Local Color

Without loss of time, Mr. Blotch drove his excursionists aboard; and soon then, to the strains of martial music, the swaddled craft was moving gayly down the river. Or, anyhow, she moved as gayly as was possible, seeing that the river was of a rumpled, grayish aspect, abounding in large waves, and each wave flounced with a ruffle of dirty-white foam; and seeing, further, that an exceedingly keen wind blew dead against her, searching out the remotest and most sheltered recesses of her decks. Mr. Blotch remained in the engine room throughout the journey.

But all pleasant things must have an end; and eventually, although to some aboard it seemed even longer than that, the steamer reached Coney. Somewhere on this globe there may be a more dispiriting, more dismal spot than Coney is on a wet and cloudy day in the early part of June. I have heard Antarctic explorers speak with feeling of the sense of desolation inspired by contemplation of the scenery closely adjacent to the South Pole; but, never having been at or near the South Pole, I am still pledged to Coney Island.

A hot dog merchant there, hearing the strains of music and beholding the approach of a multitude, lit his fires and laid specimens of his wares upon the grid to brown and sizzle. A closer view of the massed crowd, advancing toward him from the pier, disillusioned him. As a regular subscriber to the Evening Dispatch he knew that these oncoming hosts were not to be considered, even remotely, as prospective patrons. For had it not been written and repeatedly written that they were to be regaled, ABSOLUTELY WITHOUT EXPENSE, at Stanchheimer’s Chowder Pavilion? Verily it had been so written. Uttering fluent maledictions in his sonorous native Greek, the hot dog man went inside his booth, pulled down the shades and turned off the gas.

On a wide and windswept shore, where pallid sands ran down to pallid sea, and sea in turn ran out and out to mingle, under shrouding fog banks, with lowering skies, the small Fresh-Air funders were turned loose and sternly ordered to enjoy themselves. Perversely, they persisted in huddling in close, tight clusters, as though drawn together by a gravitation of common discomfort. Their conductor was not to be thwarted. He had a duty to perform – a duty to them and to his employer – and scrupulously he meant to obey it if it cost forty lives. From group to group Mr. Moe Blotch ran, yanking its members out into the cheerless open.

“Play, consarn you! Play!” he blared at them. “Laugh and sing and dig in the sands! Breathe in the life-giving ozone or I’ll break every bone in your bodies!”

Little Miriam found herself alone and lonesome in the shadow of a depressingly pale-yellow dune. She thought of the warm and comfortable tenement hallway, crowded as it would be with gossiping little deputy mothers and crawling, babbling babies. She thought of the shifting panorama of Pike Street’s sidewalk life, spectacular and thrilling. She thought of her own two special charges – Izzy and Izzy – deprived now of their customary guardianship and no doubt pining for it.

These poignant memories overcame her. She lifted her face to the unresponsive vault of heaven, and she wept. Once she was at it, there was no false restraint in her weeping; she bemoaned her lot shrilly, copiously and damply. Moisture streamed from her eyes, her mouth, her nose. In her rendition there was a certain aquatic wholeheartedness that would have interested and startled a student of natural hydraulics. Practically this child had riparian rights.

To her side came running Solly, her brother, likewise weeping. His antlerlike ears, undefended and, as it were, defiantly outbranching to the edged breezes, were now two chilled disks, shot through their more membranous surfaces with bluish, pinkish, greenish tones, like mother-of-pearl. His nose, from tip to base, was one frigid and painful curve. And, to top all, Solly, venturing too near the beach edge, had been surprised by a quick, large wave. From his waist down he dripped sea water. His fortitude succumbed before this final misfortune. He mingled his tears with Miriam’s, substantially doubling the output.

Their sorrow might have touched a heart of stone; but Mr. Blotch, embarking on this mission of pleasure, had left his heart behind him, foreseeing that its presence might be inconvenient to a proper discharge of his philanthropic obligations. He charged down upon them, separated their entwined arms and, with terrible threats, required them to play and dig in the sand.

So they played and they dug in the sand. Choking back their sobs and burying their little, cold fingers in the cold, gritty sand, they played and dug through the long forenoon until dinnertime; and after dinner they dug and played some more, until the hour for departure arrived, cutting short all their blithesome misery.

