Out of Mulberry Street: Stories of Tenement life in New York City

“Fill up, old girl! and good night to you.” With a departing pat he crept up the ladder to the loft above, and, scooping out a berth in the loose hay, snuggled down in it to sleep. Soon his regular breathing up there kept step with the steady munching of the horse in her stall. The two reunited friends were dreaming happy Christmas dreams.

The night wore into the small hours of Christmas morning. The fury of the storm was unabated. The old cottage shook under the fierce blasts, and the chestnuts waved their hoary branches wildly, beseechingly, above it, as if they wanted to warn those within of some threatened danger. But they slept and heard them not. From the kitchen chimney, after a blast more violent than any that had gone before, a red spark issued, was whirled upward and beaten against the shingle roof of the barn, swept clean of snow. Another followed it, and another. Still they slept in the cottage; the chestnuts moaned and brandished their arms in vain. The storm fanned one of the sparks into a flame. It flickered for a moment and then went out. So, at least, it seemed. But presently it reappeared, and with it a faint glow was reflected in the attic window over the door. Down in her stall ’Liza moved uneasily. Nobody responding, she plunged and reared, neighing loudly for help. The storm drowned her calls; her master slept, unheeding.

But one heard it, and in the nick of time. The door of the shed was thrown violently open, and out plunged Jim, his hair on fire and his clothes singed and smoking. He brushed the sparks off himself as if they were flakes of snow. Quick as thought, he tore ’Liza’s halter from its fastening, pulling out staple and all, threw his smoking coat over her eyes, and backed her out of the shed. He reached in, and pulling the harness off the hook, threw it as far into the snow as he could, yelling “Fire!” at the top of his voice. Then he jumped on the back of the horse, and beating her with heels and hands into a mad gallop, was off up the street before the bewildered inmates of the cottage had rubbed the sleep out of their eyes and come out to see the barn on fire and burning up.

Down street and avenue fire-engines raced with clanging bells, leaving tracks of glowing coals in the snow-drifts, to the cottage in the chestnut lots. They got there just in time to see the roof crash into the barn, burying, as Joe and his crying wife and children thought, ’Liza and their last hope in the fiery wreck. The door had blown shut, and the harness Jim threw out was snowed under. No one dreamed that the mare was not there. The flames burst through the wreck and lit up the cottage and swaying chestnuts. Joe and his family stood in the shelter of it, looking sadly on. For the second time that Christmas night tears came into the honest truckman’s eyes. He wiped them away with his cap.

“Poor ’Liza!” he said.

A hand was laid with gentle touch upon his arm. He looked up. It was his wife. Her face beamed with a great happiness.

“Joe,” she said, “you remember what you read: ‘tidings of great joy.’ Oh, Joe, Jim has come home!”

She stepped aside, and there was Jim, sister Jennie hanging on his neck, and ’Liza alive and neighing her pleasure. The lad looked at his father and hung his head.

“Jim saved her, father,” said Jennie, patting the gray mare; “it was him fetched the engine.”

Joe took a step toward his son and held out his hand to him.

“Jim,” he said, “you’re a better man nor yer father. From now on, you’n I run the truck on shares. But mind this, Jim: never leave mother no more.”

And in the clasp of the two hands all the past was forgotten and forgiven. Father and son had found each other again.

“’Liza,” said the truckman, with sudden vehemence, turning to the old mare and putting his arm around her neck, “’Liza! It was your doin’s. I knew it was luck when I found them things. Merry Christmas!” And he kissed her smack on her hairy mouth, one, two, three times.

THE DUBOURQUES, FATHER AND SON

IT must be nearly a quarter of a century since I first met the Dubourques. There are plenty of old New-Yorkers yet who will recall them as I saw them, plodding along Chatham street, swarthy, silent, meanly dressed, undersized, with their great tin signs covering front and back, like ill-favored gnomes turned sandwich-men to vent their spite against a gay world. Sunshine or rain, they went their way, Indian file, never apart, bearing their everlasting, unavailing protest.

“I demand,” read the painted signs, “the will and testament of my brother, who died in California, leaving a large property inheritance to Virgile Dubourque, which has never reached him.”

That was all any one was ever able to make out. At that point the story became rambling and unintelligible. Denunciation, hot and wrathful, of the thieves, whoever they were, of the government, of bishops, priests, and lawyers, alternated with protestations of innocence of heaven knows what crimes. If any one stopped them to ask what it was all about, they stared, shook their heads, and passed on. If money was offered, they took it without thanking the giver; indeed, without noticing him. They were never seen apart, yet never together in the sense of being apparently anything to each other. I doubt if they ever spoke, unless they were obliged to. Grim and lonely, they traveled the streets, parading their grievance before an unheeding day.

