I took the power in my hand
And went against the world;
’Twas not so much as David had,
But I was twice as bold.
I aimed my pebble, but myself
Was all the one that fell.
Was it Goliath was too large,
Or only I too small?
—EMILY DICKINSON.
We all have need of that prayer of the Breton mariner, “Save us, O
God! Thine ocean is so large and our little boats are so
small.”—FARRAR.
“Trunks checked for Utopia! Direct passenger route without change of
cars! Ye gods, it doth amaze me!”
Thus Professor Ward, with a sardonic and yet discomfited smile, standing
in the studio of his friend Pierce Everett, in Fulham. The room was in
the disorder of a radical breaking up; packing boxes standing about and
litter strewn everywhere.
Everett in his shirt sleeves was piling on a table a mass of draperies
which he had taken from the wall. He was covered with dust, but his face
was full of joyous excitement.
“Yes, my good friend—straight for Utopia now!
“‘Get on board, chil’en,
Get on board, chil’en,
For there’s room for many a more.’”
Everett trolled out the old negro chorus with hilarious enjoyment.
“_Quos Deus vult perdere_—” began Ward, grimly.
“Oh, we’re all mad, you know. We are simply not so mad as the rest of
you,” interrupted Everett, gayly. “We have intervals of sanity, and are
taking advantage of one of them to get out of the mad-house, leaving you
other fellows to keep up your unprofitable strife with phantoms by
yourselves, while we actually—yes, we even dare to believe it—_live_.
Think of that, Ward, if you have the imagination!” Ward shook his head.
“No, you haven’t; that is so. If you had, you could not have listened to
Gregory unmoved.”
“Confound Gregory,” muttered Ward. “What did you ever get the man here
for, turning our world upside down!”
“That has been the occupation of seers and prophets from the beginning,
I believe,” retorted Everett, carelessly.
“Seers and prophets!” cried Ward, angrily, “that is what I can stand
least of all. This posing as a kind of nineteenth century John the
Baptist strikes me as exquisitely ridiculous.”
Everett’s eyes flashed dangerously, but he made no rejoinder.
“I saw your John the Baptist this morning in the Central Station buying
his railway ticket and morning paper like any other average man. The
locusts and wild honey were not in evidence.”
“No, he doesn’t take nourishment habitually in railway stations,” put in
Everett, coolly.
“I didn’t see any leathern girdle about his loins, either, although of
course he may wear it next the skin for penitential purposes. His
clothing appeared to be a species of camel’s hair—”
“Falsely so called,” put in Everett; “it is really English tweed. Very
good quality.”
“Yes, I’ll venture to say that is true. Your prophet of the wilderness
strikes me as knowing a good thing when he sees it. Plague take the
fellow! He has just that sort of brute force and sheer overbearing
personal dominance, which you idealists and credulous take for spiritual
authority.”
“Come now, Ward, we may as well keep our tempers and treat this matter
decently. Nothing is gained by calling names. You are naturally
prejudiced against a man who attacks the existing social order, and
suggests that even the rulers of the synagogue and the great teachers of
the schools have something yet to learn. Gregory is radical,
revolutionary perhaps, but not a whit more so than the New Testament
makes him. He is an absolutely conscientious man; he has given up every
personal ambition, wealth, position, all that most men cling to—”
“In order to become a Dictator, in a field where there is very little
competition.”
Everett suppressed the irritation which this interposition aroused, and
continued in a lighter tone,—
“You are enough of a dictator yourself to see this point, which had
escaped the rest of us. I can see that it is a little bitter to you to
have Mrs. Burgess seeking another spiritual and intellectual
adviser,—going after other gods, as it were.”
“Yes,” said Ward, gravely; “it makes me sick at heart to see a woman
like Mrs. Burgess, with all that glorious power of self-devotion of
hers, throwing herself blindly into this wild, Quixotic experiment—sure
to end in disappointment and defeat. It is mournful, most mournful,” and
Ward shook his head in melancholy fashion. “And when it comes to Keith,”
he resumed, “alas! our brother! Poor Keith, with his lifelong habits of
luxurious ease, his conventional views of duty, his yardstick
imagination, and his wretched health—to think of such a man being torn
from all the amenities of a refined Christian home, and carted across
lots, Government bonds and all, to be set down in some malarial swamp to
dig ditches with a set of ploughmen, to prove, forsooth! that all men
are created free and equal,” and Ward groaned and bent his head as if
overcome by the picture he had called up.
Lifting his head suddenly, he added in a tone of pensive rumination.
