Edwina Stanton Babcock

“ So Sard could not go to the house, she could not see Miss Aurelia, discuss the trial, conjecture as to Minga's and Dunstan's whereabouts. The girl, her body aching, her eyes half blind with surging [Pg 277] thoughts, wandered to the little fruit orchard. It seemed to her that the gray ancient trees, like good little crones, welcomed her, and that the long grass and the rifts of leaves and patches of starred sky spoke to her. "You are part of us, Sard; we have struggled and fought, too; we have followed instincts and been smitten and wounded. You are like us, Sard, you have come into our laws." ”

“ There floated through the mind of the lawyer the pictures of Minga, with her vivid capricious demands on him, her unwitting tempting of him; what would another man have done? Of what worth were his hesitations and restraints, Sard, with her high compulsions and swift fires? Why should he, Shipman, have let these fresh wonders of womanhood flit by like shadows? He groaned, knowing why—because do what he would, think what he would, Eleanor Ledyard held him. ”

“ You will be hurt and raw from things all your life with that finger! Yes, but you will be also exultant, drunken, wild with the quintessence of beauty, of the mystery and wonder that is all through the dull, daily grind. Sard's unique gift was the poise of her head. Here was an imperious quality like that of a princess, here a curve of chin and backset of the shoulders which was at the same time elastic and defiant and challenging. A girl like this, of indomitable pride, curious nerve, wonders at some of the insults she receives from the thing this pride and nerve bring to life in others ”

“ The isolation of youth, such as Sard's, is very great. No human hand can help it. It walks a way of loneliness that glimmers and is drenched with strange lights that bewilder and if it comes to any help at all it is the knowledge of the glory of loneliness, the glory of the fighter, who at last prefers the sense of ambush and the hazard of the wrong trail. ”

“ Then Minga looked solemnly at Miss Aurelia. "Do you believe that love is divine?" she asked casually.
"Why," said Miss Aurelia, "why, my dear child, of course I do—it's—I always thought—I—we—sometimes—it is said to be."
But Minga, with a queer little self-conscious laugh, broke away from the gentle detaining hand. She walked up-stairs, whistling; as she passed Dunstan's door, she gave it a decided thump.
Later Sard slowly climbed the stairs to the tower room. The moonlight shone in patches and blocks of shimmering glamor on the floor and across the white bed. The girl stood looking out. ”

“ Miss Aurelia thought it must be Dvorak's "New World. The Largo...."
Minga, curly head to one side, listened a moment, then she shivered. "A little too weird and woozy for me," she announced. "I hate Sard's taste in music; I want everything calcium-colored—Fizz," said Minga explanatorily, "and jazz and dizz!" She stood there, a little undetermined, listening and staring at the white moonlight on the water of the river stretched far out below the terrace. ”

“ If woman grows more fine, why should not a man also rise and create a new fineness that shall still dominate her and make her happy in that mastery for which she will forever ask.
The moonlight shone through the long luxurious rooms, the silver patterns threw their strange symbols on the floor until almost morning, and the dawn became a steadiness of gray and rose.
When at last they parted, Sard looked thoughtfully at her friend. "The trial's on to-day," she said slowly, "and the Bunch are all mad, so they won't go; and I don't think you ought to go, Minga." ”

“ Minga's little pink cheeks, curly hair, her rosy dress, the little inconsequent hand on the Judge's knee, these things had a flavor and power, the depth of which the girl could not possibly guess. Yet Minga did most things very deliberately. Now she naughtily twisted her mouth at Sard.
"Ah, come on now, Judgie," turning her quizzical head to one side. "You can't have all the fun of jugging bad boys. After all, you only represent the people—that's us—let us in on it!" ”

“ Then had come the morning outside the court-house when Shipman had defined life to them. The older man's power, his penetrating analysis, had somehow reached to the soul that lay dormant, the little butterfly character had sleepily stirred, the little blue egg had broken, and Minga, a scared soul, looked forth upon a universe that had a spiritual endlessness. Some new dim sense of men came to her, not as strong creatures that must be made silly slaves to women or played upon by light motives, but as loyal brothers who had enormous power of strength or suffering through women. ”

“ It was like a play, only awful; he walked right straight toward the mountain—I saw him in the moonlight and now," said Minga, "I—I have this awful ache."
There was a long silence, Sard trying to understand this change in her friend. She began suddenly to see as if unrolled on a flaming scroll another great law of lives like Minga's, that whoever tries to control them will lose them, but whoever knows how to control them and does not try has them bound fast and submissive. In the new days of the rapid rising of women this fact contains a new challenge for men. ”

“ This was Sard Bogart, the Judge's daughter, who had been back from college only a few months. It was understood in the villages of Morris and Willow Roads that Miss Bogart was a "queer," lonely girl, impatient of many things, apt to be impulsive and to do impolitic and "unpopular" things. This was one of the things—pulling a muddy gutter-snipe out of the gutter. Yet the light in the girl's clear brown eyes was a new and grateful thing to the young bank officer. Somehow he felt as if he had never looked into a fine woman's eyes before. ”

“ Sard, moving wistfully under the great trees, looked up into the branches spread over her. "What are your laws?" she asked as of old. The girl, hot with surging new things, with new blind impulses and passions, asked but one thing, to be true to a law, to the highest laws of all, yet the great law that called men and women fiercely, insistently to each other seemed to be set forever at variance with other laws, laws that those same men and women themselves had made and sustained. What should one be faithful to, what repudiate? ”

