First harvests

by Frederic Jesup Stimson

“Mr. Haviland? you down here too? Or perhaps you come on the same errand?” And Gracie smiled frankly, as John looked up, puzzled, into her lovely face. “I am visiting some poor families, you know—for the Combined Charities——”

“But surely,” he broke in, “you ought not to be down here alone, Miss Holyoke?” They were at Sixth Avenue by this time; and Gracie was looking for a car.

“Usually my aunt lets me have the carriage,” said Gracie; “but Miss Livingstone needed it to-day. And I don’t like to drive quite up to the doors, even then. It seems so hard to drive up with one’s own carriage and horses, and then have to refuse them everything but a little work,” she added, smiling. “And Miss Brevier often goes with me.”

“Do you mean that you come here often?” asked John; and she told him that she and Miss Brevier had each “taken” the people on one street; and were seeing that they got help when help was necessary, and that the undeserving had none wasted upon them. John put her safely in the car, and resumed his pedestrian voyage with something new to think of. This personal visiting by refined young ladies was doubtless an excellent thing on its poetic side; but it could not but seem to him that the danger and the exposure were out of proportion to the benefit. He had had much experience among the city poor, and was perhaps a little skeptical as to the advantages to be gained by such devotion. For, as is the way of things so often here below, the selfish, the fraudulent, the undeserving, find it easy to advertise themselves and solicit help; while the saddest cases of all are lost in some modest garret; there they suffer unseen, ashamed to cry for charity, and wear their lives out silently. Except this latter class, and cases of long illness, most of the poor in New York are poor from laziness, intemperance, or crime; and their moral attitude towards society is rather that of sullen and callous defiance, or covetous acquiescence, than repentance. We need to get a better breed of men, not coddle the present one overmuch. Life suits them well enough as it is, if they could only get a few of their neighbors’ goods; such goods as they desire and Mrs. Flossie desired, and not the summum bonum. If degraded, they do not mind their degradation, but are content with it; money always, clothing and food sometimes, they will derisively accept; but work they will evade and not perform. Amongst these, thought Haviland, there may be much squalor, even much suffering; but there is little real poverty. Had he told all this to Gracie she would have said that it made no difference; and that one should try all the more to find the true cases, where righteous-minded beings were sinking in the turmoil of the world; and that one such family helped and saved was worth a hundred of impostures. Moreover, Gracie had not a man’s fear of being taken in; had she thought of it at all, she would have scorned it; the odium of deception falls on the deceiver, not the deceived; she would not stoop to be suspicious. And mercy will ever be a mystery to mere justice: like the ways of God to human intellect.

Meantime Haviland was walking along, lost in thought. He wandered mechanically through various unknown and afterward unremembered districts, by a strange old graveyard yet undesecrated, through Leroy Street, and Sixth Avenue, until his time was up; then he went home and dined, with his mother. In the evening he had his ward club meeting; this was a thing in which he took great interest, and he went as a matter of course. It was not an easy thing, at this time, to be admitted to the councils that rule in the free city of New York. And, as we have spent some time over pretty Flossie Gower, that flower of republican society, it may not be wasted time to see a little what thing this political club was, which may stand, in a sense, for its root.

If New England, with its offshoots on the Western Reserve and elsewhere, is the result of an attempt to obtain religious freedom, our whole country, in a still larger sense, is the result of an attempt to obtain political liberty. Our national faith has been that which is, of all possible faiths, the farthest from that of poor James Starbuck; it is government by everyone, while nihilism is the negation of any government at all; moreover it is individualism, as opposed to socialism. But in New York there has grown to be a class who, as others could give no time to government, sought to make up for it by giving all of theirs. For what proportion is there between the time of a busy merchant or physician, and that of a professional idler? And the interminable and vain caucuses, impossible to the one, form the delight of the other. These had leisure to make acquaintances; to know each other; to pass their days in bar-rooms, nurseries of political power; and long ere this, they had arrogated to themselves an effective oligarchy. Theirs to make nominations and to mar candidates’ careers; and the people, high-placed or low, had no right in their august councils save on sufferance. Thus we dropped aristocracy, and got a kakistocracy; but an oligarchy still.

John Haviland, however, had been admitted. He had had to struggle hard for this honor; and had finally attained it much more by his physical prowess than by his intellectual qualifications. Near his house were the rooms of a well-known “professor in the art of self-defence;” and there he had been in the habit of taking lessons, and occasionally “putting on the gloves” with all comers. Among the frequenters of the place were also many of the local magnates of the party; and Haviland, whose manners were frank and hearty, had thus met most of his ward leaders, and knocked the greater part of them down successively. Thus treated, they took a fancy to him; said that there was no nonsense about him; and one day, to Haviland’s great surprise, informed him that he had been elected a member of their local club.

The meeting to-night was not over-interesting. It might have been railed less incendiary, but it was certainly more selfish than Mr. James Starbuck’s, we have so lately left; while for earnestness and a definite attempt at effecting something, the two were not for one moment to be compared. For whereas the official political organization of the great national party in Haviland’s ward was occupied primarily with satisfactory apportionments of the offices among the would-be candidates, and secondarily with beating the rival party at the polls, Starbuck’s people went in much more directly for measures than for men, and as for offices, desired none at all.

Haviland found it hard to keep his attention, that evening, on the subject before the meeting. Tom was saying what a good fellow was William, and how the machinations of Richard might be defeated if Patrick were only secured, which might be done if Michael were given a local judgeship. It was pretty unsatisfactory talk at the best, and hardly can have been what the makers of the Constitution, or even what Monsieur Jean Jacques Rousseau, intended. Haviland had often stood up against it, alone; but that night he gave little ear to it, and things went their own way.

From this meeting he went to the Farnums’. He was a familiar in the house, and could call late, if he chose. Mrs. Farnum had disappeared; Mr. Farnum was rarely visible; but sitting in the front room alone, with a sweeping robe of pale-gray velvet across the floor, and head and arm leaning on a low chair, a book discarded lying face downward on the floor, he found the beauty. A moment before he entered, her eyes (purple-gray they were in color) had had a strange look, both proud and longing, both weary and fierce. This was peculiar to them; but it softened a shade as he entered, and she looked up at him.