Ii.—Alone
I was wrong. I thought she wanted the insurance money, but I misunderstood her. I found it out one wild October day more than a year later, when for the second time I sought the end of the alley.
The sufferer had “suffered out”; the gaunt and wasted shell of the man lay no more by the window in the upper story. The woman was free. “Rest at last,” I thought, “for both of them.”
But it was not as I thought.
I expected ease to come into the woman’s drawn face, and relaxation to her stooping figure. But something else came upon both, something quite unwonted and inexplicable; a wandering look in the eyes, a stupid drop to the mouth, an uncertainty in her walk, as of one who is half minded to go back and look for something. There was, too, an irritating irregularity in the performance of her work, which began to be annoying.
At last, on that October day, this new unreliability reached the limit of provocation. I was leaving the city; I needed my laundry, needed it at once; and here it was four o’clock in the afternoon, the train due at night, and packing impossible till the wash came. It was five days overdue.
The wind was howling furiously, the rain driving in sheets, but there was no alternative; I must get to the “End of the Alley” and back, somehow.
The gray, rain-drenched atmosphere was still grayer in the alley,—still, still grayer at the end. And what with the gray of it and the rain of it, I could scarcely see the thing that sat facing me when I opened the door,—a sort of human blur, hunched in a rocking-chair, its head sunken on its breast.
In response to my startled exclamation, the face was lifted vacantly for a second, and then dropped again. But I had seen: drunk, dead drunk!
And this woman had never drunk.
I looked around the wretched room. By the window, where the gray light trailed in, stood a table covered with unwashed dishes; some late flies were crawling in the gutters of slop, besotted derelicts of insects, stupidly staggering up and down the cracked china. On the stove stood a number of flat-irons, but there was no fire. A mass of unironed clothes lay on an old couch and over the backs of two unoccupied chairs. On the wall above the couch, hung the portrait of the dead man.
I walked to the slumping figure in the rocker, and with ill-contained brutality demanded: “So this is why you did not bring my clothes! Where are they?”
I heard my own voice cutting like the edge of a knife, and felt half-ashamed when that weak, shaking thing lifted up its foolish face, and stared at me with watery, uncomprehending eyes.
“My clothes,” I reiterated; “are they here or upstairs?”
“Guess-s-so,” stammered the uncertain voice, “g-guess so.”
“Nothing for it but to find them myself,” I muttered, beginning the search through the pile on the couch. Nothing of mine there, so I needs must climb to the Golgotha on the second floor, from which the Cross had disappeared, but which still bore traces of its victim’s long crucifixion,—a pair of old bed-slippers still by the window, a sleeping-cap on the wall. Some cannot but leave so the things that have touched their dead.
One by one I found the “rough-dry” garments, here, there, in the hallway, in the garret, hanging or crumpled up among dozens of others. And all the while I hunted, the rain beat and the wind blew, and a low third sound kept mingling with them, rising from the lower floor. My heart smote me when I heard it, for I knew it was the woman sobbing. The self-righteous Pharisee within me gave an impatient sneer: “Alcohol tears!” But something else clutched at my throat, and I found myself glancing at the dead man’s shoes.
When I went downstairs, I avoided the rocking-chair, tied up my bundle, counted out the money, laid it on the table, and then turning round said, deliberately and harshly: “There is your money; don’t buy whisky with it, Mrs. Bossert.”
Crying had a little sobered her. She looked up, still with less light in her face than in an intelligent dog’s, but with some dim self-consciousness. It was as a face that had appeared behind deforming bubbles of water. She half lifted her hand, let it fall, and stammered, “No, I won’t, I won’t. It don’t do nobody no good.”
The senseless desire to preach seized hold of me. “Mrs. Bossert,” I cried out, “aren’t you ashamed of yourself? A woman like you, who went through so much, and so long, and so bravely! And now, when you could get along all right, to act like this!”
The soggy mouth dropped open, the glazy eyes stared at me, fixedly and foolishly, then shifted to the portrait on the wall; and with a mawkish simper, as of some old drab playing sixteen, she slobbered out, nodding to the portrait: “All—for the love—o’ him.”
It was so utterly ludicrous that I laughed. Then a cold rage took me: “Look here,” I said (and again I heard my own voice, grim and quiet, cutting the air like a whip), “if you believe, as I have heard you say, that your husband can look down on you from anywhere, remember you couldn’t do a thing to hurt him worse than you’re doing now. ‘Love’ indeed!”
The lash went home. The stricken figure huddled closer; the voice came out like a dumb thing’s moan: “Oh—I’m all alone.”
Then suddenly I understood. I had taken it for mockery, and profanation, that leering look at the shadow on the wall, that driveling stammer, “All—for the love—o’ him.” And it had been a solemn thing! No lover’s word spoken in the morning of youth with the untried day before it, under the seductive witchery of answering breath and kisses, rushing blood and throbbing bodies; but the word of a woman bent with service, seamed with labor, haggard with watching; the word of a woman who, at the washtub, had kept her sufferer by the work of her hands, and watched him between the snatches of her sleep. The immemorial passion of a common heart, that is not much, that had not much, and has lost all. Years were in it. For years she had had her burden to carry; and she had carried it to the edge of the grave. There it had fallen from her, and her arms were empty. Nothing to do any more. Alone.
She sat up suddenly with a momentary flare of light in her face.—“As long as I had him,” she said, “I could do. I thought I’d be glad when he was gone, a many and many a time. But I’d rather he was up there yet… I did everything. I didn’t put him away mean. There was a hundred and twenty-five dollars insurance. I spent it all on him. He was covered with flowers.”
The flare died down, and she fell together like a collapsing bag. I saw the gray vacancy moving inward toward the last spark of intelligence in her eyes, as an ashing coal whitens inward toward the last dull red point of fire. Then this heap of rags shuddered with an inhuman whine, “A-l-o-n-e.”
In the crowding shadows I felt the desolation pressing me like a vise. Behind that sunken heap in the chair gathered a midnight specter; for a moment I caught a flash from its royal, malignant eyes, the Monarch of human ruins, the murderous Bridegroom of widowed souls, King Alcohol.
“After all, as well that way as another,” I muttered; and aloud (but the whip-cord had gone out of my voice), “The money is on the table.”
She did not hear me; the Bridegroom “had given His Beloved Sleep.”
I went out softly into the wild rain, and overhead, among the lashing arms of the leafless trees, and around the alley pocket, the wind was whining: “A-l-o-n-e.”
To Strive and Fail
There was a lonely wind crying around the house, and wailing away through the twilight, like a child that has been refused and gone off crying. Every now and then the trees shivered with it, and dropped a few leaves that splashed against the windows like big, soft tears, and then fell down on the dark, dying grass, and lay there till the next wind rose and whirled them away. Rain was gathering. Close by the gray patch of light within the room a white face bent over a small table, and dust-dim fingers swept across the strings of a zither. The low, pathetic opening chords of Albert’s “Herbst-Klage” wailed for a moment like the wind; then a false note sounded, and the player threw her arms across the table and rested her face upon them. What was the use? She knew how it ought to be, but she could never do it,—never make the strings strike true to the song that was sounding within, sounding as the wind and the rain and the falling leaves sounded it, as long ago the wizard Albert had heard and conjured it out of the sound-sea, before the little black notes that carried the message over the world were written. The weary brain wandered away over the mystery of the notes, and she whispered dully, “A sign to the eye, and a sound to the ear—and that is his gift to the world—his will—and he is dead, dead, dead;—he was so great, and they are so silly, those little black foolish dots—and yet they are there—and by them his soul sings—“
The numb pain at her heart forced some sharp tears from the closed eyes. She bent and unbent her fingers hopelessly, two or three times, and then let them lie out flat and still. It was not their fault, not the fingers’ fault; they could learn to do it, if they only had the chance; but they could never, never have the chance. They must always do something else, always a hundred other things first, always save and spare and patch and contrive; there was never time to do the thing she longed for most. Only the odd moments, the unexpected freedoms, the stolen half-hours, in which to live one’s highest dream, only the castaway time for one’s soul! And every year the fleeting glory waned, wavered, sunk away more and more sorrowfully into the gray, soundless shadows of an unlived life. Once she had heard it so clearly,—long ago, on the far-off sun-spaced, wind-singing fields of home,—the wild sweet choruses, the songs no man had ever sung. Still she heard them sometimes in the twilight, in the night, when she sat alone and work was over; high and thin and fading, only sound-ghosts, but still with the incomparable glory of a first revelation, a song no one else has ever heard, a marvel to be seized and bodied; only,—they faded away into the nodding sleep that would conquer, and in the light and rush of day were mournfully silent. And she never captured them, never would; life was half over now.
With the thought she started up, struck the chords again, a world of plaint throbbing through the strings; surely the wizard himself would have been satisfied. But ah, once more the fatal uncertainty of the fingers… She bit the left hand savagely, then touched it, softly and remorsefully, with the other, murmuring: “Poor fingers! Not your fault.” At last she rose and stood at the window, looking out into the night, and thinking of the ruined gift, the noblest gift, that had been hers and would die dumb; thinking of the messages that had come to her up out of the silent dark and sunk back into it, unsounded; of the voices she would have given to the messages of the masters, and never would give now; and with a bitter compression of the lips she said: “Well, I was born to strive and fail.”
And suddenly a rush of feeling swept her own life out of sight, and away out in the deepening night she saw the face of an old, sharp-chinned, white-haired, dead man; he had been her father once, strong and young, with chestnut hair and gleaming eyes, and with his own dream of what he had to do in life. Perhaps he, too, had heard sounds singing in the air, a new message waiting for deliverance. It was all over now; he had grown old and thin-faced and white, and had never done anything in the world; at least nothing for himself, his very own; he had sewn clothes,—thousands, millions of stitches in his work-weary life—no doubt there were still in existence scraps and fragments of his work,—in same old ragbag perhaps—beautiful, fine stitches, into which the keen eyesight and the deft hand had passed, still showing the artist-craftsman. But that was not his work; that was the service society had asked of him and he had rendered; himself, his own soul, that wherein he was different from other men, the unbought thing that the soul does for its own outpouring,—that was nowhere. And over there, among the low mounds of the soldiers’ graves, his bed was made, and he was lying in it, straight and still, with the rain crying softly above him. He had been so full of the lust of life, so alert, so active! and nothing of it all!—“Poor father, you failed too,” she muttered softly.
