“Mercy every way
Is infinite—and who can say?”
THERE was a high west wind, and the dust swirled in clouds at the street
corners. It was the kind of wind that never lets one alone, and is
constantly drawing attention to the inconveniences of one’s clothing.
The clouds were the dull brown of approaching rain, drifting in rags
across the chilly sky. Cynthia Grant, who had been all the night before
and half the day through fighting over the undesirable life of a mother
and child, felt almost aggrieved that she had saved them both. “What did
I want to do it for? The whole system’s rotten! Why should it be
considered mercy to prolong the agony instead of cutting it short? I
don’t care for the woman; I hate the child; and, even if I liked them
both, I don’t think their lives worth living. Why that drunken brute of
a husband, who is always throwing chairs at the poor thing, should say
‘Thank God!’ when I told him she’d live is a puzzle; he could easily
have got some one fresh to throw chairs at, and the brat is only one
mouth more to feed! I feel far more sympathy for that woman with ten
children who told me she had had ‘no churchyard luck’.” She chuckled
grimly to herself, and looked with a tolerant, amused gaze at the narrow
alley, with its children at play in the gutters, wizened and old, with
sharp, cruel, degraded little faces, slatternly women at doors, and
skulking forms, that were scarcely human, lurking in corners and in the
wretched rooms that were called “living,” a phrase more applicable to
the vermin that inhabited them than the half-human creatures that
sprawled there. It was a bad alley, and the tough knotted stick in
Cynthia’s hand did not look out of place.
“Yes,” she thought to herself, “Muriel must be impelled by some pretty
desperate attraction to give up her life to this sort of thing. It will
make her old before her time. And as for the people here, her influence
will probably cease as most influence does with her presence, and
trickle off them as easily as water off a duck’s back. As for me, I
suppose I might as well be _here_ as anywhere else—now.”
She looked at the sky and wondered what poets saw in it. It suggested to
her nothing but the need of a broom. She was tired out when she reached
rooms over the club, and glad of the tea Muriel had prepared for her.
Muriel could not stay, for it was the time when her girls came out of
the factory, and she must be ready to meet them. She was in one of her
merriest and brightest moods. The gloom of the outside world could not
touch her; even the sordid misery of the streets she had visited that
afternoon only seemed to her vistas of future sunshine. She believed in
no sympathy that stopped at sorrow; but it was because she believed so
deeply in the reality of sorrow that she knew the certainty of joy.
“What makes you so happy?” said Cynthia wistfully; “I see nothing to
cause it.” Muriel wrinkled her eyebrows as she always did when puzzled.
Geoff called it her “frowning for a vision,” and compared it to a
sailor’s whistling for a wind. At last the partial vision came.
“I don’t see why it should be so difficult to be happy,” she said. “All
that one hasn’t got is bound to come some day; all that one truly _has_
will never go. And when one is quite sure of that oneself, it is
beautiful to be able to encourage one’s bit of the world to go on
waiting for _their_ bright side. And how good and bright and dear things
really are if we only come to look through them, and don’t make
_culs-de-sac_ of sorrows. If love is the key of the world, joy is the
hand that turns it, I feel sure. To make a creed of joy and a fact of
love is to win half the battles, and be ready to fight the other half.
But you know all this just as well as I do, and practise it far
better—so what’s the use of talking? Simple things become mysteries
directly you try to explain them. Mind you rest and sleep. I’ll be back
for supper,” and she disappeared. It grew dark in the room afterwards.