Hagar. Mary Johnston

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СКАЧАТЬ daughter's lack of savoir-faire. "To give herself away like that! Just the kind of thing her mother used to do!" Aloud she said, "Medway's a great wanderer, but one of these days he will come home and settle down and we'll all be happy together. I remember him as a young man—a perfectly fascinating young man.—Dinah, bring more waffles!—Yes, if you will tell our girls something of your charming English life. We are all so interested—"

      Miss Carlisle's voice came in, a sweet treble like a canary's. "The Princess of Wales keeps her beauty, does she not?"

      The study hall was a long, red room, well enough lighted, with a dais holding desk and chairs. Roger Michael, seated in one of these, watched, while her hostess made a little speech of introduction, the bright parterre of young faces. Sitting so, she excercised a discrimination that had not been possible in the dining-room. Of the faces before her each was different, after all, from the other. There were keen faces as well as languorous ones; brows that promised as well as those that did not; behind the prevailing "sweet" expression, something sometimes that showed as by heat lightning, something that had depth. "Here as elsewhere," thought Roger Michael. "The same life!"

      Mrs. LeGrand was closing, was turning toward her. She rose, bowed toward the mistress of Eglantine, then, standing square, with her good, English figure and her sensibly shod, English feet, she began to talk to these girls.

      She did not, however, speak to them as, even after she rose, she meant to speak. She did not talk letters in England, nor English landscape. She spoke quite differently. She spoke of industrial and social unrest, of conditions among the toilers of the world. "I am what is called a Fabian," she said, and went on as though that explained. She spoke of certain movements in thought, of breakings-away toward larger horizons. She spoke of various heresies, political, social, and other. "Of course I don't call them heresies; I call them 'the enlarging vision.'" She gave instances, incidents; she spoke of the dawn coming over the mountains, and of the trumpet call of "the coming time." She said that the dying nineteenth century heard the stronger voice of the twentieth century, and that it was a voice with a great promise. She spoke of women, of the rapidly changing status of women, of what machinery had done for women, of what education had done. She spoke of the great needs of women, of their learning to organize, of the need for unity among women. She used the words "false position" thrice. "Woman's immemorially false position."—"Society has so falsely placed her."—"Until what is false is done away with."—She said that women were beginning to see. She said that the next quarter-century would witness a revolution. "You young people before me will see it; some of you will take part in it. I congratulate you on living when you will live." She talked for nearly an hour, and just as she was closing it came to her, with a certain effect of startling, that much of the time she had been speaking to just one countenance there. She was speaking directly to the girl called Hagar Ashendyne, sitting halfway down the hall. When she took her seat there followed a deep little moment of silence broken at last by applause. Roger Michael marked the girl in green. She didn't applaud; she sat looking very far away. Mrs. LeGrand was saying something smoothly perfunctory, beflowered with personal compliments; the girls all stood; the Eglantine hostess and guest, with the teachers who had been at table, passed from the platform, and turned, after a space of hallway, into the rose-carpeted big parlour.

      Miss Carlisle and Miss Bedford brought up the rear. "Didn't you think," murmured the latter, "that that was a very curious speech? Now and then I felt so uneasy.—It was as though in a moment she was going to say something indelicate! Dear Mrs. LeGrand ought to have told her how careful we are with our girls."

      The wind rose that night and swept around the tower room, and then, between eleven and twelve, died away and left a calm that by contrast was achingly still. Hagar was not yet asleep. She lay straight and still in the narrow bed, her arms behind her head. She was rarely in a hurry to go to sleep. This hour and a half was her dreaming-awake time, her time for romance building, her time for floating here and there, as in a Witch of Atlas boat in her own No-woman's land. She had in the stalls of her mind half a dozen vague and floating romances, silver and tenuous as mist; one night she drove one afield, another night another. All took place in a kind of other space, in countries that were not on any map. She brought imagined physical features into a strange juxtaposition. When the Himalayas haunted her she ranged them, snow-clad, by a West Indian sea. Ætna and Chimborazo rose over against each other, and a favourite haunt was a palm-fringed, flower-starred lawn reached only through crashing leagues of icebergs. She took over localities that other minds had made; when she wished to she pushed aside a curtain of vine and entered the Forest of Arden; she knew how the moonlight fell in the wood outside Athens; she entered the pilotless boat and drove toward the sunset gate of the Domain of Arnheim. Usually speaking, people out of books made the population of these places, and here, too, there were strange juxtapositions. She looped and folded Time like a ribbon. Mark Antony and Robin Hood were contemporaries; Pericles and Philip Sidney; Ruth and Naomi came up abreast, with Joan of Arc, and all three with Grace Darling; the Round Table and the Girondins were acquainted. All manner of historic and fictive folk wandered in the glades of her imagination, any kind of rendezvous was possible. Much went on in that inner world—doubts and dreams and dim hypotheses, romance run wild, Fata Morganas, Castles in Spain, passion for dead shapes, worship of heroes, strange, dumb stirrings toward self-immolation, dreams of martyrdom, mind drenched now with this poem, now with that, dream life, dream adventures, dream princes, religions, world cataclysms, passionings over a colour, a tone, a line of verse—much utter spring and burgeoning. Eighteen years—a fluid unimprisoned mind—and no confidante but herself; of how recapitulatory were these hours, of how youth of all the ages surged, pulsed, vibrated through her slender frame, she had, of course, no adequate notion. She would simply have said that she couldn't sleep, and that she liked to tell herself stories. As she lay here now, she was not thinking of Roger Michael's talk, though she had thought of it for the first twenty minutes after she had put out the lamp. It had been very interesting, and it had stirred her while it was in the saying, but the grappling hook had not finally held; she was not ready for it. She had let it slip from her mind in favour of the rose and purple and deep violin humming of one of her romances. She had lain for an hour in a great wood, like a wood in Xanadu, beneath trees that touched the sky, and like an elfin stream had gone by knights and ladies. … The great clock down in the hall struck twelve. She turned her slender body, and the bed being pushed against the window, laid her outstretched hands upon the window-sill, and looked up, between the spectral sycamore boughs, to where Sirius blazed. Dream wood and dream shapes took flight. She lay with parted lips, her mind quiet, her soul awake. Minutes passed; a cloud drove behind the sycamore branches and hid the star. First blankness came and then again unrest. She sat up in bed, pushing her two heavy braids of hair back over her shoulders. The small clock upon the mantel ticked and ticked. The little room looked cold in the watery moonlight. Hagar was not dreaming or imagining now; she was thinking back. She sat very still for five minutes, tears slowly gathering in her eyes. At last she turned and lay face down upon the bed, her outstretched hands against the wooden frame. Her tears wet the sleeve of her gown. "Carcassonne—Aigues-Mortes. Carcassonne—Aigues-Mortes. … "

CHAPTER VII

       MR. LAYDON

       Table of Contents

      The winter was so open, so mild and warm, that a few pale roses clung to their stems through half of December. Christmas proved a green Christmas; neither snow nor ice, but soft, Indian summer weather. Eglantine always gave two weeks' holiday at Christmas. It was a great place for holidays. Right and left went the girls. Those whose own homes were too far away went with roommates or bosom friends to theirs; hardly a pupil was left to mope in the rooms that grew so still. Most of the teachers went away. The scattering was general.

      But Hagar remained at Eglantine. Gilead Balm was a good long way off. She had gone home last Christmas and the Christmas before, but this year—she hardly knew how—she had missed it. In the most recently received of his rare letters her grandfather СКАЧАТЬ