A Woman of Yesterday

by Caroline Atwater Mason

CHAPTER XVII

Affections, Instincts, Principles, and Powers,

Impulse and Reason, Freedom and Control—

So men, unravelling God’s harmonious whole,

Rend in a thousand shreds this life of ours.

Vain labour! Deep and broad, where none may see,

Spring the foundations of that shadowy throne

Where man’s one nature, queen-like, sits alone,

Centred in a majestic unity.

—Matthew Arnold.

To some minds there is nothing more pathetic in human experience than the patient resignation with which average men and women accommodate themselves to the most disastrous and distorting of griefs and disappointments, nothing more amazing than their power to endure. If something of the brute nature is in us all, it is not always and altogether the animalhood of greed or of ferocity, but far more commonly the mute, uncomprehending submission of sheep and oxen. Though the futility of revolt is so apparent, the infrequency of it in human lives does not cease to surprise. The modern Rachel mourns for her children, and will not be comforted, but she goes about the streets in conventional mourning, orders her house with decent regularity, and probably, in the end, goes abroad for a time, and returning, enters with apparent cheerfulness into the social round. The modern Guelph or Ghibelline, banished from the political or intellectual activities which made life to him, finds readily that raving against time and fate is no longer good form, reads his daily paper with unabated interest, and enjoys a good dinner with appetite unimpaired. Very probably the man’s and the woman’s heart is broken in each instance, but what then? Life goes on, and the resiliency of the mainspring in a well-adjusted piece of human mechanism may be usually guaranteed, with safety, to last a lifetime.

In a year after her marriage Anna Burgess was diligently at work along the conventional lines of activity of her day for religious young women at home,—writing missionary reports, distributing literature, collecting dues. She saw nothing better to do. Her own private and innermost relation to God, it was true, had been dislocated, but the heathen remained to be saved.

One morning, Keith being away from home, Anna came into Madam Burgess’s sitting room, her cheeks slightly flushed, her eyes shining, a letter in hand.

“May I read you this?” she asked eagerly; “I have been invited to give an address at the foreign missionary conference next month in H——. What if I could! I should be so glad.” Her eyes told the new and eager hope which this summons had stirred within her.

An added degree of frost settled upon her mother-in-law’s face.

“You can hardly mean, Anna,” she said, “that you would be willing to speak in public?”

“But our missionaries do, and sometimes others,” Anna replied anxiously.

“The case of missionaries is, of course, entirely exceptional; and they should never be heard, in my opinion, before mixed audiences. As for other women making spectacles of themselves, it would seem to be enough to remind you, Anna, of the words of the Apostle Paul on that subject. You would hardly attempt, I think, to explain them away.”

Anna was silent.

“A woman who has a noble Christian husband, my dear,” continued Madam Burgess, more gently, feeling her case now won, “as you have, who is already at work in this very field of labour, has no occasion to leave the sacred shelter of her own home, and lift up her voice and exhibit her person in public gatherings.”

“Keith always said that I might still have a chance to do a little work in this way; I am sure he approved,” and Anna’s low voice faltered, her heart full just then of the memory of those first days of their common sorrow.

“You have a very indulgent husband, and it is not strange if, in the first fond days of your married life, he may have unwisely yielded to some mistaken sense of duty on your part, and apparently committed himself to a purpose which he would later realize to be impracticable. Understand me clearly, my dear,” and the term of endearment sounded, from Madam Burgess’s lips, as sharp as the point of an icicle, “my son’s wife can never, without flying in the face of all her holiest obligations, both to God and man, present herself before an audience of people as a public speaker. A woman who does this violates the very law of her being, she ceases to be womanly, ceases to be modest, and loses all that feminine delicacy which is woman’s chief ornament.”

The finality of these remarks clearly perceived, Anna rose from her chair, and left the room in silence. She never returned to the subject, but simply buried in her heart one more high hope of service.

This was the first time that Anna’s inexperience and young ardour had joined direct issue with Madam Burgess’s social creed. For a while everything had gone so smoothly that Anna’s first sense of disparity had been soothed to rest; all things being new, she had failed to see the full significance of certain limitations which hedged her in. Little by little she learned this, and learned the inevitable submission. She never appealed to Keith from his mother, controlled by a sense of the essential ugliness and vulgarity of a domestic situation in which the different elements are working and interworking at variance with each other. Furthermore, she learned very soon that, however sympathetic and gentle Keith might show himself toward her, he would, in the end, range himself on his mother’s side of every question.

Stratagem and indirection were alike alien to Anna’s nature and habit, but she inevitably learned, in process of time and experience, to avoid leading Madam Burgess to a declaration of definite positions, while she sought to enlist her husband’s sympathies in her own undertakings before his mother was made acquainted with them. Any plan which was brought before her by her son was comparatively acceptable to the elder woman. Thus wisely ordering her goings as women learn to do, Anna succeeded in reaching a fair degree of independence and at the same time a harmonious outward order. Her sacrifices and disappointments, the gradual paring down of her larger hopes and the dimming of her finer aspirations, she kept to herself.

Pierce Everett, the young artist who had spoken of Anna’s fitness for a model of a saint, had carried out his purpose, and had formally requested her to pose for him. With the cordial approval of both Madam Burgess and Keith, Anna had consented, and late in the winter the sittings began in Everett’s studio, which was in his father’s house. Madam Burgess brought Anna to the house for the first sitting. They were received by the mother of the artist, an intimate friend of Madam Burgess, and the older ladies then laughingly gave Anna over into Everett’s hands while they enjoyed a discussion of certain benevolent committee matters.

In the studio a little talk ensued regarding the projected sittings, and various considerations involved in them. These matters understood, Anna said composedly:—

“I am ready, Mr. Everett, if you will tell me just what you wish. I do not even know for what I am to be painted.”

“And you will not object, Mrs. Burgess,” said Everett, quickly, “if I do not tell you now? It is in a character which could not, I am sure, displease you, but I think it would be decidedly better that we should not discuss it, and that you should have no definite thought of it. Is this satisfactory to you?”

“Entirely so.”

“Very well.”

Immediately upon this Everett took his place at the easel and began a first rapid sketch of Anna’s head. He was a slight fellow, below the medium height, with a delicate, almost transparent face, a red Vandyke beard, and large and brilliant brown eyes. Quick and nervous in speech and gesture, he had the clear-cut precision of a man who knows both his means and his end.

Anna thought him very interesting.

At the second sitting their talk chanced to turn upon the relation of the ideals of men and women to their practical lives, and Everett told Anna the old story of Carcassonne, which was new to her. The train of thought thus suggested soon absorbed her, so that she forgot him and what he was doing. The sacred hope of her own life, yet unfulfilled, still centring in the hope of her father, the ever receding purpose of which she never spoke, cast its powerful influence upon her.

For half an hour neither spoke. Then Everett’s friend, Professor Ward, came into the room in familiar fashion, and the two men talked of many things.

When Anna left Nathan Ward said, looking over his friend’s shoulder:—

“If you can keep that look, you will make a great picture.” Then he added, “But don’t fail to get her hands. They have the same expression.”

After that it became an habitual thing for Ward to drop into the studio at these sittings. It never occurred to Anna that her presence had anything to do with his coming. She supposed he had always come. He talked very little with her, but she liked to listen to his talk with Everett. It was distinctly novel to her—light, rambling, touch-and-go, and yet full of underlying thought and suggestion. Anna had known few men at best, none of the order to which these two belonged, men conversant with art and literature, music and poetry, and modern life on all its sides. Much that they said puzzled and perplexed her, but she found an eager enjoyment in it.

Then one day Professor Ward said to her, apropos of Shelley, of whom they had been speaking:—

“You do not join in this discussion, Mrs. Burgess. I am quite sure you could give us opinions much wiser than ours.”

Anna’s colour deepened as she answered:—

“I have not read Shelley in a great many years. Indeed, I know nothing of literature.”

There was a little silence; Anna hesitated, half inclined to say a word in explanation of a fact which she plainly saw the two men found very surprising, but finally, finding the explanation too personal and too serious, remained silent.

As she started to walk home from the Everett’s, Professor Ward joined her, asking to walk with her. He was a man of forty, with a wife and a flock of little children. Anna knew the family slightly, but pleasantly.

“Mrs. Burgess,” the professor began, as they walked down the quiet street, “I do not want to intrude or to be found inquisitive, but I am so puzzled by what you said a little while ago that I really wish you felt inclined to enlighten me. I know you never speak with the exaggeration and inaccuracy which is so much the habit of young ladies, and so I accept what you said as to your ignorance of literature as sober truth. But you are a well-educated woman. How can it be?”

Anna was almost glad of a chance to explain. She was facing many new questions in these days, and she felt the need of light. She answered therefore at once, with frankness:—

“I deliberately gave up study on all these lines when I became a Christian. I supposed them to be contrary to the absolute consecration of my life to God.”

Professor Ward looked perplexed.

“You cannot understand,” Anna said timidly. “I have felt since I have been in Fulham as if the language of my religious life in those days would be an unknown tongue here. I see that I am right. To you, Professor Ward, I am sure such a sense of duty as I speak of is unintelligible, but I can still say it was sincere. And it was not an easy sacrifice to make, for I had already grown fond of poetry, and longed to know more in a way I could never express.”

“I see,” said her companion, gravely; “you felt that the study of the work of men like most of our poets, whose religious positions were vague and not formulated according to our creeds, was likely to act unfavourably upon your spiritual life and experience.”

“Yes. To divide my heart, to dim my sense of a one, single aim in life.”

“And that aim?”

“To serve God directly in every thought and word. That, and to try to save the souls of the lost.”

Professor Ward had no key to the profound sadness with which Anna spoke, but he watched her face with earnest interest. She spoke with the unconsciousness of absolute sincerity. He was reflecting, however, on how much easier life might be if one could sustain, undisturbed, such bare simplicity of conception of human relations.

“And so,” he said slowly, “you were going to prune away every instinct, every faculty of your nature which did not serve the immediate purpose of furthering what men call sometimes ‘the cause of religion,’ and know and feel and be one thing only?”

Anna bent her head in assent.

“That is precisely what men and women do who seek monastic life.”

Anna looked up at Professor Ward in quick surprise and instinctive protest.

“Yes,” he said, with emphasis, “it was just as noble and just as cowardly, just as weak and just as strong, as the impulses which make monks and nuns. It is what people do who are afraid of life, who do not dare to encounter the whole of it, who have not reached the highest faith in either God or man.”

“Then you think such a resolution, such a scheme of life, produces weak natures, not strong ones?” asked Anna, looking up with her honest, steadfast gaze into his eyes.

“I should say narrow natures, and yet I fear I ought to say weak ones too. Mrs. Burgess, do you not see yourself the weakness, the narrowness, of the position? It is what might be called the department system of human life,” and Professor Ward, with rapid gestures, indicated the drawing of sharp lines. “It is as if you said to your ego, your soul—yourself—whatever,—Go to now, this department of your life is religious; it sings hymns, reads a collection of sacred writings at regular hours, prays, gives away money to build churches, and performs various other exercises definitely stamped as godly. This other department loves nature, exults in beauty, pours itself into poetic thought, rejoices in music, expresses itself in art: but all this is secular, pagan—all men may have this in common who have not accepted my particular conception of the divine nature and its dealings with men; consequently all this is to be cut off—effaced, fought with to the death. Am I right?”

Anna nodded, her face very grave, her breath quickened.

“Does that seem to you a reasonable or even a noble conception? There was nobleness, I grant you, in the struggle, just as there was in the fortitude of the Spartans; but who feels now a desire to imitate that sheer, barbaric effacing of human feeling? No, no. That day has passed. We can begin to see life whole to-day; we can see God in nature, in poetry, in beauty, in ugliness even. He is all and in all. All things are ours and we are God’s! I wish I could make this clear to you.”

“You have, in part,” said Anna, simply.

“No way, however tortuous, by which men have groped after God can be indifferent to us, if we have the right sense of humanity. Trust yourself, Mrs. Burgess; trust the human heart throughout the ages. Believe me, with all the drawbacks, all the falls, and all the blunders, it has been an honest heart and is worthy of reverence and devout study. ‘Trust God: see all, nor be afraid.’”

“I have seen only one side of life, one conception of human nature.”

“That, at least, was a high and lofty one. For stern heroism of thought, commend me to that old New England Calvinism in which I see you were nurtured. It was fine; I glory in it, just as I glory in heroism everywhere, builded up on however mistaken a foundation. The worst of it, however, is that it completely deceives the human heart as to itself. It is terrible in its power to mislead. The elect are not as elect by half as they suppose. Calvin himself helped to burn Servetus, which was not really fine of him, you know. But I have said enough. I hope I have not wounded you?”

“I do not think so,” said Anna, smiling faintly, “but I am amazed beyond everything. All that you say is so new.”

They had reached Professor Ward’s house, which was very near that of Madam Burgess.

“I wish you would come in a moment,” said Ward, very gently; “you know my wife always likes to see you, and I want to show you some books in which I think you would be interested.”

Without reply, Anna passed through the gate which he held open for her, and they entered the house together. Mrs. Ward met them, and they all went into the professor’s study.

In a few moments Anna was lost in the realm of books so long self-closed to her experience. She sat at his desk, and Ward handed her and heaped about her rare and beautiful volumes until she became bewildered with the sense of intellectual richness and complexity. She looked up at last, as he bent over her, turning the leaves of a beautiful old Italian edition of Dante’s “Commedia,” and, with a smile beneath which her lips trembled, she asked, like a child:—

“Tell me truly, is all this for me, righteously, safely?”

“Did I not tell you?” he asked gently. “‘All things are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.’”

With that day Anna returned to the long-sealed books of her father’s love and her own. She read and studied under Professor Ward’s guidance and direction, steadily and with eager delight. She did this with no further misgiving or doubt. He had succeeded in satisfying her conscience, and she moved joyfully along the clear lines of her inherited intellectual choice.

As for her father and the example of renunciation he had given her, her heart was at rest. That which was perfect being come for him, was not that which had been in part done away?