Vignettes of Manhattan; Outlines in Local Color Part 5

"But I never wrote a story in my life," said the young man, promptly.

"I don't want you to write the stories," De Ruyter retorted. "Of course I can do that for myself. But I thought that you could help me to a little local color."

"Local color?" echoed Suydam, doubtfully.

"Yes," the novelist went on, "local color--that's what I want--fresh impressions."

"I don't quite see--" the young man began, hesitatingly.

"Oh, I can explain what I want," Rupert de Ruyter interrupted. "You see, I'm a New-Yorker born, as you are, and I've lived here all my life, and I know the city pretty well--that is, I know certain aspects of it thoroughly. I can do the Patriarchs, or a Claremont tea, or any other function of the smart set; I know the way men talk in clubs; I've studied the painters and the literary men and the journalists; I can describe a first night at the theatre or a panic in the Street; but I've pretty nearly exhausted the people I know, and I thought I would come down here and get introduced to a set I didn't know."

"I shall be glad to take you to the Settlement," Suydam responded, "and--"

"It isn't the Settlement I want, thank you," De Ruyter interrupted. "The people in the Settlement are variants of types I know already. The people I want to meet are people I don't know anything about--the very poor people, the tenement-house people, the people who work for the sweaters. Do you know any of those?"

"Yes," Suydam answered, "I know many of them. But they are not half so picturesque and so pathetic as the sensational newspapers make them out. Wouldn't you rather go and see the Chinese quarter?"

"That isn't what I want," the novelist made answer. "The Chinese quarter is barbarous; it is exotic; it is extraneous; it is a mere accidental excrescence on New York. But the tenement-house people have come to stay; they are an integral and a vital part of the city. I don't care about Chinatown, and I do care about Mulberry Bend. Now, Suydam, you know Mulberry Bend, don't you?"

"Yes," Suydam returned. "I know Mulberry Bend."

"Do you know any tenement-house in the Bend, or near it, which is characteristic--which is typical of the worst that the Bend has to show?" De Ruyter asked.

"Yes," Suydam responded again. "I think I could find a tenement of that kind."

"Then take me there now, if you can spare me an hour or two," said the novelist.

"I can put off my errand till this afternoon," the young man answered.

"I think I can show you what you want. Come with me."

They had been standing where they had met, at the corner of the Bowery and Rivington Street. Now, under John Suydam's guidance, they walked a little way up the Bowery, beneath the single track of the elevated railroad. Then they turned into a side street, and pushed their way westward.

Whenever they came to a crossing De Ruyter remarked that three of the corners always, and four of them sometimes, were saloons. The broad gilt signs over the open doors of these bar-rooms bore names either German or Irish, until they came to a corner where one of the saloons called itself the Caffe Cristoforo Colombo. A wooden stand, down the side street, and taking up a third of the width of the walk, had a sign announcing ice-cold soda-water at two cents a gla.s.s with fruit syrups; with chocolate and cream, the price was three cents. Right on the corner of the curb stood a large wash-tub half filled with water, in which soaked doubtful young cabbages and sprouts; its guardian was a thin slip of a girl with a red handkerchief knotted over her head.

At this corner Suydam turned out of the side street, and went down a street no wider perhaps, but extending north and south in a devious and hesitating way not common in the streets of New York. The sidewalks of this sinuous street were inconveniently narrow for its crowded population, and they were made still narrower by tolerated encroachments of one kind or another. Here, for instance, from the side of a small shop projected a stand on which unsh.e.l.led pease wilted under the strong rays of the young June sun. There, for example, were steps down to the low bas.e.m.e.nt, and in a corner of the hollow at the foot of these stairs there might be a pail with dingy ice packed about a can of alleged ice-cream, or else a board bore half a dozen tough brown loaves, also proffered for sale to the chance customer. Here and there, again, the dwellers in the tall tenements had brought chairs to the common door, and were seated, comfortably conversing with their neighbors, regardless of the fact that they thus blocked the sidewalk, and compelled the pa.s.ser-by to go out into the street itself.

And the street was as densely packed as the sidewalk. In front of Suydam and De Ruyter as they picked their way along was a swarthy young fellow with his flannel s.h.i.+rt open at the throat and rolled up on his tawny arms; he was pus.h.i.+ng before him a hand-cart heaped with gayly colored calicoes. Other hand-carts there were, from which other men, young and old, were vending other wares--fruit more often than not; fruit of a most untempting frowziness. Now and then a huge wagon came lumbering through the street, heaped high with lofty cases of furniture from a rumbling and clattering factory near the corner. And before the heavy horses of this wagon the children scattered, waiting till the last moment of possible escape. There were countless children, and they were forever swarming out of the houses and up from the cellars and over the sidewalks and up and down the street. They were of all ages, from the babe in the arms of its dumpy, thick-set mother to the sweet-faced and dark-eyed girl of ten or twelve really, though she might seem a precocious fourteen. They ran wild in the street; they played about the knees of their mothers, who sat gossiping in the doorways; they hung over the railing of the fire-escapes, which gridironed the front of every tall house.

Everywhere had the Italians treated the balcony of the fire-escape as an out-door room added to their scant accommodation. They adorned it with flowers growing in broken wooden boxes; they used its railings to dry their parti-colored flannel s.h.i.+rts; they sat out on it as though it were the loggia of a villa in their native land.

