From the Bottom Up Part 13

Dave, of course, was the guest of honour. When my guests were full and warm, they became reminiscent, and I urged them, a few of them, to tell us their stories--to unfold the torn ma.n.u.scripts of their lives.

Dave told his first.

"Boys," he said, "I was one of de toughest gazabos what ever hung aroun' de square. I met dis man an' tried t' bleed 'im, but it warn't no go--'e was on to de game and cudn't be touch't.

"I giv'd 'im a song an' dance story fur weeks. One day 'e sez to me, sez 'e, 'Chum!'--well, say boys, when I went out an' had a luk at meself, sez I, 'Ye dhirty loafer, if a man like dat calls y' "chum,"

why don't y' take a brace an' get on de dead level?' So I did an' I've been on de dead level ever since--ain't I, boss?"

I was able to place Dave as janitor of the church. After he had been there for a while and comfortably housed in the janitor's quarters in the bas.e.m.e.nt, he thought it a propitious time to be reconciled to his wife; so we arranged to have Mary come down and inspect the place. We put extra work into the cleaning of the quarters, furnishing it with some sticks of furniture. Reconciliations were getting to be an old story with Mary, and Dave knew he was going to have difficulty in this new attempt. He finally persuaded her to make a visit to the church.

When he was ready, Dave, in a most apologetic tone, said:

"There is just one thing lacking here."

"What is it Dave?"

"A white tie."

"Where?"

"On you."

The white tie as ecclesiastical appendage I had avoided. I despised it. But Dave a.s.sured me that if Mary came down to look the church over, she would be more interested in my appearance than in the appearance of the church, because what she really wanted was an a.s.surance that Dave was "on the square!" and if he could introduce her to a real minister as his friend, it would enhance his chance.

I sent Dave to the Bowery for a five cent white string tie, and I borrowed a Prince Albert coat. There was an old stovepipe hat in the church--sort of legacy from former pastorates--and it was trotted out, carefully brushed and put on the study table. Then Mary appeared! Dave had instructed me to put up a "tall talk," so I put up the tallest possible. Mary inspected the church, the quarters and the minister; then she looked at Dave and said in an undertone--"This looks on the level."

"You bet your sweet life!" Dave said.

So Mary was installed as "the lady of the temple" at Sixty-one Henry Street, and for seven years ministered to the poor and the needy, and kept in order the House of G.o.d. After her death, Dave remained at the church about a year; then he became my successor as missionary to the lodging houses on the Bowery, where he still works--a sort of humble doctor of the humanities; feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, comforting men in despair.

It seemed to me at that time that what a weak church like that most needed was a strong, powerful church to put its arms around it and give it support. I interviewed Dr. Parkhurst, as I was Chairman of a Committee of the City Vigilance League which he organized. The result was that Dr. Parkhurst's church gave it for a year support and absolute independence of action at the same time. Then the Rev. John Hopkins Dennison, who had been Dr. Parkhurst's a.s.sistant, superseded me in the care of the church, and was able to bring to its support help that I could not have touched. Mr. Dennison's service to that church is worthy of a better record than it has yet received. He performed brilliant service, intensified the life of the church and gathered around it a band of n.o.ble people. He transformed the tower of the church into a kind of modern monastery in which he lived himself, and in which Dowling, the old Irish tinker, had a place also, and which he made a centre of ten years' missionary work chiefly among the lodging houses where I found him.

One day Dowling was walking along the Bowery when a hand was laid roughly on his shoulder and a voice said:

"Ain't you Dowling?"

"Yes."

"What did you do with the loot?"

In the Sepoy Rebellion in India, he had looted the palace of a Rajah with two other soldiers. The most valuable items of the booty were several bamboo canes stuffed with diamonds, rubies and sapphires. In the act of burying them for protection and hiding, one of the soldiers was shot dead; the other two escaped and separated, and all these years each of them had lived in the suspicion that the other had gone back for the loot, and they both discovered on the Bowery that neither of them had and that this valuable stuff was buried in far-off India. Dowling wrote to the Governor-General and told of his part in the affair and volunteered to come out and locate it. But by this time his body was wasted, his steps were tottering and his head bent.

