Hagar

After a pause the pencil moved on. "Many stories in mind, one partly written. The monthly says I can write and will make a name." It paused, then moved again. "To earn a living. To live where life is simple and doesn't cost much. If I go on, and I will go on, I could live at Gilead Balm on what I make, and help keep up the place. If ever I had to live by myself, I could get two or three rooms in a city and live there. Or maybe a small house, and have Thomasine with me. In another year or two years, I can keep myself. I do not want to stay here when grandfather goes. Where there is no love and honour, what is the use? It isn't as though he needed me—he doesn't—or wanted me—"

She laid the pencil down and leaned back in the deep chair. Her eyes grew less troubled; a vague relief and calm came into her face, and she smiled fleetingly. "If he doesn't think he needs me or wants me,—and I don't believe he'll think so,—then there isn't anything surer than that I won't stay." She rose and paced the room. "I shouldn't worry, Hagar!"

Some days after this, she offered one afternoon to relieve the nurse. She had done this before and frequently. Heretofore the service had consisted, since the patient almost always slept through the afternoon, in sitting quietly in the darkened chamber and dreaming her own dreams for an hour or two, when the grateful nurse came back refreshed. To-day she was presently aware that he was awake; that he was lying there with his eyes open, regarding the slow play of light and shadow upon the ceiling. She had found out, on those earlier occasions, that he did not discriminate between her and the usual nurse; when he roused himself to demand water he had looked no farther than the glass held by her hand to his lips. Now, as she felt at once as with a faint electric shock, it was going to be different. He spoke presently. His voice, though halting and much weakened, resembled the Colonel's golden, energetic drawl.

"What time is it?"

"Five o'clock."

"What day of the month?"

She told him. "Alexandria in April!" he said. "What impossible things happen!"

She did not answer, and he fell silent, lying there staring at the ceiling. In a few minutes he asked for water. The glass at his lips, she felt that he looked with curiosity first at the hand which held it, and then at her face. "Water tastes good," he said, "doesn't it?"

"Yes, it does." She put down the glass and returned to her seat.

"You aren't," he said, "the nurse I've had."

"No; she will be back presently."

There followed another pregnant silence; then: "A beautiful string of impossibilities. I know the Colonel's here—been here a long time. Now, did I dream it or did Thomson tell me that he'd brought my daughter with him?"

"Thomson told you."

Medway lay quite quiet and relaxed. The cut over the head was nearly healed; there was now but a slight fillet-like white bandage about it. Thomson had trimmed mustache and short pointed beard; the features above were bloodless yet, but no longer sunken and ghastly; the eyes were gathering keenness and intelligence. Ashendynes and Coltsworths were alike good-looking people, and Medway had taken his share. He knew it, prized it, and bestowed upon it a proper care. Hagar wondered—wondered.

He spoke again. "Life's a variorum! I shouldn't wonder ... Hagar!"

"Yes, father?"

"Suppose you come over here, nearer. I want to see how you've 'done growed up.'"

She moved her chair until it rested full in a slant ray of sunlight, coming through the lowered blinds, then sat within the ray, as still almost as if she had been sculptured there.

Five minutes passed. "Haven't you any other name than Hagar?" said Medway. "Are they always going to call you that?"

"Grandfather calls me Gipsy—except when he doesn't like what I do."

"Does that happen often? Are you wilful?"

"I do not know," said Hagar. "I am like my mother."

When she had spoken, she repented it with a pang of fear. He was in no condition, of course, to have waked old, disturbing thoughts.

But Medway had depth on depth of sang-froid. "You look like her and you don't look like her," he murmured. "You may be like her within, but you can't be all like her. Blessings and cursings are all mixed in this life. You must be a little bit like me—Gipsy!"

"It is time," said Hagar, "for an egg beaten up in wine."

She gave it to him, standing, grave-eyed, beside the bed. "I do not think you should talk. Shut your eyes and go to sleep."

"Can you read aloud?"

"Yes, but—"

"Can you sing?"

"Not to amount to anything. But I can sing to you very low until you go to sleep, if that's what you mean—"

"All right. Sing!"

She moved from the shaft of light, and began to croon rather than to sing, softly and dreamily, bits of old songs and ballads. In ten minutes he was asleep, and in ten more the nurse returned.

The next afternoon Thomson brought her a message. "Mr. Ashendyne would like you to sit with him awhile, Miss."

She went, and took her chair by the window, the nurse leaving the room. Medway lay dozing, his eyes half-closed. After a while he woke fully and asked who was there.

"It is Hagar, father."

"Sit where you were yesterday."

She obeyed, taking again her place in the slant light. It made a gold crown for her dusky hair, slid to the hollow of her firm young throat, brought forward her slender shoulders, draped in white, and bathed her long hands, folded in her lap.

Medway lay and looked at her, coolly, as long as he pleased. "You are not at all what is called beautiful. We'll dismiss that from mind. But the people who give us our terms are mostly idiots anyhow! Beauty in the eye of the beholder—but what bats are the beholders! No, you haven't beauty, as they say, but there's something left.... I like the way you sit there, Gipsy."

"I am glad that you are pleased, father."

"I couldn't deduce you from your letters."

Her eyes met his. "I did not choose that you should."

Again she felt a quiver of pain for what she had said. She was torn between a veritable anger which now and again rose perilously near the surface and a profound pity for his broken body, and for what he would feel when he knew. Her dream of the early winter haunted her. She saw him leaving that white steamer, coming lightly and jauntily down from it to the shore, robust, with a colour in his cheeks and his white hat like a helmet. She heard again Roger Michael speaking. "We met him at Carcassonne, and afterwards at Aigues-Mortes. He was sketching most wonderfully." She saw him, moving lightly, from stone to stone in old half-ruined cities. The dandelion day and the blossoming orchard came back to her; she felt again beneath her his half-dancing motion as he carried her under the boughs where the bees were humming. Her pity, her comprehension, put the anger down.

Medway was watching her curiously. "You have a most expressive face," he said. "I do not remember you well as a child. How old were you the last time we met?"

"Five or six, I think. The clearest thing I can remember, father, is one day when you were lying under the cedars and I had been gathering dandelions and came to look at a book you had. You played with me, and I accidentally burned my finger on your cigar. Then you were very kind and lovely; you took me to grandmother to have it tied up, and then you carried me on your shoulder through the orchard, and told me 'Jack and the Beanstalk.'"

