It seemed very fortunate to Jack Delancy that he should have such a clever woman as Carmen for his confidante, a man so powerful as Henderson as his backer, and a person so omniscient as Mavick for his friend. No combination could be more desirable for a young man who proposed to himself a career of getting money by adroit management and spending it in pure and simple self-indulgence. There are plenty of men who have taken advantage of like conditions to climb from one position to another, and have then kicked down the ladders behind them as fast as they attained a new footing. It was Jack's fault that he was not one of these. You could scarcely dignify his character by saying that he had an aim, except to saunter through life with as little personal inconvenience as possible. His selfishness was boneless. It was not by any means negative, for no part of his amiable nature was better developed than regard for his own care and comfort; but it was not strong enough to give him Henderson's capacity for hard work and even self-denial, nor Mavick's cool, persevering skill in making a way for himself in the world. Why was not Edith his confidante? His respect for her was undoubted; his love for her was unquestioned; his trust in her was absolute. And yet with either Carmen or Miss Tavish he fell into confidential revelations of himself which instinctively he did not make to Edith. The explanation of this is on the surface, and it is the key to half the unhappiness in domestic life. He felt that Edith was not in sympathy with the associations and the life he was leading. The pitiful and hopeless part of it is that if she had been in sympathy with them, Jack would have gone on in his frivolous career at an accelerated pace. It was not absence of love, it was not unfaithfulness, that made Jack enjoy the hours he spent with Carmen, or with the pleasing and not too fastidious Miss Tavish, with a zest that was wanting to his hours at home. If he had been upon a sinking steamboat with the three women, and could have saved only one of them, he would not have had a moment's hesitation in rescuing Edith and letting the other two sink out of his life. The character is not unusual, nor the situation uncommon. What is a woman to do? Her very virtues are enemies of her peace; if she appears as a constant check and monitor, she repels; if she weakly acquiesces, the stream will flow over both of them. The dilemma seems hopeless.
It would be a mistake to suppose that either Edith or Jack put their relations in any such definite shape as this. He was unthinking. She was too high-spirited, too confident of her position, to be assailed by such fears. And it must be said, since she was a woman, that she had the consciousness of power which goes along with the possession of loveliness and keen wit. Those who knew her best knew that under her serenity was a gay temperament, inherited from the original settlers of Manhattan, an abounding enjoyment of life, and capacity for passion. It was early discovered in her childhood that little Edith had a will of her own.
Lent was over. It was the time of the twittering of sparrows, of the opening of windows, of putting in order the little sentimental spots called "squares," where the poor children get their idea of forests, and the rich renew their faint recollections of innocence and country life; when the hawkers go about the streets, and the hand-organs celebrate the return of spring and the possibility of love. Even the idle felt that it was a time for relaxation and quiet.
"Have you answered Miss Tavish's invitation?" asked Jack one morning at the breakfast-table.
"Not yet. I shall decline today for myself."
"Why? It's for charity."
"Well, my charity extends to Miss Tavish. I don't want to see her dance."
"That leaves me in a nice hole. I said I'd go."
"And why not? You go to a good many places you don't take me—the clubs, brokers' offices, Stalker's, the Conventional, and—"
"Oh, go on. Why do you object to my going to see this dance?"
"My dear Jack," said Edith, "I haven't objected the least in the world;" and her animated face sparkled with a smile, which seemed to irritate Jack more than a frown would have done.
"I don't see why you set yourself up. I'll bet Miss Tavish will raise more money for the Baxter Street Guild, yes, and do more good, than you and the priest and that woman doctor slopping about on the East Side in six months."
"Very likely," replied Edith, still with the same good-humored smile. "But, Jack, it's delightful to see your philanthropic spirit stirred up in this way. You ought to be encouraged. Why don't you join Miss Tavish in this charity? I have no doubt that if it was advertised that Miss Tavish and Mr. Jack Delancy would dance for the benefit of an East Side guild in the biggest hall in the city, there wouldn't be standing room."
"Oh, bosh!" said Jack, getting up from his chair and striding about the room, with more irritation than he had ever shown to Edith before. "I wouldn't be a prude."
Edith's eyes flashed and her face flushed, but her smile came back in a moment, and she was serene again. "Come here, Jack. Now, old fellow, look me straight in the eyes, and tell me if you would like to have me dance the serpentine dance before a drawing-room full of gossiping women, with, as you say, just a few men peeping in at the doors."
Jack did look, and the serene eyes, yet dancing with amusement at the incongruous picture, seemed to take a warmer glow of love and pleading.
"Oh, hang it! that's different," and he stooped and gave her an awkward kiss.
"I'm glad you know it's different," she said, with a laugh that had not a trace of mockery in it; "and since you do, you'd better go along and do your charity, and I'll stay at home, and try to be—different when you come back."
And Jack went; with a little feeling of sheepishness that he would not have acknowledged at the time, and he found himself in a company where he was entirely at his ease. He admired the dancing of the blithe, graceful girl, he applauded her as the rest did with hand-clapping and bravas, and said it was ravishing. It all suited him perfectly. And somehow, in the midst of it all, in the sensuous abandon of this electric-light eccentricity at mid-day, he had a fleeting vision of something very different, of a womanhood of another sort, and a flush came to his face for a moment as he imagined Edith in a skirt dance under the gaze of this sensation-loving society. But this was only for a moment. When he congratulated Miss Tavish his admiration was entirely sincere; and the girl, excited with her physical triumph, seemed to him as one emancipated out of acquired prudishness into the Greek enjoyment of life. Miss Tavish, who would not for the world have violated one of the social conventions of her set, longed, as many women do, for the sort of freedom and the sort of applause which belongs to women who succeed upon the stage. Not that she would have forfeited her position by dancing at a theatre for money; but; within limits, she craved the excitement, the abandon, the admiration, that her grace and passion could win. This was not at all the ambition which led the Egyptian queen Hatshepsu to assume the dress of a man, but rather that more famous aspiration which led the daughter of Herodias, in a pleasure-loving court, to imitate and excel the professional dancing-girls. If in this inclination of the women of the day, which is not new, but has characterized all societies to which wealth has brought idleness, there was a note of demoralization, it did not seem so to Jack, who found the world day by day more pleasing and more complaisant.
