her in the silence and shadows of the intervening years. She had with
her shrewd eye found me out. She had come, like the blind man, not
to exact money of me, no; but like a witch disembodied, and through
the mail, she had come to levy a more precious tax--to collect as of
old the old sympathetic affection; the old toll I had paid her so
often before; the tribute she had demanded and received times without
number--not for labors rendered, no, nor for accountable values
received, but rather by a kind of royal prerogative. Indeed, I take it
to be a thing proved, to which this is but slight additional testimony,
that these are, how much more than kings,--and it would seem by the
grace of God,--sovereigns and rulers over us.
But there is still further testimony, of another order, which I feel
called on to bear.
VII
MARGHARETTA
When we first went to live in the country, in the old house of which I
have written, we had a sufficiently large task merely to make the house
itself livable. But as time went on, we attempted to do a very little
farming.
How greatly did this broaden and extend my experience as to the poor!
There were the boys from ten to sixteen who came (again, these were
those whose condition needed improving) to do work on the farm for the
summers: Joseph, the Hebrew, who from his long and elaborate prayers
should have been at least a priest of the Temple; Lester, so practised
in picking locks and purloining that it was sheer waste of genius to
place him in a home like ours, where jewelry and other returns for his
skill were so slender. He did the best he could with the circumstances,
but how meagre they were, after all!
There was the little girl, too, who could dance and recite and sing
ragtime, having done so in vaudeville. Our home offered her neither
audience nor stage, nor was there a footlight in the house. And there
was the young Apollo, who at the least could have shepherded the sheep
of Admetus; we had no sheep--only one cow.
Then there was Ernest, capable of really heroic devotion. How far did
our possibilities fall short of his gifts! I did not engage him--he
engaged me. I was setting out the disadvantages as usual, when he
blurted out generously, "I like you, and I am going to take this
position!" He was blond, German, of the perfectly good-natured type,
and of heroic proportions. But, like the ancient heroes of his race,
he was fond of the cup that both cheers and inebriates. I used to
remonstrate with him and received always one answer, given stubbornly:
"You know I'd jump in the river for you!"
I tried my best to show him that what was desirable was, not that
he should fling himself into the river, only that he should refrain
from the cup! Useless, useless! He wanted a more royal opportunity.
To be sober, trustworthy, honorable, daily dependable--these were too
trifling! Give him something worthy of his powers! The unlikely and
surprising were pleasing to his temperament. He would how generously
neglect his work to bring home from the field rabbits, which he shot
with an old muzzle-loader, requiring days of toil before it could be
got to work at all. Once he produced a pheasant. Lacking the Nemean
lion, he butchered a pig, and smoked the pork for me, by an incredibly
laborious method, under two barrels, one on top of the other. He hewed
down trees with terrible strokes, and built me with Herculean effort a
corn-crib of gigantic size to hold a handful of corn he had raised.
All these things, while I appreciated them, left his grave fault
uncorrected. But to rebuke him on this score was to quarrel with
Hercules for some trifling mistake in his spinning. "You _know_ I would
jump in the river for you!" he would reiterate.
There really is something ample in their conceptions of life which
goes beyond our small bickerings as to honor and honesty. There is a
largeness about them which makes our code look small indeed.
After Ernest's departure, another came for a few months, who had
surprising resources. He made a practice of bringing me gifts from I do
not know where--strawberries, asparagus, and other delicacies, given
him presumably, and for the most part, by gardeners of gentlemen's
estates in the outlying land--"friends of his."
I suggested, with misgivings as to ethics, that I ought to pay for
these things; but he smiled benevolently, as a king on a subject, and
with a manner as bounteous. I had the impression that the world was his.
In the face of his generosities, I felt my behaviors to be feeble and
inadequate. These were bounties of a kind to which I was unaccustomed
and parvenu, I who had none of the ancient quarterings which would
have entitled me to such gratuities; I who had been brought up to the
deplorably plebeian idea that one must pay for what one takes.
These are occasions, when, frankly, I am at a loss how to deport
myself. I do not know the behaviors befitting. My etiquette does not
go so far; and Chesterfield, who covers so many points, stops short of
this: he says nothing on the subject.
