Chapter XX: The Candles Are Lighted 181 (3)

I became rather friendly with that near-sighted junior. He was so genial, good-hearted, apologetic a chap that I could not harbor any resentment against him for the events which took place at his fraternity house. They were not his fault, anyhow.

His name was Trevelyan, and he came from one of the oldest families in New York; one of the wealthiest, too. At college he was considered somewhat of a fool, his never-failing good nature giving justification for the opinion. I don't think that, since that first embarrassing luncheon, I have never seen him unhappy--and even then it was on my account he was discontented, not on his own. And outside of college he must have been respected with all the awe which New Yorkers accord to the Sons of the American Revolution and five or six million dollars. But he was the least lofty, least snobbish man that I have ever known. Most of his college friends thought he was too much of a fool to play the snob; I thought he was too much of a gentleman.

He came to dinner at my aunt's apartment after he had known me for about a month. I do not know who of us was the more proud, my aunt or I--for to me the idea of having a junior and a member of one of the most powerful fraternities visiting at my home was quite as much of a marvel as my aunt seemed to feel it, that a member of the Trevelyan family--the Trevelyan's of Fifth avenue and Sixty-fourth street, don't you know--should be seated at her table and giving gracious attention to her gossipy conversation. For a whole week after his visit Aunt Selina made a great point of it--and of telling her friends of it. The distinction of having a Trevelyan to dinner was a great triumph over Mrs. Fleming-Cohen, who had once entertained a Jewish mining magnate from the Far West--but who had never attained anything like a Trevelyan.

I think Trevelyan began at first feeling very much ashamed and sorry; he was just trying to square up matters with his own conscience. He had a room in one of the college dormitories. He seldom used it, but when he did he would invite me to stay up there with him and to sit until the wee, quiet hours, talking over our briar pipes, interspacing the layers of blue smoke with argument and stirring plans. Trevelyan had great hopes for me. He had discovered that I was a runner.

As a matter of fact, I had done a little practicing with the track team at military school. I had never amounted to much, had never stood out tremendously in meets. I liked to run, I liked the healthy trim that the exercise gave me, but I'm afraid I never took it very seriously.

But Trevelyan saw things differently. Here was my great chance. Never mind the college papers, the literary societies and all that tame coterie of lesser institutions. If I made the track team I would be a college hero--and, after seeing me capture the flag in the class rush, he had no doubt of my vim and nerve. I must make the track team. (Trevelyan, by the way, was assistant manager of the track organization.)

So, soon enough, I was out on the windy field in my old school track-clothes, racing around and around with a sturdy intention of proving myself worthy of Trevelyan's friendship. That was my chief reason for "coming out for track," after all.

The coach, a taciturn, gray old fellow, whose muscles were running too fat and whose temper had frayed out in the years of snarling at prospective champions, paid little attention to me until the week before the freshman-sophomore track meet. Then he tried me out at a 44-yard run. That was what I had been used to doing at school. There was only one man in the freshman class who could beat me in this run for certain. There was no reason, said Trevelyan, why I should not be absolutely sure of my place on the class team.

Three days before the meet the other "44" man sprained his knee. He was out of the race for the time being. There was no doubt now that I would be put in. So said Trevelyan, and so, in surly, semi-official fashion, said the coach.

But we had not counted on the captain of the freshman track team. This was one of my classmates, chosen from among the many candidates by the captain of the 'varsity team. This freshman leader I did not know personally. I had met him almost every day on the field, but he had never recognized me. His track shirt bore the monogram of a noted preparatory school; and it was echoed that he was the handsomest man in the class. He was most certainly the most snobbish. He was thrown into contact with me in various organizations during our four years. I do not remember his ever having bowed to me. In his college world I, and such as I, did not exist.

At any rate, the college newspaper came out one noon to announce the members of the freshman track team, as chosen by its captain. My name was not among them.

In vain did Trevelyan protest to the 'varsity captain, to the coach--I even think he took the matter as high as a meeting of the faculty athletic advisory committee. Nothing could be done. The 'varsity captain shrugged his shoulders, the old coach growled but said nothing, the faculty advisers kept away from the topic as if it were beneath their tutelary notice. And the freshman-sophomore track meet was held with me on the side-lines, among the spectators. I have no reason to gloat over it, but it is a rather amusing point that we lost the entire meet through losing the four-forty yard run.

"It's a dirty shame," said Trevelyan, his squinting eyes full of rue and anger. "I knew that sort of thing went on in the 'varsity circle--but I didn't think they'd carry it down into the class teams. It's all college politics--and college politics are the meanest, most vindictive intrigue on earth."

I didn't ask him for a further explanation, and I suppose he felt it would be kinder not to make one. But I knew well enough to what he referred--and why there had been this sudden, underhanded discrimination. I made up my mind to forget the whole episode. I had not been so tremendously anxious to make the track team that I would let the disappointment of it rankle and grow and ruin my year's fun. I put it all behind me, resolving to take my enthusiasm into some other of the college activities where it would be more sincerely appreciated.

