A Puritan Bohemia/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
"Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,
And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,
And I in the middle as with companions and as holding the hands of companions"
From her windows Mrs. Kent watched the life in the Square with something akin to interest. Picturesque models came and went. Artists walked in meditation under the trees. The shabby clientele of the Charity Organization used it as a thoroughfare to the great Charity Building on High Street.
Outside there was only the sight of strange faces, and the sound of unknown feet; within, the four walls of her room, and her thought of the past. Memories of old days drifted between her and the pamphlets which she persistently tried to read. On autumn evenings, when there were concerts in the Music Hall, the insistent cry of music set broken chords to vibrating and destroyed her hard-won calm.
Mrs. Kent had come to the city, she told herself, to forget her sorrow in caring for the poor. There were no claims upon her now. But she had not come to forget. She had come to remember. She wanted solitude, where the sound of familiar voices would not break the silence of her grief. Throughout the meaningless future she would keep fast hold of the meaning of the past.
Six months of work in the Charity Building; endless reports; endless committee meetings on spring afternoons and hot summer mornings; then suddenly the monotony was broken by the sight of a new face across the table. Anne Bradford had begun to take her dinners at the house where Mrs. Kent lived.
They were friends now. They had walked together, and had talked of many things. There was something contagious in Anne's interest in life and in people.
"I called on my new neighbour yesterday," said Anne, as she strolled one day with Mrs. Kent about the Square. "She's charming. She has spent a year in a woman's college, and is very wise. Now she's going to make the world all over."
"Don't laugh at her," begged Mrs. Kent.
"I'm not laughing at her. I like her immensely. She belongs to a wealthy old Connecticut family. Their religious, social, and economic views are not to her mind. Her criticism of her unenlightened parents rather stuns one. She has come on a mission to us, because her conscience won't permit her to stay at home. It used to be the bad boy who ran away from home. Now it's the good girl, in search of philanthropic adventure."
Mrs. Kent smiled.
"The child is brimful of that vain, hungry, ungenerous idealism of the young," continued Anne. "Heaven deliver us all from the abstract wisdom of the utterly untried!"
"Is she an artist?"
"That depends on your definition," Anne replied dryly. "She decided to keep on with art, after a year's study, because her instructor showed her how really serious a thing art is!"
From these slight demands for human interest, Mrs. Kent turned with relief to her work. This was largely mechanical. She did her duty with precision, and went her way, sweet, sad, and remote. The harder the work, the more content she was. She liked to come home late in the afternoon, so tired that the old sense of physical and mental paralysis which had come to her when she first knew how great a grief was hers, returned and took possession. That feeling carried her back nearer and nearer to all that she had lost.
Her imagination slowly acquired a new power. Through the golden autumn air and the misty rain, scenes from her former life drifted back to her. In the long silences she said over and over the old words, those that she had listened to, those that she had spoken. She had forgotten nothing. Even in the street her feet beat time to the familiar phrases. Playing both parts in this dialogue of memory, she came to feel that both voices were one, and she forgot to regret the few bitter words that had broken the happiness of those years.
Grief turned often into rebellion. Once a glimpse of Anne Bradford and Miss Wistar walking together under the falling leaves brought hot tears to Mrs. Kent's eyes. It was like looking from the end of life down a long vista, into the hope and freshness of life's beginning. For her life was over, yet she was still so young.
"Please, will you come to the studio for a Bohemian supper?" Anne Bradford begged one day. "And will you play chaperon?"
"Chaperon?"
"For Miss Wistar. An old playmate of mine has turned out to be her art-teacher. I wish to invite him to meet her."
Mrs. Kent consented with reluctance. Perhaps it was her duty. Yet this was hard for one who asked only that she might walk on softly in the bitterness of her soul, guarding for herself the hush that lies about new-made graves.
She had grown almost content, living in the constant presence of the dead. Now a sudden change of work disturbed her. She was asked to leave her books, and to do district visiting in the slums. The swarming people irritated her. The sights and sounds made her ill. She could not really care, she said to herself, about the wretched people she was trying to serve. Yet the thought of them troubled her dreams. At night their faces followed her on her journey to the past. Soiled fingers seemed to clutch her gown as she walked the old, familiar ways.
She went on in a maze. That old expectation of finding on the other side of each shut door the face she loved went with her to the slums. But the open doors revealed only dirt, misery, sin. Again and again the rebellious cry arose. The soul she loved had heaven; and she?—the blank brick walls, the long, muddy walks, the loathsome faces.
One wicked old woman with a passion for drink, two Italians out of work, and a family of motherless children were given to her care.
One day in late October Mrs. Kent made her usual round of visits. It was her birthday. She found that the old woman had turned her daughter out of doors.
The visitor walked slowly away, looking back toward the window of the basement room.
"My birthday gift," she said, "is a share in another's sin."