Out of Mulberry Street — Section 5
NIGGER MARTHA'S WAKE
A woman with face all seared and blotched by something that had burned through the skin sat propped up in the doorway of a Bowery restaurant at four o'clock in the morning, senseless, apparently dying.
A policeman stood by, looking anxiously up the street and consulting his watch.
At intervals he shook her to make sure she was not dead.
The drift of the Bowery that was borne that way eddied about, intent upon what was going on.
A dumpy little man edged through the crowd and peered into the woman's face.
"Phew!"
he said, "it's Nigger Martha!
What is gettin' into the girls on the Bowery I don't know.
Remember my Maggie?
She was her chum."
This to the watchman on the block.
The watchman remembered.
He knows everything that goes on in the Bowery.
Maggie was the wayward daughter of a decent laundress, and killed herself by drinking carbolic acid less than a month before.
She had wearied of the Bowery.
Nigger Martha was her one friend.
And now she had followed her example.
She was drunk when she did it.
It is in their cups that a glimpse of the life they traded away for the street comes sometimes to these wretches, with remorse not to be borne.
It came so to Nigger Martha.
Ten minutes before she had been sitting with two boon companions in the oyster saloon next door, discussing their night's catch.
Elsie "Specs" was one of the two; the other was known to the street simply as Mame.
Elsie wore glasses, a thing unusual enough in the Bowery to deserve recognition.
From their presence Martha rose suddenly to pull a vial from her pocket.
Mame saw it, and, knowing what it meant in the heavy humor that was upon Nigger Martha, she struck it from her hand with a pepper-box.
It fell, but was not broken.
The woman picked it up, and staggering out, swallowed its contents upon the sidewalk--that is, as much as went into her mouth.
Much went over her face, burning it.
She fell shrieking.
Then came the crowd.
The Bowery never sleeps.
The policeman on the beat set her in the doorway and sent a hurry call for an ambulance.
It came at last, and Nigger Martha was taken to the hospital.
As Mame told it, so it was recorded on the police blotter, with the addition that she was anywhere from forty to fifty years old.
That was the strange part of it.
It is not often that any one lasts out a generation in the Bowery.
Nigger Martha did.
Her beginning was way back in the palmy days of Billy McGlory and Owney Geoghegan.
Her first remembered appearance was on the occasion of the mock wake they got up at Geoghegan's for Police Captain Foley when he was broken.
That was in the days when dive-keepers made and broke police captains, and made no secret of it.
Billy McGlory did not.
Ever since, Martha was on the street.
In time she picked up Maggie Mooney, and they got to be chummy.
The friendships of the Bowery by night may not be of a very exalted type, but when death breaks them it leaves nothing to the survivor.
That is the reason suicides there happen in pairs.
The story of Tilly Lorrison and Tricksy came from the Tenderloin not long ago.
This one of Maggie Mooney and Nigger Martha was theirs over again.
In each case it was the younger, the one nearest the life that was forever past, who took the step first, in despair.
The other followed.
To her it was the last link with something that had long ceased to be anything but a dream, which was broken.
But without the dream life was unbearable, in the Tenderloin and on the Bowery.
The newsboys were crying their night extras when Undertaker Reardon's wagon jogged across the Bowery with Nigger Martha's body in it.
She had given the doctors the slip, as she had the policeman many a time.
A friend of hers, an Italian in the Bend, had hired the undertaker to "do it proper," and Nigger Martha was to have a funeral.
All the Bowery came to the wake.
The all-nighters from Chatham Square to Bleecker street trooped up to the top-floor flat in the Forsyth-street tenement where Nigger Martha was laid out.
There they sat around, saying little and drinking much.
It was not a cheery crowd.
The Bowery by night is not cheerful in the presence of The Mystery.
Its one effort is to get away from it, to forget--the thing it can never do.
When out of its sight it carouses boisterously, as children sing and shout in the dark to persuade themselves that they are not afraid.
And some who hear think it happy.
Sheeny Rose was the master of ceremonies and kept the door.
This for a purpose.
In life Nigger Martha had one enemy whom she hated--cock-eyed Grace.
Like all of her kind, Nigger Martha was superstitious.
Grace's evil eye ever brought her bad luck when she crossed her path, and she shunned her as the pestilence.
When inadvertently she came upon her, she turned as she passed and spat twice over her left shoulder.
And Grace, with white malice in her wicked face, spurned her.
"I don't want," Nigger Martha had said one night in the hearing of Sheeny Rose--"I don't want that cock-eyed thing to look at my body when I am dead.
She'll give me hard luck in the grave yet."
And Sheeny Rose was there to see that cock-eyed Grace didn't come to the wake.
She did come.
She labored up the long stairs, and knocked, with no one will ever know what purpose in her heart.
If it was a last glimmer of good, of forgiveness, it was promptly squelched.
It was Sheeny Rose who opened the door.
"You can't come in here," she said curtly.
"You know she hated you.
She didn't want you to look at her stiff."
Cock-eyed Grace's face grew set with anger.
Her curses were heard within.
She threatened fight, but dropped it.
"All right," she said as she went down.
"I'll fix you, Sheeny Rose!"
It was in the exact spot where Nigger Martha had sat and died that Grace met her enemy the night after the funeral.
Lizzie La Blanche, the Marine's girl, was there; Elsie Specs, Little Mame, and Jack the Dog, toughest of all the girls, who for that reason had earned the name of "Mayor of the Bowery."
She brooked no rivals.
They were all within reach when the two enemies met under the arc light.
Cock-eyed Grace sounded the challenge.
"Now, you little Sheeny Rose," she said, "I'm goin' to do ye fer shuttin' of me out o' Nigger Martha's wake."
With that out came her hatpin, and she made a lunge at Sheeny Rose.
The other was on her guard.
Hatpin in hand, she parried the thrust and lunged back.
In a moment the girls had made a ring about the two, shutting them out of sight.
Within it the desperate women thrust and parried, backed and squared off, leaping like tigers when they saw an opening.
Their hats had fallen off, their hair was down, and eager hate glittered in their eyes.
It was a battle for life; for there is no dagger more deadly than the hatpin these women carry, chiefly as a weapon of defense in the hour of need.
They were evenly matched.
Sheeny Rose made up in superior suppleness of limb for the pent-up malice of the other.
Grace aimed her thrusts at her opponent's face.
She tried to reach her eye.
Once the sharp steel just pricked Sheeny Rose's cheek and drew blood.
In the next turn Rose's hatpin passed within a quarter-inch of Grace's jugular.
But the blow nearly threw her off her feet, and she was at her enemy's mercy.
With an evil oath the fiend thrust full at her face just as the policeman, who had come through the crowd unobserved, so intent was it upon the fight, knocked the steel from her hand.
At midnight two disheveled hags with faces flattened against the bars of adjoining cells in the police station were hurling sidelong curses at each other and at the maddened doorman.
Nigger Martha's wake had received its appropriate and foreordained ending.
A CHIP FROM THE MAELSTROM
"The cop just sceert her to death, that's what he done.
For Gawd's sake, boss, don't let on I tole you."
The negro, stopping suddenly in his game of craps in the Pell-street back yard, glanced up with a look of agonized entreaty.
Discovering no such fell purpose in his questioner's face, he added quickly, reassured: "And if he asks if you seed me a-playing craps, say no, not on yer life, boss, will yer?"
And he resumed the game where he left off.
An hour before he had seen Maggie Lynch die in that hallway, and it was of her he spoke.
She belonged to the tenement and to Pell street, as he did himself.
They were part of it while they lived, with all that that implied; when they died, to make part of it again, reorganized and closing ranks in the trench on Hart's Island.
It is only the Celestials in Pell street who escape the trench.
The others are booked for it from the day they are pushed out from the rapids of the Bowery into this maelstrom that sucks under all it seizes.
Thenceforward they come to the surface only at intervals in the police courts, each time more forlorn, but not more hopeless, until at last they disappear and are heard of no more.
When Maggie Lynch turned the corner no one there knows.
The street keeps no reckoning, and it doesn't matter.
She took her place unchallenged, and her "character" was registered in due time.
It was good.
Even Pell street has its degrees and its standard of perfection.
The standard's strong point is contempt of the Chinese, who are hosts in Pell street.
Maggie Lynch came to be known as homeless, without a man, though with the prospects of motherhood approaching, yet she "had never lived with a Chink."
To Pell street that was heroic.
It would have forgiven all the rest, had there been anything to forgive.
But there was not.
Whatever else may be, cant is not among the vices of Pell street.
And it is well.
Maggie Lynch lived with the Cuffs on the top floor of No. 21 until the Cuffs moved.
