Part 6 (2/2)
”I don't wonder that you look inquiringly at me, as much as to say, 'is that you?' Yes, it is me, Tom Nolan, the mason, me who used to lay around the dirty rum holes with you, begging, lying, stealing, to get a drink. Do you think that now I would pick up old cigar stumps and quids of tobacco, to fill my pipe? Do you think I would wear a hat, as I have done, that my poor beggared boy picked out of the street? Look at that.
Does that look like the old battered thing I used to wear? Do these clothes look like the dirty rags I wore when you and I slept in Cale Jones's coal-box? Do I look like the drunken Tom Nolan that kept a family of starving beggars, with two other families, in one room, ten by twelve feet square; and that a garret room, without fireplace, without gla.s.s in its one window; with the roof so low that I could only stand up straight in one corner; and that mean room in the vilest locality on earth, in a house--ah! whole row of houses, tenanted by just such miserable, rum-beggared human beings--buildings owned by a human monster--houses for the poor which are enough to sicken the vilest of beasts; such as no good man would let for tenements, even when he could get tenants as degraded as I was--tenements that any Christian grand jury would indict, and any court, which desired to protect the lives of the people, would compel the owners to pull down, as the worst, with one exception, of all city nuisances.
”How did I live there? How did my wife and children ever live there, in that little miserable room, with seven others, just such wretches as ourselves? How do hundreds of such men, women, and children as we were, still live there? I was in that same room--the place my children used to call _home_--this evening. The entrance is in Cow Bay. If you would like to see it, saturate your handkerchief with camphor, so that you can endure the horrid stench, and enter. Grope your way through the long, dark, narrow pa.s.sage--turn to your right, up the dark and dangerous stairway; be careful where you place your foot around the lower step, or in the corners of the broad stairs, for it is more than shoe-mouth deep of steaming filth. Be careful too, or you may meet some one--perhaps a man, perhaps a woman--as nature divides the s.e.xes; as the rum seller combines them, both beasts, who in their drunken frenzy may thrust you, for the very hatred of your better clothes, or the fear that you have come to rescue them from their crazy loved dens of death, down, headlong down, those filthy stairs. Up, up, winding up, five stories high, now you are under the black smoky roof; turn to the left--take care and not upset that seething pot of butcher's offal soup, that is cooking upon a little furnace at the head of the stairs--open that door--go in, if you can get in. Look; here is a negro and his wife sitting upon the floor--where else could they sit, for there is no chair--eating their supper off of the bottom of a pail. A broken brown earthen jug holds water--perhaps not all water. Another negro and his wife occupy another corner; a third sits in the window monopolising all the air astir. In another corner, what do we see?
”A negro man, and a stout, hearty, rather good looking, young white woman.”
”Not sleeping together?”
”No, not exactly that--there is no bed in the room--no chair--no table--no nothing--but rags, and dirt, and vermin, and degraded, rum degraded, human beings--men and women with just such souls as animate the highest and proudest in the land.”
”Who is this man?”
”Dat am Ring-nosed Bill.”
”Is that his wife?”
”Well, I don't know that. He calls her his woman.”
”And she lives with him as his wife--you all live here together in this room?”
”Well, we is got nowhere else to live. Poor folks can't lib as rich ones do--hab to pay rent--pretty hard to do that alone.”
”How much rent for this room?”
”Seventy-five cents a week, ebry time in advance.”
”Who is this man?”
”They calls me Snaky Jo. 'Spose may be my name is Jo Snaky. Don't know rightly.”
”What do you do for a living?”
”Well, mighty hard to tell dat, dat am fact, ma.s.sa. Picks up a job now and then. Mighty hard times though--give poor man a lift, ma.s.sa.”
”Is that man and woman drunk.”
”Well, 'spose am, little tossicated.”
”A little intoxicated! They are dead drunk, lying perfectly unconscious, in each other's _emesis_, upon the bare floor. The atmosphere of this room is enough to breed contagion, and sicken the whole neighborhood, and would, but that the whole neighborhood is equally bad. Let us hasten down to the open air of the court--it is but little better--all pollution--all that breathe it, polluted. Yet, in that gate of death I once lived. Look at me, James, you knew me then. Look at me now, you don't know me. You knew me a beast--you may know me a man--you may know yourself one. Sign this paper--there is a power of magic in it--and you shall go home with me, and see where I live now, and I will clothe you and help to sustain you in your sober life, just as Thomas Elting did me, and with heaven's blessing, we will make a man of you.”
”Too late! too late! not enough of the old frame left to rebuild.”
”It is never too late. Look at the piles of old brick, and tiles, and boards, and joist, and rafters, and doors, and gla.s.s, of the pulled down houses. Are they wasted? I am a mason, you a carpenter; if we cannot put them back and build up the same old-fas.h.i.+oned edifice, we can make a good, snug, comfortable house. Come, sign the contract, and let us set right about the job.”
”Father, come, father!”
He turned and spoke a few low words to his wife, to which she replied:
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