I made the discovery one day in a tenement in talking to a little child of five, that she had never seen a green field or a tree. This led me to ask the missionaries assisting the church to make a search for a few weeks and collect as many such children as possible. We got together seventeen, ranging from three to seven years of age, not any of whom had ever seen a single aspect of the outdoor world, save the world of stone and brick and wood.
Some friends in Montclair, N.J., arranged a lawn party for these little ones, and we proceeded. Nothing extraordinary happened. There was no open-eyed wonder, few exclamations as we intently watched the emotions of these children as they gazed for the first time on lawns, flower gardens and trees. Two-thirds of them were seasick on the train and the one regret of the journey was that we had not taken along half a dozen wet nurses.
The one unique thing of the day was the luncheon. The children were arranged around an extemporized table where sandwiches, lemonade and milk were abundantly provided. At a signal from the hostess, I said, "Now, children, everything is ready! Have your luncheon." But there was no commotion. Two-thirds of them sat motionless, looking at each other.
The sandwiches were made of ham. If I had not seen this with my own eyes, I would scarcely have credited the telling of it by anybody else.Two-thirds of the children were of Jewish parents and had been taught at least one thing thoroughly. The hostess did the best she could under the circumstances and provided other kinds of meat, cake and fruit, and the festal occasion had a happy ending.
A certain amount of care has always to be exercised in new enterprises, in departures from the ordinary routine, especially if they involve expense; or, as I have said before, interfere with political or economic progress. Pulpit preaching is the smallest item in the entire programme of a preacher, especially in such a neighbourhood and in such a church. If a preacher wants an audience, all he has to do is to step outside his church door, stand on a box, and the audience is ready-made. It is miscellaneous and cosmopolitan; it is respectful and multitudinous. When I discovered this, I proceeded to act on my convictions, and copy, to the extent of getting an audience, at least, the Socialist propagandist; and I proceeded to workwiththe people around me instead offorthem. There were no lines of demarkation to my activity. I touched the life of the community at every angle, sometimes entering as a fool where an angel would fear to tread.
I was called upon to visit a poor couple who lived in a rear tenement. They were of the unattached; had no ecclesiastical connections whatever. I saw that the old man, who lay on a couch, was dying. He was scarcely able to speak, but managed to expressa desire that I sing to him; so, as there was no one present but his wife and myself to hear it, I sang. This inspired the old man to sing himself. He coughed violently, tried to clear his throat, pulled himself together, and sang after me a line of "Jesus, Lover of my Soul." This was very touching, but the solemnity was severely jarred by following that line by the first line of: "Little Brown Jug, don't I love you!" So between the Little Brown Jug and the sacred poetry of the church he wound up, dying with his head on my knee.
There was an insurance of thirty dollars on his life. I informed the undertaker, and did what I could to comfort the old woman who was now entirely alone in the world. One of the missionaries of the church came next day and helped to make arrangements for the funeral which was to take place in the afternoon. They had not been long in that alley and knew nobody in it, and when I arrived to conduct the funeral service at three o'clock in the afternoon, there was a little crowd of people around the door, and from the inside came agonized yells from the old woman.
I opened the door and marched in. I found the undertaker in the act of taking the body out of the casket and laying it on the lounge in the corner. The old woman was on her knees, wringing her hands and begging him in the name of God not to do it. I asked for an explanation and, ratherreluctantly, the undertaker told me, proceeding with his programme as he explained that there was a "kink" in the insurance.
"Well," I said, "we can fix that up all right."
"Yes," he said, "you can fix it up with cash; but we are not in the undertaking business for our health, you know."
"Well, stop for a moment," I pleaded, "and let us talk it over!"
"Have you got the dough?" he asked.
"Not here," I replied, "but I am the pastor of that church up there on the corner, and surely we are good enough for the small expense of this funeral."
By this time he had the lid on the casket and was proceeding to carry it out. The old woman was now on her feet and almost in hysterics. I was mightily moved by the situation, and asked the man to wait; but he jabbed the end of the casket under my arm—perhaps accidentally—pushing me to one side on his way to the door. I was there ahead of him however; locked the door and put the key in my pocket.
