The Long Day

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8. Wherein I Walk Through Dark And Devious Ways With Henrietta Manners



It had been an ideal day for March--a day touched with pale-yellow sunshine in which one felt the thrill and the promise of the springtime, despite the chill east wind.

Into the murky, evil-smelling squalor of Thompson Street this shy primrose sunshine had poured in the earlier part of the afternoon; but, being a north-and-south thoroughfare, it had all filtered out by half-past four, only to empty itself with increased warmth and glory into the east-and-west cross-streets, leaving Thompson dim and cold by comparison when Henrietta Manners and I emerged from Springer's.

Henrietta wore a dusty picture-hat of black velvet with a straight ostrich feather and streamers of soiled white tulle, and a shabby golf-cape of blue and white check which was not quite long enough to conceal the big brass safety-pins with which her trained skirt was tucked up, and which she had forgotten to remove until we had gone some yards down the street. While we stopped long enough for her to perform this most important sartorial detail, my eye traversed the street before us, which with a gentle descent drops downward and stretches away toward the south--a long, dim, narrow vista, broken at regular intervals by brilliant shafts of gold streaming from the sunlit cross-streets, and giving to the otherwise squalid brick-walled cañon the appearance of a gay checkered ribbon. But if the March sunshine had deserted Thompson Street, the March winds still claimed it as their own. Up and down they had swept all day, until the morning mud on the cobblestones had been long dried up and turned to dust, which now swirled along, caught up in innumerable little whirlwinds that went eddying down the street.

Grabbing up her demi-train in her bare hand, Henrietta and I also eddied down the street and were lost to view for a few moments in the whirlwind which struck us at the crowded corner of Bleecker Street.

This whirlwind was the result partly of physical and partly of human forces. For it was Saturday night, and life was running at flood-tide all over the great city. Always tempestuous, always disturbed with the passion and pain and strife of its struggle to maintain the ground it had gained, never for one brief moment calm, even at its lowest ebb--now, on this last night of the long, weary week, all the currents and counter-currents of the worker's world were suddenly released. At the stroke of bell, at the clang of deep-mouthed gong, at the scream of siren whistle, the sluice-gates were lifted from the great human reservoirs of factory and shop and office, and their myriad toilers burst forth with the cumulative violence of six days' restraint.

It was a shabby carnival of nations that jostled one another at this windy corner--Italian, Spanish, German, Slav, Jew, Greek, with a preponderance of Irish and "free-born" Americans. The general air was one of unwonted happiness and freedom. The atmosphere of holiday liberty was vibrant with the expectation of Saturday-night abandon to fun and frolic or wild carousal.

For "the ghost had walked" through the workaday world that day, and everybody had his "envelop" in his pocket. It is a pleasant sensation to feel the stiff-cornered envelop tucked safely away in your vest pocket, or in the depths of your stocking, where Henrietta had hidden hers safe out of the reach of the wily pickpocket, who, she told me, was lurking at every corner and sneaking through every crowd on that Saturday evening, which was also Easter Eve.

Easter Eve! I had almost forgotten the fact which accounted for this more than usual activity on the part of the hurrying crowds, and for the unmistakable holiday air which Bleecker Street displayed. As far as we could see, lined up on both sides of the curb were the pushcart peddlers, and at every step a sidewalk fakir, all crying their Easter wares.

Henrietta lingered first about one pushcart, then about another, opening her gaudy side-bag, then shutting it resolutely and marching on, determined not to succumb to the temptation to squander her hard-earned pennies. She succeeded admirably until we came upon a picturesque Italian and his wife who were doing a flourishing business from a pushcart piled high with sacred images. Henrietta showed a lively interest in the cut prices at which they were going: ten cents for St. Peter in a scarlet robe and golden sandals; fifteen cents for St. John in purple; and only twenty-five for the Blessed Virgin in flowing blue clasping the Holy Babe.

They were "dirt-cheap," Henrietta declared, as we watched the plaster casts pass over the heads of the crowd, out of which by and by emerged our shopmate, little Angela, clasping a Madonna under her arm and counting her change.

The three of us resumed our homeward walk together, without any comment until Angela had satisfied herself about the correctness of her change.

"What a slop you are!" remarked Henrietta, as her critical eye swept over the undeveloped little figure in the long, greasy black-taffeta coat, which, flapping open in front, disclosed the pasty surface of a drabbled blue skirt. "Why don't you never turn your skirt, Angela?"

"Oh, what's the dif?" replied Angela. "There ain't no fellows going to look at me any more now."

This reply, commonplace enough, might have passed unnoticed had there not been a note of tragedy in her deep contralto voice.

"Why, what's the matter?" I asked.

"Don't you know?" she demanded, scowling at Henrietta's silly, vacant "tee-hee."

"Know? Know what?" I asked.

"That I'm a grass-widow."

"A grass-widow!" I echoed in astonishment, and looked upon the childish creature in sheer unbelief--for child I had always considered her. "Why, how old are you, anyway, Angela?"

