The year passed. The day of the exhibition arrived. Richly gowned women, calling themselves “patronesses,” were there. They went in luxuriously equipped automobiles to smile and be condescending toward children who went in rags and were hungry.
But not all the children to whom the year before they had given flowers were there. Some of them had drooped during the summer and died like flowers in parched ground.
And many of the plants were withered and dead, too.
What an exhibition, to be sure! Geraniums without fragrance. Geraniums which a year ago bore deep, rich, green leaves and bright scarlet blossoms, were now straggling and wretched, with pale-green—almost white—stems, with poor, sickly-looking little leaves and with no flowers. And many a pot containing only a withered and rotted stick, with maybe a little note, “Please, ma’am, it died because our rooms is dark.”
Some of the richly gowned women wept as they looked at the long rows of pitiful flowers, and at the long rows of withered and dead flowers.
Wept? I wonder why.
I wonder if they wept because they began to appreciate faintly how poverty withers and oppresses all life; or only because the sight of so many dead flowers, and flowers worse than dead, overwhelmed them? Or had they heard the flowers tell their sad little histories?
For every one of the flowers had a story to tell to understanding hearts.
Yes, madam, that tall, withered geranium stick, which made you weep as you remembered how beautiful its scarlet blossoms had looked the year before, when you gave it to little crippled Polly with the flaxen hair, could unfold a story, if you could but understand it. But it is a story of the tenement, not of your world. And you cannot understand.
But little Polly (who doesn’t understand either) can tell you enough to give you cause for tears. Real tears. Human tears.