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CHAPTER IX

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"There's a lot of hollerness to religion."

Charlie Grace said this to himself, bitterly, eighteen months later, after an experience on behalf of Hattie Bright. He had met her as she hurried homeward through the twilight of a May evening. He had not seen her for nearly a year. Both Mrs Bright and Hattie had dropped out of the habit of attending church.

"Hello, Hattie." He was unaffectedly glad to see her. "Where have you been this ever so long?"

"Oh, I'm doing dressmaking. I'm always busy. I have to work very hard. And then on Sundays I'm tired. Besides, I have to help mother. Poor mother, she's been having an awful time."

He noticed now that she was not the Hattie of their last meeting. Something had come into her face, and something had gone. She was less pretty, and more beautiful. If care had driven the roguery from her eyes it had given them a look of distress of which the appeal was even more seductive. She was well-dressed, of course; she would probably not have known how to dress in any other way. Charlie Grace turned to walk beside her.

"What do you mean by having an awful time?"

"Oh, it's the house. It hasn't been paying for a long while, and now we're terribly behind. I don't know what's to become of us."

"Is it"—he hesitated to seem inquisitive—"is it—debt?"

"Debt? I should think so. We owe everybody—and now we can't get anyone to trust us."

She walked rapidly, as though trying to get away from him.

"What do you do, then?"

She gave a short laugh. "Do? We don't do. What does anyone do when there's not enough in the house to eat?"

"Oh, but, Hattie—!"

"I've seen it coming for a long time. It never really paid. If ever you're down on your luck, for God's sake don't let anyone persuade you to start a boarding-house. That's the last thing. And mother was about as well suited to it as an old hen. It wasn't so bad in the days when people wanted to live in this part of New York, but now—"

"But what do you do with the boarders if there's not enough in the house to eat? You were joking when you said that, weren't you?"

"I wish I had been. But the boarders don't worry us—for the simple reason that we haven't any. The last of them went two days ago. That was old Miss Grimes. You remember her, don't you? She's been with us since I can't tell the day when. Mother thought that whatever happened she'd stay. But she's gone; and I'm glad she is. We can starve ourselves with a clear conscience; but it's another thing to be starving old Miss Grimes."

"But, Hattie, you must be joking."

"Oh, very well. I'm joking. It's a great joke to have the butcher, and the grocer, and the fishman, and the iceman all tell you they can't supply you any more—and the landlord say that if you'll only clear out without giving trouble he'll not bother you about the arrears of rent. That's perfectly screaming, that joke is. But there's a good side to it, too. None of them will worry us about the past, if we'll only go—and not eat anything or drink anything or live anywhere any more. It's like what they call a general amnesty, isn't it?—only an amnesty on condition that you get off the earth."

The noise of the Elevated under which they were passing kept them from saying more for a minute or two. Charlie Grace was thinking hard. "How much do you owe?" he asked, when they reached the pavement on the other side.

She made a sound of impatience. "Pf-f! What's the use of counting up? We owe everyone. Isn't that enough?"

"Would it be as much as a thousand dollars?"

She considered. "N-no! not as much as that. It might be five hundred, though."

"Five hundred isn't such a lot—not when it comes to debts."

"It's a lot when you couldn't raise fifty—not if your life depended on it."

"If you left your present house," he asked, after more thinking, "where would you go?"

"God only knows. I don't. I suppose there'd be some place for us, but I can't think where. I get nine a-week, and mother wouldn't have anything. There are probably dog-holes in New York where nine a-week will take care of two women, but I haven't looked for them yet."

"Oh, but you can't be left like that."

"My dear boy, we are left like that. What's the use of talking."

"Haven't you any relations?—any friends?"

"We've no friends, but we have a relation—one—my father's brother. He's an old broken-down doctor, who was once in jail for something awful—I don't know what. We have nothing to do with him, except that he sometimes comes round to the kitchen for a meal. My mother's family are farming people in Prince Edward Island, up in the Gulf of St Lawrence. They can't help us. We should never even hear of them if the Hornblowers didn't go there for part of the summer. It agrees with Mrs Hornblower. They see them, and Fanny tells me. She's real nice, Fanny is—real sweet. She often talks of the time we were confirmed together. We were side by side. I thought they dressed her rather mean, considering their money. Reggie's fast, don't you think? I wish he wouldn't come teasing after me the way he does. What do you suppose he wants? I'm sure I don't give him any encouragement—not me."

