Gilbert was almost six years old when they all--Mother, Olga, and
baby--went to live with Garna in her tall white house. And his
expanding life leaped to meet the wide world, with its new excitements
and pleasures. It was like a rescue, like getting air when one is
smothering. Here was space and a new largeness in things. Gilbert was
freed forever from the back-street.
Garna’s house was ridiculous but it was not despicable. For your
meals you went down into a dark basement dining-room, behind a
blacker kitchen. And the outhouse, buried in Virginia creepers and
trumpet-vine, was down a long path bordered by grape-vines, where you
went fearfully at night. Gilbert was afraid of this dark, long after
he was old enough to be ashamed that his mother must come with him and
stand protectingly outside. In winter, the stars shone at him with icy
brilliancy, and the vines made a thick menacing mass around him.
Back of the house was a pump, painted very bright and green, where the
water came up cold and sparkling and ran suddenly out of its spout
over your shoes unless you were careful. And when they had finished
pumping, the well would give a long, deep sigh, whether of fatigue
or satisfaction, Gilbert never knew. In the dark kitchen, which you
entered down a flight of stone steps, there was another pump, but it
brought forth, after long persuasion, only rain-water which to Gilbert
tasted uninteresting, and which he was not allowed to drink, but which
they carried in zinc pails up two long spidery flights, and for Aunt
Nan’s room, three, so that you could wash your face in the morning.
Only on wash-day was that pump interesting when the servant filled
great wooden tubs out of it, and created huge foamy waves in them, and
beat and rubbed, and then filled long clothes-lines with damp white
garments which coiled around you clammily and disgustingly if you ran
too close under them when you were playing.
The dining-room always had a musty smell, and was always cold in
winter, though the door into the warm kitchen was propped open with
a brick. Gilbert would eat his breakfast and run out quickly to warm
his hands at the shining black range. In the summer, it was close and
stuffy, for it was lighted only by two windows at the top which were
level with the ground and opened into a little depression, so that the
shutters would move freely. In the great thunder-storms of summer,
this hollow would fill with water and as Gilbert sat there eating his
lunch, thrilling at the loud claps and the darting lightning, the
water would begin to stream over the sill and down the walls. Then
Annie would have to be hastily called, and with many ejaculations she
would throw her apron over her head, and rush out with a dish-pan to
bail out the hollow. Gilbert would stand on a chair and see dimly
through rain-streaming panes this huge slopping figure, throwing
pails of water into the path. But ordinarily nothing happened in the
dining-room. Sometimes in the summer, an odious snail or two would come
out of the walls and leave his track across the worn carpet. In a vast
closet were stored rows of jellies which Garna had put up, and which
Gilbert and Olga would sometimes get a taste of, for a treat. Behind
the dining-room was the cellar, gratefully warm in winter with its
glowing furnace, and cool in summer with its whitewashed walls. Gilbert
loved to spend long summer afternoons there watching Annie turn the
ice-cream freezer, and waiting anxiously until the top was taken off to
be tested, and you got a taste of the fresh churned cream, or licked
the dasher when it was all over. Or sometimes, in winter while Annie
shovelled coal into the furnace, Gilbert stood fearfully by and saw the
blackish flame shoot up through the new coal. But on the whole, the
basement was not a pleasant place. The furnace, so hot when you stood
by it, sent only feeble currents of air up to the little registers that
opened into the vast rooms above. And always, the year round, there was
that musty dining-room to descend into three times a day, with its old
frayed chairs, its uncertain carpet, its stained brown walls.
Nor did the creatures who inhabited the basement attract him. Annie
changed her guise, but not her nature. And she scarcely changed her
guise. If his mother had ever had a servant in the back-street,
Gilbert did not remember it. But in Garna’s house one naturally had a
servant, and one naturally had a Polish girl. Gilbert did not at first
understand what Annie was doing in the kitchen, this queer, whitish
young woman with many skirts and vast breasts, who gave a sort of
growl-smile when you spoke to her, and always started incontinently,
with alacrity, to do something without knowing what it was. Gilbert
would come in from the garden into the fragrant kitchen on baking-day
to look for cookies, and find his mother moving about, with her
serious, anxious expression, while Annie sprawled about, cutting up
potatoes, and listening to his mother’s earnest expostulations. In
a few months there would be another Annie; her mouth was perhaps
crookeder and her hair yellower, but she would plunge clumsily about
in the same old way, and would take up her education not where the
other Annie had left off, but precisely in that brutish ignorance where
she had begun. To Gilbert’s mother, the living and successive tissue
of Annies became the absorption of life, but Gilbert was not absorbed
in Annies. They were not pretty, and they had a stale odor which
Gilbert avoided when he could. He associated the unpleasantness of
this strong, docile creature, who relapsed in each transformation to
her original brutish ignorance, with the whole unpleasantness of that
downstairs floor, the dining-room which remained always the same, whose
dull squalor nobody ever did anything to take away, for which Gilbert
could not do anything, and for which perhaps nothing could be done.
Upstairs, Gilbert liked Garna’s house better. The front parlor was a
vast and cavernous room, the mysteries of which Gilbert penetrated
only slowly. The back parlor was much more comprehensible. Here the
sun shone in, and people sat and lived. When you entered the front
parlor, you involuntarily lowered your voice, and you moved around
subdued, as if someone had died there. Garna never opened the windows,
and the shutters of the bay which looked towards the east were always
kept tightly closed. But in the back parlor on bright winter days you
sent the shade flying up to the top, and let the sun stream in over
the floor all the way to the monster of a horsehair-covered sofa which
stretched along the wall.
