The Wisdom of Fools

by Margaret Wade Campbell Deland

IV

It was the next winter that she asked her first question.

“Mr. West,” she said, after making notes of this or that case that needed looking after (for she was practically visitor for St. James now),—“Mr. West, I would like to ask you something.”

“Do, my dear Mrs. Eaton,” he answered heartily.

“I would like to ask you,” she said, her eyes fixed on his, to lose no shade of meaning in his reply, “do you think it would be right for one person to live on money that another person had stolen?”

“If they knew it was stolen, of course not!” he said, smiling. “Has a pickpocket offered to go halves with you?”

“No, sir,” she answered, so gravely that her listener’s eyes twinkled. She made no explanation, but went away with a troubled look. The next time she saw him she had another question:—

“But suppose the person who lived on the money the other person stole needed it very much. Suppose they hadn’t anything else in the world. Suppose their children hadn’t anything else. Would it be their business to ask where it came from, Mr. West?”

“If it was their business to spend it, it would be,” he told her. “Oh, my dear lady, the question of complicity is a pretty big one!” He sighed, thinking how little she realized that she was guessing at the riddle of the painful earth.

Again she went away, her face falling into lines of care. But William West never thought of the matter again. Indeed, he had no time to think of his quiet almoner; those were alarming days in Mercer. The echoes of that storm which shook not only the town, but the very State and nation, are still rolling and muttering in the dark places of the land.

Another strike had begun in October. As for the deep and far-reaching causes, the economic and industrial necessities, the vast plans of organizations and trusts, they have no place in this statement of the way in which one ignorant woman regarded their effects—a woman living quietly in her brother’s house, doing her work, expending her little charities, trying to relieve the dreadful misery of those wintry days, with about as much success as a child who plays beside some terrific torrent and tries to dam it with his tiny bank of twigs and pebbles. Robert Blair’s sister had no economic or ethical theories; she had only an anguished heart at the suffering in that dreary mill town, a dreadful bewilderment at its contrast with the untouched luxury of her brother’s house. That she should find a child in one of the tenements dying at its mother’s barren breast, while her own children fared sumptuously every day; that a miserable man should curse her because her brother was robbing him of work, and warmth, and decency, even, while she must bless that same brother for what he was giving her, was a dreadful puzzle. As she understood the situation, this misery existed because her brother would no longer give even fourteen cents an hour to human beings who had to stand half naked in the scorch of intense furnaces, reeking with sweat, taking a breathless moment to plunge waist deep into tanks of cold water; to men who worked where the crash of exploding slag or the accidental tipping of a ladle might mean death; to gaunt and stunted creatures, hollow-eyed, with bleared and sodden faces, whose incessant toil to keep alive had crushed out the look of manhood, and left them silent, hopeless, brutish, with only one certainty in their stupefied souls: “men don’t grow old in the mills.” ... That these things should be, while she was clothed in soft raiment bought by wealth which these desperate beings had helped to create—meant to this ignorant woman that there was something wrong somewhere. It was not for her to say what or where. She had no ambition to reform the world. She did not protest against the “unearned increment,” nor did she have views as to “buying labor in the cheapest market.” She did not know anything about such phrases. The only thing that concerned her was whether she, living on her brother’s money, had any part or lot in the suffering about her? She grew nervous and haggard and more distrait and literal than ever. She wished she dared lay her troubles before the wise, gentle, strong man who, to her, was all that was good and great. But it did not seem to her right to criticise her brother to his clergyman. She never realized how amusing her simplicity might be, laid up against the enormous complexity of the industrial question; to her it was only: “If Robert is rich, and doesn’t give his workmen enough to live on, are not the children and I stealing from the men in living on Robert’s money?”

This little question, applied to the relations of capital and labor, is of course absurd; but she asked it all the same, this soft, negative, biddable creature. She had gone to take some food to a hungry household, and she went away burning with shame because she was not hungry! It had been a cold, bright November day; she went past one of the silent furnaces along the black cinder path to the river-bank, where the flat cones of slag were dumped; some of them were still slightly warm.

