again! What happiness to slip out of our grown-up households, and go
forth into the morning, with book-strap and luncheon in hand, to meet
by the way our harried and over-busy acquaintance, men and women, some
whiteheaded in ignorance, perhaps, all skipping and dancing along to the
same glad place. Gleeful, we enter a sunny room with geraniums on the
window-sill, bright maps on the wall, and a beautiful young lady at the
desk. We are no longer hard and hardened children: our hearts as well
as our intellects are softened by the debility of age, and we appreciate
the graciousness of our instructor with the rose in her belt, the milk
of human kindness in her eye, and the carefully preserved smile upon her
lips. It is with responsive smiles of gratitude that we feel arithmetic
and history and geography trickling into our craniums from the cranium
of our teacher. Then, when she feels that, still willing, we are perhaps
grown weary with well-doing, she gives a signal, and with one accord we
raise our cracked voices in ecstatic, yet instructive song, in which
perhaps we are poetically informed of some new fact about the firefly,
or the green grass, or perhaps our own gastronomy, or in glittering
phrase we unweave the rainbow into the colors of the spectrum. Or,
to forestall the _ennui_ resulting from our too earnest effort, our
instructor bids us stretch our cramped, rheumatic limbs, and with
graceful contortions of her lithe young body, directs us as we prance
stiffly through a calisthenic exercise.
But it is not on these diversions that my fancy lingers most fondly, but
on those more solid parts of our education. How happy I should be, for
example, if I could only add, both in my head and on paper! How many
bewildered and distrustful moments would thus be eliminated from my
existence! And if to a proficiency in addition I superadded an adeptness
in subtraction, then perhaps on some proud day might my opinion of
the bulk of my bank account approximate more nearly the opinion of
the cashier. And if my rudimentary bump of mathematics were carefully
manipulated according to the newest system of educational massage,
I might even progress as far as percentage. I might learn how to be
richer if I could once understand the allurements of compound interest.
So much depends on the attitude of mind that I wonder whether, if I
approached fractions in a spirit of friendliness rather than of enmity
to the knife, they would reward me by allowing me an entrance into their
intricacies, so that I could with impunity buy things on the bias, or
estimate the reduction by the dozen of merchandise that tags a half-cent
to its price when purchased singly. There are, besides, other valuable
facts to be gleaned from the study of arithmetic, the possession of
which would be matter for gloating. How proudly I should proclaim to
some ignorant companion of a country stroll the number of feet in a
mile! I should be happy to know under all circumstances the number of
ounces in a pound, grocer’s or apothecary’s: how exalted I should be if
I knew the exact amount of a scruple, that being a fact of which I am
sure most of my friends are ignorant. An exhaustive knowledge of weights
and measures would not only entitle one to distinction among one’s
acquaintance, but would open up many new avenues of interest in one’s
daily life.
History is another of the subjects for which I hanker; not history
as it is administered to me now, spiced for the mature palate, with
philosophy and evolution, the ebb and flow of tendencies, but history
for the infant mind, the bread and milk of history, as it were. I have
sometimes thought that historic research would be easier for me if
sometimes I knew what men did before I was forced to understand why
they did it; and a simple statement of what the actual fact is under
consideration would clarify for me much of the historian’s discussion
of cause and effect. I have a distinct conception of the development of
the great and glorious English people, but even such knowledge would
be materially strengthened if I were able instantly to sort out all
the Henrys and Edwards and stow them away in their proper cubby-holes
among the embarrassment of decades. As to my own respected fatherland, I
have discussed intelligently the growth of the spoils system, skipping
from presidential term to presidential term with all a grown-up’s airy
superiority; but ask me by whom and when and why North Carolina was
colonized, or just what Captain John Smith was about when Pocahontas
intercepted the executioner, and you have me. I want to study history
at last fairly and squarely, out of a dapper little textbook that I can
stow away handily in my brain, with fine fair outlines at beginning
and end of it, and all important events made salient by heavy type,
and a brisk brushing together of one’s information by a _résumé_ after
each chapter. Such a primer would greatly assist me in my study of the
metaphysics of history.
