Adventures in indigence, and other essays

by Laura Spencer Portor

[More pauses of which you were glad—then a beginning again of all delight.]

"I hear his footfall's music;
I feel his presence near,
All my soul responsive answers
And tells me he is here!
O stars, shine out your brightest!
[This with eyes cast to where the stars should have been]
"O nightingale, sing sweet;—
To guide him to me waiting
And speed his flying feet;—
To guide him to me waiting,
And speed his flying feet!"

This was what they did in a world outside the walls of my childish experience!—they sang like that!—of such things! I did not know what it meant save in some incomplete half-lunar way; but its effect drew me, and, like the seasons and tides of the moon, changed the face of the earth for me.

Further, it should be noted that I heard this song, not only on one occasion, not detached, isolated, as at a concert. Here was nothing paid for cold-bloodedly at a box-office; here was something all woven in with the daily chance of life. I heard the song many a time. I might come upon it unexpected when I woke from my nap. I might be drawn from my toys by it to the more desirable pleasure of standing big-eyed by the piano while such glory as this rolled around about me; or eat my bowl of bread and milk in the early evening to the accompaniment of it; or try to keep the Sandman on my pillow from throwing the last handful of sand until the final note of it was sung.

Miss Brooks was, I believe, the daughter of an army officer. She had lived in various parts of the world; common on her lips were tales of a life wholly different from that which I knew.

To my eyes, water-waves and all, she was incredibly beautiful. Moreover,—and here you see the fine discriminating points which children make,—she was engaged; already selected; chosen; set apart! I cannot tell you what glamour that lent her in my eyes. Child-psychology is not a thing that always can be reduced to measurement of reflexes and the like. I responded to all this by some unmeasured law of the soul. This knowledge and appreciation of her—or of her type, if you prefer—was as distinct and yet intangible a thing as the light of the prism. The sun fell on her and was changed to color. I could not touch or define her charm, but it was there; and the color and wonder of it seemed to fall across me too as I sat near her, and upon my sun-browned hands, if they touched her, until I could see colored jewels of rings on them too, as there might be, and as I hoped there would be some day.

I thought then that I was fond of her. Certainly her word was law to me. I know that I used to run my little legs tired to wait upon her. Her smiles and favors were precious to me as only the favors of the beautiful and the gifted can be to a little child. The tap of her fan on my cheek or my hand satisfied me altogether with life.

But I was too near her then to judge of her fairly. I know now the truth of the matter. I have never seen her since. The glamour of her presence no longer colors and impedes the white truth. She was not the most beautiful young lady in the world, as I so generously took her to be. She was not the only person in the world who could play dazzling accompaniments, and sing to melt one's soul, and make one a stranger to one's self. She was not the only one in the universe who knew the dim and lovely secret chambers of a little child's nature. She was after all, only, indeed, by courtesy, Miss Lou Brooks. For she was less and more than all this: she was a guest; a passing influence; an ineffaceable impression; a glorious experience; a far adventure in new lands; a glimpse into other worlds unknown; a new planet swum into my ken. She was a magic mirror held up to me—one in which I could for the first time clearly see myself as I might be; she was a glass of fashion, a mould of form. In her I saw moving evidences of a world more wonderful than any of my fancy; she was a passing guest in the house, yes, but a permanency in the scheme of things—a very piece of life itself; and the knowledge of her, an acquirement in learning and an acquisition in education. The educative value of life has no uncertainty.

Let Montessori children in "Houses of Childhood" feel of wooden circles and quadrangles and be taught with care the words "round," "square"; let them touch sandpaper and know thereby "this is rough," or linen and apprehend "this is smooth." I, a child of the same age, needed nothing of such information. I knew smooth and rough more nearly by the mere chance touch of my play-roughened hand on her fine satiny one; I, of a like age, wholly lacking in cubes and cylinders and color-slabs, was learning nevertheless to discriminate between short and long, heavy and light, were it but by dread of her departure, or the length of her train.

Put beside Miss Lou Brooks and all that she taught me and revealed to me any didactic material you may choose, and I wonder if it compares with her. Place beside her most of the lessons learned from books. The rule of three is useful, but I would not exchange her for it. I might do without my multiplication-tables, and indeed do get along without them fairly well, never having learned the seven, eight, and nine tables properly. But these I take to be but subordinate things—pawns, or, at the very best, but bishops and knights of the game, limited to move in certain lines without deviation, and not to be compared with a queen, who can move here or there at will, taking, disconcerting, winning, and setting the whole of life into new relations.