CHAPTER I

A Woman of Genius

BY MARY AUSTIN

_Author of "The Land of Little Rain," "The Arrowmaker," "Isidro,"

"Christ in Italy," etc., etc._

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

1912

_Copyright, 1912, by_

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO.

_All rights reserved, including that of

translation into foreign languages,

including the Scandinavian_

TO

LOU HENRY HOOVER

AND SOME PLEASANT MEMORIES

OF

THE RED HOUSE IN HORNTON

STREET

BOOK I

CHAPTER I

It is strange that I can never think of writing any account of my life

without thinking of Pauline Mills and wondering what she will say of it.

Pauline is rather given to reading the autobiographies of distinguished

people--unless she has left off since I disappointed her--and finding in

them new persuasions of the fundamental lightness of her scheme of

things. I recall very well, how, when I was having the bad time of my

life there in Chicago, she would abound in consoling instances from one

then appearing in the monthly magazines; skidding over the obvious

derivation of the biographist's son from the Lord Knows Who, except that

it wasn't from the man to whom she was legally married, to fix on the

foolish detail of the child's tempers and woolly lambs as the

advertisement of that true womanliness which Pauline loves to pluck from

every feminine bush.

There was also a great deal in that story about a certain other

celebrity, for her relations to whom the writer was blackballed in a

club of which I afterward became a member, and I think it was the things

Pauline said about one of the rewards of genius being the privilege of

association with such transcendent personalities on a footing which

permitted one to call them by their first names in one's reminiscences,

that gave me the notion of writing this book. It has struck me as

humorous to a degree, that, in this sort of writing, the really

important things are usually left out.

I thought then of writing the life of an accomplished woman, not so much

of the accomplishment as of the woman; and I have never been able to

make a start at it without thinking of Pauline Mills and that curious

social warp which obligates us most to impeach the validity of a woman's

opinion at the points where it is most supported by experience. From the

earliest I have been rendered highly suspicious of the social estimate

of women, by the general social conspiracy against her telling the truth

about herself. But, in fact, I do not think Mrs. Mills will read my

book. Henry will read it first at his office and tell her that he'd

rather she shouldn't, for Henry has been so successfully Paulined that

it is quite sufficient for any statement of life to lie outside his

wife's accepted bias, to stamp it with insidious impropriety. There is

at times something almost heroic in the resolution with which women like

Pauline Mills defend themselves from whatever might shift the centres of

their complacency.

But even without Pauline, it interests me greatly to undertake this

book, of which I have said in the title as much as a phrase may of the

scope of the undertaking, for if I know anything of genius it is wholly

extraneous, derived, impersonal, flowing through and by. I cannot tell

you what it is, but I hope to show you a little of how I was seized of

it, shaped; what resistances opposed to it; what surrenders. I mean to

put as plainly as possible how I felt it fumbling at my earlier life

like the sea at the foot of a tidal wall, and by what rifts in the

structure of living, its inundation rose upon me; by what practices and

passions I was enlarged to it, and by what well meaning of my friends I

was cramped and hardened. But of its ultimate operation once it had

worked up through my stiff clay, of triumphs, profits, all the

intricacies of technique, gossip of rehearsals, you shall hear next to

nothing. This is the story of the struggle between a Genius for Tragic

Acting and the daughter of a County Clerk, with the social ideal of

Taylorville, Ohianna, for the villain. It is a drama in which none of

the characters played the parts they were cast for, and invariably spoke

from the wrong cues, which nevertheless proceeded to a successful

dénouement. But if you are looking for anything ordinarily called plot,

you will be disappointed. Plot is distinctly the province of fiction,

though I've a notion there is a sort of order in my story, if one could

look at it from the vantage of the gods, but I have never rightly made

it out. What I mean to go about is the exploitation of the personal

phases of genius, of which when it refers to myself you must not

understand me to speak as of a peculiar merit, like the faculty for

presiding at a woman's club or baking sixteen pies of a morning, which

distinguished one Taylorvillian from another; rather as a seizure, a

possession which overtook me unaware, like one of those insidious

Oriental disorders which you may never die of, but can never be cured.

You shall hear how I did successfully stave it off in my youth for the

sake of a Working Taylor and Men's Outfitter, and was nearly intimidated

out of it by the wife of a Chicago attorney who had something to do with

stocks; how I was often very tired of it, and many times, especially in

the earlier periods when I was trying to effect a compromise between it

and the afore-mentioned Taylorvillian predilections, I should have been

happiest to have been quit of it altogether.

I shall try to have you understand that I have not undertaken to restate

those phases of autobiography which are commonly suppressed, because of

an exception to what the public has finally and at large concurred in,

that it does not particularly matter what happens to the vessel of

personality, so long as the essential fluid gets through; but from

having gone so much farther to discover that it matters not a little to

Genius to be so scamped and retarded. I have arrived at seeing the

uncritical acceptance of poverty and heartbreak as essential

accompaniments of Gift, very much of a piece with the proneness of

Christians to regard the early martyrdoms as concomitants of faith, when

every thinking person knows they arose in the cruelty and stupidity of

the bystanders. Hardly any one seems to have recalled in this

connection, that the initial Christian experience is a baptism of Joy,

and it was only in the business of communicating it that it became

bloody and tormenting. If you will go a little farther with me, you

shall be made to see the miseries of genius, perhaps also the bulk of

wretchedness everywhere, not so much the rod of inexplicable

chastisement, as the reaction of a purblind social complacency.

I shall take you at the sincerest in admitting the function of Art to be

its re-kneading of the bread of life until it nourishes us toward

greater achievement, as a basis for proving that much that you may be

thinking about its processes is wrong, and most that you may have done

for its support is beside the mark. If I have had any compunction about

writing this book, it has been the fear that in the relation of

incidents difficult and sordid, you might still miss the point of your

being largely to blame for them. And even if you escape the banality of

believing that my having lived for a week in Chicago on 85 cents was in

any way important to my artistic development, and go so far as to

apprehend it as it actually was, a foolish and unnecessary interference

with my business of serving you anew with entertainment, you must go a

little farther honestly to accept it, even when it came--this

revitalizing fluid of which I was for the moment the vase, the cup--in

circumstances which in the rule you live by, appear, when not actually

reprehensible, at least ridiculous.

Looking back over a series of struggles that have left me in a frame

when no man under forty interests me very much, still within the

possibility of personal romance, and at an age when most women have the

affectional value of a keepsake only, the arbiter and leader of my

world, I seem to see my life not much else but a breach in the social

fabric, sedulously bricked up from within and battered from without,

through which at last pours light and the fluid soul of Life. Something

of all this I shall try to make plain to you, and incidentally how in

the process I have perceived dimly this huge coil of social adjustment

as a struggle _against_ the invasive forces of blessedness, the smother

of sheep in the lanes stupidly to escape the fair pastures toward which

a large Friendliness herds them. If you go as far as this with me, you

shall avoid, who knows, what indirection, and that not altogether

without entertainment.

CHAPTER II

Of Taylorville, where I grew up and was married, the most distinguishing

thing was that there was nothing to distinguish it from a hundred towns

in Ohianna. To begin with, it was laid out about a square, and had two

streets at right angles known as Main and Broad. Broad Street, I

remember, ran east and west between the high school and the railway

station, and Main Street had the Catholic cemetery on the south, and the

tool and hoe works on the north to mark--there was no other visible

distinction--the points at which it became country road. There were

numerous cross streets, east and west, called after the Governors, or

perhaps it was the Presidents, and north and south, set forth on

official maps as avenues, taking their names from the trees with which

they were falsely declared to be planted, though I do not recall that

they were ever spoken of by these names except by the leading county

paper which had its office in one corner of the square over the

Coöperative store, was Republican in politics, and stood for Progress.

The square was planted with maples; a hitching rack ran quite around it

and was, in the number and character of the vehicles attached to it, a

sort of public calendar for the days of the week and the seasons. On

court days and elections, I remember, they quite filled the rack and

overflowed to the tie-posts in front of the courthouse, which stood on

its own ground a little off from the square, balanced on the opposite

side by the Methodist Church. It was a perfect index to the country

neighbourhoods that spread east and north to the flat, black corn lands,

west to the marl and clay of the river district, and south to the

tall-weeded, oozy Bottoms. Teams from the Bottoms, I believe, always had

cockleburs in their tails; and spanking dapple grays drove in with

shining top-buggies from the stock farms whose flacking windmills on the

straight horizons of the north, struck on my childish fancy as some sort

of mechanical scarecrow to frighten away the homey charms of the wooded

hills. I recall this sort of detail as the only thing in my native town

that affected my imagination. When I saw the flakes of black loam

dropping from the tires, or the yellow clay of the river district caked

solidly about the racked hubs, I was stirred by the allurement of travel

and adventure, the movement of human enterprise on the fourwent ways of

the world.

From my always seeming to see them so bemired with their recent

passages, I gather that my observations must have been made chiefly in

winter on my way to school. From other memories of Taylorville arched in

by the full-leaved elms and maples, smelling of dust and syringas, and

never quite separable from a suspicion of boredom, I judge my summer

acquaintance with its streets to have been chiefly by way of going to

church, for, until the winter I was eleven years old, Taylorville, the

world in fact, meant Hadley's pasture.

It lay back of that part of the town where our house was, contiguous to

a common of abandoned orchard and cow lot, and if it lacked anything of

adventurous occasion and delight, we, Forrie and Effie and I, the McGee

children, and the little Allinghams, did not know it. There was a sort

of convention of childhood that we should never go straight to it by the

proper path, but it must always be taken by assault or stealth: over the

woodhouse and then along the top of the orchard fence as far as you

could manage without falling off, and then tagging the orchard trees; I

remember there were times when we felt obliged to climb up every tree in

our way and down on the other side, and so to the stump lot where the

earliest violets were to be found--how blue it would be with them in

April about the fairy ring of some decaying trunk!--and beyond the stump

lot, the alder brook and the Stone-pit pond where we caught a pike once,

come up from the river to spawn. Up from the brook ranged a wood over

the shallow hills, farther and darker than we dared, and along its banks

was every variety of pleasantness. There was always something to be done

there, springs to be scooped out, rills to be dammed; always something

to eat, sassafras root, minnows taken by hand and half cooked on

surreptitious fires, red haws and hazelnuts; always some place to be

visited with freshness and discovery, dark umbrageous corners to provide

that dreaded and delighted panic of the wild.

But perhaps the best service the pasture did us was as a theatre for the

dramatization of the bourgeoning social instinct. We played at church

and school in it, at scalping and Robinson Crusoe and the Three Bears.

We went farther and played at High Priests and Oracles and

Sacrifice--and what were we at Taylorville to know of such things?

If this were to be as full an account of my Art as it is of myself, I

should have to stop here and try to have you understand how at this time

I was all awash in the fluid stuff of it, buoyed and possessed by

unknowledgable splendours, heroisms, tendernesses, a shifty glittering

flood. I am always checked in my attempt to render this submerged

childhood of mine by the recollection of my mother in the midst of the

annoyance which any reference to it always caused her, trying judicially

to account for it on the basis of my having read too much, with the

lurking conviction at the bottom of all comment that a few more

spankings might have effectually counteracted it. But though I read more

than the other children, there was never very much to read in

Taylorville at any time, and no amount of reading could have put into

my mind what I found there--the sustaining fairy wonder of the world.

I was not, I think, different in kind from the other children, except as

being more consistently immersed in it and never quite dispossessed. I

have lost and rediscovered the way to it some several times; have

indeed, had to defend its approaches with violence and skill: this whole

business of the biography has no other point, in fact, than to show you

how far my human behaviour has been timed to keep what I believe most

people part with no more distressfully than with their milk teeth.

Effie, I know, has no recollection of this period other than that there

was a time when the earth was hung with vestiges of splendour, and if my

brother has kept anything of his original inheritance, he would sooner

admit to a left over appetite for jujubes and liquorice; for Forester is

fully of the common opinion that the fevers, flights and drops of

temperament are the mere infirmity of Gift. There was a time, before I

left off talking to Forester at all about my work, when he visibly

permitted his pity to assuage his disgust at the persistence of so

patent a silliness in me, and still earlier, before I owned three motor

cars, an estate in Florida and a house on the Hudson, there were not

wanting intimations of its voluntary assumption as a pose; pose in

Forester's vocabulary standing for any frame of behaviour to which he is

not naturally addicted. But there it was, the flux of experience rising

to the surface of our plays, the reservoir from which later, without

having personally contemplated such an act, I drew the authority for how

Lady Macbeth must have felt, about to do a murder, from which if I had

had a taste for it, I might have drawn with like assurance the necessity

of the square of the hypotenuse to equal the squares of the other two

sides.

It is curious that, though I cannot remember how my father looked nor

who taught me long division, I recall perfectly how the reddening

blackberry leaves lay under the hoar frost in Hadley's pasture, and the

dew between the pale gold wires of the grass on summer mornings, and the

very words and rites by which we paid observance to Snockerty. I am not

sure whether Ellen McGee or I invented him, but first and last he got us

into as much trouble as though we had not always distinctly recognized

him for an invention. The McGees lived quite around the corner of the

pasture from us, and, as far as my memory serves, the whole seven of

them had nothing to do but lie in wait for any appearance of ours in the

stump lot; though in respect to their father being a section boss, and

the family Catholic, we were not supposed, when we put on our good

clothes and went out of the front gate, to meet them socially. I think

there must have been also some parental restriction on our intercourse

of play, for they never came to our house nor we to theirs; the little

Allinghams, in fact, never would play with them. They came to play with

us and only included the McGees on the implication of their being our

guests. If at any time we three Lattimores were called away, Pauline,

who was the eldest, would forthwith marshal her young tribe in exactly

the same manner in which she afterward held Henry Mills in the paths of

rectitude, and march them straight out of the big gate to their home. I

remember how I used perfectly to hate the expression of the little

Allinghams on these occasions and sympathize with the not always

successfully repressed jeers of the McGees. Mrs. Allingham was the sort

of woman who makes a point of having the full confidence of her

children--detestable practice--and I have always suspected, in spite of

the friendliness of the families, that the little Allinghams used to

make a sort of moral instance of us whenever they fell into discredit

with their parents. At any rate the report of our doings in Hadley's

pasture as they worked around through her to our mother, would lead to

episodes of marked coolness, in which we held ourselves each loftily

aloof from the other, until incontinently the spirit of play swirled us

together again in a joyous democracy.

At the time when the Snockerty obsession overtook us, Ellen McGee was

the only real rival I had for the leadership of the pasture; if she had

not had, along with all her Irish quickness, a touch of Irish

sycophancy, I should have lost all my ascendency after the advent of

Snockerty. I feel sure now that Ellen must have invented him; she was

most enviably furnished in all the signs of lucky and unlucky and what

it meant if you put your stocking on wrong side out in the morning, with

charms to say for warts, and scraps of Old World song that had all the

force of incantations. Her fairy tales too had a more convincing sound,

for she got them from her father, who had always known somebody who knew

the human participators. It was commonly insisted by Mrs. Allingham that

the McGee children would never come to anything, and I believe, in fact,

they never did, but they supplied an element of healthful vulgarity in

our lives that, remembering Alfred Allingham's adolescent priggishness,

I am inclined to think was very good for us.

If I have said nothing of my parents until now, it is because the part

they played in our lives for the first ten years was, from our point of

view, negligible. Parents were a sort of natural appendage of children,

against whose solidarity our performance had room and opportunity. They

kept the house together; they staved off fear--no one, for instance,

would think of sleeping in a place where there were no parents--they

bulked large between us and the unknown. There was a general notion of

our elders toward rubbing it into us that we ought to be excessively

grateful to them for not having turned us adrift, _sans_ food and

housing, but I do not think we took it seriously.

Parents existed for the purpose of rendering the world livable for

children, and on the whole their disposition was friendly, except in

cases like Mrs. Allingham, who contrived always to give you a guilty

sense of having forgot to wipe your feet or tramped on the flower

borders. I do not think we had a more active belief in our parents'

profession of absorption in our interests than in my father's pretence

to be desperately wounded by Forester's popgun, or scared out of his

wits when Effie jumped at him from behind the syringa bush. It was

admittedly nice of them and it kept the game going, but there were also

times when they did not manage it so successfully as we could have

wished. I think that we never questioned their right to punish us for

disobedience, perhaps because there is, after all, something

intrinsically sound about the right of might, though we sometimes

questioned the occasion, as when we had been told we might play in the

pasture for an hour, of the passage of which we knew as much as wild

pigeons. There was always, to me at least, an inexplicableness about

such reprisals that mitigated against their moral issue. There was one

point, however, upon which we all three opposed an unalterable front; we

would not kiss and make up after our private squabbles. We fought, or

combined against neighbouring tribes, or divided our benefits with an

even handedness that obtains nowhere as among children, but we would

not be tricked into a status which it might be inconvenient to maintain.

I am sure, though, that Mrs. Allingham used rather to put it over my

mother for her inability to make little prigs of us.

"Mothers," she would say on the rare occasions when she came to call in

the beaded dolman and black kid gloves which other Taylorvillians wore

only on Sunday, "MOTHERS," with the effect of making it all capitals,

"have an inestimable privilege in shaping their children's characters."

This was when we had had our faces surreptitiously washed and been

brought in for ceremonial inspection; and a little later she would add,

with the air of having tactfully conveyed advice under the guise of

information, "I always insist"--here Forester would kick me

furtively--"_insist_ on having the full confidence of mine," at which

point my mother would make excuses to get me out of the room before I,

who never could learn that people are not always of the mind they think

they are, made embarrassing disclosures.

Up to this time my mother figures chiefly as a woman who tied up our

hurts and overruled my father when he tried to beg us off from going to

church. I suppose it was the baby always in arms or expected that kept

us from romping all over her as we did with my father; and much of her

profession of interest in us, which came usually at the end of

admonitory occasions, had the cold futility of the family prayers that

my mother tried to make appear part of the habitual order when Cousin

Judd came to stay with us.

I do not know whether he suspected the hollowness of our morning

worship, but I am sure I was never in the least imposed upon by the high

moral attitude from which my mother attempted to deal with my

misbehaviours. She used to conduct these interviews on the prescription

of certain books by the reading of which I was afterward corrupted, on a

basis of shocked solemnity that, as she was not without a sense of

humour, often broke down under my raw disbelief. Forester, always

amenable to suggestion, was sometimes reduced to writhing contrition by

these inquisitorial attempts, but I came away from them oftenest not a

little embarrassed by her inability to bring anything to pass by them.

I do not think our detachment was greater than is common with young

children in families where they are pushed out of their privilege of

cuddling as fast as they were in ours. There was thirteen months between

Forester and me, another brother, early dead, before Effie, and two that

came after. The children who died were always sickly; I think it

probable in the country phrase, so appalling in its easy acceptance, my

mother had "never seen a well day"; and what was meant to be the joy of

loving was utterly swamped for her in its accompanying dread. I seem to

have been born into the knowledge that the breast, the lap, and the

brooding tenderness were the sole prerogative of babies; it was

imperative to your larger estate not to exhibit the weakness of wanting

them. There comes back to me in this connection an evening with us

three, Forester, Effie and I, squeezed on to the lowest step of the

stairs for company, my mother in the dusk, rocking and singing one of

those wildly sweet and tragic melodies that the men brought back out of

the South as seeds are carried in a sheep's coat. To this day I cannot

hear it without a certain swelling to let in the smell of the summer

dusk and the flitter of the bats outside and the quaver of my mother's

voice. I could see the baby's white gown hanging over her arm--it was

the next one after Effie, and already she must have been expecting the

next--and the soft screech of the rocker on the deal floor, and all at

once I knew, with what certainty it hurts me still to remember, how it

felt to be held so close ... _close_ ... and safe ... and the swell of

the breast under the song, and the swing of the rocker ... knew it as if

I had been but that moment dispossessed ... and the need ... as I know

now I have always needed to be so enfolded.

I do not remember just what happened; I seem to have come to from a fit

of passionate crying, climbed up out of it by a hand that gripped me by

the shoulder and shook me occasionally by way of hastening my

composure. I was struggling desperately to get away from it ... away

from the mother, who held me so to the mother I had just remembered ...

and there was Jule, the maid, holding up the lamp, ordering me to bed in

the dark for having spoiled our quiet evening. Then after what seemed a

long time, Effie snuggled up to me under the covers, terrified by my

sudden accession of sobs but too loyal to call down the household upon

us.

It came back ... the need of mothering. There was a time when I had lain

abed some days with the measles or whatever. I was small enough, I

remember, to lie in the crib bed that was kept downstairs for the

prevalent baby ... and my mouth was dry with fever. I recall my mother

standing over me and my being taken dreadfully with the need of that

sustaining bosom, and her stooping to my stretched arms divinely ... and

then ... I asked her to put me down again. I have had drops and

sinkings, but nothing to compare with this, for there was nothing there

you understand ... the release, the comforting ... it wasn't there ...

_it was never there at all_!

CHAPTER III

But I began to tell you how Ellen McGee and I invented Snockerty and

arrived at our first contact with organized society, at least Forrie and

Effie and I did, for it led to our being interdicted the society of the

McGee children for so long that we forgot to inquire what inconvenience,

if any, they suffered on account of it.

You will see for yourself that Ellen must have invented him--where,

indeed, should a saint-abhorring, Sunday-schooled Taylorville child get

the stuff for it? God we knew, and were greatly bored by His inordinate

partiality for the Jews as against all ancient peoples, and by the

inquisitorial eye and ear forever at the keyhole of our lives, as Cousin

Judd never spared to remind us; and personally I was convinced of a

large friendliness brooding over Hadley's pasture, to the sense of which

I woke every morning afresh, was called by it, and to it; walking apart

from the others, I vaguely prayed. But Snockerty was of the stripe of

trolls, leprechauns, pucks, and hobgoblins.

We began, I remember, by thinking of him as resident in an old hollow

apple tree, down which, if small trifles were dropped, they fell out of

reach and sound. There was the inviting hole, arm high in the apple

trunk, into which you popped bright pebbles, bits of glass--and I

suppose He might have sprung very naturally from the need of justifying

your having parted with something you valued and couldn't get back

again, at the prompting of an impulse you did not understand. Very

presently the practice grew into the acknowledgment of a personality

amenable to our desires.

We took to dropping small belongings in the tree for an omen of the day:

whether the spring was full or not, or if we should find any pawpaws in

the wood, and drew the augury from anything that happened immediately

afterward: say, if the wind ruffled the leaves or if a rabbit ran out of

the grass.

It was Ellen who showed the most wit in interpreting the signs and

afterward reconciling their inconsistencies, but it was I conceived the

notion of propitiating Snockerty, who by this time had come to exercise

a marked influence on all our plays, by a species of dramatic

entertainment made up of scraps of school exercises, Sunday hymns,

recitations, and particularly of improvisations in which Ellen and I

vied. There were times when, even in the midst of these ritualistic

observances, we would go off at a tangent of normal play, quite

oblivious of Snockerty; other times we were so worked upon by our own

performance as to make sacrifices of really valuable possessions and

variously to afflict ourselves.

It was I, I remember, who scared one of the little Allinghams almost

into fits by my rendering in the name of Snockerty of an anathema which

I had picked up somewhere, but it was Ellen who contrived to extend His

influence over the whole of our territory by finding in every decaying

stump and hollow trunk, a means of communication, and deriving therefrom

authority for any wild prank that happened to come into her head. It is

curious that in all the escapades which were imposed on us in the name

of our deity, for which we were duly punished, not one word of the real

cause of our outbreaks ever leaked through to our parents. It was the

only thing, I believe, the little Allinghams never told their mother,

not even when the second youngest in a perfect frenzy of propitiation,

made a sacrifice of a handful of his careful curls which I personally

hacked off for him with Forester's pocket knife. He lied like a little

gentleman and said he had cut them off himself because he was tired of

looking like a girl baby.

I think it must have been about the end of Snockerty's second summer

that Ellen's wild humour got us all into serious trouble which resulted

in my first real contact with authority.

Along the west side of Hadley's pasture, between it and the county road,

lay the tilled fields of the Ross property, corn and pumpkins and

turnips, against which a solemn trespass board advised us. It was that

board, no doubt, which led to our always referring to the owner of it as

old man Ross, for except as he was a tall, stooping, white-bearded,

childless man, I do not know how he had deserved our disrespect. I have

suspected since that the trespass sign did not originate wholly in the

alleged cantankerousness of farmer Ross, and that the McGees knew more

of the taste of his young turnips and roasting ears than they admitted

at the time when Snockerty announced to Ellen through the hollow of a

dark, gnarly oak at the foot of Hadley's hill, that he would be

acceptably served by a feast of green corn and turnips out of Ross's

field. This was the first time the idea of such a depredation had

occurred to us, I believe, for we were really good children in the main,

but I do not think we had any notion of disobeying. Personally I rather

delighted in the idea of being compelled to desperate enterprises. I

recall the wild freebooting dash, the scramble over the fence, the

rustle of the corn full of delicious intimations of ambush and surprise,

the real fear of coming suddenly on old man Ross among the rows, where I

suspect we did a great deal of damage in the search for ears suitable to

roast, and the derisive epithets which we did not spare to fling over

our shoulders as we escaped into the brush with our booty. There was a

perfect little carnival of wickedness in the safe hollow where we

stripped the ears for roasting--fires too were forbidden us--where we

dared old man Ross to come on, gave dramatic rehearsals of what we

should do to him in that event, and revelled in forbidden manners and

interdicted words. I remember the delightful shock of hearing Alfred

Allingham declare that he meant to get his belly full of green corn

anyway, for belly was a word that no well brought up Taylorville child

was expected to use on any occasion; and finally how we all took hands

in a wild dance around the fire and over it, crying,

"Snockerty, Snockerty, Snockerty!"

in a sort of savage singsong.

Following on the heels of that, a sort of film came over the

performance, an intimation of our disgust in each other at the

connivance of wrongdoing. I remember, as we came up through the orchard

rather late, this feeling grew upon us: the sense of taint, of

cheapness, which swelled into a most abominable conviction of guilt as

we discovered old man Ross on the front porch talking to our father. And

then with what a heaviness of raw turnips and culpability we huddled in

about our mother, going with brisk movements to and fro getting supper,

and how she cuffed us out of her way, not knowing in the least what old

man Ross had come about. Finally the overwhelming consciousness of

publicity swooped down upon us at my father's coming in through the

door, very white and angry, wanting to know if this were true that he

had heard--and it was the utmost limit of opprobriousness that our

father should get to know of our misdeeds at all. Times before, when we

downrightly transgressed by eating wild crabs, or taking off our

stockings to wade in the brook too early in the season, we bore our

mother's strictures according to our several dispositions. Forester, I

remember, was troubled with sensibility and used fairly to give us over

to wrath by the advertisement of guilty behaviour. He had a vocation for

confession, wept copiously under whippings which did him a world of

good, and went about for days with a chastened manner which irritated me

excessively. I believe now that he was quite sincere in it, but there

was a feeling among the rest of us that he carried the admission of

culpability too far. Myself, since I never entered on disobedience

without having settled with myself that the fun of it would be worth the

pains, scorned repentance, and endured correction with a philosophy

which got me the reputation of being a hardened and froward child. That

we did not, on this basis, get into more serious scrapes was due to

Effie, who could never bear any sort of unpleasantness. Parents, if you

crossed them, had a way of making things so very unpleasant.

It was Effie who, if we went to the neighbours for a stated visit, kept

her eye upon the clock, and if she found us yielding to temptation, was

fertile in the invention of counter exploits just as exciting and quite

within the parental pale, and when we did fall, had a genius for

extrication as great as Forester's for propitiatory behaviour. So it

fell out that our piratical descent on Ross's field was our first

encounter with an order of things that transcended my mother's personal

jurisdiction.

Up to this time contact with our parents' world had got no farther than

vainglorious imaginings of our proper entry into it, and now suddenly we

found that we were in it, haled there by our own acts in the unhappy

quality of offenders. I think this was the first time in my life that I

had been glad it was Forester who was the boy and not I who was made to

go with my father and Mr. Allingham to Ross's field to point out the

damage, for which they paid.

It was this which sealed the enormity of our offence, money was paid for

it, and came near to losing its moral point with Forrie, who felt

himself immeasurably raised in the estimate of the other boys as a

public character. It served, along with my father's anger, which was so

new to us, to raise the occasion to a solemn note against which mere

switchings were inconsiderable. No doubt my brother has forgotten it by

now, along with Effie, who got off with nothing worse than the

complicity of having been one of us, but to me the incident takes rank

as the beginning of a new kind of Snockertism which was to array itself

indefinitely against the forces inappreciably sucking at the bottom of

my life.

It was as if, on the very first occasion of my swimming to the surface

of my lustrous seas, I was taken with a line at the end of which I was

to be played into shoals and shallows, to foul with my flounderings some

clear pools and scatter the peace of many smaller fry--I mean the

obligation of repute, the necessity of being loyal to what I found in

the world because it had been founded in sincerity with pains. For what

my father made clear to us as the very crux of our transgression, was

that we had discredited our bringing up. Old man Ross could be paid for

his vegetables, but there was nothing, I was given to understand, could

satisfy our arrears to our parents' honour, which, it transpired, had

been appallingly blackened in the event.

Nothing in my whole life has so surprised me as the capacity of this

single adventure for involving us in successive coils of turpitude and

disaster; though it was not until we followed my father into the best

room the next morning after he had seen Mr. Allingham, still rather

sick, for the turnips had not agreed with us, that we realized the

worst, rounding on us through a stream of dreadful, biting things that,

as my father uttered them, seemed to float us clear beyond the pale of

sympathy and hope. I remember my father walking up and down with his

hands under his coat behind, a short man in my recollection, with a kind

of swing in his walk which curiously nobody but myself seems to have

noticed, and a sort of electrical flash in his manner which might have

come, as in this instance, from our never being brought up before him

except when we had done something thoroughly exasperating: I am not sure

that I did not tell Ellen McGee, in an attempt to render the magnitude

of our going over, that he rated us in full uniform, waving his sword,

which at that moment hung with his regimentals over the mantelpiece.

"Good heavens," he said, "you might have been arrested for it--my

children--_mine_--and I thought I could have trusted you. Good heavens!"

Suddenly he reached out as it were over my brother's shoulder, to whom

in his capacity as the eldest son most of this tirade was addressed,

with a word for me that was to go tearing its way sorely to the seat of

memory and consciousness, and, lodging there, become the one point of

attachment to support the memory of him beyond his death.

"As for you, Olivia," I started at this, for I had been staying my

misery for the moment on a red and black table cover which my mother

valued, and I was amazed to find myself still able to hate--"as for you,

Olivia May"--he would never allow my name to be shortened in the

least--"I _am_ surprised at you."

He had expected better of me then; he had reached beyond my surfaces and

divined what I was inarticulately sure of, that I was different--no, not

better--but somehow intrinsically different. He was surprised at me; he

did not say so much of Forester, and he _did_ say that it was exactly

what he had expected of the McGees, but he had had a better opinion of

me. I recall a throb of exasperation at his never having told me. I

might have lived up to it. But with all the soreness of having dropped

short of a possible estimate, that phrase, which might have gone no

deeper than his momentary disappointment, is all I have on which to hang

the faith that perhaps ... perhaps some vision had shaped on his horizon

of what I might become. I was never anything to my mother, I know, but a

cuckoo's egg dropped in her creditable nest. "But," said my father, "I

_am_ surprised at _you_."

He was, I believe, one of those men who make a speciality of integrity

and of great dependability in public service, which is often brought to

answer for the want of private success; an early republican type fast

being relegated to small towns and country neighbourhoods. He had a

brilliant war record which was partly responsible for his office, and a

string of debts pendent from some earlier mercantile enterprise, which,

in the occasion they afforded of paying up under circumstances of great

stringency, appeared somehow an additional burnish to his name. He was a

man everybody liked; that he was extremely gentle and gay in his manner

with us on most occasions, I remember very well, and I think he must

have had a vein of romance, though I do not know upon what grounds

except that among the few books that he left, many were of that

character, and from the names of his children, Forester, Olivia May, and

Ephemia, called Effie for short, which were certainly not Taylorvillian.

