A TELEGRAM
The next day she went down to the Settlement.
Elizabeth was at home. "Yes, I could give you a list of books on
Socialism. I read a good deal along those lines myself. I am glad you
are interested."
"I am interested," answered Hagar. "I cannot get any of these books
now, but I am looking for fifty dollars, and when it comes, I will."
"But I can lend you two or three," said Elizabeth. "Won't you take
them--dear Hagar?"
She regarded the younger woman with her steady, friendly eyes, her
strong lips just parting in a smile. There was perhaps nine years'
difference in their ages, but mentally they came nearer. It was the
first time that she had dropped the formal address.
Hagar answered with a warm colour and a tremulous light from brow to
chin. "Yes, if you'll be so good--Elizabeth!"
She crossed the floor with the other to the long, low, bookcase.
Elizabeth drew out a couple of volumes. "These are good to begin
with--and this." She stood a moment in thought, her back to the case,
her elbow resting on its polished top and her head upon her hand.
On a shelf behind her stood a small bronze Psyche, a photograph of
Botticelli's Judith, a drawing of Florence Nightingale. "Hagar," said
Elizabeth, "if I give you two or three books upon the position of
woman in the past and to-day, will you read them?"
"I will read anything you give me, Elizabeth."
She took her parcel of books and went back to the Maines'. She read
with great rapidity. Her memory was not a verbal one, but her very
tissues seemed to absorb the sense of what she read. Much in these
books simply formulated for her with clearness what was already in
solution in her mind. Here and there she was conscious of lines of
difference, of inward criticism, but in the main they but enlarged a
content already there, but brought above the threshold, named and fed
what she was already thinking. Her mind went back to Eglantine and
Roger Michael's talk. "No. It did not begin even here. It was in me. It
had been in me a long time, only I didn't know it, or called it other
names."
Before these books were finished she got her fifty dollars from the
magazine, and the magazine itself was sent her with her story in it.
She sat and read the story, and it seemed strange and new in its robe
of print. The magazine had provided an illustration--and how strange
it was to see her figures (or rather _not_ her figures) moving and
laughing there! Again and again, after the first time, she opened
the magazine and in part or whole read the story and gazed upon the
illustration--half a dozen or more times during the first twenty-four
hours, then with dwindling frequency day after day, for a week or
so. After that her appetite for her own completed work flagged. She
laid the magazine away, and it was years before she read that story
again. The fifty dollars--She put thirty-five away to go toward her
summer clothes and wrote to her grandmother that she had done so. The
remaining fifteen she expended on books, taking starred titles from
Elizabeth's list. In January she wrote "The Lame Duck." She sent it
to one of the great monthlies. It was accepted, she was paid a fair
price, and the monthly gave her to understand that it should like to
see _Hagar Ashendyne's_ next story.
The letter came as she was leaving the house for a walk in the Park.
There was no great distance to go before you came to an entrance,
and she often went alone and wandered here and there by herself. The
country was in her veins; not to see trees and grass very often was
very bad. She opened the letter, saw what it was, then walked on in a
rosy mist. After a while, out under the branched grey trees, she found
a bench, sat down, and read it again and yet again. Her soul passioned
to do this thing; to write, to write well, to give out wonderfully,
beautifully. A letter that told her it was so, that she was doing that
which, with the strongest longing, she longed to do, must be to her
golden as a love letter. With it open on her lap, with her eyes on the
serene, pearl-grey meadow on the edge of which she sat, she stayed a
long time, dreaming. A young man and woman, lovers evidently, slowly
passed her bench beneath the trees. She watched them with tranquil
eyes. "They're lovers," and she felt a reflex of their bliss. They
passed, and she watched as happily the grey spaces where a few sheep
stirred, and the edge of trees beyond, dream trees in the mist.
Quite simply she fell to thinking of "the boy." He had been often
in her mind since the evening of that meeting; she wondered about
him a good deal. She did not know his name; she had no idea where he
lived; he might be in New York now, or he might not be; she might
pass him in the street and not know--though, indeed, now she kept a
lookout. He did not know her name; she was to him "the little girl"
as he was to her "the boy." They might never meet again, but she had
a faith that it would not be so. What she felt toward him was but
friendliness, concern, and some admiration; but the feeling had a soft
glow and pulse. The most marked thing was the consciousness that she
knew him truly; reasoning did not come into it; she could have told
herself a dozen times how little she did know, and it would have made
no difference. It was as though the boy and she had seen each other's
essential self through a clear pane of glass.
