CHAPTER NINE
Thompson of theChroniclewas a large, fat man who had cultivated what he considered the proper editorial manner so that even in ordinary conversation he snapped out his sentences as if he were ordering a cub reporter to a fire. He prided himself on being able to do a dozen things at once and his fetish was concentration. One gathered that he could write a better article in a power house than in a library. When Jean entered he was scanning the proofs of the week's edition, making notes on a pad, smoking, and calling three numbers on the telephone. Jean's nerves had worn her almost to the point of interrupting the great man, before he glanced at her.
"I'm going to run a new feature. I want a series of interviews with leading people who are doing things. I don't give a whoop what they do so long as it's for the general good, 'our city,' 'civic betterment,' etc. But I don't want slush. No sob-sister rot. Civic pride and that dope. Herrick says you can do it. The first will be with Dr. Mary Mac Lean. We've run her regularly about every six months since Settlements got popular. You're to get a new angle. When you get the hang of it, you'll have to find your own interviews."
He almost snarled the last word, glared at Jean as if she had taken his time on a personal matter, and attacked his cigar as if he hadn't had one for fifty years. Jean had never heard of Dr. Mary Mac Lean and had no very clear idea of what a Settlement was, but she did not ask. When she had gone, the Managing Editor made a hieroglyphic in his memorandum, favorable to Jean.
As she sat waiting for Dr. Mary, Jean's courage came back. At the worst the doctor could only refuse to talk to her, in which case she would have to do the best she could.
"And an interview where the interviewed refuses to say anything doesn't leave much room for slush."
Steps sounded in the hall and a stocky woman, in a walking skirt that made her appear even shorter, with quantities of fluffy white hair piled on a large head, stood in the doorway, peering nearsightedly through gold pince-nez. She looked like a large, good-natured and freshly washed puppy picking up a scent. Jean went forward.
"Dr. Mary Mac Lean? I am Jean Norris. I 'phoned you about an interview."
The pince-nez flew off as if Dr. Mary had pressed a button somewhere about her plump person, and Jean smiled. Dr. Mary returned the smile. Without the thick lenses of the glasses her eyes were small but very bright. They were like two little searchlights, ready to be turned on any fact. When she smiled, the corners crinkled into wrinkles.
"Well, go right on. I suppose you're primed to the hilt." Dr. Mary took a deep chair and motioned Jean to another. "What's it going to be this time? Poverty, sin, crime, religion, the Social Evil, the plague, red or white, suffrage, minimum wage, I.W.W.-ism, organized labor, inefficiency of the workingman, college education, or How I Went Into the Work?"
"I don't know. You see," Jean answered in a sudden resolve to take the doctor into her confidence, "I'm very specially at sea. I don't know a thing about any of those things, not even enough to ask for enlightenment. I never heard of you up till an hour ago and would hate to be put on a stand to tell what a Settlement was. I know you do wonderful things with the poor, but I don't know whether you pay their rent, or make them send their children to school. It's because I don't know anything about you that they sent me. They want something new that won't drivel."
Dr. Mary laughed till the tears stood in her twinkling blue eyes.
"My dear, that's the most adequate explanation I ever got from an interviewer, and the Lord knows I've sampled them all. So they're after something new that won't drivel." She bent forward with exaggerated caution. "Do you know, Miss Norris, I have imperiled my immortal soul and ruined my vocabulary, reading those interviews with myself. They've called me everything from Feminine Tolstoy to All Womanhood's Sister. Now, would you like to be called All Womanhood's Sister because you installed three washtubs in an outhouse for some poor women?"
"I should loathe being called All Womanhood's Sister for any reason. But is there anything they haven't asked you?"
Dr. Mary cocked her head to one side like a badly proportioned bird and nodded:
"Yes. Nobody has ever had sense enough yet to ask me if there isn't something I want to tell them. They always come with their ammunition ready and it amuses me to watch them shoot wild."
"Then I qualify for 'the new angle,' for I haven't a bullet with me. Will you tell me, Dr. Mac Lean, if there's anything you want to say?"
Dr. Mary's face sobered. "Perhaps I can better show you. Come."
The next was a wonderful hour to Jean. She felt as if the doctor were going before her, tearing down walls, opening worlds she had never glimpsed. At the door of the last room, Dr. Mary paused.
"I want you to meet one of our girls. In some ways she combines all the problems we have—economic, social, educational. And there are many like her."
The doctor turned the handle and they entered a large, well-lighted room, fitted with sewing machines. A dozen dark women were busy sewing, and their laughter mingled with the whir of the machines. They all smiled and gave greetings in strange broken phrases of English, as Dr. Mary, followed by Jean, crossed to the farthest corner where a girl of nineteen was sewing furiously. She stopped and looked up, smiling.
"Well, Carmen, how's Jaime to-day?"
"Oh, so well! He get fat." The soft voice blurred the words to a single low note as the girl reached over to the wicker basket on the chair beside her. She lifted the baby and turned with radiant face to the doctor.
"See. Hees legs—so fat."
She turned back the coarse little dress and showed with pride the small shriveled legs. The doctor bent over the baby, so fragile and withered that it seemed something not new-born but something older than time, and gave a few directions in Spanish. The girl nodded and, as the baby began to whimper, buried her face in the wrinkled neck and crooned to him. Over her bowed head, the doctor's lips motioned to Jean: "Blind, but she doesn't know it yet."
Jean's throat tightened and she felt sick with the sadness of it; the girl-mother and the baby, so old, so weak, so resigned, as if it had accepted its burden far back down the ages. The girl put the baby, quieted now, into its basket. It lay for a moment staring with its great, empty black eyes, and then closed them wearily. The girl covered him with a bit of mosquito netting and sat down to her work again. Before they were out of the room, she was sewing furiously again.
Jean looked at the doctor.
"Carmen Gonsalez, but I call her to myself, Mater Dolorosa. She has never been to school, although she was born right here in San Francisco and has wanted all her life to read. She is just turned nineteen. Before she was fourteen she went to work in a tamale factory and learned first hand the existence of all the evil she did not already know from her own home. At sixteen she left the tamale factory because the foreman gave her no peace, and went to work in an American overall factory. She thought American men 'were different.'
"Theyaredifferent. A Mexican of the same caliber makes no bones about his desires, but Mr. George Farrel crept to his goal like a snake. She loves him yet. She believes he will come back, although she has not heard of him for months. Only once have I ever seen her angry—I never want to see it again. It was like the crushing force of a glacier. She was whiter than paper and so still. Some one had told her that George had married a Gringo. It is true. Once I thought I might tell her after the baby was born. But it was born blind. 'The sins of the fathers upon the children, yea, even to the third and fourth generation.'"
"I should think," Jean cried passionately, "that you would hate the whole human race."
"No. You see, I have been very many years in this work and that first rage has worn off. We all have it. Sometimes I think it is what brings us unto it at all. We see the crime and sin and sorrow and we are filled with a blind passion to straighten it out. It's as instinctive, at the base, as emotional an act as jumping into a river to save some one. And then, after a time, long or short according to one's temperament, you learn what I sometimes think is the only thing in the world worth knowing—The Colonel's Lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters under their skin. Then you don't get angry any more at social injustice, or very sad, not unless you happen to have indigestion or try to burn the candle at both ends. You just go along and believe."
"In what?"
Dr. Mary laughed. "Sometimes I don't know. Often I think believing is just a general state of being, like feeling well. It's not belief in a personal God and it's not unshakable faith in man and most surely it's not a belief in the tremendous importance of one's job. Belief in what? I think in this—That the Colonel's Lady and Judy go round in cycles, hand in hand at that, and each cycle is a needed cycle, because in the end—it's going to make a spiral. At least that's as near as I can word it, Miss Norris, and I try to believe it most of the time, the spiral part, I mean."
She walked with Jean to the street door, but stood for a moment before opening it.
"Now you know what it is I want to say and if you can put it into words you can do better than I. But that's your business. I want to make these people happier because I have lived. And I want to be happier because they have lived. I want to take the blind passion of the Carmens and hitch it to the aridity of the rich ladies who come in their limousines to our committees. I want to beat some of the primitive vengeance of a Sicilian fisherman into the George Farrels. I want to teach the women not to make the sign of the Evil Eye when somebody stops them on the street and looks at the baby, and I want the person who stops them on the street not to have spasms because the baby is swaddled in a fashion they have never seen. Personally, it makes me sick to see flies buzzing over a baby, but no sicker than it does to hear some of the comments of the people who come to visit us. Not half so sick. Come to think of it, I'd rather have a baby swaddled to death and eaten by flies than talk ten minutes to the flyspecked souls and swaddled brains of some of our visitors. And if you can get it through the heads of the public, Miss Norris, you will be doing a good thing. In a way, a place like this is public and we don't want to keep people out. But whenever a review of any kind appears we are always swamped as if we were a sideshow. It wouldn't be worth while paying any attention to, except that it does show a serious side of the whole attitude. For it reflects very really what the Colonel's Lady thinks of Judy O'Grady and it's bad for them both."
The telephone rang. Dr. Mary held out her hand. "It may sound vague, but we're in earnest."
"It sounds anything but that. I feel as if you'd turned a white searchlight on Society for me, and——"
"All right. So long as you don't call the article that. 'Gropings' would be nearer the mark. But if you're really interested come and see me sometimes. We're pretty busy all the week, but I usually have Sunday afternoons to myself. It's the only time I have for my personal friends. I want you to come."
"I certainly shall, and thank you."
Waiting in a drugstore at the foot of the hill, Herrick saw Jean before she saw him. She was walking quickly, her head back, her eyes glowing.
"Good Lord, what's happened? She looks like a modern Joan of Arc."
Herrick stepped out and joined her. "I suppose you would have walked right over me and not known it. You look as if you were just about to step off the edge of the world into eternal joy. What happened?"
"She's the most wonderful person that ever lived!" Jean's enthusiasm rayed from her in a physical current. Herrick smiled.
"No wonder the rest of us dry up and grow old. People like you and Dr. Mary have cornered all the energy and belief in the universe."
"Don't mention me in the same breath. My enthusiasms and beliefs are like—like specks of dust on a diamond compared to hers. I feel like a puling infant beside King Solomon. Just think of it—to go on never giving up, never weakening, always believing. To feel that you mean something. Not that you just fit in, but that you have a place that nobody else can take! To do things. To take human beings and make them into something!"
"Do they have to be poor and dirty and foreign, Jean? Wouldn't just plain needing be enough?"
The voice was wistful and Jean laughed rather uncertainly. "No, I don't suppose they would have to be dirty."
"Just so long as they were miserable and weak and dependent enough?"
"Yes. I guess that would do. I suppose all women like to be needed. It flatters our vanity and makes up for all the big things in the world we can't get at."
Herrick gave Jean's hand a quick pressure and let it go. "Kind of indirect action. Well, did this wonderful person come through with an interview?"
"Yes. I suppose she did, if you call shooting a perfect ignoramus into a new world, an interview. I felt as if I were out with a little kite to gather all the electricity in the heavens. Just think of trying to get that personality into three thousand words and hand it in to-morrow."
"It'll look more possible after dinner, a large, soggy dinner. Nothing like it for dragging the soul down within reach."