CHAPTER XVI
THE MAINES
It was the year of the assassination of Sadi Carnot in France, ofthe trial of Emma Goldman in New York, of much "Hellish AnarchistActivity." It was a year of growth in the American Federationof Labour. It was a year of Socialist growth. It was a year ofstrikes--mine strikes, railway strikes, other strikes, Lehigh andPullman and Cripple Creek. It was the year of the Army of Coxey. It wasthe year of the Unemployed and of Relief Agencies. It was the year whenthe phrase "A living wage" received currency.
In the winter of 1894 the Spanish War had not been, the Boer War hadnot been, the Russo-Japanese War had not been. The war between Japanand China was on the eve of being; people talked of Matabeleland, andCecil Rhodes was chief in South Africa. Hawaii was in process of beingannexed. In the winter of 1894 it was the Wilson Tariff Bill, andBimetallism, and Mr. Gladstone and Home Rule, and the Mafia in Sicily,and the A.P.A., and the Bicycle, and Queen Liliuokalani, and the Causesof Strikes and of Panics, and Electric Traction, and the romancesof Sienkiewicz and "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" and "The Prisoner ofZenda" and "The Heavenly Twins." Mr. Howells was writing "Letters ofan Altrurian Traveller"; George Meredith had published "Lord Ormontand his Aminta." Stevenson, at Vailima, was considering "Weir ofHermiston."
In 1894 occurred the first voting of women in New Zealand. It saw theopening of a Woman's Congress in Berlin. In New York a Woman SuffrageAmendment was strongly advocated before a Constitutional Convention.There was more talk than usual of the Unrest among Women, moreeditorials than usual upon the phenomenon, more magazine articles. Butthe bulk of the talk and the editorials and the magazine articles hadto do with the business failures and the Unemployed and the Strikes.
The beating of the waves of the year was not loudly heard in theMaines' long, high-ceilinged parlour. The law droned on, bad yearswith good. Powhatan had speculated and made his little losses. Hisphilosophy this winter was pessimistic, and the household "economized."But the table was still good and plentiful, and the coloured servants,who were fond of him and he of them, smiled and bobbed, and he hadnot felt it necessary to change his brand of cigars, and the same oldpeople came in the evening. Mrs. Maine never read the newspapers.She rarely read anything, though once in a while she took up an oldfavourite of her youth, and placidly dipped now into it and now intoher box of chocolates. Powhatan kept her supplied with the chocolates.Twice a week, when he came in at five o'clock, he produced out of hisovercoat pocket a glazed, white, two-pound box:--"Chocolates, Bessie!Catch!"
Rachel Bolt was more alert to the world surge, but to her, too, itmust come a little muted through the family atmosphere. Her swiftestvibrations were upon other lines, curious inner, personal revolts andrebellions, sometimes consumed below the crust, sometimes breakingforth with a flare and rain of words as of lava. The family and thepeople who habitually came to the house were used to Rachel's way oftalking; as long as she did nothing _outr?_,--and she did not,--it wasno more to them than a painted volcano. As for Sylvie--Sylvie was assweet and likeable as sugar, but not interested in anything outsideof the porcelain world-dish that held her. She liked her clothes thiswinter, and the young men who came to the house, and she dutifullypractised her voice, and enjoyed the shops and the plays, and wondereda good deal if she was or was not in love with Jack Carter, who was aninterne in one of the hospitals, and who sent her every week six ofthe new roses called American Beauties. She had other, more distantrelatives in New York, people of wealth who presently took her up. Shewas with them and away from the Maines a good deal, and, on the whole,Hagar saw not much of Sylvie this winter. She and Rachel were moretogether.
Almost every evening, at the Maines', people came in--old Southernfriends, living in New York, or here on business or other occasions,young men and women, fond of Rachel, acceptable fellow-sheep from thefold of St. Timothy, now and then the rector himself, now and then someyoung man, Southern, with a letter of introduction. Sometimes therewere but one or two besides the family, sometimes seven or eight. Therewas little or no formal entertainment, but this kind of thing always.Each day at dusk Hagar put on one of the two half-festive gowns which,at the last moment, Miss Serena had insisted she must have. Both weresimplicity itself, both of some soft, cr?py stuff, one dark bronzeand one dark green. They were made with the large puffed sleeves ofthe period, and the throat slightly low and square. "Country-made,but somehow just right," Rachel judged. "You aren't any more adornedthan the leaf of a tree, and yet you might walk, just as you are, intoC?sar's palace."
