Part 2

But though to the outward eye these visitors played upon the harp and violin, how much more indeed did they play upon me! Young, and sensitive, and as yet unsounded, how, with dim compelling fingers they searched and found and struck and drew from me emotions I had never known! Old and worn and bowed with life, and weather-beaten of the world, they played there in the mottled sunlight of that romantic arbor, as might Ulysses have stood mistaken and unhonored by those who had but heard of Troy. There was to me something suddenly overwhelming in the situation. Oh, who was I, to enjoy so much, in such security; to feast upon plenty, and to know the generous liberality of life, while these, doomed to the duress of the gods, went through the world, day after day, half-starved, playing miserable memorable music fearfully off the key!

Perhaps I was intense; certainly I was young; and as certainly I had all the eager vivid imagination of youth. Moreover, this was, it should not be overlooked, my very first adventure, all my own, with the poor; my first piece of entirely independent service to those mysterious powers. Meanwhile, the divinities in disguise played on--a wild, boisterous tune it was now, set to a rollicking measure and infinitely more sad for that than the sighs of "Trovatore," or than sweet Alice under the stone. Bent they seemed on sounding every stop. You may think they were but a grimy pair, dull and squalid; probably embittered. I can only tell you that they invoked for me that day, as with the mournful powers of the Sibyl of Cumæ, love and life and death, and joy irrevocable, and memory--these they called up to pass before me, and bade them as they went, for one summoning moment, to reveal their faces to me.

Presently, I do not know with what dark thoughts, these two would have departed, but I remembered and begged them to stay. I flew upstairs and found my purse, and emptied it, and gave them what it held. They took it without thanks, merely as lawful tribute exacted. Again they would have departed, but I begged them still to remain. Should this ancient Zeus and Hermes be allowed to depart without bread? I disappeared into the house with a beating heart. I found bread and milk and meat. I brought these and set them out for them, and drew chairs for them. All this, too, they took for granted, with some shrewd glances at me; they shuffled their feet about under the table, bent low to their plates like hungry men, and shoveled their food into their mouths dexterously with their knives, the better, no doubt, to disguise their divinity.

While they ate, I went, with a heart troubled yet high, and gathered for them grapes that hung immortally lovely in the sun. These too they ate, with a more manifest pleasure, cleaning the bunches down to the stems; and when they had made away with all they could, slipped the remaining clusters in their pockets against a less hospitable occasion.

I remember that then they went and left me standing there in a world of dreams and speculation and adventure. They had gone as they had come but me they left forever changed. As they departed, certain doors in my young days swung and closed mysteriously. For me the channels of life were permanently deepened. With them had departed my complacent, inexperienced attitude of mind; with them had fared forth the care-free child that I had been. This adventure all my own, conducted in my own manner, had initiated me into vast possibilities, the more impressive because but dimly seen. On me had depended for a little while these two of God knows what ancient descent. I too had begun to know and taste life. I too would begin to count my memories. Oh, strange new world! And with strange people in it!

On this world, enter, upper left stage, Leila the maid.

"Oh, Miss Laura, honey, what you bin' doin'? Dey ain't nothin' but no-'count beggars, chile. Don't you know dey mought 'a' come indo's and carried off all de silver? Dat's just de kind would steal fum you when you warn't lookin'. I ain't right sho' now dey ain't got some o' de silver in dey pockets!" And she took savage stock of what lay on the table.

O Leila, ingenuous mind! Dearly as I loved her, how little she knew! How far she was from understanding the habits and predilections of the gods! Would they trouble, do you think, to take a silver knife or fork, who can take away the priceless riches of childhood with them? Would they pause to purloin a mere petty silver spoon, who can carry off an entire golden period of your existence, and leave you with the leaden questions and dull philosophy and heavy responsibility of older years?

I should have asked their names, that I might set these in my prayers, but I had not had presence of mind enough to do that; so, that night, while I knelt by my bed, alone in the moonlight, a very devout little girl, there stood there, shadowy in the shadows, and among my nearest and dearest, on whom I asked the Lord's blessing, the old harp and violin; while, with my head buried passionately in my hands, I begged Providence to have an especial care of these new friends of my heart, to bless them, to let its face shine upon them, and to give them peace.

Musical beggars! I have seen them often since, in one guise or another. Sometimes they trumpet on the trombone or cornet, or blow fearful blasts upon the French horn; I have known them to finesse upon the flute or flageolet. These differences are but inconsiderable. Always I find them equally mighty. I have thought sometimes to get past them with giving them only a great deal more than I could afford. Useless frugality! futile economy! For still they will be laying ghostly hands upon you; still will they be exacting a heavier tribute and demanding that gold and silver of the soul which, as Plato is so well aware, is how infinitely more precious.

