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.”)