Hagar 47
She leaned back, in good humour. Hagar had given her an opportunity to
express herself very well. "Don't you, too," she asked, "feel at home
with the dear old imperfection?"
Hagar met her eyes. "No," she said.
Mrs. LeGrand shrugged. "Oh, well!" she said, "I suppose each will fight
for the place that is home."
Hagar looked beyond her, to her kindred. "You're all opponents," she
said. "Alike you worship God as Man, and you worship a static God,
never to be questioned nor surpassed. You have shut an iron door upon
yourselves.... One day you who shut it, you alone--you will open it,
you alone. But I see that the day is somewhat far."
She rose. "I was going anyhow you know, grandfather, in four days. But
I can take the morning train if you'd rather?"
But Colonel Ashendyne said stiffly that if she had forgotten her duty,
he had not his, and that the hospitality of Gilead Balm would be hers,
of course, for the four days.
Hagar listened to him, and then she looked once more around the circle.
A smile hovered on her lips and in her eyes. It broadened, became
warm and sweet. "I'll accept for a time the partial estrangement, but
I don't ever mean that it shall be complete! It takes two to make an
estrangement." She went up to her grandmother and kissed her, then said
that she was going for a walk.--"No, Ralph, you are not coming with me!"
She went down the porch steps, and moved away in the evening glow. The
black cedars swallowed her up; then upon the other side, beyond the
gate, she was seen mounting the hill to the right. The sun was down,
but the hilltop rested against rose-suffused air, and above it swam the
evening star.
Ralph spoke with a certain grim fury. "I wish the old times were back!
Then a man could do what he wished! Then you didn't feel yourself
caught in a net like a cobweb that you couldn't break--"
Mrs. LeGrand again opened her fan. "I am very fond, of course, of dear
Hagar, but I must say that she seems to me intensely unwomanly!"
CHAPTER XXVIII
NEW YORK AGAIN
It seemed strange to be back at the Maines', staying a fortnight with
Rachel while the apartment was being looked for. Nothing had been moved
in that house; it was all just the same, only the tone of time was
deeper, the furniture more worn, the prints yellower. She asked for
and was given the third-floor back room again, though, indeed, Mrs.
Maine protested that now that she was famous!... Bessie had changed
as little as the house. More grey hairs, somewhat more flesh, a great
many more pounds of chocolate creams to her credit--that seemed all.
She was still amiable, sleepily agreeable, comely, and lazy. Powhatan,
except to grow greyer and leaner, had not altered either. The old
servants held on. With some inevitable variations the same people came
in the evenings--the Bishop's nephew and the St. Timothy people, and
Powhatan's downtown acquaintances, and chance visitors from the other
side of Mason and Dixon's.
She noticed a slight difference in the cast of talk. They all seemed
uneasily aware that the world was moving. Mostly they disapproved
and foreboded. She cast her mind back to that winter of '93-'94. It
had been the terrible winter of unemployment, strikes, widespread
discontent. She remembered clearly how Powhatan had declaimed then
against "upsetters" and what the country was coming to. But now she
heard him and the Bishop's nephew agree that anti-Christ and ruin were
modern inventions. They sighed for the halcyon past. "Even ten or
twelve years ago, sir, men were content enough!"
Rachel--Rachel had not sat still. Rachel had climbed. She was the
old Rachel, but sweetened and broadened. There was left something of
her old manner; she had her broodings that to the casual eye seemed
half-sullen; at the end of long silences she might flare out, send at
table or elsewhere a flaming, unexpected arrow, but her old ways were
like old clothes, kept half-negligently, worn from habit, while all
the time a fairer, more lately woven garment was in the wardrobe. She
looked no older; she was slight and brown and somehow velvety. Hagar
called her a pansy. She was no longer tragic, or tragedy had become but
a dim background, a remembered cloud. And she was the strong, sane, and
actual comrade of her children.
Betty and Charley.... Charley was blind. Charley and Betty had changed,
changed more than anybody. Betty stood a frank, straight young Diana,
what she said and did ringing true. Charley was the student. He had
his shelves of Braille, and his mother's eyes and voice were his at
call. Just now they were doing general history together--that was what
Charley wanted, to be a historian. Charley and Betty claimed Hagar
for their own. There were her Christmas letters every year--wonderful
letters--and her Christmas gifts, small choice things from every
land. They worshipped her, too, with frankness because she had "done
something"--because her name counted. Oh, they were very ambitious,
Betty and Charley; filled with ideas, glorious for the new time, ready
to push the world with vigour! "Oh," cried Hagar, "don't they make you
feel timid, cautious, and conservative?"
