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The Precipice: A Novel, a novel by Elia W. Peattie |
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Chapter 15 |
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_ CHAPTER XV That night Kate said she would warn Honora; but in the morning she found herself doubtful of the wisdom of such a course. Or perhaps she really lacked the courage for it. At any rate, she put it off. She contemplated talking to Mary Morrison, and of appealing to her honor, or her compassion, and of advising her to go away. But Mary was much from home nowadays, and Kate, who had discouraged an intimacy, did not know how to cultivate it at this late hour. Several days went by with Kate in a tumult of indecision. Sometimes she decided that the romance between Mary and David was a mere spring madness, which would wear itself out and do little damage. At other moments she felt it was laid upon her to speak and avert a catastrophe. Then, in the midst of her indecision, she was commanded to go to Washington to attend a national convention of social workers. She was to represent the Children's Protective Agency, and to give an account of the method of its support and of its system of operation. She was surprised and gratified at this invitation, for she had had no idea that her club and settlement-house addresses had attracted attention to that extent. She made so little effort when she spoke that she could not feel much respect for her achievement. It was as if she were talking to a friend, and the size of her audience in no way affected her neighborly accent. She did not see that it was precisely this thing which was winning favor for her. Her lack of self-consciousness, her way of telling people precisely what they wished to know about the subject in hand, her sense of values, which enabled her to see that a human fact is the most interesting thing in the world, were what counted for her. If she had been "better trained," and more skilled in the dreary and often meaningless science of statistics, or had become addicted to the benevolent jargon talked by many welfare workers, her array of facts would have fallen on more or less indifferent ears. But she offered not vital statistics, but vital documents. She talked in personalities--in personalities so full of meaning that, concrete as they were, they took on general significance--they had the effect of symbols. She furnished watchwords for her listeners, and she did it unconsciously. She would have been indignant if she had been told how large a part her education in Silvertree played in her present aptitude. She had grown up in a town which feasted on dramatic gossip, and which thrived upon the specific personal episode. To the vast and terrific city, and to her portion of the huge task of mitigating the woe of its unfit, Kate brought the quality which, undeveloped, would have made of her no more than an entertaining village gossip. What stories there were to tell! What stories of bravery in defeat, of faith in the midst of disaster, of family devotion in spite of squalor and subterfuges and all imaginable shiftlessness and shiftiness. Kate had got hold of the idea of the universality of life--the universality of joy and pain and hope. She was finding it easy now to forgive "the little brothers" for all possible perversity, all defects, all ingratitude. Wayward children they might be,--children uninstructed in the cult of goodness, happiness, serenity,--but outside the pale of human consideration they could not be. The greater their fault the greater their need. Kate was learning, in spite of her native impatience and impulsiveness, to be very patient. She was becoming the defender of those who stumbled, the explainer of those who themselves lacked explanations or who were too defiant to give them. So she was going to Washington. She was to talk on a proposed school for the instruction of mothers. She often had heard her father say that a good mother was an exception. She had not believed him--had taken it for granted that this idea of his was a part of his habitual pessimism. But since she had come up to the city and become an officer of the Children's Protective Association, she had changed her mind, and a number of times she had been on the point of writing to her father to tell him that she was beginning to understand his point of view. This idea of a school for mothers had been her own, originally, and a development of the little summer home for Polish mothers which she had helped to establish. She had proposed it, half in earnest, merely, at Hull House on a certain occasion when there were a number of influential persons present. It had appealed to them, however, as a practical means of remedying certain difficulties daily encountered. Just how large a part Jane Addams had played in the enlightenment of Kate's mind and the dissolution of her inherent exclusiveness, Kate could not say. Sometimes she gave the whole credit to her. For here was a woman with a genius for inclusiveness. She was the sister of all men. If a youth sinned, she asked herself if she could have played any part in the prevention of that sin had she had more awareness, more solicitude. It was she who had, more than others,--though there was a great army of men and women of good will to sustain her,--promulgated this idea of responsibility. A city, she maintained, was a great home. She demanded, then, to know if the house was made attractive, instructive, protective. Was it so conducted that the wayward sons and daughters, as well as the obedient ones, could find safety and happiness within it? Were the privileges only for the rich, the effective, and the out-reaching? Or were they for those who lacked the courage to put out their hands for joy and knowledge? Were they for those who had not yet learned the tongue of the family into which they had newly entered? Were they for those who fought the rules and shirked the cares and dug for themselves a pit of sorrow? She believed they were for all. She could not countenance disinheritance. Yes, always, in high places and low, among friends and enemies, this sad, kind, patient, quiet woman, Jane Addams, of Hull House, had preached the indissolubility of the civic family. Kate had listened and learned. Nay, more, she had added her own interpretations. She was young, strong, brave, untaught by rebuff, and she had the happy and beautiful insolence of those who have not known defeat. She said things Jane Addams would have hesitated to say. She lacked the fine courtesy of the elder woman; but she made, for that very reason, a more dramatic propaganda. * * * * * Kate had known what it was to tramp the streets in rain and wind; she