Hagar

Rachel put it down. "I'll think that out a little. We've never had any one in the house just like you."

"I thought," said Hagar, "that Sunday morning I would go to the Catholic Cathedral. If you tell me the way I can find it—"

"You are not a Catholic?"

"No. But I have always wanted so to smell incense.—

"You are rich in differences," said Rachel. "I hope we'll get along well together. I think we will. Is there anything else you can think of at the moment?"

"I want to see the Salvation Army."

"That may be managed, if you are willing to take it in detachments."

"And I want—oh, I want to go somewhere where I can really see the ocean!"

"I'll get father to take us down to Brighton Beach. It isn't too late, this mild weather."

"This morning," said Hagar, "we came through—miles, I think—of places where poor people live. I want to see all that again."

"It isn't very edifying. But we can get under the wing of some association and do a little mild slumming."

"I want to go down there alone and often—"

"That," said Rachel, "is impossible."

"Why?"

"It is not done. Besides, it would be dangerous."

"Dangerous?"

"You might take any disease—or get into any kind of trouble. There are all sorts of traps."

"Why should they set traps?"

"Oh, all kinds of horrors happen.—Just look at the newspapers! A girl—alone—you'd be subjected to insult."

Hagar sighed. "I've always been alone. And I don't see that we are not subjected to insult everywhere. I could never feel more insulted than, sometimes, I have been at home."

Rachel, turning in her chair, darted at her a lightning-like glance of comprehension. "Well, that's true enough, though I never heard it put into words before! It's true.... But it remains that with our present conventions, you must have company when you go to see how the other half lives."

"The other half?"

"It's a term: One half of us doesn't know how the other half lives."

"I see," said Hagar. "Well, I'll be glad when I get out of fractions."

Both laughed. A kind of soft, friendly brightness prevailed in the third-floor back bedroom. There was no open fire, but they sat on either side of the little squat table, and the reading-lamp with a yellowy globe did the job of a common luminary. The light reached out to each and linked them together. Rachel Bolt was small and dark and slender. Much of the time she passed for a cynical and rather melancholy young woman; then, occasionally, sheaths parted like opening wings and something showed that was vivid and deep and duskily luminous. The next moment the rift might close, but there had been received an impression of the inward depths. She had been married at eighteen, her first child born a year later. She was now twenty-five, and had been a widow for two years. In worldly wisdom and savoir faire, and in several emotional experiences she was well ahead of Hagar, but in other respects the brain ways of the younger in years were deeper and older. Whatever differences, their planes were near enough for a comprehension that, continually deepening, passed before long into the country of lasting friendship.

CHAPTER XV
LOOKING FOR THOMASINE

When Hagar had been ten days in New York, she went early one afternoon to find Thomasine. She had the address, and upon showing it to Rachel the latter had pronounced it "poor but respectable," adding, "Are you sure you ought to go alone?"

"'Ought to go alone?—ought to go alone?'—I am so tired of that phrase 'ought to go alone'!" said Hagar. "At Gilead Balm they said, 'Don't go beyond the Mile-and-a-Half Cedar!' You say yourself that I couldn't get lost, and I was brought up with Thomasine, and Jim and his wife are perfectly good people."

Downstairs, as she was passing the parlour doors, Mrs. Maine called to her from within. "Where are you going, dear?" Hagar entered and explained. "That is very nice of you to look her up, but do you think you ought to go alone?" Hagar explained that, too; whereupon Mrs. Maine patted her hand and told her to trot along, but always to be careful! As the front door closed after her, her hostess resumed her box of chocolates and the baby sacque she was knitting. "It isn't as though I had promised to give her, or to make Rachel give her, continual chaperonage! To look after her in a general way is all that could possibly be expected. Besides, it's foolish always to be nervous about people!" She took a chocolate cream and began the sleeve. "Medway Ashendyne, with all those millions, isn't doing very much for her. She couldn't dress more plainly if she tried. I wonder what he means to do with her eventually. Perhaps he doesn't mean anything—just to let things drift...."

Hagar knew how to orientate herself very well. She took the surface car going in the right direction, and when she had travelled some distance she left it and took a cross-town car. This brought her to the block she wished. Out of the jingling car, across a street of push-carts and drays and hurrying, dodging people, she stood upon the broken and littered pavement a moment to look about her. The houses were tall and dreary; once good, a house to a family, but now not so good, and several families to a house. The corners were occupied by larger buildings, unadorned and jerry-built and ugly, each with a high-sounding name, each containing "flats";—flats and flats and flats, each with its ground floor occupied by small stores—unprosperous greengrocer, unprosperous butcher, poor chemist, prosperous saloon, and what not. It was a grimy, chilly grey afternoon with more than a hint of the approaching winter. All voices seemed raw and all colours cold. Among the children playing on the pavement and in areaways or on high, broken, entrance steps, there sounded more crying than laughing. Dirty papers were blown up and down; there floated an odour of stale beer; an old-clothes man went by, ringing a bell and crying harshly, "Old clothes! Old clothes! Got any rags?" Hagar stood with contracted brows. She shivered a little. "Why, Thomasine should not live in a place like this!" She looked about her. "Who should?" She had a vision of Thomasine playing ring-around-a-rosy, Thomasine looking for four-leaved clovers.

