'New England'

I

IT was not for the village to know everything that went on in Miriam Draper’s solitary little old white house behind the lilac trees. It did not know the nights when she knelt for hours with her elbows on the window-sill, hearing the meadow-frogs’ eternal crescendos and monotones, watching the stars shift, and the crazy moon, like a half-burned galleon, reel past the maple boughs.

What she was thinking, she hardly knew herself; only, when she caught herself singing softly, —

she would reproach herself for unwarranted romantic melancholy, and would go quickly back to bed and sleep. The silent village had no knowledge of those times, for she was quite alone; not mournfully, but soberly, alone.

Neither did the village guess her secret mirth. She loved to masquerade. Often in her room, by candle-light, she would dance, soft-footed and wildhaired, swathed in all the red and orange scarves and shawls that she could find, clinking silver bangles and barbarous glass beads, playing at a harmless dagger-dance before the long mirror. Or she would be a queen in improvised ermine and velvet, walking with high proud steps among the stiff-backed Windsor chairs and blue rag-rugs of her everyday self. She was Joan of Arc, in a straight old faded brown smock, girt on over her nightgown; or a dryad in floating green; or a wicked French woman with evilly looped hair and bespotted veil; or a copy of her own mother’s curls and hoops; or a serious angel in voluminous white cheese-cloth.

It made her laugh aloud when she realized what she was doing — she, the quiet, solitary Miriam Draper, no longer so very young, and never acknowledged as so very beautiful. Then she would look at the stiff, well-cut coats and skirts and seemly silks and ginghams hanging in her closet, and would wonder if they really belonged to her, and she to them. They were so respectable, so worthily, unobtrusively modern and mild, so fit for a New England Old Maid. They were the trappings of her body, and of one half of her soul. But she knew that the mad gay scarves and jewels became her soul and her body very well. She had a queer, dark-haired, pale-faced beauty of her own; the beauty that lies like a smothered flame under the gray ashes of day-to-day and convention, but leaps up wild and joyfully bright when a free wind fans it.

She knew that; but in the village a free wind seldom blew. She did not want her neighbors to think her altogether lunatic; and, moreover, she too was New England born and bred. She dreamed, she masqueraded, all to herself; and only once in a long time did she permit herself to ask of Life, ‘Have I no right to freedom, to beauty and wildness, still? Will no one ever understand?’ Then she would smile, perceiving that her æsthetic and social code was exactly like the moral code of children and childish peoples. It was all right to lie, and to dream, so long as you did n’t get found out. And the village was not likely to find out. It was too busy with its own lies and dreams. But they were not as hers.

She had met, at a summer camp, a man who saw the flame of her soul dancing through its gray disguise. He was an artist, and quick of eye for the more subtle beauties of the body and spirit. They had followed a few mountaintrails and watched a few sunsets together: she was too shy for more, but she had remembered him, for she had not many such free joys to remember.

One day, a year after, a letter came from him. He was going abroad; would be passing through New England; might he find out her village and stop and call? She answered yes, and was angrily amused at herself for the extra heart-beats and girlish flutterings that disturbed her. She called herself a silly old maid, and scolded herself roundly; but somehow she could not help it. After all, even if she was not so very young, neither was she so very old; and, Life having denied her its greater encounters, she could not deny herself the full delight, even the silly delight, of its lesser ones.

She found herself buying new and softer curtains for the old parlor, rearranging the books, planning fondly just where the big copper bowl with the yellow roses should stand, where the blue one with the little white roses and maiden-hair fern. She knew it was all ‘just for fun,’ but she loved an excuse for the game, and almost forgot (she was glad to find that she forgot) for whom she was playing it so eagerly. And when on the afternoon of his coming, she looked in her glass, she clapped her hand over her mouth to keep down an unreasonable bubbling laugh of joy. She looked so young, so happy, so free! Not the whimsical, sad, odd face that she and the village knew, but the face of the girl she had hardly ever had the chance to be, only keener and more wisely merry with years.

She ran to the cedar-chest, and pulled out one of her make-believe dresses. It was a long thin delicate garment of palest green; it looked like moonlight on a pool, or a clear brook, or sea-water over white sand. She had made it one day when her soul felt hot and stifled. It signified to her coolness, remoteness, mystery — everything that the village never dreamed; and she knew that it made her more beautiful. Why should she not wear it to-day — for someone with eyes to see?

