Dearborn Street. She began to see. After all, he had not understood her.
Perhaps men never understood women; certainly he had not understood
her. What he did not know was that she was willing to _pay_ for her
happiness--_pay_--pay any price that might be exacted. And anyway--she
had no choice. Strange that he could not see that! Strange that he could
not see the irony and cruelty of bidding her good-bye and then telling
her to be happy!
It simplified itself to such an extent that she _grew_ very calm. It
would be easy to find him, easy to make him see--for it was so very
simple--and then....
She turned in her copy. She said good-bye quietly, naturally, rode down
in the lumbering old elevator and started out into the now drenching
rain toward the elevated trains which would take her to the West Side;
it was so fortunate that she had heard him telling one day where he
lived.
When she reached the station she saw that more people were coming down
the stairs than were going up. They were saying things about the trains,
but she did not heed them. But at the top of the stairs a man in uniform
said: “Blockade, Miss. You'll have to take the surface cars.”
She was sorry, for it would delay her, and there was not a minute to
lose. She was dismayed, upon reaching the surface cars, to find she
could not get near them; the rain, the blockade on the “L” had caused
a great crowd to congregate there. She waited a long time, getting more
and more wet, but it was impossible to get near the cars. She thought
of a cab, but could see none, they too having all been pressed into
service.
She determined, desperately, to start and walk. Soon she would surely
get either a cab or a car. And so she started, staunchly, though she was
wet through now, and trembling with cold and nervousness.
As she hurried through the driving rain she faced things fearlessly. Oh
yes, she understood--everything. But if he were not well--should he not
have her with him? If he had that thing to fight, did he not need her
help? What did men think women were like? Did he think she was one to
sit down and reason out what would be advantageous? Better a little
while with him on a slippery plank than forever safe and desolate upon
the shore!
She never questioned her going; were not life and love too great to be
lost through that which could be so easily put right?
The buildings were reeling, the streets moving up and down--that
awful rain, she thought, was making her dizzy. Labouriously she walked
on--more slowly, less steadily, a pain in her side, that awful reeling
in her head.
Carriages returning to the city were passing her, but she had not
strength to call to them, and it seemed if she walked to the curbing she
would fall. She was not thinking so clearly now. The thing which took
all of her force was the lifting of her feet and the putting them
down in the right place. Her throat seemed to be closing up--and her
side--and her head....
Someone had her by the arm. Then someone was speaking her name; speaking
it in surprise--consternation--alarm.
It was Harold.
It was all vague then. She knew that she was in a carriage, and
that Harold was talking to her kindly. “You're taking me there?” she
murmured.
“Yes--yes, Edna, everything's all right,” he replied soothingly.
“Everything's all right,” she repeated, in a whisper, and leaned her
head back against the cushions.
They stopped after a while, and Harold was standing at the open door
of the cab with something steaming hot which he told her to drink. “You
need it,” he said decisively, and thinking it would help her to tell it,
she drank it down.
The world was a little more defined after that, and she saw things which
puzzled her. “Why, it looks like the city,” she whispered, her throat
too sore now to speak aloud.
“Why sure,” he replied banteringly; “don't you know we have to go
through the city to get out to the South Side?”
“Oh, but you see,” she cried, holding her throat, “but you see, it's the
_other_ way!”
“Not to-night,” he insisted; “the place for you to-night is home. I'm
taking you where you belong.”
She reached over wildly, trying to open the door, but he held her back;
she began to cry, and he talked to her, gently but unbendingly. “But you
don't _understand!_” she whispered, passionately. “I've _got_ to go!”
“Not to-night,” he said again, and something in the way he said it made
her finally huddle back in the corner of the carriage.
Block after block, mile after mile, they rode on in silence. She felt
overpowered. And with submission she knew that it was Z. For the
whole city was piled in between. Great buildings were in between, and
thousands of men running to and fro on the streets; man, and all man
had builded up, were in between. And then Harold--Harold who had always
seemed to count for so little, had come and taken her away.
