_JUST EIGHTEEN_
As I sit and look back on it all now, I feel almost sure that a girl's
real life begins at somewhere about eighteen years of age. A boy is
different; his life begins at a great many different times. To start
with, he has a distinct promotion at four or five--he casts off skirts
forever, with contempt, and that itself is a promotion. Then he takes
on the uniform of manhood, glorying in the frank two-leggedness of his
kind; and in quite a real sense this marks the beginning of his
manhood. Indeed, a boy has mile-posts all along the way. Top boots
come next, and the first pair, clothing his knees with their red
leather crown, give life a rosy splendour. This pales, of course, as
does all other glory--but the day reappears in divers forms. His curls
are one day amputated, falling fast, the hour of their doom still
bright with an undaunted sheen--and the young Samson shakes himself
gleefully in this new token of manly strength. Then comes his first
game of ball, or his first venture with tools; or he is one day
permitted to hold a slumbering butcher-horse while its master steps
within; in return, he is allowed to drive a block or two--trifling
enough, as some one smiles and says, but every boy remembers it and it
marks a new stage of power. About this time he learns to swim; all the
past is forgotten, the future all despised, till he becomes amphibious.
Then comes his first watch--time is annihilated in the tumult of that
hour; then a gun of his own--its first report is heard around the
world. And so it goes on, ever onward, from one lock to another in
life's long waterway. By and by the stream widens far; he must choose
his profession--then his partner--then someone, and the romance seems
never at an end.
But a girl's life has no such variety; skirts are her abiding portion,
from swaddling clothes to shroud. And her curls, undisturbed, thicken
with the years. No top boots for her, nor game of ball, nor wizardry
of tools; for her nothing but the long drab way of girlhood, beginning
with the nursery and ending with the same.
Till she is about eighteen. Then comes, or almost always comes, the
first waterfall in the stream of time. And what a wild cataract it is,
leaping with the tidal movement of her soul! And how mystically deep
that spring of love which is its far-off source! And how the light of
heaven plays upon it all!
I was just eighteen when this first came to me. And all my eighteen
years before seem now, as I recall them, like a placid afternoon such
as slips by unnoticed in the summer-time; the clock strikes the hour, I
suppose, but no one hears it.
I was born in 187-. No woman is ever quite content to tell the very
year, but the decade does not matter. And my mother has often told me
what a lovely October day it was--my dawn was mingled with the
deepening twilight, and the flowers were still abloom in the garden,
and some darky children were playing in the dusty road before the door,
and the soft autumn sky was now wreathed in smiles, now bathed in
tears, fitting symbol of the checkered life that lay before me.
My father died when I was two and a half. My only recollection of him
is an impression of his great height and strength as he once bore me on
his shoulder, when I had toddled a few yards from the door to meet him.
My mother tells me I often started forth on very uncertain feet, as
often borne back with my arms about his neck--but there lingers with me
the memory of only one such pilgrimage. Yet it is distinct and vivid,
I am thankful to say, and I can see yet the low brick fence, with its
cope of stone, all vine-entangled as it was; and to this day I never
catch the breath of the magnolia without seeing again the full-bloomed
beauty that stood close to the steps within the wall. I think I
plucked a spray as I was borne past it that evening on my father's
shoulder.
Both my mother and my aunt thought it strange that I have no
recollection of my father as he lay in the calm majesty of death; for
my mother took me with her alone into the parlour and shut the door
upon us three when she took her last farewell--so she has often told
me, her voice breaking as she spoke. And she says I wanted to linger
after she turned to go, gazing steadfastly upon the silent face,
fascinated by the master mystery of life; it seems, too, that even in
her grief she noticed my disdain of the lovely flowers that ensconced
the coffin, though I had the child's passion for those gratuities of
God, so all-absorbing was the witchery of death. And I have been told,
though none of my kinsfolk ever mentioned it--the old undertaker told
me himself one day when I was playing among the shavings in his
shop--how pitifully hard I fought when they began to shovel in the clay
after my father had been lowered to his grave. It is one of our
Southern customs for the ladies, veiled past recognition, to follow
their dead to the uttermost; and it was in the cemetery I dropped my
mother's hand and began my unavailing struggle to rescue my father from
suffocation and eternal night. I was borne away, probably easily
beguiled, and my father was left to his long loneliness. But I
remember nothing of either of these incidents, great and tragical as I
thought them, and still think them to be; even yet, I never turn away
from a new-filled grave without a sense of selfish cruelty--there seem
such oceans of God's fresh air everywhere, yet denied to those we leave
behind. And I have never been able to free myself from the pain of
this bitter helplessness--that there comes a time when the best we can
do for our nearest and dearest is to leave them all alone beneath the
darkening sky.