Horsehair made you feel almost as puckery as matting to touch it, and,
besides, you could not climb up its slippery edges very easily. And
once you were perched up there, you began to slide and slide until you
would fall in a heap ignominiously off that ungainly and inhospitable
bulk of a sofa. So you would go over and sit at Garna’s feet, as she
rocked slowly in her great chair, which you must never tip too far
back for fear of the grand-father’s clock that stood in the corner
behind it. The clock had a loud and lovely bell which struck the hours.
Gilbert could always tell when it was going to strike, for a minute
or two before the hour there was a sharp click. Then a little later
would begin a vast rumbling from the very chest of the old clock,
as if it were taking a long, deep breath for its pealing song. When
Gilbert was in the room, he always stopped and listened for the whole
long satisfactory performance. It was slow, it was prepared, it was
beautiful, and when Garna got a clock for the dining-room which rattled
off a quick little tinkle of a stroke, Gilbert despised it, and would
have covered his ears if he had not thought it would be silly.
Upstairs the rooms were just as vast. There was Mother’s room, into
which the sunlight poured, and which was the warmest in winter,
though you took turns rushing to the register to dress where it was
warm, before washing in the cold water of the wash-bowl. Just off from
Mother’s room was a little room, with nothing in it but a huge bed,
where Olga and Gilbert slept, and a dresser, in which Gilbert’s clothes
were kept. On the wall were two old pictures, one representing a donkey
in the midst of illimitable and ineffable summer pastures, and marked,
“Everything Lovely,” the other showing him in the blizzard before a
locked stabledoor, with “Nobody loves me!” Against the tall window,
at the foot of the bed, were rows and rows of shelves, on which stood
flower-pots all winter long, geraniums and begonias, and heliotrope
plants, so that they could catch the full warmth of the winter sun
and keep green for summer, when Mother took them out of the pots and
put them in rows in the garden again. The window was almost smothered
in rich greenery, and sometimes when Gilbert would wake up early on a
winter morning, when the light was just beginning to come through the
leaves, he would find that the shelves had become a black silhouetted
tracery of amazing figures. Queer outlandish heads,--fierce dragomans
with pipes in their mouths, Chinamen with queues, policemen with round
helmets, or animals such as Gilbert had seen at the Zoo--camels with
misshapen humps, elephants with long trunks, the head of a lion. It was
very startling to wake up, lying on one’s back and gazing out where
this faint light appeared in the crevices between these weird figures.
The pleasant green plants with which they had gone to bed had given
place to queer apparitions. Yet they must be plants. But how could
plants look so terrifyingly like heads? Everywhere he looked there
appeared a bristling, clear shape. The window was a vast tracery of
strangeness. Gilbert was never quite sure how real they were, and he
was always grateful when the advancing light gradually brought out the
greenness of the leaves, and finally threw them into relief, so that
the menacing head would finally dissolve into the utterly meaningless
juncture of two geranium blossoms, and the elephant trunk became a
familiar begonia frond. Then he was cheered, and he wondered how he had
ever seen anything else. No wildest forcing of his imagination could
make him see the things he had seen.
It was in this room that Gilbert’s mother put the children to bed every
night, and then took out the lamp to her room, leaving the door just
slightly ajar, so they would not be afraid. Everything was so cozy and
comfortable during the undressing. Then would come the frightening
thought, “Perhaps this comforting presence is going to be withdrawn!”
For sometimes you would wake up suddenly with a little clutch at the
heart. The dim light would be burning through the crack of the door,
but there would be a vast stillness. You knew that the house was empty,
that somehow it was the middle of a night that would never end, and
everybody, Garna, Mother, and Annie, had gone off to some distant
muffled cavern and would never come again. Olga, sleeping in a little
round ball at your side, her eyes seraphically closed, was of no avail.
The light burned steadily on, only deepening the terror of eternity,
of being lost. Should you call? What would be the use? They were
infinitely far away, in a sort of Buddha-like trance. So you cried a
little, and fell off asleep.
Or if you did not go to sleep, you waited dumbly, and, after æons of
time, you heard an unmistakable door close softly downstairs, and in a
minute Mother was looking in at you, to see if you were safe. And you
said, “Mother!” in a half-choking voice, while great waves of relief
and happiness surged through you, and you went sound asleep. So Gilbert
got in the habit of asking his mother every night whether she was going
out. And what assurance and peace there was when she said she was not!
He was safe, no matter how long the night lasted.
In Gilbert’s new house, you could go upstairs in two ways--the
front-stairs, and the back-stairs. The front-stairs were very straight
and very long and very steep, and were covered with a thick carpet.
They went straight down to a little narrow hall and the front door.
The back-stairs were crooked and narrow and covered with oil-cloth.
They ran down to a little passageway which connected the back parlor
with the “side-door,” right at the opening of the dark, steep flight
that went down into the dining-room. All these regions and passages
in Gilbert’s house had names. Gilbert soon learned that he must never
go down the front-stairs, but must always use the back ones. But one
unfortunate day, his cousin George, who was eight, showed him the
delights of sliding down the banisters, and Gilbert, although he could
never walk down the front-stairs without a feeling of the most awful
guilt, let himself be seduced into this new and amazing adventure. The
rapturous slide down the long, straight, polished wood was so safe and
gave him such a thrill that he tried it again and again. But Olga,
who by this time was all of five years old, insisted on riding too,
and threatened so instant and tumultuous a devastation of tears, that
Gilbert and George, in a panic at being discovered, held her up and,
having adjusted her little legs and cautioned her as to the way one let
one’s fingers slide along the slippery rail, let her go.
Now there was attached to the wall by a bracket a lamp, which Gilbert’s
legs just cleared, although he was always conscious of a fine potential
crash. But as Olga went slipping down the rail, it was inevitable that
she should choose just that place to fall off, which Gilbert had all
the morning been thrillingly avoiding. She fell floppily into the hall,
carrying the lamp-shade with her, and making a crash which brought
Mother and Annie from the kitchen and Garna from her room above. Then
there were tears and scoldings in a great flood, and a few reluctant
whacks; George was sent home, and the banisters were never slid on
again, at least not by Olga. Gilbert used them only as a special treat
to himself and only in his most unwatched moments. It was one instance
where his fiercely clutching guilt melted away before the thrill of
that slide.
Gilbert’s house, however, afforded few excitements. Garna’s big room
you did not often enter, though you might on Sunday while she was
putting on her veil and bonnet to take you to church. Gilbert did not
care very much how the rest of the family got to church, but it was one
of the most important things in his life that he should go with Garna.
At nine o’clock the church-bell would begin to ring, gayly, quickly,
sometimes the long peals almost falling over each other in their
eagerness. Then it would stop, with a final long echo. Now the whole
town knew that it was Sunday. Then at ten o’clock the great bell would
ring again, not quite so gayly nor so quickly, to let the people know
that there would be church that day. Then at twenty minutes after ten
the bell would begin its real earnestness,--slow and solemn strokes,
each one ringing its full sonorous note and dying away before the next
one began.
At the first stroke of the ten o’clock bell, Gilbert would rush to
Garna’s room, where he would find her putting on her black silk dress
and little lace collar. Her black bonnet with its long crêpe veil,
which Gilbert soon learned meant that grandfather was dead, would be
spread out on the bed. When the last bell began to ring, and Garna had
not yet put on her bonnet, an icy fear gripped Gilbert’s heart. They
would be late! The maddening slowness with which Garna put the last
touches to her bonnet used to send Gilbert into a delirium of anxiety.
Finally they were out on the elm-shaded streets, Gilbert fairly tugging
and straining to get them there before service began. Mother and Olga
were always late, but that was because Olga cried. He could abandon
them. He did not know what would happen to Garna and him if they were
late, but he felt that it would be something namelessly awful.
But they were never late. They would sit there in the pew several
minutes while the organ played and the great bell boomed outside, up in
the tower. Then the minister would come in, and a sense of security
and peace would steal over Gilbert, listening to the hymn and looking
up at Garna, so glossy and placid next him in the pew.
In prayer-time, Gilbert would have liked to put his head down on the
pew-rail in front of him, just as Garna and all the other people did,
but he could not reach it. So he had to be content with ducking his
head into his hand, and holding his eyes very tightly shut until he
heard the “Amen” which sent them all upright again. Why people had to
conceal their faces while they prayed Gilbert did not know, but it gave
him a very solemn feeling to keep his eyes closed, and an even more
solemn one to open them surreptitiously and look over the wilderness of
bent backs.
The ceiling was very far away, and very blue, with queer indented
squares that shot out reddish lines. Out of it came two enormous
chandeliers of brass, with a ring of lights around, which were
sometimes lighted on a dark day and made a chain of dancing lamplight.
There were galleries running down each side of the church, held up by
slender white pillars. Outside, just at the top of the pillars, ran a
narrow ledge. Gilbert’s imagination would perform perilous adventures
along that ledge. You would walk along, along, and around the back and
up the other side, dizzily perched above the congregation, clinging to
the brass rail, and you would come to the choir behind the minister’s
desk. From the ledge to the choir was a gap of a few feet, but Gilbert
saw himself jumping it, and his heart would beat faster. And then he
would return painfully, exhilaratedly, around that ledge, holding on so
tightly.
When Gilbert got tired of this play he would look up at the strange
figures that were fastened to the under side of the ledge. They looked
like playing-cards, little square raised blocks marked with black
points, at regular intervals down the gallery. Gilbert sometimes
imagined that they were really cards, and that a hooded figure moving
down the aisles would touch them with a wand, and they would lose their
frozen state and fall to the floor. From where Gilbert sat, lines went
out from him in all directions: lines of the pews, lines of the aisle
ahead which went along under the gallery, angles of the walls, lines
of the windows. Sometimes, as his gaze wandered around the church, the
line of a pillar would coincide with the line of a window, and Gilbert
would hold them there together, getting a sudden satisfaction out of
holding them in coincidence, and letting them go reluctantly, only when
his eye would mount to the queer people in the gallery, whose bonnets
and eyes and noses you could just see over the brass railing.
Sometimes in the summer when Uncle Marcus’s family was away, Garna and
Gilbert sat in their pew at the back of the gallery, a pew that was as
big as a house, with great arm-chairs and cushions for your feet. In
front of you was the clock, the face of which you could not see, for it
looked out straight towards the minister, but whose ticking you could
hear. Gilbert felt very public and self-conscious when he sat there,
under the high ceiling, with two long arms of the gallery, crowded with
its two tiers of people, stretching away on either hand. Yet it was
all very august, and religion seemed to have attained its most solemn
worthiness when you sat in Uncle Marcus’s pew.
