VIIMARGHARETTA
When we first went to live in the country, in the old house of which I have written, we had a sufficiently large task merely to make the house itself livable. But as time went on, we attempted to do a very little farming.
How greatly did this broaden and extendmy experience as to the poor! There were the boys from ten to sixteen who came (again, these were those whose condition needed improving) to do work on the farm for the summers: Joseph, the Hebrew, who from his long and elaborate prayers should have been at least a priest of the Temple; Lester, so practised in picking locks and purloining that it was sheer waste of genius to place him in a home like ours, where jewelry and other returns for his skill were so slender. He did the best he could with the circumstances, but how meagre they were, after all!
There was the little girl, too, who could dance and recite and sing ragtime, having done so in vaudeville. Our home offered her neither audience nor stage, nor was there a footlight in the house. And there was the young Apollo, who at the least could have shepherded the sheep of Admetus; we had no sheep—only one cow.
Then there was Ernest, capable of really heroic devotion. How far did our possibilities fall short of his gifts! I did not engage him—he engaged me. I was setting out the disadvantages as usual, when he blurted out generously,"I like you, and I am going to take this position!" He was blond, German, of the perfectly good-natured type, and of heroic proportions. But, like the ancient heroes of his race, he was fond of the cup that both cheers and inebriates. I used to remonstrate with him and received always one answer, given stubbornly: "You know I'd jump in the river for you!"
I tried my best to show him that what was desirable was, not that he should fling himself into the river, only that he should refrain from the cup! Useless, useless! He wanted a more royal opportunity. To be sober, trustworthy, honorable, daily dependable—these were too trifling! Give him something worthy of his powers! The unlikely and surprising were pleasing to his temperament. He would how generously neglect his work to bring home from the field rabbits, which he shot with an old muzzle-loader, requiring days of toil before it could be got to work at all. Once he produced a pheasant. Lacking the Nemean lion, he butchered a pig, and smoked the pork for me, by an incredibly laborious method, under two barrels, one on top of the other.He hewed down trees with terrible strokes, and built me with Herculean effort a corn-crib of gigantic size to hold a handful of corn he had raised.
All these things, while I appreciated them, left his grave fault uncorrected. But to rebuke him on this score was to quarrel with Hercules for some trifling mistake in his spinning. "YouknowI would jump in the river for you!" he would reiterate.
There really is something ample in their conceptions of life which goes beyond our small bickerings as to honor and honesty. There is a largeness about them which makes our code look small indeed.
After Ernest's departure, another came for a few months, who had surprising resources. He made a practice of bringing me gifts from I do not know where—strawberries, asparagus, and other delicacies, given him presumably, and for the most part, by gardeners of gentlemen's estates in the outlying land—"friends of his."
I suggested, with misgivings as to ethics, that I ought to pay for these things; but he smiled benevolently, as a king on a subject,and with a manner as bounteous. I had the impression that the world was his.
In the face of his generosities, I felt my behaviors to be feeble and inadequate. These were bounties of a kind to which I was unaccustomed and parvenu, I who had none of the ancient quarterings which would have entitled me to such gratuities; I who had been brought up to the deplorably plebeian idea that one must pay for what one takes.
These are occasions, when, frankly, I am at a loss how to deport myself. I do not know the behaviors befitting. My etiquette does not go so far; and Chesterfield, who covers so many points, stops short of this: he says nothing on the subject.
Oh, royal ways! Oh, fine prerogatives! What hope have I, who am but descended from the founders of a mere country, from men who fought and poured out their blood rather than pay for what they did not receive—what hope is there that I shall ever attain to that gracious and lordly company which receives, as a right, that for which it does not pay!
I have named but a few of these princely characters and their deportments; but rememberingthem all and weighing all their values, I believe that "the brightest jewel in my crown wad" still be—Margharetta.
I have never been entirely certain that Margharetta was not descended from the Bourbons. Her husband was in jail for theft, and was a poet. "I will show you some of his poetry," she promised me in the first five minutes of my acquaintance with her. "Some of my friends say he is as great a poet as Shakespeare."
Like Marie Antoinette, she had three children. Her husband's misfortune had made it necessary to put these under the care of others. She talked of them incessantly, and assured me that no heart could bleed like a mother's.
As we drove up from the station, she looked all about her, with the air of a Siddons.
