Ladies $1.50. Gents $2.
Yours truly,
MRS. PANSY SYLVESTER,
3 Eden Place near 4th,
Lower bell
_P.S._ Pupil of S. CORA GRUBB.
Inasmuch as Mrs. Sylvester had imbibed all her knowledge from Mrs. Grubb,
that prophet and scholar thought, not unnaturally, that she might have
been consulted about the enterprise, particularly as the cards were of a
nature to prejudice the better class of patients, and lower the social
tone of the temple of healing.
As if this were not vexatious enough, her plans were disarranged in
another and more important particular. Mrs. Sylvester’s manicure had set
up a small establishment for herself, and admitted as partner a certain
chiropodist named Boone. The two artists felt that by sharing expenses
they might increase profits, and there was a sleeping thought in both
their minds that the partnership might ripen into marriage if the
financial returns of the business were satisfactory. It was destined,
however, to be a failure in both respects; for Dr. Boone looked upon
Madame Goldmarker, the vocal teacher in No. 13 Eden Place, and to look
upon her was to love her madly, since she earned seventy-five dollars a
month, while the little manicure could barely eke out a slender and
uncertain twenty. In such crises the heart can be trusted to leap in the
right direction and beat at the proper rate.
Mrs. Grubb would have had small interest in these sordid romances had it
not been that Madame Goldmarker had faithfully promised to look after
Lisa and the twins, so that Mrs. Grubb might be free to hold classes in
the adjoining towns. The little blind god had now overturned all these
well-laid plans, and Mrs. Grubb was for the moment the victim of
inexorable circumstances.
Dr. Boone fitted up princely apartments next his office, and Madame
Goldmarker Boone celebrated her nuptials and her desertion of Eden Place
by making a formal _début_ at a concert in Pocahontas Hall. The next
morning, the neighbourhood that knew them best, and many other
neighbourhoods that knew them not at all, received neat printed circulars
thrust under the front door. Upon one side of the paper were printed the
words and music of ‘Home, Sweet Home,’ ‘as sung by Madame Goldmarker
Boone at her late concert in Pocahontas Hall.’ On the reverse side
appeared a picture of the doctor, a neat cut of a human foot, a schedule
of prices, and the alluring promise that the Madame’s vocal pupils would
receive treatment at half the regular rates.
Many small disputes and quarrels were consequent upon these business,
emotional, and social convulsions, and each of the parties concerned,
from Mrs. Grubb to the chiropodist, consulted Mistress Mary and solicited
her advice and interference.
This seemed a little strange, but Mistress Mary’s garden was the sort of
place to act as a magnet to reformers, eccentrics, professional
philanthropists, and cranks. She never quite understood the reason, and
for that matter nobody else did, unless it were simply that the place was
a trifle out of the common, and she herself a person full of ideas, and
eminently sympathetic with those of other people. Anybody could ‘drop
in,’ and as a consequence everybody did—grandmothers, mothers with babes
in arms, teachers, ministers, photographers, travellers, and journalists.
A Russian gentleman who had escaped from Siberia was a frequent visitor.
He wanted to marry Edith and open a boarding-house for Russian exiles,
and was perfectly confident of making her happy, as he spoke seven
languages and had been a good husband to two Russian ladies now deceased.
An Alaskan missionary, home on a short leave, called periodically, and
attempted to persuade Mary to return with him to his heathen. These
suitors were disposed of summarily when they made their desires known;
but there were other visitors, part of the flotsam and jetsam of a great
city, who appeared and disappeared mysteriously—ships passing Mistress
Mary in the night of sorrow, and, after some despairing,
half-comprehended signal, vanishing into the shadows out of which they
had come. Sometimes, indeed, inspired by the good cheer of the place,
they departed, looking a little less gloomy; sometimes, too, they grew
into a kind of active if transitory relation with the busy little world,
and became, for a time, a part of it.
Mistress Mary went down to the street corner with the children one noon
to see them safely over the crossing. There was generally a genial
policeman who made it a part of his duty to stand guard there, and guide
the reckless and stupid and bewildered ones among the youngsters over the
difficulties that lay in their path. Sometimes he would devote himself
exclusively to Atlantic and Pacific Simonson, who really desired death,
though they were not spiritually fitted for it, and bent all their
energies towards getting under trucks rather than away from them. Marm
Lisa never approached the spot without a nervous trembling and a look of
terror in her eyes, and before the advent of the helpful officer had
always taken a twin by each arm, and the three had gone over thus as a
solid body, no matter how strong the resistance.
On this special morning there was no guardian of the peace in evidence,
but standing on the crossing was a bearded man of perhaps forty years.
Rather handsome he was, and well though carelessly dressed, but he stood
irresolutely with his hands in his pockets, as if quite undecided what to
do next. Mary simply noted him as an altogether strange figure in the
neighbourhood, but the unexpected appearance of a large dog on the scene
scattered the babies, and they fell on her in a weeping phalanx.
‘Will you kindly help a little?’ she asked after a moment’s waiting, in
which any chivalrous gentleman, she thought, should have flung himself
into the breach.
‘I?’ he asked vaguely. ‘How do you mean? What shall I do?’
She longed to say, ‘Wake up, and perhaps an idea will come to you’; but
she did say, with some spirit, ‘Almost anything, thank you. Drive the
dog away, and help some of the smallest children across the street,
please. You can have these two’ (indicating the twins smilingly), ‘or
the other ninety-eight—whichever you like.’
He obeyed orders, though not in a very alert fashion, but showed a sense
of humour in choosing the ninety-eight rather than the two, and Mary left
him on the corner with a pleasant word of thanks and a cheery remark.
The next morning he appeared at the garden gate, and asked if he might
come in and sit a while. He was made welcome; but it was a busy morning,
and he was so silent a visitor that everybody forgot his existence.
He made a curious impression, which can hardly be described, save that
any student of human nature would say at once, ‘He is out of relation
with the world.’ He had something of the expression one sees in a
recluse or a hermit. If you have ever wandered up a mountain side, you
may have come suddenly upon a hut, a rude bed within it, and in the door
a man reading, or smoking, or gazing into vacancy. You remember the look
you met in that man’s eyes. He has tasted life and found it bitter; has
sounded the world and found it hollow; has known man or woman and found
them false. Friendship to him is without savour, and love without hope.
After watching the children for an hour, the stranger slipped out
quietly. Mistress Mary followed him to the door, abashed at her
unintentional discourtesy in allowing him to go without a good morning.
She saw him stand at the foot of the steps, look first up, then down the
street, then walk aimlessly to the corner. There, with hands in pockets,
he paused again, glancing four ways; then, with a shrug and a gait that
seemed to say, ‘It makes no difference,’ he slouched away.
‘He is simply a stranger in a strange city, pining for his home,’ thought
Mary, ‘or else he is a stranger in every city, and has nowhere a home.’
He came again a few days later, and then again, apologising for the
frequency of his visits, but giving no special reason for them. The
neophytes called him ‘the Solitary,’ but the children christened him
after a fashion of their own, and began to ask small favours of him.
‘Thread my needle, please, Mr. Man!’ ‘More beads,’ or ‘More paper, Mr.
Man, please.’
It is impossible to keep out of relation with little children. One of
these mites of humanity would make a man out of your mountain hermit,
resist as he might. They set up a claim on one whether it exists or not,
and one has to allow it, and respond to it at least in some perfunctory
fashion. More than once, as Mr. Man sat silently near the circle, the
chubby Baker baby would fall over his feet, and he would involuntarily
stoop to pick her up, straighten her dress, and soothe her woe. There
was no hearty pleasure in his service even now. Nobody was certain that
he felt any pleasure at all. His helpfulness was not spontaneous; it
seemed a kind of reflex action, a survival of some former state of mind
or heart; for he did his favours in a dream, nor heard any thanks: yet
the elixir was working in his veins.
