Miss Wald of the Nurses’ Settlement told me the story of Peter, and I set it down here as I remember it. She will forgive the slips. Peter has nothing to forgive; rather, he would not have were he alive. He was all to the good for the friendship he gave and took. Looking at it across the years, it seems as if in it were the real Peter. The other, who walked around, was a poor knave of a pretender.
This was Miss Wald’s story:—
He came to me with the card of one of our nurses, a lanky, slipshod sort of fellow of nineteen or thereabouts. The nurse had run across him begging in a tenement.When she asked him why he did that, he put a question himself: “Where would a fellow beg if not among the poor?” And now there he stood, indifferent, bored if anything, shiftless, yet with some indefinite appeal, waiting to see what I would do. She had told him that he had better go and see me, and he had come. He had done his part; it was up to me now.
He was a waiter, he said, used to working South in the winter, but it was then too late. He had been ill. He suppressed a little hacking cough that told its own story; he was a “lunger.” Did he tramp? Yes, he said, and I noticed that his breath smelled of whisky. He made no attempt to hide the fact.
I explained to him that I might send him to some place in the country where he couldget better during the winter, but that it would be so much effort wasted if he drank. He considered a while, and nodded in his curious detached way; he guessed he could manage without it, if he had plenty of hot coffee. The upshot of it was that he accepted my condition and went.
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“THERE HE STOOD, INDIFFERENT, BORED IF ANYTHING, SHIFTLESS.”
Along in midwinter our door-bell was rung one night, and there stood Peter. “Oh! did you come back? Too bad!” It slipped out before I had time to think. But Peter bore with me. He smiled reassurance. “I did not run away. The place burned down; we were sent back.”
It was true; I remembered. But the taint of whisky was on his breath. “You have been drinking again,” I fretted. “You spent your money for that—”
“No,” said he; “a man treated me.”
“And did you have to take whisky?”
There was no trace of resentment in his retort: “Well, now, what would he have said if I’d took milk?” It was as one humoring a child.
He went South on a waiter job. From St. Augustine he sent me a letter that ended: “Write me in care of the post-office; it is the custom of the town to get your letters there.” Likely it was the first time in his life that he had had a mail address. “This is a very nice place,” ran his comment on the old Spanish town, “but for business give me New York.”
TheWanderlustgripped Peter, and I heard from him next in the Southwest. For years letters came from him at long intervals, showing that he had not forgotten me. Once another tramp called on me withgreeting from him and a request for shoes. When “business” next took Peter to New York and he called, I told him that I valued his acquaintance, but did not care for that of many more tramps. He knew the man at once.
“Oh,” he said, “isn’t he a rotter? I didn’t think he would do that.”They were tramping in Colorado, he explained, and one night the other man told him of his mother. Peter, in the intimacy of the camp-fire, spoke of me. The revelation of the other’s baseness was like the betrayal of some sacred rite. I would not have liked to be in the man’s place when next they met, if they ever did.
Some months passed, and then one day a message came from St. Joseph’s Home: “I guess I am up against it this time.” He didnot want to trouble me, but would I come and say good-by? I went at once. Peter was dying, and he knew it. Sitting by his bed, my mind went back to our first meeting—perhaps his did too—and I said: “You have been real decent several times, Peter. You must have come of good people; don’t you want me to find them for you?” He didn’t seem to care very much, but at last he gave me the address in Boston of his only sister. But she had moved, and it was a long and toilsome task to find her. In the end, however, a friend located her for me. She was a poor Irish dressmaker, and Peter’s old father lived with her. She wrote in answer to my summons that they would come, if Peter wanted them very much, but that it would be a sacrifice. Hehad always been their great trial—a born tramp and idler.
Peter was chewing a straw when I told him. I had come none too soon. His face told me that. He heard me out in silence. When I asked if he wanted me to send for them, he stopped chewing a while and ruminated.
“They might send me the money instead,” he decided, and resumed his straw.
My winter lecture travels sometimes bring me to a town not a thousand miles from New York, where my mail awaits me. If it happens then, as it often does, that it is too heavy for me to attack alone—for it is the law that if a man live by the pen he shall pay the penalty in kind—I send for a stenographer, and in response there comes a knock at my door that ushers in a smiling young woman, who answers my inquiries after “Grandma” with the assurance that she is very well indeed, though she is getting older every day. As to her, I can see for myself that she is fine, and I wonder secretlywhere the young men’s eyes are that she is still Miss Murray. Before I leave town, unless the train table is very awkward, I am sure to call on Grandma for a chat—in office hours, for then the old lady will exhibit to me with unreserved pride “the child’s” note-book, with the pothooks which neither of us can make out, and tell me what a wonderful girl she is. And I cry out with the old soul in rapture over it all, and go away feeling happily that the world is all right with two such people in it as Kate Murray and her grandmother, though the one is but a plain stenographer and the other an old Irishwoman, but with the faithful, loving heart of her kind. To me there is no better kind anywhere, and Grandma Linton is the type as she is the flower of it. Sothat you shall agree with me I will tell you their story, her story and the child’s, exactly as they have lived it, except that I will not tell you the name of the town they live in or their own true names, because Kate herself does not know all of it, and it is best that she shall not—yet.
When I say at the very outset that Margaret Linton, Kate’s mother, was Margaret Linton all her brief sad life, you know the reason why, and there is no need of saying more. She was a brave, good girl, innocent as she was handsome. At nineteen she was scrubbing offices to save her widowed mother, whom rheumatism had crippled. That was how she met the young man who made love to her, and listened to his false promises, as girls have done since time out of mind to theirundoing. She was nineteen when her baby was born. From that day, as long as she lived, no word of reproach fell from her mother’s lips. “My Maggie” was more than ever the pride of the widow’s heart since the laughter had died in her bonny eyes. It was as if in the fatherless child the strongest of all bonds had come between the two silent women. Poor Margaret closed her eyes with the promise of her mother that she would never forsake her baby, and went to sleep with a tired little sigh.
