Neighbors: Life Stories of the Other Half

The peace that was made lasted just ten days, when Mr. Riley broke loose once more, and this time he was brought into court. The whole Bureau went along to tell the story of the compact and the manner of its breaking. Mr. Riley listened attentively to the recital of the black record.

“What have you to say to this?” scowled the Judge. The prisoner nodded.

“It is all true what the lady says, your Honor; she put it fair.”

“I have a good mind to send you to Bridewell to break stone.”

“Don’t do that, Judge, and lose me job. I want to be wid me family.” Mrs. Riley looked imploringly at the bench. His Honor’s glance took in her face with the family group.

“Looks like it,” he mused; but in the end he agreed to hand him over to the Bureau for one more trial, first administering the pledge in open court. Mr. Riley took the oath with great solemnity and entire good faith, kissed the Bible with a smack, reached up a large red fist for the Judge to shake, and the clerk. Then he pledged lasting friendship to the whole Bureau, including Miss Kane, whom he generously forgave the wrong she had done him, presented little Mike to the Court as “de foinest kid in de ward,” took the gurgling baby from Mrs. Riley and gallantly gave her his arm. Leaning fondly upon it, a little lame and sore yet from the fight and with one eye in deep mourning, she turned a proudly hopeful look upon her husband, like a rainbow spanning a black departing cloud. And thus, with fleet-footed Kate in the van proclaiming the peace, and three prattling children clinging to their hands and clothes, they passed out into life to begin it anew. And bench and Bureau, with sudden emotion, hopelessly irrational and altogether hopeful and good, cheered them on their way.

LIFE’S BEST GIFT

Margaret Kelly is dead, and I need not scruple to call her by her own name. For it is certain that she left no kin to mourn her. She did all the mourning herself in her lifetime, and better than that when there was need. She nursed her impetuous Irish father and her gentle English mother in their old age—like the loving daughter she was—and, last of all, her only sister. When she had laid them away, side by side, she turned to face the world alone, undaunted, with all the fighting grit of her people from both sides of the Channel. If troubles came upon her for which she was no match, it can be truly said that she went down fighting. And who of her blood would ask for more?

What I have set down here is almost as much as any one ever heard about her people. She was an old woman when she came in a way of figuring in these pages, and all that lay behind her.

Of her own past this much was known: that she had once been an exceedingly prosperous designer of dresses, with a brown-stone house on Lexington Avenue, and some of the city’s wealthiest women for her customers. Carriages with liveried footmen were not rarely seen at her door, and a small army of seamstresses worked out her plans. Her sister was her bookkeeper and the business head of the house. Fair as it seemed, it proved a house of cards, and with the sister’s death it fell. One loss followed another. Margaret Kelly knew nothing of money or the ways of business. She lost the house, and with it her fine clients. For a while she made her stand in a flat with the most faithful of her sewing-women to help her. But that also had to go when more money went out than came in and nothing was left for the landlord. Younger rivals crowded her out. She was stamped “old-fashioned,” and that was the end of it. Her last friend left her. Worry and perplexity made her ill, and while she was helpless in Bellevue Hospital, being in a ward with no “next friend” on the books, they sent her over to the Island with the paupers. Against this indignity her proud spirit arose and made the body forget its ills. She dragged herself down to the boat that took her back to the city, only to find that her last few belongings were gone, the little hall room she had occupied in a house in Twenty-ninth Street locked against her, and she, at seventy-five, on the street, penniless, and without one who cared for her in all the world.

Yes, there was one. A dressmaker who had known her in happier days saw from her window opposite Father McGlynn’s church a white-haired woman seek shelter within the big storm-doors night after night in the bitter cold of midwinter, and recognized in her the once proud and prosperous Miss Kelly. Shocked and grieved, she went to the district office of the Charities with money to pay for shelter and begged them to take the old lady in charge and save her from want.

And what a splendid old lady she was! Famished with the hunger of weeks and months, but with pride undaunted, straight as an arrow under the burden of heavy years, she met the visitor with all the dignity of a queen. The deep lines of suffering in her face grew deeper as she heard her message. She drew the poor black alpaca about her with a gesture as if she were warding off a blow: “Why,” she asked, “should any one intrude upon her to offer aid? She had not asked for anything, and was not—” she faltered a bit, but went on resolutely—“did not want anything.”

