TO RETURN THE COFFIN
and its accompaniments to the undertaker. He learned that same morning that the widower’s plea of poverty was, as it often proved to be with the occupants of those slum-tenements, a mere pretence. The bereaved descendant of Irish royalty had $12 due on that week’s work, besides $39 in a savings bank. The man returned the coffin, etc., that morning to the undertaker, telling him that his reverence Mr. ⸺ thought it not good enough for the lady, and that a twenty-dollar coffin should be sent, along with a hearse and two carriages. For payment Mr. ⸺ would be accountable; the widower had agreed to repay him by weekly instalments. The ingenious ruse did not succeed, for the undertaker went straight to Mr. ⸺. Whereon the disappointed and bereaved husband went on a week’s hard drink. The body would have been left unburied, had not Mr. ⸺ ordered back the original cheap coffin and seen to the interment. This is the most typical case of one type of pauperism peculiar, I believe, to the lowest type of Irish and English paupers. It is not the opinion of this clergyman that such abject forms of mean and servile ingratitude are found among the most degraded class of our native Canadian tramps. It results from social conditions which exist in the old country but not here.
Another instance related by Mr. ⸺ illustrates what has been said already about drunkenness being at once the source and the solace of so many of the slum miseries; it is the atmosphere of their life, the pabulum on which they feed, the destroyer for whom they sacrifice wife, child, and finally life. The slum drunkenness is not that of the graceful orgies of an opera scene—it is terribly realistic, it is the sullen sodden ivresse of our Canadian rendering of L’Assomoir?
I proceed to tell Mr. ⸺’s terrible but true tale of women drunk on the floor at a funeral. Mr. ⸺ was asked to undertake to read prayers at a house in a lane out of one of the streets in St. John’s ward. On reaching the house he found every preparation duly made, a hearse at the door, a plain black-painted shell, with the body duly laid out within it on a table. The people in the room were
A ROUGH-LOOKING CROWD
of both sexes, some of them younger and apparently less hardened than the rest; all had been drinking heavily, but they received the clergyman with high good humor, which they carried so far as to interrupt Mr. ⸺ when he began the funeral service with groans, sighs, and remarks which were judged appropriate. Thus the versicle, “Man that is born of a woman is full of trouble.” Mr. ⸺ was interrupted by remarks such as, “Thrue for yer riverence, and its meself knows it!” “His riverence is right, and may the hivens be his bed.” All went tolerably well till Mr. ⸺ proposed to offer a prayer, and requested all present to kneel. Now all the assistants at this strange funeral were sufficiently sober to keep their feet, and had the Presbyterian ritual been observed, all would have gone well. The men managed to kneel—but the women, once they tried to kneel, lost the center of gravity and toppled over on the floor, whereon when Mr. ⸺ left the place, they were sprawling in the vain effort to rise!
The clergyman whose opinions I am now quoting was convinced that in slum-life there are many cases of guiltless, undeserved poverty, not due to drink nor to vice, but to other causes. As an instance of this, he told me that he had been informed that a poor, hardworking widow and her three little girls, living in a room in a tenement house on ⸺ street, were in a state of destitution. He proceeded thither at once. In a bare, unfurnished room, without a spark of fire, though it was February of a severe winter, were three little girls, each covered by a single ragged cotton garment. Their father was in a drunkard’s grave; their mother, a frail, weak woman, was out of work. She could not earn enough to pay her weekly rent for that poor place and provide a loaf of bread daily for her children. It lay on the table ready for them to help themselves, but the poor little things had but little appetite. The youngest was five years old, the eldest seven. They lay in bed all day under the shelter of a single coverlet, for they had
NO CLOTHES, NO SHOES, THAT WINTER DAY.
The kind-hearted clergyman at once gave good food and fuel. Grateful warmth and nourishment followed in his wake, the little girls revived, and in the words of the Book, whose lessons his life is devoted to carry out, “The widow’s heart was made to sing for joy.”