She was seventy-one years old when she first flew this flag, and for the
next four years she battled unceasingly under its bold motto against odds
that rapidly grew more overwhelming as the process that had been
imperceptibly draining Greenford of its population gained impetus with it
own action. In the beginning people moved to Johnsonville because they
could get work in the print mill, but after a time they went because the
others had gone. Before long there was no cobbler in Greenford because
there was so little cobbling to do. After that the butcher went away, then
the carpenter, and finally the grocery-store was shut up and deserted by
the man whose father and grandfather had kept store in the same building
for sixty years. It was the old story. He had a large family of children
who needed education and "a chance."
The well-kept old village still preserved its outer shell of quaintness
and had a constantly increasing charm for summering strangers who rejoiced
with a shameless egoism in the death-like quiet of the moribund place, and
pointed out to visiting friends from the city the tufts of grass beginning
to grow in the main street as delightful proofs of the tranquillity of
their summer retreat.
Miss Abigail overheard a conversation to this effect one day between some
self-invited visitors to her wonderful garden. Her heart burned and her
face blackened. "You might as well," she told them, "laugh at the funny
faces of a person who's choking to death!"
The urbane city people turned amused and inquiring faces upon her. "How
so?"
"Roads aren't for grass to grow in!" she fulminated.
"They're for folks to use, for men and women and little children to go over
to and from their homes."
"Ah, economic conditions," they began to murmur. "The inevitable laws of
supply and--"
"Get out of my garden!" Miss Abigail raged at them. "Get out!"
They had scuttled before her, laughing at her quaint verocity, and she had
sworn wrath fully never to let another city dweller inside her gate--a
resolution which she was forced to forego as time passed on and she became
more and more hard pressed for ammunition.
Up to this time she had lived in perfect satisfaction on seven hundred
dollars a year, but now she began to feel straitened. She no longer dared
afford even the tiniest expenditure for her garden. She spaded the beds
herself, drew leaf mold from the woods in repeated trips with a child's
express wagon, and cut the poles for her sweet-peas with her own hands.
When Miss Molly Leonard declared herself on the verge of starvation from
lack of sewing to do, and threatened to move to Johnsonville to be near
her sister Annie, Miss Abigail gave up her "help" and paid Miss Molly for
the time spent in the empty reading-room of the library. But the campaign
soon called for more than economy, even the most rigid. When the minister
had a call elsewhere, and the trustees of the church seized the
opportunity to declare it impossible to appoint his successor, Miss
Abigail sold her woodlot and arranged through the Home Missionary Board
for someone to hold services at least once a fortnight. Later the "big
meadow" so long coveted by a New York family as a building site was
sacrificed to fill the empty war chest, and, temporarily in funds, she
hired a boy to drive her about the country drumming up a congregation.
Christmas time was the hardest for her. The traditions of old Greenford
were for much decorating of the church with ropes of hemlock, and a huge
Christmas tree in the Town Hall with presents for the best of the
Sunday-school scholars. Winding the ropes had been, of old, work for the
young unmarried people, laughing and flirting cheerfully. By the promise
of a hot supper, which she furnished herself, Miss Abigail succeeded in
getting a few stragglers from the back hills, but the number grew steadily
smaller year by year. She and Miss Molly always trimmed the Christmas tree
themselves. Indeed, it soon became a struggle to pick out any child a
regular enough attendant at Sunday-school to be eligible for a present.
The time came when Miss Abigail found it difficult to secure any children
at all for the annual Christmas party.
The school authorities began to murmur at keeping up the large old
schoolhouse for a handful of pupils. Miss Abigail, at her wit's end,
guaranteed the fuel for warming the house, and half the pay of a teacher.
Examining, after this, her shrunk and meager resources, she discovered
she had promised far beyond her means. She was then seventy-three years
old, but an ageless valor sprang up in her to meet the new emergency. She
focused her acumen to the burning point and saw that the only way out of
her situation was to earn some money--an impossible thing at her age.
Without an instant's pause, "How shall I do it?" she asked herself, and
sat frowning into space for a long time.
When she rose up, the next development in her campaign was planned. Not in
vain had she listened scornfully to the silly talk of city folks about the
picturesqueness of her old house and garden. It was all grist to her mill,
she perceived, and during the next summer it was a grimly amused old
miller who watched the antics of Abigail Warner, arrayed in a
pseudo-oldfashioned gown of green-flowered muslin, with a quaintly ruffled
cap confining her rebellious white hair, talking the most correct
book-brand of down-east jargon, and selling flowers at twenty times their
value to automobile and carriage folk. She did not mind sacrificing her
personal dignity, but she did blush for her garden, reduced to the most
obvious commonplaces of flowers that any child could grow. But by
September she had saved the school-teacher's pay, and the Martins and the
Allens, who had been wavering on account of their children, decided to
stay another winter at least.
