Imogen and Sir Basil were walking down a woodland path under the sky of
American summer, a vast, high, cloudless dome of blue. Trees, tall and
delicate, in early June foliage, grew closely on the hillside; the grass of
the open glades was thick with wild Solomon's-seal, and fragile clusters of
wild columbine grew in the niches and crannies of the rocks, their pale-red
chalices filled with fantastically fretted gold.
Imogen, dressed in thin black lawn, fine plaitings of white at throat and
wrists, her golden head uncovered, walked a little before Sir Basil with
her long, light, deliberate step. She had an errand in the village two
miles away, and her mother had suggested that Sir Basil should go with her
and have some first impressions of rural New England. He had only arrived
the night before. Miss Bocock and the Pottses were expected this afternoon,
and Mrs. Wake had been for a fortnight established in her tiny cottage on
the opposite hillside.
"Tell me about your village here," Sir Basil had said, and Imogen, with
punctual courtesy and kindness, the carrying out of her promise to Jack,
had rejoined: "It would be rather uneventful annals that I should have to
tell you. The people are palely prosperous. They lead monotonous lives.
They look forward for variety and interest, I think, to the summer, when
all of us are here. One does all one can, then, to make some color for
them. I have organized a kindergarten for the tiny children, and a girls'
club for debates and reading; it will help to an awakening I believe. I'm
going to the club this afternoon. I'm very grateful to my girls for helping
me as they do to be of use to them. It's quite wonderful what they have
done already. Our village life is in no sense like yours in England, you
know; these people are all very proud and independent. It's as a friend,
not as a Lady Bountiful, that I go among them."
"I see," said Sir Basil, with interest, "that's awfully nice all round.
I wish we could get rid of a lot of stupid ways of thought at home. I'll
see something of these friends of yours at the house, then. I'm immensely
interested in all these differences, you know."
"You won't see them at the house. Our relation is friendly, not social.
That is a froth that doesn't count."
"Oh! and they don't mind that--not having the social relation, I mean--if
they are friends?"
"Why should they? I am not hurt because they do not ask me to their picnics
and parties, nor are they because I don't ask them to my dinners and teas.
We both understand that all that is a matter of manner and accident; that
in essentials we are equal."
"I see; but," Sir Basil still queried, "you wouldn't care about their
parties, I suppose, and don't you think they might like your dinners? At
least that's the way it would work out, I'm afraid, at home."
"Ah, it doesn't here. They are too civilized for that. Neither of us would
feel fitted to the superficial aspects of the others' lives."
"We have that sort of thing in England, too, you know; only perhaps we
look at it more from the other side, and recognize difference rather than
sameness."
"Very much more, I think," said Imogen with a slight smile. "I should
think that there was very little resemblance. Your social structure is
a wholesome, natural growth, embodying ideals that, in the main, are
unconscious. We started from that and have been building ever since toward
conscious ideals."
"Well,"--Sir Basil passed over this simile, a little perplexed,--"it's very
wonderful that they shouldn't feel--inferior, you know, in our ugly sense
of the word, if they only get one side of friendship and not the other. Now
that's how we manage in England, you see; but then I'm afraid it doesn't
work out as you say it does here; I'm afraid they do feel inferior, after a
fashion."
"Only the truly inferior could feel inferiority, since they get the real
side of friendship," said Imogen, with gentle authority. "And I can't think
that, in our sense of the word, the real side is given with you. There is
conscious condescension, conscious adaptation to a standard supposed
lower."
"I see; I see"; Sir Basil murmured, looking, while still perplexed, rather
conscience-stricken; "yes, I suppose you're right."
Imogen looked as though she more than supposed it, and, feeling himself
quite worsted, Sir Basil went on to ask her further questions about the
club and kindergarten.
"What a lot of work it must all mean for you," he said.
"That, I think, is one's only right to the advantages one has--education,
taste, inherited traditions," said Imogen, willing to enlighten this
charmingly civilized, yet spiritually barbarous, interlocutor who followed
her, tall, in his delightfully outdoor-looking garments, his tie and the
tilt of his Panama hat answering her nicest sense of fitness, and his
handsome brown face, quizzical, yet very attentive, meeting her eyes on
its leafy background whenever she turned her head. "If they are not made
instruments to use for others they rust in our hands and poison us," she
said. "That's the only real significance of an aristocracy, a class fitted
to serve, with the highest service, the needs of all. Of course, much of
our best and deepest thought about these things is English; don't imagine
me ungrateful to the noble thinkers of your--of my--race,--they have
moulded and inspired us; but, there is the strange paradox of your
civilization, your thought reacts so little on your life. Your idealists
and seers count only for your culture, and even in your culture affect so
little the automatic existence of your people. They form a little isolated
class, a leaven that lies outside the lump. Now, with us, thought rises,
works, ferments through every section of our common life."
