My name is Hugh Paret. I was a corporation lawyer, but by no means a
typical one, the choice of my profession being merely incidental, and
due, as will be seen, to the accident of environment. The book I am about
to write might aptly be called The Autobiography of a Romanticist. In
that sense, if in no other, I have been a typical American, regarding my
country as the happy hunting-ground of enlightened self-interest, as a
function of my desires. Whether or not I have completely got rid of this
romantic virus I must leave to those the aim of whose existence is to
eradicate it from our literature and our life. A somewhat Augean task!
I have been impelled therefore to make an attempt at setting forth, with
what frankness and sincerity I may, with those powers of selection of
which I am capable, the life I have lived in this modern America; the
passions I have known, the evils I have done. I endeavour to write a
biography of the inner life; but in order to do this I shall have to
relate those causal experiences of the outer existence that take place in
the world of space and time, in the four walls of the home, in the school
and university, in the noisy streets, in the realm of business and
politics. I shall try to set down, impartially, the motives that have
impelled my actions, to reveal in some degree the amazing mixture of good
and evil which has made me what I am to-day: to avoid the tricks of
memory and resist the inherent desire to present myself other and better
than I am. Your American romanticist is a sentimental spoiled child who
believes in miracles, whose needs are mostly baubles, whose desires are
dreams. Expediency is his motto. Innocent of a knowledge of the
principles of the universe, he lives in a state of ceaseless activity,
admitting no limitations, impatient of all restrictions. What he wants,
he wants very badly indeed. This wanting things was the corner-stone of
my character, and I believe that the science of the future will bear me
out when I say that it might have been differently built upon. Certain it
is that the system of education in vogue in the 70's and 80's never
contemplated the search for natural corner-stones.
At all events, when I look back upon the boy I was, I see the beginnings
of a real person who fades little by little as manhood arrives and
advances, until suddenly I am aware that a stranger has taken his
place....
I lived in a city which is now some twelve hours distant from the
Atlantic seaboard. A very different city, too, it was in youth, in my
grandfather's day and my father's, even in my own boyhood, from what it
has since become in this most material of ages.
There is a book of my photographs, preserved by my mother, which I have
been looking over lately. First is presented a plump child of two, gazing
in smiling trustfulness upon a world of sunshine; later on a lean boy in
plaided kilts, whose wavy, chestnut-brown hair has been most carefully
parted on the side by Norah, his nurse. The face is still childish. Then
appears a youth of fourteen or thereabout in long trousers and the
queerest of short jackets, standing beside a marble table against a
classic background; he is smiling still in undiminished hope and trust,
despite increasing vexations and crossings, meaningless lessons which had
to be learned, disciplines to rack an aspiring soul, and long,
uncomfortable hours in the stiff pew of the First Presbyterian Church.
Associated with this torture is a peculiar Sunday smell and the faint
rustling of silk dresses. I can see the stern black figure of Dr. Pound,
who made interminable statements to the Lord.
"Oh, Lord," I can hear him say, "thou knowest..."
These pictures, though yellowed and faded, suggest vividly the being I
once was, the feelings that possessed and animated me, love for my
playmates, vague impulses struggling for expression in a world forever
thwarting them. I recall, too, innocent dreams of a future unidentified,
dreams from which I emerged vibrating with an energy that was lost for
lack of a definite objective: yet it was constantly being renewed. I
often wonder what I might have become if it could have been harnessed,
directed! Speculations are vain. Calvinism, though it had begun to make
compromises, was still a force in those days, inimical to spontaneity and
human instincts. And when I think of Calvinism I see, not Dr. Pound, who
preached it, but my father, who practised and embodied it. I loved him,
but he made of righteousness a stern and terrible thing implying not joy,
but punishment, the, suppression rather than the expansion of
aspirations. His religion seemed woven all of austerity, contained no
shining threads to catch my eye. Dreams, to him, were matters for
suspicion and distrust.
I sometimes ask myself, as I gaze upon his portrait now, the duplicate of
the one painted for the Bar Association, whether he ever could have felt
the secret, hot thrills I knew and did not identify with religion. His
religion was real to him, though he failed utterly to make it
comprehensible to me. The apparent calmness, evenness of his life awed
me. A successful lawyer, a respected and trusted citizen, was he lacking
somewhat in virility, vitality? I cannot judge him, even to-day. I never
knew him. There were times in my youth when the curtain of his unfamiliar
spirit was withdrawn a little: and once, after I had passed the crisis of
some childhood disease, I awoke to find him bending over my bed with a
tender expression that surprised and puzzled me.
