XV

When Gabriella awoke on that same morning after the storm, she too

ascertained that her shutters could not be opened. But Gabriella did

not go down into the kitchen for hot water to melt the ice from the

bolts and hinges. She fled back across the cold matting to the

high-posted big bed and cuddled down solitary into its warmth again,

tucking the counterpane under her chin and looking out from the pillows

with eyes as fresh as flowers. Flowers in truth Gabriella's eyes

were--the closing and disclosing blossoms of a sweet nature. Somehow

they made you think of earliest spring, of young leaves, of the

flutings of birds deep within a glade sifted with golden light,

fragrant with white fragrance. They had their other seasons: their

summer hours of angry flash and swift downpour; their autumn days of

still depths and soberness, and autumn nights of long, quiet rainfalls

when no one knew. One season they lacked: Gabriella's eyes had no

winter.

Brave spirit! Had nature not inclined her to spring rather than autumn,

had she not inherited joyousness and the temperamental gayety of the

well-born, she must long ago have failed, broken down. Behind her were

generations of fathers and mothers who had laughed heartily all their

days. The simple gift of wholesome laughter, often the best as often

the only remedy for so many discomforts and absurdities in life--this

was perhaps to be accounted among her best psychological heirlooms.

Her first thought on awaking late this morning (for she too had been

kept awake by the storm) was that there could be no school. And this

was only Friday, with Saturday and Sunday to follow--three whole

consecutive days of holiday! Gabriella's spirits invariably rose in a

storm; her darkest days were her brightest. The weather that tried her

soul was the weather which was disagreeable, but not disagreeable

enough to break up school. When she taught, she taught with all her

powers and did it well; when not teaching, she hated it with every

faculty and capacity of her being. And to discharge patiently and

thoroughly a daily hated work--that takes noble blood.

Nothing in the household stirred below. The members of the family had

remained up far into the night. As for the negroes, they understand how

to get a certain profit for themselves out of all disturbances of the

weather. Gabriella was glad of the chance to wait for the house-girl to

come up and kindle her fire--grateful for the luxury of lying in bed on

Friday morning, instead of getting up to a farmer's early breakfast,

when sometimes there were candles on the table to reveal the localities

of the food! How she hated those candles, flaring in her eyes so early!

How she loved the mellow flicker of them at night, and how she hated

them in the morning--those early-breakfast candles!

In high spirits, then, with the certainty of a late breakfast and no

school, she now lay on the pillows, looking across with sparkling eyes

at last night's little gray ridge of ashes under the bars of her small

grate. Those hearthstones!--when her bare soles accidentally touched

one on winter mornings, Gabriella was of the opinion that they were the

coldest bricks that ever came from a fiery furnace. There was one thing

in the room still colder: the little cherrywood washstand away over on

the other side of the big room between the windows,--placed there at

the greatest possible distance from the fire! Sometimes when she peeped

down into her wash-pitcher of mornings, the ice bulged up at her like a

white cannon-ball that had gotten lodged on the way out. She jabbed at

it with the handle of her toothbrush; or, if her temper got the best of

her (or the worst), with the poker. Often her last act at night was to

dry her toothbrush over the embers so that the hair in it would not be

frozen in the morning.

Gabriella raised her head from the pillows and peeped over at the

counterpane covering her. It consisted of stripes of different colors,

starting from a point at the middle of the structure and widening

toward the four sides. Her feet were tucked away under a bank of plum

color sprinkled with salt; up her back ran a sort of comet's tail of

puddled green. Over her shoulder and descending toward her chin, flowed

a broadening delta of well-beaten egg.

She was thankful for these colors. The favorite hue of the farmer's

wife was lead. Those hearthstones--lead! The strip of oilcloth covering

the washstand--lead! The closet in the wall containing her

things--lead! The stair-steps outside--lead! The porches down

below--lead! Gabriella sometimes wondered whether this woman might not

have had lead-colored ancestors.

A pair of recalcitrant feet were now heard mounting the stair: the

flowers on the pillow closed their petals. When the negro girl knelt

down before the grate, with her back to the bed and the soles of her

shoes set up straight side by side like two gray bricks, the eyes were

softly opened again, Gabriella had never seen a head like this negro

girl's, that is, never until the autumn before last, when she had come

out into this neighborhood of plain farming people to teach a district

school. Whenever she was awake early enough to see this curiosity, she

never failed to renew her study of it with unflagging zest. It was such

a mysterious, careful arrangement of knots, and pine cones, and the

strangest-looking little black sticks wrapped with white packing

thread, and the whole system of coils seemingly connected with a

central mental battery, or idea, or plan, within. She studied it now,

as the fire was being kindled, and the kindler, with inflammatory blows

of the poker on the bars of the grate, told her troubles over audibly

to herself: "Set free, and still making fires of winter mornings; how

was THAT? Where was any freedom in THAT? Her wages? Didn't she work for

her wages? Didn't she EARN her wages? Then where did freedom come in?"

