Florence Finch Kelly

“ Henrietta Marne looked about her as she walked slowly up the street toward her home with a heart more at ease than she had known for many weeks. For she had that day secured a position at a salary equal to that she was receiving from Felix Brand and was to begin work in it as soon as the time should expire for which she had already given him notice.
“Difficulties always disappear as soon as you tackle them in real earnest,” she was saying to herself as she smiled in pleasure of the green world all about her and of the satisfaction that glowed in her own breast. ”

“ Annister, you can’t do it! Oil and water will no more mix than my characteristics and his can be made to mingle in a smooth blend again. My purpose in life is to add to the well-being of the world. I want to lessen its poverty and its degradation and help to reform the soul-poisoning conditions under which so many thousands live. I have planned my life and my head is full of schemes for the betterment of the world. I find it easy to make money. I shall be rich soon. My chief interest and pleasure will be in using my money to work out those plans. ”

“ It was his own death warrant that this masterful force within him was ordering him to write—the death warrant of him, Felix Brand, ardent lover of life and but barely past its beginning, of all of him save only his fair physical envelope, which would still live and be glad, though he had passed into nothingness.
Stronger and stronger, the more he resisted, grew this inner compulsion, until it seemed to have entered into his every nerve and bone and muscle and he feared to remain at his desk lest it force his unwilling hand to write. ”

“ With a firm, rapid stride the young man was coming eagerly up the street, his eyes upon their house. “He doesn’t walk at all like Felix,” Penelope repeated thoughtfully as his figure became more plainly visible through the veiling snow, “but it’s curious how much like him he looks, after all.”
“See, Penelope!” the mother exclaimed, reaching out to grasp her daughter’s hand in sudden enthusiasm. “See how he comes out of the snow mist! Isn’t it just like a figure in a dream getting plainer and clearer, and more like life!” ”

“ Annister that Felix Brand was having a bad quarter of an hour. But the little physician, sitting upright in his capacious chair, his elbows on its arms and his finger-tips resting against one another, could not find it in his heart to abate in the least the penetrating gaze of his gray eyes or the gentle insistence of his questions. For the longer their talk continued the more he became convinced that the man before him was not speaking the truth and the more he felt it necessary, for his daughter’s sake, to find out what was the truth. ”

“ She bent her thin, humped and crooked body forward with fresh energy and a spark of the spirit she had conquered flashed out again in her dark eyes and tired face.
“My soul has longed so to do something, to be something, to be able to use my abilities and my energies as other people do! I have longed so fiercely to go about and see the beautiful and wonderful things in the world, to achieve something myself and to meet as an equal other people who have done things worth while! If there is hell anywhere it used to be in my heart! ”

“ Brand was still trembling and she felt strangely moved. But her usual shyness was all gone and she did not even notice that she was finding it easy to talk with this stranger, easier, indeed, than it had been, of late years, to talk with Felix. Her heart swelled and throbbed with yearning over him.
“I am quite sure,” she said, “that you will not do anything unless you are convinced that it is right and for the best. No matter how it may seem to others, I shall know that you expect good to come of it.” ”

“ Oh, I know that your beauty-loving soul shrinks from having to look at poor, helpless, misshapen Penelope. I understand perfectly well that you much prefer to look at young and pretty women, but my mind is set on this matter. You must do as I—shall we say, suggest?—and that without delay or—there will be consequences. Her poor body is not half so ugly or repulsive as your selfish soul, Felix Brand, and you know very well who is responsible for them both. ”

“ Between Mildred Annister and Henrietta there existed a friendship which made up in outward warmth what it lacked in depth. For Mildred, with her woman’s heart but lately awakened and filled to the brim with absorbed and adoring first love, could not help some secret resentment that any other woman should be anything to her beloved or give him any service. ”

“ These were all in strong contrast to Brand’s courtly, winning manners, affable tones and leisurely, graceful movements.
“Felix Brand has become a monster, a swollen toad of egotism. He cares for nothing but his own advantage, his own interests, his own pleasures, and these he reaches out and takes, grabs them, without any regard for other people’s rights or necessities. That kind of selfishness is the root of all evil, and Felix Brand is its incarnation. He is soaked with wickedness. ”

“ In that and similar ways, which will benefit and make others happy quite as much as they will contribute to my satisfaction, I expect to spend my life. Felix Brand will design some beautiful buildings. But he will add to the rottenness of the world and spread disaster and misery with every day of his life. Will the buildings atone for all that evil?”
Dr. Annister’s person, sunk in the depths of his arm-chair, looked even smaller than usual, in comparison with this energetic, dominating figure that stood above him, speaking with emphasis and conviction, instinct with determined will. ”

“ Gordon was much in her mind during the rest of the day; and as she traveled homeward in the afternoon, in the subway, across the ferry in the glowing sunset light, and in the clattering trolley car, her thought was busy with speculation about him, with comparison of him with Felix Brand, with recollections of what he had said and how he had looked, with conjecture as to the meaning of his expression when she asked him if he knew where Brand was. ”

“ Felix Brand rose and with hands thrust into his pockets moved uncertainly from one chair to another. “Mildred has entire confidence in my explanation,” he said with a touch of defiance in his voice. “She knows I would not deceive her.”
“Mildred is young,” her father replied gently, “and ignorant of the evil of which there is such a plenty in the world. She is very, very much in love with her promised husband and if he told her that black is white the dazzle in her eyes would make her see it white. ”

“ It’s to be expected that a young man will change as he grows up and enters upon his life’s work. But Mr. Gordon looks more as I used to think Felix would when he grew up, and something as my husband did when we were married, but still more—” she paused, searching his countenance with puzzled eyes. He started a little, as if pulling himself together.
“Now I know,” she exclaimed. “Penelope, Mr. Gordon looks like your Grandfather Brand! If you wore your hair longer, Mr. Gordon, and had no mustache, you’d look very like an old picture I have of him when he was young. ”

“ But suppose that at the same time he was living such a private, even secret, life as made him a source of wickedness and corruption, an endless influence for evil. Then would such a man, do you think—” his voice sank lower and thrilled with solemn earnestness—“deserve to live rather than the other one, who, though he had no genius for the creation of beauty, was using all his powers to make the world a better place for all men to live in? If both men could not have the gift of life, Miss Marne, which do you think ought to have it?” ”

“ Upon Gordon’s exultant countenance there fell a shade of solemnity. “I know not,” he replied in awed tones. “What has become of him is one of the mysteries of the human soul, a mystery whose beginning and whose growth I understand, as you shall too, but whose end no man can explain. The man whom you knew, whom [Pg 352] everyone knew, who knew himself, as Felix Brand, is no more. He will never exist again.
“Deliberately that man chose the worse side of his nature and cherished it and tried to ignore and cast out the other, the better side. ”

“ You are not two complete human beings. It has come about that he has divested himself of moral sense. But he still has a wonderful esthetic gift, of very great value to the world. Have you any part in that?”
“No, I have not,” was Gordon’s quick reply. “I admit I am lacking on that side of my nature. But is that the most important thing for a man to possess?”
He sprang to his feet and strode about as he went on pouring out his arguments with emphatic, forceful manner. Dr. Annister watched him, wondering at his apparent size. For he looked a considerably larger man than did Felix Brand. ”

“ But if one looked a second time and more searchingly one would perceive some clouding and coarsening of that refinement, signs not yet marked enough to tell their story openly and not likely to be noted by the ordinary observer, but able to make the keener student of the human countenance doubt his first impressions.
“It’s queer how much more vivid and real those dreams are nowadays—every time one comes it’s stronger than ever it was before,” Felix Brand’s thought was running as he made ready for the day. ”

“ And, really, Philip, I don’t know a handsomer man! His face is so refined, and those brown, caressing eyes of his are enough to turn any girl’s head. I don’t wonder in the least that Mildred is so completely in love with him. What is it you don’t like about his looks, Philip?”
“I don’t quite know, and perhaps it isn’t fair to him to put it into words until I do know. It is less evident tonight, when he is all animation and his thoughts are full of the entertainment of his guests, than I have seen it sometimes lately. You know, Margaret, Felix has an unusually expressive countenance. ”

“ She remembered afterward that, while his one swift glance had seemed to take in everything in the room, it had passed over the flowers as coolly as it had over the chairs and the typewriter, and she compared it with the way Felix Brand’s eyes would have lingered and feasted upon them.
“I have not seen him for several days,” he replied, his gaze again straight into her eyes. He spoke rapidly, in a direct, almost blunt manner. “But I can assure you that you need to feel no anxiety about him. He is quite safe and will be back here as soon as circumstances permit.” ”

“ You know that dear expression Mr. Brand’s eyes always have, so winning and affectionate, and as if he thought the world of you. Well, Mr. [Pg 156] Gordon’s eyes are large and brown, too, but they are keen and they look right through you and he flashes one glance around the room and you feel that he knows everything in it. He isn’t so polished in his manners——”
“Mr. Brand has the loveliest manners of any man I ever met,” Isabella interrupted. “His mission in life ought to be to travel round and show them off as a pattern for all other young men. ”

“ Annister, though you have guessed something from the change in the expression of his countenance. For years he has been like a carrier of typhoid, spreading the contagion of his own sinful nature wherever he went, himself unpunished, even admired, looked up to and patterned after. Do you want to keep such a man alive? Do you think, do you really believe, Dr. Annister, that the genius of such [Pg 327] a man as that, whatever it is, could make amends to the world for all the evil that he does?”
“You forget, Mr. Gordon, that it is no part of my purpose to keep him as he is. ”

“ Gordon,” she demurred.
Had she ever seen a wild creature expecting [Pg 262] destruction at human hands? No, surely not, she told herself, and yet this wistful pleading expression might be just the look in the eyes of an animal facing death but dumbly begging for life.
Then, in a flash, it all came back—her own little parlor, Billikins whining and hiding in her skirts in mysterious terror, and Felix Brand gazing at her with all the usual soft, caressing look of his brown eyes curtained behind some absorbing anxiety and fear. ”

“ Penelope was beginning to find a new pleasure in life, the deepest of all pleasures to the woman-heart, the pleasure of service. For Hugh Gordon had been sending her books treating of the sociological questions in which she had long taken an intellectual interest and had asked her to make digests of them for him, to tell him what she thought of them and to write him at length upon such of their contents as seemed to her of particular consequence. ”

“ Would you condone a man for deliberately making it worse because he was adding to its beauty?”
Gordon’s intent gaze and the solemn, eager earnestness with which he spoke appalled his listener ever so little. It was as if he were asking these questions from his inmost, deepest heart.
“I—I don’t know just what to say,” she faltered. “I never thought of the matter in that way before. One doesn’t like to answer so serious a question offhand. But—” she hesitated and felt herself [Pg 260] being swept into agreement by his very forcefulness of character and intensity of feeling. ”

“ But, deep down within him, that other side lived and grew strong, until it was strong enough to take possession of his body and cast him out. He is gone!” Gordon’s voice rose again into triumphal tones. “He has dropped into an oblivion man’s thought cannot fathom nor man’s brain understand. He ordained his own destiny, he worked out his own fate. Let him have the end that he himself invited!”
Gordon ceased speaking and leaned toward Henrietta. The terror had left her countenance and in her eyes was the dawning of renewed trust in him. ”

“ Behind them Manhattan reared its mighty, tawny-yellow walls and towers through the golden haze—Mammon rising from the waves, with feet lapped in the rose-gold waters and front ablaze with the diamond dazzle of a thousand sunset-lighted windows.
It was the month of May, nature’s month of marvels, when with her magic wand she strikes upon earth, and tree, and plant, and human heart, and the indwelling, everlasting life and youth gush forth in countless streams of leaf and bloom and song and leaping spirit. ”