Prisoners of Poverty Part 6

One after another the cases on the west side gave in their testimony.

Save in the first one there were no formal accounts. But a little thinking brought out the items,--for many baker's bread, tea, sugar, a little milk, and b.u.t.ter and a bit of meat once or twice a week, the average cost of food per head for the majority of cases being ninety cents per week. All coal was bought by the scuttle, a scuttle of medium size counting as twelve cents' worth, thus much more than doubling the cost per ton. In the same way, wood by the bundle and oil by the quart gave the utmost margin of profit to the seller, and the same fact applied to all provisions sold. In no case save the one first mentioned, where the mother had learned that cabbage-water can form the basis for a nouris.h.i.+ng and very palatable soup, was there the faintest gleam of understanding that the same amount of money could furnish a more varied, more savory, and more nouris.h.i.+ng regimen.

"Beans!" said one indignant soul. "What time have I to think of beans, or what money to buy coal to cook 'em? What you'd want if you sat over a machine fourteen hours a day would be tea like lye to put a back-bone in you. That's why we have tea always in the pot, and it don't make much odds what's with it. A slice of bread is about all. Once in a while you get ragin', tearin' hungry. Seems as if you'd swallow teapot or anything handy to fill up like, but that ain't often--lucky for us!"

"If you all clubbed together, couldn't one cook for you,--make good soup and oatmeal and things that are nouris.h.i.+ng? You would be stronger then."

"Stronger for what? More hours at the machine? More grinding your own flesh and bones into flour for them that's over us? Ma'am, it's easy to see you mean well, an' I won't say but what you know more than some that comes around what you're talkin' about. Club we might. I'm not denying it could be done, if there was time; but who of us has the time even if she'd the will? I was never much hand for cookin'. We'd our tea an'

bread an' a good bit of fried beef or pork, maybe, when my husband was alive an' at work. He cared naught for fancy things like beans an' such.

It's the tea that keeps you up, an' as long as I can get that I'll not bother about beans."

In the same house an old Swiss woman, who had fallen from her first estate as lady's maid through one grade and another of service, was ending her days on a wage of two dollars per week, earned in a suspender factory, where she sewed on buckles. In her case marriage with a drinking husband had eaten up both her savings and her earnings, and age now prevented her taking up household service, which she ranked as most comfortable and most profitable. But she had been taught while almost a child to cook, and though her expenditure for food was a little below a dollar per week, the savory smell from a saucepan on her tiny stove showed that she had something more nearly like nourishment than her neighbors.

"I try sometimes to teach," she said. "I give some of my soup, and they eat it and say it is good, but they not stop to do so much dat is fuss.

All this in the saucepan is seven cents,--three cents for bones and some bits the kind butcher trow in, and the rest vegetable and barley. But it makes me two days. I have lentils, too, yes, and beans, and plenty things to flavor, and I buy rye bread and coffee to Sunday. Never tea, oh, no! Tea is so vicket. It make hand shake and head fly all round.

Good soup is best, and more when one can. Vegetable is many and salad, and when I make more dollar I buy some egg. But not tea; not big loaf of white bread dot swell and swell inside and ven it is gone leave one all so empty. I would teach many but they like it not. They want only de tea; always de tea."

"De tea" and the sewing-machine are naturally inseparable allies, and so long as the sewing-women must work fourteen hours daily they will remain so; the rank fluid r.e.t.a.r.ding digestion and thus proving as friendly an aid as the "bone" which the half-fed Irish peasant demands in his potato. For the west side the story was quite plain, but for such returns as the east side has to offer there is still room for further detail.

CHAPTER ELEVENTH.

UNDER THE BRIDGE AND BEYOND.

Between east and west side poverty and its surroundings exists always this difference, that the west is newer and thus escapes the inherited miseries that hedge about life in such regions as the Fourth Ward.

There, where old New York once centred, and where Dutch gables and dormer windows may still be seen, is not only the foulness of the present, each nationality in the swarming tenements representing a distinct type of dirt and a distinct method of dealing with it and in it, but the foulness also of the past, in decay and mould and crumbling wall and all silent forces of destruction at work here for a generation and more. Those of us who have watched the evolution of the Fourth Ward into some show of decency recognize many causes as having worked toward the same end; yet even when one notes to-day the changes wrought, first by business, the march of which has wiped out many former landmarks, setting in their place great warehouses and factories, and then of philanthropy, which, as in the case of Miss Collins's tenements, has transformed dens into some semblance of homes, there remains the conviction that dens are uppermost still. The business man hurrying down Fulton or Beekman Street, the myriads who pa.s.s up and down in the various east-side car lines, with those other myriads who cross the great Bridge, have small conception what thousands are packed away in the great tenements, and the rookeries even more crowded, or what depth of vileness flaunts itself openly when day is done and the creatures of shadow come out to the light that for many quarters is the only suns.h.i.+ne. This ward has had minute and faithful description from one of the most energetic of workers for better sanitary conditions among the poor,--Mr. Charles Wingate, whose admirable papers on "Tenement House Life," published by the "Tribune" in 1884-1885, must be regarded as authority for the sanitary phases of the question. Little by little these have bettered, till the death rate has come within normal limits and the percentage of crime ceased to represent the largest portion of the inhabitants. Yet here, on this familiar battle-ground, civilization and something worse than mere barbarism still struggle. For which is the victory?

Under the great Bridge, whose piers have taken the place of much that was foulest in the Fourth Ward, stands a tenement-house so shadowed by the structure that, save at midday, natural light barely penetrates it.

The inhabitants are of all grades and all nationalities. The men are chiefly 'longsh.o.r.emen, working intermittently on the wharves, varying this occupation by long seasons of drinking, during which every p.a.w.nable article vanishes, to be gradually redeemed or altogether lost, according to the energy with which work is resumed. The women scrub offices, peddle fruit or small office necessities, take in was.h.i.+ng, share, many of them, in the drinking bouts, and are, as a whole, content with brutishness, only vaguely conscious of a wretchedness that, so long as it is intermittent, is no spur to reform of methods. The same roof covers many who yield to none of these temptations, but are working patiently; some of them widows with children that must be fed; a few solitary, but banding with neighbors in cloak or pantaloon making, or the many forms of slop-work in the hands of sweaters. Suns.h.i.+ne has no place in these rooms which no enforced laws have made decent, and where occasional individual effort has power against the unspeakable filth ruling in tangible and intangible forms, sink and sewer and closet uniting in a common and all-pervading stench. The chance visitor has sometimes to rush to the outer air, deadly sick and faint at even a breath of this noisomeness. The most determined one feels inclined to burn every garment worn during such quest, and wonders if Abana or Pharpar or even Jordan itself could carry healing and cleansing in their floods.

The dark halls have other uses than as receptacles for refuse or filth.

Hiding behind doors or in corners, or, grown bolder, seeking no concealment, children hardly more than babies teach one another such new facts of foulness as may so far have chanced to escape them,--baby voices reciting a ritual of oaths and obscenity learned in this Inferno, which, could it have place by Dante's, might be better known to a cultured generation. Only a Zola could describe deliberately what any eye may see, but any minute detail of which would excite an outburst of popular indignation. Yet I am by no means certain that such detail has not far more right to s.p.a.ce than much that fills our morning papers, and that the plain bald statement of facts, shorn of all flights of fancy or play of facetiousness, might not rouse the public to some sense of what lies below the surface of this fair-seeming civilization of to-day. Not alone in the shadow of the great pier, but wherever men and women must herd like brutes, these things exist and shape the little lives that missions do not, and as yet cannot, reach, and that we prefer to deal with later, when actual violation of laws has placed them in the hands of the State. Work as she may, the woman who must find home for herself and children in such surroundings is powerless to protect them from the all-pervading foulness. They may escape a portion of the actual degradation. They can never escape a knowledge the possibility of which is unknown to what we call barbarism, but part and parcel of the daily life of civilization.

