Doctors came and went, though I had privately done my full duty by them
long before; and I swallowed a deal of nasty stuff which did absolutely
no good, except that it soothed the feelings of the family.
By the end of the summer David was insisting on something radical; and
when he went back to college he took me with him, and deposited me in a
northern sanitarium, where I was to lie flat on my back three months,
and be made over as good as new.
This was not only radical, but revolutionary. Chatterton had never
before furnished an inmate for a sanitarium. The word, indeed, was
commonly understood as a polite euphemism for a lunatic asylum. The
sentiments of the kin ranged all the way from Grace Wood’s anxious
hopefulness to Cousin Jane’s frank curiosity concerning what new kind of
craziness Lyddy had been up to now, to make John Bird feel like she had
to be shut up in a private mad-house. She took my part, however, so far
as to say, both to my face and behind my back, that I wasn’t a mite
crazier than I’d been all my life; and if folks could get along with me
this long it did look like a pity they couldn’t put up with me a while
longer, and save disgracing the family. There was nothing the matter
with me, Cousin Jane opined, beyond being spoiled to death, and lazy;
and, anyway, it was flying in the face of Providence to go on living if
your time had come to die.
As to going North, she never did believe in wasting money on conceited
Yankee doctors when there were so many struggling physicians at home, to
say nothing of the heathen in foreign lands who were dropping into
hell-fire so many a minute for lack of any kind of doctors, good or bad,
to keep them alive until the missionaries could get to them.
“But it’s no use preachin’ to selfish ears,” she concluded, drawing her
heavy silk wrap about her ample shoulders and settling her bonnet
strings. “I’ve been wastin’ my breath, of course.”
It seemed a pity that she should, whether from my point of view or her
own; so I smiled as sympathetically as I could, and offered my cheek for
her farewell salute. She bestowed it impressively.
“Well, good-bye, Lyddy. I suppose I won’t see you again in this life;
an’ in the other one failin’ wits won’t trouble us, I trust. I want you
to know I don’t hold any of your foolishness against you, child: I
reckon you never did have sense like the rest of us.”
She went out with her ponderous, firm tread, and Caro flitted to my
side, her head thrown up, ruffling like an angry wren.
“Mammy Lil, its a shame you made me promise to be good! Do let me run
after her and——” She caught my eye and broke into bubbling laughter,
dropping her head on my pillows and snuggling her little nose under my
chin.
“Of course it’s funny,” she admitted presently; “and if you will laugh,
I have to. But I can’t see how she can be so wooden-headed and yet be
alive.”
“She isn’t alive very much, poor soul!” I answered, soberly enough. “I
don’t think anybody really lives except so far as they understand
life—and people. When you think of it in that way, Cousin Jane has
lived in a closer confinement all her life than I’ll be when I get to
the asylum.”
* * * * *
That was three years ago, and more, and I am here at the sanitarium yet,
though the Peon is coming to take me home next month. It was I who set
the limit of my stay at three months, when I came; I was determined to
be well by that time. I even had Caro put my note-book in my trunk,
because I expected to fill it before I came back. That is why I am
writing this chapter, a few lines at a time, on good days: I am
determined to do something that I planned doing, before I go back.
It would take more note-books than my trunk could hold to tell the story
of the kindness shown me here; of the patience, skill, and
resourcefulness which have fought for me when I could no longer fight
for myself. And it is good to be in a place like this for awhile, to
learn what human nature is capable of under racking, tearing strain. The
courage one finds, the high-hearted endurance of plain, ordinary people,
the brave good cheer of men and women whose pain-lined faces choke one’s
throat with tears! I have seen these things so often these last eighteen
months—or at least in so much of them as I could be carried, lying flat
in a wheeled-chair, out on one of the balconies, where I could catch
glimpses of the struggles that were going on around me.
It is not all loss, this suffering. Sickness does bring out hidden
ugliness and weakness, for it searches soul and body to the inmost core.
But there is more good hidden than there is evil; and in the stress of
suffering the most ordinary people blossom into a loveliness of soul
which reveals them as of the company of the saints. Life is so narrow
and commonplace to the average experience that it can only make a narrow
and commonplace appeal. “The trivial round, the common task” has, for so
many, no large connections; and the depths of their natures are never
stirred until their every-day world lies in ruins about them, and to
live at all they must discover new resources in
“—_that true world within the world we see_,”
and gain a true perspective and a new horizon.
And the funny folk in a place like this—they would fill volumes, too!
