INCIDENT AT THE FIVE POINTS HOUSE OF INDUSTRY.
To be able to appreciate Mr. Pease’s toils, and sacrifices, and self-denying labours at the Five Points House of Industry, one must visit the locality—one must wind through those dirty streets and alleys, and see the wrecks of humanity that meet him at every step—he must see children so dirty and squalid that they scarcely resemble human beings, playing in filthy gutters, and using language that would curdle his blood to hear from childhood’s lips—he should see men, “made in God’s own image,” brutalised beyond his power to imagine—he should see women (girls of not more than twenty years) reeling about the pavements in a state of beastly intoxication, without a trace of feminity in their vicious faces—he should pass the rum shops, where men and women are quarrelling, and fighting, and swearing, while childhood listens and learns!—he should pass the second-hand clothes cellars, where hard-featured Jewish dealers swing out faded, refuse garments (pawned by starving virtue for bread), to sell to the needy, half-naked emigrant for his last penny—he should see decayed fruit and vegetables which the most ravenous swine might well root twice over before devouring, purchased as daily food by these poor creatures—he should see gentlemen (?) threading these streets, not to make all this misery less, God knows, but to sever the last thread of hope to which many a tempted one is despairingly clinging.
One must see all this before he can form a just idea of the magnitude and importance of the work that Mr. Pease has single-handed and nobly undertaken; remembering that men of wealth and influence have their own reasons for using that wealth and influence to perpetuate this modern Sodom.
One should spend an hour in Mr. Pease’s house, to see the constant draughts upon his time and strength, in the shape of calls and messages, and especially the applications for relief that his slender purse, alas! is often not able to answer;—he should see his unwearied patience and activity, admire the kind, sympathetic heart—unaffected by the toil or the frowns of temporizing theorists—ever warm, ever pitiful, giving not only “the crumbs from his table,” but often his own meals to the hungry—his own wardrobe to the naked;—he should see this, and go away ashamed to have lived so long and done so little to help the maimed, and sick, and lame, to Bethesda’s Pool.
I will relate an incident which occurred, some time since, at the House of Industry, and which serves as a fair sample of daily occurrences there.
One morning an aged lady, of respectable appearance, called at the Mission House and inquired for Mr. Pease. She was told that he was engaged, and asked if some one else would not do as well. She said, respectfully, “No; my business is with him; I will wait, if you please, till he can see me.”
Mr. Pease immediately came in, when the old lady commenced her story:—
“I come, sir,” said she, “in behalf of a poor, unfortunate woman and three children. She is living now”—and the tears dropped over her wrinkled face—“in a bad place in Willet Street, in a basement. There are rum shops all around it, and many drunken people about the neighbourhood. She has made out to pay the rent, but has had no food for the poor little children, who have subsisted on what they could manage to beg in the daytime. The landlord promised, when she hired the basement, to put a lock on the door, and make it comfortable, so that ‘the Croton’ need not run in; but he got his rent and then broke his promise, and they have not seen him since.”
“Is the woman respectable?” inquired Mr. Pease.
“Yes—no—not exactly,” said the poor old lady, violently agitated. “She was well brought up. She has a good heart, sir, but a bad head, and then trouble has discouraged her. Poor Mary—yes, sir, it must have been the trouble—for I know her heart is good, sir. I,”—tears choked the old lady’s utterance. Recovering herself, she continued:—
“She had a kind husband once. He was the father of her two little girls: six years ago he died, and—the poor thing—oh, sir, you don’t know how dear she is to me!”—and burying her aged face in her hands, she sobbed aloud.
Mr. Pease’s kind heart interpreted the old lady’s emotion, without the pain of an explanation. In the weeping woman before him he saw the mother of the lost one.
Yes, she was “Mary’s” mother. Poverty could not chill her love; shame and the world’s scorn had only filled her with a God-like pity.
After a brief pause, she brushed away her tears and went on:—
“Yes, sir; Mary was a good child to me once; she respected religion and religious people, and used to love to go to church; but lately, sir, God knows she has almost broken my heart. Last spring I took her home, and the three dear children; but she would not listen to me, and left without telling me where she was going. I heard that there was a poor woman living in a basement in Willet Street, with three children, and my heart told me that that was my poor, lost Mary, and there I found her. But, oh, sir—oh, sir”—and she sobbed as if her heart were breaking—“such a place! My Mary, that I used to cradle in these arms to sleep, that lisped her little evening prayer at my knee—my Mary, drunk in that terrible place!”
She was getting so agitated that Mr. Pease, wishing to turn the current of her thoughts, asked her if she herself was a member of any church. She said yes, of the —— Street Baptist Church. She said she was a widow, and had had one child beside Mary—a son. And her face lighted up as she said:—
“Oh, sir, he was such a fine lad. He did all he could to make me happy; but he thought, that if he went to California he could make money, and when he left he said, ‘Cheer up, dear mother; I’ll come back and give my money all to you, and you shall never work any more.’
