So Thurley sat this May afternoon while the city throbbed with its new turmoil, thinking of many things, all of which related to Hobart’s prophecy—that America must win the violet crown, definite recognition by the Old World that America had established new standards for art, independent of the frayed and tarnished rules which had, in a sense, caused present bloodshed. As a nation’s art progresses, the nation’s virility weakens, so history has proved, Thurley reasoned. When art reached a state of so-called perfection, commercial, physical and religious supremacy of the nation dimmed—because the foundation for that art was not made of common sense rules but fantastic and self-indulgent exceptions. Let the foundation for art be moral even if limited to begin with, inspired by self-sacrifice and with sincerity its determining motif and that nation can advance in art without fear of decadence. She went to the window to close it, looking down at the busy, broad street where strange posters met her gaze, women in uniforms, women stopping pedestrians to beg for the cause, women making speeches, boys screaming out something and waving banners, while echoes of a popular military song floated up to her,—all gay anesthesia for the horror of the war. The great and needed romance of war had taken its clutch on America; reality was left unhampered for the battlefield. That was the great division of theforces. From now on anything tinged with military trimmings would be accepted. Fortunes won by a trifling penwiper made of red, white and blue cheesecloth! An actress however infamous of character and threadbare as to ability would be lauded and her salary tripled when she screeched camp ditties or waved a flag! Pictures with the flag would sell, pictures with soul and peaceful backgrounds would be shoved aside, books such as Caleb’s would flood the market, military diaries would come in droves to the editors’ payroll. For the time being art would be a necessary factor in arousing emotions and sustaining interest. It always had been so, it always must be so at such a crisis.
It occurred to her that if Hobart’s vision could have been realized before this crisis what a mightier, more direct influence true art would have in rousing the commoner. For it would be an art of spiritual sincerity and no one would be forced to discriminate among a myriad of near-art wares and mercenary efforts in patriotic guise. The peasant whose taste for opera and pictures is unsullied until he mingles with the conglomeration which this over-generous nation offers is to be preferred!
And afterwards, Thurley thought,—strangely enough, when peace had come—would the vanguard of art be brave enough to banish forever the surplus wares, false standards and begin anew?—for these swashbuckling profiteers would be loath to cry quits.
An hour later Thurley discovered herself in bed, a doctor watching her and Miss Clergy in the doorway, her face gray with apprehension. A nurse whispered she had fainted while standing at the window; that there was no need for alarm. The doctor added that she had brain fag, nothing serious if she would go away to some place where she could be pulled together. After more suave remarks and those little sugar-coated pellets left behind, he departed and Thurley sent the nurse and Miss Clergy away, tossing restlessly and wondering if she could make them understand that she would not go to a milk-fed sanitarium where nurses sneaked about in rubber-heeled shoes and one had to exclaim over sunsets with the other patients, to say nothing of bulletlike little biscuits and health foods and the talk on “Iceland Moss” given by a convalescent missionary!
When a wild rose tries to become a hothouse variety there is certain, some time during the transition, to be a bad scratching of thorns which was all that ailed Thurley.
In the morning Bliss Hobart dropped in to see her and Thurley brightened so visibly that the nurse left the room, grinning superciliously.
“Bother opera things,” Bliss said. “I’m really glad you fainted yesterday; you fainted enough for me, too, didn’t you? I was just considering getting up on top of Grant’s Tomb and dancing a Highland fling—masculine form of nerve fag.... I say, Thurley, do you know you’re coming with me to my hermitage? I’m leavingto-night and we’re to bully Miss Clergy into being chaperone.” Here they both laughed at each other like children and the pellets almost lost the sugar coating in wrath at the small part they played in curing this wild rose person! “Oh, yes, you are coming. I was just leaving for Blessed Memory myself when they told me you were ill. A month there will set you right.”
“You mean the place you disappear to—”
“And Lissa hints of a harem, a dope den, a gambling lair and what not? Yes, ma’am, Blessed Memory is its name. You’ll be there this time to-morrow. Remember, rouge boxes and high heels not admitted.”
He left her to thank her kind fortune she had had sense enough to faint and bruise herself slightly. Why, oh, why, had she never thought of doing so beforehand? She was humming as she waited for her maid to come and get a steamer trunk.... Miss Clergy watched from the corner of the doorway unawares. But what she thought she kept to herself.
Blessed Memory, buried in the wildest part of Maine, with the nearest post office entirely unpronounceable, proved to be an advance sample of paradise. Being perfect there was nothing complex about it—and very little to tell concerning it. Time flew, the hours tumbling over themselves like babies at play. It was exactly like the thirsty traveller coming upon the ice-cold mountain spring and drinking his fill with no comment but the satisfied and grateful, “A-a-h, man alive!” So it was with Thurley.
It seemed that Hobart had come into the wilderness prepared to prove that he could make it habitable, as he told her. After he had built a shack, found his food and water, lived by himself for weeks at a time to experiment with bark, twigs and logs—learning the call of woodbeasties and forgetting the cries of men—he permitted himself a few extravagances in the way of tools and furnishings until Blessed Memory, as he called the small, silvery shingled house set in a sand dune like a great moonstone in palest gold, came to be a reputable habitation where he took refuge each year, “living,” he said, in order that he might “exist the rest of the time.”
Miss Clergy was ill at ease in her nunlike bedroom without ornament and scant of furnishings. But she found thought for reflection in watching Thurley and Bliss as they went off to try for fresh fish. Her queer, bright eyes would blink rapidly as if a succession of unpleasing thoughts had attacked her conscience and she refused to give way to them. When they would return and hallo for her to answer, she would usually take refuge in the plea of eternal neuralgia and leave them to their own ways for the remainder of the day!
The rooms contained old-style braided rugs and a spinning wheel which, to Hobart’s delight, Thurley knew how to use, thanks to Betsey Pilrig, old blue china and pewter, a square piano on which Hobart played jingling tunes while Thurley sang them as gloriously as when she played missionary with Philena. The beds were mahogany, so was the fire settle, and there was an outdoor Dutch oven which her host insisted on using, a pump and a well and a tiny barn where his wheezy little automobile rested when it was not chasing up and down country roads in search of supplies.
He had no real neighbors nor did he wish for them. He had bought enough acres on all sides of Blessed Memory to secure him freedom from molestation. He wanted to feel, so he explained, that even lavender and black velvety butterflies, great, golden bees and humming-birds might come and go at will.
There were no books or even writing materials in the house. “When I have to go in to town for supplies, I get my extremely urgent mail and reply to it while at the post office,” he explained. “But I wish nothing inky about the hermitage.”
Thurley, who had first viewed the little house and the wild surroundings with dismay as to what she would ever do with herself, fell to work within a few days and became a busy Martha engrossed with house and outdoor work, plying the axe while Hobart was away, replanting flower beds, picking berries, climbing trees to sit astride some sturdy limb and dream of nothing, actually to forget language, as it were, entering the realm of delicious thought, rejoicing in merely singingsoundsas did the birds, instead of clumsy words needing to be phrased and accented.
“I never knew any one could be so busy in such a wilderness,” she told Hobart one late afternoon when they had tramped clear to the sea-coast and sat resting before they journeyed homeward with the aid of barn lanterns.
“Because you and I and other creatures who live by their wits most of the time and have the tasks of physical existence performed for them, need to remember that one can almost see and feel the truth of eternity ... the eternal seasons, Thurley, the ever-dying, ever-reviving blossoms, the migration of the birds, the continual progress and continual decay of all forms of life—that is what makes us really seem so busy. Because most of the time we are nibbling at a fragment of this supreme truth, boxed up in a steam-heated apartment with a man and a maid and an engagement tablet to be our aids, we sing some silly opera and return to the apartment convinced we are quite indispensable to mankind. We need to cometo such a place as this and humbly realize eternity. That is why I named the little house Blessed Memory, because I carry the thought with me when I lock the door for the long, white winter.”
Thurley was silent, the most sympathetic answer she could have made. She was mentally quoting,
“Cool girdles and crests of the sea gods,“Bright hollows of billowy foam”
“Cool girdles and crests of the sea gods,“Bright hollows of billowy foam”
“Cool girdles and crests of the sea gods,
“Bright hollows of billowy foam”
—as suitable for the scene.
It was a quiet sea haven they had found. Bliss had tramped there many times, he told her. Around them were wet sea wrack and pungent bog myrtle, tall protruding cliffs with the green grass clinging to them and dusky birds incessantly slipping about. The sea itself was a shadowy, gray wilderness broken with rosy trails which led to darkish mystery. In the sky a star trembled.
“Tell me more,” she demanded childishly.
“What about? I must seem as bad as a complete reading course shipped on without warning,” he began, playing with pebbles, “but do you know what I was thinking, Thurley? That the art vanguard are certain to succeed, that this time of strife should not be for merely freedom of seas and colony disputes—it is the time of discord in which all matters shall have their hearing. And then, one sees absurd glimpses now and then that make one want to shout for joy—”
“What?
“Oh, a life insurance agent with a well worn copy of Keats in his inner pocket or the apparently frivolous hairdresser who reads Ruskin’s essays with the girl who sells fountain pens during lunch hour—or a very famous prima donna who finally admits that the shadow can never be the substance and that works without faith are dead, too!”
Thurley was thinking in disconnected fashion. “Tell me, will the war level class as well, so that it will result in there being no very rich or no poor?”
He shook his head. “We must always have wealth demonstrate herself with freedom; we must always have class. Let each man be what he was best intended; we cannot have one class, one rule, one creed any more than one dimension. The Cause who made such eternal contrasts as the snowbound north and orchid-decorated tropics, the sagebrush desert and the French vineyards—has the example not been set us for all time? There must be wealth and its opposite poverty and the sunny, useful medium running between the two and understanding each alike. Remember, player and worker are like the wings of a bird, equal and necessary. Class must exist the same as vicarious atonement—the mother bearing the child, soldiers fighting for stay-at-homes. The ancient but sometimes forgotten or denied unity of the race is the belief in immortality.”
It was dark; the sea with the white rocks rising out of the water here and there gave the effect of the black and white cathedral front at Siena. Hobart lit their lanterns and urged a homeward journey.
“I don’t want to go,” Thurley begged. “Tell me more—”
“Yet you try to make me think you do not believe my vision,” he said, “that you will not be like the soldier in the old song, who did not halt but ‘he gave the bridle-reins another shake.’”
“Tell me why artists have different lives from the world in general,” she retorted.
“There are some isolated, superb but lonely souls whose work robs them of human ties and leaves them chaste yet wistful. True, again, on the firm yet terriblefoundation of expiated sins is genius often laid—the splendid blossom of the tree of experience. The greatest leaders have often, to their enemies’ delight, pleaded guilty to a youth of folly, small faults, petty actions—and yet there has come an awakening and with the handicap of the past as a ballast, they forge on to the heights. I sometimes think handicaps are as necessary for an artist as ballast for a balloon. Without them we would sail upwards beyond ordinary comprehension and the whole purpose would be of no avail. Let us stay sufficiently earthbound to insure usefulness and proper responsibility.... Come, Thurley, even if the poets say the children of dark and the children of light tread the same pathway, our lanterns may fail us and we would have to scramble to find the house.” He helped her up.
“You mean, too,” she said, not content to stop the argument, “that artists should set the example—as well as prescribe one—”
“Those who are not sufficiently developed to perceive the higher cosmic laws must have man-made laws to teach the first great principle—which is to obey. Obedience either forced or voluntary is the first requisite in moulding character. Those of us who can glimpse the higher laws must also keep annoying man-made ones to help those less developed by our example.”
Thurley began picking her way along the beach, singing softly:
If all the seas were one sea—what a great sea it would be!If all the trees were one tree—what a great tree it would be!If all the axes were one axe—what a great axe that would be!Andif all the men were one man—what a great man Bliss would be!
If all the seas were one sea—what a great sea it would be!If all the trees were one tree—what a great tree it would be!If all the axes were one axe—what a great axe that would be!Andif all the men were one man—what a great man Bliss would be!
If all the seas were one sea—what a great sea it would be!
If all the trees were one tree—what a great tree it would be!
If all the axes were one axe—what a great axe that would be!
Andif all the men were one man—what a great man Bliss would be!
Three weeks later when Hobart drove Thurley intothe nearest station, he asked almost timidly if she felt it had been worth while.
“So worth while,” she said, “it showed me what I must not do.”
Miss Clergy gave a sigh of relief as she was settled on the local train running down to the main line.
“You look like a little girl again,” she told Thurley. “I’m sure it was very kind of him.... Did you ever fancy he might fall in love with you? Imagine how distressing it would be for him—knowing your position!”
Thurley resigned herself to the inevitable, and as they jolted onward she thought of how very great and how very small was love and that from atom to apostle the personal equation would come blundering in on one’s most sacred thoughts.
The remainder of the summer found Thurley undecided as to what she should do next and not having Hortense as an aide-de-camp and with Polly still squandering her legacy, Thurley stayed in town to collect her faculties and study new rôles.
She found that women were chattering about “finding the group spirit,” pointing with envy and emulation to the soldiers who had found “the group spirit” and were working together for the cause. The germ of unrest, masquerading under the altruistic title of “group spirit,” was prevalent among all the women Thurley knew and those of whom she heard.
Even Ernestine came to explain incoherently that she had cancelled the season’s engagements to sail for France—“to help”—anything that was needed, play or amuse or scrub floors, Thurley dear, and was noncommittal as to her disorganized interests at home or her personal qualifications to serve in this capacity. Thurley accepted Ernestine’s good-by with a sense of amusement. Thurley herself did not feel she was slacking although it would have been difficult to explain just why she did not. She, too, had brought the “blessed memory” with her from the hermitage, acting as ballast for the chaos which prevailed about her.
A feeling of age had also claimed her. She seemed to see beyond these struggling, enthusiastic but deluded women who were sincere in their efforts, yet forgetful that to serve one’s immediate circle of dependents is thebest way in which to serve the larger cause. Thurley saw ahead to the psychological struggle taking place in one year, three, five—who knows?—when these restless spirits, suffering from repression of emotion or ennui had rushed pell mell with a bevy of excuses and accomplishments into the teeth of the fight and the fight had unexpectedly ceased and their adventure was at an end.
She did not try to argue with Ernestine to stay at home and when Mark came to say good-by, a few mornings later, saying he was to dance and give athletic drills overseas, she said very faintly,
“But is war a pink tea? If I were a soldier and I saw an able-bodied man dancing about in a toga to give an imitation of Greek handball, I’d ask him to get into the trenches with me or quit. After all, Mark, you are going because Lissa is going!”
“Lissa is after a duke,” Mark said lightly. “How about one of these floor-scrubbing duchesses? What about yourself? You might capture an earl,” drawing on his cream-colored kid gloves. “Fancy Bliss, who blew in yesterday fit as a fiddle, declaring he would stick along at the old game right here.”
Thurley’s face must have showed her joy.
“Oh-ho, so Lissa is right,” Mark laughed. “She always contended that it was Bliss whose word was law with you!”
Thurley put up her hands in protest and dismissed him, sending Lissa a good-by present and evading a possible interview. It did not seem as if she could endure these vapid persons who were rushing over to gain fame, excitement, copy or a worth-while matrimonial alliance! She saw, in truth, the result of Bliss Hobart’s words, that were the foundation of art of sterner stuff regarding personalities,these cluttery amateurs and intriguers would be, perforce, engaged in some industry and not foot-loose to follow the procession. The really great souls whose work would ennoble the cause could go forth unquestioned and certain of results.
The morning’s mail brought her consolation—a note from Collin, characteristically brief and with a pencil sketch of himself, very knock-kneed and bulging of eye, clad in uniform.
Dear Thurley (he wrote)After all, women aren’t the only ones to change their minds. Don’t laff! Or I’ll cut you off without a helmet. I’ve traded my brush for a bayonet. It got me. That’s why—selah,Collin.
Dear Thurley (he wrote)
After all, women aren’t the only ones to change their minds. Don’t laff! Or I’ll cut you off without a helmet. I’ve traded my brush for a bayonet. It got me. That’s why—selah,
Collin.
“Good boy,” Thurley said as she finished reading the note to Miss Clergy, “and I suppose Polly will march in with the Long Island Legion of Death behind her, making war on me if I dare to smile.”
“But you won’t have to stop singing, will you?” was all Miss Clergy answered. “There’ll be enough people left at home to listen to you?”
“I won’t stop,” Thurley promised gently, adding to herself, “my singing is Miss Clergy’s form of an ooze!”
She was wondering these days if, when she met Bliss Hobart again, the holiday at Blessed Memory would serve to bring them into closer understanding or if, as after so many other rare moments, there would follow a desultory friendship with the same harsh taskmaster and critic speaking no more of visions.
Later in the day he did call on her, the same elegantly dressed Mr. Public Opinion who was so besieged with patriotic duties and enterprises and enmeshed in a mass ofdetail regarding the reconstruction of grand opera, law suits impudently presented by dismissed Teutonic songbirds, the revival of English and French music and the possibility of a new prodigy, that he seemed to Thurley to be twin brother to the man who had played and worked and thought in the fashion of a hundred years ago—in a hundred-years-ago setting.
“Polly is busied with a surprise,” he told her, “a horrible war opera, I presume. No one seems able to convince her she is hopeless. And that ridiculous devil of a Collin has gone to fight, bless him, while Ernestine has fallen prey to war-madness which is besetting emotional and idle women and she will return with a new stock of morbidity—because she has tried to do something which she had no excuse for attempting.”
“What of Mark, Lissa, Hortense?” she persisted, laughing.
“Banish them from my thoughts—” he looked at her critically. “Yes, it did you good. Now that I’ve set the example, why not follow it? Find a wilderness and build a house in the middle of it. At eighty-two you’ll have the critics wrangling as to whether you are your own daughter!”
“Where shall I go?” she asked rather pointedly.
“Aha, you want to poach on my reserve? You can’t do it! Take your own home town; isn’t it wild in spots? Seems to me you used to say so. Take twenty acres and bury yourself in it. Do the things we did those four weeks.”
“Birge’s Corners!” So, he was to remain aloof. Birge’s Corners where she had returned in foolish triumph and ostentation—Dan and his son and Lorraine would be there, a harmonious trio! There was no place for her at Birge’s Corners.
“I’ll consider it,” was all she said.
“I came to tell you of Sam Sparling,” Hobart added in a gentler tone. “Evidently you have not heard?”
She shook her head.
“It happened while we were away. Had a nervous collapse—a stroke as well, and was battered up for keeps—all one side. Seems he had tossed his money around without thought and he was left stony broke. So they gave him a royal London benefit. The war paused long enough to honor the old chap. People came hours before the performance and waited on street curbs, brought their lunch and all that. A stall was as hard to get the day of the performance as a slice of the moon. Baxter says it was as great an event in its particular way as a coronation. They all turned out, great and small, old and young, to give Sam a valedictory. And now blush, Thurley. They even had your voice on a talking machine singing, ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes,’ and it was encored! There, doesn’t that set you up? I can’t tell you the exact programme, but every great artist available appeared. There was every one from a coster singer to the finest Shakespearean artist. And then the curtain rose for the finale—all the artists were in tiers and dressed in evening costume. Up high on a sort of throne sat our Sam, weak and not quite resigned yet to the truth of what had happened but gamey old Sam in a tuxedo and a gardenia in his buttonhole! The house burst into one sobbing roar—for he wastheirSam Sparling and they were going to prove it.”
“What did he do? Oh, why weren’t we there?” Thurley cried.
“First, the house sang the street gamin song Sam had sung when a lad, a catchy tune with a refrain of,
‘Let me hold your nag, sir,Or your little bag, sir,Anything you please to give—Oh—thank ’ee, sir—!’
‘Let me hold your nag, sir,Or your little bag, sir,Anything you please to give—Oh—thank ’ee, sir—!’
‘Let me hold your nag, sir,
Or your little bag, sir,
Anything you please to give—
Oh—thank ’ee, sir—!’
“He used to do a clog dance with it and have that laugh of his thrown in for good value. Well, the people forgot his Shakespearean triumphs and his drama work; they just sang the old song between their laughing and crying. Then two men helped Sam to half stand, a terrible effort for the dear old chap, but the house rewarded him,—they sobbed louder than ever. All Sam said was, with an echo of the old street gamin laugh, ‘Thank ’ee, sirs’—and then he fell back—dead! The excitement was too much ... and the money will go to the soldiers.”
“But that,” said Bliss, after Thurley managed to stop sobbing, “isn’t the thing that hurts the worst. That was a superb ending—just as Sam himself would have staged it. But the very next day, the leading daily announced they would run a series entitled ‘Sam Sparling’s Breach of Promise Suits’ as told by an ‘old beau’—and there you have what I’ve said in a nutshell—the wrong the man Sparling did to his better self living after him, the good forgotten, undervalued. All due to the present day system of advertising and standards for artists’ personalities.”
“What will it be after the war?” Thurley added.
“It will be the duty of every person to discriminate between the army, whether military, spiritual or mental, which has won the cause and what I name the jumblers-in, emotional hoboes who have profiteered or indulged in mental orgies or distorted patriotism in order to market inferior wares—” He was about to say more when Miss Clergy came in, her sharp eyes looking at Thurley’s tear-stained cheeks. Being a mere man, Hobart fled!
In September Thurley did go back to the Corners, Miss Clergy with her, but she did not take the maid, the accompanist, the extra motor car with which to startle the natives.
“I keep humming the old tune:
‘Home, boys, home, in the old countree,’Neath the oak and the ash and the spreading maple-tree,’”
‘Home, boys, home, in the old countree,’Neath the oak and the ash and the spreading maple-tree,’”
‘Home, boys, home, in the old countree,
’Neath the oak and the ash and the spreading maple-tree,’”
she confessed to Bliss the day before she left, “so it’s home I’m going and I’ll probably race back to town and wonder what madness moved me.”
Her concert season did not begin until November, for which she was thankful and with Miss Clergy amicably assenting to the return, Thurley sent word to reopen the Fincherie.
Inspiring her return was the longing to see Dan and Lorraine and the harmony which their child had brought them. Envious though she was and starved with the longing to have some one of her very own, Thurley had come to judge things with a broader gauge. She wanted the satisfaction of saying to Dan that she was glad for him and she understood. She must tell Lorraine that she was truly friends with “the family!”
She knew her world would have ridiculed her ridiculous conscience, deeming it more essential that she reopen the flirtation with the chewing-gum king or find out a more distinctive method of advertising. But to Thurley the contented handshake of Dan Birge and his wife’s smile was more to the point. So she drove quietly intothe Corners one warm, early fall day when every color in Dame Nature’s paint box had been employed in the bordering trees of the Fincherie lawn. She said to Ali Baba who met them eagerly,
“I’ve come home again.”
Nor did she waver from that manner. She went into the bedrooms and proceeded to settle Miss Clergy and herself with as businesslike an air as her own maid had done, stopping to ask Betsey and Hopeful questions which she knew would please, telling them again and again that it seemed good to “be home.”
“I guess you’ll find a lot of changes,” Betsey said, lingering in the room. “I guess you’re changed some yourself,” her kind old eyes looking at the girl shrewdly.
“Come, Betsey, you’re going to accuse me of growing old! Now what is it—let me hear the worst?”
“No,” Betsey pushed her glasses on to the top of her head so as to see the better, “it’s a change of heart—like I’ve heard tell about,” unconscious of Thurley’s desire both to laugh and cry, “a real change of heart, I guess.”
“Was I that bad?” Thurley asked penitently. “I thought only the town drunkards had changes of heart—” she paused, realizing it was not fair to tax Betsey’s sense of humor. “It is this, Betsey, I’ve grown up and with all the wonderful things life has given me, I have no one of my own, so,” she finished bravely, “I’m determined to belong to a town ... now, Betsey, tell me, what are my chances for having Birge’s Corners fall dead in love with me?” amused at Betsey’s struggles to be honest yet not offend.
“I guess you give ’em an earful the last time,” Betsey began. “You know, Thurley, they ain’t up to the new ways—and you—you—”
“You’re afraid I don’t understand,” Thurley hugged her—because she wanted to hug some one and Betsey happened to be handy. “I do understand—but remember the old railway crossing advice, ‘stop—look—listen’—” here she handed out a dress pattern for a present and took a deep interest in the debate as to whether there should be box pleats or a circular skirt!
Within a short time Thurley became both unconscious and disinterested as to her own change of heart. For she discovered that here was an opportunity to study first hand and in unsuspected fashion the war madness which was taking its toll of house-and-garden folk destined to do their bit by stay-at-home effort. The news that Dan had a commission did not surprise her beyond a certain pride, almost as if she had been instrumental in her arguments for his going. She thought that Lorraine probably cried a little and tried to convince Dan his duty lay at home because of the boy; she could picture Lorraine’s distressed, pretty self as she coaxed Dan not to go “and get killed” and Dan’s sentimental side warring with his manhood. At any rate he had gone, so Betsey told her, watching Thurley’s face for some evidence as to her state of feeling. Also he was making the very best first lieutenant in the army—for was he not the first commissioned officer from the Corners?
There had been a quota of village lads, some of whom Thurley remembered, who had gone and there was a fudge club organized by the village maidens which yielded weekly so many pounds of sugary delight to be forwarded to the training camps. The social club was a Red Cross center, the lodge rooms were forwarding station for garments and relief funds, no corner of the town but what had scrambled personal possessions into a corner to make way for impersonal duties.
As Thurley saw these evidences in even the shut-in hamlet, she reproached herself for having mere visions of a time far ahead when America should win the violet crown, the time when the future generations would recite in history the events of the war of wars and then say with as much assertion as they told of the enemy’s defeat, “A renaissance in art was noted in America during the reconstruction period, art was placed on a more permanent, moral basis, there was a widecut destroying and discouragement of all pursuits and achievements which did not conform to a high moral and spiritual idea. For the first time in the history of the world, our people demanded of artists more than their work, they demanded a conforming to moral law so that the number of art workers became fewer and the public was relieved of superfluous art intriguers whose influence was a menace.” So would the children recite and when the teacher would ask: “Who inspired this great movement?” their answer would be, “Bliss Hobart, he named it the violet crown—the crown for supremacy, violet as the eccelesiastics interpret it—for humility.”
Thurley could almost fancy she heard the answer being made, as glorious a feat as there ever was to be, to have children speak one’s name with admiration, to have shown America over-rich in all physical attributes, as taking for her spoils the greatest lesson of all, re-educating her artists so they might draw on the wonderful and hitherto barely skimmed surface of her astral or mystical energy which lies waiting for all true idealists.
The third day after Thurley’s return, when she was card-indexing her thoughts in order to begin her concert tour, wondering how to convince the town that she had returned to be one of them and that no matter how greatthe world might call her she did not belong to the world but to Birge’s Corners, she finally decided to go to see Lorraine.
She was amused at the situation as she slipped into a frock like the beautiful green blue rust which comes on copper and put a gold piece in her purse for the boy. She, Thurley Precore, like a wistful village spinster, going to call on the son of her erstwhile adorer! And she chose to carry out the illusion by walking through the streets, nodding at passers-by and pretending not to notice their astonished glances.
The Corners could never quite forget the birthday party for Taffy, although Taffy had long since ascended to canine realms above.
She came upon a gathering in front of Dan’s store—she had wanted to go inside to buy some trifle and recall the atmosphere of the old days, even if Dan’s desk was now locked and deserted, the days when a willful girl used to dance in and call “Cohoo” up at the young proprietor. But there was a platform in front of the showcases and women were sitting on it, all of them in uniforms. They had a barrel for a table, a pitcher of water and glasses, and pamphlets which they flung out into the crowd at intervals. Boy Scouts were standing in line and singing lustily the doughboy favorite, while a small person also in uniform directed them with wild gestures:
Oh, there was a little hen and she had a wooden leg,The best little hen that ever laid an egg,And she laid more eggs than any hen on the farm—And another little drink won’t do us any harm—
Oh, there was a little hen and she had a wooden leg,The best little hen that ever laid an egg,And she laid more eggs than any hen on the farm—And another little drink won’t do us any harm—
Oh, there was a little hen and she had a wooden leg,
The best little hen that ever laid an egg,
And she laid more eggs than any hen on the farm—
And another little drink won’t do us any harm—
As the crowd cheered, the small directress turned to face them and speak in a shrill, excited voice about theneed for funds, lapsing into slang when other superlative failed her, striding up and down, her soldier hat on one side and her hair dishevelled. It was Lorraine Birge! Thurley felt as if the world were approaching an end as she discovered the identity of the speaker. Beside Lorraine were Josie Donaldson, Hazel Mitchell and presently Cora Spooner appeared to play an uncertain trombone solo, while a queer youth in white flannels and a dangling eye glass began passing the hat—it was Oweyne Pringle of the art shoppe!
