The Whirligig of Time Part 36

More than four years have elapsed before we see James Wimbourne again.

Time has dealt easily with him, as far as appearances are concerned. No periods of searching care have imprinted their lines upon his face; no rending sorrow has dimmed the sweetness of its expression. No one could even be tempted to say that he had begun to grow stout. And if his face is a trifle thinner and more firmly molded than of old, if he has a more settled manner of sinking back in to a club chair, if he takes rather more time to get through the evening newspaper, or if, after the manner of many ex-athletes, he is inclined to become fidgety and bilious unless he has exactly the proper amount of physical exercise--well, who ever reaches his late twenties without showing similar preliminary symptoms of age; not so much the first stages of the process of ageing as indications of what the process will be like when it begins in earnest?

The process in which we now find James engaged is mental rather than senescent, but you would hardly guess it to look at him. He is sitting on a rock on the top of a hill at sunset, smoking a cigarette and patently enjoying it. One leg is thrown easily over the other, his body is bent slightly forward; one hand rests on the rock by his side and the other, when not employed in propelling the cigarette to and from his mouth, lies quietly on his lap. He is very quiet; James is not the sort of person to make many unnecessary motions; he picks out a comfortable position and usually remains in it until it is time to do something else. He would do this even if he were not gazing at an absorbingly lovely view over the roofs of Bar Harbor, Frenchman's Bay and the tumbled hills of the Maine Coast, and even if the mental process were not such an absorbing one as a review of his relation with Madge Elliston,--a sort of indexing of the steps by which it had developed from the vaguest of acquaintanceships into its present state.

It had really begun, he reflected, on the evening of that dinner. Before that Madge had been merely one of the group of chattery young women that he had danced with and was polite to and secretly rather afraid of; one of the genus debutante. After that she merged from her genus and, almost without going through the intermediate stages of species and variety, became an individual.

At first he had deliberately fostered and encouraged the thought of Madge, for obvious reasons. It was clearly profitable to do anything that would help weed out the thought of Beatrice. It would be fruitless even to try to enumerate the stages by which from that point on Beatrice faded from his heart and that of Madge took her place; to a far larger place, as he now realized, than Beatrice had ever occupied there.

It appeared to him now, as he looked back on the whole process, that Beatrice herself was responsible for a large part of it, Beatrice and her Working Girls' League. That had all grown quite logically out of that first evening and his inspiration about having Madge sing to the working girls. Beatrice adopted the suggestion, and the result was so successful that on the Sat.u.r.day a month or two afterward, when James made his next visit to New Haven, Madge was engaged to sing to them for a second time. He accompanied Beatrice to that meeting and from that evening dated his acquaintance with the Working Girls' League and social work in general.

Madge sang for the most part old English songs, things the girls could understand, and they followed them all with the most unaffected interest and pleasure. James was surprised to see several of them actually wipe tears from their eyes when she sang the plaintive ditty "A young country maid up to London had strayed," and during one intermission he was conscious of certain inarticulate sounds coming from the audience, of which the only intelligible part was the word "husband" uttered in beseeching accents again and again.

"They want her to sing 'Oh, for a husband,'" explained Beatrice to James. "She sang that the last time and they all went crazy about it."

Madge complied with a really very spirited rendering of the old song, and the girls applauded with an enthusiasm that rather touched James.

There was something appealing to him in the unaffected way in which these poor shop and factory drudges, physically half-starved and mentally wholly starved, responded to the slightest efforts to give them pleasure. He felt himself suddenly warming toward the movement.

"Tell me something about this place," he found a chance to say to Madge later on, when the gathering had broken up, and even before she replied he reflected that he had had ample opportunity to ask Beatrice that.

"Oh, _I'm_ not the person to ask--I've only just come into it.... It was started simply as a working girls' club, I believe; a place more especially for the homeless ones to come to after work hours and meet each other and spend a little time in cheerful surroundings before going back to their hall bedrooms.... Now it's become more than that; they have entertainments and dances and cla.s.ses of various kinds, and we're trying to raise money enough to build them a lodging house."

"You've become one of them then, have you?"

"Oh, yes, I'm one of those that have been drawn in. The thing has flourished amazingly lately, both among the helpers and the helped. The purpose of the League is entirely secular--I suppose that's what made it go so well. The churches don't seem--they don't get a chance at many people, do they?... This is aimed to help the very lowest cla.s.s of workers; all unmarried wage-earners are eligible, regardless of age or race or religion.... Poor things, they are so glad to have their bodies and minds cared for and their souls left alone! The souls follow easily enough, we find, just as Shaw says--you've read 'Major Barbara'?"

"I don't think I have," replied James.

"Well, that shows what the League is trying to do better than I can....

It's had its results, too. The thing has been running about a year, and already the number of arrests for certain kinds of offenses has fallen off over fifty per cent. Keeping them off the streets alone is enough to make us feel proud and satisfied...."

"I should think so," said James, blushing hotly. He had never heard a young woman make such a remark before, and was at a loss how to take it.

