The Open Question Part 46

"Madame Burne?" asked Gano.

"Au quatrieme. Encore de la boue dans mon escalier!" muttered the _concierge_. "Faudra qu'elle s'en aille a la fin."

Gano ran up two flights, pa.s.sing three girls in the dim light, who were coming down. He almost overtook the shabby man, who seemed in feverish haste. Gano slackened his pace at the foot of the third flight. The shabby man hurried up without looking back, fled round the pa.s.sage to the left, and knocked at a door facing the banisters. Without pausing for permission, he turned the k.n.o.b and went in, letting out a gush of light and the confused sound of voices. Gano was conscious of a glow of comfort in the a.s.surance of his heart that the room entered by such a creature, with ceremony so scant, was certainly not Mary Burne's. The shabby fellow had flung the door to, but the worn-out fastening didn't catch. The door rebounded and stood partly open. Two-thirds of the way up this last flight Gano turned his head in the direction of the voices, and saw through the banisters and the open door Mary Burne shaking hands with the man who had just entered. Gano stopped dead. He didn't hear anything she said; he wasn't conscious of trying to do so. He stood staring, incredulous. Presently she pa.s.sed out of his range of vision.

He could see some of the others now, and caught here and there a single unenlightening word. He wondered vaguely at hearing a room full of persons speaking English again. Should he go in, or should he go back?

He felt an indescribable shrinking from meeting Mary among that shady lot. Men, too--more than one! What was a woman like Mary Burne doing with such disreputable-looking-- He had lately been killing time for Driscoll by reading aloud that original story, _Beggars All_. It came to him like a form of nightmare that their Madonna Mary was a confidence woman. This gathering was a grim kind of thieves' tea-party, but they had left the door open! As he gave up straining to catch a glimpse of Mary, and looked closer at those nearest the door, he saw there were one or two women he would not have thought suspicious under other circ.u.mstances. Then one of these moved away, and revealed a creature with raddled cheeks and pencilled eyes, wearing her dingy finery with a clumsiness not French, and speaking now to Mary Burne, who had come to her side--speaking with a c.o.c.kney tongue, and eying her hostess with mixed suspicion and curiosity. A man, as obviously American, looking like a broken-down billiard-marker, stood behind, and sitting by the door was a well-dressed gray-haired woman, with frightened, s.h.i.+fty eyes.

Obvious tramps and beggars would have fitted better into any preconceived scheme of benevolence. But these were people of some former decency, some present alertness of intelligence, like the dregs of the foreigner cla.s.s in any land, lower than the outcast born, because these aliens had once ambition, had initiative enough to venture forth to better their estate, and had not fallen so low without desperate clutching at foul means to keep afloat. On each face that undefinable stamp of failure. What is it? Where is it? Not always in the eyes or on the lips, not always expressed in dress or even bearing--in no one thing that one may lay a finger on and say, "I know him by this mark!" There is no name for that elusive, eloquent, yet indelible sign life sets upon the faces of the lost. Yet all men know it when they see it, and instinctively turn away their eyes.

In the group that closed about Mary, some one was protesting about something.

"Perhaps Jean Latreille was right," said a man Gano couldn't see.

"Of course he was. _You_ need not to blame him."

Some one was speaking with a strong French accent.

"Well, well," said the woman with the gray hair. "I don't feel sure it ought to be encouraged _openly_."

"Zen, ought you not to belong to zis club?"

The woman turned up an anxious face.

"I've sent the girls away, Mrs. Pitman," said Mary, gently. "I think those of us that are left here, even the new members, have borne so much that they are able to bear the truth." There was a rustle and a noise of sitting down. "M. Pernet is right, I think, although I'm sorry Jean should have deserted his wife and child. It would have been manlier not to buy his liberty at the price of others' suffering."

"That's what _I_ say."

The gray-haired woman nodded at some one out of sight.

"But who can decide the problems of another soul?" Mary Burne's white face grew weary. "We have enough with our own."

"Parfaitement."

