’TWAS LIZA’S DOINGS
Joe drove his old gray mare along the stony road in deep thought. They had been across the ferry to Newtown with a load of Christmas truck. It had been a hard pull uphill for them both, for Joe had found it necessary not a few times to get down and give old ’Liza a lift to help her over the roughest spots; and now, going home, with the twilight coming on and no other job a-waiting, he let her have her own way. It was slow, but steady, and it suited Joe; for his head was full of busy thoughts, and there were few enough of them that were pleasant.
Business had been bad at the big stores, never worse, and what trucking there was there were too many about. Storekeepers who never used to look at a dollar, so long as they knew they could trust the man who did their hauling, were counting the nickels these days. As for chance jobs like this one, that was all over now with the holidays, and there had been little enough of it, too.
There would be less, a good deal, with the hard winter at the door, and with ’Liza to keep and the many mouths to fill. Still, he wouldn’t have minded it so much but for mother fretting and worrying herself sick at home, and all along o’ Jim, the eldest boy, who had gone away mad and never come back. Many were the dollars he had paid the doctor and the druggist to fix her up, but it was no use. She was worrying herself into a decline, it was clear to be seen.
Joe heaved a heavy sigh as he thought of the strapping lad who had brought such sorrow to his mother. So strong and so handy on the wagon. Old ’Liza loved him like a brother and minded him even better than she did himself. If he only had him now, they could face the winter and the bad times, and pull through. But things never had gone right since he left. He didn’t know, Joe thought humbly as he jogged along over the rough road, but he had been a little hard on the lad. Boys wanted a chance once in a while. All work and no play was not for them. Likely he had forgotten he was a boy once himself. But Jim was such a big lad, ’most like a man. He took after his mother more than the rest. She had been proud, too, when she was a girl. He wished he hadn’t been hasty that time they had words about those boxes at the store. Anyway, it turned out that it wasn’t Jim’s fault. But he was gone that night, and try as they might to find him, they never had word of him since. And Joe sighed again more heavily than before.
Old ’Liza shied at something in the road, and Joe took a firmer hold on the reins. It turned his thoughts to the horse. She was getting old, too, and not as handy as she was. He noticed that she was getting winded with a heavy load. It was well on to ten years she had been their capital and the breadwinner of the house. Sometimes he thought that she missed Jim. If she was to leave them now, he wouldn’t know what to do, for he couldn’t raise the money to buy another horse nohow, as things were. Poor old ’Liza! He stroked her gray coat musingly with the point of his whip as he thought of their old friendship. The horse pointed one ear back toward her master and neighed gently, as if to assure him that she was all right.
Suddenly she stumbled. Joe pulled her up in time, and throwing the reins over her back, got down to see what it was. An old horseshoe, and in the dust beside it a new silver quarter. He picked both up and put the shoe in the wagon.
“They say it is luck,” he mused, “finding horse-iron and money. Maybe it’s my Christmas. Get up, ’Liza!” And he drove off to the ferry.
The glare of a thousand gas-lamps had chased the sunset out of the western sky, when Joe drove home through the city’s streets. Between their straight mile-long rows surged the busy life of the coming holiday. In front of every grocery-store was a grove of fragrant Christmas trees waiting to be fitted into little green stands with fairy fences. Within, customers were bargaining, chatting, and bantering the busy clerks. Peddlers offering tinsel and colored candles waylaid them on the door-step. The rack under the butcher’s awning fairly groaned with its weight of plucked geese, of turkeys, stout and skinny, of poultry of every kind. The saloon-keeper even had wreathed his door-posts in ground-ivy and hemlock, and hung a sprig of holly in the window, as if with a spurious promise of peace on earth and good-will toward men who entered there. It tempted not Joe. He drove past it to the corner, where he turned up a street darker and lonelier than the rest, toward a stretch of rocky, vacant lots fenced in by an old stone wall. ’Liza turned in at the rude gate without being told, and pulled up at the house.
A plain little one-story frame with a lean-to for a kitchen, and an adjoining stable-shed, over-shadowed all by two great chestnuts of the days when there were country lanes where now are paved streets, and on Manhattan Island there was farm by farm. A light gleamed in the window looking toward the street. As ’Liza’s hoofs were heard on the drive, a young girl with a shawl over her head ran out from some shelter where she had been watching, and took the reins from Joe.
“You’re late,” she said, stroking the mare’s steaming flank. ’Liza reached around and rubbed her head against the girl’s shoulder, nibbling playfully at the fringe of her shawl.
“Yes; we’ve come far, and it’s been a hard pull. ’Liza is tired. Give her a good feed, and I’ll bed her down. How’s mother?”
“Sprier than she was,” replied the girl, bending over the shaft to unbuckle the horse; “seems as if she’d kinder cheered up for Christmas.” And she led ’Liza to the stable while her father backed the wagon into the shed.
It was warm and very comfortable in the little kitchen, where he joined the family after “washing up.” The fire burned brightly in the range, on which a good-sized roast sizzled cheerily in its pot, sending up clouds of savory steam. The sand on the white pine floor was swept in tongues, old-country fashion. Joe and his wife were both born across the sea, and liked to keep Christmas eve as they had kept it when they were children. Two little boys and a younger girl than the one who had met him at the gate received him with shouts of glee, and pulled him straight from the door to look at a hemlock branch stuck in the tub of sand in the corner. It was their Christmas tree, and they were to light it with candles, red and yellow and green, which mama got them at the grocer’s where the big Santa Claus stood on the shelf. They pranced about like so many little colts, and clung to Joe by turns, shouting all at once, each one anxious to tell the great news first and loudest.
Joe took them on his knee, all three, and when they had shouted until they had to stop for breath, he pulled from under his coat a paper bundle, at which the children’s eyes bulged. He undid the wrapping slowly.
“Who do you think has come home with me?” he said, and he held up before them the veritable Santa Claus himself, done in plaster and all snow-covered. He had bought it at the corner toy-store with his lucky quarter. “I met him on the road over on Long Island, where ’Liza and I was to-day, and I gave him a ride to town. They say it’s luck falling in with Santa Claus, partickler when there’s a horseshoe along. I put hisn up in the barn, in ’Liza’s stall. Maybe our luck will turn yet, eh! old woman?” And he put his arm around his wife, who was setting out the dinner with Jennie, and gave her a good hug, while the children danced off with their Santa Claus.
