Part 7 (2/2)

The same thing holds good in what we call charity. A terrific soul-struggle goes on in every man and woman before the hand is put out for the first time. Self-respect is a tremendous a.s.set, and people hold on to it as to their very souls; but when a hand is held out once and the community puts alms therein, the fabric of self-respect begins to totter, and the whole process of disintegration begins.

CHAPTER VIII

A BUNK-HOUSE AND SOME BUNK-HOUSE MEN

I made my headquarters, while a lodging-house missionary, in the Mulberry Street bunk-house. It was only a block from Chatham Square, and central. The first thing I did was to clean it. I proceeded with soap and water to scrub it out, dressed in a pair of overalls. While performing this operation, a tall gaunt figure lurched into the room with his hands in his pockets--a slit for a mouth, s.h.a.ggy eyebrows, rather small eyes. He looked at me for a moment as if in astonishment, and then he said:

”h.e.l.lo, bub, what's de game?”

”I'm a missionary,” I answered.

”Ye are, eh?”

”Yes. When I finish cleaning the floor, I am going to attempt to clean up some other things around here.”

”Me too, hey?”

”Yes; don't you think you need it?”

He laughed a hoa.r.s.e, gutteral laugh, and said:

”Don't get bughouse, boss. Ye'd wind up just where ye begun--on the floor.”

This man, who was known in the bunk-house as ”Gar,” was known also by the names of ”McBriarty” and ”Brady.” He had been in the army, but they could not drill him. He had spent fifteen years in State's Prison for various offences, but for a good many years he had been bungling around in cheap lodging houses, getting a living by his wits. He was the toughest specimen of a man I ever saw. There was a challenge in him which I at once accepted. It was in his looks and in his words. It was an intimation that he was master--that missionaries were somewhat feeble-minded and had to do with weak people. I was not very well acquainted with the bunk-house at the time, but I outlined a plan of campaign the major part of which was the capture of this primordial man. Could I reach him? Could I influence and move him to a better life? If not, what was the use of trying my theological programme on others? So I abandoned myself to the task. I knew my friends and the officers of the missionary society would have considered it very ill-advised if the details of the plan had been known to them, so I slept in the bunk-house and stayed with him night and day. Of course, I would not have done it if I had not seen beyond him: that if I could gain this man, I would gain a strategic point. He himself would be a great power in the bunk-house; first of all, because he was physically fit. He was selected because he could pitch any two men in the house out of it; and even from a missionary's point of view, that was important. He resented at first my interference, but gentleness and love prevailed, and he finally acquiesced.

The hardest part of the plan was to eat with him in an underground restaurant where meals cost five and ten cents a piece. When he was ”tapering off,” I went with him into the saloons. He visited the cheap fake auction-rooms and would buy little pieces of cheap jewelry occasionally and sell them at a few cents' profit. These things nauseated me. There was no hope of finding this man any work. He did not want work, anyway; could not work if he had it.

He tried, during the first week that I was with him, to disgust me; first with his language and then with his actions. He put the lights out in the dormitory one night, and in the darkness pulled three or four men out of the bunks, cuffed them on the side of the head and kicked them around generally. He thought this was the finis.h.i.+ng touch to my vigil. When the superintendent came up and lit the lamp again, he had an idea that it was the bouncer and came over to his cot, which was beside mine, and found him snoring. When all was quiet, the bouncer said to me:

”What did ye tink of it, boss, hey?”

”Oh,” I said, ”that was a very tame show, and utterly uninteresting.”

”Gee!” he said, ”you must have been a barker at Coney Island.”

The test of my theology on him proved a failure. The story of the prodigal son was a great joke to him. He said of it:

”Say, bub, if you ever strike an old gazabo as soft as dat one, lemme know, will ye?” Prayer to him was ”talking through one's hat.”

In a few weeks he straightened up and began to give me very fine a.s.sistance in the bunk-house. His change of mind and heart almost lost him his job, for he lost a good deal of his brutality--the thing that fitted him for his work. In ushering insubordinate gentlemen downstairs, he did it more with force of persuasion than with the force of his shoe. He continued my campaign of cleaning, and decorated the kalsomined walls with chromos that he bought at one penny apiece.

He was a psychologist and would have probably been surprised if anybody had told him so. He could tell at once the moral worth of a lodger; so he was a very good lieutenant and picked out the best of the men who had reached the bottom--and the bunk-house was the bottom rung of the social ladder. Every day he had his story to tell--of the newcomers and their possibilities. His conversion was a matter of slow work. Indeed, I don't know what conversion meant in his case. It certainly was not the working out of any theological formula that I had preached to him.

The telling of this man's story in churches helped the work a great deal. It was the kind of thing that appealed to the churches--rather graphic and striking; so, unconsciously we exploited him. We could have gotten a hundred dollars to help a man like this--whose life after all was past or nearly past--to one dollar we could get for the work of saving a boy from such a life!

<script>