Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

"No; your thinking I minded."
"Well, I did think so."

"You were mistaken, utterly mistaken." "I'm glad. If you mind doing such things, you give so much time to arranging not to do them.”

Mr. Lanley was silent. He was deciding that he should rearrange some of the details of his life. Not that he contemplated giving all his orders from the fifth story, but he saw he had always devoted too much attention to preventing unimportant catastrophes.

Under her direction he was presently driving north; then he turned sharply east down a little hill, and came out on a low, flat pier. He put out the motor's lights. They were only a few feet above the water, which was as black as liquid jet, with flat silver and gold patches on it from white and yellow lights. Opposite to them the lighthouse at the north end of Blackwell's Island glowed like a hot coal. Then a great steamer obscured it.

"Is n't this nice?" Mrs. Wayne asked, and he saw that she wanted her discovery praised. He never lost the impression that she enjoyed being praised.

Such a spot, within sight of half a dozen historic cities, was a temptation to Mr. Lanley, and he would have unresistingly yielded to it if Mrs. Wayne had not said: "But we have n't said a word yet about our children."

"True," answered Mr. Lanley. His heart sank. It is not easy, he thought, to explain to a person for whom you have just conceived a liking that her son had aspired above his station. He tapped his long, middle finger on the steering-wheel, just as at directors' meetings he tapped the table before he spoke, and began, "In a society somewhat artificially formed as ours is, Mrs. Wayne, it has always been my experience that-" Do what he would, it kept turning into a speech, and the essence of the speech was that while democracy did very well for men, a strictly aristocratic system was the only thing possible for girls-one's own girls, of course. In the dim light he could see that she had pushed all her hair back

from her brows. She was trying to follow him exactly, so exactly that she confused him a little. He became more general. "In many ways," he concluded, "the advantages of character and experience are with the lower classes." He had not meant to use the word, but when it slipped out, he did not regret it.

"In all ways," she answered.
He was not sure he had heard.
"All the advantages?" he said.
"All the advantages of character."

He had to ask her to explain. One reason, perhaps, why Mrs. Wayne habitually avoided a direct question was that, when once started, her candor had no bounds. Now she began to speak. She spoke more eagerly and more fluently than he, and. it took him several minutes to see that quite unconsciously she was making him a strange, distorted complement to his speech, that in her mouth such words as "the leisure classes, your sheltered girls," were terms of the deepest reproach. He must understand, she said, that as she did not know Miss Severance, there was nothing personal, nothing at all personal, in her feeling, she was as careful not to hurt his feelings as he had tried to be not to hurt hers,-but she did own to a prejudice at least Pete told her it was a prejudice—

Against what, in what, in Heaven's name, Lanley at first wondered; and then it came to him.

"Oh, you have a prejudice against divorce?" he said.

Mrs. Wayne looked at him reproachfully.

"Oh, no," she answered. "How could you think that? But what has divorce to do with it? Your granddaughter has n't been divorced."

A sound of disgust at the mere suggestion escaped him, and he said coldly: "My daughter divorced her first husband."

"Oh, I did not know."

"Against what, then, is this unconquerable prejudice of yours?"

"Against the daughters of the leisure class."

He was still quite at sea.
"You dislike them?"
"I fear them."

If she had said that she considered roses a menace, he could not have been more puzzled. He repeated her words aloud, as if he hoped that they might have some meaning for him if he heard his own lips pronouncing them:

"You fear them."

"Yes," she went on, now interested only in expressing her belief, "I fear their ignorance and idleness and irresponsibility and self-indulgence, and, all the more because it is so delicate and attractive and unconscious; and their belief that the world owes them luxury and happiness without their lifting a finger. I fear their cowardice and lack of character-"

"Cowardice!" he cried, catching at the first word he could. "My dear Mrs. Wayne, the aristocrats in the French Revolution, the British officer-"

"Oh, yes, they know how to die," she answered; "but do they know how to live when the horrible, sordid little strain of every-day life begins to make demands upon them, their futile education, the moral feebleness that comes with perfect safety? I know something can be made of such girls, but I don't want my son sacrificed in the process."

There was a long, dark silence; then Mr. Lanley said with a particularly careful and exact enunciation:

"I think, my dear madam, that you cannot have known very many of the young women you are describing. It may be that there are some like thatdaughters of our mushroom finance; but I can assure you that the children of ladies and gentlemen are not at all as you seem to imagine."

It was characteristic of Mrs. Wayne that, still absorbed by her own convictions, she did not notice the insult of hearing ladies and gentlemen described to her as if they were beings wholly alien to her experience; but the tone of his speech startled her, and she woke, like a person coming out of a trance, to all the harm she had done.

"I may be old-fashioned-" he began, and then threw the phrase from him; it was thus that Alberta, his sister, began her most offensive pronouncements. "It has always appeared to me that we shelter our more favored women as we shelter our planted trees, so that they may attain a stronger maturity."

"But do they, are they are sheltered women the strongest in a crisis?"

Fiend in human shape, he thought, she was making him question his bringing up of Adelaide. He would not bear that. His foot stole out to the self-starter.

For the few minutes that remained of the interview she tried to undo her work, but the injury was too deep. His life was too near its end for criticism to be anything but destructive; having no time to collect new treasure, he simply could not listen to her suggestion that those he most valued were imitation. He hated her for holding such opinion. Her soft tones, her eager concessions, her flattering sentences, could now make no impression upon a man whom half an hour before they would have completely won.

He bade her a cold good night, hardly more than bent his head, the chauffeur took the heavy coat from her, and the car had wheeled away before she was well inside her own doorway.

Pete's brown head was visible over the banisters.

"Hello, Mother!" he said. "Did the old boy kidnap you?"

Mrs. Wayne came up slowly, stumbling over her long, blue draperies in her weariness and depression.

"Oh, Pete, my darling," she said, "I think I 've spoiled everything."

His heart stood still. He knew better than most people that his mother could either make or mar.

"They won't hear of it?"

She nodded distractedly.

"I do make such a mess of things sometimes!"

He put his arm about her.

"So you do, Mother," he said; "but then think how magnificently you sometimes pull them out again."

(To be continued)

Absorbing the Alien

By M. E. RAVAGE

Author of "The Loyalty of the Foreign-Born," etc.

ANY years ago, when America

MANY

and the ways and doings of her people were to my alien mind one interminable chain of capricious inconsequences, there was, among myriads of others, one great question that kept puzzling me profoundly. Of a Sunday afternoon, the sweat-shop being closed, after dinner had been finished and before the three-thirty lecture had begun, I used to take an odd pleasure in wandering up and down the newly planted Delancey Street park; and as I watched the big motor-cars bowling off the Manhattan terminus of the Williamburg Bridge, I would ponder curiously. What do these well-groomed Americans think of us? Not that it mattered greatly. To begin with, I held with the rest of the intelligentsia of the quarter that a thinking man has only to live in peace with his revolutionary conscience and give no heed to the world's opinion of him. Moreover, when it came to opinions, we of the fellowship entertained not a few concerning the American himself. He was a crass materialist, devoted to business and baseball, to empty show, and the vain delights of the senses. Why, therefore, should the chosen of God care about the regard of the heathen? Yet idle curiosity urged, and I continued to wonder. Curiosity? No, it was not that, or at least not that alone. It was principally a fine pride in the knowledge that, whatever this selfsatisfied worshiper of Mammon thought of us, he could judge only by surface appearances, because he did not know the things that I knew. And as the cars sped by, with their raucous trumpets impatiently shrieking, and the ladies smiling and the children pointing, I would take in the scene with a sweeping glance,

and say to myself with a kind of exultation: "Ah, my friends, no doubt you think that this is the Ghetto, this vast, teeming human ant-hill, with its monstrous dungeons and bediamonded fishwomen, its sordid dickerings and anemic children, its rows of push-carts and repellent merchandise, its second-hand silk hats and third-rate imitation Americanism; and if you do, you have a good right to despise us. But if you would only come out of your cushioned vehicles and let me take you about a bit and give you a glimpse of the splendid things that lie beneath this crude exterior, I promise you you would come away with a very much changed impression of us."

And even after all these years, though in the meantime I myself have become an American and have arrived at a more charitable view of my adoptive fellowcountrymen, I can hardly say that my questionings have received a complete and satisfying answer. In a sense, indeed, I am now more puzzled than ever. In my association with natives of the older stocks I am frequently made to prick up my ears by some kindly reference to my old home. The East Side, I find, is not at all looked down upon by Americans of the morepenetrating sort. They have discovered no end of things that in their generosity they can admire about us our adaptability, our intelligence, our self-reliance, our keenness at a bargain, our readiness to make use of the libraries and opportunities of this best of all countries, our good citizenship. Sometimes, too, I hear them unaffectedly praise us in a vague sort of way for our idealism; and when, with my interest excited, I ask them for concrete illustrations, they point to our charitable institutions, our strong men in public

office who have risen from lowly beginnings, our numerous neighborhood undertakings, established by our own enterprise. Somehow, strange as it may seem, it does not satisfy me, and I am not flattered. In my boldest moments I ask them openly:

"But what of socialism and anarchism, the genuine, vital religious idealism of the Ghetto?" Whereupon I am told, in effect:

"Bah! Sansculottism, the ravings of underbred, irreconcilable trouble-makers. Thank God, it is gone! The Ghetto has found itself.”

Is it any wonder that I become more and more confirmed in my opinion that the American is congenitally incapable of understanding the alien within his gates? Unhappily, it is only too true that it is gone, the radicalism of the East Side; but my native critic's analysis is wide of the mark. It is gone not because the Ghetto has found itself, but because the Ghetto is dead. Why do I say this? Is it because I am suffering from a depression of spirits or from a species of nostalgia? Or am I merely a victim of the familiar tendency of aging men to sigh for their vanished youth and to scent decay in the progress of a generation with which they have lost touch? I wish I could think so, but the facts will not let me. I have not lost touch with either East Side people or East Side institutions, but I am aware of a melancholy change. America, the great leveler, has had her fling with my old home, as she has done with all of us aliens; and it is the young of the Ghetto themselves who are most keenly alive to the transformation. Never is the disappearance of the old vitality and the old idealism brought home to me more poignantly than when, in my meanderings among the haunts and byways of former days, I fall in with some recent youthful immigrant from Russia.

