SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
When the elders of our family could think of nothing else to worry about they put in their time to good advantage on little Cousin Maria Pearl Manley. Yes—Maria Pearl—that was really the poor child’s name, given in baptism. You can see that her troubles began early. That name was symbolical of what her life was to be, sharply divided between her mother’s family (they were the ones who insisted on the Maria) and her father’s folks, who stood out for the Pearl. Her father had died before she was born, and her mother lived only a few months after the baby came, and was so mortally ill that no one thought of naming the poor little girl. It was after her mother’s death, when the two hostile families could collect themselves, that the long struggle over the child began by giving her that name.
Thereafter she was Maria for six months of the year, the period when she stayed with the Purdons; and Pearl the other half-year, when she was with her father’s family, the Manleys. “The poor little tyke, not even a fixed name of her own,” my grandmother used to say, pitying the child’s half-yearly oscillations between those two utterly dissimilar houses “where there’s nothing the way it should be in either one!” The circle of compassionate elders used to continue, “Dear, dear! What can the poor little thing ever learn, with such awful examples always before her eyes.”
As I look back now, I must admit that such severe characterizations were really not due to the natural tendency of all elders to be sure that children are being badly brought up. Those two houses which formed the horizon of Maria Pearl’s life were certainly extravagant examples of how not to conduct life. The Purdon grandfather and grandmother and aunt were the strictest kind of church people (the kind who make you want to throw a brick through the church-windows), narrow, self-righteous, Old-Testament folks, who dragged little Maria (the “Pearl” was never pronounced inside their doors) to Church and Sunday-School and prayer-meeting and revivals and missionary meetings, and made her save all her pennies for the heathen. Not that she had very many to save, for the Purdons, although very well-to-do, were stingier than any other family in town. They loved money, it tore at the very fibers of their being to part with it, and they avoided this mental anguish with considerable skill. Although their competent “management” allowed them to live comfortably, there were few occasions which brought them to the point of letting any actual cash out of their hands. The dark, plain, well-fitting garments which clothed little Maria were never bought, but made over out of her grandmother’s clothes; the soap which kept her clothes immaculately clean had cost no money, but was part of the amazing household economies in which old Mrs. Purdon was expert and into which she introduced Maria with conscientious care. The child learned to darn and patch and how to make soap out of left-over bits of fat, and how to use the apple-culls for jelly and how, year after year, to retrim last season’s hat for this.
From morning till night she lived in a close, airless round of intensive housekeeping and thrift. She spread newspapers down over the rugs, so the sun should not fade them; she dried every scrap of orange peel to use as kindling, she saved the dried beef jars to use for jams, she picked berries all day long instead of playing, and then sat up late with Aunt Maria and Grandmother, picking them over and canning them, on the stove in the woodshed, to avoid litter in the kitchen. She always wore gingham aprons, even to school, which no other children did, and she was treated as though she had offended against the Holy Ghost, if she forgot to wash her rubbers and put them in their place in the closet under the stairs. She was rigorously held to a perfect performance of her share of the housework, making up her bed with the fear of the Lord in her poor little heart lest the corners be not square enough, poking desperately at the corner of the windows she washed and polished, and running her finger anxiously over the dishes she wiped to be sure they had that glass-smooth surface which only repeated rinsings in very hot water can give. Then when all was done, her reward was to take her seat in their appallingly neat sitting-room and, to the accompaniment of Aunt Maria’s reading aloud out of a church paper, to set tiny stitches in the stout, unbleached cotton of which her underwear was made. They were really dreadful, the six months she passed with her mother’s people.
But the other half-year was scarcely better, although she might have journeyed to another planet with less change in her surroundings. When the day came, the first of January, for her departure from the Purdon household, her solidly-constructed little trunk was filled with her solidly-constructed little clothes, her hair was once more rebraided to an even harder finish, her face was once more polished with the harsh, home-made soap, and her nails were cut to the quick. “It’s the last time the poor child will have any decent care, till she comes back,” Grandmother Purdon would say bitterly, buttoning up with exactitude the stout, plain warm little coat, and pulling down over Maria’s ears the firmly knit toque of dark-blue wool. They all went down to the station to make sure she took the right train, and put her, each of them separately, in the hands of the Conductor. They kissed her good-by, all but Grandfather, who shook hands with her hard. It was at that moment that Maria’s frozen little heart felt a faint warmth from the great protecting affection they had for her, which underlay the rigor of their training and which they hid with such tragic completeness.
The first day of the arrival at the Manley’s was always a dream of delight! To emerge from the silent rigidity of the Purdon house into the cheerful, easy-going, affectionate noise of the Manley home, to exchange the grim looks of Grandmother Purdon for the exuberant caresses of Grandmother Manley; to leave behind all stringent admonitions to put your wraps on a certain hook, and to be allowed to fling them down on the floor where you stood.... Little Pearl (she was never called Maria by the Manleys) felt herself rebounding into all the sunshine and good-nature, as a rubber ball rebounds from a hard stone wall. She flung herself around Aunt Pearl’s neck, and paid back with interest the “forty thousand kisses” which were the tradition in that home. She flung herself into play with the innumerable little cousins, who cluttered up the floor; for there was always a married aunt or two back home, with her family, while an invisible uncle-by-marriage tried somewhere in a vague distance, to get a hypothetical job. She flung herself into her bed at night joyfully reveling in the fact that its corners were not turned squarely, and that the pillow-case had last seen the wash-tub on about the same date that Aunt Carry’s husband had last had a job. It was a care-free dream to go to bed whenever she pleased—eleven o’clock if that suited her taste—with nobody to tell her to wash, or to brush her teeth, or comb her hair; and to lie there watching Aunt Carry and Aunt Pearl, who always sat up till midnight at least, putting their hair in curl-papers and talking about the way the neighbor next door treated his wife. This was life!
But already the very next morning the dream was not quite so iridescent, as with no one to wake her, she opened her eyes at twenty minutes of nine, and knew that she had to be at school at nine! She sprang up, shivering in the cold room (Grandfather Manley never could manage the furnace, and also there were periods when there was mighty little money to buy coal) and started to claw herself into her clothes. But always just at first she forgot the Manley ways, and neglected to collect everything she had taken off, and put it under her pillow, the only spot in which you could keep things for yourself in that comfortably communistic family. Her shoes were gone, her nice new calf-skin school shoes. She went flying out, comb in hand, tearing at the tangles in her hair, as she went, asking if anybody had seen her shoes. Aunt Carry, still in her nightgown, with a smeary baby in her arms, said, yes, she’d let her Elmer have them to run down to the grocery store to get some bread. Somehow they’d got out of bread and poor Aunt Pearl had had to go off to her work with only some crackers to eat. Surely little Pearl didn’t grudge the loan of her shoes to her cousin. The bread was for all of them, and Elmer couldn’t find his shoes, and anyhow one of them had a big hole in it and the snow was deep.