ANTHY
It is one of the strange things in our lives--interesting, too--what
tricks our early memories play us. What castles in fairyland they build
for us, what never-never ships they send to sea! To a single flaming
incident imprinted upon our consciousness by the swift shutter of the
soul of youth they add a little of that-which-we-have-heard-told, spice
it with a bit of that-which-would-be-beautiful-if-it-could-have-happened,
and throw in a rosy dream or two--and the compound, well warmed in the
fecund soil of the childish imagination, becomes far more real and
attractive to us than the drab incidents of our grown-up yesterdays.
Long afterward, when we had become much better acquainted, Anthy told me
one day, very quietly, of the greatest memory of her childhood. It was
of something that never could have happened at all; and yet, to Anthy,
it was one of the treasured realities of her life, a memory to live by.
She was standing at the bedside of her mother. She remembered, she said,
exactly how her mother looked--her delicate, girlish face, the big clear
eyes, the wavy hair all loose on the pillow. They had just placed the
child in her arms, and she was drawing the small bundle close up to her,
and looking down at it, and crying. It was the crying that Anthy
remembered the best of all.
And the child that Anthy saw so clearly was Anthy herself--and this was
the only memory she ever had of her mother. That poor lady, perhaps a
little tired of a world too big and harsh for her, and disappointed that
her child was not a son whom she could name Anthony, after its father,
tarried only a week after Anthy was born.
"You see," said Anthy, "I was intended to be a boy."
[Illustration: A very lonely little girl, sitting at a certain place on
the third step from the bottom of the stairs]
After that, Anthy remembered a little girl, a very lonely little girl,
sitting at a certain place on the third step from the bottom of the
stairs. There were curious urns filled with flowers on the wall paper,
and her two friends, Richard and Rachel, came out of the wall near the
dining-room door and looked through the stair spindles at her. Rachel
had lovely curly hair and Richard wore shiny brass buttons on his
jacket, and made faces. She used to whisper to them between the
spindles, and whenever any one came they went back quickly through the
wall. She liked Rachel better than Richard.
There was a time later when her hero was Ivanhoe--just the name, not the
man in the book. She read a great deal there in the lonely house, and
her taste in those years ran to the gloomy and mysterious. The early
chapters of an old book called "Wuthering Heights" thrilled her with
fascinated interest, and she delighted in "Peter Ibbetson." Sometimes
she would take down the volume of Tennyson in her father's library and,
if the light was low, read aloud:
I _hate_ the _dreadful_ hollow behind the little wood.
As she read, she would thrill with delicious horror.
[Illustration: The home of her girlhood seemed dreadfully shabby, small,
and old-fashioned]
Then she went away to school, not knowing in the least how much her
father missed her; and when she came back, the home of her girlhood
seemed dreadfully shabby, small, old-fashioned, and she did not like the
iron deer on the lawn nor the cabinet of specimens in the corner of the
parlour.
Anthy did not tell me all these things at one time, and some she never
told me at all. They were the slow gatherings of many rich friendships
in Hempfield, and a few things afterward came to me, inadvertently, from
Nort. I shall venture often in this narrative to assume the omniscience
of foreknowledge: for it is one of the beautiful things to me, as I
write, that I can look at those early hard days in the printing-office
through the golden haze of later events.
It was in the vacations from college that Anthy began really to know her
father, who was, in his way, a rather remarkable man. Although I never
knew him well personally, I remember seeing him often in the town roads
during the latter years of his life. He was always in a hurry, always
looked a little tired, always wore his winter hat too late in the
spring, and his straw hat too late in the fall.
Anthy remembered her father as forever writing on bits of yellow paper:
"John Gorman lost a valuable pig last Wednesday"; or "Mrs. Bertha
Hopkins is visiting her daughter in Arnoville."
Anthy was secretly ashamed of this unending writing of local events,
just as she was ashamed of the round bald spot on her father's head, and
of the goloshes which he wore in winter. And yet, in some curious deep
way--for love struggles in youth to harmonize the real with the
ideal--these things of which she was ashamed gave her a sort of fierce
pride in him, a tenderness for him, a wish to defend him. While she
admired her handsome uncle, the Captain, it was her father whom she
loved with all the devotion of her young soul.
He knew everybody, or nearly everybody, in the town, and treated every
one, even his best friends, with a kind of ironical regard. He knew life
well--all of it--and was rarely deceived by pretence or surprised by
evil. Sometimes, I think, he armoured himself unnecessarily against
goodness, lest he be deceived; but once having accepted a man, his
loyalty was unswerving. He believed, as he often said, that the big
things in life are the little things, and it was his idea of a country
newspaper that it should be crowded with all the little things possible.
"What's the protective tariff or the Philippine question to Nat Halstead
compared with the price of potatoes?" he would ask.
He was not at all proud, for if he could not get his pay for his
newspaper in cash he would take a ham, or a cord of wood, a champion
squash, or a packet of circus tickets. One of Anthy's early memories was
of an odd assortment of shoes which he had accepted in settlement of an
advertising account. They never quite fitted any one.
As he grew older he liked to talk with Anthy about his business, as
though she were a partner; he liked especially to have her in the office
helping him, and he was always ready with a whimsical or wise comment on
the people of the town. He also enjoyed making sly jokes about his older
brother, the Captain, and especially about the Captain's thundering
editorials (which Anthy for a long time secretly admired, wishing her
father had written them).
