* * * * *
As interesting a type as I ever knew was an old hunchback who, as I understood, had had a small music business in the Bowery, years and years ago when that street was still a vaudeville center, a sort of theatrical Broadway. Through experience he had come by a little knowledge of popular songs and songbooks and had engaged in the manufacture and sale of these things. But times changed and public taste varied and he was not able to keep up with it all. From little business to no business was an easy step, and then he failed and took lodgings in one of the side streets off the Bowery, below Fourth Street, eking out a precarious existence, heaven only knows how. Age had hounded him even more than ill success. His naturally dark skin darkened still further and his black eyes retreated into gloomy sockets. I used to see him at odd times, at a period when I lived in a vicinity near the Bowery, wending a lonely way through the crowded streets there, but never until he accosted me one night in the dark did I realize that he had become a beggar. A mumbled apology about hunger, a deprecating, shamefaced cough, and he was off again, the richer for a dime. In this case, time, to say nothing of life, had worked one of those disturbing grotesqueries which arrest one. He was so very somber, furtive, misshapen and lean, a veritable masque of a man whose very glance indicated inconsolable disappointment and whose presence, to many, would most certainly have come as an omen of failure. A hall-bedroom, a lodging-house cot, an occasional meal, some hidden corner in which to be at peace, in which to brood, and then a few years later he was found dead, alone, seated before a small table, his head leaning upon his arms in the shabby little room in which he dwelt. I know this to be true, for from time to time I made effort to hear of him. What, think you, would he have to say to his Creator if he might?
* * * * *
And yet another character. One day I was walking in Brooklyn in a very conservative neighborhood, when I saw what I fancied I never should see, in America, a woman furtively picking a piece of bread out of a garbage can. I had read of such things in Balzac, Hugo, Dickens—but where else? And she was not absolutely wretchedly dressed, though her appearance was far from satisfactory, and she had a tense expression about her face which betokened stress of some kind. My astonishment was such that I walked deliberately up to her and asked: “What is the matter with you—are you hungry?”
She had hidden the bread under her shawl as I approached and may have dropped it as we walked, for I did not see it again though her hands appeared. Yet she refused to indulge in any conversation which would explain.
“I’m all right,” she replied.
“But I saw you taking a piece of bread out of that can?”
“No.”
“Don’t you want any money?”
“No.”