Her mind did not dwell long upon him to-day. She sat with her hands
crossed above the letter, and her eyes, half-veiled, upon the far
horizon. To write--to write--to produce, to lead forth, to give birth,
to push out and farther on forever, to make a beautiful thing, and
always a more beautiful thing--always--always.... She was more mind
than body as she sat there; she saw her thought-children going up to
heaven before her.
There came an impulse to look on beauty that other minds had sent
forth. She rose and walked, with her light, rhythmic swiftness,
northward toward the Metropolitan. When she passed the turnstile there
lacked less than an hour of closing time. She went at once toward the
rooms where were the casts. There was hardly a moving figure besides
herself; there were only the still, white giants. She entered an alcove
where there was a seat drawn before a cast of the tomb of Lorenzo de'
Medici. She sat down and gazed upon Michael Angelo's Thinker. After a
while her eyes moved to the great figures of Twilight and Dawn, and
then, rising, she crossed to Guliano's Tomb and stood before Day and
Night. Presently she left the alcove, and crossing by the models of
the Parthenon and of Notre Dame came into the Hall of the Antique and
into the presence of the great Venus. Here she stayed until a man came
through the place and said it was closing time.
In February she sent to the same monthly "The Mortal." It passed from
hand to hand until in due time it reached the editor. He read it, then
strolled into the assistant editor's room:--"New star in the sky." But
before Hagar could hear from the monthly, another moment in her life
was here.
A week after she had mailed this story, she and Rachel were together
one evening in the latter's room. It was pouring rain, and there would
be no company. Supper was just over,--the Maines clung to supper,--and
the children had not been put to bed. Nightgowned, they made excursions
and alarms from their nursery into their mother's room and out again
and in again. Then Rachel turned out the gas, and they all sat in the
light of the coal fire, and first Rachel told a story, and then Betty
told one, and then Hagar, and then Charley. They were all stories
out of Mother Goose, so no one had to wait long for their turn. Then
Hagar had to tell about Bouncing Bet and Creeping Charley, which was a
continued story with wonderful adventures, an adventure a night. Then
the clock struck eight with a leaden sound, and Mammy appeared in the
nursery door. "You carry me!" cried Bouncing Bet, and "You carry me!"
cried Creeping Charley. So Rachel took one and Hagar took the other,
mounted them like papooses, and in the nursery shot each into the
appropriate small, white bed.
Back before the fire, with the lights still out, the two sat for a
time in silence. Hagar had a story in mind. She was musing it out,
seeing the figures come true in the lit hollows. Rachel had a habit
of crooning to herself. She went on now with one of the children's
rhymes:--
"Baa, baa, Black Sheep,
Have you any wool?"
"Yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full--
One for my master and one for my dame,
And one for the little boy that lives in the lane!"
Hagar stirred, lifted her arms, and clasped her hands behind her head.
"How the rain pours! The winter is nearly over. It has been a wonderful
winter."
"I'm glad you've found it so," said Rachel. "You've got a wonder-world
of your own, behind your eyes. Everything spins out for good for you
sooner or later and somehow or other. You're lucky!"
"Aren't you lucky, too? Haven't you liked this winter?"
"Oh, I've liked it so-so! I've liked you."
"Rachel, I wish you'd be happy. You've got those darling children."
"I am happy where the children touch. And, oh, yes, they touch a long
way round! But there's a gap in the circle where you go out lonely and
come in lonely."
"That's true of everybody's circle:--mine, yours, everybody's. But you
chafe so. You blow the coals with your breath."
"I don't need to blow the coal. It burns without that.... Let me tell
you, Hagar. There are two kinds of people in the world. The people who
are half or maybe two thirds the way out of the pit and the mire and
the slough and the shadow so thick you can cut it! They are rising
still, and their garments are getting clean and white, and they can
see the wonderful round landscape, and they look at it with calm,
wide eyes. They're nearly out; they're more or less spectators. The
other kind--they're the poor, dull, infuriated actors. They're still
in; they can hardly see even the rim of the pit. The first kind wants
to help and does help. It's willing for the others to lay hold of
its hands, its skirts, to drag out by. It's willing as an angel, and
often the others wouldn't get out at all if it didn't give aid. But
it's seen, of course, and it's away beyond.... People like Elizabeth
Eden, for instance.... But the other kind--my kind.--It's all personal
with us yet--we're fighting and loving and hating, down here in the
muck and turmoil--all of us who are yet devils, and those who are
half-devils, and those of us who are just getting vision and finding
the stepping-stones--the animal and the half-animal, and those who've
only got pointed ears--all resenting and striking out and trampling one
another, knowing, some of us, that there are better things and yet not
knowing how to get the shining garments; others not caring--Oh, I tell
you, life's a bubbling cauldron!"
