growing less frequent as Julie evidently began to forget her English.
Mrs. Behrens wrote back a round-robin letter or two to be passed about
among her faculty friends, one of them describing the splendid,
ceremonious, Old-World way in which Professor Behrens was inducted into
his new position. She spoke with special pride of the way in which both
the military and municipal authorities of the town had turned out to do
him honor, the soldiers, officers, and the Mayor of the town marching
at the head of the procession, the latter in his bright sash and gold
chain of office. It seemed to us we had heard something about that
Mayor before, but we could not remember what it was.
And then Julie forgot her English altogether, and Mrs. Behrens’ letters
dwindled and there were none.
I got on through the eighth grade and went into the University
prep-school. After three years there, my father was called to a better
position in another State University. As we were settling ourselves in
the new home, what should we hear but that a distinguished European
scientist was about to be added to the faculty, none other than
Professor Behrens.
Foreigners, even distinguished ones, were more common in American
faculties then than they had been seven years before; there was a
large German Department, with many native German instructors; and
the University was further east and hence not so open-heartedly
welcoming. There was, therefore, no such stir over the newcomers as on
their first arrival although every one was very nice to them and the
President’s wife had Mrs. Behrens stand by her in the receiving line at
the first of the faculty receptions. But the Behrens did not seem to
notice that there was anything lacking in their treatment. You never
saw people more delighted than they were to be back in America.
“It was worse than I remembered,” Professor Behrens told my father.
“After an experience of the free, breezy, self-respecting life in
America it was simply unendurable. Suffocating, simply suffocating!
With the most ridiculous caste spirit. Rusted to a stand-still with
cock-sure conservatism! An instant, hermetic closing up of every pore
at any mention of new possibilities for human nature, or for human
organizations. And such absurd, stiff, artificial rules of conduct
and precedence in society! Let me tell you an episode which will
seem almost incredible to you, but which really decided us to come
back here. At a garden party my wife ... _my_ wife!... seeing there
the wife of the General commanding the troops in the town garrison
and knowing her quite well, stepped across the lawn to speak to her,
one lady to another. Will you believe it, because she had not waited
till the General’s wife had summoned her to her circle, my poor wife
received a cold, unrecognizing stare, her outstretched hand was left
hanging in the air, and the General’s wife turned her back on her. And
when I was furious and protested, I was made uncomfortable, seriously
uncomfortable!”
And Mrs. Behrens told my mother she had been horrified by the
cold-hearted envy, hatred and meanness which lay underneath the
polished manners of many of the people in their circle. “They do not
wish you well. They wish you ill. They simply have no conception of the
meaning of that American word ‘friendly.’”
Julie was ready for the University, as I was, and we entered the
Freshman class together. She was a very pretty girl, one of the
brown-haired Teutons, who are so much finer and more neatly finished
than the blonde ones, and she had her fair share of popularity. We were
taken into the same fraternity, studied together, and were much in each
other’s homes. I soon saw that the Behrens home was not altogether a
light-hearted one. After the first flush of pleasure at being back had
passed, a cloud of depression settled over them. Their sojourn in a
more finished and stable, low-toned and nuanced civilization had put
them all out of key for the loud-mouthed, cheerful American tune. They
found it shrill and noisy, and often stopped their ears against it.
Heavens, they had not remembered that American trades-people were so
utterly mannerless! Nor that all Americans were so blackly ignorant of
the arts! They had no interest in organized athletics, and very soon
developed an active hostility for football because of the indisputable
fact that the university world was so occupied with it, that nothing
serious was done in classes until after Thanksgiving when the last game
was played. The Behrens were musical and nobody in the city cared for
music except the German-Americans in their shabby quarter at the other
end of town, and they were fat grocers, saloon-keepers or foremen in
factories, people with whom the Behrens could not dream of associating.
They were really very miserable and lonely and disillusioned.
When we were Seniors there came a wonderful offer from Germany: a very
high Government position for Professor Behrens. I heard them discussing
this with a certain indecision which I had never heard in their remarks
before. They knew very well what was before them in Germany. But,
oh, what was about them here! The very servant problem alone made it
impossible for civilized beings to organize a livable existence in
America. Not to speak of a thousand other, raw, unfinished edges which
rasped and fretted them at every turn.
They finally decided to go, but their packing-up was conducted in a
very different spirit from the first one I had seen. They had begun
to divine that there was, in this business of looking for the ideal
country, something more than meets the eye.
I happened to visit them a few years after this, just before I was
married, and found them much dissatisfied with European life. Mrs.
Behrens was nettled and fretted by the question of social precedence
which was, so it seemed to her, constantly used to humiliate her; and
the children were stifling in the restricted, fenced-in, tyrannically
regulated corner of life which was theirs. Julie took me off for a long
walk one afternoon and told me something of her opinion of European
young men, especially the officers whom for the most part she met in
society, as they were the ones who had most leisure for afternoon and
evening parties. “I can just tell you one thing,” she said with a grim
accent and a hardset jaw, “I’ll never marry a European, if I die an old
maid!”
But later on, when her mother and she were exchanging reminiscences
about the difficulties of American housekeeping, Julie cried out, “Oh,
I couldn’t keep house in a country where there is no servant class!”
Mrs. Behrens sighed, “Yes, I know, but just remember the bath-rooms,
and the vacuum cleaners, and the hot water.”
It seemed to me, as I looked about on their much traveled chairs and
tables that I saw them patiently making ready for another journey.
INHERITANCE
One of my mother’s distant cousins was left a widow, years ago with
no assets but the house she lived in, a savings-bank account, and a
very pretty daughter, then eighteen years old. Cousin Henrietta’s
decisions were always prompt. It took her about six weeks to sell the
house, draw the money from the savings-bank and take her daughter to
Europe. I think her intention probably was to give Ella the benefit
of a year’s polish, and bring her back to the home market, her value
enhanced by the reputation of her Continental “Education.” But the
impossible happened, as energetic women like Cousin Henrietta can
occasionally make it happen. Through some chance connection at
the pension in Florence, they made the acquaintance of a wealthy,
middle-aged Tuscan, not the traditional European nobleman at all, but a
swarthy, well-preserved man of the people, risen to wealth by his own
exertions. He was presented to Ella and lost his head entirely over her
pale blonde prettiness. He was fifty-five. They were married on her
nineteenth birthday.
Cousin Henrietta shared their married life with them, of course,
although this did not last very long. Signor Cattaneo, as not
infrequently happens to elderly husbands of very young wives, tried
to renew his youth too rapidly. He danced all one evening with his
bride, an exercise which his great bulk made extremely violent for him;
stepped out upon a balcony with her, in a cool, damp wind, and died of
double pneumonia at the end of a week.
Cousin Henrietta still in charge of affairs, at once brought home
to the God’s country of Chicago, the lovely, wealthy little widow.
They set up housekeeping on a grand scale with the money which was
sent to them every month from the honest, conscientious Tuscan agent
in Florence. The agent got it from the honest, conscientious Tuscan
peasants, and they got it out of their bodies, sweating and toiling
endlessly long hours in all weathers. Ella and Cousin Henrietta had
everything they could think of, that money could buy; and presently
Ella, wanting something new, bought herself a husband. He did not
turn out very well: Ella had done exactly as she pleased for too long
to bother with a husband, and after a time they separated, though
there was never any legal action taken, since Cousin Henrietta was an
extremely orthodox church member, who disapproved of any laxity in the
relations between the sexes. Divorce seemed to her such a laxity.
Then Ella wanted to do as other wealthy and fashionable ladies do
and learn how to ride. They bought, as usual, the best that money
could buy, and this time it was a little too good for Ella; for the
high-spirited thorough-bred took fright one day and, disregarding
Ella’s amateur efforts to control him, ran away, threw Ella off and
broke her poor little neck.
Cousin Henrietta was horrified and scandalized to find that now Ella’s
remote but still legal husband would inherit a very large proportion
of the Italian property. Her whole soul and being rose up wildly in
an understandable and instinctive protest against this iniquity.
She simply could not believe that the law would countenance such a
barefaced theft of other people’s property. She filled the newspapers
and the courts with her clamor and made us all ashamed of the family
name. But that was all the good it did her. Ella had not dreamed of
making a will; Cousin Henrietta’s son-in-law had no reason to love his
wife’s mother, and could see no reason why she had any more right to
that fortune than he had. Neither can I, when it comes to that.
Ella’s husband was rather dazed by his good luck and made all haste
to marry. But he did not make quite haste enough. That was one of the
years when the influenza was going the rounds, and he died of it two
days before his wedding, in spite of all the care of three trained
nurses and a whole battery of consulting physicians. I never knew what
became of his fiancée, but always wondered if she did not perhaps go to
live with Cousin Henrietta, as being the only person who would entirely
sympathize with her.
So the Cattaneo fortune passed to the casual next-of-kin, who happened
to be the only nephew of Ella’s husband, a young clerk of twenty. The
honest conscientious agent in Florence, who was paid a small annual
salary for his services, and who would have died before touching a
penny not his, went on administering the Italian estate which was
growing steadily in value all the time, and paying more income. He sent
that income over to the new name and address in America. He was upheld
in his meager, narrow, difficult life by feeling that he was living up
to the fine old Tuscan code of honor; and he often told his children,
who lacked schooling and opportunities he could have given them if he
had had more money, that the best inheritance a father can leave his
children is an unblemished name.
The children of Ella’s husband’s nephew have something much more
substantial as an inheritance than that. For the young man with a
fortune was married by a competent, ambitious girl as soon as he came
of age. They have three children, who learned very young how to spend
a great deal of money with great speed. The money which the Italian
day-laborers and small-farmers earn by patient endurance of hardships,
by eating rough, poor, scanty food, by working their pregnant wives
to the day before their confinements, by taking their children out of
school before they can read, is sent month by month to America and
spent in buying a new fur set for Ella’s husband’s nephew’s young-lady
daughter, a ten-thousand-dollar racing-car for Ella’s husband’s
nephew’s seventeen-year-old son, and to keep Ella’s husband’s nephew
from doing anything more strenuous than clipping the end of his cigars.
THIRTY YEARS AFTER
A long time ago, when Duane Bellamy was at the height of his brilliant
fame, and when I was a little girl, his daughter chanced to be a
school-mate of mine for a winter. And one Sunday evening I was invited
to their supper-table. I was very much impressed by the momentous
occasion which it seemed to me, and I have not forgotten a word he
said, nor a gesture he made, nor an expression of his face. I can
still see his darkly handsome face, with his glossy black mane, his
large bright eyes, his great curling Assyrian beard. And if ever I
saw a human being saturated to the bone with satisfaction, it was at
that Sunday evening supper. He was acclaimed as the greatest portrait
painter in America, and he accepted this well-deserved reputation with
no mock modesty. The knowledge of it did not make him coarsely vain or
puffed up. It acted on him like a generous wine, made him extravagantly
kind and over-flowing with high spirits. His little girl told me
that night that her princely father had been known to stop a tired
coal-heaver at his work, hand him a twenty-dollar bill and walk on. He
was like a great fountain of enjoyment, splashing with its clear waters
all who came near it, even the little schoolgirl at the other end of
the table.
But there were people he could not help to enjoyment. The name of one
of them came up in the conversation that evening: “Poor old Hendricks!”
said our host, “what can you do for the poor old chap? _He_ doesn’t
even know what hit him!”
One of the younger painters there was a protégé of Bellamy’s, admiring
him so greatly that his paintings were scarcely to be told from his
master’s. He now answered, “Oh, the old Rip Van Winkle! He ought to
be told to crawl into his hole and pull it in after him. Making a
laughing-stock of himself with those sooty old landscapes of his, year
after year.”
Our host took a great draught of the beer in his stein, wiped his great
mustache with his fine damask napkin, and turned comfortably in his
chair. “Hendrick got me in a tight place the other day,” he began, “At
this year’s exhibition he marched me up to one of his bitumen-black,
woolly horrors, and said, ‘Now, Bellamy, you’re an honest man. Tell me
what it is you youngsters don’t like in that? It looks all right to me.
