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Title: Raw Material

Author: Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Release date: September 10, 2021 [eBook #66258]

Language: English

Credits: D A Alexander, Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


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RAW MATERIAL




_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

THE SQUIRREL-CAGE
A MONTESSORI MOTHER
MOTHERS AND CHILDREN
THE BENT TWIG
THE REAL MOTIVE
FELLOW CAPTAINS (With SARAH N. CLEGHORN)
UNDERSTOOD BETSY
HOME FIRES IN FRANCE
THE DAY OF GLORY
THE BRIMMING CUP
ROUGH-HEWN




RAW MATERIAL

BY
DOROTHY CANFIELD

[Illustration: Logo]


NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY




COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.


PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. BY

The Quinn & Boden Company
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
RAHWAY      NEW JERSEY




CONTENTS

                                PAGE
RAW MATERIAL                       9

UNCLE GILES                       25

“WHAT GOES UP...”                 37

OLD MAN WARNER                    69

THE IDEAS OF M. BRODARD           83

FAIRFAX HUNTER                   111

PROFESSOR PAUL MEYER             127

“WHILE ALL THE GODS...”          143

SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS             151

ART ATMOSPHERE                   167

COLONEL SHAYS                    175

A GREAT LOVE                     187

SUPPLY AND DEMAND                197

UNCLE ELLIS                      211

GOD’S COUNTRY                    215

INHERITANCE                      227

THIRTY YEARS AFTER               233

“THE OLD NEW ENGLAND STOCK”      239

OCTOBER, 1918                    255

A BRETON AMONG HSÜ HSI           265

ALMERA HAWLEY CANFIELD           273




RAW MATERIAL


I don’t know who is responsible for this rather odd book, but I lay
it to the earlier generations of my family. My clergyman grandfather
always said that he never enjoyed any sermons so much as the ones he
preached to himself sitting under another clergyman’s pulpit. When the
text was given out, his mind seized on it with a vivid fresh interest
and, running rapidly away from the intrusive sound of the other
preacher’s voice, wove a tissue of clear, strong, and fascinatingly
interesting reasonings and exhortations. Grandfather used to say that
such sermons preached to himself were in the nature of things much
better than any he could ever deliver in church. “I don’t have to keep
a wary eye out for stupid old Mrs. Ellsworth, who never understands
anything light or fanciful; I don’t have to remember to thunder
occasionally at stolid Mr. Peters to wake him up. I don’t have to
remember to keep my voice raised so that deaf old Senator Peaseley can
hear me. I am not obliged to hold the wandering attention of their
muddled heads by a series of foolish little rhetorical tricks or by a
prodigious effort of my personality. I can just make my sermon what it
ought to be.”

My father, who did a great deal of public speaking, though not in
pulpits, took up this habit in his turn. When a speaker began an
address, he always fell into a trance-like condition, his eyes fixed
steadily on the other orator, apparently giving him the most profound
attention, but in reality making in his mind, on the theme suggested
by the audible speaker, a fluent, impassioned address of his own. He
used to say that he came to himself after one of these auto-addresses
infinitely exhilarated and refreshed by the experience of having
been speaking to an audience which instantly caught his every point,
and which, although entirely sympathetic, was stimulatingly quick to
find the weak spots in his argument and eager to keep him up to his
best. Afterwards he dreaded an ordinary audience with its limping
comprehension, its wandering attention, its ill-timed laughter and
applause.

After I began to read for myself I found the same habit of mind
familiar to many authors. The Stevensons walked up and down the
porch at Saranac, talking at the tops of their voices, on fire with
enthusiasm for their first conception of “The Wrecker.” There never
was, there never could be (so they found out afterwards) a story half
so fine as that tale seemed to them in those glorious moments when
they saw it as they would have liked to make it. I nodded my head
understandingly over this episode. Yes, that was what, in their plain
way, my grandfather and father had done. I recognized the process.
It was evidently a universal one. And when in “Cousine Bette” I
encountered Wencelas Steinbock, I recognized him from afar. “To muse,
to dream, to conceive of fine works, is a delightful occupation.
The work then floats in all the grace of infancy, in the mad joy of
conception, with the fragrant beauty of a flower, and the aromatic
juice of a fruit enjoyed in anticipation.”

And upon my own arrival in adult life it seemed quite the expected
and natural thing to find my own fancy constantly occupied in this
way. The stories I told myself were infinitely superior to anything I
ever got down on paper. Just as my father had been the ideal audience
for himself, so I was my own best reader, a reader who needed no long
explanations, who caught the idea at once, who brought to the tale
all the experience which made it intelligible. Two words with the
grocer’s boy, delivering soap and canned salmon at the back door, and
I was off, author and reader galloping along side by side, on a story
which made not only my own written tales, but other people’s as well,
seem clumsy, obvious, and wordy. A look on an old cousin’s face was
to me--like a text to my grandfather--a springboard from which author
and reader plunged simultaneously into the sea of human relationships,
sensing in human life significances pitiful, exalted, profound, beyond
anything that can be drawn out with the loose-meshed net of words. Did
I sit idling in a railway station, my great-uncle, who died before
I was born, stood there beside me, expounding his life to me with a
precision, a daring abandon, a zestful ardor which would wither and
fade if it were transferred to the pages of a book.

At first I thought this habit of mind entirely universal--as it
is certainly the most natural one possible; but in the course of
much random talk about things in general, I have occasionally come
across people whose eyes are too weak for the white brilliance of
reality, who can only see life through the printed page, which is
a very opaque object. Such people--and they are often cultivated,
university-bred--will say, quite as if they were uttering a truism: “Of
course characters in books--well-written books--are ever so much more
interesting than men and women in real life.”

They perceive the fateful mixture of beast and angel in the human face
only in a portrait gallery; for them the birds sing, the winds sigh,
and human hearts cry out, only at a symphony concert; they depend on
books to give them faintly, dully, dimly, at third-hand, what lies
before them every day, bright-colored, throbbing, and alive. It is a
mental attitude hard for me to understand but it does exist. I have
seen them turn away from a stern and noble tragedy in the life of
their washerwoman, to the cheap sentimentality of a poor novel, which
guarantees (as a fake dentist promises to fill teeth without pain) to
provide tears without emotion. I have seen women who might have been
playing with a baby, laughing at his inimitable funniness, leave him
to a nurse and go out to enliven their minds by the contemplation of
custard-pies smeared over the human countenance.

We are so used to this phenomenon that it does not seem strange to
us. But it is strange--strange and tragic. And I do not in the least
believe that the tragedy is one of the inevitable ones. I think it is
simply a bad habit which has grown up as the modern world has taken to
reading.

Why did the habit ever start? Naturally enough. Because the new medium
of cheap printing let loose on the world the innate loquacity of
writers, unrepressed by the limitations of the human voice. Other
people have not been able to hear themselves think since Gutenberg
enabled writers to drown out the grave, silent, first-hand mental
processes of people blessed by nature with taciturnity. The writer
is not born (as is his boast) with more capacity than other people
for seeing color and interest and meaning in life; he is born merely
with an irrepressible desire to tell everybody what he sees and
feels. We have been hypnotized by his formidable capacity for speech
into thinking that he is the only human being on whom life makes an
impression. This is not so. He is merely so made that he cannot rest
till he has told everybody who will listen to him, the impression
that life has made on him. This is the queer mainspring of creative
literature. The writer cannot keep a shut mouth. To speak out seems to
be the only useful thing he can do in life. And in its way it is a very
useful occupation. But there is no reason why other people who have
other useful things to do should miss the purity and vividness of a
first-hand impression of life which they could enjoy without spoiling
it, as an artist always does, by his instant anxiety about how much
of it he can carry off with him for his art, by his instant mental
fumbling with technical means, by his anguished mental questions: “What
would be the best way to get that effect over in a book?” or “How could
you convey that impression in a dialogue?”

It is a dog’s life, believe me, this absurd, pretentious carrying
about of your little literary yardstick and holding it up against
the magnificent hugeness of the world. I cannot believe that it is
necessary to have that yardstick in hand before seeing the hugeness
which it can never measure. One proof that it is not necessary is the
fact that artists enjoy the raw materials of arts which they do not
practise, much more freely and light-heartedly than the raw material
of their own. I love the materials from which painters make pictures
and musicians make music vastly more than the materials from which
novelists make novels, because I feel no responsibility about them,
because I know that they do not mean for me a struggle, foredoomed to
failure, to get them down on canvas or between the five lines of the
musical staff.

Do I seem to be advocating a habit of mind which would put an end to
the writing of novels altogether? Personally I do not believe that the
foundations of the world would move by a hair if that end were brought
about. But, as a matter of fact, I do not in the least think that
novel-writing would be anything but immensely benefited by a reading
public which had acquired its own eyesight and did not depend on the
writer’s. Such a body of creative-minded readers would lift the art of
fiction up to levels we have none of us conceived. With such a public
of trained, practised observers, fiction could cast off the encumbering
paraphernalia of explanations and photographs which now weigh it down.
There need be no fear for the future of fiction if every one takes to
being his own novelist. For then readers will not look in novels for
what is never there, reality itself. They will look for what is the
only thing that ought to be there, the impression which reality has
made on the writer, and they will have an impression of their own with
which to compare that of the writer. This will free the author forever
from attempting the impossible, bricks-without-straw undertaking of
trying to get life itself between the covers of a book.

For never, never can fiction hope to attain myriads of effects which
life effortlessly puts over wherever we look, if we will only see what
is there. If we leave those inimitable natural effects of beauty, or
fun, or tragedy, or farce entirely for the professional writer to see
and enjoy and ponder on, we are showing the same sort of passive,
closed imaginations which lead Persians to sit obesely at ease on
cushions, and watch professional dancers have all the fun of dancing.
The phrase which we traditionally ascribe to them is this, “Why bother
to dance yourselves, when you can hire somebody to do it much better?”
But that is our own unspoken phrase about the raw material of art
and its monopoly by the professional artist. We Westerners dance,
ourselves, not because we have any notion that we can dance better than
the professionals, but because we have discovered by experience that
to dance gives us a very different sort of pleasure from that given by
looking at professionals. We have also discovered that it does not at
all prevent us from hiring professionals and enjoying them as much as
any Persians.

It is for the active-minded people who enjoy doing their own thinking
as well as watching the author do his, that I have put this volume
together. When life speaks to them, their hearts answer, as a friend
to a friend. They are my brothers and my sisters. They practise the
delight-giving art of being their own authors. They know the familiar,
exquisite interest of trying to arrange in coherence the raw material
which life constantly washes up to every one in great flooding masses.
And they do this for their own high pleasure, with no idea of profiting
by it in the eyes of the world. They work to create order out of chaos
with a single-hearted effort, impossible to poor authors, tortured
by the aching need to get the results of their efforts into words
intelligible to others.

Being useful in other ways to the world, it is quite permissible for
them to indulge in what was pernicious self-indulgence for an artist
like Wencelas Steinbock. They are good children who, having nourished
themselves on the substantial food of useful work, may eat candy
without risking indigestion. The artist’s work is the fatiguing attempt
to transform the wonder of life into art! Those other disinterested
observers of life, those wise, deeply pondering, far-seeing men and
women, driven by their own need to make something understandable out of
our tangled life, struggle, just as the artist does, to piece together
what they see into intelligible order. But they do this in their
own hearts, for their own satisfaction. How singularly free-handed
and open-hearted and generous their attitude seems, compared to the
artist’s frugal, not to say penurious, not to say avaricious, anxiety
to utilize every scrap of his life as raw material for his art.

Such people have, as the reward for their disinterested attitude of
mind, all the pleasures of the creative artist’s life and none of its
terrible pains. All the pleasure, that is, except the dubious one
of seeing themselves in print. This is--for me at least--a pleasure
deeply colored with humiliation. The stuff which I manage to get into
a printed book is so tragically dry and lifeless compared to the
vibrating, ordered, succulent life which goes on inside my head before
I put pen to paper! For my part, I envy the clever, happy people who
are content to let it stay in their heads, and never try to decant it
into a book, only to find that the bouquet and aroma are all gone. I
quite sympathize with them when they are impatient with the verbose
literal-minded garrulity with which most writers of fiction spread out
clumsily over two pages that which takes but a flash to think or to
feel. They think, and quite rightly, that what is slowly written out in
the inaccurate, halting system we call language, bears little relation
to the arrow-swift movements of the thinking mind and feeling heart.

That which is written down in an attempt to make it intelligible to
everybody is a rude approximation like that of ready-made clothing,
manufactured to fit every one somewhat and no one exactly. That
which springs into being in the brain at a contact with life, exactly
fits the comprehension, background, and experience of the person who
owns the brain. There are no waste motions, no paragraphs to skip, no
compressions too bare, no descriptions too wordy, none of those sore,
never-solved problems of the writer who addresses unknown readers, “How
much can I leave out? How far can I suggest and not state? How far
can I trust the reader’s attention not to flag, his intelligence to
understand at a hint, rather than at a statement? What experience of
life can I presuppose him to have had?”

When you are your own author, you know all about your reader, and need
never think of his limitations. He is faithful to you, flies lightly
when you rise into the air, plods steadily beside you at your own pace
as you slowly work your way into unfamiliar country, flashes back into
the past and selects exactly what is needed from his experience, sinks
with you into a golden haze of contemplation over some surprising or
puzzling phenomenon, is in no nagging hurry to “get on with the story.”
After some experience of such a marriage of author and reader, don’t
you find it hard to put up with the fumbling guesswork of a printed
book?

And yet here I have written another book? No, this is not a written
book in the usual sense. It is a book where nearly everything is
left for the reader to do. I have only set down in it, just as if I
were noting them down for my own use, a score of instances out of
human life, which have long served me as pegs on which to hang the
meditations of many different moods.

Note well that I have not set down those meditations ... or at
most--for the flesh is weak!--only here and there a trace of them. But
if I have occasionally back-slid from the strait neutral path of sacred
Objectivity, at least let me here and now warn you to ignore whatever
moralizings of mine have escaped excision. Pay no attention to them,
if you run across one or two. I know for a certainty that my musings
about the men and women who were the originals of these portraits
would not serve you as they do me. I know you can make for yourselves
infinitely better ones. I know that what you will do for yourselves
will be like the living lacework of many-colored sea-weed floating free
and quivering in quiet sunlit pools; and that what I could get down in
a book would be a poor little faded collection of stiff dead tendrils,
pasted on blotting paper.

In this unrelated, unorganized bundle of facts, I give you just the
sort of thing from which a novelist makes principal or secondary
characters, or episodes in a novel. I offer them to you for the novels
you are writing inside your own heads, before I have spoiled them by
the additions, cuttings, stretchings, or twistings necessary to make
them fit into the fabric of a book. I give them to you, rounded and
whole, just as they happened, without filing and smoothing truth down
to the limits of possibility as all fiction-writers are forced to do.
I spare you all the long-winded conventional devices, descriptions,
transitions, exposition, eloquent passages and the like, by which
writers try to divert the minds of their readers from the inherent
improbability of their stories, devices which, to the suspicious mind,
resemble the patter of thimbleriggers at a county fair. You know as
well as I how inherently improbable life is. Why pretend that it is
not? I have treated you just as though you were that other self in me
who is my best reader. I have given you the fare I like best.

And I have faith to believe that you will enjoy for once being able to
move about in a book without a clutter of explanations and sign-boards
to show you the road the author wishes you to take. I do not wish you
to take any road in particular, and rather hope you will try a good
many different ones, as I do. I have only tried to loan you a little
more to add to the raw material which life has brought you, out of
which you are constructing your own attempt to understand.

I am only handing you from my shelves a few more curiosities to set
among the oddities you have already collected, and which from time to
time you take down as I do mine, turning them around in your hands,
poring over them with a smile, or a somber gaze, or a puzzled look of
surprise.




UNCLE GILES


There are few personalities which survive the blurring, dimming results
of being the subject of family talk through several generations;
but the personality of my Great-Uncle Giles has suffered no partial
obliteration. It has come down to us with outlines keen and sharply
etched into the family consciousness by the acid of exact recollection.

This is not at all because Uncle Giles ever disgraced the family or
did any evil or wicked action. Quite the contrary! Uncle Giles thought
that he was the only member of the entire tribe with any fineness
or distinction of feeling, with any fitness for a higher sphere of
activities than the grubby middle-class world of his kinsmen. Yes, that
is what Uncle Giles thought, probably adding to himself that he often
felt that he was a “gentleman among canaille.” To this day the family
bristles rise at the mention of any one who openly professes to be a
gentleman.

A gentleman should not be forced to the menial task of earning his
living. Uncle Giles was never forced to the menial task of earning
his living. None of the coarsely materialistic forces in human life
ever succeeded in forcing him to it, not even the combined and violent
efforts of a good many able-bodied and energetic kinspeople. The tales
of how Uncle Giles blandly outwitted their stub-fingered attacks on
his liberty and succeeded to the end of a very long life in living
without work are endless in number and infinite in variety; and for
three generations now have wrought the members of our family to wrath
and laughter. He was incredible. You can’t imagine anything like him.
Unless you have had him in your family too.

For many years Uncle Giles was “preparing for the ministry.” These were
the candid years when his people did not know him so well as later, and
still believed that with a little more help Giles would be able to get
on his feet. He was a great favorite in the Theological Seminary where
he was a student for so long, a handsome well-set-up blond young man,
with beautiful large blue eyes. I know just how he looked, for we have
an expensive miniature of him that was painted at the time. He paid
for that miniature with the money my great-grandfather pried out of a
Vermont farm. It had been sent to pay for his board. You can’t abandon
a son just on the point of becoming a clergyman and being a credit to
the entire family. Great-grandfather himself had no more money to send
at that time, but his other sons, hard-working, energetic, successful
men, clubbed together and made up the amount necessary to settle that
board-bill. Uncle Giles thanked them and forwarded with his letter, to
show them, in his own phrase, “that their bounty was not ill-advised,”
a beautifully bound, high-priced, little red morocco note-book in which
he had written down the flattering things said of him by his professors
and others--especially others. He underlined certain passages, thus: 
“... a very worthy young man, _most pleasing in society_.” “A model to
all _in the decorum and grace of his manners_.”

His board bill had to be paid a good many times before Uncle Giles
finally gave up preparing himself for the ministry. The summer
vacations of this period he spent in visiting first one and then
another member of the family, a first-rate ornament on the front porch
and at the table, admired by the ladies of the neighborhood, a prime
favorite on picnics and on the croquet ground. He always seemed to
have dropped from a higher world into the rough middle-class existence
of his kin, but his courtesy was so exquisite that he refrained from
commenting on this in any way. Still you could see that he felt it.
Especially if you were one of the well-to-do neighbors on whom the
distinguished young theological student paid evening calls, you admired
his quiet tact and his steady loyalty to his commonplace family.

The effect which his quiet tact and steady loyalty had on his
commonplace family was so great that it has persisted undiminished to
this day. Any one of us, to the remotest cousin, can spot an Uncle
Giles as far as we can see him. We know all about him, and it is not
on our front porches that he comes to display his tact and loyalty,
and the decorum and grace of his manners. As for allowing the faintest
trace of Uncle-Gilesism to color our own lives, there is not one of
us who would not rush out to earn his living by breaking stone by the
road-side rather than accept even the most genuinely voluntary loan.
We are, as Uncle Giles felt, a very commonplace family, of the most
ordinary Anglo-Saxon stock, with no illuminating vein of imaginative
Irish or Scotch or Welsh blood; and I think it very likely that if we
had not experienced Uncle Giles we would have been the stodgiest of the
stodgy as far as social injustice is concerned. But our imaginations
seem to have been torn open by Uncle Giles as by a charge of
dynamite; and, having once understood what he meant, we hang to that
comprehension with all our dull Anglo-Saxon tenacity. We have a deep,
unfailing sympathy with any one who is trying to secure a better and
fairer adjustment of burdens in human life, because we see in our plain
dull way that what he is trying to do is to eliminate the Uncle Gileses
from society and force them to work. And we are always uneasily trying
to make sure that we are not in the bigger scheme, without realizing
it, Uncle Gilesing it ourselves.

After a while Uncle Giles stopped preparing for the ministry and
became an invalid. He bore this affliction with the unaffected manly
courage which was always one of his marked characteristics. He never
complained: he “bore up” in all circumstances; even on busy wash-days
when there was no time to prepare one of the dainty little dishes which
the delicacy of his taste enabled him so greatly to appreciate. Uncle
Giles always said of the rude, vigorous, hearty, undiscriminating men
of the family, that they could “eat anything.” His accent in saying
this was the wistful one of resigned envy of their health.

It has been a point of honor with us all, ever since, to be able to
“eat anything.” Any one, even a legitimate invalid, who is inclined
to be fastidious and make it difficult for the others, feels a united
family glare concentrating on him, which makes him, in a panic, reach
out eagerly for the boiled pork and cabbage.

Uncle Giles’s was a singular case, “one of those mysterious maladies
which baffle even the wisest physicians,” as he used to say himself. A
good many ladies in those days had mysterious maladies which baffled
even the wisest physicians, and they used to enjoy Uncle Giles above
everything. No other man had such an understanding of their symptoms
and such sympathy for their sufferings. The easy chair beside Uncle
Giles’s invalid couch was seldom vacant. Ladies going away after having
left a vaseful of flowers for him, and a plateful of cake, and two or
three jars of jelly, and some cold breasts of chicken, would say with
shining, exalted countenances, “In spite of his terrible trials, what
an inspiration our friend can be! An hour with that good man is like an
hour on Pisgah.”

They would, as like as not, make such a remark to the brave invalid’s
brother or cousin (or, in later years, nephew) who was earning the
money to keep the household going. I am afraid we are no longer as a
family very sure what or where Pisgah is, although we know it is in
the Bible somewhere, but there is a fierce family tradition against
fussing over your health which is as vivid this minute as on the day
when the brother or cousin or nephew of Uncle Giles turned away with
discourteous haste from the shining-faced lady and stamped rudely
into another room. Doctors enter our homes for a broken leg or for a
confinement, but seldom for anything else.

When the Civil War came on, and Uncle Giles was the only man in the
family left at home, he rose splendidly to the occasion and devoted
himself to the instruction of his kinswomen, ignorant of the technique
of warfare. From his invalid couch he explained to them the strategy
of the great battles in which their brothers and husbands and fathers
were fighting; and when the letters from hospital came with news of
the wounded, who but Uncle Giles was competent to understand and
explain the symptoms reported. As a rule the women of his family were
too frantically busy with their Martha-like concentration on the mere
material problems of wartime life to give these lucid and intellectual
discussions of strategy the attention and consideration they deserved.
The war, however, though it seemed endless, lasted after all but four
years. And when it was over, Uncle Giles was free to go back to
discussions more congenial to his literary and esthetic tastes.

By this time he was past middle-age, “a butterfly broken on the
wheel of life,” as he said; it was of course out of the question to
expect him to think of earning his own living. He had become a family
tradition by that time, too, firmly embedded in the solidly set cement
of family habits. The older generation always had taken care of him,
the younger saw no way out, and with an unsurprised resignation bent
their shoulders to carry on. So, before any other plans could be made,
Uncle Giles had to be thought of. Vacations were taken seriatim not to
leave Uncle Giles alone. In buying or building a house, care had to be
taken to have a room suitable for Uncle Giles when it was your turn to
entertain him. If the children had measles, one of the first things to
do was to get Uncle Giles into some other home so that he would not be
quarantined. That strange law of family life which ordains that the
person most difficult to please is always, in the long run, the one to
please whom most efforts are made, worked out in its usual complete
detail. The dishes Uncle Giles liked were the only ones served (since
other men could “eat anything”); the songs Uncle Giles liked were the
only ones sung; the houses were adjusted to him; the very color of the
rugs and the pictures on the walls were selected to suit Uncle Giles’s
fine and exacting taste.

Looking back, through the perspective of a generation-and-a-half, I
can see the exact point of safely acknowledged middle-age when Uncle
Giles’s health began cautiously to improve; but it must have been
imperceptible to those around him, so gradual was the change. His kin
grew used to each successive stage of his recovery before they realized
it was there, and nobody seems to have been surprised to have Uncle
Giles pass into a remarkably hale and vigorous old age.

“Invalids often are strong in their later years,” he said of himself.
“It is God’s compensation for their earlier sufferings.”

He passed into the full rewards of the most rewarded old age. It was a
period of apotheosis for him, and a very lengthy one at that, for he
lived to be well past eighty. In any gathering Uncle Giles, erect and
handsome, specklessly attired, his smooth old face neatly shaved, with
a quaint, gentle, old-world courtesy and protecting chivalry in his
manner to ladies, was a conspicuous and much-admired figure. People
brought their visitors to call on him, and to hear him tell in his
vivid, animated way of old times in the country. His great specialty
was the Civil War. At any gathering where veterans of the War were to
be honored, Uncle Giles held every one breathless with his descriptions
of Gettysburg and Chancellorsville; and when he spoke of Mobile Bay and
Sherman’s march, how his voice pealed, how his fine eyes lighted up!
Strangers used to say to themselves that it was easy to see what an
eloquent preacher he must have been when he was in the active ministry.
The glum old men in worn blue coats used to gather in a knot in the
farthest corner, and in low tones, not to interrupt his discourse,
would chat to each other of crops, fishing, and politics.

Somewhere we have a scrapbook in which an ironic cousin of mine
carefully pasted in all the newspaper articles that were written about
Uncle Giles in his old age, and the many handsome obituary notices
which appeared when he finally died. I can remember my father’s getting
it out occasionally, and reading the clippings to himself with a very
grim expression on his face; but it always moved my light-hearted,
fun-loving mother to peals of laughter. After all, she was related to
Uncle Giles only by marriage and felt no responsibility for him.

The other day, in looking over some old legal papers, I came across a
yellowed letter, folded and sealed (as was the habit before envelopes
were common) with three handsome pale-blue seals on its back. The
seals were made with the crested cameo ring which Uncle Giles always
wore, bearing what he insisted was the “coat of arms” of our family.
The handwriting of the letter was beautiful, formed with an amorous
pride in every letter. It was from Uncle Giles to one of his uncles, my
great-grandfather’s brother. It had lain there lost for half a century
or more, and of course I had never seen it before; but every word
of it was familiar to me as I glanced it over. It began in a manner
characteristic of Uncle Giles’s polished courtesy, with inquiries after
every member of his uncle’s family, and a pleasant word for each one.
He then detailed the state of his health, which, alas, left much to be
desired, and seemed, so the doctors told him, to require urgently a
summer in the mountains. Leaving this subject, he jumped to the local
news of the town where he was then living, and told one or two amusing
stories. In one of them I remember was this phrase, “I told her I might
be poor, but that a gentleman of good birth did not recognize poverty
as a member of the family.” Through a neat transition after this he
led up again to the subject of his health and to the desirability of
his passing some months in the mountains, “in the pure air of God’s
great hills.” Then he entered upon a discreet, pleasant, whimsical
reference to the fact that only a contribution from his uncle’s purse
could make this possible. There never was anybody who could beat Uncle
Giles on ease and grace, and pleasant, pungent humor when it came to
asking for money. The only person embarrassed in that situation was the
one of whom Uncle Giles was expecting the loan.

I read no more. With no conscious volition of mine, my hand had
scrunched the letter into a ball, and my arm, without my bidding, had
hurled the ball into the heart of the fire.


But as I reflected on the subject afterwards, and thought of the
influence which Uncle Giles has always had on our family, it occurred
to me that I was wrong. Uncle Giles ought not to be forgotten. I ought
to have saved that letter to show to my children.




“WHAT GOES UP....”


Among the many agreeably arranged European lives which were roughly
interrupted by the war, I know of none more snugly and compactly
comfortable than that of Octavie Moreau. Indeed, for some years there
had been in the back of my mind a faint notion of something almost
indiscreet in the admirably competent way in which ’Tavie arranged
her life precisely to her taste. I don’t mean that it was an easeful
or elegant or self-indulgent life. She cared as little for dress
as any other intellectual Frenchwoman, let herself get portly, did
up her hair queerly, and the rigorously hearth-and-home matrons of
Tourciennes pointed her out to their young daughters as a horrible
example of what happens to the looks of a woman who acquires too
much learning. As for ease and self-indulgence, ’Tavie’s vigorous
personality and powerful, disciplined brain, as well as the need
to earn her living, kept her from laying on intellectual fat. But
all that vigorous personality, that powerful brain, as well as all
the money which she competently earned, seemed more and more to be
concentrated on her own comfort and on nothing else. Her excellent
salary as professor of science in the girls’ Lycée was almost doubled
by what she made by private lessons, for she was an inspired natural
teacher, who can, as the saying goes, teach anybody anything. In the
thirty years of her life in Tourciennes she has pulled innumerable
despairing boys and girls through dreaded examinations in science and
mathematics; and parents pay well, the world over, for having their
boys and girls pulled through examinations. They respect the woman who
can do it, even if, as in Octavie’s case, their respect is tempered
with considerable disapprobation of eccentric dress, irreligious ideas,
immense skepticism, and cigarette-smoking. And in this case the respect
was heightened by Mlle. Moreau’s well-known ability to drive a hard
bargain and to see through any one else’s attempt to do the same.
Octavie had plenty of everything, brains, will-power and money; but as
far as I could see, she never did anything with this plenty, except to
feather her own nest. I mean this quite literally, for ’Tavie had a
nest, a pretty, red-roofed, gray-walled, old villa, in the outskirts
of Tourciennes, which she had bought years before at a great bargain,
and which was the center of her life. Her younger sister, a weaker
edition of Octavie, who lived with her, and kept house for her, and
revolved about her, and adored her, and depended on her, joined with
her in this, as in everything else. Those two women visibly existed
for the purpose of bringing to perfection that house and the fine,
walled garden about it. Long before anybody else in our circle in
France thought of such a thing as having a real bathroom with hot and
cold water, ’Tavie had one, tiled, and glazed, and gleaming. Octavie’s
library was the best one (in science and economic history) in that
part of France. Never were there such perfectly laid and kept floors
as ’Tavie’s, nor such a kitchen garden, nor closets so convenient and
ingeniously arranged, nor a kitchen of such perfection. All well-to-do
kitchens in the north of France are works of art, but ’Tavie’s was
several degrees more shining and copper-kettled and red-tiled and
polished than any other, just as the food which was prepared there was
several degrees more succulent, even than the superexcellent meals
served elsewhere in that affluent industrial city of the North. As I
finished one of ’Tavie’s wonderful dinners, and stepped with her into
the ordered marvel of her great garden, I remember one day having on
the tip of my tongue some half-baked remark about how far the same
amount of intelligence and energy would have gone towards providing
more decent homes for a few of the poor in her quarter--for the housing
of the poor in Tourciennes was notorious for its wretchedness. But you
may be sure I said nothing of the sort. Nobody ventured to make any
such sanctimonious comment to caustic Octavie Moreau, fifty-four years
old, weighty, powerful, utterly indifferent to other people’s opinions,
her fine mind at the perfection of its maturity, her well-tempered
personality like a splendid tool at the service of her will, her heart
preserved from care about other people’s troubles by her biological
conviction of the futility of trying to help any one not energetic
enough to help himself. She was not unkind to people she happened
to know personally, occasionally spilling over on the needy ones a
little of her superabundant vigor, and some of the money she earned so
easily. But in her heart she scorned people who were either materially
or morally needy, as she scorned every one who was weak and ignorant
and timorous, who was not strong enough to walk straight up to what he
wanted and take it. She had always done that. Anybody who couldn’t ...!


Then the war began and well-planned lives became like grains of dust
in a whirlwind. Tourciennes was at once taken by the Germans and held
until the very last of the war, and for more than four years none
of the rest of us had a word from ’Tavie and her sister. Beyond the
trenches Tourciennes seemed more remote than the palest asteroid.

But after the armistice, what with letters and visits, we soon learned
all about their life under the German occupation, in most ways like
the lives of all our other friends in the North, the grinding round of
petty and great vexations and extortions and oppressions, and slow,
dirty starvation of body, mind, and soul which has been described so
many times since Armistice Day--but with one notable exception. To
Octavie life had brought something more than this.

Early in the third year of the war, the grimly enduring town was
appalled by a decree, issued from German Headquarters. In reprisal for
something said to have happened in far-away Alsace-Lorraine, forty of
the leading women of Tourciennes were to be taken as hostages, conveyed
to a prison-camp in the north of Germany, and left there indefinitely
till the grievance (whatever it was) in Alsace-Lorraine had been
adjusted to the satisfaction of the German government.

By the third year of the war, every one in Tourciennes knew very well
what deportation to a German prison-camp meant: almost sure death,
and certainly broken health for the most vigorous men. They had all
at one time or another gone to the railway station to meet returned
prisoners, ragged, demoralized groups of broken, tubercular skeletons,
who had gone away from home elderly but powerful men, leaders in their
professions. And these latest hostages were to be women, delicately
reared, not in their first youth, many of them already half-ill after
three years of war privations. In order to make the deepest possible
impression on the public of the captive city the most respected and
conspicuous women were chosen, prominent either for their husband’s
standing and wealth or for the place they had made for themselves, by
their own intelligence and energy: the Directress of the Hospital, a
well known teacher of music, the Mayor’s wife, the daughter of a noted
professor. Of course, our Octavie was among the number.

