CHAPTER XII.
THE GREAT TRAMP RENDEZVOUS.
A large bare room, steam heated and furnished with several long tables and benches, was already filled by nearly three hundred tramps. They formed a motley crowd. Old and young, of numerous nationalities and every degree of raggedness and trampdom were there. Young novices, just entering upon this degraded life. Occasionals—working men to-day, tramps to-morrow, and drunkards at all times. Professionals, who preferred mendicancy to honest labor. Honest men, reduced by dire misfortunes to this sore distress. Sick men, whose hold upon life was waxing faint. Scorbutic men, bearing on their face and persons the indelible marks that outraged nature had branded them with, for life. Sad men, who felt the degradation of their position. Bold, callous men, for whom this world held no shame; and men whose deportment denoted that they had seen better days, and could not forget them, were all gathered there in a heterogenous mass of rags, hunger, dirt, and profanity.
No notice was taken of Ben's advent among them. Indeed he was immediately swallowed up in the crowd, the members of which were variously engaged. Some paced up and down the floor, in lonely communion with their own thoughts. Some were seated by the wall patching their garments, and sewing up rents; some reading, others tossing coppers, and others asleep in all the hubbub and Babel of voices. Gathered in groups were men discussing the events of the day, or mapping out routes for future travel. What struck Ben as singular was the fact that there were very few old men present. Nearly all were young or in the vigor of manhood. He did not see but one or two old "war-horses" and they moodily held themselves aloof from the crowd. There was a hot, fetid air in the room, and his stomach sickened at this expression of the life he had adopted.
A word of explanation relative to this great tramp "home" will not be amiss. It was built by the contributions of generous citizens of Pittsburg as an asylum for the homeless wanderer. A place where he might rest and recuperate, while he sought employment. One would naturally suppose that those partaking of the charity would be grateful, but the tramps are not. A man with authority is continually employed in preserving the peace among them, and a more ungrateful, querulous, quarrelsome lot of misery it would be hard to conceive.
The building, which is a large one, is divided into two departments:—the "Hotel" and "Bum" sides of the house, as they are locally known. The "Bum" side consists of a single large hall, located in the rear, and separated entirely from the remainder of the house. The "pay" department, is a well arranged, well furnished, and well conducted hotel, principally patronized by permanent guests having occupations in the city. The proceeds of the "Hotel" are supposed to be devoted to the maintenance of the "Bum" department. "Bummers Hall" has an average nightly attendance of two hundred and fifty impecunious men every night in the year. Sometimes the number reaches to near four hundred. Statistics are kept of the attendance. Single men predominate, being above eighty per cent of those seeking the refuge. The nationalities represented stand in the following order as to numbers: Ireland, Germany, America and England; though all Europe has delegates in "Bummers Hall." It has been often questioned if the resort be not a detriment to the city, and an inducement for the fraternity to rendezvous there. But this is not good reasoning. The tramps would come whether the "Home" was there to receive them or no; and it is far better to have two hundred and fifty impecunious—and frequently lawless and reckless men—stowed safely away at night, than have them thrown loose upon the city. It is a difficult matter to make tramping a crime, for it would make poverty criminal. The suggestion that jails and work-houses receive them is pernicious in the extreme. Reformatory institutions turn out finished law-breakers. They generally reform a man of what little good there may be in him when he enters them. The great majority of tramps have not thenerveto commit a crime, though they had the inclination. They are a poor, weak, purposeless, cowardly set of vagabonds, whose most heinous offence consists in "jumping" a train, or, perhaps, purloining some trifle of food. They shrink from committing acts that will bring them before that terror of terrors, a police court. But a term in the state's prison or work house turns out quite a different individual. As tramps they still have latent hopes (however futile) of some day recovering a membership in good society. As prison graduates, this hope has left them, and they look viciously upon life. As an evidence of this, it will be found that three-quarters of the tramps arrested for unlawful acts, are released convicts.
There is a great hue and cry raised every now and then about "what shall we do with them?" Better, if we turn our attentions to thecausethat produces theeffects, and ask ourselves "what shall we do with the system that makes them?"
