Part 15 (1/2)
It got its name from the many rows that traveled in the wake of the growler out and in at the three-foot gap between brick walls, which was a garden walk when the front house was young and pansies and spiderwort grew in the back lot. These many years a tenement has stood there, and as it grew older and more dilapidated, rows multiplied and grew noisier, until the explosive name was hooked to the alley by the neighbors, and stuck. It was long after that that the Ca.s.sidys, father and daughter, came to live in it, and also the Harts. Their coming wrought no appreciable change, except that it added another and powerful one to the dynamic forces of the alley--jealousy. Kate is pretty. She is blonde and she is twenty. She greases plates in a pie bakery in Sullivan street by day, and so earns her own living. Of course she is a favorite. There isn't a ball going on that she doesn't attend, or a picnic either. It was at one of them, the last of the Hounds' b.a.l.l.s, that she met George Finnegan.
There weren't many hours after that when they didn't meet. He made the alley his headquarters by day and by night. On the morning after the ball he scandalized it by spooning with Kate from daybreak till nine o'clock.
By the middle of the afternoon he was back again, and all night, till every one was asleep, he and Kate held the alley by main strength, as it were, the fact being that when they were in it no one could pa.s.s. Their spooning blocked it, blocked the way of the growler. The alley called it mean, and trouble began promptly.
After that things fell by accident out of the windows of the rear tenement when Kate and George Finnegan were sitting in the doorway. They tried to reduce the chances of a hit as much as might be by squeezing into the s.p.a.ce of one, at which the alley jeered. Sometimes one of the tenants would jostle them in the yard and ”give lip,” in the alley's vernacular, and Kate would retort with dignity: ”Excuse yerself. Ye don't know who yer talkin' to.”
It had to come to it, and it did. Finnegan had been continuing the siege since the warm weather set in. He was a good spieler, Kate gave in to that. But she hadn't taken him for her steady yet, though the alley let on it thought so. Her steady is away at sea. George evidently thought the time ripe for cutting him out. His spooning ran into the small hours of the morning, night after night.
It was near 1 A. M. that morning when Thomas Hart came down to the yard, stumbled over the pair in the doorway, and made remarks. As he pa.s.sed out of sight, George, the swain, said:
”If he gives any more lip when he comes back, I'll swing on him.” And just then Hart came back.
He did ”give lip,” and George ”swung on him.” It took him in the eye, and he fell. Then he jumped on him and stove in his slats. Kate ran.
After all, George Finnegan was not game. When Hart's wife came down to see who groaned in the yard, and, finding her husband, let out those blood-curdling yells which made Kate Ca.s.sidy hide in an ice-wagon half-way down the block, he deserted Kate and ran.
Mistress Hart's yells brought Policeman Devery. He didn't ask whence they came, but made straight for the alley. Mistress Hart was there, vowing vengeance upon ”Kate Ca.s.sidy's feller,” who had done up her man. She vowed vengeance in such a loud voice that the alley trembled with joyful excitement, while Kate, down the street, crept farther into the ice-wagon, trembling also, but with fear. Kate is not a fighter. She is too good-looking for that.
The policeman found her there and escorted her home, past the Hart door, after he had sent Mister Hart to the hospital, where the doctors fixed his slats (ribs, that is to say). Mistress Hart, outnumbered, fell back and organized an ambush, vowing that she would lay Kate out yet. Discovering that the Floods, next door, had connived at her enemy's descent by way of their fire-escape, she included them in the siege by prompt declaration of war upon the whole floor.
The cause of it all, safe in the bakery, suspended the greasing of pie-plates long enough to give her version of the row:
”We were a-sittin' there, quiet an' peaceful like,” she said, ”when Mister Hart came along an' made remarks, an' George he give it back to him good.
'Oh,' says he, 'you ain't a thousand; yer only one,' an' he went. When he came back, George he stood up, an' Mister Hart he says to me: 'Ye're not an up-stairs girl; you can be called down,' an' George he up an' struck him. I didn't wait fer no more. I just run out of the alley. Is he hurted bad?
”Who is George? He is me feller. I met him at the Hounds' ball in Germania Hall, an' he treated me same as you would any lady. We danced together an'
had a couple of drinks, an' he took me home. George ain't me steady, you know. Me regular he is to sea. See?
”I didn't see nothin'. I hid in the wagon while I heard him callin'
names. I wasn't goin' in till Mr. Deevy [Policeman Devery] he came along.
I told him I was scart, and he said: 'Oh, come along.' But I was dead scart.
”Say, you won't forget to come to our picnic, the 'Pie-Girls,' will you?
It'll be great.”
