Books: Lifted Masks
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Susan Glaspell >> Lifted Masks
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She never questioned her going; were not life and love too great to
be lost through that which could be so easily put right?
The buildings were reeling, the streets moving up and down--that
awful rain, she thought, was making her dizzy. Labouriously she
walked on--more slowly, less steadily, a pain in her side, that
awful reeling in her head.
Carriages returning to the city were passing her, but she had not
strength to call to them, and it seemed if she walked to the curbing
she would fall. She was not thinking so clearly now. The thing which
took all of her force was the lifting of her feet and the putting
them down in the right place. Her throat seemed to be closing
up--and her side--and her head....
Someone had her by the arm. Then someone was speaking her name;
speaking it in surprise--consternation--alarm.
It was Harold.
It was all vague then. She knew that she was in a carriage, and that
Harold was talking to her kindly. "You're taking me there?" she
murmured.
"Yes--yes, Edna, everything's all right," he replied soothingly.
"Everything's all right," she repeated, in a whisper, and leaned her
head back against the cushions.
They stopped after a while, and Harold was standing at the open door
of the cab with something steaming hot which he told her to drink.
"You need it," he said decisively, and thinking it would help her to
tell it, she drank it down.
The world was a little more defined after that, and she saw things
which puzzled her. "Why, it looks like the city," she whispered, her
throat too sore now to speak aloud.
"Why sure," he replied banteringly; "don't you know we have to go
through the city to get out to the South Side?"
"Oh, but you see," she cried, holding her throat, "but you see, it's
the _other_ way!"
"Not to-night," he insisted; "the place for you to-night is home.
I'm taking you where you belong."
She reached over wildly, trying to open the door, but he held her
back; she began to cry, and he talked to her, gently but unbendingly.
"But you don't _understand!_" she whispered, passionately. "I've
_got_ to go!"
"Not to-night," he said again, and something in the way he said it
made her finally huddle back in the corner of the carriage.
Block after block, mile after mile, they rode on in silence. She
felt overpowered. And with submission she knew that it was Z. For
the whole city was piled in between. Great buildings were in
between, and thousands of men running to and fro on the streets;
man, and all man had builded up, were in between. And then
Harold--Harold who had always seemed to count for so little, had
come and taken her away.
Dully, wretchedly--knowing that her heart would ache far worse
to-morrow than it did to-night--she wondered about things. Did
things like rain and street-cars and wet feet and a sore throat
determine life? Was it that way with other people, too? Did other
people have barriers--whole cities full of them--piled in between?
And then did the Harolds come and take them where they said they
belonged? Were there not _some_ people strong enough to go
where they wanted to go?
VI
THE MAN OF FLESH AND BLOOD
The elements without were not in harmony with the spirit which it
was desired should be engendered within. By music, by gay
decorations, by speeches from prominent men, the board in charge of
the boys' reformatory was striving to throw about this dedication of
the new building an atmosphere of cheerfulness and good-will--an
atmosphere vibrant with the kindness and generosity which emanated
from the State, and the thankfulness and loyalty which it was felt
should emanate from the boys.
Outside the world was sobbing. Some young trees which had been
planted along the driveway of the reformatory grounds, and which
were expected to grow up in the way they should go, were rocking
back and forth in passionate insurrection. Fallen leaves were being
spit viciously through the air. It was a sullen-looking landscape
which Philip Grayson, he who was to be the last speaker of the
afternoon, saw stretching itself down the hill, across the little
valley, and up another little hill of that rolling prairie state. In
his ears was the death wail of the summer. It seemed the spirit of
out-of-doors was sending itself up in mournful, hopeless cries.
The speaker who had been delivering himself of pedantic
encouragement about the open arms with which the world stood ready
to receive the most degraded one, would that degraded one but come
to the world in proper spirit, sat down amid perfunctory applause
led by the officers and attendants of the institution, and the boys
rose to sing. The brightening of their faces told that their work as
performers was more to their liking than their position as auditors.
They threw back their heads and waited with well-disciplined
eagerness for the signal to begin. Then, with the strength and
native music there are in some three hundred boys' throats, there
rolled out the words of the song of the State.
