Jean's throat tightened and she felt sick with the sadness of it; the girl-mother and the baby, so old, so weak, so resigned, as if it had accepted its burden far back down the ages. The girl put the baby, quieted now, into its basket. It lay for a moment staring with its great, empty black eyes, and then closed them wearily. The girl covered him with a bit of mosquito netting and sat down to her work again. Before they were out of the room, she was sewing furiously again.
Jean looked at the doctor.
"Carmen Gonsalez, but I call her to myself, Mater Dolorosa. She has never been to school, although she was born right here in San Francisco and has wanted all her life to read. She is just turned nineteen. Before she was fourteen she went to work in a tamale factory and learned first hand the existence of all the evil she did not already know from her own home. At sixteen she left the tamale factory because the foreman gave her no peace, and went to work in an American overall factory. She thought American men 'were different.'
"They are different. A Mexican of the same caliber makes no bones about his desires, but Mr. George Farrel crept to his goal like a snake. She loves him yet. She believes he will come back, although she has not heard of him for months. Only once have I ever seen her angry—I never want to see it again. It was like the crushing force of a glacier. She was whiter than paper and so still. Some one had told her that George had married a Gringo. It is true. Once I thought I might tell her after the baby was born. But it was born blind. 'The sins of the fathers upon the children, yea, even to the third and fourth generation.'"
"I should think," Jean cried passionately, "that you would hate the whole human race."
"No. You see, I have been very many years in this work and that first rage has worn off. We all have it. Sometimes I think it is what brings us unto it at all. We see the crime and sin and sorrow and we are filled with a blind passion to straighten it out. It's as instinctive, at the base, as emotional an act as jumping into a river to save some one. And then, after a time, long or short according to one's temperament, you learn what I sometimes think is the only thing in the world worth knowing—The Colonel's Lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters under their skin. Then you don't get angry any more at social injustice, or very sad, not unless you happen to have indigestion or try to burn the candle at both ends. You just go along and believe."
"In what?"
Dr. Mary laughed. "Sometimes I don't know. Often I think believing is just a general state of being, like feeling well. It's not belief in a personal God and it's not unshakable faith in man and most surely it's not a belief in the tremendous importance of one's job. Belief in what? I think in this—That the Colonel's Lady and Judy go round in cycles, hand in hand at that, and each cycle is a needed cycle, because in the end—it's going to make a spiral. At least that's as near as I can word it, Miss Norris, and I try to believe it most of the time, the spiral part, I mean."
She walked with Jean to the street door, but stood for a moment before opening it.
"Now you know what it is I want to say and if you can put it into words you can do better than I. But that's your business. I want to make these people happier because I have lived. And I want to be happier because they have lived. I want to take the blind passion of the Carmens and hitch it to the aridity of the rich ladies who come in their limousines to our committees. I want to beat some of the primitive vengeance of a Sicilian fisherman into the George Farrels. I want to teach the women not to make the sign of the Evil Eye when somebody stops them on the street and looks at the baby, and I want the person who stops them on the street not to have spasms because the baby is swaddled in a fashion they have never seen. Personally, it makes me sick to see flies buzzing over a baby, but no sicker than it does to hear some of the comments of the people who come to visit us. Not half so sick. Come to think of it, I'd rather have a baby swaddled to death and eaten by flies than talk ten minutes to the flyspecked souls and swaddled brains of some of our visitors. And if you can get it through the heads of the public, Miss Norris, you will be doing a good thing. In a way, a place like this is public and we don't want to keep people out. But whenever a review of any kind appears we are always swamped as if we were a sideshow. It wouldn't be worth while paying any attention to, except that it does show a serious side of the whole attitude. For it reflects very really what the Colonel's Lady thinks of Judy O'Grady and it's bad for them both."