long ladder led up to it from the middle garret, and close to this
ladder stood another uncanny-looking object--the bath-closet.
The family had always been inveterate bathers, but surely this shower
bath must have capped the climax of its cold-water experiments.
It was contrived so that a pail of water, carried up by the scuttle
ladder and emptied into a tilting vessel on top of the closet, could be
made to descend on a sudden in a deluge of large drops upon the head of
the person inside. There was no escape for that person; the closet gave
him but just room to stand up under the infliction, and once the pail
was tilted, the water was bound to come.
The children thought of this machine with shivering and dread. They had
heard it said--perhaps in the kitchen--that their little grandmother
had “nearly killed herself” in that shower bath, till the doctor
forbade her to use it any more.
Its walls were screens of white cotton cloth, showing a mysterious
opaque glimmer against the light, also the shadowy outlines of some
objects within which the children could not account for. The narrow
screen door was always shut, and no child ever dreamed of opening it
or of meddling with the secrets of that pale closet. It was enough to
have to pass it on lonesome errands, looming like a “sheeted ghost” in
the garret’s perpetual twilight.
The garret, like some of the great foreign churches, had a climate of
its own; still and dry, but subject to extremes of heat and cold. In
summer it was the tropics, in winter the frozen pole.
But it had its milder moods also,--when it was neither hot nor cold,
nor light nor dark; when it beamed in mellow half-tones upon its
youthful visitors, left off its ugly frightening tricks, told them
“once upon a time” stories, and even showed them all its old family
keepsakes.
These pleasant times occurred about twice every year, at the spring and
fall house-cleaning, when the women with brooms and dust-pans invaded
the garret and made a cheerful bustle in that deserted place.
The scuttle hole in the roof was then open, to give light to the
cleaners, and a far, bright square of light shone down. It was as if
the garret smiled.
All the queer old things, stowed away under the eaves, behind boxes and
broken furniture and stoves and rolls of carpets, were dragged forth;
and they were as good as new discoveries to the children who had not
seen them nor heard their stories since last house-cleaning time.
There was the brass warming-pan, with its shining lid full of holes
like a pepper-box. On this warming-pan, as a sort of sled, the children
used to ride by turns--one child seated on, or in, the pan, two others
dragging it over the floor by the long, dark wood handle.
And there were the pattens “which step-great-grandmother Sheppard
brought over from England;” one pair with leather straps and one with
straps of cotton velvet, edged with a tarnished gilt embroidery. The
straps were meant to lace over a full-grown woman’s instep, but the
children managed somehow to keep them on their feet, and they clattered
about, on steel-shod soles, with a racket equal to the midnight clatter
of Santa Claus’s team of reindeer.
There was a huge muff of dark fur, kept in a tall blue paper bandbox;
the children could bury their arms in it up to the shoulder. It had
been carried by some lady in the time of short waists and scant skirts
and high coat collars; when girls covered their bare arms with long kid
gloves and tucked their little slippered toes into fur-lined foot-muffs
and went on moonlight sleighing parties, dressed as girls dress
nowadays for a dance.
One of these very same foot-muffs (the moths had once got into it)
led a sort of at-arm’s-length existence in the garret, neither quite
condemned nor yet allowed to mingle with unimpeachable articles of
clothing. And there was a “foot-stove” used in old times on long
drives in winter or in the cold country meeting-houses. They were
indefatigable visitors and meeting-goers,--those old-time Friends.
Weather and distance were nothing thought of; and in the most troublous
times they could go to and fro in their peaceful character, unmolested
and unsuspected, though no doubt they had their sympathies as strong as
other people’s.
A china bowl is still shown, in one branch of grandfather’s family,
which one of the great-aunts, then a young woman, carried on her
saddle-bow through both the British and Continental lines, from her
old home on Long Island to her husband’s house on the west bank of the
Hudson above West Point.
No traveling member of the society ever thought of “putting-up” for the
night anywhere but at a Friend’s house. Journeys were planned in stages
from such a Friend’s house to such another one’s, or from meeting to
meeting. In days when letter postage was dear and newspapers were
almost unknown, such visits were keenly welcome, and were a chief means
by which isolated country families kept up their communication with the
world.
