Produced by Judy Boss
PAINTED WINDOWS
By Elia W. Peattie
Will you come with me into the chamber of memory
and lift your eyes to the painted windows where the figures
and scenes of childhood appear? Perhaps by looking with
kindly eyes at those from out my past, long wished-for
visions of your own youth will appear to heal the wounds
from which you suffer, and to quiet your stormy and
restless heart.
CONTENTS
I NIGHT
II SOLITUDE
III FRIENDSHIP
IV FAME
V REMORSE
VI TRAVEL
PAINTED WINDOWS
I. NIGHT
YOUNG people believe very little that they hear about the compensations
of growing old, and of living over again in memory the events of the
past. Yet there really are these compensations and pleasures, and
although they are not so vivid and breathless as the pleasures of
youth, they have something delicate and fine about them that must be
experienced to be appreciated.
Few of us would exchange our memories for those of others. They have
become a part of our personality, and we could not part with them
without losing something of ourselves. Neither would we part with our
own particular childhood, which, however difficult it may have been at
times, seems to each of us more significant than the childhood of any
one else. I can run over in my mind certain incidents of my childhood
as if they were chapters in a much-loved book, and when I am wakeful
at night, or bored by a long journey, or waiting for some one in the
railway-station, I take them out and go over them again.
Nor is my book of memories without its illustrations. I can see little
villages, and a great city, and forests and planted fields, and familiar
faces; and all have this advantage: they are not fixed and without
motion, like the pictures in the ordinary book. People are walking up
the streets of the village, the trees are tossing, the tall wheat and
corn in the fields salute me. I can smell the odour of the gathered hay,
and the faces in my dream-book smile at me.
Of all of these memories I like best the one in the pine forest.
I was at that age when children think of their parents as being
all-powerful. I could hardly have imagined any circumstances, however
adverse, that my father could not have met with his strength and wisdom
and skill. All children have such a period of hero-worship, I suppose,
when their father stands out from the rest of the world as the best and
most powerful man living. So, feeling as I did, I was made happier than
I can say when my father decided, because I was looking pale and had a
poor appetite, to take me out of school for a while, and carry me with
him on a driving trip. We lived in Michigan, where there were, in the
days of which I am writing, not many railroads; and when my father, who
was attorney for a number of wholesale mercantile firms in Detroit, used
to go about the country collecting money due, adjusting claims, and so
on, he had no choice but to drive.
And over what roads! Now it was a strip of corduroy, now a piece
of well-graded elevation with clay subsoil and gravel surface, now a
neglected stretch full of dangerous holes; and worst of all, running
through the great forests, long pieces of road from which the stumps had
been only partly extracted, and where the sunlight barely penetrated.
Here the soaked earth became little less than a quagmire.
But father was too well used to hard journeys to fear them, and I felt
that, in going with him, I was safe from all possible harm. The journey
had all the allurement of an adventure, for we would not know from day
to day where we should eat our meals or sleep at night. So, to provide
against trouble, we carried father's old red-and-blue-checked army
blankets, a bag of feed for Sheridan, the horse, plenty of bread, bacon,
jam, coffee and prepared cream; and we hung pails of pure water and
buttermilk from the rear of our buggy.
We had been out two weeks without failing once to eat at a proper
table or to sleep in a comfortable bed. Sometimes we put up at the
stark-looking hotels that loomed, raw and uninviting, in the larger
towns; sometimes we had the pleasure of being welcomed at a little inn,
where the host showed us a personal hospitality; but oftener we were
forced to make ourselves "paying guests" at some house. We cared nothing
whether we slept in the spare rooms of a fine frame "residence" or crept
into bed beneath the eaves of the attic in a log cabin. I had begun to
feel that our journey would be almost too tame and comfortable, when one
night something really happened.
Father lost his bearings. He was hoping to reach the town of Gratiot by
nightfall, and he attempted to make a short cut. To do this he turned
into a road that wound through a magnificent forest, at first of oak and
butternut, ironwood and beech, then of densely growing pines. When we
entered the wood it was twilight, but no sooner were we well within
the shadow of these sombre trees than we were plunged in darkness,
and within half an hour this darkness deepened, so that we could see
nothing--not even the horse.
"The sun doesn't get in here the year round," said father, trying his
best to guide the horse through the mire. So deep was the mud that it
seemed as if it literally sucked at the legs of the horse and the wheels
of the buggy, and I began to wonder if we should really be swallowed,
and to fear that we had met with a difficulty that even my father could
not overcome. I can hardly make plain what a tragic thought that was!
The horse began to give out sighs and groans, and in the intervals of
his struggles to get on, I could feel him trembling. There was a note of
anxiety in father's voice as he called out, with all the authority and
cheer he could command, to poor Sheridan. The wind was rising, and
the long sobs of the pines made cold shivers run up my spine. My teeth
chattered, partly from cold, but more from fright.
"What are we going to do?" I asked, my voice quivering with tears.
"Well, we aren't going to cry, whatever else we do!" answered father,
rather sharply. He snatched the lighted lantern from its place on the
dashboard and leaped out into the road. I could hear him floundering
round in that terrible mire and soothing the horse. The next thing I
realised was that the horse was unhitched, that father had--for the
first time during our journey--laid the lash across Sheridan's back, and
that, with a leap of indignation, the horse had reached the firm ground
of the roadside. Father called out to him to stand still, and a moment
later I found myself being swung from the buggy into father's arms.
