Father Gregory came out of his house this morning. Perfectly natural thus far; Father Gregory is going to take a walk, as is his right; but wait till you hear a detail that characterises this promenade: in his hat a fine bouquet of poppies. You must swell out your voice with the poppies. This field flower becomes a symbol of pomp and ostentation. Aha! Father Gregory is no longer a worthy fellow who goes out to inhale the breezes of the country-side; he is an old beau who puts on airs; he parades, he struts, he capers, he expects to be gazed at and admired. But you will be punished, Father Gregory; ill-luck awaits you!
On the way his dog began to fight with mine. This bit of news is simply announced. It seems at first to be of slight importance. A bad thing nevertheless,—a dog fight in a little town. What! you don’t know that? You have never lived in the country? A dog fight is a matter of special gravity. The masters intervene, they take sides, and the defeated one swears that the matter shall not end here. Whole families have been embroiled through a dog fight. What was the origin of the enmity between the Montagus and the Capulets? Perhaps a dog fight. And just this way our Father Gregory undertakes to interfere; his dog is getting the worst of it, rolled in the dust as a dumpling in flour. Father Gregory, trying to part them, tumbles, nose first, in the filth. He rushes to the rescue with uplifted cane, his foot slips, and behold him on the ground in a lamentable posture, especially his nose, having made a most unlucky choice of a spot upon which to fall. At this point it is proper to assume a melancholy tone, the apostrophe which follows reaching a note of heart-rending grief. Poor Father Gregory! A pause. He is to be pitied, for his misfortune is great. But suddenly, pity becomes sarcasm, pointing to his pride. See his bunch of poppies, far from his hat! The emblems of his vanity are soiled. He himself may go home, and wash and brush himself, but he can never use the poppies again, and but for them nothing would have happened to him.
I attribute Father Gregory to Aunt Deen because of the fertility of her imagination, which daily provided her with new stories for our delectation. Grown persons are not often on a level with children: they take too low a place. Aunt Deen had an instinct for what was suited to us. Her stories kept us breathless. When I try to rescue them from the past, for her credit, they fly before me, smiling. “No, no,” they say—for I get close to them, only between us is a great chasm, deep, though not wide, which is the common grave of all my vanished years—“what is the use? You can never do anything with us. See: we have taken the colour of that time: how are you to describe that?”
When grandfather came upon us sitting in a circle around our story-teller, he would shake his head disapprovingly.
“Fiddle-faddles”, he would murmur; “fiddle-faddles. One owes it to children to tell them the truth.”
We would ask Aunt Deen what fiddle-faddles were, and she would answer, by way of getting her revenge, “It’s what one does when one plays the violin.”
Between her songs and grandfather’s violin there was sometimes a deafening discord.
Aunt Deen possessed another marvellous faculty—that of inventing words. I have already told you of carabosser, but she invented them by the hundred, so well adapted to their purpose that we understood them at once. I can not transcribe them—they lose their value when written down. Indeed I don’t know how to spell them; spoken language is not the same as written language, and her picturesque words had all the savour and crispness of popular speech. Aunt Deen also used rare words—where she found them is a mystery for she seldom read—strange and sonorous words and phrases that seemed her special property, and which since then, to my surprise and amusement, I have discovered in the dictionary, where I should never have thought of looking for them. Thus, to call down my pride, she one day called me a hospodar, and another day, “the purveyor in chief of mustard to the Pope.” I did not know that the hospodars were the tyrants of Wallachia, and that to believe oneself purveyor of mustard to the Pope meant to have a high opinion of oneself. These strange titles with which she invested me used to make me think of some big man, all in red, issuing commands in a loud voice, and I did not enjoy being likened to him.
Dear great-aunt Deen, let me apostrophise you after the manner of poor Father Gregory! If my early childhood rings musically in my memory, as if it were mounted upon one of those mules all bedight with sleigh-bells, that can not move without giving forth a multitudinous jingle from far away as if to announce the approach of a great train, I owe it to your stories and your songs. As soon as thought summons it, and that is daily, here it comes, loudly ringing its joy-bells, because of which I shall never have reason to complain of fate. Before I see it, I hear it—that merry procession of memory; and when, at some turn of the road that leads from the past to the present, it suddenly comes upon me, it bears in its arms all the flowers of the springtide. You well deserve the bouquet of them that I pick for you, even a bouquet of poppies, as a guerdon for all the stories that you added to your care and prayers. For you were always praying audibly, on the stairs or in church or even under the banner of the wolf’s head itself. Silence was painful to you. That is why, dear Aunt Deen, I break it this evening and talk to you.
Aunt Deen kept strenuous watch outside of the house. To get inside you had, like the wolf in Hans Christian Andersen, to show a white paw like a sheep. She designated by the name of they the invisible foes that were supposed to be investing it. For a long time these mysterious they terrified us. We used to look around whenever she spoke of them. By dint of never meeting them we at last came to laugh at them, little thinking that this laugh disarmed us, and that thus disarmed we should surely meet them later in flesh and blood. Her loyalty was never caught napping. The moment the family was in question she would insist upon a meed of praise being at once awarded it, failing which she promptly assumed the defensive, ready for battle. A certain person who ventured to speak of it in colourless terms found himself scanned from head to foot, and to mask his sense of defeat took refuge in sarcasm: