“I WONDER if they are so different!” Pet Sibley found the summer hotel very pleasant. She was fond of gayety and pretty dresses and music; and of these she found a plenty at the “Everglades.” The hotel was within a half-hour’s ride of Boston, but was situated in the very heart of a beautiful, shadowy grove of pines, whose breath made the air sweet all through the long hours of the languid summer day. If the trees were more civilized and conventional in their appearance than the wide-branching, free-tossing pines in Uncle Percival’s upland pastures and hundred-acre wood-lot, Pet was not yet enough waked-up to know the difference; in fact, found it rather nice to be able to stroll about the well-kept grounds of the “Everglades,” without fear of tearing her skirts in the underbrush, or losing her way if she left the path. There was no underbrush here, and it was pretty much all path.
Within a few minutes’ walk, and bordering the grove on the further side, a river wound pleasantly and peacefully through a bright strip of meadow-land. On this river the Sibleys kept a boat, with carpet and cushioned seats—not much like the rough little affair which had tipped Pet over into Loon Pond.
Life at the Everglades flowed softly and calmly, like the river; and on the surface floated, like its radiant lilies, the fair ladies, young and old, who fanned and smiled and danced away the summer, without a thought of the suffering thousands in the hot city, fifteen miles away.
Without a thought? Yes, there were some who thought, and who brought poor and ailing children out to a Country Home near by; but these were few.
Pet Sibley, I am glad to say, was one of those who remembered the narrow streets of the North End, and the swarms of ragged men, women and children who panted, dog-like, on curbstone and doorstep, along the foul streets as the sun went down each night.
The people from the West, Pet learned, were relatives, and though their views of life hardly agreed with her own—if, indeed, she had any views—she found the new-comers very pleasant. On the third day after her return, her cousin Mark, whose home was in Chicago, and with whom already, in the free intimacy of hotel life, she felt well acquainted, had taken her out on the river.
A half-hour had slipped by, during which her cousin had instructed her how to sit safely in a boat, and even how to row a little. Just as they turned a bend in the stream and floated into a cove where birches and wild grape-vines afforded a grateful bit of shade, the girl stopped rowing, and looking up at Mark, who sat indolently in the stern of the boat, made the remark with which this chapter began:
“I wonder if they are so—different!”
Pet’s pretty young forehead had a puzzled little wrinkle as she leaned forward, with the oar-blades rippling through the water, and the muslin sleeves falling back from her brown wrists.
“Are they so different, cousin Mark?”
Her companion gave an impatient twitch to his straw hat.
THE PIAZZA AT “THE EVERGLADES.”
“Why, of course! They are not like you, Pet. They are ignorant and poor and—and not clean, you know. They were born to it and they like it.”
“But it doesn’t seem right. I heard a lady on the piazza this morning say something about ‘those creatures’ in such a way that I thought she was speaking of rats or snakes. It turned out she meant the convicts who attacked their keepers at the prison last July.”
Pet spoke warmly, as she was apt to do when she once took up a subject. If she was yet a gay young creature, very fond of “good times,” and ready for any sort of fun, she yet was one of those girls with whom shallow young men at summer hotels are rather shy of entering into conversation. She was only fifteen, and one by one the terribly real problems of the day were marshalling themselves before her. She would not pass them by with a gay laugh, after the prevailing mode of her merry companions. She felt somehow that it belonged to her to help the world and make it better, as well as to the missionaries and other good people upon whose shoulders we so willingly pack responsibilities.
For this childish enthusiasm she was smiled on indulgently by her friends. Kitty and Bess knew the best there was in her, and loved her for it.
Pet gave two or three quick strokes, and paused.
“Isn’t there any way to help these poor people, Mark? It must be the way these people live and are brought up that makes them so rough and bad. Isn’t there any way to help them?”
“None that amounts to much. Besides, that isn’t our business. There are men enough who do nothing else—are paid for it—missionaries and the like. And you can’t make everybody rich, you know. The Bible itself says, ‘Ye have the poor always with you.’”
“Perhaps that doesn’t mean that we ought to have them,” replied Pet, slowly.
