carried on, through my assistant in charge, the work of St. Andrew's
chapel with gratifying success. This work has reached, and I am glad to
be able to say, is reaching more than ever before, the great ignorant
class that swarms in our midst, and exhibits a tendency to unrest that
is most disturbing. This is the class which causes most of the
uneasiness felt in the minds of the thoughtful."
I observed that he did not mention the name of "the assistant in
charge," and my sympathy rather went out to the nameless priest, doing
his work without the reward of even being mentioned.
As to the sermon, I can only say that it was twenty minutes long, and
appeared aimed exclusively at the sins of Esau (whom I had always
esteemed a quite decent sort of fellow), rather than at those of the
doctor's congregation, whom he appeared to have a higher opinion of than
of the Patriarchs. I recall the text: "Seek ye first the kingdom of God,
and all these things shall be added unto you." He made it very plain
that to be pious and prudent was the best way to secure wealth. He held
up a worldly motive and guaranteed a worldly reward. Such a sermon as
that would have eased the most uneasy conscience in Christendom.
When the congregation came out I dawdled in the aisle until my young
lady passed, when I feasted my eyes on her face and finely curved cheek,
straight nose, and soft eyes veiled under their long lashes. My two old
ladies in black were waiting in the end of a pew and, as I observed by
their smiles when she approached, waiting like myself to see her. I had
already recognized them as the old ladies of the bundles, whom I had
once helped on the street. How I envied them the smile and cordial
greeting they received in return! I made the observation then, which I
have often had confirmed since, that tenderness to the aged, like that
to the very young, is the mark of a gentle nature.
I heard them say, "We know who has done the work out at the Chapel," and
she replied, "Oh! no, you must not think that. My poor work has been
nothing. Your friend has done it all, and I think that the Doctor ought
to have said so," to which they assented warmly, and I did the same,
though I did not know their friend's name.
As I had nowhere to go in particular, I strolled slowly up the street,
and then walked back again. And as I neared the church, I met the rector
who had just left his robing-room. He was a fine-looking man on the
street as well as in the chancel, and I was prompted to speak to him,
and say that I had just heard him preach. He was, however, too impatient
at my accosting him and so manifestly suspicious that I quickly
regretted my impulse. His, "Well, what is it?" was so prompt on his lips
and his suspicion of me was so clear in his cold, bluish eyes, that I
drew myself up and replied: "Oh! nothing. I was only going to say that I
had just heard you preach--that's all."
"Oh! Ah! Well, I'm much obliged. I'm very glad if I've helped you." He
pulled out his watch.
"Helped me! You haven't," I said dryly and turned away.
A quarter of an hour later, as I strolled along the street lonely and
forlorn, I saw him hurrying up the steps of the large house which had
been pointed out to me as Mrs. Argand's, the great philanthropist.
XVII
THE GULF
As I saw more of the city, its vastness, its might and its inhumanity
grew on me. It was a world in itself, a world constructed on lines as
different from that in which I had lived as if it had been Mars; a city
as different from the smaller cities I had known as if it had been
Babylon or Nineveh. The contrasts were as great as they could have been
in the capitals Sardanapalus built--structures so vast that they must
have dwarfed the towers of Sardis--so rich and splendid that the Hanging
Gardens of Babylon must have been outshone--reared their stupendous bulk
into the smoky air and cast into perpetual shade all that lay near them.
Hard beside their towering mass lay a region filled with the wretched
tenements of the poor, and a little further off the houses of the
well-to-do. And there was not a greater contrast between the vastness of
the one and the pitiful squalor of the other than between the life of
the owners of the former and that of the denizens of the closely packed
tenements which dwindled in their shadow. Splendor and squalor were
divided often only by a brick wall. The roar of the tide that swept
through the teeming streets drowned the cry of wretchedness, and only
the wretched knew how loud it was. I had never seen such wealth, and I
had never dreamed of such poverty.
The vulgar make the parade; the refined pass so quietly as scarcely to
be observed. The vulgarity of the display of riches began to oppress me.
