For her I built a "House" high in the big maple, and there she often climbed, spending many happy hours singing to her dollies or conning over her picture books. Her face shone down upon me radiant with life's ecstasy. Baby Constance was to her a toy, a doll, I was her companion, her playmate. The garden seemed fashioned for her uses, and whenever I saw her among the flowers or sitting on the lawn, I forgot my writing, realizing that these were golden days for me as well as for her,—days that would pass like waves of light across the wheat.
Together with Zulime I received the house back into my affection. Once more I thought of it as something permanent, a sure refuge in time of trouble. It gave us both a comforting sense of security to know that we could, at need, come back to it and live in comfort. With no hope of attaining a larger income, saving money was earning money for us both. In this spirit I put in another bathroom, and enlarged the dining-room—doing much of the work with my own hands.
Nothing could be more idyllic than our daily routine that summer. Our diversions, dependent on a love of odorous fields, colorful hills and fruitful vines, were of arcadian content. Our wealth expressed in nuts and apples and berries was ample. With Mary Isabel I assumed that wild grapes were enormously important articles of food. "Without them we might grow hungry this winter," I warned her. In this spirit we harvested, intent as chipmunks.
After the nurse left us the two children slept together on an upstairs screened-in porch, and every night, just before they went to sleep, it was my habit to visit them. Lying down between them with a small head on each arm, I told them stories or answered the questions which were suggested by the trees and the sky. "What are stars? What makes the moon spotted? What does iron come from? How do people make wall paper?" and many others equally elemental. It was a tender hour for me and a delicious one for them.
Gradually as they grew older, they fell into the habit of saying, "Now tell us about when you were a little boy," and so I was led to freshen up on A Son of the Middle Border, which I had begun to rewrite. They could never get enough of these reminiscences and when, at nine o'clock, I said, "Daughties, you must go to sleep," they pleaded for "Just one more," and from this interest I derived a foolish hope that the book, if it should ever get published, would be successful.
It was sweet to hear those soft voices demanding an explanation of the universe whose wonders they were rediscovering in their turn. Every changing season, every expanding leaf was magical to them. A bat skittering about the chimney, the rustle of a breeze in the maples, were of sinister significance requiring explanation, and when at last I went away and they began to softly sing their wistful little evening prayer, one which Mary Isabel had composed, life seemed worthwhile even to me. I forgot the irrevocable past and confronted old age with composure.
Meanwhile my father's mind was becoming more and more reminiscent. His stories once so vivid and so full of detail had narrowed down to a few familiar phrases. "Just then Sherman and his staff came riding along," or "When I was camped on the upper waters of the Wisconsin." His memory was failing and so was his sense of hearing. He seldom quoted from a book, but he still cited Blaine's speeches or referred to Lincoln's anecdotes, and certain of Grant's phrases were often on his lips. In all his interests he remained objective, concerned with the world of action not with the library, and while he made no effort to talk down to Mary Isabel, he contrived to win her adoration, perhaps because she detected in his voice his adoring love for her. In the mist of his glance was the tender worship of youth on the part of age.
Always of a Sunday we sang for him and sometimes Uncle Frank, the last of the McClintocks, gray haired and lean and bent, came in with his fiddle and played while the children danced in the light of our fire, so lithe, so happy, so fairy-like in their loveliness that he and Lorette sat in silence, a silence which was at once tender and tragic. There was something alien as well as marvelous in the dramatic movements of those small forms.
Witnessing such scenes, moved by something elemental in their decay, I continued to brood over the manuscript which was to be a kind of autobiography, the blended story of the vicissitudes of the Garlands and the McClintocks. At times I worked upon it to the exclusion of all else, and when I read a part of the tale to Mary Isabel and found that she understood it and liked it, I was heartened.
Consider this! I now had a daughter to whom I could read my manuscript! Where did that personality come from? Was her soul merely the automatic reaction of a material organism against a material environment? Was her spirit dependent on the life of its little body or could it live on independent of the flesh? Acknowledging the benumbing, hopeless mystery of it all, I continued to live for my children, finding in them my comfort and my justification.