She let her hair lie soft and dusky, and pulled the white lace a little away from her throat. There was a string of beads to wear: strange dull jade, on a twisted silver cord. They lay among the folds of her gown like sea-stones in the ebb tide. She stood regarding herself, masquerading, as she had done so many times, but now with a prospective audience. It felt wonderfully gay and adventurous!

Downstairs, all was right and ready: the cool afternoon light through the lilac leaves, the big shabby chairs where the breeze crossed them, the books and pictures and tea-tray and roses. She had not really changed anything, for she knew secretly that the room was right — the essence of New England, with all its subtle old savor of intelligence, comfort, reserve, and hidden passion. And it was the essence of her own life, too, but without her wild pagan twist for windy freedom.

The copper bowl needed more yellow roses. There was a half an hour yet to her guest’s appointed train-time. She stepped through the long French window into the garden, holding her pale draperies close from the currant and raspberry bushes, and glancing consciously past the shrubbery to the street. She did not care much if the village did find her out to-day. But no one was stirring. It was warm midafternoon, the air heavy with syringascent and buzz of bees. Everything seemed asleep except the great warm earth and herself. She wandered in happy indolence down the paths, well enough aware that, for once in her life, she was as lovely and as free from stiffnecked reserve as the flowers themselves.

The garden ran far back, and ended in a tangle of old fruit trees choked with woodbine: a perfect screen, for the most part, from the little unfrequented lane beyond. There in a green plot grew one of the tallest and most glorious of the syringa bushes. Sweet air blew and vibrated about it, like sweet sound about a tower of chimes. Against the blue its great wax-white blossoms and thick green leaves gleamed like rich enamel-work. With a sudden gesture of wonder and love, Miriam stretched up her arms and gathered into them all they could hold of the sweet flowery foam. She buried her face in it passionately, half drunk with pure fragrance; she would have clasped the whole tree to her heart. Then the branches leaped back; a shower of white petals covered her hair and shoulders; and she emerged laughing, with an upturned face like a child from a sea-wave, and once more held high her arms, in their pale green draperies, to the sky and the sun.

It was a moment’s revel and ecstasy. A cloud blew over the sun. There was a wind in the woodbine, a brush as of feet, and a rattle of wheels in the lane. She turned quickly back to the house.

And as she stepped once more into the shadowy room, something tightened inside her heart and head. The familiar, sober house seemed to be laughing at her — at her, reveling like a Bacchant in scent and color, dreaming vague romance into her sedate gray life, decked in green sea-water silk and strange jade beads! Thinking herself beautiful; thinking herself, almost, fit for Love; or, if not Love, the dear departing phantom of it. The house said,

' You! ’ and pointed mocking fingers at her folly.

Meekly, in dumb haste, she ran to her room. She tore off the green garb, though it seemed to cling to her like delicate leaves and ferns and seaweeds. She brushed her hair back from her temples, and was hurrying into her neatest white linen frock when the doorbell jangled loud. She had only time to pin a black velvet bow at her throat: no beads, no mysteries now, hardly a glance in the glass; hardly time to laugh at herself as she ran down to the door.

II

They had sat talking until sunset threw its last thick gold past the lilac leaves, and the robins called down the dark. At first their talk had been a little stiff and strange. She could feel the artist’s keen eyes traveling up and down: searching the room, valuing the lights and colors, and returning always to herself. His eyes, for all the quiet friendliness and good confidence they gave her, seemed like hands touching her gently yet eagerly. They seemed to feel her hair, her shoulders, her hands; almost to recoil from the stiff texture of her gown, and to turn back to rest upon her face like a cool caress. There was something quizzical about them now, that she had never known before. She thought, ‘The New England in me is hateful to his free spirit '; and the more she thought it, the more reserved and contrary-minded she grew. She was determined to be loyal to her house, her village, her traditions, rather than to that wild strain that cried aloud in her.

She saw him smile, sometimes, when there was nothing to smile about; and once, when she looked up out of a silence that hold many thoughts, he was leaning forward, staring at her so obviously that he blushed like a boy, and laughed, saying, —

‘I beg your pardon! There seems a great deal to think about, in New England!’

She took it for a jibe, and retorted gayly enough; but she was glad her face was in the shadow. She felt as if he were staring at New England through her, and as if he did not understand it at all.

