BEGGARS
Often when I had related to my friends some of my painful experiences with beggars and they laughed at me, “Wait,” I said, “I shall have my revenge; and when I am unfit to do anything else, I shall write a book about Beggars.” Now it has sometimes happened to me of late that, when I had sat down to do the work to which I have been accustomed for so many years, I could not get on at all, or if by a great effort of will I managed to do something, it was of no use, and had to be done again. I felt, therefore, that the time had come for rest, or at all events, for a change of occupation, and, though I had not yet sufficient time to spare for writing a whole book on beggars, I thought I might jot down a few of my experiences, not only as an amusement to myself, but possibly as a useful lesson to some of my friends. It seems to me that my experience has been large, larger than that of most of my acquaintances. Why, I cannot tell; but beggars, and extremely clever beggars too, have evidently singled me out as an easy prey. They seem to have imagined—in fact they told me so again and again—that I was a rich man, and could well afford to help a poor beggar. They little knew what a poor beggar I was myself, and how hard I have had to work through life to keep myself afloat, and to live as I was expected to live among my wealthy colleagues at Oxford. They would have smiled incredulously if I had told them how many hours, nay, how many weeks, a scholar has often to do the hardest drudgery without getting a penny for his work. He has often to be thankful if he can find a publisher for what is the outcome of years of hard labour. It is schoolbooks only that are remunerative, or novels and sermons, and novels he has to leave to his worldly, sermons to his unworldly, fellow-labourers.
Some of my beggar acquaintances were so clever and so well educated that they might easily have made a living for themselves; but, as one of them told me when I thought I had made him thoroughly ashamed of himself, and quite confidential, they preferred begging to any other kind of occupation. “Talk of shooting partridges or pheasants,” he said, “talk of racing or gambling, there is no sport like begging. There must always be risk in sport, and the risk in begging is very great. You are fighting,” my half-penitent informant said, “against tremendous odds. You ring at the door, and you must first of all face a servant, who generally scrutinises you with great suspicion, and declines to take your name or your card, unless you have a clean shirt and a decent pair of boots. Then, after you have been admitted to the presence, you have to watch every expression of your enemy or your friend, as the case may be. You have to face the cleverest people in the world, and you know all the time that the slightest mistake in your looks or in the tone of your voice may lead to ruin. You may be kicked out of the house, and if you meet with a high-minded and public-spirited gentleman, who does not mind trouble and expense, you may find yourself in the hands of the police for trying to obtain money under false pretences. No,” he concluded, “I have known in my time what hunting and shooting and gambling are; but I assure you there is no sport like begging.”
What is one to do with such a visitor—in appearance, in manners, and in language, quite a gentleman, or a ci-devant gentleman, a man who has been at a university, and who, when asked, will translate a page of Homer to you very fairly, who bears, of course, a noble name, and has friends, as he gives you to understand, in every university or at every court in Europe—what is one to do with him, if not to accelerate his departure by means of a small gift, for which he is generally very grateful? But that is really the worst one can do. For, on the strength of it, your noble sportsman will at once go to other covers, to all your friends, tell them that you have helped him, describe your generosity, your room, your dog, your cat, and thus among your unsuspecting friends secure a fresh bag, dearer to him, if you may believe him, than any number of pheasants and partridges.
The information which these beggars possess is quite astounding. They have stepped into my room, and given me the most minute information about my friends and relations in Germany, who live in a small and little-known town, describing their houses, their gardens, their dogs—everything, in fact, to show that they had been on the most familiar terms with them. This happened to me some years ago when the organisation among the foreign beggars in London was far more perfect than it is, or seems to be, at present. It may be, of course, that they know that an old fox who has been hunted again and again is difficult to catch. Anyhow, I have not of late heard of any such exploits as, unfortunately, I have had to suffer from in former years.