Quite without fire, almost indolently, she spoke; very simply, too,
glancing round at him, as though she could not expect much understanding
from such an alien listener.
"I'm awfully glad, you know, to get you to talk to me like this," said Sir
Basil, after a meditative pause; "I saw a good bit of you in New York, but
you never talked much with me."
"You had mama to talk to."
"But I want to talk to you, too. You do a lot of thinking, I can see that."
"I try to"; she smiled a little at his _naïveté_.
"Your mother told me so much about you that I'm tremendously eager to know
you for myself."
"Well, I hope that you may come to, for mama's pictures of me are not
likely to be accurate," said Imogen mildly. "We don't think in the same way
or see things in the same way and, though we are so fond of each other, we
are not interested in the same things. Perhaps that is why I don't interest
her particular friends. They would not find much in common between mama and
me"; but her smile was now a little humorous and she was quite prepared for
his "Oh, but, I assure you, I am interested in you."
Already, with her unerring instinct for power, Imogen knew that Sir Basil
was interested in her. There was only, to be sure, a languid pleasure in
the sense of power over a person already, as it were, so bespoken, so in
bondage to other altars; but, though without a trace of coquetry, the smile
quietly claimed him as a partial, a damaged convert. Imogen always knew
when people were capable of being, as she expressed it to herself, "Hers."
She made small effort for those who were without the capacity. She never
misdirected such smiles upon Rose, or Miss Bocock, or Mrs. Wake. And now,
as Sir Basil went on to asseverate, just behind her shoulder, his pleasant
tones quite touched with eagerness, that the more he saw of her the more
interested he became, she allowed him to draw her into a playful argument
on the subject.
"Yes, I quite believe that you would like me--if you came to know me"--she
was willing to concede at last; "but, no, indeed no, I don't think that you
would ever feel much interest in me."
"You mean because I'm not sufficiently interesting myself? Is that it, eh?"
Sir Basil acutely asked, reflecting that he had never seen a girl walk so
beautifully or dress so exquisitely. The sunlight glittered in her hair.
"I don't mean that at all," said Imogen; "although I don't fancy that you
are interested so deeply, and in so many things, as I am."
"Now, really! Why not? You haven't given me a chance to show you. Of course
I'm not clever."
"I meant nothing petty, like cleverness."
"You mean that I don't take life seriously enough to please you?"
"Not that, exactly. It's that we face in opposite directions, as it were.
Life isn't to you what it is to me, it isn't to you such a big, beautiful
thing, with so many wonderful vistas in it--such far, high peaks."
She was very grave now, and the gravity, the assurance, and, with them, the
sweetness, of this young girl were charming and perplexing to Sir Basil.
Girls so assured he had found harsh, disagreeable and, almost always, ugly;
they had been the sort of girl one avoided. And girls so lovely had usually
been coy and foolish. This girl walked like a queen, looked at one like a
philosopher, smiled at one like an angel. He fixed his mind on her last
words, rallying his sense of quizzical paternity to meet such disconcerting
statements.
"Well, but you are very young; life looks like that--peaks, you know, and
vistas, and all the rest--when one is young. You've not had time to find it
out, to be disappointed," said Sir Basil.
Imogen's calm eye rested upon him, and even before she spoke he knew that
he had made a very false step. It was as if, sunken to the knees in his
foolish bog, he stood before her while she replied:
"Ah, it's that that is shallow in you, or, let us say, undeveloped, still
to be able to think of life in those terms. They are the thoughts of an
unawakened person, and some people, I know, go all through life without
awaking. You imagine, I suppose, that I think of life as something that
is going to give me happiness, to fulfil sentimental, girlish dreams. You
are mistaken. I have known bitter disappointments, bitter losses, bitter
shatterings of hope. But life is wonderful and beautiful to me because
we can be our best and do our best in it, and for it, if we try. It's an
immense adventure of the soul, an adventure that can disappoint only in the
frivolous sense you were thinking of. Such joys are not the objects of our
quest. One is disappointed with oneself, often, for falling so short of
one's vision, and people whom we love and trust may fail us and give us
piercing pain; but life, in all its oneness, is good and beautiful if we
wake to its deepest reality and give our hearts to the highest that we
know."
She spoke sadly, softly, surely, thinking of her own deep wounds, and to
speak such words was almost like repeating a familiar lesson,--how often
she had heard them on her father's lips,--and Sir Basil listened, while he
looked at the golden head, at the white hand stretched out now and then to
put aside a branch or sapling--listened with an amazement half baffled and
wholly admiring. He had never heard a girl talk like that. He had heard
such words before, often, of course, but they had never sounded like this;
they seemed fresh, and sparkling with a heavenly dew, spoken so quietly,
with such indifference to their effect, such calmness of conviction. The
first impression of her, that always hovered near, grew more strongly upon
him. There was something heavenly about this girl. It was as though he had
heard an angel singing in the woods, and a feeling of humility stole over
him. It was usual for Sir Basil, who rarely thought about himself, to feel
modest, but very unusual for him to feel humble.
"You make me believe it, when you say it," he murmured. "I'm afraid you
think me a dreadfully earthy, commonplace person."
Imogen, at the change of note in his voice, looked round at him, more
really aware of him than she had been at all, and when she met his glance
the prophet's calm fervor rose in her to answer the faith that she felt in
him. She paused, letting him come abreast of her in the narrow path, and
they both stood still, looking at each other.
"You are not earthy; you are not commonplace," said Imogen, then, as a
result of her contemplation. "I believe that you are a very big person, Sir
Basil."
"A big person? How do you mean?" He absolutely flushed, half abashed, half
delighted.
Imogen continued to gaze, clearly and deeply. "There are all sorts of
possibilities in you."
"Oh, come now! At my age! Why, any possibilities are over, except for a
cheerful kind of vegetating."
"You have vegetated all your life, I can see that. No one has ever waked
you. You have hardly _used_ your soul at all. It's with you as it is with
your country, whose life is built strongly and sanely with body and brain
but who has not felt nationally, as a whole, its spirit. Like it, you have
a spirit; like it, you are full of possibilities."
"Miss Upton, you aren't like anybody I've ever known. What sort of
possibilities?"
She walked on now, feeling his thrill echo in herself, symptomatic of the
passing forth of power and its return as enrichment of life and inspiration
to helpfulness. "Of service," she said. "Of devotion to great needs;
courage in great causes. I don't think that you have ever had a chance."
Sir Basil, keeping his eyes on her straight, pale profile, groping and
confused in this new flood of light, wondered if he had.
"You are an extraordinary young woman," he said at last. "You make me
believe in everything you say, though it's so awfully queer, you know, to
think in that way about myself. If you talk to me often like this, about
needs and causes, will it give me more of a chance, do you think?"
"We must all win to the light for ourselves," said Imogen very gently, "but
we can help one another."
They had come now to the edge of the wood and out upon the white road that
curved from the village up to the blue of the hills they had descended. A
tiny brook ran with a sharp, silvery tinkle on its farther edge and it was
bordered by a light barrier of white railing. Beyond were spacious,
half-cultivated meadows, stretched out for miles in the lap of low-lying
hills.
Serene yet inhuman the landscape looked, a background to the thinnest of
histories, significant only of its own dreaming solitude; and the village,
among its elms, a little farther on, suggested the barest past, the most
barren future. The road led on into its main street, where the elms made
a stately avenue, arching over scattered frame houses of buff and gray
and white. Imogen told Sir Basil that some of these houses were old, and
pointed out an austere classic façade with pediment and pillars; explained
to him, too, the pathetic condition of so much of abandoned New England.
Sir Basil was thinking more of her last words in the woods than of local
color, but he had, while he listened, a fairly definite impression of
pinchbeck shops; of shabby awnings slanting in the sunlight over heaps of
tumbled fruit and vegetables; of "buggies," slip-shod, with dust-whitened
wheels, the long-tailed, long-maned, slightly harnessed horses hitched to
posts along the pavements. The faces that passed were indolent yet eager.
The jaws of many worked mechanically at some unappeasing task of
mastication.
