“Mrs. Schmick,” I ask, interestedly, her philosophy of life arresting me, “why do you work so hard? You didn’t even know her, did you?”
“Ach, no. But she is sick now. She is in trouble. I would do as much for anybody.”
And this is Hell’s Kitchen, I recall.
* * * * *
Looking out of my front window I can see a great deal of all that goes on here, in connection with this house, I mean. Through the single narrow door under my window issue and return all those who have in any way anything to do with it. The mailman comes very seldom. There is a weekly life-insurance man who comes regularly, bangs on doors and complains that some people are in but won’t answer. Ditto the gas man. Ditto the milkman. Ditto the collector for a rug and clock house. Many duns of many kinds who come to collect bills of all kinds and never can “get in.” Of a morning only a half-dozen men and some six or eight girls seem to creep wearily and unwillingly forth to work. At night they and others, who have apparently other methods than that of regular toil for occupying their time, return with quite a different air. Truckmen and coalmen and Mr. Schmick arrive about the same time, half-past five. The son of a morose malster’s clerk, who occupies the second floor rear, back of me, arrives at six. Beer-can carrying is the chief employment of the city cart-driver’s wife, who lives on the third floor, the unemployed iron-worker, whose front room I rent, and the ill-tempered woman with the three children on the fourth floor. The six or eight girls who go out evenings after their day’s labor frequently do not begin to drift back until after eleven, several of them not before three or four. I have met them coming in. Queer figures slip in and out at all times, men and women who cannot be placed by me in any regular detail of the doings of this house. Some of them visit one or another of several “apartments” too frequently to make their comings and goings explicable on conventional grounds. It is a peculiar region and house, this, with marked streaks of gayety at times, and some very evident and frequently long-continued periods of depression and dissatisfaction and misery.
I am hanging out of my window one evening as usual when the keenest of all these local tragedies, in so far as this house and a home are concerned, is enacted directly below me. One of the daughters above-mentioned is followed down four flights of stairs and pushed out upon the sidewalk by her irate father and a bundle of wearing apparel thrown after her.
He is very angry and shouts: “You get out now. You can’t come back into my house any more. Get out!”
He waves his arms dramatically. A crowd gathers. Men and women hang out of windows or gather closely about him and the girl, while the latter, quite young yet, perhaps fifteen, cries, and the onlookers eagerly demand to know what the trouble is.
“She’s a street-walker, that’s what she is,” he screams. “She comes to my house after running around all night with loafers. Let her get out now.”
“Aw, what do you want to turn her off for?” demands a sympathetic bystander who is evidently moved by the girl’s tears. Others voice the same sentiment.