Books: Our Old Home

N >> Nathaniel Hawthorne >> Our Old Home

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The women's ward was the portion of the establishment which we especially
examined. It could not be questioned that they were treated with
kindness as well as care. No doubt, as has been already suggested, some
of them felt the irksomeness of submission to general rules of orderly
behavior, after being accustomed to that perfect freedom from the minor
proprieties, at least, which is one of the compensations of absolutely
hopeless poverty, or of any circumstances that set us fairly below the
decencies of life. I asked the governor of the house whether he met with
any difficulty in keeping peace and order among his inmates; and he
informed me that his troubles among the women were incomparably greater
than with the men. They were freakish, and apt to be quarrelsome,
inclined to plague and pester one another in ways that it was impossible
to lay hold of, and to thwart his own authority by the like intangible
methods. He said this with the utmost good-nature, and quite won my
regard by so placidly resigning himself to the inevitable necessity of
letting the women throw dust into his eyes. They certainly looked
peaceable and sisterly enough, as I saw them, though still it might be
faintly perceptible that some of them were consciously playing their
parts before the governor and his distinguished visitors.

This governor seemed to me a man thoroughly fit for his position. An
American, in an office of similar responsibility, would doubtless be a
much superior person, better educated, possessing a far wider range of
thought, more naturally acute, with a quicker tact of external
observation and a readier faculty of dealing with difficult cases. The
women would not succeed in throwing half so much dust into his eyes.
Moreover, his black coat, and thin, sallow visage, would make him look
like a scholar, and his manners would indefinitely approximate to those
of a gentleman. But I cannot help questioning, whether, on the whole,
these higher endowments would produce decidedly better results. The
Englishman was thoroughly plebeian both in aspect and behavior, a bluff,
ruddy-faced, hearty, kindly, yeoman-like personage, with no refinement
whatever, nor any superfluous sensibility, but gifted with a native
wholesomeness of character which must have been a very beneficial element
in the atmosphere of the almshouse. He spoke to his pauper family in
loud, good-humored, cheerful tones, and treated them with a healthy
freedom that probably caused the forlorn wretches to feel as if they were
free and healthy likewise. If he had understood them a little better, he
would not have treated them half so wisely. We are apt to make sickly
people more morbid, and unfortunate people more miserable, by endeavoring
to adapt our deportment to their especial and individual needs. They
eagerly accept our well-meant efforts; but it is like returning their own
sick breath back upon themselves, to be breathed over and over again,
intensifying the inward mischief at every repetition. The sympathy that
would really do them good is of a kind that recognizes their sound and
healthy parts, and ignores the part affected by disease, which will
thrive under the eye of a too close observer like a poisonous weed in the
sunshine. My good friend the governor had no tendencies in the latter
direction, and abundance of them in the former, and was consequently as
wholesome and invigorating as the west-wind with a little spice of the
north in it, brightening the dreary visages that encountered us as if he
had carried a sunbeam in his hand. He expressed himself by his whole
being and personality, and by works more than words, and had the not
unusual English merit of knowing what to do much better than how to talk
about it.

