Chapter 14

"... And some fool of a girl, no more than a child for knowing what she's doin', laughs and answers back--just for the fun of it, not looking for harm, and right there's where your trouble begins. Maybe that night after doin' the picture shows; maybe another night; but it's sure to come. Dammit, Doc, I'm no saint nor sam-singer and I've done things I hadn't ought like other men, and woke up shamed the next morning, too, but I've got a sister who's a decent good girl as there is anywhere, and by God, sir, I'd _kill_ a man who just looked at her with the dirty eyes of them little soft-mouth blaggards!"

Queed, unaffectedly interested, asked the usual question--could not the girls be taught at home the dangers of such acquaintances?--and Buck pulverized it in the usual way.

"Who in blazes is goin' to teach 'em? Don't you know _anything_ about what kind of homes they got? Why, man, they're _the sisters of the little blaggards!_"

He painted a dark picture of the home-life of many of these girls: its hard work and unrelenting poverty; its cheerlessness; the absence of any fun; the irresistible allurement of the flashily-dressed stranger who jingles money in his pocket and offers to "show a good time." Then he told a typical story, the story of a little girl he knew, who worked in a department store for three dollars and a half a week, and whose drunken father took over the last cent of that every Saturday night. This girl's name was Eva Bernheimer, and she was sixteen years old and "in trouble."

"You know what, Doc?" Buck ended. "You'd ought to take it up in the _Post_--that's what. There's a fine piece to be written, showin' up them little hunters."

It was characteristic of Doctor Queed that such an idea had not and would not have occurred to him: applying his new science of editorial writing to a practical problem dipped from the stream of everyday life was still rather beyond him. But it was also characteristic of him that, once the idea had been suggested to him, he instantly perceived its value. He looked at Buck admiringly through the iron bars.

"You are quite right. There is."

"You know they are trying to get up a reformatory--girls' home, some call it. That's all right, if you can't do better, but it don't get to the bottom of it. The right way with a thing like this is to _take it before it happens!_"

"You are quite right, Buck."

"Yes--but how're you goin' to do it? You sit up here all day and night with your books and studies, Doc--where's your cure for a sorry trouble like this?"

"That is a fair question. I cannot answer definitely until I have studied the situation out in a practical way. But I will say that the general problem is one of the most difficult with which social science has to deal."

"I know what had ought to be done. The blaggards ought to be shot. Damn every last one of them, I say."

Klinker conversed in his anger something like the ladies of Billingsgate, but Queed did not notice this. He sat back in his chair, absorbedly thinking that here, at all events, was a theme which had enough practical relation with life. He himself had seen a group of the odious "mashers" with his own eyes; Buck had pointed them out as they walked up. Never had a social problem come so close home to him as this: not a thing of text-book theories, but a burning issue working out around the corner on people that Klinker knew. And Klinker's question had been an acute one, challenging the immediate value of social science itself.

His thought veered, swept out of its channel by an unwonted wave of bitterness. Klinker had offered him this material, Klinker had advised him to write an editorial about it, Klinker had pointed out for him, in almost a superior way, just where the trouble lay. Nor was this all. Of late everybody seemed to be giving him advice. Only the other week it was Fifi; and that same day, the young lady Charles Weyland. What was there about him that invited this sort of thing?... And he was going to take Klinker's advice; he had seized upon it gratefully. Nor could he say that he was utterly insensate to Fifi's: he had caught himself saying over part of it not ten minutes ago. As for Charles Weyland's ripsaw criticisms, he had analyzed them dispassionately, as he had promised, and his reason rejected them in toto. Yet he could not exactly say that he had wholly purged them out of his mind. No ... the fact was that some of her phrases had managed to burn themselves into his brain.

Presently Klinker said another thing that his friend the little Doctor remembered for a long time.

