since the first summer we came to Bird Corners. I took her to spend the
day at Grace’s, and she went with Milly and her nurse down to the brook
to wade. The brook divides Cousin Jason’s land from theirs; and the
children, finding some of his hogs in Grace’s pasture, drove them before
them with much laughter and little clods of earth. Cousin Jason, hearing
his squealing beasts, came charging down the hill in a fury and jabbed
his petty wrath straight to poor little Milly’s heart. She was always a
timid creature, like her mother, and, like her mother, unkindness made
her physically ill; so she wept miserably, poor baby, while her
half-uncle stormed. But Caro flamed into wrath as fierce as his own. She
had been feeding the birds that morning, and had jumped from the stool
by my cot afterward a dozen times to scatter the jay-birds, who were out
in unusual force, and bent on pecking off the head of any other bird who
ventured to take a crumb. She sprang in front of Milly now, ruffling
like an angry wren.
“Go home, you horrid—jay-bird!” she shrieked; “you peck, an’ peck, an’
peck, _all_ the time! I hate you! Cousin Jay, Cousin Jay!”
He stared at the mite, speechless, with purpling face. Milly gasped with
fright, and old Aunt Susan, as she afterwards declared, “done choke
herse’f ’mos’ ter death swallerin’ her laff.”
Caro took Milly by the hand.
“Let’s go home an’ play party,” she proposed calmly; “we don’t like pigs
and jay-birds.” And back they went.
Cousin Jason was immensely impressed. He told me about it afterwards,
himself, and declared that he wished Milly had a little of Caro’s
“spunk.”
He even tried, in his not very happy fashion, to be friends with the
child, and has always treated her with more consideration than any one
else he knows. But Caro will have none of him, and to this day calls him
Cousin Jay to his face. He is a man of large bulk, with a face at once
sharp and heavy, as unlike Grace in body as he is in soul. And I’m
afraid he makes life pretty hard for her.
When her husband died, Grace was left sole mistress of his estate—which
included, according to our beautiful state law, the plantation she
inherited from her father. But her brother calmly assumed the management
of everything. Cousin Jason is really a Mohammedan born out of due
place. He cannot conceive of a woman’s having mind or soul of her own,
much less rights; and he proposes, in all honesty, to do his next-of-kin
duty by the widowed family fool. Grace, I suppose, was too broken by
grief to realize what she was doing; but in any event she would probably
have given way to him; she spent her girlhood, as she now spends her
widowhood, trying to keep her half-brother in a good humor. She yielded
to him absolutely, even to giving him power of attorney over all her
belongings, and to vacating her own pretty rose-colored bed-room, with
its private bath, on the first floor of her home. Cousin Jay never liked
to sleep upstairs; it was too far from his work, he said.
He has certainly, the Peon says, made everything pay well; he has Cousin
Chad’s own genius for money-making. But he does not believe in spending
money, nor, of course, in giving it; nor in being bothered with “idle
gossiping women who ought to be at home minding their husbands’
affairs.” (He is never conscious of a woman except as the appendage of
some man.) So Grace controls neither her own money nor her own home. All
her gracious hospitality, her wise open-handedness to those in need, is
a thing of the past. It is difficult for Milly even to have ordinary
visitors, except in the afternoons; and if it were not for the child’s
other-worldly beauty, before which the judgments applied to most girls
are abashed, one would almost call her dresses shabby. But it is not
easy to think of her dress, the girl herself so charms one.
She has been telling me a little of her troubles, poor child; they have
been hard to manage in her mother’s absence. Chief among them, as I
infer, mainly from what she did not say, is the difficulty of being
properly courteous to Robert Lincoln, without calling down Cousin
Jason’s boorish wrath on the young man’s head, as well as her own.
“You see it isn’t as if he were one of us, Cousin Lil,” she said, her
soft cheeks flushed, her eyes large with unshed tears: “he’s a
Northerner, you know, a New Englander. He’s interested in the interurban
lines they’re building and projecting here in Tennessee, and he really
lives in the city—I mean his headquarters are there. And when he comes
down here to see us, why, it isn’t real Southern hospitality not to ask
him to a single meal. But I daren’t. And once Uncle Jason came right
into the parlor and banged the fire-irons around and glared and kept
looking at his watch. And it was only half-past nine, Cousin Lil. That
was just after Caro went back; and he really hasn’t been here since. I
do hate for _Northern_ people to think——” a tear slid down one cheek;
but the slight shrinking of her pretty hand showed me she could not bear
to be petted just now; she did not want sympathy, but help. She
swallowed hard and went on.
