THE SLIPPER-MAKER’S FAST
Isaac Josephs, slipper-maker, sat up on the fifth floor of his Allen-street tenement, in the gray of the morning, to finish the task he had set himself before Yom Kippur. Three days and three nights he had worked without sleep, almost without taking time to eat, to make ready the two dozen slippers that were to enable him to fast the fourth day and night for conscience’ sake, and now they were nearly done. As he saw the end of his task near, he worked faster and faster, while the tenement slept.
Three years he had slaved for the sweater, stinted and starved himself, before he had saved enough to send for his wife and children, awaiting his summons in the city by the Black Sea. Since they came they had slaved and starved together; for wages had become steadily less, work more grinding, and hours longer and later. Still, of that he thought little. They had known little else, there or here, and they were together now. The past was dead; the future was their own, even in the Allen-street tenement, toiling night and day at starvation wages. To-morrow was the feast, their first Yom Kippur since they had come together again,—Esther, his wife, and Ruth and little Ben,—the feast when, priest and patriarch of his own house, he might forget his bondage and be free. Poor little Ben! The hand that smoothed the soft leather on the last took a tenderer, lingering touch as he glanced toward the stool where the child had sat watching him work till his eyes grew small. Brave little Ben, almost a baby yet, but so patient, so wise, and so strong!
The deep breathing of the sleeping children reached him from their crib. He smiled and listened, with the half-finished slipper in his hand. As he sat thus, a great drowsiness came upon him. He nodded once, twice; his hands sank into his lap, his head fell forward upon his chest. In the silence of the morning he slept, worn out with utter weariness.
He awoke with a guilty start to find the first rays of the dawn struggling through his window, and his task yet undone. With desperate energy he seized the unfinished slipper to resume his work. His unsteady hand upset the little lamp by his side, upon which his burnishing-iron was heating. The oil blazed up on the floor and ran toward the nearly finished pile of work. The cloth on the table caught fire. In a fever of terror and excitement, the slipper-maker caught it in his hands, wrung it, and tore at it to smother the flames. His hands were burned, but what of that? The slippers, the slippers! If they were burned, it was ruin. There would be no Yom Kippur, no feast of Atonement, no fast—rather, no end of it; starvation for him and his.
He beat the fire with his hands and trampled it with his feet as it burned and spread on the floor. His hair and his beard caught fire. With a despairing shriek he gave it up and fell before the precious slippers, barring the way of the flames to them with his body.
The shriek woke his wife. She sprang out of bed, snatched up a blanket, and threw it upon the fire. It went out, was smothered under the blanket. The slipper-maker sat up, panting and grateful. His Yom Kippur was saved.
The tenement awoke to hear of the fire in the morning, when all Jewtown was stirring with preparations for the feast. The slipper-maker’s wife was setting the house to rights for the holiday then. Two half-naked children played about her knees, asking eager questions about it. Asked if her husband had often to work so hard, and what he made by it, she shrugged her shoulders and said: “The rent and a crust.”
And yet all this labor and effort to enable him to fast one day according to the old dispensation, when all the rest of the days he fasted according to the new!
PAOLO’S AWAKENING
Paolo sat cross-legged on his bench, stitching away for dear life. He pursed his lips and screwed up his mouth into all sorts of odd shapes with the effort, for it was an effort. He was only eight, and you would scarcely have imagined him over six, as he sat there sewing like a real little tailor; only Paolo knew but one seam, and that a hard one. Yet he held the needle and felt the edge with it in quite a grown-up way, and pulled the thread just as far as his short arm would reach. His mother sat on a stool by the window, where she could help him when he got into a snarl,—as he did once in a while, in spite of all he could do,—or when the needle had to be threaded. Then she dropped her own sewing, and, patting him on the head, said he was a good boy.
Paolo felt very proud and big then, that he was able to help his mother, and he worked even more carefully and faithfully than before, so that the boss should find no fault. The shouts of the boys in the block, playing duck-on-a-rock down in the street, came in through the open window, and he laughed as he heard them. He did not envy them, though he liked well enough to romp with the others. His was a sunny temper, content with what came; besides, his supper was at stake, and Paolo had a good appetite. They were in sober earnest working for dear life—Paolo and his mother.
“Pants” for the sweater in Stanton street was what they were making; little knickerbockers for boys of Paolo’s own age. “Twelve pants for ten cents,” he said, counting on his fingers. The mother brought them once a week—a big bundle which she carried home on her head—to have the buttons put on, fourteen on each pair, the bottoms turned up, and a ribbon sewed fast to the back seam inside. That was called finishing. When work was brisk—and it was not always so since there had been such frequent strikes in Stanton street—they could together make the rent-money, and even more, as Paolo was learning and getting a stronger grip on the needle week by week. The rent was six dollars a month for a dingy basement room, in which it was twilight even on the brightest days, and a dark little cubbyhole, where it was always midnight, and where there was just room for a bed of old boards, no more. In there slept Paolo with his uncle; his mother made her bed on the floor of the “kitchen,” as they called it.
The three made the family. There used to be four; but one stormy night in winter Paolo’s father had not come home. The uncle came alone, and the story he told made the poor home in the basement darker and drearier for many a day than it had yet been. The two men worked together for a padrone on the scows. They were in the crew that went out that day to the dumping-ground, far outside the harbor. It was a dangerous journey in a rough sea. The half-frozen Italians clung to the great heaps like so many frightened flies, when the waves rose and tossed the unwieldy scows about, bumping one against the other, though they were strung out in a long row behind the tug, quite a distance apart. One sea washed entirely over the last scow and nearly upset it. When it floated even again, two of the crew were missing, one of them Paolo’s father. They had been washed away and lost, miles from shore. No one ever saw them again.
