THE MAYOR’S VISIT
The Mayor had been very punctual in keeping his engagement with Miss
Lorimer. He was standing in the wide parlor of the Lorimer mansion
into which he had been ushered by a servant apparently already
apprized of his expected visit, so felicitously suave was that
person’s reception of him, and so unhesitatingly was he conducted
over the hallway to the great parlors.
The room or succession of rooms, in which he found himself was a
superb example of architecture and decoration. The effect of a
kind of compromise between colonial spaciousness and simplicity in
the proportions of the room, and a Louis Quinze elaboration in its
furniture, was not as disquieting as might have been anticipated,
seeing too that the villa in many aspects was an Italian creation.
The ceilings were high, the windows broad, and almost destitute of
the framed arrangement of heavy mouldings; the cornice of the room
was scarcely emphasized, the windows descended to the floor.
The decorative features were a treatment in gold and pink with the
chairs and sofas upholstered in Du Barry satin, garlands of painted
roses delicately imprinted the flat ceiling, high mirrors framed in
gilt surmounted marble mantels overhanging generous hearths, and
the august dignity reached an intellectual note and emphasis in the
few large and many smaller paintings which were, with one or two
exceptions, the works of American artists, and were, for the most
part, landscapes. The three exceptions were religious subjects, being
carefully executed copies of The Assumption of Murillo, The Flight by
Correggio, and a Holy Family by Domenichino.
Great rugs were spread over the marqueterie floor, Du Barry pink
satin curtains, overspreading lace portieres, hung at the windows, a
grand piano was accommodated in a swelling niche on one side, and the
chandeliers intricately composed, and thrown into a sort of bizarre
relief by white enamel threads upon them, supported a galaxy of
opalescent globes lit with electric lamps.
It was evening and in summer. The Mayor entered the brilliant
and glowing room, walked admiringly towards an Inness which hung
almost opposite the entrance of the parlors, and then sat down in a
convenient chair, his eyes eagerly inspecting the delicate opulence
about him. Near him was a remarkable table—a creation in ivory and
ebony—and he noticed a few book-cases holding books bound in white, a
few marble sculptures were revealed, and a snowy owl, upon an ivory
bracket loomed upon him as at least, if not tasteless, an indiscreet
note in the beautiful rooms.
A moment later and his eyes encountered, approaching him from the
distant end of the room two female figures, one of whom he quickly
recognized, though now Miss Lorimer came to him in a sort of aureole
of summer emanations—her dark hair unadorned—and wearing a faintly
blue ashen gown, the sleeves caught thrice about her arms with black
velvet loops. A brooch of blood red Mexican opal set with emeralds
was at her neck, catching the lapels of a frilled white collar which
rose upon her neck, while around her waist a quaint armorial belt,
fastened with an old and lustrous Chinese buckle, holding a purple
fluorite and a green jadeite, added a note of exotic culture. She was
radiant, and as the young man rose to his feet his face brightened
into an appreciation which spoke almost too plainly his own
admiration. Julieta was with her daughter, and her matronly outline
and the dark color of her garb was a foil to the latter’s interesting
loveliness.
“Your Honor, my Mother,” was the salutation of Miss Lorimer, who
seemed eager to begin the serious work before them. The gentleman
bowed and expressed his pleasure, and then as Mrs. Lorimer spoke
of her daughter’s mission in connection with the new trial of the
prisoners seized at the time of the destruction of the Settlement
House, Helen Lorimer herself pushed a table forward, drew three
chairs up to it and rang a bell.
Answering the summons a servant appeared with a number of portfolios,
and almost at the same moment the parlor doors swung apart, and Mr.
Theodore Lorimer accompanied by a broad featured gentleman entered.
Introductions followed, and the Mayor learned that Mr. Lorimer’s
companion was the clever and industrious lawyer who had discovered a
mass of new evidence, and was willing to stake his reputation upon
his complete ability to prove that five of the men under sentence,
had nothing to do with the disastrous explosion and fire, leaving the
guilt weighing heavily on the sixth, Polinck, Longtinsky’s confidant,
and with a preponderant disposition of the facts pointing to the
central and animating spirit of mischief as residing in Longtinsky
himself.
Mr. Moser was a short man with a relentless intimation of power in
his expression. Somehow it rested in his broad shoulders, clean
shaven and pugnacious jaw, his small deep set and musing eyes, the
crisply moving thin fingers and particularly in his thin lips that
closed against each other in a vise-like way that suggested an
interior mental grasp as tight as this physical analogue.
When the portfolios had been opened and the entire party was seated
at the table, Mr. Moser rose up, and developed his position. It was
admirably done. It was clear; it seemed unmistakably certain that Mr.
Moser could prove the points which came out with bristling alacrity.
He made them in a matter-of-fact way, quite devoid of parade, and in
a conversational undertone, with a relieving gesture, and now and
then, especially aiming them at the Mayor, a convincing puckering of
his tense eyebrows:
“Longtinsky has a serpent’s tongue and the brain of a demon. The
men about him are his dupes. He plays them as you might play cards.
He holds them in his hand and no scruples interfere with his using
them for his own profit and their ruin. And yet he is a clumsy
contriver. The simple confound the wise. A child steps in, and his
fabric of deceit tumbles into pieces. It is a play-loving child,
with a dash of curiosity, just a trace of the sleuth strangely
developing—a fine prophetic instance of tendency Sir. This child
drawn by some peculiarity in Longtinsky’s looks follows him; shows
an old age interest in the man. And why? Because Longtinsky gave him
a picture book. This inflamed the child’s imagination. It exerted
some hypnotic influence. By a queer coincidence the book contained
an illustrated story of a Russian nihilist, and the boy identified
him with Longtinsky. He follows him, shadows him, if you will, a
very mania of pictorial identification seized him. In Longtinsky he
saw the hero of his story. In every incident he caught a reflexion
of the episodes of his tale. Longtinsky either mistook his devotion
or it was unobserved, or the tender years of this boy deceived him.
The boy hung round his printing office; he was amused by Longtinsky
who gave him blocks and toy type to play with. Longtinsky may have
dreamed that the child would grow up into a keen edged accomplice in
his games. At any rate he took little notice of the boy’s incessant
observation, and he never suspected his sensitive memory.
“Every impression remained there, and they remained marvellously
distinct. There are no shadows among them. The child’s mind is a
photographic plate. The child was also attracted by Miss Lorimer. He
was one of the visitors at the Settlement House, and made good use
of its advantages. But it was a different sort of attraction. He had
absorbed Longtinsky’s hatred for this excellent benefactor and mixing
up the impressions of his hero in the Russian story he made out for
himself that Longtinsky was the victim of persecution directed by
Miss Lorimer.