‘He is dreadfully in the way,’ grumbled Edith; ‘he is more ever-present
than my ardent Russian.’
‘So long as he insists on coming, let us make him supply the paternal
element,’ suggested Rhoda. ‘It may be a degrading confession, but we
could afford to part with several women here if we could only secure a
really fatherly man. The Solitary cannot indulge in any day-dreams or
trances, if we accept him as the patriarch of the institution.’
Whereupon they boldly asked him, on his subsequent visits, to go upon
errands, and open barrels of apples, and order intoxicated gentlemen off
the steps, and mend locks and window-fastenings, and sharpen
lead-pencils, and put on coal, and tell the lady in the rear that her
parrot interfered with their morning prayers by shrieking the hymns in
impossible keys. He accepted these tasks without protest, and performed
them conscientiously, save in the parrot difficulty, in which case he
gave one look at the lady, and fled without opening the subject.
It could not be said that he appeared more cheerful, the sole sign of any
increased exhilaration of spirits being the occasional straightening of
his cravat and the smoothing of his hair—refinements of toilet that had
heretofore been much neglected, though he always looked unmistakably the
gentleman.
He seemed more attracted by Lisa than by any of the smaller children; but
that may have been because Mary had told him her story, thinking that
other people’s stories were a useful sort of thing to tell people who had
possible stories of their own.
Lisa was now developing a curious and unexpected facility and talent in
the musical games. She played the tambourine, the triangle, the drum, as
nobody else could, and in accompanying the marches she invented all sorts
of unusual beats and accents. It grew to be the natural thing to give
her difficult parts in the little dramas of child life: the cock that
crowed in the morn to wake the sleeping birds and babies, the mother-bird
in the nest, the spreading willow-tree in the pond where the frogs
congregated,—these _rôles_ she delighted in and played with all her soul.
It would have been laughable, had it not been pathetic, to watch her drag
Mr. Man into the games, and to see him succumb to her persuasions with
his face hanging out flaming signals of embarrassment. In the ‘Carrier
Doves’ the little pigeons flew with an imaginary letter to him, and this
meant that he was to stand and read it aloud, as Mary and Edith had done
before him.
‘It seems to be a letter from a child,’ he faltered, and then began
stammeringly, ‘“My dear Mr. Man”’—there was a sudden stop. That there
was a letter in his mind nobody could doubt, but he was too greatly moved
to read it. Rhoda quickly reached out her hand for the paper, covering
his discomfiture by exclaiming, ‘The pigeons have brought Mr. Man a
letter from some children in his fatherland! Yes’ (reading), ‘they hope
that we will be good to him, because he is far away from home, and they
send their love to all Mistress Mary’s children. Wasn’t it pretty of the
doves to remember that Mr. Man is a stranger here?’
The Solitary appeared for the last time a week before Thanksgiving Day,
and he opened the door on a scene of jollity that warmed him to the
heart.
In the middle of the floor was a mimic boat, crowded from stem to stern
with little Pilgrim fathers and mothers trying to land on Plymouth Rock,
in a high state of excitement and an equally high sea. Pat Higgins was a
chieftain commanding a large force of tolerably peaceful Indians on the
shore, and Massasoit himself never exhibited more dignity; while Marm
Lisa was the proud mother of the baby Oceanus born on the eventful voyage
of the _Mayflower_.
Then Mistress Mary told the story of the festival very simply and
sweetly, and all the tiny Pilgrims sang a hymn of thanksgiving. The
Solitary listened, with his heart in his eyes and a sob in his throat;
then, Heaven knows under the inspiration of what memory, he brushed Edith
from the piano-stool, and, seating himself in her place, played as if he
were impelled by some irresistible force. The hand of a master had never
swept those keys before, and he held his hearers spellbound.
There was a silence that could be felt. The major part of the audience
were not of an age to appreciate high art, but the youngsters were awed
by the strange spectacle of Mr. Man at the piano, and with gaping mouth
and strained ear listened to the divine harmonies he evoked. On and on
he played, weaving the story of his past into the music, so it seemed to
Mistress Mary. The theme came brokenly and uncertainly at first, as his
thoughts strove for expression. Then out of the bitterness and gall, the
suffering and the struggle—and was it remorse?—was born a sweet,
resolute, triumphant strain that carried the listeners from height to
height of sympathy and emotion. It had not a hint of serenity; it was
new-born courage, aspiration, and self-mastery the song of ‘him that
overcometh.’
When he paused, there was a deep-drawn breath, a sigh from hearts
surcharged with feeling, and Lisa, who had drawn closer and closer to the
piano, stood there now, one hand leaning on Mr. Man’s shoulder and the
tears chasing one another down her cheeks.
‘It hurts me here,’ she sighed, pressing her hand to her heart.
He rose presently and left the room without a word, while the children
prepared for home-going with a subdued air of having assisted at some
solemn rite.
When Mistress Mary went out on the steps, a little later, he was still
there.
‘It is the last time! Auf wiedersehen!’ he said.
‘Auf wiedersehen,’ she answered gently, giving him her hand.
‘Have you no Thanksgiving sermon for me?’ he asked, holding her fingers
lingeringly. ‘No child in all your flock needs it so much.’
‘Yes,’ said Mary, her eyes falling, for a moment, beneath his earnest
gaze; but suddenly she lifted them again as she said bravely, ‘I have a
sermon, but it is one with a trumpet-call, and little balm in it. “Unto
whomsoever anything is given, of him something shall be required.”’
When he reached the corner of the street he stopped, but instead of
glancing four ways, as usual, he looked back at the porch where Mistress
Mary stood. She carried Jenny Baker, a rosy sprig of babyhood, in the
lovely curve of her arm; Bobby Baxter clasped her neck from behind in a
strangling embrace; Johnny, and Meg, and Billy were tugging at her apron;
and Marm Lisa was standing on tiptoe trying to put a rose in her hair.
Then the Solitary passed into the crowd, and they saw him in the old
places no more.
XIII
LEAVES FROM MISTRESS MARY’S GARDEN
‘WE have an unknown benefactor. A fortnight ago came three bushels of
flowers: two hundred tiny nosegays marked “For the children,” half a
dozen knots of pink roses for the “little mothers,” a dozen scarlet
carnations for Lisa, while one great bunch of white lilies bore the
inscription, “For the Mother Superior.” Last week a barrel of apples and
another of oranges appeared mysteriously, and to-day comes a note,
written in a hand we do not recognise, saying we are not to buy holly,
mistletoe, evergreens, Christmas tree, or baubles of any kind, as they
will be sent to us on December 22. We have inquired of our friends, but
have no clue as yet, further than it must be somebody who knows our needs
and desires very thoroughly. We have certainly entertained an angel
unawares, but which among the crowd of visitors is it most likely to be?
The Solitary, I wonder? I should never have thought it, were it not for
the memory of that last day, the scene at the piano, the “song of him
that overcometh,” and the backward glance from the corner as he sprang,
absolutely sprang, on the car. There was purpose in it, or I am greatly
mistaken. Mr. Man’s eyes would be worth looking into, if one could find
purpose in their brown depths! Moreover, though I am too notorious a
dreamer of dreams to be trusted, I cannot help fancying he went _back_ to
something; it was not a mere forward move, not a sudden determination to
find some new duty to do that life might grow nobler and sweeter, but a
return to an old duty grown hateful. That was what I saw in his face as
he stood on the crossing, with the noon sunshine caught in his tawny hair
and beard. Rhoda, Edith, and I have each made a story about him, and
each of us would vouch for the truth of her particular version. I will
not tell mine, but this is Rhoda’s; and while it differs from my own in
several important particulars, it yet bears an astonishing resemblance to
it. It is rather romantic, but if one is to make any sort of story out
of the Solitary it must be a romantic one, for he suggests no other.
