A Woman of Yesterday

by Caroline Atwater Mason

CHAPTER XXXII

What went ye out into the wilderness for to see?... A man clothed in soft raiment? Behold, they which are gorgeously apparelled, and live delicately, are in kings’ courts.—St. Luke’s Gospel.

Instead of the masterly good humour, and sense of power, and fertility of resource in himself; instead of those strong and learned hands, those piercing and learned eyes, that supple body, and that mighty and prevailing heart, which the father had, whom nature loved and feared, whom snow and rain, water and land, beast and fish, seemed all to know and to serve, we have now a puny, protected person, guarded by walls and curtains, stoves and down-beds, coaches, and menservants and women-servants from the earth and the sky.—R. W. Emerson.

The spring passed in Fraternia, and the summer. Not again did John Gregory and Anna come into direct personal communication. They went indeed their several ways with a steadier avoidance of this than before, from an undefined, but instinctive, sense of danger. Nevertheless, the fact that they breathed the same air and shared the same lot in life sufficed to yield in the heart of each an unfailing spring of contentment; while now and again it would happen that Anna, in her schoolroom or cottage, and Gregory, at his work, lifting their eyes at a footstep or a shadow, would be aware that the other had drawn near and passed by, and contentment would give place to nameless joy.

The poetic impulse which Anna had inherited from both parents, but the expression of which had been stifled by the deadening of her high desires which life in Fulham had brought, now developed unchecked. Many influences promoted this development: her clear child-delight in the rich life of nature about her, the release of her long-cabined spiritual energy, and the stimulation of her powers of discernment and interpretation by contact with the strong intellectual power of Gregory.

Gregory was, in the simple system of life in Fraternia, at once prophet, priest, and king; and his most potent influence over the people was manifest in the Sunday services and in the evening lectures which, for lack of a church, were held in a large empty room on the upper floor of the cotton mill. Anna found in these sermons and lectures the strongest intellectual and spiritual food upon which she had ever fared, and throve apace, having good faculty of assimilation. The verses which she wrote at intervals from a sudden and almost irresistible impulsion were always, when completed, turned over to her husband. Proud and pleased at this new gift of Anna’s, it was Keith’s habit to take them straightway to Gregory. Anna never knew this. She knew, however, that her poetry found its way into print, and now and then, she found, into the hearts of sincere people. This was new food for unaffected gladness, and she was glad.

The summer, although its fierce continuous heat had been hard to bear, was yet the season par excellence for Fraternia, and peace and plenty reigned in the valley. But with the autumn came a change, gradual at first, but later strongly accented. The wholesome occupations of the spring and summer came, of necessity, to a standstill. There was now little vent for the energy and working force of the people, while the scant resources of the narrow valley offered nothing to counteract a dull ennui which settled like a palpable cloud upon them. It had been a bad year for all their crops; the cotton crop had been a total failure, and the mill was shut down. This threw nearly fifty of the little community into enforced idleness, and a smouldering resentment was bred by the discovery that there had never been a profit, but rather a sustained loss, on the output of the mill by reason of Gregory’s scruple against selling at any advance beyond the bare cost of production. This principle might have a fine and lofty sound from the lips of an orator, speaking on broad, general lines; but the hard business sense of average men and women rebelled against the concrete results of its application to their own isolated case.

“If other people did the same, it might work. For one manufactory alone to attempt it is simply commercial suicide,” they said to each other, and with justice.

It became known, moreover, throughout the community, that a heavy mortgage had been placed on the land, held by a rich cotton planter in South Carolina, and that a wide chasm yet intervened between their present condition and that of self-support. A more serious disappointment and a more immediate difficulty, however, lay in the inadequacy of their food products to the needs of the people, and the consequent demand for ready money wherewith to buy the necessities of life.

The fare, hitherto of the simplest, was gradually made coarser and less palatable, since better could not be. Winter was coming on; open-air life had become impossible; fierce winds coming down through the gorge swept the valley, and scattered the foliage of the forest, while a grey and sullen sky hung over, and every day brought chilly rains. There was some sickness, of a mild nature, but it emphasized the discomfort and inconveniences of the homes. The prospect for the coming months in Fraternia grew grim. The enthusiasm of novelty had tided the little community over the two preceding winters, but some stronger upholding must evidently now be interposed; for the people openly murmured, and began to say to each other sullenly, as once another company, “Were we brought out into this wilderness to die? As for this food, our soul loathes it.”

Keenly conscious of the criticism of which he was now the subject, Gregory withdrew proudly more and more within himself, and touched less and less familiarly the life of those about him. It was well known that he deprived himself of all better fare than coarse bread and the water from the spring, that he had unhesitatingly devoted his last dollar to the enterprise so near his heart, and the patience and courage of the man were unfailing. But what of that? It was his own enterprise, with which he must stand or fall. Why should he not risk everything and bear everything? For the rest it was different. They, too, had given their money, and they had left their ceiled houses and their goodly fleshpots and their pleasant social commerce to further his project! They at least expected Christian food!

