One Way Out Part 5

On the second day we were fairly settled, and that night after the boy had gone to bed Ruth sat down at my side with a pad and pencil in her hand.

"Billy," she said, "there's one thing we're going to do in this new beginning: we're going to save--if it's only ten cents a week."

I shook my head doubtfully.

"I'm afraid you can't until I get a raise," I said.

"We tried waiting for raises before," she answered.

"I know, but--"

"There aren't going to be any buts," she answered decidedly.

"But six dollars a week--"

"Is six dollars a week," she broke in. "We must live on five-fifty, that's all."

"With steak thirty cents a pound?"

"We won't have steak. That's the point. Our neighbors around here don't look starved, and they have larger families than ours. And they don't even buy intelligently."

"How do you know that?"

"I've been watching them at the little stores in the square. They pay there as much for half-decayed stuff as they'd have to pay for fresh odds and ends at the big market."

She rested her pad upon her knee.

"Now in the first place, Billy, we're going to live much more simply."

"We've never been extravagant," I said.

"Not in a way," she answered slowly, "but in another way we have. I've been doing a lot of thinking in the last few days and I see now where we've had a great many unnecessary things."

"Not for the last few weeks, anyhow," I said.

"Those don't count. But before that I mean. For instance there's coffee. It's a luxury. Why we spent almost thirty cents a week on that alone."

"I know but--"

"There's another but. There's no nourishment in coffee and we can't afford it. We'll spend that money for milk. We must have good milk and you must get it for me somewhere up town. I don't like the looks of the milk around here. That will be eight cents a day."

"Better have two quarts," I suggested.

She thought a moment.

"Yes," she agreed, "two quarts, because that's going to be the basis of our food. That's a dollar twelve cents a week."

She made up a little face at this. I smiled grandly.

"Now for breakfast we must have oatmeal every morning. And we'll get it in bulk. I've priced it and it's only a little over three cents a pound at some of the stores."

"And the kind we've always had?"

"About twelve when it's done up in packages. That's about the proportion by which I expect to cut down everything. But you'll have to eat milk on it instead of cream. Then we'll use a lot of potatoes.

They are very good baked for breakfast. And with them you may have salt fish--oh, there are a dozen nice ways of fixing that. And you may have griddle cakes and--you wait and see the things I'll give you for breakfast. You'll have to have a good luncheon of course, but we'll have our princ.i.p.al meal when you get back from work at night. But you won't get steak. When we do get meat we'll buy soup bones and meat we can boil. And instead of pies and cakes we'll have nourishing puddings of cornstarch and rice. There's another good point--rice. It's cheap and we'll have a lot of it. Look at how the j.a.panese live on it day after day and keep fat and strong. Then there's cheap fish; rock cod and such to make good chowders of or to fry in pork fat like the ba.s.s and trout I used to have back home. Then there's baked beans. We ought to have them at least twice a week in the winter. But this summer we'll live mostly on fish and vegetables. I can get them fresh at the market."

"It sounds good," I said.

"Just you wait," she cried excitedly. "I'll fatten up both you and the boy."

"And yourself, little woman," I reminded her. "I'm not going to take the saving out of you."

"Don't you worry about me," she answered. "This will be easier than the other life. I shan't have to worry about clothes or dinners or parties for the boy. And it isn't going to take any time at all to keep these four rooms clean and sweet."

I took the rest of the week as a sort of vacation and used it to get acquainted with my new surroundings. It's a fact that this section of the city which for twenty years had been within a short walk of my office was as foreign to me as Europe. I had never before been down here and all I knew about it was through the occasional head-lines in the papers in connection with stabbing affrays. For the first day or two I felt as though I ought to carry a revolver. Whenever I was forced to leave Ruth alone in the house I instructed her upon no circ.u.mstances to open the door. The boy and I arranged a secret rap--an idea that pleased him mightily--and until she heard the single knock followed by two quick sharp ones, she was not to answer. But in wandering around among these people it was difficult to think of them as vicious. The Italian element was a laughing, indolent-appearing group; the scattered Jewish folk were almost timid and kept very much to themselves. I didn't find a really tough face until I came to the water front where they spoke English.

On the third morning after a breakfast of oatmeal and hot biscuit--and, by the way, Ruth effected a fifty per cent. saving right here by using the old-fashioned formula of soda and cream of tartar instead of baking powder--and baked potatoes, Ruth and the boy and myself started on an exploring trip. Our idea was to get a line on just what our opportunities were down here and to nose out the best and cheapest places to buy. The thing that impressed us right off was the big advantage we had in being within easy access of the big provision centres. We were within ten minutes' walk of the market, within fifteen of the water front, within three of the square and within twenty of the department stores. At all of these places we found special bargains for the day made to attract in town those from a distance. If one rose early and reached them about as soon as they were opened one could often buy things almost at cost and sometimes below cost. For instance, we went up town to one of the largest but cheaper grade department stores--we had heard its name for years but had never been inside the building--and we found that in their grocery department they had special mark-downs every day in the week for a limited supply of goods. We bought sugar this day at a cent a pound less than the market price and good beans for two cents a quart less.