‘Rhoda began her tale with a thrilling introduction that set us all
laughing (we smile here when still the tears are close at hand; indeed,
we must smile, or we could not live): the prelude being something about a
lonely castle in the heart of the Hartz Mountains, and a prattling
golden-haired babe stretching its arms across a ruined moat in the
direction of its absent father. This was in the nature of an absurd
prologue, but when she finally came to the Solitary she grew serious; for
she made him in the bygone days a sensitive child and a dreamy, impetuous
youth, with a domineering, ill-tempered father who was utterly unable and
unwilling to understand or to sympathise with him. His younger brother
(for Rhoda insists on a younger brother) lived at home, while he, the
elder, spent, or misspent, his youth and early manhood in a German
university. As the years went on, the relations between himself and his
father grew more and more strained. Do as the son might, he could never
please, either in his line of thought and study or in his practical
pursuits. The father hated his books, his music, his poetry, and his
artist friends, while he on his part found nothing to stimulate or
content him in his father’s tasks and manner of life. His mother pined
and died in the effort to keep peace between them, but the younger
brother’s schemes were quite in an opposite direction. At this time, Mr.
Man flung himself into a foolish marriage, one that promised little in
the shape of the happiness he craved so eagerly. (Rhoda insists on this
unhappy marriage; I am in doubt about it.) Finally his father died, and
on being summoned home, as he supposed, to take his rightful place and
assume the management of the estate, he found himself disinherited. He
could have borne the loss of fortune and broad acres better than this
convincing proof of his father’s dislike and distrust, and he could have
endured even that, had it not befallen him through the perfidy of his
brother. When, therefore, he was met by his wife’s bitter reproaches and
persistent coldness he closed his heart against all the world, shook the
dust of home from off his feet, left his own small fortune behind him,
kissed his little son, and became a wanderer on the face of the earth.
‘This is substantially Rhoda’s story, but it does not satisfy her
completely. She says, in her whimsical way, that it needs another
villain to account properly for Mr. Man’s expression.
‘Would it not be strange if by any chance we have brought him to a
happier frame of mind? Would it not be a lovely tribute to the secret
power of this place, to the healing atmosphere of love that we try to
create—that atmosphere in which we bathe our own tired spirits day by
day, recreating ourselves with every new dawn? But whether our
benefactor be the Solitary or not, some heart has been brought into new
relation with us and with the world. It only confirms my opinion that
everybody is at his or her best in the presence of children. In what
does the magic of their influence consist? This morning I was riding
down in the horse-cars, and a poor ragged Italian woman entered, a baby
in her arms, and two other children following close behind. The girl was
a mite of a thing, prematurely grave, serious, pretty, and she led a boy
just old enough to toddle. She lifted him carefully up to the seat (she
who should have been lifted herself!), took his hat, smoothed his damp,
curly hair, and tucked his head down on her shoulder, a shoulder that had
begun its life-work full early, poor tot! The boy was a feeble, frail,
ill-nourished, dirty young urchin, who fell asleep as soon as his head
touched her arm. His child-nurse, having made him comfortable, gave a
sigh of relief, and looked up and down the car with a radiant smile of
content. Presto, change! All the railroad magnates and clerks had been
watching her over their newspapers, and in one instant she had captured
the car. I saw tears in many eyes, and might have seen more had not my
own been full. There was apparently no reason for the gay, winsome,
enchanting smile that curved the red mouth, brought two dimples into the
brown cheeks, and sunny gleams into two dark eyes. True, she was riding
instead of walking, and her charge was sleeping instead of waking and
wailing; but these surely were trifling matters on which to base such
rare content. Yet there it was shining in her face as she met a dozen
pairs of eyes, and saw in each of them love for her sweet motherly little
self, and love for the “eternal womanly” of which she was the visible
expression. There was a general exodus at Brett Street, and every man
furtively slipped a piece of silver into the child’s lap as he left the
car; each, I think, trying to hide his action from the others.
‘It is of threads such as these that I weave the fabric of my daily
happiness,—a happiness that my friends never seem able to comprehend; the
blindest of them pity me, indeed, but I consider myself like Mary of old,
“blessed among women.”’
_Another day_.—‘God means all sorts of things when he sends men and women
into the world. That he means marriage, and that it is the chiefest
good, I have no doubt, but it is the love forces in it that make it so.
I may, perhaps, reach my highest point of development without marriage,
but I can never do it unless I truly and deeply love somebody or
something. I am not sure, but it seems to me God intends me for other
people’s children, not for my own. My heart is so entirely in my work
that I fancy I have none left for a possible husband. If ever a man
comes who is strong enough and determined enough to sweep things aside
and make a place for himself willy-nilly, I shall ask him to come in and
rest; but that seems very unlikely. What man have I ever seen who would
help me to be the woman my work helps me to be? Of course there are
such, but the Lord keeps them safely away from my humble notice, lest I
should die of love or be guilty of hero-worship.
‘Men are so dull, for the most part! They are often tender and often
loyal, but they seldom put any spiritual leaven into their tenderness,
and their loyalty is apt to be rather unimaginative. Heigho! I wish we
could make lovers as the book-writers do, by rolling the virtues and
graces of two or three men into one! I’d almost like to be a man in this
decade, a young, strong man, for there are such splendid giants to slay!
To be sure, a woman can always buckle on the sword, and that is rather a
delightful avocation, after all; but somehow there are comparatively few
men nowadays who care greatly to wear swords or have them buckled on.
There is no inspiration in trying to buckle on the sword of a man who
never saw one, and who uses it wrong end foremost, and falls down on it,
and entangles his legs in it, and scratches his lady’s hand with it
whenever he kisses her! And therefore, these things, for aught I see,
being unalterably so, I will take children’s love, woman’s love, and
man’s friendship; man’s friendship, which, if it is not life’s poetry, is
credible prose, says George Meredith,—“a land of low undulations, instead
of Alps, beyond the terrors and deceptions.” That will fill to
overflowing my life, already so full, and in time I shall grow from
everybody’s Mistress Mary into everybody’s Mother Mary, and that will be
the end of me in my present state of being. I am happy, yes, I am
blessedly happy in this prospect, and yet—’
_Another day_.—‘My beloved work! How beautiful it is! Toniella has not
brought little Nino this week. She says he is ill, but that he sits
every day in the orchard, singing our songs and modelling birds from the
lump of clay we sent him. When I heard that phrase “in the orchard,” I
felt a curious sensation, for I know they live in a tenement house; but I
said nothing, and went to visit them.
‘The orchard is a few plants in pots and pans on a projecting
window-sill!
‘My heart went down on its knees when I saw it. The divine spark is in
those children; it will be a moving power, helping them to struggle out
of their present environment into a wider, sunnier one—the one of the
real orchards. How fresh, how full of possibilities, is the world to the
people who can keep the child heart, and above all to the people who are
able to see orchards in window-boxes!’
_Another day_.—‘Lisa’s daily lesson is just finished. It was in
arithmetic, and I should have lost patience had it not been for her
musical achievements this morning. Edith played the airs of twenty or
thirty games, and without a word of help from us she associated the right
memory with each, and illustrated it with pantomime. In some cases, she
invented gestures of her own that showed deeper intuition than ours; and
when, last of all, the air of the Carrier Doves was played, a vision of
our Solitary must have come before her mind. Her lip trembling, she held
an imaginary letter in her fingers, and, brushing back the hair from her
forehead (his very gesture!), she passed her hand across her eyes, laid
the make-believe note in Rhoda’s apron, and slipped out of the door
without a word.
“‘Mr. Man! Mr. Man! It is Mr. Man when he couldn’t read his letter!”
cried the children. “Why doesn’t he come to see us any more, Miss
Rhoda?”
‘“He is doing some work for Miss Mary, I think,” answered Rhoda, with a
teasing look at me.
‘Lisa came back just then, and rubbed her cheek against my arm. “I went
to the corner,” she whispered, “but he wasn’t there; he is never there
now!”
