History of a literary radical, and other essays

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

The dining-room always had a musty smell, and was always cold in winter, though the door into the warm kitchen was propped open with a brick. Gilbert would eat his breakfast and run out quickly to warm his hands at the shining black range. In the summer, it was close and stuffy, for it was lighted only by two windows at the top which were level with the ground and opened into a little depression, so that the shutters would move freely. In the great thunder-storms of summer, this hollow would fill with water and as Gilbert sat there eating his lunch, thrilling at the loud claps and the darting lightning, the water would begin to stream over the sill and down the walls. Then Annie would have to be hastily called, and with many ejaculations she would throw her apron over her head, and rush out with a dish-pan to bail out the hollow. Gilbert would stand on a chair and see dimly through rain-streaming panes this huge slopping figure, throwing pails of water into the path. But ordinarily nothing happened in the dining-room. Sometimes in the summer, an odious snail or two would come out of the walls and leave his track across the worn carpet. In a vast closet were stored rows of jellies which Garna had put up, and which Gilbert and Olga would sometimes get a taste of, for a treat. Behind the dining-room was the cellar, gratefully warm in winter with its glowing furnace, and cool in summer with its whitewashed walls. Gilbert loved to spend long summer afternoons there watching Annie turn the ice-cream freezer, and waiting anxiously until the top was taken off to be tested, and you got a taste of the fresh churned cream, or licked the dasher when it was all over. Or sometimes, in winter while Annie shovelled coal into the furnace, Gilbert stood fearfully by and saw the blackish flame shoot up through the new coal. But on the whole, the basement was not a pleasant place. The furnace, so hot when you stood by it, sent only feeble currents of air up to the little registers that opened into the vast rooms above. And always, the year round, there was that musty dining-room to descend into three times a day, with its old frayed chairs, its uncertain carpet, its stained brown walls.

Nor did the creatures who inhabited the basement attract him. Annie changed her guise, but not her nature. And she scarcely changed her guise. If his mother had ever had a servant in the back-street, Gilbert did not remember it. But in Garna’s house one naturally had a servant, and one naturally had a Polish girl. Gilbert did not at first understand what Annie was doing in the kitchen, this queer, whitish young woman with many skirts and vast breasts, who gave a sort of growl-smile when you spoke to her, and always started incontinently, with alacrity, to do something without knowing what it was. Gilbert would come in from the garden into the fragrant kitchen on baking-day to look for cookies, and find his mother moving about, with her serious, anxious expression, while Annie sprawled about, cutting up potatoes, and listening to his mother’s earnest expostulations. In a few months there would be another Annie; her mouth was perhaps crookeder and her hair yellower, but she would plunge clumsily about in the same old way, and would take up her education not where the other Annie had left off, but precisely in that brutish ignorance where she had begun. To Gilbert’s mother, the living and successive tissue of Annies became the absorption of life, but Gilbert was not absorbed in Annies. They were not pretty, and they had a stale odor which Gilbert avoided when he could. He associated the unpleasantness of this strong, docile creature, who relapsed in each transformation to her original brutish ignorance, with the whole unpleasantness of that downstairs floor, the dining-room which remained always the same, whose dull squalor nobody ever did anything to take away, for which Gilbert could not do anything, and for which perhaps nothing could be done.

Upstairs, Gilbert liked Garna’s house better. The front parlor was a vast and cavernous room, the mysteries of which Gilbert penetrated only slowly. The back parlor was much more comprehensible. Here the sun shone in, and people sat and lived. When you entered the front parlor, you involuntarily lowered your voice, and you moved around subdued, as if someone had died there. Garna never opened the windows, and the shutters of the bay which looked towards the east were always kept tightly closed. But in the back parlor on bright winter days you sent the shade flying up to the top, and let the sun stream in over the floor all the way to the monster of a horsehair-covered sofa which stretched along the wall.

Horsehair made you feel almost as puckery as matting to touch it, and, besides, you could not climb up its slippery edges very easily. And once you were perched up there, you began to slide and slide until you would fall in a heap ignominiously off that ungainly and inhospitable bulk of a sofa. So you would go over and sit at Garna’s feet, as she rocked slowly in her great chair, which you must never tip too far back for fear of the grand-father’s clock that stood in the corner behind it. The clock had a loud and lovely bell which struck the hours. Gilbert could always tell when it was going to strike, for a minute or two before the hour there was a sharp click. Then a little later would begin a vast rumbling from the very chest of the old clock, as if it were taking a long, deep breath for its pealing song. When Gilbert was in the room, he always stopped and listened for the whole long satisfactory performance. It was slow, it was prepared, it was beautiful, and when Garna got a clock for the dining-room which rattled off a quick little tinkle of a stroke, Gilbert despised it, and would have covered his ears if he had not thought it would be silly.

Upstairs the rooms were just as vast. There was Mother’s room, into which the sunlight poured, and which was the warmest in winter, though you took turns rushing to the register to dress where it was warm, before washing in the cold water of the wash-bowl. Just off from Mother’s room was a little room, with nothing in it but a huge bed, where Olga and Gilbert slept, and a dresser, in which Gilbert’s clothes were kept. On the wall were two old pictures, one representing a donkey in the midst of illimitable and ineffable summer pastures, and marked, “Everything Lovely,” the other showing him in the blizzard before a locked stabledoor, with “Nobody loves me!” Against the tall window, at the foot of the bed, were rows and rows of shelves, on which stood flower-pots all winter long, geraniums and begonias, and heliotrope plants, so that they could catch the full warmth of the winter sun and keep green for summer, when Mother took them out of the pots and put them in rows in the garden again. The window was almost smothered in rich greenery, and sometimes when Gilbert would wake up early on a winter morning, when the light was just beginning to come through the leaves, he would find that the shelves had become a black silhouetted tracery of amazing figures. Queer outlandish heads,—fierce dragomans with pipes in their mouths, Chinamen with queues, policemen with round helmets, or animals such as Gilbert had seen at the Zoo—camels with misshapen humps, elephants with long trunks, the head of a lion. It was very startling to wake up, lying on one’s back and gazing out where this faint light appeared in the crevices between these weird figures. The pleasant green plants with which they had gone to bed had given place to queer apparitions. Yet they must be plants. But how could plants look so terrifyingly like heads? Everywhere he looked there appeared a bristling, clear shape. The window was a vast tracery of strangeness. Gilbert was never quite sure how real they were, and he was always grateful when the advancing light gradually brought out the greenness of the leaves, and finally threw them into relief, so that the menacing head would finally dissolve into the utterly meaningless juncture of two geranium blossoms, and the elephant trunk became a familiar begonia frond. Then he was cheered, and he wondered how he had ever seen anything else. No wildest forcing of his imagination could make him see the things he had seen.

It was in this room that Gilbert’s mother put the children to bed every night, and then took out the lamp to her room, leaving the door just slightly ajar, so they would not be afraid. Everything was so cozy and comfortable during the undressing. Then would come the frightening thought, “Perhaps this comforting presence is going to be withdrawn!” For sometimes you would wake up suddenly with a little clutch at the heart. The dim light would be burning through the crack of the door, but there would be a vast stillness. You knew that the house was empty, that somehow it was the middle of a night that would never end, and everybody, Garna, Mother, and Annie, had gone off to some distant muffled cavern and would never come again. Olga, sleeping in a little round ball at your side, her eyes seraphically closed, was of no avail. The light burned steadily on, only deepening the terror of eternity, of being lost. Should you call? What would be the use? They were infinitely far away, in a sort of Buddha-like trance. So you cried a little, and fell off asleep.

Or if you did not go to sleep, you waited dumbly, and, after æons of time, you heard an unmistakable door close softly downstairs, and in a minute Mother was looking in at you, to see if you were safe. And you said, “Mother!” in a half-choking voice, while great waves of relief and happiness surged through you, and you went sound asleep. So Gilbert got in the habit of asking his mother every night whether she was going out. And what assurance and peace there was when she said she was not! He was safe, no matter how long the night lasted.

In Gilbert’s new house, you could go upstairs in two ways—the front-stairs, and the back-stairs. The front-stairs were very straight and very long and very steep, and were covered with a thick carpet. They went straight down to a little narrow hall and the front door. The back-stairs were crooked and narrow and covered with oil-cloth. They ran down to a little passageway which connected the back parlor with the “side-door,” right at the opening of the dark, steep flight that went down into the dining-room. All these regions and passages in Gilbert’s house had names. Gilbert soon learned that he must never go down the front-stairs, but must always use the back ones. But one unfortunate day, his cousin George, who was eight, showed him the delights of sliding down the banisters, and Gilbert, although he could never walk down the front-stairs without a feeling of the most awful guilt, let himself be seduced into this new and amazing adventure. The rapturous slide down the long, straight, polished wood was so safe and gave him such a thrill that he tried it again and again. But Olga, who by this time was all of five years old, insisted on riding too, and threatened so instant and tumultuous a devastation of tears, that Gilbert and George, in a panic at being discovered, held her up and, having adjusted her little legs and cautioned her as to the way one let one’s fingers slide along the slippery rail, let her go.

Now there was attached to the wall by a bracket a lamp, which Gilbert’s legs just cleared, although he was always conscious of a fine potential crash. But as Olga went slipping down the rail, it was inevitable that she should choose just that place to fall off, which Gilbert had all the morning been thrillingly avoiding. She fell floppily into the hall, carrying the lamp-shade with her, and making a crash which brought Mother and Annie from the kitchen and Garna from her room above. Then there were tears and scoldings in a great flood, and a few reluctant whacks; George was sent home, and the banisters were never slid on again, at least not by Olga. Gilbert used them only as a special treat to himself and only in his most unwatched moments. It was one instance where his fiercely clutching guilt melted away before the thrill of that slide.

Gilbert’s house, however, afforded few excitements. Garna’s big room you did not often enter, though you might on Sunday while she was putting on her veil and bonnet to take you to church. Gilbert did not care very much how the rest of the family got to church, but it was one of the most important things in his life that he should go with Garna. At nine o’clock the church-bell would begin to ring, gayly, quickly, sometimes the long peals almost falling over each other in their eagerness. Then it would stop, with a final long echo. Now the whole town knew that it was Sunday. Then at ten o’clock the great bell would ring again, not quite so gayly nor so quickly, to let the people know that there would be church that day. Then at twenty minutes after ten the bell would begin its real earnestness,—slow and solemn strokes, each one ringing its full sonorous note and dying away before the next one began.