Forester grew out of a heroic incident of his soldiering, of which I

have forgotten all the particulars except that the other man's name was

Forester, and my father's idea of giving it to his son who was born

about that time, was that when he should grow up, and be distinguished,

the double name of Forester Lattimore should serve at once as a reminder

and a certificate of appreciation. I recall that we children, or perhaps

it was only I, used to abound in dramatic imaginings of what would

happen when this belated recognition took place, though in fact nothing

ever came of it, which might have been largely owing to my brother's

turning out the least distinguished of men.

Whether if my father had lived he would have remained always as much in

the dark as to the private sources of my behaviour, I try not to guess,

but this incident picked him out for me among the ruck of fathers as a

man distinguished for propriety, produced, in the very moment of

pronouncing me unworthy of it, the ideal of a personal standard. If he

hadn't up to this time affected greatly my gratitude or affections, he

began to shine for me now with some of the precious quality which

inheres in dreams. And before the shine had gone off I lost him.

CHAPTER IV

My father's death, which occurred the March following, came suddenly,

wholly fortuitous to the outward eye, and I have heard my mother say, in

its inconsequence, its failure to line up with any conceivable moral

occasion, did much to shake her faith in a controlling Providence; but

affects me still as then, as the most incontrovertible of evidences of

Powers moving at large among men, occupied with other affairs than ours.

A little while ago, as I sat writing here on my veranda, looking

riverward, an ant ran across my paper, which I blew out with my breath

into space, and I did not look to see what disaster. It reminded me

suddenly of the way I felt about my father's taking off. He was, he must

have been, in the way of some god that March morning; that is one of the

evidences by which you know that there are gods at all. You play happily

about their knees, sometimes they play with you, then you stumble

against a foot thrust out, or the clamour of your iniquity disturbs

their proper meditations, and suddenly you are silenced. My mother was

doubtless right; it would have been better if he had stayed with her and

the children, certainly happier, but he got in the way of the Powers.

It is curious that until I began just now to reconstruct the

circumstances in which the news of his death came to me, I never

realized that I might have been looking on, but high above it, at the

very instant and occasion, for, from the window of my room in the second

story of the Taylorville grammar school I could see the unfinished walls

of the Zimmern block aglimmer with the light which the wind heaped up

and shattered against their raw pink surfaces, and a loose board of the

scaffolding allowed to remain up all winter, flacking like a torn leaf

in the mighty current in which the school building, all the buildings,

shook with the steady tremor of reeds in a freshet. Between them the

tops of the maples, level like a shorn hedge, kept up an immensity of

tormented motion that invaded even the schoolroom with a sense of its

insupportable fatigues. I remember there were few at their desks that

day, and all the discipline relaxed by the confusion of the wind. At the

morning recess there had been some debate about dismissing the session,

and one of the young teachers on the third floor had grown hysterical

and been reprimanded by the principal.

It must have been about eleven of the clock, while I was watching the

little puffs of dust that rose between the planks of the flooring

whenever the building shuddered and ground its teeth, divided between an

affectation of timorousness which seemed to grow in favour as a suitable

frame of behaviour, and the rapid rise of every tingling sense to the

spacious movement of the weather and my private dramatization of the

demolition of the building, from which only such occupants as I favoured

should be rescued by my signal behaviour. Already several children had

been abstracted by anxious parents, so that I failed to be even startled

by another knocking until my attention was attracted by the teacher

opening the door, and opening it wide upon my Uncle Alva.

I saw him step back with a motion of his head sidewise, to draw her

after him, but it took all the suggestive nods and winks that, as she

drew it shut behind her, were focussed on my desk, to pull me up to the

realization that his visit must have something to do with me. It was

not, in fact, until I was halfway down the aisle after Miss Jessel

called me, that I recovered my surprise sufficiently to assume the

mysteriously important air that was proper to the fifth grade on being

privileged to answer the door.

There was not, I am sure, in the brief information that I was wanted at

home, one betraying syllable; nothing sufficiently unusual in the way

Miss Jessel tied me into my hood, nor in finding Effie tied into hers on

the first floor, nor in the way her teacher kissed her--everybody kissed

Effie who was allowed--nothing in Forester's having already cleared out

without waiting for us. We got into the town in the wake of Uncle Alva

and between the business blocks where the tall buildings abated the

wind. There was no traffic in the streets that day. Here and there a

foot passenger with his hat held down by both hands and his coat tails

between his legs, staggered into doorways which were snapped to behind

him, and from the glass of which faces looked out featureless in the

blur of the wind. As we passed the side door of a men's clothing

establishment one of these pale human orbs approached to the pane,

exhibited a peering movement, rapped on the glass and beckoned. I know

now this must have been the working of an instinct to which Taylorville

was so habituated that it seemed natural to Uncle Alva--he was only my

mother's half brother, not my father's--to send us on with a word about

overtaking us, while he crossed the street at the instance of that

beckoning finger to be chaffered with in the matter of my father's grave

clothes. All this time there was not a word spoken that could convey to

us children the import of our unexpected release. We drifted down the

street, Effie and I, sidling against the blasts that drove furiously in

the crossways, and finally as we caught our breath under a long red

sandstone building, I recall being taken violently, as it were, by

knowledge, and crying out that my father was dead, that he was dead and

I should never see him again. I do not know how I knew, but I knew, and

Effie accepted it; she came cuddling up to me in the smother of the

wind, trying to comfort me as if, as I think did not occur to her, he

had been my father only and not hers at all. I do not recall very well

how we got across the town between the shut houses, high shouldered with

the cold, except that Uncle Alva did not come up with us, and the vast

lapping of the wind that swirled us together at intervals in a community

of breathlessness, seemed somehow to have grown out of the occasion and

be naturally commensurate with its desolating quality. I do not think it

occurred to us as strange that we should have been left so to come to

the knowledge that grew until, as we came in sight of our home, we were

fairly taken aback to find it so little altered from what it had been

when we left it three hours before. It had never been an attractive

house: yellow painted, with chocolate trimmings and unshuttered windows

against which the wind contrived. It cowered in a wide yard full of

unpruned maples that now held up their limbs protestingly, that shook

off from their stretched boughs, disclaimers of responsibility; the very

smoke wrenched itself from the chimney and escaped, hurryingly upon the

wind; the shrubbery wrung itself; whole flights of fallen leaves that

had settled soddenly beside the borders all the winter, having at last

got a plain sight of it, whirled up aghast and fled along the road. The

blinds were down at the front windows, and no one came in or out.

I remember our hanging there on the opposite side of the street for an

appreciable interval before trusting ourselves to a usualness which

every moment began to appear more frightening, and being snatched back

from the brink of panic by the rattle of wheels in the road behind us as

a light buggy, all aglitter from point to point of its natty

furnishings, drew up at our gate and discharged from the seat beside the

driver a youngish man, all of a piece with the turnout, in the trim and

shining blackness of his exterior, who, with a kind of subdued tripping,

ran up the walk and entered at the door without a knock. I am not sure

that Effie identified him as the man who had taken away the babies,

indeed, the two who came after Effie were so close together and went so

soon, that I have heard her say that she has no recollection of anything

except a house enlivened by continuous baby; but she had the knowledge

common to every Taylorville child of the undertaker as the only man who

was let softly in at unknocked doors, with his frock coat buttoned tight

and the rim of his black hat held against his freshly shaven chin. We

snatched the knowledge from one another as we caught hands together and

fairly dove into the side entrance that opened on the living room.

The first thing I was aware of was the sound of Forester blubbering, and

then of the place being full of neighbours and my mother sitting by the

fire in a chair out of the best room, crying heartily. We flung

ourselves upon her, crying too, and were gathered up in a violence of

grief and rocking, through which I could hear a great many voices in a

kind of frightened and extenuating remonstrance, "Come now, Mrs.

Lattimore. Now Sally--there, there----" at every word of which my

mother's sobbing broke out afresh. I remember getting done with my

crying first and being very hot and uncomfortable and thinking of

nothing but how I should wriggle out of her embrace and get away,

anywhere to escape from the burden of having to seem to care; and then,

but whether it was immediately after I am not sure, going rather heavily

upstairs and being overtaken in the middle of it by the dramatic

suggestion of myself as an orphan child toiling through the world--I

dare say I had read something like that recently--and carrying out the

suggestion with an immense effect on Uncle Alva, who happened to be

coming down at that moment. And then the insidious spread through all my

soul of cold disaster, out of which I found myself unable to rise even

to the appearance of how much I cared.

Of all that time my father lay dead in the best room, for by the usual

Taylorville procedure the funeral could not take place until the

afternoon of the second day, I have only snatches of remembrance: of my

being taken in to look at him as he lay in the coffin in a very nice

coat which I had never seen him wear, and the sudden conviction I had of

its somehow being connected with that mysterious summons which had taken

Uncle Alva away from us that morning in the street; of the "sitting

up," which was done both nights by groups of neighbours, mostly young;

and the festive air it had with the table spread with the best cloth and

notable delicacies; and mine and Forester's reprisals against one

another as to the impropriety of squabbling over the remains of a layer

cake. And particularly of Cousin Judd.

He came about dusk from the farm--he had been sent for--looking shocked,

and yet with a kind of enjoyable solemnity, I thought; and the first

thing he wished to do was to pray with my poor mother.

"We must submit ourselves to the will of God, Sally," he urged.

"O God! _God!_" said my mother, walking up and down. "I'm not so sure

God had anything to do with it."

"It's a wrong spirit, Sally, a wrong spirit--a spirit of rebellion." My

mother began to cry.

"Why couldn't God have left him alone? What had he done that he should

be taken away? What have _I_ done----"

"You mustn't take it like this, Sally. Think of your duty to your

children. 'The Lord giveth'----"

"Go tell Him to give me back my husband, then----"

Effie and I cowered in our corner between the base burner and the sewing

machine; it was terrible to hear them so, quarrelling about God. My

mother had her hands to her head as she walked; her figure touched by

the firelight, not quite spoiled by childbearing, looked young to me.

"Oh! Oh! Oh!" she cried with every step.

"You mustn't, Sally; you'll be punished for it----"

Cousin Judd shook with excitement; he was bullying her about her

Christian submission. I went up to him suddenly and struck him on the

arm with my fist.

"You let her alone!" I cried. "Let her alone!"

Somebody spoke out sharply, I think; a hand plucked me from behind--to

my amazement my mother's.

"Olivia, Olivia May! I _am_ surprised ... and your father not out of the

house yet. Go up to your room and see if you can't learn to control

yourself!"

After all there was some excuse for Cousin Judd. There was, in the

general estimate, something more than fortuitous circumstance that went

to my father's taking off. Early in the winter, when work had been

stopped on the Zimmern building, there had been a good deal of talk

about some local regulations as to the removal of scaffolding and the

security of foot passengers. That the contractors had not been brought

to book about it was thought to be due to official connivance; my father

had written to the paper about it. But the scaffolding had remained

until that morning of the high wind, when it came down all together and

a bit of the wall with it. That my father should have been passing on

his way to the courthouse at the moment, was a leaping together of

circumstances that seemed somehow to have raised it to the plane of a

moral instance. It provided just that element of the dramatic in human

affairs, which somehow wakens the conviction of having always expected

it; though it hardly appeared why my father, rather than the contractor

or the convincing city official, should have been the victim. If it

wasn't an act of Providence, it was so like one that it contributed to

bring out to the funeral more people than might otherwise have ventured

themselves in such weather.

It was also thought that if anything of that nature could have made up

to her, my mother should have found much to console her in the funeral.

The Masons took part in it, as also the G. A. R. and the Republican

Club, though they might have made a more imposing show of numbers if all

the societies had not been so largely composed of the same members. In

addition to all this, my mother's crape came quite to the hem of her

dress and Effie and I had new hats. I remember those hats very well;

they had very tall crowns and narrow brims and velvet trimmings, and we

tried them on for Pauline Allingham after we had gone up to bed the

night before the funeral. Mrs. Allingham had called and Pauline had been

allowed to come up to us. I remember her asking how we felt, and Effie's

being as much impressed by the way in which I carried off the situation

as if she had not been in the least concerned in it. And then we sat up

in bed in our nightgowns and tried on the hats while Pauline walked

about to get the effect from both sides, and refrained, in respect to

the occasion, from offering any criticism.

* * * * *

It was the evening after the funeral and everybody had gone away but one

good neighbour. The room had been set in order while we were away at the

cemetery; the lamp was lit and there was a red glow on everything from

the deep heart of the base burner. The woman went about softly to set a

meal for us, and under the lamp there was a great bowl of quince

marmalade which she had brought over neighbourly from her own stores;

the colour of it played through the clear glass like a stain upon the

white cloth. It happened to have been a favourite dish of my father's.

For the last year it had been a family use, he being delicate in his

appetite, to make a point of saving for him anything which he might

possibly eat, and taking the greatest satisfaction in his enjoyment.

Therefore it came quite natural for me to get a small dish from the

cupboard and begin to serve out a portion of Mrs. Mason's preserves for

my father. All at once it came over me ... the meaning of bereavement;

that there was nobody to be done for tenderly; the loss of it ... the

need of the heart for all its offices of loving ... and the unavailing

pain.

CHAPTER V

It followed soon on my father's death that we gave up the yellow house

with the chocolate trimmings and took another near the high school, and

that very summer my mother lengthened my skirts halfway to my shoe tops

and began to find fault with my behaviour "for a girl of your age." We

saw no more of the McGees after that except as Ellen managed to keep on

in the same class at school with me; and Pauline and I found ourselves

with a bosom friendship on our hands.

I went on missing my father terribly, but in a child's inarticulate

fashion, and it is only lately that I have realized how much of my life

went at loose ends for the loss out of it of a man's point of view and

the appreciable standards which grow out of his relation to the

community. Ever since the Snockerty episode there had been glimmers on

my horizon of the sort of rightness owing from a daughter of Henry

Lattimore, but now that I had no longer the use of the personal

instance, I lost all notion of what those things might be; for though I

have often heard my mother spoken of as one of the best women in the

world, she was the last to have provided me with a definite pattern of

behaviour.

Pauline had struck out a sort of social balance for herself grounded on

the fear of what was "common." Her mother had a day at home, from which

seemed to flow an orderly perspective of social observances, for which

my mother, never having arrived at the pitch of visiting cards, afforded

me no criterion whatever.

She had been a farmer's daughter in another part of the state, and had

done something for herself in the way of school teaching before she

married my father. My grandparents I never saw, but I seem to recall at

such public occasions as county fairs and soldiers' reunions, certain

tall, farmer-looking men and their badly dressed wives, who called her

cousin and were answered by their Christian names, whom I understand to

be my mother's relatives without accepting them as mine. They were all

soldiers though, the men of our family; you saw it at once in the odd

stiffness sitting on their farmer carriage like the firm strokes of a

master on a pupil's smudged drawing. I think I got my first notion of

the quality of experience in the way they exalted themselves in the

memories of marches and battles. There had been a station of the

underground railway not ten miles from Taylorville, and there had gone

out from the town at the first call, a volunteer company with so many

Judds and Wilsons and Lattimores on the roster that it read like the

record of a family Bible. They had gone out from, they had come back to,

a life as little relieved by adventure as the flat horizon of their

corn lands, but in the interim they had stretched themselves, endured,

conquered. I have heard political economists of the cross roads account

variously for the prosperity of Ohianna in the decade following the

civil outbreak, but I have never heard it laid to the revitalizing of

our common stock by the shock of its moral strenuosities.

To this day I question whether Cousin Judd got more out of his religion

than out of this most unchristian experience, from which he had come

back silver tipped as it were, from that emperym into which men pass

when they are by great emotions a little removed from themselves, to

kindle in my young mind a realization of the preciousness of passion

over all human assets. It came to me, however, in the years between

twelve and fifteen that my mother's relations did things with their

knives and neglected others with their forks that were not done in

circles that by virtue of just such observances, got themselves called

Good Society. I was aware of a sort of gracelessness in their vital

processes, in much the same way that I knew that the striped and

flowered carpet in my mother's best room did not harmonize with the wall

paper, and that the curtains went badly with them both. I have to go

back to this, and to the fact that my clothes were chosen for wearing

qualities rather than becomingness, to account for a behaviour that, as

I began to emerge from the illumined mists of play, my mother

complained of under the head of my "not taking an interest."

How else was I to protect myself from the thousand inharmonies that

chafed against the budding instinct of beauty: the plum-coloured ribbons

I was expected to wear with my brown dress, the mottled Japanese pattern

upon the gilt ground of the wall paper, against which I had pushed out a

kind of shell, hung within with the glittering stuff of dreams.