"Now, will you wait for one moment till we talk it over?"
His answer was a volley of oaths. I waited until he subsided, and then I said:
"I will be responsible for this financially. You are wringing the heart's blood out of this poor old woman, and I don't propose to stand by and allowit." I raised my voice and continued—"I will give you two minutes to put that corpse back in the casket and arrange it for burial, and if you don't do it, there may be two to bury instead of one."
I began to time him, making absolutely no answer to anything he said. I quieted the old woman, stood very close to her and put my hand on her head. I said, "It's all right, Mary. Everything is all right. You are not friendless. You are not alone."
The two minutes were up. I took off my coat, rolled up my shirt sleeves and advanced toward him.
"Are you going to do the decent thing?"
There was one long look between us. Then he put the body back in the casket, arranged it for burial, and I opened the door and the crowd came in, not, however, before I had put my coat on again. I read the service and preached the sermon, and the undertaker did the rest.
Some months afterward, I was at work in my study in the tower of the old church, when I heard a loud knocking at the church door—a most unusual thing. I came down and found that undertaker and a gentleman and lady, well dressed, evidently of the well-to-do class, standing at the door.
"Here is a couple that want to get married, Mr. Irvine," the undertaker said.
They came into the study and were married, and I shook hands with the three, and they went off. Next day I went to the undertaker—indeed, hewas an undertaker's helper. I went up to his desk and laid down a five-dollar bill, one-fourth of the marriage fee. Without being invited, I pulled a chair up and sat down beside him.
"Now, tell me, brother," I said confidentially. "Why did you bring them to me?"
A smile overspread his features.
"Well," he said, "it was like this. You remember that funeral business?"
"Yes."
"Well, I figured it out like this: that one of the two of us was puttin' up a damned big bluff; but I hadn't the heart to call it. Shake!"
After some years' experience in missions and mission churches, I would find it very hard if I were a workingman living in a tenement not to be antagonistic to them; for, in large measure, such work is done on the assumption that people are poor and degraded through laxity in morals. The scheme of salvation is a salvation for the individual; social salvation is out of the question. Social conditions cannot be touched, because in all rotten social conditions, there is a thin red line which always leads to the rich man or woman who is responsible for them.
Coming in contact with these ugly social facts continuously, led me to this belief. It came very slowly as did also the opinion that the missionary himself or the pastor, be he as wise as Solomon, as eloquent as Demosthenes, as virtuous as St. Francis, has no social standing whatever among the people whose alms support the institutions, religious and philanthropic, of which these men are the executive heads. The fellowship of the saints is a pure fiction, has absolutely no foundation in fact in a city likeNew York except as the poor saints have it by themselves.
Tim Grogan jolted me into a new political economy; the crowded streets of the East Side on a summer night gave me a new theology. I stood one night in August on the tower of the old church and looked down upon the sweltering mass that covered the roofs, fire escapes and sidewalks. The roofs were littered with naked and half-naked children panting for breath. Down on the crowded streets thousands of little children darted in and out like sparrows, escaping as if by miracle the vehicles of all sorts and descriptions. Crowded baby-carriages lined the sidewalks. The stoops, too, were crowded. What a mass of humans! What a ganglia of living wires! As I looked on this vast multitude, I questioned the orthodox theology that held me in its grip. Most of these people belonged to another race. And I stood at that moment firmly rooted in the belief that this multitude was inevitably doomed! Let me put it frankly, even though it seems brutal: doomed to hell!
I am unable to analyze the quick currents of thought that went through my mind at that instant. I cannot explain how the change came. I know that there came to me a bigger thought than any I had ever known, and that thought so thrilled me with human feeling, with love for men, that I said to my soul: "Soul, if this multitude is doomed to hell, be brave; gird up your loins and go with them!"
