Chapter: The babe, Tommie, died.  He went away in a white, insignificant coffin,
his small waxen hand clutching a flower that the girl, Maggie, had
stolen from an Italian.

She and Jimmie lived.

The inexperienced fibres of the boy's eyes were hardened at an early
age.  He became a young man of leather.  He lived some red years
without laboring.  During that time his sneer became chronic.  He
studied human nature in the gutter, and found it no worse than he
thought he had reason to believe it.  He never conceived a respect for
the world, because he had begun with no idols that it had smashed.

He clad his soul in armor by means of happening hilariously in at a
mission church where a man composed his sermons of "yous." While they
got warm at the stove, he told his hearers just where he calculated
they stood with the Lord.  Many of the sinners were impatient over the
pictured depths of their degradation.  They were waiting for
soup-tickets.

A reader of words of wind-demons might have been able to see the
portions of a dialogue pass to and fro between the exhorter and his
hearers.

"You are damned," said the preacher.  And the reader of sounds might
have seen the reply go forth from the ragged people: "Where's our soup?"

Jimmie and a companion sat in a rear seat and commented upon the things
that didn't concern them, with all the freedom of English gentlemen.
When they grew thirsty and went out their minds confused the speaker
with Christ.

Momentarily, Jimmie was sullen with thoughts of a hopeless altitude
where grew fruit.  His companion said that if he should ever meet God
he would ask for a million dollars and a bottle of beer.

Jimmie's occupation for a long time was to stand on streetcorners and
watch the world go by, dreaming blood-red dreams at the passing of
pretty women.  He menaced mankind at the intersections of streets.

On the corners he was in life and of life.  The world was going on and
he was there to perceive it.

He maintained a belligerent attitude toward all well-dressed men.  To
him fine raiment was allied to weakness, and all good coats covered
faint hearts.  He and his order were kings, to a certain extent, over
the men of untarnished clothes, because these latter dreaded, perhaps,
to be either killed or laughed at.

Above all things he despised obvious Christians and ciphers with the
chrysanthemums of aristocracy in their button-holes.  He considered
himself above both of these classes.  He was afraid of neither the
devil nor the leader of society.

When he had a dollar in his pocket his satisfaction with existence was
the greatest thing in the world.  So, eventually, he felt obliged to
work.  His father died and his mother's years were divided up into
periods of thirty days.

He became a truck driver.  He was given the charge of a painstaking
pair of horses and a large rattling truck.  He invaded the turmoil and
tumble of the down-town streets and learned to breathe maledictory
defiance at the police who occasionally used to climb up, drag him from
his perch and beat him.

In the lower part of the city he daily involved himself in hideous
tangles.  If he and his team chanced to be in the rear he preserved a
demeanor of serenity, crossing his legs and bursting forth into yells
when foot passengers took dangerous dives beneath the noses of his
champing horses.  He smoked his pipe calmly for he knew that his pay
was marching on.

If in the front and the key-truck of chaos, he entered terrifically
into the quarrel that was raging to and fro among the drivers on their
high seats, and sometimes roared oaths and violently got himself
arrested.

After a time his sneer grew so that it turned its glare upon all
things.  He became so sharp that he believed in nothing.  To him the
police were always actuated by malignant impulses and the rest of the
world was composed, for the most part, of despicable creatures who were
all trying to take advantage of him and with whom, in defense, he was
obliged to quarrel on all possible occasions.  He himself occupied a
down-trodden position that had a private but distinct element of
grandeur in its isolation.

The most complete cases of aggravated idiocy were, to his mind, rampant
upon the front platforms of all the street cars.  At first his tongue
strove with these beings, but he eventually was superior.  He became
immured like an African cow.  In him grew a majestic contempt for those
strings of street cars that followed him like intent bugs.

He fell into the habit, when starting on a long journey, of fixing his
eye on a high and distant object, commanding his horses to begin, and
then going into a sort of a trance of observation.  Multitudes of
drivers might howl in his rear, and passengers might load him with
opprobrium, he would not awaken until some blue policeman turned red
and began to frenziedly tear bridles and beat the soft noses of the
responsible horses.

When he paused to contemplate the attitude of the police toward himself
and his fellows, he believed that they were the only men in the city
who had no rights.  When driving about, he felt that he was held liable
by the police for anything that might occur in the streets, and was the
common prey of all energetic officials.  In revenge, he resolved never
to move out of the way of anything, until formidable circumstances, or
a much larger man than himself forced him to it.

Foot-passengers were mere pestering flies with an insane disregard for
their legs and his convenience.  He could not conceive their maniacal
desires to cross the streets.  Their madness smote him with eternal
amazement.  He was continually storming at them from his throne.  He
sat aloft and denounced their frantic leaps, plunges, dives and
straddles.

When they would thrust at, or parry, the noses of his champing horses,
making them swing their heads and move their feet, disturbing a solid
dreamy repose, he swore at the men as fools, for he himself could
perceive that Providence had caused it clearly to be written, that he
and his team had the unalienable right to stand in the proper path of
the sun chariot, and if they so minded, obstruct its mission or take a
wheel off.

And, perhaps, if the god-driver had an ungovernable desire to step
down, put up his flame-colored fists and manfully dispute the right of
way, he would have probably been immediately opposed by a scowling
mortal with two sets of very hard knuckles.

