One winter evening, in a snugly built little stone cottage near the
northern border of Vermont, a young family of three had gathered beside a
glowing hearth and a cheerful lamp to enjoy an hour of that contentment
which is most deeply felt when the fire is bright, the curtain closely
drawn, and a storm is raging without. It was the birthday of the child
Samuel. He was three years old, and as a birthday indulgence, he was to
sit up until seven o’clock, and carve things with the jack-knife that his
father, himself a carver of renown, had brought him as a birthday gift.
This was by no means his first adventure with a knife. For a year or more
he had managed a knife, at first feebly, but later with an astonishing
ease. His father was proud of the infant Phidias, and even his mother had
ceased to be terror-stricken at the conjunction of child and knife. The
motions of the boy Samuel were happy and accurate. At the present hour,
such gestures as his would be called eurhythmic, or something of that
sort; even in those days of preposterous precocity, he was regarded with
wonder.
It was the month and the year when for the first time there was a
Confederacy, with a President to be prayed for, or else against. Stirring
era! No lack of interesting items for the father to read aloud from
his Weekly; Nancy, the young wife busy with her sewing, was as deeply
interested as he himself in the doings at Fort Sumter. Her comments
on Lincoln and Davis were no less keen than his. With eyes now bent
on her work, a fine linen handkerchief to be hemmed on four sides,
and now returning to the child seated on the braided rug at her feet,
she still had time and thought to give to her husband’s reading; at
twenty-three, she rejoiced to be living in portentous times. And pray
do not imagine that because the home was remote from great cities, the
mother necessarily comported herself as a poor rustic creature, or as one
unfamiliar with the counsels of “Godey’s Lady’s Book.” Her ample gown was
of the finest cashmere, triple-dyed of a deep rose-color, and it was well
spread out upon a hoop-skirt which she managed with the kind of skill
that a rose in full bloom must employ when keeping its petals in order.
The guests at the birthday feast had been a pair of grandparents, a
young uncle and aunt, and a ten-year-old girl from the farmhouse down
the road. The little girl, brave in her well-flounced, orange-spotted
purple delaine, wore pantalets that had been made much too long for her,
in anticipation of some prodigious growth which had not taken place;
and these had been starched too stiffly, so that she creaked audibly
during locomotion. But she was very happy at the party; and though her
costume might appear but ill-suited to the rigors of a Vermont winter,
it must be remembered that in those days female attire had no commerce
with common sense. Promptly at half-past five her mother came for her,
bustling competently into the house, with an accompaniment of impatient
sleigh-bells outside; and she glanced with undisguised curiosity at the
spread table, not yet cleared away, the birthday cake with its heathenish
three candles, and the young heir himself.
“They say he hain’t never been punished none?”
Nancy flushed, and held back an angry answer. She was aware that the
subject had already been torn to tatters by the village gossips.
“Punished? No, not yet.”
“I want to know! Wal, I guess he’s needed it, afore now!” The farm-wife
was emphatic; but there was motherly love as well as village curiosity in
her scrutiny of little Samuel. “Looks jest like a young American flag,
don’t he? Them blue pants, and red cheeks, and eyes stickin’ out so kinda
starry. But all childern needs punishments,” she chirped. “They’re all
of ’em limbs of Satan. I’ve had seven, and I guess I know.” She cast an
eagle eye on the pantalets of her first “limb.” “Them Hamburg points
allus ketch up every mite of dust,” she lamented, as she tucked her child
under a buffalo robe and drove away through the snow.
“Wal, she knows a lot, if she knows all she thinks she doos,” was the
grandmother’s placid comment, as she and the aunt cleared away the
feast. “Nancy has no call to mind _her_.” It was evident that Nancy was
a creature lovingly set apart in that little world. Having borne the
brunt of the birthday preparations, she was not allowed to put on her
all-enveloping kitchen apron again, but was forced down into her own
chair in the bright sitting-room. Rather early, because of the bitter
weather, the guests had gone, and the family was left to itself in a
loving intimacy precious to each of the three.
The young mother’s face, softly banded with dark hair, rose flower-like
above a lace collar, fastened at the throat by a large elliptical shell
cameo representing Ganymede teasing the eagles of Jupiter. To the
wearer that brooch was a pleasing and a precious thing. It had been her
mother’s, and had been bought in Rome by her father, our first American
translator of Tasso. Whether or not as an aid to his own understanding of
the Italian poet, the New England scholar had married a gentle Sicilian
girl, and Nancy herself had been born in Rome and christened Annunziata,
an outlandish name that American relatives, after the scholar’s return,
had promptly transformed into Nancy. And all her life Nancy had been
conscious, not without joy, of her twofold nature as a New Englander
and an Italian. Nancy and Annunziata were both of them under her skin.