As the months went by, everything prospered with him on his drifting voyage. Of all voyages, that is the easiest to make which has no port in view, that depends upon the varying winds, if the winds happen to be soft and the chance harbors agreeable. Jack was envied, thanks to Henderson. He was lucky in whatever he touched. Without any change in his idle habits, and with no more attention to business than formerly, money came to him so freely that he not only had a complacent notion that he was a favorite of fortune, but the idea of his own importance in the financial world increased enormously, much to the amusement of Mavick, when he was occasionally in the city, to whom he talked somewhat largely of his operations, and who knew that he had no more comprehension of the sweep of Henderson's schemes than a baby has of the stock exchange when he claps his hands with delight at the click of the ticker.
His prosperity was visible. It showed in the increase of his accounts at the Union, in his indifference to limits in the game of poker, in a handsome pair of horses which he insisted on Edith's accepting for her own use, in an increased scale of living at home, in the hundred ways that a man of fashion can squander money in a luxurious city. If he did not haunt the second-hand book-shops or the stalls of dealers in engravings, or bring home as much bric-a-brac as he once had done, it was because his mind was otherwise engaged; his tailor's bills were longer, and there were more expensive lunches at the clubs, at which there was a great deal of sage talk about stocks and combinations, and much wisdom exhibited in regard to wines; and then there were the little suppers at Wherry's after the theatres, which a bird could have eaten and a fish have drunken, and only a spendthrift have paid for.
"It is absurd," Edith had said one night after their return. "It makes us ridiculous in the eyes of anybody but fools." And Jack had flared up about it, and declared that he knew what he could afford, and she had retorted that as for her she would not countenance it. And Jack had attempted to pass it off lightly, at last, by saying, "Very well then, dear, if you won't back me, I shall have to rely upon my bankers." At any rate, neither Carmen nor Miss Tavish took him to task. They complimented him on his taste, and Carmen made him feel that she appreciated his independence and his courage in living the life that suited him. She knew, indeed, how much he made in his speculations, how much he lost at cards; she knew through him the gossip of the clubs, and venturing herself not too far at sea, liked to watch the undertow of fashionable life. And she liked Jack, and was not incapable of throwing him a rope when the hour came that he was likely to be swept away by that undertow.
It was remarked at the Union, and by the men in the Street who knew him, that Jack was getting rapid. But no one thought the less of him for his pace—that is, no one appeared to, for this sort of estimate of a man is only tested by his misfortunes, when the day comes that he must seek financial backing. In these days he was generally in an expansive mood, and his free hand and good-humor increased his popularity. There were those who said that there were millions of family money back of Jack, and that he had recently come in for something handsome.
But this story did not deceive Major Fairfax, whose business it was to know to a dot the standing of everybody in society, in which he was a sort of oracle and privileged favorite. No one could tell exactly how the Major lived; no one knew the rigid economy that he practiced; no one had ever seen his small dingy chamber in a cheap lodging-house. The name of Fairfax was as good as a letter of introduction in the metropolis, and the Major had lived on it for years, on that and a carefully nursed little income—an habitue of the club, and a methodical cultivator of the art of dining out. A most agreeable man, and perhaps the wisest man in his generation in those things about which it would be as well not to know anything.
Seated one afternoon in his favorite corner for street observation, by the open window, with the evening paper in his hand, in the attitude of one expecting the usual five o'clock cocktail, he hailed Jack, who was just coming down-stairs from a protracted lunch.
"I say, Delancy, what's this I hear?"
"About what?" said Jack, sauntering along to a seat opposite the Major, and touching a bell on the little table as he sat down. Jack's face was flushed, but he talked with unusual slowness and distinctness. "What have you heard, Major?"
"That you have bought Benham's yacht."
"No, I haven't; but I was turning the thing over in my mind," Jack replied, with the air of a man declining an appointment in the Cabinet. "He offers it cheap."
"My dear boy, there is no such thing as a cheap yacht, any more than there is a cheap elephant."
"It's better to buy than build," Jack insisted. "A man's got to have some recreation."
"Recreation! Why don't you charter a Fifth Avenue stage and take your friends on a voyage to the Battery? That'll make 'em sick enough." It was a misery of the Major's life that, in order to keep in with necessary friends, he had to accept invitations for cruises on yachts, and pretend he liked it. Though he had the gout, he vowed he would rather walk to Newport than go round Point Judith in one of those tipping tubs. He had tried it, and, as he said afterwards, "The devil of it was that Mrs. Henderson and Miss Tavish sympathized with me. Gad! it takes away a person's manhood, that sort of thing."
The Major sipped his bitters, and then added: "Or I'll tell you what; if you must do something, start a newspaper—the drama, society, and letters, that sort of thing, with pictures. I heard Miss Tavish say she wished she had a newspaper."
"But," said Jack, with gravity, "I'm not buying a yacht for Miss Tavish."
"I didn't suppose you were. Devilish fine girl, though. I don't care who you buy it for if you don't buy it for yourself. Why don't you buy it for Henderson? He can afford it."
"I'd like to know what you mean, Major Fairfax!" cried Jack. "What business—"
"There!" exclaimed the Major, sinking back in his chair, with a softened expression in his society beaten face. "It's no use of nonsense, Jack. I'm an average old sinner, and I'm not old enough yet to like a milksop. But I've known you since you were so high, and I knew your father; he used to stay weeks on my plantation when we were both younger. And your mother—that was a woman!—did me a kindness once when I was in a d—-d tight place, and I never forgot it. See here, Jack, if I had money enough I'd buy a yacht and put Carmen and Miss Tavish on it, and send them off on the longest voyage there is."
"Who's been talking?" exclaimed Jack, touched a little, but very much offended.
"The town, Jack. Don't mind the talk. People always talk. I suppose people talk about me: At your age I should have been angry too at a hint even from an old friend. But I've learned. It doesn't pay. I don't get angry any more. Now there's Henderson—"
"What have you got against Henderson?"
"Nothing. He is a very good fellow, for that sort of man. But, Lord! Henderson is a big machine. You might as well try to stand in with a combination of gang-saws, or to make friends with the Department of the Interior. Look at the men who have gone in with Henderson from time to time. The ground is strewn with them. He's got no more feeling in business than a reaper-and-binder."
"I don't know what Henderson's got to do with my having a yacht."