"You may be sure," she went on, nodding gravely at her dingy audience, "a young man in vigorous health doesn't wrench himself out of the world without good cause. It's grown too common to be any longer a distinction"--she smiled bitterly--"and yet it's not common enough to be any easier, or any less reviled." Her eyes travelled from one forlorn face to the other with a kindling compa.s.sion. "But let us take courage, friends; we who have done without bread can do without approval--except of one kind." She paused an instant; a look of fanaticism leaped into the white face. "No matter what we have done in the past, we will not live, from this time on, without self-respect. Two or three of us have talked a good deal here about our duties to each other. Let us think to-night of the ultimate duty we owe ourselves. You know already how some of us cannot find courage to live till we have first a.s.sured ourselves of courage to die, if need be. I've told you, one or two of you, that it was like that with me; that when hideous things drove me away from home, things I'd borne for years, and should never have borne a moment"--she flung up her head with swelling nostrils--"when my awakening came, I said to myself, 'I'll go away and work; I'll go to Paris; and if I can't live there decently, I shall die there.' All through the long voyage I kept thinking that I was probably going, as fast as the s.h.i.+p could carry me, towards my grave. When one has lived days like that, life doesn't daunt one any more, nor death either."

"No, no!" murmured a voice behind the door.

"How shall any of us justify the desperate clinging to life for the mere sake of living?" She asked the question as if she were addressing a drawing-room full of prosperous people who had the merest speculative interest in the inquiry. "How many instances do we see of men and women who have outlived not only their usefulness, but their satisfactions?

And yet they drag along their gray existence, a dreary penance to themselves, and a menace to those who still can hope. There are those who cling to the pleasant fiction that every one is of some good use in the world. If that is so, it is equally true that every one does _some_ ill, stands in somebody's light, and bars his way to progress. But it is not with the real or imaginary 'helpers' we have to deal, but with those who through misfortune have lost their grip on circ.u.mstance, and whose whole remaining energy is absorbed in an animal-like clinging to existence. Many of the world's sick and wounded are capable of feeling the attraction of the idea of suicide, and are held back from freedom by two superst.i.tions. One was made current by the people who lacked the courage to 'go and do likewise,' and who, therefore, have branded all suicides 'lunatics' or 'cowards.' The other superst.i.tion was given the world by the priests, who would have been less zealous and less astute than history shows them if they'd not barred this escape with mighty threats and penalties."

"Bah!" "Priests!" "Oh yes!"

A little undercurrent from the crowd crept through her words.

"Many a gentle soul in the past," she went on, "has endured years of needless agony rather than buy release at the price of public execration--being denied decent burial, and flung into a ditch at the cross-ways with a stake driven through the body. We don't treat these refugees quite that way now, but in being less violent we are not less cruel. When we hear of a suicide, the first insult we offer him is to ask, 'Were his accounts right?' Next, 'Was he a victim to bad habits?'"

"Exactly!" cried the voice, in broken English. "What Babin said of Jean--"

"s.h.!.+ s.h.!.+"

"If it is found the dead man was a defaulter or an opium-eater, the most aimless c.u.mberer of the earth experiences a certain sense of justification. If a man is a villain, he must _want_ to get out of the world; but for honest folk life cannot be too long. Consequently, to support existence (or let some one else do it) seems in some way a tribute to a man's personal worth or mental poise. If it is found that the suicide had the audacity to leave the world without the urging of some vulgar misdeed to account for his unpleasant independence, then up goes the universal cry, 'He was insane!' Without doubt! The world is good enough for his betters, why not for him? 'Oh, the fellow was crazy!' And that settles it. As a proof _we_ are mentally sound, we will live on at any cost, be it our own souls or our brothers'. No, no. I tell you this thirst for life cannot be proved so worthy an instinct as some have hoped to show. It is the instinct that makes the brute world one vast slaughter-house. 'One must live' would be the motto of the shark, if he had one. 'One must live' is in the roar of the Bengal tiger, and the jackal's cry. I do not see but the greed of life is the strongest survival in man of primitive animal instinct. But it is not the n.o.blest of our legacies. Over many an unworthy page of human history is that legend, 'One must live.'" She stretched out her hands, crying, "_It is not true!_ One must live _worthily_, or one can die! I feel a pa.s.sionate sense of the wrong and ruin wrought by the general view. I feel it"--she dropped her eyes--"when I hear that a man steals to keep from starving, when"--her voice was heavy with shame--"when I see wide thoroughfares full at night of young girls and brazen women 'who must live.' 'Why don't they see there is an escape?' I think." She threw back her head with a quick movement, and just as suddenly the look of courage dimmed. "Then I realize that some of them, even if they could rise above the animal instinct to prolong life at any price, would remember priestly warnings, and fancy their chances in the hereafter brighter if they lived on--vile scavengers on the highways of the world!--than if they were brave enough to disdain an evil heritage, and wise enough not to fear death. Those who are so l.u.s.tful of life"--far beyond the little company she gazed, as one gathering in a survey all the peoples of the earth--"they are like beggars at a feast. They glut themselves indiscriminately, afraid to let a single dish go by. They sit stupid and gorged, still mechanically taking of everything pa.s.sed them, with dulled taste and jaded appet.i.te, eating and drinking, with sense left to think only, 'Who knows? we may never be at such a feast again.' I tell you"--she was back now with her dingy guests--"it is the beast in us that clings so fiercely to life. In the case of the unfortunate, the hard-pressed, the ancient instinct often outlives hope, principle, innocence--all that's best in humanity."