Kate was three years old when her mother died. It was no time then for Grandma Linton to be bothered with the rheumatics. It was one thing to be a worn old woman with a big strong daughter to do the chores for you, quite anotherto have this young life crying out to you for food and shelter and care, a winsome elf putting two plump little arms around one’s neck and whispering with her mouth close to your ear, “I love oo, Grannie.” With the music of the baby voice in her ears the widow girded up her loins and went out scrubbing, cleaning, became janitress of the tenement in which she and Kate occupied a two-room flat—anything so that the thorns should be plucked from the path of the child’s blithesome feet. Seven years she strove for her “lamb.” When Kate was ten and getting to be a big girl, she faced the fact that she could do it no longer. She was getting too old.
What struggles it cost, knowing her, I can guess; but she brought thatsacrifice too. Friends who were good to the poor undertook to pay the rent. She could earn enough to keep them; that she knew. But they soon heard that the two were starving. Poor neighbors were sharing their meals with them, who themselves had scarce enough to go around; and from Kate’s school came the report that she was underfed. Her grandmother’s haggard face told the same story plainly. There was still the “county” where no one starves, however else she fares, and they tried to make her see that it was her duty to give up and let the child be cared for in an institution. But against that Grandma Linton set her face like flint. She was her Maggie’s own, and stay with her she would, as she had promised, as long as she could get aroundat all. And with that she reached for her staff—her old enemy, the rheumatics, was just then getting in its worst twinges, as if to mock her—and set out to take up her work.
But it was all a vain pretense, and her friends knew it. They were at their wits’ end until it occurred to them to lump two families in one. There was another widow, a younger woman with four small children, the youngest a baby, who was an unsolved problem to them. The mother had work, and was able to do it; but she could not be spared from home as things were. They brought the two women together. They liked one another, and took eagerly to the “club” plan. In the compact that was made Mrs. Linton became the housekeeper of the commonhome, with five children to care for instead of one, while the mother of the young brood was set free to earn the living for the household.
Mother Linton took up her new and congenial task with the whole-hearted devotion with which she had carried out her promise to Maggie. She mothered the family of untaught children and brought them up as her own. They had been running wild, but grew well-mannered and attractive, to her great pride. They soon accepted her as their veritable “grannie,” and they call her that to this day.
The years went by, and Kate, out of short skirts, got her “papers” at the school and went forth to learn typewriting. She wanted her own home then,and the partnership which had proved so mutually helpful was dissolved. Kate was getting along well, with steady work in an office, when the great crisis came. Grandma became so feeble that their friends once more urged her removal to an institution, where she could be made comfortable, instead of having to make a home for her granddaughter. When, as before, she refused to hear of it, they tried to bring things to a head by refusing any longer to contribute toward the rent. They did it with fear and trembling, but they did not know those two, after all. The day notice had been given Kate called at the office.
She came to thank her friends for their help in the past. It was all right for them to stop now, she said; it was herturn. “Grandma took care of me when I was a little girl for years; now I can take care of her. I am earning five dollars a week; that is more than when you first helped us, and I shall soon get a raise. Grannie and I will move into other rooms that are not so high up, for the stairs are hard on her. She shall stay with me while she lives and I will mind her.”
She was as good as her word. With her own hands and the aid of every man in the tenement who happened to be about, she moved their belongings to the new home, while the mothers and children cheered her on the way. They live not far from there to-day, year by year more snugly housed, for Kate is earning a stenographer’s pay now. Her employers in the office raised her wages when theyheard, through her friends, of Kate’s plucky choice; but that is another thing Kate Murray does not know. Since then she has set up in business for herself. Grandma, as I told you, is still living, getting younger every day, in her adoration of the young woman who moves about her, light-footed and light-hearted, patting her pillow, smoothing her snowy hair, and showing affection for her in a thousand little ways. Sometimes when the young woman sings the old Irish songs that Grandma herself taught the girl’s mother as a child, she looks up with a start, thinking it is her Maggie come back. Then she remembers, and a shadow flits across her kind old face. If Kate sees it, she steals up behind her, and, putting two affectionate arms around herneck, whispers in her ear, “I love oo, Grannie,” and the elder woman laughs and lives again in the blessed present. At such times I wonder how much Kate really does know. But she keeps her own counsel.
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“IF KATE SEES IT, SHE STEALS UP BEHIND HER, AND,PUTTING TWO AFFECTIONATE ARMS AROUND HER NECK,WHISPERS IN HER EAR, ‘I LOVE OO, GRANNIE.’”
The door-bell of the Nurses’ Settlement rang loudly one rainy night, and a Polish Jewess demanded speech with Miss Wald. This was the story she told: She scrubbed halls and stairs in a nice tenement on the East Side. In one of the flats lived the Schaibles, a young couple not long in the country. He was a music teacher. Believing that money was found in the streets of America, they furnished their flat finely on the installment plan, expecting that he would have many pupils, but none came. A baby did instead, and when they were three, what with doctor and nurse, their money went fast. Now it was all gone;the installment collector was about to seize their furniture for failure to pay, and they would lose all. The baby was sick and going to die. It would have to be buried in “the trench,” for the father and mother were utterly friendless and penniless.
She told the story dispassionately, as one reciting an every-day event in tenement-house life, until she came to the sick baby. Then her soul was stirred.
“I couldn’t take no money out of that house,” she said. She gave her day’s pay for scrubbing to the poor young couple and came straight to Miss Wald to ask her to send a priest to them. She had little ones herself, and she knew that the mother’s heart was grieved because she couldn’t meet the baby in her heaven if it died and was buried like a dog.
“’Tain’t mine,” she added with a little conscious blush at Miss Wald’s curious scrutiny; “but it wouldn’t be heaven to her without her child, would it?”
They are not Roman Catholics at the Nurses’ Settlement, either, as it happens, but they know the way well to the priest’s door. Before the night was an hour older a priest was in the home of the young people, and with him came a sister of charity. Save the baby they could not, but keep it from the Potter’s Field they could and did. It died, and was buried with all the comforting blessings of the Church, and the poor young parents were no longer friendless. The installment collector, met by Miss Wald in person, ceased to be a terror.
“And to think,” said that lady indignantly from behind the coffee urn inthe morning, “to think that they don’t have a pupil, not a single one!”
The residenters seated at the breakfast table laid down their spoons with a common accord and gazed imploringly at her. They were used to having their heads shampooed for the cause by unskilled hands, to have their dry goods spoiled by tyros at dressmaking, and they knew the signs.
“Leading lady,” they chorused, “oh, leading lady!Havewe got to take music lessons?”
“Go quickly, please, to No. — East Eleventh Street, near the river,” was the burden of a message received one day in the Charities Building; “a Hungarian family is in trouble.” The little word that covers the widest range in the language gives marching orders daily to many busy feet thereabouts, and, before the October sun had set, a visitor from the Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor had climbed to the fourth floor of the tenement and found the Josefy family. This was what she discovered there: a man in the last stages of consumption, a woman within twoweeks of her confinement, five hungry children, a landlord clamoring for his rent. The man had long ceased to earn the family living. His wife, taking up that burden with the rest, had worked on cloaks for a sweater until she also had to give up. In fact, the work gave out just as their need was greatest. Now, with the new baby coming, no preparation had been made to receive it. For those already there, there was no food in the house.
They had once been well off. Josefy was a tailor, and had employed nearly a score of hands in the busy season. He paid forty-four dollars a month rent then. That day the landlord had threatened to dispossess them for one month’s arrears of seven dollars, and only because of therain had given them a day’s grace. All the money saved up in better days had gone to pay doctor and druggist, without making Josefy any better. His wife listened dismally to the recital of their troubles and asked for work—any light work that she could do.
The rent was paid, and the baby came. They were eight then, subsisting, as the society’s records show, in January on the earnings of Mrs. Josefy making ladies’ blouse sleeves at twenty-five cents a dozen pairs, in February on the receipts of embroidering initials on napkins at fifteen cents apiece, in March on her labors in a downtown house on sample cloaks. Three dollars a week was her wage there. To save car-fare she walked to her work and back, a good two miles each way,getting up at 3A.M.to do her home washing and cleaning first. In bad weather they were poorer by ten cents a day, because then she had to ride. The neighbors were kind; the baker left them bread twice a week and the butcher gave them a little meat now and then. The father’s hemorrhages were more frequent. When, on a slippery day, one of the children, going for milk, fell in the street and spilled it, he went without his only food, as they had but eight cents in the house. In May came the end. The tailor died, and in the house of mourning there was one care less, one less to feed and clothe. The widow gathered her flock close and faced the future dry-eyed. The luxury of grief is not for those at close grips with stern poverty.
When word reached far-off Hungary, Mrs. Josefy’s sister wrote to her to come back; she would send the money. The widow’s friends rejoiced, but she shook her head. To face poverty as bitter there? This was her children’s country; it should be hers too. At the Consulate they reasoned with her; the chance was too good to let pass. When she persisted, they told her to put the children in a home, then; she could never make her way with so many. No doubt they considered her an ungrateful person when she flatly refused to do either. It is not in the record that she ever darkened the door of the Consulate again.
The charitable committee had no better success. They offered her passage money, and she refused it. “She is always lookingfor work,” writes the visitor in the register, for once in her life a little resentfully, it would almost seem. When finally tickets came at the end of a year, Victor, the oldest boy, must finish his schooling first. Exasperated, the committee issues its ultimatum: she must go, or put the children away. Dry bread was the family fare when Mrs. Josefy was confronted with it, but she met it as firmly: Never! she would stay and do the best she could.
The record which I have followed states here that the committee dropped her, but stood by to watch the struggle, half shamefacedly one cannot help thinking, though they had given the best advice they knew. Six months later the widow reports that “the children had never wanted something to eat.”
At this time Victor is offered a job, two dollars and a half a week, with a chance of advancement. The mother goes out house-cleaning. Together they live on bread and coffee to save money for the rent, but she refuses the proffered relief. Victor is in the graduating class; he must finish his schooling. Just then her sewing-machine is seized for debt. The committee, retreating in a huff after a fresh defeat over the emigration question, hastens to the rescue, glad of a chance, and it is restored. In sheer admiration at her pluck they put it down that “she is doing the best she can to keep her family together.” There is a curious little entry here that sizes up the children. They had sent them to Coney Island on a vacation, but at night they were back home.“No one spoke to them there,” is their explanation. They had their mother’s pride.
It happened in the last month of that year that I went out to speak in a suburban New Jersey town. “Neighbors” was my topic. I was the guest of the secretary of a Foreign Mission Board that has its office in the Presbyterian Building on Fifth Avenue. That night when we sat at dinner the talk ran on the modern methods of organized charity. “Yes,” said my host, as his eyes rested on the quiverful seated around the board, “it is all good. But best of all would be if you could find for me a widow, say, with children like my own, whom my wife could help in her own way, and the children learn to take an interest in. I have nochance, as you know. The office claims all my time. But they—that would be best of all, for them and for us.”
And he was right; that would be charity in the real meaning of the word: friendship, the neighborly lift that gets one over the hard places in the road. The other half would cease to be, on that plan, and we should all be one great whole, pulling together, and our democracy would become real. I promised to find him such a widow.
