We’ve toiled and failed; we spake the word;
None hearkened; dumb we lie;
Our Hope is dead, the seed we spread
Fell o’er the earth to die.
What’s this? For joy our hearts stand still,
And life is loved and dear,
The lost and found the cause hath crowned,
The Day of Days is here.
—WILLIAM MORRIS.
The Burgesses had come to Fraternia in the preceding December, although
Keith had soon left again, having still many business concerns to recall
him to Fulham. The house there was now closed, and the life there for
them presumably ended, and, late in February, Keith had returned to
Fraternia.
Anna had employed the months between their decision to join the
coöperative colony and their actual journey to the South, in taking a
short course in nursing in a Fulham hospital, reviving her old knowledge
of the subject, gained in her girlhood in Burlington. She had it in mind
to fit herself thus as thoroughly as the brief interval allowed, for the
duties of a trained nurse to the little community, this being an
occupation at once congenial to herself and important for the general
good. For uniformity of service was by no means according to John
Gregory’s plan, and Gertrude Ingraham might not have found herself shut
up to the cotton mill even if she had done so incredible a thing as to
throw in her fortunes with Fraternia. All must labour, and all must
labour for the general good,—one of Gregory’s prime maxims being, If a
man will not work, neither shall he eat; but as far as practicable that
labour was to be on the line of each person’s best capacity, choice, and
development. Thus Keith Burgess’s feat of stonelaying had not been
enforced, but self-chosen, as an expression of his good will in the
sharing the coarser labours of the people. The work to which he had been
assigned by Gregory was clerical, not manual, being that of secretary to
the colony.
Anna, thus far, had had no opportunity for any especial use of her
vocation as nurse, the families of Fraternia being remarkably healthy
under the simple and wholesome conditions of their life, and serious
illness unknown during that winter. Her trained and well-equipped mind
obviously fitted her for a work of intellectual rather than industrial
character, and the duties of teaching the children of the colony five
hours a day—the required time of service for the women—were given to her
by common consent.
Neither at the time when she was chosen to this service, nor at any
other, had John Gregory directly communicated his wishes to Anna or
discussed his plans with her; and yet, from the day of her arrival in
Fraternia he had perhaps never formed a plan which was not in some
subtle manner shaped by unconscious reference to her. In her own way,
Anna’s personality was hardly less conspicuous than his; and these two
invisibly and involuntarily modified each the other’s action and
deliberation as the orbits of two stars are influenced by their mutual
attraction and repulsion.
By the whole habit and choice of his life John Gregory was a purist in
morals and in his personal practice of simplicity. The most frugal fare
and the simplest domestic appliances served his turn by preference,
although he had been born and bred in comparative luxury. He was free
and fraternal with men; gently respectful to women, whom he yet never
treated as if they were superior to men by force of their weakness, but
rather as being on a basis of accepted equality; while to little
children he always showed winning tenderness. Socially, however, he
scrupulously avoided intercourse with women, with a curious, undeviating
persistency which almost suggested ascetic withdrawal. The other men of
the colony, several of whom were men of some social rank and mental
culture, found it pleasant to stop on the woodland paths or by the
stream, all the more in these soft spring days, and exchange thought and
word, light or grave, with the girls and women, but never once had
Gregory been seen to do this, or to visit the households presided over
by women on any errand whatever. Whether a line of action which thus
inevitably separated him more and more from the domestic life of the
people, was pursued by deliberate purpose or by the accident of personal
inclination was not clear, but certain it was that the fact contributed
to the distinction and separation which seemed inevitably to belong to
Gregory. With all his simplicity of life and democratic brotherliness of
conversation, he lived and moved in Fraternia with an effect of one on a
wholly different plane from the others, and with the full practical
exercise of a dictatorship which no one resented because all regarded
him with a species of hero-worship as manifestly the master of the
situation.
His residence was in one of the small cabins on the western side of the
river, to which the bridge gave convenient access. The other cabins
served, one as a rude, temporary library, the other as storehouse, while
the large barrack-like building furnished bachelor quarters for the
unmarried men. Gregory, since Everett’s arrival, had shared his house
with the artist. Their meals were taken in common with the other men. No
one was in the habit of entering the house, Gregory having a kind of
office, agreeably furnished, at the cotton mill, where he was usually to
be found when not at work in field or wood. This was, however, often the
case, for he never failed to discharge the daily quota of manual labour
which he had assigned himself; and it was noticeable to all that if any
task were of an offensive or difficult nature, he was the one to assume
it first and as a matter of course. It was owing to this characteristic,
perhaps more than to any other, save his singular personal ascendency,
that the silent dictatorship of Gregory in the little community was so
cheerfully accepted. Nominally the government of the village was in the
hands of a board of directors, with an inner executive committee, and of
which Gregory was chairman. Several women served on the larger board.
Keith Burgess was a director; Anna’s name had not been proposed for the
office. There had been but one vacancy in the board on their arrival,
which was sufficient reason. The councils of the directors were held
weekly in Gregory’s office, and thus far a good degree of harmony
prevailed.
Again it was Saturday morning. A week had passed which had brought many
days of heavy rain. The river, swollen and yellow, dashed noisily down
from the gorge and filled its channel below with deep and urgent
current. On its turbid flood appeared from time to time newly felled
logs, floated down from the regions above, where Fraternia men were at
work, taking advantage of the swollen river for conveying their lumber
to the sawmill. A west wind, the night before, had blown the clouds
before it, and this morning the sun shone from an effulgent sky; the
wind had died to a soft breeze laden with manifold fragrance; and in
place of the chill of the north, the air possessed the indescribable
softness and balm of the southern spring.
It was again a busy morning in Fraternia, and everywhere, and in all the
homely tasks, thrilled the unchecked joy in simple existence of innocent
hearts living out their normal bent for mutual help and burden-sharing.
In the garden ground around their house, which was high up the valley in
a group of three others, one of which contained the common kitchen and
dining room for the inmates of all, Anna Burgess was at work in her
garden, sowing and planting in the damp soil. Glancing down the valley,
she could see Everett hard at work with another man, who had been an
architect in Burlington, erecting a little thatched pavilion, of
original design, graceful and rustic, to protect the new and precious
fountain from the sun, and keep its water clean and serviceable. Across
the river, in the library, Keith, she knew, was at work at his
bookkeeping, and also at the task of collecting excerpts from the
writings of social economists for use in an address which he was
preparing. A new mental activity had been stimulated in Keith by the
change of climate and conditions, and the influx of new ideas; and the
ease and cheerfulness with which he had adapted himself to the primitive
habits of pioneer life, would have amazed his friend Ward.
Barnabas had been gathering one or two sizable slabs of stone which had
been left from the lining and coping of the fountain, and Anna watched
him a moment as, having loaded them into a wheelbarrow, he proceeded to
carry them down to the new bridge, and so across to the west side of the
river. She hardly cared to wonder what he was about to do, being
otherwise absorbed, and her eyes did not follow him as he wheeled his
burden on up the knoll on which were the library and the house of
Gregory, set in their bit of pine wood.
The door of Gregory’s cabin stood open, as was customary in Fraternia in
mild weather. Barnabas dropped the burden from his barrow just before
the open door, stood to wipe the sweat from his forehead, and then,
kneeling, began the self-imposed effort of placing the stones together
for a low step, which was yet lacking to the rudely finished house. As
he worked, he now and then lifted his eyes and glanced into the interior
of the house which he had never entered. It had the walls and ceiling of
unplaned, uncovered boards of all the Fraternia houses; the floor was
absolutely bare and absolutely clean, damp in spots and redolent of soap
from recent scrubbing. The open windows let in the sun-warmed, piney
air, but the light was obscured, the trees growing close to the house,
and a dim gold-green twilight reigned in the silent room. A door stood
open into the second room where two narrow iron beds came within the
field of vision. There was the ordinary chimney, built of brick, of
ample proportions, with a pine shelf running across, and in the
fireplace logs of fat pine laid for a blaze in the evening, which was
still sure to be cool. Plain wooden arm-chairs stood near the hearth; an
uncovered table of home manufacture, clumsy and heavy, in the middle of
the room, was thickly strewn with books and papers and writing
materials. It was the typical Fraternia interior,—bare, and yet not
comfortless, and with its own effect of simple distinction, conveyed by
absolute cleanness, order, and the absence of the superfluous.
But it was none of these details which caught the eye of Barnabas. Above
the chimney there was fastened by hidden screws close against the wall,
so that it had the effect of a panel, a picture, unframed, showing the
figure of a slender girl with uplifted head and solemn eyes, set against
an Oriental background. It was Everett’s study of the Girlhood of the
Virgin, and besides it there was no picture nor decoration of any sort
in the place.
Each time he lifted his eyes from the stones before him to the picture
whose high lights gleamed strangely through the dimness of the room
within, Barnabas was more impressed with some elusive resemblance in the
face; and at last, striking the stone with his hand, he murmured to
himself in his native tongue, “Now I have it! The damsel there is like
our lady when she prays.”
Meanwhile the river ran between and thundered over the dam below; the
red roofs gleamed warm in the sun, and Anna, down on her knees like
Barnabas, on a bit of board, was tending her bulbs with loving hands,
while within her was springing a very rapture of poetic joy. Almost for
the first time in her life she was conscious of unalloyed happiness. Was
it because the sky was blue? or because the vital flood of spring beat
and surged about her in the river, in the forest, in the air? Not
wholly; nor even because under these kindly influences all the dormant
poetic and creative instincts of her nature were stirring into luxuriant
blossoming, although all these things filled her with throbbing delight.
The deeper root of her joy was in the satisfaction, so long delayed, of
her passion for brotherhood with lowly men and poor; the release from
the constraint of artificial conventions, and from the painful sense,
which she could never escape in the years of her Fulham life, that she
owed to every weary toiler who passed her on the street an apology for
her own leisure, her luxury and ease.
Suddenly Anna rose, and stood facing the west, her eyes full of light. A
voice within her had called and said:—
“I can write poetry now, and I will!” The fulness of energy of joy and
fulfilment in her spirit sought expression as naturally as the mountain
spring sought its outlet in the fountain below.
Just then her neighbour, in the house on the left,—it was the
dining-house,—put her head out of the window and said, reflectively:—
“Say, Sister Benigna, I wish I knew how to get the dinner up into the
woods to the men-folks. It’s half-past eleven and time it went this
minute, and Charley has gone down to Spalding after the mail; but I
suppose it’s late or something. Anyway he ain’t here, and I’ve got the
rest to wait on.”
“Why, I could take the dinner pails up to them, Sister Amanda,” answered
Anna, obligingly. The “men-folks” alluded to were of her own group of
families and were felling lumber in the woods north of the valley.
“You couldn’t do it alone, but Fräulein Frieda, she’d be tickled to
death to go with you. There she is now,” and Sister Amanda flew to the
cabin door through which a neatly ordered dinner table could be seen,
and shouted down the slope to the young German teacher who had just come
over the bridge with some books on her arm from the library.
A few moments later Anna sallied out from the house with Frieda, both
carrying well-stored dinner pails.
“No matter,” said Anna, smiling at the sudden diversion from her poetic
inspiration; “it is better to live brotherhood than to sing brotherhood.
But some day, maybe, yet, I shall sing.”