After several calls we found ourselves again in a poorer district. It was getting late. There were no lights in the windows. We were a little hesitant about ringing more bells. The proper time for Father Christmas to arrive is when people are in bed; but in a city of suspicions and sudden arrests to be roused out of sleep by a group of strange men is more likely to cause alarm than pleasure. We threw in some extra cans of milk as compensation and chanced it.
Our ring was answered after an interval by a cheerful little woman with a wooden leg. She had seven children and was reckoned a widow; her husband had gone missing in the war. Each child had to be wakened and introduced to us in turn. They stood in a line, blinking shyly and rubbing their drowsy eyes. They had evidently been picked up off the floor, for in the inner room there was only a single bed which, as usual, had as its only covering a mattress. The clothes of the entire seven children would not have decently warmed one child. And yet, despite their leanness and rags they seemed to breathe their mother's optimism. We asked her how she managed to exist. She smiled bravely, tapping with her wooden leg. She worked when she could—yes, at washing. There was her man's pension, and then we must not forget the good God who had sent us.
We glanced round the unfurnished room. It was cold as the street outside, but scrubbed and speckless. There was no doubt that she was good, but one was puzzled to discover why she was so persuaded that God had been good to her. Then she let the secret out—or at least part of it. God was daily feeding three of her seven children at the American Relief Station. She seemed to have the idea that God had a lot in common with the Stars and Stripes. As we turned to go, my eye caught an embroidered motto on the wall, which read, “My kitchen is clean and my food well-cooked; otherwise I would not be here.” So she, too, like the Government official's wife, had her upholding pride. Poverty had failed to down her.
After this we lost our way for a time in a district where more knifings happen than in any other in Vienna. At last we found ourselves in a dank, unlighted room where people rose from the floor like shadows. It was tenanted in all by four adults and five children. One of the children was seriously ill. They hadn't been to see a doctor and didn't know what was the matter with her. She was a pretty, fair little girl and her body was shaken with fever. No, they had no food. That was nothing new. One of the men was a gardener; before gardens grew green it would be easy to die. The other man had been four years a prisoner in Siberia. He had walked most the way back to Vienna. The walking hadn't improved his health. He wondered why he had been so anxious to get back. He was rotting here; he could have rotted with equal ease out there. In the darkness they flapped their rags and coughed. When we produced our food, the men showed no enthusiasm. It was the women, hideously angular, who stooped over our hands and blessed us in the name of their children. We had done them no service with our Christmas presents; we had only prolonged their agony by a few days' respite. They made us feel that. Individuals could do nothing. It was nations who must act and act quickly if victims of this order were not to perish.
The last visit we paid was in all senses the happiest, for we, came face to face with triumphant youth. The single room was in the dreariest tenement we had entered. The snow lay in a melting quagmire outside. It was the nearest approach to a slum I have encountered in Vienna. The walls were peeling with damp and the woodwork was mouldy. We had to climb a flight and then cross along the front of the house by a rickety balcony. Pushing open a window we stumbled on a pathetic sight—six little boys and girls curled up asleep on the bare boards with their flesh showing through their rags. On a bed a handsome man was sitting, strumming softly on a guitar. He was evidently of gipsy origin; his hair was jet black, his moustaches were fiercely curled and his face was marble white. He stared at us doubtfully with his smouldering eyes while the Doctor explained our intrusion. Then he rose with an air of courtliness and made us welcome. There was a wild haughtiness about the man—a native aristocracy—which made us forget his poverty. He had seven children? Yes. We counted the little bodies strewn about and could reckon only six. He smiled. That was easily explained. The seventh was a girl of eighteen; she would be back presently. And his wife, we asked, where was she? His wife had died last May. She was out with a sack on her shoulder, picking over the old ash-heaps which have not been disturbed for twenty years. She was searching with other women as desperate as herself to find fuel. Not being an expert miner, the ashes had slipped back and buried her. She was smothered before they could dig her out. Since then his daughter, whom he hoped we should meet, had been their mother. For himself, he was a musician and sang in cafis, when people were so good as to listen.
At this point the sound of rushing feet disturbed us. A little girl, who certainly did not look eighteen, butted her way into the midst of us. It was plain that at first she had thought we were the police and was out to fight the lot of us. On finding that our intentions were kind, she fell to laughing. Her merriment was contagious and in strange contrast to her father's tragic attitudes. Her little brothers and sisters woke up and smiled at her. One could see that in her presence they felt safe.
She began to explain between smiles and gulps how happy we had made her. All day she had been puzzling what to get for the children. She had no money. Tomorrow would be Christmas. Not to give anything would not be right. And now, when she had begun to despair——. She dragged her ragged family to their feet and pushed them up one by one to kiss our hands. “You shall have a Christmas now,” she kept telling them; “a real Christmas. One of the finest.”
And it took so little to make this great happiness—such a meagre, unworthy sacrifice. One less present in each of your stockings would have brought the same gladness to every starveling in Vienna.