CHAPTER XXX
We’ve toiled and failed; we spake the word;
None hearkened; dumb we lie;
Our Hope is dead, the seed we spread
Fell o’er the earth to die.
What’s this? For joy our hearts stand still,
And life is loved and dear,
The lost and found the cause hath crowned,
The Day of Days is here.
—William Morris.
The Burgesses had come to Fraternia in the preceding December, although Keith had soon left again, having still many business concerns to recall him to Fulham. The house there was now closed, and the life there for them presumably ended, and, late in February, Keith had returned to Fraternia.
Anna had employed the months between their decision to join the coöperative colony and their actual journey to the South, in taking a short course in nursing in a Fulham hospital, reviving her old knowledge of the subject, gained in her girlhood in Burlington. She had it in mind to fit herself thus as thoroughly as the brief interval allowed, for the duties of a trained nurse to the little community, this being an occupation at once congenial to herself and important for the general good. For uniformity of service was by no means according to John Gregory’s plan, and Gertrude Ingraham might not have found herself shut up to the cotton mill even if she had done so incredible a thing as to throw in her fortunes with Fraternia. All must labour, and all must labour for the general good,—one of Gregory’s prime maxims being, If a man will not work, neither shall he eat; but as far as practicable that labour was to be on the line of each person’s best capacity, choice, and development. Thus Keith Burgess’s feat of stonelaying had not been enforced, but self-chosen, as an expression of his good will in the sharing the coarser labours of the people. The work to which he had been assigned by Gregory was clerical, not manual, being that of secretary to the colony.
Anna, thus far, had had no opportunity for any especial use of her vocation as nurse, the families of Fraternia being remarkably healthy under the simple and wholesome conditions of their life, and serious illness unknown during that winter. Her trained and well-equipped mind obviously fitted her for a work of intellectual rather than industrial character, and the duties of teaching the children of the colony five hours a day—the required time of service for the women—were given to her by common consent.
Neither at the time when she was chosen to this service, nor at any other, had John Gregory directly communicated his wishes to Anna or discussed his plans with her; and yet, from the day of her arrival in Fraternia he had perhaps never formed a plan which was not in some subtle manner shaped by unconscious reference to her. In her own way, Anna’s personality was hardly less conspicuous than his; and these two invisibly and involuntarily modified each the other’s action and deliberation as the orbits of two stars are influenced by their mutual attraction and repulsion.
By the whole habit and choice of his life John Gregory was a purist in morals and in his personal practice of simplicity. The most frugal fare and the simplest domestic appliances served his turn by preference, although he had been born and bred in comparative luxury. He was free and fraternal with men; gently respectful to women, whom he yet never treated as if they were superior to men by force of their weakness, but rather as being on a basis of accepted equality; while to little children he always showed winning tenderness. Socially, however, he scrupulously avoided intercourse with women, with a curious, undeviating persistency which almost suggested ascetic withdrawal. The other men of the colony, several of whom were men of some social rank and mental culture, found it pleasant to stop on the woodland paths or by the stream, all the more in these soft spring days, and exchange thought and word, light or grave, with the girls and women, but never once had Gregory been seen to do this, or to visit the households presided over by women on any errand whatever. Whether a line of action which thus inevitably separated him more and more from the domestic life of the people, was pursued by deliberate purpose or by the accident of personal inclination was not clear, but certain it was that the fact contributed to the distinction and separation which seemed inevitably to belong to Gregory. With all his simplicity of life and democratic brotherliness of conversation, he lived and moved in Fraternia with an effect of one on a wholly different plane from the others, and with the full practical exercise of a dictatorship which no one resented because all regarded him with a species of hero-worship as manifestly the master of the situation.
His residence was in one of the small cabins on the western side of the river, to which the bridge gave convenient access. The other cabins served, one as a rude, temporary library, the other as storehouse, while the large barrack-like building furnished bachelor quarters for the unmarried men. Gregory, since Everett’s arrival, had shared his house with the artist. Their meals were taken in common with the other men. No one was in the habit of entering the house, Gregory having a kind of office, agreeably furnished, at the cotton mill, where he was usually to be found when not at work in field or wood. This was, however, often the case, for he never failed to discharge the daily quota of manual labour which he had assigned himself; and it was noticeable to all that if any task were of an offensive or difficult nature, he was the one to assume it first and as a matter of course. It was owing to this characteristic, perhaps more than to any other, save his singular personal ascendency, that the silent dictatorship of Gregory in the little community was so cheerfully accepted. Nominally the government of the village was in the hands of a board of directors, with an inner executive committee, and of which Gregory was chairman. Several women served on the larger board. Keith Burgess was a director; Anna’s name had not been proposed for the office. There had been but one vacancy in the board on their arrival, which was sufficient reason. The councils of the directors were held weekly in Gregory’s office, and thus far a good degree of harmony prevailed.
Again it was Saturday morning. A week had passed which had brought many days of heavy rain. The river, swollen and yellow, dashed noisily down from the gorge and filled its channel below with deep and urgent current. On its turbid flood appeared from time to time newly felled logs, floated down from the regions above, where Fraternia men were at work, taking advantage of the swollen river for conveying their lumber to the sawmill. A west wind, the night before, had blown the clouds before it, and this morning the sun shone from an effulgent sky; the wind had died to a soft breeze laden with manifold fragrance; and in place of the chill of the north, the air possessed the indescribable softness and balm of the southern spring.