"By Jove!" said Medway. "Why, I remember that, too!... First the smell of the cedar and then the apple blossoms.... You were a queer little elf—and you entered into the morals of 'Jack and the Beanstalk' most seriously.... Good lack! Whoever forgets anything! That to come back as soft and vivid!... Well, I thought I had forgotten you clean, Gipsy, but it seems I hadn't."

"You mustn't talk too much. Shall I sing you to sleep?"

"Yes, sing!"

Just before he dozed off, he spoke again, drowsily. "Have you heard them say how many days it will be before I am on my feet again?"

"No."

"I will want to show you and the Colonel—" But she had begun to croon "Swanee River," and he went to sleep with his sentence unfinished.

The next day he spoke of his drowned wife. It came as a casual remark, but with propriety. "Anna was a good woman. There could hardly have been a more amiable one. She had experience and tact; she was utterly unexacting. She had her interests and I had mine; we lived and let live.... I cannot yet understand how she happened to have been the one—"

"She sent me her picture," said Hagar. "I thought it very handsome, and a good face, too. And the two or three letters I had from her—I have kept them."

"She was a good woman," repeated Medway. "You rarely see a tolerant woman—she was one. Her brother has told me about her will. It is true that I expected, perhaps, a fuller confidence. But it was her money—she had a right to do as she pleased. I knew that she had some unfortunate idea or other as to the origin of her wealth—but I did not conceive that her mind made so much of it.... However, I refuse to be troubled on that score. Her disposition of matters leaves me comfortable enough. I am not worrying over it. I never worry, Gipsy!"

After lying for three minutes he spoke with his inimitable liquid drawl. "When I think of all the years out of which I have squeezed enjoyment on the pettiest income—going here and going there—every nook of Europe, much of Asia and Africa—just managing to keep Thomson and myself—knowing every in and out, every rank and grade and caste, palace and hovel, château and garret, camp and atelier, knowing pictures, music, scenery, strange people and strange adventures, knowing my own kind and welcome among them—now basking like a lizard, now in action as though a tarantula had bit me—everywhere, desert and sea and city—and all on next to nothing!—making drawings when I had to (I did that one year in southern France; Carcassonne, Aigues-Mortes, Nîmes, and so forth), but usually fortunate in friends ... it seems that I might be able to manage on fifty thousand a year ... resume at the old house."

It was another week before he was told. He was growing impatient and suspicious.... The doctor did it, Thomson flunking for the first time in his existence. The doctor, having done it, came out of the room, drew a long breath, and accepted coffee from Mahomet with rather a shaking hand.

"Well?" demanded the Colonel. "Well?"

"He's perfectly game," said the doctor, "but I should say he's hard hit. However,"—he drank the coffee,—"there's one thing that a considerable experience with human nature has taught me, and that is, Colonel, that your born hedonist—and it's no disparagement to Mr. Ashendyne to call him that; quite the reverse—your born hedonist will remain hedonist still, though the heavens fall. He'll twist back to the pleasant. He's going through pretty bitter waters at the moment, but he'll get life somehow on the pleasurable plane again. All the same," mused the doctor, "he's undoubtedly suffering at present."

"I won't go in," said the Colonel. "Better fight such things out alone!"

The other nodded. "Yes, I suppose so."

But a little later Hagar went in. She waited an hour or two in her own room, sitting before a window, gazing with unseeing eyes. The heat swam and dazzled above countless flat, pale, parapetted roofs of countless houses. Palm and pepper and acacia and eucalyptus drooped in the airless day; there sounded a drone of voices; a great bird sailed slowly on stretched wings far overhead in a sky like brass. She turned and went to her father's room.

Outside she met Thomson. "Are you going in, Miss? I'm glad of that. Mr. Ashendyne isn't one of these people whom their own company suffices—"

Hagar raised sombre eyes. "I thought that my father had always been sufficient to himself—"

"Not in trouble, Miss."

He knocked at the door for her. Medway's voice answered, strangely jerky, quick, and harsh. "What is it? Come in!"

Thomson opened the door. "It's Miss Hagar, sir," then closed it upon her and glided away down the corridor.

Medway was lying well up upon his pillows, staring at the light upon the wall. He had sent away the nurse. He did not speak, and Hagar, moving quietly, went here and there in the large room, that was as large as an audience chamber. At the windows she drew the jalousies yet closer, making a rich twilight in the room. There were flowers on a table, and she brought fresh water and filled the bowl in which they lived. There were books in a small case, and, kneeling before it, she read over their titles, and taking one from the shelf went softly through it, looking at the pictures.

At last, with it still in her hand, she came to her accustomed seat near the bed. "It's a bad day for you," she said simply. "I am very sorry."

"Do you object to my swearing?"

"Not especially, if it helps you."

"It won't—I'll put it off.... Oh—h...." He turned his head and shoulders as best he could, until his face was buried in the pillows. The bed shook with his heavy, gasping sobs....

It did not last. Ashendynes were not apt long to indulge in that kind of thing. Medway pulled a good oar out of it. The room very soon became perfectly still again. When the silence was broken, he asked her what she was reading, and then if she had seen anything of the city. Presently he told her to sing. He thought he might sleep; he hadn't slept much last night. "I must have had a presentiment of this damned thing—Go on and sing!" She crooned "Dixie" and "Swanee River" and "Annie Laurie," but it was of no use. He could not sleep. "Of all things to come to me, this—!... Why, I should like to be out in the desert this minute, with a caravan.... O God!"

She brought him cool water. "I'm sorry—I'm sorry!" she said.

As she put down the glass, he held her by the sleeve. A twisted smile, half-wretched, half with a glint of cheer, crossed his face. "Do you know, Gipsy, I could grow right fond of you."

CHAPTER XXI
AT ROGER MICHAEL'S

On an early April afternoon in the year 1902 a man and woman were crossing, with much leisureliness, Trafalgar Square.

"We won't get run over! It isn't like Paris."

"Aren't you tired, Molly? Don't you want a hansom?"

"Tired? No! What could make me tired a day like this? I want to go stroke the lions."

They gravely went and did so. "Poor old British Lion!—Listen!"

News was being cried. "Details of fight at Bushman's Kop!"

Christopher Josslyn left the lions, ran across and got a paper, then returned. "A small affair!" he said. "How interminably the thing drags out!"