She was a comely little woman, and she tried hard to be cheerful. She gave him a brave look and a smile, but there were tears in her eyes, and Joe saw them, though he let on that he didn’t. He patted her tenderly on the back and smoothed his Jennie’s yellow braids, while he swallowed the lump in his throat and got it down and out of the way. He needed no doctor to tell him that Santa Claus would not come again and find her cooking their Christmas dinner, unless she mended soon and swiftly.
They ate their dinner together, and sat and talked until it was time to go to bed. Joe went out to make all snug about ’Liza for the night and to give her an extra feed. He stopped in the door, coming back, to shake the snow out of his clothes. It was coming on with bad weather and a northerly storm, he reported. The snow was falling thick already and drifting badly. He saw to the kitchen fire and put the children to bed. Long before the clock in the neighboring church-tower struck twelve, and its doors were opened for the throngs come to worship at the midnight mass, the lights in the cottage were out, and all within it fast asleep.
The murmur of the homeward-hurrying crowds had died out, and the last echoing shout of “Merry Christmas!” had been whirled away on the storm, now grown fierce with bitter cold, when a lonely wanderer came down the street. It was a boy, big and strong-limbed, and, judging from the manner in which he pushed his way through the gathering drifts, not unused to battle with the world, but evidently in hard luck. His jacket, white with the falling snow, was scant and worn nearly to rags, and there was that in his face which spoke of hunger and suffering silently endured. He stopped at the gate in the stone fence, and looked long and steadily at the cottage in the chestnuts. No life stirred within, and he walked through the gap with slow and hesitating step. Under the kitchen window he stood awhile, sheltered from the storm, as if undecided, then stepped to the horse-shed and rapped gently on the door.
“’Liza!” he called, “’Liza, old girl! It’s me—Jim!”
A low, delighted whinnying from the stall told the shivering boy that he was not forgotten there. The faithful beast was straining at her halter in a vain effort to get at her friend. Jim raised a bar that held the door closed by the aid of a lever within, of which he knew the trick, and went in. The horse made room for him in her stall, and laid her shaggy head against his cheek.
“Poor old ’Liza!” he said, patting her neck and smoothing her gray coat, “poor old girl! Jim has one friend that hasn’t gone back on him. I’ve come to keep Christmas with you, ’Liza! Had your supper, eh? You’re in luck. I haven’t; I wasn’t bid, ’Liza; but never mind. You shall feed for both of us. Here goes!” He dug into the oats-bin with the measure, and poured it full into ’Liza’s crib.
“Fill up, old girl! and good night to you.” With a departing pat he crept up the ladder to the loft above, and, scooping out a berth in the loose hay, snuggled down in it to sleep. Soon his regular breathing up there kept step with the steady munching of the horse in her stall. The two reunited friends were dreaming happy Christmas dreams.
The night wore into the small hours of Christmas morning. The fury of the storm was unabated. The old cottage shook under the fierce blasts, and the chestnuts waved their hoary branches wildly, beseechingly, above it, as if they wanted to warn those within of some threatened danger. But they slept and heard them not. From the kitchen chimney, after a blast more violent than any that had gone before, a red spark issued, was whirled upward and beaten against the shingle roof of the barn, swept clean of snow. Another followed it, and another. Still they slept in the cottage; the chestnuts moaned and brandished their arms in vain. The storm fanned one of the sparks into a flame. It flickered for a moment and then went out. So, at least, it seemed. But presently it reappeared, and with it a faint glow was reflected in the attic window over the door. Down in her stall ’Liza moved uneasily. Nobody responding, she plunged and reared, neighing loudly for help. The storm drowned her calls; her master slept, unheeding.
But one heard it, and in the nick of time. The door of the shed was thrown violently open, and out plunged Jim, his hair on fire and his clothes singed and smoking. He brushed the sparks off himself as if they were flakes of snow. Quick as thought, he tore ’Liza’s halter from its fastening, pulling out staple and all, threw his smoking coat over her eyes, and backed her out of the shed. He reached in, and pulling the harness off the hook, threw it as far into the snow as he could, yelling “Fire!” at the top of his voice. Then he jumped on the back of the horse, and beating her with heels and hands into a mad gallop, was off up the street before the bewildered inmates of the cottage had rubbed the sleep out of their eyes and come out to see the barn on fire and burning up.
Down street and avenue fire-engines raced with clanging bells, leaving tracks of glowing coals in the snow-drifts, to the cottage in the chestnut lots. They got there just in time to see the roof crash into the barn, burying, as Joe and his crying wife and children thought, ’Liza and their last hope in the fiery wreck. The door had blown shut, and the harness Jim threw out was snowed under. No one dreamed that the mare was not there. The flames burst through the wreck and lit up the cottage and swaying chestnuts. Joe and his family stood in the shelter of it, looking sadly on. For the second time that Christmas night tears came into the honest truckman’s eyes. He wiped them away with his cap.
“Poor ’Liza!” he said.
A hand was laid with gentle touch upon his arm. He looked up. It was his wife. Her face beamed with a great happiness.
“Joe,” she said, “you remember what you read: ‘tidings of great joy.’ Oh, Joe, Jim has come home!”
She stepped aside, and there was Jim, sister Jennie hanging on his neck, and ’Liza alive and neighing her pleasure. The lad looked at his father and hung his head.
“Jim saved her, father,” said Jennie, patting the gray mare; “it was him fetched the engine.”
Joe took a step toward his son and held out his hand to him.
“Jim,” he said, “you’re a better man nor yer father. From now on, you’n I run the truck on shares. But mind this, Jim: never leave mother no more.”
And in the clasp of the two hands all the past was forgotten and forgiven. Father and son had found each other again.
“’Liza,” said the truckman, with sudden vehemence, turning to the old mare and putting his arm around her neck, “’Liza! It was your doin’s. I knew it was luck when I found them things. Merry Christmas!” And he kissed her smack on her hairy mouth, one, two, three times.
THE DUBOURQUES, FATHER AND SON
It must be nearly a quarter of a century since I first met the Dubourques. There are plenty of old New-Yorkers yet who will recall them as I saw them, plodding along Chatham street, swarthy, silent, meanly dressed, undersized, with their great tin signs covering front and back, like ill-favored gnomes turned sandwich-men to vent their spite against a gay world. Sunshine or rain, they went their way, Indian file, never apart, bearing their everlasting, unavailing protest.