It is possible, perhaps, that this young man would have derided, in an
axle-wide alley, the approach of a flying ferry boat.  Yet he achieved
a respect for a fire engine.  As one charged toward his truck, he would
drive fearfully upon a sidewalk, threatening untold people with
annihilation.  When an engine would strike a mass of blocked trucks,
splitting it into fragments, as a blow annihilates a cake of ice,
Jimmie's team could usually be observed high and safe, with whole
wheels, on the sidewalk.  The fearful coming of the engine could break
up the most intricate muddle of heavy vehicles at which the police had
been swearing for the half of an hour.

A fire engine was enshrined in his heart as an appalling thing that he
loved with a distant dog-like devotion.  They had been known to
overturn street-cars.  Those leaping horses, striking sparks from the
cobbles in their forward lunge, were creatures to be ineffably admired.
The clang of the gong pierced his breast like a noise of remembered war.

When Jimmie was a little boy, he began to be arrested.  Before he
reached a great age, he had a fair record.

He developed too great a tendency to climb down from his truck and
fight with other drivers.  He had been in quite a number of
miscellaneous fights, and in some general barroom rows that had become
known to the police.  Once he had been arrested for assaulting a
Chinaman.  Two women in different parts of the city, and entirely
unknown to each other, caused him considerable annoyance by breaking
forth, simultaneously, at fateful intervals, into wailings about
marriage and support and infants.

Nevertheless, he had, on a certain star-lit evening, said wonderingly
and quite reverently: "Deh moon looks like hell, don't it?"



The girl, Maggie, blossomed in a mud puddle.  She grew to be a most
rare and wonderful production of a tenement district, a pretty girl.

None of the dirt of Rum Alley seemed to be in her veins.  The
philosophers up-stairs, down-stairs and on the same floor, puzzled over
it.

When a child, playing and fighting with gamins in the street, dirt
disguised her.  Attired in tatters and grime, she went unseen.

There came a time, however, when the young men of the vicinity said:
"Dat Johnson goil is a puty good looker."  About this period her
brother remarked to her: "Mag, I'll tell yeh dis!  See?  Yeh've edder
got teh go teh hell or go teh work!"  Whereupon she went to work,
having the feminine aversion of going to hell.

By a chance, she got a position in an establishment where they made
collars and cuffs.  She received a stool and a machine in a room where
sat twenty girls of various shades of yellow discontent.  She perched
on the stool and treadled at her machine all day, turning out collars,
the name of whose brand could be noted for its irrelevancy to anything
in connection with collars.  At night she returned home to her mother.

Jimmie grew large enough to take the vague position of head of the
family.  As incumbent of that office, he stumbled up-stairs late at
night, as his father had done before him.  He reeled about the room,
swearing at his relations, or went to sleep on the floor.

The mother had gradually arisen to that degree of fame that she could
bandy words with her acquaintances among the police-justices.
Court-officials called her by her first name.  When she appeared they
pursued a course which had been theirs for months.  They invariably
grinned and cried out: "Hello, Mary, you here again?"  Her grey head
wagged in many a court.  She always besieged the bench with voluble
excuses, explanations, apologies and prayers.  Her flaming face and
rolling eyes were a sort of familiar sight on the island.  She measured
time by means of sprees, and was eternally swollen and dishevelled.

One day the young man, Pete, who as a lad had smitten the Devil's Row
urchin in the back of the head and put to flight the antagonists of his
friend, Jimmie, strutted upon the scene.  He met Jimmie one day on the
street, promised to take him to a boxing match in Williamsburg, and
called for him in the evening.

Maggie observed Pete.

He sat on a table in the Johnson home and dangled his checked legs with
an enticing nonchalance.  His hair was curled down over his forehead in
an oiled bang.  His rather pugged nose seemed to revolt from contact
with a bristling moustache of short, wire-like hairs.  His blue
double-breasted coat, edged with black braid, buttoned close to a red
puff tie, and his patent-leather shoes looked like murder-fitted
weapons.

His mannerisms stamped him as a man who had a correct sense of his
personal superiority.  There was valor and contempt for circumstances
in the glance of his eye.  He waved his hands like a man of the world,
who dismisses religion and philosophy, and says "Fudge."  He had
certainly seen everything and with each curl of his lip, he declared
that it amounted to nothing.  Maggie thought he must be a very elegant
and graceful bartender.

He was telling tales to Jimmie.

Maggie watched him furtively, with half-closed eyes, lit with a vague
interest.

"Hully gee!  Dey makes me tired," he said.  "Mos' e'ry day some farmer
comes in an' tries teh run deh shop.  See?  But dey gits t'rowed right
out!  I jolt dem right out in deh street before dey knows where dey is!
See?"

"Sure," said Jimmie.

"Dere was a mug come in deh place deh odder day wid an idear he wus
goin' teh own deh place!  Hully gee, he wus goin' teh own deh place!  I
see he had a still on an' I didn' wanna giv 'im no stuff, so I says:
'Git deh hell outa here an' don' make no trouble,' I says like dat!
See?  'Git deh hell outa here an' don' make no trouble'; like dat.
'Git deh hell outa here,' I says.  See?"

