THE NEW SPRINGS
Laydon's three days spun themselves out to five with a fine smoothness.
Colonel Ashendyne's tone was balm itself to what it might have been.
Miss Serena was willing to discuss with him "In Memoriam" and the
novels of Miss Broughton, and Ralph Coltsworth who was also at the New
Springs walked with him over the place. Laydon was keen enough to see
that Hagar had appealed to her family, and that Ashendyne breeding
had rallied to her support. He was at once provoked and soothed; now
conscious only of the injury to his healthy self-love, and now of a
vague relief that, young as he still was, and with that wonderful
future all to make, he really was not tied down. His very vanity would
not agree but that the woman with whom he had thought himself in love
must be of a superior type and an undeniable charm, but the same vanity
conceded gently that to err was mortal, and that there were as good
fish in the sea as ever came out of it, and that he certainly had
not been fatally smitten--on the whole, she, poor little thing! had
probably suffered the most of the two. Charming as she was, the glamour
for him, he conceded, was gone. _He had come off pretty well, after
all._
When the five days were up, he felt positive regret at having to go,
and his good-bye to all the Ashendynes was cordial. He had already
written to Mrs. LeGrand, and, of course, to his mother. He went; the
stage took him up the mountain....
"For all I could see--and I watched pretty closely--there didn't
anything come of it," remarked Marie Caton. "On the whole, I am rather
glad. Now you can't hear the rumble of the stage any longer. He's gone
out of the picture.--Betsy, stop writing and look at the robin and the
chipmunk--"
They had the tiniest cottage to themselves--Elizabeth's brother being
an old-timer here, and his letter to the proprietor procuring them
great consideration. There were but two rooms in the cottage. Roof
and porch, it was sunk in traveller's-joy, and in front sprang a vast
walnut tree, and beyond the walnut a span-wide stream purled between
mint over a slaty bed. From the porch you looked southward over
mountains and mountains, and every evening Antares looked redly back at
you. Now it was morning, and wrens and robins and cat-birds all were
singing.
Elizabeth looked up from the table where she was working. "If I watch
chipmunks all morning, I'll never get these textile figures done.--Mrs.
Josslyn said at breakfast that it wasn't a good day for fishing, and
that she might wander by."
"She's coming now. I see her in the distance. I like Molly Josslyn."
"So do I.--We haven't been here a week and yet we talk as though we had
known these people always!"
"Well, the fact that quite a number knew your brother made for there
being no ice to break. And it would be so absurd not to know one
another at the New Springs! as absurd as if a shipload of people cast
on a desert island--Here she is. Come in, Mrs. Josslyn!"
"Thank you, I don't want a chair," said Molly Josslyn. "You don't mind
if I sit on the edge of the porch and dangle my feet, do you? Nor if I
take off my hat and roll up my sleeves so that I can feel the air on my
arms?"
"Not a bit. Take the hairpins out of your hair and let it fly."
"I wish that I could cut it off!" said Molly viciously. "I will some
day! Pretty nearly a whole three-quarters of an hour out of every
twenty-four gone in brushing and combing and doing up hair! You have
to do it in the morning and the middle of the day and the evening. A
twentieth part of your whole waking existence!... Oh, me!"
"What a sigh!"
"I've been in rocking-chair-and-gossip land over on the big porch. I've
heard everybody--in a petticoat--who wasn't there hanged, drawn, and
quartered. Of course, I knew they were eager to get at me, and so I was
obliging and came away."
Marie Caton laughed. "Miss Eden here is an optimist of the first water.
If you ask her she'll tell you that women are growing beyond that sort
of thing--that they don't sting one another half as much as they used
to!"
"No, I don't think they do," said Mrs. Josslyn. "I think that's getting
apparent nowadays. Speaking for myself, fresh air and out of doors and
swinging off by one's self seem to make a body more or less charitable.
But some of us have got the habit yet. Gnat or wasp or hornet or snake,
on they go!" she laughed. "Over on the porch it wasn't anything but
a little cloud of gnats. They weren't really stinging--just getting
between your eyes and the blue sky."
"But it is growing better--it is, it is!" said Elizabeth. "I wouldn't
give up that belief for anything."
"No, don't!" said Molly Josslyn. "I like women and like to think well
of them."
A strong, rosy blonde, she stood up and stretched her arms above
her head. "I wish there were a pool somewhere, deep enough to swim
in! I'd like to cross the Hellespont this morning--swim it and swim
back.--Christopher is coming to-morrow."
"Christopher?"
"My husband--Christopher Josslyn. They don't," said Mrs. Josslyn, "make
them any nicer than Christopher! Christopher was my born mate." And
went away with a beamy look, over the grass.
Marie spoke thoughtfully. "Yesterday I heard one of the gnats singing.
It sang, 'Yes, rather handsome, but don't you find her dreadfully
unfeminine?'"
"Oh, 'feminine'!" said Elizabeth, and went on adding figures.
Marie Caton took a book from the generous number ranged around a jar
of Black-eyed Susans on the rustic table in the middle of the porch,
but "The chipmunks and the robins get so in the way," she presently
dreamily murmured, and then, "You had just as well put up your work.
Here's Judge Black and General Argyle!"
Judge Black was sixty-two, rather lean than stout, rather short than
tall, clean-shaven, with a good-looking countenance below grizzled,
close-clipped hair, with a bald spot at the top like a monk's
tonsure. General Argyle was a much larger and taller man, big-framed,
wide-girthed, with a well-set head framed about with shaggy white hair.
His countenance was rubicund, his voice mellow. He was sixty-seven,
in some respects very old, and in others quite young. Usually, at
the New Springs, Colonel Ashendyne marched in company, but this
morning--"Ashendyne's got some family conference or other on hand. It's
a day off for fishing, and nobody seems to have a mind for whist or
poker, and the papers haven't come. Argyle and I are floating around
like two lost corks or the Babes in the Wood--"
"So I said," said General Argyle richly, "let's stroll over there and
say good-morning to Tom Eden's sister and her attractive friend.--No,
no; no chairs! We'll sit here on the steps. As soon as Ashendyne
appears, we're going after young Coltsworth and have a turn in the
bowling-alley. Must exercise!--that's what I'm always telling Black
here--"
"As if I didn't exercise," said Judge Black, "more in a day than he
does in a week.--What a pretty little porch you've got! Books, flowers,
needlework--"
The General surveyed it, too. "It _is_ pretty. Woman's touch--woman's
touch!"
"That isn't needlework in the basket," said Marie demurely. "It's
apples. Will you have one?"
"No, thanks, Mistress Eve--or yes, on second thoughts, I will! What are
you reading?--'The Doll's House.' Ibsen!"
"Yes."
"I do not know," said the Judge, "what young ladies are coming to! I
have never had time, nor, I may say, inclination, to read Ibsen myself,
but of course I know the kind of thing he's responsible for. And,
frankly, I should not permit my daughter to read that book!"
"Oh," said Marie, "I don't think myself it is a book for a child!"
"She's not a child. She's twenty-six. I should dissuade my wife, too,
from reading it."
"Then your wife," answered Marie, "would miss an illuminating piece of
literature."
Elizabeth came in with her serene voice. "Don't you think, Judge Black,
that we all acquire a habit of judging a writer, whom we haven't yet
had time to study for ourselves, too much in terms of some review or
other, or of the mere unthinking, current talk? I think we all do it.
I believe when you read Ibsen you will feel differently about him."
"Not I!" said the Judge. "I have seen extracts enough. I tell you, Miss
Eden, the age is reading too much of such decadent stuff--"
"Oh, 'decadent'!"
"And it is read, amazingly, by women. I would rather see my wife or
daughter with the old dramatists at their worst in their hands than
with stuff like that--! Overturning all our concepts, criticizing
supremacies--I beg your pardon, Miss Caton, but if you knew how women,
nowadays, amaze me--"
"Stop hectoring, Black," said the General mellowly. "She's not in the
dock. Just so that women stay women, they can fill their heads with
what stuff they will--"
"Exactly!" said Judge Black. "Do you see them staying women?"
"Women of the past," said Elizabeth.
"That is woman,--the women of the past. There isn't any other. The
eternal feminine--"
"I think you are limiting the eternal and denying the universe power to
evolve," said Elizabeth. "Why not eternally the man of the past? Why
not 'There isn't any other'? Why not 'The eternal masculine'? Why do
you change and grow from age to age?"
"I'm not so sure that they do," said Marie _sotto voce_.
"Yes, they do! They grow and become freer always; though I think,"
said Elizabeth painfully, "that they lag in the way they look at
women.--Well, if you grow, being one half, do you suppose that we
are not going to grow, being the other half? And if you think that
the principle of growth is not in us, still I shouldn't worry! If we
can't grow, we won't grow, and you needn't fash yourselves. On the
other hand, if we can, we will--and that is all there is about it. And
it wouldn't do you the least harm to read Ibsen--nor to get another
definition of 'decadent.'"
She leaned forward in her chair. "Do you see that strip of blanched
grass there?--or rather it was blanched yesterday when that board over
there was lying upon it and had lain, I don't know how long!--blanched
and bent and sicklied over. Now look! It is getting colour and standing
straight--only beginning, but it is beginning--beginning to be on terms
with the sun! Well, that grass is woman to-day! The heavy board is
being lifted, and that's the change and all the change--and you find it
'pernicious'!"