"Do you know what's the finest line in Scripture, Doc? _But He spake of the temple of His body._ I heard a minister get that off in a church once, in a sermon, and I don't guess I'll ever forget it. A dandy, ain't it?... Exercise and live straight. Keep your temple strong and clean. If I was a parson, I tell you, I'd go right to Seventh and Centre next Saturday and give a talk to them blaggards on that. _But He spake of_ ..."

Klinker stopped as though he had been shot. A sudden agonized scream from downstairs jerked him off the bed and to his feet in a second solemn as at the last trump. He stared at Queed wide-eyed, his honest red face suddenly white.

"God forgive me for talkin' so loud.... I'd ought to have known...."

"What is it? Who was that?" demanded Queed, startled more by Klinker's look than by that scream.

But Klinker only turned and slipped softly out of the door, tipping on his toes as though somebody near at hand were asleep.

Queed was left bewildered, and completely at a loss. Whatever the matter was, it clearly concerned Buck Klinker. Equally clearly, it did not concern him. People had a right to scream if they felt that way, without having a horde of boarders hurry out and call them to book.

However, his scientist's fondness for getting at the underlying causes--or as some call it, curiosity--presently obtained control of him, and he went downstairs.

There is no privacy of grief in the communism of a middle-class boarding-house. It is ordered that your neighbor shall gaze upon your woe and you shall stare at his anguish, when both are new and raw. That cry of pain had been instantly followed by a stir of movement; a little shiver ran through the house. Doors opened and shut; voices murmured; quick feet sounded on the stairs. Now the boarders were gathered in the parlor, very still and solemn, yet not to save their lives unaware that for them the humdrum round was to go on just the same. And here, of course, is no matter of a boarding-house: for queens must eat though kings lie high in state.

To Mrs. Paynter's parlor came a girl, white-faced and shadowy-eyed, but for those hours at least, calm and tearless and the mistress of herself. The boarders rose as she appeared in the door, and she saw that after all she had no need to tell them anything. They came and took her hand, one by one, which was the hardest to bear, and even Mr. Bylash seemed touched with a new dignity, and even Miss Miller's pompadour looked human and sorry. But two faces Miss Weyland did not see among the kind-eyed boarders: the old professor, who had locked himself in his room, and the little Doctor who was at that moment coming down the steps.

"Supper's very late," said she. "Emma and Laura ... have been much upset. I'll have it on the table in a minute."

She turned into the hail and saw Queed on the stairs. He halted his descent five steps from the bottom, and she came to the banisters and stood and looked up at him. And if any memory of their last meeting was with them then, neither of them gave any sign of it.

"You know--?"

"No, I don't know," he replied, disturbed by her look, he did not know why, and involuntarily lowering his voice. "I came down expressly to find out."

"Fifi--She--"

"Is worse again?"

"She ... stopped breathing a few minutes ago."

"_Dead!_"

Sharlee winced visibly at the word, as the fresh stricken always will.

The little Doctor turned his head vaguely away. The house was so still that the creaking of the stairs as his weight shifted from one foot to another, sounded horribly loud; he noticed it, and regretted having moved. The idea of Fifi's dying had of course never occurred to him. Something put into his head the simple thought that he would never help the little girl with her algebra again, and at once he was conscious of an odd and decidedly unpleasant sensation, somewhere far away inside of him. He felt that he ought to say something, to sum up his attitude toward the unexpected event, but for once in his life he experienced a difficulty in formulating his thought in precise language. However, the pause was of the briefest.

"I think," said Sharlee, "the funeral will be Monday afternoon.... You will go, won't you?"

Queed turned upon her a clouded brow. The thought of taking personal part in such mummery as a funeral--"barbaric rites," he called them in the forthcoming Work--was entirely distasteful to him. "No," he said, hastily. "No, I could hardly do that--"

"Fifi--would like it. It is the last time you will have to do anything for her."

"Like it? It is hardly as if she would know--!"

"Mightn't you show your regard for a friend just the same, even if your friend was never to know about it?... Besides--I think of these things another way, and so did Fifi."