It sounds at first like rather picayune saving but it counts up at the end of the year. Then every stall in the market had its bargain of meats--wholesome bits but unattractive to the careless buyer. We bought here for fifty cents enough round steak for several good meals of hash. We couldn't have bought it for less than a dollar in the suburbs and even at that we wouldn't have known anything about it for the store was too far for Ruth to make a personal visit and the butcher himself would never have mentioned such an odd end to a member of our neighborhood.

We enjoyed wandering around this big market which in itself was like a trip to another land. Later one of our favorite amus.e.m.e.nts was to come down here at night and watch the hustling crowds and the lights and the pretty colors and confusion. It reminded Ruth, she said, of a country fair. She always carried a pad and pencil and made notes of good places to buy. I still have those and am referring to them now as I write this.

"Blanks," she writes (I omit the name), "nice clean store with pleasant salesman. Has good soup bones."

Again, "Blank and Blank--good place to buy sausage."

Here too the market gardeners gathered as early as four o'clock with their vegetables fresh from the suburbs. They did mostly a wholesale business but if one knew how it was always possible to buy of them a cabbage or a head of lettuce or a few apples or a peck of potatoes.

They were a genial, ruddy-cheeked lot and after a while they came to know Ruth. Often I'd go up there with her before work and she with a basket on her arm would buy for the day. It was always, "Good morning, miss," in answer to her smile. They were respectful whether I was along or not. But for that matter I never knew anyone who wasn't respectful to Ruth. They used to like to see her come, I think, for she stood out in rather marked contrast to the bowed figures of the other women. Later on they used to save out for her any particularly choice vegetable they might have. She insisted however in paying them an extra penny for such things.

From the market we went down a series of narrow streets which led to the water front. Here the vessels from the Banks come in to unload.

The air was salty and though to us at first the wharves seemed dirty we got used to them, after a while, and enjoyed the smell of the fish fresh from the water.

Seeing whole push carts full of fish and watching them handled with a pitch fork as a man tosses hay didn't whet our appet.i.tes any, but when we remembered that it was these same fish--a day or two older,--for which we had been paying double the price charged for them here the difference overcame our scruples. The men here interested me. I found that while the crew of every schooner numbered a goodly per cent. of foreigners, still the greater part were American born. The new comers as a rule bought small launches of their own and went into business for themselves. The English speaking portion of the crews were also as a rule the rougher element. The loafers and hangers-on about the wharves were also English speaking. This was a fact that later on I found to be rather significant and to hold true in a general way in all branches of the lower cla.s.s of labor.

The barrooms about here--always a pretty sure index of the men of any community--were more numerous and of decidedly a rougher character than those about the square. A man would be a good deal better justified in carrying a revolver on this street than he would in Little Italy. I never allowed Ruth to come down here alone.

From here we wandered back and I found a public playground and bathhouse by the water's edge. This attracted me at once. I investigated this and found it offered a fine opportunity for bathing.

Little dressing-rooms were provided and for a penny a man could get a clean towel and for five cents a bathing suit. There was no reason that I could see, however, why we shouldn't provide our own. It was within an easy ten minutes of the flat and I saw right then where I would get a dip every day. It would be a great thing for the boy, too. I had always wanted him to learn to swim.

On the way home we pa.s.sed through the Jewish quarter and I made a note of the clothing offered for sale here. The street was lined with second hand stores with coats and trousers swinging over the sidewalk, and the windows were filled with odd lots of shoes. Then too there were the p.a.w.nshops. I'd always thought of a p.a.w.nshop as not being exactly respectable and had the feeling that anyone who secured anything from one of them was in a way a receiver of stolen goods. But as I pa.s.sed them now, I received a new impression. They seemed, down here, as legitimate a business as the second hand stores. The windows offered an a.s.sortment of everything from watches to banjoes and guns but among them I also noticed many carpenter's tools and so forth.

That might be a useful thing to remember.

It was odd how in a day our point of view had changed. If I had brought Ruth and the boy down through here a month before, we would all, I think, have been more impressed by the congestion and the picturesque details of the squalor than anything else. We would have picked our way gingerly and Ruth would have sighed often in pity and, comparing the lives of these people with our own, would probably have made an extra generous contribution to the Salvation Army the next time they came round. I'm not saying now that there isn't misery enough there and in every like section of every city, but I'll say that in a great many cases the same people who grovel in the filth here would grovel in a different kind of filth if they had ten thousand a year. At that you can't blame them greatly for they don't know any better. But when you learn, as I learned later, that some of the proprietors of these second hand stores and fly-blown butcher shops have sons in Harvard and daughters in Wellesley, it makes you think. But I'm running ahead.

The point was that now that we felt ourselves in a way one of these people and viewed the street not from the superior height of native-born Americans but just as emigrants, neither the soiled clothes of the inhabitants nor the cluttered street swarming with laughing youngsters impressed us unfavorably at all. The impa.s.sive men smoking cigarettes at their doors looked contented enough, the women were not such as to excite pity, and if you noticed, there were as many children around the local soda water fountains as you'd find in a suburban drug store. They all had clothes enough and appeared well fed and if some of them looked pasty, the sweet stuff in the stores was enough to account for that.

At any rate we came back to our flat that day neither depressed nor discouraged but decidedly in better spirits. Of course we had seen only the surface and I suspected that when we really got into these lives we'd find a bad condition of things. It must be so, for that was the burden of all we read. But we would have time enough to worry about that when we discovered it for ourselves.