"I beg your pardon, Jack; it's none of my business. Only I do not put my investments"—Jack smiled faintly, as if the conversation were taking a humorous turn—"at the mercy of Henderson's schemes. If I did, I wouldn't try to run a yacht at the same time. I should be afraid that some day when I got to sea I should find myself out of coal. You know, my boy, that the good book says you cannot serve two masters."
"Nobody ever accused you of that, Major," retorted Jack, with a laugh."But what two have you in mind?"
"Oh, I don't mean anything personal. I just use names as typical. Say Henderson and Carmen." And the Major leaned back and tapped his fingers together, as if he were putting a general proposition.
Jack flushed, and then thought a moment—it would be ridiculous to get angry with old Fairfax—and then said: "Major, if I were you, I wouldn't have anything to do with either of them. You'll spoil your digestion."
"Umph!" the Major grunted, as he rose from his chair. "This is an age of impudence. There's no more respect for gray hair than if it were dyed. I cannot waste any more time on you. I've got an early dinner. Devilish uphill work trying to encourage people who dine at seven. But, my boy, think on these things, as the saint says."
And the old fellow limped away. There was one good thing about the Major. He stood up in church every Sunday and read his prayers, like a faithful old sinner as he was.
Jack, sobered by the talk, walked home in a very irritated mood, blaming everybody except himself. For old Fairfax's opinion he didn't care, but evidently the old fellow represented a lot of gossip. He wished people would mind their own business. His irritation was a little appeased by Edith's gay and loving greeting; but she, who knew every shade of his face, saw it.
"Have you had a worrying day?"
"No; not specially. I've had an hour of old Fairfax, who hasn't any business of his own to attend to."
"Oh, nobody minds the Major," Edith said, as she gave him a shake and another kiss; but a sharp pang went through her heart, for she guessed what had happened, since she had had a visit that afternoon from another plain-speaking person.
They were staying late in town. Edith, who did not care to travel far,was going presently to a little cottage by the sea, and Mrs. SchuylerBlunt had looked in for a moment to say good-by before she went up to herLenox house.
"It's only an old farmhouse made over," Mrs. Blunt was saying; "hardly smart enough to ask anybody to, but we hope to have you and Jack there some time."
"That would be very nice. I hear Lenox is more beautiful than ever."
"Yes, it is, and about as difficult to get into as the kingdom of heaven. It's being spoiled for moderate people. The Hendersons and the Van Dams and that sort are in a race to see who shall build houses with the biggest rooms, and give the most expensive entertainments. It's all show. The old flavor has gone."
"But they cannot spoil the scenery.".
"My child, they are the scenery. You can't see anything else. It doesn't bother me, but some of my old neighbors are just ruining themselves trying to keep the pace. I do think the Americans are the biggest fools on earth."
"Father Damon says the trouble is we haven't any middle class for a balance."
"Yes, that's the English of it. But it's a pity that fashion has got hold of the country, and is turning our summers into a worry and a burden. I thought years ago when we went to Lenox that it was a good thing the country was getting to be the fashion; but now it's fashionable, and before we know it every desirable spot will be what they call syndicated. Miss Tavish says she is coming to visit the Hendersons there."
"I thought she went to Bar Harbor."
"But she is coming down for part of the season. These people don't stay anywhere. Just long enough in one place to upset everything with their extravagance. That's the reason I didn't ask you and Jack up this summer."
"Thank you, we couldn't go, you know," said Edith, simply, and then, with curiosity in her eyes, asked; "but I don't quite understand what's the reason."
"Well," said Mrs. Blunt, as if nerving herself up to say what must be said, "I thought perhaps you wouldn't like to be where they are."
"I don't know why I should or why I should not," Edith replied.
"Nor have Jack with them," continued Mrs. Blunt, stoutly.
"What do you mean, Mrs. Blunt?" cried Edith, her brown eyes flaming.
"Don't turn on me, Edith dear. I oughtn't to have said anything. But I thought it was my duty. Of course it is only talk."
"Well?"
"That Jack is always with one or the other of those women."
"It is false!" cried Edith, starting up, with tears now in her eyes; "it's a cruel lie if it means anything wrong in Jack. So am I with those women; so are you. It's a shame. If you hear any one say such things, you can tell them for me that I despise them."
"I said it was a shame, all such talk. I said it was nonsense. But, dear, as a friend, oughtn't I to tell you?" And the kind-hearted gossip put her arm round Edith, and kept saying that she perfectly understood it, and that nobody really meant anything. But Edith was crying now, with a heart both hurt and indignant.
"It's a most hateful world, I know," Mrs, Blunt answered; "but it's the best we have, and it's no use to fret about it."
When the visitor had gone, Edith sat a long time in misery. It was the first real shock of her married life. And in her heart she prayed. For Jack? Oh no. The dear girl prayed for herself, that suspicions might not enter her heart. She could not endure that the world should talk thus of him. That was all. And when she had thought it all over and grown calm, she went to her desk and wrote a note to Carmen. It asked Mrs. Henderson, as they were so soon to leave town, to do her the favor to come round informally and lunch with her the next day, and afterwards perhaps a little drive in the Park.
Jack was grateful for Edith's intervention. He comprehended that she had stepped forward as a shield to him in the gossip about Carmen. He showed his appreciation in certain lover-like attentions and in a gayety of manner, but it was not in his nature to feel the sacrifice she had made or its full magnanimity; he was relieved, and in a manner absolved. Another sort of woman might have made him very uncomfortable. Instead of being rebuked he had a new sense of freedom.
"Not one woman in a thousand would have done it," was the comment of Major Fairfax when he heard of the drive in the Park. "Gad! most of 'em would have cut Carmen dead and put Jack in Coventry, and then there would have been the devil to pay. It takes quality, though; she's such a woman as Jack's mother. If there were not one of them now and then society would deliquesce." And the Major knew, for his principal experience had been with a deliquescent society.
Whether Carmen admired Mrs. Delancy or thought her weak it is impossible to say, but she understood the advances made and responded to them, for they fell in perfectly with her social plans. She even had the face to eulogize Mrs. Delancy to Jack, her breadth of view, her lack of prejudice, and she had even dared to say, "My dear friend, she is too good for us," and Jack had not protested, but with a laugh had accepted the implication of his position on a lower moral level. Perhaps he did not see exactly what it meant, this being on confidential terms about his wife with another woman; all he cared for at the moment was that the comradeship of Miss Tavish and Carmen was agreeable to him. They were no restraint upon him. So long as they remained in town the exchange of civilities was kept up. Carmen and Miss Tavish were often at his house, and there was something reassuring to Jack in the openness with which affairs went on.
