Chapter 4

Certainly no tenement house woman could be lazier, emptier of head, more inane of life than her sister Martha. "She wouldn't even keep clean if it wasn't the easiest thing in the world for her to do, and a help at filling in her long idle day." Yet--Martha Galland had every comfort and most of the luxuries, was as sheltered from all the hardships as a hot-house flower. Then there was Hugo--to go no further afield than the family. Had he ever done an honest hour's work in his life? Could anyone have less brains than he? Yet Hugo was rich and respected, was a director in big corporations, was a member of a first-class law firm. "It isn't fair," thought the girl. "I've always felt it. I see now why. It's a bad system of taking from the many for the benefit of us few. And it's kept going by a few clever, strong men like father. They work for themselves and their families and relatives and for their class--and the rest of the people have to suffer."

She did not fall asleep for several hours, such was the tumult in her aroused brain. The first thing the next morning she went down town, bought copies of the New Day--for that week and for a few preceding weeks--and retreated to her favorite nook in her father's grounds to read and to think--and to plan. She searched the New Day in vain for any of the wild, wandering things Davy and her father had told her Victor Dorn was putting forth. The four pages of each number were given over either to philosophical articles no more "anarchistic" than Emerson's essays, not so much so as Carlyle's, or to plain accounts of the current stealing by the politicians of Remsen City, of the squalor and disease--danger in the tenements, of the outrages by the gas and water and street car companies. There was much that was terrible, much that was sad, much that was calculated to make an honest heart burn with indignation against those who were cheerily sacrificing the whole community to their desire for profits and dividends and graft, public and private. But there was also a great deal of humor--of rather a sardonic kind, but still seeing the fantastic side of this grand game of swindle.

Two paragraphs made an especial impression on her:

"Remsen City is no worse--and no better--than other American cities. It's typical. But we who live here needn't worry about the rest of the country. The thing for us to do is to CLEAN UP AT HOME."

"We are more careful than any paper in this town about verifying every statement we make, before we make it. If we should publish a single statement about anyone that was false even in part we would be suppressed. The judges, the bosses, the owners of the big blood-sucking public service corporations, the whole ruling class, are eager to put us out of existence. Don't forget this fact when you hear the New Day called a lying, demagogical sheet."

With the paper beside her on the rustic bench, she fell to dreaming--not of a brighter and better world, of a wiser and freer race, but of Victor Dorn, the personality that had unaided become such a power in Remsen City, the personality that sparkled and glowed in the interesting pages of the New Day, that made its sentences read as if they were spoken into your very ears by an earnest, honest voice issuing from a fascinating, humor-loving, intensely human and natural person before your very eyes. But it was not round Victor Dorn's brain that her imagination played.

"After all," thought she, "Napoleon wasn't much over five feet. Most of the big men have been little men. Of course, there were Alexander--and Washington--and Lincoln, but--how silly to bother about a few inches of height, more or less! And he wasn't really SHORT. Let me see--how high did he come on Davy when Davy was standing near him? Above his shoulder--and Davy's six feet two or three. He's at least as tall as I am--anyhow, in my ordinary heels."

She was attracted by both the personalities she discovered in the little journal. She believed she could tell them apart. About some of the articles, the shorter ones, she was doubtful. But in those of any length she could feel that difference which enables one to distinguish the piano touch of a player in another room--whether it is male or female. Presently she was searching for an excuse for scraping acquaintance with this pair of pariahs--pariahs so far as her world was concerned. And soon she found it. The New Day was taking subscriptions for a fund to send sick children and their mothers to the country for a vacation from the dirt and heat of the tenements--for Remsen City, proud though it was and boastful of its prosperity, housed most of its inhabitants in slums--though of course that low sort of people oughtn't really to be counted--except for purposes of swelling census figures--and to do all the rough and dirty work necessary to keep civilization going.

