Four Years in the Underbrush: Adventures as a Working Woman in New YorkAnonymous
History
Four Years in the Underbrush: Adventures as a Working Woman in New York
Anonymous
Women employees -- New York (State) -- New York
She was something of a character, that young woman. She possessed
considerable musical talent and the promise of a good voice. Her family,
with much self-denial, had managed to send her to Rome in the hope of
her becoming a singer in grand opera.
As time wore on the people in my district got to know me and talk more
freely. I soon learned that the idea of the Pope in Ireland was not a
figment of the music-teacher’s imagination. I was told repeatedly that
within a few years he would be moved to Ireland.
Soon after I went to live in the tenement on East Thirty-first Street I
got an even greater surprise. One Saturday afternoon a small, quietly
dressed woman appeared at the entrance of my little flat—the upper half
of the door being open she stood on the piazza. She asked for a
contribution to build a church and explained that she was taking from
five cents up.
Now I believe in the moral influence of a church building. Even though
the minister may not be of much significance I have found that in nine
cases out of ten having a church in a neighborhood lifts the tone. While
working for the A. S. P. C. A. I seldom passed a church in the tenements
without stepping in, even when I did not have time to sit down.
While I was getting my pocketbook the little woman at the door told me
about the church for which she was begging. It was to be the grandest in
the world, to cost more than a hundred million of dollars. It was to be
located at Washington, D. C. Then she added:
“The Pope is coming over to dedicate it. When he comes he’ll never go
back.”
I handed her twenty-five cents and told her that I hoped she would see
to it that I got a seat in case I was able to be present at the
dedication. She thanked me for my contribution, but very wisely, I
thought, refrained from promising me a seat. And I refrained from
telling her that I was not a child of the Pope’s.
After that many a time and oft I was assured that the Pope would come to
live in the United States. For days after the smashing of the windows of
the Union Club the tenements boiled. The Irish were in transports of
triumph. The United States was only a “Greater Ireland,” and the Pope
would surely come over here to live.
On my inquiring on which steamer the Pope had bought passage, the woman
who had been giving me the glad tidings became affronted. She haughtily
informed me that a battleship would be sent for him, with all our other
battle-crafts, great and small, to protect him from the English.
“The English always have been jealous of us,” I told her. “I know they
will, to the last man and woman of them, swell up and bust with jealousy
when we get the Pope over here.”
“It’ll serve ’em right,” she agreed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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