Jimmie nodded understandingly.  Over his features played an eager
desire to state the amount of his valor in a similar crisis, but the
narrator proceeded.

"Well, deh blokie he says: 'T'hell wid it!  I ain' lookin' for no
scrap,' he says (See?), 'but' he says, 'I'm 'spectable cit'zen an' I
wanna drink an' purtydamnsoon, too.'  See?  'Deh hell,' I says.  Like
dat!  'Deh hell,' I says.  See?  'Don' make no trouble,' I says.  Like
dat.  'Don' make no trouble.'  See?  Den deh mug he squared off an'
said he was fine as silk wid his dukes (See?) an' he wanned a drink
damnquick.  Dat's what he said.  See?"

"Sure," repeated Jimmie.

Pete continued.  "Say, I jes' jumped deh bar an' deh way I plunked dat
blokie was great.  See?  Dat's right!  In deh jaw!  See?  Hully gee, he
t'rowed a spittoon true deh front windee.  Say, I taut I'd drop dead.
But deh boss, he comes in after an' he says, 'Pete, yehs done jes'
right!  Yeh've gota keep order an' it's all right.'  See?  'It's all
right,' he says.  Dat's what he said."

The two held a technical discussion.

"Dat bloke was a dandy," said Pete, in conclusion, "but he hadn' oughta
made no trouble.  Dat's what I says teh dem: 'Don' come in here an'
make no trouble,' I says, like dat.  'Don' make no trouble.'  See?"

As Jimmie and his friend exchanged tales descriptive of their prowess,
Maggie leaned back in the shadow.  Her eyes dwelt wonderingly and
rather wistfully upon Pete's face.  The broken furniture, grimey walls,
and general disorder and dirt of her home of a sudden appeared before
her and began to take a potential aspect.  Pete's aristocratic person
looked as if it might soil.  She looked keenly at him, occasionally,
wondering if he was feeling contempt.  But Pete seemed to be enveloped
in reminiscence.

"Hully gee," said he, "dose mugs can't phase me.  Dey knows I kin wipe
up deh street wid any t'ree of dem."

When he said, "Ah, what deh hell," his voice was burdened with disdain
for the inevitable and contempt for anything that fate might compel him
to endure.

Maggie perceived that here was the beau ideal of a man.  Her dim
thoughts were often searching for far away lands where, as God says,
the little hills sing together in the morning.  Under the trees of her
dream-gardens there had always walked a lover.



Pete took note of Maggie.

"Say, Mag, I'm stuck on yer shape.  It's outa sight," he said,
parenthetically, with an affable grin.

As he became aware that she was listening closely, he grew still more
eloquent in his descriptions of various happenings in his career.  It
appeared that he was invincible in fights.

"Why," he said, referring to a man with whom he had had a
misunderstanding, "dat mug scrapped like a damn dago.  Dat's right.  He
was dead easy.  See?  He tau't he was a scrapper.  But he foun' out
diff'ent!  Hully gee."

He walked to and fro in the small room, which seemed then to grow even
smaller and unfit to hold his dignity, the attribute of a supreme
warrior.  That swing of the shoulders that had frozen the timid when he
was but a lad had increased with his growth and education at the ratio
of ten to one.  It, combined with the sneer upon his mouth, told
mankind that there was nothing in space which could appall him.  Maggie
marvelled at him and surrounded him with greatness.  She vaguely tried
to calculate the altitude of the pinnacle from which he must have
looked down upon her.

"I met a chump deh odder day way up in deh city," he said.  "I was
goin' teh see a frien' of mine.  When I was a-crossin' deh street deh
chump runned plump inteh me, an' den he turns aroun' an' says, 'Yer
insolen' ruffin,' he says, like dat.  'Oh, gee,' I says, 'oh, gee, go
teh hell and git off deh eart',' I says, like dat.  See?  'Go teh hell
an' git off deh eart',' like dat.  Den deh blokie he got wild.  He says
I was a contempt'ble scoun'el, er somet'ing like dat, an' he says I was
doom' teh everlastin' pe'dition an' all like dat.  'Gee,' I says, 'gee!
Deh hell I am,' I says.  'Deh hell I am,' like dat.  An' den I slugged
'im.  See?"

With Jimmie in his company, Pete departed in a sort of a blaze of glory
from the Johnson home.  Maggie, leaning from the window, watched him as
he walked down the street.

Here was a formidable man who disdained the strength of a world full of
fists.  Here was one who had contempt for brass-clothed power; one
whose knuckles could defiantly ring against the granite of law.  He was
a knight.

The two men went from under the glimmering street-lamp and passed into
shadows.

Turning, Maggie contemplated the dark, dust-stained walls, and the
scant and crude furniture of her home.  A clock, in a splintered and
battered oblong box of varnished wood, she suddenly regarded as an
abomination.  She noted that it ticked raspingly.  The almost vanished
flowers in the carpet-pattern, she conceived to be newly hideous.  Some
faint attempts she had made with blue ribbon, to freshen the appearance
of a dingy curtain, she now saw to be piteous.

She wondered what Pete dined on.

She reflected upon the collar and cuff factory.  It began to appear to
her mind as a dreary place of endless grinding.  Pete's elegant
occupation brought him, no doubt, into contact with people who had
money and manners.  It was probable that he had a large acquaintance of
pretty girls.  He must have great sums of money to spend.

