Harvey J. O'Higgins

“ The man was leaning forward on one elbow, a roll of flesh bulging above his collar. Larry's slanted eye fixed on that fat roll malevolently for a moment before the barber swung him around again. And when he was sheared and sleeked down with bay rum and out of the chair finally, he reached for his hat—with his eyes on the remembered neck—just as the girl, dropping her chamois pad, looked up appealingly at the barber as if for aid against insult. ”

“ When Carney met her, she was adrift on the life of the city in a sort of unambitious isolation, working stolidly, lonely among the younger girls with whom she had no sympathy, and bruskly repelling any flippant advances from the men. She had lost track of all her girlhood acquaintances. "Dublin Row" had long since been torn down. When she saw Carney with his truck, it was like meeting an old friend in a world of strangers. ”

“ Carney was late. He had hoped to have his team in their stalls by five o'clock, but his last delivery of packing-cases had not been taken off his hands until ten minutes past five. Now he came down Christopher Street like a Roman chariot-racer, standing behind the high seat of his double truck, shaken to the ears with the jarring of the axles, his huge Clydesdales pounding along as if to break their hoofs.
He turned in on the asphalt at full speed, and wheeled with the recklessness of a battery going into action ”

“ Every trace of the old Bowery Musée is gone now—gone with the public that used to patronize it and the conditions that kept it alive. A penny savings-bank has been built on its site. Madame Carlotta and young Redney have disappeared together—no one knows where. Only the Professor remains—an old rounder on the Bowery, gray and shabby, sleeping in doss-houses and hawking a china cement—and he, as the chief victim of this tragedy in fakirdom, is still too proud for pity and too absurd for anything else. ”

“ Then the comic Irishman developed unexpected powers as a hypnotist—not only hypnotizing, a whole man in an instant, but paralyzing an arm or a leg by merely drawing his fingers down the limb and waving a hand over it. Little Mickey tittered—giggled—shook—and screamed with laughter. The villain took another excruciating punch in the eye. A half-dozen plots of love and secret marriage, robbery and pursuit, tangled, themselves inextricably together, with every knot a tableau. And when the curtain fell on the end of the act, the villain had sworn thrice, horribly, to have revenge ”

“ On this millionaire's lawn, under these pompous trees, groups of old women in dresses of blue denim, with gingham aprons, sat gossiping over their sewing, smoking clay pipes, counting the beads of their rosaries, or dozing in the heat of the sun—as wrinkled as lizards, and blinking against the blaze of sunlight that gave an almost reptilian sparkle to their puckered eyes. Veterans in the unending battle of life, no longer able to struggle for the food to keep them struggling, they had been brought here to die in peace. ”

“ She had come to marriage as a strayed cat comes to a saucer of milk, with a boldness that is born of hunger, and a tense wariness that does not relax under the first caress. To escape from her single life of self-supported loneliness, she would have married any one of whom she was not altogether afraid; and she was not afraid of Carney. ”

“ It was her opinion that every girl in the town was a designing hypocrite who was bent upon flattering Larry into marrying her so that she might not have to work for a living. Not one of the whole useless set would know how to cook for him. Not one would wash or mend for him. Not one would be able to do anything but spend his money in clothes for herself and ruin his digestion with stuff bought at delicatessen counters, and with her folly and extravagance worry him to death. ”

“ It was her belief that a floor was by nature cold and that the more one put upon it, the warmer the house would be. She covered the windows with white roller-blinds, double sash-curtains of muslin starched like surplices, long lace curtains reaching from the cornice to the floor, and over-curtains of some sort of yellow stuff with an inwoven tinsel thread—until every window was as beautiful in gold embroidery and fine lace as "an archbishop sayin' mass." ”

“ At six o'clock, she turned from the window where she had been idle, and went to the dressing-rooms to put off her "harness" and clothe herself for the street. She did not hurry. The younger girls giggled and chattered around her, arraying themselves in open-work finery and picture hats. She was the last to leave. Her face had lost its work-hour heaviness and flushed, with the faintest twinkle of excitement.
It returned to affected indifference when she saw Carney across the street. They met, as if by accident, at the corner. "Well?" she said. ”

“ The friendliness of her smile was only the sparkle of sunlight on very deep water; he knew it; he knew that no amount of peering would give him a sight of what lay below that dazzle; and it was with the intention of clouding it over, that he repeated, with his persistent frown: "What are you doing here?
"Living," she said. "Don't you like it?"
It was a blue-and-white kitchen, with blue-and-white curtains on the windows, blue-and white china on the shelves, blue-and-white linoleum on the floor. ”

“ They shook themselves. By midday, the parlor carpet was laid; a green matting was down in the dining-room; the ten yards of oilcloth adorned the kitchen; and Carney, standing in the disorder of the bedroom where all the furniture was piled, smiled around him on the beginnings of his happiness—and felt hungry. It reminded him that his team had not been fed. ”

“ A pan banged in the kitchen. "Warrm, d' yeh call it? I call it drippin' danged hot!"
The girl did not reply; and the cook, after grumbling to herself for a while, resigned herself to a stifled silence.
A delivery wagon came clattering up the street, swung into the gutter, and pulled up with a jerk; and Annie dropped her potato and watched eagerly. When she saw a strange man climb down the wheel, she put her dish-pan on the deep window-sill and stood back from the light to regard him with a look of distress. He bustled down into the area and threw all his weight on a tug at the bell. ”