We knew some of the others, too, either by reputation or personally,
and could imagine the heart-sick horror in which their families saw
them make their few hasty preparations for departure. Here is a typical
case. One of the names on the list was that of Mme. Orléanne, a woman
of seventy. She was then so weak from malassimilation of war-food that
she had not been out of doors for months! It was nothing less than a
death-sentence for her. Her family did not even let her see the list.
Her elder daughter, married to a wealthy manufacturer, went to the
German officials and offered herself to be deported as a substitute,
although she had two children, a girl of eight and a little boy of
three! She was accepted, and, death in her heart, set about making up
the tiny bundle of necessaries--all they were allowed to carry. Her
little girl was old enough to take up the tradition of tragic stoicism
of her elders and listened with a blanched face to the instructions
of her desperate mother, who told her that there was now nothing
but dignity left to Frenchwomen. When the German guard came to tell
Mme. Baudoin that the truck which was to carry the hostages away to
the railroad was waiting at the door, little Elise, rigid and gray,
kissed her mother good-by silently, though after the truck had gone,
she fainted and lay unconscious for hours. But Raoul, only a baby,
screamed, and struck at the German soldier, clung wildly to his mother
with hysteric strength, and after she had gone, broke away from his
aunt, rushed out of the street door, shrieking, “Mother, Mother! don’t
go away from Raoul!” and flung himself frantically upon his mother’s
skirts. She said to me, as she told me of this, “dying will be easy
compared to that moment!” But without weakening she did the intolerable
thing, the only thing there was to do, she reached down, tore the
little boy’s tense fingers from her dress, and climbed up into the
truck. “As I looked away from Raoul I saw that tears were running down
the cheeks of the German guard who stood at the back of the truck.”


     Ah, this human race we belong to!


Shuddering with the anguish of such scenes of separation, the hostages
were locked for three days into cattle-cars, cold, windowless, jolting
prisons, where they lived over and over those unbearable last moments
with children, or sisters, or parents, or husbands, whom they never
expected to see again. At the end of this ordeal, the wretched women,
numb, half-starved, limping along in their disordered garments, raging
inwardly, inflamed with indignant hatred for the soldiers who marshaled
them, were brought together in their prison and left alone, save for
two bored guards who sat at the door and stared at them.

The prison camp was an enormous one in the north of Germany, a dreary
clutter of rough wooden buildings thrown down on a flat, sandy
plain, entangled and surrounded by miles of barbed-wire fencing.
The prison-room allotted to the forty women from Tourciennes was a
high, bare loft, like a part of an ill-built, hastily constructed
barn. Around three walls were tiers of bunks, filled with damp, moldy
straw, a couple of dirty blankets on each. In the middle of the room
was a smallish stove, rather tall and thin in shape, with one hole
in the top, closed by a flat lid. An iron kettle stood on the stove.
Windows were set in one wall of the room. Under the windows ran a long
bench, and before it stood a long table made of a wide board. There
was nothing else to be seen, except grease and caked filth on the
rough, unpainted boards of the floor and walls. The last of the women
staggered into the room; the door was shut, and they faced each other
in the gray winter light which filtered in through the smeared panes of
the windows.

All during the black nightmare of the journey, every one of them had
been quivering with suppressed anguish. Absorbed each in her own grief
and despair, they had lain on the thin layer of straw on the floor of
the freight car, at the end of their strength, undone by the ignominy
of their utter defenselessness before brute force. The marks of tears
showed on their gray, unwashed faces, but they had no more tears to
shed now. They leaned against the walls and the bunks, their knees
shaking with exhaustion, and looked about them at the dreary, dirty
desolation of the room which from now on was to be their world. The
guards stared at them indifferently, seeing nothing of any interest in
that group of prisoners more than in any other, especially as these
were women no longer young, disheveled, wrinkled, unappetizing, with
uncombed, gray hair, and grimy hands.

A little stir among them, and there was Octavie, our ’Tavie, on her
feet, haggard with fatigue, dowdy, crumpled, battered, but powerful and
magnetic. She was speaking to them, speaking with the authority of her
long years of directing others, with the weight and assurance of her
puissant personality.

I can tell you almost exactly what she said, for the women who were
there and who told me about it afterwards, had apparently not forgotten
a word! She began by saying clearly and energetically, like an older
sister, “Come, come, we are all Frenchwomen, and so we have courage;
and we all have brains. People with brains and courage have nothing
to fear anywhere, _if they’ll use them_. Now let’s get to work and use
ours, all for one and one for all!”

Her bold, strong voice, her dauntless look, her masterful gesture,
brought them out of their lassitude, brought them from all sides and
corners of the room, where they had abandoned themselves, brought
them in a compact group close about her. She went on, her steady eyes
going from one to the other, “I think I know what is the first thing
to do; to take a solemn vow to stick by each other loyally. You know
it is said that women always quarrel among themselves, and that all
French people do. We are in a desperate plight. If we quarrel ever, at
all: if we are divided, we are undone. We’re of all sorts, Catholics,
free-thinkers, aristocrats, radicals, housekeepers, business-women, and
we don’t know each other very well. But we are all women, civilized
women, Frenchwomen, sisters! Nobody can help us but ourselves. But if
we give all we have, they can never conquer us!”

She stopped and looked at them deeply, her strong, ugly face, white
with intensity. “A vow, my friends, a vow from every one of us, by what
she holds most sacred, that she will summon all her strength to give of
her very best for the common good. In the name of our love for those
we have left--” her voice broke, and she could not go on. She lifted
her hand silently and held it up, her eyes fixed on them. The other
hands went up, the drawn faces steadied, the quivering hearts, centered
each on its own suffering, calmed by taking thought for others. The
very air in the barrack-room seemed less stifling. The two German
guards looked on, astonished by the incomprehensible ceremony. These
scattered, half-dead women, flung into the room like cattle, who had
not seemed to know each other, all at once to be one unit!

Octavie drew a long breath. Then, homely, familiar, coherent as though
she were giving a preliminary explanation to a class at the beginning
of a school-year, “Now let us understand clearly what is happening to
us, so that we can defend ourselves against it. What is it that is
being done to us? An attempt is being made to break us down, physically
and morally. But these people around us here are not the ones who wish
this; they are not as intelligent as we; and they haven’t half the
personal incentive to accomplish it, that we have to prevent it. We
have a thousand resources of ingenuity that they can’t touch at all.

“We must begin by economizing every atom possible of our strength,
moral and physical. And we can start on that right now by not wasting
any more strength hating our guards as we have all been hating the
Germans who have had to touch us, so far. We can think of them as
demons and infernal forces of evil and make them into horrors that will
shadow our every thought. Or we can look straight at them to see what
they are, and disregard them, just leave them out of our moral lives,
when we see that they are ordinary men, for the most part coarse and
common men, and now forced to be abnormal, forced by others into a
situation that develops every germ of brutality in them.”

At this, young Mme. Baudoin spoke out and told of the German guard who
had wept when her little boy was dragged away; and, “I’d rather be in
my shoes than his,” cried Octavie vigorously.

“So then we sweep them out of our world,” she went on, “and that leaves
the decks cleared for real action. I should say,” she went on with a
change of manner, including in one wide humorous glance her own dirty
hands, the tangled hair of the others, and the grease and grime of the
room, “that the next thing is to organize ourselves to get clean! It’s
plain only a few of us can do it at a time; let’s draw lots to see who
begins, and the others can lie down while they wait. Is there anybody
here who speaks German enough to ask for soap and water? I see the
broom here at hand.” A good many of the women proved to have studied
German at school, and three of them spoke it. But this did not carry
them far. The guards laughed at the idea of soap--nobody in Germany had
had soap for months--prisoners were not given such luxuries as towels,
and as for water, the tap was down the hall, and the pail was there,
and they could carry it for themselves. Besides there was water in the
kettle on the stove.

There and then they began their campaign. Lots were drawn, a certain
number of tired women collapsed into the bunks to wait, while Octavie
organized the others into squads, some to carry water; some to arrange
a bathing-place in a corner of the room by hanging up their cloaks on
strings stretched from nails; some to sweep out the worst of the dusty
litter on the floor.

There was order and purpose in the air. The first woman who emerged
from behind the curtain of cloaks, bathed, fresh linen next her clean
skin (for they had been allowed to bring one change of linen in their
little packages), her hair in order, was like a being from another
world, the world they had left. Self-respect came back to the others,
as they looked at her.

By night every woman was clean, had arranged her small belongings in
her own bunk, and had washed out and hung up the body-linen which
she had worn on the trip. One empty bunk had been set aside as the
pharmacy, and all their little stock of medicine gathered there;
another was the library, where a half-dozen books stood side by side;
and a third was the storeroom for miscellaneous goods, the extra
bars of soap they had brought from home, a little chocolate, thread,
needles, scissors, and the like, communistically put together to be
used for whatever proved to be the greatest need. They had taken stock
of their material resources and agreed to share them. They had eaten
what they could of the coarse, unpalatable food brought to them in the
evening, and now sat on the long bench and on the floor, trying to plan
out the struggle before them, the struggle to construct an endurable
life out of the materials at hand. Octavie was saying, “Everything in
order! That is the French way to go at things; classify them and take
them up one by one. What are we? Bodies and minds; both equally in
danger. Now, the body first. We must have exercise out of doors, more
than we’re used to at home, if we are to digest this awful food. They
say we’re to be allowed out an hour a day, but that is not enough. We
must open the windows once an hour and do something active in here. Any
volunteers to show us gymnastic exercises? Anybody who remembers them
from school days? I don’t know one.”

Yes, there were several, and one whose sister was a woman doctor
using curative gymnastics. The meeting voted to make them an athletic
committee, to organize such activities.

“Now, our digestions. You know how all prisoners in Germany have always
come home with ruined digestions. Is there anything we can do here? Is
there anybody here experienced in cooking who could guess at the raw
materials in that fearful mess we’ve just finished, and does she think
it might be cooked more intelligently so that it would be better? It
stands to reason that the prison cooks would naturally be incompetent,
and indifferent to their results. Could we do better ourselves? It also
stands to reason that we’d be allowed to, because it would mean less
work for the prison kitchens.” A group of housewives was appointed to
consider this, next day.

“Now, as to cleanliness. Any suggestions about how to get along with
no soap? We don’t dare use soap on the floor, we have so little, but
heaven knows it needs it!” All the practical housekeepers spoke at once
now, crying out upon her lack of ingenuity in not thinking of sand.
That sandy path outside the barracks, that would do excellently well as
an abrasive. With plenty of water and energy, sand and some bricks for
rubbing, everything in the room could be cleaned. As they spoke, their
faces brightened at the prospect of having cleanliness about them, and
of being active once more.

“Anything more for the body?” asked Octavie. “If we keep it exercised
and clean, and as well-fed as we can manage it, it ought to last us.
Now for the mind. We’re going to have hours and hours of leisure time
such as we busy women never had before. It’s the chance of our lives to
go on with our education. Let’s share each of us with the other, what
we have in our minds. I’ll begin. I have chemistry thoroughly, economic
history fairly, and the general theory of physics. I’ll give a course
of lectures on those. Who can do something else?”

They were all appalled at this and protested that she was the only one
who had any information to impart; but she scouted the idea and began
a relentless person-to-person inquiry. The result was that a group
of musicians were organized, under the guidance of the music teacher,
to give lectures on the history of music, the lives and works of the
composers, church music, ballads, songs, and operas. Three other women
who had brought up great families were to dive deep into their memories
and lecture to the others, as logically, coherently, and rationally as
they could on proper care for children. A shy, thin, drab-colored woman
was found to have been brought up in Indo-China, and was to lecture
on the life and education of that country. The German-speaking ones
were to give a course in German. Another, the daughter of a well-known
professor of French literature, was to assemble and arrange what she
knew, and be prepared to plan and lead literary discussions. Another,
the distinguished founder and former head of the best hospital in
Tourciennes, would lecture on the care of the sick--and so on. From
one, from another, from them all, Octavie drew potential treasures of
experience and information which lay almost visibly shimmering in a
great heap before them--“Enough,” she cried triumphantly, “to last us
for years!”

“And now because we’re not solemn Anglo-Saxons, but Frenchwomen,
we must plan for some fun, if we’re to keep themselves alive,” she
told them firmly, and at their sad-hearted wincing from the idea,
she said, “Yes, we must. It’s part of our defensive campaign. Our
task is to construct out of our brains and wills a little fortress
of civilization, and to protect ourselves behind its walls against
demoralization and barbarism! And you all know that amusement is needed
for civilization!” A majority agreed to this, a dramatic committee
was appointed, and another one on games (Octavie suggested drawing
checker-boards on the tables, playing with bits of paper for men,
and starting a free-for-all tournament); some one else thought of
manufacturing balls and inventing games to be played with them, and
there were two packs of cards, in the miscellaneous store. The musical
group undertook to provide a weekly concert.

One of the subjects which had been canvassed and found no professor
was the history of France; but like all French people, they had been
soundly and carefully instructed in history and planned, by putting
all their memories together, to reconstruct the story of their nation.
The meeting was trailing off from serious, purposeful planning to a
discursive attempt to get the list of French kings complete, when one
of the older women spoke to Octavie in a low tone, the quality of which
instantly made silence about them. She said, “But Mlle. Moreau, we
have souls too, souls hard beset.”

Up to this moment Octavie had, as always, dominated the situation! Now
she, who has not been inside a church since she was a child, and who
considers herself thoroughly emancipated from what she calls, “all
that theological nonsense,” was brought up short before the need to
make just such a whole-hearted concession to other people’s ideas as
she had urged on her comrades! She looked hard at the speaker. It was
the foundress of the hospital, Mme. Rouart. From her eyes looked out a
personality just as strong as Octavie’s, and tinctured to the core with
faith. Octavie’s arrogant intellectualism humbled itself at the sight.
She made a gesture of acquiescence and was silent. Mme. Rouart went on,
“We’re of all sorts of belief, but we can all pray.”

Then, after an instant’s pause, she said in a low, trembling voice,
“Let us pray.”

There was an interval of intense silence, during which, so Octavie told
me afterwards, quite without any shade of irony, she “prayed as hard as
any one ... and after that I prayed every evening when the others did.”

“How did _you_ pray?” I asked her, incredulously.

Her definition of prayer was characteristic. “I set every ounce
of will power to calling up all my strength and endurance. It was
wonderful how I felt it rise, when I called,” she said gravely. She
added that on that first evening after her silent plunge to the deep
places of power in her soul, she put both arms around Mme. Rouart’s
neck and kissed her. “I loved her,” she said simply, without attempting
her usual skeptical, corrosive analysis of reasons.

Other kisses were exchanged, soberly, as the stiff, tired women
stumbled to their feet to go to bed. They laid their exhausted bodies
down heavily on the dirty blankets, but in their hearts which had
seemed burned out to ashes with grief, indignation, and despair, there
shone a living spark of purpose. Some time later, into the darkness
came the voice of one of the younger women. “Oh, I’ve just remembered!
That fourth son of Clovis was Charibert;” to which Octavie’s voice
answered exultantly, “Ah, they never can beat _us_!”

The life which went on after this seems as real to me as though I had
lived it with them, because when I first saw them, they were fresh
from it, and could speak of little else. Every day was thrust at them
full of the noisome poison of prison life, idleness, indifference,
despair, bitterness, hatred, personal degeneration; and every day they
poured out this poison resolutely and filled its place with intelligent
occupation! Just to keep clean was a prodigious undertaking, which
they attacked in squads, turn by turn. With sand, water, and bricks
for rubbing, they kept the room immaculate, though it took hours to
do it. Even the blankets were washed out after a fashion, one by one
at intervals, by women who had never before so much as washed out
a handkerchief. To prepare the food with the more than inadequate
utensils and poor materials and the stove unsuited for cooking was
a tremendous problem, but they all took turns at it, Octavie humbly
acting as scullery-maid when her turn for service came; and the food,
though poor, monotonous, and coarse, was infinitely superior, being
prepared with brains and patience, to what was served all around them
to the apathetic, healthless mobs of Russian and Polish women and men,
sunk despairingly in degradation and disease, “giving up and lying down
in their dirt,” Octavie told me, “to die like beasts.”

The older and weaker women among the Tourciennes group, who could not
holystone the floor and carry water and wood, were set at the lighter
tasks, the endless mending which kept their garments from becoming
mere rags, peeling turnips, washing dishes, “making the beds” as they
called the process of drying and airing the straw in the bunks.

Every day they went out in all weathers, and exercised and played ball
with their home-made, straw-stuffed balls, and every evening they
played games, checkers, guessing games, capped rimes, told stories and
sang. They all “studied singing” and sang in twos, trios, quartets, or
the whole forty in a chorus. They sang anything any one could remember,
old folk-songs of which there are such an infinite variety in French,
ballads, church-chants, songs from operas.

Octavie told me that one evening, when the false news which was
constantly served to them was specially bad, when they had been told
that half the French Army was taken prisoner, and the other half in
retreat south of Paris, they sang with the tears running down their
cheeks, but still sang, and kept their hearts from breaking.

Every day there were “lessons.” Octavie was the only trained teacher
among them, so that her courses in general science and in economic
history were the most professional of the instructions given; but she
sedulously attended the “courses” given by the others, putting her
disciplined mind on the matter they had to present, and by adroit
questionings and summarizings, helped them to order it coherently and
logically. Once a week they had dramatics, scenes out of Molière,
or Labiche, or Shakespeare, or Courteline, farce, tragedy, drama,
anything of which anybody had any recollection, with improvisations in
the passages which nobody could remember. The German guards looked on
astonished at the spirit and dash of the acting, and the laughter and
applause from the bunks, where the audience was installed to leave the
room clear for a stage. Mme. Baudoin told me that she had never begun
to suck the marrow out of the meaty Molière comedies, as she did in the
stifling days of midsummer when they were giving a series of his plays.

By midsummer they had learned that one of the younger married women
had been pregnant when she left France, that a French child was to be
born in that German prison. How they all yearned over the homesick
young mother! How important old Mme. Rouart became with her medical and
nurse’s lore! What anxious consultations about the preparations of the
layette, manufactured out of spare undergarments and a pair of precious
linen sheets brought from home. They were supposed to have medical
attention furnished in the prison, but they had seen too much of the
brutal roughness of the overworked and indifferent army-surgeons of the
camp, not to feel a horror at the thought of their attending delicate
little Mme. Larçonneur. She begged them desperately not to call in a
doctor, but themselves to help her through her black hours. They were
terrified at the responsibility, and as her time drew near, with the
ups and downs of those last days, they were almost as frightened and
tremulous as she.

But the night when she called out in a strangled voice that she needed
help, found them all organized, each one with her work planned: some
who sprang from their beds to heat water; Mme. Rouart prepared as far
as her poor substitute for a nurse’s outfit would allow her; others
ready to lift the shivering, groaning woman from her own bunk to the
one which had been cleaned, sterilized with boiling water, and kept
ready. The others, who could not help, lay in their beds, their hands
clenched tightly in sympathy with the suffering of their comrade,
shaken to the heart, as the old drama of human life opened solemnly
there in that poor place.

When the baby came, his high-pitched cry was like a shout of triumph.

“All well,” announced the nurse to the anxious women, “a fine little
boy. No! nobody must stir! Perfect quiet for Mme. Larçonneur.” She
busied herself with the mother, while her two assistants oiled the baby
and wrapped him in flannel, gloating over the perfections of his tiny
finished body, and murmuring to the faces showing over the bunks, “Such
a beauty! Such a darling! His little hands!--Oh, see how he fights us!”

The next morning they formed in line to worship him as he lay sleeping
beside his mother, and although the sight brought a fierce stab of
misery to all the mothers who had left their children behind, the
little boy brought into their lives an element of tenderness and
hopeful forward-looking which was curative medicine for their sick,
women’s hearts.

For in spite of all Octavie’s moral and physical therapeutics, there
were intolerable moments and hours and days for all of them. Women,
loving women, used to a life-time of care for others, used to the most
united family life, left for months at a time without the slightest
news of those they had left, could not, valiantly as they might try,
master the fury of longing and anxiety which sprang upon them in the
midst of the courageously planned life which they led. They all came
to recognize in others the sudden whiteness, the trembling hands, the
fixed, unseeing eyes blinded by tears. As far as loving whole-hearted
sympathy could ease human hearts, such moments of unendurable pain were
tempered by a deep sense of the sharing by all of each one’s sorrow.

And then, of course, there were other bad moments and days, meaner,
pettier enemies to fight, when it took all of one’s self-control to
prevent explosions of irritability from overwrought nerves; quarrelsome
bitterness, which comes from brooding on grievances; sudden captious
hatred for other people’s mannerisms, which, in all prison-camps,
almost as much as physical suffering, embittered and poisoned
prison-life for the high-strung, finely organized, twentieth century
prisoners of the Great War. Forty women, with lowered physical health,
with heightened nervous sensibility, used to fastidious privacy, now
shut up together in one room, with no chance ever to escape each other,
crowded each other morally almost as much as physically. Octavie told
me there were days when she would have liked to slap them, weak,
wavering, superstitious souls that they seemed to her, and turn her
face to the wall in her bunk to concentrate on hating the human race.
And one of the devout Catholics told me that she often longed so
intensely for her old atmosphere of belief and faith that she was
almost ill. But they adopted as their battle-cry, “All together to
defend our civilization!” and, clinging fiercely to this resolve,
they fought away from everything that might have separated them and
struggled out on ground common to them all.

Then Winter was there again, endless, empty, gray days. There was
sickness in the camp, a terrible wave of influenza, carrying off
hundreds all around them. They redoubled their cleanliness, boiled
every drop of water, exercised, played, mended, studied, cooked, sang,
kept steadily on with the ordered precision of their lives. But old
Mme. Rouart, the one they loved the most of all, who led the silent
prayer of every evening, fell ill, endured silently a few bitter days
of suffering, died, and was borne out from among them to be buried in
alien soil. Three others were desperately ill, lay near to death, and
slowly recovered. Tragedy drew them more closely together than ever, as
they realized how utterly they depended on each other, and after this
there were fewer struggles against black days of bad temper. The little
boy was seven months old now, laughed and crowed, and played with his
fingers.

Time seemed to stand still for them, as they fought to protect their
little shining taper of civilization, feeding it from their hearts and
minds. When they went outdoors for the daily escape from their room to
the sandy, hard-trodden desert of the prison yard, they seemed with
their neat, threadbare, faded, well-mended garments, with their gray,
carefully dressed hair, their pale faces, clean and quiet, with brave
eyes and smiling lips, like another order of being from the shaggy,
dirt-crusted, broken-down Polish and Russian soldiers, whose corrals
were on each side of them, lying listlessly in the drizzling mist or
quarreling among themselves. They were known by this time all over the
camp, and the demoralized, desperate men watched the decent Frenchwomen
with that most humanizing of emotions, respect.

Do you see them, those gaunt, heart-sick women, shoulder to shoulder,
indomitable in the patient use of their intelligence, in their long
triumphant battle against the weakness and evil in their own nature,
which were, as they had known from the first, the only things in the
world which could harm them?


     What a race to belong to!


Well, then came the end, foreshadowed by weeks of excited rumor, a
confused, bewildered period of guesses and half hopes, when nobody,
not even the guards, knew what was happening at the front. The camp
was all one crazy uproar, no newspaper, no certainty of anything. Our
little group of women clung to each other, as the world rocked round
them, till the evening when the guards came running to take them to
the train. Not an instant to spare; the thousands of other prisoners
were yelling in the riot which, the next day, tore the camp to pieces.
They huddled on their clothes and fled into the wild confusion of the
journey, standing up in locked cattle-cars, frantic to know what was
happening, with no idea in the world where they were or where the train
was taking them, until the moment when the jolting cars stopped, the
locked doors were broken open and French voices out of the darkness
cried, “Mesdames, vous êtes chez vous!”

They were at home, at their own station, a faint gray light showing
the well-known pointed roofs of their own city, the massive tower
of the old Town Hall black against the dawn. On the same platform,
where they had seen so many deported prisoners return, vermin-ridden,
filthy, half-imbecile, a burden to themselves and their families, there
they were, lean and worn and pale, but stronger, better, finer human
beings than they had been before. Half-awed by the greatness of their
victory, they stood there, like ghosts who had fought their way back
from the grave, peering out through the dim light at their own homes.


That’s where the story ought to end, oughtn’t it?

But you know as well as I do that five years have passed since that
morning when they stood there, awe-struck and transfigured. And I
cannot conceal the fact that I have seen them all again, a good many
times since then.

What are they doing with themselves now? Well, the last time I made
a round of visits among them, I found the housewives concerned about
their preserves and the hang of their skirts; the business-women deep
in calculations about how to get around the sinful rate of exchange.
The mothers were bringing up their children very hard, as we all do,
very much concerned about their knowing the children of the right
people and no others. The teachers were grumbling about the delay in
the promised raise of their pay and complaining about the tyranny
of the Directrice of their Lycée. Young Mme. Baudoin, now that her
children are old enough to go to school, often leaves them with the
servants and runs off to Brussels or Paris for a few days of fun. All
the returned hostages have grown quite stout, and they have taken up
bridge whist with enthusiasm, once more.

As for Octavie, the last time I saw her, she was on fire with interest
over a little green-house she was having built back of the kitchen,
so that she might have fresh green vegetables the year around. It was
very hard to achieve such a thing, what with the lack of workmen, the
scarcity of bricks, and the high price of glass. But Octavie was sure
she could manage it.

And so am I. Octavie can always manage anything she tries for.




OLD MAN WARNER


I must warn you at the outset that unless you or some of your folks
came from Vermont, it is hardly worth your while to read about Old Man
Warner. You will not be able to see anything in his story except, as we
say in Vermont, a “gape and swallow” about nothing. Well, I don’t claim
much dramatic action for the story of old man Warner, but I am setting
it down on the chance that it may fall into the hands of some one
brought up on Vermont stories as I was. I know that for him there will
be something in Old Man Warner’s life, something of Vermont, something
we feel and cannot express, as we feel the incommunicable aura of a
personality.

The old man has been a weight on the collective mind of our town ever
since I was a little girl, and that is a long time ago. He was an old
man even then. Year after year, as our Board of Selectmen planned
the year’s town budget they had this worry about Old Man Warner, and
what to do with him. It was not that old Mr. Warner was a dangerous
character, or anything but strictly honest and law-abiding. But he had
his own way of bothering his fellow citizens.

In his young days he had inherited a farm from his father, back up in
Arnold Hollow, where at that time, about 1850, there was a cozy little
settlement of five or six farms with big families. He settled there,
cultivated the farm, married, and brought up a family of three sons.
When the Civil War came, he volunteered together with his oldest boy,
and went off to fight in the second year of the war. He came back alone
in 1864, the son having fallen in the Battle of the Wilderness. And he
went back up to Arnold Hollow to live and there he stayed, although
the rest of his world broke up and rearranged itself in a different
pattern, mostly centering about the new railroad track in the main
valley.

Only the older men returned to the Arnold Hollow settlement to go on
cultivating their steep, rocky farms. The younger ones set off for the
West, the two remaining Warner boys with the others. Their father and
mother stayed, the man hardly ever leaving the farm now even to go to
town. His wife said once he seemed to feel as though he never could
get caught up on the years he had missed during the war. She said he
always had thought the world of his own home.

The boys did pretty well out in Iowa, had the usual ups and downs
of pioneer farmers, and by 1898, when their mother died, leaving
their father alone at seventy-one, they were men of forty-eight and
forty-six, who had comfortable homes to which to invite him to pass his
old age.

Everybody in our town began to lay plans about what they would buy at
the auction, when Old Man Warner would sell off his things, as the
other Arnold Hollow families had. By this time, for one reason or
another, the Warners were the only people left up there. The Selectmen
planned to cut out the road up into Arnold Hollow, and put the tidy
little sum saved from its upkeep into improvements on the main valley
thoroughfare. But old Mr. Warner wrote his sons and told the Selectmen
that he saw no reason for leaving his home to go and live in a strange
place and be a burden to his children, with whom, having seen them at
the rarest intervals during the last thirty years, he did not feel very
well acquainted. And he always had liked his own home. Why should he
leave it? It was pretty late in the day for him to get used to western
ways. He’d just be a bother to his boys. He didn’t want to be a bother
to anybody, and he didn’t propose to be!

There were a good many protests all round, but of course the Selectmen
had not the faintest authority over him, and as quite probably his sons
were at heart relieved, nothing was done. The town very grudgingly
voted the money to keep up the Arnold Hollow road, but consoled itself
by saying freely that the old cuss never had been so very bright and
was worse now, evidently had no idea what he was trying to do, and
would soon get tired of living alone and “doing for himself.”

That was twenty-two years ago. Selectmen who were then vigorous and
middle-aged, grew old, decrepit, died, and were buried. Boys who were
learning their letters then, grew up, married, had children, and became
Selectmen in their turn. Old Man Warner’s sons grew old and died, and
the names of most of his grand-children, scattered all over the West,
were unknown to us. And still the old man lived alone in his home and
“did for himself.”

Every spring, when road work began, the Selectmen groaned over having
to keep up the Arnold Hollow road, and every autumn they tried their
best to persuade the old man to come down to a settlement where he
could be taken care of. Our town is very poor, and taxes are a heavy
item in our calculations. It is just all we can do to keep our schools
and roads going, and we grudge every penny we are forced to spend on
tramps, paupers, or the indigent sick. Selectmen in whose régime town
expenses were high, are not only never reëlected to town office, but
their name is a by-word and a reproach for years afterwards. We elect
them, among other things, to see to it that town expenses are not high,
and to lay their plans accordingly.


Decades of Selectmen, heavy with this responsibility, tried to lay
their plans accordingly in regard to Old Man Warner, and ran their
heads into a stone wall. One Board of Selectmen after another knew
exactly what would happen; the old dumb-head would get a stroke of
paralysis, or palsy, or softening of the brain, or something, and the
town Treasury would bleed at every pore for expensive medical service,
maybe an operation at a hospital, and after that, somebody paid to
take care of him. If they could only ship him off to his family! One
of the granddaughters, now a middle-aged woman, kept up a tenuous
connection with the old man, and answered, after long intervals,
anxious communications from the Selectmen. Or if not that, if only they
could get him down out of there in the winter, so they would not be
saddled with the perpetual worry about what was happening to him, with
the perpetual need to break out the snow in the road and go up there to
see that he was all right.

But Old Man Warner was still not bright enough to see any reason why
he should lie down on his own folks, or why he should not live in his
own home. When gentle expostulations were tried, he always answered
mildly that he guessed he’d rather go on living the way he was for a
while longer; and when blustering was tried, he straightened up, looked
the blusterer in the eye, and said he guessed there wasn’t no law in
Vermont to turn a man off his own farm, s’long’s he paid his debts, and
he didn’t owe any that he knew of.

That was the fact, too. He paid spot cash for what he bought in his
semi-yearly trips to the village to “do trading,” as our phrase goes.
He bought very little, a couple of pairs of overalls a year, a bag
apiece of sugar, and coffee, and rice, and salt, and flour, some
raisins, and pepper. And once or twice during the long period of his
hermit life, an overcoat and a new pair of trousers. What he brought
down from his farm was more than enough to pay for such purchases, for
he continued to cultivate his land, less and less of it, of course,
each year, but still enough to feed his horse and cow and pig and
hens, and to provide him with corn and potatoes and onions. He salted
down and smoked a hog every fall and ate his hens when they got too old
to lay.

And, of course, as long as he was actually economically independent,
the town, groaning with apprehension over the danger to its treasury
though it was, could not lay a finger on the cranky old codger. And
yet, of course, his economic independence couldn’t last! From one day
to the next, something was bound to happen to him, something that would
cost the town money.

Each year the Selectmen planning the town expenditures with the
concentrated prudence born of hard necessity, cast an uneasy mental
glance up Arnold Hollow way, and scringed at the thought that perhaps
this was the year when money would have to be taken away from the road
or the school fund to pay for Old Man Warner’s doctoring and nursing;
and finally for his burial, because as the years went by, even the
tenuous western granddaughter vanished: died, or moved, or something.
Old Man Warner was now entirely alone in the world.

All during my childhood and youth he was a legendary figure of “sot”
obstinacy and queerness. We children used to be sent up once in a
while, to take our turn in seeing that the old man was all right. It
was an expedition like no other. You turned off the main road and
went up the steep, stony winding mountain road, dense with the shade
of sugar-maples and oaks. At the top, when your blown horse stopped
to rest, you saw before you the grassy lane leading across the little
upland plateau where the Arnold Hollow settlement had been. The older
people said they could almost hear faint echoes of whetting scythes,
and barking dogs, and cheerful homely noises, as there had been in the
old days. But for us children there was nothing but a breathlessly
hushed, sunny glade of lush meadows, oppressively silent and spooky,
with a few eyeless old wrecks of abandoned farm houses, drooping and
gray. You went past the creepy place as fast as your horse could
gallop, and clattered into the thicket of shivering white birches which
grew close to the road like a screen; and then--there was no sensation
in my childhood quite like the coming out into the ordered, inhabited,
humanized little clearing, in front of Old Man Warner’s home. There
were portly hens crooning around on the close-cropped grass, and a pig
grunting sociably from his pen at you, and shining milk-pans lying in
the sun tilted against the white birch sticks of the wood-pile, and
Old Man Warner, himself, infinitely aged and stooped, in his faded,
clean overalls, emerging from the barn-door to peer at you out of his
bright old eyes and to give you a hearty, “Well, you’re quite a long
ways from home, don’t you know it? Git off your horse, can’t ye? I’ve
got a new calf in here.” Or perhaps if it were a Sunday, he sat in
the sun on the front porch, with a clean shirt on, reading the weekly
edition of the _New York Tribune_. He drove two miles every Saturday
afternoon, down to his R. F. D. mail-box on the main road, to get this.

You heard so much talk about him down in the valley, so much fussing
and stewing about his being so “sot,” and so queer, that it always
surprised you when you saw him, to find he was just like anybody else.
You saw his calf, and had a drink of milk in his clean, well-scrubbed
kitchen, and played with the latest kitten, and then you said good-by
for that time, and got on your horse and went back through the birch
thicket into the ghostly decay of the abandoned farms, back down the
long, stony road to the valley where everybody was so cross with the
unreasonable old man for causing them so much worry.

“How _could_ he expect to go along like that, when other old folks, so
much younger than he, gave up and acted like other people, and settled
down where you could take care of them! The house might burn down over
his head, and he with it; or he might fall and break his hip and be
there for days, yelling and fainting away till somebody happened to go
by; or a cow might get ugly and hook him, and nobody to send for help.”
All these frightening possibilities and many others had been repeatedly
presented to the old man himself with the elaborations and detail which
came from heart-felt alarm about him. But he continued to say mildly
that he guessed he’d go on living the way he was for a while yet.

“A _while_!” He was ninety years old.

And then he was ninety-one, and then ninety-two; and we were surer and
surer he would “come on the town,” before each fiscal year was over.
At the beginning of last winter our Selectmen went up in a body to
try to bully or coax the shrunken, wizened old man, now only half his
former size, to go down to the valley. He remarked that he “guessed
there wasn’t no law in Vermont” and so forth, just as he had to their
fathers. He was so old, that he could no longer straighten up as he
said it, for his back was helplessly bent with rheumatism, and for
lack of teeth he whistled and clucked and lisped a good deal as he
pronounced his formula. But his meaning was as clear as it had been
thirty years ago. They came sulkily away without him, knowing that they
would both be laughed at and blamed, in the valley, because the cussed
old crab had got the best of them, again.

Last February, a couple of men, crossing over to a lumber-job on
Hemlock Mountain, by way of the Arnold Hollow road, saw no smoke coming
out of the chimney, knocked at the door, and, getting no answer, opened
it and stepped in. There lay Old Man Warner, dead on his kitchen floor
in front of his well-blacked cook-stove. The tiny, crooked, old body
was fully dressed, even to a fur cap and mittens, and in one hand was
his sharp, well-ground ax. One stove-lid was off, and a charred stick
of wood lay half in and half out of the fire box. Evidently the old man
had stepped to the fire to put in a stick of wood before he went out to
split some more, and had been stricken instantly, before he could move
a step. His cold, white old face was composed and quiet, just as it had
always been in life.

The two lumbermen fed the half-starved pig and hens and turned back to
the valley with the news, driving the old man’s cow and horse in front
of them; and in a couple of hours we all knew that Old Man Warner had
died, all alone, in his own kitchen.


Well, what do you think! We were as stirred up about it--! We turned
out and gave him one of the best funerals the town ever saw. And we
put up a good marble tombstone that told all about how he had lived.
We found we were proud of him, as proud as could be, the darned old
bull-dog, who had stuck it out all alone, in spite of us. We brag
now about his single-handed victory over old age and loneliness, and
we keep talking about him to the children, just as we brag about our
grandfather’s victories in the Civil War, and talk to the children
about the doings of the Green Mountain Boys. Old Man Warner has become
history. We take as much satisfaction in the old fellow’s spunk, as
though he had been our own grandfather, and we spare our listeners no
detail of his story: “... And there he stuck year after year, with the
whole town plaguing at him to quit. And he earned his own living, and
chopped his own wood, and kept himself and the house just as decent,
and never got queer and frowzy and half-cracked, but stayed just like
anybody, as nice an old man as ever you saw--all alone, all stark
alone--beholden to nobody--asking no odds of anybody--yes, sir, and
died with his boots on, at ninety-three, on a kitchen floor you could
have et off of, ’twas so clean.”




THE IDEAS OF M. BRODARD


During the first winter I spent in the boarding-school on the Rue de
Vaugirard, the Brodard sisters were the mainstay of my life. It was not
that I needed mainstaying in any of the regular classes, although we
were driven like dogs by the grindingly thorough teachers, for lessons
are lessons, wherever you find them, hard and tense though they may be
in France, easy and loose in America. It was quite another part of our
school life which routed me, the training in deportment and manners,
carried on in three deadly sessions a week, by a wizened skipping old
man, light and dry as a cork.

His little juiceless body was light, but everything else about him was
heavy with the somber earnestness of his determination to teach us what
he considered the manners of women of the world. Thrice a week we were
obliged to begin those lessons by a ceremonious entry into the big
salon, four by four, advancing in time to music across the bare shining
desert of its waxed floors, counting furtively under our breaths, “one,
two, three, four, glide, bend, recover, glide,” as we courtesied to
the Directrice, “advance again, one, two, three, four, glide, bend,
recover, glide,”--here we saluted the Sous-Directrice--“advance again”
(I was always shaking partly with giggles at the absurdity of the whole
business, partly with fear of the terrible eye of Professor Delacour),
“one, two three, four, glide, bend ...” but usually at this point of my
attempted bow to the Professor of Deportment I was harshly told to go
back and start the whole agonizing ritual over.

That was before the Brodard girls took me in hand and, flanking me on
either side, swept me forward on the crest of their perfect advance
and genuflection to the coveted place of safety on the other side of
the room where, in a black-robed line, the little girls who had made a
correct entry awaited further instructions in the manners of the world.

The support of the three Brodard girls did not stop short when they had
engineered me through the matter of getting into a room. The professor
himself was not more steeped in a religious sense of the importance of
his instruction than were Madeleine, Lucie, and Clotilde Brodard. The
insensate inner laughter which constantly threatened to shake the lid
of my decorum, was safely muffled by their whole-souled attention as
we stood there, watching the elegant gestures and still more elegant
immobilities of Professor Delacour, as he explained the lesson of the
day.

One day we were taught how to put money into the contribution-box in
church, “not with a preoccupied, bored air, nor yet with a complacent
smirk, but thus, gravely, with a quiet dignified gesture.” Then he
would pass the velvet contribution bag down the line, and forty little
girls must each find the right expression, “not bored, or preoccupied,
not yet with a complacent, self-conscious look, gravely--quietly--with
dignity.”

I can still feel in the pit of my stomach the quiver of mingled
terror and mirth with which at twelve years of age, I prepared to
be, “not bored or preoccupied, nor yet smirking and complacent, but
quiet--dignified--” I would never have lived through it if I had not
been hypnotized by the Brodard girls.

Or perhaps we were required to be ladies stepping from a carriage
and crossing a side-walk to enter a theater, keenly conscious of the
eyes of the crowd on us; but required to seem unaware of spectators,
“graceful, moving with a well-bred repose, and above all, unconscious,
entirely natural and unconscious.” Then two by two, squirmingly
the center of all the eyes in the salon, we crossed the imaginary
sidewalk and entered the imaginary door, “quiet, graceful, above all
unconscious, entirely natural and unconscious....” Do you suppose
for a moment I could have escaped annihilation at the hands of our
High-Priest, if Clotilde Brodard had not been my fellow acolyte,
applying all her orthodox convictions to the problem set before us?

Yes, the Brodard girls were an example to us all, in and out of the
class in deportment, for they were as scrupulously observant of all
the rules of good behavior in daily school-life as under the eye of
Professor Delacour. Any chance observer would have been sure that they
were preparing to enter the wealthiest and most exclusive society, an
impression by no means contradicted by the aspect of their mother,
a quiet, distinguished, tailored person, who brought them to school
at the beginning of the term, and once in a while made the tiresome
trip from Morvilliers to Paris to see them. But the Brodards must
have had some training in genuine good-breeding as well as the quaint
instruction given by Professor Delacour, for they never made any
pretensions to wealth or social standing--they said very little of any
sort about their home life.

Two years later I spent my Christmas vacation with them, and at once
I understood a good deal more about them. Young as I was--fourteen at
the time--it was plain to me as it would have been to any observer,
that they took their lessons in “society manners” so seriously because
society manners and any occasions for using them were the only things
lacking in the home where they were so comfortable, so much loved, and
so well cared for. They lived on a shabby street in Morvilliers, in a
small apartment, with one maid-of-all-work; and although their mother
had a genius for keeping everything on a plane of strict gentility,
their big, gay, roughly clad, unceremonious father was the ramping
red editor of the most ramping red radical newspaper in that part of
France, the center of all the anti-everything agitations going on in
the region.

As used to happen in Europe, in the far-gone days, when I was fourteen
years old (but not at all as it happens now-a-days) what they called
ramping and redness looked very plain and obvious to an American. Most
of what M. Brodard was making such a fuss about, seemed to me just
what everybody at home took for granted: for instance his thesis that
every man ought to earn his own living no matter how high his social
position might be. I was astonished that anybody could consider that
a revolutionary idea. Among other things, M. Brodard was what people
would call now-a-days a feminist, expounding hotly his conviction that
women should be trusted with the responsibility for the conduct of
their own lives, and the earning of their own livings. These opinions
found no echo at all in the serious-minded middle-class families of
his town, nor indeed in his family, but they were an old story to me.
I told him as much, informing him confidently from my wide experience
as a child in the impecunious faculty of a western State-University,
that everybody in America expected as a matter of course to earn his
_and_ her own living--everybody! He accepted this as unquestioningly
as I advanced it, with the fresh faith and enthusiasm which upheld him
in all the generous quixotism of his life. I believe, indeed, that on
the strength of my testimony he actually wrote some editorials about
America in his furiously convinced style.

Of course he was the champion of the working classes as against the
bourgeoisie, adored by the first and hated by the second. It was an
adventure to walk with him along the narrow, cobbled streets of the
musty little town. Everywhere the lean, sinewy men in working clothes
and the thin women in aprons and without hats, had a quick, flashing
look of pleasure to see his great frame come striding vigorously along.
Everywhere the artisans stopped their work to call a hearty greeting
to him, or to step quickly to meet him, full of some grievance, sure
of his sympathy, and comforted by the quick flame of his indignation.
And everywhere the very sight of him put a taste of green apples into
the mouths of all the well-dressed people. You could see that by the
sour expression of their broad, florid faces. The prosperous merchant
at the door of his shop frowned, cleared his throat, and turned hastily
within doors, as he saw M. Brodard come marching along, humming a
tune, his hat cocked light-heartedly over one ear. The lawyer in his
black broadcloth coat passed us hurriedly; the women in expensive
furs stepped high, drew their long skirts about them, and looked him
straight in the eye, with an expression half fear, half horror. This
last made him break out into the hearty, full-throated laugh, always
close to the surface with him--the laugh that was as characteristic a
part of him as the shape of his nose.

I understood now why Mme. Brodard sent the girls away to school. They
would have been outcasts in any bourgeoise school in their own town.
Yet M. Brodard was a great champion of the public schools and never
lost an opportunity of defending against their bitter critics the
public lycées for girls, then just struggling into being in France. I
wondered a little that he should allow his daughters to go to such a
boarding-school as ours. But it seemed that the angry resistance of the
moneyed and pious families of Morvilliers had up to that time prevented
the establishment of a public lycée for girls there. This enabled Mme.
Brodard to steer past another dangerous headland in the complicated
course of her life. Perhaps, also, warm-hearted M. Brodard was not
inclined to be too hard on his girls, whom he fondly loved, after the
adoring manner of French fathers, nor to expect too much from his
devoted wife in the way of conforming to his ideas.

Even at that time, poor Mme. Brodard’s life was all one miracle of
adroit achievement in reconciling irreconcilable elements and effecting
impossible compromises. She had married her husband when they were
both young (he must have been an irresistible suitor), and before his
hot-headed sympathies for the under-dog had absorbed him. Like a good
and devoted French wife, she never admitted that anything her Bernard
did was other than what she would wish. But she remained exactly what
she had been at the time of her marriage, and although she was deeply
attached to her kind and faithful husband and made the best of homes
for him, she had not the slightest intention of changing a hair or
becoming anything but a good bourgeoise, a devoted believer in social
distinctions, in the Church, in the laboring classes _as such and in
their places_, and above all in the excellence of owning property and
inheriting money.

On this last point M. Brodard went much further than anything I had
heard discussed at home, and poured out incessantly in brilliant
editorials a torrent of scorn, laughter, hatred, and denunciation, upon
the sacred institution of inheritance, the very keystone of the French
social edifice. “How ridiculous,” he used to write on mornings when
no other forlorn hope stood in special need of a harebrained charge,
“that the mere chance of birth, or a personal caprice, should put vast
sums of unearned wealth into the hands of a man who has not had the
slightest connection with its production. Property, the amassing of
wealth by a man who has had the acumen and force to produce it ... we
may have two opinions about that, about whether he should be allowed to
keep for himself all he can lay his hands on. But there can be no two
opinions about the hilarious idiocy of the theory that his grown-up
son has any inherent right to possess that wealth, his son who has no
more to do with it than the Emperor of China, save by a physiological
accident. A hundred years from now, people will be laughing at our
imbecile acquiescence in such a theory, as we now laugh at the imbecile
acquiescence of whole provinces and kingdoms in the Middle Ages, passed
from the hand of one master to another, because somebody had married
somebody else.”

Mme. Brodard used to say resignedly, that she minded such editorials
least of all. “That is a principle that will never touch _our_ lives!”
she said with melancholy conviction, for her modest dowry was the
extent of their fortune and of their expectations. She herself had been
an orphan and all the Brodard elders were dead, having left nothing to
the family of such an enemy to society as they considered Bernard to be.

She did not complain; she never complained of anything her husband did;
but it was plain to see that she thought it her obvious duty to protect
her daughters from the consequences of their dear father’s ideas. The
income from her dowry kept them at school and dressed them at home, and
as the oldest began to approach the marriageable age Mme. Brodard cast
about her with silent intensity for some possible means for stretching
that dowry to enable Madeleine to make the right sort of match. She
knew of course that this was an impossible undertaking; but all her
married life had been an impossible undertaking carried through to
success, and she did not despair, although there were times when she
looked white and anxious.

But this was never when M. Brodard was at home. Indeed it was
impossible for any one to be tense or distraught in the sunny gaiety
of M. Brodard’s presence. His entrance into that neat, hushed, narrow,
waxed, and polished interior was like the entrance of a military band
playing a quick-step. He was always full of his latest crusade, fired
with enthusiasms, hope, and certainty of success. He made you feel
that he was the commanding officer of a devoted force, besieging an
iniquitous old enemy, and every day advancing further toward victory.
Yet another blast, down would tumble the flimsy walls of cowardly
traditional injustice, and sunshine would stream into the dark places!

Full of faith in what he was doing, he was as light-hearted as a boy,
electrifying the most stagnant air with the vibrant current of his
conviction that life is highly worth the trouble it costs. Big girls
as we were, he swept us off into hilarious games of hide-and-seek; and
never in any later evenings of my life have I rocked in such gales
of fun as on the evenings when we played charades. An impersonation
of a fussy, clucking setting hen which he gave as part of the word,
“ampoule” has remained with me as a high-water mark of sheer glorious
foolery never surpassed by the highest-salaried clown. In the following
charade we laughed so at his “creation” of a fateful Napoleon that
we could not sit on our chairs; and after that, carried away by his
own high spirits, he did the “strong man” at the village fair (he was
a prodigiously powerful athlete) lifting a feather with a grotesque
display of swelling muscles, clenched jaws, and widespread legs which
all but finished me. The tears of mirth used to come to my eyes as
I recalled that evening, and many a taut, high-strung moment of my
adolescence in after years relaxed into healthy amusement at the
remembered roar of M. Brodard’s laughter.

M. Brodard’s laughter ... alas!

And yet at the very time when his care-free, fearless laughter so
filled my ears, he was standing out single-handed against the most
poisonous hostility, to force an investigation of a framed-up law case,
in which a workingman had been defrauded of his rights. Apparently
there was always some such windmill against which he thought it
necessary to charge. Apparently his zeal for forlorn hopes never
diminished. We went back to school after that vacation leaving him the
center of a pack of yelling vituperations from all the staid and solid
citizens of the region ... “poor, dear Papa,” as the Brodard girls
always said, imitating their mother’s accent.

To me, school and lessons in deportment seemed queerer than ever,
after that great gust of stormy, ruffling wind, but the Brodard girls
were used to such contrasts. They but plunged themselves deeper than
ever, up to their very necks, into the atmosphere of gentility. They
had caught more than their mother’s accent, they had caught her deep
anxiety about their future, her passionate determination that the ideas
of their father should not drag them into that impossible world of
workingmen, radicals and badly dressed outcasts, which was the singular
choice of their excellent poor dear Papa.

When Mme. Brodard came to Paris, in the well-cut tailored dress which
I now knew to be the only one she possessed, she reported that Papa,
by sheer capacity for shouting unpleasant truths at the top of his
great voice, had obtained a re-trial and acquittal of that tiresome
workingman, and was now off on a new tack, was antagonizing all the
merchants of town by an exposé of their grinding meanness to their
hapless employees. It seemed that libel-suits were thick in the air,
and the influential members of society crossed to the other side of the
street when they met M. Brodard. “But you know how poor dear Papa seems
to thrive on all that!”

Well, _he_ might thrive on all that, but Madeleine, Lucie, and Clotilde
knew very well that nothing they wanted would thrive on “all that.”
Their only salvation was in escape from it. In the effort to prepare
themselves for that escape, they smeared themselves, poor things, from
head to foot with good breeding. They had nothing but themselves,
Maman, and her little dowry to count on; but at least no one should
be able to guess from their manners that their home life had not been
conventional. Mme. Brodard went on, that day, to consult with her
banker about re-investing some of her little fortune, so that it would
mean more income. When Madeleine left school, they would need more,
Heaven knew, to piece out the plain living furnished by the head of the
house. What could they do to rise to that crisis? _When Madeleine left
school_ ... an abyss before their feet! Could they perhaps go south,
to a winter resort for a few months every year, where there were no
Morvilliers people, where there might be eligible young men ... or even
some not so young? They all looked anxious and stern, when they thought
of it, for after Madeleine, there were Lucie and Clotilde!

I was sent home to America in June that year, before the end of
the school-term. The good-bys were said at lunch-time, before my
schoolmates went off to the lesson in deportment. The last I saw of the
Brodards at the time, was through the door of the salon as I passed on
my way to the street. They were learning how to handle a fan, how to
open it--“not tearing it open with both hands like a peasant girl, but
flirting it open with a sinuous bend of the wrist of one hand ... not
so abrupt!... smooth, suave, with an aristocratic....” As I went down
the hall, the voice of Professor Delacour died away on these words. I
wondered what poor dear Papa was up to now.

Two years later when I was taken back to France and went to visit the
Brodards, I found that he was still up to the same sort of thing. Just
then he was making the echoes yell in the defense of a singularly
unattractive, snuffy old man, who lived in a village six or seven
kilometers away from Morvilliers. Old M. Duval, it seemed, had gone to
South America in his youth, had accumulated some property there, and
had lost his religion. Now, at sixty-nine, with so it was said, enough
money to live on, he had come back to Fressy, had bought a comfortable
little home there, and settled down to end his days in his birthplace.
But Fressy, as it happened, had always been and still was noted for its
piety and conservatism. The curé of the parish was a man of flaming
zeal, and the Mayor was also a very devout ultramontane. Till then
their influence had been unquestioned in the town. They had boasted
that there was one loyal village left in France where none of the
poisonous new ideas had come in to corrupt the working classes, and to
wean them from their dutiful submission to the rule of their spiritual
and secular betters. Apparently till then, M. Brodard had overlooked
the existence of such a village near him.

His attention was now very much called to it by the persecution of
old M. Duval. The persistent and ostentatious absence from Mass of
the returned traveler was followed by a shower of stones which broke
most of his windows. His easy-going advice given publicly in a café to
some young workmen of the town to follow his example, to stand up for
themselves, get higher wages or strike, was answered by the poisoning
of his dog. The old fellow became indignant, and never dreaming of
the heat of the feeling against him, walked straight up to M. le Curé
one day in the street, and asked him--as if the priest had anything
to do with what was happening!--whether the laws of France did or did
not permit a man to live quietly in his own house, no matter what his
opinions were! That night some anonymous defender of the status quo set
fire to his chicken-house. It was at this time that M. Brodard began to
be aware of the existence of Fressy.

Old M. Duval called on the police for protection. “The police.” That
sounds very fine, but the police of Fressy meant a solitary old
garde-champêtre whose wife was the most pious woman in town, and whose
only daughter was the cook in the house of the fiercely legitimatist
Mayor. It is not surprising that the next morning, the scoffing
unbeliever from overseas found that somehow marauders had eluded “the
police,” and laid waste his promising kitchen-garden. They intended
(they proclaimed it openly) to drive out from their sanctified midst,
the man who flaunted his prosperity as the result of a wicked and
godless life.

But they had not counted on M. Brodard and on his unparalleled capacity
for making a noise. He stormed out to Fressy to see the old man,
thoroughly frightened by this time; heard his story, exploding at
intervals into fiery rockets of indignation; clasped him in his arms,
as though M. Duval had been his own kin; and swore that he would prove
to him that justice and freedom existed in France to-day as always. The
old man’s nerves were shaken by his troubled nights and his harried
sense of invisible enemies all about him. Until that moment it had
seemed to him that all the world was against him. His relief was
immense. He returned M. Brodard’s embrace emotionally, his trembling
old arms clasped hard about M. Brodard’s great neck, the tears in his
scared old eyes.

Then M. Brodard hurried back to Morvilliers, tore the throttle open,
and let her go ... to the great discomfort of Mme. Brodard and the
girls, the two elder of whom were now very reluctantly preparing
themselves to teach, for they had not been able to organize the
longed-for escape. That was the situation when I visited them.

Of course in due time the intemperate publicity about the matter put an
end to the attacks on M. Duval. The rattling crackle of M. Brodard’s
quick-fire protests rose in the air, till they reached the ears of
the Sous-Prefect, from whose exalted office orders to “see to that
matter” were issued, and came with imperative urgence even to the
royalist Mayor of Fressy. He very grudgingly issued certain unofficial
orders, which meant quiet in old M. Duval’s life. There was even a
victim sacrificed to shut M. Brodard’s too-articulate mouth. The
garde-champêtre lost his position and his chance for a pension, which
was very hard on an excellent, honest man whose only intention had been
to do his duty as he saw it.

By the time that I was back in America in college, Clotilde wrote me
that all that disturbance had died down, that M. Duval, horrid old
thing, had come on his shaking old legs to make a visit to Papa, to
thank him with deep emotion for the intense peace and comfort of his
present life. I could read between the lines that Clotilde thought they
might very well have a little more of those commodities in their own
life.

After that I heard from some one else (for M. Brodard and his ideas
were becoming famous) that the opposition had finally caught him in a
legal technicality, something connected with his campaign for tearing
down the miserable old disease-soaked medieval hovels where many
poor people lived in Morvilliers. The proprietors of the threatened
rookeries chipped in together, hired expensive expert legal advice,
and finally, to their immense satisfaction, succeeded in getting a tiny
sentence of imprisonment, for defamation of their characters, inflicted
on M. Brodard. He was kept in jail for two weeks, I believe, which
was a fortnight of pure glory. All his humble adherents, hundreds of
them, came tramping in to see him from all the region round, bringing
tribute. His “cell” was heaped with flowers, he fared on the finest
game and fattest poultry, and ... what pleased him vastly more ... the
fiery editorials which he sent out from his prison about the infamy
of wretched lodgings for poor families were noticed and reprinted
everywhere in France, where the circumstances of his grotesque
imprisonment were known.

The condemnation which his opponents meant to be a crushing disgrace
turned out an apotheosis. He enjoyed every moment of it and emerged
from his two weeks vacation, ruddier, stronger, in higher spirits than
ever, his name shining with the praise of generous-hearted men all
over the country. He cocked his hat further over one ear than ever and
strode off home. You could fairly see the sparks fly from beneath his
feet.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

The morning after his release from prison, news came from Fressy that
old M. Duval had died of apoplexy.

Well, what of that? Ah, what of that ...?

He had willed his whole fortune to M. Brodard, and it seemed he was
frightfully rich: it came to more than three million francs.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

Oh, yes, he took it. Of course he did. You knew he would. What else
would you have had him do? It’s all very well to have abstract ideas
about the absurdity and iniquity of inheritance; but when your own
daughters ... and your own wife ... expect so confidently....

Mme. Brodard, you see ... he was devoted to his wife who had so
faithfully made the best of homes for him; and to his daughters whom he
loved so dearly....

Can’t you see the astounded radiance of their faces at the news? And
they’d already been sacrificed so many years for his ideas.... _Ideas!_

What do you suppose he could do but accept it?

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

I don’t know one thing about the inner history of this period when
M. Brodard was bringing himself to a decision, and in the light of a
glimpse, just one glimpse which I had later, I think the less I know
about it the better for my peace of mind. The only information I had
was contained in a very nice, conventional note from Mme. Brodard,
giving me, in the pleasantly formal, well-turned phrases of French
epistolatory style, the news of their great good fortune which, she
said, was certainly sent by Providence to protect her dear husband
from the suffering and hardship which would have been his without it;
for M. Brodard was very ill, she wrote, oh, very ill indeed! He had
gone through a phase of strange mental excitement; from that he had
sunk into melancholia which had frightened them, and in the end had
succumbed to a mysterious malady of the nervous system which made him
half-blind and almost helpless. Helpless ... her wonderful, strong
husband! What could she have done to care for him if it had not been
for this financial windfall coming just when it was most needed?

You can imagine my stupefaction on reading this letter. It was caused
as much by learning that M. Brodard was a hopeless invalid as by
learning about that odd business of the fortune left them. How strange!
M. Brodard with a nervous affection which left him in a wheel chair! It
was incredible. I reread the beautifully written letter, trying hard
to see if anything lay between the lines. But there was nothing more
in it than I had already found. It was evidently written in the utmost
good faith. Everything Mme. Brodard did was done with the utmost good
faith.

Some years later I was in France again and found myself near the
address on the Riviera where the Brodards had purchased an estate. I
had not heard from them in some months, but on the chance that they
might be there, I went over from Mentone on a slow way-train which,
returning three hours later, would give me time to pay my call and
get back the same afternoon. Everybody at the little white-stuccoed
station knew where the Brodard villa was, and when he knew where I was
going, the driver of the shabby cab tucked me into it with a respect
for my destiny he had noticeably not shown to my very plain and rather
dusty traveling-dress. We climbed a long hill-road to a high point,
commanding a glorious view of the brilliant sea and yet more brilliant
coast, and turned into a long manorial allée of fine cypress trees.

The house was as manorial and imposing as the avenue leading to it and
I began to be uneasily aware of my plain garb. As I went up the steps
to the great door I could feel the house thrilling rhythmically to
excellent music, and to the delicate gliding of many finely-shod feet.

A servant led me to a small round salon hung with blue brocade, and
in a moment Mme. Brodard came hurrying to meet me. She had bloomed
herself luxuriantly open like a late rose, and from head to foot was a
delight to the eye. Of course she was very much surprised to see me,
but with never a glance at my garb she gave me the cordial welcome of
an old friend. Her perfect good faith and good breeding still governed
her life, it was plain to see. She was giving a _thé dansant_ for the
younger girls, she told me, adding that Madeleine had been married two
months before to a silk manufacturer of Lyons. She was evidently glad
to see me, but naturally enough, just for the moment, a little puzzled
what to do with me! I suggested to her relief that I make a visit to M.
Brodard first of all and wait to see the others till their guests had
gone.

“Yes, that’s the very thing,” she said, ringing for a servant to show
me the way, “he’ll remember you, of course. He will be so glad to see
you. He always liked you so much.”

As the servant came to the door, she added with a note of caution. “But
you must expect to find him sadly changed. His health does not improve,
although we have a resident physician for him, and _everything_ is
done for him, poor dear Bernard!”

The servant in a quiet livery of the finest materials, led me upstairs
over velvet carpets, and then upstairs again, to a superb room at the
top of the house. It was all glass towards the miraculous living blue
of the Mediterranean, and full of flowers, books, and harmoniously
designed modern furniture. M. Brodard, clad in a picturesque, furred
dressing-gown sat in a wheel chair, his bald head sunk on his breast,
his eyes fixed and wide-open, lowered towards his great, wasted white
hands lying empty on his knees. Until he raised his eyes to look at me,
I could not believe that it was he ... no, it was not possible!

He remembered me, as Mme. Brodard had predicted, but the rest of her
simple-hearted prophecy did not come true. He was not in the least glad
to see me and made not the slightest pretense that he was. A look that
was intolerable to see, had come into his eyes as he recognized me, and
he had instantly turned his head as though he hated the sight of me.

I knew at once that I ought to get out of the room, no matter how; but
I was so stricken with horror and pity that for a moment I could not
collect myself, and stood there stupidly.

A faint distant sound of gay music hummed rhythmically in the silence.
A professional-looking man who had been sitting with a book on the
other side of the room got up now and, with the bored air of a man
doing his duty, took hold of M. Brodard’s thin wrist to feel the pulse.

M. Brodard snatched away his hand and said to me over the doctor’s
head, “Well, you see how it is with us now.” He corrected himself. “You
see how it is with me.”

His accent, his aspect, his eyes added what he did not say. He had
been trembling with impatience because I was there at all. Now he was
trembling with impatience because I did not answer him! His terrible
eyes dared me to answer.

I would have done better to hold my tongue altogether, but my agitation
was so great that I lost my head. I felt that I was called upon to
bring out something consoling, and heard myself murmuring in a foolish
babble something or other about possible compensations for his illness,
about his still being able to go on with his work, to write, to
publish, in that way to propagate his ideas....

At that he burst into a laugh I would give anything in the world not to
have heard.

“My ideas ... ha! ha! ha!” he cried.

Oh, I got myself out of the room then! I ran down the velvet carpets of
the stairs, my hands over my ears.

As I hurried along to the outside door I passed the salon. I saw,
across the bare, gleaming desert of its waxed floor, Clotilde standing
with a well-dressed man. She had a fan in her hand, and, as I looked,
she opened it deftly, with a sinuous bend of her flexible wrist ...
“smoothly, suavely ... with an aristocratic ...”




FAIRFAX HUNTER


The erratic philanthropist of our family arrived from New York one
spring day with a thin, sickly-looking, middle-aged, colored man,
almost in rags. “This is Fairfax Hunter,” he announced with the
professional cheeriness of the doer of good. “He’s pretty badly run
down and needs country air. I thought maybe you could let him sleep in
the barn, and work around enough for his board.”

There was nothing professionally or in any other way cheery about the
colored man, who stood waiting indifferently for my decision, his knees
sagging, his hollow chest sunken. As I glanced at him he raised his
dark, blood-shot eyes and met my look. I decided hastily, on impulse,
from something in the expression of his eyes, that we could not send
him away.

I led him off to the barn and showed him the corner of the hay-mow
where the children sometimes sleep when our tiny house overflows with
guests. He sank down on it and closed his eyes. The lids were blue and
livid as though bruised. He had nothing with him except the ragged
clothes on his back.

When I returned to the house, the philanthropist explained that
Fairfax was a Virginia negro--“You could tell that from his name, of
course”--who had come to New York and fallen into bad ways, “drink,
etc.... But there’s something about him....”

Yes, I agreed to that. There was something about him....

Fairfax lived with us after this for more than four years, the last
years of his life. He was really very ill at first, the merest little
flicker of life puffing uncertainly in and out of the bag of skin and
bones which was his body. The doctor said that rest and food were the
only medicines for him. He lay like a piece of sodden driftwood for
long hours on the edge of the hay where the sun caught it.

The good-natured old Yankee woman who was cooking for me then, used
to take him out big bowls of fresh milk, and slices of her home-baked
bread, and stand chatting with him while he sat up listlessly and ate.
At least, she being a great gossip, did the chattering, and Fairfax
listened, once in a while murmuring the soft, slow, “Ye-e-s’m,” which
came to be the speech he was known by, in our valley.

He seemed to have no interest in getting well, but little by little
the sunshine, the quiet, the mountain air, and something else of which
we did not dream till later, lifted him slowly up to health. He began
to work a little in the garden, occasionally cut the grass around the
house and, borrowing the carpentering tools, built himself a little
room in the corner of the barn. One day I paid him a small sum for his
services about the place, and my husband gave him some old clothes.
The next afternoon he took his first walk to the village, and came
back with a pipe and a bag of tobacco. That evening Nancy, our “help,”
called me to the kitchen window and pointed out towards the barn. On a
bench before the barn door sat Fairfax, smoking, his head tipped back,
watching the moon sink behind the mountain. We agreed that it looked as
though he were getting well.

Nancy had to go home to a sick sister that Fall, and Fairfax moved into
the kitchen to occupy her place. It came out that he had once worked in
a hotel kitchen in Virginia, so that thereafter our Vermont cookstove
turned out Southern food, from hot biscuit to fried chicken.

There is very little caste feeling in our valley, and not a bit of
color prejudice. Many of our people had never even seen a negro to
speak to before they knew Fairfax, and they liked him very much.

He always was very thin, but he had filled out a little by this time;
had gone to a dentist by my advice and had the blackened stumps of his
teeth replaced by shining new ivories; had bought with his first wages
a new suit of clothes, and was considered by our farmer families to
be “quite a good-looking fellow.” He kept his curling gray hair cut
short to his head, his thin cheeks scrupulously shaven, and was always
presentable.

As a matter of course he was invited to all the country gatherings,
like other people’s “hired help,” along with the rest of us. I remember
the first of these invitations: some one telephoned from the village to
announce a church supper, and I was urged, “Do bring down a good crowd.
We’ve got a lot of food to dispose of.”

I stepped back into the kitchen and told Fairfax not to get supper that
night, as we were all going to the village to a church supper.

“Yes’m,” said Fairfax.

“I want you to be ready to start at a quarter to six,” I added,
glancing at the clock.

“Who, _me_?” said Fairfax, with a little start.

“Yes,” I answered, a little surprised. “Didn’t you hear me say I wanted
us all to go?”

Fairfax looked at me searchingly, “Where’ll I get my supper?”

“Why, they usually have the church suppers out on the church green
unless it rains, and then they go down to the basement rooms.”

Fairfax said apathetically, “No’m, they don’t want me.”

I saw now what was in his mind, and said, to set him right, “Oh, yes,
they do. You know the people around here haven’t any of those notions.
Come on.”

“No’m, they don’t want me,” he repeated.

I beckoned him to follow me, went back to the telephone and rang up
the woman who was arranging for the supper. “Do you want me to bring
Fairfax Hunter with us?” I asked her explicitly.

“Why, of course,” she said surprised. “I told you we want a crowd.”

After this Fairfax stood undecided, his sensitive face clouded
and anxious. I had a glimpse then of the long years of brutal
discrimination through which he had lived, and said, feeling very much
ashamed of my civilization, “Now, Fairfax, don’t be so foolish. We
_want_ you to go. Get on your best clothes, so’s to do honor to the
Ladies Aid.”

He went back to the room in the corner of the barn, and half an hour
later came out, fresh and neat in his new suit, closely shaven, his
slim yellow hands clean, his gray hair smooth. He looked almost eager,
with a light in his eyes that was like a distant reflection of gaiety.
But when we cranked up the Ford to go he was not in sight. We called
him, and he answered from the barn that he was not ready, and would
walk in. I was vexed, and shouted back as we rolled down the hill, “Now
don’t fail to come.”

It rained on the way in, and the supper was served in the basement,
with all the neighbors spruced up and fresh, while the busy women of
the Ladies Aid rushed back and forth bringing us salmon loaf, pickles,
Boston brown bread, creamed potatoes, and coffee and ice-cream as from
the beginning of time they always have; but though I kept a chair at
our table empty for Fairfax, and sat where I could watch the door, he
did not appear.

After the supper I went across the street to see my aunt, house-ridden
with a hard cold. She told me that from her windows she had seen
Fairfax come down to the village street, halt in front of the church,
go on, turn back, halt again. She said he had paced back and forth in
this way for half an hour, and finally had gone home.

When we reached the house we found Fairfax there, his good clothes put
away, his cook’s white apron tied around him, eating bread and butter
and cold meat.

I sat down to scold him for not doing as I had said. When I had
finished Fairfax looked at me, hesitated, and said, “If it had been out
of doors, maybe I’d have tried it.” There was an expression on his thin
somber face, which made me get up and go away without venturing any
more comment.

As his health increased, his spirits rose somewhat. My little son was
born that winter, and Fairfax was very fond of the baby, who soon
developed the most extravagant fondness for his company. When spring
came on, and gardening arrived, Fairfax took over a part of that work,
and had a long-running feud with the woodchucks who live in the edge of
the woods beyond our garden patch. It was a quaint sight to see Fairfax
in his white jacket and apron, sitting outside the kitchen door,
peeling potatoes, a rifle across his knees, or to see him emerge in a
stealthy run from the kitchen door, gun in hand, and dart across the
road to get a better sight on the little brown garden thieves. It did
me good to see him stirred up enough to care about anything.

He turned out to be a great reader and worked his way through most of
our library. I know you will not believe me when I tell you who his
favorite author was. But I am not concerned with seeming probable, only
with telling the truth. It was Thomas Hardy, whose philosophy of life
fitted in exactly with Fairfax’s views and experience. He was no talker
and rarely said anything to me beyond the gentle “no’m” and “yes’m”
with which he received orders. But once he remarked to my husband that
Thomas Hardy certainly did know what life was like. He went straight
through that entire set of novels, once he had found them on the
shelves, and all that winter my life was tinged with the consciousness
of Fairfax sitting in the kitchen after his work was done, deep in
communion with Hardy. Our visiting friends used to find the sight so
curious as to be amusing. I did not find it so.

The neighbors grew very used to him, and being sociable, friendly
people, with a great deal of Yankee curiosity about the rest of the
world, they often tried to get Fairfax to tell about life in the south.
When he went out for a stroll in the evening, they would call to him,
from where they were weeding a bed in the garden, or giving the pigs
their last meal, “Hello, there, Fairfax, come on in for a minute.” If
they were in the yard, or on the porch, Fairfax often accepted the
invitation. As we went by in the car we used to see him leaning up
against the porch-railing, talking, or helping some busy woman set out
her cabbage plants. But he never went indoors.

Our corner of the valley is a very cheerful one with a number of lively
children to keep us from “shucking over” into middle age too soon, and
the school-house is often the place where we gather for good times. The
school-benches are pushed back, the lamps lighted, the fiddler tunes
up, and we all dance, young and old, children and grown-ups. Fairfax
was invited as a matter of course to these informal affairs, and some
of the children who were very fond of the kind, gentle, silent man,
used to pull at his coat, and say, “Do come on in, Mr. Hunter! Dance
with me!” But Fairfax only grinned uneasily and shook his head. He
used to stand outside, smoking his pipe and looking in wistfully at
the brightly lighted room. As we skipped back and forth in the lively
old-fashioned dances, we could see him, a dim shape outside the window,
the little red glow of his pipe reflected once in a while from his
dark, liquid eyes. Sometimes when the window was open, he came and
leaned his elbows on the sill, nodding his head with the music, and
beating time lightly with his fingers, his eyes following us about as
we stepped back and forth in the complicated figures.

When we were ready to serve the “refreshments,” some of us went
out into the entry-way, and Fairfax came in to help us with the
uncomfortable work of digging out the ice and salt from the top of the
freezers, and opening the cans. I used to say at first, “Fairfax, why
don’t you go in and dance, too? Anybody can see you know just how to.”
But his invariable answer, “No’m, I guess I won’t,” had in it a quality
which ended by silencing me.

The older people called him Fairfax, as we did, but because he was a
grown man, and a middle-aged man, they thought it not good manners for
the children to call him by his first name, and taught the boys and
girls to call him Mr. Hunter. We thought this perfectly natural, and
none of us, entirely ignorant of Southern ways, had the slightest idea
of what this meant to him.

Once a year, Fairfax took a two weeks’ vacation, and all his earnings
for the year. He went off to the city, clean, and strong, and
well-dressed; and he always came back without a cent, sick, and
coughing, and shabby, with a strong smell of whiskey all over him. Of
course, we took him severely to task for this inexcusable behavior,
getting out for his benefit all the accepted axioms of conduct,
prudence, ambition, self-interest, and so on, showing him how he could
save his money, and put it in the bank, and be prosperous.

He always answered with his invariable soft, “Yes’m,” except on one
occasion, the last year of his life, when he said somberly, with his
soft, Southern accent, “I’ve got no use for money. I can’t buy _what I
want_. I’m a colored man.”

We learned more about him ... a little ... that he had a sister now
married to a sober, hard-working carpenter, living in Buffalo, that
he had lived at home with his mother till long after he was grown up,
working in the hotel, and supporting them both with his wages. That
was the only time I ever saw him show emotion. His thin face suddenly
twisted like a child’s, and tears shone in his eyes. “She was an awful
good woman, my mother was. She had a terrible time to get along when
my sister and I were little. She never had a husband to help her. My
father was a white man.”

“Fairfax, why don’t you think of marrying and having a home of your
own?” I said impulsively.

“To bring up children to be Jim-Crowed?” he asked, shortly.

On another occasion, when I was commenting on the singular excellence
of his writing and figuring, I heard about his school taught by a
northern Negro, who had gone down south as a volunteer teacher after
the war. It was from him that Fairfax had learned his correct speech,
without a trace of what we call the Negro dialect.

When the war in Europe came, and we decided to take the children and
go to France we were confronted with the question of what to do with
Fairfax. He wanted to go with us, and asked for it with more insistence
than he ever showed, and I often now regret that I did not try to take
him. But it seemed impossible to add to the responsibility of little
children in a war-ridden country, the heavier responsibility in a
country flowing with alcohol, for a man with a weakness for drink.
Besides, we could not afford the extra expense.

There was no place for him in our region, where few people keep
help in the kitchen. In the hurry and confusion of our preparations
for departure I simply could not think of anything satisfactory to
do in the United States of America for a proud sensitive colored
man. The best I could devise was to find him a place with a friend,
unfortunately in a city where there were plenty of saloons and plenty
of race prejudice. I can’t see now why I did not think of Canada. But
we knew no one in Canada.

When we separated, he kissed the children good-by, seriously, and
shook the hand which I held heartily out to him. After our last words,
I said, making a great effort to break through the wall of dignified
reserve which his silence built around him, “Fairfax, do keep straight,
won’t you?”

He looked at me with that passive, neutral look of his, which had to my
eye an ironical color, and made a little gesture with his shoulders and
eyebrows that might mean anything.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

He drank himself to death inside six months. I read the news in a
letter from his sister, the first and only letter I ever had from her.
I had hurried back to the apartment in Paris one evening to be with
the children during an air-raid, found the American mail arrived, and
read it to the accompaniment of that anti-aircraft bombardment which
was so familiar a part of the war to make the world safe for democracy.
My letter from the country of democracy informed me that Fairfax had
died, alone, before his sister could reach him. “He had been drinking
again, I am afraid, from what they told me. I always felt so bad about
Fairfax drinking, but he wouldn’t stop--he was just plain discouraged
of life. He never touched a drop as long as our mother was living. He
was always so sorry for our mother, and so good to her, though she was
only a poor ignorant woman, who couldn’t read or write, and Fairfax was
so smart. The teacher in our school wanted Fairfax to study to be a
minister or a doctor, but he never would. He said he thought the more
colored people try to raise themselves, the worse they get treated. He
felt so bad, always, about the way colored people were treated. He said
white folks wanted them to be low-down, so he was going to be. I used
to tell him how wrong this was, and how the good white people weren’t
like that, but he didn’t have any patience. Colored people have got
to have patience. Our mother was always patient. And my husband and I
manage pretty well. But Fairfax was proud. And colored people can’t be
proud. I don’t believe he ever let you-all know how he liked the way
the folks up your way treated him. He said their folks taught the white
children to call him mister just like a white man, and that the white
people used to ask him to parties and dances. He tried to go, he said,
but at the door, he’d remember all the times when white people made a
scene and called him a nigger and got mad if he even stood near them on
the street, and looked at him that way white people do ... if you were
colored you’d know what I mean. And then he just didn’t dare risk it.
When he was a boy and something like that happened, it used to make him
down sick so he couldn’t eat for days. And when he got up to where you
live, it was too late. My husband and I had Fairfax taken to our old
home town in Virginia and buried there beside our mother.”


The air-raid was over when I finished that letter. The noisy
bombardment of hate and revenge was quiet. The night was as still there
in France as in the graveyard in Virginia. I was very thankful to know
that Fairfax was sleeping beside his mother.


We are back in Vermont now, the curtain lowered over air-raids and
barrages. Everything goes on as before.

The other evening we were all down at the school-house for an
entertainment. The children spoke pieces, and then we had a dance.
About eleven o’clock some of us went out to the entry-room and began
to serve the ice-cream. One of my neighbors said, after a while, “Do
you remember how Fairfax used to get all dressed up so nice, and then
always stayed around outside to watch?”

“Yes,” I remembered.

“Sometimes,” said another one of the women, “sometimes when we’re out
here like this, it seems to me when I look up quick and glance out
there in the dark, as though I could almost see him there now.”

After a time, some one else said, “’Twas a pity he never would come in.”




PROFESSOR PAUL MEYER


“Master of the Word.” I never could remember where I had read that
phrase--perhaps as a child in an old story-book about enchanters; but I
knew whom it described when I first saw Professor Meyer speaking to his
class in the École des Chartes. Not in any metaphorical sense, but in
the plain literal meaning of the phrase, was he Master of the Word. He
made the title “Philologist” put on purple and gold.

The sallow young seminarists in their scant black gowns, keen, pale,
young students who had come from Russia, Italy, Roumania, and Finland,
sat motionless and intent, their eyes fixed on him unwaveringly for the
two long hours of these daily lectures. Words were the living creatures
in that room. They were born before our eyes in the remote childhood
of the race, and swept down through the ages till there they were
in our own language, issuing every day from our own lips, an ironic
reminder that all the days of our lives were no more than an hour in
the existence of those disembodied and deathless sounds.

From his youth the vigorous old man had transferred all his life to the
world of words--and had found it an enchanted kingdom, something sure
and lasting in the quicksands of human existence. From inside the walls
of his safe refuge he watched the world outside suffer and despair and
cry out and die. And he marveled at its folly. He himself knew none
of these fitful moods. He was always of a steady, kind, and humorous
cheerfulness, and always the most compelling of talkers. No impassioned
orator declaiming on an emotional theme could hold more breathlessly
attentive his listeners than this tall, stooping, plain old Jew, when
in his rapid conversational staccato he traced out the life of a word,
told the Odyssey of its wanderings in the mouths of men, so much less
able to withstand death and time than this mere breath from out their
mouths. He did this not with the straining effort of the orator, but as
naturally as he breathed or thought. His mind was constantly revolving
such cycles, and when he spoke he was but thinking aloud, always with
the same zest, day after day, always alert, with never a flagging of
interest, with never a moment of treacherous wonder about the value of
anything. I knew him when I was passing through one of those passions
of doubt which mark one’s entry into adult life, and I never could be
done with marveling at him. I was grateful to him, too, for he showed
the most amused sympathetic kindliness to the foreign girl, groping her
way forward.

I think he was sorry for me, for any one tempted to step into human and
prosaic life. He stood at the door of his ordered, settled, established
life, and called to me to construct one like it, to do as he had done,
to turn away from the sordid comedy of personality, and step into
the blessed country of impersonal intellectual activity. Many things
turned me toward his path: the great weight of his mature personality
(he was over seventy then and I was twenty), my immense admiration
for his learning, my interest in his subject, my intuitive dread of
the guessed-at strain of human emotions. You must not think that his
world was austere or rarefied. He had found there, with no penalties
to pay, all the amusement, the drama, the struggle, the rewards, the
entertainment, which men find in the human world, and pay for so
dearly. He never knew a bored or listless moment in his life, nor did
any one in his company.

Every Tuesday and Thursday, after that two-hour lecture to the
seminarists, there was a half hour intermission before the next
class--eight or ten advanced students--met in his oak-paneled,
half-basement office, rich with precious books, to discuss with him a
curious Old-French manuscript which he had discovered in the library at
Cassel.

I have never in my life known anything more sparkling and stimulating
than those half-hour intermissions. The old man always clapped on his
hat, talking incessantly as usual, and, stretching his long legs to a
stride which kept me trotting like a little dog at his side, started up
the Boulevard St. Michel towards the Odéon, to the pastry-shop which
calls itself “of the Medicis.” As soon as his tall form showed in the
distance, and the inimitable, high, never-to-be-forgotten squeak of
his voice could be heard, one of the elegant young-lady waitresses
bestirred herself--for the pastry-shop was proud of its famous patron.
She always had _babas au rhum_ waiting for us, as this was the only
pastry Professor Meyer considered worth eating. I do not like _babas
au rhum_ myself, but who was I to set up my insignificant opinion
against so great a man? So I ate the wet sop docilely, considering it
a small price to pay for the stories that went with it, stories that
blew the walls away from around us, and spread there the rich darkness
of the Middle Ages. There were stories out of medieval manuscripts
as yet unattributed and unedited, heaped in the upper rooms of the
Ambrosiana at Milan, of the untold riches, unclassified and unarranged
of the Bodleian, which Paul Meyer described with apostolic fervor;
of priceless scripts discovered in impossible places, by incredible
coincidences; of years of fruitless work on an obscure passage in the
Grail-cycle, suddenly cleared up because a Greek priest in Siberia had
discovered a manuscript bound in with an old Bible.

Or if he were in a playful mood, the mood the waitresses adored and
hoped for, he would begin juggling with the names of things about
us, the trim shoes on their feet, the brooches at their throats, the
ribbon in their well-kept hair; and with a pyrotechnic display of
laughing erudition, would hunt those words around and around through
all the languages where they had tarried for a time, back through
history--the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, Late Latin,
the Empire--till they ended in the long-drawn sonorous Sanscrit chant
of an early Aryan dialect, which Professor Meyer rendered with a total
disregard of onlookers.

After one of these flights, we came to ourselves with a start, looking
around with astonishment at our everyday dress and surroundings and
bodies.

Or perhaps it was a story out of his life, his long, long life, of
which not a day had been lost from his work. My favorites, I remember,
were the Tarascon stories. Ages and ages ago, when Paul Meyer was a
very young man, one of the brilliant pioneers in the study of Old
French, the municipal authorities of Tarascon employed him to come
and decipher the Town records, faithfully kept from the beginning of
time, but in their strange medieval scripts, with the abbreviations,
conventional signs, and handwritings of the past centuries, wholly
unintelligible to the modern Tarasconians. The young savant spent a
whole winter there, studying and copying out these manuscripts, a first
experience of the intense, bright pleasure such work was to give him
all his life long. The quick-hearted southerners in the town, loving
change and novelty, delighted to see the young, new face among them,
welcomed him with meridional hospitality, and filled his leisure hours
with the noisy, boisterous fun of Provence. He made friends there whom
he never forgot, and every year after that he made the long trip to
Tarascon to have a reunion with those comrades of his youth. But he
lived long, much longer than the quickly-consumed southerners, and one
by one, the friends of Tarascon were absent from the annual reunion.
They were fewer and fewer, older and older, those men used up by the
fever of living, and they fell away from the side of the vigorous man
who had chosen for his own the unchanging world of the intellect. “And
finally, last year,” said Professor Meyer on one occasion, “when I went
back, they were all gone. Every one! I had to go to the cemetery to
have a visit with them.”

As I gazed at him, astounded by the unbroken matter-of-factness of
his tone, no self-pity in it, he went on, his voice brightening into
enthusiasm, “So I went and had another look at the town records. Such a
glorious collection of scripts. Not one known style missing!”

He regretted deeply the death of the much-loved Gaston Paris, his great
colleague at the Collège de France, whose name was always linked with
his in the glory of the renaissance of Old-French studies, but his
lamentations were over the work unfinished, the priceless manuscripts
yet unedited. When the news came of the tragic family disgrace of one
of the greatest of German editors of Old-French texts, Paul Meyer was
moved almost to tears. They were not of sympathy with the sorrow of the
other scholar, but of exasperation that any man, especially one filled
with irreplaceable knowledge of his subject, could let so ephemeral a
thing as human relations distract him from the rich fields to be tilled
in the kingdom of words.

During the second trial of Dreyfus, Paul Meyer was called to testify
as a handwriting expert and gave his testimony in favor of Dreyfus,
the evidence, he said, being unmistakable. It was at the height of the
Dreyfus re-trial, when all France was throbbing with hate and suspicion
like an ulcer throbbing with fever. Professor Meyer was abominably
treated by the opposition, attacked in the streets, insulted,
boycotted, his classes filled with jeering young men who yelled him
down when he tried to speak. His bearing through this trial is one of
the momentous impressions of my life. He did not resent it, he made no
effort to resist it, he struck no melodramatic attitude, as did many
of the fine men then fighting for justice in France. He smothered the
flame out, down to the last spark by his total disregard of it. What
did he care for howling fanatics in one camp or another? Nothing! He
had been asked to pass judgment on a piece of handwriting and he had
done it. There was nothing more to be said.

I cannot forget the slightest shade of his expression as he stood
one day, on the platform of his classroom, chalk in hand, ready to
write out an outline on the blackboard, waiting, while the yelling
crowd of “_manifestants_,” mostly young men in flowing black neckties,
with straggling attempts at beards on their pimply faces, stamped
and hooted and shrieked out, “Dirty Jew! What were you paid? Shut
up! Shut up! What was your price, dirty Jew?” and other things less
printable. And yet, although I can shut my eyes now and see that
harsh, big-nosed, deeply-lined old face, with the small, bright eyes
under the bristling white eyebrows, I can not think of any words to
describe its expression--not scornful, not actively courageous, not
resentful, not defiant; rather the quiet, unexcited, waiting look of a
man in ordinary talk who waits to go on with what he has to say until
a pounding truck of iron rails has time to pass the windows. He stood
looking at his assailants, the chalk ready in his bony fingers, and
from him emanated so profound a sense of their entire unimportance, of
the utterly ephemeral quality of their emotion compared to the life
of the consonant he was about to discuss, that little by little they
were silenced. Their furious voices flattened out to an occasional
scream which sounded foolish even to their own ears. They looked at
each other, got up in a disorderly body and stamped out of the room.
The last one might have heard Professor Meyer’s high, squeaky voice
stating, “Thus in Picardy and in the north of Normandy, Latin _C_
before _a_ did not undergo the change noted in other provinces, and we
still find it pronounced....”

The pale, keen seminarists in their long, black gowns, and the American
girl, whipped out their notebooks and were at once caught up into the
Paul-Meyer world where no storms blew.

When, three or four years after the beginning of this friendship--it
was not precisely that, but I cannot think of another name to call
it--I made my final choice and stepped out of his safe, windless realm
into human life, it was with some apprehension that I went to tell him
that I was engaged to be married and would study Philology no more. I
might have known better than to be apprehensive. What did he care? What
was one more or less among the disciples of Philology, as long as the
words were there? Also, he laughingly refused to consider my decision
as final. He seemed to stand at the door of Philology, calling after me
with perfect good humor, as I walked away, “When you’re tired of all
that, come back. I’m always here.”

In the years after this, whenever we passed through Paris I went to see
him, stepping back into my girlhood as I stepped over the threshold of
the École des Chartes. Professor Meyer was very old now, but showed
not the slightest sign of weakness or infirmity. One evening when I
went hurriedly to say good-by before we sailed for home, I found him
in his study, in that rich, half-basement room, lined with books. The
green-shaded lamp burned clear and steady as though there were no wind
in the world to shake a flame. The gray, plain, old man looked up
from the yellow parchment he was deciphering, and in a sudden gust I
had a new revelation of the insatiability of the human heart. I was a
complete, fulfilled, vigorous woman, a happy wife, a writer beginning
to feel an intoxicating interest in creative work, joyously awaiting
the birth of my first child; but I knew for an instant there, the
bitterest envy of the lot of the old scholar, half buried though he was
in the earth, safe in the infinite security of his active brain.

The last time I saw him was two years later. We had been in Italy and
were to pass through Paris on the way home. My little daughter was
eighteen months old, a mere baby still, and I wrote Professor Meyer to
ask him if he could not for once reverse the usual procedure and come
to see me. He answered, setting a day, and informing me that he had
been and still was very ill. “I will give you details when I see you.”

When he came into the room I was shocked at his appearance, and
horrified when he told me what had happened to him. He had been as
usual in the summer, at Oxford, delving in the unclassified treasures
of the Bodleian, and had started home. The Channel steamer arrived late
at night at Boulogne, and he had chosen to sleep there, instead of
taking the night train to Paris.

He had gone to sleep apparently in his usual health, but when he woke
up in the morning he had lost his control of words. He could not bring
them into the simplest order. He could not command a single one to his
use. He could not say who he was, nor where he wanted to go, although
he knew these facts perfectly. The moment he tried to speak, there
swooped down between him and his meaning, a darkening throng of words.
All the words in the world were there, Greek, Sanscrit, Provençal,
Italian, Old-French, tearing furiously through his mind. But not the
simple words in his own language to say that he was Professor Paul
Meyer of the École des Chartes, who wanted to buy a ticket to Paris.
He stood there, helpless, facing the staring chambermaids, cut off
from them, from every one by this wild, invisible storm. They thought
him an idiot, escaped from his friends, and ran away from him. As he
told me about it, he looked sick and gray, and the sweat stood out on
his forehead.

It had lasted for three days. For three days and three nights he had
felt himself drowning in words, words that flooded up about him so that
he was fighting for air. Never for an instant was he able to take his
attention from their crazy flight through his mind, and never able to
stop one long enough to use it. He suffered, suffered more than he had
thought any human being could and retain consciousness, had after the
first day fallen into a high fever, so that they feared for his life.
Hour after hour he had lain on his bed, helpless, trying with all his
strength to fight away those words long enough to remember what he
wished to say.

And then, on the morning of the fourth day, click! Something snapped
into place inside his mind, and there he was, very worn, very weak, but
perfectly himself again, Professor Paul Meyer of the École des Chartes.
He had reached home safely, though strengthless and exhausted, and the
next morning had wakened again to that horror. It had lasted an hour
then, but it had come twice since--once as he was lecturing before his
class!

He never knew when it might be upon him. As he opened his mouth to
speak at any moment, he could not be sure that words would not burst
from his command again. Even as he told me this, he glanced at my baby
daughter, whom I had brought out to show him. For an instant his face
whitened in so terrible a glare of panic that I screamed and clutched
his arm. It was over. He was drawing a long breath and wiping his
shaking lips with his handkerchief. “For an instant as I looked at
her I could not think of the word ‘baby,’” he said pitifully. “It was
there, waiting to come on me again.”

It seemed to me that he was not fit to go about the streets alone, and
when he started to go away I asked him if he would not like to have me
take him home. He hung his proud old head and said nothing. I went to
get my hat and as no one happened to be at home with whom to leave the
baby, I took her on my arm.

We went silently through the familiar Paris streets, the stooping old
man towering on one side of me, the rosy baby heavy on my shoulder.
When we reached his door, his concierge saw us and came out to meet us,
nodding knowingly to me, and behind his back, tapping her forehead. I
took his great bony old hand for a last clasp and said good-by. He went
away up the stairs led by the concierge.


Three months after this I read in a newspaper a cabled notice of the
death of the distinguished scholar, M. Paul Meyer, founder and for many
years head of the École des Chartes. He died, so the notice said, “from
an obscure form of aphasia.”




“WHILE ALL THE GODS ...”


     “_While all the gods Olympus’ summit crowned,
     Looking from high to see the wondrous sight._”
                                       ILIAD, XXII.


I was spading up the earth in the dahlia-bed, when the children came
up, a shouting band of them, just out of school, and noticed that
the angleworms were “out.” This first, indubitable sign of spring in
Vermont always suggests to adolescent Vermonters the first fishing
expedition. But ten-year-olds and under think of the early brood of
first-hatched chicks.

“Hey, Jimmy, _angleworms_!”

“Carl, run get a can!”

“Here’s a fat one!”

They swooped down on me and squatted along the edge of the spaded
earth, pecking and snatching and chattering like a flock of sparrows.
As I spaded on, I heard bits of their talk, “Won’t the chicks just love
them!” “First worms _those_ chicks ever saw.” “No, Carl, that’s too
few, let’s wait till we get a lot. It’s such fun to drop in a whole
bunch.” “They _love_ angleworms so!”

Then I heard the inevitable fanciful suggestion from the imaginative
one of the group, “I bet we seem to the chicks just like giants ... no,
giants are always mean ... like gods.”

They fell on this idea, chattering and snatching, as they had at the
worms: “_Let’s_ be gods! I’ll be Jupiter.”

“I want to be Mars.”

“Loki! Loki!”

“I want to be Thor!”

“No, _I_ want to be Thor!”

“I was just going to be Thor, myself!”

Everybody wanted to be Thor, it seemed. They trooped off to the
poultry-yard, still disputing the question.

When I passed the brooder-house a little later, a group of exasperated
gods hung over the low wire-netting, gesticulating and crying out on
the idiocy of chicks. They fell on me for sympathy, and from their
babbling account I made out that the chicks had acted just as chicks
always act and always have acted from the beginning of time.

The gods had proudly put down in the midst of the little world of their
beneficiaries the mass of angleworm wealth which they had gathered with
such good intentions of giving pleasure.

“All they had to do was to pitch right in and enjoy themselves,” cried
Jupiter, wrathfully.

And what had they done? Well, first of all they had been afraid,
running to look at the squirming heap of treasure, peeping shrilly
in agitation, and running frantically away with fluttering wings and
hearts.

The circle of omnipotents, hanging over the wire-netting had been able
to endure this foolishness with an approach to the necessary god-like
toleration of the limitations of a lesser race. One of the Thors, it
seemed, the six-year-old-one, had tried to hurry up the progress of
the race, by catching one of his pin-headed charges and holding him
firmly in a benevolent small hand, directly in front of the delicious
food, “where he couldn’t _help_ seeing how good it was, seems ’s if,”
explained Thor Number Three, to me.

But the chick had, it appeared, been perfectly capable of not seeing
how good it was, because his mind was entirely taken up With his terror
at being held. He had merely emitted one frenzied screech of horror
after another till the other chicks began to run about and screech
too, and the older, more experienced gods had sharply told young Thor
that he didn’t know so much about this god-business as he thought he
did, and that experience had told them the only thing to do was to let
the chicks alone till they got used to a new idea. That always took
forever, they informed their young colleague.

So after this they had waited and waited and _waited_, while the chicks
fluttered, and peeped and ran away from what they really wanted above
everything; from what the gods had so kindly put there for them to
enjoy.

“Gee _whiz_!” said Mars disdainfully. “Wouldn’t you think they’d know
enough for _that_! There was room for every last one of them to stand
around the pile, and eat all they wanted, without stirring a toe.”

Finally, one bold adventurer had struck his beak experimentally into
the pile, pulled out a tasty piece of meat, and turned aside to gobble
it down.

And _then_ what?

Did the other chicks follow his sensible example and begin at last to
profit by their opportunity.

“No! no! no!” A chorus of all the gods assured me that nothing like
that had happened. Instead, with shrill twitters of excitement, all the
twenty or more chicks had thrown themselves on that one, to wrest his
bit from him.

“Honest to goodness, they _did_!” Loki affirmed to me, passionately,
as if feeling that I could not possibly believe in such unreason if I
had not seen it.

The chick with the worm had taken to his heels, unable to swallow his
prize because of the hunt against him. Up and down the little world
of their yard, he had run frantically, wildly, and silently (because
of his mouth being full). And up and down, wildly, frantically and
vociferously (their mouths being empty) his fellow-chicks had pursued
him, bent on catching him and taking away from him whatever it was he
prized enough to try to possess. As he turned and doubled to escape
them, they turned and doubled in a pack, slipping, falling, and
trampling on each other in their blind fury.

Presently, “What do you _think_!” cried the oldest of the Thors. “He
got so rattled that he lost his piece of worm out of his mouth, but the
others didn’t give him time to tell them that. Anyhow, they’d yelled
and carried on so, they had him up in the air. He didn’t know by that
time what he _was_ doing; and he kept on legging it as hard as ever,
and they after him.”

By and by, this insane flight and agitation had so exhausted them
all that they were staggering feebly on their tiny legs, and unable
to emit more than hoarse squawks as they ran. Then, apparently by
chance, as he darted zigzag to and fro, he had run under a corner of
the brooder. Instantly ... ah-h-h, the grateful warmth and darkness had
suggested rest to his weary soul; with a long murmured “che-e-eep” of
utter relief, he had settled down against the wall of the brooder to
close his eyes. And each of his pursuers, as they dashed in after him,
had seized on the Heaven-sent opportunity for rest after the terrible
tension of the struggle for existence, imposed on them by a cruel fate,
and had with a sigh and a relieved, whispered twitter, given himself
over to sleep and dreams.

At the time when I came up, every chick was sound asleep in the
brooder, while outside in the middle of their world, lay the untouched
pile of angleworms, bare and open to view under the bright spring sky.

“Can you beat it!” said Mars contemptuously.

He turned away from such unimaginable imbecility to a new idea, “Say,
kids!” he bellowed, although they were all within touching distance of
him, “let's be cops and robbers!”

They flared up like tinder to a spark, “All right! I’ll be Chief of
Police!”

“I’ll be a detective!”

“I’ll be the robber captain ... cave’s under the hay, as usual.”

“No, _I_ wanted to be robber captain!”

“No, me, me!”

They all wanted to be robber captain, it seemed. They streamed away to
the barn, wrangling over this.


All but one. The youngest Thor, newer than the others to the
god-business, still hung over the wire-netting, grieving, “Seems ’s if
... if we could only _tell_ them! They _love_ angleworms so!” he said
pityingly. “If I could only think of some way to _teach_ them how to
stand around quietly, and each one get all he wanted to. They’d have
such a _good_ time!” he yearned over them.

As I said nothing, he asked of the world in general, “Why won’t they?
Oh, why _won’t_ they?”

I let fall insidiously, “I wonder how the angleworms like it?” The
little god stared at me with startled eyes; and then at the worms. He
looked at them as though he saw them for the first time. His tender
young face was fairly vacant with his surprise before a new idea.

Then he began slowly to climb over the wire-netting.

When I went back to the dahlia-bed, he was carefully burying the
angleworms again.

His young face wore an expression of puzzled bewilderment.




SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS


When the elders of our family could think of nothing else to worry
about they put in their time to good advantage on little Cousin Maria
Pearl Manley. Yes--Maria Pearl--that was really the poor child’s name,
given in baptism. You can see that her troubles began early. That name
was symbolical of what her life was to be, sharply divided between her
mother’s family (they were the ones who insisted on the Maria) and
her father’s folks, who stood out for the Pearl. Her father had died
before she was born, and her mother lived only a few months after the
baby came, and was so mortally ill that no one thought of naming the
poor little girl. It was after her mother’s death, when the two hostile
families could collect themselves, that the long struggle over the
child began by giving her that name.

Thereafter she was Maria for six months of the year, the period when
she stayed with the Purdons; and Pearl the other half-year, when she
was with her father’s family, the Manleys. “The poor little tyke, not
even a fixed name of her own,” my grandmother used to say, pitying the
child’s half-yearly oscillations between those two utterly dissimilar
houses “where there’s nothing the way it should be in either one!” The
circle of compassionate elders used to continue, “Dear, dear! What
can the poor little thing ever learn, with such awful examples always
before her eyes.”

As I look back now, I must admit that such severe characterizations
were really not due to the natural tendency of all elders to be sure
that children are being badly brought up. Those two houses which
formed the horizon of Maria Pearl’s life were certainly extravagant
examples of how not to conduct life. The Purdon grandfather and
grandmother and aunt were the strictest kind of church people (the
kind who make you want to throw a brick through the church-windows),
narrow, self-righteous, Old-Testament folks, who dragged little Maria
(the “Pearl” was never pronounced inside their doors) to Church and
Sunday-School and prayer-meeting and revivals and missionary meetings,
and made her save all her pennies for the heathen. Not that she had
very many to save, for the Purdons, although very well-to-do, were
stingier than any other family in town. They loved money, it tore at
the very fibers of their being to part with it, and they avoided
this mental anguish with considerable skill. Although their competent
“management” allowed them to live comfortably, there were few occasions
which brought them to the point of letting any actual cash out of
their hands. The dark, plain, well-fitting garments which clothed
little Maria were never bought, but made over out of her grandmother’s
clothes; the soap which kept her clothes immaculately clean had cost
no money, but was part of the amazing household economies in which
old Mrs. Purdon was expert and into which she introduced Maria with
conscientious care. The child learned to darn and patch and how to make
soap out of left-over bits of fat, and how to use the apple-culls for
jelly and how, year after year, to retrim last season’s hat for this.