He staggered along, plunging and almost falling, and presently I, too,
stood beneath the giant pines.
"One journey more," said father, "for our supper, and then we'll bivouac
right here."
Now that I was away from the buggy that was so familiar to me, and that
seemed like a little movable piece of home, I felt, as I had not felt
before, the vastness of the solitude. Above me in the rising wind tossed
the tops of the singing trees; about me stretched the soft blackness;
and beneath the dense, interlaced branches it was almost as calm and
still as in a room. I could see that the clouds were breaking and the
stars beginning to come out, and that comforted me a little.
Father was keeping up a stream of cheerful talk.
"Now, sir," he was saying to Sheridan, "stand still while I get this
harness off you. I'll tie you and blanket you, and you can lie or stand
as you please. Here's your nose-bag, with some good supper in it, and if
you don't have drink, it's not my fault. Anyway, it isn't so long since
you got a good nip at the creek."
I was watching by the faint light of the lantern, and noticing how
unnatural father and Sheridan looked. They seemed to be blocked out in a
rude kind of way, like some wooden toys I had at home.
"Here we are," said father, "like Robinson Crusoes. It was hard luck for
Robinson, not having his little girl along. He'd have had her to pick up
sticks and twigs to make a fire, and that would have been a great help
to him."
Father began breaking fallen branches over his knee, and I groped round
and filled my arms again and again with little fagots. So after a few
minutes we had a fine fire crackling in a place where it could not catch
the branches of the trees. Father had scraped the needles of the pines
together in such a way that a bare rim of earth was left all around the
fire, so that it could not spread along the ground; and presently the
coffee-pot was over the fire and bacon was sizzling in the frying-pan.
The good, hearty odours came out to mingle with the delicious scent
of the pines, and I, setting out our dishes, began to feel a happiness
different from anything I had ever known.
Pioneers and wanderers and soldiers have joys of their own--joys of
which I had heard often enough, for there had been more stories told
than read in our house. But now for the first time I knew what my
grandmother and my uncles had meant when they told me about the way they
had come into the wilderness, and about the great happiness and freedom
of those first days. I, too, felt this freedom, and it seemed to me as
if I never again wanted walls to close in on me. All my fear was gone,
and I felt wild and glad. I could not believe that I was only a little
girl. I felt taller even than my father.
Father's mood was like mine in a way. He had memories to add to his
emotion, but then, on the other hand, he lacked the sense of discovery
I had, for he had known often such feelings as were coming to me for
the first time. When he was a young man he had been a colporteur for the
American Bible Society among the Lake Superior Indians, and in that
way had earned part of the money for his course at the University of
Michigan; afterward he had gone with other gold-seekers to Pike's Peak,
and had crossed the plains with oxen, in the company of many other
adventurers; then, when President Lincoln called for troops, he had
returned to enlist with the Michigan men, and had served more than three
years with McClellan and Grant.
So, naturally, there was nothing he did not know about making himself
comfortable in the open. He knew all the sorrow and all the joy of
the homeless man, and now, as he cooked, he began to sing the old
songs--"Marching Through Georgia," and "Bury Me Not on the Lone
Prairie," and "In the Prison Cell I Sit." He had been in a Southern
prison after the Battle of the Wilderness, and so he knew how to sing
that song with particular feeling.
I had heard war stories all my life, though usually father told such
tales in a half-joking way, as if to make light of everything he had
gone through. But now, as we ate there under the tossing pines, and the
wild chorus in the treetops swelled like a rising sea, the spirit of the
old days came over him. He was a good "stump speaker," and he knew how
to make a story come to life, and never did all his simple natural gifts
show themselves better than on this night, when he dwelt on his old
campaigns.
For the first time I was to look into the heart of a kindly natured man,
forced by terrible necessity to go through the dread experience of war.
I gained an idea of the unspeakable homesickness of the man who leaves
his family to an unimagined fate, and sacrifices years in the service
of his country. I saw that the mere foregoing of roof and bed is an
indescribable distress; I learned something of what the palpitant
anxiety before a battle must be, and the quaking fear at the first
rattle of bullets, and the half-mad rush of determination with which men
force valour into their faltering hearts; I was made to know something
of the blight of war--the horror of the battlefield, the waste of
bounty, the ruin of homes.
Then, rising above this, came stories of devotion, of brotherhood, of
service on the long, desolate marches, of courage to the death of those
who fought for a cause. I began to see wherein lay the highest joy of
the soldier, and of how little account he held himself, if the principle
for which he fought could be preserved. I heard for the first time the
wonderful words of Lincoln at Gettysburg, and learned to repeat a part
of them.
I was only eight, it is true, but emotion has no age, and I
understood then as well as I ever could, what heroism and devotion and
self-forgetfulness mean. I understood, too, the meaning of the words
"our country," and my heart warmed to it, as in the older times the
hearts of boys and girls warmed to the name of their king. The new
knowledge was so beautiful that I thought then, and I think now, that
nothing could have served as so fit an accompaniment to it as the
shouting of those pines. They sang like heroes, and in their swaying
gave me fleeting glimpses of the stars, unbelievably brilliant in the
dusky purple sky, and half-obscured now and then by drifting clouds.
