Emancipation from the old teachings and beliefs came about gradually and painfully. When first assailed by doubts as to teachings and traditions formerly accepted unquestioningly, I had tried to talk them over with Mother, but her unreasoning faith irritated me. Unable to command my temper, I was narrowly and harshly critical; her devoutness, her intuitions, her faith all irritated me, counting for almost nothing with me then, when I wanted something to satisfy my reason; wanted to reconcile the conflict between orthodox teachings, and the truths of science as I was coming upon them in my studies. Moreover, I was tenderly attached to the Old Paths, and Mother’s manifestations of feelings I was trying to stifle only increased my intolerance.
The church members no longer rent the same pews year after year. Now when I go home I look in vain for the old families, or their representatives, in their accustomed places. Scattered here and there throughout the congregation, like lost sheep, I see a few of the brethren and sisters who in the early days sat with us “under the droppings of the sanctuary.” I would like to see them once again in the places that knew them in those long-gone days; would like to sit with Father and Mother in our own pew; join in the hymns, and once again feel at home in the old church; for, however far I have wandered from the old paths, they must always be sacred to me.
CHAPTER V “As Twig Is Bent”
The books one reads in childhood and youth are, of course, among the most potent formative influences of those periods. My post-Mother-Goose reading consisted largely of the Child’s Bible, later the Bible itself, and the goody-good Sunday-school books, two or three of Miss Alcott’s, and whatever else I could find in my browsings. How I have cried over the Elsie books and rejoiced over the Gypsy books! Mad-cap Gypsy Breynton and pious Elsie Dinsmore were real beings to me. Sunday afternoons I would read by the west window with the door leading upstairs at just a convenient distance, so that when I found my emotions getting the upper hand, I could at one step open the door, slip upstairs and weep in secret over the woes of my little heroines. I thought the others had no inkling what that sudden plunge meant, but my acute little sister soon learned, and one dreadful Sunday, when I was making a desperate move for the stairway before the torrent should burst, she called out mischievously, “Genie, what are you going upstairs for? It’s warmer down here.”
“Yes, Eugenia, it is too cold for you to sit upstairs,” Mother intervened. With this sudden centring of attention on me at such a crucial time, the clouds burst, the situation was revealed, and I was permitted to go up and have it out. Bitter were my tears. It was exceedingly painful to be seen thus moved. Such things should be suffered in secret. When, shamefaced, I returned to the sitting-room, Sister was not too deep in her book to shoot me a knowing glance, though she had evidently been instructed to hold her peace. After that I would feel the storm coming afar off. I learned to rise calmly; to open the door with less precipitation; sometimes even making an indifferent comment on leaving the room. So deliberate were my movements, I flattered myself that no one suspected I was withdrawing from the family circle in order to dissolve in tears. I would even open a bureau drawer in hopes they would hear the sound through the stove-pipe hole and think I had gone up after something. Oh, the poor, thin artifices of childhood! Looking back and seeing how pitiful they were, an added tenderness wells up within me for my parents who so wisely and kindly refrained from letting me see that my little devices were so ineffectual.
There was no village library, though a Temperance Club supplied a circulating one of which I availed myself till I learned to use the Academy library. Then, too, I was a great borrower of books, although we probably had more in our house than the average family in the town; these I read over and over. “Robinson Crusoe” and “The Arabian Nights,” I read surreptitiously in school. I revelled in “The Lady of the Lake,” and “Aurora Leigh.” I was wont to combine reading and housework to the detriment of the latter. While ironing sheets and towels I managed to read at the same time, with long waits between the movements of the iron—unless Mother came suddenly into the room, when I started up briskly, sometimes having to fold inside a scorched place where the iron had rested too long. Many a poem have I committed to memory at the ironing-board.
Father started to buy the American Cyclopædia when I was very young—a big undertaking, for they cost five dollars a volume. The volumes came slowly, but we rejoiced whenever a new one was added to the row. It was annoying enough, though, to step up to the book case and find that we had only got to O or P, when we needed volumes containing S or T.
As a girl I had a pastime of my own, a kind of mental book-collecting: Going along the streets I would say to myself, “What books will you have from this house?—you may have any three you choose.” Then the fun would begin. At Grandpa’s were “Timothy Titcomb’s Letters,” and “Bitter Sweet,” and a queer little book called “Aristotle’s Masterpiece”; at an uncle’s were Walton’s “Compleat Angler,” “Reveries of a Bachelor,” and “Lewie, or The Bended Twig”; at an aunt’s was “Right and Wrong, or She Told the Truth at Last”—a fascinating big, green-covered book that I used to weep over, pitying the heroine entangled in an intricate web of deceit. At another aunt’s were “Wells’s Science of Common Things” and “Sexual Science; or Love, its Powers and Uses,” by O. S. Fowler. I valued the “Science of Common Things” because it asked and answered questions about a lot of things I thought I ought to know, and did not know, and never could study out, even with the help of physics—always a hard study for me; and I liked the book of Fowler’s because it dealt with the alluring subject in a lofty and, as I thought then, scientific way. At still another aunt’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” and Byron’s Poems leaned confidingly against each other, except when I disturbed them. Bunyan was the favourite then, and for that matter is yet. At the homes of neighbours and friends were many coveted treasures—the Embury Poems, “Physiognomy and Signs of Character” (this I borrowed for months at a time), Moore’s Melodies, Longfellow’s Poems, Shakespeare, “Fern Leaves,” and many more. I thought one man in town very literary because he had all of E. P. Roe’s works; at one time “Barriers Burned Away” and “Opening of a Chestnut Bur” seemed wonderful productions, and (I may as well confess it) I adored the novels of Mary Jane Holmes. Though forbidden to read them, I borrowed them of our slatternly red-haired neighbour, devouring them on the sly. I read “Darkness and Daylight” twice or thrice, and five or six others by the same author. The only times I can remember Father’s voice raised in sternness to me were when he caught me absorbed in novels by that wicked Mrs. Holmes. (Mother told me he himself once sat up all night at a hotel to read “Lena Rivers,” and that he had wanted to name me “Lena.”)