Let me hurry, however, to catch again that thread I left dangling from
my glance at our small vague spasms of school--my personal sense of them
being as vague and small, I mean, in contrast with the fuller and
stronger cup meted out all round to the Albany cousins, much more
privileged, I felt, in every stroke of fortune; or at least much more
interesting, though it might be wicked to call them more happy, through
those numberless bereavements that had so enriched their existence. I
mentioned above in particular the enviable consciousness of our little
red-headed kinsman Gus Barker, who, as by a sharp prevision, snatched
what gaiety he might from a life to be cut short, in a cavalry dash, by
one of the Confederate bullets of 1863: he blew out at us, on New York
Sundays, as I have said, sharp puffs of the atmosphere of the
Institution Charlier--strong to us, that is, the atmosphere of whose
institutions was weak; but it was above all during a gregarious visit
paid him in a livelier field still that I knew myself merely mother'd
and brother'd. It had been his fate to be but scantly the latter and
never at all the former--our aunt Janet had not survived his birth; but
on this day of our collective pilgrimage to Sing-Sing, where he was at a
"military" school and clad in a fashion that represented to me the very
panoply of war, he shone with a rare radiance of privation. Ingenuous
and responsive, of a social disposition, a candour of gaiety, that
matched his physical activity--the most beautifully made athletic little
person, and in the highest degree appealing and engaging--he not only
did us the honours of his dazzling academy (dazzling at least to me) but
had all the air of showing us over the great State prison which even
then flourished near at hand and to which he accompanied us; a party of
a composition that comes back to me as wonderful, the New York and
Albany cousinships appearing to have converged and met, for the happy
occasion, with the generations and sexes melting together and moving in
a loose harmonious band. The party must have been less numerous than by
the romantic tradition or confused notation of my youth, and what I
mainly remember of it beyond my sense of our being at once an attendant
train to my aged and gentle and in general most unadventurous
grandmother, and a chorus of curiosity and amusement roundabout the
vivid Gussy, is our collective impression that State prisons were on the
whole delightful places, vast, bright and breezy, with a gay, free
circulation in corridors and on stairs, a pleasant prevalence of hot
soup and fresh crusty rolls, in tins, of which visitors admiringly
partook, and for the latter, in chance corners and on sunny landings,
much interesting light brush of gentlemen remarkable but for gentlemanly
crimes--that is defalcations and malversations to striking and
impressive amounts.
I recall our coming on such a figure at the foot of a staircase and his
having been announced to us by our conductor or friend in charge as
likely to be there; and what a charm I found in his cool loose uniform
of shining white (as I was afterwards to figure it,) as well as in his
generally refined and distinguished appearance and in the fact that he
was engaged, while exposed to our attention, in the commendable act of
paring his nails with a smart penknife and that he didn't allow us to
interrupt him. One of my companions, I forget which, had advised me that
in these contacts with illustrious misfortune I was to be careful not to
stare; and present to me at this moment is the wonder of whether he
would think it staring to note that _he_ quite stared, and also that his
hands were fine and fair and one of them adorned with a signet ring. I
was to have later in life a glimpse of two or three dismal
penitentiaries, places affecting me as sordid, as dark and dreadful; but
if the revelation of Sing-Sing had involved the idea of a timely warning
to the young mind my small sensibility at least was not reached by the
lesson. I envied the bold-eyed celebrity in the array of a planter at
his ease--we might have been _his_ slaves--quite as much as I envied
Gussy; in connection with which I may remark here that though in that
early time I seem to have been constantly eager to exchange my lot for
that of somebody else, on the assumed certainty of gaining by the
bargain, I fail to remember feeling jealous of such happier persons--in
the measure open to children of spirit. I had rather a positive lack of
the passion, and thereby, I suppose, a lack of spirit; since if jealousy
bears, as I think, on what one sees one's companions able to do--as
against one's own falling short--envy, as I knew it at least, was simply
of what they _were_, or in other words of a certain sort of richer
consciousness supposed, doubtless often too freely supposed, in them.
