Beside the Bowery

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

Introduction ix

I Ingenuity Askew i

Introduction

There are lives so full of inspiration and selfsacrifice and faith, that one feels the wish to hold fast the memory of every detail, and to place them In some treasure house impregnable to the assaults of time, where each event and word may be preserved. Such a life Eliza Rockwell lived among the folk of many lands and many needs in the crowded tenements beside the Bowery. The story of her life Is written so deeply into the lives of many hundreds that it might easily be read by any who would take the pains. But her work was hidden away in the narrow crowded streets under the shadow of Brooklyn Bridge, and there are few of the upper world who know even her name. Those who have known her personality will always treasure every memory of her life and work, and It Is chiefly for their sake that the author has collected these memories of her life among the people whom she loved better than her own health and happiness.

Few of her friends will ever forget the service held in her memory in the old Church of the Sea and Land, close to the Bowery, in the neighbourhood where she had worked so long. The church was filled from the pulpit to the doors by men and

ix

X INTRODUCTION

women whom she had helped in the hour of their sorest need. Their presence was no formal or perfunctory matter. They came, moved by deepest reverence and love, for they knew that she had laid down her life for them. There was scarcely a dry eye in the church as they looked for the last time on her form, worn out by hard and faithful work in their behalf. There was hardly a soul there to whom she had not brought life and hope in some hour of sickness or despair. I looked into one face after another and remembered all the bitter struggles with hunger and disease and sin in which she had borne a part. I pictured each as he had been and saw what through her he had become. I wished that all men might see what I saw, and understand what one brave, self-sacrificing life may do to transform humanity.

An ordinary description of Eliza Rockwell would convey to a stranger not the slightest idea of what she really was. To depict certain persons, it is needful only to tell how they looked; and from the contour of the chin, the flash of the eye, the cut of a gown, one knows them altogether. To reveal others, one must tell what they said, and in the burning torrent of words or the brilliant epigram, the soul of the man is revealed. Still other characters one can make clear only by describing what has happened to them, and we discover the shape of their souls by examining the world of environing circumstance which has

INTRODUCTION xi

formed them. There are a few, however — and these perhaps are the greatest souls — of whom but little may be learned by these methods. To know them, we must look not at their faces, but at the faces of those about them; we must note not their words, but the deeds of those to whom they have spoken; we must examine not the mould in which the world has shaped them, but the impress which their lives have set upon the world. As they pass, like some hidden magnet, they transform the relations of all things about them. For in them, concealed beneath an unpretending exterior and commonplace words and everyday events, lies the great force that casts down the mighty from their seats, and lifts up the poor out of the dunghill.

Such a character was that of Eliza Rockwell.

It is, therefore, not the purpose of this book to present the reader with an ordinary biography of personal description and facts In chronological order. It is enough to condense such a biography into briefest outline. Mrs. Rockwell lived the earlier part of her life in Binghamton, N. Y. After the death of her husband, she came to New York to study in the Training School for Christian Workers of the New York City Missions. She started on her work at the Church of the Sea and Land in 1894, and continued there for fifteen years. For those who did not know her, we might add that she was tall and slender almost to frailty;

xii INTRODUCTION

her face somewhat long In contour, with strong, firm chin and high forehead and aquiline nose; her mouth rather large, with straight determined lips ; her eyes deep set and penetrating. But no amount of biographical and descriptive detail would give even the faintest idea of the real woman. It Is only as one sees the effect of her life on the men and women with whom she lived that one begins to discern what manner of person she was. Under her Influence hves that were cold and hard grew warm and sensitive; wooden insensibility was transformed Into living, tender humanity, and brutal cruelty Into courtesy; base appetites gave way to visions of the spirit, and despair yielded to hope, — and It is only as one sees her soul so reflected in the lives of others that one begins to understand what she herself was.

It has, therefore, been the aim of the author in the sketches which follow to picture as accurately as possible a few of the men and women whom she knew and loved; because It Is in their lives that those who knew her can see her as she truly was; and It Is in the mirror of their deeds and lives alone that those who never knew her may hope to find a true image of her spirit.