It was quiet enough here to think: After all, Robert’s money did so much good; there was the great fountain in the square, and the hospital, and the free night school. And think of what he was doing for Essie and Silas! Oh, it surely wasn’t her business to ask why he cut the men’s wages down!

There was a flare of sunset flushing the calm blue of the upper heavens, and in the river, running black and silent before her, a red glow smouldered and brightened. Behind her, and all along the opposite bank, the furnaces were still. Oh, the misery of that black stillness! If only she could see again the monstrous sheets of flame, orange, and azure, bursting with a roar of sparks from under the dampers of the great chimneys. It would mean work and warmth and food to so many! By some unsuggested flash of memory the parsonage garden came swiftly to her mind. It must be lying chill in the wintry sunset; she could see the little house behind it, with its bare, clean poverty; she wished she were back in it again with the two children! The beauty and the luxury of her brother’s house seemed suffocating and intolerable; and yet would it feed the strikers if she should starve?—the vision of her own destitution without her brother’s money was appalling. She sat down on a piece of slag, a little faint at the thought. Just then, from down below her, on the great heap of refuse, she heard voices.

“Come farther up; they’re hotter higher up,” a woman said shrilly.

Then a miserable little group came clambering over the great cones of cooling slag, and a child cried out joyously, “This here one’s hot, mammy!”

The woman, catching sight of Robert Blair’s sister, though not recognizing her, said harshly:—

“You bet hangman Blair has a fire in his house to-day. Well, thank God, he ain’t made no cut in slag, yet; we can get a bit of warmth here. I wish he may freeze in his bed!”

Lydia Eaton answered, stammering and incoherent, something about the cold weather; and then, she was so overstrained and nervous, she burst out crying. “Oh, won’t you please let me give you this?” she said, and put some money into the woman’s hand.

She went away, stumbling, because her eyes were blurred with tears, and saying to herself,—

“What shall I do?”

She almost ran into Mr. West on Baker Street, and stopped abruptly, putting her hands on his arm, and, in her agitation, shaking it violently, her whole face convulsed and terrified.

“Tell me—you know; you are good: whose fault is it? Robert’s—for all—this?”

He understood instantly, and was very gentle with her.

“My dear Mrs. Eaton, that is a very big question. It isn’t any one man’s fault. It seems strange, but the weather in India may be the reason we are all so wretched in Mercer. Your brother may be forced to make this cut by great laws, which, perhaps, you cannot understand.”

“But we go on being warm,” she said, “and it is cold. Oh, those little children had to get warm on the slag! Oh, sir, I don’t believe the Saviour would have been warm while the children were cold!”

She looked at him passionately, abruptly applying the precepts of the Founder of his religion.

“Ah, well, you know,” William West said kindly, “this whole matter is so enormously complicated”—And then he stammered a little, for, after all, how could he explain to this poor little frightened, ignorant soul that we have learned how injurious to the race would be the literal application of the logic of the Sermon on the Mount? Nowadays the disciple is wiser than his master, and the servant more prudent than his Lord; we know that to feed the five thousand with loaves and fishes, without receiving some equivalent, would be to pauperize them. But of course Mrs. Eaton could not be made to understand that. The clergyman quieted her, somehow; perhaps just by his gentle pitifulness; or else her reverence for him silenced her. She did not ask him any more questions; and there was no one else to ask, except her brother, and just now it would have been hard to find the chance to ask Robert Blair anything.

The strike had slowly involved all the mills owned by a syndicate of which he was chairman. He had to go to South Bend, where the great smelting furnaces are; he was mobbed there, though with no worse results than the unpleasantness of eggs and cabbage stalks; still, the wickedness of those dreadful creatures was something too awful, Mrs. Blair said, crying with anger and fright over the newspaper account. At still another mill town a ghastly box reached him, labeled: “Starved by the Blair syndicate.” Robert Blair paled and sickened at its contents, but he swore under his breath: “Let them starve their brats, if they want to; it isn’t my business. There’s work for them if they want it; but the curs would rather loaf. This country can go to the devil before I’ll give in to them!”

He did not get back to Mercer until December. “I wouldn’t let the fools keep me from you on Christmas,” he told his wife savagely, and caught her in his arms with a sort of rage. “Were you very lonely? You’ve been nervous—I can see it in your face. You are paler!” He ground his teeth; that those brutes should have made her paler!