That night, as he was leaving the study to go to bed, Charlie Grace said:

"Father, did you know Mrs Bright was very hard up? She has no more boarders, and they haven't enough in the house to eat."

The rector raised his head from the letter he was writing, and surveyed his son.

"Who told you?" he asked, after a pause.

"Hattie; I met her in the street—"

"You know I've never liked that intimacy. It doesn't strike me as seemly that a young man in your position—"

"There's no question of anything like that, father. But it's true, what I'm telling you. They've no boarders; the landlord has given them notice to quit; and they're literally in want of food. Hattie is dressmaking. She gets nine dollars a week; but what's that—?"

"I've always felt that things were on a precarious footing there. I've advised Mrs Bright against going on with that house time and again."

"I suppose she couldn't do anything else. It was her plant. She'd invested her all in it, and couldn't pull out. I think we ought to do something to help her to keep in—or to make a fresh start somewhere else."

The rector raised his brows, though his eyes seemed to be contemplating the desk or the floor. "We? Who?"

"The church people—where Mrs Bright has always attended."

"What do you propose?"

"They owe about five hundred dollars. It ought not to be hard to raise that much—among us all."

"Perhaps it ought not to be; it only would. Mrs Bright hasn't made herself a favourite during the years she's been a parishioner at St David's."

"But what's that got to do with it—whether she's a favourite or not—when she's in trouble?"

"It wouldn't have anything, if it weren't for human nature, and unfortunately you've got to take human nature as you find it. Mrs Bright has made herself unpopular, and I fear she will be made to suffer for that mischance. I fear it. I hardly know to whom I should dare apply—"

"I do."

Dr Grace looked up at his son in surprise at the tone of assurance. Of late years a tone of assurance in the rectory had been rare. It was perhaps for this reason that he regarded the lad with a new interest, that he saw him in a new light. Possibly he had not till this evening taken in the fact that he was nearly eighteen years of age, and six feet tall. He could hold his head proudly, too, the chin thrust upward defiantly.

"I couldn't help in the matter," the father warned him. "I shall have all I can do to put you through college, when you enter Harvard in the autumn. I can manage it; but we shall have to pinch until you're earning something for yourself. I may as well tell you now what your grandfather said the last time he was here from Horsehair Hill. There'll be a little money coming to you from him—at his death. It won't be more than four or five thousand dollars; but I'm glad to know you'll have even that as a nest-egg. My expenses have been such that I've never been able to save anything to speak of, and so—"

The young man flushed. "I know that, father," he said hastily; "and if ever this money comes to me from grandpa I shall want you to take it in return for all—"

"There'll be no question of that, my boy. I think I may say without undue confidence that at St David's I'm provided for during such few years as may remain to me. I only want you to understand that in this affair of Mrs Bright I shall be unable to—"

"I wasn't thinking of you, father. But I should think we might apply to Mr Hornblower, and Miss Smedley, and Dr Furnival, and perhaps one or two others. They'd never miss it."

"Very well; if you choose to ask them. I don't say 'No' to it; though I shall be surprised if you get the money. Mrs Bright has not made herself a favourite. I regret to say it; but so it is."

No later than the following afternoon Charlie Grace was admitted into the private office of Silas Hornblower, Esquire, of the firm of Weed & Hornblower, bankers and brokers, in Broad Street. His reception was distinctly cordial.

"Well, well, Charlie. This is quite an unexpected pleasure. You don't often tear yourself away from your books, do you? How is your father? What can I do for you? Will you sit down? Well, well."

Mr Hornblower rubbed his hands. His tone would have been more genial had the voice not been thin and harsh. The features, too, were thin and harsh. Thin and harsh were the lines of the body under the grey "cutaway" coat. Grey was Mr Hornblower's predominating note. His complexion was grey, his hair was grey; and meagre grey side-whiskers, clipt close to the skin, adorned the ferret-like face.

