Delphi complete works of.., p.1417
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells, page 1417
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 cock-sure 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 hags 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 he rid of me; and heaven knows how glad I was to he 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.
THE CLOSING OF THE HOTEL
IT scarcely began before the last of August, when the guests ebbed away by floods, in every train. The end of the season was purely conventional. One day the almanac said it was August, and the hotel was full; another day the almanac said it was September, and the vast caravansary was instantly touched with depletion, and within a week it hung loose upon its inmates like the raiment upon the frame of a man who has been banting. There was no change in the weather; that remained as summer-like as ever, and grew more and more divinely beautiful. The conditions continued the same, only more agreeable; the service was still abundant and perfect; the table was of an unimpaired variety; there was no such sudden revival of business or pleasure in the city that people should abandon the leisure of the sea-shore; the ocean smiled as serenely, the breakers crashed as lyrically along the beach; the country, for those who were to prolong their outing, would be dry and dusty. But a certain Action of the calendar had reported itself in the human consciousness; and, as men are the prey of superstition and emotion, the population of the huge hostelry yielded by a single impulse to the pressure of the pretence that it was September.
I
Huge, I have called the hostelry, and I do not know that I can add to the effect of size which I wish to impart by saying that it is of a veritably American immensity. It stretches along the sea like the shore of a continent; and, when I walked from one end of its seaward veranda to the other, I felt as if I were going from Castine in Maine to St. Augustine in Florida. Really, it is only the fifth of a mile in length, but I have ordinarily lived in houses so much shorter that my fancy takes wing when I think of it, and will not brook a briefer flight. In like manner, when I speak of its thousand dwellers as a population, I am perhaps giving way to an effect of habitually sharing my roof with four or five persons.
They were nearly a thousand when I came, but the place was so spacious that I had large areas of the piazza to myself whenever I liked, and I was often a solitary wayfarer up and down the halls that projected themselves in dimmer and dimmer perspective between the suites of rooms on the right hand and on the left. It was the dining-room, with its forest of pine posts, its labyrinth of tables, its army of black waiters, and its only a little larger army of guests, which gave that impression of a dense overpeopling, such as one could not feel in greater degree even in the tenement quarters of the East Side. This was peculiarly the case on a Sunday, when the guests had guests; and in the tramp of the black forces, the clash of crockery, and the harsh jangle of the cutlery, mingled with the dull, subdued sound of the guttling and guzzling, there was something like the noise of a legion stirring in its harness and hailing Cæsar with the war-like devotion inspired by a munificent donative.
In the early morning there was a hardly less powerful impression of numbers, when the crying children, the half-hushed quarrelling of some husbands and wives, and the loud and loving adieux of others parting for the day, burst the frail partitions of their rooms and mixed in the corridors with the rush of the porters’ trunk - bearing trucks, pushed over the long carpeted stretches with the voluble clatter of so many lawn-mowers, the flight of the call-boys’ feet, the fierce clangor of the chambermaids’ bells, and the strongly brogued controversies and gossip of the chambermaids themselves. No doubt all these effects were exaggerated by the senses just unfolding themselves in the waking consciousness, and taking angry note of the disturbing influences without. But the multitude sheltered by a single roof was nevertheless very great: at the height of the season, the guests and the servants, the drones and the workers, were some fifteen hundred together.
II
All at once, as I say, a great part of the multitude vanished. All at once, on the verandas, and in the wide office swept with yet cooler currents from the sweet-breathed sea, I was sensible of a sudden decimation. I cannot fix the date with precision, but one night at about half-past eight the great moony electrics which swung in space high over the floors of the office, the ball-room, and the dining-room paled their effectual fires, which they never afterward resumed, and left us to the bat-like waverings of the naphtha gas. I remember the sinking of the heart with which my senses took cognizance of the fact. No one spoke or audibly noted it; the talking groups talked on in fallen tones; the people who were reading books or papers drew them a little nearer, or put them a little farther; those who were writing letters at the long tables in the reading-room silently adjusted their vision to the obscurity. It was like the effect of some august natural catastrophe; the general disposition was to ignore the fact, as we shall perhaps try to ignore the fact that the world has begun to burn up when it begins to burn, and pretend that it is merely a fire over in Hoboken or Long Island City that the department will soon have under control.