For just about the time I should have been absorbed in Cousin Lydia's

beaded dolman and the turning of my mother's one silk, I was regularly

victimized by the fits and starts of temperament, instinctive efforts

toward the rehearsal of greater passions than had appeared above my

horizon, flashes of red and blue and gold thrown up on the plain

Taylorville surface of my behaviour, with the result of putting me at

odds with the Taylorvillians.

It was as if, being required to produce a character, I found myself with

samples of a great many sorts on my hands which I kept offering, hopeful

that they might be found to match with the acceptable article, which, I

may say here, they never did. They were good samples too, considering

how young I was, of the Magdas, Ophelias, Antigones I was yet to become,

of the great lady, good comrade and lover, but the most I got by it was

the suspicion of insincerity and affectation. I sensitively suffered the

more from it as I was conscious of the veering of this inward

direction, without being able to prove what I was sure of, its relevance

to the Shining Destiny toward which I moved. If you ask how this

assurance differed from the general human hope of a superior happiness,

I can only say that the event has proved it, and as early as I was aware

of it, moved me childishly to acts of propitiation. I wanted gratefully

to be good, with a goodness acceptable to the Powers from which such

assurance flowed, but it was a long time before I could separate my

notion of this from my earliest ideal of what would have been suitable

behaviour to my father, so that all the upward reach of adolescence was

tinged by my sense of loss in him.

It was when I was about thirteen and had not yet forgotten how my father

looked, that I made an important discovery; on the opposite side of the

church, and close to the Amen corner, sat a man with something in the

cut of his beard, in the swing of his shoulders, at which some dying

nerve started suddenly athrob. I must have seen him there a great many

times without noticing, and perhaps the likeness was not so much as I

had thought, and I had had to wait until my recollection faded to its

note of faint suggestion, but from that day I took to going out of my

way to school to pass by Mr. Gower's place of business for the sake of

the start of memory that for the moment brought my father near again. I

even went so far as to mention to my mother that I liked sitting in

church where I could look at Mr. Gower because he reminded me of

somebody. We were on our way home on Sunday night--we were always taken

to church twice on Sunday--Forester was on ahead with Effie, and just as

we came along under the shadow of the spool factory, I had reached up to

tuck my hand under my mother's arm and make my timid suggestion.

"Well, somebody who?" said my mother.

"Of my father----"

"Oh," said my mother, "that's just your fancy." But she did not shake

off my hand from her arm as was her habit toward proffers of affection,

and the moment passed for one of confidence between us. I was convinced

that she must have taken notice of the likeness for herself. That was in

the spring, and all that summer vacation I spent a great deal of time

playing with Nettie Gower for the sake of seeing her father come at the

gate about five in the afternoon the way mine had done.

Nettie was not an attractive child, and of an age better suited to

Effie, who couldn't bear her; the relation, it seemed, wanted an

explanation, but it never occurred to me that so long as I withheld my

own, another would be found for it. Nettie's brother found it about the

time that my friendship with his sister was at its most flourishing. He

was no nicer than you would expect a brother of Nettie's to be, though

he was good-looking in a red-cheeked way, with a flattened curl in the

middle of his forehead, and of late he had taken to hanging about

Nettie and me, looking at me with a curious sort of smirk that I was not

quite arrived at knowing for the beginning gallantry. He knew perfectly

well that I did not come to see Nettie because I was fond of her, but it

was yet for me to discover that he thought it was because I was fond of

him. I remember I was making a bower in the asparagus bed; I was too old

to play in the asparagus bed, but I was making a point of being good

enough to do it on Nettie's account, and I had asked Charlie for his

knife to cut the stems.

"Come and get it." He was holding it out to me hollowed in his palm; and

he would not let go my hand.

"You don't want no knife," he leered sickeningly. "I know what you

want." Suddenly I caught sight of Nettie's face with its straight thick

plaits of hair and near-sighted eyes narrowed at me behind her glasses,

and it struck me all at once that she had never taken my interest in her

seriously either.

"Well, what?" I began defensively.

"This!" He thrust out his face toward mine, but I was too quick for him.

That was my first sex encounter, and it didn't somehow make it any the

less exasperating to realize that what lay behind my sudden interest in

Nettie couldn't now be brought forward in extenuation, but I am always

glad that I slapped Charlie Gower before the paralyzing sense of being

trapped by my own behaviour overtook me. I hadn't found the words yet

for the unimagined disgust of the boy's impertinence when, as I was

helping to wipe the dishes that evening after supper, I tried to put it

to my mother on a new basis which the incident seemed to have created,

of our being somehow ranged together against such offences. It was the

time for us to have emerged a little from the family relation to the

freemasonry of sex, but my mother missed knowing it.

"I am not going to Nettie Gower's any more," I began.

"No?" said my mother; and of course I could not conceive that she had

forgotten the confidence in which the connection with Nettie began.

"That Charlie ... I just hate him. You know, he thought I was coming to

see Nettie because of him."

"Well," said my mother, turning out the dishwater, "perhaps you were."

And that, I think it safe to say, is as near as my family ever came to

understanding the processes at work behind the incidents of my growing

up. Yet I think my mother very often did know that the key to my

behaviour did not lie in the obvious explanation of it; and a sort of

aversion toward what was strange, which I have come to think of as

growing out of her unsophistication, kept her from admitting it. It was

less disconcerting to have my springs of action accounted for on the

basis of what Mrs. Allingham would have called "common," than to have

it arraigned by her own standard as "queer." There was always in

Taylorville a certain caddishness toward innovations of conduct, which

we youngsters railed at as countrified, which I now perceive to have

been no worse than the instinctive movement to lessen by despising it,

the terror, the deep, far-rooted terror of the unknown. The incident

served, however, to supersede with resentment the sense of personal

definite loss in which it had begun.

Before the year was out I had so far forgotten my father that I saw no

resemblance to him in Mr. Gower and would not have recognized it had I

met it anywhere, though the want of fathering had its share no doubt in

landing me, as I cast about for an appreciable rule to live by, in what

I have already described as a superior sort of Snockertism. The

immediate step to it was my getting converted. That very winter all

Taylorville and the six townships were caught up in one of those acute

emotional crises called a Revival. It had begun in the Methodist, and

gradually involved the whole number of Protestant churches, and had

overflowed into the Congregational building as affording the greatest

seating room; by the middle of February it was possible to feel through

the whole community the ground swell of its disturbances. Night after

night the people poured in to it to be flayed in spirit, striped,

agonized, exalted at the hands of a practised evangelist, which they

_liked_; as it had the cachet of being supernaturally good for them,

they liked it with a deeper, more soul-stretching enjoyment than the

operas, theatres, social adventure of cities, supposing they had been at

hand.

It hardly seems possible with all she had to do, and yet I think my

mother could not have missed one of those meetings, going regularly with

Cousin Judd, who drove in from the farm more times than you would have

thought the farm could have spared him, or with Forester, who had been

converted the winter before, though I think he must have regretted the

smaller occasion. Left at home with Effie who was thought too young to

be benefited by the preaching and too old to be laid by in an overcoat

on the Sunday-school benches with dozens of others, heavy with sleep and

the vitiated air, late, when I had finished my arithmetic and was afraid

to go to bed in the empty house, I would open the window a crack toward

the blur on the night from the tall, shutterless windows of the church,

and catch the faint swell of the hymns and at times the hysteric shout

of some sinner "coming through," and I was as drawn to it as any savage

to the roll of the medicine drums.

The backwash of this excitement penetrated even to the schoolroom, as

from time to time some awed whisper ran of this and that one of our

classmates being converted, and walking apart from us with the other

saved in a chastened mystery. And finally Pauline Allingham and I talked

it over and decided to get converted too. Pauline, I remember, had not

been allowed to attend the meetings and considered her spiritual welfare

jeopardized in the prohibition. We knew by this time perfectly well what

we had to do, and had arranged to get excused from our respective

rooms--Pauline was a grade behind me on account of diphtheria the

previous winter--and to meet in the abandoned coal-hole between the

boys' and girls' basement. Pauline, who had always an aptitude for

proselyting, brought another girl from the sixth grade, who was also

under conviction--we had the terms very pat--a thin, hatchet-faced girl

who joined the Baptist Church and afterward married a minister, so that

she might very easily have reckoned the incident at something like its

supposititious value in her life. I remember that we knelt down in the

dusty coal-hole where the little children used to play I-spy, and prayed

by turns for light, aloud at first, and then, as we felt the approach of

the compelling mood, silently, as we waited for the moment after which

we might rather put it over our classmates on the strength of our

salvation.

It came, oh, it came! the sweep up and out, the dizzying lightness--not

very different, in fact, from the breathless rush with which on a first

night of _Magda_ or _Cleopatra_ I have felt my part meet me as I cross

between the wings--the lift, the tremor of passion.

"Oh," I said, "I'm saved! I'm saved! I know it."

"So am I," said Flora Haines. "I was a long time ago, but I didn't like

to say anything." And if I hadn't just been converted I should have

thought it rather mean of her. In the dusk of the coal-hole we heard

Pauline sniffling.

"I suppose it's because I'm so much worse a sinner," she admitted, "but

I just can't feel it."

"You must give yourself into the Lord's hands, Pauline dear." Flora

Haines had heard the evangelist. I began to offer myself passionately in

prayer as a vicarious atonement for Pauline's shortcomings.

"Don't you feel anything?" Flora urged, "not the least thing?"

"Well ... sort of ... something," Pauline confessed.

"Well, of course, that's it."

"Yes, that's it," I insisted.

"Well, I suppose it is," Pauline gave in, mopping her eyes with her

handkerchief, "but it isn't the least like what I expected."

We heard the school clock strike the quarter hour, and got up, brushing

our knees rather guiltily. Flora Haines and I were kept in all that

afternoon recess for exceeding our excuse, but Pauline saved herself by

bursting into tears as soon as she reached her room, and being sent home

with a headache.

That was on Thursday, and Saturday afternoon we were all to meet at our

house and go together to a great children's meeting, where we were

expected to announce that we were saved. Pauline was a little late. I

was explaining to Flora Haines that I was to join our church on

probation on Sunday, but Flora, being a Baptist, had been put off by her

minister until the Revival should be over and he could attend to all the

baptisms at once. We naturally expected something similar from Pauline.

"I hardly think," she said, stroking her muff and looking very ladylike,

"that I shall take such an important step in life until I am older."

"But," I objected, "how can anything be more important?"

"It's your _soul_, Pauline!" Flora Haines was slightly scandalized.

"That's just the reason; it's so important my mother thinks I ought not

to take any steps until I can give it my most mature judgment."

Flora Haines and I looked at one another silently; we might have known

Pauline's mother wouldn't let her do anything so common as get

converted.

CHAPTER VI

I was duly taken into the church on the following Sabbath, to the great

relief of my family, having for once exhibited the normal reaction of a

young person in my circumstances, and though I have laid much to the

door of that institution of the retarding of my development and the

dimming of the delicate surface of happiness, I think now it was not

wholly bad for me. If I hadn't up to this time found any way of being

good by myself, I was now provided with a criterion of conduct toward

which even those who hadn't been able to manage it for themselves, moved

a public approbation. I have heard my mother say that even Mr. Farley,

the banker, who read books on evolution and was a Freethinker

(opprobrious term), had been known to pronounce the church an excellent

thing for women.

The church left you in no doubt about things. You attended morning and

evening service; as soon as you were old enough for it, which was before

you were fit, you taught in Sunday school; you waited on table at oyster

suppers designed for the raising of the minister's salary, and if you

had any talent for it you sang in the choir or recited things at the

church sociables. And when you were married and consequently

middle-aged, you joined the W. F. M. S. and the Sewing Society.

It was after the incident of the coal-hole that I began to experience

this easy irreproachability, and to build out of its ready-to-hand

materials a sort of extra self, from which afterward to burst was the

bitter wound of life. For my particular church went farther and provided

a chart for all the by-lanes of behaviour. "You were never," said the

evangelist, whose relish of the situation on the day that a score or so

of us had renounced the devil and all his works, gave me a vague

sensation of having made a meal and licked his lips over us, "you should

never go anywhere that you could not take your Saviour with you," and

when I saw Cousin Judd wag at my mother and she smile and pat her hymn

book, I was apprised that we had come to the root of the whole matter.

I have wondered since to how many young converts in Ohianna that phrase

has been handed out and with what blighting consequences.

For a Saviour as I knew Him at thirteen and a half, was a solemn

presence that ran in your mind with the bleakness of plain, whitewashed

walls and hard benches and a general hush, a vague sensation of your

chest being too tight for you, and a little of the feeling you had when

you had gone to call at the Allinghams and had forgotten to wipe your

feet; and it was manifest if you took that incubus everywhere you went

you wouldn't have any fun.

It was fortunate at that time that it was not the desire for

entertainment that moved me so much as the need of my youth to serve;

the unparented hunger for authority. But with the pressure of that

environment, if there had been anybody with the wit to see where my Gift

lay, what anybody could have done about it it is difficult to say. When

all that Taylorville afforded of the proper food of Gift, brightness,

music, and the dance, was of so forlorn a quality, it has been a

question if I do not owe the church some thanks for cutting out the

possible cheapening of taste and the satisfaction of ill-regulated

applause--that is, if Gift can be hurt at all by what happens to the

possessor. It can be cramped and enfeebled in expression, rendered

tormenting in its passage and futile to the recipient, but to whom it

comes its supernal quality rises forever beyond all attainder.

What happened to the actress during all the time I was undertaken by the

church to be made into the sort of woman serviceable to Taylorville, was

inconsiderable; what grew out of it for Olivia was no small matter, and

much of it I lay without bitterness to Cousin Judd, who, from having got

himself named adviser in my father's will, was in a position to affect

my life to the worse.

And yet, in so far as I am not an unprecedented sport on the family

tree, I had more in common with this shrewd-dealing, loud-praying,

twice-removed soldier cousin than with any of my kin, though I should

hardly say as much to him, for he has never been in a theatre, and if he

still considers me a hopeful subject for prayer it is because his

Christian duty rises superior to his conviction.

He is pricked out in my earlier recollections by the difficulty he seems

to have had in effecting a compromise between the traditional

distrustfulness of the Ohianna farmer toward the Powers in general, and

particularly of the weather, and his obligation of Christian Joy, and

for a curious effect of not belonging to his wife, a large,

uninteresting woman with a sense of her own merit which she never

succeeded in imposing on anybody but Cousin Judd. She had a keen

appreciation of worldly values which led her always to select the best

material for her clothes, and another feeling of their expensiveness

which resulted in her being always a little belated in the styles. She

approved of religion, though not active in it, and in twenty years she

and Cousin Judd had arrived at a series of compromises and excuses which

enabled her to appear at church one Sunday in five and still keep up the

interest of the clergyman and congregation as to why she didn't come the

other four.

Whenever the days were short or the roads too heavy, Cousin Judd would

put up over night at our house, and I remember how my mother would

always be able to say, looking about the empty democrat wagon as though

she expected her in ambush somewhere:

"And you didn't bring Lydia?" and Cousin Judd being able to reply to it

as if it were something he had expected up till the last moment, and

been keenly disappointed:

"Well, no, Liddy ain't feeling quite up to it," which my mother received

without skepticism. After this they were free to talk of other things.

What there was between Cousin Judd and me, with due allowance for the

years, was the spark, the touch-and-go of vitality that rose in me to a

hundred beckonings of running flood and waving boughs--music and

movement; and only the moral enthusiasms of war and religion raised

through his heavy farmer stuff. We should have loved one another had we

known how; as it was, all our intercourse was marked on his part by the

gracelessness of rusticity, and by the impertinence of adolescence on

mine. I used regularly to receive his pious admonitions with what, for a

Taylorville child, was flippancy; nevertheless there were occasions when

we had set off of summer Sunday mornings together to early class, when

the church was cool and dim and the smell of the honey locusts came in

through the window, that I caught the thrill that ran from the pounding

of his fist where he prayed at the other end of the long bench; and

there was a kind of blessedness shed from him as with closed eyes and

lifted chin he swung from peak to peak of the splendid measure of "How

Firm a Foundation," that I garnered up and hugged to myself in place of

Art and the Joy of Living. All of which was very good for me and might

have answered if it had not come into Cousin Judd's head that he ought

to overlook my reading.

