“I feel that I owe you an apology,” he began persuasively and courteously, “for having let slip that chance remark about a relative of yours, even so very far distant. I would not have said it, of course, if I had dreamed that any member of her family....” Up to this point he had used the same sort of voice and tone that he had employed after church that morning, but now he suddenly dropped into another tone, quite different. I had a divination that it was not only quite different from any inflection he had used, but also not at all what he had had the intention of using. “I try to be fair ... to be tolerant ... to be forgiving, but really I can never forget the....” (it was as if a wave of lava had burst up out of the smiling pleasantness of his agreeable manner) “I simply can’t express to you the blighting, devastating effect she had on me, young, sensitive, emotional and ardent as I was at that time!”
He started at the violence of his own voice and glanced quickly around him as if to see whether any one else had heard it. And then he looked intensely annoyed by his own gesture.
“You are probably assuming that I refer,” he went on more quietly, but still pressingly (it was as if for some reason he quite cared to influence my unimportant opinion), “that I refer to her dictatorial assurance that she knew better than any one else how things ought to be run. Of course you must have heard plenty of stories of her overbearing ways. But that is not the point; no, although she was a hard parishioner on that account for a young clergyman struggling with the administration of his first parish. What came back to me, in a wave of bitterness as I stood up to preach to-day, was the remembrance of the peculiarly corrosive vein of irony, with which she withered and dried to the root any play of poetry or emotion in those about her. So far from feeling any natural, human sympathy with ardent youth, she had a cold intolerance for any nature richer or more warmly colored than her own. She made it her business to drop an acid sneer upon any expression of emotion or any appeal to it; and a life-long practice in that diabolical art had given her a technique of raw, brutal roughness, guaranteed to hamstring any spontaneity of feeling, any warmth of personality. I could quote you dozens of such poisoned shafts of hers.... Here’s one that came into my mind as I stood again in that pulpit, where I first dedicated myself to the service of God.
“I can never forget her comment on the first sermon in which I let myself go into the fervor which was given me by nature. It was an appeal for foreign missions, a cause always dear to my heart. I was carried away by my feelings, and fairly poured out my soul to my listeners. I have always considered that to be my first real sermon, the first time I felt sure of my Vocation. Afterwards, as I stood in the robing room, faint with the reaction after my emotion, I heard some one just outside the door say, ‘Well, Aunt Almera, what did you think of the sermon?’ And what do you think her answer was! She said, ‘Oh, I like to see anybody enjoy himself as much as that young man did.’”
This unexpected conclusion brought to me such a sudden horrifying desire to laugh that I felt quite shaken by the necessity to curb it. And it was essential not to let it be seen. For he had wound himself up again to a heat which astonished me. It was as if he had meant casually to show me an old scar, and had found to his surprise that the wound was as raw and smarting as ever.
“Why,” he cried, “she all but drove me wholly out of preaching, at the very outset of my career, sitting there as she did, Sunday after Sunday, fixing that cynical aged eye on me. You can’t know ... I hear that you have been brought up, luckily for you, outside of this deadly New England atmosphere.... You can’t imagine how it kills and freezes all the warmth and color and fire out of life to have such a ... if I hadn’t escaped out of it to....”
“I’m afraid I’ve been brought up mostly in a New England atmosphere,” I said, beginning to feel very cross and prickly.
As if struck by something in my tone, he now looked at me very hard. I don’t know what he saw in my face ... perhaps a family resemblance of expression ... but he suddenly seemed to come to himself with a start. He said abruptly, with an expression of extreme annoyance once more on his face, “I beg your pardon for bringing all this up. I can’t think what in the world made me!” and turned away with a noticeable lack of suavity and grace of manner.
Once I was taken to see an old Irishwoman who had come from Ireland as a young girl, just after the great famine in ’48, and had gone to work for Great-grandmother, who was then sixty-three years old. She told me this story, in her thick, thick early-nineteenth-century brogue, which I will not try to reproduce here: “There was a pretty girl, young and happy-looking, that lived up the road with her father, a poor weak rag of a man with a backbone like a piece of string. He’d married for his second wife a hard, hard woman. And when they found out the girl was in trouble, and her sweetheart that was the cause of it off up in the North Country for the winter to work as a lumberjack, didn’t the stepmother turn the poor girl out—yes, out like a dog. And old Mrs. Canfield—that was some kin to you, I forget what—where I was working, she went right out and brought her in, and kept her there safe and sound all winter, treating her as nice as anybody, letting her sew to pay for her keep, and helping her make the baby clothes. She’d go with her to church every Sunday, the girl right on her arm, and nobody daring to say a word, for fear of old Mrs. Canfield’s tongue, ‘For,’ she used to say, ‘let ’em say a word if they dare, and I’ll tell a few things I know about some folks in this town who had to be married in a hurry, and whose babies came into the world ahead of time.’ You see, she was so old she knew everything that had happened from the beginning almost. She’d say, ‘There’s lots worse things done every day in this town than anything Margaret’s done,’ she’d say, and nobody to answer her back a word.
“But everybody was thinking it very certain that the man would never come back, and if he did, he’d never own the child, nor have anything to do with Margaret, poor girl! You see, in those days there weren’t any mails that were carried ’way back off in the woods, and she neither had any word of him nor he of her. Well, old Mrs. Canfield knew what people were saying all right, and I could see that she was troubled in her mind, though she never lowered her high head by an inch. Margaret’s time drew near, and no sign from John Dawson that was away. But Margaret never lost her faith in him a minute. ‘When John is back,’ she’d say, just as sure of him as though they’d been married by the priest; but I could see old Mrs. Canfield look queer when she’d hear Margaret talking that way.