I knelt again by the old black trunk. They had gone back on Tim and
therefore on me. But God would not go back on us. I wept and said
every prayer that my mother had taught me. And I said this one of my
own:
“Lord, save Tim. Don’t let pop make him die.”
Boom! the report of a gun rang across the woods. I shuddered. Had God,
too, gone back on me? If so, why?
I went to the attic window and waited breathlessly. I stretched myself
flat on the dusty floor, so that I could see and not be seen. After a
little while I saw my father climb over the zig-zag fence, carrying the
trace over his shoulders.
In the evening they found me stained with dusty tears, asleep on the
attic floor. My mother kissed me and petted me and told me that I was
her king. It did no good, for she had taught me futile prayers. She put
me to bed, but I would not pray. I sobbed while she said the hollow
words for me. Then I heard her tell my father that she feared that I
was going to be ill.
“Pooh!” said my father, “a child’s sorrows are like a child’s joys,
they soon pass away.”
He had a way of checking off the events of life with some false axiom.
And soon they thought I was asleep; and I heard him tell my mother how
he had taken the trace off the dog after they reached the woods, how
Tim had followed him to the great boulder down in the hollow, how
Tim had wagged his tail when he told him to look for squirrels in the
trees, and then when Tim looked up for the game, he shot him behind the
ear, and the dog rolled over in the cave under the boulder.
That was the first night of my life when I did not close my eyes.
Our old house had a large spare room for guests, but what I remember
about it is, that my mother used to take me in there every morning when
the windows caught the sun. She would draw me up in her lap and read
poetry to me. Naturally, I did not understand much of it, but that made
no difference, I loved it just the same; for it made my mother, who was
not a pretty woman, very beautiful to me. She was an impulsive woman,
hugging me one moment, and boxing my ears the next. But those hours in
the sunshine when she used to read aloud to me in the spare room, they
were sacred. There was nothing then except deep affection.
When she was a girl, I have heard my father say in after years, my
mother was as care-free as a meadow-lark. He used to tell me how at
house-parties where they did their courting, she would keep all the
company in gay spirits and laughter. They married; and a baby girl was
born to them. She was my little sister, Louise. She grew to be four
years old and was a remarkable child, a bundle of natural mirth and
strong individuality. Then she took black diphtheria, and died.
My mother withdrew into herself, she became sad and more sad as time
went on; and during this sorrow, she conceived and bore me. Is it any
wonder that I, a man, should at times weep like a girl?
Now I am back to where I left off about Tim’s death. It was after he
was gone that my mother used to take me daily into the spare room and
console me with poetry. Then one day the blinds were drawn close in my
mother’s room. She had another of her terrible heart attacks. O God,
how I have seen her suffer! She seemed to get much better, indeed quite
well, and I grew happy again, and I can see myself climb out of my crib
and scramble into bed between her and my father. And she said jokingly
to my father:
“If I should die, who will be your wife?”
“I’ll be pop’s schwife!” I exclaimed, as a matter of course, and I can
hear their hearty laughter to this day; and my mother drew me over on
her and covered me with kisses; and I remember that my father remarked
something about my being “a precocious curiosity.” He had a bad habit
of speaking about me before my face, never crediting that I would
cherish his mysterious remarks until I understood them. Mark me, all
children do this.
Autumn went by; and winter came. We had an unusually heavy fall of snow
for Virginia. Only a redbird and some occasional sparrows could be seen
in the leafless poplar. I remember it was the week before Christmas,
because I received my sled in advance so that I would go down to the
duck pond and not disturb my mother, who was very sick again. That
night I was kept down in the kitchen with Uncle Robert and Aunt Maria.
Sandy has told me that he was there too. We were all huddled about the
brick oven; and my childish intuition perceived a hush over the old
servants. Of a sudden, we heard way off down the plantation road the
jingle, jingle of bells, coming nearer and nearer.
