Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/1022

958 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 those 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, for his brain was growing hot with the thoughts that crowded upon it. How far away the world—his kind of people—must seem to those 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 over him then those divinely human words from a poet whom he had always loved:

When God has not! The words seemed to get into the very bone and fibre of Philip Grayson. He turned and looked out at the sullen sky, returning—as all 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 that was 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—Philip Grayson 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 of the State Reformatory—if some man who had been held before them as exemplary were to rise and lay bare his own life—its weaknesses, its faults, its sins, perhaps its crimes—and tell them there was good and there was bad in every human being, and that the world-old struggle of life was to conquer one's bad with one's good.

The idea took him in mighty grip. 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, of easily bought virtue, and say 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 which they could see far across the chasm, and though they might feel somewhere deep within them faint stirrings of that passion for good which, asleep or awake, is in everything that is of God, they were uncertain about the depth of the chasm, uncertain about that thing which awaited them beyond, and so the passions which had behind them the strength of years outmatched that passion which was but a possibility, and the untaught, birthmarked human souls looked purposelessly across the man-made chasm, and went on