"But they'll have peace directly now."

"Yes—but it's Poor old Lion, just the same—"

They moved from the four in stone, striking across to Pall Mall. "There was a halcyon time in England, fifty years or so ago, when, if you'll believe what men wrote, it was seriously held that no civilized man would ever again encroach upon a weaker brother's rights! Æons were at hand of universal education, stained glass, and ascension lilies. At any rate æons of brotherhood. Under the kindly control of the great Elder Brother England. And they had some reason—it looked for an illusory moment that way. I always try to remember that—and moments like that in every land's history—at moments such as these. Why doesn't that moment carry on over? There's something deeply, fundamentally wrong."

He looked along the crowded street. Men were buying papers—that seemed their chief employment. Delarey—Kitchener—Report of fight at Hartz River.

"Not far from a billion dollars expended on this war—and those East Side streets we went through yesterday—Concentration Camps—and the Coronation—this reactionary Administration with its Corn Laws and Coercion Laws and wretched Education Bill, and so on—and the Coronation talk—and Piccadilly last night after nine—"

"Oh," said Molly sharply. "That's the sting that I feel! It's women and children who are suffering in those Concentration Camps, I suppose—and it's women's sons who are lying on the battlefields—and it's women just as well as men who are paying the taxes—and it's women, too, in those horrible slums, wretched and hopeless—and bad legislation falls on women just as hardly as on men—but the other! There we've got the tragedy mostly to ourselves—and there's no greater tragedy below the stars!" She dashed a bright drop from her eyes. "I'll never forget that girl, last night, on the Embankment—thin and painted and that hollow laugh.... I wish women would wake up!"

"Women and men," said the other. "They're waking, but it's slow, it's slow, it's slow."

The softened, softened English sunlight bathed the broad street, the buildings, the wheeled traffic, the people going up and down. The two Americans, here at last at the latter end of their six months abroad, delighted in the tender light, in the soft afternoon sky with a few sailing clouds, in the street sights and sounds, in the English speech. They strolled rather than walked; even at times they dawdled rather than strolled. They developed a tendency to stand before shop-windows. So strong and handsome a pair were they that they attracted some attention. Thirty-five and thirty-two, both tall, both well-made, lithe, active, both aglow with health; she a magnificent rosy blonde, he blue-eyed, but with nut-brown hair; both dressed with an unconventional simplicity, fitness, and comfort; both interested as children and happy in each other's company—those who observed them did not call them "Promise-Bearers"; and yet, in a way, that was what they were. There were three children at home with as splendid a grandmother. A University had sent Christopher to make an investigation, and the children had said, "You go, too, mother! It'll be splendid. You need a rest!" and Christopher had said, "Molly, you need another honeymoon."

The English weather was uncommonly good. As they came to Green Park a barrel-organ was playing. Spring was full at hand; you read it everywhere.

Two men passed, talking. "Yes, to confer at Klerksdorp, with Steyn and Botha and De Wet. Peace presently, and none too soon!"

"I should think not. I'm done with wars."

"Little Annie Rooney," played the barrel-organ.

"There is more than one way for societies to survive," said Christopher, "and some day men will find it out. You can survive by being a better duellist and for a longer time than the other fellow—and you can survive by being the better toiler, also with persistence—or you can survive by being the better thinker, in an endless, ascending scale. Each plane makes the lower largely unnecessary, is, indeed, the lower moved up, become more merciful and wiser. Survive—to live over—to outlive. The true survivor—wouldn't you like to see him—see her—see us, Molly?"

"Yes," said Molly soberly. "We are a long way off."

Christopher assented. "True enough. And, thank Heaven! the true survivor will always vanish toward the truer yet. But I don't know—it seems to me—the twentieth century might catch a faint far glimpse of our lineaments! I am madly, wildly, rashly optimistic for the twentieth century—even when I remember how optimistic they were fifty years ago! Who could help being optimistic on such an afternoon? Look at the gold on the green!"

The barrel-organ played an old, gay dance.

"Do you suppose," said Molly, "that, in Merry England, the milkmaids and shepherdesses danced about a maypole at thirty-two? For that's just exactly what I should like to do this minute! How absurd to be able to climb the Matterhorn, and then not to be let go out there and dance on that smooth bit of green!"

"You might try it. Only I wouldn't answer for the conduct of the policeman by the tree. And if you're arrested, we can't dine to-night with Roger Michael."

Roger Michael lived in a small, red, Georgian house in Chelsea. Her grandparents had lived here, and her parents, and she had been born here, nearer fifty than forty years ago. It had descended to her, and she lived here still. She had an old housekeeper and a beautiful cat, and two orphan children who were almost the happiest children in that part of the world. She always kept children in the house. There were a couple of others whom she had raised and who were out in the world, doing well, and when the two now with her were no longer children she would find another two. She did not believe in orphan asylums. She herself had never married.

She remembered George Eliot, and she had known the Rossettis, and more slightly the Carlyles. Now in her small, distinguished house, with its atmosphere of plain living and high thinking, fragrant and sunny with kindliness and good will, she set her table often for her friends and drew them together in her simple, old-fashioned, book-overflowing drawing-room. Her friends were scholars, writing and thinking people, and simply good people, and any one who was in trouble and came to her, and many reformers. She was herself of old, reforming stock, and she served humanity in all those ways. She had met and liked the Josslyns when she was in America years before, and when they wrote and told her they were in London she promptly named this evening for them to come to Chelsea.

They found besides Roger Michael a scientific man of name asked to meet Christopher, a writer of plays, a writer of essays, a noted Fabian, and as noted a woman reformer. The seventh guest was a little late. When she came, it was Hagar Ashendyne.

"What an unexpected pleasure!" said the Josslyns, and meant every word of it. "How long since that summer at the New Springs? Almost nine years! And you've grown a great, famous woman—"

"Not so very great, and not so very famous," said Hagar Ashendyne. "But I'm fortunate enough—to-night! You're a wind from home—you mountain-climbing, divine couple! The Bear's Den! Do you remember the day we climbed there?"

"Yes!" said Molly; "and Judge Black waiting at the foot. Oh, I am glad to see you! We did not dream you were in London."

"We—my father and I—have been here only a little while. All winter we were in Algeria. Then, suddenly, he wanted to see the Leonardos in the National."