Everywhere, also, were noises and smells. The roar of the metropolis was here sharpened by the rattle of near machinery heard through open windows, and by the incessant clatter and shrill cries of the mult.i.tude in the street. The rancid odor of ill-kept kitchens mingled with the mitigated effluvium of decaying fruits and vegetables.

But over and beyond the noises and the smells and the bustling business of the throng, Rupert de Ruyter felt as though he were receiving an impression of life itself. It was as if he had caught a glimpse of the mighty movement of existence, incessant and inevitable. What he saw did not strike him as pitiful; it did not weigh him down with despondency.

The spectacle before him was not beautiful; it was not even picturesque; but never for a moment, even, did it strike him as pathetic. Interesting it was, of a certainty--unfailingly interesting.

"I haven't found anything so Italian as this for years," he said to his guide, as they picked their way through a tangle of babies sprawling out of a doorway. "I remember seeing nothing more Italian in my first walk in Italy--up the hill-side at Menaggio, after we landed from the boat to Como. Some of the faces here are of a purer Greek type than any you meet in northern Italy. Did you see that young mother we pa.s.sed just now?"

"The one nursing the infant?" Suydam returned.

"Yes," De Ruyter went on. "She had the oval face and the olive complexion the Greeks left behind them in Sicily. She was not pretty, if you like, but she had the calm beauty of a race of sculptors. Her profile might have come off a Syracusan coin. And to see such a face here, in the city that was New Amsterdam and is New York!"

"We haven't time down here to think of Syracuse and New Amsterdam," said Suydam; "we are too busy thinking about New York. And if we ever do think of Sicily it is only to remember that the Sicilians we have here are the hottest tempered of all the Italians, the most revengeful and vindictive."

"If I didn't know," the novelist remarked, "that the Italians had developed their mercantile faculty at the expense of all their artistic impulses, I should wonder how it was that scions of the race of Michael Angelo and Leonardo da Vinci and Raffael of Urbino could now be willing to live in a house as hideous as that!" and with a sweep of his hand he indicated a lofty double tenement, made uglier by much misplaced ornament. "It isn't even picturesque by decay. In fact, this whole region is in better repair than I had expected."

"Look at the house behind you," answered his companion.

The house behind them was one of the oldest tenements in the street. The balconies of its fire-escape were as cluttered as those of the neighboring dwellings; and every window gave signs that the room behind was inhabited. Yet the building, as a whole, seemed neglected.

"This house does seem out at elbows and dishevelled," De Ruyter admitted. "It looks like a tramp, doesn't it?"

"It does not look very clean," said Suydam. "And the back building is dirtier yet. That's where we are going, if you like."

"Well," De Ruyter answered, "if there is local color to be found anywhere round here, I guess we shall find a fair share of it in this place."

"This way, then," Suydam said, plunging into a covered alleyway, which extended under the house, and led into a small yard paved with uneven flag-stones, and shut in on all four sides by the surrounding buildings.

Even on that sunny pure morning there was a dank chill in the air, and there were patches of moisture here and there on the pavement.

"The new building laws don't allow back buildings of this sort," Suydam explained. "But there are thousands of them in the city, put up before the new laws went into effect. Perhaps we had better try the bas.e.m.e.nt first."

In one corner of the yard half a dozen steps led down into the bas.e.m.e.nt of the back building. Followed by the novelist, the young man from the University Settlement went down these steps and into the cellarlike room, which occupied about half the s.p.a.ce under the back building.

The air in this room was so foul that De Ruyter held his breath for a moment. The room was not more than twelve feet square; its walls were unplastered, showing the coa.r.s.e foundation-stones; its floor was of earth, trodden to hardness, except where the drippings from the beer-cans had moistened it; the beams of the floor above seemed rotten.

In the damp heat of this room ten or a dozen men and boys were seated on old chairs and on broken boxes, smoking, playing cards by the light of a single foul and flaring kerosene-lamp, and drinking the dregs of beer-kegs collected in old cans.

The inhabitants of the cellar looked up as Suydam and De Ruyter entered, and then they resumed their previous occupations, with no further attention to the intruders.

The man nearest to the door was a powerfully built fellow of fifty, with gray hair cropped close to his head. He was playing cards. He had a knife thrust in his leathern belt.

"Good-morning, Giacomo," said Suydam to this grizzled brute. "I haven't heard of you for a long while now. When did you get off the Island?"

"Las' week," was the gruff answer.

"And where is your wife now?" the young man asked.

"She work," answered Giacomo.

Suydam did not pursue the conversation further. Judging that the novelist had seen enough, he turned and went up the rickety steps again, followed by his friend.

"Ouf!" said De Ruyter, drawing a long breath, as they stood again in the cramped yard. "I don't see how they can breathe that air and live."

"They don't live," answered Suydam--"at least, the weaker are soon pushed to the wall and die, leaving only the tougher specimens you saw.

Now we will go up-stairs, if you like."

"I'm ready," De Ruyter responded. "This is exactly what I came to see."

In the centre of the back building there was an entry. The door was off its hinges. Just inside the pa.s.sage were the stairs, with the railing broken, and many of the steps dangerously decayed. There was little light as they went up, and a rank odor of decaying fish accompanied them.