“I demand,” read the painted signs, “the will and testament of my brother, who died in California, leaving a large property inheritance to Virgile Dubourque, which has never reached him.”
That was all any one was ever able to make out. At that point the story became rambling and unintelligible. Denunciation, hot and wrathful, of the thieves, whoever they were, of the government, of bishops, priests, and lawyers, alternated with protestations of innocence of heaven knows what crimes. If any one stopped them to ask what it was all about, they stared, shook their heads, and passed on. If money was offered, they took it without thanking the giver; indeed, without noticing him. They were never seen apart, yet never together in the sense of being apparently anything to each other. I doubt if they ever spoke, unless they were obliged to. Grim and lonely, they traveled the streets, parading their grievance before an unheeding day.
What that grievance was, and what was their story, a whole generation had tried vainly to find out. Every young reporter tried his hand at it at least once, some many times, I among them. None of us ever found out anything tangible about them. Now and then we ran down a rumor in the region of Bleecker street, then the “French quarter,”—I should have said that they were French and spoke but a few words of broken English when they spoke at all,—only to have it come to nothing. One which I recall was to the effect that, at some time in the far past, the elder of the two had been a schoolmaster in Lorraine, and had come across the sea in quest of a fabulous fortune left by his brother, one of the gold-diggers of ’49, who died in his boots; that there had been some disagreement between father and son, which resulted in the latter running away with their saved-up capital, leaving the old man stranded in a strange city, among people of strange speech, without the means of asserting his claim, and that, when he realized this, he lost his reason. Thus his son, Erneste, found him, returning after years penniless and repentant.
From that meeting father and son came forth what they were ever since. So ran the story, but whether it was all fancy, or some or most of it, I could not tell. No one could. One by one, the reporters dropped them, unable to make them out. The officers of a French benevolent society, where twice a week they received fixed rations, gave up importuning them to accept the shelter of the house before their persistent, almost fierce, refusal. The police did not trouble them, except when people complained that the tin signs tore their clothes. After that they walked with canvas posters, and were let alone.
One morning in the winter of 1882, among the police reports of the night’s happenings that were laid upon my desk, I found one saying that Virgile Dubourque, Frenchman, seventy-five years old, had died in a Wooster-street lodging-house. The story of his death, as I learned it there that day, was as tragic as that of his life. He had grown more and more feeble, until at last he was unable to leave the house. For the first time the son went out alone. The old man sat by the stove all day, silently brooding over his wrongs. The lodgers came and went. He heeded neither their going nor their coming. Through the long night he kept his seat, gazing fixedly into the fire. In the morning, when daylight shone upon the cold, gray ashes, he sat there dead. The son slept peacefully beside him.
The old schoolmaster took his last trip alone; no mourners rode behind the hearse to the Palisade Cemetery, where charitable countrymen bought him a grave. Erneste did not go to the funeral. That afternoon I met him on Broadway, plodding alone over the old route. His eyes were red and swollen. The “protest” hung from his shoulders; in his hand he carried, done up roughly in a pack, the signs the old man had borne. A look of such utter loneliness as I had never seen on a human face came into his when I asked him where his father was. He made a gesture of dejection and shifted his feet uneasily, as if impatient at being detained. Something distracted my attention for the moment, and when I looked again he was gone.
Once in the following summer I heard from Erneste through the newspapers, just when I had begun to miss him from his old haunts. It seems that he had somehow found the papers that proved his claim, or thought he had. He had put them into the hands of the French consul the day before, said the item, appearing before him clothed and in his right mind, without the signs. But the account merely added to the mystery by hinting that the old man had unconsciously hoarded the papers all the years he sought them with such toil in the streets of New York. Here was my story at last; but before I could lay hold of it, it evaded me once more in the hurry and worry of the police office.
Autumn had come and nearly gone, when New York was one day startled by the report that a madman had run through Fourteenth street at an hour in the afternoon when it was most crowded with shoppers, and, with a pair of carpenter’s compasses, had cut right and left, stabbing as many as came in his way. A scene of the wildest panic ensued. Women flung themselves down basement-steps and fell fainting in doorways. Fully half a score were cut down, among them the wife of Policeman Hanley, who was on duty in the block, and who arrested the maniac without knowing that his wife lay mortally wounded among his victims. She had come out to meet him, with the children. It was only after he had attended to the rest and sent the prisoner away securely bound that he was told there was still a wounded woman in the next store, and found her there with her little ones.
The madman was Erneste Dubourque. I found him in the police station, surrounded by a crowd of excited officials, to whose inquiries he turned a mien of dull and stolid indifference. He knew me when I called him by name, and looked up with a movement of quick intelligence, as one who suddenly remembers something he had forgotten and vainly tried to recall. He started for the door. When they seized him and brought him back, he fought like a demon. His shrieks of “Thieves! robbers!” filled the building as they bore him struggling to a cell.
He was tried by a jury and acquitted of murder. The defense was insanity. The court ordered his incarceration in a safe asylum. The police had received a severe lesson, and during the next month, while it was yet fresh in the public mind, they bestirred themselves, and sent a number of “harmless” lunatics, who had gone about unmolested, after him. I never heard of Erneste Dubourque again; but even now, after fifteen years, I find myself sometimes asking the old question: What was the story of wrong that bore such a crop of sorrow and darkness and murder?
ABE’S GAME OF JACKS
Time hung heavily on Abe Seelig’s hands, alone, or as good as alone, in the flat on the “stoop” of the Allen-street tenement. His mother had gone to the butcher’s. Chajim, the father,—“Chajim” is the Yiddish of “Herman,”—was long at the shop. To Abe was committed the care of his two young brothers, Isaac and Jacob. Abraham was nine, and past time for fooling. Play is “fooling” in the sweaters’ tenements, and the muddling of ideas makes trouble, later on, to which the police returns have the index.
“Don’t let ’em on the stairs,” the mother had said, on going, with a warning nod toward the bed where Jake and Ikey slept. He didn’t intend to. Besides, they were fast asleep. Abe cast about him for fun of some kind, and bethought himself of a game of jacks. That he had no jackstones was of small moment to him. East-Side tenements, where pennies are infrequent, have resources. One penny was Abe’s hoard. With that, and an accidental match, he began the game.
It went on well enough, albeit slightly lopsided by reason of the penny being so much the weightier, until the match, in one unlucky throw, fell close to a chair by the bed, and, in falling, caught fire.