Sir Basil had traveled since his arrival in America, had seen the luxuries
of the Atlantic seacoast, the purposeful energy of Chicago, California's
Eden-like abundance, and had seen other New England villages where beauty
was cherished and made permanent. He hardly needed Imogen's further
comments to establish his sense of contrast.
"This was always a poor enough little place. Any people who made it count
left it long ago. But even here," she went on, "even in its stagnation, one
can find some of the things we care for in our country, some of the things
we live for."
Some of these things seemed personified in the figure of the young woman
who met them in the girls' club, among the shelves of books and the
numerous framed photographs from the old masters. Imogen introduced
Sir Basil to her and he watched her with interest while she and Imogen
discussed some business matters. She was slender and upright, perhaps too
upright; she was, in manner, unaffected and assured, perhaps too assured,
but that Sir Basil did not observe. He found her voice unpleasant and her
pronunciation faulty, but thought that she expressed herself with great
force and fluency. Her eyes were bright, her skin sallow, she smiled
gravely, and her calmness and her smile reminded Sir Basil a little of
Imogen; perhaps they were racial. She was dressed in a simple gray cotton
frock with neat lawn collar and cuffs, and her hair was raised in a
lustrous "pompadour," a wide comb traversing it behind and combs at the
sides of her head upholding it in front. Toward Sir Basil she behaved with
gracious stateliness of demeanor, so that he wondered anew at the anomalies
of a country of ideals where a young person so well-appearing should not be
asked to dinner.
Several other girls came in while they were there, and they all surrounded
Imogen with eager familiarity of manner; all displayed toward himself, as
he was introduced, variations of Miss Hickson's stateliness. He thought
it most delightful and interesting and the young women very remarkable
persons. One discordant note, only, was struck in the harmony, and
that discord was barely discerned by his untrained ear. While Imogen
was talking, a girl appeared in the doorway, hesitated, then, with an
indifferent and forbidding manner, strolled across the room to the
book-shelves, where she selected a book, strolling out again with the
barest nod of sullen recognition. She was a swarthy girl, robust and ample
of form, with black eyes and dusky cheeks. Her torn red blouse and untidy
hair marked her out from the sleek and social group. Sir Basil thought her
very interesting looking. He asked Imogen, as they walked away under the
elms, who she was. "That artistic young person, with the dark hair."
"Artistic? Do you mean Mattie Smith?--the girl with the bad manners?" asked
Imogen, smiling tolerantly.
"Yes, she looked like a clever young person. She belongs to the club?"
"She hardly counts as one of its members, though we welcome everyone, and,
like all the girls of the village, she enjoys the use of our library. She
is not clever, however. She is an envious and a rather ill-tempered girl,
with very little of the spirit of sisterhood in her. And she nurses her
defect of isolation and self-sufficiency. I hope that we may win her over
to wider, sweeter outlooks some day."
Mattie Smith, however, was one of the people upon whom Imogen wasted no
smiles. On the Uptons first coming to spend their summers near Hamborough,
Imogen had found this indolent yet forcible personality barring her path
of benignant activity. Mattie Smith, unaided, undirected, ignorant of the
Time Spirit's high demands upon the individual, had already formed a club
of sorts, a tawdry little room hung with bright bunting and adorned with
colored pictures from the cheaper magazines, pictures of over-elegant,
amorously inclined young couples in ball-rooms or on yachts and beaches.
Here the girls read poor literature, played games, made candy over the
stove and gossiped about their young men. Imogen deeply disapproved of the
place; its ventilation was atrocious and its moral influence harmful; it
relaxed and did not discipline,--so she had expressed it to her father. It
soon withered under her rival beams. Mattie Smith's members drifted by
degrees into the more advantageous alliance. Mattie Smith had resented this
triumphant placing of the higher standard and took pains, as Imogen, with
the calm displeasure of the successful, observed, to make difficulties
for her and to treat her with ostentatious disregard. Imogen guessed very
accurately at the seething of anger and jealousy that bubbled in Mattie
Smith's breast; it was typical of so much of the lamentable spirit
displayed by rudimentary natures when feeling the pressure of an ideal they
did not share or when brought into contact with a more finished manner of
life from which they were excluded. Imogen, too, could not have borne a
rival ascendancy; but she was ascendant through right divine, and, while so
acutely understanding Mattie Smith's state of mind, she could not recognize
a certain sameness of nature. She hoped that Mattie Smith would "grow," but
she felt that, essentially, she was not of the sort from which "hers" were
made.