Who can tellWhy to smellThe violet recalls the dewy primeOf youth and buried time?The cause is nowhere found in rhyme.
Who can tellWhy to smellThe violet recalls the dewy primeOf youth and buried time?The cause is nowhere found in rhyme.
Who can tellWhy to smellThe violet recalls the dewy primeOf youth and buried time?The cause is nowhere found in rhyme.
Who can tell
Why to smell
The violet recalls the dewy prime
Of youth and buried time?
The cause is nowhere found in rhyme.
I never go past the little town nowadays without looking longingly at that farm from the car-window and wondering if the spring and the spearmint are still there. At times I have almost decided to get off the train and seek it, but have never dared—it would be a needless pain to find my one little spring gone dry.
The name of my mother’s rejected suitor was Fairchild. If she could have overcome a certain inexplicablerepugnance and married him, “then I might have been a fair child,” I used to think, with a mental play upon the name; for I knew myself to be a very plain little girl. I suffered over this fact; could see myself objectively—greenish-gray eyes, a long nose, a prominent forehead—I hated the sight of my face in the glass, yet would torture myself with scrutinizing it, searching for some redeeming thing, but ending with, “No, there’s nothing,nothingnice about it.” My facial angle I used to study with a hand-glass, mentally cutting about half an inch from my nose, pinning back my ears, and thinking how nice it would be if the straight uncompromising hair would grow low in ripples on that ugly forehead. But, opposed to anything artificial, I would, not bang and curl my hair as the others girls did. Looking at certain girls that I now know were plainer than I, I wondered pitifully if I looked as well as they, afraid of deceiving myself with such cold comfort.
All of which shows how self-engrossed and morbid I was; what capacity for self-torture I developed early. I was constantly reading of beautiful persons. I lamented secretly because my mother was not beautiful. I loved her none the less, but had such a craving for the beautiful, which Fate had cruelly withheld from me and my mother. I have often been ashamed of this feeling; it seems as though a child should so love its mother (and such a mother!) that her face would have to be beautiful to it; but it was not so with me. And it was one of my bitter childish and girlish griefs that Mother would not take more pains always to appear at her best. It seems pathetic, how pleased I used to feel when she would wear particularly becoming gowns, or take special pains with dressing her hair. Unable to overcome this feeling, I have always envied one with a beautiful mother. My mother’s heart and soul arebeautiful, but there was always this yearning for beauty of face as well as of character.
Once, as a child, when impersonating Summer at a school exhibition, crowned with roses and bedecked with garlands of flowers, elated by it all, I sang so much better at the concert than I had at rehearsals as to surprise every one, myself included. Best of all I overheard someone say that I “really looked pretty”; that she never knew beforethat my eyes were black! How I treasured that statement, though knowing it was only a temporary condition!
I have no doubt I exaggerated my ugliness somewhat for, in addition to youth and health, I had a clear dark skin, good teeth, unusually fine and abundant hair, and a well-formed body. The one thing I took pride in was my hair. It was a pardonable pleasure that I felt in contrasting my long heavy brown braids with the wisps of hair many of the girls had. But when I was perhaps sixteen, working too hard in school and with my music, my hair came out so rapidly that one day a girl sitting behind me leaned over and whispered, “Why, what has become of your hair?” Bitter were the tears I shed that night! “Thatis going, too!” I cried in my wretchedness. But it did not all go; I still had more than the average girl. Even to-day I sometimes get a sudden sense of that schoolgirl’s pang at the threatened loss of her one beauty.
In babyhood I received a burn the shock of which nearly cut short my life: Tied in a high chair and placed before a stove, I was pushed over by some frozen clothes which a “green” Irish girl had brought in from the yard. The under part of my chin rested upon the stove, leaving its imprint, when I was snatched from it.
As I grew up I grieved over the scar thus sustained. Ibecame morbidly sensitive over it, though consoling myself somewhat that it was not in a more conspicuous place. I envied children and girls their smooth soft chins. It seemed to me the sweetest part of a girl’s features—that white, smooth place under the chin. When a child I would never play “Do you love butter?” although I liked to see the buttercup’s yellow shadow on the chins of the other girls. When my turn came I always drew away, painfully embarrassed.
As a young girl I used to think it would be lovely to faint away. When we “made believe,” I usually chose to be French, to have black eyes and red cheeks, and to faint away on critical occasions. But after studying physiology and hygiene, and acquiring more sensible views, I scorned these earlier ambitions, and ridiculed the silly girls who pretended to swoon when vaccinated; and who turned pale and asked to leave the room when the skeleton was brought in to the physiology recitations.
There were only eighteen months between my sister’s age and mine, and, although I was the elder, she dominated me. There was almost no difference in our heights, and not much in our figures. She had a pretty face with fairer skin and sunnier hair. Unobserving persons thought we looked alike. Dressing alike until we were sixteen, we were often asked by strangers if we were twins. Those who mistook one for the other could not have been very discriminating, for with the marked difference in our natures, there must have been, even in childhood, a corresponding difference in our looks. I was quiet, shy, and dreamy; Kate lively, active, outspoken. She had to take the lead because I would hang back. In church, when we were little things, she would fix a place for my head on her lap, then pull medown and pet me, whispering to me to keep still and go to sleep; and, although I knew I should have been the one to play that rôle, I would submit, while she carried out to the finish her assumed dignity.
How quick-witted she was! One summer Father had a certain pear tree that yielded only a few choice pears which he was jealously watching. We children had been admonished not to touch them. One day as Father walked around the yard, he hesitated before the ripening pears, then passed on. We thought him waiting unnecessarily long: one was surely dead ripe. That afternoon, while he was taking his Sunday nap, Kate picked that pear. She had just bitten into it as Father appeared. Putting both hands behind her, she edged backward in the yard till she stood under the astrachan tree, frightened, but “gamey.”
“Katherine, come here,” Father called sternly.
She came slowly, hands behind her and mouth full of the big bite she was vainly trying to swallow.
“What have you in your mouth?”
A gulp, and she said, “Nothing,” opening wide her little mouth.
“Let me see your hand.”
Out from behind her came the right hand.
“Let me see your other hand.”
Back went her right hand, out came her left, the pear still invisible.
“Let me see both hands,” said Father relentlessly.
Quick as thought the little minx lifted her leg and, hands still behind her, thrust the pear between her thighs, and calmly held out both hands. Father’s anger vanished.
Kate never resorted to deceit, and almost never to untruths, unless hard pressed. While my own hypocrisies were subtle, hers were palpable. But I long cherishedresentment for one offense—an unusual one with her: Mother had a bed of choice tulips—her special pride, our special temptation. Kate succumbed one day, picking nearly all of them, and with such short stems they were useless. Mother’s anger really frightened Kate, who declared, “Genie did it.” Though denying it, I probably acted guilty, for Mother believed her. (I always blushed and looked the culprit in school if a general accusation was made; and if any one rapped on the door and asked if a certain article had been found, I used to feel so uncomfortable it is a wonder I was not accused of having stolen it—self-conscious little snip that I was!) To punish me for my supposed falsehood Mother put red pepper on my tongue—a practice which a cousin had told her that she followed with her children. It was terrible, and was all the worse because I was innocent; though I’ve no doubt it was good for me, for I was more given to prevarication than was Sister.
My tendency to exaggerate was the cause of my fibs; they were usually harmless ones; facts never seemed startling enough; I liked to embellish them. Then, too, I was always making mistakes about quantities or anything with figures or distances, and some of my misstatements should be set down to this weakness rather than to deliberate deception. In this very matter, years after, when speaking of this red-pepper punishment, I used to say that my mother put a teaspoonful of red pepper on my tongue. I can’t remember that any one ever questioned or corrected the statement. I probably told it mostly to children. It is only within a few years that, telling the story again, my own common sense, so late to develop, showed me that that must have been a gross exaggeration—a teaspoonful of cayenne pepper on a child’s tongue!—the red pepper hadpunished one lie that had never been told, but had given rise to one that I had gone on repeating until at last I had sense enough to see that it was too preposterous to be believed!
Similarly in the matter of my weight: I had heard it mentioned—it was probably fifty pounds—but with my usual inaccuracy for figures I solemnly protested that I weighed five pounds, standing my ground even when corrected, till the absurdity of it was shown me.
I remember, too, hearing Mother talking with some women about how young a certain neighbour was when her daughter was born. In telling the school girls about it later, I announced that Mrs. H—— was only five years older than her daughter Ida. Shouts of derision greeted my statement, but I was firm. One big girl called me “little fool,” and I suffered I know not what ridicule. It was partly an exaggeration, partly ignorance. Grasping the main fact, that the mother was very young when her child was born, and having forgotten how young, but wanting to make my story worth while, I had resorted to a positive statement which I stoutly maintained. I could not see why those girls should doubt my word, even if the statement was startling.Of courseit was unusual—that was why I had cited it. I have a fellow feeling for the Vassar student who, when asked by the resident woman physician what her paternal grandfather died of, and not knowing, but wishing not to seem ignorant, said, “I—I think he died in infancy.”
For years I was not a little given to reporting bright things people might have said, as though they had said them. It was such fun to embellish commonplace events and comments with additions of my own. Whenever I would tell these untruths I always had a queer feeling (almost of disappointment) to find that nothing happenedto me; that no one questioned them; and that everything went on just as before the lie had slipped off my tongue. I don’t know whether I expected Ananias’s and Sapphira’s fate, or what, but I expected something, and nothing happened!
This tendency to exaggeration and misstatement, and, on occasion, to deliberate falsehood, I have tried conscientiously to overcome. In fact, for years I swung far to the other side. Now, in matters of fact, I think I am more often scrupulously accurate than not. If I cannot be accurate, I refrain from giving a definite statement. My special training in later years of course helped in this respect. But it was earlier, when I became a “Christian,” that this tendency appeared to me in all its heinousness, and in striving to overcome it I became, for a time, almost morbidly conscientious.
One day in school the word “conscientious” came up for discussion. I was not present, but learned from one of the girls that “Prof” had spoken out in school freely, using my name as an example of what conscientiousness meant. But my wise little sister (and how I loved her for it!), though pleased at the reference to me, went to all the girls she thought likely to mention it to me, and cautioned them not to. When I learned of it, from one who never could keep a secret, I asked why Sister didn’t want her to tell me. “Oh, she said it would make you proud, or something like that.” And she was right. I was too self-conscious as it was, and vain, in a demure kind of way. Kate knew my weaknesses.
Sister’s deceits, as I have said, were such funny ones; they never deceived any one—were never really intended to; they were only desperate measures resorted to when in a tight place, their drollery usually serving to protect her from punishment. As a rule she and Brother managed toquarrel when left to their own devices. I played the peace-maker between them, and have done it ever since. One Sunday, when we stayed home from church, they got into a wrangle. Spiteful words led to threats, and Kate was soon chasing Arthur round the room in childish rage, I trying to intervene. In the squabble my belt fell off—a black shiny belt with a metal buckle. As Kate could not reach Arthur, she grabbed up my belt and, brandishing it in the air, chased him, trying to hit him.
Crash! went the buckle against the rosewood mirror. When Father and Mother came home and saw that crack in the mirror, they saw also three guilty apprehensive children. Brother and Sister pitched in, telling about the quarrel, who did this, and who did that. “I don’t care about who started it, or who kept it up,” said Father, “I want to know who broke that looking-glass—the one to blame for that will be punished.”
“Genie is to blame for it,” Kate promptly rejoined.
Father looked at me in surprise, Arthur opened his mouth in wonderment, while I stood dumb and guilty-looking beyond question. Then Kate added:
“Arthur hit me, and I chased him with the belt, and the buckle broke the glass,and it was Genie’s belt-buckle!”
She escaped punishment.
We had fewer playthings than children have nowadays, but for that very reason they meant more to us. I had but two dolls in my childhood and one is still—living, I was about to say. One was a leather-head doll, with painted cheeks, black hair, and blue, blue eyes. But in the beginning of her career she met a strange fate—a boy much bigger than I snatched her from me and bit off her nose before my very eyes! This was one of my earliest griefs.I hated that boy but cherished the noseless doll for many years.
Later Kate and I had big wax dolls whose eyes would open and shut and who would cry when we pressed a little place in the pit of the stomach.
We played with them only on state occasions. They were kept up in the “front bedroom” in a bureau drawer. I saw them a year ago. They had on the same scarlet wool dresses trimmed with narrow black velvet ribbon, but the dresses were moth-eaten and the dolls showed the ravages of time.
Occasionally, other relatives joining us, we had a family Christmas tree—perhaps only four or five in our childhood. But there was always the hope of one, and when there was one, the joy recompensed for the lean years. One Christmas tree at Aunt Lucinda’s at which some Western relatives were present, stands out vividly—the big house overflowing with people, the smell of the dinner preparing, the air of mystery of the elders as they went to and fro to the parlour with various parcels; and then, at last, when the doors swung open and we got that first glimpse of the blessed tree! But how was my joy modified! Making our way, pell-mell, grown-ups and children, in the eagerness to push through, someone bumped against me, driving my nose against the door-jamb. I can feel the pain yet, and the blinding tears. Not all the splendour of that tree could drive that pain away. After that, in a way I had of accounting for things, I attributed a slight deflection of my nose to that bump. I recall black walnut work-boxes for Sister and me and a writing-desk for Brother as the most elaborate and expensive gifts which as children we ever received. Some years there were no gifts, except new clothing, which never satisfied the craving—except once—our white “moss velvet hats”—these made our hearts light as well as our heads. When there were no presents—can one ever forget the bitter disappointment? A trivial gift means so much to an expectant child! All in vain were we told (as we sometimes were in advance) that no gifts could be afforded that year. We never quite gave up hope. But, cruel as was the disappointment, perhaps the discipline was wholesome. One year there were crosses covered with crinkly paper bedecked with wreaths of worsted flowers, and framed in deep rustic frames. What works of art! Almost equal to the hanging basket made of allspice that adorned a cousin’s parlour, and to the framed pyramid of hair-flowers that hung in our own!
I still treasure a paper-covered Red Riding Hood, cut in the form of the little lass, with the wolf crouching at her feet, the text a metrical version, charmingly illustrated. I must have had it since I was seven or eight years old. I knew the verses “by heart,” and have heard Mother tell that I used to recite them and other long pieces in my sleep. A bottle of oil once made a spot on the book and the paper is yellow with age, but I still cherish it and would part with many a choicer possession sooner than with this childhood treasure.
In this connection I recall that when I was perhaps in my early ’teens, the instinct of acquisition developing, I went about the house placing my name upon all my belongings—every book and picture, even on the bottoms of little toy vases, a porcelain lamb, and so on. As to Red Riding Hood, I seemed to think it fitting to write my name in a big sprawling child’s hand, every letter a capital, with the notion, I suppose, that it would be thought that I had written it there when a child. I even selected a date, reckoning back as well as I could, and putting it upon one of my earlybirthdays. In the same way I mutilated a quaint book that had belonged to Grandpa, by writing his name on the fly leaf, and the legend, “His Book,” in what I considered an old-fashioned hand-writing. Some years later, coming upon these evidences of my silly deception, my cheeks burned with shame, and I erased the false records.
Fondness for my own belongings did not prevent me from a cruel piece of vandalism in regard to a cherished possession of my sister’s: She had made a clove-apple by sticking a greening full of cloves, and hiding it in a cuff-box in the upstairs closet, had declared she was going to keep it till she grew up. Laughing at her, I said it would decay, but she maintained that it would not. On rare occasions, as if it were a religious rite, she would peep into the box and sniff at the apple, vouchsafe us a sniff also, and put it carefully away. As it dwindled and dwindled, her attachment strengthened and strengthened. I believe she kept it six years. Although I had often threatened to throw it away, she never believed I would. But one day, whether out of spite, or because of my strenuous housekeeping, I did it, probably silencing my compunctions by thinking she was too old longer to indulge in such nonsense. But her grief and anger on learning of the loss were so moving that I was conscience-stricken, and would then have given anything to have restored the treasure. She scorned all attempts at extenuation. It is with real shame that I confess this misdeed—more, perhaps, than I feel for later, graver ones. I know now that as one of her treasures it should have been respected. Anything that another really loves—a toy, a bauble, an idol, a comforting superstition—why not let him keep it as long as he can?
We were a happy and harmonious family as such things go. I do not mean that we never said a cross word to oneanother; such families, I fancy, exist only in Sunday-school books. There was not always unity; our parents sometimes differed; Father was critical and methodical; Mother forgetful and wanting in system. She was tried by Father’s smoking and inordinate croquet-playing, and he was tried by her procrastination; at such times fault-finding was forthcoming. Sister and Brother had early and late unpleasantnesses; and, in our ’teens, Sister and I became less harmonious than formerly, about the time, I suppose, when we were each becoming more individual; at least, when, ceasing to be docile, I became more assertive. But there was always the good-night kiss all around, and Kate and I went to sleep with our arms around each other as long as we were girls at home. I do not think we could have slept had we let the sun go down upon our wrath.
I remember the first time I omitted our custom of kissing all round at night—the family and any guest staying with us. Some strange man was there; when I had kissed Father and Mother I hesitated before the man—I was getting to be a big girl—then, putting out my hand, said a bashful good night and went upstairs with burning cheeks, wondering if it had seemed rude not to kiss him.
We were not a demonstrative family—the good-night kiss was the chief expression of affection. I remember no fondling, no caresses after early childhood, except the habitual ones—no spontaneous overflow of affection at irregular intervals, such as I was inclined to, had the others been so minded. Once in a great while Father would call us the sweetest pet name in the world—“darling.” On these rare occasions I was secretly overjoyed. Had he known the delight it gave me, I’m sure he would have said it oftener. Mother sometimes jocosely called me“Keturah,” and when, in one of her rare playful moods, she dubbed me “Keturah Ketunk,” I liked it exceedingly.
I remember once—I was probably thirteen or fourteen—going into the bedroom to bid my parents good night, when, having kissed them, as I started to leave the bed, Father threw out his arm; and, seeing it in the half light, and thinking he did it to motion me back, I bent down and swiftly kissed him again—an unusual thing for either him or me. No sooner had I done it than my cheeks got hot as fire: perhaps I had misunderstood his gesture; he may have just happened to stretch out his arm, and was not beckoning me at all. Upstairs I went, torturing myself with the query which I never solved. Whether or not he had called me back, I now know he was not sorry to get the extra kiss. Why couldn’t I have thus comforted myself then? I suppose I was hungry for more demonstration of affection than I got, yet ashamed to show it. Sister, not at all demonstrative, provoked demonstration in me; the curve of her cheek, and her long eyelashes resting upon it, appealed to me as a child’s beauty appeals; I longed to kiss her at inopportune times, and sometimes did not resist. Half annoyed at me, she thought it nonsense, I suppose. As we grew up, when she would be fitting a dress for me, I would try to snatch kisses, sometimes calling forth her impatience, at others her laughing dexterity as she eluded me. I admired her prettiness, but was never jealous of her, though she could dance and skate, and do all such things, with an ease and grace I could never acquire. Making friends more readily than I, being sociable, lively, and even-tempered, she had plenty of beaux while I had none. But I had friends among the beaux of the other girls. Although I did not want them for beaux, I should have been unhappy had I not had them for friends—I understood myself wellenough to know that much then, though the general impression among my schoolmates was that I cared nothing for the boys.
My hypersensitiveness about the life of the affections was apparent in the way I felt when Father would bid us all good-bye: When he kissed Mother I would always turn away. It never seemed right to look on; perhaps, partly, because it made me want to cry; but also because it seemed as thoughI had no right. Even to-day, if I see lovers on the stage whose acting is good enough to give the sense of reality, I find myself turning away—it seems too intimate for me to witness.
A favourite custom in our family was an annual Sunday drive in apple-blossom time. Father would hire a team and a sort of landau which, on a pinch, would hold ten persons—an aunt’s family and ours—big baskets would be stowed under the seats, and off we would go through the country on an all-day’s drive, stopping to picnic in some grove, or by a stream. Then on again under the blue skies, the air sweet with blossoming trees; and the tender spring green giving that hazy, twiggy look of early May. (That line of Whitman’s—“Rich apple-blossomed earth”—always brings back those far-off May-times with those perfect childish joys.) Then we would drive home in the twilight, singing as we went, old and young joining in the songs. Happy children, happy parents! I’m sure the apple blossom is an escape from the Beautiful Garden. I never breathe its fragrance without recalling those cherished drives in the Mays that are no more.
Our parents were wisely indulgent, giving us treats and privileges as they could afford them. We were brought up to go without a thing till it could be paid for; consequently, all of us have a horror of being in debt. Fatherspent a good deal (considering our circumstances) on our music, first and last, and he and Mother were ever looking forward to our advancement. But there was always a struggle over money matters. We had to economize and count the cost of any indulgence; but when it was decided that we could afford a given thing, how happy, almost jubilant, Father was over the expenditure!
One of the happiest hours in childhood (I was perhaps ten years old) was when, after spending the day from home, we returned at dusk and were met at the door by Father and Mother looking so excited and happy we knew something was on the carpet. And there was! In the sitting-room our eyes encountered a change—the furniture was rearranged, and there standing against the wall (were we awake or dreaming?) was a brand new organ!
Our joy was unbounded, our parents’ delight no less. How we smoothed the polished walnut case; gingerly touched the black and the white keys; fingered the stops; tried the pedals; moved the swell; and asked to have the top lifted so we could look inside! And then Father sat down and struck a few rich chords—those chords with their variations that seemed peculiarly his own! Soon the music teacher came in, and some neighbours, and the new organ sounded throughout our home, and doubtless in our dreams that night; and the next morningit was still there!
Then began the lessons. Gradually the novelty wore away, lessons grew harder and harder. Kate and Arthur, restless beings that they were, made only fair progress; they disliked the practice. But, taking to it eagerly from the start, I made rather more than ordinary progress. It was as hard to get me away from the organ as it was to get Kate and Arthur to it. I was still very young when, one day, putting aside my exercise book, I opened theMethodist Hymnal and “picked out” one of the hymns—Boylston. I was scared, it sounded so natural—and I had done it alone! Mother came running in to see if it was really I who was playing.
Shortly after that, in Sunday School, the organist leaving before the close, the superintendent came to me, saying, “We want you to play the last piece.” I tried to beg off, but no, he knew I could do it; so, in fear and trembling, I got up and played. The treadles worked hard, and the stool was too high, so the superintendent pedalled for me, while the school rose and sang. It didn’t take us children long to get home that Sunday. “Genie played the organ! Genie played the organ!” shouted Kate and Arthur as we rushed into the house. After that this occurred so often that my timidity before the Sunday School wore away. This was the forerunner of a greater event: I had never touched the big organ, but as Father was chorister, we children often sat “in the choir” pretending to help sing. One day toward the close of the service the bass singer, leaning over, whispered, “Miss R—— has gone home, you will have to play for us, Genie.” Protesting, I looked imploringly at Father, but he only nodded and smiled encouragingly. My heart nearly thumped itself to pieces, but the wily Basso whispered, “We’ll sing so loud, if you make a mistake they’ll never know it, and we’ll pick out one with an easy bass.” So I undertook it. In time, as Miss R—— dropped out more and more, I became the regular organist. Later came piano lessons, and later still I had a teacher from a neighbouring city.
When I was developing rapidly, undergoing the physiological and emotional changes of pubescence, they unwisely put me to studying “Thorough Bass.” A paternal aunt had been an accomplished musician, and my parents hopedI would show a like talent. How my head used to ache over that study! As the lessons became more complicated, I grew stupid; my health failed perceptibly and our family physician was called. He talked with me a long time, then I was sent out of the room while he and Mother talked; then called in again, and the little black medicine-case was opened, while the Doctor folded the tiny powders that, he said, as he patted my head and called me “lassie,” were to make me strong again.
The upshot of it all was I had to drop my music, not only then, he advised, but for all time. I had too emotional a temperament, he said, to stand the strain. (What kind of a musician would a non-emotional person be!) But he was wise in prohibiting it then. I used to dignify the severe headaches which I had at that time by saying I had “brain fever.” (Girls in the books I read had “brain fever.”) But there was no real illness, no staying out of school, though for a time my hours were lessened.
Dropping music was a real cross to me. Probably, had I been allowed to resume it, I should have followed that as a vocation and not cast about for another field of work. Although discontinuing the study of music, I did not drop its practice. Music was an important part of our home life.
I remember how cruel I once thought my parents because they would not let me go to a distant county to pick hops. One of the schoolgirls had gone with her mother the year before, had earned a lot, and had had a “splendid time.” As the season came round again, I “teased” to go with this girl and her mother. I was hearing a good deal at home about economy, economy, and Nora’s account of the money she had made had fired me with the prospect ofearning great sums to relieve our growing needs. Confident, I announced my plan. Was ever a girl so repulsed, so silenced? They wouldn’t even hear me out. I tried to say what Nora said, and what her mother said, but they were obdurate. A martyr in my own eyes for a time, it was probably years before I realized what I had asked to do. When I learned what class of young people usually engaged in such work, I understood how “out of the question” (a finality of Father’s) it had been for my parents even to discuss the project. I remembered, too, how the same bright-eyed Nora had soon left school; how she changed in manner; became coarsened; drifted out of our lives. Strange how, years after, children become aware of the safeguards thrown around them in youth! With this awareness, what a feeling of gratitude wells up within one toward the parents who have surrounded them with such wise and loving care! How one longs to fly home and tell them of it; yet how reticent are we, how chary of expressing this gratitude!
One of the deepest of my early griefs was when we first learned what it was as a family to be separated; when Brother, who was a printer, went to Colorado to work. We had been so closely bound together. I realized the anxiety of our parents, divined the loneliness Arthur would feel, and what it would mean to lose him from the home. What interesting and humorous letters he wrote us, with the homesickness sometimes peeping through! How we read and re-read them!
He stayed away less than a year. Shall I ever forget the day he came back? His clothes had become shabby; he was stained with travel, but I almost devoured him with my eyes. How good his voice sounded—every well-known tone; every gesture; and his laugh—my heart was like to burst. And, oh, the joy, the security, the blessed feeling that night, to know we were all together again under the home roof!
I used to resort to various devices to keep Arthur at home in the evening, which sometimes worked, sometimes not. The most effectual was to slip away from the supper table while the rest were still seated, under the pretext of wishing to try a new piece, thus getting him under the spell of the music while he was filling the stoves and bringing in water, so he would be drawn in spite of himself into the sitting-room. Once there, he would hang around and read, often appearing indifferent when I knew he was not. When he would get up to go, after I had held him as long as I could, how my heart would sink as the door closed and his steps sounded fainter and fainter on “stoop” and sidewalk! But I would keep on playing long enough so as not to make it too apparent to the others what I had been up to, though they were doubtless as well aware of my motive as I. Sometimes he would say, on going out, “Well, I’ve got to go now”—his way of thanking me for playing.
Even when he was doing his best, there was always more or less anxiety until Brother would come home at night. No matter what I was reading, when ten o’clock came, unless he had come, I felt an anxious pang. All of us felt it, though it was seldom mentioned. Mother sometimes spoke of it, or her sighs betrayed it, but as a rule we hid our anxiety under an assumed cheerfulness. I would listen when the steps came on the veranda to see if there were two walking, or only Father. Then if Father came alone, he would ask with apparent lightness, “Is Arthur home yet?” and I would hasten to answer, “No, not yet,” just to forestall Mother’s sadder negative withits accompanying sigh. Then we would all fall to talking to cover our fears. But when he did come, how we strove to conceal the delight that our fears had been unfounded! Putting up my books, but not too quickly, lest he be aware that I was trying to reward him for coming home early, I would go to the organ, and after making a pretense by first playing some indifferent thing, would play and sing the songs he liked best.
Oh, the safe housed feeling, when we could say good night to one another, and not have to lie awake listening for Brother’s footsteps that came so late sometimes, and sometimes not at all! After such nights of watching, Sister and I would peep into his room in the morning, to see if perchance he had come after we had fallen asleep. And when his bed was untouched—the dread and fear of what may have befallen him!
Brother was always good company. He is witty, and easily moved by humour or pathos. Once stir his worthy emotions and his better nature comes to the surface, though he resists being stirred as long as he can. A fond father, he is, on the whole, a wise one, except when his temper, or his infirmity, gets the better of him. Like our dear, testy grandfather in disposition, he reacts in much the same way, yet, with all his impatience, shows surprising tolerance with certain vagaries and eccentricities in others who, being the victims of hereditary and constitutional handicaps, are “gey ill to live with.” Love for his children is one of his strongest traits.
A few months ago, when a maternal uncle, an alcoholic, died, Brother took his own little son to the uncle’s coffin and there, telling the child what a promising youth the uncle had been, explained to him that drink had been his ruination. He wrote me that he had made the child (onlythree years old) understand it all; and then had made him promise that he would never touch alcohol in any form.
Poor, tempted, struggling soul! Whitman has expressed tenderly and understandingly the feelings that always well up in me at the thought of my brother’s struggles and defeats—“Vivas for those who have failed!” Such need pity, help, and credit far more than we are wont to give. Bobbie Burns knew whereof he spoke when he reminded us:
What’s done we partly may compute,But know not what’s resisted.
What’s done we partly may compute,But know not what’s resisted.
What’s done we partly may compute,But know not what’s resisted.
What’s done we partly may compute,
But know not what’s resisted.
Father and Mother still have hope in Brother’s ultimate victory[2]—such faith, and such optimism, combined with such tenderness and forgiveness! I know of nothing more God-like than these attributes as I have seen them exemplified in the daily lives of my parents. “Like as a father pitieth his children”—what a perfect example I have known of this infinite, compassionate love!
[2]The victory came some years after this was written. My brother now knows the triumph of him “who ruleth his spirit.”
Environment—what part does it play? Its stamp is upon us, but other forces and influences also determine our reactions and mould our characters. Is the objective environment alone the sea in which we swim? More significant still are the emotions which a given environment induces in each individual. To determine these it is needful to resort to our earliest memories. What were the things that so impressed us that we carry them on down through the years, an inseparable part of our inmost selves? What part have they played in shaping our characters?
I have said that it was a commonplace little village where I was born, and to another it may seem a commonplace outward life that I have to record. But who among us will own to a commonplace inner, subjective life?
Our village, named after him who sang of the “deep and dark blue ocean,” is a prosaic port on the Erie Canal along whose banks mules slowly draw the heavy-laden boats. The canal divides the village into north and south, as Owasco creek divides it into east and west. Rising from the level landscape here and there, the long, low lenticular drumlins form a conspicuous feature through that section of the state. Commonplace, did I say? But less than three miles away are the marshes of the Montezumas. Whatstrange wild feelings the lighted skies at night evoked! “The marshes are burning!” was such an inadequate explanation of that lurid western sky. A few miles to the south is Goldsmith’s “loveliest village of the plain”; about the same distance west, one reaches Tyre; as far again, and Palmyra is found; while a little to the east sits Syracuse in all her glory—surely an illustrious environment, this Drumlin Land, if names could make it so.
In the upper and hilly part of the town, called “Nauvoo,” the house still stands where Brigham Young lived before he became famous—or, shall we say, infamous? He was a carpenter and painter, and several buildings are there pointed out as houses that “Brigham” built. They tell that the Mormon went to Utah owing a certain couple in our village for his board, and that years after, on learning that they were to celebrate their golden wedding, he sent them the amount he owed, with interest for all the years.
In the decrepit old hotel on the village green Isaac Singer once lived and dreamed of the sewing-machine which later made his name a household word. There, too, in our little hamlet faithful Henry Wells, sometimes a-foot, sometimes on horseback, went hither and yon amid the drumlins carrying in his shabby carpet-bags messages and parcels to the scattered homes. Trusty and dependable, there in our little village he laid the humble foundations of the Wells-Fargo Express of to-day.
Six churches, two hotels, several dry goods and grocery stores, a drug store, a meat market, the Post Office, sometimes a bank, a boot-and-shoe store, cigar shops and saloons, a pie factory, a shirt factory, the Masonic Hall—these, most of which were grouped around the Village fountain, constituted the town life I knew.
It was amid these scenes that I as a child went forth; theobjects I looked upon became a part of me, interwoven with my very being: the familiar drumlins on the horizon, flowers and the wayside weeds, the pets I cherished, the family life, our neighbours, my teachers and playmates, the games we played, the songs we sang, the books I read, the sunset clouds, the friendly trees, and the winding creek; and mingled with these commonplace scenes, the sorrows, joys, affections, hopes, and fears—all these became a part of that child that went forth.
In thinking of my earliest memories, why does my mind revert to that little old tannery down by the dam which we passed on our way to Grandma’s? It was painted red. There was a multitude of little square, mahogany-brown pieces of wood that covered the yard like a carpet. There was a buzz of machinery which always frightened me (and machinery frightens me still), and a peculiar smell always emanated from the place. And though later a grist mill, still later a paper mill, and then a planing mill stood there, and now for many years dwelling houses have occupied the spot, yet as I think back to my childhood I recall most vividly the earliest scene, and the peculiar elastic feel of those pieces of tan-bark under my feet.
Quiet and shy, I was, as I have said, dominated by my sister till perhaps a year or two before I went away from home. More of a leader, more practical, in those days more executive, my sister had withal more common sense and far more initiative than I. She mothered me as a child, and “bossed” me as a little girl, and for a long time I was content to have it so. In truth, so established was that order of things that she has never, I think, quite accepted my emancipation.
I was more shy in Father’s presence than elsewhere, even in my late ’teens. I don’t know why, but involuntarilyI became more reserved. I myself could see a difference in voice and manner. I was not afraid of him (though that was the way Sister put it), for I had no reason to be, he was kindness itself, and more gentle with me than with Kate, she being so full of pranks he often had to rebuke her. I don’t know just what the shyness was, but I was two different beings when with and away from my father. As nearly as I can explain it now, it was my exaggerated love of approbation making me so anxious for his approval that I over-exerted myself when near him, the result being a shy awkwardness. Yet he always seemed to understand me, and to make it easy for me. I never would ask him for favours; Kate always had to do such things for both herself and me. “You do it,” I would plead, and she would “sputter” and say I ought to do it for myself, but would give in. Sometimes she made me go with her, occasionally taking revenge by saying, “Genie wants to ask you for a penny.” Then I felt like running away. He seldom refused us; I don’t see why I was so bashful with him. It irritated Sister. Straightforward herself, she thought me two-sided. I don’t know when this shyness came, or when it wore away, but before it developed I have one memory that is significant—one of my earliest recollections. Years later I marvelled that I ever dared do it: I remember sitting on Father’s lap (he in a little black rocker) and “teasing” him to tell me where I came from. It must have been when I first began to wonder about such things. I recall how I kept pulling his face around by putting my hands in his long brown beard; how he would laugh and turn away, trying to avoid me; and I can remember just how he looked at Mother as they exchanged glances. I can’t recall how they answered me, but think they told me I would know when I was older. (I neverremember being told about storks bringing babies, though I do remember someone saying the Doctor brought them, and that God sent them.) But that scene is very vivid to me; and afterward, when I began to know, though imperfectly, the answer to my question, I thought of how I had sat and coaxed Father to tell me. I would like to know just how old I was when this question first seemed so important to me. I recall when still very small, though later than this, being in the yard and digging in the ground when Brother and some older boys, going by, asked what we were doing. “Digging for babies,” we said, and it seems as though I can remember the smile that passed between Brother and the boys as they ran off shouting derisively, “Digging for babies!” That must have been in the days when we used earnestly to try to dig down to China.
Although asking my father this question is one of my earliest recollections, I think the very earliest is that of my first day in school. I can remember just how I trotted along by my brother’s side; how my starched skirts stood out proudly, and how my heart swelled with excitement when, at the sound of the “first bell,” I started off to school. Arthur was very nice to me, and granted permission (!) to two of the bigger girls to let me sit between them. I recall the delicious feeling of being the object of interest in the little flock, and how they petted and entertained me. But the most wonderful thing was a little wire frame which the teacher let me take to amuse myself with—a frame with coloured balls big as cranberries, which could be moved back and forth on the wires. Not long after I began going to school regularly, and that little frame (years later I learned it was called anabacus) was given out as a reward of merit. I can see now the look of blushing pride mantling the cheeks of the favoured pupils as they marched fromthe teacher’s desk back to their seats bearing the coveted trophy.
One evening shortly after my first day in school, we were startled by the alarm of fire, and saw the flames coming from the direction of the Academy. “Goody, Goody!” shouted some boys in the street, “We won’t have to go to school any more!” But I cried as though my heart would break, until a neighbour came down the hill and told us it was some unimportant building farther away.
A few years ago the Academy did burn, and the news came to me with a far keener pang than that felt in childhood at the false alarm. The present was momentarily blotted out. My thoughts flew back to the old building where the most tender and beautiful memories centred. Of that place so rich in associations only ashes remained; only in memory could I see again the old brick walls—the walls my grandfather had helped to build—only in memory hear the school bell ring! Curious, but more than all the furnishings—the books, the globes, the maps and charts, the chemical apparatus—more than all the things really of value in the building, my thoughts kept going back perversely to that dear little wire frame with coloured balls which I had so cherished since my first day at school!—thatwas gone past recall!—that and the old bell! At those earlier home-comings after graduation, one of my keenest pleasures had been to be awakened in the morning by the sound of the school bell; it brought back so much: I was a girl again; the past was bridged over; it stirred a host of chaotic feelings of mingled sweetness and sadness—longing for my lost girlhood, and exultation at the successes and achievements of to-day—the Spell of the Past was in that bell.
A fine high-school building, well equipped, now standswhere the old Academy stood. To the younger generation it will doubtless mean all that the old school meant to us, but how like an interloper it is! Only the ground and the old trees are left—the old linden trees under which we played, where we used to gather the tiny round nuts and eat the sweet brown kernels that ripen in September!
Once when Sister was a little thing, perhaps four or five years old, and an aunt, in telling her Bible stories, started to make some explanation about God, Kate interrupted her in a superior way with, “Oh, yes, I know God—he lives over there,” pointing to a meadow opposite our house. Astonished, Aunt Kate inquired further, when the child added:
“He’s got white hair and wears a long coat; he walks around there when it’s getting dark.” She meant an old man with a white beard and flowing locks who, like Old Grimes, wore a “long gray coat all buttoned down before.” His unusual appearance as he came and went in the hay-meadows had appealed to the child’s imagination, and she had settled to her own satisfaction that he was God!
An experience of my own, some years later however, illustrates the marked difference in our minds and temperaments—the one given to definite, concrete ways of thinking, and to settled convictions which satisfy her, however inadequate they may seem to others; the other, at that time, to vague, even mystical interpretations. And a similar tendency exists to-day in our attitudes where temperament and personal bent are concerned: One spring, going to a sheltered strip in our yard where we had previously transplanted wild flowers from the woods, I found a pale blue hepatica in bloom. I remember the directness with which the flower spoke to me. Something in its gem-like beauty and its completeness touched me peculiarly; my eyes filledwith tears. I hesitate to write it, but it seemed almost as though the flower whispered to me, “God.” It was an exquisite moment. The beauty and purity of that flower spoke to my soul, and for a brief while I had a conception of Divinity that made the day and hour memorable.
To my mother I am primarily indebted for my love of nature. She used to take us to the cowslip woods every spring, and later to the Wintergreen woods. We would begin coaxing to go weeks beforehand. Something sweet and tender stirs at the thought of our excursions to those distant moist woods in the early spring days. With what eagerness we started off, Mother as eager as any of us! How we ran across lots, climbed rail fences and a stone wall, peeped into deserted barns, traversed meadow after meadow, till we came to the swampy woods where the gay flowers grew! It was dark and wet and mysterious in those woods; we knew them only as the cowslip woods; other woods we frequented at other times of the year, these only in the cowslip days. I liked the crackle as we gathered the plant for “greens.” We even ate the bitter buds raw. Often we would slip from the mossy, decaying logs into the brown pools; we always returned home with squeaking shoes, wet feet, full baskets, and happy hearts.
Mother used to go wading with us, too. Taking our luncheon, we would follow the winding creek along the willows a mile or more till we came to a little grove, a sort of natural park, with an island and a dam, and a big swimming hole on one side of the island. Brother, who had been to Niagara Falls, called this Goat Island; the water that went over the dam was Niagara; and the grove was Prospect Park. Many a time he has lain in his little bedroom, his door and ours open, and recounted to Sisterand me his visit to Niagara, always getting excited and waxing eloquent, and seeming to see it all over again, as he talked to his willing listeners till sleep overtook them.
“Down to the dam”—there some of our sweetest childhood hours were spent, Mother, one with us, wading the stream, teaching us the names of the flowers, and telling us what was “good to eat.” When she was in doubt about a certain thing, and so would caution us, I was pretty sure to taste it, thus finding out for myself that many a thing is good to eat at which others looked askance. Some Eves begin early to taste forbidden fruit.
Up the Ditch Bank was another favourite place for our picnics—a high grassy bank running along a feeder, and farther up a big round pond on one side of the bank, and a long stretch of marshy creek below on the other. From the bank, across a precarious bridge we got into “Groom’s Woods,” where the wake robins grew, and the large white trilliums, Dutchman’s breeches, squirrel corn, crinkle root, spring beauties, anemones, hepaticas, blood roots, and mandrakes. Mother taught us these names, and the names of what few birds we knew—robins, goldfinches, humming birds, and orioles, chiefly. Each year in cherry-blossom time, Mother would say, “The orioles are here again.”
I had a goldfinch in a cage for a time, I called it a wild canary, and grew much attached to it, but it soon died, and after that I never cared to have another bird. I had one cat that I loved, too; his name was Nimrod. He got so old a neighbour took him away. They told me what was going to happen, but when I heard the gun-shot, far away, though I had braced for it, I was nearly frantic. I could never bear to have it mentioned after that, and loathed the man who did it. Children’s griefs are about little things, butthey are not little griefs. I feel sorry for the child who suffered some of the things I remember. Mother used to say,