“Not work?” asked her caller, gently. “Would you not like me to find some work for you?”

A sudden light came into the old eyes. “Work—yes, if she could get that—” And then the reserve of the long, lonely years broke down. She buried her face in her hands and wept.

They found her a place to sew in a house where she was made welcome as one of the family. For all that, she went reluctantly. All her stubborn pride went down before the kindness of these strangers. She was afraid that her hand had lost its cunning, that she could not do justice to what was asked of her, and she stipulated that she should receive only a dollar for her day’s work, if she could earn that. When her employer gave her the dollar at the end of the day, the look that came into her face made that woman turn quickly to hide her tears.

The worst of Margaret Kelly’s hardships were over. She had a roof over her head, and an “address.” If she starved, that was her affair. And slowly she opened her heart to her new friends and gave them room there. I have a letter of that day from one of them that tells how they were getting on: “She has a little box of a room where she almost froze all winter. A window right over her bed and no heat. But she is a great old soldier and never whines. Occasionally she comes to see me, and I give her something to eat, but what she does between times God alone knows. When I give her a little change, she goes to the bake-shop, but I think otherwise goes without and pretends she is not hungry. A business man who knows her told her if she needed nourishment to let him know; she said she did not need anything. Her face looks starvation. When she was ill in the winter, I tried to get her into a hospital; but she would not go, and no wonder. If she had only a couple of dollars a week she could get along, as I could get her clothing. She wears black for her sister.”

The couple of dollars were found and the hunger was banished with the homelessness. Margaret Kelly had two days’ work every week, and in the feeling that she could support herself once more new life came to her. She was content.

So two years passed. In the second summer the old woman, now nearing eighty, was sent out in the country for a vacation of five or six weeks. She came back strong and happy; the rest and the peace had sunk into her soul. “Some of the tragedy has gone out of her face,” her friend wrote to me. She was looking forward with courage to taking up her work again when what seemed an unusual opportunity came her way. A woman who knew her story was going abroad, leaving her home up near Riverside Drive in charge of a caretaker. She desired a companion for her, and offered the place to Miss Kelly. It was so much better a prospect than the cold and cheerless hall room that her friends advised her to accept, and Margaret Kelly moved into the luxurious stone house uptown, and once more was warmly and snugly housed for the winter with congenial company.

Man proposes and God disposes. Along in February came a deadly cold spell. The thermometer fell below zero. In the worst of it Miss Kelly’s friend from the “office,” happening that way, rang the bell to inquire how she was getting on. No one answered. She knocked at the basement door, but received no reply. Concluding that the two women were in an upper story out of hearing of the bell, she went away, and on her return later in the day tried again, with no better success. It was too cold for the people in the house to be out, and her suspicions were aroused. She went to the police station and returned with help. The door was forced and the house searched. In the kitchen they found the two old women sitting dead by the stove, one with her head upon the other’s shoulder. The fire had long been out and their bodies were frozen. There was plenty of fuel in the house. Apparently they had shut off the draught to save coal and raised the lid of the stove, perhaps to enjoy the glow of the fire in the gloaming. The escaping gas had put them both to sleep before they knew their peril.

So the police and the coroner concluded. “Two friends,” said the official report. Margaret Kelly had found more than food and shelter. Life at the last had given her its best gift, and her hungry old heart was filled.

DRIVEN FROM HOME

“Doctor, what shall I do? My father wants me to tend bar on Sunday. I am doing it nights, but Sunday—I don’t want to. What shall I do?”

The pastor of Olivet Church looked kindly at the lad who stood before him, cap in hand. The last of the Sunday-school had trailed out; the boy had waited for this opportunity. Dr. Schauffler knew and liked him as one of his bright boys. He knew, too, his home—the sordid, hard-fisted German father and his patient, long-suffering mother.

“What do you think yourself, Karl?”

“I don’t want to, Doctor. I know it is wrong.”

“All right then, don’t.”