He peered down at her over the banisters, oddly disquieted. The flaring gas lamp beat mercilessly upon her face, and it occurred to him that she looked tired around her eyes.

"I think Fifi will know ... and be glad," said Sharlee. "She liked and admired you. Only day before yesterday she spoke of you. Now she ... has gone, and this is the one way left for any of us to show that we are sorry."

Long afterwards, Queed thought that if Charles Weyland's lashes had not glittered with sudden tears at that moment he would have refused her. But her lashes did so glitter, and he capitulated at once; and turning instantly went heavy-hearted up the stairs.

XV

_In a Country Churchyard, and afterwards; of Friends: how they take your Time while they live, and then die, upsetting your Evening's Work; and what Buck Klinker saw in the Scriptorium at 2 a.m._

Queed was caught, like many another rationalist before him, by the stirring beauty of the burial service of the English church.

Fifi's funeral was in the country, at a little church set down in a beautiful grove which reminds all visitors of the saying about God's first temples. Near here Mrs. Paynter was born and spent her girlhood; here Fifi, before her last illness, had come every Sabbath morning to the Sunday-school; here lay the little strip of God's acre that the now childless widow called her own. You come by the new electric line, one of those high-speed suburban roads which, all over the country, are doing so much to persuade city people back to the land. The cars are steam-road size. Two of them had been provided for the mourners, and there was no room to spare; for the Paynter family connection was large, and it seemed that little Fifi had many friends.

From Stop 11, where the little station is, your course is by the woodland path; past the little springhouse, over the tiny rustic bridge, and so on up the shady slope to the cluster of ancient pines. In the grove stood carriages; buggy horses reined to the tall trees; even that abomination around a church, the motor of the vandals. In the walk through the woods, Queed found himself side by side with a fat, scarlet-faced man, who wore a vest with brass buttons and immediately began talking to him like a lifelong friend. He was a motorman on the suburban line, it seemed, and had known Fifi very well.

"No, sir, I wouldn't believe it when my wife seen it in the paper and called it out to me, an' I says there's some mistake, you can be sure, and she says no, here it is in the paper, you can read it for y'self. But I wouldn't believe it till I went by the house on the way to my run, and there was the crape on the door. An' I tell you, suh, I couldn't a felt worse if 'twas one o' my own kids. Why, it seems like only the other morning she skipped onto my car, laughin' and sayin', 'How are you to-day, Mr. Barnes?' Why she and me been buddies for nigh three years, and she took my 9.30 north car every Sunday morning, rain or shine, just as reg'lar, and was the only one I ever let stand out on _my_ platform, bein' strictly agin all rules, and my old partner Hornheim was fired for allowin' it, it ain't six months since. But what could I do when she asked me, _please, Mr. Barnes_, with that sweet face o' hers, and her rememberin' me every Christmas that came along just like I was her Pa...."

The motorman talked too much, but he proved useful in finding seats up near the front, where, being fat, he took up considerably more than his share of room.

Unless Tim had taken him to the Cathedral once, twenty years ago, it was the first time that Queed had ever been inside a church. He had read Renan at fourteen, finally discarding all religious beliefs in the same year. Approximately Spencer's First Cause satisfied his reason, though he meant to buttress Spencer's contention in its weakest place and carry it deeper than Spencer did. But in fact, the exact limits he should assign to religious beliefs as an evolutionary function were still indeterminate in his system. He, like all cosmic philosophers, found this the most baffling and elusive of all his problems. Meantime, here in this little country church, he was to witness the supreme rite of the supreme religious belief. There was some compensation for his enforced attendance in that thought. He looked about him with genuine and candid interest. The hush, the dim light, the rows upon rows of sober-faced people, seemed to him properly impressive. He was struck by the wealth of flowers massed all over the chancel, and wondered if that was its regular state. The pulpit and the lectern; the altar, which he easily identified; the stained-glass windows with their obviously symbolic pictures; the bronze pipes of the little organ; the unvested choir, whose function he vaguely made out--over all these his intelligent eye swept, curiously; and lastly it went out of the open window and lost itself in the quiet sunny woods outside.

