A SCHOeNE SEELE ON PISGAH
More than four years have elapsed before we see James Wimbourne again.
Time has dealt easily with him, as far as appearances are concerned. No
periods of searching care have imprinted their lines upon his face; no
rending sorrow has dimmed the sweetness of its expression. No one could
even be tempted to say that he had begun to grow stout. And if his face
is a trifle thinner and more firmly molded than of old, if he has a more
settled manner of sinking back in to a club chair, if he takes rather
more time to get through the evening newspaper, or if, after the manner
of many ex-athletes, he is inclined to become fidgety and bilious unless
he has exactly the proper amount of physical exercise--well, who ever
reaches his late twenties without showing similar preliminary symptoms
of age; not so much the first stages of the process of ageing as
indications of what the process will be like when it begins in earnest?
The process in which we now find James engaged is mental rather than
senescent, but you would hardly guess it to look at him. He is sitting
on a rock on the top of a hill at sunset, smoking a cigarette and
patently enjoying it. One leg is thrown easily over the other, his body
is bent slightly forward; one hand rests on the rock by his side and the
other, when not employed in propelling the cigarette to and from his
mouth, lies quietly on his lap. He is very quiet; James is not the sort
of person to make many unnecessary motions; he picks out a comfortable
position and usually remains in it until it is time to do something
else. He would do this even if he were not gazing at an absorbingly
lovely view over the roofs of Bar Harbor, Frenchman's Bay and the
tumbled hills of the Maine Coast, and even if the mental process were
not such an absorbing one as a review of his relation with Madge
Elliston,--a sort of indexing of the steps by which it had developed
from the vaguest of acquaintanceships into its present state.
It had really begun, he reflected, on the evening of that dinner. Before
that Madge had been merely one of the group of chattery young women that
he had danced with and was polite to and secretly rather afraid of; one
of the genus debutante. After that she merged from her genus and, almost
without going through the intermediate stages of species and variety,
became an individual.
At first he had deliberately fostered and encouraged the thought of
Madge, for obvious reasons. It was clearly profitable to do anything
that would help weed out the thought of Beatrice. It would be fruitless
even to try to enumerate the stages by which from that point on Beatrice
faded from his heart and that of Madge took her place; to a far larger
place, as he now realized, than Beatrice had ever occupied there.
It appeared to him now, as he looked back on the whole process, that
Beatrice herself was responsible for a large part of it, Beatrice and
her Working Girls' League. That had all grown quite logically out of
that first evening and his inspiration about having Madge sing to the
working girls. Beatrice adopted the suggestion, and the result was so
successful that on the Saturday a month or two afterward, when James
made his next visit to New Haven, Madge was engaged to sing to them for
a second time. He accompanied Beatrice to that meeting and from that
evening dated his acquaintance with the Working Girls' League and social
work in general.
Madge sang for the most part old English songs, things the girls could
understand, and they followed them all with the most unaffected interest
and pleasure. James was surprised to see several of them actually wipe
tears from their eyes when she sang the plaintive ditty "A young country
maid up to London had strayed," and during one intermission he was
conscious of certain inarticulate sounds coming from the audience, of
which the only intelligible part was the word "husband" uttered in
beseeching accents again and again.
"They want her to sing 'Oh, for a husband,'" explained Beatrice to
James. "She sang that the last time and they all went crazy about it."
Madge complied with a really very spirited rendering of the old song,
and the girls applauded with an enthusiasm that rather touched James.
There was something appealing to him in the unaffected way in which
these poor shop and factory drudges, physically half-starved and
mentally wholly starved, responded to the slightest efforts to give them
pleasure. He felt himself suddenly warming toward the movement.
"Tell me something about this place," he found a chance to say to Madge
later on, when the gathering had broken up, and even before she replied
he reflected that he had had ample opportunity to ask Beatrice that.
"Oh, _I'm_ not the person to ask--I've only just come into it.... It was
started simply as a working girls' club, I believe; a place more
especially for the homeless ones to come to after work hours and meet
each other and spend a little time in cheerful surroundings before going
back to their hall bedrooms.... Now it's become more than that; they
have entertainments and dances and classes of various kinds, and we're
trying to raise money enough to build them a lodging house."
"You've become one of them then, have you?"
"Oh, yes, I'm one of those that have been drawn in. The thing has
flourished amazingly lately, both among the helpers and the helped. The
purpose of the League is entirely secular--I suppose that's what made it
go so well. The churches don't seem--they don't get a chance at many
people, do they?... This is aimed to help the very lowest class of
workers; all unmarried wage-earners are eligible, regardless of age or
race or religion.... Poor things, they are so glad to have their bodies
and minds cared for and their souls left alone! The souls follow easily
enough, we find, just as Shaw says--you've read 'Major Barbara'?"
"I don't think I have," replied James.
"Well, that shows what the League is trying to do better than I can....
