Impressions and experiences

by William Dean Howells

Not long before his visit I had a call from another imaginative person, whom I was not able to meet so fully in her views. This was a middle-aged lady who said she had come on that morning from Boston to see me. She owned we had never met before, and that she was quite unknown to me; but apparently she did not think this any bar to her asking me for two hundred and fifty dollars to aid in the education of her son. I confess that I was bewildered for a moment. My simple device of offering half the amount demanded would have been too costly: I really could not have afforded to give her one hundred and twenty-five dollars, even if she had been willing to compromise, which I was not sure of. I am afraid the reader will think I shirked. I said that I had a great many demands upon me, and I ended by refusing to give anything. I really do not know how I had the courage; perhaps it was only frenzy. She insisted, with reasons for my giving which she laid before me; but either they did not convince me, or I had hardened my heart so well that they could not prevail with me, and she got up and went away. As she went out of the room, she looked about its appointments, which I had not thought very luxurious before, and said that she saw I was able to live very comfortably, at any rate; and left me to the mute reproach of my carpets and easy-chairs.

I do not remember whether she alleged any inspiration in coming to see me for this good object; but a summer or two since a lady came to me, at my hotel in the mountains, who said that she had been moved to do so by an impulse which seemed little short of mystical. She said that she was not ordinarily superstitious, but she had wakened that morning in Boston with my name the first thing in her thoughts, and it seemed so directly related to what she had in view that she could not resist the suggestion it conveyed that she should come at once to lay her scheme before me. She took a good deal of time to do this; and romantic as it appeared, I felt sure that she was working with real material. It was of a nature so complex, however, and on a scale so vast, that I should despair of getting it intelligibly before the reader, and I will not attempt it. I listened with the greatest interest; but at the end I was obliged to say that I thought her mystical impulse was mistaken; I was sorry it had deceived her; I was quite certain that I had not the means or the tastes to enter upon the æsthetic enterprise which she proposed. In return, I suggested a number of millionaires whose notorious softness of heart, or whose wish to get themselves before the public by their good deeds, ought to make them more available, and we parted the best of friends. I am not yet quite able to make up my mind that she was not the victim of a hypnotic suggestion from the unseen world, and altogether innocent in her appeal to me.

XI.

In fact, I am not able to think very ill even of impostors. It is a great pity for them, and even a great shame, to go about deceiving people of means; but I do not believe they are so numerous as people of means imagine. As a rule, I do not suppose they succeed for long, and their lives must be full of cares and anxieties, which of course one must not sympathize with, but which are real enough, nevertheless. People of means would do well to consider this, and at least not plume themselves very much upon not being cheated. If they have means, it is perhaps part of the curse of money, or of that unfriendliness to riches which our religion is full of, that money should be got from them by unworthy persons. They have their little romantic superstitions, too. One of these is the belief that beggars are generally persons who will not work, and that they are often persons of secret wealth, which they constantly increase by preying upon the public. I take leave to doubt this altogether. Beggary appears to me in its conditions almost harder than any other trade; and from what I have seen of the amount it earns, the return it makes is smaller than any other. I should not myself feel safe in refusing anything to a beggar upon the theory of a fortune sewn into a mattress, to be discovered after the beggar has died intestate. I know that a great many good people pin their faith to such mattresses; but I should be greatly surprised if one such could be discovered in the whole city of New York. On the other hand, I feel pretty sure that there are hundreds and even thousands of people who are insufficiently fed and clad in New York; and if here and there one of these has the courage of his misery, and asks alms, one must not be too cocksure it is a sin to give to him.

Of course one must not pauperize him: that ought by all means to be avoided; I am always agreeing to that. But if he is already pauperized; if we know by statistics and personal knowledge that there are hundreds and even thousands of people who cannot get work, and that they must suffer if they do not beg, let us not be too hard upon them. Let us refuse them kindly, and try not to see them; for if we see their misery, and do not give, that demoralizes us. Come, I say; have not we some rights, too? No man strikes another man a blow without becoming in sort and measure a devil; and to see what looks like want, and to deny its prayer, has an effect upon the heart which is not less depraving. Perhaps it would be a fair division of the work if we let the deserving rich give only to the deserving poor, and kept the undeserving poor for ourselves, who, if we are not rich, are not deserving, either.

XII.