“It am the sleigh comin’ with those town doctors;” said Uncle Robert,
and he went out to meet it with his lantern. Even Aunt Maria, who was
usually the bulwark of our household, was uneasy and troubled.
“I doan’t lak to see them touch my young Mistus!” she said, defiantly,
as she held my hand.
Jingle! jingle! the sleigh was at the door! I broke away from her and
rushed out in the snow to see the doctors who had come from Richmond.
I remember how my childish imagination was roused by the sight of three
men in soft hats and storm coats, carrying small valises, as they
hastened up the porch steps to where my father stood, holding a lamp
aloft to light their way. Aunt Maria came and caught me and whisked me
off to bed. That was all that I knew until the next morning when I was
awakened by a strange white nurse, who had been with us a few days.
She said that my father had sent for me “to come and kiss my mamma
good-bye.”
I went with her without realizing what I was doing. I heard one of the
doctors say that he had seen my mother’s father die of the same kind
of heart failure. Die? There was that word again. My mother die? No,
no, that could not be. I ran out of the room without their knowing that
my child’s faith in God, which she had tried to restore in me, was now
actually restored. I climbed again to the garret and knelt by the black
trunk and held up my little hands in prayer. This time I did not cry. I
made up my mind that I must be brave on my father’s account, for when I
left the sick-room, I saw that his hands covered his face; and he spoke
not a word; and I went and took down his hands, and when he looked at
me, I saw his eyes film with tears.
Oh, dear, I do not want to tell the rest. I have heard others say
that the sight of my father, holding my hand, as we stood beside my
mother’s snow-bordered grave, was as bleak a scene as they ever cared
to witness, that we both looked so utterly forlorn, and that I looked
as though I tried to take my mother’s place.
I know that I wanted to do so. I know that where he went, I went; where
he slept, I slept. We went North for a while. We came back in the
spring when the fields were being plowed.
My little sister, Louise, was four years old when she died, before I
was born. I was four years old when my mother died. How often have I
envied little Louise, for at that age I reached the culmination of my
happiness. In all this world there is one truth: a motherless son is a
friendless child.
As I grew up, my father and I became more and more companionable,
though we were totally different. Up to a certain point, my father was
one of the most lovable of men, generous, unpretentious, true to the
memory of my mother. He had a unique faith in mankind. He assumed that
because he liked a man, that man was honest in all respects. Naturally,
he was imposed upon, because he could not separate his affections from
his observation; and therefore lacked discrimination. In like manner,
he assumed that if his son had good in him, that good would come out;
and if he thought that a child were bad, his favorite axiom was that
no man could save his brother’s soul, or be his brother’s keeper. In
fine, my father lived his whole existence upon assumption, and he never
discovered whether his assumptions were sound or false. He brought me
up on the theory of an ideal conception of human nature, very beautiful
in its faith, but unfortunately not practical. He had faith in my
developing only the bright and best side of myself; and here is the
point: he assumed that I did so! He was proud of me and put me upon
a pedestal and gave me sympathy at a distance, with the result that
I could not leap into his arms and tell him that it was not so, that
my little life was not bright! And so throughout my entire childhood
I was hungry for the little details of affection which a man does not
know how to give. The fact is, I never had any young boyhood. Fate
also robbed me forever of the grand schemes and the unconscious fun
which a few playmates give a child. My father and his club friends who
came up from Richmond were my playmates. They used to sit at table,
and sip their claret after dinner; and I would sit with them, too,
“always looking and listening,” as I overheard one of them describe
me. Then they would walk out over the plantation; and I would walk
with them, too, and hear the stories at which they laughed, many of
which I used to ponder over in order to find out what was so funny in
them. One especially I used to remember, that my father would tell
whenever we walked through the old red gate in the woods. It was told
of my name-sake, the famous Mr. William Wirt. He told how Mr. Wirt
used to visit in the neighborhood, and how one day at the time when my
grandfather had just had that gate hung, Mr. Wirt passed by and said:
“Ah, sir, anybody can hang a gate, but only men can propagate!”