Something hung down from the chair, and while Abe gazed, open-mouthed, at the match, at the chair, and at the bed right alongside, with his sleeping brothers on it, the little blaze caught it. The flame climbed up, up, up, and a great smoke curled under the ceiling. The children still slept, locked in each other’s arms, and Abe—Abe ran.
He ran, frightened half out of his senses, out of the room, out of the house, into the street, to the nearest friendly place he knew, a grocery-store five doors away, where his mother traded; but she was not there. Abe merely saw that she was not there, then he hid himself trembling.
In all the block, where three thousand tenants live, no one knew what cruel thing was happening on the stoop of No. 19.
A train passed on the elevated road, slowing up for the station near by. The engineer saw one wild whirl of fire within the room, and opening the throttle of his whistle wide, let out a screech so long and so loud that in ten seconds the street was black with men and women rushing out to see what dreadful thing had happened.
No need of asking. From the door of the Seelig flat, burned through, fierce flames reached across the hall, barring the way. The tenement was shut in.
Promptly it poured itself forth upon fire-escape ladders, front and rear, with shrieks and wailing. In the street the crowd became a deadly crush. Police and firemen battered their way through, ran down and over men, women, and children, with a desperate effort.
The firemen from Hook and Ladder Six, around the corner, had heard the shrieks, and, knowing what they portended, ran with haste. But they were too late with their extinguishers; could not even approach the burning flat. They could only throw up their ladders to those above. For the rest they must needs wait until the engines came.
One tore up the street, coupled on a hose, and ran it into the house. Then died out the fire in the flat as speedily as it had come. The burning room was pumped full of water, and the firemen entered.
Just within the room they came upon little Jacob, still alive, but half roasted. He had struggled from the bed nearly to the door. On the bed lay the body of Isaac, the youngest, burned to a crisp.
They carried Jacob to the police station. As they brought him out, a frantic woman burst through the throng and threw herself upon him. It was the children’s mother come back. When they took her to the blackened corpse of little Ike, she went stark mad. A dozen neighbors held her down, shrieking, while others went in search of the father.
In the street the excitement grew until it became almost uncontrollable when the dead boy was carried out.
In the midst of it little Abe returned, pale, silent, and frightened, to stand by his raving mother.
A LITTLE PICTURE
The fire-bells rang on the Bowery in the small hours of the morning. One of the old dwelling-houses that remain from the day when the “Bouwerie” was yet remembered as an avenue of beer-gardens and pleasure resorts was burning. Down in the street stormed the firemen, coupling hose and dragging it to the front. Up-stairs in the peak of the roof, in the broken skylight, hung a man, old, feeble, and gasping for breath, struggling vainly to get out. He had piled chairs upon tables, and climbed up where he could grasp the edge, but his strength had given out when one more effort would have freed him. He felt himself sinking back. Over him was the sky, reddened now by the fire that raged below. Through the hole the pent-up smoke in the building found vent and rushed in a black and stifling cloud.
“Air, air!” gasped the old man. “O God, water!”
There was a swishing sound, a splash, and the copious spray of a stream sent over the house from the street fell upon his upturned face. It beat back the smoke. Strength and hope returned. He took another grip on the rafter just as he would have let go.
“Oh, that I might be reached yet and saved from this awful death!” he prayed. “Help, O God, help!”
An answering cry came over the adjoining roof. He had been heard, and the firemen, who did not dream that any one was in the burning building, had him in a minute. He had been asleep in the store when the fire aroused him and drove him, blinded and bewildered, to the attic, where he was trapped.
Safe in the street, the old man fell upon his knees.
“I prayed for water, and it came; I prayed for freedom, and was saved. The God of my fathers be praised!” he said, and bowed his head in thanksgiving.
A DREAM OF THE WOODS
Something came over Police Headquarters in the middle of the summer night. It was like the sighing of the north wind in the branches of the tall firs and in the reeds along lonely river-banks where the otter dips from the brink for its prey. The doorman, who yawned in the hall, and to whom reed-grown river-banks have been strangers so long that he has forgotten they ever were, shivered and thought of pneumonia.
The sergeant behind the desk shouted for some one to close the door; it was getting as cold as January. The little messenger boy on the lowest step of the oaken stairs nodded and dreamed in his sleep of Uncas and Chingachgook and the great woods. The cunning old beaver was there in his hut, and he heard the crack of Deerslayer’s rifle.
He knew all the time he was dreaming, sitting on the steps of Police Headquarters, and yet it was all as real to him as if he were there, with the Mingoes creeping up to him in ambush all about and reaching for his scalp.
While he slept, a light step had passed, and the moccasin of the woods left its trail in his dream. In with the gust through the Mulberry-street door had come a strange pair, an old woman and a bright-eyed child, led by a policeman, and had passed up to Matron Travers’s quarters on the top floor.
Strangely different, they were yet alike, both children of the woods. The woman was a squaw typical in looks and bearing, with the straight black hair, dark skin, and stolid look of her race. She climbed the steps wearily, holding the child by the hand. The little one skipped eagerly, two steps at a time. There was the faintest tinge of brown in her plump cheeks, and a roguish smile in the corner of her eyes that made it a hardship not to take her up in one’s lap and hug her at sight. In her frock of red-and-white calico she was a fresh and charming picture, with all the grace of movement and the sweet shyness of a young fawn.
The policeman had found them sitting on a big trunk in the Grand Central Station, waiting patiently for something or somebody that didn’t come. When he had let them sit until he thought the child ought to be in bed, he took them into the police station in the depot, and there an effort was made to find out who and what they were. It was not an easy matter. Neither could speak English. They knew a few words of French, however, and between that and a note the old woman had in her pocket the general outline of the trouble was gathered. They were of the Canaghwaga tribe of Iroquois, domiciled in the St. Regis reservation across the Canadian border, and had come down to sell a trunkful of beads, and things worked with beads. Some one was to meet them, but had failed to come, and these two, to whom the trackless wilderness was as an open book, were lost in the city of ten thousand homes.
The matron made them understand by signs that two of the nine white beds in the nursery were for them, and they turned right in, humbly and silently thankful. The little girl had carried up with her, hugged very close under her arm, a doll that was a real ethnological study. It was a faithful rendering of the Indian papoose, whittled out of a chunk of wood, with two staring glass beads for eyes, and strapped to a board the way Indian babies are, under a coverlet of very gaudy blue. It was a marvelous doll baby, and its nurse was mighty proud of it. She didn’t let it go when she went to bed. It slept with her, and got up to play with her as soon as the first ray of daylight peeped in over the tall roofs.
