Leroy Scott

“ Rogers sent Tom out on an errand. After the boy had gone, anger slowly lit its fires in Rogers's thin white cheeks.
"The hardest part of it all is, I dare not be a man, be myself!" he burst out fiercely. "You don't know how heavy and revolting this mask of discretion, of control, of subserviency, becomes at times! He should have been kicked out, stamped on! Ah, to be unafraid!—that's the greatest thing in the world!"
He stood leaning on his tightened fists, which rested on the table, his eyes blazing across at David. But after a moment the red and flame began to die from his face and eyes. ”

“ Because the rich, powerful world was afraid!—afraid of its dollars! Because, if he were taken in, given a chance to live honestly, he might steal a bolt of cloth, or a coat, or a vase, or a shawl! There was the reason—the only reason. A bolt of cloth against a human life, begging to live! A coat against a human soul, agonising to be honest! Cloths and coats mean dollars—mean carriages, and diamonds, and wines. Cloths and coats must be guarded.
But the human life? The human soul?
In his wild rage David rose, turned his back upon the dark river, and shook his fist at the great indifferent city. ”

“ Never before had David seen anything so affecting; and even in after days, when he saw Morton's death with new eyes, the picture of the love and grief of this audience remained with him, unsoiled, as the strongest, sincerest scene he had ever witnessed. The women—factory girls, scrub-women, hard-working wives—wept with their souls in their tears and in their spasmodic moans; and the men—labourers, teamsters, and the like—let the strange tears stream openly down their cheeks, unashamed. The chapel was one great sob, choked down at times, at times stopping the Bishop's words. ”

“ A faint colour tinged her cheeks. "I have thought of everything—that too," she returned steadily. "In a few years you will have won the respect of all; it will be an honour, not a disgrace, to be your child."
Suddenly she stretched out her hands to him. "Oh, I want to share your sorrows, David! I want to share your sorrows! And there will be glories! I want to help in the good you are going to do. My life will count for most with you ... I've come to stay, David! I belong with you! I'm not going away! Take me!"
He sprang forward. "Oh, Helen!" ”

“ David left the guidance to Tom, and the boy led the way down the Bowery, where, to the hellish music of elevated trains, and by the garish light that streamed from restaurants, pawnshops, music-halls and saloons, moved the all-night procession of thieves and thugs, cheap sports and cheap confidence men, gutter-rags of men and women, girls whose bold, roving eyes sought markets for their charms—all those whom we of sheltered morals are wont to consider the devil's irretrievable share, without thinking much, or caring much, as to why they should be his. ”

“ He had pondered long over society's treatment of the man who breaks its law. That treatment seemed to him absurd, illogical. It would have been laughably grotesque in its deforming incompetence had it not been directed at human beings. It was a treatment bounded on one side by negligence, on the other by severity. It maimed souls, killed souls; it was criminal. David's sense of justice and humanity demanded that he should protest against this great criminal—our prison system. He knew it as prison reformers did not—from the inside. ”

“ Kate's last sentence, "You'll love me yet, David!" recurred to him constantly during the next two days. He would not, of course—yet he could but muse upon the possibility. We are all creatures of change. Our views of to-day may not be our views of to-morrow, our dislikes of this year may be our desires of next. Since, as Kate had said, Helen Chambers did not live for him, might there not take place within him such a change as would make him yearn for the love he now could not accept? ”

“ David's blood was leaping through him, and in him were the lightness and the all-conquering strength of youth. The crisp winter air that thrust its sting into many of the stream of home-coming workers, tinglingly pricked him with the joy of living.
"Have you thought again of writing?" she asked.
"About as much as a man who has leaped from a house-top to try his wings, thinks again of flying."
"I am speaking seriously. If the impulse to write should return, would you have time for writing?" ”

“ David returned quickly, bitterly. "I have merely builded out of words the shape of an impossible dream. Look at what I dream; and then look at me, a janitor!—look at my record!"
"You are going to do it!" she repeated, her voice vibrant with belief. "The dream is not impossible. You are doing something towards its fulfilment now—the boy, you know. You are going to grow above your record, and above this position—far above! You are going to grow into great things. What you have been saying has been to me a prophecy of that." ”

“ The crowd was chiefly German, but in it were many of the newer peoples of the neighbourhood. There were broad husbands and broad wives; children led by hand, babies carried in arms; young people in couples and in hilarious groups; solitary and furtive men and women. Most were in their finest, and some of the finery would not have made the opera ashamed; but many were dressed in shabbiness—though they, too, wore their best.
David, who had wandered into Avenue A, as he often did in his aimless night walks, paused momentarily and listlessly watched the in-going stream of people. ”

“ David was surprised to find that Rogers, for all his occasional bitter flashes, was an optimist. He often marvelled how Rogers had retained this hopefulness for the world's future; he could explain it only by a great natural soundness in the man. Rogers believed the world was marching forward, and he often said, his eyes illumined with belief: "The time is coming, Aldrich—I shall not see it, and you may not, but it's coming—when there will be no human waste, when the world will have learned the economy of men!" ”

“ The tour of installation ended, David started for his old home to begin the removal, armload at a time, of his few belongings. As he walked among the school-hurrying children, over snow grimed by ten thousand feet, he felt dazed for fear that this world of hope he had entered might suddenly vanish. Failure had been his so constantly that this beginning of success seemed unreal. ”

“ David had neither the strength nor the spirit to reply to this man as he had replied to the owner of the department store in One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street. When he reached the open air he walked a few paces, then paused and leaned against the front of a building. He felt an utter exhaustion—there was not another effort in him. He was like a horse, driven to the last ounce of its strength, that lies down in its tracks to die; the whip can only make it quiver, cannot make it rise. ”

“ Lillian Drew sprang up, as livid as if the hand had indeed cracked upon her cheek, and glared at the flame of hatred and wrath that was Kate Morgan. Rage, abetted by liquor, had taken away every thought, every desire, save to strike this girl down. Her hands clenched; but blows make only a passing hurt. All her life she had used words; words, if you have the right sort, are a better weapon—their wound is deep, permanent. ”

“ Presently they saw the gleam of water at the end of the street, and continuing they came out upon a dock. It was crowded with trucks, and against its one side creakingly rubbed a scow loaded with ashes and against its other a scow ridged high with empty tin cans. Sitting in the tails of some of the trucks were parlourless lovers—their courtship flanked by garbage, presided over by the odour of stables. They did not break their embraces as David and Kate brushed by them and passed on to the end of the dock. ”

“ They went up a narrow stairway, then a broad one, stealthily following the guidance of the lantern's white finger, pausing breathless at every three or four steps to reach forth with their ears for any possible stir of life—Kate tense and alert with excitement, David giddied by a choking, throbbing, unshaped emotion. After a dozen of these pauses, when to David the rubadub of his heart seemed to resound through the house, Kate led him across deep rugs and through a broad doorway hung with tapestries. ”

“ David's concern was now all for these unsuspecting hundreds mourning and praising Morton in the chapel. Presently, amid the chaos in his mind, one thought assumed definite shape: if the people were kept in ignorance, if Morton were kept pure in their eyes, would not their love for him, the saving influence he had set about them, remain just as potent as though he were in truth unspotted? ”

“ Have you ever thought, Miss Chambers, how saving we are of all material things, and what squanders, oh, what criminal squanderers! we are of human lives? How far more rapidly the handling of iron, and hogs, and cotton, has developed than the handling of men! The pig comes out meat and soap and buttons and what not, and the same rigid economy is observed with all other materials. Nothing is too small, too poor, to be saved. ”

“ Her imagination showed her scenes of David's trial, of his prison life, of his struggles to regain place in the world, and she cried softly as she looked upon him amid these travails. That she had not believed in him despite appearance and his own declaration, she regarded as evidence of her weakness, and she told herself that her five years of suffering were too light a punishment for her lack of faith. She should have learned his innocence—and lost him!
Presently her mind, rehearsing the evening, came to David's statement that, for St. Christopher's sake, he must always remain a guilty man. ”

“ They were a splendid pair, David had to admit to himself—both tall, she with the grace of perfect womanhood, he with the poise and dignity of power and success. She was a woman to honour any man's life; he—David now knew of Allen's brilliant achievements and brilliant future—had a life worth any woman's honouring. ”

“ But David suddenly saw again Morton's dead face upon the pillow, and he was startled to see that the mouth was small, the chin weak. He now recognised, what he would have recognised before had the fault not been hidden among a thousand virtues, that Morton did not have a strong will. He recognised that a man might have genius and all the virtues, save only courage, and yet fail to carry himself honourably through a crisis that a man of merest mediocrity might have weathered well. ”