books, unendingly bought books, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, French, English.
No junk-man who ever lived has been able to free us entirely of this
vast accumulation of serious-minded books of research, now quite
worthless, all of them, full of the pompous and inaccurate scholarship
of his day. He traveled abroad and sprang, tiger-like, upon European
culture, with his formidable New-World capacity for the assimilation
of Gargantuan meals of solid food. He married “well,” as the saying
goes, and gave his son university life and European travel. He lived
as he had wanted to live, with friends and acquaintances in three
countries, dressing his vast body in fine broadcloth and white linen;
his house was lined with well-bound books; he was a famous talker--in
the vein of Dr. Johnson--much sought after for his brilliantly amusing
conversation, though at times, I take it, he followed his prototype
into rather overpowering monologue; he was a powerful and very fluent
public speaker--we have chests and chests full of his sermons still in
the attic--and so far as I can gather he no more doubted the ultimately
satisfying value of all these things as an integral part of life than
Mr. Russel Sage seems to have questioned the ultimately satisfying
value of squeezing the last penny of interest out of a loan, or Barnum
to have doubted the worthwhileness of running the biggest show on earth.
It would be very unfair to give the impression that his agreeable
social life and the possession of objects and books then in fashion
made up the whole or even the largest part of his life. It took
such a formidable number of elements to satisfy his huge appetite
for life and activity, that it would be difficult to catalog them
all. Controversy, for instance; he adored pamphleteering, and was
known as one of the leading controversialists of his time. He was a
heart-felt Low-Churchman and perhaps the real passion of his passionate
life was his hot-blooded detestation of formalism in religious
beliefs. Infinitely various, and all headlong, were his attacks on
High-Churchism, with its rigid orthodoxy, and its fol-de-rols (as
he called them) of salvation by incense and candles and twiddling
distinctions between green and blue and yellow stoles.
Indeed this shouldering impatience of formal theological points led
him late in life, to disagree vigorously with the majority of his
parishioners on several questions of doctrine. Refusing to conform to
the strict pattern they wished to impose upon him, he blew up with an
explosion, shook the dust of his religious vocation off his feet, and
retired to the comfortable old house in Vermont, where he spent his
old age, living comfortably on his small savings. He took with him
all the possessions he had enjoyed so heartily, his many, many books,
his substantial furniture, the excellent oil-portrait which had been
painted of his vivid, handsome face in middle-life, his gold-headed
cane, his great black-silk clerical robes, and fine ecclesiastical
linen. When he died, he had never, so far as I know, slept out of an
excellent bed a single night in all his life.
* * * * * * *
The other grandfather fared forth at about the same date or a little
earlier, and at about the same age; but not in search of well-set
dinner-tables nor well-filled libraries, nor the inheritance of culture
from past ages. On the contrary, he seems all his life to have been
engaged in running away from even the light and sketchy approximation
to imprisoning regularity which was shown by the America of that day
and the State of his birth. Like an unbroken colt who snorts and
wheels and dashes away at the mere sight of some one emerging from the
barn with a rope halter, this other farm-boy gave one look at what
seemed to him the penitentiary-like pressure of conventional life and
ran away with all the speed of what turned out to be a remarkably
fleet pair of heels. First, as a lad, he ran away from his perfectly
comfortable home, where he had been well cared for, and soundly if
plainly educated. Disdaining ... no, more than that, courting hardship,
as he always did, he roamed out into the absolute, untrammeled freedom
of early frontier life. There he starved and hunted and went in ragged
buckskin, and trapped, and moved on, and grew up to a great height and
great strength, and was no man’s man to his heart’s content. At some
time during this period he acquired, with characteristic casual ease,
the profession of surveyor, the only one of the trades or professions
at which he was willing even to give a glance. There was plenty of
unsurveyed land in the States at that time, and all of it in the new,
untracked wilderness which he loved.