‘It was the remembrance of this astonishing morning that gave me courage
in the later lesson. She seems to have no idea of numbers—there will be
great difficulty there,—but she begins to read well, and the marvel of it
is that she has various talents! She is weak, uneducated; many things
are either latent or altogether missing in her as yet, and I do not know
how many of them will appear, nor how long a process it will be; but her
mind is full of compensations, and that is the last thing I expected. It
is only with infinite struggle that she _learns_ anything, though she is
capable of struggle, and that is a good deal to say; but she has besides
a precious heritage of instincts and insights, hitherto unsuspected and
never drawn upon. It is precisely as if there had been a bundle of
possibilities folded away somewhere in her brain, but hidden by an
intervening veil, or crushed by some alien weight. We seem to have drawn
away that curtain or lifted that weight, and the faculties so long
obscured are stretching themselves and growing with their new freedom.
It reminds me of the weak, stunted grass-blades under a stone. I am
always lifting it and rolling it away, sentimentally trying to give the
struggling shoots a chance. One can see for many a long day where the
stone has been, but the grass forgets it after a while, when it breathes
the air and sunshine, tastes the dew and rain, and feels the miracle of
growth within its veins.’
_Another day_.—‘The twins are certainly improving a trifle. They are by
no means angelic, but they are at least growing human; and if ever their
tremendous energy—a very whirlwind—is once turned in the right direction,
we shall see things move, I warrant you! Rhoda says truly that the
improvement cannot be seen with the naked eye; but the naked eye is never
in use with us, in our work, nor indeed with the Father of Lights, who
teaches us all to see truly if we will.
‘The young minister has spent a morning with us. He came to make my
acquaintance, shook me warmly by the hand, and—that was the last I saw of
him, for he kept as close to Rhoda’s side as circumstances would permit!
The naked eye is all one needs to discern his motives! Psychological
observations, indeed! Child study, forsooth! It was lovely to see
Rhoda’s freshness, spontaneity, and unconsciousness, as she flitted about
like a pretty cardinal-bird. Poor young minister, whose heart is
dangling at the strings of her scarlet apron! Lucky young minister, if
his arm ever goes about that slender red-ribboned waist, and his lips
ever touch that glowing cheek! But poor me! what will the garden be
without our crimson rose?’
XIV
MORE LEAVES
‘IT has been one of the discouraging days. Lisa was wilful; the twins
had a moral relapse; the young minister came again, and, oh, the
interminable length of time he held Rhoda’s hand at parting! Is it not
strange that, with the whole universe to choose from, his predatory eye
must fall upon my blooming Rhoda? I wonder whether the fragrance she
will shed upon that one small parsonage will be as widely disseminated as
the sweetness she exhales here, day by day, among our “little people all
in a row”? I am not sure; I hope so; at any rate, selfishness must not
be suffered to eclipse my common-sense, and the young minister seems a
promising, manly fellow.
‘When we have had a difficult day, I go home and sit down in my cosy
corner in the twilight, the time and place where I always repeat my
_credo_, which is this:—
‘It is the children of this year, of every new year, who are to bring the
full dawn, that dawn that has been growing since first the world began.
It is not only that children re-create the world year by year, decade by
decade, by making over human nature; by transforming trivial, thoughtless
men and women into serious, earnest ones; by waking in arid natures
slumbering seeds of generosity, self-sacrifice, and helpfulness. It is
not alone in this way that children are bringing the dawn of the perfect
day. It is the children (bless them! how naughty they were to-day!) who
are going to do all we have left undone, all we have failed to do, all we
might have done had we been wise enough, all we have been too weak and
stupid to do.
‘Among the thousands of tiny things growing up all over the land, some of
them under my very wing—watched and tended, unwatched and untended,
loved, unloved, protected from danger, thrust into temptation, among them
somewhere is the child who will write a great poem that will live for
ever and ever, kindling every generation to a loftier ideal. There is
the child who will write the novel that is to stir men’s hearts to nobler
issues and incite them to better deeds. There is the child (perhaps it
is Nino) who will paint the greatest picture or carve the greatest statue
of the age; another who will deliver his country in an hour of peril;
another who will give his life for a great principle; and another, born
more of the spirit than the flesh, who will live continually on the
heights of moral being, and, dying, draw men after him. It may be I
shall preserve one of these children to the race—who knows? It is a peg
big enough on which to hang a hope, for every child born into the world
is a new incarnate thought of God, an ever fresh and radiant
possibility.’
_Another day_.—‘Would I had the gift to capture Mrs. Grubb and put her
between the covers of a book!’
‘It tickles Rhoda’s fancy mightily that the Vague Lady (as we call her)
should take Lisa before the Commissioners of Lunacy! Rhoda says that if
she has an opportunity to talk freely with them, they will inevitably
jump at the conclusion that Lisa has brought _her_ for examination, as
she is so much the more irrational of the two! Rhoda facetiously
imagines a scene in which a reverend member of the body takes Lisa aside
and says solemnly, “My dear child, you have been wise beyond your years
in bringing us your guardian, and we cannot allow her to be at large
another day, lest she becomes suddenly violent.”
‘Of late I have noticed that she has gradually dropped one club and
society after another, concentrating her attention more and more upon
Theosophy. Every strange weed and sucker that can grow anywhere
flourishes in the soil of her mind, and if a germ of truth or
common-sense does chance to exist in any absurd theory, it is choked by
the time it has lain there among the underbrush for a little space; so
that when she begins her harvesting (which is always a long while before
anything is ripe), one can never tell precisely what sort of crop was
planted.
‘It seems that the Theosophists are considering the establishment of a
colony of Mahatmas at Mojave, on the summit of the Tehachapi Mountains.
Their present habitat is the Himalayas, but there is no reason why we
should not encourage them to settle in this country. The Tehachapis
would give as complete retirement as the Himalayas, while the spiritual
advantages to be derived from an infusion of Mahatmas into our population
are self-evident. “Think, my sisters,” Mrs. Grubb would say, “think,
that our mountain ranges may some time be peopled by omniscient beings
thousands of years old and still growing!” Up to this last aberration I
have had some hope of Grubb o’ Dreams. I thought it a good sign, her
giving up so many societies and meetings. The house is not any tidier,
but at least she stays in it occasionally. In the privacy of my own mind
I have been ascribing this slight reformation to the most ordinary
cause,—namely, a Particular Man. It would never have occurred to me in
her case had not Edith received confidential advices from Mrs. Sylvester.
‘“We’re going to lose her, I feel it!” said Mrs. Sylvester. “I feel it,
and she alludes to it herself. There ain’t but two ways of her classes
losing her, death and marriage; and as she looks too healthy to die, it
must be the other one. She’s never accepted any special attentions till
about a month ago, when the Improved Order of Red Men held their Great
Council here. You see she used to be Worthy Wenonah of Pocahontas Lodge
years ago, when my husband was Great Keeper of the Wampum, but she hasn’t
attended regularly; a woman is so handicapped, when it comes to any kind
of public work, by her home and her children.—I do hope I shall live long
enough to see all those kind of harassing duties performed in public,
co-operative institutions.—She went to the Council to keep me company,
mostly, but the very first evening I could see that William Burkhardt, of
Bald Eagle No. 62, was struck with her; she lights up splendidly, Mrs.
Grubb does. He stayed with her every chance he got during the week: but
I didn’t see her give him any encouragement, and I should never have
thought of it again if she hadn’t come home late from one of the Council
Fires at the Wigwam. I was just shutting my bedroom blinds. I tried not
to listen, for I despise eavesdropping, of all things, but I couldn’t
help hearing her say, “No, Mr. Burkhardt, you are only a Junior Sagamore,
and I am ambitious. When you are a Great Sachem, it will be time enough
to consider the matter.”’
‘Mrs. Sylvester, Edith, and I agreed that this was most significant, but
we may have been mistaken, according to her latest development. The
“passing away” so feelingly alluded to by Mrs. Sylvester is to be of a
different sort. She has spoken mysteriously to me before of her reasons
for denying herself luxuries; of the goal she expected to reach through
rigid denial of the body and training of the spirit; of her longing to
come less in contact with the foul magnetism of the common herd, so
detrimental to her growth; but she formally announced to me in strict
confidence to-day her ambition to be a Mahatma. Of course she has been
so many things that there are comparatively few left; still, say whatever
we like, she has the spirit of all the Argonauts, that woman! She has
been an Initiate for some time, and considers herself quite ready for the
next step, which is to be a Chela. It is unnecessary to state that she
climbs the ladder of evolution much faster than the ordinary Theosophist,
who is somewhat slow in his movements, and often deals in centuries, or
even æons.
‘I did not know that there were female Mahatmas, reasoning unconsciously
from the fact that an Adept is supposed to hold his peace for many years
before he can even contemplate the possibility of being a Mahatma. (The
idea of Grubb o’ Dreams holding her peace is too absurd for argument.)
There are many grades of Adepts, it seems, ranging from the “topmost”
Mahatmas down. The highest of all, the Nirmanakayas, are self-conscious
without the body, travelling hither and thither with but one object, that
of helping humanity. As we descend the scale, we find Adepts (and a few
second-class Mahatmas) living in the body, for the wheel of Karma has not
entirely revolved for them; but they have a key to their “prison” (that
is what Mrs. Grubb calls her nice, pretty body!), and can emerge from it
at pleasure. That is, any really capable and energetic Adept can project
his soul from its prison to any place that he pleases, with the rapidity
of thought. I may have my personal doubts as to the possibilities of
this gymnastic feat, but Mrs. Grubb’s intellectual somersaults have been
of such thoroughness and frequency that I am sure, if anybody can perform
the gyration, she can! Meantime, there are decades of retirement,
meditation, and preparation necessary, and she can endure nothing of that
sort in this present incarnation, so the parting does not seem imminent!
‘She came to consult me about Soul Haven for the twins. I don’t think it
a wholly bad plan. The country is better for them than the city; we can
manage occasional news of their welfare; it will tide to get over the
brief interval of time needed by Mrs. Grubb for growing into a Chela; and
in any event, they are sure to run away from the Haven as soon as they
become at all conscious of their souls, a moment which I think will be
considerably delayed.
‘Mrs. Grubb will not yield Lisa until she is certain that the Soul Haven
colonists will accept the twins without a caretaker; but unless the
matter is quietly settled by the new year I shall find some heroic means
of changing her mind. I have considered the matter earnestly for many
months without knowing precisely how to find sufficient money for the
undertaking. My own income can be stretched to cover her maintenance,
but it is not sufficient to give her the proper sort of education. She
is beyond my powers now, and perhaps—nay, of a certainty, if her health
continue to improve—five years of skilful teaching will make her—what it
will make her no one can prophesy, but it is sure to be something worth
working for. No doubt I can get the money by a public appeal, and if it
were for a dozen children instead of one I would willingly do it, as
indeed I have done it many times in the past.
‘That was a beautiful thought of Pastor Von Bodelschwingh, of the Colony
of Mercy in Germany. “Mr. Man” told me about him in one of the very few
long talks we had together. He had a home for adults and children of
ailing mind and body, and when he wanted a new house for the little ones,
and there was no money to build or equip it, he asked every parent in
Germany for a thank-offering to the Lord of one penny for each well
child. Within a short fortnight four hundred thousand pennies flowed
in—four hundred thousand thank-offerings for children strong and well.
The good pastor’s wish was realised, and his Baby Castle an accomplished
fact. Not only did the four hundred thousand pennies come, but the
appeal for them stimulated a new sense of gratitude among all the parents
who responded, so that there came pretty, touching messages from all
sides, such as: “Four pennies for four living children; for a child in
heaven, two.” “Six pennies for a happy home.” “One penny for the child
we never had.” “Five pennies for a good wife.”
‘Ah! never, surely, was a Baby Castle framed of such lovely timber as
this! It seems as if heaven’s sweet air must play about the towers, and
heaven’s sunshine stream in at every window, of a house built from turret
to foundation-stone of such royal material. The Castle might look like
other castles, but every enchanted brick and stone and block of wood,
every grain of mortar, every bit of glass and marble, unlike all others
of its kind, would be transformed by the thought it represented and
thrilled with the message it bore.
‘Such an appeal I could make for my whole great family, but somehow this
seems almost a private matter, and I am sensitive about giving it
publicity. My love and hope for Lisa are so great, I cannot bear to
describe her “case,” nor paint her unhappy childhood in the hues it
deserves, for the sake of gaining sympathy and aid. I may have to do it,
but would I were the little Croesus of a day! Still, Christmas is
coming, and who knows?
“Everywhere the Feast o’ the Babe,
Joy upon earth, peace and good-will to men!
We are baptized.”
Merry Christmas is coming. Everybody’s hand-grasp is warmer because of
it, though of course it is the children whose merriment rings truest.
‘There are just one or two things, grown up as I am, that I should like
to find in the toe of my stocking on Christmas morning; only they are
impalpable things that could neither be put in nor taken out of real
stockings.
‘Old as we are, we are most of us mere children in this, that we go on
hoping that next Christmas all the delicious happenings we have missed in
other Christmases may descend upon us by the old and reliable
chimney-route! A Santa Claus that had any bowels of compassion would
rush down the narrowest and sootiest chimney in the world to give me my
simple wishes. It isn’t as if I were petitioning nightly for a grand
house, a yacht, a four-in-hand, a diamond necklace, and a particular man
for a husband; but I don’t see that modesty finds any special favour with
St. Nick. Now and then I harbour a rascally suspicion that he is an
indolent, time-serving person, who slips down the widest, cleanest
chimneys to the people who clamour the loudest; but this abominable
cynicism melts into thin air the moment that I look at his jolly visage
on the cover of a picture-book. Dear, fat, rosy, radiant Being! Surely
he is incapable of any but the highest motives! I am twenty-eight years
old, but age shall never make any difference in the number or extent of
my absurdities. I am going to write a letter and send it up the chimney!
It never used to fail in the long-ago; but ah! then there were two dear,
faithful go-betweens to interpret my childish messages of longing to
Santa Claus, and jog his memory at the critical time!’
XV
‘THE FEAST O’ THE BABE’
IT was sure to be a green Christmas in that sunny land, but not the sort
of ‘green Yule’ that makes the ‘fat kirkyard.’ If the New Englanders who
had been transplanted to that shore of the Pacific ever longed for a
bracing snowstorm, for frost pictures on the window-panes, for the breath
of a crystal air blown over ice-fields—an air that nipped the ears, but
sent the blood coursing through the veins, and made the turkey and
cranberry sauce worth eating,—the happy children felt no lack, and basked
contentedly in the soft December sunshine. Still further south there
were mothers who sighed even more for the sound of merry sleigh-bells,
the snapping of logs on the hearth, the cosy snugness of a fire-lit room
made all the snugger by the fierce wind without: that, if you like, was a
place to hang a row of little red and brown woollen stockings! And when
the fortunate children on the eastern side of the Rockies, tired of
resisting the Sand Man, had snuggled under the great down comforters and
dropped off to sleep, they dreamed, of course, of the proper Christmas
things—of the tiny feet of reindeer pattering over the frozen crust, the
tinkle of silver bells on their collars, the real Santa Claus with
icicles in his beard, with red cheeks, and a cold nose, and a powder of
snow on his bearskin coat, and with big fur mittens never too clumsy to
take the toys from his pack.
