The Complete Writings of Charles Dudley Warner Part 164

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 cla.s.ses 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 a.s.sociations 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. n.o.body could."

"And all you've got to offer, then, to this ma.s.s 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 lat.i.tudes, 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 a.s.sociations 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 a.s.semble 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 amus.e.m.e.nts 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 n.o.bler 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 n.o.body 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?"

"n.o.body 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 acc.u.mulations 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."

The fact was that Mavick's connection with Henderson was an appreciable addition to his income, and it was not a bad thing for Henderson.

Mavick's reputation for knowing the inside of everything and being close-mouthed actually brought him confidences; that which at first was a clever a.s.sumption became a reality, and his reputation was so established for being behind the scenes that he was not believed when he honestly professed ignorance of anything. His modest disclaimer merely increased the impression that he was deep. Henderson himself had something of the Bismarck trait of brutal, contemptuous frankness. Mavick was never brutal and never contemptuous, but he had a cynical sort of frankness, which is a good deal more effectual in a business way than the oily, plausible manner which on 'Change, as well as in politics, is distrusted as hypocrisy. Now Uncle Jerry Hollowell was neither oily nor frank; he was long-headed and cautious, and had a reputation for shrewdness and just enough of plasticity of conscience to remove him out of the list of the impracticable and over-scrupulous. This reputation that business men and politicians acquire would be a very curious study. The world is very complacent, and apparently worships success and votes for smartness, but it would surprise some of our most successful men to know what a real respect there is in the community, after all, for downright integrity.

Even Jack, who fell into the current notion of his generation of young men that the Henderson sort of morality was best adapted to quick success, evinced a consciousness of want of n.o.bility in the course he was pursuing by not making Edith his confidante. He would have said, of course, that she knew nothing about business, but what he meant was that she had a very clear conception of what was honest. All the evidences of his prosperity, shown in his greater freedom of living, were sore trials to her. She belonged to that old cla.s.s of New-Yorkers who made trade honorable, like the merchants of Holland and Venice, and she knew also that Jack's little fortune had come out of honest toil and strict business integrity. Could there be any happiness in life in any other course?

It seemed cruel to put such a problem as this upon a young woman hardly yet out of girlhood, in the first flush of a new life, which she had dreamed should be so n.o.ble and high and so happy, in the period which is consecrated by the sweetest and loveliest visions and hopes that ever come into a woman's life.

As the summer wore on to its maximum of heat and discomfort in the city, Edith, who never forgot to measure the hardships of others by her own more fortunate circ.u.mstances, urged Dr. Leigh to come away from her labors and rest a few days by the sea. The reply was a refusal, but there was no complaint in the brief business-like note. One might have supposed that it was the harvest-time of the doctor, if he had not known that she gathered nothing for herself. There had never been so much sickness, she wrote, and such an opportunity for her. She was learning a great deal, especially about some disputed contagious diseases. She would like to see Mrs. Delancy, and she wouldn't mind a breath of air that was more easily to be a.n.a.lyzed than that she existed in, but nothing could induce her to give up her cases. All that appeared in her letter was her interest in her profession.

Father Damon, who had been persuaded by Edith's urgency to go down with Jack for a few days to the Golden House, seemed uncommonly interested in the reasons of Dr. Leigh's refusal to come.

"I never saw her," he said, "so cheerful. The more sickness there is, the more radiant she is. I don't mean," he added, laughing, "in apparel.

Apparently she never thinks of herself, and positively she seems to take no time to eat or sleep. I encounter her everywhere. I doubt if she ever sits down, except when she drops in at the mission chapel now and then, and sits quite unmoved on a bench by the door during vespers."

"Then she does go there?" said Edith.

"That is a queer thing. She would promptly repudiate any religious interest. But I tell her she is a bit of a humbug. When I speak about her philanthropic zeal, she says her interest is purely scientific."

"Anyway, I believe," Jack put in, "that women doctors are less mercenary than men. I dare say they will get over that when the novelty of coming into the profession has worn off."