Edith's day had been as busy as Jack's, notwithstanding she had put aside several things that demanded her attention. She denied herself the morning attendance on the Literature Class that was raking over the eighteenth century. This week Swift was to be arraigned. The last time when Edith was present it was Steele. The judgment, on the whole, had been favorable, and there had been a little stir of tenderness among the bonnets over Thackeray's comments on the Christian soldier. It seemed to bring him near to them. “Poor Dick Steele!” said the essayist. Edith declared afterwards that the large woman who sat next to her, Mrs. Jerry Hollowell, whispered to her that she always thought his name was Bessemer; but this was, no doubt, a pleasantry. It was a beautiful essay, and so stimulating! And then there was bouillon, and time to look about at the toilets. Poor Steele, it would have cheered his life to know that a century after his death so many beautiful women, so exquisitely dressed, would have been concerning themselves about him. The function lasted two hours. Edith made a little calculation. In five minutes she could have got from the encyclopaedia all the facts in the essay, and while her maid was doing her hair she could have read five times as much of Steele as the essayist read. And, somehow, she was not stimulated, for the impression seemed to prevail that now Steele was disposed of. And she had her doubts whether literature would, after all, prove to be a permanent social distraction. But Edith may have been too severe in her judgment. There was probably not a woman in the class that day who did not go away with the knowledge that Steele was an author, and that he lived in the eighteenth century. The hope for the country is in the diffusion of knowledge.
Leaving the class to take care of Swift, Edith went to the managers' meeting at the Women's Hospital, where there was much to do of very practical work, pitiful cases of women and children suffering through no fault of their own, and money more difficult to raise than sympathy. The meeting took time and thought. Dismissing her carriage, and relying on elevated and surface cars, Edith then took a turn on the East Side, in company with a dispensary physician whose daily duty called her into the worst parts of the town. She had a habit of these tours before her marriage, and, though they were discouragingly small in direct results, she gained a knowledge of city life that was of immense service in her general charity work. Jack had suggested the danger of these excursions, but she had told him that a woman was less liable to insult in the East Side than in Fifth Avenue, especially at twilight, not because the East Side was a nice quarter of the city, but because it was accustomed to see women who minded their own business go about unattended, and the prowlers had not the habit of going there. She could even relate cases of chivalrous protection of “ladies” in some of the worst streets.
What Edith saw this day, open to be seen, was not so much sin as ignorance of how to live, squalor, filthy surroundings acquiesced in as the natural order, wonderful patience in suffering and deprivation, incapacity, ill-paid labor, the kindest spirit of sympathy and helpfulness of the poor for each other. Perhaps that which made the deepest impression on her was the fact that such conditions of living could seem natural to those in them, and that they could get so much enjoyment of life in situations that would have been simple misery to her.
The visitors were in a foreign city. The shop signs were in foreign tongues; in some streets all Hebrew. On chance news-stands were displayed newspapers in Russian, Bohemian, Arabic, Italian, Hebrew, Polish, German-none in English. The theatre bills were in Hebrew or other unreadable type. The sidewalks and the streets swarmed with noisy dealers in every sort of second-hand merchandise—vegetables that had seen a better day, fish in shoals. It was not easy to make one's way through the stands and push-carts and the noisy dickering buyers and sellers, who haggled over trifles and chaffed good-naturedly and were strictly intent on their own affairs. No part of the town is more crowded or more industrious. If youth is the hope of the country, the sight was encouraging, for children were in the gutters, on the house steps, at all the windows. The houses seemed bursting with humanity, and in nearly every room of the packed tenements, whether the inmates were sick or hungry, some sort of industry was carried on. In the damp basements were junk-dealers, rag-pickers, goose-pickers. In one noisome cellar, off an alley, among those sorting rags, was an old woman of eighty-two, who could reply to questions only in a jargon, too proud to beg, clinging to life, earning a few cents a day in this foul occupation. But life is sweet even with poverty and rheumatism and eighty years. Did her dull eyes, turning inward, see the Carpathian Hills, a free girlhood in village drudgery and village sports, then a romance of love, children, hard work, discontent, emigration to a New World of promise? And now a cellar by day, the occupation of cutting rags for carpets, and at night a corner in a close and crowded room on a flock bed not fit for a dog. And this was a woman's life.
Picturesque foreign women going about with shawls over their heads and usually a bit of bright color somewhere, children at their games, hawkers loudly crying their stale wares, the click of sewing-machines heard through a broken window, everywhere animation, life, exchange of rough or kindly banter. Was it altogether so melancholy as it might seem? Not everybody was hopelessly poor, for here were lawyers' signs and doctors' signs—doctors in whom the inhabitants had confidence because they charged all they could get for their services—and thriving pawnbrokers' shops. There were parish schools also—perhaps others; and off some dark alley, in a room on the ground-floor, could be heard the strident noise of education going on in high-voiced study and recitation. Nor were amusements lacking—notices of balls, dancing this evening, and ten-cent shows in palaces of legerdemain and deformity.
It was a relenting day in March; patches of blue sky overhead, and the sun had some quality in its shining. The children and the caged birds at the open windows felt it-and there were notes of music here and there above the traffic and the clamor. Turning down a narrow alley, with a gutter in the centre, attracted by festive sounds, the visitors came into a small stone-paved court with a hydrant in the centre surrounded by tall tenement-houses, in the windows of which were stuffed the garments that would no longer hold together to adorn the person. Here an Italian girl and boy, with a guitar and violin, were recalling la bella Napoli, and a couple of pretty girls from the court were footing it as merrily as if it were the grape harvest. A woman opened a lower room door and sharply called to one of the dancing girls to come in, when Edith and the doctor appeared at the bottom of the alley, but her tone changed when she recognized the doctor, and she said, by way of apology, that she didn't like her daughter to dance before strangers. So the music and the dance went on, even little dots of girls and boys shuffling about in a stiff-legged fashion, with applause from all the windows, and at last a largesse of pennies—as many as five altogether—for the musicians. And the sun fell lovingly upon the pretty scene.
