The Line-Man's Wedding
With my good friend George Fletcher, of whom there may be more to say in another account of the "People We Pass," I enjoyed the adventure here set forth. It…
From: 1896 C.E. To: 1896 C.E.
Location: New York, New York, United States
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
“The Line-Man’s Wedding” from People We Pass: Stories of Life among the Masses of New York City by Julian Ralph.
With my good friend George Fletcher, of whom there may be more to say in another account of the "People We Pass," I enjoyed the adventure here set forth. It was the witnessing of an East Side wedding, which was in itself remarkable, and which afforded a chance for a close-range study of a phase of tenement life which was yet more interesting. Joe, my friend's apprentice, had obtained his promise that lie would some day call upon the lad's mother, who was grateful for something Fletcher had done for the boy quite in the way of business. The promise had been long standing when, one night recently, Joe told his employer that two friends of his sister were to be married at his home, and that it would be a great honor to the family if he were present.
Images from book.
"Don't be the least afraid," said Fletcher.
We were pursuing our way between tall frowning walls of tenements. We noticed that the orderliness of their fire-escapes and windows was the basis of a grand disorder of pots, pans, quilts, rugs, rags, and human heads. As for the people, few were on the pavements. "Don't be the least afraid," said he; "there's nothing except contagious diseases to fear in these streets. They are the safest in town to walk in; the only ones where the front doors are left unlocked at night. As for the people, they are what we all sprang from; they are what America is made of."
The next time you are in the neighborhood of Grand Street and the Bowery you may see the region. Turn to the east a block or two, and looking along Forsyth Street, to which you will quickly come, you will see little Joe's home. It is a gigantic five-story double tenement. It has the words "Big Barracks" painted in black letters on a white ground on one side near the top. They are startling words to see and to think about, for whether the landlord had them painted there to show his defiance of decency, or whether it was a depraved sense of humor which prompted that rich barbarian's act, no libel was practised.
Only the truth, or a merciful hint of the truth, was expressed in the words. Barracks they are within those walls, and for miles and miles to the northward of them rise blocks after blocks of other barracks. They are worse than the soldiers' dwellings to which the word is usually applied. They are more like those subterranean dormitories underneath Paris where the dead were stored, for though there is swarming, teeming life in the tenements of New York, they are veritable catacombs. They are the tombs of manly and womanly dignity, of thrift, of cleanliness, of modesty, and of self-respect.
Man's first requirement is elbow-room, and these barracks deprive him of it. Where there is not elbow-room ambition stifles, energy tires, high resolve is still-born. Childhood must be kept as it comes—fresh and pure, innocent, unsuspecting, hallowed. On this the world depends. But childhood in these barracks is a hideous thing. Instead of a host of simple joys that should brighten life's threshold, the little ones get age in babyhood, wisdom in forbidden things, and ignorance of what is sweetest and best.
Little Joe was at the doorway, and led us up and in. He introduced us to his mother, a jolly big German widow, who laughed incessantly, and with such changing tone and fashion that in a five-minute conversation she did not utter above half a dozen words, yet took her part satisfactorily by laughing. Where almost any other woman would have said "Yes" and "You're very kind," and "Do you think so?" she smiled, giggled, chuckled, and laughed. As one of us remarked, "she had a mind that would never ache from straining—a mind like a sheltered mill-pond."
Joe’s Sister.
Joe's sister was flitting in and out in such a way as to be partly in that room and more considerably in other rooms, whence issued alternate sounds of feminine merriment and feminine bickering. Joe captured and presented her. She was an ideal daughter of the tenements—a stunted, black-eyed, well-rounded little thing, with her coarse black hair "banged" on a line with her eyebrows. She wore a bit of lace at her throat, and two large red bands at the lower ends of the very tight sleeves of a dress which tilted backwards and forwards and sideways, regardless of her movement, as if it had a will as well as ways of its own.
"This is my sister," said Joe.
She bowed stiffly.
"She ain't going to get married."
"You jest shut up!" said she.
"Because her feller's so google-eyed" (here the boy's ears were spitefully boxed) "that if they went to get spliced" (here his face was slapped) "the minister would marry him to the wrong girl, 'less he was blind-folded."
"I don't care, now," said the girl, very much mortified and angry. "You're a sassy thing! Mother, can't he stop?"