had known what it was to face infection and drunken rage; she had looked on sights both piteous and obscene; but she had now begun--and much, much sooner than was usual with workers in her field--to reap some of the rewards of toil. Soon or late things in this life resolve themselves into a question of personality. History and art, success and splendor, plenitude and power, righteousness and immortal martyrdom, are all, in the last resolve, personality and nothing more. Kate was having her swift rewards because of that same indescribable, incontestable thing. The friendship of remarkable women and men--women, particularly--was coming to her. Fine things were being expected of her. She had a vitality which indicated genius--that is, if genius is intensity, as some hold. At any rate, she was vividly alert, naturally eloquent, physically capable of impressing her personality upon others. She thought little of this, however. She merely enjoyed the rewards as they came, and she was unfeignedly surprised when, on her way to Washington, whither she traveled with many others, her society was sought by those whom she had long regarded with something akin to awe. She did not guess how her enthusiasm and fresh originality stimulated persons of lower vitality and more timid imagination. At Washington she had a signal triumph. The day of her speech found the hall in which the convention was held crowded with a company including many distinguished persons--among them, the President of the United States. Kate had expected to suffer rather badly from stage fright, but a sense of her opportunity gave her courage. She talked, in her direct "Silvertree method," as Marna called it, of the ignorance of mothers, the waste of children, the vast economic blunder which for one reason and another even the most progressive of States had been so slow to perceive. She said that if the commercial and agricultural interests of the country were fostered and protected, why should not the most valuable product of all interests, human creatures, be given at least an equal amount of consideration. In her own way, which by a happy instinct never included what was hackneyed, she drew a picture of the potentialities of the child considered merely from an economic point of view, and in impulsive words she made plain the need for a bureau, which she suggested should be virtually a part of the governmental structure, in which should be vested authority for the care of children,--the Bureau of Children, she denominated it,--a scientific extension of motherhood! It seemed a part of the whole stirring experience that she should be asked with several others to lunch at the White House with the President and his wife. The President, it appeared, was profoundly interested. A quiet man, with a judicial mind, he perceived the essential truth of Kate's propaganda. He had, indeed, thought of something similar himself, though he had not formulated it. He went so far as to express a desire that this useful institution might attain realization while he was yet in the presidential chair. "I would like to ask you unofficially, Miss Barrington," he said at parting, "if you are one to whom responsibility is agreeable?" "Oh," cried Kate, taken aback, "how do I know? I am so young, Mr. President, and so inexperienced!" "We must all be that at some time or other," smiled the President. "But it is in youth that the ideas come; and enthusiasm has a value which is often as great as experience." "Ideas are accidents, Mr. President," answered Kate. "It doesn't follow that one can carry out a plan because she has seen a vision." "No," admitted the President, shaking hands with her. "But you don't look to me like a woman who would let a vision go to waste. You will follow it up with all the power that is in you." * * * * * It happened that Kate's propaganda appealed to the popular imagination. The papers took it up; they made much of the President's interest in it; they wrote articles concerning the country girl who had come up to town, and who, with a simple faith and courage, had worked among the unfortunate and the delinquent, and whose native eloquence had made her a favorite with critical audiences. They printed her picture and idealized her in the interests of news. A lonely, gruff old man in Silvertree read of it, and when the drawn curtains had shut him away from the scrutiny of his neighbors, he walked the floor, back and forth, following the worn track in the dingy carpet, thinking. They talked of it at the Caravansary, and were proud; and many men and women who had met her by chance, or had watched her with interest, openly rejoiced. "They're coming on, the Addams breed of citizens," said they. "Here's a new one with the trick--whatever it is--of making us think and care and listen. She's getting at the roots of our disease, and it's partly because she's a woman. She sees that it has to be right with the children if it's to be right with the family. Long live the Addams breed!" Friends wired their congratulations, and their comments were none the less acceptable because they were premature. Many wrote her; Ray McCrea, alone, of her intimate associates, was silent. Kate guessed why, but she lacked time to worry. She only knew that her great scheme was afoot--that it went. But she would have been less than mortal if she had not felt a thrill of commingled apprehension and satisfaction at the fact that Kate Barrington, late of Silvertree and its gossiping, hectoring, wistful circles, was in the foreground. She had had an Idea which could be utilized in the high service of the world, and the most utilitarian and idealistic public in the world had seized upon it. So, naturally enough, the affairs of Honora Fulham became somewhat blurred to Kate's perception. Besides, she was unable to decide what to do. She had heard that one should never interfere between husband and wife. Moreover, she was very young, and she believed in her friends. Others might do wrong, but not one's chosen. People of her own sort had temptations, doubtless, but they overcame them. That was their business--that was their obligation. She might proclaim herself a democrat, but she was a moral aristocrat, at any rate. She depended upon those in her class to do right. She was a trifle chilled when she returned to find how little time Honora had to give to her unfolding of the great new scheme. Honora had her own excitement. Her wonderful experiment was drawing to a culmination. Honora could talk of nothing else. If Kate wanted to promulgate a scheme for the caring for the Born, very well. Honora had a tremendous business with the Unborn. So she talked Kate down. _ |
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