Part 9 (1/2)
The man's face grew white. He had a sister of whom he was very fond and very proud.
”What would you do to the man who permitted your sister, when she was tired, to do what you permitted a girl to do to-night--a girl who has no brother to watch over her?”
The young man was six feet tall. He rose to his feet, and, raising his hands toward the starlit sky, he said:
”As true as there is a G.o.d above me, I will never while I live let any girl do what I am not willing my own sister should do anywhere.”
After a moment's quiet, the chaperon said:
”I shall never mention this to the girl. I hold you responsible. You are stronger mentally, morally and physically, and are wholly to blame.”
Whether he spoke to the girl or not, no one knows, but never again was it necessary to even mentally criticise that young girl's manners with young men. Not only did her manners change, but the expression of her face. One grew to love and trust her, and ask her help for other girls.
The chivalry of the working boys and young men is constantly seen, unconsciously revealed. Sometimes it is dangerous the degree in which it shows itself among the finest of the boys. A sick girl, unable to go out, will command attentions so special and direct that the fear of her misunderstanding, and suffering because she has not understood, will make those interested who know the danger unhappy; sympathy from any cause will make a great-hearted working boy place himself in a position where he may be easily misunderstood.
It is astonis.h.i.+ng how long the spirit of childhood will live in working boys and girls, even under conditions that seem never to justify happiness and spontaneity!
One Sunday a group of working men and girls went nutting, being duly and properly chaperoned. Four of the young men climbed a big walnut tree. The girls, with some of the young men, were gathered at the foot, waiting for the shower of nuts. The chaperon sat on a stone fence a little way off. The wind began to blow, swaying the top branches. One of the young men having a good voice laid himself along a limb high from the ground, singing ”Rock-a-bye, baby, on the tree top.” The others took it up and the girls joined in. Over and over it was sung. Then the girls and boys on the ground joined hands outside the span of the tree and sang ”Ring around a rosy.”
Every singing game of childhood was enthusiastically played. Every one of these young people were poor as the world counts wealth--every one over eighteen--all had worked from the first moment they could earn wages. Each one had suffered the wearing anxiety of no wages when the family needed what they could earn, and yet they sang--they felt like children. No amount of money at the time could have bought them this happiness.
The sun poured down a glory of yellow light on the trees that seemed to have caught its color dashed with red flames. Across the field came one of the girls slowly--a girl who never had manifested any enthusiasm, except for dancing; who never gave expression to any emotion of feeling. It was thought impossible to move her. As she came nearer, it was seen that she was deeply stirred; her face was expressive. Putting her head against the arm of the chaperon, she whispered, rather than spoke: ”I did not know trees were any color but green before.” The tears were chasing each other down her cheeks, while her mouth was wreathed with smiles. The girl was over twenty. Had she been born in a family that would use the privileges of the various Fresh-Air organizations, she would have known more of the country. It was this year that she first saw the stars over the trees, and the moon at the full in the sky when it had a horizon. Obedience to her was not easy, but to her brother she gave it willingly; he had been her nurse in babyhood, her friend and companion in childhood, and was now her protector. In every plan of these young people he considered his sister first. If she had an escort, he invited some other girl to go with him; if not, he took his sister. The girl never manifested any interest in young men beyond their ability to dance well. She would find a dozen reasons for not dancing if she found herself on the floor with an awkward dancer.
This group of twenty-two young men and women, all from homes that would bar the door to charity, even when suffering, were fairly representative of the social standard of the better part of the wage-earning world of New York. Among them was the independent girl, the one who had no desire to be sought in marriage; she saw the worries of her sisters married to men having small and uncertain wages; saw the wearing side of motherhood rather than its joys. She skillfully kept her young men friends as friends, changing from one to the other as soon as she saw the line of friends.h.i.+p being crossed. The girl who never won attention till she wooed it was among them; the girl who was treated discourteously or neglected was one of them.
The girl who was sought for exhibition because she dressed well, yet who never roused any deeper feeling, was there, for some of the men were very observant, and had standards of style for the girls they escorted.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE FOREST OF THE TENEMENTS.]
There was the young man who willfully played with a girl's feelings; the young man who openly exhibited the love he had awakened, but to which he did not respond; the girl whose adoration received indifferent treatment, yet who was never entirely cast aside by the man too selfish to marry. In that company there was one couple who were sentimental in their actions; they would sit and hold hands, if permitted, rather than dance. As soon as it was discovered that their actions were influencing others, they were given the choice to restrain the expression of their affection in public completely or resign. The lesson was effectual. When it was seen that one of the young men was very deeply interested in one of the young women, that she was only semi-conscious of his interest, yet enjoyed it, while not at all interested in him, just a few words, pointing out how unkind it was to permit his interest to develop and how unfair to let him spend money for her when she never meant to hold any relation but that of friend, changed her att.i.tude toward him. She made the young man understand her position.
More than that, she gave her lesson to the other girls, and escorts were changed frequently; groups arranged to go to the theater instead of couples. As one girl put it, ”We don't want any nonsense.” Yet several marriages have occurred among these members, the new homes making centers of social interest for the others. The babies are objects of deepest interest to all, and it is a lesson to see the ease and freedom with which even the young men will hold them. Much is said of the ”little mothers,”
but the ”little fathers” are as unselfish and devoted a part of the family life in the tenements as the little mothers. When a great, strong young man picks up a baby with the ease of a woman, is interested in its ills of the moment, one is grateful for the hours that, as a child, he spent as nurse; sees the beauty of strength and tenderness, and the humanizing effect of the maternal in the character of a boy whose character must be molded by the environment of a tenement-house region.
The rapidity with which a complete change of standard of manners can be attained amazed those who watched these young people. Outdoor life was possible to them only on Sunday. When first the trips on the railroad began, the noise, freedom, constant changing of seats mortified those who chaperoned the group. The journeys began in the spring. One Sunday evening in November, when returning from a nutting party, a group of young people entered the car laughing, pus.h.i.+ng, slapping one another. The young men and women who had been going to the country almost every Sunday for the summer looked in amazement at one another, and with very evident disapproval at the new group. Yet they had offended, if offense can be committed in perfect innocence, in just that way many times a few months before. It is this adaptability, this quickness of comprehension of the little things, that give the outward stamp, that make the American wage-earning young people so intensely interesting, so wonderful in social achievement.
These young people were all Americans, of Christian parentage, as the word means, not Hebrews. The young women worked in shops with girls of Hebrew parentage. There were deep race antagonisms, due to many causes, but princ.i.p.ally to the willingness of the Hebrews to accept any wages and work anywhere and any number of hours. These American girls grew to have the deepest sympathy with the girls of Hebrew birth when they found that many Hebrew parents coerced, while all regulated, the marriage of their daughters. That parents would dare to a.s.sume such authority in so personal a matter as marriage aroused the most extravagant terms of condemnation.
One listening could well believe the hopelessness of trying to make one of these girls marry against her will.
No greater contrast could be conceived than the entire independence of these girls in their social relations, which they did not view as a privilege but considered a right. Beyond the fact that some of them must be at home at ten or half-past, there was no law but their own will. This freedom is one of the most serious influences in the life of working girls in New York. Were it not for their common sense and the knowledge of life thrust on them when children, the effect would be most disastrous for the country. As it is, in certain ways young men and women retain the frankness of childhood in their intercourse. One realizes what perfect equality between the s.e.xes is when mingling freely with them. Doubtless this comes from playing in the street together from earliest childhood, with no favors asked or conceded because one is a girl, and the impossibility of privacy.
This last is the saddest fact in the life of tenement-house children.
At the lower rounds of the social ladder in the wage-earning world the mother and baby are inseparable, if the mother does not drink. Night and day the baby is cared for, often in hopeless ignorance, but cared for.
Often everything else is neglected. When the baby sleeps, the mother is too tired to work, too indifferent. When awake, the baby insists on being held.
One is frequently reminded of the story of the woman whose moan when her baby died was: ”What excuse can I give John now?” Yet the day that baby is able to walk alone on the street the mother loosens her hold. The baby finds its freedom limited only by its ability to remain upright, and to return to its home for meals and at night. ”Throw me the key and a piece of bread,” is often the extent of its demands from the sidewalk. True, the mother knows every woman in the block will be, in an emergency, a mother.
The child learns to care for itself; it makes less and less demands on the mother, who may even now have another baby compelling all her thought and time. Above this scale, where home-making a.s.sumes importance, the child remains longer under the mother's care; is watched when on the street by glances from the window; is sent to school, and some oversight maintained over its school life; but the wage-earning period means emanc.i.p.ation from oversight often even at this level. Hundreds of girls start out and find work for the first time without any evident responsibility on the part of even good mothers. No amount of familiarity with this exercise of freedom deadens the horror of it to the outsider. Women, mothers of attractive daughters, will not know the street on which the daughters work. After one of the most disastrous fires in New York, in which many working girls perished, four mothers notified the police the next day that their daughters had disappeared. It was the failure to trace the girls and the advertising of their disappearance that led, through companions who had escaped from the building, to the awful conclusion that these four had perished in the flames.
Sometimes it would be difficult for a mother to go to the place where the daughter finds employment; but here, as in everything else in life, that which is deemed the more important receives attention. Perhaps it is the habit of trust, or indifference, that governs mothers' activities.