_ VOLUME I. BOOK FIRST. CHAPTER V.
Mrs. Farrinder, meanwhile, was not eager to address the assembly. She
confessed as much to Olive Chancellor, with a smile which asked that a
temporary lapse of promptness might not be too harshly judged. She had
addressed so many assemblies, and she wanted to hear what other people
had to say. Miss Chancellor herself had thought so much on the vital
subject; would not she make a few remarks and give them some of her
experiences? How did the ladies on Beacon Street feel about the ballot?
Perhaps she could speak for _them_ more than for some others. That was a
branch of the question on which, it might be, the leaders had not
information enough; but they wanted to take in everything, and why
shouldn't Miss Chancellor just make that field her own? Mrs. Farrinder
spoke in the tone of one who took views so wide that they might easily,
at first, before you could see how she worked round, look almost
meretricious; she was conscious of a scope that exceeded the first
flight of your imagination. She urged upon her companion the idea of
labouring in the world of fashion, appeared to attribute to her familiar
relations with that mysterious realm, and wanted to know why she
shouldn't stir up some of her friends down there on the Mill-dam?
Olive Chancellor received this appeal with peculiar feelings. With her
immense sympathy for reform, she found herself so often wishing that
reformers were a little different. There was something grand about Mrs.
Farrinder; it lifted one up to be with her: but there was a false note
when she spoke to her young friend about the ladies in Beacon Street.
Olive hated to hear that fine avenue talked about as if it were such a
remarkable place, and to live there were a proof of worldly glory. All
sorts of inferior people lived there, and so brilliant a woman as Mrs.
Farrinder, who lived at Roxbury, ought not to mix things up. It was, of
course, very wretched to be irritated by such mistakes; but this was not
the first time Miss Chancellor had observed that the possession of
nerves was not by itself a reason for embracing the new truths. She knew
her place in the Boston hierarchy, and it was not what Mrs. Farrinder
supposed; so that there was a want of perspective in talking to her as
if she had been a representative of the aristocracy. Nothing could be
weaker, she knew very well, than (in the United States) to apply that
term too literally; nevertheless, it would represent a reality if one
were to say that, by distinction, the Chancellors belonged to the
_bourgeoisie_--the oldest and best. They might care for such a position
or not (as it happened, they were very proud of it), but there they
were, and it made Mrs. Farrinder seem provincial (there was something
provincial, after all, in the way she did her hair too) not to
understand. When Miss Birdseye spoke as if one were a "leader of
society," Olive could forgive her even that odious expression, because,
of course, one never pretended that she, poor dear, had the smallest
sense of the real. She was heroic, she was sublime, the whole moral
history of Boston was reflected in her displaced spectacles; but it was
a part of her originality, as it were, that she was deliciously
provincial. Olive Chancellor seemed to herself to have privileges enough
without being affiliated to the exclusive set and having invitations to
the smaller parties, which were the real test; it was a mercy for her
that she had not that added immorality on her conscience. The ladies
Mrs. Farrinder meant (it was to be supposed she meant some particular
ones) might speak for themselves. She wished to work in another field;
she had long been preoccupied with the romance of the people. She had an
immense desire to know intimately some _very_ poor girl. This might seem
one of the most accessible of pleasures; but, in point of fact, she had
not found it so. There were two or three pale shop-maidens whose
acquaintance she had sought; but they had seemed afraid of her, and the
attempt had come to nothing. She took them more tragically then they
took themselves; they couldn't make out what she wanted them to do, and
they always ended by being odiously mixed up with Charlie. Charlie was a
young man in a white overcoat and a paper collar; it was for him, in the
last analysis, that they cared much the most. They cared far more about
Charlie than about the ballot. Olive Chancellor wondered how Mrs.
Farrinder would treat that branch of the question. In her researches
among her young townswomen she had always found this obtrusive swain
planted in her path, and she grew at last to dislike him extremely. It
filled her with exasperation to think that he should be necessary to the
happiness of his victims (she had learned that whatever they might talk
about with her, it was of him and him only that they discoursed among
themselves), and one of the main recommendations of the evening club for
her fatigued, underpaid sisters, which it had long been her dream to
establish, was that it would in some degree undermine his
position--distinct as her prevision might be that he would be in waiting
at the door. She hardly knew what to say to Mrs. Farrinder when this
momentarily misdirected woman, still preoccupied with the Mill-dam,
returned to the charge.
"We want labourers in that field, though I know two or three lovely
women--sweet _home-women_--moving in circles that are for the most part
closed to every new voice, who are doing their best to help on the
fight. I have several names that might surprise you, names well known on
State Street. But we can't have too many recruits, especially among
those whose refinement is generally acknowledged. If it be necessary, we
are prepared to take certain steps to conciliate the shrinking. Our
movement is for all--it appeals to the most delicate ladies. Raise the
standard among them, and bring me a thousand names. I know several that
I should like to have. I look after the details as well as the big
currents," Mrs. Farrinder added, in a tone as explanatory as could be
expected of such a woman, and with a smile of which the sweetness was
thrilling to her listener.
"I can't talk to those people, I can't!" said Olive Chancellor, with a
face which seemed to plead for a remission of responsibility. "I want to
give myself up to others; I want to know everything that lies beneath
and out of sight, don't you know? I want to enter into the lives of
women who are lonely, who are piteous. I want to be near to them--to
help them. I want to do something--oh, I should like so to speak!"
"We should be glad to have you make a few remarks at present," Mrs.
Farrinder declared, with a punctuality which revealed the faculty of
presiding.
"Oh dear, no, I can't speak; I have none of that sort of talent. I have
no self-possession, no eloquence; I can't put three words together. But
I do want to contribute."
"What _have_ you got?" Mrs. Farrinder inquired, looking at her
interlocutress, up and down, with the eye of business, in which there
was a certain chill. "Have you got money?"
Olive was so agitated for the moment with the hope that this great woman
would approve of her on the financial side that she took no time to
reflect that some other quality might, in courtesy, have been suggested.
But she confessed to possessing a certain capital, and the tone seemed
rich and deep in which Mrs. Farrinder said to her, "Then contribute
that!" She was so good as to develop this idea, and her picture of the
part Miss Chancellor might play by making liberal donations to a fund
for the diffusion among the women of America of a more adequate
conception of their public and private rights--a fund her adviser had
herself lately inaugurated--this bold, rapid sketch had the vividness
which characterised the speaker's most successful public efforts. It
placed Olive under the spell; it made her feel almost inspired. If her
life struck others in that way--especially a woman like Mrs. Farrinder,
whose horizon was so full--then there must be something for her to do.
It was one thing to choose for herself, but now the great representative
of the enfranchisement of their sex (from every form of bondage) had
chosen for her.
The barren, gas-lighted room grew richer and richer to her earnest eyes;
it seemed to expand, to open itself to the great life of humanity. The
serious, tired people, in their bonnets and overcoats, began to glow
like a company of heroes. Yes, she would do something, Olive Chancellor
said to herself; she would do something to brighten the darkness of that
dreadful image that was always before her, and against which it seemed
to her at times that she had been born to lead a crusade--the image of
the unhappiness of women. The unhappiness of women! The voice of their
silent suffering was always in her ears, the ocean of tears that they
had shed from the beginning of time seemed to pour through her own eyes.
Ages of oppression had rolled over them; uncounted millions had lived
only to be tortured, to be crucified. They were her sisters, they were
her own, and the day of their delivery had dawned. This was the only
sacred cause; this was the great, the just revolution. It must triumph,
it must sweep everything before it; it must exact from the other, the
brutal, blood-stained, ravening race, the last particle of expiation! It
would be the greatest change the world had seen; it would be a new era
for the human family, and the names of those who had helped to show the
way and lead the squadrons would be the brightest in the tables of fame.
They would be names of women weak, insulted, persecuted, but devoted in
every pulse of their being to the cause, and asking no better fate than
to die for it. It was not clear to this interesting girl in what manner
such a sacrifice (as this last) would be required of her, but she saw
the matter through a kind of sunrise-mist of emotion which made danger
as rosy as success. When Miss Birdseye approached, it transfigured her
familiar, her comical shape, and made the poor little humanitary hack
seem already a martyr. Olive Chancellor looked at her with love,
remembered that she had never, in her long, unrewarded, weary life, had
a thought or an impulse for herself. She had been consumed by the
passion of sympathy; it had crumpled her into as many creases as an old
glazed, distended glove. She had been laughed at, but she never knew it;
she was treated as a bore, but she never cared. She had nothing in the
world but the clothes on her back, and when she should go down into the
grave she would leave nothing behind her but her grotesque,
undistinguished, pathetic little name. And yet people said that women
were vain, that they were personal, that they were interested! While
Miss Birdseye stood there, asking Mrs. Farrinder if she wouldn't say
something, Olive Chancellor tenderly fastened a small battered brooch
which confined her collar and which had half detached itself. _