He gurgled his delight when he recognized Thurley. “You’ll have to sing for us—the crowd will be twice as generous ... oh, do, it will please Mrs. Birge.”
“Tell Mrs. Birge I will wait for her after the meeting.” Thurley weakly dropped the gold piece she had intended for the boy into the offered hat.
After the collection and another shower of pamphlets, Lorraine and her young Coldstream Guards marched off the platform to tack up placards asking for farmerettes and speakerettes to be pressed into service. Then Lorraine dashed over to Thurley—nothing left of the timid little person with a saddish look in her dove-colored eyes. She approached Thurley as hail-fellow well-met, holding out her hand cordially:
“Well, Thurley, you’ve stolen a march on us. You would have been dragged up here to sing if I’d seen you ... isn’t it glorious?” She paused as if uncertain whether it was the war, the audience or Thurley’s frock.
“I was going to call on you,” Thurley said gravely.
“Come along—I drive the car now. Yes, indeed, I’m qualifying for an ambulance corps. Come on, girls—this is Thurley Precore who’ll boost the subscriptions a lot—you know these girls—Josie, Cora, Hazel—and,Owen, you stay behind and take in the platform and the barrel.”
They piled into the muddied car while Lorraine whizzed them up the hill. Sentimental thoughts about entering Dan’s house, which was to have once been hers, took flight. This new and a trifle mad Lorraine commanded all of Thurley’s attention—and sense of humor.
It was amusing to see the desperate way in which she strove to appear mannish, capable, immune to fears as to bumblebees or punctured tires, shouting out commands to her “crew,” the way the crew shouted back opinions and watched Thurley and her frock in semi-envy, semi-disapproval! They left the car before the door and went inside in breathless fashion. Lorraine walked up the pathway with Thurley.
“How can you bury yourself here,” she asked, “when you could be speaking to crowds in New York? I’m going to get there—I can’t go overseas because of Dan.” She almost resented the interference!
“I was tired—my head was in a whirl, the season seems a nightmare—”
“Oh, not personal work—the cause we women have championed,” she opened the door as she spoke.
“Where is your boy?” Thurley interrupted.
“Oh, the love—I’ve a girl to take care of him, I couldn’t do both my war work and the boy.” Lorraine went upstairs, her absurd little boots tapping importantly.
The young Coldstream Guardesses waited below, playing the Victrola and rummaging for a dish of fudge.
A frowsly headed, sullen girl met them at the head of the stairs. “He’s bumped hisself again,” she said by way of greeting.
“Then watch him more, Herta,” Lorraine was petulant. “Dear me, such a great lad ought to be more steady on his feet, I should think!”
The disordered nursery exhibited traces of a large lunch which Herta had consumed, a novel spread face downward, also for Herta, and the outlines of Herta’s recumbent form on the divan. Thurley’s face was disapproving as she said swiftly:
“If I were a detective, I could explain why the Boy bumped himself!”
“Oh, Herta’s mad about him,—dear me, some days I never see him at all. He’s terribly self-willed. I spoiled him those first months because we—we were all so happy,” she flushed as she went ahead. “Then Dan went away and I saw my duty as a war worker. I really have lived in the fullest sense since I went in for public work. Thurley, let’s be friends—I used to think I envied you because Dan had once loved you so,” there was a trace of the old Lorraine as she spoke, but with a surety of opinion which told Thurley that Lorraine’s husband now loved only his wife! “Boy made it all so different. Now I envy you because you are free, unhampered, able to do things—I’d be in France if I could.”
Herta appeared with Boy in her arms, a splendid little chap if he had had a little more grooming. There were telltale hollows under his pinkish rimmed eyes indicative of nervous spasms, of unattended or unchecked sobs, his hands were soiled and scratched and a blue-black bump stood out over one temple; he tried his best both to abuse and welcome his mother in his incoherent greeting.
“Oh, see his poor head.” Thurley took him from thegirl’s unwilling arms. “Didn’t you put anything on it?” she asked her sharply.
“He’s got an awful temper,” the girl retorted. “He fights me off for fair. I would have, but he didn’t want it—so I let him cry it out.”
Lorraine interposed, “It is my own fault—I never left him alone at first and it makes it hard for any one else who looks after him.”
Thurley sat down to rock Boy. “I should think you wouldn’t let a baby’s nerves be an excuse for neglecting him,” she said to her own surprise. “He must have sobbed and sobbed—and see,” pointing to traces of dried and goo-ey egg around his mouth.
“Oh, we scrub him up at night—it really doesn’t pay to keep him like a doll.... I want to show you my letters of recommendation.” Lorraine vanished with Thurley following reluctantly, Boy in her arms playing with her sash fringe.
The entire house had the neglected look which the town had prophesied Thurley’s house would have should she marry Dan—dust over everything, unpolished floors, a careless air of hurried living, merely existing within the four walls in order to escape without. Herta poked herself after them, with a look of disapproval as she watched Thurley.
When Thurley refused to surrender Boy, but sat down to listen to this new and surprising Lorraine tell of her work and aims, mentioning Dan casually, of how surprised he would be at her development, the young guardesses below set up a chorus of protests and came bounding into the room with a quick hullo to Boy and a “Mercy, what a bruise,” settling themselves on the divan to explain their life-work to Thurley.