Here the air blew across orange groves and came laden with the sweetness
of opening buds; here, if it were a sunny Christmas Day, as well it might
be, the children came in to dinner tired with playing in the garden: but
the same sort of joyous cries that rent the air three thousand miles away
at sight of hot plum-pudding woke the echoes here because of fresh
strawberries and loquats; and although, in the minds of the elders, who
had been born in snowdrifts and bred upon icicles, this union of balmy
air, singing birds, and fragrant bloom might strike a false note at
Christmastide, it brought nothing but joy to the children. After all, if
it were not for old associations’ sake, it would seem that one might
fitly celebrate the birthday of the Christ-child under sunshine as warm
and skies of the same blue as those that sheltered the heavenly Babe in
old Judea.
During the late days of October and the early days of November the long
drought of summer had been broken, and it had rained steadily, copiously,
refreshingly. Since then there had been day after day of brilliant,
cloudless sunshine, and the moist earth, warmed gratefully through to the
marrow, stirred and trembled and pushed forth myriads of tender shoots
from the seeds that were hidden in its bosom; and the tender shoots
themselves looked up to the sun, and, with their roots nestled in sweet,
fragrant beds of richness, thought only of growing tall and green,
dreamed only of the time when pink pimpernels would bloom between their
waving blades, and when tribes of laughing children would come to ramble
over the hillsides. The streets of the city were full of the fragrance
of violets, for the flower-vendors had great baskets of them over their
arms, and every corner tempted the passers-by with the big odorous purple
bunches that offered a royal gift of sweetness for every penny invested.
Atlantic and Pacific Simonson had previously known little, and Marm Lisa
less, of Christmas-time, but the whole month of December in Mistress
Mary’s garden was a continual feast of the new-born Babe. There was an
almost oppressive atmosphere of secrecy abroad. Each family of children,
working in the retirement of its particular corner, would shriek, ‘Oh,
don’t come!’ and hide small objects under pinafores and tables when Mary,
Rhoda, Edith, or Helen appeared. The neophyte in charge was always in
the attitude of a surprised hen, extending her great apron to its utmost
area as a screen to hide these wonderful preparations. Edith’s group was
slaving over Helen’s gift, Rhoda’s over Edith’s, and so on, while all the
groups had some marvellous bit of co-operative work in hand for Mistress
Mary. At the afternoon council, the neophytes were obliged to labour
conscientiously on presents destined for themselves, rubbing off stains,
disentangling knots, joining threads, filling up wrong holes and punching
right ones, surreptitiously getting the offerings of love into a
condition where the energetic infants could work on them again. It was
somewhat difficult to glow and pale with surprise when they received
these well-known and well-worn trophies of skill from the tree at the
proper time, but they managed to achieve it.
Never at any other season was there such a scrubbing of paws, and in
spite of the most devoted sacrifices to the Moloch of cleanliness the
excited little hands grew first moist, and then grimy, nobody knew how.
‘It must leak out of the inside of me,’ wailed Bobby Baxter when sent to
the pump for the third time one morning; but he went more or less
cheerfully, for his was the splendid honour of weaving a frame for Lisa’s
picture, and he was not the man to grudge an inch or two of skin if
thereby he might gain a glorious immortality.
The principal conversation during this festival time consisted of phrases
like: ‘I know what you’re goin’ to have, Miss Edith, but I won’t tell!’
‘Miss Mary, Sally ’most told Miss Rhoda what she was makin’ for her.’
‘Miss Helen, Pat Higgins went right up to Miss Edith and asked her to
help him mend the leg of his clay frog, and it’s his own Christmas
present to her!’
The children could not for the life of them play birds, or butterflies,
or carpenter, or scissors-grinder, for they wanted to shout the live-long
day—
‘Christmas bells are ringing sweet,
We too the happy day must greet’;
or—
‘Under the holly, now,
Sing and be jolly, now,
Christmas has come and the children are glad’;
or—
‘Hurrah for Santa Claus!
Long may he live at his castle in Somewhere-land!’
There was much whispering and discussion about evergreens and garlands
and wreaths that were soon to come, and much serious planning with regard
to something to be made for mother, father, sister, brother, and the
baby; something, too, now and then, for a grandpapa in Sweden, a
grandmamma in Scotland, a Norwegian uncle, an Irish aunt, and an Italian
cousin; but there was never by chance any cogitation as to what the
little workers themselves might get. In the happier homes among them,
there was doubtless the usual legitimate speculation as to doll or drum,
but here in this enchanted spot, this materialised Altruria, the talk was
all of giving, when the Wonderful Tree bloomed in their midst—the
Wonderful Tree they sang about every morning, with the sweet voice
‘telling its branches among
Of shepherd’s watch and of angel’s song,
Of lovely Babe in manger low,—
The beautiful story of long ago,
When a radiant star threw its beams so wide
To herald the earliest Christmastide.’
The Tree was coming—Mistress Mary said so; and bless my heart, you might
possibly meddle with the revolution of the earth around the sun, or
induce some weak-minded planet to go the wrong way, but you would be
helpless to reverse one of Mistress Mary’s promises! They were as fixed
and as unchangeable as the laws of the Medes and Persians, and there was
a record of their fulfilment indelibly written in the memories of two
hundred small personages—personages in whom adult caprice and flexibility
of conduct had bred a tendency to suspicion.
The Tree, therefore, had been coming for a fortnight, and on the 22nd it
came! Neither did it come alone, for it was accompanied by a forest of
holly and mistletoe, and ropes of evergreen, and wreaths and garlands of
laurel, and green stars by the dozen. And in a great box, at present
hidden from the children, were heaps of candles, silver and crystal
baubles, powdered snowflakes, glass icicles, gilded nuts, parti-coloured
spheres, cornucopias full of goodies, and, above all, two wonderful
Christmas angels, and a snow-white dove!
Neither tree, nor garlands, nor box contained any hint of the donor, to
the great disappointment of the neophytes. Rhoda had an idea, for Cupid
had ‘clapped her i’ the shoulder,’ and her intuitions were
preternaturally keen just now. Mary almost knew, though she had never
been in love in her life, and her faculties were working only in their
every-day fashion; but she was not in the least surprised when she drew a
letter from under the white dove’s wing. Seeing that it was addressed to
her, she waited until everybody had gone, and sat under the pepper-tree
in the deserted playground, where she might read it in solitude.
‘DEAR MISTRESS MARY,’ it said, ‘do you care to hear of my life?
“Pas Ewig-Weibliche
Zieht uns hinan,”
and I am growing olives. Do you remember what the Spanish monk said to
the tree that he pruned, and that cried out under his hook? “It is not
beauty that is wanted of you, nor shade, but olives.” The sun is hot,
and it has not rained for many a long week, it seems to me, but the dew
of your influence falls ever sweet and fresh on the dust of my daily
task.
‘Enclosed please find the wherewithal for Lisa’s next step higher. As
she needs more it will come. I give it for sheer gratitude, as the good
folk gave their pennies to Pastor Von Bodelschwingh. Why am I grateful?
For your existence, to be sure! I had lived my life haunted by the
feeling that there was such a woman, and finally the mysterious wind of
destiny blew me to her, “as the tempest brings the rose-tree to the
pollard willow.”
‘Do not be troubled about me, little mother-of-many! There was once upon
a time a common mallow by the roadside, and being touched by Mohammed’s
garment as he passed, it was changed at once into a geranium; and best of
all, it remained a geranium for ever after.
‘YOUR SOLITARY.’
XVI
CLEANSING FIRES
IT was the afternoon of the day before Christmas, and all the little
people had gone home, leaving the room vacant for the decking of the
Wonderful Tree. Edith, Helen, and others were perched on step-ladders,
festooning garlands and wreaths from window to window and post to post.
Mary and Rhoda were hanging burdens of joy among the green branches of
the tree.
The room began to look more and more lovely as the evergreen stars were
hung by scarlet ribbons in each of the twelve windows, and the
picture-frames were crowned with holly branches. Then Mistress Mary was
elevated to a great height on a pyramid of tables and chairs, and
suspended the two Christmas angels by invisible wires from the ceiling.
