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!"
