“I love to tell the story
Of unseen things above,
Of Jesus and his glory,
Of Jesus and his love;
I love to tell the story —
It did so much for me —
And that is just the reason
I tell it unto thee.”
At another place, he sung “Home, Sweet Home,” and I thought I saw many faces that looked sad. Either our presence was an embarrassment, or for some other reason it seemed to me there was no real gayety, and that the dancing and the keeping up of a show of hilarity were all heavy work.
There seems, however, to be a gradation in these dreadful places. Besides these which were furnished with some show and pretension, there were cellars where the same sort of thing was going on — dancing and drinking, and women set to be the tempters of men. We saw miserable creatures standing out on the sidewalk, to urge the passers-by to come into these cellars. It was pitiful, heart-breaking to see. But the lowest, the most dreadful of all, was what they called the bucket shops. There the vilest of liquors are mixed in buckets and sold to wretched, crazed people who have fallen so low that they cannot get anything better. It is the lowest depth of the dreadful deep.
Oh, those bucket shops! Never shall I forget the poor, forlorn, forsaken-looking creatures, both men and women, that I saw there. They seemed crouching in from the cold — hanging about, or wandering uncertainly up and down. Mr. James spoke to many of them, as if he knew them, kindly and sorrowfully. “This is a hard way you are going,” he said to one. “Aren’t you most tired of it?”
“Well,” he said to another poor creature, “when you have gone as far as you can, and come to the end, and nobody will have you, and nobody do anything for you, then come to us, and we’ll take you in.”
During all this time, and in all these places, the superintendent, who seemed to have a personal knowledge of many of those among whom he was moving, was busy distributing his tickets of invitation to the supper. He knew where the utterly lost and abandoned ones were most to be found, and to them he gave most regard.
But as yet, though I looked with anxious eyes, I had seen nothing of Maggie. I spoke to Mr. James at last, and he said, “We have not yet visited Mother Moggs’s establishment, where she was said to be. We are going there now.” —
“Mother Moggs is a character in her way,” he told us. “She has always treated me with perfect respect and politeness, because I have shown the same to her. She seems at first view like any other decent woman, but she is one that, if she were roused, would be as prompt with knife and pistol as any man in these streets.” As he said this, we turned a corner, and entered a dancing saloon, in its features much like many others we had seen. Mother Moggs stood at a sort of bar at the upper end, where liquors were displayed and sold. She seemed really so respectably dressed, and so quiet and pleasant-looking, that I could scarcely believe my eyes when I saw her.
Mr. James walked up with us to where she was standing, and spoke to her, as he does to every one, gently and respectfully, inquiring after her health, and then, in a lower tone, he said, “And how about the health of your soul?”
She colored, and forced a laugh, and answered with some smartness, “Which soul do you mean? I’ve got two — one on each foot.”
He took no notice of the jest, but went on: —
“And how about the souls of these girls? What will become of them?”
“I ain’t hurting their souls,” she said. “I don’t force ’em to stay with me; they come of their own accord, and they can go when they please. I don’t keep ‘em. If any of my girls can better themselves anywhere else, I don’t stand in their way.”
The air of virtuous assurance with which she spoke would have given the impression that she was pursuing, under difficult circumstances, some praiseworthy branch of industry at which her girls were apprentices.
Just at this moment, I turned, and saw Maggie standing behind me. She was not with the other girls, but standing a little back, toward the bar. Instantly I crossed over, and, raising my veil, said, “Maggie, poor child! come back to your mother.”
Her face changed in a moment; she looked pale, as if she were going to faint, and said only, “Oh! Mrs. Henderson, you here?”
“Yes, I came to look for you, Maggie. Come right away with us,” I said. “Oh, Maggie! come,” and I burst into tears.
She seemed dreadfully agitated, but said: —
“Oh, I can’t; it’s too late!”
“No, it isn’t. Mr. James,” I said, “here she is. Her mother has sent for her.”
“And you, madam,” said Mr. James to the woman, “have just said you wouldn’t stand in the way, if any of your girls could better themselves.”
