I looked about to see what if any business could be injured by their stopping and selling fruit, but found only immense establishments dealing in dry goods, drugs, furniture and the like. Some one may have complained, but it looked much more like an ordinary case of official bumptiousness or irritation.
At that time, being interested in such types, I chose to follow this one, to see what sort of a home life lay behind him. It was not difficult. By degrees, and much harried by the police, his cart with only a partially depleted stock was pushed to the lower East Side, in Elizabeth Street, to be exact. Here he and his family—a wife and three or four children—occupied two dingy rooms in a typical East Side tenement. Whether he was at peace with his swarthy, bewrinkled old helpmate I do not know, but he appeared to be, and with his several partially grown children. On his return, two of them, a boy and a girl, greeted him cheerfully, and later, finding me interested and following him, and assuming that I was an officer of the law, quickly explained to me what their father did.
“He’s a peddler,” said the boy. “He peddles fruit.”
“And where does he get his fruit?” I asked.
“Over by the Wallabout. He goes over in the morning.”
I recalled seeing the long procession of vendors beating a devious way over the mile or more of steel bridge that spans the East River at Delancey Street, at one and two and three of a winter morning. Could this old man be one of these tramping over and tramping back before daylight?
“Do you mean to say that he goes over every day?”
“Sure.”
The old gentleman, by now sitting by a front window waiting for his dinner and gazing down into the sun-baked street not at all cooled by the fall of night, looked down and for some reason smiled. I presume he had seen me earlier in the afternoon. He could not know what we were talking about, however, but he sensed something. Or perhaps it was merely a feeling of the need of being pleasant.
Upon making my way to the living room and kitchen, as I did, knowing that I could offer a legal pretext, I found the same shabby and dark, but not dirty. An oil stove burned dolefully in the rear. Mrs. Pushcart Man was busy about the evening meal.