Hagar

Hagar, with her odd, pensive, enigmatical face, drove the strain back to the limbo whence it came. She and Lily talked of the girls so long ago at Eglantine, of Sylvie and Francie and all the rest, the living and the dead, and the scattered fates. Neither had ever been back to the school, but she could tell Lily of Mrs. LeGrand's health and prosperity. "You don't like her," said Lily. "I was so ill and homesick, I didn't have energy one way or the other, but she was very smooth, I remember that, ... and we were all to marry, and only to marry—marry money and social position—especially social position." They talked of the teachers. "I liked Miss Gage," said Hagar, "and Mrs. Lane was a gentle, sweet woman. Do you remember M. Morel?"

"Yes, and Mr. Laydon."

Lily started. "Oh, Hagar, I had forgotten that! But perhaps there was nothing in it—"

Hagar laughed. "If you meant that at eighteen I sincerely thought I loved Mr. Laydon—and that he, as sincerely, I do believe, thought that he loved me—yes, there was that in it! But we found out with fair promptness that it was false fire.—I have not seen nor heard of him for many years. He taught at Eglantine for a while, and then he went, I believe, to some Western school.... Lily, Lily! I have had a long life!"

"I have had as long a one in years," said Lily. "But yours has been the fuller. You have a wonderful life."

"We all have wonderful lives," answered Hagar. "One is rich after this fashion, one after that."

The bell rang. In another moment Denny Gayde came into the big room. The six years since the Nassau month had wrought little outer change. He was still somewhat thin and worn, with a face at once keen and quiet, a little stern, with eyes that saw away, away—He was more light than heat, but there was warmth, too, and it glowed and deepened all around "Onward!" When he said the name of his paper, it was as though he caressed it. He was like a lighthouse-keeper whose whole being had become bent, on a wreck-strewn shore, to tending and heightening the light, to sending the rays streaming across the reefs.

CHAPTER XXXI
JOHN FAY

"Denny," said Hagar, "ask Mary Magazine to give you a coffee-cup." Denny came back with it and she filled it from the silver urn. "Rose went to Brooklyn to-night?"

"Yes.—I was to have spoken down on Omega Street, but at the last moment Harding came in and I sent him instead. 'Onward!' 's got the strongest kind of stuff this week, and there are some finishing touches—I'm going back to the office in an hour or two. Rose said that she asked you for that poem, and that you said you would give it, and she thought you might have it ready. I've got a telling place for it—"

"Drink your coffee and talk to the others while I copy it out," said Hagar. She rose and went to the desk in the smaller room. When she came back, Lily was dreaming with her eyes upon the forest bough, and the two men sat discussing Syndicalism. She laid a folded piece of paper upon the table beside Denny's hand. "There are only three verses."

He opened the paper and read them. "Thank you, Hagar! You've struck it home."

He refolded the paper and was about to put it in his pocket when John Fay held out his hand. "Mayn't I see it, too?" He looked at Hagar.

"Yes, of course, if you wish."

Fay read it, held the paper in his hand for a moment, then gave it back to Denny. "I wish I could write like that," he said.

His tone was so oddly humble that Hagar laughed. "I wish that I could build great bridges across deep rivers!" she said.

They sat and talked, and the poem gave leadings to their talk, though they did not speak of the poem. At first it was Fay, answering Hagar's questions, telling of the struggle of muscle and brain with the physical earth, of mountain-piercing, river-spanning, harbour-making. He was thirty-nine; he had been engineering, building in strange and desert places since he was a boy; he had a host of memories of struggles, now desperate and picturesque, now patient and drudging, grapples of mind with matter, first-hand encounters with solids and liquids and gases. He had had to manage men in order to manage these; he had had to know how to manage men. Born with an enquiring mind, he learned as he went along his governments and peoples, their customs, institutions, motor-faiths, strengths and weaknesses; also he knew the natural history of places, and loved Mother Earth and a good part of her progeny. He had also a defined, quizzical humour which saved the day for him when it grew too strenuous. He talked well, with a certain drawling fitness of phrase which brought Medway into Hagar's mind, but not unpleasantly. There had been much in Medway which she had liked.

Fay was no monopolist. The talk went from one to another, and Denny drew more into it. He had been listening attentively to Fay. "It's your work," he said, "and it's tremendous and basic work. You've been doing it through the ages ever since it first occurred to us that we could lengthen an arm with a stick and crack a nut—or an enemy's head—with a stone. It's tremendous and basic still. And the people who work under your direction, and atom by atom give you power?"

"Why, one day," said Fay, "they'll work as artists. A far day, doubtless, and there are degrees in artists; but I see no other conclusion. And to give the artist component in the mass of humanity a chance to strengthen and come out is, I take it, the tremendous and basic work to which we've all got to devote the next century or two."

"Oh, you're all right!" said Denny.

Hagar smiled. "My old 'News from Nowhere'—"

"But with a difference," said Denny. "Morris's was an over-simplified dream."

