Edith's day had been as busy as Jack's, notwithstanding she had put
aside several things that demanded her attention. She denied herself
the morning attendance on the Literature Class that was raking over the
eighteenth century. This week Swift was to be arraigned. The last time
when Edith was present it was Steele. The judgment, on the whole, had
been favorable, and there had been a little stir of tenderness among the
bonnets over Thackeray's comments on the Christian soldier. It seemed
to bring him near to them. “Poor Dick Steele!” said the essayist. Edith
declared afterwards that the large woman who sat next to her, Mrs.
Jerry Hollowell, whispered to her that she always thought his name
was Bessemer; but this was, no doubt, a pleasantry. It was a beautiful
essay, and so stimulating! And then there was bouillon, and time to look
about at the toilets. Poor Steele, it would have cheered his life
to know that a century after his death so many beautiful women, so
exquisitely dressed, would have been concerning themselves about him.
The function lasted two hours. Edith made a little calculation. In five
minutes she could have got from the encyclopaedia all the facts in the
essay, and while her maid was doing her hair she could have read five
times as much of Steele as the essayist read. And, somehow, she was not
stimulated, for the impression seemed to prevail that now Steele was
disposed of. And she had her doubts whether literature would, after all,
prove to be a permanent social distraction. But Edith may have been too
severe in her judgment. There was probably not a woman in the class that
day who did not go away with the knowledge that Steele was an author,
and that he lived in the eighteenth century. The hope for the country is
in the diffusion of knowledge.
Leaving the class to take care of Swift, Edith went to the managers'
meeting at the Women's Hospital, where there was much to do of very
practical work, pitiful cases of women and children suffering through no
fault of their own, and money more difficult to raise than sympathy. The
meeting took time and thought. Dismissing her carriage, and relying on
elevated and surface cars, Edith then took a turn on the East Side, in
company with a dispensary physician whose daily duty called her into
the worst parts of the town. She had a habit of these tours before her
marriage, and, though they were discouragingly small in direct results,
she gained a knowledge of city life that was of immense service in her
general charity work. Jack had suggested the danger of these excursions,
but she had told him that a woman was less liable to insult in the East
Side than in Fifth Avenue, especially at twilight, not because the East
Side was a nice quarter of the city, but because it was accustomed to
see women who minded their own business go about unattended, and the
prowlers had not the habit of going there. She could even relate cases
of chivalrous protection of “ladies” in some of the worst streets.
What Edith saw this day, open to be seen, was not so much sin as
ignorance of how to live, squalor, filthy surroundings acquiesced in
as the natural order, wonderful patience in suffering and deprivation,
incapacity, ill-paid labor, the kindest spirit of sympathy and
helpfulness of the poor for each other. Perhaps that which made the
deepest impression on her was the fact that such conditions of living
could seem natural to those in them, and that they could get so much
enjoyment of life in situations that would have been simple misery to
her.
The visitors were in a foreign city. The shop signs were in foreign
tongues; in some streets all Hebrew. On chance news-stands were
displayed newspapers in Russian, Bohemian, Arabic, Italian, Hebrew,
Polish, German-none in English. The theatre bills were in Hebrew or
other unreadable type. The sidewalks and the streets swarmed with noisy
dealers in every sort of second-hand merchandise--vegetables that had
seen a better day, fish in shoals. It was not easy to make one's way
through the stands and push-carts and the noisy dickering buyers and
sellers, who haggled over trifles and chaffed good-naturedly and were
strictly intent on their own affairs. No part of the town is more
crowded or more industrious. If youth is the hope of the country, the
sight was encouraging, for children were in the gutters, on the house
steps, at all the windows. The houses seemed bursting with humanity, and
in nearly every room of the packed tenements, whether the inmates
were sick or hungry, some sort of industry was carried on. In the damp
basements were junk-dealers, rag-pickers, goose-pickers. In one noisome
cellar, off an alley, among those sorting rags, was an old woman of
eighty-two, who could reply to questions only in a jargon, too proud
to beg, clinging to life, earning a few cents a day in this foul
occupation. But life is sweet even with poverty and rheumatism and
eighty years. Did her dull eyes, turning inward, see the Carpathian
Hills, a free girlhood in village drudgery and village sports, then a
romance of love, children, hard work, discontent, emigration to a New
World of promise? And now a cellar by day, the occupation of cutting
rags for carpets, and at night a corner in a close and crowded room on a
flock bed not fit for a dog. And this was a woman's life.
Picturesque foreign women going about with shawls over their heads
and usually a bit of bright color somewhere, children at their games,
hawkers loudly crying their stale wares, the click of sewing-machines
heard through a broken window, everywhere animation, life, exchange
of rough or kindly banter. Was it altogether so melancholy as it might
seem? Not everybody was hopelessly poor, for here were lawyers' signs
and doctors' signs--doctors in whom the inhabitants had confidence
because they charged all they could get for their services--and thriving
pawnbrokers' shops. There were parish schools also--perhaps others; and
off some dark alley, in a room on the ground-floor, could be heard
the strident noise of education going on in high-voiced study and
recitation. Nor were amusements lacking--notices of balls, dancing this
evening, and ten-cent shows in palaces of legerdemain and deformity.
It was a relenting day in March; patches of blue sky overhead, and the
sun had some quality in its shining. The children and the caged birds
at the open windows felt it-and there were notes of music here and there
above the traffic and the clamor. Turning down a narrow alley, with a
gutter in the centre, attracted by festive sounds, the visitors came
into a small stone-paved court with a hydrant in the centre surrounded
by tall tenement-houses, in the windows of which were stuffed the
garments that would no longer hold together to adorn the person. Here an
Italian girl and boy, with a guitar and violin, were recalling la bella
Napoli, and a couple of pretty girls from the court were footing it as
merrily as if it were the grape harvest. A woman opened a lower room
door and sharply called to one of the dancing girls to come in, when
Edith and the doctor appeared at the bottom of the alley, but her tone
changed when she recognized the doctor, and she said, by way of apology,
that she didn't like her daughter to dance before strangers. So
the music and the dance went on, even little dots of girls and boys
shuffling about in a stiff-legged fashion, with applause from all
the windows, and at last a largesse of pennies--as many as five
altogether--for the musicians. And the sun fell lovingly upon the pretty
scene.
But then there were the sweaters' dens, and the private rooms where half
a dozen pale-faced tailors stitched and pressed fourteen and sometimes
sixteen hours a day, stifling rooms, smelling of the hot goose and
steaming cloth, rooms where they worked, where the cooking was done,
where they ate, and late at night, when overpowered with weariness,
lay down to sleep. Struggle for life everywhere, and perhaps no more
discontent and heart-burning and certainly less ennui than in the
palaces on the avenues.
The residence of Karl Mulhaus, one of the doctor's patients, was typical
of the homes of the better class of poor. The apartment fronted on a
small and not too cleanly court, and was in the third story. As Edith
mounted the narrow and dark stairways she saw the plan of the house.
Four apartments opened upon each landing, in which was the common
hydrant and sink. The Mulhaus apartment consisted of a room large enough
to contain a bed, a cook-stove, a bureau, a rocking-chair, and two
other chairs, and it had two small windows, which would have more freely
admitted the southern sun if they had been washed, and a room adjoining,
dark, and nearly filled by a big bed. On the walls of the living room
were hung highly colored advertising chromos of steamships and palaces
of industry, and on the bureau Edith noticed two illustrated newspapers
of the last year, a patent-medicine almanac, and a volume of Schiller.
The bureau also held Mr. Mulhaus's bottles of medicine, a comb which
needed a dentist, and a broken hair-brush. What gave the room, however,
a cheerful aspect were some pots of plants on the window-ledges, and
half a dozen canary-bird cages hung wherever there was room for them.
None of the family happened to be at home except Mr. Mulhaus, who
occupied the rocking-chair, and two children, a girl of four years and a
boy of eight, who were on the floor playing “store” with some blocks
of wood, a few tacks, some lumps of coal, some scraps of paper, and
a tangle of twine. In their prattle they spoke, the English they had
learned from their brother who was in a store.
“I feel some better today,” said Mr. Mulhaus, brightening up as the
visitors entered, “but the cough hangs on. It's three months since
this weather that I haven't been out, but the birds are a good deal
of company.” He spoke in German, and with effort. He was very thin and
sallow, and his large feverish eyes added to the pitiful look of his
refined face. The doctor explained to Edith that he had been getting
fair wages in a type-foundry until he had become too weak to go any
longer to the shop.
It was rather hard to have to sit there all day, he explained to the
doctor, but they were getting along. Mrs. Mulhaus had got a job of
cleaning that day; that would be fifty cents. Ally--she was twelve--was
learning to sew. That was her afternoon to go to the College Settlement.
Jimmy, fourteen, had got a place in a store, and earned two dollars a
week.
“And Vicky?” asked the doctor.
“Oh, Vicky,” piped up the eight-year-old boy. “Vicky's up to the
'stution”--the hospital was probably the institution referred to--“ever
so long now. I seen her there, me and Jim did. Such a bootifer place!
'Nd chicken!” he added. “Sis got hurt by a cart.”
Vicky was seventeen, and had been in a fancy store.
“Yes,” said Mulhaus, in reply to a question, “it pays pretty well
raising canaries, when they turn out singers. I made fifteen dollars
last year. I hain't sold much lately. Seems 's if people stopped wanting
'em such weather. I guess it 'll be better in the spring.”
“No doubt it will be better for the poor fellow himself before spring,”
said the doctor as they made their way down the dirty stairways. “Now
I'll show you one of my favorites.”
They turned into a broader street, one of the busy avenues, and passing
under an archway between two tall buildings, entered a court of back
buildings. In the third story back lived Aunt Margaret. The room was
scarcely as big as a ship's cabin, and its one window gave little light,
for it opened upon a narrow well of high brick walls. In the only chair
Aunt Margaret was seated close to the window. In front of her was a
small work-table, with a kerosene lamp on it, but the side of the
room towards which she looked was quite occupied by a narrow
couch--ridiculously narrow, for Aunt Margaret was very stout. There was
a thin chest of drawers on the other side, and the small coal stove that
stood in the centre so nearly filled the remaining space that the two
visitors were one too many.
“Oh, come in, come in,” said the old lady, cheerfully, when the door
opened. “I'm glad to see you.”
“And how goes it?” asked the doctor.
“First rate. I'm coming on, doctor. Work's been pretty slack for two
weeks now, but yesterday I got work for two days. I guess it will be
better now.”
The work was finishing pantaloons. It used to be a good business before
there was so much cutting in.
“I used to get fifteen cents a pair, then ten; now they don't pay but
five. Yes, the shop furnishes the thread.”
“And how many pairs can you finish in a day?” asked Edith.
“Three--three pairs, to do 'em nice--and they are very particular--if I
work from six in the morning till twelve at night. I could do more, but
my sight ain't what it used to be, and I've broken my specs.”
“So you earn fifteen cents a day?”
“When I've the luck to get work, my lady. Sometimes there isn't any. And
things cost so much. The rent is the worst.”
It appeared that the rent was two dollars and a half a month. That must
be paid, at any rate. Edith made a little calculation that on a flush
average of ninety cents a week earned, and allowing so many cents for
coal and so many cents for oil, the margin for bread and tea must be
small for the month. She usually bought three cents' worth of tea at a
time.
“It is kinder close,” said the old lady, with a smile. “The worst is,
my feet hurt me so I can't stir out. But the neighbors is real kind. The
little boy next room goes over to the shop and fetches my pantaloons and
takes 'em back. I can get along if it don't come slack again.”
Sitting all day by that dim window, half the night stitching by a
kerosene lamp; lying for six hours on that narrow couch! How to account
for this old soul's Christian resignation and cheerfulness! “For,” said
the doctor, “she has seen better days; she has moved in high society;
her husband, who died twenty years ago, was a policeman. What the
old lady is doing is fighting for her independence. She has only one
fear--the almshouse.”
It was with such scenes as these in her eyes that Edith went to her
dressing-room to make her toilet for the Henderson dinner.
V
It was the first time they had dined with the Hendersons. It was Jack's
doings. “Certainly, if you wish it,” Edith had said when the invitation
came. The unmentioned fact was that Jack had taken a little flier in
Oshkosh, and a hint from Henderson one evening at the Union, when the
venture looked squally, had let him out of a heavy loss into a small
profit, and Jack felt grateful.
“I wonder how Henderson came to do it?” Jack was querying, as he and old
Fairfax sipped their five-o'clock “Manhattan.”
“Oh, Henderson likes to do a good-natured thing still, now and then. Do
you know his wife?”
“No. Who was she?”
“Why, old Eschelle's daughter, Carmen; of course you wouldn't know; that
was ten years ago. There was a good deal of talk about it at the time.”
“How?”
“Some said they'd been good friends before Mrs. Henderson's death.”
“Then Carmen, as you call her, wasn't the first?”
“No, but she was an easy second. She's a social climber; bound to get
there from the start.”
“Is she pretty?”
“Devilish. She's a little thing. I saw her once at Homburg, on the
promenade with her mother.
“The kind of sweet blonde, I said to myself, that would mix a man up in
a duel before he knew where he was.”
“She must be interesting.”
“She was always clever, and she knows enough to play a straight game and
when to propitiate. I'll bet a five she tells Henderson whom to be good
to when the chance offers.”
“Then her influence on him is good?”
“My dear sir, she gets what she wants, and Henderson is going to the...
well, look at the lines in his face. I've known Henderson since he came
fresh into the Street. He'd rarely knife a friend when his first wife
was living. Now, when you see the old frank smile on his face, it's put
on.”
It was half-past eight when Mr. Henderson with Mrs. Delancy on his
arm led the way to the diningroom. The procession was closed by Mrs.
Henderson and Mr. Delancy. The Van Dams were there, and Mrs. Chesney
and the Chesney girls, and Miss Tavish, who sat on Jack's right, but
the rest of the guests were unknown to Jack, except by name. There was
a strong dash of the Street in the mixture, and although the Street
was tabooed in the talk, there was such an emanation of aggressive
prosperity at the table that Jack said afterwards that he felt as if he
had been at a meeting of the board.
If Jack had known the house ten years ago, he would have noticed certain
subtle changes in it, rather in the atmosphere than in many alterations.
The newness and the glitter of cost had worn off. It might still be
called a palace, but the city had now a dozen handsomer houses, and
Carmen's idea, as she expressed it, was to make this more like a home.
She had made it like herself. There were pictures on the walls that
would not have hung there in the late Mrs. Henderson's time; and the
prevailing air was that of refined sensuousness. Life, she said, was
her idea, life in its utmost expression, untrammeled, and yes, a little
Greek. Freedom was perhaps the word, and yet her latest notion was
simplicity. The dinner was simple. Her dress was exceedingly simple,
save that it had in it somewhere a touch of audacity, revealing in a
flash of invitation the hidden nature of the woman. She knew herself
better than any one knew her, except Henderson, and even he was forced
to laugh when she travestied Browning in saying that she had one
soul-side to face the world with, one to show the man she loved, and
she declared he was downright coarse when on going out of the door he
muttered, “But it needn't be the seamy side.” The reported remark of
some one who had seen her at church that she looked like a nun made
her smile, but she broke into a silvery laugh when she head Van Dam's
comment on it, “Yes, a devil of a nun.”
The library was as cozy as ever, but did not appear to be used much as
a library. Henderson, indeed, had no time to add to his collection or
enjoy it. Most of the books strewn on the tables were French novels or
such American tales as had the cachet of social riskiness. But Carmen
liked the room above all others. She enjoyed her cigarette there, and
had a fancy for pouring her five-o'clock tea in its shelter. Books
which had all sorts of things in them gave somehow an unconventional
atmosphere to the place, and one could say things there that one
couldn't say in a drawing-room.
Henderson himself, it must be confessed, had grown stout in the ten
years, and puffy under the eyes. There were lines of irritation in his
face and lines of weariness. He had not kept the freshness of youth so
well as Carmen, perhaps because of his New England conscience. To his
guest he was courteous, seemed to be making an effort to be so,
and listened with well-assumed interest to the story of her day's
pilgrimage. At length he said, with a smile, “Life seems to interest
you, Mrs. Delancy.”
“Yes, indeed,” said Edith, looking up brightly; “doesn't it you?”
“Why, yes; not life exactly, but things, doing things--conflict.”
“Yes, I can understand that. There is so much to be done for everybody.”
Henderson looked amused. “You know in the city the gospel is that
everybody is to be done.”
“Well,” said Edith, not to be diverted, “but, Mr. Henderson, what is it
all for--this conflict? Perhaps, however, you are fighting the devil?”
“Yes, that's it; the devil is usually the other fellow. But, Mrs.
Delancy,” added Henderson, with an accent of seriousness, “I don't know
what it's all for. I doubt if there is much in it.”
“And yet the world credits you with finding a great deal in it.”
“The world is generally wrong. Do you understand poker, Mrs. Delancy?
No! Of course you do not. But the interest of the game isn't so much in
the cards as in the men.”
“I thought it was the stakes.”
“Perhaps so. But you want to win for the sake of winning. If I gambled
it would be a question of nerve. I suppose that which we all enjoy is
the exercise of skill in winning.”
“And not for the sake of doing anything--just winning? Don't you get
tired of that?” asked Edith, quite simply.
There was something in Edith's sincerity, in her fresh enthusiasm about
life, that appeared to strike a reminiscent note in Henderson. Perhaps
he remembered another face as sweet as hers, and ideals, faint and long
ago, that were once mixed with his ideas of success. At any rate, it was
with an accent of increased deference, and with a look she had not seen
in his face before, that he said:
“People get tired of everything. I'm not sure but it would interest me
to see for a minute how the world looks through your eyes.” And then he
added, in a different tone, “As to your East Side, Mrs. Henderson tried
that some years ago.”
“Wasn't she interested?”
“Oh, very much. For a time. But she said there was too much of it.” And
Edith could detect no tone of sarcasm in the remark.
Down at the other end of the table, matters were going very smoothly.
Jack was charmed with his hostess. That clever woman had felt her way
along from the heresy trial, through Tuxedo and the Independent Theatre
and the Horse Show, until they were launched in a perfectly free
conversation, and Carmen knew that she hadn't to look out for thin ice.
“Were you thinking of going on to the Conventional Club tonight, Mr.
Delancy?” she was saying.
“I don't belong,” said Jack. “Mrs. Delancy said she didn't care for it.”
“Oh, I don't care for it, for myself,” replied Carmen.
“I do,” struck in Miss Tavish. “It's awfully nice.”
“Yes, it does seem to fill a want. Why, what do you do with your
evenings, Mr. Delancy?”
“Well, here's one of them.”
“Yes, I know, but I mean between twelve o'clock and bedtime.”
“Oh,” said Jack, laughing out loud, “I go to bed--sometimes.”
“Yes, 'there's always that. But you want some place to go to after the
theatres and the dinners; after the other places are shut up you want to
go somewhere and be amused.”
“Yes,” said Jack, falling in, “it is a fact that there are not many
places of amusement for the rich; I understand. After the theatres you
want to be amused. This Conventional Club is--”
“I tell you what it is. It's a sort of Midnight Mission for the rich.
They never have had anything of the kind in the city.”
“And it's very nice,” said Miss Tavish, demurely.
“The performers are selected. You can see things there that you want
to see at other places to which you can't go. And everybody you know is
there.”
“Oh, I see,” said Jack. “It's what the Independent Theatre is trying to
do, and what all the theatrical people say needs to be done, to elevate
the character of the audiences, and then the managers can give better
plays.”
“That's just it. We want to elevate the stage,” Carmen explained.
“But,” continued Jack, “it seems to me that now the audience is select
and elevated, it wants to see the same sort of things it liked to see
before it was elevated.”
“You may laugh, Mr. Delancy,” replied Carmen, throwing an earnest
simplicity into her eyes, “but why shouldn't women know what is going on
as well as men?”
“And why,” Miss Tavish asked, “will the serpentine dances and the London
topical songs do any more harm to women than to men?”
“And besides, Mr. Delancy,” Carmen said, chiming in, “isn't it just as
proper that women should see women dance and throw somersaults on the
stage as that men should see them? And then, you know, women are such a
restraining influence.”