Of course they are pitiful; but I never could see the harm of laughter
over pitifulness, if only one doesn’t laugh unkindly. For some of them
never find new resources. Disaster leads them, not to discovery, but to
an _impasse_; and they revenge themselves on the inexplicable by endless
incongruities of thought and action.
The patient who really helped me most was a dear old lady who, though
forbidden, like the rest, to talk to me, felt it her heaven-sent mission
to cheer me up. Whenever she saw me deposited on the porch she flew out,
wringing her hands in sympathy, and exclaiming, “Oh, _what_ is life
without health!” It really is a good deal when you come to think of it;
and the old lady’s reiterations elicited a string of mental replies as
long as from western New York to Bird Corners, and kept me in ammunition
for Grumpy.
For Grumpy has been at this sanitarium for three years and seven weeks.
But the Peon has been here, too, and David—and Cousin Jane! Caro I have
not seen in all these years: Cousin Jane doesn’t consider it decent for
a young girl to be allowed in a place where women may be seen in the
halls in kimonos, and men are allowed to sit in wheeled-chairs on the
balconies, shamelessly clad in their bath robes, with heaven knows what
garments, or lack of garments, underneath. Caro should not set foot in
the place; and no entreaties could move her. But Caro has written, every
week of the world; and, to make up for my not having her, Cousin Jane
paid me a visit herself. She felt it her duty, she said, to find out
what kind of a place it was that John Bird had shut Lyddy up in; and if
the rest of the family wouldn’t look after me, she would. So she came,
suspicious and inquisitorial, and melted visibly under the tactful
suavity of the physician in charge,—“the Head,” as we called him. She
even began to help him, ministering to the patients after a fashion all
her own. She had it out with one of them, a metaphysical lady, a very
unorthodox person, and left her in a state of collapse. In no uncertain
tones she expressed her views on hen-pecking to another, an elderly lady
with a liver and a youthful husband. I don’t know what would have
happened further if I had not been inspired to beguile her into going
down into the treatment rooms for a Turkish bath. She came up purple
with wrath, and began to pack her trunk, declaring that she washed her
hands of the place forever; and if I wanted to stay there and have my
morals corrupted, I could; but for her part she was going back to her
own bathtub, and the religion she was brought up in. And go she did,
that night.
For myself, these three years must remain in the silence in which they
have been spent. The pain I wish to forget; today’s pain is enough. And
the helplessness and idleness, so much worse than the pain—that too, I
would shut from my memory. But the kindness which has filled these
years—that is an eternal possession. And the loveliness of this little
valley is mine always, cut off as it is in my thoughts as a place apart
from all my real world and life, shut in and hidden by its beautiful
circling hills. I have called it the Enchanted Valley, because it seemed
sometimes as if some spell had caught and bound me to it forever. But
now that I am to go free at last I can forget all that, and remember
only the enchantment of its beauty, and the kindness of those who dwell
in it. The Land of Make-Believe, too, is as near me as under the trees
at home. I have had beautiful times in Make-Believe, day and night, and
especially at night. I have seen Caro there, you may be sure! I made a
jingle about it not long ago which tells the real story of these long
years better than anything else I could write.
_IN MAKE-BELIEVE_
_Oh, beautiful country of Make-Believe,_
_Where in childhood I learned to play!_
_I’m not bound fast to a bed—not I!_
_Nor racked with pain till I want to cry:_
_I’m over the hills and away!_
_Poor body that lies here and cannot sleep,_
_I’m sorry to leave you so;_
_But the children are calling from far away;_
_In Make-Believe, where it’s time to play,_
_And you can’t walk, you know._
_I fly on the wings of thought, myself,_
_While the wind shrieks behind me “Wait!”_
_For he never can fly as fast as thought,_
_And, he howls because he thinks he ought;—_
_But here I am at the gate._
_No narrow, smothering walls for me,_
_Nor life shut in from the sky,_
_When Make-Believe is all outdoors,_
_With beautiful grass instead of floors,_
_And to reach it one needs but try._
_There is ice back there; but in Make-Believe_
_There’s just what you happen to choose:_
_Soft spring-time colors with silver sheen,_
_Or cool wood-reaches of summer green,_
_Or the sparkle of autumn dews._
_Oh, the woodland rambles in Make-Believe!_
_The fields where daisies grow!_
_The level light on the evening hills,_
_The wild bird-song that leaps and thrills,_
_And the rose of the sunset’s glow!_
_How the children chatter in Make-Believe,_
_Just as at home they do!_
_How close they cuddle, with laugh and kiss,_
_To tell their secrets, nor ever miss_
_Aught else if they have but you!_
_All the people you love are in Make-Believe,_
_The living, and those called dead;_
_And all the people you’d like to know—_
_The wise of the earth, both high and low,_
_And the heroes of days long fled._
_And they know what’s worth while in Make-Believe_
_That to give is the blessed way;_
_That courage, and laughter, and love, are wise;_
_That the sun shines back of the cloudiest skies;_
_That there’s end to the longest day._
_They talk of high things in Make-Believe,_
_And they love e’en the tiniest joke_
_And they take you sailing o’er land and sea;_
_And they’d know all the places you’d like to be_
_If never a word you spoke._
_But the sun is up in that wintry world;_
_And the nurse will put in her head_
_And ask, “Is the pain any better, my dear?_
_Did you sleep a little? The doctor’s here.”—_
_Well, so am I here——in bed!_
And now it is mid-November, for the weeks have passed by as I lay here,
writing a bit as I could; and I am to be home Thanksgiving morning; not
home in Make-Believe, but home in real Bird Corners, down in Tennessee!