Of course they were all going overseas—heavens, yes, why Josie and Hazel had their passports and were waiting further orders—didn’t Thurley pine to go and sing? Fancy any one’s not going if they could ... they were all going to keep a diary and take a camera, lots of people had smuggled pictures through, they just knew they had. Owen Pringle was going too—he was so jolly and his mother was related to a senator and it had all been arranged for him—these old fogies who said people had better stay home and ’tend to their knitting, who listened to them?—at least, not until it was over ... just think of the adventures, the sea trip and the chance of being submarined, every one said there were lots of life boats—and the chance to learn French and the friends they would make, particularly moving picture men. Every one said Cora Spooner was as good as Nazimova, only she needed an introduction among the professional set, while the ideas for Josie’s war stories—well, all the editors would be cabling her! Josie’s mother would have to do the housework because the help had all gone to the munition plants and her aunt’s eyes had failed terribly—but of course their day was over and it was Josie’s turn to find adventures. Besides, she would lose weight. There was an incentive—she did hate being called Fatty at all the parties. As for Hazel Mitchell—any one who knew what a wonderful godmother Hazel had been to several Tommies—and what beautiful little things she could do to make every one happy—well, Hazel would walk in and literally back melancholy against the ropes. Of course Lorraine had to stay at home—but she was certainly going to try to speak in larger cities—she wanted to be as much of the great cause as she could be—
Despite the clatter of tongues, Boy’s dark little head drooped wearily and he slept the exhausted sleep of a neglected hysteric who feels the sympathetic throb of a woman’s breast and can afford to ignore brainless chatter.
Lorraine took Thurley home. The lieutenants were all to stay for tea and start out on an evening campaign.
“We’ll have a canned supper—and candy,” she said. “I do think I’ve been a goose to drudge so in the kitchen—but no more of it.”
“And when Dan comes home?” Thurley asked in spite of herself.
“The old dear will be so used to soldiers’ fare he’ll think mine perfection.... Good-by, Thurley, do change your mind and give us a benefit sing. Don’t worry about Boy, he is all right, I weigh him every week and I am afraid I’ll lose Herta if I find too much fault—”
Ali Baba was working in the backyard and Thurley fled with relief to find him busied with currant bushes.
“Ali Baba,” she said, stamping her foot, “look at me—tell me, do you see war-madness in my eyes?”
He leaned on his hand cultivator reflectively. “War madness? Land sakes and Mrs. Davis, that’s a new one—”
“You have seen fame-madness and vanity-madness and lonesome-madness and even temper-madness in me,” Thurley confessed, “but this war-madness, this way of leaving houses undusted and babies unkissed—like Lorraine—”
Ali Baba left the cultivator to come forward. His blue eyes were keen with indignation. “Thurley,” hesaid, “God bless our women that work and pray for the boys, but I’m gosh-hanged sick of these critters chasing around day and night trying their best to get changed into these here semi-monjays!”
When it was time for Thurley to go to New York, Miss Clergy intimated that she would spend the winter at the Fincherie, while the Corners said Thurley had returned “to get cured of something,” because she had stayed so at home and the only person in whom she expressed an interest had been Dan Birge’s son.
“Oh, no, you must see me in my new opera. I’d be lonesome for you—”
“Lonesome for the baby,” Miss Clergy corrected, smiling. “There are dozens of people you can have with you, Thurley—and I’m tired.”
So Thurley packed her trunks and told Ali Baba to call her back if Miss Clergy seemed even inclined to want her. The day before she was to leave, she wandered along the shore of the lake, looking at the deserted mansions with a perplexed and disapproving air. She had found much of which to disapprove in the Corners.
It was the queer war-madness in such as Lorraine and her following, destroying common sense and blinding their eyes.
When this restless army returned, whether from overseas or from home service, for return they must, what then of the readjustment? The quiet tragedies that would be lived down slowly, so unsuspectedly—so bravely, really. After every one in the home town had heard their stories and their pictures had been locally printed—what then? They would assume the old jobs, the maddening procedure of “Good morning, help,” and “Good morning, boss”—the white shirtwaist on Mondayand the pink one on Thursday and the dark silk for best because it is serviceable; the hall bedroom with the respectable family who are always asleep by ten o’clock, the ending of dreams, the failure of the quest, the defeating admission that the circle and not the cross is life’s truest symbol.
Surely these people would turn in protest to art as their solace. What a task America had set for her, what herculean effort Bliss must make ... for these people would appeal to the accepted standards of art as their defense. The plays, poems, stories, songs, pictures, useless bohemian lives that would follow if permitted, the refusal to become one of many—to take an interest in the neighbors and not the enemies!
Thurley rose with sudden determination. Right always ends by acquiring might, she told herself, and if Bliss Hobart possessed a vision he, himself, was powerless to execute it. Player and worker were like the wings of a bird, he had said, equal and necessary ... then so were dreamer and doer. Thurley coulddo—her ancestors probably toddled about in sabots a few generations ago but she thanked heaven for the sturdy, unknown peasant strain in her which gave her the virility to act. Hobart was the patrician dreamer—yet even gold cannot be used in its purest state, it requires a sterner, coarser alloy before it becomes either practical or fully beautiful.
“After the boys fall out of step,” Thurley informed the little lake, “we must fall in step—teach them to go forth once more on a time clock.”
“Gray angels”—that was what the people in the vanguard, not only the art vanguard but in all avenues of progress, should be called,—people with enough of the divine in them to have no fear and to believe in theultimate success of their ideals, and enough of the human sinner to understand the best earthly way to go about it. Gray angels! The people who can do the needed drudgery which permits others to accomplish the toil-free feats; stay-at-homes were gray angels; the women who did not lift up their voices in egotistical speechmaking or in whines but who gave their sons and kept the home in which to welcome them back; those quiet, undersized little chaps with poor eyes or hollow chests who had quietly applied at recruiting stations only to be turned off with a laugh—they were gray angels, staying at the helm to do uninteresting routine which is always needed to keep things afloat, yet applauding those who have achieved the apparently bigger things; and it would be gray angels who should steady the army of men and women who should demand: “What next? We want another great task to do,” looking with scorn at a clerk’s white apron, an adding machine, a modest millinery store!
