Adventures in Indigence
and
Other Essays
ADVENTURES IN
INDIGENCE
AND
OTHER ESSAYS
BY
LAURA SPENCER PORTOR
[Illustration]
The Atlantic Monthly Press
Boston
COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS, INC.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
CONTENTS
ADVENTURES IN INDIGENCE
I. Musgrove 1
II. The Harp and the Violin 13
III. Major Lobley 25
IV. Mamie Faffelfinger 38
V. The Lure of the "Chiffoneer" 55
VI. Margaret 68
VII. Margharetta 87
VIII. The Powers of the Poor 101
IX. Horatio 114
GUESTS
I. Relations of the Spirit 129
II. Kith and Kin 155
THE DISAPPOINTMENTS AND VICISSITUDES OF MICE 183
BIRTHDAYS AND OTHER EGOTISMS 215
PREFACE
It is doubtful whether the present volume should be looked on as a
collection of essays, or might not more aptly be called a book of
personal experience. The true essayist offers you fewer doubts and
peradventures. He comes with clear philosophies, to which he means
to convert you. He is well armed for controversy. He will cite you
Scripture, the Decalogue, and the statutes. You will find it difficult
to pick a flaw in his argument. Never hope to prove him wrong! He
leaves no man reasonable choice but to agree with him. He is a sworn
advocate. His essay is his brief. If he be a man of force, his cause
is won before the jurymen take their places. Be sure he will prove his
point before any just judge. The case, it seems when you come to think
upon it later, might almost have gone by default, so little is there
any argument left you.
The papers in the present volume are not so forethought, nor are they
designed to be so convincing. There is more memory than doctrine in
them; more experience than authority, theology, or faith. In them
will be found little that is taught by the schools, upheld by the
courts, or propounded by the Fathers. Perhaps they contain not so much
what I believe, as what, because of persistent personal observation
and testing and proving, of my own, I have been at last unable to
disbelieve. These papers, in short, deal with none of the usual and
traditional theories of life, but rather with life as I have intimately
found it and lived it.
It is one thing to uphold loyally an ancient faith which has from
the beginning been taught one, or to which one has, on the respected
authority of others, been converted; it is a wholly other thing to
uphold sincerely, and for what it may be worth, a belief which one has
but evolved and tested and proven for one's self. God forbid it should
be upheld arrogantly! For, as the first method is calculated to produce
devout believers, zealous to convert those whose beliefs differ from
their own, so does the other tend, rather, to make devout observers;
and as the passionate believer is to the last unable to understand how
others could believe differently than he does; the devout observer is
eager to mark where and how the observations of others differ from his
own, or, it may be, happily coincide with them. He has a persistent
desire to know whether, given the same experience and facts, others
will approve of his findings.
It is for this reason, no doubt, that I find myself wondering whether
the reader of this volume has discovered, as I have,--all tradition,
teaching, theory, and articles of faith to the contrary,--indisputable
evidence of the mysterious and imponderable powers of the poor. Has
Life the Educator revealed herself to another in such a fashion
as to me? Have you who read--you also--a secret belief in certain
unmistakable superiorities hidden away in the unwritten records and the
unadministered laws of lesser creatures than ourselves? Have you, like
myself, lost birthdays irretrievably, and found in their place that
larger nativity writ in a more universal horoscope?
Though these papers do not claim to be more than personal records
of experience and adventure and consequent belief, yet there may be
those who will decry the persistent personality, who will condemn the
seeming egotism. To these there is recommended--perhaps a little
wistfully--the paper, toward the last, which attempts to deal with this
rather widespread failing.
L. S. P.
ADVENTURES IN INDIGENCE
I
MUSGROVE
Both Stevenson and Lamb, writing of "Beggars," fall into what I take to
be a grave misapprehension. They both write a defense, and constitute
themselves advocates. Lamb brilliantly solicits our pity for these
"pensioners on our bounty"; Stevenson, though he characteristically
makes himself comrade and brother of his client, and presents the
"humbuggery" of the accused as a legitimate art, nevertheless thinks
himself but too evidently of a higher order, and the better gentleman
of the two. Here, and it would seem in spite of himself, are patronage
and condescension.
I own that such an attitude shocks me and makes me apprehensive. Were
I superstitious, of a certain creed, I should cross myself to ward off
calamity; or were I a Greek of the ancient times, I should certainly
pour a propitiatory libation to Hermes, god of wayfarers, thieves,
vagabonds, mendicants, and the like.
"Poor wretches," indeed! "Pensioners," they! "Ragamuffins! humbugs!"
They, with their occult powers! _They_, mind you, needing our advocacy!
I could indeed bear a different testimony.
I think I began first to know the power of the poor, and to fall under
their sway, when I was certainly not more than six years old. It must
have been about then that I was learning to sew. This seems to have
been a profession to which I was so temperamentally disinclined that my
mother, to sweeten the task, was wont during the performance of it to
read to me. While I sat on a hassock at her feet scooping an unwilling
perpendicular needle in and out of difficult hems, my mother would read
from one of many little chap-books and children's tracts, which were
kept commonly in a flat wicker darning-basket in her wardrobe; little
paper books held over from her own and her mother's childhood. They
were illustrated with quaint woodcuts, and the covers of them were
colored. I was allowed to choose which one was to be read.