The widow’s tears flowed for her dead husband, whom she could not even see laid in a grave which the priest had blessed. The good father spoke to her of the sea as a vast God’s-acre, over which the storms are forever chanting anthems in his praise to whom the secrets of its depths are revealed; but she thought of it only as the cruel destroyer that had robbed her of her husband, and her tears fell faster. Paolo cried, too: partly because his mother cried; partly, if the truth must be told, because he was not to have a ride to the cemetery in the splendid coach. Giuseppe Salvatore, in the corner house, had never ceased talking of the ride he had when his father died, the year before. Pietro and Jim went along, too, and rode all the way behind the hearse with black plumes. It was a sore subject with Paolo, for he was in school that day.
And then he and his mother dried their tears and went to work. Henceforth there was to be little else for them. The luxury of grief is not among the few luxuries which Mott-street tenements afford. Paolo’s life, after that, was lived mainly with the pants on his hard bench in the rear tenement. His routine of work was varied by the household duties, which he shared with his mother. There were the meals to get, few and plain as they were. Paolo was the cook, and not infrequently, when a building was being torn down in the neighborhood, he furnished the fuel as well. Those were his off days, when he put the needle away and foraged with the other children, dragging old beams and carrying burdens far beyond his years.
The truant officer never found his way to Paolo’s tenement to discover that he could neither read nor write, and, what was more, would probably never learn. It would have been of little use, for the public schools thereabouts were crowded, and Paolo could not have got into one of them if he had tried. The teacher from the Industrial School, which he had attended for one brief season while his father was alive, called at long intervals, and brought him once a plant, which he set out in his mother’s window-garden and nursed carefully ever after. The “garden” was contained within an old starch-box, which had its place on the window-sill since the policeman had ordered the fire-escape to be cleared. It was a kitchen-garden with vegetables, and was almost all the green there was in the landscape. From one or two other windows in the yard there peeped tufts of green; but of trees there was none in sight—nothing but the bare clothes-poles with their pulley-lines stretching from every window.
Beside the cemetery plot in the next block there was not an open spot or breathing-place, certainly not a playground, within reach of that great teeming slum that harbored more than a hundred thousand persons, young and old. Even the graveyard was shut in by a high brick wall, so that a glimpse of the greensward over the old mounds was to be caught only through the spiked iron gates, the key to which was lost, or by standing on tiptoe and craning one’s neck. The dead there were of more account, though they had been forgotten these many years, than the living children who gazed so wistfully upon the little paradise through the barred gates, and were chased by the policeman when he came that way. Something like this thought was in Paolo’s mind when he stood at sunset and peered in at the golden rays falling athwart the green, but he did not know it. Paolo was not a philosopher, but he loved beauty and beautiful things, and was conscious of a great hunger which there was nothing in his narrow world to satisfy.
Certainly not in the tenement. It was old and rickety and wretched, in keeping with the slum of which it formed a part. The whitewash was peeling off the walls, the stairs were patched, and the door-step long since worn entirely away. It was hard to be decent in such a place, but the widow did the best she could. Her rooms were as neat as the general dilapidation would permit. On the shelf where the old clock stood, flanked by the best crockery, most of it cracked and yellow with age, there was red and green paper cut in scallops very nicely. Garlic and onions hung in strings over the stove, and the red peppers that grew in the starch-box at the window gave quite a cheerful appearance to the room. In the corner, under a cheap print of the Virgin Mary with the Child, a small night-light in a blue glass was always kept burning. It was a kind of illumination in honor of the Mother of God, through which the widow’s devout nature found expression. Paolo always looked upon it as a very solemn show. When he said his prayers, the sweet, patient eyes in the picture seemed to watch him with a mild look that made him turn over and go to sleep with a sigh of contentment. He felt then that he had not been altogether bad, and that he was quite safe in their keeping.
Yet Paolo’s life was not wholly without its bright spots. Far from it. There were the occasional trips to the dump with Uncle Pasquale’s dinner, where there was always sport to be had in chasing the rats that overran the place, fighting for the scraps and bones the trimmers had rescued from the scows. There were so many of them, and so bold were they, that an old Italian who could no longer dig was employed to sit on a bale of rags and throw things at them, lest they carry off the whole establishment. When he hit one, the rest squealed and scampered away; but they were back again in a minute, and the old man had his hands full pretty nearly all the time. Paolo thought that his was a glorious job, as any boy might, and hoped that he would soon be old, too, and as important. And then the men at the cage—a great wire crate into which the rags from the ash-barrels were stuffed, to be plunged into the river, where the tide ran through them and carried some of the loose dirt away. That was called washing the rags. To Paolo it was the most exciting thing in the world. What if some day the crate should bring up a fish, a real fish, from the river? When he thought of it, he wished that he might be sitting forever on that string-piece, fishing with the rag-cage, particularly when he was tired of stitching and turning over, a whole long day.
Besides, there were the real holidays, when there was a marriage, a christening, or a funeral in the tenement, particularly when a baby died whose father belonged to one of the many benefit societies. A brass band was the proper thing then, and the whole block took a vacation to follow the music and the white hearse out of their ward into the next. But the chief of all the holidays came once a year, when the feast of St. Rocco—the patron saint of the village where Paolo’s parents had lived—was celebrated. Then a really beautiful altar was erected at one end of the yard, with lights and pictures on it. The rear fire-escapes in the whole row were decked with sheets, and made into handsome balconies,—reserved seats, as it were,—on which the tenants sat and enjoyed it. A band in gorgeous uniforms played three whole days in the yard, and the men in their holiday clothes stepped up, bowed, and crossed themselves, and laid their gifts on the plate which St. Rocco’s namesake, the saloon-keeper in the block, who had got up the celebration, had put there for them. In the evening they set off great strings of fire-crackers in the street, in the saint’s honor, until the police interfered once and forbade that. Those were great days for Paolo always.
