I should be sorry if anything I have said seemed to cast slight upon
the organized efforts at relieving want, especially such as unite
inquiry into the facts and the provision of work with the relief of
want. All that I contend for is the right--or call it the privilege--of
giving to him that asketh, even when you do not know that he needs, or
deserves to need. Both here and in Boston I have lent myself--sparingly
and grudgingly, I’ll own--to those organized efforts; and I know how
sincere and generous they are, how effective they often are, how
ineffective. They used to let me go mostly to the Italian folk who
applied for aid in Boston, because I could more or less meet them in
their own language; but once they gave me a Russian to manage--I think
because I was known to have a devotion for Tolstoy and for the other
Russian novelists. The Russian in question was not a novelist, but a
washer of bags in a sugar-refinery; and at the time I went to make my
first call upon him he had been “laid off,” as the euphemism is, for
two months; that is, he had been without work, and had been wholly
dependent upon the allowance the charities made him. He had a wife and
a complement of children--I do not know just how many; but they all
seemed to live in one attic room in the North End. I acquainted myself
fully with the case, and went about looking for work in his behalf.
In this, I think, I found my only use: but it was use to me only,
for the people of whom I asked work for him treated me with much the
same ignominy as if I had been seeking it for myself; and it was well
that I should learn just what the exasperated mind of a fellow-being
is when he is asked for work, and has none to give. He regards the
applicant as an oppressor, or at least an aggressor, and he is eager
to get rid of him by bluntness, by coldness, even by rudeness. After
the unavailing activity of a week or two, I myself began to resent
the Russian’s desire for work, and I visited him at longer and longer
intervals to find whether he had got anything to do; for he was looking
after work, too. At last I let a month go by, and when I came he met
me at the street door--or, say, alley door--of the tenement-house
with a smiling face. He was always smiling, poor fellow, but now he
smiled joyously. He had got a job--they always call it a job, and the
Italians pronounce it a _giobbe_. His job was one which testified to
the heterogeneous character of American civilization in even amusing
measure. The Jews had come into a neighboring street so thickly that
they had crowded every one else out; they had bought the Congregational
meeting-house, which they were turning into a synagogue, and they had
given this orthodox Russian the job of knocking the nails out of the
old woodwork. His only complaint was that the Jews would not let him
work on Saturday, and the Christians would not let him work on Sunday,
and so he could earn but five dollars a week. He did not blame me for
my long failure to help him; on the contrary, so far as I could make
out from the limited vocabulary we enjoyed in common, he was grateful.
But I have no doubt he was glad to be rid of me; and Heaven knows how
glad I was to be rid of him.
I do not believe I ever found work for any one, though I tried
diligently and I think not unwisely. Perhaps the best effect from my
efforts was that they inspired the poor creatures to efforts of their
own, which were sometimes successful. I had on my hands and heart for
nearly a whole winter the most meritorious Italian family I ever knew,
without being able to do anything but sympathize and offer secret alms
in little gifts to the children. Once I got one of the boys a place in
a book-store, but the law would not allow him to take it because he was
not past the age of compulsory schooling. The father had a peripatetic
fruit-stand, which he pushed about on a cart; and his great aim was to
get the privilege of stationing himself at one of the railroad depots.
I found that there were stations which were considered particularly
desirable by the fruiterers, and that the chief of these was in front
of the old United States court-house. A fruiterer out of place, whose
family I visited for the charities, tried even to corrupt me, and
promised me that if I would get him this _stendio_ (they Italianize
“stand” to that effect, just as they translate “bar” into _barra_, and
so on) he would give me something outright. “_E poi, ci sarà sempre la
mancia_” (“And then there will always be the drink-money”). I lost an
occasion to lecture him upon the duties of the citizen; but I am not a
ready speaker.
The sole success--but it was very signal--of my winter’s work was
getting a young Italian into the hospital. He had got a rheumatic
trouble of the heart from keeping a _stendio_ in a cellarway, and
when I saw him I thought it would be little use to get him into the
hospital. The young doctor who had charge of him, and whom I looked up,
was of the same mind. But I could not help trying for him; and when the
sisters at the hospital (where he got well, in spite of all) said he
could be received, I made favor for an ambulance to carry him to it. It
was a beautiful white spring day when I went to tell him the hour the
ambulance would call; the sky was blue overhead, the canaries sang in
their cages along the street. I left all this behind when I entered the
dark, chill tenement-house, where that dreadful _poverty-smell_ struck
the life out of the spring in my soul at the first breath. The sick
man’s apartment was clean and sweet, through his mother’s care (this
poor woman was as wholly a lady as any I have seen); but when I passed
into his room, he clutched himself up from the bed, and stretched his
arms toward me with gasps of “_Lo spedale, lo spedale!_” The spring,
the coming glory of this world, was nothing to him. It was the hospital
he wanted; and to the poor, to the incurable disease of our conditions,
the hospital is the best we have to give. To be sure, there is also the
grave.