A great passageway opens.
Now of a sudden comes a boy running with a great bundle of the most successful morning paper, a most staggering load. Actually the crowd looks as though it would seize him and tear his bundle away from him, but instead it only closes in quickly behind. When he reaches the Irish woman’s stand there is a great struggling, grabbing circle formed. “The ——,” is the cry. “Gimme a ——,” and for the space of a half-dozen minutes a thriving, exciting business is done in morning papers. Then these men run with their papers like dogs run with a bone. They hurry, each to some neighboring light, and glance up and down the columns. Sometimes they mark something, and then you see them hurry on again. They have picked their prospect.
It is a pitiful spectacle from one point of view, a decidedly grim one from another. Your dishwasher (or ex-waiter) confides that most of these positions, apart from tips, pay only five dollars a week and board. And he admits that the board is vile. While you are talking you recognize some gentlemanly newspaper man, well-salaried, taking his belated way home. What a contrast! What a far cry!
“And say,” says your dishwasher friend, “I thought I’d git a job to-night. I thought somebody’d buy this ring. It’ll bring $1.75 in the pawnshop in the mornin’. I ain’t got carfare or I wouldn’t mention it. I usually soaks it early in the week and gits it out Saturday. I’ll soak it to-morrow, and git another chance to-morrow night.”
What a story! What a predicament!
You go down in your pocket and produce a quarter. You buy him a paper. “On your way,” you say cheerily—but the misery! The depths! To think that any one of us should come to this!
As he goes you watch the others going, and then the silence settles down and the night. There is no sense of traffic here now, no great need of light. The old Irish woman sinks to the dismal task of waiting, for morning, I presume. Now and then some passing pedestrian will buy a paper, but not often. But these others—they have gone in the direction of the four winds of heaven; they are applying at the shabby doors of restaurants, in Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx, Hoboken, Staten Island; they are sitting on stoops, holding their own at shop doors. They have the right to ask first, the right to be first, because they are first—noble privilege.
And you and I—well, we turn in our dreams and rest. The great world wags on. Our allotted portion is not this. We are not of these men in the dark.