Glowing-cheeked, she ceased speaking. Judge Black's colour, too, had
heightened. "My dear Miss Eden, how did all this begin? I'm the last
person in the world to deny to woman a proper freedom. I only ask
that it shan't go beyond a certain point--that it shan't threaten the
unsettling of a certain divine _status quo_--"
"I doubt if a divine _status quo_ is ever unsettled, Judge Black,"
said Elizabeth. "But there--but there!" She smiled, and she had a very
sweet, sunny smile. "I didn't in the least mean to quarrel! Tom will
have told you that I sometimes use my tongue, and that's the ancient
woman, still, isn't it? You see I care for women--being one--a good
deal."
"Let us," said Marie Caton, "talk about fishing."
General Argyle chuckled. "Black doesn't think you know anything about
fishing. He has to acknowledge that Mrs. Josslyn does--but then he
thinks that she's a charming _lusus naturæ_. I like to hear you give it
to Black. Pay him back. He's always giving it to me!"
"That's right!" said Black. "Pitch into me! Cover me with obloquy! Poor
homeless, friendless sailor with the pole star mysteriously shifted
from its place--" ...
"The homeless, friendless sailor stayed a long time, even with the pole
star shifted," remarked Marie, forty minutes later.
"I certainly didn't mean to be rude," murmured Elizabeth, her
eyes upon the disappearing guests, now well on their way to the
bowling-alley. "They mean you never to resent a thing which they would
at once recognize for an impertinence if one of themselves said it to
another--"
"Oh, I shouldn't dub you rude," said the other. "And if he found
you uncomfortable for a minute, you made up for it afterwards! You
were charming enough, just as charming as if the pole star had never
shifted. He went off still in mind the Eastern King."
"Ah," said Elizabeth, "that is where all of us are weak. We say the
truth, and then we bring in 'charm' and sandpaper it away again! It's
going to take another generation, Marie!"
"Another?" said Marie. "A dozen, more like!--Now I suppose I can read
'The Doll's House' in peace.--No, by all that's fated in this place,
here comes another guest!"
This was Ralph Coltsworth, but he made no long tarrying; he was as
transient as a butterfly. "Have you ladies seen Hagar Ashendyne? I want
her to go to walk with me, and I can't find her anywhere."
"No, we haven't," said Marie. "Judge Black and General Argyle are
looking for you to play tenpins."
Ralph smiled back at her. "Let them look! It will do the old codgers
good. Do you like this place?"
"Yes, very much. Don't you?"
"Oh, I like it so-so!" said Ralph. "It's a good enough lotus land, but
there's a lack somehow of wild, exciting adventure. I've been trying to
read on the hotel porch. What do you think they're talking about over
there? Fringed doilies!"
"What do you like to do and to talk about?"
"Live things." He laughed, tossed an apple into the air and caught it
again. "I want first to make fifty millions, and then I want to spend
fifty millions!"
"What an admirable American you are!"
"Am I not? And I vary it with just wanting to be a cowboy with a
six-shooter on a Western plain--" He tossed the apple into the air
again and, watching it, missed the glimpse of Hagar which the other two
received. She appeared around the corner of a neighbouring cottage, her
face directed toward the traveller's-joy porch, saw Coltsworth, wheeled
and withdrew. He caught the apple, and after gazing meditatively for a
moment in the direction of the tenpin-alley, sighed, and said that he
supposed after all he might as well go help the General demolish the
Army of the Potomac. "That's what he calls the pins when they're set
up. He takes the biggest bowl and sends it thundering. I believe he
thinks for the moment it is a ball from one of his old twenty-pounders.
He sees fire and smells smoke. Sometimes he demolishes the Army of the
Potomac and sometimes he doesn't; but he never gets discouraged. The
next cannon ball will surely do the work!"
When he was gone, and had been gone twenty minutes or more, Hagar
reappeared. She came swiftly across the grass, mounted the porch steps,
and stood, with a little deprecating shake of her head for the offered
chair, by Elizabeth's work-table. "I am not going to stay, thank
you! Miss Eden, somebody told me last night that you had written and
published books--"
"Only text and reference books--compilations," said Elizabeth. "I only
do that kind of unoriginal work."
"Yes, but a book is a book," said Hagar. "What I wondered was if you
wouldn't be good enough to tell me some things. No one in all my
connection writes--I don't know any one to go to. I only want to know
plain things--A, B, C's of how to manage--"
"About a manuscript, you mean?"
"Yes. I don't know anything. I've read all kinds of useless things and
so little useful! For instance," said Hagar, "is it wrong to write on
both sides of the paper?"