It's had its results, too. The thing has been running about a year, and
already the number of arrests for certain kinds of offenses has fallen
off over fifty per cent. Keeping them off the streets alone is enough to
make us feel proud and satisfied...."
"I should think so," said James, blushing hotly. He had never heard a
young woman make such a remark before, and was at a loss how to take it.
But there was something at once fearless and modest in the way Madge
made it that not only put him at his ease but set him thinking. "Good
Lord, why can't we live in a world where every one talks like that?" he
suddenly asked himself.
Madge went on to give him a fuller account of the purposes and methods
of the League, outlining some of its difficulties and indicating, as far
as she knew it, the path of its future development. She paid him the
compliment of asking him several questions, and he was displeased to
find that he had either to bluff answers for them or confess ignorance.
"I wish I could do something of this sort," he said presently, in a
musing sort of way.
"Why don't you? There's plenty of chance in New York, I should say."
"Oh, New York, yes. I hadn't thought of that. I don't know what use I
could be, though."
"No difficulty about that, I should think. What about athletics? You'd
work among boys, I presume?"
"Yes, I suppose so." Somehow the prospect did not attract him
particularly. Then he thought of Stodger; of what Stodger's evenings
would have been but for him. What did he do to illuminate Stodger's
evenings under actual conditions, now that he come to think of it?
"You'll find there are plenty of things you can do for them. Practically
every one who knows anything at all can conduct an evening class. Even
I--I have a class in hat trimming! One of the few subjects I can
truthfully say I have practical knowledge in."
Thus the germ of the desire for social service was sowed in him. It
thrived pretty steadily during the winter that followed. He got himself
introduced to the proper people and almost before he knew it he found
himself volunteering in gymnasium work and pledged to give occasional
evening talks on athletic subjects. The organization in which he worked
was, he found to his satisfaction, like Madge's--Madge's, you observe,
not Beatrice's--Working Girls' League, designed to help the very lowest
classes of wage-earners. It had its clubrooms on the lower East Side and
set itself up as a rival attraction to the saloon-haunting gangs of that
interesting neighborhood, and since it dealt with the roughest section
of the population it did not hesitate to employ means that other
organizations would have hesitated to sanction. Beer and tobacco were
sold on the place; billiards and card games were freely encouraged,
though there was a rule against playing anything for money; but the
chief interest of the place was athletic. Herein lay a problem, for it
was found that in the hands of the descendants of Nihilists and pillars
of the Mano Negra such respectable sports as boxing and wrestling were
prone to degenerate into bloody duels.
It was in this matter that James first made himself felt. Happening into
the building at an unaccustomed hour one afternoon, he became aware of
strange noises issuing from an upper floor, and dashing up to the
gymnasium discovered two brawny young Italians apparently trying to
brain each other with Indian clubs. In a storm of righteous and
unaffected wrath he rushed into the fray, separated the combatants and
treated them to such a torrent of obloquy as they had never heard even
among their own associates. Too astonished and fascinated to reply, they
allowed themselves to be hustled from the room by James and literally
kicked down the stairs and out of the building without so much as
getting into their clothes, running several blocks in their gymnasium
costumes. They aroused no particular attention, for at that time even
the East Side was becoming accustomed to the sight of scantily clad
youths using the streets as a cinder track, but it was more than an hour
before, timid and peaceful, the offenders ventured to slip back into the
clubhouse and their trousers.
From that day on James practically ran the Delancy Street Club. It never
became a very large or famous organization, partly for the reason that
it was purposely kept rather small, but it did much good in its own
quiet way. It soon became the chief extra-business interest in James'
life; it effectually drove the last vestiges of what he learned to refer
to mentally as "that foolishness" from his head; his nights became full
of sleep and empty of visions. And by the spring of the next year he
found himself slipping into an intermittent but perfectly easy
friendship with Madge Elliston, founded, naturally enough, on their
common interest in social matters. He fell into the habit of running up
to New Haven for week-ends, and into the habit of seeing Madge on those
Saturday evenings. He liked talking to her about social problems; he
soon caught up with her in the matter of knowledge and experience, and
it was from a comfortingly similar viewpoint that they were able to
discuss such matters as methods of handling evening classes, the moral
effects of workmen's compensation and the great and growing problem of
dance halls and all that it involves. They both found much to help and
instruct them in each other's views; the mere dissimilarities of the
state laws under which they worked furnished ample material for
discussion, and their friendship was always tightened by the fact that
they were, so to speak, marching abreast, running up against successive
phases of their work at about the same time.
It need cause no surprise that such a relation should have remained
practically static for a period of three years or more. Each of them had
much to think of beside social work. James had eight or nine hours' work
per day and all the absorbing interests of metropolitan life to keep him
from spending overmuch time over it. And Madge, as we know, was already
an extremely busy young woman. For a long time their common interest
hardly amounted to more than an absorbing topic of conversation during
their meetings. The stages by which it became the agent of something
greater were quite imperceptible.
