“Her device, within a ring of clouds, a heart with shine about
it.”—BEN JONSON.
“But what do you do it for? You can’t help. You only harrow up your own
feelings.” It was Janet who spoke, perverse, unhappy, winsome Janet,
sitting in a tall, old-fashioned chair at the side of her little
tea-table.
“I suppose that it is better,” I answered slowly, “to have one’s
feelings harrowed up over other people than over one’s self.”
“That’s a very neat thrust,” said the girl. “Thank you. Do you know what
the Doctor says about all this reform-scheming and theorizing?”
“No.”
“That it is all ‘shoveling-fog.’ That is a ’longshore expression. Don’t
you like it?”
“Very much,” I said. “But doesn’t it suit as well any kind of talking,
even the discussion of the ‘Is-life-worth-living’ question?”
“You must have been doing some especially good deed,” said Janet,
leaning her pretty head against the back of her chair and looking at me
through half-shut eyes. “You are so disagreeable. There isn’t any soil
that philanthropy thrives in so well as in the ruins of the social and
domestic virtues.”
“Child,” I said, “I did not mean to be personal. Why don’t you stop
thinking, and try to find shoes and stockings for some of my poor
people?”
Quick tears sprang into her shining eyes.
“‘I sometimes think it were best just to let the Lord alone;
I am sure some people forget he was there before they came,’”
she quoted. “I do not know what the poor have done that I should descend
upon them as a last affliction. First, dirt; then a financial crisis and
no work; then hunger and cold; and then I. It is like the plagues in
Egypt.”
I leaned back in my chair, powerless. It was becoming evident to me that
no one could solve Janet’s problems for her.
“It would be cowardly,” she said. “Because I am unhappy, should I try to
work off my ill-humour upon the poor?”
“They might like to look at you,” I suggested.
She was making tea, and she stopped, holding a dainty cup in her right
hand, to look up at me. That face, whose expression changed so often,
baffled and fascinated me. The mouth curved often into cynical smiles,
but the eyes were the eyes of a dreamer. At times Janet seemed to me a
child. At times she bore the weary expression of one who has fought many
battles and has won but few.
“No,” she said. “I am one of the people whose agnosticism absolves them
from all action. You know the type. We find it difficult to get up in
the morning or to button our boots because we cannot comprehend the
infinite. Really, agnosticism makes a very soft down cushion on which to
recline at one’s ease.”
“Don’t you sometimes get tired of thrusting arrows into yourself?” I
asked. “It must be hard to be a St. Sebastian where you have to be
persecutor and martyr too.”
“Please don’t make epigrams,” said the girl. “It is a sign of
degeneracy. I am sorry to see you beginning to show traces of it.”
“I thought perhaps you would not understand me if I did not try to speak
in epigrams,” I answered meekly.
Janet rose from her chair and came over to stand at my side, brushing
back, with kindly fingers, a lock of hair that had escaped from under my
bonnet.
“But to go back to the question of good works,” she said. “It seems to
me that it is useless to try anything. Listen. When I was twelve years
old I wanted to do some work for the city charity organization.
“They sent me to take two aprons to a woman on Harrow Street. ‘It was
quite safe,’ they said. So I went down through the dirty street into an
inner court, and began to climb the stairs. It was perfectly dark; it
was unutterably filthy.
“The woman, I found, lived in the garret, and, after the last flight of
stairs, I had to climb a ladder to reach her. In the loft at the top of
the ladder I saw,—I shall never forget it!—a woman diseased, shrunken,
helpless. Half her face was withered and gone; she was cold, hungry,
dirty. Two miserable little girls were crawling around her, crying.
“And I stood there stupefied, unable to speak, unable to grasp all the
horror before me. I could do nothing for them. I only stared,
helplessly, and petted the little girls. Then I gave that bed-ridden
woman the two gingham aprons and came away.
“That scene made an impression upon me that I shall never lose. Since
then, all the charity work I have heard of has seemed as ironic as that.
Such misery is hopeless. Something deeper than human misdeeds must be
the cause. I cannot help it; I cannot help believing that we are the
sport of the gods, who sit behind the curtain and laugh at our hurt.”
In the pause that followed, Janet went to the window, forgetting to put
down the empty cup that she had taken from me.
Suddenly she turned to me, with her chin raised in defiance.
“Moreover,” she said slowly, “I don’t want to forget my own life
entirely in the lives of other people. I want it all, the pleasure and
the pain of it, the whole cup down to the dregs.”
There was nothing for me to say; I rose to go.
“What do you think of the Lad?” I asked.
The girl’s face brightened. “He is interesting,” she said. “He is so
different. It seems to me that he is the only one of us who is really
living. The rest of us are merely talking about it.”