Though to outward appearance they are busy with their instruments, how they lay ghostly hands upon your imagination. How they conjure up before the inward eye themselves as they might have been, to levy a new tax upon you. The man with the horn, he who plays always off the key, and always a little ahead of the others, he, it is now mysteriously revealed to you, had meant perhaps, at the very least, to play in an orchestra. And the baggy battered old violin was to have wiped his heated brow with a grand gesture, and bowed condescendingly over his collar to metropolitan audiences, had not his dreams so unaccountably miscarried. And the old thread-bare harp-player, his shabbiness and his bitter face to the contrary notwithstanding, had meant, had really meant, to pluck some sweetness out of life. And the harp itself (yes, even so extensive is the occult power they wield) makes its own special appeal to you, and with its taste for delicacy seems suddenly like a dull tormented thing, swaying and trembling under the stiff sullen fingers of its master, there on the garish pavement--an instrument which, but for the uncertainty of life (ah, the uncertainty of life!), might have responded how devotedly, in the tempered light of a curtained alcove, to the touch of delicate fingers.

All this they conjure up before the mind's eye, ere they stop their excruciating playing. Then the violin, at the very moment that should have been his gracious one, counts the miserably few pennies. The sullen horn, his instrument tucked under his arm, goes on, still a stave ahead of the rest, a sodden expression in his eyes. The old harpist swings the harp rudely over his shoulder, and gives the strap an extra twitch to ease the dull weight, and they are off to fresh pavements and districts new. I have seen great tragedians. I have sat through the sleep-walking scene in "Macbeth." I have heard Banquo knock. I have seen Juliet waken too late in the Capulet tomb and call for Romeo: "O comfortable friar! Where is my lord?" In my schoolgirl days I saw Booth in his great parts; but none of these master-scenes and fine harmonies have stirred in me so intolerable an emotion of pity or sense of fatality as an old horn, or harp and violin, grouped on a garish pavement, their lives dedicated to cheap music fearfully off the key.

These are people of power, let appearances be what they may. You may patronize them if you like, and look upon them as the downtrodden and the dregs of existence. I am, indeed, not so hardy. I have read a different fate in their groups and constellations.

III

MAJOR LOBLEY

There were other poor whose influence was potent in my childhood, but I pass them by, to note but one more, of a curiously strong type, who crossed my path when I might have been about sixteen. She was a Salvation Army major,--Major Lobley,--and she had at her heels an army of poor wretches, "flood-sufferers." That great river on which my home town was situated had risen and overtrod its banks, spreading devastation. As it happened, my mother had standing idle at that time three or four small houses. Into these a large and variegated band of "flood-sufferers" was assisted to move. They came, poor things, bringing their lares and penates. One, whom I take to have been an aristocrat among them, led a mule. Among them all, like a burst of sunshine over a dark and variegated landscape, came Major Lobley and the drum. It would make a better recital, I know, if I said that she was beating it--but I am resolved to tell of things only as I remember them. The drum, however, even though silent, was to the eye sufficiently triumphant and sounding.

My acquaintance with Major Lobley began the morning after her installation. We had already, for the comfort of her clan, parted with all the available covers we could spare. She came seeking more. The maid brought me her name. I went into the parlor to receive her and to learn her errand. I take the liberty of reminding you that I was young and proud, with a traditional training and conventional pride.

In that curtained and rather sombre room, there sat Major Lobley, like a brilliant bit of sunshine. Before I knew what she was about, she was on her feet, had hold of both my hands, had kissed me on both cheeks, was holding me away from her a little,--a quick pleased gesture seen oftener on the stage than off it,--and was saying dazzlingly, "Sister! Are you saved?"

They tell me that even the bravest at the Yser were demoralized by the first use of poisonous gases and other methods of warfare unknown, even undreamed of, by them; and a like panic is said to have seized the Germans at earliest sight of the British armored monsters which ploughed over the ground disdainful of every obstacle, taking their own tracks with them.

Major Lobley attacked me in a fashion I had never before even dreamed of. She was carrying her own tracks with her. None of my own aforethought invulnerable defenses were of the least use. She had thrown down and traversed the most ancient barriers. She had attacked me in the very intrenchments of my oldest traditions. Where were dignity, convention, pride of place, custom of behavior, and other supposedly impregnable defenses? Where were distinctions of class, fortifications of good taste, intrenchments of haughtiness? Where were reserve and other iron and concrete and barbed-wire entanglements? I tell you, they were as though they were not! This glib inquiry about my soul routed me, demoralized me so completely, that I do not even remember what I said. I only know that I fled precipitately for safety into the covert of the nearest subject. Was there anything she needed? And how could I serve her?

At this she was eager.

"Well, I'll tell you! We need another comfort. Darius needs a comfort for his mule. Darius is a good man and his soul is saved. Now couldn't you lend another comfort to the Lord?"

"Yes," said I, in what now seems to me a kind of hypnotized state. "I think I can find another for you." And I went myself and took it from my bed.

She received it with hallelujahs and went away beaming, assuring me as she went, and as on the authority of an ambassador, that I would certainly have my reward.

I make no apology for all this. I know well that I was the weak and routed one. I know that this gypsy from nowhere, with her lack of advantages and her Cinderella training among the ashes and dregs of life, had me at an astonishing disadvantage. I know that, while I stood by, in my futile pride, she went off unaccountably, in a spangled coach, as it were, carrying with her salvation and all the satisfaction in the world, and happily possessed of the bed-covers without which I was to sleep somewhat chilly that night.

But I think it due to myself to say that this weakness on my part was not single. For weeks, months,--as long as she stayed in the neighborhood,--Major Lobley swayed people as by a spell. One would have sworn her drumstick was a wand. In theory, and out of her presence, we younger ones declared her presuming and impossible, but were reduced to serve her whenever she appeared. My mother and my elder sister, who were experienced and better judges, continued to give her and her thin ragged ranks daily help. Pans of biscuit, pots of soup, drifted in that northwesterly direction as by some gulf stream of sympathy which you might speculate and argue about all you liked, but whose course remained mystical and unchanged.

One point I must not fail to mention. I had worried somewhat concerning Darius's mule. There was, I knew, no shelter for him save a tiny woodshed just about half his size. I pictured him standing there, with only his forequarters or hindquarters sheltered, and the rest of him the sport of the elements and the biting weather. Needless anxiety; futile concern! I might have read a different fate for him in Orion and Pleiades! Such anxiety comes of thinking too meanly of life. Darius had a better opinion of it, and it may be with better cause. Perhaps he argued that a power that was able to save his soul was perfectly well able to look after his mule; and rendered expectant by this belief, Darius's eyes saw what my less faithful ones would certainly have overlooked, namely, that the comfortable kitchen of the little house, with its sunshine and its neat wainscoting, made an ideal abiding-place for his friend. Here, therefore, positively benefiting by misfortune and like an animal in a fairy tale, the mule of Darius abode, and, no doubt, more comfortably than ever in his life before; and even if his meals continued to be meagre, he was enabled to eke them out with a generous attention to the wainscoting.

You see! What can be said of a people like that, able to turn the most unlikely things to strange and immediate uses, for all the world as the fairy godmother did the pumpkin and the mice!

What stands out most clearly, as I remember Major Lobley, is neither her scoop-bonnet, nor the drum, nor her solicitude for my soul, but rather the way she managed, say rather contrived, to have us to do whatever she wanted us to do. This was not accomplished by tact, not by craft, not even by intelligence, certainly, I think, not by pity. It was rather, I am persuaded, something ancient and inherited, and not acquired in Major Lobley's brief span; something, rather, dating back to gypsy centuries, God knows how many æons ago--something that had ruled and triumphed, with sounding and loud timbrel, on countless occasions before now; some freedom, some innate self-approval; some linking, it would almost seem, of the powers of poverty with the powers of the Deity.

Have it as you will, the finer appearance still clings to the improvident. They give you color and incident without your asking; they scatter romance and wonder with largesse, as kings. As mere memorable characters, were not the old blind man and Musgrove and Major Lobley worth the money and the anxiety they cost us? And who will contend that Darius's tradition is not to be valued above a mere strip of wainscoting and the cost of a few repairs?

I have long believed that Æsop needs rewriting in many instances, and very especially in that of "The Grasshopper and the Ant." What should be told--since Æsop's creatures are intended to exemplify human behaviors and draw human morals--is how the Grasshopper spent the winter with the Ant, and ate up all the Ant's preserves and marmalades, and fiddled nightly and gayly by the Ant's fire, and managed somehow to make the Ant feel that the privilege had been all her own, to have labored long for the benefit of so interesting and so gifted a gentleman.

I can recall from time to time, all through my childhood and girlhood, that I and mine made a kind of festival of a like circumstance, and how gladly we toiled for the benefit of that class which might be said to winter perpetually on our sympathies. I do not allude merely to tableaux, fairs, private theatricals, musicales, and the like, given for the benefit of those who neither sowed nor gathered into barns. I would be afraid to say how many times, from my early years, I was for their sake a spangled fairy, a Queen Elizabeth court dame, an "Elaine," white, pallid, on a barge, dead of unrequited love, a Gainsborough or Romney portrait, or a Huguenot lady parting from her lover, or a demure "Priscilla," or a dejected "Mariana," or a shaken-kneed reciter of verses, or a trembling performer on the piano. I remember that there was a huge trunk in the old attic at home given over to nothing but amateur theatrical properties. I remember coming home often from dragging, wearisome rehearsals, how tired, but happy! What fun it was to toil and practise and rehearse and labor until your little bones ached "for the benefit of--!"