Dully, wretchedly--knowing that her heart would ache far worse to-morrow
than it did to-night--she wondered about things. Did things like rain
and street-cars and wet feet and a sore throat determine life? Was it
that way with other people, too? Did other people have barriers--whole
cities full of them--piled in between? And then did the Harolds come and
take them where they said they belonged? Were there not _some_ people
strong enough to go where they wanted to go?
VI
THE MAN OF FLESH AND BLOOD
The elements without were not in harmony with the spirit which it was
desired should be engendered within. By music, by gay decorations,
by speeches from prominent men, the board in charge of the boys'
reformatory was striving to throw about this dedication of the new
building an atmosphere of cheerfulness and good-will--an atmosphere
vibrant with the kindness and generosity which emanated from the State,
and the thankfulness and loyalty which it was felt should emanate from
the boys.
Outside the world was sobbing. Some young trees which had been planted
along the driveway of the reformatory grounds, and which were expected
to grow up in the way they should go, were rocking back and forth in
passionate insurrection. Fallen leaves were being spit viciously through
the air. It was a sullen-looking landscape which Philip Grayson, he who
was to be the last speaker of the afternoon, saw stretching itself down
the hill, across the little valley, and up another little hill of that
rolling prairie state. In his ears was the death wail of the summer.
It seemed the spirit of out-of-doors was sending itself up in mournful,
hopeless cries.
The speaker who had been delivering himself of pedantic encouragement
about the open arms with which the world stood ready to receive the most
degraded one, would that degraded one but come to the world in proper
spirit, sat down amid perfunctory applause led by the officers
and attendants of the institution, and the boys rose to sing. The
brightening of their faces told that their work as performers was more
to their liking than their position as auditors. They threw back their
heads and waited with well-disciplined eagerness for the signal to
begin. Then, with the strength and native music there are in some three
hundred boys' throats, there rolled out the words of the song of the
State.
There were lips which opened only because they must, but as a whole
they sang with the same heartiness, the same joy in singing, that he
had heard a crowd of public-school boys put into the song only the week
before. When the last word had died away it seemed to Philip Grayson
that the sigh of the world without was giving voice to the sigh of the
world within as the well-behaved crowd of boys sat down to resume their
duties as auditors.
And then one of the most important of the professors from the State
University was telling them about the kindness of the State: the State
had provided for them this beautiful home; it gave them comfortable
clothing and nutritious food; it furnished that fine gymnasium in which
to train their bodies, books and teachers to train their minds;
it provided those fitted to train their souls, to work against the
unfortunate tendencies--the professor stumbled a little there--which had
led to their coming. The State gave liberally, gladly, and in return it
asked but one thing: that they come out into the world and make useful,
upright citizens, citizens of which any State might be proud. Was that
asking too much? the professor from the State University was saying.
The sobbing of the world without was growing more intense. Many pairs of
eyes from among the auditors were straying out to where the summer
lay dying. Did they know--those boys whom the State classed as
unfortunates--that out of this death there would come again life? Or did
they see but the darkness--the decay--of to-day?
The professor from the State University was putting the case very
fairly. There were no flaws--seemingly--to be picked in his logic. The
State had been kind; the boys were obligated to good citizenship.
But the coldness!--comfortlessness!--of it all. The open arms of the
world!--how mocking in its abstractness. What did it mean? Did it mean
that they--the men who uttered the phrase so easily--would be willing to
give these boys aid, friendship when they came out into the world? What
would they say, those boys whose ears were filled with high-sounding,
non-committal phrases, if some man were to stand before them and say,
“And so, fellows, when you get away from this place, and are ready to
get your start in the world, just come around to my office and I'll help
you get a job?” At thought of it there came from Philip Grayson a queer,
partly audible laugh, which caused those nearest him to look his way in
surprise.