"Fifteen--I mean I'm 'most fifteen."

"And you're really married!" I exclaimed again, quite aghast and altogether innocent of the construction which Angela immediately put upon the qualifying adverb.

"Well, if you don't believe me look at that!" she cried, and stuck out a tiny, dirty hand, with finger-nails worn to the quick, and decorated with a gold band broad enough and heavy enough to have held a woman ten times Angela's weight and size in the bands of indissoluble matrimony; "I was married for fair, and I was married lawful. A priest did it."

"Oh, I didn't mean to question that," I hastened to apologize with some confusion. "Only you seemed so very young, I thought you were just joking me."

"Well, it's no joke to be married and have a baby, specially when you've got to s'port it," returned the girl, her lips still pouting.

"And you've a baby, too--you!"

The bedraggled little prima donna nodded; the pout on the lips blossomed into a smile, and a look of infinite tenderness transformed the tired, dark little face. "It's up to the crèche--that's where I'm going now. The ladies keeps it awful good for me."

"And it's such a lovely baby, too!" declared Henrietta, softly. "I seen it once." "She's cute; there's no lie 'bout that," assented the little mother. "Look what I bought her--here, you hold this Peter a minute--Henrietta, just hang on to the Holy Virgin," and thrusting them into our hands, she opened the box under her arm and drew forth a gaily painted hen that clucked and laid a painted egg, to the uproarious delight of Henrietta.

Henrietta meanwhile had begun counting the change in her side-bag.

"I don't never like to break a bill unless I've got to," she remarked, returning the Holy Virgin to Angela's arms; "but I'm going to have one of them chickens too," and away she went after the fakir. A moment later she emerged from the crowd with a little brown box under her arm, and we three continued our walk westward along Bleecker, dropping little Angela at the corner of the street which was to lead her to the day-nursery where she would pick up her baby and carry it home.

"That was a 'fatal wedding' for fair, wasn't it?" I remarked, as my eyes followed the little figure.

But my companion paid no attention to my attempt to be facetious, if indeed she heard the remark at all. She seemed to be deep in a brown study, and several times I caught her watching me narrowly from the corner of her eye. I was already beginning to have some misgivings as to the temperamental fitness of my strange "learner" and new-found friend as a steady, day-in-and-day-out person with whom to live and eat and sleep. And this feeling increased with every block we covered, for by and by I found myself studying Henrietta in the same furtive manner as she was evidently studying me.

At last, when we had exchanged the holiday gaiety and the sunshine of Bleecker Street for a dark, noisome side-street, she broke out explosively:

"Hope to God you ain't going to turn out the way my last room-mate did!"

"Why? What did she do?"

"Went crazy," came the laconic reply, and she shivered and drew the old golf-cape more closely about her shoulders; for the damp of the dark, silent tenements on either side seemed to strike to the marrow. Something in her manner seemed to say, "Ask no more questions," but nevertheless I pursued the subject.

"Went crazy! How?"

"I d'know; she just went sudden crazy. She come to Springer's one day just like you, and she said how she was wanting to find a place to board cheap; and she was kind of down in the mouth, and she come home with me; and all of a sudden in the night I woke up with her screamin' and going on something fearful, and I run down and got the Dago lady in the basement to come up, and her man run for the police. They took her away to the lock-up in the hurry-up wagon, and the next day they said she was crazy,--clean crazy,--and she's in the crazy-house over on the Island now."

"What island?" I asked, not with any desire to know this minor detail, but because I was too disturbed for the moment to make any other comment. It seemed to Henrietta, however, a most senseless question, for she remarked rather testily:

"Why, just the Island, where they send all the crazy folks, and the drunks, and the thieves and murderers, and them that has smallpox."

"Mercy! what an awful place it must be!" I cried. "And that's where the poor girl went?"

"That's where she went--say, tell me honest now, didn't you run away?"

"Run away! Where from?"

"Run away from home--now didn't you?"

"Mercy, no! What put such an idea as that in your head?" I asked, laughing.

"Fanny Harley did."

"Who's Fanny Harley?"

"She's the girl they took to the crazy-house."

"But," I argued, "is that any reason for you to suppose that I ran away from home too?"

"Yep, it is. You're ever so much like Fanny Harley. You talk just alike, and you've got just the same notions she had, from what I can make; and she did run away from home. She told me so. She lived up-state somewhere, and was off a farm just like you; and--"

"But I'm not a farmer, and never was," I put in.

"Why, you told me yourself you was born in the country, didn't you?" and I saw there was no use trying to point out to Henrietta the difference between farmers and those born in the country, both of which were terms of contempt in her vocabulary. We were still threading the maze of strange, squalid streets which was to lead us eventually to the former brief abiding-place of Fanny Harley; and, filled with curiosity regarding my own resemblance to my unfortunate predecessor, I revived the subject by asking carelessly:

"How is it I talk and act that makes me like Fanny Harley?"