One day--"because the time was ripe," I suppose--I selected a little
petunia-colored one, outwardly very pleasing to my fancy. It contained
the story and the pictures of a miserable beggar and a haughty and
unfeeling little girl. He was in rags, and reclined, from feebleness
I fancy, on the pavement; she walked proudly in a full-skirted dress,
strapped slippers, and pantalets. She wore a dipping leghorn with
streamers. Just over this she carried a most proud parasol; just under
it a nose aristocratically, it may even be said unduly, high in the air.
I think I need not dwell on the tale, save to say that it was one of
the genus known as "moral." There was only one ending possible to the
story: the triumph of humility, the downfall of pride and prosperity;
swift and awful retribution falling upon her of the leghorn and
pantalets. I believe they allowed her in the last picture a pallet of
straw, a ragged petticoat, bare feet, clasped hands, and a prayerful
reconciliation with her Maker. The story was rendered distinctly
poignant for me by the fact that I possessed a parasol of pink
"pinked silk," which was held on Sundays and certain other occasions
proudly--it also--over a leghorn with streamers which dipped back
and front exactly as did the little girl's in the story. But never,
never,--once I had made the acquaintance of that story,--was my nose
carried haughtily under it, when by chance I sighted one of that race
so numerous and so ancient, so well known and so little known to us
all. From that day I began to know the power of the poor.
I can remember delectable candies that I did not buy, delicious soft
cocoanut sticks that I never tasted, joys that I relinquished, hopes
that I deferred, for the questionable but tyrannous comfort of a penny
in an alien tin cup, and the inevitable "God bless you, little lady!"
which, remembering her of the leghorn and pantalets, I knew to be of
necessity more desirable than the delights I forewent.
There was an old blind man there in my home town, whom I remember
very keenly. He used to go up and down, he and his dog, in front of
the only caravansary the place boasted,--the Hotel Latonia,--tap-tap,
tap-tapping. He had the peculiar stiff, hesitating walk of the blind,
the strange expectant upward tilt of the face. He wore across his
shoulder a strap on which was fastened a little tin cup.
I used to see the drummers and leisurely men of a certain order,
their chairs tilted back against the hotel wall, their heels in the
chair-rungs, their hats on the back of their heads, their thumbs in
their arm-holes, their cigars tilted indifferently to heaven, and they
even cracking their jokes and slapping their knees and roaring with
laughter, or perhaps yawning, perfectly unaware of the blind man, it
seemed, while he passed by slowly, tap-tap, tap-tapping.
But it was never thus with me. His cane tapped, not only on the
pavement, but directly on my heart. You could have heard it, had you
put your ear there. It may have seemed that his eyes were turned to the
sky. That was but a kind of physical delusion. I knew better. In some
occult way they were searching me out and finding me. I can give you no
idea of the command of the thing. Perhaps I have no need to. Your own
childhood--it is not improbable--may have been under a similar dominion.
If I thought to experiment and withhold my penny, I might escape the
blind man for a while: I might elude him, for instance, while the
other members of the family and the guests in that old home of my
childhood were gay and talkative at the supper-table; or afterward,
when laughter and song drowned the lesser sounds; or while I stood safe
in the loved shelter of my father's arm, listening to conversations
I enjoyed, even though I could not understand them; or while, in the
more intimate evenings, he took his flute from its case, screwed its
wonderful parts together, and, his fingers rising and falling with
magic and precision on the joined wood and ivory, played "Mary of
Argyll" until I too heard the mavis singing. But later, later, when I
lay alone in my bed in the nursery in the moonlight, or, if it were
winter, in the waning firelight and the creeping shadows, then, _then_
there came up the stairs and through the rooms the sound of the blind
man's cane, tap-tap, tap-tapping. He had come for his penny. And the
next time I saw him, with a chastened spirit and a sense of escape I
gave him two.
But my own childish subserviency to the poor did not give me so great
a sense of their power as my mother's relation to them. She, it seems,
was perpetually at their service. Let them but raise a hand indicating
their need ever so slightly, and she moved in quick obedience, although
it seemed she too must sometimes have wearied of such service. Guests
were many and frequent in that old home, as I have elsewhere told; but
these came either by announcement or by invitation; the poor, on the
contrary, came unasked, unannounced, and exactly when they chose, as
by royal prerogative. Indeed, many a time I have seen my mother excuse
herself to a guest, to wait sympathetically upon a man or a woman with
a basket,--it might be the queen of the gypsies, with vivid, memorable
face; or the Wandering Jew in the very flesh; or it might be Kathleen
ni Houlihan herself, all Erin looking out, haunting you, from her
tragic old eyes,--offering soap or laces at exorbitant prices, or other
less useful wares, tendered for sale and excuse at the kitchen door.
There was one whom I especially remember--Musgrove. He was a fine
marquis of a man, was Musgrove, as slender as a fiddle and with as
neat a waist. He used to come to the front door and sit by the old
hall clock, waiting my mother's pleasure. He had a wife and seven
or nine children, and a marvelous multiplicity of woes. There was a
generosity and spaciousness about the calamities of Musgrove--something
mythopœic, promethean. Tragedies befell him with consistent abundance.