To her the earth was composed of hardships and insults.  She felt
instant admiration for a man who openly defied it.  She thought that if
the grim angel of death should clutch his heart, Pete would shrug his
shoulders and say: "Oh, ev'ryt'ing goes."

She anticipated that he would come again shortly.  She spent some of
her week's pay in the purchase of flowered cretonne for a lambrequin.
She made it with infinite care and hung it to the slightly-careening
mantel, over the stove, in the kitchen.  She studied it with painful
anxiety from different points in the room.  She wanted it to look well
on Sunday night when, perhaps, Jimmie's friend would come.  On Sunday
night, however, Pete did not appear.

Afterward the girl looked at it with a sense of humiliation.  She was
now convinced that Pete was superior to admiration for lambrequins.

A few evenings later Pete entered with fascinating innovations in his
apparel.  As she had seen him twice and he had different suits on each
time, Maggie had a dim impression that his wardrobe was prodigiously
extensive.

"Say, Mag," he said, "put on yer bes' duds Friday night an' I'll take
yehs teh deh show.  See?"

He spent a few moments in flourishing his clothes and then vanished,
without having glanced at the lambrequin.

Over the eternal collars and cuffs in the factory Maggie spent the most
of three days in making imaginary sketches of Pete and his daily
environment.  She imagined some half dozen women in love with him and
thought he must lean dangerously toward an indefinite one, whom she
pictured with great charms of person, but with an altogether
contemptible disposition.

She thought he must live in a blare of pleasure.  He had friends, and
people who were afraid of him.

She saw the golden glitter of the place where Pete was to take her.  An
entertainment of many hues and many melodies where she was afraid she
might appear small and mouse-colored.

Her mother drank whiskey all Friday morning.  With lurid face and
tossing hair she cursed and destroyed furniture all Friday afternoon.
When Maggie came home at half-past six her mother lay asleep amidst the
wreck of chairs and a table.  Fragments of various household utensils
were scattered about the floor.  She had vented some phase of drunken
fury upon the lambrequin.  It lay in a bedraggled heap in the corner.

"Hah," she snorted, sitting up suddenly, "where deh hell yeh been?  Why
deh hell don' yeh come home earlier?  Been loafin' 'round deh streets.
Yer gettin' teh be a reg'lar devil."

When Pete arrived Maggie, in a worn black dress, was waiting for him in
the midst of a floor strewn with wreckage.  The curtain at the window
had been pulled by a heavy hand and hung by one tack, dangling to and
fro in the draft through the cracks at the sash.  The knots of blue
ribbons appeared like violated flowers.  The fire in the stove had gone
out.  The displaced lids and open doors showed heaps of sullen grey
ashes.  The remnants of a meal, ghastly, like dead flesh, lay in a
corner.  Maggie's red mother, stretched on the floor, blasphemed and
gave her daughter a bad name.



An orchestra of yellow silk women and bald-headed men on an elevated
stage near the centre of a great green-hued hall, played a popular
waltz.  The place was crowded with people grouped about little tables.
A battalion of waiters slid among the throng, carrying trays of beer
glasses and making change from the inexhaustible vaults of their
trousers pockets.  Little boys, in the costumes of French chefs,
paraded up and down the irregular aisles vending fancy cakes.  There
was a low rumble of conversation and a subdued clinking of glasses.
Clouds of tobacco smoke rolled and wavered high in air about the dull
gilt of the chandeliers.

The vast crowd had an air throughout of having just quitted labor.  Men
with calloused hands and attired in garments that showed the wear of an
endless trudge for a living, smoked their pipes contentedly and spent
five, ten, or perhaps fifteen cents for beer.  There was a mere
sprinkling of kid-gloved men who smoked cigars purchased elsewhere.
The great body of the crowd was composed of people who showed that all
day they strove with their hands.  Quiet Germans, with maybe their
wives and two or three children, sat listening to the music, with the
expressions of happy cows.  An occasional party of sailors from a
war-ship, their faces pictures of sturdy health, spent the earlier
hours of the evening at the small round tables.  Very infrequent tipsy
men, swollen with the value of their opinions, engaged their companions
in earnest and confidential conversation.  In the balcony, and here and
there below, shone the impassive faces of women.  The nationalities of
the Bowery beamed upon the stage from all directions.

Pete aggressively walked up a side aisle and took seats with Maggie at
a table beneath the balcony.

"Two beehs!"

Leaning back he regarded with eyes of superiority the scene before
them.  This attitude affected Maggie strongly.  A man who could regard
such a sight with indifference must be accustomed to very great things.

It was obvious that Pete had been to this place many times before, and
was very familiar with it.  A knowledge of this fact made Maggie feel
little and new.

He was extremely gracious and attentive.  He displayed the
consideration of a cultured gentleman who knew what was due.

"Say, what deh hell?  Bring deh lady a big glass!  What deh hell use is
dat pony?"

"Don't be fresh, now," said the waiter, with some warmth, as he
departed.

"Ah, git off deh eart'," said Pete, after the other's retreating form.

Maggie perceived that Pete brought forth all his elegance and all his
knowledge of high-class customs for her benefit.  Her heart warmed as
she reflected upon his condescension.

The orchestra of yellow silk women and bald-headed men gave vent to a
few bars of anticipatory music and a girl, in a pink dress with short
skirts, galloped upon the stage.  She smiled upon the throng as if in
acknowledgment of a warm welcome, and began to walk to and fro, making
profuse gesticulations and singing, in brazen soprano tones, a song,
the words of which were inaudible.  When she broke into the swift
rattling measures of a chorus some half-tipsy men near the stage joined
in the rollicking refrain and glasses were pounded rhythmically upon
the tables.  People leaned forward to watch her and to try to catch the
words of the song.  When she vanished there were long rollings of
applause.

Obedient to more anticipatory bars, she reappeared amidst the
half-suppressed cheering of the tipsy men.  The orchestra plunged into
dance music and the laces of the dancer fluttered and flew in the glare
of gas jets.  She divulged the fact that she was attired in some half
dozen skirts.  It was patent that any one of them would have proved
adequate for the purpose for which skirts are intended.  An occasional
man bent forward, intent upon the pink stockings.  Maggie wondered at
the splendor of the costume and lost herself in calculations of the
cost of the silks and laces.

The dancer's smile of stereotyped enthusiasm was turned for ten minutes
upon the faces of her audience.  In the finale she fell into some of
those grotesque attitudes which were at the time popular among the
dancers in the theatres up-town, giving to the Bowery public the
phantasies of the aristocratic theatre-going public, at reduced rates.

"Say, Pete," said Maggie, leaning forward, "dis is great."

"Sure," said Pete, with proper complacence.

A ventriloquist followed the dancer.  He held two fantastic dolls on
his knees.  He made them sing mournful ditties and say funny things
about geography and Ireland.

"Do dose little men talk?" asked Maggie.

"Naw," said Pete, "it's some damn fake.  See?"

Two girls, on the bills as sisters, came forth and sang a duet that is
heard occasionally at concerts given under church auspices.  They
supplemented it with a dance which of course can never be seen at
concerts given under church auspices.

After the duettists had retired, a woman of debatable age sang a negro
melody.  The chorus necessitated some grotesque waddlings supposed to
be an imitation of a plantation darkey, under the influence, probably,
of music and the moon.  The audience was just enthusiastic enough over
it to have her return and sing a sorrowful lay, whose lines told of a
mother's love and a sweetheart who waited and a young man who was lost
at sea under the most harrowing circumstances.  From the faces of a
score or so in the crowd, the self-contained look faded.  Many heads
were bent forward with eagerness and sympathy.  As the last distressing
sentiment of the piece was brought forth, it was greeted by that kind
of applause which rings as sincere.

As a final effort, the singer rendered some verses which described a
vision of Britain being annihilated by America, and Ireland bursting
her bonds.  A carefully prepared crisis was reached in the last line of
the last verse, where the singer threw out her arms and cried, "The
star-spangled banner."  Instantly a great cheer swelled from the
throats of the assemblage of the masses.  There was a heavy rumble of
booted feet thumping the floor.  Eyes gleamed with sudden fire, and
calloused hands waved frantically in the air.

After a few moments' rest, the orchestra played crashingly, and a small
fat man burst out upon the stage.  He began to roar a song and stamp
back and forth before the foot-lights, wildly waving a glossy silk hat
and throwing leers, or smiles, broadcast.  He made his face into
fantastic grimaces until he looked like a pictured devil on a Japanese
kite.  The crowd laughed gleefully.  His short, fat legs were never
still a moment.  He shouted and roared and bobbed his shock of red wig
until the audience broke out in excited applause.

Pete did not pay much attention to the progress of events upon the
stage.  He was drinking beer and watching Maggie.

Her cheeks were blushing with excitement and her eyes were glistening.
She drew deep breaths of pleasure.  No thoughts of the atmosphere of
the collar and cuff factory came to her.

When the orchestra crashed finally, they jostled their way to the
sidewalk with the crowd.  Pete took Maggie's arm and pushed a way for
her, offering to fight with a man or two.

They reached Maggie's home at a late hour and stood for a moment in
front of the gruesome doorway.

"Say, Mag," said Pete, "give us a kiss for takin' yeh teh deh show,
will yer?"

Maggie laughed, as if startled, and drew away from him.

"Naw, Pete," she said, "dat wasn't in it."

"Ah, what deh hell?" urged Pete.

The girl retreated nervously.

"Ah, what deh hell?" repeated he.

Maggie darted into the hall, and up the stairs.  She turned and smiled
at him, then disappeared.

Pete walked slowly down the street.  He had something of an astonished
expression upon his features.  He paused under a lamp-post and breathed
a low breath of surprise.

"Gawd," he said, "I wonner if I've been played fer a duffer."



As thoughts of Pete came to Maggie's mind, she began to have an intense
dislike for all of her dresses.

"What deh hell ails yeh?  What makes yeh be allus fixin' and fussin'?
Good Gawd," her mother would frequently roar at her.

She began to note, with more interest, the well-dressed women she met
on the avenues.  She envied elegance and soft palms.  She craved those
adornments of person which she saw every day on the street, conceiving
them to be allies of vast importance to women.

Studying faces, she thought many of the women and girls she chanced to
meet, smiled with serenity as though forever cherished and watched over
by those they loved.

