Out of Mulberry Street Part 14

Hence the numerous tenement bath-houses on the East Side are run night and day in Yom Kippur week to their full capacity. There are so many more people than tubs that there is no rest for the attendants even in the small hours of the morning.

They are not palatial establishments exactly, these _mikwehs_ (bath-houses). Most of them are in keeping with the tenements that harbor them; but they fill the bill. One, at 20 Orchard street, has even a Turkish and a Russian attachment. It is one of the most pretentious. For thirty-five cents one can be roasted by dry heat or boiled with steam. The unhappy experience of Jacob Epstein shows that it is even possible to be boiled literally and in earnest in hot water at the same price. He chose that way unwittingly, and the choice came near causing a riot.

Epstein came to the bath-house with a party of friends at 2 A. M., in quest of a Russian bath. They had been steamed, and were disporting themselves to their heart's content when the thing befell the tailor.

Epstein is a tailor. He went to get a shower-bath in a pail,--where Russian baths are got for thirty-five cents they are got partly by hand, as it were,--and in the dim, religious light of the room, the small gas-jet struggling ineffectually with the steam and darkness, he mistook the hot-water faucet for the cold. He found out his mistake when he raised the pail and poured a flood of boiling water over himself.

Then his shrieks filled the house. His companions paused in amazement, and beheld the tailor dancing on one foot and on the other by turns, yelling:

"Weh! Weh! Ich bin verbrennt!"

They thought he had gone suddenly mad, and joined in the lamentation, till one of them saw his skin red and parboiled and raising big blisters. Then they ran with a common accord for their own cold-water pails, and pursued him, seeking to dash their contents over him.

But the tailor, frantic with pain, thought, if he thought at all, that he was going to be killed, and yelled louder than ever. His companions'

shouts, joined to his, were heard in the street, and there promptly gathered a wailing throng that echoed the "Weh! Weh!" from within, and exchanged opinions between their laments as to who was being killed, and why.

Policeman Schulem came just in time to prevent a general panic and restore peace.

Schulem is a valuable man on the East Side. His name alone is enough. It signifies peace--peace in the language of Ludlow street. The crowd melted away, and the tailor was taken to the hospital, bewailing his bad luck.

The bath-house keeper was an indignant and injured man. His business was hurt.

"How did it happen?" he said. "It happened because he is a schlemiehl.

_Teufel!_ he's worse than a schlemiehl; he is a chammer."

Which accounts for it, of course, and explains everything.

THE CHRISTENING IN BOTTLE ALLEY

All Bottle Alley was bidden to the christening. It being Sunday, when Mulberry street was wont to adjust its differences over the cards and the wine-cup, it came "heeled," ready for what might befall. From Tomaso, the rag-picker in the farthest rear cellar, to the Signor Undertaker, mainstay and umpire in the varying affairs of life, which had a habit in the Bend of lapsing suddenly upon his professional domain, they were all there, the men of Malpete's village. The baby was named for the village saint, so that it was a kind of communal feast as well. Carmen was there with her man, and Francisco Cessari.

If Carmen had any other name, neither Mulberry street nor the alley knew it. She was Carmen to them when, seven years before, she had taken up with Francisco, then a young mountaineer straight as the cedar of his native hills, the breath of which was yet in the songs with which he wooed her. Whether the priest had blessed their bonds no one knew or asked. The Bend only knew that one day, after three years during which the Francisco tenement had been the scene of more than one jealous quarrel, not, it was whispered, without cause, the mountaineer was missing. He did not come back. From over the sea the Bend heard, after a while, that he had reappeared in the old village to claim the sweetheart he had left behind.

In the course of time new arrivals brought the news that Francisco was married and that they were living happily, as a young couple should. At the news Mulberry street looked askance at Carmen; but she gave no sign.

By tacit consent, she was the Widow Carmen after that.

The summers pa.s.sed. The fourth brought Francisco Cessari, come back to seek his fortune, with his wife and baby. He greeted old friends effusively and made cautious inquiries about Carmen. When told that she had consoled herself with his old rival, Luigi, with whom she was then living in Bottle Alley, he laughed with a light heart, and took up his abode within half a dozen doors of the alley. That was but a short time before the christening at Malpete's. There their paths crossed each other for the first time since his flight.

She met him with a smile on her lips, but with hate in her heart. He, manlike, saw only the smile. The men smoking and drinking in the court watched them speak apart, saw him, with the laugh that sat so lightly upon his lips, turn to his wife, sitting by the hydrant with the child, and heard him say: "Look, Carmen! our baby!"

The woman bent over it, and, as she did, the little one woke suddenly out of its sleep and cried out in affright. It was noticed that Carmen smiled again then, and that the young mother shivered, why she herself could not have told. Francisco, joining the group at the farther end of the yard, said carelessly that she had forgotten. They poked fun at him and spoke Carmen's name loudly, with laughter.

From the tenement, as they did, came Luigi and asked threateningly who insulted his wife. They only laughed the more, said he had drunk too much wine, and, shouldering him out, bade him go look to his woman. He went.

Carmen had witnessed it all from the house. She called him a coward and goaded him with bitter taunts, until, mad with anger and drink, he went out in the court once more and shook his fist in the face of Francisco.

They hailed his return with bantering words. Luigi was spoiling for a fight, they laughed, and would find one before the day was much older. But suddenly silence fell upon the group. Carmen stood on the step, pale and cold. She hid something under her ap.r.o.n.

