Chapter 1

The Island of Faith

By MARGARET E. SANGSTER

1921

To M's M and Chance

Contents

I. INTRODUCING--THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE

II. THE QUARREL

III. CONCERNING IDEALS

IV. THE PARK

V. ROSE-MARIE COMES TO THE RESCUE

VI. "THERE'S NO PLACE--"

VII. A LILY IN THE SLUMS

VIII. ANOTHER QUARREL

IX. AND ANOTHER

X. MRS. VOLSKY PROMISES TO TRY

XI. BENNIE COMES TO THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE

XII. AN ISLAND

XIII. ELLA MAKES A DECISION

XIV. PA STEPS ASIDE

XV. A SOLUTION

XVI. ENTER--JIM

XVII. AN ANSWER

XVIII. AND A MIRACLE

XIX. AND THE HAPPY ENDING

I

INTRODUCING--THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE

There is a certain section of New York that is bounded upon the north by Fourteenth Street, upon the south by Delancy. Folk who dwell in it seldom stray farther west than the Bowery, rarely cross the river that flows sluggishly on its eastern border. They live their lives out, with something that might be termed a feverish stolidity, in the dim crowded flats, and upon the thronged streets.

To the people who have homes on Central Park West, to the frail winged moths who flutter up and down Broadway, this section does not exist. Its poor are not the picturesque poor of the city's Latin quarter, its criminals seldom win to the notoriety of a front page and inch-high headlines; it almost never produces a genius for the world to smile upon--its talent does not often break away from the undefined, but none the less certain, limits of the district.

It is curious that this part of town is seldom featured in song or story, for it is certainly neither dull nor unproductive of plot. The tenements that loom, canyon-like, upon every side are filled to overflowing with human drama; and the stilted little parks are so teeming with romances, of a summer night, that only the book of the ages would be big enough to hold them--were they written out! Life beats, like some great wave, up the dim alleyways--it breaks, in a shattered tide, against rock-like doorways. The music of a street band, strangely sweet despite its shrillness, rises triumphantly above the tumult of pavement vendors, the crying of babies, the shouting of small boys, and the monotonous voices of the womenfolk.

In almost the exact center of this district is the Settlement House--a brown building that is tall and curiously friendly. Between a great hive-like dwelling place and a noisy dance-hall it stands valiantly, like the soldier of God that it is! And through its wide-open doorway come and go the girls who will gladly squander a week's wage for a bit of satin or a velvet hat; the shabby, dull-eyed women who, two years before, were care-free girls themselves; the dreamers--and the ones who have never learned to dream. For there is something about the Settlement House--and about the tiny group of earnest people who are the heart of the Settlement House--that is like a warm hand, stretched out in welcome to the poor and the needy, to the halt in body and the maimed in soul, and to the casual passer-by.

II

THE QUARREL

"They're like animals," said the Young Doctor in the tone of one who states an indisputable fact. "Only worse!" he added.

Rose-Marie laid down the bit of roll that she had been buttering and turned reproachful eyes upon the Young Doctor.

"Oh, but they're not," she cried; "you don't understand, or you wouldn't talk that way. You don't understand!"

Quite after the maddening fashion of men the doctor did not answer until he had consumed, and appreciatively, the last of the roll he was eating. And then--

"I've been here quite as long as you have, Miss Thompson," he remarked, a shade too gently.

The Superintendent raised tired eyes from her plate. She was little and slim and gray, this Superintendent; it seemed almost as though the slums had drained from her the life and colour.

"When you've been working in this section for twenty years," she said slowly, "you'll realize that nobody can ever understand. You'll realize that we all have animal traits--to a certain extent. And you'll realize that quarrelling isn't ever worth while."

"But"--Rose-Marie was inclined to argue the point--"but Dr. Blanchard talks as if the people down here are scarcely human! And it's not right to feel so about one's fellow-men. Dr. Blanchard acts as if the people down here haven't _souls_!"

The Young Doctor helped himself nonchalantly to a second roll.