Oh, royal ways! Oh, fine prerogatives! What hope have I, who am but
descended from the founders of a mere country, from men who fought
and poured out their blood rather than pay for what they did not
receive--what hope is there that I shall ever attain to that gracious
and lordly company which receives, as a right, that for which it does
not pay!
I have named but a few of these princely characters and their
deportments; but remembering them all and weighing all their
values, I believe that "the brightest jewel in my crown wad" still
be--Margharetta.
I have never been entirely certain that Margharetta was not descended
from the Bourbons. Her husband was in jail for theft, and was a poet.
"I will show you some of his poetry," she promised me in the first five
minutes of my acquaintance with her. "Some of my friends say he is as
great a poet as Shakespeare."
Like Marie Antoinette, she had three children. Her husband's misfortune
had made it necessary to put these under the care of others. She talked
of them incessantly, and assured me that no heart could bleed like a
mother's.
As we drove up from the station, she looked all about her, with the air
of a Siddons.
"Wouldn't Ethel enjoy this scenery!" she remarked, still very grand,
but almost awed, it seemed. "She's such a poetic child!" (Ethel was the
oldest, a little girl of ten.) "And these trees!" she said solemnly, as
we entered the grave lordly shadows of the hemlocks. "Wouldn't Richard
enjoy them, now!" (Richard was the Dauphin, aged six.)
When we at last got to the house, and she entered the kitchen in her
grand manner, it seemed to grow large--as the lintels and chambers
of the Greeks are said to have done when the gods visited them. The
walls seemed to widen out, and the pans and kettles took on a shining
stateliness. I have difficulty when writing of her to keep myself to
fact, so gracious, so spacious, was her manner. I know, for instance,
that her dresses all dipped a little at the back, yet I have the
greatest temptation to say she wore a court train, so much was that
the enlarging impression that she at all times conveyed. She was the
most dominating personality, I believe, that I have ever known. Like
a French verb, she seemed to cover and account for all possibilities.
She reminded you of the infinitive, the subjunctive, the future, the
indicative, the _plus-que-parfait_. Entering the dining-room, her
handsome hands bearing--always a little aloft--the corned beef or pot
roast that should have been a peacock at the very least, she conveyed,
silently, time and tense and person, passive and active: "I am"; "let
us love"; "let us have"; "thou hast"; "I have _not_"; "_if_ I had!"
Early in her career, I asked her what desserts she could make.
She turned her full Bourbon eyes on me. She had no need to lift her
head: it was constitutionally, structurally high.
"I can't make any," she said, with firmness and finality. "We bought
all _our_ desserts at the delicatessen."
So, without anger, only with dignity, she managed to put me in my place.
Added to the many unconscious appeals that Margharetta was forever
making to me, she finally made a direct one. Informing me once more
that no heart could bleed like a mother's, she begged to be allowed to
have, if it were only one of her children with her, the little girl
aged ten. I consented, and went myself to fetch her.
She was a beautiful child. She had a great deal of Margharetta's own
handsome, insolent beauty, but she had in addition a craft and ability
for lying and deception astounding in one so young. Ten years old by
the calendar she no doubt was; but by sundry other reckonings, she
might have been ten thousand--a strange, pathetic, puzzling little
girl.
For a time Margharetta's heart was staunched. But ere long it
began to bleed afresh for the one who was, it was now clear, her
dearest--Richard, the little Dauphin. She would stand looking out of
the window, the picture of wretchedness. "He is such an angelic little
fellow! I can't begin to tell you! Oh, if I could only see him! If I
could only have him in my arms once more!"
I make no apology. I only tell the event, perhaps a little
shamefacedly. It was not long after this that I went and fetched
Richard also.
If his sister was ten thousand, Richard was, I think, of prehistoric
origin. He had carried over from the Stone Age a strange ability for
having his own way at heavy cost. He had never been in the country. His
passion for flowers would have been a hopeful and poetic thing, had
it but been accompanied by a knowledge of what flowers were. He would
appear in full rapture, bearing a huge bouquet of young bean-plants or
a large nosegay of freshly planted cabbages. Never, despite my faithful
efforts, did he lose his passionate love of flowers, and never, despite
my equally faithful endeavors, did he learn to know what flowers were.
I think that they were to him anything that could be gathered with
greatest ease in largest bunches. With this definition in mind, it will
be seen that a vegetable garden offers superlative opportunities.
Margharetta could see in all this nothing but a newly interesting phase
of her darling. I was there when he brought her his third generous
bouquet. She took it into her gracious handsome hands, held it off a
little, then appealed to me for appreciation:--
"Now, isn't that his mother's boy? He brings everything to _me_."
I had explained to Margharetta before, that, right as filial affection
undoubtedly is, the gathering of young tomato-plants from the garden
had come to be fearfully wrong. I now repeated this severely, then
addressed the Dauphin direct.
"You are never, _never_ to gather anything from the garden again; do
you understand?"
Back went the Dauphin's head suddenly; his face became a purple mask of
tragedy; his eyes rained intolerable tears; he broke forth into a most
wild and tragic wail.
Margharetta stooped, gathered him to her bosom with one of her finest
gestures, lifted him sobbing in her arms, laid his head against her
shoulder, held it there with a possessive queenly hand, and with a
colder look thrown at me, I am sure, than ever the Bourbons threw at
the mob, carried him upstairs.
Later she explained to me haughtily what the Dauphin had meanwhile
explained to her--he had been _told_ to gather those plants.
"_Told_ to gather them?"
"Yes. Come, lamb, tell just what Tony said to you."
"Tony said," began Richard, a little breathless, but resolved, and
twisting and braiding his fingers as he spoke, "Tony said, 'You can
have _all_ the flowers you want, _every_ day, and I think your mother
would like the tomato-plants best.'"
This sudden opera-bouffe turn of affairs really took me off my feet.
When I suggested that it was quite certain that Tony would contradict
Richard's statement, Margharetta's reply was perfectly consistent. Did
I suppose she would take the word of "a no-account Eye-talian" against
that of her darling?
So I found myself once more face to face with that total disregard
of fact and probabilities which I had now come to know as one of the
leading characteristics of her class. It was for me to remember that
miracle waits upon them; that nothing is improbable to them if it but
coincide with their desires; that truth shall not serve them unless it
goes dressed in their livery. Nothing could be done about the matter.
We were at a deadlock. What were mere logic and reason? What are they
ever, in the face of a faith chosen and adhered to?
Margharetta stood firm in an unshaken faith in her own, while I
departed, to wonder why it is that humanity deports itself as decently
as it does, with these dark powers, not only at work in it, but hugely
at work in it, all the while.
The days went on. In the course of becoming acquainted with the
country, the little Princess and the Dauphin underwent, of course, many
tragic adventures. Though they had me so well in command that I ran to
do their bidding, or flew to their rescue, at a mere summoning shriek,
wind, water, fire, cats, dogs, cows, horses, poison ivy, snapping
turtles, and sundry other folk were not so biddable.
This recalcitrancy led to tragedies innumerable. When either or both
children were hurt by some fact or reality which by mere royal habit
they had haughtily ignored, and when they were beaten in the fray and
wounded, Margharetta was as one bereft of her senses. Panic seized
her. She flung herself upon my mercy and my intelligence. She wrung
her hands. She was distraught. She could do nothing herself for her
darlings, but was wild with gratitude, and watched with tragic animal
eyes everything that I was able to do for them. How wonderful I was at
such moments! How could she ever thank me! Then from my ministrations
she would receive into her arms the battered Princess or dilapidated
Dauphin, as it might have been from the hands of a relented Providence.
My own glory lasted only during the danger, however. Her darlings
secure, she was not long in reascending her throne, and continued to
behave with entire consistency as to her probable ancestry. She was
the only real queen, with all a queen's regality and insolence, that
I have ever dealt with. It is clear to me now that I was hypnotized
by her manner to think it a privilege to be of use to her in the
calamities of herself and her family. It is true I did at last make a
fearful revolutionary stand for liberty, and bundled her and the young
Princess of ten and ten thousand and the little prehistoric Dauphin
off one day, and began as best I could to reconstruct life; but not
before I had come fearfully near, in the Versailles manner in which
Margharetta had conducted herself and our kitchen, being a "condition"
myself.