Granted instantly that only the lowest order of worker must submit to such conditions, yet we have seen that this lowest order is legion; that its numbers increase with every day; and that no Board of Health or of Sanitary Inspectors has yet been able to alter, save here and there, the facts that are a portion of the tenement-house system.

It is chiefly with the house under the Bridge that we deal at present.

Its upper rooms hold many workers whose testimony has helped to make plain how the east side lives. Little by little, as the blocks of granite swung into place and the pier grew, the suns.h.i.+ne vanished, its warmth and light replaced by the electric glow, cold and hard and blinding. The day's work has ceased to be the day's work, and the women who cannot afford the gas or oil that must burn if they work in the daytime, sleep while day lasts, and when night comes and the electric light penetrates every corner of the shadowy rooms, turn to the toil by which their bread is won. Never was deeper satire upon the civilization of which we boast. Natural law, natural living, abolished once for all, and this light that blinds but holds no cheer s.h.i.+ning upon the ma.s.s of weary humanity who have forgotten what suns.h.i.+ne may mean and who know no joy that life was meant to hold!

In one of these rooms, clean, if cleanliness were possible where walls and ceiling and every plank and beam reek with the foulness from sewer and closet, three women were at work on overalls. Two machines were placed directly under the windows to obtain every ray of light. The room, ten by twelve feet, with a small one half the size opening from it, held a small stove, the inevitable teapot steaming at the back; a table with cups and saucers and a loaf of bread still uncut; and a small dresser in one corner, in which a few dishes were ranged. A sickly geranium grew in an old tomato-can, but save for this the room held no faintest attempt at adornment of any sort. In many of them the cheapest colored prints are pinned up, and in one, one side had been decorated with all the trademarks peeled from the goods on which the family worked. Here there was no time for even such attempts at betterment. The machines rushed on as we talked, with only a momentary pause as interest deepened, and one woman nodded confirmation to the statement of another.

"We've clubbed, so's to get ahead a little," said the finisher, whose fingers flew as she made b.u.t.tonholes in the waistband and flap of the overalls. "We were each in a room by ourselves, but after the fever, when the children died and I hadn't but two left, it seemed as if we'd be more sensible to all go in together and see if we couldn't be more comfortable. We'd have left anyway, and tried for a better place, but for one thing,--we hadn't time to move; and for another, queer as it seems, you get used to even the worst places and feel as if you couldn't change. We'll have to, if the landlord doesn't do something about the closets. It's no good telling the agent, and I don't know as anybody in the house knows just who the landlord is. Anyway, the smell's enough to kill you sometimes, and it's a burning disgrace that human beings have to live in such a pig-pen. It's cheap rent. We pay five dollars a month for this place. When I came here it was from a neck-tie place over on Allen Street, that's moved now, and my husband was mate on a tug and earned well. But he took to drink and sold off everything I'd brought with me, and at last he was hurt in a fight round the corner, and died in hospital of gangrene. Mary's husband there was a bricklayer and had big wages, but he drank them fast as he made them, and he was ugly when the drink was in, which mine wasn't. But there's hardly one in this house, man or woman, that don't take a drop to keep off the fever; and even I, that hate the sight or smell of it, I wake up in the morning with an awful kind o' goneness that seems as if a taste might help it.

The tea stops that, though. Tea's the best friend we've got. We'd never stand it if it wasn't for tea."

"Are overalls steady pay through the year?"

"There's nothing that's steady, so far as I can find out, but want and misery. Just now overalls are up; the Lord only knows why, for you never can tell what'll be up and what down. They're up, and we're making a dollar a dozen on these. I have done a dozen a day, but it's generally ten. There's the long seams, and the two pockets, and the buckle strap and the waistband and three b.u.t.tonholes, and the stays and the finis.h.i.+ng. They're heavy machines too, and take the backbone right out of you before night comes. But you sleep like the dead, that's one comfort. It would be more if you didn't have to wake more than they do.

