At Sewell's house the maid told Evans to walk up into the study, without
seating him first in the reception-room, as if that were needless with
so intimate a friend of the family. He found Sewell at his desk, and he
began at once, without the forms of greeting:
“If you don't like that other subject, I've got a new one for you, and
you could write a sermon on it that would make talk.”
“You look at it from the newspaper point of view,” returned Sewell, in
the same humour. “I'm not an 'enterprise,' and I don't want to make talk
in your sense. I don't know that I want to make talk at all; I should
prefer to make thought, to make feeling.”
“Well,” said the editor, “this would do all three.”
“Would you come to hear me, if I wrote the sermon?”
“Ah, that's asking a good deal.”
“Why don't you develop your idea in an article? You're always bragging
that you preach to a larger congregation than I.”
“I propose to let you preach to my congregation too, if you'll write
this sermon. I've talked to you before about reporting your sermons in
_Saturday Afternoon_. They would be a feature; and if we could open with
this one, and have a good 'incisive' editorial on it, disputing some of
your positions, and treating certain others with a little satire, at
the same time maintaining a very respectful attitude towards you on the
whole, and calling attention to the fact that there was a strong and
increasing interest in your 'utterances,' which we were the first to
recognise,--it would be a card. We might agree beforehand on the points
the editorial was to touch, and so make one hand wash another. See?”
“I see that journalism has eaten into your soul. What is your subject?”
“Well, in general terms, and in a single word, _Complicity_. Don't you
think that would be rather taking? 'Mr. Sewell, in his striking sermon
on Complicity,' and so forth. It would be a great hit, and it would
stand a chance of sticking, like Emerson's 'Compensation.'”
“Delightful! The most amusing part is that you've really a grain
of business in your bushel of chaff.” Sewell wheeled about in his
swivel-chair, and sat facing his guest, deeply sunken in the low easy
seat he always took. “When did this famous idea occur to you?” he
pursued, swinging his glasses by their cord.
“About three weeks ago, at the theatre. There was one of those pieces on
that make you despair of the stage, and ashamed of writing a play even
to be rejected by it--a farrago of indecently amusing innuendoes and
laughably vile situations, such as, if they were put into a book, would
prevent its being sent through the mail. The theatre apparently can
still be as filthy in suggestion as it was at the Restoration, and not
shock its audiences. There were all sorts of people there that night:
young girls who had come with young men for an evening's polite
amusement; families; middle-aged husbands and wives; respectable-looking
single women; and average bachelors. I don't think the ordinary
theatrical audience is of a high grade intellectually; it's third
or fourth rate; but morally it seems quite as good as other public
assemblages. All the people were nicely dressed, and they sat there
before that nasty mess--it was an English comedy where all the jokes
turn upon the belief of the characters that their wives and husbands
are the parents of illegitimate offspring--and listened with as smooth
self-satisfaction as if they were not responsible for it. But all
at once it occurred to me that they _were_ responsible, every one of
them--as responsible as the players, as the author himself.”
“Did you come out of the theatre at that point?” asked Sewell.
“Oh, I was responsible too; but I seemed to be the only one ashamed of
my share in the business.”
“If you were the only one conscious of it, your merit wasn't very
great,” suggested the minister.
“Well, I should like the others to be conscious of it too. That's why
I want you to preach my sermon. I want you to tell your people and my
people that the one who buys sin or shame, or corruption of any sort, is
as guilty as the one who sells it.”
“It isn't a new theory,” said Sewell, still refusing to give up his
ironical tone. “It was discovered some time ago that this was so before
God.”
“Well, I've just discovered that it ought to be so before man,” said
Evans.
“Still you're not the first,” said Sewell.
“Yes,” said the editor, “I think I am, from my peculiar standpoint. The
other day a friend of mine--an upright, just, worthy man, no one more
so--was telling me of a shocking instance of our national corruption.
He had just got home from Europe, and he had brought a lot of dutiable
things, that a customs inspector passed for a trifling sum. That was all
very well, but the inspector afterwards came round with a confidential
claim for a hundred dollars, and the figures to show that the legal
duties would have been eight or ten times as much. My friend was glad to
pay the hundred dollars; but he defied me to name any country in Europe
where such a piece of official rascality was possible. He said it made
him ashamed of America!” Evans leaned his head back against his chair
and laughed.
“Yes,” said Sewell with a sigh, and no longer feigning lightness.
“That's awful.”
“Well, now,” said Evans, “don't you think it your duty to help people
realise that they can't regard such transactions _de haut en bas_, if
they happen to have taken part in them? I have heard of the shameful
condition of things down in Maine, where I'm told the French Canadians
who've come in regularly expect to sell their votes to the highest
bidder at every election. Since my new system of ethics occurred to me,
I've fancied that there must have always been a shameful state of things
there, if Americans could grow up in the willingness to buy votes. I
want to have people recognise that there is no superiority for them in
such an affair; that there's nothing but inferiority; that the man who
has the money and the wit to corrupt is a far baser rascal than the man
who has the ignorance and the poverty to be corrupted. I would make this
principle seek out every weak spot, every sore spot in the whole social
constitution. I'm sick to death of the frauds that we practise upon
ourselves in order to be able to injure others. Just consider the
infernal ease of mind in which men remain concerning men's share in the
social evil----”
“Ah, my dear friend, you can't expect me to consider _that_ in my
pulpit!” cried the minister.
“No; I couldn't consider it in my paper. I suppose we must leave that
where it is, unless we can affect it by analogy, and show that there is
infamy for both parties to any sin committed in common. You must
select your instances in other directions, but you can find plenty
of them--enough and to spare. It would give the series a tremendous
send-off,” said Evans, relapsing into his habitual tone, “if you would
tackle this subject in your first sermon for publication. There would be
money in it. The thing would make a success in the paper, and you could
get somebody to reprint it in pamphlet form. Come, what do you say?”
“I should say that you had just been doing something you were ashamed
of,” answered Sewell. “People don't have these tremendous moral
awakenings for nothing.”
“And you don't think my present state of mind is a gradual outgrowth
of my first consciousness of the common responsibility of actors and
audience in the representation of a shameless comedy?”
“No, I shouldn't think it was,” said the minister securely.
“Well you're right.” Evans twisted himself about in his chair, and hung
his legs over one of the arms.
“The real reason why I wish you to preach this sermon is because I have
just been offering a fee to the head-waiter at our hotel.”
“And you feel degraded with him by his acceptance? For it _is_ a
degradation.”
“No, that's the strangest thing about it. I have a monopoly of the
degradation, for he didn't take my dollar.”
“Ah, then a sermon won't help _you!_ Why wouldn't he take it?”
“He said he didn't know as he wanted any money he hadn't earned,” said
Evans, with a touch of mimicry.
The minister started up from his lounging attitude. “Is his
name--Barker?” he asked, with unerring prescience.
“Yes,” said Evans with a little surprise. “Do you know him?”
“Yes,” returned the minister, falling back in his chair helplessly, not
luxuriously. “So well that I knew it was he almost as soon as you came
into the room to-night.”
“What harm have you been doing him?” demanded the editor, in parody of
the minister's acuteness in guessing the guilty operation of his own
mind.
“The greatest. I'm the cause of his being in Boston.”
“This is very interesting,” said Evans. “We are companions in
crime--pals. It's a great honour. But what strikes me as being so
interesting is that we appear to feel remorse for our misdeeds; and I
was almost persuaded the other day by an observer of our species, that
remorse had gone out, or rather had never existed, except in the fancy
of innocent people; that real criminals like ourselves were afraid of
being found out, but weren't in the least sorry. Perhaps, if we are
sorry, it proves that we needn't be. Let's judge each other. I've told
you what my sin against Barker is, and I know yours in general terms.
It's a fearful thing to be the cause of a human soul's presence in
Boston; but what did you do to bring it about? Who is Barker? Where did
he come from? What was his previous condition of servitude? He puzzles
me a good deal.”
“Oh, I'll tell you,” said Sewell; and he gave his personal chapter in
Lemuel's history.
Evans interrupted him at one point. “And what became of the poem he
brought down with him?”
“It was stolen out of his pocket, one night when he slept in the
common.”
“Ah, then he can't offer it to me! And he seems very far from writing
any more. I can still keep his acquaintance. Go on.”
Sewell told, in amusing detail, of the Wayfarer's Lodge, where he
had found Barker after supposing he had gone home. Evans seemed more
interested in the place than in the minister's meeting with Lemuel
there, which Sewell fancied he had painted rather well, describing
Lemuel's severity and his own anxiety.
“There!” said the editor. “There you have it--a practical illustration!
Our civilisation has had to come to it!”
“Come to what?”
“Complicity.”
Sewell made an impatient gesture.
“Don't sacrifice the consideration of a great principle,” cried Evans,
“to the petty effect of a good story on an appreciative listener. I
realise your predicament. But don't you see that in establishing and
regulating a place like that the city of Boston has instinctively
sanctioned my idea? You may say that it is aiding and abetting
the tramp-nuisance by giving vagrants food and shelter, but other
philosophers will contend that it is--blindly perhaps--fulfilling the
destiny of the future State, which will at once employ and support all
its citizens; that it is prophetically recognising my new principle of
Complicity?”
“Your new principle!” cried Sewell. “You have merely given a new name to
one of the oldest principles in the moral world.”
“And that is a good deal to do, I can tell you,” said Evans. “All
the principles are pretty old now. But don't give way to an ignoble
resentment of my interruption. Go on about Barker.”
After some feints that there was nothing more important to tell, Sewell
went on to the end; and when he had come to it, Evans shook his head.
“It looks pretty black for you, but it's a beautifully perfect case of
Complicity. What do you propose to do, now you've rediscovered him?”
“Oh, I don't know! I hope no more mischief. If I could only get him back
on his farm!”
“Yes, I suppose that would be the best thing. But I dare say he wouldn't
go back!”
“That's been my experience with him.”
They talked this aspect of the case over more fully, and Evans said:
“Well, I wouldn't go back to such a place myself after I'd once had a
glimpse of Boston, but I suppose it's right to wish that Barker would. I
hope his mother will come to visit him while he's in the hotel. I would
give a good deal to see her. Fancy her coming down in her bloomers, and
the poor fellow being ashamed of her? It would be a very good subject
for a play. Does she wear a hat or a bonnet? What sort of head-gear goes
with that 'sleek odalisque' style of dress? A turban, I suppose.”
“Mrs. Barker,” said the minister, unable to deny himself the fleeting
comfort of the editor's humorous view of the situation, “is as far from
a 'sleek odalisque' as any lady I've ever seen, in spite of her oriental
costume. If I remember, her _yashmak_ was not gathered at the ankles,
but hung loose like occidental trousers; and the day we met she wore
simply her own hair. There was not much of it on top, and she had it
cut short in the neck. She was rather a terrible figure. Her having ever
been married would have been inconceivable, except for her son.”
“I should like to have seen her,” said Evans, laughing back in his
chair.
“She was worth seeing as a survival of the superficial fermentation of
the period of our social history when it was believed that women could
be like men if they chose, and ought to be if they ever meant to show
their natural superiority. But she was not picturesque.”
“The son's very handsome. I can see that the lady boarders think him
so.”
“Do you find him at all remarkable otherwise? What dismayed me more
than his poetry even was that when he gave that up he seemed to have no
particular direction.”
“Oh, he reads a good deal, and pretty serious books; and he goes to hear
all the sermons and lectures in town.”
“I thought he came to mine only,” sighed the minister, with, a
retrospective suffering. “Well, what can be done for him now? I feel my
complicity with Barker as poignantly as you could wish.”
“Ah, you see how the principle applies everywhere!” cried the editor
joyously. He added: “But I really think that for the present you can't
do better than let Barker alone. He's getting on very well at Mrs.
Harmon's, and although the conditions at the St. Albans are more
transitory than most sublunary things, Barker appears to be a fixture.
Our little system has begun to revolve round him unconsciously; he keeps
us going.”
“Well,” said Sewell, consenting to be a little comforted. He was about
to go more particularly into the facts; but Mrs. Sewell came in just
then, and he obviously left the subject.
Evans did not sit down again after rising to greet her; and presently he
said good night.
She turned to her husband: “What were you talking about when I came in?”
“When you came in?”
“Yes. You both had that look--I can always tell it--of having suddenly
stopped.”
“Oh!” said Sewell, pretending to arrange the things on his desk. “Evans
had been suggesting the subject for a sermon.” He paused a moment, and
then he continued hardily, “And he'd been telling me about--Barker. He's
turned up again.”
“Of course!” said Mrs. Sewell. “What's happened to him now?”
“Nothing, apparently, but some repeated strokes of prosperity. He has
become clerk, elevator-boy, and head-waiter at the St. Albans.”
“And what are you going to do about him?”
“Evans advises me to do nothing.”
“Well, that's sensible, at any rate,” said Mrs. Sewell. “I really think
you've done quite enough, David, and now he can be left to manage for
himself, especially as he seems to be doing well.”
“Oh, he's doing as well as I could hope, and better. But I'm not
sure that I shouldn't have personally preferred a continued course of
calamity for him. I shall never be quite at peace about him till I get
him back on his farm at Willoughby Pastures.”
“Well, that you will never do; and you may as well rest easy about it.”
“I don't know as to never doing it,” said Sewell. “All prosperity,
especially the prosperity connected with Mrs. Harmon's hotel, is
transitory; and I may succeed yet.”
“Does everything go on there in the old way, does Mr. Evans say?” Mrs.
Sewell did not refer to any former knowledge of the St. Albans, but to a
remote acquaintance with the character and methods of Mrs. Harmon, with
whom the Sewells had once boarded. She was then freshly widowed by the
loss of her first husband, and had launched her earliest boarding-house
on that sea of disaster, where she had buoyantly outridden every storm
and had floated triumphantly on the top of every ingulfing wave. They
recalled the difficult navigation of that primitive craft, in which each
of the boarders had taken a hand at the helm, and their reminiscences
of her financial embarrassments were mixed with those of the unfailing
serenity that seemed not to know defeat, and with fond memories of her
goodness of heart, and her ideal devotion in any case of sickness or
trouble.
“I should think the prosperity of Mrs. Harmon would convince the most
negative of agnostics that there was an overruling Providence, if
nothing else did,” said Sewell. “It's so defiant of all law, so
delightfully independent of causation.”
“Well, let Barker alone with her, then,” said his wife, rising to leave
him to the hours of late reading which she had never been able to break
up.