IV
After a few weeks he began to distinguish in the squalor of the faces that surrounded him the separate causes of their malady—to know drink from disease, dissipation from destitution, the drug-habit from hunger. Complexion and facial expression stood more than dress as an indication of trade, habit, and environment; from physiognomy he began to learn history, and from Monday's streets a commentary on the linked sweetness long drawn out of Jewish followed by Christian sabbath. He became inured to smells, to the breathing of foul atmosphere, to contact with foul bodies, to a nakedness of speech such as he had not dreamed of, to a class-hatred that struck from eye to eye like murder, to an apathy of dead hopelessness that revolted him yet more. From Sister Jenifer he learned the hardest lesson of all, that to understand social conditions he must refrain from gifts of charity. And so, afraid of his own frailty, he came to his district with empty pockets, and going hungry himself spent hours among sale-dens, pawn-shops, the alleys where half-starved middle-men received the piece-work of sweated labor, and the black staircases where rent-collectors, hard-driven by competing agencies, plied a desperate piece-work of their own.
In every place he visited cleanliness was discouraged, and the water system seemed a mere after-thought. In most cases the taps were buttons requiring continuous pressure, and then yielding only an exiguous supply; a kettle took nearly a minute to fill, so that while one tenant drew service others stood waiting. He spoke indignantly of it to Sister Jenifer. What were the sanitary authorities doing? he asked.
"Oh, yes," she said, "those buttons are a new device; the old taps were taken away—they became too dangerous; these poor people found a way of turning them to effect."
"You mean they stole the fixings?"
"No; though they used to do that now and then. But this was at the last strike which happened to come during a drought. One of their leaders said to them: 'Take all the water you can; drain the city dry, make the rich give up their baths,—then perhaps they will attend to you.' They actually had the power; they organized the whole of the working district, and one night they turned on all the taps, the street fountains as well. And we, because at last they were taking their full share, were threatened with a water famine! Yes, if they had those tenement baths which the last Housing Commission recommended they could run us dry as their leader proposed,—hold the whole city up to ransom and dictate terms. As it was even those taps proved dangerous, so we gave them buttons instead; and of course the death-rate has gone up."
"And now the next strike has come."
"Ah, yes, but this is not such a large one and so, as it isn't reckoned 'dangerous,' the Government doesn't interfere, and no one outside troubles about the rights of it."
They were moving on the outskirts of a crowd in the center of which a demonstration of strikers was going on. Gaunt, hungry, apathetic faces formed the bulk of them; in their midst a man with a big voice talked heroically of the rights of labor and prophesied victory. They stood to listen for a while, then moved on. At the corner of a side-street which they crossed stood a smaller group; a woman, her hat tied round with a motor-veil, stood waving her arms from an orange-box.
"Who are those?" inquired Max.
"Women Chartists," said Sister Jenifer.
"What are they doing here?"
"They go wherever they can get a hearing."
Max stopped to listen a little satirically; he had never heard a woman speaking in public before. Presently he turned to his guide and found that her eye was on him. "Shall we go on?" he said.
"This does not interest you, then?"
"It is a subject about which I know nothing."
"But you came to learn."
"Well,—is that woman telling the truth?"
"No, not exactly."
"Does she know what she is talking about?"
"Not as well as she ought to."
"Then, isn't that sufficient?"
"You have listened to men here whose statements were just as wide of the mark, and whose proposals were just as useless."
"Yes, so you warned me; but what I find instructive is not the speaker but the crowd."
"You have a crowd here."
"A much smaller one."
"So you are for the majorities?"
Max acknowledged the stroke. "Very well," he said; "let us go back."
"No, I only wanted you to notice the crowd. Did they seem interested?"
"They listened."
"That is something, is it not, when she was talking of things that to their minds hardly concerned them?"
"But you say she was not telling the truth."
"She was ignorant, and she exaggerated; but for all they know what she is saying might be gospel."
"Is that how you would have it preached?"
"If gospels had to wait for the wise and prudent," said Jenifer, "they would wait till eternity. That woman was speaking not for an institution but for a movement."
"Do not such exaggerations condemn it?"
"By no means; if some did not exaggerate none of us would get a hearing—especially if we happened to be in a minority; and reformers always are."
"Though I embroider it for myself," said Prince Max, "from others I prefer to get plain truth."
"Plain truth," she replied, "is only that manner of dealing with a thing—with some wrong, say—which makes it plain to people that the wrong exists. Short of that you haven't got truth into them."
"Now you are preaching pragmatism," said Max.
"Do you suppose," she went on, "that to that dull, sunk, slow-witted crowd we have been looking at, a mere niggardly statement of facts would make the truth plain, or stir them to any action or feeling for others? That woman on some points over-stated her case quite ridiculously—especially as to the benefits and rewards which the women's Charter would bring—but the effect upon her hearers fell far short of what the real facts justify. Oh, people have to be bribed even to do no more than open their ears to the truth."
