Jack was grateful for Edith's intervention. He comprehended that she had
stepped forward as a shield to him in the gossip about Carmen. He showed
his appreciation in certain lover-like attentions and in a gayety of
manner, but it was not in his nature to feel the sacrifice she had made
or its full magnanimity; he was relieved, and in a manner absolved.
Another sort of woman might have made him very uncomfortable. Instead of
being rebuked he had a new sense of freedom.
"Not one woman in a thousand would have done it," was the comment of
Major Fairfax when he heard of the drive in the Park. "Gad! most of 'em
would have cut Carmen dead and put Jack in Coventry, and then there would
have been the devil to pay. It takes quality, though; she's such a woman
as Jack's mother. If there were not one of them now and then society
would deliquesce." And the Major knew, for his principal experience had
been with a deliquescent society.
Whether Carmen admired Mrs. Delancy or thought her weak it is impossible
to say, but she understood the advances made and responded to them, for
they fell in perfectly with her social plans. She even had the face to
eulogize Mrs. Delancy to Jack, her breadth of view, her lack of
prejudice, and she had even dared to say, "My dear friend, she is too
good for us," and Jack had not protested, but with a laugh had accepted
the implication of his position on a lower moral level. Perhaps he did
not see exactly what it meant, this being on confidential terms about his
wife with another woman; all he cared for at the moment was that the
comradeship of Miss Tavish and Carmen was agreeable to him. They were no
restraint upon him. So long as they remained in town the exchange of
civilities was kept up. Carmen and Miss Tavish were often at his house,
and there was something reassuring to Jack in the openness with which
affairs went on.
Early in June Edith went down to their rented cottage on the south Long
Island shore. In her delicate health the doctor had recommended the
seaside, and this locality as quiet and restful, and not too far from the
whirl of the city. The place had a charm of its own, the charm, namely,
of a wide sky, illimitable, flashing, changing sea, rolling in from the
far tropical South with its message of romance to the barren Northern
shore, and the pure sand dunes, the product of the whippings of tempests
and wild weather. The cottage was in fact an old farmhouse, not an
impertinent, gay, painted piece of architecture set on the sand like a
tent for a month, but a solid, ugly, fascinating habitation, with barns
and outhouses, and shrubs, and an old garden--a place with a salty air
friendly to delicate spring blossoms and summer fruits and foliage.
If it was a farmhouse, the sea was an important part of the farm, and the
low-ceiled rooms suggested cabins; it required little imagination to
fancy that an East-Indian ship had some time come ashore and settled in
the sand, that it had been remodeled and roofed over, and its sides
pierced with casement windows, over which roses had climbed in order to
bind the wanderer to the soil. It had been painted by the sun and the
wind and the salt air, so that its color depended upon the day, and it
was sometimes dull and almost black, or blue-black, under a lowering sky,
and again a golden brown, especially at sunset, and Edith, feeling its
character rather than its appearance to ordinary eyes, had named it the
Golden House. Nature is such a beautiful painter of wood.
With Edith went one of her Baltimore cousins, a young kindergarten
teacher of fine intelligence and sympathetic manner, who brought to her
work a long tradition of gentle breeding and gayety and simplicity
--qualities which all children are sure to recognize. What a hopeful thing
it is, by-the-way, in the world, that all conditions of people know a
lady at sight! Jack found the place delightful. He liked its
quaintness, the primitiveness of the farmer-fisherman neighbors, he liked
the sea. And then he could run up to the city any morning and back at
night. He spent the summer with Edith at the Golden House. This was his
theory. When he went to town in the morning he expected to return at
night. But often he telegraphed in the afternoon that he was detained by
business; he had to see Henderson, or Mavick was over from Washington.
Occasionally, but not often, he missed the train. He had too keen a
sense of the ridiculous to miss the train often. When he was detained
over for two or three days, or the better part of the week, he wrote
Edith dashing, hurried letters, speaking of ever so many places he had
been to and ever so many people he had seen--yes, Carmen and Miss Tavish
and everybody who was in town, and he did not say too much about the hot
city and its discomforts.
