THE MAINES
It was the year of the assassination of Sadi Carnot in France, of
the trial of Emma Goldman in New York, of much "Hellish Anarchist
Activity." It was a year of growth in the American Federation
of Labour. It was a year of Socialist growth. It was a year of
strikes--mine strikes, railway strikes, other strikes, Lehigh and
Pullman and Cripple Creek. It was the year of the Army of Coxey. It was
the year of the Unemployed and of Relief Agencies. It was the year when
the phrase "A living wage" received currency.
In the winter of 1894 the Spanish War had not been, the Boer War had
not been, the Russo-Japanese War had not been. The war between Japan
and China was on the eve of being; people talked of Matabeleland, and
Cecil Rhodes was chief in South Africa. Hawaii was in process of being
annexed. In the winter of 1894 it was the Wilson Tariff Bill, and
Bimetallism, and Mr. Gladstone and Home Rule, and the Mafia in Sicily,
and the A.P.A., and the Bicycle, and Queen Liliuokalani, and the Causes
of Strikes and of Panics, and Electric Traction, and the romances
of Sienkiewicz and "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" and "The Prisoner of
Zenda" and "The Heavenly Twins." Mr. Howells was writing "Letters of
an Altrurian Traveller"; George Meredith had published "Lord Ormont
and his Aminta." Stevenson, at Vailima, was considering "Weir of
Hermiston."
In 1894 occurred the first voting of women in New Zealand. It saw the
opening of a Woman's Congress in Berlin. In New York a Woman Suffrage
Amendment was strongly advocated before a Constitutional Convention.
There was more talk than usual of the Unrest among Women, more
editorials than usual upon the phenomenon, more magazine articles. But
the bulk of the talk and the editorials and the magazine articles had
to do with the business failures and the Unemployed and the Strikes.
The beating of the waves of the year was not loudly heard in the
Maines' long, high-ceilinged parlour. The law droned on, bad years
with good. Powhatan had speculated and made his little losses. His
philosophy this winter was pessimistic, and the household "economized."
But the table was still good and plentiful, and the coloured servants,
who were fond of him and he of them, smiled and bobbed, and he had
not felt it necessary to change his brand of cigars, and the same old
people came in the evening. Mrs. Maine never read the newspapers.
She rarely read anything, though once in a while she took up an old
favourite of her youth, and placidly dipped now into it and now into
her box of chocolates. Powhatan kept her supplied with the chocolates.
Twice a week, when he came in at five o'clock, he produced out of his
overcoat pocket a glazed, white, two-pound box:--"Chocolates, Bessie!
Catch!"
Rachel Bolt was more alert to the world surge, but to her, too, it
must come a little muted through the family atmosphere. Her swiftest
vibrations were upon other lines, curious inner, personal revolts and
rebellions, sometimes consumed below the crust, sometimes breaking
forth with a flare and rain of words as of lava. The family and the
people who habitually came to the house were used to Rachel's way of
talking; as long as she did nothing _outré_,--and she did not,--it was
no more to them than a painted volcano. As for Sylvie--Sylvie was as
sweet and likeable as sugar, but not interested in anything outside
of the porcelain world-dish that held her. She liked her clothes this
winter, and the young men who came to the house, and she dutifully
practised her voice, and enjoyed the shops and the plays, and wondered
a good deal if she was or was not in love with Jack Carter, who was an
interne in one of the hospitals, and who sent her every week six of
the new roses called American Beauties. She had other, more distant
relatives in New York, people of wealth who presently took her up. She
was with them and away from the Maines a good deal, and, on the whole,
Hagar saw not much of Sylvie this winter. She and Rachel were more
together.
Almost every evening, at the Maines', people came in--old Southern
friends, living in New York, or here on business or other occasions,
young men and women, fond of Rachel, acceptable fellow-sheep from the
fold of St. Timothy, now and then the rector himself, now and then some
young man, Southern, with a letter of introduction. Sometimes there
were but one or two besides the family, sometimes seven or eight. There
was little or no formal entertainment, but this kind of thing always.
Each day at dusk Hagar put on one of the two half-festive gowns which,
at the last moment, Miss Serena had insisted she must have. Both were
simplicity itself, both of some soft, crêpy stuff, one dark bronze
and one dark green. They were made with the large puffed sleeves of
the period, and the throat slightly low and square. "Country-made,
but somehow just right," Rachel judged. "You aren't any more adorned
than the leaf of a tree, and yet you might walk, just as you are, into
Cæsar's palace."
Usually by half-past ten visitors were gone, lights downstairs were
out. Powhatan and Bessie believed in early to bed and late to rise.
Upstairs, in her bedroom on the third floor, Hagar shook out and hung
in the closet the bronze or green dress, as the case might be, put on
her gown and her red wrapper, braided her hair, pushed the couch well
beneath the light, curled herself up on it under the eider-down quilt,
and, tablet against knee, began to write.... The Short Story--it was
that she dreamed and wrote and polished. Two currents of thought and
aspiration ran side by side. "To earn money--to make my own living--to
be able to help"; and "To make this Idea, that I think is beautiful,
come forth and grow.--To get this thing right--to make this dream show
clear--to do it, to do it!--To create!" The latter current was the most
powerful. The former would sooner or later accomplish its end; it would
turn the mill-wheel and be content. But the latter--never, never would
it be satisfied; never would it say, "It is accomplished." Always there
would be the further dream, always the necessity to make that, too,
come clear. There were other currents, more or less strong, Desire of
Fame, Desire to be Known, Desire to Excel, and others; but the first
two were the great currents.
Since March and the fairy story she had written other stories, four
or five in all. She had sent them to magazines, and all but one had
come back. That one she had sent immediately after her search for
Thomasine. In a month she had word that it was taken, and that, on
publication, she would be paid fifty dollars. The letter was like
manna, she went about all day with a rapt face. To write--to write--to
write stories like Hawthorne, like Poe....
She had been six weeks in New York. That night, when she had worked
for an hour over one half-page, and then, the light out, had sat for
a long while in the window looking at the winter stars above the city
roofs, she could not sleep when she went to bed, but lay, straight and
still, half-thinking, half-dreaming. A pageant of impressions, waves
of repeated, altered, rearranged contacts drove through her mind. The
pictures and marbles of the Metropolitan, the sculptures and casts of
sculptures which she cared for more than for the paintings, those of
the latter which she loved--the music that she had heard, the plays
she had seen, the Park and the slow, interminable afternoon parade
of carriages watched from a bench beneath the trees, Fifth Avenue,
Broadway, the hurrying crowds, the rush and roar, tramp and clangour,
the colour and bravura--Omega Street, the Settlement, a Sunday
afternoon there, discussions to which she had listened, a mass meeting
of strikers which, Powhatan having taken her downtown to show her the
Stock Exchange and Trinity, they had inadvertently fringed, and from
which, with epithets of disapproval, he had hurried her away;--uptown
once more and the florists' windows and the wheels on the asphalt, a
Sunday morning at St. Timothy's with the stained glass and the Bishop's
nephew intoning;--again the theatres, a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, the
"Merchant of Venice," a play of Pinero's; again the pictures and the
statues, the cast of the great Venus, the cast of Niobe, of the Diana
with the hound, of Apollo and Hermes; the pictures, Rembrandts and
Vandykes, and certain landscapes, and a form that she liked, firelit
and vague, blind Nydia moving through ruining Pompeii, and Bastien
LePage's Joan of Arc; then the Park again, and the great trees above
the mall, and people, people, people!--all made a vibrating whirl,
vast, many-hued, and with strange harmonies. She lay until it passed
and sank like the multi-coloured sand of the desert.
When at last she slept, she had a curious dream. She and her mother
were alone on an island with palm trees. She was used to being
with her mother in dreams. She had for the memory of her mother so
passionate a loyalty; the figure of Maria, young, it always seemed to
her, as herself, so kept abreast with her inner life that it was but
a naturalness that she should be there in the dream mind, too. She
was there now, on the island with the palm trees, and the two sat and
looked at the sea, which was very blue. Then, right out of the lonely
sea, there grew a crowded wharf, with a white steamship and people
going to it and coming from it. Her father came from it, dressed in
white with a white hat like a helmet, and then suddenly there was no
wharf nor ship, but they were in a curious street of low, pale-coloured
houses--her father and her mother and herself and the palm trees.
"Now we are all going to be happy together," she said; but "No," said
her mother, "wait until the procession passes." Then there was a
procession, and they were all women, and at first they all had the face
and eyes of Bastien LePage's Joan of Arc, but then that faded, and they
were simply many women, but each of them carried a blossoming bough.
She saw faces that she knew among them, and she saw women that she
thought belonged to the Middle Ages, and Greek women, and Egyptians,
and savages. They went by for a long time, and then, with a turn of the
hand, the dream changed, and they were all in a courtyard with a well
and more palm trees, and people coming and going, and they were eating
and drinking, and there was a third woman with them whom her father
called Anna. She had a string of jewels, and she tried them, first on
Hagar and then on Maria; but Maria had a knife and suddenly she struck
at her father with it. She cut him across both wrists and the blood
flowed.--Hagar wakened and sat up in bed, shivering. Her father's face
was still plain against her eyeballs--bearded and handsome, with red in
his cheeks and the hat like a helmet.
During Christmas week Ralph Coltsworth appeared. He had to spend his
holidays somewhere, he said. Hawk Nest was dull and he didn't like
Gilead Balm without Hagar.
"Ralph, why don't you study?"
"I do study. I'm a star student. Only I don't like the law. I'm going
to do a little more convincing myself and the family, and then I'm
going to chuck it! I've got a little money to start things with. I want
to go in with a broker I know."
"What do you want to do that for?"
"Oh, because!... There are chances, if you've got the feeling in your
finger tips!... Don't you know, Gipsy, that something like that is
the career for a man like me? If I had been my father, I could have
waved my sword and gone charging down history--and if I'd been my
grandfather, I could have poured out Whig eloquence from every stump
in the country and looked Olympian and been carried in procession (I
don't like politics now; it's an entirely different thing);--and if
I'd been my great-grandfather, I could have filibustered or settled
the Southwest; and back of that I could have done almost any old
thing--come over with the Adventurers, seized a continent, shared
England with the Normans, marauded with the Vikings, whiled through
Europe with Attila, done almost anything and come out with a name and
my arms full! Now you can't conquer things like that, but, by George,
you can corner things!"
"What do you mean?--That you want to become a rich man?"
"That's what most of those others wanted. Yes, riches and power."
"I was reading the other day a magazine article. It said that the day
when any American, if he had energy and ambition, might hope to make a
great fortune was past. It said that the Capets and Plantagenets and
Hapsburgs were all here; that the dynasties were established and the
_entente cordiale_ in operation; that young and adventurous Americans
might hope to become captains of mercenaries, or they might go in for
being court chaplains, and troubadours."
"Oh, that article had dyspepsia!" said Ralph. "It isn't as easy as it
was, that's certain! but it's possible yet, in 1894--if you've got an
opening."
"Have you got one?"
"Elder and Marten would take me in. Marten was an old flame of my
mother's, and I got his son Dick out of a scrape last year.--In ten
years, you'll see, Gipsy! I'll send you orchids and pearls!"
"I don't want them, thank you, Ralph."
Ralph took the flower from his buttonhole and began to pluck away its
petals. "Gipsy, I was awfully glad, last summer, when you sent that
Eglantine fellow about his business."
"Mr. Laydon and I sent each other."
"Well, the road's clear--that's all I want to know! Gipsy--"
"Ralph, it's no use. I'm not going to listen."
"The family has planned this ever since we were infants. When you used
to come to Hawk Nest with your big eyes and your blue gingham dress and
your white stockings--I knew it somehow even then, even when I teased
you so--"
"You certainly teased me. Do you remember the rain barrel?"
"No, I don't. The family has set its heart--"
"Oh, Ralph, family can be such a tyrant! At any rate, ours will have to
take its heart off this."
Ralph turned sullen. "Well, the family used to settle it for women."
"Yes, it did--when you came over with William the Conqueror! Do you
want to _take_ me, regardless--just as you'd take those millions? Well,
you may take those millions, but you can't take me!"
"Your father wants it, too. The Colonel showed me a letter--"
Hagar stopped short--they were walking in the Park. "My father!... Do
you think I owe my father so great a love and obedience?" She looked
before her, steadily, down the vista of vast, leafless trees. "The
strongest feeling," she said, "that I have about my father is one of
strong curiosity."