“This boy was at the very centre of the operations that turned the
Settlement House into ashes. He saw the bombs taken from Longtinsky’s
office of The Beehive at night to the Settlement House. It was a
night when the House was watched, the Janitor was away: there was
collusion somewhere. Four men brought those implements of destruction
there. TWO OF THEM WERE LONGTINSKY AND POLINCK. This boy although
obsessed by an incredible devotion to Longtinsky never revealed his
feeling but like some parasitic thread of life clung to him, slipped
on behind him unknown, stood in the shadow of the doorways, slunk
from retreat to retreat along the streets. He too was vitally active
as if driven by a flame of madness. He saw everything and, what was
more astonishing, he understood. He lived through it all, the life
of his hero in the Russian tale. He slunk among the conspirators as
their unseen or unnoticed Nemesis. His parched and contracted nature
became monomaniacal with a detective precocity. His mind like wax
took impressions that were retained as if in steel.
“This strange object I met—after Miss Lorimer had engaged me to look
into this case—I saw him at the ruins of the Settlement House, and
something—as he stood on the brink of the smoking excavation—piqued
my curiosity—not averse Sir, to finding evidence in the smallest
scraps—and I spoke to him. I found out that he had been in the House
a few minutes before the explosion, that he knew Longtinsky. His
warped precocity of observation had not changed a natural childlike
simplicity for he was easily led on into the startling admission that
showed that Longtinsky and Polinck had placed the bombs in the House
themselves, had afterwards taken into the House the men who have been
accused and convicted of the crime at the moment when the bombs were
lit. This dodging boy had followed Longtinsky and Polinck in, when
they placed the fuses. Afterwards Longtinsky escaped to his home,
and left it to Polinck to inveigle and desert the victims of their
mutual treachery. Polinck would have gotten away too except for the
time lost in making the oil and rag fires that consumed the place.
The boy has no parents but lived with some family who pitied his
lonely condition and he wandered about the streets almost unobserved
and uncared for. His peculiar temperament developed into a queer
intensity of moroseness wherein the seeds of his unnatural attachment
to Longtinsky grew and flourished.
“After the catastrophe this boy seemed stunned, and I met him at
a psychological moment, when he needed a confessor. He craved the
opportunity to tell all he knew and by some reversion as strange
as his former hallucination, he now believes it necessary to do
something for the men whom he saw taken by the police. Some of these
men have protested their innocence of the exact crime, but the
circumstances of their apparent participation were too strong against
them. This boy your Honor will exculpate them, and I believe that
he will keep the rigid immobile steadiness of his story under the
fiercest cross-examination. He is of course uncorroborated by others,
and it remains to be seen how his narrative will effect a jury. On
him Sir, we pin with certainty our conviction that the men now under
judgment of death will be freed.”
“Where is this boy?” said the Mayor.
Miss Lorimer rose and in a few moments returned with the singular
being, whose abnormal and subtle watchfulness had put so complete a
reversal upon the course of events with the suspects.
As the boy came up to the table the Mayor rose, and his example was
followed by all present. The boy stood in the centre of a wondering
group. He was a creature likely to attract attention among those
accustomed to interest themselves in a face as the symbol and
expression of the nature beneath it. Extremely thin, with a stunted
effect produced by the drooping of one shoulder, and his cross-eyed
vision, his arms would excite wonder at once. They were so long. His
hands were flat and bony, and by some sort of interior nervousness
they seemed to be constantly in motion, twitching or seizing his
clothes as if worried by their fit or arrangement. His face would
have attracted attention any where, but it would also have been
the attention of sympathy and commiseration. It was at every point
almost disfigured and misshapen. The eyes were not on a level and
the ears were curiously small and shrivelled, his forehead, as in
hydrocephalics, was swollen and protuberant, his nose was a sharp
ridge and his cheeks were sunken. Only his mouth bore the traces
of an infantile charm, and it was perfectly formed and opened
over perfect teeth. This latter feature conjoined with the deep
clustering and raven darkness—lustrous too as a raven’s wing—of his
abundant hair, redeemed his physiognomy and imparted a singular elfin
weirdness to it, at least it raised the baffling surmise that his
face was made in two parts, a worser and a better half, and their
discord reflected some temperamental confusion, some alternating
balance of moral or mental tendency. His eyes seemed to dread the
light, and he kept them cast down, which further imparted a dead and
expressionless vacancy to the rather blighted and uninteresting face.
This blankness remained only when his eyes were averted. Raised and
opened, they became partially corrected in their alignment, by the
frequent flashes of excitement they betrayed, and then intelligence
entering his expression, his vexed and ill treated features gained
something in orderliness, or the more repugnant hid themselves, and
were forgotten, under this exaltation. He was short for his years,
and pale, with flushes of color coming at the moments of excitement.
He was a small boy with excellent proportions of body other than
in the simian arms and the defect of the drooping shoulder. In him
again Miss Lorimer had turned the tables upon her antagonist. Angelo
Shimura was an idolator. He craved objects of worship; they remained
with him in his waking moments as supernatural incentives to his
devotion. The subtlety and strength of his attachment had been tested
with Longtinsky, as a mere objective personality, upon which he must
lavish his imaginative attributes. But in reality his heart had not
been warmed, and in that heart lay the unappeasable fires of the most
slavish self-sacrifice.
The shock of the terrific incident which he had watched in its
growth into a tragic issue had perhaps shattered that first extreme
and provisional adherence; and now, brought under the power of a
lofty nature, and fed with the nutriment of sympathy, his little
passionate soul became steeped in love for his benefactress. In that
company, whenever he raised his eyes, they sought the face of Miss
Lorimer, as a dumb wistful yearning animal follows with unquestioning
faithfulness and service its master’s. Its pathos touched the young
Mayor, and his own heart followed the boy’s to the same goal.
When Mr. Moser had finished his short story after adding a few other
more emphatic affirmations of his complete confidence to bring about
a reversal of the conviction of five of the six men—Polinck always
should be excepted—the company again took their places around the
table, with the boy sitting alongside of Miss Lorimer and catching in
a queer studious way the drift of the dialogue though his attention
was more shown by the movement of his head than by the glances of his
eyes.
The Mayor had become thoroughly aroused and felt deeply his
indebtedness to Miss Lorimer for her interference. It had probably
saved him and the community from a serious weight of remorse and
opprobrium. Already the stay of the execution had been ordered by
the Mayor, and the further steps to secure a new order for a trial
were agreed upon. The case could not be now considered before the
fall, and in the meanwhile it was hoped that the Mayor’s action would
not meet censure. The diagrams and drawings in the portfolios were
inspected. Many of them showed the stages in the construction of the
old Settlement House, one was a photograph of the fire, another was
of the prisoners and a third, of the most significant interest in
their present hunt, was a chance photograph of Pitt Street, made by
some wandering tourist engaged in a dilettante search for reminders
of “the slums,” in which appeared two figures recognizable as
Longtinsky and Polinck standing upon the opposite side of the street,
and looking upward to the walls of the Settlement House, while far
from them crouching in a doorway was the odd figure of the haunting
Angelo Shimura.
The Mayor was surprised to see among these sketches, a series of
perfected drawings for a new Settlement House, larger and more ornate
than its predecessor and designed to comprise a Museum. On this
point Miss Lorimer became eloquent. Her animation was intense and
the charmed young man listened to her with delight. The nobility of
her design heightened the fires burning brightly in his own heart,
of sympathy with the “submerged,” and those to whom the chances of
recreation and distraction are denied, the strangely forgotten units
of life, who somehow must be masoned into the structure we call “The
Nation,” and from whom, in the lottery of Fortune’s choice, great
destinies may arise, or more practically, immense acquisitions of
sane sentiment be won.
“The large museums” said Miss Lorimer, “are a long way off from the
people I intend to help in this way. A museum, like a library, should
be constantly used. Repetition tells, and memory makes a permanent
record when it is deeply graven by iteration. Then it seems to me
no museum, as I find them, does the work that can be done for these
people in the most helpful way. Everything is remote and difficult
in its presentation, or else simply pictorial. And my museum will be
composite, and it will be national. I mean that there will be history
and art and science in it, but all these will be concerned with
America and its interests and objects.”
“I don’t imagine,” said the Mayor laughing, “that you intend to
nationalize astronomy, for instance. We can hardly pretend to any
monopoly of the stars.”
“You must not ridicule my project, Sir. Let me show you what I mean,
in a way at least. Come and see my own museum. I have one in this
house.”
“Indeed may I see it?” said the Mayor eagerly, “I may not know what
you mean to do, but I can understand what you have done.”
“Yes, that would please me,” Miss Lorimer answered, as she rose
and explained to the company her intention of giving the Mayor an
object lesson in her “improvised museum at the top of the house.”
She invited the others to accompany them, but Mr. Moser and Mr.
Theodore Lorimer had a discussion under way, which they could not
afford to interrupt, and Julieta excused herself. Thus the Mayor and
Miss Lorimer went together through rooms and corridors, up staircases
where niches rose imposingly on either side, adorned with sculptures,
and at last entered the high attic, into a broad and long room set
around with cases, occupied with tables, and somewhat divided into
alcoves, while the windows were breaches in the walls, opening out
upon the topmost balcony, which overlooked the trees, and now at
night commanded a far-spread network of twinkling lights.
The place was singularly pleasant, and the feeling of physical
elevation, as now and then the eye caught a moving barge of lights
upon the Hudson or the halloo of shouts rose from the velvety
darkness beneath, seemed grateful. The Mayor noticed that the objects
promiscuously heaped around and in almost unrestrained confusion were
for the most part pictures, prints, etchings, woodcuts, framed and
loose, with pottery, porcelains, statuettes, and furniture. There
were few of the usual accessories of the Natural History museum;
a few shells in a case, a specimen, of large size, of quartz or
feldspar or calcite, some gorgeous bird, a stuffed small animal, and
a rather amusing collection of fossils. The Mayor had some scientific
proclivities and a well developed appreciation of the objects of
nature.
Miss Lorimer observed his surprise. “No,” she said, a slight blush
mounting in her cheeks “I have not been very anxious for the
regulation display of a scientific museum, and that is not quite what
I intend to make mine in the Settlement House. I must confess art
and history appeal so much more to me. It would be very foolish for
anyone to complain of Science but—Well, I will be frank and disparage
myself in your eyes—I _do_ not love Science. IT TRIES TO EXPLAIN
TOO MUCH. I can’t help but think of it,” Miss Lorimer was laughing
now, “as a near sighted and precise middle aged gentleman, who sees
everything through his glasses which must be brought at short range
with the things he is looking at. They are very clear to his eye, but
they have no atmosphere, and the poetic—might I say—the religious
lights, and the broad vistas escape him altogether. Labels and names,
nomenclature and theories make up his life. He stumbles a good deal
because he does not see very far beyond his nose, and yet I will say
his intentions are excellent, and he does much good, but because he
is near sighted he breaks beautiful vases filled with flowers, and
puts his defacing hand on many a fresh picture.”
“Well,” retorted the Mayor, “you must admit that science has made
our everyday life more healthful and convenient; that it has taught
us a great deal, and influenced us to think more of just those
unfortunates whom you desire to help. Would you really care to see
science less powerful in this wonderful modern world?”
“Why, no,” answered the lady as the two sat down upon a bench placed
in the recess of a window, “I think of science as a handmaid to the
arts of life, as a purveyor of the necessities, making us comfortable
and keeping us healthful. It is quite irreproachable but, can you
love it?”
The Mayor’s pale face flushed, and the beautiful look returned to it
which had for an instant enthralled Helen Lorimer when she met him
in the City Hall. She looked at him intently. He rose as if confused
or pained, and walked a few steps away. A fine Barbazon bronze stood
upon a table at his elbow, and he answered, looking at this, as if
finding his text somewhere in its graven lines.
“Science _does_ keep us sane and real. Romanticism, the sort the
Germans encouraged two centuries ago, can hardly live in the world of
science. As to loving it, those who follow science seem to surrender
themselves to it with a feeling as deep, or deeper, than even Love
would ask of men. It possesses them like an inspiring demon. Perhaps
that abnegation of all interests to the one great call of Wisdom is
only realized in the more profound and zealous, but it is there,
_with them_. Why! to add one little scrap to the pages of knowledge,
just to put there a new unobserved fact, imparts a curious elation.
But as to Love—Ah! well love is something different.”
“Yes,” Miss Lorimer’s voice was low, as if she too had surrendered to
a train of interior reflections, “love is more human than Science. It
cherishes old faiths, old things, its rays are not the concentrated
radiance from patent reflectors, but the old sweet sort of light that
you see in a woman’s eyes.”
“Why not a man’s, also?” softly whispered the Mayor, who left his
absorbed contemplation of the bronze, and stood near Miss Lorimer.
“Well—” she answered, “I suppose so too, but—it is a concession
which must not be made too much of. There is good authority for
believing women monopolize that kind of illumination. Do you recall
Shakespeare’s adage?”
“Yes, but” retorted the young man “the same poet has put in the
mouths of men the deepest and the truest things about love.”
“Of course,” laughed his companion, “men are great soothsayers. I
think a very wise jester in Shakespeare averred that.
