A Puritan Bohemia

Front matter

BY

MARGARET SHERWOOD Author of "An Experiment in Altruism"

Leontes. Where's Bohemia? Speak. Lord. Here in your city.

Prologue

A PURITAN BOHEMIA

PROLOGUE

"I go to prove my soul2"

Browning's Paracelsus.

"You hold my whole life in the hollow of your hand, like that."

The speaker held out a broad palm, and a great drop of rain splashed into it.

"Whatever strength or talent I possess is vowed to your service."

"You are letting the rain drop on my face," said the girl, with an accent of reproach.

The young man righted the umbrella and gazed gloomily, past the west-bound steamer that lay off the wharf, out toward the sea. The twinkle had died out of his eyes. His stalwart figure drooped a little with an expression of defeat. Anne Bradford glanced up at him, and a look of pity softened the merry determination of her face.

"I can't do it, Howard," she said softly. "It would spoil my whole life."

"Tell me why," he demanded, with an impatient shake of his head that brought a lock of hair down over his forehead.

"I haven't time," answered the girl mischievously.

"The steamer doesn't start for fifteen minutes," he groaned.

"I mean that I haven't time to take care of you. I am too busy."

"I won't waste your time."

"But I am serious. This is no laughing matter," said the girl reprovingly.

"I had an idea that you thought it was," he muttered.

"I have my work to do, the work that I have wanted ever since I was a little girl. I have spent five years here in getting ready for it. Now I wish to go back to America to try my power. It will take all my time and strength and devotion2"

"That's just the way," he interrupted, "that the modern young woman talks in story-books. You have read too many novels. She is always bent on a solitary and egoistic life, but in the end she always gives in."

"That is only in story-books," retorted Anne Bradford. "And I'm not a modern young woman. I am old-fashioned, and very much like my Puritan grandfather."

"I wish," said Howard Stanton, with a sudden flash of impertinence, "that you were a little bit more like your Puritan grandmother."

"You see," said Anne wistfully, "I've got to do it all myself. I am not a genius, and yet I think that if I was born for any purpose it was to paint pictures. Is trying to find one's best self-expression egoism?"

Her eyes were following the red-brown sail of a tiny boat, just disappearing in the fog. She would like to catch and keep that colour effect.

Howard Stanton looked down in silence. It was useless to plead. There was resolution in every line of the little figure in the gray-checked travelling-dress. The obstinacy of that clear-cut face under the visor of the close-fitting cap he had known since childhood.

"I can't stand it, Nannie!" he exclaimed. "Reasons and arguments simply have nothing to do with it. I cannot stand it to wait here and see you sail away out of my life. You are in the warp and the woof of the whole of it. I have loved you ever since I was five years old."

The vehement words of the young man and the girl's broken answers were drowned in the noises of the wharf and the sound of the water breaking on the piles. Presently there was a lull. A cry of "All ashore!" came from the steamer. Anne Bradford paused on the gang-plank and looked up, hurt by her sympathy with this strong feeling that she could not understand.

"Plunge into your work," she said reassuringly. "You came to Europe to work, you remember."

"No," he answered, "I came to Europe to find you. I can't do my work without you."

"And I can't do mine with you. Isn't it unfortunate? Now you must go ashore."

"I am not going ashore," he asserted doggedly. "I am going to stay on the steamer and go home too."

The girl grasped her travelling-bag.

"If you stay on, of course I must go back."

As the vessel moved away the young man stood among the boxes on the wharf, his head uncovered in the rain. Anne Bradford watched from the slippery deck. The city, with its one cathedral spire, faded in gray mist beyond the flat green fields and shadowy windmills.

"Europe is all over for me," she sighed.

The fog in the air and the moisture in his eyes soon hid from Howard Stanton the little figure at the vessel's stern. He turned on his heel.

"Theories be damned," he said savagely as he strode away.

Chapter I

CHAPTER I

Half-way up the hill lay the Square. The streets that bounded it on north and south sloped westward to the river. On the east they climbed the hill and disappeared. The elm trees and the ragged willow in the centre of the Square were gray with dust. It was late September.

