One evening, a week after Antoine’s departure for the hospital, Elsie sat at the organ, idly picking out the melody of several of his favorite airs and dreamily wishing the lad could be with them once again. Margaret was busied over her books, and Lizzette, who was with them for the night, was knitting the stocking that always grew but never seemed finished, and Gilbert was putting some decorative touches upon a small medicine cabinet. Suddenly Herbert Lynn appeared in the open doorway, his arms filled with books and a violin case in one hand.
Elsie arose from her seat as the others greeted him, and stood with her slight figure as erect and indignant as her mutinous spirit could make it. Herbert turned toward her. “I am here by permission of high authority,” he laughed, glancing at Margaret. “I have no apology to make this time.”
“My sister’s guests are always welcome,” said Elsie icily, as she sank upon the piano stool and industriously undertook to rearrange several sheets of disordered music.
Herbert made no reply, but stood composedly watching the trembling fingers and the swiftly-mounting blushes on the fair face.
“You are nervous,” he said at last. “Let me do that for you. I am delightfully calm.”
Something in the exasperatingly cool tones made Elsie glance up, and then as quickly glance down again.
“It is useless to keep on the defensive any longer,” Herbert resumed as he coolly took the sheets of music from her. “I’ve come to beg a truce.”
“And have you forgotten all I said?”
“Not altogether; but I am of a forgiving disposition.”
“You forgive very easily, it seems to me,” said Elsie haughtily.
“Sometimes, and one of these times is when a spiteful little girl says things she doesn’t mean.”
Elsie tried hard to keep a sober face, but Herbert’s good-nature was irresistible, and the corners of her mouth relaxed in a smile as she looked up and asked: “What occult wisdom taught you she didn’t mean them?”
“The science of physiognomy, if there is such a science. A face that is all sunshine for others cannot surely mean to keep all its thunder-clouds for an inoffensive young man like me.”
“Some people attract lightning,” exclaimed Elsie mischievously.
“By reason of superior magnetism, it is to be presumed. Thanks!”
At this juncture Lizzette came up with the violin case in her hand. “Herbeart, zis ees ze reminder de mon petit Antoine. Let me hear ze fiddle speak again.”
“Willingly, if Miss Elsie will accompany me.”
Elsie looked up, mutinous still; but meeting Herbert’s eyes, defiance gave its last gasp as she said under her breath: “You are an arch conspirator. I suppose there is nothing left for me but submissiveness.”
Herbert’s blonde head bent low over the pile of music he was ostensibly examining as he whispered: “You shall see how generously I can conspire. Trust me to be magnanimous.”
Elsie’s nimble tongue was silent, and a sudden wave of intoxication seemed to sway her back and forth in a rarefied atmosphere where breathing was impossible. When at last she dared to glance again at Herbert, he was tuning his violin with such a look of beatific contentment on his face that pent-up feeling, on the perilous edge of a tear, seized the other alternative and burst into laughter. With instinctive quickness she dashed into a noisy jig on the organ, and by the time she dared to glance apprehensively around, Herbert had selected the piece of music and was striking its key-note on the violin. Elsie played very badly that night, and Herbert was several times obliged to point out little mistakes and make corrections with all the gravity of a professional music master. But the tumult in her veins rose higher and higher, and with a sudden crash on the keys the music came to a stop. Glancing down at the perturbed face, Herbert turned to the others:
“My violin is evidently not Antoine’s and Miss Elsie looks tired. Have you examined the new books, Miss Murchison? There is one on sociology, by Sir Lyon Playfair, I thought might interest you. And there is Henderson’s ‘History of Music,’ the ‘Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff,’ ‘The Three Germanies,’ and two or three newly-issued volumes of poetry by Meredith, Lover, and others. I thought before I dipped into them I should like your opinion.”
While Margaret, Lizzette, Gilbert, and Herbert were discussing the new books, Elsie slipped away, too perturbed to do anything but throw herself on the bed and cry. Just why she cried it would have been difficult for her to tell. But she did not try to tell; she only knew, like all volcanic natures, that safety and reason lay in a copious burst of tears. Half an hour later she presented herself in the sitting-room, her old, calm, smiling self.
