To proceed: In Pike Street, approximately midway of a block that enjoys the dubious distinction of being a part of the most congested district of the globe, up four flights of stairs and thence back to the extreme rear, the Finkelstein family, at the time of its discovery, resided. There were many of them and their lot was very lowly. To begin at the top, there was Papa Finkelstein, a man bearded and small, shrinking, unobtrusive and diffident; fashioned with sloping shoulders and an indented chest as though in his extreme youth, when his bones were supple and yielding, a partly successful effort had been made to crowd him, head first, into a narrow-mouthed jar. His back was bent, for he was of the race that for more than nineteen centuries has borne, palfrey-like, upon its patient spines the persecutions of the world.
Next in order came Mamma Finkelstein, hiding her dark head beneath a wig of slick brown horsehair in accordance with the same ritual which ordained that her husband should touch not the corners of his beard. To attend to the business of multiplying and replenishing the earth with Finkelsteins was her chief [250] mission in life. From the family stepladder of these two no rungs were missing. Indeed, about a third of the way down there was a double rung—to wit, twins. The married life of the pair extended over a period of less than eleven years and already there were eight little Finkelsteins, ranging from little to littler to littlest.
Papa Finkelstein was by profession an old-clo’ man. It was his custom to go into the favoured sections where people laid aside their weathered habiliments instead of continuing to wear them, and there watching on street corners to waylay pedestrians of an ample and prosperous aspect, and to inquire of them in his timid and twisted English, whether they had any old clothes to sell. A prospective seller being by this method interested, Papa Finkelstein would accompany the other to his apartment—follow him, rather—and when discarded garments had been fetched forth from closets and piled in a heap upon the floor he would gaze deprecatingly at the accumulation and then, with the air of one who courts ruin by his excessive generosity, tender one dollar and thirty-five cents for the entire lot.
So far so good, this course being in perfect accord with the ethics of the old-clo’ business. But if, as most generally, the owner of the raiment indignantly declined the first offer Papa Finkelstein was at a loss to proceed with the negotiations. The chaffering; the bargaining; [251] the raising of the amount in ten-cent advances, each advance accompanied by agonised outcry; the pretended departure; the reluctant return from the door; the protest; the entreaty; the final gesture, betokening abject and complete surrender, with which the buyer came up to two dollars and fifteen cents—all this, so agreeable to the nature of the born old-clo’ man, was quite beyond him. Oftener than not, the trading ended in no trade.
Or if a bargain was arrived at, if he bore away his bundled purchases to the old-clothes mart on Bayard Street, just off the Bowery, where daily the specialist in sick hats, let us say, swaps decrepit odd trousers and enfeebled dress waistcoats for wares more suitable to his needs, still he tempted bankruptcy. Sharper wits than his, by sheer weight of dominance, bore him down and trafficked him, as the saying goes, out of his eyeteeth. He could have taken over a tannery and run it into a shoestring in no time at all. Many a day was there when he returned home at eventide with nothing to show for his day’s industry except lamentable memories and two tired flat feet.
Lacking the commercial instinct, he was a failure in trade; lacking, too, the artistic, neither would he have made headway with his coreligionists as a professional Schnorrer. By persistent and devoutful attendance upon synagogue services, by the constant exhibition of his poverty in public places, he might have [252] enlisted the sympathies of the benevolent among his fellow worshippers. But he was a dilettante in the practice of piety, even as in the practice of the old-clo’ business. Except as the head of a family, he was what this world is pleased to call a failure.
From all this I would not have you jump at the conclusion that Papa and Mamma Finkelstein and their steadily accruing progeny constituted an unhappy group. Mere precarious existence and the companionship of one another spelled for them contentment. The swarming East Side satisfied them as an abiding place. To the adults it was a better home by far than the drear, dreadful land of pogroms and Black Hundreds from which they had fled; to the younger ones it was the only home they had ever known. They were used to its tormented sky lines, faced in on either side by tall tenements and blocked across by the structures of elevated roads and the stone loops of viaducts; they were used to its secondhand sunshine that filtered down to them through girders and spans. To them the high arch of the Bridge approach was an acceptable substitute for the rainbow; their idea of the profusion of Nature was a tiny square, containing many green benches, a circular band stand, and here and there a spindling tree.
Having nothing they craved for nothing. When there was food they ate thereof; kosher food preferably, though the food of the Goyim [253] was not despised. When there was none they went without, feeding on the thought of past feasts and the hope of future ones. Being without knowledge of the commoner rule of hygiene, their days were neither enhanced by its advantages nor disturbed by its observances.
With the coming of the winter Mamma Finkelstein sewed up her offspring, all and sundry, in their heavy undergarments. Only one consideration ever interposed to prevent her from so doing—the occasional absence of any heavy undergarments in which to sew them up. To the pores, which always ye have with ye, she gave no heed. An interrupted duct more or less meant nothing to her, she being serenely unaware of the existence of such things as ducts, anyhow. In the springtime she cut the stitches and removed the garments, or such portions of them as had not been taken up by natural process of absorption, finding her young, as now newly revealed, to be pinkish, though soiled as to their skins, and in every regard hale, hearty and wholesome.
Thus abided the Finkelsteins in their dire and happy extremity at the time of their discovery. The manner of their being discovered came about as follows: