HAGAR AND DENNY
The afternoon sun yet made a dazzle of the white road. Infrequent trees
cast infrequent shadows. It was warm, but not too warm, with an endless
low wind. The tide was going out; there spread an expanse of iridescent
shallows, and beyond a line of water so blue that it was unearthly.
There was a tonic smell of salt and marsh. The wheels of the surrey,
the horse's hoofs, brought a pleasant, monotonous, rhythmic sense of
sound and motion.
"That is the shell house," said Hagar, breaking a long silence; "that
small, small house with the boat behind. There you can buy throngs of
things that come out of the sea--coral and sponges and purple sea-fans
and wonderful shells."
"I walked out here last week. There's a sick child I know--a little
cripple. I am going to take her a great box of the prettiest shells.
She'll lie there and play with them in her dingy corner of the dingy
room where all the others work, and maybe they'll bring her a little of
all this.... God knows!"
The wheels went on. They passed the small house with a great lump of
coral on one side of the door, and a tall purple sea-fan upon the other.
"I sometimes think," said Hagar, "that the trouble with me is that I
am too general. My own sharp inner struggle was for intellectual and
spiritual freedom. I had to think away from concepts with which the
atmosphere in which I was raised was saturated. I had to think away
from creeds and dogmas and affirmations made for me by my ancestors.
I had to think away from the idea of a sacrosanct Past and the virtue
of Immobility;--not the true idea of the mighty Past as our present
body which we are to lift and ennoble, and not Immobility as the
supreme refusal to be diverted from that purpose,--but the Past, that
is made up of steps forward, set and stubborn against another step,
and Immobility blind to any virtue in Change. I had to think away from
a concept of woman that the future can surely only sadly laugh at. I
had to think away from Sanctions and Authorities and Taboos and Divine
Rights--and when I had done so, I had to go back with the lamp of
wider knowledge, deeper feeling, and find how organic and on the whole
virtuous in its day was each husk and shell. The trouble was that in
love with the lesser we would keep out the stronger day ... and there
was everywhere a sickness of conflict. I had to think away from my
own dogmatisms and intolerances. I'm still engaged in doing that....
What has come of it all is a certain universal feeling.... I'm not
explaining very well what I mean, but--though I want to be able to do
it--it is difficult for me to drive the lightning in a narrow track to
a definite end. It's playing over everything."
"I see what you mean. You're more the philosopher than the crusader.
Well, we need philosophers, too!... I'm more, I think, the type that
is sharpened to a point, that couches its lance for one Promised Land,
which it believes is the key to many another. But I hold that it is
better to move full-orbed, if you can."
"I do not know--I do not know," said Hagar. "I try to plunge with my
whole mind into some political or social theory, but I fail. Even the
slow drawing-up of the submerged capacities in woman, even the helping
in that,--which is greater than would be the discovery of Atlantis,
which is greater than almost anything else,--cannot bring the ends
together. Name everything and there is so much besides!"
"There is such a thing," said Denny, "as going to the stake for what
you know to be partial, only factors, scaffoldings, stairs to mount
by.... Stairs and scaffoldings are necessary; therefore, die for them
if need be."
"I agree there," answered Hagar.
The surrey had left the sight of the sea. The pale road stretched
straight before them, going on until it touched the cobalt sky. On
either hand stood growing walls, dense and thorny as those about the
Sleeping Beauty's palace--all manner of trees, silver palm and thatch
palm, tamarind, poison-wood and plum, ink-berry and jack-bush, bound
all together with smilax and many another vine. At long intervals
occurred an opening, a ragged space and a hut or cabin, with an odour,
too languid-sweet, of orange blossoms, and a vision of black children.
The walls closed in again sombrely. The road would have been a little
dreary but for the sky and the sun and the jewel-fine air.
"I suppose," said Hagar, "that there is a certain Brahmin-like attitude
to be overcome. I suppose that to take wallet and staff and go with
the mass upon the day's march, encouraging, lifting, helping, pointing
forward, bearing with the others, is a nobler thing than to run ahead
upon your own path and cry back to the throng, 'Why are you not here
as well?' I suppose that ... and yet there are times when I am
Nietzschean, too. I can be opposites."
"Yes; that is what bewilders," said Denny. "To include contradictories
and irreconcilables--to be both centripetal and centrifugal--to be
in one brain Socialist and Individualist!... But the greatest among
mankind have found themselves able. They have been farthest ahead, and
yet they have always seemed to be in the midst."
The sun sank low, the white road grew pallid. "Better turn presently,"
said Hagar.
"When we get to that palm. How wonderful it stands against the sky!--I
never thought that I should see palm trees."
When they came to it, the negro driver turned the horse. Roll of wheel
and slow thud of hoofs they went dreamily back toward Nassau. The walls
on either hand were darkening; the sky was putting on a splendid dress.
"Years and years now I have been away," said Hagar. "In the spring I am
going home."
"Home to--to Gilead Balm?"
"At first, yes, I think ... then, I do not know. I have been away so
long. There are people in New York I want to see--old friends--women.
Do you chance to know Elizabeth Eden?"
"Yes, I know her. She's one of the blessed." After a moment he said
abruptly, "I want you to know Rose Darragh."
"Yes, I want to," said Hagar simply.
They came before long to the shell house. "Let us stop and get some
shells."
Inside they had the place, save for the merchant of shells, to
themselves. Right and left and all around were strewn the pearl and
pink and purply spoils. All the sunset tints were here, and the
beauty of delicate form--grotesqueries, too; nature in queer moods.
It was pleasant to run the hands through the myriad small shells
heaped in baskets, to weigh the sea-cushions and sea-stars and golden
seafeathers, to admire rose coral and brain coral and finger coral,
and hold the conch shells to the ear. Through the open door, too, came
the smell and murmur of the near-by sea, and on the floor lay one last
splash of sunlight. "Give me a shell," said Hagar, "and I will give you
one. Then each of us will have something to remember the other by."
They gravely picked them out, and it took some minutes to do it.
Then in turn each crossed to the merchant in his corner and paid the
purchase price, then came back to the light in the doorway.
Denny held out a delicate, translucent, rosy shell. "It won't hold my
gratitude," he said. "You'll never know.... I used to see you in the
moonlight, between me and the bars.... Somebody had cried for me, ...
wept passionately. It helped to keep me human. I've always seen you
with a light about you. This is your shell."
"Thank you. I shall keep your kind gift always," said Hagar. She
spoke in a child's lyric voice, quaintly and properly, so precisely
as she might have spoken at twelve years old that, startled herself,
she laughed, and Denny, with a catch in his voice, laughed too. "Oh,"
she cried with something like a sob, "sixteen years to slip from one
like that!" She held out a small purple shell. "This is yours, Denny
Gayde.... And I've thought of you often, and wished you well. If I did
you, unknowing, a service, so you, unknowing, have done me a service,
too. That summer morning, long ago--it shocked me awake. The world
since then has been different always, more pitiful and nearer. Here's
your shell. It won't hold my gratitude and well-wishing either."
They passed out between the coral and the sea-fans, entered the surrey,
and it drove on. Now they were back by the sea. The tide was far out,
the expanse of shallows vaster. The salt pools had been fired by the
torch of the sky; they lay in reds and purples, wonderful. The smell
of the sea impregnated the air and there blew a whispering wind. The
town began to appear, straggling out to meet them, low chimneyless
houses of the poorer sort. Men and women were out in the twilight, and
children calling to one another and playing. The vivid lights had faded
from sky and from wet sand and rock, shoal and lagoon, but colour was
left, though it was the ghost of itself. It swam in the air, it gleamed
from the earth. Warmth was there, too, and languor, and the melancholy
of the gathering night. A dreamlike quality came into things--the
children's voices sounded faint and far; only there were waves of some
faint odour, coming now it seemed from gardens.... Now they were in the
town and the sea was shut away.
"One half of my fairy month is gone."
"You are sleeping better?"
"Yes--much better.... Where shall we go to-morrow?"
"Leave it to to-morrow. Look at the star ... oh, beauty!"
When to-morrow was here they walked inland to Fort Fincastle, and then
to the Queen's Staircase. Negro children raced after them with some
sweet-smelling yellow flower in their hands. "Penny, Boss!--Penny,
Boss!--Penny, Boss!" When they were gone, and when two surreys filled
with white-dressed hotel people vanished likewise, they had the Queen's
Staircase to themselves. Broad-stepped, cut in the living rock, it
plunged downward to the green bottom of the seventy-foot deep ancient
quarry. Trees overhung it and yellow flowers, and there was a rich,
green light like the bottom of the sea. Denny and Hagar sat upon a step
a quarter of the way down.
"I do not know why," said Denny, "there should be so deadly a fear
of upheaval. All growth comes with upheaval--surely all spiritual
growth comes so. Growth by accretion means little. Growth from within
comes with upheaval--what you have been transformed or discarded.
A little higher, a little finer breaks the sod and grows forth
so. The deadly fear should be of down-sinking--from the stagnant
grow-no-farther-than-our-fathers-grew down--down.... Of course, the
Woman Movement means upheaval and great upheaval--but that is a
poor reason for condemnation.... As far as its political aspect is
concerned, most open-minded men, Socialists and others, with whom I
come into contact, admit the right and the need. Unless a man is very
stupid he can see what a farce it is to talk of a democracy--government
of the people, for the people, by the people--when one out of every
two human beings is notoriously living under an aristocracy. And, of
course, we who want an associative gain of livelihood, no less than an
associative form of government, stand for her equality there.... But to
me there is something other than all that in this upheaval. I cannot
express it. I do not know what it is, unless it is some faint, supernal
promise.... It is as though the Spirit were again working upon the face
of the waters." He paused, gazing upward at the sky above the wall of
rock. "We are in for a deep change."
"Yes, I think so. A lift of mind and a change of heart, on which to
base a chance for a deep change, indeed. A richer, deeper life.... Oh,
there will be dross enough for a time, tares, detritus, heat and dust
and wounds of conflict, Babel, cries and counter-cries! and some will
think they lose...."
"They'll only think so for a while. Nothing can be lost."
"No--only transmuted.... But I hate the tumult and the shouting while
the people are yet bewildered. If that's the Brahmin in me, I am going
to sacrifice him. I am going where the battle is."
"I do not doubt that."
More white-suited people appeared, at their heels the black children.
"Penny, Boss!--Penny, Boss!--Penny, Boss!" Hagar and Denny rose and
walked back to town through the warm, fragrant ways. He left her at
Greer's studio--she had promised to come look at the portrait. As they
stood a moment in the verandah, Medway's golden drawl was heard from
within. "Well, I've known a good many philosophers--but none that were
irreducible. Every heroic, every transcendental treads at last the
same pavement. 'I love and seek the street called pleasure. I abhor
and avoid the street called pain.' Therefore the _summum bonum_--" The
door opened to Hagar. She smiled and waved her hand, and the studio
swallowed her up.
Some days after this they drove one afternoon over the Blue Hills
to the southern beach. Long white road--long white road--and on
either hand pine and scrub, pine and scrub, and over all a vault of
sky achingly blue. It was a lonely road, a road untravelled to-day,
and the wind shook in the palmetto scrub. Small grey birds flitted
before them, or cheeped from the tangled wood. It was a day for
silence and they stayed silent so long that the negro driving, who
was afraid of silence, broke it himself. He told them about things,
and when they awoke and genially answered, he was happy and talked
on to himself until they, too, were talking, when he lapsed into
silence and contentment. The wind blew, the scrub rustled, the sky was
sapphire--oh, sapphire!
When they came after a good while to the South Beach, they left the
surrey and the horse and the driver, in the shade of the trees that
fringed the beach, and walked slowly a long way, over the firm sand. It
stretched, a silver shore; the sun was westering, the great sea making
a hoarse, profound murmur. They walked in silence, thinking their own
thoughts. Before them, half-sunken in the sand, lay an old boat. When
they came to it, they sat down upon its shattered, sun-dried boards,
with the sand at their feet and the grave evening light stealing up and
Mother Ocean speaking, speaking....
"In the last analysis it is," said Hagar, "a metaphysical adventure--a
love-quest if you will. There is a passion of the mind, there is the
questing soul, there is the desire that will have union with nothing
less than the whole. I will think freely, and largely, and doing that,
under pain of being false, I must act freely and largely, live freely
and largely. Nor must I think one thing and speak another, nor must I
be silent when silence betrays the whole.... And so woman no less than
man comes into the open."
"There is something that broods in this time," said Denny. "I do not
know what it will hatch. But something vaster, something nobler...."
Hagar let the warm sand stream through her fingers. "Oh, how blue is
the sea.... Æons and æons and æons ago, when slowly, slowly life drew
itself forth from such a sea as this into upper air--when Amphibian
began to know two elements, how much richer was life for Amphibian, how
great was the gain!... When, after æons and æons, there was all manner
of warm-blooded life in woods like these behind us, or in richer woods
... and one day, dimly, dimly, some primate thought, and her children
and grandchildren a little, little more consciously thought, and it
spread.... To that tribe how strange a dawn! 'We are growing away from
the four-footed--we are growing away from our sister the gibbon and
our brother the chimpanzee--we are growing--we are changing--we feel
the heavens over us and a strange new life within us--we are passing
out, we are coming in--we need a new word....' And at last they called
themselves _human_--æons ago...."
"And now?"
"And now, on the human plane, it seems to me that we may be immediately
above that region." She took a pointed piece of driftwood and drew
upon the sand. "Here is the human plane--and here above it is another
plane." She drew a diagonal line between. "And that is a stairway of
growth from one to the other. And we are turning from this plane--the
lower plane--and coming upon that stairway, and down it, to meet us,
pours like a morning wind, like the first light in the sky, a hint
of what may be. Like that ancestral tribe, we are growing, we are
changing--we feel a strange new life within us--we are passing out, we
are coming in--we need a new word."
"What would it be?"
"I do not know.... After a while, an age hence maybe, when the light
is stronger, we will coin it. Now there is only intuition of the
change.... There is something in a translation I was reading of one
of the Upanishads, 'But he who discerns all creatures in his Self and
his Self in all creatures, has no disquiet.... What delusion, what
grief can be with him in whom all creatures have become the very self
of the thinker, discerning their oneness?... He has spread around a
thing, bright, bodiless, taking no hurt, sinewless, pure, unsmitten by
evil.... That might come after a long, long time, after change upon
change."
The great sea murmured on, a wild white bird flew across the round of
vision, melted into the sunset.
"And each change is greater by geometrical progression than was the one
before?"
"Not the change itself, but that into which the change leads us. Each
time we depart at right angles.... Yes, I think so."
"And the movement of women toward freedom of field and toward
self-recognition--no less than the general movement toward
socialization--is part of the change?"
"All things are part of it.... Yes, it is part."
She rose from the sand. "The sun is setting." They walked back to the
surrey and took the homeward road. As they came over the Blue Hills
it was first dusk; the town lay, grey-pearl, before them, and above it
swam the moon, full and opaline. "How many days have you now?"
"Just seven."
"Have you heard from Rose Darragh?"
"Yes. She's been doing her work and mine, too. She begs me to stay
another two weeks, but I must not. There is no need--I am perfectly
well again--it would only be selfish enjoyment."
"I wish it were possible--but if it's not, it's not.... Oh, how large
the moon is! You can almost see it a globe--it is like a beautiful,
lighted Japanese lantern."
"Where will we go to-morrow afternoon?"
"We cannot go anywhere to-morrow afternoon, for, alas! I have to go to
a garden-party at Government House. But the next day we might go to Old
Fort. What is that fragrance--those strange lilies? Look now at the
Japanese lantern!"
They went to Old Fort and came back in the warm evening light, driving
close to the sounding sea. "Five days now," said Denny. "Well, I have
been so happy."
That night Hagar could not sleep. She rose at last from the bed and
paced her moon-flooded room. All the long windows were wide; the night
air came in and brought a sighing of the trees. After a while she
stepped out upon the gallery that ran along the face of the house.
Medway's room was down stairs and away from this front; she had the
long silvered pathway to herself. She paced it slowly, up and down,
wooing calm. Each time she reached the end of the gallery, she paused a
moment and looked across the sleeping town that lay for the most part
below this house and garden, to where she could guess the roof of the
small, inexpensive, half hotel, half boarding-house where Denny bided.
When after a time she discovered that she was doing this, she shook
herself away from the action. "No, Hagar, no!"
Going to the other end of the gallery, she found there a low chair
and sat down, leaning her head against the railing. It was the middle
of the night. Something in the place and in the balm of the air
brought back to her those days and nights in Alexandria, so long ago.
There, too, she had had to make choice.... "I could love him here and
now--love him--love him in the old immemorial way.... Well, I will
not!" She put her elbows on her knees, her chin in her hands. "_Rose
Darragh--Rose Darragh--Rose Darragh_"--it struck through her mind,
slow and heavily vibrant, like a deep and melancholy music. She rose
and paced the gallery again, but when she came to the farther end, she
turned without pause or look over the moonlit town.
"_Rose Darragh--Rose Darragh_"--she made it rhythmic, breathing deeply
and quietly, saying the name inwardly, deeply, but without passion now,
saying it like a comrade's name. "_Rose Darragh--Rose Darragh--Rose
Darragh--_"
Calm came at last, repose of mind, victory. She sat down again, leaned
her arms upon the railing, and followed with her eyes the lonely,
silver moon. Work was in the world, the all-friend Work; and Beauty was
in the world, the all-friend Beauty; and one good put out of reach,
mind and spirit must make another and were equal to the task. "Rose
Darragh--Rose Darragh!--not if I could would I hurt you," said Hagar;
and took her attention from that matter and put it first upon the
stars, and then upon some lines of Shelley's that she loved, and then
upon the story she had in hand. It was not well to go to bed thinking
of a story, and when at last she left the gallery and laid herself
straight upon the cool linen, she stilled the waves of the mind-stuff
and let the barque of attention drift whither it would. At last she
seemed in a deep forest long ago and far away, and there she went to
sleep with a feeling of violets under her hand.
Five days, and Denny left Nassau. "It's not saying good-bye. In May,
when you come to New York--"
"Yes, in May I'll see you and Rose Darragh. Until May, then--"
Denny and she clasped hands, both hands. "Thank God for friends!" he
said with the odd little laugh that she liked, with the catch in the
voice at the end of it as though he had started to laugh and then Life
had come in. His eyes were misty. He brushed his hand across them. "You
are dancing before me," he said apologetically.
She laughed herself. "And you are dancing before me! Good-bye,
good-bye, Denny Gayde! Let's be friends always."
From the garden she watched the Miami steam slowly down the narrow
harbour, and, passing the lighthouse, turn to the open sea. She watched
it until it was but a black speck with a dark feather of smoke, and
then until the feather and all had melted into the sky. "Well," she
said, "there's work and beauty and high cheer, and Time that smooths
away most violences!"
But she did not see Denny and Rose Darragh in May. That evening at
dinner Medway was more than usually good company. He had a high colour;
his hair and curling beard had been cut just the length that was most
becoming; he looked superbly handsome. Often he affected Hagar as would
a very fine canvas, some portrait by Titian. To-night was one of these
nights.
Greer dined with them, and he was urging Medway as he had urged before
to let him paint him. "Fortune's smiling on us both--on you as well as
me. Neither of us may have such a chance again! Let me--ah, let me!"
"What should I do with it when it was done, and if I liked it--which
you know, Greer, is not dead certain? You can't hang portraits in a
nomad's tent, and I haven't a soul in the world to give it to,--my
mother would like a coloured photograph of me, but she wouldn't like
Greer's picture,--unless Gipsy will take it when she sets up her own
establishment--"
"I will take it with thanks," said Hagar. "Let Mr. Greer do it."
Medway said he would consider it. Dinner went off gaily with stories
and badinage. Afterwards the traveller from the Colonial came in,
and then the violinist. He played for them--played rhapsodies and
fantasias. It was after eleven when the three guests departed. Greer's
gay voice could be heard down the street--
"'A Saint-Blaise, à la Zuecca,
Vous étiez, vous étiez bien aise
A Saint-Blaise.
A Saint Blaise, à la Zuecca
Nous étions bien là--'"
Thomson appeared, with Mahomet behind him to put out the lights.
"Good-night--sleep right!" said Medway. "Pleasant fellows, aren't they?"
Toward daylight she was awakened by a knock at her door, followed by
Thomson's voice. "Mr. Ashendyne has had some kind of a stroke, Miss
Hagar--" She sprang up, threw on a kimono, opened the door, and ran
downstairs with Thomson. "I heard him breathing heavily--I've waked
Mahomet and sent the black boy for the doctor--"
It was paralysis. And after months of Nassau, she took him back to the
mainland and northward by slow stages, not to Gilead Balm, for he made
always "No!" with his head and eyes to that, and not to New York for he
seemed impatient of that, too; but at last to Washington. There she and
Thomson found a pleasant residence to let on a tree-embowered avenue,
and there they moved him, and there she stayed with him two years and
read a vast number of books aloud, and between the readings cultivated
a sunny talkativeness. At the end of the two years there came a second
stroke which killed him.