as she could not fail to see that whatever befell now could neither receive let nor hindrance from her, she decided to avail herself of her mother’s offer.
At the end of the week, Gerhardt took his leave and Jennie returned, after which, for a time at least, there was a restoration of the old order, a condition which of course could not endure.
Bass saw it. The trouble that had so recently manifested itself was decidedly odious to him. The thought of the possible developments, the certainty of talk and the intention of Gerhardt to move the family, with the exception of Jennie, to Youngstown, all weighed upon him disagreeably. Columbus was no place to stay. Youngstown was no place to go. If they could all move away to some larger city, it would be much better.
He pondered over this and hearing, through first one and then another, that a manufacturing boom was on in Cleveland, thought it might be wise if they, or at least he, went there. He might go, and if he succeeded, the others might come. If Gerhardt still worked on in Youngstown, as he was now doing, and the family came to Cleveland, it would save Jennie from being turned out in the streets.
Bass waited a little while before making up his mind but finally announced his purpose.
“I believe I’ll go up to Cleveland,” he said to his mother one evening as she was getting supper.
“Why?” she asked, looking up in an uncertain manner. She was rather afraid that Bass would desert her.
“I think I can get work there,” he returned. “We oughtn’t to stay in this darned old town.”
“Don’t swear,” she returned.
“Oh, I know,” he said, “but it’s enough to make any one swear. We’ve never had anything but rotten luck here. I’m going to go, and maybe if I get anything, we can all move. We’d be better off if we’d get some place where people don’t know us. We can’t do anything here.”
Mrs. Gerhardt listened with a strong hope for a betterment of their miserable life creeping into her heart. If Bass would only do this. If he would go and get work, and come to her rescue as a strong, bright young son might, what a thing it would be. They were in the rapids of a life which was moving toward a dreadful calamity. If only something would happen.
“Do you think you could get something to do?” she asked interestedly.
“I ought to,” he said. “I’ve never looked for a place yet that I didn’t get it. Other fellows have gone up there and done all right. Look at the Millers.”
He shoved his hands into his pockets and looked out the window, then said:
“Do you think you could get along until I try my hand up there?”
“I guess we could,” she replied. “Papa’s at work now and we have some money that, that—” she hesitated to name the source, so ashamed was she of their predicament.
“Yes, I know,” said Bass grimly.
“We won’t have to pay any rent here before fall and then we’ll have to give it up anyhow,” she added.
She was referring to the mortgage on the house, which fell due the next September and which unquestionably could not be met. “If we could move away from here before then, I guess we could get along.”
“I’ll do it,” said Bass determinedly. “I’ll go.”
Accordingly, he threw up his place at the end of the month, and the day after he left for Cleveland.
CHAPTER X
The incidents of the days that followed, relating as they did peculiarly to Jennie, were of an order which the morality of our day has agreed to taboo. Certain processes of the All-mother, the great artificing wisdom of the power that in silence and darkness works and weaves—when viewed in the light of the established opinion of some of the little individuals created by it, are considered very vile. “How is it,” we ask ourselves, “that any good can come of contemplating so disagreeable a process?” And we turn our faces away from the creation of life, as if that were the last thing that man should dare to interest himself in, openly.
It is curious that a feeling of this sort should spring up in a world whose very essence is generative, the vast process dual, and where wind, water, soil and light alike minister to the fruition of that which is all that we are. Although the whole earth, not we alone, is moved by passions hymeneal, and everything terrestrial has come into being by the one common road, yet there is that ridiculous tendency to close the eyes and turn away the head as if there were something unclean in the method of nature. “Conceived in iniquity and born in sin,” is the unnatural interpretation put upon the process by the extreme religionist, and the world, by its silence, gives assent to a judgement so marvelously warped.
Surely there is something radically wrong in this attitude. The teachings of philosophy and the deductions of biology should find more practical application in the daily reasoning of man. No process is vile, no condition unnatural. The accidental variation from a given social practice does not make a sin. It is the indifference to duty entailed, the ignorance of the highest wisdom which would care and make provision for the happiness of every creature conceived, that is either contemptible or pitiable. No poor little earthling, caught in the enormous grip of chance, and so swerved from the established customs of men, could possibly be guilty of that depth of vileness which the attitude of the world would seem to predicate so inevitably.
And yet Jennie, no conscious wisher of evil, was now to witness the unjust interpretation of that wonder of nature, which, but for the intervention of death, or the possible changing of an opinion of a man, might have been consecrated and hallowed as one of the ideal functions of life. Although herself unable to distinguish the separateness of this from every other normal process of life, yet was she made to feel, by the actions of all about her, that degradation was her portion, and sin the foundation as well as the condition of her state. Almost, not quite, was the affection, the consideration, the care—which afterward the world would demand of her for her child—now sought to be extinguished in her. Almost, not quite, was the budding and essential love looked upon as evil. She must contemn herself, contemn that which in the more approved limits of society is of all things the most sacred and holy.
As yet, we are dwelling in a most brutal order of society, against the pompous and loud-mouthed blusterings of which the temperate and tender voice of sympathy seems both futile and vain. Although able to look about him, and in the vast ordaining of nature read a wondrous plea for closer fellowship, yet, in the teeth of all the winds of circumstance, and between the giant legs of chance, struts little man—the indifference, the non-understanding, the selfishness of whom make his playground too often a field of despair. Winds to whisper that it is with the sum and not the minute individual of life that nature is concerned; waters to teach that of her bounty no man may be honestly deprived. All the beauty, the sweetness, the light poured forth with so lavish a hand that all may see the lesson of eternal generosity, and yet, unseeing man, narrowly drawing himself up in judgement, still seizes his brother by the throat, exacts the last tittle of form or custom and, finding him unable or unwilling to comply, drags him helpless and complaining to the gibbets and the jails.
Jennie, no unwilling but only a helpless victim, was now within the purview of this same unreasoning element of society, the judgers of those who do not judge, the blamers of those who do not blame. Although it was neither the gibbet nor the jail of a few hundred years before, there was that, in the ignorance and immobility of the human beings about her, which made it impossible for them to see anything but a vile and premeditated infraction of the social
