Charley's stateroom in the steamer "Quaker City," in the Bay of Smyrna,
in the summer of 1867, when she was in her twenty-second year. I saw her
in the flesh for the first time in New York in the following December.
She was slender and beautiful and girlish--and she was both girl and
woman. She remained both girl and woman to the last day of her life.
Under a grave and gentle exterior burned inextinguishable fires of
sympathy, energy, devotion, enthusiasm, and absolutely limitless
affection. She was _always_ frail in body, and she lived upon her
spirit, whose hopefulness and courage were indestructible. Perfect
truth, perfect honesty, perfect candor, were qualities of her character
which were born with her. Her judgments of people and things were sure
and accurate. Her intuitions almost never deceived her. In her judgments
of the characters and acts of both friends and strangers, there was
always room for charity, and this charity never failed. I have compared
and contrasted her with hundreds of persons, and my conviction remains
that hers was the most perfect character I have ever met. And I may add
that she was the most winningly dignified person I have ever known. Her
character and disposition were of the sort that not only invites
worship, but commands it. No servant ever left her service who deserved
to remain in it. And, as she could choose with a glance of her eye, the
servants she selected did in almost all cases deserve to remain, and
they _did_ remain. She was always cheerful; and she was always able to
communicate her cheerfulness to others. During the nine years that we
spent in poverty and debt, she was always able to reason me out of my
despairs, and find a bright side to the clouds, and make me see it. In
all that time, I never knew her to utter a word of regret concerning our
altered circumstances, nor did I ever know her children to do the like.
For she had taught them, and they drew their fortitude from her. The
love which she bestowed upon those whom she loved took the form of
worship, and in that form it was returned--returned by relatives,
friends and the servants of her household. It was a strange combination
which wrought into one individual, so to speak, by marriage--her
disposition and character and mine. She poured out her prodigal
affections in kisses and caresses, and in a vocabulary of endearments
whose profusion was always an astonishment to me. I was born _reserved_
as to endearments of speech and caresses, and hers broke upon me as the
summer waves break upon Gibraltar. I was reared in that atmosphere of
reserve. As I have already said, in another chapter, I never knew a
member of my father's family to kiss another member of it except once,
and that at a death-bed. And our village was not a kissing community.
The kissing and caressing ended with courtship--along with the deadly
piano-playing of that day.
She had the heart-free laugh of a girl. It came seldom, but when it
broke upon the ear it was as inspiring as music. I heard it for the last
time when she had been occupying her sickbed for more than a year, and I
made a written note of it at the time--a note not to be repeated.
To-morrow will be the thirty-sixth anniversary. We were married in her
father's house in Elmira, New York, and went next day, by special train,
to Buffalo, along with the whole Langdon family, and with the Beechers
and the Twichells, who had solemnized the marriage. We were to live in
Buffalo, where I was to be one of the editors of the Buffalo "Express,"
and a part owner of the paper. I knew nothing about Buffalo, but I had
made my household arrangements there through a friend, by letter. I had
instructed him to find a boarding-house of as respectable a character as
my light salary as editor would command. We were received at about nine
o'clock at the station in Buffalo, and were put into several sleighs and
driven all over America, as it seemed to me--for, apparently, we turned
all the corners in the town and followed all the streets there were--I
scolding freely, and characterizing that friend of mine in very
uncomplimentary words for securing a boarding-house that apparently had
no definite locality. But there was a conspiracy--and my bride knew of
it, but I was in ignorance. Her father, Jervis Langdon, had bought and
furnished a new house for us in the fashionable street, Delaware Avenue,
and had laid in a cook and housemaids, and a brisk and electric young
coachman, an Irishman, Patrick McAleer--and we were being driven all
over that city in order that one sleighful of those people could have
time to go to the house, and see that the gas was lighted all over it,
and a hot supper prepared for the crowd. We arrived at last, and when I
entered that fairy place my indignation reached high-water mark, and
without any reserve I delivered my opinion to that friend of mine for
being so stupid as to put us into a boarding-house whose terms would be
far out of my reach. Then Mr. Langdon brought forward a very pretty box
and opened it, and took from it a deed of the house. So the comedy ended
very pleasantly, and we sat down to supper.
The company departed about midnight, and left us alone in our new
quarters. Then Ellen, the cook, came in to get orders for the morning's
marketing--and neither of us knew whether beefsteak was sold by the
barrel or by the yard. We exposed our ignorance, and Ellen was fall of
Irish delight over it. Patrick McAleer, that brisk young Irishman, came
in to get his orders for next day--and that was our first glimpse of
him....
Our first child, Langdon Clemens, was born the 7th of November, 1870,
and lived twenty-two months. Susy was born the 19th of March, 1872, and
passed from life in the Hartford home, the 18th of August, 1896. With
her, when the end came, were Jean and Katy Leary, and John and Ellen
(the gardener and his wife). Clara and her mother and I arrived in
England from around the world on the 31st of July, and took a house in
Guildford. A week later, when Susy, Katy and Jean should have been
arriving from America, we got a letter instead.
It explained that Susy was slightly ill--nothing of consequence. But we
were disquieted, and began to cable for later news. This was Friday. All
day no answer--and the ship to leave Southampton next day, at noon.
Clara and her mother began packing, to be ready in case the news should
be bad. Finally came a cablegram saying, "Wait for cablegram in the
morning." This was not satisfactory--not reassuring. I cabled again,
asking that the answer be sent to Southampton, for the day was now
closing. I waited in the post-office that night till the doors were
closed, toward midnight, in the hope that good news might still come,
but there was no message. We sat silent at home till one in the morning,
waiting--waiting for we knew not what. Then we took the earliest morning
train, and when we reached Southampton the message was there. It said
the recovery would be long, but certain. This was a great relief to me,
but not to my wife. She was frightened. She and Clara went aboard the
steamer at once and sailed for America, to nurse Susy. I remained behind
to search for a larger house in Guildford.
That was the 15th of August, 1896. Three days later, when my wife and
Clara were about half-way across the ocean, I was standing in our
dining-room thinking of nothing in particular, when a cablegram was put
into my hand. It said, "Susy was peacefully released to-day."
It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can
receive a thunder-stroke like that and live. There is but one reasonable
explanation of it. The intellect is stunned by the shock, and but
gropingly gathers the meaning of the words. The power to realize their
fall import is mercifully wanting. The mind has a dumb sense of vast
loss--that is all. It will take mind and memory months, and possibly
years, to gather together the details, and thus learn and know the whole
extent of the loss. A man's house burns down. The smoking wreckage
represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and
pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he
misses this, then that, then the other thing. And, when he casts about
for it, he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an
_essential_--there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It
was in that house. It is irrevocably lost. He did not realize that it
was an essential when he had it; he only discovers it now when he finds
himself balked, hampered, by its absence. It will be years before the
tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know
the magnitude of his disaster.
The 18th of August brought me the awful tidings. The mother and the
sister were out there in mid-Atlantic, ignorant of what was happening;
flying to meet this incredible calamity. All that could be done to
protect them from the full force of the shock was done by relatives and
good friends. They went down the Bay and met the ship at night, but did
not show themselves until morning, and then only to Clara. When she
returned to the stateroom she did not speak, and did not need to. Her
mother looked at her and said:
"Susy is dead."
At half past ten o'clock that night, Clara and her mother completed
their circuit of the globe, and drew up at Elmira by the same train and
in the same car which had borne them and me Westward from it one year,
one month, and one week before. And again Susy was there--not waving her
welcome in the glare of the lights, as she had waved her farewell to us
thirteen months before, but lying white and fair in her coffin, in the
house where she was born.
The last thirteen days of Susy's life were spent in our own house in
Hartford, the home of her childhood, and always the dearest place in the
earth to her. About her she had faithful old friends--her pastor, Mr.
Twichell, who had known her from the cradle, and who had come a long
journey to be with her; her uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Crane;
Patrick, the coachman; Katy, who had begun to serve us when Susy was a
child of eight years; John and Ellen, who had been with us many years.
Also Jean was there.
At the hour when my wife and Clara set sail for America, Susy was in no
danger. Three hours later there came a sudden change for the worse.
Meningitis set in, and it was immediately apparent that she was
death-struck. That was Saturday, the 15th of August.