Her voice, which was very rich and soft, made musical notes of her words. She was subtly, indescribably, transfigured and magnified. She looked a great woman. While she turned to greet others in the room, one or two of whom seemed acquaintances of more or less old standing, Molly and Christopher were alike engaged in drawing rapidly into mind what they knew of this countrywoman. They knew what the world knew—that she was a writer of short stories whose work would probably live; that her work was fabulously in demand; that it had a metaphysical value as well as a clutching interest. They knew that she was a world-wanderer, sailing here and there over the globe with a father whose insatiable zest for life crutches and wheel-chair could not put under. It was their impression that she had not been in America more than once or twice in a number of years. They read everything she published; they knew what could be known that way. They had that one summer's impression and memory. She was there still; she was that Hagar Ashendyne also, but evolved, enriched....

Roger Michael never had large dinner-parties, and the talk was oftenest general. The fare that she spread was very simple; it was enough and good; it gained that recognition, and then the attention went elsewhere. The eight at the round table were, through a long range, harmoniously minded; half, at least, were old friends and comrades, and the other half came easily to a meeting-place. Thought, become articulate with less difficulty than usual, wove with ductileness across and across the table. There sounded a fair deal of laughter. They were all workers here, and, necessarily, toward many issues, serious-minded enough. But they could talk shop, and one another's shop, and shop of the world at large, with humour and quick appreciation of the merrier aspects of the workroom. At first, naturally, in a time of public excitement, they talked the war in Africa, and the sick longing the country now felt for peace, and the general public foreboding, undefined but very real, that had taken the place of the old, too-mellow complacency; but then, as naturally in this company, the talk went to underlying, slow, hesitant movements, evolutionary forces just "a-borning"; roads that people such as these were blazing, and athwart which each reactionary swing of the pendulum brought landslides and floods enough, mountains of obstruction, gulfs of not-yet-ness. But the roadmakers, the pioneers, had the pioneer temper; they were spinning ropes, shouldering picks, stating to themselves and one another that gulfs had been crossed before and mountains removed, and that, on the whole, it was healthful exercise. They were incurably hopeful, though at quite long range, as reformers have to be.

The Fabian told a mirth-provoking anecdote of a Tory candidate. The scientific man, who possessed an imagination and was a member of the Society for Psychical Research, gave a brief account of Thomson's new Theory of Corpuscles, and hazarded the prediction that the next quarter-century would see remarkable things. "We'll know more about radiation—gravity—the infinitely little and the infinitely big. And then—my hobby. There's a curious increase of interest in the question of a Fourth Dimension. It's a strange age, and it's going to be stranger still—or merely beautifully simple and homecoming, I don't know which. Science and mysticism are fairly within hailing distance of each other." The talk went to Christopher's investigation, and then to mountain-climbing, and Cecil Rhodes's Will, and Marconi's astonishing feat of receiving in Newfoundland wireless signals from a station on the English coast, and M. Santos-Dumont's flight in a veritable airship. The writer of essays, who was a woman and an earnest and loving one, had recently published a paper upon a term that had hardly as yet come into general use—Eugenics; an article as earnest and loving as herself. Roger Michael had liked it greatly, and so had others at the table. Now they made the writer go over a point or two, which she did quietly, elaborating what she had first said.

Only the writer of plays—his last one being at the moment in the hands of the censor—chose to be strangely, deeply, desperately pessimistic. "I am going," he said, "to quote Huxley—not that I couldn't say it as well myself. Says Huxley, 'I know of no study which is so unutterably saddening as that of the evolution of humanity.... Out of the darkness of prehistoric ages man emerges with the mark of his lowly origin strong upon him. He is a brute, more intelligent than other brutes; a blind prey to impulses which, as often as not, lead him to destruction; a victim to endless illusions which make his mental existence a terror and a burthen and fill his physical life with barren toil and battle. He attains a certain degree of comfort and develops a more or less workable theory of life ... and then for thousands of years struggles with varying fortunes, attended by infinite wickedness, bloodshed, and misery, to maintain himself at that point against the greed and ambition of his fellow-men. He makes a point of killing and otherwise persecuting all those who first try to get him to move on; and when he has moved a step farther, foolishly confers post-mortem deification on his victims. He exactly repeats the process with all who want him to move a step yet farther.'—That," said the writer of plays, "is what happens to brains, aspiration, and altruism in combination—rack and thumbscrews and auto-da-fés, and maybe in five hundred years or a thousand a picture skied by the Royal Academy—'Giordano Bruno going to the Stake,' 'Galileo Recanting,' 'Joan of Arc before her Judges.' My own theory of the world is that it is standing on its head. Naturally it resents the presence of people whose heads are in the clouds. Naturally it finds them rather ridiculous and contrary to all the proprieties, and violently to be pulled down. Moral: keep your brains close to safety and the creeping herb."

"I think that you worry," said the Fabian, "much too much about that play. I don't believe there's the slightest prospect that he'll think it fit to be produced."

The woman reformer was talking with Molly. "Yes; it's a long struggle. We've been at it since the 'fifties—just as you have been in America. A long, long time. The Movement in both countries is a grey-haired woman of almost sixty years. We've needed what they say we have—patience. Sometimes I think we've been too patient. You younger women have got to come in and take hold and give what perhaps the older type couldn't give—organization and wider knowledge and modern courage. We've given the old-time courage all right, and you'll have to have the patience and staying qualities, too;—but there's needed now a higher heart and a freer step than we could give in that world that we're coming out of."

"I think that I've always thought it right," said Molly, "but I've never really come out and said so, or become identified in any way.—Of course, it isn't thinking so very positively if you haven't done that—"

"It is like that with almost every one. Diffused thought—and then, suddenly one day, something happens or another mind touches yours, and out of the mist there gathers form, determination, action. You're all right, my dear! Only, I hope when you go home you will speak out, join some organization—That is the simple, right thing that every one can do. Concerted effort is the effort that tells to-day."

"Are you speaking," asked Hagar Ashendyne, "of the Suffrage Movement?"

They were back in the drawing-room, all gathered more or less closely around a light fire upon the hearth, kindled for the comfort of Americans who always found England "so cold." It softened and brightened all the room, quaint and old-fashioned, where, for a hundred years, distinguished quiet people had come and gone.

"Yes," said the older woman. "Are you interested?"

