Ainslee's magazine, Volume 16, No. 3, October, 1905

“You, Madame Egeria, are inclined to philosophize.”

“Sir, do not remind me of it! When we offer sacrifices at the altar of laughter, you may look for gray hairs and crows’ feet. Tears and passion belong to youth: that season of fleeting and exquisite joys, of tragic and fugitive griefs, of tempestuous and restless longings. Youth, with the passionate voice of Maurice de Guerin, cries eternally: ‘The road of the wayfarer is a joyous one. Ah, who shall set me adrift upon the waters of the Nile?’”

“And in maturity we learn to fold our hands and stop our ears and take refuge in the commonplace.” The bishop’s tone was tinged with bitterness.

“Ah, no, no!” Egeria was vehement. “We learn that the Nile, with its dream-haunted shores, flows by our door; that wherever a patch of sunlight falls is beauty, wherever a morning-glory blows is art.”

The bishop fell in with her mood. “That is it. Maturity is nothing if it is not expansion.

“’Tis life of which our nerves are scant.’Tis life, not death, for which we pant,More life and fuller life.”

He loved to quote.

“Yes,” exclaimed Egeria, “‘more life, fuller life, more work, more play, more experience, more of the dreams that scale the stars, more of the splendid, inexorable life of earth. But” – looking at him doubtfully – “we are getting horribly didactic and prosy, and we are a thousand miles away from the feminine temperament.”

“Is there anything left of it?” inquired the bishop, mildly.

Egeria ignored him. “You have only expressed yourself guardedly, while I have talked and talked,” she complained.

“I shall be equally fluent.” The twinkle shone again in his eye. “But my opinion is given in confidence. I throw myself on your discretion.”

“Assuredly,” murmured Egeria.

“Very well, then” – lowering his voice – “I am like the old Englishman who said: ‘I have always found a most horrid, romantic perverseness in your sex. To do and to love what you should not is meat, drink and vesture to you all.’ And I also know that —

“Every day her dainty hands make life’s soiled temple clean,And there’s a wake of glory where her spirit pure hath been.At midnight through the shadow-land her living face doth gleam,The dying kiss her shadow, and the dead smile in their dream.”

IN THE GARDEN

THE lily lifts her bridal whiteness up,And leans a list’ning to th’ impassioned rose,The dewdrop answer trembles in her cup,Shines on her silver lip and overflows.They lean and love for all the world to see,But thou, my love, thou leanest no more to me!Oh, mocking-bird, that bosomed in the heightOf yon magnolia, warblest all aloneThy liquid litany of heart-delight,While the pure moon steps slowly tow’rd her throne.Lo! Thou hast lured all joy to soar with thee,And thou, my love, thou sing’st no more to me.Oh, one white star in all the blue abyss!Oh, trembling star that lookest on my pain!So shook my soul beneath his parting kiss,So waits my heart, alone and all in vain.Oh, Night, sweet Night, I bare my grief to thee —Oh, world, far off, give back my love to me!Margaret Houston.

ELLEN BERWICK

BY ANNE O’HAGAN

BEFORE I went away from Agonquitt I was not, even by the most egotistic stretch of my imagination, a very important or an overwhelmingly popular person in the community. The girls from the village did not swarm out to the farm to see me; they did not hang upon my words with reverent attention. Even during the two years when I was at college, my holidays were not periods of public rejoicing; my clothes were not copied or my style of hairdressing regarded with imitative admiration.

But ever since I went to New York the attitude of my acquaintances has changed. At first I was touched and flattered by the interest which all my old companions took in me when I came home; gradually, however, it glimmered upon my consciousness that it was not myself, but the glamour of the great city, which drew them – as though the atmosphere of New York were a tangible thing, and shreds of it clung to me through the long journey down into this remote country. I think I was a little more touched, though not so flattered, when I learned this; there is something pathetic to the initiated in the eager wonderment and awe of the neophyte.