The place had an air peculiarly its own, representing, in its dignified seclusion, the ideal aspects of an old New England city. Long ago wealthy merchants had built these wide brick houses. Now artists, poets, scholars, and musicians, the builders of houses not made with hands, had become inheritors of the large rooms, with windows overlooking the roofs and chimneys of the city and the winding river in the west.

Late one afternoon Anne Bradford walked slowly home. A sleepy quiet brooded over the Square. Suddenly the silence was broken by the sound of many feet, for the doors of the Music Hall had been thrown open, and a crowd of women passed out. A lecture on Dostoievsky was just over. Then a cab came rattling down High Street and stopped at the entrance to a low, irregular structure bearing the inscription, "Rembrandt Studios." From the cab stepped a tall young girl in an extremely well-cut gown. She stood for a minute with her red-brown dress and auburn hair outlined against the dull green ampelopsis that covered the building's front. Her cheeks were flushed. Anne Bradford caught her look of keen interest in the faded brick façade, the battered stone lions that guarded the entrance, and in the preoccupied women passing two by two.

"What is that child doing in Bohemia?" wondered Anne, noticing that her trunk was being carried in. "It is somebody new in search of the ideal life. She ought to know that she cannot enter the kingdom of the ideal in clothes like that."

The girl disappeared behind the great oak door. Anne followed, pausing for a minute to bow to some one across the Square. It was a lady in widow's dress. Something in the slender, erect figure with the sweeping black robes smote the artist's heart with a sudden sense of pity.

"I wish I knew more about Mrs. Kent," she said to herself.

A polite voice interrupted her.

"If you please 'm, I've brought home your laundry, and could you pay me now?"

A child stepped forward from the stairs, watching Miss Bradford expectantly. She was an odd little creature. The business-like manner seemed strangely out of keeping with the plump cheeks and the short calico gown.

"Yes, Annabel, I am going up directly."

"There's a new young lady," whispered Annabel confidentially. "Her name's Miss Wistar. I saw it on her trunk and she smiled at me. She's awful pretty."

Anne Bradford slowly mounted the stairs, carrying in one hand a tiny bag of rolls for her breakfast, in the other, three new tubes of paint.

Chapter II

CHAPTER II

"A pleasant land, not fenced with drab stucco, like Tyburnia or Belgravia; not guarded by a huge standing army of footmen; not echoing with noble chariots; a land of chambers, billiard-rooms, supper rooms; a land where soda-water flows freely in the morning; a land of lotus-eating (with lots of cayenne pepper); of pulls on the river; of delicious readings of novels, magazines, of saunterings in many studios; a land where men call each other by their Christian names; where most are poor, where almost all are young."

Thackeray's Philip.

It was not this old Bohemia that centred in the Square, but a new Bohemia, woman's Bohemia in a Puritan city.

In certain aspects the old land and the new are alike. This too is a country without geography, a kingdom of the air. It has no continuous history. All is shifting, changing, kaleidoscopic. Here the very furniture has an air of alertness, as if about to depart. The inhabitants, driven like sand across the desert, stop only for

A moment's halt, a momentary taste Of Being2"

For this is a land of quest. One does not come to rest or stay, only to search for that which one has not yet found.

"As we proceed, it shifts its place,"

and the days go by in swift pursuit.

But here is none of the reckless, happy-go-lucky temper of the London Prague or the Paris Latin Quarter. Life is earnest, sad, ascetic. Its only lotus-eating is hard work. The shadow of grief rests over it, for women whom life has robbed come here to forget their sorrow, if may be, in philanthropy or in art. Here eager girls toil with pen or canvas, keys or strings.

Each has a purpose. The little black bag that the Bohemian carries is a symbol of an aim in life. It may hold books, or manuscript poems, or comments on Aristotle. It may hold boxes of crackers or jars of marmalade. Whatever its contents, it is always full.