But when the robins were calling and the late sun came in, their talk grew less constrained. He told her of his work, his ambitions, his visions; she told him a little, a very little, of her dreams, her tragedy and comedy. She did not think he listened much. He seemed only to look at her and to respond with one of his own half-fantastic notions. Yet she was content. She did not want him to understand too well. She was afraid that, if he had seemed to understand, she would have suddenly broken through the wall of reserve that she had built about herself, and have told him things to be sorry for. She knew only that it was good to sit there, close to someone who could talk her own language; and that, if the house had not compelled her to put off her dream-dress, he would have seen it and her spirit exulting in it, with those keen sensitive eyes.

At last he must go. He wandered absently about the room, touching the yellow roses, glancing at the books, laying a light hand on the piano keys. The chord vibrated softly. He looked over at Miriam.

‘It gives off little urgent circles of sound,’ he said, dreamily, ‘just as each rose gives off circles of scent; just as each life gives off circles of force and mystery. And sometimes it seems as if one simple chord like that, all by itself, in an empty room, had more magic than a whole symphony. I wonder if lives are like that, too: solitary lives; or if they need the other chords, need them as much as people usually assume.’

He came and held out his hand. ‘Good-bye,’ he said, pressing her fingers and smiling down at her. ‘When I come back from Old England, I should like to stop in New England again, if I may?’

She nodded and laughed.

‘Yes. Maybe then you would understand it better; poor old stiff-necked New England! ’

‘Maybe I’m not so far from understanding it now,’ he rallied. ‘But I think I shall have something to send you before that; something that will amuse you. Good-bye!’ he repeated. ‘When I come again, it would please my eyes very much — you know my eyes ask for what they want, quite boldly — if you would have a green gown — pale green — the color of sea-water over white sand. I ’ll tell you why, some time. Thank you for this afternoon, all of it. I must run for my train. Goodbye, to you, and to New England!

A few weeks later she had a note from him. All it said was, —

‘I am making the thing I think will amuse you. You thought I did n’t like or understand your New England, your village, maybe yourself. Please be patient with me. And please give my respects to your syringa bushes. I shall be back in September.’

While she waited, not knowing what to answer, and preferring to dream lightly of the thing he might be making for her, and of his mysterious allusions to green gowns and syringa bushes, she chanced upon a brief cruel item in the newspaper. He had been killed instantaneously in a motor-bus accident in Piccadilly.

There was nothing to do or to say about it. She went on her quiet village way as ever; but she did not masquerade any more by candle-light; and she felt curiously old. She did not pretend to herself that she had loved him, or he her; but she found that she longed intensely to know what the thing he was making to amuse her had been, and what it was in New England that he seemed so sure he understood. She attached an almost unreasonable importance to it, but had no expectation at all of ever uncovering the secret.

III

The next autumn, being in the city for a few days, she walked down the sunny, bustling street. She was a little weary. The village had seemed to her more cramped and dull than usual. Even the flaming autumn hills had not called their trumpet-cry loud enough to waken her. A sort of quiet apathy was drifting over her, as sands drift up across an unsheltered, lonely rock. The city did not help her. She wandered idly, until the sign, ‘Exhibition of Modern American Painters,’ attracted her dickering attention, and, without much thought, she went up to the little softly lighted gallery.

It was quiet there. The city noise was muffled and far away. The walls, with their flaming spaces and jewel-like dots of color, meant little to her tired eyes. She sank into a cushioned seat in a dim corner, and felt herself slipping, as she so often did at home, out of Time into Eternity. Nothing mattered: neither her own life and death, nor that of all the world. Everything was in Eternity.

She sat there a long time. It was forenoon, and only a few casual comers

crossed the heavy carpets, and whispered their comments in half-bored, courteous voices. They were as insignificant to her as so many paper-dolls. Her reverie was deeper than daydreams— deeper, almost, than sleep itself. Her ears hummed with silence, her limbs with a sort of dreamlike weariness. She never moved.

But at last she was aware of two people who passed and repassed her time and again. They were looking at her fixedly. She awoke, as it were, and perceived that they were a young man and girl, —art students, probably,— a frank, eager, thin-faced pair of comrades. They passed her again, stared at her without reserve, passed on, whispering, nodding their heads; and stood before the pictures at the far end of the room. The girl glanced back at Miriam. They pored together over a catalogueslip, whispering.