The old woman laughed immoderately as the girl flounced out of the room, which then began to fill with young people, mainly with girls, who looked and dressed so like Joe's sister that they might easily be mistaken for members of the same family. The young men who had been invited came in a body. They first met together, as was their nightly custom, in a large room over a corner groggery, where they maintained what they called "The Pinochle Club." Tens of thousands of men meet in the same way in the liquor and beer saloons of the city every night and every Sunday, and whenever they are not at work.
If the votes of the members of what we call the clubs of the town could be contrasted, in bulk, with the votes of these little social clubs and corner-saloon coteries, the reader would understand why Tammany Hall respects the saloon coteries and treats the great clubs of Fifth Avenue with contempt. These young men who came to the wedding were honest enough young fellows. They were working-men. Some wore blue shirts under outer clothes of locally fashionable patterns, but one or two displayed high colored collars and cuffs that matched them. Each carried a lighted cigar in his mouth, and each took his turn in darting across the room with a peculiar slide, and spitting noisily more or less in the direction of the stove.
The bride, a tiny, pert little blond German, with eyes that shone with mischievous expression, was surrounded by the other girls. To their surprise she would not take off her hat and cloak, she would not sit down, she would not say why. She would only laugh silently with her tiny beadlike eyes. It was evident that between excitement and self-consciousness she was undergoing an intense strain. Presently there came a stalwart young fellow, blond also and a German, who, from a physical standpoint, was certainly handsome. And he was more than commonly intelligent-looking as well. His dress, under the circumstances, was very peculiar. He wore a cardigan jacket, and shabby trousers tucked in cow-hide boots, to which were affixed the heavy spurred irons with which telegraph-line repairers climb the poles on which the wires are strung.
In one hand he swung a cap and a stout new hempen rope. The young men gathered around him and loudly voiced their astonishment, for this, it appeared, was the bridegroom. They asked him if he had just quit work, and how long it would take him to dress, and "what it all meant, anyhow.”
"Is the kag of beer here?" he asked the jolly widow, in German. She replied with an affirmative series of chuckles and indications of pent-up merriment, and a great bustle ensued. As a result there was brought into the room a table spread with cold meats, German cheeses, pickles, strange cakes with the fruits outside, and other cakes covered with icing and rubbed with red sugar. Then followed the inevitable beer—mainstay and chief delight of the masses—in a keg on a wooden horse, and accompanied by more than a score of heavy beer-saloon glasses with handles. This was the bridegroom's answer to the questions of his friends, and, being practical in its way, was received with better grace than the girls had accorded to the bride's responses in mysterious and mischievous glances.
The next important personage to arrive was the clergyman, a shrivelled little German, in a battered beaver hat and suit of black, illumined by one of those high white collars that show no break, but seem to have been made and laundered on the necks of those who wear them. He rubbed his hands before the stove, and after consuming a palmful of snuff, put to violent use a handkerchief of so pronounced a red that it made him seem to suffer from an extraordinary hemorrhage at the nose. When he was, as it seemed to the others, very good and ready, he took from a tail pocket of his coat something very like a woman's striped stocking, and fitted its open end over his skull.
Then the stocking took the guise of a liberty cap. During all this time he spoke to no one, but carried the air of a man of business bent upon a perfunctory performance, and determined to execute it properly and with despatch. His stocking adjusted, he might have spoken—indeed, he did clear his throat as if to do so—but the arrival of the tardiest of the guests prevented his doing so. This new arrival was, next to the bride and groom, the person of most distinction in the company, Mr. Barney Kelly, the reporter.
"Ah, there, Barney!" all the men called out.
"Ah, there! put it there," said the genial journalist, making a pantomimic offer of a shake of his hand to all at once.
In presenting him to the reader there is no intention to have it understood that he represents more than a very small fraction of those who follow the important profession to which he is allied. And yet his kind exists and even prospers, in isolated instances, especially upon such newspapers of the period as pride themselves upon a feverish degree of incessant originality in the pursuit and treatment of exciting topics. In the journals to which I refer the daily and numerous "sensations" are uniformly spread out under long and very black head-lines upon sheets no edition of which goes to the public as anything less extraordinary than an "Extra"— that word being invariably printed in larger and blacker type than the titles of the newspapers themselves. The popular journal which employs Mr. B. Kelly upon its staff is the well-known Daily Camera, possessor of uncountable circulation, giver of endless chromos, albums, and prizes—the same which comes out green as its readers on St. Patrick's day, and red (as if with the blushes of journalism) on the Fourth of July.
