The mere mention of the widow Salvini always brings before me that other
widow who came to our settlement when her rascal husband was dead after
beating her black and blue through a lifetime in Poverty Gap, during which
he did his best to make ruffians of the boys and worse of the girls by
driving them out into the street to earn money to buy him rum whenever he
was not on the Island, which, happily, he was most of the time. I know I
had a hand in sending him there nineteen times, more shame to the judge
whom I finally had to threaten with public arraignment and the certainty
of being made an accessory to wife-murder unless he found a way of keeping
him there. He did then, and it was during his long term that the fellow
died. What I started to say was that, when all was over and he out of the
way, his widow came in and wanted our advice as to whether she ought to
wear mourning earrings in his memory. Without rhyme or reason the two are
associated in my mind, for they were as different as could be. The widow
of Poverty Gap was Irish and married to a brute. Mrs. Salvini was an
Italian; her husband was a hard-working fellow who had the misfortune to
be killed on the railway. The point of contact is in the earrings. The
widow Salvini did wear mourning earrings, a little piece of crape draped
over the gold bangles of her care-free girlhood, and it was not funny but
infinitely touching. It just shows how little things do twist one's mind.
Signor Salvini was one of a gang of trackmen employed by the New York
Central Railroad. He was killed when they had been in America two years,
and left his wife with two little children and one unborn. There was a
Workmen's Compensation Law at the time under which she would have been
entitled to recover a substantial sum, some $1800, upon proof that he was
not himself grossly to blame, and suit was brought in her name; but before
it came up the Court of Appeals declared the act unconstitutional. The
railway offered her a hundred dollars, but Mrs. Salvini's lawyer refused,
and the matter took its slow course through the courts. No doubt the
company considered that the business had been properly dealt with. It is
quite possible that its well-fed and entirely respectable directors went
home from the meeting at which counsel made his report with an injured
feeling of generosity unappreciated--they were not legally bound to do
anything. In which they were right. Signor Salvini in life had belonged to
a benefit society of good intentions but poor business ways. It had
therefore become defunct at the time of his death. However, its members
considered their moral obligations and pitied the widow. They were all
poor workingmen, but they dug down into their pockets and raised two
hundred dollars for the stricken family. When the undertaker and the
cemetery and the other civilizing agencies that take toll of our dead
were paid, there was left twenty dollars for the widow to begin life with
anew.
When that weary autumn day had worn to an end, the lingering traces of the
death vigil been removed, the two bare rooms set to rights, and the last
pitying neighbor woman gone to her own, the widow sat with her dumb sorrow
by her slumbering little ones, and faced the future with which she was to
battle alone. Just what advice the directors of the railway that had
killed her husband--harsh words, but something may be allowed the
bitterness of such grief as hers--would have given then, surrounded by
their own sheltered ones at their happy firesides, I don't know. And yet
one might venture a safe guess if only some kind spirit could have brought
them face to face in that hour. But it is a long way from Madison Avenue
to the poor tenements of the Bronx, and even farther--pity our poor
limping democracy!--from the penniless Italian widow to her sister in the
fashionable apartment. As a household servant in the latter the widow
Salvini would have been a sad misfit even without the children; she would
have owned that herself. Her mistress would not have been likely to have
more patience with her. And so that door through which the two might have
met to their mutual good was closed. There were of course the homes for
the little ones, toward the support of which the apartment paid its share
in the tax bills. The thought crossed the mind of their mother as she sat
there, but at the sight of little Louisa and Vincenzo, the baby, sleeping
peacefully side by side, she put it away with a gesture of impatience. It
was enough to lose their father; these she would keep. And she crossed
herself as she bowed reverently toward the print of the Blessed Virgin,
before which burned a devout little taper. Surely, She knew!
It came into her mind as she sat thinking her life out that she had once
learned to crochet the fine lace of her native town, and that she knew of
a woman in the next block who sold it to the rich Americans. Making sure
that the children were sound asleep, she turned down the lamp, threw her
shawl over her head, and went to seek her.
The lace woman examined the small sample of her old skill which she had
brought, and promised to buy what she made. But she was not herself the
seller, and the price she got was very low. She could pay even less.
Unaccustomed fingers would not earn much at lace-making; everything
depended on being quick at it. But the widow knew nothing else. It was at
least work, and she went home to take up the craft of her half-forgotten
youth.
