and the swing of the purple lines, that I could not bring myself to
modify my voice, and the passers-by heard my shrill tones vibrating
with:
As for thee, star-eyed Egyptian!
Glorious sorceress of the Nile!
Light the path to Stygian horrors
With the splendour of thy smile.
I wiped dishes to the rhythm of such phrases as "scarred and veteran
legions," and laced my shoes to the music of "Though no glittering
guards surround me."
Confident that no one could fail to see the beauty of these lines, or
the propriety of the identification of myself with Antony, I called upon
my Sunday-school teacher, Miss Goss, to report. I never had thought
of Miss Goss as a blithe spirit. She was associated in my mind with
numerous solemn occasions, and I was surprised to find that on this day
she unexpectedly developed a trait of breaking into nervous laughter.
I had got as far as "Should the base plebeian rabble--" when Miss Goss
broke down in what I could not but regard as a fit of giggles, and I
ceased abruptly.
She pulled herself together after a moment or two, and said if I would
follow her to the library she thought she could find something--here she
hesitated, to conclude with, "more within the understanding of the other
children." I saw that she thought my feelings were hurt, and as I
passed a mirror I feared she had some reason to think so. My face was
uncommonly flushed, and a look of indignation had crept, somehow, even
into my braids, which, having been plaited too tightly, stuck out in
crooks and kinks from the side of my head. Incidentally, I was horrified
to notice how thin I was--thin, even for a dying Antony--and my frock
was so outgrown that it hardly covered my knees. "Ridiculous!" I said
under my breath, as I confronted this miserable figure--so shamefully
insignificant for the vicarious emotions which it had been housing.
"Ridiculous!"
I hated Miss Goss, and must have shown it in my stony stare, for she put
her arm around me and said it was a pity I had been to all the trouble
to learn a poem which was--well, a trifle too--too old--but that she
hoped to find something equally "pretty" for me to speak. At the use of
that adjective in connection with William Lytle's lines, I wrenched away
from her grasp and stood in what I was pleased to think a haughty calm,
awaiting her directions.
She took from the shelves a little volume of Whittier, bound in calf,
handling it as tenderly as if it were a priceless possession. Some
pressed violets dropped out as she opened it, and she replaced them
with devotional fingers. After some time she decided upon a lyric lament
entitled "Eva." I was asked to run over the verses, and found them
remarkably easy to learn; fatally impossible to forget. I presently
arose and with an impish betrayal of the poverty of rhyme and the
plethora of sentiment, repeated the thing relentlessly.
O for faith like thine, sweet Eva,
Lighting all the solemn reevah [river],
And the blessings of the poor,
Wafting to the heavenly shoor [shore].
"I do think," said Miss Goss gently, "that if you tried, my child, you
might manage the rhymes just a little better."
"But if you're born in Michigan," I protested, "how can you possibly
make 'Eva' rhyme with 'never' and 'believer'?"
"Perhaps it is a little hard," Miss Goss agreed, and still clinging to
her Whittier, she exhumed "The Pumpkin," which she thought precisely
fitted for our Harvest Home festival. This was quite another thing from
"Eva," and I saw that only hours of study would fix it in my mind. I
went to my home, therefore, with "The Pumpkin" delicately transcribed
in Miss Goss's running hand, and I tried to get some comfort from the
foreign allusions glittering through Whittier's kindly verse. As the
days went by I came to have a certain fondness for those homely lines:
O--fruit loved of boyhood!--the old days recalling,
When wood grapes were purpling and brown nuts were falling!
When wild, ugly faces we carved in the skin,
Glaring out through the dark with a candle within!
When we laughed round the corn-heap, with hearts all in tune,
Our chair a broad pumpkin--our lantern the moon,
Telling tales of the fairy who travelled like steam
In a pumpkin-shell coach, with two rats for her team!
On all sides this poem was considered very fitting, and I went to the
festival with that comfortable feeling one has when one is moving with
the majority and is wearing one's best clothes.