"Yes; we are more complex and flowing than that. But it was lovely. Do you remember the harvest home, and the masons, so absorbed and happy in their building ... like children, and yet conscious artists, buoyant, free—"

Fay looked at her. "What," he said, "is your vision of the country that is coming?"

Her candid eyes met his. "I have no clear vision," she said. "Visions, too, are flowing. The vision of to-day is not that of yesterday and to-morrow's may be different yet. Moreover, I don't want to fix a vision, to mount it like a butterfly and keep it with the life gone out. We've done too much of that all along the way behind us. Vision grows, and who wishes to say 'Lo, the beautiful End!' There is no End. I do not wish a rigid mind, posturing before one altar-piece. Pictures dissolve and altars are portable."

"Yes," said Denny, "but—"

"Lily says she reads Vedanta. Well, it is the Yogi's Neti—neti! Almost your only possible definition as yet is, 'Not this—not this!' The country that is coming—It is not capitalism, though capitalism is among its ancestors. It is not war, though in the past it warred. It is not ecclesiasticism, though ecclesiasticism, too, was an inn on its road. It is not sex-aristocracy, though that, too, is behind it; it is not preoccupation with sex at all. It is not sectionalism, nor nationalism, nor imperialism. It is not racial arrogance. It is not arrogance at all. It is not exploitation. It is not hatred. It is not selfishness. It is not lust. It is not bigotry. It is not ignorance, or pride in ignorance.—Neti, neti!... It is beauty—and truth.... And always greater.... And it comes by knowledge, out of which grows understanding, and by courage, out of which come great actions."

She ceased to speak, and leaned back in her chair, her hand at the amethysts about her throat. Fay kept his eyes upon her. He was conscious of a resurgence of a morning of a couple of years before when he had cut from a magazine a page bearing a half-tone portrait and had pinned it above his book-shelf. HAGAR ASHENDYNE had said the legend below. The rustle of the palms outside his hut came to him, and the mist of early morning above the waters.

The clock on Hagar's mantel-shelf struck ten with a silvery stroke.

Denny started. "I've got to go—work's calling!"

"I had rather hear you say, at ten o'clock, that sleep was calling," said Hagar. "You're working too hard, Rose says so, and I say so." She looked at him with friendliness deep and tender, soft and bright. "Almost Denny's only fault is that he makes his work his god rather than his servant. At times he's perilously near offering it a human sacrifice. Why will you, Denny?"

"There's so much to do and so few are doing it," said Denny. His eyes were upon the great forest bough, but he seemed to be looking beyond it, down long, long vistas. "I don't know that I worship work. But I want every prisoner of wrong to rebel. And there's no time to waste when you have to pass the word along to so many cells. Sometimes I feel, too, like sitting down and playing, but when I do, I always begin after a little to hear the chains." He laughed. "And I like you and Rose preaching dolce far niente! If ever there were two who had the power of work—!"

"All the same," said Hagar, "go to bed before two o'clock, won't you?"

He shook hands around and was gone. "What a wonderful face!" said Lily; and Fay nodded. "A kind of worn, warrior angel—"

Hagar took Lily's hand and kissed it. "You've defined Denny to a nicety! 'A kind of worn, warrior angel'—I like that!... No, don't go! It isn't late."

"We'll stay, then, just one other half-hour. And now," said Lily, "tell me about yourself. We see your name, of course, and what the papers think you are doing. But you yourself—"

"But I myself?" said Hagar. "Ah, if you'll tell me, I'll tell you!" The great bough of red leaves against the wall was repeated in miniature by a spray upon the table, resting in a piece of cloudy Venetian glass. Hagar took it from the vase and sat studying it, colour and line. She sat at ease in the deep chair, her long, slender limbs composed, her head thrown back against green-bronze, an arm bent and raised, the wine-red spray in her hand. "What," she said, "does a man or woman do in a dusty day's march of every great transit? About that is what I and many others have been doing, in this age as in other ages. Millions of minds to reach with a statement that for reasons of weight the column must surmount such a hill and again such a hill, the line of march lying truly on higher levels. The statement did not originate with the messengers of this or any other age; it is social, and the inner urge would send the marchers somehow on, but there is needed interpreting, clarifying, articulation—hence the office that we fill, though we fill it as yet, I know, weakly enough! So it means a preoccupation with communication—ways and means of reaching minds. And that, lacking a developed telepathy, means the spoken and the written word. And that means, seeing we have such great numbers to reach, a continuing endeavour to reach people in congregation. And that means arrangement, going from place to place, much time that you sigh for consumed, some weariness, a great number of petty happenings—and a vast insight into life and the way it is lived and the beings who live it! It means contacts with reality and a feeding the springs of humour and an acquaintance with the truly astonishing forest of human motives. And there is organization work and correspondence, and much of what might be called drudgery unless you can put the glow about it.... And there is the weaving all the time of the web of unity. The human family, and the dying-out before love and understanding of invidious distinctions. The world one home, and men one man, though of an infinite variety, and women one woman, though of an infinite variety, and children one child, and the open road before the three. And back of the three, Oneness. The Great Pulse—out, the Many; in, the One.... So I with others speak and write and go about and work."