It was after the Schleswig-Holstein war, in about 1850, that one morning a young military-looking man stepped into my room. He limped, and told me he had still a ball in his leg, which must be removed. He presented himself as an officer in the Danish Army—the only officer who had joined the rebels, the Schleswig-Holsteiners—and had been taken prisoner at the battle of Idstedt in 1850. He described most graphically how he was confronted with his former Danish comrades, how his epaulettes were torn off, how his sword was broken, and he himself sent to a military prison, previous, as he thought, to being fusillé for high treason. All this naturally appealed to my sympathy, and then he went on telling me, in the most confidential way, that when at last sentence of death had been pronounced against him, he knew quite well that it would never be carried out, because the Queen of Denmark was his dearest friend, and would never have allowed such a thing. “Give me some paper,” he said; “I must write to my beloved Queen, and tell her I am safe in England. She will be in deep distress till she hears of me.” He sat down and wrote a letter, which he wished me to read. I only saw the beginning of it: that was quite enough; it was in a style which only the most devoted lover could have used. That letter was stamped—I supplied the stamps—dropped into the pillar-box, sent to Copenhagen, and must have been delivered to the Queen, though I doubt its being preserved in the royal archives. And that was not all. In a few days a letter came from Copenhagen, delivered by post, which again I was asked to read, but declined. I did not wish to pry into State or Court secrets. But all this showed, at all events, how cleverly the whole scheme had been laid, so that a confederate could send from Copenhagen a letter apparently written by the Queen, in answer to a letter despatched to her a few days before. I was completely taken in. The young officer went to London to have the ball extracted. I doubt now whether there was any ball to extract. There he made many acquaintances, and was helped by some very influential people. I remember one, who afterwards rose to the highest post in our Diplomatic Service, and was at that time known among his friends as never having a five-pound note in his possession. He gave him £10, and when I asked him: “But, my dear fellow, where in the world did you get that ten-pound note?” he used, as was his wont, very strong language, and said: “I borrowed it from the porter at my club.” This little comedy went on for some time. The man himself must have enjoyed his sport thoroughly, and he never lost his presence of mind. I still think that he must have been at one time in the Danish Service, as he possessed very accurate information about Danish officials and Danish affairs in general, though in what capacity he served his country and his Queen has never been found out. His ostensible correspondence with the Queen continued for some time. Even remittances arrived, as we were told from his royal patroness, but most of his funds were drawn, I am sorry to say, from English pockets, and might have served some better purpose. As far as I remember—for I am trying to recall events that happened nearly fifty years ago—a collection was made for our clever adventurer, and he left England uninjured to look for more dupes in the United States.
Though I might have learnt a lesson, I have to confess that hardly a month passed without something of the same kind happening to me. Few swindlers were so clever or had their schemes so beautifully prepared as my Danish friend, but I generally felt whenever I was taken in that I could hardly have acted differently. Nay, when I mustered courage to say “No,” I often regretted it. Let me give an instance. A gentleman steps into your room, tells you that he has been robbed, offers you his gold watch, and asks you to lend him a pound to pay his bill at the hotel. What are you to do? I declined to advance any money, particularly as my visitor behaved rather like a sturdy beggar, and what was the consequence? He broke out into violent abuse, mentioned a number of newspapers whose correspondent he professed to be, and told me I should rue the day when I had insulted him. And it was not a vain threat. From time to time I received extracts, not indeed from The Times or the Débats or the Augsburger Zeitung, but from some obscure local papers, with violent tirades against me as an ignoramus, as a Jesuit, as a German spy, as a hard-hearted miser, etc. For all I know, the man may have been in momentary distress, but was I to open a pawnbroker’s shop in my house?
There was a time, and it lasted for several years, when a man, though he never tried his hand on me, victimised a large number of my friends. He called himself my brother, evidently unaware of the fact that I never had a brother. He must have taken the “Clergy List,” for week after week came letters from my friends, mostly clergymen in London who had known me at Oxford and who had been swindled by my brother.