Ben had scarcely time to look about and familiarize himself with the place, when supper was announced. It consisted of a tin dish of soup and a piece of bread, and was served up on the long table in the center of the room. The soup was of the "bouillon" order. In it were sliced carrots, stewed potatoes, boiled potato peelings, baked fish, chicken bones, salt mackerel, cabbage, tomatoes, cheese, beef, beans, dried apples, vegetable parings, and a few other articles. To the imaginative mind it suggested the possibility of a small grocery store having gone off on a drunk, and got drowned in a cauldron of boiling water. A more practical view of the matter was that it consisted of the remnants of the "Hotel side," with the kitchen dish water generously added, by way of a flavor.
Though Ben had fasted all day, he declined partaking of it, and sat toying with his iron spoon, and noticing the other guests. They had not his squeamishness. The greater portion of the three hundred were devoting a majesty of jaw bone to the work before them, highly edifying.
"The soup is extra to-night," remarked a veteran, as he fished up a mass that might have been fish, flesh or fowl.
"Excellent!" responded a neighbor; "the best I've tasted since leaving the rotisseries in the Rue de Gumbo!"
"I'll wait fur the toorkey wid the ister stuffin'," remarked another who had finished his pan.
"Yez'll have to wait, thin, for it's Friday, an' there's no toorkey. It'll be trout an' salmon, the day," returned a gentleman whose ragged sleeve had evidently enjoyed the soup in company with its owner.
"What part of the fowl do you prefer, sir?" asked a polite tramp, tendering Ben a section of a mackerel's back.
"Let the gentleman alone. The venison he had for dinner did not agree with him," said a thin man, eyeing Ben's untasted soup longingly. Ben saw the soup and presented him the panful, which made the thin man an object of envy to all in that vicinity.
"Didn't I see you in Poverty Barn, in Cleveland?" asked a fat, asthmatic tramp of Ben.
Our friend replied in the negative, when the asthmatic went into a glowing description of the magnificence of "Poverty Barn, in Cleveland."
"It's behind the police station, Sor. Bunks three tier high, Sor. A plank set on edge for a pillow in each of them, Sor. A big stove that you can dry your clothes at, Sor. There's no knob on the inside of the door, Sor. So when you get in you can't get out, Sor. It's a good hangup, but no chuck, Sor. When you're in Cleveland don't fail to give it a call, Sor. It's deserving of patronage, Sor."
Ben assured him that Poverty Barn should have his custom if business took him to Cleveland.
"To hell mit Boverty Parn! I preaks my neck from vone of der punks down comma, von night. Youst, when you go mit Cleveland, youst try der iron vorks an' shleep in der varm sandt!" kindly advised a gentleman having a pronounced Teutonic accent.
With much similar conversation, the meal drew to a close, the pans were removed, and the long table turned, bottom-up, against the wall; so that having banqueted off of the top side they might sleep on the bottom. The benches were then arranged across the room, and an elderly gentleman in black, with a clerical stock about his neck, (who was irreverently greeted as "Old Blue Blazes") entered at a side door, at the upper end of the hall, and proceeded to hold religious services. A more orderly and attentive congregation than the three hundred tramps composed, could not have been desired. This evening service was as much a part of the charity as the soup, and should it have been omitted they would have felt themselves defrauded. Cards, with the popular revival hymns of the day printed on them, were distributed through the crowd, and they lustily sang "Hold the Fort!" and "Pull for the Shore!"
The services concluded, preparations were made for retiring. Some of the fastidious (generally the most ragged) spread a newspaper on the floor to keep their clothes from getting soiled. Others contented themselves with scraping a place free from tobacco quids, and retired with their boots for a pillow.
There was one devotion peculiar to nearly all previous to closing their eyes. Everyone indulged in a goodscratch! That great luxury that no unfeeling world could dispossess them of so long as they had their hands. Andsuchscratching! Such contortions in getting way round at their backs; such grunts and sighs of satisfaction as both hands would be vigorously applied to opposite extremities! And then the inventions of genius—rubbing the back against a table leg while employing the hands elsewhere; and using a foot and both hands at the same time! And such courtesies—one scratching the unreachable portion of another, and three and four scratching each other in a row! Ben was about the only one present who did not scratch, and when a neighbor asked him to rub his back with the sole of his boot he could not refuse the kindness; so while he did not scratch himself, he aided others. Let him awake at what hour of the night he might, there was scratching going forward in some parts of the hall. Before daybreak, however, he found it congenial to commence upon himself, and it took the closest application and industry of search and slaughter, during the leisure moments of two succeeding days, to prevent him from becoming a confirmed scratcher.