It was not till he had actually sat down and begun his tale that Charlie Grace realized the difficulty of asking for money. Up to this minute he supposed he should only have to state the case for Mrs Bright to see her fellow-parishioner write a cheque. It was inconceivable that she should be allowed to starve, or to be turned out of house and home, when a scratch of the pen would save her. Charlie Grace had never dreamed of such a thing. It began to seem a possibility only in proportion as he saw the thin, harsh smile fade from Mr Hornblower's face to be followed by a look as wooden and lifeless as a mask—the look of the rich man when he is being asked for money. He had never seen anything to resemble it but the stoniness of death. Its immediate effect was to make the story more difficult in the telling.

"You see, sir, she's always had a hard time—and she's come to our church for so many years and now they have no boarders—and so I knew if I came to you—"

Perhaps, as he stumbled along, the banker took pity on him, for he broke in by saying:

"Now, Charlie, I may as well tell you straight off that you're wasting my time and your own too."

The boy shot out of his seat. At this abrupt termination to the interview he grew crimson. He was still crimson when he found himself in Broad Street. He tingled all over. It was as if he had been struck. It took some minutes of tramping along blindly, into Wall Street, and then along Broadway toward the City Hall, to realize that he had asked help for a poor starving widow from a rich, generous, Christian man, and had been refused. He knew, of course, that rich men were pestered to death, as the saying went, with requests for money; but in this case the circumstances were peculiar. What did St David's stand for? What did any church stand for? Surely if poverty were ever entitled to relief it was such poverty as Mrs Bright's at the hands of wealthy brethren in the faith like most of the attendants at St David's.

He was dashed but not discouraged. By the time he had made his way back to Vandiver Place he had accepted this preliminary defeat, and taken comfort to himself by saying:

"I always knew he was an old hypocrite—an old brute."

He was not surprised to find Miss Smedley really sympathetic. He knew she was at home, because he saw her reading at the window, as he ran up the brownstone steps.

He never entered her drawing-room without an awe that dated back to his childhood. As a matter of fact the elaborate gilt furniture covered in purple damask would have awed anyone. On the mantelpiece an ormolu work of art, showing a lady drooped in an uneasy attitude over a circular timepiece, caught the eye with a sense of relief because it was not purple, the same being true of the ormolu candlesticks with cut-glass pendants which flanked it.

"Poor things! Poor things!" Miss Smedley murmured, encouragingly, as he stumbled through the tale for the second time. "I shall certainly help. How did you come to know about it?"

He told of his meeting with Hattie.

"Well, it isn't for me to say anything against the child," Miss Smedley said kindly. "There are others to do that. All the same, anyone can see."

She moved her head from side to side as though sniffing a bad odour. Her dress was a long loosely-fitting robe of dove-coloured stuff. She affected the loosely fitting, possibly to modify the fact that her figure suggested a lot of carelessly-adjusted odds and ends that seemed to "chasser," as dancing teachers said in those days, when she meant to walk, and were never at ease in sitting. As she shifted restlessly in her seat a mauve shawl that lay in her lap slipped to the floor. Charlie Grace darted forward to pick it up.

"She's doing dressmaking now," he stated, while he performed this act of politeness.

"Oh, she won't do that long. You needn't tell me. Hattie Bright'll find something more to her taste than dressmaking, or I don't know her. Not that I want to say anything against the child. There are others to do that. I had her in my class in Sunday school for four years, and she's a puss. That I can tell you. I never liked the mother—that I will say. She always dressed the child out of her station. I've seen Hattie Bright come to Sunday-school wearing the most ridiculous things for a girl of her class. Fanny Hornblower hadn't the like—I can tell you that. And now what has if all come to? To this. Give me that footstool. Well, I'll help," she continued, as he placed the footstool under her feet. "I'll help, because it's you, Charlie. I'm glad to see you starting out so early on your career of mercy."

"Oh, but that's not the reason I want to raise the money, Miss Smedley," he said, flushing at the words "career of mercy" as if with shame. "I'm doing it because I like them—and I'm sorry for them—"

"I'm not surprised at that; not a bit. They're just the kind of women whose troubles appeal to men—whether young or old. They're pusses. That I can tell you. As for Hattie—well, I won't say anything against her. It's the sort of thing I always leave people to find out for themselves. If you weren't going to be a clergyman I should feel it my duty to warn you. As it is, I must help. How much did you say you wanted?"