In that tenement district people were being murdered by the tens of thousands by tuberculosis, by defective plumbing, by new diseases born of the herding of men and women like cattle. I made some feeble attempt to investigate, to ascertain, to acquaint myself with the facts, and my investigation led me to this result—a result that the lapse of years has not altered; that the private ownership of tenements—the private profits in housing—was not only the mother of the great white plague, but of most of the plagues down there that endanger health. It led me to the belief also that the struggle for bodily health, the struggle to survive, was so fierce as to leave little time for soul health or mental health! It was a source of continual wonder to me that people so helpless and so neglected were as good as they were, or as healthy as they were. It did not seem reasonable to lay the blame at the doors of the owners of the tenements. Many of them had a tenement only as a source of income—and to acquire the tenement had taken long years of savings, earnings and sacrifices. It was part of the great game of business, the game of "live I, die you!"
The churches and synagogues are of little vital importance there, because they ignore social conditions, or largely ignore them. And there is a reason for this also, and the reason is that they are supported by the people—the very people who perpetuate the evils against which prophet, priest and pastor oughtto cry out continually. The protest against such conditions is a negligible quantity.
There is a protest, an outcry, but it is related neither to the church nor to the synagogue. The East Side has a soul, but it is not an ecclesiastical soul! It is a soul that is alive—so much alive to the interest of the people that many times I felt ashamed of myself when I listened to the socialistic orators on the street corners and in the East Side halls. They were stirring up the minds of the people. They were not merely making them discontented with conditions, but they were offering a programme of reconstruction—a programme that included a trowel as well as a sword.
The soul of the East Side expressed itself in the Yiddish press, daily, weekly, and monthly, and in Yiddish literature, and in the spoken word of the propagandist whose ideal, though limited in literary expression, made him a flame of living fire. It was this soul of the East Side that drove me against my will to study the relation of politics to the condition of the people. One of the first things that I discovered was the grip that Tammany had on the people. Every saloon keeper was a power in the community. Men, of any force of character whatever, who were willing to hold their hands behind their backs for Tammany graft, were singled out by the organization for some moiety of honour. Small merchants found it to their advantage to keep on theright side of the saloon keepers and the Tammany leaders. I remember trying to express this thought in an uptown church to a wealthy congregation; and I remember distinctly, also, that I was rebuked by one of the leading lights of the missionary society of which I was a part. I was informed that my business was to "save souls," and in my public addresses to tell how I saved them; that political conditions must be left to the politicians—and it was done.
To the old church at the corner of Market and Henry streets came Dowling. He followed me as a matter of fellowship—we loved each other. And came also Dave Ranney, the "puddler from Pittsburg."
On the first anniversary of Dave's conversion, I gathered a hundred wastrels of the Bowery together and gave them a dinner at the church. Dave, of course, was the guest of honour. When my guests were full and warm, they became reminiscent, and I urged them, a few of them, to tell us their stories—to unfold the torn manuscripts of their lives. Dave told his first.
"Boys," he said, "I was one of de toughest gazabos what ever hung aroun' de square. I met dis man an' tried t' bleed 'im, but it warn't no go—'e was on to de game and cudn't be touch't.
"I giv'd 'im a song an' dance story fur weeks. One day 'e sez to me, sez 'e, 'Chum!'—well, sayboys, when I went out an' had a luk at meself, sez I, 'Ye dhirty loafer, if a man like dat calls y' "chum," why don't y' take a brace an' get on de dead level?' So I did an' I've been on de dead level ever since—ain't I, boss?"
I was able to place Dave as janitor of the church. After he had been there for a while and comfortably housed in the janitor's quarters in the basement, he thought it a propitious time to be reconciled to his wife; so we arranged to have Mary come down and inspect the place. We put extra work into the cleaning of the quarters, furnishing it with some sticks of furniture. Reconciliations were getting to be an old story with Mary, and Dave knew he was going to have difficulty in this new attempt. He finally persuaded her to make a visit to the church. When he was ready, Dave, in a most apologetic tone, said:
"There is just one thing lacking here."
"What is it Dave?"
"A white tie."
"Where?"
"On you."
The white tie as ecclesiastical appendage I had avoided. I despised it. But Dave assured me that if Mary came down to look the church over, she would be more interested in my appearance than in the appearance of the church, because what she really wanted was an assurance that Dave was "on thesquare!" and if he could introduce her to a real minister as his friend, it would enhance his chance.
I sent Dave to the Bowery for a five cent white string tie, and I borrowed a Prince Albert coat. There was an old stovepipe hat in the church—sort of legacy from former pastorates—and it was trotted out, carefully brushed and put on the study table. Then Mary appeared! Dave had instructed me to put up a "tall talk," so I put up the tallest possible. Mary inspected the church, the quarters and the minister; then she looked at Dave and said in an undertone—"This looks on the level."
"You bet your sweet life!" Dave said.
So Mary was installed as "the lady of the temple" at Sixty-one Henry Street, and for seven years ministered to the poor and the needy, and kept in order the House of God. After her death, Dave remained at the church about a year; then he became my successor as missionary to the lodging houses on the Bowery, where he still works—a sort of humble doctor of the humanities; feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, comforting men in despair.
It seemed to me at that time that what a weak church like that most needed was a strong, powerful church to put its arms around it and give it support. I interviewed Dr. Parkhurst, as I was Chairman of a Committee of the City Vigilance League which he organized. The result was that Dr. Parkhurst's church gave it for a year support and absoluteindependence of action at the same time. Then the Rev. John Hopkins Dennison, who had been Dr. Parkhurst's assistant, superseded me in the care of the church, and was able to bring to its support help that I could not have touched. Mr. Dennison's service to that church is worthy of a better record than it has yet received. He performed brilliant service, intensified the life of the church and gathered around it a band of noble people. He transformed the tower of the church into a kind of modern monastery in which he lived himself, and in which Dowling, the old Irish tinker, had a place also, and which he made a centre of ten years' missionary work chiefly among the lodging houses where I found him.
One day Dowling was walking along the Bowery when a hand was laid roughly on his shoulder and a voice said:
"Ain't you Dowling?"
"Yes."
"What did you do with the loot?"
In the Sepoy Rebellion in India, he had looted the palace of a Rajah with two other soldiers. The most valuable items of the booty were several bamboo canes stuffed with diamonds, rubies and sapphires. In the act of burying them for protection and hiding, one of the soldiers was shot dead; the other two escaped and separated, and all these years each of them had lived in the suspicion that the other had gone back for the loot, and they both discoveredon the Bowery that neither of them had and that this valuable stuff was buried in far-off India. Dowling wrote to the Governor-General and told of his part in the affair and volunteered to come out and locate it. But by this time his body was wasted, his steps were tottering and his head bent. Five-hundred dollars were appropriated by the Indian Government to take him out; but Dowling was destined for another journey; and, in the old tower that he loved so well and where he was beloved by every one who knew him, he lay down and died. They buried him in Plainfield, N.J., and his friends put over him a stone bearing these words that were so characteristic of his life:
"HE WENT ABOUT DOING GOOD"
My next service was in a city of a second class beyond the Mississippi River. I had been invited as a pulpit supply in one of its largest churches, but when I arrived I found them in a wrangle over the pastor who had just left and by whose recommendation I was to fill the pulpit. I arrived in the city on a Sunday morning and went from my hotel to the church prepared to preach. I stood for a few minutes in the vestibule, and what I heard led me to go straight out again, never to return.
My first impression of the city was that it contained more vital democracy than any city I had ever been in. It takes an Old World proletarian a long timeto outgrow a sense of subserviency. As a missionary and almoner of the rich in New York, this sense was very strong in me. In the West I felt this vital democracy so keenly and saw the vision of political independence so clearly, that my very blood seemed to change. Politically, I was born again.
While studying the social conditions of this city, I took a residence on the banks of the river among the squatters. There were about fifteen hundred people living in shacks on this "no man's land." My residence was a shack for which I paid three dollars a month. It was at the bottom of a big clay bank, and not far from where the city dumped its garbage. There was neither church nor chapel in this neglected district, and the people were mostly foreigners; but the children all spoke English.