“Well, they’re here, and we may as well make the best of it.”
“But what is the best? That’s just it.”
“What is the use of your thinking about it? You can’t do anything, and you don’t even know the kind of people we’re talking of; the North-Enders, for instance. You have never seen and touched them; and if you should meet them face to face, I don’t believe you would care for any further acquaintance. They’re simply disgusting.”
Pet said no more on the subject, and just as the sun dropped into the arms of the waiting pines on the hill they reached the little wharf on the river-bank, moored the boat, and walked up to the hotel. She went straight to her mother’s room, and, after her fashion, as straight to the point.
“Mother, I want to go into the city right away, and spend the night with aunt Augusta.”
“But, my child, it’s tea-time already, and there’s a hop this evening. You had better wait till morning.”
“Mother, I so much want to go now. The train leaves in fifteen minutes. I don’t care for the hop, anyway; it’s too warm to dance. Please, mother?”
Of course impulsive little Pet had her way, and was soon whirling along toward the city, with a strong resolve in her mind.
“I’ll walk up to auntie’s from the depot, and to-morrow I’ll go down to North Street with uncle.”
The train stopped at all the small stations, and was delayed by various causes, so that it was quite dark when she started on her walk. She was glad, after all, to find the streets well-lighted, and filled with respectable-looking people.
On reaching Washington Street, however, everything appeared weird and unnatural. The sidewalks along which one could hardly pass in the daytime, for the crowd, were nearly deserted. All the spots that were bright by sunlight, were now dark, and all the ordinarily dark places light. It was exactly like the negative of a photograph, and gave Pet a sense of looking on the wrong side of everything. Once she saw something move behind the broad plate-glass windows of a railroad agency, on a corner that in the daytime was a business centre. She approached, and was startled to find the object a huge rat, trotting silently about, over the polished engravings and placards, behind the glass, a very spirit of solitude and evil. It was all like a nightmare, and she began most heartily to wish herself back at the Everglades, dancing the Lancers with cousin Mark.
Coincidences happen; not in stories simply, but in real life. The vessel is wrecked in sight of port; the day the owner dies; the man we meet on the steamboat at the headwaters of the Saguenay River, has, unknown to us until then, ate, drank, and slept in the next house all winter, within ten feet of us; the dear friend we have known so long, is at last discovered to be intimate with that other dear friend we love so well, and finally it comes out that all three of us were born in the same little town in New Hampshire.
Now the coincidence that happened on this particular evening was as follows:
While Pet was making her way along Washington Street in the dark, another girl about thirteen years of age, named Bridget Flanagan, was standing on the third gallery of the Crystal Palace, in the same good city of Boston, looking down into Lincoln Street. Like Pet, she was wondering whether anything could be done to aid the poor. Not that any such words passed through her mind. Dear me, no! I doubt if she would have even known what “aid” meant, that word being in her mind associated solely with lemons of a shrivelled and speckled character. If she had spoken her thoughts, which she sometimes had a queer way of doing, she might have said something like this: “Don’t I wish I could git out o’ this! An’ the rich folks wid all the money they wants, an’ nothin’ to do but buy fans an’ use ’em up. My! ain’t it hot?”
It was hot. There was a man playing on a bag-pipe in the street below, and not only had a crowd of children and idlers surrounded him as he stood before a brilliantly lighted (and licensed) liquor store, but the long rickety galleries which run in front of each floor in the “Palace” were full of half-dressed, red-faced women and children, who leaned on the dirty railing and listened to the music, just as the guests at the “Everglades” at the same time were listening to their orchestra of a dozen pieces.
In the gallery overhead Bridget heard two women dancing and shouting noisily. Somewhere in the building a child was crying loudly in a different key from the bag-pipe. Bridget didn’t notice these things particularly; she was used to them. Only there came over the young human girl-heart which was beating beneath the rags and in the midst of this wretchedness a sick longing for—what? Bridget did not know.
“It’s the hot weather it is,” she said to herself; “it’s usin’ me up intirely. I’ll jist go an’ have a bit av a walk.”