"Luigi!" she called, and he came to her. She drew from under the ap.r.o.n a c.o.c.ked pistol, and, pointing to Francisco, pushed it into his hand. At the sight the alley was cleared as suddenly as if a tornado had swept through it. Malpete's guests leaped over fences, dived into cellarways, anywhere for shelter. The door of the woodshed slammed behind Francisco just as his old rival reached it. The maddened man tore it open and dragged him out by the throat. He pinned him against the fence, and leveled the pistol with frenzied curses. They died on his lips. The face that was turning livid in his grasp was the face of his boyhood's friend. They had gone to school together, danced together at the fairs in the old days. They had been friends--till Carmen came. The muzzle of the weapon fell.

"Shoot!" said a hard voice behind him. Carmen stood there with face of stone. She stamped her foot. "Shoot!" she commanded, pointing, relentless, at the struggling man. "Coward, shoot!"

Her lover's finger crooked itself upon the trigger. A shriek, wild and despairing, rang through the alley. A woman ran madly from the house, flew across the pavement, and fell panting at Carmen's feet.

"Mother of G.o.d! mercy!" she cried, thrusting her babe before the a.s.sa.s.sin's weapon. "Jesus Maria! Carmen, the child! He is my husband!"

No gleam of pity came into the cold eyes. Only hatred, fierce and bitter, was there. In one swift, sweeping glance she saw it all: the woman fawning at her feet, the man she hated limp and helpless in the grasp of her lover.

"He was mine once," she said, "and he had no mercy." She pushed the baby aside. "Coward, shoot!"

The shot was drowned in the shriek, hopeless, despairing, of the widow who fell upon the body of Francisco as it slipped lifeless from the grasp of the a.s.sa.s.sin. The christening party saw Carmen standing over the three with the same pale smile on her cruel lips.

For once the Bend did not shield a murderer. The door of the tenement was shut against him. The women spurned him. The very children spat at him as he fled to the street. The police took him there. With him they seized Carmen. She made no attempt to escape. She had bided her time, and it had come. She had her revenge. To the end of its lurid life Bottle Alley remembered it as the murder accursed of G.o.d.

IN THE MULBERRY STREET COURT

"Conduct unbecoming an officer," read the charge, "in this, to wit, that the said defendants brought into the station-house, by means to deponent unknown, on the said Fourth of July, a keg of beer, and, when apprehended, were consuming the contents of the same." Twenty policemen, comprising the whole off platoon of the East One Hundred and Fourth street squad, answered the charge as defendants. They had been caught grouped about a pot of chowder and the fatal keg in the top-floor dormitory, singing, "Beer, beer, glorious beer!" Sergeant McNally and Roundsman Stevenson interrupted the proceedings.

The commissioner's eyes bulged as, at the call of the complaint clerk, the twenty marched up and ranged themselves in rows, three deep, before him.

They took the oath collectively, with a toss and a smack, as if to say, "I don't care if I do," and told separately and identically the same story, while the sergeant stared and the commissioner's eyes grew bigger and rounder.

Missing his reserves, Sergeant McNally had sent the roundsman in search of them. He was slow in returning, and the sergeant went on a tour of inspection himself. He journeyed to the upper region, and there came upon the party in full swing. Then and there he called the roll. Not one of the platoon was missing.

They formed a hollow square around something that looked uncommonly like a beer-keg. A number of tin growlers stood beside it. The sergeant picked up one and turned the tap. There was enough left in the keg to barely half fill it. Seeing that, the platoon followed him down-stairs without a murmur.

One by one the twenty took the stand after the sergeant had left it, and testified without a tremor that they had seen no beer-keg. In fact, the majority would not know one if they saw it. They were tired and hungry, having been held in reserve all day, when a pleasant smell a.s.sailed their nostrils.

Each of the twenty followed his nose independently to the top floor, where he was surprised to see the rest gathered about a pot of steaming chowder.

He joined the circle and partook of some. It was good. As to beer, he had seen none and drunk less. There was something there of wood with a bra.s.s handle to it. What it was none of them seemed to know. They were all shocked at the idea that it might have been a beer-keg. Such things are forbidden in police stations.

The sergeant himself could not tell how it could have got in there, while stoutly maintaining that it was a keg. He scratched his head and concluded that it might have come over the roof or, somehow, from a building that is in course of erection next door. The chowder had come in by the main door.

At least, one policeman had seen it carried up-stairs. He had fallen in behind it immediately.

When the commissioner had heard this story told exactly twenty times the platoon fell in and marched off to the elevated station. When he can decide what punishment to inflict on a policeman who does not know a beer-keg when he sees it, they all will be fined accordingly, and a door-man who has served a term as a barkeeper will be sent to the East One Hundred and Fourth street station to keep the police there out of harm's way.

SPOONING IN DYNAMITE ALLEY

Dynamite Alley is bereft. Its spring spooning is over. Once more the growler has the right of way. But what good is it, with Kate Ca.s.sidy hiding in her third floor back, her "steady" hiding from the police, and Tom Hart laid up in hospital with two of his "slats stove in," all along of their "spieling"? There will be nothing now to heave a brick at on a dark night, and no chance for a row for many a day to come. No wonder Dynamite Alley is out of sorts.