Children of the Tenements | Page 2

pedler of colored Christmas candles passed him by unheard.
Women with big baskets jostled him, stopped and fingered his
cabbages; he answered their inquiries mechanically. Adam's mind was
not in the street, at his stand, but in the dark back basement where his
wife Hansche was lying, there was no telling how sick. They could not
afford a doctor. Of course, he might send to the hospital for one, but he
would be sure to take her away, and then what would become of little
Abe? Besides, if they had nothing else in the whole world, they had yet
each other. When that was no longer the case--Adam would have
lacked no answer to the vexed question if life were then worth living.
Troubles come not singly, but in squads, once the bag be untied. It was
not the least sore point with Adam that he had untied it himself. They
were doing well enough, he and his wife, in their home in Leinbach,
Austria, keeping a little grocery store, and living humbly but
comfortably, when word of the country beyond the sea where much
money was made, and where every man was as good as the next, made
them uneasy and discontented. In the end they gave up the grocery and
their little home, Hansche not without some tears; but she dried them
quickly at the thought of the good times that were waiting. With these
ever before them they bore the hardships of the steerage, and in good
season reached Hester Street and the longed-for haven, only to
find--this. A rear basement, dark and damp and unwholesome, for
which the landlord, along with the privilege of keeping a stand in the
street, which was not his to give, made them pay twelve dollars a
month. Truly, much money was made in America, but not by those
who paid the rent. It was all they could do, working early and late, he
with his push-cart and at his stand, she with the needle, slaving for the
sweater, to get the rent together and keep a roof over the head of little
Abe.
Five years they had kept that up, and things had gone from bad to
worse. The police blackmail had taken out of it what little profit there
was in the push-cart business. Times had grown harder than they ever
were in Hester Street. To cap it all, two weeks ago gas had begun to
leak into the basement from somewhere, and made Hansche sick, so
that she dropped down at her work. Adam had complained to the

landlord, and he had laughed at him. What did he want for twelve
dollars, anyway? If the basement wasn't good enough for him, why
didn't he hire an upstairs flat? The landlord did not tell him that he
could do that for the same rent he paid for the miserable hole he
burrowed in. He had a good thing and he knew it. Adam Grunschlag
knew nothing of the Legal Aid Society, that is there to help such as he.
He was afraid to appeal to the police. He was just a poor, timid Jew, of
a race that has been hunted for centuries to make sport and revenue for
the great and mighty. When he spoke of moving and the landlord said
that he would forfeit the twenty dollars deposit that he had held back all
these years, and which was all the capital the pedler had, he thought
that was the law, and was silent. He could not afford to lose it, and yet
he must find some way of making a change, for the sake of little Abe as
well as his wife, and the child.
At the thought of the child, the pedler gave a sudden start and was wide
awake on the instant. Little Abe was their own, and though he had
come in the gloom of that dismal basement, he had been the one ray of
sunshine that had fallen into their dreary lives. But the child was a rent
baby. In the crowded tenements of New York the lodger serves the
same purpose as the Irishman's pig; he helps to pay the rent. "The
child"--it was never called anything else--was a lodger. Flotsam from
Rivington Street, after the breaking up of a family there, it had come to
them, to perish "if the Lord so willed it" in that basement. "Infant
slaughter houses" the Tenement House Commission had called their
kind. The father paid seventy-five cents a week for its keep, pending
the disclosure of the divine purpose with the baby. The Grunschlags, all
unconscious of the partnership that was thus thrust upon them, did their
best for it, and up to the time the trouble with the gas began it was a
disgracefully