I discovered later the great store of refinement, goodness and sweetness
that was hidden in the homes alike of an element of the wealthy, the
merely well-to-do and the poor. But for a time it was all eclipsed by
the glare of the vulgar and irresponsible rich. Arrogance, discontent,
hardness, vulgarity, were stamped in many faces, and spoke in every
movement of many of those I saw, even of the most richly dressed.
I think it was more the vulgarity and insolence of those I saw decked in
the regalia of wealth than anything else--than even my own poverty--that
changed my views and turned me for a time from my easy indifference as
to social conditions toward a recognition that those conditions are
ridiculously antiquated, a bent I have never quite got over, though I
was later drawn back to a more conservative point of view than, under
the hatred of sham and the spur of want, I was driven to occupy for some
time. They have no traditions and no ideals. They know no standard but
wealth, and possess no ability to display it but through parade. They
feel it necessary to prove their novel position by continual assertion.
They think that wealth has exempted them from decency. They mistake
civility for servility and rudeness for gentility. Their best effort is
only a counterfeit, a poor imitation of what they imagine to be the
manners of the upper class abroad whose indifferent manners they ape.
"Misery loves company," and when I wanted comfort I left the section of
splendor and display, of riotous extravagance and glittering wealth, and
went to those poorer than myself; a practice I can commend from
experience.
When I got so desperate that I could not stand it any longer, and was
afraid I might fall down dead or do myself violence, I used to turn my
steps in another direction and walk through the poorer part of the
city--not the worst part--where there was nothing but dirt and squalor
and filth: that sickened me, and I had never had much sympathy with the
class that lived there. They always appeared contented enough with their
surroundings and rather to enjoy themselves in their own way. And not
the successful workman's quarter. There was an assurance and assumption
there that offended me. The assumption bred of sudden success, no matter
in what class, is everywhere equally vulgar after its kind. It was the
part of the city where the people were respectable, but where they could
just hold on with all their struggling and striving, that I used to go
into; the part where there were patches, not rags; and sometimes an
effort to keep down the dirt, and where a bit of a plant in a little pot
or a little cheap ornament in a window told of the spark of sentiment
that could yet live amid the poverty and hardness about it. They always
place them in the windows, partly, no doubt, to get the light, and
partly, perhaps, to show passers-by that there is something within
better than might be looked for next door. These people on their
holidays always make toward the open country; they try to get away from
their robuster, more successful brothers, and get back near to
Nature--the old mother that cares nothing for success; and repays only
according to the love her children bear her. Here I often walked as I
grew more wretched.
In this section I used to see people with whom I felt in touch: a man
with the badgered look in his eye that made me know that he was at bay;
or a woman with that resigned air which hopeless struggling stamps in
the face and binds on the shoulders. These drew me nearer to my kind,
and made me feel that there were others in a harder case than I, and
gave me a desire to help them. I came to know some of them by sight and
the houses in which they lived, and sometimes I spoke to them and
exchanged a word or two, and the effort to take a cheerful view with
them helped me, and sent me back to my little lonely cubby-hole cheered
and in some sort comforted and resolute to hold out a little longer. But
it was hungry work.
This element composed the great body of the population, but deep down
below them lay a yet lower element weltering in an infinite and hopeless
misery to which even the poor class I speak of were alien. They were
generically spoken of at times as the criminal classes. They were not
this at all, though among them were many criminals--driven to crime by
necessity--because there was no means for them to subsist, no possible
means nor hope outside of their casual and occasional violation of the
statute law by which they secure enough for empty bellies and freezing
bodies merely to keep alive. They live among and on the poor, and one of
the bitterest trials of poverty is the continual presence and preying of
these parasites who like other vermin pursue them and cannot be kept
off. Their only common crime is desperate, infinite poverty--poverty
beyond hope, for they have nothing--not work, nor the hope of work--not
even the power to work, if it should be offered them. As the well-to-do
look with anxiety to the loss of their property and the consequent
sinking to some lower plane of moderate poverty, so the poor look with
shuddering or, at last, with despair to sinking into the slough of this
hopeless state for which there is no name, because none has been devised
adequate to describe its desperate misery. Often but a block, or even
but a wall divides the reeking slum where they creep and fester and rot,
from the broad, well-lighted, smooth-paved avenue where irresponsible
wealth goes clattering by in its wild orgy of extravagance and reckless
mirth. The eye of the mangy and starving wolf from his thicket gleams
dully at the glittering pageant of heartless irresponsibility and waste.