There were many old-fashioned household utensils in the garret, the use
of which had to be explained to the children; and all this was as good
as history, and more easily remembered than much that is written in
books.
There was the old “Dutch oven” that had stood in front of roaring
hearth-fires in days when Christmas dinners were cooked without
the aid of stoves or ranges. And there were the iron firedogs, the
pot-hooks and the crane which were part of the fireplace furniture. And
the big wool-wheel for the spinning of yarn, the smaller and lady-like
flax-wheel, and the tin candle moulds for the making of tallow candles;
and a pleasure it must have been to see the candles “drawn,” when the
pure white tallow had set in the slender tubes and taken the shape of
them perfectly,--each candle, when drawn out by the wick, as cold and
hard and smooth as alabaster. And there was the “baby-jumper” and the
wicker “runaround,” to show that babies had always been babies--just
the same restless little pets then as now--and that mother’s and
nurse’s arms were as apt to get tired.
The garret had kept a faithful family record, and hence it told of
sickness and suffering as well as of pleasure and business and life and
feasting.
A little old crutch, padded by some woman’s hand with an attempt to
make it handsome as well as comfortable, stood against the chimney on
the dark side next the eaves. It was short enough for a child of twelve
to lean upon. It had seen considerable use, for the brown velvet pad
was worn quite thin and gray. Had the little cripple ever walked again?
With what feelings did the mother put that crutch away up-garret when
it was needed no more? The garret did not say how that story of pain
had ended; or whether it was long or short. The children never sought
to know. It was one of the questions which they did not ask: they knew
very little about pain themselves, and perhaps they did not fully enter
into the meaning of that sad little relic.
Still less did they understand the reverence with which the
house-cleaning women handled a certain bare wooden frame, neither
handsome nor comfortable looking. It had been made to support an
invalid in a sitting posture in bed; and the invalid for whom it was
provided, in her last days, had suffered much from difficulty of
breathing, and had passed many weary hours, sometimes whole nights,
supported by this frame. It had for those who knew its use the
sacredness of association with that long ordeal of pain, endured with
perfect patience and watched over with constant love.
But these were memories which the little children could not share. When
their prattling questions touched upon the sore places, the wounds in
the family past, they were not answered, or were put aside till some
more fitting occasion, or until they were old enough to listen with
their hearts.
Under the eaves there was an old green chest whose contents, year after
year, the children searched through in the never-failing hope that
they should find something which had not been there the year before.
There were old account-books with their stories of loss and gain which
the children could not read. There were bundles of old letters which
they were not allowed to examine. There were “ink-portraits,” family
profiles in silhouette, which they thought very funny, especially in
the matter of coat collars and “back hair.” There were schoolgirl
prizes of fifty years ago; the schoolgirls had grown into grandmammas,
and some were dead. There was old-fashioned art-work, paintings on
velvet or satin; boxes covered with shells; needlebooks and samplers
showing the most exemplary stitches in colors faded by time. There
were handsomely bound volumes of “Extracts,” containing poems and long
passages of elegant prose copied in pale-brown ink, in the proper
penmanship of the time. And there was a roll of steel-plate engravings
which had missed the honor of frames; and of these the children’s
favorite picture was one called The Wife.
It is some time since I have seen that picture; I may be wrong about
some of the details. But as I remember her, the wife was a long-necked
lady with very large eyes, dressed in white, with large full sleeves
and curls falling against her cheek. She held a feather hand-screen,
and she was doing nothing but look beautiful and sweetly attentive to
her husband, who was seated on the other side of the table and was
reading aloud to her by the light of an old-fashioned astral lamp.
This, of course, was the ideal wife, so thought the little girls. Every
other form of wifehood known to them was more or less made up of sewing
and housework and everyday clothes. Even in the family past, it had the
taint of the Dutch oven and the spinning-wheel and the candle moulds
upon it. They looked at their finger-tips; no, it was not likely theirs
would ever grow to be long and pointed like hers. _The_ wife no one of
them should ever be--only _a_ wife perhaps, with the usual sewing-work,
and not enough white dresses to afford to wear one every evening.