“Now that the ice is broken I shall hope I may come often,” said Herbert as he bade them good-night. And saucy Elsie had no retort ready.
The summer wore into early autumn with busy days and brightening prospects for our little circle. Antoine was making slow but evidently sure progress at the hospital, and was hopeful and happy at the Sunday receptions of the friends who clustered around him. Lizzette beamed with joy and gratitude and seemed to have thrown discretion to the winds in the praises of Herbert which she constantly chanted in Elsie’s ears. The treaty of peace to which Elsie had so unwillingly committed herself had, after all, been a very simple affair. Herbert had been generous, as he promised, and beyond occasional evenings together over violin and organ, at which Elsie was learning to acquit herself with greater credit than on their first venture, they did not often meet. Contrary to her usual custom, Helen Mason had not closed her city home for the summer. Herbert, much to her chagrin, refused to seek the seashore, and with wise forethought, as she fancied, she filled her house with gay company. Among the guests was a certain Miss Alice Houghton, who, an orphan and the sole possessor of great wealth, lived, together with a duenna aunt, at one of the great family hotels in the city. She was a tall, fine-looking, well-bred girl of twenty-three or twenty-four. Her distinguishing characteristic was an air of pronounced weariness, that reminded one vividly of Young’s “Languid Lady.” It was a difficult matter to interest her in anything, yet her attention once caught, her face would light up with unusual intelligence and animation. Herbert at first regarded her simply as an exponent of the system of purposeless education which is bestowed upon the average society girl; but after several weeks of acquaintance he became convinced that a secret grief was preying upon her. He was consequently not greatly surprised when he found her one morning in late summer in the drawing-room, with a ghastly look of horror on her face as she clutched a newspaper and read the head-lines concerning a sensational suicide of a fast young man about town in one of the gambling hells of the city.
“My husband!” she gasped, pointing to the head-lines and then lapsed into insensibility.
Elsie was on her way to her morning conference with her mistress when she encountered Herbert, pale and distracted, with the limp burden in his arms, calling wildly for Helen. There was no time for explanations as Helen Mason ran quickly down the stairs, and Elsie returned to her work with a clouded face and defiant air that did not escape Herbert’s notice. The story of Alice Houghton’s life was soon told to the two sympathetic friends. A marriage, secret at first from mere caprice, but afterward guarded because of shame, to a handsome but dissipated and entirely characterless man of fashion, who, having spent his own and a considerable portion of his wife’s fortune at the gambling table, had deliberately shot himself rather than face the consequences of his evil deeds. The story never became known beyond the three or four sympathizers within the Mason household, and the death of a relative furnished ample excuse for the deep mourning and grief-stricken air with which the young widow again faced the world. Herbert was very kind and attentive to her in the early days of her grief, and in consequence his sister drew some exceedingly flattering pictures as to his future.
With Margaret the summer had been productive of much good. The little leaven of her kindly nature and generous deeds had permeated the whole tenement-house and extended even beyond it in sundry additions to her Busy Fingers Club. She was idolized by the children of the neighborhood, who hailed her as the patron saint of all their little schemes and ambitions. Under her fostering care and that of the physician which Herbert had ordered, the invalid, Mrs. Carson, was slowly gaining her health and some slight encouragement in her literary ventures. There was a cloud, however, hovering in Margaret’s sky. Gilbert, who had already reached a man’s stature, had acquired as well a man’s independence, and had taken to absenting himself from home evenings, much to the annoyance of both sisters. It had been his custom during the spring and summer to go for Elsie and bring her home for the night, and there had been a substantial progress made in their studies in consequence. Of late, however, Elsie had found herself dependent for escort upon the good-natured William, who had shown himself only too happy to be of use to her, and had grown alarmingly confidential as a result. This state of William’s mind being duly imparted to Margaret, she had resolved to forestall trouble by insisting upon Gilbert’s usual attendance on his sister. But the lad was sullen and unresponsive when she broached the subject, and when night came he put on his hat and went away without a word. Margaret brooded for some time over Gilbert’s changed demeanor, and with a feeling of impending trouble which it is so often impossible to resist, she dressed herself for the street and went out, resolved to discover the places he frequented most. Fortune favored her, for at Mrs. Carson’s door she learned that Gilbert and Mr. Carson had held a discussion about a meeting of some kind which they were to attend that evening at Harmonie Hall. The nature of the meeting the invalid did not know, but she imagined it was semi-political in character, as she had found that her husband had become interested of late in municipal politics. There had been strange mutterings in the air for some time among the inmates of the tenement-house, and Margaret’s heart instantly took the alarm. What had Gilbert, a minor, to do with municipal politics and this spirit of discontent that she could but notice among the laborers with whom she lived? The great strife between labor and capital had never come actively home to Margaret. Indeed, so simple had seemed its solution to her upon the broad basis of brotherly love and active Christianity, that she had worked on quietly, hopefully, in the firm faith that she was only one of millions of like factors in once more establishing the kingdom of Christ. Like one who watches the battle from the hill-top, she believed the contending forces were only seeking their way up to the clear sunshine. It was, therefore, with something like consternation that she found herself among the disorderly crowd in the hall. Here and there little groups of men and women were noisily discussing various topics and paying only occasional attention to the speaker, a swarthy, wild-eyed woman, who was shouting in a shrill, rasping voice the most astounding ideas that had ever greeted Margaret’s ears. Drawn by curiosity as well as interest, she quietly worked her way up to a position near the platform and sank into a seat to listen.
“Talk about freedom,” yelled the speaker, waving her long thin arms like a revolving windmill. “I tell you we are slaves—handcuffed, manacled, abject slaves.” This assertion brought a round of applause. “Talk about the great American eagle—it is only a superannuated old crow that lets its blind followers go where the witches dance on the point of a needle.” This witticism provoked a loud guffaw of approval from the crowd. “I tell you, men, what we want is to preach the gospel of discontent. We want every one of you, all thinking people, to be anarchists. We don’t believe in statutory law; we don’t want any law but natural law.”
“Hear! Hear!” came in shrill calls from various parts of the room.
“But you say,” resumed the speaker, “that anarchy is disreputable. That is just what we want it to be. We want to find the gospel of discontent in the gutters. We don’t want to be reputable, and I thank God that I am absolutely disreputable. We leave respectability for the Christian capitalist, the slave-driver, the monopolist. Why, a man cannot be a Christian anarchist, because anarchy is only of the earth. The only class of people who can regulate this dismal condition of society, at which so many are just now trying their hands, are the anarchists. Think of it: the telegraphs in this country are owned by one man, the railroads by sixty families, and into the hands of the few is fast being gathered the country’s wealth. Impracticable dreamers propose to remedy this evil by making the state or nation responsible, but the anarchist says no, he doesn’t want any interference, for he has had too much of it. The state resorts to armed force. If we want liberty, there is no other way to get it but to do as the state does and resort to armed force.”
The speaker sat down amid a great wave of applause, and Margaret shrank back in her seat with her cheeks burning and eyes flashing with indignation. A man with long black hair and ragged beard next occupied the platform, and held forth on the cruelty of the bloated capitalists and a monopolistic press.
“Why, all attempts at pacification,” he cried, “are dead failures. Monopolists are more arrogant, trades unions more bitter than ever. ‘Give us more wages,’ we cry; ‘We’ll give you less,’ they say. ‘We don’t want to work so many hours a day,’ we respond; ‘You shall have more,’ they answer. ‘We won’t work under such conditions,’ we declare; ‘Then starve,’ they hiss. Do you know there are over three millions of workingmen who are crying all this? And the capitalists ask: ‘What are you going to do about it?’ We’ll show them what we’ll do about it. Let them beware! Let them remember the dark days of the French Revolution, and note how many patrician heads went under the axe because the rabble like us—the sans culottes like us, if you please—went crying for bread, and when they couldn’t have bread they cried for blood and had it. Why, men, this is the greatest war of history. It is a war not of countries, but of the globe, and the two great forces, the very rich and the very poor, those bonded slaves of an arrogant aristocracy, are closing in upon each other. As yet it is a bloodless strife; but let them beware, I say, let them beware! This trouble will never cry itself to sleep. There are too many mighty passions surging through the bosoms of outraged and insulted beings. There are too many hungry wives and freezing children. From the Bastile to the portals of this hall stalks a long line of menacing ghosts, who with pointing fingers demand that the cause for which they died shall yet be made triumphant. Blind is he who cannot see that the edicts of society are crushing to the wall the helpless toilers, the unfortunate women and innocent children of this world. Blind is he who looks upon the cruelties indorsed by capital without rising in righteous indignation to echo the cry that rings along the line, ‘Down with the aristocracy!’ It is a lie that all men have an equal chance in this world; I tell you the competition is unequal and capital forces the issue. Success! success! is the Moloch of the world’s worship, and into its ravenous maw you and I and every one of the toilers feed daily the writhing bodies of wives and children. It is feasting on the putrid carcasses that are crushed under its triumphal car. And all the while there is wealth enough in this world for every man to have and to spare. I tell you, fellow-mortals, the torch and the shotgun, the bomb and the bludgeon, are as much for the toiler as the blue-coated minions of the law.”
The man took his seat on the rear of the platform amid the wildest cheers, and Margaret watched the eagle-like face and the trembling, attenuated form with more than usual interest. There had been many grains of truth in his wild harangue, and they had inspired her conservative breast with an enthusiastic desire to behold the wide gulf, between the two great opposing forces of the world, narrowed down to the line of arbitration and adjustment, to which all such questions must finally come. But she shuddered with horror at the sanguinary battle which the speaker’s inflammatory words had conjured. A second French revolution, intolerably bitterer, bloodier, more wide-spread than its prototype! God forbid! There was just then a call from the chairman for volunteer speakers, and Margaret’s eyes became stony in their wonder and terror, as she saw Gilbert rise from his seat and advance to the front of the platform. Tall, lithe, like a young sapling, with a wealth of dark hair pushed back from a high, straight brow, piercing dark eyes, a square, firmly-set mouth and chin, and fine thin nostrils expanding with the fire of enthusiasm, he stood before them all. For the first time in her life Margaret realized the singular beauty and magnetism of the boy’s presence. To her he had been always only Gilbert, to be watched over and taken care of with a mother’s unfailing forethought. Now she saw, with a bitter wrenching of her heart-strings, that the chrysalis had burst and her lad had gone away forever. Before her stood the man Gilbert, on whose utterances she hung in breathless apprehension. There was something almost wonderful in the boy’s self-possession as he stood and gazed the noisy crowd into curious silence.
“Friends and brother toilers,” he began in a rich, sonorous voice that filled the hall. “You have called for volunteer talks, and although I am not yet fully come to man’s estate, the impulse to speak is too strong to be resisted. It is time that something was done to lift this burden under which we are groaning, and yet it is the old, old question that for thousands of years before Christ oppressed the bondsmen of the earth. How long, O Lord, how long, before this world shall see the fruition of the mighty labors of the millions who have gone down to death for the good of their brothers? How long before vengeance shall overtake the insatiable greed of capital, which has no more care for the toiler in its grasp than the tiger in the jungle for the man he has smitten with his paw? What is it to capital that labor goes unshod, to the well-fed gourmand that the slave who serves him is starving for the crust he despises? What does the capitalist care for the wails of woe that go up from thousands of infantile throats, for the shiverings of the naked wretches at his door, so that piled higher and higher in his safes he sees the gold these wretched toilers have wrested from the mighty bowels of the earth? Who cares for the wretched twenty-four thousand souls that live in one precinct in this great and wealth-rolling city, within a compass of two small blocks? Who cares for the nobodies that live in hovels where the water from the street pours in on the floors, and where sixty or seventy people live in eight or ten rooms and exhibit the morality of the dogs they represent? What millionaire philanthropist goes down into his pocket to pay his men living wages, so that the poverty which shames old-country degradation need not be re-enacted here? Where is the churchman who, giving largely to conspicuous charities, would be willing to turn that charity into specific help in business to the man or men who do his bidding? It is only a few years back that the ‘boss’ worked at the same bench with his men. Now this is all changed. Now he has his elegant office, his carriage, his fine attire; but the workmen show no such advance in prosperity. They work for even less wages, wear the same cheap clothing, and toil just as many hours as when they and the ‘boss’ were co-workers. What has wrought this change? What has made these conditions possible? I will tell you. It is governmental aid. It is because the government has fostered the schemes of the rich man and made him a ward of the nation. But it is unjust, and a relic of the old feudality that the government should recognize one son to the exclusion of the others equally well-born, and equally deserving. On this principle, therefore, we demand that we be made wards of the nation. We demand a distributive justice, by pacific means if possible, and if not, then by a retributive justice, by force of arms——”
“Gilbert! Gilbert!”
A hand laid on the lad’s shoulder caused him to turn in wonder and confusion to meet Margaret’s pleading face and terror-stricken eyes.
“You are wrong, Gilbert,” she cried earnestly. “Wrong! wrong! You must not incite to violence. Just see what turbulent elements are before you!”
There had come an instant hush with her appearance on the platform; men and women had risen to their feet and were peering curiously at the two. Flushed, trembling, intoxicated with enthusiasm, Gilbert cried: “But the terrible wrongs of the poor! You know what they are—you who toil for a daily pittance! They must be avenged!”
“But not in the way you indicate. Not by bloodshed or violence. See! we are attracting attention! Will you let me speak for you?”
For a moment resentment gleamed in Gilbert’s eyes, and then, as he glanced at Margaret’s uplifted earnest face, he answered: “Yes, correct me if I am wrong. God speed you!”
Gilbert sank back into a chair, his eyes intently fixed upon his sister’s face as she advanced to the front of the platform and stood looking out upon the sea of wondering faces.
“Friends,” she began in a low voice, “I have a story to tell you. The lad who has just addressed you is my brother. For seven years I have been mother, counsellor, friend to him. I promised his dying father to watch over him with unremitting vigilance until his feet should be firmly set in the paths of upright manhood. That father was a man who believed in and practiced the doctrine of the universal brotherhood of man. He recognized not that all men are created equal mentally and physically, for that is a manifest absurdity, but that there is a principle underneath all conditions of society calling for the respect, veneration, and love of man as man. We must respect humanity in all its phases, and there is no right, divine or earthly, that permits us to cripple it, enslave it, or destroy it. This idea was one of his ardent beliefs; but it would have cut his gentle heart to the quick to know that his son would ever be misled into uttering words that could in any way incite to violence or wrong-doing. I have listened to-night to words that made my heart bleed; not only for the evils afflicting labor, not only for the misguided ideas of the so-called upper classes, but for the deeper wrongs you are inflicting on yourselves.”
A stir among the audience and a few hisses for a moment disturbed Margaret’s equanimity, but gathering heart again she went on in a voice of deep and commanding earnestness: “Nay! hear me out. I premise here that I am not against you; indeed, I am one of you. I toil for my daily bread, and I receive but a pittance for my work. I take slop-work from the factories, and make men’s shirts for forty-five cents per dozen, and men’s overalls for fifty cents per dozen pairs. So you see I know what labor has to contend with.”
Shouts of “You’re a good one!” “Go on!” encouraged the increasing tide of thought that surged to her lips. She stood before them pale, earnest, like a prophet, and forgetting time, self, place, she swept the now listening throng with the full force of the unselfish convictions which had made her mistress of herself and untoward circumstance.
