Hamlin Garland

“ It was all glorious beyond words, to the imaginative girl. It flooded her with color, beauty, youth, poetry, music. Every gleaming neck or flashing eye, every lithe man's body, every lover's deferential droop of head, every woman's worshipful upturned glance, came to her with power to arouse and transform. The like of this she had not dreamed of seeing.
Nobody had told her of this Chicago. Nobody could tell her of it, indeed, for no one else saw it as she did. When Mason spoke again his voice was very low and gentle. He began to comprehend the soul of the girl. ”

“ When she rose to her feet the girl from the coulé staggered, and the brilliant, moving, murmuring house blurred into fluid color like a wheel of roses.
The real world was gone, the world of imagined things lay all about her. She felt the power to reach out her hand to take fame and fortune.
In that one reeling instant the life of the little coulé, the lonely, gentle old father, and the days of her youth—all her past—were pushed into immeasurable distance. The pulling of weeds in the corn, the driving of cattle to pasture were as the doings of ants in a dirt-heap. ”

“ A plover was faintly calling from the sedgy shore on the other side.
"One should be forever young," said Mason broodingly.
Isabel said: "Once I heard a cow low, and a robin laugh, while a cricket chirped in the grass. Why should they have moved me so?"
Mason mused a moment. "The cow was maternity pleading for its suckling; the robin's laugh suggested a thousand springtimes, and the cricket prophesied the coming of frost and age. Love and loss are in the wail of yonder song, the loneliness of age in yonder piping bird, and the infinite and all-absorbing menstruum of death in the growing dusk." ”

“ I want you as comrade and lover, not as subject or servant, or unwilling wife. I do not claim any rights over you at all. You can bear me children or not, just as you please. You are a human soul like myself, and I shall expect you to be as free and as sovereign as I, to follow any profession or to do any work which pleases you. It is but just to say that I have never been a man of loose habits. No woman has any claim upon me for deed or word. I have thought at various times that I could marry this woman or that woman, but I have never before made a proposition of marriage to any woman. ”

“ Rose came out, and he put his arm about her.
"Hark!" he commanded. "Do you hear the wind in the tree-tops? It brings me the roar of the city this morning. I hear the grind of cars, the roar of mills, the throb of presses; the city calls me and I must go. My vacation is over. I must say good-by tonight."
"It's very beautiful up here now," she said a little wistfully. "The sumac is beginning to turn and the hills are like jewels."
"Oh yes, it is beautiful," he said smiling a little. "But down there life is. Infinite novelty, ceaseless change. As you love the country, so I love the city. ”

“ Rose gazed at her with unwearying eyes. Her bosom rose and fell as if she had been running, and she said in her heart: "I can do that! I could stand there and do that!"
Then the theme of the play filled her with strange new thoughts. These people lived out before her a condition which she had read about but which had never been discussed in her presence. A husband discovers his wife to have been a lover and mother in her girlhood, and in a tempest of self-righteous passion flings her to the ground in scorn and horror. ”

“ Robins clucked, orioles whistled, a ring-dove uttered its never changing, sorrowful, sweet love-note. A thrush, high on a poplar, sang to the setting sun a wonderful hymn, and the vivid green valley, with its white houses and red barns, was flooded with orange light, heaped and brimming full of radiance and fragrance.
And yet what was all that to a girl without love, a brain which craved activity, not repose? Vain were sunset sky, flaming green slopes and rows of purple hills to eyes which dreamed of cities and the movement of masses of men. She was young, not old; ambitious, not vegetative. ”

“ You're very kind, Mary Compton. I don't deserve it."
"You deserve the world," cried the adoring girl. "If I had your figure and complexion I'd make the universe wait on me."
In spite of all this fervor of praise Rose felt herself to be a very dejected and spiritless beauty. She was irritated and angry with the nagging of strange sights and sounds and smells. The air seemed laden with disease and filth. It was all so far from the coolly with its purple hills looming against the sapphire sunset sky. ”