It took one day to clean the garret and another to put things away.
Winter clothing had to be brushed and packed in the chests where it was
kept; the clothes closet had to be cleaned; then its door was closed
and locked. The last of the brooms and dust-pans beat a retreat, the
stair door was shut, and the dust and the mystery began to gather as
before.
But summer, though no foe to dust, was a great scatterer of the garret
mysteries. Gay, lightsome summer peeped in at the half-moon window and
smiled down from the scuttle in the roof. Warm weather had come, the
sash that fitted the gable window was taken out permanently. Outdoor
sounds and perfumes floated up. Athwart the sleeping sunbeams golden
dust motes quivered, and bees from the garden sailed in and out on
murmuring wing.
If a thunderstorm came up suddenly, then there was a fine race up two
flights of stairs!--and whoever reached the scuttle ladder first had
the first right to climb it, and to pull in the shutter that covered
the scuttle hole. There was time, perhaps, for one breathless look down
the long slope of bleached shingles,--at the tossing treetops, the
meadow grass whipped white, the fountain’s jet of water bending like
a flame and falling silent on the grass, the neighbor’s team hurrying
homeward, and the dust rising along the steep upward grade of the
village road.
Then fell the first great drop--another, and another; the shutter hid
the storm-bright square of sky, and down came the rain--trampling on
the shingles, drumming in the gutters, drowning the laughing voices
below; and suddenly the garret grew cool, and its mellow glow darkened
to brown twilight.
Under the gable window there stood for many years a white pine box,
with a front that let down on leather hinges. It was very clean inside
and faintly odorous. The children called it the bee-box, and they had a
story of their own to account for the tradition that this box had once
held rich store of honey in the comb.
A queen bee, they said, soaring above the tops of the cherry-trees in
swarming-time, had drifted in at the garret window with all the swarm
in tow; and where her royal caprice had led them, the faithful workers
remained and formed a colony in the bee-box, and, like honest tenants,
left a quantity of their sweet wares behind to pay for their winter’s
lodging.
There may have been some truth in this story, but the honey was long
since gone, and so were the bees. The bee-box, in the children’s
time, held only files of old magazines packed away for binding. Of
course they never were bound; and the children who used to look at
the pictures in them, grew into absent-minded girls with half-lengths
of hair falling into their eyes when they stooped too low over their
books,--as they always would, to read. The bee-box was crammed till the
lid would no longer shut. And now the dusty pages began to gleam and
glow, and voices that all the world listened to spoke to those young
hearts for the first time in the garret’s stillness.
The rapt young reader, seated on the garret floor, never thought of
looking for a date, nor asked, “Who tells this story?” Those voices
were as impersonal as the winds and the stars of the summer night.
It might have been twenty years, it might have been but a year before,
that Lieutenant Strain led his brave little band into the deadly tropic
wilderness of Darien. It is doubtful if those child-readers knew why
he was sent, by whom, or what to do. The beginning of the narrative
was in a “missing number” of the magazine. It mattered not; they read
from the heart, not from the head. It was the toils, the resolves, the
sufferings of the men that they cared about,--their characters and
conduct under trial. They agonized with “Truxton” over his divided
duty, and they wept at his all but dying words:--
“Did I do right, Strain?”
They worshiped, with unquestioning faith, at the shrine of that
factitious god of battles, Abbot’s “Napoleon.” With beating hearts and
burning cheeks they lived in the tragic realism of “Witching Times.”
“Maya, the Princess,” and “The Amber Gods,” “In a Cellar,” “The South
Breaker,” stormed their fresh imaginations, and left them feverishly
dreaming; and there in the garret’s tropic warmth and stillness they
first heard the voice of the great master who gave us Colonel Newcome,
and who wrought us to such passionate sympathy with the fortunes of
Clive and Ethel. And here, too, the last number was missing, and for a
long time the young readers went sorrowing for Clive, and thinking that
he and Ethel had been parted all their lives.
These garret readings were frequently a stolen joy, but perhaps
“mother” was in the secret of the bee-box, and did not search very
closely or call very loud when a girl was missing, about the middle of
the warm, midsummer afternoons.