"For the benefit of"! I tell you it is a magic phrase! I remember my mother coming home again and again,--from some charitable conclave I suppose,--radiant and eager, as she so often was, to announce that we were once more to be permitted to labor in response to its magic. Once, after her attendance on some missionary meeting, it was conveyed to us that we were to be allowed to dress fifty dolls "for the benefit of" as many gregarious little grasshoppers of Senegambia, to the end that their Christmas and our own should be the happier.

It had all the air of a fine adventure. It _was_ a fine adventure. I really would not have missed it. Yet unless you have dressed, let us say, thirty dolls, and know that twenty more remain naked, you can hardly guess how doll-dressmaking may hang heavy, even on the most eager fingers. I can still see them all in their pretty and varied dresses, ranged triumphant at last on top of the old square piano, that we might behold the labor of our hands--their feet straight ahead of them, their eyes fixed, staring but noncommittal, supposedly on Senegambia.

It seems to me now a gay, even though at the same time a somewhat futile, thing to have done; but turn it as you will, the true privilege was ours.

We and our forebears, you see, had in perfect innocence laid by a few stores through the generations. We had preserved and retained certain standards and comfortable customs and conveniences of living; certain traditions, too, of education and treasures of understanding; by which token it became our privilege to entertain and provide for those cicada souls who had followed the more romantic profession of fiddling; and that we might have our privilege to the full, we were graciously permitted to set out preserves, not merely for the swarming grasshoppers of our own land: it was vouchsafed us to sustain and supply with dolls and other delights the appealing little grasshoppers of Senegambia.

Recalling all my childhood and girlhood experience with the poor, I am led by every path of logic to believe that they have some secret power of their own--some divine right and authority by which they rule, beside which the most ancient dynasties are but tricks of evanescence, and the infallibility of the Pope a mere political exigency. The powers they wield would seem to me unique. Show me a dictatorship, empire, oligarchy, system, or a suzerainty, seignory or pashawlic, which presides over and possesses anything commensurate with their realm; which sways and commands anything comparable to their wide dominion!

Will you show me any other people outside of the fairy-books who can put the most fearful calamity on like a cloak and doff it at will, who can augment their families to seven or eight children overnight, and reduce them as readily to five or six the following day, if it but seem to them advisable? Where outside their ranks is there any one capable of persuading you that it is a privilege to sleep cold so that some Darius you never saw or care to see shall, he and his allegorical mule, go better warmed? Who else, being neither of your kith nor kin, has such power over you that, with a mere bloodshot eye and shiver of the shoulders, he can turn your automobile, your furs, your warmth, and all your pleasant pleasures into Dead Sea apples of discomfort? Or, did any of your own class, by merely playing "Ben Bolt," raggedly and horribly off the key, under a grape-arbor, exercise so great a power over you that, having given him what you had, you went awed and chastened of all vanity, and set his name in your prayers that night as the Church service does the king? Are these people of rank who can do this? Or will you still cling to your aristocracies?

It is likely that I shall be accused of sentimentality. Some will say that to talk of the power of the poor is but cruel irony. If I would speak wisely and not as one of the foolish women, let me live and work among the poor, or better still, be of them. This is the only way fairly to judge them.

I am of a like opinion; and am therefore resolved to ask you to let me speak of a later time when I myself was poor, and of the wider knowledge of the powers of the poor which that circumstance afforded me. For, in my advantageous days, I was permitted only to serve the poor, the discouraged, the improvident; later, I was promoted to be, at least in a measure, of their fellowship.

IV

MAMIE FAFFELFINGER

The _nouveaux pauvres_ are, I believe, as a rule, fully as awkward with their poverty as the _nouveaux riches_ with their wealth. They have not the true grand manner. They are not a whit more born to the rags than your suddenly prosperous parvenu to the purple. It is difficult to be at ease with them. Their behaviors, their manners, their speech, more often their silences, are forever reminding you of their former mode of living.

For these and other reasons, I willingly pass over those intervening years, when, though distinctly poor, I was unaccustomed, and wore my changed conditions, I do not doubt, awkwardly. I pass on to a later and more fixed season when, thrown wholly now on my own resources, and totally untrained and unfitted for such an emergency, I made shift to support myself, to live meagrely, and to endure what I took to be a well-nigh intolerable poverty.