PART 17 of 24 Parts
The Saturday matinee at the Auditorium in Chicago was just over; and the crowd was struggling out the aisles to the street.
Two girls stepped out of the crowd toward one of the carriages. The older one had entered and taken her seat, and the attendant was still holding the door open for the younger, who stood hesitating on the curb.
"Come, Felicia! What are you waiting for? I shall freeze to death!" called the voice from the carriage.
The girl outside the carriage hastily unpinned a bunch of English violets from her dress and handed them to a small boy who was standing shivering on the edge of the sidewalk. He took them with a look of astonishment and a "Thank ye, lady!" and instantly buried a very grimy face in the bunch of perfume. The girl stepped into the carriage, and in a few moments the coachman was speeding the horses rapidly up one of the boulevards.
"You are always doing some queer thing or other, Felicia," said the other girl.
"Am I? What have I done that is queer now, Rose?" asked Felicia, looking up suddenly and turning her head toward her sister.
"Giving those violets to that boy. He looked as if he needed a good hot supper more than a bunch of violets. It’s a wonder you didn’t invite him home with us. I shouldn’t have been surprised if you had. You are always doing such queer things."
"Would it be queer to invite a boy like that to come to the house and eat a hot supper?" Felicia asked softly, almost as if she were alone.
"Queer isn’t just the word, of course," replied Rose indifferently. "it would be what Madame Blanc calls outre. Decidedly. Therefore, you will please not invite him, or others like him, to hot suppers because I suggested it. Oh, dear, I’m so tired."
She yawned as Felicia silently looked out the window.
"The concert was stupid, and the violinist was simply a bore. I don’t see how you could sit so still through it all," Rose exclaimed a little impatiently.
"I liked the music," answered Felicia quietly.
"You like anything. I never saw a girl with so little critical taste."
Felicia colored slightly but would not answer. Rose yawned again, then she exclaimed abruptly:
"I’m sick of ‘most everything. I hope the Shadows of London will be exciting tonight."
"The Shadows of Chicago!" murmured Felicia.
"Shadows of Chicago, Shadows of London, who cares what you call the play when it was the sensation of
Felicia turned toward her sister. Her great brown eyes were impressive and not altogether free from a sparkle of luminous heat.
"And yet we never weep over the real thing on the actual stage of life. What are the shadows of London on the stage to the shadows of London or Chicago as they really exist? Why don’t we get excited over the facts as they are?"
"Because the actual people are dirty and disagreeable and it’s too much bother, I suppose," replied Rose carelessly. "Felicia, you can never reform the world. What’s the use? We’re not to blame for the poverty and misery. There have always been rich and poor, and there always will be. We ought to be thankful we’re rich."
"Suppose Christ had gone on that principle," replied Felicia with unusual persistence. "Do you remember Dr Bruce’s sermon on that verse a few Sundays ago: ‘For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might become rich?"
"I remember it well enough," said Rose with some petulance. "And didn’t Dr. Bruce go on to say that there was no blame attached to people who have wealth, if they are kind and give to the needs of the poor? I am sure he himself is pretty comfortably settled. He never gives up his luxuries just because some people go hungry. What good would it do if he did?
"I tell you, Felicia, there will always be poor and rich in spite of all we can do. Ever since Rachel has written about those queer doings in Raymond, you have upset the whole family. People can’t live up to such high standards all the time. You see if Rachel doesn’t give it up soon. It’s a good pity she doesn’t come to Chicago and sing in the Auditorium concerts. I heard today that she had received an offer. I’m going to write and urge her to come. I’m just dying to hear her sing."
Felicia looked out the window and was silent. The carriage rolled on past two blocks of magnificent private residences and turned into a wide driveway under a covered passage. The sisters hurried into the house. It was an elegant mansion of gray stone, furnished like a palace, every corner of it warm with the luxury of paintings, sculpture, art and modern refinement.
The owner of it all, Charles R. Sterling, stood before an open grate fire smoking a cigar. He had made his money in grain speculation and railroad ventures, and was reputed to be worth something over two million. His wife was a sister of Rachel’s mother. She had been an invalid for several years. The two girls, Rose and Felicia, were the only children.
