Front matter (continued 2)

The library work interested me more than my study had done. Even the routine detail of it was not bad and I had much time to spend on the Old English which fascinated me. I was not ambitious and would have been content to spend my life in that peaceful, pleasant town. But Prof. Meers had other plans for me. Back of my indolent interest in old books, he was optimistic enough to see a promise of great scholarship. He was better as a critic of literature than as a judge of men. He continually made plans for me. I paid scant attention to them until almost a year had passed and we were beginning to see the end of the work he could offer me. I began to speculate with more interest about what I would do next.

Without telling me about it, Prof. Meers wrote to the head of a New York Library, whom he knew and secured a position for me. When he received the news he came to me with a more definite plan than I would ever have been able to work out for myself. He knew that a certain publishing house wanted to bring out a text book edition of "Ralph Roister Doister." He had given them my name and I was to prepare the manuscript during my free hours. This he told me would not bring me much money, but some reputation and would make it easier for him to find other openings for me, where I could develop my taste for Old English. I caught some of his enthusiasm and set out for my new work with high hopes.

Of my first weeks in the city there is little memory left except of a disheartening search for a place to live. After much tramping about I took a forlorn hall bedroom in a not over peaceful family. The quest for an eating place was equally unsatisfactory.

In the library I was put to uninteresting work in the Juvenile Department. But there, handling books in words of one syllable, I found a new and disturbing outlook on life. There was more jealousy than friendship among my fellow employees. The chances of advancement were few, the competition keen—and new to me. I did not understand the hostility, which underlies the struggle for a living. Once I remember I found a carefully compiled sheet of figures, which I had prepared for my monthly report, torn to bits in my waste paper basket. Another time some advice, which I afterwards discovered to have been intentionally misleading, sent me off on a wild goose chase, wasted half a day and brought me a reprimand from the chief. Such things were incomprehensible to me at first. It took some time to realize that the people about me were afraid of me, afraid that I might win favor and be advanced over their heads. I resented their attitude, but gradually, by a word dropped here and there, I learned how a dollar a week more or less was a very vital matter to most of them. One girl in my department had a mother to support and was trying desperately to keep a brother in school. There was a man whose wife was sick, the doctor's and druggist's bills were a constant terror to him. Very likely if I had been in their place, I would have done the little, mean things they did. Life began to wear a new aspect of sombreness to me. I could not hope for advancement without trampling on someone.

By temperament I was utterly unfitted for this struggle. My desire for life was so weak that such shameful, petty hostilities seemed an exorbitant price to pay for it. I would much rather not have been born than struggle in this manner to live. I began to look about eagerly for some other employment. But I could find none which did not bear the same taint.

However it was there in that library that I encountered Norman Benson. He was near ten years older than I, tall and loose jointed. His face, very heavily lined, reminded me of our Tennessee mountaineers. But the resemblance went no farther. He was a city product, bred in luxury and wealth. He was variously described by the people of the library as "a saint," "a freak," "a philanthropist," "a crank." The chief called him "a bore." He was the idol of the small boys who ran errands for us and put the books back on the shelves. He gave them fat Egyptian cigarettes out of his silver case, to their immense delight and to the immense horror of Miss Dilly, who had the boys in charge.

His hobby, as he soon explained to me, was "a circulating library that really circulates." He had a strange language, a background of Harvard English, a foreground of picturesque slang—all illumined by flashes of weird profanity. Of course I cannot recall his words, but his manner of speaking I shall never forget.

"They call this a circulating library," he would shout. "Hell! It never moves an inch. It's stationary! Instead of going out around the town, it sits here and waits for people to come. And the people don't come. Not on your life! Only a few have the nerve to face out all this imposing architecture and red-tape. If there is anything to discourage readers, they don't do it because they've been too stupid to think of it. If a stranger comes in and asks for a book they treat him like a crook. Ask him impertinent questions about his father's occupation. Won't let him take a book unless he can get some tax-payer to promise to pay for it if he steals it! What in thunder has that got to do with it? Someone wants to read. They ought to send up an Hosanna! They ought to go out like postmen, and leave a book at each door every morning. Circulating? Rot!"

He had given his time and money for a year or two to bring about this reform. At first he had met with cold indifference. But he stuck to his point. He had put up his money as guarantees for any books which might be lost. He had persuaded half a dozen or more school teachers to distribute books among their scholars and the parents, paying them out of his own pocket for the extra work. He had established branches in several mission churches and in one or two saloons.

"That corpse of a librarian," he explained to me, "had the fool idea that his job was to preserve books—to pickle them! I've been trying to show him that every book he has on his shelves gathering dust, is money wasted, that his job is to keep them moving. The city's books ought to be in the homes of the tax-payers—not locked up in a library. The very idea horrified him at first. He was afraid the books would get dirty. Good Lord! What's the best end that can come to a book, I'd like to know? It ought to fall to pieces from much reading. For a book to be eaten by worms is a sin. I've been hammering at him, until he's beginning to see the light. He don't cry any more if a book has to be rebound."

Indeed, the "hammering" process had been effective. That year the chief read a paper at the National Congress on "Library Extension." Of course he took all the credit; boasted how the idea had come from his library and so forth. But Benson cared not at all for that. His plan had been accepted and he was content.

He interested me immensely. Why did a man with a large income spend his time, rushing about trying to make people read books they did not care enough for to come after? I could get no answer from him. He would switch away from the question into a panegyric on reading. It was a frequent expression of his that "reading is an invention of the last half century."

"Of course," he would qualify, "the aristocracy has enjoyed reading much longer. But the people? They've just learned how. The democratization of books is the most momentous social event in the history of the world. Think of it! More people read an editorial in the newspaper within twenty-four hours than could possibly have read Shakespeare during his entire life. There are dozens of single books which have had a larger edition than all the imprints of Elizabethan literature put together. Don't you see the immensity of it? It means that people all over the world will be able to think of the same thing at the same time. It means a social mind. Plato lived in his little corner of the world and his teachings lived by word of mouth and manuscripts. Only a few people could read them, fewer still could afford to buy them. 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' swept across the country in a couple of years. Think how long it took Christianity to spread—a couple of hundred miles a century. And then think of the theory of evolution! It has captured the world in less than a generation! That's what books mean. We're just entering the epoch of human knowledge as compared to the old learning of individuals. It's gigantic! Wonderful!"

Benson, like many another, took a liking to me. I was lonely enough in that library. And finding no sympathy elsewhere, I improved every opportunity to talk with him.

One evening he asked me to come home with him to dinner. I accepted gladly, being more than tired of my pallid little room, and the sloppy restaurant where I ate. An evening with this rich young man, seemed attractive indeed. To my surprise he led the way to a downtown Bowery car. I did not know the city well and I thought perhaps this dismal street led to some fairer quarter. But the further we went the grimmer became the neighborhood. It was my first visit to the slums.

We got off at Stanton Street. It is so familiar to me now—with its dingy unloveliness, the squalor of its tenements, its crowding humanity, and the wonder that people can laugh in such a place—that it is hard to recall how it looked that first time. I think the thing which impressed me most was the multitude of children. Clearest of all I remember stepping over a filthy baby. It lay flat on its back, sucking an apple core and stared up at me with a strange disinterestedness. It did not seem to be afraid I would step on it. I wanted to stop and set the youngster to one side, out of the way. But I felt that I would look foolish. I did not know where to take hold of it. And Benson strode on down the street without noticing it.

A couple of blocks further, we came to a dwelling house with flower boxes in the windows. A brass-plate on the door bore the inscription, "The Children's House." So I was introduced to the Social Settlement. They were novelties in those days.

A tumult of youngsters swarmed about us as we entered. A sweet faced young woman was trying to drive them out, explaining with good natured vexation that they had over-stayed their time and would not go. They clambered all over Benson, but somehow he was more successful than the young woman in persuading them to go home. Her name, when Benson introduced me, gave me a start. It recalled a fantastic newspaper story of a millionaire's daughter who had left her diamonds and yachts to live among the poor. I had supposed her some sallow-faced, nun-like creature. I found her to be vibrantly alive, not at all a recluse.

The Settlement consisted of a front and rear tenement. The court between had been turned into a pleasant garden. With the hollyhocks along the walls and the brilliant beds of geraniums it was a strangely beautiful place for that crowded district. The men's quarters were in the back building. Benson had two rooms on the top floor, a small monastic bedroom and a larger study. It surprised me more than the courtyard. It was startling to find the atmosphere of a college dormitory in the center of the slums. The books, the fencing foils, the sofa-pillows in the window-seat—after my months in a furnished room—made me homesick for my fraternity house.