“And you know next morning at breakfast I spoke to him—not to
criticise, you know, nor anger him, of course. I told him not to be
afraid that I would forget his wishes; that I told every one it kept him
awake to have anyone stirring after ten o’clock at night, and that
Mother and I always closed the house then; and I said it was only
half-past nine last night.”
“What did he say?”
“Why, he just stormed, like he always does, you know. He said he wanted
to go to bed early. And he got up without eating his breakfast, and
slammed the door and went out. I had to run clear to the barn after him
and beg and beg, before he would come back.”
“What on earth did you want him back for?” I inquired.
“Why, to eat his breakfast. He hadn’t had his coffee, and he’d have had
a headache without it.”
“Milly Wood!” I gasped.
“Mother always coaxes him back,” said Milly, with gentle finality; “at
least, she always tries. Sometimes he won’t come, and then she takes it
to him herself. You know he has terrible headaches sometimes.”
“But, dear, if you would only face him down just once.”
“Oh, I couldn’t,” said Milly, shrinking. “And Mother would never get
over it. You don’t know how she feels about Uncle Jason. She says he’s
never had the best of life, because he never has known the love that can
give its all. She’s sorry for him, and she wants us to make up to him
for what he has missed.”
“Well, you’ll never do it,” I said. “Nobody but Jason Blue can ever make
good that loss to him.”
“Sometimes I think Mother ought to require some things of him,” she
said; “but she won’t; and I know I’ll never make it harder for her by
doing what she doesn’t want. But I wish he didn’t live at home.”
She kissed me, smiling rather forlornly, and went away, while I lay here
wondering about Mr. Lincoln, whom I have never seen. But David and Caro
liked him, which is sufficient passport to my favor.
* * * * *
_February 12th._ The mocking-birds have a constant fascination for
me—the charm of a complex nature which touches life on many sides. One
can know a robin by heart in a single season, and predict with one’s
eyes shut the doings of any one of the tribe; but a mocking-bird is a
different proposition.
His song throbs with the pure joy of living. It is the song of one in
the world and of it, and rejoicing so to be; yet there is in it a
haunting suggestion of aloofness, of mystery, of something beyond one’s
ken. It is as if his joy had deeper foundations than sunshine and
plenty; as if he had lived through pain, clear to the other side of it,
and learned that it, too, is good.
His powers of mimicry, I think, are greatly exaggerated. He does not
really sing other birds’ songs, as his cousin, the catbird, does; he
merely experiments with their notes—a stave from a thrasher here, a
light-flung oriole measure there, a thrush note, piercing sweet, a bit
of the wren’s summer trill. It is as if he would try life on all sides
and look at it from every point of view; his ear is keen for the music
from every throat. But always, through all this imaginative performance,
he clings to the integrity of his own message. One may hear a catbird
for an hour, and, unless one sees the blithe gray mime among the leaves,
never suspect his real identity. But all a mocking-bird’s borrowed notes
are woven into the texture of his own song, which wholly claims him as
the melody rises, sweeping him with it bodily up to heaven, and carrying
the listener’s heart with him. His is the rapture of open vision,
feathered mystic that he is.
Now, a bird like that one would expect to be a recluse, dwelling apart
in cloistered green, afar from his fellows and from mankind; but the
mocking-bird flatly declines that rôle. He is a bird of affairs,
friendly and neighborly withal, a haunter of men’s doorways and
house-vines, and a public-spirited citizen who rejoices to succor the
oppressed. For he has a fine, full-fledged temper of his own, and any
amount of fighting blood. He rarely seeks a quarrel; but if one be
thrust upon him, either by aggressions attempted upon his own rights or
by the call of another bird in distress, he accepts the combat with
alacrity, and carries it joyously to a triumphant conclusion. And three
minutes after the enemy is routed his voice floats down from the highest
perch in the vicinity as if he were singing at heaven’s gate. He has
fought for all he is worth, yet not a feather of his spirit is ruffled.
* * * * *
_February 15th._ When I can catch Grumpy and call him to his face by his
right name, he always disappears; but blue devils are so very clever at
disguising themselves, and at concentrating one’s attention on their
instruments of torture!
