Four Girls at Chautauqua Part 30

"I'll tell you what it is, Ruth, we must just ask for work--little bits of work, you know--and then keep our eyes open until it comes. I know of things I can do when I get home."

"So do I," said Ruth, "but I want to begin now."

Silence for a few minutes, and then Flossy asked:

"Ruthie, have you written to Mr. Wayne?"

"No," said Ruth, her cheeks flus.h.i.+ng even in the darkness. "I wrote a long letter just before this came to me, but I burned it, and I am glad of it."

Then they went to sleep. But the desire for the work did not fade with the daylight. Flossy had even been tempted to say a humble little word to Marion, but had been deterred by the sound of that sneer of which I told you; and Ruth, lying on her bed, had revolved the subject and sent up many an earnest prayer, and went out to afternoon service resolved upon keeping her eyes very wide open.

The special attraction for the afternoon was a conference of primary cla.s.s teachers. They were out in full force, and were ready for any questions that might fill the hearts and the mouths of eager learners.

Our girls had each their special favorites among these leaders. Ruth found herself attracted and deeply interested in every word that Mrs.

Clark uttered. Marion was making a study of both Mrs. Knox and Miss Morris, and found it difficult to tell which attracted her most. Even Eurie was ready for this meeting. She had never been able to shake off the thought of Miss Rider, and her eager enthusiasm in this work, while Flossy had been fascinated and carried away captive by the magnetic voice and manner of Mrs. Partridge.

"She makes me glow," Flossy said, in trying to explain the feeling to the calmer Ruth. "Her life seems to quiver all through me, and make me long to reach after it; to have the same power which she has over the hearts of wild uncared-for children."

And Ruth looked down on the exquisite bit of flesh and blood beside her, and thought of her elegant home and her elegant mother, and of all the softening and enervating influences of her city life, and laughed. How little had she in common with such a work as that to which Mrs.

Partridge had given her soul!

Keeping her eyes open, as she had planned to do, this same Flossy saw as she was pa.s.sing down the aisle the hungry face of one of her boys, as she had mentally called the Arabs with whom her life had brushed on the Sunday morning The word just described it still, a hungry face like one hanging wistfully around the outskirts of a feast in which he had no share. Flossy let go her hold of Ruth's arm and darted toward him.

"How do you do?" she said, in winning voice, before he had even seen her. "I am real glad to see you again. If you will come with me I will get a seat for you. A lady is going to speak this afternoon who has five hundred boys in her cla.s.s in Sunday-school."

Now the Flossy of two weeks ago, if she could have imagined herself in any such business, would have been utterly disgusted with the result, and gone away with her pretty nose very high.

The boy turned his dirty face toward her and said, calmly:

"What a whopper!"

The experience of a lifetime could not have answered more deftly:

"You come and see. I am almost certain she will tell us about some of them."

Still he stared, and Flossy waited with her pretty face very near to his, and her pretty hand held coaxingly out.

"Come," she said again. And it could not have been more to the boy's surprise than it was to hers that he presently said:

"Well, go ahead. I can send if I don't like it. I'll follow."

And he did.

CHAPTER XXIX.

WAITING.

It required Flossy's eyes and heart both to keep watch of her boy during the progress of that meeting. The novelty of the scene, the strangeness of seeing ladies occupying the speaker's stand, kept him quiet and alert, until Mrs. Partridge, that woman with wonderful power over the forgotten, neglected portion of the world, arrested all his bewildering thoughts and centered them on the strange stories she had to tell.

Did you ever hear her tell that remarkable story of her first attempt at controlling that remarkable cla.s.s which came under her care, many years ago, in St. Louis? It is full of wonder and pathos and terror and fascination, even to those who are somewhat familiar with such experiences. But Flossy and her boy had never heard, or dreamed of its like. No, I am wrong; the boy had dreamed of scenes just so wild and daring, but even he had not fancied that such people ever found their way to Sunday-schools.

Peanuts, cigars, a pack of cards, and a bowie-knife! Imagine yourself, teacher, to be seated before your orderly and courteous cla.s.s of boys next Sunday morning and find them transformed into beings represented by such surroundings as these! It was Mrs. Partridge's experience. How fascinating that story is! That one incorrigible boy, the one with the bowie-knife, the one who would make no answer to her questions, show no interest in her stories, ignore her very presence and go on with his horrible mischief, until it even came to a stabbing affray right there in the cla.s.s-room!

Imagine her meeting that boy ten years afterward, when he was not only a man, but a gentleman; not only that, but a Christian and not only that, but a working Christian, superintending a mission Sunday-school, giving his best energies and his best time to work like that! Think of being told by him that the determination to amount to something was taken that morning, ten years before, when he seemed not to be listening nor caring! What is ten years of Christian work when we can hope for such results as that!

Flossy had forgotten her charge; her face was all aglow; so was her heart. She knew more about Christian work than she did an hour before.

