wonder!” said another. “Such a fascinating, attractive personality.”
“How did you like his sermon?” I asked. Personally I had found it
rather too dramatic for my taste. It rubs me the wrong way when I feel
that somebody is trying to work my feelings up, although I always feel
a little ashamed of this natural ungraciousness, which is labeled in
the talk of the old people of our locality as “Canfield cussedness.”
One of my companions answered me, “Why, the tears ran right down my
cheeks, towards the end of that sermon!”
And another added, “Such a power for good as he has been, all his life.
Think of his having begun his wonderful work right here in our little
parish.”
The door opened and the preacher himself entered in his black cassock,
followed by a group of people. He was a little flushed from the
handshaking reception he had been holding in the vestibule and still
wore the affable smile which had gone with the handshaking. The men and
women who had followed him in were still talking two or three at once,
trying to get his attention, still fixing their eyes on him, unwilling
to leave him, moved evidently by his mere presence.
“It’s a renewal of my youth to be here again in this dear old parish,”
he said genially, using a set of inflections of his fine voice quite
different from those of the sermon, “I find it all comes back to me
with the utmost freshness. Ah, youth! Youth!”
He broke off to say in still another tone, “I know none of you will
object to my saying also that it is an immense relief to find the
parish rid of that detestable incubus Mrs. Almera Canfield. You must
all breathe a happier air, since she took her mocking cynicism into
another world.”
A quick shifting of eyes, lifted eyebrows, and suppressed smiles told
him that he had been indiscreet. He faced the uncomfortable little
situation with a well-oiled ease of manner. “Have I offended some
one here?” he asked, instantly, turning towards us. Then, seeing by
my expression that I was the one involved, he said gallantly, “It’s
not possible that so very young a lady can have any connection with a
generation so long since passed away.”
“Mrs. Almera Canfield was my great-grandmother,” I said, perhaps rather
drily. Not that I cared especially about Great-grandmother, of whom at
that time I knew very little, and who seemed as remote from my life as
Moses. But that same hateful, contrary streak in my nature was roused
to resentment by his apparent assumption that a smile and a word from
him could set anything straight.
He found the fact of my relationship and of my knowledge of it very
amusing, “Where, oh, where, out of Vermont could you find a modern
young person who even knew the name of her great-grandmother? I’m
sure, my dear, that family loyalties are outlawed by such a long
interval of years. And I’m also sure by one look at you, that you are
not at all like your great-grandmother.”
He seemed to think, I reflected, that I would be sure to take that as a
compliment. She must have been an old Tartar.
I could think of nothing to answer, and he turned away again, to go on
chatting with the people who continued to hang on his words, laughing
loudly when he said something playful, nodding a grave concurrence in
his more seriously expressed opinions, their eyes always fixed on his.
They all moved away, out into the church and down the aisle and I
did not see him again till that evening, when, quite unexpectedly,
he appeared beside me in the break-up of the company after the large
public dinner.
“I feel that I owe you an apology,” he began persuasively and
courteously, “for having let slip that chance remark about a relative
of yours, even so very far distant. I would not have said it, of
course, if I had dreamed that any member of her family....” Up to this
point he had used the same sort of voice and tone that he had employed
after church that morning, but now he suddenly dropped into another
tone, quite different. I had a divination that it was not only quite
different from any inflection he had used, but also not at all what he
had had the intention of using. “I try to be fair ... to be tolerant
... to be _forgiving_, but really I can never forget the....” (it was
as if a wave of lava had burst up out of the smiling pleasantness of
his agreeable manner) “I simply can’t express to you the blighting,
devastating effect she had on me, young, sensitive, emotional and
ardent as I was at that time!”
He started at the violence of his own voice and glanced quickly around
him as if to see whether any one else had heard it. And then he looked
intensely annoyed by his own gesture.
“You are probably assuming that I refer,” he went on more quietly,
but still pressingly (it was as if for some reason he quite cared to
influence my unimportant opinion), “that I refer to her dictatorial
assurance that she knew better than any one else how things ought
to be run. Of course you must have heard plenty of stories of her
overbearing ways. But that is not the point; no, although she was a
hard parishioner on that account for a young clergyman struggling with
the administration of his first parish. What came back to me, in a wave
of bitterness as I stood up to preach to-day, was the remembrance of
the peculiarly corrosive vein of irony, with which she withered and
dried to the root any play of poetry or emotion in those about her. So
far from feeling any natural, human sympathy with ardent youth, she
had a cold intolerance for any nature richer or more warmly colored
than her own. She made it her business to drop an acid sneer upon any
expression of emotion or any appeal to it; and a life-long practice in
that diabolical art had given her a technique of raw, brutal roughness,
guaranteed to hamstring any spontaneity of feeling, any warmth of
personality. I could quote you dozens of such poisoned shafts of
hers.... Here’s one that came into my mind as I stood again in that
pulpit, where I first dedicated myself to the service of God.
“I can never forget her comment on the first sermon in which I let
myself go into the fervor which was given me by nature. It was an
appeal for foreign missions, a cause always dear to my heart. I was
carried away by my feelings, and fairly poured out my soul to my
listeners. I have always considered that to be my first real sermon,
the first time I felt sure of my Vocation. Afterwards, as I stood in
the robing room, faint with the reaction after my emotion, I heard some
one just outside the door say, ‘Well, Aunt Almera, what did you think
of the sermon?’ And what do you think her answer was! She said, ‘Oh, I
_like_ to see anybody enjoy himself as much as that young man did.’”
This unexpected conclusion brought to me such a sudden horrifying
desire to laugh that I felt quite shaken by the necessity to curb it.
And it was essential not to let it be seen. For he had wound himself up
again to a heat which astonished me. It was as if he had meant casually
to show me an old scar, and had found to his surprise that the wound
was as raw and smarting as ever.
“Why,” he cried, “she all but drove me wholly out of preaching, at
the very outset of my career, sitting there as she did, Sunday after
Sunday, fixing that cynical aged eye on me. You can’t know ... I hear
that you have been brought up, luckily for you, outside of this deadly
New England atmosphere.... You can’t _imagine_ how it kills and freezes
all the warmth and color and fire out of life to have such a ... if I
hadn’t escaped out of it to....”
“I’m afraid I’ve been brought up mostly in a New England atmosphere,” I
said, beginning to feel very cross and prickly.
As if struck by something in my tone, he now looked at me very hard. I
don’t know what he saw in my face ... perhaps a family resemblance of
expression ... but he suddenly seemed to come to himself with a start.
He said abruptly, with an expression of extreme annoyance once more on
his face, “I beg your pardon for bringing all this up. I can’t think
what in the world made me!” and turned away with a noticeable lack of
suavity and grace of manner.
Once I was taken to see an old Irishwoman who had come from Ireland as
a young girl, just after the great famine in ’48, and had gone to work
for Great-grandmother, who was then sixty-three years old. She told me
this story, in her thick, thick early-nineteenth-century brogue, which
I will not try to reproduce here: “There was a pretty girl, young and
happy-looking, that lived up the road with her father, a poor weak
rag of a man with a backbone like a piece of string. He’d married for
his second wife a hard, hard woman. And when they found out the girl
was in trouble, and her sweetheart that was the cause of it off up in
the North Country for the winter to work as a lumberjack, didn’t the
stepmother turn the poor girl out--yes, out like a dog. And old Mrs.
Canfield--that was some kin to you, I forget what--where I was working,
she went right out and brought her in, and kept her there safe and
sound all winter, treating her as nice as anybody, letting her sew
to pay for her keep, and helping her make the baby clothes. She’d go
with her to church every Sunday, the girl right on her arm, and nobody
daring to say a word, for fear of old Mrs. Canfield’s tongue, ‘For,’
she used to say, ‘let ’em say a word if they dare, and I’ll tell a few
things I know about some folks in this town who had to be married in a
hurry, and whose babies came into the world ahead of time.’ You see,
she was so old she knew everything that had happened from the beginning
almost. She’d say, ‘There’s lots worse things done every day in this
town than anything Margaret’s done,’ she’d say, and nobody to answer
her back a word.
“But everybody was thinking it very certain that the man would never
come back, and if he did, he’d never own the child, nor have anything
to do with Margaret, poor girl! You see, in those days there weren’t
any mails that were carried ’way back off in the woods, and she neither
had any word of him nor he of her. Well, old Mrs. Canfield knew what
people were saying all right, and I could see that she was troubled in
her mind, though she never lowered her high head by an inch. Margaret’s
time drew near, and no sign from John Dawson that was away. But
Margaret never lost her faith in him a minute. ‘When John is back,’
she’d say, just as sure of him as though they’d been married by the
priest; but I could see old Mrs. Canfield look queer when she’d hear
Margaret talking that way.
“And then one morning, in April ’twas, and we’d all the doors and
windows open for the first time, Margaret had gone down the walk to
look at the lilac bush to see if there were any buds on it, and around
the corner came John Dawson!
“Her back was to him and he hadn’t any idea she was there, so when
she turned round, they stared at each other for just a minute, as if
they’d never seen each other. Now the moment had come, Margaret stood
there frozen, just waiting, like a little scared, helpless--I had the
half of me hanging out the kitchen window to see what would happen, and
I’ll never forget it--never--never--never--the look on his face, the
astounded look on his face, so full of pity and love, so strong with
pity and love. ‘Margie! _Margie!_’ he said in a loud voice, and threw
his sack off his back and his gun from his hand, and ran, ran to take
her in his arms.
“Well, when I could see again, I went off to tell old Mrs. Canfield,
and there was the old lady in her own bedroom, standing bolt upright
in the middle of the floor, and crying at the top of her voice. Her
wrinkled old face was just a-sop with tears. Faith, but it was the
grand cry she was having! And the good it did her! When she came to,
she says to me, ‘Well,’ says she, ‘folks aren’t so cussed as they seem,
are they?’
“And then we went downstairs to get out the fruit-cake and the brandied
peaches; for the minister married them in our parlor that afternoon.”
One day old Mr. Morgan, the one-armed Civil War veteran, took me along
with him, to get out of the buckboard and open gates, on the back road
along the river. He was going up to a hill pasture to salt his sheep.
It took forever to get there, because his horse was so slow, and he
had time to tell me a great many stories. This was one of them: “When
I was a boy at school, I worked at Aunt Almera Canfield’s doing chores
night and morning. I remember how she used to loosen herself up in
the morning. She was terribly rheumaticky, but she wouldn’t give in
to it. Every morning she’d be all stiffened up so she couldn’t stand
up straight, nor hardly move her legs at all; but she’d get herself
dressed somehow, and then two of her sons came in to help her get
started. She’d make them take hold of her, one on each side, and walk
her around the room. It was awful to hear how she’d yell out--yell as
though they were killing her! And then they’d stop, the sweat on their
faces to see how it hurt her, and then she’d yell at them to go on,
go on, _she_ hadn’t asked them to stop! They were over sixty, both of
them, with grandchildren themselves, but they didn’t dare not do what
she said, and they’d walk her round again. She’d kick her poor legs
out in front of her hard, to get the joints limbered up, and holler
with the pain, and kick them out again, till by and by she’d get so she
could go by herself, and she’d be all right for the day. I tell you, I
often think of that. Yes, lots of times, it comes back to me.”
Up in the sheep pasture, as we sat to rest the horse, he told me this:
“I always thought Aunt Almera knew all about the John Brown raid before
most folks did--maybe she sent some money to help him. She wasn’t a
bit surprised, anyhow, when she heard of it, and all through the whole
business she never thought of another thing, nor let anybody else. He
was caught--any of us that lived in that house those days will never
forget a one of those dates--and put in jail on the 9th of October,
and his trial lasted until the 31st. Aunt Almera made us get together
in the evenings, me and the hired girl and one of her grandsons and
her daughter, all the family, and she’d read aloud to us out of the
‘Tribune’ about what had happened that day at his trial. I never saw
her so worked up about anything--just like ashes her old face was, and
her voice like cold steel. We got as excited about it as she did, all
of us, especially her grandson, that was about my age. The day of his
execution--December 2d, it was--Aunt Almera came at dawn to wake me up.
‘Put on your clothes,’ says she, ‘and go over to the church and begin
to toll the bell.’ I didn’t need to ask her what for, either. I’ll
never forget how awful she looked to me.
“Well, we tolled the bell all day long, one or the other of the family,
never stopped a minute. You never heard anything so like death. All day
long that slow, deep clang--and then a stillness--and then _clang!_
again. I could hear it in my head for days afterwards. Folks came in
from all around to find out what it meant, and Aunt Almera called them
all into her parlor--she sat there all day and never ate a mouthful
of food--and _told_ them what it meant, so they couldn’t ever get the
sound of her voice out of their ears. Between times she’d read out
of the Bible to whoever was there, ‘Avenge thou thy cause, O Lord God
of battles,’ and ‘It is time for thee, O Lord, to lay to thy hand,
for they have destroyed thy law,’ and ‘Let there be no man to pity
them; nor to have compassion of their fatherless children.’ It was the
darndest thing to hear her!
“You’d better believe when Abraham Lincoln sent out the first call for
men there wasn’t a boy of military age in our town that didn’t enlist!”
An aged cousin had just died, and as we sat downstairs talking with the
doctor, he said to my aunt, who had been taking care of the sick woman:
“She took it hard! She took it hard!”
They both frowned, and my aunt looked rather sick. Then the doctor
said, “Not much like your grandmother, do you remember?”
“Oh, yes, I remember,” said my aunt, her face quivering, her eyes
misty, her lips smiling.
The doctor explained to me: “Your great-grandmother was an old, old
woman before she ever was really sick at all, except for rheumatism.
And then she had a stroke of paralysis that left her right side dead.
She lived four days that way--the only days she’d spent in bed in
years, since she was a young woman, I suppose. Her mind wasn’t very
clear, she couldn’t talk so that we could understand her, and I don’t
think she rightly knew anybody after her stroke. I guess she went
back, ’way back, for we saw from what she did that she thought she had
a little baby with her. I suppose she thought she was a young mother
again, and that was why she was in bed. We used to see her spread out
her arm, very gentle and slow, the only arm she could move, so’s to
make a hollow place for a little head, and then she’d lie there, so
satisfied and peaceful, looking up at the ceiling with a smile in her
eyes, as if she felt a little warm, breathing creature there beside
her. And sometimes she’d half wake up and stretch out her hand and
seem to stroke the baby’s head or snuggle it up closer to her, and
then she’d give a long sigh of comfort to find it there, and drop off
to sleep again, smiling. And she’d always remember, even in her sleep,
to keep her arm curved around so there’d be room for the baby; and
even in her sleep her face had that shining new-mother look--that old
wrinkled face, with that look on it! I’ve seen lots of death-beds, but
I never--” he stopped for a moment.
“Why, at the very last--do you remember?”--he went on to my aunt, “I
thought she was asleep, but as I moved a chair she opened her eyes
quickly, looked down as if to see whether I had wakened the baby, and
looked at me, to warn me to be quiet, her fingers at her lips. ‘Sh!’
she whispered.
“And that was the way she died.”