David is there, for good, now, running the farm as he planned, but
helping the Peon in his office, too; and Caro is coming home for
Christmas, and to stay “forever,” she says, in June; and I am to get
well—some day—at home. I can walk quite a little already—twenty yards
sometimes; and the bad days are better than they used to be, and farther
apart. Even Grumpy must admit that good bad days are encouraging!
* * * * *
_All_ the people you love in Make-Believe? Not quite all—not Ella.
Somehow I can’t look for her there any more; not since the day the
letter came back unopened. We were together in Make-Believe always
before that. But when I see her again it will be when Make-Believe will
have disappeared, with the world we see, and the real world will be
plain to sight. But everybody else was there—even pious, pompous Cousin
Chad, and foolish, kind-hearted, exasperating Cousin Jane.
And now it’s day after tomorrow, and the Peon is coming in four days!
IV
THE DARK O’ THE YEAR
_November 30th._ The deepest joys can never be put into words; but lying
here in my own dear room, close under the long windows which form its
eastern side, and looking out across the valley to the familiar hills
beyond, I know there is one spot on the map more beautiful than anything
Make-Believe can show. The Peon and David left me only an hour ago—the
real ones, I mean; and out on the lawn Uncle Milton is pretending to
rake invisible leaves, looking towards my windows every few minutes to
assure himself that I am really here.
Near the wall of honeysuckle along the pasture fence the cardinal and
his wife are flitting about, just as I left them three years ago; and in
the lilac outside my window, where all the spring-time beauty sleeps
safe in the sheltering buds, a Carolina wren proclaims the triumph of
days to come. His spring song is a bubbling rhapsody of present love and
delight; but his winter song is vibrant with the joy of things unseen.
He sings as one who carries spring in his heart always, as vivid a
reality in December as when all the woods are green. To doubts,
questions and hopes he has one answer, and he gives it joyously under
the darkest skies. Will earth awake again? Will sunshine come? Will life
reign in evident triumph, and winter and darkness pass? _Sur-e-ly,
sur-e-ly, sur-e-ly, sure!_ The rich notes thrill with the joy of
assurance, and shake him bodily as he stands with up-thrown head and
pulsing throat, wagging from beak to tail.
But like many another of the sons of the prophets, his gift of open
vision lies close to his love of fun. His tail jerks with a wildness
suggestive of broken gearings in his little insides, as he dashes into
his score again _accelerando_, singing it _da capo_ with a comical
exaggeration of his former style. _Sure-ly, sure-ly, sure-ly, sure!_ He
cocks his head, flirts his tail, gives me a sharp look from his sharper
eye, and whisks around the house in a twinkling.
And Grace Wood is coming to see me tomorrow! I have been good and waited
until I am quite rested, and now I am to have my reward. But I did not
know until I came home that George died two years ago. There were never
two people happier together than they; and yet she has gone on writing
to me all this time, the same sunshiny, hopeful, heartening letters she
sent me when I first left home. That was always Grace’s way; everything
that came to her, hurt or pleasure, went out from her again only as help
to somebody who needed it.