In fact, and in short, the Camera is the identical journal which "beat" all its contemporaries by three minutes with the news of one electrocution, and followed up that triumph with an account of a subsequent electrocution in no less time than half an hour before the Governor granted a reprieve to the condemned man. To the office of the Camera young Barney Kelly came as an office-boy from the tenements. Allowed to make extra money by writing for the sporting page (developer of most of such odd fish in the newspaper swim), he exhibited such talent as a tireless and ingenious news-getter that he was soon installed as a reporter. His lack of modesty did not trouble him. The defects in his education he was repairing by good use of a shrewd mind and an imitative nature; and meantime the office men were "licking into shape" or rewriting all the copy he turned in. "We shall see traces of a queer lingo in Mr. Kelly's speech.
He knows better English than he speaks, just as many New Yorkers who hold themselves his superiors know better than to talk like affected Englishmen, as they do. In their cases, as in Barney's, these peculiarities of speech are mere homages to fashion; for as the proper thing in the middle of town is to talk broad English, so the proper thing in the tenement regions is to talk "Bowery."
"Yell," said the parson, facing the company, "do ve been all retty?"
"Min," said the bridegroom, turning to the bride, "have you told anyone?"
"Well, I just guess not," said the bride.
"Very well, then," said the bridegroom.
"Gents and ladies all. The first time I seen Minnie Bechman I was at work on a pole just in front of this window, where she was sitting, once, on a visit to these old friends of hers. She took to me, and—you know how it is yourselves—I took to her, and we agreed to get married. "Well, then, the thing was how we was to get married so as to make a sensation in the city. Well, then, Barney Kelly here, he put the scheme into my head that we was to get married on a po—"
"Hully gee, Chris!" exclaimed the great journalist, "don't give the snap away so quick."
"Go on, Chris!" " Go on, Dutch!" cried the others.
"No; you go 'head and tell it, Barney," said the bridegroom. "Tell it just the way you'll write it up."
"I've written it up a'ready," said the journalist. "It's a corker, boys—ladies and gentlemen—a corker; a hull collum in the Camera."
"Say, fellers, that's great, hain't it?" one visitor exclaimed. "Is our names dere in de Camera, Barney?"
The Preacher.
"Every son of a gun's name that got invited is in there, you kin bet," said Mr. Kelly. "Now I'll give you the whole snap. You see, this is the age of sensations, and nothing but sensations goes. Understand? You know how it is in the noozepaper business—you can't git the coin unless you git sensations. I was a-chasin' meself up an' down the sidewalks one day when I run acrost Dutch, our friend here. You know the first time I seen Dutch was at the Pinochle Club, and I worked him fer a sensation on the 'Romance of a Line-man.' Him and I faked a dandy story. 'Twas about a feller bein' on a pole, an' he got to thinkin' 'bout his poor old mother that was a-dyin' round the corner—see? An' he took off his rubber glove to wipe the tears from his eyes, an' he touched a live wire, an' he curled up like an autumn leaf an' died on the pole—see? An' Dutch was on the pole an' took him down, an' we faked up how, ever since that night—see?—he don't dream of nothing but live wires. Everything that he dreams of turns inter snakes, and the snakes tarns out to be live wires—see?—and chases him to the roof, an' off inter the street, where he wakes up dead an' mangled. Gents, that's how I got acquainted with Dutch, an' made him famous, an' got eight dollars in hard stuff for me trouble.
"Well, now, we're gettin' to the marriage. I was a-chasin' meself over the sidewalks, and I met Dutch, and he told me he was going to marry his girl. I seen the chance for a sensation the minute he told me. 'We can make a sensation,' says I; ‘one that’ll make the boys on the News and Dial crazy and sick'—see? People have got married in Trinity steeple, in a row-boat on the river, in a cab in Central Park, in a balloon, on skates, by telephone and telegraph, and on horseback—in fact, more ways than yon can shake a stick at—but Dutch an' me agreed we never heard of no one gittin' married on a telegraph pole. He's a line-man, an' climbing them sticks is his business, ladies; so the only thing was whether Minnie wouldn't be a-scared—see?