By and by we lay down, not far apart, each rolled in an army blanket,
frayed with service. Our feet were to the fire--for it was so that
soldiers lay, my father said--and our heads rested on mounds of
pine-needles.
Sometimes in the night I felt my father's hand resting lightly on my
shoulders to see that I was covered, but in my dreams he ceased to be my
father and became my comrade, and I was a drummer boy,--I had seen the
play, "The Drummer Boy of the Rappahannock,"--marching forward, with set
teeth, in the face of battle.
Whatever could redeem war and make it glorious seemed to flood my soul.
All that was highest, all that was noble in that dreadful conflict came
to me in my sleep--to me, the child who had been born when my father
was at "the front." I had a strange baptism of the spirit. I discovered
sorrow and courage, singing trees and stars. I was never again to think
that the fireside and fireside thoughts made up the whole of life.
My father lies with other soldiers by the Pacific; the forest sings
no more; the old army blankets have disappeared; the memories of the
terrible war are fading,--happily fading,--but they all live again,
sometimes, in my memory, and I am once more a child, with thoughts as
proud and fierce and beautiful as Valkyries.
II. SOLITUDE
AMONG the pictures that I see when I look back into the past, is the one
where I, a sullen, egotistic person nine years old, stood quite alone
in the world. To be sure, there were father and mother in the house, and
there were the other children, and not one among them knew I was
alone. The world certainly would not have regarded me as friendless or
orphaned. There was nothing in my mere appearance, as I started away to
school in my clean ginghams, with my well-brushed hair, and embroidered
school-bag, to lead any one to suppose that I was a castaway. Yet I
was--I had discovered this fact, hidden though it might be from others.
I was no longer loved. Father and mother loved the other children; but
not me. I might come home at night, fairly bursting with important news
about what had happened in class or among my friends, and try to relate
my little histories. But did mother listen? Not at all. She would nod
like a mandarin while I talked, or go on turning the leaves of her book,
or writing her letter. What I said was of no importance to her.
Father was even less interested. He frankly told me to keep still, and
went on with the accounts in which he was so absurdly interested, or
examined "papers"--stupid-looking things done on legal cap, which he
brought home with him from the office. No one kissed me when I started
away in the morning; no one kissed me when I came home at night. I
went to bed unkissed. I felt myself to be a lonely and misunderstood
child--perhaps even an adopted one.
Why, I knew a little girl who, when she went up to her room at night,
found the bedclothes turned back, and the shade drawn, and a screen
placed so as to keep off drafts. And her mother brushed her hair twenty
minutes by the clock each night, to make it glossy; and then she sat by
her bed and sang softly till the girl fell asleep.
I not only had to open my own bed, but the beds for the other children,
and although I sometimes felt my mother's hand tucking in the bedclothes
round me, she never stooped and kissed me on the brow and said, "Bless
you, my child." No one, in all my experience, had said, "Bless you, my
child." When the girl I have spoken of came into the room, her mother
reached out her arms and said, before everybody, "Here comes my
dear little girl." When I came into a room, I was usually told to do
something for somebody. It was "Please see if the fire needs more wood,"
or "Let the cat in, please," or "I'd like you to weed the pansy bed
before supper-time."
In these circumstances, life hardly seemed worth living. I decided that
I had made a mistake in choosing my family. It did not appreciate me,
and it failed to make my young life glad. I knew my young life ought to
be glad. And it was not. It was drab, as drab as Toot's old rain-coat.
Toot was "our coloured boy." That is the way we described him. Father
had brought him home from the war, and had sent him to school, and
then apprenticed him to a miller. Toot did "chores" for his board and
clothes, but was soon to be his own man, and to be paid money by the
miller, and to marry Tulula Darthula Jones, a nice coloured girl who
lived with the Cutlers.
The time had been when Toot had been my self-appointed slave. Almost my
first recollections were of his carrying me out to see the train pass,
and saying, "Toot, toot!" in imitation of the locomotive; so, although
he had rather a splendid name, I called him "Toot," and the whole town
followed my example. Yes, the time had been when Toot saw me safe to
school, and slipped little red apples into my pocket, and took me out
while he milked the cow, and told me stories and sang me plantation
songs. Now, when he passed, he only nodded. When I spoke to him about
his not giving me any more apples, he said:
"Ah reckon they're your pa's apples, missy. Why, fo' goodness' sake,
don' yo' he'p yo'se'f?"
But I did not want to help myself. I wanted to be helped--not because
I was lazy, but because I wanted to be adored. I was really a sort of
fairy princess,--misplaced, of course, in a stupid republic,--and I
wanted life conducted on a fairy-princess basis. It was a game I wished
to play, but it was one I could not play alone, and not a soul could I
find who seemed inclined to play it with me.
Well, things went from bad to worse. I decided that if mother no longer
loved me, I would no longer tell her things. So I did not. I got a
hundred in spelling for twelve days running, and did not tell her!