Downstairs in the cheery dining room, I met the staff of "Residents." The Rev. James Dawn, an Englishman, was the Head Worker. He was a graduate of Oxford and had been associated with Arthur Toynbee in the first London Settlement. His wife, also English, sat at the foot of the table. Benson introduced me rapidly to the others. "Miss Blake—District Nurse," "Miss Thompson—Kindergartner," "Long, Instructor in Sociology in the University," "Dr. Platt—of the Health Department." I did not begin to get the labels straight.

It was a very much better dinner than I could get in any restaurant, better than the food I had had at College and school. But the thing which impressed me most was the whizz of sharp, intellectual—often witty—conversation. The discussion centered on one of the innumerable municipal problems. I was ashamed of my inability to contribute to it.

It was to me a wonderfully attractive group of people. They enjoyed all which seemed most desirable in college life and added to this was a strange magnetic earnestness, I did not understand. I saw them relaxed. But even in their after-dinner conversation, over their coffee cups and cigarettes, there was an undercurrent of seriousness which hinted at some vital contact with an unknown reality. I was like an Eskimo looking at a watch, I could not comprehend what made the hands go round. I could see their actions, but not the stimuli from which they reacted. I knew nothing of misery.

That evening set my mind in a whirl. It was an utterly new world I had seen. I had never thought of the slums except as a distressful place to live. Stanton Street was revolting. I did not want to see it again. And yet I could not shake myself free from the thought of it—of it and of the strange group I had met in the Children's House. There seemed to be something fateful about it, something I must look at without flinching and try to understand.

On the other hand some self-defensive instinct made me try to forget it. The distaste for the struggle for life which had come to me from experiencing the petty jealousies of the library was turned into a dumb, vague fear by the sight of the slum. I turned to "Ralph Roister Doister"—on which I had made only listless progress—with a new ardor. The only escape which I could see from perplexing problems of life lay in a career of scholarship.

The Old English which had formerly been an amusement for me, now seemed a means of salvation. When Benson next suggested that I spend the evening with him, I excused myself on the ground of work.

But very often as I sat at my table, burning the midnight oil over that century old farce, the vision of that baby of Stanton Street, sucking the piece of garbage, came between me and my page. And I felt some shame in trying to drive him away. It was as though a challenging gauntlet had been thrown at my feet which I must needs pick up and face out the fight, or commit some gross surrender. I tried to escape the issue, with books.

BOOK III

I

Not long after this visit to the slums, when I had been in the city a little more than a year, I received a new offer of employment, through the kindness of Professor Meer. The work was to catalogue, and edit a descriptive bibliography of a large collection of early English manuscripts and pamphlets. A rich manufacturer of tin cans had bought them and intended to give them to some college library.

It offered just the escape I was looking for. I wrote at once, in high spirits, to accept it. However some cold water was thrown on my glee by Norman Benson. He was my one friend in the library and I hastened to tell him the good news. But when he read the letter he was far from enthusiastic.

"Are you going to accept it?" he asked coldly.

"Of course," I replied, surprised at his tone. "I hardly hoped for such luck, at least not for many years. It's a great chance."

"This really interests me," he said, laying down the books he was carrying and sitting on my desk. "What earthly good," he went on, "do you think it's going to do anyone to have you diddle about with these old parchments?"

"Why. It——" I began glibly enough, but I was not prepared for the question. And, realizing suddenly that I had not considered this aspect of the case, I left my response unfinished.

"I haven't a bit of the scholastic temperament," he said, after having waited long enough to let me try to find an answer. "It's just one of the many things I don't understand. I wouldn't deny that any bit of scholarship, however 'dry-as-dust,' may be of some use. I don't doubt that a good case of this kind could be made for the study of medieval literature. I don't say it's absolutely useless. But relatively it seems—well—uninteresting to me. It's in the same class as astronomy. You could study the stars till you were black in the face and you wouldn't find anything wrong with them, and if you did you couldn't make it right. Astronomy has been of some practical use to us, at least it helps us regulate our watches. But how in the devil do you expect to wring any usefulness out of Anglo-Saxon? Don't you want to be useful?"

His scorn for my specialty ruffled my temper.

"What would you suggest for me to do? Social-Settlement-ology?" I replied with elaborate irony.

But if he caught the note of anger in my retort, he was too busy with his own ideas to pay any attention to it. He got off the table and paced up and down like a caged beast, as he always did when he was wrestling with a problem. In a moment he came back and sat down.

"You don't answer my question," he said sharply. "You can stand on your dignity and say I have no right to ask it. But that's rot! I'm serious and I give you the credit of thinking you are. Now you propose to turn your back on the world and go into a sort of monastery. This job is just a beginning. You're making your choice between men and books, between human thought that is alive and the kind that's been preserved like mummies. Why? I ask. What is there in these old books which can compare in interest to the life about us. Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more dramatic, more comic, more tragic, more beautiful. Even Shelley never wrote a lyric like some you can see with your own eyes, perhaps feel. I like to know what makes people do things. I'd like to know what makes you accept this offer. I assume that you want to be useful to your day and generation. What utility do you hope to serve in tabulating these old books, which nobody but a few savants will ever read?"

I was entirely unprepared to answer his question. And I felt myself sink in his estimation. Why was I reaching out for the life of a bookworm with such eagerness? I understand now. I was a coward. I was still sore from the wounds of my childish endeavor to comprehend God. I was afraid of life. I was afraid of the little child sucking the apple core on Stanton Street. The life about me, of which Benson spoke so enthusiastically, seemed to me threatening. It evidently laid an obligation of warfare on the people who entered it actively. I wanted peace. Books seemed to me a sort of city of refuge.

My new employer, Mr. Perry, the tin-can man, was a strange type. He had grown up in a fruit preserving industry and at thirty-odd he had invented a method of crimping the tops onto cans, without the use of solder. Good luck had given him an honest business partner and the patent had made a fortune for both of them. When the first instalment of royalties had come in, Perry had stopped stirring the kettle of raspberry preserves and had not done a stroke of work since. At forty he had built a "mansion" in the city and had gone in for politics. He bought his way to a seat in the State Senate, only to find that it bored him to extinction. After several other fads had proved uninteresting, he had set his heart on a LL.D. A friend had advised him to donate a valuable collection of books to some college.

He had sent a large check to a London dealer and this heterogeneous mass had been the result. As his interest in the matter had been only momentary he was decidedly penurious about it after the first outlay. That, I suppose, is why I, instead of a recognized authority, was chosen for the work. He had no idea what the catalogue should be like, and his one instruction to me, was to make it "something scholarly."

There was in his monstrous mansion an apartment originally designed for the children's tutor. But there had never been any children. These quarters were given to me. There was a private entrance, a bedroom, bath and study, where my meals were served, and there was a stairway down to the library.

In the three years I worked for him I did not see him ten times. His wife was dead, he lived away a good deal and, to my great satisfaction, he never invited me to his bachelor parties—the reverberations of which sometimes shook me out of sleep. Once every six months or so he would bring an expert to look over my work. As they found no fault and he could not understand it, he was convinced that it was scholarly.

It was a period of great content for me. The rut into which I fell was deep indeed. I saw no one. Almost my only contact with others was by mail. And my letters all related to my specialty. Eight full hours I worked in the library. The architect had not expected Mr. Perry to do much reading and, the windows being few, the room was gloomy. I had often to use artificial light. At five I went for an hour's walk in the park. At least this was my theory. But the least inclemency was an excuse to take some manuscript up to my room, to my shaded lamp and open fire. The daily eight hours on the catalogue was only a beginning. As soon as I had finished my edition of "Ralph Roister-Doister," I began a monograph on Anglo-Saxon Roots. My ambition was to win a fellowship in an English University. By the time my catalogue was finished, I would have enough money put by for a year or more of study in Oxford. My life was mapped out.

II

The darkness came unexpectedly.

Sometimes my eyes had been tired, but I had not taken it seriously. One afternoon, as I laid out a sheet of paper on the desk, the page was suddenly obscured by a dancing spider-web—a dizzying contortion of black and white—growing denser and denser. I clapped my hands over my eyes and felt so sudden a relief I was afraid to take them away again.

I got up slowly and felt my way with my foot to an easy chair. How long I sat there, my hands pressed hard against my eyes, I do not know. I had read somewhere of a man going blind with just such symptoms. It was fear unspeakable, fear that made me laugh. When one feels that the gods are witty it is a bad sign.

I was suddenly calm. It was accepted. I thought for a few minutes, my eyes still shut, and then felt my way to the telephone.

