A Woman of Yesterday

by Caroline Atwater Mason

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.