THE PASSING OF CAT ALLEY
When Santa Claus comes around to New York this Christmas he will look in
vain for some of the slum alleys he used to know. They are gone. Where
some of them were, there are shrubs and trees and greensward; the sites
of others are holes and hillocks yet, that by and by, when all the
official red tape is unwound,--and what a lot of it there is to plague
mankind!--will be levelled out and made into playgrounds for little feet
that have been aching for them too long. Perhaps it will surprise some
good people to hear that Santa Claus knew the old alleys; but he did. I
have been there with him, and I knew that, much as some things which he
saw there grieved him,--the starved childhood, the pinching poverty, and
the slovenly indifference that cut deeper than the rest because it spoke
of hope that was dead,--yet by nothing was his gentle spirit so grieved
and shocked as by the show that proposed to turn his holiday into a
battalion drill of the children from the alleys and the courts for
patricians, young and old, to review. It was well meant, but it was not
Christmas. That belongs to the home, and in the darkest slums Santa
Claus found homes where his blessed tree took root and shed its mild
radiance about, dispelling the darkness, and bringing back hope and
courage and trust.
They are gone, the old alleys. Reform wiped them out. It is well. Santa
Claus will not have harder work finding the doors that opened to him
gladly, because the light has been let in. And others will stand ajar
that before were closed. The chimneys in tenement-house alleys were
never built on a plan generous enough to let him in in the orthodox way.
The cost of coal had to be considered in putting them up. Bottle Alley
and Bandits' Roost are gone with their bad memories. Bone Alley is gone,
and Gotham Court. I well remember the Christmas tree in the court, under
which a hundred dolls stood in line, craving partners among the girls in
its tenements. That was the kind of battalion drill that they
understood. The ceiling of the room was so low that the tree had to be
cut almost in half; but it was beautiful, and it lives yet, I know, in
the hearts of the little ones, as it lives in mine. The "Barracks" are
gone, Nibsey's Alley is gone, where the first Christmas tree was lighted
the night poor Nibsey lay dead in his coffin. And Cat Alley is gone.
[Illustration: The First Christmas Tree in Gotham Court.]
Cat Alley was my alley. It was mine by right of long acquaintance. We
were neighbors for twenty years. Yet I never knew why it was called Cat
Alley. There was the usual number of cats, gaunt and voracious, which
foraged in its ash-barrels; but beyond the family of three-legged cats,
that presented its own problem of heredity,--the kittens took it from
the mother, who had lost one leg under the wheels of a dray,--there was
nothing specially remarkable about them. It was not an alley, either,
when it comes to that, but rather a row of four on five old tenements in
a back yard that was reached by a passageway somewhat less than three
feet wide between the sheer walls of the front houses. These had once
had pretensions to some style. One of them had been the parsonage of the
church next door that had by turns been an old-style Methodist
tabernacle, a fashionable negroes' temple, and an Italian mission
church, thus marking time, as it were, to the upward movement of the
immigration that came in at the bottom, down in the Fourth Ward, fought
its way through the Bloody Sixth, and by the time it had travelled the
length of Mulberry Street had acquired a local standing and the right to
be counted and rounded up by the political bosses. Now the old houses
were filled with newspaper offices and given over to perpetual insomnia.
Week-days and Sundays, night or day, they never slept. Police
headquarters was right across the way, and kept the reporters awake.
From his window the chief looked down the narrow passageway to the
bottom of the alley, and the alley looked back at him, nothing daunted.
No man is a hero to his valet, and the chief was not an autocrat to Cat
Alley. It knew all his human weaknesses, could tell when his time was up
generally before he could, and winked the other eye with the captains
when the newspapers spoke of his having read them a severe lecture on
gambling or Sunday beer-selling. Byrnes it worshipped, but for the
others who were before him and followed after, it cherished a
neighborly sort of contempt.
In the character of its population Cat Alley was properly cosmopolitan.
The only element that was missing was the native American, and in this
it was representative of the tenement districts in America's chief city.