But he was all unconscious of their looks of inquiry, absorbed in the
thoughts that crowded upon him. How far away the world--his kind of
people--must seem to these boys of the State Reform School. The speeches
they had heard, the training that had been given them, had taught
them--unconsciously perhaps, but surely--to divide the world into two
great classes: the lucky and the unlucky, those who made speeches
and those who must listen, the so-called good and the so-called bad;
perhaps--he smiled a little at his own cynicism--those who were caught
and those who were not.
There came to him these words of a poet of whom he used to be fond:
In men whom men pronounce as ill,
I find so much of goodness still;
In men whom men pronounce divine,
I find so much of sin and blot;
I hesitate to draw the line
Between the two, when God has not.
When God has not! He turned and looked out at the sullen sky,
returning--as most men do at times--to that conception of his childhood
that somewhere beyond the clouds was God. God! Did God care for the boys
of the State Reformatory? Was that poet of the western mountains right
when he said that God was not a drawer of lines, but a seer of the good
that was in the so-called bad, and of the bad in the so-called good, and
a lover of them both?
If that was God, it was not the God the boys of the reformatory had been
taught to know. They had been told that God would forgive the
wicked, but it had been made clear to them--if not in words, in
implications--that it was they who were the wicked. And the so-called
godly men, men of such exemplary character as had been chosen to address
them that afternoon, had so much of the spirit of God that they, too,
were willing to forgive, be tolerant, and--he looked out at the bending
trees with a smile--disburse generalities about the open arms of the
world.
What would they think--those three hundred speech-tired boys--if some
man who had been held before them as exemplary were to rise and lay bare
his own life--its weaknesses, its faults, perhaps its crimes--and tell
them there was weakness and there was strength in every human being, and
that the world-old struggle of life was to overcome one's weakness with
one's strength.
The idea took strange hold on him. It seemed the method of the world--at
any rate it had been the method of that afternoon--for the men who stood
before their fellows with clean hands to plant themselves on the far
side of a chasm of conventions, or narrow self-esteem, or easily won
virtue, and cry to those beings who struggled on the other side of that
chasm--to those human beings whose souls had never gone to school: “Look
at us! Our hands are clean, our hearts are pure. See how beautiful it
is to be good! Come ye, poor sinners, and be good also.” And the poor
sinners, the untaught, birthmarked human souls, would look over at the
self-acclaimed goodness they could see far across the chasm, and even
though attracted to it (which, he grimly reflected, would not seem
likely) the thing that was left with them was a sense of the width of
the chasm.
He had a sense of needless waste, of unnecessary blight. He looked down
at those three hundred faces and it was as if looking at human waste;
and it was human stupidity, human complacency and cowardice kept those
human beings human drift.
With what a smug self-satisfaction--under the mask of benevolence--the
speakers of that afternoon had flaunted their virtue--their position!
How condescendingly they had spoken of the home which we, the good,
prepare for you, the bad, and what namby-pambyness there was, after all,
in that sentiment which all of them had voiced--and now you must pay us
back by being good!
Oh for a man of flesh and blood to stand up and tell how he himself had
failed and suffered! For a man who could bridge that chasm with strong,
broad, human understanding and human sympathies--a man who would stand
among them pulse-beat to pulse-beat and cry out, “I know! I understand!
I fought it and I'll help you fight it too!”
The sound of his own name broke the spell that was upon him. He looked
to the centre of the stage and saw that the professor from the State
University had seated himself and that the superintendent of
the institution was occupying the place of the speaker. And the
superintendent was saying:
“We may esteem ourselves especially fortunate in having him with us this
afternoon. He is one of the great men of the State, one of the men
who by high living, by integrity and industry, has raised himself to a
position of great honour among his fellow men. A great party--may I say
the greatest of all parties?--has shown its unbounded confidence in him
by giving him the nomination for the governorship of the State. No man
in the State is held in higher esteem to-day than he. And so it is with
special pleasure that I introduce to you that man of the future--Philip
Grayson.”