Beyond question, Solly next day would have developed pneumonia, except that pneumonia was far too troublesome a luxury for any of the Finkelstein family to be having. Besides, at this juncture the weather providentially turned off to be warm and seasonable, and, scouting in East Broadway, he happened upon a large, empty crockery crate, which seemed to lack a friend. He up-ended it, crawled inside it and made off with it; and so completely hidden was he within its capsized depths that one observing the spectacle might have been excused for assuming that a crockery crate was out for a walk on its own account. In the joys of perilous adventures and treasure-findings Solly conquered his symptoms and forgot to fall ill.

The weather continued to be warm and warmer. By mid-July it was so warm that the interior of the tenements became insufferable, and the dwellers slept of nights on fire escapes and in doorways, and even in the little squares and out on the pavement gratings, stretched – whole rows of them – upon pallets and quilts. The hot spell afforded Miss Godiva Sleybells an opportunity to do something that was really worth while for the two older of the eight younger Finkelsteins. She came one simmering day and told them the splendid news. They were to have a week – a whole week – on a farm up in the Catskills.

With memories of Coney still vivid in their young brains, Miriam and Solly inwardly quailed at the prospect; but they went. There was nothing else for them to do; the determined dragoness in the double-lensed spectacles, who managed their mother and condemned them at intervals to trials by soap and water, had so ordained it.

I wish I might say the two children were wrong in their forebodings; I wish I might paint their week in the Catskills as a climactic success. Perhaps from Miss Godiva Sleybells’ viewpoint it was a success; but, remember, I am concerned with detailing not her impressions so much as the impressions of these small wards of hers.

Remember, too, that in saying what I must, as a truthful historian, say, I mean not to reflect upon the common aims or the general results of that splendid charity which each year sends thousands of poor children to the country, there for a spell to breathe in a better air than ever they have breathed, and to eat of better fare than ever they have eaten. In this instance I am afraid the trouble was that the city had trapped the small Finkelsteins too early. If they had not been born in its stone-and-steel cage, at any rate they could not remember a time when they had not lived in it. They were like birds, which, being freed, cannot use their wings because they have never used them, but only flutter about distractedly, seeking to return to the old confines within the bars of the prison and the familiar perches of its constricted bounds. Distance – free, limitless and far-extending – daunts those other birdlings as it daunted these two small human ones. It was so strange an experience to them to be thrust into the real out-of-doors. And to most of us whatever is strange is uncomfortable – until we get accustomed to it.

The journey mountainward frightened the small pair. They had never been on a train before. As they clung to each other, cowering low in their seat every time the locomotive hooted, they resolved that willingly they would never be on one again. Upon reaching their destination they were required to sleep in separate beds, which was an experience so very different from the agreeable and neighbourly congestion of sleeping four or five to a bed, as at home. Next morning they were given for breakfast country eggs and country milk – the one fresh-laid by the hen; the other fresh-drawn from the udder.

For Miriam and Solly it proved a most unsatisfactory meal. This milk came from a cow, whereas the milk they knew came from a milkman. It was so yellow, so annoyingly thick, so utterly lacking in the clear blue, almost translucent, aspect of East Side milk! The Catskill egg likewise proved disappointing. After the infrequent Pike Street egg, with its staunchness and pungency of flavour, it seemed but a weak, spiritless, flat-tasting thing.

When breakfast was over they went forth upon kindly compulsion from the farmhouse kitchen and, barefooted, were turned loose on a grassy mead. At once all Nature appeared in a conspiracy against them. The wide reaches of space disturbed them, whose horizon always had been fenced in with tall, close-racked buildings. The very earth was a pitfall, bearded with harsh saw-edged grass blades, drenched with chilly dews, and containing beneath the ambush of its green covering many rough and uneven depressions. The dew irritated Solly’s naked legs, making him long for the soothing contact of Pike Street’s mud-coated cobbles. Miriam stubbed her shrinking pink toes against hidden clods when she essayed a timorous step or two forward. So both of them stood still, then, very much at a loss to know what they should or could do next.

