Chapter 179

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.

XI

The question has been very much discussed whether the devil, in temperate latitudes, is busier in the summer or in the winter. When Congress and the various State legislatures are in session, and the stock and grain exchanges are most active, and society is gayest, and the churches and benevolent and reformatory associations are most aggressive--at this season, which is the cool season, he seems to be most animated and powerful.

But is not this because he is then most opposed? The stream may not flow any faster because it is dammed, but it exhibits at the obstructed points greater appearance of agitation. Many people are under the impression that when they stop fighting there is a general truce: There is reason to believe that the arch enemy is pleased with this impression, that he likes a truce, and that it is his best opportunity, just as the weeds in the garden, after a tempest, welcome the sun and the placidity of the elements. It is well known that in summer virtue suffers from inertia, and that it is difficult to assemble the members of any vigilant organization, especially in cities, where the flag of the enemy is never lowered. But wherever the devil is there is always a quorum present for business. It is not his plan to seek an open fight, and many observers say that he gains more ground in summer than in any other season, and this notwithstanding people are more apt to lose their tempers, and even become profane, in the aggravations of what is known as spring than at any other time. The subject cannot be pursued here, but there is ground for supposing that the devil prefers a country where the temperature is high and pretty uniform.

At any rate, it is true that the development of character is not arrested by any geniality or languor of nature. By midsummer the Hendersons were settled in Lenox, where the Blunts had long been, and Miss Tavish and her party of friends were at Bar Harbor. Henderson was compelled to be in the city most of the time, and Jack Delancy fancied that business required his presence there also; but he had bought a yacht, and contemplated a voyage, with several of the club men, up the Maine coast. "No, I thank you," Major Fairfax had said; "I know an easier way to get to Bar Harbor."

Jack was irritable and restless, to be sure, in the absence of the sort of female society he had become accustomed to; but there were many compensations in his free-and-easy bachelor life, in his pretense of business, which consisted in watching the ticker, as it is called, in an occasional interview with Henderson, and in the floating summer amusements of the relaxed city. There was nothing unusual in this life except that he needed a little more stimulation, but this was not strange in the summer, and that he devoted more time to poker--but everybody knows that a person comes out about even in the game of poker if he keeps at it long enough--there was nothing unusual in this, only it was giving Jack a distaste for the quiet and it seemed to him the restraint of the Golden House down by the sea. And he was more irritable there than elsewhere. It is so difficult to estimate an interior deterioration of this sort, for Jack was just as popular with his comrades as ever, and apparently more prosperous.

It is true that Jack had had other ideas when he was courting Edith Fletcher, and at moments, at any rate, different aspirations from any he had now. With her at that time there had been nobler aspirations about life. But now she was his wife. That was settled. And not only that, but she was the best woman he knew; and if she were not his wife, he would spare no effort to win her. He felt sure of that. He did not put it to himself in the way an Oriental would do, "That is finished"; but it was an act done--a good act--and here was his world again, with a hundred interests, and there were people besides Edith to be thought of, other women and men, and affairs. Because a man was married, was he to be shut up to one little narrow career, that of husband? Probably it did not occur to him that women take a different view of this in the singleness of their purpose and faith. Edith, for instance, knew or guessed that Jack had no purpose in life that was twenty-four hours old; but she had faith--and no amount of observation destroys this faith in women--that marriage would inspire him with energy and ambition to take a man's place in the world.

With most men marriage is un fait accompli. Jack had been lucky, but there was, no doubt, truth in an observation of Mavick's. One night as they sat at the club Jack had asked him a leading question, apropos of Henderson's successful career: "Mavick, why don't you get married?" "I have never," he replied, with his usual cynical deliberation, "been obliged to. The fact is, marriage is a curb-bit. Some horses show off better with it, and some are enraged and kick over the traces. I cannot decide which I would be."

"That's true enough," said Jack, "from a bachelor's point of view of independence, but it's really a question of matching."

"The most difficult thing in the world--in horses. Just about impossible in temperament and movement, let alone looks. Most men are lucky if they get, like Henderson, a running mate."

"I see," said Jack, who knew something about the Henderson household, "your idea of a pair is that they should go single."

Mavick laughed, and said something about the ideas of women changing so much lately that nobody could tell what the relation of marriage would become, and Jack, who began to feel that he was disloyal, changed the subject. To do him justice, he would have been ashamed for Edith to hear this sort of flippant and shallow talk, which wouldn't have been at all out of place with Carmen or Miss Tavish.

"I wanted to ask you, Mavick, as a friend, do you think Henderson is square?"

"How square?"

"Well, safe?"

"Nobody is safe. Henderson is as safe as anybody. You can rely on what he says. But there's a good deal he doesn't say. Anything wrong?"

"Not that I know. I've been pretty lucky. But the fact is, I've gone in rather deep."

"Well, it's a game. Henderson plays it, as everybody does, for himself. I like Henderson. He plays to win, and generally does. But, you know, if one man wins, somebody else has got to lose in this kind of industry."

"But Henderson looks out for his friends?"

"Yes--when it doesn't cost too much. Times may come when a man has to look out for himself. Wealth isn't made out of nothing. There must be streams into the reservoir. These great accumulations of one--you can see that--must be made up of countless other men's small savings. There's Uncle Jerry. He operates a good deal with Henderson, and they'd incline to help each other out. But Uncle Jerry says he's got a small pond of his own, and he's careful not to connect it with Henderson's reservoir."

"What do you think of Missouri?"

"What do I think of the Milky Way? It doesn't much matter to me what becomes of Missouri, unless Henderson should happen to get smashed in it, and that isn't what he is there for. But when you look at the combinations, and the dropping-off of roads that have been drained, and the scaling down in refunding, and the rearranging, and the strikes, how much chance do you think the small fry stand? I don't doubt that Henderson will make a big thing out of it, and there will be lots of howling by those who were not so smart, and the newspapers will say that Henderson was too strong for them. What we respect nowadays are adroitness and strength."

"It's an exciting game," Mavick continued, after a moment's pause. "Let me know if you get uneasy. But I'll tell you what it is, Jack; if I had a comfortable income, I wouldn't risk it in any speculation. There is a good deal that is interesting going on in this world, and I like to be in it; but the best plan for a man who has anything is, as Uncle Jerry says, to sail close and salt down."