Strange and full of wonder. This incredible instinct for adoration--this invincible insistence in believing, in defiance of all reason, that man was not born to die as the flesh dies. What, after all, was the full significance of this unique phenomenon?

_I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live...._

A loud resonant voice suddenly cut the hush with these words and immediately they were all standing. Queed was among the first to rise; the movement was like a reflex action. For there was something in the thrilling timbre of that voice that seemed to pull him to his feet regardless of his will; something, in fact, that impelled him to crane his neck around and peer down the dim aisle to discover immediately who was the author of it.

His eye fell on a young man advancing, clad in white robes the like of which he had never seen, and wearing the look of the morning upon his face. In his hands he bore an open book, but he did not glance at it. His head was thrown back; his eyes seemed fastened on something outside and beyond the church; and he rolled out the victorious words as though he would stake all that he held dearest in this world that their prophecy was true.

_Whom I shall see for myself, and_ MINE _eyes shall behold, and not another...._

But behind the young man rolled a little stand on wheels, on which lay a long box banked in flowers; and though the little Doctor had never been at a funeral before, and never in the presence of death, he knew that here must lie the mortal remains of his little friend, Fifi. From this point onward Queed's interest in the service became, so to say, less purely scientific.

There was some antiphonal reciting, and then a long selection which the young man in robes read with the same voice of solemn triumph. It is doubtful if anybody in the church followed him with the fascinated attention of the young evolutionist. Soon the organ rumbled, and the little choir, standing, broke into song.

For all the Saints who from their labors rest....

Saints! Well, well, was it imaginable that they thought of Fifi that way _already_? Why, it was only three weeks ago that he had sent her the roses and she....

A black-gloved hand, holding an open book, descended out of the dim space behind him. It came to him, as by an inspiration, that the book was being offered for his use in some mysterious connection. He grasped it gingerly, and his friend the motorman, jabbing at the text with a scarlet hand, whispered raucously: "'S what they're singin'." But the singers had traveled far before the young man was able to find and follow them.

And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long, Steals on the ear the distant triumph song, And hearts are brave again, and arms are strong.

The girls in the choir sang on, untroubled by a doubt:--

But lo, there breaks a yet more glorious day; The saints triumphant rise in bright array; The King of glory passes on His way.

They marched outside following the flower-banked casket into the little cemetery, and Queed stood with bared head like the others, watching the committal of dust unto dust. In the forefront of the mournful gathering, nearest the grave's edge, there stood three women heavily swathed in black. Through all the rite now, suppressed sobbing ran like a motif. Soon fell upon all ears the saddest of all sounds, the pitiless thud of the first earth upon the stiff lid. On the other side of the irregular circle, Queed saw the coarse red motorman; tears were rolling down his fat cheeks; but never noticing them he was singing loudly, far off the key, from the book the black-gloved hand had given Queed. The hymn they were singing now also spoke surely and naturally of the saints. The same proud note, the young man observed, ran through the service from beginning to end. Hymn and prayer and reading all confidently assumed that Fifi was dead only to this mortal eye, but in another world, open to all those gathered about the grave for their seeking, she lived in some marvelously changed form--her body being made _like unto his own glorious body_....

In the homeward-bound car, Queed fully recaptured his poise, and redirected his thoughts into rational channels.

The doctrine of the immortality of the soul had not a rational leg to stand on. The anima, or spirit, being merely the product of certain elements combined in life, was wiped out when those elements dissolved their union in death. It was the flame of a candle blown out. Yet with what unbelievable persistence this doctrine had survived through history. Science had annihilated it again and again, but these people resolutely stopped their ears to science. They could not answer science with argument, so they had answered her with the axe and the stake; and they were still capable of doing that whenever they thought it desirable. Strange spectacle! What was the "conflict between Religion and Science" but man's desperate struggle against his own reason? Benjamin Kidd had that right at any rate.