The morning brought visitors, who admired the doll, chirruped to the little girl, and tried to talk with her grandmother, for that they made her out to be. To most questions she simply answered by shaking her head and holding out her credentials. There were two letters: one to the conductor of the train from Montreal, asking him to see that they got through all right; the other, a memorandum, for her own benefit apparently, recounting the number of hearts, crosses, and other treasures she had in her trunk. It was from those she had left behind at the reservation.
“Little Angus,” it ran, “sends what is over to sell for him. Sarah sends the hearts. As soon as you can, will you try and sell some hearts?” Then there was “love to mother,” and lastly an account of what the mason had said about the chimney of the cabin. They had sent for him to fix it. It was very dangerous the way it was, ran the message, and if mother would get the bricks, he would fix it right away.
The old squaw looked on with an anxious expression while the note was being read, as if she expected some sense to come out of it that would find her folks; but none of that kind could be made out of it, so they sat and waited until General Parker should come in.
General Ely S. Parker was the “big Indian” of Mulberry street in a very real sense. Though he was a clerk in the Police Department and never went on the war-path any more, he was the head of the ancient Indian Confederacy, chief of the Six Nations, once so powerful for mischief, and now a mere name that frightens no one. Donegahawa—one cannot help wishing that the picturesque old chief had kept his name of the council lodge—was not born to sit writing at an office desk. In youth he tracked the bear and the panther in the Northern woods. The scattered remnants of the tribes East and West owned his rightful authority as chief. The Canaghwagas were one of these. So these lost ones had come straight to the official and actual head of their people when they were stranded in the great city. They knew it when they heard the magic name of Donegahawa, and sat silently waiting and wondering till he should come. The child looked up admiringly at the gold-laced cap of Inspector Williams, when he took her on his knee, and the stern face of the big policeman relaxed and grew tender as a woman’s as he took her face between his hands and kissed it.
When the general came in, he spoke to them at once in their own tongue, and very sweet and musical it was. Then their troubles were soon over. The sachem, when he had heard their woes, said two words between puffs of his pipe that cleared all the shadows away. They sounded to the paleface ear like “Huh Hoo—ochsjawai,” or something equally barbarous, but they meant that there were not so many Indians in town but that theirs could be found, and in that the sachem was right. The number of redskins in Thompson street—they all live over there—is about seven.
The old squaw, when she was told that her friend would be found, got up promptly, and, bowing first to Inspector Williams and the other officials in the room, and next to the general, said very sweetly, “Njeawa,” and Lightfoot—that was the child’s name, it appeared—said it after her; which meant, the general explained, that they were very much obliged. Then they went out in charge of a policeman, to begin their search, little Lightfoot hugging her doll and looking back over her shoulder at the many gold-laced policemen who had captured her little heart. And they kissed their hands after her.
Mulberry street awoke from its dream of youth, of the fields and the deep woods, to the knowledge that it was a bad day. The old doorman, who had stood at the gate patiently answering questions for twenty years, told the first man who came looking for a lost child, with sudden resentment, that he ought to be locked up for losing her, and, pushing him out in the rain, slammed the door after him.
A HEATHEN BABY
A stack of mail comes to Police Headquarters every morning from the precincts by special department carrier. It includes the reports for the last twenty-four hours of stolen and recovered goods, complaints, and the thousand and one things the official mail-bag contains from day to day. It is all routine, and everything has its own pigeonhole into which it drops and is forgotten until some raking up in the department turns up the old blotters and the old things once more. But at last the mail-bag contained something that was altogether out of the usual run, to wit, a Chinese baby.
Piccaninnies have come in it before this, lots of them, black and shiny, and one papoose from a West-Side wigwam; but a Chinese baby never.
Sergeant Jack was so astonished that it took his breath away. When he recovered he spoke learnedly about its clothes as evidence of its heathen origin. Never saw such a thing before, he said. They were like they were sewn on; it was impossible to disentangle that child by any way short of rolling it on the floor.
Sergeant Jack is an old bachelor, and that is all he knows about babies. The child was not sewn up at all. It was just swaddled, and no Chinese had done that, but the Italian woman who found it. Sergeant Jack sees such babies every night in Mulberry street, but that is the way with old bachelors. They don’t know much, anyhow.
It was clear that the baby thought so. She was a little girl, very little, only one night old; and she regarded him through her almond eyes with a supercilious look, as who should say, “Now, if he was only a bottle, instead of a big, useless policeman, why, one might put up with him”; which reflection opened the flood-gates of grief and set the little Chinee squalling: “Yow! Yow! Yap!” until the sergeant held his ears, and a policeman carried it up-stairs in a hurry.
Down-stairs first, in the sergeant’s big blotter, and up-stairs in the matron’s nursery next, the baby’s brief official history was recorded. There was very little of it, indeed, and what there was was not marked by much ceremony. The stork hadn’t brought it, as it does in far-off Denmark; nor had the doctor found it and brought it in, on the American plan.
An Italian woman had just scratched it out of an ash-barrel. Perhaps that’s the way they find babies in China, in which case the sympathy of all American mothers and fathers will be with the present despoilers of the heathen Chinee, who is entitled to no consideration whatever until he introduces a new way.
The Italian woman was Mrs. Maria Lepanto. She lives in Thompson street, but she had come all the way down to the corner of Elizabeth and Canal streets with her little girl to look at a procession passing by. That as everybody knows, is next door to Chinatown. It was ten o’clock, and the end of the procession was in sight, when she noticed something stirring in an ash-barrel that stood against the wall. She thought first it was a rat, and was going to run, when a noise that was certainly not a rat’s squeal came from the barrel. The child clung to her hand and dragged her toward the sound.
“Oh, mama!” she cried, in wild excitement, “hear it! It isn’t a rat! I know! Hear!”
It was a wail, a very tiny wail, ever so sorry, as well it might be, coming from a baby that was cradled in an ash-barrel. It was little Susie’s eager hands that snatched it out. Then they saw that it was indeed a child, a poor, helpless, grieving little baby.
It had nothing on at all, not even a rag. Perhaps they had not had time to dress it.