"That evening she took food for the last time," (Jean's letter to me).
The next morning the brain-fever was raging. She walked the floor a
little in her pain and delirium, then succumbed to weakness and returned
to her bed. Previously she had found hanging in a closet a gown which
she had seen her mother wear. She thought it was her mother, dead, and
she kissed it, and cried. About noon she became blind (an effect of the
disease) and bewailed it to her uncle.
From Jean's letter I take this sentence, which needs no comment:
"About one in the afternoon Susy spoke for the last time."
It was only one word that she said when she spoke that last time, and it
told of her longing. She groped with her hands and found Katy, and
caressed her face, and said "Mamma."
How gracious it was that, in that forlorn hour of wreck and ruin, with
the night of death closing around her, she should have been granted that
beautiful illusion--that the latest vision which rested upon the clouded
mirror of her mind should have been the vision of her mother, and the
latest emotion she should know in life the joy and peace of that dear
imagined presence.
About two o'clock she composed herself as if for sleep, and never moved
again. She fell into unconsciousness and so remained two days and five
hours, until Tuesday evening at seven minutes past seven, when the
release came. She was twenty-four years and five months old.
On the 23d, her mother and her sisters saw her laid to rest--she that
had been our wonder and our worship.
In one of her own books I find some verses which I will copy here.
Apparently, she always put borrowed matter in quotation marks. These
verses lack those marks, and therefore I take them to be her own:
Love came at dawn, when all the world was fair,
When crimson glories' bloom and sun were rife;
Love came at dawn, when hope's wings fanned the air,
And murmured, "I am life."
Love came at eve, and when the day was done,
When heart and brain were tired, and slumber pressed;
Love came at eve, shut out the sinking sun,
And whispered, "I am rest."
The summer seasons of Susy's childhood were spent at Quarry Farm, on the
hills east of Elmira, New York; the other seasons of the year at the
home in Hartford. Like other children, she was blithe and happy, fond of
play; unlike the average of children, she was at times much given to
retiring within herself, and trying to search out the hidden meanings of
the deep things that make the puzzle and pathos of human existence, and
in all the ages have baffled the inquirer and mocked him. As a little
child aged seven, she was oppressed and perplexed by the maddening
repetition of the stock incidents of our race's fleeting sojourn here,
just as the same thing has oppressed and perplexed maturer minds from
the beginning of time. A myriad of men are born; they labor and sweat
and struggle for bread; they squabble and scold and fight; they scramble
for little mean advantages over each other; age creeps upon them;
infirmities follow; shames and humiliations bring down their prides and
their vanities; those they love are taken from them, and the joy of life
is turned to aching grief. The burden of pain, care, misery, grows
heavier year by year; at length, ambition is dead, pride is dead; vanity
is dead; longing for release is in their place. It comes at last--the
only unpoisoned gift earth ever had for them--and they vanish from a
world where they were of no consequence; where they achieved nothing;
where they were a mistake and a failure and a foolishness; there they
have left no sign that they have existed--a world which will lament them
a day and forget them forever. Then another myriad takes their place,
and copies all they did, and goes along the same profitless road, and
vanishes as they vanished--to make room for another, and another, and a
million other myriads, to follow the same arid path through the same
desert, and accomplish what the first myriad, and all the myriads that
came after it, accomplished--nothing!
"Mamma, what is it all for?" asked Susy, preliminarily stating the
above details in her own halting language, after long brooding over them
alone in the privacy of the nursery.
A year later, she was groping her way alone through another sunless bog,
but this time she reached a rest for her feet. For a week, her mother
had not been able to go to the nursery, evenings, at the child's prayer
hour. She spoke of it--was sorry for it, and said she would come
to-night, and hoped she could continue to come every night and hear Susy
pray, as before. Noticing that the child wished to respond, but was
evidently troubled as to how to word her answer, she asked what the
difficulty was. Susy explained that Miss Foote (the governess) had been
teaching her about the Indians and their religious beliefs, whereby it
appeared that they had not only a God, but several. This had set Susy to
thinking. As a result of this thinking, she had stopped praying. She
qualified this statement--that is, she modified it--saying she did not
now pray "in the same way" as she had formerly done. Her mother said:
"Tell me about it, dear."
"Well, mamma, the Indians believed they knew, but now we know they were
wrong. By and by, it can turn out that we are wrong. So now I only pray
that there may be a God and a Heaven--or something better."
I wrote down this pathetic prayer in its precise wording, at the time,
in a record which we kept of the children's sayings, and my reverence
for it has grown with the years that have passed over my head since
then. Its untaught grace and simplicity are a child's, but the wisdom
and the pathos of it are of all the ages that have come and gone since
the race of man has lived, and longed, and hoped, and feared, and
doubted.
To go back a year--Susy aged seven. Several times her mother said to
her:
"There, there, Susy, you mustn't cry over little things."
This furnished Susy a text for thought She had been breaking her heart
over what had seemed vast disasters--a broken toy; a picnic cancelled by
thunder and lightning and rain; the mouse that was growing tame and
friendly in the nursery caught and killed by the cat--and now came this
strange revelation. For some unaccountable reason, these were not vast
calamities. Why? How is the size of calamities measured? What is the
rule? There must be some way to tell the great ones from the small
ones; what is the law of these proportions? She examined the problem
earnestly and long. She gave it her best thought from time to time, for
two or three days--but it baffled her--defeated her. And at last she
gave up and went to her mother for help.
"Mamma, what is '_little_ things'?"
It seemed a simple question--at first. And yet, before the answer could
be put into words, unsuspected and unforeseen difficulties began to
appear. They increased; they multiplied; they brought about another
defeat. The effort to explain came to a standstill. Then Susy tried to
help her mother out--with an instance, an example, an illustration. The
mother was getting ready to go down-town, and one of her errands was to
buy a long-promised toy-watch for Susy.
"If you forgot the watch, mamma, would that be a little thing?"
She was not concerned about the watch, for she knew it would not be
forgotten. What she was hoping for was that the answer would unriddle
the riddle, and bring rest and peace to her perplexed little mind.
The hope was disappointed, of course--for the reason that the size of a
misfortune is not determinate by an outsider's measurement of it, but
only by the measurements applied to it by the person specially affected
by it. The king's lost crown is a vast matter to the king, but of no
consequence to the child. The lost toy is a great matter to the child,
but in the king's eyes it is not a thing to break the heart about. A
verdict was reached, but it was based upon the above model, and Susy was
granted leave to measure her disasters thereafter with her own
tape-line.
As a child, Susy had a passionate temper; and it cost her much remorse
and many tears before she learned to govern it, but after that it was a
wholesome salt, and her character was the stronger and healthier for its
presence. It enabled her to be good with dignity; it preserved her not
only from being good for vanity's sake, but from even the appearance of
it. In looking back over the long vanished years, it seems but natural
and excusable that I should dwell with longing affection and preference
upon incidents of her young life which made it beautiful to us, and that
I should let its few small offences go unsummoned and unreproached.
In the summer of 1880, when Susy was just eight years of age, the
family were at Quarry Farm, as usual at that season of the year.
Hay-cutting time was approaching, and Susy and Clara were counting the
hours, for the time was big with a great event for them; they had been
promised that they might mount the wagon and ride home from the fields
on the summit of the hay mountain. This perilous privilege, so dear to
their age and species, had never been granted them before. Their
excitement had no bounds. They could talk of nothing but this
epoch-making adventure, now. But misfortune overtook Susy on the very
morning of the important day. In a sudden outbreak of passion, she
corrected Clara--with a shovel, or stick, or something of the sort. At
any rate, the offence committed was of a gravity clearly beyond the
limit allowed in the nursery. In accordance with the rule and custom of
the house, Susy went to her mother to confess, and to help decide upon
the size and character of the punishment due. It was quite understood
that, as a punishment could have but one rational object and
function--to act as a reminder, and warn the transgressor against
transgressing in the same way again--the children would know about as
well as any how to choose a penalty which would be rememberable and
effective. Susy and her mother discussed various punishments, but none
of them seemed adequate. This fault was an unusually serious one, and
required the setting up of a danger-signal in the memory that would not
blow out nor burn out, but remain a fixture there and furnish its saving
warning indefinitely. Among the punishments mentioned was deprivation of
the hay-wagon ride. It was noticeable that this one hit Susy hard.