It is now five years ago, "of a sunny morning," since they left us,
and the post brought me the other day a short letter from Margharetta
enclosing a "poem" by her husband, on the death of the little girl.
She "wanted me to know." I feel quite sure that the letter was divided
between sorrow for her loss and pride in her husband's performance.
The circumstance touched me more than I would have supposed possible.
I thought of course of a mother's "bleeding heart." Poor Margharetta,
for all her queenliness and all her disregard of fact, brought at last
with the humblest of us to face the one supreme reality; and weaving
as best she could some fancy about that, too, and turning away her face
from it toward some consolation of reunion which (the verses promised
this) was to be given her in another life, and, I doubt not, also
toward the pride in this life of being wedded to a man (let us waive
the matter of the jail) who could write poetry, and was, some thought,
"as great as Shakespeare."
VIII
THE POWERS OF THE POOR
That the poor have strange, one might almost say occult, powers, seems
to me proved. The downtrodden with whom I dealt were, so far as I could
judge, the very pies and daws of existence, who, one might reasonably
suppose, would be grateful for whatever hips and haws and other chance
berries the bleak winter of their calamities left them. Nothing could
be further from the truth. They lived, rather, it would seem, on canary
seed and millet, maize and sesame, not obtainable in the open markets
of the world. I fell under the strange delusion that they were to labor
for me, and that, for a wage agreed upon, they were to relieve me of
care. Again, how wide of the mark was this! They expected to be looked
after like queen bees, and they _were_! I myself laboring from flower
to flower for them, and filling their cells with honey.
You may think them as stupid as you like, and as inconsiderable. Deal
with them but long enough, and you shall have strange suspicions. You
shall begin to note a growing and undeniable likeness in these to
"Cinderella" and "The Youngest Brother." Nor are these fairy tales,
mind you, safe and unbelievable, shut up there in your Grimm and
Andersen on the shelf, to be taken down only at pleasure; no, but fairy
tales potent and indisputable, hoeing your potatoes, walking about in
the flesh in your kitchen, and hanging out your clothes of a Monday.
There is, indeed, some royalty about this class that bodes as ill for
us to ignore, as it is alarming for us to contemplate. If the Lord be
for them,--and there is every reason, historical and romantical, to
suppose that He is,--who then can be against them? Turn, Fortune,
turn thy wheel, but these can never be lowered! These, I take it, are
in their own manner imperial spirits, let kings and royal successions
be what they may. Here, without cabinets or ministers, or executive or
administrative cares to weigh upon them, yet with what authority they
go clothed!
It is astounding, if one only becomes poor enough,--I say it in all
soberness and sincerity,--how rich and powerful one may become. And
perhaps just here it is my duty to submit a testimony I have up to this
time withheld. I have said that I myself have been poor, but I have
as yet said nothing of the strange unlooked-for loftiness that this
circumstance lent me. While I was of the wealthy, I strongly maintained
that these, and what we are wont to call the "upper classes," have the
very considerable advantage, and believed it with all my heart. But no
sooner was I downright poor, uncertain even where the next meals were
to come from, than the potion, the charm, the necromancy, the delusion,
or the truth,--have it which you will!--began to work, and I myself to
have a subtle suspicion, and at last a positive sense, of superiority.
Who never ate his bread with tears,
He knows ye not, ye heavenly powers!
The wealthy, the advantageous began to dwindle in my eyes. How poor
they were in real experience, in sympathy, in understanding; how
wanting in fine feeling; how destitute, for the most part, of that
only wealth worth acquiring,--wealth of the heart!--whereas, the
poorer I was, the greater the wealth of understanding that was mine;
as my moneys dwindled, I was made rich of the universe; a new sense
of love and bounty was given me as by an unlooked-for legacy. The
vast tired multitude going home at night, all these suddenly were my
own--my brothers and my sisters; further, it may be noted, I acquired
the wealthy also. These too became my brothers, more chill and starved
sometimes (I knew this now) in their luxuries than the "poor" in their
destitution. Could one, indeed, knowing any of the real values, feel a
bitterness toward such? or could one fail to experience, having known
any of the true humilities of life, a love for these also?
