I assured Mrs. S. that I would do all in my power to prevent her children being taken from her, and I was soon downstairs, where I found Miss Alten waiting. We walked some distance together without speaking a word—just eyeing one another. We passed a lunch room. I asked her to have a cup of coffee, feeling sure she would refuse. To my great astonishment she accepted, and soon we were sitting at a table with the steaming coffee before us. The pleasant warmth of the place and the steam from the cups soon melted the ice. She was a handsome dark girl of about twenty, of Jewish-Russian descent. She had a pleasant voice, yet how harsh and cold was her speech awhile ago, exactly the same voice as Cram's. I wondered then! not now! Afterward I learned that this was the professional tone, the intimidating note, as Cram called it.
"Why did you leave Mrs. S., that poor woman, without coal?" I asked. "It's so very cold and you know she has no money to buy any!"
"Oh! she's a pest," Miss Alten replied, making a grimace that passed like an ugly cloud of hatred over her young face. "That was to punish her, to show her that she must not disregard my authority," she continued. "Last month she finished the coal. When I came to see her she told me the story, and I told her she would get it next week. Instead of waiting, what do you think she did? She came up to the office to beg. So! I thought, you come to the office. Wait! you'll wait a month before you get any at all. And that is why it happened. To show her that I am the boss. We have to have some means of keeping them in order, you know."
"Yes, but it is not fair to punish her. And for what? She felt cold, so did the children, and she's a mother. She was afraid of sickness for them. Why, great God, they could have died." Miss Alten laughed at me long and scornfully.
"Die, die? Her children die? They never die. They never die. Their children never die, these beggars."
The coffee was finished. Miss Alten buttoned her coat, put on her gloves, and saying good-bye she quickly disappeared from the table. I sat more than an hour, drinking one cup of coffee after another. I wanted to think but my mind was in confusion. "They never die. They never die," rang in my ears. And to think that the wages of these women investigators are seldom higher than ten dollars per week, and that if somebody did not help them out, a brother, a sister, or father, they themselves would be depending on charity, or—
"I'll have her discharged, too," I finally decided, and with this determination I went out again into the street.
Aimlessly I walked through the slums. I had never taken so much interest in every minute detail of the street as I did at that time. Every house, every window, every door meant something, said something. Tales of untold misery and despair and shame. I looked at the clothes of all the children and tried to guess, figure out, which one's mother was an applicant and which was not. Unconsciously I had divided the world into two classes—one that applies to charity and one that does not.
Then I made up my mind that Miss Alten was a relative, perhaps a sister, of Cram's, and I felt sorry that I had not asked her about it. In our discussion his name had been mentioned several times, and she had always affirmed that "he was the finest gentleman and the best investigator of the whole bunch."