Should the pack ever find a leader bold enough to spring, what will be
the end?
At present they are hungry enough, but they have not organized; they are
not yet a hunting pack, but only scattered bands, slinking about
hungrily, fighting and preying on each other, the larger bands with the
bolder leaders driving off the weaker and unorganized. But let them all
organize once and the end will not be yet.
Day after day I saw my last few dollars leak away, and, though I
replenished my thin purse at times by pawning everything pawnable I had,
yet this, too, gradually oozed away. Fortunately I had plenty of
clothes, which I had bought in my flush days, so I could still make a
respectable appearance.
As money got low all sorts of schemes used to present themselves to me
to replenish my pocket. One was to go out as a laborer on the streets,
clean bricks, or do anything. I was not lazy. I would have walked around
the world for a case. I do not think I was ashamed of it, for I knew it
was respectable, but I was afraid some one I knew might pass by; I was
afraid that Pushkin or Mrs. Starling might see me, and--yes, that that
young girl from the colonial house might recognize me. I had often
thought of her violets since I had dropped them into my pocket-book. And
now, when this idea came to me, I took them out and looked at them. They
still retained a faint fragrance. What would be the result if she should
pass by and see me cleaning bricks--me a laborer, and Pushkin--the
thoughts came together--should see me? I would win on my own line if it
took me all my life.
The idea of Pushkin suggested another plan. Why not gamble? Gambling was
gentlemanly--at least, gentlemen gambled. But did they play for a
living? I had gambled a little myself in the past; played poker, and,
like most men, prided myself on my game, though I generally lost in the
long run; and when I was making good resolutions after my failure, I had
made up my mind never to play again anywhere. And I had always held to
the opinion that, as soon as a man played for his living, he crossed the
line and ceased to be a gentleman. Now, however, it began to appear to
me as if this were the only plan by which I could make anything, and as
if I should have a good excuse for breaking my resolution. I resisted
the temptation for some time; but one night, when I had pawned nearly
everything and had only three or four dollars left, I went out, and
after a long but half-hearted battle gave up, as such are always lost,
and turned into a street across an alley from my office where I knew
there was a gambling place over a saloon kept by one Mick Raffity. I
went boldly up the stairs. Even as I mounted them I felt a sort of
exhilaration. I stopped at the door and my old resolution not to play
again stirred and struggled a little. I caught it, however, with a sort
of grip almost physical, and gave it a shake till it was quiet. I knew I
should win. The blaze of light within cheered me, and, without
hesitating an instant, I walked across the room to where a crowd stood
watching the play of some one seated at a table. It was a large and
richly decorated room, with a few rather daring pictures on the walls
and much gilding about the ceiling. The hot air, heavy with tobacco
smoke and fumes of one kind and another, met me in a blast as I entered,
and involuntarily I thought of a sweat-shop I had once seen in my
earlier days. But the sensation passed and left me warm and exhilarated.
As I passed along, a man looked at me and half nodded. I knew he was the
proprietor. I made my way in and caught the dealer's expressionless
eye, and taking out a note as carelessly as if my pockets were stuffed
with them, I glanced over the board to select my bet. At one end of the
table sat the large, heavy-browed, middle-aged man I had run into one
night on the stairway leading from the alley to the building where I had
my office. He was somewhat tipsy and evidently in bad luck; for he was
heated and was betting wildly. Near by sat a big, sour-looking fellow,
flashily dressed, whom I recognized as having been one of my
fellow-travellers on the side-tracked train, the one who had talked to
the trainmen of their wrongs. He still wore his paste diamonds, his silk
hat and patent-leather shoes. But I took little notice of these.
