Adventures in indigence, and other essays

by Laura Spencer Portor

Such types were rare, even in my day. There were only a few, a very few such men and women left then, guests of a twice older generation, visiting still, with a kind of retained graciousness, in the house of life from which they were soon finally to depart. By an enviable fate some six or eight of these men and women belonged to me. An air of grandeur came to the house with them as with the coming of the gods and goddesses in the old days; the human dwellings expanded, and the lintels grew tall.

You can guess, perhaps, whether we children ventured a word! Glory enough to be permitted to come as silent as mice to supper, while they were there!

Yet I would not be misleading. Even those of a twice older generation were by no means inevitably stately and imposing. History is not given over entirely to kings and queens. There was, for instance, my great-aunt Henrietta, of the "other side of the house." She was a wholly different type. She was little. She wore three puffs at either side of her face. These were held in place by little gray combs. She knew everybody's affairs, and her chief delight was in recounting them. She was a living chronicle, an accurate, if inglorious, historian; an intimate and personal account, with a mind for little happenings and a prodigious memory for events; a sort of Pepys in petticoats and neckerchief.

She was the oldest survivor of my mother's people. The family tree was in her keeping. But she cared little enough to dig about its deep roots. She took no delight, apparently in the dignity of its stem, or pride in the wide spread of its branches. Her entire pleasure, rather, was in the twittering and whispering of its leaves. There was something bird-like and flitting in her character, and she gossiped like a chaffinch.

In her flowed together the great strains on my mother's side, Spencer and Halsted, names to conjure with. She had, certainly, not less to be stately about than my great-aunt Sarah. She had plenty of ancestors to be proud of, and for a touch of romance, had danced the minuet with Lafayette, when she was a slip of a girl and he a guest in her grandfather's house; but she never appeared in the least proud of her people, only unfailingly entertained by them.

It was at an early age that I resolved to model my life after my aunt Sarah rather than after my aunt Henrietta; yet recalling my aunt Henrietta's memorable characteristics, and that about Lafayette, and the delightful side-puffs, and her searching comments on humanity, I am willing to admit that she was perhaps the more vivid lesson of the two. And if one counts the lasting distaste for gossip which I acquired by being obliged to listen respectfully, hours at a time, it seemed, while she continued to profess her little astonishments and "you-don't-say-so's!" to my mother, with the best end of her sentences always finished, inaudible to me, behind her fan, I am even prone to believe her to have been the more influential and educative of the two.

In those days, those days when visits were long and frequent, the bond of kinship was firmly established, and family characteristics were strong and vivid. These were Halsteds, Spencers, Hamiltons, Ogdens, Portors, and not to be mistaken, any more than you mistake now your reader for your speller, your history for your geography.

It seemed, it is true, that they were there but to visit; but how much were they there, though how little were they aware of it, to teach, to enlighten, to admonish! With them came the Halsted or Spencer or Portor imperiousness or graciousness or brains; the Halsted eyes, which were beautiful, and the Halsted tempers, which were not; with them came those obstinate egotisms, those devotions and ideals, those headstrong weaknesses, those gentle fortitudes which, strong in themselves, survived vividly from generation to generation.

My aunt Henrietta, my aunt Sarah and the rest, it was plain to be seen, were the earthly abodes of strong antecedent family spirits; and now, these bodily abodes doomed to decay, had not those spirits, strong and nimble, already begun to frequent the available lives of the younger generation, resolved on living yet in the day-lighted world, and visiting still the glimpses of the moon; hopeful, perhaps, in the younger generation, to correct some old folly; or willful, and determined, it might be, to pursue in some younger life the old fatality and mistakes?

This was what it meant, this and not less, when, often a little wistfully, the passing generation remarked certain likenesses. "Mary, how much she is getting to be like William!" or, "Do you know, she reminds me of her great-grandmother Ferguson"; or, "She has the Portor eyes"; and sometimes, cryptically, so that I might not guess too clearly what it meant, "Very like the Halsteds."