But the fun Paolo loved best of all was when he could get in a corner by himself, with no one to disturb him, and build castles and things out of some abandoned clay or mortar, or wet sand if there was nothing better. The plastic material took strange shapes of beauty under his hands. It was as if life had been somehow breathed into it by his touch, and it ordered itself as none of the other boys could make it. His fingers were tipped with genius, but he did not know it, for his work was only for the hour. He destroyed it as soon as it was made, to try for something better. What he had made never satisfied him—one of the surest proofs that he was capable of great things, had he only known it. But, as I said, he did not.
The teacher from the Industrial School came upon him one day, sitting in the corner by himself, and breathing life into the mud. She stood and watched him awhile, unseen, getting interested, almost excited, as he worked on. As for Paolo, he was solving the problem that had eluded him so long, and had eyes or thought for nothing else. As his fingers ran over the soft clay, the needle, the hard bench, the pants, even the sweater himself, vanished out of his sight, out of his life, and he thought only of the beautiful things he was fashioning to express the longing in his soul, which nothing mortal could shape. Then, suddenly, seeing and despairing, he dashed it to pieces, and came back to earth and to the tenement.
But not to the pants and the sweater. What the teacher had seen that day had set her to thinking, and her visit resulted in a great change for Paolo. She called at night and had a long talk with his mother and uncle through the medium of the priest, who interpreted when they got to a hard place. Uncle Pasquale took but little part in the conversation. He sat by and nodded most of the time, assured by the presence of the priest that it was all right. The widow cried a good deal, and went more than once to take a look at the boy, lying snugly tucked in his bed in the inner room, quite unconscious of the weighty matters that were being decided concerning him. She came back the last time drying her eyes, and laid both her hands in the hand of the teacher. She nodded twice and smiled through her tears, and the bargain was made. Paolo’s slavery was at an end.
His friend came the next day and took him away, dressed up in his best clothes, to a large school where there were many children, not of his own people, and where he was received kindly. There dawned that day a new life for Paolo, for in the afternoon trays of modeling-clay were brought in, and the children were told to mold in it objects that were set before them. Paolo’s teacher stood by, and nodded approvingly as his little fingers played so deftly with the clay, his face all lighted up with joy at this strange kind of a school-lesson.
After that he had a new and faithful friend, and, as he worked away, putting his whole young soul into the tasks that filled it with radiant hope, other friends, rich and powerful, found him out in his slum. They brought better-paying work for his mother than sewing pants for the sweater, and Uncle Pasquale abandoned the scows to become a porter in a big shipping-house on the West Side. The little family moved out of the old home into a better tenement, though not far away. Paolo’s loyal heart clung to the neighborhood where he had played and dreamed as a child, and he wanted it to share in his good fortune, now that it had come. As the days passed, the neighbors who had known him as little Paolo came to speak of him as one who some day would be a great artist and make them all proud. He laughed at that, and said that the first bust he would hew in marble should be that of his patient, faithful mother; and with that he gave her a little hug, and danced out of the room, leaving her to look after him with glistening eyes, brimming over with happiness.
But Paolo’s dream was to have another awakening. The years passed and brought their changes. In the manly youth who came forward as his name was called in the academy, and stood modestly at the desk to receive his diploma, few would have recognized the little ragamuffin who had dragged bundles of fire-wood to the rookery in the alley, and carried Uncle Pasquale’s dinner-pail to the dump. But the audience gathered to witness the commencement exercises knew it all, and greeted him with a hearty welcome that recalled his early struggles and his hard-won success. It was Paolo’s day of triumph. The class honors and the medal were his. The bust that had won both stood in the hall crowned with laurel—an Italian peasant woman, with sweet, gentle face, in which there lingered the memories of the patient eyes that had lulled the child to sleep in the old days in the alley. His teacher spoke to him, spoke of him, with pride in voice and glance; spoke tenderly of his old mother of the tenement, of his faithful work, of the loyal manhood that ever is the soul and badge of true genius. As he bade him welcome to the fellowship of artists who in him honored the best and noblest in their own aspirations, the emotion of the audience found voice once more. Paolo, flushed, his eyes filled with happy tears, stumbled out, he knew not how, with the coveted parchment in his hand.
Home to his mother! It was the one thought in his mind as he walked toward the big bridge to cross to the city of his home—to tell her of his joy, of his success. Soon she would no longer be poor. The day of hardship was over. He could work now and earn money, much money, and the world would know and honor Paolo’s mother as it had honored him. As he walked through the foggy winter day toward the river, where delayed throngs jostled one another at the bridge entrance, he thought with grateful heart of the friends who had smoothed the way for him. Ah, not for long the fog and slush! The medal carried with it a traveling stipend, and soon the sunlight of his native land for him and her. He should hear the surf wash on the shingly beach and in the deep grottoes of which she had sung to him when a child. Had he not promised her this? And had they not many a time laughed for very joy at the prospect, the two together?
He picked his way up the crowded stairs, carefully guarding the precious roll. The crush was even greater than usual. There had been delay—something wrong with the cable; but a train was just waiting, and he hurried on board with the rest, little heeding what became of him so long as the diploma was safe. The train rolled out on the bridge, with Paolo wedged in the crowd on the platform of the last car, holding the paper high over his head, where it was sheltered safe from the fog and the rain and the crush.
