Impressions and experiences

by William Dean Howells

I must say that his statement of his own case is usually incoherent. The poor fellows have very little imagination or invention; they might almost as well be realistic novelists. I find that those who strike me for a night’s lodging, when they stop me in the street at night, come as a rule from Pittsburg, and are ironworkers of some sort; the last one said he was a puddler, “A skilled mechanic,” he explained—“what is called a skilled mechanic”; and of course he was only watching for some chance to get back to Pittsburg, though there was no chance of work, from what he told me, after he got there. On the other hand, I find that most of those who ask by day for money to get a dinner are from Philadelphia, or the rural parts of eastern Pennsylvania, though within six months I have extended hospitality (I think that is the right phrase) to two architectural draftsmen from Boston. They were both entirely decent-looking, sober-looking young men, who spoke like men of education, and they each gratefully accepted a quarter from me. I do not attempt to account for them, for they made no attempt to account for themselves; and I think the effect was more artistic so.

I am rarely approached by any professed New-Yorker, which is perhaps a proof of the superior industry or prosperity of our city; but now and then a fellow-citizen who has fallen out asks me for money in the street, and perhaps goes straight and spends it for drink. Drink, however, is as necessary in some forms as food itself, and a rich, generous port wine is often prescribed for invalids. These men, without exception, look like invalids, and I dare say that they would prefer to buy a rich, generous port wine if I gave them money enough. I never do that, though I have a means of making my alms seem greater, to myself at least, by practising a little cordiality with the poor fellows. I do not give grudgingly or silently, but I say, if I give at all, when they ask me, “Why, of course!” or “Yes, certainly”; and sometimes I invite them to use their feeble powers of invention in my behalf, and tell how they wish me to think they have come to the sad pass of beggary. This seems to flatter them, and it makes me feel much better, which is really my motive for doing it.

Now and then they will offer me some apology for begging, in a tone that says, “I know how it is myself”; and once there was one who began by saying, “I know it’s a shame for a strong man like me to be begging, but—” They seldom have any devices for working me, beyond the simple statement of their destitution; though there was a case in which I helped a poor fellow raise a quarter upon a postal order, which he then kept as a pledge of my good faith. Their main reliance seems to be lead-pencils, which they have in all inferior variety. I find that they will take it kindly if you do not want any change back when you have given them a coin worth more than they asked for the pencil, and that they will even let you off without taking the pencil after you have bought it. In the end you have to use some means to save yourself from the accumulation of pencils, unless you are willing to burn them for kindling-wood; and I find the simplest way is not to take them after you have paid for them. It is amusing how quickly you can establish a comity with these pencil people; they will not only let you leave your pencils with them, but they will sometimes excuse you from buying if you remind them that you have bought of them lately. Then, if they do not remember you, they at least smile politely and pretend to do so.

IV.

Ought one to give money to a hand-organist, who is manifestly making himself a nuisance before the door of some one else? I have asked myself this when I have been tempted, and I am not yet quite clear about it. At present, therefore, I give only to the inaudible street minstrels, who earn an honest living, and make no noise about it. I cannot think that a ballad-singer on Sixth Avenue, who pours forth his artless lay amid the roar and rattle of the elevated trains, the jangle and clatter of the horse-cars, the bang of the grocers’ carts, and the thunder of the express-wagons, is practically molesting anybody; and I believe that one can reward his innocent efforts without wronging his neighbors. It is always amusing to have him stop in his most effective phrase to say, “Thank you, thank you, sir,” and then go on again. The other day, as I dropped my contribution into the extended hat, I asked, “How is business?” and the singer interrupted himself to answer, “Nothing-to-brag-of-sir-thank-you,” and resumed with continuous tenderness the “ditty of no tone” that he was piping to the inattentive uproar of the street.

