XIV
The debate over the charity ball raged until twilight, and it served for unfinished business at two special sessions. The spare little woman who had proposed that the meetings be opened with prayer led the opposition to the charity ball, and, summoning all her militant religion to her aid, succeeded in arraying most of the evangelical churches against it. In two weeks the controversy was in the newspapers, and when it had waged for a month, and both parties were exhausted, they compromised on a charity bazaar.
The dispute had been distressing to Mrs. Russell, whose nature was too sensitive to take the relish most of the others seemed to find in the controversy, and it was through her tact that peace was finally established. Even after the bazaar was decided on, the peace was threatened by dissension as to where the bazaar should be held. The more sophisticated and worldly-minded favored the Majestic Theater, and this brought the spare little woman to her feet again, trembling with moral indignation. To her the idea of a bazaar in a theater was even more sacrilegious than a ball. But Mrs. Russell saved the day by a final sacrifice—she offered her residence for the bazaar.
“It was beautiful in you!” Elizabeth exclaimed as they drove homeward together in the graying afternoon of the November day. “To think of throwing your house open for a week—and having the whole town tramp over the rugs!”
“Oh, I’ll lay the floors in canvas,” said Mrs. Russell, with a little laugh she could not keep from ending in a sigh.
“You’ll find it no light matter,” said Elizabeth; “this turning your house inside out. Of course, the fact that it is your house will draw all the curious and vulgar in town.”
This was not exactly reassuring and Elizabeth felt as much the moment she had said it.
“You must help me, dear!” Mrs. Russell said, squeezing Elizabeth’s hand in a kind of desperation. Elizabeth had never known her to be in any wise demonstrative, and her own sympathetic nature responded immediately.
“Indeed I shall!” she said.
The bazaar was to be held the week before Christmas, and the ladies forgot their differences to unite in one of those tremendous and exhausting labors they seem ever ready to undertake, though the end is always so disproportionate to the sacrifice and toil that somehow bring it to pass. Elizabeth was almost constantly with Mrs. Russell; they were working early and late. Mrs. Russell appointed her on the committee on arrangements, and the committee held almost daily meetings at the Charities. And here Elizabeth at last found an opportunity of seeing some of the poor for whom she was working.
The fall had prolonged itself into November; the weather was so perfect that Dick could daily speed his automobile, and the men who, like Marriott, still clung to golf, could play on Saturdays and Sundays at the Country Club. But December came, and with it a heavy rain that in three days became a sleet; then the snow and a cold wave. The wretched winter weather, which seems to have a spite almost personal for the lake regions, produced its results in the lives of men—there were suicides and crimes for the police, and for the Organized Charities, the poor, now forced to emerge from the retreats where in milder weather they could hide their wretchedness. They came forth, and when Elizabeth and Mrs. Russell entered the Charities one morning, there they were, ranged along the wall. They sat bundled in their rags, waiting in dumb patience for the last humiliation of an official investigation, making no sound save as their ailments compelled them to sneeze or to cough now and then; and as Elizabeth and Mrs. Russell passed into the room, they were followed by eyes that held no reproach or envy, but merely a mild curiosity. The poor sat there, perhaps glad of the warmth and the rest; willing to spend the day, if necessary; with hopes no higher than some mere temporary relief that would help them to eke out their lives a few hours longer and until another day, which should be like this day, repeating all its wants and hardships. The atmosphere of the room was stifling, with an odor that sickened Elizabeth, the fetor of all the dirt and disease that poverty had accumulated and heaped upon them.
At the desk Mrs. Rider, the clerk, and the two agents of the society were interrogating a woman. The woman was tall and slender, and her pale face had some trace of prettiness left; her clothing was better than that of the others, though it had remained over from some easier circumstance of the summer.
The woman was hungry, and she was sick. She had reported her condition to the agent of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty, but as this man could think of nothing better than to arrest somebody and have somebody punished, he had had the woman’s husband sent to the workhouse for six months, thus removing the only hope she had.
To Elizabeth it seemed that the three inquisitors were trying, not so much to discover some means of helping this woman, as to discover some excuse for not helping her; they took turns in putting to her, with a professional frankness, the most personal questions,—questions that made Elizabeth blush and burn with shame, even as they made the woman blush. But just then a middle-aged woman appeared, and Elizabeth instantly identified her when Mrs. Rider pleasantly addressed her by a name that appeared frequently in the newspapers in connection with deeds that took on the aspect of nobility and sacrifice.
“I’m so glad you dropped in, Mrs. Norton,” said Mrs. Rider. “We have a most perplexing case.”
The clerk lifted her eyebrows expressively, and somehow indicated to Mrs. Norton the woman she had just had under investigation. Mrs. Norton glanced at the hunted face and smiled.
“You mean the Ordway woman? Exactly. I know her case thoroughly. Mr. Gleason ’phoned me from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty and I looked her up. You should have seen her room—the filthiest place I ever saw—and those children!” She raised her hands, covered with gloves, and her official-looking reticule slid up her forearm as if to express an impossibility. “The woman was tired of farm life—determined to come to town—fascinated by city life—she complained of her husband, and yet—what do you think?—she wanted me to get him out of the work-house!”
Mrs. Norton stopped as if she had made an unanswerable argument and proved that the woman should not be helped; and Mrs. Rider and the two agents seemed to be relieved. Presently Mrs. Rider called the woman, and told her that her case was not one that came within the purview of the society’s objects, and when the hope was dying out of the woman’s face Mrs. Norton began to lecture her on the care of children, and to assure her the city was filled with pitfalls for such as she. The woman, beaten into humility, listened a while, and then she turned and dragged herself toward the door. The eyes of the waiting paupers followed her with the same impersonal curiosity they had shown in the entrance of Mrs. Russell and Elizabeth and Mrs. Norton.
The limp retreating figure of the woman filled Elizabeth with distress. When, at the door, she saw the woman press to her eyes the sodden handkerchief she had been rolling in her palm during the interview, she ran after her; in the hall outside, away from others, she called; the woman turned and gazed at her suspiciously.
“Here!” said Elizabeth fearfully.
She opened her purse and emptied from it into the woman’s hand all the silver it held.
“Where do you live?” she asked, and as the woman gave her the number of the house where she rented a room, Elizabeth realized how inappropriate the word “live” was. Elizabeth returned to the office with a glow in her breast, though she dreaded Mrs. Norton, whom she feared she had affronted by her deed. But Mrs. Norton received her with a smile.
“It seemed hard to you, no doubt,” Mrs. Norton said, and Mrs. Rider and the two agents looked up with smiles of their own, as if they were about to shine in Mrs. Norton’s justification, “but you’ll learn after a while. We must discriminate, you know; we must not pauperize them. When you’ve been in the work as long as I have,”—she paused with a superior lift of her eyebrows at the use of this word “work,”—“you’ll understand better.”
Elizabeth felt a sudden indignation which she concealed, because she had her own doubts, after all. The ladies were gathering for the committee meeting and just then Mrs. Russell beckoned her into an inner room.
“The air is better in here,” she said.