“ If there were things that swept people so they rose bigger and finer than they had ever dreamed themselves to be, that might count some way, but how did they start becoming bigger and finer? One couldn't go down-stairs and announce to one's family—"From now on I am going to be bigger and finer." So, tossing away from the star inquiry, turning penitently back to it, the young form fought out the thing. A sense of awful loneliness and youth came to Sard, an awful sense of not knowing herself, not working from the most inward of her. ”

“ There were many ways a man might take to come to grips with active life. Cowardly men, sly men or men who had not thought the thing out had taken these ways. Cynical men took them and then wondered why their lives were forever hurt by smirched and bleared life pictures, pictures that stayed in their minds. The ways of such men were not for him. Passion in its highest, most superb moments, Shipman knew himself to be capable of, but devotion, tenderness, the fair way of the approach of men and women to each other's mystery was what his nature craved. ”

“ But an older man attracted for a moment by a vivid little face always makes the mistake of speaking to depths that do not exist behind that face while he blunders on little vanities that do exist. Watts had seemed too irreverent about the engagement. He had not treated Minga as a valuable person to envy another man the possession of; this by all the books and plays that Minga knew anything about, was the proper way to treat an engaged girl—there must be envy from both men and women, heart-burning and backbiting jealousies, else why be engaged? ”

“ Have you ever thought," went on Shipman purposefully, "what a marvelous thing it would be if we could have heroic statuary all along our river banks, really heroic statuary, sculpture of the great deeds of discovery, the statues of men who invented things for human good, great inventors, great mothers, great scientists, great writers, great explorers; not a single statue that should spell wars or the glory of wars, but all the superb names that bear witness to the everlasting wonder and glory and forward looking of Human Life." ”

“ With these things, part of their pretty feminine play, Sard could hear the whisper, that strange mother whisper, the whisper which is back of the building of the whole world, the whisper which is responsible for the best men and the best women, for all greatness and heroism and sometimes for the weakness and foolishness and decadence—The Mother-whisper.
"We love Foddie, little Sard, don't we? We aren't afraid of him—he won't send us to pwison." Then over their own clasping had come the man's bear hug and little laughs and screams from her pretty mother. ”

“ Sard looked out of the open house door toward the fleur de lis and the peonies, massed purple and crimson against the silver sparkle of the river. She stood gazing at the wealth and the shimmer of spring leaves. "Why," said Sard slowly, "those laws were only made for people who haven't grown up; surely," said the girl to herself, "surely we were meant to bring out of them other, better laws; why," said Sard, a deep light came into her long eyes with their straight clear brown, "surely there are other Laws! We can build above the Law, we don't need to stay Under the Law." ”

“ Shipman's voice, full of his controlled human tenderness, always influenced people at once. It surrounded Miss Aurelia like a wall against which the shaky lady leaned like a slender wandering vine of femininity. She now leaned some more, and inquired, "I thought they—you see, we know very little about the man Colter—was it—did he attack her?" Miss Aurelia, with sick tremulousness, put the question and Shipman's eyes half gleamed with amusement. The lawyer knew what a curious charnel house the mind of a good country woman could be. ”

“ Shipman had had his mind upon this girl and her problem ever since the club dance. So Sard's little world had already "made her ashamed." It had, with its tawdry assumption, already begun to pass judgment upon her. These were the things that sent young people running amuck. What chance was there in a community like this for the fine idealisms of youth? Shipman thought. How much more stringent and vindictive are the unwritten laws of so-called society against the bold spirit that seeks to transcend it than the concise preventive inhibitions of the state statute. ”

“ They waded through the long grass lamenting the great dark bruises on the soft pear shapes.
"One smashing fall, and a whole lovely pear is spoiled," complained Minga.
"Something like people," Sard thought; "one bruise makes us say a pear is 'spoiled.' A person does some one thing that isn't right, and then as it has with Terence, it spreads out and out and we think of him not as having his other good qualities, but of just that one thing. ”

“ Sard would smile a little, looking rather wistfully at him. Perhaps when her father heard this music he wandered down the paths of youth, paths of wistfulness and wanting to do right, paths such as hers must be: what had been his laws? What had at last made him this curt, severe, unapproachable man? "What were your laws, Father?" the girl almost whispered. "Did you always live under the law?"
"Very pretty—very pretty," snapped the Judge. "The best machines are accurate, that's the idea, accurate; no banging, tinpanning; accuracy, that's the test of music." ”

“ His quiet, the absolute calm of him, made Sard wonder. Suddenly she sat up; her hands went to her hair. She was glad he could not see her eyes and wondered if he could have heard her sobbing. Again, inquiringly, she looked at the tall thin form with its broad shoulders and the head, nobly poised, set to a listening attitude.
"If we are very quiet," said Colter at last, "we can hear the wind freshening down the river." ”

“ Not to accept dogma—to be ready for the new light, to trim one's mental sails for the breeze from a fresh quarter, it had given the great criminal lawyer a profound insight into the human heart, an almost awful power over the souls of men. Wastrel after wastrel had tried to look Watts Shipman in the eye, and had known that some strange God of Equity sat watchful in this man—that only in proportion to their actual guilt would they be dealt with. ”

“ To souls like Watts, intent upon some high conception of honor and goodness, bent upon making themselves into a fit home for the Spirit or some part of Spirit that possesses them, there come moments of awful despair and groping. The lawyer, sawing until his back burned with sore muscles, was knowing this despair to its utmost, for the golden currents, the flowered tides of the Hudson River summer had nearly swamped him. ”