He seems always to have despised physical comfort as a clumsy trap laid
by life to catch you and hold you fast. None of it for him. He hated
the very indoor smell of it, as he did the burdening weight of material
possessions. A gun (which like other frontiersmen of that day he
passionately and personally loved), an ax (with which he could perform
almost any feat), the clothes he stood in, the tools of his wildwoods
profession, and the world before him, full, intoxicatingly full of
untrodden paths leading into bright enticing danger. Prosperity? A
home of his own? Above all, regular work? Never, as long as there were
squirrels and deer to shoot and logs to make temporary shelters withal!
His roamings took him into Ohio, the early river and lake settlements
of which were at that time horribly marshy and fever-ridden. There
he encountered the lure which brings most young adventurers in under
a roof and beside a hearth-fire. He fell in love. A pretty Vermont
girl was visiting some cousins there and had set up a little millinery
shop, where she made and sold the scoop-bonnets of the period. Do you
see them, the tall, big-boned surveyor, with his magnetic personality,
pungent with the odor of freedom, and the pink-cheeked, white-fingered
little amateur milliner?
She went back to Vermont to her family, and he followed her. I have
often amused myself by walking around over the roads and paths and
fields he must have trod during his wooing, and trying to imagine his
impatience of the cribbed and cabined superfluity and conventionality
of the Vermont life, which looked so primitive and bare to my other
grandfather.
He endured it for some months, till his wooing was successful, and,
just after her twenty-first birthday, the gentle, home-loving girl put
her hand upon his sinewy arm and followed him out into the wilds. This
was in 1838 when the wilds were very wild indeed. My great-uncle, who
was her little brother at that time conceived a lifelong admiration
and affection for the great, strapping, warm-hearted hero who came to
take away his big sister. He used to tell me stories of that impetuous
wooing, and of the strange impression left on the deeply-rooted
mountain-people by the meteor-like appearance and disappearance of
this startling, unreliable, dangerously alive personality, living so
immorally free from all the rules and possessions and standards which
bore them down to the earth, and to which they so tenaciously clung.
My great-uncle always ended these stories of his brother-in-law (whom
he never saw but on that occasion) by saying, “He was a talented man,
with a powerful personality, who could have done anything he chose.”
He also told me, “Our minister said of Albert that he was a wild, free
son of Nature.” I take it the minister had had some contact with the
romantic-school phraseology so much in fashion at that date.
It was a bitterly hard life which the Vermont girl had chosen, full
of extravagant hardships and privations of which she could never have
dreamed. They lived here and there, always from hand to mouth, always
as far beyond the edge of the settlements as it was possible to take a
family of young children, for they had five little girls by the time
they had been married a decade. Once or twice her husband made an
attempt to enter regular life, to run a store in a frontier settlement,
to take an everyday job; but these trials never lasted long, and their
old life was taken up, log-cabin after log-cabin, rough clearings in
the primeval forest, days when there was nothing but corn-meal in the
pantry, long treks in covered wagons to escape from the fever-and-ague
which burned and ravaged them; never more possessions than could be
drawn by a team of lean horses, ... and always unbroken love and
devotion between the two wayfarers. Wherever their caravan halted for
a few months was home to the woodsman’s wife, because he was there;
his vitality, his free-hearted zest in whatever came to them, bore her
along like a tidal wave. And to the end of her days she worshipped the
memory of his deep, never-wavering passion for her.
You can imagine that her comfortably well-to-do family thought he took
a very queer way to show it, and with Yankee out-spokenness told them
both so, as cuttingly as Yankee tongues can speak. Without a hesitation
she flung her family ties away along with her love of home, her woman’s
love for stability, her mother’s anxiety about her little girls. Not
till long after his death did she again resume relations with her
family.
Her little girls, never having known any other life, saw nothing
unusual in the one they led, especially as their mother, her
personality doubled and trebled by the exigencies of her life, stood,
somehow, miraculously between them and the most impossible of the
hardships to which their father so light-heartedly condemned them.
They were always dressed in well-mended garments, they had shoes and
stockings, they were clean and cherished, there was always cheer and
loving-kindness between their father and mother, and when there was
only corn-meal mush for supper, they scarcely noticed it, because of
the old songs and stories of which their mother had such a store. My
mother sang them to me, and I now sing them to my children, those old
folk-songs with which my grandmother charmed away hunger from her
little children. They adored their great, rollicking father, always in
high spirits, and they preferred the deer-steaks and squirrel stews
which were the results of his wonderful marksmanship, to the tough,
stringy beef and salt pork which was the diet of the other frontier
children. One of my mother’s vivid recollections is of looking out of
the window on a snowy day and seeing her stalwart father emerge from
the woods into the clearing, carrying ... a very Robin Hood ... a whole
deer’s carcass on his broad shoulders. He cast it down before the door
and called, like a great boy, for his women-folk to come and admire
him! She says she can close her eyes now, see the blood ruddy on the
snow, and her father’s thrown-back head and bright, laughing face.
Of course, when the news of gold in California came, burning-hot like
wild-fire from the west, he was one of the first to go. He would be.
A distant, uncertain, and dangerous expedition, into unknown country;
could he resist such an alluring combination? Of course, he could have
resisted it if he had tried; but he did not try. He never tried.
Also, of course, it was really out of the question to transport a wife
and five little girls across an untracked continent, full of Indians.
He was to go alone, make a brief stay, get the lay of the land, and
come back, his pockets full of gold, to take the family out in a ship
around the Horn. It was all settled in his mind as if the gold were
heavy in his pockets. The separation would be short ... he was sure
of it, as he was always sure of whatever would ensure his being free
of the slightest constraint.... He moved his family into the nearest
settlement, cashed in on everything saleable, added a small sum that
had just come to him as his share of his father’s small property, and
got together enough to support his family for a year. It took little
enough, as they had always lived. And he would be back before the year
was out, rolling in gold.
With empty pockets and a high heart he took his gun and his ax, kissed
his family good-by and went away planning to live off the country as he
traveled, as he always had.
One letter came back from California, the only one he ever wrote,
since he had never before been separated from the one human being he
had loved. He had had a gloriously adventurous time in getting out
there, Indians, drought, snow, heat, grizzly bears--all the regulation
accompaniments of the transcontinental trip in 1849. He struck it rich
at once, and as one of the first on the ground had a wonderful claim of
his own. They would all be rich in no time.
In no time he was dead.
For an interminable period his wife heard nothing, and then, very
vaguely, that he had died of “mountain fever.” He had been dead and
buried for months before she learned that she was a widow at thirty-two
with five helpless little girls and not a penny in the world.
OCTOBER, 1918
MORNING
I was crossing the Place de la Concorde, and stopped for an instant,
fascinated by the sinister expression of an immense cannon, painted
in serpentine streaks and stripes, the muzzle of its tube distorted
by an explosion so that a twisted flap of steel hung down like a
broken jaw-bone. A hail made me turn around. The elegant old man who
was an American correspondent for a New York newspaper, came up with
an expression of approval. “Magnificent display, isn’t it?” he said,
waving his hand towards the ranks of captured cannon and mitrailleuses,
standing thick on the public square. “Why didn’t you bring your
children?”
The gulf between his generation and mine yawned deep. I told myself
the part of wisdom was to close my lips on what I felt. But the cannon
leered at me too insolently, with its torn muzzle.
I answered, “I’m glad enough when the police seem to be getting the
better of a band of ruffians who’ve been terrorizing the town. But I
don’t take the children to see the bloody clubs with which....”
“Oh, come!” said my old friend, genially. “Feminine emotionality!
These don’t look much like bloody clubs. They look more like part of a
steel-foundry.”
“Every cannon here is wreathed in human viscera, spattered with human
brains, and stands in a pool of human blood, if we only had eyes to
see!” I said moderately.
“Why, you talk like a pacifist!” said the old gentleman, forgetting his
usual politeness to women.
“I thought the unforgivable sin of the Germans was in forcing a war
on a world that has outgrown war! If war is so hateful a thing, why
complacently lay out to view its hideous instruments of torture?”