Four or five of the seven or nine had broken their arms, almost put
out their eyes, or had just escaped by a hair's breadth from permanent
blanket-mortgage disability when the floor of the cottage they lived
in fell through; or they had been all but carried off wholesale by
measles. Once all nine, as I remember it, were poisoned _en gros_ by
Sunday-school-picnic ice-cream, which left the children of others
untouched. Only myths were comparable. Niobe alone, and she not
altogether successfully, could have matched calamities with him.
By and by Time itself, I think, wearied of Musgrove. I think my
mother, sympathetic as she was, must have come to think the arrows of
outrageous fortune were falling far too thick for likelihood, even on
so shining a mark as Musgrove. She came from interviews with him with a
kind of gentle weariness. But Musgrove, I am very sure, had an eye for
the drama. He knew his exits and his entrances, and I have reason to
believe no shade of feeling in my mother's face was lost upon him.
He came one day to say good-bye, his shabbiness heightened, but
brightened also, by a red cravat. It was safe now, no doubt, to allow
himself this gayety. He knew that my mother would be glad to hear that,
through the kindness of someone nearly as kind as herself, he had been
able to obtain a position in a large city. He lacked but the money to
move. After that--prosperity would be his.
My mother did not deny him his chance, Musgrove himself, you see,
having contrived it so that the chance was not without a certain
advantage and privilege for her. So he made his fine bow, and he and
his fine marquis manners were gone.
I think my mother must have missed him. I know I did. The other
pensioners came as regularly as ever--the gypsy with her grimy laces;
the Jew with his tins and soap; rheumatic darkies by the dozen, frankly
empty-handed; the little girl with the thin legs and with the black
shawl pinned over her head and draped down over the shy and empty
basket on her arm; and the old German inventor who always brought the
tragedy of old and outworn hopes along with some new invention; or,
at infrequent intervals, for a touch of color, there came an Italian
organ-grinder, and--if the gods were good--a monkey. But there were
times when I would have exchanged them all to see Musgrove again, with
his fine promethean show of endurance, his incomparable assortment of
unthinkable calamities.
Another, it is true, came in his place, but he was of a wholly
different type. He had not the old free manner of Musgrove, yet he was
strangely appealing, too. He wore a beard and was stooped and spent and
submissive, a man broken by fate. He did not complain. He did not wait
rather grandly by the hall clock as Musgrove had done; no, but in the
kitchen, about breakfast-time, biding the cook's not always cordial
pleasure.
In spite of my mother's sympathy,--which should certainly have made
amends for any lack of it in the cook,--he had a way of slipping in and
out with a little shrinking movement of his body, like the hound that
does the same to escape a blow. One would have said that body and soul
flinched. He limped stiffly, and seemed always to have come a little
dazed from far countries.
My mother took even a very keen interest in him. This man was more
difficult to reach, but by that very token seemed no doubt the more
worthy. He told no wonderful tales to tax your credulity. His very
reticence was moving and hard to endure; the death of nine or seven
children would have been less sad. He kept coming for quite a long
time. Then the day dawned--a day quite like any other, I suppose,
though it should have been dark with cloudy portent--when, by some
slight misstep, some trifling but old reference on his part when his
mind was off its guard, my mother discovered, as by a sudden lightning
flash, that this _was_ Musgrove.
I have known some dramatic moments in my life, but I would not put this
low on the list.
He seemed to know for an intense arrested instant that he had spoken
a false line, that he had for a miserable moment forgotten his part.
He staggered into it again with what I know now was fine courage, and
managed in perfect character to get away. I can still see him as he
departed, bent and submissive (having most meekly thanked my mother),
and not forgetting to limp stiffly, going along under the falling
leaves of the grape-arbor, in the autumn sunshine, the shadows of the
stripped vines making a strange and moving pattern on his old coat as
he went; nor have I failed to see him in all the years since, thus
departing,--inevitably, irretrievably,--and have found my heart going
many a time along with him.
My mother, and I with my hand in hers, went back into the quiet
comfortable rooms of that old house. But if you suppose we went in
any spirit of ascendency, or righteous indignation, or justification,
you are indeed mistaken. To be in the right is such an easy, such a
pleasant thing; what is difficult and must be tragically difficult
to endure is to be artistically, tragically in the wrong. I think it
likely that my mother remembered Musgrove, as I have done, through all
the years, a little as a survivor might remember one who had gone down
before his eyes. It is thus, you see, that Musgrove, bent and always
departing, still continues to sway others with his strange powers, as
it is fitting, no doubt, that one of his rare genius should do.
II
THE HARP AND THE VIOLIN
Besides those that I have mentioned, there were two especially of that
ancient race whose fortunes were bound in with my early memories.
It was upon a day when I was a little more than fourteen that I came to
know them. I was alone at home, save for the maids in the house, and
was reading at my ease, as I loved to do, in that old verandah that
fronted the south. I remember well that the book I read was "Rasselas,
or The Happy Valley."
The verandah was deep and long. Beside it ran a brick pavement,
delightful in color and texture. Over this, joining the verandah, there
curved a latticed grape-arbor of most gracious lines, on which grew,
in lovely profusion, a wistaria, a catawba grape-vine, moonflower, and
traveler's-joy. When the wistaria, like a spendthrift, had lavished
all its purple blossoms, and there were left but green leaves in its
treasury, then the grape bloom lifted its fragrance; and when this was
spent, the traveler's-joy, as though it had foreseen and saved for
the event, flung forth its abundance; and when at last its every petal
had fallen and nothing more remained,--for the moonflower had its own
prejudice, persistently refused the demands of the sun, and would open
its riches only to the moon and the night moths,--then the early autumn
sun, feeling through the thinning leaves, hardly expectant, would come
upon that best treasure of all, stored long, against this time, in the
reddening clusters of the grapes.
All these things lent I cannot say what charm inexhaustible to that
old verandah, and made it a place of abiding romance and delight. The
pattern of the sunshine and of the moonlight on the floor of it, as
they fell through the lattice and the leaves, are things that still
haunt my memory with the sense of a lovely security, of a generous
abundance, and, as it were, of the lavish inexhaustible liberality of
life itself.
There, secure against interruption, I read and pondered, with the
imaginative ponderings of fourteen, the strange longings of that Prince
who should have been so content in the Happy Valley.
As I read, I was aware of a strange intrusion: a bent form in baggy
trousers and rusty coat stooped under the weight of an old and worn
harp; behind him, bent also, but by no visible burden, an old man with
a violin entered the gateway of the arbor. They came very slowly and
deliberately, yet without pause or uncertainty. They did not introduce
themselves, being, I knew instantly, quite above such plebeian need.
They asked no permission, nor solicited any tolerance. They spoke not
a word. It was as if they had long outgrown the need of such earthly
trivialities.
He of the rusty coat and baggy trousers, having taken a slow look at
the place around,--as though to establish in his mind some mysterious
identity,--let the harp slip from his shoulders to the brick pavement,
adjusted it there very deliberately, and proceeded to pluck one or two
of its strings with testing fingers, still looking around carefully all
the while; then he adjusted his camp-stool, seated himself, pulled the
worn, yet delicate and feminine instrument toward him, so that her body
lay against his shoulder, and put his hands in position to play.
The old violin, more lordly, made no concession whatever to harmony;
he tuned or touched not a string, but with a really kingly gesture put
his instrument in the worn hollow of his shoulder, laid his head and
cheek over against it, as though lending his whole soul to listen,
raised the bow, held it for an immortal instant over the strings,
and then drew out a long preliminary note--on, on, on, to the very
quivering tip of the bow.
My education had not been neglected as to music. There had always been
much of it in my home, where flute and voice and harp and violin and
piano spoke often, and my home town was near a great musical centre,
where, young as I was, I had heard the best that was to be heard. Had I
been in a critical mood, I should have noted how badly the long-drawn
note was drawn; I can hear still how excruciating it was, how horribly
it squawked; but rendered solemn, as I was, by the strangeness of their
appearance and their presence, and dimly, dimly aware of their immortal
powers, it thrilled me more than I remember those of Sarasate or Ysaye
to have done.
The long note at an end, without so much as a consultation of the
eyes, they then began. With never a word, only with thrilling tones
horribly off the key, the violin spoke, say rather wrung its hands and
wailed,--"Oh, don't you remember"--("Oh, yes; I remember!" throbbed and
sobbed the harp)--"Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt?"
They played it all through, even to what must have been the "slab of
granite so gray," varying all the while from one half to one tone off
the key, the old violin lending his ear as attentively all the while to
the voice of his instrument as if she spoke with the tongues of angels;
his dim veiled eyes fixed on incalculable distances, like those of an
eagle in captivity.
The old harp, on the contrary, kept his eyes lowered stubbornly on the
vibrating strings; and the harp, as he smote, quivered like some human
thing struck upon its remembering heart. From the painfully reminiscent
song they leaped without pause into that second most wailful melody in
the world,--
Ah, I have sighed to rest me,
Deep in the quiet grave,--
and played that on to the end also.
But though to the outward eye these visitors played upon the harp
and violin, how much more indeed did they play upon me! Young, and
sensitive, and as yet unsounded, how, with dim compelling fingers
they searched and found and struck and drew from me emotions I had
never known! Old and worn and bowed with life, and weather-beaten of
the world, they played there in the mottled sunlight of that romantic
arbor, as might Ulysses have stood mistaken and unhonored by those who
had but heard of Troy. There was to me something suddenly overwhelming
in the situation. Oh, who was I, to enjoy so much, in such security; to
feast upon plenty, and to know the generous liberality of life, while
these, doomed to the duress of the gods, went through the world, day
after day, half-starved, playing miserable memorable music fearfully
off the key!
Perhaps I was intense; certainly I was young; and as certainly I had
all the eager vivid imagination of youth. Moreover, this was, it should
not be overlooked, my very first adventure, all my own, with the poor;
my first piece of entirely independent service to those mysterious
powers. Meanwhile, the divinities in disguise played on--a wild,
boisterous tune it was now, set to a rollicking measure and infinitely
more sad for that than the sighs of "Trovatore," or than sweet Alice
under the stone. Bent they seemed on sounding every stop. You may think
they were but a grimy pair, dull and squalid; probably embittered.
I can only tell you that they invoked for me that day, as with the
mournful powers of the Sibyl of Cumæ, love and life and death, and joy
irrevocable, and memory--these they called up to pass before me, and
bade them as they went, for one summoning moment, to reveal their faces
to me.
Presently, I do not know with what dark thoughts, these two would have
departed, but I remembered and begged them to stay. I flew upstairs and
found my purse, and emptied it, and gave them what it held. They took
it without thanks, merely as lawful tribute exacted. Again they would
have departed, but I begged them still to remain. Should this ancient
Zeus and Hermes be allowed to depart without bread? I disappeared into
the house with a beating heart. I found bread and milk and meat. I
brought these and set them out for them, and drew chairs for them. All
this, too, they took for granted, with some shrewd glances at me; they
shuffled their feet about under the table, bent low to their plates
like hungry men, and shoveled their food into their mouths dexterously
with their knives, the better, no doubt, to disguise their divinity.
While they ate, I went, with a heart troubled yet high, and gathered
for them grapes that hung immortally lovely in the sun. These too they
ate, with a more manifest pleasure, cleaning the bunches down to the
stems; and when they had made away with all they could, slipped the
remaining clusters in their pockets against a less hospitable occasion.
I remember that then they went and left me standing there in a world of
dreams and speculation and adventure. They had gone as they had come
but me they left forever changed. As they departed, certain doors in
my young days swung and closed mysteriously. For me the channels of
life were permanently deepened. With them had departed my complacent,
inexperienced attitude of mind; with them had fared forth the care-free
child that I had been. This adventure all my own, conducted in my own
manner, had initiated me into vast possibilities, the more impressive
because but dimly seen. On me had depended for a little while these two
of God knows what ancient descent. I too had begun to know and taste
life. I too would begin to count my memories. Oh, strange new world!
And with strange people in it!
On this world, enter, upper left stage, Leila the maid.
"Oh, Miss Laura, honey, what you bin' doin'? Dey ain't nothin' but
no-'count beggars, chile. Don't you know dey mought 'a' come indo's
and carried off all de silver? Dat's just de kind would steal fum you
when you warn't lookin'. I ain't right sho' now dey ain't got some o'
de silver in dey pockets!" And she took savage stock of what lay on the
table.
O Leila, ingenuous mind! Dearly as I loved her, how little she knew!
How far she was from understanding the habits and predilections of the
gods! Would they trouble, do you think, to take a silver knife or fork,
who can take away the priceless riches of childhood with them? Would
they pause to purloin a mere petty silver spoon, who can carry off an
entire golden period of your existence, and leave you with the leaden
questions and dull philosophy and heavy responsibility of older years?
I should have asked their names, that I might set these in my prayers,
but I had not had presence of mind enough to do that; so, that night,
while I knelt by my bed, alone in the moonlight, a very devout little
girl, there stood there, shadowy in the shadows, and among my nearest
and dearest, on whom I asked the Lord's blessing, the old harp and
violin; while, with my head buried passionately in my hands, I begged
Providence to have an especial care of these new friends of my heart,
to bless them, to let its face shine upon them, and to give them peace.
Musical beggars! I have seen them often since, in one guise or another.
Sometimes they trumpet on the trombone or cornet, or blow fearful
blasts upon the French horn; I have known them to finesse upon the
flute or flageolet. These differences are but inconsiderable. Always
I find them equally mighty. I have thought sometimes to get past them
with giving them only a great deal more than I could afford. Useless
frugality! futile economy! For still they will be laying ghostly hands
upon you; still will they be exacting a heavier tribute and demanding
that gold and silver of the soul which, as Plato is so well aware, is
how infinitely more precious.
Though to outward appearance they are busy with their instruments,
how they lay ghostly hands upon your imagination. How they conjure up
before the inward eye themselves as they might have been, to levy a new
tax upon you. The man with the horn, he who plays always off the key,
and always a little ahead of the others, he, it is now mysteriously
revealed to you, had meant perhaps, at the very least, to play in an
orchestra. And the baggy battered old violin was to have wiped his
heated brow with a grand gesture, and bowed condescendingly over his
collar to metropolitan audiences, had not his dreams so unaccountably
miscarried. And the old thread-bare harp-player, his shabbiness and
his bitter face to the contrary notwithstanding, had meant, had really
meant, to pluck some sweetness out of life. And the harp itself (yes,
even so extensive is the occult power they wield) makes its own special
appeal to you, and with its taste for delicacy seems suddenly like
a dull tormented thing, swaying and trembling under the stiff sullen
fingers of its master, there on the garish pavement--an instrument
which, but for the uncertainty of life (ah, the uncertainty of life!),
might have responded how devotedly, in the tempered light of a
curtained alcove, to the touch of delicate fingers.