I consulted Trevelyan about it. He suggested the college newspaper. But after he had made the suggestion, he began to stammer and make strange protests. I asked him to tell me plainly what was wrong.

"Why, it's the same with that as with the track team. The editor-in-chief of the paper is in my 'crowd.' I'll speak to him--and save you any trouble. If he says yes, then you go out and win a place on the board of editors. But if he says no, I want you to promise me that you won't subject yourself to any more of this puppy-dog prejudice."

I did promise. And two days later I received a postcard from Trevelyan, telling me that it would hardly be worth my while to try for the college paper. He added, in the large, unruly handwriting which his near-sightedness made necessary:

"You may go on breathing, however, if you don't make a noise at it."

He supplemented this, a few nights later, when he and I were at our old places in his room. He threw down his pipe in the midst of talking about something carefully unimportant, and sat up with a laughably angry face.

"See here, 'fresh,'" he bawled out, "you're getting the rottenest deal I ever saw. You know why--so do I. And we're going to show them a thing or two. We're going to buck up against the strongest thing in the world--and that thing is prejudice. We're going to beat it, too. Do you understand? Were going to beat it out! Smash it to pieces!"

Yes, I understood, I said. I understood it all only too well. So well, indeed, that I knew there was no use trying to fight. I knew that prejudice of race and religion was the strongest shield of the ignorant and mean, that neither he nor I could fight it fairly--and that, if he came into the fight by my side, he would ruin his own chances of being one of the biggest men in the college world when his senior year arrived.

"A lot I care for being a big man in a place of little thoughts," he snapped back at me. "I'm ready to take the consequences, now and forever after."

"Have you thought of what your fraternity brothers might say about it?" I asked him.

"I don't care--I don't--well, if they--." His voice died away in perplexity. I had hit upon his weak spot. He was an easy-going, likeable chap; he hated a rumpus. If he made any sort of fight against the anti-Jewish prejudice, he would have his whole fraternity against him, he would perhaps be shunned by all his sworn brothers, by his best college friends. His enthusiasm became a little dulled, then died down into a great good-natured sigh.

"I suppose you're right, 'fresh,'" he admitted slowly. "I'm not of the fighting sort. And I have my fraternity to consider. That's the worst of belonging to a fraternity." He took up his pipe again and smoked in silence for a while. "I suppose you think you'll never be happy, now that you know you aren't going to be in a fraternity. Take my word for it, you're ten times luckier in having your freedom. Wait until you're an upperclassman and you'll agree with me."

It seemed a dreadful sacrilege for him to be saying it. Besides, I thought he was blaming his own lack of fighting power on his fraternity in too heavy and unjust a degree. I wasn't any more of a fighter than he--but I was disappointed, somehow, that his pugnacity had died out so readily.

"I can't do it, 'fresh,'" he confessed, with a grin. "I'm not the scrapper I thought I could be. I just want to go through college lazily, happily, respectably--and all that. I wouldn't know how to make a rumpus if I wanted to. But listen here." He pointed his finger at me sternly. "If I were you, I wouldn't rest until I had made the fight and won it. Fight it not only for yourself but for the hundred other Jewish fellows in college. See that they get a square deal. See that they don't lose out on all the things that make college worth while. A Jew is just as good as anyone else, isn't he?"

"Yes," I answered him only faintly.

"Well, then, go ahead and prove that fact to the whole college world."

But, though I did not answer him, I knew that I was not any more able to make the fight than he. Less able, perhaps, because I was more handicapped. I made myself a thousand excuses as I sat there thinking it over--I was not brave enough, that was all.

But one thing my acquaintanceship with Trevelyan did bring me. He was a dabbler in light verse, and had been elected to the college funny paper. He also contributed to the undergraduate literary magazine at times--though he was a bit ashamed of being taken seriously. At any rate, he encouraged me to go into these two activities.

Whether or not it was due entirely to his influence, or whether these two college publications were broader and less exacting as to the ancestry of contributors, my work for them was welcomed. Before the year was over I had been elected an associate editor of the funny paper, and had four articles accepted by the literary magazine--enough to put me among the list of "probables" for election, next winter.

At the same time I went through a successful trial for membership in the college dramatic association. I was not given a part in the annual play, however. I made up my mind to consider this a just decision, and that I had no right to impute it to anything other than my lack of talent. The president of the association, however, met me at lunch hour one day and made some rather lame remarks about the embarrassment to which the "dramatics" would be put if I were in the cast.

"Yer see," he said, "we go on an annual tour. And we get entertained a lot, yer see. And it's big social stunts in every city. And it's the cream of society wherever we go--so, it'd be funny if--well don'tcher see?"

"Yes," I admitted, "I do see. I see further than you do."