That was _something_, Miss Abigail thought, that Christmas, as she and
Miss Molly tortured their rheumatic limbs to play games with the six
children around the tree. She had held rigorously to the old tradition of
having the Christmas tree party in the Town Hall, and she had heartened
Miss Molly through the long lonely hours they had spent in trimming it;
but as the tiny handful of forlorn celebrants gathered about the tall
tree, glittering in all the tinsel finery which was left over from the
days when the big hall had rung to the laughter of a hundred children and
as many more young people, even Miss Abigail felt a catch in her throat as
she quavered through "King _Will_yum was King _James's_ son!"
When the games were over and the children sat about soberly, eating their
ice-cream and cake, she looked over her shoulder into the big empty room
and shivered. The children went away and she and Miss Molly put out the
lights in silence. When they came out into the moonlight and looked up and
down the deserted street, lined with darkened houses, the face of the
younger woman was frankly tear-stained. "Oh, Miss Abigail," she said;
"let's give it up!"
Miss Abigail waited an instant, perceptible instant before answering, but,
when she did, her voice was full and harsh with its usual vigor.
"Fiddlesticks! You must ha' been losing your sleep. Go tuck yourself up
and get a good night's rest and you won't talk such kind of talk!"
But she herself sat up late into the night with a pencil and paper,
figuring out sums that had impossible answers.
That March she had a slight stroke of paralysis, and was in an agony of
apprehension lest she should not recover enough to plant the flowers for
the summer's market. By May, flatly against the doctor's orders, she was
dragging herself around the garden on crutches, and she stuck to her post,
smiling and making prearranged rustic speeches all the summer. She earned
enough to pay the school-teacher another winter and to buy the fuel for
the schoolhouse, and again the Martins and the Allens stayed over; though
they announced with a callous indifference to Miss Abigail's ideas that
they were going down to Johnsonville at Christmas to visit their relatives
there, and have the children go to the tree the ex-Greenfordites always
trimmed.
When she heard this Miss Abigail set off to the Allen farm on the lower
slope of Hemlock Mountain. "Wa'n't our tree good enough?" she demanded
hotly.
"The _tree_ was all right," they answered, "but the children were so
mortal lonesome. Little Katie Ann came home crying."
Miss Abigail turned away without answering and hobbled off up the road
toward the mountain. Things were black before her eyes and in her heart as
she went blindly forward where the road led her. She still fought off any
acknowledgment of the bitterness that filled her, but when the road, after
dwindling to a wood trail and then to a path, finally stopped, she sat
down with a great swelling breath. "Well, I guess this is the end," she
said aloud, instantly thereafter making a pretense to herself that she
meant the road. She looked about her with a brave show of interest in the
bare November woods, unroofed and open to the sunlight, and was rewarded
by a throb of real interest to observe that she was where she had not been
for forty years, when she used to clamber over the spur of Hemlock
Mountain to hunt for lady's-slippers in the marshy ground at the head of
the gorge. A few steps more and she would be on her own property, a steep,
rocky tract of brushland left her by her great-uncle. She had a throb as
she realized that, besides her house and garden, this unsalable bit of the
mountainside was her only remaining possession. She had indeed come to the
end.
With the thought came her old dogged defiance to despair. She shut her
hands on her crutches, pulled herself heavily up to her feet, and toiled
forward through some brush. She would not allow herself to think if
thoughts were like that. Soon she came out into a little clearing beside
the Winthrop Branch, swirling and fumbling in its headlong descent. The
remains of a stone wall and a blackened beam or two showed her that she
had hit upon the ruins of the old sawmill her great-grandfather had owned.
This forgotten and abandoned decay, a symbol of the future of the whole
region, struck a last blow at the remnants of her courage. She sank down
on the wall and set herself to a losing struggle with the blackness that
was closing in about her. All her effort had been in vain. The fight was
over. She had not a weapon left.
A last spark of valor flickered into flame within her. She stood up,
lifting her head high, and summoning with a loudly beating heart every
scattered energy. She was alive; her fight could not be over while she
still breathed.
For an instant she stood, self-hypnotized by the intensity of her
resolution. Then there burst upon her ear, as though she had not heard it
before, the roar of the water rushing past her. It sounded like a loud
voice calling to her. She shivered and turned a little giddy as though
passing into a trance, and then, with one bound, the gigantic forces of
subconscious self, wrought by her long struggle to a white heat of
concentration on one aim, arose and mastered her. For a time--hours
perhaps--she never knew how long, old Miss Abigail was a genius, with the
brain of an engineer and the prophetic vision of a seer.