What that grievance was, and what was their story, a whole generation had tried vainly to find out. Every young reporter tried his hand at it at least once, some many times, I among them. None of us ever found out anything tangible about them. Now and then we ran down a rumor in the region of Bleecker street, then the “French quarter,”—I should have said that they were French and spoke but a few words of broken English when they spoke at all,—only to have it come to nothing. One which I recall was to the effect that, at some time in the far past, the elder of the two had been a schoolmaster in Lorraine, and had come across the sea in quest of a fabulous fortune left by his brother, one of the gold-diggers of ’49, who died in his boots; that there had been some disagreement between father and son, which resulted in the latter running away with their saved-up capital, leaving the old man stranded in a strange city, among people of strange speech, without the means of asserting his claim, and that, when he realized this, he lost his reason. Thus his son, Erneste, found him, returning after years penniless and repentant.

From that meeting father and son came forth what they were ever since. So ran the story, but whether it was all fancy, or some or most of it, I could not tell. No one could. One by one, the reporters dropped them, unable to make them out. The officers of a French benevolent society, where twice a week they received fixed rations, gave up importuning them to accept the shelter of the house before their persistent, almost fierce, refusal. The police did not trouble them, except when people complained that the tin signs tore their clothes. After that they walked with canvas posters, and were let alone.

One morning in the winter of 1882, among the police reports of the night’s happenings that were laid upon my desk, I found one saying that Virgile Dubourque, Frenchman, seventy-five years old, had died in a Wooster-street lodging-house. The story of his death, as I learned it there that day, was as tragic as that of his life. He had grown more and more feeble, until at last he was unable to leave the house. For the first time the son went out alone. The old man sat by the stove all day, silently brooding over his wrongs. The lodgers came and went. He heeded neither their going nor their coming. Through the long night he kept his seat, gazing fixedly into the fire. In the morning, when daylight shone upon the cold, gray ashes, he sat there dead. The son slept peacefully beside him.

The old schoolmaster took his last trip alone; no mourners rode behind the hearse to the Palisade Cemetery, where charitable countrymen bought him a grave. Erneste did not go to the funeral. That afternoon I met him on Broadway, plodding alone over the old route. His eyes were red and swollen. The “protest” hung from his shoulders; in his hand he carried, done up roughly in a pack, the signs the old man had borne. A look of such utter loneliness as I had never seen on a human face came into his when I asked him where his father was. He made a gesture of dejection and shifted his feet uneasily, as if impatient at being detained. Something distracted my attention for the moment, and when I looked again he was gone.

Once in the following summer I heard from Erneste through the newspapers, just when I had begun to miss him from his old haunts. It seems that he had somehow found the papers that proved his claim, or thought he had. He had put them into the hands of the French consul the day before, said the item, appearing before him clothed and in his right mind, without the signs. But the account merely added to the mystery by hinting that the old man had unconsciously hoarded the papers all the years he sought them with such toil in the streets of New York. Here was my story at last; but before I could lay hold of it, it evaded me once more in the hurry and worry of the police office.

Autumn had come and nearly gone, when New York was one day startled by the report that a madman had run through Fourteenth street at an hour in the afternoon when it was most crowded with shoppers, and, with a pair of carpenter’s compasses, had cut right and left, stabbing as many as came in his way. A scene of the wildest panic ensued. Women flung themselves down basement-steps and fell fainting in doorways. Fully half a score were cut down, among them the wife of Policeman Hanley, who was on duty in the block, and who arrested the maniac without knowing that his wife lay mortally wounded among his victims. She had come out to meet him, with the children. It was only after he had attended to the rest and sent the prisoner away securely bound that he was told there was still a wounded woman in the next store, and found her there with her little ones.

The madman was Erneste Dubourque. I found him in the police station, surrounded by a crowd of excited officials, to whose inquiries he turned a mien of dull and stolid indifference. He knew me when I called him by name, and looked up with a movement of quick intelligence, as one who suddenly remembers something he had forgotten and vainly tried to recall. He started for the door. When they seized him and brought him back, he fought like a demon. His shrieks of “Thieves! robbers!” filled the building as they bore him struggling to a cell.

He was tried by a jury and acquitted of murder. The defense was insanity. The court ordered his incarceration in a safe asylum. The police had received a severe lesson, and during the next month, while it was yet fresh in the public mind, they bestirred themselves, and sent a number of “harmless” lunatics, who had gone about unmolested, after him. I never heard of Erneste Dubourque again; but even now, after fifteen years, I find myself sometimes asking the old question: What was the story of wrong that bore such a crop of sorrow and darkness and murder?