I was beginning to wonder if that fight that Trevelyan planned wouldn't be worth while, after all.

XI

A MAN'S WORK

I talked to Trevelyan, too, of my interest in the work of Lawrence Richards. Trevelyan had heard of him and of his settlement, and was rather at sea to give an opinion about it. He was only mildly enthusiastic.

"What's the use of bothering with things so far away from your college life?" he protested lazily. "Of course, the idea of being useful to people in need is splendid and all that. But somehow, it doesn't fit in with college life."

"Why not? Why shouldn't it?" I argued.

He waved his hand as if to begin some generalization, but made no real reply.

"Wait until you're through with college before you settle down to manhood," he said a little later. "College is just the sport of kids, after all."

It came to me--though I did not tell him so--of how, in the beginning, I had thought of college as a place of full manhood--and of the misgivings I had had, that perhaps, after all, college would be only another stepping stone to that manhood. And so it was: just a stepping stone, through brambles of prickly prejudice and childish pranks. When would it come, that manhood?

"You know, Trev," I said to him hesitatingly, "I sometimes feel I am much older than most fellows. Almost old enough to do a man's work."

He looked at me and laughed, refusing to take me too soberly. "You are older," he admitted. "Only what do you call a man's work?"

I didn't know, and told him so. He seemed to consider it a triumph for his own argument.

"See here," he said, "what's the use of all this stewing about the slums and the wretched poor and that sort of thing, if you're just aching to make trouble for yourself? If you want manhood, you'll reach it ten times sooner if you'll slip into it comfortably, gracefully, lying quietly on your back and floating--and not splashing too hard. You'll never get anywhere if you insist on getting there with a rumpus."

I admired the studied grace of his similes, but had to confess that they did not impress me as true. But, at the same time, I did not try to explain any further to him how I felt.

That did not end the questioning for me, however. I even broached it to Aunt Selina once, and she threw up her hands in despair. I think I did it somewhat with the idea of seeing her do just that. It was beginning to amuse me, how hopeless she thought I was.

So that was why I did not tell her of my intention to go, one evening, to see Mr. Lawrence Richards at his East Side Settlement. But immediately after supper, I bade my aunt good night, and answered her suspicious query with the information that I was "bound for a social affair." The answer seemed to reassure her and she gave me gracious permission to go.

I took the subway to Spring street, walked across to the Bowery, and a few blocks on the other side of it, came to the Settlement. It was in the heart of a noisy crowded section, towering high above the shabby buildings like a great, clean, shining bulwark.

Mr. Richards was at supper, I was told. A bright-eyed little Jewish boy, neatly dressed and careful of speech, offered to show me the way to the dining room on the fifth floor.

I had a hearty welcome from the Head Worker when he recognized me. He was disappointed that I had already had my supper; made me sit down beside him and introduced me to all his associates. They were mostly young men, I was surprised to find; one of them told me that he had graduated from one of the New England colleges only the year before.

Mr. Richards showed me all about the place, as he had promised he would. Then he took me with him into his "den" as he called it--a little room, just off the gymnasium, where he had his desk and filing cabinets and books. He sat me down opposite him on a canvas-covered chair, and, when he had gone over some reports which needed his signature, looked up at me and smiled.

"Well," he said, "what's the trouble?"

"Oh, I didn't--well, how did you know there was any trouble?"

The smile broadened. "None of you ever come down here unless you are in trouble. Trouble's a sort of bait that lands ambitious youths into doing settlement work--and into coming to me for advice. They say I'm pretty good at giving it. Why don't you try me?"

I did. I told him exactly how I felt: that I was growing impatient of all the tomfoolery of college; that I wanted work more sure of manly results, more broadening, more full of character. Then, too, I told him of what Trevelyan had said, and he laughed at it merrily.

"Trevelyan?" he said. "Oh, yes, I know him. He belongs to my fraternity, doesn't he? I've met him at one or another of our affairs. A good enough fellow--a little too much money, and a little too easy with himself in consequence. But he's a thorough gentleman at heart, isn't he?"

I almost gasped. He had summed up Trevelyan marvelously well in those few words. He saw my wonderment and smiled.

"I've only met him once or twice," he said, "but I have the faculty of knowing men. It's a faculty I have to have in this sort of work. It depends so much on the human equation. I meet thousands of young men and women every year--meet them, talk with them a little while, give them the best I have to give in that short space--and like to think that, even if I never see them again, I've helped them along a bit. That's all that a settlement can do, after all."

Outside the door, in the gymnasium, we could hear the joyful shrieks of a crowd of young boys playing basketball. From the upper floors came a scraping of feet to tell that the clubs were beginning to meet for the evening. From across the hall came the sound of young girls singing the parts of a cantata--and this was all planned, all created by Lawrence Richards who sat there at his desk and had a smile for each and everyone who came before him.