Her mother wouldn't have it; but there wasn't no poles around her house, anyhow; and besides, Dutch wanted the pole where he was when he first seen Minnie. He told her all about it, an' she was dead game, and she says, 'We might as well be romantic wunst in our life'—see?"
"So," said the bridegroom, vastly impatient to play his part, "we didn't tell Min's mother she was a-goin' to get married at all; and as for Minnie being a-scared, why, here goes for the first wedding alongside the wires."
"Stop! Hold on!" the little clergyman said, imperatively, arresting the bride and groom as they were about to leave the room. "Toes anypody here opject to dis wetting, or to der manner of it?"
Anxiety shone in every young face, and each person looked at the other to see who should raise a question about the propriety of what they all regarded as novel and exciting sport.
"Do you think it all right yourself?" one of the young men asked of the clergyman.
"Oh, veil," he said, with a laugh and a shrug of the shoulders that seemed to indicatea desire to shake off all responsibility and gravity, "I ton'd know apout dot. A man gits porn in vunny blaces, and a man dies in vunny blaces. It makes not much deeferenz if he shood git marrit by such blaces vot he likes. Laties and shendlemen, so long vot efferypody peen bleased, vy shood not I git bleased? It is mit me only choost a madder of gitting my pay for der chob."
"He's all right, lads; don't go to guying him," said the journalist. Then, in an "aside," he whispered, "That's His Whiskers that married the skeleton and the fat woman in the Bowery museum last week, an' got a collum in every morning paper—see?”
“But, my vriends," the parson continued, producing a tiny black book, and speaking in a graver and less business-like tone than before, "in der chapel vare I been aggustomed to do dese sort of dings I alvays gif a vord of adwice. See to it you got a goot vooman—vooman mitout bride and voolislmess. See to it you haf got a goot man, von vich got shteady vork, und vich dreats his farder und mudder bropper. See to it, bote of yon, vot you got luf by your hearts. Not vot I call shicken luf, not vot I shall call dot luf vich purns der body vile der heart und soul are shiffering mit cold, but dot kind of luf vich is more as twenty-one years old, und looks owd for der future; vich says, 'I haf got a young vooman vich vill got blendy shildren, und vill pring 'em up goot, und vill dake care uf me ven I got sick, und vill also vork for her lifting, choost like myself; und, 'I haf got a man sdrong und heldty like a lion, und he has got a goot trade, und if he trinks lager-peer a leedle he vill not git trunk too much und make a fool by his family, nnd lie vill dreat me like I ought to peen dreated, so nice as I could vish.' Now, den, I am all retty."
The bridegroom, a picture of impatience, held out one powerful arm, crooked at the elbow, and the diminutive bride leaped into it and was carried as lightly out of the room as if she weighed no more than a shawl. All the young men and many of the girls trooped down stairs behind the happy man and his freight, the clanking of the irons on his boots drowning the noises of all their feet. The clergyman went to one of the front windows, and throwing it open, leaned out, book in hand; all who remained in the room crowded behind him and at the other window. Within a few feet—say twice an easy-reaching distance—rose the great mastlike pole, and even with the next floor above were the cross-bars on which the lowest wires were fastened. Five minutes before, not many persons had been seen on the street, but now the sidewalk was thronged, and men, women, and children, some shouting, some laughing, and some calling loudly to others at a distance, were hurrying to the scene. Perceptible above the other sounds was the thud, thud, thud of the lineman's spikes, or "irons," as he drove them into the pole. He mounted steadily upward, circling the pole with one arm, while his bride rested partly on the other and partly on a hempen rope which was arranged so as to form a loop under her body and over his farther shoulder.
"Don't spill me, Chris," she said, in a tone betraying at least a little nervousness.
"Don't—wiggle—an'—I—won't," said he, punctuating each word with a thud and a step upward.
At first the villageful of people who lived on that one block had been aroused by the rumor that a girl was climbing a telegraph pole, but the spectacle of the man and the girl working their way towards heights that thousands inhabit, but reach exclusively by stairs or elevators, gave rise to the report that the man was a maniac. The invention waxed more ingenious as it flew, until it got about that the maniac was going to hang himself and the girl from the cross-bars. In a minute and a half the block, from stoop-line to stoop-line, was crowded. If any policeman was in the neighborhood, he did not interfere. The Pinochle Club was never interfered with.