“Of course I was lonely,” she said, smiling, though her eyes were bright with tears, “and I’ve been frightened almost to death about you, too. Oh, that mob!”

“You little goose; didn’t I tell you there was no danger? I always had two detectives. But I used to get anxious about you. I telegraphed the mayor to detail an officer to be always about the house. Heaven knows what’s going to be the end of this business, Nell! Well, sweetheart, may I have some dinner, or must I go and dress first?”

“No. You’re dreadfully dusty, but I can’t lose sight of you for a moment,” she said gayly. “Robert, I should have died if you hadn’t been at home for Christmas!”

His sister and the children met him at the dining-room door—Silas, capering about with delight; Esther, prettier than ever, coming to hang on his arm, and rub her cheek against his shoulder, and say how glad she was to see him.

“Robert, it’s perfectly disgusting,” Mrs. Blair complained, “but a delegation insists upon seeing you to-night; they are coming about eight.”

“Oh, confound it!” he said frowning; “the strike, of course? A lot of parsons meddling with what they know nothing about.”

“There are parsons, I suppose,” she said, “but the mayor is coming. Do get rid of them as soon as you can, so that I may have a little of you.”

She looked so pretty as she sat at the head of her table, beseeching him, that he declared he would kick the delegation out if they stayed over ten minutes; then he tossed a small white velvet box across the roses in the big silver bowl in the middle of the table, and watched her flash of joy as she opened it.

“It seems to me I have some more boxes, somewhere,” he said good-humoredly. “There, Essie! if your aunt Eleanor had packed me off to get into my dress-suit, I wouldn’t have found this one in my pocket. Lydia, you sober old lady, can you wear that? As for you, Silas, you don’t want any gewgaws, do you? We fellows think more of a bit of paper with three figures on it, hey?”

“There! there’s the bell. It’s your horrid delegation,” Mrs. Blair cried. “Just let them wait till you finish dinner. And do get rid of them quickly. Mr. Hudson, Lydia’s minister, will be there; tell him to wait a minute when the others have gone. I want to speak to him.”

“I thought little Hudson had more sense,” Robert Blair grumbled, rising and going into the library to meet a dozen of his fellow-citizens, some of them men with grave and startled faces, who from pity for the three thousand fools who were turning Mercer upside down, and from good-humored interest in the affairs of their powerful townsman, were beginning to feel the sting of personal alarm about their own concerns.

These men were saying to each other what the newspapers had been saying for two months, that Robert Blair, for vanity or obstinacy or greed, was bringing alarming disaster not merely upon a few thousand desperate and hungry and unreasonable puddlers, but upon the respectable well-to-do business population of his city.

“And he’s got to stop it!” the mayor said angrily.

“It would be a good job if somebody would blow him up with dynamite,” said the Baptist deacon, who was the wealthiest merchant in town. “He’ll swamp us all, if we don’t look out.”

As for the clergyman, he looked very miserable, for he had the expenses of his church and his own salary in mind, and between offending Mr. Blair and not protesting against the continuance of the strike, the poor little man was between the devil and the deep sea.

“Gentlemen,” said Robert Blair, calm and hard (“as nails,” the Baptist deacon said), “I appreciate the honor of your call, and I hope I have listened with proper courtesy and patience to what you had to say; but allow me to call your attention to certain facts which seem to contradict your assertions that you suspect that I am not acting for the public good in this matter of the strike. Mr. Mayor, if my wealth had been gained by the subversion of law and order, as you suggest, I am sure you could not have accepted any of it for your campaign—ah—expenses. For you, Mr. Davis, a church member, a deacon, if I mistake not, I need only remind you of your willingness to borrow, I will not say how many thousands, as the basis of your most successful business (though I would not be thought to underrate your own prudence and economy in paying your women clerks a little less than they can live on). And as for my worthy friend here, the Rev. Mr. Hudson, if my money were, as he has so delicately implied, ‘blood-money,’ I cannot think he would have accepted the contribution I had the privilege of making towards the alterations of his church. Gentlemen, you have felt it your duty to remonstrate with me upon my way of making money; so long as you are content to spend that money, I cannot believe that your remonstrances are based upon anything else than the inconvenience to yourselves of certain exigencies which I deeply regret, but which result from methods which commend themselves to me, and which, I observe, you apply in your own concerns: you all pay as little as you can for what you want; I pay as little as I can for labor. For your particular request that I submit to the demands of the strikers, I can only say that when Mr. Davis will give away in charity the fortune built upon the outcome of those methods; when his honor the Mayor will refund the—ah—expenses of his recent successful campaign and call it conscience-money; when the Rev. Mr. Hudson will give up improving his church—in fact, when you will all consent to buy your shirts or your potatoes in the dearest market—I will consent to alter the methods whereby I have had the honor of serving you. We will all reduce together. When we can do that, I will recognize a moral issue, as Mr. Hudson so admirably expresses it. Until then I will try to mind my own business. If it were not perhaps discourteous, I would recommend a like course of action to this committee. Gentlemen, I bid you good-evening.”

