be, with a houseful of children--and nothing
coming in. They talk of death-rates to measure the misery of the slum
by, but death does not touch the bottom. It ends the misery. Sickness
only begins it. It began Gavin's. When he had to drop hammer and
nails, he got a job in a saloon as a barkeeper; but the saloon didn't
prosper, and when it was shut up, there was an end. Gavin didn't know
it then. He looked at the babies and kept up spirits as well as he
could, though it wrung his heart.
He tried everything under the sun to get a job. He travelled early and
travelled late, but wherever he went they had men and to spare. And
besides, he was ill. As they told him bluntly, sometimes, they didn't
have any use for sick men. Men to work and earn wages must be strong.
And he had to own that it was true.
Gavin was not strong. As he denied himself secretly the nourishment he
needed that his little ones might have enough, he felt it more and
more. It was harder work for him to get around, and each refusal left
him more downcast. He was yet a young man, only thirty-four, but he
felt as if he was old and tired--tired out; that was it.
The feeling grew on him while he went his last errand, offering his
services at saloons and wherever, as he thought, an opening offered.
In fact, he thought but little about it any more. The whole thing had
become an empty, hopeless formality with him. He knew at last that he
was looking for the thing he would never find; that in a cityful where
every man had his place he was a misfit with none. With his dull brain
dimly conscious of that one idea, he plodded homeward in the midnight
hour. He had been on the go since early morning, and excepting some
lunch from the saloon counters, had eaten nothing.
The lamp burned dimly in the room where May sat poring yet over her
books, waiting for papa. When he came in she looked up and smiled,
but saw by his look, as he hung up his hat, that there was no good
news, and returned with a sigh to her book. The tired mother was
asleep on the bed, dressed, with the baby in her arms. She had lain
down to quiet it and had been lulled to sleep with it herself.
Gavin did not wake them. He went to the bed where the four little ones
slept, and kissed them, each in his turn, then came back and kissed
his wife and baby.
May nestled close to him as he bent over her and gave her, too, a
little hug.
"Where are you going, papa?" she asked.
He turned around at the door and cast a look back at the quiet room,
irresolute. Then he went back once more to kiss his sleeping wife and
baby softly.
But however softly, it woke the mother. She saw him making for the
door, and asked him where he meant to go so late.
"Out, just a little while," he said, and his voice was husky. He
turned his head away.
A woman's instinct made her arise hastily and go to him.
"Don't go," she said; "please don't go away."
As he still moved toward the door, she put her arm about his neck and
drew his head toward her.
She strove with him anxiously, frightened, she hardly knew herself by
what. The lamplight fell upon something shining which he held behind
his back. The room rang with the shot, and the baby awoke crying, to
see its father slip from mamma's arms to the floor, dead.
For John Gavin, alive, there was no place. At least he did not find
it; for which, let it be said and done with, he was to blame. Dead,
society will find one for him. And for the one misfit got off the list
there are seven whom not employment bureau nor woodyard nor charity
register can be made to reach. Social economy the thing is called;
which makes the eighth misfit.
A HEATHEN BABY
A stack of mail comes to Police Headquarters every morning from the
precincts by special department carrier. It includes the reports for
the last twenty-four hours of stolen and recovered goods, complaints,
and the thousand and one things the official mail-bag contains from
day to day. It is all routine, and everything has its own pigeonhole
into which it drops and is forgotten until some raking up in the
department turns up the old blotters and the old things once more. But
at last the mail-bag contained something that was altogether out of
the usual run, to wit, a Chinese baby.
Pickaninnies have come in it before this, lots of them, black and
shiny, and one pappoose from a West Side wigwam; but a Chinese baby
never.
Sergeant Jack was so astonished that it took his breath away. When he
recovered he spoke learnedly about its clothes as evidence of its
heathen origin. Never saw such a thing before, he said. They were like
they were sewn on; it was impossible to disentangle that child by any
way short of rolling it on the floor.