But when she climbed to the third floor of one of the corner buildings, and, standing in the perpetual twilight of the landing-way, rang the bell of a door from which much of the paint had been scarred, she found that Thomasine did not live there.

The door was opened by a gaunt, raw-boned woman. "Thomasine Dale? Did she live with Marietta Green and Jim?"

"Yes. She is Jim's niece."

"Well, she don't live here now."

"May I see Jim or his wife?"

"They don't live here neither."

The door across the landing opened, and a stout woman in a checked apron looked out. "Was you looking for the Greens?"

"Yes, please."

"If you'll come in and set a minute, I'll tell you about them. I've got asthmy, and there's an awful draught comes up those steps."

Hagar sat down in an orange plush rocking-chair and the stout woman, having removed her apron, took the green and purple sofa.

"There now! I meant to mend that carpet!"—and she covered the hole with the sole of her shoe. "I am as fond as I can be of the Greens! Jim's a good man, and if Marietta wa'n't so delicate she'd manage better. The children are nice youngsters, too.... Well, I'm sorry they've gone, but Jim hurt his arm down in the Works and Marietta couldn't seem to get strong again after the last baby, and everybody's cutting wages when they ain't turning men off short, and Jim's turn come, for all he's always been good and sober and a good workman. First the Works hurt his arm, and then it said that he wasn't so useful now; and then it said that it had seen for a long time that it would have to economize, and the men could choose between cut wages or no wages at all, and Jim was one of them it said it to. So he had to take the cut." She began to cough and wheeze and then to pant for breath. "Did you—ever have—the asthmy? I'm—going off—with it—some day. Glass of water? Yes—next room—cup by the sink.... Thank you—child! You're real helpful.—What was I saying? Oh, yes—'t was Jim and Marietta and the children and Thomasine who had to economize."

"Where are they gone?" asked Hagar sorrowfully.

"It isn't so awful far from here. I'll give you the address. The car at the corner'll take you there pretty quick. But it ain't nowhere near so nice a neighbourhood or a house as this." She regarded her plush furniture and Nottingham curtains with pride. "Thomasine's an awful nice girl."

"Yes," said Hagar. The tears came into her eyes. "I love Thomasine. I oughtn't to have waited so long before coming to find her, but I never thought of all this. It never entered my head."

"She's got an awful good place, for a woman—nine dollars a week. She could have kept a room here, but she's awful fond of Jim and Marietta and the children, and she went with them. I reckon she'll help right sharp this winter—'less'n the stores take to cutting too."

On the street-car, the new address in her hand, Hagar considered Poverty. It was there in person to illustrate, in an opposite row of anæmic, anxious faces and forms none too warmly clad; it was there on the street, going up and down; it was there in the houses that were so gaunt, defaced, and ugly. The very November air, cold and querulous, seemed poor. Her mind was sorting and comparing impressions. She had known, when she came to think of it, a good deal of poverty, and a number of poor people. In the first place, she had been brought up on the tradition of the poverty after the war—but that had been heroic, exalted poverty, in which all shared, and where they kept the amenities. Then, when that had passed, there were the steadygoing poor people in the country—those who had always been poor and apparently always would be so. But it did not seem to hurt so in the country, and certainly it was not so ugly. Often it was not ugly at all. Of course, everybody at home, in a cheerful tone of voice, called the Greens poor people. The Greens were poor,—Car'line and Isham were poor;—she remembered, with a curious vividness, the poor woman on the canal boat, the summer her mother died. She had even heard the Colonel say that he—the Colonel—was poor. Of course, she had seen hosts of poor people. And yet until to-day, or rather, to be more precise, until the morning of the ferry and the Elevated, she had never generalized Poverty, never conceived it abstractly. Poverty! What was Poverty? Why was Poverty? Was it a constant; was it going to last? If so, why? If it wasn't going to last, what was going to make things better? It was desirable that things should be better—oh, desirable, desirable! The slave of Beauty and the slave of Righteousness in Hagar's soul rose together and looked upon the dump-heap and the shards that were thrown upon it. "It shouldn't be. There is no need and no sense—"