I broke Edna Grantham's mother's water-pitcher, and kept the fact a
secret. The secret was, indeed, as sharp-edged as the pieces of the
broken pitcher had been; I cried under the bedclothes, thinking how
sorry Mrs. Grantham had been, and that mother really ought to know.
Only what was the use? I no longer looked to her to help me out of my
troubles.
I had no need now to have father and mother tell me to hurry up and
finish my chatter, for I kept all that happened to myself. I had a new
"intimate friend," and did not so much as mention her. I wrote a poem
and showed it to my teacher, but not to my uninterested parents. And
when I climbed the stairs at night to my room, I swelled with loneliness
and anguish and resentment, and the hot tears came to my eyes as I heard
father and mother laughing and talking together and paying no attention
to my misery. I could hear Toot, who used to be making all sorts of
little presents for me, whistling as he brought in the wood and water,
and then "cleaned up" to go to see his Tulula, with never a thought of
me. And I said to myself that the best thing I could do was to grow up
and get away from a place where I was no longer wanted.
No one noticed my sufferings further than sometimes to say impatiently,
"What makes you act so strange, child?" And to that, of course,
I answered nothing, for what I had to say would not, I felt, be
understood.
One morning in June I left home with my resentment burning fiercely
within me. I had not cared for the things we had for breakfast, for I
was half-ill with fretting and with the closeness of the day, but my
lack of appetite had been passed by with the remark that any one
was likely not to have an appetite on such a close day. But I was so
languid, and so averse to taking up the usual round of things, that I
begged mother to let me stay at home. She shook her head decidedly.
"You've been out of school too many days already this term," she said.
"Run along now, or you'll be late!"
"Please--" I began, for my head really was whirling, although, quite as
much, perhaps, from my perversity as from any other cause. Mother turned
on me one of her "last-word" glances.
"Go to school without another word," she said, quietly.
I knew that quiet tone, and I went. And now I was sure that all was over
between my parents and myself. I began to wonder if I need really wait
till I was grown up before leaving home. So miserably absorbed was I
in thinking of this, and in pitying myself with a consuming pity,
that everything at school seemed to pass like the shadow of a dream. I
blundered in whatever I tried to do, was sharply scolded for not hearing
the teacher until she had spoken my name three times, and was holding on
to myself desperately in my effort to keep back a flood of tears, when I
became aware that something was happening.
There suddenly was a perfect silence in the room--the sort of silence
that makes the heart beat too fast. The mist swimming before me did not,
I perceived, come from my own eyes, but from the changing colour of the
air, the usual transparency of which was being tinged with yellow. The
sultriness of the day was deepening, and seemed to carry a threat with
it.
"Something is going to happen," thought I, and over the whole room
spread the same conviction. Electric currents seemed to snap from one
consciousness to another. We dropped our books, and turned our eyes
toward the western windows, to look upon a changed world. It was as if
we peered through yellow glass. In the sky soft-looking, tawny clouds
came tumbling along like playful cats--or tigers. A moment later we saw
that they were not playful, but angry; they stretched out claws, and
snarled as they did so. One claw reached the tall chimneys of the
schoolhouse, another tapped at the cupola, one was thrust through the
wall near where I sat.
Then it grew black, and there was a bellowing all about us, so that the
commands of the teacher and the screams of the children barely could be
heard. I knew little or nothing. My shoulder was stinging, something had
hit me on the side of the head, my eyes were full of dust and mortar,
and my feet were carrying me with the others along the corridor, down
the two flights of wide stairs. I do not think we pushed each other or
were reckless. My recollection is only of many shadowy figures flying on
with sure feet out of the building that seemed to be falling in upon us.
Presently we were out on the landing before the door, with one more
flight of steps before us, that reached to the street. Something so
strong that it might not be denied gathered me up in invisible arms,
whirled me round once or twice and dropped me, not ungently, in the
middle of the road. And then, as I struggled to my knees and, wiping the
dust from my eyes, looked up, I saw dozens of others being lifted in
the same way, and blown off into the yard or the street. The larger
ones were trying to hold on to the smaller, and the teachers were
endeavouring to keep the children from going out of the building, but
their efforts were of no avail. The children came on, and were blown
about like leaves.
Then I saw what looked like a high yellow wall advancing upon me--a
roaring and fearsome mass of driven dust, sticks, debris. It came over
me that my own home might be there, in strips and fragments, to beat me
down and kill me; and with the thought came a swift little vision out of
my geography of the Arabs in a sand-storm on the desert. I gathered up
my fluttering dress skirt, held it tight about my head, and lay flat
upon the ground.
It seemed as if a long time passed, a time in which I knew very little
except that I was fighting for my breath as I never had fought for
anything. There were more hurts and bruises now, but they did not
matter. Just to draw my own breath in my own way seemed to be the only
thing in the world that was of any account. And then there was a shaft
of flame, an earsplitting roar, and the rain was upon us in sheets, in
streams, in visible rivers.
I imagined that it would last a long time, and wondered in a daze how
I could get home in a rain like that--for I should have to face it. I
could see that in a few seconds the gutters had begun to race, the road
where I lay was a stream, and then--then the rain ceased. Never was
anything so astonishing. The sky came out blue, tattered rags of cloud
raced across it, and I had time to conclude that, whipped and almost
breathless though I was, I was still alive.