Yet perhaps I do but hanker after impossibilities; perhaps this school
I so happily image forth would refuse to teach me what I want to know.
Possibly such information belongs only to the period of my negligent
infancy. Perhaps my charming young teacher, exuding the wit and wisdom
of the newest normal school, would refuse to stand and deliver the
knowledge I long for. If I desired the facts of the French and Indian
War, I might merely be set to building wigwams and drawing braves in
war-paint with colored crayons on the blackboard. Perhaps after all
there is nobody left who knows how to teach the things I have forgotten.
For example, do they now acknowledge in the primary curriculum that
fair, old-fashioned study called penmanship? I yearn to be put once more
into a copybook. I long to set forth once more wise saws in round _v_’s
and unquestioned _e_’s and _i_’s. My fingers long since became callous
and conscienceless to distinguish _t_ from _l_, _b_ from _p_, and I
wish somebody would reform the rascally old digits. It would be a great
relief to my friends and myself if I could only become legible in my old
age.
One branch of knowledge little emphasized in my youth, however, I
could be sure of receiving at the hands of my fair instructress of
to-day,--I refer to that varied information known as “nature-study.” I
am greatly deficient in nature-study. I own to an unanalytical habit
of mind as regards out-of-doors. So long as the wild flowers make a
glory at my feet, I have never cared much to shred them into pistil and
corolla and stamen. So long as the small fowls make me melody, I have
never cared to know the color of their pinfeathers. But I would fain
amend all this and die knowing something. I picture our band of eager
grown-ups pouring over the countryside in the wake of our animated and
instructive conductor,--peering into the grass to lay bare the soul
in the sod, blinking our old eyes to discover the bird in his coverts,
cocking our dull ears to classify the notes of his song. I see us
disporting ourselves over the landscape, busily seeking some curious
knowledge, and then scampering back to our teacher with treasure trove
of leaf or flower or pebble or captured insect. Sweetly she commends
our application, and explains the exact nature of our find. We swell
with knowledge momentarily, and return to more prosaic tasks elate,
having hung its proper label on blade and bush, bird and bough. What a
satisfaction it would be, after having lived with nature for a lifetime
in awesome ignorance, to feel that one had at last assailed her and
ascertained her secrets!
As a young child, I must have been singularly limited in mental scope;
I cannot otherwise explain my well-remembered aversion to geography.
Those parti-colored maps streaked with inky rivers, and bordered by
the wiggling lines of the Gulf Stream, filled me with loathing. The
revolving globe, and that oft-repeated image which likens the earth to
an orange flattened at the poles, seemed to me almost sickening. How
bitterly do I repent my obstinacy! Besides, there is not one trace left
now of my former aversion. In fact, geography appeals to me to-day as
if it were a brand-new branch of study, so well did I succeed in not
learning it as a child. I have tried ever since reaching maturity to
make up my geographical deficiencies, but with small success. Often do
I find myself relegated to the dunce-seat in the minds of the company
present. Despite my constant effort, there are certain countries that
always elude my grasp, notably Burma and New Zealand, and there is
always for me an airy insubstantiality about the entire continent of
South America. Within my own beloved country, certain rivers have a way
of turning up in unexpected States when I supposed that they had long
comfortably emptied themselves into the ocean; and there are some cities
which always flit with agility to and fro across the map.
I wonder if my early antagonism to geography might perhaps have been
due to a shrewd sense of its uselessness to me at that stage of my
existence. Stay-at-home as I was, why trouble myself with strange lands
until necessary? Yet I was lacking in foresight, and should be grateful
now if only I had packed away some information against the day I should
need it, whereas nowadays I find traveling without any knowledge of
geography stimulating but inconvenient. This observation leads me to
a broader one on the topsy-turvy nature of our present educational
sequence: those studies most astute and useless we put in the college
curriculum, and those most immediate and practical to the college
graduate about to grapple with life, we relegate to the elementary
school, where the children neither desire nor need to master them.