The air in the collar and cuff establishment strangled her.  She knew
she was gradually and surely shrivelling in the hot, stuffy room.  The
begrimed windows rattled incessantly from the passing of elevated
trains.  The place was filled with a whirl of noises and odors.

She wondered as she regarded some of the grizzled women in the room,
mere mechanical contrivances sewing seams and grinding out, with heads
bended over their work, tales of imagined or real girlhood happiness,
past drunks, the baby at home, and unpaid wages.  She speculated how
long her youth would endure.  She began to see the bloom upon her
cheeks as valuable.

She imagined herself, in an exasperating future, as a scrawny woman
with an eternal grievance.  Too, she thought Pete to be a very
fastidious person concerning the appearance of women.

She felt she would love to see somebody entangle their fingers in the
oily beard of the fat foreigner who owned the establishment.  He was a
detestable creature.  He wore white socks with low shoes.

He sat all day delivering orations, in the depths of a cushioned chair.
His pocketbook deprived them of the power to retort.

"What een hell do you sink I pie fife dolla a week for? Play? No, py
damn!" Maggie was anxious for a friend to whom she could talk about
Pete. She would have liked to discuss his admirable mannerisms with a
reliable mutual friend. At home, she found her mother often drunk and
always raving. It seems that the world had treated this woman very
badly, and she took a deep revenge upon such portions of it as came
within her reach. She broke furniture as if she were at last getting her
rights. She swelled with virtuous indignation as she carried the lighter
articles of household use, one by one under the shadows of the three
gilt balls, where Hebrews chained them with chains of interest.

Jimmie came when he was obliged to by circumstances over which he had no
control. His well-trained legs brought him staggering home and put him
to bed some nights when he would rather have gone elsewhere. Swaggering
Pete loomed like a golden sun to Maggie. He took her to a dime museum
where rows of meek freaks astonished her. She contemplated their
deformities with awe and thought them a sort of chosen tribe.

"What een hell do you sink I pie fife dolla a week for? Play? No, py
damn!" Maggie was anxious for a friend to whom she could talk about
Pete. She would have liked to discuss his admirable mannerisms with a
reliable mutual friend. At home, she found her mother often drunk and
always raving. It seems that the world had treated this woman very
badly, and she took a deep revenge upon such portions of it as came
within her reach. She broke furniture as if she were at last getting her
rights. She swelled with virtuous indignation as she carried the lighter
articles of household use, one by one under the shadows of the three
gilt balls, where Hebrews chained them with chains of interest.

Jimmie came when he was obliged to by circumstances over which he had no
control. His well-trained legs brought him staggering home and put him
to bed some nights when he would rather have gone elsewhere. Swaggering
Pete loomed like a golden sun to Maggie. He took her to a dime museum
where rows of meek freaks astonished her. She contemplated their
deformities with awe and thought them a sort of chosen tribe.

Pete, raking his brains for amusement, discovered the Central Park
Menagerie and the Museum of Arts. Sunday afternoons would sometimes find
them at these places. Pete did not appear to be particularly interested
in what he saw. He stood around looking heavy, while Maggie giggled in
glee.

Once at the Menagerie he went into a trance of admiration before the
spectacle of a very small monkey threatening to thrash a cageful because
one of them had pulled his tail and he had not wheeled about quickly
enough to discover who did it. Ever after Pete knew that monkey by sight
and winked at him, trying to induce hime to fight with other and larger
monkeys. At the Museum, Maggie said, "Dis is outa sight."

"Oh hell," said Pete, "wait 'till next summer an' I'll take yehs to a
picnic."

While the girl wandered in the vaulted rooms, Pete occupied himself in
returning stony stare for stony stare, the appalling scrutiny of the
watch-dogs of the treasures. Occasionally he would remark in loud tones:
"Dat jay has got glass eyes," and sentences of the sort. When he tired
of this amusement he would go to the mummies and moralize over them.

Usually he submitted with silent dignity to all which he had to go
through, but, at times, he was goaded into comment.

"What deh hell," he demanded once.  "Look at all dese little jugs!
Hundred jugs in a row!  Ten rows in a case an' 'bout a t'ousand cases!
What deh blazes use is dem?"

Evenings during the week he took her to see plays in which the
brain-clutching heroine was rescued from the palatial home of her
guardian, who is cruelly after her bonds, by the hero with the
beautiful sentiments.  The latter spent most of his time out at soak in
pale-green snow storms, busy with a nickel-plated revolver, rescuing
aged strangers from villains.

Maggie lost herself in sympathy with the wanderers swooning in snow
storms beneath happy-hued church windows.  And a choir within singing
"Joy to the World."  To Maggie and the rest of the audience this was
transcendental realism.  Joy always within, and they, like the actor,
inevitably without.  Viewing it, they hugged themselves in ecstatic
pity of their imagined or real condition.

The girl thought the arrogance and granite-heartedness of the magnate
of the play was very accurately drawn.  She echoed the maledictions
that the occupants of the gallery showered on this individual when his
lines compelled him to expose his extreme selfishness.

Shady persons in the audience revolted from the pictured villainy of
the drama.  With untiring zeal they hissed vice and applauded virtue.
Unmistakably bad men evinced an apparently sincere admiration for
virtue.

