Our Philadelphia

by Elizabeth Robins Pennell

How comfortable a type of house it was to live in, I know from experience of another, not a school, within sight, a ten minutes' walk across the fields, and like it in design and arrangement and even colour, in everything except size,—which my Father took one summer: to me a most memorable summer as it was the first I spent outside the Convent limits from the beginning to the end of the long holiday. The jerry-builder had had no part in putting up the solid, well-constructed walls which stood firm against winter storms and winds, and were no less a protection from the torrid heat of a Philadelphia summer. But fashion can leave architecture no more alone than dress. Already, the newer group of houses down by the Delaware were built of the brown stone which, to my mind, dates the beginning of the Philadelphian's fall from architectural grace, the beginning of his distrust in William Penn's plans for his well-being and of his foolish hankering after the fleshpots of New York.

LOUDOUN, MAIN STREET GERMANTOWN

The Convent, before I came to it, had been a victim to the brown stone fashion. With success, the pleasant old country house had grown too small for the school into which it had been converted, and a southern wing had been added: a long, low building with the Chapel at the far end, all built in brown stone and in a style that passed for Gothic and that a thousand times I could have wished based upon any other model. For the upper room in the wing, ambitiously christened by somebody Gothic Hall, had a high pointed roof that made it an ice-house in winter and, for our sins, it was used as the Dormitory of the Sacred Heart where I slept. I can recall mornings when the water was frozen in our pitchers while the big stove, in the middle of the high-pitched room, burned red hot as if to mock at us as, with numbed fingers, we struggled to make our beds and wash ourselves and button and hook on our clothes. And the builders had so contrived that summer turned our fine Gothic Dormitory into a fiery furnace. How many June nights, contrary to all the rules, have I hung out of the little, horribly Gothic window at the head of my alcove, gasping in the warm darkness that was so sweet and stifling with the fragrance of the flowers in Madame Huguet's garden just below.

I had not been long at the Convent before another brown stone wing extended to the north and two stories were added to the main building which, for the sake of harmony, was now painted brown from top to bottom. In a niche on this new façade, a statue of the Sacred Heart was set, and all semblance to the old country house was gone, except for the broad porch without and the well-proportioned rooms within. But these, and later improvements, additions and alterations cannot make me forget the Convent as it was when I first came to it, growing up about the simple, solidly-built, spacious yellow house that was once the Philadelphian's ideal of suburban comfort and so like the house where I spent my most memorable summer, so like, save for the size and the colour, my Great-Grandfather Ambrose White's old house on the Turnpike at Chestnut Hill, so like innumerable other country houses of the same date where I visited.

III

The Convent rule and discipline could not alter the changing of the seasons as Philadelphia ordered them. They might appear to us mainly regulated by feasts and fasts—All Saints and All Souls, the milestones on the road to Christmas; Lent and the month of St. Joseph heralding the approach of spring; the month of Mary and the month of the Sacred Heart, Ascension and Corpus-Christi, as ardent and splendid as the spring and summer days they graced. But, all the same, each season came laden with the pleasures held in common by all fortunate Philadelphia children who had the freedom of the country or the countrified suburbs.

The school year began with the fall, when any night might bring the first frost and the first tingle in the air—champagne to quicken the blood in a school girl's veins, and make the sitting still through the long study and class hours a torture. The woods shone with gold; the Virginia creeper flamed on the front porch; sickel pears fell, ripe and luscious, from the tree close to the Chapel where it was against the law to go and pick them up but where no law in the world could have barred the way; chestnuts and hickory nuts and the walnuts that stained my fingers black to open offered a substantial dessert after as substantial a dinner as ever children were served with. But those were the joyful years when hunger never could be satisfied and digestion was equal to any surfeit of raw chestnuts—or raw turnips for that matter, if the season supplied no lighter dainties, or of next to anything that could be picked up and eaten. I know I drew the line only at the huge, white, oversweet mulberries strewing the grass by the swings in Mulberry Lane, that favourite scene of the war to the knife we waged under the name of Old Man and Bands, primitive games not to be outdone by the Tennis and Hockey of the more sophisticated modern school girl.

The minute the Refectory was left for the noonday hour of recreation on a brisk autumn day, there was a wild scamper to the woods where, just beyond the gate that led into them, the hoary old chestnut trees spread their shade and dropped their fruit on either side the hill between the Poisonous Valley, a thrill in its deadly name, and the graveyard, few crosses then in the green enclosure which now, alas! is too well filled. The shadow of death lay so lightly upon us that I recall to-day only the delicious rustle of eager feet through the fallen leaves, and the banging of stone upon stone as hickory nuts cracked between them, I feel only the delicious pricking of the chestnut burrs in the happy, hardened fingers of the school girl. And these, anyway, are memories I share with every Philadelphian who, as a child, wandered in the suburbs or the near country when the woods were gold and scarlet, and the way through them was carpeted with leaves hiding rich stores of nuts for the seeker after treasure.

But no Philadelphia child in the shelter of her own house could know the meaning of the Philadelphia winter as I knew it in the Convent, half frozen in that airy dormitory of the Sacred Heart, shivering in shawl and hood through early Mass in the icy Chapel, still huddled in my shawl at my desk or scurrying as fast as discipline would wink at through the windy passages. The heating arrangements, somehow, never succeeded in coping with the extreme cold of a severe winter in the large rooms and halls of the new wings, and I must confess that we were often most miserably uncomfortable. I cannot but wonder what the pampered school girls of the present generation in the same Convent would say to such discomfort. But it did us no harm. Indeed, though I shiver at the memory, I am sure it did us good. We came out the healthier and hardier for it, much as the Englishman does from his cold house, the coldest in the world. The old conditions of a hardier life, that either killed or cured, did far more to make a vigorous people than all the new-fangled eugenics ever can.