And then behind the wraith of the dead man there rose an older picture, a face she had never seen, dead fifty years before; but it shone through the other face, and outshone it, luminous with great suffering, much overcoming, and complete and final failure. It was the face of a woman not yet middle-aged, smitten with death, with the horror of utter strangeness in the dying eyes; the face of a woman lost in a strange city of a strange land, and with her little crying, helpless children about her, facing the inexorable agony there on the pavement, where she was sinking down, and only foreign words falling in the dying ears!—She, too, had striven; how she had striven! Against the abyss of poverty there in the old world; against the load laid on her by Nature, Law, Society, the triune God of Terror; against the inertia of another will. She had bought coppers with blood, and spared and saved and endured and waited; she had bent the gods to her will; she had sent her husband to America, the land of freedom and promise; she had followed him at last, over the great blue bitter water with its lapping mouths that had devoured one of her little ones upon the way; she had been driven like a cow in the shambles at the landing stage; she had been robbed of all but her ticket, and with her little children had hungered for three days on the overland journey; she had lived it through, and set foot in the promised land; but somehow the waiting face was not there, had missed her or she, him,—and lost and alone with Death and the starving babes, she sank at the foot of the soldiers’ monument, and the black mist came down on the courageous eyes, and the light was flickering out forever. With a bitter cry the living figure in the room stretched its hands toward the vision in the night. There was nothing there, she knew it; nothing in the heavens above nor the earth beneath to hear the cry,—not so much as a crumbling bone any more,—but she called brokenly, “Oh, why must she die so, with nothing, nothing, not one little reward after all that struggle? To fall on the pavement and die in the hospital at last!”
And shuddering, with covered eyes and heavy breath, she added wearily, “No wonder that I fail; I come of those who failed; my father, his mother,—and before her?”
Behind the fading picture, stretched dim, long shadows of silent generations, with rounded shoulders and bent backs and sullen, conquered faces. And they had all, most likely, dreamed of some wonderful thing they had to do in the world, and all had died and left it undone. And their work had been washed away, as if writ in water, and no one knew their dreams. And of the fruit of their toil other men had eaten, for that was the will of the triune god; but of themselves was left no trace, no sound, no word, in the world’s glory; no carving upon stone, no indomitable ghost shining from a written sign, no song singing out of black foolish spots on paper,—nothing. They were as though they had not been. And as they all had died, she too would die, slave of the triple Terror, sacrificing the highest to the meanest, that somewhere in some lighted ball-room or gas-bright theater, some piece of vacant flesh might wear one more jewel in her painted hair.
“My soul,” she said bitterly, “my soul for their diamonds!” It was time to sleep, for to-morrow—WORK.
The Sorrows of the Body
I have never wanted anything more than the wild creatures have,—a broad waft of clean air, a day to lie on the grass at times, with nothing to do but slip the blades through my fingers, and look as long as I pleased at the whole blue arch, and the screens of green and white between; leave for a month to float and float along the salt crests and among the foam, or roll with my naked skin over a clean long stretch of sunshiny sand; food that I liked, straight from the cool ground, and time to taste its sweetness, and time to rest after tasting; sleep when it came, and stillness, that the sleep might leave me when it would, not sooner—Air, room, light rest, nakedness when I would not be clothed, and when I would be clothed, garments that did not fetter; freedom to touch my mother earth, to be with her in storm and shine, as the wild things are,—this is what I wanted,—this, and free contact with my fellows;—not to love, and lie and be ashamed, but to love and say I love, and be glad of it; to feel the currents of ten thousand years of passion flooding me, body to body, as the wild things meet. I have asked no more.
But I have not received. Over me there sits that pitiless tyrant, the Soul; and I am nothing. It has driven me to the city, where the air is fever and fire, and said, “Breathe this;—I would learn; I cannot learn in the empty fields; temples are here,—stay.” And when my poor, stifled lungs have panted till it seemed my chest must burst, the Soul has said, “I will allow you, then, an hour or two; we will ride, and I will take my book and read meanwhile.”
And when my eyes have cried out with tears of pain for the brief vision of freedom drifting by, only for leave to look at the great green and blue an hour, after the long, dull-red horror of walls, the Soul has said, “I cannot waste the time altogether; I must know! Read.” And when my ears have plead for the singing of the crickets and the music of the night, the Soul has answered, “No: gongs and whistles and shrieks are unpleasant if you listen; but school yourself to hearken to the spiritual voice, and it will not matter.”
When I have beat against my narrow confines of brick and mortar, brick and mortar, the Soul has said, “Miserable slave! Why are you not as I, who in one moment fly to the utterest universe? It matters not where you are, I am free.”
When I would have slept, so that the lids fell heavily and I could not lift them, the Soul has struck me with a lash, crying, “Awake! Drink some stimulant for those shrinking nerves of yours! There is no time to sleep till the work is done.” And the cursed poison worked upon me, till Its will was done.
