Hagar 42

Hagar 42

Inside they had the place, save for the merchant of shells, to

themselves. Right and left and all around were strewn the pearl and

pink and purply spoils. All the sunset tints were here, and the

beauty of delicate form--grotesqueries, too; nature in queer moods.

It was pleasant to run the hands through the myriad small shells

heaped in baskets, to weigh the sea-cushions and sea-stars and golden

seafeathers, to admire rose coral and brain coral and finger coral,

and hold the conch shells to the ear. Through the open door, too, came

the smell and murmur of the near-by sea, and on the floor lay one last

splash of sunlight. "Give me a shell," said Hagar, "and I will give you

one. Then each of us will have something to remember the other by."

 

They gravely picked them out, and it took some minutes to do it.

Then in turn each crossed to the merchant in his corner and paid the

purchase price, then came back to the light in the doorway.

 

Denny held out a delicate, translucent, rosy shell. "It won't hold my

gratitude," he said. "You'll never know.... I used to see you in the

moonlight, between me and the bars.... Somebody had cried for me, ...

wept passionately. It helped to keep me human. I've always seen you

with a light about you. This is your shell."

 

"Thank you. I shall keep your kind gift always," said Hagar. She

spoke in a child's lyric voice, quaintly and properly, so precisely

as she might have spoken at twelve years old that, startled herself,

she laughed, and Denny, with a catch in his voice, laughed too. "Oh,"

she cried with something like a sob, "sixteen years to slip from one

like that!" She held out a small purple shell. "This is yours, Denny

Gayde.... And I've thought of you often, and wished you well. If I did

you, unknowing, a service, so you, unknowing, have done me a service,

too. That summer morning, long ago--it shocked me awake. The world

since then has been different always, more pitiful and nearer. Here's

your shell. It won't hold my gratitude and well-wishing either."

 

They passed out between the coral and the sea-fans, entered the surrey,

and it drove on. Now they were back by the sea. The tide was far out,

the expanse of shallows vaster. The salt pools had been fired by the

torch of the sky; they lay in reds and purples, wonderful. The smell

of the sea impregnated the air and there blew a whispering wind. The

town began to appear, straggling out to meet them, low chimneyless

houses of the poorer sort. Men and women were out in the twilight, and

children calling to one another and playing. The vivid lights had faded

from sky and from wet sand and rock, shoal and lagoon, but colour was

left, though it was the ghost of itself. It swam in the air, it gleamed

from the earth. Warmth was there, too, and languor, and the melancholy

of the gathering night. A dreamlike quality came into things--the

children's voices sounded faint and far; only there were waves of some

faint odour, coming now it seemed from gardens.... Now they were in the

town and the sea was shut away.

 

"One half of my fairy month is gone."

 

"You are sleeping better?"

 

"Yes--much better.... Where shall we go to-morrow?"

 

"Leave it to to-morrow. Look at the star ... oh, beauty!"

 

When to-morrow was here they walked inland to Fort Fincastle, and then

to the Queen's Staircase. Negro children raced after them with some

sweet-smelling yellow flower in their hands. "Penny, Boss!--Penny,

Boss!--Penny, Boss!" When they were gone, and when two surreys filled

with white-dressed hotel people vanished likewise, they had the Queen's

Staircase to themselves. Broad-stepped, cut in the living rock, it

plunged downward to the green bottom of the seventy-foot deep ancient

quarry. Trees overhung it and yellow flowers, and there was a rich,

green light like the bottom of the sea. Denny and Hagar sat upon a step

a quarter of the way down.

 

"I do not know why," said Denny, "there should be so deadly a fear

of upheaval. All growth comes with upheaval--surely all spiritual

growth comes so. Growth by accretion means little. Growth from within

comes with upheaval--what you have been transformed or discarded.

A little higher, a little finer breaks the sod and grows forth

so. The deadly fear should be of down-sinking--from the stagnant

grow-no-farther-than-our-fathers-grew down--down.... Of course, the

Woman Movement means upheaval and great upheaval--but that is a

poor reason for condemnation.... As far as its political aspect is

concerned, most open-minded men, Socialists and others, with whom I

come into contact, admit the right and the need. Unless a man is very

stupid he can see what a farce it is to talk of a democracy--government

of the people, for the people, by the people--when one out of every

two human beings is notoriously living under an aristocracy. And, of

course, we who want an associative gain of livelihood, no less than an

associative form of government, stand for her equality there.... But to

me there is something other than all that in this upheaval. I cannot

express it. I do not know what it is, unless it is some faint, supernal

promise.... It is as though the Spirit were again working upon the face

of the waters." He paused, gazing upward at the sky above the wall of

rock. "We are in for a deep change."