He was pale with rage. He forgot his wife’s message to the minister; he bowed, and stood with folded arms watching the withdrawal of the humiliated and angry delegation, “with their tails between their legs,” the little clergyman said to himself, stung by the impudent injustice of it all.

Mr. Blair went into the drawing-room, breathing hard with the restraint he had put upon himself, for his coldly insolent words had been no outlet to his anger. “Don’t talk about it,” he said violently. “I won’t hear another word on the subject. Nell, I thought that little Hudson was not entirely a jackass, though he is a parson; he had the impertinence to say that ‘Brother West’ agreed with him. I don’t believe it! But if it’s true, why, then, West is a meddling idiot, like all the rest of these damned self-seeking philanthropists.”

“Robert, dear! the children,” murmured Mrs. Blair nervously.

His face was dully red, and his blue, fierce eyes cut like knives; one felt an unspoken epithet applied to the children, who watched him furtively, with frightened glances, and moved about awkwardly, speaking to each other in undertones. A moment before, everything had been full of charm and graciousness; their pretty aunt sat, indolent and graceful, on a yellow sofa, leaning back against some ivory-satin cushions, with a great yellow-shaded lamp shining down on her delicate dark beauty; the flicker of the fire behind the sparkling brass dogs went leaping softly about the room, glowing on the walls, which were covered above the white wainscoting with yellow damask, on which the candle-light from the high sconces fell with a yellow shine; everything was golden and bright and rich, and the warm still air was delicate with the scent of violets. Then into it burst this violent and angry presence.

There is no embarrassment quite like the embarrassment of listening to a person for whom one has a regard making a fool of himself. Nobody spoke. Robert Blair tramped up and down, kicked a little gilded stool half across the room, caught his foot in a rug, stumbled, and then swore. Mrs. Blair’s fox-terrier, Pat, shrunk under a table and looked at him, trembling.

“Silas,” said Mrs. Eaton, “you and Esther must go upstairs.”

“The trouble is,” said her brother to his wife, “these men don’t know what they are talking about; they don’t know anything about the market; they don’t know anything about the necessities of trade; all they know is their dividends; if they were cut, there’d be a howl! But they presume to dictate to us; to tell us the money is blood-money; all the same, they are ready enough to spend it on their own carcasses!”

Mrs. Eaton had closed the door on her children, and came and stood by a little silver-cluttered table, under the big yellow lamp. “I think Robert is quite right,” she said.

The approval of this mild creature was like an edge laid against the tense thread of Robert Blair’s anger. He burst into a laugh.

“Bless your heart, Lydia, I didn’t know you were in the room. Well, my dear, I’m glad you approve of me.”

“I don’t, brother.”

“Oh, you don’t? Where are the chicks? Sent them out of the room because I used bad words? Well, I oughtn’t to swear in the drawing-room, that’s a fact. Place aux Dames! But after all, I only dropped the ‘place.’”

“Oh!” his wife said; and then, “you are very naughty;” and pouted, and pulled him down on his knees beside her.

“I thought it was very natural to be angry at the rug,” Mrs. Eaton said breathlessly; “I’ve often felt like speaking that way myself”—

“Do, Lydia, do!” Mr. Blair interrupted, with a laugh.

