the despair she had every reason to experience over my stupidity and
awkwardness, if at the “psychological moment” she had occasionally
spoken sharply, blown me up as did the teachers later at the public
school, the effect I am convinced would have been definite and salutary.
But hers was the haggard benevolence of the child-gardener in its most
indestructible form. All day long sweetness and light glared from her
eyes like pharos rays that faileth not because they’ve been wound up.
There was in the loving expression around her mouth something
appallingly inanimate, objective, detachable; one felt that it hadn’t
grown there, it had been put. It bore about the same relation to reality
as does the art of the confectioner. It lay against her teeth like the
thin white icing on a cake, and the hand that itched to box an ear
faltered in its flight pausing to caress a curl. It terrified me to
realize that the perishable, narrow strips of glazed, colored paper we
tried to weave into mats, and the dried peas with which I finally
builded better than I knew were, even as the hairs of our heads, all
numbered. This was for the purpose of teaching us neatness and
thrift--the husbanding of our resources. To crumple the former or
scatter the latter was, we knew, a crime, but Mrs. White’s method of
calling our attention to it was merely an insult to the intelligence.
The punishment was a deliberate misfit, an elaborately artificial
evasion of the point at issue. When, for instance, a dried pea would
slip through my clumsy fingers and rattle over the uncarpetted floor
with what sounded to me like the detonations of artillery, Mrs. White
never told me to wake up and be more careful of what I was doing.
Instead she would coo like a philandering pigeon and murmur:
“Why, laddie--what would the hungry little birds say if they were to see
_all_ that nice food wasted!” When panic-stricken at the number of my
crumpled failures I feloniously thrust them into my pocket, she would
fish them out with sweet amaze, exclaiming:
“Why, dearie--how did _these_ get here? Does any little girl or boy know
how _all_ these poor little strips of paper got into the very bottom of
Charlie’s dark pocket?” When, as once in so often happened, I would “all
alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless
cries, And look upon myself and curse my fate,” she never told me to
stop at once and behave myself; she would open her eyes to their
incredulous roundest, slightly drop her lower jaw, wonderingly scan
every face and then purr:
“Why, manny--what’s become of _all_ the smiles?”
There was invariably a reply to these inquiries and it was almost as
invariably furnished by one Adelaide Winkle, a dreadful child, but one
more sinned against, I now appreciate, than sinning. Forced to the limit
in the hothouse of the home, and deeply imbedded in the fertilizing
approval of Mrs. White, she was in all our gay little parterre the most
brilliant and the most noxious bloom. At the age of seven she already
had the executive air of a woman who has long presided over meetings.
She also played the piano, danced fancy dances, sang, recited, wore
three rings, a necklace and a red plush dress. I hated her, even more if
possible than I hated Mrs. White, for she not only kept an eye on my
shortcomings, she formulated them into ready words and by request smugly
proclaimed them. But it was the manner in which Mrs. White exploited her
before strangers that most enraged me. When visitors appeared, as they
often did, for a kindergarten under cultivation was a decided novelty,
Adelaide was called upon to execute her entire program from A to Izzard.
She sang, she elocuted “Bobolink, spink, spank, bobolink,” she played
her show piece (“Fairy Chimes”) on the-piano, she withdrew to an
adjoining room and tripped coquettishly in again, strewing, like the
springtime, an armful of tissue-paper roses, and last of all she gave
with experiments a short discourse on geography that brought tears to
the eyes of the most criminal. The experiments were evolved in sight of
the audience with the aid of a large wooden trayful of sand and a tin
dipperful of water. Under Adelaide’s precocious fingers these helpless
elements gave a presumably correct rendering of the Book of Genesis in
action, becoming at her will a continent, a river, a lake, an island, a
peninsula, a mountain. One downward thrust of an unerring thumb upon a
soggy peak and lo! the mountain was a volcano which, Adelaide always
ended the lecture by informing us, “Spouts when in a state of
ac-tiv-it-y, fire, smoke, glow-ing stones and mol-tennn law-vaw.”
Powerless to protest, and crushed beneath the weight of my own
incompetence, I have sat through the performance of this revolting rite
as often as three times in a single morning.
Revenge came slowly. It took nineteen years to arrive, but it arrived.
Unduly familiar in childhood with continents and dizzy heights,
Adelaide, as she matured, reached out, expanded, longed to become a
world-power. At the age of twenty-six, therefore, she eloped with a
French “count,” who not only failed to observe the convention of proving
to be a waiter or a hairdresser, he absolutely failed to be anything at
all and Adelaide ever since has had to support him.
At eleven o’clock we took a dejected orphan-asylum walk about the
suburban streets in two long lines led by the older pupils of the more
advanced school downstairs and followed by Mrs. White who, by constantly
running back and forth in order to satisfy herself that no one was
neglecting to “observe nature,” must have covered miles to our blocks.