When I would have dallied over my food, the Soul has ordered, “Hurry, hurry! Do I have time to waste on this disgusting scene? Fill yourself and be gone!”
When I have envied the very dog, rubbing its bare back along the ground in the sunlight, the Soul has exclaimed, “Would you degrade me so far as to put yourself on a level with beasts?” And my bands were drawn tighter.
When I have looked upon my kind, and longed to embrace them, hungered wildly for the press of arms and lips, the Soul has commanded sternly, “Cease, vile creature of fleshly lusts! Eternal reproach! Will you forever shame me with your beastliness?”
And I have always yielded: mute, joyless, fettered, I have trod the world of the Soul’s choosing, and served and been unrewarded. Now I am broken before my time; bloodless, sleepless, breathless,—half-blind, racked at every joint, trembling with every leaf. “Perhaps I have been too hard,” said the Soul; “you shall have a rest.” The boon has come too late. The roses are beneath my feet now, but the perfume does not reach me; the willows trail across my cheek and the great arch is overhead, but my eyes are too weary to lift to it; the wind is upon my face, but I cannot bare my throat to its caress; vaguely I hear the singing of the Night through the long watches when sleep does not come, but the answering vibration thrills no more. Hands touch mine—I longed for them so once—but I am as a corpse. I remember that I wanted all these things, but now the power to want is crushed from me, and only the memory of my denial throbs on, with its never-dying pain. And still I think, if I were left alone long enough—but already I hear the Tyrant up there plotting to slay me.—“Yes,” it keeps saying, “it is about time! I will not be chained to a rotting carcass. If my days are to pass in perpetual idleness I may as well be annihilated. I will make the wretch do me one more service.—You have clamored to be naked in the water. Go now, and lie in it forever.”
Yes: that is what It is saying, and I—the sea stretches down there—
The Triumph of Youth
The afternoon blazed and glittered along the motionless tree-tops and down into the yellow dust of the road. Under the shadows of the trees, among the powdered grass and bushes, sat a woman and a man. The man was young and handsome in a way, with a lean eager face and burning eyes, a forehead in the old poetic mould crowned by loose dark waves of hair; his chin was long, his lips parted devouringly and his glances seemed to eat his companion’s face. It was not a pretty face, not even ordinarily good looking,—sallow, not young, only youngish; but there was a peculiar mobility about it, that made one notice it. She waved her hand slowly from East to West, indicating the horizon, and said dreamingly: “How wide it is, how far it is! One can get one’s breath. In the city I always feel that the walls are squeezing my chest.” After a little silence she asked without looking at him: “What are you thinking of, Bernard?”
“You,” he murmured.
She glanced at him under her lids musingly, stretched out her hand and touched his eyelids with her finger-tips, and turned aside with a curious fleeting smile. He caught at her hand, but failing to touch it as she drew it away, bit his lip and forcedly looked off at the sky and the landscape: “Yes,” he said in a strained voice, “it is beautiful, after the city. I wish we could stay in it.”
The woman sighed: “That’s what I have been wishing for the last fifteen years.”
He bent towards her eagerly: “Do you think—“ he stopped and stammered, “You know we have been planning, a few of us, to club together and get a little farm somewhere near—would you—do you think—would you be one of us?”
She laughed, a little low, sad laugh: “I wouldn’t be any good, you know. I couldn’t do the work that ought to be done. I would come fast enough and I would try. But I’m a little too old, Bernard. The rest are young enough to make mistakes and live to make them good; but when I would have my lesson learned, my strength would be gone. It’s half gone now.”
“No, it isn’t,” burst out the youth. “You’re worth half a dozen of those young ones. Old, old—one would think you were seventy. And you’re not old; you will never be old.”
She looked up where a crow was wheeling in the air. “If,” she said slowly, following its motions with her eyes, “you once plant your feet on my face, and you will, you impish bird—my Bernard will sing a different song.”
“No, Bernard won’t,” retorted the youth. “Bernard knows his own mind, even if he is ‘only a boy.’ I don’t love you for your face, you—“
She interrupted him with a shrug and a bitter sneer. “Evidently! Who would?”
A look of mingled pain and annoyance overspread his features. “How you twist my words. You are beautiful to me; and you know what I meant.”
“Well,” she said, throwing herself backward against a tree-trunk and stretching out her feet on the grass, ripples of amusement wavering through the cloudy expression, “tell me what do you love in me.”
He was silent, biting his lower lip.
“I’ll tell you then,” she said. “It’s my energy, the life in me. That is youth, and my youth has overlived its time. I’ve had a long lease, but it’s going to expire soon. So long as you don’t see it, so long as my life seems fuller than yours—well—; but when the failure of life becomes visible, while your own is still in its growth, you will turn away. When my feet won’t spring any more, yours will still be dancing. And you will want dancing feet with you.”
“I will not,” he answered shortly. “I’ve seen plenty of other women; I saw all the crowd coming up this morning and there wasn’t a woman there to compare with you. I don’t say I’ll never love others, but now I don’t; if I see another woman like you—But I never could love one of those young girls.”