"Don't think you're different from all the other fellows at the university," he said to me. "You're not. You're all as much alike as a row of pins. Your problems are youth's problems--and you needn't be ashamed to have them, as long as you work them out to suit the best that is in you. You've nothing definite in mind, have you?"

I said, "No." I only had an idea that he might be able to use me here at the settlement in some capacity.

"There's a good deal in what Trevelyan said," he told me. "While you're at college you might as well give college all that it needs of your time and energy. College will surely pay you back. All the work that you do on a team, for a college paper, for any of the undergraduate organizations, will be just so much of a pledge on the part of your college that she will honor you, give you power and position and the opportunity to do bigger things. Don't you want those honors? Doesn't that power mean anything to you?"

I could not answer him; I did not want to tell him that I thought myself above these little things. He understood me, however, even in my silence.

"They are things worth while," he said. "There is a senior society worth 'making,' if you can. It would be something to be proud of to be the only Jew ever to have 'made' it. But it's more than an honor. That senior society practically governs the student body--molds its thought, holds sway over all campus opinion. Think what you could do if you were a member of it. You could fight for the other Jewish boys, make things easier and fairer for them--could spare them the unpleasant things you had to bear. You could master all snobbery, could make the university a place of real American democracy and gentlemanliness. Don't you think that that's worth while?"

I admitted it was. I had not thought of it in that way.

"Now, this is what I suggest," he said. "It's getting near the end of the term, and there's no use in your beginning any work down here at the settlement while college is still in session. But when vacation begins, I want you to come down here to live for a couple of months. I'll make you a resident club-leader, and you'll have your full share of the best sort of work." He paused a moment. "Will you come?"

"Will I? You bet I will!"

"Good! And in the meanwhile, take Trevelyan's advice--it's mine, to. Stick to your college work and your college play, and don't bother about the outside world for a while. That is your world--the college. Fight hard in it. The whole world likes a stiff upper lip, and the college world likes it best of all. And, sooner or later, Jew or Gentile, the college world will repay you for all that you give it. If you go through college shunning everyone, afraid of your own shadow, surly to the approach of all who would be friendly to you, you will reap nothing but loneliness and a bitter 'grouch.' If you loaf and play cards and hang about the billiard parlors all day long, you won't make a friend worth having, you won't gain anything worth remembering. If you work at your studies only, you'll gain nothing but Phi Beta Kappa--and, for all its worth, that'll mean nothing to you unless it brings along with it the respect and good will of all the men from whom you wrested it. At college as much as in any business office a smile will beget a smile, willingness to work will reap willingness to reward--and Alma Mater, if only you prove your love for her by working for her, will return your love tenfold."

He reached over the desk and touched my arm.

"I don't mean to be just rhetorical," he continued. "I have been through the same inner struggle and wonder and repugnance that you have--and I know how deeply you feel it. Well, I worked blindly ahead at the things that college gave me to work at--the football team and the newspaper and all that--and soon enough I knew that I had been working into manhood by the only right road. Manhood is a matter of disposition, not of work. There's a place for manhood in your little college world. Go and find that place--and give it all that is manly and courageous in you."

I left him, I confess, doubting his words a little to find that place of which he spoke so feelingly.

Well, perhaps I would find it. Perhaps an opportunity would spring up from out of the sing-song ordinariness of my daily life--and what would I do then?

XII

THE HEART OF JUDEA

My promise to Mr. Richards brought more than one result. The first of them was a serious quarrel with my Aunt Selina. Her horror at the idea of my spending the summer at a slum-settlement was beyond curbing. She had planned that I should accompany her and Mrs. Fleming-Cohen upon a trip to Europe. They did not need me; they would be in no way dependent on my company ... and I flatly declined. Aunt Selina, outraged at my actual intentions, left for France a week earlier than she had expected--and, in high indignation, gave me leave to do "whatever I pleased by way of disgracing her reputation."

Her letter from the steamer warned me to bathe every day in very hot water, lest I should be contaminated by the filth of that section of the city which I had chosen for my summer home ... and to be sure and give her warmest regards to that delightful Mr. Trevelyan!

I lost no time in moving into Mr. Richards' company at the East Side settlement. I was given a room there which was small, dark, but neat and comfortable enough. College had no sooner closed than I was settled in it, ready for the two months of work which had been allotted me.

In return for my board and lodgings, the settlement demanded all my time. There was hardly an hour which was not given to some sort of club or class, rehearsal or supervision or gymnastic training. Almost immediately after breakfast the playground work began; by noon I was helping a crowd of little ragamuffins to forget the heat in the splashing fun of the swimming pool, in the basement. In the afternoon there were classes for young boys who needed tutoring--hungry-eyed, eager little fellows who reminded me of what I must have been when I was their age.