But then there were the sweaters' dens, and the private rooms where half a dozen pale-faced tailors stitched and pressed fourteen and sometimes sixteen hours a day, stifling rooms, smelling of the hot goose and steaming cloth, rooms where they worked, where the cooking was done, where they ate, and late at night, when overpowered with weariness, lay down to sleep. Struggle for life everywhere, and perhaps no more discontent and heart-burning and certainly less ennui than in the palaces on the avenues.
The residence of Karl Mulhaus, one of the doctor's patients, was typical of the homes of the better class of poor. The apartment fronted on a small and not too cleanly court, and was in the third story. As Edith mounted the narrow and dark stairways she saw the plan of the house. Four apartments opened upon each landing, in which was the common hydrant and sink. The Mulhaus apartment consisted of a room large enough to contain a bed, a cook-stove, a bureau, a rocking-chair, and two other chairs, and it had two small windows, which would have more freely admitted the southern sun if they had been washed, and a room adjoining, dark, and nearly filled by a big bed. On the walls of the living room were hung highly colored advertising chromos of steamships and palaces of industry, and on the bureau Edith noticed two illustrated newspapers of the last year, a patent-medicine almanac, and a volume of Schiller. The bureau also held Mr. Mulhaus's bottles of medicine, a comb which needed a dentist, and a broken hair-brush. What gave the room, however, a cheerful aspect were some pots of plants on the window-ledges, and half a dozen canary-bird cages hung wherever there was room for them.
None of the family happened to be at home except Mr. Mulhaus, who occupied the rocking-chair, and two children, a girl of four years and a boy of eight, who were on the floor playing “store” with some blocks of wood, a few tacks, some lumps of coal, some scraps of paper, and a tangle of twine. In their prattle they spoke, the English they had learned from their brother who was in a store.
“I feel some better today,” said Mr. Mulhaus, brightening up as the visitors entered, “but the cough hangs on. It's three months since this weather that I haven't been out, but the birds are a good deal of company.” He spoke in German, and with effort. He was very thin and sallow, and his large feverish eyes added to the pitiful look of his refined face. The doctor explained to Edith that he had been getting fair wages in a type-foundry until he had become too weak to go any longer to the shop.
It was rather hard to have to sit there all day, he explained to the doctor, but they were getting along. Mrs. Mulhaus had got a job of cleaning that day; that would be fifty cents. Ally—she was twelve—was learning to sew. That was her afternoon to go to the College Settlement. Jimmy, fourteen, had got a place in a store, and earned two dollars a week.
“And Vicky?” asked the doctor.
“Oh, Vicky,” piped up the eight-year-old boy. “Vicky's up to the 'stution”—the hospital was probably the institution referred to—“ever so long now. I seen her there, me and Jim did. Such a bootifer place! 'Nd chicken!” he added. “Sis got hurt by a cart.”
Vicky was seventeen, and had been in a fancy store.
“Yes,” said Mulhaus, in reply to a question, “it pays pretty well raising canaries, when they turn out singers. I made fifteen dollars last year. I hain't sold much lately. Seems 's if people stopped wanting 'em such weather. I guess it 'll be better in the spring.”
“No doubt it will be better for the poor fellow himself before spring,” said the doctor as they made their way down the dirty stairways. “Now I'll show you one of my favorites.”
They turned into a broader street, one of the busy avenues, and passing under an archway between two tall buildings, entered a court of back buildings. In the third story back lived Aunt Margaret. The room was scarcely as big as a ship's cabin, and its one window gave little light, for it opened upon a narrow well of high brick walls. In the only chair Aunt Margaret was seated close to the window. In front of her was a small work-table, with a kerosene lamp on it, but the side of the room towards which she looked was quite occupied by a narrow couch—ridiculously narrow, for Aunt Margaret was very stout. There was a thin chest of drawers on the other side, and the small coal stove that stood in the centre so nearly filled the remaining space that the two visitors were one too many.
“Oh, come in, come in,” said the old lady, cheerfully, when the door opened. “I'm glad to see you.”
“And how goes it?” asked the doctor.
“First rate. I'm coming on, doctor. Work's been pretty slack for two weeks now, but yesterday I got work for two days. I guess it will be better now.”
The work was finishing pantaloons. It used to be a good business before there was so much cutting in.
“I used to get fifteen cents a pair, then ten; now they don't pay but five. Yes, the shop furnishes the thread.”
“And how many pairs can you finish in a day?” asked Edith.
“Three—three pairs, to do 'em nice—and they are very particular—if I work from six in the morning till twelve at night. I could do more, but my sight ain't what it used to be, and I've broken my specs.”
“So you earn fifteen cents a day?”
“When I've the luck to get work, my lady. Sometimes there isn't any. And things cost so much. The rent is the worst.”
It appeared that the rent was two dollars and a half a month. That must be paid, at any rate. Edith made a little calculation that on a flush average of ninety cents a week earned, and allowing so many cents for coal and so many cents for oil, the margin for bread and tea must be small for the month. She usually bought three cents' worth of tea at a time.
“It is kinder close,” said the old lady, with a smile. “The worst is, my feet hurt me so I can't stir out. But the neighbors is real kind. The little boy next room goes over to the shop and fetches my pantaloons and takes 'em back. I can get along if it don't come slack again.”
