Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York Part 7

"It vas selfishness vot der vorld make pad. It was being ignorant und selfish vot crime und bofferty pring to der many und vealth und ease to der few. Der beoples tondt see dot. Tey tondt know vot Anarchy mean. It vas all rest, all peace, nopoddy pad, no var, no bestilence. Dot is Anarchy, hey?

"I haf my life gif to der cause uf Anarchy. I haf dravel der vorlt over shbeaking, wriding, delling der beoples to make vay for der zoshul refolushun. Uf dey vill not, ve must der reech kill. We must remofe dem vich stand py der roat und stay der march of civilization. Some say 'Make haste! kill! kill!' I say, 'Nein, vait, gif der wretched beoples some chance to be safe. Tell dem vot is Anarchy. Etjucade dem.'

"Vell, den, dey listen to me. Dey say, 'Ve bow der vill before uf Herr Bludoffski, whose vordt vas goot. Ve vait. But how long? Ah, dat I can not tell. But I have decide I make von appeal. I gif der vorlt von chance to come ofer to Anarchy and be save. Ha! Se! I haf write a pook!

I haf say der pook inside all apout Anarchy. I haf tell der peauties of der commune, vere no selfishness vas, no law, but efery man equal und none petter as some udder. I haf describe it all. Nopody can dot pook reat mitout he say ven he lay him down, 'I vil be an Anarchist.'"

Mr. Bludoffski had become intensely interested in his own remarks. He picked his ma.n.u.scripts from the table and caressed them lovingly.

"See," he said, "dere vas der pook vich make mankind brudders. I tell you how you help. I vas poor. I haf no money. I lif on noddings, und dem noddings I peg. Ven I see you und you dot money gif me, I say 'Dis man he haf soul! He shall be save.' Den I say more as dot. I say he shall join his hand mit me. He shall print him, den million copies, send him de vorlt ofer, in all der lankviches, to all der peoples. d.i.n.k uf dot!

You shall be great Anarchist as I. Ve go down mit fame togedder!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "HE HAF NO SOUL, NO HEART, NO MIND, NO NODDINGS."]

He paused for Mr. O'Royster's reply, trembling with fanatical excitement. The reply was somewhat slow in coming. Mr. O'Royster, when his companion began to talk, had leaned his head on his arm and closed his eyes. He had preserved this att.i.tude throughout the address and was now breathing hard.

"Vell!" said Bludoffski, impatiently.

Mr. O'Royster drew a more resonant breath, long, deep and mellow.

"He sleep!" cried Bludoffski, in scornful fury. "Der tog! He sleep ven I tell him--"

He sprang up, ran across the room and returned with a huge carving-knife. "I vill kill him!" he cried, and, indeed, made start to do it. But as suddenly he checked himself, tossed the knife on the floor, muttering, "Bah, he not fit to kill," and opened the door into the saloon. The Anarchist meeting had ended, but several persons were still sitting around the tables, drinking beer. He called to two of these, and said, in a tone of almost pitiful despair:

"Take dot man home. I not know who he vas. I not know vere he lif.

Somebotty fin' oud. Look his pockets insite. Ask der boleecemans. Do any dings, but take him avay. He haf no soul, no mind, no heart, no noddings!"

IV.

MAGGIE.

Wrapped in contemplation and but little else, probably because his stock of contemplation largely exceeded his stock of else, Mr. Dootleby wandered down the Bowery. Midnight sounded out from the spire in St.

Mark's Church just as Mr. Dootleby, having come from Broadway through Astor Place, turned about at the Cooper Union.

There was a touch of melancholy in Mr. Dootleby's expression as he looked down the big, brilliant Bowery, glowing with the light of a hundred electric burners and myriads of gas-jets, and seething with unnatural activity. He stopped a moment in the shadow thrown by the booth of a coffee and cake vender, and looked attentively into the faces of the throngs that pa.s.sed him. He seemed to be thinking hard.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MR. DOOTLEBY.]

In truth, it is a suggestive place, is the Bowery. Day and night are all the same to it. It never gets up and it never goes to bed. It never takes a holiday. It never keeps Lent. It indulges in no sentiments. It acknowl-edges no authority that bids it remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy. But from year's end to year's end it bubbles, and boils, and seethes, and frets while the daylight lasts, and in the glare of its brighter night it plunges headlong into carousal!

