The Story of the Street Continued

— I shall never be done telling the Club about the children I see on the city streets. The drama they act in outstretches any on the Chinese stage ; and though it has its dull days, its tiresome, meaningless acts, it is always likely to reward attention by some bit of byplay, some passage of pantomime that is truly precious.

What fitter adjective could be given, for instance, to a scene I have just observed enacted by three infants in FortySecond Street ? Who could hope that a Forty-Second Street would bring forth anything so pretty ? The heroine was very ragged, very dirty, and the loveliest bit of womanhood that ever reached the age of four. She had golden-brown curls, goldenbrown eyes, a peach - blossom complexion, and the particularly soft and lovely curves and modelings that seem almost peculiar to this coloring. And in the same simple, unconscious, helpless way, she was as touchingly feminine as Adelaide Neilson in the part of Viola.

When my eyes fell upon her, she was in trouble ; her eyes were filling with tears, and she was pressing a mite of a palm upon her quivering mouth in a piteous effort to keep back a rising tide of sobs. She was not the only one in trouble ; a snub-nosed newsboy of eight or nine years was bending over her, his eyes strained with worried anxiety. He talked to her, but she only turned her curly head this way and that in an effort to hide her tears, and caught her breath the faster beneath that repressive palm. He offered her (God knows why) his only remaining paper ; but she would none of it, though her refusal was only grief-smitten, not cross. No being could have seen her without an impulse to try to comfort her. But speaking to children is a perilous measure, perilous to the interest of the play ; and now see how a proper sacrifice of human to artistic feeling was rewarded, The harried newsboy raised his eyes and looked despairingly about him. He saw another and lesser boy forty feet away, and coming toward him ; he hurried to the seven-year-old, and — as my eyes told me — stated the case to him.

The snub-nosed boy was masculine enough in his despair, but the little one had a trick of masculinity worth more ; he (the little one), with the firm, even step of the head of a family, walked up to her ladyship, and, without one word, one inquiring glance, just threw his arm around her neck, drew her close, and walked on. To see her snuggle her comforted head on his shoulder, and slip an arm about his waist, and silently dry her eyes with the other hand, and be happy again — well, if it is worth the paper it is printed on here, what do you suppose it was to see it? It would have been just like the pictures of street children in Life, if it had not been altogether unlike in being as winsome as it was humorous.

Of coarse the children are the stars in the panorama of the street, but occasionally men or women rise above the comparatively sordid parts they usually play, and, generally by some touch of helplessness that makes them akin to the children, arrive at a like power to move the heart.

One morning, as I came through Washington Square, I became conscious that a dingy woman was hovering about me ; now before, now behind or beside me. When my eyes turned to her, she drifted nearer, looking at me with pale, watery eyes and the gentlest expression of tenderness.

“You don’t mind my speaking to you, do you ? ” she said. “ I like to look at you. You don’t mind?” Then, sinking still lower her quiet voice, she said, while a look of appeal came into her face, as if she felt she were telling the most pitiful thing in the world, “ I ’ve been drinking. Yes,” nodding her head a little, and trying to smile her blank, friendly smile again, “ I’m trying to get sober now. I just thought I ’d like to speak to you. You don’t mind, do you ? I’m very respectable, only that I go on sprees. I’m a sewing-woman, — see ? and she pointed to a number of needles impaling her breast in the usual seamstress fashion. “ I knew you were kind. I like to look at you. You don’t know anything that would help me sober up, do you ? ”

It seemed probable she knew more on this point than I, but the fact was she had the air of simply seeking to prolong the conversation. Considering her state, one was not called upon to feel flattered by her attentions ; but I confess that I do not always wait for the necessity, and probably I should not have parleyed so long with a drunken woman who was uncomplimentary. My vanity did not receive the wholesome check that might have been expected, fur the poor woman proved that her vague pursuit was quite unmercenary.

I told her, on a venture, that I thought a cup of strong black coffee would do her good, and asked if she had the money to get it.

“How much will it cost?” she asked, smiling still as she tried to focus her eyes upon mine, and giving her soft, affectionate inflections such simplicity as would have befitted a wanderer from Mars who had never heard of coffee.

When I suggested localities — near by — where five cents might be expected to pay for my prescription, she said, “I’ve got a dime,” and still without seeming quite to descend to any sharp recognition of the vulgar, material sides of life, she drew her dime from her pocket and showed it to me. When, after expressing my sympathy and my hope that the coffee would help her, I started on my way, she stood aside to let me pass, saying once more, “ You don’t mind nly speaking to you, do you ? ”

How things change their proportions in retrospect! I shall never remember what engagement I was so determined to keep just then, and now it seems the strangest brutality that I left that poor, pitiful, struggling thing without really turning a hand to help her. But I was full of an idiotic notion that I must hurry about this or that triviality. It was not a case in which it seemed wise to offer money, and I contented myself very well then by turning back, giving her a card bearing my name and address, and telling her to come to me if she wanted assistance or wished to see me. She said nothing, smiled on, and stood watching me as long as I could see her, Of course I have had no more knowledge of her since than of some raindrop that splashed my cheek that week.

That is a definitely melancholy little tale, but here is another, in which I find the melancholy element, if less definite, is still poignantly touching. I sat unobserved at a window close to the sidewalk, and watched two little urchins in shabby knickerbockers search ardently for some lost treasure. Probably it was a broken key or a glass marble. Anyway, it was something very small and very precious, and they rubbed their bits of noses over yards of flag and cobble stones looking for it.

All the time, as they hunted, they manufactured little superstitions, and acted upon them. The big one (he might have been seven) would say, “ Now let’s shut our eyes and walk to the gutter, and maybe, when we open them and look down, one of us ’ll see it.”

This expedient failing, the little one, enough less to be very docile with his superior, would venture a suggestion expressing his faith that if they walked ten steps backward into the street, and then whirled around three times and looked, this singular course would prove efficacious. I found their self-invented, vague devil-worship curious and entertaining ; but when the baby, at last, tired out and on the point of tears, exclaimed, in a half-whispered tone of patient awe this time, “Willie, Willie, let’s say we don’t want to find it,” — when it came to that, I broke up the council.

The age of five is too young, too young for a little man to be discovering the darker ways of fate.