“ She filled it full of love and praise for "pappa John," as if in remorse for growing so far away from him.
That done she fell back upon her group of friends; upon the concert, upon thought of that wonderful promenade with Mason.
The world of art seemed so secure and reposeful, so filled with splendor of human endeavor. She drew her breath in a mighty inspiration, and resolved to be a part of it. Art had always seemed to her so far off, something European, and now she seemed to be in immediate contact with it, and soared into exultation for a day, falling soon into dreary doubt. ”

“ He sat there listening to the recitations in a dreamy impassivity. He was deep in the past, thinking of the days when to pass from his seat to the other side of the room was an event; when a visitor was a calamity—for the teacher; when the master was a tyrant and his school-room a ceaselessly rebellious kingdom.
As his eyes fell at last more closely upon the scholars; he caught the eyes of a young girl looking curiously at him, and so deep was he in the past, his heart gave a sudden movement, just as it used to leap when in those far-off days Stella Baird looked at him. ”

“ Mary had hardly been more than an acquaintance at school, but now she seemed a staff to lean upon. Rose looked to her as a guide to a refuge, a hiding-place from all these terrors.
Out under the prodigious arching roof she stepped, into the tumult of clanging bells, of screeching, hissing steam and of grinding wheels. The shouts of men echoed here and there in the vaulted roof, mysteriously as in a cavern. Up the long walk, streams of people moved, each one laden, like herself, with a valise. ”

“ A red barn set against a gray-green wooded hillside was no longer commonplace. "How pretty!" she thought; "I never noticed that before."
A little girl wrapped in a shawl was watching cattle in the field; a dog sat near, his back to the misty drizzle. Rose saw it and put herself in the place of that child, chilled and blue of hand, with unfallen tears upon her cheeks.
A crow flying by with ringing, rough cry made her blood leap. Some cattle streamed up a lane and over a hill; their legs moving invisibly gave them a gliding motion like a vast centipede. ”

“ She considered the coulé a wilderness. It had nothing for her but nature, and nature palls upon a girl of twenty, with red blood in her veins, and splendid dreams in her heart.
Out there was her ideal. "Out there is the man who is to fill out my life," she uttered to herself softly, so that only her inner ear heard.
So she argued, fought, wept, surrendered, and went to battle again. While all about her, John and his sister, moved tranquilly to their daily duties, calm as the cattle in the meadows. ”

“ When Rose huddled into her little attic bed, her eyes were wide open, and her brain active as at noonday. There was no sleep for her then. Lying there in the darkness she lived it all over again; the flutter of flags, the wild voices, the blare of music, the chariots, the wild beasts, the knights and ladies, the surging crowds; but the crowning glory, the pictures which lingered longest in her mind were the splendid and beautiful men, whose naked majesty appealed to her pure wholesome awakening womanhood, with the power of beauty and strength combined, with sex and art both included. ”

“ In the case of the sculptress—she's the poor girl, of course—she's a genius. The first time I saw her she read a paper on 'The Modern in Sculpture' (it was good, too) . She was dressed beautifully, in cheese-cloth, for all I know—I only know she put to shame her sculptured copies of Hope and Ariadne. The glamour was around her like rose-colored flame. It was about her still when I stepped up to her. She was tall, and strong as a young lioness. Her clean, sweet eyes were level with mine, and she made me ashamed of every mean thing I had uttered in my whole life. ”

“ They fell into long talks on marriage, and Rose confided to her some of her deepest thoughts, though she felt each time that this little twittering sparrow was hardly capable of understanding her.
"I want to know the men who think the great thoughts of the world," she said once as they lay under the beeches on the hillside, far above the haying field. "I don't want to marry—I only want to know men who can lift me up by their great plans. I want to forget myself in work of some kind—I don't know what kind—any kind that will make me big and grand in my life. ”

“ When Josie awoke in the morning the country girl was awake and fully dressed and reading a book by the window.
The wrinkly red dress could not utterly break up the fine lines of her firm bust and powerful side and thigh, and the admiring little creature hopped out of bed and stole across the room, and threw her arms about Rose.
"How big and beautiful you are!"
These wonderful words ran into the country girl's blood like hot scented wine. To be beautiful made some amends for being coarse and uncultured. ”

