History of a literary radical, and other essays

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

In the summer afternoons Garna would take her waist off, and sit sewing in her bare arms. Gilbert liked to lean over and rub his face against the expanse of cool flesh, lay his head on the cool shoulder, and listen to Garna’s stories of when she was a little girl. Gilbert learned about her father’s house in Burnham, which he should some day see, but it was a long distance from where they lived now; about his mill-pond and his mill, where great mahogany logs that came from the West Indies were sawed up for furniture; about the canal that was dug, when she was a little girl, through their very front yard, and on which they saw the very first boat sail grandly by, the grandfather of those boats that Gilbert had loved to watch from the porch of the house in the back-street, and which he had almost forgotten now that he had come to live with Garna.

So he would lean there against her arm, stroking her plump elbow with its dimples that so fascinated him, and listening to her stories until, in the drowsy summer air, he sank away indistinctly, and knew nothing until he woke up towards supper-time on Garna’s high bed. Every now and then, as a great distinction and event, Gilbert would be allowed to sleep with Garna. How different and solemn it was from any other sleep! When Gilbert said good-night to Garna in her big chair in the back-parlor, it was with a “I’m going to sleep with you to-night!” Then he would get, not into the hard little bed with Olga, but into the great feathery soft bed in Garna’s room. He would sink off to sleep in billows and oceans of soft pillows and sheets. Along towards morning he would half wake, perhaps, and there would be the huge, comforting, dear presence of Garna filling the bed beside him, as he lay pressed against her warm night-gown. And when he woke again, Mother would be there standing by the side of the bed, and she would whisk him off to her room to be dressed. And life would go on as before.

Aunt Nan seemed to love Garna as much as Gilbert did. And she liked Gilbert. Often, on summer days, she would take him up to her room in the third-story, a region to which Gilbert never ventured alone, for there were queer, pitchy-black closets and alcoves that led far back under the sloping roof, and contained trunks and boxes, in which and behind which you never knew what menacing forces of evil might be hidden. At the top of the stairs was a little hall, lighted by a sky-light, through which you saw the blue sky. Aunt Nan’s room was shaped like an L, but the ceiling on one side ran down so steeply that Gilbert could stand against the wall and touch the line where it joined the ceiling. Aunt Nan would fix up a pallet on the floor, soft and comfortable, and on hot days Gilbert would roll half-naked on it, while Aunt Nan rubbed his hot arms with a sweet-smelling balsam. Then she would sit and read a great shiny new book, which Gilbert spelled out as “Psychology. James.” She had several books on shelves over her desk, and a great bunch of programs stuck together on an iron hook that hung on the wall. In the winter Aunt Nan was not in the house. Mother said she was a teacher, and lived in New York.

Aunt Nan was very tall and slender and very straight, and she had very black hair that came over her forehead in a kind of bang. She always wore black and white dresses, and she always had a bright fierceness about her that Gilbert liked. She was several years younger than Mother, and she was very proud. There was a stiff exhilaration in her walk and in her laugh that daunted Gilbert a little, but made him like to be with her. Sometimes she would put the tennis-net across the green lawn and play with a neighbor, darting so swiftly, like a long black bird, across the green, hitting the ball so straight and true, and blazing so fiercely with her black eyes when she missed, that Gilbert sat enthralled, motionless, until the set was over and they went in to supper. On those days he would help her mark the court, going to the little barn and watching her fill the marker with white powdery lime, and then helping her push it over the closely-mown grass. The long summer days were full of Aunt Nan. She loved the garden, with its flower-beds, and she loved to see the paths all clipped and weeded and raked. Once a week, a black man would come from somewhere, and spend the whole day with Aunt Nan, mowing the lawn, digging the vegetable garden, and weeding the flowers. That was a glorious day for Gilbert and for Aunt Nan. How much there was to be done. They all seemed to be wrestling with the whole yard, to turn it up, to bring it to a bright, shiny newness. At the end of the day, Gilbert would walk about the garden on the gravelly paths with Aunt Nan to survey their handiwork. She would be immensely contented. Her bright black eyes would soften; she would be weary and her hands would be dirty, but Gilbert would feel the peace that radiated from her at the sight of this freshly burnished garden. The grass would be smooth like a carpet, the flower-beds and the vegetable-garden all dark and tumbled with their upturned earth. The paths would be straight brown indented tracks, or, where they went around the house, beautifully curved tracks, with the marks of the rake on the fine earth where George had worked it over. During the week the grass would grow longer, the weeds shoot up in the flower-beds, the paths become bedraggled at the edges, the grass grow up rank on the lawns. But soon Saturday would come with George, and the fine renovation would take place all over again.

Aunt Nan was neat and quick in her movements. She had a cold scorn for dirty faces and dirty hands, and Gilbert sometimes became a little weary trying to satisfy her demands. He was always a little intimidated by her, but at the same time fascinated by her vibrancy, her restless passion. He loved to see her coming towards him, because he knew that she would snatch him away to something interesting. But he was a little fearful, too; subdued by that decisiveness that made him realize how little what he wanted would count. She did not kiss or fondle Gilbert much. She would take him on her lap and put her arms around him.

Mother was never like that. She did not seem to know what she wanted. Every incident was a crisis. Gilbert found that he and Olga could resist her by delaying. Dirty faces could be grudgingly and slowly cleaned. One could come in the utmost disapproving reluctance when one was called. Mother was always distressed that you did not obey her; she was always distressed about what to do with you. She would implore you to be good, and you would be good with a certain chilly haughtiness, because it seemed somewhat humiliating to see Mother so distressed and uncertain. Olga did not usually obey, but kicked and screamed. Gilbert soon got the habit of ignoring his mother’s expressed desires and wearing out her decisiveness. Then he would be left alone to follow his own desires.

That yard, which Aunt Nan loved so much, was for Gilbert a domain, a principality. It was years before he had really explored it thoroughly or searched out all its delights. At first it was a rich and bountiful collection of all the things that Gilbert had missed in the back-street. He did not know that he had missed them, but now that he had found them, something down very deep in him told him that this was what his restlessness and sadness had craved.

You rushed out the side-door—for the front door was just as heavily interdicted as the front stairs—and you tumbled into a bed of myrtles and wistaria which climbed out of the flower-bed in thick stalks and grew steadily over the corner of the house. Across the path were two tall pine trees, whose branches brushed Gilbert’s shutter by his bed when the wind blew loud. Beyond the trees lay the green, unbroken lawn, covered with velvety grass that even the lawn-mower could not keep from growing thick and soft like a carpet. The lawn went straight up towards the neighbor’s fence, but just before it reached there it turned into a long flower-bed, with rose-bushes and tangled flowery vines that climbed over and pretended that there was no fence there at all. To the right, and up near the street corner of the yard were three more lordly pines set in a triangle, which Gilbert had promptly named “Three Trees Grove.” The floor was covered with needles. It was shady and spacious, almost as big as Gilbert’s room. It could be turned into a house, or a shop or a church, at a moment’s notice. The big trunks stretching up above Gilbert’s head gave it an air of delightful majesty, and he could not play there enough with Olga and Cousin Ethel.

At the other end of the broad lawn were the grape-arbors, six or seven lines of them, where you walked between the overflowing vines and looked longingly at the green bunches which took endless æons, all through the long golden summer, to ripen, while Gilbert went every day to examine them. Behind that was the barn, from which the horses and carriage had vanished, though when Grandfather was alive, Garna told him, they had their horses and Aunt Nan had ridden one of them, and so had Uncle Rob, who was far off in Texas now. Gilbert could see traces of the carriage road which had led out through the side-gate to the side-street, but which was now all grass-grown. The barn was now full of rakes and hoes and wheel-barrows, but there were deep bins where still remained a peck or two of oats and a measure, and there was a manger which swung back and forth from the stall to the bin, so you could fill it and then turn it in to the horse. Gilbert wished that there were still horses to play with, but it was fun turning the manger and making Olga and Ethel pretend to be horses.

If you went on beyond the barn you came to a clump of currant and gooseberry bushes which ran out in a thin line to the fence, which by this time had lost its rose-bushes and become a prickly tangle of blackberries. Enclosed by the blackberries and the currants was the broad expanse of the vegetable garden, with corn in summer that Gilbert could get quite lost in, and an amazing variety of good vegetables to eat. The vegetable garden ran up to Uncle Marcus’s barn and his garden. Straight down back of Garna’s house, through the middle of the yard, ran a path, part way through a grape-arbor of its own, and then past the currant bushes. At the end of the garden it joined a path in Uncle Marcus’s yard. Along the foot of the path, where it passed the garden, was a row of rhubarb, and on the other side Aunt Nan’s sweet-peas, which she planted every spring. On the other side of the path was an open meadow where the grass was not cut, and where Gilbert sometimes lay on cool summer days and looked up at great white clouds floating past in the blue sky. Nearer the house you came to a wilderness of fruit-trees, pears of all kinds and apples, and as you approached the street the yard broke into flower-beds and shrubs and bushes. Close to the house grew lilies-of-the-valley, and a curious ribbon-grass which Aunt Nan could take between her fingers and blow shrill whistles on. Along the path which went past the dining-room window were beds of pink and white peonies and tall white lilies which had a smell so sweet that Gilbert felt almost faint when he touched them. And along the whole side of the yard was a beautiful japonica hedge, with its white and red flowers in the spring, which turned into sweetly smelling green balls in the summer. There were great maples interspersed in the hedge that threw down their keys in the spring. And all along the front of the yard, close to the house, ran a white wooden fence just within which was a line of graceful black-walnut trees, with their thin green clustered leaves and the green nuts which fell in heaps on the ground. Aunt Nan and Gilbert would collect them in sacks and put them in the barn. There they would grow all black, so that you could strip off the covering and find the crinkled nutshell within. Then you cracked them on a stone.