The Turn of the Balance

by Brand Whitlock

"How's Gusta?"

And instantly, by a change in the atmosphere, he felt that he had made a mistake. Koerner made no reply. Marriott heard him exchange two or three urgent sentences with his wife, in his harsh, guttural German. When Marriott turned about, Koerner was smoking in stolid silence, his face was stone. Mrs. Koerner cast a timid glance at her husband, and, turning in embarrassment from Marriott, fluttered her shawl about her arms and gazed out the windows. What did it mean? Marriott wondered.

"Well, let's get down to business," he said. He would ask no more questions, at any rate. But as he was going over the allegations of the petition with Koerner, finding the usual trouble in initiating the client into the mysteries of evidence, which are as often mysteries to the lawyers and the courts themselves, he was thinking more of Gusta than of the case. Poor Gusta, he thought, does the family doom lie on her, too?

XIII

Elizabeth kept to her purpose of doing something to justify her continuing in existence, as she put it to her mother, and there was a period of two or three weeks following a lecture by a humanitarian from Chicago, when she tortured the family by considering a residence in a social settlement. But Mrs. Ward was relieved when this purpose realized itself in a way so respectable as joining the Organized Charities. The Organized Charities was more than respectable, it was eminently respectable, and when Mrs. Russell consented to become its president, it took on a social rank of the highest authority. The work of this organization was but dimly understood; it was incorporated, and so might quite legally be said to lack a soul, which gave it the advantage of having the personal equation excluded from its dealings with the poor. Business men, by subscribing a small sum might turn all beggars over to the Organized Charities, and by giving to the hungry, who asked for bread, the stone of a blue ticket, secure immediate relief from the disturbing sense of personal responsibility. The poor who were thus referred might go to the bureau, file their applications, be enrolled and indexed by the secretary, and have their characters and careers investigated by an agent. All this was referred to as organized relief work, and it had been so far successful as to afford relief to those who were from time to time annoyed by the spectacles of poverty and disease that haunted their homes and places of business.

When the Organized Charities resumed in the fall the monthly meetings that had been discontinued during the heated term, Elizabeth was on hand. Mrs. Russell was in the president's chair, and promptly at three o'clock, consulting the tiny jeweled watch that hung in the laces at her bosom, she called the meeting to order. After the recording secretary had read the minutes of the last meeting, held in the spring, and these had been approved, the corresponding secretary read a report, and a list of the new members. Then a young clergyman, with a pale, ascetic face, and a high, clerical waistcoat against which a large cross of gold was suspended by a cord, read his report as treasurer, giving the names of the new members already reported by the corresponding secretary, but adding the amount subscribed by each, the amount of money in the treasury, the amount expended in paying the salaries of the clerks, the rent of the telephone, printing, postage, and so on. Then the agents of the organization reported the number of cases they had investigated, arranging them alphabetically, and in the form of statistics. Then the clerk reported the number of meal tickets that had been distributed and the smaller number that had been gastronomically redeemed. After that there were reports from standing committees, then from special committees, and when all these had been read, received and approved, they were ordered to be placed on file. These preliminaries occupied an hour, and Elizabeth felt the effect to be somewhat deadening. During the reading of the reports, the members, of whom there were about forty, mostly women, had sat in respectful silence, decorously coughing now and then. When all the reports had been read a woman rose, and addressing Mrs. Russell as "Madame President," said that she wished again to move that the meetings of the society be opened with prayer. At this the faces of the other members clouded with an expression of weariness. The woman who made the motion spoke to it at length, and with the only zeal that Elizabeth had thus far observed in the proceedings. Elizabeth was not long in discerning that this same woman had made this proposal at former meetings; she knew this by the bored and sometimes angry expressions of the other members. The young curate seemed to feel a kind of vicarious shame for the woman. When the woman had finished, the matter was put to a vote, and all voted no, save the woman who had made the proposal, and she voted "aye" loudly, going down to defeat in the defiance of the unconvinced.

Then another woman rose and said that she had a matter to bring before the meeting; this matter related to a blind woman who had called on her and complained that the Organized Charities had refused to give her assistance. Now that the winter was coming on, the blind woman was filled with fear of want. Elizabeth had a dim vision of the blind woman, even from the crude and inadequate description; she felt a pity and a desire to help her, and, at the same time, with that condemnation which needs no more than accusation, a kind of indignation with the Organized Charities. For the first time she was interested in the proceedings, and leaned forward to hear what was to be done with the blind woman. But while the description had been inadequate to Elizabeth, so that her own imagination had filled out the portrait, it was, nevertheless, sufficient for the other members; a smile went round, glances were exchanged, and the secretary, with a calm, assured and superior expression, began to turn over the cards in her elaborate system of indexed names. There was instantly a general desire to speak, several persons were on their feet at once, saying "Madame President!" and Mrs. Russell recognized one of them with a smile that propitiated and promised the others in their turn. From the experiences that were then related, it was apparent that this blind woman was known to nearly all of the charity workers in the city; all of them spoke of her in terms of disparagement, which soon became terms of impatience. One of the ladies raised a laugh by declaring the blind woman to be a "chronic case," and then one of the men present, a gray-haired man, with a white mustache stained yellow by tobacco, rose and said that he had investigated the "case" and that it was not worthy. This man was the representative of a society which cared for animals, such as stray dogs, and mistreated horses, and employed this agent to investigate such cases, but it seemed that occasionally he concerned himself with human beings. He spoke now in a professional and authoritative manner, and when he declared that the case was not worthy, the blind woman, or the blind case, as it was considered, was disposed of. Some one said that she should be sent to the poorhouse.

When the blind woman had been consigned, so far as the bureau was concerned, to the poorhouse, Mrs. Russell said in her soft voice:

"Is there any unfinished business?"

Elizabeth, who was tired and bored, felt a sudden hope that this was the end, and she started up hopefully; but she found in Mrs. Russell's beautiful face a quick smile of sympathy and patience. And Elizabeth was ashamed; she was sorry she had let Mrs. Russell see that she was weary of all this, and she felt a new dissatisfaction with herself. She told herself that she was utterly fickle and hopeless; she had entered upon this charity work with such enthusiasm, and here she was already tiring of it at the first meeting! Elizabeth looked at Mrs. Russell, and for a moment envied her her dignity and her tact and her patience, all of which must have come from her innate gentleness and kindness. The face of this woman, who presided so gracefully over this long, wearying session, was marked with lines of character, her brow was serene and calm under the perfectly white hair massed above it. The eyes were large, and they were sad, just as the mouth was sad, but there dwelt in the eyes always that same kindness and gentleness, that patience and consideration that gave Mrs. Russell her real distinction, her real indisputable claim to superiority. Elizabeth forgot her impatience and her weariness in a sudden speculation as to the cause of the sadness that lay somewhere in Mrs. Russell's life. She had known ease and luxury always; she had been spared all contact with that world which Elizabeth was just beginning to discover beyond the confines of her own narrow and selfish world. Mrs. Russell surely never had known the physical hunger which now and then was at least officially recognized in this room where the bureau met; could there be a hunger of the soul which gave this look to the human face? Elizabeth Ward had not yet realized this hunger, she had not yet come into the full consciousness of life, and so it was that just at a moment, when she seemed very near to its recognition, she lost herself in the luxury of romanticizing some sorrow in Mrs. Russell's life, some sorrow kept hidden from the world. Elizabeth thought she saw this sorrow in the faint smile that touched Mrs. Russell's lips just then, as she gave a parliamentary recognition to another woman--a heavy, obtrusive woman who was rising to say: