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Wolf made another speech, sealing the impression he had made. Then the poor narrow-chested pious men went home through the cold air to recite the Song of Solomon in their stuffy back-rooms and garrets. "Behold thou art fair, my love," they intoned in a strange chant. "Behold thou art fair, thou hast doves' eyes. Behold thou art fair, my beloved, yea pleasant; also our couch is green.
For three separate days I kept at his heels wherever he went, each day growing more and more astonished if not to say hopeful, as I found myself treading the narrowest and most disreputable streets of the city; halting at the shops of pawnbrokers; peering into the back-rooms of liquor shops; mixing with the crowds that infest the corner groceries at nightfall, and even slinking with hand on the trigger of the pistol I carried in my pocket, up dark alleys where every door that swung noiselessly to and fro as we passed, shut upon haunts of such villainy as only is known to us of the police, or to those good souls that for the sake of One whose example they follow, lay aside their fears and sensitiveness to carry light into the dim pits of this wretched world.
The clatter of the hooves of the bays resounds through those poor back-rooms, full of human misery; the notes of our horn are perhaps sounding now in dying ears. Tootle, Jim, tootle; what care we for that pale mother and her babe, or that toiling coster whose barrow is too heavy for him! If there is to be revolution, it will not be in our time; we are the end of the world.
"Ah! one never knows," said Forest gravely. "There's one man Jackson, now, only two weeks ago he was up in a third floor in Lambeth, and had brought down two women and a child, and was in the back-rooms groping for more, when the floor above gave way and came down on him.
In the wild confusion no one seems to know if all the girls are out or not; but presently one cries out that two are still in the back-rooms, now blazing fiercely. Up go the firemen again and plunge into the windows right into the flames. A long time elapses. We hold our breath; it seems as if the brave men must have perished. Then there is a cheer as a fireman appears with something in his arms.
But few of the Montmorencis, whatever their species, left the Ghetto without pressing bits of gold into half-reluctant palms in shabby back-rooms where old friends or poor relatives mouldered. Overhead, the stars burned silently, but no one looked up at them. Underfoot, lay the thick, black veil of mud, which the Lane never lifted, but none looked down on it.
Those who toil, the immense majority, receive barely enough food to keep them from dying of hunger; they live in back-rooms, in garrets, in the filthy alleys of cities, or in the country in hovels not fit for stables for horses or cattle.
Because he despised the company of the respectables, and went among the humble and human folk of his own class in the places where they gathered the public houses the churchly scandal-mongers called him "a man gluttonous and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners" precisely as in the old days they used to sneer at the Socialists for having their meetings in the back-rooms of saloons, and precisely as they still denounce us as free-lovers and atheists.
Never even in those East End back-rooms where the pitiful disproportion of his consumptive-looking collaborators to their great task was sometimes borne in dismally upon him had he felt so black a despair as in this brilliant supper-room, surrounded by all that was strong and strenuous in the race lawyers and soldiers, and men of affairs, whose united forces and finances could achieve almost anything they set their heart upon.
Huneker calls it in his collection of international urban studies, 'The New Cosmopolis. If one judged externals by grime, by poverty, by sanded back-rooms, with long-haired visionaries assailing the social order, then the East Side of the early eighties has gone down before the mad rush of settlement workers, impertinent reformers, sociological cranks, self-advertising politicians, billionaire socialists, and the reporters.
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