And then I saw a curious sight. Down the street in every direction came
rushing hatless men and women. Here and there a wild-eyed horse was
being lashed along. All the town was coming. They were in their work
clothes, in their slippers, in their wrappers--they were in anything
and everything. Some of them sobbed as they ran, some called aloud names
that I knew. They were fathers and mothers looking for their children.
And who was that--that woman with a white face, with hair falling about
her shoulders, where it had fallen as she ran--that woman whose breath
came between her teeth strangely and who called my name over and
over, bleatingly, as a mother sheep calls its lamb? At first I did not
recognise her, and then, at last, I knew. And that creature with the
rolling eyes and the curious ash-coloured face who, mumbling something
over and over in his throat, came for me, and snatched me up and wiped
my face free of mud, and felt of me here and there with trembling
hands--who was he?
And breaking out of the crowd of men who had come running from the
street of stores and offices, was another strange being, with a sort of
battle light in his eyes, who, seeing me, gathered me to him and bore me
away toward home. Looking back, I could see the woman I knew following,
leaning on the arm of the boy with the rolling eyes, whose eyes had
ceased to roll, and who was quite recognisable now as Toot.
A happiness that was almost as terrible as sorrow welled up in my heart.
I did not weep, or laugh, or talk. All I had experienced had carried me
beyond mere excitement into exultation. I exulted in life, in love. My
conceit and sulkiness died in that storm, as did many another thing. I
was alive. I was loved. I said it over and over to myself silently, in
"my heart's deep core," while mother washed me with trembling hands in
my own dear room, bound up my hurts, braided my hair, and put me, in a
fresh night-dress, into my bed. I do not recall that we talked to
each other, but in every caress of her hands as she worked I felt the
unspoken assurances of a love such as I had not dreamed of.
Father had gone running back to the school to see if he could be of any
assistance to his neighbours, and had taken Toot with him, but they were
back presently to say that beyond a few sharp injuries and broken bones,
no harm had been done to the children. It was considered miraculous that
no one had been killed or seriously injured, and I noticed that father's
voice trembled as he told of it, and that mother could not answer, and
that Toot sobbed like a big silly boy.
Then as we talked together, behold, a second storm was upon us--a sharp
black blast of wind and rain, not terrifying, like the other, but with
an "I've-come-to-spend-the-day" sort of aspect.
But no one seemed to mind very much. I was carried down to the
sitting-room. Toot busied himself coming and going on this errand and
on that, fastening the doors, closing the windows, running out to see
to the animals, and coming back again. Father and mother set the table.
They kept close together; and now and then they looked over at me,
without saying anything, but with shining eyes.
The storm died down to a quiet rain. From the roof of the porch the
drops fell in silver strings, like beads. Then the sun came out and
turned them into shining crystal. The birds began to sing again, and
when we threw open the windows delicious odours of fresh earth and
flowering shrub greeted us. Mother began to sing as she worked. And I
sank softly to sleep, thrilled with the marvels of the world--not of the
tempest, but of the peace.
The sweet familiarity of the faces and the walls and the furniture and
the garden was like a blessing. There was not a chair there that I would
have exchanged for any other chair--not a tree that I would have parted
with--not a custom of that simple, busy place that I would have changed.
I knew now all my stupidity--and my good fortune.
III. FRIENDSHIP
WHEN I look back upon the village where I lived as a child, I cannot
remember that there were any divisions in our society. This group went
to the Congregational church, and that to the Presbyterian, but each
family felt itself to be as good as any other, and even if, ordinarily,
some of them withdrew themselves in mild exclusiveness, on all occasions
of public celebration, or when in trouble, we stood together in the
pleasantest and most unaffected democracy.
There were only the "Bad Madigans" outside the pale.
The facts about the Bad Madigans were, no doubt, serious enough, but
the fiction was even more appalling. As to facts, the father drank,
the mother followed suit, the appearance of the house--a ramshackle old
place beyond the fair-grounds--was a scandal; the children could not be
got to go to school for any length of time, and, when they were there,
each class in which they were put felt itself to be in disgrace, and the
dislike focused upon the intruders, sent them, sullen and hateful, back
to their lair. And, indeed, the Madigan house seemed little more than a
lair. It had been rather a fine house once, and had been built for the
occupancy of the man who owned the fairgrounds; but he choosing finally
to live in the village, had permitted the house to fall into decay,
until only a family with no sense of order or self-respect would think
of occupying it.
When there occurred one of the rare burglaries in the village, when
anything was missing from a clothes-line, or a calf or pig disappeared,
it was generally laid to the Madigans. Unaccounted-for fires were
supposed to be their doing; they were accorded responsibility for
vicious practical jokes; and it was generally felt that before we were
through with them they would commit some blood-curdling crime.
