IT was on the day following the dancing party at the Calmaines' that
Constance Elliott arrayed herself in a modest street dress, and ran
down to the library where Miss Van Vetter was writing letters.
"You'd better change your mind, Myra, and come along with me. It'll do
you good to see how the other half lives," she said coaxingly.
Miss Van Vetter calmly finished her sentence before she replied.
"Thank you, Connie; but I believe not. I know it is the proper fad
nowadays to go slumming, but I can't do it; it's a matter of principle
with me."
Connie's eyebrows arched in mild surprise. "That's a new one," she
commented. "I've heard all kinds of excuses, but never that. How do you
diagram it?"
"It is simple enough. One sees plenty of misery in the ordinary course
of things without making a specialty of looking for it; and when you've
done everything that your money and sympathy can do, it is only a
single drop in the great ocean of human wretchedness, after all. More
than that, you have added to the sum total of the world's suffering
by just so much as the miseries of the others hurt you through your
compassion."
"Myra, dear, if I didn't know that you are better than your theories, I
should try to humble you. What will you do if the evil day ever comes
to you?"
"Unload my woes upon some such angelic and charitable sister of mercy
as you are, I suppose," rejoined Miss Van Vetter complacently. "But
that doesn't make it necessary for me to go about and shed literal
tears with those who weep, now. I prefer to do it by proxy." She took
a gold piece from her purse and offered it to Constance. "Take this,
and make some poor wretch comfortable for ten or fifteen minutes on my
account."
Miss Elliott was not yet canonized, and she refused the contribution
with an indignant little stamp of her foot. "Myra Van Vetter, you're
worse than a heathen! I wouldn't touch your money with the tip of
my finger; I'd be afraid it would burn me. I hope you'll learn for
yourself some day what the cold shoulder of charity is--there!" And she
swept out of the room with as much dignity as five-feet-one-and-a-half
may compass upon extraordinary occasions.
Once on the other side of the library door, she laughed softly to
herself and was instantly Connie the serene again.
"It does me a whole lot of good to boil over once in a while," she
said, going out on the veranda. "Myra serves one beneficent end in the
cosmogony in spite of herself: she's a perfect safety-valve for me.
Tommie-e-e-e! O Tom! Are you out there?"
A ragged boy, sitting on the curb and shaking dice with a pair of
pebbles, sprang up and ran to the gate. When the latch baffled him, as
it usually did from the outside, he vaulted the fence and stood before
her.
"Prompt as usual, aren't you, Tommie?"
"Ain't got nothin' else to do but to be promp'. Is it a baskit, dis
time, 'r wot?"
"It's a basket, and you'll find it in the kitchen."
Five minutes later the dwellers in the avenue might have seen a small
procession headed townwards. Its component parts were a dainty little
lady, walking very straight with her hands in the pockets of her
jacket, and a ragged urchin bent sidewise against the weight of a
capacious basket.
The street-car line was convenient, but Constance walked in deference
to Tommie's convictions,--he objected to the car on the score of
economy. "Wot's the use o' givin' a bloated corp'ration a nickel w'en
a feller can mog along on his feets?" he had demanded, one day; and
thereafter they walked.
What profits it to set down in measured phrase at what numbers in
what streets the basket cover was lifted that afternoon? Doubtless,
in that great day when the books shall be opened, it will be found
that a faithful record has been kept, not only of the tumbler of jelly
left with bedridden Mother M'Garrihan, the bottle of wine put into the
hands of gaunt Tom Devins, who was slowly dying of lead-poisoning, and
the more substantial viands spread out before the hungry children in
drunken Owen David's shanty, but of all the other deeds of mercy that
left a trail of thankful benisons in the wake of the small procession.
Be it sufficient to say that the round was a long one, and that
Constance spared neither herself nor her father's bank-account where
she found misery with uplifted hands.
The basket had grown appreciably lighter, and Tommie's body was once
more approaching the perpendicular, when the procession paused before
an unswept stairway leading to the second story of a building fronting
on one of the lower cross streets. Constance held out her hand for the
basket, but the boy put it behind him.
"Wot's the matter with me?" he demanded.
"Nothing at all, Tommie. I only meant to save you a climb. The basket
isn't heavy now, you know."
"S'posin' it ain't; ain't I hired to run this end o' the show? You jes'
tell me where you want it put, an' that's right where I'm goin' to put
it, an' not nowheres else."
