First harvests

JOHN HAVILAND was a banker down-town, a man of much business and of few intimate friends. He was over thirty at this time, and made no sign of getting married; which was the stranger, as his health was good, his wealth sufficient, and he cared less for the pleasures of life than for its happiness. He had no brothers nor sisters; his mother was a widow and he lived with her. Flossie said it was hard to get interested in such people as John Haviland.

Every afternoon at four he left his office and went on a long and solitary walk; thus his days were of a piece with his life. He never chose the conventional promenades: and through the outlying districts, the river villages, the Bowery, the forgotten little parks and green places; by Riverside and Morningside; through the mysterious Greenwich settlement, as well as Central Park, Morrisania, and Fort Washington; in any sort of weather—sleet, snow, rain, or freeze—you might have met the man, striding along like a well-oiled engine, observant of everything, from the street urchins to the signs in the shop-windows. This at an hour of day when he might have gone to teas; wherefore people said he had never been in love. Which is a rash predication of your chimney-sweeper, but happened to be true of Haviland.

One day his wandering took a direction beyond Washington Square. This most characteristic of all New York squares lies bounded on the north by Belgravia, on the west by Bohemia, on the east by Business, and on the south by Crime. West of it are rich districts of individuality, where the bedrock of shabby gentility develops occasional lodes and pockets for the student of humanity. It is a place where the deserving and the undeserving poor are huddled together, both of them inefficient, but neither wicked; and where all the inhabitants make some sort of incoherent struggle against the facts of life, and either, on the one hand, emulate respectability, or, on the other, excuse themselves with the divine license to vagabondage given by Art.

In one of the southernmost and more dubious of these streets, Haviland, steaming along with his mind on everything and a watch on deck—for he was no introspective Hamlet—noticed a group of hulking fellows ahead of him. They were the sort of persons that have no obvious function in the divine economy; persons whose principal end seems to be to get knocked on the head with clubs in street riots, thereby dying, at least, with some poetic justice. Haviland would not have ordinarily noticed them; but he was struck by their unwonted rapidity of motion, and looking, he saw that they were following something; that something being a graceful female figure, dressed in black. John Haviland swung promptly into line behind them; and gaining more rapidly upon them than they upon the lady, he sauntered innocently between two of them when she was still a few dozen yards in front of them. He glanced casually at them as he passed; they slunk away like beaten dogs, and melted, in divers directions, from sight.

In a moment more they had reached a broader street; and John was on the point of diverging his course again from that of his protégée, when, looking at her, he hesitated a second, and then walked rapidly up to her.

“Miss Holyoke?” said he, raising his hat and with an unavoidable shade of surprise in his tone.

“Mr. Haviland? you down here too? Or perhaps you come on the same errand?” And Gracie smiled frankly, as John looked up, puzzled, into her lovely face. “I am visiting some poor families, you know—for the Combined Charities——”

“But surely,” he broke in, “you ought not to be down here alone, Miss Holyoke?” They were at Sixth Avenue by this time; and Gracie was looking for a car.

“Usually my aunt lets me have the carriage,” said Gracie; “but Miss Livingstone needed it to-day. And I don’t like to drive quite up to the doors, even then. It seems so hard to drive up with one’s own carriage and horses, and then have to refuse them everything but a little work,” she added, smiling. “And Miss Brevier often goes with me.”

“Do you mean that you come here often?” asked John; and she told him that she and Miss Brevier had each “taken” the people on one street; and were seeing that they got help when help was necessary, and that the undeserving had none wasted upon them. John put her safely in the car, and resumed his pedestrian voyage with something new to think of. This personal visiting by refined young ladies was doubtless an excellent thing on its poetic side; but it could not but seem to him that the danger and the exposure were out of proportion to the benefit. He had had much experience among the city poor, and was perhaps a little skeptical as to the advantages to be gained by such devotion. For, as is the way of things so often here below, the selfish, the fraudulent, the undeserving, find it easy to advertise themselves and solicit help; while the saddest cases of all are lost in some modest garret; there they suffer unseen, ashamed to cry for charity, and wear their lives out silently. Except this latter class, and cases of long illness, most of the poor in New York are poor from laziness, intemperance, or crime; and their moral attitude towards society is rather that of sullen and callous defiance, or covetous acquiescence, than repentance. We need to get a better breed of men, not coddle the present one overmuch. Life suits them well enough as it is, if they could only get a few of their neighbors’ goods; such goods as they desire and Mrs. Flossie desired, and not the summum bonum. If degraded, they do not mind their degradation, but are content with it; money always, clothing and food sometimes, they will derisively accept; but work they will evade and not perform. Amongst these, thought Haviland, there may be much squalor, even much suffering; but there is little real poverty. Had he told all this to Gracie she would have said that it made no difference; and that one should try all the more to find the true cases, where righteous-minded beings were sinking in the turmoil of the world; and that one such family helped and saved was worth a hundred of impostures. Moreover, Gracie had not a man’s fear of being taken in; had she thought of it at all, she would have scorned it; the odium of deception falls on the deceiver, not the deceived; she would not stoop to be suspicious. And mercy will ever be a mystery to mere justice: like the ways of God to human intellect.