Rose was 21, a blonde beauty, educated in a fashionable college, just entering society, and already somewhat cynical and indifferent. A hard young lady to please, her father said about her sometimes playfully, sometimes sternly. Felicia, at 19, had a tropical loveliness somewhat like her cousin Rachel Winslow, with warm, generous impulses just waking into Christian feeling, capable of all sorts of expression: a puzzle to her father, a source of irritation to her mother. There was in Felicia a large unsurveyed territory of thought and action.
"Here’s a letter for you, Felicia," said Mr. Sterling.
Felicia took the letter and instantly opened it, saying as she did so, "It’s from Rachel."
"Well, what’s the latest news from Raymond?" asked Mr. Sterling, taking his cigar out of his mouth and looking at Felicia as he often did—with half-shut eyes, as if he were studying her.
"Rachel says Dr. Bruce has been in Raymond for two Sundays and seems very interested in what has happened at First Church this past year."
"What does Rachel say about herself?" asked Rose, who was lying on a couch almost buried in elegant cushions.
"She is still singing at the Rectangle. Since the tent meetings closed, she sings in an old hall until the new buildings that her friend Virginia Page is putting up are completed."
Mr. Sterling relit his cigar as Rose exclaimed, "Rachel is so queer. She might set Chicago wild with her voice if she sang in the Auditorium. And there she goes on, throwing her voice away on people who don’t know what they are hearing."
"Rachel won’t come here unless she can do it and keep her pledge at the same time," said Felicia after a pause.
"What pledge?" Mr. Sterling asked, and then added vaguely, "Oh, I remember now, that business of letting Jesus run your life." He reflected. "It’s rather strange, but Alexander Powers used to be a friend of mine. We learned telegraphy in the same office. Made a great sensation when he resigned and handed over that evidence to the Interstate Commerce Commission. And he’s back at his telegraph again. There have been queer doings in Raymond during the past year. I wonder what Dr. Bruce thinks of it on the whole. I must have a talk with him about it."
"He is at home and will preach tomorrow," said Felicia. "Perhaps he will tell us something about it."
There was silence for a minute. Then Felicia said abruptly, "And what if he should propose the same pledge to the Nazareth Avenue Church?"
"What are you talking about?" asked her father a little sharply.
"About Dr. Bruce. I mean, what if he should propose to our church what Mr. Maxwell proposed to his, and ask for volunteers who would pledge themselves to do nothing until asking the question, ‘What would Jesus do?’"
"There’s no danger of it," said Rose.
"It’s a very impractical movement, to my mind," said Mr. Sterling.
"I understand from Rachel’s letter that the church in Raymond is going to make an attempt to extend the idea of the pledge to other churches. If it succeeds, it will certainly make great changes in the churches and in people’s lives," said Felicia.
"At the moment, all I’m interested in is dinner," said Rose, walking into the dining room. Her father and Felicia followed and the meal proceeded in silence. Mrs. Sterling’s meals were served in her room. Mr. Sterling was preoccupied. He ate very little and excused himself early, and although it was Saturday night he remarked as he went out that he would not be home until late because of business matters.
"Don’t you think that Father looks disturbed lately?" asked Felicia after he had gone out.
"Oh, I don’t know. I hadn’t noticed anything unusual," replied Rose. After a silence she said, "Are you going to the play tonight, Felicia? Mrs. Delano will be here at half-past seven. I think you ought to go. She’ll feel hurt if you refuse."
"I’ll go. I don’t care about it, though. I can see shadows enough without going to the play."
"That’s a doleful remark for a girl of 19," replied Rose. "But then, you’re queer in your ideas anyhow, Felicia. If you’re going up to see Mother, tell her I’ll run in after the play, if she’s still awake."
Felicia went up to see her mother and remained with her until the Delano carriage came. Mrs. Sterling was worried about her husband. She talked incessantly and was irritated by every remark Felicia made. She would not listen to Felicia’s attempt to read even a part of Rachel’s letter. When Felicia offered to stay with her for the evening, she refused the offer sharply.
Felicia was not happy as she left for the play, but she was familiar with that feeling, except that sometimes she was more unhappy than at other times. Her feeling expressed itself tonight by withdrawal. When the company was seated in the box and the curtain went up, Felicia positioned herself behind the others and remained for the evening by herself. Mrs. Delano, as chaperone for a half-dozen young ladies, understood Felicia well enough to know that she was "a bit strange," as Rose often said, and she made no attempt to draw her out of her corner.