She watched with interest to see what effect the two had upon Powhatan
and Bessie. She was forced to the conclusion that they had very little.
They angered Powhatan sometimes, and he would strike the table and
deplore the days of silent reverence. But he was desperately proud
of Betty's looks, and he had an odd, sneaking pity and fondness for
Charley, and Hagar gathered that he would have sadly missed them out of
the house. As for Bessie, she only gave her sleepy smile, and said that
all children talked foolishly, but that you didn't have to listen.
Upstairs, at bedtime, now in Rachel's room, now in Hagar's the two
talked together. Daytime, they looked for Hagar's apartment. They
found it at last, high in air, overlooking the great city; roofs and
roofs and roofs at a hundred levels; curling streamers of white steam
like tossed plumes against the blue sky, bright pennants floating from
towering hotel or department store; a clock below a church spire, with
a gilt weather-cock far above; blurs of occasional trees seen in some
hollow opening; streets far below them, crossing, crossing--percolating
rivulets of manikins that were people; roofs and roofs and roofs, and
a low perpetual, multitudinous voice; and the sky over all, high and
clear and exhilarating the day they found the place. "I am going to
utter a bromide," said Hagar. "How marvellous is modern life!"
They went over it again. "Thomasine's room, and a guest-room, and
my room, and a fine room for Mary Magazine who is coming--Isham
having remarried--to look after us, and two baths and a great big
library-study-drawing-room, and a little room for what we please,
and plenty of closets, and a quiet and good café away up on the
roof--Rachel, it's fine!" They sat on a window-seat and Rachel produced
a pencil and notebook, and together they tinted the walls and laid
rugs and hung pictures and ran bookshelves around and furnished the
apartment. "There! that's quiet and perfect and not expensive. As
Thomson would say, 'It's quite _comme il faut_, Miss!'"
"Where is Thomson?"
"Mr. Greer, the artist, has taken him over. He wrote me that he was
making thousands, throwing the light on millionaires, and especially
millionairesses, and that he wanted Thomson, oh, so badly! He's the
type that Thomson likes, and so he joined him two months ago at
Newport. Dear old Thomson! Mahomet has gone back to Alexandria."
They looked around the big room. "Soft lights at night and all those
twinkling stars out there. It's going to be a dear home."
"You'll have people coming about you. Your own sort--"
Hagar laughed. "What is my sort? Everybody's my sort."
"Writers--artists--"
Hagar pondered the mantel-shelf with a view to what should go above
it. "I don't know many of them. I know more of them abroad than here.
We're a very isolated kind of craftspeople--each of us more or less on
a little Robinson Crusoe island of our own. It may be different in New
York, I don't know.... We could do a good deal if we'd put our heads
together and push the same wheel."
The apartment was not to be furnished in a day. They worked at it in
a restful and leisurely manner, and in the midst of operations, Hagar
went to see the Josslyns who had a house up on the Sound.
That afternoon she and the Josslyns walked by the water and watched
the white sails gliding by the green and rocky shore, then in the
evening sat by a wood fire with cider and apples. Monday to Friday
the children were in town at their grandmother's, going to school;
Friday afternoon they entered the big living-room like a west wind and
danced about with their mother. A little later the whole family would
go into town; Christopher had had a course of lectures to write and
he was doing it better here. The fire crackled and blazed; at night
through the open windows came in a dim sound of waves, with passing
lights of boats, and the fragrance of the salt sea, beloved by Hagar.
On Monday, when the children had gone, she drove with Molly deep into
the sweet countryside, and the two talked as the quiet old horse jogged
along.... Molly had taken the advice of the woman at Roger Michael's
dinner-party three years and more ago. She was an active member of a
suffrage organization, deeply interested, beginning to speak. "I'm a
good out-of-doors sort. My voice carries and I don't have to strain it.
Of course, we're just beginning out-of-doors speaking. I haven't half
the intellect I wish I had, but I can give them good, plain doctrine.
It's so common-sense, after all! And Christopher helps so much.... Oh,
Hagar, when you're truly mated, it's _heaven_!"
Molly could tell much of the practical working, of the everyday effort
and propaganda. "In two weeks we'll be back in town, and then if you'll
let me take you here and there--And when we get back to the house I'll
show you what I have of the literature we use,--pamphlets, leaflets,
and so on,--from John Stuart Mill down to an article Christopher wrote
the other day. We broadcast a great amount of it in every state, but
if we were rich we could make use of a thousand times more. But we're
not rich--whether that's to our damnation or our salvation! We have
to make devotion do instead. Then there are the books that help us,
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