I haven’t seen Cousin Jane yet, and David says she’s been simmering for
days and is liable to boil over any minute. She came an hour after I
reached home, though requested to stay away until I sent for her; but
the Peon caught her at my door and turned her back. She insisted she had
something of the greatest importance to explain to me; but the Peon is
an awesome person when he does lay down the law, and she hasn’t been
back since. I can’t help wondering if it is something about Caro—though
it can’t be, for I’ve been Caro’s “mother-confessor” too long to be
learning anything about her from Cousin Jane. Besides, Caro will be here
herself in three more weeks—after all these years and years!
* * * * *
_December 9th._ Grace came, her old dear self, unchanged except that the
look of detachment from herself was deepened in her clear, sweet eyes,
and about her smiling, tender mouth.
We spoke of George as if he were still with her—as indeed I think he
is—and of Milly, now quite grown, and sharing with Caro the honors of
Chatterton belledom.
We had a beautiful time together, and chatted and giggled as we have
done these forty years whenever occasion offered; and she went away
promising to come soon again if I would keep on getting better. And so I
would have done but for Cousin Jane. She was driving down the pike and
saw Grace, with her own eyes, coming through the gate. She drove on down
the road a bit till Grace was out of sight, and then swooped down on me
like a blackbird on a worm. Josie tried to stop her at the front door;
but she had known Josie from her pickaninny days; and if she hadn’t, it
wouldn’t have mattered, for Cousin Jane is not a person to be frustrated
by darkies.
She knocked once, sepulchrally, on my door, and opened it on the
instant. She wore her best Sunday air, and eyed me like a familiar of
the Holy Office about to put a heretic through a course of sprouts.
* * * * *
“Well, Lyddy,” she began, settling weightily into Grace’s chair, “so you
lived to get back home, after all. I hope you’re as grateful to
Providence as you ought to be.”
Her tone made it evident that, though she might hope it, she certainly
didn’t expect it.
“You’ve gone off mightily in your looks,” she continued; “not that you
weren’t always sorter peaked an’ skinny-lookin’—‘slender,’ Letitia used
to call it! Do you think your mind’s gettin’ straight any?”
“It’s straight, what there is of it,” I said; “but I’m tired just now,
Cousin Jane; I can’t talk very well. You see Grace has been here——”
“Didn’t I see her?” she demanded indignantly. “That’s why I came. If you
can see a chatterer like her, I reckon you can see me. I told John Bird
I wanted to see you about Caroline.”
My tired eyes opened at once.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Caroline is gettin’ grown-up; she was nineteen last June. I’ve tried my
best to keep beaux and foolishness away from her, but everything in
town, looks like, was after her last summer; and the worst of it was,
Caroline liked it.”
The corners of my mouth took an upward curve.
“You wait till I get through, missy, an’ you’ll be laughin’ the other
side of your mouth. Caroline is hail-fellow-well-met with every boy in
this town except David Bird; and she knows perfectly well, for I told
her, that Chadwell and I and you and John Bird intend her to marry
David.”
The room swam round, and I closed my eyes. Speech was impossible.
“Good land, Lyddy! Don’t go to faintin’—I didn’t know you were such a
baby. You needn’t get so scared, child. Jane Grackle is pretty safe to
get her own way, and long as your way’s my way you’ll get yours, too.
She’ll marry him yet; young folks haven’t any sense; they need managin’,
and I——”
“For heaven’s sake don’t try to manage Caro,” I gasped. “And as for
telling her I intended her to marry David—go, before you say something
else that will make forgiveness impossible!”
Cousin Jane turned purple. I saw that as my eyes closed again. She rose
stiffly, with rustling skirts.
“If I didn’t know you’d lost what little sense the Lord gave you, Lyddy
Bird, I’d box your ears for your impudence. I’ll go when I get ready,
miss. I didn’t tell Caroline you _said_ you intended her to marry
David—I know you’ve never said a word about it: I just took it as a
matter of course. Chadwell and I feel it our duty to provide for
her—not in money, of course; she has quite a tidy little fortune of her
own, and of course you and John Bird expect to leave David all you’ve
got; they won’t need anything from us. But we want to see her settled:
an’ David’s steady an’ reliable an’ a real good business boy, for all
you’ve raised him so harum-scarum; an’ it stands to reason, with your
keepin’ Caroline all the time like you did, an’ throwin’ away the good
stout clothes I provided for her to waste your own money in fol-de-rols,
an’ good as adoptin’ her, you might say, that you’d picked her out for
David an’ meant to leave them your money. Don’t you?”