Accordingly she issued forth, shortly afterward, with a broken-nosed pitcher in her hand, and made her way to one of the shops across the street. There were plenty to choose from—the city had looked out for that. Their licenses were as strong as the Municipal Seal, stamped on one corner, with its picture of church steeples and clouds, and heavens above and pure, broad sea beneath, could make them. Nearly every second house in the street beckoned with flaring lights to its pile of whiskey barrels and shining counters; the dark intervals along the street, between these shops, were the ruined homes of those who went in at the lighted doors.
Opposite, the Crystal Palace, then at its filthiest and worst, reared its ugly shape like a fat weed, watered day and night by whiskey and gin.
[Within the last twelvemonth this building has been torn down, and Lincoln Street largely reclaimed from the squalor and wretchedness which marked it on the evening of which I am speaking; but within a stone’s throw of the same spot, the same sights may be witnessed any night in the week. The district is popularly known as the “South Cove.”]
As Bridget pattered along the sidewalk with her bare feet, a coarse-looking woman in front of her threw something down on the bricks and laughed hoarsely. The “something” resolved itself into a kitten, which picked itself up and walked painfully over to a burly, broad-shouldered man who was sitting on the steps of a basement alley, so that his arms rested on the sidewalk. The kitten curled up beside him. The man put out his big, red hand and stroked it once, then went on with his smoking. The kitten was purring and licking its aching feet as Bridget, who had paused a moment from some dull feeling of compassion, went on her way.
Leaving her pitcher at the bar, with the injunction that it should be filled and ready for her return, she passed out of the store and walked slowly down Lincoln Street toward the Albany Station. The street was full of children running to and fro with shouts and screams of laughter or pain; some of them going in and out of the shops with pitchers and mugs, some lying stupidly in the gutter. The air was stifling, and as Bridget reached the corner she saw the groups of belated people hurrying out to the Newtons and Wellesley, where they might cool themselves in the pure air, with whatever means of comfort money could purchase.
Pet Sibley and Bridget Flanagan both reflected upon this as they unconsciously drew nearer and nearer together. Pet was tired, and was beginning to look for a horse-car to take her to her aunt’s house. The little Irish princess had turned and left her “Palace” until she was now near the head of Summer Street.
Ten steps further, and they met upon the corner, with the great gilded eagle’s wings outstretched above their heads. Both paused for a moment. Pet was dressed as she had been in the boat—all in white, with a pretty fluffy ostrich feather curving around her broad straw hat, and a fleecy shawl thrown over her shoulders. Bridget’s shawl was not fleecy, and her dress was not white. Nor did she wear lawn shoes.
What either would have said I do not know. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps their lives, just touching at this point, would have glided farther and farther apart, until there was no room in this earth for them to meet again. But at that moment something happened.
“Look o’ that!” cried Bridget.
“See!” cried Pet at the same moment; and they both pointed to the third story of a high granite block across the street. One of the windows was slightly open, and through this narrow space a delicate curl of blue smoke floated softly out, laughed noiselessly to itself, and disappeared. They could hardly have seen it at all, but for the powerful electric light upon the corner. Another puff of smoke, and another; then a steady stream, growing blacker and larger every moment. A faint glow, reflected from somewhere inside, shone upon the window panes.
“What shall we do?” cried Pet; “it’s all on fire, and nobody knows!” Instinctively she looked at Bridget for an answer. Somehow the difference between herself and the ragged little Irish girl did not seem so great just then.
The fire had broken out near the place where the great fire of 1872 started. Each of the girls could remember dimly that awful night of red skies and glittering steeples. The massive blocks had been rebuilt, business had rolled through the streets once more, property of value untold lay piled away in those great warehouses on every side, and only these two slender, wide-eyed girls knew of that ugly black smoke, with its gleaming tongues of flame, gliding about over counter and shelf, as Pet had seen the rat, a few minutes before.
“Sure we must give the alar-r-m,” said Bridget, hurriedly, gathering the faded shawl about her neck.
“But I don’t know how. Do you?”
“Don’t I? You jist come along wid me—run, now!”
They almost flew down the street, dainty shoes and bare brown feet side by side.