There were lips which opened only because they must, but as a whole
they sang with the same heartiness, the same joy in singing, that he
had heard a crowd of public-school boys put into the song only the
week before. When the last word had died away it seemed to Philip
Grayson that the sigh of the world without was giving voice to the
sigh of the world within as the well-behaved crowd of boys sat down
to resume their duties as auditors.
And then one of the most important of the professors from the State
University was telling them about the kindness of the State: the
State had provided for them this beautiful home; it gave them
comfortable clothing and nutritious food; it furnished that fine
gymnasium in which to train their bodies, books and teachers to
train their minds; it provided those fitted to train their souls, to
work against the unfortunate tendencies--the professor stumbled a
little there--which had led to their coming. The State gave
liberally, gladly, and in return it asked but one thing: that they
come out into the world and make useful, upright citizens, citizens
of which any State might be proud. Was that asking too much? the
professor from the State University was saying.
The sobbing of the world without was growing more intense. Many
pairs of eyes from among the auditors were straying out to where the
summer lay dying. Did they know--those boys whom the State classed
as unfortunates--that out of this death there would come again life?
Or did they see but the darkness--the decay--of to-day?
The professor from the State University was putting the case very
fairly. There were no flaws--seemingly--to be picked in his logic.
The State had been kind; the boys were obligated to good
citizenship. But the coldness!--comfortlessness!--of it all. The
open arms of the world!--how mocking in its abstractness. What did
it mean? Did it mean that they--the men who uttered the phrase so
easily--would be willing to give these boys aid, friendship when
they came out into the world? What would they say, those boys whose
ears were filled with high-sounding, non-committal phrases, if some
man were to stand before them and say, "And so, fellows, when you
get away from this place, and are ready to get your start in the
world, just come around to my office and I'll help you get a job?"
At thought of it there came from Philip Grayson a queer, partly
audible laugh, which caused those nearest him to look his way in
surprise.
But he was all unconscious of their looks of inquiry, absorbed in the
thoughts that crowded upon him. How far away the world--his kind of
people--must seem to these boys of the State Reform School. The
speeches they had heard, the training that had been given them,
had taught them--unconsciously perhaps, but surely--to divide the
world into two great classes: the lucky and the unlucky, those who
made speeches and those who must listen, the so-called good and the
so-called bad; perhaps--he smiled a little at his own cynicism--those
who were caught and those who were not.
There came to him these words of a poet of whom he used to be fond:
In men whom men pronounce as ill,
I find so much of goodness still;
In men whom men pronounce divine,
I find so much of sin and blot;
I hesitate to draw the line
Between the two, when God has not.
When God has not! He turned and looked out at the sullen sky,
returning--as most men do at times--to that conception of his
childhood that somewhere beyond the clouds was God. God! Did God
care for the boys of the State Reformatory? Was that poet of the
western mountains right when he said that God was not a drawer of
lines, but a seer of the good that was in the so-called bad, and of
the bad in the so-called good, and a lover of them both?
If that was God, it was not the God the boys of the reformatory had
been taught to know. They had been told that God would forgive the
wicked, but it had been made clear to them--if not in words, in
implications--that it was they who were the wicked. And the
so-called godly men, men of such exemplary character as had been
chosen to address them that afternoon, had so much of the spirit of
God that they, too, were willing to forgive, be tolerant, and--he
looked out at the bending trees with a smile--disburse generalities
about the open arms of the world.
What would they think--those three hundred speech-tired boys--if
some man who had been held before them as exemplary were to rise and
lay bare his own life--its weaknesses, its faults, perhaps its
crimes--and tell them there was weakness and there was strength in
every human being, and that the world-old struggle of life was to
overcome one's weakness with one's strength.
The idea took strange hold on him. It seemed the method of the
world--at any rate it had been the method of that afternoon--for the
men who stood before their fellows with clean hands to plant
themselves on the far side of a chasm of conventions, or narrow
self-esteem, or easily won virtue, and cry to those beings who
struggled on the other side of that chasm--to those human beings
whose souls had never gone to school: "Look at us! Our hands are
clean, our hearts are pure. See how beautiful it is to be good! Come
ye, poor sinners, and be good also." And the poor sinners, the
untaught, birthmarked human souls, would look over at the
self-acclaimed goodness they could see far across the chasm, and
even though attracted to it (which, he grimly reflected, would not
seem likely) the thing that was left with them was a sense of the
width of the chasm.
He had a sense of needless waste, of unnecessary blight. He looked
down at those three hundred faces and it was as if looking at human
waste; and it was human stupidity, human complacency and cowardice
kept those human beings human drift.
With what a smug self-satisfaction--under the mask of
benevolence--the speakers of that afternoon had flaunted their
virtue--their position! How condescendingly they had spoken of the
home which we, the good, prepare for you, the bad, and what
namby-pambyness there was, after all, in that sentiment which all of
them had voiced--and now you must pay us back by being good!
Oh for a man of flesh and blood to stand up and tell how he himself
had failed and suffered! For a man who could bridge that chasm with
strong, broad, human understanding and human sympathies--a man who
would stand among them pulse-beat to pulse-beat and cry out, "I
know! I understand! I fought it and I'll help you fight it too!"
The sound of his own name broke the spell that was upon him. He
looked to the centre of the stage and saw that the professor from
the State University had seated himself and that the superintendent
of the institution was occupying the place of the speaker. And the
superintendent was saying:
"We may esteem ourselves especially fortunate in having him with us
this afternoon. He is one of the great men of the State, one of the
men who by high living, by integrity and industry, has raised
himself to a position of great honour among his fellow men. A great
party--may I say the greatest of all parties?--has shown its
unbounded confidence in him by giving him the nomination for the
governorship of the State. No man in the State is held in higher
esteem to-day than he. And so it is with special pleasure that I
introduce to you that man of the future--Philip Grayson."
The superintendent sat down then, and he himself--Philip Grayson--was
standing in the place where the other speakers had stood. It was with
a rush which almost swept away his outward show of calm that it came
to him that he--candidate for the governorship--was well fitted to be
that man of flesh and blood for whom he had sighed. That he himself
was within grasp of an opportunity to get beneath the jackets and into
the very hearts and souls of those boys, and make them feel that a
man of sins and virtues, of weaknesses and strength, a man who had
had much to conquer, and for whom the fight would never be finally
won, was standing before them stripped of his coat of conventions
and platitudes, and in nakedness of soul and sincerity of heart was
talking to them as a man who understood.
Almost with the inception of the idea was born the consciousness of
what it might cost. And as in answer to the silent, blunt question,
Is it worth it? there looked up at him three hundred pairs of
eyes--eyes behind which there was good as well as bad, eyes which
had burned with the fatal rush of passion, and had burned, too, with
the hot tears of remorse--eyes which had opened on a hostile world.
And then the eyes of Philip Grayson could not see the eyes which
were before him, and he put up his hand to break the mist--little
caring what the men upon the platform would think of him, little
thinking what effect the words which were crowding into his heart
would have upon his candidacy. But one thing was vital to him now:
to bring upon that ugly chasm the levelling forces of a common
humanity, and to make those boys who were of his clay feel that a
being who had fallen and risen again, a fellow being for whom life
would always mean a falling and a rising again, was standing before
them, and--not as the embodiment of a distant goodness, not as a
pattern, but as one among them, verily as man to man--was telling
them a few things which his own life had taught him were true.
It was his very consecration which made it hard to begin. He was
fearful of estranging them in the beginning, of putting between them
and him that very thing he was determined there should not be.
"I have a strange feeling," he said, with a winning little smile,
"that if I were to open my heart to-day, just open it clear up the
way I'd like to if I could, that you boys would look into it, and
then jump back in a scared kind of way and cry, 'Why--that's me!'
You would be a little surprised--wouldn't you?--if you could look
back and see the kind of boy I was, and find I was much the kind of
boy you are?
"Do you know what I think? I think hypocrisy is the worst thing in
the world. I think it's worse than stealing, or lying, or any of the
other bad things you can name. And do you know where I think lots of
the hypocrisy comes from? I think it comes from the so-called
self-made men--from the real good men, the men who say 'I haven't
got one bad thing charged up to my account.'
"Now the men out campaigning for me call me a self-made man. Your
superintendent just now spoke of my integrity, of the confidence
reposed in me, and all that. But do you know what is the honest
truth? If I am any kind of a man worth mentioning, if I am deserving
of any honour, any confidence, it is not because I was born with my
heart filled with good and beautiful things, for I was not. It is
because I was born with much in my heart that we call the bad, and
because, after that bad had grown stronger and stronger through the
years it was unchecked, and after it had brought me the great shock,
the great sorrow of my life, I began then, when older than you boys
are now, to see a little of that great truth which you can put
briefly in these words: 'There is good and there is bad in every
human heart, and it is the struggle of life to conquer the bad with
the good.' What I am trying to say is, that if I am worthy any one's
confidence to-day, it is because, having seen that truth, I have
been able, through never ceasing trying, through slow conquering, to
crowd out some of the bad and make room for a little of the good.