These earnest women suffer loneliness, and, it may be, failure. But they have freedom and pleasant companionship, long walks by river-bank or bridge, long discussions by tea-table or by fireplace. For the hardship there is compensation. Here the ideal has become real. One may hear the Bohemians condemning, over a luncheon of coffee and rolls, the ascetic idea, and expressing belief in controlled Epicureanism. Bread and cheese for the body's diet; Transcendentalism for the mind: muddy crossings for the feet; for the soul, the paths among the stars.

The charm of evanescence belongs to this life. Work and friends are doubly dear when every morning brings the thought that they may vanish. For the mortality is great in Bohemia. It lies hard by the borderland of life, life with its ordered sequences of birth and death, of marrying and giving in marriage, of family happenings. A constant fear walks with one that one's friend may at any moment be drawn to that bourne whence none return to Bohemia.

The charm of the unexpected belongs to it. Who knows what choice spirit may come to abide in the next studio or in the vacant suite? Any day may bring within the borders a victim to be sacrificed to one's art, or a friend to be grappled to one's soul.

The gathering of the inhabitants is ruled by seeming chance. Women drift hither through lack of strong ties to hold them back. Others come to whom this is but a halting place in a road to a chosen goal. A whim, a momentary wish, an old ambition revived, guide many feet to Bohemia.

This is hence a peculiar race, bound together, not by ties of birth and family, only by community of interest, of hope, of suffering. As in the world of mediæval story here are neither old people nor young children, only the vigorous, ready for battle.

Yet bits of everyday life float into Bohemia. Children come to play in the Square. Humble lovers stroll past, arm in arm, and little girls with braided hair walk through to school. Frail old ladies with nodding curls and men with hair like white spun silk go tremulously by, wondering at the queer life of this secluded spot.

The place is as quiet as a motionless pool at the side of a moving stream. Hence the tales of Bohemia are not full of strange incident. The hero of romance does not dwell here, and the villain is unknown. There are few men in this new country. Man here is a memory, a shadow, rarely a reality.

And the stories are incoherent. Only moments of life are represented. Here are but the beginnings and the endings of stories, often the ending that comes after the climax, sometimes the climax itself. Residence in Bohemia is perhaps only as long as the working out of a mood. Therefore its romances are not orderly developments of plot and counterplot, but merely bits of vivid experience in busy people's lives.

Chapter III

CHAPTER III

"Truly … in respect … of itself it is a good life. In respect that it is solitary I like it very well, but in respect that it is private it is a very vile life.… As it is a spare life, look you, it suits my humour well."

As You Like It.

"Don't stop working," begged Mrs. Kent. "I do so like to watch you."

Anne pushed the ruffle of her blue gingham painting-apron away from her face, and took up her brushes again. She was retouching, from memory, a study of an old sailor.

Mrs. Kent stooped to pat Miserere, the studio cat, then looked at the pictures on the walls,—an old woman, drinking tea; a white-haired man, warming his fingers over the last coals of his fire; a young Italian mother, with a brown baby in her arms.

"The things you do have an unusual charm for me," said the caller.

"Yet I am an utter failure, so far as any recognition of my work is concerned," responded the artist cheerfully.

"You have not been working long enough."

"Ever since I came back to America. That is four whole years. I haven't exhibited a single picture, nor sold one. But I'm having a beautiful time. Maybe if it weren't so hopeless I should not be so enthusiastic about it."

"That is hard philosophy," said Mrs. Kent, with her sad little smile. "Do you suppose that I could apply it in my charity work?"

It was a peculiar room. The old-fashioned furniture had brought into the world of art a suggestion of serious and ascetic New England life. A tall old clock stood by the cast of Psyche. The cherry desk, where the artist's father had written sermons for thirty years, was crowned by a Venus de Milo. From claw-footed table and high-backed chairs reminders of the Vermont parsonage stole across the warmth and colour of the studio. Over the door Anne had hung a sketch of her father's face—stern, spiritual, Puritan.

The studio was like Miss Bradford. So were the pictures. Mrs. Kent looked at them again, wondering at the likeness between the artist and her work. There was careful rendering of the wrinkles, the lines about the mouth, the curving of the lips; but the eyes were Anne's own. Into them all had crept that look of mingled thirst for life and fear of life, and they looked out wistfully from the canvases, full of sadness, as if trying to understand.

