Chapter VI: Part 6

The beauty of life is involved very largely with the outline of its scenery. There are many other things which make up the joy of our world for us, but this is one of the most salient of its charms. The stretch of a level valley, the graceful rise of a hill, water running, a clump or a forest of trees--these add to the majesty of our being and show us how great a thing our world really is.

The significance of scenes in general which hold and bind our lives for us, making them sweet or grim according to the sharpness of our perceptions, is a wonderful thing. We are passing among them every moment. A new arrangement is had with every move we make. If we but lift our eyes we see a variation which is forever interesting and forever new.

The fact significant is that every scene possesses that vital instability which is the charm of existence. It is forever changing. The waters are running, the winds blowing, the light waxing and waning, and in the very ground such currents are at work as produce and modify all the visible life and color that we know. Great forces are at work, strong ones, and our own little lives are but a shadow of something that wills activity and enjoys it, that wills beauty and is beauty. The scenes that we see are purely representative of that.

But how, in the picturing of itself to itself, is the spirit of the universe revealed to us? Here are forces which at bottom might be supposed to be anything--grim, deadly, terrible--but on the surface how fair is their face. The trees are beautiful--you would not suppose there was anything deadly at work to create them. The water is mellifluent, sweet--you could hardly assume that it was grim in purpose or design. Every aspect of the scene reveals something pleasing which could scarcely have been the result of a cruel tendency, and yet we know that cruelty exists, or if not cruelty at least a tendency to contention--one thing striving with another and wearing it away, feeding upon it, destroying it which is productive of pain. And this element of contention represents all the cruelty there is. And this is not what is generally revealed in any scene.

Before such a picture of combined beauty and contentiousness--however graceful--life living upon life, in order to produce at least a part of this beauty--the mind pauses, wondering. It is so useless to quarrel with an order which is compulsory and produces all that we know of either joy or pain. This scene, as we look at it, is one of the joys, one of the compensations, of our existence which we must take whether we will or no, and which satisfies us whether or not we are aware of the contentiousness beneath. Even the contentiousness cannot be wholly sneered at or regretted, for at worst it produces the change which produces the other scenes and variations of which our world is full, and at worst it gives our life the edge of drama and tragedy, to say nothing of those phases of our moods which make our world seem beautiful.

Pity the mind for whom the immediate scene, involved as it is with change and decay and contentiousness, has no direct appeal, for whom the clouds hanging in the heavens, the wind stirring in the trees, the genial face of the earth, spread before the eye, has no meaning. Here are the birds daily circling in the air; here are the waters running in a thousand varied forms; here are the houses, the churches, the factories, and all their curious array of lines, angles, circles, cones, or towers, shafts and pinnacles which form ever new and pleasing combinations to which the mind, confused by other phases of life, can still turn for both solace and delight. For one not so mentally equipped a world of imagery is closed, with all that that implies: poetry, art, literature--one might almost say religion, for upon so much that is beautiful in nature does religion depend. To be dull to the finer beauties of line and curve that are forever beating upon the heart and mind--in earth, in air, in water, in sky or space--how deadly! The dark places of the world are full of that. Its slums and depths reek with the misery that knows no response to the physical beauty of nature, the wonder of its forms. To perceive these, to see the physical face of life as beautiful, to respond in feeling to the magnificent panoramas from which the eye cannot escape, is to be at once strong and wise mentally and physically, to have in the very blood and brain the beauty, glory and power of all that ever was or will be here on this earth.

A WAYPLACE OF THE FALLEN

In the center of what was once a fashionable section of New York, but is now a badly deteriorated tenement region, stands a hotel which to me is one of the curiosities of New York. It is really not a hotel at all, in one sense, and yet in another it is, a hybrid or cross between a hotel and a charity, one of those odd philanthropies of the early years following nineteen hundred, which were supposed to bridge with some form of relief the immense gap that existed between the rich and the poor; a gap that was not supposed to exist in a republic devoted to human brotherhood and the equality of man.

Let that be as it will. Exteriorly at least it is really a handsome affair, nine stories in height, with walls of cream-colored brick and gray stone trimmings, and a large, overhanging roof of dark-red curved tiles which suggests Florence and the South. Set apart in an open space it would be admirable. It is not, however, as its appearance would indicate, a hotel of any distinction of clientele, for it was built for an entirely different purpose. And, despite the aim and the dreams of those who sought to reach those who might be only temporarily embarrassed, rather than whose who were permanently so, and who might use this as a wayplace on their progress upward rather than on their way downward, still it is more the latter who frequent it most. It is really a rendezvous for those who are “down and out.”

About the time that it was built, or a little after, I myself was in a bad way. It was not exactly that I was financially helpless or that I could not have come by relief in one and another form, if my pride would have let me, as that my pride and a certain psyche which, like a fever or a passion, must take its course, would not permit me to do successfully any of the things that normally I could and would have done. I was nervous, really very sick mentally, and very depressed. Life to me wore a somber and at most times a forbidding air, as though, indeed, there were furies between me and the way I would go. Yet, return I would not. And courage not lacking, a certain grim stubbornness that would not permit me to retreat nor yet to ask for help, at last for a brief period I took refuge here, as might one beset by a raging gale at sea take refuge in some seemingly quiet harbor, any port indeed, in order to forfend against utter annihilation.