“He is one of those men Thoreau tells of, who would not go
a-huckleberrying without a medicine chest; and he would perish, I am
convinced, if deprived of improved sanitary plumbing.”
“All very clever,” said Everett, “but I will take the liberty of
mentioning the fact that the Burgess’s physician hails the North
Carolina project as the very best thing which could happen for Keith’s
health.”
Hardly had he finished the sentence when a light knock was heard on the
half-open door of the studio, and Anna Burgess, at Everett’s word,
stepped into the room.
She wore a thin black gown, for the day was warm, and a broad-brimmed
hat of some transparent black substance threw the fine shape of her head
and the pure tints of her face into striking relief. A handful of white
jonquils was fastened into the front of her gown, and the freshness of
the June day seemed to enter the dusty, despoiled studio with her.
Both men stood at gaze before her with deference and admiration in every
line and look. With a delicate flush rising in her cheeks, Anna gave her
hand to each, and spoke a word of greeting in which her natural shyness
and her acquired social grace were mingled to a manner of peculiar
charm.
“I ran up to hand you these papers for Mr. Gregory,” she said to
Everett, a vibration of suppressed joy in her full, low voice which he
had never heard before. “You know he said he would like it if you would
bring them,” and she placed a long envelope in his hand. “No, I cannot
stop a moment, Keith is waiting for me in the carriage. I did not give
the papers to the maid because I wanted to say to you, Mr. Everett, that
Keith does not see it any differently,—about the estate, you know. He
pledges the income, freely, altogether, but he feels that the estate
itself should be kept intact.”
“Thank Heaven, he has a spark of reason left!” exclaimed Ward under his
breath, adding quickly,—
“Pardon me, Mrs. Burgess, but you know I am not a Gregorian psalm
myself, yet.”
Anna turned to him with her rare smile, less brilliant than clear and
luminous.
“But I was so glad you came to the house, Professor Ward, and heard Mr.
Gregory,” she said with gracious courtesy; “we cannot expect every one
to follow out these new theories practically as we hope to do, but at
least we want every one we care about to know really what they are.”
“Do you think that many of those present at your house that afternoon
were inclined to accept Mr. Gregory’s gospel, if I may so call it?”
asked Ward, respectfully.
“Of course not,” interjected Everett, “there was no one there but cranks
and critics.”
Anna’s face clouded a little. “No,” she said simply. “Fulham is not a
good field for such a message; it was quite different in Burlington.
Most of them went away saying it would be very fine if it were not
wholly impossible.”
“And it does not occur to you, does it, Mrs. Burgess,” Ward pressed the
question with undisguised earnestness, “that perhaps they were right?
that there is something to be said for the old order, as old as the
race? that possibly certain distinctions are inherent in the nature of
things? Such distinctions, for instance, as separate you,” and Ward gave
the pronoun a freight of significance to carry, “from that man,” and he
indicated a labourer who had just left the room with an immense box of
merchandise on his broad, bent shoulders, and whose slow, heavy steps
could now be heard on the stairs below.
He had struck the wrong chord.
“Professor Ward,” cried Anna, her voice even lower than its wont, but
her emphasis the more intense, “did that man choose to be reduced to the
life and little more than the faculties of a beast of burden, to be a
brother to the ox, to live a blind, brutalized, animal existence, with
neither joy nor star?”
She paused a moment, and then added, with indescribable pathos dimming
the kindling light in her eyes:—
“It is that man, Professor Ward, and what he stands for, that sends me
to Fraternia, if perhaps I can yet atone. It is I that have made that
man what he is, and you, and all of us who have clung gladly to our
powers and privileges, and dared to believe that we were made for the
heights of life, and men like him for the abyss. If we could read our
New Testament once as if it were not an old story! If we, for one
moment, could lay our social cruelties beside that pattern shown us in
the mount!”
The deep heart of her and the innermost motive power broke forth from
Anna’s usual quiet and reserve in these last words with thrilling
influence upon both men. She was beautiful as she spoke, but with the
beauty of some Miriam or Cassandra,—a woman, as had been said of her
long before, “to die for, not to play games with.”
Professor Ward, the irritation of his earlier mood quite gone, stood
regarding Anna as she spoke with a sadness as profound as it was wholly
unaffected. Having spoken, she turned to go.
“Let me say one word, Mrs. Burgess,” he said, extending his hand to
detain her a moment. “I sympathize deeply with your purposes, and I am
not wholly incapable of appreciating your motives. From my heart I shall
bid you God-speed on your way when your time comes to go out into this
new spiritual adventure. It will be none the less noble because it is
impossible.”
“Good-by,” she said, and smiled.