About midsummer the sage was picked and spread upon newspapers upon the
garret floor to dry. That was a pleasant task. Children are sensitive
to the touch of beauty connected with their labors. Their eyes lingered
with delight upon the color, the crêpe-like texture of the fragrant
sage, bestrewing the brown garret floor with its delicate life already
wilting in the dry, warm air.
“September winds should never blow upon hops,” the saying is; therefore
the hops for a whole year’s yeast-making were gathered in the wane of
summer; and here, too, was a task that brought its own reward. The
hops made a carpet for the garret floor, more beautiful even than the
blue-green sage; and as the harvest was much larger, so the fair living
carpet spread much wider. It was a sight to see, in the low light of
the half-moon window, all the fragile pale green balls, powdered to the
heart’s core with gold-colored pollen--a field of beauty spread there
for no eye to see. Yet it was not wasted. The children did not speak
of what they felt, but nothing that was beautiful, or mysterious, or
stimulating to the fancy in those garret days, was ever lost. It is
often the slight impressions that, like the “scent of the roses,” wear
best and most keenly express the past.
No child ever forgot the physiognomy of those rooms at grandfather’s:
the mid-afternoon stillness when the sun shone on the lemon-tree, and
its flowers shed their perfume on the warm air of the sitting-room;
the peculiar odor of the withering garden when October days were
growing chill; the soft rustle of the wind searching among the dead
leaves of the arbor; the cider-mill’s drone in the hazy distance; the
creaking of the loaded wagons; the bang of the great barn doors when
the wind swung them to.
No child of all those who have played in grandfather’s garret ever
forgot its stories, its solemn, silent make-believes, the dreams they
dreamed there when they were girls, or the books they read.
THE SPARE BEDROOM AT GRANDFATHER’S
It was the hour for fireside talks in the cañon: too early, as dusk
falls on a short December day, for lamps to be lighted; too late to
snatch a page or two more of the last magazine, by the low gleam that
peered in the western windows.
Jack had done his part in the evening’s wood-carrying, and now was
enjoying the fruits of honest toil, watching the gay red flames that
becked and bowed up the lava-rock chimney. The low-ceiled room, with
its rows of books, its guns and pipes and idols in Zuñi pottery,
darkled in corners and glowed in spots, and the faces round the
hearth were lighted as by footlights, in their various attitudes of
thoughtfulness.
“Now, what is _that_?” cried Jack’s mamma, putting down the fan screen
she held, and turning her head to listen.
It was only the wind booming over the housetop, but it had found a new
plaything; it was strumming with a free hand and mighty on the long,
taut wires that guyed the wash-shed stovepipe. The wash-shed was a
post-script in boards and shingles hastily added to the main dwelling
after the latter’s completion. It had no chimney, only four feet of
pipe projecting from the roof, an item which would have added to the
insurance had there been any insurance. The risk of fire was taken
along with the other risks, but the family was vigilant.
Mrs. Gilmour listened till she sighed again. The wind, she said,
reminded her of a sound she had not thought of for years,--the whirring
of swallows’ wings in the spare bedroom chimney at home.
“Swallows in the chimney?” cried Jack, suddenly attentive. “How could
they build fires then, without roasting the birds?”
“The chimneys were three stories high, and the swallows built near
the top, I suppose. They had the sky and the stars for a ceiling to
their dark little bedrooms. In spring there was never more than a
blaze of sticks on the hearth--not that, unless we had visitors to
stay. Sometimes a young swallow trying to fly fell out of the nest and
fluttered across the hearth into the room. That was very exciting to us
children. But at house-cleaning time a great bag of straw was stuffed
up the chimney’s throat to save the hearth from falling soot and dried
mud and the litter from the nests. It was a brick hearth painted red,
and washed always with milk to make it shine. The andirons were such as
you will see in the garret of any good old house in the East,--fluted
brass columns with brass cones on top.
“It was in summer, when the bird colony was liveliest, that we used to
hear the beating of wings in the chimney,--a smothered sound like the
throbbing of a steamer’s wheels far off in a fog, or behind a neck of
land.”
