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The Wiley Handbook of Vocational Education and Training
How Is High Status Given to the Accounts of Participants’ Perspectives and Understandings?
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References
2 Lived Forms of Schooling
Education as Schooling
Ethnography
Ethnography and Its Four Elementary Forms
The Ethnographic Imagination
References
3 Tales of Working Without/Against a Compass
Introduction
Ethics and Methodological Theory
Doing Educational Ethnography Ethically or Thinking “Ethics” through Educational Ethnography
(Re)thinking Ethnographic Ethics Aloud
References
4 Communities of Practice and Pedagogy
All Too Familiar
Apprenticeship
Situated Learning
Modes of Enculturation
Some Key Examples
Higher Levels of Learning and Teaching
Studying the Tacit
Conclusion
References
5 Critical Bifocality
Studying Privilege: Middle/Uppermiddleclass Parents, Schools, and Students
Working inside the Press of Economic and Social Restructuration
Situated Class Analysis: Insights Gained through the Lens of Critical Bifocality
Dispossession Stories: How Public Space Becomes a Private Commodity
Critical Bifocality and Circuits of Privilege: Concluding Thoughts
References
6 Ethnographic Writing
Writing – Field Notes, Memos, and Main Narratives
Conclusion
References
7 What Can Be Learnt?
Introduction: Educational Ethnography as a Complex Array of Things
ASociology of Knowledge Framework of Educational Ethnography
Ethnomethodology: Interaction and the IRE Sequence in Research on Instruction
Conclusion
References
Part Two
8 Changing Conceptions of Culture and Ethnography in Anthropology of Education in the United States
The Centrality of Culture in American Cultural Anthropology
The Tradition of Educational Ethnography in the United States
Changes in Conceptualizing Culture and Ethnography
The Turn to Interpretive Logics
The Turn to Culture as Empowering and Disempowering
Discussion/Conclusion
References
9 Ethnography of Schooling in England
Feminist and Antiracist Interventions
The Shift to Policy Scholarship
The Influence of Postmodernism
Conclusion
References
10 Latin American Educational Ethnography
Introduction
The Beginning: The First 30 Years
Most Visited Topics and Issues
Conclusion: Looking Critically at the Present and Foreseeing the Future
References
11 Curriculum, Ethnography, and the Context of Practice in the Field of Curriculum Policies in Brazil
Introduction
Ethnography in Stephen Ball’s Studies: Introducing the Practice in the Policy
Ethnographic Research about CurriculumPolicies in Brazil: The Risk of Realism
For a Discursive Comprehension of Context in Ethnographic Research
Final Words
References
12 Ethnographic Research in Schools
Developments in Educational Ethnography in the USAand UK: An Overview
The German Sonderweg and Its Connections to the AngloSaxon Debate
Switzerland: AMultidisciplinary Position Betwixt and Between
Conclusion
References
13 Ethnography and Education in an African Context
Introduction
Defining MetaEthnography
The Ethnography of Education: Studies in an African Context
The Value Provided by Ethnography to Understanding the Education Processes
Studied
Conclusion: Contribution of Metaethnography to Ethnography and Education as a Combined Research Area
Appendix
References
Part Three
14 Visual Ethnography in Education
Participatory Photography in Education
Examples of Different Ways of Using Participatory Photography in Ethnographic Research in Education
Existing Photographs as Part of Visual Ethnographies
Participatory Video Research in “Education”
Some General Methodological Questions
Analysis of Visual Ethnographic Studies
Ways of Communicating Visual Ethnographic Studies in Education with Audiences
Ethical Issues in Visual Ethnographies
Concluding Thoughts on Visual Ethnographies in Education
References
15 Lost in Performance? Rethinking and Reworking the Methodology of Educational Ethnography
Drama Not Theatre
Audit Culture
The Research Act
“This Is My Ethnodrama!”
Unnatural Representation
Conclusion
References
16 Staging Resistance
References
17 Agential Realismand Educational Ethnography
The Return to Ontology
New Materialism’s Rejection of the Linguistic Turn
Agential Realismbeyond (before) the New Materialism
School Resegregation: An Illustrative Example
Methodological Implications
References
18 Multisited Global Ethnography and Elite Schools
Introduction
Multisited Global Ethnography
Global Forces
Global Connections
Global Imaginations
Concluding Comments
References
Further Reading
19 Educational Ethnography In and For a Mobile Modernity
Responding to the Mobility Turn
Ethnography in a Mobile Modernity
Ethnography as Travel Encounter (and Other Unsettling Metaphors)
Educational Ethnography In and For a Mobile Modernity
References
20 On Network(ed) Ethnography in the Global Education Policyscape
Introduction
Policy Networks and Policy Mobilities
Globalizing Networks and Ethnography
Researching Conferences
Concluding Comments
References
21 Autoethnography Comes of Age
Introduction
Consequences and Comforts of Autoethnography Coming of Age
Differentiating “Good” from“Bad” Autoethnography
Ethical Issues in Autoethnography
Autoethnography as a Risky Business and Causes for Concern
Stories frominside the Academy
Closing Thoughts
Acknowledgments
References
22 Positionality and Standpoint
Stances of Insiderness/Outsiderness
Multiple and Overlapping “Situated” Identities
Situated Knowledges, Power, and Positionalities
Examining Positionalities through Reflexivity
Positionalities and Reflexivities in the On and Offline Field(s)
Concluding Remarks
References
Part Four
23 Ethnography of Education
Introduction
Thinking Forward, Looking Back
Legacies and Developments
Postmodernism: Literary and Cultural Turns in (Relation to) Ethnography of Education
Changing Ideas, Changing Practices: New Technologies in the Ethnography of Education
Summing Up and/or Rounding Down
References
Further Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 13
Table 13.1 Selected studies: Ethnography and education in Africa
Chapter 18
Table 18.1 Conceptual matrix
List of Illustrations
Chapter 14
Figure 14.1
Figure 14.2
Figure 14.3 Finland Swedes often have cottages in the archipelago and like being there.
Figure 14.4 Stockmann’s bookstore has many Swedish books.
Figure 14.5 FinlandSwedishness is to understand other Nordic languages.
Figure 14.6 FinlandSwedishness is to be special.
Figure 14.7 We FinlandSwedes have crayfish parties at the end of the summer.
Figure 14.8 No one is alike.
Figure 14.9 I may be FinlandSwedish – but I refuse to be only that.
Figure 14.10 The FinlandSwedish go side by side with Finnish speakers, but they may be merged in the future.
Figure 14.11 Almost all clothes and fashion are bought in Sweden! (Student fromthe land Islands.)
Figure 14.12 Atreasure. The Swedish Finland is special and unique. I’mproud to be a FinlandSwede. (Student fromrural school in southern Finland.)
Figure 14.13 We will soon fall like the last leaf on the tree. (Student fromrural school in southern Finland.)
Figure 14.14 Together. The flowers are close to each other. We FinlandSwedes are also close to each other. Everybody knows everybody and sometimes others know more about me than I do … (Student fromrural school in southern Finland.)
Figure 14.15
Figure 14.16
Figure 14.17
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Paul Atkinson, PhD (Edinburgh), DScEcon (Wales), is Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology at Cardiff University. His most recent books are For Ethnography (2014) and Thinking Ethnographically (2017). He and Sara Delamont were the founding editors of the journal Qualitative Research.
Carl Bagley, PhD FRSA, is Professor of Educational Sociology and Head of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland. He has undertaken research and published extensively in the fields of policy ethnography and critical artsbased research; pioneering the live artistic performance of educational research data. He is the cofounder of the Special Interest Group (SIG) Arts and Inquiry in the Visual and Performing Arts in Education within the American Educational Research Association (AERA). He is coeditor of the British Educational Research Association (BERA) journal Review of Education and deputy editor of the journal Ethnography and Education.
Stephen J. Ball is Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology of Education at the University College London, Institute of Education. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2006; is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and Society of Educational Studies, and a Laureate of Kappa Delta Phi; and has honorary doctorates fromthe University of Turku (Finland) and the University of Leicester. He is cofounder and managing editor of the Journal of Education Policy. His main areas of interest are in sociologically informed education policy analysis and the relationships between education, education policy, and social class. He has written 20 books and over 140 journal articles. Recent books are Edu.Net (with Carolina Junemann and Diego Santori, 2017) and Foucault as Educator (2017).
Dennis Beach is Professor of Education at the Faculty of Education and Special Education at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden and at the Faculty of Librarianship, Information, Education and IT at the University of Borås, Sweden. He is a member of the Nordic Research Council Excellence Centre for research on education justice and chief editor of the international research journal Ethnography and Education. His main research interests are in the sociology and politics of education and ethnography.
Angeles Clemente has worked as a lecturer and researcher at the Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca, México, for 30 years, where she also founded the research group in Critical Applied Linguistics. She holds an MAin TESOLand a PhD in education fromthe Institute of Education, University of London, where she was a visiting research fellow during the academic year 2000/2001. Her main research interest is ethnographic studies with vulnerable communities and language teaching and learning in a postcolonial world anchored by a globalized political economy in order to understand the various localized interplays between language, culture, agency, and identity in the context of Oaxaca, Mexico. She co authored Performing English as a Postcolonial Accent: Ethnographic Narratives from México (with Michael J. Higgins, 2008) and coedited Encuentros etnográficos con niños y
adolescentes [Ethnographic encounters with children and adolescents] (2011), Shaping Ethnography in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts (with Michael J. Higgins and Steve Marshall, 2014), and Bordes, límites y fronteras: Etnografía en colaboración con niños, niñas, adolescentes y jóvenes [Edges, boundaries and borders: Ethnography in collaboration with children, adolescents and young people] (2017).