How we all loathed nature! I loved animals and plants, clouds and rain,
snow and sunshine then as I do now, but “Nature” was something quite
different. I don’t believe we ever knew what it was and probably
connected the term in our minds not with the works of God themselves but
with the inescapable obligation of perpetually fussing about them. I
without doubt would have ended by becoming very fond of the White
Maria’s shaggy old ponies, but the labored pretense that we were all
dying to bring them a handful of oats for their Thanksgiving dinner and
a dozen other pretenses concerning them ended by preventing it. Birds
were really wonderful, heavenly creatures to watch and examine, but
weeks of prattle about the Christmas present (seeds, bread-crumbs and
more oats) of birds we had never seen, merely resulted in a band of
ornithological cynics. This fictitious passion for just
birds--disembodied, abstract birds, that Mrs. White entirely imagined
for us and widely advertised--was taken seriously by our families for
years. My grandmother fondly believed in it to the last and almost
embittered my young life by bequeathing in her will three beautiful
family portraits to my brothers, and to me the “nature lover,” the
unwilling product of Mrs. White’s, a set of Audubon!
On our return from the walk Mrs. White inspected our lunch-baskets,
confiscating what she considered injurious to our digestions and teeth
and allowing us to fortify ourselves against further blesséd play and
blesséd work with the remains. I have often wondered what actually
became of the cake and candy she daily took from us “for our own good,”
and I shouldn’t be surprised if she scattered it along the sidewalk or
threw it into passing carriages. It would have been a natural reaction
from her incessant official pother about “neatness and thrift,” but at
the time we all of course firmly believed that she put the loot away in
a pantry and that the whole White family lived on it for weeks.
Almost everything we learned at Mrs. White’s was sure to be incorrect to
the point of imbecility. For I don’t know how long after leaving there I
took it for granted that a thoughtful Creator had supplied dear Bossy
with a “dewlap” in order that she could wipe dry each mouthful of wet
grass before eating it.
“When Bossy goes out to the fields in the morning for her breakfast,
this long, soft fold you see here under her neck” (pointing to the
picture) “swings from side to side brushing away the damp and chilly
dew,” Mrs. White had told us, and I need scarcely dwell on the
disappointment and sense of injury I experienced when I subsequently
sought Bossy in her graminaceous lair and watched her dewlap quite
otherwise engaged. But even so, Mrs. White is no more, and anyhow I was
always a facile relenter. At times I have been even grateful for Mrs.
White’s. There was for instance the mystery of Mary Blake and the
mystery of the White Maria. I have often been grateful for them.
Mary Blake was an overgrown girl in the school downstairs. She was a
most pervasive lass--“a perfect romp.” We all knew her well. She
belonged to a family prominent in our growing town, and although my
family and hers were not intimate they no doubt would have thought they
were had they unexpectedly met for instance on the spiral stairway of 7
Rue Scribe. There were two sons and four daughters in Mary’s family and
none of them was named Jane. This is important. Years elapsed. I had
spent considerable time abroad, I had been occupied in growing up, in
going to school, in preparing for college. There were still four Blake
girls, but my interest in them was vague, collective. Then one day I
heard of the marriage of Jane Blake, which surprised me somewhat as
there had never been a Jane Blake. This led a short time later to my
expressing to Mrs. Blake a belated interest in Mary, at which Mrs. Blake
looked mystified for a moment and then said, “I think you must mean
Susan.” I didn’t mean Susan but I refrained from saying so, and since
then I have been haunted by the mystery of Mary Blake. Apparently there
is no Mary Blake and never was one, although in answer to my feverish
questionings several persons who were at Mrs. White’s with her have
assured me that they remember her perfectly. Every now and then I meet
Jane Blake and talk to her, wondering the while if she can be Mary. That
she is dark and Mary was blonde is perhaps negligible. Once I sat next
to Jane at dinner and when, after a pause in our conversation, I said,
“Come, now--aren’t you really your sister who died?” She answered coldly
that none of her sisters had ever died and immediately afterward refused
to let the servant help her to any more champagne.
The mystery of the White Maria I have never tried to solve. It is enough
to know that it was and to wonder if I shall ever again see anything so
lovely. The White Maria, as has been mentioned, was a large, square box
of black oilcloth. It’s inner surface, however, was white, soiled to a
neutral gray. On our outward journeys when I noticed this at all it was
only to feel the tragedy of life with a greater intensity. But on the
return.... To state in words what we saw when returning gives but little
idea of it. We were always tired, silent and a trifle sleepy when we
started for home, and we at once leaned back and quietly watched for It.
It often appeared but sometimes it refused to show itself for days, and
I then used to wonder if I had ever really seen it. The perpetual
fascination it had for us was a most complicated one, consisting as it
did of the mystery, the beauty, the unreality and the reality of the
thing itself, together with the fact that Mrs. White was somehow being
thwarted. The black canopy of the White Maria, in a word, sought to
imprison us, to impose an impenetrable barrier between us and the
outside world, but as we jogged along, the houses, the trees, the
horses, the wagons and the people we passed were reproduced in miniature
on one of the inside walls. The details were always clear enough to let
us know where we were; frequently they were perfect. The little
panorama, furthermore, was without color, which gave it an additional,
ghostly charm. I have never been hypnotized, but I think in staring at
this dreamlike, dissolving procession I used to be very near the
hypnotic state. At times when the White Maria drew up at our front door
I was asleep and it would take me half an hour or more to get back again
into my body--I can remember the sensation even if I can’t describe it.
The moving-picture shows of to-day seem to me like a crude and vulgar
attempt to recall and commercialize the age when we were mystics and had
visions.
THE END