Then they would laugh. I puzzled for years over that story.
My father had a tutor for me whom they called “Doctor.” The truth is,
he was a pensioner on us with whom my father liked to converse. He
did not teach me one iota of the usual textbook knowledge. He did not
believe in machine-made learning. But it was a general education for me
to go about in his company and browse here and there in our library.
Actually, I have not read thirty books in my life all told; but that
good man taught me that if a book is worth reading at all, it is worth
reading slowly.
“What conceit!” he used to say, “for one to try to digest in a few
hours what has taken another years to think out!”
He told me that it took him a year to read “The Newcomes.”
I have to thank him for one inestimable heritage, which laid the
foundation of my religion. He taught me concerning the Omnipotence of
Truth. In this lies all my faith. He taught me ‘to dare to stand alone,
to dare to have an opinion of my own and to dare to make it known.’
“Beware though,” said he, “it is the part or mark of youthful vigor to
discover that things are not altogether right in this unintelligible
world; and youth sets about to mould things over to his own
satisfaction, only to find that he has himself been cast in a mould.”
I think that he and my father, who dearly loved to moralize, used to
sit and talk and smoke on our back porch for fourteen hours out of many
a day, calling out occasional suggestions to the negroes as they worked
in the garden. So I used often to leave them and go fishing in the
canal. I used to catch chub with a pin hook. Oh, to watch again those
old canal boats as they glided under me, as I sat upon the bridge; oh,
to dream again that they were moving fairy lands, going up and down to
realms, marvelous and weird, to which I might some day travel and enjoy
their unlimited pleasures. That was my chief source of delight.
The day when I was to take one of them came sooner than I had hoped. My
father took me on a visit down in Goochland, and I met little Susanne,
she was twelve and I was thirteen. A flood of warm light seemed to
fall upon me and to thaw out my boyish spirit. But I am not going to
write about her any more. I can not stand it. She had my mother’s eyes,
“wistful and mild.” My father was as pleased as Punch over our fondness
for each other. Poor man! I thank God that he was spared the end of
that long attachment. He died even before I lost Susanne. He rode off
one day on a new stallion. I climbed on the zig-zag fence and watched
him disappear down the plantation road. When he reached the creek, the
stallion threw him against the rocks and broke his neck. Uncle Robert
and Sandy and I brought him home.
Don’t pity me. Call me a mad dog, say that I am a peculiar idiot, say
that I have been a fool and wasted my life; but don’t pity me! And
if there is one thing more abhorrent to me than self-praise, it is
self-pity. I am disgusted with myself, who might have amounted to some
one. Then I would not have been lonely, physically lonely. And there
is mental loneliness, more galling, more gnawing, than murky solitude.
The following blames no one except myself:
“I felt myself pressed onward by an internal force, which I could not
resist.--Let us look into this a little, and see whether the direction
you gave to your life has not had for its object to make this force
irresistible.”
That may be. But I prefer to know what I actually am, than to be proud
and contented in a _cul-de-sac_. Tumble-bugs roll from rut to rut,
clinging to their eggs, never knowing that they are tumble-bugs. I
would rather be unhappy than be the man with illusions, snug in his
own pettiness. If contentment comes only from rolling in a rut, then I
choose discontent.
“Come, review your days and your years, call them to account! Tell us
how much time you have allowed to be stolen from you by a creditor, by
a mistress, by a patron, by a client.” Which of us can read those lines
without blushing?
This night is my birth night. Nine and twenty years ago, at eleven
o’clock, when the July sun had sunk out of the valley of the James,
when the cattle were at rest, and the whippoorwills uttered forth their
conscience-stricken notes, “Whippoorwill! Whippoorwill!” the moon had
arisen and shone upon the purple bloom of the fox-grapes, hidden above
the brook, then a deep joy came over my mother and she was delivered of
me. It must have been the blessed, unspeakable, sacred joy of labour,
which men never know. My father told me once that she wept in the midst
of her joy--that is how I know.