And a strange, sad harbor I found it to be indeed, a nondescript and fantastic affair, sheltering a nondescript and quite fantastic throng. The thin-bodied and gray-bearded old men loitering out their last days here, and yet with a certain something about them that suggested courage or defiance, or at least a vague and errant will to live. The lean and down-at-heels and erratic-looking young men, with queer, restless, nervous eyes, and queer, restless, deceptive and nervous manners. And the chronic ne’er-do-wells, and bums even, pan-handlers, street fiddle and horn players, street singers, street cripples and beggars of one kind and another. Some of them I had even encountered in the streets in my more prosperous hours and had given them dimes, and here I encountered them again. They were all so poor, if not physically or materially at least spiritually, or so nearly all, as to make contact with them disconcerting, if not offensive. For they walked, the most of them, with an air of rundown, hopeless inadequacy that was really disturbing to look upon. All of them were garbed in clothing which was not good and yet which at all times could not be said to be absolutely ragged. Rather, in many cases it was more of an intermediate character, such as you might expect to find on a person who was out of a job but who was still struggling to keep up appearances.

You would find, for instance, those whose suits were in a fair state of preservation but whose shoes were worn or torn. Again, there were those whose hats and shoes were good but whose trousers were worn and frayed. Still others would show a good pair of trousers or a moderately satisfactory coat, but such a gleam of wretched linen or so poor and faded a tie, that one was compelled to notice it. And the mere sight of it, as they themselves seemed to realize by their furtive efforts at concealment, was sufficient to convict them of want or worse. Between these grades and conditions there were so many other little gradations, such as the inadvertently revealed edge of a cotton shirt under a somewhat superior suit, the exposed end of a rag being used for a handkerchief, the shifting edge of a false shirt front, etc., so that by degrees one was moved to either sympathy or laughter, or both.

And the nature of the life here. It was such as to preclude any reasonable classification from the point of view, say, of happiness or comfort. For all its exterior pretentiousness and inner spaciousness, it offered nothing really except two immense lounging-rooms or courts about which the various tiers or floors of rooms were built and which rose, uninterrupted, to the immense glass roofs or coverings nine stories above. There were several other large rooms--a reading-room, a smoking-room--equipped with chairs and tables, but which could only be occupied between 9 a.m. and 10 p.m., and which were watched over by as surly and disagreeable a type of orderly or guard as one would find anywhere--such orderlies or guards, for instance, as a prison or an institution of charity might employ. In fact, I never encountered an institution in which a charge was made for service which seemed to me more barren of courtesy, consideration or welcome.

We were all, as I soon found, here on sufferance. During a long day that began between 9 a.m., at which hour the room you occupied had to be vacated for the day, and 5 p.m., when it might be reoccupied once more, and not before, there was nothing to do but walk the streets if one was out of work, as most of these were, or sit in one or another of these same rooms filled with these same nondescripts, who looked and emanated the depression they felt and who were too taciturn or too evasive or shy or despondent to wish to talk to anybody. And in addition, neither these nor yourself were really welcome here. For, if you remained within these lobbies during the hours of nine and five daylight, these underlings surveyed you, if at all, with looks of indifference or contempt, as who should say, “Haven’t you anything at all to do?” and most of those with whom you were in contact could not help but feel this. It was too obvious to be mistaken.

But to return to the type of person who came here to lodge. Where did they all come from? one was compelled to ask oneself. How did it happen that they were so varied as to age, vigor or the lack of it and the like? For not all were old or sick or poorly dressed. Some quite the contrary. And yet how did some of them manage to subsist, even with the aid of such a place as this? What was before them? These thoughts, somehow, would intrude themselves whether one would or no. For some of them were so utterly hopeless looking. And others (I told myself) were the natural idlers of the world, or what was left of them, men too feeble, too vagrom in thought, or too indifferent to make an earnest effort in any direction. At least there was the possibility of many such being here. Again, there were those of better mood and substance, like myself, say, who were here because of stress, and who were temporarily driven to this form of economy, wretched as it was. Others were obviously criminals or drug fiends, or those suffering from some incurable or wasting disease, who probably had little money and no strength, or very little, and who were seeking to hide themselves away here, to rest and content themselves as obscurely and as cheaply as possible. (The maximum charges for a room and a free bath in the public bathroom, the same including towels and soap, ranged from twenty-five to forty cents a day. A meal in the hotel dining-room, such as it was, was fifteen cents. I ate several there.) Pick-pockets and thugs from other cities drifted in here, and it was not difficult to pick out an occasional detective studying those who chose to stay here. For the rest, they were of the flotsam and jetsam of all metropolitan life--the old, the young, the middle-aged, the former and the latter having in the main passed the period of success without achieving anything, the others waiting and drifting, perhaps until they should come upon something better. Some of them looked to me to be men who had put up a good fight, but in vain. Life had worsted them. Others looked as though they had not put up any fight at all.