All this they conjure up before the mind's eye, ere they stop their
excruciating playing. Then the violin, at the very moment that should
have been his gracious one, counts the miserably few pennies. The
sullen horn, his instrument tucked under his arm, goes on, still a
stave ahead of the rest, a sodden expression in his eyes. The old
harpist swings the harp rudely over his shoulder, and gives the strap
an extra twitch to ease the dull weight, and they are off to fresh
pavements and districts new. I have seen great tragedians. I have sat
through the sleep-walking scene in "Macbeth." I have heard Banquo
knock. I have seen Juliet waken too late in the Capulet tomb and call
for Romeo: "O comfortable friar! Where is my lord?" In my schoolgirl
days I saw Booth in his great parts; but none of these master-scenes
and fine harmonies have stirred in me so intolerable an emotion of pity
or sense of fatality as an old horn, or harp and violin, grouped on a
garish pavement, their lives dedicated to cheap music fearfully off the
key.
These are people of power, let appearances be what they may. You may
patronize them if you like, and look upon them as the downtrodden and
the dregs of existence. I am, indeed, not so hardy. I have read a
different fate in their groups and constellations.
III
MAJOR LOBLEY
There were other poor whose influence was potent in my childhood, but
I pass them by, to note but one more, of a curiously strong type,
who crossed my path when I might have been about sixteen. She was a
Salvation Army major,--Major Lobley,--and she had at her heels an army
of poor wretches, "flood-sufferers." That great river on which my
home town was situated had risen and overtrod its banks, spreading
devastation. As it happened, my mother had standing idle at that time
three or four small houses. Into these a large and variegated band
of "flood-sufferers" was assisted to move. They came, poor things,
bringing their lares and penates. One, whom I take to have been an
aristocrat among them, led a mule. Among them all, like a burst of
sunshine over a dark and variegated landscape, came Major Lobley and
the drum. It would make a better recital, I know, if I said that
she was beating it--but I am resolved to tell of things only as I
remember them. The drum, however, even though silent, was to the eye
sufficiently triumphant and sounding.
My acquaintance with Major Lobley began the morning after her
installation. We had already, for the comfort of her clan, parted with
all the available covers we could spare. She came seeking more. The
maid brought me her name. I went into the parlor to receive her and to
learn her errand. I take the liberty of reminding you that I was young
and proud, with a traditional training and conventional pride.
In that curtained and rather sombre room, there sat Major Lobley, like
a brilliant bit of sunshine. Before I knew what she was about, she was
on her feet, had hold of both my hands, had kissed me on both cheeks,
was holding me away from her a little,--a quick pleased gesture seen
oftener on the stage than off it,--and was saying dazzlingly, "Sister!
Are you saved?"
They tell me that even the bravest at the Yser were demoralized by the
first use of poisonous gases and other methods of warfare unknown,
even undreamed of, by them; and a like panic is said to have seized
the Germans at earliest sight of the British armored monsters which
ploughed over the ground disdainful of every obstacle, taking their own
tracks with them.
Major Lobley attacked me in a fashion I had never before even
dreamed of. She was carrying her own tracks with her. None of my own
aforethought invulnerable defenses were of the least use. She had
thrown down and traversed the most ancient barriers. She had attacked
me in the very intrenchments of my oldest traditions. Where were
dignity, convention, pride of place, custom of behavior, and other
supposedly impregnable defenses? Where were distinctions of class,
fortifications of good taste, intrenchments of haughtiness? Where were
reserve and other iron and concrete and barbed-wire entanglements? I
tell you, they were as though they were not! This glib inquiry about
my soul routed me, demoralized me so completely, that I do not even
remember what I said. I only know that I fled precipitately for safety
into the covert of the nearest subject. Was there anything she needed?
And how could I serve her?
At this she was eager.
"Well, I'll tell you! We need another comfort. Darius needs a comfort
for his mule. Darius is a good man and his soul is saved. Now couldn't
you lend another comfort to the Lord?"
"Yes," said I, in what now seems to me a kind of hypnotized state. "I
think I can find another for you." And I went myself and took it from
my bed.
She received it with hallelujahs and went away beaming, assuring me
as she went, and as on the authority of an ambassador, that I would
certainly have my reward.
I make no apology for all this. I know well that I was the weak and
routed one. I know that this gypsy from nowhere, with her lack of
advantages and her Cinderella training among the ashes and dregs of
life, had me at an astonishing disadvantage. I know that, while I stood
by, in my futile pride, she went off unaccountably, in a spangled
coach, as it were, carrying with her salvation and all the satisfaction
in the world, and happily possessed of the bed-covers without which I
was to sleep somewhat chilly that night.
But I think it due to myself to say that this weakness on my part
was not single. For weeks, months,--as long as she stayed in the
neighborhood,--Major Lobley swayed people as by a spell. One would have
sworn her drumstick was a wand. In theory, and out of her presence, we
younger ones declared her presuming and impossible, but were reduced
to serve her whenever she appeared. My mother and my elder sister, who
were experienced and better judges, continued to give her and her thin
ragged ranks daily help. Pans of biscuit, pots of soup, drifted in
that northwesterly direction as by some gulf stream of sympathy which
you might speculate and argue about all you liked, but whose course
remained mystical and unchanged.
