One morning about a week later she entered her carriage and was
driven rapidly away. A soft-faced, middle-aged woman with gray
ringlets and nervous eyes stepped timorously upon the veranda and
watched her departure with an expression of relief--Miss Harriet
Crane, the unredeemed daughter of the household.
She had been the only fruit of her mother's first marriage and she
still remained attached to the parental stem despite the most
vigorous wavings and shakings of that stem to shed its own product.
Nearly fifty years of wintry neglect and summer scorching had not
availed to disjoin Harriet from organic dependence upon her mother.
And of all conceivable failings in a child of hers that mother
could have found none so hard to forgive as the failure to attract
a man in a world full of men nearly all bent upon being attracted.
It was by no choice of Harriet's that she was born of a woman who
valued children as a kind of social collateral, high-class
investments to mature after long periods with at least reasonable
profits for the original investors. Nor was it by any volition of
hers that she had commended herself to her mother in the beginning
by being a beautiful and healthful child: initial pledge that she
could be relied upon to turn out lucrative in the end. The parent
herself was secretly astounded that she had given birth to a child
of so seraphic a disposition.
Trouble and disappointment began with education, for education is
long stout resistance. You cannot polish highly a stone that is
not hard enough to resist being highly polished. Harriet's soft
nature gave way before the advance of the serried phalanxes of
knowledge: learning passed her by; and she like the many "passed
through school."
By this time her mother had grown alarmed and she brought Harriet
out prematurely, that she might be wedded before, so to speak, she
was discovered. Meantime Mrs. Crane herself had married a second
and a third time, with daughters by the last husband who were
little younger than her eldest; and she laughingly protested that
nothing is more confusing to a woman than to have in the house
children by two husbands. Hence further reason for desiring
immediate nuptials: she could remove from the parlors the trace of
bi-marital collaboration.
At first only the most brilliant matches were planned for Harriet;
these one by one unaccountably came to naught. Later the mother
began to fall back: upon those young men who should be glad to
embrace such an opportunity; but these less desirable young men
failed to take that peculiar view of their destinies. In the
meanwhile the Misses Conyers had come on as debutantes and were
soon bespoken. At the marriage of the youngest, Harriet's mother
had her act as first bridesmaid and dressed her, already fading, as
though she were the very spirit of April.
The other sisters were long since gone, scattered north and south
with half-grown families; and the big house was almost empty save
when they came in troops to visit it.
Harriet's downward career as an article of human merchandise had
passed through what are perhaps not wholly unrecognizable stages.
At first she had been displayed near the entrance for immediate
purchase by the unwary. Then she had been marked down as something
that might be secured at a reduced price; but intending buyers
preferred to pay more. By and by even this label was taken off and
she became a remnant of stock for which there was no convenient
space--being moved from shelf to shelf, always a little more
shop-worn, a little more out of style. What was really needed was
an auction.
Mrs. Conyers did not take much to heart the teachings of her Bible;
but it had at least defined for her one point of view: all
creatures worth saving had been saved in pairs.
Bitter as were those years for Harriet, others more humiliating
followed. The maternal attempts having been discontinued, she,
desperate with slights and insults, had put forth some efforts of
her own. But it was as though one had been placed in a boat
without oars and told to row for life: the little boat under the
influence of cosmic tides had merely drifted into shallows and now
lay there--forgotten.
This morning as she sat idly rocking on the veranda, she felt that
negative happiness which consists in the disappearance of a
positively disagreeable thing. Then she began to study how she
should spend the forenoon most agreeably. Isabel was upstairs; she
would have been perfectly satisfied to talk with her; but for
several mornings Isabel had shown unmistakable preference to be let
alone; and in the school of life Harriet had attained the highest
proficiency in one branch of knowledge at least--never to get in
anybody's way. Victor Fielding lay under the trees with a pipe and
a book, but she never ventured near him.
So Harriet bethought herself of a certain friend of hers on the
other side of town, Miss Anna Hardage, who lived with her brother,
Professor Hardage--two people to trust.
She put on her hat which unfortunately she had chosen to trim
herself, tied a white veil across the upper part of her face and
got out her second-best pair of gloves: Harriet kept her best
gloves for her enemies. In the front yard she pulled a handful of
white lilacs (there was some defect here or she would never have
carried white lilacs in soiled white gloves); and passed out of the
gate. Her eyes were lighted up with anticipations, but ill must
have overtaken her in transit; for when she was seated with Miss
Anna in a little side porch looking out on the little green yard,
they were dimmed with tears.
"The same old story," she complained vehemently. "The same
ridicule that has been dinned into my ears since I was a child."
"Ah, now, somebody has been teasing her about being an old maid,"
said Miss Anna to herself, recognizing the signs.
"This world is a very unprincipled place to live in," continued
Harriet, her rage curdling into philosophy.
"Ah, but it is the best there is just yet," maintained Miss Anna,
stoutly. "By and by we may all be able to do better--those of us
who get the chance."
"What shall I care then?" said Harriet, scouting eternity as a
palliative of contemporary woes.
"Wait! you are tired and you have lost your temper from thirst:
children always do. I'll bring something to cure you, fresh from
the country, fresh from Ambrose Webb's farm. Besides, you have a
dark shade of the blues, my dear; and this remedy is capital for
the blues. You have but to sip a glass slowly--and where are
they?" And she hastened into the house.
She returned with two glasses of cool buttermilk.
The words and the deed were characteristic of one of the most
wholesome women that ever helped to straighten out a crooked and to
cool a feverish world. Miss Anna's very appearance allayed
irritation and became a provocation to good health, to good sense.
Her mission in life seemed not so much to distribute honey as to
sprinkle salt, to render things salubrious, to enable them to keep
their tonic naturalness. Not within the range of womankind could
so marked a contrast have been found for Harriet as in this maiden
lady of her own age, who was her most patient friend and who
supported her clinging nature (which still could not resist the
attempt to bloom) as an autumn cornstalk supports a frost-nipped
morning-glory.
If words of love had ever been whispered into Miss Anna's ear, no
human being knew it now: but perhaps her heart also had its under
chamber sealed with tears. Women not even behind her back jested
at her spinsterhood; and when that is true, a miracle takes place
indeed. No doubt Miss Anna was a miracle, not belonging to any
country, race, or age; being one of those offerings to the world
which nature now and then draws from the deeps of womanhood: a pure
gift of God.
The two old maids drained their rectifying beverage in the shady
porch. Whether from Miss Anna's faith in it or from the simple
health-giving of her presence, Harriet passed through a process of
healing; and as she handed back the empty glass, she smiled
gratefully into Miss Anna's sparkling brown eyes. Nature had been
merciful to her in this, that she was as easily healed as wounded.
She now returned to the subject which had so irritated her, as we
rub pleasantly a spot from which a thorn has been extracted.
"What do I care?" she said, straightening her hat as if to complete
her recovery. "But if there is one thing that can make me angry,
Anna, it is the middle-aged, able-bodied unmarried men of this
town. They are perfectly, _perfectly_ contemptible."
"Oh, come now!" cried Miss Anna, "I am too old to talk about such
silly things myself; but what does a woman care whether she is
married or not if she has had offers? And you have had plenty of
good offers, my dear."
"No, I haven't!" said Harriet, who would tell the truth about this
rankling misfortune.
"Well, then, it was because the men knew you wouldn't have them."
"No, it wasn't!" said Harriet, "it was because they knew I would."
"Nonsense!" cried Miss Anna, impatiently. "You mustn't try to palm
off so much mock modesty on me, Harriet."
"Ah, I am too old to fib about it, Anna! I leave _that_ to my many
sisters in misfortune."
Harriet looked at her friend's work curiously: she was darning
Professor Hardage's socks.
"Why do you do that, Anna? Socks are dirt cheap. You might as
well go out into the country and darn sheep."
"Ah, you have never had a brother--my brother! so you cannot
understand. I can feel his heels pressing against my stitches when
he is walking a mile away. And I know whenever his fingers touch
the buttons I have put back. Besides, don't you like to see people
make bad things good, and things with holes in them whole again?
Why, that is half the work of the world, Harriet! It is not his
feet that make these holes," continued Miss Anna, nicely, "it is
his shoes, his big, coarse shoes. And his clothes wear out so
soon. He has a tailor who misfits him so exactly from year to year
that there is never the slightest deviation in the botch. I know
beforehand exactly where all the creases will begin. So I darn and
mend. The idea of his big, soft, strong feet making holes in
anything! but, then, you have never tucked him in bed at night, my
dear, so you know nothing about his feet."
"Not I!" said Harriet, embarrassed but not shocked.
Miss Anna continued fondly in a lowered voice: "You should have
heard him the other day when he pulled open a drawer: 'Why, Anna,'
he cried, 'where on earth did I get all these new socks? The
pair I left in here must have been alive: they've bred like
rabbits.'--'Why, you've forgotten,' I said. 'It's your birthday;
and I have made you over, so that you are as good as new--_me_!'"
"I never have to be reminded of my birthday," remarked Harriet,
reflectively. "Anna, do you know that I have lived about
one-eighth of the time since Columbus discovered America: doesn't
that sound awful!"
"Ah, but you don't look it," said Miss Anna, artistically, "and
that's the main object."
"Oh, I don't feel it," retorted Harriet, "and that's the main
object too. I'm as young as I ever was when I'm away from home;
but I declare, Anna, there are times when my mother can make me
feel I'm about the oldest thing alive."
"Oh, come now! you mustn't begin to talk that way, or I'll have to
give you more of the antidote. You are threatened with a relapse."
"No more," ordered Harriet with a forbidding hand, "and I repeat
what I said. Of course you know I never gossip, Anna; but when I
talk to you, I do not feel as though I were talking to anybody."
"Why, of course not," said Miss Anna, trying to make the most of
the compliment, "I am nobody at all, just a mere nonentity,
Harriet."
"Anna," said Harriet, after a pause of unusual length, "if it had
not been for my mother, I should have been married long ago.
Thousands of worse-looking women, and of actually worse women,
marry every year in this world and marry reasonably well. It was
because she tried to marry me off: that was the bottom of the
deviltry--the men saw through her."
"I am afraid they did," admitted Miss Anna, affably, looking down
into a hole.
"Of course I know I am not brilliant," conceded Harriet, "but then
I am never commonplace."
"I should like to catch any one saying such a thing."
"Even if I were, commonplace women always make the best wives: do
they not?"
"Oh, don't ask that question in this porch," exclaimed Miss Anna a
little resentfully. "What do I know about it!"
"My mother thinks I am a weak woman," continued Harriet, musingly.
"If my day ever comes, she will know that I am, strong, Anna,
_strong_."
"Ah, now, you must forgive your mother," cried Miss Anna, having
reached a familiar turn in this familiar dialogue. "Whatever she
did, she did for the best. Certainly it was no fault of yours.
But you could get married to-morrow if you wished and you know it,
Harriet." (Miss Anna offered up the usual little prayer to be
forgiven.)
The balm of those words worked through Harriet's veins like a
poison of joy. So long as a single human being expresses faith in
us, what matters an unbelieving world? Harriet regularly visited
Miss Anna to hear these maddening syllables. She called for them
as for the refilling of a prescription, which she preferred to get
fresh every time rather than take home once for all and use as
directed.
Among a primitive folk who seemed to have more moral troubles than
any other and to feel greater need of dismissing them by artificial
means, there grew up the custom of using a curious expedient. They
chose a beast of the field and upon its head symbolically piled all
the moral hard-headedness of the several tribes; after which the
unoffending brute was banished to the wilderness and the guilty
multitude felt relieved. However crude that ancient method of
transferring mental and moral burdens, it had at least this
redeeming feature: the early Hebrews heaped their sins upon a
creature which they did not care for and sent it away. In modern
times we pile our burdens upon our dearest fellow-creatures and
keep them permanently near us for further use. What human being
but has some other upon whom he nightly hangs his troubles as he
hangs his different garments upon hooks and nails in the walls
around him? Have we ever suspected that when once the habit of
transferring our troubles has become pleasant to us, we thereafter
hunt for troubles in order that we may have them to transfer, that
we magnify the little ones in order to win the credit of having
large ones, and that we are wonderfully refreshed by making other
people despondent about us? Mercifully those upon whom the burdens
are hung often become the better for their loads; they may not live
so long, but they are more useful. Thus in turn the weak develop
the strong.