Four or five summers past, visiting with Miss Serena some Coltsworth or Ashendyne house in the country, and exploring, as she always did almost at once, the bookcases, she had come upon—tucked away in the extreme shadow of a shadowy shelf—a copy of William Morris's "News From Nowhere." Hagar had long since come to the conviction that her taste was radically different from that of most Coltsworths and Ashendynes. Where they tucked away, she drew forth. She had read "News From Nowhere" upon that visit. But she had read it hurriedly, amid distractions, and she was much younger then than now. It had left with her chiefly an impression of a certain kind of haunting, other-world beauty. She remembered the boy and the girl in the tobacco-shop, playing merchant, and the cherry trees in the streets, and the cottage of Ellen, and Ellen herself, and the Harvest Home. Why it was written or what it was trying to show, she had not felt then with any clearness. Now, somehow, the book came back to her. "That was what 'News from Nowhere' was trying to show. That people might work, work well and enough, and yet there be for all beauty and comfort and leisure and friendliness.... I'll see if I can find that book and I'll read it again."

The car stopped at the street-corner indicated. When she was out upon the pavement, and again stood a moment to look about her, she was frightened. This was the region of the fire-escapes, zig-zagging down the faces of the buildings, the ramshackle buildings. It was the region of the black windows, and the women leaning out, and the wan children. This street was narrower than the other, grimier and more untidy, more crowded, colder, and the voice of it never died. It rose to a clamour, it sank to a murmur, but it never vanished. Usually it kept a strident midway, idle and fretful as the interminable blown litter of the street. Hagar drew a pained breath. "Thomasine's got no business living here—nor Jim and Marietta and the children either!"

But it seemed, when she mounted a dirty, narrow stair and made enquiries of a person she met atop,—it seemed that they didn't live there. "They moved out a week ago. The man was in some damned Works or other, and it threw him on the scrap-heap with about a thousand more. Then the place where the girl worked thought scrap-heaps were so pretty that it started one, too. Then he heard a report of work to be had over in New Jersey—as if, if this is the frying-pan, that ain't the fire!—and so they left this state. No; they didn't leave any address. Working people's address this year is 'Tramping It. Care of the Unemployed.' Sometimes, it's just plain 'Gone Under.'"

The man looked at Hagar, and Hagar looked at the man. She thought that he had the angriest, gloomiest eyes she had ever seen, and yet they were not wicked eyes. They blazed out of the dark entryway at her, but for all their coal-like glowing they were what she denominated far-away-seeing eyes. They seemed to look through her at something big and black beyond. "Have you seen the evening paper?" he asked abruptly.

"No, I have not. Why?"

"I wanted to see.... This morning's had an account of three Anarchist bits-of-business. A bomb in Barcelona, a bomb in Milan, and a bomb in Paris.—No, I can't tell you anything more about your friends. Yes, I'm sorry. It's a hard world. But there's a better time coming."

Grieving and bewildered, she came out upon the pavement. Why hadn't Thomasine—why hadn't Jim let them know? If there wasn't anything at home for Jim to do,—and she agreed that there wasn't—nor for Thomasine, still they could all have stayed there and waited for a while until Jim's arm and hard times got better. She tried to put them all—there were six—in the overseer's house with Mrs. Green. It would be crowded, but.... The overseer's house was her grandfather's; Mrs. Green had had it, rent free, since William Green's death, and most of her cornmeal and flour came from the Colonel's hand. Hagar tried to say to herself that her grandfather would be glad to see Jim and Marietta and Thomasine and the three children there staying with Mrs. Green as long as was necessary; that if it were crowded in the overseer's house her grandmother would be glad to have Thomasine and perhaps one of the children stay in the big house. It would not work. It came to her too, that perhaps Jim and Marietta and Thomasine might not be so fond of coming and sitting down on Mrs. Green and saying, "We've failed." But couldn't they work in the country? Jim was a mechanic; he didn't know anything about farming—and the farmers were having a hard time, too. Hagar's head began to ache. Then the travelling expenses—she tried to count those up. If they couldn't pay the rent, how could they pay for six to go down to Virginia—and the children's clothes, and the food and everything?... Was there no one who could send them money? Mrs. Green couldn't, she knew—and Thomasine's mother and father were very poor, and Corker wasn't doing well, and Maggie was at home nursing their mother whose spine was bad.... Gilead Balm had a kindly feeling for the Greens, she knew that. William Green had been a good overseer, and he had fought in the regiment the Colonel led. Her grandfather—if he knew how bad it was, if he could see these places where they had been living, if he could have heard the woman in the check apron and the man with the eyes—he might send Jim twenty-five dollars, he might even send him fifty dollars, though she doubted if he could do that much. She herself had twenty dollars left of that August two hundred. She had been saving it for Christmas presents for Gilead Balm, but now she was going to send it to Thomasine—just as soon as she knew where to send it. She walked on for a little way in a hopeful glow, and then the bottom dropped out of that, too. It wouldn't go far or do much. It was too small a cloth to wrap a giant in. Jim and Thomasine's unemployment—Jim's injured arm, hurt in the Works, Marietta weak and worn, trying to care for a little baby.... Other Mariettas, Jims, Thomasines, thousands and thousands of them.... They were willing and wanting to work. They were not lazy. Jim hadn't injured his own arm. Apparently there had to be babies.... Unemployment, and no one to help when help was needed.... It needed a giant. "All of us together could do it—all of us together."

She was cold, even under her warm jacket and with her thick gloves. The street looked horribly cold, but she did not notice many jackets, and no gloves. With all her beauty-loving nature she hated the squalid; nothing so depressed her. She had not seen it before so verily itself; in the country it was apt to have a draping and setting of beauty; even a pigpen might be environed by blossoming fruit trees. Here squalor environed squalor, ugliness ugliness. On a step before her sat a forlorn little girl of eight or nine, taking care of a large baby wrapped in a shawl. Hagar stopped and spoke.

"Are you cold?" The child shook her head. "Are you hungry?" She shook it still; then suddenly broke forth volubly in a strange tongue. She was telling her something, but what could not be made out. The door behind opened, and Elizabeth Eden came forth. She spoke to the child kindly, in her own language, with a caressing touch upon the shoulder. The little girl nodded, gathered up the baby, and went into the house.

"Miss Eden—"

Elizabeth turned. "What—Why, Miss Ashendyne! Did you drop out of the sky? What on earth are you doing in Omega Street?"

"I came down here to find some people whom I know. I am visiting in New York. Oh, I am glad to see you!"

"We can't stand here. The Settlement is just two blocks away. Can't you come with me and have a cup of tea? Where are you staying?"

Hagar told her, adding, "I must be back before dark or they won't let me come out again by myself."

"It isn't quite four. I'll put you on the Elevated in plenty of time.—What people were you looking for?"

Hagar told her as they walked. Elizabeth listened, knew nothing of them, but said gravely that it was a common lot nowadays. "I have seen many hard winters, but this promises to be one of the worst." She advised writing guardedly to Mrs. Green, until she found out how Thomasine and Jim wrote themselves. "They may not be telling her how bad it is, and if she cannot help, it is right that they shouldn't. I believe, too, in being hopeful. If they're sturdy, intelligent people, they'll weather the gale somehow, barring accidents. It's the miserable accidents—the strained arm, your Marietta's illness after the baby—things like that that tip the scales against them. Well, cheer up, child! You may hear that they've got work and are happy.—This is the Settlement."

Three old residences, stranded long years ago when "fashionable society" moved away, first street by street and at last mile by mile, formed the Settlement. Made one building by archways cut through, grave and plain, with a dignity of good woodwork and polished brass and fit furniture sparely placed, the house had the poise and force of a galleon caught and held intact in the arms of some sargasso sea. All around it were wrecks of many natures, strangled, pinned down, and disintegrating, but it had not disintegrated. One use and custom had left it, but another had passed in with a nobler plan.

Hagar Ashendyne went through the place, wondering, saw the workrooms, the classrooms, the assembly-room, the dwelling-rooms, austere, with a quiet goodness and fairness, of the people who dwelled there and made the heart of the place. "It is not like a convent," she said in a low voice; "at least, I imagine it is not—and yet—"

"Oh, the two ideas have a point of contact!" answered Elizabeth cheerfully. "Only, here, the emphasis is laid on action."

She met several people whom she thought she would like to meet again, and at the last minute came in Marie Caton. It was Marie, who, at five o'clock, put her on the Elevated that would take her home in twenty minutes. Marie had met the Maines—"I'm Southern, too, you know,"—and she promised to come to see Hagar, and she said that Hagar and Rachel Bolt must come, some Sunday afternoon, to the Settlement. "That is chiefly when we see our personal friends."

That night Hagar wrote to her grandmother and to Mrs. Green. In four days time she heard from the latter. Yes, Jim and all of them and Thomasine had moved to New Jersey. Times were hard, Jim said, and work was slack, and they thought they could better themselves. Sure enough he had got a right good job. They were living where it wasn't so crowded as it was in New York, almost in the country, right by a big mill. There was a row of houses, just alike, Thomasine said, and they were living in one of them. There wasn't any yard, but you could walk into the country and see the woods, and Thomasine said the sky was wonderful at night, all red from a furnace. Thomasine hadn't got work yet, but she thought that she would. There was a place where they made silk into ribbons, and she thought there'd be a place for her there. Marietta was better, and the children were fine. Mrs. Green sent the address—and Gilead Balm certainly missed Hagar.

Old Miss wrote an explanatory letter. Hagar knew or ought to know that they had little or nothing but the place. The Colonel had been in debt, but Medway had cleared that off, as it was right that he should, now that he was able to do it; right and kind. But as for ready money—country people never had any ready money, she knew that perfectly well. Medway was now, Old Miss supposed, a rich man, but no one knew exactly how rich, and at any rate it was his money, and living abroad as he did was, of course, expensive. He couldn't justly be expected to do much more than he was doing. "As for your having money to give the Greens, you haven't any, child! Medway has told your grandfather that he wants you from now on to have every proper advantage, but that he does not believe in the way young people to-day squander money, nor does he want you to depart from what you have been taught at Gilead Balm. He wants you to remain modest in your wants, as every woman should be. The money he has put in your grandfather's hands for you this year is to pay for this winter in New York and for wherever you go next summer. He never meant it to be diverted to helping people without any claim upon him that are out of employment. Your grandfather won't hear to any such thing as you propose. He says your idea of coming home and using the money you are costing in New York is preposterous. The money isn't your money; it's your father's money, to be used as he, and not as you, direct.... Of course, it's a hard year, and of course, there are people suffering. There always are. But Jim's a man and can get work, and Thomasine oughtn't to have gone away from home anyhow. They aren't starving, child."—So Old Miss, and more to the same effect, and then, at the end, a postscript. "I had a ten-dollar gold-piece that's been lying by me a long time, and I've taken it to Mary Green and told her to send it to Jim. She seemed surprised, and from what she says and what his letter says, I don't think they are any worse off than most people. You're young, and your feelings run away with you."

Hagar wrote a long, loving letter to Thomasine, and sent her the twenty dollars. Thomasine returned her effusive, pretty thanks, showed that she was glad, and glad enough to have the help, but insisted that she should regard it as a loan. She acknowledged that Jim and she, and therefore Marietta and the babies, had been pretty hard up. But things were better, she hopefully said. She had a place and Jim had a place. His arm was about well, and on the whole, they liked New Jersey, "though it isn't as interesting, of course, as New York."

CHAPTER XVI
THE MAINES

It was the year of the assassination of Sadi Carnot in France, of the trial of Emma Goldman in New York, of much "Hellish Anarchist Activity." It was a year of growth in the American Federation of Labour. It was a year of Socialist growth. It was a year of strikes—mine strikes, railway strikes, other strikes, Lehigh and Pullman and Cripple Creek. It was the year of the Army of Coxey. It was the year of the Unemployed and of Relief Agencies. It was the year when the phrase "A living wage" received currency.

In the winter of 1894 the Spanish War had not been, the Boer War had not been, the Russo-Japanese War had not been. The war between Japan and China was on the eve of being; people talked of Matabeleland, and Cecil Rhodes was chief in South Africa. Hawaii was in process of being annexed. In the winter of 1894 it was the Wilson Tariff Bill, and Bimetallism, and Mr. Gladstone and Home Rule, and the Mafia in Sicily, and the A.P.A., and the Bicycle, and Queen Liliuokalani, and the Causes of Strikes and of Panics, and Electric Traction, and the romances of Sienkiewicz and "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" and "The Prisoner of Zenda" and "The Heavenly Twins." Mr. Howells was writing "Letters of an Altrurian Traveller"; George Meredith had published "Lord Ormont and his Aminta." Stevenson, at Vailima, was considering "Weir of Hermiston."

In 1894 occurred the first voting of women in New Zealand. It saw the opening of a Woman's Congress in Berlin. In New York a Woman Suffrage Amendment was strongly advocated before a Constitutional Convention. There was more talk than usual of the Unrest among Women, more editorials than usual upon the phenomenon, more magazine articles. But the bulk of the talk and the editorials and the magazine articles had to do with the business failures and the Unemployed and the Strikes.

The beating of the waves of the year was not loudly heard in the Maines' long, high-ceilinged parlour. The law droned on, bad years with good. Powhatan had speculated and made his little losses. His philosophy this winter was pessimistic, and the household "economized." But the table was still good and plentiful, and the coloured servants, who were fond of him and he of them, smiled and bobbed, and he had not felt it necessary to change his brand of cigars, and the same old people came in the evening. Mrs. Maine never read the newspapers. She rarely read anything, though once in a while she took up an old favourite of her youth, and placidly dipped now into it and now into her box of chocolates. Powhatan kept her supplied with the chocolates. Twice a week, when he came in at five o'clock, he produced out of his overcoat pocket a glazed, white, two-pound box:—"Chocolates, Bessie! Catch!"

