Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1930-04-06

than half of what 1t had been in the larger
building. And yet in some ways life was
easier The little apartment he shared with
the now completely bed-ridden Tessa meant
fewer hours to devote to the chores OF keeping
the household moving.
And vet there was about the environment
of this house something so depressing that It
seemed to Peter, struggling always with the
problem of keeping afloat the sinking spirits OF
TesSa as If the rows of days were simply too
drab to face. It was not alone his own plight.
but day after day there marched before his
troubled eyes the woes OF the poverty stricken,
the lame the halt, the blind, who dwelt around
them. Evictions, for reasons of poverty or sick
ness were not unusual in the house where he
acted in the capacity Of janitor-of- all-work.
Usually this unsavory task fell to him.
It was a GRIM bitter job this business of be-
ing janitor to the poNerty-stricken families OF
the building. Sickness lurked under the ROOF.
crime, CRIME and sometimes even hunger One
old woman, as a matter Of fact had been found
dead in her rear apartment of q simple COM
plant easily diagnosed. Hunger Little wonder
Tessa who had always been sensitive to pain
of others, lay there not only drenched IN her
own misery. but seeming to feel, with the
antennae of her intuition, the poverty that lay
everywhere around her.
Babies cried in the tenements at night. Late
unsteady footsteps lurched upstairs. Women
cried out. fTOm ClIIle IO CAIA1C tAiCAC SPCU AS
horror through the dank and narrow house
news of a child run over by truck; the wage
earning head of a household falling from
scaffolding; the son Of a household turning
gangster and facing the death house
T Fan mean years, filled with terror of one
- sort or another, but through it all. Peter
and Tessa cingng fast to the murky nest OF
%u,o home
time moved on, Peter becoming more and more
obsessed with the fear of losing his job, through
having to give more and more time to the task
Of tending TesSa.
The night that he found ruin of woman
propped up against the door as he was about
to enter his apartment, proved memorable
one She was a gin-fogged creature with deep
rutS of suffering and dissipation down the still
white flesh of her face. wreck Of woman.
with q strange suggestion IF Splendor left to
her.
It was while he was picking her up to carry
her out to the curb and turn her over to the
mercies of the corner policeman, that recogni-
ton came to Peter. Recognition and flash
of anger so binding that it seemed to him for
a moment that here now nothing could pre-
vent his digging talonS into the throat of the
creature before him. Pent up in him, all
through the years, were passions about to be
released. Here in his arms, derelict, REM
nant, a skeleton Of comic opera, was the OBJ
ject of his lifetime of hatred.
Somehow again, once more it did not work
out that way Peters talons did not sink in to
blemish that last remnant of the beauty of
Hda's throat. He has given her roof, and in
her befogged way, she knows that janitor,
whom at heart she despises for being mental,
has come to her succor.
There are two women for Peter to tend now.
The helpless Tessa, and the curious tempera-
fol ubO thew taken intn
their home Sometimes she sings and creates
the Juror of cracked melody and pitiful dance
in the little tenement they all share together.
Sometimes she rises in wrath, and strikes
the old janitor whose humble lot she shares.
Copyright, ls30)