When the clock struck again, Lily and John Fay said good-night. Lily was to come once more before her boat sailed.

Hagar looked at Fay. "You are going to England, too?"

He hesitated. "I've said so—"

"He's just built a great bridge," said Lily, "and he hasn't really taken a holiday for years. Robert and I want him just as long as he will travel with us."

When they were gone, Hagar went to the window and looked out far and wide upon the city settling to its rest. Here, to-night, would be deep repose, here fevered tossing, here perhaps no sleep at all. There would be death chambers and birth chambers—a many of each. And spiritual death chambers and spiritual birth chambers and the trodden middle rooms, minds that cried, "Light, more light!" and minds that said, "We see as it is." ... And over all, the suns so far away they were but glittering points. Hagar's gaze moved across the heavens from host to host. "Ah, if you were hieroglyphics, and we could find the key—"

She came back to the lamplit table; Thomasine away, Mary Magazine asleep—the place was alone with her. She had been tired, but she did not feel so now. She sat down, put her arms above her head and her eyes upon the forest bough, and began to think.... She thought visually with colour and light and form, luminous images parting the mist, rising in the great "interior sphere." She sat there till the clock struck twelve, then she rose, put out the lights, opened every window. In the east, above the roofs, glittered Orion, with Aldebaran red and mighty and the glimmering Pleiades. Hagar stood and gazed. She lifted her eyes toward the zenith—Capella and Algol and the street whose dust is stars between. Her lips moved, she raised her hand. "All hail!" she said; then turning from the window opened the door that led into her bedroom. It was a white and fair and simple place. As she undressed, she was thinking of the October woods at Gilead Balm.

Three days later, at the hotel, Lily and John Fay had a short but momentous conversation. "Do you want to go, John? I don't want you to go if you don't want to go, you know."

"That's what I came to talk to you about," said Fay. "I have my stateroom. The boat sails day after to-morrow. I've written to men I know in London and in Paris. I want to see them. They're men I've worked with. I want to see Robert. I even want to keep on seeing you, Lily! I've been about as eager as a boy for that run over Europe with the two of you. And I don't want to disappoint you and Robert, if it is the least disappointment. But—"

"I don't know that she'll ever marry," said Lily. "She'll not, unless she finds some one alike to strengthen and be strengthened by. A lot of the reasons for which women used to marry are out of court with her. Even what we call love—she won't feel it now for anything less than something that matches her."

Fay walked across the floor, stood at the window a moment, then came back. "I won't fence," he said. "It's simple truth, however you divined it. And I'm going to stay. I don't match her, but I've never proposed to stop growing."

CHAPTER XXXII
RALPH

Fay stayed. Lily's farewell note to Hagar merely said that after all he was not sailing with her and that she hoped Hagar would let him be among her friends. He made a good friend. Fay himself wrote to her, stating that he would be much in New York that autumn and winter and asking if he might come to see her. She answered yes, but that she herself was often away; he would have to take the chance of not finding her. He came, and she was away, came again, and she was away; then she wrote and asked him to dine with her on such an evening. He went, and it was an evening to mark with a white stone, to keep a lamp burning before in the mind. He asked how he could find out where she would be, since it was evident that she was speaking here and there. She nodded; she was working hard that autumn, oftenest in company with Rose Darragh, but often, too, with Elizabeth Eden and Marie Caton, with Rachel and Molly Josslyn. She showed him a list of meetings.

He thanked her and copied it down. "I see that your book will presently be out."

"Yes. I hope that you will like it."

"I think that I shall. How hard you work!"

"Not harder than others. The secret is to learn concentration and to fill all the interstices with the balm of leisure. And to work with love of the World to Be."

That November, together with Rose Darragh and Denny and Elizabeth, she was often speaking in the poor and crowded sections of the great city. Sometimes they talked to the people in dim, small halls, sometimes in larger, brighter places, sometimes there were street meetings. She grew aware that often Fay was present. Sometimes, when the meeting was over, he joined her; it began to be no infrequent thing his going uptown upon the car with her. She began to wonder.... Once in a street meeting she saw him near her as she spoke. It was a good crowd and interested. As she brought her brief, straight talk to a conclusion, Elizabeth whispered to her, "Lucien couldn't come. Is there any one else who could speak?" Hagar's eyes met John Fay's. "We lack a speaker," she said. "Couldn't you—won't you?" He nodded, stepped upon the box, and made a good speech. His drawling, telling periods, his smiling, sea-blue eyes, a story that he told and a blow or two out from the shoulder caught the fancy and then the good-will of the crowd.

An old woman, Irish, wrinkled, her hands on her hips, called out to him. "Be yez the new man? If yez are, I loike yez foine!"

He laughed at and with her. "Do you? Then you'll have to become a new woman to match me!"

The November dusk was closing in when the crowd dispersed. Elizabeth with the other woman speaker faced toward the Settlement. "Can't you come with me, Hagar?"