The play was an English melodrama full of startling situations, realistic scenery and unexpected climaxes. There was one scene in the third act that impressed even Rose Sterling. It took place inside one of the slum tenements in the East End of London. Here the scene painter and carpenter had done their utmost to produce an exact copy of a famous court and alley well-known to the poor creatures who made up a part of the outcast London humanity.
The rags, the crowding, the vileness, the broken furniture, the horrible animal existence forced upon creatures made in God’s image were shown so skillfully in this scene that more than one elegant woman in the theatre, seated like Rose Sterling in a sumptuous box, surrounded with silk hangings and velvet-covered railing, caught herself shrinking back a little, as if contamination were possible from the nearness of this piece of scenery. It was almost too realistic, and yet it had a horrible fascination for Felicia as she sat there alone, buried back in a cushioned seat and absorbed in thoughts that went far beyond the dialogue on the stage.
From the tenement scene the play shifted to the interior of a nobleman’s palace, and something akin to a sigh of relief went up all over the house at the sight of the accustomed luxury of the upper classes. The contrast was startling. It was brought about by a clever piece of staging that allowed only a few minutes to elapse between the slum and the palace scenes.
The dialogue went on, the actors came and went in their various roles, but upon Felicia the play made but one distinct impression. Though the scenes in the slum were only incidents in the story of the play, Felicia found herself living those scenes over and over. She had never philosophized about the causes of human misery. She was not old enough; she had not the temperament. But she felt intensely—and this was not the first time she had felt—the contrast between the upper and lower conditions of human life.
"Come, Felicia, aren’t you going home?" said Rose. The play was over, the curtain down, and the people were going noisily out, laughing and gossiping, as if the play were only good diversion.
Felicia roused herself from her thoughts and quietly went out with the rest. She was never absentminded, but often thought herself into a condition that left her alone in the midst of a crowd.
"Well, what did you think of it?" asked Rose when the sisters had reached home. Rose had considerable respect for Felicia’s judgment of a play.
"I thought it a pretty fair picture of real life."
"I mean the acting," said Rose, annoyed.
"The bridge scene was well-acted, especially the woman’s part. I thought the man overdid the sentiment a little."
"Did you? I enjoyed that. And wasn’t the scene between the two cousins funny when they first learned they were related? But the slum scene was horrible. I think they ought not to show such things in a play. They are too painful."
"They must be painful in real life, too," replied Felicia.
"Yes, but I don’t think we should have to pay money to see such things."
"Are you going up to see Mother?" asked Felicia after a pause.
"No," replied Rose from the other room. "I won’t trouble her tonight. If you go in, tell her I am too tired to be agreeable."
As Felicia climbed the great staircase and walked down the upper hall, she could see that the light was still burning in her mother’s room. The servant who always waited on Mrs. Sterling was beckoning Felicia to come in.
"Tell Clare to go out," exclaimed Mrs. Sterling as Felicia came up to the bed.
Felicia was surprised, but did as her mother bade her and then inquired how she was feeling.
"Felicia—" said her mother. "Can you pray?"
The question was so unlike any her mother had ever asked that Felicia was startled. But she answered, "Why, yes, Mother. Why do you ask such a question?"
"Felicia, I am frightened. Your father—I have had such strange fears about him all day. Something is wrong with him. I want you to pray."
"Now? Here, Mother?"
"Yes. Pray, Felicia."
Felicia reached out and took her mother’s hand. It was trembling. Mrs. Sterling had never shown such tenderness for her younger daughter, and her strange demand now was the first real sign of any confidence in Felicia’s character.
The Girl knelt, still holding her mother’s trembling hand, and prayed. It was doubtful if she had ever prayed aloud before. She must have said in her prayer the words that were needed, for when it was silent in the room her mother was weeping softly and her nervous tension was gone.
Felicia stayed there some time. When she was assured that her mother would no longer need her, she rose to go.
"Goodnight, Mother. You must let Clara call me, if you feel bad in the night."
"I feel better now." Then, as Felicia was moving away, Mrs. Sterling said, "Won’t you kiss me, Felicia?"
Felicia went back and bent over her mother. The kiss was almost as strange to her as the prayer had been. When Felicia went out of the room, her cheeks were wet with tears. She had not often cried since she was a little girl.
