He told me the name of the tailor for whom he had been working in Oxford, and I received the most satisfactory account both from his employer and from the men with whom he had been working.
“Why do you come to see me?” he said again and again. “No one has ever been kind to me. I want to die; I have nothing to care for in this world. The few things that belong to me I wish to leave to the poor servant girl in the house where I have last been at work, the little money in my purse may go to the Infirmary. I know no one else; no one cares for me, or has ever cared for me.”
Who can imagine such a life? Without father or mother, without friends, without the sense of belonging to anybody in the world, of ever being loved or pitied by a single human soul. Even the idea of a kind and loving Father in heaven had no meaning for him. His one wish was to have done with it all. It was no trouble to him to leave this world and to cease from stitching. He could not even express anything like gratitude. All he could say was that it was so strange that any one should care for him, and come to see him. He passed away without suffering, anyhow without a sound of complaint. Whatever he left was given to the poor servant girl, who was equally surprised that the poor tailor should have thought of her. What an empty, purposeless life it seemed to have been, and yet his, too, was a precious soul, and meant to be more on earth than a mere sewing machine.
Yes, now and then one can do a little good, even to professional beggars; but very, very seldom—and it is right that such cases should be known and remembered. The most difficult people to deal with are educated young foreigners, who always came to me with the same tale. Some of them were hardened sinners, and had to end their visits to Oxford and to the always open rooms of undergraduates in college, with a visit to our gaol. I have no doubt whatever that some of them belonged to good families, and had received an excellent education. Some of them had run away from home with a woman they had fallen in love with; others may have committed some crime, mostly while serving in the army, and had tried to escape punishment by deserting. But there were others who had come to England to learn English, hoping to support themselves by giving lessons, for as soon as a foreigner arrives in England he imagines that a dozen people are ready to learn his language, which in many cases he is quite unable to teach. I remember one of this class whom, by mere accident, I was able to help. He came to me in a ragged and very disreputable state. He told me he was starving, and wished me to find pupils for him at Oxford. Well, I managed with some effort to get hold of him and shake him. He showed that he knew Greek and Latin, and his German was that of an educated man. “My dear fellow,” I said, “how in the world did you sink so low?” He saw that I meant it, and, with tears in his eyes, told me his simple, and this time true, story. He had been a teacher in a well-known German watering-place, and, as he had several English pupils, he was anxious to perfect himself in English. He arrived in London without knowing anybody, and with but a small sum of money left. “I don’t know what happened to me,” he said; “I must have had a very serious illness, and I was told that for weeks I was in a delirious fever. When I came to myself, I was in a miserable hovel occupied by a poor German family in Whitechapel. I know nothing about them, nor how I had fallen into their hands. But they had taken me in; they had nursed me, as I found out, for several weeks; and they now asked me to repay what they had spent on me. My money was gone; I knew no one who would have sent me any money from Germany. My Whitechapel friends were kind to me, and at last they advised me, as I knew Greek and Latin, to go to Oxford and Cambridge and beg. I did not like it at all; but what could I do? I owed them the money, and I had no means of earning anything in London. I was starving, and my friends had little to eat and drink themselves.” I believed his story, and this time I had no reason to regret it. The master of a school for boys near London had written to me to recommend a German teacher as a stop-gap. I wrote to him, giving him a full account of my man, and told him that he had experience in teaching, and wished to stay for a time in England to improve his knowledge of English. The master said he would give him a trial. I told the young man to get rid of every article of clothing he had on, and had him clothed as well as I could before I sent him off. He acquitted himself admirably at the school, and his first thought was to pay the poor Samaritans in Whitechapel for what they had done for him. After a time he went back to Germany to resume his work as a teacher of German at the fashionable watering-place he had come from; and for several years I regularly received letters of thanks from him, telling me how well he was getting on in the world, that he was happily married, and hoped that he would see me once more, though not in England, but at his watering-place in Germany. Here I had my reward.
During the first year I was in England I sometimes saw harrowing scenes among the poor German families stranded and wrecked in London. These poor people flocked to the Prussian Legation. Generally they could only see the porter. If they were lucky, they saw a secretary; and, if very lucky, the Minister himself, Bunsen, came to see them in the hall. Now and then I was sent to find out what might be true in the heart-rending stories they told. And often there was plenty of truth in them. Father, mother, and children had been tempted away from a small village in the Black Forest or the Erzgebirge. They had been told that England was made of gold and silver, and that they had only to scratch the soil to get as much as they wanted and bring it home. They believed it all, and when they saw the glistening white chalk cliffs near Dover, they thought they were all of silver. Then when they came to London, the misery began, and began very soon. They were hungry, the children were sickly, and there was nothing for them to do to earn an honest penny. Nothing remained but to earn dishonest pennies, and in this they were readily helped by all the people around them.
I cannot tell the harrowing scenes I saw. Those who care to know what is going on among the poor German families in London should go themselves, and they would see more than they would wish ever to have seen. One case I shall never forget, and it is perhaps as well that people should know these things. In one room on a miserable bed there lay a poor girl, quite young, who had given birth to a child. The child had fortunately died. The people about her had been kind to her, and done all they could be expected to do. But, oh! the sad, half-delirious face of the dying mother, for there could be no doubt that she was dying. And what was her story? As far as I could find out from the women about her, she was the daughter of a German clergyman. A young Englishman had come to their vicarage to learn German. He had fallen in love with his pretty German teacher, and the poor girl had fallen in love with him. He had promised her marriage, and when she could no longer hide her state from her parents she had been persuaded by her lover to follow him to England. In London he had left her with a small sum of money at a little German hotel, promising to come back as soon as possible after he had seen his father. When the money which he had left for her became low, she had been sent to a poor German family. She never believed that he whom she called her English husband had forsaken her. Something, she felt sure, had happened to prevent him from coming back to her. I hope she was right. However, he never came; she died, and died in agonies, calling for him, for her child, for her happy home in Germany, and with her last breath and her last tears for her mother! She never divulged any names. She died and was buried with her child.
Can society do nothing for these poor victims? Can we only call them hard names—some of them being the most gentle, the most loving, the most innocent creatures in the world! Have we not even some Pharisees left among us who will go out one by one, beginning at the eldest even unto the last, instead of throwing a stone at her? Who is to solve this problem if not He who said: “Neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin no more”? And she, the poor girl, was she really so great a sinner? She did not look so. And if she was, had she not expiated her sin and been purified by the most awful suffering? She looked so pure and innocent that Heine’s lines were constantly coming into my mind:—
Mir ist’s als ob ich die Hände
Auf’s Haupt Dir legen sollt’,
Und beten dass Gott Dich behüte,