They were so _other_--that was what I felt; and to _be_ other, other
almost anyhow, seemed as good as the probable taste of the bright
compound wistfully watched in the confectioner's window; unattainable,
impossible, of course, but as to which just this impossibility and just
that privation kept those active proceedings in which jealousy seeks
relief quite out of the question. A platitude of acceptance of the poor
actual, the absence of all vision of how in any degree to change it,
combined with a complacency, an acuity of perception of alternatives,
though a view of them as only through the confectioner's hard
glass--that is what I recover as the nearest approach to an apology, in
the soil of my nature, for the springing seed of emulation. I never
dreamed of competing--a business having in it at the best, for my
temper, if not for my total failure of temper, a displeasing ferocity.
If competing was bad snatching was therefore still worse, and jealousy
was a sort of spiritual snatching. With which, nevertheless, all the
while, one might have been "like" So-and-So, who had such horizons. A
helpless little love of horizons I certainly cherished, and could
sometimes even care for my own. These always shrank, however, under
almost any suggestion of a further range or finer shade in the purple
rim offered to other eyes--and that is what I take for the restlessness
of envy. It wasn't that I wished to change with everyone, with anyone at
a venture, but that I saw "gifts" everywhere but as mine and that I
scarce know whether to call the effect of this miserable or monstrous.
It was the effect at least of self-abandonment--I mean to visions.
There must have been on that occasion of the Sing-Sing day--which it
deeply interests me to piece together--some state of connection for some
of us with the hospitalities of Rhinebeck, the place of abode of the
eldest of the Albany uncles--that is of the three most in our view; for
there were two others, the eldest of all a half-uncle only, who formed a
class quite by himself, and the very youngest, who, with lively
interests of his own, had still less attention for us than either of his
three brothers. The house at Rhinebeck and all its accessories (which
struck our young sense as innumerable,) in especial the great bluff of
the Hudson on which it stood, yields me images scarcely dimmed, though
as the effect but of snatches of acquaintance; there at all events the
gently-groaning--ever so gently and dryly--Albany grandmother, with the
Albany cousins as to whom I here discriminate, her two adopted
daughters, maturest and mildest of the general tribe, must have paused
for a stay; a feature of which would be perhaps her juncture with the
New York contingent, somewhere sociably achieved, for the befriending of
juvenile Gussy. It shimmers there, the whole circumstance, with I scarce
know what large innocence of charity and ease; the Gussy-pretext, for
reunion, all so thin yet so important an appeal, the simplicity of the
interests and the doings, the assumptions and the concessions, each
to-day so touching, almost so edifying. We were surely all gentle and
generous together, floating in such a clean light social order, sweetly
proof against ennui--unless it be a bad note, as is conceivable, never,
_never_ to feel bored--and thankful for the smallest aesthetic or
romantic mercies. My vision loses itself withal in vaster
connections--above all in my general sense of the then grand newness of
the Hudson River Railroad; so far at least as its completion to Albany
was concerned, a modern blessing that even the youngest of us were in a
position to appraise. The time had been when the steamboat had to
content us--and I feel how amply it must have done so as I recall the
thrill of docking in dim early dawns, the whole hour of the Albany
waterside, the night of huge strange paddling and pattering and
shrieking and creaking once ended, and contrast with it all certain long
sessions in the train at an age and in conditions when neither train nor
traveller had suffered chastening; sessions of a high animation, as I
recast them, but at the same time of mortal intensities of lassitude.
The elements here indeed are much confused and mixed--I must have known
that discipline of the hectic interest and the extravagant strain in
relation to Rhinebeck only; an _etape_, doubtless, on the way to New
York, for the Albany kinship, but the limit to our smaller patiences of
any northward land-journey. And yet not the young fatigue, I repeat, but
the state of easy wonder, is what most comes back: the stops too
repeated, but perversely engaging; the heat and the glare too great, but
the river, by the window, making reaches and glimpses, so that the
great swing of picture and force of light and colour were themselves a
constant adventure; the uncles, above all, too pre-eminent, too
recurrent, to the creation of a positive soreness of sympathy, of
curiosity, and yet constituting by their presence half the enlargement
of the time. For the presence of uncles, incoherent Albany uncles, is
somehow what most gives these hours their stamp for memory. I scarce
know why, nor do I much, I confess, distinguish occasions--but I see
what I see: the long, the rattling car of the old open native form and
the old harsh native exposure; the sense of arrival forever postponed,
qualified however also by that of having in my hands a volume of M.