Twice The Times was kind enough to print a letter from me in large type to warn my friends. It was of no use. I seldom went to London without some friend coming up to me and asking after my brother, or expressing himself thoroughly ashamed of having allowed himself to be so stupidly victimised by a common impostor. One friend told me that he was so convinced that the man was a swindler that he had him turned out of the house. But then it struck him that after all the man might really be my brother, who only wanted a ticket to go to Oxford, so he rushed into the street after him, apologised, and pressed a sovereign into his hand. “There were telegraphs in those days, and why did you not telegraph to me?” I said. But my brother went on unabashed. He once called at the house of Lord W., telling the old story of having been robbed, and wanting a ticket to go to Oxford to see his dear brother. Lord W. was not to be taken in so easily, but Lady W., who came into the room and heard the story, said to the young man: “Perhaps you are not aware that you are speaking to a very near relation of your brother, who is the husband of my niece?” The man never flinched, but was rushing up to Lady W. to shake hands most affectionately and to embrace her, if she had not beaten a sudden retreat. Lord W. was quite convinced that the man was an impudent beggar, took him to the front door, and told him to be gone. “Would you tell your servant to call a cab for me,” he said, “to go to the station?” A servant, who was present, hailed a cab. “Please to give the man half a crown,” my brother said. The half-crown was given, and the man got away unharmed, having swindled one of the cleverest financial men in London out of half a crown. Only a few minutes after, my wife called at her aunt’s house, and regretted that she was just too late to make the long-desired personal acquaintance of my lost brother.
After carrying on this business for more than two years in England, and chiefly in London, the place seems to have become too hot at last. He vanished from the soil of England without ever having called on his brother at Oxford, and the next I heard of him was through some friends in New Zealand, who had suffered as others had suffered before in England.
The worst of such experiences is that they make us very hard-hearted. One believes nothing that a man tells one who comes begging to the door. And yet how much of real misery there is! It is a problem which really seems to admit of no solution. Of course we must not expect angels to come to us in the disguise of beggars. All beggars are more or less disreputable; not one of them would venture to tell the true story of his life. Yet they generally have something to say for themselves, and they hardly know the mischief they are doing by making it impossible for any one with any self-respect to believe the old, old stories which they are telling. They say: “What can we do? We must say something to appeal to your pity, and the unvarnished tale of our life is too long and too dry, and not likely to excite your sympathy.” All this is true, but what is to be done to alleviate or to cure this terrible evil of poverty and beggary? Nothing really seems to remain but to adopt the example of the Buddhists, and give to the beggar a recognised status in society. The Buddhists have no poor rates, but whoever is admitted to the brotherhood has a right to go round the village or town once or twice a day, to hold out his begging bowl, and to take home to his monastery whatever is given him. No householder likes these Bhikshus or beggars to depart from his house without having received a gift, however small, while the Bhikshu himself is not degraded, but enjoys, on the contrary, the same respect which the begging friars enjoyed during the middle ages. Even in later times we hear in Scotland of the Gaberlunzie men, and elsewhere of Bedesmen, Bluegowns, etc., all forming a kind of begging fraternity, and having a recognised position in society.
Free above Scot-free, that observe no laws,
Obey no governor, use no religion,
But what they draw from their own ancient custom,
Or constitute themselves, yet they are no rebels.
“Antiquary,” chap. xii.
All this is extinct now, but the beggar is not extinct, and never will be, as we are told. What then is to be done? for we are all more or less responsible for their existence. It seems to me that there is only one thing to be done, namely, to give up, every one of us, whatever quotum of our income we think right, and to hand it over to such societies as take the trouble to find out for us some not quite undeserving poor. Our Charity Organisation Society does no doubt much good, but it should have another branch, the members of which should be understood to give, say, a tenth part, or any other quotum of their annual income for charitable purposes. Such a society existed formerly. The members of it were not subjected to any inquisitorial questions. They simply declared that they would regularly devote a tenth of their income to the alleviation of poverty, and they were left perfectly free to do it each in his own way. What has become of that society? The organiser and leading spirit of it died, and no one seems to have taken it up again.
There is, however, one class of beggars and impostors more objectionable than any—people who do not beg for money, but borrow, and never mean to return either the money or any thanks. I have known of a good many cases where young men visiting Oxford and having made a few acquaintances among the undergraduates, were invited to dinner in college, and not only borrowed from their young companions, but, introduced by their young friends, ran up bills among the tradesmen of the town, and then quietly slipped away, leaving their friends to satisfy their creditors as best they could. All this goes on, and it seems impossible to stop it. Even if now and then these swindlers make a mistake, and place themselves within the clutches of the law, what satisfaction is it to keep them in prison for a month or two? No one knows their real names. They are boarded and fed at the expense of the country, and enjoy a little rest from their labours. That is all. They go in and come out of prison as if nothing had happened, and all they have learnt in prison is how to be more careful in future.
Who can doubt that there is much poverty and suffering, even undeserved suffering, among the poor, more particularly among poor foreigners in London? The Society for the Relief of Foreigners in Distress does much, but that much is but like a drop of milk in an ocean of salt water. The stories of the applicants printed each year, and carefully sifted by the committee, are simply heart-rending. And those who go to see for themselves often wish they had never crossed the thresholds of these hovels in which whole families live huddled up together, hungry, sick, dying, dead. One feels utterly hopeless and helpless at the sights one sees. One might as well jump into the Atlantic to save a sinking vessel and a drowning crew as attempt to rescue this drowning humanity.
And the men, after all, can help themselves. They can work, they may fight and beg, and even steal, and be sent to prison. But what is the fate of the poor unfortunate women!
There is one more class of beggars, though they would indignantly protest against such a name, who have given me great trouble. They are gentlemen who have something to sell and who are willing to sell it to you as a great favour. In Oxford these gentlemen have generally manuscripts to sell, ancient, valuable, unique. As I spent a good deal of my time at the Bodleian Library, and was there every day for several years as Oriental librarian, I made some curious acquaintances. After some time I never trusted a man who offered to sell scarce manuscripts or unique books to the library. My experiences were many, most of them painful. Perhaps the most interesting was when we received a visit from the famous forger, Simonides. Fortunately his fame had preceded him. There had been a full account of his doings and misdoings abroad, yet he arrived quite unabashed with a box full of Greek MSS. I had warned our librarian, the Rev. H. O. Coxe, and it was amusing to watch the two when their pourparlers began. Simonides—so called, not because he was a descendant of the poet Simonides, but (with a long î) because his ancestor was one Simon, a Jew—addressed the librarian half in ancient Greek, half in modern English. He knew both equally well. His manners were most engaging. The librarian was equally polite, and began to examine some of the Greek MSS. “These are of small value,” Simonides said, “they are modern. What century would you assign to them?” The librarian assigned the thirteenth century to them, and Simonides fully agreed. He then went on producing MS. after MS., but claiming for none of them more than the twelfth or tenth century. All went on most amicably until he produced some fragments of an uncial Greek MS. The librarian opened his eyes wide, and, examining them very carefully, put some of them aside for further consideration. Becoming more and more confidential, Simonides at last produced a real treasure. “This,” he said, “ought to repose nowhere but in the Bodleian Library. And what century would you assign to it, Mr. Librarian?” Simonides said with a smile and a respectful bow. Mr. Coxe turned over a few pages, and, looking very grave, though never quite without his usual twinkle, “The second half of the nineteenth century, sir,” he said, “and now pack up your MSS. and Apage (begone).”
Simonides did as he was told, and, with an injured expression, walked away. Next day he wrote a Greek letter to the librarian, bitterly complaining about the Apage, and offering some more MSS. for his inspection. But all was in vain; too much had been discovered about him in the meantime. He was certainly a most extraordinary man—a scholar who, if he had applied his ingenuity to editing instead of forging Greek MSS., might have held a very high position. His greatest achievement was, of course, the newly discovered Greek text of the history of ancient Egypt by Uranios. The man possessed a large quantity of later Greek MSS. It seems that in the Eastern monasteries, where he sold, he also acquired some Greek MSS., by what means we must not ask. He tried several of these MSS. with chemicals to see whether, as was the fashion during the middle ages, the parchment on which they were written had been used before, and the old writing scraped off in order to get writing material for some legends of Christian saints or other modern compositions. When that has been the case, chemical appliances bring out the old writing very clearly, and he knew that in this way some very old and valuable Greek texts had been recovered. In that case the old uncial writing comes out generally in a dark blue, and becomes quite legible as underlying the modern Greek text. As Simonides was not lucky enough to discover or recover an ancient Greek text, or what is called a Palimpsest MS., the thought struck him that he might manufacture such a treasure, which would have sold at a very high price. But even this did not satisfy his ambition. He might have taken the text of the Gospels and written it between the lines of one of his modern Greek MSS., adding some startling various readings. In that case detection would have seemed much more difficult. But he soared higher. He knew that a man of the name of Uranios had written a history of Egypt which was lost. Simonides made up his mind to write himself in ancient Greek a history of Egypt such as he thought Uranios might have written. And, deep and clever as he was, he chose Bunsen’s “Egypt” and Lepsius’ “Chronology” as the authorities which he faithfully followed. After he had finished his Greek text, he wrote it in dark blue ink and in ancient uncial Greek letters between the letters of a Greek MS. of about 1200 a.d. Anybody who knows the smallness of the letters in such a MS. can appreciate the enormous labour it must have been to insert, as it were, beneath and between these minute lines of each letter the supposed earlier writing of Uranios, so that the blue ink should never encroach on the small but true Greek letters. One single mistake would have been fatal, and such is the knowledge which antiquaries now possess of the exact changes of Greek letters in every century that here, too, one single mistake in the outline of the old uncial letters would have betrayed the forger.
When Simonides had finished his masterpiece, he boldly offered it to the highest tribunal, the Royal Berlin Academy. The best chemists of the time examined it microscopically, and could find no flaw. Lepsius, the great Egyptologist, went through the whole text, and declared that the book could not be a forgery, because no one except Uranios could have known the names of the ancient Egyptian kings and the right dates of the various dynasties, which were exactly such as he had settled them in his books. The thought that Simonides might have consulted these very books never entered anybody’s mind. Great was the excitement in the camp of the Egyptologists, and, though the price demanded by Simonides was shamefully extravagant, Bunsen persuaded the then King of Prussia, Frederick William IV., to pay it and to secure the treasure for Berlin. Dindorf, the famous Greek scholar, had been entrusted by Simonides with the editing of the text, and he had chosen the Clarendon Press at Oxford to publish the first specimen of it. In the meantime unfavourable reports of Simonides reached the German authorities, and during a new examination of the MS. some irregularities were detected in the shape of the uncial M, and at last one passage was discovered by a very strong microscope where the blue ink had run across the letters of the modern Greek text. No doubt could then remain that the whole MS. was a forgery. Part of it had actually been printed at the Clarendon Press, and I was able to secure six copies of Dindorf’s pamphlet, which was immediately destroyed, and has now become one of the scarcest books in any library. After I had secured my copy, I read on the first page κὰτ’ ἐμὴν ἰδέαν, which was intended for “According to my idea.” I went straight to the then Master of Balliol, Dr. Scott, of Greek Lexicon fame. I asked him whether he thought such an expression possible before the fifteenth century A.D. He took down his Stephanus, but after looking for some time and hesitating, he admitted at last that such an expression was certainly not quite classical. Simonides had, of course, to refund the money, and was sent to prison, never to appear again in the libraries of Europe. A number of his forgeries, however, exist in England, in public and private collections; among them portraits of the Virgin Mary and some of the Apostles painted by St. Luke, a copy of Homer with a dedication from Perikles to the tyrant of Syrakuse, other Greek MSS. written on paper made of human skin, etc. His forged MS. of Uranios was such a masterpiece that he was offered £100 for it, but he declined, and I have never been able to find out what has been the end of it.