Sitting all day by that dim window, half the night stitching by a kerosene lamp; lying for six hours on that narrow couch! How to account for this old soul's Christian resignation and cheerfulness! “For,” said the doctor, “she has seen better days; she has moved in high society; her husband, who died twenty years ago, was a policeman. What the old lady is doing is fighting for her independence. She has only one fear—the almshouse.”
It was with such scenes as these in her eyes that Edith went to her dressing-room to make her toilet for the Henderson dinner.
It was the first time they had dined with the Hendersons. It was Jack's doings. “Certainly, if you wish it,” Edith had said when the invitation came. The unmentioned fact was that Jack had taken a little flier in Oshkosh, and a hint from Henderson one evening at the Union, when the venture looked squally, had let him out of a heavy loss into a small profit, and Jack felt grateful.
“I wonder how Henderson came to do it?” Jack was querying, as he and old Fairfax sipped their five-o'clock “Manhattan.”
“Oh, Henderson likes to do a good-natured thing still, now and then. Do you know his wife?”
“No. Who was she?”
“Why, old Eschelle's daughter, Carmen; of course you wouldn't know; that was ten years ago. There was a good deal of talk about it at the time.”
“How?”
“Some said they'd been good friends before Mrs. Henderson's death.”
“Then Carmen, as you call her, wasn't the first?”
“No, but she was an easy second. She's a social climber; bound to get there from the start.”
“Is she pretty?”
“Devilish. She's a little thing. I saw her once at Homburg, on the promenade with her mother.
“The kind of sweet blonde, I said to myself, that would mix a man up in a duel before he knew where he was.”
“She must be interesting.”
“She was always clever, and she knows enough to play a straight game and when to propitiate. I'll bet a five she tells Henderson whom to be good to when the chance offers.”
“Then her influence on him is good?”
“My dear sir, she gets what she wants, and Henderson is going to the... well, look at the lines in his face. I've known Henderson since he came fresh into the Street. He'd rarely knife a friend when his first wife was living. Now, when you see the old frank smile on his face, it's put on.”
{0065}
It was half-past eight when Mr. Henderson with Mrs. Delancy on his arm led the way to the diningroom. The procession was closed by Mrs. Henderson and Mr. Delancy. The Van Dams were there, and Mrs. Chesney and the Chesney girls, and Miss Tavish, who sat on Jack's right, but the rest of the guests were unknown to Jack, except by name. There was a strong dash of the Street in the mixture, and although the Street was tabooed in the talk, there was such an emanation of aggressive prosperity at the table that Jack said afterwards that he felt as if he had been at a meeting of the board.
If Jack had known the house ten years ago, he would have noticed certain subtle changes in it, rather in the atmosphere than in many alterations. The newness and the glitter of cost had worn off. It might still be called a palace, but the city had now a dozen handsomer houses, and Carmen's idea, as she expressed it, was to make this more like a home. She had made it like herself. There were pictures on the walls that would not have hung there in the late Mrs. Henderson's time; and the prevailing air was that of refined sensuousness. Life, she said, was her idea, life in its utmost expression, untrammeled, and yes, a little Greek. Freedom was perhaps the word, and yet her latest notion was simplicity. The dinner was simple. Her dress was exceedingly simple, save that it had in it somewhere a touch of audacity, revealing in a flash of invitation the hidden nature of the woman. She knew herself better than any one knew her, except Henderson, and even he was forced to laugh when she travestied Browning in saying that she had one soul-side to face the world with, one to show the man she loved, and she declared he was downright coarse when on going out of the door he muttered, “But it needn't be the seamy side.” The reported remark of some one who had seen her at church that she looked like a nun made her smile, but she broke into a silvery laugh when she head Van Dam's comment on it, “Yes, a devil of a nun.”
The library was as cozy as ever, but did not appear to be used much as a library. Henderson, indeed, had no time to add to his collection or enjoy it. Most of the books strewn on the tables were French novels or such American tales as had the cachet of social riskiness. But Carmen liked the room above all others. She enjoyed her cigarette there, and had a fancy for pouring her five-o'clock tea in its shelter. Books which had all sorts of things in them gave somehow an unconventional atmosphere to the place, and one could say things there that one couldn't say in a drawing-room.
{0069}
Henderson himself, it must be confessed, had grown stout in the ten years, and puffy under the eyes. There were lines of irritation in his face and lines of weariness. He had not kept the freshness of youth so well as Carmen, perhaps because of his New England conscience. To his guest he was courteous, seemed to be making an effort to be so, and listened with well-assumed interest to the story of her day's pilgrimage. At length he said, with a smile, “Life seems to interest you, Mrs. Delancy.”
“Yes, indeed,” said Edith, looking up brightly; “doesn't it you?”
“Why, yes; not life exactly, but things, doing things—conflict.”
“Yes, I can understand that. There is so much to be done for everybody.”
Henderson looked amused. “You know in the city the gospel is that everybody is to be done.”
“Well,” said Edith, not to be diverted, “but, Mr. Henderson, what is it all for—this conflict? Perhaps, however, you are fighting the devil?”
“Yes, that's it; the devil is usually the other fellow. But, Mrs. Delancy,” added Henderson, with an accent of seriousness, “I don't know what it's all for. I doubt if there is much in it.”
“And yet the world credits you with finding a great deal in it.”
“The world is generally wrong. Do you understand poker, Mrs. Delancy? No! Of course you do not. But the interest of the game isn't so much in the cards as in the men.”
“I thought it was the stakes.”
“Perhaps so. But you want to win for the sake of winning. If I gambled it would be a question of nerve. I suppose that which we all enjoy is the exercise of skill in winning.”