Meantime Haviland was walking along, lost in thought. He wandered mechanically through various unknown and afterward unremembered districts, by a strange old graveyard yet undesecrated, through Leroy Street, and Sixth Avenue, until his time was up; then he went home and dined, with his mother. In the evening he had his ward club meeting; this was a thing in which he took great interest, and he went as a matter of course. It was not an easy thing, at this time, to be admitted to the councils that rule in the free city of New York. And, as we have spent some time over pretty Flossie Gower, that flower of republican society, it may not be wasted time to see a little what thing this political club was, which may stand, in a sense, for its root.

If New England, with its offshoots on the Western Reserve and elsewhere, is the result of an attempt to obtain religious freedom, our whole country, in a still larger sense, is the result of an attempt to obtain political liberty. Our national faith has been that which is, of all possible faiths, the farthest from that of poor James Starbuck; it is government by everyone, while nihilism is the negation of any government at all; moreover it is individualism, as opposed to socialism. But in New York there has grown to be a class who, as others could give no time to government, sought to make up for it by giving all of theirs. For what proportion is there between the time of a busy merchant or physician, and that of a professional idler? And the interminable and vain caucuses, impossible to the one, form the delight of the other. These had leisure to make acquaintances; to know each other; to pass their days in bar-rooms, nurseries of political power; and long ere this, they had arrogated to themselves an effective oligarchy. Theirs to make nominations and to mar candidates’ careers; and the people, high-placed or low, had no right in their august councils save on sufferance. Thus we dropped aristocracy, and got a kakistocracy; but an oligarchy still.

John Haviland, however, had been admitted. He had had to struggle hard for this honor; and had finally attained it much more by his physical prowess than by his intellectual qualifications. Near his house were the rooms of a well-known “professor in the art of self-defence;” and there he had been in the habit of taking lessons, and occasionally “putting on the gloves” with all comers. Among the frequenters of the place were also many of the local magnates of the party; and Haviland, whose manners were frank and hearty, had thus met most of his ward leaders, and knocked the greater part of them down successively. Thus treated, they took a fancy to him; said that there was no nonsense about him; and one day, to Haviland’s great surprise, informed him that he had been elected a member of their local club.

The meeting to-night was not over-interesting. It might have been railed less incendiary, but it was certainly more selfish than Mr. James Starbuck’s, we have so lately left; while for earnestness and a definite attempt at effecting something, the two were not for one moment to be compared. For whereas the official political organization of the great national party in Haviland’s ward was occupied primarily with satisfactory apportionments of the offices among the would-be candidates, and secondarily with beating the rival party at the polls, Starbuck’s people went in much more directly for measures than for men, and as for offices, desired none at all.

Haviland found it hard to keep his attention, that evening, on the subject before the meeting. Tom was saying what a good fellow was William, and how the machinations of Richard might be defeated if Patrick were only secured, which might be done if Michael were given a local judgeship. It was pretty unsatisfactory talk at the best, and hardly can have been what the makers of the Constitution, or even what Monsieur Jean Jacques Rousseau, intended. Haviland had often stood up against it, alone; but that night he gave little ear to it, and things went their own way.

From this meeting he went to the Farnums’. He was a familiar in the house, and could call late, if he chose. Mrs. Farnum had disappeared; Mr. Farnum was rarely visible; but sitting in the front room alone, with a sweeping robe of pale-gray velvet across the floor, and head and arm leaning on a low chair, a book discarded lying face downward on the floor, he found the beauty. A moment before he entered, her eyes (purple-gray they were in color) had had a strange look, both proud and longing, both weary and fierce. This was peculiar to them; but it softened a shade as he entered, and she looked up at him.

“Mr. Haviland?” said she.

“Yes—I came to see you because——”

“Because you had nothing better to do,” said she, tersely.

“If you will,” said John, smiling. “Though it is not kind.”

“The world is not kind,” said the beauty, with a frown, looking off again.

“For the world you are not responsible,” said Haviland gravely. “Tell me, do you know Miss Holyoke?”

“Miss Holyoke? What Miss Holyoke?”

“Mrs. Richard Livingstone’s niece.”

“No,” said Kitty Farnum, curtly. “I don’t know Mrs. Livingstone.”

“But I thought you might have met Miss Holyoke. Do you not belong to the Combined Charities?”

“Certainly not.”

“I wish you did,” said John, half to himself. “I thought you and Miss Holyoke might—might find it pleasant to go together.”

“I have no interest in them,” said Miss Farnum, as if finally. And she looked as if she thought the world too intolerable to herself to dream of trying to mitigate it for others.

“Excuse me,” said Haviland; and the talk drifted off into commonplaces. But Miss Farnum’s manners were not lenient, and his call was a short one.

Haviland continued to take his afternoon walks; but he was now more than ever apt to lose himself in the district west of Washington Square. Gracie never came to any trouble, all that winter, on her charitable excursions; but, if you had ever met her there alone, you would have very likely met, just far enough behind her, so that she never saw him, steaming along in his usual wholesome way, our friend John Haviland.