“I hadn't thought of that,” said Jack. “I thought the Conventional
was for the benefit of the audience, not for the salvation of the
performers.”
“It's both. It's life. Don't you think women ought to know life? How are
they to take their place in the world unless they know life as men know
it?”
“I'm sure I don't know whose place they are to take, the serpentine
dancer's or mine,” said Jack, as if he were studying a problem. “How
does your experiment get on, Miss Tavish?”
Carmen looked up quickly.
“Oh, I haven't any experiment,” said Miss Tavish, shaking her head.
“It's just Mr. Delancy's nonsense.”
“I wish I had an experiment. There is so little for women to do. I wish
I knew what was right.” And Carmen looked mournfully demure, as if life,
after all, were a serious thing with her.
“Whatever Mrs. Henderson does is sure to be right,” said Jack,
gallantly.
Carmen shot at him a quick sympathetic glance, tempered by a grateful
smile. “There are so many points of view.”
Jack felt the force of the remark as he did the revealing glance. And he
had a swift vision of Miss Tavish leading him a serpentine dance, and of
Carmen sweetly beckoning him to a pleasant point of view. After all it
doesn't much matter. Everything is in the point of view.
After dinner and cigars and cigarettes in the library, the talk dragged
a little in duets. The dinner had been charming, the house was lovely,
the company was most agreeable. All said that. It had been so somewhere
else the night before that, and would be the next night. And the ennui
of it all! No one expressed it, but Henderson could not help looking it,
and Carmen saw it. That charming hostess had been devoting herself to
Edith since dinner. She was so full of sympathy with the East-Side work,
asked a hundred questions about it, and declared that she must take it
up again. She would order a cage of canaries from that poor German for
her kitchen. It was such a beautiful idea. But Edith did not believe in
her one bit. She told Jack afterwards that “Mrs. Henderson cares no more
for the poor of New York than she does for--”
“Henderson?” suggested Jack.
“Oh, I don't know anything about that. Henderson has only one idea--to
get the better of everybody, and be the money king of New York. But I
should not wonder if he had once a soft spot in his heart. He is better
than she is.”
It was still early, lacked half an hour of midnight, and the night was
before them. Some one proposed the Conventional. “Yes,” said Carmen;
“all come to our box.” The Van Dams would go, Miss Tavish, the Chesneys;
the suggestion was a relief to everybody. Only Mr. Henderson pleaded
important papers that must have his attention that night. Edith said
that she was too tired, but that her desertion must not break up the
party.
“Then you will excuse me also,” said Jack, a little shade of
disappointment in his face.
“No, no,” said Edith, quickly; “you can drop me on the way. Go, by all
means, Jack.”
“Do you really want me to go, dear?” said Jack, aside.
“Why of course; I want you to be happy.”
And Jack recalled the loving look that accompanied these words, later
on, as he sat in the Henderson box at the Conventional, between Carmen
and Miss Tavish, and saw, through the slight haze of smoke, beyond the
orchestra, the praiseworthy efforts of the Montana Kicker, who had
just returned with the imprimatur of Paris, to relieve the ennui of the
modern world.
The complex affair we call the world requires a great variety of people
to keep it going. At one o'clock in the morning Carmen and our friend
Mr. Delancy and Miss Tavish were doing their part. Edith lay awake
listening for Jack's return. And in an alley off Rivington Street a
young girl, pretty once, unknown to fortune but not to fame, was about
to render the last service she could to the world by leaving it.