She would subscribe to this worthy charity--and would take her subscription, herself. Settled--easily and well settled. She did not involve herself, or commit herself in any way. Besides, those who might find out and might think she had overstepped the bounds would excuse her on the ground that she had not been back at home long and did not realize what she was doing.

What should she wear?

Her instinct was for an elaborate toilet--a descent in state--or such state as the extremely limited resources of Martin Hastings' stables would permit. The traps he had ordered for her had not yet come; she had been glad to accept David Hull's offer of a lift the night before. Still, without a carriage or a motor she could make quite an impression with a Paris walking dress and hat, properly supported by fashionable accessories of the toilet.

Good sense and good taste forbade these promptings of nature. No, she would dress most simply--in her very plainest things--taking care to maintain all her advantages of face and figure. If she overwhelmed Dorn and Miss Gordon, she would defeat her own purpose--would not become acquainted with them.

In the end she rejected both courses and decided for the riding costume. The reason she gave for this decision--the reason she gave herself--was that the riding costume would invest the call with an air of accident, of impulse. The real reason.

It may be that some feminine reader can guess why she chose the most startling, the most gracefully becoming, the most artlessly physical apparel in her wardrobe.

She said nothing to her father at lunch about her plans. Why should she speak of them? He might oppose; also, she might change her mind. After lunch she set out on her usual ride, galloping away into the hills--but she had put twenty-five dollars in bills in her trousers pocket. She rode until she felt that her color was at its best, and then she made for town--a swift, direct ride, her heart beating high as if she were upon a most daring and fateful adventure. And, as a matter of fact, never in her life had she done anything that so intensely interested her. She felt that she was for the first time slackening rein upon those unconventional instincts, of unknown strength and purpose, which had been making her restless with their vague stirrings.

"How silly of me!" she thought. "I'm doing a commonplace, rather common thing--and I'm trying to make it seem a daring, romantic adventure. I MUST be hard up for excitement!"

Toward the middle of the afternoon she dropped from her horse before the office of the New Day and gave a boy the bridle. "I'll be back in a minute," she explained. It was a two-story frame building, dingy and in disrepair. On the street floor was a grocery. Access to the New Day was by a rickety stairway. As she ascended this, making a great noise on its unsteady boards with her boots, she began to feel cheap and foolish. She recalled what Hull had said in the carriage. "No doubt," replied she, "I'd feel much the same way if I were going to see Jesus Christ--a carpenter's son, sitting in some hovel, talking with his friends the fishermen and camel drivers--not to speak of the women."

The New Day occupied two small rooms--an editorial work room, and a printing work room behind it. Jane Hastings, in the doorway at the head of the stairs, was seeing all there was to see. In the editorial room were two tables--kitchen tables, littered with papers and journals, as was the floor, also. At the table directly opposite the door no one was sitting--"Victor Dorn's desk," Jane decided. At the table by the open window sat a girl, bent over her writing. Jane saw that the figure was below, probably much below, the medium height for woman, that it was slight and strong, that it was clad in a simple, clean gray linen dress. The girl's black hair, drawn into a plain but distinctly graceful knot, was of that dense and wavy thickness which is a characteristic and a beauty of the Hebrew race. The skin at the nape of her neck, on her hands, on her arms bare to the elbows was of a beautiful dead-white--the skin that so admirably compliments dead-black hair.

Before disturbing this busy writer Jane glanced round. There was nothing to detain her in the view of the busy printing plant in the room beyond. But on the walls of the room before her were four pictures--lithographs, cheap, not framed, held in place by a tack at each corner. There was Washington--then Lincoln--then a copy of Leonardo's Jesus in the Last Supper fresco--and a fourth face, bearded, powerful, imperious, yet wonderfully kind and good humored--a face she did not know. Pointing her riding stick at it she said:

"And who is that?"

With a quick but not in the least a startled movement the girl at the table straightened her form, turned in her chair, saying, as she did so, without having seen the pointing stick:

"That is Marx--Karl Marx."