I should be sorry if anything I have said seemed to cast slight upon the organized efforts at relieving want, especially such as unite inquiry into the facts and the provision of work with the relief of want. All that I contend for is the right—or call it the privilege—of giving to him that asketh, even when you do not know that he needs, or deserves to need. Both here and in Boston I have lent myself—sparingly and grudgingly, I’ll own—to those organized efforts; and I know how sincere and generous they are, how effective they often are, how ineffective. They used to let me go mostly to the Italian folk who applied for aid in Boston, because I could more or less meet them in their own language; but once they gave me a Russian to manage—I think because I was known to have a devotion for Tolstoy and for the other Russian novelists. The Russian in question was not a novelist, but a washer of bags in a sugar-refinery; and at the time I went to make my first call upon him he had been “laid off,” as the euphemism is, for two months; that is, he had been without work, and had been wholly dependent upon the allowance the charities made him. He had a wife and a complement of children—I do not know just how many; but they all seemed to live in one attic room in the North End. I acquainted myself fully with the case, and went about looking for work in his behalf. In this, I think, I found my only use: but it was use to me only, for the people of whom I asked work for him treated me with much the same ignominy as if I had been seeking it for myself; and it was well that I should learn just what the exasperated mind of a fellow-being is when he is asked for work, and has none to give. He regards the applicant as an oppressor, or at least an aggressor, and he is eager to get rid of him by bluntness, by coldness, even by rudeness. After the unavailing activity of a week or two, I myself began to resent the Russian’s desire for work, and I visited him at longer and longer intervals to find whether he had got anything to do; for he was looking after work, too. At last I let a month go by, and when I came he met me at the street door—or, say, alley door—of the tenement-house with a smiling face. He was always smiling, poor fellow, but now he smiled joyously. He had got a job—they always call it a job, and the Italians pronounce it a giobbe. His job was one which testified to the heterogeneous character of American civilization in even amusing measure. The Jews had come into a neighboring street so thickly that they had crowded every one else out; they had bought the Congregational meeting-house, which they were turning into a synagogue, and they had given this orthodox Russian the job of knocking the nails out of the old woodwork. His only complaint was that the Jews would not let him work on Saturday, and the Christians would not let him work on Sunday, and so he could earn but five dollars a week. He did not blame me for my long failure to help him; on the contrary, so far as I could make out from the limited vocabulary we enjoyed in common, he was grateful. But I have no doubt he was glad to be rid of me; and Heaven knows how glad I was to be rid of him.

I do not believe I ever found work for any one, though I tried diligently and I think not unwisely. Perhaps the best effect from my efforts was that they inspired the poor creatures to efforts of their own, which were sometimes successful. I had on my hands and heart for nearly a whole winter the most meritorious Italian family I ever knew, without being able to do anything but sympathize and offer secret alms in little gifts to the children. Once I got one of the boys a place in a book-store, but the law would not allow him to take it because he was not past the age of compulsory schooling. The father had a peripatetic fruit-stand, which he pushed about on a cart; and his great aim was to get the privilege of stationing himself at one of the railroad depots. I found that there were stations which were considered particularly desirable by the fruiterers, and that the chief of these was in front of the old United States court-house. A fruiterer out of place, whose family I visited for the charities, tried even to corrupt me, and promised me that if I would get him this stendio (they Italianize “stand” to that effect, just as they translate “bar” into barra, and so on) he would give me something outright. “E poi, ci sarà sempre la mancia” (“And then there will always be the drink-money”). I lost an occasion to lecture him upon the duties of the citizen; but I am not a ready speaker.

The sole success—but it was very signal—of my winter’s work was getting a young Italian into the hospital. He had got a rheumatic trouble of the heart from keeping a stendio in a cellarway, and when I saw him I thought it would be little use to get him into the hospital. The young doctor who had charge of him, and whom I looked up, was of the same mind. But I could not help trying for him; and when the sisters at the hospital (where he got well, in spite of all) said he could be received, I made favor for an ambulance to carry him to it. It was a beautiful white spring day when I went to tell him the hour the ambulance would call; the sky was blue overhead, the canaries sang in their cages along the street. I left all this behind when I entered the dark, chill tenement-house, where that dreadful poverty-smell struck the life out of the spring in my soul at the first breath. The sick man’s apartment was clean and sweet, through his mother’s care (this poor woman was as wholly a lady as any I have seen); but when I passed into his room, he clutched himself up from the bed, and stretched his arms toward me with gasps of “Lo spedale, lo spedale!” The spring, the coming glory of this world, was nothing to him. It was the hospital he wanted; and to the poor, to the incurable disease of our conditions, the hospital is the best we have to give. To be sure, there is also the grave.