Some years afterwards another forger of the name of Shapira offered to the British Museum some scrolls of parchment containing the text of the Pentateuch from the hand of Moses. They, too, were very closely criticised, and were exhibited for some time at the Museum; nay, a Commission was appointed to report on the MS., for which, very naturally, an enormous sum was demanded. It was perfectly well known, of course, among Semitic scholars that writing for literary purposes was unknown at the time of Moses, and that the very alphabet used by the forger belonged to a much later period. Poor Shapira, whose name had already become notorious as connected with the spurious Moabite antiquities, which he had sold at Berlin, professed to be so dejected when the fraud was discovered, a fraud, as he stated, not committed by himself, but practised on him by some Arabs, that he went to Belgium, and there, according to the newspapers, committed suicide; while some of his victims maintained that even then the newspaper paragraphs on his suicide were a forgery, and that he had retired from an ungrateful world under the veil of a new name.
It is extraordinary how low a man may sink who once takes to this kind of trade. A Greek gentleman whom I knew, and who moved in the very best society in London, who held a responsible position in a bank, where he was trusted with any amount of money, roused the suspicions of the authorities in the coin department of the British Museum. He possessed himself a very valuable collection of ancient coins, and was admitted to all the privileges of a special student of numismatics.
Nearly all the employees of the British Museum were his personal friends, and no one would have ventured to doubt his honour. However, some unique specimens of Greek coins disappeared, or rather were found to be replaced by inferior specimens. A trap was laid, and there remained little doubt that he had transferred the better specimens to his own collection, substituting inferior specimens in his possession. At first no one would believe it, but an English jury found him guilty, and he was condemned to five years’ penal servitude. Great efforts were made by some of the Foreign Ministers, and by the directors of the bank in which he had been employed, and a pardon was obtained for him on condition of his never returning to England. When, however, inquiries were made as to his behaviour in the hulks where he had been detained in the meantime, it turned out that this perfect gentleman had behaved there worse than the lowest criminal, so that it was quite out of the question to release him, and he was kept to serve his full sentence. What may have become of him afterwards, who knows? But it shows how scientific devotion can go hand in hand with moral degradation, nay, can blunt the conscience to such an extent that exchange seems no robbery, and even the abstraction of a book from a public or private library is looked upon as a venial offence. MSS. have again and again disappeared from libraries, and have been returned after the death of the scholar who took them, showing, at least, a late repentance. But I have also known of cases where MSS. seemed to have vanished and suspicion fell on scholars who had consulted them last, while after a time the MSS. turned up again, having been placed in a wrong place in the library; which, of course, in a large library is tantamount to throwing them out of window.
There was a well-known case in the same coin-room of the British Museum, where, during a visit of a number of gentlemen and ladies, it was observed that a very valuable and almost unique Sicilian coin had disappeared. All the gentlemen present in the room at the time had to be searched, and no one objected except one. He protested his innocence, but declared that nothing would induce him to allow his pockets to be searched. All the other visitors were allowed to go home, but he was detained while the coin-room was swept, and every corner searched once more. At last the missing coin was found in a chink of the floor.
Every apology was made to the suspected person, but he was asked why he had so strongly objected to being searched. He then produced from his pocket another specimen of the very same coin. “I came here,” he said, “to compare my specimen, which is very perfect, with the only other specimen which is thought to be superior to mine, and almost unique in the world. Now, suppose,” he added, “that you had not found your coin, and had found my specimen in my pocket, would anybody have believed in my innocence?”
Such cases will happen, though no doubt a man must have been born under a very unlucky star to come in for such a trial. In most museums unique specimens are now never shown except under precautions which make such accidents, as well as deliberate thefts, almost impossible.
After all the sad experiences which one has had, it is perhaps quite right that we should shut our ears and our house against all beggars, whether in rags or in the disguise of gentlemen. But even our servants have hearts, and though they have orders not to admit beggars, they often are, or imagine they are, better judges than ourselves. I know that they sometimes give something where their masters, rightly or wrongly, decline to do anything. Physical suffering appeals to them, though they also have learnt how beggars who ask for a crust of bread throw away what has been given them as soon as they leave the house.