The impartial historian scarcely knows how to distribute his pathos. By
the electric light (and that is the modern light) gayety is almost as
pathetic as suffering. Before the Montana girl hit upon the happy device
that gave her notoriety, her feet, whose every twinkle now was worth a
gold eagle, had trod a thorny path. There was a fortune now in the whirl
of her illusory robes, but any day--such are the whims of fashion--she
might be wandering again, sick at heart, about the great city, knocking
at the side doors of variety shows for any engagement that would give
her a pittance of a few dollars a week. How long had Carmen waited on
the social outskirts; and now she had come into her kingdom, was she
anything but a tinsel queen? Even Henderson, the great Henderson, did
the friends of his youth respect him? had he public esteem? Carmen used
to cut out the newspaper paragraphs that extolled Henderson's domestic
virtue and his generosity to his family, and show them to her lord, with
a queer smile on her face. Miss Tavish, in the nervous consciousness of
fleeting years, was she not still waiting, dashing here and there like a
bird in a net for the sort of freedom, audacious as she was, that seemed
denied her? She was still beautiful, everybody said, and she was sought
and flattered, because she was always merry and good-natured. Why should
Van Dam, speaking of women, say that there were horses that had been set
up, and checked up and trained, that held their heads in an aristocratic
fashion, moved elegantly, and showed style, long after the spirit had
gone out of them? And Jack himself, happily married, with a comfortable
income, why was life getting flat to him? What sort of career was it
that needed the aid of Carmen and the serpentine dancer? And why not,
since it is absolutely necessary that the world should be amused?
We are in no other world when we enter the mean tenement in the alley
off Rivington Street. Here also is the life of the town. The room is
small, but it contains a cook-stove, a chest of drawers, a small table,
a couple of chairs, and two narrow beds. On the top of the chest are
a looking-glass, some toilet articles, and bottles of medicine. The
cracked walls are bare and not clean. In one of the beds are two
children, sleeping soundly, and on the foot of it is a middle-aged
woman, in a soiled woolen gown with a thin figured shawl drawn about her
shoulders, a dirty cap half concealing her frowzy hair; she looks tired
and worn and sleepy. On the other bed lies a girl of twenty years, a
woman in experience. The kerosene lamp on the stand at the head of the
bed casts a spectral light on her flushed face, and the thin arms that
are restlessly thrown outside the cover. By the bedside sits the doctor,
patient, silent, and watchful. The doctor puts her hand caressingly
on that of the girl. It is hot and dry. The girl opens her eyes with a
startled look, and says, feebly:
“Do you think he will come?”
“Yes, dear, presently. He never fails.”
The girl closed her eyes again, and there was silence. The dim rays of
the lamp, falling upon the doctor, revealed the figure of a woman of
less than medium size, perhaps of the age of thirty or more, a plain
little body, you would have said, who paid the slightest possible
attention to her dress, and when she went about the city was not to be
distinguished from a working-woman. Her friends, indeed, said that she
had not the least care for her personal appearance, and unless she was
watched, she was sure to go out in her shabbiest gown and most battered
hat. She wore tonight a brown ulster and a nondescript black bonnet
drawn close down on her head and tied with black strings. In her lap
lay her leathern bag, which she usually carried under her arm, that
contained medicines, lint, bandages, smelling-salts, a vial of ammonia,
and so on; to her patients it was a sort of conjurer's bag, out of which
she could produce anything that an emergency called for.
Dr. Leigh was not in the least nervous or excited. Indeed, an artist
would not have painted her as a rapt angelic visitant to this abode of
poverty. This contact with poverty and coming death was quite in her
ordinary experience. It would never have occurred to her that she was
doing anything unusual, any more than it would have occurred to the
objects of her ministrations to overwhelm her with thanks. They trusted
her, that was all. They met her always with a pleasant recognition. She
belonged perhaps to their world. Perhaps they would have said that “Dr.
Leigh don't handsome much,” but their idea was that her face was good.
That was what anybody would have said who saw her tonight, “She has such
a good face;” the face of a woman who knew the world, and perhaps was
not very sanguine about it, had few illusions and few antipathies, but
accepted it, and tried in her humble way to alleviate its hardships,
without any consciousness of having a mission or making a sacrifice.
Dr. Leigh--Miss Ruth Leigh--was Edith's friend. She had not come from
the country with an exalted notion of being a worker among the poor
about whom so much was written; she had not even descended from some
high circle in the city into this world, moved by a restless enthusiasm
for humanity. She was a woman of the people, to adopt a popular phrase.
From her childhood she had known them, their wants, their sympathies,
their discouragements; and in her heart--though you would not discover
this till you had known her long and well--there was a burning sympathy
with them, a sympathy born in her, and not assumed for the sake of
having a career. It was this that had impelled her to get a medical
education, which she obtained by hard labor and self-denial. To her this
was not a means of livelihood, but simply that she might be of service
to those all about her who needed help more than she did. She didn't
believe in charity, this stout-hearted, clearheaded little woman; she
meant to make everybody pay for her medical services who could pay; but
somehow her practice was not lucrative, and the little salary she got
as a dispensary doctor melted away with scarcely any perceptible
improvement in her own wardrobe. Why, she needed nothing, going about as
she did.
She sat--now waiting for the end; and the good face, so full of sympathy
for the living, had no hope in it. Just another human being had come
to the end of her path--the end literally. It was so everyday. Somebody
came to the end, and there was nothing beyond. Only it was the end, and
that was peace. One o'clock--half-past one. The door opened softly. The
old woman rose from the foot of the bed with a start and a low “Herr!
gross Gott.” It was Father Damon. The girl opened her eyes with a
frightened look at first, and then an eager appeal. Dr. Leigh rose to
make room for him at the bedside. They bowed as he came forward, and
their eyes met. She shook her head. In her eyes was no expectation, no
hope. In his was the glow of faith. But the eyes of the girl rested upon
his face with a rapt expression. It was as if an angel had entered the
room.
Father Damon was a young man, not yet past thirty, slender, erect.
He had removed as he came in his broad-brimmed soft hat. The hair
was close-cut, but not tonsured. He wore a brown cassock, falling in
straight lines, and confined at the waist with a white cord. From
his neck depended from a gold chain a large gold cross. His face was
smooth-shaven, thin, intellectual, or rather spiritual; the nose long,
the mouth straight, the eyes deep gray, sometimes dreamy and puzzling,
again glowing with an inner fervor. A face of long vigils and the
schooled calmness of repressed energy. You would say a fanatic of God,
with a dash of self-consciousness. Dr. Leigh knew him well. They met
often on their diverse errands, and she liked, when she could, to go to
vespers in the little mission chapel of St. Anselm, where he ministered.
It was not the confessional that attracted her, that was sure; perhaps
not altogether the service, though that was soothing in certain moods;
but it was the noble personality of Father Damon. He was devoted to the
people as she was, he understood them; and for the moment their passion
of humanity assumed the same aspect, though she knew that what he saw,
or thought he saw, lay beyond her agnostic vision.
Father Damon was an Englishman, a member of a London Anglican order, who
had taken the three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, who had
been for some years in New York, and had finally come to live on the
East Side, where his work was. In a way he had identified himself with
the people; he attended their clubs; he was a Christian socialist; he
spoke on the inequalities of taxation; the strikers were pretty sure of
his sympathy; he argued the injustice of the present ownership of land.
Some said that he had joined a lodge of the Knights of Labor. Perhaps
it was these things, quite as much as his singleness of purpose and his
spiritual fervor, that drew Dr. Leigh to him with a feeling that verged
on devotion. The ladies up-town, at whose tables Father Damon was an
infrequent guest, were as fully in sympathy with this handsome and
aristocratic young priest, and thought it beautiful that he should
devote himself to the poor and the sinful; but they did not see why he
should adopt their views.
It was at the mission that Father Damon had first seen the girl. She had
ventured in not long ago at twilight, with her cough and her pale face,
in a silk gown and flower-garden of a hat, and crept into one of the
confessional boxes, and told him her story.
“Do you think, Father,” said the girl, looking up wistfully, “that I
can--can be forgiven?”
Father Damon looked down sadly, pitifully. “Yes, my daughter, if you
repent. It is all with our Father. He never refuses.”
He knelt down, with his cross in his hand, and in a low voice repeated
the prayer for the dying. As the sweet, thrilling voice went on in
supplication the girl's eyes closed again, and a sweet smile played
about her mouth; it was the innocent smile of the little girl long ago,
when she might have awakened in the morning and heard the singing of
birds at her window.
When Father Damon arose she seemed to be sleeping. They all stood in
silence for a moment.
“You will remain?” he asked the doctor.
“Yes,” she said, with the faintest wan smile on her face. “It is I, you
know, who have care of the body.”
At the door he turned and said, quite low, “Peace be to this house!”