I would not have you believe that I was readily sympathetic with every case I met. These boys and girls--though I rarely had to do with the latter--were all Jewish. The appearance of some of them would perhaps have justified my aunt's antipathy to the East Side. Those that were new to the settlement, I noticed, were shabby, dull, rough of speech, surly of manners. It would need a few weeks before I could see how subtle, yet how fundamental, were the changes which the settlement would have wrought in them.

I was shy, too, in the presence of so many boys: shy of their hastily-offered friendship, their rushing eagerness to bring me into all their schemes and boyish dreams. But I was still young enough to know those dreams upon my own account: young enough to feel with little Mosche, a cripple, who wanted so much to become an expert at the swinging of Indian clubs, and who was forever dropping the heavy things in clumsy weakness; young enough to realize how much his mother's love meant to thirteen-year-old Frank Cohen, who had been caught stealing fruit from a corner grocery and was "on parole."

But the feeling in itself was not enough, evidently. I must try and try to make that feeling eloquent--to make these boys feel, in turn, the sureness and helpfulness of my understanding. Sometimes it was torture. It is harder to conquer shyness than to slap a dragon.

Mr. Richards saw this in me--watched the struggle, appreciated it. He spoke of it to me, once, and I did not hesitate to tell him how I felt. How inadequate, how chagrined and humbled in the face of all the poverty and suffering which life down here disclosed.

"It was the same when I first came down here," he said to me in turn. "But I gained courage. Thank God for that!"

He said it quietly, but there was a good deal of fervor in the tones. It surprised me, somehow, because, I had never before heard him mention the name of the Deity. It gave me a new question to ask.

"Why is it that you don't lay more stress on religion down here? Don't the boys and girls need it?"

"Need it? Who doesn't?" A shadow crossed his face. His vivacity gave way for a moment before deep thoughtfulness. "But they get all they need, these kids. They are mostly all of them members of strictly orthodox Jewish families. Religion is given them at all hours in their own homes. Many of them get more of it than they can ever need. They get so much of it that they flee from it, just anxious for the freedom of the streets and the novelty of the bar room and the brothel and the gambling den. I have made investigations. I know that half of the East Side boys who land in the police court have been driven there by the religious strictness of their parents."

"Mr. Richards," I began ... but stopped in dismay. What I had been about to say was no more nor less than a hot, strong denial of his opinion. I felt sure he was wrong--and yet it seemed humorous to me that I, who a year ago, had hated all things Jewish, was now defending all the worth and venerability of its ritual.

"I do not agree with you altogether," I said lamely. "But ... but still, don't think I am a very enthusiastic Jew. Because I'm not."

"Aren't you? Why not?"

I did not answer--had no answer to make, in fact. I did not want to tell him of my aunt, of her influence, of my own cowardice. But, looking at me, I think he did guess something of the longing I had had ... something of that strange night when I had stood outside the synagogue and heard the music coming from within the depths of its golden haze. For he put his hand on my shoulder and bade me think for a moment why I was not a Jew in spirit as well as in name.

"You're not a snob," he said, trying to help me. "You're not thinking that, because your religion is in the minority in the midst of a Christian land, it is necessarily an ignominy to be a Jew--and to act as one."

My silence held. I let him go on talking. "Anyhow, you need religion. Every man does to a variable extent. I should feel sorry for the man who didn't. And do you mind my telling you--" he paused only for a second--"that you are one of those who need it most?"

I hung my head. He had hit so truly upon what was right, what was most secret in me.... I could not ask him how he had guessed it, I remembered his assertion that he knew men--all men--and saw now that he had not been boasting.

He went on, presently, to explain that religion was a thing for the fathers and mothers and rabbis to teach to the children--not for the settlement to teach them. He knew that boys needed the guidance of religion ... but he felt that it was supplied in even too large doses already.

"The pity of it is," he said in closing, "that wherever Jewish children turn away from the faith of their fathers, they have nothing to turn towards next. They are at sea ..." he gave me another of his quick, deep set glances ... "and that applies to rich and poor alike. Christians forget their religion when they feel they have outgrown it ... because they have lost interest in it. Jews forsake theirs but never forget it. Under certain circumstances they grow impatient with it, slink from the inconveniences which it entails ... but their hearts are always desperate for the Faith. It is a hidden loneliness, a stifled longing to them."

I thought of Aunt Selina and wondered if she had ever felt that loneliness, that longing, as I had. I could hardly imagine her happy in devoutness to Judaism. It was so comical, I laughed aloud ... and got up and left Mr. Richards, lest he should ask me at what I was laughing.

It was his remark about Jewish children getting all the religion they need which nettled me the most. I felt that I would like to go out upon the streets and see for myself. The streets are the East Side's parliament, its court of law and high opinion.

