Chapter 14

“Oh, perfectly excusable,” said Lemuel. He added that he liked a good novel too, when he could get hold of it.

“You must come to my room some day, and see if you can't get hold of one there. Or if you prefer metaphysics, I've got shelves full that you're welcome to. I suppose,” he added, “you hadn't been in Boston a great while when I met you that day?”

“No,” said Lemuel, dropping his head again, “I had just come.”

As if he saw that something painful lurked under the remembrance of the time for Lemuel the editor desisted.

The next morning he stopped on his way to breakfast with some books which he handed to Lemuel. “Don't feel at all obliged to read them,” he said, “because I lend them to you. They won't be of the least use to you, if you do so.”

“I guess that anything you like will be worth reading,” said Lemuel, flattered by the trouble so chief a boarder as Mr. Evans had taken with him.

“Not if they supplied a want you didn't feel. You seem to be fond of books, and after a while you'll be wanting to lend them yourself. I'll give you a little hint that I'm too old to profit by: remember that you can lend a person more books in a day than he can read in a week.”

His laugh kept Lemuel shy of him still, in spite of a willingness that the editor showed for their better acquaintance. He seemed to wish to know about Lemuel, particularly since he had recognised the pursuer of the horse-car in him, and this made Lemuel close up the more. He would have liked to talk with him about the books Evans had lent him. But when the editor stopped at the office door, where Lemuel sat reading one of them, and asked him what he thought of it, the boy felt that somehow it was not exactly his opinion that Mr. Evans was getting at; and this sense of being inspected and arranged in another's mind, though he could not formulate the operation in his own, somehow wounded and repelled him. It was not that the editor ever said anything that was not kind and friendly; he was always doing kind and friendly things, and he appeared to take a real interest in Lemuel. At the end of the first week after Lemuel had added the head waitership to his other duties, Evans stopped in going out of the dining-room and put a dollar in his hand.

“What is it for?” asked Lemuel.

“For? Really, I don't know. It must be tribute-money,” said the editor in surprise, but with a rising curiosity. “I never know what it's for.”

Lemuel turned red, and handed it back. “I don't know as I want any money I haven't earned.”

That night, after dinner, when Evans was passing the office door on his way out of the hotel, Lemuel stopped him and said with embarrassment, “Mr. Evans, I don't want you should think I didn't appreciate your kindness this morning.”

“Ah, I'm not sure it was kindness,” said Evans with immediate interest. “Why didn't you take the money?”

“Well, I told you why,” said Lemuel, overcoming the obscure reluctance he felt at Evans's manner as best he could. “I've been thinking it over, and I guess I was right; but I didn't know whether I had expressed it the best way.”

“The way couldn't be improved. But why did you think you hadn't earned my dollar?”

“I don't do anything but open the doors, and show people to their places; I don't call that anything.”

“But if you were a waiter and served at table?”

“I wouldn't _be_ one,” said Lemuel, with a touch of indignation; “and I shouldn't take presents, anyway.”

Evans leaned against the door-jamb.

“Have you heard of the college students who wait at the mountain hotels in vacation? They all take fees. Do you think yourself better than they are?”

“Yes, I do!” cried Lemuel.

“Well, I don't know but you are,” said the editor thoughtfully. “But I think I should distinguish. Perhaps there's no shame in waiting at table, but there is in taking fees.”

“Yes; that's what I meant,” said Lemuel, a little sorry for his heat. “I shouldn't be ashamed to do any kind of work, and to take my pay for it; but I shouldn't want to have folks giving me money over and above, as if I was a beggar.”

The editor stood looking him absently in the face. After a moment he asked, “What part of New England did you come from, Mr. Barker?”

“I came from the middle part of the State--from Willoughby Pastures.”

“Do those ideas--those principles--of yours prevail there?”

“I don't know whether they do or not,” said Lemuel.

“If you were sure they did, I should like to engage board there for next summer,” said the editor, going out.

It was Monday night, a leisure time with him, and he was going out to see a friend, a minister, with whom Monday night was also leisure time.

After he was gone, some of the other boarders began to drop in from the lectures and concerts which they frequented in the evening. The ladies had all some favour to ask of Lemuel, some real or fancied need of his help; in return for his promise or performance, they each gave him advice. What they expressed collectively was that they should think that he would put his eyes out reading by that gas, and that he had better look out, or he would ruin his health anyway, reading so much. They asked him how much time he got for sleep; and they said that from twelve till six was not enough, and that he was just killing himself. They had all offered to lend him books; the least literary among them had a sort of house pride in his fondness for books; their sympathy with this taste of his amused their husbands, who tolerated it, but in their hearts regarded it as a womanish weakness, indicating a want of fibre in Lemuel. Mrs. Harmon as a business woman, and therefore occupying a middle ground between the sexes, did not exactly know herself what to make of her clerk's studiousness; all that she could say was that he kept up with his work. She assumed that before Lemuel's coming she had been the sole motive power of the house; but it was really a sort of democracy, and was managed by the majority of its inmates. An element of demagoguery tampered with the Irish vote in the person of Jerry, nominally porter, but actually factotum, who had hitherto, pending the strikes of the different functionaries, filled the offices now united in Lemuel. He had never been clerk, because his literature went no further than the ability to write his name, and to read a passage of the constitution in qualifying for the suffrage. He did not like the new order of things, but he was without a party, and helpless to do more than neglect the gong-bell when he had reason to think Lemuel had sounded it.

About eleven o'clock the law-student came in with the two girl art-students, fresh from the outside air, and gay from the opera they had been hearing. The young man told Lemuel he ought to go to see it. After the girls had opened their door, one of them came running back to the elevator, and called down to Lemuel that there was no ice-water, and would he please send some up.

Lemuel brought it up himself, and when he knocked at the door, the same girl opened it and made a pretty outcry over the trouble she had given him. “I supposed, of course, Jerry would bring it,” she said contritely; and as if for some atonement, she added, “Won't you come in, Mr. Barker, and see my picture?”

Lemuel stood in the gush of the gas-light hesitating, and the law-student called out to him, jollily, “Come in, Mr. Barker, and help me play art-critic.” He was standing before the picture, with his overcoat on and his hat in his hand. “First appearance on any stage,” he added; and as Lemuel entered, “If I were you,” he said, “I'd fire that porter out of the hotel. He's outlived his usefulness.”

“It's a shame, your having to bring the water,” said Miss Swan; she was the girl who had spoken before.

The other one came forward and said, “Won't you sit down?”

She spoke to Lemuel; the law-student answered, “Thank you; I don't care if I do.”

Lemuel did not know whether to stay, nor what to say of Miss Swan's picture, and he thanked the young lady and remained standing.

“O Jessie, _Jessie_, Jessie!” cried Miss Swan.

The other went to her, tranquilly, as if used to such vehement appeals.

“Just _see_ how my poor cow looks since I painted out that grass! She hasn't got a leg to stand on!”

The law-student did nothing but make jokes about the picture. “I think she looks pretty well for a cow that you must have had to study from a milk-can--nearest you could come to a cow in Boston.”

Miss Carver, the other young lady, ignored his joking, and after some criticisms on the picture, left him and Miss Swan to talk it over. She talked to Lemuel, and asked him if he had read a book he glanced at on the table, and seemed willing to make him feel at ease. But she did not. He thought she was very proud, and he believed she wanted him to go, but he did not know how to go. Her eyes were so still and pure; but they dwelt very coldly upon him. Her voice was like that look put into sound; it was rather high-pitched but very sweet and pure, and cold. He hardly knew what he said; he felt hot, and he waited for some chance to get away.

At last he heard Miss Swan saying, “_Must_ you go, Mr. Berry? So _soon_!” and saw her giving the student her hand, with a bow of burlesque desolation.

Lemuel prepared to go too. All his rusticity came back upon him, and he said, “Well, I wish you good evening.”