Those who knew her best say that my mother was never the same again.
No melancholy, or despondency, or indifference to life came to mark the
change, but her soul took new depth under the influence of sorrow and
her outlook was more to the eternal. There was plenty of brightness
and merriment--frank laughter, too--all of her after life; but it was
the play of the sunlight upon the noble gloom of ocean, stirred gently
by some influence from afar.
She soon abandoned her own home, leaving it to strangers; they saw no
white face on the pillow in the front room up-stairs--they gave dances
in the parlour, and no recumbent form disturbed the revelry. My
mother's sister was Mrs. Lundy, my Aunt Agnes; her husband was Henry
Lundy, my Uncle Henry. To their home we went to live, I in unconscious
glee, my mother in hope of healing. There my life was spent till I was
eighteen years of age--and later; but my story begins with that
particular year, which, as I have hinted, is to so many a maiden's life
like the month of April to the Northern river--for then the ice breaks
up and the stream moves outward to the sea.
I was eighteen when I fell in love. That is, if I fell at
all--concerning which I have my doubts. For many a girl thinks she has
_fallen_ in love when all the time she _walked_ in.
Ah me! those days are far past now; but the words I have just written
gave my pen a good half hour's rest while I mused on all the meaning of
them. For after a girl becomes a mother, after she has children of her
own--which is about the same thing--she is far more fastidious about
love, and far more solicitous that it should be genuine, than when she
was choosing for herself. And she knows then, what she knew not at
eighteen, that the difference between falling in love and walking into
it, is just the difference between Heaven and--Hades. (What a
convenient word "Hades" is! It was made, I reckon, expressly for
woman's use.)
Well, I am afraid I _walked_ in, the first time I got in love. Yet I
feel it is a sort of blasphemy to say the _first_ time--for no true
girl is ever really in love but once; born, loved, died, thus stand the
mountain peaks of life, and each can rise but once. So I must amend by
saying that the first time I tried to be in love, and everybody else
thought I really was, I got there by the pedestrian route. I rather
think I honestly wanted to be in love, had almost resolved to be; and
when a girl's face is once set in that direction she will see land
ahead, though half an ocean lie between--or, to change the figure, she
is like those silly chanticleers that crow at midnight, thinking it the
dawn.
One other thing, too, I must tell in my defense. I was _pushed_ in. A
dearer and more devoted mother than mine no girl ever had. But this I
will dare to say--and I am old enough to know--I do believe every true
mother-heart has, somewhere in its great expanse, a cavity that aches,
never to be filled till some one who loves her daughter comes to dwell
there evermore, bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh by the great
adoption of their united love. Two streams, both different--but the
confluence is mighty. And then there is another cavity, farther in,
its ache more poignant still--and that place is never filled, that pain
never banished, till she scans some baby face, her leaping heart
descrying the likeness to her own, all the lovelier because the image
of the adopted mingles with it.
I am right well aware how horrified my mother would have been if any
one had dared to hint that she, or any other gentlewoman, cherished the
hope of some day being either mother-in-law or grandmother--or both;
and I cannot help a little shudder as I write those terms myself. But
the truth as I first set it down, free from those rude bald words, is
not to be denied.
It was at the seaside that I first met Charlie Giddens. Mother and I
met him the same evening, in the midst of a merry dance on the grand
piazza. He was tall and dark, and his hair was gloriously rebellious,
every way for Sunday. We both noticed that he looked at us a little
long, a little earnestly, I thought--but he asked mother to dance
first, and that's where his head was level.
"Don't fill your program all up, Helen," she whispered as she handed me
her fan, gliding out with the tall figure, so handsome in his spotless
ducks.
"Did you notice how gracefully he handed me to my seat?" mother said
after he had left her; "he has the manners of a cavalier." For the
old-time Southern lady puts gracefulness next to grace.
"He dances like a Dervish of the Desert," I remarked, a little
maliciously perhaps--for he had bowed and left us.
"Like a courtier, you mean," my mother amended, her eyes still
following him. "And his father's a ship owner in Savannah, and his
mother comes from one of the oldest families in South Carolina,"
concluded my mother, naming the ancient house.
"That's why you like his dancing," I suggested; "old families all dance
exquisitely--the older, the sprightlier, it seems."
"He has such a delicate way of putting things," pursued my mother; "he
was describing his mother to me, and he said she had a lovely figure,
just about my size," surveying somewhat hopefully her rather
substantial form the while. For this was a very live issue with my
mother; she lived in daily horror of growing stout, and any such
reassuring word was balm of Gilead to her.
But what's the use of going on with this? This story's main concern is
not with my dancing days, and what I have written, or yet shall write,
regarding them, is only a streamlet leading towards the river of my
life. And my story--if it be ever finished, or however far it roam,
must follow the winding current of my changeful years.
Yet this I must record, that Mr. Giddens came back that night and stood
once again beneath the swinging lanterns that cast their fitful light
on mother's face and mine. And he asked for another dance--but it was
not from mother. And whenever we swirled before her as we compassed
the great piazza, I could see how mother's eyes followed us
approvingly, more approving than I had ever known them to be before.
And thus it all began--all that never should have been begun at all.
That is what I meant when I said, a little farther back, that I was
_pushed_ into love--and by my own dear mother. Oh, it all seems so
terrible, so cruel to me now, looking back over all the happy years,
beautiful in the uncreated light of love--it is really awful to reflect
how often the hands that love her most are the fateful hands to many a
girlish life, pushing the poor protesting heart, so gently, yet so
relentlessly, pressing it on, on to the dark abyss of a loveless union.
Mr. Giddens was of gentle birth, I know; he was handsome, cultured,
charming,--and he was very rich. All these shed their light about him,
and my mother gloried in their radiance. Their light, I said--but it
was artificial. The summer sun of love had never shined on me at all;
so that while I could not but feel the effulgence of it all, yet only
one room of my life was lighted, and that the hallway--the vast world
within was still wrapt in darkness. I knew all the time that I did not
really love Mr. Giddens. Yet I could not see why I should not--and
there the great peril lay. It was that fatal path that misled me. All
the outward sign-posts pointed my way as leading towards his own--but
these sign-posts were marked by human hands alone, and my mother never
tired of spelling out their message.
"There's not a girl in Virginia," she said one day, "but would give her
head for him. He's aristocratic, and handsome, and rich."
"And the greatest of these is rich," quoth I.
"For shame!" cried my patrician mother, "that's the least of it."
"Not at all," I retorted. "For if a girl doesn't love a man as
fiercely as----"
"As what!" exclaimed my mother, shocked.
"As devotedly as she should," I revised, "she won't get much comfort
out of his blue blood--and she can't do much with his beauty--but his
cash is a different matter," I affirmed; "she could get her little
hands on that all right."
"Helen, you're a foolish child," said my mother gravely.
"That's what I often think myself," said I, more gravely still.
Well, that was the way it went on. I told him "yes" one night. I do
not believe he heard me, but he seemed to know I yielded, for he did
what he had never done before--nor ever other man beside. And thus
life's greatest, holiest moment was stained to me; and the sacred altar
was lighted with far different fire than that for which God meant it.
I had never been kissed before--at least not that way--and even then I
felt how I was cheated of my birthright, and I marvelled at the sense
of shame. But that can never be recalled, so I try not to dwell upon
it. Nor can it be amended, and the loss is to eternity. I have known
the rapture since then, the primal bliss--but the virgin joy was
tempered with the cruel thought that it had all been rehearsed before.
And the bitterest feature of it all is this, that it had never been,
except for her who loved me with a mother's love. But her ambition
mingled with her love--and these two are enemies.
If I had been a little more in love, I reckon mother would not have
tried so hard to urge me on. But I was not--I was a little less. And
mother kept kneeling beside the poor little flame on the mean altar of
my heart, to quote the old hymn, and she kept the bellows going pretty
steadily, if haply she might make the fire burn. Or if I had been a
little less in love, perhaps she would have given over--for I was dear
to her. But I was not; I admitted he was rich, and handsome, and
superior--and these seemed quite enough reason to a girl's mother why
there should be true affection. So I was neither a little more, nor
yet a little less, in love with Charlie--and that is Hades, to use the
convenient word again, when it has to do duty for the real thing. But
mother kept on encouraging me, saying she knew I'd be very happy, and
drawing lovely pictures of the position I would occupy and the
leadership in society that would be mine; and mothers can make ashes
look like bread--only they don't have to eat them through the hungry
years.