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The CENTURY MAGAZINE

Vol. 107

C

April, 1924

The Comedy of Coal

BY ROBERT W. BRUERE

APRICIOUS fate had transferred me abruptly from a university instructorship in literature to the management of the largest charitable relief agency in America. The points of the compass in this realm of benevolence were not so clear to me as I could have wished. In those days a group of ardent young reformers were energetically trying to convert the ladies bountiful of philanthropic tradition into scientific social workers, to transform "friendly visitors" into human engineers. They were recognized leaders in the social-service profession, the men to whom new-comers like myself naturally looked for guidance. Most of them had been students under that inspiring teacher Simon Nelson Patten, professor of political economy in the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce in the University of Pennsylvania. He was their prophet of the new basis of civilization. Their enthusiastic devotion made me eager to meet him. When the opportunity came, he had just returned from a tour of the globe.

Feeling diffident in his presence, I began by asking him the crudest of conventional questions.

No. 6

"What were the most impressive things you saw in Asia and Europe?" I asked. I confess that I was thinking of magnificent temples, ancient cathedrals, and the ruins of vanished civilizations.

"Well," he said, "I think the most significant things I came across were two new words. You know, words are not made by scholars; they grow out of the soil of a people's life. A new word is likely to be the sign of something that is brewing in the soul or the society of a people. In India I heard men using a word meaning not only political liberty in our sense, but emancipation into liberty. There was no such word in the old Indian vocabulary. The birth of the new idea which that word expresses seems to me to foreshadow the political awakening of India."

Within less than a decade his prophecy was fulfilled.

"In Turkey," he went on, "I heard men using a word meaning person, neither orthodox Moslem nor gentile— just plain man. Formerly the Mohammedan divided the world into two groups, those of the faith and the heathen. The new idea which this

Copyright, 1924, by THE CENTURY Co. All rights reserved.

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demanded him with more vigor while there was yet opportunity? Could she expect to keep the secret permanently from her husband, and would the effect not be far more painful upon him if he learned the truth from any one besides his wife or from her too late? What if the true state of affairs should eventually be at once more difficult and more necessary to reveal? I had not dreamed that a mind could so persist as Rose Winton's did in studying the labyrinth of its fate without finding some kind of key.

Her dilemma had become the center of her existence. I do not mean, of course, that she had no other concerns. It was a perpetual wonder to me that now and then she could be so gay about trivial matters. Her curiosity moved among a hundred topics which mine had barely touched. She teased me, as she teased her husband, about our slower intellects. When she was merry, as indeed she often was, it seemed to me that her merriment went through and through her. Watching her dance, or dancing with her, I was struck always with the apparently happy abandon of her body, as if a point of flame, rather than flesh and blood, fluttered there. And yet in an instant she would lose these outward qualities and be plunged, without an interval that I could measure, into the pit of her misery. If she was eager for pleasure, I perceived, it was because she found in it an escape from that deeper self in which joy normally resides, but which, with her, was poisoned by her stubborn sense of desperation. Since her period of escape could not be indefinite, she would sooner or later have to come back to her joyless self, and then it would exact the harshest penalties.

"Surely there must be some end to such torture!" she cried once when our talk had come round, as it so regularly did, to her tragedy. "I can't see why it does n't wear me out and make me numb. I hate this fearful strength of mine that keeps me able to endure so much. With most pain people faint after a while, but I only grow more capable of pain. If there were anything to do! If I could act, no matter how, instead of always standing still and trying to figure out what would be least bad for everybody who is concerned! I don't see why I don't go mad. I don't see why I should n't wish I could."

Once or twice I tried to hint that she had possibly hugged her grief too close and that by some more steady exercise of the will she might lift herself above it, but to go further with such hints seemed to me a sort of irreverence toward her unmistakable agony. She had communicated to me her sense of helplessness. At a moment when I had been full of hope and courage she had, involuntarily enough, enlisted my sympathies in a cause which, so far as I could see, could have no victory. This stalemate would continue for Rose Winton till death should sweep the board, I then told myself. I was full of bitterness at a universe which had such dilemmas in it. Like her, I could find no course of action. At least, however, I determined that I could and would give her the poor comfort of a friend always ready to listen to her.

With what horror, then, I began to see that even in this aim I was doomed to fail. As her habit of confiding in me grew, I could not misunderstand, inexperienced as I was, the change that came over her. Gradually she

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recovered a certain buoyancy which I guessed must once have been frequent in her moods. Her hours of gloom were shorter, her intervals of pleasure richer than they had been during the first weeks of our acquaintance. Telling her secret had furnished her a partial outlet for the pain which had filled her too full to be endured. But, and here were the roots of my horror at the situation, this pain was being poured into me, who had no confidant. My nerves, things I had hitherto known only by hearsay that I had, were habitually unstrung. Her recurrent moods ceased to interest me, and, as I had to pretend to be interested long after I actually was, they came before long to irritate me. From marveling at the passion of her distress I turned to resenting it, since it pressed upon me with such an incessant weight. From rejoicing at the signs of her recovery I turned to hating them because of the tax which had been, no matter how innocently, levied upon me. Worst of all, of course, I had to contend with the horrible sense within me that I had fallen short of even a decent patience. Surely a generous spirit could endure this, which was so much less than Mrs. Winton had to endure. I spurred myself to fresh resolutions each time I left her, and yet I saw her each next time with positive antipathy, not precisely for her, but for the task I had chivalrously assumed.