The minister was very large and very loud, and he wore a white tie.
Gilbert did not altogether like him when he laid his moist and unctuous
hand on Gilbert’s head, as he sometimes did in Sunday School. For
after you had gone to church with Garna, you let her go home, and you
stayed to Sunday School. You went into an old brick building, which
stood a little distance from the church. The light poured through the
big windows, and you could see the lilac-bushes outside. The room swam
with very fluffy little girls, but when they had sung several hymns,
Gilbert and half a dozen other little boys were shepherded into a
corner and sat on their little chairs in a circle around Miss Fogg,
while she taught them the lesson for the day. Gilbert always knew his
golden text, and he was often the only little boy who did. Miss Fogg
would smile at him, which would make him uncomfortable, and he would be
glad when they all stood up and marched around the room to drop their
pennies into a basket which Miss Fogg held while they sang:
“Hear the pennies dropping,
Listen while they fall,
Every one for Jesus.
He will have them all.”
Gilbert did not doubt that Jesus would have them all, and he was
not in the least interested in what Jesus did with them when he had
them. It was part of the ceremony, to which you resigned yourself
unquestioningly, and when the penny-dropping was over, Gilbert ran
home as fast as he could go, to the wonderful dinner of roast beef and
potatoes that Mother had for them on Sundays.
Sunday School was a neutral, colorless event in his life. Every Sunday
as they left the Sunday School, each child would receive a little
leaflet; those who had known their golden texts would get a card with
a golden star on it. Gilbert always cried a little if he lost his card
while running home, and he cherished his leaflet for a day or two. But
he never tried to read it, and he soon mislaid his golden star. Good
boys, after they had got a prodigious number of golden stars, were
each supposed to receive as a reward a Bible all of his own. But when
Gilbert was seven years old, Garna gave him a beautiful thick black
Bible, with his name--Gilbert Shotwell Harden--stamped on the cover
in golden letters. Besides, it did not appeal to him to grub along
for a prize. Far better to have things, glorious, imposing, come to
you out of the blue sky. Once Aunt Shotwell promised him fifty cents
if he would learn the Westminster Catechism, but Gilbert never got
farther than “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him
forever.” Something obscure, unconscious, revolted in him at the base
commerciality of the transaction, and although he did not question that
this was the chief end of man indeed, he did not want to be bribed into
proclaiming it.
Things were better in the stories he learned from Miss Fogg: that Adam
had eaten the apple and been expelled from Eden; that Noah had built
and taken his cruise in the ark; that Abraham had offered up Isaac,
and Jacob served seven years; that Moses had led the Israelites into
the wilderness, and Joshua made the sun stand still; that David should
have loved Jonathan and killed Goliath; that Samson should have been
shorn of his strength, and Esther gotten Haman hanged higher than the
housetops;--all in order to teach little boys and girls to be good, to
obey their fathers and mothers and go regularly to church and Sunday
School, seemed to Gilbert entirely plausible, at least as it was
expounded by the patient and smiling Miss Fogg. He read the stories in
his new Bible, but he did not wonder much about them.
Every now and then there was a temperance lesson, when Miss Fogg
would horrify the little boys with her pictures of the evils of strong
drink. Gilbert had never seen any spirituous liquors, and he could
hardly identify them in his mind, but through the vivid and scandalized
exhortations of the minister and Miss Fogg, Gilbert conceived liquor as
a dark, evil-smelling brew, a sort of religious urine, which foul and
wicked men put into their stomachs, so that at once homes were wrecked,
and mothers and children brought to abject want. The process by which
this result arrived was vague in his mind, but the earliest genuine
crime of which he had knowledge and felt with a shuddering realization
of the existence of sin was this crime of entering a saloon, or of
drinking down wine or beer. One of the golden texts was a special
favorite with Gilbert and Olga, and she would declaim it with great
éclat, in a broad, free-verse style:
“Wine is a maw-aw-ker,
Strong drink is ray-ay-ging,
And whoever is deceived there-by-y,
Is not--wise!”
But sin, on the whole, was a very vague idea to Gilbert. He early
learned that God had sent His Son Jesus down to earth to save us from
our sins, and that this was the central fact of life. Garna told him
about it, and so did Miss Fogg, when they later had lessons in the
New Testament. We must all love God very much, and especially Jesus,
who had done so much for us. And in the solemn Sunday afternoons,
when Gilbert was told to take his Bible and sit by the window in the
back-parlor and read a chapter, he would sometimes wonder if he loved
God enough, or if he loved Jesus. God was a majestic old gentleman with
a white beard, reclining on white cumulus clouds, and Jesus he knew
equally well as a young man in an archaic blue robe, holding a lamb in
one arm, and followed by others. He had seen their pictures long ago,
and whenever either of them was mentioned, these images popped into his
mind, faintly colored by a sense of awe, as in the case of God, and of
tenderness, as in the case of Jesus. But did he love them? The pastor
was certainly a very poor caricature of God, and yet with his beard and
square head and loud words, there must be a faint resemblance. Gilbert
certainly did not like him.
Much more nearly like God was his father’s father, whom he had once
been taken to see and whom he remembered now as a white-haired,
white-bearded man, very solemn, and yet with something cold and
repellent about him whenever Gilbert had touched him. Gilbert did not
feel that he loved this God, and yet he knew that he ought to, that it
was the most important thing in life that he could do. So he would sit
there and try to screw his heart into an attitude of loving. He would
grow very serious and tighten his muscles, and fix his thought on the
majesty reclining on the white cloud, and, pretty soon, he would feel
that indeed he now loved God, and he would be kept from sin. Jesus, who
was tenderer, he might have found easier to love, but for the fact of
those lambs. Gilbert had never seen young men carrying lambs, and the
picture, whose authenticity he did not question, aroused no emotion
within him. But after he had come to love God, he tightened his heart
towards the benignant being in the blue robe.
He was always present, because before every meal they would all put
down their heads, so that they breathed upon their plates, and they
would ask Jesus to bless their food. Sometimes Gilbert would say it,
sometimes Olga, and the food unblessed would have tasted bad in their
mouths. Gilbert would have had a vague presentiment of something evil.
Did Garna and Mother love God? Garna must, because every day she would
put on her gold-rimmed spectacles and read a chapter in her Bible, and
mother would kneel down with Gilbert and Olga at night while they said
their prayers, and often murmur something fervently with them. The
prayers, they understood, were addressed directly to God in heaven,
and were necessary if you were to show your gratitude to the Heavenly
Father and ensure for yourself a peaceful and secure night. You asked
God also to bless all those people you were fond of, and you knew that
if they should die before they woke, their souls also would be taken to
Heaven with yours.
If it was only with painful effort that Gilbert in his early days of
church and Sunday School loved God and Jesus, whom did he love? Did he
love Mother? He did not know. He loved her very much at night when he
felt her protecting presence in the house, but in the daytime she was
a strange being who did not seem interested in Gilbert and Olga. She
spent most of her time with little brother, or, if he were asleep, she
would be lying stretched across the foot of the bed, with her face in
her hands. Often there were tears in her eyes, and if Gilbert wanted
her to do something for him, she would say piteously that she was not
well. There were no more walks on the village green, but this did not
make any difference to Gilbert, for the wonderful yard in which Garna’s
house stood was a region that could never be explored or exhausted.
The one person that Gilbert knew he loved was Garna. You could not
always see her, for she would be shut up in her room; but when you were
let in, how inexhaustible she was, how comfortable you felt, playing
about on the floor while Garna sat always by the window, sewing, always
sewing, looking so wise and jolly and good out of her gold-rimmed
spectacles. Garna was always the same, and always good to be with and
look upon. Gilbert loved to sit in her lap, and touch her hair, brushed
to such silky smoothness and parted in the middle. As she bent over, he
would run both hands back over it from her forehead, and laugh as she
laughed and pretended to arrange it again.
Gilbert liked to have Garna all to himself, and it was fortunate
that Olga was not much interested in Garna. She did not seem to half
appreciate her or her wonderful room. But once in a while she would
take a perverse desire to come in with Gilbert when he went to see
Garna. Olga would have to be prevented with all his weight and force.
How could he stand so outrageous an invasion of his rights? And Olga
would probably hit him, concentrating all her round little pugnacity
into one stout blow, and Gilbert would hit back, and Olga would scream,
and Mother would come running, and there would be many tears, and Eden
would be spoiled, if not altogether denied him, for that afternoon. On
the very threshold, Olga, who did not really care to be with Garna, had
ruined his day with her! Hateful little Olga! And all the time, Garna
would be inside, behind the closed door, serene, unheeding, letting
her daughter, Gilbert’s mother, settle the whole affair, as far away
as if she were in Pampelune. Gilbert felt the perversity of Fate, the
inexorable aloofness of the gods, the fragility of happiness. Going
eagerly to taste this sweet exhilaration of an afternoon with Garna,
the cup, without any warning whatever, would be fatally dashed from
his lips. But he could not have it shared with Olga!
Between Garna’s chair and the window was a high, chintz-colored box
which opened into a voluminous cavern of sheets and white things. In
the corner just behind Garna’s chair was the tall secretary-desk, with
its big doors above that opened on shelves full of books, and its heavy
writing-lid which folded down and rested horizontally on two supports
that pulled out on each side. You could sit on the high chintz-box
and write on the secretaire. Gilbert thought this was one of the most
satisfactory spots in the whole world. At your right was the window
looking down through the black-walnut trees to the street below; just
behind you sat Garna, busily knitting or sewing; you had all the flat,
shiny surface of the lid to make your puzzles on, or practise writing,
or draw on; your legs hung down over the chintz-box, high above the
ground; you were shut in to the most delicious privacy. At the back
of the secretaire were innumerable compartments and pigeon-holes in
which Garna kept her letters and papers; there were old diaries and
account-books, which Gilbert puzzled over, and one compartment Garna
gave Gilbert for his very own, so that he could keep his pencils and
paper there, and anything he chose, safe for ever from the depredations
of the marauding Olga, who seemed to Gilbert, whenever he thought of
her at all from his safe retreat, as a very imp of lawlessness, of
restless and devastating mischief. Sometimes, to make sure that no one
interrupted him, he would silently turn the keys in the doors. But
Garna did not like that very much, and it was awkward if Mother or Aunt
Nan really came and wanted to come in, and Garna had to wonder how the
doors could ever have become locked.
In the summer afternoons Garna would take her waist off, and sit
sewing in her bare arms. Gilbert liked to lean over and rub his face
against the expanse of cool flesh, lay his head on the cool shoulder,
and listen to Garna’s stories of when she was a little girl. Gilbert
learned about her father’s house in Burnham, which he should some day
see, but it was a long distance from where they lived now; about his
mill-pond and his mill, where great mahogany logs that came from the
West Indies were sawed up for furniture; about the canal that was dug,
when she was a little girl, through their very front yard, and on
which they saw the very first boat sail grandly by, the grandfather of
those boats that Gilbert had loved to watch from the porch of the house
in the back-street, and which he had almost forgotten now that he had
come to live with Garna.
So he would lean there against her arm, stroking her plump elbow with
its dimples that so fascinated him, and listening to her stories until,
in the drowsy summer air, he sank away indistinctly, and knew nothing
until he woke up towards supper-time on Garna’s high bed. Every now
and then, as a great distinction and event, Gilbert would be allowed
to sleep with Garna. How different and solemn it was from any other
sleep! When Gilbert said good-night to Garna in her big chair in the
back-parlor, it was with a “I’m going to sleep with you to-night!” Then
he would get, not into the hard little bed with Olga, but into the
great feathery soft bed in Garna’s room. He would sink off to sleep in
billows and oceans of soft pillows and sheets. Along towards morning
he would half wake, perhaps, and there would be the huge, comforting,
dear presence of Garna filling the bed beside him, as he lay pressed
against her warm night-gown. And when he woke again, Mother would be
there standing by the side of the bed, and she would whisk him off to
her room to be dressed. And life would go on as before.
Aunt Nan seemed to love Garna as much as Gilbert did. And she liked
Gilbert. Often, on summer days, she would take him up to her room
in the third-story, a region to which Gilbert never ventured alone,
for there were queer, pitchy-black closets and alcoves that led far
back under the sloping roof, and contained trunks and boxes, in which
and behind which you never knew what menacing forces of evil might
be hidden. At the top of the stairs was a little hall, lighted by a
sky-light, through which you saw the blue sky. Aunt Nan’s room was
shaped like an L, but the ceiling on one side ran down so steeply that
Gilbert could stand against the wall and touch the line where it joined
the ceiling. Aunt Nan would fix up a pallet on the floor, soft and
comfortable, and on hot days Gilbert would roll half-naked on it, while
Aunt Nan rubbed his hot arms with a sweet-smelling balsam. Then she
would sit and read a great shiny new book, which Gilbert spelled out
as “Psychology. James.” She had several books on shelves over her desk,
and a great bunch of programs stuck together on an iron hook that hung
on the wall. In the winter Aunt Nan was not in the house. Mother said
she was a teacher, and lived in New York.
Aunt Nan was very tall and slender and very straight, and she had very
black hair that came over her forehead in a kind of bang. She always
wore black and white dresses, and she always had a bright fierceness
about her that Gilbert liked. She was several years younger than
Mother, and she was very proud. There was a stiff exhilaration in her
walk and in her laugh that daunted Gilbert a little, but made him like
to be with her. Sometimes she would put the tennis-net across the green
lawn and play with a neighbor, darting so swiftly, like a long black
bird, across the green, hitting the ball so straight and true, and
blazing so fiercely with her black eyes when she missed, that Gilbert
sat enthralled, motionless, until the set was over and they went in
to supper. On those days he would help her mark the court, going to
the little barn and watching her fill the marker with white powdery
lime, and then helping her push it over the closely-mown grass. The
long summer days were full of Aunt Nan. She loved the garden, with its
flower-beds, and she loved to see the paths all clipped and weeded and
raked. Once a week, a black man would come from somewhere, and spend
the whole day with Aunt Nan, mowing the lawn, digging the vegetable
garden, and weeding the flowers. That was a glorious day for Gilbert
and for Aunt Nan. How much there was to be done. They all seemed to be
wrestling with the whole yard, to turn it up, to bring it to a bright,
shiny newness. At the end of the day, Gilbert would walk about the
garden on the gravelly paths with Aunt Nan to survey their handiwork.
She would be immensely contented. Her bright black eyes would soften;
she would be weary and her hands would be dirty, but Gilbert would feel
the peace that radiated from her at the sight of this freshly burnished
garden. The grass would be smooth like a carpet, the flower-beds and
the vegetable-garden all dark and tumbled with their upturned earth.
The paths would be straight brown indented tracks, or, where they went
around the house, beautifully curved tracks, with the marks of the
rake on the fine earth where George had worked it over. During the week
the grass would grow longer, the weeds shoot up in the flower-beds,
the paths become bedraggled at the edges, the grass grow up rank on
the lawns. But soon Saturday would come with George, and the fine
renovation would take place all over again.
Aunt Nan was neat and quick in her movements. She had a cold scorn for
dirty faces and dirty hands, and Gilbert sometimes became a little
weary trying to satisfy her demands. He was always a little intimidated
by her, but at the same time fascinated by her vibrancy, her restless
passion. He loved to see her coming towards him, because he knew that
she would snatch him away to something interesting. But he was a little
fearful, too; subdued by that decisiveness that made him realize how
little what he wanted would count. She did not kiss or fondle Gilbert
much. She would take him on her lap and put her arms around him.
Mother was never like that. She did not seem to know what she wanted.