When, as sometimes happened, I had met one of the Bad Madigans on the
road, or down on the village street, my heart had beaten as if I was
face to face with a company of banditti; but I cannot say that this
excitement was caused by aversion alone. The truth was, the Bad
Madigans fascinated me. They stood out from all the others, proudly and
disdainfully like Robin Hood and his band, and I could not get over
the idea that they said: "Fetch me yonder bow!" to each other; or, "Go
slaughter me a ten-tined buck!" I felt that they were fortunate in not
being held down to hours like the rest of us. Out of bed at six-thirty,
at table by seven, tidying bedroom at seven-thirty, dusting sitting-room
at eight, on way to school at eight-thirty, was not for "the likes of
them!" Only we, slaves of respectability and of an inordinate appetite
for order, suffered such monotony and drabness to rule. I knew the
Madigan boys could go fishing whenever they pleased, that the Madigan
girls picked the blackberries before any one else could get out to them,
that every member of the family could pack up and go picnicking for days
at a time, and that any stray horse was likely to be ridden bareback,
within an inch of its life, by the younger members of the family.
Only once however, did I have a chance to meet one of these modern
Visigoths face to face, and the feelings aroused by that incident
remained the darling secret of my youth. I dared tell no one, and I
longed, yet feared, to have the experience repeated. But it never was!
It happened in this way:
On a certain Sunday afternoon in May, my father and mother and I went to
Emmons' Woods. To reach Emmons' Woods, you went out the back door,
past the pump and the currant bushes, then down the path to the
chicken-houses, and so on, by way of the woodpile, to the south gate.
After that, you went west toward the clover meadows, past the house
where the Crazy Lady lived--here, if you were alone, you ran--and then,
reaching the verge of the woods, you took your choice of climbing a
seven-rail fence or of walking a quarter of a mile till you came to the
bars. The latter was much better for the lace on a Sunday petticoat.
Once in Emmons' Woods, there was enchantment. An eagle might come--or
a blue heron. There had been bears in Emmons' Woods--bears with rolling
eyes and red mouths from which their tongues lolled. There was one place
for pinky trillium, and another for gentians; one for tawny adders'
tongues, and another for yellow Dutchman's breeches. In the sap-starting
season, the maples dripped their luscious sap into little wooden cups;
later, partridges nested in the sun-burned grass. There was no lake or
river, but there was a pond, swarming with a vivacious population, and
on the hard-baked clay of the pond beach the green beetles aired their
splendid changeable silks and sandpipers hopped ridiculously.
It was, curiously enough, easier to run than to walk in Emmons' Woods,
and even more natural to dance than to run. One became acquainted with
squirrels, established intimacies with chipmunks, and was on some sort
of civil relation with blackbirds. And, oh, the tossing green of the
young willows, where the lilac distance melted into the pale blue of the
sky! And, oh, the budding of the maples and the fringing of the oaks;
and, oh, the blossoming of the tulip trees and the garnering of the
chestnuts! And then, the wriggling things in the grass; the procession
of ants; the coquetries of the robins; and the Beyond, deepening,
deepening into the forest where it was safe only for the woodsmen to go.
On this particular Sunday one of us was requested not to squeal and run
about, and to remember that we wore our best shoes and need not mess
them unnecessarily. It was hard to be reminded just when the dance was
getting into my feet, but I tried to have Sunday manners, and went along
in the still woods, wondering why the purple colours disappeared as
we came on and what had been distance became nearness. There was a
beautiful, aching vagueness over everything, and it was not strange
that father, who had stretched himself on the moss, and mother, who was
reading Godey's Ladies' Book, should presently both of them be nodding.
So, that being a well-established fact--I established it by hanging over
them and staring at their eyelids--it seemed a good time for me to let
the dance out of my toes. Still careful of my fresh linen frock, and
remembering about the best shoes, I went on, demurely, down the green
alleys of the wood. Now I stepped on patches of sunshine, now in pools
of shadow. I thought of how naughty I was to run away like this, and of
what a mistake people made who said I was a good, quiet, child. I knew
that I looked sad and prim, but I really hated my sadness and primness
and goodness, and longed to let out all the interesting, wild, naughty
thoughts there were in me. I wanted to act as if I were bewitched, and
to tear up vines and wind them about me, to shriek to the echoes, and
to scold back at the squirrels. I wanted to take off my clothes and
rush into the pond, and swim like a fish, or wriggle like a pollywog.
I wanted to climb trees and drop from them; and, most of all--oh, with
what longing--did I wish to lift myself above the earth and fly into the
bland blue air!
I came to a hollow where there was a wonderful greenness over
everything, and I said to myself that I would be bewitched at last. I
would dance and whirl and call till, perhaps, some kind of a creature as
wild and wicked and wonderful as I, would come out of the woods and join
me. So I forgot about the fresh linen frock, and wreathed myself with
wild grape-vine; I cared nothing for my fresh braids and wound trillium
in my hair; and I ceased to remember my new shoes, and whirled around
and around in the leafy mould, singing and shouting.
I grew madder and madder. I seemed not to be myself at all, but some
sort of a wood creature; and just when the trees were looking larger
than ever they did before, and the sky higher up, a girl came running
down from a sort of embankment where a tornado had made a path for
itself and had hurled some great chestnuts and oaks in a tumbled mass.
The girl came leaping down the steep sides of this place, her arms
outspread, her feet bare, her dress no more than a rag the colour of the
tree-trunks. She had on a torn green jacket, which made her seem more
than ever like some one who had just stepped out of a hollow tree, and,
to my unspeakable happiness, she joined me in my dance.