In the end, for all my resolutions, I left the town with a savage abruptness, taking pains to bid her farewell in the presence of several friends. I have never seen her since that day and know from her letters little about her, but I know she has done nothing to resolve her dilemma.

Incredible as the whole affair seems now, it haunted me for years. The world in which I lived during most of my twenties was a world which I saw, because of that summer, peopled with dilemmas. Long after I had ceased to think often of this particular case, I still thought of fate as some exterior thing, organized to tempt and trap its victims. It was more than a decade before a chance meeting with another woman threw a long light back over Mrs. Winton and did as much to make her circumstances clear to me as anything ever will.

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This other woman, whose very name I do not know, came to consult me about a novel which she said she was writing. The plot, she explained, had stopped in mid-career despite anything she could do with it. I had not listened long when I guessed that she was more intimately involved in this material than she would have been in any imagined plot. It was almost certainly her own story that she was telling me, hoping under this disguise to get some more impartial counsel than she could presumably have got from any one nearer to her.

It seems that her heroine, to give my caller the benefit of the doubt, was married to one man and in love with another. She was willing to leave her husband, with or without a divorce, no matter what the consequences. But her lover was so placed that this simple solution seemed impossible. By reason of his public station, which I suspect was that of a clergyman, he believed that he would lose all his usefulness if he obtained a wife on these terms, while any more informal arrangement was quite out of the

question. He was thus faced with a dilemma, divided between a love which he could not do without and a duty which would not let him have his love. What, the baffled novelist asked me, could be done with a plot which thus so obstinately resisted all her ingenuity?

I found it difficult to advise her, guessing as I did that she would take any conceivable advice to herself, but I did the best I could. There was, I told her, in such a case no solution except what had to be provided by the character of the lover. If he wanted If he wanted the woman powerfully enough, he would take her even at the gravest cost; if he cared more for his duty than for her, he would be loyal to his duty. She would have, in creating her lover, to endow him with such qualities as would prepare him for one outcome or the other.

Though I had tried hard to maintain the fiction that we were discussing the plot of her novel, not of her life, she winced with a pain which I tried even harder not to seem to notice. She had obviously never admitted to herself that the cause of her distress lay in her lover, possibly in some laggard or pedantic disposition which her pride would long make her hesitate to acknowledge. She had regarded the state of their affairs as a mere tangle brought upon them from without, and she had clung to the hope that she could, with a little help, find some dexterous solution.

"But there are so many possibilities of action in any life," she protested. "Surely I can hit on a fresh one for my plot."

Doubtless she did not take my comment as final in any way, but I do not like to remember the look of despair which was on her face when she left me.

Not unnaturally, the incident brought Rose Winton back to my mind. To my surprise, the sense of a malevolent dilemma which I had long felt in connection with her had utterly disappeared from my mind. It had, I realized, been gone so long that I found it difficult to recall, at least its former poignancy. Her tragedy had begun at home, in her own character. A different woman would never have given up her child; a different woman would have acknowledged and recovered it though she disturbed a hundred lives; a different woman would have refused to accept a dilemma for her destiny. I do not know that Mrs. Winton's fate was necessarily any the less tragic, or less agonizing to her, than if it had been spun and measured for her by the devil in whom she believed. For that matter, she might argue that the devil had shaped her character for this purpose. But I know that if, in that summer long ago, she had been able to fix her scrutiny upon the quarter from which her predicament truly came, she would have had a better chance to escape from it.

Mr. Bok and World Peace

BY GLENN FRANK

T

HANKS to Edward W. Bok, we are again engaged in a nationwide discussion of American foreign policy. There are still a few Americans, inside and outside the United States Senate and in both the Republican and Democratic parties, who cannot distinguish between ward politics and world politics; but millions of us are sick and tired of seeing America's potential power for peace and reconstruction kicked about as the battered foot-ball of partizan politics.

If it is important that politics stop at the water's-edge in time of war, it is even more important that politics stop at the water's-edge in time of peace. In Europe, as in the United States, foreign policy is being dictated by domestic politics, with the result that international statesmanship the world over is at a standstill. World problems can be solved only by world statesmanship. The world will inevitably drift into war and bankruptcy unless in both Europe and the United States politicians divorce foreign policy from the conflicts of domestic party politics.

Unless I utterly misread the mood of America, the party that succeeds in nominating a Presidential candidate who is intellectually and morally big enough to lift the issue of foreign policy above the battle of party politics will

have a decided advantage in the 1924 election.

Meanwhile the Bok plan is before us. Millions of us have said a formal "yes" or "no" to what the plan in substance means. But if we are to achieve a creative and comprehensive American foreign policy, merely nodding our heads in approval or shaking our heads in disapproval of this particular plan is not enough. We must make this referendum the startingpoint of a national discussion of the whole problem of America's relation to world peace and world reconstruction. The American Peace Award is a new experiment in the democratic control of foreign policy. When the masses begin to take part in the formulation of policies, they must study and discuss their way into a real understanding of the whole round of problems the policies are to meet.

Without attempting to pass judgment on the details of the Bok plan, I want, if I can, to make a contribution to the national discussion of what America can and should do toward promoting the peace and the reconstruction of the post-war world.

§ 2

When human affairs are the most complicated, practical statesmen search for the simplest possible basis for action. The present critical situation in

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