Usually by half-past ten visitors were gone, lights downstairs wereout. Powhatan and Bessie believed in early to bed and late to rise.Upstairs, in her bedroom on the third floor, Hagar shook out and hungin the closet the bronze or green dress, as the case might be, put onher gown and her red wrapper, braided her hair, pushed the couch wellbeneath the light, curled herself up on it under the eider-down quilt,and, tablet against knee, began to write.... The Short Story--it wasthat she dreamed and wrote and polished. Two currents of thought andaspiration ran side by side. "To earn money--to make my own living--tobe able to help"; and "To make this Idea, that I think is beautiful,come forth and grow.--To get this thing right--to make this dream showclear--to do it, to do it!--To create!" The latter current was the mostpowerful. The former would sooner or later accomplish its end; it wouldturn the mill-wheel and be content. But the latter--never, never wouldit be satisfied; never would it say, "It is accomplished." Always therewould be the further dream, always the necessity to make that, too,come clear. There were other currents, more or less strong, Desire ofFame, Desire to be Known, Desire to Excel, and others; but the firsttwo were the great currents.
Since March and the fairy story she had written other stories, fouror five in all. She had sent them to magazines, and all but one hadcome back. That one she had sent immediately after her search forThomasine. In a month she had word that it was taken, and that, onpublication, she would be paid fifty dollars. The letter was likemanna, she went about all day with a rapt face. To write--to write--towrite stories like Hawthorne, like Poe....
She had been six weeks in New York. That night, when she had workedfor an hour over one half-page, and then, the light out, had sat fora long while in the window looking at the winter stars above the cityroofs, she could not sleep when she went to bed, but lay, straight andstill, half-thinking, half-dreaming. A pageant of impressions, wavesof repeated, altered, rearranged contacts drove through her mind. Thepictures and marbles of the Metropolitan, the sculptures and casts ofsculptures which she cared for more than for the paintings, those ofthe latter which she loved--the music that she had heard, the playsshe had seen, the Park and the slow, interminable afternoon paradeof carriages watched from a bench beneath the trees, Fifth Avenue,Broadway, the hurrying crowds, the rush and roar, tramp and clangour,the colour and bravura--Omega Street, the Settlement, a Sundayafternoon there, discussions to which she had listened, a mass meetingof strikers which, Powhatan having taken her downtown to show her theStock Exchange and Trinity, they had inadvertently fringed, and fromwhich, with epithets of disapproval, he had hurried her away;--uptownonce more and the florists' windows and the wheels on the asphalt, aSunday morning at St. Timothy's with the stained glass and the Bishop'snephew intoning;--again the theatres, a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, the"Merchant of Venice," a play of Pinero's; again the pictures and thestatues, the cast of the great Venus, the cast of Niobe, of the Dianawith the hound, of Apollo and Hermes; the pictures, Rembrandts andVandykes, and certain landscapes, and a form that she liked, firelitand vague, blind Nydia moving through ruining Pompeii, and BastienLePage's Joan of Arc; then the Park again, and the great trees abovethe mall, and people, people, people!--all made a vibrating whirl,vast, many-hued, and with strange harmonies. She lay until it passedand sank like the multi-coloured sand of the desert.
