Of all our protégés among the “People,” none interested us more than the
Tailoress. The discovery of interesting characters among the poor was
one of the rewards that we hoped for from our work.
The Tailoress was a tall, gaunt, strong-featured woman of forty, who
lived alone on the fifth floor of a Brand Street lodging-house. She
worked ten hours a day; at night she read. From the city library she had
obtained stray volumes of Browning and Ruskin and Carlyle. Her comments
on these books had marked individuality.
The Tailoress had been an ambitious country girl, and had come to the
city to work her way through sewing into an art-education. Once she had
succeeded in taking a six-weeks course in elementary drawing. The work
had been interrupted, but the Tailoress had not yet given up her hope.
That was the reason why, although she commanded comparatively good
wages, she lived up so many flights of stairs, and fared on porridge and
tea.
She had a peculiar face, with a long nose, and strong under-jaw. Her
skin was brown, despite her years of confinement in a shop, so brown
that her blue eyes looked paler than they really were. I liked to see
her pupils dilate when an idea came to her. They expanded, and her whole
face glowed with enthusiasm.
For the Tailoress had the soul of a poet. Through all her starved life
she had carefully saved up every semblance of beauty that had fallen to
her lot. In her room hung a Carlo Dolce Madonna, in a narrow
black-walnut frame, and an unmounted photograph of two Corregio cherubs
was pinned to the wall-paper. She owned a few books: a volume of
Longfellow, selections from Ruskin, and an Emerson Birthday Book. The
heavy underlining in these few volumes revealed an admiration deep and
uncritical.
“It looks,” said Janet, with mock gravity, when I told her about the
Tailoress, “as if a sphere of usefulness were going to be given me. May
I lead the Tailoress up from Carlo Dolce to a love for French
impressionism? I will take her to see the pictures of M. Puvis de
Chavannes.”
“If you choose,” I answered, “but leave her her books.”
“Nay,” said Janet, “I will take away her Longfellow and give her Amiel.
Shall the poor be shut off from the sources of our inspiration?”
The Tailoress was different from the other working-people that I knew.
Most of them were weighed down by a constant sense of wrong, but the
Tailoress never rebelled against the hardships of her lot. They seemed
to have no power over her. Perhaps she forgot them in her hunger and
thirst for beauty and knowledge.
I remember some of her remarks. Once, when some one was denouncing the
useless luxury of the lives of the rich, the Tailoress looked up
quickly.
“I don’t feel like that,” she said, in her deep, masculine voice. “Why
should we grudge them the beauty of their lives? God knows what is best.
I am glad that there are people in the world who can have the things
they want.”
We took her to the Art Museum, and she was as one possessed. I found her
in a room devoted to Greek sculpture, sitting alone and silent. She
rose, with the face of one greatly moved, and grasped my arm.
“What does it matter,” she said, “all the suffering and the lack, in a
world that has in it things like this?”
It was hard to induce her to come away. “It makes me so happy to stay
here,” she said. “It is full of beauty and of peace.”
Doubtless it was her longing for something else that kept her from
rising in her trade. After twenty-two years of work she was still a
vest-maker, never having shown sufficient ambition to try her skill as a
maker of coats.
Now a crisis came in her life. She went to hear the Altruist lecture,
and became his most ardent disciple. I think that he unlocked the gates
of Heaven to her. Through the glamour of his eloquence she caught sight
of the pinnacles and towers of the city of her dreams. Unconsciously she
adopted his opinions and his tastes. Cardinal Newman’s “Dream of
Gerontius” appeared among the books on her table, and the Correggio
cherubs gave way to a thin Giotto saint.
Her devotion was so extreme that the Altruist at last learned to
distinguish her from his many other followers. He saw her strength, and
confided to me the way in which he thought it should be used. The
Tailoress had personal ambition, aspiration, he said, but it seemed to
him hardly worth while to encourage that. She was too old. In our
attempts to serve Humanity, we must utilize our forces in the most
economical way, and must work with the young. It was too late for her to
fulfil her own life; she must learn to help fulfil the lives of others.
She needed, first of all, to be led up to a higher spiritual plane.
There was something pagan in her thirst for pure beauty. Under his
forming touch she might grow into more impersonal and holier ambition.
And there was no nobler mission for her than the liberation of her sex.
The Tailoress was employed in an ill-paid industry, which was almost
entirely in the hands of women. Already in her own shop she was looked
upon as an oracle. Could she not learn that, in helping secure better
conditions of life for her fellow-workers, she would be doing higher
service than she could ever do in search for knowledge, or in devotion
to art?
I, who was still at the mercy of indiscriminate enthusiasm, and had not
yet learned to let other people’s causes alone, promised to go with the
Tailoress to the Anarchist, that she might learn from him the social
wrong from which she was suffering, and the social mission to which she
was called.