"I am going home," he invariably tells me, and looks about him with a strange despair. "There is no haven for the spirit of man in this country of yours. others back yonder still have our revo

We

lution to make. There is something to live and fight for in Russia. Your revolution is behind you, and in a sorry plight it has left you. Not that there is nothing more for you to do; but your fires are out. You are all old men here. You seem to feel as if your goal were attained, and you vegetate and rot, with your failing vision fixed on a noble past, which in your dotage you do not even begin to understand. In Russia, in the movements, is life and youth."

As for me, I can say frankly that it is not the movements that I regret. I am not so sure now as I once was that anarchism, even the philosophic anarchism of Spencer and Kropotkin and Elisée Reclus, would cure society of all the ills that fester in its old bones; and I have a suspicion that socialism, if it were ever to come, would bring with it worse things than those it aims to destroy. Even my theology, thanks in part to the bourgeois education imparted to me in an American college, has undergone some radical modifications, so that I shy ignobly at any classification of me as an atheist. But the movement,-in the clear, bold, inclusive singular, with its fine enthusiasms, its deep, stirring faith, its martyrdoms and sacrifices, its tragic conflicts, yes, even its bigotry and intolerance and childish exaggerations-how can I but look back to it with a kind of filial devotion and regret? It was the one thing that relieved the drabness of existence in the Ghetto and made living there tolerable. It was the soul of the quarter, and not to belong to it was tantamount to confessing that one was spiritually dead.

That was why, at meetings, in a restaurant, in the sweat-shop, the only information that people wanted about you was just that: Were you in the movement? If so, then nothing else mattered, at least for the time being, because one knew at once all that it was essential to know about you. Later on, to be sure, it might develop that you were, say, an orthodox Marxian or a revolutionary socialist or an opportunist or any one of the half dozen or more shades of anar

chist, which began at the moderate end of the spectrum with communism, and finished at the invisible infra-red extreme with the propaganda of the deed. All this, however, was of but secondary importance. To be in the movement was the positive, vital thing. For it proclaimed without delay that you were a modern human being, emancipated from all the outworn creeds in religion, politics and economy. It amounted to a detailed account of just how you spent your evenings, what public places you frequented, where you bought your books, and precisely what publications you read and supported. It meant, in a word, that you were a thinking person, and in the Ghetto it was taken for granted that all thinking people were right-thinking people.

I vividly recall my own initiation into the radical movement, and it is altogether characteristic that it came simultaneously with the beginnings of my literary education. I had been in the quarter for nearly a year and in the sweat-shop for two or three months. But whether it was because of my middle-class ancestry and rearing, or my preoccupations with getting a foothold in this new country, or my determination to acquire a formal education, during all that time I had been completely unaware of the spiritual realities about me. I was rather sympathizing with myself for being an operative, and regarding my fellow-workers somewhat superiorly because they were not, as I was, taking the sojourn in the shop as a temporary imprisonment and disgrace, until-until one Friday night, when I went to the play.

For weeks the entire quarter had been placarded with announcements of a new play by one Jacob Gordin entitled "The Kreutzer Sonata," and the newspapers had been hailing it as a forthcoming event. The probabilities are that I should have avoided the Thalia theater, where the masterpiece was to make its first appearance on that night, if for no other reason than because it was expected so impatiently by the less desirable people and

taken by them so seriously. Among my own conservative compatriots it was regarded as highly questionable good taste to take one's amusements seriously, and no respectable Rumanian ever patronized any other theater than the Windsor, "the home of music and fun." But it chanced that on my way home from the shop my attention was attracted by a paper-bound book on a pushcart bearing the same title as Gordin's play. I bought and read it, and found it so interesting that my curiosity got the better of me, and I thought I would go to see how such a tale would be produced on the stage. With my idea of a play derived from the café chantant, I could picture some very entertaining matter in a performance that contained a railroad train, a disloyal wife, a jealous husband, and a murder. It never, of course, entered my head to look a little below the title, or I should have learned in time that the novel was by one named Tolstoy, and in all likelihood had nothin time that the novel was by one named sake.

Fortunately, my literary education had not yet gone far enough to make me interested in such subtleties as the authorship of books, and the result was that I did go to the Thalia that night. When I arrived at the theater the performance seemed to have no thought of beginning. In the gallery, where the seats were not reserved, there was a scramble for places, with loud threats of battle, while the attendants did the honors at the rate of ten cents per seat in the first row and five cents apiece in the more distant rows.

Shortly after nine the wild clapping and stamping and whistling suddenly ceased, the foot-lights were flashed on, the overhead lights died softly away. the gloom that supervened the expectant stillness was only occasionally broken by a whisper from the pit below as an attendant conducted some belated patron to his seat. When the decorative curtain had glided up and revealed, instead of performers, a stereopticon screen, with the picture of a package of Russian tea standing on its head, the thunder broke forth

« AnkstesnisTęsti »