The One Woman Part 9

"A derrick at work in that wreck yesterday fell on a working-man.

He has a wife and four children. We must see how he is getting on."

They got off on the Bowery, turned down a cross street toward the East River, threading their way through the ma.s.ses of people jamming the sidewalks, and dodging missiles from dirty children screaming and romping at play.

"Mercy!" exclaimed Kate, "I thought Broadway and Fifth Avenue and the shopping districts crowded--but this is beyond belief! I didn't know there were so many people in the world."

"And what you see, just a drop in the ocean of humanity. There are miles and miles of these tenements in New York--square mile after square mile, packed from cellar to attic. We have a million and a half crowded behind these grim walls on this island alone."

"Surely not all so ugly and wretched as these?"

"Many worse. But don't let the outside deceive you. Back of these nightmares of scorched mud, festooned with shabby clothes, are thousands of brave loving men and women, living their lives cheerfully, not asking us for pity. Even in this squalor grow beautiful, innocent girls like flowers in a muck-heap. When I see these children growing up thus into fair men and women with such sur-roundings, I know that every babe is born a child of G.o.d, not of the devil."

They climbed a dark stairway and knocked at the back door of a double-decker tenement.

A stout woman opened it, and they entered the tiny kitchen, so small that the table had to be pushed against the wall to pa.s.s it and the family of six could not all eat at one time because the table could not be pulled out into the room.

"How is John this afternoon, Mrs. McDonald?"

"We don't know, sir. The doctor's in there now. If he dies, G.o.d knows what we will do; and if he lives, a cripple, it'll be worse."

The doctor called them into the front room and whispered to Gordon:

"He's got to die, and I'm going to tell him. I'm glad you are here."

He took the man by the hand.

"Well, John, I'm sorry to say so to you, but you must know it. You can't live beyond the day."

The man drew himself upon his elbow, looked at the doctor in a dazed sort of way and then at his wife holding his crying baby in her arms, the other little ones clinging to her dress, and gasped:

"Did you say die? Here--now--to-day--die? And if I do, I leave my helpless ones to starve."

He paused, fingering the covering nervously, shut his jaws firmly and looked at the doctor.

"Almighty G.o.d! I can't die!" he growled through his teeth. "I will not die!"

"No, no, you sha'n't die, John. We'll help you to live!" his wife cried.

"Very well; if you keep on feeling that way you may live," said the doctor cheerfully. "We will hope for the best."

Kate's eyelids drooped as she stood watching this scene as in a dream. She took the woman by the hand as she left:

"I do hope he will live for your sake. I believe he will."

When they reached the street, the doctor said to her:

"Glad to welcome you, Miss Ransom, from the little world into the great one."

"Thank you. I begin to feel I have not been in the world at all before. Will he live, do you think?"

"If he holds that iron will with the grip he has on it now he'll pull through--and be a hopeless invalid for life. He will join the great army of industrial cripples--a havoc that makes war seem harmless. The wrecking corporation have already sent their lawyer and settled his case for eighty-five dollars cash: not enough to bury him. He thought it better than nothing."

The doctor hurried on to another patient.

It had grown quite dark. Gordon took Kate by the arm after the modern fashion, and they threaded their way through the crowds made denser by the return of the working people. She had removed her right glove in the house and did not replace it immediately.

His big hand clasped her rounded, beautiful arm, and a thrill of emotion swept him at the consciousness of her nearness, her sympathy, her open admiration and sweet companionship in his work.

Again, as she walked with the quick, sinuous and graceful swing of her body, he was impressed with her perfect health and vital power.

She had recovered her balance now, and when she spoke it was with contagious enthusiasm.

"I can never thank you enough for opening the door of a real world to me, Doctor," she declared, looking up at him soberly.

"And you have no idea what inspiration you have given the church--just at a time I need it, too," he answered warmly.

"I've been wondering what I did here for nine years, unconscious of this wonderful drama of love and shame, joy and sorrow about me. But what did he mean by an army of cripples greater than the havoc of war?"

