Ceremony of the Innocent Page 6

  The girl flushed a bright rose at being addressed so directly by so distinguished a gentleman, and could not answer at once. Mrs. Jardin gave her a sharp thrust in her side and she almost dropped a platter, and she said in a trembling voice, “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  What a beautiful voice, thought young Francis. What a beautiful girl. She is like a fire in this awful room which is always chilly and dank. He was suddenly breathless. When Ellen presented him with the pancakes and sausages he could only, for a moment or two, look up into that miraculous face and see only those large blue eyes, so brilliantly shining and so timid. Mrs. Jardin keenly watched not only the table but the young man, and she felt gleeful. Another scandal in this house, unless one watched out. But what could he see in this ugly girl, such a gawk, so clumsy and with such rough hands? A real hoyden as well as a wench of bad repute, as the minister called it. Not like Miss Amelia Beale, who was a real lady though poor, too.

  It isn’t possible for anyone to be so beautiful, Francis was thinking, finally looking away from Ellen. She has a noble face, the face of an aristocrat, as well as being too exquisite to be believed. And what eyes! Like a newborn infant’s, clear and glowing. His character was somewhat listless, due partly to nature and partly to the malaria he had contracted a year ago during the war with Spain. But now the listlessness was gone and he felt totally alive and moved and even joyful. He wanted to touch Ellen as a shivering man wants to move from dimness into the warm sun.

  Mrs. Jardin was muttering commands to Ellen and the girl was following orders in a hurried confusion and with a desperate desire to escape admonitions. If she did well she would be permitted to eat the scraps from this banquet, and she was forced to repeated swallowings so that her mouth would not openly run. Francis saw the spasms in the white throat and he thought, with astonishment: Why, the poor child is hungry! Now he was filled with compassion, a compassion so strong that self-congratulating tears came into his eyes. She can’t be more than fourteen; that face is too immature. What a beauty she will be in a few years, if such beauty can be increased by maturity.

  Walter Porter was giving Ellen swift close glances, and when she offered him a dish he smiled at her kindly. “Did you come from Philadelphia, Ellen?” he asked, extraordinarily stirred by Ellen, who so resembled the portrait in the Widdimer house. Was it possible there was some connection somewhere, though it seemed improbable? Perhaps from the wrong side of the blanket, he added to himself, and smiled again.

  “No, sir,” the girl almost whispered, filling his coffee cup with extreme care, for her hands were shaking. “I was born in Erie. I’ve never been in Philadelphia.”

  “You have no relatives there, child?”

  “No, sir. None. Aunt May—my aunt—she was born in Erie, too, and was never in Philadelphia.”

  Now Francis spoke to her for the first time, and his breathlessness had returned. “Are your parents alive, Ellen?”

  Her hands empty now, Ellen stood stiff and tall, hiding those hands under the white apron. She glanced down into Francis’ candid eyes and saw there only a soft tenderness, which she could not interpret. She only knew that he was not hostile and she wanted to cry in gratitude. He was so good; he was the best person she had ever known. Who else cared about her parents, or wished to know about them? She swallowed nervously and forgot her hunger.

  “No, sir, my mama and papa are dead. Papa was from New York and Mama was from Erie. They both died when I was two years old. That’s what Auntie May tells me. She was Mama’s sister.” She had never spoken so freely to anyone before, and certainly not to a stranger. Her aunt was always warning her mysteriously not to speak to strangers and never to answer them, but there was no harm in it, was there? She was overcome by shyness again and her velvety color deepened and she both wanted to run and to remain in the presence of this man who looked at her with such unrestrained gentleness and interest, as if he saw her as others never saw her.

  Mr. Porter spoke then. “Have you ever heard the names of Sheldon and Widdimer, Ellen?”

  She shook her head. “No, sir, never.”

  “Unbelievable,” murmured Walter, shaking his head slightly.

  Ellen moved back a step, feeling helpless and confused again. Mrs. Jardin was watching from the door to the kitchen, her eyes rapidly blinking as they moved from face to face. Then she said bullyingly, “Ellen, bring the gentlemen fresh coffee, and the strawberry pie.”