Arsene Houssaye, Philosophes et Comediennes, remarkably submitted by one
of my relatives to my judgment. I see them always, the relatives, in
slow circulation; restless and nervous and casual their note, not less
than strikingly genial, but with vaguenesses, lapses, eclipses, that
deprived their society of a tactless weight. They cheered us on, in
their way; born optimists, clearly, if not logically determined ones,
they were always reassuring and sustaining, though with a bright brevity
that must have taken immensities, I think, for granted. They wore their
hats slightly toward the nose, they strolled, they hung about, they
reported of progress and of the company, they dropped suggestions, new
magazines, packets of the edible deprecated for the immature; they
figured in fine to a small nephew as the principal men of their time
and, so far as the two younger and more familiar were concerned, the
most splendid as to aspect and apparel. It was none the less to the
least shining, though not essentially the least comforting, of this
social trio that, if I rightly remember, I owed my introduction to the
_chronique galante_ of the eighteenth century.
There tags itself at any rate to the impression a flutter as of some
faint, some recaptured, grimace for another of his kindly offices (which
I associate somehow with the deck of a steamboat:) his production for
our vague benefit of a literary classic, the Confessions, as he called
our attention to them, of the celebrated "Rosseau" I catch again the
echo of the mirth excited, to my surprise, by this communication, and
recover as well my responsive advance toward a work that seemed so to
promise; but especially have I it before me that some play of light
criticism mostly attended, on the part of any circle, this speaker's
more ambitious remarks. For all that, and in spite of oddities of
appearance and type, it was Augustus James who spread widest, in default
of towering highest, to my wistful view of the larger life, and who
covered definite and accessible ground. This ground, the house and
precincts of Linwood, at Rhinebeck, harboured our tender years, I
surmise, but at few and brief moments; but it hadn't taken many of these
to make it the image of an hospitality liberal as I supposed great
social situations were liberal; suppositions on this score having in
childhood (or at least they had in mine) as little as possible to do
with dry data. Didn't Linwood bristle with great views and other
glories, with gardens and graperies and black ponies, to say nothing of
gardeners and grooms who were notoriously and quotedly droll; to say
nothing, in particular, of our aunt Elizabeth, who had been Miss Bay of
Albany, who was the mother of the fair and free young waltzing-women in
New York, and who floats back to me through the Rhinebeck picture,
aquiline but easy, with an effect of handsome highbrowed, high-nosed
looseness, of dressing-gowns or streaming shawls (the dowdy, the
delightful shawl of the period;) and of claws of bright benevolent steel
that kept nipping for our charmed advantage: roses and grapes and
peaches and currant-clusters, together with turns of phrase and scraps
of remark that fell as by quite a like flash of shears. These are mere
scrapings of gold-dust, but my mind owes her a vibration that, however
tiny, was to insist all these years on _marking_--on figuring in a whole
complex of picture and drama, the clearest note of which was that of
worry and woe: a crisis prolonged, in deep-roofed outer galleries,
through hot August evenings and amid the dim flare of open windows, to
the hum of domesticated insects. All but inexpressible the part played,
in the young mind naturally even though perversely, even though
inordinately, arranged as a stage for the procession and exhibition of
appearances, by matters all of a usual cast, contacts and impressions
not arriving at the dignity of shocks, but happening to be to the taste,
as one may say, of the little intelligence, happening to be such as the
fond fancy could assimilate. One's record becomes, under memories of
this order--and that is the only trouble--a tale of assimilations small
and fine; out of which refuse, directly interesting to the
subject-victim only, the most branching vegetations may be conceived as
having sprung. Such are the absurdities of the poor dear inward
life--when translated, that is, and perhaps ineffectually translated,
into terms of the outward and trying at all to flourish on the lines of
the outward; a reflection that might stay me here weren't it that I
somehow feel morally affiliated, tied as by knotted fibres, to the
elements involved.
