Читать книгу The Precipice - Elia Wilkinson Peattie - Страница 10

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But though Miss Morrison had made herself so brightly, so almost universally at home, there was one place into which she did not venture to intrude. This was Kate's room. Mary had felt from the first a lack of encouragement there, and although she liked to talk to Kate, and received answers in which there appeared to be no lack of zest and response, yet it seemed to be agreed that when Miss Barrington came tramping home from her hard day's work, she was to enjoy the solitude of her chamber.

Mary used to wonder what went on there. Miss Barrington could be very still. The hours would pass and not a sound would issue from that high upper room which looked across the Midway and included the satisfactory sight of the Harper Memorial and the massed University buildings. Kate would, indeed, have had difficulty in explaining that she was engaged in the mere operation of living. Her life, though lonely, and to an extent undirected, seemed abundant. Restless she undoubtedly was, but it was a restlessness which she succeeded in holding in restraint. At first when she came up to the city the daze of sorrow was upon her. But this was passing. A keen awareness of life suffused her now and made her observant of everything about her. She felt the tremendous incongruities of city life, and back of these incongruities, the great, hidden, passionate purpose which, ultimately, meant a city of immeasurable power. She rejoiced, as the young and gallant dare to do, that she was laboring in behalf of that city. Not one bewildered, wavering, piteous life was adjusted through her efforts that she did not feel that her personal sum of happiness had received an addition. That deep and burning need for religion, or for love, or for some splendid and irresistible impetus, was satisfied in part by her present work.

To start out each morning to answer the cry of distress, to understand the intricate yet effective machinery of benevolent organizations, so that she could call for aid here and there, and have instant and intelligent coöperation, to see broken lives mended, the friendless befriended, the tempted lifted up, the evil-doer set on safe paths, warmed and sustained her. That inquisitive nature of hers was now so occupied with the answering of practical and immediate questions that it had ceased to beat upon the hollow doors of the Unknown with unavailing inquiries.

So far as her own life was concerned, she seemed to have found, not a haven, but a broad sea upon which she could triumphantly sail. That shame at being merely a woman, with no task, no utility, no independence, had been lifted from her. So, in gratitude, everywhere, at all times, she essayed to help other women to a similar independence. She did not go so far as to say that it was the panacea for all ills, but she was convinced that more than half of the incoherent pain of women's lives could be avoided by the mere fact of financial independence. It became a religion with her to help the women with whom she came in contact, to find some unguessed ability or applicability which would enable them to put money in their purses. With liberty to leave a miserable condition, one often summoned courage to remain and face it. She pointed that out to her wistful constituents, the poor little wives who had found in marriage only a state of supine drudgery, and of unexpectant, monotonous days. She was trying to give them some game to play. That was the way she put it to them. If one had a game to play, there was use in living. If one had only to run after the balls of the players, there was not zest enough to carry one along.

She began talking now and then at women's clubs and at meetings of welfare workers. Her abrupt, picturesque way of saying things "carried," as an actor would put it. Her sweet, clear contralto held the ear; her aquiline comeliness pleased the eye without enticing it; her capable, fit-looking clothes were so happily secondary to her personality that even the women could not tell how she was dressed. She was the least seductive person imaginable; and she looked so self-sufficient that it seldom occurred to any one to offer her help. Yet she was in no sense bold or aggressive. No one ever thought of accusing her of being any of those things. Many loved her--loved her wholesomely, with a love in which trust was a large element. Children loved her, and the sick, and the bad. They looked to her to help them out of their helplessness. She was very young, but, after all, she was maternal. A psychologist would have said that there was much of the man about her, and her love of the fair chance, her appetite for freedom, her passion for using her own capabilities might, indeed, have seemed to be of the masculine variety of qualities; but all this was more than offset by this inherent impulse for maternity. She was born, apparently, to care for others, but she had to serve them freely. She had to be the dispenser of good. She was unconsciously on the outlook against those innumerable forms of slavishness which affection or religion gilded and made to seem like noble service.

Among those who loved her was August von Shierbrand. He loved her apparently in spite of himself. She did not in the least accord with his romantic ideas of what a woman should be. He was something of a poet, and a specialized judge of poetry, and he liked women of the sort who inspired a man to write lyrics. He had tried unavailingly to write lyrics about Kate, but they never would "go." He confessed his fiascoes to her.

"Nothing short of martial measures seems to suit you," he said laughingly.

"But why write about me at all, Dr. von Shierbrand?" she inquired. "I don't want any one writing about me. What I want to do is to learn how to write myself--not because I feel impelled to be an author, but because I come across things almost every day which ought to be explained."

"You are completely absorbed in this extraordinary life of yours!" he complained.

"Why not!" demanded Kate. "Aren't you completely absorbed in your life?"

"Of course I am. But teaching is my chosen profession."

"Well, life is my chosen profession. I want to see, feel, know, breathe, Life. I thought I'd never be able to get at it. I used to feel like a person walking in a mist. But it's different now. Everything has taken on a clear reality to me. I'm even beginning to understand that I myself am a reality and that my thoughts as well as my acts are entities. I'm getting so that I can define my own opinions. I don't believe there's anybody in the city who would so violently object to dying as I would, Dr. von Shierbrand."

The sabre cut on Von Shierbrand's face gleamed.

"You certainly seem at the antipodes of death, Miss Barrington," he said with a certain thickness in his utterance. "And I, personally, can think of nothing more exhilarating than in living beside you. I meant to wait--to wait a long time before asking you. But what is the use of waiting? I want you to marry me. I feel as if it must be--as if I couldn't get along without you to help me enjoy things."

Kate looked at him wonderingly. It was before the afternoon concert and they were sitting in Honora's rejuvenated drawing-room while they waited for the others to come downstairs.

"But, Dr. von Shierbrand!" she cried, "I don't like a city without suburbs!"

"I beg your pardon!"

"I like to see signs of my City of Happiness as I approach--outlying villas, and gardens, and then straggling, pleasant neighborhoods, and finally Town."

"Oh, I see. You mean I've been too unexpected. Can't you overlook that? You're an abrupt person yourself, you know. I'm persuaded that we could be happy together."

"But I'm not in love, Dr. von Shierbrand. I'm sorry. Frankly, I'd like to be."

"And have you never been? Aren't you nursing a dream of--"

"No, no; I haven't had a hopeless love if that's what you mean. I'm all lucid and clear and comfortable nowadays--partly because I've stopped thinking about some of the things to which I couldn't find answers, and partly because Life is answering some of my questions."

"How to be happy without being in love, perhaps."

"Well, I am happy--temperately so. Perhaps that's the only degree of happiness I shall ever know. Of course, when I was younger I thought I should get to some sort of a place where I could stand in swimming glory and rejoice forever, but I see now how stupid I was to think anything of the sort. I hoped to escape the commonplace by reaching some beatitude, but now I have found that nothing really is commonplace. It only seems so when you aren't understanding enough to get at the essential truth of things."

"Oh, that's true! That's true!" cried Von Shierbrand.

"Oh, Kate, I do love you. You seem to complete me. When I'm with you I understand myself. Please try to love me, dear. We'll get a little home and have a garden and a library--think how restful it will be. I can't tell you how I want a place I can call home."

"There they come," warned Kate as she heard footsteps on the stairs. "You must take 'no' for your answer, dear man. I feel just like a mother to you."

Dr. von Shierbrand arose, obviously offended, and he allied himself with Mary Morrison on the way to the concert. Kate walked with Honora and David until they met with Professor Wickersham, who was also bound for Mandel Hall and the somewhat tempered classicism which the Theodore Thomas Orchestra offered to "the University crowd."

"Please walk with me, Miss Barrington," said Wickersham. "I want you to explain the universe to me."

"I can do that nicely," retorted Kate, "because Dr. von Shierbrand has already explained it to me."

Blue-eyed Mary was pouting. She never liked any variety of amusement, conversational or otherwise, in which she was not the center.

So Kate's life sped along. It was not very significant, perhaps, or it would not have seemed so to the casual onlooker, but life is measured by its inward rather than its outward processes, and Kate felt herself being enriched by her experiences.

She enjoyed being brought into contact with the people she met in her work--not alone the beneficiaries of her ministrations, but the policemen and the police matrons and the judges of the police court. She joined a society of "welfare workers," and attended their suppers and meetings, and tried to learn by their experience and to keep her own ideas in abeyance.

She could not help noticing that she differed in some particulars from most of these laborers in behalf of the unfortunate. They brought practical, unimaginative, and direct minds to bear upon the problems before them, while she never could escape her theories or deny herself the pleasure of looking beyond the events to the causes which underlay them. This led her to jot down her impressions in a notebook, and to venture on comments concerning her experiences.

Moreover, not only was she deeply moved by the disarrangement and bewilderment which she saw around her, but she began to awaken to certain great events and developing powers in the world. She read the sardonic commentators upon modern life--Ibsen, Strindberg, and many others; and if she sometimes passionately repudiated them, at other times she listened as if she were finding the answers to her own inquiries. It moved her to discover that men, more often than women, had been the interpreters of women's hidden meanings, and that they had been the setters-forth of new visions of sacredness and fresh definitions of liberty.

It was these men--these aloof and unsentimental ones--who had pointed out that the sin of sins committed by women had been the indifference to their own personalities. They had been echoers, conformers, imitators; even, in their own way, cowards. They had feared the conventions, and had been held in thrall by their own carefully nursed ideals of themselves. They had lacked the ability to utilize their powers of efficiency; had paid but feeble respect to their own ideals; had altogether measured themselves by too limited a standard. Failing wifely joy, they had too often regarded themselves as unsuccessful, and had apologized tacitly to the world for using their abilities in any direction save one. They had not permitted themselves that strong, clean, robust joy of developing their own powers for mere delight in the exercise of power.

But now, so Kate believed,--so her great instructors informed her,--they were awakening to their privileges. An intenser awareness of life, of the right to expression, and of satisfaction in constructive performances was stirring in them. If they desired enfranchisement, they wanted it chiefly for spiritual reasons. This was a fact which the opponents of the advancing movement did not generally recognize. Kate shrank from those fruitless arguments at the Caravansary with the excellent men who gravely and kindly rejected suffrage for women upon the ground that they were protecting them by doing so. They did not seem to understand that women desired the ballot because it was a symbol as well as because it was an instrument and an argument. If it was to benefit the working woman in the same way in which it benefited the working man, by making individuality a thing to be considered; if it was to give the woman taxpayer certain rights which would put her on a par with the man taxpayer, a thousand times more it was to benefit all women by removing them from the class of the unconsidered, the superfluous, and the negligible.

Yes, women were wanting the ballot because it included potentiality, and in potentiality is happiness. No field seems fair if there is no gateway to it--no farther field toward which the steps may be turned. Kate was getting hold of certain significant similes. She saw that it was past the time of walls and limits. Walled cities were no longer endurable, and walled and limited possibilities were equally obsolete. If the departure of the "captains and the kings" was at hand, if the new forces of democracy had routed them, if liberty for all men was now an ethic need of civilization, so political recognition was necessary for women. Women required the ballot because the need was upon them to perform great labors. Their unutilized benevolence, their disregarded powers of organization, their instinctive sense of economy, their maternal-oversoul, all demanded exercise. Women were the possessors of certain qualities so abundant, so ever-renewing, that the ordinary requirements of life did not give them adequate employment. With a divine instinct of high selfishness, of compassion, of realization, they were seeking the opportunity to exercise these powers.

"The restlessness of women," "the unquiet sex," were terms which were becoming glorious in Kate's ears. She saw no reason why women as well as men should not be allowed to "dance upon the floor of chance." All about her were women working for the advancement of their city, their country, and their race. They gave of their fortunes, of their time, of all the powers of their spirit. They warred with political machines, with base politicians, with public contumely, with custom. What would have crushed women of equally gentle birth a generation before, seemed now of little account to these workers. They looked beyond and above the irritation of the moment, holding to the realization that their labors were of vital worth. Under their administration communities passed from shameless misery to self-respect; as the result of their generosity, courts were sustained in which little children could make their plea and wretched wives could have justice. Servants, wantons, outcasts, the insane, the morally ill, all were given consideration in this new religion of compassion. It was amazing to Kate to see light come to dull eyes--eyes which had hitherto been lit only with the fires of hate. As she walked the gray streets in the performance of her tasks, weary and bewildered though she often was, she was sustained by the new discovery of that ancient truth that nothing human can be foreign to the person of good will. Neither dirt nor hate, distrust, fear, nor deceit should be permitted to blind her to the essential similarity of all who were "bound together in the bundle of life."

It was not surprising that at this time she should begin writing short articles for the women's magazines on the subjects which presented themselves to her in her daily work. Her brief, spontaneous, friendly articles, full of meat and free from the taint of bookishness, won favor from the first. She soon found her evenings occupied with her somewhat matter-of-fact literary labors. But this work was of such a different character from that which occupied her in the daytime that so far from fatiguing her it gave an added zest to her days.

She was not fond of idle evenings. Sitting alone meant thinking, and thought meant an unconquerable homesickness for that lonely man back in Silvertree from whom she had parted peremptorily, and toward whom she dared not make any overtures. Sometimes she sent him an article clipped from the magazines or newspapers dealing with some scientific subject, and once she mailed him a number of little photographs which she had taken with her own camera and which might reveal to him, if he were inclined to follow their suggestions, something of the life in which she was engaged. But no recognition of these wordless messages came from him. He had been unable to forgive her, and she beat down the question that would arise as to whether she also had been at fault. She was under the necessity of justifying herself if she would be happy. It was only after many months had passed that she learned how a heavy burden may become light by the confession of a fault.

Meantime, she was up early each morning; she breakfasted with the most alert residents of the Caravansary; then she took the street-car to South Chicago and reported at a dismal office. Here the telephone served to put her into communication with her superior at Settlement House. She reported what she had done the day before (though, to be sure, a written report was already on its way), she asked advice, she talked over ways and means. Then she started upon her daily rounds. These might carry her to any one of half a dozen suburbs or to the Court of Domestic Relations, or over on the West Side of the city to the Juvenile Court. She appeared almost daily before some police magistrate, and not long after her position was assumed, she was called upon to give evidence before the grand jury.

"However do you manage it all?" Honora asked one evening when Kate had been telling a tale of psychically sinister import. "How can you bring yourself to talk over such terrible and revolting subjects as you have to, before strange men in open court?"

"A nice old man asked me that very question to-day as I was coming out of the courtroom," said Kate. "He said he didn't like to see young women doing such work as I was doing. 'Who will do it, then?' I asked. 'The men,' said he. 'Do you think we can leave it to them?' I asked. 'Perhaps not,' he admitted. 'But at least it could be left to older women.' 'They haven't the strength for it,' I told him, and then I gave him a notion of the number of miles I had ridden the day before in the street-car-it was nearly sixty, I believe. 'Are you sure it's worth it?' he asked. He had been listening to the complaint I was making against a young man who has, to my knowledge, completely destroyed the self-respect of five girls--and I've known him but a short time. You can make an estimate of the probable number of crimes of his if it amuses you. 'Don't you think it's worth while if that man is shut up where he can't do any more mischief?' I asked him. Of course he thought it was; but he was still shaking his head over me when I left him. He still thought I ought to be at home making tidies. I can't imagine that it ever occurred to him that I was a disinterested economist in trying to save myself from waste."

She laughed lightly in spite of her serious words.

"Anyway," she said, "I find this kind of life too amusing to resign. One of the settlement workers was complaining to me this morning about the inherent lack of morals among some of our children. It appears that the Harrigans--there are seven of them--commandeered some old clothes that had been sent in for charitable distribution. They poked around in the trunks when no one was watching and helped themselves to what they wanted. The next day they came to a party at the Settlement House togged up in their plunder. My friend reproved them, but they seemed to be impervious to her moral comments, so she went to the mother. 'Faith,' said Mrs. Harrigan, 'I tould them not to be bringing home trash like that. "It ain't worth carryin' away," says I to them.'"

About this time Kate was invited to become a resident of Hull House. She was touched and complimented, but, with a loyalty for which there was, perhaps, no demand, she remained faithful to her friends at the Caravansary. She was loath to take up her residence with a group which would have too much community of interest. The ladies at Mrs. Dennison's offered variety. Life was dramatizing itself for her there. In Honora and Marna and Mrs. Barsaloux and those quiet yet intelligent gentlewomen, Mrs. Goodrich and Mrs. Applegate, in the very servants whose pert individualism distressed the mid-Victorian Mrs. Dennison, Kate saw working those mysterious world forces concerning which she was so curious. The frequent futility of Nature's effort to throw to the top this hitherto unutilized feminine force was no less absorbing than the success which sometimes attended the impulsion. To the general and widespread convulsion, the observer could no more be oblivious than to an earthquake or a tidal wave.