I swept together my floating wits, steadied them with a supreme effort,
and considered for an instant, while I felt Cousin Jane’s angry stare
battering at my closed lids. I must tell her something, and nothing.
“Caro and David are like our own children,” I said weakly; “we want
their happiness, and nothing else. If they love one another as brother
and sister, it’s quite to be expected, don’t you think? Whatever made
you think we wanted a marriage, brought up as they have been?”
“Do you mean you won’t leave them the money?”
“I mean money has nothing to do with it. We expect to do all we can for
them, and to let them be happy in their own ways, not in ours.”
“Well, any way suits Caroline that’s not my way an’ that makes
mischief—I can see that plain enough, an’ I told her so. I scolded her
good. An’ it’s my opinion David’s in love with her. I caught him lookin’
at her one day when they were fishin’ down by the mill, an’ I just
happened to go by in the buggy. I couldn’t get a word out of him when I
asked him about it; an’ when I told him I’d given Caroline a talkin’-to,
an’ I’d set my head on his havin’ her, he glared at me as if I was
tryin’ to murder him, an’ told me to let Caroline alone, an’ let her
marry whoever she wanted to. He ain’t been near me since, an’ won’t
hardly speak to me; an’ Caroline behaved like a spitfire when I went to
her about it. But I believe David’s willin’ if she’d be—but she ain’t,
yet. You may as well know there’s goin’ to be trouble when she comes
home. It ain’t like it used to be; an’ you’d better get up out of that
bed an’ be gettin’ ready to help straighten things out.”
How much longer she would have stayed there I don’t know. Her voice,
near and strident as it was, was drifting off into a world that seemed
far away, when the door opened with soft quickness and David was in the
room.
Before he could speak Cousin Jane was lumbering away, his eyes driving
her like bayonets. He poured out something and held it to my lips, and
then sat stroking my hand as gently as Caro could have done. And for
days and nights I lay here in the clutch of the old weakness and the old
pain, and scarcely heeding either in the blackness of this new fear. I
have been trying for days to write it all down, thinking maybe I could
face it better so, and find some way of deliverance from Cousin Jane’s
cataclysmic diplomacy.
That Caro should marry David! Has there ever been a time when I didn’t
hope for it? And I have never said it, even to the Peon himself, for
fear the very walls should carry the secret and make the hope
impossible: and now! If Jane Grackle—but there’s no use railing; when
one’s hopes are in ruins it takes all one’s strength to face the
disaster; if I waste mine in reproaches I shall turn coward, and then
Grumpy will rule my world.
* * * * *
_December 17th._ Gray days, with sullen skies which will neither shine
nor storm. The mocking-birds have entered their winter silence, and eye
me indifferently as they hop about under my windows picking up the
crumbs which Josie scatters daily for my feathered guests. They never
come together at this time of the year. Each goes his own path in
solitude as well as in silence. But the flickers are more sociable, and
the wrens are always in pairs. The cardinal and his wife come together
every morning, she gently indifferent as usual, and he the devoted lover
of all the year around.
Over in the pasture the meadow-larks sing half-heartedly, and a titmouse
protests sturdily against their sentimental pathos. He is pecking at a
magnolia seed tucked under his toes as he sits in the beech at
breakfast. “_Here! Here! Here! Here!_” he exclaims. He believes in
making the best of things, does the titmouse, and holds his crest as
high these dark, raw days as when he goes courting in a world that is in
gala attire for the occasion.
And if the pain isn’t better yet, the weakness is; and that is always
the worst part of it. I shall be out in my wheeled-chair yet, by the
time Caro comes. And as to Cousin Jane’s nonsense, she may make
mischief—has made it, evidently; but if they’re really made for each
other, as I have hoped for so long, surely an old woman’s foolish tongue
can never ruin their lives. _Sur-e-ly, sur-e-ly, sur-e-ly, sure!_ Oh,
bless the little red-brown seer! He tilts on the lilac bush a second,
winks at me distinctly, and is off with a whisk of his tail which says
plainly, “Don’t be more of a fool than you must be, old pal!” and I
won’t.
* * * * *
_December 24th._ How full of happiness one’s world can be! Caro is not
much bigger than her feathered namesake out of doors, but the place
overflows with her presence.
I was afraid Cousin Jane wouldn’t let her stay here after the late
unpleasantness, and was lying on the south porch the other day, trying
to devise some way to make my peace with her, when she drove around the
house and over the grass, and stopped her buggy close to my chair.