“Let me show you my meaning, the hope I have of putting in the new
House, over there on the east side, something more useful to the
people than labelled insects and shells and fossils. I want to have
a series of rooms each one of which will be a page of history as
it were, that is, a section of historic time, and, as the visitor
passes from one to the next, he will feel the changing atmosphere of
the rolling ages. It will be the paleontology of culture. Instead of
fossils arranged to show the evolution of animals you shall here see
the evolution of the human idea of living.”
“It’s a grand thought, but perhaps it is larger than the space you
have to put it in,” said the Mayor.
“I think, Sir,” and the speaker moved closer to him and looked almost
inquiringly into his face, “you intend to jest with me. But I will
have your submission. Let me show you how well even in a small way
this all can be done. I intend to do it with pictures, a few small
replicas of buildings, and some figures, with just enough archeology
to make the pictures and the figures real. Be patient with my good
intentions and remember I have chosen you for my ally.”
“There are some reserved rights of criticism for an ally,” said the
Mayor, taking up the border of a tapestry which hung near them.
“But I should be, I fear, a poor critic. My allegiance is too
unquestioning.”
“Well you shall have privileges. In my scheme there are aspects of
civics to be considered. That will be your affair.”
“Perhaps,” the Mayor whispered in serio-comic tone, “We ought really
to consult Briggs?”
Helen laughed outright; “OH! that Cerberus. No, indeed. He would
discover some means to ruin all my plans. He is implacable. He will
not forgive me his discomfiture at the Hall. He sees in me the
embodiment of a rabid useless philanthropy which is about as bad in
his eyes as the red Jacobinism he fears in the _sans culottes_. But
you approve of me don’t you?”
The speaker turned upon the young man the appealing beauty of her
face and the gesture was too significant not to escape the jealous
attention of her hearer, who never felt so happy.
“Miss Lorimer, my admiration of what you are attempting is a good
deal deeper than approval. I think I am not careless in using words,
when I say that I love you for what you are doing and have done.”
A red tide of color flushed Helen Lorimer’s face, her eyes sought the
floor, and the Mayor looked at her with a wondering smile, which was
an excellent index of his feeling that his words were not resented.
There was a short silence and then Miss Lorimer rose, and moved
towards the opposite end of the long room, while she half turned and
invited the Mayor to follow.
“I have indeed made a step forward in my plan. Come and see the
Egyptian phase. I call these phases of civilization—chapters. It is
the great book of life I wish to show these people, as if the human
mind advanced in cycles of development, and each of these cycles was
a chapter in a continuous history. There will be rooms, each room a
chapter, each chapter successional to the others that precede it. But
that is not all—not all—I have so much to show you.”
They stopped a moment at the door of a room, which when opened,
revealed a half arranged assortment of maps, pictures, models,
apparel, with a number of stereoscopic cameras, and relievos,
all illustrating scenes, customs, and the ruins of Egypt. There
were here great portfolios filled with drawings, photographs, and
colored sketches. A number of well made relief maps showed the
configuration of the ancient country, while small but exquisitely
executed restorations of temples, propylons, sphinxes, obelisks,
occupied a table in the middle of the apartment. There was the usual
miscellaneous assortment of scarabaei, glass vessels, vases, mortuary
images, ises, and one sarcophagus.
Miss Lorimer viewed them all with pride, though she was silent for an
instant as if estimating the forlorn confusion among these crowded
reminders of the past; but her embarrassment quickly vanished.
“I shall try,” she said, contemplating with a little perplexity
the disarray of objects, “with these types, and with books and
labels—yes with poetry and epigrams—to set before the people a
picture, a restoration of Old Egypt. If they can be made to realize
its awful distance from our modern variegation, its monolithic
cryptic strangeness, if they can feel the breath of its exaggerated
egotism, and the weird pantheistic aspirations of its religions, or
catch in an imaginative picture its stolid immensity of architectural
violence, will that not be an education? Suppose I can draw them
along from room or hall to other rooms and halls, each one the
concentration of the idea of a peculiar culture, as the Greeks, the
Romans, the Mediaeval, the Mahommetan, the Indian and, expanding as
they move upward to our modern day, into treatment of nations or
races, as cultural units what a breadth of well defined impressions I
can make!
“I can invite them into beautiful avenues of thought, recreating by
the spell of portraiture and language these obliterated complexes
of ideation; the Egyptian aridity and monumental titanism, the art
and limpidity of Greece, the strength and legal emphasis of Rome,
and then may I not attempt somehow to show the warming power of
Christianity by which our hearts become susceptible to all beauty,
for Christianity Sir, unlocked the treasury of Sympathies we possess
with all life.”
There was something very lovely in Helen Lorimer when her
enthusiasm—always easily evoked—kindled, and the young Mayor thought
nothing in the form of lovely woman could be more captivating.
He was less attentive to her plans as he watched her, than he
was thoughtfully wondering with himself how impossible it was for
him to control his own feelings, and then again how far away from
him seemed the radiant gifted and noble woman whose voice rose
to him with a penetrating sweetness, and whose eyes met his with
challenging sincerity. Curiously he found himself retracing the steps
of his own life, so that while he listened, while he watched—and
watching loved—some hidden operative power of thought reviewed the
toiling days he had gone through, and his divided attention, like
a rider on two horses, noticed Miss Lorimer’s ideals—probably a
little vaguely—and his own struggles amid deprivations and against
obstacles—perhaps a little acutely.
He saw himself the child of humble parents—his father being a
bookkeeper and his mother a lady of simple birth—who had grown
rapidly and was devoured by a passion for place. At school he
fought with his schoolmates for the best position in the school
base-ball team, in the class room he engaged every power he possessed
of self-control to seize and hold the first place. He admitted
this superiority came easily, his lessons were quickly and well
learned, and his physical skill, the celerity of his movement,
were ungrudgingly acknowledged by less successful rivals. His
disposition—he was not embarrassed in making the confession—was
genial and loving, with traces of irritability, and though his
worsted opponents might regret their failures, somehow—if the
individual was not too cross grained and unforgiving—he could coax
them back into good humor and even make his own victory serviceable
to their needs.
But he must be on top; the rage for conquest burned fiercely in his
boyish heart, and this ambition kept him restlessly aggressive. He
bounded through the grammar school, he leaped over the grades in the
High School, as if, figuratively, he was an acrobat bursting paper
rings. Then he flashed through the City College, and his coruscating
transit remained a vivid bewilderment to the faculty and his class
mates. But he was always poor. He came home after the day’s exciting
experiences to a very simple home life, wherein the delicate and
sweet figure of his patiently toiling Mother, like a consecration,
deepened his love, and brought feverish resolves in his mind to lift
her, his father, and himself into affluence.