Mrs. Kent glanced at the artist's clear gray eyes, determined mouth, and smooth, parted hair.

"You must never give up."

"I can't," Anne responded, putting the finishing touches on a thumb. "The work won't give me up. It holds me as a cat does a mouse. You see, it has always been the one thing in the world for me, and life has had no meaning apart from it. I want to be genuine—not like other women. Most women wear their careers as if they were jewelry. Work is only a new species of ornament. They aren't great enough to lose themselves in it.

"Only I should like one wee bit of encouragement! The master never stopped at my easel, as he always does in books, to say, 'You have a touch. There is a future before you.' I've got nothing to depend on but my belief in myself."

"It is all very wonderful to me," said Mrs. Kent, rising to go. "How can you interpret people's faces in that way without having had their experience?"

"I don't know. I have an idea that you can interpret other people's lives better if your own isn't too much tangled up. Lack of life is life's best interpreter."

There was a knock at the door. The janitor had brought Miss Bradford a card. She stood for a minute, turning it over in paint-stained fingers.

"Say that I will come down directly."

Then she went back to her canvas and spoiled the thumb.

Five minutes later Anne walked down with Howard Stanton's card in her hand. Miserere accompanied her to the reception-room door, then dashed away to play with the other studio cats, Victoria Regina, and Albert Edward, Prince of Wales.

Anne tore up the card, then wondered helplessly what to do with the pieces. It was strange that Howard should come just now. But then, it was strange that he had not come before. She must be rather formal at first. Memories drifted to her of scenes where she had met him in imagination. In imagination she had been quite self-possessed. Now she was undeniably ill at ease. This was only because of her haunting anxiety lest she had spoiled this man's life.

As she entered, the young man rose and held out his hand. He, apparently, was not embarrassed.

"I am presuming upon our old acquaintance," he said. "Chance has brought me to the city2"

"Why, Howard!" gasped Anne. She had not meant to be so formal as that.

He had not changed, she thought, as he drew a wicker chair out for her from its position by the Van Dyck portrait. He had the same voice, the same light brown hair, though the lock over the forehead was gone. Anne suppressed a desire to tell him that he had grown, remembering that he was six feet two when she saw him last. She wondered vaguely at her own surprise in finding him so robust.

"When did you return from Europe?" she asked stiffly, then repented having spoken. That seemed like alluding to their last meeting.

"A year and a half ago. I studied in Paris first, then went to London for inspiration."

"London!"

"People do not usually go to London for art. But French art is dead, except for the Symbolists."

This sweeping assertiveness seemed very familiar.

"I got hold of some good ideas among the London Socialists. There's a movement afoot for the popularization of art. It is indirectly the work of Ruskin. After I came home I taught a year, just to send the message on."

Anne lifted her eyebrows.

"You have a new theory?"

"I have," he answered. "Moreover, I've got a commission, to design frescoes for a room in the City Hall."

"Here?" cried Anne eagerly. Then she corrected her manner.

"You have been very successful. I saw notices of your two Sâlon pictures. Why did the Art Review call you an impressionist?"

"It's a perfectly harmless term, as it doesn't mean anything."

"You always were something of an impressionist in temperament!"

Howard changed the subject abruptly. He had come to bespeak Miss Bradford's interest in a pupil of his, Miss Wistar, now at the Rembrandt Studios. Anne politely promised to call.

The difficulties of finding their bearings in these new waters increased. They talked of Hazleton, of their childhood, of the water-colour exhibition. Finally they drifted into a half-merry quarrel over theories of work. Once again the old, boyish, emphatic manner broke through the new reserve.

"Realism! There's nothing in it, French realism anyway, but impure taste and false accuracy."

The caller accepted with apparent interest an invitation to come again. In the street he fell to thinking.

"Anne has not changed in the least, but she looks tired. She has been working too hard. And her father's death was hard for her."

He had not expected the reminder of old days to be so poignant.

Anne went back to the studio and picked up her brushes. Howard had improved beyond her best hopes for him. He was not a blighted being, but was self-poised, interested in his work.