I sat rigid with expectancy while my schoolmates spoke their "pieces"
and sang their songs. With frozen faces they faced each other in
dialogues, lost their quavering voices, and stumbled down the stairs
in their anguish of spirit. I pitied them, and thought how lucky it was
that my memory never failed me, and that my voice carried so well that I
could arouse even old Elder Waite from his slumbers.
Then my turn came. My crimps were beautiful; the green harps danced on
my freshly-ironed frock, and I had on my new chain and locket. I relied
upon a sort of mechanism in me to say: O greenly and fair in the lands
of the sun, The vines of the gourd and the rich melon run.
In this seemly manner Whittier's ode to the pumpkin began. I meant to
go on to verses which I knew would delight my audience--to references to
the "crook-necks" ripening under the September sun; and to Thanksgiving
gatherings at which all smiled at the reunion of friends and the bounty
of the board.
What moistens the lip and brightens the eye!
What calls back the past like the rich pumpkin pie!
I was sure these lines would meet with approval, and having "come down
to the popular taste," I was prepared to do my best to please.
After a few seconds, when the golden pumpkins that lined the stage had
ceased to dance before my eyes, I thought I ought to begin to "get
hold of my audience." Of course, my memory would be giving me the right
words, and my facile tongue running along reliably, but I wished to
demonstrate that "ability" which was to bring me favour and fame. I
listened to my own words and was shivered into silence. I was talking
about "dark Plutonian shadows"; I was begging "Egypt" to let her arms
enfold me--I was, indeed, in the very thick of the forbidden poem. I
could hear my thin, aspiring voice reaching out over that paralysed
audience with:
Though my scarred and veteran legions
Bear their eagles high no more;
And my wrecked and scattered galleys
Strew dark Actium's fatal shore.
My tongue seemed frozen, or some kind of a ratchet at the base of it
had got out of order. For a moment--a moment can be the little sister
of eternity--I could say nothing. Then I found myself in the clutches of
the instinct for self-preservation. I felt it in me to stop the giggles
of the girls on the front seat; to take the patronising smiles out of
the tolerant eyes of the grown people. Maybe my voice lost something of
its piping insistence and was touched with genuine feeling; perhaps some
faint, faint spark of the divine fire which I longed to fan into a flame
did flicker in me for that one time. I had the indescribable happiness
of seeing the smiles die on the faces of my elders, and of hearing the
giggles of my friends cease.
I went to my seat amid what I was pleased to consider "thunders of
applause," and by way of acknowledgment, I spoke, with chastened
propriety, Whittier's ode to the pumpkin.
I cannot remember whether or not I was scolded. I'm afraid, afterward,
some people still laughed. As for me, oddly enough, my oratorical
aspirations died. I decided there were other careers better fitted to
one of my physique. So I had to go to the trouble of finding another
career; but just what it was I have forgotten.
V. REMORSE
IT is extraordinary, when you come to think of it, how very few days,
out of all the thousands that have passed, lift their heads from
the grey plain of the forgotten--like bowlders in a level stretch of
country. It is not alone the unimportant ones that are forgotten; but,
according to one's elders, many important ones have left no mark in the
memory. It seems to me, as I think it over, that it was the days that
affected the emotions that dwell with me, and I suppose all of us must
be the same in this respect.
Among those which I am never to forget is the day when Aunt Cordelia
came to visit us--my mother's aunt, she was--and when I discovered evil,
and tried to understand what the use of it was.
Great-aunt Cordelia was, as I often and often had been told, not only
much travelled, rich and handsome, but good also. She was, indeed, an
important personage in her own city, and it seemed to be regarded as
an evidence of unusual family fealty that she should go about, now and
then, briefly visiting all of her kinfolk to see how they fared in the
world. I ought to have looked forward to meeting her, but this, for
some perverse reason, I did not do. I wished I might run away and hide
somewhere till her visit was over. It annoyed me to have to clean up the
play-room on her account, and to help polish the silver, and to comb
out the fringe of the tea napkins. I liked to help in these tasks
ordinarily, but to do it for the purpose of coming up to a visiting--and
probably, a condescending--goddess, somehow made me cross.
