JOHN FAY
"Denny," said Hagar, "ask Mary Magazine to give you a coffee-cup."
Denny came back with it and she filled it from the silver urn. "Rose
went to Brooklyn to-night?"
"Yes.--I was to have spoken down on Omega Street, but at the last
moment Harding came in and I sent him instead. 'Onward!' 's got the
strongest kind of stuff this week, and there are some finishing
touches--I'm going back to the office in an hour or two. Rose said that
she asked you for that poem, and that you said you would give it, and
she thought you might have it ready. I've got a telling place for it--"
"Drink your coffee and talk to the others while I copy it out," said
Hagar. She rose and went to the desk in the smaller room. When she came
back, Lily was dreaming with her eyes upon the forest bough, and the
two men sat discussing Syndicalism. She laid a folded piece of paper
upon the table beside Denny's hand. "There are only three verses."
He opened the paper and read them. "Thank you, Hagar! You've struck it
home."
He refolded the paper and was about to put it in his pocket when John
Fay held out his hand. "Mayn't I see it, too?" He looked at Hagar.
"Yes, of course, if you wish."
Fay read it, held the paper in his hand for a moment, then gave it
back to Denny. "I wish I could write like that," he said.
His tone was so oddly humble that Hagar laughed. "I wish that I could
build great bridges across deep rivers!" she said.
They sat and talked, and the poem gave leadings to their talk, though
they did not speak of the poem. At first it was Fay, answering Hagar's
questions, telling of the struggle of muscle and brain with the
physical earth, of mountain-piercing, river-spanning, harbour-making.
He was thirty-nine; he had been engineering, building in strange
and desert places since he was a boy; he had a host of memories of
struggles, now desperate and picturesque, now patient and drudging,
grapples of mind with matter, first-hand encounters with solids and
liquids and gases. He had had to manage men in order to manage these;
he had had to know how to manage men. Born with an enquiring mind, he
learned as he went along his governments and peoples, their customs,
institutions, motor-faiths, strengths and weaknesses; also he knew the
natural history of places, and loved Mother Earth and a good part of
her progeny. He had also a defined, quizzical humour which saved the
day for him when it grew too strenuous. He talked well, with a certain
drawling fitness of phrase which brought Medway into Hagar's mind, but
not unpleasantly. There had been much in Medway which she had liked.
Fay was no monopolist. The talk went from one to another, and Denny
drew more into it. He had been listening attentively to Fay. "It's your
work," he said, "and it's tremendous and basic work. You've been doing
it through the ages ever since it first occurred to us that we could
lengthen an arm with a stick and crack a nut--or an enemy's head--with
a stone. It's tremendous and basic still. And the people who work under
your direction, and atom by atom give you power?"
"Why, one day," said Fay, "they'll work as artists. A far day,
doubtless, and there are degrees in artists; but I see no other
conclusion. And to give the artist component in the mass of humanity
a chance to strengthen and come out is, I take it, the tremendous and
basic work to which we've all got to devote the next century or two."
"Oh, you're all right!" said Denny.
Hagar smiled. "My old 'News from Nowhere'--"
"But with a difference," said Denny. "Morris's was an over-simplified
dream."
"Yes; we are more complex and flowing than that. But it was lovely. Do
you remember the harvest home, and the masons, so absorbed and happy in
their building ... like children, and yet conscious artists, buoyant,
free--"
Fay looked at her. "What," he said, "is _your_ vision of the country
that is coming?"
Her candid eyes met his. "I have no clear vision," she said. "Visions,
too, are flowing. The vision of to-day is not that of yesterday and
to-morrow's may be different yet. Moreover, I don't want to fix a
vision, to mount it like a butterfly and keep it with the life gone
out. We've done too much of that all along the way behind us. Vision
grows, and who wishes to say 'Lo, the beautiful End!' There is no End.
I do not wish a rigid mind, posturing before one altar-piece. Pictures
dissolve and altars are portable."
"Yes," said Denny, "but--"
"Lily says she reads Vedanta. Well, it is the Yogi's _Neti--neti!_
Almost your only possible definition as yet is, 'Not this--not this!'
The country that is coming--It is not capitalism, though capitalism
is among its ancestors. It is not war, though in the past it warred.
It is not ecclesiasticism, though ecclesiasticism, too, was an inn on
its road. It is not sex-aristocracy, though that, too, is behind it;
it is not preoccupation with sex at all. It is not sectionalism, nor
nationalism, nor imperialism. It is not racial arrogance. It is not
arrogance at all. It is not exploitation. It is not hatred. It is not
selfishness. It is not lust. It is not bigotry. It is not ignorance,
or pride in ignorance.--_Neti, neti!_... It is beauty--and truth....
And always greater.... And it comes by knowledge, out of which grows
understanding, and by courage, out of which come great actions."
She ceased to speak, and leaned back in her chair, her hand at the
amethysts about her throat. Fay kept his eyes upon her. He was
conscious of a resurgence of a morning of a couple of years before when
he had cut from a magazine a page bearing a half-tone portrait and had
pinned it above his book-shelf. HAGAR ASHENDYNE had said the legend
below. The rustle of the palms outside his hut came to him, and the
mist of early morning above the waters.
The clock on Hagar's mantel-shelf struck ten with a silvery stroke.
Denny started. "I've got to go--work's calling!"
"I had rather hear you say, at ten o'clock, that sleep was calling,"
said Hagar. "You're working too hard, Rose says so, and I say so." She
looked at him with friendliness deep and tender, soft and bright.
"Almost Denny's only fault is that he makes his work his god rather
than his servant. At times he's perilously near offering it a human
sacrifice. Why will you, Denny?"
"There's so much to do and so few are doing it," said Denny. His eyes
were upon the great forest bough, but he seemed to be looking beyond
it, down long, long vistas. "I don't know that I worship work. But I
want every prisoner of wrong to rebel. And there's no time to waste
when you have to pass the word along to so many cells. Sometimes I
feel, too, like sitting down and playing, but when I do, I always begin
after a little to hear the chains." He laughed. "And I like you and
Rose preaching _dolce far niente_! If ever there were two who had the
power of work--!"
"All the same," said Hagar, "go to bed before two o'clock, won't you?"
He shook hands around and was gone. "What a wonderful face!" said Lily;
and Fay nodded. "A kind of worn, warrior angel--"
Hagar took Lily's hand and kissed it. "You've defined Denny to a
nicety! 'A kind of worn, warrior angel'--I like that!... No, don't go!
It isn't late."
"We'll stay, then, just one other half-hour. And now," said Lily, "tell
me about yourself. We see your name, of course, and what the papers
think you are doing. But you yourself--"
"But I myself?" said Hagar. "Ah, if you'll tell me, I'll tell you!" The
great bough of red leaves against the wall was repeated in miniature by
a spray upon the table, resting in a piece of cloudy Venetian glass.
Hagar took it from the vase and sat studying it, colour and line. She
sat at ease in the deep chair, her long, slender limbs composed, her
head thrown back against green-bronze, an arm bent and raised, the
wine-red spray in her hand. "What," she said, "does a man or woman do
in a dusty day's march of every great transit? About that is what I and
many others have been doing, in this age as in other ages. Millions of
minds to reach with a statement that for reasons of weight the column
must surmount such a hill and again such a hill, the line of march
lying truly on higher levels. The statement did not originate with the
messengers of this or any other age; it is social, and the inner urge
would send the marchers somehow on, but there is needed interpreting,
clarifying, articulation--hence the office that we fill, though we fill
it as yet, I know, weakly enough! So it means a preoccupation with
communication--ways and means of reaching minds. And that, lacking
a developed telepathy, means the spoken and the written word. And
that means, seeing we have such great numbers to reach, a continuing
endeavour to reach people in congregation. And that means arrangement,
going from place to place, much time that you sigh for consumed, some
weariness, a great number of petty happenings--and a vast insight into
life and the way it is lived and the beings who live it! It means
contacts with reality and a feeding the springs of humour and an
acquaintance with the truly astonishing forest of human motives. And
there is organization work and correspondence, and much of what might
be called drudgery unless you can put the glow about it.... And there
is the weaving all the time of the web of unity. The human family, and
the dying-out before love and understanding of invidious distinctions.
The world one home, and men one man, though of an infinite variety, and
women one woman, though of an infinite variety, and children one child,
and the open road before the three. And back of the three, Oneness. The
Great Pulse--out, the Many; in, the One.... So I with others speak and
write and go about and work."
When the clock struck again, Lily and John Fay said good-night. Lily
was to come once more before her boat sailed.
Hagar looked at Fay. "You are going to England, too?"
He hesitated. "I've said so--"
"He's just built a great bridge," said Lily, "and he hasn't really
taken a holiday for years. Robert and I want him just as long as he
will travel with us."
When they were gone, Hagar went to the window and looked out far and
wide upon the city settling to its rest. Here, to-night, would be deep
repose, here fevered tossing, here perhaps no sleep at all. There would
be death chambers and birth chambers--a many of each. And spiritual
death chambers and spiritual birth chambers and the trodden middle
rooms, minds that cried, "Light, more light!" and minds that said, "We
see as it is." ... And over all, the suns so far away they were but
glittering points. Hagar's gaze moved across the heavens from host to
host. "Ah, if you were hieroglyphics, and we could find the key--"
She came back to the lamplit table; Thomasine away, Mary Magazine
asleep--the place was alone with her. She had been tired, but she did
not feel so now. She sat down, put her arms above her head and her eyes
upon the forest bough, and began to think.... She thought visually
with colour and light and form, luminous images parting the mist,
rising in the great "interior sphere." She sat there till the clock
struck twelve, then she rose, put out the lights, opened every window.
In the east, above the roofs, glittered Orion, with Aldebaran red and
mighty and the glimmering Pleiades. Hagar stood and gazed. She lifted
her eyes toward the zenith--Capella and Algol and the street whose dust
is stars between. Her lips moved, she raised her hand. "All hail!" she
said; then turning from the window opened the door that led into her
bedroom. It was a white and fair and simple place. As she undressed,
she was thinking of the October woods at Gilead Balm.
Three days later, at the hotel, Lily and John Fay had a short but
momentous conversation. "_Do_ you want to go, John? I don't want you to
go if you don't want to go, you know."
"That's what I came to talk to you about," said Fay. "I have my
stateroom. The boat sails day after to-morrow. I've written to men
I know in London and in Paris. I want to see them. They're men I've
worked with. I want to see Robert. I even want to keep on seeing you,
Lily! I've been about as eager as a boy for that run over Europe with
the two of you. And I don't want to disappoint you and Robert, if it is
the least disappointment. But--"
"I don't know that she'll ever marry," said Lily. "She'll not, unless
she finds some one alike to strengthen and be strengthened by. A lot of
the reasons for which women used to marry are out of court with her.
Even what we call love--she won't feel it now for anything less than
something that matches her."
Fay walked across the floor, stood at the window a moment, then came
back. "I won't fence," he said. "It's simple truth, however you divined
it. And I'm going to stay. I don't match her, but I've never proposed
to stop growing."