A Life Unveiled, by a Child of the Drumlins

by Anonymous

CHAPTER II The Roof-tree

If my father had married a certain sweetheart of his early youth, and Mother a suitor to whom she almost became engaged, what would have become of me?

Should I be I, or would it be

One-tenth another to nine-tenths me?

I often asked myself this question. But after each of my parents had had a preliminary romance, they met at a Methodist prayer-meeting, and each knew from the start what the outcome would be.

Mother was then a school-teacher, Father a dry-goods clerk. Both were born in log houses; both reared in the frugal way of their times; the snow often blew in on their coverlids through chinks in the logs; they slept in trundle beds; wore homespun clothes and calf-skin shoes, and had their education at the district schools to which they walked through the woods following marked trees. Born amid the drumlins less than fifty miles apart, all their married lives—more than fifty years together—have been spent in the little village where they met.

In the early years of their marriage Father had a travelling wagon called a “Yankee Notion and Boot and Shoe Store.” Brother, several years my senior, would tell with pride of Papa’s big wagon and the iron-gray horses. In girlhood I spent hours upstairs, when supposed to be putting the large closet to rights at the spring housecleaning, sitting on the floor poring over Father’s letters to Mother, written during those years. How like a romance to find those letters so full of solicitude and love!—comments on Brother’s baby ways; admonitions to the adopted brother; words of love to Mother—strange to get this glimpse of my parents; to see the young father’s pride in his boy; and to read these unrestrained expressions of devotion! For the father I knew, though affectionate and kind, was a more staid, reserved person than the one in the letters. Now the baby boy was grown up, the adopted brother scarcely a memory, and the girl who was not born when the letters were written was reading eagerly the ardent words that had gladdened her mother’s young heart!

The circumstances of my brother’s birth strongly appealed to my imagination: My parents had given up hopes of a child some years before he came. Father’s health had long been precarious—a persistent cough and exhausting night sweats were wasting him rapidly. Mother, at his side day and night, facing his approaching death, was facing a hidden dread as well—the fear that she was now to become a mother. As the weeks passed and the fear became a certainty, she determined to spare Father the knowledge, thinking it would kill him outright. She almost prayed for his release before the truth must be apparent. How she dreaded the scrutiny of the Doctor, and Father’s questioning eyes! How she resorted to evasion, artifice, and concealment! But one day, suddenly changing her mind, trusting in God to help him bear it, she told Father that the child they had hoped for so long was actually to come.

Instantly he became electrified with the glad tidings. Summoning unknown funds of strength he cried, “I must live, I will live!” It was a greatly improved patient that the Doctor found the next day, and recovery, though slow, dated from that time. (It was probably arrested tuberculosis.)

Many years later Father’s health again seemed precarious—dizziness, and numbness of the arms, caused the physician to prophesy approaching paralysis. I remember this as my first sorrow. I was perhaps fourteen years old. When Mother told me what the Doctor had said I flung myself on the bed in a paroxysm of grief. My Father was going to leave me! The utter helplessness and wretchedness of us all without him! It was an hour of agony. But there stood Mother with her own grief, and mine. This calmed me. I must help and comfort her, instead of giving way like this. The storm passed; but the days, weeks, and months that followed were shadowed by this dread, which, however, proved less well-founded than it had seemed; or else Father’s change in his mode of life effected a decided change in his condition. Closing out his boot-and-shoe store, and travelling again for the same firm for which he had travelled as a young man, he recuperated markedly. Now, in his seventy-second year, he is in fair health, alert, enduring, and with keen intellectual vigour—a man of undaunted courage and unconquerable optimism.

I have often wondered how it would seem to have more than one brother and sister; it always seems as if all the love I have went to these two, and that there would have been none left for others; or at least that it would have had to be divided up, leaving each the poorer—one does not have to divide for brother and sister—the love you give a sister is peculiarly hers, the love to a brother peculiarly his, but how is it that large families have enough to go around?

Death has never come nearer to me than when my grandparents were taken. Not unmindful of this escape, I think of it often now. Once I thought, “Death can never take away my father and mother, my sister and brother,” but of late I am losing the feeling that none of the calamities of life can come nigh me; and, instead, find myself trying to think what it would be like to live on if one of them were taken.

Once when Brother was a lad of perhaps twelve, during an attack of inflammatory rheumatism, his heart acted so badly that Sister and I were sent for in great haste to come home from school. The attack passed, but after that illness his disposition was altered; he was more irritable, with a temper much like Grandpa’s. He would domineer over us, as big brothers will, speaking sharply over trifles, and he and Sister would quarrel. I did not quarrel, but would grieve over his harsh tones. I never could endure angry tones, they always made me shudder. Noting this susceptibility, Brother was more patient with me than with Sister, who would get miffed easily and talk back. My tears, which came easily in those days, always melted him. Consciously or unconsciously, I ruled him to some extent by this weakness.

Once in school a boy whispered maliciously, “Genie, Art is reading a dime novel.” Now I had never read a dime novel, but having strait-laced notions of how wicked they were, my whole soul rose in denial—my brother do such a thing! No! But seeing Arthur bending over his geography with unaccustomed diligence, something in his absorption told me that what that boy said was true! The tears flowed fast. Ah, the bitterness of that knowledge! Someone—the same boy, was it?—told Arthur his little sister was weeping because he was reading a dime novel, and at recess he berated me; I cried the more bitterly; he then consoled me in his half-scolding, half-wheedling way, finally promising not to do it again.

And when he first learned to smoke! We were skating on the canal at noon-time, I skating with a girl that Arthur was “sweet on.” Suddenly he skated past us with a braggadocio air, a cigar in his mouth! Carrie and I gave one look at each other, one swift, comprehending look—if Arthur had robbed a bank or stolen a horse we could hardly have felt worse. We tacitly sat down and took off our skates, and, heavy-hearted, went ’cross-lots to school, the skates dangling from our arms, and the lumps in our throats choking us. I cannot remember that we talked about it; it was too awful to discuss. And that defiant look of Arthur’s, how it cut! Our grief-stricken faces must have worked on his conscience, for in the afternoon a note was passed to me (I’ve no doubt he wrote to Her, too), in which Arthur said:

Dear Sister,

Why did you leave the ice this noon? We had a good time.

Then as if in afterthought,

Did you feel bad because I was smoking? I won’t do it again.

Your loving brother,
Arthur.

He kept his word for a long time; then, whenever he would break it, there would be tears and repentance and fresh promises. Similar scenes occurred the first time I smelled his breath and learned that he had been drinking. Heart-breakings, attempted denials, then confessions, promises, struggles to keep them, followed by lapses, penitence, and tears.

“I’ll never do it again, Genie,” used to make my heart bound with hope. The tears no longer come now. Something too deep for tears is felt when the poor fellow, thinking he can keep his word this time, says penitently, “I’ve learned my lesson. I won’t do it again, Genie.”

This weakness of Arthur’s has been almost the only sorrow in our family. We each react to it in different ways, according to our temperaments. Father’s watchfulness, and the necessary work and care that are occasioned by this infirmity; his forgiveness, seventy times seven; and his optimism, are his ways of meeting the conditions; Mother suffers, pities him, and prays that with the grace of God he will yet be able to conquer; Sister, seeing the sorrow that follows in the wake of such indulgence, loses patience with a weakness she cannot understand, upbraids him, and chides the rest of us for lenience; yet, in spite of herself, breaks through her resolutions and, in practical ways, dispenses timely aid; and I, knowing it to be a disease, perhaps largely an inheritance, am bound to regard it charitably. Trying to throw around him what safeguards we can, I am thankful for the periods of well-doing, and can but be merciful when defeat comes. He tries hard, never stops trying, and suffers keen remorse at times. It is unspeakably pitiful, and especially in later years, since he has children of his own and sees how they suffer through his infirmity.

Who knows how much inherited tendencies in certain ancestors, the poor state of Father’s and Mother’s health before and at the time of his birth, and that critical illness when a lad, may have had to do with giving him an organization seriously hampered from the beginning? How can any of us blame another for a given course since, if we were that other, and were confronted with identical conditions, we should have to react to them in the same way? We make the mistake of saying virtually, “If I were you, I would be I” whereas, the truth would be, “If I were you, I should be you, and do as you do.”

But all my life with Brother has not been under a cloud. He used to let me go fishing with him (though I had to keep very still); sometimes go with him down to the pasture after Grandpa’s cows; and often when he went alone he would bring me back a flower—usually a syringa, “cabbaged” from a bush that overhung a fence we used to pass. This stolen sweet was precious to me, largely because he gave it, perhaps partly because it was stolen.

One especially joyous memory is that of a visit to a cousin in a neighbouring village, and the happy time we children had there one sunny forenoon. Three things contributed to our pleasure: Brother and Sister, who usually bickered a lot, were amiable; the spearmint was luxurious and abundant; and we followed a path across a meadow to a spring—little things, simple things, but that particular day with its keen joy of life is a red-letter day in my memory. That was the one spring of my childhood. To this day the taste and smell of spearmint bring all this back, and I mentally substitute “spearmint” for Tennyson’s “violet”—

Who can tell

Why to smell

The violet recalls the dewy prime

Of youth and buried time?

The cause is nowhere found in rhyme.

I never go past the little town nowadays without looking longingly at that farm from the car-window and wondering if the spring and the spearmint are still there. At times I have almost decided to get off the train and seek it, but have never dared—it would be a needless pain to find my one little spring gone dry.