Those who through these pages may learn to see Eliza Rockwell as she was, cannot fail in some measure to share her interest in the men and women to whom she gave her life, different though their circumstances and characteristics may seem

INTRODUCTION xlii

from those of that world with which we are familiar. Amid the over-refinements of civilisation and culture we sometimes forget the great mass of men who are struggling fiercely with almost primitive passions, men for whom the A B C of the moral code — the things we take for granted — are a matter of difficult, even of desperate, achievement. In contrast to the subtle analyses of the modern psychological novel, and the hair-splitting ethics of the romanticist, and the exaggerated remorse of the neurasthenic, there is a desperate reality about the battle of this frail woman with the brute passions of men for the great fundamentals of morality, that makes much of our best effort seem in comparison a mere beating of the air.

Those who read stories of the slums to be assured that, frightful though such an environment would be to us, to the poor themselves these conditions afford plentiful amusement and abundant opportunities of happiness, will find little satisfaction In these pages. Nothing can be more untrue to fact, or more Immoral In effect than the cheap optimism characteristic of much so-called " Slum Literature," which Is really only a sop flung to the consciences of those who, in a city where such conditions exist, enjoy comfortable homes and happy lives without stirring a finger to better those conditions. Literature can only be pernicious in its effect If It leads men to suppose that environxlv INTRODUCTION

ment counts for nothing, and that when a man is out of work, half starved, subject to bad habits, and living in the old-time Cherry Street tenement, it requires only a little religion to make him happy and prosperous. A slight acquaintance with the work of Mrs. Rockwell makes one realise that the terrible suffering of the poor in our great cities calls for remedies far more radical than the mere preaching of the gospel of redemption and the expression of personal friendliness. Under such conditions honesty and virtue and happiness are so difficult of attainment as to seem almost miraculous in the case of those who realise them, and the fact that men are willing to struggle toward them against such desperate odds, and that at times they do succeed in attaining them, should give an assurance that when such men receive a fair chance they will respond to It In a way that will abundantly repay the efforts made In their behalf.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the distress and wretchedness of the men and women described in these sketches, for Mrs. Rockwell's work In New York covered those terrible years when thousands of able-bodied worklngmen could find no employment, and little children were sent to school day after day with no food. It Is not surprising, therefore, that In many cases even one with such extraordinary power over men as she possessed, should have failed; but It should be evident from the narratives that follow that her failures were

INTRODUCTION xv

due to conditions the existence of which is a blot upon a Christian civilisation.

These sketches make no pretence of being wellrounded stories. They are descriptions of actual events and of real persons, presented as accurately as memory can depict them, in the hope that they may aid in preserving to those who loved her, the thought of one who was possessed of the unfaltering faith that there is no life so perverted but that with a true friend and a fair chance it may be transformed to a thing of worth — one who in that faith gave herself and all that she had to the service of her neighbours beside the Bowery.

There is a certain fascination about canvassing the ancient tumble-down tenements of lower New York. Each door opens upon some new and strange type of life. One sees side by side the flags of all nations, and reads inscriptions in every language from Hebrew and Greek to Chinese. One passes at a step from Syria to Lithuania, from Sicily to furthest Russia and Japan. One may enter upon a mixed-ale party or a rag-pickers' bee, a sweat-shop or a dive. One meets every sort of greeting, from the whining welcome of the beggar to the resentful curse of an anarchist.

Of all the homes into which the Lady of Good Cheer entered on her journeys of friendship the one which impressed her perhaps most vividly with its strangeness was one which she discovered on a winter day in a wretched old tenement in Water Street. It was a season when thousands were out of work and the distress was so great that she had been asked to go through the poorest tenements in search of those who were actually starving and who had not found the city's sources of relief. As she ascended from door to door, she was greeted by responses in almost every known tongue, and when she reached the fourth floor of the tenement and knocked at one of the doors, it was a pleasant surprise to hear a " Come in," in good broad Scotch.