"There's a certain sort of a little bug that lives in the water," he said, "and it drifts around aimlessly until it finds another little bug that it holds on to. And then another little bug takes hold, and another, and another. And pretty soon there are hundreds of little bugs, and then there are thousands, and then there are millions, and then billions, and then--"

The Superintendent interrupted wearily.

"I'd stop at the billions, if I were you," she said, "particularly as they haven't any special bearing on the subject."

"Oh, but they _have_" said the doctor, "for, after a while, the billions and _trillions_ of little bugs, clinging together, make an island. They haven't souls, perhaps," he darted a triumphant glance at Rose-Marie, "but they make an island just the same!"

He paused for a moment, as if waiting for some sort of comment. When it did not come, he spoke again.

"The people of the slums," he said, "the people who drift into, and out of, and around this Settlement House, are not very unlike the little bugs. And, after all, _they do help to make the city_!"

There was a quaver in Rose-Marie's voice, and a hurt look in her eyes, as she answered.

"Yes, they are like the little bugs," she said, "in the blind way that they hold together! But please, Dr. Blanchard, don't say they are soulless. Don't--"

All at once the Young Doctor's hand was banging upon the table. All at once his voice was vehemently raised.

"It's the difference in our point of view, Miss Thompson," he told Rose-Marie, "and I'm afraid that I'm right and that you're--not right. You've come from a pretty little country town where every one was fairly comfortable and fairly prosperous. You've always been a part of a community where people went to church and prayer-meeting and Sunday-school. Your neighbours loved each other, and played Pollyanna when things went wrong. And you wore white frocks and blue sashes whenever there was a lawn party or a sociable." He paused, perhaps for breath, and then--"I'm different," he said; "I struggled for my education; it was always the survival of the fittest with me. I worked my way through medical school. I had my hospital experience in Bellevue and on the Island--most of my patients were the lowest of the low. I've tried to cure diseased bodies--but I've left diseased minds alone. Diseased minds have been out of my line. Perhaps that's why I've come through with an ideal of life that's slightly different from your sunshine and apple blossoms theory!"

"Oh," Rose-Marie was half sobbing, "oh, you're so hard!"

The Young Doctor faced her suddenly and squarely. "Why did you come here," he cried, "to the slums? Why did you come to work in a Settlement House? What qualifications have you to be a social service worker, you child? What do you know of the meaning of service, of life?"

Rose-Marie's voice was earnest, though shaken.

"I came," she answered, "because I love people and want to help them. I came because I want to teach them to think beautiful thoughts, to have beautiful ideals. I came because I want to show them the God that I know--and try to serve--" she faltered.

The Young Doctor laughed--but not pleasantly.

"And I," he said, "came to make their bodies as healthy as possible. I came because curing sick bodies was my job--_not because I loved people or had any particular faith in them_. Prescribing to criminals and near-criminals isn't a reassuring work; it doesn't give one faith in human nature or in human souls!"

The Superintendent had been forgotten. But her tired voice rose suddenly across the barrier of speech that had grown high and icy between the Young Doctor and Rose-Marie.

"You both came," she said, and she spoke in the tone of a mother of chickens who has found two young and precocious ducklings in her brood, "you both came to help people--of that I'm sure!"

Rose-Marie started up, suddenly, from the table.

"I came," she said, as she moved toward the door that led to the hall, "to make people better."

"And I," said the Young Doctor, moving away from the table toward the opposite side of the room and another door, "I came to make them healthier!" With his hand on the knob of the door he spoke to the Superintendent.

"I'll not be back for supper," he said shortly, "I'll be too busy. Giovanni Celleni is out of jail again, and he's thrown his wife down a flight of stairs. She'll probably not live. And while Minnie Cohen was at the vaudeville show last night--developing her soul, perhaps--her youngest baby fell against the stove. Well, it'll be better for the baby if it does die! And there are others--" The door slammed upon his angry back.

Rose-Marie's face was white as she leaned against the dark wainscoting.

"Minnie Cohen brought the baby in last week," she shuddered, "such a dear baby! And Mrs. Celleni--she tried so hard! Oh, it's not right--" She was crying, rather wildly, as she went out of the room.