And, again, the nature of the rooms here offered (one of which I was compelled to accept), the air or illusion of cells in an institution or prison that characterized them! They were really not rooms at all, as I found, but cells partitioned or arranged in such a way as to provide the largest amount of renting space and personal supervision and espionage to the founder and manager but only a bare bed to the guest. As I have said, they were all arranged either about an inner court or the exterior walls, so as to have the advantage of interior or exterior lighting, quite as all hotels and prisons are arranged. But the size of them and the amazingly small windows through which one looked, either into one or other of these courts or onto the streets outside! They were not more than five feet in width by eight in length, and contained each a small iron bed, a single chair, and a very small closet or wardrobe where some clothing might be installed, but so little that it could hardly be called a convenience.

And, again, the walls were really not walls at all, but marble partitions set upon iron legs or jacks two feet from the floor and reaching to within three feet of the ceiling, which permitted the observation of one’s neighbor’s legs from below, if you wished to observe those conveniences, or of studying his entire chamber if you chose to climb upon your bed and look over the top. These open spaces were of course protected by iron screens, which prevented any one entering save through the door.

It is obvious that any such arrangement would preclude any sense of privacy. When you were in your cell there came to you from all parts of the building the sounds of a general activity--the shuffling of feet, the clearing of throats, the rattling of dominoes in the reading-room below, voices in complaint or conversation, walkings to and fro, the slamming of doors here, there and everywhere, and what not. Coupled with this was the fact that the atmosphere of the whole building was permeated with tobacco smoke, and tainted or permeated with breaths in all degrees of strength from that of the drunkard to that of the drug fiend or consumptive. It was as though one were living in a weird dream. You were presumed to be alone, and yet you were not, and yet you were, only there was no sense of privacy, only a sense of being separated and then neglected and irritated.

And the way these noises and this atmosphere continued into the small hours of the morning was maddening. There is something, to begin with, about poverty and squalor that is as depressing and destructive as a gas or a chemic ferment. Poverty has color and odor and radiation as strong as any gas or ferment. It speaks. It mourns, and these radiations are destructive. Hence the instinctive impulse to flee not only disease but poverty.

At ten o’clock all lights in the lobbies and halls were supposed to be put out, and they were put out. There being none in the rooms, all was dark. Before this you would hear the shuffling of this throng bedward, and the piling of chairs on tables in the lobbies for the night in order that the orderlies of the hotel might sweep afterwards. There followed a general opening and shutting of doors and the sound made by individuals here and there stirring among their effects in the dark or straightening their beds. Finally, during the small hours of the night, when peace was supposed to reign, you would hear, whether you wished to or not, your neighbor and your neighbor’s neighbor, even to the extent of aisles and floors distant, snoring and coughing or complaining. There were raucous demands from the irritated to “cut it out” or “turn over,” and from others return remarks as “go to hell. Who do you think you are!”--retorts, sometimes brutal, sometimes merely irritable, which, however, kept the night vocal and one awake.

When, however, all these little difficulties had been finally ironed out and the last man had either quit grumbling or decided to dispose of his thoughts in a less audible way, there came an hour in which nature seemed truly able, even here, to “knit up the raveled sleeve of care.” The noisy had now become silent, the nervous peaceful. Throughout the whole establishment an audible, rhythmic, synchronic breathing was now apparent. You felt as though some great chemic or psychic force were at work in the world, as though by some strange hocus-pocus of chemistry or physics, life was still capable of solving its difficulties, even though you were not, and as though these misfits of soul and body were still breathing in unison with something, as though silence and shadow were parts of some shrewd, huge plan to soothe the minds of the weary and to bring final order out of chaos.

In the morning, however, one awoke once more (at least I did) to a still more painful realization of what it means to be very poor. There were no conveniences, as I found, at least none which were private. Your bath was a public one, a shower only, one; of a series of spouting discs in the basement, where you were compelled to foregather with others, taking your clothes with you--for unless you arose early you could not return to your room. The towels, fortunately, were separate, except for some roll-towels that served at washstands. The general toilet was either a long trough or a series of exposed closets, doorless segments extending along one wall. The shaving-room consisted of the mirrors above the washstands, nothing separate. Over all were the guards loitering to see that nothing was misused.

There is no question as to the necessity of such rigid, almost prison-like control, perhaps, but the general effect of it on one--or on me, let me say--was coarse and bitter.

“Blime me” (the attendants were for some curious reason mostly English), “you’d think there was no other time but nine for ’im to come start shaving. I say, you can’t do that. We’re closing ’ere now. Cut it out.”

This to a shabby soul with a three days’ growth of beard who has evidently not reached the stage where he understands the regulations of the institution.

“You’ll ’ave to quit splattering water ’ereabouts, I’m telling you. This ain’t no bawth. If you want to do that, go in the basement.”

This to one who was not as careful about his shaving as he might be.

“You’ll ’ave to be moving out o’ ’ere now.”