"Yes, of course—"

She had not spoken much at dinner, but had sat, a pearl of listeners, deep, soft eyes upon each discourser in turn. There was in the minds of all an interest and curiosity regarding her. Her work was very good. She had personality to an extraordinary degree.

Now she spoke in a voice that had a little of the Ashendyne golden drawl. "I have been—in the last eight years—oh, all over! Europe, yes; but more especially, it seems to me, looking back, the Orient. Egypt, all North Africa, Turkey and Persia, Japan and India. Yes, and Europe, too; Greece and Italy and Spain, the mid-Continent and the North. Around the world—a little of Spanish America, a little of the Islands. Sometimes long in one place, sometimes only a few days.... Everywhere it was always the same.... The Social Organism with a shrivelled side."

The writer of plays was in a mood to take issue with his every deepest conviction; also to say banal things. "But aren't American women the freest in the world?"

Hagar Ashendyne did not answer. She sat in a deep armchair, her elbow upon the arm, her chin in her hand, her eyes dreaming upon the fire....

But Christopher entered the lists. "'Freest'—'freest'! Yes, perhaps they are. The Italian woman is freer than the Oriental woman, and the German woman is freer than the Italian, and the English woman is freer than the German, and the American is freer than the English! But what have they to do with 'freer' and 'freest'? It is a question of being free!"

"Free politically?"

"Free in all human ways, politically being one. I do not see how a man can endure to say to a woman, 'You are less free than I am, but be satisfied! you are so much freer than that wretch over there!'"

Hagar rose. Her eyes chanced to meet those of the man who had talked physics and mysticism. "We shan't," she said, "get into the Fourth Dimension while we have a shrivelled side. We can't limp into that, you know." She crossed the room and stood before a portrait hung above a sofa. "Roger Michael, come tell me about this Quaker lady!"

She left before ten, pleading an early rising for work that must be done. And Molly and Christopher would come to see her? She might be a month in London.

Christopher and the Fabian saw her into her cab, and she gave each her hand and was driven away. "That," said the Fabian, as they turned back to the house, "is a woman one could die for."

It was a long way to the hotel where the Ashendynes were staying. A mild, dark, blurred night; street lights, houses with lights and darkened houses, forms on the pavement that moved briskly, forms that idled, forms that went with stealthiness; passing vehicles, the horses' hoofs, the roll of the wheels, the onward, unfolding ribbon of the night. The air came in at the lowered window, soft and cool, with a hint now of rain. Hagar was dreaming of Gilead Balm. Up over the threshold had peered a childhood evening, and she and Thomasine and Maggie and Corker and Mary Magazine played ring-around-a-rosy, over the dewy grass until the pink in the west was ashes of roses and the fireflies were out.

CHAPTER XXII
HAGAR IN LONDON

"I have been re-reading Humboldt," said Medway Ashendyne. "What do you say, Gipsy, to risking a South American Revolution? Venezuela—Colombia—Sail from New York in September—and if you wanted ten days at Gilead Balm—"

Their drawing-room looked pleasantly out over gardens; indeed, so closely came the trees, there was a green and shimmering light in the room. It was May, and the sounds of the London streets floated pleasantly in at the open windows with the pleasant morning breeze. The waiter had taken away Medway's breakfast paraphernalia. Hagar had breakfasted much earlier. Thomson stood at the back of the room arranging upon a small table, which presently would be moved within reach of Medway's hand, smoking apparatus, papers, magazines, and what not. That eight-years-past prolonged sojourn and convalescence in Egypt had produced a liking for Mahomet, and Medway had annexed him as he annexed all possible things that he liked and that could serve him. Mahomet, speaking English now, but still in the costume of the East, had just brought in a pannier of flowers. They were all over the room, in tall vases. "Too many," said Hagar's eyes; but Medway who, when he was in search of the rarefied pleasure of adventure and novelty in strange and barbarous places, could be as ascetic as a red Indian on the warpath, loved, when he rocked in the trough of the waves, to rock in a bower.

"Cartagena would be our port. There's a railroad, I believe, to Calamar. Then up the Magdalena by some kind of a steamboat to Giradot. Then get to Bogotá as best we might. There's an interesting life there, eight thousand feet above the sea, with schools and letters, and governments in and governments out, and cool mountain water running downwards through the city, and the houses built low because of the earthquakes. Let us go up the Magdalena and across to Bogotá, Gipsy!"

He sat in the wheel-chair he had himself designed, a wonderfully light and graceful affair,—considering,—with wonderful places alongside and beneath for wonderful things. His crutches were there, slung alongside, ready to his hand, and wicker detachable receptacles for writing-things and sketching-block and pencils and the book he was reading and so forth. Where he travelled now, the wheel-chair must travel. He was good with crutches for a hundred paces or two; then he must sit down and gather force for the next hundred. He suffered at times—not at all constantly—a good deal of pain. But with all of this understood, he yet looked a vigorous person,—fresh, hale, well-favoured, with not a grey hair,—a young man still.

"Bogotá," he said, "An archiepiscopal see—universities, libraries, and a botanic garden. Shut-in and in-growing meridional culture, tempered by revolutions. By all means let us go to Bogotá, Gipsy!"

Hagar smiled, sat without speaking, waiting, her eyes upon Thomson putting the last touches to the table, and Mahomet thrusting long-stemmed irises into the vases, the faces of both discreetly masking whatever interest they might feel in the proposed itinerary.

When, after another minute or two, they were gone from the room, "Were you waiting for them to go? Why, who keeps anything from Thomson? He knows my innermost soul. I told him this morning I was thinking of South America."

Hagar rose, and with her hands behind her head, began slowly to pace the large room. "Bogotá qua Bogotá is all right. You've the surest instinct, of course, when it comes to matching your mood with your place. You're a marvel there, as you are in so many ways, father! And Thomson and Mahomet would like it, too, I think."

"Do you mean that you won't like it?"

"No. I should like it very much. But I am not going, father."

Medway made an impatient movement, "We have had this before—"

"Yes, but not so determinedly.... Why not agree that the battle is over? It is over."

"And you rest the conqueror?"

"In this—yes."

"I could see," said Medway, "some point in it if the existence you lead with me made the fulfilment of your undoubted talent—your genius, perhaps—impossible. But you write wherever we go. You work steadily."

"Yes," said Hagar, "but the work by which you live is not all of life."

"It seems to me that you have touched life at a good many points in these eight years."

