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PART II--THE TEST

I

BEGINNINGS

It was in that red gash of crosstown brick--West Tenth Street--that the
new life began. The neighborhood was quaint and poor, a part of that old
Greenwich Village which at one time was a center of quiet and chaste
respectability, with its winding streets, its old-fashioned low brick
houses, its trees, its general air of detachment and hushed life. Now it
was a scene of slovenliness and dust, of miserable lives huddled thickly
in inadequate houses, of cheap roomers and boarders, of squalid
poverty--a mix of many nations well-sprinkled with saloons.

But the house was quite charming--three stories, red brick, with a stoop
of some ten steps, and long French windows on the first floor. Behind
those French windows was a four-room flat; beneath them, in the
basement, a room with iron-grated windows. Into that flat Joe and his
mother moved.

The invasion was unostentatious. No one could have dreamed that the
tall, homely man, dashing in and out in his shirt-sleeves between the
rooms and the moving-van drawn up at the curb, had come down with the
deliberate purpose of making a neighborhood out of a chaos, of
organizing that jumble of scattered polyglot lives.... In the faded
sunshine of the unusually warm winter afternoon, with its vistas of
gold-dusty air, and its noise of playing children and on-surging
trolleys and trucks and all the minute life of the saloons and the
stores--women hanging out of windows to get the recreation of watching
the confused drama of the streets, neighbors meeting in doorways, young
men laughing and chatting in clusters about lamp-posts--Joe toiled
valiantly and happily. He would rapidly glance at the thickly peopled
street and wonder, with a thrill, how soon he would include these lives
in his own, how soon he would grip and rouse and awaken the careless
multitude....

All was strange, all was new. Everything that was deep in his life--all
the roots he had put down through boyhood, youth, and manhood into the
familiar life of Yorkville--was torn up and transplanted to this fresh
and unfriendly soil.... He felt as if he were in an alien land, under
new skies, in a new clime, and there was all the romance of the
mysterious and all the fear of the untried. Beginnings always have the
double quality of magic and timidity--the dreaded, delicious first
plunge into cold water, the adventurous striking out into unknown
perils...