“Sh—sh,” she said glancing down the road where a whirl of dust was making towards them, in the center of which moved a band of bright young figures, “there they come now. Don’t they look beautiful?” There were four young girls in front, their faces radiant with sun and air, and daisy wreaths in their gleaming hair; they had their arms around each other’s waists and sang as they walked, with neither more accord nor discord than the birds about them. The voices were delicious in their youth and joy; one heard that they were singing not to produce a musical effect, but from the mere wish to sing. Behind them came a troop of young fellows, coats off, heads bare, racing all over the roadside, jostling each other and purposely provoking scrambles. The tallest one had a nimbus of bright curls crowning a glowing face, dimpled and sparkling as a child’s. The girls glanced shyly at him under their lashes as he danced about now in front and now behind them, occasionally tossing them a flower, but mostly hustling his comrades about. Behind these came older people with three or four very little children riding on their backs.
As the group came abreast of our couple they stopped to exchange a few words, then went on. When they had passed out of hearing the woman sat with a sphinx-like stare in her eyes, looking steadily at the spot where the bright head had nodded to her as it passed.
“Like a wildflower on a stalk,” she murmured softly, narrowing her eyes as if to fix the vision, “like a tall tiger-lily.”
Her companion’s face darkened perceptibly. “What do you mean? What do you see?” he asked.
“The vision of Youth and Beauty,” she answered in the tone of a sleep-walker, “and the glory and triumph of it,—the immortality of it—its splendid indifference to its ruined temples, and all its humble worshipers. Do you know,” turning suddenly to him with a sharp change in face and voice, “what I would be wicked enough to do, if I could?”
He smiled tolerantly: “You, wicked? Dear one, you couldn’t be wicked.”
“Oh, but I could! If there were any way to fix Davy’s head forever, just as he passed us now,—forever, so that all the world might keep it and see it for all time, I would cut it off with this hand! Yes, I would.” Her eyes glittered mercilessly.
He shook his head smiling: “You wouldn’t kill a bug, let alone Davy.”
“I tell you I would. Do you remember when Nathaniel died? I felt bad enough, but do you know the week before when he was so very sick, I went out one day to a beautiful glen we used to visit together. They had been improving it! they had improved it so much that the water is all dying out of the creek; the little boats that used to float like pond lilies lie all helpless in the mud, and hardly a ribbon of water goes over the fall, and the old giant trees are withering. Oh, it hurt me so to think the glory of a thousand years was vanishing before my eyes and I couldn’t hold it. And suddenly the question came into my head: ‘If you had the power would you save Nathaniel’s life or bring back the water to the glen?’ And I didn’t hesitate a minute. I said, ‘Let Nathaniel die and all my best loved ones and I myself, but bring back the glory of the glen!”
“When I think,” she went on turning away and becoming dreamy again, “of all the beauty that is gone that I can never see, that is lost forever—the beauty that had to alter and die,—it stifles me with the pain of it. Why must it all die?”
He looked at her wonderingly. “It seems to me,” he said slowly, “that beauty worship is almost a disease with you. I wouldn’t like to care so much for mere outsides.”
“We never long for the thing we are rich in,” she answered in a dry, changed voice. Nevertheless his face lighted, it was pleasant to be rich in the thing she worshiped. He had gradually drawn near her feet and now suddenly bent forward and kissed them passionately. “Don’t,” she cried sharply, “it’s too much like self-abasement. And besides—“
His face was white and quivering, his voice choked. “Well—what besides—“
“The time will come when you will wish you had reserved that kiss for some other foot. Some one to whom it will all be new, who will shudder with the joy of it, who will meet you half way, who will believe all that you say, and say like things in fullness of heart. And I perhaps will see you, and know that in your heart you are sorry you gave something to me that you would have ungiven if you could.”
He buried his face in his hands. “You do not love me at all,” he said. “You do not believe me.”
A curious softness came into the answer: “Oh, yes, dear, I believe you. Years ago I believed myself when I said the same sort of thing. But I told you I am getting old. I can not unmake what the years have made, nor bring back what they have stolen. I love you for your face”, the words had a sting in them, “and for your soul too. And I am glad to be loved by you. But, do you know what I am thinking?”
He did not answer.
“I am thinking that as I sit here, beloved by you and others who are young and beautiful—it is no lie—in a—well, in a triumph I have not sought, but which I am human enough to be glad of, envied no doubt by those young girls,—I am thinking how the remorseless feet of Youth will tramp on me soon, and carry you away. And”—very slowly—“in my day of pain, you will not be near, nor the others. I shall be alone; age and pain are unlovely.”
“You won’t let me come near you,” he said wildly. “I would do anything for you. I always want to do things for you to spare you, and you never let me. When you are in pain you will push me away.”
A fairly exultant glitter flashed in her face. “Yes,” she said, “I know my secret. That is how I have stayed young so long. See,” she said, stretching out her arms, “other women at my age are past the love of men. Their affections have gone to children. And I have broken the law of nature and prolonged the love of youth because—I have been strong and stood alone. But there is an end. Things change, seasons change, you, I, all change; what’s the use of saying ‘Never—forever, forever—never,’ like the old clock on the stairs? It’s a big lie.”
“I won’t talk any more,” he said, “but when the time comes you will see.”