I would suggest a turning about. Let the college youth and maid who
will suffer from a lack of practical arithmetic learn to add a column
accurately; let the irresponsible infant sport with trigonometry and
conic sections. These subjects unlearned or forgotten, one could still
go through life unfretted by the loss. So with other subjects forever
lost to us because entrusted to the intelligence of careless infancy. I
would teach geography and handwriting in the senior year at college, and
put philosophy in the primary school. So would the young collegian go
forth upon life well equipped, and not come to fifty years burdened with
regrets for knowledge lost forever,--as I. I have kept afloat in higher
mathematics, I have delved into the mines of science, I have trod air
with many a prancing philosopher,--therefore who so well fitted as I to
appreciate at last the peace of having a foundation!
IX
_My Clothes_
In the dear, naughty memoirs of Madame de Brillaye, not inaptly named
by the author the “Journal of a Wicked Old Woman,” you remember that
scene in the pleasaunce at Château Vernot, where the turf was like
fairy velvet and the trees were tortured into all manner of shapes
unarboreal,--she liked to have her trees dressed, she said,--“There is
something indecent in great naked branches sprawling the good God knows
where.” The little old lady is sitting with her great, old-ivory cane
across her knees; she rolls it back and forth with her little old-ivory
hands, while she scolds Aimée--as always. Aimée has just come through
that brisk little encounter of hers with de Brontignac, and seems
to have allowed her raiment to look a little battle-worn. “Go dress
yourself, baby,” cries Madame Great-Aunt. “Will you let your very laces
whimper? Into your rose velvet brocade, and your chin will be jerked
up as if by a string. Gowns have healed more hearts than they’ve ever
broken: the second, men’s; the first, women’s. Now you think you have a
soul; when you are my age, you will know that women are not souls, but
dresses. I look back; my history is the history of my gowns; undressed,
I do not exist; my clothes are myself.” (A few lines above I used the
word “remember,” but merely for the sake of an effective start-off.
Madame and her memoirs do not exist outside of this paragraph. I am not
the first to perpetrate a spurious quotation; I am merely the first to
confess it. To proceed.) It is not the first time that the little old
de Brillaye has set me thinking. Is she true in this passage, or merely
epigrammatic? If my history is the history of my clothes, let me so
study it out, formulate, as it were, the meditations of the pupa upon
its successive integumenta. Yet the figure is infelicitous. In fact, the
chrysalis image is not over-pretty as regards this side of eternity:
pupa suggests the pulpy tenantry of the chestnut; this worminess may be
liturgical, but it is unpleasant, is opposed to that sociability with
one’s self which makes life entertaining; there is nothing chat-worthy
in a worm. Be it granted me to regard these accidental rags of lawn
or wool or silk I find adherent, these hardly less transitory hands
and feet, this hardly more durable incasing occipital, not as a worm
incarcerate, but with the detachment and uplift of the incipient
butterfly.
Why not _my_ philosophy of _my_ clothes,--the pronoun italicized,
meaning not Teufelsdröckh’s, but my own, both the clothes and the
philosophy? Let me here and now make some effort toward system and
definition, toward order out of chaos, in that long chapter in a woman’s
story, my lady’s wardrobe. How far have these successive wrappings
around and prankings out of diverse colors and tissues that are to my
fellow passengers labels of my lone pilgrim soul, stating of what age,
sex, nation, education, and caste I may be,--how far have these clothes
of mine served for triumph or undoing in my spiritual history, the
life-history of this “celestial amphibian,” myself?
The clothes of babyhood first. It is a strong-minded adult who does not
grow sentimental in regarding the garments of his infancy,--those caps
and bibs and socks reminding us of the wabbling heads, the aching gums,
the simian feet, of the days when we, for all our present arrogance of
maturity, were the sport of colic and nutritive experiment.
How explain the repugnance of the newly born to clothing, the birth-wail
that pleads for the sincerity of the nude, protests against the
cloakings of convention? Strange paradox that the first emotion of
the baby soul should be bitterness against all those contrivances of
decency, those hemstitched linens and embroidered flannels, through
which the mother heart eased its brooding love. The little pink,
squirming creature, fresh out of eternity, cannot be too quickly
incased in the wrappings of finite human care. That is why we are so
long in seeing ourselves as we really are; all the clothes and the
conventions were ready for us; before we had a glimpse at ourselves we
were popped into them; it is a merciful long while before we are old
enough to undress sufficiently to discover, away inside, the little shy
soul-thing, the naked ego, with its eerie eyes.
