She, that janitor, was tubercular, and ready, dressed, and waiting for the ambulance to come and take her to Bellevue. Looking for dogs I called at her flat. On learning her condition I expressed my sympathy, then added:
“Yet how fortunate you are to have four such lovely daughters.”
“I would to God they were mine,” she replied, and both her voice and the expression with which she looked at the children attested her sincerity. “Mary, take the children into the kitchen. I wanter speak to the lady.”
Mary took the children into the kitchen, and the janitor told me their story.
Their father was a Swede and their mother an Irishwoman. About a year before I met with the children their father, a skilled machinist, had been killed in the shop where he worked. Because of this accident his wife received seventy-five dollars a month.
According to the janitor’s story, which was verified by three tenants in the house, every month as soon as this woman received her check she went on a drunk. Not satisfied with drinking, she would bring strange men to her flat—men as drunk and degraded as herself. On such occasions the children had taken refuge with the janitor.
The night before my visit this woman had returned, after an absence of several days, with two men. Finding her eldest daughter, under thirteen years of age, in their flat, she refused to allow her to leave, ordered her to spend the night with one of the drunken men. The child had escaped from the room in which her mother had locked her with the drunken man by the fire-escape.
“I’d die happy if I only knew somebody would look after those little girls, see that they come to no harm,” the janitor added, after telling me their story.
This was during my first summer working in the tenements. How hot the sun was that day! The cars on Twenty-third Street were not running, because of a blockade. I did not know that there were such long blocks in New York as those between First and Fourth Avenues seemed that day.
The ambulance from Bellevue might come for that janitor at any minute. With her gone those little girls would be at the mercy of their drunken mother and her beastly companions. Those three blocks seemed miles long. And the sun! I was dripping with perspiration when I entered the offices of the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.