Rachel Bolt was more alert to the world surge, but to her, too, it must come a little muted through the family atmosphere. Her swiftest vibrations were upon other lines, curious inner, personal revolts and rebellions, sometimes consumed below the crust, sometimes breaking forth with a flare and rain of words as of lava. The family and the people who habitually came to the house were used to Rachel's way of talking; as long as she did nothing outré,—and she did not,—it was no more to them than a painted volcano. As for Sylvie—Sylvie was as sweet and likeable as sugar, but not interested in anything outside of the porcelain world-dish that held her. She liked her clothes this winter, and the young men who came to the house, and she dutifully practised her voice, and enjoyed the shops and the plays, and wondered a good deal if she was or was not in love with Jack Carter, who was an interne in one of the hospitals, and who sent her every week six of the new roses called American Beauties. She had other, more distant relatives in New York, people of wealth who presently took her up. She was with them and away from the Maines a good deal, and, on the whole, Hagar saw not much of Sylvie this winter. She and Rachel were more together.

Almost every evening, at the Maines', people came in—old Southern friends, living in New York, or here on business or other occasions, young men and women, fond of Rachel, acceptable fellow-sheep from the fold of St. Timothy, now and then the rector himself, now and then some young man, Southern, with a letter of introduction. Sometimes there were but one or two besides the family, sometimes seven or eight. There was little or no formal entertainment, but this kind of thing always. Each day at dusk Hagar put on one of the two half-festive gowns which, at the last moment, Miss Serena had insisted she must have. Both were simplicity itself, both of some soft, crêpy stuff, one dark bronze and one dark green. They were made with the large puffed sleeves of the period, and the throat slightly low and square. "Country-made, but somehow just right," Rachel judged. "You aren't any more adorned than the leaf of a tree, and yet you might walk, just as you are, into Cæsar's palace."

Usually by half-past ten visitors were gone, lights downstairs were out. Powhatan and Bessie believed in early to bed and late to rise. Upstairs, in her bedroom on the third floor, Hagar shook out and hung in the closet the bronze or green dress, as the case might be, put on her gown and her red wrapper, braided her hair, pushed the couch well beneath the light, curled herself up on it under the eider-down quilt, and, tablet against knee, began to write.... The Short Story—it was that she dreamed and wrote and polished. Two currents of thought and aspiration ran side by side. "To earn money—to make my own living—to be able to help"; and "To make this Idea, that I think is beautiful, come forth and grow.—To get this thing right—to make this dream show clear—to do it, to do it!—To create!" The latter current was the most powerful. The former would sooner or later accomplish its end; it would turn the mill-wheel and be content. But the latter—never, never would it be satisfied; never would it say, "It is accomplished." Always there would be the further dream, always the necessity to make that, too, come clear. There were other currents, more or less strong, Desire of Fame, Desire to be Known, Desire to Excel, and others; but the first two were the great currents.

Since March and the fairy story she had written other stories, four or five in all. She had sent them to magazines, and all but one had come back. That one she had sent immediately after her search for Thomasine. In a month she had word that it was taken, and that, on publication, she would be paid fifty dollars. The letter was like manna, she went about all day with a rapt face. To write—to write—to write stories like Hawthorne, like Poe....

She had been six weeks in New York. That night, when she had worked for an hour over one half-page, and then, the light out, had sat for a long while in the window looking at the winter stars above the city roofs, she could not sleep when she went to bed, but lay, straight and still, half-thinking, half-dreaming. A pageant of impressions, waves of repeated, altered, rearranged contacts drove through her mind. The pictures and marbles of the Metropolitan, the sculptures and casts of sculptures which she cared for more than for the paintings, those of the latter which she loved—the music that she had heard, the plays she had seen, the Park and the slow, interminable afternoon parade of carriages watched from a bench beneath the trees, Fifth Avenue, Broadway, the hurrying crowds, the rush and roar, tramp and clangour, the colour and bravura—Omega Street, the Settlement, a Sunday afternoon there, discussions to which she had listened, a mass meeting of strikers which, Powhatan having taken her downtown to show her the Stock Exchange and Trinity, they had inadvertently fringed, and from which, with epithets of disapproval, he had hurried her away;—uptown once more and the florists' windows and the wheels on the asphalt, a Sunday morning at St. Timothy's with the stained glass and the Bishop's nephew intoning;—again the theatres, a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, the "Merchant of Venice," a play of Pinero's; again the pictures and the statues, the cast of the great Venus, the cast of Niobe, of the Diana with the hound, of Apollo and Hermes; the pictures, Rembrandts and Vandykes, and certain landscapes, and a form that she liked, firelit and vague, blind Nydia moving through ruining Pompeii, and Bastien LePage's Joan of Arc; then the Park again, and the great trees above the mall, and people, people, people!—all made a vibrating whirl, vast, many-hued, and with strange harmonies. She lay until it passed and sank like the multi-coloured sand of the desert.