“Because,” said my old friend with deep emotion, “because they have
been instruments of righteousness!” (For the moment he had forgotten
the nationality of the cannon about us.)
“Have they?” I asked. “They’re German cannon, remember.” In spite of my
feeling sick, I could not but laugh at the change in his expression. I
went on, “Well, even if they had been sacred Allied cannon, they’d be
instruments of torture all the same. I thought we were fighting to put
such things on the scrap heap. Why don’t we have the decency to hide
them from view? We don’t put the offal from our slaughter-houses on
public view.”
“Vegetarianism, next?”
“Oh, no, I eat beefsteaks. But I don’t take the children to see the
steers killed.”
“Of course, I know,” said my old friend tolerantly, “that women have a
traditional right to be illogical, but _really_.... Did you, or did you
not turn your personal life upside down to do your share in this war?
It would give me brain fever to feel two different ways about the same
thing.”
“See here,” I put it to him, “a man, crazy-drunk comes roaring down our
street. Who _wouldn’t_ feel two ways about him? I certainly do. First,
I know that society has been wrongly organized to permit any boy to
grow up crazed with whiskey; and second, I know that my children must
be protected, now, at this very minute. Shooting that man dead isn’t
going to help the general situation at all. If we are not to have a
perpetual procession of crazy-drunk men coming down our street (_and
our own men among them_) we must change the organization of society
by long, patient, and constructive efforts. In the meantime with
the drunken man pounding on my door, if the police don’t do what is
necessary, why, of course, I will throw a dishpan of scalding water
down on him. But I wouldn’t spend the rest of my life making speeches
about the dishpan.”
My sophisticated old friend had for me the smiling amusement one
feels for a bright child talking about what he does not understand.
Taking up the sharp ax of Ecclesiastes, he struck a great blow at the
root of the matter, “No, my dear girl, no, you don’t. A well-meaning,
high-principled woman like you, can do a great deal, but she cannot
amputate a vital part of human nature. You can’t make manly, brave men
ashamed of war and it’s a lucky thing for you you can’t, for if you
did, there would be nobody to stand between you and the bullies. Take
it from a man nearly twice your age, that without the soldier in every
man (and that means love of force and submission to force--you must
swallow that!) there would be no order in the world. You needn’t try to
reduce that element of force to mere businesslike police-work. It can’t
be done. There would be anarchy in the twinkling of an eye. You won’t
believe this, because it doesn’t fit into your womanish, preconceived
notions. But it doesn’t make any difference whether you believe it or
not. Such are the facts. And all your noble phrases can’t change them.”
I turned and left him. I did not believe a word he said, of course ...
but.... There _is_ a horrible side to human nature.... Suppose that to
hold it in check it might be necessary ...
AFTERNOON
“Oh, mother, this is Thursday and the merry-go-round in the Parc of the
Château is running. Couldn’t you take us?”
We set off, the three of us, hand in hand, crossed the arid, bare
Place d’Armes where the great Louis had mustered his troops, hobbled
up over the villainous paving-stones of the gray entrance court and
came by beautiful leafy avenues to where the primitive circle of wooden
horses whirled slowly about, as a one-armed soldier turned the crank.
I was left on a bench, with the other waiting mothers, watching our
children’s pleasure.
My two were at once in another world--Jimmy’s a mere wide world of
enchantment, as befitted his five-year-old ignorance. He swam through
the air, a vague smile of beatitude on his lips. Sally sat very
straight, one hand on her hip, the other stretched out in a gesture of
command. She was perhaps Charlemagne before the defeated Saxons, or
possibly Joan of Arc at Orléans. Sally’s class at school begins to have
some notions of history.
When the crippled soldier was tired, and we had paid our copper sous,
we wandered on, to a bench in front of a statue of mellow marble. Here
I sat down while the children ran about, shouting and kicking up the
chestnut leaves which laid a carpet of cloth-of-gold under their feet.
Their laughter sounded distant in my ears. I was hearing again the
cock-sure old voice of the morning.... “Anarchy in a moment if respect
for force were eliminated ... you cannot amputate a part of human
nature....”
What was my little daughter saying, with her amusing older-sister air
of omniscience? “Did you know, Jimmy, that it was a king who had all
this made, out of nothing at all. We’ve just had that in school. It was
only a bare, sandy plain, and he had all the trees brought here, and
the terraces made, and the water brought here.... It cost millions and
millions.”
Jimmy looked up in astonishment at the giant oak over him. “Can you
carry great big trees like these around with you?” he asked.
“No, gracious, no! It was ever so long ago. They’ve grown up since.
They were just scrawny little saplings. They’ve got an old picture at
school that shows how it was when he was alive. Awfully ugly!”
“I wouldn’t have liked it then,” said Jimmy.
Sally hooted at his ignorance. “My goodness, you don’t suppose you’d
ever have got any chance to play here if you’d lived then. Not much!
We never could have got in. They had soldiers at all the gates to keep
people out.”
Jimmy’s sense of the probable was outraged. There were some things too
tall to be believed, even if Sally did say them. “What was it _for_, if
nobody was allowed in?”
“It was for the king. Everything was for the king then. And he only let
in his own family and his special friends.”
“I should think people would ha’ been mad to see the king hogging
everything for himself,” Jimmy said vigorously.
“Oh, they were used to it,” explained Sally. “They thought it had to be
that way. All the learned men in those days told them that everything
would go to pieces and everybody would rob and murder everybody else
if they didn’t have a king and think they loved him more than anybody
else.”
Once more Jimmy’s sense of the probable rose up to protest, “They
didn’t _love_ that old hog-it-all king!” The little twentieth-century
American brain refused to credit this ridiculous and inherently
impossible idea.
( ... and yet how many generations of men suffered and died to affirm
that idea as the natural and inevitable foundation of society!)
“Well, they thought they had to, and so they thought they did,” said
Sally lucidly. “The way we love our governments now. But after a couple
of hundred years or so they found out the learned men didn’t know so
much, and that it wasn’t having a king that kept folks from robbing and
murdering all the time. So they got together and came out here from
Paris and took all this away from him. And that’s how we get in to
play.”
Jimmy’s fancy was tickled by a new idea. “I bet he’d be surprised if he
could see us playing here.”
Sally dramatized the scene, instantly. “Wouldn’t he though! Suppose
he should come walking right down those marble steps with his high
wig and his big-buckled shoes, and his clothes all solid gold and
diamonds, and suppose he should walk right up to us and say, ‘You
good-for-nothing common-people, what are you doing in MY park? I’ll
have you boiled in oil at once!’”
Jimmy was a little intimidated. He took his big sister’s hand and said
in rather a small voice, “What would you say back?”
Sally made a dramatic gesture of scorn. “I’d say, ‘Get away from here,
you old King. Don’t you know you’re dead?’ And then, Jimmy, you know
ghosts aren’t solid. I’d just draw off and run right through him, gold
clothes and diamonds and all, like this.”
She executed a headlong assault on space and came back laughing.
Jimmy, reassured, caught the note, “Yes,” he said swaggering, “I would
too, I’d say, ‘You old King, you’re dead!’ and I’d run right through
him too.”
It was the most delightful of all the games Sally had invented. They
went at it with gusto, their faces rosy and laughing as they took turns
in dashing through the non-existent might, majesty, and glory of a dead
idea.
It was a game which amused their mother quite as much as the children.
I sat watching them at it, till it was time to start home back through
the rich magnificence of the old park which had been planted for a
king’s pleasure and which throughout the silent, purposeful centuries
had grown to beauty for the people.
A BRETON AMONG HSÜ HSI
The black-and-white maid told me I was expected and showed me into the
drawing-room to wait. As I waited I looked around at the beautiful
room with the leaden depression which such beautiful rooms always
produce in me. It was a wonderfully elaborate composition with as many
details in it as there are notes on a page of music, and every one of
them was correct and accredited. As I stepped in through the door the
whole shouted in my ears a pæan of religiously devout acceptance of the
fashion then prevailing in interior decoration.