With true Italian hospitality young Bruno not only brought his “buddie” and his French wife home, but included their dog. The young Frenchwoman went to Bellevue, her husband found work, and Mrs. Bruno set out to find them a living place, anything in the way of a roof-tree from a cellar to a garret.
When I last called on the Bruno dog the hunt for a flat, a room, a cellar, was still being made. While Mrs. Bruno was doing her best to find a vacancy she told me that because of the money she would be sorry to have “buddie” and his little family go.
“It’s the rent,” she told me. “Everybody’s workin’ exceptin’ me and Marie. She hasn’t been out the hospital long, and there’s her baby to feed. All gets good wages. Why, my youngest girl gets twenty a week. I’m as careful as I knows how, but the rent— She’s chargin’ us four times as much for these three rooms as we used to pay for four.”
Any one who believes that tender-heartedness means woman, or that all women are tender of heart and conscience, had best never investigate the ownership of tenement-house property in the slums of New York City. The filthiest, most dilapidated tenement-houses I entered were the property of a woman, a human slug who, from the cradle to the grave, never did anything more than dress and eat.
“I don’t know what this city’s coming to,” she once said to me as she waved an opened letter. “Here’s the Health Department ordering me to put toilets in my houses. Why, I scarcely get enough to live on from those houses as it is.”
“You live at an expensive hotel and dress rather expensively,” I suggested. “If, when you go off this summer——”
“I won’t do anything of the sort. Why should I sacrifice myself to provide a lot of filthy foreigners with luxuries. Besides, they don’t want them,” she asserted positively. “They’ve never been accustomed to such conveniences; they’d as soon go in the yard.”
“Ever ask them?” I inquired. She was old enough to be my grandmother, so I didn’t wish to hurt her feelings, though I did long to get her to look at the matter from the tenant’s point of view. “How long since you’ve gone through those houses, seen the condition with your own eyes? How long?”
“Not since mother’s death. We used to live in the front house, you know. East Third Street was fashionable then.” She gave a list of neighbors and friends who had owned homes within a few blocks of her property, most of them names prominent in the history of the city. “Mother and I used to live on those houses, had money to do as we pleased. Now they order me to put in toilets. I’ll do no such thing—unless they force me to.”
She was forced to. After getting estimates from several contractors she finally got a bid which she considered “reasonable.” Acting against the advice of her renting-agent, she accepted this bid. The man did the work, she paid his bill, and a few weeks later was notified that all the toilets had dropped through the floor. One of them in falling struck one of the tenants, who threatened a suit for damages.