They were hot and glaring with the noonday sun when first I appealed to them. Their pavements, white and littered with unspeakable confusion, gave off a dancing wave of heat. Old women, squatting on their doorsteps, their coarse wigs low upon perspiring foreheads, dozed and woke and gabbled to each other and dozed again. Old men, with long grey beards, long, tousled hair and melancholy eyes shuffled listlessly up and down, stopping only to make way for playing children or to pat them on the head. The gutters had their Jewish peddlers, each window its fat Jewish matron who leaned upon a cushioned window-sill and gazed apathetically at nothing. There was a Babel of Yiddish and Russian and guttural English. At one corner there was a crap-game going on in full sight of the policeman across the street. Young men of my age were in it; youths with mean, furtive faces and laughs that were cruel and raucous.

So this was Judea? This was where religion played too strong a part ... where parents and rabbis taught so fully to their charges the word and the comfort of God? It did not seem so to me. It seemed all hateful, smeared, repellant. And, with the question unanswered, I fled from it.

But the next morning, in the settlement playground, something happened which began the solution for me. It was an accident and I regretted it for a long while, feeling that it was my fault.

I had been teaching little Frank Cohen some tricks on the horizontal bar. Frank, the boy on parole for petty theft, was daring in this gymnastic work. No sooner was my back turned on him than he tried one of the tricks without my help. His fingers slipped, he fell heavily from the bar to the ground. When we picked him up, his arm was found to be broken.

We got him home in Mr. Richards' little run-about, and put the boy to bed. The doctor set his arm and put it into splints. I met Frank's mother here, and, later on, his father who, having heard of the accident, came rushing upstairs from his bakery shop. They were a nervous, frightened pair; and it needed all the talk my lungs were capable of to assure them that their son would soon recover the use of his arm and be out of his bandage.

As I left their stuffy little flat, they were reciting some Hebrew prayers of gratitude. Tears were on the cheeks of both of them, and their eyes were uplifted to a God I could not know. I went downstairs bitterly conscious of that.

And this was why, when Frank Cohen, pale, his arm in a sling, but the hero of his comrades, came again to the settlement, I sought him out and made an especial friend of him. Of what that friendship should become I had then no plan.

XIII

CHILD AND PARENT

One hot evening, when the fire-escapes were crowded with hundreds of sleeping children, and the streets were shrieking canyons of heated stone and iron, and men and women lay in the grass of little parks, breathing heavily as if in prayer for coolness, I learned the secret in the heart of young Frank Cohen.

He was sitting beside me in the amateur roof-garden which Mr. Richards had contrived atop the settlement. We had wicker chairs there, a few potted palms and a solitary, tiny goldfish in a small glass bowl. That was the extent of its furnishings; but in the later afternoons the old Jewish mothers would come and sit here and doze in the sun, grateful for the breeze, city-fed and redolent, which might carry relief towards them.

This afternoon Frank's mother had been among them. I had seen her there, a pale, little woman who sat with her sewing in her lap, staring dully out over the roofs below her. I had been detailed to go around among these women and to make them as comfortable as I could. Hardly a one, however, could understand English; and Frank's mother, when I came to her, took no notice of anything that I said or mentioned. She looked at me from under lowered eyebrows. Later on Mr. Richards, who had had her under his attention for some months, told me how frightened she had been by her son's misdemeanor--it had been no more than that, according to the police report--and it was easy to imagine that she looked with suspicion upon every comrade whom Frank followed, now. The fact that I was so much older and was a member of the staff of the settlement workers was not enough to overcome the whole of her distrust.

And when the evening came, and Frank and I had emerged from one of the club meetings--for he was president of his particular club of boys of his own age--hot and tired from wrangling over Robert's Rules of Order and the wording of a baseball challenge to be sent to a rival organization, he told me the entire story of that misdemeanor. He would not speak of it readily. He too felt the shame of it, differently of course, but no less heavily. He had been in bad company. He had been going for months with some sons of one of the East Side's notorious gamblers--boys who were wise beyond their years and brutal beyond their strength. Cowardly, sneaky, they had prompted him to steal things at the counters of all the shops on their street. He had never realized, under their whispered urgings, how wrong it was--and he had never had a chance to profit by his thefts himself. The petty business had gone on for a couple of weeks, the other boys praising him, bullying him by turn, and dividing the loot between them. And when the inevitable happened and Frank found himself locked for the night in a police court, frantic at the disgrace which the loathsome night exaggerated, these boys informed against him.

When he told me of this, and how they had come snivelling before the police lieutenant, and had lied to make that fat, gruff, old master believe that Frank had stolen even more than he actually had, and all for the sake of becoming the chief of their "gang"--then his narrow face darkened and writhed with a hate that was too great for him to bear--and presently tears came into his black eyes.

"Were they Jewish boys?" I asked him. "No," he answered passionately. "I think I should have gone crazy if they had been."

I glanced at him quickly. He did not smile as he said it, nor was there anything too melodramatic about his manner.

"Why do you say that? That you would have gone crazy?"

"Don't you see? You're a Jew, ain't you?"

I said, "Yes."