"No, not to-night. There are letters and letters—"

Fay asked if he might go uptown with her.

She nodded. "Yes, if you like. Good-night, Elizabeth—good-night, Mary Ware; good-night, good-night!"

They took a surface car. She sat for a minute with her eyes shut.

"Are you very tired?"

She smiled. "No, I am not tired. After all, why should it fatigue more than standing in cathedrals, walking through art galleries? But I was thinking of something.... Let us sit quietly for a while."

The minutes went by. At last she spoke. "I liked what you said, and the way you said it. Thank you."

"You do not need to thank me. Had I been less convinced, I might have spoken because you asked me to. As it is, I was willing to serve the truth."

"Ah, good!..."

There was another silence; then she began to speak of the light and thunder of the city about them, and then of a book she was reading. When they left the car it was dark—they walked westward together.

"Have you heard from Lily?"

"Yes. She and Robert are going first to the Riviera, then to Sicily."

"Both are very lovely. Why do you not change your mind and go?"

"I like it better here."

The evening was dark, clear and windy, with the stars trooping out.

"When," asked Hagar, "are you going to build another bridge?"

He pondered it. "I've been building for a long time and I'm going to build for another long time. Do you grudge me this half-year in between?"

"I do not. I was only wondering—" She broke off and began to talk about the Josslyns whom, it had turned out, he knew and liked. Two weeks ago she had dined there with him, and Christopher had taken occasion to tell her that John Fay was about the rightest all right he knew.... She had not really needed the telling. She had a good deal of insight herself.

They came to the great arched door of the apartment house, and there she told Fay good-night. When he was gone, she stood for a moment in the paved lobby with its palm or two, her eyes upon the clear darkness without; then she turned to the elevator.

Upstairs, within her own doors, Thomasine met her. "Oh, Hagar! It's Mr. Ralph—"

"Ralph!"

Ralph had been abroad, and she had not seen him for a long time.

"Yes!" said Thomasine. "His boat came in yesterday evening. And awhile ago he telephoned to ask you if he might come to dinner with you, and I didn't know what to say, and I told him you wouldn't be in till late; and he said did I think you'd mind his coming, and I didn't know what to say, so I said, 'No,' I couldn't think so; and he asked what time you dined—and it's nearly seven now—"

"Well, you couldn't say anything else," said Hagar. "Only I devoutly hope—" She moved toward her own room. "I'll dress quickly."

"And don't you think," said Thomasine, "that I'd better not dine with you—"

"I think just the contrary," answered Hagar, and vanished.

Ralph came. He was the Ralph of three years ago, of that last autumn week at Gilead Balm, only with certain things accentuated. He was richer, he had more and more a name in finance; his state was now loudly and perpetually proud of him. There was an indefinable hardening.... He was very handsome, Thomasine thought; he looked tremendously Somebody. He had been around the world—his physician had sent him off because of a threatened breaking-down. Apparently that had been staved off, pushed at least into a closet to stay there a few years. He talked well, with vigorous, clipped sentences, of Australia and China and India. Hagar, sitting opposite him in a filmy black gown, kept the talk upon travel. She had not seen him for eighteen months, and before then, for a long while, their meetings had been casual, cold and stiff enough, with upon his side an absurd hauteur. The eighteen months had at least dissipated that.... Dinner over, they went for coffee back to the apartment, and Thomasine determinedly disappeared. Old Gilead Balm talk was in Thomasine's mind. Ralph Coltsworth and Hagar Ashendyne were to mate—Old Miss had somehow kept that in the air, even so long, long ago.

In the grave and restful room with its shaded lights Hagar poured a cup of coffee for her cousin and gave it to him.

Taking it, he took for a moment also her two hands, long, slender, and very finely made. "Ringless!" he said.

Hagar, withdrawing them, poured her own coffee. "I have never cared to wear jewels. A necklace and an old brooch or two of my mother's are almost the only things I have."

Ralph looked about the room. The bough of flaming maple was gone and in its place rested a great branch of cone-bearing white pine.

Her eyes followed his. "I can see the forest through it. Do you remember the great pine above the spring?"

His gaze still roamed. "And you call this home?"

"Yes, it is home."

"Without a man?"

She smiled. "Do you think there can be no home without a man?"

He drank his coffee; then, putting down the cup, rose and moved about the deep and wide place. She watched him from her armchair, long and slim as Diana in her black robe. He looked at the walls with their rows of cabined thought and the pictures above, at the great library table with its tokens of work, and then, standing before the wide, clear windows, at the multitudinous lights of the world without. A sound as of a distant sea came through the glass. "And without a child?"

