Hagar 41

Hagar 41

She regarded him with dark eyes, simple and serious and interested as

the eyes with which as a child she had regarded him above her flower

dolls. He was not hungry and haggard and fear-ridden as then, nor

was he as he had been the night of the Socialist meeting, somewhat

embarrassed and stumbling, strong, but piteous, too.... He was a

little thin and worn, and looked as though he had been ill, she noted,

but he was quiet, at ease, and assured. There needed no elaborate

process in telling her things; to intuition she added a considerable

knowledge of the world and of ways and means; to heart, intellect. One

could do much in nine years; she knew that from personal experience.

This man had added to native strength education, experience, poise,

and significance. She might have said culture, only she had grown

to dislike the word. He had not, evidently, attained to wealth as

wealth is counted. In a region where the male visitor, though he might

arrive in winter garments, promptly sloughed them off for fine white

flannels, he had not followed custom. It was true that he was not

wearing a winter suit, but what was probably a last summer's one. It

was not white--only a grey, light-weight business suit, ready-made and

somewhat worn. His straw hat looked new. He was clean-shaven. His face

was at once the face of the boy in the thicket, and the face of the

workman talking out of bitter experience to other workmen, and a new

face, too,--a judging face, ascetic rather than not, with eyes that

carried a passion for something vaster than the flesh. "And you?" asked

Hagar again.

 

But he had fallen into a brown study. "_Hagar Ashendyne_--You can't

be--do you mean that you are--Hagar Ashendyne, the writer?"

 

"Yes, Hagar Ashendyne, the writer." She smiled. "It never occurred to

me that you might read what I have written. Have you?"

 

"Yes, I have read what you have written--read it and cared for it

greatly.... Well, all life's a strange encounter!"

 

"And that's true enough. And now will you tell me about yourself?"

 

His eyes smiled back at her. "Let me see--what is there to tell? That

night in New York.... Well, after that night ... I was fortunate in

the work I got, and I rose from grade to grade. I studied hard, every

moment I could get. I read and read and read. I became secretary to a

certain Socialist organization. I have been for some years a Socialist

organizer, lecturer, and occasional writer. In the summer I am to take

the editorship of a Socialist paper. Behold the short and simple annals

of the poor!"

 

"How long are you going to be in Nassau?"

 

"A whole month. These last two years have been years of exacting,

constant work, and there's a prospect of the same continuing. I thought

I'd got my second wind--and then I came down suddenly. The doctor said

that if I wanted to do the paper justice--and I do--I'd have to give it

an editor who could sleep. So he and Rose packed me off."

 

"Rose?"

 

"My wife--Rose Darragh."

 

He spoke as though she would know the name. Indeed, it seemed to have

for her some association; but it wavered like a dream; she could not

fix it. She seemed to feel how long she had been away from America--out

of touch--not knowing things, events, trendings. "Nine years," she said

again, uncertainly; "so much happens in nine years."

 

"Yes," he said. "Personal life changes rapidly to-day--with everything

more flexible, with horizons growing wider--and the age follows and

changes and changes--changes and mounts. We are in for a great century.

I'm glad to be alive!"

 

"Yes, I am, too." Presently she looked at her watch. It was

luncheon-time. Would he not take it with her father and herself? No;

he would not do that to-day; but leaving the great tree and the garden

they walked together to the house. At the gate in the wall she said,

"Come to see me here to-morrow morning, if you will. I should like you

to come and go as you please."

 

"Thank you," he said, then, with emphasis, "_friend_.... That is what,

when I was nineteen and afterwards, I called you in my mind."

 

"It's a good word--'friend.' Let us use it still."

 

"With all the will in the world. You are wonderful to me--Hagar

Ashendyne."

 

"I am glad to have found you again, Denny Gayde."

 

That night, suddenly, before she slept, she placed the name Rose

Darragh.... A feminist--A Socialist agitator and leader--a writer of

vigorous prose--sociology--economics.... She seemed to see her picture

in some magazine of current life--a face rich, alert, and daring,

rising on a strong throat from a blouse like a peasant's.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER XXV

 

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."