"Well, you 've got a kind of high-toned way of talking," she explained. "I don't mind the way you talk, though,--using big words and all that. That ain't none of our business, I tell the girls; but you do walk so funny and stand so funny, that it is all I can do to keep from bu'stin' out laughing to see you. And the other girls says it's the same with them, but I told them it was because you was just from the country, and that farmers all walk the same way. But really, Rose,--you're getting used to that name, ain't you?--you ought to get yourself over it as quick as you can; you ain't going to have no lady-friends in the factory if you're going to be queer like that."

"But I walk as I always did. How else should I walk? How do I walk that makes me so funny?" I asked, mortified at the thought of my having been the butt of secret ridicule. Henrietta was cordial in her reply.

"You walk too light," she explained; "you don't seem to touch the ground at all when you go along, and you stand so straight it makes my back ache to watch you."

Then my mentor proceeded to correct my use and choice of diction.

"And what makes you say 'lid' when you mean a cover? Why, it just about kills us girls to hear you say 'lid.'"

"But," I remonstrated, aggravated by her silly "tee-hee" into defense of my English, "why shouldn't I say 'lid' if I want to? It means just the same as cover."

"Well, if it mean the same, why don't you say 'cover'?" my "learner" retorted, with ill-disguised anger that I should question her authority; and I dropped the subject, and the remainder of the walk was continued in silence.

It was growing more and more apparent that I had not made a wise selection in my room-mate, but it seemed too late to back out now--at least until I had given her a trial of several days.

I felt as though I had obtained, as if by magic, a wonderfully illuminating insight into her nature and character during this short walk from the factory. I had thought her at the work-table a kind-hearted, honest toiler, a bit too visionary, perhaps, to accord with perfect veracity, and woefully ignorant, but with an ignorance for which I could feel nothing but sorrow and sympathy, as the inevitable result of the hard conditions of her life and environment. But now I recognized with considerable foreboding, not only all this, but much more besides. Henrietta Manners, that humble, under-fed, miserable box-maker, was the very incarnation of bigotry and intolerance, one by whom any idea, or any act, word, or occurrence out of the ordinary rut set by box-factory canons of taste and judgment, must be condemned with despotic severity. And yet, in the face of all these unpleasant reflections upon poor Henrietta's unbeautiful mental characteristics, I felt a certain shamefaced gratitude toward the kind heart which I knew still beat under that shabby golf-cape.

Meanwhile, Henrietta had again lapsed into a silent, sullen mood, as she pitched along in the nervous, jerky, heavy-footed gait which she had urged me to emulate, and which I thought so hideous. I did not know then, but I do know now, that such gait is invariably a characteristic of the constitution in which there is not the proper coördination of muscular effort. In the light of knowledge gained in later years, I can now see in that long, slouching, shuffling figure, in that tallow-colored face with the bloodless, loose lips and the wandering, mystic eyes of periwinkle blue--I can see in that girl-face framed by a trashy picture-hat, and in that girl-form wrapped in the old golf-cape, one of the earth's unfortunates; a congenital failure; a female creature doomed from her mother's womb--physically, mentally, and morally doomed.

I was, however, on this memorable Easter Eve most happily innocent of my Lombroso and my Mantagazza, else I had not been walking home with Henrietta Manners, in all the confidence of an unsophisticated country-girl. So much confidence did I have in my shop-mate that I did not yet know the name of the street on the West Side where my future home was, nor did I know any of the strange, dark, devious paths by which she led me through a locality that, though for the most part eminently respectable, is dotted here and there, near the river-front, with some of the worst plague-spots of moral and physical foulness to be found in New York.

In later and more prosperous years I have several times walked into Thompson Street, and from that as a starting-point tried to retrace our walk of that night, bordering along old Greenwich Village, but as well have tried to unravel the mazes of the Cretan Labyrinth.

The last westward street we traversed, dipping under the trellis of an elevated railroad, led straight into a lake of sunset fire out of which the smoking funnels of a giant steamship lying at her dock rose dark and majestic upon the horizon.

A little cry of admiration escaped me at sight of the splendid picture, and I hoped secretly that our way might continue to the water's edge; but instead, reaching the line of the elevated, we turned in and followed the old, black street above which the noisy trains ran. The street itself presented the appearance of a long line of darkened warehouses, broken occasionally by a dismal-looking dwelling, through the uncurtained windows of which we could see slattern housewives busy getting supper.

It was the most miserable and squalid of all the miserable and squalid streets I had thus far seen, and it had the additional disadvantage of being practically deserted of everything save the noise and smoke overhead. There were no foot-passengers, no human sounds. It was all so hideous and fearsome that after five minutes' walk I was not surprised to see Henrietta select the most wretched of all the wretched houses as the one we should enter. As we climbed the high stoop, I could see, through the interstices of rusted ironwork that had once been handsome balusters, the form of an Italian woman sitting in the basement window beneath, nursing a baby at her breast.

"That's the lady what come up to help hold Fanny Harley," my room-mate remarked as we passed inside.