Her clear voice sounded behind him. "You are mistaken," she said. "My work is my child. One human being serves and expresses in one way and one in another, and I think it is not the office which is higher or lower, but only the mind with which the office is performed. Did I ever meet a man whom I loved and who was my comrade, and who loved me and saw in me his comrade, my home would probably open to that man. And we two might say, 'Now in cleanliness and joy and awe will we bring a child into our home.' ... I think that would be a happy thing to happen. But if it does not happen, none the less will I have my earthly home as I have my unearthly, and be happy in it, and none the less will I do world-work and rejoice in the doing. And if it happened, it would be but added bliss—it would be by no means all the bliss, or all the world, nor should it be. We grow larger than that.... And now, having answered your question, come! let us sit down and talk about what you are doing and when you are going down to Hawk Nest. I had a letter from Gilead Balm last week—from Aunt Serena."

He came and sat down. "The last time I was at Gilead Balm—two years and a half ago—they said they had ceased to write to you."

"They have begun again," said Hagar calmly. "Dear Ralph, we live in the twentieth century. You yourself are here to-night, eating my bread and salt."

"Have you been to Gilead Balm?"

"Yes, I went last summer, and again the summer before. Not for long, for a little while. Grandfather and grandmother and Aunt Serena said some hard things, but I think they enjoyed saying them, and I could ramble over the old place, and, indeed, I think, though they would never have said so, that they were glad to have me there. I will not quarrel. They are so feeble—the Colonel and Old Miss. I do not think they can live many years longer."

"Are you going again this summer?"

"Yes."

They talked again of his journey and recovered health, of New York, of the political and financial condition of the country; or rather he gave his view upon this and she sat studying him, her fine, long hands folded in her lap. What with question and remark she kept him for a long time upon general topics, or upon his increasing part in the subtle machinery behind so much that made general talk;—but at last, skilfully as she fenced, he came back to personal life and to his resentment of all her attitude.... He had thought that time and absence had cured his passion for her. Even a month ago he had told himself that there was left only family interest, old boyish memories. He disapproved intensely of the way she thought of things; she was not at all the wife for him. Sylvie Carter was—he would go to see Sylvie just as soon as he reached New York.... And then, upon the boat, coming over, it was of Hagar that he dreamed all the time. Like a gathering thunderstorm it was all coming back. Landing in New York he had only thought of her, all last night and to-day. It was an obsession, he told himself that—he could see that once he had her, possessed her, owned her, he would fight her through life ... or she would fight him ... and all the same the obsession had him, whirling him like a leaf in storm.

He spoke with a suddenness startling to himself. "What is between us is all this fog of damnable ideas that has arisen in the last twenty years! If it wasn't for that you would marry me."

Hagar took the jade Buddha from the table and weighed it in her hands. "Oh, give me patience—" she murmured.

He rose and began to pace the floor. The physical, the passionate side of him was in storm. He was not for nothing a Coltsworth. Coltsworths were dominating people, they were masterful. They wished to prevail, body and point of view, point of view, perhaps, no less than body. They were not content to have their scheme of life and to allow another a like liberty; their scheme must lie upon and smother under the other's. They wished submissiveness of mind—the other person's mind. They wished it in their relations with men—Ralph himself preferred subservient officials, subservient secretaries, subservient boards, subservient legislators. He preferred men to listen in the club, he liked a deferential murmur from his acquaintance. He had followers whom he called friends. A certain number of these truly admired him; he was to them feudal and splendid. He was a Coltsworth and Coltsworths liked to dominate the minds and fortunes of men. When it came to collective womankind, they might have said that they had really never considered the question—naturally men dominated women. To them God was male. They would have agreed with the Kentucky editor that the feminist movement was an audacious attempt to change the sex of Deity.... The thing that angered the Coltsworths through and through was Revolt. Political, economic, intellectual, spiritual—Revolt was Revolt, whatever adjective went before! Rage boiled up in the mind of the master. And when the revolted was not perturbed, or anxious or fluttered, but stood aloof and was aloof, when the revolt was successful, when the rebellion had become revolution and the new flag was up and the citadel impregnable—the sense of wrath and injury overflowed like the waves of Phlegethon. It overflowed now with Ralph.

He turned from the window. "All this rebellion of women is unthinkable!"

Hagar looked at him somewhat dreamily. "However, it has occurred."

"Things can't change like that—"

"The answer to that is that they have changed."

She sat and smiled at him, quite eluding him, a long way off. "Do you think that only mind in man rebels? Mind in woman does it too. And it comes about that there are always more rebels, men and women. We are quite numerous to-day.... But there are women who do not rebel, as there are men. There are many women who will grant you your every premise, who are horrified in company with you, horrified at us others.... Why do you not wish to mate among your own kind?"

"I wish to mate with you!"

She shook her head. "That you cannot do.... There is being drawn a line. Some men and women are on one side of it, and some men and women are on the other side of it. There is taking place a sorting-out.... In the things that make the difference you are where you were when Troy fell. I cannot go back, down all those slopes of Time."

"I am afire for you."

"You wake in me no answering fire." She rose. "I will talk about much with you, but I will talk no longer about love. You may take your choice. Stay and talk as my old playmate and cousin, or say good-night and good-bye."

"If I go," said Ralph hoarsely, "I shall not come again—I shall not ask you again—"

"Ralph, Ralph! do you think I shall weep for that?... You do think that I shall weep for that!... You are mad!"