When at last she slept, she had a curious dream. She and her mother were alone on an island with palm trees. She was used to being with her mother in dreams. She had for the memory of her mother so passionate a loyalty; the figure of Maria, young, it always seemed to her, as herself, so kept abreast with her inner life that it was but a naturalness that she should be there in the dream mind, too. She was there now, on the island with the palm trees, and the two sat and looked at the sea, which was very blue. Then, right out of the lonely sea, there grew a crowded wharf, with a white steamship and people going to it and coming from it. Her father came from it, dressed in white with a white hat like a helmet, and then suddenly there was no wharf nor ship, but they were in a curious street of low, pale-coloured houses—her father and her mother and herself and the palm trees. "Now we are all going to be happy together," she said; but "No," said her mother, "wait until the procession passes." Then there was a procession, and they were all women, and at first they all had the face and eyes of Bastien LePage's Joan of Arc, but then that faded, and they were simply many women, but each of them carried a blossoming bough. She saw faces that she knew among them, and she saw women that she thought belonged to the Middle Ages, and Greek women, and Egyptians, and savages. They went by for a long time, and then, with a turn of the hand, the dream changed, and they were all in a courtyard with a well and more palm trees, and people coming and going, and they were eating and drinking, and there was a third woman with them whom her father called Anna. She had a string of jewels, and she tried them, first on Hagar and then on Maria; but Maria had a knife and suddenly she struck at her father with it. She cut him across both wrists and the blood flowed.—Hagar wakened and sat up in bed, shivering. Her father's face was still plain against her eyeballs—bearded and handsome, with red in his cheeks and the hat like a helmet.

During Christmas week Ralph Coltsworth appeared. He had to spend his holidays somewhere, he said. Hawk Nest was dull and he didn't like Gilead Balm without Hagar.

"Ralph, why don't you study?"

"I do study. I'm a star student. Only I don't like the law. I'm going to do a little more convincing myself and the family, and then I'm going to chuck it! I've got a little money to start things with. I want to go in with a broker I know."

"What do you want to do that for?"

"Oh, because!... There are chances, if you've got the feeling in your finger tips!... Don't you know, Gipsy, that something like that is the career for a man like me? If I had been my father, I could have waved my sword and gone charging down history—and if I'd been my grandfather, I could have poured out Whig eloquence from every stump in the country and looked Olympian and been carried in procession (I don't like politics now; it's an entirely different thing);—and if I'd been my great-grandfather, I could have filibustered or settled the Southwest; and back of that I could have done almost any old thing—come over with the Adventurers, seized a continent, shared England with the Normans, marauded with the Vikings, whiled through Europe with Attila, done almost anything and come out with a name and my arms full! Now you can't conquer things like that, but, by George, you can corner things!"

"What do you mean?—That you want to become a rich man?"

"That's what most of those others wanted. Yes, riches and power."

"I was reading the other day a magazine article. It said that the day when any American, if he had energy and ambition, might hope to make a great fortune was past. It said that the Capets and Plantagenets and Hapsburgs were all here; that the dynasties were established and the entente cordiale in operation; that young and adventurous Americans might hope to become captains of mercenaries, or they might go in for being court chaplains, and troubadours."

"Oh, that article had dyspepsia!" said Ralph. "It isn't as easy as it was, that's certain! but it's possible yet, in 1894—if you've got an opening."

"Have you got one?"

"Elder and Marten would take me in. Marten was an old flame of my mother's, and I got his son Dick out of a scrape last year.—In ten years, you'll see, Gipsy! I'll send you orchids and pearls!"

"I don't want them, thank you, Ralph."

Ralph took the flower from his buttonhole and began to pluck away its petals. "Gipsy, I was awfully glad, last summer, when you sent that Eglantine fellow about his business."

"Mr. Laydon and I sent each other."

"Well, the road's clear—that's all I want to know! Gipsy—"

"Ralph, it's no use. I'm not going to listen."

"The family has planned this ever since we were infants. When you used to come to Hawk Nest with your big eyes and your blue gingham dress and your white stockings—I knew it somehow even then, even when I teased you so—"

"You certainly teased me. Do you remember the rain barrel?"

"No, I don't. The family has set its heart—"

"Oh, Ralph, family can be such a tyrant! At any rate, ours will have to take its heart off this."

Ralph turned sullen. "Well, the family used to settle it for women."

