Adventures in indigence, and other essays

by Laura Spencer Portor

My parents, who twice before had been summoned to bear acute loss,—once when, before I was born, a little baby brother of mine died, and once when the life of a little baby sister had flickered out before the flame got well started,—tasted now of what must have been a far deeper bitterness. She who had gone now was their "extreme hope."

She was twenty-one when she died, and within a few months of her graduation at the University. She was brilliant above any promise given by the rest of us. I remember her very clearly—her sensitive and beautiful face, her great delicacy of body, her ready, very gentle laugh, and her unfailing understanding of all a little child's desires and moods. She was exquisite, sensitive as a mimosa in a garden of sturdier growth. Above us all she seemed to stretch delicate and flowering branches, in which the wind moved more mysterious; and lovely winged and songful things, that we could never have hoped to harbor, seemed to have made their home in her. There was in her something rare and unlooked for (I do not exaggerate), like the sudden call of a thrush in the twilight, or delicate and darkling, as in starlight the song of the nightingale. She was the one reckoned to be most like my father, and by the generous, and, I think, even proud consent of all of us, was by him the most beloved. She was as devoted as Cordelia, and with lesser cause, bringing to the happiness and fullness of his life what Lear knew only in his desolation. Since I have grown into what is at least some slight realization of what her loss must have meant to my father, I cannot touch without a trembling of tears the memory of his taking me in his arms as he did, to look upon her as she lay, white and final, delicate and done with life, there in the still and shuttered room.

But, incredible though it seems to my present knowledge, I had then no feeling of sadness whatever. She might have slept. Nor did the days that followed lay heavy hands upon me. There was a quiet stir and hushed preparation toward what I did not know, and I was looked after by neighbors or relatives to the extent of believing that a certain pleasant distinction accrued to me. In all that followed, I know that I contributed no sadness, only a child's frank observation in the face of unusual behavior of its elders.

But to return to the birthday. It was a remarkable one, you see, linked with all these things, allied to such large sorrows—a sad one and disappointing enough, you will say, for a little child. Yet I did not find it so. I was, as I have told you, indignant as to the cake, and disappointed, no doubt, that there was no happy and devoted family now gathered to hear me sing my gay little song. But to offset these there was a kind of reassurance in the day which I find it difficult to describe very exactly. It was as if, at one and the same time, this were and were not my birthday. It was my day by the calendar, but in no other way. For a birthday is one whose dawn and sunset are one's very own, a day when one's importance is admitted very gladly by a certain intimate circle. But on no day of my life, I am sure, was I of so little importance as then—a very inconsiderable little person, playing alone in the sunshine and with my song unsung. Yet something in that day shines now across the years, as distant as a star, as silver, as satisfying. That something is not to be ascribed to any one mere incident: it was compounded, no doubt, of the best of every relationship which I felt that day for the first time. The extreme gentleness of the grown-up of whom I have told you was one element; for the rest, the companionship with my father in that strange still moment in the shuttered room; the wordless love given me by my mother, of a different sort from any she had given me before; the quietness, giving me an impression as of remote spaces never dreamed of before; and, over all, the sense of something strange and of a great dignity, as of presences that moved, dread, but not unkindly.

And the little song which I had practised so faithfully, and which I was to have sung! Little as I was, and without ever being told, I believe, as the day wore on, I must have had a dim realization of how inconsiderable it was in that house where Death had taken up Life's lute, and, brows bent above it, remembered the songs that Life had sung.

II

The birthdays that followed on this one were curiously unsatisfying, though they were celebrated appropriately enough, and with the fullest respect for my importance. The anticipation and approach of them, as nearly as I can remember, were clear joy. But the days, when they arrived, overwhelmed me unaccountably. There was something disproportionate in them, so that I was glad to escape from their too personal glory to the more comfortable commonplace of the impersonal. It was as if I guessed dimly, without being in the least aware, that this display in my honor had in it something almost a little cheap—an egotism (though I had not then so much as heard the word) which contrasted unfavorably with the large and gracious and forgetful ways of Life itself.

I believe my embarrassment, my wholly unanalyzed sense of disappointment and disproportion, may have been, on a very diminutive scale, something akin to that which I am sure Joshua must have experienced,—not, mind you, at the moment of his extraordinary and flattering command,—no, but afterwards, afterwards, in the disappointed watches of the night, when he must have reflected, with disappointed amazement, that, if his senses deceived him not, he, Joshua, had made the great luminary to stand still over Gibeon, and the moon in the valley of Ajalon. Something, too, of what Joseph must have experienced,—not in the enjoyable dream of his brothers' sheaves bowing down to his sheaf, and the sun and the moon and the eleven stars making their obeisance to him; nor in those long anticipatory years, when his greatness was approaching, and the scroll of the future hung loose in his hands for his remembering eye to read,—no, but in the actual moment of overwhelming fulfillment, when, from Judah to Benjamin, his brothers actually did bow down to him as ruler over all those great granaries of Egypt, and, as we are told, his mature spirit could not consent to endure so much, but "he sought where to weep, and entered into his chamber and wept there."

These are, I believe, no mere extraneous or personal experiences, but are rather of the fine weave and fabric of humanity; and the uneasiness I felt in my complacent little soul, I now believe to have been a stirring of old things, of ancient memories under the moon, which linked my little inconsiderable life, as they link all lives, to Egypt, Nilus, Babylon, and the ages that are not.

But lest this seem but vague argument and debatable territory, I would like to speak of other childhood birthdays of my own which, it seems to me, bring to the case clear evidence and important testimony.