But it proved a harder task than I had thought. None of the widows I knew had six children. The charitable societies had no family that fitted my friend’s case. But in time I found people who knew about Mrs. Josefy. The children were right—so many boys and so manygirls; what they told me of the mother made me want to know more. I went over to East Eleventh Street at once. On the way the feeling grew upon me that I had found my friend’s Christmas present—I forgot to say that it was on Christmas Eve—and when I saw them and gathered something of the fight that splendid little woman had waged for her brood those eight long years, I knew that my search was over. When we had set up a Christmas tree together, to the wild delight of the children, and I had ordered a good dinner from a neighboring restaurant on my friend’s account, I hastened back to tell him of my good luck and his. I knew he was late at the office with his mail.
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“WHEN WE HAD SET UP A CHRISTMAS TREE TOGETHER,TO THE WILD DELIGHT OF THE CHILDREN.”
Half-way across town it came to me with a sense of shock that I had forgottensomething. Mrs. Josefy had told me that she scrubbed in a public building, but where I had not asked. Perhaps it would not have seemed important to you. It did to me, and when I had gone all the way back and she answered my question, I knew why. Where do you suppose she scrubbed? In the Presbyterian Building! Under his own roof was the neighbor he sought. Almost they touched elbows, yet were they farther apart than the poles. Were, but no longer to be. The very next day brought my friend and his wife in from their Jersey home to East Eleventh Street. Long years after I found this entry on the register, under date January 20, 1899:
“Mrs. Josefy states that she never had such a happy Christmas since she came to this country. The children were allso happy, and every one had been so kind to them.”
It was the beginning of better days for the Josefy family. Weary stretches of hard road there were ahead yet, but they were no longer lonesome. The ladies’ committee that had once so hotly blamed her were her friends to the last woman, for she had taught them with her splendid pluck what it should mean to be a mother of Americans. They did not offer to carry her then any more than before, but they went alongside with words of neighborly cheer and saw her win over every obstacle. Two years later finds her still working in the Presbyterian Building earning sixteen dollars a month and leaving her home at five in the morning. Her oldest boy is making four dollars and a half a week,and one of the girls is learning dressmaking. The others are all in school. One may be sure without asking that they are not laggards there. When the youngest, at twelve, is wanted by her friends of the mission board to “live out” with them, the mother refuses to let her go, at the risk of displeasing her benefactors. The child must go to school and learn a trade. Three years more, and all but the youngest are employed. Mrs. Josefy has had a long illness, but she reports that she can help herself. They are now paying fourteen dollars a month rent. On April 6, 1904, the last entry but one is made on the register: the family is on dry ground and the “case is closed.”
The last but one. That one was added after a gap of eight years when I madeinquiries for the Josefys the other day. Eight years is a long time in the Charities Buildings with a heavy burden of human woe and failure. Perhaps for that very reason they had not forgotten Mrs. Josefy, but they had lost trace of her. She had left her old home in Eleventh Street, and all that was known was that she was somewhere up near Fort Washington. I asked that they find her for me, and a week later I read this entry in the register, where, let us hope, the case of the Josefys is now closed for all time:
“The Josefys live now at No. — West One Hundred and Eighty —st Street in a handsome flat of six sunny rooms. The oldest son, who is a cashier in a broker’s office on a salary of $35 a week, is the head of the family. His brother earns $20 aweek in a downtown business. Two of the daughters are happily married; another is a stenographer. The youngest, the baby of the dark days in the East Side tenement, was graduated from school last year and is ready to join the army of workers. The mother begins to feel her years, but is happy with her children.”
Some Christmas Eve I will go up and see them and take my friend from the Presbyterian Building along.
This is the story of a poor woman, daughter of a proud and chivalrous people, whose sons have helped make great fortunes grow in our land and have received scant pay and scantier justice in return, and of whom it is the custom of some Americans to speak with contempt as “Huns.”
The first snowflake was wafted in upon the north wind to-day. I stood in my study door and watched it fall and disappear; but I knew that many would come after and hide my garden from sight ere long. What will the winter bring us? When they wake once more, the flowers that now sleep snugly under their blanket of dead leaves, what shall we have to tell?
The postman has just brought me a letter, and with it lying open before me, my thoughts wandered back to “the hard winter” of a half-score seasons ago which none of us has forgotten, when women and children starved in cold garrets while menroamed gaunt and hollow-eyed vainly seeking work. I saw the poor tenement in Rivington Street where a cobbler and his boy were fighting starvation all alone save for an occasional visit from one of Miss Wald’s nurses who kept a watchful eye on them as on so many another tottering near the edge in that perilous time, ready with the lift that brought back hope when all things seemed at an end. One day she found a stranger in the flat, a man with close-cropped hair and a hard look that told their own story. The cobbler eyed her uneasily, and, when she went, followed her out and made excuses. Yes! he was just out of prison and had come to him for shelter. He used to know him in other days, and Jim was not—
She interrupted him and shook her head. Was it good for the boy to have that kind of a man in the house?
The cobbler looked at her thoughtfully and touched her arm gently.
“This,” he said, “ain’t no winter to let a feller from Sing Sing be on the street.”
The letter the postman brought made me see all this and more in the snowflake that fell and melted in my garden. It came from a friend in the far West, a gentle, high-bred lady, and told me this story: Her sister, who devotes her life to helping the neighbor, had just been on a visit to her home. One day my friend noticed her wearing an odd knitted shawl, and spoke of it.
“Yes,” said she, “that is the shawl the cook gave me.”
“The cook?” with lifted eyebrows, I suppose. And then she heard how.
One day, going through the kitchen of the institution where she teaches, she had seen the cook in tears and inquired the cause. The poor woman sobbed out that her daughter had come home to die. The doctors had said that she might live perhaps ten days, no longer, and early and late she cried for her mother to be with her. But she had vainly tried every way to get a cook to take her place—there was none, and her child was dying in the hospital.