"By God!" said Ralph, and quivered, "I wish that we were together in a dark wood—I wish that you were in a captured city, and I was coming through the broken gate—" Suddenly he crossed the few feet between them, caught and crushed her in his arms, bruising her lips with his. "Just be a woman—you dark, rich thing with wings—"

Hagar had a physical strength for which he was unprepared. Exerting it, she freed herself, and in the same instant and as deliberately as swiftly, struck him across the face with her open hand. "Good-bye, to you!" she said in a thrilling voice.

They stared at each other for a moment across space. Then Hagar said quietly. "You had better go, Ralph...."

He went. When the door had closed behind him, she stood very still for a few moments, her eyes upon the pine bough. The excess of colour slowly ebbed from her face, the anger died in her eyes. "Oh, all of us poor, struggling souls!" she said. Obeying some inner impulse she first lowered, then extinguished the lights in the room and moved to one of the windows. She threw up the sash and the keen, autumnal night streamed in upon her. The window-seat was low and broad. She sat there with her head thrown back against the frame, and let the night and the high, starry heaven and the moving air absorb and lift her. It was very clear and there seemed depths on depths above. Hyades and Pleiades, and the Charioteer, and Andromeda Bound, and Perseus climbing the steep sky. "We are all bound and limited—we are all on the lower slopes of Time—down in the fens with the lower nature. It is only a question of more or less—Aspiration born and strengthening, or Aspiration yet in the womb. Then what room for anger because another is where I have been—because another, coming upward, rests awhile in the dungeon that was also mine, perhaps it was yesterday, perhaps it was ages ago?... Where I am to-day will seem dungeon enough to that which one day I shall be.... And so with him, and so with us all...."

A month after this she found among her letters one morning four smoothly ecstatic pages from Sylvie Carter. Ralph had asked Sylvie to marry him, and Sylvie had said Yes. Sylvie wrote that she expected to be very happy, and that she was going to do her best to make Ralph so, too. The next day brought a half-page from Ralph. It stated that something Hagar had said had set him to thinking. She had said that there was being a line drawn and that some men and some women were finding themselves together on either side. He thought there was truth in it, and that, after all, one should marry within one's class; otherwise a perpetual clash of opinions, fatal to love. There followed a terse announcement of his engagement to Sylvie, and he signed himself, "Your affectionate cousin, Ralph Coltsworth."

But it was Old Miss whose letter was wholly aggrieved and indignant....

CHAPTER XXXIII
GILEAD BALM

The second letter from Old Miss came in February. The Colonel had suddenly failed and taken to his bed. Old Miss believed that he would get up again,—there was, she said, no reason why he shouldn't,—but in the mean time there he lay. He was a little wandering in his mind, and he had taken to thinking that Hagar was in the house, and a little girl still, and demanding to see her. Old Miss suggested that she should come to Gilead Balm.

She went at once. On the train, thundering south through a snowy night, she lay awake until half of her journey was over. Scenes and moments, occurrences of the outer and inner life, went by her mind like some endless, shifting tapestry. Childhood, girlhood, womanhood, work and play, the daily, material task and the inner lift, lift, and ever-strengthening knowledge of the impalpable—that last was not tapestry; it was height and breadth and depth, and something more. The old, wide travel came back to her; shifting gleams of Eastern cities, deserts, time-broken temples, mountains, vineyards, haunted groves, endless surrounding, azure, murmuring seas.... Medway, white-clothed and helmeted, in his rolling chair.... The whistle shrieked; the train stopped with a jar at some lighted station, then, regathering its forces, rushed and roared on through the February night. Now it was the last three years and more: they passed in panorama before her. Stages and stairways and scaffoldings by which the world-spirit might mount an inch: ferments and leavens: voices telling of democracy and fair play and care for your neighbour's freedom as for your own, your woman-neighbour and your man-neighbour. Through her mind ran all the enormous detail of the work being pursued over all the country; countless meetings, speeches, appeals, talks to a dozen gathered together or to two or three; letters and letters and letters, press and magazine utterances, organization, the difficult raising of money, legislative work, petitions, canvassing; drudgery in myriad detail, letters and letters, voice and pen.... And all the opposition—blind bigotry to be met, and a maniac fear of change, inertia, tradition, habit, the dead past's hand, cold and heavy—and all the interested opposition, the things whose book the movement did not suit—and all the lethargy of womankind itself.... And in the very camp, in the huge, chaotic movement itself, as in all the past's vast human movements, recurring frictions, antagonisms, small jealousies, flags set up by individuals, pacifications and smoothings, bringing compatibles together, keeping incompatibles apart.... A contending with outer oppositions and inner weaknesses, resisting discouragement, fighting cynicism, acknowledging the vast road to travel, keeping on.... She knew nothing that was at once so weak and so mighty as the Woman Movement. One who was deep within it might feel at times a vast weariness, impatience, and despair ... but deep within it you never left it. Here you dealt with clay that was so cold and lumpish it seemed that no generous idea could germinate within; here you dealt with stuff so friable, light, and disintegrative that the thought would come that it were better to cast it to the winds ... but you did not; you comforted your soul with the very much that was noble, and you hoped for the other that was not yet noble, and you went on—went on. It was all you yourself—you had within you the intractable clay and the stuff light as chaff, inconsequent; but you went on transmuting, lifting.... There was no other hope, no other course, deep down no other wish. So with the Woman Movement.... Another station. Hagar looked out at the lights and the hurrying forms; then, as the train roared into the white countryside, at what could be seen of the fields and hills and storm-bent trees. She was thinking now of Gilead Balm and her childhood and her mother. She seemed to lie again, close beside Maria, on the big, chintz-covered sofa. At last she slept, lying so.