 

"Yes, I think so. A lift of mind and a change of heart, on which to

base a chance for a deep change, indeed. A richer, deeper life.... Oh,

there will be dross enough for a time, tares, detritus, heat and dust

and wounds of conflict, Babel, cries and counter-cries! and some will

think they lose...."

 

"They'll only think so for a while. Nothing can be lost."

 

"No--only transmuted.... But I hate the tumult and the shouting while

the people are yet bewildered. If that's the Brahmin in me, I am going

to sacrifice him. I am going where the battle is."

 

"I do not doubt that."

 

More white-suited people appeared, at their heels the black children.

"Penny, Boss!--Penny, Boss!--Penny, Boss!" Hagar and Denny rose and

walked back to town through the warm, fragrant ways. He left her at

Greer's studio--she had promised to come look at the portrait. As they

stood a moment in the verandah, Medway's golden drawl was heard from

within. "Well, I've known a good many philosophers--but none that were

irreducible. Every heroic, every transcendental treads at last the

same pavement. 'I love and seek the street called pleasure. I abhor

and avoid the street called pain.' Therefore the _summum bonum_--" The

door opened to Hagar. She smiled and waved her hand, and the studio

swallowed her up.

 

Some days after this they drove one afternoon over the Blue Hills

to the southern beach. Long white road--long white road--and on

either hand pine and scrub, pine and scrub, and over all a vault of

sky achingly blue. It was a lonely road, a road untravelled to-day,

and the wind shook in the palmetto scrub. Small grey birds flitted

before them, or cheeped from the tangled wood. It was a day for

silence and they stayed silent so long that the negro driving, who

was afraid of silence, broke it himself. He told them about things,

and when they awoke and genially answered, he was happy and talked

on to himself until they, too, were talking, when he lapsed into

silence and contentment. The wind blew, the scrub rustled, the sky was

sapphire--oh, sapphire!

 

When they came after a good while to the South Beach, they left the

surrey and the horse and the driver, in the shade of the trees that

fringed the beach, and walked slowly a long way, over the firm sand. It

stretched, a silver shore; the sun was westering, the great sea making

a hoarse, profound murmur. They walked in silence, thinking their own

thoughts. Before them, half-sunken in the sand, lay an old boat. When

they came to it, they sat down upon its shattered, sun-dried boards,

with the sand at their feet and the grave evening light stealing up and

Mother Ocean speaking, speaking....

 

"In the last analysis it is," said Hagar, "a metaphysical adventure--a

love-quest if you will. There is a passion of the mind, there is the

questing soul, there is the desire that will have union with nothing

less than the whole. I will think freely, and largely, and doing that,

under pain of being false, I must act freely and largely, live freely

and largely. Nor must I think one thing and speak another, nor must I

be silent when silence betrays the whole.... And so woman no less than

man comes into the open."

 

"There is something that broods in this time," said Denny. "I do not

know what it will hatch. But something vaster, something nobler...."

 

Hagar let the warm sand stream through her fingers. "Oh, how blue is

the sea.... Æons and æons and æons ago, when slowly, slowly life drew

itself forth from such a sea as this into upper air--when Amphibian

began to know two elements, how much richer was life for Amphibian, how

great was the gain!... When, after æons and æons, there was all manner

of warm-blooded life in woods like these behind us, or in richer woods

... and one day, dimly, dimly, some primate thought, and her children

and grandchildren a little, little more consciously thought, and it

spread.... To that tribe how strange a dawn! 'We are growing away from

the four-footed--we are growing away from our sister the gibbon and

our brother the chimpanzee--we are growing--we are changing--we feel

the heavens over us and a strange new life within us--we are passing

out, we are coming in--we need a new word....' And at last they called

themselves _human_--æons ago...."

 

"And now?"

 

"And now, on the human plane, it seems to me that we may be immediately

above that region." She took a pointed piece of driftwood and drew

upon the sand. "Here is the human plane--and here above it is another

plane." She drew a diagonal line between. "And that is a stairway of

growth from one to the other. And we are turning from this plane--the

lower plane--and coming upon that stairway, and down it, to meet us,

pours like a morning wind, like the first light in the sky, a hint

of what may be. Like that ancestral tribe, we are growing, we are

changing--we feel a strange new life within us--we are passing out, we are coming in--we need a new word."