The loud gallery was overwhelmingly with the unfortunate and the
oppressed.  They encouraged the struggling hero with cries, and jeered
the villain, hooting and calling attention to his whiskers.  When
anybody died in the pale-green snow storms, the gallery mourned.  They
sought out the painted misery and hugged it as akin.

In the hero's erratic march from poverty in the first act, to wealth
and triumph in the final one, in which he forgives all the enemies that
he has left, he was assisted by the gallery, which applauded his
generous and noble sentiments and confounded the speeches of his
opponents by making irrelevant but very sharp remarks.  Those actors
who were cursed with villainy parts were confronted at every turn by
the gallery.  If one of them rendered lines containing the most subtile
distinctions between right and wrong, the gallery was immediately aware
if the actor meant wickedness, and denounced him accordingly.

The last act was a triumph for the hero, poor and of the masses, the
representative of the audience, over the villain and the rich man, his
pockets stuffed with bonds, his heart packed with tyrannical purposes,
imperturbable amid suffering.

Maggie always departed with raised spirits from the showing places of
the melodrama.  She rejoiced at the way in which the poor and virtuous
eventually surmounted the wealthy and wicked.  The theatre made her
think.  She wondered if the culture and refinement she had seen
imitated, perhaps grotesquely, by the heroine on the stage, could be
acquired by a girl who lived in a tenement house and worked in a shirt
factory.



A group of urchins were intent upon the side door of a saloon.
Expectancy gleamed from their eyes.  They were twisting their fingers
in excitement.

"Here she comes," yelled one of them suddenly.

The group of urchins burst instantly asunder and its individual
fragments were spread in a wide, respectable half circle about the
point of interest.  The saloon door opened with a crash, and the figure
of a woman appeared upon the threshold.  Her grey hair fell in knotted
masses about her shoulders.  Her face was crimsoned and wet with
perspiration.  Her eyes had a rolling glare.

"Not a damn cent more of me money will yehs ever get, not a damn cent.
I spent me money here fer t'ree years an' now yehs tells me yeh'll sell
me no more stuff!  T'hell wid yeh, Johnnie Murckre!  'Disturbance'?
Disturbance be damned!  T'hell wid yeh, Johnnie--"

The door received a kick of exasperation from within and the woman
lurched heavily out on the sidewalk.

The gamins in the half-circle became violently agitated.  They began to
dance about and hoot and yell and jeer.  Wide dirty grins spread over
each face.

The woman made a furious dash at a particularly outrageous cluster of
little boys.  They laughed delightedly and scampered off a short
distance, calling out over their shoulders to her.  She stood tottering
on the curb-stone and thundered at them.

"Yeh devil's kids," she howled, shaking red fists.  The little boys
whooped in glee.  As she started up the street they fell in behind and
marched uproariously.  Occasionally she wheeled about and made charges
on them.  They ran nimbly out of reach and taunted her.

In the frame of a gruesome doorway she stood for a moment cursing them.
Her hair straggled, giving her crimson features a look of insanity.
Her great fists quivered as she shook them madly in the air.

The urchins made terrific noises until she turned and disappeared.
Then they filed quietly in the way they had come.

The woman floundered about in the lower hall of the tenement house and
finally stumbled up the stairs.  On an upper hall a door was opened and
a collection of heads peered curiously out, watching her.  With a
wrathful snort the woman confronted the door, but it was slammed
hastily in her face and the key was turned.

She stood for a few minutes, delivering a frenzied challenge at the
panels.

"Come out in deh hall, Mary Murphy, damn yeh, if yehs want a row.  Come
ahn, yeh overgrown terrier, come ahn."

She began to kick the door with her great feet.  She shrilly defied the
universe to appear and do battle.  Her cursing trebles brought heads
from all doors save the one she threatened.  Her eyes glared in every
direction.  The air was full of her tossing fists.

"Come ahn, deh hull damn gang of yehs, come ahn," she roared at the
spectators.  An oath or two, cat-calls, jeers and bits of facetious
advice were given in reply.  Missiles clattered about her feet.

"What deh hell's deh matter wid yeh?" said a voice in the gathered
gloom, and Jimmie came forward.  He carried a tin dinner-pail in his
hand and under his arm a brown truckman's apron done in a bundle.
"What deh hell's wrong?" he demanded.

"Come out, all of yehs, come out," his mother was howling.  "Come ahn
an' I'll stamp her damn brains under me feet."

"Shet yer face, an' come home, yeh damned old fool," roared Jimmie at
her.  She strided up to him and twirled her fingers in his face.  Her
eyes were darting flames of unreasoning rage and her frame trembled
with eagerness for a fight.

"T'hell wid yehs!  An' who deh hell are yehs?  I ain't givin' a snap of
me fingers fer yehs," she bawled at him.  She turned her huge back in
tremendous disdain and climbed the stairs to the next floor.

Jimmie followed, cursing blackly.  At the top of the flight he seized
his mother's arm and started to drag her toward the door of their room.

"Come home, damn yeh," he gritted between his teeth.

"Take yer hands off me!  Take yer hands off me," shrieked his mother.

She raised her arm and whirled her great fist at her son's face.
Jimmie dodged his head and the blow struck him in the back of the neck.
"Damn yeh," gritted he again.  He threw out his left hand and writhed
his fingers about her middle arm.  The mother and the son began to sway
and struggle like gladiators.