The women, I imagine, must have felt one imperfection in their state,
however comfortable otherwise. They were forbidden, or, at all events,
lacked the means, to follow out their natural instinct of adorning
themselves; all were dressed in one homely uniform of blue-checked gowns,
with such caps upon their heads as English servants wear. Generally,
too, they had one dowdy English aspect, and a vulgar type of features so
nearly alike that they seemed literally to constitute a sisterhood. We
have few of these absolutely unilluminated faces among our native
American population, individuals of whom must be singularly unfortunate,
if, mixing as we do, no drop of gentle blood has contributed to refine
the turbid element, no gleam of hereditary intelligence has lighted up
the stolid eyes, which their forefathers brought, from the Old Country.
Even in this English almshouse, however, there was at least one person
who claimed to be intimately connected with rank and wealth. The
governor, after suggesting that this person would probably be gratified
by our visit, ushered us into a small parlor, which was furnished a
little more like a room in a private dwelling than others that we
entered, and had a row of religious books and fashionable novels on the
mantel-piece. An old lady sat at a bright coal-fire, reading a romance,
and rose to receive us with a certain pomp of manner and elaborate
display of ceremonious courtesy, which, in spite of myself, made me
inwardly question the genuineness of her aristocratic pretensions. But,
at any rate, she looked like a respectable old soul, and was evidently
gladdened to the very core of her frost-bitten heart by the awful
punctiliousness with which she responded to her gracious and hospitable,
though unfamiliar welcome. After a little polite conversation, we
retired; and the governor, with a lowered voice and an air of deference,
told us that she had been a lady of quality, and had ridden in her own
equipage, not many years before, and now lived in continual expectation
that some of her rich relatives would drive up in their carriages to take
her away. Meanwhile, he added, she was treated with great respect by her
fellow-paupers. I could not help thinking, from a few criticisable
peculiarities in her talk and manner, that there might have been a
mistake on the governor's part, and perhaps a venial exaggeration on the
old lady's, concerning her former position in society; but what struck me
was the forcible instance of that most prevalent of English vanities, the
pretension to aristocratic connection, on one side, and the submission
and reverence with which it was accepted by the governor and his
household, on the other. Among ourselves, I think, when wealth and
eminent position have taken their departure, they seldom leave a pallid
ghost behind them,--or, if it sometimes stalks abroad, few recognize it.

We went into several other rooms, at the doors of which, pausing on the
outside, we could hear the volubility, and sometimes the wrangling, of
the female inhabitants within, but invariably found silence and peace,
when we stepped over the threshold. The women were grouped together in
their sitting-rooms, sometimes three or four, sometimes a larger number,
classified by their spontaneous affinities, I suppose, and all busied, so
far as I can remember, with the one occupation of knitting coarse yarn
stockings. Hardly any of them, I am sorry to say, had a brisk or
cheerful air, though it often stirred them up to a momentary vivacity to
be accosted by the governor, and they seemed to like being noticed,
however slightly, by the visitors. The happiest person whom I saw there
(and, running hastily through my experiences, I hardly recollect to have
seen a happier one in my life, if you take a careless flow of spirits
as happiness) was an old woman that lay in bed among ten or twelve
heavy-looking females, who plied their knitting-work round about her.
She laughed, when we entered, and immediately began to talk to us, in a
thin, little, spirited quaver, claiming to be more than a century old;
and the governor (in whatever way he happened to be cognizant of the
fact) confirmed her age to be a hundred and four. Her jauntiness and
cackling merriment were really wonderful. It was as if she had got
through with all her actual business in life two or three generations
ago, and now, freed from every responsibility for herself or others, had
only to keep up a mirthful state of mind till the short time, or long
time (and, happy as she was, she appeared not to care whether it were
long or short), before Death, who had misplaced her name in his list,
might remember to take her away. She had gone quite round the circle of
human existence, and come back to the play-ground again. And so she had
grown to be a kind of miraculous old pet, the plaything of people seventy
or eighty years younger than herself, who talked and laughed with her as
if she were a child, finding great delight in her wayward and strangely
playful responses, into some of which she cunningly conveyed a gibe that
caused their ears to tingle a little. She had done getting out of bed in
this world, and lay there to be waited upon like a queen or a baby.

In the same room sat a pauper who had once been an actress of
considerable repute, but was compelled to give up her profession by a
softening of the brain. The disease seemed to have stolen the continuity
out of her life, and disturbed an healthy relationship between the
thoughts within her and the world without. On our first entrance, she
looked cheerfully at us, and showed herself ready to engage in
conversation; but suddenly, while we were talking with the century-old
crone, the poor actress began to weep, contorting her face with
extravagant stage-grimaces, and wringing her hands for some inscrutable
sorrow. It might have been a reminiscence of actual calamity in her past
life, or, quite as probably, it was but a dramatic woe, beneath which she
had staggered and shrieked and wrung her hands with hundreds of
repetitions in the sight of crowded theatres, and been as often comforted
by thunders of applause. But my idea of the mystery was, that she had a
sense of wrong in seeing the aged woman (whose empty vivacity was like
the rattling of dry peas in a bladder) chosen as the central object of
interest to the visitors, while she herself, who had agitated thousands
of hearts with a breath, sat starving for the admiration that was her
natural food. I appeal to the whole society of artists of the Beautiful
and the Imaginative,--poets, romancers, painters, sculptors, actors,--
whether or no this is a grief that may be felt even amid the torpor of a
dissolving brain!