Somebody suggested to Miriam that she pick the wild flowers and the wild vine tendrils and weave them into garlands. Was it her fault that her very first selections should be a spray of poisoned sumac, first cousin to poison ivy, and that her second should be a handful of nettles? Somebody else undertook to induct Solly into the pleasures of tree climbing. Was it altogether his fault that he should promptly fall out of the first crotch and painfully sprain and bruise himself in several places?

And when, finally, they had been induced to quit the immediate proximity of the farmhouse, which at least provided a refuge and a shelter from suspected dangers, and had ventured over a fence and into a pasture, a most terrible thing occurred. Toward them there suddenly advanced an enormous red creature, tossing a huge head crowned with sharp horns, and emitting frightful, rumbling sounds from a great rubbery muzzle.

With shrieks of terror, they fled blindly into a patch of woodland that was perhaps two acres in extent; and, losing themselves in its – to them – vast and impenetrable depths, they remained there, crouching behind a tree until discovered, tearful, hungry and disconsolate, by a volunteer search party shortly before sunset. Miriam’s subsequent description of the monster that had menaced them, as detailed to her mother, gave Mamma Finkelstein a mental picture of something which might be likened to a cross between a raging rhinoceros and a hook-and-ladder motor truck. For it had been many a year since Mamma Finkelstein herself had seen a yearling heifer. And Miriam never had seen one before.

It was indeed a hard and an irksome week. The end of it saw the two small adventurers, both sun-blistered and peeling, both broken out as to hands and legs with strange, irritating rashes, and both with gladness in their little homesick souls, returning to the beloved perils and the customary pleasures of the torrid town.

After this the Finkelsteins for a while had a welcomed respite from kindness. They fairly revelled in it; but not for a great while, nor, in fact, for very long, did it endure. Following Labor Day, Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass came back from her country place up Greenwich way and reopened her city place. It transpired that with her she had brought a perfectly splendid idea. She was going to establish the Finkelsteins on an abandoned farm. While motoring about over the country lanes in Connecticut she had found the very spot for them – an ideal spot, indeed – nine acres, and nine miles from a railroad, with a ruinous little cottage, all furnished, perched upon a rocky hillock in the centre of the nine acres.

It was upon this site she was resolved they should be domiciled. There – as she herself said – Papa Finkelstein might turn farmer and maybe make a fortune. There Mamma Finkelstein could rear her brood in peace and quiet, far aloof and remote from the teeming multitude. There the fresh, pure air of the country would restore the bloom of health to the cheeks of all the little Finkelsteins. What mattered it though the little Finkelsteins were already so healthy that if they had been any healthier than they were it might have been necessary to tap them for it? I am not detailing what was actually the case, but what Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass, in the exuberance engendered by her generous impulses, said about it.

A scheme so large required cooperation. Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass secured it from Miss Godiva Sleybells, whom she had met upon more than one occasion when the two of them chanced to happen in upon the Finkelsteins at the same time, and from Miss Betty Gwin, who frequently had been called upon to detail to a hungry reading public particulars concerning Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass’ social and charitable endeavours.

Together these three constituted a committee on ways, means and publicity. Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass provided the funds for leasing the nine acres and for transporting its ten future tenants to their future home. Miss Godiva Sleybells agreed, for her part, to insure that the prospective colonists, both big and little, were properly loaded and properly shipped to their destination. Miss Betty Gwin wrote a moving word picture two columns long about it, in which she mentioned the late Baron de Hirsch once and Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass a great many times.

Actually the day preceding the day set for the removal of the Finkelsteins arrived before it occurred to the three conferees that they had entirely forgotten until that minute to take the Finkelsteins into their confidence – not that it very much mattered; this was but an incidental detail, which before now had been altogether overlooked. Miss Sleybells volunteered to go and tell them. She went and she did.