The woman was fairly caught in her own trap. She cast an evil look at us all, but said nothing, as we turned to leave, I holding upon Maggie, determined not to let her go.
We took her with us to the Home. She was crying as if her heart would break. The girls who were getting the supper looked at her with sympathy and gathered round her. One of them interested me deeply. She was very pale and thin, but had such a sweet expression of peace and humility in her face! She came and sat down by Maggie and said, “Don’t be afraid; this is Christ’s home, and he will save you as he has me. I was worse than you are — worse than you ever could be — and He has saved me. I am so happy here!”
And now the miserable wretches who had been invited to the supper came pouring in. Oh, such a sight! Such forlorn wrecks of men, in tattered and torn garments, with such haggard faces, such weary, despairing eyes! They looked dazed at the light and order and quiet they saw as they came in. Mr. James and the superintendent stood at the door, saying, “Come in, boys, come in; you’re welcome heartily! Here you are, glad to see you,” seating them on benches at the lower part of the room.
While the supper was being brought in, the table was set with an array of bowls of smoking hot soup and a large piece of nice white bread at each plate. When all had been arranged, Mr. James saw to seating the whole band at the tables, asked a blessing, standing at the head, and then said cheerily, “Now, boys, fall to; eat all you want; there is plenty more where this came from, and you shall have as much as you can carry.” —
The night was cold, and the soup was savory and hot, and the bread white and fine, and many of them ate with a famished appetite; the girls meanwhile stood watchful to replenish the bowls or hand more bread. All seemed to be done with such a spirit of bountiful, cheerful good will as was quite inspiriting. It was not till hunger was fully satisfied that Mr. James began to talk to them, and when he did, I wondered at his tact.
“This is quite the thing, now, isn’t it, boys, of a cold night like this, when a fellow is hungry? See what it is to have friends.
“I suppose, boys, you get better suppers than these from those fellows that you buy your drink of. They make suppers for you sometimes, I suppose?”
“No, indeed,” growled some of the men. “Catch ’em doing it!”
“Why, I should think they ought to, when you spend all your money on them. You pay all your money to them, and make yourselves so poor that you haven’t a crust, and then they won’t even get you a supper?”
“No, that they won’t,” growled some. “They don’t care if we starve.”
“Boys,” said Mr. James, “aren’t you fools? Here these men get rich and you get poor. You pay all your earnings to them. You can’t have anything, and they have everything. They can have plate-glass windows, and they can keep their carriages, and their wives have their silk dresses and jewels, and you pay for it all; and then, when you’ve spent your last cent over their counters, they kick you into the street. Aren’t you fools to be supporting such men? Your wives don’t get any silk dresses, I’ll bet. Oh, boys, where are your wives, where are your mothers, where are your children?”
By this time they were looking pretty sober, and some of them had tears in their eyes.
“Oh, boys, boys!
this is a bad way you’ve been in — a bad way. Haven’t you gone long enough? Don’t you want to give it up? Look here — now, boys, I’ll read you a story.” And then he read from his pocket Testament the parable of the Prodigal Son. He read it beautifully: I thought I had never understood it before. When he had done, he said, “And now, boys, hadn’t you better come back to your Father? Do you remember, some of you, how your mother used to teach you to say, ‘Our Father, who art in heaven’? Come now, kneel down, every one of you, and let’s try it once more.”
They all knelt, and I never heard anything like that prayer. It was so loving, so earnest, so pitiful. He prayed for those poor men, as if he were praying for his own soul. They must have felt how he loved them. It almost broke my heart to hear him; it did seem for the time as if the wall were down that separates God’s love from us, and that everybody must feel it, even these poor wretched creatures.
There were among them some young men, and some whose heads and features were good, and indicative of former refinement of feeling. I could not help thinking how many histories of sorrow, for just so many families, were written in those faces.
“Is it possible that you can save any of these?” I said to Mr. James, as they were going out.
“We cannot, but God can,” he said. “With God, all things are possible. We have seen a great many saved that were as low as these; but it was only by the power of God converting their souls. That is at all times possible.”
“But,” said Harry, “the craving for drink gets to be a physical disease.”
“Yet I have seen that craving all subdued and taken away by the power of the Holy Spirit. They become new creatures in Christ.”
“That would be almost miraculous,” said Harry.
“We must expect miracles, and we shall have them,” replied he.
Meanwhile, the girls had gathered around Maggie, and were talking with her, and when we spoke of going, she said: —
“Dear Mrs. Henderson, let me stay here awhile; the girls here will help me, and I can do some good here, and by and by, perhaps, when I am stronger, I can come back to mother. It’s better for me here now.”
Mr. James and the matron both agreed that, for the present, this would be best. There is a current of sympathy, an energy of Christian feeling, a sort of enthusiasm, about this house, that helps one to begin anew.
It was nearly morning before we found ourselves in our home again — but, for me, the night has not been spent in vain. Oh, mother, can it be that in a city full of churches and Christians such dreadful things as I saw are going on every night? Certainly, if all Christians felt about it as those do who have begun this Home, there would be a change. If every Christian would do a little, a great deal would be done; for there are many Christians. But now it seems as if a few were left to do all, while the many do nothing. But Harry and I are resolved henceforth to do our part in helping this work.
Mary is comforted about Maggie and unboundedly grateful to me for going. I think she herself prefers her staying there awhile; she has felt so keenly what Aunt Maria said about her being a burden and disgrace to us.
We shall watch over her there, and help her forward in life as fast as she is strong enough to go. But I am making this letter too long, so good-by for the present.
Your loving — EVA.
CHAPTER XLII
JIM’S FORTUNES
“WELL, hurrah for Jim!” exclaimed our friend Jim Fellows, making tumultuous entrance into the Henderson house, with such a whirl and breeze of motion as to flutter the music on the piano, and the papers on Harry’s writing-desk, while he skipped round the room, executing an extemporary pas seul.
“Jim, for goodness’ sake, what now?” said Harry, rising. “What’s up?”
“I’ve got it! I’ve got it! — the first place on the ‘Forum’! Think of the luck! I’ve been talking with Ivison and Sears about it, and the papers are all drawn. I’m made now, you’d better believe. It’s firm land at last, and I tell you, if I haven’t scratched for it!”
“Wish you joy, my boy, with all my heart,” said Harry, shaking his hand. “It’s the top of the ladder.”
“And I, too, Jim,” said Eva, offering her hand frankly. “Sit down and have a cup of tea with us.”
“You don’t care, I suppose, what happens to me,” said Jim in an abused tone, turning to Alice, who had sat quietly in a shaded corner through this outburst.
“Bless me, Jim, I’ve been holding my breath, for I didn’t know what you’d do next. I’m sure I wish you joy with all my heart. There’s my hand on it,” and Alice reached out her hand as frankly as Eva.
It was a hand as fair, soft, and white as a man might wish to have settle like a dove of peace and rest in his own; and, as it went into his palm, Jim could not help giving it a warm, detaining grasp that had a certain significance, especially as his eyes rested upon her with a flash of expression before which hers fell.
Alice had come to Eva’s to dine, and they were now just enjoying that pleasant after-dinner hour around the fireside, when they sat and played with their tea in pretty teacups, and chatted, and looked into the fire. It is the hour dear to memory, when the home fireside seems like a picture, when the gleams of light that fall on one’s plants and pictures and books and statuettes bring forth some new charm in each one, giving rise to the exulting feeling, “Nowhere in the world is there a place so pretty and so cosy as this.”
Now, Alice had been meditating a return to her own home that night, trusting to Harry for escort; but, at the moment that Jim took her hand and she saw the expression of his eyes, she mentally altered her intentions and resolved to remain all night. She was sure if she rose to go Jim would, of course, be her escort. She was not going to walk home alone with him in his present mood, and trust herself to hear, and be obliged to answer, anything he might be led to say.