Sometimes the girls have asked my advice, confiding to me their yearnings to leave home, to make “careers” for themselves in the world. And when I try – as perhaps I too often do – to discourage them, they look at me reproachfully, mutely accusing me of a selfish refusal to share with them pleasures and glories. They talk of the theaters, the opera, books, pictures, the glittering press of life, as though a ticket to New York insured one these things. I talk of loneliness and discomfort, of the pinch of poverty. They speak of enlarged horizons; and I of the hall bedrooms which would bound the outlook of most of them. They glow with the thought of new friendships; and I dash their ardor with tales of isolation, of snubs in the effort to escape isolation, of tawdry relationships begun for the sake of mere companionship. But their eyes are always full of incredulity. And sometimes, remembering the delights which were no less a part of my life in the big city than the depression, remembering the wholesome joy of work, the natural pride of feeling oneself an integral part of the great onward-pressing stream of life; yes, and remembering the sweet and the bitter-sweet that came to me there, I wonder if my prohibitive wisdom is not a little hypocritical. Would I myself forego any of my New York experiences?

Sometimes it has seemed to me that my own adventures – or lack of adventures – set down as plainly and truthfully as I can recall them, might be of more illuminating, perhaps – perhaps – of more deterrent, effect than all my spoken generalizations. For though my existence had its peculiar features, rose to its individual climaxes, yet in the main it was typical – the duplicate in most essentials of that of thousands and thousands of young women, not greatly gifted, who come to New York to seek their fortunes.

I shall never forget how the whole thing came about. I was in the poultry yard, doctoring some of my chickens for the pip, when I heard a great puffing and chugging in the road. It was the Hennens’ automobile, and instead of dashing past the house, scattering terror before it, it snorted itself to a standstill before our old carriage block. I knew that mother’s annual ordeal was before her, and I half laughed as I went on forcing the broilers’ throats open.

Mother hated the yearly visitation of Mrs. Hennen with all the intensity of her very gentle, very proud nature. Thirty-five years before she and Letitia Bland had been the rival belles of the Agonquitt region, and the legend was that Letty Bland had taken to her bed for three days when mother’s engagement to father was made known, and that she went to visit relatives in Eastport at the time of the marriage. After a triumph like that, no wonder mother hated the magnificent summer descent upon her of Mrs. Letitia Hennen, widow of the oil-field king, mother of George Hennen, the banker, broker, yachtsman and what not; of Mrs. Letitia Hennen, owner of the feudal castle on the shore three miles from the village, whose splendors put to utter rout the modest opulence of all the rest of Agonquitt’s summer colony. I was always sorry for mother at the season of her recurrent Nemesis, and yet I was always amused at the thought of time’s revenges.

To-day, when I had finished doctoring the broilers, I strolled into the house and greeted the great lady. She was a kind, stout, motherly soul – very gorgeous in raiment, very imposing in a white pompadour; her good-natured, round face always looked forth half bewilderedly between the effort of her dressmaker and that of her hairdresser. This time her eyes were frankly wet as she took my hand and patted it.

“And so you’ve lost your dear father,” she said. “And you’ve come home from college – what a pity, my dear! And you’ve been down to Bangor and learned stenography – what a brave girl you are, your father’s own daughter – and you’re selling broilers to the hotel; why not to me, my child?”

Mother’s cheeks were pink with badly suppressed mortification, her eyes sparkled, her lips were on the quivering point.

“Thank you ever so much, Mrs. Hennen,” I interposed, hastily, before mother could say anything, “but the Agonquitt House contracted for them all. Next year – ”

“But I must do something for you,” the dear, kind lady blundered on. “It’s all too sad; it’s too like your dear father’s own case. You’ve heard how he had to come back from college to take charge of the farm when his father had the stroke, and he – your father, I mean, dear, not your grandfather – had so wanted to be – ”

“Of course Ellen knows all about that,” interrupted mother, icily. “And I would have done anything to spare her the sacrifice” – her voice grew human again – “but – ”

“I’m sure she knows everything there is to know already” – Mrs. Hennen beamed, benignly. “And stenography! My, my! Doesn’t it make you feel ignorant, Marietta? And so you’re going to get a position in Bangor or Portland, your mother says, in the fall?”

I nodded. Mrs. Hennen looked at me with an air of silly, puzzled admiration. Suddenly she clapped her hands – the fingers were like little bleached sausages in the tight, white gloves.

“The very thing!” she cried. “You shall be George’s private secretary. His Miss O’Dowd is going to be married in October. The very thing! I’ll speak to him to-night.”

She puffed up, the kind lady, and kept saying, “Not a word, not a word; I won’t hear a word against it; not a word, Marietta, not one, Ellen, my dear.” And she panted off, leaving mother on the verge of tears, and me quivering with excitement.