Thus it is that when I first find myself in those early, misty recesses
I see myself all dressed, dressed for company inspection; I am a little
girl wearing a crispness of brown curl and a crispness of white muslin;
I wear white stockings and Burt’s shoes.--I recognize, also, quite in
the same way, as enveloping facts, without which I may not present
myself unclothed to my fellows, that I have a peppery, passionate
temper, and an imagination,--that is what seeing people in void air and
talking to them is called. Thus clad and ticketed, I go pattering along
the pilgrimage.
How little clothes mattered then! All spun about with fairy films and
the witchery of talking trees and singing winds, I did not remember my
clothes. But at times clothes broke in abruptly on my unconsciousness. I
well remember a certain mitten. It was a brown mitten on my left hand.
My mother and I were walking down a flight of stone steps. I slipped;
my mother caught my hand, retained, not it, but the mitten, and I
bumped unimpeded to the bottom. My baby resentment against that mitten
endured long. It was a surprise, a disappointment, this treachery of
the accepted; so my clothes were not to be trusted; it was well to keep
half an eye on them. The mitten episode marks a step in my spiritual
adjustment; my clothes might at any moment go back on me. It is a lesson
I have not yet found it safe to unlearn.
In those days there was a pleasant interest attached to the Burt’s
shoes,--not when new and shiny, but later, when they had become well
worn. Some unexpected morning I would espy a peering bit of white
stocking looking out from the blackness of the leather toe. The hole
being not yet so large or so alarming as the cobbler’s charges, a piece
of black silk was adjusted over the stocking, the foot deftly slipped
into the shoe, a dash of blacking applied to the whole, and behold only
mother and I knew the difference.
Penury as such was not yet known to me. The consciousness of shabbiness
had not yet frayed the elbows of my soul. The device was merely
interesting, beguiling the tedium of the sanctuary, and affording
meditation on the ingenuity of mothers.
Here succeeded several years of tranquillity in my relations to my
garments, until, at the age of six, I found myself--infelix!--removed
to a town possessing a bleak climate and many woolen manufactories. It
was the custom of the house mothers to buy flannel by the piece direct
from the factory, red flannel, hot, thick, felled like a Laplander,
and the invention of Lucifer. Out of this flannel was cut a garment,
a continuous, all-embracing garment, of neuter gender, in which every
child in that town might have been observed flaming Mephistophelian-like
after the morning bath. A pattern was given to our mother.
The hair shirt--I laugh when I read! By definition the hair shirt must
have possessed geographical limits of attack, but my flannels left no
pore untickled, untortured; they heated the flesh until scarlet fever
paled into a mere pleasantry; and they soured the milk of amiability
within me forever. The rotation of the seasons reduced itself to terms
of red flannel. In the autumn, when the happy fowls and foliage alike
moulted, shed the superfluous, when bracing October set the body in
a glow, I alone of living things must be done up in flannel! And
more,--did you ever try to draw on your stocking smoothly over a red
flannel tumor at the ankle, and then attempt to button over the whole
the shoe that fitted snugly enough over nothing at all? Did you ever
tear off shoe and stocking, and, dancing red-legged and barefooted, cry
out in frenzy that you would eschew breakfast and school, aliment and
enlightenment, but never, never, never again would you wear footgear?
Thus autumn. And spring, that season of vernal bourgeoning, was the
time when I, too, like any other seedkin, slipped free of all stuffy
incasings, and could sprout and spring in air and sun, clad in blessed,
blessed muslin. I shall never forget the corroding bitterness induced
by flannels. At times they absolutely reduced me to fisticuffs with my
religion, so that filial piety, the ordaining of the seasons, and the
very catechism itself, hung in the balance of the conflict. I believe I
can hardly over-estimate the spiritual detriment done me by my flannels.
One incident of this, my first decade, I recall with mingled respect and
envy:--
“It is not now as it hath been of yore.”