Henderson's affairs kept him in town, Miss Tavish still postponed Bar
Harbor, and Carmen willingly remained. She knew the comfort of a big New
York house when the season is over, when no social duties are required,
and one is at leisure to lounge about in cool costumes, to read or dream,
to open the windows at night for the salt breeze from the bay, to take
little excursions by boat or rail, to dine al fresco in the garden of
some semi-foreign hotel, to taste the unconventional pleasures of the
town, as if one were in some foreign city. She used to say that New York
in matting and hollands was almost as nice as Buda-Pesth. These were
really summer nights, operatic sorts of nights, with music floating in
the air, gay groups in the streets, a stage imitation of nature in the
squares with the thick foliage and the heavy shadows cast on the asphalt
by the electric lights, the brilliant shops, the nonsense of the summer
theatres, where no one expected anything, and no one was disappointed,
the general air of enjoyment, and the suggestion of intrigue. Sometimes,
when Mavick was over, a party was made up for the East Side, to see the
foreign costumes, the picturesque street markets, the dime museums, and
the serious, tragical theatres of the people. The East Side was left
pretty much to itself, now that the winter philanthropists had gone away,
and was enjoying its summer nights and its irresponsible poverty.
They even looked in at Father Damon's chapel, the dimly lighted fragrant
refuge from the world and from sin. Why not? They were interested in
the morals of the region. Had not Miss Tavish danced for one of the
guilds; and had not Carmen given Father Damon a handsome check in support
of his mission? It was so satisfactory to go into such a place and see
the penitents kneeling here and there, the little group of very plainly
dressed sinners attracted by Father Damon's spiritual face and unselfish
enthusiasm. Carmen said she felt like kneeling at one of the little
boxes and confessing--the sins of her neighbors. And then the four
--Carmen, Miss Tavish, Mavick, and Jack--had a little supper at Wherry's,
which they enjoyed all the more for the good action of visiting the East
Side--a little supper which lasted very late, and was more and more
enjoyed as it went on, and was, in fact, so gay that when the ladies were
set down at their houses, Jack insisted on dragging Mavick off to the
Beefsteak Club and having something manly to drink; and while they drank
he analyzed the comparative attractions of Carmen and Miss Tavish; he
liked that kind of women, no nonsense in them; and presently he wandered
a little and lost the cue of his analysis, and, seizing Mavick by the
arm, and regarding him earnestly, in a burst of confidence declared that,
notwithstanding all appearances, Edith was the dearest girl in the world.
It was at this supper that the famous society was formed, which the
newspapers ridiculed, and which deceived so many excellent people in New
York because it seemed to be in harmony with the philanthropic endeavor
of the time, but which was only an expression of the Mephistophelian
spirit of Carmen--the Society for Supplying Two Suspenders to Those who
have only One.
By the end of June there was no more doubt about the heat of the town
than about its odors. The fashionable residence part was dismantled and
deserted. At least miles and miles of houses seemed to be closed.
Few carriages were seen in this quarter, the throngs of fashion had
disappeared, comparatively few women were about, and those that appeared
in the Sunday promenade were evidently sight-seers and idlers from other
quarters; the throng of devotees was gone from the churches, and indeed
in many of them services were suspended till a more convenient season.
The hotels, to be sure, were full of travelers, and the club-houses had
more habitues than usual, and were more needed by the members whose
families had gone into the country.