I can’t see why they all jump on me so. I look at theirs, and then I
look at mine.... I _can’t_ see what they’re talking about.’”
“Well, for God’s sake, what nerve!” ejaculated the disciple, very much
astonished. “What did you say?”
“What could I say?” said Bellamy. “I didn’t want to hurt the old man’s
feelings. I hadn’t supposed till then that he’d so much as noticed how
people feel about his work. I didn’t try to explain to him, of course.
What’s the use? He _can’t_ understand! If I’d talked to him all day
about what we’re after--light, and shimmer, and vibration--he wouldn’t
have known what I was talking about. If it were _in_ him to understand,
he’d die before he’d paint the way he does. So I just patted him on the
back and said, ‘Oh, you’re all right, Mr. Hendricks. What makes you
think there is anything the matter with your work?’ and pretended that
somebody was calling to me from the other side of the gallery.”
He finished his beer at a draught. He thought himself magnificently
kind and tolerant. And so did we.
That was a long time ago, thirty years ago, to be exact. The Bellamys
took their little girl out of our school that spring, and I saw no more
of them. But I always felt a slight personal interest at the sight
of his name in a list of exhibitors, and in picture-galleries always
went to look at whichever bright, high-keyed, dashing portrait he was
exhibiting that year. Some years ago it began to seem to me that they
did not look just the same; and yet when I looked straight at them,
I saw that they were, quite miraculously, the same, the old Bellamy
flowing brush-work, the masterly rendering of fabrics, the ringing
color, the firm drawing, all lighted by that bold flood of sunlight
with which he had shocked and enchanted the early American public
groping its way out from Munich.
Presently, finding that the impression that they were different
persisted, I set myself to analyze it, and found that their altered
look came from the altered character of the paintings beside and above
them ... and then, as the years went on, below them! For the time came
when the annual Bellamy portrait was not in the center of the last
gallery, to catch your eye as you entered, but was hung high in one of
the side-rooms. It looked very queer and matter-of-fact with its solid
surfaces honestly rendered in all their opacity, compared to the odd,
subtle, sideways-glancing, arrestingly imaginative canvases about it.
They took the eye far below the surfaces they depicted. They suggested
far more than they said. For days afterwards, they haunted you like an
unfinished cadence in a poem in a foreign language. The Bellamy canvas
was in no unknown language, but in the speech used for the daily order
to the grocer; nor was it in the least unfinished. It came finally to
seem to me as literal and bald a statement of fact as a time-table.
One day this year, as I hung over an Arthur Davies, a strange,
beautiful, white-fleshed, eerie, blonde woman, placed at the side of a
luminous canvas, with, so it seemed to me, more pure imaginative beauty
than anything since Botticelli, I heard voices behind me. A tall,
splendid-looking old man, with a great white beard, fine dark eyes, and
the carriage of a king was talking to a younger man, an unimpressive,
slight, fair fellow, evidently very ill at ease.
“See here, Brehming, speak out, tell me what it’s all about. I honestly
don’t know what you’re driving at, you kids. What’s the matter with
good drawing? What do you _want_ in a painting?” He waved a well-kept
hand up towards a canvas above us, “Isn’t there light in that? And
space? And interesting composition? And true values? _I_ ought to know
a good painting when I see one. What are you boys talking about when
you slash at my things so? I’m not sore. Don’t think I’m sore. You’ve
a right to your own opinion. Only, for the Lord’s sake, what _is_ your
opinion?”
He had said he was not sore, but there was a raw note of hurt in his
voice, and his eyes rested anxiously on the young man beside him.
The other looked every way except at him and said in a vague, hurried,
kindly voice, “Why, Mr. Bellamy, your work is all right, of course.
It’s fine. Sure, it’s fine. We all admire it like anything....”
Yes, I did hear that! I heard it just exactly as I’m setting it down.
“THE OLD NEW ENGLAND STOCK”
Students and classifiers of American “types” often say that the
grandfathers of the present generation of New Englanders represent
the “New England type” much more accurately than their descendants
of to-day. Some times I wonder what they mean by “New England type.”
Apparently they make the phrase stand for blue-nosed, thin-blooded
frigidity of temperament, a pinched, mean, timorous attitude towards
human life and human nature, and a cold, calculating capacity to skin
other people alive in a bargain. At any rate, the presumption seems to
be that whatever else they were, New Englanders were always very much
of the same sort.
Here are my two New England grandfathers.
Both of them had identically the same sort of ancestry, plain English
people who came to the New World about the middle of the seventeenth
century. Certain genealogically-minded members of the two families
have gathered reverently together the scant tradition concerning the
generations that bridge the two centuries and a half of life in
America; but though I have dutifully plodded through the thick volumes
of “family histories” I have never been able to see that any of my
forebears did anything more than earn their own livings and keep out of
jail.
Younger branches of both families moved up into Vermont, after the end
of the French-and-Indian wars and have lived here ever since. Both
my grandfathers spent their boyhood on Vermont farms. And there the
resemblance ceases.
One of them had, apparently, from early childhood, a passion for books
and learning and sophistication and cultivation--and gregarious,
articulate social existence--and dinner parties and black broadcloth
and white linen and good wine--and all the other elements in the sort
of life which is not to be found on Vermont farms. The Vermont farm,
however, seems to have presented him with some tools for getting what
he wanted: a powerful great body, an active mind and an unlimited
amount of dynamic energy. He left home at sixteen (this was about 1833)
spurred on by the sympathy of a strong-minded mother. I have still in
the attic of his old house, the little hair-covered trunk which he
took with him, and which contained all his worldly possessions.
From that time on, until his old age, he never came home except to
rest in the occasional, very brief intervals of incessant and almost
appalling activity, both intellectual and physical. With only a
little help from his family he earned his way through college, and
then put himself through a Theological Seminary in record time. With
him, as with other manifestants of the mid-century explosion of
energy in America, it was as if the long generations of vegetating
country-dwellers had, like other vegetating matter of by-gone ages,
turned to rich veins of highly combustible material, which this
descendant of theirs mined out, at top speed, and cast by great
shovelfuls into the furnace of his personality. He seems always to have
been incandescent, the whole six-feet-three of him, with motive-power
which he could not, try as he might, use up fast enough to cool off.
All his life he burned hot with a vitality at which an ever-widening
circle of other human beings, rich and poor, young and old, learned
and ignorant, warmed their hands and their hearts. Even the people
whom he furiously rubbed the wrong way (he had as many enemies as
friends) were stimulated by the friction to a quicker life-pace, a
livelier circulation. The temperature in a room rose when he entered
it. Even people of sluggish, scholarly, dilettante temperaments, even
coldly superior and skeptical people who prided themselves on being too
disdainful of life to lift an eyebrow over its issues, soon kindled
either to intense exasperation or lively personal affection. In either
case, calm and ease and torpidity of life were scorched and shaken.
I have often thought with sympathy of the vestrymen in Grandfather’s
various parishes.
As a young clergyman he ran one parish after another, with increasing
brio. When he settled down in the New York parish where he stayed for
most of his life, he was already editing a church-paper and writing
innumerable pamphlets, in addition to his regular duties as rector. He
now speeded up the staid old parish into new work of all sorts, added
one mission chapel after another to the church organization, pushed out
the influence of the parish further and further, especially into the
outlying regions of the slums, which because of their very discouraging
aspect of poverty and foreignness had been till then safe from attempts
to improve them.
Of course I knew my grandfather only when he was a very old man, long
after he had retired from active life; but I never got from him the
slightest impression that he was what is known as a “religious-minded
person” or that all this remarkable expansion of church and mission
work came entirely from evangelical fervor. In fact, as I remember
Grandfather, you never would dream that he had been a minister at
all. My guess is that he developed that church as his contemporaries
developed their transcontinental systems of railways, because he was
born with a clutch that never slipped, so that all the power he created
by his many-cylindered motor was transmitted without loss to the wheels
which sent him with extreme rapidity along the road he had chanced to
follow.