Recalling all my childhood and girlhood experience with the poor, I am led by every path of logic to believe that they have some secret power of their own—some divine right and authority by which they rule, beside which the most ancient dynasties are but tricks of evanescence, and the infallibility of the Pope a mere political exigency. The powers they wield would seem to me unique. Show me a dictatorship, empire, oligarchy, system, or a suzerainty, seignory or pashawlic, which presides over and possesses anything commensurate with their realm; which sways and commands anything comparable to their wide dominion!
Will you show me any other people outside of the fairy-books who can put the most fearful calamity on like a cloak and doff it at will, who can augment their families to seven or eight children overnight, and reduce them as readily to five or six the following day, if it but seem to them advisable? Where outside their ranks is there any one capable of persuading you that it is a privilege to sleep cold so that some Darius you never saw or care to see shall, he and his allegorical mule, go better warmed? Who else, being neither of your kith nor kin, has such power over you that, with a mere bloodshot eye and shiver of the shoulders, he can turn your automobile, your furs, your warmth, and all your pleasant pleasures into Dead Sea apples of discomfort? Or, did any of your own class, by merely playing "Ben Bolt," raggedly and horribly off the key, under a grape-arbor, exercise so great a power over you that, having given him what you had, you went awed and chastened of all vanity, and set his name in your prayers that night as the Church service does the king? Are these people of rank who can do this? Or will you still cling to your aristocracies?
It is likely that I shall be accused of sentimentality. Some will say that to talk of the power of the poor is but cruel irony. If I would speak wisely and not as one of the foolish women, let me live and work among the poor, or better still, be of them. This is the only way fairly to judge them.
I am of a like opinion; and am therefore resolved to ask you to let me speak of a later time when I myself was poor, and of the wider knowledge of the powers of the poor which that circumstance afforded me. For, in my advantageous days, I was permitted only to serve the poor, the discouraged, the improvident; later, I was promoted to be, at least in a measure, of their fellowship.
IV
MAMIE FAFFELFINGER
The nouveaux pauvres are, I believe, as a rule, fully as awkward with their poverty as the nouveaux riches with their wealth. They have not the true grand manner. They are not a whit more born to the rags than your suddenly prosperous parvenu to the purple. It is difficult to be at ease with them. Their behaviors, their manners, their speech, more often their silences, are forever reminding you of their former mode of living.
For these and other reasons, I willingly pass over those intervening years, when, though distinctly poor, I was unaccustomed, and wore my changed conditions, I do not doubt, awkwardly. I pass on to a later and more fixed season when, thrown wholly now on my own resources, and totally untrained and unfitted for such an emergency, I made shift to support myself, to live meagrely, and to endure what I took to be a well-nigh intolerable poverty.
Poverty is a variable term and much subject to comparison. Some will allow it only to those who have been born to it. To have been always half-starved, these think, and to carry a basket from door to door—that is to be poor. But it is idle to think of cold and hunger to the point of beggary as the only cold and hunger there are. Not alone are there degrees of cold and hunger of the body,—discomfortable and ill-nourished living,—but there are, as well, things which seem to me even more difficult to endure—unsatisfied hunger of the mind and heart and a most cruel and persistent chill of the spirit. The literal-minded may need to see the open sore, the sightless eye, or the starved countenance, before their pity is moved; but he who has ever touched the spiritual values will know—with a tenderness that is mercy—that in one who never asked for pity, one who perhaps even went outwardly gay, there may be hidden hurts borne unflinchingly; intolerable darknesses not complained of; crippled powers which once went proud and free; and a heart and mind which have endured, it may be, starved hours. These are, I believe, some of the most real poverties that the soul may be called on to endure.
Yet, God forbid that, having tasted some of them, I should not bear true witness! There are some hidden springs in these also. Here also, in what you would take to be so dry, so arid a land, there will have been wells and fountains, and locusts and honey for those cut off from their kind. But of these things I would speak later. I wish at present to tell of my further adventures with the poor, when I myself had become more nearly one of them.
Under the conditions I have mentioned my life had of course changed greatly. Most of the old fond bonds were broken; but there were new and even closer ones to be assumed, newer and larger responsibilities to be undertaken.