I shall never forget how beautiful she was, with her wild tangle of dark
hair, and her deep blue eyes and ripe lips. Her cheeks were flaming red,
and her limbs strong and brown. She did not merely shout and sing; she
whistled, and made calls like the birds, and cawed like a crow, and
chittered like a squirrel, and around and around the two of us danced,
crazy as dervishes with the beauty of the spring and the joy of being
free.
By and by we were so tired we had to stop, and then we sat down panting
and looked at each other. At that we laughed, long and foolishly, but,
after a time, it occurred to us that we had many questions to ask.
"How did you get here?" I asked the girl.
"I was walking my lone," she said, speaking her words as if there was a
rich thick quality to them, "and I heard you screeling."
"Won't you get lost, alone like that?"
"I can't get lost," she sighed. "I 'd like to, but I can't."
"Where do you live?"
"Beyant the fair-grounds."
"You're not--not Norah Madigan?"
She leaned back and clasped her hands behind her head. Then she smiled
at me teasingly.
"I am that," she said, showing her perfect teeth.
I caught my breath with a sharp gasp. Ought I to turn back to my
parents? Had I been so naughty that I had called the naughtiest girl in
the whole county out to me?
But I could not bring myself to leave her. She was leaning forward and
looking at me now with mocking eyes.
"Are you afraid?" she demanded.
"Afraid of what?" I asked, knowing quite well what she meant.
"Of me?" she retorted.
At that second an agreeable truth overtook me. I leaned forward, too,
and put my hand on hers.
"Why, I like you!" I cried. She began laughing again, but this time
there was no mockery in it. She ran her fingers over the embroidery on
my linen frock, she examined the lace on my petticoat, looked at the
bows on my shoes, and played delicately with the locket dangling from
the slender chain around my neck.
"Do you know--other girls?" she almost whispered.
I nodded. "Lots and lots of 'em," I said. "Don't you?"
She shook her head in wistful denial.
"Us Madigans," she said, "keeps to ourselves." She said it so haughtily
that for a moment I was almost persuaded into thinking that they lived
their solitary lives from choice. But, glancing up at her, I saw a blush
that covered her face, and there were tears in her eyes.
"Well, anyway," said I quickly, "we know each other."
"Yes," she cried, "we do that!"
She got up, then, and ran to a great tree from which a stout grape-vine
was swinging, and pulling at it with her strong arms, she soon had it
made into a practical swing.
"Come!" she called--"come, let's swing together!"
She helped me to balance myself on the rope-like vine, and, placing her
feet outside of mine, showed me how to "work up" till we were sweeping
with a fine momentum through the air. We shrieked with excitement, and
urged each other on to more and more frantic exertions. We were like two
birds, but to birds flying is no novelty. With us it was, which made us
happier than birds. But I, for my part, was no more delighted with
my swift flights through the air than I was with the shining eyes and
flashing teeth of the girl opposite me. I liked her strength, and the
way in which her body bent and swayed. Once more, she seemed like a
wood-child--a wild, mad, gay creature from the tree. I felt as if I had
drawn a playmate from elf-land, and I liked her a thousand times
better than those proper little girls who came to see me of a Saturday
afternoon.
Well, there we were, rocking and screaming, and telling each other that
we were hawks, and that we were flying high over the world, when the
anxious and austere voice of my mother broke upon our ears. We tried to
stop, but that was not such an easy matter to do, and as we twisted and
writhed, to bring our grape-vine swing to a standstill, there was a slow
rending and breaking which struck terror to our souls.
"Jump!" commanded Norah--"jump! the vine's breaking!" We leaped at the
same moment, she safely. My foot caught in a stout tendril, and I fell
headlong, scraping my forehead on the ground and tearing a triangular
rent in the pretty, new frock. Mother came running forward, and the
expression on her face was far from being the one I liked to see.
"What have you been doing?" she demanded. "I thought you were getting
old enough and sensible enough to take care of yourself!"
I must have been a depressing sight, viewed with the eyes of a careful
mother. Blood and mould mingled on my face, my dress needed a laundress
as badly as a dress could, and my shoes were scratched and muddy.
"And who is this girl?" asked mother. I had become conscious that Norah
was at my feet, wiping off my shoes with her queer little brown frock.
"It's a new friend of mine," gasped I, beginning to see that I must lose
her, and hoping the lump in my throat wouldn't get any bigger than it
was.
"What is her name?" asked mother. I had no time to answer. The girl did
that.
"I'm Norah Madigan," she said. Her tone was respectful, and, maybe, sad.
At any rate, it had a curious sound.
"Norah Mad-i-gan?" asked mother doubtfully, stringing out the word.
"Yessum," said a low voice. "Goodbye, mum."
"Oh, Norah!" cried I, a strange pain stabbing my heart. "Come to see
me--"
But my mother's voice broke in, firm and kind.
"Good-bye, Norah," said she.
I saw Norah turn and run up among the trees, almost as swiftly and
silently as a hare. Once, she turned to look back. I was watching, and
caught the chance to wave my hand to her.
"Come!" commanded mother, and we went back to where father was sitting.
