Quillcote’s important structure, like the home of H. G. Wells’s Mr. Britling, is the barn. We can believe that the builder would not recognize it, aside from the weather-vane. It is what, in the jargon of the day, is known as a “community center.” Years ago all the interior was ripped out. A new floor was laid, casement windows were cut in and the place took on the semblance of a rustic hall. Alone untampered with, the great century-old rafters, hewn of stout-hearted oak and strong as ever, remain in position. The barn walls were brushed down but left their hue of tawny brown. Other old barns were stripped to supply fish-hook hinges, suitably antique; ancient latches, decorative horns of the moose. Solid settles were constructed of old boards weathered to a silver gray. Old lanterns fitted with candles were hung from harness pegs about the walls. The old grain-chest, piled high with cushions, stands at one end of the big oblong room. “Wide doors open at the back into a field of buttercups and daisies.” They still dance the square dances on the threshing floor.
Biography is pointless if it does not build us a picture; and once we have our picture who cares for dates and a chronicle of the years? In the girl in New England, the young woman kindergartner in San Francisco, the visitor to Ireland (and England and Scotland), the writer reading from her manuscript in Old Buxton Meeting-House, the festival-bringer of the Quillcote barn you have Kate Douglas Wiggin, born a Smith; you have very completely and with a delightful authenticity the creator of all those hosts of happy children, children sometimes sad, sometimes grieved but always as certain of happiness as they are of sunshine;—you have the Penelope who found the humors of foreign travel which more pretentious humorists coming later could merely copy; you have the perceptive and sympathetic heart which saw the Christmas romance of The Old Peabody Pew. You ask no more. You ask only to be allowed to recall with a changing but invariable pleasure the dozens of tales in which she has shared with you her feelings about life.
Do you remember the Penelope books? Do you remember! Somehow, Penelope’s Progress, wherein we accompany Salemina, Francesca and Penelope through Scotland, has always seemed a bit the best. Page 2, please:
“On arriving in New York, Francesca discovered that the young lawyer whom for six months she had been advising to marry somebody ‘more worthy than herself’ was at last about to do it. This was somewhat in the nature of a shock, for Francesca has been in the habit, ever since she was seventeen, of giving her lovers similar advice, and up to this time no one of them has ever taken it. She therefore has had the not unnatural hope, I think, of organizing at one time or another all those disappointed and faithful swains into a celibate brotherhood; and perhaps of driving by the interesting monastery with her husband and calling his attention modestly to the fact that these poor monks were filling their barren lives with deeds of piety, trying to remember their Creator with such assiduity that they might, in time, forget Her.”
Frank Stockton could be as funny as that. Mark Twain might have written the close of the first chapter, where Francesca and Penelope, heads bent over a genealogical table of the English kings, try to decide whether “b. 1665” means born or beheaded. Irvin Cobb, shaking our sides with his discussion of English pronunciation of proper names, and gravely referring to a Norwegian fjord (“pronounced by the English, Ferguson”) was anticipated by nearly twenty years when Mrs. Wiggin wrote:
“On the ground floor are the Misses Hepburn-Sciennes (pronounced Hebburn-Sheens); on the floor above us are Miss Colquhoun (Cohoon) and her cousin Miss Cockburn-Sinclair (Coburn-Sinkler). As soon as the Hepburn-Sciennes depart, Mrs. M’Collop expects Mrs. Menzies of Kilconquhar, of whom we shall speak as Mrs. Mingess of Kinyukkar.”
Marm Lisa is graced with the presence of S. Cora Grubb, as well as the youthful Atlantic and Pacific Simonson. Have we not yet with us such places as Mrs. Grubb’s Unity Hall, the Meeting-Place of the Order of Present Perfection? We have. On the wall was “an ingenious pictorial representation of the fifty largest cities of the world, with the successful establishment of various regenerating ideas indicated by colored disks of paper neatly pasted on the surface.” Blue was for Temperance, green for the Single Tax, orange, Cremation; red, Abolition of War; purple, Vegetarianism; yellow, Hypnotism; black, Dress Reform; blush rose, Social Purity; silver, Theosophy; magenta, Religious Liberty; and, somewhat inappropriately, crushed strawberry denoted that in this spot the Emancipation of Women had made a forward stride. It was left for a small gold star to signify the progress of the Eldorado face powder, S. Cora Grubb, sole agent.
The cat ’Zekiel in The Old Peabody Pew:
“’Zekiel had lost his tail in a mowing-machine; ’Zekiel had the asthma, and the immersion of his nose in milk made him sneeze, so he was wont to slip his paw in and out of the dish and lick it patiently for five minutes together. Nancy often watched him pityingly, giving him kind and gentle words to sustain his fainting spirit, but to-night she paid no heed to him, although he sneezed violently to attract her attention.”
The sensation when, after the ringing of the last bell, Nancy Wentworth walked up the aisle on Justin Peabody’s arm, is conveyed by some parentheses of the comment later in the day. The two had taken their seats side by side in the old family pew.