A Woman of Yesterday

by Caroline Atwater Mason

—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.