Orchids and Ash-Cans*
The jungle folk of Manhattan The Story. Most stories are made of a few fibres carefully twisted together in a single strand. This story is of many fibres woven into an outspread fabric, almost without design. Here a thread enters, twists about this other thread and that, and then departs from the unfinished fabric. The only limitation which restricts the weave is that the warp is stretched from some time in the '90s to the present, and the woof extends from the East River to the Hudson.
Some of the threads:
Ellen Thatcher, born of an ailing mother and a poor little ambitious father follows the most persistent thread in the book. It leads to elopement with Jojo Oglethorpe, a career on the stage, love and liaison with wastrel Stanwood Emery, marriage with Jimmy Herf, newspaper man, and finally a third marriage with a lawyer-politician.
Bud Korpenning, rawboned youth from up state, comes to the city seeking work. He never finds it. Finally the dark waters swallow him and his past.
Congo Jake, a French sailor, hops ship in Manhattan. He is a wild boy and chases the women; goes off to sea again, comes back after learning bookkeeping in the Orient, turns bootlegger, makes a million perhaps, goes to jail for six months, marries curly-headed little Nevada Jones, who has been mistress to several men.
Gus McNiel, a milkman, finishes his round one bitter cold morning, stops for a drink in a saloon, is run down by a train on Eleventh Ave., gets $12,500 damages from the railroad and rises to be a Tammany politician of note.
George Baldwin, a young lawyer, in practice for three months without a case, reads about McNeil's accident in the paper, seduces the milkman's wife, pretty Nellie McNiel, gets Gus his damages, grows successful, marries for social position, keeps Nevada Jones for a time, goes into politics, makes love to Ellen Thatcher Oglethorpe Herf, starts to kill her, gets a divorce, finally induces her to marry him.
Jimmy Herf, of well-to-do parents, left an orphan at 16, revolts against conservative life, becomes a newspaper reporter, war correspondent, husband of Ellen for a time, father of a child, friend of Congo Jake, divorced; finally he leaves Manhattan with 28c in his pocket.
James Merivale, Herf's cousin, follows the line of least resistance, does as he is told, gets into the best clubs.
All told there must be literally several hundred characters: tramps, Jewish clothing workers, actors and actresses, office workers, pampered wives, bounders, a bob-haired bandit, storekeepers, good-for-nothings, capitalists, mistresses, seamen, crooks, waiters, hotel clerks—sweating and swearing and suffering, drinking and wenching, and maiming the King's English.