“Why, we’ve hardly come halfway!” she said.
Her husband, plodding along behind her, nodded ruefully. “Hardly,” he said.
In her slim prettiness Athalia Hall looked like a girl, but she was thirty-four. Part of the girlishness lay in the smoothness of her white forehead and in the sincere intensity of her gaze. She wore a blue linen dress, and there was a little, soft, blue scarf under her chin; her white hat, with pink roses and loops of gray-blue ribbon, shadowed eager, unhumorous eyes, the color of forget-me-nots. Her husband was her senior by several years—a large, loose-limbed man, with a scholarly face and mild, calm eyes—eyes that were full of a singular tenacity of purpose. Just now his face showed the fatigue of the long climb up-hill; and when his wife, stopping to look back over the glistening tops of the birches, said, “I believe it’s half a mile to the top yet!” he agreed, breathlessly. “Hard work!” he said.
“It will be worth it when I get to the top and can see the view!” she declared, and began to climb again.
“All the same, this road will be mighty hot when the sun gets full on it,” her husband said; and added, anxiously, “I wish I had made you rest in the station until train-time.” She flung out her hands with an exclamation: “Rest! I hate rest!”
“Hold on, and I’ll give you a stick,” he called to her; “it’s a help when you’re climbing.” He pulled down a slender birch, and, setting his foot on it, broke it off at the root. She stopped, with an impatient gesture, and waited while he tore off handfuls of leaves and whittled away the side-shoots.
“Do hurry, Lewis!” she said.
They had left their train at five o’clock in the morning, and had been sitting in the frowsy station, sleepily awaiting the express, when Athalia had had this fancy for climbing the hill so that she might see the view.
“It looks pretty steep,” her husband warned her.
“It will be something to do, anyhow!” she said; and added, with a restless sigh, “but you don’t understand that, I suppose.”
“I guess I do—after a fashion,” he said, smiling at her. It was only in love’s fashion, for really he was incapable of quite understanding her. To the country lawyer of sober piety and granite sense of duty, the rich variety of her moods was a continual wonder and sometimes a painful bewilderment. But whether he understood the impetuous inconsequence of her temperament “after a fashion,” or whether he failed entirely to follow the complexity of her thought, he met all her fancies with a sort of tender admiration. People said that Squire Hall was henpecked; they also said that he had married beneath him. His father had been a judge and his grandfather a minister; he himself was a graduate of a fresh-water college, which later, when he published his exegesis on the Prophet Daniel, had conferred its little degree upon him and felt that he was a “distinguished son.” With such a lineage he might have done better, people said, than to marry that girl, who was the most fickle creature and no housekeeper, and whose people—this they told one another in reserved voices—were PLAY-ACTORS! Athalia’s mother, who had been the “play-actor,” had left her children an example of duty—domestic as well as professional duty—faithfully done. As she did not leave anything else, Athalia added nothing to the Hall fortune; but Lewis’s law practice, which was hardly more than conveyancing now and then, was helped out by a sawmill which the Halls had owned for two generations. So, as things were, they were able to live in humdrum prosperity which gave Lewis plenty of time to browse about among his grandfather’s old theological books, and by-and-by to become a very sound Hebrew scholar, and spared Athalia much wholesome occupation which would have been steadying to her eager nature. She was one of those people who express every passing emotion, as a flower expresses each wind that sways it upon its stalk. But with expression the emotion ended.
“But she isn’t fickle,” Lewis had defended her once to a privileged relation who had made the accusation, basing it on the fact that Athalia had sewed her fingers off for the Missionary Society one winter and done nothing the next—“Athalia ISN’T fickle,” Lewis explained; “fickle people are insincere. Athalia is perfectly sincere, but she is temporary; that’s all. Anyway, she wants to do something else this winter, and ‘Thalia must have her head.”
“Your head’s better than hers, young man,” the venturesome relative insisted.
“But it must be her head and not mine, Aunty, when it comes to doing what she thinks is right, even if it’s wrong,” he said, smiling.
“Well, tell her she’s a little fool!” cried the old lady, viciously.
“You can’t do that with ‘Thalia,” Lewis explained, patiently, “because it would make her unhappy. She takes everything so dreadfully hard; she feels things more than other people do.”
“Lewis,” said the little, old, wrinkled, privileged great-aunt, “think a little less of her feelings and a little more of your own, or you’ll make a mess of things.”
Lewis Hall was too respectful to tell the old lady what he thought of such selfish advice; he merely did not act upon it. Instead, he went on giving a great deal of thought to Athalia’s “feelings.” That was why he and she were climbing the hill in the dewy silence of this August morning. Athalia had “felt” that she wanted to see the view—though it would have been better for her to have rested in the station, Lewis thought;—(“I ought to have coaxed her out of it,” he reproached himself.) It certainly was a hard walk, considering that it followed a broken night in the sleeping-car. They had left the train at five o’clock in the morning, and were sitting in the station awaiting the express when Athalia had had this impulse to climb the hill. “It looks pretty steep,” Lewis objected; and she flung out her hands with an impatient gesture.