“And I told her to go to her right away, I would see to that; that was all,” concluded my friend’s sister; “and she gave me this shawl when she came back, and I took it, of course. She had worked it for the daughter that died.”
But it was not all. For during ten days of sweltering July heat that gentle, delicate woman herself superintended the kitchen, did the cooking, and took the place of the mother who was soothing her dying child’s brow, and no one knew it. Not here, that is. No doubt it is known, with a hundred such daily happenings that make the real story of human life, where that record is kept and cherished.
And clear across the continent it comes to solve a riddle that had puzzled me. Recently I had long arguments with a friend about religion and dogmas that didn’t help either of us. At the end of three weeks we were farther apart than when we began, and the arguments had grown into controversy that made us bothunhappy. We had to have a regular treaty of peace to get over it. I know why now. The snowflake and my friend’s letter told me. Those two, the cobbler and the woman, were real Christians. They had the secret. They knew the neighbor, if neither had ever heard of dogma or creed. Our arguments were worse than wasted, though we both meant well, for we were nearer neighbors when we began than when we left off.
I am not learned in such things. Perhaps I am wrong. No doubt dogmas are useful—to wrap things in—but even then I would not tuck in the ends, lest we hide the neighbor so that we cannot see him. After all, it is what isinthe package that counts. To me it is the evidence of such as these that God livesin human hearts—that we are molded in his image despite flaws and failures in the casting—that keeps alive the belief that we shall wake with the flowers to a fairer spring. Is it not so with all of us?
“Bosh!” said my friend, jabbing impatiently with his stick at a gaunt cat in the gutter, “all bosh! A city has no heart. It’s incorporated selfishness; has to be. Slopping over is not business. City is all business. A poet’s dream, my good fellow; pretty but moonshine!”
We turned the corner of the tenement street as he spoke. The placid river was before us, with the moonlight upon it. Far as the eye reached, up and down the stream, the shores lay outlined by rows of electric lamps, like strings of shining pearls; red lights and green fights moved upon the water. From a roofed-over piernear by came the joyous shouts of troops of children, and the rhythmic tramp of many feet to the strains of “Could you be true to eyes of blue if you looked into eyes of brown?” A “play-pier” in evening session.
I looked at my friend. He stood gazing out over the river, hat in hand, the gentle sea-breeze caressing the lock at his temple that is turning gray. Something he started to say had died on his lips. He was listening to the laughter of the children. What thoughts of days long gone, before the office and the market reports shut youth and sunshine out of his life, came to soften the hard lines in his face, I do not know. As I watched, the music on the pier died away in a great hush. The river with its lights was gone;my friend was gone. The years were gone with their burden. The world was young once more.
I was in a court-room full of men with pale, stern faces. I saw a child brought in, carried in a horse-blanket, at the sight of which men wept aloud. I saw it laid at the feet of the judge, who turned his face away, and in the stillness of that court-room I heard a voice raised claiming for the human child the protection men had denied it, in the name of the homeless cur of the street. And I heard the story of little Mary Ellen told again, that stirred the souls of a city and roused the conscience of a world that had forgotten. The sweet-faced missionary who found Mary Ellen was there, wife of a newspaper man—happy augury; where the gospelof faith and the gospel of facts join hands the world moves. She told how the poor consumptive in the dark slum tenement, at whose bedside she daily read the Bible, could not die in peace while “the child they called Mary Ellen” was beaten and tortured in the next flat; and how on weary feet she went from door to door of the powerful, vainly begging mercy for it and peace for her dying friend. The police told her to furnish evidence, prove crime, or they could not move; the societies said: “bring the child to us legally, and we will see; till then we can do nothing”; the charitable said, “it is dangerous to interfere between parent and child; better let it alone.” And the judges said that it was even so; it was for them to see that men walked in the way laid down,not to find it—until her woman’s heart rebelled in anger against it all, and she sought the great friend of the dumb brute, who made a way.
“The child is an animal,” he said. “If there is no justice for it as a human being, it shall at least have the rights of the cur in the street. It shall not be abused.”
And as I looked I knew that I was where the first charter of the Children’s rights was written under warrant of that made for the dog; for from that dingy court-room, whence a wicked woman went to jail, thirty years ago came forth the Children’s Society, with all it has meant to the world’s life. It is quickening its pulse to this day in lands and among peoples who never spoke the name of my city and Mary Ellen’s. For her—herlife has run since like an even summer stream between flowery shores. When last I had news of her, she was the happy wife of a prosperous farmer up-State.
The lights on the river shone out once more. From the pier came a chorus of children’s voices singing “Sunday Afternoon” as only East Side children can. My friend was listening intently. Aye, well did I remember the wail that came to the Police Board, in the days that are gone, from a pastor over there. “The children disturb our worship,” he wrote; “they gather in the street at my church and sing and play while we would pray”; and the bitter retort of the police captain of the precinct: “They have no other place to play; better pray for sense to help them get one.” I saw him the otherday—the preacher—singing to the children in the tenement street and giving them flowers; and I knew that the day of sense and of charity had swept him with it.
The present is swallowed up again, and there rises before me the wraith of a village church in the far-off mountains of Pennsylvania. It is Sunday morning at midsummer. In the pulpit a young clergyman is preaching from the text: “Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren, even the least, ye did it unto me.” The sun peeps through the windows, where climbing roses nod. In the tall maples a dove is cooing; the drowsy hum of the honey-bee is on the air. But he recks not of these, nor of the peaceful day. His soul has seen a vision of hotand stony streets, of squalid homes, of hard-visaged, unlovely childhood, of mankind made in His image twisted by want and ignorance into monstrous deformity: and the message he speaks goes straight to the heart of the plain farmers on the benches; His brethren these, and steeped in the slum! They gather round him after the service, their hearts burning within them.