This morning, for instance, he hid under the foot of my bed, and kept
poking up all sorts of things where I couldn’t help seeing them; the
things the Peon and David need me to get well for; the things I long to
do; the idleness I so desperately hate—for he can make even an
abstraction visible, being a very clever devil indeed. Then he held up
the pain, turning it round and round, and counting off the time like a
clock—minutes, hours, days, months, years, and never an end in sight. I
had to look out of the window in self-defense; and there I saw a
kinglet.
Except the winter wren and the humming-bird, the kinglets are the
smallest birds we have. But they make up in energy what they lack in
size; and this one dashed about as if his very life depended on his
getting his breakfast in ten seconds and catching the seven-thirty
breeze to Somewhere. Grayish-olive, of course; but was his crown of
ruby-red, or of orange, crimson and black? And why should a mite of the
tree-tops be so inconsiderate as to carry his trade-mark on the top of
his head?
I was almost in despair about him—for when you meet a bird, it is of
consuming importance to know whose acquaintance you have the pleasure of
making—when he took pity on me of his own sweet will. Perhaps the
breeze was a thought late, and he had a moment to spare: but he perched
on a twig just outside the window, bowed his tiny head toward me, thrust
one claw up between his wing and his body, and scratched the back of his
neck for the whole of one second and a half!
Golden-crowned! The cunningest striped pate, red in the middle, with a
yellow band on each side, a black band next the yellow, and a white line
over his eye. Then he flung up his head as boldly as though it were
mountain-high, jerked his wee tail-feathers frantically, and squeaked in
the finest and most wiry of voices, the astonishing information that it
was only Grumpy under the bed, at his old tricks—a creature for nobody
to pay attention to. And as soon as he found himself discovered, my blue
devil took himself off.
* * * * *
_February 20th._ If I can’t go outdoors, outdoors can come to me! The
windows are all open this morning, and my bed so close under them that I
can lie here and stretch my hand into the outside world, where the lilac
is rapidly leafing and the elms and maples are all abloom. A moment ago
Uncle Milton stepped into view, one hand holding his hat and the other
filled with jonquils.
“Is you gittin’ er little better, honey?” he inquired. “Hit’s gittin’
spring-time now, en Milton wants ter see you ridin’ roun’ in dat ar
cheer you got. Ef we-all puts er mattress in it, don’ you reckon we kin
git you down ter de holler by de gate? Des see what come f’um down dat
er way dis mawnin’—dem holler jonquils allus did beat dese yere up on
de hill.”
He reached the flowers through the window and laid them upon the
bed—the first flowers of the awakening year; for the violets are
ageless, belonging neither to the new year nor to the old. I caught up
the golden beauty with a gasp of joy.
“Oh, thank you, Uncle Milton! I knew spring was coming true before long!
And I’ll be walking down there when they bloom again: don’t think I’m
going to live in beds and wheeled-chairs forever.”
His brown old face beamed.
“Dat’s de talk!” he exclaimed gleefully. “Ef dat ain’t de Forest sperrit
my name ain’t Milton, sho’! You look like yo’ pa endurin’ er de war. You
keep talkin’ dat erway, honey, en feelin’ dat erway, too. Hit’s sperrit
en spunk what cyores folks a sight mo’ dan doctors en physicin, I lay my
little Missy gwinter be runnin’ roun’ yere yet, makin’ ole Milton hop.”
He walked off, chuckling to himself.
Josie brought me a vase, and I set the flowers in it as flowers should
be set, lovingly, and one by one. It has been years since I have been
down in that hollow, just this side of where the road turns out into the
pike; but I can see it as if I were there this minute—the maples
blooming overhead, the meadow-larks flashing the white of their
tail-feathers as they fly, singing, on the hill beyond; the twigs in the
strip of woodland down the road, shining yellow, tan, and red with the
rising sap. The blue-grass is under foot, soft and thick, and all
through it rise the spears of the jonquil leaves, and the swinging,
golden bells. Along the fence runs the broad band of iris, matted close,
the pointed leaves already taller than the jonquils. Cardinals and
mocking-birds are calling all up the hillside; and down under the
willows and sycamores at the water’s edge the myrtle warblers are
swarming, and thinking of donning their gay spring suits. Oh, I can see
it all, all! A little wind is dancing along the hillside, and the
branches touch one another softly, the dry, scraping, winter sound all
gone. The wren’s spring song is in full blast, the bluebirds are
twittering, and even the jays’ voices are turning sweet. The breath of
life is everywhere, and the joy of it. I can feel the wind in my hair,
and the grass under my flying feet—_My flying feet_! For a moment I had
forgotten. But here are the four close walls, the narrow bed, the
endless, wrenching pain. And I could not walk even to my sofa today,
though the Peon’s life were my reward.—Eh, well, and what of that? Did
I not run in Make-Believe? And shall I shut my eyes to joy and beauty
because my locomotive apparatus is laid up for a few repairs? I may be
walking clear out to the hall again before the week is out, and be out
in my chair on the porch tomorrow. Love and sunshine really are enough,
no matter what Grumpy says—even love without the sunshine: and here are
both, and flowers besides, and the spring-time everywhere out of doors.