"Central," I said, and I remember that my voice was calm and commonplace. "Will you give me the Eye and Ear Hospital? I can't look up the number. I'm blind."

"Sure," came back the answer. "It must be hard to be blind."

A clutch came to my throat. It comes to me now as I write about it, comes every time I hear people complaining that modern industry has robbed our life of all humanity, has turned us into mechanisms. Such talk makes me think of the sudden sympathy which came to me out of the machine. Whenever I am utterly blue and discouraged, I go into a telephone booth.

"Hello, Central," I say, "tell me something cheerful. I'm down on my luck."

It has never failed. Always some joking sympathy has come out of the machine and helped me to get right again.

When the doctor came, he looked a minute at my desk, at the whole eye-straining mass of faded print and notes. He snapped on the electric light.

"I suppose you work a lot in this fiendish glare?"

"I need a strong light," I said.

He grunted in disgust.

"This will hurt," he said, as he made me sit down near the electric light, "but you've got to bear it."

He fixed a little mirror on his forehead and flashed the cruel ray into my eye. Back somewhere in the brain it focussed and burned. The sweat broke out all over me.

"Now the other eye."

I flinched for a moment, holding my hand before it.

"Come, come," he said gruffly, and I took my hand away.

When the ordeal was over, he tied a black bandage over my eyes, laid me down on the lounge and lectured me. When he stopped for breath, I interrupted.

"What hope is there?"

He hesitated.

"Oh! Tell me the truth."

"Well—I guess the chances are even—of your seeing enough for ordinary work. But they will never be strong. You'll have to give up books. You must keep your eyes bandaged—complete rest—six weeks—then we can tell how much damage you've done. It is only a guess now."

We talked business. I had enough money saved for a private room and good treatment, so he put me into a cab and told the driver to deliver me at the hospital.

It was an appalling experience, that ride. Try it yourself. Ride through the streets with your eyes darkened: you will hear a thousand sounds you never heard before, even familiar sounds will be fearsome. Every jolt, every stoppage will seem momentous. I was glad the doctor did not come with me, glad that no one saw me so afraid.

At last we stopped and I heard the cabby call.

"Hey! there. Come out and take this man."

I revolted at my helplessness, pushed the door open and stumbled as I stepped out. I would have fallen heavily, if an orderly had not been there to catch me.

"You must be careful at first, Mister," he said. "You'll get used to it in time."

That was just what I was afraid of—getting used to the darkness!

However, his words jogged my pride. The ways of the gods seemed funny to me again, and I joked with him as he led me up some stairs and into a receiving room. The house surgeon, to me only a voice, was nervously cheerful. He kept saying, "It'll be all right." "It'll be all right." He seemed to be dancing about in all directions. My ears had not become accustomed to locating sounds. I suppose he moved about normally, but he seemed to talk from a different angle every time.

"This is Miss Barton," he said at last. "She is day nurse in your ward. She'll make you comfortable."

Mechanically I thrust my hand out into the darkness. It was met and grasped by something I knew to be a hand, but it did not feel like any hand I had ever seen.

"I'm glad to meet you," I said.

With some jest about people not usually being glad to meet nurses, she led me off to the elevator and my room.

"You've quite a job before you—exploring this place," she said with real cheer in her voice. "There are all sorts of adventures in this terra incognita. Everything is cushioned so you can't bang your shins, but watch out for your toes. At first you'd better stay in bed for a few days and rest. Have you all you need in your valise?"

"I don't know. A servant packed it."

"Well then. That's the first bit of exploring to do. I'll help you."

Her voice also jumped about surprisingly. There was something weird in being in a room with an utter stranger whose existence was only manifested by this apparently erratic voice and by hands which unsnarled my shoe laces, handed me my pajamas, and put me to bed.

"I must run off now and attend to Mrs. Stickney, next door—she is very fussy. The night nurse, Miss Wright, comes on pretty soon, at six. She'll bring you your supper. When you wake up in the morning, ring the bell, here over your head, and I'll bring you breakfast. Good night."

It was when she had gone and I alone there in the strange bed, that I first felt the awful void of the darkness. I do not like to think of it now.

It was probably not many minutes, but it seemed hours on end, before Miss Wright brought me my supper. She sat on the edge of my bed and helped me find the way to my mouth. She was considerate, and tried to be cheering. But I did not like her. Always her very efficiency reminded me of my helplessness. And her voice seemed too large for a woman. It gave me the impression that she was talking to someone several feet behind me.

They had, I think, mercifully drugged my food, for I fell asleep at once. When I woke I had no idea of the hour. For some time I lay there in the darkness wondering about it. I did not want to wake anybody up. But at last I decided that I would not be so hungry before breakfast time. After much futile fumbling I found the bell above my bed. In a few minutes Miss Barton's voice—even after all these years, I think of it as the type of sunny cheerfulness—announced that it was near eleven. When the breakfast was finished, with joking cautions against setting the bed on fire, she filled my pipe and taught my hands the way to the matchbox.

In the weeks which followed, I lost all track of the sun's time. I came to figure my days in relation to her. During the "nights," when she was off duty, the darkness was very black.

It would be impossible for me to give in detail the evolution by which Miss Barton, my nurse, changed into my friend, Ann. It began I think when she discovered how utterly alone I was. The second day in the hospital I was given permission to have visitors, and I sent for my employer's man of law.

"Whom do you want to have come to see you to-morrow?" Miss Barton asked when he had gone.

I could think of no one.

"Do you want me to write some letters to your relatives?"

"No. I haven't any near kin."

"Well. Haven't you some friends to write to?"

In the three years I had lived at Mr. Perry's I had severed all social connections. I had not kept up my college friendships. Benson had been so opposed to my leaving what he called active life that I had lost all touch with him. My only relations with people had been technical, by correspondence. I did not want to trouble even Prof. Meer with my purely personal misfortunes. This seemed utterly impious to Miss Barton. What? I had lived several years in the city and had no friends? It was unbelievable! Unfortunately it was true. I could think of no one to ask in to relieve my loneliness. And there is no loneliness like the darkness.

The next week was the worst, for the nurses changed and Miss Wright, who was on day duty, was not companionable. However, Miss Barton, taking compassion on me, used often to sit with me by the hour at night. How fragmentary was my contact with her! No one who has not been deprived of sight can realize how large a part it plays in the relationships of life. I could only hear. There was always the creak of the rocking chair beside my bed and her voice, sometimes placid, sometimes tense, swinging back and forth in the darkness. It did not seem to have any body to it. Whenever her hands touched me, it startled me.

But from her talk I learned something of the person who owned the voice. She had been born in a Vermont village, where no one had ever heard of a professional woman, but as far back as she could remember, she had set her heart on medicine. Her father she had never known. Her mother, a fine needlewoman and embroidery designer had brought up the children. A brother was an engineer and the older sister a school teacher. But there had not been enough money to send Ann to medical college. Nursing was as near as she had been able to get towards her ambition. But what could not be given her she intended to win for herself. She had taken this position because the night duty was very light and every other week she could give almost the entire day to study. Her interest had turned to the new science of bacteriology. Her vague ambition to be a doctor had changed to the definite ideal of research work.

Somehow the voice, so calmly certain when it dealt of this, gave me an impression of integrity of purpose, of invincible determination, such as sight has never given me of anyone. I did not, any more than she, know how she was to get her research laboratory. But I could not doubt that she would. She had unquestioning faith in her destiny. I find myself emphasizing this phase of her. It impressed me most at the time.

But her conversation was by no means limited to her ambition. She had read a thousand things besides her medicine, and spoke of them more frequently. She was constantly referring to books, to facts of history and science, of which I was ignorant. She talked seriously of ethics and the deeper things of life. It woke again in me all the old questionings and aspirations of prep. school days—the things I had hidden away from in my book-filled library. She was the first person I had met since the doctor at school who showed me what she thought of these things. Benson had talked copiously about the objective side of life, but he had never referred to his inner life. The people I had known wanted to make this world a prayer meeting, a counting house or a playground. Ann was no more interested in such ideals than I was.

She used a phraseology which was new to me: "Individualism," "self-expression," "expansion of personality." She spoke of life as a crusade against the tyrannies of prejudice and conventions. Her viewpoint was biologic. All evolutionary progress was based on variations from the type. Efforts to sustain or conserve the type she called "reactionary" and "invasive." She insisted on the desirability of "absolute freedom to vary from the norm." The authority she quoted with greatest reverence was Spencer. This conversation, much of which I did not understand, showed me clearly one thing—a soul seeking passionately for truth. That she told me was her ideal as it had been the war-cry of Bakounine. "Je suis un chercheur passionné de la Vérité."

