Vignettes of Manhattan; Outlines in Local Color Part 6

At the head of the stairs there was a door on either hand. Suydam knocked at them in turn, and then tried to open them; but they were locked, and there was no response to the repeated hammerings.

"I say," remarked the novelist, as they went up to the floor above, "do these people like to have us intrude on them in this way?"

"Some don't," Suydam answered, promptly, "and of course I try never to intrude. But most of them don't mind. Most of them have no sense of home. Most of them don't know what privacy means. How could they?"

"True," echoed the novelist. "How could they?"

"Here is an exemplification of what I mean," said the young man from the Settlement as they came to the next landing.

The door leading into the room on the right was open. The room was perhaps ten feet square; it contained two beds. On one of the beds a man sat cross-legged sewing; he glanced up for a moment only as the two visitors darkened the doorway, and then he went on with his work. On the other bed were two little children, half naked and asleep; one was a boy of three, the other a girl of nearly two. On the edge of this bed sat a tall boy of seventeen, also sewing. In the narrow alley between the two beds were two sewing-machines, one tended by a girl of fifteen or sixteen perhaps, a thin, stunted child, with bent shoulders. The other machine was operated by the mother of these children, a large-framed woman of forty, with the n.o.ble head so often seen among the Trasteverines.

She knew Suydam, and she smiled.

"Good-mornin'," she said.

"Good-morning," responded Suydam. "I am showing a friend over the building. You seem a little crowded here."

"Not crowd' now," she answered. "Only one boarder now," and she indicated the man seated cross-legged on the bed. "Last week two."

"Where is your husband?" asked the young man.

"Oh, he got another girl," she replied, with a vague gesture, apparently of disapproval.

Suydam and De Ruyter went a floor higher, glancing into the rooms which were open. Suydam knew most of the inhabitants, and they seemed glad to see him. Evidently they looked on him as a friend.

On the top floor, under the steps which led to the roof, was a den scarce six feet by eight. Small as it was, this room had better furniture than most of those De Ruyter had seen; it contained evidences of a desire to make a home. There were violent chromos pinned to the wall. The bed had a parti-colored coverlet. The sole inhabitant was a tall, dark Italian with fiery eyes. He was cooking macaroni with ropy cheese over an oil-lamp. His door was ajar only.

"Good-morning, Pietro," said Suydam, cheerfully.

Pietro obeyed his first impulse, and shut the door swiftly. Then he changed his mind, for he opened the door and peered out suspiciously.

Recognizing Suydam, he was about to throw it wide, when he caught sight of De Ruyter. There was a moment of hesitancy, and then he took his hand from the k.n.o.b of the door and went on with his cooking.

"I am showing my friend over the building," explained Suydam.

The Italian said nothing. Apparently his cooking absorbed all his attention. But he gave De Ruyter a searching glance.

Suydam turned to the novelist. "This is Pietro Barretti," he said; "he is one of the most expert layers of mosaic in America. He is from Naples; that's the reason he cooks macaroni so well, I suppose."

"Certainly I haven't seen macaroni cooked that way since I was in Naples last," the novelist remarked, for the sake of talk, not knowing just what to make of the Italian's manner.

"Your wife not here?" asked Suydam.

"No," the Italian answered, abruptly.

"Where is she?" persisted the young man.

"She mort," responded Barretti.

"Dead?" Suydam cried. "That is very sad. When did she die?"

"Ten days," the Italian replied.

When Suydam and De Ruyter had made an end of their visit, and were going down the stairs cautiously, the young man from the University Settlement asked the novelist if he had seen anything interesting.

"Oh yes," was the answer. "I've got lots of color; just what I wanted.

And that Italian whose wife was mort--he's copy, I'm sure."

"Copy?" queried Suydam.

"I mean I can use him in one of my sketches for the _Metropolis_," the novelist explained. "I wish I knew what his wife was like."

"She was a pretty girl--dark-haired, dark-eyed, with a lively smile,"

Suydam said. "He was very jealous of her. I've been told they used to quarrel bitterly."

"I shouldn't like to have that fellow for an enemy," De Ruyter declared, as they pa.s.sed through the alleyway and came out in the open air. "He has an eye like a gla.s.s stiletto."

The novelist and the young man from the University Settlement walked up the street together. As they drew near to a police-station, jealously guarded by its green lamps, three officers came out and turned down the street.

When the policemen were abreast of the two friends, one of them stepped aside and accosted the young man from the Settlement.

"Mr. Suydam," he said, "you gentlemen from the Settlement sometimes know what's going on better than we do. Have you seen Pietro Barretti lately--the one they call Italian Pete?"

"I saw him not ten minutes ago--in his own room," Suydam answered.

"He's all right, boys," cried the policeman. "He's there."

"Do you want him?" asked Suydam.

"Don't we?" the policeman replied, promptly. "We've got to bring him in."

"What has he done?" De Ruyter inquired.

"Oh, he's done enough!" responded the officer. "He murdered his wife last week, that's what he's done."

Suydam looked at De Ruyter.

"Yes," said De Ruyter, "that completes the picture. I can get a good _mot de la fin_ now."

(1893.)

BEFORE THE BREAK OF DAY

She lived in a little wooden house on the corner of the street huddled in the shadow of two towering tenements. There are a few frail buildings of this sort still left in that part of the city, half a mile east of the Bowery and half a mile south of Tompkins Square, where the architecture is as irregular, as crowded, and as little cared for as the population. Amid the old private houses erected for a single family, and now violently altered to accommodate eight or ten--amid the tall new tenements, stark and ugly--here and there one can still find wooden houses built before the city expanded, half a century old now, worn and shabby and needlessly ashamed in the presence of every new edifice no better than they. With the peak of their s.h.i.+ngled roofs they are pathetic survivals of a time when New York still remembered that it had been New Amsterdam, and when it did not build its dwellings in imitation of the polyglot loftiness of the Tower of Babel. It was in one of these little houses with white clapboarded walls, ashen gray in the paling moonlight, that Maggie O'Donnell lay fast asleep, when the bell in a far-off steeple tolled three in the morning of the day that was to be the Fourth of July.

She was asleep in the larger of the two little rooms over the saloon. In that part of the city there are saloons on every corner almost, and sometimes two and three in a block. The signs over the doors of most of these saloons and over the doors of the groceries and of the bakeries and of the other shops bear strangely foreign names. The German quarter of the city is not far off, nor is the Italian, nor the Chinese; but hereabouts the houses are packed with Poles chiefly, and chiefly Jews--industrious, docile, and saving. Not until midnight had the whir of the sewing-machines ceased in the tenements which occupied the three other corners. The sign over the door of the saloon above which Maggie lay fast asleep bore an Irish name, the name of her husband, Terence O'Donnell. But the modest boards which displayed his name were overawed by the huge signs that flanked them, filling a goodly share of the wall on either street and proclaiming the "McGown's Pa.s.s Brewery, Kelly & Company."