Sergeant Jack is an old bachelor, and that is all he knows about
babies. The child was not sewn up at all. It was just swaddled, and no
Chinese had done that, but the Italian woman who found it. Sergeant
Jack sees such babies every night in Mulberry Street, but that is the
way with old bachelors. They don't know much, anyhow.
It was clear that the baby thought so. She was a little girl, very
little, only one night old; and she regarded him through her almond
eyes with a supercilious look, as who should say, "Now, if he was only
a bottle, instead of a big, useless policeman, why, one might put up
with him;" which reflection opened the flood-gates of grief and set
the little Chinee squalling: "Yow! Yow! Yap!" until the Sergeant held
his ears, and a policeman carried it upstairs in a hurry.
Downstairs first, in the Sergeant's big blotter, and upstairs in the
matron's nursery next, the baby's brief official history was recorded.
There was very little of it, indeed, and what there was was not marked
by much ceremony. The stork hadn't brought it, as it does in far-off
Denmark; nor had the doctor found it and brought it in, on the
American plan.
An Italian woman had just scratched it out of an ash barrel. Perhaps
that's the way they find babies in China, in which case the sympathy
of all American mothers and fathers will be with the present
despoilers of the heathen Chinee, who is entitled to no consideration
whatever until he introduces a new way.
The Italian woman was Mrs. Maria Lepanto. She lives in Thompson
Street, but she had come all the way down to the corner of Elizabeth
and Canal streets with her little girl to look at a procession passing
by. That, as everybody knows, is next door to Chinatown. It was ten
o'clock, and the end of the procession was in sight, when she noticed
something stirring in an ash barrel that stood against the wall. She
thought first it was a rat, and was going to run, when a noise that
was certainly not a rat's squeal came from the barrel. The child clung
to her hand and dragged her toward the sound.
"Oh, mamma!" she cried, in wild excitement, "hear it! It isn't a rat!
I know! Hear!"
It was a wail, a very tiny wail, ever so sorry, as well it might be,
coming from a baby that was cradled in an ash barrel. It was little
Susie's eager hands that snatched it out. Then they saw that it was
indeed a child, a poor, helpless, grieving little baby.
It had nothing on at all, not even a rag. Perhaps they had not had
time to dress it.
"Oh, it will fit my dolly's jacket!" cried Susie, dancing around and
hugging it in glee. "It will, mamma! A real live baby! Now Tilde
needn't brag of theirs. We will take it home, won't we, mamma?"
The bands brayed, and the flickering light of many torches filled the
night. The procession had gone down the street, and the crowd with it.
The poor woman wrapped the baby in her worn shawl and gave it to the
girl to carry. And Susie carried it, prouder and happier than any of
the men that marched to the music. So they arrived home. The little
stranger had found friends and a resting-place.
But not for long. In the morning Mrs. Lepanto took counsel with the
neighbors, and was told that the child must be given to the police.
That was the law, they said, and though little Susie cried bitterly at
having to part with her splendid new toy, Mrs. Lepanto, being a
law-abiding woman, wrapped up her find and took it to the Macdougal
Street station.
That was the way it got to Headquarters with the morning mail, and
how Sergeant Jack got a chance to tell all he didn't know about
babies. Matron Travers knew more, a good deal. She tucked the little
heathen away in a trundle-bed with a big bottle, and blessed silence
fell at once on Headquarters. In five minutes the child was asleep.
While it slept, Matron Travers entered it in her book as "No. 103" of
that year's crop of the gutter, and before it woke up she was on the
way with it, snuggled safely in a big gray shawl, up to the Charities.
There Mr. Bauer registered it under yet another number, chucked it
under the chin, and chirped at it in what he probably thought might
pass for baby Chinese. Then it got another big bottle and went to
sleep once more.
At ten o'clock there came a big ship on purpose to give the little
Mott Street waif a ride up the river, and by dinner-time it was on a
green island with four hundred other babies of all kinds and shades,
but not one just like it in the whole lot. For it was New York's first
and only Chinese foundling. As to that Superintendent Bauer, Matron
Travers, and Mrs. Lepanto agreed. Sergeant Jack's evidence doesn't
count, except as backed by his superiors. He doesn't know a heathen
baby when he sees one.