Notwithstanding the silence and vacation aspect of up-town, the public
conveyances were still thronged, and a census would have shown no such
diminution of population as seemed. Indeed, while nobody was in town,
except accidentally, the greater portion of it presented a more animated
appearance than usual, especially at night, on account of the open
windows, the groups on door-steps and curb-stones, and the restless
throng in the streets-buyers and sellers and idlers. To most this
outdoor life was a great enjoyment, and to them the unclean streets with
the odors and exhalations of decay were homelike and congenial. Nor did
they seem surprised that a new country should so completely reproduce the
evil smells and nastiness of the old civilization. It was all familiar
and picturesque. Work still went on in the crowded tenement-houses, and
sickness simply changed its character, death showing an increased
friendliness to young children. Some impression was of course made by
the agents of various charities, the guilds and settlements bravely
strove at their posts, some of the churches kept their flags flying on
the borders of the industrial districts, the Good Samaritans of the
Fresh-air Fund were active, the public dispensaries did a thriving
business, and the little band of self-sacrificing doctors, most of them
women, went their rounds among the poor, the sick, and the friendless.
Among them Ruth Leigh was one who never took a vacation. There was no
time for it. The greater the heat, the more noisome the town, the more
people became ill from decaying food and bad air and bad habits, the more
people were hungry from improvidence or lack of work, the more were her
daily visits a necessity; and though she was weary of her monotonous
work, and heart-sick at its small result in such a mass, there never came
a day when she could quit it. She made no reputation in her profession
by this course; perhaps she awoke little gratitude from those she served,
and certainly had not so much of their confidence as the quacks who
imposed upon them and took their money; and she was not heartened much by
hope of anything better in this world or any other; and as for pay, if
there was enough of that to clothe her decently, she apparently did not
spend it on herself.
It was, in short, wholly inexplicable that this little woman should
simply go about doing good, without any ulterior purpose whatever, not
even notoriety. Did she love these people? She did not ever say
anything about that. In the Knights of Labor circle, and in the little
clubs for the study of social questions, which she could only get leisure
to attend infrequently, she was not at all demonstrative about any
religion of humanity. Perhaps she simply felt that she was a part of
these people, and that whether they rejected her or received her, there
was nothing for her to do but to give herself to them. She would
probably have been surprised if Father Damon had told her that she was in
this following a great example, and there might have been a tang of
agnostic bitterness in her reply. When she thought of it the condition
seemed to her hopeless, and the attitude of what was called civilization
towards it so remorseless and indifferent, and that of Christianity so
pharisaical. If she ever lost her temper, it was when she let her mind
run in this nihilistic channel, in bitterness against the whole social
organization, and the total outcome of civilization so far as the mass of
humanity is concerned.
One day Father Damon climbed up to the top of a wretched tenement in
Baxter Street in search of a German girl, an impulsive and pretty girl of
fifteen, whom he had missed for several days at the chapel services.
He had been in the room before. It was not one of the worst, for though
small and containing a cook-stove, a large bed, and a chest of drawers,
there was an attempt to make it tidy. In a dark closet opening out from
it was another large bed. As he knocked and opened the door, he saw that
Gretchen was not at home. Her father sat in a rocking-chair by an open
window, on the sill of which stood a pot of carnations, the Easter gift
of St. George's, a wax-faced, hollow-eyed man of gentle manners, who
looked round wearily at the priest. The mother was washing clothes in a
tub in one corner; in another corner was a half-finished garment from a
slop-shop. The woman alternated the needle at night and the tub in the
daytime. Seated on the bed, with a thin, sick child in her arms, was Dr.
Leigh. As she looked up a perfectly radiant smile illuminated her
usually plain face, an unworldly expression of such purity and happiness
that she seemed actually beautiful to the priest, who stopped,
hesitating, upon the threshold.
"Oh, you needn't be afraid to come in, Father Damon," she cried out; "it
isn't contagious--only rash."
Father Damon, who would as readily have walked through a pestilence as in
a flower-garden, only smiled at this banter, and replied, after speaking
to the sick man, and returning in German the greeting of the woman, who
had turned from the tub, "I've no doubt you are disappointed that it
isn't contagious!" And then, to the mother: "Where is Gretchen? She
doesn't come to the chapel."
"Nein," replied the woman, in a mixture of German and English, "it don't
come any more in dot place; it be in a shtore now; it be good girl."
"What, all day?"
