“Well, don’t you think you would be more comfortable in that nice warm schoolroom than in this dark, cold place?”
“Yes, ’m, we would.”
“You’ll have to promise to be tremendously good, I can tell you, if I bring you in again. Will you promise?”
Vows of everlasting order and obedience were tendered; and, to Miss Carpenter’s intense amusement, I came into St. James’ Back, followed by a whole troop of little outlaws reduced to temporary subjection. At all events they never shouted “Cob-web” again. Indeed, at all times the events of the day’s work, if they bordered on the ludicrous (as was often the case), provoked her laughter till the tears ran down her cheeks. One night she sat grieving over a piece of ingratitude on the part of one of her teachers, and told me she had given him some invitation for the purpose of conciliating him and “heaping coals of fire on his head.” “It will take another scuttle, my dear friend,” I remarked; and thereupon her tears stopped, and she burst into a hearty fit of laughter. Next evening she said to me dolorously, “I tried that other scuttle, but it was no go!”
Of course, like every mortal, Mary Carpenter had les défauts de ses qualités. Her absorption in her work always blinded her to the fact that other people might possibly be bored by hearing of it incessantly.
In India, I have been told that a Governor of Madras observed, after her visit, “It is very astonishing; I listened to all Miss Carpenter had to tell me, but when I began to tell her what I knew of this country, she dropped asleep.” Indeed, the poor wearied and over-worked brain, when it had made its effort, generally collapsed, and in two or three minutes, after “holding you with her eye” through a long philanthropic history, Miss Carpenter might be seen to be, to all intents and purposes, asleep.
On one occasion, that most loveable old man, Samuel J. May, of Syracuse, came to pass two or three days at Red Lodge House, and Miss Carpenter was naturally delighted to take him about and show him her schools and explain everything to him. Mr. May listened with great interest for a time, but at last his attention flagged and two or three times he turned to me; “When can we have our talk, which Theodore Parker promised me?” “Oh, by and by,” Miss Carpenter always interposed; till one day, after we had visited St. James’ Back, we arrived all three at the foot of the tremendous stairs, almost like those of the Trinità, which then existed in Bristol, and were called the Christmas Steps. “Now, Mr. May and Miss Cobbe” (said Mary Carpenter, cheerfully), “you can have your talk.” And so we had—till we got to the top, when she resumed the guidance of the conversation. Good jokes were often made of this little weakness, but it had its pathetic side. Never was there a word of real egotism in her eager talk, or the evidence of the slightest wish to magnify her own doings, or to impress her hearers with her immense share in the public benefits she described. It was her deep conviction that to turn one of these poor sinners from the errors of its ways, to reach to the roots of the misery and corruption of the “perishing and dangerous classes,” was the most important work which could possibly be undertaken; and she, very naturally, in consequence made it the most prominent, indeed, almost the sole, subject of discourse. I was once in her company at Aubrey House in London, when there happened to be present half-a-dozen people, each one devoted to some special political, religious or moral agitation. Miss Carpenter remarked in a pause in the conversation; “It is a thousand pities that everybody will not join and give the whole of their minds to the great cause of the age, because, if they would, we should carry it undoubtedly.” “What is the great cause of the age?” we simultaneously exclaimed. “Parliamentary Reform?” said our host, Mr. Peter Taylor; “the Abolition of Slavery?” said Miss Remond, a Negress, Mrs. Taylor’s companion; “Teetotalism?” said another; “Woman’s Suffrage?” said another; “The conversion of the world to Theism?” said I. In the midst of the clamour, Miss Carpenter looked serenely round, “Why! the Industrial Schools Bill of course!” Nobody enjoyed the joke, when we all began to laugh, more than the reformer herself.
It was, above all, in the Red Lodge Reformatory that Mary Carpenter’s work was at its highest. The spiritual interest she took in the poor little girls was, beyond words, admirable. When one of them whom she had hoped was really reformed fell back into thievish or other evil ways, her grief was a real vicarious repentance for the little sinner; a Christ-like sentiment infinitely sacred. Nor was she at all blind to the children’s defects, or easily deceived by the usual sham reformations of such institutions. In one of her letters to me she wrote these wise words (July 9th, 1859):—
“I have pointed out in one of my reports why I have more trouble than others (e.g., especially, Catholics). A system of steady repression and order would make them sooner good scholars; but then I should not have the least confidence in the real change of their characters. Even with my free system in the Lodge, remember how little we knew of Hill’s and Hawkins’ real characters, until they were in the house? (Her own private house). I do not object to nature being kept under curbs of rule and order for a time, until some principles are sufficiently rooted to be appealed to. But then it must have play, or we cannot possibly tell what amount of reformation has taken place. The Catholics have an enormous artificial help in their religion and priests; but I place no confidence in the slavish obedience they produce and the hypocrisy which I have generally found inseparable from Catholic influence. I would far rather have M. A. M’Intyre coolly say, ‘I know it was wrong’” (a barring and bolting out) “and Anne Crooks in the cell for outrageous conduct, acknowledge the same—‘I know it was wrong, but I am not sorry,’ than any hypocritical and heartless acknowledgments.”
Indeed nobody had a keener eye to detect cant of any kind, or a greater hatred of it. She told me one day of her visit to a celebrated institution, said to be supported semi-miraculously by answers to prayer in the specific shape of cheques. Miss Carpenter said that she asked the matron (or some other official) whether it was supported by voluntary subscriptions? “Oh, dear no! madam,” the woman replied; “Do you not know it is entirely supported by Prayer?” “Oh, indeed,” replied Miss Carpenter. “I dare say, however, when friends have once been moved to send you money, they continue to do so regularly?” “Yes, certainly they do.” “And they mostly send it at the beginning of the year?” “Yes, yes, very regularly.” “Ah, well,” said Miss Carpenter, “when people send me money for Red Lodge under those circumstances, I enter them in my Reports as Annual Subscribers!”