is best remembered is not of a bent old man, leaning somewhat heavily
upon his rake, but of the figure that takes shape out of the mists of
childhood--a figure that somehow always personifies the attributes of
kindliness and sympathy--standing in a long vanished garden, beneath an
apple tree in bloom.
_XII: The Christmas Party_
WE always stood rather in awe of Raymond's Uncle Horace because it was
said he had once taught Latin in a boys' school. Any one who had ever
wielded the power of a teacher was a person with a background of
authority and importance whom one could not approach too familiarly.
Indeed, it would have been difficult to be familiar with Raymond's Uncle
Horace under any conceivable circumstances, for he was essentially a
dignified and aloof person.
It was understood that the abandonment of teaching had been caused by
failing health and to the same origin was perhaps due the reserve and
apparent preoccupation that militated against any real intimacy with his
nephew's young friends. There was some vague story of a young wife who
had died years before, but an experience of that sort was so far beyond
our comprehension that the rumor added but little to the isolation in
which Raymond's uncle seemed to dwell. He was never really an actor in
the drama of our young lives. Sometimes appearing in the wings, more
often in the critic's seat, he was an onlooker rather than a
participant.
One remembers him chiefly as walking back and forth on the old street
between Raymond's grandfather's house and certain indefinite rooms he
dwelt in which were probably in the edifice then known as the Charter
Oak building.
The impression that persists is of one very carefully wrapped up against
the weather. He wore a long ulster, a seal-skin cap, with a visor, and
about his neck, under his iron-gray beard, a muffler was efficiently
disposed. His large, gold-rimmed spectacles gave him the customary
owlish, peering expression, but in spite of them he could not seem to
recognize us, or any one else, except when close at hand. He carried a
stout walking stick, the point of which he never raised from the ground,
but dragged after him between alternate steps and he stood so straight
that he appeared to lean a little backward. It would seem that in the
warmer seasons this habitual manner of dress must have been modified,
but there is no recollection of any other costume.
A tradition of immense learning clung about him. It was said that in his
mysterious rooms the walls were lined with books which he spent all his
time in reading. It was even whispered that he read Latin and Greek for
fun--and no higher intellectual achievement than this could be imagined.
There was something facile and careless, too, about the idea of reading
for pleasure dead languages with which we had as yet no acquaintance but
which loomed as educational obstacles in the not distant future. This
casual facility appealed to our youthful sporting spirit and compelled a
reluctant admiration. Whatever Raymond's uncle's shortcomings as an
intimate might be, he had at least reached the point where matters that
were soon to be weighty problems to us were to him merely a question of
amusement.
Raymond's grandparents lived in an old house around the corner from the
old street. Their home was, in fact, one of the oldest houses in the
city. They were people of wealth for that day and the house had been
brought up to date in the fashion of that time when the finer harmonies
of the antique were not as yet appreciated. Plate glass windows had
replaced the small panes, hard wood floors covered the fine oak planking
and varnished inside shutters had supplanted the dignified panelling of
the originals. But our aesthetic appreciations, like those of our
elders, noticed no incongruity. To us the old house was the acme of
contemporary good taste, as well as the abode of comfort and even
luxury.
It was here that Raymond's grandparents gave their annual Christmas
party for their grandson and his friends. This was a festival famous in
the young life of that neighborhood. Its celebrity was chiefly due to
the Gargantuan amount of delightful food available. There was a tree, of
course, but the presents were of the edible, rather than the permanent
kind, and no less appreciated on that account. Nowhere else was there to
be found such an amount and variety of candy, fruit, ice cream, cake,
nuts, raisins, chicken salad, sandwiches, jellies, jams, _pâté de foies
gras_, and other pleasing forms of nourishment--to say nothing of
lemonade and various kinds of "shrub"--as at Raymond's Christmas party.
At the close of each of these events it did not seem that we could ever
eat again, yet there was a certain assurance of the continuance of the
fête in carrying home a paper bag containing an orange, an apple and a
generous selection of sweets.
After the assembly had been fed there were games--"Drop the
Handkerchief," "Still Pond, No More Moving," that perennial juvenile
pastime where the participants chant the memorable chorus beginning
"Oats, peas, beans and barley grow," and sometimes, much against the
sentiments of the boys, that embarrassing game where the player who
became "It" was compelled to "Bow to the wittiest, kneel to the
prettiest and kiss the one you love best." The boys decided early in
their social experience that no self-respecting male ought to play this
game and it soon fell into disrepute, though the girls fought for its
continuance for a time.
Youthful spirits rise with food as rapidly as does a thermometer under
the sun's rays and a good deal of noise and romping invariably
accompanied these games. Raymond's dear old grandfather and grandmother
enjoyed all these manifestations of young life as keenly, so far as we
could see, as did the children themselves, but Uncle Horace, it was
evident, did not like noise and confusion. Memory pictures him standing
in the background of the party, as in the background of life, a quiet
spectator, blinking shortsightedly but not unkindly, through his big
spectacles, and vanishing altogether as the excitement increased.
Once one of the youthful guests, while the festivities were at their
height, wandered into a remote part of the house in search of some
accessory required for an approaching game and entered by a rear door a
room where Uncle Horace had been reading. He had put his book down in
his easy chair and was now discovered standing in the other doorway, his
back to the room.
An intense curiosity to look at one of Uncle Horace's learned volumes
took possession of the interloper and at that age it did not occur to
him that delicacy might demand some hesitation. He tiptoed over to the
chair expecting to see on the cushion some calf-bound, ancient tome
written in characters that were hieroglyphics to him. But a complete
reversal of his ideas about Uncle Horace was at hand. The book that lay
there was in blue-and-gold cloth binding and was a copy of the first
edition of "Huckleberry Finn."
The intruder looked in some astonishment at the spare figure of
Raymond's uncle and perceived that there was no danger of discovery for
the attitude was that of a man completely absorbed. He was listening
intently. At this distance the general hubbub was softened and there was
a rather wistful quality in the childish voices rising and falling with
the lilting old refrain:
"Thus the farmer sows his seeds.
Thus he stands and takes his ease,
Stamps his foot (bang!) and claps his hand (smack!)
And looks around to view the land."
After the lapse of a good many years it is this picture of Raymond's
Uncle Horace that is the most vivid. There was some implication in the
listening figure, with head slightly bowed, one hand resting on the
casing of the doorway, that carried, even to a childish mind, a
suggestion of hitherto unsuspected aspects of the rather lonely
widower's personality. At the time it was all very vague and
unformulated and later speculation has hesitated somewhat before the
privacy thus unwittingly invaded. Yet afterward one could not help at
least wondering what visions of his own childhood he saw as he listened
to the silly old lines of the ancient folk game, handed down through so
many generations and bearing their little testimony to the continuity of
experience.
A tardy sense of eavesdropping awoke at last in the youthful visitor's
mind--an understanding that he did not belong there. He slipped out as
quietly as he had entered, but he took with him a dawning appreciation
of a new incarnation of Raymond's Uncle Horace.
_XIII: The Fabric of a Dream_
"_And that night . . . . a dream of that place came to
Florian, a dream which did for him the office of a
finer sort of memory, bringing its object to mind with
a great clearness, yet, as sometimes happens in dreams,
raised a little above itself, and above ordinary
retrospect. The true aspect of the place . . . . the
fashion of its doors, its hearths, its windows, the
very scent upon the air of it, was with him in sleep
for a season. . . ._"
--THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE.
COUSIN MARY'S home was a little, old, brick house standing flush with
the street. A woodshed where the cat slept in summer extended easterly
from the house and in the angle thus formed was a diminutive garden
where such old-fashioned flowers as holly-hocks, bachelors' buttons,
sweet william and larkspur seemed to bloom earlier and last longer than
elsewhere.
Everything about Cousin Mary's home was on a small scale. She herself
was a very small and slight old lady, but she had inherited from the
hardy New England race from which she sprang a certain tradition of
vitality and longevity which she lived long enough to exemplify in her
own person. Other family legends of uncomfortable eccentricity and
general worrisomeness she utterly disproved, for never was there a
kindlier or more placid soul than she.
Of course she wore a cap with lavender ribbons and gowns of black
bombazine for every day and black silk with lace at the throat for great
occasions. She seldom ventured out of doors, except into her garden, or,
on such annual celebrations as Thanksgiving and Christmas, to a
neighboring relative's home where she was with difficulty persuaded to
take at dinner a glass of port or Madeira, though she always protested
that she did not really need it. Most of her life was spent in the
southeast downstairs sitting-room, where she used to sit in the
smallest, oldest rocking-chair ever seen. On memorable occasions she
would take possession of the kitchen, against the protests of Drusilla,
her companion, and make gingerbread that was famous in the neighborhood,
especially among the children.
To childish imaginations there always seemed something mysterious about
the rooms in Cousin Mary's house--doubtless merely because we never
visited them,--except the sitting-room and the kitchen. The sitting-room
communicated with another room--I think it was called the "parlor"--by
folding doors. These were generally open, but in there the blinds were
always closed and the room was in a kind of perpetual dusky twilight. We
could dimly see within, but no recollection of entering remains, though
there is a faint memory of an obscure marble-topped center-table--were
there not wax flowers on it under a glass cover?--and ancient mahogany
chairs.
We never reached the upper floors, at least till after Cousin Mary's
death, when it seems as if there was an expedition to the attic in
company with some older person of authority. It was a brief and somewhat
nervous experience. Those were the days when all ghost stories might
possibly be true and the attic, like the "parlor," was dark. The visit
was long enough to leave only a memory of dim corners, piles of old
horse-hide trunks, a remarkable collection of ancient cooking utensils
adapted for use over the open fires of colonial and Revolutionary
days--where, we wonder, has all this old kitchen equipage gone?--and
rafters from which hung dried roots and leaves of one kind and another.
It was a distinct relief to get out of doors again.
But of course the mysterious qualities we attributed to certain
precincts of Cousin Mary's house existed entirely in our youthful minds.
No one could be imagined who had less to conceal than this serene old
lady. Yet it was natural that there should be romantic stories about
her.
She had never married and it was not strange that speculations about her
past should concern themselves with early love affairs. These fancies
crystallized into the quite customary tradition that she had been
engaged in her early youth to a young man whose future was then so
uncertain that her parents objected to the match. The years have dimmed
recollection of the details of the story--there were other romantic
complications--but at all events the young man afterwards married
another and lived to disprove the early doubts of sceptical parents as
to his chance of success in life. But Cousin Mary remained true to her
early love.
Many years after her death one of the children who used occasionally to
call upon her, and to whom even now the odor of certain old-fashioned
flowers will bring back a vivid picture of that little garden, had a
curious dream about her.
He was again in that familiar sitting-room, but in some way he was
invisible to the other two occupants. One was of course Cousin Mary--but
quite a different Cousin Mary. Youth had come back to her. She was a
young girl again--and one of the prettiest young girls the dreamer had
ever seen. Her hair was dressed high at the back of her head. A great
comb was in it. Curls hung down over her cheeks, as sitting in the
familiar diminutive rocking-chair she bent her head forward listening to
the words of her visitor. Old lace was about her throat which was of a
singular whiteness and beauty. Her gown was of some shimmering stuff,
high-waisted, with many flounces. Her whole figure gave the beholder a
sense of delicate and rather fragile beauty. She was a creature of
race--a thoroughbred.
Seated close before her and talking softly and eagerly was a
good-looking young man in the uniform of a naval officer of, I should
guess, the period of the second war with Great Britain. His sword and
cap lay on the floor beside his chair.
Incongruities in dreams are generally accepted without surprise, but in
this case the sleeper afterward recalled a sense of astonishment at the
character of this stranger. Who was he? So far as was known no sailor
had ever been associated with Cousin Mary's life.
Even in dreams a sense of the proprieties sometimes follows one and it
was evident to the dreamer that his presence was superfluous. He turned
to the dark "parlor" and for the first time entered.
It was a queer place. All sorts of curios from the East were scattered
about it--yet "scattered" is not the right word for there was a method
in the arrangement, grotesque though it was. The dreamer, however, had
little opportunity to observe all this for he was drawn at once to a
corner where was a strange, spiral staircase, built of some light Indian
wood, and leading through the ceiling to the story above. He ascended
and emerged into the unknown region overhead.
It was a wonderful place. The details are gone--one recalls only an
impression of happiness, sunshine, scents of exotic flowers, the singing
of innumerable birds, the tinkling sound of a hidden fountain. It was
no longer a room--it was a new country. Here, it seemed, dwelt peace,
content, beauty. A fragment of a familiar poem drifted into the
dreamer's fancies--
"It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles
And see the great Achilles whom we knew--"
And there was more than a sense of well-being. There was, for a little
moment, a fantastic sensation of fulfillment in one's presence there.
There was a feeling of power. Here, one was somehow assured, ambitions
would be accomplished, hopes would come true. Here could be done the
things one always wanted to do.
The dreamer wished to go on, to explore, to find the happy secret of
this region, but this, for some reason, was denied him. Some
all-powerful influence compelled him to go back, to descend the little
staircase into the darkened parlor.
Standing there he looked through the open folding doors into the
well-known sitting-room and the picture he saw halted him.
Cousin Mary and her sailor lover were standing in the middle of the
room. His arms were about her, her hands were on his shoulders, her face
raised to his. . . .
Almost as soon as it was perceived the vision began to fade, receding
slowly into the formless, tenuous clouds of semi-consciousness. In a
moment the sleeper awoke. For an instant it was difficult to
disassociate from the spirit of his dream the golden light of the early
spring morning, the twittering of birds, the light drip from the eaves
of the brief rain left by the vanished April shower.
* * * * *
The later history of the spot where Cousin Mary dwelt offers its
commentary on a fast changing civilization. Soon after her death the
little brick house was pulled down and the cubic space it occupied was
filled with heavy machinery which daily filled with its reverberations
this place which was once the very epitome of quietude. Now, in their
turn, the huge presses have given way to one corner of a vast office
building where an army of busy clerks pursues the urgent and exacting
routine of a great corporation.
The Latin poets liked to believe that every locality had its own
peculiar divinity--the "genius of the place." What has become of the
goddess who for so long dedicated to peacefulness this abode of a benign
old age? Is it that she was so closely identified with the one who
dwelt there that when that life ceased the guardian angel fled with the
departing spirit to some still fairer abode--or is the genius of the
place really called Memory, who, in the minds of those who cherish her,
effectually preserves against any merely material desecration the places
she once held dear?
_XIV: The Quiet Life_
"_More than half a century of life has taught me that
most of the wrong and folly which darkens earth is due
to those who cannot possess their souls in quiet; that
most of the good which saves mankind from destruction
comes of life that is led in thoughtful stillness._"
--THE PRIVATE PAPERS OF HENRY RYECROFT.
WITH the thoughtless cruelty of childhood we used to call him
"Thermometer" Tatlock because he was forever watching the temperature.
The tradition was that whenever he went down cellar to look at the
furnace he arrayed himself in overcoat, fur cap, muffler and arctics.
Nicknames are not always brutal and the cruelty of this case lay only in
the peculiar features of the situation--the fact, in short, that the
subject of our joke was such a gentle, retiring, almost apologetic old
gentleman. He was deprecatory even toward us children. To adult
reflection it seems ruthless to have made any fun of him at all.