"But there are a good many--" interrupted the gray-haired woman, feebly.

"Yes, yes, thank Heaven!" Mary Burne agreed, in the old gentle voice.

"For those happy ones who have found, or think they have found, a chance of doing some service, or to those who for any reason find the world or themselves an interesting and compensating study, there are only congratulations, and a plea for fairer judgment of less fortunate, maybe not less sane or n.o.ble, men."

"Like ze poor Jean Latreille," lamented the Frenchman behind the door.

"No work; only me for friend."

"Yes, yes," a.s.sented Mary Burne, as if she knew the story, and others to cap it. "No one who is in sympathetic touch with his kind can honestly affirm that every man and woman has something worth living for, and can, if he and she choose, make an honest livelihood. It is frankly untrue!

Life is becoming more and more difficult to the majority; worldly success is more and more bought at the price of personal dignity. Mere existence for the million is secured only by a warfare in which he who does not slay is slain. But it is idle to enlarge upon the results of our civilization; every one with eyes sees how the conflict rages, and how the weak and often finer-natured go to the wall. It is not for me to urge that it is sad, or wasteful, but only that it _is_. My plea, as some of you know, is that more should realize there is honorable retreat this side moral overthrow."

The gray-haired woman moved uneasily. The speaker, glancing at her, seemed to answer an unuttered protest:

"Let no one say G.o.d would have a man yield bit by bit his faith and charity, accepting any terms, so that he may be allowed to draw his coward breath a little span the more. There is a kind of spiritual cannibalism among us, more appalling than the simpler sort we shudder to think is practised in Darkest Africa, or the islands of the South Sea.

It flourishes on our fairest hopes, and fills its witch's caldron with the consciences of men and the honor of our women. 'We must live!' the victims cry, and give up all that makes life worth the living. Maimed, stripped of grace and dignity, they wander forth into the world, to deaden the public sense of moral decency by the spectacle of their shame. The people who are shocked that one should think of suicide permit themselves a mild enthusiasm that long ago a blind King of Bohemia could care so much for his cause that he gathered a sheaf of his enemies' spears in his breast rather than face defeat. We are told there was once a Brutus, too, and many another in the brave old time, who showed there was a refuge this side dishonor. But the world has forgotten, and ancient valor is renamed modern cowardice."

Her scorn-filled eyes dropped an instant on the gray-haired woman's fingers fumbling feebly under her mantle. Below it the end of a rosary could be seen twitching against her gown. Mary Burne lifted quiet eyes from the dangling crucifix.