He was well educated, and from his portrait a shrewd observer might
divine in him a genteel taste for literature. The fine features bear
witness to the influence of an American environment, yet suggest the
intellectual Englishman of Matthew Arnold's time. The face is
distinguished, ascetic, the chestnut hair lighter and thinner than my
own; the side whiskers are not too obtrusive, the eyes blue-grey. There
is a large black cravat crossed and held by a cameo pin, and the coat has
odd, narrow lapels. His habits of mind were English, although he
harmonized well enough with the manners and traditions of a city whose
inheritance was Scotch-Irish; and he invariably drank tea for breakfast.
One of my earliest recollections is of the silver breakfast service and
egg-cups which my great-grandfather brought with him from Sheffield to
Philadelphia shortly after the Revolution. His son, Dr. Hugh Moreton
Paret, after whom I was named, was the best known physician of the city
in the decorous, Second Bank days.
My mother was Sarah Breck. Hers was my Scotch-Irish side. Old Benjamin
Breck, her grandfather, undaunted by sea or wilderness, had come straight
from Belfast to the little log settlement by the great river that
mirrored then the mantle of primeval forest on the hills. So much for
chance. He kept a store with a side porch and square-paned windows, where
hams and sides of bacon and sugar loaves in blue glazed paper hung beside
ploughs and calico prints, barrels of flour, of molasses and rum, all of
which had been somehow marvellously transported over the passes of those
forbidding mountains,--passes we blithely thread to-day in dining cars
and compartment sleepers. Behind the store were moored the barges that
floated down on the swift current to the Ohio, carrying goods to even
remoter settlements in the western wilderness.
Benjamin, in addition to his emigrant's leather box, brought with him
some of that pigment that was to dye the locality for generations a deep
blue. I refer, of course, to his Presbyterianism. And in order the better
to ensure to his progeny the fastness of this dye, he married the
granddaughter of a famous divine, celebrated in the annals of New
England,--no doubt with some injustice,--as a staunch advocate on the
doctrine of infant damnation. My cousin Robert Breck had old Benjamin's
portrait, which has since gone to the Kinley's. Heaven knows who painted
it, though no great art were needed to suggest on canvas the tough fabric
of that sitter, who was more Irish than Scotch. The heavy stick he holds
might, with a slight stretch of the imagination, be a blackthorn; his
head looks capable of withstanding many blows; his hand of giving many.
And, as I gazed the other day at this picture hanging in the shabby
suburban parlour, I could only contrast him with his anaemic descendants
who possessed the likeness. Between the children of poor Mary
Kinley,--Cousin Robert's daughter, and the hardy stock of the old country
there is a gap indeed!
Benjamin Breck made the foundation of a fortune. It was his son who built
on the Second Bank the wide, corniced mansion in which to house
comfortably his eight children. There, two tiers above the river, lived
my paternal grandfather, Dr. Paret, the Breck's physician and friend; the
Durretts and the Hambletons, iron-masters; the Hollisters, Sherwins, the
McAlerys and Ewanses,--Breck connections,--the Willetts and Ogilvys; in
short, everyone of importance in the days between the 'thirties and the
Civil War. Theirs were generous houses surrounded by shade trees, with
glorious back yards--I have been told--where apricots and pears and
peaches and even nectarines grew.
The business of Breck and Company, wholesale grocers, descended to my
mother's first cousin, Robert Breck, who lived at Claremore. The very
sound of that word once sufficed to give me a shiver of delight; but the
Claremore I knew has disappeared as completely as Atlantis, and the place
is now a suburb (hateful word!) cut up into building lots and connected
with Boyne Street and the business section of the city by trolley lines.
Then it was "the country," and fairly saturated with romance. Cousin
Robert, when he came into town to spend his days at the store, brought
with him some of this romance, I had almost said of this aroma. He was no
suburbanite, but rural to the backbone, professing a most proper contempt
for dwellers in towns.
Every summer day that dawned held Claremore as a possibility. And such
was my capacity for joy that my appetite would depart completely when I
heard my mother say, questioningly and with proper wifely respect--
"If you're really going off on a business trip for a day or two, Mr.