I see him speeding the next day toward the great city, a messenger of love and pity and help. I see him return before the week’s end, nine starved urchins clinging to his hands and the skirts of his coat, the first Fresh Air party that went out of New York twoscore years ago. I see the big-hearted farmers take them into their homes and hearts. I see the sunand the summer wind put back color in the wan cheek, and life in the shrunken and starved frame. I hear the message of one of the little ones to her chums left behind in the tenement: “I can have two pieces of pie to eat, and nobody says nothing if I take three pieces of cake”; and I know what it means to them. Laugh? Yes! laugh and be glad. The world has sorrow enough. Let in the sunshine where you can, and know that it means life to these, life now and a glimpse of the hereafter. I can hear it yet, the sigh of the tired mother under the trees on Twin Island, our Henry-street children’s summer home: “If heaven is like this, I don’t care how soon I go.”
For the sermon had wings; and whithersoever it went blessings sprang in its track.Love and justice grew; men read the brotherhood into the sunlight and the fields and the woods, and the brotherhood became real. I see the minister, no longer so young, sitting in his office in the “Tribune” building, still planning Fresh Air holidays for the children of the hot, stony city. But he seeks them himself no more. A thousand churches, charities, kindergartens, settlements, a thousand preachers and doers of the brotherhood, gather them in. A thousand trains of many crowded cars carry them to the homes that are waiting for them wherever men and women with warm hearts live. The message has traveled to the farthest shores, and nowhere in the Christian world is there a place where it has not been heard and heeded. Wherever it has, there you haveseen the heart of man laid bare; and the sight is good.
“’Way—down—yonder—in—the—corn-field,” brayed the band, and the shrill chorus took up the words. At last they meant something to them. It was worth living in the day that taught that lesson to the children of the tenements. Other visions, new scenes, came trooping by on the refrain: the farm-homes far and near where they found, as the years passed and the new love grew and warmed the hearts, that they had entertained angels unawares; the host of boys and girls, greater than would people a city, that have gone out to take with the old folks the place of the lads who would not stay on the land, and have grown up sturdy men and women, good citizens, governorsof States some of them, cheating the slum of its due; the floating hospitals that carry their cargoes of white and helpless little sufferers down the bay in the hot summer days, and bring them back at night sitting bolt upright at the supper-table and hammering it with their spoons, shouting for more; the new day that shines through the windows of our school-houses, dispelling the nightmare of dry-as-dust pedagoguery, and plants brass-bands upon the roof of the school, where the children dance and are happy under the stars; that builds play-piers and neighborhood parks in which never a sign “Keep off the Grass” shall stand to their undoing; that grows school-gardens in the steps of the kindergarten, makes truck-farmers on city lots of the toughs theywould have bred, lying waste; that strikes the fetters of slavery from childhood in home and workshop, and breaks the way for a better to-morrow. Happy vision of a happy day that came in with the tears of little Mary Ellen. Truly they were not shed in vain.
There was a pause in the play on the pier. Then the strains of “America” floated down to us where we stood.
“Long may our land be brightWith Freedom’s holy light,”
came loud and clear in the childish voices. They knew it by heart, and no wonder. To their fathers, freedom was but an empty name, a mockery. My friend stood bareheaded till the last line was sung:
“Great God, our King!”
then he put on his hat and nodded to me to come. We walked away in silence. To him, too, there had come in that hour the vision of the heart of the great city; and before it he was dumb.
It is a good many years since I ran across the Murphy family while hunting up a murder, in the old Mulberry Street days. That was not their name, but no matter; it was one just as good. Their home was in Poverty Gap, and I have seldom seen a worse. The man was a wife-beater when drunk, which he was whenever he had “the price.” Hard work and hard knocks had made a wreck of his wife. The five children, two of them girls, were growing up as they could, which was not as they should, but according to the way of Poverty Gap: in the gutter.
We took them and moved them across town from the West Side to be nearer us, for it was a case where to be neighbor one had to stand close. As another step, I had the man taken up and sent to the Island. He came home the next week, and before the sun set on another day had run his family to earth. We found one of the boys bringing beer in a can and Mr. Murphy having a good time on the money we had laid away against the landlord’s call. Mrs. Murphy was nursing a black eye at the sink. She had done her best, but she was fighting against fate.
So it seemed; for as the years went by, though he sometimes stayed out his month on the Island—more often, especially if near election time, he was back the nextor even the same day—and though we moved the family into every unlikely neighborhood we could think of, always he found them out and celebrated his return home by beating his wife and chasing the children out to buy beer, the girls, as they grew up, to earn in the street the money for his debauches. I had talked the matter over with the Chief of Police, who was interested on the human side, and we had agreed that there was no other way than to eliminate Mr. Murphy. All benevolent schemes of reforming him were preposterous. So, between us, we sent him to jail nineteen times. He did not always get there. Once he was back before he could have reached the Island ferry; we never knew how. Another time, when the doorman at the policestation was locking him up, he managed to get on the free side of the door, and, drunk as he was, slammed it on the policeman and locked him in. Then he sat down outside, lighted his pipe and cracked jokes at the helpless anger of his prisoner. Murphy was a humorist in his way. Had he also been a poet he might have secured his discharge as did his chum on the Island who delivered himself thus in his own defense before the police judge:
“Leaves have their time to fall,And so likewise have I.The reason, too, is the same,It comes of getting dry.The difference ’twixt leaves and me—I fall more harder and more frequently.”
But Murphy was no poet, and his sense of humor was of a kind too fraught with peril to life and limb. When he wasarraigned the nineteenth time, the judge in the Essex Market Court lost patience when I tried to persuade him to break the Island routine and hold the man for the Special Sessions, and ordered me sternly to “Stand down, sir! This court is not to be dictated to by anybody.” I had to remind his Honor that unless he could be persuaded to deal rationally with Mr. Murphy the court might yet come to be charged before the Grand Jury with being accessory to wife murder, for assuredly it was coming to that. It helped, and Murphy’s case was considered in Sessions, where a sentence of two years and a half was imposed upon him. While serving it he died.