"I know it is--deep above and deep below. But--"
Rachel rose, went to the window, and stood, brow against the pane,
looking out. The rain dashed against the glass; all the street lights
were blurred; the gusty wind shook the bare boughs of the one tree upon
the block, "You don't know anything about my married life. Well, I'm
going to tell you."
She came back to the fire, pushed a footstool upon the hearth, and
sat down, crouching close to the flame. "I'm not yet twenty-six. I
was married to Julian Bolt when I was eighteen. I'd known him--or I
thought I'd known him--for years. His mother and sisters went in summer
to the place in the mountains where we always went. They had money,
though less than people supposed. Julian spent two weeks with them each
summer. He was older than I, of course,--years older. But he used to
row us girls upon the lake, and to play tennis with us, and we thought
him wonderful. We called him 'The Prince.' As I got older, he rowed
me sometimes alone on the lake, and now and then we went for a walk
together. He was good-looking, and he dressed and talked well, and he
spent money. I had heard somebody call him 'a man-about-town'--but I
didn't know what 'a man-about-town' meant. There were two or three
families in the place with daughters out or about to come out, and they
made Julian Bolt very welcome. I never heard a father or mother there
say a word against him. Mine didn't.
"Well, I came out very early, and the summer after, when I went to
Virginia, to the White with my aunt, and that winter when I stayed with
some army people at Old Point, he came to both places, and I knew that
he came to see me. He told me so.... Of course, though I would have
died rather than say it, even to myself, of course, I was expecting
men to fall in love with me and ask me to marry them--and expecting
to choose one, having first, of course, fallen in love with him, and
be married in white satin and old lace, and be romantically happy
and provided for ever after! Isn't that the thinking rôle for every
properly brought-up girl? The funny thing is that I'd rather die than
see Betty come upon that treadmill they've built for a girl's mind!...
Well, I was on it all right....
"Julian had money, and he spent it recklessly. I didn't see how
recklessly; I didn't see anything except that he liked me; for he sent
me the most beautiful flowers, the most expensive bon-bons and books
and magazines. It was a gay winter. Looking back, it seems to me that
everybody was eating and drinking, for to-morrow we die. I knew I must
fall in love--that had been suggested to me, suggested for years,
just as regularly and powerfully as any hypnotist could do it. The
whole world was bent on suggesting it to every young girl. You see,
the world's selfish. It wants to live, and it can't live unless the
young girl says Yea. And it can't leave it, or it thinks it can't, to
Nature working in a certain number in her own good time. It must cheat
and beguile and train the girl--every girl--every girl! I tell you,
I didn't know any more about marriage than I did about life on the
planet Mars! I was packing my trunks for a voyage--and I didn't know
where I was going. I didn't know anything about it. No one offered me
a Baedeker.... It was orange blossoms and a veil and a ring--and I
didn't know what either meant--and felicitations and presents and 'Hear
the golden wedding-bells!' and 'They lived happily ever after.' Julian
was handsome and lavish and popular, and his family were all right,
and if he had been gay he would now settle down; and father and mother
were satisfied, and people said I was to be envied.... I married at
eighteen. I hadn't read much. I didn't know anything. No one told me
anything. Maybe the world thinks that if it tells, the young girl would
say No.
"We went on a wedding-trip. I suppose sometimes a wedding-trip isn't a
mockery. I'm not so bitter as not to know that often it isn't so--that
often it is all right. I'm not denying love, and clean men and
considerate. I'm not denying hosts of marriages that without any very
high ideal are fit and decent enough. I'm not denying noble lovers--men
and women--and noble marriages. I'm only saying that the other kind,
the kind that's not fit nor clean nor decent and anything but noble,
is so frequent and commonplace that it is rather laughable and
altogether sardonic and devilish to kneel down and worship as we do the
Institution of Staying Together--Staying Together at any price, even
when evidently the only clean thing to do would be to Stay Apart....
My wedding-trip lasted four months. I went eighteen, and I came back
old as I am now--older than I am now; for I have grown younger these
last two years. My marriage wasn't the noble kind. It was the kind you
couldn't make noble. It wasn't even the decent, low-order type. It was
a sink and a pit and a horror."