We looked into a good many sleeping-chambers, where were rows of beds,
mostly calculated for two occupants, and provided with sheets and
pillow-cases that resembled sackcloth. It appeared to me that the sense
of beauty was insufficiently regarded in all the arrangements of the
almshouse; a little cheap luxury for the eye, at least, might do the poor
folks a substantial good. But, at all events, there was the beauty of
perfect neatness and orderliness, which, being heretofore known to few of
them, was perhaps as much as they could well digest in the remnant of
their lives. We were invited into the laundry, where a great washing and
drying were in process, the whole atmosphere being hot and vaporous with
the steam of wet garments and bedclothes. This atmosphere was the
pauper-life of the past week or fortnight resolved into a gaseous state,
and breathing it, however fastidiously, we were forced to inhale the
strange element into our inmost being. Had the Queen been there, I know
not how she could have escaped the necessity. What an intimate
brotherhood is this in which we dwell, do what we may to put an
artificial remoteness between the high creature and the low one! A poor
man's breath, borne on the vehicle of tobacco-smoke, floats into a
palace-window and reaches the nostrils of a monarch. It is but an
example, obvious to the sense, of the innumerable and secret channels by
which, at every moment of our lives, the flow and reflux of a common
humanity pervade us all. How superficial are the niceties of such as
pretend to keep aloof! Let the whole world be cleansed, or not a man or
woman of us all can be clean.

By and by we came to the ward where the children were kept, on entering
which, we saw, in the first place, several unlovely and unwholesome
little people lazily playing together in a court-yard. And here a
singular incommodity befell one member of our party. Among the children
was a wretched, pale, half-torpid little thing (about six years old,
perhaps,--but I know not whether a girl or a boy), with a humor in its
eyes and face, which the governor said was the scurvy, and which appeared
to bedim its powers of vision, so that it toddled about gropingly, as if
in quest of it did not precisely know what. This child--this sickly,
wretched, humor-eaten infant, the offspring of unspeakable sin and
sorrow, whom it must have required several generations of guilty
progenitors to render so pitiable an object as we beheld it--immediately
took an unaccountable fancy to the gentleman just hinted at. It prowled
about him like a pet kitten, rubbing against his legs, following
everywhere at his heels, pulling at his coat-tails, and, at last,
exerting all the speed that its poor limbs were capable of, got directly
before him and held forth its arms, mutely insisting on being taken up.
It said not a word, being perhaps under-witted and incapable of prattle.
But it smiled up in his face,--a sort of woful gleam was that smile,
through the sickly blotches that covered its features,--and found means
to express such a perfect confidence that it was going to be fondled and
made much of, that there was no possibility in a human heart of balking
its expectation. It was as if God had promised the poor child this favor
on behalf of that individual, and he was bound to fulfil the contract, or
else no longer call himself a man among men. Nevertheless, it could be
no easy thing for him to do, he being a person burdened with more than an
Englishman's customary reserve, shy of actual contact with human beings,
afflicted with a peculiar distaste for whatever was ugly, and,
furthermore, accustomed to that habit of observation from an insulated
stand-point which is said (but, I hope, erroneously) to have the tendency
of putting ice into the blood.

So I watched the struggle in his mind with a good deal of interest, and
am seriously of opinion that he did an heroic act, and effected more than
he dreamed of towards his final salvation, when he took up the loathsome
child and caressed it as tenderly as if he had been its father. To be
sure, we all smiled at him, at the time, but doubtless would have acted
pretty much the same in a similar stress of circumstances. The child, at
any rate, appeared to be satisfied with his behavior; for when he had
held it a considerable time, and set it down, it still favored him with
its company, keeping fast hold of his forefinger till we reached the
confines of the place. And on our return through the court-yard, after
visiting another part of the establishment, here again was this same
little Wretchedness waiting for its victim, with a smile of joyful, and
yet dull recognition about its scabby mouth and in its rheumy eyes. No
doubt, the child's mission in reference to our friend was to remind him
that he was responsible, in his degree, for all the sufferings and
misdemeanors of the world in which he lived, and was not entitled to look
upon a particle of its dark calamity as if it were none of his concern:
the offspring of a brother's iniquity being his own blood-relation, and
the guilt, likewise, a burden on him, unless he expiated it by better
deeds.