ABE’S GAME OF JACKS

TIME hung heavily on Abe Seelig’s hands, alone, or as good as alone, in the flat on the “stoop” of the Allen-street tenement. His mother had gone to the butcher’s. Chajim, the father,—“Chajim” is the Yiddish of “Herman,”—was long at the shop. To Abe was committed the care of his two young brothers, Isaac and Jacob. Abraham was nine, and past time for fooling. Play is “fooling” in the sweaters’ tenements, and the muddling of ideas makes trouble, later on, to which the police returns have the index.

“Don’t let ’em on the stairs,” the mother had said, on going, with a warning nod toward the bed where Jake and Ikey slept. He didn’t intend to. Besides, they were fast asleep. Abe cast about him for fun of some kind, and bethought himself of a game of jacks. That he had no jackstones was of small moment to him. East-Side tenements, where pennies are infrequent, have resources. One penny was Abe’s hoard. With that, and an accidental match, he began the game.

It went on well enough, albeit slightly lopsided by reason of the penny being so much the weightier, until the match, in one unlucky throw, fell close to a chair by the bed, and, in falling, caught fire.

Something hung down from the chair, and while Abe gazed, open-mouthed, at the match, at the chair, and at the bed right alongside, with his sleeping brothers on it, the little blaze caught it. The flame climbed up, up, up, and a great smoke curled under the ceiling. The children still slept, locked in each other’s arms, and Abe—Abe ran.

He ran, frightened half out of his senses, out of the room, out of the house, into the street, to the nearest friendly place he knew, a grocery-store five doors away, where his mother traded; but she was not there. Abe merely saw that she was not there, then he hid himself trembling.

In all the block, where three thousand tenants live, no one knew what cruel thing was happening on the stoop of No. 19.

A train passed on the elevated road, slowing up for the station near by. The engineer saw one wild whirl of fire within the room, and opening the throttle of his whistle wide, let out a screech so long and so loud that in ten seconds the street was black with men and women rushing out to see what dreadful thing had happened.

No need of asking. From the door of the Seelig flat, burned through, fierce flames reached across the hall, barring the way. The tenement was shut in.

Promptly it poured itself forth upon fire-escape ladders, front and rear, with shrieks and wailing. In the street the crowd became a deadly crush. Police and firemen battered their way through, ran down and over men, women, and children, with a desperate effort.

The firemen from Hook and Ladder Six, around the corner, had heard the shrieks, and, knowing what they portended, ran with haste. But they were too late with their extinguishers; could not even approach the burning flat. They could only throw up their ladders to those above. For the rest they must needs wait until the engines came.

One tore up the street, coupled on a hose, and ran it into the house. Then died out the fire in the flat as speedily as it had come. The burning room was pumped full of water, and the firemen entered.

Just within the room they came upon little Jacob, still alive, but half roasted. He had struggled from the bed nearly to the door. On the bed lay the body of Isaac, the youngest, burned to a crisp.

They carried Jacob to the police station. As they brought him out, a frantic woman burst through the throng and threw herself upon him. It was the children’s mother come back. When they took her to the blackened corpse of little Ike, she went stark mad. A dozen neighbors held her down, shrieking, while others went in search of the father.

In the street the excitement grew until it became almost uncontrollable when the dead boy was carried out.

In the midst of it little Abe returned, pale, silent, and frightened, to stand by his raving mother.

A LITTLE PICTURE

THE fire-bells rang on the Bowery in the small hours of the morning. One of the old dwelling-houses that remain from the day when the “Bouwerie” was yet remembered as an avenue of beer-gardens and pleasure resorts was burning. Down in the street stormed the firemen, coupling hose and dragging it to the front. Up-stairs in the peak of the roof, in the broken skylight, hung a man, old, feeble, and gasping for breath, struggling vainly to get out. He had piled chairs upon tables, and climbed up where he could grasp the edge, but his strength had given out when one more effort would have freed him. He felt himself sinking back. Over him was the sky, reddened now by the fire that raged below. Through the hole the pent-up smoke in the building found vent and rushed in a black and stifling cloud.

“Air, air!” gasped the old man. “O God, water!”

There was a swishing sound, a splash, and the copious spray of a stream sent over the house from the street fell upon his upturned face. It beat back the smoke. Strength and hope returned. He took another grip on the rafter just as he would have let go.

“Oh, that I might be reached yet and saved from this awful death!” he prayed. “Help, O God, help!”

An answering cry came over the adjoining roof. He had been heard, and the firemen, who did not dream that any one was in the burning building, had him in a minute. He had been asleep in the store when the fire aroused him and drove him, blinded and bewildered, to the attic, where he was trapped.

Safe in the street, the old man fell upon his knees.

“I prayed for water, and it came; I prayed for freedom, and was saved. The God of my fathers be praised!” he said, and bowed his head in thanksgiving.

A DREAM OF THE WOODS