This to one who had fixed himself comfortably in the lobby and who might be in the way of some orderly who wanted to sweep or sprinkle a little sawdust. On every hand, at every time, as I noticed, it was the orderly or the hired servant, not the guest, who was the important and superior person. And it seemed to me, after a three days’ study of it, that they were really looking for flaws and slight mistakes on the part of guests in order that they might show their authority and proclaim to the world their strength. It was discouraging.

The saddest part of it was that this place, with all its drawbacks, was still beyond the purse of many. Some, as anyone could see, only came here between the hours of ten in the morning and ten at night, the hours when lounging in these lobbies was permitted, to loaf and keep warm. They could not afford one of these palatial rooms but must only loaf here by day. It was at least warm and bright, and so, up to ten o’clock at night, not unsatisfactory. But having no room to go to at ten at night, they must make their way out. And this necessity, exposing them for what they were, bench-warmers, soon made them known to the guards or orderlies, who could be seen eyeing them, sometimes speaking to them, suggesting that they come no more, that they “cut it out.” They were bums, benchers, really below the level of those who could afford to stop here, and so beneath that level of contempt which was regularly meted out to those who could stop here. I myself have seen them sidling or slipping out at 9:30 or 9:45, and with what an air--like that of a dog that is in danger of a booting. I have also seen a man at closing time count the remaining money in his possession, calculate a moment, and then rise and slip out into the night. Men such as these are not absolutely worthless, but they have reached the lowest rung of the ladder, are going down, not up, and beyond them is the Bowery, the hospital, and the river--the last, I think, the most merciful of all.

HELL’S KITCHEN

N. B. When I first came to New York, and for years afterward, it was a whim of the New York newspapers to dub that region on the West Side which lies between Thirty-sixth and Forty-first Streets and Ninth Avenue and the Hudson River as _Hell’s Kitchen_. There was assumed to be operative there, shooting and killing at will, a gang of young roughs that for savagery and brutality was not to be outrivaled by any of the various savage groups of the city. Disturbances, murders, riots, were assumed to be common; the residents of this area at once sullen and tempestuous. Interested by the stark pictures of a slum life so often painted, I finally went to reside there for a period. What follows is from notes or brief pictures made at the time.

* * * * *

It is nine o’clock of a summer’s evening. Approaching my place at this hour, suddenly I encounter a rabble issuing out of Thirty-ninth Street into Tenth Avenue. It is noisy, tempestuous, swirling. A frowsy-headed man of about thirty-eight, whose face is badly lacerated and bleeding and whose coat is torn and covered with dust, as though he had been rolling upon the ground, leads the procession. He is walking with that reckless abandon which characterizes the movements of the angry. A slatternly woman of doughy complexion follows at his heels. About them sways a crowd of uncombed and stribbly-haired men and women and children. In the middle of the street, directly on a line with the man whom the crowd surrounds, but, to one side and nearer the sidewalk walks another man, undersized, thickset and energetic, who seems to take a great interest in the crowd. Though he keeps straight ahead, like the others, he keeps turning and looking, as though he expected a demonstration of some sort. No word is spoken by either the man or the woman, and as the curious company passes along under the variable glows of the store-lamps, shop-keepers and store-dealers come out and make humorous comments, but seem to think it not worth while to follow. I join the procession, since this now relates to my interests, and finally shake an impish, black-haired, ten-year-old girl by the arm until she looks up at me.

“What’s the matter?”

“Aw, he hit him with a banister.”

“Who hit him?”

“Why, that man out there in the street.”

“What did he hit him for?”

“I dunno,” she replies irritably. “He wouldn’t get out of the room. They got to fightin’ in the hall.”

She moves away from me and I ply others fruitlessly, until, turning into Thirty-seventh Street, the green lights of the police station come into view. The object of this pilgrimage becomes apparent. I fall silent, following.

Reaching the station door, the injured man and his woman attendant enter, while the thickset individual who walked to one side, and the curious crowd remain without.

“Well?” says the sergeant within, glaring intolerantly at the twain as they push before him. The appearance of the injured man naturally takes his attention most.

“Lookit me eye,” begins the wounded man, with that curious tone of injured dignity which the drunk and disorderly so frequently assume. “That--” and he interpolates a string of oaths descriptive of the man who has assaulted him “--hit me with a banister leg.”

“Who hit you? Where is he? What did he hit you for?” This from the sergeant in a breath. The man begins again. The woman beside him interrupts with a description of her own.

“Shut up!” yells the sergeant savagely, showing his teeth. “I’ll ram me fist down your throat if you don’t. Let him tell what’s the matter with him. You keep still.”

The woman, overawed by the threat, stops her tirade. The man resumes.

“He hit me with a banister leg.”

“What for?”

“It was this way, Captain. I went to call on this here lady and that ---- came in and wanted me to get out of the room. I----”

“What relation is this man to you?” inquires the sergeant, addressing the woman.

“Nothin’,” she replies blandly.

“Isn’t the other man your husband?”