It was again a busy morning in Fraternia, and everywhere, and in all the homely tasks, thrilled the unchecked joy in simple existence of innocent hearts living out their normal bent for mutual help and burden-sharing. In the garden ground around their house, which was high up the valley in a group of three others, one of which contained the common kitchen and dining room for the inmates of all, Anna Burgess was at work in her garden, sowing and planting in the damp soil. Glancing down the valley, she could see Everett hard at work with another man, who had been an architect in Burlington, erecting a little thatched pavilion, of original design, graceful and rustic, to protect the new and precious fountain from the sun, and keep its water clean and serviceable. Across the river, in the library, Keith, she knew, was at work at his bookkeeping, and also at the task of collecting excerpts from the writings of social economists for use in an address which he was preparing. A new mental activity had been stimulated in Keith by the change of climate and conditions, and the influx of new ideas; and the ease and cheerfulness with which he had adapted himself to the primitive habits of pioneer life, would have amazed his friend Ward.
Barnabas had been gathering one or two sizable slabs of stone which had been left from the lining and coping of the fountain, and Anna watched him a moment as, having loaded them into a wheelbarrow, he proceeded to carry them down to the new bridge, and so across to the west side of the river. She hardly cared to wonder what he was about to do, being otherwise absorbed, and her eyes did not follow him as he wheeled his burden on up the knoll on which were the library and the house of Gregory, set in their bit of pine wood.
The door of Gregory’s cabin stood open, as was customary in Fraternia in mild weather. Barnabas dropped the burden from his barrow just before the open door, stood to wipe the sweat from his forehead, and then, kneeling, began the self-imposed effort of placing the stones together for a low step, which was yet lacking to the rudely finished house. As he worked, he now and then lifted his eyes and glanced into the interior of the house which he had never entered. It had the walls and ceiling of unplaned, uncovered boards of all the Fraternia houses; the floor was absolutely bare and absolutely clean, damp in spots and redolent of soap from recent scrubbing. The open windows let in the sun-warmed, piney air, but the light was obscured, the trees growing close to the house, and a dim gold-green twilight reigned in the silent room. A door stood open into the second room where two narrow iron beds came within the field of vision. There was the ordinary chimney, built of brick, of ample proportions, with a pine shelf running across, and in the fireplace logs of fat pine laid for a blaze in the evening, which was still sure to be cool. Plain wooden arm-chairs stood near the hearth; an uncovered table of home manufacture, clumsy and heavy, in the middle of the room, was thickly strewn with books and papers and writing materials. It was the typical Fraternia interior,—bare, and yet not comfortless, and with its own effect of simple distinction, conveyed by absolute cleanness, order, and the absence of the superfluous.
But it was none of these details which caught the eye of Barnabas. Above the chimney there was fastened by hidden screws close against the wall, so that it had the effect of a panel, a picture, unframed, showing the figure of a slender girl with uplifted head and solemn eyes, set against an Oriental background. It was Everett’s study of the Girlhood of the Virgin, and besides it there was no picture nor decoration of any sort in the place.
Each time he lifted his eyes from the stones before him to the picture whose high lights gleamed strangely through the dimness of the room within, Barnabas was more impressed with some elusive resemblance in the face; and at last, striking the stone with his hand, he murmured to himself in his native tongue, “Now I have it! The damsel there is like our lady when she prays.”
Meanwhile the river ran between and thundered over the dam below; the red roofs gleamed warm in the sun, and Anna, down on her knees like Barnabas, on a bit of board, was tending her bulbs with loving hands, while within her was springing a very rapture of poetic joy. Almost for the first time in her life she was conscious of unalloyed happiness. Was it because the sky was blue? or because the vital flood of spring beat and surged about her in the river, in the forest, in the air? Not wholly; nor even because under these kindly influences all the dormant poetic and creative instincts of her nature were stirring into luxuriant blossoming, although all these things filled her with throbbing delight. The deeper root of her joy was in the satisfaction, so long delayed, of her passion for brotherhood with lowly men and poor; the release from the constraint of artificial conventions, and from the painful sense, which she could never escape in the years of her Fulham life, that she owed to every weary toiler who passed her on the street an apology for her own leisure, her luxury and ease.
Suddenly Anna rose, and stood facing the west, her eyes full of light. A voice within her had called and said:—
“I can write poetry now, and I will!” The fulness of energy of joy and fulfilment in her spirit sought expression as naturally as the mountain spring sought its outlet in the fountain below.
Just then her neighbour, in the house on the left,—it was the dining-house,—put her head out of the window and said, reflectively:—
“Say, Sister Benigna, I wish I knew how to get the dinner up into the woods to the men-folks. It’s half-past eleven and time it went this minute, and Charley has gone down to Spalding after the mail; but I suppose it’s late or something. Anyway he ain’t here, and I’ve got the rest to wait on.”
“Why, I could take the dinner pails up to them, Sister Amanda,” answered Anna, obligingly. The “men-folks” alluded to were of her own group of families and were felling lumber in the woods north of the valley.
“You couldn’t do it alone, but Fräulein Frieda, she’d be tickled to death to go with you. There she is now,” and Sister Amanda flew to the cabin door through which a neatly ordered dinner table could be seen, and shouted down the slope to the young German teacher who had just come over the bridge with some books on her arm from the library.
A few moments later Anna sallied out from the house with Frieda, both carrying well-stored dinner pails.
“No matter,” said Anna, smiling at the sudden diversion from her poetic inspiration; “it is better to live brotherhood than to sing brotherhood. But some day, maybe, yet, I shall sing.”