Casually, as I dropped my note, my eye fell on the player at the middle
of the table. He was surrounded by stacks of chips. As I looked he raked
in a new pile; at least a hundred dollars, and he never changed a
particle. He was calmer than the dealer before him. He was in evening
dress and success had given him quite an air. I caught up my note
without knowing it and fell back behind a group of young men who had
just come up. Curious things happen sometimes. I found my note doubled
up in my hand when I had got out of doors, a quarter of an hour later.
All I remember is my revulsion at seeing that gambler sitting there
raking in money so calmly, with my money for his stake in his pocket,
and I turned out for him: an adventurer who said all American women were
at his bidding. It recalled to me the girl I had seen on the train and
had handed, later, into her carriage, and the good resolutions I had
formed. And it strung me up like wine. I felt that I was a coward to
have come there and as bad as Pushkin.
Just as I turned to leave the place a party of young fellows entered the
room. They had come from a dinner at Mr. Leigh's, as I understood from
their talk, and were "going on" to a dance unless the luck should run to
suit them. They were in high spirits, "Mr. Leigh's champagne" having
done its work, and they were evidently habitués of the place, and good
patrons, I judged, from the obsequious respect paid them by the
attendants. The leader of them was a large, rather good-looking young
fellow, but with marks of dissipation on a face without a line of
refinement in it. The others all seemed to be his followers. They
greeted familiarly and by name the eager attendants who rushed forward
to take their coats, and the leader asked them casually who was in
to-night.
"The Count's here, I think, sir," said one whom they called Billy.
"The Count! Coll McSheen's staked him again," said the young leader.
"And he swore to me he'd never let him have another cent, with oaths
enough to damn him deeper than he will be damned anyhow. Come on, I'll
skin him clean."
I lingered for a moment to see him "skin" Pushkin.
They sauntered up to the table and, after a greeting to the Count, began
to toss bills on the board as though they grew on trees. The least of
them would have kept me going for months. I had never seen money
handled so before and it staggered me.
"Who is that young man?" I asked of a man near me, nodding toward the
leader. "He must be pretty rich."
"Rich! You bet. He's Jim Canter. Got all his daddy's money and going to
get all the Argand and Leigh piles some day. He'll need it, too," added
my informant.
"I should think so." I recalled his name in connection with Miss Leigh's
name in the account of the ball, and I was feeling a little bitter.
"Why, he'd just as lief try to corner water as to bet a hundred dollar
bill on a card. This is just play to him. He'd give all he'd win
to-night to any one of his women."
"His women?"
"Yes. He's one of the real upper class."
"The upper class!" So this was the idea of the upper class held by this
man and his kind! My soul revolted at the thought of this man standing
as the type of our upper class, and I was turning away when Pushkin
shoved back his chair. As I turned he looked up and I saw him start,
though I did not catch his glance. The dealer saw him, too, and as he
looked at me I caught his eye. He motioned to me, but I took no notice.
As I walked out the man near the door spoke to me.
"There's supper in the next room."
"Thank you. I don't want it."
"Come in again. Better luck to-morrow."
"For you, I hope," I said, and I saw his mystification.
I had of late been having an uncomfortable thought which was beginning
to worry me. The idea of doing away with myself had suggested itself to
me from time to time. I do not mean that I ever thought I should really
do it; for when I reflected seriously, I knew I should not. In the first
place, I was afraid; and in the next place, I never gave up the belief
that I should some day achieve success. When I analyzed my feelings I
found that the true name for my unhappiness was egotism. But the idea
would come up to me and now began to pester me. I had a pistol which I
could never bring myself to pawn, though nearly everything else was
pledged. I put the pistol away; but this did not help matters; it looked
like cowardice. So that evening I had taken the pistol out and put it
into my pocket when I went into the street. If I could only catch some
burglar breaking into a bank, or some ruffian beating a woman, or some
scoundrel committing any crime, it would attract attention, and I might
get work. I often used to think thus, but nothing ever happened, and I
knew nothing would happen that evening when I walked out of the gambling
house. So presently the pistol began to be in my way, and my mind went
to working again on the ease with which I could go to my office and lock
myself in. Still I kept on, and presently I found myself near the river,
a black stream that I had often thought of as the Styx. It was as black
and silent now, as it slipped on in the darkness, as the River of
Death.