"Well, I couldn't talk about it to you at all if you wasn't. And if they had been Jews--my own people--and had gone back on me like that, it would've been just a little too much. They were just tough kids--and so they didn't know any better. If they had been Jews they wouldn't have taught me to steal, they wouldn't have done what they--God, my father and mother were right about it, for sure!"

"Your father and mother? Why, what had they to do with it?"

"Oh, you know how parents are. They used to warn me against going with those tough kids. They seemed to know from the beginning that something'd happen out of it. They said--you know, it's like old folks--that Christian boys would never want to go with me unless to gain their own ends--and then to desert me, see? They wanted me to go with the Jewish boys I'd been going with all my life, before then. But I laughed and didn't listen. And--and when I had to pay back for all the things I stole, it was--well, it was the Jewish boys I knew who clubbed together and earned money by odd jobs after school--and if it wasn't for them, I'd be in the workhouse."

"But all Christian boys aren't like the ones you went with," I argued.

"No, I suppose not. But I like to think that all Jewish boys are like the ones on this street. They made a good Jew of me!"

I turned on him quickly. "Did they? How?"

"They made me proud of being one of them. They made me feel the close something-or-other--well, I ain't much when it comes to speeches but you know what I mean."

Perhaps I did, but I would not admit it to myself. Perhaps I did see the faith reborn in him through the faith that other boys had given him. Perhaps, too, I could picture something of the welling joy that had come to his parents when he returned to the only right path that their simple, unquestioning eyes could see. And how jealously they must be guarding him now, to keep him in that code which was their life's law and had become his daily lesson!

"Don't you see?" he begged. "Can't you? Why, a fellow's just _got_ to have a side to fight on--and to fight for. And he's got to believe that his side is the only one, the right one. Life wouldn't be worth living without it. You don't know what it means to be _fighting for the right_!"

From below came the droning of the unquiet streets. A little higher up a hot wind went almost noiselessly among the chimneys, so that we heard but faint sighs. The roof garden was in darkness, naught gleaming but the little glass bowl of gold fish. There was a sense of utter darkness and loneliness--and yet into it had come, like the glad, brave blast of New Year's trumpet, a battle cry of the One God. A battle cry which made throb the heart of a young, rough boy; a battle cry which would be his whole life's secret well of gratitude and bravery.

"_You don't know what it means to be fighting for the right!_"

He was so slight, so meagre in appearance, that I could not help finding something gently humorous about his utterance. But when I looked at him and saw how his eyes glowed through the dark, and how he stood straight and at full height, his narrow shoulders thrown back, in spite of his bandaged arm, and his face upraised to the summer stars, my smile passed quickly.

There came over me that same queer panging sense of being only on the outside of things--only on Life's outermost border. I was looking straight into the heart of a boy and seeing the gladness which blazed there--and yet I could not have it, as he had it. Here was this sudden, all-forgetting boldness of belief which he had won--and I could only watch it covetously through the bars of my exiled doubts.

No, no, he was right--a thousand times more right than I. If faith in the One God did all of this for him, then that faith was surely justified.

And if I could only bring myself to believe as deeply, as powerfully as he did--then my whole life would be remade as his had been--and I, too, would fight for what I must believe: would fight--_for the right_!

I did not let him talk any further, but sent him home. I did not want his parents to be worrying as to where he was, this time of night. I stayed on a little while, looking over the roofs and the white-faced huddlings of the fire-escapes, and then I went to bed, to toss with heat and battle with my thoughts throughout the night.

When the morning came, I went early to Frank's house. The pavements were fresh and damp with the water of a sprinkling cart, and the shops, just beginning to open, had a Sabbath air of cleanliness. It was cooler than yesterday, too, and the street corners were still cleared and quiet.

I had been granted permission to take Frank and two other boys on a picnic to Westchester. He was ready for me when I knocked at his door, and let me into the darkened kitchen.

His mother was there, too, cutting bread for sandwiches which we would take along. Her old morning wrapper and her hastily-shawled head gave her an even more forbidding appearance than ever. But when her sandwiches were packed into a box and wrapped and tied, she wiped her hands on a towel and looked at me steadfastly, not unkindly, for fully a minute.

I could not understand what she said. It was in Yiddish, and I have never learned that tongue. But here and there I caught a word which gave me enough of her meaning.

She was telling me that Frank had spoken to her of me last night when he returned from the blessed settlement. He always came to her bedside, nowadays, knowing that she would be awake and waiting to hear where he had been. And so he had whispered, while his father slept, of the strange young man who was so kind--a Jew, like them--and yet who had no faith in God.

Then suddenly she began to beg something. "Mutter, mutter," was all I could make of it--and I guessed that she was asking me of my mother, and wondering why I did not listen at her knee as Frank had done at his own mother's. And when I told her that my mother was dead, tears came into her eyes, and this was the finest sympathy I had ever known.