"Now, Anthy," he would say, "don't disturb your Uncle Newt; he's saving
the nation," or "Pass this pamphlet along to your uncle; it will come in
handy when he gets ready to regulate the railroads."
He was not an emotional man, at least to outward view; but once, on a
Memorial Day, while the old soldiers were marching past the
printing-office on their way to the cemetery, Anthy saw him standing by
the window in his long apron, a composing stick in his hand, with the
tears rolling unheeded down his face.
I think sometimes we do not yet appreciate the influence of that great
burst of idealism, which was the Civil War, upon the lives of the men of
that generation, nor the place which Lincoln played in moulding the
characters of his time. Men who, even as boys, passed through the fire
of that great time and learned to suffer with Lincoln, could never again
be quite small. Although Anthy's father had not been a soldier--he was
too young at the time--the most impressionable years of his boyhood were
saturated with stories from the front, with the sight of soldiers
marching forth to war, his own older brother, the Captain, among them,
the sound of martial drums and fifes, and the heroic figures of wan and
wounded men who returned with empty sleeves or missing legs. He never
forgot the thrill that came with the news of Lincoln's assassination.
There was a portrait of Lincoln over the cases at the office, and
another over the mantel in the dining-room--the one that played so
important a part, afterward, in Anthy's life.
Sometimes, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, Anthy's father would get down a
certain volume from the cases, and read Tom Taylor's tribute to the dead
Lincoln. She could recall vividly the intonation of his voice as he read
the lines, and she knew just where he would falter and have to clear his
throat:
_You_ lay a wreath on murdered Lincoln's bier;
You, who with mocking pencil wont to trace,
Broad for the self-complaisant British sneer,
His length of shambling limb, his furrowed face,
His gaunt, gnarled hands, his unkempt, bristling hair,
His garb uncouth, his bearing ill at ease,
His lack of all we prize as debonair,
Of power or will to shine, or art to please....
When he had finished reading, he would take off his spectacles and wipe
them, and say to Anthy:
"Lincoln was the greatest man this country has ever produced."
He was a curious combination of hardheadedness, of ironical wisdom, and
of humour, and somewhere, hidden deep within, of molten sentiment. He
was a regular Yankee.
One night he got more than ordinarily tired, and just stopped. They
found him in bed the next morning, his legs drawn up under the coverlet,
a volume of Don Quixote open on his knees, his empty pipe fallen from
his lips, the lamp dying out on a table near him. At his elbow were two
of the inevitable yellow slips:
Squire Baker of Arnoville was a visitor at Lawyer Perkins's
on Monday.
Apples stopped yesterday at Banks's store at 30 cents a
peck--on their way up (adv).
He never knew what a hero he was: he had made a living for thirty years
out of a country newspaper.
Anthy came home from college to the forlorn and empty and ugly
house--and it seemed to her that the end of the world had come. This
period of loneliness made a deep impression upon her later years. When
at last she could bear to open the envelope labelled: "To Anthy--in case
of my death," she found this letter:
DEAR ANTHY: I am leaving the _Star_ to you. There is nothing
else except the homestead--and the debts. Do what you like
with all of them--but look after your Uncle Newt.
Now, Anthy's earliest memories were bound up with the printing-office.
There was never a time that she did not know the smell of printer's ink.
As a child she had delighted to tip over the big basket and play with
the paper ribbons from the cutting machine. Later, she had helped on
press days to fold and label the papers. She was early a pastmaster in
the art of making paste, and she knew better than any one else the
temperamental eccentricities of the old-fashioned Dick labeller. She
could set type (passably) and run the hand press. But as for taking upon
herself the activities of her tireless father--who was at once editor,
publisher, compositor, pressman, advertising solicitor, and father
confessor for the community of Hempfield--she could not do it. There is
only a genius here and there who can fill the high and difficult
position of country editor.
The responsibility, therefore, fell upon the Captain, who for so many
years had been the titular and ornamental editor of the _Star_. It was
the Captain who wrote the editorials, the obituaries, and the
"write-ups," who attended the political conventions, and was always much
in demand for speeches at the Fourth of July celebrations.
But, strangely enough, although the _Star_ editorials sparkled with
undimmed lustre, although the obituaries were even longer and more
wonderful than ever before--so long as to crowd out some of the items
about Johnny Gorman's pigs and Mrs. Hopkins's visits to her sister,
although the fine old Captain worked harder than ever, the light of the
luminary of Hempfield grew steadily dimmer. Fergus saw it early and it
distressed his Scotch soul. Anthy felt it, and soon the whole town knew
of the decay of the once thrifty institution in the little old
printing-office back from the street. Brother Kendrick, of that
nefarious rag, the Sterling _Democrat_, even dared to respond to one of
the Captain's most powerful and pungent editorials with a witticism in
which he referred to the _Weakly Star_ of Hempfield, and printed
"Weakly" in capital letters that no one might miss his joke.
It was at this low stage in the orbit of the _Star_ that I came first to
the printing-office, trying to discover the man who could shout "Fudge"
with such fine enthusiasm--and found myself, quite irresistibly,
hitching my wagon to the _Star_.
[Illustration]