NEW YORK AGAIN
It seemed strange to be back at the Maines', staying a fortnight with
Rachel while the apartment was being looked for. Nothing had been moved
in that house; it was all just the same, only the tone of time was
deeper, the furniture more worn, the prints yellower. She asked for
and was given the third-floor back room again, though, indeed, Mrs.
Maine protested that now that she was famous!... Bessie had changed
as little as the house. More grey hairs, somewhat more flesh, a great
many more pounds of chocolate creams to her credit--that seemed all.
She was still amiable, sleepily agreeable, comely, and lazy. Powhatan,
except to grow greyer and leaner, had not altered either. The old
servants held on. With some inevitable variations the same people came
in the evenings--the Bishop's nephew and the St. Timothy people, and
Powhatan's downtown acquaintances, and chance visitors from the other
side of Mason and Dixon's.
She noticed a slight difference in the cast of talk. They all seemed
uneasily aware that the world was moving. Mostly they disapproved
and foreboded. She cast her mind back to that winter of '93-'94. It
had been the terrible winter of unemployment, strikes, widespread
discontent. She remembered clearly how Powhatan had declaimed then
against "upsetters" and what the country was coming to. But now she
heard him and the Bishop's nephew agree that anti-Christ and ruin were
modern inventions. They sighed for the halcyon past. "Even ten or
twelve years ago, sir, men were content enough!"
Rachel--Rachel had not sat still. Rachel had climbed. She was the
old Rachel, but sweetened and broadened. There was left something of
her old manner; she had her broodings that to the casual eye seemed
half-sullen; at the end of long silences she might flare out, send at
table or elsewhere a flaming, unexpected arrow, but her old ways were
like old clothes, kept half-negligently, worn from habit, while all
the time a fairer, more lately woven garment was in the wardrobe. She
looked no older; she was slight and brown and somehow velvety. Hagar
called her a pansy. She was no longer tragic, or tragedy had become but
a dim background, a remembered cloud. And she was the strong, sane, and
actual comrade of her children.
Betty and Charley.... Charley was blind. Charley and Betty had changed,
changed more than anybody. Betty stood a frank, straight young Diana,
what she said and did ringing true. Charley was the student. He had
his shelves of Braille, and his mother's eyes and voice were his at
call. Just now they were doing general history together--that was what
Charley wanted, to be a historian. Charley and Betty claimed Hagar
for their own. There were her Christmas letters every year--wonderful
letters--and her Christmas gifts, small choice things from every
land. They worshipped her, too, with frankness because she had "done
something"--because her name counted. Oh, they were very ambitious,
Betty and Charley; filled with ideas, glorious for the new time, ready
to push the world with vigour! "Oh," cried Hagar, "don't they make you
feel timid, cautious, and conservative?"
She watched with interest to see what effect the two had upon Powhatan
and Bessie. She was forced to the conclusion that they had very little.
They angered Powhatan sometimes, and he would strike the table and
deplore the days of silent reverence. But he was desperately proud
of Betty's looks, and he had an odd, sneaking pity and fondness for
Charley, and Hagar gathered that he would have sadly missed them out of
the house. As for Bessie, she only gave her sleepy smile, and said that
all children talked foolishly, but that you didn't have to listen.
Upstairs, at bedtime, now in Rachel's room, now in Hagar's the two
talked together. Daytime, they looked for Hagar's apartment. They
found it at last, high in air, overlooking the great city; roofs and
roofs and roofs at a hundred levels; curling streamers of white steam
like tossed plumes against the blue sky, bright pennants floating from
towering hotel or department store; a clock below a church spire, with
a gilt weather-cock far above; blurs of occasional trees seen in some
hollow opening; streets far below them, crossing, crossing--percolating
rivulets of manikins that were people; roofs and roofs and roofs, and
a low perpetual, multitudinous voice; and the sky over all, high and
clear and exhilarating the day they found the place. "I am going to
utter a bromide," said Hagar. "How marvellous is modern life!"
They went over it again. "Thomasine's room, and a guest-room, and
my room, and a fine room for Mary Magazine who is coming--Isham
having remarried--to look after us, and two baths and a great big
library-study-drawing-room, and a little room for what we please,
and plenty of closets, and a quiet and good café away up on the
roof--Rachel, it's fine!" They sat on a window-seat and Rachel produced
a pencil and notebook, and together they tinted the walls and laid
rugs and hung pictures and ran bookshelves around and furnished the
apartment. "There! that's quiet and perfect and not expensive. As
Thomson would say, 'It's quite _comme il faut_, Miss!'"
"Where is Thomson?"
"Mr. Greer, the artist, has taken him over. He wrote me that he was
making thousands, throwing the light on millionaires, and especially
millionairesses, and that he wanted Thomson, oh, so badly! He's the
type that Thomson likes, and so he joined him two months ago at
Newport. Dear old Thomson! Mahomet has gone back to Alexandria."
They looked around the big room. "Soft lights at night and all those
twinkling stars out there. It's going to be a dear home."
"You'll have people coming about you. Your own sort--"
Hagar laughed. "What is my sort? Everybody's my sort."
"Writers--artists--"
Hagar pondered the mantel-shelf with a view to what should go above
it. "I don't know many of them. I know more of them abroad than here.
We're a very isolated kind of craftspeople--each of us more or less on
a little Robinson Crusoe island of our own. It may be different in New
York, I don't know.... We could do a good deal if we'd put our heads
together and push the same wheel."
The apartment was not to be furnished in a day. They worked at it in
a restful and leisurely manner, and in the midst of operations, Hagar
went to see the Josslyns who had a house up on the Sound.
That afternoon she and the Josslyns walked by the water and watched
the white sails gliding by the green and rocky shore, then in the
evening sat by a wood fire with cider and apples. Monday to Friday
the children were in town at their grandmother's, going to school;
Friday afternoon they entered the big living-room like a west wind and
danced about with their mother. A little later the whole family would
go into town; Christopher had had a course of lectures to write and
he was doing it better here. The fire crackled and blazed; at night
through the open windows came in a dim sound of waves, with passing
lights of boats, and the fragrance of the salt sea, beloved by Hagar.
On Monday, when the children had gone, she drove with Molly deep into
the sweet countryside, and the two talked as the quiet old horse jogged
along.... Molly had taken the advice of the woman at Roger Michael's
dinner-party three years and more ago. She was an active member of a
suffrage organization, deeply interested, beginning to speak. "I'm a
good out-of-doors sort. My voice carries and I don't have to strain it.
Of course, we're just beginning out-of-doors speaking. I haven't half
the intellect I wish I had, but I can give them good, plain doctrine.
It's so common-sense, after all! And Christopher helps so much.... Oh,
Hagar, when you're truly mated, it's _heaven_!"
Molly could tell much of the practical working, of the everyday effort
and propaganda. "In two weeks we'll be back in town, and then if you'll
let me take you here and there--And when we get back to the house I'll
show you what I have of the literature we use,--pamphlets, leaflets,
and so on,--from John Stuart Mill down to an article Christopher wrote
the other day. We broadcast a great amount of it in every state, but
if we were rich we could make use of a thousand times more. But we're
not rich--whether that's to our damnation or our salvation! We have
to make devotion do instead. Then there are the books that help us,
and they are coming out constantly now. And every now and then we gain
a bit of the press. A number of the magazines help no end. And, of
course, we speak and have meetings and work quietly, each among her
own acquaintance. It's to educate--educate--educate! We're just at
the beginning of things. There were the early stages and the heroic
women who blazed the trail. They're all going,--Miss Anthony died last
March,--and their time is merging into our time, and now the trail's
a roadway and there are thousands on it, and still we're just at the
beginning--"
Molly could tell, too, something of the personality of the women
eminent in the movement. "The really eminent to-day are not always
those whose names the reporters catch, and _vice versa_. And while the
papers talk of 'leaders,' I do not think that, in the man's sense, they
are leaders at all. We do not hurrah for any woman as the men do for
Mr. Roosevelt or Mr. Bryan. The movement goes without high priests and
autocrats and personifications. We haven't, I suppose, the Big Chief
tradition. Perhaps woman's individualism has a value after all. It's
like religion when it really is personal; your idea of good remains
your idea of good; it doesn't take on a human form. Or perhaps we're
merely tired of crooking the knee. I don't know. The fact remains."
They jogged along by country roads and orchards. "It's the most
worth-_while_ thing!" said Molly. "Nobody can explain it, but every one
who takes hold of it _deep_ feels it. I heard a woman say the other
day that it was like going out of a close room into ozone and wind and
the blue lift of the sky. She said she felt as though she had wings!
Discouragements? Cartloads of them! But somehow they don't matter. Nor
do mistakes. Of course we make them--but the next time we do better."
The witching autumn week with the Josslyns over, Hagar went back to
town, and, as she had promised, to the Settlement for three days.
The Settlement! The first day she had seen it came back clearly; the
harsh, biting day and the search for Thomasine, and Omega Street, and
then how wonderful the old house had seemed to her, going over it with
Elizabeth. It was shrunken now, of course, in size and marvel, but it
was still a grave and pleasant place of fine uses. She had visited it
before during this month, and she had marked certain changes. A few of
the people in residence years before were here yet, others were gone,
others of later years had come in. But it was not only people; other
changes appeared. She found exhibited a deep skepticism of certain
Danaïdes' labours still favoured or tolerated so many years ago. The
policies of the place were bolder and larger; every one was at once
more radical and more serene.
Marie Caton met her. "Elizabeth has a committee meeting, and then she
speaks to-night at Cooper Union: _Women in the Sweated Trades_. I
haven't had you to myself hardly ever! Now I'm going to."
"Can't I go to Cooper Union to-night?"
"Oh, yes! I'm going, too. It's an important meeting. But I've got you
for a whole two hours, and nowadays that's a long and restful sojourn
together! Get your things off and we'll take possession of Elizabeth's
sitting-room."
In Elizabeth's room, with her books, with the Psyche and the Botticelli
Judith and the Mona Lisa and the drawing of the Sphinx, they talked of
twenty things, finally of the Settlement's specific activities, old
ones carried on, new ones embarked in; then, "But more and more you get
drawn--or I get drawn--into the ocean of China Awake."
"China Awake?"
"Women Awake. It's an ocean all right, with an ocean's possibilities."
"I don't think it's women only who are waking, Marie. Women and men,
all of us--"
"I agree," said Marie. "But it wasn't just natural sleepy-headedness
with women. They've been drugged--given knock-out drops, so to speak.
They have a long way to wake up."
Hagar mused, her eyes upon the drawing. "Yes, a good, long way....
There must have been a lot of pristine strength."
"Well, it's coming out. All kinds of things are coming out with an
accent on qualities they didn't think she had."
"Yes. The world _is_ rather in the position of the hen with the
duckling--"
"The kind of thing we read and hear at this place emphasizes, of
course, the economic and sociological side. It's to be the Century of
Fair Distribution, of Social Organization, of Humanism--_ergo_, Woman
Also. Which, of course, is all right, but I'd put an infinite plus to
that."
"And Elizabeth?"
"Oh, Elizabeth is a saint! What she thinks of is the sweated woman
and the little children, and the girl who goes under--most often is
pushed under. It's what we see down here; it's the starved bodies and
minds, the slow dying of fatigue, the monstrous wrong of the Things
Withheld that's moving her. Of course, we all think of that. How can
any thinking woman not think of that? She wants the vote to use as a
lever, and so do I, and so do you.... But behind all that, in the place
where I myself live," said Marie, with sudden passion, "I am fighting
to be myself! I am fighting for that same right for the other woman! I
am fighting for plain recognition of an equal humanity!"
There was a crowd that night at Cooper Union. Elizabeth spoke; a
grave, strong talk, followed with attention, clapped with sincerity.
After her there spoke an A. F. of L. man. "Women have got to unionize.
They've got to learn to keep step. They've got to learn that the good
of one is wrapped up in the good of all. They've got to learn to
strike. They've got to learn to strike not only for themselves, but for
the others. They've got to get off their little, just-standing-room
islands, and think in terms of continents. They've got to get an idea
of solidarity--"
When he had taken his seat came an announcement, made with evident
satisfaction. "We did not know it until a few minutes ago. We thought
she was still in the West--but we are so fortunate as to have with us
to-night--Rose Darragh!" Applause broke forth at once.