By this time I had worked through all my father's books and was ready to

satisfy the itch of imagination even with the vicious inaccuracies of

what was called Christian literature. The trouble all came of course of

my not understanding the nature of a lie. Not that I couldn't tell a

downright fib if I had to, or haven't on occasion, but a lie is to me

just as silly a performance when it is about marriage or work as about

the law of gravitation, and when it is presented to me in the form of

human behaviour it makes me sick, like the smell of tuberoses in a close

room; and I failed utterly to realize then that there are a great many

people capable of living sincerely and at the same time blandly

misrepresenting the facts of life in the interests of what is called

morality. I do not think it probable that Cousin Judd accepted for

himself the rule of behaviour prescribed by the books he recommended--I

shall not tell you what they were, but if there are any Sunday-school

libraries in Ohianna you will find them on the shelves--but I know that

he and my mother esteemed them excellent for the young.

So far as they thought of it at all, they believed that in surrounding

me with intimations of a life in which there was nothing more important

than settling with Deity the minor details of living, and especially how

much you would pay to His establishment, they had done their utmost to

provide me with a life in which nothing more important could happen. If

you were careful about reading the Bible and doing good to people--that

is, persuading them to go to church and to leave off swearing--all the

more serious details such as making a living, marrying and having

children would take care of themselves; and the trouble was, as I have

said, that I believed it. And that was how I found myself farthest from

Art and Life at the time when I found myself a young lady.

I had to make this discovery for myself, for there were no social

occasions in Taylorville to give a term to your advent into the grown-up

world, though there was a definite privilege which marked your

achievement of it. There was a period prior to this in which you bumped

against things you were too old for, and carromed to the things for

which you were quite too young, and about the end of your high-school

term you had done with hair ribbons and begun to have company on your

own account, and the sort of things began to happen which marked the

point beyond which if you fell upon disaster it was your own fault. They

happened to me.

By dint of my doing her compositions and of her doing my arithmetic,

Pauline Allingham and I had managed to keep together all through the

high school, and it was in our last year, when we used to put in the

long end of the afternoons at Pauline's, playing croquet, that I first

took notice of Tommy Bettersworth. The Bettersworth yard abutted on the

Allingham's for the space of one woodshed and a horse-chestnut tree, and

it was along in October that I began to be aware that it was not

altogether the view of the garden that kept Tommy on the woodshed or in

the chestnut tree the greater part of the afternoon. It may be that the

adventure with Charlie Gower had sharpened my perception, at any rate it

had aroused my discretion; I was carefully oblivious to the proximity of

Tommy Bettersworth. But there came a day when Pauline was not, when she

wanted to tell me something about Flora Haines which she was afraid he

might overhear.

"Come around to the summer-house," she said, "Tommy's always hanging

about; I can't think what makes him."

"Always?" I suggested.

"Why, you know yourself he was there last Saturday, and Thursday when

we ..."

"Is he there when you and Flora are there, or only ..."

"Oh," Pauline gave a gasp, "No----Oh, I never thought ... Olive ... I do

believe ... that's it!"

"Well, what?"

"It's _you_, Olive," solemnly. "It must be that ... he really is...."

Pauline's reading included more romance than mine.

"Well, he can't say I gave him any encouragement."

"Oh, _of course_ not, darling," Pauline was sympathetic. "You

couldn't ... it is _so_ interesting. What would the girls say?"

"Pauline, if you ever ..."

"Truly, I never will.... But just _think_!"

But we reckoned without Alfred Allingham. Alfred was not a nice boy at

that age; he had come the way of curled darlings to be a sly,

tale-bearing, offensive little cad, and the next Saturday, when Pauline

turned him off the croquet ground for ribaldry, he went as far as the

rose border and jeered back at us.

"I know why you don't want me," he mocked; "so's I can't see Olive and

Tommy Bettersworth makin' eyes." He executed a jig to the tune of

"Olive's mad and I am glad.

And I know what'll please her----"

At this juncture the wrist and hand of Tommy Bettersworth appeared over

the partition fence armed with horse-chestnuts which thudded with

precision on the offensive person of Alfred Allingham. Pauline and I

escaped to the summer-house. I thought I was going to cry until I found

I was giggling, at which I was so mortified that I did cry.

"He'll tell everybody in school," I protested.

"What do you care?" soothed Pauline, "besides, you have to be teased

about somebody, you know, and have somebody to choose you when they play

clap in and clap out. You just _have_ to. Look at me." Pauline had been

carrying on the discreetest of flirtations with Henry Glave for some

months. "Tommy Bettersworth is a nice boy, and besides, dear, we'll have

so much more in common."

Pauline was right. Unless you had somebody to be teased about you were

really not in things. I was furiously embarrassed by it, but I was

resigned. Tommy sent me two notes that winter and a silk handkerchief

for Christmas which I pretended was from Pauline. I am not going to be

blamed for this. It was at least a month earlier that I had observed

Tommy Bettersworth's inability to get away from Nile's corner on his way

home from school until I had passed there on mine. It struck me as a

very interesting trait of masculine character; I would have liked to

talk it over with my mother on the plane of human interest; it seemed

possible she might have noted similar eccentricities. I remember I

worked around to it Saturday morning when I was helping her to darn the

tablecloths. My mother was not unprepared; she did her duty by me as it

was conceived in Taylorville, and did it promptly.

"You are too young to be thinking about the boys," she said. "I don't

want to hear you talking about such things until the time comes."

This was so much in line with what was expected of parents, that I

blinked the obvious retort that the time for talking about such things

was when they began to happen, and went on with the tablecloths. But I

couldn't tell her about the handkerchief after that. It would have been

positively unmaidenly. And after he had sent me a magnificent paper lace

valentine, I distinctly encouraged Tommy Bettersworth.

This being the case, I do not know just how it began to be conveyed to

me, as in the lengthening evenings of spring, Tommy took to

church-going, that his hands were coarse and his ears too prominent, and

as I confided solemnly to Pauline, though I had the greatest respect for

his character, I simply couldn't bear to have him about. This was the

more singular since the church-going was the visible sign of the good

influence that, according to the books, I was exercising; and though

Tommy was as nearly inarticulate as was natural, I was in no doubt on

whose account this new start proceeded. If I had not disliked Tommy very

much at this period, why should I have taken to tucking myself between

Forester and Effie on the way home, embarrassedly aware of Tommy, whose

way did not lie in our direction, scuffling along with the Lawrences on

the other side of the street? I seem to remember some rather heroic

attempts on Tommy's part to account for his presence there on the ground

of wanting to speak privately to Forester, certain shouts and sallies

toward which my brother displayed a derisive consciousness of their not

being pertinent to the occasion.

I have often wondered how much of these tentative ventures toward an

altered relation were observed by our elders; not much, I should think.

At any rate no mollifying word drifted down from their heights of

experience to our shallows of self-consciousness.

My mother adhered to her notion of my not being at an age for "such

things," borne out, I believe, by the consensus of paternal opinion that

she might too easily "put notions" in my head; not inquiring what

notions might by the natural process of living be already there. Perhaps

they were not altogether wrong in this, so delicate is the process of

sex development that nature herself obscures the processes. To this day

I do not know how much my taking suddenly to going home with Belle

Endsleigh by a short cut was embarrassment, and how much a discreet

feminine awareness that in my absence Tommy would better manage to make

the family take his walking with them as a matter of course, but I

remember that I cried when my mother, who did not approve of Belle

Endsleigh, scolded me. And then quite suddenly came the click and the

loosened tension of the readjustment.

Along about Easter Alfred Allingham told Pauline that Tommy had thrashed

Charlie Gower, and though it was supposed to be the strictest secret, it

was because Charlie had teased him about me. Pauline was rather

scandalized by my insistence that Charlie wouldn't have done it if Tommy

hadn't rather conspicuously brought it on himself.

"I call it truly noble of him ... like a knight." Pauline could always

throw the glamour of her reading around the immediate circumstance. "At

any rate, after this you can't do anything less than treat him

politely," she urged.

Whether it would have made any difference in my attitude or not, it did

in Tommy's. I saw that when he came out of the church with us next

Sunday. There was a certain aggressive maleness in the way he strode

beside me, that there was no mistaking. I looked about rather feebly for

Belle.

"I don't see her anywhere," Tommy assured me, "besides, we don't want

her." As I could see Tommy in the light that streamed from the church

windows, it occurred to me that if he was not good-looking he certainly

looked good, and he had a moustache coming.

Forester, who was going through a phase himself, had gone home with Amy

Lawrence; Effie lagged behind with mother, talking to Mrs. Endsleigh

about the prospects of the Sewing Society raising the money for

repainting the parsonage. Looking back to see what had become of them I

tripped on the boardwalk.

"If you would take my arm" ... suggested Tommy. I was aware of the

sleeve of his coat under my fingers.

The next turn took us out of sound of the voices; the street lamps

flared far apart in the long, quiet avenue. The shed pods of the maples

slipped and popped under us with the sweet smell of the sap.

"How did you like the sermon?" Tommy wished to know. What I had to say

of it was probably not very much to the point. No one overtook us as we

walked. There was a sense of tremendous occasions in the air, of things

accomplished. I had established the privilege. I was walking home from

church with a young man. I was a young lady.

CHAPTER VII

As often as I think of Olivia Lattimore growing up, I have wondered if

there was really no evidence of dramatic talent about, or simply no one

able to observe it. There was no theatre at Taylorville, and when from

time to time third-rate stock companies performed indifferent plays at

the Town Hall, Forrie and Effie and I heard nothing of them except that

they were presumably wicked.

Occasionally there were amateur performances in which, when I had won a

grudging consent to take part, I failed to distinguish myself. Effie had

a very amusing trick of mimicry, and if you had heard her recite "Curfew

Shall Not Ring To-night," you would have thought that the Gift on its

way from whatever high and unknowable source, in passing her had lighted

haphazard on the most unlikely instrument. I was not even clever at my

books except by starts and flashes.

I graduated at the high school with Pauline, and afterward we had two

years together at Montecito. This was the next town to Taylorville, and

its bitter rival. Montecito had a Young Ladies' Seminary, a Business

College, and the State Institution for the Blind, for which Taylorville

so little forgave it that the new railroad was persuaded to leave

Montecito four miles to the right and make its junction with the L. and

C. at Taylorville. This carried the farmer shipping away from Montecito,

but the victory was not altogether scathless; young ladies were still

obliged to go to the seminary, and it enabled Montecito to put on the

air of having retired from the vulgar competition of trade and become

the Athens of the West.

Pauline and I went over to school on Mondays and home on Fridays. The

course of study was for three years, but because there was Effie to

think of and my mother's means were limited, I had only two, and was

never able to catch up with Pauline by the length of that extra year.

She was always holding it out against me in extenuation and excuse; when

she tried to account for my marriage having turned out so badly on the

ground of my not having had Advantages, I knew she was thinking of

Montecito. She thinks of it still, I imagine, to condone as she does, I

am sure, with an adorable womanliness, what in my conduct she no longer

feels able to countenance. And yet I hardly know what I might have drawn

from that third year more than I took away from the other two, which

was, besides the regular course of study, an acquaintance with a style

of furnishings not all gilt wall paper and plush brocade, and a renewed

taste for good reading. They made such a point of good reading at the

seminary that I have always thought it a pity they could not go a

little farther and make a practice of it.

The difficulty with most of our reading was that it had no relativity to

the processes of life in Ohianna; we had things as far removed from it

as Dante and Euripides, things no nearer than "The Scarlet Letter" and

"David Copperfield," from which to draw for the exigencies of

Taylorville was to cause my mother to wonder, with tears in her eyes,

why in the world I couldn't be like other people. I read; I gorged, in

fact, on the best books, but I found it more convenient to go on living

by the shallow priggishness of Cousin Judd's selection. All that

splendid stream poured in upon me and sank and lost itself in the shifty

undercurrent that made still, by times, distracting eddies on the

surface of adolescence.

But whatever was missed or misunderstood of its evidences, the Gift

worked at the bottom, throve like a sea anemone under the shallows of

girlishness, and, nourished by unsuspected means, was the source no

doubt of the live resistance I opposed to all that grew out of

Forester's making a vocation of being a good son. I do not know yet how

to deal with sufficient tenderness and without exasperation with the

disposition of widowed women, bred to dependence, to build out of their

sons the shape of a man proper to be leaned upon. It is so justified in

sentiment, so pretty to see in its immediate phases, that though my

mother was young and attractive enough to have married again, it was

difficult not to concur in her making a virtue, a glorification of

living entirely in her boy. I seem to remember a time before Forrie was

intrigued by the general appreciation, when it required some coercion to

present him always in the character of the most dutiful son. He hadn't,

for instance, invariably fancied himself setting out for prayer meeting

with my mother's hymn book and umbrella, but the second summer after my

father died, when he had worked on Cousin Judd's farm and brought home

his wages, found him completely implicated. We were really not so poor

there was any occasion for this, but mother was so delighted with the

idea of a provider, and Forester was so pleased with the picture of

himself in that capacity, that it was all, no doubt, very good for him.

He always did bring home his wages after that, which led to his being

consulted about meals, and the new curtains for the dining-room, and to

being met in the evening as though all the house had been primed for his

return, and merely gone on in that expectation while he was away. Effie,

I know, had no difficulty in accepting him as the excuse for any amount

of household ritual, making a fuss about his birthdays and trying on her

new clothes for his approval, but Effie was five years younger than

Forester and I was only twenty-two months. It was more, I think, than

our community in the gaucheries and hesitancies of youth that

disinclined me to take seriously my brother's opinions on window

curtains and to sniff at my mother's affectionate pretence of his being

the head of the family. At times when I felt this going on in our house,

there rose up like a wisp of fog between me and the glittering promise

of the future, a kind of horror of the destiny of women; to defer and

adjust, to maintain the attitude of acquiescence toward opinions and

capabilities that had nothing more to recommend them than merely that

they were a man's! I could be abased, I should be delighted to be

imposed upon, but if I paid out self-immolation I wanted something for

my money, and I didn't consider I was getting it with my brother for

whom I smuggled notes and copied compositions.

It never occurred to my mother, until it came to the concrete question

of spending-money, that there was anything more than a kind of natural

perverseness in my attitude, which only served to throw into relief the

satisfactoriness of her relations to her son. Forester, it appeared, was

to have an allowance, and I wanted one too.

"But what," said my mother, tolerantly, for she had not yet thought of

granting it, "would you do with an allowance?"

"Whatever Forester does."

"But Forester," my mother explained, waving the stocking she had

stretched upon her hand, "is a boy." I expostulated.

"What has that got to do with it?"

"Olivia!" The ridiculousness of having such a question addressed to her

brought a smile to my mother's lips, which hung fixed there as I saw her

mind back away suddenly in fear that I was really going to insist on

knowing what that had to do with it.

"I give you twenty-five cents a week for church money," she parried

weakly.

"That's what you think I ought to give. I want an allowance, and then I

can deny myself and give what I like."

"Forester earns his," said my mother; she hadn't of course meant the

discussion to get on to a basis of reasonableness.

"Well," I threatened, "I'll earn mine."

That was really what did the business in the end. All the boys in

Taylorville worked as soon as they were old enough, but it was the last

resort of poverty that girls should be put to wages. Before that

possibility my mother retreated into amused indulgence. She paid me my

allowance, appreciably less than my brother's, on the first of the

month, with the air of concurring in a joke, which I think now must have

covered some vague hurt at my want of sympathy with the beautiful

fiction of Forester's growing up to take my father's place with her.

They had achieved by the time Forester was twenty, what passed for

perfect confidence between them, though it was at the cost of

Forester's living shallowly or not at all in the courts of boyhood which

my mother was unable to reënter, and her voluntary withdrawal from

varieties of experience from which his youth prevented him. My mother

always thought it was made up to her in affection; what came out of it

for Forester is still on the knees of the gods.