Early in June Edith went down to their rented cottage on the south Long Island shore. In her delicate health the doctor had recommended the seaside, and this locality as quiet and restful, and not too far from the whirl of the city. The place had a charm of its own, the charm, namely, of a wide sky, illimitable, flashing, changing sea, rolling in from the far tropical South with its message of romance to the barren Northern shore, and the pure sand dunes, the product of the whippings of tempests and wild weather. The cottage was in fact an old farmhouse, not an impertinent, gay, painted piece of architecture set on the sand like a tent for a month, but a solid, ugly, fascinating habitation, with barns and outhouses, and shrubs, and an old garden—a place with a salty air friendly to delicate spring blossoms and summer fruits and foliage. If it was a farmhouse, the sea was an important part of the farm, and the low-ceiled rooms suggested cabins; it required little imagination to fancy that an East-Indian ship had some time come ashore and settled in the sand, that it had been remodeled and roofed over, and its sides pierced with casement windows, over which roses had climbed in order to bind the wanderer to the soil. It had been painted by the sun and the wind and the salt air, so that its color depended upon the day, and it was sometimes dull and almost black, or blue-black, under a lowering sky, and again a golden brown, especially at sunset, and Edith, feeling its character rather than its appearance to ordinary eyes, had named it the Golden House. Nature is such a beautiful painter of wood.
With Edith went one of her Baltimore cousins, a young kindergarten teacher of fine intelligence and sympathetic manner, who brought to her work a long tradition of gentle breeding and gayety and simplicity —qualities which all children are sure to recognize. What a hopeful thing it is, by-the-way, in the world, that all conditions of people know a lady at sight! Jack found the place delightful. He liked its quaintness, the primitiveness of the farmer-fisherman neighbors, he liked the sea. And then he could run up to the city any morning and back at night. He spent the summer with Edith at the Golden House. This was his theory. When he went to town in the morning he expected to return at night. But often he telegraphed in the afternoon that he was detained by business; he had to see Henderson, or Mavick was over from Washington. Occasionally, but not often, he missed the train. He had too keen a sense of the ridiculous to miss the train often. When he was detained over for two or three days, or the better part of the week, he wrote Edith dashing, hurried letters, speaking of ever so many places he had been to and ever so many people he had seen—yes, Carmen and Miss Tavish and everybody who was in town, and he did not say too much about the hot city and its discomforts.
Henderson's affairs kept him in town, Miss Tavish still postponed Bar Harbor, and Carmen willingly remained. She knew the comfort of a big New York house when the season is over, when no social duties are required, and one is at leisure to lounge about in cool costumes, to read or dream, to open the windows at night for the salt breeze from the bay, to take little excursions by boat or rail, to dine al fresco in the garden of some semi-foreign hotel, to taste the unconventional pleasures of the town, as if one were in some foreign city. She used to say that New York in matting and hollands was almost as nice as Buda-Pesth. These were really summer nights, operatic sorts of nights, with music floating in the air, gay groups in the streets, a stage imitation of nature in the squares with the thick foliage and the heavy shadows cast on the asphalt by the electric lights, the brilliant shops, the nonsense of the summer theatres, where no one expected anything, and no one was disappointed, the general air of enjoyment, and the suggestion of intrigue. Sometimes, when Mavick was over, a party was made up for the East Side, to see the foreign costumes, the picturesque street markets, the dime museums, and the serious, tragical theatres of the people. The East Side was left pretty much to itself, now that the winter philanthropists had gone away, and was enjoying its summer nights and its irresponsible poverty.
They even looked in at Father Damon's chapel, the dimly lighted fragrant refuge from the world and from sin. Why not? They were interested in the morals of the region. Had not Miss Tavish danced for one of the guilds; and had not Carmen given Father Damon a handsome check in support of his mission? It was so satisfactory to go into such a place and see the penitents kneeling here and there, the little group of very plainly dressed sinners attracted by Father Damon's spiritual face and unselfish enthusiasm. Carmen said she felt like kneeling at one of the little boxes and confessing—the sins of her neighbors. And then the four —Carmen, Miss Tavish, Mavick, and Jack—had a little supper at Wherry's, which they enjoyed all the more for the good action of visiting the East Side—a little supper which lasted very late, and was more and more enjoyed as it went on, and was, in fact, so gay that when the ladies were set down at their houses, Jack insisted on dragging Mavick off to the Beefsteak Club and having something manly to drink; and while they drank he analyzed the comparative attractions of Carmen and Miss Tavish; he liked that kind of women, no nonsense in them; and presently he wandered a little and lost the cue of his analysis, and, seizing Mavick by the arm, and regarding him earnestly, in a burst of confidence declared that, notwithstanding all appearances, Edith was the dearest girl in the world.
It was at this supper that the famous society was formed, which the newspapers ridiculed, and which deceived so many excellent people in New York because it seemed to be in harmony with the philanthropic endeavor of the time, but which was only an expression of the Mephistophelian spirit of Carmen—the Society for Supplying Two Suspenders to Those who have only One.
By the end of June there was no more doubt about the heat of the town than about its odors. The fashionable residence part was dismantled and deserted. At least miles and miles of houses seemed to be closed. Few carriages were seen in this quarter, the throngs of fashion had disappeared, comparatively few women were about, and those that appeared in the Sunday promenade were evidently sight-seers and idlers from other quarters; the throng of devotees was gone from the churches, and indeed in many of them services were suspended till a more convenient season. The hotels, to be sure, were full of travelers, and the club-houses had more habitues than usual, and were more needed by the members whose families had gone into the country.
Notwithstanding the silence and vacation aspect of up-town, the public conveyances were still thronged, and a census would have shown no such diminution of population as seemed. Indeed, while nobody was in town, except accidentally, the greater portion of it presented a more animated appearance than usual, especially at night, on account of the open windows, the groups on door-steps and curb-stones, and the restless throng in the streets-buyers and sellers and idlers. To most this outdoor life was a great enjoyment, and to them the unclean streets with the odors and exhalations of decay were homelike and congenial. Nor did they seem surprised that a new country should so completely reproduce the evil smells and nastiness of the old civilization. It was all familiar and picturesque. Work still went on in the crowded tenement-houses, and sickness simply changed its character, death showing an increased friendliness to young children. Some impression was of course made by the agents of various charities, the guilds and settlements bravely strove at their posts, some of the churches kept their flags flying on the borders of the industrial districts, the Good Samaritans of the Fresh-air Fund were active, the public dispensaries did a thriving business, and the little band of self-sacrificing doctors, most of them women, went their rounds among the poor, the sick, and the friendless.
