Hey Rub-a-dub-dub: A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life

HEY RUB-A-DUB-DUB
A BOOK OF THE MYSTERY AND WONDER AND TERROR OF LIFE
BOOKS BY THEODORE DREISER
SISTER CARRIE JENNIE GERHARDT THE FINANCIER THE TITAN THE GENIUS A TRAVELER AT FORTY A HOOSIER HOLIDAY PLAYS OF THE NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL THE HAND OF THE POTTER FREE AND OTHER STORIES TWELVE MEN
A BOOK OF THE MYSTERY AND WONDER AND TERROR OF LIFE By T H E O D O R E D R E I S E R AUTHOR OF “SISTER CARRIE,” “THE HAND OF THE POTTER,” “FREE AND OTHER STORIES,” “JENNIE GERHARDT,” ETC.
B O N I A N D L I V E R I G H T N E W Y O R K 1920 Copyright, 1920, By BONI & LIVERIGHT, Inc. Printed in the United States of America

I HAVE lived now to my fortieth year, and have seen a good deal of life. Just now, because of a stretch of poverty, I am living across the river from New York, in New Jersey, in sight of a splendid tower, the Woolworth Building on the lower end of Manhattan, which lifts its defiant spear of clay into the very maw of heaven. And although I am by no means as far from it as is Fifth Avenue, still I am a dweller in one of the shabbiest, most forlorn neighborhoods which the great metropolis affords. About me dwell principally Poles and Hungarians, who palaver in a lingo of which I know nothing and who live as I would despise to live, poor as I am. For, after all, in my hall-bedroom, which commands the river over the lumberyard, there is some attempt at intellectual adornment, whereas outside and around me there is little more than dull and to a certain extent aggrieved drudgery.
Not so very far from me is a church, a great yellow structure which lifts its walls out of a ruck of cheap frame houses, and those muddy, unpaved streets which are the pride of Jersey City and Hoboken. Here, if I will, I can hear splendid masses intoned, see bright altars and stained glass windows and people going to confession and burning votive candles before images. And if I go of a Sunday, which I rarely do, I can hear regularly that there is a Christ who died for men, and that He was the son of the living God who liveth and reigneth world without end.