She never knew which one triumphed the oftener. In the kitchen, Nancy,
perhaps; in the sitting-room, Annunziata.
That evening, as she sewed her fine seam, the ample roseate sleeves
of her gown and the white undersleeves flowing beneath them moved in
and out of the lamplight in a kind of stately melody as for a minuet.
Watching the child at his carving, she hoped and dreamed for him the
life beautiful, the life of a sculptor. Had Raphael been there, she
would have been a Madonna; a Madonna of the hoop-skirt, but not of
the rocking-chair. No, indeed! The chair she sat in was one that her
husband had made and carved for her, after a drawing in an ancient book
on Italian furniture; its beauty and strength were a constant delight
to her. And even without the chair, and the Ganymede, and the crimson
curtains, it would have been evident that this young pair were among the
aristocrats of the village; they felt that they belonged to the only
aristocracy the place permitted, the aristocracy of mind. They had more
books than the minister even. And no doubt Nancy’s birth in Rome, that
far-off city where the Pope lives, had added a secretly savored pagan
touch to the picture the hamlet had made of her.
Still more than the woman with her Madonna vision, the man exulted in
the child’s rapt industry. With vigilant eye he noted the process of
creation. A cat, it seemed; Samuel was carving a cat; no, _the_ cat! Once
in a while, as if to refresh a memory perhaps somewhat dimmed by his
three years’ stay among mortals, Samuel would glance toward Pharaoh, the
great green-eyed old black torn; but mostly his head with its long fair
curls was bent over his work. Samuel was not copying a cat; he was rather
evolving the cat from the deeps of his inner consciousness. Samuel’s
cat was not the lithe and lordly beast of Barye, nor yet the affable
companion that Frémiet has given to the world; it was rather a cat of the
Egyptians, the mystery of cathood incarnate. And just as Michelangelo
knew that an angel slept in his marble block, so Samuel knew that all
cathood crouched within a wooden chip. The father, seeing the child’s
difficulty in separating the cat-mass from the scrap of board in his tiny
hand, would gladly have performed the rude preliminaries. But the boy had
drawn back, and clasping the wood to his chest, had said firmly, in his
usual way of speaking only the key-words of a situation, “Self do all!”
Samuel knew no baby-talk. From his mother and her New England forbears
(scholars, theologians, translators, and the like) he had inherited a
great fund of words fit to be spoken, and from his father a passion
for perfection in all things. He had a natural longing to say things
rightly, and so saved his larynx for the essential syllables. The father,
well-pleased with that confident “Self do all,” returned to his reading.
But Samuel, rather than Fort Sumter, filled his mind that night.
An odd-looking creature, one would say, if Samuel should suddenly appear
in our modern circle. Yet his oddity was rather in what had been done
to him than in what he was. His yellow hair was arranged in seven tight
spirals hanging to his shoulders; an eighth spiral made a sort of shining
ridgepole on the roof of his head, from the brow backwards. Beyond
question, a pretty child, with the delicately brilliant coloring of the
Nordic; and his fine strong hands and feet had a definite character of
their own. He wore a low-necked, short-sleeved tunic, very voluminous as
to its skirt; it was made of thick blue woollen material woven by his
grandmother. Beneath the tunic were ridiculous shapeless breeches of the
same stuff; then came a section of bare calf, and after that, white wool
socks and stout, copper-toed ankle-ties. As he sat on the braided rug,
among his blue homespun billows, his back against his adoring slave, the
sheep-dog Ajax, and his heart and soul bound up in his job of carving,
he was at once the most absurd and lovable object in all Vermont.
Disquieting, too, perhaps, for his next of kin.
Seven o’clock was to be his bed-knell; and now seven o’clock suddenly
sounded from the tall shape in the corner. At once the mother rose,
smoothed her ample skirt, and held out her hand. “Bedtime, Samuel.”
Samuel looked at her beseechingly, but he knew that his look was
lost. Already in his short life he had learned that in the realm of
prohibitions, woman is of sterner stuff than man. He therefore gazed
toward the spot where help was more likely to be found. Still seated
firmly, clutching his cat in one hand and his new knife in the other, he
stretched out his arms to his father, and cried aloud, “None done, papa!”