The substratum was Irish, of volcanic properties. Upon this were imposed
layers of German, French, Jewish, and Italian, or, as the alley would
have put it, Dutch, Sabé, Sheeny, and Dago; but to this last it did not
take kindly. With the experience of the rest of Mulberry Street before
it, it foresaw its doom if the Dago got a footing there, and within a
month of the moving in of the Gio family there was an eruption of the
basement volcano, reënforced by the sanitary policeman, to whom
complaint had been made that there were too many "Ginnies" in the Gio
flat. There were four--about half as many as there were in some of the
other flats when the item of house rent was lessened for economic
reasons; but it covered the ground: the flat was too small for the Gios.
The appeal of the signora was unavailing. "You got-a three bambino," she
said to the housekeeper, "all four, lika me," counting the number on her
fingers. "I no putta me broder-in-law and me sister in the street-a.
Italian lika to be together."
The housekeeper was unmoved. "Humph!" she said, "to liken my kids to
them Dagos! Out they go." And they went.
Up on the third floor there was the French couple. It was another of the
contradictions of the alley that of this pair the man should have been a
typical, stolid German, she a mercurial Parisian, who at seventy sang
the "Marseillaise" with all the spirit of the Commune in her cracked
voice, and hated from the bottom of her patriotic soul the enemy with
whom the irony of fate had yoked her. However, she improved the
opportunity in truly French fashion. He was rheumatic, and most of the
time was tied to his chair. He had not worked for seven years. "He no
goode," she said, with a grimace, as her nimble fingers fashioned the
wares by the sale of which, from a basket, she supported them both. The
wares were dancing girls with tremendous limbs and very brief skirts of
tricolor gauze,--"ballerinas," in her vocabulary,--and monkeys with tin
hats, cunningly made to look like German soldiers. For these she taught
him to supply the decorations. It was his department, she reasoned; the
ballerinas were of her country and hers. _Parbleu!_ must one not work?
What then? Starve? Before her look and gesture the cripple quailed, and
twisted and rolled and pasted all day long, to his country's shame,
fuming with impotent rage.
"I wish the devil had you," he growled.
She regarded him maliciously, with head tilted on one side, as a bird
eyes a caterpillar it has speared.
"Hein!" she scoffed. "Du den, vat?"
He scowled. She was right; without her he was helpless. The judgment of
the alley was unimpeachable. They were and remained "the French couple."
[Illustration: The Mouth of the Alley.
_By permission of the Century Company._]
Cat Alley's reception of Madame Klotz at first was not cordial. It was
disposed to regard as a hostile act the circumstance that she kept a
special holiday, of which nothing was known except from her statement
that it referred to the fall of somebody or other whom she called the
Bastille, in suspicious proximity to the detested battle of the Boyne;
but when it was observed that she did nothing worse than dance upon the
flags "_avec ze leetle bébé_" of the tenant in the basement, and torture
her "Dootch" husband with extra monkeys and gibes in honor of the day,
unfavorable judgment was suspended, and it was agreed that without a
doubt the "bastard" fell for cause; wherein the alley showed its sound
historical judgment. By such moral pressure when it could, by force when
it must, the original Irish stock preserved the alley for its own
quarrels, free from "foreign" embroilments. These quarrels were many and
involved. When Mrs. M'Carthy was to be dispossessed, and insisted, in
her cups, on killing the housekeeper as a necessary preliminary, a
study of the causes that led to the feud developed the following
normal condition: Mrs. M'Carthy had the housekeeper's place when Mrs.
Gehegan was poor, and fed her "kids." As a reward, Mrs. Gehegan worked
around and got the job away from her. Now that it was Mrs. M'Carthy's
turn to be poor, Mrs. Gehegan insisted upon putting her out. Whereat,
with righteous wrath, Mrs. M'Carthy proclaimed from the stoop: "Many is
the time Mrs. Gehegan had a load on, an' she went upstairs an' slept it
off. I didn't. I used to show meself, I did, as a lady. I know ye're in
there, Mrs. Gehegan. Come out an' show yerself, an' I'ave the alley to
judge betwixt us." To which Mrs. Gehegan prudently vouchsafed no answer.