One point I must not fail to mention. I had worried somewhat concerning
Darius's mule. There was, I knew, no shelter for him save a tiny
woodshed just about half his size. I pictured him standing there, with
only his forequarters or hindquarters sheltered, and the rest of him
the sport of the elements and the biting weather. Needless anxiety;
futile concern! I might have read a different fate for him in Orion and
Pleiades! Such anxiety comes of thinking too meanly of life. Darius had
a better opinion of it, and it may be with better cause. Perhaps he
argued that a power that was able to save his soul was perfectly well
able to look after his mule; and rendered expectant by this belief,
Darius's eyes saw what my less faithful ones would certainly have
overlooked, namely, that the comfortable kitchen of the little house,
with its sunshine and its neat wainscoting, made an ideal abiding-place
for his friend. Here, therefore, positively benefiting by misfortune
and like an animal in a fairy tale, the mule of Darius abode, and, no
doubt, more comfortably than ever in his life before; and even if his
meals continued to be meagre, he was enabled to eke them out with a
generous attention to the wainscoting.
You see! What can be said of a people like that, able to turn the most
unlikely things to strange and immediate uses, for all the world as the
fairy godmother did the pumpkin and the mice!
What stands out most clearly, as I remember Major Lobley, is neither
her scoop-bonnet, nor the drum, nor her solicitude for my soul, but
rather the way she managed, say rather contrived, to have us to do
whatever she wanted us to do. This was not accomplished by tact, not
by craft, not even by intelligence, certainly, I think, not by pity.
It was rather, I am persuaded, something ancient and inherited, and
not acquired in Major Lobley's brief span; something, rather, dating
back to gypsy centuries, God knows how many æons ago--something that
had ruled and triumphed, with sounding and loud timbrel, on countless
occasions before now; some freedom, some innate self-approval; some
linking, it would almost seem, of the powers of poverty with the
powers of the Deity.
Have it as you will, the finer appearance still clings to the
improvident. They give you color and incident without your asking; they
scatter romance and wonder with largesse, as kings. As mere memorable
characters, were not the old blind man and Musgrove and Major Lobley
worth the money and the anxiety they cost us? And who will contend
that Darius's tradition is not to be valued above a mere strip of
wainscoting and the cost of a few repairs?
I have long believed that Æsop needs rewriting in many instances,
and very especially in that of "The Grasshopper and the Ant." What
should be told--since Æsop's creatures are intended to exemplify human
behaviors and draw human morals--is how the Grasshopper spent the
winter with the Ant, and ate up all the Ant's preserves and marmalades,
and fiddled nightly and gayly by the Ant's fire, and managed somehow
to make the Ant feel that the privilege had been all her own, to
have labored long for the benefit of so interesting and so gifted a
gentleman.
I can recall from time to time, all through my childhood and girlhood,
that I and mine made a kind of festival of a like circumstance, and
how gladly we toiled for the benefit of that class which might be said
to winter perpetually on our sympathies. I do not allude merely to
tableaux, fairs, private theatricals, musicales, and the like, given
for the benefit of those who neither sowed nor gathered into barns. I
would be afraid to say how many times, from my early years, I was for
their sake a spangled fairy, a Queen Elizabeth court dame, an "Elaine,"
white, pallid, on a barge, dead of unrequited love, a Gainsborough
or Romney portrait, or a Huguenot lady parting from her lover, or a
demure "Priscilla," or a dejected "Mariana," or a shaken-kneed reciter
of verses, or a trembling performer on the piano. I remember that
there was a huge trunk in the old attic at home given over to nothing
but amateur theatrical properties. I remember coming home often from
dragging, wearisome rehearsals, how tired, but happy! What fun it was
to toil and practise and rehearse and labor until your little bones
ached "for the benefit of--!"
"For the benefit of"! I tell you it is a magic phrase! I remember my
mother coming home again and again,--from some charitable conclave I
suppose,--radiant and eager, as she so often was, to announce that we
were once more to be permitted to labor in response to its magic. Once,
after her attendance on some missionary meeting, it was conveyed to us
that we were to be allowed to dress fifty dolls "for the benefit of"
as many gregarious little grasshoppers of Senegambia, to the end that
their Christmas and our own should be the happier.
It had all the air of a fine adventure. It _was_ a fine adventure. I
really would not have missed it. Yet unless you have dressed, let us
say, thirty dolls, and know that twenty more remain naked, you can
hardly guess how doll-dressmaking may hang heavy, even on the most
eager fingers. I can still see them all in their pretty and varied
dresses, ranged triumphant at last on top of the old square piano,
that we might behold the labor of our hands--their feet straight ahead
of them, their eyes fixed, staring but noncommittal, supposedly on
Senegambia.
It seems to me now a gay, even though at the same time a somewhat
futile, thing to have done; but turn it as you will, the true privilege
was ours.
We and our forebears, you see, had in perfect innocence laid by a
few stores through the generations. We had preserved and retained
certain standards and comfortable customs and conveniences of living;
certain traditions, too, of education and treasures of understanding;
by which token it became our privilege to entertain and provide for
those cicada souls who had followed the more romantic profession of
fiddling; and that we might have our privilege to the full, we were
graciously permitted to set out preserves, not merely for the swarming
grasshoppers of our own land: it was vouchsafed us to sustain and
supply with dolls and other delights the appealing little grasshoppers
of Senegambia.