Among other hardships, I had to take care of my little sister Julie all
day. I loved Julie. She had soft golden-brown curls fuzzing around on her
head, and mischievous brown eyes--warm, extra-human eyes. There was a
place in the back of her neck, just below the point of her curls, which
it was a privilege to kiss; and though she could not yet talk, she had a
throaty, beautiful little exclamation, which cannot be spelled any more
than a bird note, with which she greeted all the things she liked--a
flower, or a toy, or mother. But loving Julie as she sat in mother's
lap, and having to care for her all of a shining Saturday, were two
quite different things. As the hours wore along I became bored with
looking at the golden curls of my baby sister; I had no inclination to
kiss the "honey-spot" in the back of her neck; and when she fretted from
heat and teething and my perfunctory care, I grew angry.
I knew mother was busy making custards and cakes for Aunt Cordelia, and
I longed to be in watching these pleasing operations. I thought--but
what does it matter what I thought? I was bad! I was so bad that I was
glad I was bad. Perhaps it was nerves. Maybe I really had taken care
of the baby too long. But however that may be, for the first time in my
life I enjoyed the consciousness of having a bad disposition--or perhaps
I ought to say that I felt a fiendish satisfaction in the discovery that
I had one.
Along in the middle of the afternoon three of the girls in the
neighbourhood came over to play. They had their dolls, and they wanted
to "keep house" in the "new part" of our home. We were living in a roomy
and comfortable "addition," which had, oddly enough, been built before
the building to which it was finally to serve as an annex. That is to
say, it had been the addition before there was anything to add it to. By
this time, however, the new house was getting a trifle old, as it waited
for the completion of its rather disproportionate splendours; splendours
which represented the ambitions rather than the achievements of the
family. It towered, large, square, imposing, with hints of M. Mansard's
grandiose architectural ideas in its style, in the very centre of a
village block of land. From the first, it exercised a sort of "I dreamt
I dwelt in marble halls" effect upon me, and in a vague way, at the back
of my mind, floated the idea that when we passed from our modest home
into this commanding edifice, well-trained servants mysteriously would
appear, beautiful gowns would be found awaiting my use in the closets,
and father and mother would be able to take their ease, something after
the fashion of the "landed gentry" of whom I had read in Scotch and
English books. The ceilings of the new house were so high, the sweep of
the stairs so dramatic, the size of the drawing-rooms so copious, that
perhaps I hardly was to be blamed for expecting a transformation scene.
But until this new life was realised, the clean, bare rooms made the
best of all possible play-rooms, and with the light streaming in through
the trees, and falling, delicately tinged with green, upon the new
floors, and with the scent of the new wood all about, it was a place
of indefinable enchantment. I was allowed to play there all I
pleased--except when I had Julie. There were unguarded windows and
yawning stair-holes, and no steps as yet leading from the ground to the
great opening where the carved front door was some time to be. Instead,
there were planks, inclined at a steep angle, beneath which lay the
stones of which the foundation to the porch were to be made. Jagged
pieces of yet unhewn sandstone they were, with cruel edges.
But to-day when the girls said, "Oh, come!" my newly discovered badness
echoed their words. I wanted to go with them. So I went.
Out of the corner of my eye I could see father in the distance, but I
wouldn't look at him for fear he would be magnetised into turning my
way. The girls had gone up, and I followed, with Julie in my arms. Did I
hear father call to me to stop? He always said I did, but I think he was
mistaken. Perhaps I merely didn't wish to hear him. Anyway, I went on,
balancing myself as best I could. The other girls had reached the top,
and turned to look at us, and I knew they were afraid. I think they
would have held out their hands to help me, but I had both arms clasped
about Julie. So I staggered on, got almost to the top, then seemed
submerged beneath a wave of fears--mine and those of the girls--and
fell! As I went, I curled like a squirrel around Julie, and when I
struck, she was still in my grasp and on top of me. But she rolled
out of my relaxing clutch after that, and when father and mother came
running, she was lying on the stones. They thought she had fallen that
way, and as the breath had been fairly knocked out of her little body,
so that she was not crying, they were more frightened than ever, and ran
with her to the house, wild with apprehension.