“No, he ain’t, the blank-blank-blank-blank ----” and you have a sweet string of oaths. “He’s a ----,” and she begins again to ardently describe the assailant. The man assists her as best he can.

“I thought so,” exclaims the officer vigorously. “Now, you two get the hell out of here, and stay out, before I club you both. Get on out! Beat it!”

“Ain’t you goin’ to lock him up?” demands the victim.

“I lock nothing,” vouchsafes the sergeant intolerantly. “Clear out of here, both of you. If I catch you coming around here any more I’ll give you both six months.”

He calls an officer from the rear room and the two complainants, together with others who have ventured in, myself included, beat a sullen retreat, the crowd welcoming us on the outside. A buzz of conversation follows. War is promised. When the victim is safely down the steps he exclaims:

“All right! I ast him to arrest him. Now let ’em look out. I’ll go back there, I will. Yes, I will. I’ll kill the bastard, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll show him whether he’ll hit me with a banister leg, the ----,” and as he goes now, rather straight and yet rhythmically forward, his assailant, who has been opposite him all the while but in the middle of the street, keeps an equal and amusing pace.

The crowd follows and turns into Thirty-ninth Street, a half-block east of Tenth Avenue. It stops in front of an old, stale, four-story red brick tenement. Some of its windows are glowing softly in the night. On the third floor some one is playing a flute. Quiet and peace seem to reign, and yet this----

“I’ll show him whether he’ll hit me,” insists the injured man, entering the house. The woman follows, and then the short, thickset man from the street. One after another they disappear up the narrow stairs which begin at the back of the hall. Some of the crowd follows, myself included.

Presently, after a great deal of scuffling and hustling on the fourth floor, all return helter-skelter. They are followed by a large, comfortably-built, healthy, white-shirted Irish-American, who lives up there and who has strength and courage. Before him, pathetically small in size and strength, the others move, the mutilated and still protesting victim among them. Apparently he has been ejected from the room in which he had been before.

“I’ll show him,” he is still boasting. “I’ll see whether he’ll hit me with a banister leg, the ----.”

“That’s all right,” says the large Irishman with a brogue, pushing him gently onto the sidewalk as he does so. “Go on now.”

“I’ll get even with him yet,” insists the victim.

“That’s all right. I don’t care what you do to-morrow. Go on now.”

The victim turns and looks up at this new authority fixedly, as though he knew him well, scratches his head and then turns and solemnly walks away. The other man does likewise. You wonder why.

“It’s over now,” says the new authority to the crowd, and he smiles as blandly as if he had been taking part in an entertainment of some kind. The crowd begins to dissolve. The man who drew the banister leg or stick and who was to have been punished has also disappeared.

“But how is this?” I ask of some one. “How can he do that?”

“Him?” replies an Irish longshoreman who seems to wish to satisfy my curiosity. “Don’t you know who that is? It’s Patsy Finnerty. He used to be a champeen prize-fighter. He won all the fights around here ten years ago. Everybody knows him. He’s in charge over at the steamship dock now, but they won’t fight with him. If they did he wouldn’t give ’em no more work. They both work for him once in a while.”

I see it all in a blinding flash and go to my own room. How much more powerful is self-interest as typified by Patsy than the police!

* * * * *

It is raining one night and I hear a voice in the room above mine, singing. It is a good voice, sweet and clear, but a little weak and faint down here.

“Tyro-al, Tyro-al! Tyro-al, Tyro-al!
Ich hab dich veeder, O mine Tyro-al!”

I know who lives up there by now: Mr. and Mrs. Schmick and a little Schmick girl, about ten or eleven. Being courageous in this vicinity because of the simplicity of these people, the awe they have for one who holds himself rather aloof and dresses better than they, and lonely, too, I go up. In response to my knock a little fair-complexioned, heavily constructed German woman with gray hair and blue eyes comes to the door.

“I heard some one singing,” I say, “and I thought I would come up and ask you if I might not come in and listen. I live in the room below.”

“Certainly. Why, of course.” This with an upward lift of the voice. “Come right in.” And although flustered and red because of what to her seems an embarrassing situation, she introduces me to her black-haired, heavy-faced husband, who is sitting at the center table with a zither before him.

“Papa, here is a gentleman who wants to hear the music.”

I smile, and the old German arises, smiles and extends me a welcoming hand. He is sitting in the center of this combination sitting-room, parlor, kitchen and dining-room, his zither, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, on the table before him.

“I don’t know your name,” I say.

“Schmick,” he replies.

I apologize for intruding but they both seem rather pleased. Also the little daughter, who is sitting in one corner.

“Were you singing?” I ask her.

“No. Mamma,” she replies.

I look at the gray-haired little mother and she shows me even, white teeth in smiling at my astonishment.

“I sing but very little,” she insists, blushing red. “My woice is not so strong any more.”

“Won’t you sing what you were singing just before I came in?” I ask.

Without any of that diffidence which characterizes so many of all classes she rises and putting one hand on the shoulder of her heavy, solemn-looking husband, asks him to strike the appropriate chord, and then breaks forth into one of those plaintive folksongs of the Tyrol which describes the longing of the singer for his native land.