One must look low for high truth sometimes, as we gather necessary

fruit on nethermost boughs and dig the dirt for treasure. The

Anglo-Saxon girl lying in the bed and the young African girl kindling

her fire--these two, the highest and the humblest types of womanhood in

the American republic--were inseparably connected in that room that

morning as children of the same Revolution. It had cost the war of the

Union, to enable this African girl to cast away the cloth enveloping

her head--that detested sign of her slavery--and to arrange her hair

with ancestral taste, the true African beauty sense. As long as she had

been a slave, she had been compelled by her Anglo-Saxon mistress to

wear her head-handkerchief; as soon as she was set free, she, with all

the women of her race in the South, tore the head-handkerchief

indignantly off. In the same way, it cost the war of the Union to

enable Gabriella to teach school. She had been set free also, and the

bandage removed from her liberties. The negress had been empowered to

demand wages for her toil; the Anglo-Saxon girl had been empowered to

accept without reproach the wages for hers.

Gabriella's memoirs might be writ large in four parts that would really

be the history of the United States, just as a slender seam of gold can

only be explained through the geology of the earth. But they can also

be writ so small that each volume may be dropped, like certain

minute-books of bygone fashions, into a waistcoat pocket, or even read,

as through a magnifying glass, entire on a single page.

The first volume was the childhood book, covering the period from

Gabriella's birth to the beginning of the Civil War, by which time she

was fourteen years old: it was fairy tale. These earliest recollections

went back to herself as a very tiny child living with her mother and

grandmother in a big white house with green window-shutters, in

Lexington--so big that she knew only the two or three rooms in one ell.

Her mother wore mourning for her father, and was always drawing her to

her bosom and leaving tears on her face or lilylike hands. One day--she

could not remember very well--but the house had been darkened and the

servants never for a moment ceased amusing her--one day the house was

all opened again and Gabriella could not find her mother; and her

grandmother, everybody else, was kinder to her than ever. She did not

think what kindness was then, but years afterward she learned perfectly.

Very slowly Gabriella's knowledge began to extend over the house and

outside it. There were enormous, high-ceiled halls and parlors, and

bedrooms and bedrooms and bedrooms. There were verandas front and back,

so long that it took her breath away to run the length of one and

return. Upstairs, front and back, verandas again, balustraded so that

little girls could not forget themselves and fall off. The pillars of

these verandas at the rear of the house were connected by a network of

wires, and trained up the pillars and branching over the wires were

coiling twisting vines of wisteria as large as Gabriella's neck. This

was the sunny southern side; and when the wisteria was blooming,

Gabriella moved her establishment of playthings out behind those sunlit

cascades of purple and green, musical sometimes with goldfinches.

The front of the house faced a yard of stately evergreens and great

tubs of flowers, oleander, crepe myrtle, and pomegranate. Beyond the

yard, a gravelled carriage drive wound out of sight behind cedars,

catalpa, and forest trees, shadowing a turfy lawn. At the end of the

lawn was the great entrance gate and the street of the town, Gabriella

long knew this approach only by her drives with her grandmother. At the

rear of the house was enough for her: a large yard, green grazing lots

for the stable of horses, and best of all a high-fenced garden

containing everything the heart could desire: vegetables, and flowers;

summer-houses, and arbors with seats; pumps of cold water, and

hot-houses of plants and grapes, and fruit trees, and a swing, and

gooseberry bushes--everything.

In one corner, the ground was too shaded by an old apple tree to be of

use: they gave this to Gabriella for her garden. She had attached

particularly to her person a little negress of about the same age--her

Milly, the color of a ripe gourd. So when in spring the gardener began

to make his garden, with her grandmother sometimes standing over him,

directing, Gabriella, taking her little chair to the apple tree,--with

some pretended needle-work and a real switch,--would set Milly to work

making hers. Nothing that they put into the earth ever was heard of

again, though they would sometimes make the same garden over every day

for a week. So that more than once, forsaking seed, they pulled off the

tops of green things near by, planted these, and so had a perfect

garden in an hour.

Then Gabriella, seated under the apple tree, would order Milly to water

the flowers from the pump; and taking her switch and calling Milly

close, she would give her a sharp rap or two around the bare legs (for

that was expected), and tell her that if she didn't stop being so

trifling, she would sell her South to the plantations. Whereupon Milly,

injured more in heart than legs, and dropping the watering-pot, would

begin to bore her dirty fists into her eyes. Then Gabriella would say

repentantly:--

"No, I won't, Milly! And you needn't work any more to-day. And you can

have part of my garden if you want it."