From morning till night she lived in a close, airless round of
intensive housekeeping and thrift. She spread newspapers down over the
rugs, so the sun should not fade them; she dried every scrap of orange
peel to use as kindling, she saved the dried beef jars to use for jams,
she picked berries all day long instead of playing, and then sat up
late with Aunt Maria and Grandmother, picking them over and canning
them, on the stove in the woodshed, to avoid litter in the kitchen.
She always wore gingham aprons, even to school, which no other children
did, and she was treated as though she had offended against the Holy
Ghost, if she forgot to wash her rubbers and put them in their place
in the closet under the stairs. She was rigorously held to a perfect
performance of her share of the housework, making up her bed with the
fear of the Lord in her poor little heart lest the corners be not
square enough, poking desperately at the corner of the windows she
washed and polished, and running her finger anxiously over the dishes
she wiped to be sure they had that glass-smooth surface which only
repeated rinsings in very hot water can give. Then when all was done,
her reward was to take her seat in their appallingly neat sitting-room
and, to the accompaniment of Aunt Maria’s reading aloud out of a church
paper, to set tiny stitches in the stout, unbleached cotton of which
her underwear was made. They were really dreadful, the six months she
passed with her mother’s people.

But the other half-year was scarcely better, although she might have
journeyed to another planet with less change in her surroundings. When
the day came, the first of January, for her departure from the Purdon
household, her solidly-constructed little trunk was filled with her
solidly-constructed little clothes, her hair was once more rebraided to
an even harder finish, her face was once more polished with the harsh,
home-made soap, and her nails were cut to the quick. “It’s the _last_
time the poor child will have any decent care, till she comes back,”
Grandmother Purdon would say bitterly, buttoning up with exactitude the
stout, plain warm little coat, and pulling down over Maria’s ears the
firmly knit toque of dark-blue wool. They all went down to the station
to make sure she took the right train, and put her, each of them
separately, in the hands of the Conductor. They kissed her good-by, all
but Grandfather, who shook hands with her hard. It was at that moment
that Maria’s frozen little heart felt a faint warmth from the great
protecting affection they had for her, which underlay the rigor of
their training and which they hid with such tragic completeness.

The first day of the arrival at the Manley’s was always a dream of
delight! To emerge from the silent rigidity of the Purdon house into
the cheerful, easy-going, affectionate noise of the Manley home,
to exchange the grim looks of Grandmother Purdon for the exuberant
caresses of Grandmother Manley; to leave behind all stringent
admonitions to put your wraps on a certain hook, and to be allowed to
fling them down on the floor where you stood.... Little Pearl (she was
never called Maria by the Manleys) felt herself rebounding into all the
sunshine and good-nature, as a rubber ball rebounds from a hard stone
wall. She flung herself around Aunt Pearl’s neck, and paid back with
interest the “forty thousand kisses” which were the tradition in that
home. She flung herself into play with the innumerable little cousins,
who cluttered up the floor; for there was always a married aunt or two
back home, with her family, while an invisible uncle-by-marriage tried
somewhere in a vague distance, to get a hypothetical job. She flung
herself into her bed at night joyfully reveling in the fact that its
corners were not turned squarely, and that the pillow-case had last
seen the wash-tub on about the same date that Aunt Carry’s husband had
last had a job. It was a care-free dream to go to bed whenever she
pleased--eleven o’clock if that suited her taste--with nobody to tell
her to wash, or to brush her teeth, or comb her hair; and to lie there
watching Aunt Carry and Aunt Pearl, who always sat up till midnight at
least, putting their hair in curl-papers and talking about the way the
neighbor next door treated his wife. This was life!

But already the very next morning the dream was not quite so
iridescent, as with no one to wake her, she opened her eyes at twenty
minutes of nine, and knew that she had to be at school at nine! She
sprang up, shivering in the cold room (Grandfather Manley never could
manage the furnace, and also there were periods when there was mighty
little money to buy coal) and started to claw herself into her clothes.
But always just at first she forgot the Manley ways, and neglected to
collect everything she had taken off, and put it under her pillow,
the only spot in which you could keep things for yourself in that
comfortably communistic family. Her shoes were gone, her nice new
calf-skin school shoes. She went flying out, comb in hand, tearing
at the tangles in her hair, as she went, asking if anybody had seen
her shoes. Aunt Carry, still in her nightgown, with a smeary baby in
her arms, said, yes, she’d let her Elmer have them to run down to the
grocery store to get some bread. Somehow they’d got out of bread and
poor Aunt Pearl had had to go off to her work with only some crackers
to eat. Surely little Pearl didn’t grudge the loan of her shoes to her
cousin. The bread was for all of them, and Elmer couldn’t find his
shoes, and anyhow one of them had a big hole in it and the snow was
deep.

“But, Aunt Carry, how can I get to school? I’ll be late!”

“Well, gracious, what if you are! Don’t be so fussy! Time was made for
slaves!” That was Aunt Carry’s favorite motto, which she was always
citing, and for citing which there were plenty of occasions in her
life. Little Pearl thought somewhat resentfully, as she rummaged in
her trunk for her other shoes, that if Aunt Carry had to enter the
school-room late and get scolded, she’d think differently about time!
But anyhow it was fun to wear her best shoes if she liked, and to
watch their patent leather tips twinkling as she scurried about. They
twinkled very fast during that quarter of an hour, as Pearl collected
her wraps (her mittens she never did find after that day) and tried to
scare up something for breakfast in the disordered kitchen, where the
cat, installed on the table, was methodically getting a breakfast by
licking the dirty plates clean. Pearl was not so lucky, and had to go
off to school with a cracker in one hand and a piece of marshmallow
cake in the other. The less said about her hair the better! Grandmother
Manley’s “forty thousand kisses” were not quite so wonderful this
morning as they had been last night.

At noon Pearl ran home, her stomach in her heels, all one voracious
demand for good food. Aunt Carry was crocheting by the window and
there was no sign of any lunch. “Mercy me!” cried Grandmother Manley,
“Is it noon? Why, how the morning has gone!” And then with the utmost
compunction they both rushed out into the kitchen and began to hurry
with all their might to get something for Pearl to eat. The kitchen
fire was pretty low, and there were no potatoes cooked, and Aunt Carry
had forgotten to order any eggs, and the milk bottle had been left
outside and was frozen hard. Hurry as they might and apologize to Pearl
almost with tears as they did, it was very little that Pearl had eaten
when she went back to school, and she knew well enough that they would
forget to-morrow, just as they had to-day. No, already Pearl felt that
life could not be made _wholly_ out of kisses and good nature. By
nightfall, her thin kid shoes were rather scuffed and very wet, with a
break in one of the patent leather tips where Cousin Tom had stepped on
it, in a scuffle with his brother. Little Pearl nursed her sore toe and
broken shoe with a weary feeling.

Always at the end of the six months with the Manleys, Pearl was nearly
a nervous wreck. She was behind in her lessons, since there was not
a quiet spot in the house to study, and even if there had been you
couldn’t escape from the noise of the trombone, which Aunt Carry’s
oldest was learning to play; she was underweight and anæemic for lack
of regular food and enough sleep ... it wasn’t much use to go to bed
when nobody else did, and Aunt Pearl and Aunt Carry always visited in
more than audible voices as they put up their hair in curlers; she
had nothing to wear (since nothing had been renewed or mended) except
a blue silk dress which Grandfather Manley had bought for her in a
fit of affection, and some mostly-lace underwear which Aunt Carry
had sat up till all hours making for her, so that “she should have
something pretty like the other girls!” But for an active little girl,
mostly-lace underwear soon was reduced to the quality of mosquito
netting; and a blue silk dress in the Manley’s house was first cousin
to Sir Walter Raleigh’s cloak in the mud-puddle.

With all the family she had been night after night to the moving
pictures and not infrequently was kept up afterwards by the hysterics
of little Nelly, Aunt Carry’s nervous, high-strung five-year-old, who
saw men with revolvers pointed at her, and desperadoes about to bind
and gag her, till Pearl more than half saw them too, and dreamed of
them afterwards. She had suffered the terrible humiliation of having
the teacher send her home with a note saying that her hair must be
washed and kept in better order, a humiliation scarcely lessened by the
outraged affection of the Manleys, who had taken her into their loving
arms, to moan over their darling’s hurt feelings. She had thereafter
made frantic efforts to keep her own hair in order, with what brush
and comb she could salvage out of the jetsam in the room which was
at once hers and the aunts’ bedroom; but if she complained that her
hair-ribbons disappeared, or were crumpled in a corner of the drawer,
she was told comfortably, not to be fussy, “For goodness’ sakes, don’t
make such a fuss about things! Folks that do never have a minute’s
comfort in life, nor nobody else in the house either.”

Yes, it was a rather pale, wild-eyed little Pearl, who on the first day
of July scrambled together into her trunk what she could find, put on
the hat which had been so bright and pretty when Aunt Pearl gave it to
her at Easter, and which now after two months with the Manleys looked
like a floor-cloth. She did not put her hands over her ears to deaden a
little the volume of noise as they all crowded about her in the station
to say their affectionate and vociferous good-byes, but that was only
because she did not want to hurt their feelings. The instant she was in
the train, she always hid her face in her arms, quivering all over with
nervous tension. Oh, the noise the Manleys always made over everything,
and the confusion they were always in, when they tried to do anything,
colliding with each other, and dropping things, and squealing and
screaming! And it was all right for them to be warm-hearted and
generous--but when they slathered money on ice-cream, and then didn’t
have enough to pay for her ticket, till they’d borrowed it ...!

Well, then there was the re-entrance into the Purdon house, the
beautiful, fragrant cleanliness of everything, the dustless order, her
own room, with the clean, white sheets, and her own safe closet into
which nobody would ever plunge rummaging. And Aunt Maria so quiet and
calm, with her nice low voice, and Grandmother Purdon so neat with
her white lace collar, and her lovely white hair so well-brushed, and
oh, the good things to eat.... To sit down to a well-ordered table,
with a well-cooked savory mutton stew, and potatoes neither watery nor
underdone, and clear apple jelly quivering in a glass dish! And the
clean, clean dishes! Had Maria ever complained of having to rinse the
dishes too often! She remembered the dried-on bits of food always to
be felt on the Manley plates ...!

The first evening too was always dream-like, the quiet, deft
despatching of the dishes, in the kitchen shining with cleanliness, and
then all the evening free, and so quiet, so blessedly quiet, with no
trombone, and no whoops of chatter or boisterous crying and laughing;
no piano banging (except perhaps Aunt Maria softly playing a hymn or
two), no children overturning chairs and slamming doors, no one falling
up or downstairs, no crash of breaking crockery from the kitchen ...
little Maria sat on the well-swept porch behind the well-trained vines
and soaked herself in the peace and quiet.

But by the next morning, the shine was a little off. When Aunt Maria
came to wake her at half past six, _half past six_ ... why, no one
at Grandfather Manley’s thought of stirring till eight! And she was
expected to wash and dress ... not a button unbuttoned or a hair out
of place under penalty of a long lecture on neatness ... and “do” her
room, even to wiping off the woodwork; and make her bed. Heavens! How
fussy they were about those old corners! All this before she had a
bit of breakfast. Then, breakfast with everybody’s whole soul fixed
on the work to be done, and nobody so much as dimly aware that it
was a glorious, sunny, windy, summer day outside. Maria’s heart sank,
sank, sank, as she drank her perfectly made chocolate, and ate her
golden-brown toast, till it struck the dismal level where it usually
lived during the Purdon half-year. “Come, Maria, don’t loiter over your
food. The only way to get the work done is to go right at it!”

“Oh, Maria, do you call that folding your napkin? I call it crumpling
it into a ball.”

“You forgot to put your chair back against the wall, Maria. If we each
do faithfully our share of what is to be done, it will be easier for us
all.”

“No, the _spoons_ go there ... mercy, no! not the forks!”

“Don’t twitch the curtain so as you go by. It takes all the fresh out
of it. I only ironed them yesterday.”

“Why, Maria, whistling! Like a little street boy!”

The July sun might shine and the wind blow outside, inside the house
it was always gray, windless November weather. She felt herself curl
up like a little autumn leaf, and, with a dry rattle, blow about the
rooms before the chill admonitory breath of Grandmother Purdon and Aunt
Maria.

Yes, the family elders were right in pitying her, as a child brought
up just as badly as it was possible to be; and nobody was surprised or
blamed her a bit, when she got out of both families as rapidly and as
unceremoniously as she could, by making a very early marriage with an
anonymous young man, somebody she had met at a high-school dance. He
seemed just like any young man, from the glimpse of him, which was all
the family had, before their marriage; but nobody knew a thing about
his character or whether he would make a good husband. And, indeed,
there was a big doubt in the family mind as to whether Maria Pearl
would be any sort of wife or home-maker. How could she have learned
anything about rational living, the poor little tyke, hustled from one
bad example to another through all the impressionable years of her
life? Suppose she kept house like the Manleys! Horrors! Or suppose she
took after the Purdons! Her poor husband!

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

Nothing of the sort! There’s not a happier home anywhere in the country
than hers, nor a better housekeeper, nor a wiser mother. It’s a perfect
treat to visit in her cheerful, sunny, orderly house, or to talk with
her well-brought-up, jolly children, or to see her well-fed, satisfied
husband. And she herself is a joy to the eye, stout and rosy and calm.
She is neither fussy nor slack, neither stingy nor extravagant, neither
cold and repressed, nor slushy and sentimental.

How did it happen? Probably Maria Pearl doesn’t know. But I do. And
since it has happened, I can see perfectly how inevitable it was.
Whenever the routine of her housekeeping begins to set too hard, and
she feels like flying at muddy-footed, careless children with the
acrimony natural to the good housekeeper, the memory of forlorn little
Pearl among the Purdons softens and humanizes her words. And when the
balance begins to swing the other way, when she tastes that first
delicious, poisonous languor of letting things slide, when her Manley
blood comes to the top, she has other memories to steady her. I have
seen her sitting at the breakfast table, after the children are off to
school, begin to sag in her chair, and reach with an indolent gesture
for a tempting novel; and I knew what was in her mind as she sprang
up with a start and began briskly to clear off the table and plan the
lunch.




ART ATMOSPHERE


My cousin Angelica was one of the advance-guard. She bowed down and
worshipped Whistler six months or so before the rest of humanity
reached the adoration stage; and when she heard that he had opened
a studio for “lady students” available to any one who would pay
the entrance-fee--“just like one of the second-raters who teach at
Carlorossi’s”--she lost no time in making tracks for the Passage
Stanislas, where, if I remember rightly, the Whistler studio was
situated.

It was, just as rumor had said, like all other studio-classes of
that sort, except that the fee was many times larger; but that was
legitimate, Whistler being _the_ thing that winter, and _the_ thing
always commanding a high price in the open market.

It was a large, grimly dirty, barn-like room, with a big sky-light
towards the north. In it sat some twenty or thirty more-or-less-young
ladies, most of them Americans (the fee was really _very_ large)
enveloped in voluminous, paint-stained aprons. They sat, as always in
such studio-classes, in a circle around a platform, on which stood the
model.

Once a week (or was it once a fortnight?) “the Master” drove up in a
cab, made his way into the room amid palpable emanations of awe, and
going from canvas to canvas shed upon the bowed head of each acolyte a
little of the sacred fire of his genius.

My cousin Angelica, like the others, found this a more than
satisfactory arrangement and considered that she received full value
for her money. We heard little from her that winter but enthusiasm over
the Whistler atmosphere and scorn of everything else. In any exhibition
she was to be found in ecstasy before some barely visible human visage
sunk in the gloom of a dusky corner at twilight, or a floating, whitish
blur or two on a dark-blue canvas, which, she told us, represented
the new artistic tradition, worth all the other artistic traditions
produced since they carried the Cimabue Madonna through the streets--or
was that a Giotto?

I was studying philology that year and had no quarrel with Angelica
about that sort of thing. For all I cared, she could give her adherence
to whichever artistic tradition took her fancy for the moment. But
it was occasionally inconvenient to have her so slavishly tied to
the studio-class on the days when they expected a criticism. Nothing
could have tempted her away from one of those marvelous opportunities
to profit by first-hand personal instruction from a first-rate living
genius. Even when our one prosperous relative, Uncle Frederick, came
through Paris and invited us over to the Right Bank to go to lunch with
him at a fearfully expensive restaurant, and to sit in a fearfully
expensive loge at the Français afterwards, Angelica had to go first to
the studio.

I went with her, so that I could carry her off directly afterwards.
This is what I saw and heard in the hour I spent there.


The day was a fine one of sunlight less tempered with gray than most
Paris sunshine. The model was a stout, red-haired woman with the
milk-white skin of red-haired people. From the great expanse of the
skylight, there poured upon her opulent nude body, as smooth and white
as a newly peeled almond, a flood of light that was sparkling, in spite
of the north exposure. The room rang with the high, clear brightness of
that white flesh in that morning light.

Around the model sat the thirty or so disciples of the Master. While
I waited for Angelica, I wandered around back of them, glancing at the
canvases on their easels.

They had all painted the model the color of an old saddle. From one
dim, cavernous sketch after another, a misty, smeary, dark-brown mass
looked out waveringly from blue, or brown, or gray twilight. The red
head glimmered faintly, attenuated by layers and layers of shadow. The
disciples looked up at the gleaming white woman before them, reflecting
the daylight as definitely as a sound tooth reflects it, and looked
down happily and proudly on their dark, blurred canvases. You could see
how pleased they were at the progress they were making. They had caught
it, this time, they had caught what was the thing to catch.

“We’ll have some fireworks, all right, when ‘the Master’ gets here,” I
thought to myself.

Presently he came. The door swung open, I caught a glimpse of the
concierge performing the impossible in the way of holding the door
open and effacing herself in one and the same gesture, and in came a
dapper, immaculately dressed little old gentleman, with gray gloves and
pearl-gray gaiters.

The disciples prostrated themselves, foreheads to the floor (or at
least that is the impression they made on me in the first intense
emotion of his entrance) and then stiffened to attention before their
easels, not to miss a word of the down-dropping pearls and rubies.

The little old gentleman advanced with small, gentlemanly steps
to the first of the easels, and contemplated the leather-brown
South-Sea-Islander depicted on it. Every one of the students held her
breath. So did I.

He looked at it a long time, his face imperturbable. Then
with the traditional studio gesture I had seen all my life in
studios--outstretched thumb, modeling in the air--he began saying
what I had heard all my life in studios, “A little more shadow on the
shoulder, I should say. And perhaps.... Yes, go into the modeling of
that arm more deeply. On the whole very promising, very interesting.”

He passed on to the next easel. One felt another devout heart turn
over with a rustle. “Good! Well _felt_, that knee. But lacking in
distinction, perhaps, the treatment of the hair. Go into the modeling
of the hands more deeply.”

He passed to the next. And the next. And the next. I heard a murmur
of “Very promising ... very interesting ... deeper feeling about ...
keep it flat ... subtle ... relations of planes not quite ... very
promising ... very interesting.”

In half an hour it was over. He walked neatly back to the door, which
the nearest student sprang to open, and with a courteous bow all around
he disappeared, his face imperturbable to the last. If he lifted a
cynical eyebrow in amusement, it was not till after the door had closed
upon him.


Angelica and I were now free to go, and I proceeded to the difficult
undertaking of cutting her out from the herd of art-students milling
excitedly around and around before the canvases, “Did you hear what
he said about my shoulder-blade?” “This was the plane he liked on my
back.” “He didn’t object to the treatment of my ...”


The model, however, showed an imperturbability as complete as that of
the Master. Like him, she had earned her pay for a morning’s work. As
the door had closed on him, she had climbed down off the platform, and
she was now calmly pulling her chemise on over her red head.


Angelica was still a little wild-eyed and emotional when we emerged
on the street. “Isn’t he _won_derful?” she said, clutching at my arm.
“Can’t you understand now what a privilege it is to ...” She took
ten minutes to blow off this high-pressure steam and come down to
little wandering puffs like, “It _means_ so much to have such precious
contacts!” And, “You simply take it in through your _pores_ when you
are in the real art atmosphere.”


Understand me, please, I do not venture to affirm that this is really
all that took place. I am no art-student and never was. There may have
been oceans more. But this is all that I saw.




COLONEL SHAYS


I dare say when you studied American history you read about Shays’
Rebellion, in Massachusetts, and duly learned that it was put down, and
the instigators punished. But I am sure that you never knew, and never
wondered, what became of Colonel Shays himself, of whom the history
books say succinctly, “the leader himself, escaped.”

I have never seen in print anything about the latter part of his life
beyond one or two scanty and inaccurate references in one or two
out-of-date books of reference; but all the older people in our town
were brought up on stories about him, for it was to the valley just
over the mountain from us that he fled after his last defeat. And later
on, as an old man, he lived for some years in our town, in a house
still standing, and told many people what I am going to set down here.

At the time when he made his escape from the officers of the State in
Massachusetts, Vermont was, quaintly enough, an independent republic,
all by itself, and hence a sufficient refuge for men fleeing from the
officers of any State in the Union. Furthermore it was still rather
wild, sparsely settled, none too respectful of any authority, and
distinctly sympathetic to strangers who came from the east, south, or
west over the mountains on the run, with the manner of men escaping
from sheriffs. Sheriffs were not popular persons in Vermont in 1787.

But all this did not seem to make it a safe enough refuge to the man
with a price set on his head, the man who had risked everything on the
boldest of enterprises, and had lost everything. He passed by the rough
scattered little hamlets and went into a remote, narrow, dark, high
valley, which is to this day a place where a man might hide for years
and never be seen. Colonel Shays, traveling at night, on foot, through
the forests, came down into the Sandgate valley through the Beartown
notch, over the mountains, and not a soul knew that he had come.

He made his first camp, which was also his permanent and last one,
since he was never disturbed, high up on a shoulder of the mountain,
overlooking the trail for a great distance, and densely surrounded with
a thick growth of pine trees. Very cautiously, making no noise, using
the ax and knife which were his only tools, he put up a rough shelter,
and building a fire only at night in a hollow where rocks masked its
flame, began cooking some of the game he caught. He lived in this way,
all alone for years and years. Game was abundant; like most men of that
time he was an adroit trapper, a good pioneer, and knew how to smoke
and preserve the flesh of animals and to save their skins. For the
first year he did not dare to let any one know that a man was living
there, and literally saw not one soul.

Then one day about a year after he began this life, a little boy going
fishing saw a tall, strong, black-haired stranger standing in the trail
and holding a large packet of furs. He told the child to take the
packet and ask his father for a bushel of seed-corn and a bag of salt.
He specified that the man who brought it was to leave it just where
they then stood and go away without waiting.

The child’s father was a rough, half-civilized, good-natured trapper,
who had had troubles of his own with unreasonable officers of the
law in York State. When the child told his story, the father laughed
knowingly, took the skins, got the seed-corn and the salt, left them
in the place indicated, and kept a neighborly shut mouth. He could not
read or write, had never heard of Shays’ Rebellion, and supposed the
man in hiding to be in the same situation as himself. Living as he
did, it seemed no awful fate to make one’s living out of the woods, and
he thought little of the fact that he had a new neighbor.

After this, Colonel Shays began a little cultivation of the ground,
in scattered places, hidden behind screens of thick trees, in a
few natural clearings in the forest. He used to say that life was
infinitely more tolerable to him after the addition to his diet of salt
and cereals. After some months he risked a little more, and, buying
them with furs worth forty times their value, he secured a few tools
and some gunpowder. The transactions were always carried on through the
child, the only one to see the fugitive.

Nothing has come down to me of what this terrible dead halt in
mid-career, and this grim isolation from the world meant to the active,
intelligent, ambitious man at the height of his powers. None of the
old people who heard him talk seem to have asked him about this, or to
have had any curiosity on the subject. Only the bare facts are known,
that he lived thus for many years, till the little boy grew up, till
his own hair turned gray and then white, till the few families in that
valley were quite used to the knowledge that a queer, harmless old man
was living up in the woods near the northern pass of the mountains,
miles from any neighbor. Once in a great while, now, some one saw
him--a boy fishing, a hunter far on the trail of a deer, or a group
of women picking berries. He occasionally exchanged a few words with
his neighbors at such times, but he had almost forgotten how to speak
aloud. All the stories about him mention the rough, deep, hoarseness of
his unused voice.

One day his nearest neighbor, meaning to do him a kindness, told him
with a rough good-will that he might as well quit hiding now, “Whatever
’tis you done, ’tis so long past now! And up here ... nobody from your
part of the country, wherever ’tis, would ever be coming up here. And
if they did they wouldn’t know you. Why, your own mother wouldn’t know
you in them clothes, and with that white beard.”

It is said that Colonel Shays on hearing this, drew back and looked
down at himself with a strange air of astonishment.

Apparently the advice stuck in his mind, for, some weeks after this,
he decided to risk it, and to make the trip to Cambridge, the nearest
town to those mountain settlements. Early one morning the people of the
Sandgate valley were astonished to see the old man going down the trail
of the valley which led into the State road going to Cambridge. Well,
that was something to talk about! He was going to town at last like
anybody else.


Now, this happened a good many years after Shays’ Rebellion had failed,
and the bitterness of the feeling about it had died down. Although
Colonel Shays could not know this, most people had even forgotten all
about him, and as for looking for him to arrest him, nobody would have
dreamed of doing it. There were many other things in the world to
think of by that time and although to himself Colonel Shays was still
the dramatically hunted fugitive with every man’s hand against him,
to other people he had begun to sink into the history-book paragraph,
which he has since remained. His family and friends in Massachusetts
had waited till the occasion seemed favorable, and then petitioned for
his pardon, on the ground that he must be, if still living, an old
man now, quite harmless, and that it would be only decent to let him
come back to spend his last days in his own home; and if he were dead,
his pardon would clear his family name, and straighten out certain
complications about his property. At first they had not succeeded.
People still remembered too vividly the treasonable attempt to
overturn the authority of the State, only just established and none too
strong. But by and by, the pertinacity of the petitioners wore out the
fading hostility to his name. He was proclaimed pardoned, and notices
were sent to all American newspapers informing him that he could now
return. This had happened a year before Colonel Shays had started down
to Cambridge, but you may be sure that at that period no newspapers
found their way to the Sandgate valley.

After a year had gone by, and no sign came from the fugitive, people
generally thought him dead. But a fellow-townsman who had known him
well by sight and who, some years after his flight, had married his
youngest sister, volunteered to try to spread the news more widely
than by newspaper. There had been a faint notion among his kinspeople
that he had fled to Vermont, although they had taken care to keep
this to themselves as long as he was an outlaw, and had now almost
forgotten about it. Acting on this notion, Shays’ brother-in-law took
the long journey on horseback up into Vermont. He entered the state
at Bennington and slowly worked his way north, branching off at every
practicable road. But nowhere did he find any one who had ever heard of
any such man as his wife’s brother. Colonel Shays had hidden himself
only too well.

The Massachusetts man began to think his errand a futile one, and
prepared to turn back. But on a chance he rode down to Cambridge, just
over the New York line. Cambridge was the nearest town to a number of
small valley settlements in Vermont. He would ask there if any one had
seen or heard of the man he was seeking. He knew that men from the
remote outlying settlements came to Cambridge to do their trading. He
arrived rather late one evening and as he was no longer young, and very
much tired by his long and fruitless journey, he slept that night in
the Cambridge Inn.


For the rest of the story there are plenty of details, for Colonel
Shays told over and over exactly what happened and just how he felt,
and why he acted as he did. It seared deep into him, and to the end of
his days, he always showed a consuming agitation in speaking of it.

He walked along the road, the first road he had seen since the night
so many years ago when he had fled along the roads in Massachusetts.
It seemed like iron to his buckskin-shod feet. He walked slowly for
this and other reasons. Every house which came into view along the
road brought him up short with a jerk like a frightened horse. The
instinct to hide, to trust himself in no man’s sight, had deformed
his whole nature so that the bold leader of men halted, trembling and
white-faced, at the sight of an ordinary farm-house. He forced himself
to go on, to pass those sleeping homes, but after he had passed each
one with his silent, stealthy wood-dweller’s tread, he quickened his
pace and looked fearfully over his shoulder, expecting to see men run
out after him with warrants for his arrest.

By the time he approached Cambridge, the nervous strain was telling on
him. He was wet with sweat, and as tired as though he had been four
times over the mountains. Only a few people were abroad as it was the
breakfast hour. Partly from the old fear of years, partly from the mere
habit of total isolation, every strange face was startling to him. He
felt his knees weak under him and sat down on a bench in front of the
kitchen door of the Cambridge Inn to get his breath. He had been a man
of powerful will and strong self-control or he never could have lived
through those terrible years of being buried alive, and he now angrily
told himself there was nothing to fear in this remote little hamlet,
where everybody was used to the sight of men in buckskins coming down
to trade their furs for gunpowder and salt. At the sight of all those
human faces taking him back to the days of his human life, a deep
yearning had come upon him to get back into the world of living men. He
could have wept aloud and taken them into his arms like brothers. He
was determined to master his tense nerves, to learn to move about among
his fellow-men once more. In a moment, just a moment, he decided he
would stand up and move casually over to the general store across the
street where a lad was then unlocking the door. He would go in and make
a purchase--the first in so many years!

He turned his head to glance into the kitchen of the Inn, and as he did
so, the door opened, and a man came in, a traveler with a face familiar
to him in spite of gray hair and wrinkles, a man he had known in
Massachusetts, who knew him, and no friend of his, a man who had been
on the other side in the Rebellion.

Colonel Shays’ heart gave a staggering leap. He caught at the door-jamb
and shrank out of sight. He heard the other voice say, “I stepped in
to ask if any of you know whether Colonel Shays was ever heard of in
this....”

And then the old man, running madly for his life, fled back to his den
in the woods.

A whole decade passed after this, before he happened to learn in a
conversation overheard between two trappers, that for eleven priceless,
irreplaceable years, he had been a free man.




A GREAT LOVE


When my pretty young cousin and god-daughter, Flossie, fell in love
with Peter Carr, we all felt rather apprehensive about her future. But
Flossie faced the facts with an honest, even a rather grim resolution
which surprised us. She said with only a little tremor in her voice
that she never expected to occupy the place in Peter’s heart which
Eleanor Arling had taken forever, but that she loved him so much she
was willing to take whatever he could give her. It wasn’t _his_ fault,
she said, with the quaintest chivalric defiance of us, if poor Peter
hadn’t more to give. She thought a great love like that “was a noble
thing in any one’s life, even if it did make them perfectly miserable.”
If Miss Arling felt that personal happiness must be sacrificed for her
art, why, that was an exalted attitude to take, and Peter’s sorrow was
“sacred in her eyes”; and so on and so forth--the usual things that
are said in such cases by people who are in sympathy with that sort of
thing.

So they were married, with the understanding that Peter could still go
on worshiping the very sound of Eleanor Arling’s name and turning white
when he came across a mention of her or of her pictures in the cabled
news of the art world in Paris. Flossie was, so we all agreed, a good
sport if there ever was one, and she stuck gamely to her bargain. She
had transferred the big silver-framed photograph of Miss Arling from
Peter’s bachelor quarters to the wall of their new living room, and she
dusted it as conscientiously as she did the Botticelli Spring which I
gave her for a wedding present. It was not easy for her. I have seen
her flush deeply and set her lips hard as Peter looked up at the dusky
brooding eyes shadowed by the casque of black braids. Flossie is one of
the small, quick, humming-bird women, with nothing to set against Miss
Arling’s massive classic beauty, and by her expression at such moments,
I know she felt her defenselessness bitterly. But she never let Peter
see how she felt. She had taken him, the darkness of his unrequited
passion heavy on him, and if she ever regretted it, she gave no sign.

She flashed about the house, keeping it in perfect order, feeding Peter
the most delicious food, and after the twins came, caring for them with
no strain or nervous tension, with only a bright thankful enjoyment
of them that was warm on your heart like sunshine. Peter enjoyed his
pretty home and devoted wife and lively babies and excellent food. He
began to lay on flesh, and to lose the haggard, gray leanness which,
just after Miss Arling had gone away, had made people turn and look
after him in the street. Architecture is, even when you are busy and
successful as Peter is, a rather sedentary occupation, offering no
resistance to such cooking as Flossie’s. Peter’s skin began to grow
rosy and sleek, his hair from being rough and bristling, began to look
smooth and glossy. It was quite beautiful hair as long as it lasted;
but as the years went on and the twins began to be big children, it,
unlike the rest of Peter, began to look thinner. Peter with a bald spot
was queer enough, but before he was thirty-five it was not a mere spot,
but all the top of his head. We thought it very becoming to him as it
gave him a beneficent, thoughtful, kindly look, like a philosopher.
And his added weight was also distinctly an improvement to his looks.
We often said to each other that nobody would ever have thought that
crazy-looking boy would make such a nice-looking man.

Flossie had not changed an atom. Those tiny, slight women occasionally
remain stationary in looks as though they were in cold storage. She
continued to worship Peter, and as he had made a good husband, we had
nothing to say, although of course you never can understand what an
excessively devoted wife sees in her husband, year after year. Flossie
never mitigated in the least the extremity of her attention to Peter’s
needs. When he was called away on a business trip she always saw that
his satchel was packed with just what he would need; and she would have
risen from her grave to put exactly the right amount of cream and sugar
into his coffee.

The rest of us had forgotten all about Miss Arling’s connection with
Peter, and had grown so used to the big photograph of the big, handsome
woman that we did not see it any more, when one morning I found Flossie
waiting for me as I came downstairs. She was very pale, with dark
circles under her eyes. She was holding a newspaper in her clenched
hand--the New York newspaper they had always taken on account of its
full, gossipy “Happenings in the World of Art” column. Flossie opened
it to that column now, and read in a dry voice: “American art lovers
are promised a treat in the visit of the famous Eleanor Arling who
arrives on the _Mauretania_. Miss Arling plans an extensive trip in
her native country from which she has been absent for many years. She
will visit New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Denver and San Francisco. Her
keen artistic memory is shown by her intention of breaking her trip for
a few days at ...” Flossie’s voice broke.... “She’s coming _here_!”
she gasped. Then collecting herself, she continued reading, “Miss
Arling told our interviewer that she once passed some weeks there and
remembers with pleasure a composition of cliff, water, and pine trees.
She wishes to see it again.”

“Cliff, water, and pine trees,” repeated Flossie, her eyes blazing.
“Of course _we_ know it is nothing in the way of a _landscape_ she is
coming to see here!” I saw that her little fists were clenched. “I
won’t stand it!” she cried, “I won’t stand it!”

But she looked horribly frightened all the same.

“What can you do?” I asked, sympathizing painfully with the poor little
thing.

“I shall go to her the minute she reaches town.”

This threw me into a panic, “What good would _that_ do?” I cried,
alarmed at the prospect of scenes and goings-on.

“I don’t know! I don’t know! If I see her, I can think of some way to
make her go away and not ...” she said wildly.

I hoped devoutly that she would settle down from this hysterical state
of unreason, but three days after this she darted in, her face pinched,
and told me that the time was now, and that she wanted me to be with
her.... “I must have _some_body there,” she said piteously.

I was thoroughly alarmed, protested, tried desperately to back out,
but found myself in Flossie’s car driving at a dangerous rate of speed
towards Miss Arling’s hotel.

We were shown into the sitting room of her suite, and sat down, both
breathing hard. I am fond of Flossie and I was very sorry for her,
but I certainly wished her at the other end of the world just then.
If I had not feared she would have rushed to lock me in, I would have
tried to escape even then, but before I could collect myself, the door
opened, and a stout, middle-aged woman came in. Her straight gray hair
was bobbed and hanging in strings around a very red, glistening face.
It was terribly hot weather and she had, I suppose, just came in from
the long motor trip. She had a lighted cigarette in one hand. Her
cushiony shapeless feet were thrust into a pair of Japanese sandals.
She distinctly waddled as she walked. We supposed that she was Miss
Arling’s companion, and I said, because Flossie was too agitated to
speak, “We wished to speak to Miss Arling, please.”

“I am Miss Arling,” she said casually. “Won’t you sit down?” I don’t
know what I did, but I heard Flossie give a little squeak like a
terrified rabbit. So I hurried on, saying desperately the first thing
that came into my mind. “We heard you were coming ... in the newspapers
... we are old residents here ... a cliff, water, and pine trees.... I
know the view ... we thought perhaps we might show you where....”

She was surprised a little at my incoherence and Flossie’s strange
face, but she was evidently a much-experienced woman-of-the-world, whom
nothing could surprise very much. “Oh, that’s very kind,” she said
civilly, tossing her cigarette butt away and folding her strong hands
on her ample knees, “But I went that way on the road coming into town.
I remembered it perfectly I find. I used it as the background in a
portrait, some years ago.”

She saw no reason for expanding the topic and now stopped speaking.
I could think of nothing more to say. There was a profound silence.
Our hostess evidently took us for tongue-tied, small-town people who
do not know how to get themselves out of a room, and went on making
conversation for us with a vague, fluent, absent-minded kindness.
“It’s very pleasant to be here again. I stayed here once, you know,
a few weeks, many years ago, when I was young. We had quite a jolly
time, I remember. There was a boy here ... a slim, dark, tall fellow,
with the most perfect early-Renaissance head imaginable, quite like the
Jeune Homme Inconnu. I’ve been trying all day to remember his name?
Paul?... no. Walter?... it had two syllables it seems to me. Well, at
any rate, he had two great beauties, the pale, flat white of his skin,
and his great shaggy mass of dark hair. I’ve often used his hair in
drawings, since. But I don’t suppose he looks like that now.”

Flossie spoke. She spoke with the effect of a revolver discharging a
bullet, “Oh, yes, he does! He looks exactly like that still, only more
mature, more interesting,” she said in an indignant tone.

“Ah, indeed,” said the painter with an accent of polite acquiescence.
She sighed now and looked firmly at the clock. I rose and said since we
could not be of use to her, we would leave her to rest.

She accompanied us to the door pleasantly enough, with the
professional, impersonal courtesy of a celebrity.

Outside Flossie sprang into her car, leaving me stranded on the
sidewalk. “I must get Peter away,” she said between her teeth.

“But not now, surely!” I cried.

“Now more than ever,” she flung back at me, as she whirled the car
around.

Then as I stood open-mouthed, utterly at a loss, she drove the car
close to the curb and leaning to my ear, whispered fiercely, “You don’t
suppose I’d let him see how she looks _now_.”


Miss Arling was gone before they returned from the two-day fishing-trip
on which they started that night. I doubt if Peter ever heard that she
had been in town.

The morning after their return, as soon as Peter had gone downtown,
Flossie tore down the big photograph from the wall and flung it into
the garbage can.

I noticed its absence some days later, when I went over to see them,
and asked with a little apprehension, “What did Peter say when he found
it gone?”

The strangest expression came into her face. She said in a low tone,
“He has never even missed it.” And then she began to cry. As I looked
at her, I saw that she had suddenly begun to show her age.




SUPPLY AND DEMAND


The thoughtful intellectual people around the fire were talking with
animation and conviction, and I hoped the one business-man present, a
relative of mine, was appreciating his privileges. It was not often
that you could collect before your fire so many brilliant people
representing so many important varieties of human activity; and when
you had collected them it was not often that the talk fell on a subject
big enough to draw out of each one his most hotly held conviction.

The subject was big enough in all conscience: nothing more or less than
what is the matter with the world in general and with our country in
particular. They all had different ideas about what the trouble is and
about the best cure for it. The head nurse of the big City Hospital had
started the ball rolling by some of her usual scornful remarks about
the idiocy with which most people run their physical lives, and the
super-idiocy, as she put it, “which makes them think that doctors and
nurses can put scrambled eggs back into the shell.”

“We’ll never have any health as a nation till we have health as
individuals,” she said. “See that the babies have clean milk; give the
children plenty of space and time for out-door play; keep the young
folks busy with athletic sports; run down all the diphtheria carriers
and make it a misdemeanor not to be both vaccinated for small-pox and
inoculated against typhoid ... and we’d be a nation such as the world
never saw before.”

The political reformer was sincerely shocked by the narrowness of her
views, and took her down in a long description of our villainously
mismanaged government. “Much good mere physical health would do against
our insane tolerance of such political ineptness and corruption!” he
ended. “What we need is an awakening to the importance of government as
every man’s personal business.”

Mrs. Maynard, the tragic-faced, eloquent Scotch expert on
birth-control, now said in that low, bitter voice of hers which always
makes every one stop to listen, “I would be obliged if you would point
out to me how either physical health or the very best of municipal
governments should alleviate in the slightest, the hideous ulcers of
our so-called respectable married homes. When the very foundation
of every-day human life is cemented in such unthinkable cruelty and
suffering to defenseless women, I don’t see how human beings with
hearts in their bosoms can stop for an instant to consider such puerile
non-essentials as athletics and party politics!”

The two or three happily married women in the group, startled by
her fierce acrimony, were silent, feeling abashed by the grossly
comfortable way we had managed to escape even a knowledge of the
horrors which she so urgently assured us were universal. But Mr.
Sharpless, the efficiency engineer, shook his head pityingly. “No, no,
my dear lady, you can’t cure anything by going at it with the hammer
and tongs of direct action. The economic key is the only one that
fits all locks, opens all doors. The women of what we call the ‘upper
classes’ do not suffer as you describe. You know they don’t. Now why do
we _call_ them the ‘upper classes’? Because they have money. You know
it! Hence, if everybody had money ...! I tell you the thing to do is to
reorganize our wretched old producing machinery till ever so much more
is produced, ever so much more easily; and then invent distributing
machinery that will ensure everybody’s getting his share. You may not
think home life is much affected by the chemist in his laboratory,
devising a way to get nitrogen chiefly from the air, or by the engineer
struggling with the problem of free power out of the tides or the
sun. But it is. Just once put _all_ women in the comfortable upper
classes....”

He was interrupted here by a number of protesting voices, all speaking
at once, the loudest of which, Professor Oleny’s finally drowned
out the others, “... money without intelligence is the most fatal
combination conceivable to man! Economic prosperity would spell speedy
destruction without an overhauling of education.” He spun like a
pinwheel for a moment, in a sparkling, devastating characterization of
American schools, and of their deadening effect on the brains which
passed through them, and began on a description of what schools should
be.

But I had heard him lecture on that only the day before and, looking
away from him, sought out the face of my cousin, the business-man.
He had sat through it all, and now continued to sit through the
free-for-all debate which followed, without opening his mouth except to
emit an occasional thoughtful puff of cigar-smoke. His thoughts seemed
to be with the billowing smoke-rings, which he sent towards the ceiling
rather than with the great sweep of the subjects being discussed. I
knew well enough that his silence did not come in the least from any
inability to follow the pyrotechnics about him, and I felt in his
absent preoccupation something of the disdain, traditionally felt for
talkers and reformers by men of action--when in the twentieth century
and in the United States, you say “man of action” you mean of course,
“business-man.”

It nettled me a little, and after the others had gone and he was
finishing the end of his cigar, I said challengingly, “I suppose you
think they are all off! I suppose you think that you know what is the
matter with the world and that it is something quite different.”

He considered the end of his cigar meditatively and answered mildly, “I
don’t _think_ I know, I _know_ I know.”

“Oh, you do, do you?” I said, amused and ironic. “Would you mind
telling me what it is?”

He shucked further down in his chair, tipped his head back and looked
up at the ceiling. “Well, if you really want to know, I’ll tell you a
story that happened just lately in one of the biggest mail-order houses
in this country. Of course, I know that you don’t fully appreciate the
importance of mail-order houses, not being in business. And they’re too
through and through American a growth for people like your friends
to-night to know about or talk about. But some of the best brains and
real sure-enough genius in the United States have gone into creating
the mail-order house idea. Maybe you might allow that to be a good
enough reason for considering for a moment what goes on inside one of
them ... what?

“As a matter of fact, the story isn’t just about a mail-order house,
but about what is the matter with the world ... the very same subject
your friends were debating. My story won’t have so many long words in
it as they use, nor so many abstract ideas ... at least on the surface;
but it won’t do you any harm to soak it away and think it over. I’ll
tell you what, _I’ve_ been thinking it over this evening, as I listened
to the talk. I only heard the story this morning, and it’s stuck in my
head all day ... and especially this evening, as they were all talking
about how to hit on some organization of society that would really fix
things up, once and for all.”

He paused for a moment, stretched his legs out straight before him and
put his hands into his pockets. “If I really told you all you ought
to know, to understand the background and setting of the story, I’d
be sitting here to-morrow morning still talking. So I won’t try, I’ll
just tell you the plain story as it happened. You try to imagine
the background: an organization as big, as complicated, with as many
chances for waste motion, or overorganization, or poor organization as
society itself. And not only power and glory, but _cash_, plenty of
hard cash as immediate reward for the successful use of brains.

“Well now, into that arrives a smart youngster full of enthusiasm for
making things run better, just like your friends to-night; dead sure
just like them that _he_ has the key; with lots of pep and brains and
interest in his job, pushing his way right up from the stenographer’s
desk, with his eye on the Manager’s. Do you get him? Well, he’s laid
awake nights, thinking how to improve the organization, partly because
he wanted to improve it, partly because he wanted to get the credit
for it ... just like your friends again. And because he is a smart
young fellow as keen as a razor, he soon figured out a way to increase
business, to increase it like a house afire, and to handle it once it
was increased.

“He went to the big man of the concern and laid out his plans. Now,
you’d better believe the big men in any organization always have a glad
hand out for anybody in the concern who’ll show interest and brains;
and the boy got treated like a king. Sure, he could try out his plan!
On a small scale at first, to see how it would work. Let him take a
county out of each of six selected states, and concentrate on them.
And, sure, yes, indeed, he could have anything in the organization he
wanted, to make his try with.

“So the boy went away bounding like a rubber-ball and planned his
campaign. I won’t bother you by trying to tell you what it was....
It wouldn’t interest you, and anyhow you couldn’t understand the
business details. It was a mixture of intensive publicity, special
attention paid to detail, a follow-up system that meant personal care
and personal acquaintance with the tastes of customers, and intimate
knowledge of what past orders from customers had been. To get the
right kind of assistants he went through the various departments of
that big organization and hand-picked his staff; the very best of the
publicity men, the smartest of the order-clerks, the brightest of the
stenographers. And then they just tore in and ate up the territory they
were practising on! They plowed it with publicity, and sowed it with
personal service, they reaped, by George, a harvest that would put your
eye out! Business increased by a twenty-five per cent, by a fifty per
cent! At the end of a year, the boy, too big for his skin, paraded into
the Manager-in-chief’s office with statistics to prove a seventy-five
per cent increase over any business ever done there before! Well, that
was simply grand, wasn’t it? Yes, the Manager would certainly sit up
and take some notice of a system that had accomplished _that_!”

My cousin had finished his cigar, now threw the butt into the
fire-place, and sat looking at the embers with a somber expression.
I couldn’t see anything to look somber about. Indeed I found myself
stifling a yawn. What did I care how much business a mail-order house
did or how they did it?

My cousin answered my thought, “Don’t you see that the story is all
about the same general idea you were all discussing this evening? It
is about getting things done more intelligently, more efficiently,
about avoiding fool mistakes, about rising to big opportunities, about
learning how to scramble over the obstacles that prevent human beings
from being intelligent and efficient and effective. Now, then, at the
first take-off, the boy had soared right over those obstacles, hadn’t
he? But the Manager-in-chief knew a thing or two about them, too. In
fact he had grown bald and gray trying to climb over those very same
obstacles. But you can be sure the boy didn’t once think that his chief
might be just as anxious as he was to have things done better. Boys
never do....” There was a pause, while my cousin considered the embers
moodily.

“So, by and by, after the boy had fizzed the place all foamy with his
wonderful statistics, the bald-headed, gray-haired Manager began to
come down to brass tacks, and to inquire just how the thing had been
done. The boy was crazy to tell him, went into every detail; and the
Manager listened hard.

“And then he shook his old bald gray head. He said: ‘Young fellow, you
listen to me. It takes _sense_ to run that system of yours. You’re
counting on everybody, from you right down to the boy that works your
mimeograph, paying attention to what he’s doing, using his brains and
using them every minute. If everybody doesn’t, you won’t get your
results, will you? Now, consider this, how did you get hold of a staff
that would have any brains to use and would use them? _You_ know how!
We let you run a fine tooth comb through our whole organization,
thousands and thousands of employees. You took out of every department
the very best they had; three or four out of hundreds, and they are
the only ones out of thousands who amount to anything after years of
training at our expense. And then you put your very best licks into
it yourself. Now, who are you? You’re the first stenographer we’ve
had in ten years, who took enough interest in the business as a whole
to have a single idea about it. You tell me something. Suppose we
reorganized along your lines, who would I get to run all the other
departments and keep up the high-speed efficiency and red-hot ambition
you’ve shown, which is the _only_ reason your scheme works? You know
as well as I do I can’t find another _one_, let alone the eighty or
ninety I’d have to have, if we tried to do business on your plan. And
if I could--supposing for the sake of argument that an angel from
Heaven served such department heads to me on a silver platter, where am
I going to find staffs to work with them. You’ve _got_ all the really
efficient employees we’ve been able to rake in from the whole United
States in the past twenty years.

“‘Did you ever have to work with a plain, ordinary six-for-a-quarter
stenographer, such as the business colleges turn out, such as you
mostly get? You’ve built your machine so that only brains and sense
will run it. How long would it take a couple of hundred of such stenogs
to smash your system into splinters? Did you ever have to try and get
work out of the average dressy young employee who puts ninety-eight
and a half per cent of what gray matter he has on his neckties and
the bets he made on the horse-races, and the little flier he took on
stocks; and one and a half per cent of his brains on his work when
somebody higher up is looking at him? How do you suppose you can
persuade a crowd of light-weights like that to care a whoop whether
Mrs. Arrowsmith in Cohoes, N. Y., is satisfied with the color of the
linoleum rug she bought?’”

My cousin looked at me hard, and again answered an unspoken thought of
mine. “Are you wondering why hadn’t the boy interrupted long before
this, to hold up his end, if he was really so enthusiastic as I’ve
said? This is the reason. Though he hadn’t let on to the Manager, he
really had had plenty of troubles of his own, already, keeping even his
hand-picked crew up to the scratch. Many’s the time he’d been ready to
murder them! Drive as hard as he might, he couldn’t keep them steadily
up to the standard he’d set for his work. He’d noticed that. Oh, yes,
of course, he’d noticed it all right, and he’d been furious about it.
But until that minute, he hadn’t thought of it--what it meant; and the
minute the Manager spoke, he knew in his bones the old man was right.
And he felt things come down with a smash.

“It pretty nearly knocked him silly. He never said a word. And the old
bald-head looked at him, and saw that in the last three minutes the boy
had grown up ... he’d grown up! That hurts, hurts more than any visit
to the dentist. I know how he felt; probably the Manager knew how he
felt. Anybody who’s ever tried to get anything done has run his head
into that stone wall.

“Well, he was sorry for the kid, and tried to let him down easy.
He went on talking, to give the boy time to catch his breath. ‘You
understand, I’d like, maybe more than you, to reorganize the whole ball
o’ wax, on any lines that would work better. And there are lots of good
points in your plan that we _can_ use, plenty of ’em. This invention
of yours about cross-indexing orders now, that is a splendid idea. I
believe we could install that ... it looks _almost_ fool proof! And
maybe we might run a special mailing-list along the lines you’ve worked
out. Lemme look at it again. Well, I guess the mistakes the stenogs
would make _might_ be more than offset by the extra publicity ... maybe!

“But the lad was feeling too cut up to pay any attention to these
little poultices. He stood there, and almost fell in pieces, he
was thinking so hard. Not very cheerful thoughts, at that. When he
could get his breath he leaned over the table and said in a solemn,
horrified voice, ‘Good God, Mr. Burton, why then ... why then....’ He
was all but plumb annihilated by the hardness of the fact that had just
hit him on the head. He broke out, ‘What’s the _use_ of inventing a
better system as long as ... as long as ...?’ he got it out finally.
‘Why, Mr. Burton, there just aren’t enough folks with sense to go
around!’”

My cousin stood up, moved to the hall, secured his hat and looked in
at me through the door-way. “Poor kid!” he commented pityingly. “Just
think of his never having thought of that before!”




UNCLE ELLIS


I never saw my Uncle Ellis because he died before I was born, but I
heard a great deal about him when I was a child. His stepdaughter
married one of our fellow-townsmen, and lived next door to us when I
was a little girl, and her mother, my great-aunt, Uncle Ellis’ third
wife, lived with her. Whatever Cousin Ruth did not say about her
stepfather, Aunt Molly supplied. The two women spent the rest of their
lives hating him, and for his sake hated, distrusted and despised all
men.

The gruesome impressions of married life which float through the
air to most little girls, came to me from their half-heard and
half-understood stories of Uncle Ellis. He had killed his first two
wives, they said, just as much as though he had taken an ax to them,
and only his opportune death had saved Aunt Molly from the same fate.
His innumerable children--I would never venture to set down how many
he had, all in legal marriage--feared and detested him and ran away
from home as soon as they could walk. He was meanness itself, secret,
sneaking meanness, the sort of man who would refuse his wife money
for a wringer to do the family wash, and spend five dollars on a box
of cigars; he would fly into a black rage over a misplaced towel, and
persecute the child who had misplaced it, till she was ready to commit
suicide; and then open his arms with a spectacular smile to the new
baby of a parishioner. After mistreating his wife till she could hardly
stand, she used to hear him holding forth in a boys’ meeting, exhorting
them to a chivalric attitude towards women.

Aunt Molly died long ago, firing up to the last in vindictive
reminiscences of her husband. Ruth is dead now, too, in the fullness of
time. I am a middle-aged woman, and probably the only one now alive who
ever heard those two talk about Uncle Ellis; and I had forgotten him.
If he stayed at all in my memory it was with the vague, disembodied
presence of a character in a book.


About a month ago, I accepted an invitation to speak at a convention in
a town in the middle-west which I had never seen, but the name of which
seemed slightly familiar; perhaps, I thought, because I had learned it
in a geography lesson long ago. But when I arrived I understood the
reason. It was the town where for many years Uncle Ellis had been
pastor of the church. At the railway station, as I stepped down on the
platform, one of the older women in the group who met me, startled
me by saying, “We have been especially anxious to see you because of
your connection with our wonderful Dr. Ellis Randolph. I was a young
girl when he died, but I can truly say that my whole life has been
influenced for good by the words and example of that saintly man.”

The elderly man beside her added, “You will find many here who will
say the same. In the formative period of our town’s history he made an
indelible impression for good.”

They took me to his church, where a large bronze tablet set forth
his virtues and his influence. They showed me the Ellis Randolph
Memorial Library. I was shown the public playground which he conceived
a generation before any one else thought of such a thing. But what
made the deepest impression on me were the men and women who came to
shake my hand because I was Uncle Ellis’ niece, because they wanted to
testify to the greatness of his value in their lives. The minister of
the town, a white-haired man, told me with a deep note of emotion in
his voice, that Dr. Randolph had done more than merely save his life;
in his wayward youth he had saved his soul alive. The banker told me
that he had heard many celebrated orators, but never any one who could
go straight to the heart like Dr. Randolph. “I often tell my wife that
she ought to be thankful to Dr. Randolph for a lecture on chivalry to
women which he gave to us boys, at an impressionable moment of our
lives.”

And the old principal of the school said, “Not a year goes by that I
do not thank God for sending that righteous man to be an example to my
youth. He left behind him many human monuments to his glory.”


What did I say to them? Oh, I didn’t say anything to them. I couldn’t
think of anything to say.




GOD’S COUNTRY


When I was a faculty-child living in a middle-western university town
we were all thrilled by the news that the energetic Chancellor of the
University had secured as head of the Department of Chemistry a noted
European scientist. Although still young he had made a name for himself
by some important discoveries in organic chemistry. We talked about
those discoveries as fluently, and understood about them as thoroughly
as we all now discuss and understand the theories of Professor Einstein.

Professor Behrens was not only a remarkable chemist, so we heard, but a
remarkable teacher and a man of wide sympathies and democratic ideals.
It was the candid period in American life, when, especially in the
west, the word “Europe” was pronounced with a very special intonation,
of which Henry James’ wistful admiration was the quintessence. It was
the time in American university life when Germany was the goal toward
which all our younger scholars ran their fastest race. Yet here was
Professor Behrens, leaving a University not only European but German,
from which our younger professors were proud to have a Ph.D. and
deliberately choosing our new, raw, young institution for the sake of
the free, untrammeled, democratic life in America. It went to our heads!

Passages in his letter of acceptance were read to my mother by my
father, who had borrowed the letter from the Chancellor. “I have a
family of children and as they grow older I am more and more aware
of the stifling, airless stagnation of European life. I want them to
know something bigger and freer than will ever come to them in this
Old World of rigid caste lines and fixed ideas. My wife and I, too,
wish to escape from the narrowness of this provincial town where
an arrogant young lieutenant swaggering about in his gold-braided
white broadcloth uniform is much higher in social rank than the most
learned and renowned member of the University faculty; where a rich
lumber-merchant, brutal and ignorant, can buy his way into political
position and parade about with sash and gold chain and the insignia of
the office of Mayor.”

We were all righteously indignant over such elements of life in
Europe, and quite exalted in our certainty that the distinguished
immigrant would find nothing like that in our midst. The sole and only
representative of the military caste was the lieutenant who drilled
the university battalion, and he was a most unassuming young American
who never on any occasion wore white broadcloth, put on his plain
dark-blue uniform as seldom as possible, and for the most part wore
a pepper-and-salt business suit and a derby hat. Since there were no
trees on the Western plains, there was no equivalent to the iniquitous
lumber merchant, the nearest approach being a man who had made a good
deal of money out of lucky guesses in real estate. But he would have
dropped dead before putting on a sash and a gold chain.

So we awaited the Behrens full of pride and pleasure. When they
arrived, everybody in the faculty gave receptions and lunch-parties for
them, and all we children rejoiced in the unlimited leavings of fried
chicken (it was in September), ice cream, and cake, which were at our
disposition after these “functions,” as the Faculty ladies called them.
Although surprisingly unceremonious as to table manners, the Behrens
were as nice as we expected to find them; and they were evidently
delighted with the warm-hearted, open-handed good nature of Americans,
by the cordiality of their reception (which seemed quite to amaze them)
by the wide-open doors which led anywhere they might wish to go, by the
absence of class distinction, and by the generosity with which America
supported universities, hospitals, libraries, and public schools.
When the University opened, Professor Behrens threw himself into his
teaching and soon became one of the favorite professors. He had a song
sung about him at the winter concert of the Glee Club; and the Junior
year-book was dedicated to him in the spring. By that time the Behrens
children, who were in the eighth, fifth, and third grades of my public
school were no longer to be distinguished from the rest of us, running
and yelling on the hard-beaten earth of the playground, and thoroughly
acquainted with duck-on-a-rock, prisoner’s base, and run-sheep-run.
Julie and I were classmates in the fifth grade that year, and the next
and the next.

But just as we were about to pass together into the exalted rank of the
eighth grade, Professor Behrens received a call to be Rector (Julie
explained to me that this had nothing to do with a church, but was the
same as our Chancellor) of a university in his own country.

It seemed such an advancement to be promoted from Professor to
Chancellor that it was no surprise to have him accept, and to see Mrs.
Behrens begin hastily to pack up the family belongings. But what
did surprise us was the sudden revelation brought out by this event,
of a great home-sickness on the part of the Behrens to get back to a
“civilized country.” This was one of the phrases Julie overheard her
father saying to her mother, which she repeated to me, and I to my
parents. A faculty circle gets its news by about the same channels as
an army post or a village sewing circle. So by the time this remark
had reached my parents it did not surprise them. The Behrens, although
still heartily grateful for all the kindness that had been shown
them, although still feeling a lively affection for the good-hearted
qualities in American life, could not conceal their immense relief at
the prospect of the change. Professor Behrens discussed the question
with the open frankness of a scientist before a new phenomenon: “I
had no idea, till I had to go without them, how vital to civilization
are the finer shades, the polish, the stability, the decorum, which
comes only with long life of a society in an old country. I had never
thought of them, had always supposed, of course, they were to be found
everywhere. It is not that I blame America for not having them ...
nothing but time can give them ... but there is no denying that they
give a different color to life, the same difference of color there
is between camping out in a cave, ever so fine and airy and open a
cave, and living in a well-ordered house with the appurtenances of
civilization. There is a certain something which springs up from such
niceties of life.... I can hardly wait to get home, and give a real
dinner with well-trained servants, and cultivated, established guests
who have had a social position for so long that it is a part of them.
The crudeness, the abruptness, the roughness in human intercourse
here! And the total lack on the part of people in the lower classes of
any sense of the fitness of things! The _conductor on the street-car_
slapped me on the back the other day!”

So we gave them a grand good-by reception in the gymnasium, and we
faculty-children fairly swam in lemonade and wallowed in left-over
cake. The faculty presented Professor Behrens with a beautifully bound
edition of Emerson, and Mrs. Behrens with a little pearl pendant; and
then they went away, and we supposed we would never see them again.

Julie and I corresponded once in a while as children do, the letters
growing less frequent as Julie evidently began to forget her English.
Mrs. Behrens wrote back a round-robin letter or two to be passed about
among her faculty friends, one of them describing the splendid,
ceremonious, Old-World way in which Professor Behrens was inducted into
his new position. She spoke with special pride of the way in which both
the military and municipal authorities of the town had turned out to do
him honor, the soldiers, officers, and the Mayor of the town marching
at the head of the procession, the latter in his bright sash and gold
chain of office. It seemed to us we had heard something about that
Mayor before, but we could not remember what it was.

And then Julie forgot her English altogether, and Mrs. Behrens’ letters
dwindled and there were none.

I got on through the eighth grade and went into the University
prep-school. After three years there, my father was called to a better
position in another State University. As we were settling ourselves in
the new home, what should we hear but that a distinguished European
scientist was about to be added to the faculty, none other than
Professor Behrens.

Foreigners, even distinguished ones, were more common in American
faculties then than they had been seven years before; there was a
large German Department, with many native German instructors; and
the University was further east and hence not so open-heartedly
welcoming. There was, therefore, no such stir over the newcomers as on
their first arrival although every one was very nice to them and the
President’s wife had Mrs. Behrens stand by her in the receiving line at
the first of the faculty receptions. But the Behrens did not seem to
notice that there was anything lacking in their treatment. You never
saw people more delighted than they were to be back in America.

“It was worse than I remembered,” Professor Behrens told my father.
“After an experience of the free, breezy, self-respecting life in
America it was simply unendurable. Suffocating, simply suffocating!
With the most ridiculous caste spirit. Rusted to a stand-still with
cock-sure conservatism! An instant, hermetic closing up of every pore
at any mention of new possibilities for human nature, or for human
organizations. And such absurd, stiff, artificial rules of conduct
and precedence in society! Let me tell you an episode which will
seem almost incredible to you, but which really decided us to come
back here. At a garden party my wife ... _my_ wife!... seeing there
the wife of the General commanding the troops in the town garrison
and knowing her quite well, stepped across the lawn to speak to her,
one lady to another. Will you believe it, because she had not waited
till the General’s wife had summoned her to her circle, my poor wife
received a cold, unrecognizing stare, her outstretched hand was left
hanging in the air, and the General’s wife turned her back on her. And
when I was furious and protested, I was made uncomfortable, seriously
uncomfortable!”

And Mrs. Behrens told my mother she had been horrified by the
cold-hearted envy, hatred and meanness which lay underneath the
polished manners of many of the people in their circle. “They do not
wish you well. They wish you ill. They simply have no conception of the
meaning of that American word ‘friendly.’”

Julie was ready for the University, as I was, and we entered the
Freshman class together. She was a very pretty girl, one of the
brown-haired Teutons, who are so much finer and more neatly finished
than the blonde ones, and she had her fair share of popularity. We were
taken into the same fraternity, studied together, and were much in each
other’s homes. I soon saw that the Behrens home was not altogether a
light-hearted one. After the first flush of pleasure at being back had
passed, a cloud of depression settled over them. Their sojourn in a
more finished and stable, low-toned and nuanced civilization had put
them all out of key for the loud-mouthed, cheerful American tune. They
found it shrill and noisy, and often stopped their ears against it.
Heavens, they had not remembered that American trades-people were so
utterly mannerless! Nor that all Americans were so blackly ignorant of
the arts! They had no interest in organized athletics, and very soon
developed an active hostility for football because of the indisputable
fact that the university world was so occupied with it, that nothing
serious was done in classes until after Thanksgiving when the last game
was played. The Behrens were musical and nobody in the city cared for
music except the German-Americans in their shabby quarter at the other
end of town, and they were fat grocers, saloon-keepers or foremen in
factories, people with whom the Behrens could not dream of associating.
They were really very miserable and lonely and disillusioned.

When we were Seniors there came a wonderful offer from Germany: a very
high Government position for Professor Behrens. I heard them discussing
this with a certain indecision which I had never heard in their remarks
before. They knew very well what was before them in Germany. But,
oh, what was about them here! The very servant problem alone made it
impossible for civilized beings to organize a livable existence in
America. Not to speak of a thousand other, raw, unfinished edges which
rasped and fretted them at every turn.

They finally decided to go, but their packing-up was conducted in a
very different spirit from the first one I had seen. They had begun
to divine that there was, in this business of looking for the ideal
country, something more than meets the eye.


I happened to visit them a few years after this, just before I was
married, and found them much dissatisfied with European life. Mrs.
Behrens was nettled and fretted by the question of social precedence
which was, so it seemed to her, constantly used to humiliate her; and
the children were stifling in the restricted, fenced-in, tyrannically
regulated corner of life which was theirs. Julie took me off for a long
walk one afternoon and told me something of her opinion of European
young men, especially the officers whom for the most part she met in
society, as they were the ones who had most leisure for afternoon and
evening parties. “I can just tell you one thing,” she said with a grim
accent and a hardset jaw, “I’ll never marry a European, if I die an old
maid!”

But later on, when her mother and she were exchanging reminiscences
about the difficulties of American housekeeping, Julie cried out, “Oh,
I couldn’t keep house in a country where there is no servant class!”

Mrs. Behrens sighed, “Yes, I know, but just remember the bath-rooms,
and the vacuum cleaners, and the hot water.”

It seemed to me, as I looked about on their much traveled chairs and
tables that I saw them patiently making ready for another journey.




INHERITANCE


One of my mother’s distant cousins was left a widow, years ago with
no assets but the house she lived in, a savings-bank account, and a
very pretty daughter, then eighteen years old. Cousin Henrietta’s
decisions were always prompt. It took her about six weeks to sell the
house, draw the money from the savings-bank and take her daughter to
Europe. I think her intention probably was to give Ella the benefit
of a year’s polish, and bring her back to the home market, her value
enhanced by the reputation of her Continental “Education.” But the
impossible happened, as energetic women like Cousin Henrietta can
occasionally make it happen. Through some chance connection at
the pension in Florence, they made the acquaintance of a wealthy,
middle-aged Tuscan, not the traditional European nobleman at all, but a
swarthy, well-preserved man of the people, risen to wealth by his own
exertions. He was presented to Ella and lost his head entirely over her
pale blonde prettiness. He was fifty-five. They were married on her
nineteenth birthday.

Cousin Henrietta shared their married life with them, of course,
although this did not last very long. Signor Cattaneo, as not
infrequently happens to elderly husbands of very young wives, tried
to renew his youth too rapidly. He danced all one evening with his
bride, an exercise which his great bulk made extremely violent for him;
stepped out upon a balcony with her, in a cool, damp wind, and died of
double pneumonia at the end of a week.

Cousin Henrietta still in charge of affairs, at once brought home
to the God’s country of Chicago, the lovely, wealthy little widow.
They set up housekeeping on a grand scale with the money which was
sent to them every month from the honest, conscientious Tuscan agent
in Florence. The agent got it from the honest, conscientious Tuscan
peasants, and they got it out of their bodies, sweating and toiling
endlessly long hours in all weathers. Ella and Cousin Henrietta had
everything they could think of, that money could buy; and presently
Ella, wanting something new, bought herself a husband. He did not
turn out very well: Ella had done exactly as she pleased for too long
to bother with a husband, and after a time they separated, though
there was never any legal action taken, since Cousin Henrietta was an
extremely orthodox church member, who disapproved of any laxity in the
relations between the sexes. Divorce seemed to her such a laxity.

Then Ella wanted to do as other wealthy and fashionable ladies do
and learn how to ride. They bought, as usual, the best that money
could buy, and this time it was a little too good for Ella; for the
high-spirited thorough-bred took fright one day and, disregarding
Ella’s amateur efforts to control him, ran away, threw Ella off and
broke her poor little neck.

Cousin Henrietta was horrified and scandalized to find that now Ella’s
remote but still legal husband would inherit a very large proportion
of the Italian property. Her whole soul and being rose up wildly in
an understandable and instinctive protest against this iniquity.
She simply could not believe that the law would countenance such a
barefaced theft of other people’s property. She filled the newspapers
and the courts with her clamor and made us all ashamed of the family
name. But that was all the good it did her. Ella had not dreamed of
making a will; Cousin Henrietta’s son-in-law had no reason to love his
wife’s mother, and could see no reason why she had any more right to
that fortune than he had. Neither can I, when it comes to that.

Ella’s husband was rather dazed by his good luck and made all haste
to marry. But he did not make quite haste enough. That was one of the
years when the influenza was going the rounds, and he died of it two
days before his wedding, in spite of all the care of three trained
nurses and a whole battery of consulting physicians. I never knew what
became of his fiancée, but always wondered if she did not perhaps go to
live with Cousin Henrietta, as being the only person who would entirely
sympathize with her.

So the Cattaneo fortune passed to the casual next-of-kin, who happened
to be the only nephew of Ella’s husband, a young clerk of twenty. The
honest conscientious agent in Florence, who was paid a small annual
salary for his services, and who would have died before touching a
penny not his, went on administering the Italian estate which was
growing steadily in value all the time, and paying more income. He sent
that income over to the new name and address in America. He was upheld
in his meager, narrow, difficult life by feeling that he was living up
to the fine old Tuscan code of honor; and he often told his children,
who lacked schooling and opportunities he could have given them if he
had had more money, that the best inheritance a father can leave his
children is an unblemished name.

The children of Ella’s husband’s nephew have something much more
substantial as an inheritance than that. For the young man with a
fortune was married by a competent, ambitious girl as soon as he came
of age. They have three children, who learned very young how to spend
a great deal of money with great speed. The money which the Italian
day-laborers and small-farmers earn by patient endurance of hardships,
by eating rough, poor, scanty food, by working their pregnant wives
to the day before their confinements, by taking their children out of
school before they can read, is sent month by month to America and
spent in buying a new fur set for Ella’s husband’s nephew’s young-lady
daughter, a ten-thousand-dollar racing-car for Ella’s husband’s
nephew’s seventeen-year-old son, and to keep Ella’s husband’s nephew
from doing anything more strenuous than clipping the end of his cigars.




THIRTY YEARS AFTER


A long time ago, when Duane Bellamy was at the height of his brilliant
fame, and when I was a little girl, his daughter chanced to be a
school-mate of mine for a winter. And one Sunday evening I was invited
to their supper-table. I was very much impressed by the momentous
occasion which it seemed to me, and I have not forgotten a word he
said, nor a gesture he made, nor an expression of his face. I can
still see his darkly handsome face, with his glossy black mane, his
large bright eyes, his great curling Assyrian beard. And if ever I
saw a human being saturated to the bone with satisfaction, it was at
that Sunday evening supper. He was acclaimed as the greatest portrait
painter in America, and he accepted this well-deserved reputation with
no mock modesty. The knowledge of it did not make him coarsely vain or
puffed up. It acted on him like a generous wine, made him extravagantly
kind and over-flowing with high spirits. His little girl told me
that night that her princely father had been known to stop a tired
coal-heaver at his work, hand him a twenty-dollar bill and walk on. He
was like a great fountain of enjoyment, splashing with its clear waters
all who came near it, even the little schoolgirl at the other end of
the table.

But there were people he could not help to enjoyment. The name of one
of them came up in the conversation that evening: “Poor old Hendricks!”
said our host, “what can you do for the poor old chap? _He_ doesn’t
even know what hit him!”

One of the younger painters there was a protégé of Bellamy’s, admiring
him so greatly that his paintings were scarcely to be told from his
master’s. He now answered, “Oh, the old Rip Van Winkle! He ought to
be told to crawl into his hole and pull it in after him. Making a
laughing-stock of himself with those sooty old landscapes of his, year
after year.”

Our host took a great draught of the beer in his stein, wiped his great
mustache with his fine damask napkin, and turned comfortably in his
chair. “Hendrick got me in a tight place the other day,” he began, “At
this year’s exhibition he marched me up to one of his bitumen-black,
woolly horrors, and said, ‘Now, Bellamy, you’re an honest man. Tell me
what it is you youngsters don’t like in that? It looks all right to me.
I can’t see why they all jump on me so. I look at theirs, and then I
look at mine.... I _can’t_ see what they’re talking about.’”

“Well, for God’s sake, what nerve!” ejaculated the disciple, very much
astonished. “What did you say?”

“What could I say?” said Bellamy. “I didn’t want to hurt the old man’s
feelings. I hadn’t supposed till then that he’d so much as noticed how
people feel about his work. I didn’t try to explain to him, of course.
What’s the use? He _can’t_ understand! If I’d talked to him all day
about what we’re after--light, and shimmer, and vibration--he wouldn’t
have known what I was talking about. If it were _in_ him to understand,
he’d die before he’d paint the way he does. So I just patted him on the
back and said, ‘Oh, you’re all right, Mr. Hendricks. What makes you
think there is anything the matter with your work?’ and pretended that
somebody was calling to me from the other side of the gallery.”

He finished his beer at a draught. He thought himself magnificently
kind and tolerant. And so did we.


That was a long time ago, thirty years ago, to be exact. The Bellamys
took their little girl out of our school that spring, and I saw no more
of them. But I always felt a slight personal interest at the sight
of his name in a list of exhibitors, and in picture-galleries always
went to look at whichever bright, high-keyed, dashing portrait he was
exhibiting that year. Some years ago it began to seem to me that they
did not look just the same; and yet when I looked straight at them,
I saw that they were, quite miraculously, the same, the old Bellamy
flowing brush-work, the masterly rendering of fabrics, the ringing
color, the firm drawing, all lighted by that bold flood of sunlight
with which he had shocked and enchanted the early American public
groping its way out from Munich.

Presently, finding that the impression that they were different
persisted, I set myself to analyze it, and found that their altered
look came from the altered character of the paintings beside and above
them ... and then, as the years went on, below them! For the time came
when the annual Bellamy portrait was not in the center of the last
gallery, to catch your eye as you entered, but was hung high in one of
the side-rooms. It looked very queer and matter-of-fact with its solid
surfaces honestly rendered in all their opacity, compared to the odd,
subtle, sideways-glancing, arrestingly imaginative canvases about it.
They took the eye far below the surfaces they depicted. They suggested
far more than they said. For days afterwards, they haunted you like an
unfinished cadence in a poem in a foreign language. The Bellamy canvas
was in no unknown language, but in the speech used for the daily order
to the grocer; nor was it in the least unfinished. It came finally to
seem to me as literal and bald a statement of fact as a time-table.

One day this year, as I hung over an Arthur Davies, a strange,
beautiful, white-fleshed, eerie, blonde woman, placed at the side of a
luminous canvas, with, so it seemed to me, more pure imaginative beauty
than anything since Botticelli, I heard voices behind me. A tall,
splendid-looking old man, with a great white beard, fine dark eyes, and
the carriage of a king was talking to a younger man, an unimpressive,
slight, fair fellow, evidently very ill at ease.

“See here, Brehming, speak out, tell me what it’s all about. I honestly
don’t know what you’re driving at, you kids. What’s the matter with
good drawing? What do you _want_ in a painting?” He waved a well-kept
hand up towards a canvas above us, “Isn’t there light in that? And
space? And interesting composition? And true values? _I_ ought to know
a good painting when I see one. What are you boys talking about when
you slash at my things so? I’m not sore. Don’t think I’m sore. You’ve
a right to your own opinion. Only, for the Lord’s sake, what _is_ your
opinion?”

He had said he was not sore, but there was a raw note of hurt in his
voice, and his eyes rested anxiously on the young man beside him.

The other looked every way except at him and said in a vague, hurried,
kindly voice, “Why, Mr. Bellamy, your work is all right, of course.
It’s fine. Sure, it’s fine. We all admire it like anything....”


Yes, I did hear that! I heard it just exactly as I’m setting it down.




“THE OLD NEW ENGLAND STOCK”


Students and classifiers of American “types” often say that the
grandfathers of the present generation of New Englanders represent
the “New England type” much more accurately than their descendants
of to-day. Some times I wonder what they mean by “New England type.”
Apparently they make the phrase stand for blue-nosed, thin-blooded
frigidity of temperament, a pinched, mean, timorous attitude towards
human life and human nature, and a cold, calculating capacity to skin
other people alive in a bargain. At any rate, the presumption seems to
be that whatever else they were, New Englanders were always very much
of the same sort.

Here are my two New England grandfathers.


Both of them had identically the same sort of ancestry, plain English
people who came to the New World about the middle of the seventeenth
century. Certain genealogically-minded members of the two families
have gathered reverently together the scant tradition concerning the
generations that bridge the two centuries and a half of life in
America; but though I have dutifully plodded through the thick volumes
of “family histories” I have never been able to see that any of my
forebears did anything more than earn their own livings and keep out of
jail.

Younger branches of both families moved up into Vermont, after the end
of the French-and-Indian wars and have lived here ever since. Both
my grandfathers spent their boyhood on Vermont farms. And there the
resemblance ceases.


One of them had, apparently, from early childhood, a passion for books
and learning and sophistication and cultivation--and gregarious,
articulate social existence--and dinner parties and black broadcloth
and white linen and good wine--and all the other elements in the sort
of life which is not to be found on Vermont farms. The Vermont farm,
however, seems to have presented him with some tools for getting what
he wanted: a powerful great body, an active mind and an unlimited
amount of dynamic energy. He left home at sixteen (this was about 1833)
spurred on by the sympathy of a strong-minded mother. I have still in
the attic of his old house, the little hair-covered trunk which he
took with him, and which contained all his worldly possessions.

From that time on, until his old age, he never came home except to
rest in the occasional, very brief intervals of incessant and almost
appalling activity, both intellectual and physical. With only a
little help from his family he earned his way through college, and
then put himself through a Theological Seminary in record time. With
him, as with other manifestants of the mid-century explosion of
energy in America, it was as if the long generations of vegetating
country-dwellers had, like other vegetating matter of by-gone ages,
turned to rich veins of highly combustible material, which this
descendant of theirs mined out, at top speed, and cast by great
shovelfuls into the furnace of his personality. He seems always to have
been incandescent, the whole six-feet-three of him, with motive-power
which he could not, try as he might, use up fast enough to cool off.
All his life he burned hot with a vitality at which an ever-widening
circle of other human beings, rich and poor, young and old, learned
and ignorant, warmed their hands and their hearts. Even the people
whom he furiously rubbed the wrong way (he had as many enemies as
friends) were stimulated by the friction to a quicker life-pace, a
livelier circulation. The temperature in a room rose when he entered
it. Even people of sluggish, scholarly, dilettante temperaments, even
coldly superior and skeptical people who prided themselves on being too
disdainful of life to lift an eyebrow over its issues, soon kindled
either to intense exasperation or lively personal affection. In either
case, calm and ease and torpidity of life were scorched and shaken.
I have often thought with sympathy of the vestrymen in Grandfather’s
various parishes.

As a young clergyman he ran one parish after another, with increasing
brio. When he settled down in the New York parish where he stayed for
most of his life, he was already editing a church-paper and writing
innumerable pamphlets, in addition to his regular duties as rector. He
now speeded up the staid old parish into new work of all sorts, added
one mission chapel after another to the church organization, pushed out
the influence of the parish further and further, especially into the
outlying regions of the slums, which because of their very discouraging
aspect of poverty and foreignness had been till then safe from attempts
to improve them.

Of course I knew my grandfather only when he was a very old man, long
after he had retired from active life; but I never got from him the
slightest impression that he was what is known as a “religious-minded
person” or that all this remarkable expansion of church and mission
work came entirely from evangelical fervor. In fact, as I remember
Grandfather, you never would dream that he had been a minister at
all. My guess is that he developed that church as his contemporaries
developed their transcontinental systems of railways, because he was
born with a clutch that never slipped, so that all the power he created
by his many-cylindered motor was transmitted without loss to the wheels
which sent him with extreme rapidity along the road he had chanced to
follow.

He not only developed the parish, he developed his own life: he bought
books, unendingly bought books, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, French, English.
No junk-man who ever lived has been able to free us entirely of this
vast accumulation of serious-minded books of research, now quite
worthless, all of them, full of the pompous and inaccurate scholarship
of his day. He traveled abroad and sprang, tiger-like, upon European
culture, with his formidable New-World capacity for the assimilation
of Gargantuan meals of solid food. He married “well,” as the saying
goes, and gave his son university life and European travel. He lived
as he had wanted to live, with friends and acquaintances in three
countries, dressing his vast body in fine broadcloth and white linen;
his house was lined with well-bound books; he was a famous talker--in
the vein of Dr. Johnson--much sought after for his brilliantly amusing
conversation, though at times, I take it, he followed his prototype
into rather overpowering monologue; he was a powerful and very fluent
public speaker--we have chests and chests full of his sermons still in
the attic--and so far as I can gather he no more doubted the ultimately
satisfying value of all these things as an integral part of life than
Mr. Russel Sage seems to have questioned the ultimately satisfying
value of squeezing the last penny of interest out of a loan, or Barnum
to have doubted the worthwhileness of running the biggest show on earth.

It would be very unfair to give the impression that his agreeable
social life and the possession of objects and books then in fashion
made up the whole or even the largest part of his life. It took
such a formidable number of elements to satisfy his huge appetite
for life and activity, that it would be difficult to catalog them
all. Controversy, for instance; he adored pamphleteering, and was
known as one of the leading controversialists of his time. He was a
heart-felt Low-Churchman and perhaps the real passion of his passionate
life was his hot-blooded detestation of formalism in religious
beliefs. Infinitely various, and all headlong, were his attacks on
High-Churchism, with its rigid orthodoxy, and its fol-de-rols (as
he called them) of salvation by incense and candles and twiddling
distinctions between green and blue and yellow stoles.

Indeed this shouldering impatience of formal theological points led
him late in life, to disagree vigorously with the majority of his
parishioners on several questions of doctrine. Refusing to conform to
the strict pattern they wished to impose upon him, he blew up with an
explosion, shook the dust of his religious vocation off his feet, and
retired to the comfortable old house in Vermont, where he spent his
old age, living comfortably on his small savings. He took with him
all the possessions he had enjoyed so heartily, his many, many books,
his substantial furniture, the excellent oil-portrait which had been
painted of his vivid, handsome face in middle-life, his gold-headed
cane, his great black-silk clerical robes, and fine ecclesiastical
linen. When he died, he had never, so far as I know, slept out of an
excellent bed a single night in all his life.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

The other grandfather fared forth at about the same date or a little
earlier, and at about the same age; but not in search of well-set
dinner-tables nor well-filled libraries, nor the inheritance of culture
from past ages. On the contrary, he seems all his life to have been
engaged in running away from even the light and sketchy approximation
to imprisoning regularity which was shown by the America of that day
and the State of his birth. Like an unbroken colt who snorts and
wheels and dashes away at the mere sight of some one emerging from the
barn with a rope halter, this other farm-boy gave one look at what
seemed to him the penitentiary-like pressure of conventional life and
ran away with all the speed of what turned out to be a remarkably
fleet pair of heels. First, as a lad, he ran away from his perfectly
comfortable home, where he had been well cared for, and soundly if
plainly educated. Disdaining ... no, more than that, courting hardship,
as he always did, he roamed out into the absolute, untrammeled freedom
of early frontier life. There he starved and hunted and went in ragged
buckskin, and trapped, and moved on, and grew up to a great height and
great strength, and was no man’s man to his heart’s content. At some
time during this period he acquired, with characteristic casual ease,
the profession of surveyor, the only one of the trades or professions
at which he was willing even to give a glance. There was plenty of
unsurveyed land in the States at that time, and all of it in the new,
untracked wilderness which he loved.

He seems always to have despised physical comfort as a clumsy trap laid
by life to catch you and hold you fast. None of it for him. He hated
the very indoor smell of it, as he did the burdening weight of material
possessions. A gun (which like other frontiersmen of that day he
passionately and personally loved), an ax (with which he could perform
almost any feat), the clothes he stood in, the tools of his wildwoods
profession, and the world before him, full, intoxicatingly full of
untrodden paths leading into bright enticing danger. Prosperity? A
home of his own? Above all, regular work? Never, as long as there were
squirrels and deer to shoot and logs to make temporary shelters withal!

His roamings took him into Ohio, the early river and lake settlements
of which were at that time horribly marshy and fever-ridden. There
he encountered the lure which brings most young adventurers in under
a roof and beside a hearth-fire. He fell in love. A pretty Vermont
girl was visiting some cousins there and had set up a little millinery
shop, where she made and sold the scoop-bonnets of the period. Do you
see them, the tall, big-boned surveyor, with his magnetic personality,
pungent with the odor of freedom, and the pink-cheeked, white-fingered
little amateur milliner?

She went back to Vermont to her family, and he followed her. I have
often amused myself by walking around over the roads and paths and
fields he must have trod during his wooing, and trying to imagine his
impatience of the cribbed and cabined superfluity and conventionality
of the Vermont life, which looked so primitive and bare to my other
grandfather.

He endured it for some months, till his wooing was successful, and,
just after her twenty-first birthday, the gentle, home-loving girl put
her hand upon his sinewy arm and followed him out into the wilds. This
was in 1838 when the wilds were very wild indeed. My great-uncle, who
was her little brother at that time conceived a lifelong admiration
and affection for the great, strapping, warm-hearted hero who came to
take away his big sister. He used to tell me stories of that impetuous
wooing, and of the strange impression left on the deeply-rooted
mountain-people by the meteor-like appearance and disappearance of
this startling, unreliable, dangerously alive personality, living so
immorally free from all the rules and possessions and standards which
bore them down to the earth, and to which they so tenaciously clung.
My great-uncle always ended these stories of his brother-in-law (whom
he never saw but on that occasion) by saying, “He was a talented man,
with a powerful personality, who could have done anything he chose.”
He also told me, “Our minister said of Albert that he was a wild, free
son of Nature.” I take it the minister had had some contact with the
romantic-school phraseology so much in fashion at that date.

It was a bitterly hard life which the Vermont girl had chosen, full
of extravagant hardships and privations of which she could never have
dreamed. They lived here and there, always from hand to mouth, always
as far beyond the edge of the settlements as it was possible to take a
family of young children, for they had five little girls by the time
they had been married a decade. Once or twice her husband made an
attempt to enter regular life, to run a store in a frontier settlement,
to take an everyday job; but these trials never lasted long, and their
old life was taken up, log-cabin after log-cabin, rough clearings in
the primeval forest, days when there was nothing but corn-meal in the
pantry, long treks in covered wagons to escape from the fever-and-ague
which burned and ravaged them; never more possessions than could be
drawn by a team of lean horses, ... and always unbroken love and
devotion between the two wayfarers. Wherever their caravan halted for
a few months was home to the woodsman’s wife, because he was there;
his vitality, his free-hearted zest in whatever came to them, bore her
along like a tidal wave. And to the end of her days she worshipped the
memory of his deep, never-wavering passion for her.

You can imagine that her comfortably well-to-do family thought he took
a very queer way to show it, and with Yankee out-spokenness told them
both so, as cuttingly as Yankee tongues can speak. Without a hesitation
she flung her family ties away along with her love of home, her woman’s
love for stability, her mother’s anxiety about her little girls. Not
till long after his death did she again resume relations with her
family.

Her little girls, never having known any other life, saw nothing
unusual in the one they led, especially as their mother, her
personality doubled and trebled by the exigencies of her life, stood,
somehow, miraculously between them and the most impossible of the
hardships to which their father so light-heartedly condemned them.
They were always dressed in well-mended garments, they had shoes and
stockings, they were clean and cherished, there was always cheer and
loving-kindness between their father and mother, and when there was
only corn-meal mush for supper, they scarcely noticed it, because of
the old songs and stories of which their mother had such a store. My
mother sang them to me, and I now sing them to my children, those old
folk-songs with which my grandmother charmed away hunger from her
little children. They adored their great, rollicking father, always in
high spirits, and they preferred the deer-steaks and squirrel stews
which were the results of his wonderful marksmanship, to the tough,
stringy beef and salt pork which was the diet of the other frontier
children. One of my mother’s vivid recollections is of looking out of
the window on a snowy day and seeing her stalwart father emerge from
the woods into the clearing, carrying ... a very Robin Hood ... a whole
deer’s carcass on his broad shoulders. He cast it down before the door
and called, like a great boy, for his women-folk to come and admire
him! She says she can close her eyes now, see the blood ruddy on the
snow, and her father’s thrown-back head and bright, laughing face.

Of course, when the news of gold in California came, burning-hot like
wild-fire from the west, he was one of the first to go. He would be.
A distant, uncertain, and dangerous expedition, into unknown country;
could he resist such an alluring combination? Of course, he could have
resisted it if he had tried; but he did not try. He never tried.

Also, of course, it was really out of the question to transport a wife
and five little girls across an untracked continent, full of Indians.
He was to go alone, make a brief stay, get the lay of the land, and
come back, his pockets full of gold, to take the family out in a ship
around the Horn. It was all settled in his mind as if the gold were
heavy in his pockets. The separation would be short ... he was sure
of it, as he was always sure of whatever would ensure his being free
of the slightest constraint.... He moved his family into the nearest
settlement, cashed in on everything saleable, added a small sum that
had just come to him as his share of his father’s small property, and
got together enough to support his family for a year. It took little
enough, as they had always lived. And he would be back before the year
was out, rolling in gold.

With empty pockets and a high heart he took his gun and his ax, kissed
his family good-by and went away planning to live off the country as he
traveled, as he always had.

One letter came back from California, the only one he ever wrote,
since he had never before been separated from the one human being he
had loved. He had had a gloriously adventurous time in getting out
there, Indians, drought, snow, heat, grizzly bears--all the regulation
accompaniments of the transcontinental trip in 1849. He struck it rich
at once, and as one of the first on the ground had a wonderful claim of
his own. They would all be rich in no time.

In no time he was dead.

For an interminable period his wife heard nothing, and then, very
vaguely, that he had died of “mountain fever.” He had been dead and
buried for months before she learned that she was a widow at thirty-two
with five helpless little girls and not a penny in the world.




OCTOBER, 1918


MORNING

I was crossing the Place de la Concorde, and stopped for an instant,
fascinated by the sinister expression of an immense cannon, painted
in serpentine streaks and stripes, the muzzle of its tube distorted
by an explosion so that a twisted flap of steel hung down like a
broken jaw-bone. A hail made me turn around. The elegant old man who
was an American correspondent for a New York newspaper, came up with
an expression of approval. “Magnificent display, isn’t it?” he said,
waving his hand towards the ranks of captured cannon and mitrailleuses,
standing thick on the public square. “Why didn’t you bring your
children?”


The gulf between his generation and mine yawned deep. I told myself
the part of wisdom was to close my lips on what I felt. But the cannon
leered at me too insolently, with its torn muzzle.

I answered, “I’m glad enough when the police seem to be getting the
better of a band of ruffians who’ve been terrorizing the town. But I
don’t take the children to see the bloody clubs with which....”

“Oh, come!” said my old friend, genially. “Feminine emotionality!
These don’t look much like bloody clubs. They look more like part of a
steel-foundry.”

“Every cannon here is wreathed in human viscera, spattered with human
brains, and stands in a pool of human blood, if we only had eyes to
see!” I said moderately.

“Why, you talk like a pacifist!” said the old gentleman, forgetting his
usual politeness to women.

“I thought the unforgivable sin of the Germans was in forcing a war
on a world that has outgrown war! If war is so hateful a thing, why
complacently lay out to view its hideous instruments of torture?”

“Because,” said my old friend with deep emotion, “because they have
been instruments of righteousness!” (For the moment he had forgotten
the nationality of the cannon about us.)

“Have they?” I asked. “They’re German cannon, remember.” In spite of my
feeling sick, I could not but laugh at the change in his expression. I
went on, “Well, even if they had been sacred Allied cannon, they’d be
instruments of torture all the same. I thought we were fighting to put
such things on the scrap heap. Why don’t we have the decency to hide
them from view? We don’t put the offal from our slaughter-houses on
public view.”

“Vegetarianism, next?”

“Oh, no, I eat beefsteaks. But I don’t take the children to see the
steers killed.”

“Of course, I know,” said my old friend tolerantly, “that women have a
traditional right to be illogical, but _really_.... Did you, or did you
not turn your personal life upside down to do your share in this war?
It would give me brain fever to feel two different ways about the same
thing.”

“See here,” I put it to him, “a man, crazy-drunk comes roaring down our
street. Who _wouldn’t_ feel two ways about him? I certainly do. First,
I know that society has been wrongly organized to permit any boy to
grow up crazed with whiskey; and second, I know that my children must
be protected, now, at this very minute. Shooting that man dead isn’t
going to help the general situation at all. If we are not to have a
perpetual procession of crazy-drunk men coming down our street (_and
our own men among them_) we must change the organization of society
by long, patient, and constructive efforts. In the meantime with
the drunken man pounding on my door, if the police don’t do what is
necessary, why, of course, I will throw a dishpan of scalding water
down on him. But I wouldn’t spend the rest of my life making speeches
about the dishpan.”

My sophisticated old friend had for me the smiling amusement one
feels for a bright child talking about what he does not understand.
Taking up the sharp ax of Ecclesiastes, he struck a great blow at the
root of the matter, “No, my dear girl, no, you don’t. A well-meaning,
high-principled woman like you, can do a great deal, but she cannot
amputate a vital part of human nature. You can’t make manly, brave men
ashamed of war and it’s a lucky thing for you you can’t, for if you
did, there would be nobody to stand between you and the bullies. Take
it from a man nearly twice your age, that without the soldier in every
man (and that means love of force and submission to force--you must
swallow that!) there would be no order in the world. You needn’t try to
reduce that element of force to mere businesslike police-work. It can’t
be done. There would be anarchy in the twinkling of an eye. You won’t
believe this, because it doesn’t fit into your womanish, preconceived
notions. But it doesn’t make any difference whether you believe it or
not. Such are the facts. And all your noble phrases can’t change them.”


I turned and left him. I did not believe a word he said, of course ...
but.... There _is_ a horrible side to human nature.... Suppose that to
hold it in check it might be necessary ...


AFTERNOON

“Oh, mother, this is Thursday and the merry-go-round in the Parc of the
Château is running. Couldn’t you take us?”

We set off, the three of us, hand in hand, crossed the arid, bare
Place d’Armes where the great Louis had mustered his troops, hobbled
up over the villainous paving-stones of the gray entrance court and
came by beautiful leafy avenues to where the primitive circle of wooden
horses whirled slowly about, as a one-armed soldier turned the crank.
I was left on a bench, with the other waiting mothers, watching our
children’s pleasure.

My two were at once in another world--Jimmy’s a mere wide world of
enchantment, as befitted his five-year-old ignorance. He swam through
the air, a vague smile of beatitude on his lips. Sally sat very
straight, one hand on her hip, the other stretched out in a gesture of
command. She was perhaps Charlemagne before the defeated Saxons, or
possibly Joan of Arc at Orléans. Sally’s class at school begins to have
some notions of history.

When the crippled soldier was tired, and we had paid our copper sous,
we wandered on, to a bench in front of a statue of mellow marble. Here
I sat down while the children ran about, shouting and kicking up the
chestnut leaves which laid a carpet of cloth-of-gold under their feet.
Their laughter sounded distant in my ears. I was hearing again the
cock-sure old voice of the morning.... “Anarchy in a moment if respect
for force were eliminated ... you cannot amputate a part of human
nature....”


What was my little daughter saying, with her amusing older-sister air
of omniscience? “Did you know, Jimmy, that it was a king who had all
this made, out of nothing at all. We’ve just had that in school. It was
only a bare, sandy plain, and he had all the trees brought here, and
the terraces made, and the water brought here.... It cost millions and
millions.”

Jimmy looked up in astonishment at the giant oak over him. “Can you
carry great big trees like these around with you?” he asked.

“No, gracious, no! It was ever so long ago. They’ve grown up since.
They were just scrawny little saplings. They’ve got an old picture at
school that shows how it was when he was alive. Awfully ugly!”

“I wouldn’t have liked it then,” said Jimmy.

Sally hooted at his ignorance. “My goodness, you don’t suppose you’d
ever have got any chance to play here if you’d lived then. Not much!
We never could have got in. They had soldiers at all the gates to keep
people out.”

Jimmy’s sense of the probable was outraged. There were some things too
tall to be believed, even if Sally did say them. “What was it _for_, if
nobody was allowed in?”

“It was for the king. Everything was for the king then. And he only let
in his own family and his special friends.”

“I should think people would ha’ been mad to see the king hogging
everything for himself,” Jimmy said vigorously.

“Oh, they were used to it,” explained Sally. “They thought it had to be
that way. All the learned men in those days told them that everything
would go to pieces and everybody would rob and murder everybody else
if they didn’t have a king and think they loved him more than anybody
else.”

Once more Jimmy’s sense of the probable rose up to protest, “They
didn’t _love_ that old hog-it-all king!” The little twentieth-century
American brain refused to credit this ridiculous and inherently
impossible idea.


( ... and yet how many generations of men suffered and died to affirm
that idea as the natural and inevitable foundation of society!)


“Well, they thought they had to, and so they thought they did,” said
Sally lucidly. “The way we love our governments now. But after a couple
of hundred years or so they found out the learned men didn’t know so
much, and that it wasn’t having a king that kept folks from robbing and
murdering all the time. So they got together and came out here from
Paris and took all this away from him. And that’s how we get in to
play.”

Jimmy’s fancy was tickled by a new idea. “I bet he’d be surprised if he
could see us playing here.”

Sally dramatized the scene, instantly. “Wouldn’t he though! Suppose
he should come walking right down those marble steps with his high
wig and his big-buckled shoes, and his clothes all solid gold and
diamonds, and suppose he should walk right up to us and say, ‘You
good-for-nothing common-people, what are you doing in MY park? I’ll
have you boiled in oil at once!’”

Jimmy was a little intimidated. He took his big sister’s hand and said
in rather a small voice, “What would you say back?”

Sally made a dramatic gesture of scorn. “I’d say, ‘Get away from here,
you old King. Don’t you know you’re dead?’ And then, Jimmy, you know
ghosts aren’t solid. I’d just draw off and run right through him, gold
clothes and diamonds and all, like this.”

She executed a headlong assault on space and came back laughing.

Jimmy, reassured, caught the note, “Yes,” he said swaggering, “I would
too, I’d say, ‘You old King, you’re dead!’ and I’d run right through
him too.”

It was the most delightful of all the games Sally had invented. They
went at it with gusto, their faces rosy and laughing as they took turns
in dashing through the non-existent might, majesty, and glory of a dead
idea.


It was a game which amused their mother quite as much as the children.
I sat watching them at it, till it was time to start home back through
the rich magnificence of the old park which had been planted for a
king’s pleasure and which throughout the silent, purposeful centuries
had grown to beauty for the people.




A BRETON AMONG HSÜ HSI


The black-and-white maid told me I was expected and showed me into the
drawing-room to wait. As I waited I looked around at the beautiful
room with the leaden depression which such beautiful rooms always
produce in me. It was a wonderfully elaborate composition with as many
details in it as there are notes on a page of music, and every one of
them was correct and accredited. As I stepped in through the door the
whole shouted in my ears a pæan of religiously devout acceptance of the
fashion then prevailing in interior decoration.

The floor was dully lustrous, avoiding the vulgar shininess of varnish
so esteemed a decade or so before. There was a great deal of black in
all the fabrics as was then the fashion (now it would be vermilion
and verdigris green); chintz curtains with a black background and a
splashingly-colored design of wreaths and strange large birds; black
satin sofa-pillows, with stiff quilled ruffles in brilliant colors
to match the birds. The shades of the electric lights (which were
of course designed to make them look like candles) were ornamented
with cut-out black silhouettes of nude ladies with extremely long
legs. The furniture was either all “antique” or had been doctored to
look as though it were. A large, dark, carved chest stood against a
wall--to contain what it was difficult to conjecture. The chairs had
the correct kind of legs and backs and arms, that is, the kind that
had not yet been copied sufficiently to spoil it for the discerning
taste; and the straight, curiously-shaped table was at least two jumps
ahead of anything shown at that time even by the most enterprising
department-store. The walls, in accordance with the order of the
day, were for the most part smartly and knowingly bare, with a
few permissible reproductions of Chinese landscapes; one a tall,
narrow study of bamboo shoots, another a long, narrow study of snowy
mountains, depicted in three or four lines (this year it would be, I
suppose, an 1858 panel by Jolly).

I sat down in what looked like the most comfortable of the
distinguished chairs, my feet on one of the correctly Oriental rugs,
and looked dispiritedly about me for some sign of living taste in all
that tastefully arranged room. There was plenty of taste shown there;
but it smelled so of the pages of an expensive magazine printed on
highly-glazed paper, that presently, as I sat there, despairing of
my race, I felt my own body take on the same flat, two-dimensional
unreality. Well, that is the sort of flat and unreal creatures human
beings are when it comes to taste, I reflected.

There was not, so far as I could see, one single object in that room
(and God knows there were plenty of objects in it!) which rang out with
the clear, brave note of a thing chosen because it gives pleasure.
Everything about me wore a large, invisible but plainly legible
placard, setting forth that it was there because it was “the thing”;
and that the instant “the thing” was something else it would be cast
out and replaced with something else as meaningless as itself in the
life of the owner.