“I love to climb!” she said. So here they were, almost at the top, panting and toiling, Athalia’s skirts wet with dew, and Lewis’s face drawn with fatigue.
“Look!” she said; “it’s all open! We can sit down and see all over the world!” She left the road, springing lightly through the fringing bay and briers toward an open space on the hillside. “There is a gate in the wall!” she called out; “it seems to be some sort of enclosure. Lewis, help me to open the gate! Hurry! What a queer place! What do you suppose it is?”
The gate opened into a little field bounded by a stone wall; the grass had been lately mowed, and the stubble, glistening with dew, showed the curving swaths of the scythe; across it, in even lines from wall to wall, were rows of small stakes painted black. Here and there were faint depressions, low, green cradles in the grass; each depression was marked at the head and foot by these iron stakes, hardly higher than the stubble itself.
“Shakers’ graveyard, I guess,” Lewis said; “I’ve heard that they don’t use gravestones. Peaceful place, isn’t it?”
Her vivid face was instantly grave. “Very peaceful! Oh,” she added, as they sat down in the shadow of a pine, “don’t you sometimes want to lie down and sleep—deep down in the grass and flowers?”
“Well,” he confessed, “I don’t believe it would be as interesting as walking round on top of them.”
She looked at him in despair.
“Come, now,” he defended himself, “you don’t take much to peace yourself at home.”
“You don’t understand!” she said, passionately.
“There, there, little Tay,” he said, smiling, and putting a soothing hand on hers; “I guess I do—after a fashion.”
It was very still; below them the valley had suddenly brimmed with sunshine that flickered and twinkled on the birch leaves or shimmered on sombre stretches of pine and spruce. Close at hand, pennyroyal grew thick in the shadow of the wall; and just beyond, mullen candles cast slender bars of shade across the grass. The sunken graves and the lines of iron markers lay before them.
“How quiet it is!” she said, in a whisper.
“I guess I’ll smoke,” Lewis said, and scratched a match on his trousers.
“How can you!” she protested; “it is profane!”
He gave her an amused look, but lighted his cigar and smoked dreamily for a minute; then he drew a long breath. “I was pretty tired,” he said, and turned to glance back at the road. A horse and cart were coming in at the open gate; the elderly driver, singing to himself, drew up abruptly at the sight of the two under the pine-tree, then drove toward them, the wheels of the cart jolting cheerfully over the cradling graves. He had a sickle in his hand, and as he clambered down from the seat, he said, with friendly curiosity:
“You folks are out early, for the world’s people.”
“Is this a graveyard?” Athalia demanded, impetuously.
“Yee,” he said, smiling; “it’s our burial-place; we’re Shakers.”
“But why are there just the stakes—without names?”
“Why should there be names?” he said, whimsically; “they have new names now.”
“Where is your community? Can we go and visit it?”
“Yee; but we’re not much to see,” he said; “just men and women, like you. Only we’re happy. I guess that’s all the difference.”
“But what a difference!” she exclaimed; and Lewis smiled.
“I’ve come up for pennyroyal,” the Shaker explained, sociably; “it grows thick round here.”
“Tell me about the Shakers,” Athalia pleaded. “What do you believe?”
“Well,” he said, a simple shrewdness glimmering in his brown eyes, “if you go to the Trustees’ House, down there in the valley, Eldress Hannah’ll tell you all about us. And the sisters have baskets and pretty truck to sell—things the world’s people like. Go and ask the Eldress what we believe, and she’ll show you the baskets.”
She turned eagerly to her husband. “Never mind the ten-o’clock train, Lewis. Let us go!”
“We could take a later train, all right,” he admitted, “but—”
“Oh, PLEASE!” she entreated, joyously. “We’ll help you pick pennyroyal,” she added to the Shaker.
But this he would not allow. “I doubt you’d be careful enough,” he said, mildly; “Sister Lydia was the only female I ever knew who could pick herbs.”
“Do you get paid for the work you do?” Athalia asked, practically. Lewis flushed at the boldness of such a question, but the old man chuckled.
“Should I pay myself?” he asked.
“You own everything in common, don’t you?” Lewis said.
“Yee,” said the Shaker; “we’re all brothers and sisters. Nobody tries to get ahead of anybody else.”
“And you don’t believe in marriage?” Athalia asserted.
“We are as the angels of God,” he said, simply.
He left them and began to sickle his herbs, with the cheerfully obvious purpose of escaping further interruption.
Athalia instantly bubbled over with questions, but Lewis could tell her hardly more of the Shakers than she knew already.
“No, it isn’t free love,” he said; “they’re decent enough. They believe in general love, not particular, I suppose.... ‘Thalia, do you think it’s worth while to wait over a train just to see the settlement?”