The Lady of Good Cheer was by no means prepared, however, for the scene which met her eyes as she entered the room. Its chaotic contents made It appear like the headquarters of some queer Demiurge who was attempting to equip a world with some new and strange form of vegetation. The floor was piled high with dry stalks, and brown bushes, and withered weeds, and shrubs; and beside them were heaps of some kind of vegetable matter of an unnaturally vivid shade of green. Nearby she was horrified to see a huge tub filled with blood or something that counterfeited it successfully. A neighbouring vat contained a bright green poisonous-looking liquid. Over it bent a wiry little Scotchman with dark side whiskers, a sharp nose, a sharp chin and sharper eyes. His face was decorated with a colour scheme which rivalled that of an Indian brave. Green was the predominant shade, but the weird and ghastly appearance which it imparted was fortunately relieved by a few brilliant dashes of scarlet and gold. Opposite this chromo sat a woman with a good homely Scotch face and keen brown eyes, one of which persisted in a special independent twinkle of its own, while the other glowered in a questioning scowl. She was busily engaged in tying up bundies of flowers, whose odd shape and vivid hues would have given Linnaeus a troubled half-hour before he could have discovered a Latin phrase sufficiently profane to do them justice. There was a singular and penetrating odour about the whole place, an odour at once pungent and yet suggestive of some heavy and overpowering perfume. The room seemed full of children. Two little girls were helping their mother gather and bind the stalks. A small boy also lent occasional aid, while a smaller child played on the floor. A baby was asleep on the bed, the only article of furniture in the room which was not piled high with the materials of their labour.

The Scotchman turned his decorated countenance slightly toward the Lady of Good Cheer. The sharp nose, standing out like an illuminated capital in scarlet and gold, added emphasis to the snappy query: " Who are you? "

She explained herself as best as she could, but not to his satisfaction.

" Well, if ye come frae a kirk ye can get out o' here I " he said. " They're all fakes, frauds and liars! I know 'em and I want none of 'em!"

" Don't talk like that, Tom," said his wife. " I know her. She's a good lady and she's helped lots o' poor folks around here. Don't mind him," she said to the Lady of Good Cheer, " he's terrible cranky about the church. Some of the church people treated him awful mean, an' he'll never forgive 'em."

The Lady of Good Cheer sat on the edge of a chair full of bushes, patted the head of a little girl who stood by, and talked with the mother, while the man worked on in sulky silence.

The man did his best to freeze out the Lady of Good Cheer, but something in her voice as she chatted, seemed gradually to wake old associations in his mind, and he listened in spite of himself. Her voice had the singular power of suggesting even to the most unimpressionable some softening memory of a mother or of a home. It struck the note of the eternal womanliness ! He looked up at some casual appeal, and caught the twinkle in her kindly eyes, that were surveying him as one might look at an absurdly petulant child. Her firm lips and strong chin were quite as determined as his own square Scotch jaw, and somehow, before he knew it, he had capitulated, and was talking as if he had known her all his life.

He recounted to her, how, in desperation because he was out of work, he had devised this extraordinary employment. Over in the Jersey flats he had found growing a weed with a tall stalk and prickly pod, which opened into a sort of star. He gilded the centres of these and painted the prickly calyx a bright scarlet. Then he gathered a mass of brown vegetation which he dyed bright green and tied up in bunches with the scarlet and gold flowers. Being a good salesman he had succeeded in leaving a couple of these bunches in exchange for a quarter in nearly every tenement, advocating them as an incomparable ornament for the mantelpiece. The people of the tenements were unable to resist the charms of these gorgeous blooms, which were guaranteed never to wither, and he prospered greatly.

There was also a subordinate source of revenue. He had discovered a spot where skunk cabbage grew in profusion. He thought the plants interesting and unusual, and dug them up and brought them home, but the unpleasant odour reduced their market value to zero. He had accordingly hit on the idea of pouring citronella perfume into the cup of the plant. It retained the perfume, which combined with its original odour to make something quite new and entirely unrecognisable in the olfactory sphere. Then he potted the plants and sold them as " Japanese lilies." The East Side not being skilled in botanical analysis was charmed by these strange oriental flowers, and delighted with their rare perfume, and bought all he could prepare. He calculated to adopt another business before the citronella wore off and left the original nauseating odour.