“ The children stared away at it, but Rose looked into the teacher's eager face. Then her flowers dropped to the ground, the sunlight fell upon her with a richer glow, the dandelions shone like stars in a heaven of green, the birds and the wind sang a wild clear song in the doors of her ears, and her heart swelled with unutterable emotion. She was overpowered by the beauty of the world, as she had been by its immensity that day on the hill top with her father. ”

“ All things tended to make her powerful, lithe and erect. The naked facts of nature were hers to command. She touched undisguised and unrefined nature at all points. Her feet met not merely soil, but mud. Her hands smelled of the barn yard as well as of the flowers of the wild places of wood and meadow.
Meanwhile her comradeship was sweet to John Dutcher. He hardly knew his loss of a son so completely was he companioned by Rose. He had put far away the time when she should wear shoes and long dresses and become a "young lady." ”

“ But there came at last a number on the programme which dimmed the splendor of the spectacle. The voice of Wagner came to her for the first time, and shook her and thrilled her and lifted her into wonderful regions where the green trees dripped golden moss, and the grasses were jeweled in very truth. Wistful young voices rose above the lazy lap of waves, sad with love and burdened with beauty which destroyed. Like a deep-purple cloud death came, slowly, resistlessly, closing down on those who sang, clasped in each other's arms. ”

“ After a little Mason went on in a calm, even voice:
"The world to me is not well governed and I hesitate about marriage, for it has the effect, in most cases, of perpetuating the human species, which is not as yet a noble business. I am torn by two minds. I don't appear to be torn by even one mind, but I am. I am convinced that Rose has imagination, which is in my eyes the chief thing in a wife. It enables her to idealize me"—there was a touch of his usual humor in that—"and fills me with alleged desire to possess her, but it is sad business for her, Isabel. ”

“ Every carpet she bought would bind her to stay. She was to select the wallpaper, and by so doing to proclaim her intention to conform and to content herself in the new home.
She rose the next morning feeling, in spite of disturbing thought, the wonderful peace and beauty of the coulé, while her heart responded to the birds, rioting as never before—orioles, thrushes, bob-o-links, robins, larks—their voices wonderful and brilliant as the sunlight which streamed in upon her new, uncarpeted floor. ”

“ Mason turned to Rose with a grave and tender look.
"You have seen human beings engulfed like flies—"
"No! no! There they are!" shouted a hundred voices, as if in answer to Mason's thought.
Thereafter the whole great city seemed to be watching those specks of human life, drifting toward almost certain death upon the breakwater of the south shore. For miles the beach was clustered black with people. They stood there, it seemed for hours, watching the slow approach of that tiny raft. ”

“ But the day came at last when Josie must say good-bye, and then Rose's essential loneliness swept back upon her in a bitter flood. That night she walked her room in her naked feet, with her handkerchief stifling her sobs, so that John might not hear. She fought it out there (she supposed) and ended at last by determining to sacrifice herself to her father.
He could not be deserted, he needed her so, now that he was growing old and a little weaker. She must put away her vague, ambitious dreams of success, and apply herself to making him happy. ”

“ To Rose graduation day came as the sweetest, saddest day of her life. It seemed to close a gate upon something in her history. The smiling, yet mournful, faces of her friends, the wistful eyes of the young men who loved her, the rustle of leaves, the gleam of the water, the dapple of light and shade on the campus, the exaltation of the public moment, all these wondrous things rushed upon her like a flood, and overwhelmed her ambitions and desires, powerful as they were. ”

“ Was her life, like his, to come down to the raising of cattle and the breeding of sheep? Was not his office served in educating her? Should not the old be sacrificed to the young?
All these devilish questions came into her mind like flashes of lurid light, but they all paled and faded before this one unchangeable radiance; he was her father, tender, loving, simple, laborious and old.
She fell asleep after hours of writhing agony, worn out, yet triumphant—she imagined.
But she was not. Day followed day, each one seemingly more hopeless than the other. ”