Another train backed up, received its load of cross humanity, and vanished in the mist. The damp gray curtain had barely closed behind it, and the impatient throng was fretting at a further delay, when consternation spread in the bridge-house. Word had come up from the track that something had happened. Trains were stalled all along the route. While the dread and uncertainty grew, a messenger ran up, out of breath. There had been a collision. The last train had run into the one preceding it, in the fog. One was killed, others were injured. Doctors and ambulances were wanted.
They came with the police, and by and by the partly wrecked train was hauled up to the platform. When the wounded had been taken to the hospital, they bore from the train the body of a youth, clutching yet in his hand a torn, blood-stained paper, tied about with a purple ribbon. It was Paolo. The awakening had come. Brighter skies than those of sunny Italy had dawned upon him in the gloom and terror of the great crash. Paolo was at home, waiting for his mother.
THE LITTLE DOLLAR’S CHRISTMAS JOURNEY
“It is too bad,” said Mrs. Lee, and she put down the magazine in which she had been reading of the poor children in the tenements of the great city that know little of Christmas joys; “no Christmas tree! One of them shall have one, at any rate. I think this will buy it, and it is so handy to send. Nobody would know that there was money in the letter.” And she inclosed a coupon in a letter to a professor, a friend in the city, who, she knew, would have no trouble in finding the child, and had it mailed at once. Mrs. Lee was a widow whose not too great income was derived from the interest on some four-per-cent. government bonds which represented the savings of her husband’s life of toil, that was none the less hard because it was spent in a counting-room and not with shovel and spade. The coupon looked for all the world like a dollar bill, except that it was so small that a baby’s hand could easily cover it. The United States, the printing on it said, would pay on demand to the bearer one dollar; and there was a number on it, just as on a full-grown dollar, that was the number of the bond from which it had been cut.
The letter traveled all night, and was tossed and sorted and bunched at the end of its journey in the great gray beehive that never sleeps, day or night, and where half the tears and joys of the land, including this account of the little dollar, are checked off unceasingly as first-class matter or second or third, as the case may be. In the morning it was laid, none the worse for its journey, at the professor’s breakfast-plate. The professor was a kindly man, and he smiled as he read it. “To procure one small Christmas tree for a poor tenement,” was its errand.
“Little dollar,” he said, “I think I know where you are needed.” And he made a note in his book. There were other notes there that made him smile again as he saw them. They had names set opposite them. One about a Noah’s ark was marked “Vivi.” That was the baby; and there was one about a doll’s carriage that had the words “Katie, sure,” set over against it. The professor eyed the list in mock dismay.
“How ever will I do it?” he sighed, as he put on his hat.
“Well, you will have to get Santa Claus to help you, John,” said his wife, buttoning his greatcoat about him. “And, mercy! the duckses’ babies! don’t forget them, whatever you do. The baby has been talking about nothing else since he saw them at the store, the old duck and the two ducklings on wheels. You know them, John?”
But the professor was gone, repeating to himself as he went down the garden walk: “The duckses’ babies, indeed!” He chuckled as he said it, why I cannot tell. He was very particular about his grammar, was the professor, ordinarily. Perhaps it was because it was Christmas eve.
Down-town went the professor; but instead of going with the crowd that was setting toward Santa Claus’s headquarters, in the big Broadway store, he turned off into a quieter street, leading west. It took him to a narrow thoroughfare, with five-story tenements frowning on either side, where the people he met were not so well dressed as those he had left behind, and did not seem to be in such a hurry of joyful anticipation of the holiday. Into one of the tenements he went, and, groping his way through a pitch-dark hall, came to a door ’way back, the last one to the left, at which he knocked. An expectant voice said, “Come in,” and the professor pushed open the door.
The room was very small, very stuffy, and very dark, so dark that a smoking kerosene-lamp that burned on a table next the stove hardly lighted it at all, though it was broad day. A big, unshaven man, who sat on the bed, rose when he saw the visitor, and stood uncomfortably shifting his feet and avoiding the professor’s eye. The latter’s glance was serious, though not unkind, as he asked the woman with the baby if he had found no work yet.
“No,” she said, anxiously coming to the rescue, “not yet; he was waitin’ for a recommend.” But Johnnie had earned two dollars running errands, and, now there was a big fall of snow, his father might get a job of shoveling. The woman’s face was worried, yet there was a cheerful note in her voice that somehow made the place seem less discouraging than it was. The baby she nursed was not much larger than a middle-sized doll. Its little face looked thin and wan. It had been very sick, she explained, but the doctor said it was mending now. That was good, said the professor, and patted one of the bigger children on the head.
There were six of them, of all sizes, from Johnnie, who could run errands, down. They were busy fixing up a Christmas tree that half filled the room, though it was of the very smallest. Yes, it was a real Christmas tree, left over from the Sunday-school stock, and it was dressed up at that. Pictures from the colored supplement of a Sunday newspaper hung and stood on every branch, and three pieces of colored glass, suspended on threads that shone in the smoky lamplight, lent color and real beauty to the show. The children were greatly tickled.
“John put it up,” said the mother, by way of explanation, as the professor eyed it approvingly. “There ain’t nothing to eat on it. If there was, it wouldn’t be there a minute. The childer be always a-searchin’ in it.”
“But there must be, or else it isn’t a real Christmas tree,” said the professor, and brought out the little dollar. “This is a dollar which a friend gave me for the children’s Christmas, and she sends her love with it. Now, you buy them some things and a few candles, Mrs. Ferguson, and then a good supper for the rest of the family. Good night, and a Merry Christmas to you. I think myself the baby is getting better.” It had just opened its eyes and laughed at the tree.
The professor was not very far on his way toward keeping his appointment with Santa Claus before Mrs. Ferguson was at the grocery laying in her dinner. A dollar goes a long way when it is the only one in the house; and when she had everything, including two cents’ worth of flitter-gold, four apples, and five candles for the tree, the grocer footed up her bill on the bag that held her potatoes—ninety-eight cents. Mrs. Ferguson gave him the little dollar.