He had not indeed gained riches, but he had won _place_, the highest
in the city-state, and before him opened untrodden vistas of
ascending power, social and financial. After graduating from college
he studied law. His wit and energy, the tireless practice of self
imposed tasks, his utter absorption in the thing at hand, bore the
customary fruit. He won out easily, and before a bench of jurists
delivered an oration—argumentative, speculative, and didactic—on the
claims of socialism that almost brought that deliberative body to its
feet, and for an instant endangered its dignity by an irruption of
hand-clapping. His subsequent course had been persistently upward.
Prestige, reputation, employment were naturally gained. And finally
as he wished it, the offer of the nomination for governor was
tendered to him, and art and opportunity combined to seat him in the
governor’s chair.
He had done well, the rewards were not undeservingly allotted; no man
exerted more relentlessly his ability to work, or aimed higher in the
standards of excellence his ambition proposed to his skill. Yet—the
opposition is unusual—with this incessant application for success,
under the good of his own unappeasable thirst for place, he displayed
a most irrelevant modesty. It was an almost unsupportable personal
enigma. A man ruthlessly overcoming opposition, battling like a
maniac for position, and yet at the surcease of effort declining into
self-effacement. It seemed to his friends a neurological accident; it
was nervous exhaustion and they looked upon it as a dangerous symptom
of a physical decay.
As the Mayor thus mused, still retaining in his ears and mind the
lavish picture that Miss Lorimer was drawing, he felt again the
challenge to a new sort of conquest. Could he capture the heart, the
hand, of this famous woman, the soul of an aristocratic coterie—a
Hypatia indeed, upon whose shoulders dwelt the prestige of wealth and
talent, and yet one mingling her daily life with the currents of the
people’s lives in the ministrations of mercy, of education.
How amazingly acceptable to him—a man eager to disenthrall the
commonality from the sordid commonplaces of their lives, and bring to
them the assets of an intellectual endowment—was this condescension.
And yet he secretly but acutely augured that he and Miss Lorimer
were separated by a deep moral hostility. Helen Lorimer dwelt wholly
within the borders of a severe and ecstatic religious faith, and
he—Ah! how should he reconcile to her his repudiation of all creed,
the complete erasure from his heart of all faith and the bleak
hardihood of his reiterated negations before the fabric and the
vouchers of the Church?
The Mayor was enrolled among those who accept the scientific
conduct of life, who look along the years ahead of them as periods
of duration to be used discreetly, but who spurned the illusion of
any forbearance from above, any posture of agreement with a God,
any dream of perpetuation beyond the pit and doom of death. Perhaps
he felt the authority and corrective uses of the Church, but like
Napoleon who saw in the Concordat a political compact and nothing
more, he appreciated its invincible excellence as a police guarantee
for ORDER.
He could not have said with Napoleon, “I do not believe in religions,
_but in the idea of a God_;” he believed in neither. To the world
about him, to the men of daily intercourse he was reticent. He
respected the rights of conviction, and he knew their value. But with
this new aspect of life delightfully developing before him, with the
ingratiating companionship of a woman’s heart and soul, leading him
into untraversed joys—and such a woman—could there safely be long
concealment? He saw how immensely earnest she was, that perhaps she
in a measure lived for invisible realities; should he hesitate to be
frank?
Well at any rate there was now no need for brutal, disconcerting,
confessions; let Love have her perfect way at first, and let
reconcilement follow later. His present happiness was too great to
be disturbed by shocks of disagreement. He was quite ready to fight
hard for the splendid prize, and strategy—though he despised mean
motives—was a legitimate resource.
There was a short silence which might have left an unpleasant
impression upon the lady had it been continued, when the Mayor spoke;
“It is a splendid thought, but can you realize it, as you wish; can
you make these people understand? I suppose too, there is an ulterior
aim, something outside of the mere literary or poetic image of these
superseded cultures. What is that?”
“Oh, there will be much more than my museum. There will be
instructions, lectures and these must all conform to a definite
progressive training in the idea of the improved modern state over
all these decadent and vanished social states. I wish to show the
rise of the conception and the realization under our modern forms
of government of property; I want to accentuate the individualistic
idea, the definite personal progression, by which the whole community
rises to higher things, and I want to give that all a christian
imprint, because I believe that the christian formula is the only one
that fits the requirements of our day, as I believe that they have
always fitted the requirements of every day.
“The vagaries and the perplexities of men would vanish if they
could all feel—rich and poor alike—the dissolving efficacy of Love,
mutual toleration, mutual forbearance, and if too in accordance with
the hierarchical type of the Church they could feel the necessary
relations of higher and lower in the social scale. The socialists are
levellers: they would crop all men short to one height and that the
shortest; the wonderful picture of our world with its atmosphere and
relief would all become like a Chinese drawing, all foreground, out
of proportion and distorted.”
The Mayor was hearing very carefully now, and he was looking at the
speaker with a flushed face—the index of some sudden resolution—his
hands folded before him and his lips just slightly tightened—a
further assurance of a forming determination.
“It will surprise you, Miss Lorimer, but _I_ am a socialist in a way,
and perhaps you will remonstrate with me if I say that I would invoke
the traditions and the teachings of Christianity to convince you,
that you ought to be one too—_in a way_.”
The speaker was now smiling with a deferential suggestion of not
wishing to be misunderstood or rebuked. When he looked that way he
was at his best, and Helen Lorimer forsook her dogmatism and answered
back with a strange girlish sweetness and yearning; “Ah! please: You
wish to confuse me. Tell me just what you mean, and tell me too how
you can be a socialist and say the things you said to me at the City
Hall when I came to you to crave mercy for socialists. I think I can
undeceive you as to Christianity being socialistic—in your sense.”
The Mayor sat down and leaning on the arm of his chair spoke slowly,
softly, without ostentation, and with an earnestness that was the
outpouring of his deepest convictions.
“Christianity must, I think, be socialistic in all senses. What
does it pretend to be, to do? Surely it is not solely a Gospel of
Preparation, it is also a Gospel of Life; this life, this weary
work-a-day world, with its inequalities, its disrupting accidents,
its amazing wildernesses of need, of sickness, of despair, of the
manifold disorganizing vagaries of temper, and of the vast Upas Tree
of evil.
“Is it not meant to meet all that and help it? How can it be done? I
think in one way only. By preaching the essential community of all
the productive powers of the state, by helping to make society a
vast machine, if you will, running smoothly like a perfect machine,
with all its parts coordinated, adjusted, registered, inter-active,
reciprocating. Christianity should denounce the tyranny of the
individual and the individualistic conceit. Society organized
upon individualization is organized upon Greed. The principle of
individualism is the feral type, the manner of wild nature, of
preying and carnivorous appetite; it is the struggle, internecine,
sanguinary, continuing, wherein the strongest survives and it alone.