Mr. Dootleby had a great habit of walking at night, though he seldom came down town so far as this. His apartments were in Harlem, and usually, after he had taken his dinner and played a rubber of whist, he found himself sufficiently exercised by a stroll as far as Forty-second Street. But to-night he felt a trifle restless, and journeyed on.

Though his hair was nearly white and his face somewhat deeply furrowed, Mr. Dootleby's tall heavy figure stood straight toward the zenith, and moved with an ease and celerity that many a younger man had envied. With his antecedents I am not entirely familiar, but they say he was always eccentric. I, for my part, shall like him none the less for this. They say he was rich once, but that he never knew how to take care of his money, and what part of it he did not give away slipped off of its own accord.

They say he was past fifty when he married, and his bride was a young woman, and when they went off together he was as frisky as a young fellow of twenty-three. Then, they say, she died, and after that he took but little interest in things, spending his time chiefly in such amiable pursuits as the entertainment of the children playing in Central Park, and the writing of an occasional article for the scientific papers, on "The Peculiar Behavior of Alloys."

Despite the dinginess of his costume, Mr. Dootleby was a handsome old man, and he looked very out of place on the Bowery. Not that good looks are wanting in the Bowery, for many a crownless Cleopatra mingles with its crowds. But Mr. Dootleby, as he stood in the shadow of the coffee-vender's booth, seemed to be the one kind of being necessarily incongruous with the midnight Bowery spectacle.

Mr. Dootleby stood and looked for full twenty minutes. In some of the faces that pa.s.sed him he saw only a careless sensuality brightened by the flush of excitement. Others, somewhat older, were full of brazen coa.r.s.eness, and others, older still, bore that pitiful look of hopeless regret, quickly changing to one that says as plainly as can be that the time for thinking and caring has gone. Upon many was stamped the brand of inborn infamy, their only inheritance.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BOWERY NIGHT-SCENE.]

Some hunted souls went by, their manner jaded and hapless, their steps nervous and irresolute, and their eyes sweeping the streets before them, never resting, never closed. A few as they pa.s.sed scowled at him--even at him, as if there were not one in all this world upon whom they had not declared war. Want had marked most of them with unmistakable lines, and crossing these were often others telling that they knew no better than they did.

Mr. Dootleby watched awhile and then went on, pausing occasionally at the corners to peer through the dark side streets, up at the big tenement-houses--those ugly nurseries of vice--from whose black shadows came many of these that had been christened into crime. But in the Bowery itself there was no gloomy spot. Light streamed from every window, and flooded the pavements. The street-cars whirled along. Even the bony creatures that drew them caught the spirit of this feverish thoroughfare. From every other doorway, s.h.i.+elded by cloth or wicker screens, came the sounds of tw.a.n.ging harps and sc.r.a.ping fiddles, the click of gla.s.ses and the shrill chatter and laughter of discordant voices.

Here and there, in front of a bewildering canvas, upon which, in the gayest of gay colors, mountainous fat women, prodigious giants, scaly mermaids, wild men from Zululand, living skeletons, and three-headed girls were painted, stood clamorous gentlemen in tights, urgently importuning pa.s.sers-by to enter the establishments they represented, whereof the glories and mysteries could be but too feebly told in words.

And upon the sidewalks all about him, swarms of itinerant musicians, instantaneous photographers, dealers in bric-a-brac, toilet articles, precious stones, soda water, and other needful and nutritious wares, urged themselves upon Mr. Dootleby's attention.

He walked leisurely on, moralizing as he went, until he had pa.s.sed Chatham Square, and had got into the somberer district below. He turned a corner somewhere, thinking to walk around the block and find his way back into the Bowery. But the more corners he rounded the more he found ever at his elbow, and the conviction began to make its way into his mind that he had lost his bearings.

The block in which he was now wandering was quite dark and dismal, save for a single gas-jet hanging almost hidden within a dirty globe, over some steep steps that led into a cellar. Mr. Dootleby concluded to stop there and ask his way. As he approached the cellar, he heard what seemed to be cries of distress. They grew more distinct, and accompanying them were the dull sounds of blows and the harsh accents of a man's voice, evidently permeated with rage.

Mr. Dootleby ran down the steps and flung the door open, presenting his eyes with a spectacle that made his blood run cold. The room was long and narrow. At one end and near the door was a bar fitted up with a few black bottles and broken tumblers, a keg or two of beer, and some boxes of cigars. Along the walls stood a couple of benches, and further on were half a dozen little rooms, part.i.tioned from each other, all opening into the bar-room. On the benches six girls were lolling about, dressed in gaudy tights, and with them were three or four men. The room was hot to suffocation, and the smell from the dim and dirty lamps that stood on each end of the bar, together with the foul tobacco-smoke with which the atmosphere was saturated, combined to make the place disgusting and poisonous.

All these conditions Mr. Dootleby took in at his first glance, and his second fell upon two figures in the center of the room, from whom had proceded the noises he had heard. One was that of a girl cowering on her knees and moaning in a voice from which reason had clearly departed. A big, unconscionably brutal-looking man stood over her, holding her down by her hair, which, braided in a single plait, was wound about his hand.

He had just thrown the stick upon the floor with which he had been beating her, and was drawing from the stove a red-hot poker.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE FELLOW WHEELED QUICKLY AROUND.]

Mr. Dootleby was not of an excitable temperament ordinarily, but his senses were so affected by the horrors he saw and the pestilential air he breathed that his head began to swim, and only by an especial draft upon his resolution was he able to command himself. There was a pause consequent upon his entrance, and his quick eyes made good use of it.

He saw that the girl had already been half murdered, and that her a.s.sailant was a short, thick-set old man, with the eyes of a snake and the neck of a bull. He saw that the men on the bench, all beastly specimens, were contemplating her torture with an indifference that would have shamed the grossest savage. Several of the women, too--the older ones--were looking on with scarcely the sign of a protest in their faces, and only one, a mere child, seemed to feel a genuine sense of terror and sympathy.

Mr. Dootleby threw open his coat, tightened his grasp on his walking-stick, and said, very quietly: "What are you doing?"

The fellow wheeled quickly around. He looked with intense malice at Mr.

Dootleby, and then shouted at one of the women, "Why didencher lock de door like I toljer, you fool?"

Mr. Dootleby did not wait for either of these questions to be answered.

He sprang into action with all the agility and ferocity of a young panther. The handle of his cane was a huge k.n.o.b of carved ivory. He brought it directly on the head of the ruffian in a blow of tremendous force, and as the fellow staggered, Mr. Dootleby grasped the poker, turning it so that its heated end touched his antagonist's arm. Of course, the man loosened his hold, and in an instant more dropped upon the floor. Then Mr. Dootleby, keenly alive to the necessity of improving every second, caught the prostrate girl by the arm and threw her behind him toward the open door. "Run for your life!" he said.

But she didn't run. She couldn't run, and while she was struggling to get upon her feet, the fellow recovered himself and emitted a roar that acted on her terrified soul as if it had been a blow. She fell incontinently upon her back in a dead swoon.

Mr. Dootleby's situation was perilous. He had hoped by a sudden and overwhelming attack to stun the man and get the girl out into the street. But the man's quick recovery and the girl's exhaustion left him in almost as bad a situation as ever, and he glanced apprehensively at the party upon the benches.

They had scarcely stirred! One of the men, indeed, had risen, and was standing with his hands in his pockets and something in the nature of an amused smile upon his face. The others had so far s.h.i.+fted their positions as to be the better able to see whatever went on, and only one of them manifested the slightest desire to take a hand in the proceedings. This was the little girl of twelve or fourteen. She was intensely excited, and in the moment's pause that succeeded Mr.

Dootleby's onslaught she dashed across the room, and lifting the head of the unconscious girl, rested it on her knee, and stroked it soothingly.

"Good for you, my child!" said Mr. Dootleby. "Try to bring her to."

The hideous old scoundrel, as he now turned again to confront Mr.

Dootleby, was more hideous than ever. Blood from the wound in his head was trickling over his face, into which the fury of a legion of devils was concentrated. "Sissy!" he bellowed, "go back to yer bench!"

"Don't do it, my child," said Mr. Dootleby. "You're all right. Run outside if it gets too dangerous for you in here."