“You! You!” exclaims the old locksmith, who is her father, in uncontrollable rage. “You mind your own business. She is a street-walker, that’s what she is. She shall not come into my house any more.”
There is wrangling and more exclamations, and finally into the thick of the crowd comes a policeman, who tries to gather up all the phases of the story.
“You won’t take her back, eh?” he asks of the father, after using all sorts of arguments to prevent a family rupture. “All right, then, come along,” he says to the girl, and leads her around to the police station. “We’ll find some place for you, maybe, to-night anyhow.”
I heard that she did not stay at the station, after all, but what the conclusion of her career was, outside of the fact that the matter was reported to the Gerry Society, I never learned. But the reasons for her predicament struck me as obvious. Here was too much toil, too much gloom, too much solemnity for her, the non-appreciation which the youthful heart so much abhors. Elsewhere, perhaps, was light, warmth, merriment, beauty—or so she thought.
She went, she and so many others, fluttering eastward like a moth, into the heart of the great city which lay mostly to the east. When she returned, and with singed wings, she was no longer welcome.
* * * * *
But why they saw fit to dub it Hell’s Kitchen, however, I could never discover. It seemed to me a very ordinary slum neighborhood, poor and commonplace, and sharply edged by poverty, but just life and very, very human life at that.
A CERTAIN OIL REFINERY
There is a section of land very near New York, lying at the extreme southern point of the peninsula known as Bayonne, which is given up to a peculiar business. The peninsula is a long neck of land lying between those two large bays which extend a goodly distance on either hand, one toward the city of Newark, the other toward the vast and restless ocean beyond Brooklyn. Stormy winds sweep over it at many periods of the year. The seagull and the tern fly high over its darksome roof-tops. Tall stacks and bare, red buildings and scores of rounded tanks spread helter-skelter over its surface, give it a dreary, unkempt and yet not wholly inartistic appearance which appeals, much as a grotesque deformity appeals or a masque intended to represent pain.