CHAPTER III “A Child Went Forth”
Environment—what part does it play? Its stamp is upon us, but other forces and influences also determine our reactions and mould our characters. Is the objective environment alone the sea in which we swim? More significant still are the emotions which a given environment induces in each individual. To determine these it is needful to resort to our earliest memories. What were the things that so impressed us that we carry them on down through the years, an inseparable part of our inmost selves? What part have they played in shaping our characters?
I have said that it was a commonplace little village where I was born, and to another it may seem a commonplace outward life that I have to record. But who among us will own to a commonplace inner, subjective life?
Our village, named after him who sang of the “deep and dark blue ocean,” is a prosaic port on the Erie Canal along whose banks mules slowly draw the heavy-laden boats. The canal divides the village into north and south, as Owasco creek divides it into east and west. Rising from the level landscape here and there, the long, low lenticular drumlins form a conspicuous feature through that section of the state. Commonplace, did I say? But less than three miles away are the marshes of the Montezumas. What strange wild feelings the lighted skies at night evoked! “The marshes are burning!” was such an inadequate explanation of that lurid western sky. A few miles to the south is Goldsmith’s “loveliest village of the plain”; about the same distance west, one reaches Tyre; as far again, and Palmyra is found; while a little to the east sits Syracuse in all her glory—surely an illustrious environment, this Drumlin Land, if names could make it so.
In the upper and hilly part of the town, called “Nauvoo,” the house still stands where Brigham Young lived before he became famous—or, shall we say, infamous? He was a carpenter and painter, and several buildings are there pointed out as houses that “Brigham” built. They tell that the Mormon went to Utah owing a certain couple in our village for his board, and that years after, on learning that they were to celebrate their golden wedding, he sent them the amount he owed, with interest for all the years.
In the decrepit old hotel on the village green Isaac Singer once lived and dreamed of the sewing-machine which later made his name a household word. There, too, in our little hamlet faithful Henry Wells, sometimes a-foot, sometimes on horseback, went hither and yon amid the drumlins carrying in his shabby carpet-bags messages and parcels to the scattered homes. Trusty and dependable, there in our little village he laid the humble foundations of the Wells-Fargo Express of to-day.
Six churches, two hotels, several dry goods and grocery stores, a drug store, a meat market, the Post Office, sometimes a bank, a boot-and-shoe store, cigar shops and saloons, a pie factory, a shirt factory, the Masonic Hall—these, most of which were grouped around the Village fountain, constituted the town life I knew.
It was amid these scenes that I as a child went forth; the objects I looked upon became a part of me, interwoven with my very being: the familiar drumlins on the horizon, flowers and the wayside weeds, the pets I cherished, the family life, our neighbours, my teachers and playmates, the games we played, the songs we sang, the books I read, the sunset clouds, the friendly trees, and the winding creek; and mingled with these commonplace scenes, the sorrows, joys, affections, hopes, and fears—all these became a part of that child that went forth.
In thinking of my earliest memories, why does my mind revert to that little old tannery down by the dam which we passed on our way to Grandma’s? It was painted red. There was a multitude of little square, mahogany-brown pieces of wood that covered the yard like a carpet. There was a buzz of machinery which always frightened me (and machinery frightens me still), and a peculiar smell always emanated from the place. And though later a grist mill, still later a paper mill, and then a planing mill stood there, and now for many years dwelling houses have occupied the spot, yet as I think back to my childhood I recall most vividly the earliest scene, and the peculiar elastic feel of those pieces of tan-bark under my feet.
Quiet and shy, I was, as I have said, dominated by my sister till perhaps a year or two before I went away from home. More of a leader, more practical, in those days more executive, my sister had withal more common sense and far more initiative than I. She mothered me as a child, and “bossed” me as a little girl, and for a long time I was content to have it so. In truth, so established was that order of things that she has never, I think, quite accepted my emancipation.
I was more shy in Father’s presence than elsewhere, even in my late ’teens. I don’t know why, but involuntarily I became more reserved. I myself could see a difference in voice and manner. I was not afraid of him (though that was the way Sister put it), for I had no reason to be, he was kindness itself, and more gentle with me than with Kate, she being so full of pranks he often had to rebuke her. I don’t know just what the shyness was, but I was two different beings when with and away from my father. As nearly as I can explain it now, it was my exaggerated love of approbation making me so anxious for his approval that I over-exerted myself when near him, the result being a shy awkwardness. Yet he always seemed to understand me, and to make it easy for me. I never would ask him for favours; Kate always had to do such things for both herself and me. “You do it,” I would plead, and she would “sputter” and say I ought to do it for myself, but would give in. Sometimes she made me go with her, occasionally taking revenge by saying, “Genie wants to ask you for a penny.” Then I felt like running away. He seldom refused us; I don’t see why I was so bashful with him. It irritated Sister. Straightforward herself, she thought me two-sided. I don’t know when this shyness came, or when it wore away, but before it developed I have one memory that is significant—one of my earliest recollections. Years later I marvelled that I ever dared do it: I remember sitting on Father’s lap (he in a little black rocker) and “teasing” him to tell me where I came from. It must have been when I first began to wonder about such things. I recall how I kept pulling his face around by putting my hands in his long brown beard; how he would laugh and turn away, trying to avoid me; and I can remember just how he looked at Mother as they exchanged glances. I can’t recall how they answered me, but think they told me I would know when I was older. (I never remember being told about storks bringing babies, though I do remember someone saying the Doctor brought them, and that God sent them.) But that scene is very vivid to me; and afterward, when I began to know, though imperfectly, the answer to my question, I thought of how I had sat and coaxed Father to tell me. I would like to know just how old I was when this question first seemed so important to me. I recall when still very small, though later than this, being in the yard and digging in the ground when Brother and some older boys, going by, asked what we were doing. “Digging for babies,” we said, and it seems as though I can remember the smile that passed between Brother and the boys as they ran off shouting derisively, “Digging for babies!” That must have been in the days when we used earnestly to try to dig down to China.
