"Woman," I cried, "what have you done? Why did you move from the other place?"
"The investigator told me to," was her answer.
"But you are killing yourself, ruining the broken health of your children."
She shrugged her shoulders, the children coughed, and even the baby had eyeglasses on. It was the district of Mrs. B.--the investigator who lectured so well on tuberculosis. I waited for her in the office and asked her why she had moved the family from the top floor to the basement.
"I can't run up so many stairs every day," she answered angrily. "I have a big district and they all live on top floors. Basements are cheaper and it is easier for me," she went on.
"But, Mrs. B., the whole family is touched by the plague. You know better than they do how necessary it is for them to live in light and airy rooms. You lecture on the subject."
To all this the investigator answered, "It's easy to lecture but to climb so many floors a day is too hard. Let them live in the basement. They will not die. It's not so terrible. Let them sit in the park ... let them go up on the roof."
No amount of talk could persuade her that it was dangerous for the people to live, eat, sleep in the basement, and when I had succeeded in convincing the manager that a change should be made, and I called on the woman, she was already so drilled by the investigator that she claimed her legs hurt her and her heart was weak and I had to give it up. She would not move from the basement.
A second child was taken to the hospital in a few months, but as a recompense for the mother's good behaviour the investigator did not, as usual, reduce the pension of the family.
The father died, the two older girls died, the mother with the other children returned to Russia to live ... to die.
Up to now I have said so much about the heartlessness of the investigators that naturally the question arises: "If they were good-hearted women, and if the men in charge of the charities were better men, would that solve the problem of charity?"
No. It's not their fault. The system of organised charity is such that they must inevitably become as they are after a few months' work. Almost all of the women investigators and other employés of the institutions are recruited from the impoverished middle class. To obtain a position what is commonly called "pull" is absolutely necessary. As a rule these people have never known any want--real privation. At first, when they see poverty in all its ugliness they get excited, run to the office and make a terrible report, advising relief in heartrending sentences. They imagine that their will will immediately be carried out and that their mission is a very high one. But when the Manager calls them into his office and proves to them that they have been lied to and deceived; that the pauper is a habitual liar; that you cannot believe a single word they say; when he tells them that if they do not prove more adroit the next time their position is not suited to them, then they look at the poor with other eyes. He or she is no more a subject for pity, a wreck that has to be pulled ashore. It is bread and butter for herself. If she allows herself to be deceived by an applicant she endangers her own position.