“But he will kick me out and never take me back. He told me so, and he’ll do it.”

“Well—”

The boy’s face flushed. At fourteen, to decide between home and duty is not easy. And there was his mother. Knowing him, the Doctor let him fight it out alone. Presently he squared his shoulders as one who has made his choice.

“I can’t help it if he does,” he said; “it isn’t right to ask me.”

“If he does, come straight here. Good-by!”

Sunday night the door-bell of the pastor’s study rang sharply. The Doctor laid down his book and answered it himself. On the threshold stood Karl with a small bundle done up in a bandana handkerchief.

“Well, I am fired,” he said.

“Come in, then. I’ll see you through.”

The boy brought in his bundle. It contained a shirt, three collars, and a pair of socks, hastily gathered up in his retreat. The Doctor hefted it.

“Going light,” he smiled. “Men fight better for it sometimes. Great battles have been won without baggage trains.”

The boy looked soberly at his all.

“I have got to win now, Doctor. Get me a job, will you?”

Things moved swiftly with Karl from that Sunday. Monday morning saw him at work as errand-boy in an office, earning enough for his keep at the boarding-house where his mother found him at times when his father was alone keeping bar. That night he registered at the nearest evening school to complete his course. The Doctor kept a grip on his studies, as he had promised, and saw him through. It was not easy sledding, but it was better than the smelly saloon. From the public school he graduated into the Cooper Institute, where his teachers soon took notice of the wide-awake lad. Karl was finding himself. He took naturally to the study of languages, and threw himself into it with all the ardor of an army marching without baggage train to meet an enemy. He had “got to win,” and he did. All the while he earned his living working as a clerk by day—with very little baggage yet to boast of—and sitting up nights with his books. When he graduated from the Institute, the battle was half won.

The other half he fought on his own ground, with the enemy’s tents in sight. His attainments procured for him a place in the Lenox Library, where his opportunity for reading was limited only by his ambition. He made American history and literature his special study, and in the course of time achieved great distinction in his field. “And they were married and lived happily ever after” might by right be added to his story. He did marry an East Side girl who had been his sweetheart while he was fighting his uphill battle, and they have to-day two daughters attending college.

It is the drawback to these stories that, being true, they must respect the privacy of their heroes. If that were not so, I should tell you that this hero’s name is not Karl, but one much better befitting his fight and his victory; that he was chosen historian of his home State, and held the office with credit until spoils politics thrust him aside, and that he lives to-day in the capital city of another State, an authority whose word is not lightly questioned on any matter pertaining to Americana. That is the record of the East Side boy who was driven from home for refusing to tend bar in his father’s saloon on Sunday because it was not right.

He never saw his father again. He tried more than once, but the door of his home was barred against him. Not with his mother’s consent; in long after years, when once again Dr. Schauffler preached at Olivet, a little German woman came up after the sermon and held out her hand to him.

“You made my Karl a man,” she said.

“No,” replied the preacher, soberly, “God made him.”

THE PROBLEM OF THE WIDOW SALVINI

The mere mention of the widow Salvini always brings before me that other widow who came to our settlement when her rascal husband was dead after beating her black and blue through a lifetime in Poverty Gap, during which he did his best to make ruffians of the boys and worse of the girls by driving them out into the street to earn money to buy him rum whenever he was not on the Island, which, happily, he was most of the time. I know I had a hand in sending him there nineteen times, more shame to the judge whom I finally had to threaten with public arraignment and the certainty of being made an accessory to wife-murder unless he found a way of keeping him there. He did then, and it was during his long term that the fellow died. What I started to say was that, when all was over and he out of the way, his widow came in and wanted our advice as to whether she ought to wear mourning earrings in his memory. Without rhyme or reason the two are associated in my mind, for they were as different as could be. The widow of Poverty Gap was Irish and married to a brute. Mrs. Salvini was an Italian; her husband was a hard-working fellow who had the misfortune to be killed on the railway. The point of contact is in the earrings. The widow Salvini did wear mourning earrings, a little piece of crape draped over the gold bangles of her care-free girlhood, and it was not funny but infinitely touching. It just shows how little things do twist one’s mind.