MAX FARGUS
CHAPTER I THE HOUSE OF THE TIN SAILOR
In a street, uniform and dedicated it would seem to commonplace existences, there was taking place, on a certain evening in March, 187-, a chapter in one of the most perplexing and mysterious of dramas which the scramble for wealth has known; whose denouement, unsuspected by neighbors and hidden from the press, holds the secret of the rise of one of the most forceful and brutal individualities that have dominated the city.
Near Stuyvesant Square, which then presented in the waste of New York, a charming oasis, serene and calm with the quiet of Colonial dignity; in one of the side streets east of Second Avenue there extended an unbroken march of red brick houses, uniform as though homes were fashioned wholesale. The block was clear of the skirts of fashion which gathered about the square, yet rescued from the squalor into which the street suddenly sank as it passed east under the brutal yoke of the Elevated.
It belonged to mediocre life, to those who earned two thousand a year, who paid a third of their income in rent, went rarely to the theater and always to church, where occasionally the children fetched the family beer in pail and pitcher; a street of one servant or none at all; one of those indistinct half-way stations of the city where fortune and misfortune, ascending and descending, pass; where one finds the small shopkeeper, the clerk who is rising next to the doctor whose patients have left him, or the lawyer who has missed his leap. Towards the east a saloon made the corner, while a few doors nearer a brothel displayed its red ensign, before which, in the daytime, the children romped without distinction. Already several doorways invited board and lodging, signs of the invasion which sooner or later would claim the street.
A third of the way down the block, on the north side, there projected above a doorway the figure of a tin sailor, balancing two paddles which the breeze caused to revolve. Some one in whom the instinct of home was strong had placed it there in protest against the tyranny of uniformity, while succeeding tenants, grateful for the indication, had left it undisturbed.
By eleven o'clock of the night on which this story opens, beside the distant red lantern of the brothel and a few top-story lights there was only the parlor window, under the odd weather-vane, whose bright edge cut into the blackness of the street. The shade, contrary to custom, was lowered, but at each approaching step the silhouette of a woman crossed it hurriedly in the direction of the door.
Shortly after the bells of a dozen churches had cried the hour, a man coming from the west passed under the lamp-post, carrying a satchel and striding with that nervous intensity which the tumult of New York injects into the legs.