"Being with you," said Hagar, "has been a liberal education." She laughed with soft, deliberate merriment, but she meant what she said. From a slender green vase she took an iris, and coming to the wheel-chair knelt down and drew the long stalk through the appropriate buttonhole. "You must have as large a bouquet as that!" she said. "Yes, a university and a training-ship! I can never be sufficiently grateful!"

They both laughed. "Well, you've paid your way!" he said; "literally and metaphorically. I suppose two gratitudes cancel each other—"

"Leaving an understanding friendship." She grew graver. "A good deal of love, too. I want you to realize that." She laughed again. "I do not always approve you, you know, but, thank God! I can love without always approving!"

Medway nodded. "I like a tolerant woman."

She rose and stood, regarding him with a twisted smile, affectionate and pitying. "I think that you are a fearfully selfish man—to quote Stevenson, quoted by Henley, 'an unconscious, easy, selfish person.' And I think that, of your own brand, you have grit and pluck and stamina for twenty men. There's no malice or envy in you, and you're intellectually honest, and you can be the best company in the world. I am very fond of you."

"Aren't you the selfish person not to be willing to go to Bogotá?"

"Perhaps—perhaps—" said Hagar Ashendyne, "but I am not willing."

"What is it that you do want?"

"That is the first time you have asked me that.... Wandering is good, but it is not good for all of life. I want to return to my own country and to live there. I want to grow in my native forest and serve in my own place."

"To live at Gilead Balm with Bob and Serena?"

"No; I do not mean that precisely." Hagar pushed back her heavy hair. "I haven't thought it out perfectly. But it has grown to be wrong to me, personally, to wander, wander forever like this—irresponsible, brushing life with moth wings.... If I saw any end to it ... but I do not—"

"And you wish to cut the painter? This comes," said Medway, "of the damned modern independence of women. If you couldn't write—couldn't earn—you'd trot along quietly enough! The pivotal mistake was letting women learn the alphabet."

"I could always have taken a position as housemaid," said Hagar serenely. "You can't make me angry, and so get the best of me. And you like me better, knowing the alphabet, and there's no use in your denying it.... If only you would conceive that it were possible for you to return to America, to take a house, to live there. And still you could travel—sometimes with me, sometimes without me—travel often if you pleased and far and wide.... Would it be so distasteful?"

"Profoundly so," said Medway. "It is idle to talk of it. I should be bored to extinction.—What is your alternative?"

"I shall be glad to spend three months out of every year with you."

"Is that your last word?"

"Yes."

"Suppose you do not begin the arrangement until next year? Then we can still go to Bogotá."

"Are you so wild to go to Bogotá?"

"All life," said Medway, "is based upon compromise."

Hagar, pacing to and fro, in her soft dull-green cotton with its fine deep collar of valenciennes, stopped now before the purple irises and now before the white. "Had I not appeared by your bedside in Alexandria, eight years ago, had I not been at hand during that convalescence for you to grow a little fond of, you would have, all these years, taken Thomson and Mahomet and gone to every place where we have gone, just the same,—just the same,—and with, I hardly doubt, just as full enjoyment. If you had not liked me, you would, with the entirest equanimity, have bidden me good-bye and seen me return with grandfather to Gilead Balm, and you would have travelled on, finding and making friends, acquaintances, and servants as you do to so remarkable a degree, missing not one station or event. If I died to-day, you would do every proper thing—and in the autumn proceed to Bogotá."

"Granting all that," said Medway, "it remains that I find and have found in the past a pleasure in your company.—I am going to remind you again, Gipsy, that all life is compromise."

Hagar, at the window, in the green and shimmering light like the bottom of the sea, leaned her forehead against the sash and looked across into the leafy gardens. Children were there, playing and calling. A young girl passed, carrying smart bandboxes; then an old woman, stooping, using a cane, with her a great dog and a young woman in the dress of a nurse. The soft rumble and crying of the city droned in together with a bee that made for the nearest flower. Hagar turned. "I will go with you for another year, father, but after that, I will go home."

"No end of things," said Medway, "can happen in a year. I never cross a bridge that's three hundred and sixty-five days away.—I'd advise you, if you haven't already done so, to read Humboldt."

He had a luncheon engagement, and at twelve vanished, Thomson and Mahomet in attendance. This drawing-room, his large chamber and bath, an adjoining room with its own entrance for Thomson, quarters somewhere for Mahomet, were his; he paid for them. Hagar had two rooms, her bedroom, and a much smaller drawing-room. They were hers; she paid for them. After the first two years she had assumed utterly her own support. Medway had shrugged. "As you choose—"

Now, in her own rooms, she wrote through the early afternoon, then, rising, weighted the sheets of manuscript with a jade Buddha, put on a street dress, and went out into the divine, mild May weather. She knew people in London; she had acquaintances, engagements; but to-day was free. She walked a long way, the air was so sweet, and at last she found herself before Westminster Abbey. After a moment's hesitation she went in. The great, crowded place was empty, almost, of the living; a few tourist figures flitted vaguely. She moved slowly, over the dust of the dead, between the dull, encumbering marbles, until she reached a corner that she liked. Sitting here, her head a little thrown back against the stone, her soul opened the gates of Quiet. Rose and purple light sifted down from the great windows; all about was the dim thought of dead kings and queens, soldiers, poets, men of the state. In the organ loft some one touched the organ keys. A few chords were sounded, then the vibration ceased.

Hagar sat very still, her eyes closed. Her soul was searching, searching, not tumultuously, but quietly, quietly. It touched the past, here and there, and lighted it up; days and nights, dreams, ambitions, aspirations. Some dreams, some ambitions were in the way of fulfilment. Medway Ashendyne was within her; she, too, knew Wanderlust—"for to admire an' for to see." She had wandered and had seen. She would always love to wander, crave for to see and to admire.... To write—to earn—to write.... Her lips curved into the slightest smile. The old days and nights when she had wondered, wondered if that would ever come to pass, if it ever could come to pass! It had come to pass. To do better work, and always better work—that was a continuing impulse; but it was still and steady now, not fevered.... Her mind swept with wider wings. To know, to learn, to gain in content and in fineness, to gather being, knowledge, wisdom, bliss—to gather, and then from her granary to give the increase, that was the containing, the undying desire. She had a strange passion for the future, for all that might become. She was sensitive to the wild and scattered motion within the Whole, atom colliding with atom, blind-man's-buff—all looking for the outlet into freedom, power, glory; all groping, beating the air with unclutching hands, missing the outlet, it was perhaps so small. She thought of an expression of George Meredith's, "To see the lynx that sees the light." To see it—to follow—to help find the opening.... What was needed was direction, and then unity of movement, the atoms in one stream, resistless. That, when the lightning bolt went across the sky, was what happened; corpuscles streaming freely, going side by side, not face against face, not energy dashing itself endlessly against energy. It was all one, physical and psychic; power lay in community of understanding.... Public Opinion, community of understanding, minds moving in a like direction, power resulting, power to accomplish mighty and mightier things.... Then do your best to ennoble Public Opinion. Do not think whether your best is little or great; do your best....