The superintendent sat down then, and he himself--Philip Grayson--was
standing in the place where the other speakers had stood. It was with
a rush which almost swept away his outward show of calm that it came to
him that he--candidate for the governorship--was well fitted to be
that man of flesh and blood for whom he had sighed. That he himself was
within grasp of an opportunity to get beneath the jackets and into the
very hearts and souls of those boys, and make them feel that a man of
sins and virtues, of weaknesses and strength, a man who had had much to
conquer, and for whom the fight would never be finally won, was standing
before them stripped of his coat of conventions and platitudes, and in
nakedness of soul and sincerity of heart was talking to them as a man
who understood.
Almost with the inception of the idea was born the consciousness of what
it might cost. And as in answer to the silent, blunt question, Is it
worth it? there looked up at him three hundred pairs of eyes--eyes
behind which there was good as well as bad, eyes which had burned with
the fatal rush of passion, and had burned, too, with the hot tears of
remorse--eyes which had opened on a hostile world.
And then the eyes of Philip Grayson could not see the eyes which were
before him, and he put up his hand to break the mist--little caring
what the men upon the platform would think of him, little thinking what
effect the words which were crowding into his heart would have upon his
candidacy. But one thing was vital to him now: to bring upon that ugly
chasm the levelling forces of a common humanity, and to make those boys
who were of his clay feel that a being who had fallen and risen again,
a fellow being for whom life would always mean a falling and a rising
again, was standing before them, and--not as the embodiment of a distant
goodness, not as a pattern, but as one among them, verily as man to
man--was telling them a few things which his own life had taught him
were true.
It was his very consecration which made it hard to begin. He was fearful
of estranging them in the beginning, of putting between them and him
that very thing he was determined there should not be.
“I have a strange feeling,” he said, with a winning little smile, “that
if I were to open my heart to-day, just open it clear up the way I'd
like to if I could, that you boys would look into it, and then jump back
in a scared kind of way and cry, 'Why--that's me!' You would be a little
surprised--wouldn't you?--if you could look back and see the kind of boy
I was, and find I was much the kind of boy you are?
“Do you know what I think? I think hypocrisy is the worst thing in the
world. I think it's worse than stealing, or lying, or any of the other
bad things you can name. And do you know where I think lots of the
hypocrisy comes from? I think it comes from the so-called self-made
men--from the real good men, the men who say 'I haven't got one bad
thing charged up to my account.'
“Now the men out campaigning for me call me a self-made man. Your
superintendent just now spoke of my integrity, of the confidence reposed
in me, and all that. But do you know what is the honest truth? If I am
any kind of a man worth mentioning, if I am deserving of any honour, any
confidence, it is not because I was born with my heart filled with good
and beautiful things, for I was not. It is because I was born with much
in my heart that we call the bad, and because, after that bad had grown
stronger and stronger through the years it was unchecked, and after it
had brought me the great shock, the great sorrow of my life, I began
then, when older than you boys are now, to see a little of that great
truth which you can put briefly in these words: 'There is good and there
is bad in every human heart, and it is the struggle of life to conquer
the bad with the good.' What I am trying to say is, that if I am worthy
any one's confidence to-day, it is because, having seen that truth, I
have been able, through never ceasing trying, through slow conquering,
to crowd out some of the bad and make room for a little of the good.
“You see,” he went on, three hundred pairs of eyes hard upon him now,
“some of us are born to a harder struggle than others. There are people
who would object to my saying that to you, even if I believed it. They
would say you would make the fact of being born with much against which
to struggle an excuse for being bad. But look here a minute; if you were
born with a body not as strong as other boys' bodies, if you couldn't
run as far, or jump as high, you wouldn't be eternally saying, 'I can't
be expected to do much; I wasn't born right.' Not a bit of it! You'd
make it your business to get as strong as you could, and you wouldn't
make any parade of the fact that you weren't as strong as you should be.
We don't like people who whine, whether it's about weak bodies or weak
souls.