“And not for the sake of doing anything—just winning? Don't you get tired of that?” asked Edith, quite simply.
There was something in Edith's sincerity, in her fresh enthusiasm about life, that appeared to strike a reminiscent note in Henderson. Perhaps he remembered another face as sweet as hers, and ideals, faint and long ago, that were once mixed with his ideas of success. At any rate, it was with an accent of increased deference, and with a look she had not seen in his face before, that he said:
“People get tired of everything. I'm not sure but it would interest me to see for a minute how the world looks through your eyes.” And then he added, in a different tone, “As to your East Side, Mrs. Henderson tried that some years ago.”
“Wasn't she interested?”
“Oh, very much. For a time. But she said there was too much of it.” And Edith could detect no tone of sarcasm in the remark.
Down at the other end of the table, matters were going very smoothly. Jack was charmed with his hostess. That clever woman had felt her way along from the heresy trial, through Tuxedo and the Independent Theatre and the Horse Show, until they were launched in a perfectly free conversation, and Carmen knew that she hadn't to look out for thin ice.
“Were you thinking of going on to the Conventional Club tonight, Mr. Delancy?” she was saying.
“I don't belong,” said Jack. “Mrs. Delancy said she didn't care for it.”
“Oh, I don't care for it, for myself,” replied Carmen.
“I do,” struck in Miss Tavish. “It's awfully nice.”
“Yes, it does seem to fill a want. Why, what do you do with your evenings, Mr. Delancy?”
“Well, here's one of them.”
“Yes, I know, but I mean between twelve o'clock and bedtime.”
“Oh,” said Jack, laughing out loud, “I go to bed—sometimes.”
“Yes, 'there's always that. But you want some place to go to after the theatres and the dinners; after the other places are shut up you want to go somewhere and be amused.”
“Yes,” said Jack, falling in, “it is a fact that there are not many places of amusement for the rich; I understand. After the theatres you want to be amused. This Conventional Club is—”
“I tell you what it is. It's a sort of Midnight Mission for the rich. They never have had anything of the kind in the city.”
“And it's very nice,” said Miss Tavish, demurely.
“The performers are selected. You can see things there that you want to see at other places to which you can't go. And everybody you know is there.”
“Oh, I see,” said Jack. “It's what the Independent Theatre is trying to do, and what all the theatrical people say needs to be done, to elevate the character of the audiences, and then the managers can give better plays.”
“That's just it. We want to elevate the stage,” Carmen explained.
“But,” continued Jack, “it seems to me that now the audience is select and elevated, it wants to see the same sort of things it liked to see before it was elevated.”
“You may laugh, Mr. Delancy,” replied Carmen, throwing an earnest simplicity into her eyes, “but why shouldn't women know what is going on as well as men?”
“And why,” Miss Tavish asked, “will the serpentine dances and the London topical songs do any more harm to women than to men?”
“And besides, Mr. Delancy,” Carmen said, chiming in, “isn't it just as proper that women should see women dance and throw somersaults on the stage as that men should see them? And then, you know, women are such a restraining influence.”
“I hadn't thought of that,” said Jack. “I thought the Conventional was for the benefit of the audience, not for the salvation of the performers.”
“It's both. It's life. Don't you think women ought to know life? How are they to take their place in the world unless they know life as men know it?”
“I'm sure I don't know whose place they are to take, the serpentine dancer's or mine,” said Jack, as if he were studying a problem. “How does your experiment get on, Miss Tavish?”
Carmen looked up quickly.
“Oh, I haven't any experiment,” said Miss Tavish, shaking her head. “It's just Mr. Delancy's nonsense.”
“I wish I had an experiment. There is so little for women to do. I wish I knew what was right.” And Carmen looked mournfully demure, as if life, after all, were a serious thing with her.
“Whatever Mrs. Henderson does is sure to be right,” said Jack, gallantly.
Carmen shot at him a quick sympathetic glance, tempered by a grateful smile. “There are so many points of view.”
Jack felt the force of the remark as he did the revealing glance. And he had a swift vision of Miss Tavish leading him a serpentine dance, and of Carmen sweetly beckoning him to a pleasant point of view. After all it doesn't much matter. Everything is in the point of view.
After dinner and cigars and cigarettes in the library, the talk dragged a little in duets. The dinner had been charming, the house was lovely, the company was most agreeable. All said that. It had been so somewhere else the night before that, and would be the next night. And the ennui of it all! No one expressed it, but Henderson could not help looking it, and Carmen saw it. That charming hostess had been devoting herself to Edith since dinner. She was so full of sympathy with the East-Side work, asked a hundred questions about it, and declared that she must take it up again. She would order a cage of canaries from that poor German for her kitchen. It was such a beautiful idea. But Edith did not believe in her one bit. She told Jack afterwards that “Mrs. Henderson cares no more for the poor of New York than she does for—”
“Henderson?” suggested Jack.
“Oh, I don't know anything about that. Henderson has only one idea—to get the better of everybody, and be the money king of New York. But I should not wonder if he had once a soft spot in his heart. He is better than she is.”
It was still early, lacked half an hour of midnight, and the night was before them. Some one proposed the Conventional. “Yes,” said Carmen; “all come to our box.” The Van Dams would go, Miss Tavish, the Chesneys; the suggestion was a relief to everybody. Only Mr. Henderson pleaded important papers that must have his attention that night. Edith said that she was too tired, but that her desertion must not break up the party.
“Then you will excuse me also,” said Jack, a little shade of disappointment in his face.
“No, no,” said Edith, quickly; “you can drop me on the way. Go, by all means, Jack.”
“Do you really want me to go, dear?” said Jack, aside.
“Why of course; I want you to be happy.”
And Jack recalled the loving look that accompanied these words, later on, as he sat in the Henderson box at the Conventional, between Carmen and Miss Tavish, and saw, through the slight haze of smoke, beyond the orchestra, the praiseworthy efforts of the Montana Kicker, who had just returned with the imprimatur of Paris, to relieve the ennui of the modern world.
The complex affair we call the world requires a great variety of people to keep it going. At one o'clock in the morning Carmen and our friend Mr. Delancy and Miss Tavish were doing their part. Edith lay awake listening for Jack's return. And in an alley off Rivington Street a young girl, pretty once, unknown to fortune but not to fame, was about to render the last service she could to the world by leaving it.
The impartial historian scarcely knows how to distribute his pathos. By the electric light (and that is the modern light) gayety is almost as pathetic as suffering. Before the Montana girl hit upon the happy device that gave her notoriety, her feet, whose every twinkle now was worth a gold eagle, had trod a thorny path. There was a fortune now in the whirl of her illusory robes, but any day—such are the whims of fashion—she might be wandering again, sick at heart, about the great city, knocking at the side doors of variety shows for any engagement that would give her a pittance of a few dollars a week. How long had Carmen waited on the social outskirts; and now she had come into her kingdom, was she anything but a tinsel queen? Even Henderson, the great Henderson, did the friends of his youth respect him? had he public esteem? Carmen used to cut out the newspaper paragraphs that extolled Henderson's domestic virtue and his generosity to his family, and show them to her lord, with a queer smile on her face. Miss Tavish, in the nervous consciousness of fleeting years, was she not still waiting, dashing here and there like a bird in a net for the sort of freedom, audacious as she was, that seemed denied her? She was still beautiful, everybody said, and she was sought and flattered, because she was always merry and good-natured. Why should Van Dam, speaking of women, say that there were horses that had been set up, and checked up and trained, that held their heads in an aristocratic fashion, moved elegantly, and showed style, long after the spirit had gone out of them? And Jack himself, happily married, with a comfortable income, why was life getting flat to him? What sort of career was it that needed the aid of Carmen and the serpentine dancer? And why not, since it is absolutely necessary that the world should be amused?
{0079}
We are in no other world when we enter the mean tenement in the alley off Rivington Street. Here also is the life of the town. The room is small, but it contains a cook-stove, a chest of drawers, a small table, a couple of chairs, and two narrow beds. On the top of the chest are a looking-glass, some toilet articles, and bottles of medicine. The cracked walls are bare and not clean. In one of the beds are two children, sleeping soundly, and on the foot of it is a middle-aged woman, in a soiled woolen gown with a thin figured shawl drawn about her shoulders, a dirty cap half concealing her frowzy hair; she looks tired and worn and sleepy. On the other bed lies a girl of twenty years, a woman in experience. The kerosene lamp on the stand at the head of the bed casts a spectral light on her flushed face, and the thin arms that are restlessly thrown outside the cover. By the bedside sits the doctor, patient, silent, and watchful. The doctor puts her hand caressingly on that of the girl. It is hot and dry. The girl opens her eyes with a startled look, and says, feebly:
“Do you think he will come?”
“Yes, dear, presently. He never fails.”
The girl closed her eyes again, and there was silence. The dim rays of the lamp, falling upon the doctor, revealed the figure of a woman of less than medium size, perhaps of the age of thirty or more, a plain little body, you would have said, who paid the slightest possible attention to her dress, and when she went about the city was not to be distinguished from a working-woman. Her friends, indeed, said that she had not the least care for her personal appearance, and unless she was watched, she was sure to go out in her shabbiest gown and most battered hat. She wore tonight a brown ulster and a nondescript black bonnet drawn close down on her head and tied with black strings. In her lap lay her leathern bag, which she usually carried under her arm, that contained medicines, lint, bandages, smelling-salts, a vial of ammonia, and so on; to her patients it was a sort of conjurer's bag, out of which she could produce anything that an emergency called for.
Dr. Leigh was not in the least nervous or excited. Indeed, an artist would not have painted her as a rapt angelic visitant to this abode of poverty. This contact with poverty and coming death was quite in her ordinary experience. It would never have occurred to her that she was doing anything unusual, any more than it would have occurred to the objects of her ministrations to overwhelm her with thanks. They trusted her, that was all. They met her always with a pleasant recognition. She belonged perhaps to their world. Perhaps they would have said that “Dr. Leigh don't handsome much,” but their idea was that her face was good. That was what anybody would have said who saw her tonight, “She has such a good face;” the face of a woman who knew the world, and perhaps was not very sanguine about it, had few illusions and few antipathies, but accepted it, and tried in her humble way to alleviate its hardships, without any consciousness of having a mission or making a sacrifice.
Dr. Leigh—Miss Ruth Leigh—was Edith's friend. She had not come from the country with an exalted notion of being a worker among the poor about whom so much was written; she had not even descended from some high circle in the city into this world, moved by a restless enthusiasm for humanity. She was a woman of the people, to adopt a popular phrase. From her childhood she had known them, their wants, their sympathies, their discouragements; and in her heart—though you would not discover this till you had known her long and well—there was a burning sympathy with them, a sympathy born in her, and not assumed for the sake of having a career. It was this that had impelled her to get a medical education, which she obtained by hard labor and self-denial. To her this was not a means of livelihood, but simply that she might be of service to those all about her who needed help more than she did. She didn't believe in charity, this stout-hearted, clearheaded little woman; she meant to make everybody pay for her medical services who could pay; but somehow her practice was not lucrative, and the little salary she got as a dispensary doctor melted away with scarcely any perceptible improvement in her own wardrobe. Why, she needed nothing, going about as she did.
She sat—now waiting for the end; and the good face, so full of sympathy for the living, had no hope in it. Just another human being had come to the end of her path—the end literally. It was so everyday. Somebody came to the end, and there was nothing beyond. Only it was the end, and that was peace. One o'clock—half-past one. The door opened softly. The old woman rose from the foot of the bed with a start and a low “Herr! gross Gott.” It was Father Damon. The girl opened her eyes with a frightened look at first, and then an eager appeal. Dr. Leigh rose to make room for him at the bedside. They bowed as he came forward, and their eyes met. She shook her head. In her eyes was no expectation, no hope. In his was the glow of faith. But the eyes of the girl rested upon his face with a rapt expression. It was as if an angel had entered the room.
Father Damon was a young man, not yet past thirty, slender, erect. He had removed as he came in his broad-brimmed soft hat. The hair was close-cut, but not tonsured. He wore a brown cassock, falling in straight lines, and confined at the waist with a white cord. From his neck depended from a gold chain a large gold cross. His face was smooth-shaven, thin, intellectual, or rather spiritual; the nose long, the mouth straight, the eyes deep gray, sometimes dreamy and puzzling, again glowing with an inner fervor. A face of long vigils and the schooled calmness of repressed energy. You would say a fanatic of God, with a dash of self-consciousness. Dr. Leigh knew him well. They met often on their diverse errands, and she liked, when she could, to go to vespers in the little mission chapel of St. Anselm, where he ministered. It was not the confessional that attracted her, that was sure; perhaps not altogether the service, though that was soothing in certain moods; but it was the noble personality of Father Damon. He was devoted to the people as she was, he understood them; and for the moment their passion of humanity assumed the same aspect, though she knew that what he saw, or thought he saw, lay beyond her agnostic vision.
Father Damon was an Englishman, a member of a London Anglican order, who had taken the three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, who had been for some years in New York, and had finally come to live on the East Side, where his work was. In a way he had identified himself with the people; he attended their clubs; he was a Christian socialist; he spoke on the inequalities of taxation; the strikers were pretty sure of his sympathy; he argued the injustice of the present ownership of land. Some said that he had joined a lodge of the Knights of Labor. Perhaps it was these things, quite as much as his singleness of purpose and his spiritual fervor, that drew Dr. Leigh to him with a feeling that verged on devotion. The ladies up-town, at whose tables Father Damon was an infrequent guest, were as fully in sympathy with this handsome and aristocratic young priest, and thought it beautiful that he should devote himself to the poor and the sinful; but they did not see why he should adopt their views.
It was at the mission that Father Damon had first seen the girl. She had ventured in not long ago at twilight, with her cough and her pale face, in a silk gown and flower-garden of a hat, and crept into one of the confessional boxes, and told him her story.
“Do you think, Father,” said the girl, looking up wistfully, “that I can—can be forgiven?”
Father Damon looked down sadly, pitifully. “Yes, my daughter, if you repent. It is all with our Father. He never refuses.”
He knelt down, with his cross in his hand, and in a low voice repeated the prayer for the dying. As the sweet, thrilling voice went on in supplication the girl's eyes closed again, and a sweet smile played about her mouth; it was the innocent smile of the little girl long ago, when she might have awakened in the morning and heard the singing of birds at her window.
When Father Damon arose she seemed to be sleeping. They all stood in silence for a moment.
“You will remain?” he asked the doctor.
“Yes,” she said, with the faintest wan smile on her face. “It is I, you know, who have care of the body.”
At the door he turned and said, quite low, “Peace be to this house!”
Father Damon came dangerously near to being popular. The austerity of his life and his known self-chastening vigils contributed to this effect. His severely formal, simple ecclesiastical dress, coarse in material but perfect in its saintly lines, separated him from the world in which he moved so unostentatiously and humbly, and marked him as one who went about doing good. His life was that of self-absorption and hardship, mortification of the body, denial of the solicitation of the senses, struggling of the spirit for more holiness of purpose—a life of supplication for the perishing souls about him. And yet he was so informed with the modern spirit that he was not content, as a zealot formerly might have been, to snatch souls out of the evil that is in the world, but he strove to lessen the evil. He was a reformer. It was probably this feature of his activity, and not his spiritual mission, that attracted to him the little group of positivists on the East Side, the demagogues of the labor lodges, the practical workers of the working-girls' clubs, and the humanitarian agnostics like Dr. Leigh, who were literally giving their lives without the least expectation of reward. Even the refined ethical-culture groups had no sneer for Father Damon. The little chapel of St. Anselm was well known. It was always open. It was plain, but its plainness was not the barrenness of a non-conformist chapel. There were two confessionals; a great bronze lamp attached to one of the pillars scarcely dispelled the obscurity, but cast an unnatural light upon the gigantic crucifix that hung from a beam in front of the chancel. There were half a dozen rows of backless benches in the centre of the chapel. The bronze lamp, and the candles always burning upon the altar, rather accented than dissipated the heavy shadows in the vaulted roof. At no hour was it empty, but at morning prayer and at vespers the benches were apt to be filled, and groups of penitents or spectators were kneeling or standing on the floor. At vespers there were sure to be carriages in front of the door, and among the kneeling figures were ladies who brought into these simple services for the poor something of the refinement of grace as it is in the higher circles. Indeed, at the hour set apart for confession, there were in the boxes saints from up-town as well as sinners from the slums. Sometimes the sinners were from up-town and the saints from the slums.
