CHAPTER XX.

A PEST HOUSE WIPED OUT.

It is the custom for people to say that evil has existed from the beginning, and will continue till the end of all things. And as far as anybody knows this is entirely true, but the application which a great many put on it is entirely wrong. They make the truism an excuse for ceasing all efforts for lessening evil and confining it to as few of our fellow-creatures as possible. When, some 18 months ago or more, a few gentlemen in the city got up a movement for the suppression of one of the forms of vice which, of all others, is the most degrading, destructive, and terrible in its results, they were met in the outset with the old saw, “This evil has always existed and will continue to exist.” They did not propose to be put down by such an aphorism, and they pressed their ideas on the police authorities, the commissioners, and the magistrates until steps were taken to scorch at least, if not altogether kill, the viper. No one can deny one result which followed. Our principal streets, which were formerly thronged with wantons attired in purple and fine linen, became freed of them to such an extent that the presence of an occasional one caused remark. In the auditoriums of our places of amusement, where they were wont, like the Scribes and Pharisees, to occupy the prominent places,

THEIR PAINTED FACES

and flashing jewelry were missing. This was undoubtedly the result of a couple of months’ work. It is well known that they left the city in droves. The heavy hand of repression has since then been removed, and once more the soiled doves flutter their plumes on all the public promenades. Two years ago York street was one of the worst streets on the American Continent. It would be impossible to conceive of lower dens or more desperate denizens than those who haunted the darksome cellars and holes on that street. There were dozens of keepers of these places, but a man named McQuarry occupied a bad pre-eminence above them all. McQuarry was an addition to our population which was contributed from rural parts. He had sold a farm and in some way or other lost the money in the city and started a store on York street. This store rapidly became a mere illicit drinking place and very soon was the resort of bad characters of both sexes. The state that the street had drifted into began to attract the notice of the newspapers, and the police also paid some attention to the phenomena connected therewith. The result was that raids were made on the places and severe encounters took place between the roughs and the officers. In one case an officer was dangerously stabbed, and the knife-user had his head battered pretty badly with the officer’s club. Then the man with the phrase we have quoted above began to be heard from. You couldn’t cure these things by drastic remedies. Evil always did exist, etc. A judge on the bench at one of the trials spoke in severe terms of the conduct of the officers. The prisoner, however, received a pretty severe sentence. The police kept up the war unremittingly, and the result was that at last York street was cleansed from end to end. A few of the old habitues still prowl about, and one or two dives have ventured to blossom forth again into existence.

In McQuarry’s den it was the custom to hold a dance weekly, and these were perhaps

THE MOST DREADFUL FEATURES

of these wicked holes. A small fee was charged, but the proprietor depended more on the sale of bad liquor for his profits than on this admission. Many of the revelers had other business speculations in their eye, and woe be to the man wearing anything of value who did not keep all his senses about him, and even then he was not safe.

“Having paid my ten cents to a young man at the foot of the stairs,” says an eye-witness of one of these orgies, “I descended into a cellar whose rough stone walls had once been whitewashed, but which were now discolored with the slimy moisture which oozed therefrom. The place was not large, and the 12 or 15 couple who were on the floor did not have much room in which to turn. Two colored lads supplied the music, one playing a very wheezy concertina, and the other tooting a fife. The company was largely composed of bad women and thieves. Here and there, however, could be seen a man who ought to be respectable, and who usually was accounted among his fellow-men as such. They were on the spree, and one of them, a master plasterer, I was told had been around the place for a week. He was sitting on a stone which had been pulled out of the wall, with a loathsome-looking creature seated on his knee. Among the

SCORE OF WOMEN

in the place there is not one who has one redeeming look of womanhood left. They have not that one trait which leaves a woman last—the desire to look well. Their faces are swollen with the fiery liquids they have been pouring into themselves all night. The men for the most part are not nearly so repulsive. The few “suckers” who are in the room, are doing all the treating, and as they produce their money furtive glances are exchanged, and that man’s “roll” is spotted.

The company gets more riotous as the night proceeds and as the liquor begins to take hold. A fight starts in one corner of the room and all hands seem to join in. Pandemonium has broke loose.

“At once there rose so loud a yell Within that dark and narrow dell, As if the fiends from heaven that fell Had pealed the battle-cry of hell.”

Women and all join in the melee, and the cursing is terrible for its impiety and ferocity. At last the main combatants are parted, and one of them is carried upstairs almost insensible, with blood streaming from his chin, where his antagonist had rended a piece of flesh half off with his teeth. The victor swaggers about with the air of a conqueror, and his blood-covered fangs make even the boldest rough of them all tremble.

A girl entered after this, who took up a position near where I had squeezed myself into a corner to be out of the way of fists and boots, which were being thrown around loose a few minutes before. A glance sufficed to show that if she was vicious vice had not yet had time to mark her as it had the other creatures in the room. She looked a little frightened.

“They are having a good time,” I remarked.

“Yes,” she said somewhat doubtfully, “but I wish they weren’t so rough.”

I found out that she was a servant girl who had been out with her “fellow,” and was unable to gain admission to her house. The knave or the fool had then taken her here. I ventured to suggest to her that this was no place for a respectable woman, and offered to go with her in search of a hotel, but as I found that she suspected my motives, I gave the matter up.

I found that a new piece of fun was being promoted by the humorous gentlemen of the house. They were carrying stories back and forth between two of the women, so as to

PROVOKE THEM INTO A FIGHT.

In this they were successful, and the two poor misguided wretches were soon screaming and clawing like cats on the floor. The men and women, howling and jibbering, formed a ring about this couple of unsexed beings. When the men were fighting the desire of every man in the room was to assist in parting them, but when two members of that sex, who are supposed to arouse in man all that is self-sacrificing and gallant, came to disgrace their claim to womanhood, these wolves not only stood by, but cheered them on to worse and worse shame.

“Come, my men,” said a spectator, thinking to appeal to the better nature of some of the beings present, “stop this disgraceful scene.”

But he was taken hold of and hurled against the wall with oaths. Bound not to witness what he could not remedy he made his way outside with a lower opinion of humanity than ever he had in his life before.

“I tell you,” said a friend the other day after the conclusion of the six days walk, “a man has more endurance than any animal.”

“Yes,” said the spectator of the McQuarry dance, “and he can be more brutal and more ferocious.”