As for me, I got up somehow and followed. I decided no bones were broken,
but I was dizzy and faint, and aching from bruises. I saw my little
friends running down the plank and making off along the poplar drive,
white-faced and panting. I knew they thought Julie was dead and that I'd
be hung. I had the same idea.
When we got to the sitting-room I had a strange feeling of never having
seen it before. The tall stove, the green and oak ingrain carpet, the
green rep chairs, the what-not with its shells, the steel engravings
on the walls, seemed absolutely strange. I sat down and counted the
diamond-shaped figures on the oilcloth in front of the stove; and after
a long time I heard Julie cry, and mother say with immeasurable relief:
"Aside from a shaking up, I don't believe she's a bit the worse."
Then some one brought me a cupful of cold water and asked me if I was
hurt. I shook my head and would not speak. I then heard, in simple and
emphatic Anglo-Saxon the opinions of my father and mother about a girl
who would put her little sister's life in danger, and would disobey her
parents. And after that I was put in my mother's bedroom to pass the
rest of the day, and was told I needn't expect to come to the table with
the others.
I accepted my fate stoically, and being permitted to carry my own chair
into the room, I put it by the western window, which looked across two
miles of meadows waving in buckwheat, in clover and grass, and sat
there in a curious torpor of spirit. I was glad to be alone, for I had
discovered a new idea--the idea of sin. I wished to be left to myself
till I could think out what it meant. I believed I could do that by
night, and, after I had got to the root of the matter, I could cast the
whole ugly thing out of my soul and be good all the rest of my life.
There was a large upholstered chair standing in front of me, and I put
my head down on the seat of that and thought and thought. My thoughts
reached so far that I grew frightened, and I was relieved when I felt
the little soft grey veils drawing about me which I knew meant sleep.
It seemed to me that I really ought to weep--that the circumstances were
such that I should weep. But sleep was sweeter than tears, and not only
the pain in my mind but the jar and bruise of my body seemed to demand
that oblivion. So I gave way to the impulse, and the grey veils wrapped
around and around me as a spider's web enwraps a fly. And for hours I
knew nothing.
When I awoke it was the close of day. Long tender shadows lay across the
fields, the sky had that wonderful clearness and kindness which is like
a human eye, and the soft wind puffing in at the window was sweet with
field fragrance. A glass of milk and a plate with two slices of bread
lay on the window sill by me, as if some one had placed them there
from the outside. I could hear birds settling down for the night, and
cheeping drowsily to each other. My cat came on the scene and, seeing
me, looked at me with serious, expanding eyes, twitched her whiskers
cynically, and passed on. Presently I heard the voices of my family.
They were re-entering the sitting-room. Supper was over--supper, with
its cold meats and shining jellies, its "floating island" and its fig
cake. I could hear a voice that was new to me. It was deeper than my
mother's, and its accent was different. It was the sort of a voice that
made you feel that its owner had talked with many different kinds of
people, and had contrived to hold her own with all of them. I knew it
belonged to Aunt Cordelia. And now that I was not to see her, I felt
my curiosity arising in me. I wanted to look at her, and still more I
wished to ask her about goodness. She was rich and good! Was one the
result of the other? And which came first? I dimly perceived that if
there had been more money in our house there would have been more help,
and I would not have been led into temptation--baby would not have been
left too long upon my hands. However, after a few moments of self-pity,
I rejected this thought. I knew I really was to blame, and it occurred
to me that I would add to my faults if I tried to put the blame on
anybody else.
Now that the first shock was over and that my sleep had refreshed me, I
began to see what terrible sorrow had been mine if the fall had really
injured Julie; and a sudden thought shook me. She might, after all, have
been hurt in some way that would show itself later on. I yearned to look
upon her, to see if all her sweetness and softness was intact. It seemed
to me that if I could not see her the rising grief in me would break,
and I would sob aloud. I didn't want to do that. I had no notion to call
any attention to myself whatever, but see the baby I must. So, softly,
and like a thief, I opened the door communicating with the little
dressing-room in which Julie's cradle stood. The curtain had been drawn
and it was almost dark, but I found my way to Julie's bassinet. I could
not quite see her, but the delicate odour of her breath came up to me,
and I found her little hand and slipped my finger in it. It was gripped
in a baby pressure, and I stood there enraptured, feeling as if a flower
had caressed me. I was thrilled through and through with happiness,
and with love for this little creature, whom my selfishness might have
destroyed. There was nothing in what had happened during this moment or
two when I stood by her side to assure me that all was well with her;
but I did so believe, and I said over and over: "Thank you, God! Thank
you, God!"
