Hagar 54

Hagar 54

A month after this she found among her letters one morning four

smoothly ecstatic pages from Sylvie Carter. Ralph had asked Sylvie to

marry him, and Sylvie had said Yes. Sylvie wrote that she expected to

be very happy, and that she was going to do her best to make Ralph

so, too. The next day brought a half-page from Ralph. It stated that

something Hagar had said had set him to thinking. She had said that

there was being a line drawn and that some men and some women were

finding themselves together on either side. He thought there was truth

in it, and that, after all, one should marry within one's class;

otherwise a perpetual clash of opinions, fatal to love. There followed

a terse announcement of his engagement to Sylvie, and he signed

himself, "Your affectionate cousin, Ralph Coltsworth."

 

But it was Old Miss whose letter was wholly aggrieved and indignant....

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER XXXIII

 

GILEAD BALM

 

 

The second letter from Old Miss came in February. The Colonel had

suddenly failed and taken to his bed. Old Miss believed that he would

get up again,--there was, she said, no reason why he shouldn't,--but in

the mean time there he lay. He was a little wandering in his mind, and

he had taken to thinking that Hagar was in the house, and a little girl

still, and demanding to see her. Old Miss suggested that she should

come to Gilead Balm.

 

She went at once. On the train, thundering south through a snowy

night, she lay awake until half of her journey was over. Scenes and

moments, occurrences of the outer and inner life, went by her mind

like some endless, shifting tapestry. Childhood, girlhood, womanhood,

work and play, the daily, material task and the inner lift, lift, and

ever-strengthening knowledge of the impalpable--that last was not

tapestry; it was height and breadth and depth, and something more. The

old, wide travel came back to her; shifting gleams of Eastern cities,

deserts, time-broken temples, mountains, vineyards, haunted groves,

endless surrounding, azure, murmuring seas.... Medway, white-clothed

and helmeted, in his rolling chair.... The whistle shrieked; the

train stopped with a jar at some lighted station, then, regathering

its forces, rushed and roared on through the February night. Now it

was the last three years and more: they passed in panorama before

her. Stages and stairways and scaffoldings by which the world-spirit

might mount an inch: ferments and leavens: voices telling of democracy

and fair play and care for your neighbour's freedom as for your own,

your woman-neighbour and your man-neighbour. Through her mind ran all

the enormous detail of the work being pursued over all the country;

countless meetings, speeches, appeals, talks to a dozen gathered

together or to two or three; letters and letters and letters, press

and magazine utterances, organization, the difficult raising of money,

legislative work, petitions, canvassing; drudgery in myriad detail,

letters and letters, voice and pen.... And all the opposition--blind

bigotry to be met, and a maniac fear of change, inertia, tradition,

habit, the dead past's hand, cold and heavy--and all the interested

opposition, the things whose book the movement did not suit--and all

the lethargy of womankind itself.... And in the very camp, in the huge,

chaotic movement itself, as in all the past's vast human movements,

recurring frictions, antagonisms, small jealousies, flags set up

by individuals, pacifications and smoothings, bringing compatibles

together, keeping incompatibles apart.... A contending with outer

oppositions and inner weaknesses, resisting discouragement, fighting

cynicism, acknowledging the vast road to travel, keeping on.... She

knew nothing that was at once so weak and so mighty as the Woman

Movement. One who was deep within it might feel at times a vast

weariness, impatience, and despair ... but deep within it you never

left it. Here you dealt with clay that was so cold and lumpish it

seemed that no generous idea could germinate within; here you dealt

with stuff so friable, light, and disintegrative that the thought

would come that it were better to cast it to the winds ... but you did

not; you comforted your soul with the very much that was noble, and you

hoped for the other that was not yet noble, and you went on--went on.

It was all you yourself--you had within you the intractable clay and

the stuff light as chaff, inconsequent; but you went on transmuting,

lifting.... There was no other hope, no other course, deep down no

other wish. So with the Woman Movement.... Another station. Hagar

looked out at the lights and the hurrying forms; then, as the train

roared into the white countryside, at what could be seen of the fields

and hills and storm-bent trees. She was thinking now of Gilead Balm and

her childhood and her mother. She seemed to lie again, close beside

Maria, on the big, chintz-covered sofa. At last she slept, lying so.

 

Captain Bob and Lisa met her at the station, three miles from Gilead

Balm. Captain Bob had a doleful mien. "Oh, yes, the Colonel's

better--but I don't think he's so much better. He's getting old--and

Lisa and I are getting old, too, aren't we old girl?--old like Luna

and going away pretty soon like Luna. Well, Gipsy, you're looking

natural--No, it's been an open winter down here--not much snow." He put

her in the carriage, and they drove slowly to Gilead Balm, over the

heavy country road.