Yet did these people really believe their doctrine of the saved body and the saved soul? They said they did, but did they? If they believed it surely, as they believed that this night would be followed by a new day, if they believed it passionately as they believed that money is the great earthly good, then certainly the biggest of their worldly affairs would be less than a grain of sand by the sea against the everlasting glories that awaited them. Yet ... look at them all about him in the car, these people who told themselves that they had started Fifi on the way to be a saint, in which state they expected to remeet her. Did they so regard their worldly affairs? By to-morrow they would be at each other's throats, squabbling, cheating, slandering, lying, fighting desperately to gain some ephemeral advantage--all under the eye of the magnificent guerdon they pretended to believe in and knew they were jeopardizing by such acts. No, it was pure self-hypnosis. Weak man demanded offsets for his earthly woes, and he had concocted them in a world of his own imagining. That was the history of man's religions; the concoction of other-worldly offsets for worldly woes. In their heart of hearts, all knew that they were concoctions, and the haruspices laughed when they met each other.

Supper was early at Mrs. Paynter's, as though to atone for the tardiness of yesterday. The boarders dispatched it not without recurring cheerfulness, broken now and again by fits of decorous silence. You could see that by to-morrow, or it might be next day, the house would be back in its normal swing again.

Mr. Queed withdrew to his little chamber. He trod the steps softly for once, and perhaps this was why, as he passed Mrs. Paynter's room, his usually engrossed ear caught the sound of weeping, quiet but unrestrained, ceaseless, racking weeping, running on evermore, the weeping of Rachel for her children, who would not be comforted.

The little Doctor shut the door of the Scriptorium and lit the gas. So far, his custom; but here his whim and his wont parted. Instead of seating himself at his table, where the bound _Post_ for January-March, 1902, awaited his exploration, he laid himself down on his tiny bed.

If he were to die to-night, who would weep for him like that?

The thought had come unbidden to his mind and stuck in his metaphysics like a burr. Now he remembered that the question was not entirely a new one. Fifi had once asked him who would be sorry if he died, and had answered herself by saying that she would. However, Fifi was dead, and therefore released from her promise.

Yes, Fifi was dead. He would never help her with her algebra again. The thought filled him with vague, unaccountable regrets. He felt that he would willingly take twenty minutes a night from the wrecked Schedule to have her come back, but unfortunately there was no way of arranging that now. He remembered the night he had sent Fifi out of the dining-room for coughing, and the remembrance made him distinctly uncomfortable. He rather wished that he had told Fifi he was sorry about that, but it was too late now. Still he had told her that he was her friend; he was glad to remember that. But here, from a new point of view, was the trouble about having friends. They took your time while they lived, and then they went off and died and upset your evening's work.

Clearly, Fifi left behind many sorrowful friends, as shown by her remarkable funeral. If he himself were to die, Tim and Murphy Queed would probably feel sorrowful, but they would hardly come to the funeral. For one thing, Tim could not come because of his duties on the force, and Murphy, for all he knew, was undergoing incarceration. About the only person he could think of as a probable attendant at his graveside was William Klinker. Yes, Buck would certainly be there, though it was asking a good deal to expect him to weep. A funeral consisting of only one person would look rather odd to those who were familiar with such crowded churches as that he had seen to-day. People passing by would nudge each other and say that the dead must have led an eccentric life, indeed, to be so alone at the end.... Come to think of it, though, there wouldn't be any funeral. He had nothing to do with those most interesting but clearly barbaric rites. Of course his body would be cremated by directions in the will. The operation would be private, attracting no attention from anybody. Buck would make the arrangements. He tried to picture Buck weeping near the incinerator, and failed.