She opened her eyes upon the light sifting down from the rose windows. It was shortening, the shaft; evening was at hand in the church of the great dead. Many who lay there had had within them a lynx that saw the light and had tried to bring the mass of their being to follow; many had ennobled the world-mind, one this way and one that; each had brought to the vast granary his handful of wheat. Ruby and amethyst, the light lay athwart the pillars like an ethereal stair. The organist touched the organ again. A verger came down the aisle; it was closing time. Hagar rose and went out into what sunshine lay over London.

CHAPTER XXIII
BY THE SEA

But after all they did not go to Bogotá. That autumn a revolution flared up in Colombia. Medway considered the matter, but finally shrugged and shook his head. His point gained and Bogotá prepared for, he gave the idea up "for this time" with entire nonchalance. But they were in New York by now, and something must be done. He went with Hagar to Gilead Balm for two weeks—going home for the second time in eight years. The first time had been perhaps two years after his accident. Old Miss had cried out so to him to come, had so passionately besought him to let her see him again, and Hagar had so steadfastly supported her claim, that at last he gave in and went. He spent two months at Gilead Balm, and he had been gracious and considerate to all the family with an extra touch for his mother. But when he went away he evidently considered that he had done all that mortal could ask, and though Old Miss continued to write to him every three months, and though she always said, "And when are you coming home?" she never so urged the matter again.

Now he went with Hagar down through the late autumn country to his birthplace, and stayed for a fortnight, as unruffled, debonair, and dominant as before. The Colonel and Old Miss had each of them years enough now; as age is counted they were old. But each came of a long-lived stock, and they held their own to a marvel. Hagar could see the difference the years had made, but there was no overwhelming difference. The Colonel did not ride so far, and Old Miss, though she jealously guarded her key-basket and abated authority not a jot, was less active than of old. She had grown rather deaf, and Medway avoided much conversation with her. Captain Bob was more broken; he looked older than the elder brother. Luna was dead long ago, and he had another hound, Lisa. He was fond of Lisa and Lisa of him, but Lisa was not Luna, and he was very faithful to Luna's memory and always telling stories of her intelligence and exploits. Miss Serena had changed very little. Mrs. Green was dead, and the overseer's house at the moment stood empty. Car'line was dead, too, but Mary Magazine kept house for Isham. Hagar walked down to the ferry, and she and Mary Magazine talked about the old flower dolls and the hayloft, and the cavern by the spring. She walked by herself upon the ridge, and sat under the cucumber tree, and went to the north side, and, leaning against the beech, which had grown to be a good-sized tree, looked down the long slope to the hollow and streamlet, the sunken boulder and thicket.

The two weeks passed. Indian summer held throughout November. "This dreamy place makes you disinclined to vigorous planning," said Medway. "I think, Gipsy, that we will drift on down through Florida, and cross to Cuba."

This year there were evidently cross-winds. At Palm Beach, Medway came upon an old acquaintance, associate of ancient days in Paris, an artist with whom he had rambled through Fontainebleau forest and drunk good wine in Barbizon. For years each had been to the other a thin memory; now, almost with violence, the attraction renewed itself. But the artist was not going to Cuba; he was going to the Bahamas. He had a commission to paint a portrait, and his subject, who was a Chicago multi-millionaire, had elected to winter at Nassau and to give the sittings there. Commissions evidently did not come every day to the artist, who was post-post-impressionist, and he was quite willing to go to Nassau, jubilantly so, in fact. He said that, for once, light was going to be thrown upon the multi-millionaire.

Medway strove to persuade him to forfeit the commission and go to Cuba; and he was even, it was evident, prepared to make the proceeding no financial loss. But the artist stated explicitly that he had a sense of honour and could not leave the Chicagoan in the lurch; besides he wanted to paint that portrait. "Come and see me do it, old fellow! I'm going to take a reasonable small house with a garden, knock out partitions and make a studio. One commission leads to another:—Light on the whole bunch.—Oh, I'm told that you've got a million, too! How the devil did you get into that galley?" In the end, rather than part with the old companion, Medway exchanged Cuba for the Bahamas.

Thomson found a house that he thought would answer. Hagar went with him to see it, and agreed that it would. Both spoke entirely with reference to Medway. Back at the great hotel, she explained its advantages. "There's a pleasing, tangled garden, palms and orange trees and hibiscus, and a high garden wall. The verandahs, upper and lower, are wide. You get the air, and you have, besides the town, a great sweep of this turquoise sea. There's only a short, quiet, easy street between the house and Mr. Greer's studio. I think that it will answer."

It answered very well as Medway granted. He and Greer were much together. The Chicagoan, when he arrived, proved to be a good fellow, too, earnest in his endeavour to play blotting-paper to culture. Greer gathered from the hotel several congenial Americans. Medway, who always had the best of letters, provided an Englishman or two from the more or less stationary Government set. The studio became practically his and Greer's in common; they were extraordinarily good talkers and they rolled wonderful cigarettes and Mahomet made café fort. A violinist of some note was stopping at the hotel, and he and his violin added themselves to the company. When a traveller who knew Lhasa, Bangkok, and Baalbek, Knossos and Kairwan and Kandy, was joined to the others, it became evident that Medway had made his circle and found the winter's entertainment.

He had never made greatly too large demand upon Hagar's hours. He was full of resources, supple in turning from person to person of all his varied acquaintance in varied lands, moderately appreciative, too, of the value of solitude. On her side she would have stood, had there been need, for time to herself. It was to her the very breath of life. But there was never extreme need. She was within call when he wanted to turn to her, and that was sufficient. But this winter, it was evident, she would have her days to a greater extent than usual in her own hand. There was never any accounting to him for her days apart from him; almost from the first there had obtained that relation of personal liberty. To do him justice he felt no desire to exact such an accounting, and had he tried to do so he would have failed.

