The next day I looked for work and to see what privileges were accorded for the out-of-work, destitute man in Seattle. First, after a jungle hunt, I found the Charity Society. After waiting a half-hour far up in a very high building in a dark room with a lot of rubbish, I was seen and put through a humiliating lot of questions. I was not asked if I were sick, or hungry, or whether I had comfortable clothing or needed medicine. I was asked if I were a church member, if I supported my wife, and many other such questions. Then I was offered a ticket for two twenty-cent meals at a restaurant and a bed at a Mission Lodging House. I took the names and addresses of these places and making some trivial excuse for not taking the tickets (although I could have given hundreds of them away that night) I left. I found the restaurant in a slum, and while I stood in its doorway I counted eight saloons. The lodging house I found in the heart of the worst tenderloin ever created. The sleeping quarters were in a basement. Its immediate surroundings were Chinese and Japanese who come to this country bringing all of their own vices and who then promptly adopt all of ours. Three doors from the entrance to the lodgings is a brothel of the lowest character. It harbors seventy-five scarlet women of the worst type, and it is only one of the many near at hand. These places, which, with all the other corrupting influences for sin, make up Seattle’s worst hell, cannot be described. Yet it is here that the heads of the greatest of all the virtues send their homeless to rest. I rejoiced to understand that Seattle abolished this frightful tenderloin at the end of the administration which was in control of the city at the time of my visit.
While loafing late in the evening in one of the big beer joints, a strong, healthy fellow with whom I had been talking (and in our talk we discovered we were both broke) said, “If I had thought for one moment I would not have been at work by this time, I would not have sent so much of my money home.” Then he continued, “Where are you going to sleep to-night?”
With a quick thought, I replied, “Oh, I am fixed for something to-night. I have two places and you can surely have one of them if you want it. One is at the Salvation Army. I was up there not long ago and the attendant told me they couldn’t think of giving me supper, bath and breakfast, but if I would come and help him clean up between eleven and twelve o’clock at night he would give me a place to lie down, and you may have it. Do you want it?”
“You bet I do,” he answered. Then I said, “It is nearly eleven o’clock now. Let us go there.”
As we approached the place I said, “I’ll not go in and you will stand a better show.”
He went in with an uncertain manner. He was not used to begging. Presently he returned and said, “I don’t see anyone.”
“He is back in there somewhere,” I said, “hunt him up.”
Trying again, I saw him come out with a broom. Looking through the window he saw me, smiled and shook his hand as he began sweeping. He had got his job and covering.
The next day I met two brothers, one of whom was pale and trembling and staggered as he walked. I said to the elder boy (for they were only boys), “What is the matter with the kid?”
“Sick. They let him stay in the hospital until he could walk. I guess he is still sick.”