CHAPTER XXV
Of all our protégés among the “People,” none interested us more than the Tailoress. The discovery of interesting characters among the poor was one of the rewards that we hoped for from our work.
The Tailoress was a tall, gaunt, strong-featured woman of forty, who lived alone on the fifth floor of a Brand Street lodging-house. She worked ten hours a day; at night she read. From the city library she had obtained stray volumes of Browning and Ruskin and Carlyle. Her comments on these books had marked individuality.
The Tailoress had been an ambitious country girl, and had come to the city to work her way through sewing into an art-education. Once she had succeeded in taking a six-weeks course in elementarydrawing. The work had been interrupted, but the Tailoress had not yet given up her hope. That was the reason why, although she commanded comparatively good wages, she lived up so many flights of stairs, and fared on porridge and tea.
She had a peculiar face, with a long nose, and strong under-jaw. Her skin was brown, despite her years of confinement in a shop, so brown that her blue eyes looked paler than they really were. I liked to see her pupils dilate when an idea came to her. They expanded, and her whole face glowed with enthusiasm.
For the Tailoress had the soul of a poet. Through all her starved life she had carefully saved up every semblance of beauty that had fallen to her lot. In her room hung a Carlo Dolce Madonna, in a narrow black-walnut frame, and an unmounted photograph of two Corregio cherubs was pinned to the wall-paper. She owned a few books: a volume of Longfellow, selections from Ruskin, and an Emerson Birthday Book. The heavy underliningin these few volumes revealed an admiration deep and uncritical.
“It looks,” said Janet, with mock gravity, when I told her about the Tailoress, “as if a sphere of usefulness were going to be given me. May I lead the Tailoress up from Carlo Dolce to a love for French impressionism? I will take her to see the pictures of M. Puvis de Chavannes.”
“If you choose,” I answered, “but leave her her books.”
“Nay,” said Janet, “I will take away her Longfellow and give her Amiel. Shall the poor be shut off from the sources of our inspiration?”
The Tailoress was different from the other working-people that I knew. Most of them were weighed down by a constant sense of wrong, but the Tailoress never rebelled against the hardships of her lot. They seemed to have no power over her. Perhaps she forgot them in her hunger and thirst for beauty and knowledge.
I remember some of her remarks. Once,when some one was denouncing the useless luxury of the lives of the rich, the Tailoress looked up quickly.
“I don’t feel like that,” she said, in her deep, masculine voice. “Why should we grudge them the beauty of their lives? God knows what is best. I am glad that there are people in the world who can have the things they want.”
We took her to the Art Museum, and she was as one possessed. I found her in a room devoted to Greek sculpture, sitting alone and silent. She rose, with the face of one greatly moved, and grasped my arm.
“What does it matter,” she said, “all the suffering and the lack, in a world that has in it things like this?”
It was hard to induce her to come away. “It makes me so happy to stay here,” she said. “It is full of beauty and of peace.”
Doubtless it was her longing for something else that kept her from rising in her trade. After twenty-two years of workshe was still a vest-maker, never having shown sufficient ambition to try her skill as a maker of coats.
Now a crisis came in her life. She went to hear the Altruist lecture, and became his most ardent disciple. I think that he unlocked the gates of Heaven to her. Through the glamour of his eloquence she caught sight of the pinnacles and towers of the city of her dreams. Unconsciously she adopted his opinions and his tastes. Cardinal Newman’s “Dream of Gerontius” appeared among the books on her table, and the Correggio cherubs gave way to a thin Giotto saint.
Her devotion was so extreme that the Altruist at last learned to distinguish her from his many other followers. He saw her strength, and confided to me the way in which he thought it should be used. The Tailoress had personal ambition, aspiration, he said, but it seemed to him hardly worth while to encourage that. She was too old. In our attempts to serve Humanity, we must utilize our forces in the mosteconomical way, and must work with the young. It was too late for her to fulfil her own life; she must learn to help fulfil the lives of others.
She needed, first of all, to be led up to a higher spiritual plane. There was something pagan in her thirst for pure beauty. Under his forming touch she might grow into more impersonal and holier ambition.
And there was no nobler mission for her than the liberation of her sex. The Tailoress was employed in an ill-paid industry, which was almost entirely in the hands of women. Already in her own shop she was looked upon as an oracle. Could she not learn that, in helping secure better conditions of life for her fellow-workers, she would be doing higher service than she could ever do in search for knowledge, or in devotion to art?
I, who was still at the mercy of indiscriminate enthusiasm, and had not yet learned to let other people’s causes alone,promised to go with the Tailoress to the Anarchist, that she might learn from him the social wrong from which she was suffering, and the social mission to which she was called.