The name of my mother’s rejected suitor was Fairchild. If she could have overcome a certain inexplicable repugnance and married him, “then I might have been a fair child,” I used to think, with a mental play upon the name; for I knew myself to be a very plain little girl. I suffered over this fact; could see myself objectively—greenish-gray eyes, a long nose, a prominent forehead—I hated the sight of my face in the glass, yet would torture myself with scrutinizing it, searching for some redeeming thing, but ending with, “No, there’s nothing, nothing nice about it.” My facial angle I used to study with a hand-glass, mentally cutting about half an inch from my nose, pinning back my ears, and thinking how nice it would be if the straight uncompromising hair would grow low in ripples on that ugly forehead. But, opposed to anything artificial, I would, not bang and curl my hair as the others girls did. Looking at certain girls that I now know were plainer than I, I wondered pitifully if I looked as well as they, afraid of deceiving myself with such cold comfort.

All of which shows how self-engrossed and morbid I was; what capacity for self-torture I developed early. I was constantly reading of beautiful persons. I lamented secretly because my mother was not beautiful. I loved her none the less, but had such a craving for the beautiful, which Fate had cruelly withheld from me and my mother. I have often been ashamed of this feeling; it seems as though a child should so love its mother (and such a mother!) that her face would have to be beautiful to it; but it was not so with me. And it was one of my bitter childish and girlish griefs that Mother would not take more pains always to appear at her best. It seems pathetic, how pleased I used to feel when she would wear particularly becoming gowns, or take special pains with dressing her hair. Unable to overcome this feeling, I have always envied one with a beautiful mother. My mother’s heart and soul are beautiful, but there was always this yearning for beauty of face as well as of character.

Once, as a child, when impersonating Summer at a school exhibition, crowned with roses and bedecked with garlands of flowers, elated by it all, I sang so much better at the concert than I had at rehearsals as to surprise every one, myself included. Best of all I overheard someone say that I “really looked pretty”; that she never knew before that my eyes were black! How I treasured that statement, though knowing it was only a temporary condition!

I have no doubt I exaggerated my ugliness somewhat for, in addition to youth and health, I had a clear dark skin, good teeth, unusually fine and abundant hair, and a well-formed body. The one thing I took pride in was my hair. It was a pardonable pleasure that I felt in contrasting my long heavy brown braids with the wisps of hair many of the girls had. But when I was perhaps sixteen, working too hard in school and with my music, my hair came out so rapidly that one day a girl sitting behind me leaned over and whispered, “Why, what has become of your hair?” Bitter were the tears I shed that night! “That is going, too!” I cried in my wretchedness. But it did not all go; I still had more than the average girl. Even to-day I sometimes get a sudden sense of that schoolgirl’s pang at the threatened loss of her one beauty.

In babyhood I received a burn the shock of which nearly cut short my life: Tied in a high chair and placed before a stove, I was pushed over by some frozen clothes which a “green” Irish girl had brought in from the yard. The under part of my chin rested upon the stove, leaving its imprint, when I was snatched from it.

As I grew up I grieved over the scar thus sustained. I became morbidly sensitive over it, though consoling myself somewhat that it was not in a more conspicuous place. I envied children and girls their smooth soft chins. It seemed to me the sweetest part of a girl’s features—that white, smooth place under the chin. When a child I would never play “Do you love butter?” although I liked to see the buttercup’s yellow shadow on the chins of the other girls. When my turn came I always drew away, painfully embarrassed.

As a young girl I used to think it would be lovely to faint away. When we “made believe,” I usually chose to be French, to have black eyes and red cheeks, and to faint away on critical occasions. But after studying physiology and hygiene, and acquiring more sensible views, I scorned these earlier ambitions, and ridiculed the silly girls who pretended to swoon when vaccinated; and who turned pale and asked to leave the room when the skeleton was brought in to the physiology recitations.

There were only eighteen months between my sister’s age and mine, and, although I was the elder, she dominated me. There was almost no difference in our heights, and not much in our figures. She had a pretty face with fairer skin and sunnier hair. Unobserving persons thought we looked alike. Dressing alike until we were sixteen, we were often asked by strangers if we were twins. Those who mistook one for the other could not have been very discriminating, for with the marked difference in our natures, there must have been, even in childhood, a corresponding difference in our looks. I was quiet, shy, and dreamy; Kate lively, active, outspoken. She had to take the lead because I would hang back. In church, when we were little things, she would fix a place for my head on her lap, then pull me down and pet me, whispering to me to keep still and go to sleep; and, although I knew I should have been the one to play that rôle, I would submit, while she carried out to the finish her assumed dignity.

How quick-witted she was! One summer Father had a certain pear tree that yielded only a few choice pears which he was jealously watching. We children had been admonished not to touch them. One day as Father walked around the yard, he hesitated before the ripening pears, then passed on. We thought him waiting unnecessarily long: one was surely dead ripe. That afternoon, while he was taking his Sunday nap, Kate picked that pear. She had just bitten into it as Father appeared. Putting both hands behind her, she edged backward in the yard till she stood under the astrachan tree, frightened, but “gamey.”

“Katherine, come here,” Father called sternly.

She came slowly, hands behind her and mouth full of the big bite she was vainly trying to swallow.

“What have you in your mouth?”

A gulp, and she said, “Nothing,” opening wide her little mouth.

“Let me see your hand.”

Out from behind her came the right hand.

“Let me see your other hand.”

Back went her right hand, out came her left, the pear still invisible.

“Let me see both hands,” said Father relentlessly.

Quick as thought the little minx lifted her leg and, hands still behind her, thrust the pear between her thighs, and calmly held out both hands. Father’s anger vanished.

Kate never resorted to deceit, and almost never to untruths, unless hard pressed. While my own hypocrisies were subtle, hers were palpable. But I long cherished resentment for one offense—an unusual one with her: Mother had a bed of choice tulips—her special pride, our special temptation. Kate succumbed one day, picking nearly all of them, and with such short stems they were useless. Mother’s anger really frightened Kate, who declared, “Genie did it.” Though denying it, I probably acted guilty, for Mother believed her. (I always blushed and looked the culprit in school if a general accusation was made; and if any one rapped on the door and asked if a certain article had been found, I used to feel so uncomfortable it is a wonder I was not accused of having stolen it—self-conscious little snip that I was!) To punish me for my supposed falsehood Mother put red pepper on my tongue—a practice which a cousin had told her that she followed with her children. It was terrible, and was all the worse because I was innocent; though I’ve no doubt it was good for me, for I was more given to prevarication than was Sister.

My tendency to exaggerate was the cause of my fibs; they were usually harmless ones; facts never seemed startling enough; I liked to embellish them. Then, too, I was always making mistakes about quantities or anything with figures or distances, and some of my misstatements should be set down to this weakness rather than to deliberate deception. In this very matter, years after, when speaking of this red-pepper punishment, I used to say that my mother put a teaspoonful of red pepper on my tongue. I can’t remember that any one ever questioned or corrected the statement. I probably told it mostly to children. It is only within a few years that, telling the story again, my own common sense, so late to develop, showed me that that must have been a gross exaggeration—a teaspoonful of cayenne pepper on a child’s tongue!—the red pepper had punished one lie that had never been told, but had given rise to one that I had gone on repeating until at last I had sense enough to see that it was too preposterous to be believed!

Similarly in the matter of my weight: I had heard it mentioned—it was probably fifty pounds—but with my usual inaccuracy for figures I solemnly protested that I weighed five pounds, standing my ground even when corrected, till the absurdity of it was shown me.

I remember, too, hearing Mother talking with some women about how young a certain neighbour was when her daughter was born. In telling the school girls about it later, I announced that Mrs. H—— was only five years older than her daughter Ida. Shouts of derision greeted my statement, but I was firm. One big girl called me “little fool,” and I suffered I know not what ridicule. It was partly an exaggeration, partly ignorance. Grasping the main fact, that the mother was very young when her child was born, and having forgotten how young, but wanting to make my story worth while, I had resorted to a positive statement which I stoutly maintained. I could not see why those girls should doubt my word, even if the statement was startling. Of course it was unusual—that was why I had cited it. I have a fellow feeling for the Vassar student who, when asked by the resident woman physician what her paternal grandfather died of, and not knowing, but wishing not to seem ignorant, said, “I—I think he died in infancy.”

For years I was not a little given to reporting bright things people might have said, as though they had said them. It was such fun to embellish commonplace events and comments with additions of my own. Whenever I would tell these untruths I always had a queer feeling (almost of disappointment) to find that nothing happened to me; that no one questioned them; and that everything went on just as before the lie had slipped off my tongue. I don’t know whether I expected Ananias’s and Sapphira’s fate, or what, but I expected something, and nothing happened!

This tendency to exaggeration and misstatement, and, on occasion, to deliberate falsehood, I have tried conscientiously to overcome. In fact, for years I swung far to the other side. Now, in matters of fact, I think I am more often scrupulously accurate than not. If I cannot be accurate, I refrain from giving a definite statement. My special training in later years of course helped in this respect. But it was earlier, when I became a “Christian,” that this tendency appeared to me in all its heinousness, and in striving to overcome it I became, for a time, almost morbidly conscientious.

One day in school the word “conscientious” came up for discussion. I was not present, but learned from one of the girls that “Prof” had spoken out in school freely, using my name as an example of what conscientiousness meant. But my wise little sister (and how I loved her for it!), though pleased at the reference to me, went to all the girls she thought likely to mention it to me, and cautioned them not to. When I learned of it, from one who never could keep a secret, I asked why Sister didn’t want her to tell me. “Oh, she said it would make you proud, or something like that.” And she was right. I was too self-conscious as it was, and vain, in a demure kind of way. Kate knew my weaknesses.

Sister’s deceits, as I have said, were such funny ones; they never deceived any one—were never really intended to; they were only desperate measures resorted to when in a tight place, their drollery usually serving to protect her from punishment. As a rule she and Brother managed to quarrel when left to their own devices. I played the peace-maker between them, and have done it ever since. One Sunday, when we stayed home from church, they got into a wrangle. Spiteful words led to threats, and Kate was soon chasing Arthur round the room in childish rage, I trying to intervene. In the squabble my belt fell off—a black shiny belt with a metal buckle. As Kate could not reach Arthur, she grabbed up my belt and, brandishing it in the air, chased him, trying to hit him.

Crash! went the buckle against the rosewood mirror. When Father and Mother came home and saw that crack in the mirror, they saw also three guilty apprehensive children. Brother and Sister pitched in, telling about the quarrel, who did this, and who did that. “I don’t care about who started it, or who kept it up,” said Father, “I want to know who broke that looking-glass—the one to blame for that will be punished.”

“Genie is to blame for it,” Kate promptly rejoined.

Father looked at me in surprise, Arthur opened his mouth in wonderment, while I stood dumb and guilty-looking beyond question. Then Kate added:

“Arthur hit me, and I chased him with the belt, and the buckle broke the glass, and it was Genie’s belt-buckle!”

She escaped punishment.

We had fewer playthings than children have nowadays, but for that very reason they meant more to us. I had but two dolls in my childhood and one is still—living, I was about to say. One was a leather-head doll, with painted cheeks, black hair, and blue, blue eyes. But in the beginning of her career she met a strange fate—a boy much bigger than I snatched her from me and bit off her nose before my very eyes! This was one of my earliest griefs. I hated that boy but cherished the noseless doll for many years.

Later Kate and I had big wax dolls whose eyes would open and shut and who would cry when we pressed a little place in the pit of the stomach.

We played with them only on state occasions. They were kept up in the “front bedroom” in a bureau drawer. I saw them a year ago. They had on the same scarlet wool dresses trimmed with narrow black velvet ribbon, but the dresses were moth-eaten and the dolls showed the ravages of time.

Occasionally, other relatives joining us, we had a family Christmas tree—perhaps only four or five in our childhood. But there was always the hope of one, and when there was one, the joy recompensed for the lean years. One Christmas tree at Aunt Lucinda’s at which some Western relatives were present, stands out vividly—the big house overflowing with people, the smell of the dinner preparing, the air of mystery of the elders as they went to and fro to the parlour with various parcels; and then, at last, when the doors swung open and we got that first glimpse of the blessed tree! But how was my joy modified! Making our way, pell-mell, grown-ups and children, in the eagerness to push through, someone bumped against me, driving my nose against the door-jamb. I can feel the pain yet, and the blinding tears. Not all the splendour of that tree could drive that pain away. After that, in a way I had of accounting for things, I attributed a slight deflection of my nose to that bump. I recall black walnut work-boxes for Sister and me and a writing-desk for Brother as the most elaborate and expensive gifts which as children we ever received. Some years there were no gifts, except new clothing, which never satisfied the craving—except once—our white “moss velvet hats”—these made our hearts light as well as our heads. When there were no presents—can one ever forget the bitter disappointment? A trivial gift means so much to an expectant child! All in vain were we told (as we sometimes were in advance) that no gifts could be afforded that year. We never quite gave up hope. But, cruel as was the disappointment, perhaps the discipline was wholesome. One year there were crosses covered with crinkly paper bedecked with wreaths of worsted flowers, and framed in deep rustic frames. What works of art! Almost equal to the hanging basket made of allspice that adorned a cousin’s parlour, and to the framed pyramid of hair-flowers that hung in our own!

I still treasure a paper-covered Red Riding Hood, cut in the form of the little lass, with the wolf crouching at her feet, the text a metrical version, charmingly illustrated. I must have had it since I was seven or eight years old. I knew the verses “by heart,” and have heard Mother tell that I used to recite them and other long pieces in my sleep. A bottle of oil once made a spot on the book and the paper is yellow with age, but I still cherish it and would part with many a choicer possession sooner than with this childhood treasure.

In this connection I recall that when I was perhaps in my early ’teens, the instinct of acquisition developing, I went about the house placing my name upon all my belongings—every book and picture, even on the bottoms of little toy vases, a porcelain lamb, and so on. As to Red Riding Hood, I seemed to think it fitting to write my name in a big sprawling child’s hand, every letter a capital, with the notion, I suppose, that it would be thought that I had written it there when a child. I even selected a date, reckoning back as well as I could, and putting it upon one of my early birthdays. In the same way I mutilated a quaint book that had belonged to Grandpa, by writing his name on the fly leaf, and the legend, “His Book,” in what I considered an old-fashioned hand-writing. Some years later, coming upon these evidences of my silly deception, my cheeks burned with shame, and I erased the false records.

Fondness for my own belongings did not prevent me from a cruel piece of vandalism in regard to a cherished possession of my sister’s: She had made a clove-apple by sticking a greening full of cloves, and hiding it in a cuff-box in the upstairs closet, had declared she was going to keep it till she grew up. Laughing at her, I said it would decay, but she maintained that it would not. On rare occasions, as if it were a religious rite, she would peep into the box and sniff at the apple, vouchsafe us a sniff also, and put it carefully away. As it dwindled and dwindled, her attachment strengthened and strengthened. I believe she kept it six years. Although I had often threatened to throw it away, she never believed I would. But one day, whether out of spite, or because of my strenuous housekeeping, I did it, probably silencing my compunctions by thinking she was too old longer to indulge in such nonsense. But her grief and anger on learning of the loss were so moving that I was conscience-stricken, and would then have given anything to have restored the treasure. She scorned all attempts at extenuation. It is with real shame that I confess this misdeed—more, perhaps, than I feel for later, graver ones. I know now that as one of her treasures it should have been respected. Anything that another really loves—a toy, a bauble, an idol, a comforting superstition—why not let him keep it as long as he can?

We were a happy and harmonious family as such things go. I do not mean that we never said a cross word to one another; such families, I fancy, exist only in Sunday-school books. There was not always unity; our parents sometimes differed; Father was critical and methodical; Mother forgetful and wanting in system. She was tried by Father’s smoking and inordinate croquet-playing, and he was tried by her procrastination; at such times fault-finding was forthcoming. Sister and Brother had early and late unpleasantnesses; and, in our ’teens, Sister and I became less harmonious than formerly, about the time, I suppose, when we were each becoming more individual; at least, when, ceasing to be docile, I became more assertive. But there was always the good-night kiss all around, and Kate and I went to sleep with our arms around each other as long as we were girls at home. I do not think we could have slept had we let the sun go down upon our wrath.

I remember the first time I omitted our custom of kissing all round at night—the family and any guest staying with us. Some strange man was there; when I had kissed Father and Mother I hesitated before the man—I was getting to be a big girl—then, putting out my hand, said a bashful good night and went upstairs with burning cheeks, wondering if it had seemed rude not to kiss him.

We were not a demonstrative family—the good-night kiss was the chief expression of affection. I remember no fondling, no caresses after early childhood, except the habitual ones—no spontaneous overflow of affection at irregular intervals, such as I was inclined to, had the others been so minded. Once in a great while Father would call us the sweetest pet name in the world—“darling.” On these rare occasions I was secretly overjoyed. Had he known the delight it gave me, I’m sure he would have said it oftener. Mother sometimes jocosely called me “Keturah,” and when, in one of her rare playful moods, she dubbed me “Keturah Ketunk,” I liked it exceedingly.

I remember once—I was probably thirteen or fourteen—going into the bedroom to bid my parents good night, when, having kissed them, as I started to leave the bed, Father threw out his arm; and, seeing it in the half light, and thinking he did it to motion me back, I bent down and swiftly kissed him again—an unusual thing for either him or me. No sooner had I done it than my cheeks got hot as fire: perhaps I had misunderstood his gesture; he may have just happened to stretch out his arm, and was not beckoning me at all. Upstairs I went, torturing myself with the query which I never solved. Whether or not he had called me back, I now know he was not sorry to get the extra kiss. Why couldn’t I have thus comforted myself then? I suppose I was hungry for more demonstration of affection than I got, yet ashamed to show it. Sister, not at all demonstrative, provoked demonstration in me; the curve of her cheek, and her long eyelashes resting upon it, appealed to me as a child’s beauty appeals; I longed to kiss her at inopportune times, and sometimes did not resist. Half annoyed at me, she thought it nonsense, I suppose. As we grew up, when she would be fitting a dress for me, I would try to snatch kisses, sometimes calling forth her impatience, at others her laughing dexterity as she eluded me. I admired her prettiness, but was never jealous of her, though she could dance and skate, and do all such things, with an ease and grace I could never acquire. Making friends more readily than I, being sociable, lively, and even-tempered, she had plenty of beaux while I had none. But I had friends among the beaux of the other girls. Although I did not want them for beaux, I should have been unhappy had I not had them for friends—I understood myself well enough to know that much then, though the general impression among my schoolmates was that I cared nothing for the boys.

My hypersensitiveness about the life of the affections was apparent in the way I felt when Father would bid us all good-bye: When he kissed Mother I would always turn away. It never seemed right to look on; perhaps, partly, because it made me want to cry; but also because it seemed as though I had no right. Even to-day, if I see lovers on the stage whose acting is good enough to give the sense of reality, I find myself turning away—it seems too intimate for me to witness.

A favourite custom in our family was an annual Sunday drive in apple-blossom time. Father would hire a team and a sort of landau which, on a pinch, would hold ten persons—an aunt’s family and ours—big baskets would be stowed under the seats, and off we would go through the country on an all-day’s drive, stopping to picnic in some grove, or by a stream. Then on again under the blue skies, the air sweet with blossoming trees; and the tender spring green giving that hazy, twiggy look of early May. (That line of Whitman’s—“Rich apple-blossomed earth”—always brings back those far-off May-times with those perfect childish joys.) Then we would drive home in the twilight, singing as we went, old and young joining in the songs. Happy children, happy parents! I’m sure the apple blossom is an escape from the Beautiful Garden. I never breathe its fragrance without recalling those cherished drives in the Mays that are no more.

Our parents were wisely indulgent, giving us treats and privileges as they could afford them. We were brought up to go without a thing till it could be paid for; consequently, all of us have a horror of being in debt. Father spent a good deal (considering our circumstances) on our music, first and last, and he and Mother were ever looking forward to our advancement. But there was always a struggle over money matters. We had to economize and count the cost of any indulgence; but when it was decided that we could afford a given thing, how happy, almost jubilant, Father was over the expenditure!

One of the happiest hours in childhood (I was perhaps ten years old) was when, after spending the day from home, we returned at dusk and were met at the door by Father and Mother looking so excited and happy we knew something was on the carpet. And there was! In the sitting-room our eyes encountered a change—the furniture was rearranged, and there standing against the wall (were we awake or dreaming?) was a brand new organ!

Our joy was unbounded, our parents’ delight no less. How we smoothed the polished walnut case; gingerly touched the black and the white keys; fingered the stops; tried the pedals; moved the swell; and asked to have the top lifted so we could look inside! And then Father sat down and struck a few rich chords—those chords with their variations that seemed peculiarly his own! Soon the music teacher came in, and some neighbours, and the new organ sounded throughout our home, and doubtless in our dreams that night; and the next morning it was still there!

Then began the lessons. Gradually the novelty wore away, lessons grew harder and harder. Kate and Arthur, restless beings that they were, made only fair progress; they disliked the practice. But, taking to it eagerly from the start, I made rather more than ordinary progress. It was as hard to get me away from the organ as it was to get Kate and Arthur to it. I was still very young when, one day, putting aside my exercise book, I opened the Methodist Hymnal and “picked out” one of the hymns—Boylston. I was scared, it sounded so natural—and I had done it alone! Mother came running in to see if it was really I who was playing.

Shortly after that, in Sunday School, the organist leaving before the close, the superintendent came to me, saying, “We want you to play the last piece.” I tried to beg off, but no, he knew I could do it; so, in fear and trembling, I got up and played. The treadles worked hard, and the stool was too high, so the superintendent pedalled for me, while the school rose and sang. It didn’t take us children long to get home that Sunday. “Genie played the organ! Genie played the organ!” shouted Kate and Arthur as we rushed into the house. After that this occurred so often that my timidity before the Sunday School wore away. This was the forerunner of a greater event: I had never touched the big organ, but as Father was chorister, we children often sat “in the choir” pretending to help sing. One day toward the close of the service the bass singer, leaning over, whispered, “Miss R—— has gone home, you will have to play for us, Genie.” Protesting, I looked imploringly at Father, but he only nodded and smiled encouragingly. My heart nearly thumped itself to pieces, but the wily Basso whispered, “We’ll sing so loud, if you make a mistake they’ll never know it, and we’ll pick out one with an easy bass.” So I undertook it. In time, as Miss R—— dropped out more and more, I became the regular organist. Later came piano lessons, and later still I had a teacher from a neighbouring city.

When I was developing rapidly, undergoing the physiological and emotional changes of pubescence, they unwisely put me to studying “Thorough Bass.” A paternal aunt had been an accomplished musician, and my parents hoped I would show a like talent. How my head used to ache over that study! As the lessons became more complicated, I grew stupid; my health failed perceptibly and our family physician was called. He talked with me a long time, then I was sent out of the room while he and Mother talked; then called in again, and the little black medicine-case was opened, while the Doctor folded the tiny powders that, he said, as he patted my head and called me “lassie,” were to make me strong again.

The upshot of it all was I had to drop my music, not only then, he advised, but for all time. I had too emotional a temperament, he said, to stand the strain. (What kind of a musician would a non-emotional person be!) But he was wise in prohibiting it then. I used to dignify the severe headaches which I had at that time by saying I had “brain fever.” (Girls in the books I read had “brain fever.”) But there was no real illness, no staying out of school, though for a time my hours were lessened.

Dropping music was a real cross to me. Probably, had I been allowed to resume it, I should have followed that as a vocation and not cast about for another field of work. Although discontinuing the study of music, I did not drop its practice. Music was an important part of our home life.

I remember how cruel I once thought my parents because they would not let me go to a distant county to pick hops. One of the schoolgirls had gone with her mother the year before, had earned a lot, and had had a “splendid time.” As the season came round again, I “teased” to go with this girl and her mother. I was hearing a good deal at home about economy, economy, and Nora’s account of the money she had made had fired me with the prospect of earning great sums to relieve our growing needs. Confident, I announced my plan. Was ever a girl so repulsed, so silenced? They wouldn’t even hear me out. I tried to say what Nora said, and what her mother said, but they were obdurate. A martyr in my own eyes for a time, it was probably years before I realized what I had asked to do. When I learned what class of young people usually engaged in such work, I understood how “out of the question” (a finality of Father’s) it had been for my parents even to discuss the project. I remembered, too, how the same bright-eyed Nora had soon left school; how she changed in manner; became coarsened; drifted out of our lives. Strange how, years after, children become aware of the safeguards thrown around them in youth! With this awareness, what a feeling of gratitude wells up within one toward the parents who have surrounded them with such wise and loving care! How one longs to fly home and tell them of it; yet how reticent are we, how chary of expressing this gratitude!

One of the deepest of my early griefs was when we first learned what it was as a family to be separated; when Brother, who was a printer, went to Colorado to work. We had been so closely bound together. I realized the anxiety of our parents, divined the loneliness Arthur would feel, and what it would mean to lose him from the home. What interesting and humorous letters he wrote us, with the homesickness sometimes peeping through! How we read and re-read them!

He stayed away less than a year. Shall I ever forget the day he came back? His clothes had become shabby; he was stained with travel, but I almost devoured him with my eyes. How good his voice sounded—every well-known tone; every gesture; and his laugh—my heart was like to burst. And, oh, the joy, the security, the blessed feeling that night, to know we were all together again under the home roof!

I used to resort to various devices to keep Arthur at home in the evening, which sometimes worked, sometimes not. The most effectual was to slip away from the supper table while the rest were still seated, under the pretext of wishing to try a new piece, thus getting him under the spell of the music while he was filling the stoves and bringing in water, so he would be drawn in spite of himself into the sitting-room. Once there, he would hang around and read, often appearing indifferent when I knew he was not. When he would get up to go, after I had held him as long as I could, how my heart would sink as the door closed and his steps sounded fainter and fainter on “stoop” and sidewalk! But I would keep on playing long enough so as not to make it too apparent to the others what I had been up to, though they were doubtless as well aware of my motive as I. Sometimes he would say, on going out, “Well, I’ve got to go now”—his way of thanking me for playing.

Even when he was doing his best, there was always more or less anxiety until Brother would come home at night. No matter what I was reading, when ten o’clock came, unless he had come, I felt an anxious pang. All of us felt it, though it was seldom mentioned. Mother sometimes spoke of it, or her sighs betrayed it, but as a rule we hid our anxiety under an assumed cheerfulness. I would listen when the steps came on the veranda to see if there were two walking, or only Father. Then if Father came alone, he would ask with apparent lightness, “Is Arthur home yet?” and I would hasten to answer, “No, not yet,” just to forestall Mother’s sadder negative with its accompanying sigh. Then we would all fall to talking to cover our fears. But when he did come, how we strove to conceal the delight that our fears had been unfounded! Putting up my books, but not too quickly, lest he be aware that I was trying to reward him for coming home early, I would go to the organ, and after making a pretense by first playing some indifferent thing, would play and sing the songs he liked best.

Oh, the safe housed feeling, when we could say good night to one another, and not have to lie awake listening for Brother’s footsteps that came so late sometimes, and sometimes not at all! After such nights of watching, Sister and I would peep into his room in the morning, to see if perchance he had come after we had fallen asleep. And when his bed was untouched—the dread and fear of what may have befallen him!

Brother was always good company. He is witty, and easily moved by humour or pathos. Once stir his worthy emotions and his better nature comes to the surface, though he resists being stirred as long as he can. A fond father, he is, on the whole, a wise one, except when his temper, or his infirmity, gets the better of him. Like our dear, testy grandfather in disposition, he reacts in much the same way, yet, with all his impatience, shows surprising tolerance with certain vagaries and eccentricities in others who, being the victims of hereditary and constitutional handicaps, are “gey ill to live with.” Love for his children is one of his strongest traits.

A few months ago, when a maternal uncle, an alcoholic, died, Brother took his own little son to the uncle’s coffin and there, telling the child what a promising youth the uncle had been, explained to him that drink had been his ruination. He wrote me that he had made the child (only three years old) understand it all; and then had made him promise that he would never touch alcohol in any form.

Poor, tempted, struggling soul! Whitman has expressed tenderly and understandingly the feelings that always well up in me at the thought of my brother’s struggles and defeats—“Vivas for those who have failed!” Such need pity, help, and credit far more than we are wont to give. Bobbie Burns knew whereof he spoke when he reminded us:

What’s done we partly may compute,

But know not what’s resisted.

Father and Mother still have hope in Brother’s ultimate victory[2]—such faith, and such optimism, combined with such tenderness and forgiveness! I know of nothing more God-like than these attributes as I have seen them exemplified in the daily lives of my parents. “Like as a father pitieth his children”—what a perfect example I have known of this infinite, compassionate love!