She nodded: “Yes, I will see.”
“Do you think all people alike?”
“As like as ants. People are vessels which life fills and breaks, as it does trees and bees and other sorts of vessels. They play when they are little, and then they love and then they have children and then they die. Ants do the same.”
“To be sure. But I don’t deceive myself as to the scope of it.”
The crowd were returning now, and by tacit consent they arose and joined the group. Down the road they jumped a fence into a field and had to cross a little stream. “Where is our bridge?” called the boys. “We made a bridge. Some one has stolen our bridge.”
“Oh, come on,” cried Davy, “let’s jump it.” Three ran and sprang; they landed laughing and taunting the rest. Bernard sought out his beloved. “Shall I help you over?” he asked.
“No,” she said shortly, “help the girls,” and brushing past him she jumped, falling a little short and muddying a foot, but scrambling up unaided. The rest debated seeking an advantageous point. At last they found a big stone in the middle, and pulling off his shoes, Bernard waded in the creek, helping the girls across. The smallest one, large-eyed and timid, clung to his arm and let him almost carry her over.
“He does it real natural,” observed Davy, who was whisking about in the daisy field like some flashing butterfly.
They gathered daisies and laughed and sang and chattered till the sun went low. Then they gathered under a big tree and spread their lunch on the ground. And after they had eaten, the conversation lay between the sallow-faced woman and one of the older men, a clever conversation filled with quaint observations and curious sidelights. The boys sat all about the woman questioning her eagerly, but behind in the shadow of the drooping branches sat the girls, silent, unobtrusive, holding each other’s hands. Now and then the talker cast a furtive glance from Bernard’s rather withdrawn face to the faces in the shadow, and the enigmatic smile hovered and flitted over her lips.
Three years later on the anniversary of that summer day the woman sat at an upstairs window in the house on the little farm that was a reality now, the little co-operative farm where ten free men and women labored and loved. She had come with the others and done her best, but the cost of it, hard labor and merciless pain, was stamped on the face that looked from the window. She was watching Bernard’s figure as it came swinging through the orchard. Presently he came in and up the stairs. His feet went past her door, then turned back irresolutely, and a low knock followed. Her eyebrows bent together almost sternly as she answered, “Come in.”
He entered with a smile: “Can I do anything for you this morning?”
“No,” she said quietly, “you know I like my own cranky ways. I—I’d rather do things myself.” He nodded: “I know. I always get the same answer. Shall you go to the picnic? You surely will keep our foundation-day picnic?”
“Perhaps—later. And perhaps not.” There was a curious tone of repression in the words.
“Well,” he answered good-naturedly, “if you won’t let me do anything for you, I’ll have to find some one who will. Is Bella ready to go?”
“This half hour. Bella. Here is Bernard.” And Bella came in. Bella, the timid girl with the brilliant complexion and gazelle soft eyes, Bella radiant in her youth and feminine daintiness, more lovely than she had been three years before.
She gave Bernard a lunch basket to carry and a shawl and a workbag and a sun umbrella, and when they went out she clung to his arm besides. She stopped near one of their own rose bushes and told him to choose a bud for her, and she put it coquettishly in her dark hair. The woman watched them till they disappeared down the lane; he had never once looked back. Then her mouth settled in a quiet sneer and she murmured: “How long is ‘forever’? Three years.” After a while she rose and crossed to an old mirror that hung on the opposite wall. Staring at the reflection it gave back, she whispered drearily: “You are ugly, you are eaten with pain! Do you still expect the due of youth and beauty? Did you not know it all long ago?” Then something flashed in the image, something as if the features had caught fire and burned. “I will not,” she said hoarsely, her fingers clenching. “I will not surrender. Was it he I loved? It was his youth, his beauty, his life. And younger youth shall love me still, stronger life. I will not, I will not die alive.” She turned away and ran down into the yard and out into the fields. She would not go on the common highway where all went, she would find a hard way through woods and over hills, and she would come there before them and sit and wait for them where the ways met. Bareheaded, ill-dressed and careless she ran along, finding a fierce pleasure in trampling and breaking the brush that impeded her. There was the road at last, and right ahead of her an old, old man hobbling along with bent back and eyes upon the ground. Just before him was a bad hole in the road; he stopped, irresolute, and looked around like a crippled insect stretching its antenna to find a way for its mangled feet. She called cheerily, “Let me help you.” He looked up with dim blue eyes helplessly seeking. She led him slowly around the dangerous place, and then they sat down together on the little covered wooden bridge beyond.
“Ah!” murmured the old man, shaking his head, “it is good to be young.” And there was the ghost of admiration in his watery eyes, as he looked at her tall straight figure.
“Yes,” she answered sadly, looking away down the road where she saw Bella’s white dress fluttering, “it is good to be young.”
The lovers passed without noticing them, absorbed in each other. Presently the old man hobbled away. “It will come to that too,” she muttered looking after him. “The husks of life!”
