PITTSBURGH TYPES.
IMMIGRANT OUT OF WORK.
First I had to inspect his home, which was neat and well-furnished. Then he ordered his children (three daughters, eight, ten and thirteen) who were going to bed, to dress and recite their lessons for the stranger. While the girls rather sleepily displayed some of their English learning, Mamaj stood by, hands in his pockets, and nodded proudly.
A quality that I have noted again and again among the Slavs is their readiness to help their countrymen,—already instanced by the case of Málek's father loaning money to a robbed fellow immigrant. Sometimes this generosity shows itself amid the most adverse circumstances, as it did with Koval. Koval (the same man that I mentioned as having wandered about before settling in Pittsburgh) has himself had enough misfortune during his three years in America to drive all unselfish feeling for others out of a man's heart. Two years ago he sent for his family and his younger brother. Immediately upon their arrival his three children and his brother fell sick with typhoid fever. They were no sooner well than Koval himself went down with the fever. This illness, since it drained their resources, forced them to fill their home with boarders,—which was a hardship on the slight wife, all the more keenly felt because keeping boarders had been no part of their original plan. Then all three of the children were taken ill with the croup. The usual price for a doctor's call is one dollar, but the doctor charged three dollars each visit inasmuch as he had three patients; Koval protested, but had to pay. Two of the children died, and Koval, by this time financially exhausted, had to go in debt to the undertaker for the funerals. And then amid these last disasters came the financial crash, with its misery of unemployment.
Certainly enough to sour the milk of human kindness in any man. But the penniless Koval did not drive out his penniless boarders, now only a burden. Instead, he gave them a sleeping place, divided with them the food he could get on credit from the grocery, for since he was a steady man and a householder Koval still had some credit; and for the rest of the food, he and his boarders would go and stand in the bread line, which had been established in Woods Run. Not only did Koval not throw out the penniless boarders, who already encumbered him, but he took in seven additional people who were in distress. Two of these latter were young men from his native village who had landed in Pittsburgh in the midst of the depression; two were Russians who had been found wandering through the streets, nearly frozen, by a policeman, who brought them to Koval; the others were a countryman, his wife and child of six, and to accommodate these Koval had to give up his own bed. During the period of my acquaintance with him Koval was supporting twelve boarders, only one of whom was paying him a cent.
What he was doing seemed quite the natural thing to Koval; he hardly seemed conscious of his generosity. "Why do you keep all these people?" I asked him. "Why, what else could I do?" he returned. "They have no work and no other place to go. I cannot throw a man into the street. They will go themselves when they can."
Frequently circumstances throw the burden of the home upon the child. In looking into an accident case I called at a home in Saw Mill alley,—a cheerless, dingy neighborhood that is flooded every year by the high water. I was received in the kitchen by a slight Polish girl of fifteen, and soon discovered that she was the real head of the home. Annie had just finished the wash, and at such a time even the best of houses are apt to be in disorder, but here everything was neat and clean. She told me her story willingly enough. Her father, who had been a laborer in one of the mills, had been killed by an engine while working in the yard at night. Her mother had remarried, and soon had herself been killed by the explosion of a kerosene lamp. Annie was now keeping house for a brother and her stepfather. As the seventeen-year-old brother was rather shy, and as the stepfather was a night-watchman, naturally a man of no authority and allowed by his work little opportunity to exercise it even had he possessed it, the main control of the household has passed into Annie's hands. That authority she was using well, as was shown not only by the tidiness of the house, but by the fact that it is chiefly through her influence that her brother is attending night school. She has energy, determination and character. She reads and writes both English and Polish. She said she liked to read books, history especially, but that she hadn't the time.
Annie's stepfather is soon to marry a widow, but this further complication of her already complicated family relations does not seem to trouble her in the least. In fact she was quite enthusiastic over her future stepmother. "She came to see me the other day," she said, "and she was awful nice. Oh, she's fine all right, and she's rich!"
"Rich? How rich?" I asked.
"Oh, she's got a lot o' money! It's a benefit she got from a society when her first man died. She's got $1,200!"