Sara Delamont, PhD (Edinburgh), DScEcon (Cardiff), FAcSS, is Reader in Sociology at Cardiff University. She has received Lifetime Service awards fromthe BSAand fromBERA. Her most recent books are Key Themes in the Ethnography of Education (2016), the third edition of Fieldwork in Educational Settings (2016), and Embodying Brazil: An Ethnography of Diasporic Capoeira, coauthored with Neil Stephens and Claudio Campos (2017).
Barbara Dennis is an associate professor in Inquiry Methodology at Indiana University where she studies core methodological concepts through practice. As an educational feminist ethnographer, Barbara has concerned herself with studies of concepts like validity and ethics through research practice in order both to better understand our methodological thinking and to refine the ways in which researchers work in the social world for change.
Norman K. Denzin is distinguished Professor of Communications, Research Professor of Communications, Cinema Studies, Sociology, Criticismand Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois. His most recent book is Indians in Color: Native Art, Identity, and Performance in the New West (2015).
Margaret Eisenhart is University Distinguished Professor Emerita of Educational Foundations and Research Methodology at the University of Colorado Boulder, USA. She specializes in educational anthropology and ethnographic research methods. Her research focuses on the social and cultural experiences of students in US schools. She has examined racial dynamics and identities in elementary students, gender imagery and relationships among college students, and student experiences of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in high school. From1999 to 2013 she directed, participated in, and researched afterschool programs in science and engineering, particularly for nonprivileged high school girls of color. Her most recent writings examine high school students’ opportunities to learn STEM and the subsequent pathways they take to college. Some of this research relies on text messaging and Facebook data, as well as more standard ethnographic techniques. She is the author or coauthor of over 100 research articles and three books: Educated in Romance: Women, Achievement and College Culture (with Dorothy C. Holland, 1990), Designing Classroom Research (with Hilda Borko, 1993), and Women’s Science: Learning and Succeeding from the Margin (with Elizabeth Finkel, 1998). She is a member of the US National Academy of Education.
Debbie Epstein is Professor of Cultural Studies in Education at the University of Roehampton, having previously worked at Cardiff University; Goldsmiths College, London; the Institute of Education, London; and the University of Central England. She is joint author of Class Choreographies: Elite Schools and Globalization, on which this chapter is based. She has published widely on a range of inequalities. Other publications fromthis project are listed in the book. Her other books include Towards Gender Equality: South African Schools during
the HIV and AIDS Epidemic (with Robert Morrell, Elaine Unterhalter, Relebohile Moletsane, and Deevia Bhana, 2009), Silenced Sexualities in Schools and Universities (with Sarah O’Flynn and David Telford, 2003), Schooling Sexualities (with Richard Johnson, 1998), and Changing Classroom Cultures: Antiracism, Politics and Schools (1993).
Johannah Fahey is Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Education at Monash University. She has an international reputation in the areas of intersectionality (gender, race, and class), and cultural globalization. She is coauthor/author of Class Choreographies: Elite Schools and Globalization (2017), Haunting the Knowledge Economy (2006), and David Noonan: Before and Now (2004); and coeditor of In the Realm of the Senses: Social Aesthetics and the Sensory Dynamics of Privilege (2015) and Globalising the Research Imagination (2009).
Michelle Fine is a Distinguished Professor of Critical Psychology, Women’s Studies, American Studies, and Urban Education at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She has authored many books and articles on high school pushouts, adolescent sexuality, the impact of college in prison, the struggles and brilliance of the children of incarcerated adults, the wisdomof MuslimAmerican youth, the injustice of high stakes testing, the racial abuse and mass incarceration of people of color and queer youth. She loves to conduct research with young people who know intimately the scars of injustice and the laughter of surviving the streets of New York.
Martin Forsey is Associate Professor in Anthropology and Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia. Martin is an educational sociologist/anthropologist with particular interests in the social and cultural effects of schooling and the internationalization of tertiary education. An awardwinning teacher, Martin has an abiding interest in the scholarship of teaching. He also has an extensive list of research publications, including books on neoliberal reformof government schooling and school choice and a range of papers reflecting his interest in qualitative research methods, social change, schools and society, education and mobility, among other things. His profile also reflects a strong commitment to interdisciplinary research.
Martyn Hammersley is Emeritus Professor of Educational and Social Research at The Open University, UK. He has carried out research in the sociology of education and the sociology of the media. However, much of his work has been concerned with the methodological issues surrounding social inquiry. He has written several books, including (with Paul Atkinson) Ethnography: Principles in Practice (3rd ed., 2007), Educational Research, Policymaking and Practice (with Paul Chapman, 2002), What Is Qualitative Research? (2012), The Myth of ResearchBased Policy and Practice (2013), and The Limits of Social Science (2014).
Gunilla Holmis a professor of education in the Faculty of Educational Sciences at the University of Helsinki and director of the Nordic Centre of Excellence in Education “Justice through Education.” Her research interests are focused on justicerelated issues in education with particular focus on the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, and gender. She is also interested in and writes on photography as a research method. She is the cofounder of a new elementary teacher education programat the University of Helsinki with the profile of
multilingualism, diversity, and social justice.
Bob Jeffrey was appointed Honorary Research Fellow at Exeter University in 2012 following retirement fromThe Open University. He researched from1992 the work of primary teachers with Professor Peter Woods and Professor Geoff Troman. They focused on the opportunity for creative teaching and the effects of the reforms of the 1990s in England on this formof pedagogy and teacher identities. In the 2000s, they developed this focus to learners and their opportunities for creative learning, including a ninenation European study from2004 to 2006. He also worked closely with Professor Anna Craft developing research and promoting creative teaching and learning in the educational research community. They have published extensively, including a great many methodology articles emphasizing an ethnographic approach, including a focus on crosscultural methods. Bob is cofounder of the Ethnography and Education journal and edited it from2008 to 2012, also coorganizing an annual ethnography conference in Oxford for 10 years as well as coediting a book series from2007 to 2012. www.ethnographyandeducation.org.
Carolina Junemann is a researcher and lecturer at the University College London Institute of Education. Her research has focused on the analysis of the participation of nonstate actors, and philanthropy in particular, in global policy networks and global policy communities. Her latest research has engaged these interests through a focus on the development of chains of lowfee private schools in subSaharan Africa. Her main areas of research interest are in new forms and methods of global education policy and governance and education policy mobilities. She has published on these themes in academic journals and has recently contributed to major international collections such as the World Yearbook of Education 2016 and the Handbook of Global Education Policy (2016). She is the author of two books, Networks, New Governance and Education (with Stephen J. Ball, 2012) and Edu.Net (with Stephen J. Ball and Diego Santori, 2017). She has also conducted research on education privatization for Education International, focusing on the case of the world’s largest edu business, Pearson.
Jane Kenway is Professorial Fellow at Melbourne University and Emeritus Professor at Monash University, and an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, Australia. Her research expertise is in sociocultural studies of education in the context of wider social and cultural change, focusing particularly on power and politics.
Aaron Koh is an associate professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Education. He previously taught at Monash University, Hong Kong Institute of Education, and National Institute of Education, Singapore. He has published in the areas of global studies in education, cultural studies in education, and sociology of education. His most recent publicationa are three coedited books: Education in the Global City: The Manufacturing of Education in Singapore (with Terence Chong, 2016), Elite Schools: Multiple Geographies of Privilege (with Jane Kenway, 2016), and New Sociologies of Elite Schooling (with Jane Kenway, 2017). He is on the editorial boards of Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Curriculum Inquiry, Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, and Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. He is also the cofounding editor of a Springer book series,
Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education.
Alice Casimiro Lopes is a curriculumprofessor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. She is currently the managing editor of the journal Transnational Curriculum Inquiry and member of the advisory board of the Journal of Education Policy and of many other journals and Brazilian funding agencies. She has authored and edited several books and she has published many papers in Portuguese, Spanish, and English. Her research focuses on curriculumpolicy in a discursive approach.
Anna Lund is an associate professor in sociology and codirector for the Center for Cultural Sociology at Linnaeus University in Sweden. Her research interests are in culture, ethnography, education, youth, gender, and multicultural incorporation. She has published articles in Gender and Education, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, and American Journal of Cultural Sociology.
Christoph Maeder is Professor of Educational Sociology at the University of Teacher Training in Zurich, Switzerland. He specializes in ethnographic research on “people processing organizations” such as schools, welfare bureaucracies, prisons, and hospitals. He received his academic training at the University of St. Gallen, a business school, where he started his career with work in medical sociology. This experience pushed himfinally into organizational ethnography. Maeder is a founding member of the research network “Qualitative Methods” of the European Sociological Association (ESA) and a former president of the Swiss Sociological Association (SSA). During recent years he has focused on sociology of knowledge approaches in education. His most recent publication in English is on the use of computer technology in the classroomof a primary school. Currently he is working on an ethnography of the kindergarten together with his colleagues in the research group “Children, Childhood, and Schooling” in Zurich.
Cameron McCarthy is Hardie Fellow and University Scholar in the Department of Educational Policy, Organization, and Leadership (EPOL) and in the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. He was, until recently, director and divisional coordinator of the Global Studies in Education Programat the University of Illinois. Professor McCarthy teaches courses in globalization studies, postcolonialism, mass communications theory, and cultural studies at his university. His latest books include Elite Schools in Globalizing Circumstances (coedited with Jane Kenway, 2015) and Class Choreographies: Elite Schools and Globalization (coauthored with Jane Kenway, Johannah Fahey, Debbie Epstein, Aaron Koh, and Fazal Rizvi, 2017).
JimMienczakowski studied at London University’s Central School of Speech & Drama and King’s College London. His first ethnographic study researched the working lives of teachers in Extra Priority Area (EPA) schools in inner London during the early 1980s. His subsequent ethnographically derived research work involved interdisciplinary academic teams researching the experiences of young people stigmatized through crime, addiction, and circumstances of health and entailed the development of critical ethnodrama and performance as a means of presenting and testing research reports. He is currently working in Borneo on a multimedia mode of research reporting.
Diana Milstein is a professor at the National University of Comahue (UNCo), Neuquén and Río Negro, Argentina and researcher at the Center of Social Research of National Council of Scientific and Technical Research at Institute of Economic and Social Development (CIS CONICETIDES), Argentina. She is coordinator of the international network of ethnography with children and teenagers. Her fields of interest are ethnography and education, ethnography with children, anthropology of the body, and art education. She has taught graduate and postgraduate courses in national and Latin American universities. In addition to publishing several articles in international journals and book chapters, she is coauthor of La escuela en el cuerpo [The school in the body] (with Hector Mendes, 1999/ 2017, translated into Portuguese), author of Higiene, autoridad y escuela [Hygiene, authority, and school] (2003), La nación en la escuela [Nation in school] (2009), and coeditor of Encuentros etnográficos con niños y adolescentes [Ethnographic encounters with children and adolescents] (2011) and Bordes, límites y fronteras: Etnografía en colaboración con niños, niñas, adolescentes y jóvenes [Edges, boundaries and borders: Ethnography in collaboration with children, adolescents and young people] (2017).
Maropeng Modiba is Professor of CurriculumStudies at the University of Johannesburg where, for four years, she was the Head of the Department of Education and Curriculum Studies. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Research in Education. Her current research focuses on teacher education and curriculumliteracy captured by studying classroominstructional practices. She pursues this research as a member of the conference “Ethnography and Education – Oxford” and VicePresident (Africa) of the Board for the International Council on Education for Teaching (ICET). In addition to journal articles and other publications, her latest book chapters include “Teacher Education policy in South Africa: Definitions of Best Practice and Challenges” (2016), “How Do We Educate so ‘that the people of this precious Earth … may live?’: Rethinking the History Curriculumin Zimbabwe” (with Nathan Moyo, 2015), and “Critical Research: Understanding Material Constraints and Engaging in Transformative Action Research” (with Nathan Moyo and Kefa Simwa, 2015).
Joan Parker Webster is a retired associate professor of education at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), where she developed the Reading Endorsement for Alaska state licensure and the Master’s of Reading and Literacy programat UAF. Specializing in literacies and crosscultural communications, she also taught courses in qualitative methodologies. Currently she is affiliated faculty in the Center for Cross Cultural Studies at UAF. She also works as an educational research consultant, primarily as an evaluator for federally funded grant programs. Parker Webster continues to conduct ethnographic research and publish in the areas of qualitative and online research methodologies, multiliteracies, crosscultural communication, and Indigenous education.
Fazal Rizvi is a professor of global studies in education at the University of Melbourne Australia, as well as an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign in the United States. He has written extensively on issues of identity and culture in transnational contexts, globalization and education policy, and Australia–Asia relations. A collection of his essays is published in Encountering Education in the Global: Selected Writings of Fazal Rizvi (2014). Professor Rizvi is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the
Social Sciences, and is a past editor of the journal Discourse: Studies in Cultural Politics of Education and past President of the Australian Association of Research in Education.
Jerry Lee Rosiek is a professor of education studies at the University of Oregon where he teaches courses on the cultural foundations of education and qualitative research methodology. His scholarship examines the knowledge that enables the promotion of justice, equity, and care in educational institutions. His research has experimented with the use of narrative modes of representations and is informed by revisionist pragmatism, new materialist philosophy, and Indigenous Studies. His writing has appeared in the journals Harvard Educational Review, Education Theory, and Educational Researcher, and his recently published book, Resegregation as Curriculum (2016), won the American Association for Teaching and Curriculum2016 Book of the Year Award.
Diego Santori is a senior lecturer in education at the University of Roehampton. His interests include the relationships between education policy, economics, and subjectivity and the ways in which their interpenetration produce new cultural forms and practices. Together with Professor Stephen J. Ball and Carolina Junemann, he has recently completed a Leverhulme Trustfunded research on the role of philanthropy in education policy, with a focus on the development of chains of lowcost, private schools for the poor in subSaharan Africa. His recent publications include Edu.Net (with Stephen J. Ball and Caroline Junemann, 2017), “Financial Markets and Investment in Education,” in World Yearbook of Education 2016, and “Public Narratives under Intensified Market Conditions: Chile as a Critical Case,” in Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education (2016).
Anja Sieber Egger, DPhil (University of Berne), is coleader of the research group Children – Childhood – Schooling at Zurich University of Teacher Education. She is a social anthropologist with a strong research interest in the anthropology of childhood, in everyday culture in school including processes of doing gender/ethnicity/culture/pupil, as well as (domestic) violence. At the heart of her methodological interest lies ethnography.
Sofia Marques da Silva is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Porto, Portugal, and member of CIIE – Educational Research and Intervention Centre, obtaining her PhD in Educational Sciences in 2008. Recently she has been involved in an online and offline ethnography with young people fromborder regions. She is the coordinator of the national project Youth, Education, and Border Regions (2010–2018) and coordinator of the Portuguese teamin the Project “NAOS – Professional Capacity Dealing with Diversity” (KA2, Erasmus + , European Commission). She teaches research methodologies, sociology of education, and youth cultures, is on the editorial board of several international journals, and is deputy editor of the journal Ethnography and Education. She is the vice president of the Portuguese Society of Educational Sciences (SPCE), an expert of NESET II, and member of the experts group of EACEA(Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency), with experience in assessing and analyzing European projects on youth, migrants, equality, and diversity. She is also part of a working group of the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Higher Education for promoting digital competencies.
Andrew C. Sparkes works as Professor of Education at Leeds Beckett University in the
Carnegie School of Sport. His research and pedagogical interests are inspired by a continuing fascination with the ways that people experience different forms of embodiment over time in a variety of contexts. Andrew’s work is necessarily nomadic in nature and dwells in the fertile cracks between disciplines where he finds much that intrigues, amuses, and baffles him.
Sandra Stewart’s lengthy experience of teaching at primary school level as well as lecturing preset teachers at university level underpins her interest in teachers’ professional development. She is particularly interested in the use of ethnography as a research method to better capture and understand how individuals experience curriculumpolicy at school level. She has published on classroomteaching, curriculumpolicy, and teacher development. Contributions are in journal papers and conference proceedings.
Mats Trondman is Professor of Cultural Sociology at Linnaeus University in Sweden and a visiting professor at the Department of Child and Youth Studies at StockholmUniversity. He is the founding editor of the Sage journal Ethnography together with Paul Willis. His main focus is youth culture in relation to conditions of existence, forms of selfunderstanding, and agency, within areas such as schooling, sports, and the arts. Trondman also has a deep interest in social and cultural theory which often combines with political philosophy.
Maria de Lourdes Rangel Tura earned her PhD in education at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She is associate professor at the Graduate Programin Education (ProPEd) of the State University of Rio de Janeiro. Her studies are based on ethnographic research, which has been the object of publications in books, book chapters, and papers in academic journals.
Gisela Unterweger, DPhil (University of Zurich), is coleader of the research group Children – Childhood – Schooling at Zurich University of Teacher Education. She is a European ethnologist and has a research background in childhood studies, everyday culture in school, and the construction of identity as a pupil. She works with ethnographic research strategies to explore and investigate the cultural dimensions of schooling.
Geoffrey Walford is Emeritus Professor of Education Policy and an Emeritus Fellow of Green Templeton College at the University of Oxford. His main research foci are the relationships between central government policy and local processes of implementation, private schools, choice of schools, religiously based schools, and qualitative research methodology. Professor Walford is currently engaged with various scholarly writing activities, working, in particular, on issues connected to private schooling for the poor and social justice.
Lois Weis is State University of New York Distinguished Professor of Sociology of Education at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, USA. She has written extensively about the current predicament of white, African American, and Latino/a workingclass and poor youth and young adults, and the complex role gender and race play in their lives in light of contemporary dynamics associated with the global knowledge economy. She is the author and/or editor of numerous books and articles relating to race, class, gender, education, and the economy. Together with Michelle Fine she is a winner of the outstanding book award fromthe Gustavus Meyers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America.
Paul Willis has a wide range of interests in lived and other cultures in a variety of locations,
institutional, formal and informal, commercial and noncommercial, work related and leisure. Significant publications include Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (1977), Profane Culture (2015), and The Ethnographic Imagination (2000).
Introduction
Dennis Beach, Carl Bagley, and Sofia Marques da Silva
In the past 30 years ethnography has grown froman emerging tradition in education research to one of the important research methods in the field. Impulses in this development have come fromdifferent national directions and disciplines. Predominant amongst them, however, have been influences fromthe UK and the USAand the disciplines of sociology (in the UK) and anthropology and sociology (in the USA) respectively. Following this, as discussed by Paul Atkinson (2005), the position has changed significantly. Ethnographic research has flourished; methodological reflection has grown. There is now extensive writing around matters of research methods and a need to return to some fundamental principles of ethnographic inquiry, along with a desire to describe and analyze the many modalities of ethnography that now exist. These developments have led to WileyBlackwell’s interest in creating the present volume and our desire to edit it.
When editing the Handbook we have tried to be open to new developments and challenges, whilst also being cautious, by locating these within a wider ethnographic framework. We want to both recognize and give space to intrinsic principles of order and explore new challenges and new ideas and practices. This means that both classic ideas in the ethnography of education, such as “grounded theory,” “triangulation,” and “thick description,” will be reviewed in various chapters, along with newer ways of trying to be faithful to the phenomena under investigation. In addition, we acknowledge the need to respond to a range of new developments associated with globalization, mobility, technologies of communication, and changes in concepts of culture.
Methodological reflections and intellectual challenges posed by changes in society and culture have influenced and shaped generations of ethnographers of education and the Handbook has been composed with the need for continuous methodological reflection and intellectual development in mind. The selection of chapters and authors has been made on this basis: each chapter has been specially commissioned and represents an original contribution.
In this regard, the scope of the Handbook and its various chapters does not rest simply in repeating, rehearsing, and renewing ethnographic principles and reaffirming their importance. Indeed, while the concept of education ethnography is now well established, a lot of the work of establishing the discipline rested fundamentally on these principles being repeatedly tested and challenged in and by empirical, philosophical, and theoretical research in education, sociology, and other disciplines (see, for example, the chapters by Hammersley and Eisenhart in the present volume, as well as the chapter by Trondman, Willis, and Lund). As Martyn Hammersley recently substantiated during a plenary presentation at the Oxford Conference on Ethnography of Education (Hammersley 2017), there are serious new challenges for the discipline to meet that differ fromthe challenges identified in the past; the Handbook therefore tries to do as much justice as it can to these challenges (see, for instance, the chapters by Mienczakowski and Denzin around politics of representation, the chapter by Rosiek addressing
new materialism, and the chapter by Junemann, Ball, and Santori with respect to global networks and education policy research).
One of the problems that was identified by Hammersley in his talk concerned the pluralization and diffusion of the concept of ethnography of education. As Hammersley pointed out, the term “ethnography” has acquired a range of meanings, and comes in many different versions, often reflecting sharply divergent orientations. This is also discussed by both Walford and Jeffrey in their chapters and is implied to be a problemthat requires attention in terms of possible threats toward the practice of ethnography and to the quality of ethnographic work. Walford, for instance, argues for the need for a basic agreement about the meaning of the termwith respect to certain specific principles among ethnographers as to ontological, epistemological, and other matters.
Another problemidentified in the plenary presentation by Hammersley was the growing demand for education research to be accountable in very narrow terms, such as through demonstrable impact and knowledge transfer. This has serious restraining effects on ethnography of education, according to Hammersley, and restrains its possibilities for critical engagement (see also chapters by Dennis, Weis and Fine, Denzin, and Mienczakowski in the present volume). Moreover, it is part of a longtermshift away froma statepatronage system of research funding toward an investment model, according to Hammersley, which demands that the returns on specific projects be identifiable.
Athird threat identified by Hammersley is related to the above. It concerns the currently growing ideological and financial support that research financing agencies and national governments are devoting to pushing back the dominance of qualitative methods in favor of statistical analyses. One example identified by Hammersley is the renewed stress on randomized controlled trials as a gold standard. Another is the large amounts of money that are being devoted to quantitative methods training. Besides being bad for the prospects of ethnographic research possibilities, echoing Blumer’s (1954) critique of the expansion and flaws of variable research, these developments also imply serious problems for critically reflective research in the education field, with such research being displaced in favor of so called evidencebased best practice research.
Finally, fromthe list of problems presented by Hammersley we want to draw attention to the changed conditions of work in universities and in the employment market for academics. These changes, which variously refer to the commodification and neoliberal restructuring of the higher education sector, and the introduction of new forms of governance (often termed “new public management” or NPM), has been extensively researched in recent decades. Changes have been seen to put extensive pressure on postgraduate students to complete their research work in a fixed (and quite limited) period of time, whilst at the same time also forcing themto feel compelled to display employability by teaching along the way. In some cases this means that the time that can be devoted to longtermparticipant observation and analysis in ethnography becomes ruptured, and the work becomes fragmented. Changing conditions of labor in academia are resulting in threats to the practices of ethnographic research. Changes in culture more broadly are doing so too (see the chapters by Hammersley and Eisenhart in this
Structure and Chapter Disposition
In compiling the Handbook we have attempted to produce a foundational benchmark regarding the issues introduced above, together with a presentation of what conceptually and empirically characterizes current thinking about good educational ethnographic practices. Our hope is that we can present an authoritative reference point and a valuable academic resource for those who are either planning to conduct ethnographic research in education or simply wish to learn more about this kind of research. We hope and anticipate therefore that the book will be read by:
researchers in education around the world; graduate students and academics in fields such as special education, general education, disability studies, and teacher education; administrators, at school, district, and/or state level who are responsible for establishing and evaluating educational programs, services, and curricula.
The Handbook has been edited with the anticipated needs of these groups in mind and at a level that we anticipate will make it accessible to a wide range of researchers, educators, and administrators as a reference and as a textbook for graduatelevel courses in research methods. It has been organized into different sections, each with chapters of between 8,000 and 10,000 words that examine a specific subject in depth. These are related either to established standards of good ethnographic practices that forma picture of what has come to characterize the ethnography of education, or to various developments and different positions, values, principles, and commitments that both influence and challenge the ethnography of education. Thinking about these issues is then used to compose ideas about the future of ethnography of education. The Handbook will in this way be valuable not simply for those looking to ethnography as a method, but also for those looking to find answers to assist with their existing research practice and those seeking to modify or extend their practice further. In essence, the Handbook strives to situate the past, underscore the present, and reflect on the future of educational ethnography.
Chapter Contents and Main Messages
The first chapter, by Geoffrey Walford, is entitled “Recognizable Continuity: ADefense of Multiple Methods.” Walford’s chapter recognizes that although ethnographic traditions change, there is a need for some strong and recognizable continuity, including resistance to efforts to equate ethnography with forms of qualitative research. Positioning ethnography as just a qualitative methodology shears it free fromindependent meaning, according to Walford, and also actually misrepresents the ethnography of early practitioners, who often generated quantitative data as well as qualitative field notes and descriptions in their research. Another problemis an overreliance on interviews. The details of social organization and social action can be uncovered through observation as well as through talk and Walford argues strongly that a greater emphasis on observation in all its many forms, using all of the five senses, may improve the quality of ethnographies immeasurably. Ethnographic research benefits frommore time being spent in observing the activities of others and recording these observations in field notes and less time being spent in trying to construct “hard” data fromephemeral conversations. These concerns ally well with some of those expressed by both Hammersley and Atkinson, referred to above.
Chapter 2, “Lived Forms of Schooling: Bringing the Elementary Forms of Ethnography to the Science of Education,” by Mats Trondman, Paul Willis, and Anna Lund, follows Walford’s chapter and adds further theoretical reflections and historical relief to those presented by him. Looking back in history to debates within ethnography fromthe beginning of the twentieth century, the chapter analyzes what ethnography can do for education when it is taken as a proper object fromthe ethnographic point of view. The best ethnography, the authors suggest, recognizes and records how experience is entrained in the flow of contemporary sociocultural history, recorded as sociomaterial structures, meanings, and trends, and where human beings are both subjects, objects, and the voluntary agents of their own involuntary determination in a specific world of meaning. This world of meaning is not fixed and inviolable, however, but rather fully dependent on the whole to which it belongs. In such a context, the “truth of each fact depends upon the … coherence of the facts which compose it” (Oakeshott 1933: 113). Specific lived meanings relate to already existing repositories of meanings that lived experience more or less consciously and overtly enacts, and fromwhich individuals and groups selectively and creatively take on lived identifications and meanings.
Chapter 3, “Tales of Working Without/Against a Compass: Rethinking Ethical Dilemmas in Educational Ethnography,” by Barbara Dennis, addresses questions of ethics in the ethnography of education. As discussed by Dennis, the ethical education ethnographer enters the field legitimized through approvals by ethical review boards, as a hopefully selfaware and reflective researcher, with basically good intentions. However, this awareness and the good intentions are often challenged when facing encounters in the field, as the question of what it means to be an ethical educational ethnographer is not isolated fromhow we contemplate, confront, engage ourselves in, and are contemplated, confronted, and engaged as ethical beings with/in the world with others in the research process itself, in the entanglements “we” help enact and the commitments “we” are willing to take on (Dennis, this volume). This is about
how ethnographers act in the practical domain of everyday life where the course of ethical actions is both interdependently and situationally forged. The question of “what it means to be an ethical ethnographer” is transformed here into a question of how we can engage in and rethink ethics for ethnography. Following postqualitative deconstructions of the modern subject, this calls, according to Dennis, for a more participatory approach to ethics, one that involves collectively creating a space of opportunity where behaving ethically means engaging with imaginative possibilities within activities where one’s both open and fallible researcher self is at stake.
The idea of researching across and within communities of practice and pedagogy is addressed in Chapter 4 by Sara Delamont and Paul Atkinson. This chapter argues that ethnographic studies of education need to encompass a wider range of settings than is currently the case, as it is important for researchers to defamiliarize educational settings if they are to keep their analytic perspectives fresh, and extend their ideas about educational processes. The chapter points out both that and how research on schools and classrooms can be enriched through theoretically informed studies that encompass comparative perspectives. Socialization and instruction take place in many contexts beyond schools, colleges, and universities and many communities of practice are also communities of pedagogy, such as craft studios or sports coaching. Occupational and artistic apprenticeship are among the modes of practical pedagogy but there is a continuing need for detailed studies of how knowledge, skills, techniques, and judgments are transmitted and learned. Ethnographers of education need to pay attention to studies of such settings that already exist. Ethnographies that pay close attention to the concrete practices of practical learning and instruction are advocated. They are of significance in their own right, but studies of diverse settings of instruction also help to throw social processes in conventional educational settings into relief.
The concept of remaining critical when researching educational settings is addressed in Chapter 5, “Critical Bifocality,” by Lois Weis and Michelle Fine. Weis and Fine explore critical bifocality as a theory and method for designing critical research work that moves between educational policy and everyday life in schools, by interrogating how the global and local structural arrangements that are embodied in institutional policy, educational practice, and everyday people – parents, teachers, and administrators – reproduce and embody America’s class structure of the future. The authors theorize and simultaneously humanize the work of social actors across our ever more contentious economic and social structure in a shifting global context. However, above all the chapter elaborates on critical bifocality as a dedicated theoretical and methodological commitment to a multiscale ethnographic design that documents the historic and contemporary linkages and capillaries of structural arrangements and the discursive practices by which those on the ground in schools and communities make sense of their circumstances. The chapter outlines a theory of method and chronicles the macrolevel structural dynamics associated with the refractive implications of globalization and neoliberalism. Two recent ethnographic investigations are used as exemplars. They provide a deliberate focus on structures and lives, as paired empirical opportunities, to illustrate how researchers can account for global, national, and local transformations as insinuated, embodied, and resisted, when trying to make sense of current
educational and economic possibilities in shifting contexts and circumstances.