“Oh, it will fit my dolly’s jacket!” cried Susie, dancing around and hugging it in glee. “It will, mama! A real live baby! Now Tilde needn’t brag of theirs. We will take it home, won’t we, mama!”
The bands brayed, and the flickering light of many torches filled the night. The procession had gone down the street, and the crowd with it. The poor woman wrapped the baby in her worn shawl and gave it to the girl to carry. And Susie carried it, prouder and happier than any of the men that marched to the music. So they arrived home. The little stranger had found friends and a resting-place.
But not for long. In the morning Mrs. Lepanto took counsel with the neighbors, and was told that the child must be given to the police. That was the law, they said, and though little Susie cried bitterly at having to part with her splendid new toy, Mrs. Lepanto, being a law-abiding woman, wrapped up her find and took it to the Macdougal-street station.
That was the way it got to Headquarters with the morning mail, and how Sergeant Jack got a chance to tell all he didn’t know about babies. Matron Travers knew more, a good deal. She tucked the little heathen away in a trundle-bed with a big bottle, and blessed silence fell at once on Headquarters. In five minutes the child was asleep.
While it slept, Matron Travers entered it in her book as “No. 103” of that year’s crop of the gutter, and before it woke up she was on the way with it, snuggled safely in a big gray shawl, up to the Charities. There Mr. Bauer registered it under yet another number, chucked it under the chin, and chirped at it in what he probably thought might pass for baby Chinese. Then it got another big bottle and went to sleep once more.
At ten o’clock there came a big ship on purpose to give the little Mott-street waif a ride up the river, and by dinner-time it was on a green island with four hundred other babies of all kinds and shades, but not one just like it in the whole lot. For it was New York’s first and only Chinese foundling. As to that Superintendent Bauer, Matron Travers, and Mrs. Lepanto agreed. Sergeant Jack’s evidence doesn’t count, except as backed by his superiors. He doesn’t know a heathen baby when he sees one.
The island where the waif from Mott street cast anchor is called Randall’s Island, and there its stay ends, or begins. The chances are that it ends, for with an ash-barrel filling its past and a foundling asylum its future, a baby hasn’t much of a show. Babies were made to be hugged each by one pair of mother’s arms, and neither white-capped nurses nor sleek milch-cows fed on the fattest of meadow-grass can take their place, try as they may. The babies know that they are cheated, and they will not stay.
HE KEPT HIS TRYST
Policeman Schultz was stamping up and down his beat in Hester street, trying to keep warm, on the night before Christmas, when a human wreck, in rum and rags, shuffled across his path and hailed him: “You allus treated me fair, Schultz,” it said; “say, will you do a thing for me?”
“What is it, Denny?” said the officer. He had recognized the wreck as Denny the Robber, a tramp who had haunted his beat ever since he had been on it, and for years before, he had heard, further back than any one knew.
“Will you,” said the wreck, wistfully—“will you run me in and give me about three months to-morrow? Will you do it?”
“That I will,” said Schultz. He had often done it before, sometimes for three, sometimes for six months, and sometimes for ten days, according to how he and Denny and the justice felt about it. In the spell between trips to the island, Denny was a regular pensioner of the policeman, who let him have a quarter or so when he had so little money as to be next to desperate. He never did get quite to that point. Perhaps the policeman’s quarters saved him. His nickname of “the Robber” was given to him on the same principle that dubbed the neighborhood he haunted the Pig Market—because pigs are the only ware not for sale there. Denny never robbed anybody. The only thing he ever stole was the time he should have spent in working. There was no denying it, Denny was a loafer. He himself had told Schultz that it was because his wife and children put him out of their house in Madison street five years before. Perhaps if his wife’s story had been heard it would have reversed that statement of facts. But nobody ever heard it. Nobody took the trouble to inquire. The O’Neil family—that was understood to be the name—interested no one in Jewtown. One of its members was enough. Except that Mrs. O’Neil lived in Madison street, somewhere “near Lundy’s store,” nothing was known of her.
“That I will, Denny,” repeated the policeman, heartily, slipping him a dime for luck. “You come around to-morrow, and I will run you in. Now go along.”
But Denny didn’t go, though he had the price of two “balls” at the distillery. He shifted thoughtfully on his feet, and said:
“Say, Schultz, if I should die now,—I am all full o’ rheumatiz, and sore,—if I should die before, would you see to me and tell the wife?”
“Small fear of yer dying, Denny, with the price of two drinks,” said the policeman, poking him facetiously in the ribs with his club. “Don’t you worry. All the same, if you will tell me where the old woman lives, I will let her know. What’s the number?”
But the Robber’s mood had changed under the touch of the silver dime that burned his palm. “Never mind, Schultz,” he said; “I guess I won’t kick; so long!” and moved off.
The snow drifted wickedly down Suffolk street Christmas morning, pinching noses and ears and cheeks already pinched by hunger and want. It set around the corner into the Pig Market, where the hucksters plodded knee-deep in the drifts, burying the horseradish man and his machine, and coating the bare, plucked breasts of the geese that swung from countless hooks at the corner stand with softer and whiter down than ever grew there. It drove the suspender-man into the hallway of a Suffolk-street tenement, where he tried to pluck the icicles from his frozen ears and beard with numb and powerless fingers.
As he stepped out of the way of some one entering with a blast that set like a cold shiver up through the house, he stumbled over something, and put down his hand to feel what it was. It touched a cold face, and the house rang with a shriek that silenced the clink of glasses in the distillery, against the side door of which the something lay. They crowded out, glasses in hand, to see what it was.
“Only a dead tramp,” said some one, and the crowd went back to the warm saloon, where the barrels lay in rows on the racks. The clink of glasses and shouts of laughter came through the peep-hole in the door into the dark hallway as Policeman Schultz bent over the stiff, cold shape. Some one had called him.
“Denny,” he said, tugging at his sleeve. “Denny, come. Your time is up. I am here.” Denny never stirred. The policeman looked up, white in the face.
“My God!” he said, “he’s dead. But he kept his date.”
And so he had. Denny the Robber was dead. Rum and exposure and the “rheumatiz” had killed him. Policeman Schultz kept his word, too, and had him taken to the station on a stretcher.
“He was a bad penny,” said the saloon-keeper, and no one in Jewtown was found to contradict him.