“A favor from Letty Bland I will not endure!” mother proclaimed. “I will not endure her patronage.” Then she broke down entirely and sobbed: “Oh, I can’t stand in your way, my poor little girl, and I can’t bear to let you go so far from me.”

The end of the whole matter was that the close of September found me on the way to New York, warmly clad in the clothes over which mother had reddened her pretty eyes and pricked her pretty fingers, an emergency fund of a hundred and twenty-five dollars – those blessed broilers! – in a chamois bag between my excellent woolens and my stout muslins, a room in the Margaret Louisa Home engaged for me for any period up to a month. Our clergyman’s wife had recommended that refuge, and mother’s premonitions of battle, murder and sudden death for me grew a little less insistent when she had been finally convinced that I could go almost without change of cars from the safety of Agonquitt to that most evangelical of shelters.

Oh, the tremors, the breathlessness, the excitement, of that journey! Oh, the fairly dizzy rapture and pain of it! I had a vision of streets brilliant with lights, of a press of carriages, of shops, flowers, buildings; of unknown faces, each one the possibility of interest, the invitation to adventure, and I exulted. Then I saw the big, square house where I had been born, shabbily in need of paint; the lonely fields sloping away from it, the woods of yellow birch and pine, the lonely blue reaches of our Northern bays, and my mother sitting in her poor black frock alone by the fire in the early evening. Then I strangled sobs behind my clinched teeth.

My journey from Agonquitt had been broken by one night’s stay in Portland with our second cousins. Mother regarded a sleeping car as an unpermissible atrocity – and wider experience compels me to share her views – and I made the trip by daylight stages. No one had paid any particular attention to me; no adventure had paused by my chair in the car. Nothing happened until I emerged from the train into the murky, glittering evening at the Grand Central Station. Then for a few minutes I was really dazed.

I had spurned the assistance of porters, being forewarned of tips, and I carried my bag through the yard toward the street. There I gasped and nearly reeled. Never had I heard such a clamor, or seen such a whirl and tangle of lights, such recklessness of darting figures, such insistent greed of beckoning fingers and whips.

“Keb, keb, keb, keb!” The maddening din rang in my ears. “Keb, keb, keb, keb!” The arms, the eyes, all echoed the cry. “Keb, keb, keb, keb – ” Beyond the barricade of that shout there was tempest, turmoil, clatter; I turned and fled backward toward the train yard, which seemed to me calm and sane now, though a few minutes before it had been a smoking, roaring understudy for Purgatory. Never could I breast that tumultuous tide of madness without.

Another train was unloading. I was jostled by a great many persons who had evidently determined to reach the bedlam on the sidewalk in less than half a second. I dodged. I looked for a uniform which might remain stationary long enough for me to reach it. I saw one – baggage man, carriage starter, train announcer, I didn’t know or care what – I made a sidewise dash for him and collided violently with a dress-suit case, whose owner towered several feet above. He muttered an apology, I muttered an excuse, and then we both stopped, to the damming of the torrential haste behind us.

“Ellen Berwick!”

“Bob Mathews!”

Never had human face seemed to me so friendly as this one. Never had words sounded so honey-sweet as my name ejaculated by a voice which, if not lately familiar, was at least friendly and recognizable. The Agonquitt stamp was already the hall mark of worth, of excellence, in my mind. And Robert Mathews was Dr. Mathews’ son; no amount of Beaux-Arts-ing it, no amount of rising-young-architect-ing it, could alter that blessed fact.

“Where are you going? Why are you here? Where is your mother? Oh, you are, are you? To the Maggie Lou! Why do I call it that? It’s a pet name for an excellent institution given by its intimate admirers. The George Hennens – you – ”

Questioning, answering, tossing information back and forth as a Japanese juggler might balls, he somehow managed at the same time to deposit me and my bag in a cab. I breathed a sigh of relief to think that it was the driver’s problem and not mine safely to cross the noisy flood in front of the station.

Sometimes since then I have marveled at the chance which caused me, just down from Maine, to collide with Bob Mathews, just in from New Rochelle. But I have learned that it is a miracle of frequent occurrence that newcomers to Babylon should run upon acquaintances. It is only the old residents who go abroad day after day and see no familiar face.

Should I have gone back to Agonquitt in despair of Forty-second Street if I had not met Bob? I suppose not. But how meeting him simplified the problem of reaching the Margaret Louisa!

“I’ve a dinner engagement with a fellow at the club to-night, or I should carry you off to dine with me,” said Bob, as the cab drew up in front of the brownstone building between the home-rushing roar of Broadway and the early evening glitter of Fifth Avenue. “But I’ll tell you what I’m going to do: I’ll cut away early and see you before bedtime. I know some girls who keep bachelor’s hall in a Harlem flat, but they used to live in boarding houses, and I’ll telephone them for a list of addresses and bring it around to you.”

The door of the evangelical shelter swung open before me. I am not a timid person, but a chill crept up my backbone. There was something depressing in the air of prim rectitude that pervaded the hall. But Bob was gone, and my bag – by the way, it had looked old-fashioned and shabby beside his in the cab – stood within the portals.

I don’t know why I should have expected the woman at the desk to beam upon me, or to have a brass band ready with a pæan announcing that Ellen Berwick had come to town to conquer fortune. But her politeness was so impersonal, her civility so thinly cloaked her ennui, that I had difficulty in controlling the quiver of my lips. How friendly and dear the Agonquitt station suddenly seemed, with the neighbors clustered on the platform with their little last gifts!

“Oh, yes,” said the lady at the desk – “Berwick. Your pastor and Mrs. Hennen recommended you.” I felt that I was being weighed for a housemaid’s position, and the blood tingled behind my ears, but she went on indifferently: “Your trunk must be sent to the trunk room within twenty-four hours.”

“It – it can’t have reached here yet,” I murmured.

“Within twenty-four hours from the time when it does come.” I felt that I had been guilty of levity.

“I thought,” I faltered, “since this is only a temporary – er – stopping place, that I wouldn’t entirely unpack – ”

“Within twenty-four hours. You need not unpack entirely. If it is ever necessary for you to get anything out of your trunk while you are here, you may be admitted to the trunk room. Jenkins, 44.”

“When is dinner?” My question trailed between the desk and Jenkins, the elevator man, who miraculously preserved an air of jauntiness as he lounged at the door of his wire cage. I made up my mind to ask him how he did it.

“Going on now.” The elevator slammed upon me, and I was borne aloft to a room of exquisite order and freshness. But either I saw double or there were two white beds, two oak bureaus, two oak wardrobes, two —

“This can’t be my room,” I protested.

“Oh, yes, miss,” declared the maid to whom I had now been delivered. “No more single rooms left. A lovely lady has this one with you. You’ll like her.”

“But I don’t want – ”

The chambermaid passed lightly over the question of my desires. The door closed firmly upon my protests, and I proceeded to remove the marks of travel from my clothes and person.

Oh, the Olympian indifference of the lady at the desk to my plea for a room by myself! In two seconds it reduced me from a state of angry protest to one of humble gratitude that I had obtained any shelter at all. Oh, the big dining rooms, with the narrow tables, and women, women, women, packed along them! Oh, the hum of feminine voices, the shrill of feminine laughter, the weariness of feminine faces! Never shall I forget how dreary my own sex seemed to me when I had my first sight of it, massed, unindividualized, hard working, poor, tired. I was suddenly appalled at the number of us in New York – homeless, laboring, impoverished; for to dine at the Maggie Lou was tacit proclamation of all these things.

The food was excellent – plain, homely, plentiful. It was handed dexterously over one’s shoulders and planted firmly and noisily on the table. There was danger in unexpected movements while the waitresses scurried up and down the narrow aisles between the tables, as a young woman opposite me discovered. She leaned forward at a critical moment in her discourse to emphasize the statement that “the fleece-lined cotton were quite as warm as the woolen”; and she jarred the waitress’ busy arm by her vivacity, receiving a stream of yellow squash down her back as penalty.

At a desk, commanding an excellent view of both exits from the dining room, a lady sat with the same somewhat morose expression of countenance which I was beginning to believe the universal New York badge. (Later I corrected this opinion. It is only the women doomed to constant dealing with their sisters in the mass who acquire it.) This particular woman had the presumably pleasant task of receiving the money of the diners. In return she gave them cards, without which egress would have been impossible, for other disillusioned persons guarded the doors, and only the surrender of the oily piece of pasteboard enabled one to escape. During the whole period of my incarceration – I was about to say – in the Margaret Louisa I used to linger about the dining room hoping that some day some reckless, abandoned soul would attempt to flee without the delivery of her card. But it never happened. Meekly, automatically, we all paid, received the token of payment, and slipped out into the wide halls.