I began to say how it was that the Gift took care of itself while

Forester was engrossing the family attention. He had had a year at the

business college in Montecito, which was considered quite sufficient,

and rather more, in fact, than his accepted vocation as the support of

his mother seemed to call for. Any question that might naturally come up

of a profession for him, seemed to have been quashed beforehand by the

general notion of an immediate salary as the means to that end. I do not

recall a voice lifted on behalf of a life of his own. He had worked up

from driving the delivery wagon in vacations to being dry goods clerk at

the Coöperative, where his affability and easy familiarity with the

requirements of women, made him immensely popular. Everybody liked to

trade with Forester because he took such pains in matching things, and

he was such a good boy to his mother. He paid the largest portion of his

salary for his board, and took Effie, who adored him, about with him. I

don't mean to say that he was not also good friends with Olivia, or that

there was anything which prevented my doing my best with the three

chocolate layer cakes and the angel's food I made for his party on his

twenty-first birthday.

The real unpleasantness on that occasion came of my mother's notion of

distinguishing it among all other birthdays by paying over to Forester a

third of the not very considerable sum left by my father, derived

chiefly from his back pay as an officer, which she had always held as

particularly set aside for us children. It was owing perhaps to a form

of secretiveness that in unprotected woman does duty for caution, that

Effie and I had scarcely heard of this sum until it was flourished

before us on the day before the birthday, much as if it had been my

father's sword, supposing the occasion to have required it being girded

on his son.

Forester was to have a third of that money in the form of a check under

his plate on the morning of his birthday. Effie and I did full justice

to the magnificence of the proposal. I was beating the whites of

thirteen eggs by Pauline's recipe for angel food--mine called for only

eleven--and Effie was rubbing up Mrs. Endsleigh's spoons, which had been

borrowed for the party.

I was always happier in the kitchen than in any room of the house, with

its plain tinted walls, the plain painted woodwork (the parlour was

hideously "grained"), and the red of Effie's geraniums at the window

ledge. The stir of domesticity, all this talk of my father, intrigued

me for the moment into the sense of being a valued and intrinsic part of

the family.

"His father would have wanted Forester to have that money," said my

mother, "now that he's of age."

"And when," I questioned, raised by the mention of thirds to the joyous

inclusion, "are Effie and I to have ours?"

"Oh," my mother's interest waned, "when you are married, perhaps."

It had grown in my mind as I spoke, that I had been of age now more than

a year and nothing had come of it. The suggestion that my father could

have taken a less active interest in the event on my behalf, pressed

upon a dying sensibility; I resented his being so committed to this

posthumous slight and meant to defend him from it.

"He'd have wanted me to have mine on my birthday, the same as Forester,"

I insisted.

"Oh, Olivia!" My mother's tone intimated annoyance at my claim to being

supported by my father in my absurdities, but her good humour was proof

against it. "Girls have theirs when they are married," she soothed.

I held up the platter and whisked the stiff froth with the air of doing

these things very dexterously; I wasn't going to admit by taking it

seriously, that my brother's coming of age was any more important than

mine, but I spare you the flippancies by which I covered the hurt of

realizing that to everybody except myself, it was.

"It is so like you, Olivia," said my mother, with tears in her eyes, "to

want to spoil everything." What I had really spoiled was the free

exercise of partiality by which she was enabled to distinguish Forester

over her other children, according to her sense of his deserts; and,

besides, what in the world would the child do with all that money?

"The same thing that Forester does," I maintained, and then quickly to

forestall another objection which I saw rising in her face. "If you were

old enough to be married at nineteen, I guess I am old enough to be

trusted with a few hundred dollars."

But there I had struck again on the structure of tradition that kept

Taylorville from direct contact with the issues of life; anybody was old

enough to be married at eighteen, but money was a serious matter.

Whenever I said things like that I could see my mother waver between a

shocked wonder at having produced such unnaturalness, and the fear that

somebody might overhear us. And I didn't know myself what I wanted with

that money, except that I craved the sense of being important that went

with the possession of it. And of course now that I had been refused it

on the ground of sex, it was part of the general resistance that I

opposed to things as they were, to have it on principle. Just when I

had mother almost convinced that she ought to give it to me, she made it

nearly impossible for me to accept, by asking Forester what she ought to

do about it. When I had demanded it as the evidence of my taking rank

with my brother as a personage, it was insufferable that it should come

to me as a concession of his amiability.

What I really wanted of course was to have it put under my plate with an

affectionate speech about its being the legacy of a soldier and the

witness of his integrity, coupled with the hope that I would spend it in

a manner to give pleasure to my dear father, who was no doubt looking on

at this happy incident.

There was nothing in me then--there is nothing now--which advised me of

being inappropriately the object of such an address, or my replying to

it as gallantly as the junior clerk of the Coöperative. To do Forester

justice, he came out squarely on the question of my being entitled to

the money if he was, but he contrived backhandedly to convey his sense

of my obtuseness in not deferring sentimentally to a male ascendancy

that I did not intrinsically feel; and I can go back now to these

disquieting episodes as the beginning of that maladjustment of my

earlier years, in not having a man about toward whom I could actually

experience the deference I was expected to exhibit.

Well, I had my check for the same amount and on the same occasion as my

brother's, but the feeling in the air of its being merely a concession

to my forwardness, prevented me from making any return for it that

interfered with Forester's carrying off the situation of coming into his

father's legacy on coming of age, quite to my mother's satisfaction.

What it might have made for graciousness for once in my life to have

been the centre of that dramatic affectionateness, I can only guess.

Firm in the determination that since no sentiment went to its bestowal

none should go to its acknowledgment, I carried my check upstairs and

shook all of the rugs out of the window to account for my eyes being red

at ten o'clock in the morning. And that was the way the Powers took to

provide against the complete submergence of the actress in the young

lady, for though it turned out that I did spend the greater part of the

money on my wedding clothes, a portion of it went for the only technical

training I ever had.

The real business of a young lady in Taylorville was getting married,

but to avoid an obviousness in the interim, she played the piano or

painted on satin or became interested in missions. If my money had

fallen in eight months earlier I should undoubtedly have spent it on the

third year at Montecito; as it was I decided to study elocution. It

appeared a wholly fortuitous choice. I was not supposed to have any

talent for it, but I burned to spend some of my money sensibly, and it

was admittedly sensible for a young lady to take lessons in something.

Effie was having music, Flora Haines painted plaques; when Olivia joined

Professor Winter's elocution classes at Temperance Hall mother said it

looked like throwing money away, but of course I could teach in case

anything happened, which meant in case of my not being married or being

left a widow with young children.

Professor Winter was the kind of man who would have collected patch

boxes and painted miniatures on ladies' fans; not that he could have

done anything of the sort on his income, but it would have suited the

kind of man he was. He had small neat ways and nice little tricks of

discrimination, and microscopic enthusiasms that hovered and fluttered,

enough of them when it came to the rendering of a favourite passage, to

produce a kind of haze of appreciation like a swarm of midges. Not being

able to afford patch boxes or Louis XV enamels, he collected accents

instead. The man's memory for phonic variations was extraordinary; all

our accustomed speech was a wild garden over which he took little

flights and drops and humming poises, extracting, as it were by sips,

your private history, things you would have probably told for the

asking, but objected to having wrested from your betraying tongue. He

would come teetering forward on his neat little boots, upon the toes of

which he appeared to elevate himself by pressing the tips of his

fingers very firmly together, and when you committed yourself no farther

than to remark on the state of the weather or the election outlook, he

would want to know if you hadn't spent some time of your youth in the

South, or if it was your maternal or paternal grandfather who was

Norwegian. Either of which would be true and annoying, particularly as

you weren't aware of speaking other than the rest of the world, for if

there was anything quite and completely abhorrent to the Taylorville

mind it was the implication of being different from other

Taylorvillians.

Somewhere the Professor had picked up an adequate theory and practice of

voice production, though I never knew anything of his training except

that he had been an instructor in a normal school and was aggrieved at

his dismissal. After he had advertised himself as open for private

instruction and tri-weekly classes at Temperance Hall, there was

something almost like a concerted effort at keeping him in the town,

because of the credit he afforded us against Montecito. With the

exception of a much-whiskered personage who came over from the business

college in the winter to conduct evening classes in penmanship, he was

the only man addressed habitually as Professor, and the only one who

wore evening dress at public functions.

His dress coat imparted a particular touch of elegance to occasions when

he gave readings from "Evangeline" and "The Lady of the Lake"

(Taylorville choice), and thoroughly discredited a disgruntled

Montecitan who, on the basis of having been to Chicago on his wedding

trip, insisted that such were only worn by waiters in hotels.

It would be interesting to record that Professor Winter lent himself

with alacrity to the unfolding of my Gift, but, in fact, his imagination

hardly strayed so far. He taught phonics and voice production and taught

them very well; probably he had no more practical acquaintance with the

stage than I had. Certainly he never suggested it for me, and for my

part I could hardly have explained why with so little encouragement I

was so devoted to the rather tedious drill. Pauline was still at the

seminary, and the regular hours of practice made a bulwark against an

insidious proprietary air which Tommy Bettersworth began to wear.

Besides the voice training, I had a system of physical culture,

artificial and unsound as I have since learned, but serving to restrain

my too exuberant gesture, and much memorizing of poems and plays for

practice work. I hardly know if the Professor had any dramatic talent or

not; probably not, as he made nothing, I remember, of stopping me in the

middle of a great passion for the sake of a dropped consonant, and

deprecated original readings on my part.

It was his relish for musical cadence as much as its intellectual

appreciation that led him to select the Elizabethan drama, in the great

scenes of which I was letter perfect by the time I had come to the end

of the Professor's instruction, and at the end too, it seemed, of my

devices for dodging the destiny of women.

CHAPTER VIII

I have tried to sketch to you how in Taylorville we were allowed to

stumble on the grown-up consciousness of sex, but I can give you no idea

of the extent to which we were prevented from the grown-up judgment.

Somewhere between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, one was loosed on a

free and lively social intercourse from which one was expected to emerge

later, triumphantly mated. This was obligatory; otherwise your family

sighed and said that somehow Olivia didn't seem to know how to catch a

husband, and then painstakingly refrained from the subject in your

presence; or your mother, if she was particularly loyal, said she had

always thought there was no call for a girl to marry if she didn't feel

to want to. But anything resembling maternal interference in your behalf

was looked upon as worldly minded, or at the least unnecessary. The

custom of chaperonage was unheard of; girls were supposed to be trusted.

I do not recall now that I ever had any particular instruction as to how

to conduct myself toward young men except that they were never on any

account to take liberties. Whatever else went to the difficult business

of mating you were supposed to pick up. That I did not pass through

this period in entire obliviousness was due to Pauline, who had the

keenest appreciation of her effect on the opposite sex. She was the sort

of girl who is described as having always had a great deal of attention;

she had a nice Procrustean notion of the sort of young man to be engaged

to--our maiden imagination hardly went farther than that--and her young

ladyhood appeared to be a process of trying it on the greatest possible

number of eligible Taylorvillians. When she came home from Montecito she

had already met Henry Mills at the house of a roommate where she had

spent the Easter vacation, and he had sent her flowers at commencement

and verses of his own composition.

It was Pauline who explained to me that unless I had some young man like

Tommy Bettersworth who could be counted on, I could hardly hope to be

"in" things--when they made up a party to go sleighing, for instance, or

a picnic to Willesden Lake. I liked being in things and did not

altogether dislike Tommy Bettersworth. He was a thoroughly creditable

beau and required very little handling, for even as early as that I had

an inkling of what I have long since concluded, that a man who requires

overmuch to be played and baited, held off and on, is rather poor game

after you have got him. It worried Pauline not a little that I forgave

Tommy so lightly for small offences; she was afraid it might appear that

I liked him too much, when in truth it was only that I liked him too

little. And for complacence, if I had had any disposition toward it, I

was saved by the shocking example of Forester, all of whose relations

were tinged by his vocation of model son. He had acquired by this time a

manner, by the intimacy, greater than is common in boys, with which he

lived into the feminine life of the household, and by his daily

performance of measuring off petticoats and matching hose, which

admitted him to families where we visited, on a footing that enabled him

to flirt with the daughters under the very apron-strings of their

mothers. You couldn't somehow maintain a strict virginal severity with a

young man who had just taken an informed and personal interest in your

mother's flannelette wrappers, the credit of whose dutifulness was a

warrant for his not meaning anything in particular. In short, Forrie

spooned.

I think now there was some excuse for him; he had been wrenched very

early by his affections from the normal outbreaks of adolescence; he had

never to my knowledge been "out with the boys." Unless he got it in the

business of junior clerk at the Coöperative, he could hardly be said to

have a male life at all; he was being shaped to a man's performance at

the expense of his mannishness. But against his philandering rose up,

not only the fastidiousness of girlhood, but some latent sense of

rightness, as keen in me as the violinist's for the variation of tone;

something that questioned the justice of pronouncing thoroughly moral a

young man who, if he never went over the brink, was willing to spend a

considerable portion of his time on the edge of it. I should have

admired Forester more at this juncture if he had been a little wild--and

I knew perfectly that my mother would have interdicted any social life

for me whatever if I had permitted a tithe of the familiarities allowed

to my brother.

Among the other things which a girl was expected to "pick up," along

with the art of attracting a husband, was the vital information with

which she was expected to meet the occasion of marrying one. It was all

a part of the general assumption of the truth as something not suitable

for the young to know, that nobody told us any of these things if they

could help it. I do not mean to say that there was not a certain amount

of half information whispered about among the girls, who by the avidity

for such whisperings established themselves as not quite nice. But

Pauline Allingham and I were nice girls. What this meant was that

nothing that pertained to the mystery of marriage reached us through all

the suppression and evasions of the social conspiracy, except the

obviousness of maternity. I remember how intimations of it as part of

our legitimate experience, began to grow upon us with a profound and

tender curiosity toward very young children, and, particularly on

Pauline's part, a great shyness of being seen in their company. But we

were not expected to possess ourselves of accurate information until we

were already involved in it.

We had reached the age when matrons no longer avoided references to its

most conspicuous phases in our presence, before we found words for

mentioning it to one another. There was a young aunt of Pauline's lent

something to that.

She was a sister of Mr. Allingham, come to stay with them while her

husband was absent somewhere in the West. Pauline told me about it one

of the week-ends she spent at home from Montecito; this was Saturday

afternoon, and she had found the aunt in the house on her return the

evening before.

"Do you know," she said, "it is very queer the way I feel about Aunt

Alice--the way she is, you know. Mamma hadn't told me, and when I came

into the sitting room and saw her, I thought I was going to cry; and it

wasn't that I was sorry either ... I'm awfully fond of her. I just felt

it."

"Yes, I know," I admitted.

"Aunt Alice is so sensible," Pauline explained a few weeks later, "she

talks to me a great deal; she's only a few years older than I am. She

has shown me all her things for the baby. Mamma didn't think she

ought ... you know how mothers are. They're in the bureau drawer in the

best room. I'll show them to you some time; Alice won't mind."

Alice didn't mind, it appeared, so it must have been shyness that led

us to select the afternoon when the married women were away, and though

I cannot forgive the conditions which led us so surreptitiously to touch

the fringe of the great experience, I own still to some tenderness for

the two girls with their heads together that bright hot afternoon, over

the bureau drawer in Mrs. Allingham's best room. Pauline showed me a

little sacque which she had crocheted.

"Mother thought I was too young, but Alice said I might."

"You must have liked to, awfully," I envied.

"That's one of the nice things about having children, I should

think"--Pauline fingered a hemstitched slip--"you can make things for

them."

"Which would you rather have, girls or boys?" I hazarded.

"Oh, girls; you can always dress them so prettily."

"But boys ... they can do so many things when they grow up." I felt

rather strongly on that point.

"Alice says"--Pauline folded the little frock--"that she's so glad to

have it she doesn't care which it is." Something, perhaps an echo of my

mother's experience, pricked in me.

"They aren't always as glad as that."

"I suppose not. Alice is having this one because she wants it."

We looked at one another. We would have liked to have spoken further, to

have defined ourselves, despoiled ourselves of tenderness, nobilities,

but around the whole subject lay the blank expanse of our ignorance. We

locked the drawer again and went out and played croquet. And that was

how we stood toward our normal destiny that summer when Pauline was

wondering if Henry Mills meant to propose to her, and I was wondering

how much longer I could keep Tommy Bettersworth from proposing to me.

I managed to stave it off until the end of September. On the

twenty-second of that month there was a picnic at Willesden Lake. There

were ten couples of us, and Flora Haines, who was wanted to count even

with a young man who was to join us at the lake, a stranger to most of

us, nephew to one of the wealthiest farmers in the township. We had

always wished there might have been young people at the Garrett farm,

and there was some talk of this nephew, who was to come on a visit,

being adopted.

