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.”