Captain Bob and Lisa met her at the station, three miles from Gilead Balm. Captain Bob had a doleful mien. "Oh, yes, the Colonel's better—but I don't think he's so much better. He's getting old—and Lisa and I are getting old, too, aren't we old girl?—old like Luna and going away pretty soon like Luna. Well, Gipsy, you're looking natural—No, it's been an open winter down here—not much snow." He put her in the carriage, and they drove slowly to Gilead Balm, over the heavy country road.

Old Miss was well; Serena was well; Captain Bob himself had had rheumatism, but he was better.—The Colonel didn't look badly; it was only that he didn't seem to want to get out of bed, and that every little while he set the clock back and rambled on about things and people—"It's creepy to hear him," said Captain Bob. "He thinks young Dr. Bude is old Dr. Bude, and he thinks that Maria is alive, and that she won't let you come into the room. And then it'll change like that, and he's just as much himself as he ever was—more so, in fact.—Hi, Li-sa! let that rooster alone—"

The house cedars showed over the brown hills. "Dr. Bude wanted Old Miss to get a trained nurse because somebody's got more or less to watch at night. But Old Miss wouldn't hear to it. She don't approve of women training for nurses, so she's got young Phœbe and Isham's second wife—and I think myself," said Captain Bob, "that I wouldn't want a young white woman that I couldn't order round."

Red brick and brown fields and the black-green of many cedars—here was Gilead Balm, looking just as it used to look of a February. The air was cold and still, the day a grey one, the smoke from the chimneys moving upward sluggishly. Miss Serena came down the porch steps and greeted Hagar as she stepped from the carriage.

"Yes, your old room. Did you have a tiresome journey?—Is your trunk coming? Then I'll send it up as soon as they bring it. Young Phœbe, you take Miss Hagar's bag up to her room. The fire's lighted, Hagar, and Mimy shall make you a cup of coffee. We're glad to see you."

The old room, her mother's and her own! Hagar had not been in it in winter-time for a long while. When Phœbe was gone, she sat in the winged chair by the fire and regarded the familiar wall-paper and the old, carved wardrobe and the four-poster bed and the sofa where Maria had lain, and, between the dimity curtains at the windows, the winter landscape. The fire was bright and danced in the old mahogany; the old chintz covers were upon the chair and sofa—the old pattern, only the hues faded. Hagar rose, took off her travelling dress, bathed and put on a dark, silken dressing-gown. She took the pins from her hair and let it stream; it was like Maria's. She stood for a moment, her eyes upon the pallid day, the rusty cedars without the window, then she went to the chintz sofa and lay down in the firelight, piling the pillows behind her head, taking, half-consciously, the posture that oftenest in her memory she saw Maria take. Her mother was present with her; there came an expression into her face that was her mother's. Old Miss knocked at the door, and entered without waiting for the "Come in!"

Hagar rose and embraced her grandmother; then Old Miss sat down in the winged chair and her granddaughter went back to the sofa. The two gazed at each other. Hagar did not know that she looked to-day like Maria, and Old Miss did not examine the springs and sources of a mounting anger and sense of injury. She sat very straight, with her knitting in her hand, wearing a cap upon her smoothly parted hair, in which there were yet strands of brown, wearing a black stuff skirt and low-heeled shoes over white stockings; comely yet, and as ever, authoritative.

"I am so very sorry about grandfather," said Hagar. "Uncle Bob thinks he is better—"

"Yes, he is better. He will be well presently. I should not," said Old Miss coldly, "have written asking you to come but that Dr. Bude advised it."

"I was very glad to come."

"Dr. Bude is by no means the man his father was. The age is degenerate. And so"—said Old Miss—"Sylvie Maine has taken the prize right from under your hand."

"Oh!" said Hagar. The corners of her lips rose; her look that had been rather still and brooding broke into sunshine. "If you call it that!—I hope that Ralph and Sylvie will be very happy."

"They will probably be extraordinarily happy. She is not one of your new women. I detest," said Old Miss grimly, "your new women."

Silence. Hagar lay back against the pillows and she looked more and more to Old Miss like Maria. Old Miss's needles clicked.

"When may I see grandfather?" asked Hagar, and she kept her voice friendly and quiet.