Crossing the bridge from the library, on a raw afternoon late in November, Anna Burgess met a woman of her own age, a woman of cheerful, sensible temperament and habit, the wife of the architect, whom she had known in Burlington. The husband, George Hanson, had surrendered with unconditional devotion to Gregory’s teaching, and the wife, in loyal sympathy, although herself by no means an idealist, had gathered her little brood of children and a few household treasures together, and had come to Fraternia with him.

As she approached the bridge, Mrs. Hanson, holding up her wet skirts with both hands, cried to Anna:—

“Oh, how I hate this red mud! Don’t you? It seems to me I could stand it better if it were not this horrid colour. One can never get away from it, or lose sight of it.”

Anna, who thus far, with only a few others, still kept heart and courage unbroken through this gloomy season, replied cheerfully that she rather liked the colour.

Mrs. Hanson gave a mournful sigh.

“You like Fraternia anyway, don’t you, Sister Benigna? You always did?”

Anna smiled at the naïveté of the question, and assented.

“I must like what I have chosen above all other things.”

“Well, I confess I never did like it, and I never shall. Oh, it will do very well for a summer vacation if one could be sure of getting safe home at the end. But as for a life like this! and when it comes to bringing up children here!—” and Mrs. Hanson’s voice broke into a suppressed sob.

“I am sorry,” said Anna, gently.

“Oh, Sister Benigna!” cried the other, letting loose the floodgates of her tears, while they still stood on the bridge in the piercing rain, “I never was so homesick in my life! When I hear my children asking if they are not going home to see grandma pretty soon, it just breaks my heart. They have no appetite for this hard meat and coarse bread, and they look so white and thin, and plead so for a good old-fashioned turkey dinner! I have a little money of my own, and I would spend every cent of it for better food for them, but Mr. Hanson, he says that would be unjust to the rest who cannot have such things, and that all must share alike. He says it would cost a hundred dollars to give one such dinner as the children want to the whole village.”

“I suppose that is true,” said Anna, seriously; “and then it would only be harder to come back—”

“To prison fare,” Mrs. Hanson interjected with unconcealed bitterness. “Well, all I have to say is that, if this is coöperation, I’ve had all I want of it. As for ‘the brotherhood of man,’ I wish I may never hear of it again as long as I live! I believe we have some duties to ourselves.”

With this she passed slowly on, and Anna hastened homeward, a deep pang in her heart.

Entering her own house, she found Keith, pale and dispirited, leaning with outstretched hands over the fire in an attitude unpleasantly suggestive of decrepitude and want. He looked up as Anna came in, and smiled faintly.

“I think I have taken a fresh cold,” he said hoarsely; “this climate is lovely half the year, but the other half—” and he left the sentence unfinished, coughing sharply.

Anna sat down by the hearth and removed her mud-sodden shoes, afterward hastening to prepare such scanty remedies for Keith as the cabin afforded. There was a dispensary down at the mill. She would go down for medicine as soon as she had made him comfortable. On the surface of her mind lay the habit of sympathy and care for her husband’s fragile health, but in the depth below was a sense she could not have formulated to herself of resentment at his lack of courage and fortitude. For Keith, although too finely courteous to share in the open murmuring of the people, was himself in the full swing of reaction from the comparative enthusiasm which he had felt six months ago. The fall weather had brought on ague, which, added to his chronic physical weakness, made him altogether wretched; and while he punctiliously avoided contributing to the public discontent, Anna perceived and understood perfectly his weariness with the enterprise. For the first time in their married life his patience and sweetness of temper failed; he had grown irritable, and fretted at small inconveniences in a way which chafed Anna’s hardier spirit indescribably.

“I am very sorry, Keith, you are so miserable to-day,” Anna said now, with half-mechanical commiseration. It chanced that, as she had come on her way home from the little conversation with Mrs. Hanson, a new sympathy had taken possession of her for the lonely man upon whom fell the full burden of all this reaction, but who bore it with such unflinching patience, albeit so silently. Almost inevitably, her mind being thus absorbed, the sympathy with Keith in his familiar ailments and complaints was rendered perfunctory for the time, and by comparison his weakness wore to her some complexion of unmanliness.

Perhaps Keith discerned a shade of coldness in her tone, and was stirred by it.

“I am sure I do not know,” he said with significant emphasis, “how long I can stand this condition of things. You must see, Anna, that I am losing ground from day to day. Look at my hands!” and he held out his left hand to her, clammy and cold, for all the yellow blaze, wasted and thin even to emaciation.

Anna took the hand in hers, and caressed it with womanly gentleness, murmuring that it was too bad, and something must be done; he certainly was not properly nourished.

“Why, Anna,” the poor fellow cried, warmed by her compassion, “I would give all my ‘incomes from dreamland,’ all the fine-spun theories of economic religion and social salvation that Gregory or any other idealist ever dreamed of, to be for just one day in our own dear old library, warmed all through, floor warm, walls warm—everything, you know; to see you, beautifully dressed again, at your own table, with its silver and damask; to have the service we always had; and once, just once, Anna—to have all the hot water I want for a bath!”

Anna smiled, but forebore to speak. The echo of Mrs. Hanson’s wail was almost too much for her, and yet she pitied and understood. Pioneers must be made of sterner stuff, that was all; men who, like Emerson’s genius, should “learn to eat their meals standing, and to relish the taste of fair water and black bread.” Were there such men? She knew one. She almost began to doubt if there were any more. A few moments later she brought Keith a tray containing tea and toast, served with such little elegance as was possible, and with the daintiness of shining linen and silver.

“We must find a way for you to spend the winter in a different climate,” she said, as she stood beside him. She spoke very kindly, but with the inward sense of concession as of the stronger to the weaker. “You certainly cannot remain here if this ague continues.”

Keith watched her gratefully, as she prepared to go out again, sure of some effective help when her strong determination was enlisted. The last six months had revealed his wife to him as six years had not done before. As she was about leaving, he said thoughtfully:—

“Anna, I am not the only one to be anxious about. Perhaps you do not know it fully, but the whole scheme of Fraternia is on the edge of collapse.”

“How do you mean, dear?” she asked, alarmed.

“Through lack of funds. He says very little, but I can see that Gregory has practically reached the end of his resources and expectations.”

Anna’s face showed her great concern.

“I did not know it was so bad,” she answered. “Oh, Keith, would you not be willing to help out a little more? I know you have been wonderfully generous, but some one must come up to the point of real sacrifice and save the day. You could sell the Mill Street property, you know?” and the timid tone of her final question contrasted strangely with that in which she had begun speaking.

It was the expression of Keith’s face which had dashed Anna’s confidence. She had never seen him look so much like his mother as when he replied.

“No, my dear, I shall have to stand my ground,” he said, “and abide by the terms I first proposed. My mother’s estate is not to be sacrificed for this doubtful experiment. More than ever before I feel the problematic nature of Gregory’s scheme. We must provide for our own future as well as for his present crisis.”

It was hard, Anna felt, as she started out again alone into the wind and rain, not to reflect that, perhaps, the sooner the experiment proved a failure the better Keith would be satisfied. She struggled against a rising sense of anger which the separation of their interest from Gregory’s gave her, at the characteristic caution, the irritating prudence, the old familiar inflexibility, so like his mother. Keith’s decision chafed her all the more because something warned her, in her own despite, that he was after all justified in it. But the contrast between his softness of yielding toward his own desires for luxury, and the hardness of his withholding from the bare needs of another, came just then into unfortunate juxtaposition.

The attitude of Keith toward Gregory was complex and peculiar. When in the immediate presence of this man he was brought under his personal influence to a degree which even Anna often found surprising. Gregory’s intensely masculine and forceful nature appeared to exert an almost irresistible control over the younger man so long as they were together. As soon, however, as Keith was removed from that immediate influence, he reverted at once to an attitude not only critical toward Gregory, but at times, and as if instinctively, antagonistic.

Anna went on her way down the valley to the cotton mill with a sore and heavy heart. On other days she could rejoice even in a leaden sky, in the muddy, sullen stream, in the stripped branches of the forest; but to-night, for twilight was falling now, all seemed clothed in that oppressive ugliness of Tennyson’s picture:—

“When the rotten woodland drips,

And the leaf is stamped in clay.”

Reaching the mill, dark and silent otherwise, she noted a light in Gregory’s office and the sound of voices, but the door was closed. She passed through the corridor to the small room beyond which was used as a dispensary. Pushing open the door she found the room empty; the young man whose charge it was seemed to have betaken himself otherwhere over early. However, Anna’s knowledge of drugs was not inconsiderable, and in this case she knew precisely what Keith needed and where to find it. So she proceeded without delay to place on the small polished counter which stretched across the narrow room, the necessary ingredients for a certain powder, and then carefully mixed these in the proportion called for by her simple prescription. While she was thus occupied she noticed with a sense of discomfort that the voices in the office, only divided from her now by a thin partition, grew louder and took on a disagreeable quality. Presently the door of the office was opened, and some one hastened from the building in evident impatience, leaving the door wide open. There was complete silence for a moment, and then Anna heard John Gregory speak. She could not fail to hear every word, although his voice was not raised, and its wonted quietness and courtesy were unchanged.

“You will bear me witness, nevertheless, Mr. Hanson,” he said, “that I never promised an easy life for those who came with me to Fraternia. I declared plainly that simplicity and poverty and roughness were to be accepted as necessary conditions.”