The children had meanwhile grown into young men and women. The firstsummer, when we sent the two girls to a clergyman’s family in the country, they stole some rings and came near wrecking all our plans. But those good people had sense, and saw that the children stole as a magpie steals—the gold looked good to them. They kept them, and they have since grown into good women. To be sure, it was like a job of original creation. They had to be built, morally and intellectually, from the ground up. But in the end we beat Poverty Gap. The boys? That was a harder fight, for the gutter had its grip on them. But we pulled them out. At all events, they did better than their father. When they were fifteen they wore neckties, which in itself was a challenge to the traditions of the Gap. I don’t think I ever saw Mr. Murphywith one, or a collar either. They will never be college professors, but they promised fair to be honest workingmen, which was much.
What to do with the mother was a sore puzzle for a while. She could not hold a flat-iron in her hand; didn’t know which end came first. She could scrub, and we began at that. With infinite patience, she was taught washing and ironing, and between visits from her rascal husband began to make out well. For she was industrious, and, with hope reviving, life took on some dignity, inconceivable in her old setting. In spite of all his cruelty she never wholly cast off her husband. He was still to her Mr. Murphy, the head of the house, if by chance he were to be caught out sober; but the chance neverbefell. It was right that he should be locked up, but outside of these official relations of his, as it were, with society, she had no criticism to make upon him. Only once, when he dropped a note showing that he had been carrying on a flirtation with a “scrub” on the Island, did she exhibit any resentment. Mrs. Murphy was jealous; that is, she was human.
Through all the years of his abuse, with the instinct of her race, she had managed to keep up an insurance on his life that would give him a decent burial. And when he lay dead at last she spent it all—more than a hundred and fifty dollars—on a wake over the fellow, all except a small sum which she reserved for her own adornment in his honor. She came over to the Settlement to consult our headworker as to the proprieties of the thing: should she wear mourning earrings in his memory?
Such is the plain record of the Murphy family, one of the oldest on our books in Henry Street. Over against it let me set one of much more recent date, and let them tell their own story.
Our gardener, when he came to dig up from their winter bed by the back fence the privet shrubs that grow on our roof garden in summer, reported that one was missing. It was not a great loss, and we thought no more about it, till one day one of our kindergarten workers came tiptoeing in and beckoned us out on the roof. Way down in the depth of the tenement-house yard back of us, where the ice lay in a grimy crust long after the springflowers had begun to peep out in our garden above, grew our missing shrub. A piece of ground, yard-wide, had been cleared of rubbish and dug over. In the middle of the plot stood the privet shrub, trimmed to make it impersonate a young tree. A fence had been built about it with lath, and the whole thing had quite a festive look. A little lad was watering and tending the “garden.” He looked up and saw us and nodded with perfect frankness. He was Italian, by the looks of him.
One of our workers went around in Madison Street to invite him to the Settlement, where we would give him all the flowers he wanted.
“But come by the front door, not over the back fence,” was the message shebore, and he said he would. He made no bones of having raided our yard. He wanted the “tree” and took it. But he didn’t come. It was a long way round; his was more direct. This spring the same worker caught him climbing the back fence once more, and this time trying to drag back with him a whole window-box. She was just in time to pull it back on our side. He let go his grip without resentment. It was the fate of war; that time we won. We renewed our invitation after that, and, when he didn’t respond, sent him four blossoming geraniums with the friendly regards of a neighbor who bore no grudge. For in our social creed the longing for a flower in the child-heart covers a maze of mischief; and a maze it is always with the boys. Nowonder we feel that way. Our work, all of it, sprang from that longing and was built upon it. But that is another story.
The other day I looked down and saw our flowers blooming there, but with a discouraged look I could make out even from that height. Still no news from their owner. A little girl with blue ribbons in her hair was watering them. I went around and struck up an acquaintance with her. Mike was in the country, she said, on Long Island, where his sister was married. She, too, was his sister. Her name was Rose, and a sweet little rose she did look like in all the litter of that tenement yard. It was for her Mike had made the garden and had built the summer-house which she and her friends furnished. She took me to it, in the corner of thegarden. You could just put your head in; but it was worth while. The walls, made of old boxes and boards, had been papered with colored supplements. The “Last Supper” was there, and some bird pictures, a snipe and a wood-duck with a wholesome suggestion of outdoors; on a nicely papered shelf some shining bits of broken crockery to finish things off. A doll’s bed and chair furnished one-half of the “house,” a wobbly parlor chair the other half. The initials of the four girl friends were written in blue chalk over the door.
The “garden” was one step across, two the long way. I saw at a glance why the geraniums drooped, with leaves turning yellow. She had taken them out of the pots and set them right on top of the ground.
“But that isn’t the way,” I said, and rolled up my sleeves to show her how to plant a flower. I shall not soon get the smell of that sour soil out of my nostrils and my memory. It welled up with a thousand foul imaginings of the gutter the minute I dug into it with the lath she gave me for a spade. Inwardly I resolved that before summer came again there should be a barrel of the sweet wholesome earth from my own Long Island garden in that back yard, in which a rosebush might live. But the sun?
“Does it ever come here?” I asked, doubtfully glancing up at the frowning walls that hedged us in.
“Every evening it comes for a little while,” she said cheerfully. It must be a little while indeed, in that den. Sheshowed me a straggling green thing with no leaves. “That is a potato,” she said, “and this is a bean. That’s the way they grow.” The bean was trying feebly to climb a string to the waste-pipe that crossed the “garden” and burrowed in it. Between the shell-paved walk and the wall was a border two hands wide where there was nothing.