“I can see him now, sir, as he stood there, with his eye kindling. Poor lad! poor lad! He came back, but it was only to die. His last words were, ‘God will care for you, mother—I know it—when I’m gone to Heaven.’ Oh! if I could have seen my poor girl die as he did, before she became so bad. Oh, sir, won’t you take her here?—won’t you try to make her good?—can’t you make her good, sir? I can’t give Mary up. Nobody cares for Mary now but me. Won’t you try, sir?”
Mr. Pease promised that he would do all he could, and sent a person out with the old lady, to visit “Mary,” and obtain particulars; he soon returned and corroborated all the old lady’s statements. Mr. Pease then took a friend and started to see what could be done.
In Willet Street is a rickety old wooden building, filled to overflowing with the very refuse of humanity. The basement is lighted with two small windows half under ground; and in this wretched hole lived Mary and her children. As Mr. Pease descended the steps into the room, he heard some one say, “Here he comes, grandmother; he’s come—he’s come!”
The door was opened. On a pile of rags in the corner lay Mary, “my Mary,” as the old lady tearfully called her.
God of mercy! what a wreck of beautiful womanhood! Her large blue eyes glared with maniac wildness, under the influence of intoxication. Long waves of auburn hair fell, in tangled masses, over a form wasted, yet beautiful in its graceful outlines.
Poor, lost Mary!
“Such a place!” as her mother had, weeping, said. Not a table or chair, or bedstead, or article of furniture in it of any description. On the mantel-piece stood a beer-bottle, with a half-burnt candle in its neck. A few broken, dirty dishes stood upon the shelf, and a quantity of filthy rags lay scattered round the floor.
The grandmother was holding by the hand a sweet child of eight years, with large, bright eyes, and auburn hair (like poor Mary’s) falling about her neck. An older girl of twelve, with a sweet Madonna face, that seemed to light up even that wretched place with a beam of Heaven, stood near, bearing in her arms a babe of sixteen months, which was not so large as one of eight months should have been. Its little hands looked like birds’ claws, and its little bones seemed almost piercing the skin.
The old lady went up to her daughter, saying, “Mary, dear, this is the gentleman who is willing to take you to his house if you will try to be good.”
“Get out of the room, you old hypocrite,” snarled the intoxicated woman, “or I’ll——(and she clutched a hatchet beside her)—I’ll show you! You are the worst old woman I ever knew, except the one you brought in here the other day, and she is a fiend outright. Talk to me about being good!—ha—ha!”—and she laughed an idiotic laugh.
“Mother,” said the eldest child, sweetly laying her little hand upon her arm,—“dear mother, don’t, please don’t hurt grandmother. She is good and kind to us: she only wants to get you out of this bad place, to where you will be treated kindly.”
“Yes, dear mother,” chimed in the younger sister, bending her little curly head over her, “mother, you said once you would go. Don’t keep us here any longer, mother. We are cold and hungry. Please get up and take us away; we are afraid to stay here, mother dear.”
“Yes, Mary,” said the old lady, handing her down a faded, ragged gown, “here is your dress; put it on, won’t you?”
Mary raised herself on the pile of rags on which she was lying, and pushing the eldest child across the room, screamed out, “Get away, you impudent little thing! you are just like your old grandmother. I tell you all,” said she, raising herself on one elbow, and tossing back her auburn hair from her broad white forehead, “I tell you all, I never will go from here, never! I love this place. So many fine people come here, and we have such good times. There is a gentleman who takes care of me. He brought me some candles last night, and he says that I shan’t want for anything, if I will only get rid of these troublesome children—my husband’s children.” And she hid her face in her hands and laughed convulsively.
“You may have them,” she continued, “just as soon as you like—baby and all! but I never will go from this place. I love it. A great many fine people come here to see me.”
The poor old lady wrung her hands and wept, while the children clung round their grandmother, with half-averted faces, trembling and silent.
Mr. Pease said to her, “Mary, you may either go with me, or I’ll send for an officer, and have you carried to the station-house. Which will you do?”
Mary cursed and raved, but finally put on the dress the old lady handed her, and consented to go with them. A carriage was soon procured, and Mary helped inside—Mr. Pease lifting in the baby and the two little girls; and away they started for the Five Points House of Industry.
“Oh, mother!” exclaimed the younger of the girls, “how very pleasant it is to ride in this nice carriage, and to get away from that dirty place; we shall be so happy now, mother; and Edith and the baby too: see, he is laughing: he likes to ride. You will love sister Edith and baby, and me, now, won’t you, dear mother? and you won’t frighten us with the hatchet any more, or hurt dear grandmother, will you?”
Arriving at Mr. Pease’s house, the delight of the little creatures was unbounded. They caught hold of their mother’s faded dress, saying, “Didn’t we tell you, mother, that you would have a pleasant home here? Only see that nice garden! You didn’t have a garden in Willet Street, mother!”
Reader, would you know that mother’s after history?
Another “Mary” hath “bathed the Saviour’s feet” with her tears, and wiped them with the hairs of her head. Her name is no longer written Mary Magdalena. In the virtuous home of her aged mother, she sits clothed in her right mind, “and her children rise up and call her blessed.”