“What’s this?” said the grocer, his fat smile turning cold as he laid a restraining hand on the full basket. “That ain’t no good.”
“It’s a dollar, ain’t it?” said the woman, in alarm. “It’s all right. I know the man that give it to me.”
“It ain’t all right in this store,” said the grocer, sternly. “Put them things back. I want none o’ that.”
The woman’s eyes filled with tears as she slowly took the lid off the basket and lifted out the precious bag of potatoes. They were waiting for that dinner at home. The children were even then camping on the door-step to take her in to the tree in triumph. And now—
For the second time a restraining hand was laid upon her basket; but this time it was not the grocer’s. A gentleman who had come in to order a Christmas turkey had overheard the conversation, and had seen the strange bill.
“It is all right,” he said to the grocer. “Give it to me. Here is a dollar bill for it of the kind you know. If all your groceries were as honest as this bill, Mr. Schmidt, it would be a pleasure to trade with you. Don’t be afraid to trust Uncle Sam where you see his promise to pay.”
The gentleman held the door open for Mrs. Ferguson, and heard the shout of the delegation awaiting her on the stoop as he went down the street.
“I wonder where that came from, now,” he mused. “Coupons in Bedford street! I suppose somebody sent it to the woman for a Christmas gift. Hello! Here are old Thomas and Snowflake. I wonder if it wouldn’t surprise her old stomach if I gave her a Christmas gift of oats. If only the shock doesn’t kill her! Thomas! Oh, Thomas!”
The old man thus hailed stopped and awaited the gentleman’s coming. He was a cartman who did odd jobs through the ward, thus picking up a living for himself and the white horse, which the boys had dubbed Snowflake in a spirit of fun. They were a well-matched old pair, Thomas and his horse. One was not more decrepit than the other. There was a tradition along the docks, where Thomas found a job now and then, and Snowflake an occasional straw to lunch on, that they were of an age, but this was denied by Thomas.
“See here,” said the gentleman, as he caught up with them; “I want Snowflake to keep Christmas, Thomas. Take this and buy him a bag of oats. And give it to him carefully, do you hear?—not all at once, Thomas. He isn’t used to it.”
“Gee whizz!” said the old man, rubbing his eyes with his cap, as his friend passed out of sight, “oats fer Christmas! G’lang, Snowflake; yer in luck.”
The feed-man put on his spectacles and looked Thomas over at the strange order. Then he scanned the little dollar, first on one side, then on the other.
“Never seed one like him,” he said. “’Pears to me he is mighty short. Wait till I send round to the hockshop. He’ll know, if anybody.”
The man at the pawnshop did not need a second look. “Why, of course,” he said, and handed a dollar bill over the counter. “Old Thomas, did you say? Well, I am blamed if the old man ain’t got a stocking after all. They’re a sly pair, he and Snowflake.”
Business was brisk that day at the pawnshop. The door-bell tinkled early and late, and the stock on the shelves grew. Bundle was added to bundle. It had been a hard winter so far. Among the callers in the early afternoon was a young girl in a gingham dress and without other covering, who stood timidly at the counter and asked for three dollars on a watch, a keepsake evidently, which she was loath to part with. Perhaps it was the last glimpse of brighter days. The pawnbroker was doubtful; it was not worth so much. She pleaded hard, while he compared the number of the movement with a list sent in from Police Headquarters.
“Two,” he said decisively at last, snapping the case shut—“two or nothing.” The girl handed over the watch with a troubled sigh. He made out a ticket and gave it to her with a handful of silver change.
Was it the sigh and her evident distress, or was it the little dollar? As she turned to go, he called her back:
“Here, it is Christmas!” he said. “I’ll run the risk.” And he added the coupon to the little heap.
The girl looked at it and at him questioningly.
“It is all right,” he said; “you can take it; I’m running short of change. Bring it back if they won’t take it. I’m good for it.” Uncle Sam had achieved a backer.
In Grand street the holiday crowds jammed every store in their eager hunt for bargains. In one of them, at the knit-goods counter, stood the girl from the pawnshop, picking out a thick, warm shawl. She hesitated between a gray and a maroon-colored one, and held them up to the light.
“For you?” asked the salesgirl, thinking to aid her. She glanced at her thin dress and shivering form as she said it.
“No,” said the girl; “for mother; she is poorly and needs it.” She chose the gray, and gave the salesgirl her handful of money.
The girl gave back the coupon.
“They don’t go,” she said; “give me another, please.”
“But I haven’t got another,” said the girl, looking apprehensively at the shawl. “The—Mr. Feeney said it was all right. Take it to the desk, please, and ask.”
The salesgirl took the bill and the shawl, and went to the desk. She came back, almost immediately, with the storekeeper, who looked sharply at the customer and noted the number of the coupon.
“It is all right,” he said, satisfied apparently by the inspection; “a little unusual, only. We don’t see many of them. Can I help you, miss?” And he attended her to the door.
In the street there was even more of a Christmas show going on than in the stores. Peddlers of toys, of mottos, of candles, and of knickknacks of every description stood in rows along the curb, and were driving a lively trade. Their push-carts were decorated with fir-branches—even whole Christmas trees. One held a whole cargo of Santa Clauses in a bower of green, each one with a cedar-bush in his folded arms, as a soldier carries his gun. The lights were blazing out in the stores, and the hucksters’ torches were flaring at the corners. There was Christmas in the very air and Christmas in the storekeeper’s till. It had been a very busy day. He thought of it with a satisfied nod as he stood a moment breathing the brisk air of the winter day, absently fingering the coupon the girl had paid for the shawl. A thin voice at his elbow said: “Merry Christmas, Mr. Stein! Here’s yer paper.”