Jane was so astonished by the face she was now seeing--the face of the girl--that she did not hear the reply. The girl's hair and skin had reminded her of what Martha had told her about the Jewish, or half-Jewish, origin of Selma Gordon. Thus, she assumed that she would see a frankly Jewish face. Instead, the face looking at her from beneath the wealth of thick black hair, carelessly parted near the centre, was Russian--was Cossack--strange and primeval, intense, dark, as superbly alive as one of those exuberant tropical flowers that seem to cry out the mad joy of life. Only, those flowers suggest the evanescent, the flame burning so fiercely that it must soon burn out, while this Russian girl declared that life was eternal. You could not think of her as sick, as old, as anything but young and vigorous and vivid, as full of energy as a healthy baby that kicks its dresses into rags and wears out the strength of its strapping nurse. Her nose was as straight as Jane's own particularly fine example of nose. Her dark gray eyes, beneath long, slender, coal black lines of brow, were brimming with life and with fun. She had a wide, frank, scarlet mouth; her teeth were small and sharp and regular, and of the strong and healthy shade of white. She had a very small, but a very resolute chin. With another quick, free movement she stood up. She was indeed small, but formed in proportion. She seemed out of harmony with her linen dress. She looked as if she ought to be careening on the steppes in some romantic, half-savage costume. Jane's first and instant thought was, "There's not another like her in the whole world. She's the only living specimen of her kind."

"Gracious!" exclaimed Jane. "But you ARE healthy."

The smile took full advantage of the opportunity to broaden into a laugh. A most flattering expression of frank, childlike admiration came into the dark gray eyes. "You're not sickly, yourself," replied Selma. Jane was disappointed that the voice was not untamed Cossack, but was musically civilized.

"Yes, but I don't flaunt it as you do," rejoined Jane. "You'd make anyone who was the least bit off, furious."

Selma, still with the child-like expression, but now one of curiosity, was examining Jane's masculine riding dress. "What a sensible suit!" she cried, delightedly. "I'd wear something like that all the time, if I dared."

"Dared?" said Jane. "You don't look like the frightened sort."

"Not on account of myself," explained Selma. "On account of the cause. You see, we are fighting for a new idea. So, we have to be careful not to offend people's prejudices about ideas not so important. If we went in for everything that's sensible, we'd be regarded as cranks. One thing at a time."

Jane's glance shifted to the fourth picture. "Didn't you say that was--Karl Marx?"

"Yes."

"He wrote a book on political economy. I tried to read it at college. But I couldn't. It was too heavy for me. He was a Socialist--wasn't he?--the founder of Socialism?"

"A great deal more than that," replied Selma. "He was the most important man for human liberty that ever lived--except perhaps one." And she looked at Leonardo's "man of sorrows and acquainted with grief."

"Marx was a--a Hebrew--wasn't he?"

Selma's eyes danced, and Jane felt that she was laughing at her hesitation and choice of the softer word. Selma said:

"Yes--he was a Jew. Both were Jews."

"Both?" inquired Jane, puzzled.

"Marx and Jesus," explained Selma.

Jane was startled. "So HE was a Jew--wasn't He?"

"And they were both labor leaders--labor agitators. The first one proclaimed the brotherhood of man. But he regarded this world as hopeless and called on the weary and heavy laden masses to look to the next world for the righting of their wrongs. Then--eighteen centuries after--came that second Jew"--Selma looked passionate, reverent admiration at the powerful, bearded face, so masterful, yet so kind--"and he said: 'No! not in the hereafter, but in the here. Here and now, my brothers. Let us make this world a heaven. Let us redeem ourselves and destroy the devil of ignorance who is holding us in this hell.' It was three hundred years before that first Jew began to triumph. It won't be so long before there are monuments to Marx in clean and beautiful and free cities all over the earth."

Jane listened intensely. There was admiring envy in her eyes as she cried: "How splendid!--to believe in something--and work for it and live for it--as you do!"