The Lady of Good Cheer entirely won the Donald family, and they became loyal attendants at church. For a year or so everything prospered. They were very religious, they knew the Bible thoroughly, and were to all appearances honest, and earnest in prayer. Then something began to go wrong. They ceased to prosper. Donald had at length glutted the market for scarlet and gold bouquets, and Japanese lilies were no longer in good odour with the public. He had found other employment, but lost it without adequate cause. Things went from bad to worse. One day the Lady of Good Cheer found little Agnes barefoot and ragged, begging in the street. She went to hunt up the family and found the mother and six children, — a new baby had just arrived, — huddled in a wretched little attic in Cherry Street, and there enshrined in the place of honour upon the kitchen table was the dark squat Divinity to whose malevolent influence she at once ascribed the change in their fortune. It needed no further proof that they had betaken themselves to the worship of evil spirits, when there before her stood the visible evidence thereof — a black bottle.

It was a hard blow to the Lady of Good Cheer. She hated to think that all their earnestness in religion had been a cloak of deception to disguise such a worship as this. It was no trifling matter to her. She gave to the men and women whom she found battling with evil and poverty that passion of love which Is itself a Divine gift, and It cut her to the heart to find that she had been deceived. It was this love, disappointed and yet still trusting, that spoke In the burning words with which she reproved the woman before her. Mrs. Donald listened, at first with flushed cheeks and angry eyes, and then with bowed head and hot tears as she recognised the supreme authority that alone has the right to reprove another and enter into the Inmost recesses of his soul. Hard though she was, she melted before it into confession. They had both been drinking, and Donald had behaved like a demon. Her face and breast were scarred with his blows. He had driven the children Into the street to beg, and had taken for drink the money they brought back. For some days they had lived in sodden intoxication, leaving the children to run wild after each had done his turn at begging.

The Lady of Good Cheer did her utmost to bring Donald to his senses, but he was too far gone in drink to be susceptible to reason or affection. He continued to beat his wife and the children and to drive them out upon the streets to beg. At last the family had to be given up in order to save the children. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was called in. Donald was intoxicated and resisted when the agents came; and as a result he was given two months on the Island. Two of the girls and the boy were put in the Juvenile Asylum. The oldest sister and the babies were left with the mother.

When the two months were up, Donald returned sober and penitent, and manifested a great desire to get back his children. The Lady of Good Cheer told him that the Society refused to give them up until he had a decent home for them, and could give good evidence that he was sincere in his renunciation of whiskey. In a year or so, with his wife's help, he had acquired a nice little home. But just as the Lady of Good Cheer began to feel safe about helping him in securing the return of the children, she found evidence that he was drinking again. The more she learned of his former abuse of the children the more she hesitated to put them again into his hands. When she refused her aid, Donald stormed and raged. He denounced her and the church as kidnappers, frauds, and liars. He secured a lawyer who made appeals in behalf of a " poor but honest labourer, robbed of his children by the malice and slander of the church and by the injustice and barbarity of the Gerry Society.''

Donald's plea found supporters, as such pleas against the church often do, but it was not until the younger girls were fifteen and sixteen that the father got possession of them again. The Lady of Good Cheer continued to treat him with kindness, and even helped him in one crisis by paying his rent when he was about to be dispossessed. In return, supported by his lawyer, he lost no opportunity to insult her, and to denounce the church. It would have been hard to predict anything but a disastrous future for the reunited family.