It was the newsboy who left the evening papers at the door every night. The storekeeper knew him, and something about the struggle they had at home to keep the roof over their heads. Mike was a kind of protégé of his. He had helped to get him his route.
“Wait a bit, Mike,” he said. “You’ll be wanting your Christmas from me. Here’s a dollar. It’s just like yourself: it is small, but it is all right. You take it home and have a good time.”
Was it the message with which it had been sent forth from far away in the country, or what was it? Whatever it was, it was just impossible for the little dollar to lie still in the pocket while there was want to be relieved, mouths to be filled, or Christmas lights to be lit. It just couldn’t, and it didn’t.
Mike stopped around the corner of Allen street, and gave three whoops expressive of his approval of Mr. Stein; having done which, he sidled up to the first lighted window out of range to examine his gift. His enthusiasm changed to open-mouthed astonishment as he saw the little dollar. His jaw fell. Mike was not much of a scholar, and could not make out the inscription on the coupon; but he had heard of shin-plasters as something they “had in the war,” and he took this to be some sort of a ten-cent piece. The policeman on the block might tell. Just now he and Mike were hunk. They had made up a little difference they’d had, and if any one would know, the cop surely would. And off he went in search of him.
Mr. McCarthy pulled off his gloves, put his club under his arm, and studied the little dollar with contracted brow. He shook his head as he handed it back, and rendered the opinion that it was “some dom swindle that’s ag’in’ the law.” He advised Mike to take it back to Mr. Stein, and added, as he prodded him in an entirely friendly manner in the ribs with his locust, that if it had been the week before he might have “run him in” for having the thing in his possession. As it happened, Mr. Stein was busy and not to be seen, and Mike went home between hope and fear, with his doubtful prize.
There was a crowd at the door of the tenement, and Mike saw, before he had reached it, running, that it clustered about an ambulance that was backed up to the sidewalk. Just as he pushed his way through the throng it drove off, its clanging gong scattering the people right and left. A little girl sat weeping on the top step of the stoop. To her Mike turned for information.
“Susie, what’s up?” he asked, confronting her with his armful of papers. “Who’s got hurted?”
“It’s papa,” sobbed the girl. “He ain’t hurted. He’s sick, and he was took that bad he had to go, an’ to-morrer is Christmas, an’—oh, Mike!”
It is not the fashion of Essex street to slop over. Mike didn’t. He just set his mouth to a whistle and took a turn down the hall to think. Susie was his chum. There were seven in her flat; in his only four, including two that made wages. He came back from his trip with his mind made up.
“Suse,” he said, “come on in. You take this, Suse, see! an’ let the kids have their Christmas. Mr. Stein give it to me. It’s a little one, but if it ain’t all right I’ll take it back, and get one that is good. Go on, now, Suse, you hear?” And he was gone.
There was a Christmas tree that night in Susie’s flat, with candles and apples and shining gold on, but the little dollar did not pay for it. That rested securely in the purse of the charity visitor who had come that afternoon, just at the right time, as it proved. She had heard the story of Mike and his sacrifice, and had herself given the children a one-dollar bill for the coupon. They had their Christmas, and a joyful one, too, for the lady went up to the hospital and brought back word that Susie’s father would be all right with rest and care, which he was now getting. Mike came in and helped them “sack” the tree when the lady was gone. He gave three more whoops for Mr. Stein, three for the lady, and three for the hospital doctor to even things up. Essex street was all right that night.
“Do you know, professor,” said that learned man’s wife, when, after supper, he had settled down in his easy-chair to admire the Noah’s ark and the duckses’ babies and the rest, all of which had arrived safely by express ahead of him and were waiting to be detailed to their appropriate stockings while the children slept—“do you know, I heard such a story of a little newsboy to-day. It was at the meeting of our district charity committee this evening. Miss Linder, our visitor, came right from the house.” And she told the story of Mike and Susie.
“And I just got the little dollar bill to keep. Here it is.” She took the coupon out of her purse and passed it to her husband.
“Eh! what?” said the professor, adjusting his spectacles and reading the number. “If here isn’t my little dollar come back to me! Why, where have you been, little one? I left you in Bedford street this morning, and here you come by way of Essex. Well, I declare!” And he told his wife how he had received it in a letter in the morning.
“John,” she said, with a sudden impulse,—she didn’t know, and neither did he, that it was the charm of the little dollar that was working again,—“John, I guess it is a sin to stop it. Jones’s children won’t have any Christmas tree, because they can’t afford it. He told me so this morning when he fixed the furnace. And the baby is sick. Let us give them the little dollar. He is here in the kitchen now.”
And they did; and the Joneses, and I don’t know how many others, had a Merry Christmas because of the blessed little dollar that carried Christmas cheer and good luck wherever it went. For all I know, it may be going yet. Certainly it is a sin to stop it, and if any one has locked it up without knowing that he locked up the Christmas dollar, let him start it right out again. He can tell it easily enough. If he just looks at the number, that’s the one.
A PROPOSAL ON THE ELEVATED
The sleeper on the 3:35 A. M. elevated train from the Harlem bridge was awake for once. The sleeper is the last car in the train, and has its own set that snores nightly in the same seats, grunts with the fixed inhospitality of the commuter at the intrusion of a stranger, and is on terms with Conrad, the German conductor, who knows each one of his passengers and wakes him up at his station. The sleeper is unique. It is run for the benefit of those who ride in it, not for the company’s. It not only puts them off properly; it waits for them, if they are not there. The conductor knows that they will come. They are men, mostly, with small homes beyond the bridge, whose work takes them down-town to the markets, the Post-office, and the busy marts of the city long before cock-crow. The day begins in New York at all hours.