She had learned that we must take the step that plainly comes next to be taken, no matter for the darkness of the day and the apparent gloom of the future. _Work_ is ours; _results_ are G.o.d's. This life business is divided. Partners.h.i.+p with G.o.d. Nothing but _the work_ to do; so that it is done to the utmost limit of our best, the responsibility is the Lord's. That was blessed! She could dare to try.

Meantime the boy. He had listened in utmost silence, and with eyes that never for an instant left the speaker's face! When the spell was broken he drew a long sigh, and this was his mighty conclusion.

"That chap was enough sight meaner than I'd ever be, and yet he got to be _some_! I'll be blamed if I don't see what can be done in that line!"

A small beginning; so small that on Flossy's face it excited only smiles. She was ignorant, you know. To Mrs. Partridge that sentence would have been worth a wedge of gold. But it is possible that Flossy's first simple little reach after work may have fruit to bear.

It is difficult to begin to tell about that next day at Chautauqua.

There was so much crowded into it that it would almost make a little book of itself. The morning was spent by a large cla.s.s of people in a state of excited unrest and expectancy. The sensible ones by the hundreds, and indeed I suppose I may say by the thousands, went to the morning service, as usual, and heard the children's sermon, delivered by Dr. Newton; and those who did not, and who afterward had the misfortune to fall in with those who did, bemoaned their folly in not doing likewise. On the whole, the children, and those who had brains enough to become children for the time being, were the only comfortable ones at Chautauqua that Sat.u.r.day morning.

The president was coming! So, apparently, was the rest of the world!

Oh, the throngs and throngs that continually arrived! It of itself was a rare and never-to-be-forgotten novelty to those who had never in their lives before seen such a vast army of human beings gathered into a small s.p.a.ce, and all perfectly quiet and correct, and even courteous in their deportment.

"Where are the drunken men?" said Marion, looking around curiously on the constantly increasing throng. "We always read of them as being in great crowds."

"Yes, and the people who swear," added Eurie. "I haven't heard an oath this morning, and I have roamed around everywhere. I must say Chautauqua will bear off the palm for getting together a most respectable-looking, well-behaved 'rabble!' That is what I overheard a sour-looking old gentleman, who doesn't approve of having a president--or of letting him come to a religious meeting, I don't know which--say would rush in to-day. It certainly is a remarkably orderly 'rush.' Girls, look at Dr.

Vincent! I declare, Chautauqua has paid, just to watch him! He ought to be the president himself. I mean to vote for him when female suffrage comes in. Or a king! Wouldn't he make a grand king? How he would enjoy ordering the subjects and enforcing his laws!"

"All of which he seems able to do now," Marion said. "I don't believe he would thank you for a vote. His realm is large enough, and he seems to have willing subjects."

"He has go-ahead-a-tive-ness." Eurie said. "What is the proper word for that, school-ma'am? Executive ability, that's it. Those are splendid words, and they ought to be added to his name. I tell you what, girls, I wish we could cut him up into seven men, and take him home with us.

Seven first-cla.s.s men made out of him and distributed through the towns about us would make a new order of things."

All this was being said while they were scrambling with the rest of the world down to the auditorium to secure seats, for the grand afternoon had arrived, and people had been advised to be "in their seats as soon after one o'clock as they could make it convenient."

"How soon will that be, I wonder?" Marion said, quoting this sentence from Dr. Vincent's advice given in the morning, and holding up her watch to show that it was five minutes of one.

"It looks to me as though those deluded beings who arrive here at one o'clock will have several hours of patient waiting before they will make it convenient to secure seats. Just stand a minute, girls, and look! It is worth seeing. Away back, just as far as I can see, there is nothing but heads! The aisles are full, and s.p.a.ce between the seats, and the office is full, and the people are just pouring down from the hill in a continuous stream. To look that way you wouldn't think that any had got down here yet!"

Now I really wish I had a photograph of that gathering of people to put right in here, on this page! Many of them would have looked much better at this point than they did after four hours of patient waiting. How that crowd did fidget and fix and change position, as far as it was possible to change, when there was not an inch of unoccupied s.p.a.ce. How they talked and laughed and sang and grumbled and yawned, and sang again!

It _was_ a tedious waiting. It had its irresistibly comic side. There were those among the Chautauqua girls who could see the comic side of things with very little trouble. The material out of which they made some of their fun might have appeared very meager to orderly, decorous people. But they made it.

What infinite sport they got out of the fidgety lady before them, who could not get herself and her three children seated to her mind! Those ladies who labored so industriously in order that the nation's flags, draping the stand, should float gracefully over the nation's chief, were an almost inexhaustible source of amus.e.m.e.nt to our girls.

"Look!" said Eurie, "that arrangement doesn't suit; some of the stars are hidden; see them twitch it; it will be down! Now that one has it looped just to her fancy. No! I declare, there it comes down again! The other one twitched it this time; they are not of the same mind. Girls, do look! It is fun to watch them; they work as though the interests of this meeting all turned on a right arrangement of that flag."

By this time the attention of the girls was engaged, and the number of witty remarks that were made at the expense of those flags would no doubt have disconcerted the earnest workers thereat could they have heard them.