“I have such a poor woice now,” she insists when she concludes. “When I was younger it was different.”

“Poor!” I exclaim. “It’s very clear and beautiful. How old are you?”

“I will be fifty next August,” she answers.

This woman is possessed of a sympathetic and altogether lovely disposition. How can she exist in Hell’s Kitchen, amid grime and apparent hardness, and remain so sweet and sympathetic? In my youth and ignorance I wonder.

* * * * *

I am returning one day from a serious inspection of the small stores and shops of the neighborhood. As I near my door I am preceded up the street by three grimy coal-heavers, evidently returning from work in an immense coalyard in Eleventh Avenue.

“Come on in and have a pint,” invites one great hulking fellow, with hands like small coal-shovels. He was, as it chanced, directly in front of my doorway.

One of his two companions needs no second invitation, but the other, a small, feeble-witted-looking individual, seems uncertain as to whether to go on or stay.

“Come on! Come on back and have a pint!” shouts the first coal-heaver. “What the hell--ain’t you no good at all? Come on!”

“Sure I am,” returns the other diffidently. “But I ought to be home by half-past.”

“Aw, home be damned! It won’t take long to drink a pint. Come on.”

“All right,” returns the other, grinning sheepishly.

They go over the way to a saloon, and I pause in my own door. Presently a little girl comes down, carrying a tin pail.

“Whose little girl are you?” I inquire, not recognizing her.

“Mamma ain’t home to-day,” she returns quickly.

“Mamma?” I reply. “Why do you say that? I don’t want your mamma. I live here.”

“Oh, I thought you was the insurance man,” she adds, grinning. “You look just like him.”

“Aren’t you the coal man’s little girl?”

“Yes.”

“Well, he just went into the saloon over there.”

“Huh-uh. Mine’s upstairs, drunk. He must be Mr. Kelly,” and she goes quickly on with her bucket.

* * * * *

I am sitting in my room one night, listening to the sounds that float vaguely about this curious little unit of metropolitan life, when a dénouement in the social complications of this same coal-heaver’s life is reached. I already know him now to be a rough man, for once or twice I heard him damning his children very loudly. But I did not suspect that there were likely to be complications over and above the world of the purely material.

“Die frau hat sich selbst umgebracht!” (“The woman has taken her life!”) I hear some one crying out in the hall, and then there is such a running and shuffling in the general hubbub. A score of tenants from the different floors are talking and gesticulating, and in the rear of the hall the door opening into the coal-heaver’s dining-room is open. My landlady, Mrs. Witty, is on the scene, and even while we gaze a dapper little physician of the region, in a high hat and frockcoat, comes running up the steps and enters the open door in the rear.

“The doctor! The doctor!” The word passes from one to another.

“What is it?” I ask, questioning a little girl whom I had often seen playing tag on the sidewalk below.

“She took poison,” she answers.

“Who?”

“That woman in there.”

“The wife of the coal man?”

“Sure.”

“What did she take it for?”

“I dunno. Here comes another doctor--look!”

Another young doctor is hurrying up the steps.

While we are still gaping at the opening and closing door, Mrs. Schmick, the little German woman who sang for me, comes out. She has evidently been laboring in the sick room and seems very much excited.

“Is she dead?” ask a half-dozen people as she hurries upstairs for something.

“No-oh,” she answers, puckering up her mouth in her peculiar way. “She is very low, though. I must get some things,” and she hurries away.

The crowd waits, and finally some light on the difficulty begins to break.

“She wouldn’t live with him if he didn’t stop going with her,” my own landlady is saying. “I heard her say it.”

“Who? Who?” inquires another.

“Why, that woman in Fortieth Street. You know her.”

“No.”

“Yes, you do. She lives next door to the blacksmith’s shop, upstairs there, the woman with the two little girls.”

“Her? Is that why she did it?”

“Sure.”

“You don’t say!”

They clatter on in this way and gradually it comes out in good order. This coal-heaver knows a widow in the next block. He is either in love with her or she is in love with him, and sometimes she comes here into Thirty-ninth Street to catch a glimpse of him. He has been seen with her a number of times and had been in the habit of driving his coal-wagon through Fortieth Street in order to catch a glimpse of her. His wife has frequently complained, of course, and there have been rows, bitter nocturnal wrangles, in which he has not come off triumphant. He has sworn and raved and struck his wife but he has been made to promise not to drive through Fortieth Street just the same. This day, however, he failed to keep this injunction. She was in Fortieth Street and had seen him, then had come home and in a fit of jealous rage and affectionate distemper had drunk a bottle of camphor. The husband is not home yet.

While we are still patiently awaiting him he arrives, dark, heavy, unprepared for the difficulty awaiting him, and very much astonished at the company gathered about his door.

“My wife!” he exclaims when told.

“Yes, your wife.” This from several members of the company.

He hurries in, very shaken and frightened.

“What is this?” he demands as he passes the door and is confronted by serious-looking physicians. More we could not hear.

But after a time out he comes for something at the drugstore, then in again. He is in and out two or three times, and finally, before the assembled company and in explanation, wrings his hands.

“I never done nothin’ to make her do this. I never done nothin’.” He pauses, awaiting a denial, possibly, from some one, then adds: “The disgrace! I wouldn’t mind if it wasn’t for the disgrace!”

I meet Mrs. Schmick the next day in the hall. She has been indefatigable in her labors.

“Will she die?”

“No, she gets better now.”

“Is he going to behave himself?”

She shrugs her shoulders, lifts up her hands dubiously.

“Mrs. Schmick,” I ask, interestedly, her philosophy of life arresting me, “why do you work so hard? You didn’t even know her, did you?”

“Ach, no. But she is sick now. She is in trouble. I would do as much for anybody.”

And this is Hell’s Kitchen, I recall.

* * * * *

Looking out of my front window I can see a great deal of all that goes on here, in connection with this house, I mean. Through the single narrow door under my window issue and return all those who have in any way anything to do with it. The mailman comes very seldom. There is a weekly life-insurance man who comes regularly, bangs on doors and complains that some people are in but won’t answer. Ditto the gas man. Ditto the milkman. Ditto the collector for a rug and clock house. Many duns of many kinds who come to collect bills of all kinds and never can “get in.” Of a morning only a half-dozen men and some six or eight girls seem to creep wearily and unwillingly forth to work. At night they and others, who have apparently other methods than that of regular toil for occupying their time, return with quite a different air. Truckmen and coalmen and Mr. Schmick arrive about the same time, half-past five. The son of a morose malster’s clerk, who occupies the second floor rear, back of me, arrives at six. Beer-can carrying is the chief employment of the city cart-driver’s wife, who lives on the third floor, the unemployed iron-worker, whose front room I rent, and the ill-tempered woman with the three children on the fourth floor. The six or eight girls who go out evenings after their day’s labor frequently do not begin to drift back until after eleven, several of them not before three or four. I have met them coming in. Queer figures slip in and out at all times, men and women who cannot be placed by me in any regular detail of the doings of this house. Some of them visit one or another of several “apartments” too frequently to make their comings and goings explicable on conventional grounds. It is a peculiar region and house, this, with marked streaks of gayety at times, and some very evident and frequently long-continued periods of depression and dissatisfaction and misery.

I am hanging out of my window one evening as usual when the keenest of all these local tragedies, in so far as this house and a home are concerned, is enacted directly below me. One of the daughters above-mentioned is followed down four flights of stairs and pushed out upon the sidewalk by her irate father and a bundle of wearing apparel thrown after her.

He is very angry and shouts: “You get out now. You can’t come back into my house any more. Get out!”

He waves his arms dramatically. A crowd gathers. Men and women hang out of windows or gather closely about him and the girl, while the latter, quite young yet, perhaps fifteen, cries, and the onlookers eagerly demand to know what the trouble is.

“She’s a street-walker, that’s what she is,” he screams. “She comes to my house after running around all night with loafers. Let her get out now.”

“Aw, what do you want to turn her off for?” demands a sympathetic bystander who is evidently moved by the girl’s tears. Others voice the same sentiment.

“You! You!” exclaims the old locksmith, who is her father, in uncontrollable rage. “You mind your own business. She is a street-walker, that’s what she is. She shall not come into my house any more.”

There is wrangling and more exclamations, and finally into the thick of the crowd comes a policeman, who tries to gather up all the phases of the story.

“You won’t take her back, eh?” he asks of the father, after using all sorts of arguments to prevent a family rupture. “All right, then, come along,” he says to the girl, and leads her around to the police station. “We’ll find some place for you, maybe, to-night anyhow.”

I heard that she did not stay at the station, after all, but what the conclusion of her career was, outside of the fact that the matter was reported to the Gerry Society, I never learned. But the reasons for her predicament struck me as obvious. Here was too much toil, too much gloom, too much solemnity for her, the non-appreciation which the youthful heart so much abhors. Elsewhere, perhaps, was light, warmth, merriment, beauty--or so she thought.

She went, she and so many others, fluttering eastward like a moth, into the heart of the great city which lay mostly to the east. When she returned, and with singed wings, she was no longer welcome.

* * * * *

But why they saw fit to dub it Hell’s Kitchen, however, I could never discover. It seemed to me a very ordinary slum neighborhood, poor and commonplace, and sharply edged by poverty, but just life and very, very human life at that.

A CERTAIN OIL REFINERY

There is a section of land very near New York, lying at the extreme southern point of the peninsula known as Bayonne, which is given up to a peculiar business. The peninsula is a long neck of land lying between those two large bays which extend a goodly distance on either hand, one toward the city of Newark, the other toward the vast and restless ocean beyond Brooklyn. Stormy winds sweep over it at many periods of the year. The seagull and the tern fly high over its darksome roof-tops. Tall stacks and bare, red buildings and scores of rounded tanks spread helter-skelter over its surface, give it a dreary, unkempt and yet not wholly inartistic appearance which appeals, much as a grotesque deformity appeals or a masque intended to represent pain.