Jack asked more questions; the men seemed not inclined to talk, and
the mother fell to remembering aloud, speaking sometimes to Jack, but
often to the others. All the simple features of her old Eastern home
had gained a priceless value, as things of a past gone out of her life
which she had scarcely prized at the time. She was half jealous of her
children’s attachment to the West, and longed to make them know the
place of the family’s nativity, through such pictures of it as her
memory could supply.
But her words meant more to herself than to any that listened.
“Did we ever sleep in that bedroom with the chimney-swallows?” asked
Jack. He was thinking, What a mistake to stop up the chimney and cut
off communication with such jolly neighbors as the swallows!
Yes, his mother said; he had slept there, but before he could remember.
It was the winter he was three years old, when his father was in
Deadwood.
There used to be such beautiful frost-pictures on the eastern window
panes; and when the sun rose and the fire was lighted and the pictures
faded, a group of little bronze-black cedars appeared, half a mile
away, topping the ridge by the river, and beyond them were the solemn
blue hills. Those hills and the cedars were as much a part of a
winter’s sunrise on the Hudson as the sun himself.
Jack used to lie in bed and listen for the train, a signal his mother
did not care to hear, for it meant she must get up and set a match
to the fire, laid overnight in the big-bellied, air-tight stove that
panted and roared on its four short legs, shuddering in a transport of
sudden heat.
When the air of the room grew milder, Jack would hop out in his wrapper
and slippers, and run to the north window to see what new shapes the
fountain had taken in the night.
The jet of water in winter was turned low, and the spray of it froze
and piled above the urn, changing as the wind veered and as the sun
wasted it. On some mornings it looked like a weeping white lady in a
crystal veil; sometimes a Niobe group, children clinging to a white,
sad mother, who clasped them and bowed her head. When the sun peeped
through the fir-trees, it touched the fountain statuary with sea tints
of emerald and pearl.
Had Jack been old enough to know the story of Undine, he might have
fancied that he saw her, on those winter mornings, and I am sure he
would have wanted to fetch her in and warm her and dry her icy tears.
The spare-room mantelpiece was high. Jack could see only the tops
of things upon it, even by walking far back into the room; but of a
morning, mounted on the pillows of the great four-poster, he could
explore the mantel’s treasures, which never varied nor changed places.
There was the whole length and pattern of the tall silver-plated
candlesticks and the snuffers in their tray; the Indian box of
birch-bark overlaid with porcupine quills, which held concealed riches
of shells and coral and dark sea beans; there was the centre vase
of Derbyshire spar, two dolphins wreathing their tails to support a
bacchante’s bowl crowned with grape leaves. In winter this vase held
an arrangement of dried immortelles, yellow and pink and crimson,
and some that verged upon magenta and should have been cast out as an
offense to the whole; but grandmother had for flowers a charity that
embraced every sin of color they were capable of. When her daughters
grew up and put on airs of superior taste, they protested against these
stiff mementos; but she was mildly inflexible; she continued to gather
and to dry her “everlastings,” with faithful recognition of their
prickly virtues. She was not one to slight old friends for a trifling
mistake in color, though Art should put forth her edict and call them
naught.
In the northeast corner of the room stood a great invalid chair,
dressed, like a woman, in white dimity that came down to the floor
all round. The plump feather cushion had an apron, as little Jack
called it, which fell in neat gathers in front. The high stuffed sides
projected, forming comfortable corners where a languid head might rest.
Here the pale young mothers of the family “sat up” for the first time
to have their hair braided, or to receive the visits of friends; here,
in last illnesses, a wan face sinking back showed the truth of the
doctor’s verdict.
White dimity, alternating with a dark-red reps in winter, covered the
seats of the fiddle-backed mahogany chairs. White marseilles or dimity
covers were on the washstand, and the tall bureau had a swinging glass
that rocked back against the wall and showed little Jack a picture of
himself walking into a steep background of the room--a small chap in
kilts, with a face somewhat out of drawing and of a bluish color; the
floor, too, had a queer slant like the deck of a rolling vessel. But
with all its faults, this presentation of himself in the glass was an
appearance much sought after by Jack, even to the climbing on chairs to
attain it.