Let it sound as paradoxical as it may,--I do not say it
unadvisedly,--poverty is an enrichment, and often enough a grandeur.
Here, indeed, in this fact--I think it by no means unlikely--may lie
the explanation of many a humorously high behavior and lordliness in
those of whom I have more particularly told. If this be truth, as I
take it to be, then it lends consistency, even if a little quaint, to
what threatened to seem but unwarrantable chaos.
Is it not probable, remembering my own experience, that Musgrove,
Mamie, Margaret, and the others had with their very indigence acquired
a compensating fortune and, by reason of their very destitution,
inherited, as by lofty bequest, the universe? It should not be
forgotten, moreover, that I had come to these distinctions only after
years of comfortable living, whereas those I have told you of had been
born to the purple of their poverty. I, in serving others, have never
yet been able to give myself the ample airs of a Margharetta. I have
never found it possible to pull pennies out of people's pockets by the
Æschylean tragedy of my condition, or to draw pity at will out of
their hearts. I am smitten with silence when trouble and difficulty
assail me, and I have an intolerable instinct against asking for the
sympathy and commiseration of others; whereas those better accustomed
than myself,--as I have shown you,--how readily are they able to
requisition your sympathy, to appropriate wholly your pity, and to
confiscate your possessions, your theories, and your ethics!
Yet we, mind you, in the face of these abilities, have assumed them to
be our inferiors, and have organized for them frankly a society for the
improvement of their condition! That we can mitigate their sufferings
and inconveniences, lessen their cold or their hunger, I willingly
admit; but I am not of so bold an intellect as to believe that we can
improve their condition, or that their condition, take it for all in
all, can be improved upon.
If you doubt such testimony as I have borne, and think it too personal,
there is other more general and considerable. Were not Egypt and all
her power despised and triumphed over by "a colony of revolted Egyptian
slaves"? Did not proud Rome go down, also, to a like downtrodden
people? Picture what Rome was in her might--Rome tracing her ancestry
to the gods! And then look upon her bowed down in slavish subserviency
to kiss the shoe of a poor fisherman!
And the poor then, who called themselves Christians--as now you would
have called them underlings, menials, subalterns. Yes, and so they
were. And they lived precariously in caves and catacombs under the
surveillance of the emperor's guards, as our most scurvy poor under the
police. Yet see them to-day, with dominion over palm and pine, and with
control of the earth's continents. And where now are the Roman emperors?
History teems with such instances. With what scorn do you suppose the
mighty Persians in their glittering armor might have looked upon those
few youths who in the dawn "sat combing their long hair for death"
before Marathon? When the nameless poor murmured outside the gates of
Versailles, what would any of us have given for the brief lineage or
trumpery royalty of a Marie or a Louis? It would not have sold for a
franc to any one with a head for business. Even as these poor people
shook the gates, almost the haughtiest queen of history was already on
her way, then, and at their bidding, to become the Widow Capet. And
that, too, for only a little while, and by sufferance, before they
hurried her on to the last level of all.
There may seem to be about them at first a marked futility. Only wait,
and you shall see what a power they have! Is there need that they
should pique or plume themselves or strut? They have no need to cut
a dash. The herald's office could add nothing to their stature. Here
is no newness or recency, no innovation; here rather are tradition,
custom, something time-honored, however little you may think it
venerable. Here is immemorial usage, "whereof the memory of man runneth
not to the contrary."
And have these continued in the world in predominating numbers, despite
misfortune, calamity, catastrophe? No; mind you, rather because
of these! Think of a race with that ability! Since Cain fell into
misfortune and was shielded of the Almighty, and Lazarus, for a like
reason, lacked not a divine advocate, have these not had the special
protection of God? Can you show me any people of lands and property,
of thrift and saving habits, of full granaries and honest provident
stores laid by, who were guided by a pillar of cloud by day and of fire
by night? who had manna and quail supplied them; and an entire land
swept clean of its rightful owners by the Lord's hand, so that they
might come into it instead, to enjoy the wells they had not digged, and
the fruits thereof which neither had they planted?