And now my tears began to flow. They came in a storm--a storm I could
not control, and I fled back to mother's room, and stood there before
the west window weeping as I never had wept before.
The quiet loveliness of the closing day had passed into the splendour of
the afterglow. Mighty wings as of bright angels, pink and shining white,
reached up over the sky. The vault was purple above me, and paled to
lilac, then to green of unimaginable tenderness. Now I quenched my
tears to look, and then I wept again, weeping no more for sorrow and
loneliness and shame than for gratitude and delight in beauty. So fair a
world! What had sin to do with it? I could not make it out.
The shining wings grew paler, faded, then darkened; the melancholy sound
of cow-bells stole up from the common. The birds were still; a low
wind rustled the trees. I sat thinking my young "night thoughts" of
how marvellous it was for the sun to set, to rise, to keep its place in
heaven--of how wrapped about with mysteries we were. What if the world
should start to falling through space? Where would it land? Was there
even a bottom to the universe? "World without end" might mean that there
was neither an end to space nor yet to time. I shivered at thought of
such vastness.
Suddenly light streamed about me, warm arms enfolded me.
"Mother!" I murmured, and slipped from the unknown to the dear
familiarity of her shoulder.
It was, I soon perceived, a silk-clad shoulder. Mother had on her best
dress; nay, she wore her coral pin and ear-rings. Her lace collar was
scented with Jockey Club, and her neck, into which I was burrowing, had
the indescribable something that was not quite odour, not all softness,
but was compounded of these and meant mother. She said little to me as
she drew me away and bathed my face, brushed and plaited my hair, and
put on my clean frock. But we felt happy together. I knew she was as
glad to forgive as I was to be forgiven.
In a little while she led me, blinking, into the light. A tall stranger,
a lady in prune-coloured silk, sat in the high-backed chair.
"This is my eldest girl, Aunt Cordelia," said my mother. I went forward
timidly, wondering if I were really going to be greeted by this person
who must have heard such terrible reports of me. I found myself caught
by the hands and drawn into the embrace of this new, grand acquaintance.
"Well, I've been wanting to see you," said the rich, kind voice. "They
say you look as I did at your age. They say you are like me!"
Like her--who was good! But no one referred to this difference or said
anything about my sins. When we were sorry, was evil, then, forgotten
and sin forgiven? A weight as of iron dropped from my spirit. I sank
with a sigh on the hassock at my aunt's feet. I was once more a member
of society.
VI. TRAVEL
IT was time to say good-bye.
I had been down to my little brother's grave and watered the sorrel that
grew on it--I thought it was sorrow, and so tended it; and I had walked
around the house and said good-bye to every window, and to the robin's
nest, and to my playhouse in the shed. I had put a clean ribbon on the
cat's neck, and kissed my doll, and given presents to my little sisters.
Now, shivering beneath my new grey jacket in the chill of the May
morning air, I stood ready to part with my mother. She was a little
flurried with having just ironed my pinafores and collars, and with
having put the last hook on my new Stuart plaid frock, and she looked
me over with rather an anxious eye. As for me, I thought my clothes
charming, and I loved the scarlet quill in my grey hat, and the set of
my new shoes. I hoped, above all, that no one would notice that I was
trembling and lay it down to fear.
Of course, I had been away before. It was not the first time I had left
everything to take care of itself. But this time I was going alone, and
that gave rather a different aspect to things. To go into the country
for a few days, or even to Detroit, in the company of a watchful parent,
might be called a "visit"; but to go alone, partly by train and partly
by stage, and to arrive by one's self, amounted to "travel." I had an
aunt who had travelled, and I felt this morning that love of travel ran
in the family. Probably even Aunt Cordelia had been a trifle nervous, at
first, when she started out for Hawaii, say, or for Egypt.