When any reference was made to my manner of life, she flared up. It was—and this was her worst denunciation—unnatural.

"I believe in individualism, egoism," she said. "But not in isolation. Man is naturally as gregarious as the ant. An ant that lived alone would be a non-ant. You've been a non-man. It's good your eyes went back on you—if it teaches you sense. Intercourse with one's kind is a necessary food of human life."

And while it was a God-send for me to find someone to talk to, it must have been also a pleasure for her. The stories she told me about the other patients showed that their relations to nurses were barren enough—when not actually insulting. After listening by the hour to Mrs. Stickney's endless little troubles, it was a relief for her, I think, to come to my room and talk of the things which interested her violently. She gave more and more time to me. During the third week, when she was again on day duty, she read me Lecky's "History of European Morals."

III

It is hard to write about the next week. I can no longer see it as it must have looked in those days. I cannot tell the "why" of it. It was.

There was immense loneliness—and fear. The few hundred dollars I had saved for studying in Oxford would pay the doctor's bill and keep me for some months. But what was there beyond, if my eyes did not come back? At best the chances were only even. In any case the one trade I knew was gone. A bookworm with weak eyes is a sorry thing. Of course I might have gone home. But I have never had much respect for the Prodigal Son. He must have been a poor spirited chap.

Well, in my utmost misery, Ann comforted me—as women have comforted men since the world began. In some inexplicable way, for some inexplicable causes, she loved me.

I try to arrange my memories of those days in orderly sequence. But it is all a blur. Day by day my need grew and day by day she met the need. The patients in that hospital did not require much attention, except in the day. Most of them slept well. They rarely rang for her after midnight. She gave me more and more of her time.

The stress between us grew rapidly, but by gradual steps, almost imperceptibly. Her hand rested in mine a trifle longer. The hand clasp became a caress—then a kiss. The kiss lingered....

So the voice took on a body. Touch came to the aid of hearing as a means of contact with this dear person of the darkness. It is strange in what a fragmentary way she took shape in my consciousness as something more than a paid nurse, more close and intimate than any friend I had known in the light.

In the darkness every other thing seemed strange. What I discovered by touch to be a table, did not fit into the old category of "tables." Even the pipe which I had smoked since college seemed to have undergone some fundamental change in its nature. Ann was the only thing which seemed natural. I had had no intimacy with woman of the light by which I could judge this experience. Coming to me as it did, it did not seem strange—it made subsequent things seem strange. When at last my eyes were opened, I blushed before Ann as before a stranger.

It all seemed so inevitable.

"It's late," she said one night, "I must go. If you want me, ring."

"Of course I want you."

"But you ought to sleep. I mean, ring if anything happens."

"It don't matter whether anything happens or not. I——"

"Don't ring unless you need me."

The door closed behind her. I lay there debating with myself whether or not I needed her. The bell was in reach of my hand. I got out of bed to be further from temptation. With awkward trembling hands, I filled and lit my pipe and sat down by the open window. My head ached with loneliness and desolation. Off somewhere in the night a church bell struck two, some belated footsteps rang sharp and clear on the sidewalk below me. I tried to interest myself in speculating whither or to whom the person was hurrying. But my thoughts swung back to my own loneliness. In all the world there was no one who knew of my blindness and cared except the tin-can merchant who was cursing that he must have the trouble to find someone to finish my work. No. There was Ann.

Quite suddenly a vision of my childhood came back to me, of the time I had been sick at Mary Dutton's, when she had taken me into the warm comfort of her bed. The vision brought quick resolution. I rang the bell. I stood up against the wall and waited—breathless. The door opened and from the darkness came her voice.

"Do you really want me?"

I do not think I spoke, but I remember reaching out my hands to her. My strained ears caught a faint rustle—then came touch—and my arms were about her.

So I was comforted.

IV

For the night there was rich forgetfulness. But the new day called me back from the Elysian Fields to the cold reality of this ordinary world of ours.

My familiarity with the frank openness of my good friend Chaucer and the early English writers had cleansed my mind of much nastiness. I never had any feeling of Biblical sin in regard to my sudden passion for Ann. It was too entirely sweet and natural to be anything so wrong. But conflicting with this early Renaissance attitude was a modern sense of personal responsibility. The implications of the thing troubled me desperately.

As I sat there in the darkness, thinking it out—with now and then Miss Wright coming in on the routine business of the day—I realized for the first time the difference between love and passion. There was no doubt that Ann loved me. But I did not love her.

She was as far removed from cheap sentimentality as any woman I have known. She was strangely unromantic. There was an impressive definiteness about everything she did. I knew from the first that the love she gave me was for always. It was to be the big human factor of her life, but it was not to be mutual. In my misery I wanted her comfort, in my loneliness I had need of her affection. I had grown greatly fond of her, dependent on her, but I knew from the first that she was not to be the center of my life.

Nevertheless my course seemed very clear. "The Woman Who Did" had not been written in those days. The idea, now so commonly expressed in literature, that sex life outside of marriage might be beautiful and dignified, was not familiar. Although I had no longing for a perpetual mating, no desire to marry her, my conscience told me very clearly that I ought to. I did not think that I could, with anything like decency, do less.

Since Margot had receded, I had not been given to romantic dreams. I was not counting on the grand passion, as a necessary part of life, so there was no especial self-sacrifice in closing the door on that possibility by marrying a woman I did not wholly love. Yet, threatened with blindness without money or a trade, what had I to offer her? The more I thought of these things the more humble I became. However her "fair name" seemed more important to me than any of these considerations. It was regrettable that I could not assure her ease and comfort. It was regrettable that I could not give her the love which should be the kernel of marriage, but all this seemed no reason not to offer her the husk.

When at last Ann came, she laughed at me. What? Get married? Nothing was further from her mind. She had her own work mapped out for her. Set up a home? Why as soon as she had saved a hundred and fifty dollars more she was going to Paris to study with Pasteur. People might laugh at his germs and cultures and serums. Let them laugh! The future was to bacteriology. Marry? Of course she loved me, but where did I get those two ideas mixed up?

She gave me a lecture on free love. It is hard to write about a theory to which I am so strongly opposed. Yet Ann's attitude in this matter is an integral part of my story.

The longer I live the more remarkable it seems to me, how limited is the field in which any of us does original thinking. One of my friends is an exceedingly able physician. Within his specialty he has been startlingly radical. His cures, however, are so amazing that his colleagues are accepting his methods. But in all other departments of thought he is hopelessly conservative. Another acquaintance, a painter, is a daring innovator in his use of colors, but has unquestioningly accepted all those beliefs which Max Nordau has called "The Conventional Lies of our Civilization." To one subject we seem to give all our mental energy, all our powers of original thinking, in other matters we believe what we are taught. It was so with Ann. Her specialty was bacteriology, her ideas on marriage she had inherited.

Her mother, whom I afterwards came to know and respect, was a remarkable woman. Mr. Barton, after a fairly upright younger life, had deserted her at thirty-five. Although neither Ann nor Mrs. Barton, ever spoke much of him, I learned that he had died, a hopeless drunkard. At first the mother had supported the children by nursing and sewing among the families of her Vermont neighbors. And everywhere, once she had entered the privacy of a household, she found the same repellent pretense, a carefully preserved outward show of harmony and affection, an inside reality of petty quarrels and discord. Often she found situations of more abhorrent tragedy, jealousy, hatred and strange passions, women heartbroken for lack of love, bodily broken from an excess of child-bearing. From considering her own misfortunes a horrible exception, she came to believe such sorrows were pitifully common. And everywhere women seemed to be the victims. However unhappy a man's married life might be, he found release in his work. To the woman, home was everything, if it went wrong, all life was awry.

By chance apparently, but I suppose inevitably, she had come in contact with some of the leaders of the early "Woman's Rights Movement." She corresponded with them ardently and at length came west to Cincinnati, having decided that she needed education. She supported herself and her children by needle-work and spent half the nights, after they were abed, over schoolbooks. She had to begin at the beginning. By herself, in her garret, she followed the grammar school course, crowding the work which takes a child two or three years, into the half nights of one. Gradually she worked her way up to the position of forewoman in a large embroidery establishment and so was able to send her children through high school, the older ones to college. But her health had given out before Ann's turn came.

Her interest in the Woman's Movement had brought her into touch with all sorts of radicals and shortly after her arrival in Cincinnati she had met Herr Grun, a German Anarchist refugee. The friendship had grown into a beautiful love relationship which had lasted until his death.