When the chorus of admiration had subsided, she took the white dove from
Rhoda’s upstretched hands (and what a charming Christmas picture they
made—the eager, upturned rosy face of the one, the gracious fairness of
the other!), and laying its soft breast against her cheek for a moment,
perched it on the topmost branch of waving green with a thought of ‘Mr.
Man,’ and a hope that the blessed day might bring him a tithe of the
cheer he had given them. The effect of the dove and the angels was so
electrical that all the fresh young voices burst into the chorus of the
children’s hymn:
‘He was born upon this day
In David’s town so far away,
He the good and loving One,
Mary’s ever-blessèd Son.
Let us all our voices lend,
For he was the children’s Friend,
He so lovely, He so mild,
Jesus, blessèd Christmas Child!’
As the last line of the chorus floated through the open windows, an alarm
of fire sounded, followed by a jangle of bells and a rumble of patrol
wagons. On going to the west window, Edith saw a blaze of red light
against the sky, far in the distance, in the direction of Lone Mountain.
Soon after, almost on the heels of the first, came another alarm with its
attendant clangings, its cries of ‘Fire!’ its chatterings and
conjectures, its rushing of small boys in all directions, its tread of
hurrying policemen, its hasty flinging up of windows and grouping of
heads therein.
The girls were too busy labelling the children’s gifts to listen
attentively to the confused clamour in the streets,—fires were common
enough in a city built of wood; but when, half an hour after the first
and second alarms, a third sounded, they concluded it must be a
conflagration, and Rhoda, dropping her nuts and cornucopias, ran to the
corner for news. She was back again almost immediately, excited and
breathless.
‘Oh, Mary!’ she exclaimed, her hand on her panting side, ‘unless they are
mistaken, it is three separate fires: one, a livery-stable and
carriage-house out towards Lone Mountain; another fearful one on
Telegraph Hill—a whole block of houses, and they haven’t had enough help
there because of the Lone Mountain fire; now there’s a third alarm, and
they say it’s at the corner of Sixth and Dutch streets. If it is, we
have a tenement house next door; isn’t that clothing-place on the corner?
Yes, I know it is; make haste! Edith and Helen will watch the Christmas
things.’
Mary did not need to be told to hasten. She had her hat in her hand and
was on the sidewalk before Rhoda had fairly finished her sentence.
They hurried through the streets, guided by the cloud of smoke that
gushed from the top of a building in the near distance. Almost everybody
was running in the opposite direction, attracted by the Telegraph Hill
fire that flamed vermilion and gold against the grey sky, looking from
its elevation like a mammoth bonfire, or like a hundred sunsets massed in
one lurid pile of colour.
‘Is it the Golden Gate tenement house?’ they asked of the neighbourhood
locksmith, who was walking rapidly towards them.
‘No, it’s the coat factory next door,’ he answered hurredly. ‘’Twouldn’t
be so much of a blaze if they could get the fire company here to put it
out before it gets headway; but it’s one o’ those blind fires that’s been
sizzling away inside the walls for an hour. The folks didn’t know they
was afire till a girl ran in and told ’em—your Lisa it was,—and they
didn’t believe her at first; but it warn’t a minute before the flames
burst right through the plastering in half a dozen places to once. I
tell you they just dropped everything where it was and run for their
lives. There warn’t but one man on the premises, and he was such a
blamed fool he wasted five minutes trying to turn the alarm into the
letter-box on the lamp-post, ’stead of the right one alongside. I’m
going home for some tools—Hullo! there’s the flames coming through one
corner o’ the roof; that’s the last o’ the factory, I guess; but it ain’t
much loss, any way; it’s a regular sweatin’-shop. They’ll let it go now,
and try to save the buildings each side of it—that’s what they’ll do.’
That is what they were doing when Mary and Rhoda broke away from the
voluble locksmith in the middle of his discourse and neared the scene of
excitement. The firemen had not yet come, though it was rumoured that a
detachment was on the way. All the occupants of the tenement house were
taking their goods and chattels out—running down the narrow stairways
with feather-beds, dropping clocks and china ornaments from the windows,
and endangering their lives by crawling down the fire-escapes with small
articles of no value. Men were scarce at that hour in that locality, but
there was a good contingent of small shopkeepers and
gentlemen-of-steady-leisure, who were on the roof pouring-water over wet
blankets and comforters and carpets. A crazy-looking woman in the fourth
story kept dipping a child’s handkerchief in and out of a bowl of water
and wrapping it about a tomato-can with a rosebush planted in it.
Another, very much intoxicated, leaned from her window, and, regarding
the whole matter as an agreeable entertainment, called down humorous
remarks and ribald jokes to the oblivious audience. There was an
improvised hook-and-ladder company pouring water where it was least
needed, and a zealous self-appointed commanding officer who did nothing
but shout contradictory orders; but as nobody obeyed them, and every man
did just as he was inclined, it did not make any substantial difference
in the result.
Mary and Rhoda made their way through the mass of interested spectators,
not so many here as on the cooler side of the street. Where was Lisa?
That was the first, indeed the only question. How had she come there?
Where had she gone? There was a Babel of confusion, but nothing like the
uproar that would have been heard had not part of the district’s
population fled to the more interesting fire, and had not the whole thing
been so quiet and so lightning-quick in its progress. The whole scene
now burst upon their view. A few harassed policemen had stretched ropes
across the street, and were trying to keep back the rebellious ones in
the crowd who ever and anon would struggle under the line and have to be
beaten back by force.
As Mary and Rhoda approached, a group on the outskirts cried out, ‘Here
she is! ’Tain’t more ’n a minute sence they went to tell her! Here she
is now!’
The expected fire-brigade could hardly be called ‘she,’ Mary thought, as
she glanced over her shoulder. She could see no special reason for any
interest in her own movements. She took advantage of the parting of the
crowd, however, and as she made her way she heard, as in a waking dream,
disjointed sentences that had no meaning at first, but being pieced
together grew finally into an awful whole.
‘Why didn’t the factory girls bring ’em out? Didn’t know they was
there?’
‘Say, one of ’em was saved, warn’t it?’
‘Which one of ’em did she get down before the roof caught?’
‘No, ’tain’t no such thing; the manager’s across the bay; she gave the
alarm herself.’
‘She didn’t know they was in there; I bet yer they’d run and hid, and she
was hunting ’em when she seen the smoke.’
‘Yes, she did; she dropped the girl twin out of the second-story window
into Abe Isaac’s arms, but she didn’t know the boy was in the building
till just now, and they can’t hardly hold her.’
‘She’s foolish, anyhow, ain’t she?’
Mary staggered beyond Rhoda to the front of the crowd.
‘Let me under the rope!’ she cried, with a mother’s very wail in her
tone—‘let me under the rope, for God’s sake! They’re my children!’
At this moment she heard a stentorian voice call to some one, ‘Wait a
minute till the firemen get here, and they’ll go for him! Come back,
girl, d-n you! you shan’t go!’
‘Wait? No! _Not_ wait!’ cried Lisa, tearing herself dexterously from
the policeman’s clutches, and dashing like a whirlwind up the tottering
stairway before any one else could gather presence of mind to seize and
detain her.
Pacific was safe on the pavement, but she had only a moment before been
flung from those flaming windows, and her terrified shrieks rent the air.
The crowd gave a long-drawn groan, and mothers turned their eyes away and
shivered. Nobody followed Marm Lisa up that flaming path of death and
duty: it was no use flinging a good life after a worthless one.
‘Fool! crazy fool!’ people ejaculated, with tears of reverence in their
eyes.
‘Darling, splendid fool!’ cried Mary. ‘Fool worth all the wise ones
among us!’
‘He that loseth his life for My sake shall find it!’ said a pious
Methodist cobbler with a patched boot under his arm.
In the eternity of waiting that was numbered really but in seconds, a
burly policeman beckoned four men and gave them a big old-fashioned
counterpane that some one had offered, telling them to stand ready for
whatever might happen.
