CHAPTER V
Something at last became real to me: that was the misery of the poor. It seemed sadder than anything else in the world, except the misery of their benefactors. I could hardly tell whether, in this great tragedy of poverty, it was actor or spectator who suffered most.
I saw on the one side hunger, sin, ignorance, and they weighed down upon me like a nightmare. I became familiar with the crowded quarters of the city, where the population was nine hundred to the acre. I knew the inside of great shops, where women worked and starved on two dollars a week.
On the other side I saw brave attempts to help, that were yet half futile. There were charities, religious and secular; relief-giving societies, working into the hands of general organizations; there were settlements among the poor. But they all fought against frightful odds. The lot of many who were trying to help was to look and suffer, impotently.
A kind of morbid fascination drew me continually to the foreign quarters. I liked the picturesqueness of the crowded streets, where women in gay head-dresses chattered, holding their babies in their arms. I liked the alley-ways lined with old-clothes shops, and the corners where Russians, Italians, Germans, Jews congregated, talking, laughing, quarrelling. The quaint children in old-world garments interested me; and the aged, wrinkled faces of men and women roused often a feeling of remembrance, as if I had known them somewhere, in book or picture.
The most crowded district was near the sea. A broad thoroughfare called Traffic Street skirted the city at the water edge. On the outer side were enormous warehouses and dock-yards; on the inner, tall tenements.
Looking between the great buildings, I caught sudden glimpses of blue water, with my old friends, the white sea-gulls, floating overhead. And often, in coming down rickety tenement-house steps, from scenes that left me sick and faint, the sight of tall masts of ships thrilled me with their inevitable suggestion of freedom and escape.
I had begun to feel that the misery of it was greater than I could bear. Then suddenly the Lad appeared.