"Yaas, by six o'clock, and abends so spate. Not much it get, but my man
can't earn nothing any more." And the woman, as she looked at him, wiped
her eyes with the corner of her apron.
"But, on Sunday?" Father Damon asked, still further.
"Vell, it be so tired, and goed up by de Park with Dick Loosing and dem
oder girls."
"Don't you think it better, Father Damon," Dr. Leigh interposed, "that
Gretchen should have fresh air and some recreation on Sunday?"
"Und such bootiful tings by de Museum," added the mother.
"Perhaps," said he, with something like a frown on his face, and then
changed the subject to the sick child. He did not care to argue the
matter when Dr. Leigh was present, but he resolved to come again and
explain to the mother that her daughter needed some restraining power
other than her own impulse, and that without religious guidance she was
pretty certain to drift into frivolous and vulgar if not positively bad
ways. The father was a free-thinker; but Father Damon thought he had
some hold on the mother, who was of the Lutheran communion, but had
followed her husband so far as to become indifferent to anything but
their daily struggle for life. Yet she had a mother's instinct about the
danger to her daughter, and had been pleased to have her go to Father
Damon's chapel.
And, besides, he could not bring himself in that presence to seem to
rebuke Ruth Leigh. Was she not practically doing what his Lord did
--going about healing the sick, sympathizing with the poor and the
discouraged, taking upon herself the burden of the disconsolate,
literally, without thought of self, sharing, as it were, the misery and
sin of this awful city? And today, for the first time, he seemed to have
seen the woman in her--or was it the saint? and he recalled that
wonderful illumination of her plain face that made her actually beautiful
as she looked up from the little waif of humanity she held in her arms.
It had startled him, and struck a new chord in his heart, and planted a
new pang there that she had no belief in a future life.
It did not occur to him that the sudden joy in her face might have been
evoked by seeing him, for it was a long time since she had seen him. Nor
did he think that the pang at his heart had another cause than religious
anxiety. Ah, priest and worldly saint, how subtle and enduring are the
primal instincts of human nature!
"Yes," he said, as they walked away, in reply to her inquiry as to his
absence, "I have been in retreat a couple of weeks."
"I suppose," she said, softly, "you needed the rest; though," and she
looked at him professionally, "if you will allow me to say it, it seems
to me that you have not rested enough."
"I needed strength"--and it was the priest that spoke--"in meditation
and prayer to draw upon resources not my own."
"And in fasting, too, I dare say," she added, with a little smile.
"And why not?" he asked.
"Pardon me," she said; "I don't pretend to know what you need. I need to
eat, though Heaven knows it's hard enough to keep up an appetite down
here. But it is physical endurance you need for the work here. Do you
think fasting strengthens you to go through your work night and day?"
"I know I couldn't do it on my own strength." And Dr. Leigh recalled
times when she had seen him officiating in the chapel apparently
sustained by nothing but zeal and pure spirit, and wondered that he did
not faint and fall. And faint and fall he did, she was sure, when the
service was over.
"Well, it may be necessary to you, but not as an example to these people.
I see enough involuntary fasting."
"We look at these people from different points of view, I fear." And
after a moment he said: "But, doctor, I wanted to ask you about Gretchen.
You see her?"
"Occasionally. She works too many hours, but she seems to be getting on
very well, and brings her mother all she earns."
"Do you think she is able to stand alone?"
Dr. Leigh winced a little at this searching question, for no one knew
better than she the vulgarizing influence of street life and chance
associations upon a young girl, and the temptations. She was even forced
to admit the value in the way of restraint, as a sort of police force,
of the church and priestly influence, especially upon girls at the
susceptible age. But she knew that Father Damon meant something more
than this, and so she answered:
"But people have got to stand alone. She might as well begin."
"But she is so young."
"Yes, I know. She is in the way of temptation, but so long as she works
industriously, and loves her mother, and feels the obligation, which the
poor very easily feel, of doing her share for the family, she is not in
so much moral danger as other girls of her age who lead idle and
self-indulgent lives. The working-girls of the city learn to protect
themselves."