"I am glad it has all ended sensibly," she said to herself. "He's very satisfactory, almost too satisfactory."

Then her eyes clouded, and she could not see the thumb.

Chapter IV

CHAPTER IV

Helen Wistar had spent three days in finding appropriate furniture for her studio. She looked with satisfaction at the sofa-bed, draped with unhemmed brown denim, the pine chiffonnier, the huge screen covered with burlap. Three willow-ware cups, with plates to match, some plated spoons and forks, and a tiny coffee-pot decorated a shelf on the wall. These were for her housekeeping.

"I'm so glad I'm here at last!" she said.

She took the "Fabian Essays on Socialism" and Ruskin's "Political Economy of Art" out of her trunk and put them on the floor.

Somebody knocked.

The girl greeted her visitor with an embarrassed self-possession, gazing with wide-opened brown eyes as she heard her name.

"Miss Bradford? Oh, do you know, I have a note of introduction to you from my old art teacher, Mr. Stanton!"

She gracefully offered Anne a wooden kitchen chair, and seated herself on a pine box under the window.

Anne was puzzled. The bare walls and cheap furniture wore the desolation of apparent poverty. But a gold-mounted travelling-bag stood in one corner. From the box where her hostess was sitting, the strong light bringing out all the rich colouring of her hair and lashes and curving cheeks, came the gleam of the silver furnishings of her toilet-table.

"Yes," Anne was saying, "I knew Mr. Stanton when we were children. We went to the same village school. My father was the minister. His father owned the mills."

"Mr. Stanton has very remarkable theories about art," observed the girl solemnly.

"He used to have when I knew him," Anne replied, smiling in reminiscence. "What are the new ones?"

"He thinks that art should not be mo by the cultured classes, but should be shared with common people."

"That isn't precisely an art theory, is it?"

"It is the new art," answered Helen with sudden dignity, "the art that is no longer selfish, but that recognizes the claims of human brotherhood."

Decidedly the child was interesting. That little air of self-importance was charming, taken in connection with the rounded outlines of her face. Anne watched her hostess unobserved. Those gray eyes never seemed to see, yet nothing escaped them.

"She is just a bewitching baby," said the caller to herself, "masquerading in the manner of a woman of the world."

"Mr. Stanton always was an enthusiast," she remarked. "He has not changed, unless he has found an enthusiasm that lasts."

"Oh, Miss Bradford!" cried Helen. "Don't!"

A look of swift intelligence flashed into Anne's face, but she turned toward the girl with her usual inscrutable smile.

"Mr. Stanton's teaching has opened a whole new world for me," said Helen bravely. Her face had grown severe over Anne Bradford's flippancy. "I see everything differently now. I never knew before that it is wrong to shut one's life away from poorer people, and to live selfishly with one's own beautiful things. Now, I don't want to keep any part of my life, my aim, or hope, or achievement, to myself."

She stopped, excited and embarrassed.

"The eagerness of the young to give what they have not got is very sweet," thought the guest.

"I am carrying out one of Mr. Stanton's suggestions now," said Helen shyly. "I am going to study, of course, but that isn't what I am most interested in. I have come here in order to find out all about the lives of poor artists who have to struggle for an education. I am going to live with absolutely no luxuries, and am going to try to help them.

"It was hard to come," she added. "My family disapprove. They say that it is very foolish and very improper."

"Do they need you?"

Red colour surged to Helen's cheeks.

"That's the way everybody talks!" she cried. "If I were a man, I should by general consent have a right to live my own life. But just because I am a woman, with an aim of my own, nobody understands.

"You see," she pleaded, "it is impossible for me to live out at home my beliefs. It is a Christian home, they say, and yet my family feels a great deal more responsible to social convention than to its faith. I cannot have simple relations there. My position in regard to the maids in my father's house contradicts my idea of the Gospels."

"You are a new kind of Saint Francis," said Anne with a smile. "You seem to have taken a vow of poverty and disobedience."

The door was suddenly pushed open. A little girl in a calico gown and broken straw hat appeared.

"Why, Annabel!" exclaimed Miss Bradford.