"Whoop!" said the Rum Alley tenement house.  The hall filled with
interested spectators.

"Hi, ol' lady, dat was a dandy!"

"T'ree to one on deh red!"

"Ah, stop yer damn scrappin'!"

The door of the Johnson home opened and Maggie looked out.  Jimmie made
a supreme cursing effort and hurled his mother into the room.  He
quickly followed and closed the door.  The Rum Alley tenement swore
disappointedly and retired.

The mother slowly gathered herself up from the floor.  Her eyes
glittered menacingly upon her children.

"Here, now," said Jimmie, "we've had enough of dis.  Sit down, an' don'
make no trouble."

He grasped her arm, and twisting it, forced her into a creaking chair.

"Keep yer hands off me," roared his mother again.

"Damn yer ol' hide," yelled Jimmie, madly.  Maggie shrieked and ran
into the other room.  To her there came the sound of a storm of crashes
and curses.  There was a great final thump and Jimmie's voice cried:
"Dere, damn yeh, stay still."  Maggie opened the door now, and went
warily out.  "Oh, Jimmie."

He was leaning against the wall and swearing.  Blood stood upon bruises
on his knotty fore-arms where they had scraped against the floor or the
walls in the scuffle.  The mother lay screeching on the floor, the
tears running down her furrowed face.

Maggie, standing in the middle of the room, gazed about her.  The usual
upheaval of the tables and chairs had taken place.  Crockery was strewn
broadcast in fragments.  The stove had been disturbed on its legs, and
now leaned idiotically to one side.  A pail had been upset and water
spread in all directions.

The door opened and Pete appeared.  He shrugged his shoulders.  "Oh,
Gawd," he observed.

He walked over to Maggie and whispered in her ear.  "Ah, what deh hell,
Mag?  Come ahn and we'll have a hell of a time."

The mother in the corner upreared her head and shook her tangled locks.

"Teh hell wid him and you," she said, glowering at her daughter in the
gloom.  Her eyes seemed to burn balefully.  "Yeh've gone teh deh devil,
Mag Johnson, yehs knows yehs have gone teh deh devil.  Yer a disgrace
teh yer people, damn yeh.  An' now, git out an' go ahn wid dat
doe-faced jude of yours.  Go teh hell wid him, damn yeh, an' a good
riddance.  Go teh hell an' see how yeh likes it."

Maggie gazed long at her mother.

"Go teh hell now, an' see how yeh likes it.  Git out.  I won't have
sech as yehs in me house!  Get out, d'yeh hear!  Damn yeh, git out!"

The girl began to tremble.

At this instant Pete came forward.  "Oh, what deh hell, Mag, see,"
whispered he softly in her ear.  "Dis all blows over.  See?  Deh ol'
woman 'ill be all right in deh mornin'.  Come ahn out wid me!  We'll
have a hell of a time."

The woman on the floor cursed.  Jimmie was intent upon his bruised
fore-arms.  The girl cast a glance about the room filled with a chaotic
mass of debris, and at the red, writhing body of her mother.

"Go teh hell an' good riddance."

She went.

 There is the passage of a considerable, unspecified number of years, perhaps ten or twelve. The father and baby Tommie die unremarkably and largely unremarked, and they vanish from the narrative. Meanwhile, Jimmie grows up--or devolves--into a hardened, scornful young man. Chapter 4 is a character sketch of his development, his formative years when he "menaced mankind" and dreamed "blood-red dreams...at the intersection of streets." He grows even more belligerent, despising all forms of religion and refinement as weakness. As a teamster driving his horses through the violence and chaos of lower Manhattan, he becomes tougher still--"he became so sharp that he believed in nothing"--finding power in aggression, developing a courtroom record due to his brawling, and seducing and impregnating two different women. He is now the man of the house, drunken and profane as his father was, and Mary upholds her end of the bargain by continuing her line of deeper descent into alcoholism. Maggie, however, develops and preserves a ragged beauty amid the filth of Rum Alley. She goes to work in a sweatshop for a factory making collars and cuffs. She is quickly entranced by Pete, a friend who calls for Jimmie one night, telling tales of his prowess and glowing with bravado. Pete is "a man who had a correct sense of his personal superiority. There was valor and contempt for circumstances in the glance of his eye." Maggie, naive and sentimental, sees in Pete the possibility of a romantic life and an escape from Rum Alley. The two begin to date, and Pete introduces Maggie into the workingman's world of leisure--cheap popular music, burlesque dances, and stock melodramas--which seems princely and extravagant to the downtrodden girl. Her developing affair with Pete, and the morals of the rags-to-riches melodramas he takes her to see, give Maggie vain hope that she might one day rise out of abject poverty. There comes a night when the badly drunk Mary is refused service at a local bar. Taunted by street children, she staggers back to her tenement, where she makes a loud and belligerent scene in the hallway. Jimmie forces her back into the tenement, where they have a violent encounter. Into the wreckage following this combat walks Pete, who has come to take Maggie on a date. Inflamed by beer and excitement, Mary launches into a diatribe against Maggie: "Yer a disgrace teh yer people, damn you," Mary glowers, "Go teh hell an' good riddance." Maggie indeed does leave with Pete, and the stage is set for her final seduction.

