My Day: Reminiscences of a Long Life

by Sara Agnes Rice Pryor

I engaged madame—and then I was a busy woman indeed. I hired a hall and two pianos, wrote programmes and advertisements and had rose-colored cards painted, "Soirée, Musical and Literary." I discovered a florist near my hall, and persuaded him to lend me all his plants,—I wrote invitations to my ushers and presented each one with a crystal heart for a badge,—and then I went home, on the great evening, tired to death, and perfectly sure it would end in failure. My general, fully of the same opinion, tried to comfort me by saying that I would know better next time. He went early to the hall, and when I arrived he was pacing the street in front of the door. "The place is crammed full," he announced; "there is hardly standing room."

It wanted but eight minutes to the hour announced for commencing, and Madame Bishop had not arrived. Mrs. Gamp's fiddle-string illustration would have again been a feeble expression of mine. My heart almost failed me. But at last the expected carriage arrived,—madame, her maid, and her accompanist. To my exclamation of relief, she threw back her head and laughed heartily: "Oh, you amateurs! Now, you just go and get a seat and enjoy the music. We'll go on by the programme all right."

Advance sale of tickets had yielded $100. This I handed madame in an envelope. All went well. She was very good indeed—very spirited. The dashing young sergeant marched away with all the fire of earlier days. Everybody was pleased. When I thanked madame, she slipped into my hand her own donation—$50. The next day I entered $500 upon my collection book and, thus vindicated, I was able to face my colleagues. A great and useful charity is this Home for friendless women and children in Brooklyn. And noble were the women I learned to know and love who worked with me there. They made me their corresponding secretary, and liked everything I did for them.

Some women formerly of high position in the South found temporary refuge in this Home. The world would be surprised if I should give their names! In the depth of winter I once found a woman bearing one of Virginia's oldest names. She was sitting upon a box beside a fireless stove, warming her baby in her bosom. Her husband had gone out to hunt for work! She had no fire, no furniture, no food! Another, belonging to a proud South Carolina family, I found in an attic in New York. She had had no food for two days! These, and more, I was enabled by the lovely women of Brooklyn to relieve, delicately and permanently. Better, truer, more cultivated women I have nowhere known. Of the extent of my own anxieties and privations they never knew. Something within me proudly forbade me to complain. My dear Mrs. Eaton alone knew the true condition of my own family. She lives to bear testimony to the truth of the strange story I am telling—the story of a Southern general and his wife, who showed smiling, brave faces to the world, and suffered for ten years the pangs of extreme poverty in their home, working all the time to the utmost limit of human endurance. Not one moment's recreation did we allow ourselves—our "destiny was work, work, work"—and patiently we fulfilled it. Hard study filled my husband's every waking hour, and few were his hours of sleep. Excessive use of his eyes night and day so injured them that at one time he found reading impossible. Gordon read his law aloud to him for many weeks. I once copied a book of law forms for him as we had no money to buy the book—the hardest work I have ever done! It was my custom to retire at night with my family and, after all were quietly sleeping, to rise and with my work-basket creep down to the library, light a lamp, and sew until two or three o'clock in the morning. There were seven children. All must be clothed. I literally made every garment they wore, even their wraps in winter. Through the kindness of Professor Eaton arrangements were made that enabled my little girls to attend the Packer Institute, founded by the most gracious and beautiful of women, Mrs. Harriet Packer. When they went forth in the morning to their school, they all presented a fresh, well-groomed appearance—the result of the midnight lamp and work-basket!

I remember but one occasion when any member of the family indulged in outside amusements. Just across the river were the brilliant theatres and opera-houses of the great metropolis. Here in Brooklyn were plays, concerts, balls, evening parties. The children for five or six years after our coming North never supposed these things possible for them. I cannot say the fate of Tantalus was ours. True, the rivers of delight were around us, but we never "bent to drink"—never gave the "refluent waters" an opportunity to shrink from our lips. We simply ignored them. But Gordon and Roger had one great pleasure in 1868. It would be hard to make this generation understand the emotions with which they saw and heard Dickens. His books had for a time made the very atmosphere of their lives! They talked Dickensese to each other, and fitted his characters into the situations of their own lives. Now they were to look upon the man himself. Of this experience my daughter writes me:—

"I remember as I awaited his appearance how my heart beat. I doubt whether the recrudescence of Shakespeare would move me as much now. At the appointed hour he ascended the little platform of Plymouth Church with a rapid gait, almost running up the few steps, as I remember; but truly my heart was thumping so, and there was such a mist of agitation before my eyes, that I did not at once clearly discern the great magician. When my brain cleared with a jerk and I could make myself believe that Dickens was really before me, what did I see? A very garish person with a velvet-faced coat and a vast double watch chain—all, as well as his rather heavy-nosed unspiritual face perfectly presented in the photograph of the time. He had an alert, businesslike way with him, no magnetism, as I recollect. But his reading impressed me then as now, as perfection of elocution—natural, spontaneous, as if he himself enjoyed every word of it and had never done it before. He read the trial scene from Pickwick inimitably. I think I have since seen the criticism that he did not give us the Sam Weller of our imagination, but certainly it did not so impress me then. I was absolutely satisfied. He followed Pickwick with Dr. Marigold, for which I cared much less. Dickens's pathos, even in my days of thraldom, almost always struck me as mawkish. Somehow, in looking at the man, it was hard to believe in his sentiment—though I still think much of it sincere. But truly, in appearance, he is what is now called 'a bounder.' I never read Forster's life of him: I know him only through his own books, but my impression of him from his appearance is that he was not exactly a gentleman. Yet I forgot everything except delight in the reading—after my initial shock of the velvet coat, the ponderous watch chains, the countenance to match. And to this day one of my most cherished memories is that I saw and heard Dickens."

CHAPTER XXXIII

I soon found that two of my children were old enough to pine for something more than physical comfort. They did not propose to live by bread alone. The appealing eyes of our daughter Gordon were not to be resisted and, as I have said, she entered the Packer Institute with her little sisters, entering the senior class, where she soon graduated with the first honors,—and where she nobly taught an advanced class,—relinquishing at eighteen years of age all the pleasures to which she was entitled. Theo, I supposed, would learn law in his father's office. But he, too, like Goethe, craved "more light." One day as I was returning from church he asked me, with suppressed feeling, if he was ever to go to college.

I was smitten to the heart! When I repeated this to his father, he declared, "He shall!" And within a few months a scholarship at Princeton was found and promised, provided the boy could pass a creditable entrance examination.