Part 12 (2/2)

The two minutes were up. I took off my coat, rolled up my s.h.i.+rt sleeves and advanced toward him.

”Are you going to do the decent thing?”

There was one long look between us. Then he put the body back in the casket, arranged it for burial, and I opened the door and the crowd came in, not, however, before I had put my coat on again. I read the service and preached the sermon, and the undertaker did the rest.

Some months afterward, I was at work in my study in the tower of the old church, when I heard a loud knocking at the church door--a most unusual thing. I came down and found that undertaker and a gentleman and lady, well dressed, evidently of the well-to-do cla.s.s, standing at the door.

”Here is a couple that want to get married, Mr. Irvine,” the undertaker said.

They came into the study and were married, and I shook hands with the three, and they went off. Next day I went to the undertaker--indeed, he was an undertaker's helper. I went up to his desk and laid down a five-dollar bill, one-fourth of the marriage fee. Without being invited, I pulled a chair up and sat down beside him.

”Now, tell me, brother,” I said confidentially. ”Why did you bring them to me?”

A smile overspread his features.

”Well,” he said, ”it was like this. You remember that funeral business?”

”Yes.”

”Well, I figured it out like this: that one of the two of us was puttin' up a d.a.m.ned big bluff; but I hadn't the heart to call it.

Shake!”

CHAPTER XII

WORKING WAY DOWN

After some years' experience in missions and mission churches, I would find it very hard if I were a workingman living in a tenement not to be antagonistic to them; for, in large measure, such work is done on the a.s.sumption that people are poor and degraded through laxity in morals. The scheme of salvation is a salvation for the individual; social salvation is out of the question. Social conditions cannot be touched, because in all rotten social conditions, there is a thin red line which always leads to the rich man or woman who is responsible for them.

Coming in contact with these ugly social facts continuously, led me to this belief. It came very slowly as did also the opinion that the missionary himself or the pastor, be he as wise as Solomon, as eloquent as Demosthenes, as virtuous as St. Francis, has no social standing whatever among the people whose alms support the inst.i.tutions, religious and philanthropic, of which these men are the executive heads. The fellows.h.i.+p of the saints is a pure fiction, has absolutely no foundation in fact in a city like New York except as the poor saints have it by themselves.

Tim Grogan jolted me into a new political economy; the crowded streets of the East Side on a summer night gave me a new theology. I stood one night in August on the tower of the old church and looked down upon the sweltering ma.s.s that covered the roofs, fire escapes and sidewalks. The roofs were littered with naked and half-naked children panting for breath. Down on the crowded streets thousands of little children darted in and out like sparrows, escaping as if by miracle the vehicles of all sorts and descriptions. Crowded baby-carriages lined the sidewalks. The stoops, too, were crowded. What a ma.s.s of humans! What a ganglia of living wires! As I looked on this vast mult.i.tude, I questioned the orthodox theology that held me in its grip. Most of these people belonged to another race. And I stood at that moment firmly rooted in the belief that this mult.i.tude was inevitably doomed! Let me put it frankly, even though it seems brutal: doomed to h.e.l.l!

I am unable to a.n.a.lyze the quick currents of thought that went through my mind at that instant. I cannot explain how the change came. I know that there came to me a bigger thought than any I had ever known, and that thought so thrilled me with human feeling, with love for men, that I said to my soul: ”Soul, if this mult.i.tude is doomed to h.e.l.l, be brave; gird up your loins and go with them!”

In that tenement district people were being murdered by the tens of thousands by tuberculosis, by defective plumbing, by new diseases born of the herding of men and women like cattle. I made some feeble attempt to investigate, to ascertain, to acquaint myself with the facts, and my investigation led me to this result--a result that the lapse of years has not altered; that the private owners.h.i.+p of tenements--the private profits in housing--was not only the mother of the great white plague, but of most of the plagues down there that endanger health. It led me to the belief also that the struggle for bodily health, the struggle to survive, was so fierce as to leave little time for soul health or mental health! It was a source of continual wonder to me that people so helpless and so neglected were as good as they were, or as healthy as they were. It did not seem reasonable to lay the blame at the doors of the owners of the tenements. Many of them had a tenement only as a source of income--and to acquire the tenement had taken long years of savings, earnings and sacrifices. It was part of the great game of business, the game of ”live I, die you!”

The churches and synagogues are of little vital importance there, because they ignore social conditions, or largely ignore them. And there is a reason for this also, and the reason is that they are supported by the people--the very people who perpetuate the evils against which prophet, priest and pastor ought to cry out continually. The protest against such conditions is a negligible quant.i.ty.

There is a protest, an outcry, but it is related neither to the church nor to the synagogue. The East Side has a soul, but it is not an ecclesiastical soul! It is a soul that is alive--so much alive to the interest of the people that many times I felt ashamed of myself when I listened to the socialistic orators on the street corners and in the East Side halls. They were stirring up the minds of the people. They were not merely making them discontented with conditions, but they were offering a programme of reconstruction--a programme that included a trowel as well as a sword.

The soul of the East Side expressed itself in the Yiddish press, daily, weekly, and monthly, and in Yiddish literature, and in the spoken word of the propagandist whose ideal, though limited in literary expression, made him a flame of living fire. It was this soul of the East Side that drove me against my will to study the relation of politics to the condition of the people. One of the first things that I discovered was the grip that Tammany had on the people. Every saloon keeper was a power in the community. Men, of any force of character whatever, who were willing to hold their hands behind their backs for Tammany graft, were singled out by the organization for some moiety of honour. Small merchants found it to their advantage to keep on the right side of the saloon keepers and the Tammany leaders. I remember trying to express this thought in an uptown church to a wealthy congregation; and I remember distinctly, also, that I was rebuked by one of the leading lights of the missionary society of which I was a part. I was informed that my business was to ”save souls,” and in my public addresses to tell how I saved them; that political conditions must be left to the politicians--and it was done.

To the old church at the corner of Market and Henry streets came Dowling. He followed me as a matter of fellows.h.i.+p--we loved each other. And came also Dave Ranney, the ”puddler from Pittsburg.”

On the first anniversary of Dave's conversion, I gathered a hundred wastrels of the Bowery together and gave them a dinner at the church.

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