Ann had accepted all the libertarian dogmas of her foster father. It seemed very wonderful to me to hear her speak about her "home." It was a barren enough word to me. But to her it meant a wealth of affection, a place of sure sympathy. I listened with sad and bitter envy to her stories of childhood. The loving kindness, the happy harmony which she had known at home, she had been taught to believe resulted from the free relationship between her mother and her lover. Ann had grown up in an atmosphere where free love was the conventional thing.

Persecution is the surest way of convincing a heretic that he is right. I have known a good many Anarchists and the most striking thing about them is their community interest. Whether or not they are seriously offensive towards society, they are all in a close defensive alliance against it. The hostility they meet on every hand forces them to associate with their own kind. Ann had grown up among the children of comrades.

To them love is an entirely personal, individual matter. The interference of the Church or State they regard as impertinent and indecent. They take this whole business of sex more seriously, and in some respects more sanely, than most of us. Their households, as far as I have seen them, are very little different, no better nor worse than the average home. Their advantage lies in the fact that most Anarchists are of kindly nature and that they are seldom cursed with money grubbing materialism. But this is a difference in the people, not in their institutions.

Marriage, for Ann, would have been a repudiation of her up-bringing and the people she loved, comparable to that of a daughter of a Baptist minister who became a Catholic nun or the third wife of a Mormon Elder. But Protestant women sometimes do marry Mormons or take the veil. And Anarchists are no wiser in bending the twig so it will stay bent than Baptists. If Ann had been this type of a woman, she might have kicked over the traces, and have left her people to marry me, as carefully reared daughters have done in similar crises since the world was young.

But she had a very definite theory that love should not be allowed to interfere with life. Each of us, she held, has been given a distinct personality, a special job to do in the world, and the development of this personality, the performance of this individual task, is the great aim of life. Love should not distract one from the race to the appointed goal. Love is an adornment of life. She spoke with biting scorn of a man she knew who "wore too many rings on his fingers." His taste was bad, he tried to over-decorate his life and so missed the reality of life. The goal she had set before her was bacteriology and she had not the faintest doubt that she had chosen it rightly. This was to be her life. If the fates granted her such joys as she called her love for me, it was something to be thankful for. But it must be subservient to—never allowed to interfere with—her career.

Certainly this is not the ordinary attitude of women towards love. But Ann was an exceptional woman, one of those unaccountable exceptions, which we label with the vague word "Genius."

A few months ago I picked up an illustrated French paper and opening it at random came upon a page containing photographs of half a dozen celebrated women. Ann's face was among them. There was an article by an eminent psychologist on "Women of Genius." His conclusions did not especially interest me, but I had never before seen so concise a statement of Ann's accomplishments, the learned societies to which she belongs, the scientific reviews she helps to edit, the brochures she has written, the noted discoveries she had made. It startled me to see on half a page so impressive a record of achievement.

It helps me now to a better understanding of the young woman, who puzzled me sorely twenty odd years ago. In those days I saw no special promise of distinction. I smile with a wry twist to my mouth when I recall my presumption in thinking that it was necessary for her to hide herself under the shadow of my name. I suppose that if she had consented to marry me, we would have somehow found a way to gain a livelihood. In my crippled condition I could not have done much—I have no knack for money making. The burden of supporting the home would have fallen considerably on her. Perhaps it would have been "better" for both of us, if her strange upbringing had not made marriage distasteful to her. She and I might possibly have been "happier" if she had not been filled by the consuming ambition which drove her to put love in a lesser place. Perhaps. But the race would have been poorer, would have lost her very real contributions to the elimination of disease.

I could not argue with her then about these things. My knowledge was so much less than hers. But although it was a relief to find that she would not marry me, there was still a feeling of deep injustice. There seemed a despicable cheat in taking from her so much more than I could give. It seemed ultimately unfair to accept a love I could not wholly return. But she brushed aside any efforts to explain. She ran to her room, and bringing a copy of the Rubaiyat, preached me quite a sermon on the quatrain about Omar's astronomy, how he had revised the calendar, struck off dead yesterday and the unborn tomorrow. Love, she said, was subjective, its joy came from loving, rather than from being loved. Then suddenly she became timorous. Perhaps she was being "invasive," perhaps I did not want her to love me....

My scruples went by the board with a rush. I surely did want her. And I was able to convince her of it.

V

Our relations having been for the time determined, Ann set about to reform me. She was really horrified at the isolated life I had been leading. That I took little interest in humanity, none at all in public life and only by chance knew who was mayor of the city, shocked her. Every evening, after her other patients had been settled for the night, she brought me the papers. There was no love-making—only one kiss—until she had read to me for half an hour. It bored me to extinction, but she insisted that it was good for me. I had to listen, because each evening she examined me on what she had read the night before. So I acquired a certain amount of unrelated information about millionaire divorces, murders and municipal politics.

Her next step was to make me associate with the other patients.

"Bored?" she scolded. "It's a sin to be bored. They're people—human beings—just as good as you are. You're not interested in Mrs. Stickney's husband? You're not interested in Mr. Blake's business worries? Those are the two great facts of life. The woman half of the world is thinking about men. The man half is thinking about business. They are the two things which are really most interesting."

She took my reformation so much to heart that I began to be interested in it myself. I familiarized myself with all the symptoms of a husband's dyspepsia. Mrs. Stickney's eye trouble seemed to have been caused by a too close application to cook books—in search for a dish her husband could digest. From Mr. Blake's peevish discourse I got a new insight into business and the big and little dishonesties which go to make it up. I sometimes wonder if he really was robbed during his illness as much as he expected to be. He was convinced that his chief competitor would buy his trade secrets from his head book-keeper. He did not seem angry at his rival nor at his employee for seizing this opportunity to cheat him, but at the fates which, by his sickness, offered them so great a temptation. He complained bitterly because no such lucky chances had ever come to him.

But it was through the newspapers that I gained most.

"Want to hear about a millionaire socialist, who says that all judges and policemen ought to serve a year in jail before being eligible for office?"

"It sounds more hopeful than campaign speeches," I said submissively.

It was Norman Benson. I recognized his quaint way of expressing things, before she came to his name.

"I know him," I laughed.

I had to tell her all about our short acquaintance.

"Why don't you ask him to come up and see you?"

I did not feel that I knew him well enough to bother him. I had not seen him nor heard from him for three years.

The first thing in the morning, without letting me know, she telephoned him of my plight. About eleven o'clock, to my immense surprise, Miss Wright brought him to my room.

Benson was the busiest man I have ever known. In later years when I roomed with him and was his most intimate friend, I could never keep track of half his activities. He was a sort of "consulting engineer" in advertising. Big concerns all over the country would send for him and pay well to have him attract the attention of the public to some new product. He could write the Spotless Town kind of verses while eating breakfast, and although he did not take art seriously, he drew some of the most successful advertisements of his time. One year he earned about thirty thousand dollars, above his inherited income of ten thousand. He did not spend more than five thousand a year on himself, but he was always hard up.

He was director of half a hundred philanthropies—settlements, day-nurseries, immigrant homes, children's societies, and so forth. His pet hobby was the "Arbeiter Studenten Verein." When he did not entirely support these enterprises, he paid the yearly deficit. It was such expenses which pushed him into the advertising work he detested.

It was a wonder to me how, in spite of these manifold activities, he found time for the thousand and one little kindnesses, the varied personal relations he maintained with all sorts and conditions of men. Once a week or so he dined at the University Club, more often at the settlement, and the other nights he took pot-luck on the top floor of some tenement with one of his Arbeiter Studenten. In the same way he found time to remember me and bring cheer into the hospital.

That first morning, in speaking of the newspaper story, I asked him if he was a socialist.

"Hanged if I know," he said. "I never joined any socialist organization. I don't care much for these soap-box people. They talk about reconstructing our industrial institutions, and most of them don't know how to make change for a dollar. They talk about overthrowing Wall Street, and they don't know railroad-stock from live-stock. They don't begin to realize what a big thing it is—nor how unjust and crazy and top-heavy. But sometimes I think I must be a socialist. I can't open my mouth and say anything serious without everybody calling me a socialist. I don't know."

The remaining weeks in the hospital gave me a great fund of things to ponder over. My mind works retrospectively. I have always sympathized with the cud-chewing habit of the cow. The impressions of the hour are never clear-cut with me. For an experience to become real, I must mull over it a long time; gradually it sinks into my consciousness and becomes a vital possession.