HEROES WHO FIGHT FIRE
Thirteen years have pa.s.sed since, but it is all to me as if it had happened yesterday--the clanging of the fire-bells, the hoa.r.s.e shouts of the firemen, the wild rush and terror of the streets; then the great hush that fell upon the crowd; the sea of upturned faces, with the fire-glow upon it; and up there, against the background of black smoke that poured from roof and attic, the boy clinging to the narrow ledge, so far up that it seemed humanly impossible that help could ever come.
But even then it was coming. Up from the street, while the crew of the truck company were laboring with the heavy extension-ladder that at its longest stretch was many feet too short, crept four men upon long, slender poles with cross-bars, iron-hooked at the end. Standing in one window, they reached up and thrust the hook through the next one above, then mounted a story higher. Again the crash of gla.s.s, and again the dizzy ascent. Straight up the wall they crept, looking like human flies on the ceiling, and clinging as close, never resting, reaching one recess only to set out for the next; nearer and nearer in the race for life, until but a single span separated the foremost from the boy. And now the iron hook fell at his feet, and the fireman stood upon the step with the rescued lad in his arms, just as the pent-up flame burst lurid from the attic window, reaching with impotent fury for its prey. The next moment they were safe upon the great ladder waiting to receive them below.
Then such a shout went up! Men fell on each other's necks, and cried and laughed at once. Strangers slapped one another on the back, with glistening faces, shook hands, and behaved generally like men gone suddenly mad. Women wept in the street. The driver of a car stalled in the crowd, who had stood through it all speechless, clutching the reins, whipped his horses into a gallop, and drove away yelling like a Comanche, to relieve his feelings. The boy and his rescuer were carried across the street without any one knowing how. Policemen forgot their dignity, and shouted with the rest. Fire, peril, terror, and loss were alike forgotten in the one touch of nature that makes the whole world kin.
Fireman John Binns was made captain of his crew, and the Bennett medal was pinned on his coat on the next parade-day. The burning of the St. George Flats was the first opportunity New York had of witnessing a rescue with the scaling-ladders that form such an essential part of the equipment of the fire-fighters to-day. Since then there have been many such. In the company in which John Binns was a private of the second grade, two others to-day bear the medal for brave deeds: the foreman, Daniel J. Meagher, and Private Martin M. Coleman, whose name has been seven times inscribed on the roll of honor for twice that number of rescues, any one of which stamped him as a man among men, a real hero. And Hook-and-Ladder No. 3 is not specially distinguished among the fire-crews of the metropolis for daring and courage. New-Yorkers are justly proud of their firemen. Take it all in all, there is not, I think, to be found anywhere a body of men as fearless, as brave, and as efficient as the Fire Brigade of New York. I have known it well for twenty years, and I speak from a personal acquaintance with very many of its men, and from a professional knowledge of more daring feats, more hairbreadth escapes, and more brilliant work, than could well be recorded between the covers of this book.
Indeed, it is hard, in recording any, to make a choice, and to avoid giving the impression that recklessness is a chief quality in the fireman's make-up. That would not be true. His life is too full of real peril for him to expose it recklessly--that is to say, needlessly. From the time when he leaves his quarters in answer to an alarm until he returns, he takes a risk that may at any moment set him face to face with death in its most cruel form. He needs nothing so much as a clear head; and nothing is prized so highly, nothing puts him so surely in the line of promotion; for as he advances in rank and responsibility, the lives of others, as well as his own, come to depend on his judgment. The act of conspicuous daring which the world applauds is oftenest to the fireman a matter of simple duty that had to be done in that way because there was no other. Nor is it always, or even usually, the hardest duty, as he sees it. It came easy to him because he is an athlete trained to do just such things, and because once for all it is easier to risk one's life in the open, in the sight of one's fellows, than to face death alone, caught like a rat in a trap. That is the real peril which he knows too well; but of that the public hears only when he has fought his last fight, and lost.
How literally our every-day security--of which we think, if we think of it at all, as a mere matter of course--is built upon the supreme sacrifice of these devoted men, we realize at long intervals, when a disaster occurs such as the one in which Chief Bresnan and Foreman Rooney[2] lost their lives three years ago. They were crushed to death under the great water-tank in a Twenty-fourth street factory that was on fire. Its supports had been burned away. An examination that was then made of the water-tanks in the city discovered eight thousand that were either wholly unsupported, except by the roof-beams, or propped on timbers, and therefore a direct menace, not only to the firemen when they were called there, but daily to those living under them. It is not pleasant to add that the department's just demand for a law that should compel landlords either to build tanks on the wall or on iron supports has not been heeded yet; but that is, unhappily, an old story.
[2] Rooney wore the Bennett medal for saving the life of a woman at the disastrous fire in the old ”World” building, on January 31, 1882.