“Here’s the box,” panted Bridget, pausing suddenly before an iron box attached to a telegraph pole. “Can yer read where it says the key is?”
Pet read: “Key at Faxon’s Building, corner of Bedford and Summer Streets.”
To reach the corner, rouse the watchman, snatch the key from his sleepy hands, rush back again, and whisk open the iron box was the work of two minutes.
Perfect silence everywhere.
“Look a-here, now,” said Bridget, breathlessly, standing on tiptoe. “I’ve seen ’em do it.”
She pulled the handle once, twice. Then they waited, their hearts beating fiercely. They were off the travelled ways, and no one passed by them. All this time the smoke was creeping up the stairways of the lofty building, and the red fire was quietly devouring yard after yard of wood-work.
Bridget raised her hand to pull the lever for the third and last time—when they both started.
All over the broad, restless, wakeful city, the heavy bells rang out, one following another like echoes. Sick people turned wearily in their beds; babies awoke to bewail their broken naps; men and women stopped at the corners of streets to count the number, and shook their heads.
“Bad place, down by Summer and Chauncey Streets—let’s go!” said one to another.
ONE—TWO—THREE—FOUR—FIVE——ONE—TWO.
Miss Augusta Vernon consulted her fire-alarm card, which always hung by the sitting-room mantel-piece; then she went to the front window and threw open the blinds. There was a faint flush on the sky, like the coming dawn.
“Dear me!” exclaimed aunt Augusta. “It’s a real fire. And this hot night, too! I do hope they’ll have it out soon, poor fellows!”
As she took her seat by the window, and watched the light growing broader and redder every moment, her strong, kind features showed much more anxiety than one would expect, considering that it was not her store that was burning, nor her firemen fighting the fire. But aunt Augusta, in the city, had a curious way like that of aunt Puss up in the Maine woods, of concerning herself with other people’s troubles and trying to lighten them, with loving-kindness or with money. As she had a plentiful supply of both, her sympathy in such cases was apt to be a substantial affair, really worth counting upon—as many a poor creature, sick and in prison, could testify.
As soon as the bells rang out, a great awe fell upon the two girls. What mighty host of giants had they roused from sleep, calling hoarsely to one another over the housetops?
Pet drew closer to Bridget, and grasped her hand. Even Bridget seemed dismayed at first, but quickly recovering herself, she half pushed, half drew Pet up a flight of high stone steps near by.
“Yer’ll git yer dress all kivered wid mud, if yer don’t kape out o’ the strate,” she said, as she turned away. “I’m a-goin’ ter stay down an’ tell ’em where the fire is. It says so on them little cards.”
“But the crowd! When they come you will get hurt.”
“Hm! I’m used to worse crowds nor ever you saw. There! I hear ’em now!”
As Pet listened there rose a faint, far-off rattle of wheels upon the pavement, mingled with a jangling sound of gongs and horns.
“It’s the ingine!” cried Bridget, in great excitement. “It’s comin’!”
But other things were coming too. Bridget had taken her stand directly in front of the alarm-box, and a stream of men and boys who poured around the corner jostled her roughly and pushed her to and fro.
“Come!—come quick!” called Pet, just able to make herself heard above the noise of the crowd. But Bridget shook her head, and pointed down the street.
It was a grand sight—the engine, with its scarlet wheels, and its polished stack sending out a long trail of brilliant sparks like shooting stars, the two powerful black horses tearing furiously over the pavements, yet subject to the slightest word or touch of their driver, who sat behind them firmly braced against the foot-board, the reins taut as steel, and the gong sounding beneath without pause.
“Get out of the way here!” shouted a burly policeman, forcing his way through the crowd.
The men surged back, and nobody noticed the little barefooted figure who was hurled violently against the building. She uttered a faint cry, and held up one foot, as a lame spaniel might do. A young man with delicate clothes and a light cane, who had stopped on his way to the station to “see the fun,” had set his heavy boot on the little, shrinking foot. She might have got out of the way more quickly, but she must keep to the front to tell the firemen.
The engine thundered up to the box and stopped, hissing and smoking furiously. The black horses quivered and pawed the pavement, shaking white flecks of foam over their sleek bodies.