Among them Ruth Leigh was one who never took a vacation. There was no time for it. The greater the heat, the more noisome the town, the more people became ill from decaying food and bad air and bad habits, the more people were hungry from improvidence or lack of work, the more were her daily visits a necessity; and though she was weary of her monotonous work, and heart-sick at its small result in such a mass, there never came a day when she could quit it. She made no reputation in her profession by this course; perhaps she awoke little gratitude from those she served, and certainly had not so much of their confidence as the quacks who imposed upon them and took their money; and she was not heartened much by hope of anything better in this world or any other; and as for pay, if there was enough of that to clothe her decently, she apparently did not spend it on herself.
It was, in short, wholly inexplicable that this little woman should simply go about doing good, without any ulterior purpose whatever, not even notoriety. Did she love these people? She did not ever say anything about that. In the Knights of Labor circle, and in the little clubs for the study of social questions, which she could only get leisure to attend infrequently, she was not at all demonstrative about any religion of humanity. Perhaps she simply felt that she was a part of these people, and that whether they rejected her or received her, there was nothing for her to do but to give herself to them. She would probably have been surprised if Father Damon had told her that she was in this following a great example, and there might have been a tang of agnostic bitterness in her reply. When she thought of it the condition seemed to her hopeless, and the attitude of what was called civilization towards it so remorseless and indifferent, and that of Christianity so pharisaical. If she ever lost her temper, it was when she let her mind run in this nihilistic channel, in bitterness against the whole social organization, and the total outcome of civilization so far as the mass of humanity is concerned.
One day Father Damon climbed up to the top of a wretched tenement in Baxter Street in search of a German girl, an impulsive and pretty girl of fifteen, whom he had missed for several days at the chapel services. He had been in the room before. It was not one of the worst, for though small and containing a cook-stove, a large bed, and a chest of drawers, there was an attempt to make it tidy. In a dark closet opening out from it was another large bed. As he knocked and opened the door, he saw that Gretchen was not at home. Her father sat in a rocking-chair by an open window, on the sill of which stood a pot of carnations, the Easter gift of St. George's, a wax-faced, hollow-eyed man of gentle manners, who looked round wearily at the priest. The mother was washing clothes in a tub in one corner; in another corner was a half-finished garment from a slop-shop. The woman alternated the needle at night and the tub in the daytime. Seated on the bed, with a thin, sick child in her arms, was Dr. Leigh. As she looked up a perfectly radiant smile illuminated her usually plain face, an unworldly expression of such purity and happiness that she seemed actually beautiful to the priest, who stopped, hesitating, upon the threshold.
"Oh, you needn't be afraid to come in, Father Damon," she cried out; "it isn't contagious—only rash."
Father Damon, who would as readily have walked through a pestilence as in a flower-garden, only smiled at this banter, and replied, after speaking to the sick man, and returning in German the greeting of the woman, who had turned from the tub, "I've no doubt you are disappointed that it isn't contagious!" And then, to the mother: "Where is Gretchen? She doesn't come to the chapel."
"Nein," replied the woman, in a mixture of German and English, "it don't come any more in dot place; it be in a shtore now; it be good girl."
"What, all day?"
"Yaas, by six o'clock, and abends so spate. Not much it get, but my man can't earn nothing any more." And the woman, as she looked at him, wiped her eyes with the corner of her apron.
"But, on Sunday?" Father Damon asked, still further.
"Vell, it be so tired, and goed up by de Park with Dick Loosing and dem oder girls."
"Don't you think it better, Father Damon," Dr. Leigh interposed, "thatGretchen should have fresh air and some recreation on Sunday?"
"Und such bootiful tings by de Museum," added the mother.
"Perhaps," said he, with something like a frown on his face, and then changed the subject to the sick child. He did not care to argue the matter when Dr. Leigh was present, but he resolved to come again and explain to the mother that her daughter needed some restraining power other than her own impulse, and that without religious guidance she was pretty certain to drift into frivolous and vulgar if not positively bad ways. The father was a free-thinker; but Father Damon thought he had some hold on the mother, who was of the Lutheran communion, but had followed her husband so far as to become indifferent to anything but their daily struggle for life. Yet she had a mother's instinct about the danger to her daughter, and had been pleased to have her go to Father Damon's chapel.
And, besides, he could not bring himself in that presence to seem to rebuke Ruth Leigh. Was she not practically doing what his Lord did —going about healing the sick, sympathizing with the poor and the discouraged, taking upon herself the burden of the disconsolate, literally, without thought of self, sharing, as it were, the misery and sin of this awful city? And today, for the first time, he seemed to have seen the woman in her—or was it the saint? and he recalled that wonderful illumination of her plain face that made her actually beautiful as she looked up from the little waif of humanity she held in her arms. It had startled him, and struck a new chord in his heart, and planted a new pang there that she had no belief in a future life.
It did not occur to him that the sudden joy in her face might have been evoked by seeing him, for it was a long time since she had seen him. Nor did he think that the pang at his heart had another cause than religious anxiety. Ah, priest and worldly saint, how subtle and enduring are the primal instincts of human nature!
"Yes," he said, as they walked away, in reply to her inquiry as to his absence, "I have been in retreat a couple of weeks."
"I suppose," she said, softly, "you needed the rest; though," and she looked at him professionally, "if you will allow me to say it, it seems to me that you have not rested enough."
"I needed strength"—and it was the priest that spoke—"in meditation and prayer to draw upon resources not my own."
"And in fasting, too, I dare say," she added, with a little smile.
"And why not?" he asked.
"Pardon me," she said; "I don't pretend to know what you need. I need to eat, though Heaven knows it's hard enough to keep up an appetite down here. But it is physical endurance you need for the work here. Do you think fasting strengthens you to go through your work night and day?"