I was sauntering along, chewing the cud of fancy, wholly bitter--and
sinking lower and lower every step in the slough of despond, working
over what would come if I should suddenly chuck up the whole business
and get out of life--pondering how I should destroy all marks by which
there could be any possibility of identification, when the current of my
thoughts, if that moody train of dismal reflection could be dignified
with such a name, was turned aside by a small incident. As I wandered on
in the darkness, the figure of a woman standing--a shadow in the
shadow--at a corner of an alley arrested my attention. Even in the gloom
the attitude of dejection was such as to strike me, and I saw or felt, I
know not which, that her eyes were on me, and that in some dim, distant
way they contained an appeal. I saw that she was young, and in the dusk
the oval outline of a face that might have both refinement and beauty
challenged my attention. Was she a beggar or only an unhappy outcast,
waiting in the darkness for the sad reward which evil chance might fling
to her wretchedness? I put my hand in my pocket, thinking that she might
beg of me, and I would give her a small portion of my slender store, but
she said nothing and I passed on. After a little, however, still
thinking of her dejected air and with a sudden sympathy for her
wretchedness, I turned back. She was still standing where I left her. I
passed slowly by her, but she said nothing, though I felt again that her
eyes were on me. Then my curiosity or possibly, I may say, my interest,
being aroused, I turned again and walked by her.
"Why so sad to-night?" I said, with words which might have appeared
flippant, but in a tone which she instantly recognized for sympathy. She
turned half away and said nothing and I stood silent watching her, for
her face must once have been almost beautiful, though it was now sadly
marred, and an ugly scar across her eye and cheek, as if it might have
come from the slash of a razor, made that side drawn and distorted.
"Do you want money?"
She slowly shook her head without looking at me.
"What is it, then? Maybe, I can help you?"
She turned slowly and looked at me with such indescribable hopelessness
in her face that my heart went out to her.
"No, I'm past help now."
"Oh, no, you're not." My spirits rose with the words, and I felt
suddenly as if I had risen out of the slough which had been engulfing
me, and as though I had gotten my feet on a firm place where I could
reach out a hand to help this despairing and sinking sister.
"Yes, past help now."
"Come and walk with me." And as she did not stir, I took her hand and
drew it through my arm and gently led her forward along the street. I
had a strange feeling as I walked along. I somehow felt as though I had
escaped from something which had been dragging me down. It was a strange
walk and a strange and tragic story that she told me--of having left her
home in the country, inspired by the desire to do something and be
something more than she was, a simple farmer's daughter in another
State, with some little education such as the country schools could
give; of having secured a position in a big shop where, for a small sum,
she worked all day and learned to see and love fine clothes and
beautiful things; of having fallen in with one or two gay companions in
this and other shops who wore the fine clothes and had the beautiful
things she admired; of having been put forward because she was pretty
and polite; and then of having met a young man, well dressed and with
fine manners; of having fallen in love with him and of having accepted
his attentions and his gifts; and then, of having been led astray by
him; and then--of such an act of base betrayal as, had I not had it
substantiated afterward in every horrid detail, I should never have
believed. I had known something of the wickedness of men and the evil of
an uncontrolled life in the city, where the vilest passions of the heart
are given play, but I had never dreamed of anything so revolting as the
story this girl told me that night. She had been deliberately and with
malice aforethought lured not only to her destruction but to a life of
slavery so vile as to be unbelievable. The man who had secured her heart
used his power over her to seize and sell her into a slavery for which
there is no name which could be used on the printed page. Here, stricken
by the horror of her situation, she had attempted to escape from her
captors, but had been bodily beaten into submission. Then she had made a
wild dash for liberty and had been seized and slashed with a knife until
she fell under her wounds and her life was in imminent danger.