In the Border Country | Page 5

your
charges has stopped your ears to the voices of the young who fill the
world outside. They would tell you, if you could understand, that Art is
the one word that is one for men and women."
"My child," said the Bee-woman, "so long as bees hive and trees root in
the earth there will be no such word. For the words of the world were
made to match the things of the world, and that is so in this wood and
out of it."
She looked at the Bee-woman and felt troubled and on the eve of
something great and sad.
"You are no common peasant woman, I am sure," she said gently, "and
indeed, I have heard wiser and more travelled persons than you say
very much the thing that I think you mean. But like you, they were
old."
"That is to say, that they had seen more of the life they speak of, I
suppose," said the Bee-woman.
"But the world moves, mother," she said.
"That is to say, that it runs round and round, I suppose," said the
Bee-woman, "but not that it gets any farther from the sun."
"But women have learned many new things since you were young,
mother."
"That is to say, that they have all the more to teach their children, I
suppose," said the Bee-woman, "and they had more than a little,
before."

"Who spoke of children?" she cried harshly, "not I! I spoke of
work--the world's work, that I am free to do!"
"So long as bees hive and seeds fly on the wind," said the Bee-woman,
"the world has one work for you to do, and you are bound, not free, to
do it!"
Then she sank on the floor beside the old woman and began to beg her,
for it seemed to her, as often it seems in dreams, that before she could
go any farther she must win over this one who stood between her and
where she would go.
"You think me vain," she cried, "but, indeed, with me this is no girlish
fancy, mother. Men greater and wiser than I have told me that mine will
be work for which the world will be the better."
"I think that they have spoken truly, my child," said the Bee-woman,
"and that is why I was waiting for you."
"Then let me go and work!" she cried, and rose from her knees.
"Go quickly, indeed," said the Bee-woman, "but work with flesh and
blood, as does God the Creator, not with paint and canvas, as does man,
the mimic!"
Then this old bee woman grew tall and terrible to her, and she saw that
she had been led into the wood as into a trap and that she must fight
hard for her freedom.
"I do not know what you are!" she cried wildly, "but you talk like an
old song mumbled over the hearthstone, and it is to the hearthstone that
you would chain me. Was I given eyes that can sweep the horizon only
to turn them downward to that narrow hearth?"
"My child," said the old woman, and her voice was like a bell that tolls
across the ancient fields, "so long as bees hive and fire burns on the
hearths of men will the daughters of men walk in this wood and tell me
that the hearth is narrow; and yet it is wider than the width of the womb

whence all men come, and wider than the width of the grave whither all
men go. And all men know this."
She put her hand over her heart, as one who covers a wound, and her
hand touched a folded paper under her gray gown. She drew it out in
triumph and her face grew bright.
"Not all men, mother, not all men!" she boasted. "See--I took this with
me when I went in to the trial from which I escaped. (Though what I
have suffered in this wood is worse than that from which I ran away.)
Read this letter from my husband, and you will see that not all men
would chain their mates--that to-day the jailer himself throws away the
key!"
"Read me the letter," said the Bee-woman. And she read:
"I love you because you think my thoughts with me, because our work is
the same and we understand each other. Let us work on together hand
in hand."
"Now dip this letter in the spring," said the Bee-woman, "and read it to
me again. For now the paper can show you only what the pen has
written."
Wondering, she dipped it in the spring, and the writing, which had been
black, turned blood red and was not the same when she read it:
"I love you because your