"By false promises of reward? Yes, you have the Church with you there. It deals with our ordinary everyday morality, in very much the same way. Tells a maximum of untruth so that a necessary minimum may spring out of it. How many Christians to-day really believe in the doctrine of hell?"
"Surely," she said, "to see the light of its fires in so many faces is proof enough."
"That is not the doctrine," said the Prince, "and you know it. Hell here and now may be very real; but it is not what your Church preaches. Many of those lit-up faces that you speak of are aglow with mere lustful enjoyment. But the Church does not teach that men can make the mistake when in hell of actually believing themselves in Heaven; that would be too dangerous. Turn on that tap, and the jasper sea in which your angels take their baths will run dry."
She looked at him half quizzically. "And what is your doctrine?" she inquired. "When you are enjoying yourself—saying things like that, for instance, hoping to hurt—do you ever think that you are in hell?"
"No," said Max, "I do not make enjoyment the test. Just now, for instance, I rather feel that I may be at the gates of Heaven; but I am not, therefore, superlatively happy. Can you promise me that the heavenly road is one of pure happiness?"
"To any one who accepted absolutely the Divine Will it must be."
"The Divine Will," said Max, "gave me my body and my reasoning power. You must not ask me to forfeit them. I agree with that old collegiate (a doctor of divinity like myself) to whom one of more austere piety had declared 'abject submission' the only possible attitude of the creature toward his Creator. 'No, no!' protested the Doctor, with outraged dignity, 'deference, but not—not abject submission!' Deference is all a man can honestly promise so long as reason remains to him; abject submission is fit only for lunatic asylums."
"And yet," she retorted, "abject submission to antecedents is all that science can infer when once it starts to investigate the springs of action."
"That is not to deny reason; that only conditions it. I wanted you to accuse me of blasphemy; but as you do not give me my legitimate openings I have to make them for myself. To me the abrogation of reason, on any pretense, is the most rooted blasphemy of which the mind of man is capable. Some modern Romanist penned once a hymn which had in it these or like words for its refrain—
'And black is white,
And wrong is right,
If it be Thy sweet Will.'
That, to my mind, is a blasphemous utterance, for it juggles with the fundamentals of all morality. The person who adopts that attitude as an act of surrender to earthly love is a sensualist. It is a form of sensualism rampant in women; and men encourage it by bestowing upon it the names of womanly virtues. To adopt a similar attitude in spiritual matters seems to me sensualism none the less. And what a hot-bed for that sort of sensualism the Church has always been and still is!"
His ugly talk roused her spirit of resistance.
"How can it be sensual," she protested, "when it results in self-denial and self-sacrifice?"
"Self-sacrifice," he replied, "may be merely sensualism in its intensest form; it is peculiarly a woman's temptation; the scientific name for it (since you throw science at my head) is 'negative egoism.' You yourself are quite capable of it; for you cannot get rid of the results of your training all in a day."
She did not flinch from his attack.
"What do you know of my training?" she asked.
"I know this: here are you the superior of any Bishop on the bench now preparing to play injured martyr at the loss of his political privileges; and what position of authority and influence has your Church to offer you—you and the thousands like you whose practical humanity alone has made its antiquated forms still possible? Yes, you are its life-preservers, and they tuck you away into subordinate positions and back slums where nobody hears of you. And you have been trained to think that it is right!"
"The training was all my own," she said. "I tucked myself."
"Wastefully, under parental conditions—you yourself have owned it."
"There is always more work than one can do."
"There is much more work that you could do; but here, what is your chance? Has it not struck you—if you had only the position given you, what a power you might be, in that direction, I mean, of bringing the two halves of society face to face, which you say is your main object? If that position were offered you would you accept it as a thing sent to you from God, or would you——?"
And then Max stopped abruptly, for he realized that in another moment he would have been offering her the succession to the throne, and he felt that the street was not exactly the right place for it. Not that he minded making the offer anywhere; but she, self-sacrificingly, might refuse; and a crowded street was not the place where he could tackle a refusal of the throne to advantage. It was not like an ordinary proposal; there were too many points to urge and objections to be met; while a certain amount of preliminary incredulity was almost inevitable. She might know that he loved her still; but it would take a considerable amount of knowing that he also wished her to sit with him upon the throne; nay, for that matter, to sit with him off it, if Court etiquette and the fates so ordained. And if they did so ordain, where would that great position be which he was proposing to offer?
And so as Max has ended his declaration abruptly let us also end the chapter abruptly, and wonder what the next, or the next but one may have to bring forth.