But there was something at once fearless and modest in the way Madge made it that not only put him at his ease but set him thinking. "Good Lord, why can't we live in a world where every one talks like that?" he suddenly asked himself.

Madge went on to give him a fuller account of the purposes and methods of the League, outlining some of its difficulties and indicating, as far as she knew it, the path of its future development. She paid him the compliment of asking him several questions, and he was displeased to find that he had either to bluff answers for them or confess ignorance.

"I wish I could do something of this sort," he said presently, in a musing sort of way.

"Why don't you? There's plenty of chance in New York, I should say."

"Oh, New York, yes. I hadn't thought of that. I don't know what use I could be, though."

"No difficulty about that, I should think. What about athletics? You'd work among boys, I presume?"

"Yes, I suppose so." Somehow the prospect did not attract him particularly. Then he thought of Stodger; of what Stodger's evenings would have been but for him. What did he do to illuminate Stodger's evenings under actual conditions, now that he come to think of it?

"You'll find there are plenty of things you can do for them. Practically every one who knows anything at all can conduct an evening cla.s.s. Even I--I have a cla.s.s in hat tr.i.m.m.i.n.g! One of the few subjects I can truthfully say I have practical knowledge in."

Thus the germ of the desire for social service was sowed in him. It thrived pretty steadily during the winter that followed. He got himself introduced to the proper people and almost before he knew it he found himself volunteering in gymnasium work and pledged to give occasional evening talks on athletic subjects. The organization in which he worked was, he found to his satisfaction, like Madge's--Madge's, you observe, not Beatrice's--Working Girls' League, designed to help the very lowest cla.s.ses of wage-earners. It had its clubrooms on the lower East Side and set itself up as a rival attraction to the saloon-haunting gangs of that interesting neighborhood, and since it dealt with the roughest section of the population it did not hesitate to employ means that other organizations would have hesitated to sanction. Beer and tobacco were sold on the place; billiards and card games were freely encouraged, though there was a rule against playing anything for money; but the chief interest of the place was athletic. Herein lay a problem, for it was found that in the hands of the descendants of Nihilists and pillars of the Mano Negra such respectable sports as boxing and wrestling were p.r.o.ne to degenerate into b.l.o.o.d.y duels.

It was in this matter that James first made himself felt. Happening into the building at an unaccustomed hour one afternoon, he became aware of strange noises issuing from an upper floor, and dashing up to the gymnasium discovered two brawny young Italians apparently trying to brain each other with Indian clubs. In a storm of righteous and unaffected wrath he rushed into the fray, separated the combatants and treated them to such a torrent of obloquy as they had never heard even among their own a.s.sociates. Too astonished and fascinated to reply, they allowed themselves to be hustled from the room by James and literally kicked down the stairs and out of the building without so much as getting into their clothes, running several blocks in their gymnasium costumes. They aroused no particular attention, for at that time even the East Side was becoming accustomed to the sight of scantily clad youths using the streets as a cinder track, but it was more than an hour before, timid and peaceful, the offenders ventured to slip back into the clubhouse and their trousers.

From that day on James practically ran the Delancy Street Club. It never became a very large or famous organization, partly for the reason that it was purposely kept rather small, but it did much good in its own quiet way. It soon became the chief extra-business interest in James'

life; it effectually drove the last vestiges of what he learned to refer to mentally as "that foolishness" from his head; his nights became full of sleep and empty of visions. And by the spring of the next year he found himself slipping into an intermittent but perfectly easy friendship with Madge Elliston, founded, naturally enough, on their common interest in social matters. He fell into the habit of running up to New Haven for week-ends, and into the habit of seeing Madge on those Sat.u.r.day evenings. He liked talking to her about social problems; he soon caught up with her in the matter of knowledge and experience, and it was from a comfortingly similar viewpoint that they were able to discuss such matters as methods of handling evening cla.s.ses, the moral effects of workmen's compensation and the great and growing problem of dance halls and all that it involves. They both found much to help and instruct them in each other's views; the mere dissimilarities of the state laws under which they worked furnished ample material for discussion, and their friendship was always tightened by the fact that they were, so to speak, marching abreast, running up against successive phases of their work at about the same time.

It need cause no surprise that such a relation should have remained practically static for a period of three years or more. Each of them had much to think of beside social work. James had eight or nine hours' work per day and all the absorbing interests of metropolitan life to keep him from spending overmuch time over it. And Madge, as we know, was already an extremely busy young woman. For a long time their common interest hardly amounted to more than an absorbing topic of conversation during their meetings. The stages by which it became the agent of something greater were quite imperceptible.

There was just one exterior fact that served as a landmark in the progress of his feeling. Some months before--shortly after Harry had so unexpectedly gone abroad--Madge had started a series of Sat.u.r.day night dances for her working girls--that was at the time when the dance craze was spreading among all cla.s.ses of society--and she asked James to help her give some exhibitions of new dances, to get the thing well launched.

James rather hesitated in accepting this invitation.

"I'll do it, of course, if you really want me to," he said; "but I don't see why you want to drag me all the way up here for that. Why don't you ask somebody in town?"