“—but Mr. Eaton would never have allowed the children to hear, and”—

“Come, now! Haven’t I apologized? Don’t rub it in. I’ll give you something extra to put in the plate on Sunday, because I did pitch into your man Hudson like the devil! I told him so long as he spent ‘blood-money’ for his darned improvements, he couldn’t reproach me for earning it.”

“Oh,” Lydia Eaton said, her hands squeezed together,—“oh, no! He is quite different from—me. It is you who are spending the—blood-money on the improvements. If he were spending it on himself, like—like me, it would be different.”

Her brother looked up at her from his footstool at his wife’s feet, first amused, and then bored.

“My dear Lily, I’m sure I don’t know what you are talking about. I’m sorry if I stepped on your toes about your parson. He means well. Only he is a parson, so I suppose he can’t help being rather ladylike in business matters. Do drop the subject; I am sick of the whole thing. How is your conservatory, Nell? Are those violets the result of your agricultural efforts?”

“I think, Robert,” his sister said in her low voice, that shivered and broke, “I must just say one thing more: I must give you back this beautiful thing you gave me at dinner. And I must go away with the children.”

“What under the sun!” he began, frowning; then he got up and stood on the hearth-rug, his back to the fire. “Lydia, I hope you are not going to be a fool? What are you talking about? Sit down,—sit down! You’re as white as a ghost. Lily, I’m afraid you’re a great goose. What’s the matter?” He could not help softening as he looked at her. She stood there by the little tottering table, loaded with its dozens of foolish bits of silver, so tense and quivering that even his impatient eyes could not fail to see her agitation.

“Robert, you have been so kind to us; you are so good to us,—oh, I don’t know how I can do it!” she broke into an anguished sob,—“but I must. Mr. Eaton would never have let the children be supported on money that was not—that was not good.”

There was silence; the clock in the hall chimed ten. Then Eleanor Blair, sitting up, pale and angry, said,—

“Well, upon my word!”

Her husband looked at his sister with sudden kindness in his eyes. “Lily, you don’t understand. When I said what I did to Mr. Hudson,—of course, that has put it into your head,—I didn’t really mean it. In the first place, I’m an honest man (I’ll just mention that in passing), and it is not your business nor his to judge my business methods. It isn’t a pretty thing to look a gift-horse in the mouth, Lil.”

“It isn’t what you said to Mr. Hudson,” she answered. “I’ve been thinking about it for nearly a year. Robert, you pay them so little, and I—I have all this.”

She looked about the beautiful room with a sort of fright: it seemed to her that the warm and stately walls hid human misery lying close outside,—hunger and hatred, cold and sickness, and the terror of to-morrow. The impudent luxury of this enormous wealth struck her like a blow on the mouth.

“They,” she said, with a sob, “are hungry.”

Her brother, divided between irritation and amusement, was touched in spite of himself.

“My dear Lily,” he said, “you can’t understand this thing. To put it vulgarly, you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. Look here, the men can go to work to-morrow if they want to; but they don’t want to. I offer them work, and they can take it or leave it. Well, they leave it. It’s their affair, not mine.”

But she shook her head miserably. “I don’t understand it. If you were poor, too, it would be different.”

“Well, really!” said Mrs. Blair.

But Robert Blair was wonderfully patient.

“There’s another thing you must remember, Lily; these people are far better off on what I am willing to pay them than they were in Europe, where most of them came from.”

“But, Robert,” she said passionately, “because they could be worse off doesn’t seem to be any reason why they shouldn’t be better off. And—it isn’t kind.”

“Kind?” Her brother looked at her blankly, and then, with a shout of laughter, “Lydia, you are as good as a play! No, my dear; I don’t run my mills for kindness.”

“But,” she said, almost in a whisper, “whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you”—

Mrs. Blair made a gesture of disgust.

“—oh, brother, I didn’t mean to find fault with you. Only with myself. I—I haven’t any right to spend money that I—don’t know about.”

“Well, anything more?” Robert Blair said, a little tired of her foolishness. “My dear, like the parson, you mean well; but you are a great goose!”

As for his wife, she did not even answer Mrs. Eaton’s tremulous “good-night.”