Out of Mulberry Street — Section 10
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.
"Moegtest 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.