 

Old Miss was well; Serena was well; Captain Bob himself had had

rheumatism, but he was better.--The Colonel didn't look badly; it was

only that he didn't seem to want to get out of bed, and that every

little while he set the clock back and rambled on about things and

people--"It's creepy to hear him," said Captain Bob. "He thinks young

Dr. Bude is old Dr. Bude, and he thinks that Maria is alive, and that

she won't let you come into the room. And then it'll change like that,

and he's just as much himself as he ever was--more so, in fact.--Hi,

Li-sa! let that rooster alone--"

 

The house cedars showed over the brown hills. "Dr. Bude wanted Old

Miss to get a trained nurse because somebody's got more or less to

watch at night. But Old Miss wouldn't hear to it. She don't approve of

women training for nurses, so she's got young Phoebe and Isham's second

wife--and I think myself," said Captain Bob, "that I wouldn't want a

young white woman that I couldn't order round."

 

Red brick and brown fields and the black-green of many cedars--here was

Gilead Balm, looking just as it used to look of a February. The air was

cold and still, the day a grey one, the smoke from the chimneys moving

upward sluggishly. Miss Serena came down the porch steps and greeted

Hagar as she stepped from the carriage.

 

"Yes, your old room. Did you have a tiresome journey?--Is your trunk

coming? Then I'll send it up as soon as they bring it. Young Phoebe,

you take Miss Hagar's bag up to her room. The fire's lighted, Hagar,

and Mimy shall make you a cup of coffee. We're glad to see you."

 

The old room, her mother's and her own! Hagar had not been in it in

winter-time for a long while. When Phoebe was gone, she sat in the

winged chair by the fire and regarded the familiar wall-paper and the

old, carved wardrobe and the four-poster bed and the sofa where Maria

had lain, and, between the dimity curtains at the windows, the winter

landscape. The fire was bright and danced in the old mahogany; the old

chintz covers were upon the chair and sofa--the old pattern, only the

hues faded. Hagar rose, took off her travelling dress, bathed and put

on a dark, silken dressing-gown. She took the pins from her hair and

let it stream; it was like Maria's. She stood for a moment, her eyes

upon the pallid day, the rusty cedars without the window, then she went

to the chintz sofa and lay down in the firelight, piling the pillows

behind her head, taking, half-consciously, the posture that oftenest

in her memory she saw Maria take. Her mother was present with her;

there came an __EXPRESSION__ into her face that was her mother's. Old Miss

knocked at the door, and entered without waiting for the "Come in!"

 

Hagar rose and embraced her grandmother; then Old Miss sat down in the

winged chair and her granddaughter went back to the sofa. The two gazed

at each other. Hagar did not know that she looked to-day like Maria,

and Old Miss did not examine the springs and sources of a mounting

anger and sense of injury. She sat very straight, with her knitting in

her hand, wearing a cap upon her smoothly parted hair, in which there

were yet strands of brown, wearing a black stuff skirt and low-heeled

shoes over white stockings; comely yet, and as ever, authoritative.

 

"I am so very sorry about grandfather," said Hagar. "Uncle Bob thinks

he is better--"

 

"Yes, he is better. He will be well presently. I should not," said Old

Miss coldly, "have written asking you to come but that Dr. Bude advised

it."

 

"I was very glad to come."

 

"Dr. Bude is by no means the man his father was. The age is degenerate.

And so"--said Old Miss--"Sylvie Maine has taken the prize right from

under your hand."

 

"Oh!" said Hagar. The corners of her lips rose; her look that had been

rather still and brooding broke into sunshine. "If you call it that!--I

hope that Ralph and Sylvie will be very happy."

 

"They will probably be extraordinarily happy. She is not one of your

new women. I detest," said Old Miss grimly, "your new women."

 

Silence. Hagar lay back against the pillows and she looked more and

more to Old Miss like Maria. Old Miss's needles clicked.

 

"When may I see grandfather?" asked Hagar, and she kept her voice

friendly and quiet.

 

"He is sleeping now. When he wakes up, if he asks for you you may go

in. I wouldn't stay long.--And what have you been doing this winter?"

 

"Various things, grandmother. Thomasine and I have been working pretty

hard. Thomasine sent her regards to every one at Gilead Balm."

 

"If you hadn't thrown away Medway's million dollars you wouldn't have

had to work," said Old Miss. "Maria was perfectly spendthrift, and of

course you take after her.--What kind of work do you mean you have been

doing?"

 

"I have been writing, of course. And then other work connected with

movements in which I am interested."

 

Old Miss's needles clicked again! "Unsexing women and unsettling the

minds of working-people. I saw a piece in a paper. Preposterous! But it's just what Maria would have liked to have done."