She had met Miles Bjornstam on the street. For
the second of welcome encounter this workman with
the bandit mustache and the muddy overalls seemed
nearer than any one else to the credulous youth which
she was seeking to fight beside her, and she told
him, as a cheerful anecdote, a little of her story.
He grunted, “I never thought I’d be agreeing
with Old Man Dawson, the penny-pinching old land-thief—and
a fine briber he is, too. But you got the wrong
slant. You aren’t one of the people—yet.
You want to do something for the town. I don’t!
I want the town to do something for itself. We
don’t want old Dawson’s money—not
if it’s a gift, with a string. We’ll
take it away from him, because it belongs to us.
You got to get more iron and cussedness into you.
Come join us cheerful bums, and some day—when
we educate ourselves and quit being bums—we’ll
take things and run ’em straight.”
He had changed from her friend to a cynical man in
overalls. She could not relish the autocracy
of “cheerful bums.”
She forgot him as she tramped the outskirts of town.
She had replaced the city hall project by an entirely
new and highly exhilarating thought of how little
was done for these unpicturesque poor.
The spring of the plains is not a reluctant virgin
but brazen and soon away. The mud roads of a
few days ago are powdery dust and the puddles beside
them have hardened into lozenges of black sleek earth
like cracked patent leather.
Carol was panting as she crept to the meeting of the
Thanatopsis program committee which was to decide
the subject for next fall and winter.
Madam Chairman (Miss Ella Stowbody in an oyster-colored
blouse) asked if there was any new business.
Carol rose. She suggested that the Thanatopsis
ought to help the poor of the town. She was ever
so correct and modern. She did not, she said,
want charity for them, but a chance of self-help; an
employment bureau, direction in washing babies and
making pleasing stews, possibly a municipal fund for
home-building. “What do you think of my
plans, Mrs. Warren?” she concluded.
Speaking judiciously, as one related to the church
by marriage, Mrs. Warren gave verdict:
“I’m sure we’re all heartily in
accord with Mrs. Kennicott in feeling that wherever
genuine poverty is encountered, it is not only noblesse
oblige but a joy to fulfil our duty to the less fortunate
ones. But I must say it seems to me we should
lose the whole point of the thing by not regarding
it as charity. Why, that’s the chief adornment
of the true Christian and the church! The Bible
has laid it down for our guidance. ‘Faith,
Hope, and charity,’ it says, and, ’The
poor ye have with ye always,’ which indicates
that there never can be anything to these so-called
scientific schemes for abolishing charity, never!
And isn’t it better so? I should hate to
think of a world in which we were deprived of all
the pleasure of giving. Besides, if these shiftless
folks realize they’re getting charity, and not
something to which they have a right, they’re
so much more grateful.”
