My aunt Sarah gave me my first book of poems. It had her name in it,
and she wrote mine beneath hers on my seventh birthday. Within its
worn blue covers was found a garland--old poems, old and
fine--gathered from twenty gardens. The donor said that I could not
read the book now, but that later I should. She said that evidently
I was going to be fond of reading. So I was--I was already fond of
it. And it was not so long before I read the garland, and not so
long before I set to work to memorize certain favorite pieces.
Before I was ten I knew by heart a number of these component
blossoms. And by then I had found in the house other books of poetry.
My aunt Sarah at the time when she gave me the book, stood a pale,
slender woman, dressed always, when she could, in white, not very
strong, rather silent, and with beautiful eyes. Every side of
Restwell life laid claim upon my mother's time. Aunt Sarah was not
idle. She sewed swiftly and beautifully. Her long-fingered,
delicate hands accomplished many a task in a house where now all must
work. But she stood aside from planning and overseeing, from
account-book and calculation. Her needle flashed, her long fingers
wiped and dusted, but all the time heart and mind were traveling.
She did not desire household authority. I think that it was only
with strong relief that she saw matters flowing toward my mother for
decisions. Her own decisions were almost wholly upon inner
things--though that means, of course, that she did then choose and
decide outer things yet to come. She was a great reader. But here,
too, she read for practical aid in that other-lighted kingdom. Her
inner theme was the ultimate union of all lovers. The strengthening
of every perception, every intuition, that said, "It is so!" had
become her intense preoccupation. She read to this end, thought to
this end, held herself still and invited her intuitions. What marked
her off from many women of her acquaintance who had also lost, who
also dreamed reunion, was that she sought corroboration, related
experience, acceptable evidence, not alone in the Bible or in books
of devotion, but wherever she saw or heard of a rainbow glint. Her
mind was bold in her good cause. A defined, intense, personal will,
patient and massive, led her over the bound into a transcendentalism
that gathered food from every sea. My grandfather, weary of trouble,
turned definitely to "sacred" writings. But my aunt sought
everywhere.
About an eighth of a mile from the house there lay, on the eastern
slope of a little hill, the Restwell graveyard. Here were laid in
earth the frames of my father and my uncle Robert, and of my
grandmother beside two infants she had lost. And others were here,
men, women, and children of my grandparents' generation, and older
graves of the generation before these. Piety kept fair the Restwell
burying-ground. Lack of working hands might involve old lawn and
garden in barbarous upgrowths, but in the graveyard weeds were kept
down, the grass duly cut and the flowers tended. My mother and Aunt
Sarah both worked here. But my aunt Sarah was oftenest in the place.
It had become for her a secret palace, a cloister, a refuge. Under
the oak-tree she had put a cross for the man who was buried far away,
where he died in prison. The Whitechurch mason made it for her, cut
out of gray stone. Above it rose the oak, of a hundred years and
more, with outcropping great roots. My aunt Sarah sat beneath it,
with the cross before her. Upright and arms, looked at so, it
quartered the field of the sky. She brought flowers and laid them
against the base. She had a pansy-bed just for this. She laid
against the stone every color of pansy. She scattered there fragrant
leaves, bits of lavender and myrrh, leaves of rose geranium and
citronalis. She planted straw-flowers--"immortelles"--so that in the
autumn she might gather them, white and purple heads like clover,
wider, sun-hued disks, and treasure them until the snows came. Then,
a cluster at a time, she placed them against this cross, and with
them sprays of cedar or white pine, ivy or holly. She had a stand of
house plants and as they bloomed she cut from these and brought the
glowing bits of color to the graveyard. The mounds of others there
were not neglected. Flower and herb and evergreen went to these,
too. She was scrupulous as to this. But the clinging passion was
for the cross that had no mound.
As a child I spent much time in this graveyard. I remember it when I
was five and I remember it when I was ten. I entered it with my
mother or with my aunt, and here, while they worked or dreamed, I
pursued my own ends. There was much that might entertain a child
used to collating and devising for himself. With an old pair of
scissors I might cut away dead roses, or make my own small haymows of
shorn grass. Or I might play at various houses between the numerous
upstanding oak roots. I had many mansions here, and with bits of
clay and gravel made roads that linked the whole. The place overhung
the river. In a far corner rose a growth of ailanthus whence came
excellent long poles for many uses. In another corner grew a wild
apple-tree. The apples reddened and hung among the green leaves.
Later they might lie red upon the ground. I could not understand why
my mother and my aunt would not let me eat them. They lay there,
red, in the grass.
A stone wall divided in half the Restwell burying-ground. On the
fairer aspect of the hill, with the richer trees and the rarer
flowers, with the marble headstones and footstones and the half-dozen
older flat slabs of granite, lay Restwell Forths. On the other side
of the wall, in a stretch not untended and not unfair, but distinctly
simplified, were Restwell servants. Here ranged themselves many
small, upright wooden slabs, with two or three of stone showing
resting-places of old, responsible negroes held in affection by the
big house. The slabs were marked, the place was sweet, overwrought
with dark, running periwinkle, with here and there a bush of lilac or
althea, with locust-trees, heavy and sweet in May. But still there
was the wall between, and a contrast running from of old.... I often
scrambled over this wall and played hide-and-seek with myself in and
out among the mounds and the wooden slabs. And, first and last, I
learned to spell many words in the two-sided Restwell burying-ground.
On our side of the wall lichen and moss were to be kept from the
gravestones. I liked to follow my aunt as she made each name and the
inscription beneath fair and clean. She read them all to me. Even
before I could read I knew the graves by name and verse. But I
learned to read before I was five.
The bank that sloped to the river was truly a fairy place of moss and
fern and jutting rock and tremulous, slender trees. It early became
to me an enchanted wood. There was a shelf where I could stand and
throw small stones into the river over the bushy heads of willow and
alder. Down in an arc went the flung stone; there followed a silver
flash and a liquid sound, then widening rings. I stood here throwing
stone after stone.... Sometimes there was a rabbit or a squirrel,
and always there were birds and other winged things, and creeping,
charming grotesques. Now and then I had a human playmate. At
considerable intervals Ahasuerus came upon the scene. "Miss Sarah
done axed me ter help her!" Ahasuerus worked for a time, then,
dismissed, he and I crossed the wall and scampered over the matted
periwinkle, past the graves of his color, to the long, sloping bank.
Here, in the amplest camaraderie, we carried on Lilliputian
explorations, industries. But Mandy's Jim almost always needed
Ahasuerus in potato-patch or corn-field.
My aunt Sarah and I grew into a kind of communion. She was oftener
in the graveyard than was my mother, and I was often there with her.
She was also fond of walking by the river or through the home woods,
and here I was her companion. My circle and hers found their point
of interfusion. We had each a sense of Nature and of all musical
language. That I was a child and she a woman made little difference.
We could talk and listen each to the other. She had a way of
repeating poems to me, and she let me say over to her the verses I
learned. It was she who first told me old legends and romances. And
it was she who most distinctly aided me to see the arabesque, the
come and go, of natural phenomena, of night and day, rain and shine,
the seasons, the return and rhythm of all things. She aided the
birth of my sense of periodicity, directed my ear to the drum of
time. She never condescended to me, but talked as to an equal. Of
what she said much went by me like the speaking wind. But it went to
return in later life and give me up then its meaning.
I recall many an hour spent with her. Here is one.
On a sunny morning we weeded the graveyard. Then we sat down under
the oak and, taking a book that she had brought with her, she began
to read while she rested. She often did this, and sometimes I
pursued my own ends while she read, and sometimes I came to her and
said, "Read it to me."
I said it this day. She looked at me with her beautiful, seeking
eyes. "It's a piece by Edgar Allan Poe. I found it by chance in
this old magazine. I read it yesterday, and now I'm reading it
again. But you won't understand it. You had better keep on playing."
But I was tired of playing and said so, and lay down on the clean
ground with my head against her knee. Suddenly she began to read.
She read well, after a quiet, clear, impressive fashion. Be it
understood that in speaking of my childhood I speak now according to
its simple, momentary impressions, and now after the larger knowledge
of the upheaping, remembering, sorting, comprehending years. Now I
speak after the one book and now after the other. She read Poe's
"Colloquy of Una and Monos."
UNA. "Born again!"
MONOS. "Yes, fairest and best-beloved Una, 'born again,'"
UNA. "Death!"
MONOS. "... You are confused and oppressed by the majestic novelty
of the Life Eternal. Yes, it was of Death I spoke. And here how
singularly sounds that word...."
On went my aunt Sarah's voice. The two lovers, both "dead," both
living, moving, speaking in a land of added senses, new tones in the
scale, pursue their colloquy. They speak of what they thought of
Death, in the old world, and of the mistakes and woes of that world.
And Monos had "died," and Una, a year later, had "died." And time
had passed, and here they met, with emotion and memory clear,
sonorous, golden-true. Una asks Monos for a detailed recital of his
passage from the old plane into the other. He accedes and speaks
further:
MONOS. "... Wearied at heart with anxieties which had their origin
in the general turmoil and decay, I succumbed to the fierce fever.
After some few days of pain, and many of dreamy delirium replete with
ecstasy the manifestation of which you mistook for pain, there came
upon me, as you have said, a breathless and motionless torpor, and
this was termed _Death_ by those who stood around me.
"Words are vain things. My condition did not deprive me of
sentience....
"I breathed no longer. The pulses were still. The heart had ceased
to beat. Volition had not departed, but was powerless. The senses
were unusually active, although, eccentrically so--assuming often
each other's functions at random. The taste and the smell were
inextricably confounded, and became one sentiment, abnormal and
intense.... _All_ my perceptions were purely sensual. The materials
furnished the passive brain by the senses were not in the least
degree wrought into shape by the deceased understanding. Of pain
there was some little; of pleasure there was much; but of moral pain
or pleasures none at all.... And this was in truth the _Death_ of
which these bystanders spoke reverently, in low whispers....
"They attired me for the coffin--three or four dark figures which
flitted busily to and fro.... The day waned....
"And now from the wreck and the chaos of the usual senses there
appeared to have arisen within me a sixth, all perfect. In its
exercise I found a wild delight--yet a delight still physical,
inasmuch as the understanding had in it no part. Motion in the
animal frame had fully ceased. No muscle quivered; no nerve
thrilled, no artery throbbed. But there seemed to have sprung up in
the brain _that_ of which no words could convey to the merely human
intelligence even an indistinct conception. Let me term it a mental,
pendulous pulsation. It was the moral embodiment of man's abstract
idea of _Time_. By the absolute equalization of this movement--or of
such as this--had the cycles of the fundamental orbs themselves been
adjusted. By its aid I measured the irregularities of the clock upon
the mantel, and of the watches of the attendants. Their tickings
came sonorously to my ears. The slightest deviation from the true
proportion--and these deviations were omni-prevalent--affected me
just as violations of abstract truth are wont, on earth, to affect
the moral senses. Although no two of the timepieces in the chamber
struck individual accords accurately together, yet I had no
difficulty in holding steadily in mind the tones, and the respective
momentary errors of each. And this--this keen, perfect,
self-existing sentiment of _duration_, this sentiment existing (as
man could not possibly have conceived it to exist) independent of any
succession of events--this idea--this sixth sense upspringing from
the ashes of the rest, was the first obvious and certain step of the
intemporal soul upon the threshold of the temporal Eternity.
"It was midnight, and you still sat by my side.... They had
deposited me in the coffin. The lamps burned flickeringly.... The
perfume in my nostrils ceased. Forms affected my vision no longer.
The oppression of the Darkness uplifted itself from my bosom. A dull
shock like that of electricity pervaded my frame, and was followed by
total loss of the idea of contact. All of what man has termed sense
was merged in the sole consciousness of entity, and in the one
abiding sentiment of duration. The mortal body had been at length
stricken with the hand of the deadly _Decay_.
"Yet had not all of sentience departed; for the consciousness and the
sentiment remaining supplied some of its functions by a lethargic
intuition. I appreciated the direful change now in operation upon
the flesh.... I was not unconscious of those movements which
displaced you from my side, which confined me within the coffin,
which deposited me within the hearse, which bore me to the grave,
which lowered me within it, which heaped heavily the mold upon me....
"And here ... there rolled away days and weeks and months; and the
soul watched narrowly each second as it flew, and, without effort,
took record of its flight--without effort and without object.
"A year passed. The consciousness of _being_ had grown hourly more
indistinct, and that of mere _locality_ had, in great measure,
usurped its position. The idea of entity was becoming merged in that
of _place_. The narrow space immediately surrounding what had been
the body was now going to be the body itself....
"Many lustra had supervened. Dust had returned to dust. The form
had food no more. The sense of being had at length utterly departed,
and there reigned in its stead--instead of all things--dominant and
perpetual--the autocrats _Place_ and _Time_. For that which was
not--for that which had no form--for that which had no thought--for
that which had no sentience--for that which was soulless, yet of
which matter formed no portion;--for all this nothingness, yet for
all this immortality, the grave was still a home, and the corrosive
hours co-mates."
There was no more of the colloquy. It ended there, with the
definiteness of a stone dropped into the river. Yet after the stone
the widening rings! My aunt put down the book. "It says no more.
But Una and Monos are talking, in happiness, each to the other. They
move, they touch, they remember, reason, desire, and love. They
speak of being 'born again' and of the 'august Eternal Life.' I
think that as desire and will slept and rested, so now they awoke,
moved, and gathering themselves together, found richer being in a
richer world! At any rate, separation passed away like a dream."
She sat with her hands locked over her knees, looking afar. I had a
little heap of acorns, and I played with these--one acorn, then a
line, then two lines, then a square.
Ahasuerus taught me to swim, Mandy's Jim to shoot, my grandfather to
ride. My mother taught me to read, to write, and to cipher. She
carried me into geography and history, and through the gate of Latin.
All persons and all things at Restwell taught me. I was born a
listener and a gatherer--a giver, too, I hope, of what I thought
valuable.... Out of a thousand faults I pick pride, an indolent
will, some fear, some obscure strains of cruelty, fretted thin, I
hope, by now. I see, too, oversensitiveness to blame, and some
finesse. Now and then I lied, but not often; generally under some
strong, imagined stress. Physically, I was fairly strong, fairly
healthy. I was early used to being told that I had a good mind.
"You have a good mind--you ought to study hard."--"You have a good
mind; you might grow up to be the greatest help!" ... The wings to
carry me, to lift my feet from the clogging faults, were a hunger and
thirst after understanding, a sense for the cleanly and the
harmonious, a considerable synthesizing power, a considerable power
of idealization. So I ranged my first decade here at Restwell in
Virginia--small tiger in small jungle, small lion in small desert,
small man in small earth, small angel in small heaven.
Though I lived chiefly with grown persons there were times when I
forgathered with children. Ahasuerus had a toddling brother, Creed,
and a sister, Mimy. They were younger than I, but I made mud pies
with them down by the creek that flowed past the quarters. And when
we went to Whitechurch or to neighboring country houses I met
children. And there were the Dallas cousins at Flowerfield, twenty
miles away. Each summer they came to Restwell for two or three
weeks--my aunt Kate and the four young Dallases, John, Miriam,
Catherine, and Lewis. And, usually in October, my aunt Sarah went to
Flowerfield for as long a time, and I went with her.
Flowerfield! That was a brick house somewhat larger than Restwell,
but otherwise quite like it. It stood upon a hilltop and commanded a
most lovely, wide view. Before the war Flowerfield had meant two
thousand acres of rich land, green, watered meadows, and a famous
breed of horses. During the war the land went down, the horses were
taken away. The house stood in the path of a noted "raider."
Together with its many outbuildings, it was first looted, then fired.
Barns, stables, cabins, went off in flame. But the thick-walled
house withstood. Great damage was done, but the strong shell rested.
After the war the two thousand acres were parted into three lots.
One moiety went for debt; one for some money with which to stock and
cultivate the remaining third. The money it brought was little
enough. There were no more famous horses. The damage done to the
house could be but meagerly repaired. When I knew it as a child,
bare indeed was the furnishing! The raider had taken all that could
be taken and had smashed the rest. To help Flowerfield into a
livable condition all that could be spared was sent from Restwell.