They left an old lounge they didn't want, and Maggie.
Maggie was sick, and the housekeeper had no heart to put her out.
Heart sometimes survives in the slums, even in Pell street, long after respectability has been hopelessly smothered.
It provided shelter and a bed for Maggie when her only friends deserted her.
In return she did what she could, helping about the hall and stairs.
Queer that gratitude should be another of the virtues the slum has no power to smother, though dive and brothel and the scorn of the good do their best, working together.
There was an old mattress that had to be burned, and Maggie dragged it down with an effort.
She took it out in the street, and there set it on fire.
It burned and blazed high in the narrow street.
The policeman saw the sheen in the windows on the opposite side of the way, and saw the danger of it as he came around the corner.
Maggie did not notice him till he was right behind her.
She gave a great start when he spoke to her.
"I've a good mind to lock you up for this," he said as he stamped out the fire.
"Don't you know it's against the law?"
The negro heard it and saw Maggie stagger toward the door, with her hand pressed upon her heart, as the policeman went away down the street.
On the threshold she stopped, panting.
"My Gawd, that cop frightened me!"
she said, and sat down on the door-step.
A tenant who came out saw that she was ill, and helped her into the hall.
She gasped once or twice, and then lay back, dead.
Word went around to the Elizabeth-street station, and was sent on from there with an order for the dead-wagon.
Maggie's turn had come for the ride up the Sound.
She was as good as checked off for the Potter's Field, but Pell street made an effort and came up almost to Maggie's standard.
Even while the dead-wagon was rattling down the Bowery, one of the tenants ran all the way to Henry street, where he had heard that Maggie's father lived, and brought him to the police station.
The old man wiped his eyes as he gazed upon his child, dead in her sins.
"She had a good home," he said to Captain Young.
"But she didn't know it, and she wouldn't stay.
Send her home, and I will bury her with her mother."
The Potter's Field was cheated out of a victim, and by Pell street.
But the maelstrom grinds on and on.
SARAH JOYCE'S HUSBANDS
Policeman Muller had run against a boisterous crowd surrounding a drunken woman at Prince street and the Bowery.
When he joined the crowd it scattered, but got together again before it had run half a block, and slunk after him and his prisoner to the Mulberry-street station.
There Sergeant Woodruff learned by questioning the woman that she was Mary Donovan and had come down from Westchester to have a holiday.
She had had it without a doubt.
The sergeant ordered her to be locked up for safe-keeping, when, unexpectedly, objection was made.
A small lot of the crowd had picked up courage to come into the station to see what became of the prisoner.
From out of this, one spoke up: "Don't lock that woman up; she is my wife."
"Eh," said the sergeant, "and who are you?"
The man said he was George Reilly and a salesman.
The prisoner had given her name as Mary Donovan and said she was single.
The sergeant drew Mr. Reilly's attention to the street door, which was there for his accommodation, but he did not take the hint.
He became so abusive that he, too, was locked up, still protesting that the woman was his wife.
She had gone on her way to Elizabeth street, where there is a matron, to be locked up there; and the objections of Mr. Reilly having been silenced at last, peace was descending once more upon the station-house, when the door was opened, and a man with a swagger entered.
"Got that woman locked up here?"
he demanded.
"What woman?"
asked the sergeant, looking up.
"Her what Muller took in."
"Well," said the sergeant, looking over the desk, "what of her?"
"I want her out; she is my wife.
She--" The sergeant rang his bell.
"Here, lock this man up with that woman's other husband," he said, pointing to the stranger.
The fellow ran out just in time, as the doorman made a grab for him.
The sergeant drew a tired breath and picked up the ruler to make a red line in his blotter.
There was a brisk step, a rap, and a young fellow stood in the open door.
"Say, serg," he began.
The sergeant reached with his left hand for the inkstand, while his right clutched the ruler.
He never took his eyes off the stranger.
"Say," wheedled he, glancing around and seeing no trap, "serg, I say: that woman w'at's locked up, she's--" "She's what?"
asked the sergeant, getting the range as well as he could.
"My wife," said the fellow.
There was a bang, the slamming of a door, and the room was empty.
The doorman came running in, looked out, and up and down the street.
But nothing was to be seen.
There is no record of what became of the third husband of Mary Donovan.
The first slept serenely in the jail.