“Of course it is! He said they were happy; I would like to see what kind of life makes people happy.”
He looked at the lighted end of his cigar and smiled, but he said nothing. Afterward, as they followed the cart across the field and out into the road, Athalia asked the old herb-gatherer many questions about the happiness of the community life, which he answered patiently enough. Once or twice he tried to draw into their talk the silent husband who walked at her side, but Lewis had nothing to say. Only when some reference was made to one of the Prophecies did he look up in sudden interest. “You take that to mean the Judgment, do you?” he said. And for the rest of the walk to the settlement the two men discussed the point, the Shaker walking with one hand on the heavy shaft, for the support it gave him, and Lewis keeping step with him.
At the foot of the hill the road widened into a grassy street, on both sides of which, under the elms and maples, were the community houses, big and substantial, but gauntly plain; their yellow paint, flaking and peeling here and there, shone clean and fresh in the sparkle of morning. Except for a black cat whose fur glistened like jet, dozing on a white doorstep, the settlement, steeped in sunshine, showed no sign of life. There was a strange remoteness from time about the place; a sort of emptiness, and a silence that silenced even Athalia.
“Where IS everybody?” she said, in a lowered voice; as she spoke, a child in a blue apron came from an open doorway and tugged a basket across the street.
“Are there children here?” Lewis asked, surprised; and their guide said, sadly:
“Not as many as there ought to be. The new school laws have made a great difference. We’ve only got two. Folks used to send ‘em to us to bring up; oftentimes they stayed on after they were of age. Sister Lydia came that way. Well, well, she tired of us, Lydy did, poor girl! She went back into the world twenty years ago, now. And Sister Jane, she was a bound-out child, too,” he rambled on; “she came here when she was six; she’s seventy now.”
“What!” Lewis exclaimed; “has she never known anything but—this?”
His shocked tone did not disturb the old man. “Want to see my herb-house?” he said. “Guess you’ll find some of the sisters in the sorting-room. I’m Nathan Dale,” he added, courteously.
They had come to the open door of a great, weather-beaten building, from whose open windows an aromatic breath wandered out into the summer air. As they crossed the worn threshold, Athalia stopped and caught her breath in the overpowering scent of drying herbs; then they followed Brother Nathan up a shaky flight of steps to the loft. Here some elderly women, sitting on low benches, were sorting over great piles of herbs in silence—the silence, apparently, of peace and meditation. Two of them were dressed like world’s people, but the others wore small gray shoulder-capes buttoned to their chins, and little caps of white net stretched smoothly over wire frames; the narrow shirrings inside the frames fitted so close to their peaceful, wrinkled foreheads that no hair could be seen.
“I wish I could sit and sort herbs!” Athalia said, under her breath.
Brother Nathan chuckled. “For how long?” he asked; and then introduced her to the three workers, who greeted her calmly and went on sorting their herbs. The loft was dark and cool; the window-frames, in which there were no sashes, opened wide on the still August fields and woods; the occasional brief words of the sorting-women seemed to drop into a pool of fragrant silence. The two visitors followed Brother Nathan down the room between piles of sorted herbs, and out into the sunshine again. Athalia drew a breath of ecstasy.
“It’s all so beautifully tranquil!” she whispered, looking about her with blue, excited eyes.
“Tay and tranquillity!” Lewis said, with an amused laugh.
But as they went along the grassy street this sense of tranquillity closed about them like a palpable peace. Now and then they stopped and spoke to some one—always an elderly person; and in each old face the experiences that life writes in unerasable lines about eyes and lips were hidden by a veil of calmness that was curiously unhuman.
“It isn’t canny, exactly,” Lewis told his wife, in a low voice. But she did not seem to hear him. She asked many questions of Eldress Hannah, who had taken them in charge, and once or twice she burst into impetuous appreciation of the idea of brotherhood, and even of certain theological principles—which last diverted her husband very much. Eldress Hannah showed them the dairy, and the work-room, and all there was to see, with a patient hospitality that kept them at an infinite distance. She answered Lewis’s questions about the community with a sad directness.
“Yee; there are not many of us now. The world’s people say we’re dying out. But the Lord will preserve the remnant to redeem the world, young man. Yee; when they come in from the world they cast their possessions into the whole; we own nothing, for ourselves. Nay; we don’t have many come. Brother William was the last. Why did he come?” She looked coldly at Athalia, who had asked the question. “Because he saw the way to peace. He’d had strife enough in the world. Yee,” she admitted, briefly, “some fall from grace, and leave us. The last was Lydia. She was one of our children, and I thought she was of the chosen. But she was only thirty when she fell away, and you can’t expect wisdom at that age. That was nearly twenty years ago. When she has tasted the dregs of the world she will come back to us—if she lives,” Eldress Hannah ended.
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