When the overall rush is over, it'll be back to pants again. That's my trade. I learned it regular after I was married, when I saw Tim wasn't going to be any dependence. There were the children then, and I thought I'd send 'em to school and keep things decent maybe. I know all about pants, the best and the worst, but it's mostly worse these days. First the German women piled in ready to do your work for half your rates, and when they'd got well started, in comes the Italians and cuts under, till it's a wonder anybody keeps soul and body together."

"We don't," one of the women said, turning suddenly. "I got rid o' my soul long ago, such as 'twas. Who's got time to think about souls, grinding away here fourteen hours a day to turn out contract goods?

'Tain't souls that count. It's bodies that can be driven, an' half starved an' driven still, till they drop in their tracks. I'm driving now to pay a doctor's bill for my three that went with the fever. Before that I was driving to put food into their mouths. I never owed a cent to no man. I've been honest and paid as I went and done a good turn when I could. If I'd chosen the other thing while I'd a pretty face of my own I'd a had ease and comfort and a quick death. Such life as this isn't living."

The machine whirled on as she ended, to make up the time lost in her outburst. The finisher shook her head as she looked at her, then poured a cup of tea and put it silently on the edge of the table where it could be reached.

"She's right enough," she said, "but there's no use thinking about it. I try to sometimes, just to see if there's any way out, but there isn't.

I've even said I'd take a place; but I don't know anything about housework, and who'd take one looking as I do, and not a rag that's fit to be put on? I cover up in an old waterproof when I go for work. They wouldn't give it to me if they saw my dress in rags below, and me with no time to mend it. But we're doing better than some. We've had meat twice this week, and we've kept warm. It's the coal that eats up your money,--twelve cents a scuttle, and no place to keep more if ever we got ahead enough to get more at a time. It's lucky that tea's so staying.

Give me plenty of tea, and the most I want generally besides is bread and a sc.r.a.pe of b.u.t.ter. It's all figured out. It's long since I've spent more than seventy-five cents a week for what I must eat. I've no time to cook even if I had anything, so it's lucky I haven't. I suppose there'd be plenty to eat if you once made up your mind to take a place."

It was the second machine that stopped now, and the haggard woman running it faced about suddenly. "Do you know what come to my girl," she said,--"my girl that I brought up decent and that was a good girl? I said to myself a trade was no good, for it was more an' more starvation wages, and I'd put her with folks that would be good to her, even if the other girls did look down on her for going into service. She was fifteen, and a still little thing with soft eyes and a pretty, soft way, if she did come of a drinking father. I put her with a lady that wanted a waitress and said she'd train her well. She'd three boarders in the house, and all gentlemen to look at, and one that's in a bank to-day he did his best to turn her head on the sly, and when he found he couldn't, one Sunday when she was alone in the house and none to hear or help, he had his will. The mistress turned her off the hour she heard it, for Nettie went to her when she come home. 'Such things don't happen unless the girl is to blame,' she said. 'Never show your shameless face here again.' Nettie came home to me kind of dazed, and she stayed dazed till she went to a hospital and a baby was born dead, and she dead herself a week after. An' it isn't one time alone or my girl alone. It's over an'

over an' over that that thing happens. There's plenty that go to the bad of their own free will, but I know plenty more with the same chance that doesn't, an' there's many a mother that's been in service herself that says, 'Whatever the mistress may know about it she can't tell, but the devil's let loose when the master or a son maybe is around, an' they'll not have their girls standing what they had to stand and then turned off without a character because they were found with the master talkin' to 'em.' It's women that keeps women down an' is hard on 'em. I'll take my chances with any Jew you'll bring along before I'll put myself in the power of women that calls themselves ladies an' hasn't as much heart as a broomstick; an' I'll warn every girl to keep to herself an' learn a trade, an' not run the risk she'll run if she goes out to service, letting alone the way you're looked down on."

There was no time for discussion. The machines must go on; but, as usual, much more than the fact of which I was in search had come to me, and, strangely enough, in this house and in others of its kind inspected one after another, much the same story was told. In the "improved tenements" close at hand, where comparative comfort reigned, more than one woman gave willingly the detail of the weekly expenditure for food, and added, as if the underlying question had made itself felt, "It's betther to be a little short even an' your own misthress," with other words that have their place elsewhere. On the upper floor of one of these houses a pantaloon-maker sat in a fireless room, finis.h.i.+ng the last of a dozen which when taken back would give her money for coal and food. She had been ill for three days, and on the bed,--an old mattress on a dry-goods box in the corner. "Even that's more than I had for a good while," she said. "I'd p.a.w.ned everything before my husband died, except the machine. I couldn't make but twenty-two cents a pair on the pants, an' as long as he could hold up he did the pressing. With him to help a little I made three a day. That seems little, but there was so many pieces to each pair,--side and watch and pistol pockets, buckle strap, waistband, and bottom facings and lap; six b.u.t.tonholes and nine b.u.t.tons. We lived--I don't just know how we lived. He was going in consumption an' very set about it. 'I'll have no medicine an' no doctor to make me hang an' drag along,' he says. 'I've got to go, an' I know it, an' I'll do it as fast as I can.' He was Scotch, an' took his porridge to the last, but I came to loathe the sight of it. He could live on six cents a day. I couldn't. 'I'm the kind for your contractors,' he'd say.

'It's a glorious country, and the rich'll be richer yet when there's more like me.' He didn't mind what he said, an' when a Bible-reader put her head in one day, 'Come in,' he says. 'My wife's working for a Christian contractor at sixty-six cents a day, an' I'm what's left of another Christian's dealings with me, keeping me as a packer in a damp bas.e.m.e.nt and no fire. Come in and let's see what more Christianity has to say about it.' He scared her, his eyes was so s.h.i.+ny an' he most gone then. But there's many a one that doesn't go over fifty cents a week for what she'll eat. G.o.d help them that's starving us all by bits, if there is a G.o.d, but I'm doubting it, else why don't things get better, an' not always worse an' worse?"

For east and west, however conditions might differ, the final word was the same, and it stands as the summary of the life that is lived from day to day by these workers,--"never better, always worse and worse."

CHAPTER TWELFTH.

ONE OF THE FUR-SEWERS.

"I suppose if you'd been born on the top of a hill in New Hamps.h.i.+re with the stones so thick ten miles of stone wall couldn't have used 'em up, an' the steeple of the Methodist meetin'-house the only thing in sight, maybe you'd have wanted to get where you could see folks too. It was just Elkins luck to have another hill between us an' the village so't I couldn't see beyond the woods between. If there was a contrary side to anything it always fell to father, an' I'm some like him, though I've got mother's way of never knowing when I'm knocked flat, though I've had times enough to find out. But I said straight through, 'If ever there's a chance of getting to New York I'll take it. Boston won't do. I want the biggest an' the stirringest thing there is in the United States,'

an' Leander felt just as I did.

"Leander lived down the valley a way, an' such cobble-stones as hadn't come to our share had come to his. He'd laid wall from the time he was ten years old, and he'd sat on the hay an' cried for pure lonesomeness.

His folks weren't any hands to talk, an' he couldn't even have the satisfaction of meetin' Sundays, because they was Seventh Day Baptists, an' so set a minister couldn't get near 'em. An' Leander was conscientious an' thought he ought to stay by. I didn't. I told him from the time we went to school together that I was bound to get to New York, an' that sort of fired him up, an' we've talked hours to time about what it was like, an' what we'd do if we ever got there. My folks were set against the notion, an' so were his, but he went after a while, with some man that was up in the summer an' that gave him a place in a store.