The Superintendent, left alone at the table, rang for the stolid maid. Her voice was carefully calm as she gave orders for the evening meal. If she was thinking of Giovanni Celleni, his brute face filled with semi-madness; if she was thinking of a burned baby, sobbing alone in a darkened tenement while its mother breathlessly watched the gay colours and shifting scenes of a make-believe life, her expression did not mirror her thought. Only once she spoke, as she was folding her napkin, and then--

"They're both very young," she murmured, a shade regretfully. Perhaps she was remembering the enthusiasm--and the intolerance--of her own youth.

III

CONCERNING IDEALS

"Sunshine and apple blossoms!" Rose-Marie, hurrying along the hall to her own room, repeated the Young Doctor's words and sobbed afresh as she repeated them. She tried to tell herself that nothing he could think mattered much to her, but there was a certain element of truth in everything that he had said. It was a fact that her life had been an unclouded, peaceful one--her days had followed each other as regularly, as innocuously, as blue china beads, strung upon a white cord, follow each other.

Of course, she told herself, she had never known a mother; and her father had died when she was a tiny girl. But she was forced to admit--as she had been forced to admit many times--that she did not particularly feel the lack of parents. Her two aunts, that she had always lived with, had been everything to her--they had indulged her, had made her pretty frocks, had never tried, in any way, to block the reachings of her personality. When she had decided suddenly, fired by the convincing address of a visiting city missionary, to leave the small town of her birth, they had put no obstacle in her path.

"If you feel that you must go," they had told her, "you must. Maybe it is the work that the Lord has chosen for you. We have all faith in you, Rose-Marie!"

And Rose-Marie, splendid in her youth and assurance, had never known that their pillows were damp that night--and for many another night--with the tears that they were too brave to let her see.

They had packed her trunk, folding the white dress and the blue sash--Rose-Marie wondered how the Young Doctor had known about the dress and sash--in tissue paper. They had created a blue serge frock for work, and a staunch little blue coat, and a blue tam-o'-shanter. Rose-Marie would have been aghast to know how childish she looked in that tam-o'-shanter! Her every-day shoes had been resoled; her white ruffled petticoats had been lengthened. And then she had been launched, like a slim little boat, upon the turbulent sea of the city!

Looking back, through a mist of angry tears, Rose-Marie felt her first moment of homesickness for the friendly little town with its wide, tree-shaded streets, its lawn parties, and its neighbours; cities, she had discovered, discourage the art of neighbouring! She felt a pang of emptiness--she wanted her aunts with their soft, interested eyes, and their tender hands.

At first the city had thrilled her. But now that she had been in the Settlement House a month, the thrill was beginning to die away. The great buildings were still unbelievably high, the crowds of people were still a strange and mysterious throng, the streets were as colourful as ever--but life, nevertheless, was beginning to settle into ordinary channels.

She had thought, at the beginning of her stay there, that the Settlement House was a hotbed of romance. Every ring of the doorbell had tingled through her; every step in the hall had made her heart leap, with a strange quickening movement, into her throat--every shabby man had been to her a possible tragedy, every threadbare woman had been a case for charity. She had fluttered from reception-hall to reading-room, and back again--she had been alert, breathless, eager.

But, with the assignment of regular duties, some of the adventure had been drained from life. For her these consisted of teaching a club of girls to sew, of instructing a group of mothers in the art of making cakes and pies and salads, and of hearing a half hundred little children repeat their A B Cs. Only the difference in setting, only the twang of foreign tongues, only the strange precociousness of the children, made life at all different from the life at home. She told herself, fiercely, that she might be a teacher in a district school--a country school--for all the good she was accomplishing.

She had offered, so many times, to do visiting in the tenements--to call upon families of the folk who would not come to the Settlement House. But the Superintendent had met her, always, with a denial that was wearily firm.

"I have a staff of women--older women from outside--who do the visiting," she had said. "I'm afraid" she was eyeing Rose-Marie in the blue coat and the blue tam-o'-shanter, "I'm afraid that you'd scarcely be--convincing. And," she had added, "Dr. Blanchard takes care of all the detail in that department of our work!"