Mrs. M'Carthy had succeeded to the office of housekeeper upon the death
of Miss Mahoney, an ancient spinster who had collected the rents since
the days of "the riot," meaning the Orange riot--an event from which the
alley reckoned its time, as the ancients did from the Olympian games.
Miss Mahoney was a most exemplary and worthy old lady, thrifty to a
fault. Indeed, it was said when she was gone that she had literally
starved herself to death to lay by money for the rainy day she was
keeping a lookout for to the last. In this she was obeying her
instincts; but they went counter to those of the alley, and the result
was very bad. As an example, Miss Mahoney's life was a failure. When at
her death it was discovered that she had bank-books representing a total
of two thousand dollars, her nephew and only heir promptly knocked off
work and proceeded to celebrate, which he did with such fervor that in
two months he had run through it all and killed himself by his excesses.
Miss Mahoney's was the first bank account in the alley, and, so far as I
know, the last.
From what I have said, it must not be supposed that fighting was the
normal occupation of Cat Alley. It was rather its relaxation from
unceasing toil and care, from which no to-morrow held promise of relief.
There was a deal of good humor in it at most times. "Scrapping" came
naturally to the alley. When, as was sometimes the case, it was the
complement of a wake, it was as the mirth of children who laugh in the
dark because they are afraid. But once an occurrence of that sort
scandalized the tenants. It was because of the violation of the Monroe
Doctrine, to which, as I have said, the alley held most firmly, with
severely local application. To Mulberry Street Mott Street was a foreign
foe from which no interference was desired or long endured. A tenant in
"the back" had died in the hospital of rheumatism, a term which in the
slums sums up all of poverty's hardships, scant and poor food, damp
rooms, and hard work, and the family had come home for the funeral. It
was not a pleasant home-coming. The father in his day had been strict,
and his severity had driven his girls to the street. They had landed in
Chinatown, with all that implies, one at a time; first the older and
then the younger, whom the sister took under her wing and coached. She
was very handsome, was the younger sister, with an innocent look in her
blue eyes that her language belied, and smart, as her marriage-ring bore
witness to. The alley, where the proprieties were held to tenaciously,
observed it and forgave all the rest, even her "Chink" husband. While
her father was lying ill, she had spent a brief vacation in the alley.
Now that he was dead, her less successful sister came home, and with her
a delegation of girls from Chinatown. In their tawdry finery they walked
in, sallow and bold, with Mott Street and the accursed pipe written all
over them, defiant of public opinion, yet afraid to enter except in a
body. The alley considered them from behind closed blinds, while the
children stood by silently to see them pass. When one of them offered
one of the "kids" a penny, he let it fall on the pavement, as if it were
unclean. It was a sore thrust, and it hurt cruelly; but no one saw it in
her face as she went in where the dead lay, with scorn and hatred as her
offering.
The alley had withheld audible comment with a tact that did it credit;
but when at night Mott Street added its contingent of "fellows" to the
mourners properly concerned in the wake, and they started a fight among
themselves that was unauthorized by local sanction, its wrath was
aroused, and it arose and bundled the whole concern out into the street
with scant ceremony. There was never an invasion of the alley after that
night. It enjoyed home rule undisturbed.
Withal, there was as much kindness of heart and neighborly charity in
Cat Alley as in any little community up-town or down-town, or out of
town, for that matter. It had its standards and its customs, which were
to be observed; but underneath it all, and not very far down either, was
a human fellowship that was capable of any sacrifice to help a friend in
need. Many was the widow with whom and with whose children the alley
shared its daily bread, which was scanty enough, God knows, when death
or other disaster had brought her to the jumping-off place. In twenty
years I do not recall a suicide in the alley, or a case of suffering
demanding the interference of the authorities, unless with such help as
the hospital could give. The alley took care of its own, and tided them
over the worst when it came to that. And death was not always the worst.
