"Look at those girls now: while you and your Happy Elizas are trampin' in the mud with your flag and your procession, and gettin' black eyes and brickbats, they are singin' and laughin' and dancin', and makin' what fun they can for themselves. It seems to me, Tom, that if this kind of thing gets fashionable you and your army will be played out."
Well, he had come to see this place, which had offered pleasure instead of repentance, as a method of improving life. They were not laughing and singing at all; there were no men present except one old gentleman in a blue coat with brass buttons. To be sure, he had a fiddle lying on a chair beside him. There was no indication whatever of the red cup, and no smell of tobacco. Now, pleasure without drink, tobacco, and singing had been in Tom's unregenerate days incomprehensible. "I would rather," said Dick, "see an army of Miss Kennedy's girls than an army of Hallelujah Polls." Yet they seemed perfectly quiet. "Make 'em happy, Tom, first," said Dick, who was still thinking over Harry's speech as a possible point of departure. Happiness is not a word in the dictionary of men like Tom Coppin; they know what it means; they know a spree; they understand drink; they know misery, because it is all round them—the misery of hunger, of disease, of intemperance, of dirt, of evil temper, of violence; the misery which the sins of one bring all, and sins of all upon each. Indeed, we need not go to Whitechapel to find out misery. But they know not happiness. For such as Captain Coppin there is, as an alternative for misery, the choice of glory. What they mean by glory is ecstasy, the rapture, the mysteries of emotional religion; he, they believe, is the most advanced who is most often hysterical; Dick, like many of his followers, yearned honestly and unselfishly to extend this rapture which he himself so often enjoyed: but that there should be any other way out of the misery save by way of the humble stool of conviction, was a thing which he could not understand. Happiness, calm, peace, content, the sweet enjoyment of innocent recreation—these things he knew nothing of; they had not come his way.
He had come; he had seen; no doubt the moment his back was turned the orgy would begin. But he had delivered his message: he had warned the young woman who had led the girls—that calm, cold woman who looked at him with curiosity and was so unmoved by what he said: he might go. With his whole heart he had spoken and had so far moved no one except the daughter of the Seventh-Day Independent—and her only a little. This kind of thing is very irritating. Suppose you were to put a red-hot poker into a jug of water without producing any steam or hissing at all, how, as a natural philosopher, would you feel?
"You may preach to us, if you like," said Miss Kennedy.
She sat before him, resting her chin upon her hand. He knew that she was beautiful, although women and their faces, graces, and sweet looks played no part at all in his thoughts. He felt, without putting the thing into words, that she was beautiful. Also, that she regarded him with a kind of contempt, as well as curiosity; also, that she had determined not to be moved by anything he might say; also, that she relied on her own influence over the girls. And he felt for a moment as if his trusty arms were dropping from his hands and his whole armor was slipping from his shoulders. Not her beauty; no, fifty Helens of Troy would not have moved this young apostle; but her position as an impregnable outsider. For against the curious outsider, who regard captains in the Salvation Army only as so many interesting results of growing civilization, their officers are powerless indeed.
If there is any real difference between the working-man of England and the man who does other work, it is that the former is generally emotional and the latter is not. To the man of emotion things cannot be stated too strongly; his leader is he who has the greatest command of adjectives; he is singularly open to the charm of eloquence; he likes audacity of statement; he likes to be moved by wrath, pity, and terror; he has no eye for shades of color; and when he is most moved he thinks he is most right. It is this which makes him so angry with the people who cannot be moved.
Angela was one of those persons who cannot be moved by the ordinary methods. She looked at Tom as if he was some strange creature, watching what he did, listening to what he said, as if she was not like unto him. It is not quite a fair way of describing Angela's attitude of mind; but it is near enough; and it represents what passed through the brain of the Salvation captain.
"Will you preach to us?" she repeated the third time.
He mechanically opened his hymn-book.
"Number three hundred and sixty-two," he said quietly.