Hagar saw that she was going to have time, time this winter; and, what she liked, they would be long enough in one place to allow her to work with advantage. There would be visitors, invitations—already they had begun:—Medway would wish to give, now and then, a garden-party, a dinner-party. But life would by no means run to an exchange of visits and entertainments. Father and daughter had alike, in this direction, the art of sufficient but not too much. Anything beyond a certain, not-great amount wearied and exasperated him, wearied and saddened her. All that would be kept in bounds. Hagar, pacing the garden, saw quiet days, surcharged with light.

She was thinking out her half-year's work. A volume of stories, eight or ten in all—such a subject and such a subject; such or such an incident, situation, value; such a man, such a woman. She knew that her work was good, that it was counted very good, counted to her for name and fame. All that was something to her; rather, it was much to her; but only positively so, not relatively. It could by no means fill her universe. For years she had taken now this, now that filament-like value and with skill and power had enlarged, coloured, and arranged it so that her great audience might also see; and she had done, she thought, service thereby; had, in her place, served beauty and knowledge. But the hunger grew to serve more fully. Knowledge, knowledge—wisdom, wisdom—action....

Hagar moved to a stone seat that commanded an opening in the garden wall. She looked out, down and over a short, steep, dazzling white street and a swarm of low, pale-coloured, chimneyless houses, with the green between of tropic trees, to the surf upon the coral shore and the opaque, marvellous blue of the surrounding sea. The creative passion was upon her, but it moved nowadays as it had moved with many an idealist-realist before.... To mould living material, to deal with the objective, to deal with the living world, not the world of bright-hued shadows; to see the living world lighten to the dawn, see the dull hues brighten, see the beautyless become beauty and beauty grow vivid, to see all the world lift, lift toward the golden day, to see the race become the over-race.... She would have died for that and died to help. She laid her arms along the stone and her head upon them. "And yet I do not help, or not with all that is in me. I sit here to one side and spin fancies."

She rose, and put on a shady hat, and going out into the dazzling white street moved down it, and then by another across for some distance to the white road by the sea. Her back to the town, she walked on. A few scattered palms, the sea-wall; then where it ended, an edging tangle of the hard green leaves of the sea-grape; outside of that, low fantastically worn coral rock and the white dash and spray of the water. Though the sun was high and the sky intense and cloudless, a wind blew always; the air was dry and the day not too warm. There was hardly anyone upon the road. She met a cluster of negro children and talked with them a little. A surrey, of the type that waited on the street near the great hotels, passed her, driven sleepily by a sleepy negro, within it a large man in white. When it was gone in a little cloud of white dust there was only the long road, and the unyielding monotonous green of the sea-grape, and the water thundering in an undertone. Hagar turned aside, broke through the grape, and came down to the edge of the surf. There was a rock hollowed until it made a rude chair. She sat down and looked out to sea. On one hand, across the harbour mouth, rose from a finger-narrow sliver of land, a squat white lighthouse; but turn a little and look away and there was only the open sea, unimaginably blue, azure as the sky. The soft wind blew, the surf broke in low thunder. Hagar, her chin upon her hand, sat for a long time, very still.

"How good is man's life, the mere living—"

It seemed true enough, sitting there in the sunshine, in the heart of so rich a beauty. She agreed. How good it was, how good it often was!—only, only.... The line was true, perhaps, of all at some time, of some at all times—though she doubted that—but never of all at all times. It was true of a host at very few times; it was never so true of any as it might be.

"How good is man's life, the mere living!—how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!"

Who felt that?—Not even the poets immemorial who so sang—sang often in sadness of heart! They felt only the promise that the future cast before her.

Association of ideas was so strong and quick within her that she was apt to call up images, not singly, but in series and sequences. Her mind swept away from the West Indian sea. She saw her mother at Gilead Balm, beating her wings against invisible bars; the woman on the packet-boat, racked with anxiety, her child in her arms, begging her way to her sick mate; the figure of the convict at the lock, Thomasine in the silk mill, Omega Street.... She thought of Rachel and her married life, of things which she had heard at the Settlement, and the pain in Elizabeth Eden's eyes as she told them. She thought of Eglantine and its insidious sapping, sapping ... of Miss Serena and her stunted, small industries and too-obedient soul. She thought of Miss Bedford, and of Francie Smythe, and of Mrs. LeGrand. She seemed again to hear Mrs. LeGrand upon Roger Michael. She thought of the Bishop and the day he passed sentence upon a child for reading a great book. She saw the thicket back of the ridge, and dogs set by a human being upon a human being. She saw winter streets in New York, and the light shining on the three balls of the pawnbrokers, and a bread-line, and men and women huddled on park benches while the wind shook the leafless trees. She saw Wall Street and St. Timothy's. Her mind passed overseas. Russia—three summers before they had been there. Medway, though he laughed at her, had agreed to a stepping aside which she proposed. She wished to see Tolstoy. It was always easy to him to arrange such things, and it had ended in their being invited for two days to Yásnaya Polyána. She saw again the old man and heard his slow words. Non-resistance—but his mind, through his pen, was not non-resistant! It acted, it scourged, it fought, it strove to build and to clear the ground that it might build. He deceived himself, the tremendous old man. He thought himself quietist as Lao-Tzu, but there in that bare, small study he cried, Allah! Allah! and fought like a Mohammedan. Russia and the burden of Russia ... the world and the burden of the world. She thought of the East, and now her mind entered Zenanas—of India, and it was the child marriages; of Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, and it was the veiled women, proclaimed without souls. She saw the eunuchs at the gate. Away to Europe—and she saw that concept grading away, but never quite gone, never quite gone. Woman as mind undying, self-authoritative and unrelated, the arbiter of her own destiny, the definer of her own powers, with an equal goal and right-of-way—few were the earthly places where that ray fell!

"How good is man's life, the mere living—"

"With vast modifications and withdrawals, with dross and alloy," said Hagar. "But it might be—O, God, it might be! Lift all desire and you lift the whole. Lift the present—steady, steady!—and know that one day the future will blossom. And a woman's work is now with women. Solidarity—unification—woman at last for woman."