Something at last became real to me: that was the misery of the poor. It
seemed sadder than anything else in the world, except the misery of
their benefactors. I could hardly tell whether, in this great tragedy of
poverty, it was actor or spectator who suffered most.
I saw on the one side hunger, sin, ignorance, and they weighed down upon
me like a nightmare. I became familiar with the crowded quarters of the
city, where the population was nine hundred to the acre. I knew the
inside of great shops, where women worked and starved on two dollars a
week.
On the other side I saw brave attempts to help, that were yet half
futile. There were charities, religious and secular; relief-giving
societies, working into the hands of general organizations; there were
settlements among the poor. But they all fought against frightful odds.
The lot of many who were trying to help was to look and suffer,
impotently.
A kind of morbid fascination drew me continually to the foreign
quarters. I liked the picturesqueness of the crowded streets, where
women in gay head-dresses chattered, holding their babies in their arms.
I liked the alley-ways lined with old-clothes shops, and the corners
where Russians, Italians, Germans, Jews congregated, talking, laughing,
quarrelling. The quaint children in old-world garments interested me;
and the aged, wrinkled faces of men and women roused often a feeling of
remembrance, as if I had known them somewhere, in book or picture.
The most crowded district was near the sea. A broad thoroughfare called
Traffic Street skirted the city at the water edge. On the outer side
were enormous warehouses and dock-yards; on the inner, tall tenements.
Looking between the great buildings, I caught sudden glimpses of blue
water, with my old friends, the white sea-gulls, floating overhead. And
often, in coming down rickety tenement-house steps, from scenes that
left me sick and faint, the sight of tall masts of ships thrilled me
with their inevitable suggestion of freedom and escape.
I had begun to feel that the misery of it was greater than I could bear.
Then suddenly the Lad appeared.