“That is all very well,” a voice replied, which Anna recognized as that of the Burlington architect, whose wife had evidently been working upon him; “but when simplicity means starvation for delicate women and children, and poverty begins to look like bankruptcy, the situation strikes me as pretty serious. All I have to say is,” and the man’s voice rose to a pitch of high excitement, “you are the dictator here, and you are responsible; you’ve got us into this scrape, Mr. Gregory, by working upon our emotions, and all that, and now you’ve got to get us out of it, somehow!” and with these words Anna heard the speaker leave the office with rapid steps, and a moment after the outer door of the mill closed upon him.

Anna had dropped the powders which she was dividing now into their papers, and had started to go to the door and close it that she might hear no more; but before she could do this a step in the corridor which she knew sent her back to her place with a beating heart, and in another instant John Gregory stood in the doorway.

Anna had never seen his face changed by any mental agitation, nor was it now, save for a touch of weariness and an unwonted pallor. There was a deep, sunk glow in his eyes, which, together with the careless sweep of the grey hair flung off his forehead, recalled with peculiar emphasis the leonine effect Anna had often noticed. The habitual grave composure of his manner was in no way disturbed; and although he could not have known of her presence in the dispensary, it did not seem to cause him surprise.

“Is some one ill at your house?” he asked with evident concern but characteristic abruptness. He was one of those few persons who do not find it necessary to explain what is self-evident.

“Mr. Burgess is not very well,” Anna replied, hesitating somewhat, unwilling to strike another dart into the soreness of his spirit, which she felt distinctly, for all his outward firmness.

“I fear,” Gregory said thoughtfully, “that Mr. Burgess ought not to remain in Fraternia this winter. I am very much afraid that his health will suffer. Both of you deserve a little change,” he continued, with a slight smile, the pathos of which Anna felt sharply. “Fraternia is not so pleasant at this time of year. Why do you not go North for a few months? You would come back to us in the spring—perhaps?”

The apparent carelessness which he wished to convey to this question contrasted strangely with the piercing anxiety of the look with which Gregory’s eyes searched Anna’s face. She understood the instinctive desire to forestall another attack, to take for granted an impending blow.

Quietly working at her powders, laughing a little, by sheer effort of will, since tears were near the surface, she replied:—

“I could not be spared, Mr. Gregory, this winter. I see you are a little disposed to undervalue my services. There are several cases of sickness now, and I am vain enough to think I am needed. Besides, you know, I love Fraternia. I do not want to go away from home.”

The minor arts of coquetry were all unknown and foreign to Anna, but the genius of her woman’s nature and intuition was thrown into the last sentence with full effect.

The strong spirit of Gregory, which could meet the assaults and buffets of reproach and detraction without shrinking, and which would have rejected express sympathy, was mastered for a minute by the delicate comprehension and implied fidelity of Anna’s words.

She knew better than to see the momentary suspicion of dimness in his eyes, or to note the silence which for a little space he did not care to break. When at last he spoke, it was to ask, in a wholly matter-of-fact manner:—

“Have I not heard that Mr. Burgess was a particularly successful public speaker?” Anna looked up quickly then.

“You may have heard it, for I am sure it is true,” she said. Another pause for reflection, and then Gregory said:—

“It is becoming urgently necessary that the purpose and future of Fraternia should be promoted by some one capable of going about, particularly in the cities, and presenting our aims publicly—before audiences of people.”

Anna had gathered up her powders now and put them in her pocket and stood ready to go but she stopped, and her face kindled with swift recognition and welcome of the thought in Gregory’s mind.

“And you have thought that Mr. Burgess might do this, and so still serve the cause and yet do it for a while under easier conditions?” she exclaimed. “Mr. Gregory, I cannot tell you how glad I should be if this plan could be carried out. I am really a little anxious about my husband. I am sure this would work well for every one, and it might solve several problems at once.”

He smiled, a little sadly, at her confident eagerness, said they must consider it seriously, and then stood aside to let her pass out and go home. It was not necessary for him to say, as he bade her good night, that he wished it were expedient for him to walk home with her. She understood his theory of what was wise for himself in such matters. She approved it. Nevertheless, she found it hard to leave him alone just then in the deserted mill. Half-way back she met Everett, plodding through the mud, with his hands in his pockets, and whistling, to keep his spirits up, she fancied.

“Be extra good to Mr. Gregory to-night,” she said, womanlike, unable to resist the longing to help, as he paused a moment.

“Why?” he asked, frowning; “have they been at him again?”

Anna nodded and passed on, afraid to say more.

“Fools!” he murmured between his teeth, and plunged on against the wind.

But Anna went home with a beatific vision to soothe her spirit, of Keith comfortable at last in a good hotel, with menus and waiters, bells and bathrooms, in an infinite series.