We sat with subdued spirits at the prow, discussing the dangers of the sea. McLaughlin, who had been five years in the service, told of accidents and disappearances in the past. Once, out of the night had rushed a steamer, cutting a boat such as ours in two. One pilot-boat that had gone out two years ago had never returned. Not a stick or scrap was found to indicate what had become of her fifteen men. He told how the sounding of the fog-horns had chilled his heart the first year of his service, and how the mournful lapping of the waters had filled him with dread. And as we looked and saw nothing but blackness, and listened and heard nothing but the sipping of the still waters, it did seem as though the relentless sea merely waited its time. Some day it might have them all, sailor and cook, and where now were rooms and lockers would be green water and strange fishes.
That night we slept soundly. A fine wind sprang up, and when morning came we were scurrying home over a thrashing sea. We raced past Sandy Hook and put up the bay. By eight o’clock we were at the Narrows, with the Battery in sight. The harbor looked like a city of masts. After the lonely sea it seemed alive with a multitude of craft. Tugs went puffing by. Scows and steamers mingled. Amid so much life the sea seemed safe.
BUMS
Whenever I think of them I think of the spectacle that genius of the burlesque world of my day, Nat Wills, used to present when, in fluttering rags and tatters, his vestless shirt open at the breast, revealing no underwear, his shoes three times too big, and torn and cracked, a small battered straw hat, from a hole in which his hair protruded, his trousers upheld by a string, and that indefinable smirk of satisfaction of which he was capable flickering over his dirty and unshaven face he was wont to strike an attitude worthy of a flight of oratory, and exclaim: “Fifteen years ago to-day I was a poor, dispirited, broken-down tramp sitting on a bench in a park, not a shirt to my back. Not a decent pair of shoes on my feet. A hat with a hole in it. No money to get a shave or a bath or a place to sleep. No place to eat. Not a friend in the world to turn to. My torn and frayed trousers held up by a string. Yet” (striking his chest dramatically) “look at me now!” And then he would lift one hand dramatically, as much as to say, “Could any change be greater?”
The humor was not only in the contrast which his words implied and his appearance belied, but in a certain definite and not unkindly characterization of the bum as such, that smug and even defiant disregard of the conventions and amenities which characterizes so many of them and sets them apart as a species quite distinct from the body social—for that they truly are. And for that very reason they have always had a peculiar interest for me, even a kind of fascination, such as an arrestingly different animal might have for others. And here in the great city, from time to time I have encountered so many of them, suggesting not poverty or want but a kind of devil-may-care indifference and even contempt for all that society as we know it prizes so highly—order, cleanliness, a job, a good suit of clothes, marriage, children, respected membership in various orders, religion, politics—anything and everything that you will. And yet, by reason of their antithesis and seeming antipathy to all this, interesting.
For, say what you will, it does take something that is not social, and most certainly independent, either in the form of thought or temperament, to permit one to thus brazenly brave the notions and the moods, to say nothing of the intellectual convictions, of those who look upon the things above described as essential and permanent. These astonishingly strange men, with their matted hair over their eyes, their dirty skins, their dirty clothes, their large feet encased in torn shoes, their hats with holes in them and their hair actually protruding—just as though there were rules or conventions governing them in the matter of dress. Along railroad tracks and roads outside the large cities of the country I have seen them (curiously enough, I have never seen a woman tramp), singly or in groups, before a fire, the accredited tin can at hand for water, a degenerate pail brought from somewhere in which something is being cooked over a fire. And on occasion, as a boy, I have found them asleep in the woods, under a tree, or in some improvised hole in a hay or straw stack, snoring loudly or resting as only the just and the pure in heart should rest.
But here in the great city I have always thought them a little strange and out of place. They consort so poorly with the pushing, eager, seeking throngs. And arrayed as they are, and as unkempt and unwashed, not even the low-priced lodging houses of the Bowery would receive them, and most certainly they would not pay the price of fifteen or twenty cents which would be required to house them, even if they had it. They are not of that kidney. And as for applying to a police station at any time, it were better that they did not. In bitter weather an ordinary citizen might do so with safety and be taken care of, but these, never. They would be driven out or sent to the Island, as the work-house here is called. Their principal lodging resource in times of wintry stress appears to be some grating covering a shaft leading to an engine room of some plant operative the night through, from which warm air pours; or some hallway in a public building, or the ultra-liberal and charitable lodging house of some religious mission. Quite often on an icy night I have seen not a few of them lying over the gratings of the subway at Fourteenth Street and at other less conspicuous points, where, along with better men than themselves, they were trusting to the semi-dry warm air that poured up through to prevent death from freezing. But the freeze being over, they would go their ways, I am sure, and never mend them from any fear of a like experience.
And it is exactly that about them which has always interested me. For, by and large, I have never been able to feel that they either craved or deserved the need of that sympathy that we so freely extend to others of a less sturdy and different character. In truth, they are never as poor physically and nervously as many of those who, though socially fallen, yet appear to be better placed in the matter of clothes, food and mood. They are, in the main, neither lean nor dispirited, and they take life with too jaunty an air to permit one to be distressed about them. They remind me more of gulls or moles, or some different and unsocial animal that still finds in man his rightful prey or source of supply. And I am positive that theirs is a disposition, either inherited or made so by circumstances, which has not too much chemic opposition to their lackadaisical state, that prefers it even to some other forms of existence. Summer or winter I have seen them here and there, in the great city, but never in those poorer neighborhoods, frequented by those who are really in need, and always with the air of physical if not material comfort hovering about them, and that in the face of garments that would better become an ashcan than a man. The rags. The dirt. And yet how often of a summer’s evening have I not seen them on the stones of doorways and the planks of docks and lumber yards, warm and therefore comfortable, resting most lazily and snoring loudly, as though their troubles or irritations, whatever they were, were far from them.
And in these same easier seasons have I not seen them making their way defiantly or speculatively among the enormous crowds on the principal streets of the city, gazing interestedly and alertly into the splendid shopwindows, and thinking what thoughts and contemplating what prospects! It is not from these that the burglars are recruited or the pickpockets, as the police will tell you. And the great cities do not ordinarily attract them; though they come, occasionally, drawn, I suppose, by the hope of novelty, and interested, quite as is Dives in Egypt or India, by what they see. Now and then you will behold one, as have I, being “ragged” by one of those idle mischievous gangs of the city into whose heartless clutches he has chanced to fall. His hat will be seized and pulled or crushed down over his eyes, his matted hair or beard pulled, straws or rags or paper shoved between his back and his coat and himself made into a veritable push-ball or punching-bag to be shoved here and there, before he is allowed to depart. And for no offense other than that he is as he is. Yet whether they are spiritually outraged or depressed by this I would not be able to say. To me they have ever appeared to be immune to what would spiritually degrade and hence torture and depress another.