I remember yet with a shudder a tragedy which I was just in time with
the police to prevent. A laborer, who lived in the attic, had gone mad,
poisoned by the stenches of the sewers in which he worked. For two
nights he had been pacing the hallway, muttering incoherent things, and
then fell to sharpening an axe, with his six children playing
about--beautiful, brown-eyed girls they were, sweet and innocent little
tots. In five minutes we should have been too late, for it appeared that
the man's madness had taken on the homicidal tinge. They were better out
of the world, he told us, as we carried him off to the hospital. When he
was gone, the children came upon the alley, and loyally did it stand by
them until a job was found for the mother by the local political boss.
He got her appointed scrub-woman at the City Hall, and the alley, always
faithful, was solid for him ever after. Organized charity might, and
indeed did, provide groceries on the instalment plan. The Tammany
captain provided the means of pulling the family through and of bringing
up the children, although there was not a vote in the family. It was not
the first time I had met him and observed his plan of "keeping close" to
the people. Against it not the most carping reform critic could have
found just ground of complaint.
The charity of the alley was contagious. With the reporters' messenger
boys, a harum-scarum lot, in "the front," the alley was not on good
terms for any long stretch at a time. They made a racket at night, and
had sport with "old man Quinn," who was a victim of dropsy. He was
"walking on dough," they asseverated, and paid no attention to the
explanation of the alley that he had "kidney feet." But when the old man
died and his wife was left penniless, I found some of them secretly
contributing to her keep. It was not so long after that that another old
pensioner of the alley, suddenly drawn into their cyclonic sport in the
narrow passageway, fell and broke her arm. Apparently no one in the lot
was individually to blame. It was an unfortunate accident, and it
deprived her of her poor means of earning the few pennies with which she
eked out the charity of the alley. Worse than that, it took from her
hope after death, as it were. For years she had pinched and saved and
denied herself to keep up a payment of twenty-five cents a week which
insured her decent burial in consecrated ground. Now that she could no
longer work, the dreaded trench in the Potter's Field yawned to receive
her. That was the blow that broke her down. She was put out by the
landlord soon after the accident, as a hopeless tenant, and I thought
that she had gone to the almshouse, when by chance I came upon her
living quite happily in a tenement on the next block. "Living" is hardly
the word; she was really waiting to die, but waiting with a cheerful
content that amazed me until she herself betrayed the secret of it.
Every week one of the messenger boys brought her out of his scanty wages
the quarter that alike insured her peace of mind and the undisturbed
rest of her body in its long sleep, which a life of toil had pictured to
her as the greatest of earth's boons.
Death came to Cat Alley in varying forms, often enough as a welcome
relief to those for whom it called, rarely without its dark riddle for
those whom it left behind, to be answered without delay or long
guessing. There were at one time three widows with little children in
the alley, none of them over twenty-five. They had been married at
fifteen or sixteen, and when they were called upon to face the world and
fight its battles alone were yet young and inexperienced girls
themselves. Improvidence! Yes. Early marriages are at the bottom of much
mischief among the poor. And yet perhaps these, and others like them,
might have offered the homes from which they went out, as a valid
defence. To their credit be it said that they accepted their lot
bravely, and, with the help of the alley, pulled through. Two of them
married again, and made a bad job of it. Second marriages seldom turned
out well in the alley. They were a refuge of the women from work that
was wearing their lives out, and gave them in exchange usually a tyrant
who hastened the process. There never was any sentiment about it. "I
don't know what I shall do," said one of the widows to me, when at last
it was decreed that the tenements were to be pulled down, "unless I can
find a man to take care of me. Might get one that drinks? I would hammer
him half to death." She did find her "man," only to have him on her
hands too. It was the last straw. Before the wreckers came around she
was dead. The amazed indignation of the alley at the discovery of her
second marriage, which till then had been kept secret, was beyond
bounds. The supposed widow's neighbor across the hall, whom we knew in
the front generally as "the Fat One," was so stunned by the revelation
that she did not recover in season to go to the funeral. She was never
afterward the same.
[Illustration: The Wrecking of Cat Alley.
_By permission of the Century Company._]
In the good old days when the world was right, the Fat One had enjoyed
the distinction of being the one tenant in Cat Alley whose growler never
ran dry. It made no difference how strictly Sunday law was observed
toward the rest of the world, the Fat One would set out from the alley
with her growler in a basket,--this as a concession to the unnatural
prejudices of a misguided community, not as an evasion, for she made a
point of showing it to the policeman on the corner,--and return with it
filled. Her look of scornful triumph as she marched through the alley,
and the backward toss of her head toward police headquarters, which
said plainly: "Ha! you thought you could! But you didn't, did you?" were
the admiration of the alley. It allowed that she had met and downed
Roosevelt in a fair fight. But after the last funeral the Fat One never
again carried the growler. Her spirit was broken. All things were coming
to an end, the alley itself with them.
One funeral I recall with a pleasure which the years have in no way
dimmed. It was at a time before the King's Daughters' Tenement House
Committee was organized, when out-of-town friends used to send flowers
to my office for the poor. The first notice I had of a death in the
alley was when a delegation of children from the rear knocked and asked
for daisies. There was something unnaturally solemn about them that
prompted me to make inquiries, and then it came out that old Mrs. Walsh
was dead and going on her long ride up to Hart's Island; for she was
quite friendless, and the purse-strings of the alley were not long
enough to save her from the Potter's Field. The city hearse was even
then at the door, and they were carrying in the rough pine coffin. With
the children the crippled old woman had been a favorite; she had always
a kind word for them, and they paid her back in the way they knew she
would have loved best. Not even the coffin of the police sergeant who
was a brother of the district leader was so gloriously decked out as old
Mrs. Walsh's when she started on her last journey. The children stood in
the passageway with their arms full of daisies, and gave the old soul a
departing cheer; and though it was quite irregular, it was all right,
for it was well meant, and Cat Alley knew it.
They were much like other children, those of the alley. It was only in
their later years that the alley and the growler set their stamp upon
them. While they were small, they loved, like others of their kind, to
play in the gutter, to splash in the sink about the hydrant, and to
dance to the hand-organ that came regularly into the block, even though
they sadly missed the monkey that was its chief attraction till the
aldermen banished it in a cranky fit. Dancing came naturally to them,
too; certainly no one took the trouble to teach them. It was a pretty
sight to see them stepping to the time on the broad flags at the mouth
of the alley. Not rarely they had for an appreciative audience the big
chief himself, who looked down from his window, and the uniformed
policeman at the door. Even the commissioners deigned to smile upon the
impromptu show in breathing-spells between their heavy labors in the
cause of politics and pull. But the children took little notice of them;
they were too happy in their play. They loved my flowers, too, with a
genuine love that did not spring from the desire to get something for
nothing, and the parades on Italian feast-days that always came through
the street. They took a fearsome delight in watching for the big dime
museum giant, who lived around in Elizabeth Street, and who in his last
days looked quite lean and hungry enough to send a thrill to any little
boy's heart, though he had never cooked one and eaten him in his whole
life, being quite a harmless and peaceable giant. And they loved Trilby.
[Illustration: Trilby.
_By permission of the Century Company._]
Trilby was the dog. As far back as my memory reaches there was never
another in Cat Alley. She arrived in the block one winter morning on a
dead run, with a tin can tied to her stump of a tail, and with the
Mott Street gang in hot pursuit. In her extremity she saw the mouth of
the alley, dodged in, and was safe. The Mott Streeters would as soon
have thought of following her into police headquarters as there. Ever
after she stayed. She took possession of the alley and of headquarters,
where the reporters had their daily walk, as if they were hers by right
of conquest, which in fact they were. With her whimsically grave
countenance, in which all the cares of the vast domain she made it her
daily duty to oversee were visibly reflected, she made herself a
favorite with every one except the "beanery-man" on the corner, who
denounced her angrily, when none of her friends were near, for coming in
with his customers at lunch-time on purpose to have them feed her with
his sugar, which was true. At regular hours, beginning with the opening
of the department offices, she would make the round of the police
building and call on all the officials, forgetting none. She rode up in
the elevator and left it at the proper floors, waited in the anterooms
with the rest when there was a crowd, and paid stated visits to the
chief and the commissioners, who never omitted to receive her with a nod
and a "Hello, Trilby!" no matter how pressing the business in hand. The
gravity with which she listened to what went on, and wrinkled up her
brow in an evident effort to understand, was comical to the last
degree. She knew the fire alarm signals and when anything momentous was
afoot. On the quiet days, when nothing was stirring, she would flock
with the reporters on the stoop and sing.
There never was such singing as Trilby's. That was how she got her name.
I tried a score of times to find out, but to this day I do not know
whether it was pain or pleasure that was in her note. She had only one,
but it made up in volume for what it lacked in range. Standing in the
circle of her friends, she would raise her head until her nose pointed
straight toward the sky, and pour forth her melody with a look of such
unutterable woe on her face that peals of laughter always wound up the
performance; whereupon Trilby would march off with an injured air, and
hide herself in one of the offices, refusing to come out. Poor Trilby!
with the passing away of the alley she seemed to lose her grip. She did
not understand it. After wandering about aimlessly for a while, vainly
seeking a home in the world, she finally moved over on the East Side
with one of the dispossessed tenants. But on all Sundays and holidays,
and once in a while in the middle of the week, she comes yet to inspect
the old block in Mulberry Street and to join in a quartette with old
friends.
[Illustration: Old Barney.]
Trilby and Old Barney were the two who stuck to the alley longest.
Barney was the star boarder. As everything about the place was misnamed,
the alley itself included, so was he. His real name was Michael, but the
children called him Barney, and the name stuck. When they were at odds,
as they usually were, they shouted "Barney Bluebeard!" after him, and
ran away and hid in trembling delight as he shook his key-ring at them,
and showed his teeth with the evil leer which he reserved specially for
them. It was reported in the alley that he was a woman-hater; hence the
name. Certain it is that he never would let one of the detested sex
cross the threshold of his attic room on any pretext. If he caught one
pointing for his aerie, he would block the way and bid her sternly
begone. She seldom tarried long, for Barney was not a pleasing object
when he was in an ugly mood. As the years passed, and cobweb and dirt
accumulated in his room, stories were told of fabulous wealth which he
had concealed in the chinks of the wall and in broken crocks; and as he
grew constantly shabbier and more crabbed, they were readily believed.
Barney carried his ring and filed keys all day, coining money, so the
reasoning ran, and spent none; so he must be hiding it away. The alley
hugged itself in the joyful sensation that it had a miser and his hoard
in the cockloft. Next to a ghost, for which the environment was too
matter-of-fact, that was the thing for an alley to have.
Curiously enough, the fact that, summer and winter, the old man never
missed early mass and always put a silver quarter--even a silver dollar,
it was breathlessly whispered in the alley--in the contribution box,
merely served to strengthen this belief. The fact was, I suspect, that
the key-ring was the biggest end of the business Old Barney cultivated
so assiduously. There were keys enough on it, and they rattled most
persistently as he sent forth the strange whoop which no one ever was
able to make out, but which was assumed to mean "Keys! keys!" But he was
far too feeble and tremulous to wield a file with effect. In his younger
days he had wielded a bayonet in his country's defence. On the rare
occasions when he could be made to talk, he would tell, with a
smouldering gleam in his sunken eyes, how the Twenty-third Illinois
Volunteers had battled with the Rebs weary nights and days without
giving way a foot. The old man's bent back would straighten, and he
would step firmly and proudly, at the recollection of how he and his
comrades earned the name of the "heroes of Lexington" in that memorable
fight. But only for the moment. The dark looks that frightened the
children returned soon to his face. It was all for nothing, he said.
While he was fighting at the front he was robbed. His lieutenant, to
whom he gave his money to send home, stole it and ran away. When he
returned after three years there was nothing, nothing! At this point the
old man always became incoherent. He spoke of money the government owed
him and withheld. It was impossible to make out whether his grievance
was real or imagined.
When Colonel Grant came to Mulberry Street as a police commissioner,
Barney brightened up under a sudden idea. He might get justice now.
Once a week, through those two years, he washed himself, to the mute
astonishment of the alley, and brushed up carefully, to go across and
call on "the general's son" in order to lay his case before him. But he
never got farther than the Mulberry Street door. On the steps he was
regularly awestruck, and the old hero, who had never turned his back to
the enemy, faltered and retreated. In the middle of the street he
halted, faced front, and saluted the building with all the solemnity of
a grenadier on parade, then went slowly back to his attic and to his
unrighted grievance.
It had been the talk of the neighborhood for years that the alley would
have to go in the Elm Street widening which was to cut a swath through
the block, right over the site upon which it stood; and at last notice
was given about Christmas time that the wreckers were coming. The alley
was sold,--thirty dollars was all it brought,--and the old tenants moved
away, and were scattered to the four winds. Barney alone stayed. He
flatly refused to budge. They tore down the church next door and the
buildings on Houston Street, and filled what had been the yard, or
court, of the tenements with débris that reached halfway to the roof, so
that the old locksmith, if he wished to go out or in, must do so by way
of the third-story window, over a perilous path of shaky timbers and
sliding brick. He evidently considered it a kind of siege, and shut
himself in his attic, bolting and barring the door, and making secret
sorties by night for provisions. When the chimney fell down or was blown
over, he punched a hole in the rear wall and stuck the stovepipe through
that, where it blew defiance to the new houses springing up almost
within arm's-reach of it. It suggested guns pointing from a fort, and
perhaps it pleased the old man's soldier fancy. It certainly made smoke
enough in his room, where he was fighting his battles over with himself,
and occasionally with the janitor from the front, who climbed over the
pile of bricks and in through the window to bring him water. When I
visited him there one day, and, after giving the password, got behind
the bolted door, I found him, the room, and everything else absolutely
covered with soot, coal-black from roof to rafters. The password was
"Letter!" yelled out loud at the foot of the stairs. That would always
bring him out, in the belief that the government had finally sent him
the long-due money. Barney was stubbornly defiant, he would stand by his
guns to the end; but he was weakening physically under the combined
effect of short rations and nightly alarms. It was clear that he could
not stand it much longer.
The wreckers cut it short one morning by ripping off the roof over his
head before he was up. Then, and only then, did he retreat. His exit was
characterized by rather more haste than dignity. There had been a heavy
fall of snow overnight, and Barney slid down the jagged slope from his
window, dragging his trunk with him, in imminent peril of breaking his
aged bones. That day he disappeared from Mulberry Street. I thought he
was gone for good, and through the Grand Army of the Republic had set
inquiries on foot to find what had become of him, when one day I saw him
from my window, standing on the opposite side of the street, key-ring in
hand, and looking fixedly at what had once been the passageway to the
alley, but was now a barred gap between the houses, leading nowhere. He
stood there long, gazing sadly at the gateway, at the children dancing
to the Italian's hand-organ, at Trilby trying to look unconcerned on the
stoop, and then went his way silently, a poor castaway, and I saw him no
more.
So Cat Alley, with all that belonged to it, passed out of my life. It
had its faults, but it can at least be said of it, in extenuation, that
it was very human. With them all it had a rude sense of justice that did
not distinguish its early builders. When the work of tearing down had
begun, I watched, one day, a troop of children having fun with a seesaw
they had made of a plank laid across a lime barrel. The whole Irish
contingent rode the plank, all at once, with screams of delight. A
ragged little girl from the despised "Dago" colony watched them from the
corner with hungry eyes. Big Jane, who was the leader by virtue of her
thirteen years and her long reach, saw her and stopped the show.
"Here, Mame," she said, pushing one of the smaller girls from the plank,
"you get off an' let her ride. Her mother was stabbed yesterday."
And the little Dago rode, and was made happy.