I remember once my servant coming in and saying: “There is a poor man at the door, I believe he is dying, sir!” I confess I did not believe it, but I went to see him, and he looked so ill that the doctor had to be sent for. The doctor declared he was in the last stage of consumption, and I was glad to send him to the Infirmary.
He was a poor tailor, a German by birth, but who had lived many years in England and spoke English perfectly well. Being well taken care of, he got better for a time. I went to see him and tried to cheer him as well as I could. He was surprised to see me, and said with a frown: “Why do you come to see me?” I said that he seemed quite alone in the world, without any friends or relations in England.
“Friends and relations!” he said. “I have never had any in all my life.”
“You had father and mother?” I said.
“No,” he answered, “I never had. I never knew anybody that belonged to me. I was brought up at a Government school for poor children, was apprenticed to a tailor, and when I was quite young sent to England, where I have been working in different places for nearly twenty years. I have never begged, and have always been able to support myself.”
He told me the name of the tailor for whom he had been working in Oxford, and I received the most satisfactory account both from his employer and from the men with whom he had been working.
“Why do you come to see me?” he said again and again. “No one has ever been kind to me. I want to die; I have nothing to care for in this world. The few things that belong to me I wish to leave to the poor servant girl in the house where I have last been at work, the little money in my purse may go to the Infirmary. I know no one else; no one cares for me, or has ever cared for me.”
Who can imagine such a life? Without father or mother, without friends, without the sense of belonging to anybody in the world, of ever being loved or pitied by a single human soul. Even the idea of a kind and loving Father in heaven had no meaning for him. His one wish was to have done with it all. It was no trouble to him to leave this world and to cease from stitching. He could not even express anything like gratitude. All he could say was that it was so strange that any one should care for him, and come to see him. He passed away without suffering, anyhow without a sound of complaint. Whatever he left was given to the poor servant girl, who was equally surprised that the poor tailor should have thought of her. What an empty, purposeless life it seemed to have been, and yet his, too, was a precious soul, and meant to be more on earth than a mere sewing machine.
Yes, now and then one can do a little good, even to professional beggars; but very, very seldom—and it is right that such cases should be known and remembered. The most difficult people to deal with are educated young foreigners, who always came to me with the same tale. Some of them were hardened sinners, and had to end their visits to Oxford and to the always open rooms of undergraduates in college, with a visit to our gaol. I have no doubt whatever that some of them belonged to good families, and had received an excellent education. Some of them had run away from home with a woman they had fallen in love with; others may have committed some crime, mostly while serving in the army, and had tried to escape punishment by deserting. But there were others who had come to England to learn English, hoping to support themselves by giving lessons, for as soon as a foreigner arrives in England he imagines that a dozen people are ready to learn his language, which in many cases he is quite unable to teach. I remember one of this class whom, by mere accident, I was able to help. He came to me in a ragged and very disreputable state. He told me he was starving, and wished me to find pupils for him at Oxford. Well, I managed with some effort to get hold of him and shake him. He showed that he knew Greek and Latin, and his German was that of an educated man. “My dear fellow,” I said, “how in the world did you sink so low?” He saw that I meant it, and, with tears in his eyes, told me his simple, and this time true, story. He had been a teacher in a well-known German watering-place, and, as he had several English pupils, he was anxious to perfect himself in English. He arrived in London without knowing anybody, and with but a small sum of money left. “I don’t know what happened to me,” he said; “I must have had a very serious illness, and I was told that for weeks I was in a delirious fever. When I came to myself, I was in a miserable hovel occupied by a poor German family in Whitechapel. I know nothing about them, nor how I had fallen into their hands. But they had taken me in; they had nursed me, as I found out, for several weeks; and they now asked me to repay what they had spent on me. My money was gone; I knew no one who would have sent me any money from Germany. My Whitechapel friends were kind to me, and at last they advised me, as I knew Greek and Latin, to go to Oxford and Cambridge and beg. I did not like it at all; but what could I do? I owed them the money, and I had no means of earning anything in London. I was starving, and my friends had little to eat and drink themselves.” I believed his story, and this time I had no reason to regret it. The master of a school for boys near London had written to me to recommend a German teacher as a stop-gap. I wrote to him, giving him a full account of my man, and told him that he had experience in teaching, and wished to stay for a time in England to improve his knowledge of English. The master said he would give him a trial. I told the young man to get rid of every article of clothing he had on, and had him clothed as well as I could before I sent him off. He acquitted himself admirably at the school, and his first thought was to pay the poor Samaritans in Whitechapel for what they had done for him. After a time he went back to Germany to resume his work as a teacher of German at the fashionable watering-place he had come from; and for several years I regularly received letters of thanks from him, telling me how well he was getting on in the world, that he was happily married, and hoped that he would see me once more, though not in England, but at his watering-place in Germany. Here I had my reward.