During the early part of my stay in that shack, I entered my first great period of doubting—doubt as to the moral order of the universe, doubt on the question of God. I had gone through some great soul struggles, but this was the greatest. It was for a time the eclipse of my soul. For weeks I lived behind closed doors—I was shut in with my soul. But the community around me called in a thousand ways for help, for guidance, for instruction, and I opened the door of my shack and invited the children in. I organized a Sunday School and taught themethics and religion. I got up little entertainments for them. I procured a stereopticon, gave them lectures on my experience in Egypt, and lectures on art, biography and history. I had a peculiar method of advertising these lectures. I informed the little cripple boy on the corner. He whispered the information to a section of the huts, at the farthest end of which a golden-haired courier informed another section; so that by the time the lecture was scheduled to begin, my audience was ready, and most of them slid down the clay bank in front of my door. Later I went out through the surrounding towns and cities, lecturing, and raised money for a chapel, and we called it the "Chapel of the Carpenter."
I never knew the meaning of the incarnation until I lived on "the bottoms" with the squatters. I talked of great characters of history; I reviewed great books. I travelled with these children over the great highways of history, science and art, and very soon we had a strong Sunday School, and helpers came from the city—but the door of my own soul was still shut. It seemed to me that my soul was dead. I was without hope for myself: everything around me was dark. Sometimes I locked the door and tried to pray, but no words came, nor thoughts—not a ray of light penetrated the darkness. My mind and intellect became duller and duller. It was at this time that I came across the writings of Schopenhauer; and Schopenhauer suggested to me a methodof relief. I may be doing him an injustice, but it was his philosophy that made me reason that, as I did not ask to come into life and had no option, I had a right to go out of it. There was nothing spasmodic in the development of my thought along this line: it was cold, calm reasoning; I had determined to go out of life. So, with the same calm deliberation that I cooked my breakfast, I destroyed every vestige of my correspondence; and, one night went to the river to seek relief. I was sitting on the end of a log when a man, who had been working twelve hours in a packing-house, came out to smoke, after his supper. He had not washed himself. His bloody shirt stuck to his skin—he was haggard, pale; and we dropped naturally into conversation. In language intelligible to him I asked him what life meant to him.
"The kids," he said, "that's what it means to me. I work like one of the things I kill every day—I kill hundreds of them, thousands of them every day. I go home and eat like one of them, and sleep like one of them, and go back to hog it again like one of them."
"Do you get tired?"
"Tired? Tired as hell!"
"I mean—tired of life?"
"Oh, no," he said, "I aint livin' the best kind of a life, but what I have is better than none. I don't know what's beyond—if there is any life or none at all; but something in me makes me stick to this one.Besides, if there is any chance for a better life here, he must be a damned coward that would go out of it and leave it undone. Good night."
I saw him retreat to his shack among the tall weeds. I heard the door close. I fancied him lie down in a heap in the corner and go to sleep. He was a better philosopher than I was, and he had called me a coward, but he had not altered my determination. I began to sweat. It was like the action of a fever on my body, and I became very nervous; but I was determined to meet the crisis, and go.
A sudden change in affairs was created by an unearthly scream—the scream of a woman. I looked around suddenly and discovered that the only two-story shack on "the bottoms" was in a blaze, and the thought occurred to me that I might be of some help and accomplish my purpose at the same time.
In a moment I was beside the burning hut. It appeared that a lamp had exploded upstairs, and that three small children were hemmed in. That was the cause of the scream.
A plank that reached to the upstairs window was lying at the wood pile. I pushed it against the house and climbed like a cat into the burning bedroom. By this time the neighbours had collected, and I helped the woman and lowered the three children down, one by one, and then deliberately groped for the stairs to get hemmed in, the smoke suffocatingme as I did so. By the time I found the stairs, my hair was singed, my arms were burned, but I was gradually losing consciousness, and before I reached the bottom I fell, suffocated with the smoke. In that last moment of consciousness, my whole life came up in review. I had no regrets. I had played a part and it was over.
When I came out of coma, I was lying on my cot in the hut, the neighbours crowding my little bedroom and standing outside in scores. One of the newspapers that had most severely criticized my interference in politics, gave me a pass to Colorado and return—and in the mountains of Colorado, the door of my soul opened again, and I saw the world beautiful—and opportunities that were golden for helpfulness and service awaiting my touch. So I returned to my hut with the sense of God more fully developed in me than it had ever been.
They had a system in that city that I was very much ashamed of—that I thought all men ought to be ashamed of—the segregation of the "social evil." I discovered that the city fined these poor creatures of the streets, and that these fines, amounting to thousands of dollars every year, went straight into the public school fund, so that it could truly be said that the more debauched society was, the more efficiently it could educate its children and its youth.
