I
The girl Madelaine had been within three weeks of her eleventh birthday when Mrs. Theddon adopted her from the Corpus-Christi Orphanage.
If the child were precocious in a queer, matronly way, her clouded parentage and life at the Home were mainly responsible. She was intensely feminine and affectionate, fiercely maternal, all of which at first made for a certain distress when thrust out into the coëducational environment of the Springfield public schools with children of equal age.
Like some unmarried women, Mrs. Theddon was full of theories as to how a child should be reared. Yet the woman was neither bigoted nor maudlin. She had brains and common sense. If she held theories on child culture and child psychology, it was because she had evolved them from a shrewdness of observation when in contact with the offspring of affluent parents with whom she associated. There was no “private school nonsense” for her child therefore, until Madelaine was old enough to know the meaning and worth of exclusiveness. Beside, for a few years, Gracia Theddon wanted the little girl about her home and private tutors could never supply that academic atmosphere and class camaraderie which should be made chief among the heritages of adolescence.
So Madelaine went to the Forest Park school, and while the locality and its offspring were above normal, she stood out in her classes like an orchid in a thistle bed. She did careful, neat, thorough work and made friends. But she had no giggly age. No boys wrote asinine notes to her or tried to flirt with her. She shrank from participation in adolescent pranks.
At home she quickly absorbed the atmosphere of the Theddon household. She became an avid reader of everything in the big Theddon library. For hours at a time she lay stretched face downward along the window seat in the southeast corner of that splendid room, absorbed in the classics. And three years passed like white magic.
During her term in the ninth grade Madelaine grew perceptibly. It was an awkward time but never wholly distressing. At fifteen she was almost as tall as her foster-mother. Then she began to grow willowy, lithe and graceful.
She had few companions even then, and did not seem to cultivate them.
“Honestly, I wish the child would laugh once in a while,” Mrs. Theddon told a friend, calling one afternoon. “But somehow it doesn’t occur to her to laugh. She acts as if the world were too big, wonderful and mystic to contain such a thing as humor.”
“Then you’re satisfied with her?” the caller suggested.
“Satisfied? My dear woman, there are times when I’m afraid I’ll be unable to satisfy her! That sounds strange, doesn’t it? But the girl’s faith in every one and everything is so absolute and her ideals so quaint that I almost fear to have her grow further. I try to tell her, to pave the way for disillusion, but I don’t seem to get results. She looks at me so hurt and incredulous that I feel as though I were defiling Eden.”
This incredulity of Madelaine’s worried her mother far more than the latter cared to admit. Likewise the girl’s instinctive estheticism and reserve. One summer evening, as they strolled the length of Sumner Avenue, Mrs. Theddon expounded her philosophy of life for the first time aggressively, to her daughter.
“Madelaine, dear,” she declared, “I want you to think of this world and look upon life as a long, long, series of interesting and constructive experiences. All of them may not be pleasant. But always they must be constructive. Whether you make them interesting depends entirely upon yourself, your capacity for participation in them.”
“Participation!” repeated the girl. “What do you mean by participation?”
“I mean plunging in and enjoying them for all they’re worth, taking part in everything—your own accorded part—to the utmost, regardless of how small that part may be. Don’t shrink from anything. Never be that most distressing and unfinished product—a “wallflower” or spectator. Plunge in—taste, feel, enjoy, laugh and love. Be in the center of things, never on the edge. Of course, I don’t meant perverted things, activities or pursuits that offend decency or violate self-respect. And there is never excuse for stirring a sewer, in order to prove it’s foul.”
“I understand, mother dear.”
“What I want to impress upon you, and the greatest heritage a parent can pass on to any child, is this: It’s your world, yours to enjoy, yours to live in, play in, work in, get the most from. Every healthy activity exists to be experienced and not to be watched while others experience. Every social accomplishment, every art, every science, every hobby, has come about and is enjoyed because normal, healthy people in the past have found pleasure, enjoyment and improvement in them. If they have done so—you may likewise. Life has been given to you to get your portion. But Life can’t seize you by the shoulders and drag you in. You must go in for yourself. The deepest wrong I can conceive a grown person doing to a younger is implanting within his or her subconscious mind that horrible ‘You mustn’t!’ It’s the blackest handicap a child can acquire. My creed is ‘Do!’ Never doubt yourself. Never believe you’re any different from any girl or woman who has ever lived on earth. Because you’re not. Yet you’re not commonplace, either! The greatest self-crime is self-depreciation. Remember that all people believe in you unless you doubt yourself. They take you not at somebody else’s appraisal but solely at the estimate you place upon yourself. Timid people are only those with half-developed souls. I don’t mean by not being timid that you should be noisy or obstreperous. A child’s home influences should curb or counteract hoydenism. But hold up your head, be positive, never fear to look at life courageously, to see it clearly and see it whole. The world is yours, my dear, and all the men and women in it—for your enjoyment and boon companions.”
“You make me afraid when you talk to me like that—and yet you make me glad!” the girl responded wonderingly.
“I’ve learned it by bitter experience, dear—my philosophy. I’ve told you something of my story: how I started life a poor girl in a village up in Vermont. My father and mother were never able to see beyond the village sky line. Life and the outside world terrified them. Forever they were telling me ‘You can’t!’ Doubting themselves, of course they doubted their daughter. From ‘You can’t!’ it was a step to ‘You mustn’t!’ I loved a man at eighteen as dearly as I ever loved anybody. He was a smart young man, with many excellent qualities. In those days he was considered so smart I doubted that I could be his wife. It sounds strange. But I did. I thought he needed a cleverer woman than myself to be that wife successfully. I told him so. It broke his heart. Then my father and mother died suddenly—within a year of each other. I had to make my way alone; earn my living. I went to Boston. Always I found myself a wallflower, a spectator, while others played and enjoyed. I wanted to play and enjoy also. But I’d been taught to believe that ‘nice girls’ didn’t do anything but sit and fold their hands. Then, praise God, a man came and took me up into an exceeding high mountain.”
“Captain Theddon?”
“No. Not Captain Theddon! He was a man from Virginia. He loved me dearly. For a year I was almost too happy to move. It seemed the world about me was made of frail glass—pink glass. If I moved it would crash. This man took me in hand, I say. In a year he undid most of my vicious training. He opened a new heaven and a new earth by getting me to accept exactly what I told you a moment ago—to be a participant in everything instead of a spectator. He taught me the simple truth that shyness is only the fear of ridicule—but that people who ridicule are either deficient themselves or coarsely conceited. Therefore they are not deserving of attention at all. And under his tutelage, for two short years I was deliriously happy!”
“Why didn’t you marry him, mother dear?”
“He had to go to California—because of tuberculosis. He died out there.”
The girl was shocked. Then she observed softly:
“I should have thought it would have broken you too, mother dear.”
“It would have broken me, Madelaine, if Hugh hadn’t taught me, along with the rest, to consider every experience that came to me as sent for some grand and constructive purpose. I think he knew he was going to die before he left me. Just a few moments before he boarded his train he said, ‘The greatest experience of your life, dear girl, lies just ahead. If you fail to apply it constructively, you’re not worthy of it at all.’ Poor me! I thought he meant our marriage if he recovered. He meant his own death—my loss of him. It came to me—his last message—after he was only a memory. It was hard to see anything constructive in that horrible disappointment. But I did. I plunged into life, making it give me something to outweigh my grief. I don’t mean I became frivolous—I simply refused to be morbid—for Hugh’s sake at first—then for the sake of Life itself. I saw that my loss had been sent to deepen my life, to make me sensitive to others who had suffered. I found out how richly one may live, whether it be in sunshine or in mist. And that philosophy now I want to pass along to you. To live, dear girl, just to live—for its own sweet sake—is a blessed, blessed privilege. But alas, so few know how to live. They go on the ‘I mustn’t’ policy, never stopping to reason out why. They merely exist—even in the simplest of life’s rôles. And I don’t want you to merely exist, Madelaine. I want you to get from beautiful Life every last fleck of sunshine and shadow. There’s no sorrow that can come to you, dear, that you can’t make beautiful. There’s no joy or happiness that you can’t make injurious and vicious. Never mind what your rôle in life is to be, dear, whether you become a great artist or the unsung wife of an unsung man, whatever your hands find to do, don’t only ‘do it with all your might’ but find some way to make it interesting. A sod hut on a prairie can be made as interesting as a gallery of Italian art—if you only look at it in the right light, making the utmost of yourself and materials. But to do that, you must be a part of those materials yourself—always a participant, sure of yourself, positive, constructive, analytical, intense, living each day to every one of the eighty-six thousand, four hundred seconds it contains.”
Gracia Theddon not only preached this sort of thing; she lived it—every one of the day’s eighty-six thousand, four hundred seconds—herself. Her home, her social life, her dress, her face,—she had paid a price for everything that she was and owned. And having paid the price, she saw that she had her “Value Received.”