Five-hundred dollars were appropriated by the Indian Government to take him out; but Dowling was destined for another journey; and, in the old tower that he loved so well and where he was beloved by every one who knew him, he lay down and died. They buried him in Plainfield, N.J., and his friends put over him a stone bearing these words that were so characteristic of his life:

"HE WENT ABOUT DOING GOOD"

My next service was in a city of a second cla.s.s beyond the Mississippi River. I had been invited as a pulpit supply in one of its largest churches, but when I arrived I found them in a wrangle over the pastor who had just left and by whose recommendation I was to fill the pulpit. I arrived in the city on a Sunday morning and went from my hotel to the church prepared to preach. I stood for a few minutes in the vestibule, and what I heard led me to go straight out again, never to return.

My first impression of the city was that it contained more vital democracy than any city I had ever been in. It takes an Old World proletarian a long time to outgrow a sense of subserviency. As a missionary and almoner of the rich in New York, this sense was very strong in me. In the West I felt this vital democracy so keenly and saw the vision of political independence so clearly, that my very blood seemed to change. Politically, I was born again.

CHAPTER XIII

LIFE AND DOUBT ON THE BOTTOMS

While studying the social conditions of this city, I took a residence on the banks of the river among the squatters. There were about fifteen hundred people living in shacks on this "no man's land." My residence was a shack for which I paid three dollars a month. It was at the bottom of a big clay bank, and not far from where the city dumped its garbage. There was neither church nor chapel in this neglected district, and the people were mostly foreigners; but the children all spoke English.

During the early part of my stay in that shack, I entered my first great period of doubting--doubt as to the moral order of the universe, doubt on the question of G.o.d. I had gone through some great soul struggles, but this was the greatest. It was for a time the eclipse of my soul. For weeks I lived behind closed doors--I was shut in with my soul. But the community around me called in a thousand ways for help, for guidance, for instruction, and I opened the door of my shack and invited the children in. I organized a Sunday School and taught them ethics and religion. I got up little entertainments for them. I procured a stereopticon, gave them lectures on my experience in Egypt, and lectures on art, biography and history. I had a peculiar method of advertising these lectures. I informed the little cripple boy on the corner. He whispered the information to a section of the huts, at the farthest end of which a golden-haired courier informed another section; so that by the time the lecture was scheduled to begin, my audience was ready, and most of them slid down the clay bank in front of my door. Later I went out through the surrounding towns and cities, lecturing, and raised money for a chapel, and we called it the "Chapel of the Carpenter."

I never knew the meaning of the incarnation until I lived on "the bottoms" with the squatters. I talked of great characters of history; I reviewed great books. I travelled with these children over the great highways of history, science and art, and very soon we had a strong Sunday School, and helpers came from the city--but the door of my own soul was still shut. It seemed to me that my soul was dead. I was without hope for myself: everything around me was dark. Sometimes I locked the door and tried to pray, but no words came, nor thoughts--not a ray of light penetrated the darkness. My mind and intellect became duller and duller. It was at this time that I came across the writings of Schopenhauer; and Schopenhauer suggested to me a method of relief. I may be doing him an injustice, but it was his philosophy that made me reason that, as I did not ask to come into life and had no option, I had a right to go out of it. There was nothing spasmodic in the development of my thought along this line: it was cold, calm reasoning; I had determined to go out of life. So, with the same calm deliberation that I cooked my breakfast, I destroyed every vestige of my correspondence; and, one night went to the river to seek relief. I was sitting on the end of a log when a man, who had been working twelve hours in a packing-house, came out to smoke, after his supper. He had not washed himself. His b.l.o.o.d.y shirt stuck to his skin--he was haggard, pale; and we dropped naturally into conversation. In language intelligible to him I asked him what life meant to him.

"The kids," he said, "that's what it means to me. I work like one of the things I kill every day--I kill hundreds of them, thousands of them every day. I go home and eat like one of them, and sleep like one of them, and go back to hog it again like one of them."

"Do you get tired?"

"Tired? Tired as h.e.l.l!"

"I mean--tired of life?"