“Where’s the fire?” called the driver sharply.
“Blest if I know—” began one of the men addressed, but he was interrupted.
“Sure it’s on Summer Street, sir, ’most up to Washington, on the other side.”
It was a surprisingly small, shrill voice for such an important piece of information, but it sounded reliable. The driver knew that every moment now might mean the loss of thousands of dollars, and, giving his horses the rein, was galloping off up the street again, almost before Bridget’s words were out of her mouth. A few moments after, the panting engine and the distant shouts of the firemen told of the work they were doing.
Well, the block was saved. A few thousand dollars’ damage on goods fully insured was all. Next morning the papers, being somewhat hard pressed for news, gave “full particulars” of the fire.
“It was fortunate,” said the eloquent reporter, in closing his account, “that the fire was discovered by some passer-by, who promptly pulled in an alarm from box fifty-two. Five minutes later, and the loss must have been almost incalculable.”
“Full particulars?” Perhaps not quite full.
When the engine rattled away, with the crowd after it, Pet had come timidly down the steps. Bridget had been borne away by the crowd, and was not to be found.
“Where are you?” she called. “I do not know your name—oh-h!” She stopped with a pitiful little cry.
Bridget was crouched in a miserable heap just around the corner. She was stroking her bruised foot with trembling hands, and crying softly to herself. Somehow she felt like the kitten, only she had no one to go to; and her head was so dizzy!
Then she looked up, and saw the white shawl and the ostrich feather and Pet’s eyes. And once more Pet forgot the difference.
A policeman found them there a few minutes later. Pet had her arms around the faded shawl, and Bridget’s tously little head was lying wearily against her shoulder. The poor trampled foot was bound up in somebody’s embroidered handkerchief.
Pet did not give the officer time to speak. She was on her own ground now.
“Will you call a hack or a herdic, please? This girl is sick.”
The tone was quiet, but plainly said it was accustomed to giving directions, and having them obeyed, too.
The policeman had approached with a rough joke on his tongue’s end, but it turned into a respectful “Yes’m, certainly.”
Of course they went straight to aunt Augusta, who was still sitting by the window, and who was so used to emergencies that she took the whole affair quite as a matter of course.
“I’ve told the Lord I’m not worth it,” she had been heard to say, once, “but such as I am, I want to help. So I’m always expecting Him to give me something of the sort, just as my father used to let me hold the tacks when he was at work on pictures or carpets.”
Bridget was promptly put to bed and her foot dressed by Miss Augusta’s own deft hands. Before long she was fast asleep, which probably didn’t make much difference with her state of mind, as the whole scene, with Pet and the motherly woman hovering about her, was the best kind of a dream.
Meanwhile Pet told the story to her aunt; she had learned from the Irish girl, on the way to the house, that she had no father or mother living, but made her home with a dissipated uncle and brother, who took turns in the prisoner’s dock of the criminal court; where, likely enough, Bridget would have taken her own turn, before long.
“I know what I’m going to do,” said Miss Augusta, decisively. “I’m going to send her up to Mrs. Percival. When are you going back, Pet?”
“Day after to-morrow, I think.”
“Well, you can take her along as well as not.”
“But her family—”
“I’ll see Mr. Waldron—he’s the City Missionary—and he’ll fix it all right. We’ve often arranged matters like this.”
“But do you suppose Mrs. Percival will take her?” asked Pet rather doubtfully.
“I don’t see’s she can help it,” said Miss Augusta, with a short laugh. “Don’t you fear. I know ‘aunt Puss’ better than you do, though I never ’ve seen her. Kittie and Bess told me all about her, last spring.” So it came about that when Pet took her seat in the Northern train, a few days later, a neatly dressed little Irish girl sat beside her, awed into silence by the furniture of the car and, shortly afterward, by its rapid motion.
When the conductor came round for the tickets, her hand furtively stole over and clutched a fold of Pet’s rich dress, for protection from the man in uniform. And Pet had to reassure her, and point out interesting bits of landscape as they flew northward toward The Pines, side by side.