"You see," he went on, three hundred pairs of eyes hard upon him
now, "some of us are born to a harder struggle than others. There
are people who would object to my saying that to you, even if I
believed it. They would say you would make the fact of being born
with much against which to struggle an excuse for being bad. But
look here a minute; if you were born with a body not as strong as
other boys' bodies, if you couldn't run as far, or jump as high, you
wouldn't be eternally saying, 'I can't be expected to do much; I
wasn't born right.' Not a bit of it! You'd make it your business to
get as strong as you could, and you wouldn't make any parade of the
fact that you weren't as strong as you should be. We don't like
people who whine, whether it's about weak bodies or weak souls.
"I've been sitting here this afternoon wondering what to say to you
boys. I had intended telling some funny stories about things which
happened to me when I was a boy. But for some reason a serious mood
has come over me, and I don't feel just like those stories now. I
haven't been thinking of the funny side of life in the last
half-hour. I've been thinking of how much suffering I've endured
since the days when I, too, was a boy."
He paused then; and when he went on his voice tested to the utmost
the silence of the room: "There is lots of sorrow in this old world.
Maybe I'm on the wrong track, but as I see it to-day human beings
are making a much harder thing of their existence than there is any
need of. There are millions and millions of them, and year after
year, generation after generation, they fight over the same old
battles, live through the same old sorrows. Doesn't it seem all
wrong that after the battle has been fought a million times it can't
be made a little easier for those who still have it before them?
"If a farmer had gone over a bad road, and the next day saw another
farmer about to start over the same road, wouldn't he send him back?
Doesn't it seem too bad that in things which concern one's whole
life people can't be as decent as they are about things which
involve only an inconvenience? Doesn't it seem that when we human
beings have so much in common we might stand together a little
better? I'll tell you what's the matter. Most of the people of this
world are coated round and round with self-esteem, and they're
afraid to admit any understanding of the things which aren't good.
Suppose the farmer had thought it a disgrace to admit he had been
over that road, and so had said: 'From what I have read in books,
and from what I have learned in a general way, I fancy that road
isn't good.' Would the other farmer have gone back? I rather think
he would have said he'd take his chances. But you see the farmer
said he _knew_; and how did he know? Why, because he'd been
over the road himself."
As he paused again, looking at them, he saw it all with a clarifying
simplicity. He himself knew life for a fine and beautiful thing. He
had won for himself some of the satisfactions of understanding,
certain rare delights of the open spirit. He wanted to free the
spirits of these boys to whom he talked; wanted to show them that
spirits could free themselves, indicate to them that self-control
and self-development carried one to pleasures which sordid
self-indulgences had no power to bestow. It was a question of
getting the most from life. It was a matter of happiness.
It was thus he began, slowly, the telling of his life's story:
"I was born with strange, wild passions in my heart. I don't know
where they came from; I only know they were there. I resented
authority. If someone who had a right to dictate to me said,
'Philip, do this,' then Philip would immediately begin to think how
much he would rather do the other thing. And," he smiled a little,
and some of the boys smiled with him in anticipation, "it was the
other thing which Philip usually did.
"I didn't go to a reform school, for the very good reason that there
wasn't any in the State where I lived." Some of he boys smiled
again, and he could hear the nervous coughing of one of the party
managers sitting close to him. "I was what you would call a very bad
boy. I didn't mind any one. I was defiant--insolent. I did bad
things just because I knew they were bad, and--and I took a great
deal of satisfaction out of it."
The sighing of the world without was the only sound which vibrated
through the room. "I say," he went on, "that I got a form of
satisfaction from it. I did not say I got happiness; there is a vast
difference between a kind of momentary satisfaction and that
thing--that most precious of all things--which we call happiness.
Indeed, I was very far from happy. I had hours when I was so morose
and miserable that I hated the whole world. And do you know what I
thought? I thought there was no one in all the world who had the
same kind of things surging up in his heart that I did. I thought
there was no one else with whom it was as easy to be bad, or as hard
to be good. I thought that no one understood. I thought that I was
all alone.
"Did you ever feel like that? Did you ever feel that no one else
knew anything about such feelings as you had? Did you ever feel that
here was you, and there was the rest of the world, and that the rest
of the world didn't know anything about you, and was just generally
down on you? Now that's the very thing I want to talk away from you
to-day. You're not the only one. We're all made of the same kind of
stuff, and there's none of us made of stuff that's flawless. We all
have a fight; some an easy one, and some a big one, and if you have
formed the idea that there is a kind of dividing-line in the world,
and that on the one side is the good, and on the other side the bad,
why, all I can say is that you have a wrong notion of things.
"Well, I grew up to be a man, and because I hadn't fought against
any of the stormy things in my heart they kept growing stronger and
stronger. I did lots of wild, ugly things, things of which I am
bitterly ashamed. I went to another place, and I fell in with the
kind of fellows you can imagine I felt at home with. I had been told
when I was a boy that it was wrong to drink and gamble. I think that
was the chief reason I took to drink and gambling."
There was another cough, more pronounced this time, from the party
manager, and the superintendent was twisting uneasily in his seat.
It was the strangest speech that had ever been delivered at the
boys' reformatory. The boys were leaning forward--self-forgetful,
intent. "One night I was playing cards with a crowd of my friends,
and one of the men, the best friend I had, said something that made
me mad. There was a revolver right there which one of the men had
been showing us. Some kind of a demon got hold of me, and without so
much as a thought I picked up that revolver and fired at my friend."
The party manager gave way to an exclamation of horror, and the
superintendent half rose from his seat. But before any one could say
a word Philip Grayson continued, looking at the half-frightened
faces before him: "I suppose you wonder why I am not in the
penitentiary. I had been drinking, and I missed my aim; and I was
with friends, and it was hushed up."
He rested his hand upon the table, and looked out at the sullen
landscape. His voice was not steady as he went on: "It's not an easy
thing to talk about, boys. I never talked about it to any one before
in all my life. I'm not telling it now just to entertain you or to
create a sensation. I'm telling it," his voice grew tense in its
earnestness, "because I believe that this world could be made a
better and a sweeter place if those who have lived and suffered
would not be afraid to reach out their hands and cry: 'I know that
road--it's bad! I steered off to a better place, and I'll help you
steer off, too.'"
There was not one of the three hundred pairs of eyes but was riveted
upon the speaker's colourless face. The masks of sullenness and
defiance had fallen from them. They were listening now--not because
they must, but because into their hungry and thirsty souls was being
poured the very sustenance for which--unknowingly--they had yearned.
"We sometimes hear people say," resumed the candidate for Governor,
"that they have lived through hell. If by that they mean they've
lived through the deepest torments the human heart can know, then I
can say that I, too, have lived through hell. What I suffered after
I went home that night no one in this world will ever know. Words
couldn't tell it; it's not the kind of thing words can come anywhere
near. My whole life spread itself out before me; it was not a
pleasant thing to look at. But at last, boys, out of the depths of
my darkness, I began to get a little light. I began to get some
understanding of the battle which it falls to the lot of some of us
human beings to wage. There was good in me, you see, or I wouldn't
have cared like that, and it came to me then, all alone that
terrible night, that it is the good which lies buried away somewhere
in our hearts must fight out the bad. And so--all alone, boys--I
began the battle of trying to get command of my own life. And do you
know--this is the truth--it was with the beginning of that battle I
got my first taste of happiness. There is no finer feeling in this
world than the sense of coming into mastery of one's self. It is
like opening a door that has shut you in. Oh, you don't do it all in
a minute. This is no miracle I'm talking about. It's a fight. But
it's a fight that can be won. It's a fight that's gloriously worth
the winning. I'm not saying to you, 'Be good and you'll succeed.'
Maybe you won't succeed. Life as we've arranged it for ourselves
makes success a pretty tough proposition. But that doesn't alter the
fact that it pays to be a decent sort. You and I know about how much
happiness there is in the other kind of thing. And there is
happiness in feeling you're doing what you can to develop what's in
you. Success or failure, it brings a sense of having done your
part,--that bully sense of having put up the best fight you could."
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