“There used to be grass there,” she said, “but the cats ate it.” On the wall above it was chalked the inevitable “Keep off the Grass.” They had done their best.
Three or four plants with no traditional prejudices as to soil grew in one corner. “Mike found the seed of them,” she said simply. I glanced at the back fence and guessed where.
She was carrying water from the hydrant when I went out. “They’re good people,” said the old housekeeper, who had come out to see what the strange man was there for. On the stoop sat an old grandfather with a child in his lap.
“It is the way of ’em,” he said. “I asked this one,” patting the child affectionately, “what she wanted for her birthday. ‘Gran’pa,’ she said, ‘I want a flower.’ Now did ye ever hear such a dern little fool?” and he smoothed her tangled head. But I saw that he understood.
Chips from the maelstrom that swirls ever in our great city. We stand on the shore and pull in such wrecks as we may. I set them down here without comment, without theory. For it is not theory that in the last going over we are brothers,being children of one Father. Hence our real heredity is this, that we are children of God. Hence, also, our fight upon the environment that would smother instincts proclaiming our birthright is the great human issue, the real fight for freedom, in all days.
And Murphy, says my carping friend, where does he come in? He does not come in; unless it be that the love and loyalty of his wife which not all his cruelty could destroy, and the inhumanity of Poverty Gap, plead for him that another chance may be given the man in him. Who knows?
In a mean street, over on the West Side, I came across a doorway that bore upon its plate the word “Heartsease.” The house was as mean as the street. It was flanked on one side by a jail, on the other by a big stable barrack. In front, right under the windows, ran the elevated trains, so close that to open the windows was impossible, for the noise and dirt. Back of it they were putting up a building which, when completed, would hug the rear wall so that you couldn’t open the windows there at all.
After nightfall you would have found in that house two frail little women. Oneof them taught school by day in the outlying districts of the city, miles and miles away, across the East River. By night she came there to sleep, and to be near her neighbors.
And who were these neighbors? Drunken, dissolute women, vile brothels and viler saloons, for the saloon trafficked in the vice of the other. Those who lived there were Northfield graduates, girls of refinement and modesty. Yet these were the neighbors they had chosen for their own. At all hours of the night the bell would ring, and they would come, sometimes attended by policemen. Said one of these:
“We have this case. She isn’t wanted in this home, or in that institution. She doesn’t come under their rules. Wethought you might stretch yours to take her in. Else she goes straight to the devil.”
Yes! that was what he said. And she: “Bless you; we have no rules. Let her come in.” And she took her and put her to bed.
In the midnight hour my friend of Heartsease hears of a young girl, evidently a new-comer, whom the brothel or the saloon has in its clutch, and she gets out of bed, and, going after her, demandsher sister, and gets her out from the very jaws of hell. Again, on a winter’s night, a drunken woman finds her way to her door—a married woman with a husband and children. And she gets out of her warm bed again, and, when the other is herself, takes her home, never leaving her till she is safe.
I found her papering the walls and painting the floor in her room. I said to her that I did not think you could do anything with those women,—and neither can you, if they are just “those women” to you. Jesus could. One came and sat at his feet and wept, and dried them with her hair.
“Oh,” said she, “it isn’t so! They come, and are glad to stay. I don’t know that they are finally saved, that they never fall again. But here, anyhow, we have given them a resting spell and time to think. And plenty turn good.”
She told me of a girl brought in by her brother as incorrigible. No one knew what to do with her. She stayed in that atmosphere of affection three months, and went forth to service. That was nearlyhalf a year before, and she had “stayed good.” A chorus girl lived twelve years with a man, who then cast her off. Heartsease sent her out a domestic, at ten dollars a month, and she, too, “stayed good.”
“I don’t consider,” said the woman of Heartsease, simply, “that we are doing it right, but we will yet.”
I looked at her, the frail girl with this unshaken, unshakable faith in the right, and asked her, not where she got her faith—I knew that—but where she got the money to run the house. Alas, for poor human nature that will not accept the promise that “all these things shall be added unto you!” She laughed.
“The rent is pledged by half a dozen friends. The rest—comes.”
“But how?”
She pointed to a lot of circulars, painfully written out in the night watches.
“We are selling soap just now,” she said; “but it is not always soap. Here,” patting a chair, “this is Larkin’s soap; that chafing-dish is green stamps; this set of dishes is Mother’s Oats. We write to the people, you see, and they buy the things, and we get the prizes. We’ve furnished the house in that way. And some give us money. A man offered to give an entertainment, promising to give us $450 of the receipts. And then the Charity Organization Society warned us against him, and we had to give up the $450,” with a sigh. But she brightened up in a moment: “The very next day we got $1000 for our building fund. We shall have to move some day.”
The elevated train swept by the window with rattle and roar. You could have touched it, so close did it run. “I won’t let it worry me,” she said, with her brave little smile.
I listened to the crash of the vanishing train, and looked at the mean surroundings, and my thoughts wandered to the great school in the Massachusetts hills—her school—which I had passed only the day before. It lay there beautiful in the spring sunlight. But something better than its sunlight and its green hills had come down here to bear witness to the faith which the founder of Northfield preached all his life,—this woman who was a neighbor.
I forgot to ask in what special church fold she belonged. It didn’t seem tomatter. I know that my friend, Sister Irene, who picked the outcast waifs from the gutter where they perished till she came, was a Roman Catholic, and that they both had sat at the feet of Him who is all compassion, and had learned the answer there to the question that awaits us at the end of our journey:
“‘I showed men God,’ my Lord will say,‘As I traveled along the King’s highway.I eased the sister’s troubled mind;I helped the blighted to be resigned;I showed the sky to the souls grown blind.And what did you?’ my Lord will say,When we meet at the end of the King’s highway.”