For she put her big, buttery hand on mine and shook her head. "You must learn to know God," I think she said. "He alone can take your mother's place. He made my son what I longed he should be. He will make you what you most desire. In God alone is there happiness."

And so Frank and I went out and down the dirty, narrow stairs, and came into a street of Heaven itself--a street of early sunlight, and a clear sky above--and morning smiles upon the faces of all passersby. Or so it seemed to me, at any rate.

Because, for once in my life, I had seen the happiness of mother and child swept up into glory that is God's.

And I laughed to think of Mr. Richard's remark that religion works harm among these East Side people.

XIV

AN UNGRATEFUL NEPHEW

The summer came to an end only too quickly. I had enjoyed every moment of it, every opportunity. I had built up three clubs of which I was personal leader; I had given service in the gymnasium and playground; I had helped in the development of a roof-garden cordiality between the settlement workers and the mothers of children on the street. Mr. Richards, the last night I was there, presented me with a loving-cup on behalf of the other workers.

It was at supper that he did this, in front of them all. He called upon me, then, to describe to them the most interesting experience I had had in the course of the summer. So I told them the incident of Frank Cohen and his mother--but I do not think they saw much that was interesting about it. Mr. Richards may have, perhaps, because he must have remembered that dictum of his which the incident disproved; but even he could guess little of the impression it had made upon my thought and character.

I had had a letter from my Aunt Selina, to tell me curtly that she was back in New York, but intended starting out immediately upon an automobile tour through New England into Canada, in company with Mrs. Fleming-Cohen and some ship-board acquaintances--"personages," she called them in her much underlined letter, which probably meant that she had succeeded in capturing some stray society folk. She bade me go back to our apartment and to have it ready for her on her return. The servants, she said, were already there, engaged in cleaning away the summer's dust. She hoped "I would be able to start the college year without her, and that I would comport myself on the campus in a manner creditable and befitting, etc., etc."

But in spite of the servants' efforts to make things bright and comfortable, the apartment was a dismal and lonely place. College kept me uptown all day long, of course, but when the evening came and I must return to the big, empty rooms that were our substitute for home, I did not like it. I began to linger more and more about the campus at night: it was truly the most beautiful time to be there, when the autumn moon silvered its lawns and gave the buildings a marble whiteness. There was singing on the fences, then, and all sorts of meetings of all kinds of college organizations. The campus hummed with a hundred undergraduate activities--so that I saw, as never before, how much I missed through having to go downtown each night to live. But so long as my aunt wanted it, I felt I owed it to her to obey, and would not even consider the renting of Trevelyan's suite of rooms in the principal dormitory. Trevelyan had given up these rooms to move into his fraternity house.

"It's a dreadful bore," he said to me in his lazy, rueful way. "I'd be ten times more comfortable here--but I don't want to insult the brothers. However, you'll come up to the house and see me just as often, won't you?"

I promised him I would, but he seemed to know as well as I that I would not. A sophomore paying nightly visits to a senior in the fraternity house where that sophomore had only a year ago been smiled politely out--no, it didn't seem even probable. And so, when I had helped Trevelyan put his last bit of furniture upon a truck--and had tucked among the rungs of many Morris chairs the bundle of flags and college shields which he had overlooked--I could hardly bear to shake hands with him. We both knew that it was something in the nature of a definite goodbye; at any rate, so far as college was concerned.

"A damned nuisance, this," he said thickly, his short-sighted eyes screwing up oddly. "And if it wasn't for the brothers--" But the brothers did win him, and I lost a friend thereby.

The home to which I must go seemed lonelier than ever now. I was not expecting Aunt Selina for two more weeks, and so I hit upon the idea of inviting some one to stay with me until then.

Frank Cohen! Yes, I would ask Frank Cohen. He was going to high school now, and the branch which he attended was not so far from where I lived. It would be convenient for him, and perhaps a happy change from the East Side crowdedness which he had had to encounter all his life.

He was as glad to come as I to have him. I gave him Aunt Selina's room to sleep in, and we sat there, when our homework was done, many evenings until past midnight, talking gently and thoughtfully of many things. He was a boy much as I had been--and perhaps, still was. He was shy to an uncomfortable degree, low of voice, dreamy in manner. But when he was aroused to something especial, he became uncontrollably intense, his eyes flashing and his knees trembling, so that his whole small body seemed but the sheer vibration of his thoughts.

He was hoping to go to college, when his high school days were over. He had not dared mention it at home, though, because he knew how poor his father was, and how much of a help he would be when he could go to work and begin to carry home his weekly earnings. He hated to go into a shoddy little business; he wanted to study further, to take up some profession--perhaps the law. Or if he did go into business, he wanted to have had a few years of college first, so that he might see things broadly and with a mind trained for bigness. But he had only dreamed all this, only longed for it in secret. He would rather forego all of it than urge his father to make the big sacrifice.