Dr. Blanchard ... Rose-Marie felt the tears coming afresh at the thought of him! She remembered how she had written home enthusiastic, schoolgirlish letters about the handsome man who sat across the dining table from her. It had seemed exciting, romantic, that only the three of them really should live in the great brownstone house--the Young Doctor, the Superintendent--who made a perfect chaperon--and herself. It had seemed, somehow, almost providential that they should be thrown together. Yes, Rose-Marie remembered how she had been attracted to Dr. Blanchard at the very first--how she had found nothing wanting in his wiry strength, his broad shoulders, his dark, direct eyes.

But she had not been in the Settlement House long before she began to feel the clash of their natures. When she started to church service, on her first Sunday in New York, she surprised a smile of something that might have been cynical mirth upon his lean, square-jawed face. And when she spoke of the daily prayers that she and her aunts had so beautifully believed in, back in the little town, he laughed at her--not unkindly, but with the sympathetic superiority that one feels for a too trusting child. Rose-Marie, thinking it over, knew that she would rather meet direct unkindness than that bland superiority!

And so--though there had never been an open quarrel until the one at the luncheon table--Rose-Marie had learned to look to the Superintendent for encouragement, rather than to the Young Doctor. And she had frigidly declined his small courtesies--a visit to the movies, a walk in the park, a 'bus ride up Fifth Avenue.

"I never went to the movies at home," she had told him. Or, "I'm too busy, just now, to take a walk." Or, "I can't go with you to-day. I've letters to write."

"It's a shame," she confided, on occasion, to the Superintendent, "that Dr. Blanchard never goes to church. It's a shame that he has had so little religious life. I gave him a book to read the other day--the letters of an American Missionary in China--and he laughed and told me that he couldn't waste his time. What do you think of that! But later," Rose-Marie's voice sank to a horrified whisper, "later, I saw him reading a cheap novel--he had time for a cheap novel!"

The Superintendent looked down into Rose-Marie's earnest little face.

"My dear," she said gently, stifling a desire to laugh, "my dear, he's a very busy man. He gives a great deal of himself to the people here in the slums. The novel, to him, was just a mental relaxation."

But to the Young Doctor, later, the Superintendent spoke differently.

"Billy Blanchard," she said, and she only called him Billy Blanchard when she wanted to scold him, "I've known you for a long time. And I'm sure that there's no harm in you. Of course," she sighed, "I wish that you could feel a little more in sympathy with the spiritual side of our work. But I've argued with you, more than once, on that point!"

The doctor, who was packing medicines into his bag, looked up.

"You know, you old dear," he told her, "that I'm hopeless. I haven't had an easy row to hoe, not ever; you wouldn't be religious yourself if you were in my shoes! There--don't look so shocked--you've been a mother to me in your funny, fussy way, since I came to this place! That's the main reason, I guess, that I stick here, as I do, when I could make a lot more money somewhere else!" He reached up to pat her thin hand, and then, "But why are you worrying, just now, about my soul?" he questioned.

The Superintendent sighed again.

"It's the little Thompson girl," she answered; "she's so anxious to convert people, and she's so sincere,--so very sincere. I can't help feeling that you are a thorn in her flesh, Billy. She says that you won't read her missionary books--"

The Young Doctor interrupted.

"She's such a pretty girl," he said quite fiercely. "Why on earth didn't she stay at home, where she belonged! Why on earth did she pick out this sort of work?"

The Superintendent answered.

"One never knows," she said, "why girls pick out certain kinds of work. I've had the strangest cases come to my office--of homely girls who wanted to be artists' models, and anemic girls who wanted to be physical directors, and flighty girls who wanted to go to Bible School, and quiet girls who were all set for a career on the stage. Rose-Marie Thompson is the sort of a girl who was cut out to be a home-maker, to give happiness to some nice, clean boy, to have a nursery full of rosy-cheeked babies. And yet here she is, filled with a desire to rescue people, to snatch brands from the burning. Here she is in the slums when she'd be dramatically right in an apple orchard--at the time of year when the trees are covered with pink and white blossoms."