Every incident was a crisis. Gilbert found that he and Olga could
resist her by delaying. Dirty faces could be grudgingly and slowly
cleaned. One could come in the utmost disapproving reluctance when one
was called. Mother was always distressed that you did not obey her; she
was always distressed about what to do with you. She would implore you
to be good, and you would be good with a certain chilly haughtiness,
because it seemed somewhat humiliating to see Mother so distressed and
uncertain. Olga did not usually obey, but kicked and screamed. Gilbert
soon got the habit of ignoring his mother’s expressed desires and
wearing out her decisiveness. Then he would be left alone to follow his
own desires.
That yard, which Aunt Nan loved so much, was for Gilbert a domain,
a principality. It was years before he had really explored it
thoroughly or searched out all its delights. At first it was a rich and
bountiful collection of all the things that Gilbert had missed in the
back-street. He did not know that he had missed them, but now that he
had found them, something down very deep in him told him that this was
what his restlessness and sadness had craved.
You rushed out the side-door--for the front door was just as heavily
interdicted as the front stairs--and you tumbled into a bed of myrtles
and wistaria which climbed out of the flower-bed in thick stalks and
grew steadily over the corner of the house. Across the path were two
tall pine trees, whose branches brushed Gilbert’s shutter by his bed
when the wind blew loud. Beyond the trees lay the green, unbroken lawn,
covered with velvety grass that even the lawn-mower could not keep from
growing thick and soft like a carpet. The lawn went straight up towards
the neighbor’s fence, but just before it reached there it turned into
a long flower-bed, with rose-bushes and tangled flowery vines that
climbed over and pretended that there was no fence there at all. To the
right, and up near the street corner of the yard were three more lordly
pines set in a triangle, which Gilbert had promptly named “Three Trees
Grove.” The floor was covered with needles. It was shady and spacious,
almost as big as Gilbert’s room. It could be turned into a house, or a
shop or a church, at a moment’s notice. The big trunks stretching up
above Gilbert’s head gave it an air of delightful majesty, and he could
not play there enough with Olga and Cousin Ethel.
At the other end of the broad lawn were the grape-arbors, six or
seven lines of them, where you walked between the overflowing vines
and looked longingly at the green bunches which took endless æons, all
through the long golden summer, to ripen, while Gilbert went every day
to examine them. Behind that was the barn, from which the horses and
carriage had vanished, though when Grandfather was alive, Garna told
him, they had their horses and Aunt Nan had ridden one of them, and so
had Uncle Rob, who was far off in Texas now. Gilbert could see traces
of the carriage road which had led out through the side-gate to the
side-street, but which was now all grass-grown. The barn was now full
of rakes and hoes and wheel-barrows, but there were deep bins where
still remained a peck or two of oats and a measure, and there was a
manger which swung back and forth from the stall to the bin, so you
could fill it and then turn it in to the horse. Gilbert wished that
there were still horses to play with, but it was fun turning the manger
and making Olga and Ethel pretend to be horses.
If you went on beyond the barn you came to a clump of currant and
gooseberry bushes which ran out in a thin line to the fence, which by
this time had lost its rose-bushes and become a prickly tangle of
blackberries. Enclosed by the blackberries and the currants was the
broad expanse of the vegetable garden, with corn in summer that Gilbert
could get quite lost in, and an amazing variety of good vegetables to
eat. The vegetable garden ran up to Uncle Marcus’s barn and his garden.
Straight down back of Garna’s house, through the middle of the yard,
ran a path, part way through a grape-arbor of its own, and then past
the currant bushes. At the end of the garden it joined a path in Uncle
Marcus’s yard. Along the foot of the path, where it passed the garden,
was a row of rhubarb, and on the other side Aunt Nan’s sweet-peas,
which she planted every spring. On the other side of the path was an
open meadow where the grass was not cut, and where Gilbert sometimes
lay on cool summer days and looked up at great white clouds floating
past in the blue sky. Nearer the house you came to a wilderness of
fruit-trees, pears of all kinds and apples, and as you approached the
street the yard broke into flower-beds and shrubs and bushes. Close to
the house grew lilies-of-the-valley, and a curious ribbon-grass which
Aunt Nan could take between her fingers and blow shrill whistles on.
Along the path which went past the dining-room window were beds of pink
and white peonies and tall white lilies which had a smell so sweet that
Gilbert felt almost faint when he touched them. And along the whole
side of the yard was a beautiful japonica hedge, with its white and
red flowers in the spring, which turned into sweetly smelling green
balls in the summer. There were great maples interspersed in the hedge
that threw down their keys in the spring. And all along the front of
the yard, close to the house, ran a white wooden fence just within
which was a line of graceful black-walnut trees, with their thin green
clustered leaves and the green nuts which fell in heaps on the ground.
Aunt Nan and Gilbert would collect them in sacks and put them in the
barn. There they would grow all black, so that you could strip off the
covering and find the crinkled nutshell within. Then you cracked them
on a stone.
The yard was wonderful to Gilbert. The winter was one long torpor
when, as he played with his blocks in the great stretch of sunlight in
Mother’s room, the days passed almost in a dream. It was only when
spring came, and he could run about and see the buds and the flowers
come out one after another, that he felt alive again. And it was good
in the endless summer days to have so much to attend to. He could be
playing in Three Trees Grove, and yet have running in an undercurrent
of his mind the sense of the garden or the japonica hedge, or the
manger in the barn. He could go down to the cherry-tree to see if the
cherries were ripe, or to the currant-bushes, or he could prick his
fingers on the rose-bushes, or get himself stuck in the gum of the
pine-trees. The yard was a world, and only very dimly did he imagine
anything beyond it. What his mother did in the kitchen or about the
house only very dimly concerned him. What they had to live on never
entered his mind. His sorrows were concerned almost entirely with the
rebellions of Olga, or the calamities of weather which would keep
them all home from a walk to the kind lady who lived up the street
and gave them cookies when they went to see her. Or the hornets and
yellow-jackets. Sometimes on very hot days, when Mother kept them
in the darkened back parlor and the big clock ticked menacingly,
insistently at them, and Gilbert felt sleepy and could not go to
sleep, the tædium vitæ would overwhelm him in a great drenching wave.
He was suddenly conscious of time, endlessly flowing and yet somehow
dreadfully static. Nothing was ever going to happen again; he was as if
alive in a tomb. The flies buzzed; the clock ticked; Mother was taking
an exhausted nap; Aunt Nan and Garna were away for a vacation. The
world was a great vacuum with nothing to experience and nothing to do.
And if a summer afternoon could produce so appalling a sense of
eternity, what must heaven be like, where you went so infallibly when
you were dead? Either because lovely Garna and mild Miss Fogg had kept
Gilbert from the terrors of hell, or it was his natural ego, it never
occurred to him that he was not destined for heaven, or that there
was any way of avoiding it. And the thought of eternal life seemed
to fuse itself with the long and empty summer afternoon. The tædium
vitæ was transmuted into the colossal ennui of heaven. Not as a pearly
municipality of golden streets and white-robed choirs did Gilbert
imagine heaven, but always in the guise of those white clouds on which
God rode. He saw himself clearly, seated infinitely high above the
earth, to which he should never be able to come again. Perhaps there
was the intimation of a harp, but what seized Gilbert’s imagination
was the vast emptiness of the space around him, the disorientation
of everything. Time and space were no longer fluid and mobile, but
frozen; and in the hot, sticky afternoon, his slightly feverish body,
all alert and sensitive at every pore of time that dripped past him,
would be terribly conscious of this horror that awaited him, of this
immobile time in empty space. It was not the dark or stillness that he
feared. On the contrary, he saw this future state as floating in the
clearest, most luminous light. On certain days, when he happened to
look at the sky, he would see just that pale infinite blue into which
you could look on and on and never reach the end. When it was really
blue or cloudy, it curved comfortingly over you, near and definite like
a bowl. But when it was of a certain paleness, the bowl seemed to have
been removed and you looked through, out into nothingness. And if in
this nothingness there were white majestic clouds floating, that looked
solid as if they could bear you away, then over Gilbert would sweep
again this ennui of heaven, lost and forgotten perhaps since that last
afternoon in the darkened parlor. And a vague feeling of homelessness
and of fear would fall upon him. His play would flag until the clouds
drifted away again and he forgot that they had come.
The first break in Gilbert’s world came when his mother decided that he
and Olga ought to go to school. Gilbert was seven years old, and when
his mother told him rather worriedly about it, he felt at first rather
pleased at the idea of something so important. What would they teach
him? Mother said Miss Waldron would teach him. He knew how to read and
write and he could spell all the words he wrote. He read all the books
he was given and sometimes looked into Hawthorne’s Wonder Tales, and
read a page or two. When he went back for the book, however, he would
forget where he had left off. So he would read a page anywhere. What
did it matter? He read his Bible in the same haphazard way. He knew his
multiplication table, and he liked to recite it. And he knew all about
the calendar and the hymn-book. Most of these things he had known
since he was four or five, and what good did they do him?
But in the morning he liked taking Olga by the hand, and leading her
out the gate under the big black-walnut trees, and down the street.
Mother always kissed them good-bye with such a serious and anxious
air that Gilbert felt he was setting out on a genuine mission. At
the crossing he would restrain Olga from rushing ahead; then he
would carefully look up and down the street to see if there were any
horses and wagons coming. Then he would dash across, pulling Olga
precipitately behind him. They would go along the upper green, under
the great railroad bridge, and come to Miss Waldron’s.
To Gilbert the school was an enormous joke. He could not take Miss
Waldron seriously. Her tall, bony frame and her sad, fierce eyes
touched no springs of affection in him. A lesson or two unlocked all
the latent cruelty in him. She was there to teach Gilbert and Olga
and the half-dozen other little children who came to the school-room
over the kitchen, and she was determined to teach them. She knew that
children under seven needed to be taught to read and write and spell.
So she gritted her teeth, and came every morning to her hard and bitter
work.
But Gilbert by that time had read so many books at home that it seemed
absurd that he should be taught to read, and he would rattle through
the lesson while the younger children fidgeted and then tried painfully
to puzzle it out. Gilbert could spell, too, and he raced through the
words, and when he was asked the meaning of words he would say that
“retire” meant “go to bed,” because he had seen it mean that in a book
he had read. And Miss Waldron would say he was a saucy boy, and plead
with him to answer nicely. Then he would mimic her, and watch her fight
back the temper in her sad, fierce eyes. She would stand him in the
corner, with his back to the class, and he would look round and wink
at the other children to make them laugh. Miss Waldron’s sisters would
come up from the kitchen below, where they were baking, and beg Gilbert
not to make the teacher so unhappy, and promise him a cookie if he
would be good. And Gilbert, drunk with power, would refuse everything,
and ride his high horse until the mill-whistles blew twelve o’clock,
and they all went home for the day.