The gray angels dyke a nation’s forceful common sense from becoming a flood of useless sentiment, expending itself no one knows where, lost to practical purposes. It would be the gray angels who would help win the violet crown because they gauge nothing in misleading blacks or whites, since life on this planet is not expressed in harsh, sweeping tones, but in neutral grays, partaking of both white and black, now foggy and bewildering, now serene and sweetly sad with lavender veiling, or rosy flecked and hopeful.
Bliss was a gray angel—Ernestine, Polly, Collin and Caleb had the possibilities of becoming them.
... “I believe I’m a gray angel, too,” Thurley thought with sudden delight.
Thurley had lingered at the Fincherie until the time grew so short she knew she must rush into her concert work without her customary rehearsals. She had word from Bliss Hobart that he was on his way West to speak for patriotic matters and arrange some musical things and he had left some music for her and advice as to a difficult new rôle.
His letter did not create in Thurley the usual rebellion against Bliss’s reserved self or her own foolish pledge. She was too busy casting ahead for coming events, wondering how her opportunity would arrive in which to prove her gray angel self and best to help Bliss’s vision to become practically demonstrated.
She said good-by with reluctance to Dan’s son and his foolish, ineffectual little mother whose head was temporarily in a whirl of excitement. Lorraine was to face readjustment as much as the man who would return to civilian life minus an arm. It seemed to Thurley that perhaps here was where gray angel demonstration must begin—to stop Lorraine’s neglect of her home and child, and convince her that when Dan came back expecting to find the same gentle wife whose house was her kingdom and whose outlook on life would be his tempering element—she must not fail him.
Yet Lorraine seemed beyond reason. Josie, Hazel, Cora and Owen, with another handful of equally featherweight mental calibre, had gone on their way rejoicing, they had had a farewell banquet with speeches madeabout their being “patriotic pilgrims” and had fitted bags presented as tokens of esteem....
Thurley found intriguers and hysterical hikers in full swing in the city, but it was good to have a hum of life and progress once again. Caleb dropped in to tell of the success of “The Patriotic Burglar” which had gone into six editions.
“Have you read it?” he asked, snuggling in an easy chair.
She shook her head. “What do you hear from Ernestine? Collin wrote a postal which I found when I came in from the Corners.”
Caleb laughed. “I don’t think Beethoven and Bach will make a hit; Ernestine will pack up her music in her kit bag and blow back ... but you ought to read my book—it was like rolling off a log to write it—”
Thurley frowned.
“Any other time it would have been too thin to have got by, but every subway advertises it and there is a stampede outside the bookstores. I have raked in a harvest.”
The gray angel of Thurley prompted a reproof.
“What’s wrong?” he demanded gaily. “You’re too pretty to scold.”
“It is cheating to write drivel—when Bliss’s and Ernestine’s ideals for you—”
Caleb rose. “I’m off,” he had a petulant air like Mark’s flippant unrest. “If people want what I write, they shall have it! We may as well have as good a time as we can; it seems to be the main thing these days.”
After he left Thurley sat oblivious to telephones or unanswered mail, forgetting the Corners and Miss Clergy and Ali Baba’s pride as he had driven her to the station.She was considering as a judicial gray angel this question of eternally having a good time which was a cancer spot in national common sense.
Now that the tide was turning rapidly towards peace and victory, a call was being made so stupendous and half mystical that perhaps women could best hear and understand since their ears are attuned to children’s unworded, sobbed wants. It was the call to declare themselves as gray angels and to work together for the banishment of the good time menace, to show the world, non-fighting and veterans, that it is good to be ordinary, to return to “life as usual” instead of staying breathless with excitement, unjustly halo-clad, scornful of humdrum duties and rebelling at the inevitable readjustment. By this women should come to see things as they are, not as they would wish them to be.
Dusk crept on Thurley unawares. She started up as the maid came in to hand her a telegram. She knew before she opened it. Miss Clergy was dead.
“She went to sleep-like,” Ali Baba told her, after the simple funeral. “She wasn’t what you would call in pain—just sighing and calling for people dead these forty years. She says to Hopeful, ‘The Watcher of the Dead has seen me’—and we knew then it was the end.”
“What about the watcher of the dead?” Thurley said softly.
“The watcher must have some one to keep him company and when the last one that has died has stayed with him long enough and goes away, they do say the watcher goes about the village looking into faces to see in which lies the shadow of death—and he loses no time in taking him so that he will have company. Miss Clergy remembered the story. She went to sleep sayin’, ‘Tell Thurley—to—use—her—own—judgment.’”
“Ali Baba—did she—” Thurley grasped his arm.
He nodded. “Just like I said—‘Tell—Thurley—to—use—her—own judgment,’—and then she looks up at me and she says, ‘An hour’s drive, Ali Baba—not too fast.’” His rough hand was across his eyes.
“Are you quitesure, Ali Baba, that she knew what she was saying?”
“As sure as I am what you are askin’,” the old man answered.
Miss Clergy’s will was dated the year that Thurley went with her to New York. It left, requiring neither bond nor security, everything to Thurley Precore.
But the excitement over the death and the disposal of the fortune was increased by Thurley’s prompt use of it. Even the war lost its prominence when Thurley in remarkably short time gave out a statement declaring her intentions.
Her contracts would be kept but after the present season Thurley Precore was to retire for a year at least, in which she would devote herself—secretly, she whispered, “to being a gray angel and helping Bliss,” but to the public she named it “to the philanthropic enterprise which, with Miss Clergy’s money, was to be started.”
She wrote Bliss Hobart as school-girlish and impulsive a note as one could imagine, setting forth her gray angel theories in superlative fashion, even underlining and putting exclamation points in pairs and punctuating sentences by a wriggling up and down mark which she said he was to consider as “a grin.”