One of these was assuredly that my father had again, characteristically,
suffered me to dangle; he having been called to Linwood by the dire
trouble of his sister, Mrs. Temple, and brought me with him from Staten
Island--I make the matter out as of the summer of '54. We had come up,
he and I, to New York; but our doings there, with the journey following,
are a blank to me; I recover but my sense, on our arrival, of being for
the first time in the presence of tragedy, which the shining scene,
roundabout, made more sinister--sharpened even to the point of my
feeling abashed and irrelevant, wondering why I had come. My aunt, under
her brother's roof, had left her husband, wasted with consumption, near
death at Albany; gravely ill herself--she had taken the disease from him
as it was taken in those days, and was in the event very scantly to
survive him--she had been ordered away in her own interest, for which
she cared no scrap, and my father, the person in all his family most
justly appealed and most anxiously listened to, had been urged to come
and support her in a separation that she passionately rejected. Vivid to
me still, as floating across verandahs into the hot afternoon stillness,
is the wail of her protest and her grief; I remember being scared and
hushed by it and stealing away beyond its reach. I remember not less
what resources of high control the whole case imputed, for my
imagination, to my father; and how, creeping off to the edge of the
eminence above the Hudson, I somehow felt the great bright harmonies of
air and space becoming one with my rather proud assurance and
confidence, that of my own connection, for life, for interest, with
such sources of light. The great impression, however, the one that has
brought me so far, was another matter: only that of the close,
lamp-tempered, outer evening aforesaid, with my parent again, somewhere
deep within, yet not too far to make us hold our breath for it, tenderly
opposing his sister's purpose of flight, and the presence at my side of
my young cousin Marie, youngest daughter of the house, exactly of my own
age, and named in honour of her having been born in Paris, to the
influence of which fact her shining black eyes, her small quickness and
brownness, marking sharply her difference from her sisters, so oddly, so
almost extravagantly testified. It had come home to me by some voice of
the air that she was "spoiled," and it made her in the highest degree
interesting; we ourselves had been so associated, at home, without being
in the least spoiled (I think we even rather missed it:) so that I knew
about these subjects of invidious reflection only by literature--mainly,
no doubt, that of the nursery--in which they formed, quite by
themselves, a romantic class; and, the fond fancy always predominant, I
prized even while a little dreading the chance to see the condition at
work. This chance was given me, it was clear--though I risk in my record
of it a final anticlimax--by a remark from my uncle Augustus to his
daughter: seated duskily in our group, which included two or three dim
dependent forms, he expressed the strong opinion that Marie should go to
bed--expressed it, that is, with the casual cursory humour that was to
strike me as the main expressional resource of outstanding members of
the family and that would perhaps have had under analysis the defect of
making judgment very personal without quite making authority so.
Authority they hadn't, of a truth, these all so human outstanding ones;
they made shift but with light appreciation, sudden suggestion, a
peculiar variety of happy remark in the air. It had been remarked but in
the air, I feel sure, that Marie should seek her couch--a truth by the
dark wing of which I ruefully felt myself brushed; and the words seemed
therefore to fall with a certain ironic weight. What I have retained of
their effect, at any rate, is the vague fact of some objection raised by
my cousin and some sharper point to his sentence supplied by her father;
promptly merged in a visible commotion, a flutter of my young companion
across the gallery as for refuge in the maternal arms, a protest and an
appeal in short which drew from my aunt the simple phrase that was from
that moment so preposterously to "count" for me. "Come now, my dear;
don't make a scene--I _insist_ on your not making a scene!" That was all
the witchcraft the occasion used, but the note was none the less
epoch-making. The expression, so vivid, so portentous, was one I had
never heard--it had never been addressed to us at home; and who should
say now what a world one mightn't at once read into it? It seemed
freighted to sail so far; it told me so much about life. Life at these
intensities clearly became "scenes"; but the great thing, the immense
illumination, was that we could make them or not as we chose. It was a
long time of course before I began to distinguish between those within
our compass more particularly as spoiled and those producible on a
different basis and which should involve detachment, involve presence of
mind; just the qualities in which Marie's possible output was apparently
deficient. It didn't in the least matter accordingly whether or no a
scene _was_ then proceeded to--and I have lost all count of what
immediately happened. The mark had been made for me and the door flung
open; the passage, gathering up _all_ the elements of the troubled time,
had been itself a scene, quite enough of one, and I had become aware
with it of a rich accession of possibilities.