It seemed to him that Miss Carver's still eyes looked a sort of starry scorn after him. He found that he had brought away the book they had been talking about, and he was a long time in question whether he had better take it back at once, or give it to her when she came to breakfast.

He went to bed in the same trouble of mind. Every night he had fallen asleep with Statira in his thoughts, but now it was Miss Carver that he thought of, and more and more uncomfortably. He asked himself what she would say if she saw his mother in the bloomers. She was herself not dressed so fashionably as Statira, but very nicely.

XVII.

At Sewell's house the maid told Evans to walk up into the study, without seating him first in the reception-room, as if that were needless with so intimate a friend of the family. He found Sewell at his desk, and he began at once, without the forms of greeting:

“If you don't like that other subject, I've got a new one for you, and you could write a sermon on it that would make talk.”

“You look at it from the newspaper point of view,” returned Sewell, in the same humour. “I'm not an 'enterprise,' and I don't want to make talk in your sense. I don't know that I want to make talk at all; I should prefer to make thought, to make feeling.”

“Well,” said the editor, “this would do all three.”

“Would you come to hear me, if I wrote the sermon?”

“Ah, that's asking a good deal.”

“Why don't you develop your idea in an article? You're always bragging that you preach to a larger congregation than I.”

“I propose to let you preach to my congregation too, if you'll write this sermon. I've talked to you before about reporting your sermons in _Saturday Afternoon_. They would be a feature; and if we could open with this one, and have a good 'incisive' editorial on it, disputing some of your positions, and treating certain others with a little satire, at the same time maintaining a very respectful attitude towards you on the whole, and calling attention to the fact that there was a strong and increasing interest in your 'utterances,' which we were the first to recognise,--it would be a card. We might agree beforehand on the points the editorial was to touch, and so make one hand wash another. See?”

“I see that journalism has eaten into your soul. What is your subject?”

“Well, in general terms, and in a single word, _Complicity_. Don't you think that would be rather taking? 'Mr. Sewell, in his striking sermon on Complicity,' and so forth. It would be a great hit, and it would stand a chance of sticking, like Emerson's 'Compensation.'”

“Delightful! The most amusing part is that you've really a grain of business in your bushel of chaff.” Sewell wheeled about in his swivel-chair, and sat facing his guest, deeply sunken in the low easy seat he always took. “When did this famous idea occur to you?” he pursued, swinging his glasses by their cord.

“About three weeks ago, at the theatre. There was one of those pieces on that make you despair of the stage, and ashamed of writing a play even to be rejected by it--a farrago of indecently amusing innuendoes and laughably vile situations, such as, if they were put into a book, would prevent its being sent through the mail. The theatre apparently can still be as filthy in suggestion as it was at the Restoration, and not shock its audiences. There were all sorts of people there that night: young girls who had come with young men for an evening's polite amusement; families; middle-aged husbands and wives; respectable-looking single women; and average bachelors. I don't think the ordinary theatrical audience is of a high grade intellectually; it's third or fourth rate; but morally it seems quite as good as other public assemblages. All the people were nicely dressed, and they sat there before that nasty mess--it was an English comedy where all the jokes turn upon the belief of the characters that their wives and husbands are the parents of illegitimate offspring--and listened with as smooth self-satisfaction as if they were not responsible for it. But all at once it occurred to me that they _were_ responsible, every one of them--as responsible as the players, as the author himself.”

“Did you come out of the theatre at that point?” asked Sewell.

“Oh, I was responsible too; but I seemed to be the only one ashamed of my share in the business.”

“If you were the only one conscious of it, your merit wasn't very great,” suggested the minister.

“Well, I should like the others to be conscious of it too. That's why I want you to preach my sermon. I want you to tell your people and my people that the one who buys sin or shame, or corruption of any sort, is as guilty as the one who sells it.”

“It isn't a new theory,” said Sewell, still refusing to give up his ironical tone. “It was discovered some time ago that this was so before God.”

“Well, I've just discovered that it ought to be so before man,” said Evans.