"I know I couldn't do it on my own strength." And Dr. Leigh recalled times when she had seen him officiating in the chapel apparently sustained by nothing but zeal and pure spirit, and wondered that he did not faint and fall. And faint and fall he did, she was sure, when the service was over.
"Well, it may be necessary to you, but not as an example to these people.I see enough involuntary fasting."
"We look at these people from different points of view, I fear." And after a moment he said: "But, doctor, I wanted to ask you about Gretchen. You see her?"
"Occasionally. She works too many hours, but she seems to be getting on very well, and brings her mother all she earns."
"Do you think she is able to stand alone?"
Dr. Leigh winced a little at this searching question, for no one knew better than she the vulgarizing influence of street life and chance associations upon a young girl, and the temptations. She was even forced to admit the value in the way of restraint, as a sort of police force, of the church and priestly influence, especially upon girls at the susceptible age. But she knew that Father Damon meant something more than this, and so she answered:
"But people have got to stand alone. She might as well begin."
"But she is so young."
"Yes, I know. She is in the way of temptation, but so long as she works industriously, and loves her mother, and feels the obligation, which the poor very easily feel, of doing her share for the family, she is not in so much moral danger as other girls of her age who lead idle and self-indulgent lives. The working-girls of the city learn to protect themselves."
"And you think this is enough, without any sort of religion—that thisEast Side can go on without any spiritual life?"
Ruth Leigh made a gesture of impatience. In view of the actual struggle for existence she saw around her, this talk seemed like cant. And she said:
"I don't know that anything can go on. Let me ask you a question, Father Damon. Do you think there is any more spirituality, any more of the essentials of what you call Christianity, in the society of the other side than there is on the East Side?"
"It is a deep question, this of spirituality," replied Father Damon, who was in the depths of his proselyting action a democrat and in sympathy with the people, and rated quite at its full value the conventional fashion in religion. "I shouldn't like to judge, but there is a great body of Christian men and women in this city who are doing noble work."
"Yes," replied the little doctor, bitterly, "trying to save themselves. How many are trying to save others—others except the distant and foreign sinners?"
"You surely cannot ignore," replied the father, still speaking mildly, "the immense amount of charitable work done by the churches!"
"Yes, I know; charity, charity, the condescension of the rich to the poor. What we want are understanding, fellowship, and we get alms! If there is so much spirituality as you say, and Christianity is what you say it is today, how happens it that this side is left in filth and misery and physical wretchedness? You know what it is, and you know the luxury elsewhere. And you think to bridge over the chasm between classes with flowers, in pots, yes, and Bible-readers and fashionable visitors and little aid societies—little palliatives for an awful state of things. Why, look at it! Last winter the city authorities hauled off the snow and the refuse from the fashionable avenues, and dumped it down in the already blockaded and filthy side streets, and left us to struggle with the increased pneumonia and diphtheria, and general unsanitary conditions. And you wonder that the little nihilist groups and labor organizations and associations of agnostics, as you call them, meeting to study political economy and philosophy, say that the existing state of things has got to be overturned violently, if those who have the power and the money continue indifferent."
"I do not wonder," replied Father Damon, sadly. "The world is evil, and I should be as despairing as you are if I did not know there was another life and another world. I couldn't bear it. Nobody could."
"And all you've got to offer, then, to this mass of wretchedness, poverty, ignorance, at close quarters with hunger and disease, is to grin and bear it, in hope of a reward somewhere else!"
"I think you don't quite—"
The doctor looked up and saw a look of pain on the priest's face.
"Oh," she hastened to say, almost as impetuously as she had spoken before, "I don't mean you—I don't mean you. I know what you do. Pardon me for speaking so. I get so discouraged sometimes." They stood still a moment, looking up and down the hot, crowded, odorful street they were in, with its flaunting rags of poverty and inefficiency. "I see so little result of what I can do, and there is so little help."
"I know," said the father, as they moved along. "I don't see how you can bear it alone."
This touched a sore spot, and aroused Ruth Leigh's combativeness. It seemed to her to approach the verge of cant again. But she knew the father's absolute sincerity; she felt she had already said too much; and she only murmured, as if to herself, "If we could only know." And then, after a moment, she asked, "Do you, Father Damon, see any sign of anything better here?"
"Yes, today." And he spoke very slowly and hesitatingly. "If you will excuse the personality of it. When I entered that room today, and saw you with that sick child in your arms, and comprehended what it all meant, I had a great wave of hope, and I knew, just then, that there is coming virtue enough in the world to redeem it."
Ruth was confounded. Her heart seemed to stand still, and then the hot blood flowed into her face in a crimson flood. "Ah," escaped from her lips, and she walked on more swiftly, not daring to look up. This from him! This recognition from the ascetic father! If one of her dispensary comrades had said it, would she have been so moved?
And afterwards, when she had parted from him, and gone to her little room, the hot flush again came to her neck and brow, and she saw his pale, spiritual face, and could hear the unwonted tenderness of his voice. Yes, Father Damon had said it of her.
The question has been very much discussed whether the devil, in temperate latitudes, is busier in the summer or in the winter. When Congress and the various State legislatures are in session, and the stock and grain exchanges are most active, and society is gayest, and the churches and benevolent and reformatory associations are most aggressive—at this season, which is the cool season, he seems to be most animated and powerful.
But is not this because he is then most opposed? The stream may not flow any faster because it is dammed, but it exhibits at the obstructed points greater appearance of agitation. Many people are under the impression that when they stop fighting there is a general truce: There is reason to believe that the arch enemy is pleased with this impression, that he likes a truce, and that it is his best opportunity, just as the weeds in the garden, after a tempest, welcome the sun and the placidity of the elements. It is well known that in summer virtue suffers from inertia, and that it is difficult to assemble the members of any vigilant organization, especially in cities, where the flag of the enemy is never lowered. But wherever the devil is there is always a quorum present for business. It is not his plan to seek an open fight, and many observers say that he gains more ground in summer than in any other season, and this notwithstanding people are more apt to lose their tempers, and even become profane, in the aggravations of what is known as spring than at any other time. The subject cannot be pursued here, but there is ground for supposing that the devil prefers a country where the temperature is high and pretty uniform.