The fact is well known to observers of mental phenomena, that an engagement suddenly sprung upon a circle of intimate acquaintances is often productive of great searchings of heart, and that it is apt to have a result similar to the knocking down of one brick at the extreme of a line of them. Alice had been startled and astonished by finding her rector descending from the semi-angelic sphere where she had, in” her imagination, placed him, and coming into the ranks of mortal and marrying men. She had seen and handled the engagement ring which sparkled on Angie’s finger, and it looked like any other ring that a gentleman of good taste might buy, and she had heard all the comments of the knowing ones thereon. Already there was activity in the direction of a prospective trousseau. Aunt Maria, with her usual alertness, was prizing stuffs and giving records of prices and of cheap and desirable shopping places, and racing from one end of the city to the other in self-imposed pilgrimages of research. There were discussions of houses for the future rectory. Everything was in a whirl of preparation. There was marriage in the very air: and the same style of reflection which occurs when there is a death is apposite also to the betrothal—”Whose turn shall come next?” Hodie mihi —— cras tibi. Jim Fellows, the most excitable, sympathetic of all mortal Jims, may well be supposed to have felt something of the general impulse.
Now, Miss Alice was as fine a specimen of young ladyhood at twenty-two as is ordinarily to be met with in New York or otherwhere. She was well read, well bred, high minded, and high principled. She was a little inclined to the ultra-romantic in her views, and while living along contentedly, and with a moderate degree of good sense and comfort, with such people as were to be found on earth, was a little prone to indulge dreams of supercelestial people — imaginary heroes and heroines. In the way of friendship, she imagined she liked many of her gentlemen associates; but the man she was to marry was to be a hero —— somebody before whom she and every one else should be irresistibly constrained to bow down and worship. She knew nobody of this species as yet.
Harry was all very well; a nice fellow — a bright, lively, wide-awake fellow — a faultless husband — a desirable brother-in-law; but
still Harry was not a hero. He was a man subject to domestic discipline for at times littering the parlor table with too many pamphlets, for giving imprudent invitations to dinner on an ill-considered bill of fare, and for confounding solferino with pink when describing colors or matching worsteds. All these things brought him down into the sphere of the actual, and took off the halo. In review of all the married men of her acquaintance, she was constrained to acknowledge that the genus hero was rare. Nobody that she was acquainted with ever had married this kind of being; and, in fact, within her own mind his lineaments were cloudy and indistinct, like the magic looking-glass of Agrippa before the destined image shone out. She only knew of this or that mortal man of her acquaintance, that he was not in the least like this ideal of her dreams.
Meanwhile, Miss Alice was not at all insensible to the charm of having a friend of the other sex wholly and entirely devoted to her. She thought she had with most exemplary frankness and directness indicated to Jim that they were to be friends and only friends; she had contended for her right to be just as intimate with him as he and she pleased, in the face of Aunt Maria and of all the ranks and orders of good gossips who make the regulation of other people’s affairs a specialty; and she flattered herself that she had at last conquered this territory and secured for herself this independent right. People had almost done telling her they had heard that she was engaged to Jim Fellows, and asking her when it was going to be announced. She plumed herself, in a quiet way, on the independence and spirit she had shown in the matter.
Now, Jim was one of those fellows who, in certain respects, remain a boy forever. The boy in him was certainly booked for as long a mortal journey as the man; and, at threescore years and ten, one ought not to expect to meet in him other than a white-headed, vivacious old boy. He was a driving, industrious, efficient creature. He was, in all respects, ideally fitted to success in the profession he had chosen; the very image and body of the New York press man — lively, versatile, acute, unsleeping, untiring, always wide awake, up and dressed, and in full command of his faculties, at any hour of day or night, ready for any emergency, overflowing with inconsiderate fun and frolic, and, like the public he served, going for his joke at any price. Since his intimacy with Alice she had assumed to herself the right of looking over his ways and acting the part of an exterior conscience; and Jim had formed the habit of bringing to her his articles for criticism. And Alice flattered herself that she was not altogether selfish in accepting his devotion, but was saving him from many an unwise escapade, and inciting him to higher standards and nobler ways of looking at life.
Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe Page 406