When at last she slept, she had a curious dream. She and her motherwere alone on an island with palm trees. She was used to beingwith her mother in dreams. She had for the memo
ry of her mother sopassionate a loyalty; the figure of Maria, young, it always seemed toher, as herself, so kept abreast with her inner life that it was buta naturalness that she should be there in the dream mind, too. Shewas there now, on the island with the palm trees, and the two sat andlooked at the sea, which was very blue. Then, right out of the lonelysea, there grew a crowded wharf, with a white steamship and peoplegoing to it and coming from it. Her father came from it, dressed inwhite with a white hat like a helmet, and then suddenly there was nowharf nor ship, but they were in a curious street of low, pale-colouredhouses--her father and her mother and herself and the palm trees."Now we are all going to be happy together," she said; but "No," saidher mother, "wait until the procession passes." Then there was aprocession, and they were all women, and at first they all had the faceand eyes of Bastien LePage's Joan of Arc, but then that faded, and theywere simply many women, but each of them carried a blossoming bough.She saw faces that she knew among them, and she saw women that shethought belonged to the Middle Ages, and Greek women, and Egyptians,and savages. They went by for a long time, and then, with a turn of thehand, the dream changed, and they were all in a courtyard with a welland more palm trees, and people coming and going, and they were eatingand drinking, and there was a third woman with them whom her fathercalled Anna. She had a string of jewels, and she tried them, first onHagar and then on Maria; but Maria had a knife and suddenly she struckat her father with it. She cut him across both wrists and the bloodflowed.--Hagar wakened and sat up in bed, shivering. Her father's facewas still plain against her eyeballs--bearded and handsome, with red inhis cheeks and the hat like a helmet.
During Christmas week Ralph Coltsworth appeared. He had to spend hisholidays somewhere, he said. Hawk Nest was dull and he didn't likeGilead Balm without Hagar.
"Ralph, why don't you study?"
"I do study. I'm a star student. Only I don't like the law. I'm goingto do a little more convincing myself and the family, and then I'mgoing to chuck it! I've got a little money to start things with. I wantto go in with a broker I know."
"What do you want to do that for?"
"Oh, because!... There are chances, if you've got the feeling in yourfinger tips!... Don't you know, Gipsy, that something like that isthe career for a man like me? If I had been my father, I could havewaved my sword and gone charging down history--and if I'd been mygrandfather, I could have poured out Whig eloquence from every stumpin the country and looked Olympian and been carried in procession (Idon't like politics now; it's an entirely different thing);--and ifI'd been my great-grandfather, I could have filibustered or settledthe Southwest; and back of that I could have done almost any oldthing--come over with the Adventurers, seized a continent, sharedEngland with the Normans, marauded with the Vikings, whiled throughEurope with Attila, done almost anything and come out with a name andmy arms full! Now you can't conquer things like that, but, by George,you can corner things!"
"What do you mean?--That you want to become a rich man?"
"That's what most of those others wanted. Yes, riches and power."
"I was reading the other day a magazine article. It said that the daywhen any American, if he had energy and ambition, might hope to make agreat fortune was past. It said that the Capets and Plantagenets andHapsburgs were all here; that the dynasties were established and the_entente cordiale_ in operation; that young and adventurous Americansmight hope to become captains of mercenaries, or they might go in forbeing court chaplains, and troubadours."
"Oh, that article had dyspepsia!" said Ralph. "It isn't as easy as itwas, that's certain! but it's possible yet, in 1894--if you've got anopening."
"Have you got one?"
"Elder and Marten would take me in. Marten was an old flame of mymother's, and I got his son Dick out of a scrape last year.--In tenyears, you'll see, Gipsy! I'll send you orchids and pearls!"
"I don't want them, thank you, Ralph."
Ralph took the flower from his buttonhole and began to pluck away itspetals. "Gipsy, I was awfully glad, last summer, when you sent thatEglantine fellow about his business."
"Mr. Laydon and I sent each other."
"Well, the road's clear--that's all I want to know! Gipsy--"
"Ralph, it's no use. I'm not going to listen."
"The family has planned this ever since we were infants. When you usedto come to Hawk Nest with your big eyes and your blue gingham dress andyour white stockings--I knew it somehow even then, even when I teasedyou so--"
"You certainly teased me. Do you remember the rain barrel?"
"No, I don't. The family has set its heart--"
"Oh, Ralph, family can be such a tyrant! At any rate, ours will have totake its heart off this."
Ralph turned sullen. "Well, the family used to settle it for women."
"Yes, it did--when you came over with William the Conqueror! Do youwant to _take_ me, regardless--just as you'd take those millions? Well,you may take those millions, but you can't take me!"
"Your father wants it, too. The Colonel showed me a letter--"
Hagar stopped short--they were walking in the Park. "My father!... Doyou think I owe my father so great a love and obedience?" She lookedbefore her, steadily, down the vista of vast, leafless trees. "Thestrongest feeling," she said, "that I have about my father is one ofstrong curiosity."