At any rate, it is true that the development of character is not arrested by any geniality or languor of nature. By midsummer the Hendersons were settled in Lenox, where the Blunts had long been, and Miss Tavish and her party of friends were at Bar Harbor. Henderson was compelled to be in the city most of the time, and Jack Delancy fancied that business required his presence there also; but he had bought a yacht, and contemplated a voyage, with several of the club men, up the Maine coast. "No, I thank you," Major Fairfax had said; "I know an easier way to get to Bar Harbor."
Jack was irritable and restless, to be sure, in the absence of the sort of female society he had become accustomed to; but there were many compensations in his free-and-easy bachelor life, in his pretense of business, which consisted in watching the ticker, as it is called, in an occasional interview with Henderson, and in the floating summer amusements of the relaxed city. There was nothing unusual in this life except that he needed a little more stimulation, but this was not strange in the summer, and that he devoted more time to poker—but everybody knows that a person comes out about even in the game of poker if he keeps at it long enough—there was nothing unusual in this, only it was giving Jack a distaste for the quiet and it seemed to him the restraint of the Golden House down by the sea. And he was more irritable there than elsewhere. It is so difficult to estimate an interior deterioration of this sort, for Jack was just as popular with his comrades as ever, and apparently more prosperous.
It is true that Jack had had other ideas when he was courting Edith Fletcher, and at moments, at any rate, different aspirations from any he had now. With her at that time there had been nobler aspirations about life. But now she was his wife. That was settled. And not only that, but she was the best woman he knew; and if she were not his wife, he would spare no effort to win her. He felt sure of that. He did not put it to himself in the way an Oriental would do, "That is finished"; but it was an act done—a good act—and here was his world again, with a hundred interests, and there were people besides Edith to be thought of, other women and men, and affairs. Because a man was married, was he to be shut up to one little narrow career, that of husband? Probably it did not occur to him that women take a different view of this in the singleness of their purpose and faith. Edith, for instance, knew or guessed that Jack had no purpose in life that was twenty-four hours old; but she had faith—and no amount of observation destroys this faith in women—that marriage would inspire him with energy and ambition to take a man's place in the world.
With most men marriage is un fait accompli. Jack had been lucky, but there was, no doubt, truth in an observation of Mavick's. One night as they sat at the club Jack had asked him a leading question, apropos of Henderson's successful career: "Mavick, why don't you get married?" "I have never," he replied, with his usual cynical deliberation, "been obliged to. The fact is, marriage is a curb-bit. Some horses show off better with it, and some are enraged and kick over the traces. I cannot decide which I would be."
"That's true enough," said Jack, "from a bachelor's point of view of independence, but it's really a question of matching."
"The most difficult thing in the world—in horses. Just about impossible in temperament and movement, let alone looks. Most men are lucky if they get, like Henderson, a running mate."
"I see," said Jack, who knew something about the Henderson household, "your idea of a pair is that they should go single."
Mavick laughed, and said something about the ideas of women changing so much lately that nobody could tell what the relation of marriage would become, and Jack, who began to feel that he was disloyal, changed the subject. To do him justice, he would have been ashamed for Edith to hear this sort of flippant and shallow talk, which wouldn't have been at all out of place with Carmen or Miss Tavish.
"I wanted to ask you, Mavick, as a friend, do you think Henderson is square?"
"How square?"
"Well, safe?"
"Nobody is safe. Henderson is as safe as anybody. You can rely on what he says. But there's a good deal he doesn't say. Anything wrong?"
"Not that I know. I've been pretty lucky. But the fact is, I've gone in rather deep."
"Well, it's a game. Henderson plays it, as everybody does, for himself. I like Henderson. He plays to win, and generally does. But, you know, if one man wins, somebody else has got to lose in this kind of industry."
"But Henderson looks out for his friends?"
"Yes—when it doesn't cost too much. Times may come when a man has to look out for himself. Wealth isn't made out of nothing. There must be streams into the reservoir. These great accumulations of one—you can see that—must be made up of countless other men's small savings. There's Uncle Jerry. He operates a good deal with Henderson, and they'd incline to help each other out. But Uncle Jerry says he's got a small pond of his own, and he's careful not to connect it with Henderson's reservoir."
"What do you think of Missouri?"
"What do I think of the Milky Way? It doesn't much matter to me what becomes of Missouri, unless Henderson should happen to get smashed in it, and that isn't what he is there for. But when you look at the combinations, and the dropping-off of roads that have been drained, and the scaling down in refunding, and the rearranging, and the strikes, how much chance do you think the small fry stand? I don't doubt that Henderson will make a big thing out of it, and there will be lots of howling by those who were not so smart, and the newspapers will say that Henderson was too strong for them. What we respect nowadays are adroitness and strength."
"It's an exciting game," Mavick continued, after a moment's pause. "Let me know if you get uneasy. But I'll tell you what it is, Jack; if I had a comfortable income, I wouldn't risk it in any speculation. There is a good deal that is interesting going on in this world, and I like to be in it; but the best plan for a man who has anything is, as Uncle Jerry says, to sail close and salt down."
The fact was that Mavick's connection with Henderson was an appreciable addition to his income, and it was not a bad thing for Henderson. Mavick's reputation for knowing the inside of everything and being close-mouthed actually brought him confidences; that which at first was a clever assumption became a reality, and his reputation was so established for being behind the scenes that he was not believed when he honestly professed ignorance of anything. His modest disclaimer merely increased the impression that he was deep. Henderson himself had something of the Bismarck trait of brutal, contemptuous frankness. Mavick was never brutal and never contemptuous, but he had a cynical sort of frankness, which is a good deal more effectual in a business way than the oily, plausible manner which on 'Change, as well as in politics, is distrusted as hypocrisy. Now Uncle Jerry Hollowell was neither oily nor frank; he was long-headed and cautious, and had a reputation for shrewdness and just enough of plasticity of conscience to remove him out of the list of the impracticable and over-scrupulous. This reputation that business men and politicians acquire would be a very curious study. The world is very complacent, and apparently worships success and votes for smartness, but it would surprise some of our most successful men to know what a real respect there is in the community, after all, for downright integrity.
Even Jack, who fell into the current notion of his generation of young men that the Henderson sort of morality was best adapted to quick success, evinced a consciousness of want of nobility in the course he was pursuing by not making Edith his confidante. He would have said, of course, that she knew nothing about business, but what he meant was that she had a very clear conception of what was honest. All the evidences of his prosperity, shown in his greater freedom of living, were sore trials to her. She belonged to that old class of New-Yorkers who made trade honorable, like the merchants of Holland and Venice, and she knew also that Jack's little fortune had come out of honest toil and strict business integrity. Could there be any happiness in life in any other course?
It seemed cruel to put such a problem as this upon a young woman hardly yet out of girlhood, in the first flush of a new life, which she had dreamed should be so noble and high and so happy, in the period which is consecrated by the sweetest and loveliest visions and hopes that ever come into a woman's life.
As the summer wore on to its maximum of heat and discomfort in the city, Edith, who never forgot to measure the hardships of others by her own more fortunate circumstances, urged Dr. Leigh to come away from her labors and rest a few days by the sea. The reply was a refusal, but there was no complaint in the brief business-like note. One might have supposed that it was the harvest-time of the doctor, if he had not known that she gathered nothing for herself. There had never been so much sickness, she wrote, and such an opportunity for her. She was learning a great deal, especially about some disputed contagious diseases. She would like to see Mrs. Delancy, and she wouldn't mind a breath of air that was more easily to be analyzed than that she existed in, but nothing could induce her to give up her cases. All that appeared in her letter was her interest in her profession.
Father Damon, who had been persuaded by Edith's urgency to go down with Jack for a few days to the Golden House, seemed uncommonly interested in the reasons of Dr. Leigh's refusal to come.
"I never saw her," he said, "so cheerful. The more sickness there is, the more radiant she is. I don't mean," he added, laughing, "in apparel. Apparently she never thinks of herself, and positively she seems to take no time to eat or sleep. I encounter her everywhere. I doubt if she ever sits down, except when she drops in at the mission chapel now and then, and sits quite unmoved on a bench by the door during vespers."
"Then she does go there?" said Edith.
"That is a queer thing. She would promptly repudiate any religious interest. But I tell her she is a bit of a humbug. When I speak about her philanthropic zeal, she says her interest is purely scientific."
"Anyway, I believe," Jack put in, "that women doctors are less mercenary than men. I dare say they will get over that when the novelty of coming into the profession has worn off."
"That is possible," said Father Damon; "but that which drives women into professions now is the desire to do something rather than the desire to make something. Besides, it is seldom, in their minds, a finality; marriage is always a possibility."
"Yes," replied Edith, "and the probability of having to support a husband and family; then they may be as mercenary as men are."
"Still, the enthusiasm of women," Father Damon insisted, "in hospital and outdoor practice, the singleness of their devotion to it, is in contrast to that of the young men-doctors. And I notice another thing in the city: they take more interest in philanthropic movements, in the condition of the poor, in the labor questions; they dive eagerly into philosophic speculations, and they are more aggressively agnostics. And they are not afraid of any social theories. I have one friend, a skillful practitioner they tell me, a linguist, and a metaphysician, a most agreeable and accomplished woman, who is in theory an extreme nihilist, and looks to see the present social and political order upset."
"I don't see," Jack remarked, "what women especially are to gain by such a revolution."
"Perhaps independence, Jack," replied Edith. "You should hear my club of working-girls, who read and think much on these topics, talk of these things."
"Yes," said Father Damon, "you toss these topics about, and discuss them in the magazines, and fancy you are interested in socialistic movements. But you have no idea how real and vital they are, and how the dumb discontent of the working classes is being formulated into ideas. It is time we tried to understand each other."
Not all the talk was of this sort at the Golden House. There were three worlds here—that of Jack, to which Edith belonged by birth and tradition and habit; that of which we have spoken, to which she belonged by profound sympathy; and that of Father Damon, to which she belonged by undefined aspiration. In him was the spiritual element asserting itself in a mediaeval form, in a struggle to mortify and deny the flesh and yet take part in modern life. Imagine a celibate and ascetic of the fifteenth century, who knew that Paradise must be gained through poverty and privation and suffering, interesting himself in the tenement-house question, in labor leagues, and the single tax.
Yet, hour after hour, in those idle summer days, when nature was in a mood that suggested grace and peace, when the waves lapsed along the shore and the cicada sang in the hedge, did Father Damon unfold to Edith his ideas of the spiritualization of modern life through a conviction of its pettiness and transitoriness. How much more content there would be if the poor could only believe that it matters little what happens here if the heart is only pure and fixed on the endless life.
"Oh, Father Damon," replied Edith, with a grave smile, "I think your mission ought to be to the rich."
"Yes," he replied, for he also knew his world, "if I wanted to make my ideas fashionable; but I want to make them operative. By-and-by," he added, also with a smile, "we will organize some fishermen and carpenters and tailors on a mission to the rich."
Father Damon's visit was necessarily short, for his work called him back to town, and perhaps his conscience smote him a little for indulging in this sort of retreat. By the middle of August Jack's yacht was ready, and he went with Mavick and the Van Dams and some other men of the club on a cruise up the coast. Edith was left alone with her Baltimore friend.
And yet not alone. As she lay in her hammock in those dreamy days a new world opened to her. It was not described in the chance romance she took up, nor in the volume of poems she sometimes held in her hand, with a finger inserted in the leaves. Of this world she felt herself the centre and the creator, and as she mused upon its mysteries, life took a new, strange meaning to her. It was apt to be a little hazy off there in the watery horizon, and out of the mist would glide occasionally a boat, and the sun would silver its sails, and it would dip and toss for half an hour in the blue, laughing sea, and then disappear through the mysterious curtain. Whence did it come? Whither had it gone? Was life like that? Was she on the shore of such a sea, and was this new world into which she was drifting only a dream? By her smile, by the momentary illumination that her sweet thoughts made in her lovely, hopeful face, you knew that it was not. Who can guess the thoughts of a woman at such a time? Are the trees glad in the spring, when the sap leaps in their trunks, and the buds begin to swell, and the leaves unfold in soft response to the creative impulse? The miracle is never old nor commonplace to them, nor to any of the human family. The anticipation of life is eternal. The singing of the birds, the blowing of the south wind, the sparkle of the waves, all found a response in Edith's heart, which leaped with joy. And yet there was a touch of melancholy in it all, the horizon was so vast, and the mist of uncertainty lay along it. Literature, society, charities, all that she had read and experienced and thought, was nothing to this, this great unknown anxiety and bliss, this saddest and sweetest of all human experiences. She prayed that she might be worthy of this great distinction, this responsibility and blessing.
And Jack, dear Jack, would he love her more?