"What do you think!" said mother. "I found the child playing with one of
the Bad Madigans. Isn't she a sight!"
The lump in my throat swelled to a terrible size; something buzzed in my
ears, and I heard some one weeping. For a second or two I didn't realise
that it was myself.
"Well, never mind, dear," said mother's voice soothingly. "The frock
will wash, and the tear will mend, and the shoes will black. Yes, and
the scratches will heal."
"It isn't that," I sobbed. "Oh, oh, it isn't that!"
"What is it, then, for goodness sake?" asked mother.
But I would not tell. I could not tell. How could I say that the
daughter of the Bad Madigans was the first real and satisfying playmate
I had ever had?
IV. FAME
AS I remember the boys and girls who grew up with me, I think of them as
artists, or actors, or travellers, or rich merchants. Each of us, by the
time we were half through grammar school, had selected a career. So far
as I recollect, this career had very little to do with our abilities.
We merely chose something that suited us. Our energy and our vanity
crystallised into particular shapes. There was a sort of religion abroad
in the West at that time that a person could do almost anything he set
out to do. The older people, as well as the children, had an idea that
the world was theirs--they all were Monte Cristos in that respect.
As for me, I had decided to be an orator.
At the time of making this decision, I was nine years of age, decidedly
thin and long drawn out, with two brown braids down my back, and a
terrific shyness which I occasionally overcame with such a magnificent
splurge that those who were not acquainted with my peculiarities
probably thought me a shamefully assertive child.
I based my oratorical aspirations upon my having taken the prize a
number of times in Sunday-school for learning the most New Testament
verses, and upon the fact that I always could make myself heard to the
farthest corner of the room. I also felt that I had a great message to
deliver to the world when I got around it, though in this, I was in
no way different from several of my friends. I had noticed a number
of things in the world that were not quite right, and which I thought
needed attention, and I believed that if I were quite good and studied
elocution, in a little while I should be able to set my part of
the world right, and perhaps even extend my influence to adjoining
districts.
Meantime I practised terrible vocal exercises, chiefly consisting of a
raucous "caw" something like a crow's favourite remark, and advocated
by my teacher in elocution for no reason that I can now remember; and
I stood before the glass for hours at a time making grimaces so as to
acquire the "actor's face," till my frightened little sisters implored
me to turn back into myself again.
It was a great day for me when I was asked to participate in the Harvest
Home Festival at our church on Thanksgiving Day. I looked upon it as the
beginning of my career, and bought crimping papers so that my hair could
be properly fluted. Of course, I wanted a new dress for the occasion,
and I spent several days in planning the kind of a one I thought best
suited to such a memorable event. I even picked out the particular
lace pattern I wanted for the ruffles. This was before I submitted the
proposition to Mother, however. When I told her about it she said she
could see no use in getting a new dress and going to all the trouble of
making it when my white one with the green harps was perfectly good.
This was such an unusual dress and had gone through so many
vicissitudes, that I really was devotedly attached to it. It had, in the
beginning, belonged to my Aunt Bess, and in the days of its first
glory had been a sheer Irish linen lawn, with tiny green harps on it at
agreeable intervals. But in the course of time, it had to be sent to
the wash-tub, and then, behold, all the little lovely harps followed
the example of the harp that "once through Tara's hall the soul of music
shed," and disappeared! Only vague, dirty, yellow reminders of their
beauty remained, not to decorate, but to disfigure the fine fabric.
Aunt Bess, naturally enough, felt irritated, and she gave the goods to
mother, saying that she might be able to boil the yellow stains out of
it and make me a dress. I had gone about many a time, like love amid the
ruins, in the fragments of Aunt Bess's splendour, and I was not happy in
the thought of dangling these dimmed reminders of Ireland's past around
with me. But mother said she thought I'd have a really truly white
Sunday best dress out of it by the time she was through with it. So
she prepared a strong solution of sodium and things, and boiled the
breadths, and every little green harp came dancing back as if awaiting
the hand of a new Dublin poet. The green of them was even more charming
than it had been at first, and I, as happy as if I had acquired the
golden harp for which I then vaguely longed, went to Sunday-school
all that summer in this miraculous dress of now-you-see-them
and-now-you-don't, and became so used to being asked if I were Irish
that my heart exulted when I found that I might--fractionally--claim to
be, and that one of the Fenian martyrs had been an ancestor. For a year,
even, after that discovery of the Fenian martyr, ancestors were a
favorite study of mine.
Well, though the dress became something more than familiar to the eyes
of my associates, I was so attached to it that I felt no objection to
wearing it on the great occasion; and, that being settled, all that
remained was to select the piece which was to reveal my talents to a
hitherto unappreciative--or, perhaps I should say, unsuspecting--group
of friends and relatives. It seemed to me that I knew better than my
teacher (who had agreed to select the pieces for her pupils) possibly
could what sort of a thing best represented my talents, and so, after
some thought, I selected "Antony and Cleopatra," and as I lagged
along the too-familiar road to school, avoiding the companionship of my
acquaintances, I repeated:
I am dying, Egypt, dying!
Ebbs the crimson life-tide fast,
And the dark Plutonian shadows
Gather on the evening blast.