Benson's sort of kindness was absolutely new to me. No one had ever done things for me as he did. And as it surprised me to have him take the trouble to send me a can of my favorite tobacco, so the affection, the intimate revelations of love, which Ann gave me, was a thing undreamed of. "Come with me, up on to a high mountain, and I will show you all the wonder of the world"—such was Ann's gift to me. Out of the horror of darkness, from the very bottom of the slough of despond, she led me up into the white light of the summit peaks of life.

As I read back over these pages, I find that I have described Ann as a voice, as a person who thought and talked of serious things, who seemed principally absorbed in an ambition, which up to that time had borne no fruit. I would like to picture the woman who came to me in the darkness with a wealth of cheer and tenderness and love.

Some day I hope our literature and our minds will be purified so that such things can be dealt with sanely and sweetly. But that time has not yet come and I must be content with the tools at hand. Ann brought to me in those desolate days all the wondrous womanly things—the quaint and gentle jests of love, the senseless sweet words and names which are caresses, the sudden gusts of self revelation, the strange and unexpected restraints—of which I may not write.

I was not lonely any more—not even when Miss Wright was on duty—there was so much to ponder over.

VI

At last the bandages were taken off. I recall the sudden painful glare of the darkened room, the three doctors in hospital costumes, who were consulting on different forms of torture. Especially I remember the mole on the forehead of the chief, a gray haired, spectacled man. It was the first things my eyes, startled out of their long sleep, fixed upon. The ordeal dragged along tragically. It seemed that they were intentionally slow. But the verdict when it came was acquittal. I was lucky. With care I might regain almost normal vision. But for months I must not try to read. Always, all my life, I must stop at the first hint of fatigue.

So, having adjusted some smoked glasses, they sent me back to my room, to pack and go out into a new life. As I entered the corridor, I saw two nurses at the other end. My heart stopped with a jump and I was suddenly dizzy. Somehow I had not thought of Ann in terms of sight. She had come to me out of the darkness, revealed herself as a sound and a touch. I had no idea how she would look. They both came towards me. I could see very little through my dark glasses. I could not guess which was which.

"So. They've taken off the bandages? I'm very glad." It was Miss Wright's strenuous voice.

"I'm glad, too," Ann said.

I tried to see her, but my eyes were full of tears.

"I'll show him his room," Ann said.

When the door was closed on us, she threw her arms about my neck and cried as I had never seen a woman cry.

"Oh! beloved," she sobbed. "I'm so glad. I was afraid—afraid you were going to be blind."

She had always been so cheerful, so professional, about my case—of course it would turn out all right—that I had not seen it from her point of view. It was a revelation to me that her bravery had been a sham.

"Oh. I was afraid—afraid!"

I tried to comfort her but all the pent-up worry and fear of weeks had broken out. And I had not realized that her love had made my risk a personal tragedy for her.

When she had quieted a little, I wanted her to stand away so that I might look at her. But no—she said—she did not want me to see her first when her eyes were swollen with tears. She clung to me tightly and would not show me her face.

There was a knock at the door. I had not lived long enough to realize the seriousness of a woman's wet eyes, and, without thought of this, I said, "Come in." It was Benson.

"Miss Wright tells me—"

He hesitated. He was looking at Ann. I turned too. She was making a brave effort to appear unconcerned, but her eyes were red past all hiding.

"Yes," she said, in her professional tone. "The news is very good. Better than we hoped."

"Fine. I dropped in," Benson said, as though there was nothing to be embarrassed about, "to see how you came out and get you to spend the week-end with me if they let you go. I've got to visit my uncle and aunt—stupid old people—hypochondriacs. But they are going to Europe next week and I really must see them. I'll die of boredom if there isn't someone to talk to. Better come along—the sailing's good. I've got to run over to the club for a few minutes. Can you get your grip packed in half an hour? All right. So long."

Ann was as nearly angry as I have ever seen her.

"At least you might have given me time to dry my eyes."

"I don't believe he noticed anything. Men never see things like that," I said.

But Ann laughed at this and so her good temper was restored.

Her face, now that I saw it, was not at all what I had expected. It was serious, meagre, a bit severe. I had thought of her as blonde, but her hair was a rich, deep brown. Of course I am no judge of her looks. She had brought joy into my darkness. She could not but be beautiful for me.

The expression is what counts most. About her face, emphasized by her nurse's uniform, was a definite air of sensibleness, of New England reliability. Perhaps under other circumstances she would not have attracted me. Her face in repose might not have inspired more than confidence. But when she put her hands on my shoulders and looked up into my face, with the light of love in her eyes, it seemed to me that a mystic halo of beauty shone about her. No other woman has ever looked to me as Ann did. And yet I know that most people would call her "plain."

The hardest thing for me to accept about her was her height. I had thought her considerably shorter than Miss Wright. I had been misled of course by the relative size of their voices. Ann was above average height and Miss Wright hardly five feet.

In the half hour before Benson returned, we had not discussed anything more concrete than opportunities to meet outside the hospital. She was free on alternate Saturdays from supper time till midnight. I was rather afraid that Benson, when we were alone, might ask some questions or make some joke about her, but he talked busily of other things.

His uncle and aunt were a lonely old couple. Their children were established and they had little left to interest them except their illnesses, some of which, Benson said, were real. It was a beautiful house just out of Stamford on the Sound—rather dolefully empty now that the children had gone. I had never seen such luxury, such heavy silver, such ubiquitous servants.

They were planning to live in Paris, near a daughter who had married a Frenchman. Their arrangements had been all made. But at the last moment their trained nurse had thrown them into confusion by deciding suddenly that she did not want to leave America. The aunt told us about it, querulously, at dinner. Ann's desire came to mind.

"How much free time would the nurse have?" I asked. "I know one who is anxious to live in Paris and study with Pasteur. She is very capable. Your nephew has seen her—Miss Barton—she was at the hospital. I liked her immensely."

Benson shot a quick glance at me. It was the only sign he ever gave of having noticed any intimacy between us.

"My aunt expects to live permanently in Paris," he said. "She would not want to take any one who was not willing to stay indefinitely."

"That, I think, would suit Miss Barton exactly."

Benson immediately fell in with my suggestion and recommended Ann enthusiastically. I had to answer a string of questions. The aunt was one of those undecided persons who hate to make up their mind, but the uncle wanted to get started. We talked about it continually during the three Sunday meals, and on Monday morning they went in to see her, with a note of introduction from me.

Ann, as I had foreseen, was delighted with the opportunity. She pleased them, and as soon as she could find a substitute, an easy matter, as her position was desirable, the arrangements were made.

VII

Ann and I spent together the day before they sailed. We had planned an excursion to the sea-side, but it rained desperately and we found refuge in an hotel. We were too much interested in each other to care much about the weather or our surroundings. Any beauties of nature which might have distracted our attention would have seemed an impertinence.

It was a day of never-to-be-forgotten delight. And yet it was not without a subtle alloy. By an unexpressed agreement, we lived up to Omar's philosophy, we discussed neither the past nor the future. I was afraid to stop and think, for fear it might seem wrong....

Once she brought a cloud by some expressions of gratitude for my having, as she put it, given her this great opportunity to realize her dream of studying with Pasteur. And all the while, I knew it was not solely for her sake that I had picked up this chance, which the fates had thrown me. Despite the joy of her love there was this under-current of incertitude. I wanted to get far enough away from it, to judge it. It is hard to express what I mean, but I was happier, more light-hearted, that day, because I knew she was leaving the next.

But these blurred moments were—only moments. We were young. It was the spring of life as it was of the year. The spirit of poesy, of the great Lyrics, was there in that tawdry hotel room....

In the early morning, through the wet glistening streets we made our way across town towards the river. Of course I knew just where we were going, but somehow the entrance to the dock found me surprised and unprepared. For a moment we stood there, shaking hands as formally as might be. Suddenly tears sparkled in her eyes, she reached up and kissed me. Then she turned abruptly and walked into the bare, shadowy building. She had a firm step, she was sallying out to meet her destiny.

I watched until she was out of sight. And then I surprised myself by a sigh of strange relief.

VIII

Later in the day I lunched with Benson at the University Club.

"What are your plans now?" he asked as we settled down to coffee and cigarettes.

"Find a job, I suppose."

"You're in no condition to work nor to look for work—just out of the hospital."

"But I've got to eat."

"That's a fool superstition!" he exploded. "You don't have to work in order to eat. None of 'the best people' do. Half the trouble with the world is that so many idiots will sweat—just to eat. If they'd refuse to work for tripe-stews and demand box seats at the opera, it would do wonders. Why people will slave all their lives long for a chance to die in a tenement is beyond me. What kind of work do you want?"