Recalling all my childhood and girlhood experience with the poor, I
am led by every path of logic to believe that they have some secret
power of their own--some divine right and authority by which they rule,
beside which the most ancient dynasties are but tricks of evanescence,
and the infallibility of the Pope a mere political exigency. The powers
they wield would seem to me unique. Show me a dictatorship, empire,
oligarchy, system, or a suzerainty, seignory or pashawlic, which
presides over and possesses anything commensurate with their realm;
which sways and commands anything comparable to their wide dominion!
Will you show me any other people outside of the fairy-books who can
put the most fearful calamity on like a cloak and doff it at will, who
can augment their families to seven or eight children overnight, and
reduce them as readily to five or six the following day, if it but seem
to them advisable? Where outside their ranks is there any one capable
of persuading you that it is a privilege to sleep cold so that some
Darius you never saw or care to see shall, he and his allegorical mule,
go better warmed? Who else, being neither of your kith nor kin, has
such power over you that, with a mere bloodshot eye and shiver of the
shoulders, he can turn your automobile, your furs, your warmth, and all
your pleasant pleasures into Dead Sea apples of discomfort? Or, did any
of your own class, by merely playing "Ben Bolt," raggedly and horribly
off the key, under a grape-arbor, exercise so great a power over you
that, having given him what you had, you went awed and chastened of
all vanity, and set his name in your prayers that night as the Church
service does the king? Are these people of rank who can do this? Or
will you still cling to your aristocracies?
It is likely that I shall be accused of sentimentality. Some will say
that to talk of the power of the poor is but cruel irony. If I would
speak wisely and not as one of the foolish women, let me live and work
among the poor, or better still, be of them. This is the only way
fairly to judge them.
I am of a like opinion; and am therefore resolved to ask you to let
me speak of a later time when I myself was poor, and of the wider
knowledge of the powers of the poor which that circumstance afforded
me. For, in my advantageous days, I was permitted only to serve the
poor, the discouraged, the improvident; later, I was promoted to be, at
least in a measure, of their fellowship.
IV
MAMIE FAFFELFINGER
The _nouveaux pauvres_ are, I believe, as a rule, fully as awkward with
their poverty as the _nouveaux riches_ with their wealth. They have not
the true grand manner. They are not a whit more born to the rags than
your suddenly prosperous parvenu to the purple. It is difficult to be
at ease with them. Their behaviors, their manners, their speech, more
often their silences, are forever reminding you of their former mode of
living.
For these and other reasons, I willingly pass over those intervening
years, when, though distinctly poor, I was unaccustomed, and wore my
changed conditions, I do not doubt, awkwardly. I pass on to a later
and more fixed season when, thrown wholly now on my own resources, and
totally untrained and unfitted for such an emergency, I made shift to
support myself, to live meagrely, and to endure what I took to be a
well-nigh intolerable poverty.
Poverty is a variable term and much subject to comparison. Some
will allow it only to those who have been born to it. To have been
always half-starved, these think, and to carry a basket from door to
door--_that_ is to be poor. But it is idle to think of cold and hunger
to the point of beggary as the only cold and hunger there are. Not
alone are there degrees of cold and hunger of the body,--discomfortable
and ill-nourished living,--but there are, as well, things which seem
to me even more difficult to endure--unsatisfied hunger of the mind
and heart and a most cruel and persistent chill of the spirit. The
literal-minded may need to see the open sore, the sightless eye, or
the starved countenance, before their pity is moved; but he who has
ever touched the spiritual values will know--with a tenderness that
is mercy--that in one who never asked for pity, one who perhaps even
went outwardly gay, there may be hidden hurts borne unflinchingly;
intolerable darknesses not complained of; crippled powers which once
went proud and free; and a heart and mind which have endured, it
may be, starved hours. These are, I believe, some of the most real
poverties that the soul may be called on to endure.
Yet, God forbid that, having tasted some of them, I should not bear
true witness! There are some hidden springs in these also. Here also,
in what you would take to be so dry, so arid a land, there will have
been wells and fountains, and locusts and honey for those cut off from
their kind. But of these things I would speak later. I wish at present
to tell of my further adventures with the poor, when I myself had
become more nearly one of them.
Under the conditions I have mentioned my life had of course changed
greatly. Most of the old fond bonds were broken; but there were new and
even closer ones to be assumed, newer and larger responsibilities to be
undertaken.
In every circumstance of our lives lies the stirring knowledge that
one's own case, however strange, is far from being singular. There are
others besides myself with whom Poverty has taken up its abode; there
are others from whose cup Despair has daily drunk; who, looking up from
their daily bread, have found Sorrow's eyes forever on them. Those who
have known these cup-companions need not be told how the House of Life
can be darkened, or how these darker presences occupy the chambers of
the mind. Nor need they yet be reminded how all this becomes bearable,
even enduringly precious to the heart, if Love but remains, and
consents still to sit at the board, and, though with brows bent, still
breaks bread with its white hands, and lifts in its unshaken fingers
the cup of bitter wine.