* * * * *
_February 25th._ Grace was here yesterday. She has a way of dropping in
when she is most wanted and leaving a trail of sunshine behind her. She
is a quiet little body, never hurried or fretted, and she has a genius
for discovering, in the most unlikely places, virtues invisible to the
naked eye. She sees the wrong and mean things, too—she’s not at all a
goody-goody person; but she keeps the wrong and the wrong-doers so
entirely distinct and separate that you wonder how you were ever so
stupid as to confuse them. She’s really devoted to that cranky old
half-brother of hers. She is always commiserating him because he did not
have her mother, and his own died when he was born. She’ll explain and
expound him till you think he really is noble, only he never had a
chance to learn how to do noble things.
It is certainly a pity, however, that his education is in such a
backward stage. Robert Lincoln and Milly are becoming much more than
friends; and Cousin Jason’s infantile ignorance of other people’s rights
is anything but conductive to comfort under the circumstances. But
Grace’s one idea, as usual, is that dear brother Jason must not be
crossed. He takes it so hard, poor fellow, when things don’t go as he
wishes. And if Mr. Lincoln is as seriously fond of Milly as he professes
to be, he may as well make up his mind to be satisfied with winning her,
if he can succeed in doing it, and not be too exacting with her
relatives.
Poor Grace! As if I don’t know the kind of young-ladyhood she believes
in Milly’s having, and is simply aching to give her! But evidently
Cousin Jason’s will is to be law.
The truth is, as I told Grace, Cousin Jason is just like Cousin
Chad—though they’d both foam at the mouth to hear me say it. But
they’ve neither of them any sense of proportion. That’s why they have no
sense of humor, nor power to get their own personalities in proper
perspective with other people and their rights. But why, asks Grace
calmly, shouldn’t we be as sorry for a person born with no sense of
proportion as for a person born with only one eye? Of course the lack of
a sense of humor is harder on the kin than the lack of an eye would
be—Grace admitted that handsomely; but in neither case was the
afflicted party to blame. And didn’t one really deserve more sympathy
when his affliction necessitated his also being a bore?
We fell to giggling as we discussed this knotty point; and I was so far
converted to Grace’s charitable views that I had Uncle Milton get a
basket of double jonquils for her to take to Cousin Jane. Cousin Jane
always did admire my double jonquils, and somehow her own never succeed.
I like the single ones much better myself; the others, like my revered
relative, are too clumsy and fat. I told Grace to say I sent them to her
on the principle of sweets to the sweet. And now I’ll be having another
visitation, for my sins!
* * * * *
_February 27th._ Pitch dark when I woke this morning; and pain to make
one clench one’s teeth. Grumpy is not hilarious company at such times,
but occasionally he helps by overdoing things.
This morning, for instance, he began about the unendingness of
things—sickness, and the long night, and all that—till it struck me
all at once it really was morning that second, and only looked like
night. Besides, the pain is like this, often, when I don’t feel blue a
bit: so it isn’t the pain that makes me miserable—it’s my own mood
about the pain; and if a seasoned old party like me can’t manage her own
moods, what’s the world coming to?
Only, sometimes I can’t manage them, and I don’t know why. They sweep
over me like the waves of the sea, and trample me like wild horses. It
isn’t often like that; but when it is, I know I’m in for it—and also
that I’m dead sure to get out of it after a while. I’m lying here—this
racketty old body, with a piece of me, myself, inside it, just about as
miserable as such a combination can get to be. And the rest of me is
hanging around outside, looking on, and saying, “Just lie low and keep
quiet, old lady. It’s tough, but it won’t last. Lay your nose to the
wind and let it howl. If it blows you even on both sides, you’ll get out
of it without being crank-sided, and that’s the best you can do.” So I
lie here; and after awhile the comfort of knowing it’s just a mood soaks
in till I can feel it and get the good of it—and then the storm is
past. I come out of it, too, with my self-respect unimpaired; because,
no matter how it raged inside, I did keep quiet on the outside till it
blew over.
