“Oh, yes. I have only one room. It’s small. There’s no window in it. It’s an inside room.”
“And you pay rent––to Mr. Ames––the man whose machines killed your husband and took off your arm––you still pay rent to him, for one little room?”
“Yes, Miss. He owns these tenements. Why, his company gave me almost a hundred dollars, you know! I was lucky, for when Lizzie Sidel’s man lost his hand in the cog wheels he went to law to sue the company, and three years afterward the case was thrown out of court and he had to pay the costs himself. But he was a picker-boss, and got nine dollars a week.”
A little hand stole up along Carmen’s arm. She looked down into the wondering face of the child. “I––I just wanted to see, Signorina, if you were real.”
“I have been wondering that myself, dear,” replied the girl, as her thought dwelt upon what she had been hearing.
“I must go now, Miss,” said the widow Marcus, rising. “I promised to drop in and look after Katie Hoolan’s children this afternoon. She’s up at the mills.”
“Then I will go with you,” Carmen announced. “But I will come back here,” she added, as some little hands seized hers. “If not to-day, then soon––perhaps to-morrow.”
She crossed the cold hall with Mrs. Marcus, and entered the doorway which led to the little inner room where dwelt the widow. There were a dozen such rooms in the building, the latter informed her. This one in particular had been shunned for many years, for it had a bad reputation as a breeder of tuberculosis. But the rent was low, and so the widow had taken it after her man was killed. It contained a broken stove, a dirty bed, and a couple of unsteady chairs. The odor was fetid. The walls were damp, and the paper which had once covered them was molding and rotting off.
“It won’t stay on,” the widow explained, as she saw the girl looking at it. “The walls are wet all the time. Comes up from the cellar. The creek overflows and runs into the basement. They call this the ‘death-room.’”
Death! Carmen shuddered when she looked about this fearful human habitation. Yet, “The only death to be feared,” said Paracelsus, “is unconsciousness of God.” Was this impoverished woman, then, any less truly alive than the rich owner of the mills which had robbed her of the means of existence? 154 And can a civilization be alive to the Christ when it breeds these antipodal types?