JOHN GAVIN, MISFIT
John Gavin was to blame—there is no doubt of that. To be sure, he was out of a job, with never a cent in his pockets, his babies starving, and notice served by the landlord that day. He had traveled the streets till midnight looking for work, and had found none. And so he gave up. Gave up, with the Employment Bureau in the next street registering applicants; with the Wayfarers’ Lodge over in Poverty Gap, where he might have earned fifty cents, anyway, chopping wood; with charities without end, organized and unorganized, that would have referred his case, had they done nothing else. With all these things and a hundred like them to meet their wants, the Gavins of our day have been told often enough that they have no business to lose hope. That they will persist is strange. But perhaps this one had never heard of them.
Anyway, Gavin is dead. But yesterday he was the father of six children, running from May, the eldest, who was thirteen and at school, to the baby, just old enough to poke its little fingers into its father’s eyes and crow and jump when he came in from his long and dreary tramps. They were as happy a little family as a family of eight could be with the wolf scratching at the door, its nose already poking through. There had been no work and no wages in the house for months, and the landlord had given notice that at the end of the week out they must go, unless the back rent was paid. And there was about as much likelihood of its being paid as of a slice of the February sun dropping down through the ceiling into the room to warm the shivering Gavin family.
It began when Gavin’s health gave way. He was a lather and had a steady job till sickness came. It was the old story: nothing laid away—how could there be, with a houseful of children?—and nothing coming in. They talk of death-rates to measure the misery of the slum by, but death does not touch the bottom. It ends the misery. Sickness only begins it. It began Gavin’s. When he had to drop hammer and nails, he got a job in a saloon as a barkeeper; but the saloon didn’t prosper, and when it was shut up, there was an end. Gavin didn’t know it then. He looked at the babies and kept up spirits as well as he could, though it wrung his heart.
He tried everything under the sun to get a job. He traveled early and traveled late, but wherever he went they had men and to spare. And besides, he was ill. As they told him bluntly, sometimes, they didn’t have any use for sick men. Men to work and earn wages must be strong. And he had to own that it was true.
Gavin was not strong. As he denied himself secretly the nourishment he needed that his little ones might have enough, he felt it more and more. It was harder work for him to get around, and each refusal left him more downcast. He was yet a young man, only thirty-four, but he felt as if he was old and tired—tired out; that was it.
The feeling grew on him while he went his last errand, offering his services at saloons and wherever, as he thought, an opening offered. In fact, he thought but little about it any more. The whole thing had become an empty, hopeless formality with him. He knew at last that he was looking for the thing he would never find; that in a cityful where every man had his place he was a misfit with none. With his dull brain dimly conscious of that one idea, he plodded homeward in the midnight hour. He had been on the go since early morning, and excepting some lunch from the saloon counters, had eaten nothing.
The lamp burned dimly in the room where May sat poring yet over her books, waiting for papa. When he came in she looked up and smiled, but saw by his look, as he hung up his hat, that there was no good news, and returned with a sigh to her book. The tired mother was asleep on the bed, dressed, with the baby in her arms. She had lain down to quiet it and had been lulled to sleep with it herself.
Gavin did not wake them. He went to the bed where the four little ones slept, and kissed them, each in his turn, then came back and kissed his wife and baby.
May nestled close to him as he bent over her and gave her, too, a little hug.
“Where are you going, papa?” she asked.
He turned around at the door and cast a look back at the quiet room, irresolute. Then he went back once more to kiss his sleeping wife and baby softly.
But however softly, it woke the mother. She saw him making for the door, and asked him where he meant to go so late.
“Out, just a little while,” he said, and his voice was husky. He turned his head away.
A woman’s instinct made her arise hastily and go to him.
“Don’t go,” she said; “please don’t go away.”
As he still moved toward the door, she put her arm about his neck and drew his head toward her.
She strove with him anxiously, frightened, she hardly knew herself by what. The lamplight fell upon something shining which he held behind his back. The room rang with the shot, and the baby awoke crying, to see its father slip from mama’s arms to the floor, dead.
For John Gavin, alive, there was no place. At least he did not find it; for which, let it be said and done with, he was to blame. Dead, society will find one for him. And for the one misfit got off the list there are seven whom not employment bureau nor woodyard nor charity register can be made to reach. Social economy the thing is called; which makes the eighth misfit.
IN THE CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL
The fact was printed the other day that the half-hundred children or more who are in the hospitals on North Brother Island had no playthings, not even a rattle, to make the long days skip by, which, set in smallpox, scarlet fever, and measles, must be longer there than anywhere else in the world. The toys that were brought over there with a consignment of nursery tots who had the typhus fever had been worn clean out, except some fish-horns which the doctor frowned on, and which were therefore not allowed at large. Not as much as a red monkey on a yellow stick was there left on the island to make the youngsters happy.
That afternoon a big, hearty-looking man came into the office with the paper in his hand, and demanded to see the editor. He had come, he said, to see to it that those sick youngsters got the playthings they were entitled to; and a regular Santa Claus he proved to the friendless little colony on the lonely island, for he left a crisp fifty-dollar note behind when he went away without giving his name. The single condition was attached to the gift that it should be spent buying toys for the children on North Brother Island.
Accordingly, a strange invading army took the island by storm three or four nights ago. Under cover of the darkness it had itself ferried over from One Hundred and Thirty-eighth street in the department yawl, and before morning it was in undisputed possession. It has come to stay. Not a doll or a sheep will ever leave the island again. They may riot upon it as they please, within certain well-defined limits, but none of them can ever cross the channel to the mainland again, unless it be the rubber dolls who can swim, so it is said. Here is the muster-roll:
Six sheep (four with lambs), six fairies (big dolls in street-dress), twelve rubber dolls (in woolen jackets), four railroad-trains, twenty-eight base-balls, twenty rubber balls, six big painted (Scotch plaid) rubber balls, six still bigger ditto, seven boxes of blocks, half a dozen music-boxes, twenty-four rattles, six bubble (soap) toys, twelve small engines, six games of dominoes, twelve rubber toys (old woman who lived in a shoe, etc.), five wooden toys (bad bear, etc.), thirty-six horse-reins.
As there is only one horse on the island, and that one a very steady-going steed in no urgent need of restraint, this last item might seem superfluous, but only to the uninstructed mind. Within a brief week half the boys and girls on the island that are out of bed long enough to stand on their feet will be transformed into ponies and the other half into drivers, and flying teams will go cavorting around to the tune of “Johnny, Get your Gun,” and the “Jolly Brothers Gallop,” as they are ground out of the music-boxes by little fingers that but just now toyed feebly with the balusters on the golden stair.
