STANHOPE plodded dully through his routine—listening to reports, directing his assistants, arranging services in the church and chapels, dictating letters. A score of annoying details were thrust at him for discussion and settlement—details with which helpers with a spark of initiative would never have bothered him. His wife, out of temper, came to nag him about expenditures. His son wrote from college for an extra allowance, alleging a necessity which his father at once knew was mythical. Another letter was from a rich parishioner, taking him to task for last Sunday’s sermon as “socialistic, anarchistic in its tendency, and of the sort which makes it increasingly difficult for conservative men of property to support your church.” At luncheon there were two women friends of his wife and they sickened him with silly compliments, shot poisoned arrows at the reputations of their friends, and talked patronisingly of their “worthy poor.” After luncheon—more of the morning’s routine, made detestable by the self-complacent vanity of one of his stupidest curates and by the attempts of the homeliest deaconess to flirt with him under the mask of seeking “spiritual counsel.” And finally, when his nerves were unstrung, a demand from a tedious old woman that he come to her bedside immediately as she was dying—demands of that kind his sense of duty forbade him to deny.
“This is the third time within the month,” he said peevishly. “Before, she was simply hysterical.” And he scowled at Schaffer, the helper to the delicatessen merchant in the basement of the tenement where the old woman lived.
“I think maybe there’s a little something in it this time,” ventured Schaffer, his tone expressing far less doubt than his words.
“I’ll follow you in a few minutes,” said Stanhope, adding to himself, “and I’ll soon be out of all this.”
He did not know how or when—“after Evelyn is married,” he thought vaguely—but he felt that he was practically gone. He would leave his wife all the property; and he and Emily would go away somehow and somewhere and begin life—not anew, but actually begin. “I shall be myself at last,” he thought, “speaking the truth, earning my living in the sweat of my face, instead of in the sweat of my soul.” As he came out of the house he looked up at the church—the enormous steepled mass of masonry, tapering heavenward. “Pointing to empty space,” he thought, “tricking the thoughts of men away from the street and the soil where their brothers are. Yes, I shall no longer court the rich to get money for the poor. I shall no longer fling the dust of dead beliefs into the eyes of the poor to blind them to injustice.” He strode along, chin up, eyes only for his dreams. He did not note the eager and respectful bows of the people in the doorways, block after block. He did not note that between the curtains of the dives, where painted women lay in wait for a chance to leer and lure, forms shrank back and faces softened as he passed.
Into the miserable Orchard street tenement; through the darkness of the passageway; into a mouldy court, damp and foul even in that winter weather; up four ill-smelling stairways with wall paper and plastering impatient for summer that they might begin to sweat and rot and fall again; in at a low door—the entrance to a filthy, unaired den where only the human animal of all the animal kingdom could long exist.
The stove was red-hot and two women in tattered, grease-bedaubed calico were sitting at it. They were young in years, but their abused and neglected bodies were already worn out. One held a child with mattered eyes and sores hideously revealed through its thin hair. The other was about to bring into the world a being to fight its way up with the rats and the swarming roaches.
In the corner was a bed which had begun its career well up in the social scale and had slowly descended until it was now more than ready for the kindling-box. Upon it lay a heap of rags swathing the skeleton of what had once been a woman. Her head was almost bald. Its few silver-white hairs were tied tightly into a nut-like knot by a rusty black string. Her skin, pale yellow and speckled with dull red blotches, was drawn directly over the bones and cartilages of her skull and face, and was cracked into a network of seams and wrinkles. The shapeless infoldings of her mouth were sunk deep in the hollow between nose and chin. Her hands, laid upon the covers at which her fingers picked feebly, had withered to bones and bunches of cords thrust into two ill-fitting gloves of worn-out parchment.
As Stanhope entered, the women at the stove rose, showed their worse than toothless gums in a momentary smile, then resumed the doleful look which is humanity’s universal counterfeit for use at death-beds. They awkwardly withdrew and the old woman opened her eyes—large eyes, faded and dim but, with the well-shaped ears close against her head, the sole reminders of the comeliness that had been.
She turned her eyes toward the broken-backed chair at the head of her bed. He sat and leaning over put his hand—big and strong and vital—upon one of her hands.
“What can I do, Aunt Albertina?” he said.
“I’m leaving, Doctor Stanhope.” There was a trace of a German accent in that hardly human croak.
“Well, Aunt Albertina, you are ready to go or ready to stay. There is nothing to fear either way.”
“Look in that box behind you—there. The letters. Yes.” He sat again, holding in his hand a package of letters, yellow where they were not black. “Destroy them.” The old woman was looking at them longingly. Then she closed her eyes and tried to lift her head. “Under the pillow,” she muttered. “Take it out.” He reached under the slimy pillow and drew forth a battered embossed-leather case. “Look,” she said.
He opened it. On the one side was the picture of a man in an officer’s uniform with decorations across his breast—a handsome man, haughty-looking, cruel-looking. On the other side was the picture of a woman—a round, weak, pretty face, a mouth longing for kisses, sentimental eyes, a great deal of fair hair, graceful, rounded shoulders.
“That was I,” croaked the old woman. He looked at that head in the bed, that face, that neck with the tendons and bones outstanding and making darker-brown gullies between.
“Yes—I,” she said, “and not thirty years ago.”
She closed her eyes and her fingers picked at the covers. “Do you remember,” she began again—“the day you first saw me?”
He recalled it. She was wandering along the gutter of Essex Street, mumbling to herself, stooping now and then to pick up a cigar butt, a bit of paper, a rag, and slip it into a sack.
“Yes, Aunt Albertina—I remember.”
“You stopped and shook hands with me and asked me to come to a meeting, and gave me a card. I never came. I was too busy—too busy drinking myself to death.” She paused and muttered, in German, “Ach, Gott, I thought I would never accomplish it. But at last—” Then she went on in English, “But I remembered you. I asked about you. They all knew you. ‘The giant’ they call you. You are so strong. They lean on you—all these people. You do not know them or see them or feel them, but they lean on you.”
“But I am weak, Aunt Albertina. I am a giant with a pigmy soul—a little soul.”
“Yes, I know what pigmy means.” The wrinkles swirled and crackled in what was meant to be a smile. “I had a ‘von’ in my name in Germany, and perhaps something before it—but no matter. Yes, you are weak. So was he—the man in the picture—and I also. We tempted each other. He left his post, his wife, all. We came to America. He died. I was outcast. I danced in a music-hall—what did I care what became of me when he was gone? Then I sat at the little tables with the men, and learned what a good friend drink is. And so—down, down, down——” she paused to shut her eyes and pick at the covers.
“But,” she went on, “drink always with me as my friend to make me forget, to make me content wherever I was—the gutter, the station-house, the dance-hall. If he could have seen me among the sailors, tossing me round, tearing at my clothes, putting quarters in my stockings—for drinks afterwards—drinks!”
There was a squirming among the rags where her old bones were hidden. Stanhope shuddered and the sweat stood in beads on his white face. “But that is over, and you’ve repented long ago,” he said hurriedly, eager to get away.
“Repent?” The old woman looked at him with jeering smile. “Not I! Why? With drink one thing’s as good as another, one bed as another, one man as another. The idealissmus soon passes. Ach, how we used to talk of our souls—Gunther and I. Souls! Yes, we were made for each other. But—he died, and life must be lived. Yes, I know what pigmy means. I had a von in my name over there and something in front. But no soul—just a body.”
“What else can I do for you, Aunt Albertina?” He spoke loudly as her mind was evidently wandering.
“Be strong. They lean on you. No, I mean I lean on you. The letters and the pictures—destroy them. Yes, Gunther and I had von in our names—but no soul—just youth and love——”
He went to the stove, lifted the lid, and tossed in the letters and the old case. As he was putting the lid on again he could see the case shrivelling, and the flame with its black base crawling over sheets closely written in a clear, beautiful foreign handwriting.
“They are destroyed, Aunt Albertina. Is that all?”
“All. No religion—not to-day, I thank you. Yes, you are strong—but no soul, only a body.”
He went out and sent the two women. He expanded his lungs to the tainted air of Orchard Street. It seemed fresh and pure to him. “Horrible!” he thought, “I shall soon be out of all this——”
Out of it? He stopped short in the street and looked wildly around. Out of it? Out of what?—out of life? If not, how could he escape responsibility, and consequences? Consequences! He strode along, the children toddling or crawling swiftly aside to escape his tread. And as he strode the word “Consequences!” clanged and banged against the walls of his brain like the clapper of a mighty bell.
At the steps of his house a woman and a man tried to halt him. He brushed them aside, went up the steps two at a time, let himself in, and shut himself in his study.
Why had he not seen it before? To shiver with the lightning of lust the great tree of the church, the shelter and hope of these people; to tempt fate to vengeance not upon himself, but upon Emily; to cover his children with shame; to come to her, a wreck, a ruin; to hang a millstone about her neck and bid her swim!—“And I called this—love!”
At eight o’clock that evening Emily sat waiting for him. “Shall I hate him as soon as I see him? Or shall I love him so that I’ll not care for shame or sin?” The bell rang and she started up, trembling. The maid was already at the front door.
“Nancy!” she called; then stood rigid and cold, holding the portière with one hand and averting her face.
“Yes, mum.”
“If it is any one for me——”
She hesitated again. She could see herself in the long mirror between the windows. She drew herself up and sent a smile, half-triumphant, half-derisive, at her image, “Say I’m not at home,” she ended.
The door opened, there was a pause, then it closed. Nancy entered, “Only a note, mum.” She held it out and Emily took it—Stanhope’s writing. She tore it open and read:
“I have a presentiment that you, too, have seen the truth. We may not go the journey together, I have come to my senses. If it was love that we offered each the other, then we do well to strangle the monster before it strangles us, and tramples into the mire all that each of us has done for good thus far.
I—and you, too—feel like one who dreams that he is about to seize delight and awakens to find that he was leaping from a window to destruction.
This is not renunciation. It is salvation.
Evelyn tells me she is to see you to-morrow. I am glad that you and my daughter are friends.”
She read the note again, and, after a long interval, a third time. Then she bent slowly and laid it upon the coals. She sat in a low chair, watched the paper curl into a tremulous ash, which presently drifted up the chimney. She was not conscious that there was any thought in her mind. She was conscious only of an enormous physical and mental relief.
“I must go to bed,” she said aloud. She hardly touched the pillow before she was sound asleep—the sleep of exhaustion, of content, of the battle won. After several hours she awakened. “I’m so glad my ‘better self’ told Nancy to say I wasn’t at home,” she thought. “That makes me know that I was—what was I?” But before she could answer she was again asleep.
The next morning Joan at breakfast suddenly lifted her eyes from her newspaper and her coffee, listened and smiled. Emily was singing at her bath.