"Oh, no," he said, "I aint livin' the best kind of a life, but what I have is better than none. I don't know what's beyond--if there is any life or none at all; but something in me makes me stick to this one.

Besides, if there is any chance for a better life here, he must be a d.a.m.ned coward that would go out of it and leave it undone. Good night."

I saw him retreat to his shack among the tall weeds. I heard the door close. I fancied him lie down in a heap in the corner and go to sleep.

He was a better philosopher than I was, and he had called me a coward, but he had not altered my determination. I began to sweat. It was like the action of a fever on my body, and I became very nervous; but I was determined to meet the crisis, and go.

A sudden change in affairs was created by an unearthly scream--the scream of a woman. I looked around suddenly and discovered that the only two-story shack on "the bottoms" was in a blaze, and the thought occurred to me that I might be of some help and accomplish my purpose at the same time.

In a moment I was beside the burning hut. It appeared that a lamp had exploded upstairs, and that three small children were hemmed in. That was the cause of the scream.

A plank that reached to the upstairs window was lying at the wood pile. I pushed it against the house and climbed like a cat into the burning bedroom. By this time the neighbours had collected, and I helped the woman and lowered the three children down, one by one, and then deliberately groped for the stairs to get hemmed in, the smoke suffocating me as I did so. By the time I found the stairs, my hair was singed, my arms were burned, but I was gradually losing consciousness, and before I reached the bottom I fell, suffocated with the smoke. In that last moment of consciousness, my whole life came up in review. I had no regrets. I had played a part and it was over.

When I came out of coma, I was lying on my cot in the hut, the neighbours crowding my little bedroom and standing outside in scores.

One of the newspapers that had most severely criticized my interference in politics, gave me a pa.s.s to Colorado and return--and in the mountains of Colorado, the door of my soul opened again, and I saw the world beautiful--and opportunities that were golden for helpfulness and service awaiting my touch. So I returned to my hut with the sense of G.o.d more fully developed in me than it had ever been.

They had a system in that city that I was very much ashamed of--that I thought all men ought to be ashamed of--the segregation of the "social evil." I discovered that the city fined these poor creatures of the streets, and that these fines, amounting to thousands of dollars every year, went straight into the public school fund, so that it could truly be said that the more debauched society was, the more efficiently it could educate its children and its youth.

These houses in the red light district were built to imitate castles on the Rhine, and were owned by church people and politicians.

Everybody winked at this condition. One minister of this town uttered a loud protest and took his children out of the public schools, but he had to leave the city. The Christians would not stand for such a protest. The newspapers would not touch it, trustees would not touch it, the great political parties would not touch it.

I joined the Knights of Labour in that city, an organization then in its prime of strength, but they would not touch it. I joined the People's Party in the hope that there I might do something about it.

One of the leading members of that party importuned me to nominate him as presiding officer of the city convention. "On one condition," I told him; "that you appoint me chairman of the committee on resolutions." And the compact was made.

Five men were on that committee, and when I asked the committee to put in a resolution condemning the education of children from this fund, they refused. I could only persuade one of four to indorse my minority report, which, signed by two of us, condemned this remnant of Sodom left over; but it swept the convention and was carried almost unanimously. Even the three men on the resolutions committee who refused to sign it before, voted for it in convention. I am aware that it does not matter from what fund or funds the public school system is supported. I am aware also that one of the things we can do is to make that kind of thing cover up its head.

What I suffered for that resolution can never be recorded.

My period of inclement mental weather was followed by a period of poverty--dest.i.tution rather--I was physically unable to work with my hands and I had not yet tried to earn money by my pen. I was often so reduced by hunger that I could scarcely walk. At such times one feels more grateful for friendship. Into my life then came a few choice souls whose fellowship acted as a dynamic to my life. It was when things were at their worst that George D. Herron found me. The almost Jewish cast of feature, the strange, wonderful voice, the prophetic atmosphere of the man forced me to express the belief that I had never met a human being who seemed to me so like Christ. Then came George A.

Gates, the president of Iowa College where Dr. Herron was a professor.

About the same time came Elia W. Peattie and Ida Doolittle Fleming.