It always seemed to me that Aunt Millie was overstocked with the things that uncle lacked—will-power, assertiveness, and electric temper. She was positively positive in every part of her nature. She was positive that “Rule Britannia” should come next after “Nearer, my God, to Thee!” She was likewise positive as to the validity of her own ideas. Her mind, once made up—it did not take very long for that—was inflexible. The English landed nobility never had a more worshipful worshiper than my aunt. She was positive that it was one of our chief duties to “know our place,” and “not try to be gentlemen and ladies when we don’t have the right to be such.” “It’s no use passing yourself off as middle-classers if you arn’t middle-classers and why should, on the other hand, a middle-classer try to pose as a gentleman?”
She was always reciting to me, as one of the pleasant memories she had carried off from her girlhood, how, when the carriage of a squire had swept by, she had courtesied graciously and humbly.
“Did they bow to you, Aunt?” I asked.
“Bow to me!” she exclaimed, contemptuously, “who ever heard the likes!” Once she had seen a real lord! Her father had been one of those hamlet geniuses whose dreams and plans never get much broader recognition than his own fireside. He had built church organs, played on them, and had composed music. He had also made the family blacking, soap, ink, and many other useful necessities. He had also manufactured the pills with which the family cured its ills, pills of the old-fashioned sort of soap, sugar, and herb, compounded. Once he had composed some music for his church’s share in a national fête, on the merit of which, my aunt used to fondly tell me, real gentlemen would drive up to the door merely to have a glimpse at the old gentleman, much as if he had been Mendelssohn in retirement.
Aunt sent me daily to one or other of the public-houses for either a jug of ale or a pint of porter. Sometimes she took more than a perfunctory jug, and then she was on edge for a row instantly. When intoxicated she fairly quivered with jealousy, suspicion, and violent passion. One question touching on a delicate matter, one word injudiciously placed, one look of the eye, and she became a volcano of belligerent rage, belching profanity, and letting crockery or pieces of coal express what even her overloaded adjectives could not adequately convey. And when the storm had spent itself, she always relapsed into an excessive hysteria, which included thrillingly mad shrieks, which my poor, inoffensive uncle tried to drown in showers of cold water.
“I’ve brought it all on myself,” explained Uncle Stanwood, in explanation of his wife’s intoxication. He then went on to explain how, when he had been courting, he had taken his fiancée on a holiday trip to the seaside. While there, in a beer-garden, he had pressed her to drink a small glass of brandy. “It all started from that,” he concluded. “God help me!”
He certainly had to pay excessive interest on that investment, for if ever a mild man was nagged, or if ever a patient man had his temper tried, it was Uncle Stanwood. By my tenth birthday the house walls were no longer echoing with peace, for there were daily tirades of wrath and anger about the table.
These family rows took many curious turns. In them my aunt, well read in Dickens, whose writings were very real and vivid to her, freely drew from that fiction master’s gallery of types, and fitted them to uncle’s character. “Don’t sit there a-rubbin’ your slimy hands like Uriah Heep!” she would exclaim; or, “Yes, there you go, always and ever a-sayin’ that something’s bound to turn up, you old Micawber, you!” But this literary tailoring was not at all one-sided, for uncle was even better read than his wife, and with great effect he could say, “Yes, there you go, always insinuatin’ everlastingly, like Becky Sharp,” and the drive was superlatively effective in that uncle well knew that Thackeray’s book was aunt’s favorite. I heard him one day compare his wife to Mrs. Gamp, loving her nip of ale overmuch, and on another occasion she was actually included among Mrs. Jarley’s wax-works!
There was a curious streak of benevolence in my aunt’s nature, a benevolence that concerned itself more with strangers than with those in her own home. I have seen her take broths and meats to neighbors, when uncle and I have had too much buttered bread and preserves. I have seen her take her apron with her to a neighbor’s, where she washed the dishes, while her own had to accumulate, to be later disposed of with my assistance. There was a shiftless man in the town, the town-crier, who would never take charity outright. Him did aunt persuade to come and paint rural scenes, highly colored with glaring tints, as if nature had turned color-blind. There were cows in every scene, and aunt noticed that all the cows were up to their knees in water. Not one stood clear on the vivid green hills.
“Torvey,” she remarked to the old man, “why do you always put the cows in water?” The old artist responded, “It’s this way, Mrs. Brindin, you see, ma’am, I never learnt to paint ’oofs!” As a further benevolence towards this same man, she kept on hand a worn-out clock, for him to earn a penny on. After each tinkering the clock was never known to run more than a few minutes after the old man had left. But aunt only laughed over it, and called Torvey “summat of a codger, to be sure!”