A Woman of Yesterday

by Caroline Atwater Mason

Anna was the first to speak. When she rose and faced the little audience, made up of fashionable women, professional men, and a sprinkling of the more clearly defined religious “workers”, she did not feel the coldness underlying their courteous attention. The Titian beauty fixed upon her eyes full of unconsciously patronizing kindness, and Mrs. Ingraham smiled at her with sympathetic encouragement, but they might have spared themselves the effort. Anna did not perceive or consider these things. She was not thinking of them at all, nor of herself.

The peculiar twofold consecration which rested upon her spirit in regard to her missionary vocation, as a call to fulfil at once the Divine Will and the will of her father, was so profound and so solemn as to remove her from personal and passing cares. She would not herself have chosen to appear before these people and to speak to them of her supreme interest; but to do so had been laid upon her as duty, and Anna’s conception of duty, by reason of the “tremendously developed conscience” which the worldly-wise women had discerned in her, was of something to be done. She did this duty with the simple directness of a soldier under command. She stood erect and motionless, with no nervous working of hands or trembling of lips, and spoke in a clear, low voice, in which alone, by reason of a peculiar vibrant pathos, the profound, undeclared passion of her nature was suggested.

Her critics of the early evening had been right in finding her destitute of manner. There was no slightest evidence as she spoke of the orator’s instinct—the magnetism of kindling eye and changing expression, of the conciliation and subtle flattery of her hearers. Neither had she fervid personal raptures nor spiritual triumphs to communicate. Of the picturesque and pathetic elements of the situation she made no use whatever. She had simply an absolute, dominating conviction that the heathen were lost; that they could only be saved by the knowledge of Christ; that this knowledge must be conveyed to them by the disciples of Christ at his command; and that she, Anna Mallison, was humbly grateful that she was permitted to devote herself to a service so obviously necessary. Of these things she spoke; of the sacred sense of living out her father’s disappointed life she naturally could not speak.

It was not the speech which Mrs. Ingraham and her guests had expected. They had looked to have their sympathies aroused by a pathetic recital of sacrifice and exalted self-devotion. Anna, on the contrary, was unconscious of sacrifice, and felt herself simply grateful for the privilege of carrying out her innermost desires.

The people who heard her felt that to give up “the world” was a mighty thing. Anna did not yet know what “the world” was. To their anticipation, she had been a figure almost as romantic and moving as a young novitiate about to take conventual vows; to herself, she was an enlisted soldier who has received marching orders, and whose heart exults soberly, since there are ties which may be broken, and death, perhaps, awaiting, but even so exults with joyful response.

Thus, to most of those who heard her, Anna’s little speech was a distinct disappointment; the very loftiness of her conception of her calling made it featureless, and robbed it of adaptation to easy emotional effect. The ladies who had discussed her before her speech found, after it, that it was, after all, exactly what might have been expected—altogether of a piece with the austerity of her figure, and her sad, colourless face, no warmth, no emotion—just the hard Puritan conscience at its hardest.

There were two or three only who felt the spiritual elevation belonging to the girl and to what she said, and the underlying pathos of her high restraint, as too great to put into the conventional phrases of sympathy and praise, and so kept silence.

There was a brief pause after Anna returned to her seat, during which people stirred and spoke in low tones, and the beaded lady leaned over and thanked Anna for her “charming little talk”. Then Mrs. Westervelt, the guest from Boston came forward and began speaking with a winning smile, a gentle, soothing voice, and an affectionate reference to “the dear, sweet young sister.” She had the ease and flexibility of the practised public speaker; the winning and dimpled smile with which she won the company at the start was in frequent use, and she made constant motions with a pair of very white hands. She was quietly dressed, and yet, after the straightness of Anna’s poor best gown, her attire had its own air of handsome comfort. The perfect command of her voice and of herself established instantaneously a rapport with her audience, of which Anna, in her inexperience, had never dreamed.

Her beloved Mrs. Ingraham, she said, had asked her to tell the dear friends of some wonderful answers to prayer which she had recently experienced, but before doing this she craved the privilege of reading a few verses of Scripture.

She then read certain passages from the prophecy of Zechariah, detached from one another, taken entirely from their historic setting, but fitted together with some care. The speaker explained that she had, in her earlier Christian life, found some difficulty in interpreting this rather obscure passage, but in the new life of complete sanctification, into which it had been her glorious privilege to enter, she had come to see all Scripture by a new and marvellous light. No longer did she trust to the dry and formal explanations of scholars, many of whom, it was but too well known, had never had the deep things of God revealed to them, and who had been led into many errors by their pride of learning. All that kind of study was past for her, for the dear Lord himself showed her, when she lifted her heart to him, just what he meant in his blessed word. This had been her experience in regard to the passage just read. To the natural mind there were difficulties in it, but just below the surface was the great precious truth which God would have all his children receive. It had been given her that when she came to the beautiful home of Mrs. Ingraham, and should be called upon to speak to these friends, she must bring them this particular passage. But it had looked dark to her, and she was in doubt how to interpret it. But as she had been in the cars, coming up from Boston, she had said: “Now, Lord, those dear friends in Burlington will want to know just what you meant by that sweet portion of your word, and I do not feel that I can tell them unless you enlighten me. What is it that is intended by the two staves in the hand of the prophet, one called Beauty and one called Bands?”