CHAPTER VII
“Her device, within a ring of clouds, a heart with shine about it.”—Ben Jonson.
“But what do you do it for? You can’t help. You only harrow up your own feelings.” It was Janet who spoke, perverse, unhappy, winsome Janet, sitting in a tall, old-fashioned chair at the side of her little tea-table.
“I suppose that it is better,” I answered slowly, “to have one’s feelings harrowed up over other people than over one’s self.”
“That’s a very neat thrust,” said the girl. “Thank you. Do you know what the Doctor says about all this reform-scheming and theorizing?”
“No.”
“That it is all ‘shoveling-fog.’ That is a ’longshore expression. Don’t you like it?”
“Very much,” I said. “But doesn’t it suit as well any kind of talking, even the discussion of the ‘Is-life-worth-living’ question?”
“You must have been doing some especially good deed,” said Janet, leaning her pretty head against the back of her chair and looking at me through half-shut eyes. “You are so disagreeable. There isn’t any soil that philanthropy thrives in so well as in the ruins of the social and domestic virtues.”
“Child,” I said, “I did not mean to be personal. Why don’t you stop thinking, and try to find shoes and stockings for some of my poor people?”
Quick tears sprang into her shining eyes.
“‘I sometimes think it were best just to let the Lord alone;I am sure some people forget he was there before they came,’”
“‘I sometimes think it were best just to let the Lord alone;I am sure some people forget he was there before they came,’”
“‘I sometimes think it were best just to let the Lord alone;I am sure some people forget he was there before they came,’”
“‘I sometimes think it were best just to let the Lord alone;
I am sure some people forget he was there before they came,’”
she quoted. “I do not know what the poor have done that I should descend upon them as a last affliction. First, dirt; thena financial crisis and no work; then hunger and cold; and then I. It is like the plagues in Egypt.”
I leaned back in my chair, powerless. It was becoming evident to me that no one could solve Janet’s problems for her.
“It would be cowardly,” she said. “Because I am unhappy, should I try to work off my ill-humour upon the poor?”
“They might like to look at you,” I suggested.
She was making tea, and she stopped, holding a dainty cup in her right hand, to look up at me. That face, whose expression changed so often, baffled and fascinated me. The mouth curved often into cynical smiles, but the eyes were the eyes of a dreamer. At times Janet seemed to me a child. At times she bore the weary expression of one who has fought many battles and has won but few.
“No,” she said. “I am one of the people whose agnosticism absolves them from all action. You know the type. Wefind it difficult to get up in the morning or to button our boots because we cannot comprehend the infinite. Really, agnosticism makes a very soft down cushion on which to recline at one’s ease.”
“Don’t you sometimes get tired of thrusting arrows into yourself?” I asked. “It must be hard to be a St. Sebastian where you have to be persecutor and martyr too.”
“Please don’t make epigrams,” said the girl. “It is a sign of degeneracy. I am sorry to see you beginning to show traces of it.”
“I thought perhaps you would not understand me if I did not try to speak in epigrams,” I answered meekly.
Janet rose from her chair and came over to stand at my side, brushing back, with kindly fingers, a lock of hair that had escaped from under my bonnet.
“But to go back to the question of good works,” she said. “It seems to me that it is useless to try anything. Listen. When I was twelve years old I wantedto do some work for the city charity organization.
“They sent me to take two aprons to a woman on Harrow Street. ‘It was quite safe,’ they said. So I went down through the dirty street into an inner court, and began to climb the stairs. It was perfectly dark; it was unutterably filthy.
“The woman, I found, lived in the garret, and, after the last flight of stairs, I had to climb a ladder to reach her. In the loft at the top of the ladder I saw,—I shall never forget it!—a woman diseased, shrunken, helpless. Half her face was withered and gone; she was cold, hungry, dirty. Two miserable little girls were crawling around her, crying.
“And I stood there stupefied, unable to speak, unable to grasp all the horror before me. I could do nothing for them. I only stared, helplessly, and petted the little girls. Then I gave that bed-ridden woman the two gingham aprons and came away.
“That scene made an impression upon me that I shall never lose. Since then,all the charity work I have heard of has seemed as ironic as that. Such misery is hopeless. Something deeper than human misdeeds must be the cause. I cannot help it; I cannot help believing that we are the sport of the gods, who sit behind the curtain and laugh at our hurt.”
In the pause that followed, Janet went to the window, forgetting to put down the empty cup that she had taken from me.
Suddenly she turned to me, with her chin raised in defiance.
“Moreover,” she said slowly, “I don’t want to forget my own life entirely in the lives of other people. I want it all, the pleasure and the pain of it, the whole cup down to the dregs.”
There was nothing for me to say; I rose to go.
“What do you think of the Lad?” I asked.
The girl’s face brightened. “He is interesting,” she said. “He is so different. It seems to me that he is the only one of us who is really living. The rest of us are merely talking about it.”