“Christianity I take you mean to assert, is a superinduced order at
war with nature, intended to overcome nature even to the extent of
exterminating its normal instincts,” the voice speaking became as
it were stealthily murmurous for an instant, and then it rose again
sonorous and persuasive.
“Can I care, can you care, can anyone care, whether an industrial
metamorphosis like this strikes at the roots of literature and
art, so long as it means redemption, elevation, and happiness for
Humanity? _The main fact about life is living._ Should we not be more
interested in making the world absolutely habitable for the millions
that are in it, than in furnishing subjects to art and letters,
because it is tragic and disappointing; full now of dark shadows and
high lights too sharply contrasted conditions, too dangerous abysses
and too risky peaks?
“Art of the kind we have known, and literature of the kind we
have read, might be discouraged in an earth absolutely at peace,
absolutely happy, absolutely comfortable, absolutely _bourgeoise_,
if you will. But perhaps some other sorts of art and writing
might appear. It is not easy to stagnate the human mind, but if
its activity depends on the misery of the human heart then let it
stagnate.
“And your Christianity, why is it not socialistic? It began so.
Your Christ, observe Miss Lorimer I will be abjectly honest, not
mine—_your_ Christ told the rich man to give all he had to the poor
and to follow him;” at these words Helen Lorimer seemed to quiver
as if with a sort of terror, still her eyes never left the speaker’s
face, and because they dwelt so courageously upon his own the speaker
surrendered himself to the sway of his impulse, without reservation,
driven on by the novel inspiration of imposing upon the splendid
being in front of him by his own indomitable frankness.
“Why can not the civilized minds of the world get together and
establish some sort of a vast homogeneity, some standards of
co-operative living, an international fusion, a set of rules
governing every aspect of life, at least so far as rules will. Let it
be a machine made society, machine run, but like a perfect machine
running smoothly with oiled parts, with certainty, and exquisitely
effective, from top to bottom clean and happy.”
The Mayor ended but Miss Lorimer continued her fixed gaze at least
for a moment longer; that ended too as she rose, withdrew a little,
passing her hands over a cleverly reconstructed mimic sphinx. The
young man’s face had resumed its paleness, but his eyes shone; their
eagerness was not unnoticed, and when Helen Lorimer after a minute’s
indecision returned, and stood near him, his expression changed from
its challenging confidence, and grew quietly grave, and then he
looked at her with a queer questioning humility:
“Do I offend you? You will not think less of me, will you, if I have
been sincere? As to your visit to the City Hall in the interest of
these unfortunate men, and my stubbornness there, that has nothing
to do with my convictions. Perhaps I have not much sympathy with the
Longtinsky type, and at any rate his ideals, if he has any, are not
mine, and Order, Security, Law must be continued at all hazards. I do
not think that chaos will form a desirable introduction to a perfect
state.”
“No indeed, Mr. Mayor,” returned Miss Lorimer, a smile struggling
upward in features that had become a little daunted and astonished
with his unexpected ardor and confession; “No. I could feel no
offense—but somehow I cannot think you are right. Society is not
mechanical; you cannot make it so. In my mind christian society is an
organization, whose life—I mean its spiritual vitality—is religion,
and let me too be frank—the religion of the Catholic Church; an
organism with parts, functions, and these of high and low degree
though all serviceable to one end—and bearing the blossom and fruit
of character.
“Perhaps you will say an organism is socialistic—that our own bodies
with their various parts are socialistic. Well—perhaps—and yet—”
the speaker reflectively looked at the Mayor with a puzzled honest
glance, which brought the pleasantest of smiles into his face, and
with a little gentle laugh he hastened to increase her confusion:
“Of course—if any living thing were not a socialistic compound, it
would fall to pieces. All of its organs must become fraternally
united, fraternally active, fraternally sound: if they compete with
each other, if they engage in self assertions of independence,
and begin a war upon each other, they are no longer fraternal but
fratricidal. Has not most society, as we read of it in history, been
just that?”
Miss Lorimer did not seem to be convinced. The problem “gave her
pause,” and the half pained, half amused indecision in her face
served naturally to make the Mayor and herself better acquainted.
Indeed it pushed them forward to a very close mental companionship.
Miss Lorimer’s brow cleared, her eyes lost their humorous dismay, she
felt the grip of argument and flung back her answer with almost a
vindictive taunt.
“But society can be social without being socialistic; individual
initiative does not forbid mutual toleration, help, recognition.
Will you kill the principle of property that it has taken so long
to form, formed too by bloodshed, heroism of all sorts, invention
and patience? The savage is a socialist, the despot is one too, and
tyrannies are socialistic. The goad to effort is the prospect of
possible possession. Your socialistic society will be a sponge, made
of innumerable identical monads, not a Ship of State moving on to new
lands, new hopes, new treasures.”
“No simile will help you,” retorted the Mayor, who was enjoying
himself, who felt the thrills of a deepening friendship with the
woman before him, deepened too by just such an amiable and thoughtful
contest, “the Ship is itself a socialistic State. Each man who is on
it has his work, his pay, and lives on the winnings of the voyage.
Socialism does not preclude promotion, nor to my mind, property, but
it greatly equalizes the chances of having anything at all for those
who to-day have nothing.
“As a child without liberty, a man, supported by his family, lives,
the imprudences or accidents of his life deprive him of support
when he becomes of age and is given liberty. Liberty to five or
six men out of ten means destruction. Let the State once become a
family, and all of its children live, for it will be a family rich
enough to support them. The best, the smartest, if you will, the
most able will control, but not altogether for themselves. They will
no longer use their wits to get the best of those around them—as
I have, as others do—for selfish reasons. They will be saved from
themselves. Greatness of character, that I know Miss Lorimer you
adore, will not be diminished because struggle—that is the hard,
sordid, internecine—conflict sort—ceases; greatness of character
will be apportioned more liberally to many. And there will be
struggle enough. No ideal state can escape it; struggle against sin,
sickness, disease, ignorance, waste, revolt, prejudice, against
storm, earthquake the viciousness of nature. Only by a process of
unification, consolidation, can the race burst its bonds, and reach
Utopia. You say, it is a dream—perhaps—but dreams have lifted men to
Heaven.”
Miss Lorimer hesitated for one instant, but a new light of
appreciation entered her face; the Mayor had won—something—and
perhaps much.
“Well, Mr. Mayor, you press it strongly, and because it now comes to
me under a different guise, let me suspend judgment. You may teach
me more—but surely individual responsibility cannot carelessly be
forgotten, and with me, back of everything is the Church. Bonald has
written that society does not consist of the walls of our houses or
the ramparts of our towns but that wherever a human being is found
there is a father, a mother, a child, a language, heaven, earth, God
and a religion.”