The island where the waif from Mott Street cast anchor is called
Randall's Island, and there its stay ends, or begins. The chances are
that it ends, for with an ash barrel filling its past and a foundling
asylum its future, a baby hasn't much of a show. Babies were made to
be hugged each by one pair of mother's arms, and neither white-capped
nurses nor sleek milch cows fed on the fattest of meadow-grass can
take their place, try as they may. The babies know that they are
cheated, and they will not stay.
THE CHRISTENING IN BOTTLE ALLEY
All Bottle Alley was bidden to the christening. It being Sunday, when
Mulberry Street was wont to adjust its differences over the cards and
the wine-cup, it came "heeled," ready for what might befall. From
Tomaso, the ragpicker in the farthest rear cellar, to the Signor
Undertaker, mainstay and umpire in the varying affairs of life, which
had a habit in The Bend of lapsing suddenly upon his professional
domain, they were all there, the men of Malpete's village. The baby
was named for the village saint, so that it was a kind of communal
feast as well. Carmen was there with her man, and Francisco Cessari.
If Carmen had any other name, neither Mulberry Street nor the Alley
knew it. She was Carmen to them when, seven years before, she had
taken up with Francisco, then a young mountaineer straight as the
cedar of his native hills, the breath of which was yet in the songs
with which he wooed her. Whether the priest had blessed their bonds no
one knew or asked. The Bend only knew that one day, after three years
during which the Francisco tenement had been the scene of more than
one jealous quarrel, not, it was whispered, without cause, the
mountaineer was missing. He did not come back. From over the sea The
Bend heard, after a while, that he had reappeared in the old village
to claim the sweetheart he had left behind. In the course of time new
arrivals brought the news that Francisco was married and that they
were living happily, as a young couple should. At the news Mulberry
Street looked askance at Carmen; but she gave no sign. By tacit
consent, she was the Widow Carmen after that.
The summers passed. The fourth brought Francisco Cessari, come back to
seek his fortune, with his wife and baby. He greeted old friends
effusively and made cautious inquiries about Carmen. When told that
she had consoled herself with his old rival, Luigi, with whom she was
then living in Bottle Alley, he laughed with a light heart, and took
up his abode within half a dozen doors of the alley. That was but a
short time before the christening at Malpete's. There their paths
crossed each other for the first time since his flight.
She met him with a smile on her lips, but with hate in her heart. He,
manlike, saw only the smile. The men smoking and drinking in the court
watched them speak apart, saw him, with the laugh that sat so lightly
upon his lips, turn to his wife, sitting by the hydrant with the
child, and heard him say, "Look, Carmen! our baby!"
The woman bent over it, and, as she did, the little one woke suddenly
out of its sleep and cried out in affright. It was noticed that Carmen
smiled again then, and that the young mother shivered, why she herself
could not have told. Francisco, joining the group at the farther end
of the yard, said carelessly that Carmen had forgotten. They poked fun
at him and spoke her name loudly, with laughter.
From the tenement, as they did, came Luigi and asked threateningly who
insulted his wife. They only laughed the more, said he had drunk too
much wine, and shouldering him out, bade him go look to his woman. He
went. Carmen had witnessed it all from the house. She called him a
coward and goaded him with bitter taunts until mad with anger and
drink he went out in the court once more and shook his fist in the
face of Francisco. They hailed his return with bantering words. Luigi
was spoiling for a fight they laughed, and would find one before the
day was much older. But suddenly silence fell upon the group. Carmen
stood on the step, pale and cold. She hid something under her apron.