Selma laughed, with a charming little gesture of the shoulders and the hands that reminded Jane of her foreign parentage. "Nothing else seems worth while," said she. "Nothing else is worth while. There are only two entirely great careers--to be a teacher of the right kind and work to ease men's minds--as those four did--or to be a doctor of the right kind and work to make mankind healthy. All the suffering, all the crime, all the wickedness, comes from ignorance or bad health--or both. Usually it's simply bad health."

Jane felt as if she were devoured of thirst and drinking at a fresh, sparkling spring. "I never thought of that before," said she.

"If you find out all about any criminal, big or little, you'll discover that he had bad health--poisons in his blood that goaded him on."

Jane nodded. "Whenever I'm difficult to get on with, I'm always not quite well."

"I can see that your disposition is perfect, when you are well," said Selma.

"And yours," said Jane.

"Oh, I'm never out of humor," said Selma. "You see, I'm never sick--not the least bit."

"You are Miss Gordon, aren't you?"

"Yes--I'm Selma Gordon."

"My name is Jane Hastings." Then as this seemed to convey nothing to Selma, Jane added: "I'm not like you. I haven't an individuality of my own--that anybody knows about. So, I'll have to identify myself by saying that I'm Martin Hastings' daughter."

Jane confidently expected that this announcement would cause some sort of emotion--perhaps of awe, perhaps of horror, certainly of interest. She was disappointed. If Selma felt anything she did not show it--and Jane was of the opinion that it would be well nigh impossible for so direct and natural a person to conceal. Jane went on:

"I read in your paper about your fund for sick children. I was riding past your office--saw the sign--and I've come in to give what I happen to have about me." She drew out the small roll of bills and handed it to Selma.

The Russian girl--if it is fair thus to characterize one so intensely American in manner, in accent and in speech--took the money and said:

"We'll acknowledge it in the paper next week."

Jane flushed and a thrill of alarm ran through her. "Oh--please--no," she urged. "I'd not like to have my name mentioned. That would look as if I had done it to seem charitable. Besides, it's such a trifle."

Selma was calm and apparently unsuspicious. "Very well," said she. "We'll write, telling what we did with the money, so that you can investigate."

"But I trust you entirely," cried Jane.

Selma shook her head. "But we don't wish to be trusted," said she. "Only dishonest people wish to be trusted when it's possible to avoid trusting. And we all need watching. It helps us to keep straight."

"Oh, I don't agree with you," protested Miss Hastings. "Lots of the time I'd hate to be watched. I don't want everybody to know all I do."

Selma's eyes opened. "Why not?" she said.

Jane cast about for a way to explain what seemed to her a self-evident truth. "I mean--privacy," she said. "For instance, if you were in love, you'd not want everybody to know about it?"

"Yes, indeed," declared Selma. "I'd be tremendously proud of it. It must be wonderful to be in love."

In one of those curious twists of feminine nature, Miss Hastings suddenly felt the glow of a strong, unreserved liking for this strange, candid girl.

Selma went on: "But I'm afraid I never shall be. I get no time to think about myself. From rising till bed time my work pushes at me." She glanced uneasily at her desk, apologetically at Miss Hastings. "I ought to be writing this minute. The strike is occupying Victor, and I'm helping out with his work."

"I'm interrupting," said Jane. "I'll go." She put out her hand with her best, her sweetest smile. "We're going to be friends--aren't we?"

Selma clasped her hand heartily and said: "We ARE friends. I like everybody. There's always something to like in everyone--and the bad part isn't their fault. But it isn't often that I like anyone so much as I do you. You are so direct and honest--quite different from the other women of your class that I've met."

Jane felt unaccountably grateful and humble. "I'm afraid you're too generous. I guess you're not a very good judge of people," she said.

"So Victor--Victor Dorn--says," laughed Selma. "He says I'm too confiding. Well--why not? And really, he trusts everybody, too--except with the cause. Then he's--he's"--she glanced from face to face of the four pictures--"he's like those men."