"I beg your pardon, ma'am," said Annabel, with utmost politeness, to the mistress of the studio. "You said 'Come,' didn't you? My mamma wanted me to ask you if you have any laundry. The janitress recommended you."

"How are your little sisters, Annabel?" asked Anne.

"Pretty well, thank you. They've almost got to Greenland."

Annabel still panted from rapid walking.

"I thought they were going to Japan."

A troubled look came into the child's face. She touched Miss Bradford's arm affectionately; then her eyes brightened in triumph.

"They're going to Greenland first, and Japan afterward. I've travelled a good deal in my day, too," said Annabel, looking up guilelessly into Miss Wistar's face. "It runs in the family. I went with my sailor uncle to Switzerland and Greenland and Iceland and Africa and New Jersey!"

"Indeed!" said Miss Wistar gravely.

"We went past Asia too, but we didn't stop to Asia."

"That's Annabel," explained Anne, after the child had gone. "Her real name is Sarah Orr. She insists on Annabel because it is romantic. She is the mainstay of an entire family. It is 'personally conducted' by Annabel. She's one of the most interesting characters in Bohemia."

"Why does she tell such queer tales?"

"That's genius. It is Annabel's way of escaping from her hard world. Her imagination has been fed by geography and a few stray books. She lies with such accuracy and precision that she would deceive the very elect. Sometimes she tells the truth, and that complicates things. She never lies about business matters."

Miss Bradford lingered on the threshold.

"It is rather strange that Mr. Stanton should come here to work just now," she said.

"Here!" cried Helen.

"Yes. Didn't you know?"

"No. I thought he was still at Eliot."

Across the way an open door gave a glimpse of the mysterious recesses of a studio. Hidden behind the tall green plants and Japanese screens was some one playing a violin.

"Oh!" exclaimed the girl. "It is glorious! Life is so free, and so full of things to do!"

"Maybe the child thinks that this is altruistic passion, but I doubt if it is," meditated Anne.

Suddenly Helen turned, with a quiver on her lips that completed the conquest of the older woman's heart.

"Oh, Miss Bradford! I do so want to help! Do you think I can?"

Chapter V

CHAPTER V

Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me, And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me, And I in the middle as with companions and as holding the hands of companions2"

Walt Whitman.

From her windows Mrs. Kent watched the life in the Square with something akin to interest. Picturesque models came and went. Artists walked in meditation under the trees. The shabby clientele of the Charity Organization used it as a thoroughfare to the great Charity Building on High Street.

Outside there was only the sight of strange faces, and the sound of unknown feet; within, the four walls of her room, and her thought of the past. Memories of old days drifted between her and the pamphlets which she persistently tried to read. On autumn evenings, when there were concerts in the Music Hall, the insistent cry of music set broken chords to vibrating and destroyed her hard-won calm.

Mrs. Kent had come to the city, she told herself, to forget her sorrow in caring for the poor. There were no claims upon her now. But she had not come to forget. She had come to remember. She wanted solitude, where the sound of familiar voices would not break the silence of her grief. Throughout the meaningless future she would keep fast hold of the meaning of the past.

Six months of work in the Charity Building; endless reports; endless committee meetings on spring afternoons and hot summer mornings; then suddenly the monotony was broken by the sight of a new face across the table. Anne Bradford had begun to take her dinners at the house where Mrs. Kent lived.

They were friends now. They had walked together, and had talked of many things. There was something contagious in Anne's interest in life and in people.

"I called on my new neighbour yesterday," said Anne, as she strolled one day with Mrs. Kent about the Square. "She's charming. She has spent a year in a woman's college, and is very wise. Now she's going to make the world all over."

"Don't laugh at her," begged Mrs. Kent.

"I'm not laughing at her. I like her immensely. She belongs to a wealthy old Connecticut family. Their religious, social, and economic views are not to her mind. Her criticism of her unenlightened parents rather stuns one. She has come on a mission to us, because her conscience won't permit her to stay at home. It used to be the bad boy who ran away from home. Now it's the good girl, in search of philanthropic adventure."