Our families occupied neighbouring houses in the country, and Minna
used to hide in the bathroom whenever our governess took us round.
She was to us but a symbol of shyness for months before she became a
body--a very thin body, with dark, straggly hair, and dark eyes, and
very long legs and arms for an eight-year-old. Looking back on her
hardihoods from eight to fifteen, I find difficulty in assigning to the
bathroom period its full significance, to realise that she actually
used to make herself invisible because she could not face strange
people even of her own age. She faced us so beautifully afterward,
would steal up behind and pull our hairs, and bag our caps and throw
them up on to the tops of wardrobes, and then, as likely as not, climb
up, throw them down, and follow with a jump. Few were the tops of
our trees that did not know her in her blue jersey and red cap, and
stockings green at the knees and showing little white portions of her.
She had a neck long as a turkey’s and feet narrow as canoes. She was
certainly going to be tall. Though quite normal about sticking pins
into a body, making the lives of calves and dogs burdensome, giving
fizzy magnesia to cats, fetching stray souls down with a booby-trap,
and other salutary pastimes, she would dissolve into tears and rush
away if anybody played Chopin, or caught and killed a butterfly; and,
if one merely shot a little bird with a catapult, would dash up and
thump him. When she fought she was like a tiger-cat, but afterward
would sit and shake uncontrollably with most dreadful dry sobs. So
there was no relying on her.
She could not have been called pretty in those days.
She became fifteen and went to school. We saw little of her for three
years. At eighteen she came home, and out. Then we would meet her at
dances, and picnics, skating and playing tennis--always languid, pale,
dark-eyed; still not quite regular in her features, and with angles
not perfectly covered; but, on the whole, like a tall lily with a dark
centre. She was very earnest, too, and beginning to be æsthetic, given
to standing against walls, with her dark-brown eyes immovably fixed on
persons playing violins; given to Russian linen and embroidering book
covers; to poetry and the sermons of preachers just unorthodox enough;
dreamy, too, but puffing and starting at things that came too near. She
was very attractive.
Going to college, one saw little more of Minna till she was twenty-two.
She was working then at a “Settlement,” and looked unhappy and anæmic.
Two months later we were told she had broken down. The work was too
painful; her nerves had gone all wrong. She was taken abroad.
We did not see her again till she was twenty-six. She was then marrying
a Quaker, a handsome, big fellow with reddish hair, ten years older
than herself. More like a swaying lily than ever she looked in her long
white veil. A tall, striking couple! The Quaker had warm eyes, and by
the way he looked at her, one wondered.
Another four years had passed before I, at all events, saw much of
Minna again. She was now thirty, and had three children, two girls and
a boy, and was evidently soon to have another. There was a pathetic
look in her eyes. They said that the Quaker should have been a Turk,
for his physique was powerful and his principles extremely strict.
His wife had grown to have a shrinking, fagged-out air, and worried
terribly over her infants. She was visibly unhappy; had gone off, too,
in looks; grown sallow and thin-cheeked, and seemed not to care to hold
herself up.
I recollect the Quaker coming in one day, full of health and happiness,
and putting his affectionate hand on her shoulder. To me--not to the
Quaker, from whom many things were hidden--it was apparent that she
flinched, and when his back was turned I saw in a mirror that she was
actually trembling all over, and on her face an expression as if she
saw before her suffering from which she could not possibly escape.
It was clear that the quivering, lilylike creature had been brought
almost to her last gasp by the physique and principles of that healthy,
happy Quaker. It was quite painful to see one for whom life seemed so
terribly too much.
She was, I think, about thirty-two when one noticed how much better
she was looking. She had begun to fill out and hold herself up; her
eyes had light in them again. Though she was more attractive than ever,
and the Quaker had abated no jot of either principle or physique,
she had given up quivering and starting, and had a way of looking
tranquilly through or over him, as if he were not there, though her
amiability was obviously perfect, and from all accounts she fulfilled
every duty better than ever. She no longer worried over her children,
of whom there were now five. It was mysterious. I can only describe
the impression she made by saying that she seemed in a sort of trance,
seeing and listening to something far away. There was a curious
intentness in her eyes, and her voice had acquired a slight but not
unpleasing drawl, as though what she was talking of had little reality.
Every afternoon from three to four she was invisible.
Having in those days a certain interest in psychology, one used to
concern oneself to account for the extraordinary change in her that
was becoming more marked every year. By the time she was thirty-five
it really seemed impossible that she could ever have been a sensitive,
high-strung creature, hiding in the bathroom, thumping us for killing
butterflies, sobbing afterward so uncontrollably; suffering such
tortures from the “Settlement,” and the Quaker, and her children,
whose ailments and troubles she now supported with an equanimity which
any one, seeing her for the first time, would surely have mistaken
for callousness. And all the time she was putting on flesh without,
however, losing her figure. Indeed, in those days she approached
corporeal perfection.
And at last one afternoon I learned the reason.
She no longer believed she had a body!
She told me so, almost with tears of earnestness. And when I pointed
out to her humbly that she had never had more, she insisted that I saw
nothing really sitting there except the serene and healthy condition of
her spirit. Long she talked to me that afternoon, explaining again and
again, in her slightly drawling voice, that she could never have gone
on but for this faith; and how comforting and uplifting it was, so that
no one who lacked it could be really happy! Every afternoon--she told
me--from three to four she “held” that idea of “no body.”
This was all so startling to me that I went away and thought it over.
Next day I came back and said that I did not see how it could be much
good to her to have no body, so long as other people still had theirs;
since it was their bodies, not hers, which had caused her pain and
grief.
“But, of course,” she said, “they haven’t.”