At the time that Congress declared that a state of war existed between this country and Germany, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Bruno, both American born, and their four children, lived in the flat in which I afterward found them. At that time their flat consisted of a dark kitchen, a front room with two windows looking on Second Avenue, and two twilight bedrooms, each with a window looking on a by-courtesy court no wider than a well.
One of these twilight bedrooms was occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Bruno, the other by their grown daughter and her schoolgirl sister. The two sons, one at work and the other at school, slept on a couch-bed in the front room.
“We was thinking about getting a flat with more room,” Mrs. Bruno explained to me. “Both my boy and girl was making good wages. When I told them I’d found a place, they both told me they was thinking of marryin’. No use movin’ and havin’ an extra room on your hands when your boy and girl marry.”
Both did marry and both young husbands enlisted. As a consequence when they were called to camp both young wives came to live with Mr. and Mrs. Bruno. In time both young wives gave birth to a baby.
All went well until the owner of the flat-house determined to get higher rents. Five dollars a month was the raise charged the Bruno family. Though the old man grumbled he paid the raise.
Two months later he received notice of a ten-dollar-a-month raise—the cost of living was so high, the owner explained, that she had to have more money. A few months more and yet another raise. This notice was served just after the birth of one baby and before the birth of the other. With one young woman just home from the hospital and the other expecting to go any day, the family was in no condition to move.
With Mr. Bruno the only worker in the family, for the allotment due each of the young wives had not been paid, ten dollars more rent meant starvation. The two children, boy and girl, were taken out of school and put to work. Their wages made up the needed ten dollars a month and gave something over to meet the rise in the cost of all the necessities of life.
Shortly after the birth of the second baby the tenement-owner made a tour of inspection, looked over her property. As described by the occupants of her tenement she was a large, “fleshy” lady. All agreed that her clothes, furs, diamonds, and automobile were “grand.” As an additional evidence of her grandeur, besides her chauffeur there was seated another grown man in uniform, whose only duty, so far as the women and children living in her tenement could understand, was to hop out when the automobile stopped and hold open the door.