There was just one exterior fact that served as a landmark in the
progress of his feeling. Some months before--shortly after Harry had so
unexpectedly gone abroad--Madge had started a series of Saturday night
dances for her working girls--that was at the time when the dance craze
was spreading among all classes of society--and she asked James to help
her give some exhibitions of new dances, to get the thing well launched.
James rather hesitated in accepting this invitation.
"I'll do it, of course, if you really want me to," he said; "but I don't
see why you want to drag me all the way up here for that. Why don't you
ask somebody in town?"
"That's just the point," replied Madge; "I shall want you to give a
little individual instruction to the girls, if you will, and I think it
would be just as well if the person who did that had no chance of
meeting the girls about town, in other capacities...! Beside, you happen
to dance rather better than any one I know up here."
"Oh, nonsense!" said James. "I'll come," he added in the next breath.
It was from just about the time of those dances, James thought, that the
personal element in his relation to Madge began to overbalance the
intellectual. He had had his moments of being rather attracted by her,
of course--the episode of Aunt Selina's dinner was a fair example--but
such moments had been mere sparks, soulless little heralds of the flame
that now began to burn brightly and warmly. Hitherto he had primarily
been interested in her; now he began definitely to like her. And then,
before long, something more.
It is interesting to compare the processes by which the two brothers
fell in love with the same woman. Harry's experience might be likened to
a blinding but illuminating flash of lightning; James' to the gentle but
permeating effect of sunrise. Both were held at first by the purely
intellectual side of Madge's character, but by different aspects of it.
Harry was primarily attracted to her by her active wit; this had at
first repelled James, made him somewhat afraid of her, until he
discovered the more solid qualities of her mind. Both at last fell in
love with her as a person, not as a member of the female sex nor as a
thinking machine. Both passions were founded upon solid rock; neither
could be uprooted without violent and far-reaching results.
How beautifully it had all worked out in the end, James reflected; how
wisely the progress of things was ordained! How fortunate it was that
his first futile passion for Beatrice had not been allowed to develop
and bear ill-conceived fruit! Now that he almost went so far as to
despise himself for that passion as unworthy both of himself and of her.
What had he fallen in love with there? A lip, a cheek, a pair of eyes, a
noble poise of a head, a thing to win and kiss and at last squeeze in
his arms--nothing more! He had set her up as the image of a false,
fleshly ideal, an empty Victorian husk of an ideal, a sentimental,
boyish, calfish vision of womanhood. How paltry that image looked when
compared to that newer one combining the attributes of friend, comrade,
fellow-worker, kin of his mind and spirit! His first image had done
injustice to its material counterpart, to be sure; Beatrice had turned
out to be far different from the alluring but empty creature he had
pictured her. She was a being with a will, ideas, powers, purposes of
her own. Well, all the better--for Harry! How admirably suited she was
to Harry! What a pair they would make, with their two keen minds, their
active ambitions, their fine, dynamic personalities! The thought
furnished almost as pleasing a mental picture as that of his union with
a small blue-eyed person at this very moment covered by the sloping gray
roof he had already taken pains to pick out from the ranks of its
fellows....
The contemplation of material things brought a slight diminution of
pleasure. When one came down to solid facts, things were not going quite
so well as could be desired. Harry was at this moment kiting
unconcernedly about the continent of Europe and his match with Beatrice
seemed, as far as James could make out, as much in the air as ever.
Also, his own actual relation with Madge was not entirely satisfactory.
That was due chiefly to sordid facts, no doubt; he could not expect to
have the freedom of meeting and speech he naturally desired with a
governess in a friend's house. Still, in the two or three conversations
he had been able to arrange with her during the past three weeks he had
been conscious of an unfamiliar spirit of elusiveness. Once, he
remembered, she had gone so far as to bring the subject of conversation
round to impersonal things with something little short of rudeness, just
as he was getting started on something that particularly interested him,
too....
Plenty of time for that, though; it would never do to hurry things. He
arose from his rock and stretched himself, lifting his arms high above
his head in the cool evening air with a sense of strength and ease.
There was nothing to worry about; things were fundamentally all right;
ends would meet and issues right themselves, all in due time.
It was time, or very nearly time, for Aunt Selina's evening meal, so he
started off at a brisk pace down the hill, whistling softly and
cheerfully to himself. He thought of Aunt Selina, how pleased she would
be with it all, when she knew. Good old soul! He remembered how
pointedly she had asked him to spend his month's vacation with her when
she told him she had taken a house at Bar Harbor for the summer; could
it be that she suspected anything? Perhaps she had, perhaps not; it had
all worked in very conveniently with Madge being at Gilsons', at any
rate. Let her and every one else suspect what they wished; it did not
matter much. Nothing did matter much, when you came to that, except
that small person in white linen and lawn who had flouted him when he
had last seen her and whom he would show what was what, he promised
himself, on the next favorable opportunity....
"Thank God for Madge," he breathed softly to himself as he walked on and
the peace of the evening descended more deeply around him; "oh, thank
God for Madge!"