I couldn't go on account of father's dying sudden an' mother's holdin'

on harder'n ever to me, but she was took within the year, an' there I was, free enough, an' not a soul in the world but Leander's folks that seemed to think much one way or another how I was likely to come out.

"There was a mortgage on the farm, an' Dr. Grayson foreclosed an' had most of the money for his bill; an' when things were all settled I had forty dollars in cash an' the old furniture. Leander's folks was dreadful short for things, for they'd been burned out once, an' so I just turned everything over to them but some small things I could pack in my trunk, mother's teaspoons an' such, an' walked down to the village an' took the stage for Portsmouth. I wasn't scared. I didn't care nor think how I looked. It was heaven to think I was on the way to folks an'

the things folks do. I ain't given to crying, but that day I sat back in the stage an' cried just for joy to think I was going to have something different.

"All this time I hadn't thought much what I'd do. Forty dollars seemed a big lot, enough for weeks ahead. I'd done most everything about a house, an' I could make everything I wore. I had only to look at a pattern an'

I could go home an cut out one like it. The dress I had on was cheap stuff, but when I looked at other folks's I saw it wasn't so much out o'

the way. So I said, most likely some dressmaker would take me, an' I'd try my luck that way. This was before I got to Boston, an' I went round there all the afternoon before it was time to take the train, for the conductor told me just what to do, an' I hadn't a mite of trouble. I never do going to a strange place. I was half a mind to stay in Boston when I saw the Common an' the crowds of folks. I sat still there an'

just looked at 'em, an' cried again for joy to think I'd got where there were so many. 'But there'll be more in New York,' I said, 'an' there'll be sure to be plenty ready to do a good turn.' I could have hugged 'em all. I didn't think then the time would ever come that I'd hate the sight of faces an' wish myself on top of the hill in the cobble-stones, but it did, an' it does now sometimes.

"I went on board the boat that night sort of crazy. I'd gone an' got some sandwiches an' things at a place the conductor told me, an' I sat on the deck in the moonlight an' ate my supper. I'd been too happy to eat before, an' I was so happy then I could hardly keep still. There was a girl not far off, a kind of nice-looking girl, an' she watched me, an'

at last she began to talk. In half an hour I knew all about her an' she about me. She was a Rhode Island girl an' had worked in a mill near Providence, an' gone to New York at last an' learned fur-sewing. She said it was a good trade, an' she made ten an' twelve dollars a week while the season lasted an' never less than five. This seemed a mint of money, an' when she said one of their old hands had died, an' she could take me right in as her friend an' teach me herself, I felt as if my fortune was made.

"Well, I went with her next day. She had a room in Spring Street, near Hudson,--an old-fas.h.i.+oned house that belonged to two maiden sisters, an'

I went in with her the first night, an' afterward for a while had the hall bedroom. It didn't take me long to learn. It was a Jew place an'

there were thirty girls, but he treated us well. For my part I've fared just as well with Jews as ever I did with Christians, an' sometimes better. I'd taken to Hattie so that I couldn't bear to think of leaving her, an' so I let my dressmaking plan go. But I'll tell you what I found out in time. These skins are all dressed with a.r.s.enic. The dealers say there's nothing poisonous about them, but of course they lie. Every pelt has more or less in it, an' the girls show it just as the artificial-flower girls show it. Your eyelids get red an' the lids all puffy, an' you're white as chalk. The dealers say the red eyes come from the flying hairs. Perhaps they do, but the lids don't, an' every fur-sewer is poisoned a little with every p.r.i.c.k of her needle. What the flying hair does is just to get into your throat an' nose and everywhere, an' tickle till you cough all the time, an' a girl with weak lungs hasn't a chance. The air is full of fur, an' then the work-room is kept tight shut for fear of moths getting in. The work is easy enough.

It's just an everlasting patchwork, for you're always sewing together little bits, hundreds of them, that you have to match. You sew over an'