"And you think this is enough, without any sort of religion--that this
East Side can go on without any spiritual life?"
Ruth Leigh made a gesture of impatience. In view of the actual struggle
for existence she saw around her, this talk seemed like cant. And she
said:
"I don't know that anything can go on. Let me ask you a question, Father
Damon. Do you think there is any more spirituality, any more of the
essentials of what you call Christianity, in the society of the other
side than there is on the East Side?"
"It is a deep question, this of spirituality," replied Father Damon, who
was in the depths of his proselyting action a democrat and in sympathy
with the people, and rated quite at its full value the conventional
fashion in religion. "I shouldn't like to judge, but there is a great
body of Christian men and women in this city who are doing noble work."
"Yes," replied the little doctor, bitterly, "trying to save themselves.
How many are trying to save others--others except the distant and foreign
sinners?"
"You surely cannot ignore," replied the father, still speaking mildly,
"the immense amount of charitable work done by the churches!"
"Yes, I know; charity, charity, the condescension of the rich to the
poor. What we want are understanding, fellowship, and we get alms!
If there is so much spirituality as you say, and Christianity is what you
say it is today, how happens it that this side is left in filth and
misery and physical wretchedness? You know what it is, and you know the
luxury elsewhere. And you think to bridge over the chasm between classes
with flowers, in pots, yes, and Bible-readers and fashionable visitors
and little aid societies--little palliatives for an awful state of
things. Why, look at it! Last winter the city authorities hauled off
the snow and the refuse from the fashionable avenues, and dumped it down
in the already blockaded and filthy side streets, and left us to struggle
with the increased pneumonia and diphtheria, and general unsanitary
conditions. And you wonder that the little nihilist groups and labor
organizations and associations of agnostics, as you call them, meeting to
study political economy and philosophy, say that the existing state of
things has got to be overturned violently, if those who have the power
and the money continue indifferent."
"I do not wonder," replied Father Damon, sadly. "The world is evil, and I
should be as despairing as you are if I did not know there was another
life and another world. I couldn't bear it. Nobody could."
"And all you've got to offer, then, to this mass of wretchedness,
poverty, ignorance, at close quarters with hunger and disease, is to grin
and bear it, in hope of a reward somewhere else!"
"I think you don't quite--"
The doctor looked up and saw a look of pain on the priest's face.
"Oh," she hastened to say, almost as impetuously as she had spoken
before, "I don't mean you--I don't mean you. I know what you do. Pardon
me for speaking so. I get so discouraged sometimes." They stood still a
moment, looking up and down the hot, crowded, odorful street they were
in, with its flaunting rags of poverty and inefficiency. "I see so
little result of what I can do, and there is so little help."
"I know," said the father, as they moved along. "I don't see how you
can bear it alone."
This touched a sore spot, and aroused Ruth Leigh's combativeness.
It seemed to her to approach the verge of cant again. But she knew the
father's absolute sincerity; she felt she had already said too much; and
she only murmured, as if to herself, "If we could only know." And then,
after a moment, she asked, "Do you, Father Damon, see any sign of
anything better here?"
"Yes, today." And he spoke very slowly and hesitatingly. "If you will
excuse the personality of it. When I entered that room today, and saw
you with that sick child in your arms, and comprehended what it all
meant, I had a great wave of hope, and I knew, just then, that there is
coming virtue enough in the world to redeem it."
Ruth was confounded. Her heart seemed to stand still, and then the hot
blood flowed into her face in a crimson flood. "Ah," escaped from her
lips, and she walked on more swiftly, not daring to look up. This from
him! This recognition from the ascetic father! If one of her dispensary
comrades had said it, would she have been so moved?
And afterwards, when she had parted from him, and gone to her little
room, the hot flush again came to her neck and brow, and she saw his
pale, spiritual face, and could hear the unwonted tenderness of his
voice. Yes, Father Damon had said it of her.