“I've been sitting here this afternoon wondering what to say to you
boys. I had intended telling some funny stories about things which
happened to me when I was a boy. But for some reason a serious mood has
come over me, and I don't feel just like those stories now. I haven't
been thinking of the funny side of life in the last half-hour. I've been
thinking of how much suffering I've endured since the days when I, too,
was a boy.”
He paused then; and when he went on his voice tested to the utmost the
silence of the room: “There is lots of sorrow in this old world. Maybe
I'm on the wrong track, but as I see it to-day human beings are making
a much harder thing of their existence than there is any need of. There
are millions and millions of them, and year after year, generation after
generation, they fight over the same old battles, live through the same
old sorrows. Doesn't it seem all wrong that after the battle has been
fought a million times it can't be made a little easier for those who
still have it before them?
“If a farmer had gone over a bad road, and the next day saw another
farmer about to start over the same road, wouldn't he send him back?
Doesn't it seem too bad that in things which concern one's whole life
people can't be as decent as they are about things which involve only an
inconvenience? Doesn't it seem that when we human beings have so much in
common we might stand together a little better? I'll tell you what's the
matter. Most of the people of this world are coated round and round with
self-esteem, and they're afraid to admit any understanding of the things
which aren't good. Suppose the farmer had thought it a disgrace to admit
he had been over that road, and so had said: 'From what I have read in
books, and from what I have learned in a general way, I fancy that road
isn't good.' Would the other farmer have gone back? I rather think he
would have said he'd take his chances. But you see the farmer said
he _knew_; and how did he know? Why, because he'd been over the road
himself.”
As he paused again, looking at them, he saw it all with a clarifying
simplicity. He himself knew life for a fine and beautiful thing. He had
won for himself some of the satisfactions of understanding, certain rare
delights of the open spirit. He wanted to free the spirits of these
boys to whom he talked; wanted to show them that spirits could free
themselves, indicate to them that self-control and self-development
carried one to pleasures which sordid self-indulgences had no power to
bestow. It was a question of getting the most from life. It was a matter
of happiness.
It was thus he began, slowly, the telling of his life's story:
“I was born with strange, wild passions in my heart. I don't know where
they came from; I only know they were there. I resented authority. If
someone who had a right to dictate to me said, 'Philip, do this,' then
Philip would immediately begin to think how much he would rather do the
other thing. And,” he smiled a little, and some of the boys smiled with
him in anticipation, “it was the other thing which Philip usually did.
“I didn't go to a reform school, for the very good reason that there
wasn't any in the State where I lived.” Some of he boys smiled again,
and he could hear the nervous coughing of one of the party managers
sitting close to him. “I was what you would call a very bad boy. I
didn't mind any one. I was defiant--insolent. I did bad things
just because I knew they were bad, and--and I took a great deal of
satisfaction out of it.”
The sighing of the world without was the only sound which vibrated
through the room. “I say,” he went on, “that I got a form of
satisfaction from it. I did not say I got happiness; there is a vast
difference between a kind of momentary satisfaction and that thing--that
most precious of all things--which we call happiness. Indeed, I was very
far from happy. I had hours when I was so morose and miserable that I
hated the whole world. And do you know what I thought? I thought there
was no one in all the world who had the same kind of things surging up
in his heart that I did. I thought there was no one else with whom it
was as easy to be bad, or as hard to be good. I thought that no one
understood. I thought that I was all alone.
“Did you ever feel like that? Did you ever feel that no one else knew
anything about such feelings as you had? Did you ever feel that here was
you, and there was the rest of the world, and that the rest of the world
didn't know anything about you, and was just generally down on you? Now
that's the very thing I want to talk away from you to-day. You're not
the only one. We're all made of the same kind of stuff, and there's none
of us made of stuff that's flawless. We all have a fight; some an easy
one, and some a big one, and if you have formed the idea that there is
a kind of dividing-line in the world, and that on the one side is the
good, and on the other side the bad, why, all I can say is that you have
a wrong notion of things.