Usually the sleeper is all that its name implies, but this morning it was as far from it as could be. A party of young people, fresh from a neighborhood hop, had come on board and filled the rear end of the car. Their feet tripped yet to the dance, and snatches of the latest waltz floated through the train between peals of laughter and little girlish shrieks. The regulars glared, discontented, in strange seats, unable to go to sleep. Only the railroad yardmen dropped off promptly as they came in. Theirs was the shortest ride, and they could least afford to lose time. Two old Irishmen, flanked by their dinner-pails, gravely discussed the Henry George campaign.
Across the passage sat a group of three apart—a young man, a girl, and a little elderly woman with lines of care and hard work in her patient face. She guarded carefully three umbrellas, a very old and faded one, and two that were new and of silk, which she held in her lap, though it had not rained for a month. He was a likely young fellow, tall and straight, with the thoughtful eye of a student. His dark hair fell nearly to his shoulders, and his coat had a foreign cut. The girl was a typical child of the city, slight and graceful of form, dressed in good taste, and with a bright, winning face. The two chatted confidentially together, forgetful of all else, while mama, between them, nodded sleepily in her seat.
A sudden burst of white light flooded the car.
“Hey! Ninety-ninth street!” called the conductor, and rattled the door. The railroad men tumbled out pell-mell, all but one. Conrad shook him, and he went out, mechanically blinking his eyes.
“Eighty-ninth next!” from the doorway.
The laughter at the rear end of the car had died out. The young people, in a quieter mood, were humming a popular love-song. Presently above the rest rose a clear tenor:
Oh, promise me that some day you and I
Will take our love together to some sky
Where we can be alone and faith renew—
The clatter of the train as it flew over a switch drowned the rest. When the last wheel had banged upon the frog, I heard the young student’s voice, in the soft accents of southern Europe:
“Wenn ich in Wien war—” He was telling her of his home and his people in the language of his childhood. I glanced across. She sat listening with kindling eyes. Mama slumbered sweetly; her worn old hands clutched unconsciously the umbrellas in her lap. The two Irishmen, having settled the campaign, had dropped to sleep, too. In the crowded car the two were alone. His hand sought hers and met it half-way.
“Forty-seventh!” There was a clatter of tin cans below. The contingent of milkmen scrambled out of their seats and off for the depot. In the lull that followed their going, the tenor rose from the last seat:
Those first sweet violets of early spring,
Which come in whispers, thrill us both, and sing
Of love unspeakable that is to be,
Oh, promise me! Oh, promise me!
The two young people faced each other. He had thrown his hat upon the seat beside him and held her hand fast, gesticulating with his free hand as he spoke rapidly, eloquently, eagerly of his prospects and his hopes. Her own toyed nervously with his coat-lapel, twisting and twirling a button as he went on. What he said might have been heard to the other end of the car, had there been anybody to listen. He was to live here always; his uncle would open a business in New York, of which he was to have charge, when he had learned to know the country and its people. It would not be long now, and then—and then—
“Twenty-third street!”
There was a long stop after the levy for the ferries had left. The conductor went out on the platform and consulted with the ticket-chopper. He was scrutinizing his watch for the second time, when the faint jingle of an east-bound car was heard.
“Here she comes!” said the ticket-chopper. A shout, and a man bounded up the steps, three at a time. It was an engineer who, to make connection with his locomotive at Chatham Square, must catch that train.
“Hullo, Conrad! Nearly missed you,” he said as he jumped on the car, breathless.
“All right, Jack.” And the conductor jerked the bell-rope. “You made it, though.” The train sped on.
Two lives, heretofore running apart, were hastening to a union. The lovers had seen nothing, heard nothing but each other. His eyes burned as hers met his and fell before them. His head bent lower until his face almost touched hers. His dark hair lay against her blond curls. The ostrich feather on her hat swept his shoulder.
“Mögtest Du mich haben?” he entreated.
Above the grinding of the wheels as the train slowed up for the station a block ahead, pleaded the tenor:
Oh, promise me that you will take my hand,
The most unworthy in this lonely land—
Did she speak? Her face was hidden, but the blond curls moved with a nod so slight that only a lover’s eye could see it. He seized her disengaged hand. The conductor stuck his head into the car.
“Fourteenth street!”
A squad of stout, florid men with butchers’ aprons started for the door. The girl arose hastily.
“Mama!” she called, “steh’ auf! Es ist Fourteenth street.”
The little woman woke up, gathered the umbrellas in her arms, and bustled after the marketmen, her daughter leading the way. He sat as one dreaming.
“Ach!” he sighed, and ran his hand through his dark hair, “so rasch!”
And he went out after them.
DEATH COMES TO CAT ALLEY
The dead-wagon stopped at the mouth of Cat Alley. Its coming made a commotion among the children in the block, and the Chief of Police looked out of his window across the street, his attention arrested by the noise. He saw a little pine coffin carried into the alley under the arm of the driver, a shoal of ragged children trailing behind. After a while the driver carried it out again, shoved it in the wagon, where there were other boxes like it, and, slamming the door, drove off.
A red-eyed woman watched it down the street until it disappeared around the corner. Then she wiped her eyes with her apron and went in.
It was only Mary Welsh’s baby that was dead, but to her the alley, never cheerful on the brightest of days, seemed hopelessly desolate to-day. It was all she had. Her first baby died in teething.
