The Masses (periodical)/Volume 1/Number 2/City Vignettes

by Edwin Björkman

CITY
VIGNETTES
By Edwin Björkman
I
The Will To Live

 

ABOVE me, where the towering tenements ended, the stars of a summer night were barely visible, dimmed not by clouds, but by the fetid breath of the overheated city. Around me the narrow street swarmed with human beings that could not stay indoors, and the noise made by this restless multitude filled the air with a shrill, deafening whir. But at my feet, in an areaway sunk a few feet below the level of the street, there lay six children asleep in a row, stretched side by side on a single mattress.

The sight of them made me stop and lean against the iron railing to look at ease. They were all boys, and brothers beyond any mistake. The youngest might have been three and the eldest ten. They were ranged according to size, with their heads toward the two low-set windows behind which evidently lay their home. Covered by nothing but their own scanty clothing, they slept as peacefully as if a hundred miles of lifeless desert had intervened between them and the crowded, clamorous street.

As I stood there idly gazing at their prostrate forms, my ear caught a sound that would not merge with the rest—a sound unlike anything I had ever heard before—and my heart leapt within me. It was faint at first, but grew steadily in volume and intensity. A woman's wail I made it out to be—long-drawn, rising as if it were to last forever, and then coming to an abrupt end in a short, sharp scream.

The smallest of the sleepers stirred uneasily, woke, tossed about for a moment, and broke at last into loud crying. Instantly someone hissed from within:

"Tacete! Tacete!"

A bushy black head poked out through one of the windows; then a pair of massive shoulders; finally the whole body of a man dressed merely in a bright-colored shirt, baggy trousers, and coarse shoes whitened by dust or lime. Crawling on his hands and knees across the bodies of the two smallest boys, he reached the end of the areaway and found there just space enough to stand up very close to the wall.

As he rose to his feet, he saw me, smiled, and nodded as if he had recognized an intimate friend. Then he spoke to me, and though his speech was crude and broken, his voice was full of that music which seems to be the very soul of Italy.

"The boy, he hear the mother, and he cry too," he said.

Hardly had he finished, when the strange wail rose again and snapped in the same startling way, leaving behind it an inexpressible sense of pain. And again the smallest boy tossed and cried in response.

"Keep still, angelo mio," the man warned. "Mother, she is sick, and she hear. So you must keep very still."

"Are they all yours?" I asked, as the little figure sank back in hushed obedience. But my mind was still busy with the meaning of that dolorous wail which I had already heard twice.

"All mine," the man replied promptly, in a tone of indubitable pride. Then, as he bent down so that he could see something in the room within that was hidden from me, he added: "And one more just coming."

"Oh!" I gasped, with sudden understanding, The next moment I turned my face instinctively to the street, with its weltering mass of shrill humanity. The man's glance followed mine, and apparently he guessed my thought. With something like pensiveness in his voice, he murmured:

"Children all over—such plenty of children—and little room for more."

Once more my glance swept over the row of sleeping boys and tried to reach beyond the glimpse of choked-up bareness revealed by the open basement windows. Lastly I turned to the man himself, looking long and hard at him. In my eyes there must have been a question, for he shrugged his shoulders and grinned a little—apologetically, as I thought. It took a second only. Then his face grew serious and almost dignified. He stood up as straight as he could, looked me full in the face, and said in a changed tone:

"Let them come—we like them!"

For the third time the wail of that woman in pain rose, rose, and broke as before. And I fled, marvelling at that resistless force in whose hands men seem to be nothing but blind tools.