Jane's glance followed Selma's. She said: "Yes--I should imagine so--from what I've heard." She startled, flushed, hid behind a somewhat constrained manner. "Will you come up to my house to lunch?"

"If I can find time," said Selma. "But I'd rather come and take you for a walk. I have to walk two hours every day. It's the only thing that'll keep my head clear."

"When will you come?--to-morrow?"

"Is nine o'clock too early?"

Jane reflected that her father left for business at half-past eight. "Nine to-morrow," she said. "Good-by again."

As she was mounting her horse, she saw "the Cossack girl," as she was calling her, writing away at the window hardly three feet above the level of Jane's head when she was mounted, so low was the first story of the battered old frame house. But Selma did not see her; she was all intent upon the writing. "She's forgotten me already," thought Jane with a pang of jealous vanity. She added: "But SHE has SOMETHING to think about--she and Victor Dorn."

She was so preoccupied that she rode away with only an absent thank you for the small boy, in an older and much larger and wider brother's cast-off shirt, suspenders and trousers. At the corner of the avenue she remembered and turned her horse. There stood the boy gazing after her with a hypnotic intensity that made her smile. She rode back fumbling in her pockets. "I beg your pardon," said she to the boy. Then she called up to Selma Gordon:

"Miss Gordon--please--will you lend me a quarter until to-morrow?"

Selma looked up, stared dazedly at her, smiled absently at Miss Hastings--and Miss Hastings had the strongest confirmation of her suspicion that Selma had forgotten her and her visit the instant she vanished from the threshold of the office. Said Selma: "A quarter?--oh, yes--certainly." She seemed to be searching a drawer or a purse out of sight. "I haven't anything but a five dollar bill. I'm so sorry"--this in an absent manner, with most of her thoughts evidently still upon her work. She rose, leaned from the window, glanced up the street, then down. She went on:

"There comes Victor Dorn. He'll lend it to you."

Along the ragged brick walk at a quick pace the man who had in such abrupt fashion stormed Jane Hasting's fancy and taken possession of her curiosity was advancing with a basket on his arm. He was indeed a man of small stature--about the medium height for a woman--about the height of Jane Hastings. But his figure was so well put together and his walk so easy and free from self-consciousness that the question of stature no sooner arose than it was dismissed. His head commanded all the attention--its poise and the remarkable face that fronted it. The features were bold, the skin was clear and healthy and rather fair. His eyes--gray or green blue and set neither prominently nor retreatedly--seemed to be seeing and understanding all that was going on about him. He had a strong, rather relentless mouth--the mouth of men who make and compel sacrifices for their ambitions.

"Victor," cried Selma as soon as he was within easy range of her voice, "please lend Miss Hastings a quarter." And she immediately sat down and went to work again, with the incident dismissed from mind.

The young man--for he was plainly not far beyond thirty--halted and regarded the young woman on the horse.

"I wish to give this young gentleman here a quarter," said Jane. "He was very good about holding my horse."

The words were not spoken before the young gentleman darted across the narrow street and into a yard hidden by masses of clematis, morning glory and sweet peas. And Jane realized that she had wholly mistaken the meaning of that hypnotic stare.

Victor laughed--the small figure, the vast clothes, the bare feet with voluminous trousers about them made a ludicrous sight. "He doesn't want it," said Victor. "Thank you just the same."

"But I want him to have it," said Jane.

With a significant unconscious glance at her costume Dorn said: "Those costumes haven't reached our town yet."

"He did some work for me. I owe it to him."

"He's my sister's little boy," said Dorn, with his amiable, friendly smile. "We mustn't start him in the bad way of expecting pay for politeness."

Jane colored as if she had been rebuked, when in fact his tone forbade the suggestion of rebuke. There was an unpleasant sparkle in her eyes as she regarded the young man in the baggy suit, with the basket on his arm. "I beg your pardon," said she coldly. "I naturally didn't know your peculiar point of view."