‘Come closer, boys,’ said one of them, wetting his hat in a tub of water;
‘if we take a little scorchin’ doin’ this now, we may git it cooler in
the next world!’
‘Amen! Trust the Lord!’ said the cobbler; and just then Marm Lisa
appeared at one of the top windows with a child in her arms. No one else
could have recognised Atlantic in the smoke, but Rhoda and Mary knew the
round cropped head and the familiar blue gingham apron.
Lisa stood in the empty window-frame, a trembling figure on a background
of flame. Her post was not at the moment in absolute danger. There was
hope yet, though to the onlookers there seemed none.
‘Throw him!’ ‘Drop him!’ ‘Le’ go of him!’ shouted the crowd.
‘Hold your jaws, and let me do the talking!’ roared the policeman. ‘Stop
your noise, if you don’t want two dead children on your consciences!
Keep back, you brutes, keep back o’ the rope, or I’ll club you!’
It was not so much the officer’s threats as simple, honest awe that
caused a sudden hush to fall. There were whisperings, sighs, tears,
murmurings, but all so subdued that it seemed like silence in the midst
of the fierce crackling of the flames.
‘Drop him! We’ll ketch him in the quilt!’ called the policeman, standing
as near as he dared.
Lisa looked shudderingly at the desperate means of salvation so far
below, and, turning her face away as much as she could, unclasped her
arms despairingly, and Atlantic came swooping down from their shelter,
down, down into the counterpane; stunned, stifled, choked by smoke, but
uninjured, as Lisa knew by the cheers that greeted his safe descent.
A tongue of fire curled round the corner of the building and ran up to
the roof towards another that was licking its way along the top of the
window.
‘Jump now yourself!’ called the policeman, while two more men silently
joined the four holding the corners of the quilt. Every eye was fixed on
the motionless figure of Marm Lisa, who had drawn her shawl over her
head, as if just conscious of nearer heat.
The wind changed, and blew the smoke away from her figure. The men on
the roof stopped work, not caring for the moment whether they saved the
tenement house or not, since a human life was hanging in the balance.
The intoxicated woman threw a beer-bottle into the street, and her son
ran up from the crowd and locked her safely in her kitchen at the back of
the house.
‘Jump this minute, or you’re a dead girl!’ shouted the officer, hoarse
with emotion. ‘God A’mighty, she ain’t goin’ to jump—she’s
terror-struck! She’ll burn right there before our eyes, when we could
climb up and drag her down if we had a long enough ladder!’
‘They’ve found another ladder and are tying two together,’ somebody said.
‘The fire company’s comin’! I hear ’em!’ cried somebody else.
‘They’ll be too late,’ moaned Rhoda, ‘too late! Oh, Mary, make her
jump!’
Lisa had felt no fear while she darted through smoke and over charred
floors in pursuit of Atlantic—no fear, nothing but joy when she dragged
him out from under bench and climbed to the window-sill with him,—but now
that he was saved she seemed paralysed. So still she was, she might have
been a carven statue save for the fluttering of the garments about her
thin childish legs. The distance to the ground looked impassable, and
she could not collect her thoughts for the hissing of the flame as it ate
up the floor in the room behind her. Horrible as it was, she thought it
would be easier to let it steal behind her and wrap her in its burning
embrace than to drop from these dizzy heights down through that terrible
distance, to hear her own bones snap as she touched the quilt, and to see
her own blood staining the ground.
‘She’ll burn, sure,’ said a man. ‘Well, she’s half-witted—that’s one
comfort!’
Mary started as if she were stung, and forced her way still nearer to the
window; hoping to gain a position where she could be more plainly seen.
Everybody thought something was going to happen. Mary had dozens of
friends and more acquaintances in that motley assemblage, and they
somehow felt that there were dramatic possibilities in the situation.
Unless she could think of something, Marm Lisa’s last chance was gone:
that was the sentiment of the crowd, and Mary agreed in it.
Her cape had long since dropped from her shoulders, her hat was trampled
under foot, the fair coil of hair had loosened and was falling on her
neck, and the steel fillet blazed in the firelight. She stepped to the
quilt and made a despairing movement to attract Lisa’s attention.
‘Li-sa!’ she called, in that sweet, carrying woman’s voice that goes so
much further than a man’s.
The child started, and, pushing back the shawl, looked out from under its
cover, her head raised, her eyes brightening.
Mary chanced all on that one electrical moment of recognition, and, with
a mien half commanding and half appealing, she stretched out both her
arms and called again, while the crowd held its breath:
‘Come to me, darling! Jump, little sister! _now_!’
Not one second did Marm Lisa hesitate. She would have sprung into the
fire at that dear mandate, and, closing her eyes, she leaped into the air
as the roof above her head fell in with a crash.
Just then the beating of hoofs and jangling of bells in the distance
announced the coming of the belated firemen; not so long belated
actually, for all the emotions, heart-beats, terrors, and despairs that
go to make up tragedy can be lived through in a few brief moments.
In that sudden plunge from window to earth Marm Lisa seemed to die
consciously. The grey world, the sad world, vanished, ‘and the immortal
light, all young and joyful, million-orbed, million-coloured,’ beamed on
her darkness. She kept on falling, falling, falling, till she reached
the abysmal depths of space—then she knew no more: and Mary, though prone
on the earth, kept falling, falling, falling with her into so deep a
swoon that she woke only to find herself on a friendly bed, with Rhoda
and Lisa herself, weeping over her.
* * * * *
At five o’clock, Mrs. Grubb, forcibly torn from a meeting and acquainted
with the afternoon’s proceedings, hurried into a lower room in the
tenement house, where Mary, Rhoda, and the three children were gathered
for a time. There were still a hundred people in the street, but they
showed their respect by keeping four or five feet away from the windows.
The twins sat on a sofa, more quiet than anything save death itself.
They had been rocked to the very centre of their being, and looked like
nothing so much as a couple of faded photographs of themselves. Lisa lay
on a cot, sleeping restlessly; Mary looked pale and wan, and there were
dark circles under her eyes.
As Mrs. Grubb opened the door softly, Mary rose to meet her.
‘Have you heard all?’ she asked.
‘Yes, everything!’ faltered Mrs. Grubb with quivering lips and downcast
eyelids.
Mary turned towards Lisa’s bed. ‘Mrs. Grubb,’ she said, looking straight
into that lady’s clear, shallow eyes, ‘I think Lisa has earned her
freedom, and the right to ask a Christmas gift of you. Stand on the
other side of the cot and put your hand in mine. I ask you for the last
time, will you give this unfinished, imperfect life into my keeping, if I
promise to be faithful to it unto the end, whatever it may be?’
I suppose that every human creature, be he ever so paltry, has his hour
of effulgence, an hour when the mortal veil grows thin and the divine
image stands revealed, endowing him, for a brief space at least with a
kind of awful beauty and majesty.
It was Mistress Mary’s hour. Her pure, unswerving spirit shone with a
white and steady radiance that illuminated Mrs. Grubb’s soul to its very
depths, showing her in a flash the feeble flickerings and waverings of
her own trivial purposes. At that moment her eye was fitted with a new
lens, through which the road to the summit of the Tehachapi Mountains and
Mahatmadom suddenly looked long, weary, and profitless, and by means of
which the twins were transferred from the comfortable middle distance
they had previously occupied to the immediate foreground of duty. The
lens might slip, but while it was in place she saw as clearly as another
woman.
‘Will you?’ repeated Mistress Mary, wondering at her silence.
Mrs. Grubb gave one last glance at the still reproach of Lisa’s face, and
one more at the twins, who seemed to loom more formidably each time she
regarded them; then drawing a deep breath she said, ‘Yes, I will; I
_will_, no matter what happens; but it isn’t enough to give up, and you
needn’t suppose I think it is.’ And taking a passive twin by either
hand, she passed out of the door into the crowded thoroughfare, and
disappeared in the narrow streets that led to Eden Place.