CHAPTER X
Thebusiness of the Legal Aid Society had brought Thornton Jennings to know one Peter Erard, an operative in a piano-factory. He lived with his father, a helpless old man, on one of the long traffic streets which pierce the stockyards district. In the section where the Erards lived, the narrow frame cottages were sunk below the level of the street, which seemed to have bestirred itself recently and risen above the squalor of the marsh. Jennings had asked Molly Parker to visit the Erards, when Peter met with an accident at the factory, that ended finally in a fever and a gradual decline. While he was idle Jennings and Miss Parker did what they could for him. They discussed the possibility of Mrs. Wilbur’s inducing Simeon to do something for the old man, at least in the event of Peter’s death. But Miss Parker was afraid of the subject in her friend’s present mood.
The two felt that Peter’s misfortune was more pathetic than showed on the surface. “He yearns for what the other one got,” Jennings said. “Hestuck by the old people, and yet he had the call, too.”
When Molly reflected dubiously that it did seem as if conscience didn’t pay, Jennings puzzled her by asserting: “It doesn’t—unless you can’t help it. Peter couldn’t, and so he is dying over there in that hole with his sharplittle eyes unsatisfied. Simeon could, and so he sails to Europe for a poultice that will heal the abrasions we have made on his sensorium.”
Miss Parker learned much from pondering on this case of Peter Erard. He was such a confirmed sceptic, she found, that she hesitated to proffer her simple religious panacea. Jennings seemed to her sceptical also, when he insisted that Peter’s sacrifice was quite irrational. To her insistentwhy, he answered dreamily,—“‘Why, why,’—you can’t answerwhys. Why do we hate and love, and why do we live? The Master wills it; it is idle to talk back.”
This was a vague reason, yet wonderfully comforting to Molly, chiefly on account of the authority the propounder had with her. If he were content with this mystery, she must be. So she continued to visit the Erards, and formed plans of using Adela’s purse to help the old man. For it was but just that Mrs. Wilbur should pay some of Simeon Erard’s bills to society. When Jennings urged that Mrs. Wilbur could probably force Erard to make Peter’s last days happy in other ways than with money, Miss Parker shook her head.
“Adela can be as hard as a rock.”
“Perhaps she has never been tapped the right way.”
Yet to her suggestion thatheshould try tapping the rock, he answered lightly, “I guess I’m notherMoses.”
It disturbed the equable Molly to realize how much interest he took in Mrs. Wilbur. For “Adela spoils everything,” she declared sententiously.
Jennings had it in mind to approach Mrs. Wilbur, atthe first good chance, in behalf of the Erards. He had seen little of her since the fall season; intangible influences kept them apart. Late in June, however, he spent a Sunday in one of the northern suburbs at Mrs. Stevans’s “place,” and when he arrived from the city in the evening, he discovered Mrs. Wilbur sitting alone on the cool, silent veranda above the lake. The other guests had gone off for a drive along the bluffs. She greeted him with frank surprise.
“I didn’t expect to seeyouhere.”
“They don’t seem quite my crowd,” he admitted cheerily. “But Mrs. Stevans is a sort of cousin, and she has done her best for me. She has found me a hard case; her good deeds have come to asking me over for Sunday.”
“Why haven’t you hit it off in Chicago?” Mrs. Wilbur inquired curiously.
“Why haven’t you?” the young man retorted. “And I like it tremendously well here. I should want to hang on merely for the pleasure of seeing your crowd thrown into the lake or banged on the head, if they don’t reform.” He tilted back and forth with suppressed merriment. “I can’t help feeling pleased over the growls from the ‘masses.’ If some of your rich friends keep on grabbing quite so shamelessly, there will be a row. I should hate to shoulder a musket in defence of your palace, Mrs. Wilbur.”
“Their selfishness is intolerable,” she said fiercely. “I feel stifled when I see them.”
“Yet many of them are very good people to see.” Herexplosiveness rendered him impartial. “You are too ready to includeall; there is a splendid remnant—fine men one can honestly admire. Even the selfish ones are merely crude and wrong-headed. You don’t do the place justice.”
“I can’t be just. There is no reason in my life here.” She leaned toward him appealingly, longing for sympathy. He was not merely a young man she had seen a dozen times in a fragmentary way. He was so intensely human that she felt she had always known him.
“No, not on your basis, there isn’t any reason,” Jennings admitted.
She waited for his meaning.
“The refined selfish person can’t get satisfied here.”
She looked at him inquiringly.
“You have always desired. A tremendous ego, and admirable, admirable,” he ended softly.
She was, indeed, beautiful and alluring as she lay in the steamer-chair, questioning him with her anxious eyes. The personal power of her developed, intelligent face excited him, and made him totally forgetful of the Erards.
“You think me pretty bad,” she exclaimed, dropping her hand from her face.
“No!” he began to tilt back and forth once more abstractedly. “Of the two souls—the one that demands, the other that accepts—you are the demanding, absorbing kind. Most women accept, ultimately.”
They paused, embarrassed at the distance they had gone from the conventional.
“I am sorry,” he added softly, “for I don’t believethere is any peace for your kind. You go flaming about the earth, until death extinguishes you.”
“Oh! to flame, to burn, tofeel,” she appealed for his alliance in her revolt. He rose from his chair and paced back and forth, his face flushed with an excitement deeper than hers.
“That is not all,” he murmured to quiet himself. “There are mighty laws which are holy. And there is holiness itself, a state of spirit in the face of our Lord the Master, and that is peace. It is possible, yes, as possible as the intoxication of passion.”
“If I take my life in my own hands, and go where I can spend it joyfully,” she spoke deliberately, “then?”
“Then,” his low voice swept by her, “you are burned to ashes.”
“But I shall do it,” she exclaimed defiantly, “I think. Yes! I shall—”
He had come to a stand by her side and looked at her sympathetically. “Well, do it, and God help you when your heart lies cold,” he burst out, resuming his tramp.
“I don’t think He will help me,” Mrs. Wilbur had it on her lips to say. “If”—but the wistful words died unspoken. Her husband’s reproach came to her mind. “If you had cared very much!” She had not cared, that was the truth. Jennings had stripped her subterfuges away,—her nausea over the business methods of a few men among the multitude of honest hearts who were building the new world; her irritation over her husband’s conduct in the Erard matter; her discontent with Chicago. The reason for her act did not lieultimately in any of these causes; it lay in her own soul. Now she knew the unlovely truth.
Could she care? A wayward instinct prompted her to tell this acquaintance who had happened to search her heart deeply, that she could care, if—. But she was afraid. Let him think her merely a craving ego! His truth-telling had made her hard. She would offer no more excuses. She would accept her poverty of soul and take her freedom.
“Well,” she said at last, “it is very chill. I am going to my room. Good-by, Mr. Jennings.”
She gave him her hand and let him keep it for an instant while she wondered at him, and “at the other kind that accepts.” He opened his lips as if to speak, then squared himself stiffly and dropped her hand.
“Good-by,” he muttered, and strode down the steps to the edge of the bluff where the moonlight was peeping through the thickets. In old days at college, some had called him the Saint, and some the Blasphemer.