The Old Shoemaker
He had lived a long time there, in the house at the end of the alley, and no one had ever known that he was a great man. He was lean and palsied and had a crooked back; his beard was grey and ragged and his eyebrows came too far forward; there were seams and flaps in the empty, yellow old skin, and he gasped horribly when he breathed, taking hold of the lintel of the door to steady himself when he stepped out on the broken bricks of the alley. He lived with a frightful old woman who scrubbed the floors of the rag-shop, and drank beer, and growled at the children who poked fun at her. He had lived with her eighteen years, she said, stroking the furry little kitten that curled up in her neck as if she had been beautiful.
Eighteen years they had been drinking and quarreling together—and suffering. She had seen the flesh sucking away from the bones, and the skin falling in upon them, and the long, lean fingers growing more lean and trembling, as they crooked round his shoemaking tools.
It was very strange she had not grown thin; the beer had bloated her, and rolls of weak, shaking flesh lapped over the ridges of her uncouth figure. Her pale, lack-lustre blue eyes wandered aimlessly about as she talked: No—he had never told her, not even in their quarrels, not even when they were drunken together, of the great Visitor who had come up the little alley, yesterday, walking so stately over the sun-beaten bricks, taking no note of the others, and coming in at the door without asking. She had not expected such an one; how could she? But the Old Shoemaker had shown no surprise at the Mighty One. He smiled and set down the teacup he was holding, and entered into communion with the Stranger. He noticed no others, but continued to smile; and the infinite dignity of the Unknown fell upon him, and covered the wasted old limbs and the hard, wizened face, so that all we who entered, bowed, and went out, and did not speak.
But we understood, for the Mighty One gave understanding without words. We had been in the presence of Freedom! We had stood at the foot of Tabor, and seen this worn, old, world-soiled soul lose all its dross and commonplace, and pass upward smiling, to the Transfiguration. In the hands of the Mighty One the crust had crumbled, and dropped away in impalpable powder. Souls should be mixed of it no more. Only that which passed upward, the fine white playing flame, the heart of the long, life-long watches of patience, should rekindle there in the perennial ascension of the great Soul of Man.
Where the White Rose Died
It was late at night, a raw, rough-shouldering night, that shoved men in corners as having no business in the street, and the few people in the northbound car drew themselves into themselves, radiating hedgehog quills of feeling at their neighbors. Presently there came in a curious figure, clothed in the drapery of its country’s honor, the blue flannel flapping very much about its legs. I looked at its feet first, because they were so very small and girlish, and because the owner of them adjusted the flapping pants with the coquetry of a maiden switching her skirts. Then I glanced at the hands: they also were small and womanish, and constantly in motion. At last, the face, expecting a fresh young boy’s, not long away from some country village. It was the sunk, seamed face of a man of forty-five, seared, and with iron-gray eyebrows, but lit by twinkling young eyes, that gleamed at everything good-humoredly. The sailor’s pancake with its official lettering was pushed rakishly down and forward, and looking at hat and wearer, one instinctively turned milliner and decorated the “shape” with aigrette and bows,—they would nod so accordant with the flirting head. Presently the restless hands went up and gave the hat another tilt, went down and straightened the “divided skirt,” folded themselves an instant while the little feet began tattooing the car floor, and the scintillant eyes looked general invitation all round the car. No perceptible shrinkage of quills, however, so the eyes wandered over to their image in the plate glass, and directly the hat got another coquettish dip, and the skirts another flirt and settle.
The conductor came in: some one to talk to at last! “Will you let me off at Ninth and Race?”
The dim chill of a smile shivered over the other faces in the car. Ninth and Race! Who ever heard a defender of his country’s glory ask a conductor on a street car in Philadelphia for any other point than Ninth and Race!
The conductor nodded appreciatively. “Just come to the city, I suppose,” he said interlocutively.
The sailor plucked off his hat, exhibiting his label with child-like vanity: “S. S. Alabama. Here for three days just. Been over in New York.”
“Like it?” remarked the conductor, prolonging his stay inside the car.
The hat went on again, proudly. “Sixteen years in the service. Yes, sir. Six-teen years. The service is all right. The service is good enough for me. Live there. Expect to die there. Sixteen years. You won’t forget to let me off at Ninth and Race.”
“No. Going to see Chinatown?”
“Sure. Chinatown’s all right. Seen it in Hong Kong. Want to see it in Philadelphia.”
O cradle of my country’s freedom! These are your defenders,—these to whom your chief delight is your stews and your brothels, your fantans and your opium dens, your sinks of filth and your cesspools of slime! Let them only be as they were “at Hong Kong”—or worse—and “the service” asks no more. He will live in it and die in it, and it’s good enough for him. Oh, not your old-time patriotic legends, nor the halls of the great Rebel Birth, nor the solemn, silent Bell that once proclaimed liberty throughout the land, nor the piteous relics of your dead wise men, nor any dream of your bright, pure young days when yet you were “a fair greene country towne,” swims up in the vision of “the service” when he sets his foot within your borders, filling him with devotion to Our Lady Liberty, and drawing him to New World pilgrim shrines. Not these, oh no, not these. But your leper spot, your Old World plague-house, your breeding-ground of pest-begotten human vermin! So there is Chinatown, and electric glare enough upon it, and rat-holes enough within it, “the service” is good enough for him,—he will shoot to order in your defense till he dies!