She bent and stirred the fire. Outside the gusty wind went by and the
rain beat upon the windows. "I know that there are marriages where
woman is the ruiner. There are women who are wreckers. They fasten
themselves on a man's life and drain it dry. They are devil-fish. They
hold him in their arms and break his bones. They're among the worst of
us struggling here in the pit. They're wicked women. They may be fewer
than wicked men, or they may be equal in number, I don't know. I'm not
talking of wicked men or wicked women in that sense. I'm talking of men
whom the world does not call wicked, and of a great army of women like
myself, an army that stretches round the world and through hundreds of
years.... An army? It isn't an army. We never had any weapons. We were
never taught to fight. We were never allowed to ask questions. We were
told there were no questions to ask. We were young girls, dreaming,
dropped into the wolf pack ... and it goes on all the time. It is going
on now. It may be going on when Betty grows up--though I'll tell her!
You needn't be afraid. I'll tell her....
"That wedding trip--that honeymoon. I had married a handsome beast--a
cruel one, too. He treated me like a slave, bought for one purpose,
wanted for one purpose, kept for one purpose. I wasn't enough for
him--I found that out very soon. But those others were freer than I.
They made him pay them.... He would have said that he paid me, too;
that he supported me. Perhaps it's true. I only know that I am going to
have Betty taught to support herself."
"You should have left him."
"We were in Europe. I hadn't any money. I was beaten down and stunned.
When I tried to write to father and mother, I couldn't. They would have
said that I was hysterical, and for God's sake to consider the family
name!... I have been a woman slow to develop mentally. What poise I've
got, what reading, what knowledge, what everything, has come to me
since that time. Then I didn't know how to hold my head up and march
out. Then I only wanted to die.... We came home, and it was to find
father with a desperate illness. I couldn't tell mother then. I doubt
if I could ever have told her. I doubt if it would have done any good
if I had.... We went to live in a house up on the Sound. Julian said
his fortune was getting low, and that it would be cheaper there. But he
himself came into town and stayed when he wished. He spent a great deal
of money. I do not know what he did with it. He threw away all that
he had.... I knew by now that Betty was coming. She was born before I
was nineteen. And Charley was born a year afterward--born blind, and
I knew why. I loved my children. But my marriage remained what it had
always been. When Charley was nearly a year old, I couldn't stand it
any longer. If I could stand it for myself, I saw that I couldn't stand
it for them. I couldn't let them grow up having that kind of a mother,
the kind that would stand it.... Julian went away. Every two or three
months he took all the money he could lay his hands on and disappeared.
I knew that he had dived into all that goes on here, in some places, in
this city. He would be gone sometimes two weeks, sometimes longer....
Well, this time I took Betty and Charley and came home, came here--and
they tried to persuade me to go back. The Bishop was here, visiting his
nephew, and he came and tried to persuade me to go back. But I wouldn't
... and there was no need. Within the week Julian was killed in a fray
in a house a mile, I suppose, from where we sit. That was two years
ago."
She rose and moved about the firelit room. "Yes, I've got the two
children, and life's healing over. I don't call myself unhappy now.
At times I'm quite gay--and you don't know how eerie it feels! But
happy or not, Hagar, I'll never forget--I'll never forget--I'll never
forget! They talk about the end of the century, and about our seeing
the beginning of better things. They say the twentieth century will be
an age of clearer Thinking and greater Courage, and they talk about
the coming great Movements.--There's one Movement that I want to see,
and that's the Movement to tell the young girl. If I were the world I
wouldn't have my dishonoured life as it gets it now.... And now let's
talk about something else."
Hagar crossed to her, took her in her arms, and kissed her lips and
forehead. "I love you, Rachel. Come, let's look at the rain, how it
streams! Listen! Isn't that thunder?"
They stood at the window and looked out upon the slanting lines and the
glistening asphalt. The doorbell rang.
"Who on earth can that be?" Rachel went to the door, opened it, and
stood listening. "A telegram. Dicey is bringing it up. It's for you,
Hagar."
She struck a match and lit the gas. Hagar opened the brown envelope and
unfolded the sheet within. The telegram was from Gilead Balm, from her
grandfather:--
_Cables from physician and Consul at Alexandria. Terrible accident.
Yacht on which were Medway and his wife wrecked. His wife drowned, body
not recovered. Medway seriously injured. Life not despaired of, but
believe it will leave him crippled. Ill in hotel there. Unconscious
at present. Every attention. Your grandmother will fret herself ill
unless I go. Insists that you accompany me. Have telegraphed for
passage on boat sailing Saturday. Arrive in New York Friday morning.
Get ready.--Argall Ashendyne._