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.