“Still you're not the first,” said Sewell.

“Yes,” said the editor, “I think I am, from my peculiar standpoint. The other day a friend of mine--an upright, just, worthy man, no one more so--was telling me of a shocking instance of our national corruption. He had just got home from Europe, and he had brought a lot of dutiable things, that a customs inspector passed for a trifling sum. That was all very well, but the inspector afterwards came round with a confidential claim for a hundred dollars, and the figures to show that the legal duties would have been eight or ten times as much. My friend was glad to pay the hundred dollars; but he defied me to name any country in Europe where such a piece of official rascality was possible. He said it made him ashamed of America!” Evans leaned his head back against his chair and laughed.

“Yes,” said Sewell with a sigh, and no longer feigning lightness. “That's awful.”

“Well, now,” said Evans, “don't you think it your duty to help people realise that they can't regard such transactions _de haut en bas_, if they happen to have taken part in them? I have heard of the shameful condition of things down in Maine, where I'm told the French Canadians who've come in regularly expect to sell their votes to the highest bidder at every election. Since my new system of ethics occurred to me, I've fancied that there must have always been a shameful state of things there, if Americans could grow up in the willingness to buy votes. I want to have people recognise that there is no superiority for them in such an affair; that there's nothing but inferiority; that the man who has the money and the wit to corrupt is a far baser rascal than the man who has the ignorance and the poverty to be corrupted. I would make this principle seek out every weak spot, every sore spot in the whole social constitution. I'm sick to death of the frauds that we practise upon ourselves in order to be able to injure others. Just consider the infernal ease of mind in which men remain concerning men's share in the social evil----”

“Ah, my dear friend, you can't expect me to consider _that_ in my pulpit!” cried the minister.

“No; I couldn't consider it in my paper. I suppose we must leave that where it is, unless we can affect it by analogy, and show that there is infamy for both parties to any sin committed in common. You must select your instances in other directions, but you can find plenty of them--enough and to spare. It would give the series a tremendous send-off,” said Evans, relapsing into his habitual tone, “if you would tackle this subject in your first sermon for publication. There would be money in it. The thing would make a success in the paper, and you could get somebody to reprint it in pamphlet form. Come, what do you say?”

“I should say that you had just been doing something you were ashamed of,” answered Sewell. “People don't have these tremendous moral awakenings for nothing.”

“And you don't think my present state of mind is a gradual outgrowth of my first consciousness of the common responsibility of actors and audience in the representation of a shameless comedy?”

“No, I shouldn't think it was,” said the minister securely.

“Well you're right.” Evans twisted himself about in his chair, and hung his legs over one of the arms.

“The real reason why I wish you to preach this sermon is because I have just been offering a fee to the head-waiter at our hotel.”

“And you feel degraded with him by his acceptance? For it _is_ a degradation.”

“No, that's the strangest thing about it. I have a monopoly of the degradation, for he didn't take my dollar.”

“Ah, then a sermon won't help _you!_ Why wouldn't he take it?”

“He said he didn't know as he wanted any money he hadn't earned,” said Evans, with a touch of mimicry.

The minister started up from his lounging attitude. “Is his name--Barker?” he asked, with unerring prescience.

“Yes,” said Evans with a little surprise. “Do you know him?”

“Yes,” returned the minister, falling back in his chair helplessly, not luxuriously. “So well that I knew it was he almost as soon as you came into the room to-night.”

“What harm have you been doing him?” demanded the editor, in parody of the minister's acuteness in guessing the guilty operation of his own mind.

“The greatest. I'm the cause of his being in Boston.”

“This is very interesting,” said Evans. “We are companions in crime--pals. It's a great honour. But what strikes me as being so interesting is that we appear to feel remorse for our misdeeds; and I was almost persuaded the other day by an observer of our species, that remorse had gone out, or rather had never existed, except in the fancy of innocent people; that real criminals like ourselves were afraid of being found out, but weren't in the least sorry. Perhaps, if we are sorry, it proves that we needn't be. Let's judge each other. I've told you what my sin against Barker is, and I know yours in general terms. It's a fearful thing to be the cause of a human soul's presence in Boston; but what did you do to bring it about? Who is Barker? Where did he come from? What was his previous condition of servitude? He puzzles me a good deal.”

