Much of the tragical lore of the infant mortality,
the malnutrition, and the five-in-a-room morality
of the city’s poor is written in statistics,
and the statistical path to the heart is more figurative
than literal.
It is difficult to write stylistically a per-annum
report of 1,327 curvatures of the spine, whereas the
poor specific little vertebra of Mamie O’Grady,
daughter to Lou, your laundress, whose alcoholic husband
once invaded your very own basement and attempted
to strangle her in the coal-bin, can instantly create
an apron bazaar in the church vestry-rooms.
That is why it is possible to drink your morning coffee
without nausea for it, over the head-lines of forty
thousand casualties at Ypres, but to push back abruptly
at a three-line notice of little Tony’s, your
corner bootblack’s, fatal dive before a street-car.
Gertie Slayback was statistically down as a woman
wage-earner; a typhoid case among the thousands of
the Borough of Manhattan for 1901; and her twice-a-day
share in the Subway fares collected in the present
year of our Lord.
She was a very atomic one of the city’s four
millions. But after all, what are the kings and
peasants, poets and draymen, but great, greater, or
greatest, less, lesser, or least atoms of us?
If not of the least, Gertie Slayback was of the very
lesser. When she unlocked the front door to her
rooming-house of evenings, there was no one to expect
her, except on Tuesdays, which evening it so happened
her week was up. And when she left of mornings
with her breakfast crumblessly cleared up and the box
of biscuit and condensed-milk can tucked unsuspectedly
behind her camisole in the top drawer there was no
one to regret her.
There are some of us who call this freedom. Again
there are those for whom one spark of home fire burning
would light the world.
Gertie Slayback was one of these. Half a life-time
of opening her door upon this or that desert-aisle
of hall bedroom had not taught her heart how not to
sink or the feel of daily rising in one such room to
seem less like a damp bathing-suit, donned at dawn.
The only picture—or call it atavism if
you will—which adorned Miss Slayback’s
dun-colored walls was a passe-partout snowscape, night
closing in, and pink cottage windows peering out from
under eaves. She could visualize that interior
as if she had only to turn the frame for the smell
of wood fire and the snap of pine logs and for the
scene of two high-back chairs and the wooden crib
between.
What a fragile, gracile thing is the mind that can
leap thus from nine bargain basement hours of hairpins
and darning-balls to the downy business of lining
a crib in Never-Never Land and warming No Man’s
slippers before the fire of imagination.
There was that picture so acidly etched into Miss
Slayback’s brain that she had only to close
her eyes in the slit-like sanctity of her room and
in the brief moment of courting sleep feel the pink
penumbra of her vision begin to glow.