Invincible argument from creator to creator, “None done!”
The parents exchanged irresolute glances. “Very well, Samuel, just ten
minutes more.” Samuel, victorious, returned to his art. But what are
minutes to him whom the dream has possessed? At the end of ten minutes,
when the mother rose again, and delicately flicked her cashmere folds,
Samuel was far more unready than before. And now, his clear infantine
voice with its uncannily correct enunciation had lost its former coaxing
grace. The tone was haughty, argumentative. “None done, papa!”
“It’s his birthday, _caro mio_.” The young mother spoke softly,
hesitating; the father, in secret delight, relinquished responsibility.
“May as well make it half-past seven,” he growled. “Perhaps he’ll be
tired out by then.” But when he said that, he must have forgotten his
own elation in carving his violins of an evening. By day he worked on
patterns for huge machinery, shaping them with deft mechanical skill. But
every night, between nine and eleven, when the evening reading was over
and the little house under the pines was very still, he used to bring
out one of his violins, and carve and caress and polish its exquisite
surfaces. The patterns for machines were his livelihood, but the violins
were his love. How could he have forgotten his own raptures of carving!
Ah, no, Samuel was by no means “tired out by then!”
When the half-hour sounded, the husband stood up, beckoning to the wife
to remain seated. No more woman’s foolishness; the boy must to bed. “Come
on, young man! Time’s up!” Yet his voice did not sound so commanding as
he had hoped. Samuel felt its indecision; and indeed he was at the moment
too high in the clouds of carving to give any attention whatsoever to
things beneath. “None done, papa!” The voice was no longer coaxing;
it was not even argumentative; it was hostile, truculent to a degree.
And when his father approached him, to make an end, the boy looked
wildly around as if praying to the gods to take his work of art under
their protection. But no gods intervened, and Samuel, at bay before
his universe, seized his carving in all its cathood, hid it among his
back breadths, and sat down strongly upon it, glaring defiance at his
progenitors. “None done!”
The mother rose quickly, Nancy trampling on Annunziata. Her face was
pale. “This is disobedience,” she said in a shaken voice, “and it must
have its punishment. It is the third time, within three months, that he
has needed punishment. The first time was the eggs. The second time it
was the spectacles. And now, it is—insubordination.” Her heart contracted
with suffering. Insubordination! A large word to use on so small a being!
Ah, yes, the eggs, and the spectacles! The young father remembered the
eggs and the spectacles; and even in the midst of a misery scarcely less
acute than the mother’s, a smile twitched his lips. The eggs!
In brief, little Samuel, at the age of quarter before three, had noted
with a curious eye that Matilda, the brown hen, had one egg that differed
from others. It was hard, white, shiny; it had nothing of the soft,
pale-brown, pleasant egg-color the other eggs had. One day he took it
out of the nest to consider it. He put it on the barn floor. There was
a hammer near at hand. Samuel liked hammers. With the hammer, he struck
the china egg once, twice, thrice. Nothing happened. Curious! He then
put one of the pleasant egg-colored eggs on the floor. He struck it but
once, and his whole world dissolved into a filthy chaos not to be borne.
Overwhelmed with remorse and bad-egg juice, he fled in terror to his
mother. He wept so long and earnestly that she considered him punished
enough.
As for the spectacles, there was an evil deed for you! His grandmother
had set her spectacles on the tall mantel-shelf, just under the picture
of sorrowful flowers made from the hair of young and old. Most of the
flowers were black, or white, or brownish drab. Samuel did not like the
picture, but the spectacles had always interested him. He dragged a chair
to the mantel, and by heroic climbing, reached them. He seldom broke
things, his motions being accurate, and he came down to earth with the
spectacles unharmed. What to do with them? And there was grandmother’s
lace cap, too. How about Ajax, the sheep-dog? Not without difficulty, but
without mishap, Samuel was forcing the glasses upon Ajax, when help came
to the good dog, and in the person of the master of the house. At the
sight of the woe-begone spectacled animal, and the lace cap, no longer
what it once was, Samuel’s father had laughed so loud and long that both
parents agreed that punishment would be inconsistency itself.
But now, with little Samuel sitting defiant on his work of art, a picture
of insubordination, punishment could no longer be delayed. The mother put
her arms around her husband’s neck. “Oh, remember how tiny he is, Abel,”
she wailed. “I shall stay in the kitchen till it’s done.” She ran into
the cold, dark kitchen, where she knelt in anguish, an ear against the
keyhole.