A shadow of pain crossed the face of the young man. He rose from his
chair, stooped towards Miss Lorimer, who had sat down and in a voice
that vibrated with a distinct suggestion of sorrow, said: “You may
teach me what you can about the Church, but to me it seems unlikely
that the Church stands so stubbornly for things as they are.”
“The Church revolutionized the world. It brought into action all
the unselfish sentiments you appeal to. The culture in sympathy it
has given to the world makes your Socialism possible. Besides” Miss
Lorimer grew more beautiful before his face, as some transfiguring
grace of Hope and Faith rested on her, and gave her an indefinable
sweetness, “the Church gazes beyond the rim of this earth. Its feet
stand on the earth but its head is above the clouds. You remember
Virgil’s image:
_Ingreditur que solo, et caput inter nubila condit?_”
The Mayor laughed, “Ah, yes, Miss Lorimer, but for most practical
purposes it is best to keep our eyes fastened on the ground. Really
star gazing seldom helps us to walk straight. But do not rebuke me, I
understand. I do indeed, and I would not do myself such harm in your
eyes as to appear to be cynical.”
A swinging window frame pushed by a softly rising breeze borne to
them from the river, swung back, and the delicious summer air,
fragrant and warm, blew in upon them, breathing its delicate febrile
sensuousness, and almost—as if a voice, by some disembodiment only
present to their interior sense, had spoken—summoning them to come
out into the night The window opened upon one of the broad balconies
which encircled the mansion at this attic story, and as they both
looked to the portal caught by a common sense of interest in the
pleasant draught of air, the moonlight also smote the floor, though
barely seen in the lighted room. It came from the full moon that now
had floated upward over Long Island, and inundated the outspread city
with a golden glow, whose burnish only rested here and there where
it was not repelled by the electric aureole below it, withdrawing
timidly from the spaces bathed in the nether glow of its terrestrial
rival.
As it happened the room in which they were, was at the north end
of the villa, and at that point occurred one of the gaps in the
artificial illumination of the city upon which, as if by its own
preemption, the disheartened moonlight still presumingly remained
unchallenged. The invitation met their wishes. This personal
collision of opinion was out of place that glorious night. The Mayor
dearly wished to have done with it, earnest as he was, and just then
his heart rebelled against this intellectual coercion. And why was it
that Helen Lorimer wistfully gazed at the shrinking intrusion of the
wisps of moonlight, and rose obediently to the same unuttered welcome
to the outer night? It was a quaint incident that they both rose and
walked toward the open window, and they both laughed a little. It
seemed to help. Louder laughter came to their ears from the river,
where flaming barges sailed with bursts of music, and waifs of
song, bewitched—however crude they were—into delightsome sound by
the melting amiable night. They could see the opposite banks of the
noble stream where the Palisades, formed then into a reservation,
showed their columnar masses weirdly glistening, for on them fell the
moonlight with the peccant light of the wavering electrical auroras.
“May we sit here?” said the Mayor.
“The night is too lovely to be missed, and this view of the valley
and those far distant Van Cortlandt towers is wonderful; it always
is. Ah, and the air boats are abroad to-night,” and the speaker
pointed upward to the arrowy trails of light, and the Mayor listened
to the hum of the aeroplanes.
The chairs were brought out by the Mayor, and the two sat down silent
for an instant, startled by the strangeness of their abandonment to
the scarcely felt intuition of a mutual recognition.
Below them shone the lamps in an oval courtyard, where sanded paths
wound about slender marble pillars, amid stunted and clipped fig
trees, where clambering eglantine masked the stone pedestals on which
the electric lights glowed, all caught in the embrace of a peristyle
whose seats also looked off to the glinting waters of the river. They
could see the outstretched roofs of the many mansions of Carrara and
flaring on the horizon many steeply rising flames of light, issuing
from the monuments in Van Cortlandt Park, like sentinels, along the
ridgy back of the Mosholu.
“The world is a task master that it is hard to please.” It was the
Mayor’s voice, and the accusing tone seemed sad with some ulterior
meaning; he continued: “I mean in all our vocations we fail to meet
expectations.”
“Because the world expects too much; it is always looking for an idol
and an ideal. We all do. It is better to be disappointed in what we
do than to be destitute of ambitions. But the end of the matter is
that this world is insufficient. It is provisional, probational, and
the prelude of completer states.
“_The flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow dies
All that we wish to stay
Tempts and then flies.
What is this world’s delight?
Lightning that mocks the night,
Brief even as bright._”
“Those are Shelley’s words,” answered the Mayor, “I know them; but
they are vitiated by an obliquity of thought. The flower that fades,
the fleeting pleasure, the thought—quick lightning, are beautiful,
_because_ they vanish, because they are the transports of a moment,
because they are figures in the shimmering flying weave of things.
It is the marvel of change that helps us to live, and it is a
progressive change, too, an eternally upward march. The vanished
delights are only replaced by better ones.”
“_So on our heels a fresh perfection treads,
A power more strong in beauty, born of us
And fated to excel us, as we pass
In glory that old darkness._
“And _with_ us, as eternal souls, the fresh perfection is Paradise or
Heaven.” Again there was a silence, and the Mayor’s face was turned
to the speaker gazing so intently with perhaps, could it have been
narrowly determined, a haunting wonder and amused delight, as if he
prized in her the power of faith, so dead in his own heart. But he
intended to concede nothing:
“The thought is pleasant, but is it true? Is it not wiser to submit
to our limitations, to bow the neck to the necessitous hardship of
our place and not too fondly dwell in dreams?”
“Our limitations are made by ourselves. There can be no necessary
limit to belief, if we will but listen.”
“Listen—listen to what?” the voice trembled a little.
“Well I will not say the Church—the Revelation—but listen to the
desires within us. Surely it is as legitimate to believe our hopes as
to set up our Despair, and worship that.”
“No,” answered the Mayor, “not Despair but Negation—and not set up as
an idol, but like an inner controlling voice—like our conscience, if
you will—whispering warnings against intoxicating fancies, against
too warm and vaporous delusions, that will make us incapable and
foolish. Let the Promethean age come, but it can only come by effort,
work, thought, not by submission to veiled and luxurious promises.”
The voice was not hard or strained, nor was there any suspicion
of defiance in it; if anything, there was in it, to the ears of
the listener—and the listener was alert, eager, yearning even—an
admonition of gentle remonstrance only.
“If Christianity does not mean effort, work, thought, I do not know
what it means; and the Promethean age, will it come on this earth,
and as we are? Can it? Does it help to murmur with the Cenci:
“_If there should be
No God, no heaven, no earth, in the void world,
The wide grey lampless deep unpeopled world?_
And are dreams so useless? In what harbor of refuge do we crave to
enter when we sleep, if it is not pleasant dreams. And is not even
sleep itself necessary? If doubt and angry questionings are to fill
our lives with turmoil, can we work at all? There must be a foothold
somewhere, somehow, a ground level where our new ambitions rise.”