It occurred to him that if she was going to be generous he might as well be daring. "Five hundred dollars would pay what they owe, but it wouldn't leave them anything over."

"Anything over? Why should it indeed? It seems to me we're doing a good deal as it is. No one would do it for me. That I can tell you. Leave them anything over? If it did, they'd spend it on dress, or going to a play. Oh, I know them. Hattie's a puss—a pretty puss, I admit—but all the worse for that. Five hundred, you said?"

With her curious sidelong gait she passed into the library, separated by heavy purple portières from the room in which they had been sitting. Her shawl falling to the floor as she proceeded, he went after her and picked it up. Holding it respectfully, he watched her from a distance as, seated at a handsome library desk, she took out her cheque-book and began to write. It was a large flat book, with several blanks on a page, suggesting opulence and a sense of power.

"There," she said, blotting her signature, and detaching the cheque carefully, "there; and much good may it do them."

The strip of pink paper being folded he thought it good manners not to look at it in the lady's presence. He wondered if she had given him the whole of the five hundred or only the half. From her smile, and the fact that she was known to be generous, he felt justified in hoping he had got it all.

"There, there; that'll do," she said impatiently, in response to the profuseness of his thanks. "Of course I must help. I always do when money is wanted at St David's—and goodness knows the calls come often enough nowadays. I can't imagine where all the money's gone that used to be in the church. Well, good-bye. Tell your father I never expect to see him again. That's a joke, of course. I'm not the one to complain about lack of attentions. I only wish everyone was like me. Most people think the rector of a church has nothing to do but call on them. When I see your father I want to tell him what old Mrs Pemberton gave as her excuse for leaving St David's. He'll never get over it. But it'll put him on his guard. That I can tell you."

He dared not look at the cheque till he was out of sight of Miss Smedley's windows. It was for fifty dollars.

It took him the rest of the afternoon to readjust his point of view, and to see that this was as much as he had a right to expect Miss Smedley to give. He couldn't call her mean, as his first impulse was to do. On the contrary, she had made what anyone would call a handsome contribution, and it was only reasonable to look to others to do the rest.

With this conviction, and spirits considerably dampened, he went to see Mrs Furnival on the following afternoon. He protected himself against further disillusioning by saying in advance that if she gave him another fifty he would be content.

Mrs Furnival was intensely interested. She was a pretty little woman always fashionably dressed, commonly reported to be drowning marital sorrows by going a great deal into society. It was said that she knew more people than anyone in New York, because she "had the art of giving herself to her friends." She gave herself now to Charlie Grace, sitting with hands clasped in her lap, and eyes gazing earnestly into his.

"Dear Charlie, I can't tell you how much I admire you. Just to think of you taking all this trouble for people you hardly know. You do hardly know them, don't you? Oh, yes, I remember them; though of course I should only consider them church acquaintances—if that. In church one has to meet people you couldn't mingle with outside. I consider that only right. I consider that it would be snobbish to make distinctions there. Some people do, I know, but I consider it does a great deal of harm to religion. Don't you? I used to make it a point to go and sit beside this Mrs Bright whenever she came to our meetings. I consider that we ought to do everything we can to make people like that feel welcome. Don't you? I must say she sometimes struck me as presuming. That's the difficulty with that class. They don't know where to draw the line. Not that that should weigh with us now, when she's in trouble. Poor thing; you don't know how my heart bleeds for her. I'll tell you what I'll do, Charlie. I'll give you five dollars now, and if you find you can't make up the balance I'll give you five more. I'd make it ten at once if we hadn't so many calls on us. But five now I certainly will give. And I can't tell you how much I admire you for taking all this trouble about it. If there were only more like you. But then you're going to be a clergyman anyhow. That was settled years ago, when you put the wig into the missionary-box. What a boy you were."

It was once more a question of readjustment. At the end of a week, when his father asked him how he was getting on, he was able to state that the fruit of his efforts was eighty dollars.

The rector lifted his brows. "Indeed? I hardly expected you to get so much."

"But why?"