Some of our brothers had made his acquaintance, and Pauline, who had met

him at Montecito, had warranted him as "interesting." I believe Flora

Haines was invited to pair with him because every girl felt that Flora

would be eminently safe to trust her own young man to in the event of

Helmeth Garrett proving more worth while.

Henry Mills, who was reading law at the county seat of the adjoining

county, had come over for the picnic and was expected to bring matters

to a crisis with Pauline, and Forester had a day off to take Belle

Endsleigh, who was at the point of pitying him because, though he had

such an affectionate disposition, so long as his mother depended on him

he couldn't think of marrying. We had no chaperone of course; several of

the couples were engaged, and there were brothers; we wouldn't have to

put up with the implication that we were not able to manage by

ourselves.

It was the sort of day ... soft Indian summer, painted woodlands,

gossamer glinting high in the windless air ... on which Forester found

it necessary to hope brotherly that I should be able to get through it

without being silly. By that he meant that the submerged Olivia, however

interestingly she might read in a book, was highly incomprehensible and

nearly always ridiculous to her contemporaries.

Willesden Lake was properly a drainage pond of four or five acres in

extent, drawn like a bow about the contour of two hills; water-lilies

grew at the head where a stream came in, and muskrats built at the lower

end. The picnic ground was in the hollow between the two hills, by a

spring, where the grass grew smooth like a lawn to the roots of oaks

burning blood red from leaf to leaf. As it turned out, though we put off

lunch for him for an hour, young Mr. Garrett did not come, and as the

party sat about on the mossy hummocks in the quiet of repletion, I

thought nothing could be so much worth while as to leave Tommy in care

of Flora Haines and get away into the woods by myself. The soul of the

weather had got into my soul and I felt I should discredit myself with

Forester if I stayed. There was a little footpath that led down by a

rill to the lake, and as I took it, there was scarcely a sound louder

than the soft down-rustle of the painted leaves. There were two or three

old boats, half water-logged, tied at the head of the lake, and one of

these I found and paddled across to the opposite bank. I had not known

there was a path there opening from the dewberry bushes that dipped

along the border, but the spirit in my feet answered to its invitation.

I followed it up the hill through the leaf drift that heaped whispering

in the smoky wood. I spread out my arms as I went and began to move to

the rhythm of chanted verse. Where the red and gold and russet banners

brushed me I was touched delicately as with flame. I had on a very

pretty dress that day, I remember, a thin organdy with a leaf pattern,

made up over yellow sateen, and the consciousness of suitability worked

happily on my mind. At the top of the hill I struck into an old wood

road where it passed through a grove of young hickory, blazing yellow

like a host. Here I went slowly and dropped the chanting to the measure

of classic English verse; it was the only means of expression

Taylorville had provided me. Scene after scene I went through happy and

oblivious. I had been at it half an hour perhaps, moving forward with

the natural impetus of the play, in the faint old wagon tracks, and had

got as far as

--Flowers that affrighted she let fall

From Dis's wagon!--

when I was startled by the clapping of hands, and looked up to see a

young man sitting on the top of a rail fence that ran straight across

the way, as though he might have stopped there to rest in the act of

climbing over.

"I knew you would see me the next minute," he said, "and I wanted to be

discovered in the act of appreciation." He sprang down from the fence

and came toward me, taking off his hat. "I suppose you are from the

picnic; I expected to find you somewhere about. I am Helmeth Garrett."

"They're at the spring--we waited lunch for you. I am Miss Lattimore;

Olivia May," I supplemented. I was a little doubtful about that point,

for at Taylorville we called one another by our first names. I was

pleased with the swiftness with which he struck upon a permissible

compromise.

"I owe you all sorts of apologies, Miss Olivia, but the mare I was to

ride went lame and uncle couldn't spare me another, so I had an early

lunch at the house and walked over." As he stood looking down at me I

saw that he had a crop of unruly dark hair and what there was in his

face that Pauline had found interesting. He wore a soft red tie,

knotted loosely at the collar of a white flannel shirt, and for the rest

of him was dressed very much as other young men. All at once a spark of

irrepressible friendliness flashed up in smiles between us.

It seemed the merest chance then that I had come across the wood to meet

him. In the light of what has happened since, I see that the guardian of

my submerged self was doing what it could for me; but against the

embattled social forces of Taylorville what could even the gods do!

"If you will take me to the others," he suggested, "I can make my

excuses, and then we can talk." It was remarkable, I thought, that he

should have discovered so early that we would wish to talk. We began to

move in the direction of the lake.

"Were you doing a play?" he asked. I nodded.

"How long were you watching me?"

"Since you passed the plum brush yonder; it was bully! Are you going on

the stage?" I explained about Professor Winter and the elocution

lessons.

"They don't approve of the stage in Taylorville," I finished, touched by

the vanishing trace of a realization that up to this moment the

objection would have been stated personally.

"And with all your talent! Oh, I know what I'm saying. I lived in

Chicago four years and saw a lot of the theatre."

He began to talk to me of the stage, probably much of it neither

informed nor profitable, but I had never heard it talked of before in

unembarrassed relevancy to living, and he had that trick of speech that

goes with the achieving propensity, of accelerating his own energy as he

talked, so that its backwater fairly floated us into the ease of

intimacy. There was no doubt we were tremendously pleased with one

another. I was throbbing still with the measure of verse and moved half

trippingly to the rhythm of my blood.

"Do you dance too?" What went with that implied something personal and

complimentary.

"Oh, no--a few steps I've picked up at school. That's another of the

things we don't approve at Taylorville."

"I say, what a lot of old mossbacks there must be about here anyway.

Take my uncle, now...." He went on to tell me how he had tried to induce

his uncle, who could afford it, to advance the money for technical

training in engineering. Uncle Garrett was of the opinion that Helmeth

would do better to get a job with some good man and "pick up things ...

always managed to get along by rule of thumb himself," said the nephew,

"and thinks all the rest of us ought to. I said, 'How would it be with a

doctor, now, just to scramble up his medicine?' but you can't get

through to my uncle. He thinks a man who can run a thrashing machine is

an engineer."

I remember that we found it necessary to sit down on the slope of the

hill toward the pond while he sketched for me his notion of what an

engineer's career might be. "But you've got to have technical

training ... got to! Talk about rule of thumb ... it's like going at it

with no thumbs at all." In the midst of this we remembered that we ought

to be looking for the rest of the picnickers. Once in the boat, however,

there was a muskrat's nest which, as something new to him, had to be

poked into, and we stopped to gather lilies, which I could not have done

by myself without wetting my dress. When we came at last to the spring,

we found the lunch baskets huddled under the oak and nobody about.

I think we must have been very far gone by this time in the young

rapture of intimacy. The wood was smokily still, and we scuffed great

heaps of the leaves together as we walked about pretending to look for

the others. I remember it seemed a singular flame-touched circumstance

that the leaves flew up from under our feet and fell lightly on our

faces and our hair.

"I suppose we can't help finding them; the wonder is they haven't been

spoiling our good talk before now."

"Oh," I protested, "if you hadn't been coming to look for them you

wouldn't have met me."

"And now that we have met, we are going to keep on. I'm coming to see

you. May I?"

"If you care so much...." A little spiral of wind rising fountain-wise

out of the breathlessness whirled up a smother of brightening leaves; it

caught my skirts and whipped them against his knees. It seemed to have

blown our hands together too, though I am at a loss to know how that

was.

"Care!" he said. "If I care? Oh, you beauty, you wonder!" All at once he

had kissed me.

The electrical moment hung in the air, poised, took flight upward in

dizzying splendour. Suddenly from within the wood came a little snigger

of laughter.

CHAPTER IX

I do not know how long it took for the certainty that I had been kissed

by an utter stranger in the presence of the entire picnic, to work

through the singing flames in which that kiss had wrapped me. We must

have walked on almost immediately in the direction of the snigger; I

remember a kind of clutch of my spirit toward the mere mechanical act of

walking, to hold me fast to the time and place from which there was an

inward rush to escape. We walked on. They were all sitting together

under a bank of hazel and the girls' laps were filled with the brown

clusters. Out of my whirling dimness I heard Helmeth Garrett explaining,

as I introduced him, how he had come across me in the wood, looking for

them.

"And of course," suggested Charlie Gower, "in such good company you

weren't in a hurry about looking for the rest of us." I remembered the

asparagus bed and was glad I had slapped him.

"No," my companion looked him over very coolly, "now that I've seen some

of the rest of you I'm glad I didn't hurry." Plainly it wasn't going to

do to try to take it out of Helmeth Garrett.

As we began by common consent to move back to the spring, Forester drew

me by the arm behind the hazel. He was divided between a brotherly

disgust at my lapse, and delight to have caught the prim Olivia

tripping.

"Well," he exclaimed, "you _have_ done it!" Considering what I knew of

Forester's affairs this was unbearable.

"Oh! it isn't for _you_ to talk----"

"What I want to know is, whether I am to thrash him or not?"

"Thrash him?" I wondered.

"For getting you talked about ... off there in the woods all afternoon!"

"We weren't----" I began, but suddenly I saw the white bolls of the

sycamores redden with the westering sun; we must have been three hours

covering what was at most a half hour's walk. "Don't be vulgar,

Forester," I went on, with my chin in the air.

"Oh, well," was my brother's parting shot, "I don't know as I ought to

make any objection, seeing you didn't."

That, I felt, was the weakness of my position; I not only hadn't made

any objection, I hadn't felt any shame; the annoyance, the hurt of

outraged maidenliness, whatever was the traditional attitude, hadn't

come. Inwardly I burned with the woods afire, the red west, the white

star like a torch that came out above it. On the way home Helmeth

Garrett rode with us as far as the main road and was particularly

attentive to Pauline and Flora Haines. I remember it came to me dimly

that there was something designedly protective in this; there was more

or less veiled innuendo flying about which failed to get through to me.

Pauline put it quite plainly for me when she came to talk things over

the day after the picnic. She was sympathetic.

"Oh, my dear, it must be dreadful for you," she cooed; "a perfect

stranger, and getting you talked about that way!"

"So I am talked about?"

"My _dear_, what could you expect? And in plain sight of us. If you had

only pushed him away, or something."

"I couldn't," I said, "I was so ... astonished." In the night I had

found myself explaining to Pauline how this affair of Helmeth Garrett

had differed importantly from all similar instances; now I saw its

shining surfaces dimmed with comment like unwiped glass.

"That's just what I _said_!" Pauline was pleased with herself. "I told

Belle Endsleigh you weren't used to that sort of thing ... you were

_completely_ overcome. But of course he wasn't really a gentleman or he

wouldn't have done it." I do not know why at this moment it occurred to

me that probably Henry Mills hadn't proposed to Pauline after all, but

before I could frame a discreet question she was off in another

direction.

"What will Tommy Bettersworth say?"

"Why, what has he got to do with it?"

"O-_liv_-ia! After the way you've encouraged him...."

"You mean because I went to the picnic with him? Well, what can he do

about it?" Pauline gave me up with a gesture.

"Tommy is the soul of chivalry," she said, "and anybody can see he is

crazy about you, simply crazy." What I really wanted was that she should

go on talking about Helmeth Garrett. I wanted ground for putting to her

that since all we had been sedulously taught about kissing and all "that

sort of thing"--that it was horrid, cheapening, insufferable--had failed

to establish itself, had in fact come as a sword, divining mystery, it

couldn't be dealt with on the accepted Taylorville basis. I felt the

quality of achievement in Helmeth Garrett's right to kiss me, a right

which I was sure he lacked only the occasion to establish. But when the

occasion came it went all awry.

It was the next Sunday morning, and all down Polk Street the

frost-bitten flower borders were a little made up for by the passage

between the shoals of maple leaves that lined the walks, of whole flocks

of bright winged, new fall hats on their way to church. Mother and Effie

were in front and two of my Sunday-school scholars had scurried up like

rabbits out of the fallen leafage and tucked themselves on either side

of my carefully held skirts. Suddenly there was a rattle of buggy wheels

on the winter roughed road; it turned in by Niles's corner and drove

directly toward us; the top was down and I made out by the quick

pricking of my blood, the Garrett bays and Helmeth with his hat off, his

hair tousled, and a bright soft tie swinging free of his vest. You saw

heads turning all along the block in discreet censure of his

unsabbatical behaviour. He recognized me almost immediately and turned

the team with intention to our side of the street. He was going to speak

to me ... he was speaking. My mother's back stiffened, she didn't know

of course. Forrie wouldn't have had the face to tell her, but how many

eyes on us up and down the street did know? A Sunday-school teacher in

the midst of her scholars ... and he had kissed me on Thursday!

"Olivia," said my mother, "do you know that young man? Such manners ...

Sunday morning, too. Well, I am glad that you had the sense to ignore

him;" and I did not know until that moment that I had.

It was because of my habit of living inwardly, I suppose, that it never

occurred to me that the incident could have any other bearing on our

relations than the secret one of confirming me in my impression of our

intimacy being on a superior, excluding footing. He had come, as I was

perfectly aware, to renew it at the point of breaking off, and this

security quite blinded me to the effect my cold reception might have

upon him. That he would fail to understand how I was hemmed and pinned

in by Taylorville, hadn't occurred to me, not even when he passed us

again on the way home from church, driving recklessly. His hat was on

this time, determinedly to one side, and he was smoking, smoking a

cigar. I thought at first he had not seen me, but he turned suddenly

when he was quite past and swept me a flourish with it held between two

fingers of the hand that touched his hat.

At that time in Taylorville no really nice young man smoked, at least

not when he would get found out. This offensiveness in the face of the

returning church-goers was too flagrant to admit even the appearance of

noticing it, but that it would be noticed, taken stock of in the general

summing up of our relation, I was sickeningly aware.

Tommy Bettersworth put one version of it for me comfortingly when he

came in the evening to take me to church.

"I saw you turn down that Garrett fellow this morning. Served him

right ... that and the way you behaved Thursday ... just as if you did

not find him worth rowing about. A lot of girls make a fuss, and it's

only to draw a fellow on; and now you're going to church with me the

same as usual; that'll show 'em what _I_ think of it." Now, I had clean

forgotten that Tommy might come that evening. I was whelmed with the

certainty that Helmeth Garrett had gone back to the farm after all

without seeing me; and the moment Tommy came through the gate I had one

of those rifts of lucidity in which I saw him whole and limited, pasted

flat against the background of Taylorville without any perspective of

imagination, and was taken mightily with the wish to explain to him

where he stood, once for all, outside and disconnected with anything

that was vital and important to me. But quite unexpectedly, before I

could frame a beginning, he had presented himself to me in a new light.

He was cover, something to get behind in order to exercise myself more

freely in the things he couldn't understand.

Something more was bound to come out of my relation to Helmeth Garrett;

the incident couldn't go on hanging in the air that way; and in the

meantime here was an opportunity to put it out of public attention by

going out with Tommy. It did hang in the air, however, for three days,

during which I pulsed and sickened with expectancy; by Thursday it had

reached a point where I knew that if Helmeth Garrett didn't come and

kiss me again I shouldn't be able to bear it. It was soon after sundown

that I felt him coming.

I took a great many turns in the garden, which, carrying me occasionally

out of reach of the click of the gate latch, afforded me the relief of

thinking that he might have arrived in the interval when I was out of

hearing. His approaching tread was within me. When it was just seven my

mother came out and called:

"Olivia, I promised Mrs. Endsleigh a starter of yeast; I have just

remembered. Could you take it to her?"

The Endsleigh backyard was separated from ours by a vacant lot, the

houses fronting on parallel streets; there was no sound at the gate and

mother had the bowl in a white napkin held out to me, with a long

message about where the sewing circle was to meet next Thursday.

"If any body comes,"--for the life of me I couldn't have kept that

back,--"you can tell them I'll be back in a minute," I cautioned her.

"Are you expecting anybody?"

"Only Tommy," I prevaricated, instantly and unaccountably. I saw my

mother look at me rather oddly over the tops of the glasses she had

lately assumed. On the Endsleigh's back porch I found Belle in evening

dress gathering ivy berries for her hair.

"Oh," she said, to my plain appearance, "aren't you going?"