That music! When I went over to the island it fell upon my ears in little drops of sweet melody, as soon as I came in sight of the nurses’ quarters. I listened, but couldn’t make out the tune. The drops seemed mixed. When I opened the door upon one of the nurses, Dr. Dixon, and the hospital matron, each grinding his or her music for all there was in it, and looking perfectly happy withal, I understood why.
They were all playing different tunes at the same time, the nurse “When the Robins Nest Again,” Dr. Dixon “Nancy Lee,” and the visitor “Sweet Violets.” A little child stood by in open-mouthed admiration, that became ecstasy when I joined in with “The Babies on our Block.” It was all for the little one’s benefit, and she thought it beautiful without a doubt.
The storekeeper, knowing that music hath charms to soothe the breast of even a typhus-fever patient, had thrown in a dozen as his own gift. Thus one good deed brings on another, and a good deal more than fifty dollars’ worth of happiness will be ground out on the island before there is an end of the music.
There is one little girl in the measles ward already who will eat only when her nurse sits by grinding out “Nancy Lee.” She cannot be made to swallow one mouthful on any other condition. No other nurse and no other tune but “Nancy Lee” will do—neither the “Star-Spangled Banner” nor “The Babies on our Block.” Whether it is Nancy all by her melodious self, or the beautiful picture of her in a sailor’s suit on the lid of the box, or the two and the nurse and the dinner together, that serve to soothe her, is a question of some concern to the island, since Nancy and the nurse have shown signs of giving out together.
Three of the six sheep that were bought for the ridiculously low price of eighty-nine cents apiece, the lambs being thrown in as make-weight, were grazing on the mixed-measles lawn over on the east shore of the island, with a fairy in evening dress eying them rather disdainfully in the grasp of tearful Annie Cullum. Annie is a foundling from the asylum temporarily sojourning here. The measles and the scarlet fever were the only things that ever took kindly to her in her little life. They tackled her both at once, and poor Annie, after a six or eight weeks’ tussle with them, has just about enough spunk left to cry when anybody looks at her.
Three woolly sheep and a fairy all at once have robbed her of all hope, and in the midst of it all she weeps as if her heart would break. Even when the nurse pulls one of the unresisting mutton heads, and it emits a loud “Baa-a,” she stops only just for a second or two and then wails again. The sheep look rather surprised, as they have a right to. They have come to be little Annie’s steady company, hers and her fellow-sufferers’ in the mixed-measles ward. The triangular lawn upon which they are browsing is theirs to gambol on when the sun shines, but cross the walk that borders it they never can, any more than the babies with whom they play. Sumptuary law rules the island they are on. Habeas corpus and the constitution stop short of the ferry. Even Comstock’s authority does not cross it: the one exception to the rule that dolls and sheep and babies shall not visit from ward to ward is in favor of the rubber dolls, and the etiquette of the island requires that they shall lay off their woolen jackets and go calling just as the factory turned them out, without a stitch or shred of any kind on.
As for the rest, they are assigned, babies, nurses, sheep, rattles, and railroad-trains, to their separate measles, scarlet-fever, and diphtheria lawns or wards, and there must be content to stay. A sheep may be transferred from the scarlet-fever ward with its patron to the mixed-measles or diphtheria, when symptoms of either of these diseases appear, as they often do; but it cannot then go back again, lest it carry the seeds of the new contagion to its old friends.
Even the fairies are put under the ban of suspicion by such evil associations, and, once they have crossed the line, are not allowed to go back to corrupt the good manners of the babies with only one complaint.
Pauline Meyer, the bigger of the two girls on the mixed-measles stoop,—the other is friendless Annie,—has just enough strength to laugh when her sheep’s head is pulled. She has been on the limits of one ward after another these four months, and has had everything short of typhus fever and smallpox that the island affords.
It is a marvel that there is one laugh left in her whole little shrunken body after it all; but there is, and the grin on her face reaches almost from ear to ear, as she clasps the biggest fairy in an arm very little stouter than a boy’s bean-blower, and hears the lamb bleat. Why, that one smile on that ghastly face would be thought worth his fifty dollars by the children’s friend, could he see it. Pauline is the child of Swedish emigrants. She and Annie will not fight over their lambs and their dolls, not for many weeks. They can’t. They can’t even stand up.
One of the railroad-trains, drawn by a glorious tin engine, with the name “Union” painted on the cab, is making across the stoop for the little boy with the whooping-cough in the next building. But it won’t get there; it is quarantined. But it will have plenty of exercise. Little hands are itching to get hold of it in one of the cribs inside. There are thirty-six sick children on the island just now, about half of them boys, who will find plenty of use for the balls and things as soon as they get about. How those base-balls are to be kept within bounds is a hopeless mystery the doctors are puzzling over.
Even if nines are organized in every ward, as has been suggested, it is hard to see how they can be allowed to play each other, as they would want to, of course, as soon as they could toddle about. It would be something, though, a smallpox nine pitted against the scarlets or the measles, with an umpire from the mixed ward!
The old woman that lived in a shoe, being of rubber, is a privileged character, and is away on a call in the female scarlet, says the nurse. It is a good thing that she was made that way, for she is very popular. So are Mother Goose and her ten companion rubber toys. The bear and the man that strike alternately a wooden anvil with a ditto hammer are scarcely less exciting to the infantile mind; but, being of wood, they are steady boarders permanently attached each to his ward. The dominoes fell to the lot of the male scarlets. That ward has half a dozen grown men in it at present, and they have never once lost sight of the little black blocks since they first saw them.
The doctor reports that they are getting better just as fast as they can since they took to playing dominoes. If there is any hint in this to the profession at large, they are welcome to it, along with humanity.
A little girl with a rubber doll in a red-woolen jacket—a combination to make the perspiration run right off one with the humidity at 98—looks wistfully down from the second-story balcony of the smallpox pavilion, as the doctor goes past with the last sheep tucked under his arm.
But though it baa-a ever so loudly, it is not for her. It is bound for the white tent on the shore, shunned even here, where sits a solitary watcher gazing wistfully all day toward the city that has passed out of his life. Perchance it may bring to him a message from the far-away home where the birds sang for him, and the waves and the flowers spoke to him, and “Unclean” had not been written against his name. Of all on the Pest Island he alone is hopeless. He is a leper, and his sentence is that of a living death in a strange land.