All the children in this ward seemed to be invalids, and, going up
stairs, we found more of them in the same or a worse condition than the
little creature just described, with their mothers (or more probably
other women, for the infants were mostly foundlings) in attendance as
nurses. The matron of the ward, a middle-aged woman, remarkably kind and
motherly in aspect, was walking to and fro across the chamber--on that
weary journey in which careful mothers and nurses travel so continually
and so far, and gain never a step of progress--with an unquiet baby in
her arms. She assured us that she enjoyed her occupation, being
exceedingly fond of children; and, in fact, the absence of timidity in
all the little people was a sufficient proof that they could have had no
experience of harsh treatment, though, on the other hand, none of them
appeared to be attracted to one individual more than another. In this
point they differed widely from the poor child below stairs. They seemed
to recognize a universal motherhood in womankind, and cared not which
individual might be the mother of the moment. I found their tameness as
shocking as did Alexander Selkirk that of the brute subjects of his else
solitary kingdom. It was a sort of tame familiarity, a perfect
indifference to the approach of strangers, such as I never noticed in
other children. I accounted for it partly by their nerveless, unstrung
state of body, incapable of the quick thrills of delight and fear which
play upon the lively harp-strings of a healthy child's nature, and partly
by their woful lack of acquaintance with a private home, and their being
therefore destitute of the sweet home-bred shyness, which is like the
sanctity of heaven about a mother-petted child. Their condition was like
that of chickens hatched in an oven, and growing up without the especial
guardianship of a matron hen: both the chicken and the child, methinks,
must needs want something that is essential to their respective
characters.

In this chamber (which was spacious, containing a large number of beds)
there was a clear fire burning on the hearth, as in all the other
occupied rooms; and directly in front of the blaze sat a woman holding a
baby, which, beyond all reach of comparison, was the most horrible object
that ever afflicted my sight. Days afterwards--nay, even now, when I
bring it up vividly before my mind's eye--it seemed to lie upon the floor
of my heart, polluting my moral being with the sense of something
grievously amiss in the entire conditions of humanity. The holiest man
could not be otherwise than full of wickedness, the chastest virgin
seemed impure, in a world where such a babe was possible. The governor
whispered me, apart, that, like nearly all the rest of them, it was the
child of unhealthy parents. Ah, yes! There was the mischief. This
spectral infant, a hideous mockery of the visible link which Love creates
between man and woman, was born of disease and sin. Diseased Sin was its
father, and Sinful Disease its mother, and their offspring lay in the
woman's arms like a nursing Pestilence, which, could it live and grow up,
would make the world a more accursed abode than ever heretofore. Thank
Heaven, it could not live! This baby, if we must give it that sweet
name, seemed to be three or four months old, but, being such an unthrifty
changeling, might have been considerably older. It was all covered with
blotches, and preternaturally dark and discolored; it was withered away,
quite shrunken and fleshless; it breathed only amid pantings and
gaspings, and moaned painfully at every gasp. The only comfort in
reference to it was the evident impossibility of its surviving to draw
many more of those miserable, moaning breaths; and it would have been
infinitely less heart-depressing to see it die, right before my eyes,
than to depart and carry it alive in my remembrance, still suffering the
incalculable torture of its little life. I can by no means express how
horrible this infant was, neither ought I to attempt it. And yet I must
add one final touch. Young as the poor little creature was, its pain and
misery had endowed it with a premature intelligence, insomuch that its
eyes seemed to stare at the bystanders out of their sunken sockets
knowingly and appealingly, as if summoning us one and all to witness the
deadly wrong of its existence. At least, I so interpreted its look, when
it positively met and responded to my own awe-stricken gaze, and
therefore I lay the case, as far as I am able, before mankind, on whom
God has imposed the necessity to suffer in soul and body till this dark
and dreadful wrong be righted.

Thence we went to the school-rooms, which were underneath the chapel.
The pupils, like the children whom we had just seen, were, in large
proportion, foundlings. Almost without exception, they looked sickly,
with marks of eruptive trouble in their doltish faces, and a general
tendency to diseases of the eye. Moreover, the poor little wretches
appeared to be uneasy within their skins, and screwed themselves about on
the benches in a disagreeably suggestive way, as if they had inherited
the evil habits of their parents as an innermost garment of the same
texture and material as the shirt of Nessus, and must wear it with
unspeakable discomfort as long as they lived. I saw only a single child
that looked healthy; and on my pointing him out, the governor informed me
that this little boy, the sole exception to the miserable aspect of his
school-fellows, was not a foundling, nor properly a work-house child,
being born of respectable parentage, and his father one of the officers
of the institution. As for the remainder,--the hundred pale abortions to
be counted against one rosy-cheeked boy,--what shall we say or do?
Depressed by the sight of so much misery, and uninventive of remedies for
the evils that force themselves on my perception, I can do little more
than recur to the idea already hinted at in the early part of this
article, regarding the speedy necessity of a new deluge. So far as these
children are concerned, at any rate, it would be a blessing to the human
race, which they will contribute to enervate and corrupt,--a greater
blessing to themselves, who inherit no patrimony but disease and vice,
and in whose souls, if there be a spark of God's life, this seems the
only possible mode of keeping it aglow,--if every one of them could be
drowned to-night, by their best friends, instead of being put tenderly to
bed. This heroic method of treating human maladies, moral and material,
is certainly beyond the scope of man's discretionary rights, and probably
will not be adopted by Divine Providence until the opportunity of milder
reformation shall have been offered us again and again, through a series
of future ages.

It may be fair to acknowledge that the humane and excellent governor, as
well as other persons better acquainted with the subject than myself,
took a less gloomy view of it, though still so dark a one as to involve
scanty consolation. They remarked that individuals of the male sex,
picked up in the streets and nurtured in the workhouse, sometimes succeed
tolerably well in life, because they are taught trades before being
turned into the world, and, by dint of immaculate behavior and good luck,
are not, unlikely to get employment and earn a livelihood. The case is
different with the girls. They can only go to service, and are
invariably rejected by families of respectability on account of their
origin, and for the better reason of their unfitness to fill
satisfactorily even the meanest situations in a well-ordered English
household. Their resource is to take service with people only a step or
two above the poorest class, with whom they fare scantily, endure harsh
treatment, lead shifting and precarious lives, and finally drop into the
slough of evil, through which, in their best estate, they do but pick
their slimy way on stepping-stones.

From the schools we went to the bake-house, and the brew-house (for such
cruelty is not harbored in the heart of a true Englishman as to deny a
pauper his daily allowance of beer), and through the kitchens, where we
beheld an immense pot over the fire, surging and walloping with some kind
of a savory stew that filled it up to its brim. We also visited a
tailor's shop, and a shoemaker's shop, in both of which a number of mien,
and pale, diminutive apprentices, were at work, diligently enough, though
seemingly with small heart in the business. Finally, the governor
ushered us into a shed, inside of which was piled up an immense quantity
of new coffins. They were of the plainest description, made of pine
boards, probably of American growth, not very nicely smoothed by the
plane, neither painted nor stained with black, but provided with a loop
of rope at either end for the convenience of lifting the rude box and its
inmate into the cart that shall carry them to the burial-ground. There,
in holes ten feet deep, the paupers are buried one above another,
mingling their relics indistinguishably. In another world may they
resume their individuality, and find it a happier one than here!

As we departed, a character came under our notice which I have met with
in all almshouses, whether of the city or village, or in England or
America. It was the familiar simpleton, who shuffled across the
court-yard, clattering his wooden-soled shoes, to greet us with a howl or
a laugh, I hardly know which, holding out his hand for a penny, and
chuckling grossly when it was given him. All under-witted persons, so
far as my experience goes, have this craving for copper coin, and appear
to estimate its value by a miraculous instinct, which is one of the
earliest gleams of human intelligence while the nobler faculties are yet
in abeyance. There may come a time, even in this world, when we shall
all understand that our tendency to the individual appropriation of gold
and broad acres, fine houses, and such good and beautiful things as are
equally enjoyable by a multitude, is but a trait of imperfectly developed
intelligence, like the simpleton's cupidity of a penny. When that day
dawns,--and probably not till then,--I imagine that there will be no more
poor streets nor need of almshouses.

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