For years Miss Anna had sacrificially demeaned herself in the
service of Harriet, who would now have felt herself a recreant
friend unless she had promptly detailed every annoyance of her
life. She would go home, having left behind her the infinite
little swarm of stinging things--having transferred them to the
head of Miss Anna, around which they buzzed until they died.
There was this further peculiarity in Harriet's visits: that the
most important moments were the last; Just as a doctor, after he
has listened to the old story of his patient's symptoms, and has
prescribed and bandaged and patted and soothed, and has reached the
door, turns, and noting a light in the patient's eye hears him make
a remark which shows that all the time he has really been thinking
about something else.
Harriet now showed what was at the bottom of her own mind this
morning:
"What I came to tell you about, Anna, is that for a week life at
home has been unendurable. There is some trouble, some terrible
trouble; and no matter what goes wrong, my mother always holds me
responsible. Positively there are times when I wonder whether I,
without my knowing it, may not be the Origin of Evil."
Miss Anna made no comment, having closed the personal subject, and
Harriet continued:
"It has scarcely been possible for me to stay in the house.
Fortunately mother has been there very little herself. She goes
and goes and drives and drives. Strange things have been
happening. You know that Judge Morris has not missed coming on
Sunday evening for years. Last night mother sat on the veranda
waiting for him and he did not come. I know, for I watched. What
have I to do but watch other people's affairs?--I have none of my
own. I believe the trouble is all between Isabel and Rowan."
Miss Anna dropped her work and looked at Harriet with sudden
gravity.
"I can give you no idea of the real situation because it is very
dramatic; and you know, Anna, I am not dramatic: I am merely
historical: I tell my little tales. But at any rate Rowan has not
been at the house for a week. He called last Sunday afternoon and
Isabel refused to see him. I know; because what have I to do but
to interest myself in people who have affairs of interest? Then
Isabel had his picture in her room: it has been taken down. She
had some of his books: they are gone. The house has virtually been
closed to company. Isabel has excused herself to callers. Mother
was to give a tea; the invitations were cancelled. At table Isabel
and mother barely speak; but when I am not near, they talk a great
deal to each other. And Isabel walks and walks and walks--in the
garden, in her rooms. I have waked up two or three times at night
and have seen her sitting at her window. She has always been very
kind to me, Anna," Harriet's voice faltered, "she and you: and I
cannot bear to see her so unhappy. You would never believe that a
few days would make such a change in her. The other morning I went
up to her room with a little bunch of violets which I had gathered
for her myself. When she opened the door, I saw that she was
packing her trunks. And the dress she had ordered for Marguerite's
ball was lying on the bed ready to be put in. As I gave her the
flowers she stood looking at them a long time; then she kissed me
without a word and quickly closed the door."
When Harriet had gone. Miss Anna sat awhile in her porch with a
troubled face. Then she went softly into the library, the windows
of which opened out upon the porch. Professor Hardage was standing
on a short step-ladder before a bookcase, having just completed the
arrangement of the top shelf.
"Are you never going to get down?" she asked, looking up at him
fondly.
He closed the book with a snap and a sigh and descended. Her
anxious look recalled his attention,
"Did I not hear Harriet harrowing you up again with her troubles?"
he asked. "You poor, kind soul that try to bear everybody's!"
"Never mind about what I bear! What can you bear for dinner?"
"It is an outrage, Anna! What right has she to make herself
happier by making you miserable, lengthening her life by shortening
yours? For these worries always clip the thread of life at the
end: that is where all the small debts are collected as one."
"Now you must not be down on Harriet! It makes her happier; and as
to the end of my life, I shall be there to attend to that."
"Suppose I moved away with you to some other college entirely out
of her reach?"
"I shall not suppose it because you will never do it. If you did,
Harriet would simply find somebody else to confide in; she _must_
tell _everything_ to _somebody_. But if she told any one else, a
good many of these stories would be all over town. She tells me
and they get no further."
"What right have you to listen to scandal in order to suppress it?"
"I don't even listen always: I merely stop the stream at its
source."
"I object to your offering your mind as the banks to such a stream.
Still I'm glad that I live near the banks," and he kissed his hand
to her.
"When one woman tells another anything and the other woman does not
tell, remember it is not scandal--it is confidence."
"Then there is no such thing as confidence," he replied, laughing.
He turned toward his shelves.
"Now do rest," she pleaded, "you look worn out."
She had a secret notion that books instead of putting life into
people took it out of them. At best they performed the function of
grindstones: they made you sharper, but they made you thinner--gave
you more edge and left you less substance.
"I wish every one of those books had a lock and I had the bunch of
keys."
"Each has a lock and key; but the key cannot be put into your
pocket, Anna, my dear; it is the unlocking mind. And you are not
to speak of books as a collection of locks and keys; they make up
the living tree of knowledge, though of course there is very little
of the tree in this particular bookcase."
"I don't see any of it," she remarked with wholesome literalness.
"Well, here at the bottom are lexicons--think of them as roots and
soil. Above them lie maps and atlases: consider them the surface.
Then all books are history of course. But here is a great central
trunk rising out of the surface which is called History in
especial. On each side of that, running to the right and to the
left, are main branches. Here for instance is the large limb of
Philosophy--a very weighty limb indeed. Here is the branch of
Criticism. Here is a bough consisting principally of leaves on
which live unnamed venomous little insects that poison them and die
on them: their appointed place in creation."
"And so there is no positive fruit anywhere," she insisted with her
practical taste for the substantial.
"It is all food, Anna, edible and nourishing to different mouths
and stomachs. Some very great men have lived on the roots of
knowledge, the simplest roots. And here is poetry for dates and
wild honey; and novels for cocoanuts and mushrooms. And here is
Religion: that is for manna."
"What is at the very top?"
His eyes rested upon the highest row of books.
"These are some of the loftiest growths, new buds of the mind
opening toward the unknown. Each in its way shows the best that
man, the earth-animal, has been able to accomplish. Here is a
little volume for instance which tells what he ought to be--and
never is. This small volume deals with the noblest ideals of the
greatest civilizations. Here is what one of the finest of the
world's teachers had to say about justice. Aspiration is at that
end. This little book is on the sad loveliness of Greek girls; and
the volume beside it is about the brief human chaplets that Horace
and some other Romans wore--and then trod on. Thus the long story
of light and shadow girdles the globe. If you were nothing but a
spirit, Anna, and could float in here some night, perhaps you would
see a mysterious radiance streaming upward from this shelf of books
like the northern lights from behind the world--starting no one
knows where, sweeping away we know not whither--search-light of the
mortal, turned on dark eternity."
She stood a little behind him and watched him in silence, hiding
her tenderness.
"If I were a book," she said thoughtlessly, "where should I be?"
He drew the fingers of one hand lingeringly across the New
Testament.
"Ah, now don't do that," she cried, "or you shall have no dinner.
Here, turn round! look at the dust! look at this cravat on one end!
look at these hands! March upstairs."
He laid his head over against hers.
"Stand up!" she exclaimed, and ran out of the room.
Some minutes later she came back and took a seat near the door.
There was flour on her elbow; and she held a spoon in her hand.
"Now you look like yourself," she said, regarding him with approval
as he sat reading before the bookcase. "I started to tell you what
Harriet told me."
He looked over the top of his book at her.
"I thought you said you stopped the stream at its source. Now you
propose to let it run down to me--or up to me: how do you know it
will not run past me?"
"Now don't talk in that way," she said, "this is something you will
want to know," and she related what Harriet had chronicled.