Impressions and experiences

by William Dean Howells

VI.

The actual practice of fraud, even when you discover it, must give you interesting question, unless you are cock-sure of your sociology. I was once met by a little girl on a cross-street in a respectable quarter of the town, who burst into tears at sight of me, and asked for money to buy her sick mother bread. The very next day I was passing through the same street, and I saw the same little girl burst into tears at the sight of a benevolent-looking lady, whom undoubtedly she asked for money for the same good object. The benevolent-looking lady gave her nothing, and she tried her woes upon several other people, none of whom gave her anything. I was forced to doubt whether, upon the whole, her game was worth the candle, or whether she was really making a provision for her declining years by this means. To be sure, her time was not worth much, and she could hardly have got any other work, she was so young; but it seemed hardly a paying industry. By any careful calculation, I do not believe she would have been found to have amassed more than ten or fifteen cents a day; and perhaps she really had a sick mother at home. Many persons are obliged to force their emotions for money, whom we should not account wholly undeserving; yet I suppose a really good citizen who found this little girl trying to cultivate the sympathies of charitable people by that system of irrigation would have had her suppressed as an impostor.

In a way she was an impostor, though her sick mother may have been starving, as she said. It is a nice question. Shall we always give to him that asketh? Or shall we give to him that asketh only when we know that he has come by his destitution honestly? In other words, what is a deserving case of charity—or, rather, what is not? Is a starving or freezing person to be denied because he or she is drunken or vicious? What is desert in the poor? What is desert in the rich, I suppose the reader would answer. If this is so, and if we ought not to succor an undeserving poor person, then we ought not to succor an undeserving rich person. It will be said that a rich person, however undeserving will never be in need of our succor, but this is not so clear. If we saw a rich person fall in a fit before the horses of a Fifth Avenue omnibus, ought not we to run and lift him up, although we knew him to be a man whose life was stained by every vice and excess, and cruel, wanton, idle, luxurious? I know that I am imagining a quite impossible rich person; but once imagined, ought not we to save him all the same as if he were deserving? I do not believe the most virtuous person will say we ought not; and ought not we, then, to rescue the most worthless tramp fallen under the wheels of the Juggernaut of want? Is charity the reward of merit?

VII.

My friend who was not sure that Christ’s doctrine was the last word in regard to charity, was quite sure that you ought to have a conscience against dead-beats, whom I suggested for his consideration, especially the dead-beats who come to your house and try to work you upon one pretext or another. He said he never gave to them, and I asked what he answered them when they professed themselves in instant want; and whether he plumply denied them; and it appeared that he told them he had other use for his money. I suspect this was a proper answer to make. It had never occurred to me, but I think I will try it with the next one who comes, and see what effect it has upon him. Hitherto I have had no better way than to offer them a compromise: if they ask twenty, to propose ten; and if they ask ten, to propose five; and so on down. The first time I did this (it was with an actor, who gave me his I O U—the first and only I O U that I ever got: I suppose he was used to giving it on the stage) it seemed to me that I had made ten dollars, and since then it has seemed to me that I made five dollars on several occasions; but I now think this was an illusion, and that I only saved the money: I did not actually add to my store.

It is usually indigent literature which presents itself with these imaginative demands, and I think usually fictionists of the romantic school. I do not know but it would be well for me as a man of principle to confine my benefactions to destitute realists: I am sure it would be cheaper. Last winter there came to me a gentleman thrown out of employment by the completion of an encyclopedia he had been at work on, and he said that he was in absolute want of food for his family, who had that morning been set out with all his household stuff on the sidewalk for default of rent. I relieved his immediate necessity, and suggested to him that if he would write a simple, unrhetorical account of his eviction I could probably sell it for him; that this sort of thing mostly happened to the inarticulate classes; and that he had the chance of doing a perfectly fresh thing in literature. He caught at the notion, and said he would begin at once, and I said the sooner the better. He asked if it would not be well to get the narrative type-written, and I begged him not to wait for that; but he said that he knew a person who would typewrite it for him without charge. I could only urge haste, and he went away in a glow of enterprise. He left with me the address of a twenty-five cent lodging-house in the Bowery; for he explained that he had got money enough, by selling his furniture on the sidewalk to send his family into the country, and he was living alone and as cheaply as he could. While at work on his narrative he came for more relief, and then he vanished out of my knowledge altogether. I had a leisure afternoon, and went down into the Bowery to his lodging-house, and found that he really lodged there, but he was then out; and so far as I am concerned he is out still. I am out myself, in the amount I advanced him, and which he was to repay me from the money for his eviction article. He never wrote it, apparently; and perhaps his experience of eviction lacked the vital element of reality. I am quite sure he was at heart a romanticist, for he was an Englishman, and the Englishmen are all romanticists.

VIII.

I was at one time worked for a period of years by a German-born veteran of our war, whom I was called out to see one night from dinner, when I was full of good cheer, and, of course, quite helpless against a case of want like his. He represented that he was the victim of an infirmity brought on by falling from a burning bridge under the rebel fire, and was liable to be overtaken by it at any moment; and he showed me all sorts of surgeons’ certificates in proof of the fact, as well as kindly notes from college professors and clergymen. I had, therefore, a double motive for befriending him. I had as little wish that he should be overtaken by his infirmity in my reception-room as that he should go on sleeping in unfinished houses and basement areas; and so I gave him some money at once. He was to have his pension money at the end of the month, and till then he said he could live on what I gave him. I hurried him out of the house as fast as I could, for I did not feel safe from his infirmity while he was there. But he kept coming back, and always, in view of his threatening infirmity, got money from me; I am not sure that I always pitied him so much. At last he agreed to seek refuge in a soldiers’ home, upon my urgence, and I lost sight of him for several years. When he reappeared, one summer, at the seaside, as destitute as ever, and as threatening as ever in regard to his infirmity, it seemed that he had passed the time in working his way from one soldiers’ home to another, in Maine and in New York, in Virginia and in Ohio, but everywhere, because of some informality in his papers, the gates were closed against him. I gave him a suit of clothes and some more money, and I thought I had done with him at last, for he said that now, as soon as he got his next pension money, he was going home to Germany, to spend his last years with his brother,—a surgeon, retired from the German army,—who could take care of him and his infirmity, and they could live cheaply together, upon their joint pensions. I applauded so wise a plan, and we parted with expressions of mutual esteem. Two or three months later, after I had come from the seaside place, where he visited me, to New York for the winter, he presented himself again to me. Heaven knows how he had found me out, but there he was, with his infirmity, and his story was that now he had money enough to buy his steamer ticket to Hamburg, but that he lacked his railroad fare from Hamburg to the little village where his brother lived. His notion seemed to be that I should subscribe with others to supply the amount; but I had at last a gleam of worldly wisdom. I said I thought the subscription business had gone on long enough; and he assented that it had at least gone on a good while.

“Very well, then,” I added; “you go now with the money you have for your steamer ticket, and buy it. Come back here with the ticket and I will not oblige you to wait till you can collect your railroad fare from different people; I will give you the whole of it myself.”

Will it be credited that this sufferer did not come back with his steamer ticket? I have never seen him since, though a few weeks later I went to call upon him at the ten-cent hotel in the Bowery where he said he slept. The clerk said he was staying there, but he could not throw any light upon his intention of going back to Germany, for he had never heard him say anything about it. He was out at the moment, like my romanticist Englishman.