Chapter IV: Police News and Crime (3)

She went to the home of Mrs. Jennie Nelson, 4212
North avenue. Mrs. Nelson’s brother, William
Larson, is the man she wanted to marry. He “was
fond of her, too,” as Mrs. Nelson said, “but his
health was poor and he did not want to marry for
the present.”

Emma Johnson turned on the gas and died. She left a
letter, in which she said:

“Dearest Friends--When you have read this I have
crossed the bar. Ambition, energy and strength have
deserted me and every hope and dream is shattered.
Death is the only relief. I have called upon heaven
to save me from myself--to send me a natural death.
I don’t want to die like this. I want to live and
be happy, but that is not to be.

“I’ve had my hell here, but it is hard to go like
this, hard to bring this sorrow upon my folks,
bitterly hard.

“For the one who has driven me to do this I feel
only love, and if I am permitted to enter heaven I
shall wait for him.

“Perhaps he will love me then; he will feel bad
about this, but help him understand that I forgive
all, and I hope some one else will be to him what I
never could, a joy and a comfort, and that she may
make him happy as I had hoped to do. I wish I could
look upon the faces of my dear father and brothers
and sisters again. I can’t still the voice in my
heart. I haven’t the strength. Forgive me and pray
for me. Only another lost soul.”

* * * * *

SUICIDE OF SCHOOL GIRL

_Chicago Tribune_

Rose Lubin’s younger brother, Max, wanted help
with his “home work” last night. Rose, who is 16,
is proud of her standing at the head of the eighth
grade in the Winfield school.

“I can’t do my own work and yours, too,” she told
Max. “I’ve got enough to keep me busy till bed time
and I’m not going to lose my marks on your account.”

Max went to his father and the father went to Rose.

“If you don’t help your brother I’ll take you out
of school,” said Lubin.

Whereupon Rose changed her mind about the manner in
which the nickel she had earned in the afternoon
was to be spent. She bought acid with it, returned
to her home at 951 West Fifteenth street, and drank
the poison.

Rose will not be at school today. Perhaps she will
never go back. She is in the county hospital.
Physicians there fear she will not recover.

* * * * *

CAUSE OF ATTEMPTED SUICIDE

_New York Evening Post_

Mary Stober, eighteen years old, of 951 East
135th Street, who tried to kill herself last week
(Friday) because she has no piano, is home again
from the Lincoln Hospital, and is starting in to
live again in a world where no hope is, since she
cannot have a piano.

To dream every night that you have a piano and
“play just grand,” and then wake up to hear the
alarm clock buzzing six o’clock; to forget where
you are, and half close your eyes and pretend
that the movements your fingers are making are on
a piano, instead of having something to do with
the bobbin of a machine in an embroidery factory;
to hear beautiful music suddenly in the midst of
your work, and listen, startled and ecstatic, for
a moment until it is lost in the endless whirring
of the machines--these things, if you have never
done them, may seem a certainty that Life is, after
all, very splendid while there is such a thing as
imagination, and that the gray of it is woven full
of unexpected and vivid threads of color.

Or it may impress you as deliciously funny that the
lack of a piano can seem tragic, if you have a big
enough view of tragic things to see that some of
them are greater. But to this girl, who does them
every day and night of her life, they are simply
the things which have twice made her try to kill
herself, the reason why she is “disgusted, always
disgusted,” as she says, very simply.

Mary Stober has a pale, strong face, with a
stubborn chin and a wistful smile, very gray eyes,
light brown hair in a bang on her forehead, and
very red lips. She looks very young and very
determined and very wistful and somewhat sullen.
Her hands are red and rough and square-fingered
from hard work.

She was dusting one of the rooms this morning in
the soggy apartment house of which her mother
is janitress, and where they and the six other
children live and pay half-rent. She goes back to
the factory on Monday. She sat down in one of the
innumerous chairs to tell her story, fingering
the grimy dust-cloth with her red fingers, which
are never quiet for a minute. Her mother stood up
through the recital--the little German mother who
speaks English only brokenly, who wears a little
shawl over her head while she sweeps down the long
flights of stairs and who used to play the piano
herself when she was a girl in Germany--and looked
at Mary with a worried, gentle, almost heartbroken
look.

“When I was ten--that was when I stopped school and
went to work--I thought always about when I would
be eighteen and a grand piano player,” Mary began,
fingering the dust-cloth. “Then I was eighteen
and I didn’t have a piano yet, and I was almost
crazy. Eight years I have worked, and I haven’t got
anything yet. And what’s worrying me now is where
we’re going to go. We can’t stay here. Other places
we’ve been we’ve had coal and things, and our money
could all go for the food and clothes. But now
we’ve got to pay for a stove and coal.”

She and her sister, who is nineteen and who can
play the piano by ear when she can find one to
play--Mary herself can only play with one hand by
ear, and “people don’t like to hear that kind o’
playing,” she says--and the oldest brother, are the
only ones who make money. Mary makes seven dollars
a week. All of these details, which she tells
simply, go to show that there is little hope for
a piano. The little, crumpled mother from behind
the chair she is leaning on says, in her broken
way, that a piano is not so easy to get, and looks
hopelessly at her daughter.

“Then we got phonograph, but she only cry every
time he play,” the mother said.

“I can’t bear to hear it,” interrupted Mary. “I’d
rather play myself.”

And so finally the brother took the phonograph
away, about a month ago, since it only made the
girl more miserable than ever.

“And in every house I go to,” she said, “there is
a piano. And one girl comes to the factory, saying
she can play grand, and her father wants her to
play in a cabaret. She’s only sixteen, too. I can’t
be happy,” she finished simply. “I can’t be happy.
And it gets my goat when anybody laughs. And every
single night I dream I’ve got a piano and play so
nice, and every day at work I imagine I am playing.
All I want to do is to play a piano. I don’t want
clothes. If I have good clothes the girls would
want me to go out with them, and I don’t want to go
out. It is only trouble comes of it. All I want to
do is to stay home and play the piano.”

All the family like music, it seems, “but none of
them but me would die for it,” she says. “And my
father hated it. He wanted me only to work, day
and night to work, since I was ten. But he’s gone
away now. They took him away--Randall’s Island.” It
was when the father was home, though, and earning
a little now and then, that the phonograph, which
proved a doubtful blessing, was made possible.

Mary Stober says, and her chin looks very square,
that she knows she could pay for lessons--she
would walk to the factory instead of riding and go
without lunch--if she only had a piano to practice
on at home.

It was a mixture of lysol and iodine that she took
last week--the only things she could find. “I don’t
care what I take,” she says, “if I can’t get what I
want. Eight years I’ve worked and I haven’t gotten
anything yet.” It was last August that she tried
before to kill herself.