But it was one thing to ply her needle with deft young fingers and the
songs of sunny Italy in her ears, when the world and its tasks were but
play; another to bait grim poverty with so frail a weapon in a New York
tenement, with the landlord to pay and hungry children to feed. At the end
of the week, when she brought the product of her toil to the lace woman,
she received in payment thirty cents. It was all she had made, she was
told.
There was still the bigger part of her little hoard; but one more rent
day, and that would be gone. Thirty cents a week does not feed three
mouths, even with the thousand little makeshifts of poverty that
constitute its resources. The good-hearted woman next door found a spare
potato or two for the children; the neighbor across the hall, when she had
corned beef for dinner, brought her the water it was boiled in for soup.
But though neighbors were kind, making lace was business, like running a
railway, and its rule was the same--to buy cheap, lives or lace, and sell
dear. It developed, moreover, that the industry was sweated down to the
last cent. There was a whole string of women between the seller and the
widow at the end of the line, who each gave up part of her poor earnings
to the one next ahead as her patron, or _padrone_. The widow Salvini
reduced the chain of her industrial slavery by one link when she quit
making lace.
Upstairs in the tenement was a woman who made willow plumes, that were
just then the fashion. To her went the widow with the prayer that she
teach her the business, since she must work at home to take care of her
children; and the other good-naturedly gave her a seat at her table and
showed her the simple grips of her trade. Simple enough they were, but
demanding an intensity of application, attention that never flagged, and
deft manipulation in making the tiny knots that tie the vanes of the
feather together and make the droop of the plume. Faithfully as she
strove, the most she could make was three inches in a day. The price paid
was eleven cents an inch. Thirty-three cents a day was better than thirty
cents a week, but still a long way from the minimum wage we hear about. It
was then, when her little margin was all gone and the rent due again, that
the baby came. And with it came the charity workers, to back the helpful
neighborliness of the tenement that had never failed.
When she was able to be about again, she went back to her task of making
plumes. But the work went slower than before. The baby needed attention,
and there were the beds to make and the washing for two lodgers, who paid
the rent and to whom the charity workers closed their eyes even if they
had not directly connived at procuring them. It is thus that the grim
facts of poverty set at naught all the benevolent purposes of those who
fight it. It had forced upon the widow home-work and the lodger, two
curses of the tenement, and now it added the third in child labor. Little
Louisa's fingers were nimbler than her mother's. She was only eight, but
she learned soon to tie a plume as well as the mother. The charity
visitor, who had all the economic theories at her fingers' ends and knew
their soundness only too well, stood by and saw her do it, and found it
neither in her heart nor in her reason to object, for was she not
struggling to keep her family together? Five-year-old Vincenzo watched
them work.
"Could he make a plume, too?" she asked, with a sudden sinking of the
heart. Yes, but not so fast; his wee hands grew tired so soon. And the
widow let him show how he could tie the little strange knot. The baby
rolled on the floor, crooning and sucking the shears.
In spite of the reenforcement, the work lagged. The widow's eyes were
giving out and she grew more tired every day. Four days the three had
labored over one plume, and finished it at last. To-morrow she would take
it to the factory and receive for it ninety cents. But even this scant
wage was threatened. Willow plumes were going out of fashion, and the
harassed mother would have to make another start. At what?
The question was answered a month later as it must, not as it should be,
when to the three failures of the plan of well-ordered philanthropy was
added the fourth: Louisa and Vincenzo were put in the "college," as the
Italians call the orphan asylum. The charity workers put them there in
order that they might have proper food and enough of it. Willow plumes
having become a drug in the market, the widow went into a factory, paying
a neighbor in the tenement a few cents a day for taking care of the baby
in her absence. As an unskilled hand she was able to earn a bare living.
One poor home, that was yet a happy home once, was wiped out. The widow's
claim against the railway company still waits upon the court calendar.[1]
[1] Her claim has since been settled for $1000.
Such as it is, it is society's present solution of the problem of the
widow Salvini. If any find fault with it, let them not blame the charity
workers, for they did what they could; nor the railway company, for its
ways are the ways of business, not of philanthropy; nor our highest court,
for we are told that impious is the hand that is stretched forth toward
that ark of the covenant of our liberties. Let them put the blame where it
belongs--upon us all who for thirty years have been silent under the
decision which forbade the abolition of industrial slavery in the Bohemian
cigar-makers' tenements because it would interfere with "the sacredness
and hallowed associations of the people's homes." That was the exact
phrase, if memory serves me right. Such was the sowing of our crop of
social injustice. Shall a man gather figs from thistles?