She smiled and let him lead the way up the dusty stair. At a certain
door near the end of the long upper corridor she signed to him to give
her the basket. "Go to the head of the stairs and wait," she whispered.
"I may want you."
When he was out of hearing she tapped on the door and went in. It was
the interior of all others that made Constance want to cry. There was a
sufficiency of garish furniture and tawdry knickknacks scattered about
to show that it was not the dwelling-place of the desperately poor; but
these were only the accessories to the picture of desolation and utter
neglect having for its central figure the woman stretched out upon the
bed. She was asleep, and her face was turned toward the light which
struggled feebly through the unwashed window. Beauty there had been,
and might be again, but not even the flush of health would efface the
marks of Margaret Gannon's latest plunge into the chilling depths of
human indifference. Connie tiptoed to the bedside and looked, and her
heart swelled within her.
It had fallen out in this wise. On the Monday night Mademoiselle
Angeline--known to her intimates as Mag Gannon--saw fuzzy little
circles expand and contract around the gas-jets in the Bijou Theatre
while she was walking through her part in the farce. Tuesday night the
fuzzy circles became blurs; and the stage manager swore audibly when
she faltered and missed the step in her specialty. On the Wednesday
Mademoiselle Angeline disappeared from the Bijou altogether; and for
three days she had lain helpless and suffering, seeing no human face
until Constance came and ministered to her. And the pity of it was that
while the fever wrought its torturous will upon her, delirium would not
come to help her to forget that she was forgotten.
Constance had pieced out the pitiful story by fragments while she was
dragging the woman back from the brink of the pit; and when all was
said, she began to understand that a sick soul demands other remedies
than drugs and dainties. Just what they were, or how they were to be
applied, was another matter; but Constance grappled with the problem as
ardently as if no one had ever before attacked it. In her later visits
she always brought the conversation around to Margaret's future; and on
the afternoon of the basket-procession, after she had made her patient
eat and drink, she essayed once again to enlist the woman's will in her
own behalf.
"It's no use of me trying, Miss Constance; I've got to go back when I'm
fit. There ain't nothing else for the likes of me to do."
"How can you tell till you try? O Margaret, I wish you would try!"
A smile of hard-earned wisdom flitted across the face of the woman.
"You know more than most of 'em," she said, "but you don't know it all.
You can't, you see; you're so good the world puts on its gloves before
it touches you. But for the likes of me, we get the bare hand, and
we're playing in luck if it ain't made into a fist."
"You poor girl! It makes my heart ache to think what you must have gone
through before you could learn to say a thing like that. But you must
try; I can't let you go back to that awful place after what you've told
me about it."
"Supposing I did try; there's only the one thing on earth I know how to
do,--that's trim hats. Suppose you run your pretty feet off till you
found me a place where I could work right. How long would it be before
somebody would go to the missis, or the boss, or whoever it might be,
and say, 'See here; you've got one of Pete Grim's Bijou women in there.
That won't do.' And the night after, I'd be doing my specialty again,
if I was that lucky to get on."
"But you could learn to do housework, or something of that kind, so you
could keep out of the way of people who would remember you. You must
have had some experience."
The invalid rocked her head on the pillow. "That'd be worse than the
other. Somebody'd be dead sure to find out and tell; and then I'd be
lucky if I got off without going to jail. And for the experience,--a
minute ago you called me a girl, but I know you didn't mean it. How old
do you think I am?"
Constance looked at the fever-burned face, and tried to make allowances
for the ravages of disease. "I should say twenty-five," she replied,
"only you talk as if you might be older."
"I'll be eighteen next June, if I'd happen to live that long," said
Margaret; and Constance went home a few minutes later with a new pain
in her heart, born of the simple statement.
At the gate she took the empty basket and paid the boy. "That's all
for to-day, but I want to give you some more work," she said. "Every
morning, and every noon, and every night, until I tell you to stop, I
want you to go up to that last place and ask Margaret Gannon if there
is anything you can do for her. And if she says yes, you do it; and if
it's too big for you to do, you come right up here after me. Will you
do all that?"
"Will I? Will a yaller dorg eat his supper w'en he's hungry? You're
jes' dead right I'll do it. An' I'll be yere to-morrer afternoon,
promp'."
All of which was well enough in its way, but the problem was yet
unsolved, and Constance had to draw heavily on her reserves of
cheerfulness to be able to make an accordant one of four when Richard
Bartrow called that evening after dinner.