When the organ sounded, and through a low door in the chancel the priest entered, preceded by a couple of acolytes, and advanced swiftly to the reading-desk, there was an awed hush in the congregation. One would not dare to say that there was a sentimental feeling for the pale face and rapt expression of the devotee. It was more than that. He had just come from some scene of suffering, from the bed of one dying; he was weary with watching. He was faint with lonely vigils; he was visibly carrying the load of the poor and the despised. Even Ruth Leigh, who had dropped in for half an hour in one of her daily rounds—even Ruth Leigh, who had in her stanch, practical mind a contempt for forms and rituals, and no faith in anything that she could not touch, and who at times was indignant at the efforts wasted over the future of souls concerning which no one knew anything, when there were so many bodies, which had inherited disease and poverty and shame, going to worldly wreck before so-called Christian eyes—even she could scarcely keep herself from adoring this self-sacrificing spirit. The woes of humanity grieved him as they grieved her, and she used to say she did not care what he believed so long as he gave his life for the needy.
It was when he advanced to the altar-rail to speak that the man best appeared. His voice, which was usually low and full of melody, could be something terrible when it rose in denunciation of sin. Those who had traveled said that he had the manner of a preaching friar—the simple language, so refined and yet so homely and direct, the real, the inspired word, the occasional hastening torrent of words. When he had occasion to address one of the societies of ladies for the promotion of something among the poor, his style and manner were simplicity itself. One might have said there was a shade of contempt in his familiar and not seldom slightly humorous remarks upon society and its aims and aspirations, about which he spoke plainly and vigorously. And this was what the ladies liked. Especially when he referred to the pitifulness of class distinctions, in the light of the example of our Lord, in our short pilgrimage in this world. This unveiling and denunciation made them somehow feel nearer to their work, and, indeed, while they sat there, co-workers with this apostle of righteousness.
Perhaps there was something in the priestly dress that affected not only the congregation in the chapel, but all the neighborhood in which Father Damon lived. There was in the long robe, with its feminine lines, an assurance to the women that he was set apart and not as others were; and, on the other hand, the semi-feminine suggestion of the straight-falling garment may have had for the men a sort of appeal for defense and even protection. It is certain, at any rate, that Father Damon had the confidence of high and low, rich and poor. The forsaken sought him out, the hungry went to him, the dying sent for him, the criminal knocked at the door of his little room, even the rich reprobate would have opened his bad heart to him sooner than to any one else. It is evident, therefore, that Father Damon was dangerously near to being popular. Human vanity will feed on anything within its reach, and there has been discovered yet no situation that will not minister to its growth. Suffering perhaps it prefers, and contumely and persecution. Are not opposition, despiteful anger, slander even, rejection of men, stripes even, if such there could be in these days, manna to the devout soul consciously set apart for a mission? But success, obsequiousness, applause, the love of women, the concurrent good opinion of all humanitarians, are these not almost as dangerous as persecution? Father Damon, though exalted in his calling, and filled with a burning zeal, was a sincere man, and even his eccentricities of saintly conduct expressed to his mind only the high purpose of self-sacrifice. Yet he saw, he could not but see, the spiritual danger in this rising tide of adulation. He fought against its influence, he prayed against it, he tried to humiliate himself, and his very humiliations increased the adulation. He was perplexed, almost ashamed, and examined himself to see how it was that he himself seemed to be thwarting his own work. Sometimes he withdrew from it for a week together, and buried himself in a retreat in the upper part of the island. Alas! did ever a man escape himself in a retreat? It made him calm for the moment. But why was it, he asked himself, that he had so many followers, his religion so few? Why was it, he said, that all the humanitarians, the reformers, the guilds, the ethical groups, the agnostics, the male and female knights, sustained him, and only a few of the poor and friendless knocked, by his solicitation, at the supernatural door of life? How was it that a woman whom he encountered so often, a very angel of mercy, could do the things he was doing, tramping about in the misery and squalor of the great city day and night, her path unilluminated by a ray from the future life?
Perhaps he had been remiss in his duty. Perhaps he was letting a vague philanthropy take the place of a personal solicitude for individual souls. The elevation of the race! What had the land question to do with the salvation of man? Suppose everybody on the East Side should become as industrious, as self-denying, as unselfish as Ruth Leigh, and yet without belief, without hope! He had accepted the humanitarian situation with her, and never had spoken to her of the eternal life. What unfaithfulness to his mission and to her! It should be so no longer.
It was after one of his weeks of retreat, at the close of vesper service, that Dr. Leigh came to him. He had been saying in his little talk that poverty is no excuse for irreligion, and that all aid in the hardship of this world was vain and worthless unless the sinner laid hold on eternal life. Dr. Leigh, who was laboring with a serious practical problem, heard this coldly, and with a certain contempt for what seemed to her a vague sort of consolation.
“Well,” he said, when she came to him in the vestry, with a drop from the rather austere manner in which he had spoken, “what can I do for you?”
“For me, nothing, Father Damon. I thought perhaps you would go round with me to see a pretty bad case. It is in your parish.”
“Ah, did they send for me? Do they want spiritual help?”
“First the natural, then the spiritual,” she replied, with a slight tone of sarcasm in her voice. “That's just like a priest,” she was thinking. “I do not know what to do, and something must be done.”
“Did you report to the Associated Charities?”
“Yes. But there's a hitch somewhere. The machine doesn't take hold. The man says he doesn't want any charity, any association, treating him like a pauper. He's off peddling; but trade is bad, and he's been away a week. I'm afraid he drinks a little.”
“Well?”
“The mother is sick in bed. I found her trying to do some fine stitching, but she was too weak to hold up the muslin. There are five young children. The family never has had help before.”
Father Damon put on his hat, and they went out together, and for some time picked their way along the muddy streets in silence.
At length he asked, in a softened voice, “Is the mother a Christian?”
“I didn't ask,” she replied shortly. “I found her crying because the children were hungry.”
Father Damon, still under the impression of his neglect of duty, did not heed her warning tone, but persisted, “You have so many opportunities, Dr. Leigh, in your visits of speaking a word.”
“About what?” she asked, refusing to understand, and hardened at the slightest sign of what she called cant.
“About the necessity of repentance and preparation for another life,” he answered, softly but firmly. “You surely do not think human beings are created just for this miserable little experience here?”
“I don't know. I have too much to do with the want and suffering I see to raise anxieties about a world of which no one can possibly know anything.”
“Pardon me,” he persisted, “have you no sense of incompleteness in this life, in your own life? no inward consciousness of an undying personality?”
The doctor was angry for a moment at this intrusion. It had seemed natural enough for Father Damon to address his exhortations to the poor and sinful of his mission. She admired his spirit, she had a certain sympathy with him; for who could say that ministering to minds diseased might not have a physical influence to lift these people into a more decent and prosperous way of living? She had thought of herself as working with him to a common end. But for him now to turn upon her, absolutely ignoring the solid, rational, and scientific ground on which he knew, or should know, she stood, and to speak to her as one of the “lost,” startled her, and filled her with indignation. She had on her lips a sarcastic reply to the effect that even if she had a soul, she had not taken up her work in the city as a means of saving it; but she was not given to sarcasm, and before she spoke she looked at her companion, and saw in the eyes a look of such genuine humble feeling, contradicting the otherwise austere expression of his face, that her momentary bitterness passed away.
“I think, Father Damon,” she said, gently, “we had better not talk of that. I don't have much time for theorizing, you know, nor much inclination,” she added.
The priest saw that for the present he could make no progress, and after a little silence the conversation went back to the family they were about to visit.
They found the woman better—at least, more cheerful. Father Damon noticed that there were medicines upon the stand, and that there were the remains of a meal which the children had been eating. He turned to the doctor. “I see that you have been providing for them.”
“Oh, the eldest boy had already been out and begged a piece of bread when I came. Of course they had to have something more at once. But it is very little that I can do.”
He sat down by the bed, and talked with the mother, getting her story, while the doctor tidied up the room a bit, and then, taking the youngest child in her lap and drawing the others about her, began to tell a story in a low voice. Presently she was aware that the priest was on his knees and saying a prayer. She stopped in her story, and looked out through the dirty window into the chill and dark area.
“What is he doing?” whispered one of the children.
“I don't know,” she said, and a sort of chill came over her heart. It all seemed a mockery, in these surroundings.
When he rose he said to the woman, “We will see that you do not want till your husband comes back.”
“And I will look in tomorrow,” said the doctor.
When they were in the street, Father Damon thanked her for calling his attention to the case, thanked her a little formally, and said that he would make inquiries and have it properly attended to. And then he asked: “Is your work ended for the day? You must be tired.”
“Oh, no; I have several visits to make. I'm not tired. I rather think it is good for me, being out-of-doors so much.” She thanked him, and said good-by.
For a moment he stood and watched the plain, resolute little woman threading her way through the crowded and unclean street, and then slowly walked away to his apartment, filled with sadness and perplexity.
The apartment which he occupied was not far from the mission chapel, and it was the one clean spot among the ill-kept tenements; but as to comfort, it was not much better than the cell of an anchorite. Of this, however, he was not thinking as he stretched himself out on his pallet to rest a little from the exhausting labors of the day. Probably it did not occur to him that his self-imposed privations lessened his strength for his work.
He was thinking of Ruth Leigh. What a rare soul! And yet apparently she did not think or care whether she had a soul. What could be the spring of her incessant devotion? If ever woman went about doing good in an unselfish spirit it was she. Yet she confessed her work hopeless. She had no faith, no belief in immortality, no expectation of any reward, nothing to offer to anybody beyond this poor life. Was this the enthusiasm of humanity, of which he heard so much? But she did not seem to have any illusions, or to be burned up by enthusiasm. She just kept on. Ah, he thought, what a woman she would be if she were touched by the fire of faith!
Meantime, Ruth Leigh went on her round. One day was like another, except that every day the kaleidoscope of misery showed new combinations, new phases of suffering and incompetence, and there was always a fresh interest in that. For years now this had been her life, in the chill of winter and the heat of summer, without rest or vacation. The amusements, the social duties, the allurements of dress and society, that so much occupied the thoughts of other women, did not seem to come into her life. For books she had little time, except the books of her specialty. The most exciting novels were pale compared with her daily experiences of real life. Almost her only recreation was a meeting of the working-girls, a session of her labor lodge, or an assembly at the Cooper Union, where some fiery orator, perhaps a priest, or a clever agitator, a working-man glib of speech, who had a mass of statistics at the end of his tongue, who read and discussed, in some private club of zealots of humanity, metaphysics, psychology, and was familiar with the whole literature of labor and socialism, awoke the enthusiasm of the discontented or the unemployed, and where men and women, in clear but homely speech, told their individual experiences of wrong and injustice. There was evidence in all these demonstrations and organizations that the world was moving, and that the old order must change.
Years and years the little woman had gone on with her work, and she frankly confessed to Edith, one day when they were together going her rounds, that she could see no result from it all. The problem of poverty and helplessness and incapacity seemed to her more hopeless than when she began. There might be a little enlightenment here and there, but there was certainly not less misery. The state of things was worse than she thought at first; but one thing cheered her: the people were better than she thought. They might be dull and suspicious in the mass, but she found so much patience, unselfishness, so many people of good hearts and warm affections.