UNCLE ELLIS
I never saw my Uncle Ellis because he died before I was born, but I heard a great deal about him when I was a child. His stepdaughter married one of our fellow-townsmen, and lived next door to us when I was a little girl, and her mother, my great-aunt, Uncle Ellis’ third wife, lived with her. Whatever Cousin Ruth did not say about her stepfather, Aunt Molly supplied. The two women spent the rest of their lives hating him, and for his sake hated, distrusted and despised all men.
The gruesome impressions of married life which float through the air to most little girls, came to me from their half-heard and half-understood stories of Uncle Ellis. He had killed his first two wives, they said, just as much as though he had taken an ax to them, and only his opportune death had saved Aunt Molly from the same fate. His innumerable children—I would never venture to set down how many he had, all in legal marriage—feared and detested him and ran away from home as soon as they could walk. He was meanness itself, secret, sneaking meanness, the sort of man who would refuse his wife money for a wringer to do the family wash, and spend five dollars on a box of cigars; he would fly into a black rage over a misplaced towel, and persecute the child who had misplaced it, till she was ready to commit suicide; and then open his arms with a spectacular smile to the new baby of a parishioner. After mistreating his wife till she could hardly stand, she used to hear him holding forth in a boys’ meeting, exhorting them to a chivalric attitude towards women.
Aunt Molly died long ago, firing up to the last in vindictive reminiscences of her husband. Ruth is dead now, too, in the fullness of time. I am a middle-aged woman, and probably the only one now alive who ever heard those two talk about Uncle Ellis; and I had forgotten him. If he stayed at all in my memory it was with the vague, disembodied presence of a character in a book.
About a month ago, I accepted an invitation to speak at a convention in a town in the middle-west which I had never seen, but the name of which seemed slightly familiar; perhaps, I thought, because I had learned it in a geography lesson long ago. But when I arrived I understood the reason. It was the town where for many years Uncle Ellis had been pastor of the church. At the railway station, as I stepped down on the platform, one of the older women in the group who met me, startled me by saying, “We have been especially anxious to see you because of your connection with our wonderful Dr. Ellis Randolph. I was a young girl when he died, but I can truly say that my whole life has been influenced for good by the words and example of that saintly man.”
The elderly man beside her added, “You will find many here who will say the same. In the formative period of our town’s history he made an indelible impression for good.”
They took me to his church, where a large bronze tablet set forth his virtues and his influence. They showed me the Ellis Randolph Memorial Library. I was shown the public playground which he conceived a generation before any one else thought of such a thing. But what made the deepest impression on me were the men and women who came to shake my hand because I was Uncle Ellis’ niece, because they wanted to testify to the greatness of his value in their lives. The minister of the town, a white-haired man, told me with a deep note of emotion in his voice, that Dr. Randolph had done more than merely save his life; in his wayward youth he had saved his soul alive. The banker told me that he had heard many celebrated orators, but never any one who could go straight to the heart like Dr. Randolph. “I often tell my wife that she ought to be thankful to Dr. Randolph for a lecture on chivalry to women which he gave to us boys, at an impressionable moment of our lives.”
And the old principal of the school said, “Not a year goes by that I do not thank God for sending that righteous man to be an example to my youth. He left behind him many human monuments to his glory.”
What did I say to them? Oh, I didn’t say anything to them. I couldn’t think of anything to say.