Annoyance and amusement broke Miriam’s trance. Why in the world were they so curious about her? She was afraid that she had seemed to nod off to sleep, or had spoken some vagrant thought aloud, as she sometimes did at home. She stood up, half-staggering at first like a man too quickly roused from sleep, and began an unseeing round of the gallery. She had no catalogue, and wished for none. The pictures, beautiful and mediocre alike, were to her mood only so much brilliant or blurred color. A windy upland pasture, with silver-white clouds chasing over a blue sky, caught her fancy for a moment. She was touched by a child’s wistful big-eyed simplicity, and repelled by a dancer’s sensual face and limbs. But they had no meaning for her. She was still in Eternity.

Her round brought her slowly toward the young art students, who stood still, glancing now covertly from her to their catalogue and the walls. She refused to notice them, although in reality her heart cried out to ask them plainly, ‘What is there so queer about me? Do you like me or hate me? Why do you look at me as if I had no eyes to see you too? Do you think me simple, or blind, or asleep, or one of the paperdoll people?’

As she stood beside them, their whispers hushed. Her languid glance swept the walls. Many little pictures were hung there: delicate intense studies of faces, figures, phantoms. A foot-square canvas seemed enough for this artist to open a window on romance or reality. For the first time Miriam leaned forward in vivid wonder and delight, forgetful of herself and of Eternity.

Then, suddenly, she gasped. Her heart missed a stroke. She knew she flushed and went pale. With involuntary directness she turned on the young people beside her.

‘Tell me,’ she breathed fast; ‘I have n’t any catalogue. Who painted these pictures?’

The two seemed to exchange a glance. There was an instant’s awkward silence. Then the young man spoke, courteously, but with a note of interrogating curiosity in his voice and words.

‘Surely,’ he said, ‘you must know that better than we.’

They both looked at her, with parted lips and shining, searching eyes. But Miriam was gazing at a little picture that hung just on a level with her face.

‘Do you mean to say,’ she half whispered, ‘that John Carlisle painted these?’

‘Why, of course,’ the girl answered with amazement, as if she were explaining something too obvious for words. ‘Some of these were just sent over from England after his death. They’re wonderful, are n’t they? But surely you — you know all about them, or some of them! ’

‘I don’t know as much as you do,’ Miriam said brusquely. ‘ How should I ? What makes you think — ’

She realized the foolishness of her speech, and was silent ; for there before them, from a square of exquisite glowing color, looked her own face.

There was her own garden, the white gable and chimney of her house, the church spire beyond the tree-tops, the blue, blue sky, the great white syringa bush, and her own shape, slim and cool as a dryad, glad-armed and glorying, with hands reached to the sun and delicate wild face flung back under a shower of petals. But the house-gable, the church spire, cast along dark shadow over the greensward. The shadow almost touched her feet — not quite. Tt was a creeping, grasping, greedy shadow; but she, how glad and gay in the sun!

Next it hung another picture. It had a rough, unfinished look, but the face stood out clear. Her face again: a white face in a shadowy room, with thick gold sunshine blotting t he walls; her face, sad and whimsical, a little remote and old, above her stiff white gown.

In a corner of each picture, like a trade-mark, was painted a great Luna moth, pale green, with silvery moons and eyes and veins. But in the first picture, his wings were spread and shining; in the second, they seemed shriveled and cold.

Miriam stood with her hand to her lips, pressing back the wonder and the trouble that twisted them. She could have laughed or cried aloud. It would not have mattered which. A mad impulse to snatch the pictures from the wall and run with them straight home to her village, to the secret corners of her house and her heart, swept over her. She could have cried, ‘These are mine! mine! Nobody else has a right to them.’

But that was impossible. She controlled herself, and spoke, trying to be as cool and careless as might be.

‘I was surprised. I did n’t know — these were to be hung, now. Would you be good enough to let me see the catalogue?’

Her hand trembled as she took it; the little figures blurred before her eyes. At last she found them: 46 — it had no name; a note informed the reader, ‘Found unfinished after the artist’s death.’ ‘47: “New England.” ’ She gave back the paper with a crooked smile.

‘Thank you. You see — I did n’t know what they would call them, here.’

She wished the two young people would leave her alone. They vibrated with too much curious sympathy. The girl turned to her impulsively.

‘It must have been wonderful, to know him! ’ she said; and then, with the audacity of shyness, she touched Miriam’s hand, whispering, ‘It would n’t matter to me what happened, if someone had once seen me, and understood, like that!’

Before Miriam could speak, they were gone. She had a vision of bright tears in the girl’s eyes; the young man followed her with a sudden little gesture of sympathy and protection. Then they almost ran from the room, and she was alone.

She went only twice more to the gallery. Each time someone seemed to recognize her and to stare at her, though perhaps it was only her self-consciousness that made her think so. But she did not need to look at the pictures much. She made no effort to get them for herself. They were already sold, the catalogue said; everything that John Carlisle had painted was sold. She had hardly known how eminent he was.

Once the two young art students passed her in the Gardens. They bowed gravely, wistfully; a shadow seemed to cross their gay, self-absorbed faces. She thought in a flash, —

‘And do I cast shadows, so? Or is it — New England ? I will not have them sorry for me!’

She felt them turning to look back at her, and she turned, too, with a smile and a little wave of the hand. It was the look of the garden-dryad, loving and wild and free; it challenged them. They laughed out in sympathy; the glad youth surged back to their eyes and lips; and she went on her way comforted. ‘They will remember the sun, and not the shadow,’ she thought.

IV

At home, she sat one evening in her warm firelit house. Bare lilac boughs tapped the panes; sharp autumn stars pricked through. Great gray Diogenes purred and licked his sleek side. The fire crackled.

Miriam, under the lamp, wrote in the brown journal that held her most secret thoughts. She had taken it from its drawer, and smiled, as ever, at the warning written in her lost girlish hand across the cover-label.

’This Book is Mine. Let nobody else dare look into it. If any bad thing happens to me, let this Book be burned.

M. L. D.’

The date was old enough now. The book was more than half full. Miriam wrote, —

‘I cannot help it if the mystery of Life grows thicker around me. I cannot help it if my thoughts are strange sometimes. I have been wondering to-night whether what John Carlisle said was true: whether one solitary life, vibrating to itself in an empty room, is in the least degree as worthy and true to the completeness of Life, as the chord lost in a song or a symphony.

‘I wonder what he meant by that. He was talking about me. Did he think that my life counted much or little? But he knew nothing, really, about it. I shall never know how much he knew.

‘And what did he mean by the pictures? Which was the way he saw me finally — in the sun or the shadow? With wide bright wings, or crumpled? Did he really see the loneliness and reserve and pain, and the great, unexpected, queer joys that women like me find in life?

‘I do not want to masquerade any more; and yet I want so very much to be free — free in my spirit. The village would never understand. It is n’t necessary that it should. The village would think that I must have loved John Carlisle, or thought that I did, to care so much. It would become obviously a romance.

‘Well, there was n’t any romance. There never would have been if he had come ever so many times. Romance walks by the doors of such as me and only thrusts in his head to say “Goodday!” and “Good-morrow!” and perhaps that is as much of romance as we are capable of managing.

‘And there are a thousand other things than romance. I know that. Only, to be free and to be complete, if only for a little while — everybody wants those two things, in their own fashion.

‘So I think of what the little art-student girl said. I suppose she thought, too, that I had known him very well, and maybe cared a great deal. I know I was a strange person that day.

‘But what she said I like to remember. “It would n’t matter what happened, if someone had once understood, like that.”

‘Of course, that is not exactly true. But nothing is exactly and absolutely true; and half-truths have their consolations.

‘And that gives me a certain assurance that somehow, ultimately, my life and all the others like it shall have comprehension and fulfilment — a different comprehension and fulfilment from that which we force from Life by our own attacks upon it. Even if I were braver in attack, I should want something more swift, more instinctive, than what I had made myself.

‘But it is greedy to demand everything — everything — from these few mortal years.

‘Truly, I do not mean to think things like this very often. There is enough work; there are more than enough people. I shall be free and glad, too. But inside, something never changes.

‘And we have so few years. And then — Eternity.

‘I am glad God is looking after it all. I never could!’

She closed the book and went over to the piano. A pure, thin chord trembled under her fingers. She smiled, but one slow, undesired tear dropped on the keys.

‘I wonder,’ she whispered, ‘John Carlisle, — could you, — or anybody, ever understand?’