Our home was the exact opposite of this. A swift current of the world’s life flowed through our house. Great public questions, the causes of freedom, education, and the succoring of the weak and afflicted of our own and other lands took precedence over all private affairs. Among our guests were distinguished European travelers, political exiles, Greeks, Italians, Poles, Hungarians, who had sought refuge in our country and were made welcome at our table.
“To ride the errand of the hour,” is a phrase my mother used in speaking of my father’s restless activity. Whether the errand took him to President Lincoln in Washington with a message from John Andrew, or to Crete with a shipload of food and clothing from Boston to help the Cretans in their fight for liberty, he was ready, booted and spurred for action. In his youth, he was given a Greek decoration, carrying the title of Chevalier. His friends gave him the nickname of “Chev”; I never heard my mother address him by any other name.
In thinking back over my first decade, I realize that my best teachers were my father, my mother, and my sister Julia. One of my early memories is of an evening when I was allowed to sit up to see Julia dressed for a party. She wore a white tarletan dress; Madame Canagalli, the Italian hairdresser, and my mother had a discussion as to which camellia they should place in her beautiful black hair, fine as a baby’s and softer than any other! I remember noticing that the white camellia was the same color as her smooth forehead “that looked like marble and smelt like myrrh”, that the red camellia matched the color in her cheeks and lips. This is the first impression I have of personal beauty. The vision persists, clear-cut as it was that night, when I first realized that some people are better to look at than others.
Julia read me all the Waverley novels and all of Dickens. I have often read them since, but that first impression remains the strongest. Julia, who introduced me to this company, was the intimate of my childhood, but I remember a curious withdrawal the moment my feet touched the threshold of girlhood. She had been the beneficient and adored elder sister of my childhood, but when I braided my tawny mane and “put up” my hair like a big girl, I lost something that had been an intrinsic part of our comradeship. I understand it all now, I could not then.
In the evening my father read us the poems of Byron, Scott, and Macaulay. He had a fine voice and read—recited rather, for he knew them by heart—many a stirring poem in the hour of rest he allowed himself after the evening meal. I can hear his voice now, reciting a line he always gave with great spirit:
“Roderick Vich Alpin Dhu, ho ieroe!”
While my father was teaching me to love poetry, my mother was teaching me to love good music. At dusk we gathered around the Chickering grand piano, while Mama sang to us. She had a beautiful, cultivated voice, and the flexible hands of the trained pianist, which she kept to the end of her life. Her repertoire was immense; she sang the florid arias of Bellini, the grand recitatives of Handel, folk-songs of France and Italy, Scotch and English ballads, German lieder, plantation melodies. We all joined in the chorus of these polyglot songs,—Irish, Polish, and Russian!
Beside a taste for poetry and music, the most valuable life asset I acquired in these days was a love of art. Our house was filled with pictures and statuary. While I do not remember either parent talking to me about them, their influence was none the less powerful. A copy of the Greek Clytie stood on the stairs; I loved her so much that on going up to bed, after having kissed all the family good night, I would pause and, if nobody were looking, reach up and kiss the cold lips of the marble woman. A set of engravings of the Greek temples hung in my father’s study; long before I knew what they were, I had learned to love the Parthenon, the Temple of Victory, the Erectheum, so that when I first saw the Acropolis at Athens I was well prepared for its glories. Mama had inherited a number of old masters from her father’s gallery, remembered as the first private picture gallery in the country. Of these I liked best the Velasquez portrait of the Little Prince. There were a dozen good Italian and Dutch pictures, all of which I studied thoroughly, if unconsciously, for when I went to live in Italy, I found no difficulty in attributing these pictures to their proper schools.
CHAPTER V
Uncle Sam Ward
While proud of being a Bostonian, I had from the beginning a sort of sneaking affection for New York. My mother, though of mixed New England and Southern descent, was born and bred a New Yorker. Some consciousness of these different strains of blood made me resent equally the disparagement with which Bostonians spoke of New York, and the condescension with which New Yorkers mentioned Boston. Like Annie in Enoch Arden, I wanted to be “little wife to both.”