"Well, I'm going," said Caroline so briskly that her mother and sisters looked at her in surprise. "Jonas will have to saddle Billy and take the telegram to the station, and then you can stop knitting and help me finish those caps. This is my war and I'm going to fight it through to the end."
She went out with the telegram, and a little later when she came back and turned again to the window, Mrs. Meade saw that her eyes were shining. After all, it looked sometimes as if Caroline really liked a battle. Always when things went wrong or appeared disastrous, this shining light came to her eyes.
Outside an eddying wind was driving the rain in gusts up the avenue, and the old cedar dashed its boughs, with a brushing sound, against the blurred window panes. As Caroline stood there she remembered that her father had loved the cedar, and there drifted into her thoughts the words he had spoken to her shortly before his death. "I haven't much to leave you, daughter, but I leave you one good thing—courage. Never forget that it isn't the victory that matters, it is the fight."
She heard Mrs. Meade telling Jonas, who was starting to the station, that he must haul a load of wood from Pine Hill when the rain was over, and while she listened, it seemed to her that she had never really known her mother until this instant—that she had never understood her simple greatness. "She has fought every minute," she thought, "she has had a hard life, and yet no one would know it. It has not kept her from being sweet and gay and interested in every one else. Even now in that calico dress, with an apron on, she looks as if she were brimming with happiness." Out of the wreck of life, out of poverty and sacrifice and drudgery, she realized that her mother had stood for something fine and clear and permanent—for an ideal order. She had never muddled things under the surface; she had kept in touch with realities; she had looked always through the changing tissue of experience to the solid structure of life. Like the old house she had held through all vicissitudes to her high standards.
Then her thoughts left her mother, and she faced the unknown future with the defiant courage she had won from disillusionment. "If we were not so poor I'd go to France," she reflected, "but how could they possibly do without the hundred dollars a month I can earn?" No, whatever happened she must stick to her task, and her task was keeping the roof from falling in over her mother and the girls. After a month's rest at The Cedars, she would start again on the round of uninspiring patients and tedious monotony. The place Mrs. Colfax offered her seemed to her uninteresting and even sordid, and yet she knew that nothing better awaited her. She hated darkness and mystery, and the house into which she was going appeared to her to be both dark and mysterious. She was sure of her own strength; she had tested her courage and her endurance, and she was not afraid; yet for some vague and inexplicable reason she shrank from the position she had accepted. Mrs. Colfax's picture of the situation she thought tinged with melodrama, and her honest and lucid intelligence despised the melodramatic. They might all have been on the stage—the good wife, the brutal husband, and the delicate child; they seemed to her as unrelated to actual life as the sombre ghost that stalked through Hamlet.
"Angelica! It is a lovely name," she mused, seizing upon the one charming thing in Mrs. Colfax's description, "I wonder what she is like?" Fair, graceful, suffering, she saw this unknown woman against the background of the unhappy home, in an atmosphere of mystery and darkness. "She must be weak," she thought. "If she were not weak, she would not let him hurt her." And she longed to pour some of her own strength of will, her own independence and determination and philosophy, into the imaginary figure of Mrs. Blackburn. "It may be that I can help her. If I can only help her a little, it will all be worth while."
She tried presently to think of other things—of the caps she must finish, of the uniforms she had intended to make during her vacation, of the piece of white lawn she must cut up into kerchiefs, of the mending she would ask the girls to do for her before they went to bed. There was so much to occupy her time and her thoughts in the one evening that was left to her—yet, do what she would—look where she pleased—the sweet veiled image of Mrs. Blackburn floated to her through the twilight, up the long, dim road and round the bend in the avenue—as if this stranger with the lovely name were the "something different" she had waited for in the past. By a miracle of imagination she had transferred this single character into actual experience. The sense of mystery was still there, but the unreality had vanished. It was incredible the way a woman whose face she had never seen had entered into her life. "Why, she is more real than anything," she thought in surprise. "She is more real even than the war."
For the war had not touched her. She stood secure, enclosed, protected from disaster, in her little green corner of southside Virginia. Her personal life had not been overpowered and submerged in the current of impersonal forces. The age of small things still surrounded her—but the quiver and vibration of great movements, of a world in dissolution, the subdued, insistent undercurrent of new spiritual energies in action—these were reaching her, with the ebb and flow of psychological processes, as they were reaching the Virginia in which she lived.
The world was changing—changing—while she went toward it.
CHAPTER II
The Time
AT midnight, when she was alone in her room, Caroline's mind passed from an intense personal realization of the Blackburns to a broader conception of the time in which she was living—the time which this generation had helped to create, and which, like some monster of the imagination, was now devouring its happiness. She thought of her father—a man of intellectual abilities who had spent his life out of touch with his environment, in an uncongenial employment. Young as she was when he died, she had been for years the solitary confidant of his mind, for he also, like these strangers into whose lives she was about to enter, had been the victim of the illimitable and inscrutable forces which shape the thought of an age. He had been different from his generation, and because he had been different, it had destroyed him. Yet his single idea had outlived the multitudinous actions and reactions that surrounded him. He saw not to-day, but to-morrow; and though he was of another mettle from this Blackburn of whom she had been reading, he appeared now in her fancy to take a place beside him in the vivid life of the age.
The lamp was smoking, and after lowering the wick, she sat gazing into the darkness beyond the loosened shutters, which rattled when the wind shook them.
It was in the early autumn of nineteen hundred and sixteen, the moment in history when America, hesitating on the verge of war, discovered that it was no longer an Anglo-Saxon nation; that, in spite of its language and literature, its shell of customs and traditions, a new race had been created out of a complicated mass of diverse interacting sympathies, prejudices, attractions, and repulsions. Confronted now with problems demanding a definite expression of the national will, it became evident that the pioneer stock had undergone profound modifications, and that from a mingling of many strains had been born an emphatic American spirit, with aspirations essentially different from those of the races from which its lifeblood was drawn. In the arrogant vigour of youth this spirit resented any disposition on the part of its kindred to dictate or even influence its policy or its purpose.
For two years Europe had been at war. The outbreak of the struggle had come as a distant thunderbolt to a nation unaccustomed to threatening armies, and ignorant of the triumphant menace of military ideals; and stunned by a calamity which it had believed impossible, America had been inclined at first to condemn indiscriminately those who had permitted the disaster for apparently insignificant causes. There was sympathy with Belgium because it had been destroyed; with France because it had been invaded; and with England because it had worked sincerely in the interests of peace; but as early as the autumn of nineteen hundred and sixteen this sympathy was little more than uncrystallized sentiment. To the people the problem was irrelevant and disguised in words. For a century they had been taught that their geographical isolation was indestructible, and that European history concerned them only after it had been successfully transmuted into literature.