Reporting back to the principal factor in this kindly little conspiracy, Miss Sleybells said the Finkelstein family had been stunned – literally stunned into dumb silence by the grateful joy the tidings brought to them. She said surprise and gratitude had left them absolutely speechless. Naturally she had no way of knowing, when she broke the glad news, that Solly thought of Coney’s inhospitable sands and treacherous seas; that Miriam thought of the fearsome Catskill cow; that their mother, whose whole life had been bounded by two Ghettos – one in the Old World and one in the New, and who knew no other life – thought of a great variety of things; and that the children, ranging from the twins downward, would have done some thinking, too, had they been of suitable age thus to indulge their juvenile intellects.

She had no way of knowing that, when she was gone from among them, Papa Finkelstein stood erect and, elevating his two hands in passionate entreaty toward heaven, with solemn fervour uttered the only words which it is fated that we, in this recital, shall ever hear him utter. He spake them in the tongue with which he was most conversant. He said:

“Gott bei heit!”

September’s hurried twilight was folding in upon Pike Street. Against the curbing, surrounded by an admiring throng, stood Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass’ third-best car. Hard by stood an express wagon, its driver ready to receive what puny freightage of household and personal belongings as might be consigned to his care. And upstairs, upon the top floor of a certain tenement, in the narrow hall outside the Finkelstein flat, stood Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass, Miss Godiva Sleybells and Miss Betty Gwin. The first named of these three was come to witness the accomplishment of her beautiful purpose; the second, to lend her executive abilities to the details of the undertaking; the third, to write a piece about it.

In accord with her regular habit Miss Sleybells turned the knob. The knob turned part way, but the door did not open; so she rattled the knob and knocked with her knuckles on the panel. Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass raised her flutelike voice in cooing accents.

“Open the door, my dear charities,” she said clearly. “It is I – your good angel.”

Miss Betty Gwin stooped and applied a squinted eye at the keyhole. Miss Sleybells knocked again – harder. There was no answer.

I shall tell you why there was no answer. The reason is a good and sufficient one. All day within their two rooms the Finkelstein family had bided, waiting, waiting; hoping against hope. With the sound of well-remembered footsteps in the hall without, with the sound of a well-known voice uplifted, the last faint remnant of hope expired.

In melancholy resignation Papa Finkelstein nodded to Mamma Finkelstein; and Mamma Finkelstein, stifling the plaint of the youngest baby in her shawl, nodded back to him in sorrowful confirmation of the worst. With gestures he imposed deep silence upon all present. He tiptoed into the rear room and his people followed, tiptoeing also. He climbed out of the back window and descended the fire-escape ladder to the fire-escape landing at the level of the next floor below. He balanced himself there and into his extended arms, Mamma Finkelstein passed down to him, one by one, their children; and he, in turn, passed them in at a window where Mrs. Esther Rabinowitz, a good-hearted neighbour, received them, and deposited them in a mute row upon her kitchen floor. At the last Mamma Finkelstein descended and joined him.

They assembled their progeny. They noiselessly emerged from Mrs. Rabinowitz’ hall door; and, noiselessly all, they fled down the stairs and out into the gathering twilight of Pike Street, which has a way of growing shabby and soiled-looking as it gathers. They had deserted all their small belongings; they knew not where that night they might lay their heads; they had no idea where they were going – but they were on their way.

Up on the top floor Miss Sleybells knocked and knocked again. Miss Gwin put her ear to the locked, barred door and listened and listened for betraying sounds within; and Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass raised her coo to yet a flutier pitch. And while they were thus engaged the Finkelstein family, one and all, vanished into the cloaking, protecting dusk where Pike Street runs toward the river.

Did I say Finkelstein family? I was wrong there.

For purposes of better concealment Papa Finkelstein had changed the name. The inspiration had come to him even as he gripped the topmost round of the fire-escape ladder. Changing it, he had seen fit to honour, by virtue of self-adoption, a race of Irish kings, and notably a policeman of his acquaintance, a descendant of that kingly line. He changed it to Finnigan. Loss to the Finkelsteins would thenceforth be gain to the Finnigans.

So they vanished away – Papa Meyer Finnigan, Mamma Leah Finnigan – née Pincus – Miriam Finnigan, Solly Finnigan, the Finnigan twins, Izzy and Izzy; Benjamin Finnigan, Rebecca Finnigan, Lena Finnigan, and so on down to Baby Leopold Finnigan – and were gone!

For does it not stand written that – ? But see Corinthians – first, thirteenth and fourth – and notably the first three words of the same. Only it should have been written there, in amplification, that there is a limit.

CHAPTER VIII

ENTER THE VILLAIN

It is conceded, I believe, that every story should have a moral; also, whenever possible, a heroine or a hero, a villainess or a villain, a plot and a climax. Now this story has a villain of sorts, if you choose to look upon him in that light; but no hero, and no climax. And certainly there is no moral to adorn the tale. So far as I have been able to discover it is absolutely moral-less. So then, reader, if you, being thus foreadvised regarding these avowed shortcomings of my narrative, choose to go further with it, the responsibility must be yours and not mine. Don’t you come round afterward saying I didn’t warn you.

The rise of the curtain discloses the city room of The Clarion, a New York morning newspaper. The hour is six-thirty P. M., the period is the approximate present, and the season is summer time. At a desk in the foreground is discovered the head office boy in the act of scissoring certain marked passages out of copies of the afternoon papers and impaling them upon spindles. Beyond him, at a big oaken table shaped like half of a pie, a lone copy reader is humped in his chair, chewing on a cold pipestem and editing a bad piece of copy with a relentless black lead. In this case the copy reader is named Hemburg. He is of a type of which at least one example is to be found in nearly every large newspaper shop – a competent failure, gone alcoholically to seed; usually holding down a desk job; rarely quite drunk and rarely quite sober, and in this mid-state of befuddlement performing his work with a strange mechanical accuracy; but once in a while he comes on duty cold sober – cause unknown – and then the chances are he does something unpardonably wrong, something incredibly stupid, which costs him his job. Just such a man is this present man Hemburg. As, shoving his pencil, he carves the very giblets out of the last sheet of the belated typewritten manuscript lying under his hand, the sunlight, slanting in at a west window behind him, falls over his shoulders in a streaked flood, making his reddened face seem redder than ever – as red as hearth paint – and turning his ears a bright, clear, pinkish colour, as though they might be two little memorial panes set there in dedication to the wasted life and the frittered talents of their owner.

Farther up stage the city-hall reporter, who because he has passed his fortieth birthday and has grey in his hair is known as Pop, and the ship-news reporter, who because he is the ship-news reporter is known as Skipper, the same as in all well-regulated newspaper offices, are pasting up their strings, both of them being space men. Otherwise the big bare room with its rows of desks and its scrap-strewn floor is quite empty. This hour, coming between six and seven, in the city room of The Clarion or any other big paper, is apt to be the quietest of all hours between starting time, early in the afternoon, and quitting time, early in the morning. The day city editor, having finished his stint, has gone off watch, leaving behind for his successor, the night city editor, a single scrawled sheet upon which is recorded the tally of things accomplished, things undertaken and things failed at. The reporters who got afternoon assignments have most of them turned in their stories and have taken other assignments which will keep them out of the office until much later. So almost an ecclesiastical quiet fills the city room now.

For the matter of that, it is only in the dramatic versions that a newspaper office ever attains the aspect of frenzied tumult so familiar and so agreeable to patrons of plays purporting to deal with newspaper life. As usually depicted upon the stage, a city room near press time is something like a skating rink, something like the recreation hall of a madhouse, something like a munitions factory working overtime on war orders, and nothing at all like a city room. Even when its manifold activities are in full swing the actual city room, save for the click of typewriter keys, is apt to be as sedately quiet as – let’s see now! What would make a suitable comparison? Well – as sedately quiet, say, as the reading room of the average Carnegie Library.

Six-thirty-four – enter the villain.

The practical door at the right opened and Mr. Foxman came in. In just what he stood in he might have posed for the typical picture of the typical New York business man; not the tired business man for whom the musical shows are supposed to be written but the kind of business man who does not tire so easily. A close-cropped, greyish moustache, a pair of nose glasses riding a short, pugnacious nose in front of two keen eyes, a well-knit middle-age shape inside of a smart-fitting suit, a positive jaw, an air of efficiency and a square shoulder – that briefly would be Mr. Hobart Foxman, managing editor of The Clarion.