During the first year I was in England I sometimes saw harrowing scenes among the poor German families stranded and wrecked in London. These poor people flocked to the Prussian Legation. Generally they could only see the porter. If they were lucky, they saw a secretary; and, if very lucky, the Minister himself, Bunsen, came to see them in the hall. Now and then I was sent to find out what might be true in the heart-rending stories they told. And often there was plenty of truth in them. Father, mother, and children had been tempted away from a small village in the Black Forest or the Erzgebirge. They had been told that England was made of gold and silver, and that they had only to scratch the soil to get as much as they wanted and bring it home. They believed it all, and when they saw the glistening white chalk cliffs near Dover, they thought they were all of silver. Then when they came to London, the misery began, and began very soon. They were hungry, the children were sickly, and there was nothing for them to do to earn an honest penny. Nothing remained but to earn dishonest pennies, and in this they were readily helped by all the people around them.
I cannot tell the harrowing scenes I saw. Those who care to know what is going on among the poor German families in London should go themselves, and they would see more than they would wish ever to have seen. One case I shall never forget, and it is perhaps as well that people should know these things. In one room on a miserable bed there lay a poor girl, quite young, who had given birth to a child. The child had fortunately died. The people about her had been kind to her, and done all they could be expected to do. But, oh! the sad, half-delirious face of the dying mother, for there could be no doubt that she was dying. And what was her story? As far as I could find out from the women about her, she was the daughter of a German clergyman. A young Englishman had come to their vicarage to learn German. He had fallen in love with his pretty German teacher, and the poor girl had fallen in love with him. He had promised her marriage, and when she could no longer hide her state from her parents she had been persuaded by her lover to follow him to England. In London he had left her with a small sum of money at a little German hotel, promising to come back as soon as possible after he had seen his father. When the money which he had left for her became low, she had been sent to a poor German family. She never believed that he whom she called her English husband had forsaken her. Something, she felt sure, had happened to prevent him from coming back to her. I hope she was right. However, he never came; she died, and died in agonies, calling for him, for her child, for her happy home in Germany, and with her last breath and her last tears for her mother! She never divulged any names. She died and was buried with her child.
Can society do nothing for these poor victims? Can we only call them hard names—some of them being the most gentle, the most loving, the most innocent creatures in the world! Have we not even some Pharisees left among us who will go out one by one, beginning at the eldest even unto the last, instead of throwing a stone at her? Who is to solve this problem if not He who said: “Neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin no more”? And she, the poor girl, was she really so great a sinner? She did not look so. And if she was, had she not expiated her sin and been purified by the most awful suffering? She looked so pure and innocent that Heine’s lines were constantly coming into my mind:—
Mir ist’s als ob ich die Hände
Auf’s Haupt Dir legen sollt’,
Und beten dass Gott Dich behüte,
So fromm, so rein, so hold.
Poor girl! I felt for her with all my heart, but I had but few words of comfort for her. How difficult it is to judge. Love, youth, nature, and ignorance have to be reckoned with in our judgments; and society, which no doubt has to enforce certain laws for its own protection, should distinguish at least between sins against society and sins against God, before whom one untrue and unkind word, written or spoken, may weigh heavier in the scales, for all we know, than the sin of many a heart-broken girl.