The father, alone with his offspring, was agitated too. His hands were
so strong! Surely, in a better world than this, a better way could be
found. How was he to know how much he ought to hurt his own child? He
groaned as he picked up the boy, slipped down those absurd and shapeless
breeches, and with firm hand directed toward the infirm, time-honored
spot, administered chastisement. A shriek of surprise and anger, a burst
of sobs, then silence. The woman at the keyhole could bear the shriek and
the sobs, but not the silence. She bounded into the room, and clasped the
insubordinate one to her heart. In truth, even the dog Ajax was disturbed
by that homely scene of punishment; the hair on his shoulders stiffened,
and he made an evil noise in the back of his throat. Of all those
present, the cat Pharaoh alone remained unmoved, detached as the Pyramids
themselves, in a stony indifference to human woe. Pharaoh, though in a
sense connected with the origin of the trouble, washed his paws of it,
and kept his calm.
Silent tears ran down Samuel’s cheeks, from which, as the mother saw with
terror, the dazzling rosy color had now quite faded. The Nancy in her
died; only the Annunziata was left. Oh, what if, what if?—But her alarm
was needless. Samuel had the proud blood of survivors in his veins. Not
for nothing was he a Vermonter born. Welsh seers and Norman craftsmen
and Scottish covenanters had stubbornly watched his cradle; his fair
substance had come all the way to Vermont from old Rome via Bunker
Hill. The father brought from the adjoining bedroom the child’s woolly
nightgown, ugly and comfortable and orange-dyed. He warmed it before the
blaze. As the parents undressed the culprit, they noted, with an almost
guilty surprise, how much smaller he seemed now that his blue tunic was
off. The father held the boy in his arms before the fire, while the
mother, kneeling, wiped away the soundless tears welling continually. No
word was spoken. At last the father carried the dusky orange cocoon into
the bedroom, and set it in its crib, and covered it gently. The mother,
worn out by the artist’s birthday, crept away to bed, leaving her husband
to console himself with his violins, if he could.
That hour with the violins was always very dear to Abel. As he busied his
hands with their beautiful bodies, his soul lost itself in happy reveries
in which Samuel played no small part. Annunziata also shone, in rich,
incredible rainbow robings from foreign looms, and with the wealth of
foreign continents on her neck and fingers; from the first moment when he
saw her, he had been mad about her touch of foreignness; he had seen it
as a sure amulet against the encroaching hated drabness of New England
milltown life. It was Annunziata who had set his spirit free. He always
called her Annunziata in those golden visions; never Nancy. And sometimes
he thought it odd, indeed, that in his violin hours, when wife and child
were away, safe in a dreamland of their own, he felt and cherished their
existences even more deeply than when they were at his side.
But to-night he had no joy in craftsmanship; he stared helplessly at the
scrolled neck-piece in his hand. “The little shaver!” he muttered. “He
took it like a soldier. The little shaver! Damned if I’ll do it again, in
a hurry.” Then he smiled that sudden whimsical smile of his. “But perhaps
he’ll be damned if I don’t! Queer world.” He was startled to find that
for the first time in his life, his violins had no interest for him; he
put away his veneers and glue-pot. He could not wait any longer; he must
see for himself whether those silent tears had ceased.
Samuel in his crib lay very quiet, eyes wide open, tears still coursing
into the collar of his orange nightgown. The perplexed father decided to
meet the situation with jocularity. “Say, laddie, aren’t you going to
shut those peepers?” And the child, as before, answered with what was
uppermost in his mind, “None done, papa!”
A long time the parents lay in their great square bed, saying nothing,
but each guessing at the other’s thought. Annunziata was trying to be
Nancy, as Vermont expected, and Abel was seeking to be Providence for
his all. At last he stretched out a cautious hand toward the crib, to
find that the child also was awake. Without more ado, he lifted Samuel
into the big bed, and there the parents cherished the child between
them, until the small body relaxed in the pleasant warmth. Next morning,
when the carver went to his work, Samuel was still sleeping, as rosy and
peaceful as if he had never known either insubordination or punishment.
The new day was a marvel of sunshine. During the night, the snow had
changed to rain; this in turn had given way to colder weather, and now
myriads of jewels hung from enchanted apple trees. A white fairyland!
The child clapped his hands with delight as his mother wrapped him warm
in his various rabbit-skin garments, and gathered his curls up under a
raccoon cap, and led him down the garden path to frolic with old Ajax in
the clean snow. When she brought him in, he was glowing and sparkling
with unearthly glee. She thought she had never dreamed of anything so
beautiful. She wondered whether Joseph and Mary in the carpenter’s shop
had ever punished Jesus for playing too long among the shavings, and what
the Child had said. Probably something much more moving than “None done,
papa.” But if so, she wondered how Mary could bear it.
Samuel’s elfin merriment quieted down in the warm room. No longer
insubordinate, he allowed his mother to take him up on her lap, and to
brush the tangled curls over a round stick, until they became orderly
spirals once more. He had not yet learned that curls were effeminate;
that battle was to be much later. He made no move to take up his carving,
or to defend his past, reserving such discussions as these for a
meeting with the masculine mind. All the afternoon he seemed a creature
both isolate and expectant, darting to the window whenever a vagrom
sleigh-bell tinkled in fairyland. Isolate and expectant! His mother
wondered whether all artists were doomed to be so. Once she caught him up
in her arms, and cried out to him in her childhood’s tongue, “_O caro,
caro, perché?_” And Samuel passed his fingers over her forehead, and
then over the Ganymede brooch, saying three words that his father had
taught him in jest, but which he had learned in earnest, “_Beau, bello,
beau-ti-ful!_” He loved those three words, and very often, apropos of
nothing, he spoke them in his incredibly distinct way. But to-day his
mother felt his aloofness; she knew that he was waiting for something,
something not in her power to give.
The young carver was a privileged person in the shop where he worked.
That day he could not fix his mind on those wooden models of wheel and
shaft. He was unsatisfied about his child, and in the middle of the
afternoon abruptly put away his tools and went home. Early as it was,
Samuel was already waiting. The child had been listening for that step
in the passage. There was something to be explained; the indignity of
yesterday’s happening had not yet passed into forgetfulness. He took his
unfinished cat in hand, and hitched his trousers higher. If last night’s
encounter was to be repeated, he would not easily be separated from his
defensive armor!
The father, coming in glowingly from the freshness of the winter day, was
dazed by that militant figure and its immediate challenge, “None done,
papa!” He hardly knew how to answer whatever demand was thereby made
upon him. No parent relishes the rôle of Goliath! But love aided him. He
warmed his hands at the blaze, and seizing the belligerent, tossed him
high in the air many times, knowing that Samuel had never yet had enough
of that sport. Then he sat down before the fire, the boy in his arms, and
poured out a thousand foolish tendernesses over the seven spirals, and
the shining ridgepole. The sensitive child caught the shadow of anxiety,
even as it was vanishing from his father’s face. What sorrow was this?
His own sorrows had been two: a work of art undone, a first whipping. His
father was the one who gave, not took whippings; his father’s sorrow was
therefore about the work of art. Ah, that was something he himself could
well understand, and perhaps console; though the cat was unfinished,
there was many another work not yet begun. He laid a valiant hand on his
blue woollen chest, and declared, “Self make more!” Perhaps he saw a long
vista of bright shapes clamoring to be carved for the comfort and delight
of the world.
Hastily he slipped down from his father’s arms to his own place on the
hearthrug, and brought out his little box of clean chips from beneath
the sofa. A great company of living beings was hidden there, waiting,
waiting in the wood. Samuel looked up, and announced with jubilation,
“Self—make—all!” He pondered a moment on his next subject. The carving
of a cat had ended in disaster; let us then attempt the dog, the friend
of man, not the heartless watcher by his fire. The child passed a thumb
over the knife-edge, as the elders do, then chose a block, and addressed
himself to it. “Dog.” No more.
The parents looked at each other, understanding profoundly that Samuel
was no longer a child of three. Overnight, he had become a boy in the
fourth year of his age. In mingled joy and anxiety they perceived also
that for a certainty their wish had been granted; there was an artist in
the family. And an artist, they supposed, would have his isolations, and
tremulous expectancies; his aspirations, too, and perhaps his anguish in
high enterprises, “None done.” But joy alone radiated from Samuel and
his shining spirals. From the sorrow of a dream never to be finished he
had passed to the incalculable rapture of a vision newly begun. “Dog,”
he murmured, “dog.” He knew that the creature was lying low there in
the chip, just for the express purpose of being summoned forth by him,
Samuel. In his abounding bliss he had time to bestow on his parents three
words to describe what he was about to make; and he spoke these words as
if they were three priceless jewels, “_Beau—bello—beautiful!_”