The Young Doctor laughed. He so well understood the Superintendent--so enjoyed her point of view.

"Yes," he agreed, "she'd be perfect there in an organdy frock with the sun slanting across her face. But--well, she's just like other girls. Tell a pretty girl that she's clever, they say, and tell a clever girl that she's a raving, tearing beauty. That's the way for a man to be popular!"

The Superintendent laughed quietly with him. It was a moment before she grew sober again.

"I wonder," she said at last, "why you have never tried to be popular with girls. You could so easily be popular. You're young and--don't try to hush me up--good-looking. And yet--well, you're such an antagonistic person. From the very first you've laughed at Rose-Marie--and she was quite ready to adore you when she arrived. How do I know? Oh, I could tell! Take the child seriously, Billy Blanchard, before she actually begins to dislike you!"

The Young Doctor put several bottles of violently coloured pills into his bag before he spoke.

"She dislikes me already," he said. "She's such a cool little person. What are you trying to do, anyway? Are you trying to matchmake; to stir up a love affair between the both of us--" suddenly he was laughing again.

"I'm too busy to have a romance, you old dear," he told the Superintendent, "far too busy. I'm as likely to fall in love, just now, as you are!"

The woman's face was averted as she answered. But her low voice was steady.

"When I was your age, Billy," she said gently, "I _was_ in love. That's why, perhaps, I came here. That's why, perhaps, I stayed. No, he didn't die--he married another girl. And dreams are hard things to forget. That's why I left the country. Maybe that's why the little Thompson girl--"

But the Young Doctor was shaking his head.

"She hasn't had any love affair," he told the Superintendent. "She's too young and full of ideals to have anything so ordinary as a romance. Everybody," his laugh was not too pleasant, "can have a romance! And few people can be so filled with ideals as Miss Thompson. Oh, it's her ideals that I can't stand! It's her impractical way of gazing at life through pink-coloured glasses. She'll never be of any real use here in the slums. I'm only afraid that she'll come to some harm because she's so trusting and over-sincere. I'd hate to see her placed in direct contact with some of the young men that I work with, for instance. You haven't--" All at once his voice took on a new note. "You haven't let her be with any of the boys' classes, have you? Her ideals might not stand the strain!"

The Superintendent answered.

"Ideals don't hurt any one," she said, and her voice was almost as fierce as the doctor's. "No, I haven't given her a bit of work with the boys. She's too young and too untouched and, as you say, too pretty. I'm letting her spend her time with the mothers, and the young girls, and the little tots--not even allowing her to go out alone, if I can help it. Such innocence--" The Superintendent broke off suddenly in the middle of the sentence. And she sighed again.

IV

THE PARK

Crying helps, sometimes. When Rose-Marie, alone in her room, finally dried away the tears that were the direct result of her quarrel with Dr. Blanchard, there was a new resolve in her eyes--a look that had not been there when she went, an hour before, to the luncheon table. It was the look of one who has resolutions that cannot be shattered--dreams that are unbreakable. She glanced at her wrist watch and there was a shade of defiance in the very way she raised the arm that wore it.

"They make a baby of me here," she told herself, "they treat me like a silly child. It's a wonder that they don't send a nurse-maid with me to my classes. It's a wonder"--she was growing vehement--"that they give me credit for enough sense to wear rubbers when it's raining! I," again she glanced at the watch, "I haven't a single thing to do until four o'clock--and it's only just a little after two. I'm going out--_now_. I'm going into the streets, or into a tenement, or into a--a _dive_, if necessary! I'm going to show them"--the plural pronoun, strangely, referred to a certain young man--"that I can help somebody! I'm going to show them--"

She was struggling eagerly into her coat; eagerly she pulled her tam-o'-shanter over the curls that, even in the city slums, were full of sunshine. With her hands thrust staunchly into her pockets, she went out; out into the jungle of streets that met, as in the center of a labyrinth, in front of the Settlement House.