With his lowered lids and tolerant half-smile, Dr Grace's expression was one of sphinx-like benignity. "You'd have to go somewhat deep into the philanthropic temperament to explain that. I've come to the conclusion that we're not a people easily touched by individual distress. We like our good deeds to be institutional, and in the mass. As with so many other things, so with that—we're attracted by size. It's to the overgrown university, or to the Art Museum already teemingly rich, that our people like to give their benefactions, not because they're convinced they do the most good, but because they want to put their money where other people are putting theirs. If you'd gone begging for some big institution to which this five hundred dollars would have been as a drop in the sea, you'd have had it in no time. But when it's for an unhappy, obscure woman whose life depends on it, it's ten to one you can't get it. It's the kind of need that doesn't appeal to our generosity. At least, that's been my experience."

"But why?" the young man demanded again. "Christ didn't work through institutions. He helped the man. Institutions, even the best of them, are surely second to the individual."

Dr Grace shrugged his shoulders. With his hands under his long black coat-tails he flapped the latter before the empty study grate. "My dear boy, when you're older you won't try to get at the philanthropic temperament through reasons. It's like the proverbial woman—when it will it will, and when it won't it won't. You've got to take it as you find it. Having had a long experience in doing that, I was convinced beforehand that you couldn't raise the money for Mrs Bright."

It may have been the raw irritation of personal failure or it may have been indignation of a deeper kind that caused Charlie Grace, as he stood with one hand on his hip and the other grasping the back of a chair, to tremble with anger. "Then what they call their Christianity isn't Christianity at all?"

"That's a good deal to say. It's certainly Christianity of a rudimentary kind; but then, Christianity of a rudimentary kind is all the world as yet has ever attained to. The Church, in the sense of a Body worthy of the Head, is still as much an unrealized vision as the New Jerusalem, the City with foundations of sapphire and gates of pearl. But what are you to do? You must take Christianity as you find it, or leave it alone."

"Then I can understand why there should be so many who prefer to leave it alone."

In the end he considered it less humiliating to return the eighty dollars to the donors, who took back their respective contributions without excessive signs of regret. It was summer before he spoke of the incident again. He would not have done so then but for Fanny Hornblower's concern as to what had become of poor Hattie Bright. She hadn't seen her for so long.

They were walking on the beach at Idlewild, Mr Hornblower's residence in Long Island. Mrs Hornblower admitted calling the place Idlewild because one name was as good as another, and she couldn't think of anything else. The house—a cluster of red gables and yellow verandas—hung above them, at the top of a long cliff, shelving inland and covered with olive-green scrub oak. A schooner was beating its way down the Sound toward New York, while the mainland lay as a thin line on the horizon. Charlie Grace had come down to Idlewild to spend a Sunday.

At the mention of Hattie Bright in this sympathetic fashion he suddenly found the strings of his tongue loosed. He told Miss Hornblower of the trouble in the Bright household as it had been a few months earlier, and of his own useless efforts to relieve it.

"But why didn't you come to me?"

He confessed that he hadn't thought of it. As he said so he made subconscious note of the fact that the distress in her eyes rendered her almost pretty. She was nearly eighteen now, like himself—tall and thin—her father's harshness of outline, which she had inherited, tempered by her natural sweetness into something that resembled grace.

"But five hundred dollars," she continued, still with distress in her eyes, "is a mere nothing. I always have more than that in my little bank account, just for pin-money. Papa is so generous; that is," she added, colouring, "when he really understands. You mustn't think hardly of him, Charlie. You see this is something he—he—he naturally wouldn't understand. But I would. Any girl would. Oh, why didn't you come to me?"

It was difficult to tell her that to him, at least, five hundred dollars was a sum such as he had been accustomed to associate only with grown-up people of wealth—with bankers like her father, or heiresses like Miss Smedley. He was even more ashamed of the poverty of his ideas than of that of his purse. He made the explanation somehow, though she was so little interested as to say:

"Perhaps it isn't too late even now."

"Oh, it must be," he declared. "They're either all right by this time, or else they're dead. It's the sort of thing that has to be short and sharp, one way or the other."

"I don't see that. I don't see that at all. They may have been able to scrape along up to now, and still be in debt. I wish you'd go and see."

He did go and see—on Monday morning, immediately on his return to New York. But Mrs Bright and her daughter had gone, and the boarding-house had been turned into a "three-family" tenement. Moreover, no one could tell him where the late occupants had found refuge. Some said in Harlem, others in Hoboken; but no one knew for sure.

The Way Home

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