Yet there was no doubt about the fact that he was an odd character. The
incarnation of bashfulness, he was, like most bashful persons,
persistent and consistent in doing just exactly as he liked so far as
the demands of a world, not primarily constituted for people of his
stripe, allowed. It must be confessed that, in modern parlance, he got
away with it pretty successfully.
Probably this was because he was wise enough not to demand very much. It
did not seem that either the rise and fall of nations or of the stock
market gave him very much concern. Doubtless he did not disturb himself
greatly over the question of who was to be the next president. His chief
worry seemed to be the weather, though why he should have troubled
himself about this, when most of his life was spent indoors, remains a
mystery. Memory seems to recall some story of ill-health in early life
which perhaps inculcated a habit of consulting weather conditions that
lasted as long as life itself--and he lived to a green old age.
The spacious brick mansion that was his home stood sideways, as it were,
to the street, behind a tall fence with panelled posts and blunt,
rounded pickets, like large broomsticks of alternating heights. Both
the main front door and what we should now call the service entrance
were reached by a gravelled driveway with a flag walk beside it that
terminated around in the rear of the house at the stable. Narrow flights
of steps with wrought-iron railings, topped here and there with brass
balls, led to the two doors.
The entrance hall was almost square, a passage way running off toward
the kitchen from the left-hand farther corner and the staircase
ascending on one's left as one entered. At the landing, halfway up, was
a large window, opening to the north, which illumined the hall and
stair-well with an even, rather bare light. Somewhere in the wall was a
recess in which stood a bust of Cicero, of which the eyes, formed
without indication of the pupils after the fashion of its period of
sculpture, gave an effect of blindness fascinating to the childish
imagination.
On the right was a little room where Mr. Tatlock's sister, a dear old
lady who always wore a little flat lace cap with a black bow, generally
sat knitting. Straight ahead was the parlor where occasionally, when Mr.
Tatlock's niece was visiting at the house, there were subdued children's
parties. On these occasions he was never visible. His own room was the
library, east of the parlor, with a southern exposure toward the garden.
Here we never entered, but once or twice we caught a glimpse of the
interior through the door left unguardedly open by some momentary
oversight. The picture thus presented had as its background the south
wall of the room with its two windows between which stood the chimney
piece. Above the mantle, which was supported by miniature Ionic columns,
hung a portrait of a gentleman with a great deal of hair and shirt
frill, and below a bright fire burned, partly concealed by a fire
screen, beside which, reading in a large easy chair, was Mr. Tatlock.
Recollection is still vivid of the startled, rather furtive glance, the
look of a timid animal whose place of refuge had been discovered,
directed toward us as we peeked in.
What was the old man reading as he sat there day after day and year
after year, while presidents were elected, national policies inaugurated
and abandoned, the maps of the world changed here and there, automobiles
invented, and the children grew up, went to college, got married and
left the old street? Probably no one knows for a certainty, but we
should be willing to guess that his favorites were Burke, the Spectator,
Boswell's Johnson, Pope, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt and perhaps Gibbon.
Did he, we wonder, ever read a novel? If so, it is doubtful whether he
got much beyond Jane Austen and Mrs. Gaskell.
The house had a lovely old garden that stretched away to the east, down
a slope that was broken into two or three terraces. At the eastward end
was a level portion where the box-lined gravel walk from the house made
a circle around an old oak tree under which was a bench. There were a
good many old fashioned flowers and shrubs in the garden and some pear
trees, but who took care of the pruning and gardening, except Mr
Tatlock's sister who assuredly could not do it all, is still
unexplained.
There was a hired man whom we called "Mister" O'Neil who sometimes went
to the post office and may have done other errands, but as his title
implies he seems to have been above gardening. At any rate there is no
recollection of seeing him at work in the garden. In spite of his name
there was nothing in his appearance that indicated Irish extraction. He
was not a hired man at all in the New England sense; he was more the
type of the confidential servant of the English novelists. He was dark,
wore a beard, dressed habitually in black and looked like a particularly
doleful undertaker.