It may be doubted whether a balladist who is not making himself heard is earning his money; but, on the other hand, it may be asked if he is not less regrettable for that reason. A great many good people do not earn their money, and yet by universal consent they seem to have a right to it. We cannot oblige the poor to earn their money, any more than the rich, without attacking the principle on which society is based, and classing ourselves with its enemies. If people get money out of other people, we ought not to ask how they get it, whether it is much or little; and I, at any rate, will not scan too closely the honesty of the inaudible balladist of the avenue. Neither will I question the gains of those silentious minstrels who grind small, mute organs at the corners of the pavement, with a little tin cup beside them to receive tribute. They are usually old, old women, and I suppose Italians; but they seem not to be very distinctively anything. How they can sit upon the cold stone all day long without taking their deaths, passes me to say; and I am inclined to think that they do really earn their money, if not as minstrels, then as monuments of human endurance. The average American grandmother would sneeze in five seconds, under the same conditions, and be laid up for the rest of the winter. But these hardy aliens remain unaffected by cold or wet, light or dark. One night I came upon one sleeping on her curbstone,—such a small, dull wad of out-worn womanhood!—her gray old head bent upon her knees, and her withered arms wound in her thin shawl. It was very chill that night, with a sharp wind sweeping the street that the Street Department had neglected; but this poor old thing slept on, while I stood by her trying to imagine her short and simple annals; a dim, far-off childhood in some peasant hut, a girlhood with its tender dreams, a motherhood with its cares, a grandmotherhood with its pains—the whole round of woman’s life, with want through all, wound into this last result of houseless age at my feet. How much of human life comes to no more—if, indeed, one ought not to say how little comes to so much! I sighed, as people of feeling used to do in the eighteenth century, and dropped a dime into the tin cup. The sound startled the beldame, and I hope that before she woke and looked up at me she had time to dream riches and luxury for the rest of her life. “Bella musica!” I said, with a fine irony, and she smiled and shrugged, and began to feel for the handle of her organ, as if she were willing to begin giving me my money’s worth on the spot. If we did not see such sights every day how impossible they would seem!

V.

The whole spectacle of poverty, indeed, is incredible. As soon as you cease to have it before your eyes,—even when you have it before your eyes,—you can hardly believe it, and that is perhaps why so many people deny that it exists, or is much more than a superstition of the sentimentalist. When I get back into my own comfortable room, among my papers and books, I remember it as I remember something at the theatre. It seems to be turned off, as Niagara does, when you come away. The difficulty here in New York is that the moment you go out again, you find it turned on, full tide. I used to live in a country supposed to be peculiarly infested by beggars; but I believe I was not so much asked for charity in Venice as I am in New York. There are as many beggars on our streets as in Venice, and as for the organized efforts to get at one’s compassion, there is no parallel for New York anywhere. The letters asking aid for air funds, salt and fresh, for homes and shelters, for reading-rooms and eating-rooms, for hospitals and refuges, for the lame, halt, and blind, for the old, for the young, for the anhungered and ashamed, of all imaginable descriptions, storm in with every mail, so that one hates to open one’s letters nowadays; for instead of finding a pleasant line from a friend, one finds an appeal, in print imitating typewriting, from several of the millionaires in the city for aid of some good object to which they have lent the influence of their signatures, and inclosing an envelope, directed but not stamped, for your subscription. You do not escape from the proof of poverty even by keeping indoors amidst your own luxurious environment; besides, your digestion becomes impaired, and you have to go out, if you are to have any appetite for your dinner; and then the trouble begins on other terms.

One of my minor difficulties, if I may keep on confessing myself to the reader, is a very small pattern of newsboys, whom I am tempted to make keep the change when I get a one-cent paper of them and give them a five-cent piece. I see men, well dressed, well brushed, with the air of being exemplary citizens, fathers of families, and pillars of churches, wait patiently or impatiently, while these little fellows search one pocket and another for the pennies due, or run to some comrade Chonnie or Chimmie for them; and I cannot help feeling that I may be doing something very disorganizing or demoralizing in failing to demand my change. At first I used to pass on without apparently noticing that I had given too much, but I perceived that then these small wretches sometimes winked to their friends, in the belief that they had cheated me; and now I let them offer to get the change before I let them keep it. I may be undermining society, and teaching them to trust in a fickle fortune rather than their own enterprise, by overpaying them; but at least I will not corrupt them by letting them think they have taken advantage of my ignorance. If the reader will not whisper it again, I will own that I have sometimes paid as high as ten cents for a one-cent paper, which I did not want, when it has been offered me by a very minute newsboy near midnight; and I have done this in conscious defiance of the well-known fact that it is a ruse of very minute newsboys to be out late when they ought to be in bed at home, or at the Home (which seems different), in order to work the sympathies of unwary philanthropists. The statistics in regard to these miscreants are as unquestionable as those relating to street beggars who have amassed fortunes and died amidst rags and riches of dramatic character. I am sorry that I cannot say where the statistics are to be found.