"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 pier near 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 gospel
of 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--her life 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
other day--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 hot and 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 sun
and 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 have seen
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, governors of 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 they would
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 bright
With 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.