  Ellen ran, not walked to the kitchen. Mrs. Jardin, who felt herself in a privileged position, spoke to Walter Porter. “Ellen will be all right, I think, when she’s trained. She’s still raw; her first day here, or anywhere in service, a big girl like that! She should have been in service four years ago, and learning her place and how to be useful. But things are changing and not for the better, sir. Law here won’t let a girl go into service until she’s fourteen, and that’s a scandal. Bringing up a useless lazy generation, ain’t we? Ellen ought to be in a factory.”

  Walter gave his son a quick glance but Francis was laying down his knife and fork and had begun to speak. “I think it is a scandal to send very young girls into a factory, Mrs. Jardin.” His light voice was precise and almost dogmatic. “Thank God that this Commonwealth is beginning to realize that and has enacted a few tentative laws in the proper direction. I belong to a Committee—”

  “May I trouble you for the rolls, Francis?” asked his father. “And save your elocutions for your professors at Harvard. I am sure Mrs. Jardin isn’t interested in your opinions. Concerning child labor, at least.”

  Mrs. Jardin smirked at him knowingly. But Francis, his fair face animated at the mention of his favorite subject, could not be repressed. “When I am graduated from law school, Father, I am going into politics, much as they disgust me.”

  “Yes, so you have said before,” replied his father, highly diverted. “But I think the stench will drive you out, in spite of your convictions. You see, I know politicians as you do not, my boy. Ah, well, have your dreams. You are still young and untouched, though you’ve gone through a war.”

  “Which was asinine,” said Francis, and his eyes sparkled with anger.

  “You didn’t think so when you enlisted in Teddy’s Rough Riders.”

  “Well, I think so now. And you know my reasons for thinking that.”

  “All imaginary,” said his father with a wave of his plump hand. “It was an outright, and justified war. That’s what Teddy said, anyway.”

  “To seize the Philippines and Cuba,” said Francis.

  “‘And the beginning of American imperialism,’ to quote you, Francis, my boy.”

  “Certainly. We are now entering the Age of Tyrants.”

  Mr. Porter leaned back in his chair, smiling broadly and closing his eyes. “Where you get these notions!” he said.

  “From reading, which you do not do, Father, and from history.”

  “Well, I was never a scholar, even in the university,” said Walter, still good-humored. He lifted his hand in defense. “Please, dear boy. Don’t bore me again. It’s a fine day. Let’s go for a ride. You still aren’t well, you know. When you entirely recover your health you will also recover—”

  “My mind, too.”

  “Now, now, my boy. Ah, here is fresh coffee and strawberry pie. An excellent breakfast, Mrs. Jardin. You are spoiling us.”

  “I just wish Mr. Francis would eat more,” said Mrs. Jardin, her hands comfortably locked under her apron; she gave Francis a hypocritically false look of fondness. “All he had was a dish of prunes and figs, a few sausages and only two eggs, a slice or two of bacon, one small piece of fish and a little dish of potatoes, and four griddle cakes, and a couple cups of coffee and a teensy bite of pie. That’s not a breakfast for a man, sir.”

  “It’s enough for four breakfasts—for four men,” said Francis, who did not like Mrs. Jardin and was not deceived by her jocular air and jaunty winking. He wanted to believe—it was a necessity for him to believe—that the “working class” was endo
wed with native nobility, virtue, and wisdom, and was exploited. However, his perceptiveness often refuted that theory, and Mrs. Jardin was one of those who refuted it by her very being. Therefore, he incontinently disliked her; she was an affront to his vehement idealism, an idealism which must be total and never conditioned by facts. He was beginning, lately, to accuse himself of lack of charity, or understanding, and a failure to “see deeply enough and grasp hidden factors.”

  Once his father had said to him, “Of course, there are a multitude of uncountable injustices in this world. But who said this world must be ‘perfect’? Only an idiot would believe in the perfectibility of man and a Utopia where it would always be summer and no one would work very much but would wander around in an incorruptible garden singing. Who would carry out the slops, sweep the streets, and lay the crops? So long as we have bowels, and the air has dust in it, and we need to eat, we will have to work. Didn’t St. Paul say, ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat’? Yes.”

  “Science is already prophesying that soon it will not be necessary for any man to labor,” said Francis, flushing scarlet as usual when his theories were attacked. “In the meantime, labor must not be exploited; it must be given a living wage.”