"Yes, it did—when you came over with William the Conqueror! Do you want to take me, regardless—just as you'd take those millions? Well, you may take those millions, but you can't take me!"

"Your father wants it, too. The Colonel showed me a letter—"

Hagar stopped short—they were walking in the Park. "My father!... Do you think I owe my father so great a love and obedience?" She looked before her, steadily, down the vista of vast, leafless trees. "The strongest feeling," she said, "that I have about my father is one of strong curiosity."

CHAPTER XVII
THE SOCIALIST MEETING

The house was full, said the man at the ticket-window. Nothing to be had, short of almost the back row, under the gallery. Rachel shook her head, and her cousin, Willy Maine, leaving the window, expressed his indignation. "You ought to have told me this afternoon that you wanted to go! Anybody might have known"—Willy was from one of the sleepier villages in one of the sleepiest counties of his native state—"Anybody might have known that in New York you have to get your tickets early! Now we've missed the show!" By now they were out of the swinging doors and down upon the pavement. The night was bright and not especially cold. It was the Lyceum Theatre, and they stood at the intersection of Fourth Avenue and Twenty-third Street.

"It's too late to try anything else," pondered Rachel. "Willy, I'm sorry. But we truly didn't know we could go until the last minute, and I didn't believe it would be crowded."

"It's a beautiful night," said Hagar. "It's light and bright, and there are crowds of people. Why can't we just walk about until bedtime?"

Willy, who was nineteen but a young giant, pursed his lips. "Is it proper for ladies?"

"Oh, I think so," said Rachel absently, "but would it really amuse you, Hagar?"

"Yes, it would. Let us go slowly, Rachel, and look in windows and pretend to be purchasing."

Willy laughed, genially and patronizingly. "I've been along here. There aren't any Paris fashions in these windows."

"I want," said Hagar succinctly, "to saunter through the streets of a great city."

They began to walk, their faces turned downtown, staying chiefly upon the avenue, but now and then diverging into side streets where there were lights and people. By degrees they came into congested, poorer quarters. To Willy, not long removed from a loneliness of tidal creeks, vast stretches of tobacco, slow, solitary sandy roads, all and any of New York was exciting, all a show, a stimulus swallowed without discrimination. That day Rachel had found occasion to rage against a certain closed circle of conventions. The subject had come up at the breakfast table, introduced by a headline in the morning paper, and she had so shocked her family that for once they had acted as though the volcano was real. Mrs. Maine had grown moist and pink, and had said precipitately that in her time a young woman—whether she were married or single, that didn't matter!—would as soon have thought of putting her hand in the fire as of mentioning such things! And Powhatan had as nearly thundered as was in his nature to do. Rachel shrugged her shoulders and desisted, but she had gone about all day with defiance written in her small, sombre face. Now to-night, the street, the broad stripes of blackness, the thin stripes of gold light, the sound of voices and of many footfalls, the faces when the light fell upon them and the brushing by of half-seen forms suited her raised, angry, and mutinous mood. As for Hagar, the street and its movement simply became herself. She never lost the child's and the poet's power of coalescence.

It was before the days of Waring. The only White Wings upon this avenue had been the snowflakes which a week ago had fallen thickly, which had been dully scraped over the curbing into the gutter, and which now stayed there in irregular, one to three feet in altitude, begrimed Alpine ranges. The cobblestones of the street between, over which the great dray horses ceaselessly passed, were foul enough, while the sidewalks had their own litter of torn scraps of paper, cheap cigar ends, infinitesimal bits of refuse. The day of the weirdness of electric lighting, of the bizarre come-and-go of motion signs was not yet either. Down here there were occasional arc lights, but gas yet reigned in chief. The shops, that were not shops for millionaires, nor even for the Quite Comfortable, all had their winking gaslights. Below them like chequered walls sprang out the variegated show-windows. The wares displayed were usually small in size, slight of value, and high in colour, a kaleidoscopic barbaric display. Above dark doorways the frequent three golden balls showed up well.

Because the night was so mild and windless many people were abroad—people not well-dressed, and yet not quite poverty-stricken in aspect; others who were so, lounging men with hopeless faces, women wandering by, pinched and lost-looking; then again groups or individuals of a fairly prosperous appearance. The flaring gas showed now and again faces that were evidently alien, or there came a snatch of strange jargon. A crowd had gathered at a street corner. A girl wearing a dark-blue poke bonnet with a red ribbon across it was going from one to the other holding out a tambourine. A few pennies clinked into it. A man standing in the centre of the crowd, raised his arm. "Now, we are going to sing." The women in the bonnets beat upon the tambourines, a man with a drum and another with a cornet gave the opening bars, the women raised shrill, sweet voices,—