The whole expensive show was perched on the branch of other people’s
opinions, and was ready to fall to the ground as soon as that branch
waved in the wind of a new fashion. There was not one object which
suggested what you might think would be the first, simple, hearty,
healthy instinct of prospering humanity, the desire to surround itself
with what it likes. No, in its abject consistency, the room shamelessly
proclaimed that its ambition was to be well thought of by “people in
the know” and not at all to please the family who had paid for it and
had to live with it.

Docility in human beings is always a dreadful quality, but docility
in matters of taste is shameful. I sighed, and fixed my eyes on what
looked like a Chardin. Oh, yes, Chardin was “in” now, I remembered.
But an ordinary private family would be as little likely to own a
real Chardin as a real Veermeer. I reflected that as soon as it was
discovered not to be a genuine one, it would certainly be sent off to
the junk shop. And yet it was a delightful canvas, apparently by some
one of the period who had absorbed Chardin’s atmosphere and loved it as
we do. If it looked so much like a Chardin that only the X-ray could
tell the difference, why wasn’t it as good as a Chardin? I fell into a
meditation on the hideous ways of collectors of pictures, blasphemers
against the Holy Ghost of Art that they are. Ostensibly they buy
pictures because they love good paintings (I am not referring to art
_dealers_!). A collector sees a small canvas, said to be a Teniers,
and is ready to pay a fantastic price for it, enough to endow a school
for all time. Some expert with a chemical test proves that it is not a
Teniers. It is the same picture as before, the very same; but now the
lover of good art would not hang it on his walls, if it were given to
him.

What kind of a race is that to belong to, I asked myself plaintively.
They don’t want beauty, they don’t want art, they haven’t even the
plain courage that any dog or monkey has, to want what they want. They
want what other people pretend to want.

I got up restlessly, crossed over to the other side of the room,
turned my eyes to the side I had left, and was electrified. There
in the center of the wall, next to a small reproduction of a Madhu
camel-fight, was a large canvas, a solidly painted, honest, dark,
sentimental Jules Breton. I gazed at it with profound thankfulness.
There was not an extenuating circumstance. It was his usual peasant
girl, done with his usual pseudo-realism, with her usual bare feet,
every muddy toe conscientiously drawn, and it had darkened to the usual
Breton gloom. It swore at the top of its voice at all the knowing,
Orientalized, simplified, subtle things about it, and my heart leaped
up to hear it swear. For it sounded like a living voice.

Here was something that must have been bought some time ago (for nobody
can actually have bought a Breton recently), which must have been hung
on the wall when Bretons were in style. But it had not been banished
when the style had changed!

And yet the rest of the room told me unmistakably that the owner of
that room knew as well as any one else what was now thought of that
Breton by people “in the know.”

Well, there was one visitor who appreciated it. Never before had I
thought to admire so ardently the dull, faithful, unimaginative surface
of a Breton. But I gazed at it with affection. There could be no reason
for its presence except that somebody liked it enough to keep it in
spite of what other people thought. Well, now--I took heart--maybe the
situation wasn’t so desperate as I had thought. Perhaps we may have a
live national taste in art, twenty or more generations later on. If
there was _any_body not an artist himself, who had the honesty and
courage which must be at the foundation of anything alive in artistic
taste, why perhaps....

Just then a dreadful possibility came into my mind--perhaps it had been
a wedding present from a wealthy uncle not to be offended?

On this my host and hostess came in. As we talked of the object of my
visit (which had nothing to do with art) I was constantly spying on the
expression of their eyes, listening half-hopefully, half-despairingly
to the sound of their voices, watching feverishly every turn of
expression in their kind, honest faces. I had never seen them before
that day and probably shall have no occasion to see them again. But I
often think of them and wonder about them. They really looked as though
they might be capable of not being ashamed to like a picture no longer
in fashion. Perhaps they _had_ kept that Breton on their walls out of
sheer, honest, brave, artistic integrity....

But the more I think of it, the more unlikely it seems.




ALMERA HAWLEY CANFIELD

b. 1787; m. 1808; d. 1874


Of course I never saw her. She died years before I was born. But she
left behind her a portrait so full of her personality that no living
figure is more human to me than my great-grandmother.

I do not at all refer to the portrait over the dining-room mantelpiece,
showing her as a withered old woman in a frilled cap, which is now the
only tangible sign of her existence left in her old home. No; that
might have been any withered old woman in a frilled cap.

There is another portrait of my great-grandmother not done on canvas
with oils. Here are some of the strokes which one by one, at long
intervals, as if casually and by chance, have painted it for me.


When I was about eight years old, I went out one day to watch old
Lemuel Hager, who came once a year to mow the grass in the orchard back
of the house. As he clinked the whetstone over the ringing steel of
his scythe, he looked down at me and remarked: “You favor the Hawley
side of the family, don’t you? There’s a look around your mouth sort
o’ like Aunt Almera, your grandmother--no--my sakes, you must be her
great-granddaughter! Wa’l--think of that! And it don’t seem more’n
yesterday I saw her come stepping out same’s you did just now; not so
much bigger’n you are this minute, for all she must have been sixty
years old then. She always was the _littlest_ woman. But for all that
she marched up to me, great lummox of a boy, and she said, ‘Is it true,
what I hear folks say, Lemuel, that you somehow got out of school
without having learned how to read?’ And I says, ‘Why, Mis Canfield, to
tell the truth, I never did seem to git the hang of books, and I never
could seem to git up no sort of interest in ’em.’

“And she says back, ‘Well, no great boy of eighteen in the town
_I_ live in is a-goin’ to grow up without he knows how to read the
Declaration of Independence,’ says she. And she made me stop work for
an hour--she paid me just the same for it--took me into the house, and
started teaching me.

“Great land of love! if the teacher at school had ’a’ taught me like
that, I’d ’a’ been a minister! I felt as though she’d cracked a hole
in my head and was just pouring the l’arning in through a funnel.
And ’twa’n’t more’n ten minutes before she found out ’twas my eyes
the trouble. I’m terrible near-sighted. Well, that was before the
days when everybody wore specs. There wa’n’t no way to git specs for
me; but you couldn’t stump Aunt Almera. She just grabbed up a sort of
magnifying-glass that she used, she said, for her sewing, now her eyes
were kind o’ failing her, and she give it to me. ‘I’ll take bigger
stitches,’ says she, laughing; ‘big stitches don’t matter so much as
reading for an American citizen.’

“Well, sir, she didn’t forgit me; she kept at me to practice to home
with my magnifying-glass, and it was years before I could git by the
house without Aunt Almera come out on the porch and hollered to me,
that bossy way she had, ‘Lemuel, you come in for a minute and let me
hear you read.’ Sometimes it kind o’ madded me, she had such a way o’
thinkin’ she could make everybody stand ’round. And sometimes it made
me laugh, she was so old, and not much bigger’n my fist. But, by gol, I
l’arned to read, and I have taken a sight of comfort out of it. I don’t
never set down in the evening and open up the Necronsett ‘Journal’
without I think of Aunt Almera Canfield.”

One day I was sent over to Mrs. Pratt’s to get some butter, and found
it just out of the churn. So I sat down to wait till Mrs. Pratt should
work it over, munching on a cookie, and listening to her stream of
talk--the chickens, the hail-storm of the other day, had my folks
begun to make currant jelly yet? and so on--till she had finished and
was shaping the butter into beautiful round pats. “This always puts
me in mind of Aunt Almera,” she said, interrupting an account of how
the men had chased a woodchuck up a _tree_--who ever heard of such a
thing? “Whenever I begin to make the pats, I remember when I was a girl
working for her. She kept you right up to the mark, I tell you, and you
ought to have seen how she lit into me when she found out some of my
butter-pats were just a little over a pound and some a little less. It
was when she happened to have too much cream and she was ‘trading in’
the butter at the store. You’d have thought I’d stolen a fifty-cent
piece to hear her go on! ‘I sell those for a pound; they’ve got to _be_
a pound,’ says she, the way she always spoke, as though that ended it.

“‘But land sakes, Mis’ Canfield,’ says I, all out o’ patience with her,
‘an ounce or two one way or the other--it’s as likely to be more as
less, you know! What difference does it make? _Nobody_ expects to make
their pats just a pound! How could you?’

“‘How could you? How could you?’ says she. ‘Why, just the way you make
anything else the way it ought to be--by keeping at it till it _is_
right. What other way is there?’

“I didn’t think you could do it. I _knew_ you couldn’t; but you always
had to do the way Mis Canfield said, and so I began grumbling under my
breath about high-handed, fussy old women. But she never minded what
you _said_ about her, so long as you did your work right. So I fussed
and fussed, clipping off a little, and adding on a little, and weighing
it between times. It was the awfulest bother you ever saw, because it
spoiled the shape of your pat to cut at it so much, and you had to
start it over again every time.

“Well, you wouldn’t believe it, how soon I got the hang of it! She’d
made me think about it so much, I got interested, and it wasn’t any
time at all before I could tell the heft of a pat to within a fraction
of an ounce just by the feel of it in my hand. And I never forgot it.
You never do forget that kind of thing. I brought up my whole family on
that story. ‘Now you do that spelling lesson just exactly _right_,’
I’d say to my Lucy, ‘just the way Aunt Almera made me do the butter
pats!’”


I was sitting on the steps of the Town Hall, trying to make a willow
whistle, when the janitor came along and opened the door. “The Ladies’
Aid are going to have a supper in the downstairs room,” he explained,
getting out a broom. I wandered in to visit with him while he swept and
dusted the pleasant little community sitting-room where our village
social gatherings were held. He moved an armchair and wiped off the
frame of the big portrait of Lincoln. “Your great-grandmother gave
that, do you know it?” he observed, and then, resting on the broom for
a moment and beginning to laugh, “Did you ever hear how Aunt Almera
got folks stirred up to do something about this room? Well, ’twas so
_like_ her! The place used to be the awfulest hole you ever saw. Years
ago they’d used it to lock up drunks in, or anybody that had to be
locked up. Then after the new jail was built the sheriff began to take
prisoners down there. But nobody did anything to this room to clean it
up or fix it. It belongs to the town, you know, and nobody ever’ll do
anything that they think they can put off on the town. The women used
to talk a lot about it--what a nice place ’twould be for socials, and
how ’twould keep the boys off the streets, and how they could have
chicken suppers here, same as other towns, if this room was fixed up.
But whose business was it to fix it up? The town’s of course! And of
course nobody ever thinks that he and his folks are all there is _to_
the town. No, they just jawed about it, and kept saying ‘wa’n’t the
selectmen shiftless because they didn’t see to it!’ But of course the
selectmen didn’t have the money to do anything. Nothing in the law
about using tax money to fix up rooms for sociables, is there? And
those were awful tight times, when money came hard and every cent of
tax money had to be put to some good plain use. So the selectmen said
_they_ couldn’t do anything. And nobody else would, because it wasn’t
anybody’s business in particular, and nobody wanted to be put upon and
made to do more than his share. And the room got dirtier and dirtier,
with the lousy old mattress the last drunk had slept on right there
on the floor in the corner, and broken chairs and old wooden boxes,
and dust and dry leaves that had blown in through the windows when the
panes of glass were broken--regular dumping-ground for trash.

“Well, one morning bright and early--I’ve heard my mother tell about it
a thousand times--the first person that went by the Town Hall seen the
door open and an awful rattling going on. He peeked in, and there was
little old Aunt Almera, in a big gingham apron, her white hair sticking
out from underneath a towel she’d tied her head up in, cleaning away
to beat the band. She looked up, saw him standing and gaping at her,
and says, just as though that was what she did every day for a living,
‘Good morning,’ she says. ‘Nice weather, isn’t it?’

“He went away kind of quick, and told about her over in the store, and
they looked out, and sure enough out she come, limping along (she had
the rheumatism _bad_) and dragging that old mattress with her. She drug
it out in front to a bare place, and poured some kerosene on it and set
fire to it; and I guess by that time every family in the street was
looking out at her from behind the window-shades. Then she went back
in, leaving it there burning up, high and smoky, and in a minute out
she came again with her dustpan full of trash. She flung that on the
fire as if she’d been waiting all her life to have the chance to get
it burned up, and went back for more. And there she was, bobbing back
and forth all the fore part of the morning. Folks from the Lower Street
that hadn’t heard about it would come up for their mail, and just stop
dead, to see the bonfire blazing and Aunt Almera limping out with
maybe an old broken box full of junk in her arms. She’d always speak
up just as pleasant and gentle to them--_that_ made ’em feel queerer
than anything else. Aunt Almera talking so mild! ‘Well, folks, how are
you this morning?’ she’d say. ‘And how are all the folks at home?’ And
then _slosh!_ would go a pail of dirty water, for as soon as she got
it swept out, didn’t she get down on her creaking old marrow-bones and
scrub the floor! All that afternoon every time anybody looked out,
splash! there’d be Aunt Almera throwing away the water she’d been
scrubbing the floor with. Folks felt about as big as a pint-cup by that
time, but nobody could think of anything to do or say, for fear of what
Aunt Almera might say back at them, and everybody was always kind o’
slow about trying to stop her once she got started on anything. So they
just kept indoors and looked at each other like born fools, till Aunt
Almera crawled back home. It mighty nigh killed her, that day’s work.
She was all crippled up for a fortnight afterwards with rheumatism. But
you’d better believe folks stirred around those two weeks, and when she
was out and around again there was this room all fixed up just the way
’tis now, with furniture, and the floor painted, and white curtains to
the windows, and all. Nobody said a word to her about it, and neither
did she say a word when she saw it--she never was one to do any crowing
over folks--once she’d got her own way.”


The hassocks in our pew began to look shabby, and my aunt brought
them home from church to put fresh carpeting on them. They suggested
church, of course, and as she worked on them a great many reminiscences
came to her mind. Here is one: “I used to love to ride horseback, and
grandmother always made father let me, although he was afraid to have
me. Well, one summer evening, right after supper I went for a little
ride, and didn’t get home till about half-past seven. As I rode into
the yard I looked through the open windows, and there was grandmother
putting her bonnet on; and it came to me in a flash that I’d promised
to go to evening prayers with her. I was a grown-up young lady then,
but I was scared! You did what you’d promised grandmother you would,
or something happened. So I just fell off my horse, turned him out in
the night pasture, saddle and all, and ran into the house. Grandmother
was putting on her gloves, and, although she saw me with my great
looped-up riding skirt on and my whip in my hand, she never said
a word nor lifted an eyebrow; just went on wetting her fingers and
pushing the gloves down on them as though I was ready with my best hat
on. That scared me worse than ever. I tore into my room, slipped off my
skirt, put on another right over my riding trousers, slammed on a hat,
threw a long cape around me, and grabbed my gloves. As the last bell
began to ring and grandmother stepped out of the house, I stepped out
beside her, all right as to the outer layer, but with the perspiration
streaming down my face. I’d hurried so, and those great thick riding
trousers were so hot under my woolen skirt! My! I thought I’d die! And
it was worse in the church! Over in our dark, close corner pew there
wasn’t a breath of air. It must have been a hundred by the thermometer.
I was so hot I just had to do something or die! There weren’t but a
few people in the church, and nobody anywhere near our corner, and it
was as dark as could be, back in our high pew. So when we knelt down
for the General Confession I gathered the cape all around me, reached
up under my full skirt, unbuttoned those awful riding trousers, and
just cautiously slipped them off. My! What a relief it was! Grandmother
felt me rustling around and looked over sharp at me, to see what I
was doing. When she saw the riding trousers, she looked shocked, and
frowned; but I guess I must have looked terribly hot and red, so she
didn’t say anything.

“Well, I knew it was an awful thing to do in church, and I was so
afraid maybe somebody _had_ seen me, although old Dr. Skinner, the
rector, was the only one high enough up to look over the pew-top, and
he was looking at his Prayer Book. But I felt as mean as though he’d
been looking right at me. Well, he finally got through the prayers and
began on the First Lesson. It was something out of the Old Testament,
that part about how the Jews went back and repaired the broken walls
of Jerusalem, each one taking a broken place for his special job, and
then how they got scared away, all but a few, from the holes in the
walls they were trying to fix up. Dr. Skinner always read the Lessons
very loud and solemn, as though he were reading them right at somebody,
and he’d sort of turn from one to another in the congregation with his
forefinger pointed at them, as if he meant that just for them. What
_do_ you suppose I felt like when he turned right towards our corner
and leaned ’way over and shook his finger at me, and said in a loud,
blaming tone, ‘But Asher continued and _abode_ in _his_ breaches!’ I
gave a little gasp, and grandmother turned towards me quick. When she
saw the expression on my face (I guess I must have looked funny), she
just burst right out into that great laugh of hers--ha! ha! ha! She
laughed so she couldn’t stop, and had to actually get up and go out
of church, her handkerchief stuffed into her mouth. We could hear her
laughing as she went down the walk outside!

“You’d have thought she’d be mortified, wouldn’t you? _I_ was mortified
almost to death! But she wasn’t a bit. She laughed every time she
thought of it, for years after that. It was just like her! She did love
a good laugh! Let anything happen that struck her as funny, and she’d
laugh, no _matter_ what!”

Later on, as we carried the hassocks back to the church and put them in
our pew, my aunt said, reflectively, looking round the empty church:
“I never come in here that I don’t remember how grandmother used to
say the Creed, loud and strong--she always spoke up so clear: ‘From
thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. I believe in the
Holy Ghost: The Holy Catholic Church: The Communion of Saints: The
Forgiveness of sins--’ and then she’d stop dead, while everybody went
on, ‘The Resurrection of the body;’ and then she’d chime in again,
‘And the Life everlasting, Amen.’ You couldn’t help noticing it, she
took the greatest pains you should. But if anybody said anything about
it she always said that she didn’t believe in the resurrection of the
body, and she wasn’t going to _say_ she did. Sometimes the ministers
would get wrought up, especially the young ones, and one of them went
to the bishop about it, but nobody ever did anything. What _could_ you
do? And grandmother went right on saying the Creed that way to the day
of her death.”


On the hundredth anniversary of the organization of our parish there
were, of course, great doings in the way of centenary celebrations.
Many of the old rectors came back to visit, and to make after-dinner
talks and to preach at special services. One of the most interesting of
these old men was the Reverend Mr. Jason Gillett, who had been rector
for a year shortly after the Civil War, when he was a young man just
out of the Theological Seminary. He had since become well-known, one
might say famous (in church circles at least) for his sermons of a
fervor truly evangelical (so it was said), delivered in a voice noted
for its harmony and moving qualities. We had often read about his
preaching, in the Church papers. He had brought up from decay several
old parishes and had founded one of the finest and most thriving in
Chicago.

There was a stir when his return for a day was announced, and the
morning when he preached, the church was crowded to the doors. He
proved to be a spiritual-faced, white-haired, handsome old man,
equipped with fine eyes and beautiful hands as well as his famous
voice. He preached a sermon which held every one in the church
breathlessly attentive. I noticed that his stole was exquisitely
worked in gold thread, and after the service, when the Altar Guild
were putting things away, we saw that his surplice was of extremely
fine material, with a deep band of embroidery about the hem. “Loving
lady-parishioners,” conjectured one of the Guild, holding it up.

“They say the women are always crazy about him, everywhere, and no
wonder!” said another. “Such a fascinating, attractive personality.”

“How did you like his sermon?” I asked. Personally I had found it
rather too dramatic for my taste. It rubs me the wrong way when I feel
that somebody is trying to work my feelings up, although I always feel
a little ashamed of this natural ungraciousness, which is labeled in
the talk of the old people of our locality as “Canfield cussedness.”

One of my companions answered me, “Why, the tears ran right down my
cheeks, towards the end of that sermon!”

And another added, “Such a power for good as he has been, all his life.
Think of his having begun his wonderful work right here in our little
parish.”

The door opened and the preacher himself entered in his black cassock,
followed by a group of people. He was a little flushed from the
handshaking reception he had been holding in the vestibule and still
wore the affable smile which had gone with the handshaking. The men and
women who had followed him in were still talking two or three at once,
trying to get his attention, still fixing their eyes on him, unwilling
to leave him, moved evidently by his mere presence.

“It’s a renewal of my youth to be here again in this dear old parish,”
he said genially, using a set of inflections of his fine voice quite
different from those of the sermon, “I find it all comes back to me
with the utmost freshness. Ah, youth! Youth!”

He broke off to say in still another tone, “I know none of you will
object to my saying also that it is an immense relief to find the
parish rid of that detestable incubus Mrs. Almera Canfield. You must
all breathe a happier air, since she took her mocking cynicism into
another world.”

A quick shifting of eyes, lifted eyebrows, and suppressed smiles told
him that he had been indiscreet. He faced the uncomfortable little
situation with a well-oiled ease of manner. “Have I offended some
one here?” he asked, instantly, turning towards us. Then, seeing by
my expression that I was the one involved, he said gallantly, “It’s
not possible that so very young a lady can have any connection with a
generation so long since passed away.”

“Mrs. Almera Canfield was my great-grandmother,” I said, perhaps rather
drily. Not that I cared especially about Great-grandmother, of whom at
that time I knew very little, and who seemed as remote from my life as
Moses. But that same hateful, contrary streak in my nature was roused
to resentment by his apparent assumption that a smile and a word from
him could set anything straight.

He found the fact of my relationship and of my knowledge of it very
amusing, “Where, oh, where, out of Vermont could you find a modern
young person who even knew the name of her great-grandmother? I’m
sure, my dear, that family loyalties are outlawed by such a long
interval of years. And I’m also sure by one look at you, that you are
not at all like your great-grandmother.”

He seemed to think, I reflected, that I would be sure to take that as a
compliment. She must have been an old Tartar.

I could think of nothing to answer, and he turned away again, to go on
chatting with the people who continued to hang on his words, laughing
loudly when he said something playful, nodding a grave concurrence in
his more seriously expressed opinions, their eyes always fixed on his.

They all moved away, out into the church and down the aisle and I
did not see him again till that evening, when, quite unexpectedly,
he appeared beside me in the break-up of the company after the large
public dinner.

“I feel that I owe you an apology,” he began persuasively and
courteously, “for having let slip that chance remark about a relative
of yours, even so very far distant. I would not have said it, of
course, if I had dreamed that any member of her family....” Up to this
point he had used the same sort of voice and tone that he had employed
after church that morning, but now he suddenly dropped into another
tone, quite different. I had a divination that it was not only quite
different from any inflection he had used, but also not at all what he
had had the intention of using. “I try to be fair ... to be tolerant
... to be _forgiving_, but really I can never forget the....” (it was
as if a wave of lava had burst up out of the smiling pleasantness of
his agreeable manner) “I simply can’t express to you the blighting,
devastating effect she had on me, young, sensitive, emotional and
ardent as I was at that time!”

He started at the violence of his own voice and glanced quickly around
him as if to see whether any one else had heard it. And then he looked
intensely annoyed by his own gesture.

“You are probably assuming that I refer,” he went on more quietly,
but still pressingly (it was as if for some reason he quite cared to
influence my unimportant opinion), “that I refer to her dictatorial
assurance that she knew better than any one else how things ought
to be run. Of course you must have heard plenty of stories of her
overbearing ways. But that is not the point; no, although she was a
hard parishioner on that account for a young clergyman struggling with
the administration of his first parish. What came back to me, in a wave
of bitterness as I stood up to preach to-day, was the remembrance of
the peculiarly corrosive vein of irony, with which she withered and
dried to the root any play of poetry or emotion in those about her. So
far from feeling any natural, human sympathy with ardent youth, she
had a cold intolerance for any nature richer or more warmly colored
than her own. She made it her business to drop an acid sneer upon any
expression of emotion or any appeal to it; and a life-long practice in
that diabolical art had given her a technique of raw, brutal roughness,
guaranteed to hamstring any spontaneity of feeling, any warmth of
personality. I could quote you dozens of such poisoned shafts of
hers.... Here’s one that came into my mind as I stood again in that
pulpit, where I first dedicated myself to the service of God.

“I can never forget her comment on the first sermon in which I let
myself go into the fervor which was given me by nature. It was an
appeal for foreign missions, a cause always dear to my heart. I was
carried away by my feelings, and fairly poured out my soul to my
listeners. I have always considered that to be my first real sermon,
the first time I felt sure of my Vocation. Afterwards, as I stood in
the robing room, faint with the reaction after my emotion, I heard some
one just outside the door say, ‘Well, Aunt Almera, what did you think
of the sermon?’ And what do you think her answer was! She said, ‘Oh, I
_like_ to see anybody enjoy himself as much as that young man did.’”

This unexpected conclusion brought to me such a sudden horrifying
desire to laugh that I felt quite shaken by the necessity to curb it.
And it was essential not to let it be seen. For he had wound himself up
again to a heat which astonished me. It was as if he had meant casually
to show me an old scar, and had found to his surprise that the wound
was as raw and smarting as ever.

“Why,” he cried, “she all but drove me wholly out of preaching, at
the very outset of my career, sitting there as she did, Sunday after
Sunday, fixing that cynical aged eye on me. You can’t know ... I hear
that you have been brought up, luckily for you, outside of this deadly
New England atmosphere.... You can’t _imagine_ how it kills and freezes
all the warmth and color and fire out of life to have such a ... if I
hadn’t escaped out of it to....”

“I’m afraid I’ve been brought up mostly in a New England atmosphere,” I
said, beginning to feel very cross and prickly.

As if struck by something in my tone, he now looked at me very hard. I
don’t know what he saw in my face ... perhaps a family resemblance of
expression ... but he suddenly seemed to come to himself with a start.
He said abruptly, with an expression of extreme annoyance once more on
his face, “I beg your pardon for bringing all this up. I can’t think
what in the world made me!” and turned away with a noticeable lack of
suavity and grace of manner.


Once I was taken to see an old Irishwoman who had come from Ireland as
a young girl, just after the great famine in ’48, and had gone to work
for Great-grandmother, who was then sixty-three years old. She told me
this story, in her thick, thick early-nineteenth-century brogue, which
I will not try to reproduce here: “There was a pretty girl, young and
happy-looking, that lived up the road with her father, a poor weak
rag of a man with a backbone like a piece of string. He’d married for
his second wife a hard, hard woman. And when they found out the girl
was in trouble, and her sweetheart that was the cause of it off up in
the North Country for the winter to work as a lumberjack, didn’t the
stepmother turn the poor girl out--yes, out like a dog. And old Mrs.
Canfield--that was some kin to you, I forget what--where I was working,
she went right out and brought her in, and kept her there safe and
sound all winter, treating her as nice as anybody, letting her sew
to pay for her keep, and helping her make the baby clothes. She’d go
with her to church every Sunday, the girl right on her arm, and nobody
daring to say a word, for fear of old Mrs. Canfield’s tongue, ‘For,’
she used to say, ‘let ’em say a word if they dare, and I’ll tell a few
things I know about some folks in this town who had to be married in a
hurry, and whose babies came into the world ahead of time.’ You see,
she was so old she knew everything that had happened from the beginning
almost. She’d say, ‘There’s lots worse things done every day in this
town than anything Margaret’s done,’ she’d say, and nobody to answer
her back a word.

“But everybody was thinking it very certain that the man would never
come back, and if he did, he’d never own the child, nor have anything
to do with Margaret, poor girl! You see, in those days there weren’t
any mails that were carried ’way back off in the woods, and she neither
had any word of him nor he of her. Well, old Mrs. Canfield knew what
people were saying all right, and I could see that she was troubled in
her mind, though she never lowered her high head by an inch. Margaret’s
time drew near, and no sign from John Dawson that was away. But
Margaret never lost her faith in him a minute. ‘When John is back,’
she’d say, just as sure of him as though they’d been married by the
priest; but I could see old Mrs. Canfield look queer when she’d hear
Margaret talking that way.

“And then one morning, in April ’twas, and we’d all the doors and
windows open for the first time, Margaret had gone down the walk to
look at the lilac bush to see if there were any buds on it, and around
the corner came John Dawson!

“Her back was to him and he hadn’t any idea she was there, so when
she turned round, they stared at each other for just a minute, as if
they’d never seen each other. Now the moment had come, Margaret stood
there frozen, just waiting, like a little scared, helpless--I had the
half of me hanging out the kitchen window to see what would happen, and
I’ll never forget it--never--never--never--the look on his face, the
astounded look on his face, so full of pity and love, so strong with
pity and love. ‘Margie! _Margie!_’ he said in a loud voice, and threw
his sack off his back and his gun from his hand, and ran, ran to take
her in his arms.

“Well, when I could see again, I went off to tell old Mrs. Canfield,
and there was the old lady in her own bedroom, standing bolt upright
in the middle of the floor, and crying at the top of her voice. Her
wrinkled old face was just a-sop with tears. Faith, but it was the
grand cry she was having! And the good it did her! When she came to,
she says to me, ‘Well,’ says she, ‘folks aren’t so cussed as they seem,
are they?’

“And then we went downstairs to get out the fruit-cake and the brandied
peaches; for the minister married them in our parlor that afternoon.”


One day old Mr. Morgan, the one-armed Civil War veteran, took me along
with him, to get out of the buckboard and open gates, on the back road
along the river. He was going up to a hill pasture to salt his sheep.
It took forever to get there, because his horse was so slow, and he
had time to tell me a great many stories. This was one of them: “When
I was a boy at school, I worked at Aunt Almera Canfield’s doing chores
night and morning. I remember how she used to loosen herself up in
the morning. She was terribly rheumaticky, but she wouldn’t give in
to it. Every morning she’d be all stiffened up so she couldn’t stand
up straight, nor hardly move her legs at all; but she’d get herself
dressed somehow, and then two of her sons came in to help her get
started. She’d make them take hold of her, one on each side, and walk
her around the room. It was awful to hear how she’d yell out--yell as
though they were killing her! And then they’d stop, the sweat on their
faces to see how it hurt her, and then she’d yell at them to go on,
go on, _she_ hadn’t asked them to stop! They were over sixty, both of
them, with grandchildren themselves, but they didn’t dare not do what
she said, and they’d walk her round again. She’d kick her poor legs
out in front of her hard, to get the joints limbered up, and holler
with the pain, and kick them out again, till by and by she’d get so she
could go by herself, and she’d be all right for the day. I tell you, I
often think of that. Yes, lots of times, it comes back to me.”

Up in the sheep pasture, as we sat to rest the horse, he told me this:
“I always thought Aunt Almera knew all about the John Brown raid before
most folks did--maybe she sent some money to help him. She wasn’t a
bit surprised, anyhow, when she heard of it, and all through the whole
business she never thought of another thing, nor let anybody else. He
was caught--any of us that lived in that house those days will never
forget a one of those dates--and put in jail on the 9th of October,
and his trial lasted until the 31st. Aunt Almera made us get together
in the evenings, me and the hired girl and one of her grandsons and
her daughter, all the family, and she’d read aloud to us out of the
‘Tribune’ about what had happened that day at his trial. I never saw
her so worked up about anything--just like ashes her old face was, and
her voice like cold steel. We got as excited about it as she did, all
of us, especially her grandson, that was about my age. The day of his
execution--December 2d, it was--Aunt Almera came at dawn to wake me up.
‘Put on your clothes,’ says she, ‘and go over to the church and begin
to toll the bell.’ I didn’t need to ask her what for, either. I’ll
never forget how awful she looked to me.

“Well, we tolled the bell all day long, one or the other of the family,
never stopped a minute. You never heard anything so like death. All day
long that slow, deep clang--and then a stillness--and then _clang!_
again. I could hear it in my head for days afterwards. Folks came in
from all around to find out what it meant, and Aunt Almera called them
all into her parlor--she sat there all day and never ate a mouthful
of food--and _told_ them what it meant, so they couldn’t ever get the
sound of her voice out of their ears. Between times she’d read out
of the Bible to whoever was there, ‘Avenge thou thy cause, O Lord God
of battles,’ and ‘It is time for thee, O Lord, to lay to thy hand,
for they have destroyed thy law,’ and ‘Let there be no man to pity
them; nor to have compassion of their fatherless children.’ It was the
darndest thing to hear her!

“You’d better believe when Abraham Lincoln sent out the first call for
men there wasn’t a boy of military age in our town that didn’t enlist!”


An aged cousin had just died, and as we sat downstairs talking with the
doctor, he said to my aunt, who had been taking care of the sick woman:
“She took it hard! She took it hard!”

They both frowned, and my aunt looked rather sick. Then the doctor
said, “Not much like your grandmother, do you remember?”

“Oh, yes, I remember,” said my aunt, her face quivering, her eyes
misty, her lips smiling.

The doctor explained to me: “Your great-grandmother was an old, old
woman before she ever was really sick at all, except for rheumatism.
And then she had a stroke of paralysis that left her right side dead.
She lived four days that way--the only days she’d spent in bed in
years, since she was a young woman, I suppose. Her mind wasn’t very
clear, she couldn’t talk so that we could understand her, and I don’t
think she rightly knew anybody after her stroke. I guess she went
back, ’way back, for we saw from what she did that she thought she had
a little baby with her. I suppose she thought she was a young mother
again, and that was why she was in bed. We used to see her spread out
her arm, very gentle and slow, the only arm she could move, so’s to
make a hollow place for a little head, and then she’d lie there, so
satisfied and peaceful, looking up at the ceiling with a smile in her
eyes, as if she felt a little warm, breathing creature there beside
her. And sometimes she’d half wake up and stretch out her hand and
seem to stroke the baby’s head or snuggle it up closer to her, and
then she’d give a long sigh of comfort to find it there, and drop off
to sleep again, smiling. And she’d always remember, even in her sleep,
to keep her arm curved around so there’d be room for the baby; and
even in her sleep her face had that shining new-mother look--that old
wrinkled face, with that look on it! I’ve seen lots of death-beds, but
I never--” he stopped for a moment.

“Why, at the very last--do you remember?”--he went on to my aunt, “I
thought she was asleep, but as I moved a chair she opened her eyes
quickly, looked down as if to see whether I had wakened the baby, and
looked at me, to warn me to be quiet, her fingers at her lips. ‘Sh!’
she whispered.

“And that was the way she died.”



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