Whenever I think of the influenza epidemic in New York City there flashes before me a series of mental pictures, pictures so indelibly stamped on my mind that I believe they will go with me to the grave. In each of them, in all of them, I see myself walking through the slums of the great city as through the Valley of the shadow of Death.
But unlike the valley through which Christian passed I could not make out even the narrowest of safe pathways. So far as my vision extended my next step might plunge me into the ditch wherein the blind lead the blind, or into some bottomless quag. And always over me, over the whole of each of these pictures, Death spread his black wings.
In none of these pictures do I see myself ill with influenza. Yet I had it. According to my diary I remained in bed one day, took five capsules, and had one meal brought to me by a young music-teacher who occupied the room under mine in Miss O’Brien’s Greenwich Village rooming-house. This young woman had a music class in New Jersey, from which after a lesson she returned with a slight cold. Within twenty-four hours she had an unmistakable case of the “flu.”
Being the only other woman roomer—Hildegarde Hook having failed to make her tea-room go had gone to live in her basement—it fell to my lot to see that the music-teacher did not starve. Mornings before going to work I would go to Sixth Avenue and buy food and medicines to last her during the day, and evenings on my return from work I would again go shopping, getting what was necessary to make her night comfortable.
Just when she was able to crawl out of her bed I crawled into mine. Besides a few outstanding facts, all the details of my attack of influenza have been rubbed from my memory.
But nothing can ever erase, or I believe make less vivid, my memory of Bellevue Hospital during those terrible heart-breaking months—packed beyond its doors newly admitted patients had to wait in passageways on stretchers resting on chairs or other makeshift props. No sick person may be turned away from the doors of New York’s great city hospital; room must be found for them however crowded the wards, however overworked the nurses and the doctors. How those nurses and doctors worked during the influenza! how everybody connected with Bellevue worked! To remain on duty, going without sleep and snatching a few mouthfuls of food when opportunity offered, was not considered worth mentioning—so many nurses and doctors did more.
While the pressure on Bellevue’s staff of social service workers was very great, far above normal, it was not so continuous. Though their days did stretch into the nights they did finally get home for a few hours’ rest and sleep. There are persons who claim that Miss Wadley, the head of the social service department, did not leave her desk during the entire epidemic;—that day and night she sat there at the telephone, listening to pleadings from parents that she send assistance to sick ones left at home, or to the demands of persons half-mad with anxiety that she locate for them some one dear to them who had failed to return home.
For that—the unexplained disappearance of persons—was one of the hideous features of the epidemic in the tenement districts. The workers of a family, scourged on by the additional necessity of having sickness in their home circle, would start out of a morning when they themselves felt ready to drop. During the day, while at work, they would drop and be taken to a hospital. Even had their employers, or fellow employees, the inclination to notify the family of the stricken one, they would not be able to do so, because in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred they did not know their home address.
Because I was not a trained nurse Miss Wadley set me to work running down missing parents, and putting children orphaned during the epidemic out to board. It was while looking up the parents of Francisco LaCastro that I was first brought face to face with the puzzling dread caused by a person dropping out of sight. Miss Wadley was notified by the hospital that Francisco, though able to leave the hospital, had not been called for by his parents. She turned the case over to me. According to Francisco’s entrance-card, he was three years old, and lived at a certain number on Sullivan Street.
Accustomed to tenement conditions, on reaching the address I set about looking for the janitor. After much knocking, the door was opened by a tiny girl. Yes, her mother was janitor—here the tiny mite began to sob. From her sobs I learned that a policeman in a hospital wagon had carried her mother off. Furthermore, that her father had been in a hospital, but was out and had gone to work. Also that three children older and two younger than herself were still in the hospital.