I
When I know that Lucy is going to Palm Beach for the winter I shall go
to Aiken. When I know that she is going to Aiken, I shall go to Palm
Beach. And I shall play the same game with Bar Harbor, Newport,
Europe, and other summer resorts. So we shall only meet by accident,
and hardly ever. We've been asked not to.
But I ought to begin further back. It would do no harm to begin at the
beginning. There is even a king's advice to that effect. Said the
king in "Alice," "Begin at the Beginning, go on to the End, and then
stop."
In the beginning, then: When I was a little boy, old enough to be
warned against playing with matches, I began of course to think them
desirable playthings, and whenever I got a chance played with them.
And I never:
(1) Set myself on fire,
(2) Nor anybody else,
(3) Nor the house in which my parents lived with me.
And yet I had been told that I should do all of these things; not often
perhaps, but certainly every once in a while.
Of course it is possible to do all sorts of things with a match. You
may light it and blow it out, for instance. Lighted, you may put it in
your mouth without burning yourself. And if you do this in the dark,
the light will shine through your cheek, and if you are a fat child you
will give the impression of a Hallowe'en lantern carved from a pumpkin.
Or you may light the butt of your father's cigar and learn to smoke.
It is one of the cheapest ways. Or you may set fire to the lower edge
of the newspaper which your grandfather is reading in the big armchair
by the window, and I guarantee that you will surprise him. Here is an
interesting play: Light a match, blow it out, and, while the end is
still red hot, touch the cook firmly on the back of the neck. If she
has been reading Swinburne she will imagine that she has been kissed by
a policeman. When she finds out that she hasn't she will be
disappointed, and perhaps you will be disappointed, too. Oh, a match
is a wonderful thing, even the wooden ones that are made on earth! You
may burn a whole city to the ground. And once, I am told, there was a
man who lighted a match and fired a cannon that was heard around the
world.
To play with matches is one thing: to play with the fire that you have
lighted, or helped light, is another. And it was not until I played
with fire that I did any real harm in this world (that I know about).
Playing with fire I singed a moth; I singed a butterfly, and I burnt a
man.
If this was just the story of my own life I wouldn't be so impertinent
as to hope that it would be interesting to anybody. It isn't my story,
and no matter how much I may seem to figure in it, I am neither its
hero, nor, I think, the god who started the machinery.
Thirty-five years ago I took to live with me a middle-aged couple, who
had begun to fear that they were going to die without issue. Though I
say it that shouldn't, I was very good to them. I let them kiss me and
maul me from morning till night. Later, when I knew that it was the
very worst thing in the world for me, I let them spoil me as much as
they wanted to. They even gave me the man's name, without my consent,
and I didn't make a row. But I _did_ lift my head with sufficient
suddenness and violence to cause the Bishop of New York to bite his
tongue, and to utter a word that is not to be found in the prayer book.
I was christened Archibald Mannering Damn.
But I have never used the surname with which the good Bishop so
suddenly and without due authorization provided me. Certain old
friends, acquainted with the story, do not always, however, show my
exquisite taste and reticence in this matter. Only the other day in
the Knickerbocker Club I overheard some men talking. And one of them,
in a voice which I did not care for, said "Archibald Mannering--damn!"
And conveyed without other word or qualification than the tone of his
voice, that he had very little use for me. Well, I can thank God for
putting into the world some other people who have not that man's
clearsightedness and excellent powers for passing judgment upon his
fellow men.
So the man gave me his name and took other liberties with me, and the
woman gave me her watch to break (I broke it) and took other liberties,
and a second woman who called herself Nana took still other liberties
with me--liberties which made me furiously angry at the time, and which
even now would make me blush.
Sometimes I was sorry that I had taken the man and the woman to live
with me. At times they bored me. They seemed to me intelligent, and I
had to choose my words carefully, and talk down to them as to a pair of
children. But I got used to them gradually. And I got to like them,
especially the woman. I even formed the habit of forgiving her things
offhand without being asked to--Oh, my dear parents, I am only trying
to poke a little fun at you! And you weren't middle-aged when you came
to live with me. I only imagine that you must have seemed so to a baby
whose eyes had only just come undone. Thirty-five years have rolled
by--bringing, taking, and, alas! leaving behind them cares and
vicissitudes, and still you seem no more than middle-aged to me. You,
father, with your fine, frank weather-beaten face of a county squire
with the merry smile and the wit which makes you so welcome wherever
you go, even those ghosts of sorrow deep in your eyes don't make you
look more than middle-aged. And yet I think no hour of your life
passes in which you don't recall, with a strangling at your throat, how
my little sister, Pitapat, came in from the garden drooping, to you,
almost always to you, when she was in trouble, and climbed and was
lifted into your lap, and cuddled against you--Oh, I can't write the
rest. But I tell you that I, too, sir, have recalled little Pitapat,
and how she died, all on a summer's day, in her "Dada's" arms, and that
the thought of what she was to you, and what such another child might
be to such another man, has twisted even my tough entrails, and caused
me for once, at least, to draw back from a piece of easy and enticing
mischief, and play the man.
And you, mother, with your face of a saint, haven't I always poked fun
at you? You don't look more than middle-aged either. You look less.
And yet you too have your sorrow that never dies. For you were fitted
to be a mother of men, and you have brought into the world only a
lovely flower that soon withered away, and a Butterfly.
I don't call myself a Butterfly from choice. I only do it because I'm
trying to be honest, and I think that it's just about what I am. But
do we really know what a butterfly is? Have we given that ornamental
(though I say it--that shouldn't) and light-minded (though I say it
with shame) and light-hearted (though the very lightest of hearts must
weigh _something_, you know) insect a square deal? I confess that only
a light-hearted insect would perpetrate such a sentence as the
foregoing; but wouldn't it be fun if, when the whole truth comes to be
known about butterflies, we found them more or less self-respecting,
more or less monogamous, occasionally ratiocinative, carelessly kind,
rather than light-hearted creatures, and not insects, in the accepted
sense, at all? It would surprise me no more to learn that an insect
was really a man, than that a man, even so great and thinking a man as
Mr. Bryan for example, was an insect.
If the butterfly at lunch flits from flower to flower; and the
butterfly at play flits from butterfly to butterfly; so then may the
butterfly (at what he is pleased to call his work) flit from theme to
theme, from subject to subject, from character to character, from plot
to counterplot, and crosswise and back again. If more autobiographists
realized how many difficulties may be avoided in this way, far fewer
autobiographists would be heroes and many, many more would be
butterflies.