The Diary of a Saint

by Arlo Bates

[IX]
SEPTEMBER

September 15. At last Kathie is gone. What with having dressmakers and seeing to her, and doing the shopping, and corresponding with the principal of the school, and all the rest of it, I have had my hands full for the last three weeks. I have enjoyed it, though; I suppose it is always a pleasure partaking of the moral for a woman when she can conscientiously give her whole mind up to the making of clothes. I do not doubt the delight of sewing fig-leaves together went for the moment far toward comforting Eve for leaving Paradise. I cannot now help smiling to see how entirely Kathie's fine scruples about breaking her vow not to come into the house were forgotten when I had a dressmaker here waiting to fit her frocks.

I feel a little as if I were trying to be Providence and to interfere in her life unwarrantably now she is gone and there is nothing more to do about it but to await the result. I have done what I thought best, though, and that is the whole of it. As Father used to say, it is not our duty to do the wisest thing, for we cannot always tell what it is, but only to be honest in doing what seems to us wisest. I hope she will do well, and I believe she will.

September 17. Cousin Mehitable writes me from Rome that she is sure I am tired of baby, and had better come over for a couple of months. I cannot tell whether she means what she says, or is only trying to carry her point. She has never had a child near her, and can hardly know how completely a baby takes possession of one. There are many things in the world that I should enjoy, and I should certainly delight in going abroad again, but baby has so taken the first place in my heart and life that everything else is secondary. I wonder sometimes whether after a woman has a child of her own she can any longer give her husband her very warmest love. Perhaps the law of compensation comes in, and if men grow less absorbed in their wives the wives have an equal likelihood of coming to feel that the husband is less a part of their lives than the child. Only if a woman really loved a man—

September 18. It is a childish habit to break off in the middle of a sentence because one does not know how to finish it. I have been turning over the leaves of this book to see if I had done it often, and I have been amused and humiliated to find so many places where I have ended with a dash, like an hysterical schoolgirl. Yet I do not see just what one is to do when suddenly one finds a subject hopelessly too deep. Last night when I got to a place where I was balancing the love of a mother for her husband and for her child, I naturally realized suddenly that I had never had a child, and very likely never really loved a man. The love I had for George seems now so unreal that I feel completely fickle; although I believe I am generally pretty constant. I could not bear to think I am not loyal in my feelings. I have come to be so sure the George I was fond of never existed, though, that I can hardly have the same feelings I had before.

This is the sort of subject, however, which is sure to end in a dash if I go on with it, so it seems wiser to stop before such a catastrophe is reached.

September 19. To-day is Father's birthday. It is always a day which moves me a good deal. I can never be reminded of an anniversary like this without finding my head full of a swarm of thoughts. I cannot think of the beginning or the ending of Father's life without looking at it as a whole, and reckoning up somehow the effect of his having lived. This is the real question, I suppose, in regard to any life. He was to me so wonderful, he was so great a man, that I have almost to reason with myself to appreciate why the world in general does not better remember him. His life was and is so much to me that I find it hard to realize how narrow is the circle which ever even knew of him at all. His books and his decisions keep his name still in the memory of lawyers somewhat, and those who knew him will not easily forget; but after all this is so little in comparison to the fame he might have had.

How persistent is an old thought! I should have supposed this idea might have died long ago. Father himself answered it when he told Cousin Mehitable he was entirely satisfied if his part in the progress of humanity was conducted decently and in order; he was not concerned whether anybody knew he lived or did not know. "The thing is that I live as well as I can," he said, "and not that it should be known about. I shan't mind, Cousin Mehitable, whether anybody takes the trouble to praise me after I am dead, but I do think it may make some tiny difference to the race that I did my level best while I was alive."

I can see him now as he stood by the library fire saying this, with his little half whimsical smile, and I remember thinking as he spoke how perfectly he lived up to his theories. Certainly the best thing a man can leave to his children is a memory like that which I have of Father: a memory half love and half respect.