Chapter XIX The Inheritance
Little more is to be told.
Time has smoothed the jagged edges, and I have never again dared to measure my puny wisdom to His. Yet, and there is a forgiveness, no day passes without the question: “Is what I have learned worth the tuition fee?”
True, my knowledge is trifling when compared to yours, but we also differ in our “Whence.”
To me it is all a miracle. Before it I did not even grope about in the darkness searching for light.
I was satisfied.
Now I know at least that there is a soul, a mind within me, and that they were given for a purpose. There are limits to my understanding, and why it was that just as the portals of the better life were slowly opening to me, my little guide should fall exhausted on the threshold, is now a mystery to me, but will some day be answered.
Soon after the funeral the mother and the little brother went West to the elder son to make their future home with him. That left just Bill and me.
We got used to it in time. We had always had the same likes and hobbies, and we found ways to spend our time with profit to ourselves.
Down here, where we live, there are few trees and flowers, and even air is at a premium. Air is necessary, and Bill and I have devised a scheme to get it as pure as possible under the circumstances.
The roaring bustle of lower Broadway turns into deadly silence with the fall of evening. For miles, excepting a watchman or policeman, you will scarcely see a living being. That is where Bill and I enjoy our pleasant pastime. After the day’s work is ended we travel through the quiet streets until we reach our stoop in the yawning dark cañon of the skyscrapers. We do not talk much; there is better intercourse.
From where we sit we gaze up at the skies and greet the merry twinkle of our glistening friends. Then through the dancing myriads of celestial bodies our vision winds its way on through the mazes, and does not stop until it sees the most beloved spirit in all the glory of the heavenly home. Every star reflects her face in brilliants, and from behind the hazy veilings of the cloud-smile her eyes shine radiantly. Bill and I go home, not lonely, not sad or soured, for we have spent the hours in the anteroom of heaven and have learned another lesson in the quiet night.
The firmament and the stars are for all of us; their glories shine for all mankind. You, gentle reader, may learn to know them—to own them—but, alas! you cannot own my Bill. Perhaps you would not care for him. He never was handsome, and now he is getting old and might not be to you a pleasant companion. But he has traveled with me along life’s highway; he has never told a lie; he has been loyal and true, and there’s not in all this world another dog like my good old pal.
For some time after the going-home of my Mamie Rose I was ill, but found my position still open for me after regaining my health. I was not so strong as I had been, but did not wish to neglect my work, and, overtasking myself, an accident permanently incapacitated me for that kind of employment. I had to submit to an operation—to be repeated later—and the expense of it, with the long and enforced idleness, soon exhausted the remainder of my savings.
It was then that the old past crooned the tempter’s lay. But for only a very short time was I near the brink, from which it would have been easy to drop back into the black abyss from whence I had come.
I overcame my temptation, and, since then, have had no fear that I would revert to my former ways of wickedness. I have learned to understand life, feel mind and soul within me, and I want to go on, not back.
And, besides, there is the legacy of her who has taught and inspired me.
Some who will approve of my determination to go on might disapprove of the immediate methods employed by me.
I had to go to work and was compelled to accept the first opportunity offered to me. I became a dishwasher in a downtown lunchroom at three dollars a week.
It was unsavory work, but it was work, and left me time in the evenings and on Sundays to live in my books.
Bill and I were again reduced to the attic. It did not affect us very much, as we were both in a mood in which we did not care for the nicety of our environment.
One day I heard that a man I knew wanted to see me to tell me about a better job, which, however, was in the dishwashing line, too. He was staying at a lodging house. He was not in when I called there, and I sat down in the reading room to wait for him. The tables were covered with daily papers which are furnished free by the lodging house keepers, and I took one to while the time away.
It was the Evening Journal. I glanced through the news columns and then meant to drop the paper. The only page which had absolutely no interest for me was the women’s page. Once, indeed, it had helped to built castles in Spain, and the patterns of gay frocks and dresses had made our “dreams to come true” more enjoyable, but now—it was all different.
Throwing the paper to the table it happened that just that women’s page was uppermost. I did not read it, but every once in a while my glance would sweep the page in rambling look. At the bottom of it there was a caption in big type: “The Evening Journal’s True Love Story Contest.” The caption was so conspicuous that my eye could not help meeting it every time I looked at the page. My wait was long. I did not care to go over the news columns again, and at last I began reading the True Love Story.
It was not a bad story, still the features of it were not very extraordinary. I finished it, and then soliloquized.
“If the story of this man is worth printing, why not mine? All there is to his story is that he and the girl had a quarrel before the marriage eventually took place. Neither one of them had to undergo a self-sacrifice. Would it be sacrilegious to tell the story of my Mamie Rose? Or would it not rather inspire greater unselfishness in those who are in love?”
I discussed this question with myself for some time, and then came to the conclusion that the memory of my little girl would not be profaned by having the story of our love told. To this very day I am not sure whether I did right in giving way to my inclination. Perhaps I acted indelicately, but on the other hand I am not refined or cultured, and the dictates of my heart are generally decisive in a question of this kind.
