III
CONCERNING IDEALS
"Sunshine and apple blossoms!" Rose-Marie, hurrying along the hall to her own room, repeated the Young Doctor's words and sobbed afresh as she repeated them. She tried to tell herself that nothing he could think mattered much to her, but there was a certain element of truth in everything that he had said. It was a fact that her life had been an unclouded, peaceful one—her days had followed each other as regularly, as innocuously, as blue china beads, strung upon a white cord, follow each other.
Of course, she told herself, she had never known a mother; and her father had died when she was a tiny girl. But she was forced to admit—as she had been forced to admit many times—that she did not particularly feel the lack of parents. Her two aunts, that she had always lived with, had been everything to her—they had indulged her, had made her pretty frocks, had never tried, in any way, to block the reachings of her personality. When she had decided suddenly, fired by the convincing address of a visiting city missionary, to leave the small town of her birth, they had put no obstacle in her path.
"If you feel that you must go," they had told her, "you must. Maybe it is the work that the Lord has chosen for you. We have all faith in you, Rose-Marie!"
And Rose-Marie, splendid in her youth and assurance, had never known that their pillows were damp that night—and for many another night—with the tears that they were too brave to let her see.
They had packed her trunk, folding the white dress and the blue sash—Rose-Marie wondered how the Young Doctor had known about the dress and sash—in tissue paper. They had created a blue serge frock for work, and a staunch little blue coat, and a blue tam-o'-shanter. Rose-Marie would have been aghast to know how childish she looked in that tam-o'-shanter! Her every-day shoes had been resoled; her white ruffled petticoats had been lengthened. And then she had been launched, like a slim little boat, upon the turbulent sea of the city!
Looking back, through a mist of angry tears, Rose-Marie felt her first moment of homesickness for the friendly little town with its wide, tree-shaded streets, its lawn parties, and its neighbours; cities, she had discovered, discourage the art of neighbouring! She felt a pang of emptiness—she wanted her aunts with their soft, interested eyes, and their tender hands.
At first the city had thrilled her. But now that she had been in the Settlement House a month, the thrill was beginning to die away. The great buildings were still unbelievably high, the crowds of people were still a strange and mysterious throng, the streets were as colourful as ever—but life, nevertheless, was beginning to settle into ordinary channels.
She had thought, at the beginning of her stay there, that the Settlement House was a hotbed of romance. Every ring of the doorbell had tingled through her; every step in the hall had made her heart leap, with a strange quickening movement, into her throat—every shabby man had been to her a possible tragedy, every threadbare woman had been a case for charity. She had fluttered from reception-hall to reading-room, and back again—she had been alert, breathless, eager.
But, with the assignment of regular duties, some of the adventure had been drained from life. For her these consisted of teaching a club of girls to sew, of instructing a group of mothers in the art of making cakes and pies and salads, and of hearing a half hundred little children repeat their A B Cs. Only the difference in setting, only the twang of foreign tongues, only the strange precociousness of the children, made life at all different from the life at home. She told herself, fiercely, that she might be a teacher in a district school—a country school—for all the good she was accomplishing.
She had offered, so many times, to do visiting in the tenements—to call upon families of the folk who would not come to the Settlement House. But the Superintendent had met her, always, with a denial that was wearily firm.
"I have a staff of women—older women from outside—who do the visiting," she had said. "I'm afraid" she was eyeing Rose-Marie in the blue coat and the blue tam-o'-shanter, "I'm afraid that you'd scarcely be—convincing. And," she had added, "Dr. Blanchard takes care of all the detail in that department of our work!"
Dr. Blanchard … Rose-Marie felt the tears coming afresh at the thought of him! She remembered how she had written home enthusiastic, schoolgirlish letters about the handsome man who sat across the dining table from her. It had seemed exciting, romantic, that only the three of them really should live in the great brownstone house—the Young Doctor, the Superintendent—who made a perfect chaperon—and herself. It had seemed, somehow, almost providential that they should be thrown together. Yes, Rose-Marie remembered how she had been attracted to Dr. Blanchard at the very first—how she had found nothing wanting in his wiry strength, his broad shoulders, his dark, direct eyes.
But she had not been in the Settlement House long before she began to feel the clash of their natures. When she started to church service, on her first Sunday in New York, she surprised a smile of something that might have been cynical mirth upon his lean, square-jawed face. And when she spoke of the daily prayers that she and her aunts had so beautifully believed in, back in the little town, he laughed at her—not unkindly, but with the sympathetic superiority that one feels for a too trusting child. Rose-Marie, thinking it over, knew that she would rather meet direct unkindness than that bland superiority!
And so—though there had never been an open quarrel until the one at the luncheon table—Rose-Marie had learned to look to the Superintendent for encouragement, rather than to the Young Doctor. And she had frigidly declined his small courtesies—a visit to the movies, a walk in the park, a 'bus ride up Fifth Avenue.
"I never went to the movies at home," she had told him. Or, "I'm too busy, just now, to take a walk." Or, "I can't go with you to-day. I've letters to write."
