“Come, Mary,” said Stilson severely. And he lifted his hat, but not his eyes, and bowed very formally.
Emily sat staring absently at the point at which they had disappeared.
CHAPTER XXIV.
TO THE TEST.
STANHOPE plodded dully through his routine—listening to reports, directing his assistants, arranging services in the church and chapels, dictating letters. A score of annoying details were thrust at him for discussion and settlement—details with which helpers with a spark of initiative would never have bothered him. His wife, out of temper, came to nag him about expenditures. His son wrote from college for an extra allowance, alleging a necessity which his father at once knew was mythical. Another letter was from a rich parishioner, taking him to task for last Sunday’s sermon as “socialistic, anarchistic in its tendency, and of the sort which makes it increasingly difficult for conservative men of property to support your church.” At luncheon there were two women friends of his wife and they sickened him with silly compliments, shot poisoned arrows at the reputations of their friends, and talked patronisingly of their “worthy poor.” After luncheon—more of the morning’s routine, made detestable by the self-complacent vanity of one of his stupidest curates and by the attempts of the homeliest deaconess to flirt with him under the mask of seeking “spiritual counsel.” And finally, when his nerves were unstrung, a demand from a tedious old woman that he come to her bedside immediately as she was dying—demands of that kind his sense of duty forbade him to deny.
“This is the third time within the month,” he said peevishly. “Before, she was simply hysterical.” And he scowled at Schaffer, the helper to the delicatessen merchant in the basement of the tenement where the old woman lived.
“I think maybe there’s a little something in it this time,” ventured Schaffer, his tone expressing far less doubt than his words.
“I’ll follow you in a few minutes,” said Stanhope, adding to himself, “and I’ll soon be out of all this.”
He did not know how or when—“after Evelyn is married,” he thought vaguely—but he felt that he was practically gone. He would leave his wife all the property; and he and Emily would go away somehow and somewhere and begin life—not anew, but actually begin. “I shall be myself at last,” he thought, “speaking the truth, earning my living in the sweat of my face, instead of in the sweat of my soul.” As he came out of the house he looked up at the church—the enormous steepled mass of masonry, tapering heavenward. “Pointing to empty space,” he thought, “tricking the thoughts of men away from the street and the soil where their brothers are. Yes, I shall no longer court the rich to get money for the poor. I shall no longer fling the dust of dead beliefs into the eyes of the poor to blind them to injustice.” He strode along, chin up, eyes only for his dreams. He did not note the eager and respectful bows of the people in the doorways, block after block. He did not note that between the curtains of the dives, where painted women lay in wait for a chance to leer and lure, forms shrank back and faces softened as he passed.
Into the miserable Orchard street tenement; through the darkness of the passageway; into a mouldy court, damp and foul even in that winter weather; up four ill-smelling stairways with wall paper and plastering impatient for summer that they might begin to sweat and rot and fall again; in at a low door—the entrance to a filthy, unaired den where only the human animal of all the animal kingdom could long exist.
The stove was red-hot and two women in tattered, grease-bedaubed calico were sitting at it. They were young in years, but their abused and neglected bodies were already worn out. One held a child with mattered eyes and sores hideously revealed through its thin hair. The other was about to bring into the world a being to fight its way up with the rats and the swarming roaches.