When it was time for Thurley to go to New York, Miss Clergy intimated
that she would spend the winter at the Fincherie, while the Corners said
Thurley had returned “to get cured of something,” because she had stayed
so at home and the only person in whom she expressed an interest had been
Dan Birge’s son.
“Oh, no, you must see me in my new opera. I’d be lonesome for you—”
“Lonesome for the baby,” Miss Clergy corrected, smiling. “There are
dozens of people you can have with you, Thurley—and I’m tired.”
So Thurley packed her trunks and told Ali Baba to call her back if Miss
Clergy seemed even inclined to want her. The day before she was to
leave, she wandered along the shore of the lake, looking at the deserted
mansions with a perplexed and disapproving air. She had found much of
which to disapprove in the Corners.
It was the queer war-madness in such as Lorraine and her following,
destroying common sense and blinding their eyes.
When this restless army returned, whether from overseas or from home
service, for return they must, what then of the readjustment? The quiet
tragedies that would be lived down slowly, so unsuspectedly—so bravely,
really. After every one in the home town had heard their stories and
their pictures had been locally printed—what then? They would assume the
old jobs, the maddening procedure of “Good morning, help,” and “Good
morning, boss”—the white shirtwaist on Monday and the pink one on
Thursday and the dark silk for best because it is serviceable; the hall
bedroom with the respectable family who are always asleep by ten o’clock,
the ending of dreams, the failure of the quest, the defeating admission
that the circle and not the cross is life’s truest symbol.
Surely these people would turn in protest to art as their solace. What a
task America had set for her, what herculean effort Bliss must make ...
for these people would appeal to the accepted standards of art as their
defense. The plays, poems, stories, songs, pictures, useless bohemian
lives that would follow if permitted, the refusal to become one of
many—to take an interest in the neighbors and not the enemies!
Thurley rose with sudden determination. Right always ends by acquiring
might, she told herself, and if Bliss Hobart possessed a vision he,
himself, was powerless to execute it. Player and worker were like the
wings of a bird, he had said, equal and necessary ... then so were
dreamer and doer. Thurley could _do_—her ancestors probably toddled about
in sabots a few generations ago but she thanked heaven for the sturdy,
unknown peasant strain in her which gave her the virility to act. Hobart
was the patrician dreamer—yet even gold cannot be used in its purest
state, it requires a sterner, coarser alloy before it becomes either
practical or fully beautiful.
“After the boys fall out of step,” Thurley informed the little lake, “we
must fall in step—teach them to go forth once more on a time clock.”
“Gray angels”—that was what the people in the vanguard, not only the
art vanguard but in all avenues of progress, should be called,—people
with enough of the divine in them to have no fear and to believe in the
ultimate success of their ideals, and enough of the human sinner to
understand the best earthly way to go about it. Gray angels! The people
who can do the needed drudgery which permits others to accomplish the
toil-free feats; stay-at-homes were gray angels; the women who did not
lift up their voices in egotistical speechmaking or in whines but who
gave their sons and kept the home in which to welcome them back; those
quiet, undersized little chaps with poor eyes or hollow chests who had
quietly applied at recruiting stations only to be turned off with a
laugh—they were gray angels, staying at the helm to do uninteresting
routine which is always needed to keep things afloat, yet applauding
those who have achieved the apparently bigger things; and it would be
gray angels who should steady the army of men and women who should
demand: “What next? We want another great task to do,” looking with scorn
at a clerk’s white apron, an adding machine, a modest millinery store!
The gray angels dyke a nation’s forceful common sense from becoming a
flood of useless sentiment, expending itself no one knows where, lost to
practical purposes. It would be the gray angels who would help win the
violet crown because they gauge nothing in misleading blacks or whites,
since life on this planet is not expressed in harsh, sweeping tones,
but in neutral grays, partaking of both white and black, now foggy and
bewildering, now serene and sweetly sad with lavender veiling, or rosy
flecked and hopeful.
Bliss was a gray angel—Ernestine, Polly, Collin and Caleb had the
possibilities of becoming them.
... “I believe I’m a gray angel, too,” Thurley thought with sudden
delight.