This section is the seat of a most prosperous manufacturing establishment, a single limb of a many-branched tree, and its business is the manufacturing, or rather refining, of oil. Of an ordinary business day you would not want a more inspiring picture of that which is known as manufacture. Great ships, inbound and outbound, from all ports of the world, lie anchored at its docks. Long trains of oil cars are backed in on many spurs of tracks, which branch from main-line arteries and stand like caravans of steel, waiting to carry new burdens of oil to the uttermost parts of the land. There are many buildings and outhouses of all shapes and dimensions which are continually belching forth smoke in a solid mass, and if you stand and look in any direction on a gloomy day you may see red fires which burn and gleam in a steady way, giving a touch of somber richness to a scene which is otherwise only a mass of black and gray.

This region is remarkable for the art, as for the toil of it, if nothing more. A painter could here find a thousand contrasts in black and gray and red and blue, which would give him ample labor for his pen or brush. These stacks are so tall, the building from which they spring so low. Spread out over a marshy ground which was once all seaweed and which now shows patches of water stained with iridescent oil, broken here and there with other patches of black earth to match the blacker buildings which abound upon it, you have a combination in shades and tones of one color which no artist could resist. A Whistler could make wonderful blacks and whites of this. A Vierge or a Shinn could show us what it means to catch the exact image of darkness at its best. A casual visitor, if he is of a sensitive turn, shudders or turns away with a sense of depression haunting him. It is a great world of gloom, done in lines of splendid activity, but full of the pathos of faint contrasts in gray and black.

At that, it is not so much the art of it that is impressive as the solemn life situation which it represents. These people who work in it--and there are thousands of them--are of an order which you would call commonplace. They are not very bright intellectually, of course, or they would not work here. They are not very attractive physically, for nature suits body to mind in most instances, and these bodies as a rule reflect the heaviness of the intelligence which guides them. They are poor Swedes and Poles, Hungarians and Lithuanians, people who in many instances do not speak our tongue as yet, and who are used to conditions so rough and bare that those who are used to conditions of even moderate comfort shudder at the thought of them. They live in tumbledown shacks next to “the works” and they arrange their domestic economies heaven only knows how. Wages are not high (a dollar or a dollar and a half a day is good pay in most instances), and many of them have families to support, large families, for children in all the poorer sections are always numerous. There are dark, minute stores, and as dark and meaner saloons, where many of them (the men) drink. Looking at the homes and the saloons hereabout, it would seem to you as though any grade of intelligence ought to do better than this, as if an all-wise, directing intelligence, which we once assumed nature to possess, could not allow such homely, claptrap things to come into being. And yet here they are.

Taken as a mass, however, and in extreme heat or cold, under rain or snow, when the elements are beating about them, they achieve a swart solemnity, rise or fall to a somber dignity or misery for which nature might well be praised. They look so grim, so bare, so hopeless. Artists ought to make pictures of them. Writers ought to write of them. Musicians should get their inspiration for what is antiphonal and contra-puntal from such things. They are of the darker moods of nature, its meanest inspiration.

However, it is not of these houses alone that this picture is to be made, but of the work within the plant, its nature, its grayness, its intricacy, its rancidity, its commonplaceness, its mental insufficiency; for it is a routine, a process, lacking from one year’s end to another any trace of anything creative--the filling of one vat and another, for instance, and letting the same settle; introducing into one vat and another a given measure of chemicals which are known to bring about separation and purifications or, in other words, the process called refining; opening gates in tubes and funnels which drain the partially refined oils into other vats and finally into barrels and tanks, which are placed on cars or ships. You may find the how of it in any encyclopedia. But the interesting thing to me is that men work and toil here in a sickening atmosphere of blackness and shadow, of vile odors, of vile substances, of vile surroundings. You could not enter this yard, nor glance into one of these buildings, nor look at these men tramping by, without feeling that they were working in shadow and amid foul odors and gases, which decidedly are not conducive to either health or the highest order of intelligence.

Refuse tar, oil and acids greet the nostrils and sight everywhere. The great chimneys on either hand are either belching huge columns of black or blue smoke, or vapory blue gases, which come in at the windows. The ground under your feet is discolored by oil, and all the wagons, cars, implements, machinery, buildings, and the men, of course, are splotched and spotted with it. There seems to be no escape. The very air is full of smoke and oil.

It is in this atmosphere that thousands of men are working. You may see them trudging in in the morning, their buckets or baskets over their arms, a consistent pallor overspreading their faces, an irritating cough in some instances indicating their contact with the smoke and fumes; and you may see them trudging out again at night, marked with the same pallor, coughing with the same cough; a day of peculiar duties followed by a night in the somber, gray places which they call home. Another line of men is always coming in as they go out. It is a line of men which straggles over all of two miles and is coming or going during an hour, either of the morning or the night. There is no gayety in it, no enthusiasm. You may see depicted on these faces only the mental attitude which ensues where one is compelled to work at some thing in which there is nothing creative. It is really, when all is said and done, not a pleasant picture.