  “I agree with that,” said Walter Porter. “I pay my men well, far above what the new unions are asking. But man will never be freed from labor. Doesn’t the Bible say that man must earn his bread by the sweat of his face? Yes. My boy, this is a realistic world, based on objective truths, and no dreams will change it. But dreams can destroy as well as create. Remember that.”

  “There are no objective truths,” Francis had replied with heat. “All is subjective.”

  “Then let’s have imaginary mills, factories, ships, crops, commerce, and God knows what else,” said his father with exasperation. “In that way we’ll let the world go back to a savage wilderness, for the world is not only subjective—in the minds of men—but brutally objective, too.”

  Walter had become alarmed after this conversation. Francis was not only his own child, but his son, and he expected much of him.

  He knew that Francis had an excellent mind and had had a sound upbringing. Where had he acquired these new and perilous ideas which he was expounding lately? Had the war tainted him? But thousands of young men had engaged enthusiastically in that war-as Francis had done originally—and they had returned to desk and bench in a normal fashion, though many of them had become afflicted with malaria as Francis had been afflicted. Was there some rotting flaw in his nature which demanded perfection in all things, in human behavior, in the very laws of existence? It was not for some years that he became convinced that such as Francis were dangerous to all men, for they brought the unstable atmosphere of dreams to the affairs of mankind, and not muscle, not realism. One must deal with things as they are, Walter would often ponder, not as we should like them to be. I am not against dreams, if they are possible, and God knows that without dreamers we should have no poetry, no justice, no Constitution, no order, and no civilization. It is only when dreams leave the realm of the probable, or even the possible, that we are threatened. When dreams exclude fallible human nature, then we are in trouble. Human nature is not mutable, in spite of the lacy philosophers.

  He had tried, over and over, to impart his thoughts to Francis, but Francis was becoming more and more resistive. Worse, he would fall into a sullen silence when his dreams encountered the sawtooth edges of reality. As a believer in the subjective, he vehemently believed that reality itself could be changed. He did not blame his faulty theories; he blamed reality. He had become suspicious of nature itself.

  There is plenty of room in this world for dreamers—if the dreams are credible—Walter would think, and room for absolute realists. We must have a mingling of the two—if that is possible itself!—and work together. The only danger to the world is in those who believe only in dreams, and those who believe only in brutish facts. Both are dogmatists, and if we do not watch out we will be destroyed by them. We must concede, all of us, that man is more than an animal, but that he is an animal also, and has appetites that embrace the spiritual, yet also must be fed and watered and sheltered as any other beast. I detest the noncompromisers!

  On another occasion he said to his son, “When God became man He had to obey His own laws: Evacuation of the bowels, urination, itches, pains, lusts of the flesh, as the parsons call it, hunger, labor, sweat, dirty hands and face, the necessity to wash and sleep, to change His garments, to scratch His feet. He did not suspend the laws of being in order to make Himself more comfortable in the environment which existed. We must accept the human condition, as He accepted it, with all its miseries, discomforts and complaints and insect bites and toil. As man, as well as God, He became annoyed at His Mother when she demanded that He perform the miracle of the wine at the marriage in Cana. A minor matter—but He was annoyed. There is a deep meaning in this: We cannot escape our flesh. We can only control it to a certain extent, but we cannot obliterate our nature, and the weaknesses of our nature. We can only have compassion—when it is deserved. And a sense of humor, which you lack, my boy. Humor makes life tolerable. There is no mention of it in the Bible, but I am pretty sure that Christ laughed frequently and joked and told interesting stories. After all, He was a Jew in the flesh, and Jews are famous for their wry jokes.”

  Francis did not believe in any Deity, and he did not believe in Christ. But something in him was offended by his father’s speech. It threatened his concept of the grim perfectibility of man. Once he said meaningly to his father, “There is a new spirit growing in the world,” to which Walter had replied, “If it is what I think it is, then may God have mercy on our souls.”

  On another occasion, in order to conciliate his beloved son, Walter had said, “My boy, there is enough room in this world for both of us.” He had looked pleadingly at Francis, but Francis had shut his face and had tightened his lips and had not replied. Consequently, and in increasing exasperation, Walter had begun to oppose any ideas of Francis’, some of which he privately agreed were worthy. Such as my son would choke the theories which are probable, he would think, and set men like myself obdurately against what we know ourselves to be good. That is disastrous to everybody.

  Today, on extra urging, Francis went with his father for a drive through the country. Francis was not interested in farms and fields and the exuberance of nature in flower and fruit and grain. He was an urban man, which Walter regretted. There were too many urban men in the world these days. They were bored by the obvious; they thought labor demeaning. Worse still, they thought it unnecessary, and an affront to something they called “the dignity of man.” More and more, father and son were finding speech between them—honest and deep-hearted speech and self-revelation—impossible. Francis blamed his father. Walter was “old.” He had no concept of the “new world.” In his turn, Walter thought his son’s ideas resembled a bowl of lusty oatmeal and milk prematurely rancid, and poisonous. Ah, well, he would think, when Francis becomes older he will find that there are laws to contain impossible dreams, the laws of God and nature. The only idea which has splendor is the bountiful mercy of God—and we surely need it in these days!

  Mrs. Jardin said to Ellen, in the kitchen: “Now we’ll go upstairs to do the bedrooms. The Missus makes her own bed, but there are the three others. Here is the mop and duster and the broom and the pail. Don’t stare at them. You know what they’re for, don’t you?”

  Ellen had been permitted the scraps from Francis’ plate; she had devoured them with swift avidity, relishing every crumb. She had had a cup of coffee, which she thought delectable. She was surfeited, she was also sleepy, and it was only eight o’clock. “If you didn’t romp around all night,” said Mrs. Jardin with severity, “and behaved yourself like a Christian, you wouldn’t be so heavy-eyed.” As Ellen did not understand this, she could only accompany Mrs. Jardin in silence to the upper stories. Mrs. Jardin was a perfectionist for everybody but herself, something which would ha
ve interested Walter Porter, ironically.

  The many bedrooms upstairs were as vast as the rooms below, but were so weightily populated with dark and corpulent furniture that they gave the impression of being thrust together in a small space, and even overlapping. As on the lower floor the light here was dun and shrouded, the air stifling. Every window was filled with shirred gray silk blinds, as well as lace curtains and dark-blue velvet draperies; the shutters were half closed. But here and there a ruddy needle of sunlight pierced a crevice at the choked windows and darted across a rug, or a wider bar made the edge of a mahogany arm redly incandescent. There were, in addition to beds with high corner posts and canopies, carved wardrobes gloomily closed and locked, dressers, chests, chairs, settees, tabourets holding bloated Chinese bowls in which a struggling plant fought for its life, and funereal pier mirrors. There was a dusty smell of lavender in each room, or cloves, or bay rum or dead roses.

  “Rich, ain’t it?” said Mrs. Jardin, looking about her as Ellen labored. The girl’s face was running with sweat; she licked it away around her mouth. I think it is terrible, she thought, with her very new rebelliousness. So she pretended not to hear Mrs. Jardin’s complacent remark and dusted and swept and shook with feverish swiftness. She saw her first bathroom, in this house, and was genuinely awed by all that marble and whiteness and polished brass and taps.

  Still, it seemed to her not at all clean to have privies in the house, and she breathed as lightly as possible. She knew nothing of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress or its Slough of Despond, but she felt caught in something which dulled her soul while it terrified her.

  She was sent to the cellar to iron, and here the air, though as still as stone, was at least cooler than the air upstairs. There were men’s shirts damply piled in profusion in baskets, endless sheets, lace-edged pillowcases and shams, a woman’s discreet and billowing underwear, napkins, tablecloths, “runners,” and mounds of stockings, as well as corset covers and petticoats and aprons and lawn dresses and “wrappers,” and men’s drawers. The flatirons warmed on a hot plate, the first Ellen had ever seen, and she did not mind the rank odor of gas in her gratitude that the plate did not heat the cellar as a wood stove would have heated it. But the gas made her languid and faintly nauseated and gave her a headache. The hours passed in a semi-slumbrous way. For Ellen was indulging herself in her usual fantasy of wide lawns at sunset, with long golden shadows creeping over grass and roses, and of white houses with glittering free glass, of bright roofs and green vines, of soft music and peace, and somewhere, she herself, in a pale sprigged gown, walking serenely in the scented silence with a flower in her hand. And waiting. But for what or whom she waited she did not know.