"He is sleeping now. When he wakes up, if he asks for you you may go in. I wouldn't stay long.—And what have you been doing this winter?"

"Various things, grandmother. Thomasine and I have been working pretty hard. Thomasine sent her regards to every one at Gilead Balm."

"If you hadn't thrown away Medway's million dollars you wouldn't have had to work," said Old Miss. "Maria was perfectly spendthrift, and of course you take after her.—What kind of work do you mean you have been doing?"

"I have been writing, of course. And then other work connected with movements in which I am interested."

Old Miss's needles clicked again! "Unsexing women and unsettling the minds of working-people. I saw a piece in a paper. Preposterous! But it's just what Maria would have liked to have done."

Silence again; then Hagar leaned across and took up her grandmother's work. "What is it? An afghan? It's lovely soft wool."

"When," asked Old Miss, "are you going to marry—and whom?"

"I do not know, grandmother, that I am going to marry, or whom."

"You should have married Ralph.... All these years have you had any other offers?"

"Yes, grandmother."

"While you were with Medway?"

"Yes, grandmother."

"Have you had any since you set up in this remarkable way for yourself?"

Hagar laughed. "No, grandmother—unless you except Ralph."

"Ha!" said Old Miss in grim triumph; "I knew you wouldn't!"

Miss Serena came to the door. "Father's awake and he wants to see Hagar."

But when Hagar went down and into the big room and up to the great bed, the Colonel declared her to be Maria, grew excited, and said that she shouldn't keep his grandchild from him. "I tell you, woman, Medway and I are going to use authority! The child's Medway's—Medway's next of kin by every law in the land! He can take her from you, and, by God! he shall do it!"

"Father," said Miss Serena, "this is Hagar, grown up."

But the Colonel grew violently angry. "You are all lying!—a man's family conspiring against him! That woman's my daughter-in-law—my son's wife, dependent on me for her bread and shelter and setting up her will against mine! And now she's all for keeping from me my grandchild—she's hiding Gipsy in closets and under the stairs—You have no right. It's not your child, it's Medway's child! That's law. You ought to be whipped!"

"Grandfather," said Hagar, "do you remember Alexandria and the mosques and the Place Mahomet Ali?"

"Why, exactly," said the Colonel. "Well, Gipsy, we always wanted to travel, didn't we? That dragoman seems to know his business—we're going down to Cairo to-day and out to see the pyramids. Want to come along?"

Day followed day at Gilead Balm. Sometimes the Colonel's mind wandered over the seas of creation, with the pilot asleep at the helm; sometimes the pilot suddenly awoke, though it was not apt to be for long. It was eerie when the pilot awoke; when he suddenly sat there, gaunt, with a parchment face and beak-like nose and straying white hair, and in a cool, drawling voice asked intelligent questions about the hour and the season and the plantation happenings.

At such times, if Hagar were not already in the room, he demanded to see her. She came, sat by him in the great chair, offered to read to him. He was not infrequently willing for her to do this. She read both prose and verse to him this winter. Sometimes he did not wish her to read; he wanted to talk. When this was the case—the pilot being awake—it was her life away from Gilead Balm that he oftenest chose to comment upon. That he knew the content of her life hardly at all mattered, as little to the Colonel as it mattered to Old Miss and Miss Serena. They were going to let fly their arrows; if there was no target in the direction in which they shot, at least they were in sublime ignorance of the fact. Hagar let them talk. Not only the Colonel—Gilead Balm was dying.... In the middle of a sarcastic sentence the pilot would drop asleep again; in a moment the barque was at the mercy of every wandering wind. Hagar became Maria and he gibbered at her.

Young Dr. Bude came and went. February grew old and passed into March; March, cold and sunny, with high winds, wheeled by; April came with tender light, with Judas trees and bloodroot, and the white cherry trees in a mist of bloom; and still the Colonel lay there, and now the pilot waked and now the pilot slept.

May came. Dr. Bude stayed in the house. One evening at dusk the Colonel suddenly opened his eyes upon his family gathered about his bed. Old Miss was sitting, upright and still, in the great chair at the bed-head. Miss Serena had a low chair at the foot, and Captain Bob was near, his old, grey head buried in his hands. There was also an Ashendyne close kinsman, and a Coltsworth—not Ralph. Dr. Bude waited in the background. Hagar stood behind Miss Serena.

Colonel Argall Ashendyne looked out from his pillow. "Wasn't the Canal good enough? Who wants their Railroad—damn them! And after the Railroad there'll be something else.... Public Schools, too!... This country's getting too damnably democratic!" His eyes closed, his face seemed to sink together. Dr. Bude came from the hearth and, bending over, laid his finger upon the pulse. The Colonel again opened his eyes. They were fastened now on Hagar, standing behind Miss Serena. "Well, Gipsy!" he said with cheerfulness, "It's a pretty comfortable boat, eh? We'll make the voyage before we know it." His hands touched the bed. "Steamer chairs! I don't think I was ever in one before. Lean back and see the wide ocean stretch before you! The wide ocean ... the wide ocean ...