"Victims of machinery. It's incredible to those who do not come in contact with it. The railroads alone kill and wound thirty-five thousand working-men every year: this is a small percentage of the grand total. More men are killed and wounded by machinery in America than were killed and wounded any year in the great Civil War, the bloodiest and most fatal struggle in history. We pay billions in pensions to our soldiers, but nothing is done about this. The social order that permits such atrocity must go down before the rising consciousness of human brotherhood. The employers ask, 'Am I my brother's keeper?' and forget that they are echoing the shriek of the first murderer over his victim's body."

"And I never thought of it before. How strange that so many people are in the world and never a part of it."

"You can begin to see the outlines of the problems before us. It will be years before you can realise the height and depth of need that calls here to-day for deeds more heroic than knights of old ever dreamed."

Again she looked at him with frank admiration.

"But the most wonderful thing I have seen to-day has been a man,"

she boldly said. "Your faith, your optimism, your dreams in the face of the awful facts of life, and with it a tenderness of sympathy I never thought in you, have been a revelation to me. I feel more and more ashamed of the years I have wasted."

She said this very tenderly, while Gordon unconsciously tightened the grip of his big hand on her arm, and then went on as though she had not spoken.

"What a call to an earnest life! New York City furnishes two-thirds of the convicts of the state. We have one murder and ten suicides every week. More than eighty thousand men and women are arrested here every year. Fifty thousand pa.s.s through that basilisk's den we saw to-day. We have a hundred thousand child workers out of whose tender flesh we are coining gold. Three hundred thousand of our women are hewers of wood and drawers of water, robbed of their divine right of love and motherhood. There are twenty thousand children and fifty thousand men and women homeless in our streets. I have seen more than five hundred of them fighting for the chance of sleeping on the bare planks of a dirty police lodging-house."

He felt her nerves quiver with sympathy and surprise.

"I never dreamed such things took place in New York."

"Yes, and those homeless children are the saddest tragedy. We haven't orphanages for them. When a house burns down that has a coal shute or an opening in it where a child can crawl, the firemen thrust their hooks in and pull out a bundle of charred rags and flesh--one of these homeless waifs. No father or mother that ever bent over a cradle, looked into a baby's face and felt its warm breath can realise that horror and not go mad. We don't realise it. We ignore it. We have four hundred churches. We open them a few hours every week. We have nine thousand saloons opened all day, most of the night, and Sunday too. We haven't orphanages, but we have these nine thousand factories where orphans are made. When our country friends come to see us we take them to see the saloons! Our shame is our glory. You have to-day seen some of the fruits."

"And yet you have faith?"

"Yes; I have eyes that see the invisible. In all this crash of brute forces I see beauty in ugliness, innocence in filth. Here one is put to the test. Here the great powers of Nature have gathered for their last a.s.sault and have challenged man's soul to answer for its life. Dark spiritual forces shriek their battle-cries over the din of matter. The swiftness of progress, crushing and enriching, the mad greed for gold, the worship of success--a success that sneers at duty, honour, love and patriotism--the filth and frivolity of our upper strata, the growth of hate and envy below, the restlessness of the ma.s.ses, the waning of faith, the growth of despair, the triumph of brute force, the reign of the liar and huckster--all these are more real and threatening here, as beasts and reptiles increase in size as we near the tropics. We are nearing the tropics of civilisation. We must not forget that the flowers will be richer, wilder, more beautiful, and life capable of higher things."

They had reached her door, and he released her arm, soft, round and warm, with a sense of loss and regret.

"Yet with all its shadows and sorrows," he cried with enthusiasm, "I love this imperial city. It is the centre of our national life--its very beating heart. If we can make it clean, its bright blood will go back to the farthest village and country seat with life. I shall live to see its black tenements swept away, and homes for the people, clean, white and beautiful, rise in their places.

I have a vision of its streets swept and garnished, of green parks full of happy children, of working-men coming to their homes with songs at night as men once sang because their work was glad. I haven't much to depend on just now in the church. But G.o.d lives.

I have a growing group of loyal young dreamers, and you have come as an omen of greater things."

She smiled.