Cat Alley is a back-yard illustration of the theory of evolution. The fittest survive, and the Welsh babies were not among them. It would be strange if they were. Mike, the father, works in a Crosby-street factory when he does work. It is necessary to put it that way, for, though he has not been discharged, he had only one day’s work this week and none at all last week. He gets one dollar a day, and the one dollar he earned these last two weeks his wife had to draw to pay the doctor with when the baby was so sick. They have had nothing else coming in, and but for the wages of Mrs. Welsh’s father, who lives with them, there would have been nothing in the house to eat.
The baby came three weeks ago, right in the hardest of the hard times. It was never strong enough to nurse, and the milk bought in Mulberry street is not for babies to grow on who are not strong enough to stand anything. Little John never grew at all. He lay upon his pillow this morning as white and wan and tiny as the day he came into a world that didn’t want him.
Yesterday, just before he died, he sat upon his grandmother’s lap and laughed and crowed for the first time in his brief life, “just like he was talkin’ to me,” said the old woman, with a smile that struggled hard to keep down a sob. “I suppose it was a sort of inward cramp,” she added—a mother’s explanation of baby laugh in Cat Alley.
The mother laid out the little body on the only table in their room, in its only little white slip, and covered it with a piece of discarded lace curtain to keep off the flies. They had no ice, and no money to pay an undertaker for opening the little grave in Calvary, where their first baby lay. All night she sat by the improvised bier, her tears dropping silently.
When morning came and brought the woman with the broken arm from across the hall to sit by her, it was sadly evident that the burial of the child must be hastened. It was not well to look at the little face and the crossed baby hands, and even the mother saw it.
“Let the trench take him, in God’s name; he has his soul,” said the grandmother, crossing herself devoutly.
An undertaker had promised to put the baby in the grave in Calvary for twelve dollars and take two dollars a week until it was paid. But how can a man raise two dollars a week, with only one coming in in two weeks, and that gone to the doctor? With a sigh Mike Welsh went for the “lines” that must smooth its way to the trench in the Potter’s Field, and then to Mr. Blake’s for the dead-wagon. It was the hardest walk of his life.
And so it happened that the dead-wagon halted at Cat Alley and that little John took his first and last ride. A little cross and a number on the pine box, cut in the lid with a chisel, and his brief history was closed, with only the memory of the little life remaining to the Welshes to help them fight the battle alone.
In the middle of the night, when the dead-lamp burned dimly at the bottom of the alley, a policeman brought to Police Headquarters a wailing child, an outcast found in the area of a Lexington-avenue house by a citizen, who handed it over to the police. Until its cries were smothered in the police nursery up-stairs with the ever-ready bottle, they reached the bereaved mother in Cat Alley and made her tears drop faster. As the dead-wagon drove away with its load in the morning, Matron Travers came out with the now sleeping waif in her arms. She, too, was bound for Mr. Blake’s.
The two took their ride on the same boat—the living child, whom no one wanted, to Randall’s Island, to be enlisted with its number in the army of the city’s waifs, strong and able to fight its way; the dead, for whom a mother’s heart yearns, to its place in the great ditch.
WHY IT HAPPENED
Yom Kippur being at hand, all the East Side was undergoing a scrubbing, the people included. It is part of the religious observance of the chief Jewish holiday that every worshiper presenting himself at the synagogue to be cleansed from sin must first have washed his body clean.
Hence the numerous tenement bath-houses on the East Side are run night and day in Yom Kippur week to their full capacity. There are so many more people than tubs that there is no rest for the attendants even in the small hours of the morning.
They are not palatial establishments exactly, these mikwehs (bath-houses). Most of them are in keeping with the tenements that harbor them; but they fill the bill. One, at 20 Orchard street, has even a Turkish and a Russian attachment. It is one of the most pretentious. For thirty-five cents one can be roasted by dry heat or boiled with steam. The unhappy experience of Jacob Epstein shows that it is even possible to be boiled literally and in earnest in hot water at the same price. He chose that way unwittingly, and the choice came near causing a riot.
Epstein came to the bath-house with a party of friends at 2 A. M., in quest of a Russian bath. They had been steamed, and were disporting themselves to their heart’s content when the thing befell the tailor. Epstein is a tailor. He went to get a shower-bath in a pail,—where Russian baths are got for thirty-five cents they are got partly by hand, as it were,—and in the dim, religious light of the room, the small gas-jet struggling ineffectually with the steam and darkness, he mistook the hot-water faucet for the cold. He found out his mistake when he raised the pail and poured a flood of boiling water over himself.
Then his shrieks filled the house. His companions paused in amazement, and beheld the tailor dancing on one foot and on the other by turns, yelling:
“Weh! Weh! Ich bin verbrennt!”
They thought he had gone suddenly mad, and joined in the lamentation, till one of them saw his skin red and parboiled and raising big blisters. Then they ran with a common accord for their own cold-water pails, and pursued him, seeking to dash their contents over him.
But the tailor, frantic with pain, thought, if he thought at all, that he was going to be killed, and yelled louder than ever. His companions’ shouts, joined to his, were heard in the street, and there promptly gathered a wailing throng that echoed the “Weh! Weh!” from within, and exchanged opinions between their laments as to who was being killed, and why.
Policeman Schulem came just in time to prevent a general panic and restore peace.
Schulem is a valuable man on the East Side. His name alone is enough. It signifies peace—peace in the language of Ludlow street. The crowd melted away, and the tailor was taken to the hospital, bewailing his bad luck.
The bath-house keeper was an indignant and injured man. His business was hurt.
“How did it happen?” he said. “It happened because he is a schlemiehl. Teufel! he’s worse than a schlemiehl; he is a chammer.”
Which accounts for it, of course, and explains everything.
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 rag-picker 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 she had forgotten. They poked fun at him and spoke Carmen’s 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 cellarways, 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 leveled 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 at 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.