My ideas on that point were vague.

"How much money have you?"

That I had figured out.

"One hundred and eighty-five dollars and ninety-three cents. And then my books—perhaps I could get a hundred more for them."

"Of course if you are sufficiently unscrupulous that's a good start for a fortune. Lots of men have done it on less. But it's a bore to sit back and watch money grow. Did you ever see a hunk of shad-roe—all eggs? Money's a darn sight more prolific than fish. Impregnate a silver dollar with enough cynicism and you can't keep your expenses up with your income. Look how wealth has grown in this country in spite of all our thievery and waste! In the Civil War we burned money—threw millions after millions into the flames—we never noticed it. The nation was richer in '65 than in '60.

"But making money is a fool's ambition. Just think how many dubs succeed in earning a living. Anybody can do that. It isn't original. Look round for interesting work. Something that's worth doing aside from the wages. Take things easy. If you begin worrying, you'll grab the first job that offers and think you're lucky. Come down to the settlement—the board's seven a week. You can live three months on half your money. In that time you'll see a dozen openings. You'll be able to take your choice instead of snatching the first job you see."

This conversation was typical of Benson. He nearly always started off with some generalized talk, but just when you began to think he had forgotten you and the issue, he would end up sharp, with a definite proposition. I accepted his advice and moved to the "Children's House."

So my temporary blindness brought me into contact with two great facts of life I had hitherto ignored, women and want—the beauty of sex and the horror of misery. And these two things occupied my whole mind.

One by one I picked out my memories of Ann and pondered them in all their implications. I tried to arrange them like beads on a thread, in some ordered unified design. Day by day she became a more real and concise personality.

The effect of my encounter with Ann, I could then have found no word to describe. But a very modern term would explain my meaning to some. She opened my spirit to the "over-tones" of life. Last year I heard "Pelleas and Melisande." I sat through the first half hour unstirred. There was much sensuous appeal to the eyes, but the music seemed unsatisfactory. Suddenly appreciation came. Suddenly I understood with a rush what he was meaning to say. All the mystic harmony, the unwritten, unwritable wonder of it swept over me. And now Debussy seems to me the greatest of them all. "The Afternoon of the Faun" moves me more deeply than any other music. In fact, I think, we must invent some newer name than "music," for this more subtle perfume of sound.

In a similar way Ann showed me the "over-tones" of life. Deeper significance, mystic meanings, I found in many things I had hardly noticed before. The sunsets held a richer wealth of colors. I had known Chaucer and his predecessors intimately, somewhat less thoroughly all the world's great poetry. It had interested me not only as a study of comparative philology, not only as a delicate game of prosody—of rhythm and rhyme and refrain. It had held for me a deeper charm than these mechanical elements—fascinating as they are. But somehow it all became new to me. I discovered in the old familiar lines things, which, alone in my study, I had never dreamed of. I began to see in all poetry—in all art—an effort to express these "overtones."

On the other hand, my active life was spent in the appalling misery of the slums—a thing equally new to me. In those days the majority of our neighbors were Irish and German. Decade after decade the nationality of Stanton Street has changed. First the Germans disappeared, then the Russian and Hungarian Jews pushed out the Irish, now one hears as much Italian as Yiddish. The heart-rending poverty, the degradation of filth and drunkenness is not a matter of race. Wave after wave of immigration finds its native customs and morality insufficient to protect it from the contagion of the slum. And so it will be until we have the wisdom to blot out the crime of congestion and give our newcomers a decent chance.

I try to force my mind back to its attitude in those first weeks in the "Children's House" and try to explain to myself how I became part of "The Settlement Movement." I fail. I think very few of the really important things in life are susceptible to a logical explanation.

I have met some people, who from books alone have been impressed with the injustices of our social organization, and have left the seclusion of their studies to throw their lives into the active campaign for justice. Such mental processes are, I think, rare. Certainly it came about differently in my case.

When Benson proposed that I should come to live in the settlement, I felt no "call" to social service. I was lonely, out of work, utterly adrift. The memory of the evening I had spent with him in the Children's House and the interesting people I had met was very pleasant. I had no suspicions that I was going there to stay. It appealed to me as sort of convalescent home, where I could rest up until I was able to go out and cope with the ordinary life of the world.

At first the little circle of workers seemed incoherent. Here were half a dozen highly educated men and women, most of whom had left pleasant homes, living in the most abject neighborhood of the city. Why? What good were they doing? Around us roared the great fire of poverty. Here and there they were plucking out a brand, to be sure. But the fire was beyond their control. They did not even think they could stop it.

I remember one night at dinner we had for guest, a professor of economics from one of the big universities. He prided himself on his cold scientific view-point, he regarded the settlement movement as sentimental, almost hysterical, and he had the ill-breeding to forget that what he scoffed at was a desperately serious thing to his hosts.

"This settlement movement reminds me of a story," he said. "Once upon a time a kind hearted old gentleman was walking down the street and found a man—drunk—in the gutter. He tried vainly to pull the unfortunate one up on the sidewalk and then losing courage, he said, 'My poor man, I can't help you, but I'll get down in the gutter beside you.'"

He laughed heartily, but no one else did. The story fell decidedly flat. It was several minutes before anyone took up the challenge. At last, Rev. Mr. Dawn, the head worker, coughed slightly and replied. He had turned quite red and I saw that the joke had stung him.

"That is a very old story," he said, "it was current in Jerusalem a good many centuries ago. It was told with great eclat by a scribe and a pharisee who 'passed by on the other side.'"

"Oh, come, now!" our guest protested. "That's hardly a fair comparison. The Samaritan we are told really did some good to the poor devil. And besides the victim in that case was not a drunkard, but a person who had 'fallen among thieves.'"

"Thieves?" Benson asked, with a ring of anger in his voice. "Do you think there are no thieves but highway robbers?"—and then apparently realizing the uselessness of arguing with such a man, he smiled blandly and in a softer tone went on. "Besides some of us are foolish enough to imagine that we also can do some good. Let's not discuss that, we'd rather keep our illusions. Won't you tell us what you are teaching your classes about Marx's theory of surplus value? Of course I know that phrase is taboo. But what terms do you use to describe the proceeds of industrial robbery?"

I could not make up my mind whether the professor realized that Benson was trying to insult him or whether he was afraid to tackle the question. At all events he turned to Mrs. Dawn and changed the conversation.

This little tilt gave me a great deal to think of. I did not like the professor's attitude towards life. But after all, what good were these settlement workers doing? Again and again this question demanded an answer. Sometimes I went out with Mr. Dawn to help in burying the dead. I could see no adequate connection between his kindly words to the bereaved and the hideous dragon of tuberculosis which stalked through the crowded district. What good did Dawn's ministrations do? Sometimes I went out with Miss Bronson, the kindergartner and listened to her talk to uncomprehending mothers about their duties to their children. What could Miss Bronson accomplish by playing a few hours a day with the youngsters who had to go to filthy homes? They were given a wholesome lunch at the settlement. But the two other meals a day they must eat poorly cooked, adulterated food. Sometimes I went out with Miss Cole, the nurse, to visit her cases. It was hard for me to imagine anything more futile than her single-handed struggle against unsanitary tenements and unsanitary shops.

I remember especially one visit I made with her. It was the crisis for me. The case was a child-birth. There were six other children, all in one unventilated room, its single window looked out on a dark, choked airshaft, and the father was a drunkard. I remember sitting there, after the doctor had gone, holding the next youngest baby on my knee, while Miss Cole was bathing the puny newcomer.

"Can't you make him stop crying for a minute?" Miss Cole asked nervously.

"No," I said with sudden rage. "I can't. I wouldn't if I could. Why shouldn't he cry? Why don't the other little fools cry! Do you want them to laugh?"

She stopped working with the baby and offered me a flask of brandy from her bag. But brandy was not what I wanted. Of course I knew men sank to the very dregs. But I had never realized that some are born there.

When she had done all she could for the mother and child, Miss Cole put her things back in the bag and we started home. It was long after midnight but the streets were still alive.

"What good does it do?" I demanded vehemently. "Oh, I know—you and the doctor saved the mother's life—brought a new one into the world and all that. But what good does it do? The child will die—it was a girl—let's get down on our knees right here and pray the gods that it may die soon—not grow up to want and fear—and shame." Then I laughed. "No, there's no use praying. She'll die all right! They'll begin feeding her beer out of a can before she's weaned. No. Not that. I don't believe the mother will be able to nurse her. She'll die of skimmed milk. And if that don't do the trick there's T.B. and several other things for her to catch. Oh, she'll die all right. And next year there'll be another. For God's sake, what's the use? What good does it do?" Abruptly I began to swear.