The parlor was a most inviting room, mellow in tint, comfortable in the cut of the chairs and sofas, and inviting with magazines and pictures. I wandered into it after my first dinner in New York. I turned the pages of the magazines, I looked at the pictures on the walls, and I wondered with all my powers of bewilderment why every other woman who entered the apartment should immediately sit stiffly down, clasp her hands in her lap or against her stomach, and gaze at me reprovingly. As the number of these women grew, I became convicted in my mind of indecorous conduct, though I was only turning the pages of the North American Review. The rustle of the leaves sounded noisy, blatant even, in the ominous stillness. Suddenly I understood why.

A stout lady in widow’s weeds cleared her throat twice, warningly, and the after-dinner prayer meeting was upon us. The North American Review slid from my guilty fingers, and I almost lost my balance as I stooped to recover the magazine. Then I composed my features, folded my own hands and listened to the leader of the meeting. Once I raised my eyes, and through the door that led into the hall I saw Bob Mathews standing. He was staring into the parlor with an expression of arrested protest and strangled mirth upon his nice, homely face. At that precise moment the worthy leader was besieging the throne of grace with intercessions for “the one new come among us,” and I felt vulgarly prominent.

It did not last long, that prayer meeting, and when it was over there was a little gentle conversation. The leader had just advanced to me with a smile of professional kindness when Bob bore down upon me. She withdrew, disapproval squaring her shoulders. My unfortunate caller and I retired to the remotest corner of the room and conversed in guilty whispers, alternated with sudden trumpet blasts of sound as we realized that our subdued manner was unnecessary and open to suspicion. All the others sat around and looked at us. They were all quite sure, I think, that the list of boarding houses with which Bob furnished me on departing was a document of very sinister import.

The next morning, armed with this list and with one furnished by the uninterested lady at the office, I set out in search of a permanent abode. In Agonquitt I had seemed to myself a person of the furthest reaching prudence because I had left for New York a whole fortnight earlier than my engagement as Mr. Hennen’s stenographer required. The two weeks were to be devoted to “settling comfortably” and to “learning the city thoroughly.” By the end of the first forenoon I asked myself bitterly if a year – if a lifetime – would suffice for either of these results.

I had told six landladies that the hall bedroom I sought was for myself alone, and I had been banished at once, without further parley, from their presences. I was discouraged to learn that spinsterhood, which we in Agonquitt regard as a state normal, admirable and even a little high-minded, was frowned upon here. The number of front doors that closed upon me because I could lay claim to no husband!

I have never satisfactorily solved the problem of the average landlady’s dislike for the single woman. Is the married boarder less addicted to bathroom laundry work? Does she consume less gas in the front hall and the parlor? Is she not so apt to keep the wearied purveyor of her meals and lodgings from the folding bed which adorns the front drawing room with a pretense of being a curio cabinet during the day? Or is it merely that even in these strenuous days of wage-earning women, a husband seems to the mediæval-minded landlady a guarantee of payment securer than any number of salaried positions? I don’t know. I only know that my first forenoon’s search for a habitation was rendered uncommonly difficult because I could not assure six gimleteyed landladies in rusty black that I was “wooed an’ married an’ all.”

There were other ladies – a considerable number of them, too – who gave one look at my cloth turban, made by Miss Milly, our Agonquitt milliner; and at my reefer, which Miss Keziah, who goes out by the day, had helped mother to make; and smilingly shook their heads. These informed me, interposing their plump persons between me and their stairways, as though they feared a forcible entrance on my part, that they had nothing which would suit me – nothing under twenty dollars a week. At first this abashed me, for ten dollars was the utmost which I could allow for lodgings and meals; and I departed, gurgling apologetically in my throat. Later, anger began to stir my pulses, and I gave these haughty ones level glance of scorn for level glance of scorn, and said: “Ah, I am looking for a suite of two rooms and bath; breakfast upstairs, of course; you have nothing of that sort?” And we separated in mutual incredulity and respect.