Poor mother! the theatre was to her imagination but a beautiful vestibule leading to a place of wickedness and general wrong-doing!
During those endless months, when I had each day to sit for hours and hours in one particular chair in a corner, well out of the way—sit so long that often when I was lifted down I could not stand at all, my limbs being numbed to absolute helplessness, I had two great days to dream of, to look forward to—Christmas and that wonderful 17th of March, when because it was my birthday all those nice gentlemen, with the funny hats and green collars, walked out behind the band. And I felt particularly well disposed toward those most amusing gentlemen who wore, according to my theory at least, their little girls' aprons tied about their big waists.
I did not like so well the attendant crowd, but then I could not be selfish enough to keep people from looking at "my procession" and enjoying the music that made the blood dance in my own veins, even as my feet danced on the chill pavement.
I always received an orange on that day from my mother, and almost always a book, so it was a great event in my life, and I used to get down my little hat-box and fix the laces in my best shoes days ahead of time that I might be ready to stand on some steps where I could bow and smile to the nice gentlemen who walked out in my honor. Heaven only knows how I got the idea that the procession was meant for me, but it made me very happy, and my heart was big with love and gratitude for those people who took so much trouble for me.
I had but two illusions in the world—Santa Claus and "my procession"—but, alas! on my eighth birthday, when in an outburst of innocent triumph and joy I cried to a grown-up: "Ain't they good—those funny gentlemen—to come and march and play music for my birthday?" I was answered with the assurance that I "was a fool—that no one knew or cared a copper about me—that it was a Saint, a dead and gone man, they marched for!"
All the dance went out of my feet, heavy tears fell fast and stood round and clear on the woolly surface of my cloak, and bending my head low to hide my disappointment, I went slowly home, where the chair seemed harder, the hours longer, and life more bare because I had lost the illusion that had brightened and glorified it.
At the present time, here in my home, there is seated in an arm-chair, a venerable doll. She is a hideous specimen of the beautiful doll of the early "fifties." She sits with her soles well turned up, facing you, her arms hanging from her shoulders in that idiotically helpless "I-give-it-up" fashion peculiar to dolls. With bulging scarlet cheeks, button-hole mouth and flat, blue staring eyes she faces Time and unwinkingly looks him down. To anyone else she is stupidity personified, but to me she speaks, for she came to me on my fourth Christmas, and she is as gifted as she is ugly. Only last birthday—as I straightened out her old, old dress skirt—she asked me if I remembered how I cried, with my face in her lap, over that first loss of an illusion—and I told her quite truly that I remembered well!
CHAPTER THIRD
I Enter a New World—I Know a New Hunger and we Return to Cleveland.
The experiences of the first two of my third group of years have influenced my entire life. Still flying from my seemingly ubiquitous father, my mother after a desperate struggle gained enough money to pay for our journey to what was then called the "far West"—namely, the southwestern part of Illinois. Child-fashion, I was delighted at the prospect of a change, and happy over the belief that I was going to some place where I could be free to go and come like other children, without dreading the appearance of a big, smiling man from any deep doorway or from around the next corner. To tell the truth, that persistent, indestructible smile always seemed an insult added to the injury of his malicious and revengeful conduct.