At the End of the Alley
I
It is a long narrow pocket opening on a little street which runs like a tortuous seam up and down the city, over there. It was at the end of the summer; and in summer, in the evening, the mouth of the pocket is hard to find, because of the people, in it and about, who sit across the passage, gasping at the dirty winds that come loafing down the street like crafty beggars seeking a hole to sleep in—like mean beggars, bereft of the spirit of free windhood. Down in the pocket itself the air is quite dead; one feels oneself enveloped in a scum-covered pool of it, and at every breath long filaments of invisible roots, swamp-roots, tear and tangle in your floundering lungs.
I had to go to the very end, to the bottom of the pocket. There, in the deepest of these alley-holes, lives the woman to whom I am indebted for the whiteness of this waist I wear. How she does it, I don’t know; poverty works miracles like that, just as the black marsh mud gives out lilies.
At the very last door I knocked, and presently a man’s voice, weak and suffocated, called from a window above. I explained.—“There’s a chair there; sit down. She’ll be home soon.” And the voice was caught in a cough.
This, then, was the consumptive husband she had told me of! I looked up at the square hole dimly outlined in the darkness, whence the cough issued, and suddenly felt a horrible pressure at my heart and a curious sense of entanglement, as if all the invisible webs of disease had momentarily acquired a conscious sense of prey within their clutch, and tightened on it like an octopus. The haunting terror of the unknown, the dim horror of an inimic Presence, recoil before the merciless creeping and floating of an enemy one cannot grasp or fight, repulsive turning from a Thing that has reached behind while you have been seeking to face it, that is there awaiting you with the frightful ironic laughter of the Silence—all this swept round and through me as I stared up through the night.
Up there on the bed he was lying, he who had been meshed in the fatal web for three long years—and was struggling still! In the darkness I felt his breath draw.
The sharp barking of a dog came as a relief. I turned to the broken chair, and sat down to wait. The alley was hemmed in by a high wall, and from the farther side of it there towered up four magnificent old trees, whose great crowns sent down a whispering legend of vanished forests and the limitless sweep of clean air that had washed through them, long ago, and that would never come again. How long, how long since those far days of purity, before the plague spot of Man had crept upon them! How strong those proud old giants were that had not yet been strangled! How beautiful they were! How mean and ugly were the misshapen things that sat in the doorways of the foul dens that they had made, chattering, chattering, as ages ago the apes had chattered in the forest! What curious beasts they were, with their paws and heads sticking out of the coverings they had twisted round their bodies—chattering, chattering always, and always moving about, unable to understand the still strong growths of silence.
So a half hour passed.
At last I saw a parting in the group of bodies across the entrance of the pocket, and a familiar weary figure carrying a basket, coming down the brickway. She stopped halfway where a widening of the alley furnished the common drying place, and a number of clothes lines crossed and recrossed each other, casting a net of shadows on the pavement; after a glance at the sky, which had clouded over, she sighed heavily and again advanced. In the sickly light of the alley lamp the rounded shoulders seemed to droop like an old crone’s. Yet the woman was still young. That she might not be startled, I called “Good evening.”
The answer was spoken in that tone of forced cheerfulness which the wretched always give to their employers; but she sank upon the step with the habitual “My, but I’m glad to sit down,” of one who seldom sits.
“Tired out, I suppose. The day has been so hot.”
“Yes, and I’ve got to go to work and iron again till eleven o’clock, and it’s awful hot in that kitchen. I don’t mind the washing so much in summer; I wash out here. But it’s hot ironing. Are you in a hurry?”
I said no, and sat on. “How much rent do you pay?” I asked.
“Seven dollars.”
“Three rooms?”
“Yes.”
“One over the other?”
“Yes. It’s an awful rent,
