For the last year it had been a family use, he being delicate in his appetite, to make a point of saving for him anything which he might possibly eat, and taking the greatest satisfaction in his enjoyment. Therefore it came quite natural for me to get a small dish from the cupboard and begin to serve out a portion of Mrs. Mason's preserves for my father. All at once it came over me ... the meaning of bereavement; that there was nobody to be done for tenderly; the loss of it ... the need of the heart for all its offices of loving ... and the unavailing pain.
CHAPTER V
It followed soon on my father's death that we gave up the yellow house with the chocolate trimmings and took another near the high school, and that very summer my mother lengthened my skirts halfway to my shoe tops and began to find fault with my behaviour "for a girl of your age." We saw no more of the McGees after that except as Ellen managed to keep on in the same class at school with me; and Pauline and I found ourselves with a bosom friendship on our hands.
I went on missing my father terribly, but in a child's inarticulate fashion, and it is only lately that I have realized how much of my life went at loose ends for the loss out of it of a man's point of view and the appreciable standards which grow out of his relation to the community. Ever since the Snockerty episode there had been glimmers on my horizon of the sort of rightness owing from a daughter of Henry Lattimore, but now that I had no longer the use of the personal instance, I lost all notion of what those things might be; for though I have often heard my mother spoken of as one of the best women in the world, she was the last to have provided me with a definite pattern of behaviour.
Pauline had struck out a sort of social balance for herself grounded on the fear of what was "common." Her mother had a day at home, from which seemed to flow an orderly perspective of social observances, for which my mother, never having arrived at the pitch of visiting cards, afforded me no criterion whatever.
She had been a farmer's daughter in another part of the state, and had done something for herself in the way of school teaching before she married my father. My grandparents I never saw, but I seem to recall at such public occasions as county fairs and soldiers' reunions, certain tall, farmer-looking men and their badly dressed wives, who called her cousin and were answered by their Christian names, whom I understand to be my mother's relatives without accepting them as mine. They were all soldiers though, the men of our family; you saw it at once in the odd stiffness sitting on their farmer carriage like the firm strokes of a master on a pupil's smudged drawing. I think I got my first notion of the quality of experience in the way they exalted themselves in the memories of marches and battles. There had been a station of the underground railway not ten miles from Taylorville, and there had gone out from the town at the first call, a volunteer company with so many Judds and Wilsons and Lattimores on the roster that it read like the record of a family Bible. They had gone out from, they had come back to, a life as little relieved by adventure as the flat horizon of their corn lands, but in the interim they had stretched themselves, endured, conquered. I have heard political economists of the cross roads account variously for the prosperity of Ohianna in the decade following the civil outbreak, but I have never heard it laid to the revitalizing of our common stock by the shock of its moral strenuosities.
To this day I question whether Cousin Judd got more out of his religion than out of this most unchristian experience, from which he had come back silver tipped as it were, from that emperym into which men pass when they are by great emotions a little removed from themselves, to kindle in my young mind a realization of the preciousness of passion over all human assets. It came to me, however, in the years between twelve and fifteen that my mother's relations did things with their knives and neglected others with their forks that were not done in circles that by virtue of just such observances, got themselves called Good Society. I was aware of a sort of gracelessness in their vital processes, in much the same way that I knew that the striped and flowered carpet in my mother's best room did not harmonize with the wall paper, and that the curtains went badly with them both. I have to go back to this, and to the fact that my clothes were chosen for wearing qualities rather than becomingness, to account for a behaviour that, as I began to emerge from the illumined mists of play, my mother complained of under the head of my "not taking an interest."
How else was I to protect myself from the thousand inharmonies that chafed against the budding instinct of beauty: the plum-coloured ribbons I was expected to wear with my brown dress, the mottled Japanese pattern upon the gilt ground of the wall paper, against which I had pushed out a kind of shell, hung within with the glittering stuff of dreams.
For just about the time I should have been absorbed in Cousin Lydia's beaded dolman and the turning of my mother's one silk, I was regularly victimized by the fits and starts of temperament, instinctive efforts toward the rehearsal of greater passions than had appeared above my horizon, flashes of red and blue and gold thrown up on the plain Taylorville surface of my behaviour, with the result of putting me at odds with the Taylorvillians.