One morning the Lady of Good Cheer discovered it plainly written in the pages of The Sun. She could not help smiling as she read, at the characteristic cleverness of the daughters of the canny Scot who once supplied the tenements with flowers surpassing all the efforts of Nature; but she felt defeated and depressed to know that all her work had not availed to prevent such extraordinary ingenuity from going wrong. The papers gave an account of the arrest of the girls for obtaining money under false pretences. They pretended to be the daughters of a gentleman of social prominence who had forsaken the elegant leisure of their palatial home on Madison Avenue to go about soliciting funds for a mission in the slums In which their father was interested. They were trained as beggars from the cradle, and now that they were dressed in the becoming gowns bequeathed them by a lady of fashion, they had sufficient beauty and charm to win even greater success than when they were clothed in rags. After they had collected a goodly sum their contributors began to make requests to visit the mission. This was confusing, and threatened to interrupt the income which was flowing in upon them in such rich streams. They were clever enough, however, to expand their scheme to meet the demands. One day after a particularly insistent inquiry from a wealthy contributor, Alice came forward with a suggestion: *' I have it, Agnes I " she cried. " We must really lo BESIDE THE BOWERY

have a mission to show these guys. They won't take any more of our dope without."

" What do you mean? " asked Agnes.

" I mean we can rent a hall in the slums, and there are always lots of fool mission workers crazy to hear themselves speak, and we can get some one of 'em to come each night. You can play the piano, and I can do a bit of exhorting if we're up against It for talk. We've got plenty of money to rent a cheap stove and some chairs and a piano, and when we can really show the place, we'll raise twice as much. Only we must have it somewhere where there'll be plenty of ragged old loafers looking for shelter and a chance to sit down."

They worked out the plan to the letter. They selected a favourable spot in Brooklyn, rented a stove, a piano and some chairs and soon had persuaded a goodly number of mission workers to come and help on certain nights. The mission soon was filled with the usual crowd of the destitute, and they were able to tabulate a sufficient number of conversions to increase their income by a considerable amount. In the meantime they had found it expedient to separate from their father and mother, who claimed the lion's share of their funds and spent it on drink. Their parents bitterly resented this desertion, and sought them everywhere, but could find no trace of them.

One night the mother, dispossessed of her home

INGENUITY ASKEW ii

and just recovering from a prolonged spree, saw the open door of the mission, and tired of walking the streets with her latest babe in her arms, went in to rest. To her utter amazement she beheld her two daughters on the platform. She arose to her feet and prepared to denounce them. Alice saw her standing there, ragged, dishevelled, her hair falling about her ears, and her dirty shawl wrapped around the baby. It was easy to guess her mother's intent to expose them.

She whispered to Agnes: "Look! There's Mother ! If she speaks shell give the whole show away."

She stepped down swiftly to the woman's side and whispered, " If you say a word we're all done for; keep your mouth shut and we'll give you all you want."

Then she returned to the platform and said: " That poor woman has been walking the streets all day with her baby, with nothing to eat. She has no home, no place to sleep, and not a penny in the world. We can't turn her out in the cold with that child. Christ said to take In the strangers, and I am going to take her into my own house. She shall sleep In my own bed, and so long as there IS a roof over my head she shall be cared for."

The audience was greatly impressed by her self-sacrificing charity. Some one proposed a collection, and the girls soon had in their possession a considerable sum of money, which they devoted to fitting out their mother with more suitable garments.

For a time their colossal deceit worked smoothly, but the father was on their trail. He tracked his wife, and when he found her, there was such a violent altercation that the neighbours sent for the police. The case was thoroughly investigated by the Associated Charities and the girls were arrested.

Alice and Agnes were highly indignant at this turn of affairs. " Why should we be arrested? " they said. " We work for a living. If any one thinks it's a soft snap to run a mission every night in the year, and raise money for it every day, let him try it. They say we Spend some of the money given for the mission on ourselves to go to the theatre and all that, but so does this agent of the Charities that hasn't been arrested. Where does he get the money he spends from his salary to go to the theatre? Some one gave it to the Charity Society for their work with the poor. A person must have a little fun now and then." The Court did not respect their indignation nor appreciate their arguments. They had at last reached a place where they could no more be helped by the love and patience of the friend whom they had rejected, and it was the hand of the law which at length dealt the Donald family its '^ coup de grace J*