"It's a shame," she confided, on occasion, to the Superintendent, "that Dr. Blanchard never goes to church. It's a shame that he has had so little religious life. I gave him a book to read the other day—the letters of an American Missionary in China—and he laughed and told me that he couldn't waste his time. What do you think of that! But later," Rose-Marie's voice sank to a horrified whisper, "later, I saw him reading a cheap novel—he had time for a cheap novel!"
The Superintendent looked down into Rose-Marie's earnest little face.
"My dear," she said gently, stifling a desire to laugh, "my dear, he's a very busy man. He gives a great deal of himself to the people here in the slums. The novel, to him, was just a mental relaxation."
But to the Young Doctor, later, the Superintendent spoke differently.
"Billy Blanchard," she said, and she only called him Billy Blanchard when she wanted to scold him, "I've known you for a long time. And I'm sure that there's no harm in you. Of course," she sighed, "I wish that you could feel a little more in sympathy with the spiritual side of our work. But I've argued with you, more than once, on that point!"
The doctor, who was packing medicines into his bag, looked up.
"You know, you old dear," he told her, "that I'm hopeless. I haven't had an easy row to hoe, not ever; you wouldn't be religious yourself if you were in my shoes! There—don't look so shocked—you've been a mother to me in your funny, fussy way, since I came to this place! That's the main reason, I guess, that I stick here, as I do, when I could make a lot more money somewhere else!" He reached up to pat her thin hand, and then, "But why are you worrying, just now, about my soul?" he questioned.
The Superintendent sighed again.
"It's the little Thompson girl," she answered; "she's so anxious to convert people, and she's so sincere,—so very sincere. I can't help feeling that you are a thorn in her flesh, Billy. She says that you won't read her missionary books—"
The Young Doctor interrupted.
"She's such a pretty girl," he said quite fiercely. "Why on earth didn't she stay at home, where she belonged! Why on earth did she pick out this sort of work?"
The Superintendent answered.
"One never knows," she said, "why girls pick out certain kinds of work. I've had the strangest cases come to my office—of homely girls who wanted to be artists' models, and anemic girls who wanted to be physical directors, and flighty girls who wanted to go to Bible School, and quiet girls who were all set for a career on the stage. Rose-Marie Thompson is the sort of a girl who was cut out to be a home-maker, to give happiness to some nice, clean boy, to have a nursery full of rosy-cheeked babies. And yet here she is, filled with a desire to rescue people, to snatch brands from the burning. Here she is in the slums when she'd be dramatically right in an apple orchard—at the time of year when the trees are covered with pink and white blossoms."
The Young Doctor laughed. He so well understood the Superintendent—so enjoyed her point of view.
"Yes," he agreed, "she'd be perfect there in an organdy frock with the sun slanting across her face. But—well, she's just like other girls. Tell a pretty girl that she's clever, they say, and tell a clever girl that she's a raving, tearing beauty. That's the way for a man to be popular!"
The Superintendent laughed quietly with him. It was a moment before she grew sober again.
"I wonder," she said at last, "why you have never tried to be popular with girls. You could so easily be popular. You're young and—don't try to hush me up—good-looking. And yet—well, you're such an antagonistic person. From the very first you've laughed at Rose-Marie—and she was quite ready to adore you when she arrived. How do I know? Oh, I could tell! Take the child seriously, Billy Blanchard, before she actually begins to dislike you!"
The Young Doctor put several bottles of violently coloured pills into his bag before he spoke.
"She dislikes me already," he said. "She's such a cool little person. What are you trying to do, anyway? Are you trying to matchmake; to stir up a love affair between the both of us—" suddenly he was laughing again.
"I'm too busy to have a romance, you old dear," he told the Superintendent, "far too busy. I'm as likely to fall in love, just now, as you are!"
The woman's face was averted as she answered. But her low voice was steady.
"When I was your age, Billy," she said gently, "I was in love. That's why, perhaps, I came here. That's why, perhaps, I stayed. No, he didn't die—he married another girl. And dreams are hard things to forget. That's why I left the country. Maybe that's why the little Thompson girl—"
But the Young Doctor was shaking his head.
"She hasn't had any love affair," he told the Superintendent. "She's too young and full of ideals to have anything so ordinary as a romance. Everybody," his laugh was not too pleasant, "can have a romance! And few people can be so filled with ideals as Miss Thompson. Oh, it's her ideals that I can't stand! It's her impractical way of gazing at life through pink-coloured glasses. She'll never be of any real use here in the slums. I'm only afraid that she'll come to some harm because she's so trusting and over-sincere. I'd hate to see her placed in direct contact with some of the young men that I work with, for instance. You haven't—" All at once his voice took on a new note. "You haven't let her be with any of the boys' classes, have you? Her ideals might not stand the strain!"
The Superintendent answered.
"Ideals don't hurt any one," she said, and her voice was almost as fierce as the doctor's. "No, I haven't given her a bit of work with the boys. She's too young and too untouched and, as you say, too pretty. I'm letting her spend her time with the mothers, and the young girls, and the little tots—not even allowing her to go out alone, if I can help it. Such innocence—" The Superintendent broke off suddenly in the middle of the sentence. And she sighed again.