"Looking at the question from the religious standpoint," she said, "it is impious to suppose we can take the Creator by surprise or defeat His ends. If He sent us into the world, He knew just what weapons He put into our hands, where the weak spots in our armor were, and what foes would meet us. In the case of the suicide, He knew just how many hard blows he could meet like a soldier and a man, as well as He knew there would some day come a stroke that would cut him down. Does G.o.d sleep while the battle rages?" she cried, with swelling but uneven cadence--"while the wounded man drags himself away from the dying, pursued by visions of captivity and the loss of all he fought for?" She shook her head with slow, pitying solemnity. "Believers must think the eye of G.o.d is on this child of His, as he creeps wearily out of the strife and turns into a dark by-way, groping along to the little gate at the end. The fugitive looks back an instant"--into her own clear eyes came a curious filminess--"he is too calm to seem heroic, and the pain is fading out of his face. 'Good-bye, my enemies'"--she made the faintest little gesture of farewell to some world without her walls--"'good-bye, my friends'"--she nodded to the dingy crew within, and lifted haggard eyes above their heads--"'temptations, ghosts of failure and of grief, good-bye!' Silently turning, he pa.s.ses out through the little gate and shuts it fast behind him. Wherever he goes, no believer can suppose he has defeated G.o.d, or strayed outside the limits of His mercy."

As she ended she came forward. Gano, forgetting the dusk of the staircase, and thinking on the spur of the moment that she had caught sight of him, turned and made his way noiselessly down the three flights. He reached the street before he realized that Mary's motion forward had been to the gray-haired woman with the crucifix. But why had he been so afraid she should speak to him? He leaned against the lintel of the open door watching the rain. What strange thing had befallen his tender interest in this woman? It was gone. Simply wiped out. In its place a shrinking of his very soul. He had thought her so "womanly,"

full of protecting tenderness and steadfast cheer; and, behold! this abyss of hopelessness, this dark, iron resolution, this unshrinking acceptance of the tragedy of life.

The opinions she had given out, to be sure he shared them more or less; but it hurt him to think women shared them, above all the woman he-- A woman without hope--better she were without heart! Away, away with this unfeminine acceptance of the worst. It made the underlying horror of things more real, more unescapable! Away with such views, except for the occasional philosophic mood of man. Who wanted to have them daily, hourly brought to mind? He knew he should never see Mary Burne again without seeing that dingy circle of the lost, and the look of unshrinking despair that hardened and whitened in her face.

Her old sheltering mother-gentleness, where was it? _His_ old tenderness for the tenderness in her, where was that? Gone, gone, and in its place this staggering dislike! He tried to think that, unselfconscious as she had been in manner, she had been theatrical in thought; he recalled some of her sentences--she was a phrase-maker! She liked standing up there, even before such an audience, listening to the sound of her own voice, and airing views that she no doubt thought original and bold. He did not for a moment realize that just because he in the main agreed with her "beyond refuge," he shrank from hearing himself echoed back to himself from the imagined haven of a woman's heart. It was a situation meet for wry, ironic laughter that the woman he had been drawn to for her supposed embodiment of man's soothing ultra-feminine ideal should be caught playing the part of a dingy nineteenth-century Joan of Arc, urging men to battle and to death.

CHAPTER XVII

The _concierge_ appeared, angry and s.h.i.+very, and bade him either come in or go out. He was in the act of doing the latter when he remembered Driscoll. He turned back and faced the angry woman.

"Go up to Madame Burne," he said, giving the woman a franc, "and tell her--wait!" He searched his pockets, and finally drew the envelope off Mrs. Gano's birthday letter, and wrote on the back:

"Driscoll unable to sleep without some word from you. Please send down a message for him."

"Give her that and bring me the answer."

The woman shuffled up-stairs. He stood there in the dingy pa.s.sage, waiting, cogitating. Suppose Mary were to send word that after all she would come when that infernal club broke up, what should he do? He would certainly have to protect poor old Driscoll against her pitiless fanaticism. That much was clear. It took her a long time to scribble a line. He paced back and forth from the foot of the mud-tracked stair to the open door, where the rain fell ceaselessly. With a sudden elation he thought of the change in his fortunes, and how soon he should have turned his back upon all this squalor. A millionaire! Yes, it had a good ring. It took the sound of Mary Burne's voice out of his tortured ears.

Suddenly he paused, hearing with relief the shambling footsteps of the returning _concierge_, a relief rudely dashed with fear of the message she might be bringing.

A quicker figure slipped before the square, slow-moving woman; it was Mary Burne, running down the stairs, dressed to go out.