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.