The next chapter, “Ethnographic Writing,” by Bob Jeffrey, takes us back to the principled concerns of ethnographers in ethnography and ethnographic representation. The chapter explores some of the major aspects of writing and ethnography. Writing is an integral part of the ethnographic process, particularly in the field. This involves “writing down,” and then re presenting an authentic, authoritative, and plausible account of the lived reality of our research site, which is “writing up.” When doing this, ethnographers have to produce characteristics of a site through the production of descriptive data that both reflect these characteristics and provide food for analysis. In the main this involves the ethnographer writing and/or recording descriptions in the formof field notes. Field notes are of different kinds. They may portray the environment, provide a description of how respondents work and live, or make use of many literary forms and persuasive rhetoric to construct data that reflect the lived reality of those we research. The chapter provides examples fromextensive research of different types of writing and its implications for the academy. It draws on the author’s extensive experience of ethnographic research to exemplify four fieldnote forms of writing. The use of memos, writing main texts, and constructing whole narratives are also addressed.
Part II of the Handbook opens with Chapter 7, called “What Can Be Learnt? Educational Ethnography, the Sociology of Knowledge, and Ethnomethodology,” by Christoph Maeder. This chapter describes the field of educational ethnography as situated within a complex array of disciplines, national traditions, and languages, each with various purposes and institutional functions. In an arrangement like this, ethnography of education is predictably fuzzy, obviously scattered, and theoretically diverse, the chapter argues. Therefore, an idea that brings together such a vast area of scientific endeavor is looked for. The theory suggested as useful in doing so is the social constructionist theory emanating fromthe sociology of knowledge fromthe 1960s, along with theoretical concepts fromethnomethodology. Froma sociology of knowledge perspective, ethnomethodologists were – and still are – concerned with basic and fundamental questions of how education works. One of their core concepts, the Intervention–Response/Reaction–Evaluation sequence (IRE sequence), is used to explore how the definition of the pedagogical situation as a theoretical prerequisite can yield an exemplary starting point for educational ethnography in general. The overall aimof this chapter is therefore to suggest clearer theoretical underpinnings for educational ethnography, which should not take educational realities and institutions for granted but yet still needs to ask fundamental questions.
The chapter by Maeder opens up questions that are also addressed in Chapter 8, “Changing Conceptions of Culture and Ethnography in Anthropology of Education in the United States,” by Margaret Eisenhart. This chapter first reviews how American anthropologists of education have traditionally thought about culture and ethnography before then taking up two major turns in conceptions of culture that have occurred since the 1970s. One turn draws attention to cultural forms that travel across spaces, times, and scales (rather than to forms that are bounded). The second focuses on critical analyses of cultural forms that reveal social injustices (rather than only celebrating cultural traditions and differences). Most traditional ethnographers wanted to learn fromand understand, not change, the lives of study participants.
Critical ethnographers want change and, often, change of a particular kind. They purposefully engage study participants in consciousnessraising, coalition building, and community activism. They intentionally work with study participants to resist, oppose, and move beyond the constraining and oppressive features of culture. Several methodological developments identified in the chapter, including multisited ethnography, metaethnography, vertical case study, participatory action research, communityengaged scholarship, and humanist education research, are reviewed to illustrate the changes. The conclusions are that where traditional ethnography prioritized sustained firsthand engagement and indepth participation in the lives of a single group of people, some new forms, such as multisited ethnographies, seemto challenge this tenet. They point to the need for careful study of discourses, practices, and tools that circulate within and also across groups, levels, spaces, and times and that require researchers or research teams to establish their presence in several sites and distribute tasks accordingly. The chapter argues that different developments have each contributed to change ethnography, but in ways that that have led ethnographers of education to extend and develop its distinctive tradition.
The chapter by Eisenhart is followed by Chapter 9, “Ethnography of Schooling in England: A History and Assessment of Its Early Development,” by Martyn Hammersley. This chapter explores developments in the ethnography of schooling in the UK during the second half of the twentieth century, fromthe Manchester studies of the 1960s, through the influence of the “new sociology of education” and the impact of feminismand other political movements, to postmodernism. Ashift toward policyfocused investigations is also addressed. Hammersley argues that these various developments have been influential in providing models for later ethnographic research in the UK and elsewhere to follow and that they have raised significant theoretical and methodological issues that are still with us today. These include the relationship between ethnographic work and politics or practice, the nature and role of theory in ethnography, what counts as evidence, and what sorts of knowledge ethnography produces –facts, interpretations, or fictions.
How developments in ethnography in the USAand the UK are both reflected in and challenged by developments elsewhere are issues that are addressed in several chapters in this Handbook, as is the issue of what this has added to the ethnography of education, what it has opposed, and what further challenges exist. The first of these chapters, Chapter 10, is by Diana Milstein and Angeles Clemente on Latin American educational ethnography. The first section describes the development of the field, as well as the topics dealt with, according to the histories of the countries of this part of the world. Here, it is important to discuss the ways the ethnography of education has evolved according to the diverse academic, social, economic, cultural, and political features of the different parts of the continent. The influential role of outsider anthropological and sociological traditions, mainly Western views fromthe USA, UK, and France, on these matters is acknowledged and described, as well as Latin American schools of thought such as popular education based on Paulo Freire’s work. Five broad topics are identified: race, ethnicity, and nationality; gender and schooling; cultures of schooling and education policies; children and youth in education; and language and education. The chapter concludes with three main points. First, it broadly identifies similarities and differences in
educational ethnography (EE) in Britain and the USA(Delamont 2014). Second, it critically discusses the stance of educational ethnography in this part of the world, or what the chapter calls a “fromthe South” EE approach. Third, it envisions the future of the field as structured by ongoing dialogues with diverse interlocutors that will critically enrich educational ethnography in Latin America.
Chapter 11 by Alice Casimiro Lopes and Maria de Lourdes Rangel Tura, “Curriculum, Ethnography, and the Context of Practice in the Field of CurriculumPolicies in Brazil,” addresses some of the structural and historical questions raised also in the chapter by Milstein and Clemente. The connection between ethnography and poststructuralismis explored through ethnographic research in the field of curriculumpolicies in Brazil. The work of S.J. Ball and his closest associates is given particular attention, especially concerning the connection proposed by Ball for discursive approaches and ethnography. The question of the notion of practice (as reality) in ethnographic research of curriculumpolicies is itself based on discursive interpretations of reality, according to the chapter authors.
The development of ethnographic research in schools and the historical roots and developments of this research is considered, with a focus on Germany and Switzerland, in Chapter 12 by Anja Sieber Egger and Gisela Unterweger. This chapter examines, first, the developmental legacy of educational ethnography and the anthropology of education in the AngloSaxon area, and the role of these respective disciplinary contexts. It then identifies that in comparison to the AngloSaxon area, the developments of educational ethnography in Germany can be seen as a special pathway, with a different disciplinary anchor and different theoretical and methodological approaches. With a strong base in educational science as a discipline, German educational ethnography focused in its beginnings on the lifeworlds of children and developed later an emphasis on situated practices, as understood in German sociological theories of practice. Similar developments can be seen in Switzerland. But despite the same language and a vivid exchange, educational ethnography in Germany and Switzerland has principally unfolded differently. There is a German influence on Swiss educational ethnography without doubt, but at the same time, Swiss ethnographers are in a position betwixt and between all the other mentioned different traditions at the same time as they are also searching for their own path.
Maropeng Modiba and Sandra Stewart, in Chapter 13, have analyzed the development of ethnography and education in an African context. Findings fromselected ethnographies conducted in different African countries by a variety of researchers are synthesized through metaethnography. At the core of the development has been a reframing of Clifford’s (1988) notion of personal and collective selffashioning that was part of the aspects studied to enhance an understanding of education as a uniquely sociocultural process. The arguments formed represent a second level of synthesis as suggested by Noblit and Hare (1988). The chapter shows how ethnographies can be collectively reanalyzed and how this can contribute to an understanding of ethnographic practices. It is followed by an extensive literature appendix and will appeal to international research theorists, researchers, and graduate students interested in using ethnography in educational research.
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It was the street of the stranger from far-off lands, of able seamen whose sturdy boots had knocked about the worst sections of Port Said, Marseilles, Singapore, or Bilbao—a street where honest ships poked their bowsprits up to its very edge, a long, floating barrier, a maze of masts, spars, and rigging, of vessels safe in port, whose big hulls lay still in the flotsam and jetsam and swill of the harbor, where the hungry, garrulous gulls wheeled, gossiped, and gorged themselves like scavengers.
There was an atmosphere of adventure, of the freedom of the sea along its length, that the staid old business streets back of it could not boast of; that charm, sordid as it was, that holds the sailor and his nickels in port, close to his quay, for he rarely ventures as far inland as the city’s midst. At night jewels of lights hung in the maze of rigging, others gleamed forth a broad welcome from the saloons. When these went out, only the jewels in the rigging remained, leaving the old, busy street of the day dark and deserted, save for an occasional prowler of the night—or a stray cat foraging for food.
There were women, too—fat ogresses in cheap finery, skeletons in rouge and rags, their ratlike eyes ever watchful for their prey—and now and then some shuffling human derelict, those who have no definite destination, neither friends nor home nor bed nor bunk to go to; worse off even than the poor sailor in port, robbed, cajoled, flattered, tempted, and always enticed, down to his last nickel.
None knew them better than Enoch. Many an empty pocket he brightened with a coin. Others he helped out of more serious difficulties. Had he accepted all the chattering monkeys and profane parrots he had been offered from time to time in grateful remembrance, he would have had enough to have started a birdstore.
It was along this street that Ebner Ford picked his way the next morning to Enoch’s office, eager for the interview, and never more confident of selling him enough of his laundry stock, to be rid of old Mrs. Miggs and her lawyer forever.