"You mustn't talk like that," Miss Cole said in a strained voice.

"Why shouldn't I curse?" I said fiercely, turning on her challengingly, trying to think of some greater blasphemy to hurl at the muddle of life. But the sight of her face, livid with weariness, her lips twisting spasmodically from nervous exhaustion, showed me one reason not to. The realization that I had been so brutal to her shocked me horribly.

"Oh, I beg your pardon," I cried.

She stumbled slightly. I thought she was going to faint and I put my arm about her to steady her. She was almost old enough to be my mother, but she put her head on my shoulder and cried like a little child. We stood there on the sidewalk—in the glare of a noisy, loathsome saloon—like two frightened children. I don't think either of us saw any reason to go anywhere. But we dried our eyes at last and from mere force of habit walked blindly back to the children's house. On the steps she broke the long silence.

"I know how you feel—everyone's like that at first, but you'll get used to it. I can't tell 'why.' I can't see that it does much good. But it's got to be done. You mustn't think about it. There are things to do, today, tomorrow, all the time. Things that must be done. That's how we live. So many things to do, we can't think. It would kill you if you had time to think. You've got to work—work.

"You'll stay too. I know. You won't be able to go away. You've been here too long. You won't ever know 'why.' You'll stop asking if it does any good. And I tell you if you stop to think about it, it will kill you. You must work."

She went to her room and I across the deserted courtyard and up to mine. But there was no sleep. It was that night that I first realized that I also must. I had seen so much I could never forget. It was something from which there was no escape. No matter how glorious the open fields, there would always be the remembered stink of the tenements in my nostrils. The vision of a sunken cheeked, tuberculosis ridden pauper would always rise between me and the beauty of the sunset. A crowd of hurrying ghosts—the ghosts of the slaughtered babies—would follow me everywhere, crying, "Coward," if I ran away. The slums had taken me captive.

As I sat there alone with my pipe, the groans of the district's uneasy sleep in my ears, I realized more strongly than I can write it now the appalling unity of life. I sensed the myriad intricate filaments which bind us into an indivisible whole. I saw the bloody rack-rents of the tenements circulating through all business—tainting it—going even into the collection plates of our churches. I saw the pay drawn by the lyric poet, trailing back through the editorial bank account to the pockets of various subscribers who speculated in the necessities of life, who waxed fat off the hunger of the multitude. My own clothes were sweat-shop made.

I could not put out the great fire of injustice. I could at least bind up the sores of some of my brothers who had fallen in—who were less lucky than I. My old prep. school ethics came back to me. "I want to live so that when I die, the greatest number of people will be glad I did live." In a way it did not seem to matter so much whether I could accomplish any lasting good. I must do what I could. Such effort seemed to me the only escape from the awful shame of complaisancy.

Wandering in and out of the lives of the people of our neighborhood, I looked about for a field of activity. There were so many things to be done. I sought for the place where the need was greatest. It did not take me long to decide—a conclusion I have not changed—that the worst evils of our civilization come to a head in "The Tombs."

The official name for that pile of stone and brick is "The Criminal Courts Building." But the people persist in calling it "The Tombs." The prison dated from the middle of the century and a hodge-podge of official architecture had been added, decade by decade, as the political bosses needed money. It housed the district attorney's office, the "police court," "special sessions" for misdemeanants, and "general sessions" for felons. One could study our whole penal practice in that building.

I was first led into its grim shadow by a woman who came to the settlement. Her son, a boy of sixteen, had been arrested two months before and had been waiting trial in an unventilated cell, originally designed for a single occupant, with two others. His cell-mates had changed a dozen times. I recall that one had been an old forger, who was waiting an appeal, another was the keeper of a disorderly house and a third had been a high church curate, who had embezzled the foreign mission fund to buy flowers for a chorus girl. The lad was patently innocent. And this was the very reason he was held so long. The district attorney was anxious to make a high record of convictions. His term was just expiring and he was not calling to trial the men he thought innocent, these "technically" bad cases he was shoving over on his successor. At last, with the help of a charitable lawyer, named Maynard, of whom I will write more later, we forced the case on the calendar and the boy was promptly acquitted.

In talking over this case with Benson, I found that he was already interested in the problems of Criminology. He was one of the trustees of "The Prisoner's Aid Society." The interview in the newspaper, which Ann had read to me at the hospital, had been an effort of his to draw attention to the subject and to infuse some life into the society.

"They're a bunch of fossils," he said. "Think they're a 'société savante.' They read books by foreign penologists and couldn't tell a crook from a carpet sweeper. We need somebody to study American crime. Not a dilettante—someone who will go into it solid."

I told him I had thought a good deal about it and was ready to tackle the job if the ways and means could be arranged.

"I imagine I could get the society to pay you a living salary. But they are dead ones. If you did anything that wasn't in the books, it would scare them. I'll think it over."

About a week later, I received a letter from the recently elected, not yet installed district attorney asking me to call on him. His name was Brace, his letter the result of Benson's thinking. I found him a typical young reform politician. A man of good family, he was filled with enthusiasm, and confidently expected to set several rivers on fire. There was going to be absolute, abstract justice under his regime. Benson had told him how the actual district attorney was shoving off the "bad cases" on him and he was righteously indignant. He wanted someone whose fidelity he could trust, who would keep an eye on the prison side of the Tombs. He was sure there were many abuses there to stop, and he was the man to do it. The only position he could offer me under the law was that of special county detective. The pay would be eighteen hundred a year.

"It is not exactly a dignified position," he said. "The county detectives are a low class,—but of course you won't have to associate with them."

I was more than ready to take the place. With the rest of the new administration I was sworn in, and so entered on my life work. It was a far cry from my earlier ambition to be a Fellow at Oxford.

BOOK IV

I

"Literary unity" can be secured in an autobiography only at the expense of all sense of reality. The simplest of us is a multiple personality, can be described only partially from any one point of view. The text book on physiology which I studied in school contained three illustrations. One of them pictured a human being as a structure of bones, a skeleton; another showed man as a system of veins and arteries; the third as a mass of interwoven muscles. None of them looked like any man I have ever seen. It is the same with most autobiographies, the writers, in order to center attention on one phase of their activities, have cut away everything which would make their stories seem life-like.

"The Memoirs" of Cassanova give us the picture of a lover. But he must have been something more than a roué. "The Personal Recollections" of General Grant portray the career of a soldier. But after all he was a man first, it was more or less by chance that he became a victory-machine. How fragmentary is the picture of his life, which Benvenuto Cellini gives us!

I might accept these classic models and tell directly the story of my work in the Tombs. I might limit my narrative to that part of myself which was involved in friendship with Norman Benson. Or again, I might strip off everything else, ignore the flesh and bones and blood vessels, and write of myself as an "emotional system." In one of these ways I might more nearly approach a literary production. But certainly it would be at a sacrifice of verisimilitude. Perhaps some great writer will come who will unite the artistic form with an impression of actuality. But until genius has taught us the method we must choose between the two ideals. My choice is for reality rather than art.

And life, as it has appeared to me, is episodal in form, unified only in the continual climaxes of the present moment. It is a string of incidents threaded on to the uninterrupted breathing of the same person. The facts of any life are related only de post facto, in that they influence the future course of the individual to whom they happen. The farther back we strive to trace these influences, which have formed us, the greater complexity we find. It is not only our bodies which have "family trees," that show the number of our ancestors, generation by generation, increasing with dizzy rapidity. It is the same with our thoughts and tastes. From an immensely diffuse luminosity the lens of life has focused the concentrated rays of light which are you and I.

So—in telling of my life, as I see it—my narrative must break up into fragments. Unartistic as such a form may be, it seems to me the only one possible for autobiography. Incidents must be given, which, however unrelated they appear, seem to me to have been caught by the great lens and to have formed an integral part of the focal point, which sits here—trying to describe itself.

II

For some years I have been continually writing on the subject of criminology. I could not give, here in this narrative, a complete picture of the Tombs and its people, nor show in orderly sequence how one incident after another forced me into a definite attitude towards our penal system, without repeating what I have published elsewhere. But the atmosphere in which I have spent my working life has so definitely influenced me, has been so important a force in my experiment in ethics, that I must give it some space. I must try, at least, to give some illuminating examples of the sort of thing which did influence me and a brief statement of the attitude which has resulted from my work, for without this background the rest of my story would be meaningless.