The woman herself, when she saw the iron bars in the Elizabeth-street station, fell into hysterics and was taken to the Hudson Street Hospital.
Reilly was arraigned in the Tombs Police Court in the morning.
He paid his fine and left, protesting that he was her only husband.
He had not been gone ten minutes when Claimant No. 4 entered.
"Was Sarah Joyce brought here?"
he asked Clerk Betts.
The clerk couldn't find the name.
"Look for Mary Donovan," said No. 4. "Who are you?"
asked the clerk.
"I am Sarah's husband," was the answer.
Clerk Betts smiled, and told the man the story of the other three.
"Well, I am blamed," he said.
THE CAT TOOK THE KOSHER MEAT
The tenement No. 76 Madison street had been for some time scandalized by the hoidenish ways of Rose Baruch, the little cloakmaker on the top floor.
Rose was seventeen, and boarded with her mother in the Pincus family.
But for her harum-scarum ways she might, in the opinion of the tenement, be a nice girl and some day a good wife; but these were unbearable.
For the tenement is a great working hive in which nothing has value unless exchangeable for gold.
Rose's animal spirits, which long hours and low wages had no power to curb, were exchangeable only for wrath in the tenement.
Her noisy feet on the stairs when she came home woke up all the tenants, and made them swear at the loss of the precious moments of sleep which were their reserve capital.
Rose was so Americanized, they said impatiently among themselves, that nothing could be done with her.
Perhaps they were mistaken.
Perhaps Rose's stout refusal to be subdued even by the tenement was their hope, as it was her capital.
Perhaps her spiteful tread upon the stairs heralded the coming protest of the freeborn American against slavery, industrial or otherwise, in which their day of deliverance was dawning.
It may be so.
They didn't see it.
How should they?
They were not Americanized; not yet.
However that might be, Rose came to the end that was to be expected.
The judgment of the tenement was, for the time, borne out by experience.
This was the way of it: Rose's mother had bought several pounds of kosher meat and put it into the ice-box--that is to say, on the window-sill of their fifth-floor flat.
Other ice-box these East-Side sweaters' tenements have none.
And it does well enough in cold weather, unless the cat gets around, or, as it happened in this case, it slides off and falls down.
Rose's breakfast and dinner disappeared down the air-shaft, seventy feet or more, at 10:30 P. M.
There was a family consultation as to what should be done.
It was late, and everybody was in bed, but Rose declared herself equal to the rousing of the tenants in the first floor rear, through whose window she could climb into the shaft for the meat.
She had done it before for a nickel.
Enough said.
An expedition set out at once from the top floor to recover the meat.
Mrs. Baruch, Rose, and Jake, the boarder, went in a body.
Arrived before the Knauff family's flat on the ground floor, they opened proceedings by a vigorous attack on the door.
The Knauffs woke up in a fright, believing that the house was full of burglars.
They were stirring to barricade the door, when they recognized Rose's voice and were calmed.
Let in, the expedition explained matters, and was grudgingly allowed to take a look out of the window in the air-shaft.
Yes!
there was the meat, as yet safe from rats.
The thing was to get it.
The boarder tried first, but crawled back frightened.
He couldn't reach it.
Rose jerked him impatiently away.
"Leg go!"
she said.
"I can do it.
I was there wunst.
You're no good."
And she bent over the window-sill, reaching down until her toes barely touched the floor, when all of a sudden, before they could grab her skirts, over she went, heels over head, down the shaft, and disappeared.
The shrieks of the Knauffs, of Mrs. Baruch, and of Jake, the boarder, were echoed from below.
Rose's voice rose in pain and in bitter lamentation from the bottom of the shaft.
She had fallen fully fifteen feet, and in the fall had hurt her back badly, if, indeed, she had not injured herself beyond repair.
Her cries suggested nothing less.
They filled the tenement, rising to every floor and appealing at every bedroom window.
In a minute the whole building was astir from cellar to roof.
A dozen heads were thrust out of every window, and answering wails carried messages of helpless sympathy to the once so unpopular Rose.
Upon this concert of sorrow the police broke in with anxious inquiry as to what was the matter.
When they found out, a second relief expedition was organized.
It reached Rose through the basement coal-bin, and she was carried out and sent to the Gouverneur Hospital.
There she lies, unable to move, and the tenement wonders what is amiss that it has lost its old spirits.
It has not even anything left to swear at.
The cat took the kosher meat.