“Once more I say to you, O my brothers and sisters, you are wrong, and I repeat it with the facts of history as a bulwark of defence. Let us go back a little to the dim days of which we catch but faint shadows, two thousand years and more before the Christian era, when there were but two classes of men, feudal lords and bondsmen. Let us trace up through the freedom given the slaves under Moses, fourteen hundred years before Christ, and through all the struggles of the toiler up to the present day, the results of violent uprisings of brute force. History gives but two evidences where such uprisings on the part of labor’s slaves were not terribly disastrous to the insurgents. Thousands of years have passed away, men have fought with the desperation of tigers for their rights, and still these rights are in a measure denied, and the millennium of labor is not yet in sight. You may strike the torch to the factory, aim the shotgun at your fellow-workman because he refuses to listen to your dictation, put your bombs on railroad tracks before the midnight express, leave the ship without sailors or the printing press without workers, because any or all of these are not conducted with a true regard for mutual welfare, and you will only find yourselves still deeper in the mire of dissatisfaction and wrong. You cripple your own resources and injure your own prospects when you preach the doctrine of physical force. Leave the development of that doctrine to the brute whose only resource it is, and lift yourselves up to the higher plane where exists the reason of man. But you are no doubt asking where that reason must begin. Back of all sophistries, back of all calculation, on that primitive plane of the newly awakened—the conscience! This, in the age of intricate reasoning and perplexing sophistries, may seem to you but the utterance of a simple-minded woman; but history proves, through experience, that the great and seemingly complex problems of the day never can be and never will be solved on any other basis. It was not indeed until the gentle Nazarene walked the earth that its toilers began to grope upward toward the light of reason and conscience. He it was who first took the taint from the grimy hand of the worker; He it is who ought to-day to be the sole advocate and mediator in all your wrongs and suffering. I am not talking to you of the religion that the occupants of velvet pulpits preach to the occupants of velvet pews, nor of the Christianity, so called, that is reserved for the rich man who builds churches where he and his class may worship in unsullied seclusion; but of that fundamental principle which led the Carpenter of Nazareth to render absolute justice to all men and which prompted the good Samaritan to do a generous deed to his fallen neighbor. Yes, you say all this would do very well if men could be made over on a higher basis; but they are greedy, avaricious, and prompted more by self-interest than brotherly love. True; but there is always the acorn before there is the oak. Social reforms must begin with the individual. In order to have an upright community it must be largely composed of upright individuals, and if every man reformed himself the proposition of a reformed society would be of very simple solution. It is wonderful indeed how the little leaven leavens the whole lump. Wonderful how the gulf between classes is already being widened by these injudicious threats of violence. Let us beware, then, of incendiary words! We are all of us, Dives and Lazarus alike, striving for the same goal; we would all be rich, prosperous, happy if we could. We are indignant because Dives gets in our way and hinders our advancement, when he ought, by all the laws of good-fellowship, to give us fair play and equal chances. But when we as Lazarus, by a fortunate conjunction of circumstances, come at last to Dives’ importance, how is it that we take the same mean advantage of some less capable or lucky mortal? Ah, my friends, until we learn that all these great problems lie partially at least within ourselves, and, like Atlas, are willing to bear the world on our shoulders, we shall never gain the object we are seeking. In the conscience of every individual lies the hope of the world’s progress. Let us seek, therefore, to cultivate that light within our own breasts, so that, feeble ray though it may be, it shall illumine the pathway of some weaker brother and help him toward the diviner light of the gentle Nazarene. I protest against the indiscriminate and wordy assaults upon rich men. Not alone in the poor man’s breast are all the virtues. Much of the poverty of the world is the fault of the individual. Natural thrift and industry have their reward even in the present untoward industrial conditions. You cannot smoke away, and drink up your income, and justly blame the bloated capitalist who employs you if your children are shoeless and the table stands empty. But you can use your reason, you can be thrifty, careful, and educate yourselves on the side of conscience and humanity. I look upon this talk of reform which is in the air as excellent for the great cause of universal brotherhood. This is the tendency of the times; the cardinal truth underlying the welfare of the world. Capital is identical in interest with us, and must recognize sooner or later the trite truth that we are only the fulfilment and complement of each other. Let us beware, then, my friends, how we antagonize those whose help we need. Let us make capital feel, by reason of our foresight, our fidelity, our judgment, our generosity, that it cannot afford to ignore our rights and must open wide the doors to human progress or fall a victim to its own inertia. With you I believe in organization; organization upheld by, and upholding, the rights of the people, irrespective of class; organization prompted by the still small voice of conscience, which abridges no man’s freedom while seeking its own. In this way only can your wrongs and mine be righted. But before we mend the steps of those who oppress us, let us as individuals sweep the inner chambers of the heart, and garnish them anew for the long-waited guest of universal justice.”