“Hardly,” the Mayor answered quickly, and his voice rose with that
peculiar sweetness of tone that fell on Helen Lorimer’s ears like
music, “Work for work’s sake is ground enough; bettering conditions,
giving beauty to the world, hastening the conquest of nature,
mastering power, dispelling disease, winning knowledge, conquering
the silence and oppression of things, rising eternally to far off
dispensations of greater and greater power. Man’s ultimatum is the
world and what he can make of _it_, and _himself_.
“_The lightning is his slave; heavens utmost deep
Gives up her stars, and like a flock of sheep
They pass before his eye, are numbered, and roll on!
The tempest is his steed, he strides the air;
And the abyss shouts from her depth laid bare,
Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man unveils me; I have none._”
“And yet—there remains Death. Will you conquer Him? And Age and
Sorrow? Does Knowledge and Power mean everything, do they mean
anything without companionship and Love?” Miss Lorimer stopped,
checked by a sudden embarrassment, her words carried meanings which
stirred her blood, and her instinct told her too acutely it was for
both of them dangerous going—just there; the word she had uttered
seemed even then to her like some torch which, inconsiderately
dropped, lights the eager dry prairies when the wind is rising.
Perhaps it was such; her own heart leaped strangely, an unwonted
warmth flowed stealthily yet urgently through her body, and the
whispering summer night bore to her ears its undulous distant sounds,
as if they were faintly calling to her to follow the new summons of
a new joy, opening before her, rich, splendid, and fathomless. She
leaned on the balustrade of the balcony, and watched the sky, shamed
by some untoward concussion of her being, unknown before, discovered
in this last instant, as when a man walking in the night enters a
disk of illumination which reveals himself and his position, and
startled, he finds another step reaches a brink of peril.
And what were these serious words that came now to her ears, moving
faster and faster, breathed, she seemed to feel, almost upon her
cheeks, eloquent with conviction; prayers they were—and such
prayers!—not as she knew them in her Church—tapers of devotion—but
prayers from an adoring man’s heart, that smote her own as caresses;
how willingly she let them enter there, where she stored all her
aspirations, secret treasures of affection, and her own best
resolves!
And now when they were in, how proud they grew, holding that inner
citadel of her own as theirs and staunchly possessing the whole
place! But this was surrender—she must eject them, push them out from
those uninvaded precincts, and close the doors again, or else—Oh how
desolating it was to have those wicked prayers within, believing
themselves welcome, and acting so importunately the parts of welcomed
guests. Oh for some stalwart hand to rid her of them, to send them
backward, stumbling backward, unrewarded, repelled, killed—No! No!
not killed; that were inhuman; just ordered off and out Forever?
Ah, well, let them stand off awhile. This haste is insolence, worse,
ingratitude; let these clustering rampant prayers become more
formal, more respectful, less rapacious with their stormy signals
and provocations. There must be decorum, a slow approach, the signs
of parley and convention. These prayers are blatant, blustering,
overbearing; they have entered an open door and—now—once in, they
will not out. Oh, God!—they are indeed too cruel!
Her Pride, that glorious mistress of her heart tells them to
leave, and they do not stir. They taunt her, they seize her, tie
her chaste hands—Merciful Heavens must it be so!—and throw _her_
out, and then—these perfidious demons!—smile at their conquest,
dry their beseeching eyes, and inhabit unmoved that dear shrine of
her soul wherein she thought no steps should ever tread but those
of Memory and Faith. Has it been made so rare and lovely for this
profanation—Oh, Mother of Sorrows hear;—and Helen Lorimer’s head sank
upon her arms, on the stone railing, and she sobbed, and in her sobs
the prayers still repeated themselves, and now stood like pitiful
supplicants—no longer bold or careless—and she put her hands forward
to them, and pressed them to her breast. Suddenly they all were dear
to her; she would not have lost one! No, they should not go; the
place was theirs; her heart received them, and kept them. And these
were the prayers.
“Yes, Love and Companionship, those accompany the best effort. They
are the linked comrades who hold up the arms while the battle rages,
who press to our lips the chalice which feeds our strength, who
fold us in their arms when the victory is won and who bring sleep
to our wearied brain. Oh, have I not yearned for that shelter and
encouragement! But neither Church nor Religion could bring to me that
aid. Pardon me Miss Lorimer, but the empty voices of a Church, or the
old reiterations of a creed are not the Love nor the Companionship a
man craves; Oh, something much nearer the inmost inscrutable needs of
his nature. Surely your own heart tells you and if—no restraint can
withhold this confession Miss Lorimer—I tell you now that I love you,
that I have with a fixed unswerving, tireless determination, meant
to say this all to you. It is an effrontery for me to speak now,
but you touched the overflowing stream of feeling, and it has burst
its bounds. Do not disdain me for it; do not let this error, this
rashness, foil or hurt me in your approval.
“I beg you to listen, to let the open chance be mine to win you, to
forgive this advantage of opportunity I have taken. Hear my promises.
I will not molest you; I will prove my love; I will be patient if you
can be. You turn away. Are you astonished? Do you feel resentment? Oh
say that you do not. Say that I am forgiven, that you will let me see
you often. It is a priceless boon for me to know you. The thought of
you has grown daily in my mind, until it has become an overmastering
desire and adoration. I have lived a barren and struggling life among
men, cut off by the relentless pressure of work from the priceless
joys of womanly culture. And yet I do not know that matters now. I
rejoice that it has been so, for as you have entered my life you come
with all the more abounding blessedness of promises, I have until
this moment, never dreamed of.
“Speak to me one word—just this—that this sudden loss of restraint
is forgiven. I do not know, I did not dream—that I would be so
hopelessly swept off my feet. I meant no harm, by every throb of my
poor bewildered heart I meant none. Miss Lorimer, I love you, and
though that love were born but yesterday, a century would not make it
greater. Do you despise me because I cannot believe as you believe?
I know that you honor candor, just common honesty—no soul so upright
as yours could do otherwise—and I have been candid. Does that seem
wrong? I am willing to learn all things. Let me learn from you.”
The head of the sobbing woman before him was raised, its tears were
wiped away and the figure that bore it rose, and then the eyes—those
wondrous, burning, searching, welcoming eyes—were turned to his, and
on that face was born—as if from the enchantment of his own words—a
smile, and somehow the young man knew that it was the gesture of
permission, and he bowed before the splendor of that beauty, while
his heart stood still, engulfed in its own unutterable hopes.