Rat-tat-tat went the little feet upon the floor, and the pancake got another rakish pull. Presently the active figure squared sharply about and faced the door. The car had stopped, and a drunken man was staggering in. The sailor caught him good-humoredly in his arms, swung him about, and seated him beside himself with a comforting “Now you’re all right, sir; sit right here, my friend.”
The drunkard had a sodden, stupid face and bleary eyes from which the alcohol was oozing. In his shaking hand he held a bunch of delicate half-opened roses, hothouse roses, cream and pink; the odor of them drifted faintly through the car like a whiff of summer. Something like a sigh of relaxation exhaled from the hedge-hogs, and a dozen commiserating eyes were fastened on the ill-fated flowers,—so fragile, so sweet, so inoffensive, so wantonly sacrificed. The hot, unsteady, clutching hand had already burned the stems, and the pale, helpless faces of the roses drooped heavily.
The drunkard, full of beery effervescence, cast a bubbling look over the car, and spying a young lady opposite, suddenly stood up and offered the bouquet to her. She stared resolutely through him, seeing and hearing nothing, not even the piteous child-blossoms, with their pleading, downbent heads, and with a confused muttering of “No offense, no offense, you know,” the man sank back again. As he did so the uncertain fingers released one stem, and a cream-white bloom went fluttering down, like a butterfly with broken wings. There it lay, jolting back and forth on the dirty floor, and no one dared to pick it up.
Presently the drunkard sopped over comfortably on the sailor’s shoulder, who, with a generally directed wink of bonhomie, settled him easily, bestowing a sympathetic pat upon the bloated cheek. The conductor disturbed the situation by asking for his fare. The drunkard stupidly rubbed his eyes and offered his flowers in place of the nickel. Again they were refused; and after a fluctuant search in his pockets between intervals of nodding, the dirty, over-fingered bit of metal was produced, accepted—and still the dying blossoms shivered in the torturer’s hands.
He was drowsing off again, when, by some sudden turn of the obstructed machinery in his skull, his lids opened and he struggled up; the image of myself must have swum suddenly across the momentarily acting eye-nerve, and with gurgling deference, at the immanent risk of losing his equilibrium once more, he proffered the bouquet to me, grabbing the heads and presenting them stem-end towards. A smothered snuffle went round the car.
I wanted them, Oh, how I wanted them! My heart beat suffocatingly with the sense of baffled pity and rage and cowardice. Who was he, that drunken sot, with his smirching, wabbling hand, that I should fear to take the roses from him? Why must I grind my teeth and sit there helpless, while those beautiful things were crushed and blasted and torn in living fragments? I could take them home, I could give them drink, they would lift up their heads, they would open wide, for days they would make the room sweet, and the pale, soft glory of their inimitable petals would shine like a luminous promise across the winter. Nobody wanted them, nobody cared; this sodden beast in the flare-up of his consciousness wished to be quit of them. Why might I not take them? Something sharp bit and burned my eyelids as I glanced at the one on the floor. The conductor had stepped on it and crushed it open; and there lay the marvelous creamy leaves, curled at their edges like kiss-seeking lips, each with its glory greater than Solomon’s, all fouled and ruined in the human reek.
And I dared not save the others! Miserable coward!
I forced my hands tighter in my pockets and turned my head away towards the outside night and the backward slipping street. Between me and it, a dim reflection wavered, the image of the thing that stood there before me; and somewhere, like a far-off, dulled bell, I heard the words, “And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created He him.” The sailor, no doubt with the kindly intention of relieving me from annoyance, and not averse to play with anything, made pretence of seizing the roses. Then the drunkard, in an abandon of generosity, began tearing off the blossoms by the heads, scrutinizing, and casting each away as unfit for the exalted service of his “friend,” till the latter reaching out managed to get hold of a white one with a stem. He trimmed its sheltering green carefully, brought out a long black pin, stuck it through the stalk, and fastened the pale shining head against his dark blue blouse. All hedgehoggery smiled. We had thrust the roses through with our forbidding quills,—what matter that a barbarian nail crucified this last one? The drunkard slept again, limply holding his scattering bunch of headless stems and torn foliage. Pink and cream the petals strewed the floor. Where was the loving hand that had nursed them to bloom in this hard, unwonted weather; loved and nursed and—sold them?
“Ninth and Race,” sang out the conductor. The sailor sprang up with a merry grin, bowed gaily to everyone, twinkled his fingers in the air with a blithe “Ta ta; I’m off for Chinatown,” as he slid through the door, and was away in a trice, tripping down to the pestiferous sink that was awaiting him somewhere. And on his breast he wore the pallid flower that had offered its stainless beauty to me, that I had loved,—and had not loved enough to save. The rest were dead; but that one—somewhere down there in a den where even the gas-choked lights were leering like prostitutes’ eyes, down there in that trough of swill and swine, that pure, still thing had yet to die.
An Important Human Document
An earnest portrayal of the revolutionary psychology of the author, as manifested by his Attentat during the great labor struggle of Homestead, in 1892.
The whole truth about prisons has never before been told as this book tells it. The MEMOIRS deal frankly and intimately with prison life in its various phases.