So it blew over this time also. And after awhile even Grumpy was forced
to admit that it was morning, for all the world was drenched with light.
The long, level beams slipped across the hills as the sun rose, and
touched the tree-tops, one by one; and behold, life had risen—in the
night. Every twig of the tulip-tree was tipped with green where the
great terminal buds had burst their sheaths; and down by the brook a
fairy mist of color clung tenuously about the willows. The mocking-bird
was in a rapture of prophecy in the maple; and the English sparrows were
actually housebuilding in a beautiful hole in the scarlet oak.
Nobody else thinks of nest building yet; but among the birds, as among
humans, the increase of population is most rapid where one would fain
find it least. These sparrows will be rearing half a dozen families
before the year is out—good, large families, too; and it behooves them
to select their apartment early in the season. That hole belongs to the
wrens, but that’s of no consequence to the sparrows, who have the
pleasant habit of taking whatever they want.
It must be owned they are a hardworking tribe, even though their works
be evil. If the fathers left their wives to do all the work, after the
bluebirds’ fashion, some of the broods would surely starve; the mothers
would succumb to nervous prostration before all the mouths could be
filled. But the head of the family rolls up his feathers and pitches
right in, from nest building days until frost. Nuisances though they be,
there isn’t a shirker among them; and they will drop their petty
personal squabbles instantly, to make common cause against any bird, big
or little, not of sparrow feather. But they shall not have the wren’s
hole for all that—not while Uncle Milton can climb a tree for me.
* * * * *
_March 6th._ The blackbirds are falling in love. Even sensible, lovely
creatures are a bit comical when hard hit by the tender passion. In its
first inflammatory stages it so utterly destroys the patient’s sense of
proportion that one smiles even when one’s heart is aglow with sympathy.
But a blackbird lover, a sleek, slick gentleman, oppressed with more
dignity than an archbishop could carry gracefully, trying to unlimber
enough to convince his _inamorata_ that he desires her favor when he
merely wishes to air his perfections for her dazzlement!
One flies to a branch in plain sight of the greedy black gang, gobbling
crumbs below, and meditates. Shall he condescend, or shall he not? Well,
maybe she is worth it; and it will display his feathers to an admiring
world. He ducks a little, spreads wings and tail, rises a-tiptoe, and
says something through his nose to call attention to his noble self,
though a compliment may be tacked on in the last note. I know that’s
just the way Cousin Chad did it when he courted Cousin Jane. And think
of the laughterless depths of Cousin Jane’s soul that she found it a
performance to take seriously! Things are pretty much evened up in this
life, after all. It is true Cousin Jane has no back; but think of a
blackbird husband—and of me with the Peon!
* * * * *
_March 10th._ Rain, rain, rain. I’ve been examining my mercies this
morning to see which of them can stand the strain of a three-days’ cold
down-pour, a week of almost utter sleeplessness, and a spine that is
conducive to profanity. The mercies look badly frazzled; but they were
all right the other day, and couldn’t possibly wear out as fast as this.
I suppose it’s the same old trouble—my eyes are moth-eaten, and need to
be done up in camphor at once.
Anyway, it’s a piece of a mercy that if I had to get so much worse I did
it in weather when I couldn’t go outdoors if I were able. It is awfully
cold. Grumpy says it will frost when it clears off, and all the peaches
will be killed. Cheerful, isn’t it, when David’s pet peach-orchard
experiment is in full bloom for the first time? But the peach trees are
like us humans: they never can tell what is ahead of them. They have to
go on in the dark with such capital of good-will and ignorance as they
possess, and take the consequences without kicking.
I think the titmice might be counted as mercies today. The other birds
have disappeared, but the titmice are as jaunty as possible in their
trim gray rain coats, whistling like boys calling dogs.
And pray, if a titmouse can keep his crest starched in this down-pour,
why should the spirit of mortal be limp?
* * * * *
_March 12th._ If one be born a coward, one cannot help that; and what
one cannot help is no disgrace, but a burden to be carried in patience
to the end of life.
But in my childhood it came to me that though one be born a coward
beyond escape, it is never necessary to behave like one. That has been
my comfort a thousand times, and it is my comfort tonight—a comfort
great enough to hold me steady in the iron grip of pain.