And more fortunate neighbors had given with prompt kindness what they
could. But all the Flowerfield region stood in the swathe of
destruction. Not much could be given from one to the other. For
years after the Surrender Flowerfield, house and place, exhibited a
bareness not without its own distinction. War-wrecked, it sang like
a ballad.
Of the young Dallases, John and Miriam were about of my age. John
was--is--square-made, solid and good. Miriam was--is--Miriam!
Winter and spring I looked forward to their coming with summer to
Restwell. My aunt Kate, my mother said, was like my father. I see
now her strong, irregular face, her brown eyes, both intent and
quizzical. She and my mother were good friends. "Cary"--"Kate"--I
hear their voices now.
Major Dallas, like his father-in-law, Colonel Forth, like his county
and like his state, was whelmed in the difficulties of a shattered
order. He must build again, with effort, with struggle--must do his
part in the building up, after new patterns, of the South. A young
man still, he put hand and mind to his work, with determination, with
courage and ableness. His left sleeve hung empty, two-thirds of his
land must go, his house stood half a ruin. There were children to
educate, a bedridden mother to keep in something like old comfort.
He set to work. I do not remember him often at Restwell, but at
Flowerfield I knew and liked him. He was a big man, magnetic,
humorous, fond of children. Before the war, at the university, he
had read law, had been admitted to the bar in '61. In '66 he rented
the quaintest of law-offices in the shadow of the court-house in the
county seat, four miles from Flowerfield. In two years he had become
the principal lawyer of the county. There was law business enough,
the lord of law knows, in those troubled years! But it was business
for impoverished clients, individuals, fellow-Confederates, widows
and orphans. Major Dallas made little money. But he grew rich in
the good-will of his people. These were the years when Achilles drew
the body of Hector around Troy. Major Dallas waked and wrought for
his region, fought gloom and bitterness, cheered To-morrow, backed
Time to bring in one and all as winners. He declined to be
pessimistic as to the United States--even to be ironic over the
"united." "If we're big enough, each man jack of us, North and
South, we'll find that we are united!"
He turned gray early. But, for all his empty sleeve and his gallant
record, he was a better soldier after the war than during it.
I loved Flowerfield. I see it in autumn with all its noble trees
scarlet and gold, and, in the no great distance, blue waves of
mountains. The house had--has--an emanation for me, indescribable,
its own, welcome to the inner senses. I loved the bare, clean,
little room where I slept with John, loved the old, wide stair, the
big empty hall; loved the front porch, pillared differently from ours
at Restwell; loved the wide, sunny two-storied back porch; loved the
dogs that lay there. October is, to me, to this day, a royal month.
John and Miriam and I ranged together. Catherine and Lewis were too
small for deep plans and purposes, long strides afield. But the
first three owned the world in those Octobers.
In mid-October came the nutting, came the smell of wood smoke, came
the Indian summer. We might be poor, we might be surrounded by
dubitations and brain-rackings, we might encounter among our adult
acquaintances sighs and furrowed brows, we might, at times, from
visiting folk, hear bitter or indignant utterance when newspapers
were unfolded and read, we might be dimly aware that we had a life of
work before us. A bitter war had been fought with immediately bitter
results. But yet children might be happy. On the whole, we children
thought precious little about the war, or reconstruction, or poverty,
or a new order ripped from the womb of the old. We thought at times,
of course, archaically, queerly. But then surged in the vital
present of chinkapin strings, ripening persimmons and black haws,
dropping chestnuts and tumbling walnuts.
June again, when Aunt Kate and the children came to Restwell....
Miriam was said to be like her mother, as her mother was said to be
like my father. Now she was active, now she was a dreamer. I have
seen her for half an hour on end, sitting in the sun or in the shade,
a little, motionless figure, her chin on her knees, her eyes on the
ground. But when she arose she arose with a spring, became at once
the whole-hearted player. She and I early found the corridor between
our natures. I knew her--know her--from within, and she knows me.