There were lips which opened only because they must, but as a whole they sang with the same heartiness, the same joy in singing, that he had heard a crowd of public-school boys put into the song only the week before. When the last word had died away it seemed to Philip Grayson that the sigh of the world without was giving voice to the sigh of the world within as the well-behaved crowd of boys sat down to resume their duties as auditors.
And then one of the most important of the professors from the State University was telling them about the kindness of the State: the State had provided for them this beautiful home; it gave them comfortable clothing and nutritious food; it furnished that fine gymnasium in which to train their bodies, books and teachers to train their minds; it provided those fitted to train their souls, to work against the unfortunate tendencies—the professor stumbled a little there—which had led to their coming. The State gave liberally, gladly, and in return it asked but one thing: that they come out into the world and make useful, upright citizens, citizens of which any State might be proud. Was that asking too much? the professor from the State University was saying.
The sobbing of the world without was growing more intense. Many pairs of eyes from among the auditors were straying out to where the summer lay dying. Did they know—those boys whom the State classed as unfortunates—that out of this death there would come again life? Or did they see but the darkness—the decay—of to-day?
The professor from the State University was putting the case very fairly. There were no flaws—seemingly—to be picked in his logic. The State had been kind; the boys were obligated to good citizenship. But the coldness!—comfortlessness!—of it all. The open arms of the world!—how mocking in its abstractness. What did it mean? Did it mean that they—the men who uttered the phrase so easily—would be willing to give these boys aid, friendship when they came out into the world? What would they say, those boys whose ears were filled with high-sounding, non-committal phrases, if some man were to stand before them and say, “And so, fellows, when you get away from this place, and are ready to get your start in the world, just come around to my office and I'll help you get a job?” At thought of it there came from Philip Grayson a queer, partly audible laugh, which caused those nearest him to look his way in surprise.
But he was all unconscious of their looks of inquiry, absorbed in the thoughts that crowded upon him. How far away the world—his kind of people—must seem to these boys of the State Reform School. The speeches they had heard, the training that had been given them, had taught them—unconsciously perhaps, but surely—to divide the world into two great classes: the lucky and the unlucky, those who made speeches and those who must listen, the so-called good and the so-called bad; perhaps—he smiled a little at his own cynicism—those who were caught and those who were not.
There came to him these words of a poet of whom he used to be fond:
In men whom men pronounce as ill,
I find so much of goodness still;
In men whom men pronounce divine,
I find so much of sin and blot;
I hesitate to draw the line
Between the two, when God has not.
When God has not! He turned and looked out at the sullen sky, returning—as most men do at times—to that conception of his childhood that somewhere beyond the clouds was God. God! Did God care for the boys of the State Reformatory? Was that poet of the western mountains right when he said that God was not a drawer of lines, but a seer of the good that was in the so-called bad, and of the bad in the so-called good, and a lover of them both?
If that was God, it was not the God the boys of the reformatory had been taught to know. They had been told that God would forgive the wicked, but it had been made clear to them—if not in words, in implications—that it was they who were the wicked. And the so-called godly men, men of such exemplary character as had been chosen to address them that afternoon, had so much of the spirit of God that they, too, were willing to forgive, be tolerant, and—he looked out at the bending trees with a smile—disburse generalities about the open arms of the world.
What would they think—those three hundred speech-tired boys—if some man who had been held before them as exemplary were to rise and lay bare his own life—its weaknesses, its faults, perhaps its crimes—and tell them there was weakness and there was strength in every human being, and that the world-old struggle of life was to overcome one's weakness with one's strength.