"Going where?"

"Oh, if you don't know ... to Flora's." Belle was embarrassed.

"I hadn't heard of it."

"It's just a few friends," Belle wavered between sympathy and

superiority. "Flora is so particular...."

"I couldn't have gone anyway," I interpolated, "I have an engagement." I

had to find Mrs. Endsleigh after that and deliver my errand.

When I reached home mother was sitting placidly just outside the circle

of the lamp, knitting. She only looked up as I entered and I had to drag

it out of her at last.

"Has anybody been here?"

"Nobody that you would care to see."

"But who?"

"That fast-looking young man who tried to speak to you on Sunday. I'm

glad you have a proper feeling about such things. Mr. Garrett's nephew,

didn't you say? I told him you were engaged."

"Oh, mother!" I was out in panting haste. At the gate I ran square into

Tommy Bettersworth.

"Did you see anybody?"

"Nobody. I came through by Davis's. I was coming in," he suggested, as I

stood peering into the dark.

"I thought you'd be going to Flora's." A wild hope flashed in me that

maybe he was going and I should be rid of him.

"Oh, I don't care much for that crowd. I told her I had an engagement

with you." So he had known I was not to be invited. I resented the

liberty of his defence. "Let's go down to Niles's and have some ice

cream," Tommy propitiated.

"It's too cold for ice cream." I led the way back to the house. I was

satisfied there was no one in the street. When we stepped into the fan

of light from the lit window, Tommy saw my face.

"Oh, I say, Ollie, you mustn't take it like that. Beastly cats girls

are! Flora's just jealous because she thought she was invited to the

picnic for that Garrett chap, and you got him; she wants to have a

chance at him herself to-night." There was a green-painted garden seat

on the porch between the front windows. I sat down in it.

"It's not Flora I'm crying about ... it is being so misunderstood." I

was thinking that Helmeth Garrett would suppose I had stayed away from

Flora's on his account; she would never dare to say she had not invited

me. Tommy's arm came comfortingly along the back of the bench.

"It's just because they do understand that they are mad; they know a

fellow would give his eyes to kiss you. Infernal cad! to snatch it like

that; and I've never even asked you for one." His voice was very close

to my ear. "I tell you, Olivia, I've thought of something. If you were

to be engaged to me ... you know I've always wanted ... then nobody

would have a right to say anything. They'd see that you just left it to

me."

"Oh," I blurted, "it's not so bad as that!"

"You think about it," he urged. "I don't want to bother you, but if you

need it, why here I am." It was because I was thinking of him so little

that I hadn't noticed where Tommy's arm had got by this time. That

unfulfilled kiss had seemed somehow to leave me unimaginably exposed,

assailed. I was needing desperately then to be kissed again, to find

myself revalued.

"It's awfully good of you, Tommy...."

I do not know how it was that neither of us heard Forester come up from

the gate; all at once there was his foot on the step; as he came into

the porch a soft sound drew him, he stared blankly on us for a moment

and then laughed shortly.

"Oh! it's you this time, Bettersworth. I thought it might be that

Garrett chap."

That was unkind of Forester, but there were extenuations. I found

afterward that Belle had teased Flora to ask him and he had refused,

thinking it unbrotherly when I was not to be invited, and he and Belle

had quarrelled.

"I don't know as it matters to you"--Tommy was valiant--"whom she

kisses, if I don't mind it."

"You? What have you got to do with it?"

"Well, a lot. I'm engaged to her."

BOOK II

CHAPTER I

The first notion of an obligation I had in writing this part of my

story, was that if it is to be serviceable, no lingering sentiment

should render it less than literal, and none of that egotism turned

inside out which makes a kind sanctity of the personal experience,

prevent me from offering it whole. And the next was that the only way in

which it could be made to appear in its complete pitiableness, would be

to write it from the point of view of Tommy Bettersworth. For after all,

I have emerged--retarded, crippled in my affectional capacities, bodily

the worse, but still with wings to spread and some disposition toward

flying. And when I think of the dreams Tommy had, how he must have

figured in them to himself, large between me and all misadventure,

adored, dependable; and then how he blundered and lost himself in the

mazes of unsuitability, I find bitterness augmenting in me not on my

account but his. The amazing pity of it was that it might all have

turned out very well if I had been what I seemed to him and to my family

at the time when I let him engage himself to me to save me from immanent

embarrassment.

My mother, though she took on for the occasion an appropriate

solemnity, was frankly relieved to have me so well disposed. Tommy had

been brought up in the church, had no bad habits, and was earning a

reasonable salary with Burton Brothers, Tailors and Outfitters.

There was nobody whose business it was to tell me that I did not love

Tommy enough to marry him. I have often wondered, supposing a medium of

communication had been established between my mother and me, if I had

told her how much more that other kiss had meant to me than Tommy's mild

osculation, she would have understood or made a fight for me? I am

afraid she would only have seen in it evidence of an infatuation for an

undesirable young man, one who smoked and drove rakishly about town in

red neckties on Sunday morning. But in fact I liked Tommy immensely. The

mating instinct was awake; all our world clapped us forward to the

adventure.

If you ask what the inward monitor was about on this occasion, I will

say that it is always and singularly inept at human estimates. If, often

in search of companionship, its eye is removed from the Mark, to fix

upon the personal environment, it is still unfurnished to divine behind

which plain exterior lives another like itself! I took Tommy's community

of interest for granted on the evidence of his loving me, though,

indeed, after all these years I am not quite clear why he, why Forester

and Pauline couldn't have walked in the way with me toward the Shining

Destiny. I was not conscious of any private advantage; certainly so far

as our beginnings were concerned, none showed, and I should have been

glad of their company ... and here at the end I am walking in it alone.

About a month after my engagement, Henry Mills proposed to Pauline, and

she began preparations to be married the following June. Tommy's salary

not being thought to justify it so soon, the idea of my own marriage had

not come very close to me until I began to help Pauline work initials on

table linen.

The chief difference between Pauline and me had been that she had lived

all her life, so to speak, at home; nothing exigent to her social order

had ever found her "out"; but Olivia seemed always to be at the top of

the house or somewhere in the back garden, to whom the normal occasions

presented themselves as a succession of cards under the door. I do not

mean to say that I actually missed any of these appointed visitors, but

all my early life comes back to me as a series of importunate callers

whose names I was not sure of, and who distracted me frightfully from

something vastly more pleasant and important that I wanted very much to

do, without knowing very well what it was. But it was in the long

afternoons when Pauline and I sat upstairs together sewing on our white

things that I began to take notice of the relation of what happened to

me to the things that went on inside, and to be intrigued away from the

Vision by the possibility of turning it into facts of line and colour

and suitability. It was the beginning of my realizing what came

afterward to be such a bitter and engrossing need with me, the need of

money.

Much that had struck inharmoniously on me in the furnishings of

Taylorville, had identified itself so with the point of view there, that

I had come to think of the one as being the natural and inevitable

expression of the other; now, with the growing appreciation of a home of

my own as a medium of self-realization, I accepted its possibility of

limitation by the figure of my husband's income without being entirely

daunted thereby. For I was still of the young opinion that getting rich

involved no more serious matter than setting about it. As I saw it then,

Men's Tailoring and Outfitting did not appear an unlikely beginning; if

Tommy had achieved the magnificence I planned for him, it wouldn't have

been on the whole more remarkable than what has happened. What I had to

reckon with later was the astonishing fact that Tommy liked plush

furniture, and liked it red for choice.

I do not know why it should have taken me by surprise to find him in

harmony with his bringing up; there was no reason for the case being

otherwise except as I seemed to find one in his being fond of me. His

mother's house was not unlike other Taylorvillian homes, more austerely

kept; the blinds were always pulled down in the best room, and they

never opened the piano except when there was company, or for the little

girls to practise their music lessons. Mrs. Bettersworth was a large,

fair woman with pale, prominent eyes, and pale hair pulled back from a

corrugated forehead, and his sisters, who were all younger than Tommy,

were exactly like her, their eyes if possible more protruded, which you

felt to be owing to their hair being braided very tightly in two braids

as far apart as possible at the corners of their heads.

They treated me always with the greatest respect. If there had been

anybody who could have thrown any light on the situation it would have

been Mr. Bettersworth. He was a dry man, with what passed in Taylorville

for an eccentric turn of mind. He had, for instance, been known to

justify himself for putting Tommy to the Men's Outfitters rather than to

his own business of building and contracting, on the ground that Tommy

wanted the imagination for it. Just as if an imagination could be of use

to anybody!

"So you are going to undertake to make Tommy happy?" he said to me on

the occasion of my taking supper with the family as a formal

acknowledgment of my engagement.

"Don't you think I can do it?" He was looking at me rather quizzically,

and I really wished to know.

"Oh! I was wondering," he said, "what you would do with what you had

left over." But it was years before I understood what he meant by that.

About the time I was bridesmaid for Pauline, Tommy had an advantageous

offer that put our marriage almost immediately within reach. Burton

Brothers was a branch house, one of a score with the Head at Chicago, to

whom Tommy had so commended himself under the stimulus of being engaged,

that on the establishment of a new store in Higgleston they offered him

the sales department. There was also to be a working tailor and a

superintendent visiting it regularly from Chicago, which its nearness to

the metropolis allowed.

All that we knew of Higgleston was that it was a long settled farming

community, which, having discovered itself at the junction of two

railway lines that approached Chicago from the southeast, conceived

itself to have arrived there by some native superiority, and awoke to

the expectation of importance.

It lay, as respects Taylorville, no great distance beyond the flat

horizon of the north, where the prairie broke into wooded land again,

far enough north not to have been fanned by the hot blast of the war and

the spiritual struggle that preceded it, and so to have missed the

revitalizing processes that crowded the few succeeding years. Whatever

difference there was between it and Taylorville besides population, was

just the difference between a community that has fought whole-heartedly

and one that stood looking on at the fight.

It was not far enough from Taylorville to have struck out anything new

for itself in manners or furniture, but the necessity of going south two

or three hours to change cars, and north again several hours more, set

up an illusion of change which led to a disappointment in its want of

variety. Tommy went out in July, and in a month wrote me that he would

be able to come for me as soon as I was ready, and hoping it would not

be long. If I had looked, as in the last hesitancies of girlhood I

believe I did, for my mother to have raised an objection to my going so

far from home, I found myself, instead, almost with the feeling of being

pushed out of the nest. It seemed as if in hastening me out of the

family she would be the sooner free to give herself without reproach to

a new and extraordinary scheme of Forester's. What I guess now to have

been in part the motive, was that she already had been touched by the

warning of that disorder which finally carried her off, which, with the

curious futility of timid women, she hoped, by not mentioning, to

postpone.

For a long time now Forester had found himself in the situation of

having grown beyond his virtues. That assumption of mannishness which

sat so prettily on his nonage was rendered inconspicuous by his

majority. People who had forgotten that he had never had any boyhood,

found nothing especially commendable in the mild soberness of

twenty-three. I have a notion, too, that the happy circumstance of my

marriage lit up for him some personal phases which he could hardly have

regarded with complacence, for by this time he had passed, in his

character of philanderer, from being hopefully regarded as reclaimable

to constancy, to a sort of public understudy in the practice of the

affections. However it had come about, the young ladies who still took

on Forester at intervals, no longer looked on him so much as privileged

but as eminently safe; and the number of girls in a given community who

can be counted on for such a performance, is limited. That summer before

I was married, after Belle Endsleigh had run away from home with a

commercial traveller who disappointed the moral instance by making her a

very good husband afterward, my brother found himself, as regards the

young people's world, in a situation of uneasy detachment. And there was

no doubt that the Coöperative, where he had been seven years, bored him

excessively. It was then he conceived the idea of reinstating himself in

the atmosphere of importance by setting himself up in business.

Adjacent to Niles's Ice Cream Parlours, there was a small stationery and

news agency which might be bought and enlarged to creditable

proportions. There was, I believe, actually nothing to be urged against

this as a matter of business; the difficulty was that to accomplish it

my mother would be obliged to hypothecate the whole of her small

capital. What my mother really thought about her property was that she

held it in trust for the family interest, and that, with the secret

intimation of her end which I surmise must have reached her by this

time, she believed to be served by Forester's plan. It was so much the

general view that by marrying I took myself out of the family

altogether, that I felt convinced that she meant, so soon as that was

accomplished, to undertake what, in the face of my protesting attitude,

she had not the courage to begin. I remember how shocked she was at my

telling her that this tying up of the two ends of life in a monetary

obligation, would put her and Forester very much in the situation of a

young man married to a middle-aged woman. I mention this here because

the implication that grew out of it, of my marriage being looked forward

to as a relief, had much to do with the failure out of my life at this

juncture, of informing intimacy.

A great deal of necessary information had come my way through Pauline's

marriage, through the comment set free by Belle Endsleigh's affair,

through the natural awakening of my mind toward the intimations of

books. Marriage I began to perceive as an engulfing personal experience.

Until now I hadn't been able to think of it except as a means of

providing pleasant companionship on the way toward that large and

shining world for which I felt myself forever and unassailably fit. It

began to exhibit now, through vistas that allured, the aspect of a vast

inhuman grin. Somewhere out of this prospect of sympathy and

understanding, arose upon you the tremendous inundation of Life. Dimly

beyond the point of Tommy's joyous possession of me, I was aware of an

incalculable force by which the whole province of my being was assailed,

very different from the girlish prevision of motherhood which had

floated with the fragrance of orris root from Aunt Alice's bureau drawer

in the Allingham's spare room.

I don't say this is the way all girls feel about the approach of

maternity, but I saw it then like the wolf in the fairy tale, which as

soon as its head was admitted, thrust in a shoulder and so came bodily

into the room and devoured the protestant. Long afterward, when I was in

a position to know something of the private experience of trapeze

performers, I learned that they came to a point sometimes in mid-spring

when the body apprised them of inadequacy, a warning sure to be followed

in no long time by disaster. I have thought sometimes that what reached

me then was the advice of a body instinctively aware of being unequal to

the demands about to be imposed upon it.

I hardly know now by what road I arrived at the certainty that some

women, Pauline for instance, were able to face this looming terror of

childbearing by making terms with it. Life, it appeared, waited at

their doors with respect, modified the edge of its inevitableness to

their convenience. If Pauline had been accessible--but she was living in

Chicago with Henry Mills, going out a great deal, and writing me

infrequent letters of bright complacency. It was only in the last

frightened gasp I fixed upon my mother. You must imagine for yourself

from what you know of nice girls thirty years ago, how inarticulate the

whole business was; the most I can do is to have you understand my

desperate need to know, to interpose between marriage and maternity

never so slight an interval in which to collect myself and leave off

shrinking.

About a week before my wedding we were sitting together at the close of

the afternoon; my mother had taken up her knitting, as her habit was

when the light failed. Something in the work we had been doing, putting

the last touches to my wedding dress, led her to speak of her own, and

of my father as a young man. The mention pricked me to notice what I

recall now as characteristic of Taylorville women, that, with all she

had been through, the war, her eight children, so many graves, there was

still in her attitude, toward all these, a kind of untutored virginity.

It made, my noticing it then and being touched by it, a sort of bridge

by which it seemed for the moment she might be drawn over to my side. On

the impulse I spoke.

"Mother," I said, "I want to know?..."

It seemed a natural sort of knowledge to which any woman had a right.

Almost before the question was out I saw the expression of offended

shock come over my mother's reminiscent softness, the nearly animal rage

of terror with which the unknown, the unaccustomed, assailed her.

"Olivia! Olivia!" She stood up, her knitting rigid in her hands, the

ball of it speeding away in the dusk of the floor on some private terror

of its own. "Olivia, I'll not hear of such things! You are not to speak

of them, do you understand! I'll have nothing to do with them!"

"I wanted to know," I said. "I thought you could tell me...."

I went over and stood by the window; a little dry snow was blowing--it

was the first week in November--beginning to collect on the edges of the

walks and along the fences; the landscape showed sketched in white on a

background of neutral gray. I heard a movement in the room behind me; my

mother came presently and stood looking out with me. She was very pale,

scared but commiserating. Somehow my question had glanced in striking

the dying nerve of long since encountered dreads and pains. We faced

them together there in the cold twilight.

"I'm sorry, daughter"--she hesitated--"I can't help you. I don't

know ... I never knew myself."