These houses in the red light district were built toimitate castles on the Rhine, and were owned by church people and politicians. Everybody winked at this condition. One minister of this town uttered a loud protest and took his children out of the public schools, but he had to leave the city. The Christians would not stand for such a protest. The newspapers would not touch it, trustees would not touch it, the great political parties would not touch it.
I joined the Knights of Labour in that city, an organization then in its prime of strength, but they would not touch it. I joined the People's Party in the hope that there I might do something about it. One of the leading members of that party importuned me to nominate him as presiding officer of the city convention. "On one condition," I told him; "that you appoint me chairman of the committee on resolutions." And the compact was made.
Five men were on that committee, and when I asked the committee to put in a resolution condemning the education of children from this fund, they refused. I could only persuade one of four to indorse my minority report, which, signed by two of us, condemned this remnant of Sodom left over; but it swept the convention and was carried almost unanimously. Even the three men on the resolutions committee who refused to sign it before, voted for it in convention. I am aware that it does not matter from what fund or funds the public schoolsystem is supported. I am aware also that one of the things we can do is to make that kind of thing cover up its head.
What I suffered for that resolution can never be recorded.
My period of inclement mental weather was followed by a period of poverty—destitution rather—I was physically unable to work with my hands and I had not yet tried to earn money by my pen. I was often so reduced by hunger that I could scarcely walk. At such times one feels more grateful for friendship. Into my life then came a few choice souls whose fellowship acted as a dynamic to my life. It was when things were at their worst that George D. Herron found me. The almost Jewish cast of feature, the strange, wonderful voice, the prophetic atmosphere of the man forced me to express the belief that I had never met a human being who seemed to me so like Christ. Then came George A. Gates, the president of Iowa College where Dr. Herron was a professor. About the same time came Elia W. Peattie and Ida Doolittle Fleming. Mrs. Fleming and her husband helped me organize a Congregational Church which, when organized, was a means of support.
The church was in a growing section of the city but I could not be persuaded to live there. I lived where I thought my life was most serviceable—on "the bottoms."
One night after a few days' involuntary fast I found in the hut two cents. To the city I went and bought two bananas—one I ate on the way back and the other I put in my hip pocket.
There were no streets, no lights, no sidewalks in that region. As I came to a railroad arch on the edge of the squatter community I saw a figure emerge from the deep shadows. I knew instantly I was to be held up, but as life was rather cheap down there I was not sure what would accompany the assault. A second figure emerged and when I came to within a few yards of them, I whipped the banana from my pocket and pointing it as one would a revolver I said—"Move a muscle, either of you, and I'll blow your brains out!"
"Gee!" one of them muttered; "it's Mr. Irvine."
They belonged to a gang of young toughs who lived in a dug-out on the banks of the river. Some of them had brothers in my school. There were about a dozen of them. They had hinted several times that they would clean me out when they had time, but they had delayed their plan. I took these fellows to my hut and we talked for hours.
When I produced the banana they laughed vociferously and invited me to their "hole." Next evening they gave a reception and, I suppose, fed me on stolen property. They had a stove—a few old mattresses and some dry-goods boxes.
I held their attention that night for four hourswhile I told the story of Jean Valjean. Next day we were all photographed together on a pile of stones near the "hole."
After that these fellows protected the chapel and made themselves useful in their way. In less than a year afterward half of them had gone to honest work; the rest went the way of the transgressor, to the penetentiary and the reform school.
This period was one of total rejection by any means—powerful influences were at work to render my labour void—but they were offset for a time by the finer influences of life. I gave a series of addresses in Tabor College, Iowa, and they were the beginning of an awakening among the students. After the last word of the last address the student about whom the president and faculty were most concerned walked up the aisle and expressed a desire to lead a new life.
"Do it now," I suggested.
"Right here?"
"Yes, right where you stand."
The president and faculty gathered around him, making a circle; he stood in the midst, alone, and in that way with prayer and dedication from the lips of the young man and his friends began one of the most useful lives in the American ministry. This young man became an ascetic. I gave him to read the life of Francis of Assisi, and he went to the extreme in emulation. He divested himself of collarsand ties and on graduating read his thesis for his Bachelor's degree collarless and tieless.
I was in New Haven when he came there to take his Divinity degree in Yale. He came without either collar or tie, but after days of prayer and fasting he was "led" to enter the University as others entered it. He is now pastor of the First Congregational Church in Rockford, Illinois; his name is Frank M. Sheldon. Nine men have gone by a similar route into the ministry, but Mr. Sheldon is the only one of them who has kept touch with the modern demands on religious leadership.
Birthdays have meant nothing whatever to me, but I made my thirty-second an occasion for a party on "the bottoms."
I could only accommodate seven guests. Two were favourite boys and the others were selected because of their great need. The hut was the centre of a mud puddle that January morning. I got a long plank and laid it from my doorstep to the edge of the clay bank. I took precaution not to announce the affair, even to the guests, but a grocer's boy who had been sent by a friend with some oranges lost his way and his inquiry after me created such a sensation that when he found me he was accompanied by about fifty children.
Old Mrs. Belgarde, my nearest neighbour, had whispered across the fence to her neighbour that something was sure to happen, for she had noticedme making unusual preparations that day. I think the origin of the party idea came with my first birthday gift—I mean the first I had ever received—it was a copy of Thomas à Kempis, given me by my friend the Reverend Gregory J. Powell. [I gave it later to a man who was to die by judicial process in the county jail.]
When the hour arrived a crowd of two hundred youngsters stood in the mud outside. On the top of the clay bank stood parents, crossing themselves and praying quietly that their offspring would be lucky enough to get in.
I had taught these children some simple rules of order, and when I opened the door I rang a little bell. There was absolute silence. They had been actually tearing each other's clothing to rags for a position near the door. I told them that I was so poor that I had scarcely enough food for myself. That the little I had I was going to share with seven of my special friends; of course they all considered themselves included in that characterization.
"Dear little friends," I said, "I never had a birthday party before; and now you are going to spoil this one."
Up to this time the crowd didn't know who the guests were. I proceeded to call the names. As those called made a move there was a violent fight for the door. Some of them I had to drag out of the clutches of the unsuccessful. Only six of the sevenwere there. There was a howl from a hundred throats to take the place of the absent one.
"No," I said sternly; "he'll come, all right." A roar of discontent went up and chaos reigned. I couldn't make myself heard; I rang the bell and again calmed them. I was at a loss to know what to say.
"Dear little folks," I said, "I thought you loved me!"
"Do too!" whined a dozen voices.
"Then if you do, go away and some day I will have a party for every child on 'the bottoms.'"
That quieted the youthful mob and they departed—that is, the majority departed. Some stayed and bombarded the doors and windows with stones. There were few stones to be found, and as it didn't occur to them to use the same stones twice they used mud and plastered the front of the hut with it.
This form of expression, however, did not disturb us much. I sent three of my guests into the back yard to wash and arrange their hair. They returned for inspection but didn't pass, the hair refusing to comply on such short notice. I put the finishing touches on each of their toilets and we sat down to supper. The oldest boy, "Fritz," was half past twelve and the youngest, "Ano," had just struck ten. Ano was a cripple and both legs were twisted out of shape—he hobbled about on crutches. "Jake" was eleven—two of his eleven years he had spent ina reformatory where he had learned to chew tobacco and to swear.
"Eddy" was also eleven, but the oldest of all in point of wits. I had a claim on Eddy: one day he was amusing himself by jerking a cat at the end of a string, in and out of Frau Belgarde's well. She was stealthily approaching him with a piece of fence rail when I arrived and possibly prevented some broken bones. "Kaiser" was nearly twelve; he too had been in a reform school—he liked it and would have been glad to stay as long as they wanted him—for he had three meals a day and he had never had such "luck" outside. "Whitey" was a little Swedish boy whose mother worked in a cigar factory. "Kaiser" and "Whitey" had a "dug-out" and they spent more nights together in it than they spent in their huts.