“ He had regarded himself as a masterly, strong spirit, living aloof from the weakness of humanity; and he was willing to let her go without a word of kindliness or reconciliation.
She went. He stood up, dazed and shaken. He stumbled out into the hall to look after her. There, all the living curiosities, exhibitors, and platform entertainers were cursing and despairing together like the passengers on a sinking ship. Their wages were lost; their trunks, their properties, their trained animals and their poor exhibits were all held by the law. They faced bankruptcy and want. ”

“ The innocent sailor rushed in to her cry. He was seized by the police (who had apparently been in the next room) . "Arrest that man for murder!" "I am in-no-cent!" Then the robber captain's deep bass boomed out from the background: "And my evidence will prrrove it!"
When the captain, posing for Liberty enlightening the Upper Bay, uttered those generous words, Mickey brought his dirty little palms together with a smack that led the gallery. A whirlwind of applause beat upon the curtain, and—when the curtain rose again—upon the actors bowing before the storm. ”

“ He was discovered. "Help! Help!" He threw himself on the miser. The old man struggled and choked. And Mickey strangled the gallery railing with a relentless clutch. A gurgle, a sob— What? He had killed him! He 'd be caught! "Ssss-sh!"
Some one—some one—was coming. It was the robber's blind wife. "Thank God, she 's blind!" Mickey caught a long breath, and the robber escaped noiselessly through the open door, just as the blind woman stumbled on the body of the dead miser and screamed an alarm. ”

“ But the crowning audacity of his day was the purchase of a delicatessen dinner—cold chicken, sweet pickles, potato salad, Swiss cheese, bologna, rye bread, a wooden plate of butter, and four bottles of imported English ale. He spread it on the table, in the dishes of the "decorated English tea-set," drew up two chairs, and surveyed his work from the doorway with a chuckle of uncontainable delight. ”

“ The deputy's insteps had fallen in his days of police duty. Whenever he was accused of any political obliquity, he would admit, "Well, my feet don't track good"—with a humorous air of conceding the one fault of which he could be justly suspected.
To a man who has been condemned to prison for life, there may be something momentous in his arrival at the gates of doom; but to the little world that receives him, the event is commonplace and routinary. In Sam's case, his coming was only an incident in the arrival of Johns, whose visits were always welcome ”

“ THE CLOWNS I "THE difference between the two Henry Brothers," a dramatic critic had written of them, jocularly, "is the difference between the realist who observes the modesty of nature, and the romantic artist who adds one to truth and begins where the realist leaves off."
They were "The Henry Brothers" on the programs; but they were "Hen Sutley" and "Harry Burls" in private life; and they were the "star" clowns of the 'New York Amphitheater. ”

“ Joliffe had been reduced to the meekness of despair.
At last Hetty happened to say, one day at dinner: "When we have a girl we 'll be able to give little parties."
Bailey remained silent, and his silence piqued her. She glanced at her mother and took the old woman's set lips as an unspoken challenge. She remembered how humiliatingly she had been defeated on this point once, and she set herself to carry it now—to make her husband say that she might have a servant if she wished, although she did not intend to get one. ”

“ She showed no interest; and the girl explained, importantly: "I 'm going to be married."
"Yes, miss," she replied in the same tone. In a moment, she added: "When the men want you, there 's no denyin' them. It 'as to be, miss."
The girl smiled at this resigned view of her fate. "You know what it is to be married."
"Yes, miss. I 've been married twice." She kept her eyes on the empty lawn, and the nurse wondered what she saw there to hold her thoughts—what memories, what faces, what ghosts of old events. ”

“ Civil War relics were no longer of interest—even though they had been imperfectly converted into relics of the campaign in Cuba. The living curiosities had outlived curiosity. Even the Musée's "Amateurs' Night"—of the Professor's own origination—had been stolen by its rivals, and the glory of its Friday night contests had departed. A three-story building, with a theater on its ground floor and two large amusement halls above, cannot pay rent and salaries on a feeble trickle of dimes that took a whole evening to fill one of the wooden pools of the till in the box-office. ”

“ IN THE MUSÉE I "REDNEY"—who sold chewing-gum and prize packages on the various floors of the old Bowery Musée—stopped at the door of Madame Carlotta's gipsy tent and grinned in at Madame. "Well," he said, "how 's the game goin'? Been holdin' any warm hands lately?"
It was a gipsy tent that might have served as a Turkish cozy corner in a Harlem flat; and Madame Carlotta, plump and comfortable, dressed in a scarlet kimono, among soiled bespangled cushions, looked almost as gipsy-like and nomadic as a fat house cat looks tigerish. ”

“ All he said was—when they were carrying him aboard the tug: 'She 's all gone, this time'—speaking of the dam."
He was silent.
The business man challenged him: "Well?"
"Well!" he cried, suddenly, "we 're all hired men, are n't we? Do I work the way I do, for money alone, or out of any loyalty to anybody? Does a soldier, or a clergyman, or a doctor, or an artist? Does even a man like Larsen? Is the world really run by wages—by hire—or by any feudal-system sort of loyalty? ”

“ But in the middle of the meal, she gathered—from something Carney said—that he did not expect her to go back to her work in Sturm & Bergman's; and she was struck dumb. She had been prepared to work until the care of a family should keep her at home. She listened to him with a pathetic expression of wistfulness and doubt, while he—in clumsy apology for having furnished the flat without consulting her—took out his bank-book and explained his indebtedness to the "Furniture Emporium." ”