It may have been the morning of that day or the morning of the next, but it was at least some neighboring morning that I sauntered down to one of the forenoon trains and saw a large detachment of our colored troops departing. They were very gay, as they nearly always are, poor fellows; and they were exchanging humorous and derisive adieux with a detachment of those who were to remain, and who pretended on their part to mock their departing comrades. These helped them off with their baggage, wheeling the heavy truck-loads of the trunks which the porters left to them; and, when all was ready, shaking hands again and, again, and telling them to be good to themselves. At the last moment a very short, stout, little black man appeared with a truck heaped high with baggage, and rushed it down the long esplanade to the platform beside the train, amid the wild cheers and wagers of the going and staying spectators. He had all the cry till the train actually started, when a young colored brother burst out of the front door of a car from which it had detached itself and began to run it down with a heavy grip-sack flying wildly about and beating his legs and flanks. He had taken his place in this car unaware of its fate, and had remained in it, exulting from the open window in his sole possession; and now the secret of his proprietorship had been revealed to his dismay. Hut it was a very kindly train; when his pursuit became known, the locomotive obligingly slowed to a stand, and he was pulled aboard the rear platform amid a jubilation which few real advantages inspire in this world.
III
An indefinable gloom settled upon me as the train curved out into the marsh, and the laughing, chattering, cheering, hat-waving remnant came back to the hotel and dispersed about their work. There were still a great many of them, and there were still a great many of us, but I felt that the end had begun. I do not know whether I felt this fact more keenly or not when the dentist, whose presence I had been tacitly proud of all through August, abandoned the house which he had helped to render metropolitan. But I am sure that it was a definite shock to lose him; and that the tooth which his presence had held in abeyance asserted itself in a wild throe at his going. Once as I passed the door of his office his name was on it and his hours; when I returned fifteen minutes later to ask an appointment with him his name was gone, and the useless hours alone remained. On his way to take passage in his cat-boat for the farthermost parts of the Great South Bay, he kindly stopped and advised about the grumbling tooth. Then he passed out of the hotel, and left it to ache if it must, with an unrequited longing for the filling fatally delayed.
The doctor went a week later, but before this other changes had taken place, among which the most cataclysmal was the passing of the band, which vanished, as it were, in a sudden crash of silence. The whole month long I had heard it playing in the afternoon midway of the long veranda, and in the evening on its platform in the ballroom, and with my imperfect knowledge of music had waited each day and night till it came to that dissolute, melancholy melody to which, the Eastern girls danced their wicked dance at the World’s Fair; not because I like dissolute and melancholy things, but because I was then able to make sure what tune the band was playing. I had in this way become used to the band, and I missed it poignantly, if one can miss a thing poignantly; which. I doubt. Other people seemed to enjoy it, and I like to see people enjoying themselves. Besides, its going brought the dancing to a close, which I enjoyed myself. —
I mean that I enjoyed looking at the dancing. This was for the most part, even at the height of our gayety, performed by boys and girls, and very young children, whom I saw led away to bed heart-broken at nine o’clock. One small couple of these I loved very much. I fancied them a little brother and sister, and I delighted in their courage and perseverance in taking the floor for every dance, and through all changes of tune and figure turning solemnly round and round with their arms about each other’s waists. One night there came a bad, bad boy, who posted himself in front of them and plagued them, jumping up and down before them and hindering their serious gyration. Another evening the little brother was cross and would not dance, and the little sister had to pull him out on the floor and make him.
Sometimes, however, there were even grown people on the floor. Then I chose a very pretty young couple, whom I called my couple, and shared their joy in the waltz without their knowing it. We were by all odds the best dancers and the best looking. We stayed long enough to poison the others with jealousy, but we always went away rather early. When the band left, all this innocent pleasure ended. There was one delirious evening, indeed, when the floor-manager, in default of other music, whistled a waltz, and the young ladies, in default of young men, trod a mad measure with one another to his sibilation. But this was a dying burst of gayety: it did not and could not happen again.
IV
I have to accuse myself of giving no just idea of the constant flowing and dribbling away of the guests, who never ceased departing. The trains that bore them and their baggage brought no others to replace them, and the house gradually emptied itself until not more than a poor three hundred remained. With each defection of a considerable number of guests there followed a reduction of the helping force, who now no longer departed laughing, but with a touch of that loneliness falling upon us all. It must be understood that we were all staying on in our closing hotel by sufferance. It closed officially on the 10th, but the landlord was to remain, and such guests as wished might remain, too. This made us eager to linger till the very last moment we were allowed.