"Fritz," the oldest boy, began his career in the open by stealing his father's revolver; and, jumping on the first grocery wagon he found handy, he left town. Of course he was brought back and "sent up" for a year. "Franz," the absent one, was Ano's brother, and the toughest boy in the community.
These brief outlines describe the guests of my birthday party.
"When ye make a feast call the poor" was stretched a little to cover this aggregation—stretched as to the character of those invited. A blessing was asked, of course—by the host and repeated by the guests.Of things to eat there was enough and to spare. After dinner each one was to contribute something to the entertainment.
"Beginning here on my left with 'Whitey,'" I said, "I want each boy to tell us what he would like to be when he becomes a man." Whitey without hesitation said:
"A organ-man wid a monkey."
"Why?"
"'Cause."
Eddy said he would like to be a butcher, and as a reason gave: "Plenty ov beef to eat."
"Kaiser" preferred to be a "Reformatory boss."
"Ano," the cripple, said he would like to be a minister. When pressed for a reason he said, "That's what m' father says—dey ain't got notin' to do!"
In the midst of this social quiz a loud noise was heard outside. "Bang! Bang!! Bang!!!" The timbers of the hut shivered, the guests made a rush to the back door. I was there first and found Franz, the missing guest, his arms smeared with blood, his ragged jacket covered with hair of some sort and in his hand a bloody stiletto.
He rushed past me into the hut, got to the table and exclaimed: "Gee whiz! der ain't a —— scrap left!"
"Look here, Franz," I said, "I want to know what you've been up to?"
"Ye do, hey? Ye look skeered, too, don't yer—hey?"
"Never mind how I look; tell me at once what you've been up to!"
"Ha, ha, ha!" he laughed, "d'ye tink I kilt some ol' sucker for 'is money—hey? Ha, ha! Well, I hain't, see? I've bin skinnin' a dead hoss an brot ye d' skin for a birfday present, see?"
The skin was lying in a bloody heap outside the back door. I arranged "Franz" for dinner and the party was complete.
I told some stories; then we played games and at ten o'clock they went home. The moment the front door was opened, about forty children—each with a lighted candle in hand—sang a verse of my favourite hymn: "Lead, Kindly Light." They knew but one verse, but that they sang twice. It was a weird performance and moved me almost to tears.
After they sang they came down the clay bank and shook hands, wishing me all sorts of things. Two nights afterward I had a different kind of a party. A bullet came crashing through the boards of my hut about midnight. Rushing to the door, I saw the fire flashes of other shots in a neighbour's garden. I went to the high board fence and saw one of my neighbours—a German—emptying a revolver at his wife who was dodging behind a tree.
My first impulse was to jump the fence and save the woman but the man being evidently half-drunk might have turned and poured into me what was intended for his wife; and the first law of nature wassufficiently developed in me to let her have what belonged to her! I tried to speak but my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I was positively scared.
The old fellow walked up to the tree, letting out as he walked a volley of oaths. I recovered my equilibrium, sprang over the fence, crept up behind and jumped on him, knocking him down and instantly disarming him.
I went inside with them and sat between them until they seemed to have forgotten what had happened. Then I put them to bed, put the light out and went home. I examined the revolver and found it empty. Next morning I went back and told the old man that I would volunteer to give him some lessons in target practice; and that the reason I knocked him down was because he was such a poor shot. This old couple became my staunchest supporters.
I interested the students of Tabor College in the people of that out-of-the-way community, and before I built the Chapel of the Carpenter which still stands there I organized a college settlement which was manned by students.
The small church, the chapel on "the bottoms," the work of the college students and the increasing circle of converts and friends made the work attractive to me, but I had entered the political field in order to protest against and possibly remedy something civicthat savoured of Sodom; and for a minister that was an unpardonable sin. The "interests" determined to cripple me or destroy my work. This they did successfully by the medium of a subsidized press and other means, fair and foul. It was a case of a city against one man—a rich city against a poor man and the man went down to defeat—apparent defeat, anyway: I packed my belongings and left. As I crossed the bridge which spans the river I looked on the little squatter colony on "the bottoms" and as my career there passed in review, for the second time in my life I was stricken with home-sickness and I was guilty of what my manhood might have been ashamed of—tears.