I did not have a scrap of paper in my pocket, but saw a piece of yellow wrapping paper on the floor. I examined its cleanliness, and, finding it fairly clean, began to write my story. The conditions were rather severe for an amateur author. The story had to be told in less than seven hundred and fifty words.
After the last line was written I hurried to the office of the Evening Journal, not trusting the stability of my impulse. A very imposing young man condescended to receive my contribution, and, instead of reading it immediately, threw it carelessly aside.
“That is a story for the ‘Prize Contest,’” I whispered, falteringly.
“Is it? I thought it was an editorial on the relative positions of England and Russia in Manchuria. Anyway, don’t let it worry you, it won’t worry us. We haven’t anything to do with that kind of stuff; it goes up to the editor of the women’s page.”
If that young man could have read my thoughts he would have been surprised to find how near he was to trouble. The story of my only blessing called “stuff” by that young whippersnapper!
Not until many months later did I understand that “stuff” meant anything and everything from an essay to a two-line joke.
I firmly believe that I was the first buyer of the Evening Journal on the following day. I turned to the women’s page, but did not find my story. The following day brought the same experience, and I felt certain then that my “stuff” had found its way into the waste basket.
On the third day I saw the name, Owen Kildare, for the first time in print. I had won the prize and received my check. My elation knew no bounds, and when, after a few days, letters full of sympathy reached me, I was certain that I had not done wrong in writing that little story.
My thoughts found something new to think about. If this story, written under adverse circumstances and without any preparation, could win a prize, why could I not write other stories about the men and women I had known, and about the things and scenes I had seen and am still seeing? If, as in some of the stories which I had read in reputable magazines, untruths and deliberate misrepresentations can find a place in print, the truth about us—the people of the slums—should surely be also worthy of publication.
My mind was full of incidents witnessed by me through the many years I spent in slummery, and, without any difficulty, I wrote a story of the life I know best.
I sent the story to McClure’s Magazine. It was accepted and partly paid for, but later returned to me because it was a trifle “too true.” I sold it three days later to the Sunday Press, and the editor, Mr. William Muller, invited me to become a contributor. The invitation was gladly accepted, and short stories, editorials and special articles, all treating of my peculiar phase, have since then been written by me for that paper.
During my connection with the Press I learned much from Andrew McKenzie, who succeeded William Muller as Sunday editor, and who never tired of pruning my “copy” with kind care. There also I met one of the finest men that it has ever been my pleasure to know, Hilary Bell, who, besides being the critic of the paper, was an artist and literateur of high degree, and so devoted to his work that the zeal with which he pursued his studies brought him to a much too early end. Bright, staunch, manly, Hilary Bell is no more, but his memory will live forever in my grateful heart. In the fall of 1901 the Sunday Herald published a story, “How To Be a Gentleman on Ten Thousand a Year.” I happened to read it and, providing one has the other and more essential qualities, thought it no hard matter to keep from starvation on that amount. The story was written in a spirit of complaint, reciting how difficult it was to be a “somebody” in society on that figure. Down here on the Bowery and East Side we have gentlemen, though some may doubt it, and they manage to retain their claim to the title on very much less than ten thousand. The contrast was so wide that I could not refrain from writing about it and submitting it to the Herald.
Mr. Dinwiddie, the Sunday editor, sent me a letter asking me to call. I had called the story “How To Be a Gentleman on Three Dollars a Week.” The editor thought my story a trifle exaggerated, and it took some time to convince him that the truth had not been stretched. But at last the story was printed, and I followed it up with other stories about my people.
In January, 1902, Mr. Hartley Davis, the editor of the Sunday News, invited me to become a steady contributor to that paper. The News had always been the paper of the Fourth Ward, and you can easily imagine what a stir it created among some of my old friends when they saw my name so frequently at the bottom of a story. In the “front rooms” of many humble homes down there I have seen some of my stories hang proudly, and framed, in the place of honor on the wall. And it has made me feel good. Not so much because of the self-satisfaction, although let me be frank and state that very often when I know and feel I have written a fairly good story, I cannot hide my pride in my work and glory in it, for it proves to me that all was not in vain—but because it shows that even these poor people whom you think so vile, so demoralized, are glad to recognize it with sincerity, when one from among them succeeds in climbing a few steps on the ladder of useful decency and manhood.
During my connection with the Sunday News I had a chat with Hartley Davis which was the starting point of this book. I had returned to the office from an assignment, and, after reporting to the editor, made a few comments on the scenes just left by me. We fell into a discussion on the slums, and Hartley Davis congratulated me on my escape from them. My origin was not known to my readers at the time. This point was accentuated by Davis.
“Kildare, if the readers of the Sunday News knew how you were developed from a seller of the paper on the streets to a writer for it, they would have greater faith in your stories of your people and in you. A chance was offered to you and you took advantage of it. When a man is a Bowery tough at thirty, unable to read, and at thirty-seven starts in to earn his living by writing, it is worth the telling.”
I said: “It was not a chance, it was a miracle.”
There was a difference of opinion. To settle the difference and to adopt the suggestion made, I wrote my story for the Sunday News and was surprised at the sympathetic response it awakened.
Below, you will find a copy of the epitome written by Hartley Davis at the publication of my story: