Our Philadelphia

by Elizabeth Robins Pennell

V

I recall more formal family reunions, above all the Golden Wedding, as impressive as a court function, the two old people enthroned at the far end of the front parlour, the sons and daughters and grandchildren approaching in a solemn line—an embarrassed line when it came to the youngest, always shy in the awful presence of the Grandfather—and offering, each in turn, their gifts. We were by no means a remarkable family, to the unprejudiced we may have seemed a commonplace one, my forefathers evidently having decided that leaving England for America was a feat remarkable enough to satisfy the ambitions of any one family and having then proceeded to rest comfortably on their respectable laurels, but we took each other with great seriousness. The oldest Aunt, who was married and lived in New York, received on her annual visit to Spruce Street the homage due to a Princess Royal, and no King or Emperor could have caused more of a flutter than my Grandfather when he honoured one of his children with a visit. Family anniversaries were scrupulously observed, the legend of family affection was kept up as conscientiously, whatever it cost us in discomfort, and there were times when we paid heavily. I would have run many miles to escape one Uncle who, when he met me in the street, would stop to ask how I was, and how we all were at home, and then would stand twisting his moustache in visible agony, trying to think what the affectionate intimacy between us that did not exist required him to say, while I thanked my stars that we were in the street and not in a house where he would have felt constrained to kiss me. We were horribly exact in this matter of kissing. There was a family legend of another Uncle from New York who once, when he came over for some family meeting, was so eager to do his duty by his nieces that he kissed not only all of them—no light task—but two or three neighbours' little girls into the bargain. I think, however, that every Philadelphia family took itself as seriously and that our scruples were not a monopoly brought with us from Virginia and Maryland. In a town where family names are handed down from generation to generation, so that a family often will boast, as ours did, not only a "Jr." but a "3d," and lose no opportunity to let the world know it, family feeling is not likely to be allowed to wilt and die.

Every public holiday also was a family affair to be observed with the rigours of the family feast. Christmas for me, when I did not celebrate it at the Convent with Midnight Mass and a Crèche in the chapel and kind nuns trying to make me forget I had not gone home like other little girls, took me to the Spruce Street house in time to look on at the succession of Uncles and Aunts who dropped in on Christmas Eve and went away laden with bundles, and carrying in some safe pocket a collection of envelopes with a crisp new greenback in each, the sum varying from one hundred dollars to five according to the age of the child or grandchild whose name was on the envelope—my Grandfather gave with the fine patriarchal air he maintained in all family relations. The family appropriation of Thanksgiving Day and Washington's Birthday I did not grasp until after I left school, for while I was at the Convent they were both spent there, where they dwindled into insignificance compared to Reverend Mother's feast and its glories. As a rule, I must have been at the Convent as well for the Fourth of July, though I retain one jubilant vision of myself and a bag of torpedoes in the back-yard, solemnizing a little celebration among the roses. And I have larger visions of military parades in broiling sunshine and of the City Troop filling the quiet streets with their gorgeousness which awed me long before the knowledge of their historic origin and uniform inspired me with reverence.

VI

Other duties and pleasures and observances that for most Philadelphia children were scattered through the interminable year, were crowded into my short holiday: visits to the dentist, to Dr. Hopkins, Dr. White's assistant, it being a test of Philadelphia respectability to have one's teeth seen to by Dr. White or one of his assistants or students, and the regular appointment was as much of obligation for me as Mass on Sunday; visits to the Academy of Fine Arts in the old Chestnut Street building, as I remember set back at the end of a court that made of it a place apart, a consecrated place which I entered with as little anticipation of amusement as St. Joseph's Church hidden in Willing's Alley, and was the more surprised therefore to be entertained, as I must have been, by Benjamin West, for of no other painter there have I the faintest recollection; visits to the Academy of Natural Sciences, where I liked the rows upon rows of stuffed birds, and the strange things in bottles, and the colossal skeletons that filled me with the same delicious shivers as the stories of afreets and genii in The Arabian Nights; visits to Fairmount Park, leagues away, houses left behind before it was reached, where the mysterious machinery of the Waterworks was as terrifying as the skeletons, and I thought it much pleasanter outside under the blue sky; visits to the theatre—the most wonderful visits of all, for they took me out into the night that I knew only from stolen vigils in the Convent dormitory, or glimpses from the Spruce Street windows. Romance was in the dimly-lit streets, in the stars above, in the town after dark, which I was warned I was never to brave alone until I can laugh now to think how terrified I was the first time I came home late by myself, in my terror jumping into a street-car and claiming the protection of a contemptuous young woman whom work had not allowed to draw a conventional line between day and night.

CLASSIC FAIRMOUNT

I have never got rid of that suggestion of romance, not so much in the theatre itself as in the going to it, and, to this day, a matinée in broad daylight will bring back a little of the old thrill. But nothing can bring back to any theatre the glitter, the brilliancy, the splendour of the old Chestnut, the old Walnut, the old Arch, then already dingy with age I have no doubt, but transfigured by my childhood's ecstasies in them. Nothing can persuade me that any plays have been, or could be, written to surpass in beauty, pathos and humour, Solon Shingle, and Arrah-na-Pogue, and Our American Cousin, and The Black Crook, and Ours, though I have forgotten all but their names; that in opera Clara Louise Kellogg ever had a rival; that in gaiety and wit La Grande Duchesse and La Belle Hélène could be eclipsed; or that any actors could compete with Sothern and Booth and Mrs. Drew and the Davenports, and Charlotte Cushman as Meg Merrilies—there was a bit of good old melodramatic acting to make a small Convent girl's flesh creep! Shakespeare was redeemed by Booth from the dulness of the Convent reading-book and entered gloriously into my Convent life. For one happy winter, it was not I who led the long procession down to the refectory, though nobody could have suspected it, but the Ghost of Hamlet's Father, with, close behind me, in gloom absorbed, the Prince of Denmark, mistaken by the unknowing for the little girl, my friend, whose father, with more than the usual father's amiable endurance, had taken me with her and her sister to see the play of Hamlet during the Christmas holidays.

DOWN PINE STREET