"That's just the point," replied Madge; "I shall want you to give a little individual instruction to the girls, if you will, and I think it would be just as well if the person who did that had no chance of meeting the girls about town, in other capacities...! Beside, you happen to dance rather better than any one I know up here."

"Oh, nonsense!" said James. "I'll come," he added in the next breath.

It was from just about the time of those dances, James thought, that the personal element in his relation to Madge began to overbalance the intellectual. He had had his moments of being rather attracted by her, of course--the episode of Aunt Selina's dinner was a fair example--but such moments had been mere sparks, soulless little heralds of the flame that now began to burn brightly and warmly. Hitherto he had primarily been interested in her; now he began definitely to like her. And then, before long, something more.

It is interesting to compare the processes by which the two brothers fell in love with the same woman. Harry's experience might be likened to a blinding but illuminating flash of lightning; James' to the gentle but permeating effect of sunrise. Both were held at first by the purely intellectual side of Madge's character, but by different aspects of it.

Harry was primarily attracted to her by her active wit; this had at first repelled James, made him somewhat afraid of her, until he discovered the more solid qualities of her mind. Both at last fell in love with her as a person, not as a member of the female s.e.x nor as a thinking machine. Both pa.s.sions were founded upon solid rock; neither could be uprooted without violent and far-reaching results.

How beautifully it had all worked out in the end, James reflected; how wisely the progress of things was ordained! How fortunate it was that his first futile pa.s.sion for Beatrice had not been allowed to develop and bear ill-conceived fruit! Now that he almost went so far as to despise himself for that pa.s.sion as unworthy both of himself and of her.

What had he fallen in love with there? A lip, a cheek, a pair of eyes, a n.o.ble poise of a head, a thing to win and kiss and at last squeeze in his arms--nothing more! He had set her up as the image of a false, fleshly ideal, an empty Victorian husk of an ideal, a sentimental, boyish, calfish vision of womanhood. How paltry that image looked when compared to that newer one combining the attributes of friend, comrade, fellow-worker, kin of his mind and spirit! His first image had done injustice to its material counterpart, to be sure; Beatrice had turned out to be far different from the alluring but empty creature he had pictured her. She was a being with a will, ideas, powers, purposes of her own. Well, all the better--for Harry! How admirably suited she was to Harry! What a pair they would make, with their two keen minds, their active ambitions, their fine, dynamic personalities! The thought furnished almost as pleasing a mental picture as that of his union with a small blue-eyed person at this very moment covered by the sloping gray roof he had already taken pains to pick out from the ranks of its fellows....

The contemplation of material things brought a slight diminution of pleasure. When one came down to solid facts, things were not going quite so well as could be desired. Harry was at this moment kiting unconcernedly about the continent of Europe and his match with Beatrice seemed, as far as James could make out, as much in the air as ever.

Also, his own actual relation with Madge was not entirely satisfactory.

That was due chiefly to sordid facts, no doubt; he could not expect to have the freedom of meeting and speech he naturally desired with a governess in a friend's house. Still, in the two or three conversations he had been able to arrange with her during the past three weeks he had been conscious of an unfamiliar spirit of elusiveness. Once, he remembered, she had gone so far as to bring the subject of conversation round to impersonal things with something little short of rudeness, just as he was getting started on something that particularly interested him, too....

Plenty of time for that, though; it would never do to hurry things. He arose from his rock and stretched himself, lifting his arms high above his head in the cool evening air with a sense of strength and ease.

There was nothing to worry about; things were fundamentally all right; ends would meet and issues right themselves, all in due time.

It was time, or very nearly time, for Aunt Selina's evening meal, so he started off at a brisk pace down the hill, whistling softly and cheerfully to himself. He thought of Aunt Selina, how pleased she would be with it all, when she knew. Good old soul! He remembered how pointedly she had asked him to spend his month's vacation with her when she told him she had taken a house at Bar Harbor for the summer; could it be that she suspected anything? Perhaps she had, perhaps not; it had all worked in very conveniently with Madge being at Gilsons', at any rate. Let her and every one else suspect what they wished; it did not matter much. Nothing did matter much, when you came to that, except that small person in white linen and lawn who had flouted him when he had last seen her and whom he would show what was what, he promised himself, on the next favorable opportunity....

"Thank G.o.d for Madge," he breathed softly to himself as he walked on and the peace of the evening descended more deeply around him; "oh, thank G.o.d for Madge!"

CHAPTER VI

A LONG CHAPTER. BUT THEN, LOVE IS LONG

Aunt Selina was almost the only person with whom Harry spoke during the interval between his last interview with Madge and his departure for foreign parts. He was living in the old house now, so he could not very well avoid seeing her. At the last moment, with his overcoat on and his hat in his hand, he sought out his aunt, and found her in a small room on the ground floor known as the morning-room, going over her accounts.

"Good-by, Aunt Selina," he said. "I'm going to sail for Europe on the first steamer I can get, so I shan't see you for some time."

Aunt Selina calmly took off her gla.s.ses, laid them beside her pen on the desk and paused before replying.