Finally, in the summing up, the mother named over the list and asked:
"Which one do you think it ought to be, Susy?"
Susy studied, shrank from her duty, and asked:
"Which do you think, mamma?"
"Well, Susy, I would rather leave it to you. _You_ make the choice
yourself."
It cost Susy a struggle, and much and deep thinking and weighing--but
she came out where any one who knew her could have foretold she would.
"Well, mamma, I'll make it the hay-wagon, because you know the other
things might not make me remember not to do it again, but if I don't get
to ride on the hay-wagon I can remember it easily."
In this world the real penalty, the sharp one, the lasting one, never
falls otherwise than on the wrong person. It was not _I_ that corrected
Clara, but the remembrance of poor Susy's lost hay-ride still brings
_me_ a pang--after twenty-six years.
Apparently, Susy was born with humane feelings for the animals, and
compassion for their troubles. This enabled her to see a new point in an
old story, once, when she was only six years old--a point which had been
overlooked by older, and perhaps duller, people for many ages. Her
mother told her the moving story of the sale of Joseph by his brethren,
the staining of his coat with the blood of the slaughtered kid, and the
rest of it. She dwelt upon the inhumanity of the brothers; their cruelty
toward their helpless young brother; and the unbrotherly treachery which
they practised upon him; for she hoped to teach the child a lesson in
gentle pity and mercifulness which she would remember. Apparently, her
desire was accomplished, for the tears came into Susy's eyes and she was
deeply moved. Then she said:
"Poor little kid!"
A child's frank envy of the privileges and distinctions of its elders is
often a delicately flattering attention and the reverse of unwelcome,
but sometimes the envy is not placed where the beneficiary is expecting
it to be placed. Once, when Susy was seven, she sat breathlessly
absorbed in watching a guest of ours adorn herself for a ball. The lady
was charmed by this homage; this mute and gentle admiration; and was
happy in it. And when her pretty labors were finished, and she stood at
last perfect, unimprovable, clothed like Solomon in all his glory, she
paused, confident and expectant, to receive from Susy's tongue the
tribute that was burning in her eyes. Susy drew an envious little sigh
and said:
"I wish _I_ could have crooked teeth and spectacles!"
Once, when Susy was six months along in her eighth year, she did
something one day in the presence of company, which subjected her to
criticism and reproof. Afterward, when she was alone with her mother, as
was her custom she reflected a little while over the matter. Then she
set up what I think--and what the shade of Burns would think--was a
quite good philosophical defence.
"Well, mamma, you know I didn't see myself, and so I couldn't know how
it looked."
In homes where the near friends and visitors are mainly literary
people--lawyers, judges, professors and clergymen--the children's ears
become early familiarized with wide vocabularies. It is natural for them
to pick up any words that fall in their way; it is natural for them to
pick up big and little ones indiscriminately; it is natural for them to
use without fear any word that comes to their net, no matter how
formidable it may be as to size. As a result, their talk is a curious
and funny musketry clatter of little words, interrupted at intervals by
the heavy artillery crash of a word of such imposing sound and size that
it seems to shake the ground and rattle the windows. Sometimes the child
gets a wrong idea of a word which it has picked up by chance, and
attaches to it a meaning which impairs its usefulness--but this does not
happen as often as one might expect it would. Indeed, it happens with an
infrequency which may be regarded as remarkable. As a child, Susy had
good fortune with her large words, and she employed many of them. She
made no more than her fair share of mistakes. Once when she thought
something very funny was going to happen (but it didn't), she was racked
and torn with laughter, by anticipation. But, apparently, she still felt
sure of her position, for she said, "If it had happened, I should have
been transformed [transported] with glee."
And earlier, when she was a little maid of five years, she informed a
visitor that she had been in a church only once, and that was the time
when Clara was "crucified" [christened]....
In Heidelberg, when Susy was six, she noticed that the Schloss gardens
were populous with snails creeping all about everywhere. One day she
found a new dish on her table and inquired concerning it, and learned
that it was made of snails. She was awed and impressed, and said:
"Wild ones, mamma?"