Paret" (she generally addressed my father thus formally), "I think I'll
go to Robert's and take Hugh."
"Shall I tell Norah to pack, mother," I would exclaim, starting up.
"We'll see what your father thinks, my dear."
"Remain at the table until you are excused, Hugh," he would say.
Released at length, I would rush to Norah, who always rejoiced with me,
and then to the wire fence which marked the boundary of the Peters domain
next door, eager, with the refreshing lack of consideration
characteristic of youth, to announce to the Peterses--who were to remain
at home the news of my good fortune. There would be Tom and Alfred and
Russell and Julia and little Myra with her grass-stained knees, faring
forth to seek the adventures of a new day in the shady western yard. Myra
was too young not to look wistful at my news, but the others pretended
indifference, seeking to lessen my triumph. And it was Julia who
invariably retorted "We can go out to Uncle Jake's farm whenever we want
to. Can't we, Tom?"...
No journey ever taken since has equalled in ecstasy that leisurely trip
of thirteen miles in the narrow-gauge railroad that wound through hot
fields of nodding corn tassels and between delicious, acrid-smelling
woods to Claremore. No silent palace "sleeping in the sun," no edifice
decreed by Kubla Khan could have worn more glamour than the house of
Cousin Robert Breck.
It stood half a mile from the drowsy village, deep in its own grounds
amidst lawns splashed with shadows, with gravel paths edged--in barbarous
fashion, if you please with shells. There were flower beds of equally
barbarous design; and two iron deer, which, like the figures on Keats's
Grecian urn, were ever ready poised to flee,--and yet never fled. For
Cousin Robert was rich, as riches went in those days: not only rich, but
comfortable. Stretching behind the house were sweet meadows of hay and
red clover basking in the heat, orchards where the cows cropped beneath
the trees, arbours where purple clusters of Concords hung beneath warm
leaves: there were woods beyond, into which, under the guidance of Willie
Breck, I made adventurous excursions, and in the autumn gathered
hickories and walnuts. The house was a rambling, wooden mansion painted
grey, with red scroll-work on its porches and horsehair furniture inside.
Oh, the smell of its darkened interior on a midsummer day! Like the
flavour of that choicest of tropical fruits, the mangosteen, it baffles
analysis, and the nearest I can come to it is a mixture of matting and
corn-bread, with another element too subtle to define.
The hospitality of that house! One would have thought we had arrived, my
mother and I, from the ends of the earth, such was the welcome we got
from Cousin Jenny, Cousin Robert's wife, from Mary and Helen with the
flaxen pig-tails, from Willie, whom I recall as permanently without shoes
or stockings. Met and embraced by Cousin Jenny at the station and driven
to the house in the squeaky surrey, the moment we arrived she and my
mother would put on the dressing-sacks I associated with hot weather, and
sit sewing all day long in rocking-chairs at the coolest end of the
piazza. The women of that day scorned lying down, except at night, and as
evening came on they donned starched dresses; I recall in particular one
my mother wore, with little vertical stripes of black and white, and a
full skirt. And how they talked, from the beginning of the visit until
the end! I have often since wondered where the topics came from.
It was not until nearly seven o'clock that the train arrived which
brought home my Cousin Robert. He was a big man; his features and even
his ample moustache gave a disconcerting impression of rugged integrity,
and I remember him chiefly in an alpaca or seersucker coat. Though much
less formal, more democratic--in a word--than my father, I stood in awe
of him for a different reason, and this I know now was because he
possessed the penetration to discern the flaws in my youthful
character,--flaws that persisted in manhood. None so quick as Cousin
Robert to detect deceptions which were hidden from my mother.
His hobby was carpentering, and he had a little shop beside the stable
filled with shining tools which Willie and I, in spite of their
attractions, were forbidden to touch. Willie, by dire experience, had
learned to keep the law; but on one occasion I stole in alone, and
promptly cut my finger with a chisel. My mother and Cousin Jenny accepted
the fiction that the injury had been done with a flint arrowhead that
Willie had given me, but when Cousin Robert came home and saw my bound
hand and heard the story, he gave me a certain look which sticks in my
mind.
"Wonderful people, those Indians were!" he observed. "They could make
arrowheads as sharp as chisels."