At five minutes to ten his lean figure might have been seen dodging among the trucking, slipping around crates and bales, and only
stopping now and then to verify the address on Enoch’s note.
So elated was he over the prospect of the interview that he entered Enoch’s building whistling a lively tune, continued snatches of it up in the shaky elevator, insisted he had “an appointment at ten with Mr. Crane,” and was led half-way down the corridor by the Irish janitor to Enoch’s modest door, which he opened briskly with a breezy “Well, neighbor, ain’t a minute late, am I?” and with a laugh, ending in a broad, friendly grin, shot out his long hand in greeting.
Simultaneously Enoch swung sharply around in his desk chair with a savage glance; not only did he refuse the proffered hand, but left his visitor staring at him bewildered.
“Sit down!” snapped Enoch.
“Well, say!” drawled Ford. “Ain’t you a little mite nervous this mornin’, friend?”
“Sit down!” repeated Enoch curtly, indicating the empty chair beside his desk. “Do not delude yourself for an instant, sir, that you are here to interest me in your laundry stock.”
“Well, that beats all,” declared Ford. “You to be all-fired interested in your note. That’s what you said, wa’n’t it?”
“I’ve been enlightened as to the precise value of that laundry stock of yours, sir,” came Enoch’s sharp reply—“your gilt-edged securities relative to the Household Gem as well.” Ford started.
“Have, eh? Well, it’s at par. That’s what you wanted—er—that’s what you said you wanted,” he blurted out, slinking into the empty chair and fumbling his dusty derby nervously.
“Well, neighbor, ain’t a minute late, am I?”
“Par!” snapped Enoch. “It’s at zero, and you know it. Below zero, I should say, judging from all reports.” And before Ford could reply: “Let us come to the point. You are in arrears for your rent, sir.”
Ford gaped at him in amazement.
“I refer, sir, to your apartment in Waverly Place; with the exception of your first month’s payment, you have not paid a dollar’s worth of rent since you moved in, not a penny, sir; rents are made to be paid, sir, not avoided. You have not even made the slightest excuse or apology to your landlord over the delay. Any other landlord would have ousted you from the premises.”
Ford laid his dusty derby on the desk, planting his long hands over his bony knees, his small eyes regarding Enoch with a curious expression.
“Oh, I haven’t, have I?” he exclaimed. “Wouldn’t like to take a bet on it, would you?”
“No, sir!” cried Enoch, squaring back in his seat. “You have not, not a penny of it. Can you deny it?”
“What’s my rent got to do with you?” returned Ford. “You seem to be almighty interested in other folks’ rents.”
“I’ve let you run on,” continued Enoch firmly, “so far without troubling you.”
“Oh, you have, have you? Well, say, you take the cake! Talk as if you owned the place.”
Enoch sprang out of his chair, his under lip shot forward.
“I do,” said he.
“You what?” gasped Ford, opening his small eyes wide. “You don’t mean to tell me that there house is yourn?”
“Yes, sir—it’s mine, from cellar to roof. If you want further proof of it,” he cried, wrenching open a drawer of his desk, fumbling among
some papers and flinging out on his desk the document of sale in question, stamped, sealed, and witnessed, “there it is.”
“Well, I’ll be jiggered!”
“Jiggered or not, sir, your lease is up! You are behind in your rent, and out you go.”
“Well, hold on now; I guess we can fix up this little matter,” returned Ford, with a sheepish grin. “Hadn’t no idea it was you, friend, who owned the house, or I wouldn’t have kept you waitin’.”
“I can assure you,” retorted Enoch, “there is no friendship concerned in this matter. You will desist, sir, in calling me your friend; that phase of our acquaintanceship never existed.”
For a moment neither spoke.
“See here, neighbor,” Ford resumed by way of explanation, and in a tone that was low and persuasive, “with our increasin’ business I’ve been under some mighty heavy expenses lately; new machinery has exacted heavy payments. Our long list of canvassers on the road’s been quite an item in salaries. S’pose I was to let you have a little of our gilt-edged at par, as collateral for the rent?”
“Stop, sir!” cried Enoch. “Do you take me for a fool? Your laundry stock is not worth the paper it is printed on—wasn’t at the time you sold it to Mrs. Miggs.” He slammed his closed fist down on the desk. “There is not a judge on the bench that would take four minutes to decide a case against you for embezzlement. It’s as plain as daylight.”
Ford stared at him dumfounded. He started to speak, but Enoch cut him short in a towering rage.
“You’ve swindled my friend, Miss Ann Moulton, as well,” he cried. “You took seven thousand five hundred dollars from her in payment for your worthless stock—from a helpless lady—half she owned in the world, you despicable hound—from a helpless woman.” Ford reddened. “Half, I say—from the support of a sister who is ill—a poor, pitiful wreck of a woman dying of consumption.”
“Oh! Now see here, Crane—go slow—let me explain.”
“Systematically swindled her, robbed her, talked her into it— persuaded her until she gave you her check. Your kind stop at nothing.” His voice rang out over the half-open transom and down the corridor. Ford sat gripping his chair.
“I tell you, Miss Moulton ain’t lost a penny of her money,” he stammered. “What I done for her I done out of neighborly kindness.”
“Stop, sir! Don’t lie to me. Answer me one question. How much of Miss Moulton’s money have you got left?”
Ford glowered at him in silence.
“Answer me! How much have you got left? I intend to get at the bottom of this damnable business. What you’ve got left of Miss Moulton’s money, you’ll return to her.”
“Why, there ain’t a penny of it missin’,” declared Ford blandly, paling visibly.
“You call a credit in your bank of five thousand two hundred and some odd dollars, nothing missing? Where’s the rest?”
“Who told you that?” cried Ford, half rising, with a sullen gleam in his eyes.
“Your bank!” cried Enoch sharply. “Its president, my old friend, John Mortimer, told me. Under criminal circumstances such information is not difficult to obtain.”
Enoch drove his hands in his pockets and started to pace the room. Ford was the first to break the silence that ensued. His voice had a whine in it, and most of the color had left his lean cheeks.
“You don’t want to ruin me, do yer?” he said thickly.
“Ruin you! No one can ruin you! You were born ruined! Answer me— where’s the rest of Miss Moulton’s money?”
“Spent,” faltered Ford. “You don’t suppose a man can live on nothin’, do yer? We all have our little ups and downs in business. Fluctuations, they call ’em. Why, the biggest men with the biggest business acumen, in the biggest business deals in the world have ’em. I ain’t no exception. That’s what all business is—chuck full of
little ups and downs. No man ever complains when business is boomin’—only boomin’ is never regular. Good times pay for the bad. A feller has to have grit to weather ’em. Then, if we didn’t risk nothin’, we wouldn’t have nothin’. What does the Bible say? Sow and ye shall reap.”
His voice faltered weakly.
“See here,” returned Enoch. “If I’ve got the slightest pity for you, you personally are not responsible for it. Your stepdaughter is adorable. Your wife is an honest woman.”
“There ain’t no better,” declared Ford meekly, moistening his lips with a long finger that shook. “Girlie, too; her ideas ain’t mine, but I ain’t got nothin’ agin her.”
“Good gad, sir! I should hope not. You have not a thought in common! No dearer child ever lived! The very soul of honesty and sincerity—a joy to my house, sir! A joy to every one who has come in contact with her. That you should have so little love and respect for her as to have acted as you have is astounding!”
“Girlie thinks an awful lot of you,” returned Ford, heaving a sigh, Enoch’s tender allusion to his stepdaughter bringing with it his first ray of hope. “Ever stopped to think,” he went on, with sudden courage, “what this hull business will mean to her when she knows it? See here, neighbor, you’re human, I take it. ’Tain’t human in no man to crowd another feller to ruin like you’re crowdin’ me. It’ll like to kill my wife when she hears it. As for girlie—well, you know what it’ll mean to her—her little home gone, after all I’ve tried to do to make it pleasant for ’em both. S’pose I was to tell you I’ll make good—only you’ve got to give me time; that I’ll pay the rent and give every cent back to Miss Moulton—square her up as clean as a whistle.”
Enoch turned sharply.
“On what, I’d like to know? And when? Out of the chimeric profits of your vast laundry business, I suppose?”
“Hold on, neighbor, not so fast. I ain’t told you all. S’pose you was to give me a couple of weeks’ time. I’ve got a little property I’ve been bangin’ on to up-State. Four neat buildin’ lots on the swellest
outskirts of Troy—Fairview Park, they call it—neatest lookin’ place you ever see; gas and water piped right from the city. I’ve been waitin’ for the right party, but if I’ve got to sell now, Crane, I’ll do it. At the lowest figger they’ll square up all these little differences between us—Mrs. Miggs and Miss Moulton will get their satisfy, you’ll get your rent, and girlie and Emma won’t know no more than if it never happened.”
“You’ll pay Miss Moulton first,” declared Enoch firmly. “I am not concerned with Mrs. Miggs’s affairs. Her own lawyer can attend to them; as for the rent, I wish you to understand plainly, that if it was not for your wife and stepdaughter——”
He ceased speaking. His teeth clenched. There was little doubt in Ford’s mind that the worst was over; that Enoch was softening. He already felt more at his ease, and for the first time leaned back in his chair, and with the vestige of a forced smile crossed his long legs, feeling that half the battle was won. What he exactly intended to do he had not the slightest idea. Mrs. Miggs’s lawyer had given him until noon. It was now past eleven. He decided to wire him: “Sending check to-morrow.” Meanwhile Enoch had resumed his pacing before him, muttering to himself words that even Ebner Ford’s quick ears did not catch.
“How about this property of yours?” cried Enoch with renewed heat. “Your four lots in Troy? You are rather vague, sir, about their value. This Fairview Park you speak of? Anything there but gas and waterpipes and a chance for the right party, as you say to come along? Any railroad or street-car communication that would persuade any one to build?”
Ford’s lean jaws, to which the color had now returned, widened in a condescending smile over Enoch’s abject ignorance.
“Fairview Park!” he exclaimed with quick enthusiasm. “Why, neighbor, it’s a bonanza! Has any one built on it? Well, I guess yes! Take the Jenkins mansion alone—the candy king. Mansard roof alone cost a fortune, to say nothin’ of a dozen other prominent homes—brand-new and up to date—not a fence in the hull park. Everybody neighborly. Course, soon as we get our railroad-station
things will boom. Quick transportation to the city and plenty of fresh air for the children. Come to think of it, I was lucky to have bought when I did. Got in on the ground floor, ’twixt you and me, and ain’t never regretted it. Big men like Jenkins have been pesterin’ me a dozen times to sell, but I’ve held on, knowin’ I could double my money. Property has already advanced fifty per cent out there in the last few years, friend, and is——”
“Stop, sir!” cried Enoch. “I believe we have already discussed the question of friendship between us.”
“Oh, well now, see here, Crane.”
“In future, sir, you will address me as Mr. Crane. I trust that is clear to you, Mr. Ford.”
“Well, suit yourself. What’s the use of our bein’ so all-fired unfriendly? Neighbors, ain’t we? Livin’ under the same roof!”
“You are living under my roof, sir! Not I under yours! That you continue to live there is purely due to the presence of a woman who has had the misfortune to marry you, and a stepdaughter—thank Heaven, she is not your daughter—whom I hope, with all my heart, some day will be rid of you forever. You ask me for two weeks’ time. Very well, you shall have it. I trust you fully realize your situation. Remember, I shall hold you to your promise in regard to Miss Moulton. Mr. Ford, I have nothing more to say to you—good morning.”
Ford picked up his dusty derby slowly from the desk, and as slowly rose to his feet.
Enoch, with his hands plunged deep in his trousers pockets, stood grim and silent, gazing irritably at the floor; if he saw Ford’s outstretched hand reach toward him slowly across the desk between them, he did not move a muscle in recognition.
“Well, so long,” ventured Ford.
“Good morning,” repeated Enoch gruffly, without raising his head.
“Well, now, that’s too bad,” drawled Ford, slowly withdrawing his hand. “I was just thinkin’ if you and me was to go down for a little
straight Bourbon you’d feel better.”
Enoch jerked up his head.
“Drink with you!” he exclaimed sharply. “Drink with you!” His keen eyes blazed.
“Well, now, that wouldn’t hurt the quality of the whiskey any, would it?” grinned Ford. “Sorter smooth down the remainin’ little rough places between us—warm us both up into a more friendly understandin’, seem’ I’ve agreed to do for you all any man can do for another—give you my bona-fide guarantee.”
Enoch sprang forward, his clenched hands planted on his desk, his face livid.
“Get out, sir!” he shouted. For an instant his voice stopped in his throat, then broke out with a roar: “Out, sir! Out! When you have anything more substantial to offer me than an invitation to a rum mill I will listen to you.”
Before this volley of rage Ford backed away from him, backed out through the door that Enoch swung open to him, and the next instant slammed in his face with a sound that reverberated through the whole building.
Any other man but Ebner Ford would have turned down the corridor, dazed and insulted. As for Enoch’s door, it was not the first that had been slammed in his face. He could recall a long list of exits in his business career that were so alike in character they had ceased to make any serious impression upon him. His rule had been to allow time for the enraged person to cool off, and to tackle him again at the earliest opportunity—preferably after luncheon, when experience had taught him men were always in a more genial and approachable humor.
All of his past interviews, however, had been trivial compared to this with Enoch. He had entered his office keyed up with confidence and
exuberance, and had backed out of it under the fury of a man who had laid bare his character and every secret detail of what he chose to call his “own private affairs”; bad enough when he arrived but ten times worse now as he realized the man he had to deal with.
Three things, however, were comforting. Enoch’s affirmed respect for his wife and stepdaughter in regard to the overrent; his open, almost paternal affection for Sue, and his word that he would give him two weeks in which to settle with Miss Moulton. As for old Mrs. Miggs, he decided to send her a check for half the amount out of Miss Ann’s money and see what would happen.
That he drank his Bourbon alone on the first corner he reached, the bartender agreeably changing another one of Miss Ann’s dollars, only helped to sharpen his wits. He stood on the sawdusted floor of the saloon, at the bar, hemmed in between the patched elbows of a boatswain’s mate and a common sailor, ruminating over the overwhelming events of the morning.
Now that he was out of Enoch’s drastic presence and voice, he felt at his ease, and more so when he had laid another one of Miss Ann’s dimes on the bar, freshly wiped from the beer spill, and ordered a second Bourbon.
“Thinks a heap of girlie,” he mused. “Wa’n’t so savage about the rent, after all.” As he thought of Sue there flashed through his mind an idea, so sudden that he started, and his small eyes sparkled, so perfectly logical to him that he grinned and wondered why, during the whole of the strenuous interview, he had not thought of it before.
Instead, he had clutched at the idea of “Fairview Park,” his entire acquaintance with its existence dating from a real-estate advertisement he had read in a newspaper several weeks old, he adding to its popularity and magnificence by capping the mythical mansion of the candy king with a mansard roof worth a fortune, and further embellishing its undesirable acres with the hope of a railroadstation. Only the air changed in Fairview Park; the rest had lain a flat failure for years, the home of crows and the sign-boards they avoided, announcing the best cigar and the cheapest soap.
That Enoch would investigate the truth of his statements gave him little apprehension. He was certain he had convinced him of his good faith, building lots and all. What elated him now was his sudden idea —an inspiration-and his first step in that direction took him out of the saloon and on his way to see Lamont.
On a crowded corner in Fulton Street a newsboy bawled in his passing ear:
“Here yer are! Git the extry, boss! All about the big club scandal——” Ford stopped and glanced at the head-line, “Millionaire Slaps Clubman’s Face,” and below it saw the face in question. It was Jack Lamont’s.
CHAPTER XVI
Gossip, that imaginative, swift-footed, and altogether disreputable slave of Hearsay, who runs amuck, distributing his pack of lies from one telltale tongue to the next eager ear, rich in clever exaggerations, never at a loss for more—far-reaching as contagion, and heralding all else but the truth—seldom affects the poor.
In certain congested, poverty-stricken quarters, it is the basis of their easy, garrulous language, and as current as their slang or their profanity. Those who are both poor, humble, and meek are seldom mentioned—since they do nothing to attract attention. They may be said to be philosophers. Gossip, stealthy as the incoming tide, sweeps wide; like the sea’s long, feathery fingers, it spreads with a rapidity that is amazing. Gossip runs riot in a village. It tears down streets, runs frantically up lanes, and into houses, short-cuts to the next, flies around corners, climbs stairs, is passed over neighbors’ fences, seeks out the smallest nooks, is whispered through cracks and keyholes, and even bawled down cellars—lest there should be any one left below ground who has not heard the news.
Among those whom riches have thrown laughing into the lap of luxury and elected to the pinnacles of the most expensive society, women who move in those fashionable and exclusive circles, where every detail of their private lives, from their gowns and jewels to their marriages and divorces, the press so kindly keep the public informed of—over these gossip hovers like an ill-omened forerunner of scandal.
Scandal is the prime executioner; when scandal strikes it lays the naked truth bare to the bone—stark, hideous, undeniable. It takes a brave woman to stand firm in the face of scandal. Some totter and fall at the first blow; others struggle to their feet and survive. Some hide themselves.
There is something so frank and open about scandal that it becomes terrible—merciless and terrifying in its exposure of plain fact The hum of gossip may be compared to the mosquitoes, whose sting is trivial; scandal strikes as sudden as a thunderbolt; it shatters the four walls of a house with a single blow, and turns a search-light on its victim in the ruins.
That “Handsome Jack” Lamont should have said what he did to pretty Mrs. Benton as they met by chance coming out of the theatre, and that pretty Mrs. Benton’s husband, having gone himself to-night in search of his carriage, discovered it far down the line, signalled to his coachman, made his way again through the waiting group of women in theatre wraps and their escorts, and reached his wife’s side at the precise moment to overhear Lamont’s quick question to her, caught even her smiling, whispered promise to him—was unfortunate. The attack followed.
Before either were aware of his presence, Benton struck Lamont a stinging blow from behind, knocking off his hat. As he turned, Benton struck him again—two very courageous blows for so short a little man, red with rage and round as a keg. Pretty Mrs. Benton, who was tall and slim—an exquisite blonde—screamed; so did several women in the group about them, falling back upon their escorts for protection —but by this time, Lamont had the enraged little man by the shoulders and was shaking him like a rat, denouncing his attack as an outrage, demanding an apology, explaining to him exactly what he said, that nobody but a fool could have construed it otherwise, that he was making himself ridiculous. Pretty Mrs. Benton also explaining, and both being skilful liars in emergency, the dramatic incident closed, to the satisfaction of the two stalwart policemen, who had strolled up, swinging their long night-sticks—recognized Benton, the millionaire, as being too wealthy to arrest, and Lamont as an old friend of their chief at headquarters—dispersed the crowd with a “G’wan now about yer business”; waited until the lady and her still furious husband were safe in their carriage; shouted to the coachman to move on, and a moment later followed Lamont around the corner, where he explained the affair even more to their satisfaction. In their plain brogue they thanked him, and expressed
their admiration over the skill with which he had pinioned the excited arms of the little man; that admiration which is common among men at prize-fights when the better of the two antagonists refuses to give the final knockout to the weaker man.
“Sure ye had him from the first!” they both agreed. It had all happened quickly. By the time Lamont left the two patrolmen the theatre was dark and the doors locked for the night.
Let us discreetly draw down the dark-blue silk shades of the Benton equipage upon the scenes that ensued on their way home. Let us refrain from raising them even an inch to catch sight of the pretty face of the now thoroughly indignant though tearful lady, or the continued tirade of her lord and master, as they rumbled over the cobbles.
Was she not lovely and convincing in her grief—and—and purely in the right? How preposterous to think otherwise! To disagree with an angel! Heavens! Was she not blond and adorable? Bah! How silly husbands are! What a tempest in a teapot they make of nothing—to misconstrue the simplest and most innocent of questions and the most natural of whispered replies into high treason! Did not Benton owe Mr. Lamont the most abject of apologies? Of course. He owed a still deeper apology to Mrs. Benton for “mortifying her beyond words.” Innocence in the hands of a brute! A lily in the grip of a brigand! She who had given all to him—her love—her devotion— could he doubt her for an instant? Had he ever doubted her? Had she ever been jealous of him? How lucky he was to have a wife like her. Henceforth he could go to the theatre alone—forever—nightly— as long as he lived—and stay there until he died.
Passionately, with a sharp cry of contempt, she slipped off her marriage ring, and flung it away forever on the floor of the brougham, where he groped for it out of breath, and returned it to her imploringly, seizing her clenched hand and begging her to let him restore it to its rightful finger. That he restored it finally came as a
reward for a score of humble promises, including his entire belief in her innocence, and the meekest of confessions that his undying love for her alone had been responsible for his uncontrollable jealousy. Her slim, satin-slippered foot still kept tapping in unison to her beating heart, but victory was hers. It shone in her large blue eyes, in the warm glow overspreading her delicate cheeks, her lovely throat and neck. Her whole mind exulted as she thought of “Jack.” How she would pour out to him in a long letter all of her pent-up heart. She could hardly wait for morning to come in which to write it, upon the faintly scented paper he loved, and which he could detect in his box at the club among a dozen others by its violet hue.
After all, what had Lamont said to have raised all this tragic row? To have been struck like a common ruffian in the public street, before the eyes of people he knew, and several of whom he had dined with —or hoped to—and for what?
Nine of the simplest words, all told, were what Benton had overheard, and not a syllable more. Lamont’s quick question, “At three, then?” and her smiling, whispered promise: “No—at threethirty, impatient child.”
What could have been more innocent? Has a gentleman no right to hurriedly ask the time—and be sweetly chided for his impatience?
Far better had he refrained and discreetly sent her a note by some trusted servant to her dressmaker’s (for he kept tally of her “fittings”) —far better—one of those brief notes, whose very telltale briefness reads in volumes. They are always typical of serious affairs.
Alas! the affair had only begun. The two patrolmen recounted the incident on their return from their “beat” to the sergeant at the desk, interspersing their narrative with good-humored laughter and some unprintable profanity.
“’Twas him,” they said, referring to Benton. They expatiated on his riches and the good looks of his wife, emphasized their own magnanimity in refusing to arrest, and covered Lamont’s level, handsome head with a wreath of glory—all to the delight of a young
reporter hanging around for an instalment, and eager to “make good” with his night editor.
In little less than two hours the whole story was on the press—that most powerful gossiper in the world! Needless to say, it printed the story to a nicely—a giant high-speed press, capable of thousands of copies an hour. It even took the trouble to fold them in great packages, which were carried on the shoulders of men and thrown into wagons, that dashed off to waiting trains, which in turn rushed them to distant cities.
It made the young reporter’s reputation, but it nearly ruined pretty Mrs. Benton’s, and brought Jack Lamont before the public eye by a wide-spread publicity he had never dreamed of.
Needless to say, too, that the unfortunate lady did not write the note the next morning; she became prostrated and lay in a darkened room, and could see no one by her physician’s orders—not even her enraged husband.
Let us pass over the heartrending details which ensued—of her return to her mother; of their long talks of a separation, providing it could be obtained without pecuniary loss to the injured daughter. Both of them, you may be sure, held Benton wholly responsible—or, rather, irresponsible, being unfit for any woman to live with, owing to his ungovernable jealousy.
Poor Phyllis! She was born much too beautiful, with her delicate skin like a tea-rose, and her fine, blond hair, that reached nearly to her knees, and when up and undulated left little stray wisps at the nape of her graceful, white neck. She should never have married a man like Benton—round like his dollars. What a stunning pair she and Jack Lamont would have made! But what a dance he would have led her! Lucky he was to have the wife he had, who forgave him everything and paid his debts and lived her own life, which was eminently respectable, firm in her devotion to her charities, and as set in her opinions at her women’s clubs—a small, pale woman with large, dark eyes—a woman whom he seldom saw, never breakfasted with, and rarely lunched or dined with at home, since he came and went as he pleased; now and then they met at a
reception, now and then at a tea, his cheery “Hello, Nelly,” forcing from her a “Hello, Jack,” that convinced every one around them they were still the best of friends. Even the account of this latest affair of his in the papers did not surprise her. For a day or two she was annoyed by reporters, but her butler handled them cleverly, and they went away, no wiser for having come. Not a word of reproach to her husband passed Mrs. Lamont’s lips. If there was any money needed over the affair, she knew Jack would come to her; further than that, she refused to let the matter trouble her.
Nothing could have been more convincing than Lamont’s side of the affair in the afternoon papers. This remarkable document from the pen of a close club friend of his—a talented journalist—was satisfactory in the extreme. It not only evoked public sympathy for the injured lady, but put her insanely jealous husband in the light of a man who was not responsible for his actions, and should not be allowed to walk abroad, unless under the care of an attendant. As for Mr. Lamont, he had done nothing or said a word that might have been misconstrued to warrant so scandalous an attack. The same thing might have happened to any gentleman whom common courtesy had led to speak to a woman of his acquaintance on leaving the theatre, and further went on to state that “Mr. Lamont’s many virtues were vouched for by his host of friends; his fairness as a sportsman, and his popularity in society being too widely known to need further comment.” Lamont remained sober until he had read it; then he went on the worst spree in ten years.
It is erroneous to suppose that men of birth and breeding seek luxurious places to amuse themselves in. They often seek the lowest. To a worldly and imaginative mind like Lamont’s nothing in his own strata of society amused him at a time like this. A gentleman may become a vagabond for days and still remain a gentleman. Men are complex animals. The animal is simpler, wholly sincere; it possesses but one nature; man has two—his intellectual and his savage side—distinct one from the other, as black from white.
Women have but one nature; the ensemble of their character changes only in rare exceptions. They are what they are born to be, and remain so. That this nature “goes wrong” is erroneous. Psychologically, it goes right. It reverts to its true nature at the first real opportunity. Birth and breeding have very little to do with it. Environment may often be likened to a jail, and since it is the nature born of some women to crave to escape—they do. A woman who is fundamentally saintly remains a saint. She has no desire to be otherwise. Temptation leaves the really good alone.
Lamont, however, was a man, and a worldly man at that, a man whose eyes were accustomed to gaze calmly at those illusive jewels called pleasure, with their variegated facets of light, and to choose the one whose rays most pleased him. Strange, is it not, that red has always stood for evil?
This worst spree in ten years of his should rightly have begun with him at Harry Hill’s, at Crosby and Houston Streets, for he had been a familiar figure there, and a keen enthusiast over the boxing. Hill’s white front screening the old room, with its boxes, its women, its old bar down-stairs and its prize-ring above, had been closed by the police. Such places, however, as Donovan’s, Dempsey’s, and Regan’s were still wide open to receive him. Of the three he preferred Regan’s, and, indeed, nearly the whole of his five days’ spree was spent there, down in that sordid basement, with its steep iron stairs, its bouncer, its famous banjo player, accompanied by a small Sunday-school melodeon; its women, its whiskey, and its smoke. Not a breath of scandal ever entered the place, save when it was permanently closed at last for a murder. Gentlemanly deportment was rigorously exacted, and the first signs of trouble meant a throw-out. It was a fine place to be forgotten in and to forget the World above ground. This place, like Bill Monahan’s, had its small virtues; Bill Monahan himself never touched liquor, his clean pot of tea, which he drank from liberally, being always simmering within his reach.
Lamont had not a single enemy at Regan’s. He spent his money freely to the twang of one of the best banjo players the world has ever known. That a gentleman of so much innate refinement should
have chosen a dive to amuse himself in—a place that reeked with the odor of evil, and through whose heat, and smoke, and glaring lights the faces of so many lost souls stared at one like spectres— seems incredible. Where would you have him go? Back into his own dull environment? Free and drunk as he was? Nonsense! He would have become conspicuous. No one was ever conspicuous at Regan’s. Hell has no favorites. The place had not sunk so low as to have clean sawdust on its floors. It was run rigorously for coin. Its waiters, silent, experienced, and attentive; its women, confidential in the extreme; and the eye of the bouncer on and over them all. The bartender, the melodeon, and the banjo player did the rest. It was they who kept up its esprit—changed an old hard-luck story into new luck, tears into laughter, and desperation into a faint glimmer of hope. In the lower world everything is so well understood, there are no novelties—stale love—stale beer—stale everything.
The last we saw of Ebner Ford was when he glanced at the extra announcing the scandal. He who rarely bought a paper, bought this. He handed the newsboy a nickel, waited impatiently for his change, and leaped up the Elevated stairs, reading the account.
He read as he ran, glancing at Lamont’s portrait framed in an oval of yacht pennants and polo-mallets, with a horseshoe for luck crowning them all. He threw another nickel on the worn sill of the ticket window, received a coupon from a haggard ticket-seller, and kept on reading while he waited on the drafty station at Fulton Street for an up-town train. Nothing could have happened to better further his idea. Was not his friend Lamont in trouble? What better excuse to call on him and express his sympathy? He began as he boarded the train to frame up what he would say to him. “Sympathy first and business afterward,” he said to himself. How he would come to him gallantly as a friend—slap him on the back and cheer him up. “Help him ferget—all them little worries”—and having gotten him sufficiently cheered, talk to him man to man over his little scheme. He told himself that there was not a chance in a thousand of its
