ELLEN BERWICK
BY ANNE O’HAGAN
BEFORE I went away from Agonquitt I was not, even by the most egotistic stretch of my imagination, a very important or an overwhelmingly popular person in the community. The girls from the village did not swarm out to the farm to see me; they did not hang upon my words with reverent attention. Even during the two years when I was at college, my holidays were not periods of public rejoicing; my clothes were not copied or my style of hairdressing regarded with imitative admiration.
But ever since I went to New York the attitude of my acquaintances has changed. At first I was touched and flattered by the interest which all my old companions took in me when I came home; gradually, however, it glimmered upon my consciousness that it was not myself, but the glamour of the great city, which drew them—as though the atmosphere of New York were a tangible thing, and shreds of it clung to me through the long journey down into this remote country. I think I was a little more touched, though not so flattered, when I learned this; there is something pathetic to the initiated in the eager wonderment and awe of the neophyte.
Sometimes the girls have asked my advice, confiding to me their yearnings to leave home, to make “careers” for themselves in the world. And when I try—as perhaps I too often do—to discourage them, they look at me reproachfully, mutely accusing me of a selfish refusal to share with them pleasures and glories. They talk of the theaters, the opera, books, pictures, the glittering press of life, as though a ticket to New York insured one these things. I talk of loneliness and discomfort, of the pinch of poverty. They speak of enlarged horizons; and I of the hall bedrooms which would bound the outlook of most of them. They glow with the thought of new friendships; and I dash their ardor with tales of isolation, of snubs in the effort to escape isolation, of tawdry relationships begun for the sake of mere companionship. But their eyes are always full of incredulity. And sometimes, remembering the delights which were no less a part of my life in the big city than the depression, remembering the wholesome joy of work, the natural pride of feeling oneself an integral part of the great onward-pressing stream of life; yes, and remembering the sweet and the bitter-sweet that came to me there, I wonder if my prohibitive wisdom is not a little hypocritical. Would I myself forego any of my New York experiences?
Sometimes it has seemed to me that my own adventures—or lack of adventures—set down as plainly and truthfully as I can recall them, might be of more illuminating, perhaps—perhaps—of more deterrent, effect than all my spoken generalizations. For though my existence had its peculiar features, rose to its individual climaxes, yet in the main it was typical—the duplicate in most essentials of that of thousands and thousands of young women, not greatly gifted, who come to New York to seek their fortunes.
I shall never forget how the whole thing came about. I was in the poultry yard, doctoring some of my chickens for the pip, when I heard a great puffing and chugging in the road. It was the Hennens’ automobile, and instead of dashing past the house, scattering terror before it, it snorted itself to a standstill before our old carriage block. I knew that mother’s annual ordeal was before her, and I half laughed as I went on forcing the broilers’ throats open.
Mother hated the yearly visitation of Mrs. Hennen with all the intensity of her very gentle, very proud nature. Thirty-five years before she and Letitia Bland had been the rival belles of the Agonquitt region, and the legend was that Letty Bland had taken to her bed for three days when mother’s engagement to father was made known, and that she went to visit relatives in Eastport at the time of the marriage. After a triumph like that, no wonder mother hated the magnificent summer descent upon her of Mrs. Letitia Hennen, widow of the oil-field king, mother of George Hennen, the banker, broker, yachtsman and what not; of Mrs. Letitia Hennen, owner of the feudal castle on the shore three miles from the village, whose splendors put to utter rout the modest opulence of all the rest of Agonquitt’s summer colony. I was always sorry for mother at the season of her recurrent Nemesis, and yet I was always amused at the thought of time’s revenges.