"Come this way."
This way was out into Forty-second Street. With their suitcases in their hands, they climbed into a street car going westward. Westward they went, changing to another car going southward, under the thunder of the elevated, in Ninth Avenue. At Fourteenth Street they got out again. Tom recognized the neighborhood because of its nearness to the great markets to which they sometimes brought supplies. But they avoided the markets, making their way between drays, round buildings in course of demolition, through gangs of children wooing disaster as they played in the streets. In the end they turned out of the tumult to find themselves in a placid little backwater of the "old New York" of the early nineteenth century. Reading the sign at the corner Tom saw that it was Jane Street.
Jane Street dates from a period earlier than the development of that civic taste which gives to all New York north of Fourteenth Street the picturesqueness of a sum in simple arithmetic. Jane Street has atmosphere, period, chic. You know at a glance that the people who built these trim little red-brick houses still felt that impulse which first came to Manhattan from The Hague, to be fostered later by William and Mary, and finally merged in the Georgian tradition. Jane Street is Dutch. It has Dutch quaintness, and, as far as New York will permit it, Dutch cleanliness. It might be a byway in Amsterdam. Instead of cutting straight from the Hudson River Docks to Greenwich Avenue, it might run from a canal with barges on it to a field of hyacinths in bloom.
But Tom Quidmore saw not what you and I would have seen, a relief from the noise and fetidness of a hot summer's morning in a neighborhood reeking with garbage. When his heart had been fixed on that dream-city, Wilmington, Delaware, he found himself in a dingy little alley. Not often querulous, he became so now.
"What are we doing down here?"
The reply startled him. "I'm—I'm sick."
Looking again at the man who shuffled along beside him, he saw that his face had grown ashy, while his eyes, which earlier in the day had had life in them, were lusterless. The boy would have been frightened had it not been for the impulse of affection.
"Let's go back to Bere. Then you can have the doctor. I'll get a cab and steer the whole business."
Without answering, Quidmore stopped at a brown door, level with the pavement, in a big, dim-windowed building, with fire escapes zigzagging down the front. Jane Street is not exclusively clean and trim and Dutch. It has lapses—here a warehouse, there a dwelling tumbling to decay, elsewhere a nondescript structure like this. It looked like a lodging house for sailors and dock laborers. In the basement was a restaurant to which you went down by steps, and bearing the legend Pappa's Chop Saloon.