“Oh, I'll tell you,” said Sewell; and he gave his personal chapter in Lemuel's history.

Evans interrupted him at one point. “And what became of the poem he brought down with him?”

“It was stolen out of his pocket, one night when he slept in the common.”

“Ah, then he can't offer it to me! And he seems very far from writing any more. I can still keep his acquaintance. Go on.”

Sewell told, in amusing detail, of the Wayfarer's Lodge, where he had found Barker after supposing he had gone home. Evans seemed more interested in the place than in the minister's meeting with Lemuel there, which Sewell fancied he had painted rather well, describing Lemuel's severity and his own anxiety.

“There!” said the editor. “There you have it--a practical illustration! Our civilisation has had to come to it!”

“Come to what?”

“Complicity.”

Sewell made an impatient gesture.

“Don't sacrifice the consideration of a great principle,” cried Evans, “to the petty effect of a good story on an appreciative listener. I realise your predicament. But don't you see that in establishing and regulating a place like that the city of Boston has instinctively sanctioned my idea? You may say that it is aiding and abetting the tramp-nuisance by giving vagrants food and shelter, but other philosophers will contend that it is--blindly perhaps--fulfilling the destiny of the future State, which will at once employ and support all its citizens; that it is prophetically recognising my new principle of Complicity?”

“Your new principle!” cried Sewell. “You have merely given a new name to one of the oldest principles in the moral world.”

“And that is a good deal to do, I can tell you,” said Evans. “All the principles are pretty old now. But don't give way to an ignoble resentment of my interruption. Go on about Barker.”

After some feints that there was nothing more important to tell, Sewell went on to the end; and when he had come to it, Evans shook his head. “It looks pretty black for you, but it's a beautifully perfect case of Complicity. What do you propose to do, now you've rediscovered him?”

“Oh, I don't know! I hope no more mischief. If I could only get him back on his farm!”

“Yes, I suppose that would be the best thing. But I dare say he wouldn't go back!”

“That's been my experience with him.”

They talked this aspect of the case over more fully, and Evans said: “Well, I wouldn't go back to such a place myself after I'd once had a glimpse of Boston, but I suppose it's right to wish that Barker would. I hope his mother will come to visit him while he's in the hotel. I would give a good deal to see her. Fancy her coming down in her bloomers, and the poor fellow being ashamed of her? It would be a very good subject for a play. Does she wear a hat or a bonnet? What sort of head-gear goes with that 'sleek odalisque' style of dress? A turban, I suppose.”

“Mrs. Barker,” said the minister, unable to deny himself the fleeting comfort of the editor's humorous view of the situation, “is as far from a 'sleek odalisque' as any lady I've ever seen, in spite of her oriental costume. If I remember, her _yashmak_ was not gathered at the ankles, but hung loose like occidental trousers; and the day we met she wore simply her own hair. There was not much of it on top, and she had it cut short in the neck. She was rather a terrible figure. Her having ever been married would have been inconceivable, except for her son.”

“I should like to have seen her,” said Evans, laughing back in his chair.

“She was worth seeing as a survival of the superficial fermentation of the period of our social history when it was believed that women could be like men if they chose, and ought to be if they ever meant to show their natural superiority. But she was not picturesque.”

“The son's very handsome. I can see that the lady boarders think him so.”

“Do you find him at all remarkable otherwise? What dismayed me more than his poetry even was that when he gave that up he seemed to have no particular direction.”

“Oh, he reads a good deal, and pretty serious books; and he goes to hear all the sermons and lectures in town.”

“I thought he came to mine only,” sighed the minister, with, a retrospective suffering. “Well, what can be done for him now? I feel my complicity with Barker as poignantly as you could wish.”