Although asking my father this question is one of my earliest recollections, I think the very earliest is that of my first day in school. I can remember just how I trotted along by my brother’s side; how my starched skirts stood out proudly, and how my heart swelled with excitement when, at the sound of the “first bell,” I started off to school. Arthur was very nice to me, and granted permission (!) to two of the bigger girls to let me sit between them. I recall the delicious feeling of being the object of interest in the little flock, and how they petted and entertained me. But the most wonderful thing was a little wire frame which the teacher let me take to amuse myself with—a frame with coloured balls big as cranberries, which could be moved back and forth on the wires. Not long after I began going to school regularly, and that little frame (years later I learned it was called an abacus) was given out as a reward of merit. I can see now the look of blushing pride mantling the cheeks of the favoured pupils as they marched from the teacher’s desk back to their seats bearing the coveted trophy.
One evening shortly after my first day in school, we were startled by the alarm of fire, and saw the flames coming from the direction of the Academy. “Goody, Goody!” shouted some boys in the street, “We won’t have to go to school any more!” But I cried as though my heart would break, until a neighbour came down the hill and told us it was some unimportant building farther away.
A few years ago the Academy did burn, and the news came to me with a far keener pang than that felt in childhood at the false alarm. The present was momentarily blotted out. My thoughts flew back to the old building where the most tender and beautiful memories centred. Of that place so rich in associations only ashes remained; only in memory could I see again the old brick walls—the walls my grandfather had helped to build—only in memory hear the school bell ring! Curious, but more than all the furnishings—the books, the globes, the maps and charts, the chemical apparatus—more than all the things really of value in the building, my thoughts kept going back perversely to that dear little wire frame with coloured balls which I had so cherished since my first day at school!—that was gone past recall!—that and the old bell! At those earlier home-comings after graduation, one of my keenest pleasures had been to be awakened in the morning by the sound of the school bell; it brought back so much: I was a girl again; the past was bridged over; it stirred a host of chaotic feelings of mingled sweetness and sadness—longing for my lost girlhood, and exultation at the successes and achievements of to-day—the Spell of the Past was in that bell.
A fine high-school building, well equipped, now stands where the old Academy stood. To the younger generation it will doubtless mean all that the old school meant to us, but how like an interloper it is! Only the ground and the old trees are left—the old linden trees under which we played, where we used to gather the tiny round nuts and eat the sweet brown kernels that ripen in September!
Once when Sister was a little thing, perhaps four or five years old, and an aunt, in telling her Bible stories, started to make some explanation about God, Kate interrupted her in a superior way with, “Oh, yes, I know God—he lives over there,” pointing to a meadow opposite our house. Astonished, Aunt Kate inquired further, when the child added:
“He’s got white hair and wears a long coat; he walks around there when it’s getting dark.” She meant an old man with a white beard and flowing locks who, like Old Grimes, wore a “long gray coat all buttoned down before.” His unusual appearance as he came and went in the hay-meadows had appealed to the child’s imagination, and she had settled to her own satisfaction that he was God!
An experience of my own, some years later however, illustrates the marked difference in our minds and temperaments—the one given to definite, concrete ways of thinking, and to settled convictions which satisfy her, however inadequate they may seem to others; the other, at that time, to vague, even mystical interpretations. And a similar tendency exists to-day in our attitudes where temperament and personal bent are concerned: One spring, going to a sheltered strip in our yard where we had previously transplanted wild flowers from the woods, I found a pale blue hepatica in bloom. I remember the directness with which the flower spoke to me. Something in its gem-like beauty and its completeness touched me peculiarly; my eyes filled with tears. I hesitate to write it, but it seemed almost as though the flower whispered to me, “God.” It was an exquisite moment. The beauty and purity of that flower spoke to my soul, and for a brief while I had a conception of Divinity that made the day and hour memorable.
To my mother I am primarily indebted for my love of nature. She used to take us to the cowslip woods every spring, and later to the Wintergreen woods. We would begin coaxing to go weeks beforehand. Something sweet and tender stirs at the thought of our excursions to those distant moist woods in the early spring days. With what eagerness we started off, Mother as eager as any of us! How we ran across lots, climbed rail fences and a stone wall, peeped into deserted barns, traversed meadow after meadow, till we came to the swampy woods where the gay flowers grew! It was dark and wet and mysterious in those woods; we knew them only as the cowslip woods; other woods we frequented at other times of the year, these only in the cowslip days. I liked the crackle as we gathered the plant for “greens.” We even ate the bitter buds raw. Often we would slip from the mossy, decaying logs into the brown pools; we always returned home with squeaking shoes, wet feet, full baskets, and happy hearts.
Mother used to go wading with us, too. Taking our luncheon, we would follow the winding creek along the willows a mile or more till we came to a little grove, a sort of natural park, with an island and a dam, and a big swimming hole on one side of the island. Brother, who had been to Niagara Falls, called this Goat Island; the water that went over the dam was Niagara; and the grove was Prospect Park. Many a time he has lain in his little bedroom, his door and ours open, and recounted to Sister and me his visit to Niagara, always getting excited and waxing eloquent, and seeming to see it all over again, as he talked to his willing listeners till sleep overtook them.
“Down to the dam”—there some of our sweetest childhood hours were spent, Mother, one with us, wading the stream, teaching us the names of the flowers, and telling us what was “good to eat.” When she was in doubt about a certain thing, and so would caution us, I was pretty sure to taste it, thus finding out for myself that many a thing is good to eat at which others looked askance. Some Eves begin early to taste forbidden fruit.
Up the Ditch Bank was another favourite place for our picnics—a high grassy bank running along a feeder, and farther up a big round pond on one side of the bank, and a long stretch of marshy creek below on the other. From the bank, across a precarious bridge we got into “Groom’s Woods,” where the wake robins grew, and the large white trilliums, Dutchman’s breeches, squirrel corn, crinkle root, spring beauties, anemones, hepaticas, blood roots, and mandrakes. Mother taught us these names, and the names of what few birds we knew—robins, goldfinches, humming birds, and orioles, chiefly. Each year in cherry-blossom time, Mother would say, “The orioles are here again.”
I had a goldfinch in a cage for a time, I called it a wild canary, and grew much attached to it, but it soon died, and after that I never cared to have another bird. I had one cat that I loved, too; his name was Nimrod. He got so old a neighbour took him away. They told me what was going to happen, but when I heard the gun-shot, far away, though I had braced for it, I was nearly frantic. I could never bear to have it mentioned after that, and loathed the man who did it. Children’s griefs are about little things, but they are not little griefs. I feel sorry for the child who suffered some of the things I remember. Mother used to say,
“Poor Nimrod’s dead, he’s run his race,
No other cat can fill his place.”
And no other cat ever did. I have never cared for cats since. Cats came and went, there was always one at home; they multiplied as cats have a way of doing, but after Nimrod’s death I was indifferent to them. I had one dog, too—one cat, one bird, one dog, and ever after eschewed all pets. A little yellow dog came to our house once—from heaven, I guess. We called him Ponto—such a big name for such a roly-poly dog! Æolus would have suited him better, for we knew not whence he came, nor whither he went, months later, after having endeared himself to us all. He came the night I was brought home with a broken arm, and was such a dear companion during my six weeks in splints that I grew inordinately fond of him. Rheumatism attacking the arm caused me more suffering than did the fracture itself. Ponto would cry when I cried, putting up his paws so imploringly that, just to hear him take on, I’d stop crying in earnest, only to cry louder in make-believe. How piteously he wailed! I would get ashamed of myself for enlisting his ever-ready sympathy. He left so mysteriously that we found no trace of him. One of the desires of my heart for a year or two was to have Ponto back. I believe I used to pray for his return. “Prayer is the soul’s sincere desire,” and my soul surely longed for Ponto.
Another love of mine, a less responsive one, was my big willow tree. It was only one of many trees along the creek, but oh, the difference to me! Cows grazed in the pasture near by; spearmint grew in patches along the path; the water flowed quietly. It was about ten minutes’ walk from home, but I was in another world when there. Seated in the heart of the old tree, I looked out upon a scene commonplace enough to the eye—level fields and houses and distant drumlins, but ah, what inner visions! What happy hours I have spent ensconced in that old willow! Just a little climb (for I never could really climb a tree—I was too afraid of getting up high), and there I sat, a queen on her throne. Safe in the tree I was not afraid of the cows. There I read and sang, recited poetry, and dreamed dreams.
“I am monarch of all I survey,” I usually began with—the place really belonged to me. The old farmer who came after his cows every night thought he owned the land, but I knew and the old tree knew who was the real owner. For years, as a child and a girl, I kept tryst with this tree; and for years only the cows and I knew just where it was that I went when I stole away “to the willows,” for I guarded the exact spot jealously. Often in going past it with others, I have feigned indifference, lest someone note its natural seat. I wanted it all to myself. I used to feel uneasy when I had to climb down, about supper-time; for the cows, eager for their own supper, came near the bars and insisted on coming close to me. Although my heart beat wildly at their approach, I would try to brave it out and look them down as I had heard one should do. On they always came, bland and peaceable. Facing them as long as I could, ashamed to show fright, even to cows, I finally had to cut and run, and then how chagrined I felt! Once in running from them, in my hurry to get under the fence, I flung my book ahead of me, and it went into the creek—my beloved Cathcart’s Literary Reader! To this day its stained leaves and warped cover remind me of the fright I got from the harmless, curious cows.
“Oh, aren’t they cute, they must be twins,” was a remark Sister and I often heard, long before we knew what twins really meant. Mother would follow such remarks with, “No, there’s eighteen months’ difference between them.”
We thought “twins” must be something pretty nice, and learned to feel the disappointment that we saw on the faces of strangers when Mother set them right. Once at camp-meeting we were playing together, when some ladies stopped us asking, “Little girls, are you twins?” Mother was not near. Kate and I looked at each other and knew that our time had come to be twins. With one accord we nodded yes, and had some few minutes of unalloyed pleasure. Days later, while playing in our tent door, the same lady and another passed. Pausing and noting us as we sat with our big wax dolls (they, too, dressed just alike) the one lady told the other that we were twins.
“Oh, no, there’s eighteen months’ difference between them,” said Mother, sitting near.
“But they told me they were twins,” insisted the lady. We were covered with confusion; tears, chidings, shame, and repentance followed. Though I am not sure whether at that time we knew what twins really meant, still we knew very well that we were not twins.
When we were perhaps ten and eleven years of age, one of our schoolmates, a child in a destitute Irish family living in the west part of the village, died of scarlet fever. They lived in the “haunted house” on the hill—a house near which we never ventured, though Mother had repeatedly assured us there was no such thing as a haunted house. Now, however, because of the fever, one would have thought we would have still kept our distance. But hearing of the child’s death, Sister was bound to go there. The dead always had a strange fascination for her; she wanted to feel the corpse—the last thing I wanted to do. At noon Kate made me go with her to that house. Other children accompanied us. Awe-struck, we crept up the hill; we glanced furtively at the broken shutters of the windows from which a ghostly arm was said often to beckon. Such poverty and squalor we had never before come in contact with. We filed past the body of our little schoolmate (Kate touched the marble forehead), awed by the presence of Death, and uneasy at what we knew was wrong. If the ghosts of the Board of Health of to-day could have antedated themselves and walked there, what consternation would they have felt at the presence of those children in the fever-stricken precinct!
The bereaved mother howled hysterically. An elder sister told us they had no underclothes to put on the dead child. Kate marched me home, enjoining strict secrecy. Moved by the poverty and grief we had seen, with one accord we stole upstairs and purloined a suit of our best underclothes, secreting them till after dinner, when we ran with them to the house of mourning, intending then to hurry back to school. I can see now the trimming on that little white petticoat that we stole from ourselves; we hesitated, it was such a pretty petticoat; but the need was urgent, and, somehow, we thought it must be the very best that we give to the dead child.
The family welcomed us effusively, blessing us, or asking Holy Mary to, as they immediately put our offerings to use; and still we lingered on. Presently they asked Kate to go with them to the burial, bribing her with a nice long drive; before I knew it, it was all settled. Kate ordered me to stop my opposition, she was going to that funeral. She also persuaded, or commanded, me to give her my hat, having lent hers to the sister. Then she made me promise to go back to school and say nothing; she would soon be home. The “last bell” had long since rung when, bareheaded, frightened, and alone, Miss Docility ran to school, tardily repentant over the whole strange proceedings. A wretched afternoon! As soon as school was out, I rushed up to the Post Office and in tears and penitence told it all to Father. I can see now his growing anxiety on learning of our visit to that fever-stricken house; and then of Kate’s having gone to the burial. He upbraided me for not coming to him at once, but knew that, as usual, Kate had dominated me.
“Run home and tell your mother not to worry,” he said; “we will soon get track of her and see that she gets home safe.”
Mother’s distress was pitiful. Tormenting herself and me, she rehearsed tales of Catholic funerals where they raced horses and got drunk—perhaps they would have a runaway—Kate might be thrown out—hurt, maybe killed—and perhaps we would all get the scarlet fever!
When Father came home to supper, no trace had yet been found of the funeral train, though a man had driven to the cemetery—the mourners were either driving home by some other road, or had gone on to a near-by city.
How the hours dragged! But the joy when Father came in bringing Kate, safe and sound, her elation over the experience only a little dampened by the fear of punishment! But she escaped it that time; and we all escaped the fever!
Although I had had to drop the study of music in early girlhood, music continued to be an important part of our home life. Other boys and girls in our street used to gather round our organ in the winter evenings, or sit on the veranda in summer, and sing till we had to stop for hoarseness, the neighbours often calling to us for this and that favourite. “Gathering up the Sea Shells,” “Pass under the Rod,” “Jamie’s on the Stormy Sea,” “O, Fair Dove,” “We’d Better Bide a Wee,” “I’ll Be All Smiles To-night, Love,” “Then You’ll Remember Me,” “Juanita”—a heterogeneous repertoire, the list seems interminable. There were certain favourites we would get Father to sing—“Bonnie Doon,” “The Sword of Bunker Hill,” and “My Susanna”—songs inseparably linked with home and those happy days.
I used to sing Father to sleep Sunday afternoons. No matter how many other songs I introduced, I always had to sing Longfellow’s “Bridge,” and “The Day Is Done.” I was annoyed if he asked for the latter before the day was done. I liked best to sing it as the afternoon light began to fade and barely come in at the west window, just enough for me to trace the notes.
Sometimes of a Sunday evening an aunt and uncle would ask for more lively songs than those I chose, for there was a long period when I steadfastly refused to sing secular songs on the Sabbath. At their request, I would evade and substitute; but if their insistence became too pronounced to be set aside, I would refuse point blank. In my unregenerate days there had been a time when I had sung “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” “Nancy Lee,” “Putting on the Style,” “Father, Come Down with the Stamps,” and such worldly things, but later the little Puritan was shocked to be asked to desecrate the Sabbath with such levity. They learned to cater to my strait-laced notions. I am afraid I was a not very pleasant person to deal with when a question of what I considered the fitness of things was involved. (Perhaps I am not even now.) I strongly suspect I was a self-righteous little prig for several years. At a later period one of the schoolboys described me to a newcomer in the town as “a nice girl, only such a prim little Methodist.” Not many weeks later, that girl and I were laughing in great glee over the description which, though it had once been true, was then hardly applicable; but I was still living on the reputation of a past phase of religious emotion.
We had a song called “Fire Bells Are Ringing,” a dramatic account of a fire on a wild winter night, the chorus ringing out with repeated cries of “Fire!” One windy night in February as Sister and I were at the organ singing this with all the dramatic power we could summon, the wild night putting us in the mood, Father, who had been in the kitchen popping corn, came running in shouting “Fire!” even louder than we were. Smiling, we sang on with redoubled energy, pleased that we had put him in the spirit of acting, too. He rushed around the room frantically shouting, “Fire! I tell you! Girls! do you hear?” Louder and more dramatic grew our efforts, and louder grew his cries until, a still more desperate tone in his voice, and the words, “Girls! Get me my coat, quick!” finally made us understand he was in earnest. Mother, too, had thought him fooling and there he was, excited as he always got at the alarm of fire, almost in despair of making any of us take him seriously!
It was a house on the street above. A fierce conflagration was under way. With the high wind, the adjoining house of a neighbour was endangered, and we had an exciting time helping our friends gather together valuables and other belongings, though luckily the fire did not spread. Ah! the cruel, relentless sight of that burning home! What if it was “the meanest man in town” whose house was burning down—everyone pitied him that wild night when they saw the pitiless flames.
We never associated with the neighbours on our right, except to be civil to them (and I to borrow their novels by Mary Jane Holmes—whenever I could without the knowledge of my parents). The man was coarse and illiterate, his wife a silly, slovenly, red-haired woman who would sit on her husband’s lap on the doorstep in full view of passers-by. But our left-hand neighbours, though shiftless and lawless, were interesting and likeable. Great borrowers, always borrowing, they would keep our belongings till we had to go after them. I would feel chagrined to have to ask for our own flatirons, or tack-hammer, or chopping-knife, when we needed them, but Jean, the witty daughter, would relieve my embarrassment by her ready assurance: “Certainly, Miss Genie, you are welcome to the irons; keep them as long as you like—we’ll come after them when we need them again.”
Formerly there had been a picket fence between our yard and theirs, along which the “myrtle” grew, and a board fence farther back, between the gardens; but, little by little, first the board fence disappeared, later the picket fence—whenever they got out of kindling wood they would take a board here, a picket there (usually early in the morning, or late at night). In time both fences were down, and only the “myrtle” in front and the pie-plant bed and berry bushes in the rear marked the division between our yards.
Mother would try shaming them out of it by wondering (to them) who could be carrying off our fence boards, and the wily Jean would reply, “It’s a shame, Mrs. Arnold, such people ought to have something done to them,” when perhaps that very morning Mother had seen her slip out, knock off a picket or two, and hustle with it into the woodshed. But the whole family had a way with them that was irresistible, and they were kindness itself when any one was sick or in trouble.
A slack housekeeper, the mother of the family, proud as Lucifer, was a remarkable character. She reared a large family, all “smart as whips,” but inclined to waywardness of one kind and another—the boys handsome and debonair, but profane and given to drink, yet more gentlemanly when drunk than many are when sober. Although we lived near them all their lives, the young men never spoke to Sister and me after we reached our ’teens without prefixing our names with “Miss,” and lifting their hats. If they stood at the wood-pile (perhaps sawing some of our fence-boards!) when we went to the well, they would bid us a courteous good morning, always cutting short their profanity, if indulging in it at the time.
I admired their chivalrous manners, their good looks, and their witty talk, even though knowing less admirable things about them.
The father, a crafty man, with no visible means of support, lived mostly by his wits. He was handsome, and humorous in a droll way. Never lifting his hand to help his over-worked wife, he would yet say ingratiatingly, “Mother, I don’t like to see you work so hard—we are not worthy of it.” And she, knowing how lazy he was, how it was all talk, would beam on him, proud of his good looks—the handsome father of her handsome sons—pleased with the affectionate protestations that he shouted in her deaf ears. She never criticized him or her sons to others; but sometimes her lips would shut in an emphatic way and her eyes say unutterable things if she thought herself unobserved; but the face she turned to others was innocent of all this. How her eyes would shine as she watched her sons start out of the house, well dressed, with manly carriage, and that air of distinction that never wholly left them! and when they came home intoxicated, how fertile she was in resources to get them quietly out of sight; how apt in concealing the loquacity induced by a lesser degree of intoxication!
An incident in her earlier days put her on a pedestal in my regard. Jean, her daughter, a fiery girl with coal-black eyes and hair was witty and irresponsible, as I have said, but energetic and warm-hearted. The neighbours knew her to be capable of escapades of which her doting mother was innocent! More than once she had been seen creeping down the slanting veranda-roof and down the porch pillars, from which she dropped softly to the ground. But no one dared acquaint her mother with the fact. In the course of time Jean was missing. Her brother traced her to a neighbouring town, and going to the hotel where she and her lover were staying, so arranged it that when they came into the dining-room, there he sat confronting them!
Equal to the occasion, Jean, I’ll wager, showed no embarrassment, and though her brother was bursting with rage and shame, he, too, was mindful not to make a scene. But what a dinner it must have been! Yet I can imagine that Jean kept the conversation going in her inimitable way. Dinner over, she asked her brother when he was going home. “Just as soon as you can get your things packed,” Dick said significantly. Knowing the Norton blood was up, she made the best of it and returned with him. After that she stayed closely at home. People in general did not know of her elopement, nor of the fact that she was to become a mother. Both she and her mother kept secluded for months. I wish I knew just how old her mother’s youngest child was when Jean’s child was born. My impression is that he was at least three or four years old. Nevertheless, it is stated as a fact, and was generally believed in the village, that at the birth of Jean’s baby, Mrs. Norton, its grandmother, put the baby to her own breast, and, by sheer force of will causing the milk to flow, brought up the child at her breast! He always called her “Mamma,” and his own mother by her given name; and although after a time, the fact of his parentage was learned, the family pride was saved to a great degree. People tacitly accepted the child as Jean’s youngest brother, and he himself thought he was until quite a lad.
Not having learned of all this till years after it occurred, the impression it made upon me was far less pronounced than when I learned about a certain girl, nearer my own age, who “went wrong.” But I did not learn of this little tragedy till a year or two afterward, although when I did, I was so sorry for the girl that there was no room for blame, and I was glad to know that Mother, knowing it all along, had befriended her; I loved my mother the more for it. But how incredible that such a thing had happened to one I actually knew! I used to wonder how she could go on living and acting like other folk; how she could meet that young man on the street; how she could fulfil her daily tasks. Divining what she must secretly have suffered, I felt sure her keenest grief must come from knowing that she was not as good as people thought her. I used to wish that she knew I knew of it, and that Mother had known it all the time, and yet that we felt the same toward her. I was sure that would have been a comfort to her.
A boy in our neighbourhood, a gay, boastful, light-hearted boy, who was always whistling on the street, got into difficulties, became entangled with low companions, and a grave charge was made against him from which he was only partly exonerated. The first year I was away from home, in writing to me about it, Mother had said, “Howard has lost his whistle.” How significant that was! The merry-hearted boy was never the same after that. These and other revelations concerning townspeople I knew made a profound impression upon me. They were the beginnings of my plucking the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and I found it bitter. Every taste saddened me. The dispersion of every illusion was accompanied by a distinct pain. I think it must always be so for those who believe that persons and things are what they seem. The surface so smooth, so fair—incredible that beneath lie many diverse strata seldom or never seen. Outcroppings come as a revelation, and with the shattering of an ideal—inevitable sadness and pain!
One of my vivid childhood experiences comes to me here—that of being taken through the State Prison at Auburn, and to chapel services there, and how my throat ached as those hundreds and hundreds of men in convict garb filed in and took their places! The striped gray-and-black cloth for their suits was made at a woolen mill just outside our village. We sat in the gallery and looked down on the men. I have never forgotten the pain I felt, child that I was, at seeing such a mass of men branded with shame and crime, many imprisoned for life. I wonder if my sympathy and tolerance for wrong-doing were not generated by that early experience, when I pitied them so that there was no room to condemn.
Notes of piercing sweetness sounded through that vast auditorium as a convict played on a cornet the prelude to “Watchman, tell us of the night.” When they began singing I thought my heart would break. A part of the men sang the questions, then another body of them the answers, all joining in the refrain. Mother and all of us were in tears. Always after that, at home, when we would sing that piece, that moving scene would be vividly reproduced.
Chaplain Searle preached that day, and I remember (or think I remember) his beautiful, beneficent spirit as he talked to the men. (He used later to lecture in our village, and those impressions of him became blended with the earlier. One of his lectures was “The Sunny Side of Life in Libby Prison.”)
We saw the men march to dinner; saw their coarse fare, and peered into their bare cells; and a great pity rose within me for their blighted lives. To this day the sight of “Copper John”—the statue we see on the top of the prison, on driving in to Auburn—awakens the recollection of the painful emotions born that day when I first learned how hard the way of the transgressor really is.
About the only plays I ever saw, until I went away from home, were “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and “Ten Nights in a Bar Room,” played in our home town, and “East Lynne” in Syracuse. These were my only preparation for the appreciation and understanding of Booth’s “Hamlet,” which I saw my first year in Boston.
A mere child when “Uncle Tom” came to town, and too moved to do anything but cry openly, I was unmercifully tormented the next day at school by the older girls who, having witnessed my humiliation of the night before, jeered at and mimicked me. Curiously enough, many years later, while visiting in Worcester, Massachusetts, I encountered the star of this performance at close quarters: I was taken ill while there, and the landlady of my hostess was the “Topsy” of my early remembrance. When she learned that I had seen her as “Topsy,” she doubled her offices in my behalf: there was a distinct improvement in my toast and gruel, although her housekeeping was almost as “shifless” as “Aunt Ophelia” had complained of years before.
My first experience with remorse came when I was quite a little girl, on learning of the death of a schoolmate: One of the older girls, on seeing me weeping bitterly, looking at me coldly said, “Humph! you needn’t cry—you used to quarrel with her—you know you did.” As though I didn’t know it only too well! For years that girl’s twitting me of those irrevocable quarrels seemed the most unfeeling thing imaginable.
It was perhaps when I was sixteen that another schoolmate, going into a rapid decline, died of “consumption.” During that summer I went almost daily to brush her hair; she said I did not tangle it as others did. It was painful to see her wasting daily: that ominous cough, that sickly odour, and her pathetic hopefulness as her condition became more hopeless! But I had a strong sense of duty then. It was about the time, I suppose, that youthful altruism developed. Sometimes I would be so tired from work at home that I could hardly drag myself up the hill, and I dreaded the depressing environment. When she died they sent for me to dress her hair. She had requested it. That seemed more than I could do. (I have never been able to conquer my repugnance to touching a dead body.) But there was no way out of it. After the task was done, with which there was no one to help me except her brother, who was no help at all, I stayed and got supper for the invalid parents, and did other little things round the house, waiting for someone to come in who would stay the night. But no one came. I could not leave those helpless parents alone, so sent word home that I was going to stay, at the same time sending for a schoolmate to come and bear me company.
We had Louisa M. Alcott’s “Old-Fashioned Girl” to read, and proceeded to pass the night sitting up in the room next to the one where our dead schoolmate lay. The girl’s brother (the same who years before had bitten off the nose of my leatherhead doll), kept coming into the room and lamenting his sister’s death; then, going into the parlour, he would weep over the body, groaning and reproaching himself noisily for his past unkindness. The wildness of his grief, which came in paroxysms, was terrible. I pitied him, but it was a relief when he calmed down and went to bed.
Late in the evening the undertaker came and was alone in the parlour a long time. On coming out he asked who was going to stay over night. Lizzie and I told him we were. “But what grown person, I mean.” On learning that there was no one else, he scrutinized us a moment, then said to me, “If you will step in here, I will show you what I wish you to do.” Wondering, I followed him and learned that at midnight I was to remove the cloth from the face, moisten it in a solution, replace it, “taking care to press it well down on the eyes and around the nose and lips.” I have forgotten what else we had to do, but remember that I had to remove the folded hands from across the chest. (I did it by taking hold of the nightgown sleeves at the wrist. How startled I was at the spring the arms gave as I let go the sleeves!) He added that if I did it at midnight, and again at three or four o’clock in the morning, it would answer.
I have done much harder things since, but never remember undertaking anything that seemed more of an ordeal than that was then—our dead schoolmate, my shrinking at the feel of a corpse, the mere staying up in this remote house that night, no neighbours within call, we two girls, with the sick parents and the remorse-stricken brother—no one to give us moral support—small wonder that I quailed! But it had to be done.
My companion, less self-contained, and terrified on learning what was required, began to be hysterical. It was not easy to get her interested in the book, but we read on and on, taking turns through the long hours, our feverish excitement increasing as the dread hour approached. How loud the clock ticked! how every little sound about the house smote our ears! how furtively we kept glancing at the time, pretending not to be thinking of it! how our voices trembled! We both started in affright as the clock began to strike twelve! Lizzie held the lamp while I did as I had been instructed. Poor girls! They seem like someone else, not I and another. She trembled and nearly dropped the lamp; and when it was done, we almost ran from the room. It was no vulgar fear of the corpse; it was the general gruesomeness, our loneliness, and all that—the uncanny, tiny little mother, a mere skeleton; the Quilp-like father—everything added to our shuddering dread.
No sooner had we closed the creaking folding-doors and were back in the sitting-room than my companion, heaving a sigh of relief, said, “Now let’s go and have something to eat.” I could have screamed outright—“Eat now! after that experience!” My hands felt contaminated, even after repeated washings. I begged her to wait awhile. So Miss Alcott still diverted us till I felt I could go and eat. After that we grew cheerful, even hilarious, and then felt guilty for laughing in that house of mourning.
Long hours passed in talking and reading till we had to go in that dread room again. Finally morning came, and with it a neighbour who relieved us. Going home in the early dawn, the queer look of the quiet streets, the physical weariness, combined with the night’s experiences, made me feel years older. Stealing up the steps at home and creeping into the hammock on the veranda, I slept until the opening of doors and windows in the house announced the family astir.
Perhaps a year after the death of this girl, another schoolmate died of the same disease—a brilliant, beautiful girl with smouldering dark eyes, a girl of great promise, who had made a brave fight for life.
Her mother, who was given to doing things in a theatrical way, asked four of us girls to be honorary pall-bearers—to dress in white and follow the casket in and out of the church.
At the house the general gloom and our own grief had been a strain on us, but as we got into the carriage we calmed down from our weeping and were trying to get in condition to face the ordeal at the church when, just as we were driving through the main street, without any warning, one of us broke into laughter! Two others followed in sympathy, the fourth girl looking so disgusted that it made us laugh the more. Finally she gave way, too, and we were all in a state of uncontrolled, unreasoning mirth!
Although the carriage was closed, we feared the driver would hear us, or people in the street catch a glimpse of us. Our efforts at self-control were painful in the extreme. What would Ruth think if she could know of our conduct? But everything we tried to say only made matters worse. When the carriage drove into the churchyard, we were still in a pitiable plight, and how we ever mastered ourselves enough to step out and walk past the by-standers and on into the church behind the casket is something I marvel at even yet. But we had had our escape-valve, and now everything was done “decently and in order.” Long after that, we thought with remorse of our conduct, not understanding how blameless we were—how wrong it was to subject a group of impressionable girls to such an emotional strain.
I recall some by-word meetings which I think had some share in my development at a plastic period. They were conducted by the wife of the Presbyterian minister, their object being to help us refrain from the use of slang. That minister’s wife seems to me, even yet, the most beautiful woman I ever saw—tall, slender, with a queenly carriage, the smoothest, creamiest skin, bewitching dimples, jet black hair and eyes, and slender white hands.
On the street she wore a heavy veil, and when she lifted it as she came into the meetings, it was like the unveiling of a beautiful statue. She had a silvery voice, so different from any voice I had heard. In fact, she seemed a little too bright and good for everyday life. We children idolized her. Some of our playmates would not go to her meetings, and spitefully told us she was “proud”; wore a veil to preserve her complexion; never ate butter; and nearly starved herself to keep slender; but, resenting these rude charges against our divinity, we continued her willing devotees.
How good she used to talk to us! She began her prayers with “Dear Father,” praying easily as she stood before us, as though talking to a loved parent. She listened to our confessions of what by-words we had been betrayed into saying during the week, smiling brilliantly at times, looking grieved at other disclosures, and sometimes shocked, but always encouraging us to try harder the next week. The by-words permitted were, “Oh!” “Oh, my!” “Oh, dear!” and “Oh, dear me!”—these with varying intensity were the legitimate outlets for the various experiences and emotions of our lives! All others we must strive to keep from saying, “with the aid of our Heavenly Father.” I think “Grief!” was the word with which I kicked over the traces the oftenest; but her reproving smile was not a hard punishment; and it was such a delight to see her approval when we could make a good confession. It was an excellent influence she shed, not the least of which was due to her beauty. My aversion to slang (except when “right off the bat”) is probably due to those early by-word meetings.
Although the hands of this woman strongly appealed to me by their beauty and delicacy, my mother’s appealed more powerfully—the whole woman in her seems typified in her hands. Not small, nor especially white, they are well-formed, and, in spite of a life filled with work, are soft, yet firm, strong, capable, and tender. Even as a child I seemed aware of her emotion, as well as her strength, in them. I used to like to clasp them—such a warm, sustaining grasp! And I liked to open them and look at the palms. She has a hollow palm (something like my own), and all the mounds are full and elastic—a warm, soft, brooding handclasp peculiarly her own. In my emotional nature I am more like Mother, in mental make-up more like Father. Sister’s hands are more like Father’s, yet her physical type in general, and her mental, is more like Mother’s. From Mother she and Brother get their fairer skin, while mine is the brunette shade, like Father’s. How mysterious it all is! How complex!—“Mate and make beget such different issues!”