"Luigi!" she called, and he came to her. She drew from under the
apron a cocked pistol, and, pointing to Francisco, pushed it into his
hand. At the sight the alley was cleared as suddenly as if a tornado
had swept through it. Malpete's guests leaped over fences, dived into
cellar-ways anywhere for shelter. The door of the woodshed slammed
behind Francisco just as his old rival reached it. The maddened man
tore it open and dragged him out by the throat. He pinned him against
the fence, and levelled the pistol with frenzied curses. They died on
his lips. The face that was turning livid in his grasp was the face of
his boyhood's friend. They had gone to school together, danced
together at the fairs in the old days. They had been friends--till
Carmen came. The muzzle of the weapon fell.
"Shoot!" said a hard voice behind him. Carmen stood there with face of
stone. She stamped her foot. "Shoot!" she commanded, pointing,
relentless, at the struggling man. "Coward, shoot!"
Her lover's finger crooked itself upon the trigger. A shriek, wild and
despairing, rang through the alley. A woman ran madly from the house,
flew across the pavement, and fell panting at Carmen's feet.
"Mother of God! mercy!" she cried, thrusting her babe before the
assassin's weapon. "Jesus Maria! Carmen, the child! He is my
husband!"
No gleam of pity came into the cold eyes. Only hatred, fierce and
bitter, was there. In one swift, sweeping glance she saw it all: the
woman fawning at her feet, the man she hated limp and helpless in the
grasp of her lover.
"He was mine once," she said, "and he had no mercy." She pushed the
baby aside. "Coward, shoot!"
The shot was drowned in the shriek, hopeless, despairing, of the widow
who fell upon the body of Francisco as it slipped lifeless from the
grasp of the assassin. The christening party saw Carmen standing over
the three with the same pale smile on her cruel lips.
For once The Bend did not shield a murderer. The door of the tenement
was shut against him. The women spurned him. The very children spat
upon him as he fled to the street. The police took him there. With him
they seized Carmen. She made no attempt to escape. She had bided her
time, and it had come. She had her revenge. To the end of its lurid
life Bottle Alley remembered it as the murder accursed of God.
IN THE MULBERRY STREET COURT
"Conduct unbecoming an officer," read the charge, "in this, to wit,
that the said defendants brought into the station-house, by means to
deponent unknown, on the said Fourth of July, a keg of beer, and, when
apprehended, were consuming the contents of the same." Twenty
policemen, comprising the whole off platoon of the East One Hundred
and Fourth Street squad, answered the charge as defendants. They had
been caught grouped about a pot of chowder and the fatal keg in the
top-floor dormitory, singing, "Beer, beer, glorious beer!" Sergeant
McNally and Roundsman Stevenson interrupted the proceedings.
The Commissioner's eyes bulged as, at the call of the complaint clerk,
the twenty marched up and ranged themselves in rows, three deep,
before him.
They took the oath collectively, with a toss and a smack, as if to
say, "I don't care if I do," and told separately and identically the
same story, while the Sergeant stared and the Commissioner's eyes grew
bigger and rounder.
Missing his reserves, Sergeant McNally had sent the Roundsman in
search of them. He was slow in returning, and the Sergeant went on a
tour of inspection himself. He journeyed to the upper region, and
there came upon the party in full swing. Then and there he called the
roll. Not one of the platoon was missing.
They formed a hollow square around something that looked uncommonly
like a beer-keg. A number of tin growlers stood beside it. The
Sergeant picked up one and turned the tap. There was enough left in
the keg to barely half fill it. Seeing that, the platoon followed him
downstairs without a murmur.
One by one the twenty took the stand after the Sergeant had left it,
and testified without a tremor that they had seen no beer-keg. In
fact, the majority would not know one if they saw it. They were tired
and hungry, having been held in reserve all day, when a pleasant smell
assailed their nostrils.
Each of the twenty followed his nose independently to the top floor,
where he was surprised to see the rest gathered about a pot of
steaming chowder. He joined the circle and partook of some. It was
good. As to beer, he had seen none and drunk less. There was something
there of wood with a brass handle to it. What it was none of them
seemed to know. They were all shocked at the idea that it might have
been a beer-keg. Such things are forbidden in police stations.