"Ready! Be quick about it!" said the bridegroom; and at the words the little German parson, leaning so far out of the window that the end of his stockinglike cap fell in front of his nose, began to read the marriage service, in German, at breakneck speed. In the wild flight of words there were perceptible baitings, marked with a "Yah" by one or the other of the couple on the pole. Before it seemed possible the ceremony could have reached its conclusion, the minister stopped, slapped his book shut, and said, in what he intended for the Queen's English, "I now bronounce you man und vife. May Gott in heffun pless you bote!"
A roar of applause marked their successful descent to the street, and presently the bride and groom, the former glowing from excitement, and the latter nursing his arm with rude pantomime, reappeared in the room, preceded by some and followed by the others of those who had gone down to the street with them. Then there was great excitement. The young men seized the proud and grinning bridegroom's hands and jerked him violently about the room in the excess of their admiration. The young women crowded the bride into a corner and intended to give vent to their surprise and delight, but their excitement greatly exaggerated their natural lack of conversational gifts.
When they did recover their powers of speech the results were not such as one is accustomed to in feminine gatherings in the heart of the town. But these girls have standards of their own, and were conscious of no defects in manners. Besides, they were excited, and had put aside all the affectation they display when they call out "Carsh! heah, carsh!" in the great shopping stores in which some were employed; and they did not mince their words, as is their fashion at the first meeting with a prepossessing young man. Here are some sentences of their talk:
"It was great, Minnie."
"It was out of sight."
"For Gord's sakes! I don't see how you could ever do it."
"I didn't care." This by the bride.
"She hit me for a silk dress for doing it, just the same," said her husband.
"Is tha-a-t so, Minnie? Did yer get a silk dress?”
"I did so, Ma-a-a-ggie."
"My Gord, girls! ain't Chris good to her?"
"Well," said Ma-a-a-ggie (this name is never otherwise pronounced six blocks from Fifth
Avenue in our Celtic metropolis), "I'd marry anny man for a silk dress."
"And who wouldn't, I'd like to know?" asked little Elsa Muller, the youngest girl in the room.
The people of the tenements manage with fewer words than Shakespeare used. Their frequent use of the most sublime name should not shock the reader. No harm is meant by it, nor does its use damage any character among the most of us. It is but the Englishing of an innocent exclamation common to all the peoples of continental Europe. It is by long odds the commonest exclamation of the majority of the women on the island we inhabit. My dear madam, your soft-voiced maid says it fifty times a day to the others in your kitchen, and if your modiste does not say it, it is because she prefers Hon Dieu or Ach Gott.
These girls at the wedding ate and drank and sang and romped as merrily as so many children. The young men talked of present and absent friends, or teased the young women in ways good-natured and not meant to be disrespectful, though perhaps they were not always gentle.
Suddenly, when the fun was waxing lively and general, about half an hour after the wedding, an unexpected but characteristic occurrence took place. The hall door flew open and banged against the wall, and in the doorway was seen a portly Irish woman of most savage mien. She glared at the company, and scanning each member of it fiercely, finally fixed her angry frown upon one of the young girls.
"Cordelia Angeline Mahoney," said she, "come right down to your own home—d'ye hear me?—and doan't be dishgracing yersef wid spakin' to thim Dootch omadhauns. It's none o' my business, sure " (this to the company generally), "but if I wanted to get marrit I'd be man-it loike a Christian, and not loike a couple of floies in the air."
Miss Mahoney replied that she'd be "right down," and the stout Irish woman turned to go away. She wheeled about almost directly, however, and singled out another of the girls.
"Mary Maud Estelle Gilligan," said she, "what wud your poor mother, dead an' gone—God bless her!—think if she cud see ye skaylarrukin' wid a couple of pole-climbing monkeys an' a mob av sour-crout-atin' hathen? Shame be to ye, Mary Maud Estelle! Yer frinds have a roight to be sick and sorry for ye."
I followed close upon her heels, for I found that the merriment was to last all night.
Ralph, Julian. People We Pass: Stories of Life among the Masses of New York City. Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1896.
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