“Choose,” commanded my mother, “will you have a new dress this winter or
‘St. Nicholas’ for next year?” I was stung at the implication that for
such as me there could have been a doubt of the choice. “St. Nicholas,”
of course! A magazine doth not wax old as doth a garment, and besides,
is not reading more than raiment? Alas for the high intellectuality of
eight years old! If the choice lay now between the dress and the book,
would I hug the volume and walk among my fellows gladly shabby? I would
not.
About at this same period we were visited by a family of strange
little girls. There were three of them; they stayed three days, they
changed their dresses three times a day, and they never wore the same
dress twice. We regarded them as we might have regarded the fauna of
Mars,--they were an utterly new thing. It was wonder at first, then
pity, then wonder again, for we found that they liked it! Being little
human animals even as we, they would rather be tricked out in fresh
frocks than play tag! What were we going to wear that evening, they
asked. Why, how in the world should we know? Something clean, of course.
Our visitor’s bits of frocks were embroidered, beribboned, bevelveted
in a manner simply incomprehensible. What in the world happened when
they got dirty? That visit filled me with prophetic misgivings; some
day I should have to wear stuff goods. In a vision I saw the great gulf
that separates the grown-up who cannot be put through the wash-tub
from the child who can. Horror of the unwashable! “Shades of the
prison-house,”--Oh, no!
Just here the retrospect reaches the place where the road turned; I do
not say, forked, for it was not a question of alternatives; I was a
woman-child, and I had to keep on in the only way. Hitherto my clothes
had been as much or as little myself as the down of the chick, or the
fur of the rabbit. Providence and my parents had provided my apparel
without the faintest solicitude on my part, leaving me free to attend to
my body and soul. This could not long endure. It is the era of Mother
Hubbards that bridges together the old time and the new. The Mother
Hubbard was so noteworthy, so startling, in fact, after the trimness to
which we were accustomed, this
“Robe ungirt from clasp to hem.”
It swayed with a truly Hellenic undulation like the pictures in the
mythology. I first admired, then coveted, then teased my mother into
making me one. It was finished just after dinner, and though it was
yet early for dressing, I put it on, and turned out upon the street,
which, to my disappointment, was empty of children. There I strutted,
and swelled, and waited for the others to come and see, and was exalted,
not recognizing the first shackles of my slavery. Now, first, I become
acquainted with Fashion; now, first, I regard other people’s clothes
as the most important factor in the production of my own. Too truly it
is the close of the first chapter, the end of innocence, the end of
joy, the end of sexlessness. I am irrevocably a woman: imitation and
emulation are henceforth the distinguishing motives of my costume. Now,
first, I look in the glass to see my frock, and then I look a little
higher to see that face and that mop of curls I wear, and I wonder what
colors best suit them. I look at the eyes, too, and at the secrets
they tell me, and I wonder what external clothes and conduct are most
becoming to those eyes and to that inner meshed personality they reveal.
What is becoming! The word is epitome of all that the grown-up is and
the child is not.
The period of my teens was the period when my wardrobe was continually
in abeyance upon the higher claims of my education. It was not possible
simultaneously to beautify my brain and my body. I acquiesced in the
circumstance, for the most part, with occasional fits of passionate
revolt, and more or less constant misanthropy. I blush to recall that
at one time the light which was in me turned to darkness for a year or
more, and all on account of my clothes. I found myself at a great city
school, I a shy little country waif, most curiously clad. I looked at
the clothes of my compeers, and I locked my lips and my heart against
all converse with my fellows, and I walked to the top of my classes in a
desolation of spirit that was tragic. I would have exchanged my monthly
reports with those of my most addle-pated classmate if I could have had
her clothes. Never since have I approached the intellectual achievement
of fourteen; but the shabbiness of my motives was greater than that of
my costume. The effect was not wholly evil, but I here confess that I
never should have learned Latin rules if I had been prettily dressed.
I wanted to show those stylish misses that there was no backwoods
brain under my backwoods hat--that was all! I attributed to others a
snobbishness wholly my own, and for that once clothes came perilously
near costing me all human joy in human friendship. If my wardrobe had
never bettered, I might now be a female Diogenes,--and incidentally
have furnished meteoric display for a dozen universities. My clothes
improved; I am not friendless, but dull and illiterate, and all through
the shaping destiny of dress.