That winter of my editorship wore away to the adjournment of the
legislature and my father's return home, after J. W.'s withdrawal into
the vague of Wisconsin. But now another beloved friend had come to us.
He had learned his trade with us in southern Ohio, where he lived with
our family like one of ourselves, as brotherly as if he had been of our
blood. In those days he and I read the same books and dreamed the same
dreams, but he was nearer my eldest brother in age, and was as much his
companion as mine. After he left us to live the wander-years of the
journeyman printer, we heard from him at different points where he
rested, and when the Civil War began in Kansas, five years before it
began in South Carolina, we knew of him fighting and writing on the Free
State side. In this time, my brother made it his romance to promote a
correspondence between H. G. and a young girl of the village, which
ended in their engagement. It was taking too great a risk in every way,
but they were fitly mated in their tastes, and their marriage was of
such lasting attachment that when she survived him and lay suffering in
her last sickness, she prayed every night that she might die before she
woke and be with him in the everlasting morning. Romance for romance, I
think their romance of the greatest pathos of any I have known, and it
had phases of the highest tragedy. H. G. was among the first to
volunteer for the great war, and quickly rose from the ranks to be
captain, but somehow he incurred the enmity of a superior officer who
was able to have him cashiered in dishonor from the army. The great war
which we look back upon as hallowed by a singleness of patriotic purpose
was marked by many private wrongs which were promptly revenged, or kept
for ultimate vengeance, sometimes forgone at last through the wearing
out of the hate which cherished them. I am glad to think this was so
with H. G.; his memory is very dear to me, and our friendship was of a
warmth of affection such as I did not know for J. W., though he had so
much greater charm for me, and in the communion of our minds I was so
much more intimate with him.
Earlier in his absence, I had grown more and more into intellectual
companionship with the eldest of my sisters, who was only little more
than a year younger than myself. We had gone to the village parties and
dances and sleigh-rides together, but she was devoted to my mother and
the helper in her work, and gave herself far less than I to the
pleasures which had palled upon me; she may never have cared for them
much; certainly not so much as for the household life. It is one of
those unavailing regrets which gather upon us if we question memory as I
am doing now, and try to deal honestly with the unsparing truth of its
replies, that I ignored so long her willingness to be my companion in
the things of the mind. With my mother it was a simple affair; I was
bound to her in an affection which was as devoted throughout my youth as
it had been in my childhood; she was herself the home which I suffered
such longing for if I ever left it; and I am now, in my old age, humbly
grateful for the things I was prompted to do in my love of her. I could
not, without an effect of exaggeration unworthy of her dear memory,
express my sense of her motherly perfection within the limits of her
nature, which I would not now have had different through worldly
experience or privilege. She had, like my father, the instinct of
poetry; and over what was left of her day's work for the long evenings
which we spent reading or talking or laughing together, while my father
selected copy for his paper without losing the fun we all made, she was
gay with the gayest of us. Often I had savagely absented myself from the
rest, but when I came out of my little study, dazed with my work, after
the younger children had gone to bed, I have the vision of her rolling
her sewing together in her lap, and questioning me with her fond eyes
what I was thinking of or had been trying to do.
I believe she did not ask; that was forbidden by my pride and shame. I
did not read to any of them what I had been writing; they would not have
been hard enough upon it to satisfy me, though if they had criticized it
I should have been furious. In fact, I was not an amiable or at least a
reasonable youth; it was laid upon me to try solitarily for the things I
had no help in doing, and I seldom admitted any one to the results until
that sister of mine somehow passed my ungracious reserves. I do not know
just how this happened; but perhaps it was through our confiding to each
other, brokenly, almost unspokenly, our discontent with the village
limit of our lives. Within our home we had the great world, at least as
we knew it in books, with us, but outside of it, our social experience
dwindled to the measure of the place. I have tried to say how uncommon
the place was intellectually, but we disabled it on that side because it
did not realize the impossible dreams of that great world of wealth, of
fashion, of haughtily and dazzlingly, blindingly brilliant society,
which we did not inconveniently consider we were altogether unfit for.
The reader may or may not find a pathos in our looking at the
illustration on the front of a piece of tawdry sheet-music, and
wondering whether it would ever be our high fortune to mingle with a
company of such superbly caparisoned people as we saw pictured there,
playing and singing and listening.
Vanity so criminal as ours, might have been for a just punishment
lastingly immured in that village which the primeval woods encircled
like a prison wall; and yet almost at that moment, when we had so
tardily discovered ourselves akin in our tastes, our hopes and despairs,
we were nearer the end of our imprisonment than we could have imagined.
Whether we were punished in our enlargement which we were both so near,
I cannot say; my own life since that time has been such as some know and
any may know who care, and of hers I may scarcely speak. After a few
happy weeks, a few happy months of our common escape, she went back to
those bounds where her duty lay; and when after many years she escaped
from them again it was to circumstances where she was so willingly
useful as to feel herself very happy. Her last dream, one of being
usefuler yet to those dearest to her, ended in a nightmare of
disappointment; but that too had wholly passed before she woke to the
recompense which we try to believe that death shall bring to all who
suffer here to no final good.
Now it was life full beyond our fondest expectations, if not our fancies
of its possibilities, which lured us forward. We were making the most of
our mutual interest in the books we were reading, and she was giving, as
sisters give so far beyond the giving of brothers, her sympathy to me in
what I was trying to write. It was some time since I had turned, upon
the counsel of J. W., from Greek to German, I forget from just what
reasoning, though I think it was because he said I could study Greek any
time, and now we could study German together. I had gone so far with it
that I was already reading Heine and trying to write like him, instead
of reading my Spanish poets and trying to imitate them in their own
meters. But there is scarcely any definite memory of my sister's
literary companionship left me. I remember her coming to me once with
the praise, which I shame-facedly refused, of the neighbor who had
pointed to a row of Washington Irving's works in her house, and said
that some day my books would fill a shelf like that. For the rest, I am
dimly aware of our walking summer evenings down a certain westward way
from our house, and of her helping me dream a literary future. If she
had then a like ambition she kept it from me, and it was not till twenty
years later that she sent me a play she had written, with village
motives and village realities, treated with a frankness which I still
had not the intelligence to value. The play never came to the stage, and
in that farther time, it was the fruition of hopes which had not defined
themselves, that when my father's scheme was realized, not only I, but
she too, was to return to Columbus with him. It would be easy to
pretend, and I can easily believe that we had always, at the bottom of
our hearts, thought of Columbus with distinct longing; but I am not sure
that there was more in our remembrance of it than a sense of its
greatness as the state capital to give direction to our ambition for
some experience of the world beyond our village. There was no part for
her in our journalistic plan; probably the affair for her was an outing
which she had won by her unselfish devotion to the duties of her narrow
lot; but what I am sure of, and what I am glad of now, amidst my
compunctions for not valuing her loving loyalty at its true worth, is
that she did have this outing.