"Wouldn't Ethel enjoy this scenery!" she remarked, still very grand, but almost awed, it seemed. "She's such a poetic child!" (Ethel was the oldest, a little girl of ten.) "And these trees!" she said solemnly, as we entered the grave lordly shadows of the hemlocks. "Wouldn't Richard enjoy them, now!" (Richard was the Dauphin, aged six.)
When we at last got to the house, and she entered the kitchen in her grand manner, it seemed to grow large—as the lintels and chambers of the Greeks are said to have done when the gods visited them. The walls seemed to widen out, and the pans and kettles took on a shining stateliness. I have difficulty when writing of her to keep myself to fact, so gracious, so spacious, was her manner. I know, for instance, that her dresses all dipped a little at the back, yet I have the greatest temptation to say she wore a court train, so much was that the enlarging impression that she at all times conveyed. She was the most dominating personality, I believe, that I have ever known. Like a French verb, she seemed to cover and account for all possibilities. She reminded you of the infinitive, the subjunctive, the future, the indicative, theplus-que-parfait. Entering the dining-room, her handsome hands bearing—always a little aloft—the corned beef or pot roast that should have been a peacock at the very least, she conveyed, silently, time and tense and person, passive and active: "I am"; "let us love"; "let us have"; "thou hast"; "I havenot"; "ifI had!"
Early in her career, I asked her what desserts she could make.
She turned her full Bourbon eyes on me. She had no need to lift her head: it was constitutionally, structurally high.
"I can't make any," she said, with firmness and finality. "We bought allourdesserts at the delicatessen."
So, without anger, only with dignity, she managed to put me in my place.
Added to the many unconscious appeals that Margharetta was forever making to me, she finally made a direct one. Informing me once more that no heart could bleed like a mother's, she begged to be allowed to have, if it were only one of her children with her, the little girl aged ten. I consented, and went myself to fetch her.
She was a beautiful child. She had a great deal of Margharetta's own handsome, insolent beauty, but she had in addition a craft and ability for lying and deception astounding in one so young. Ten years old by the calendar she no doubt was; but by sundry other reckonings, she might have been ten thousand—a strange, pathetic, puzzling little girl.
For a time Margharetta's heart was staunched. But ere long it began to bleed afresh for the one who was, it was now clear, her dearest—Richard, the little Dauphin. She would stand looking out of the window, the picture of wretchedness. "He is such an angelic little fellow! I can't begin to tell you! Oh, if I could only see him! If I could only have him in my arms once more!"
I make no apology. I only tell the event, perhaps a little shamefacedly. It was not long after this that I went and fetched Richard also.
If his sister was ten thousand, Richard was, I think, of prehistoric origin. He had carried over from the Stone Age a strange ability for having his own way at heavy cost. He had never been in the country. His passion for flowers would have been a hopeful and poetic thing, had it but been accompanied by a knowledge of what flowers were. He would appear in full rapture, bearing a huge bouquet of young bean-plants or a large nosegay of freshly planted cabbages. Never, despite my faithful efforts, did he lose his passionate love of flowers, and never, despite my equally faithful endeavors, did he learn to know whatflowers were. I think that they were to him anything that could be gathered with greatest ease in largest bunches. With this definition in mind, it will be seen that a vegetable garden offers superlative opportunities.
Margharetta could see in all this nothing but a newly interesting phase of her darling. I was there when he brought her his third generous bouquet. She took it into her gracious handsome hands, held it off a little, then appealed to me for appreciation:—
"Now, isn't that his mother's boy? He brings everything tome."
I had explained to Margharetta before, that, right as filial affection undoubtedly is, the gathering of young tomato-plants from the garden had come to be fearfully wrong. I now repeated this severely, then addressed the Dauphin direct.
"You are never,neverto gather anything from the garden again; do you understand?"
Back went the Dauphin's head suddenly; his face became a purple mask of tragedy; his eyes rained intolerable tears; he broke forth into a most wild and tragic wail.
Margharetta stooped, gathered him to herbosom with one of her finest gestures, lifted him sobbing in her arms, laid his head against her shoulder, held it there with a possessive queenly hand, and with a colder look thrown at me, I am sure, than ever the Bourbons threw at the mob, carried him upstairs.
Later she explained to me haughtily what the Dauphin had meanwhile explained to her—he had beentoldto gather those plants.
"Toldto gather them?"
"Yes. Come, lamb, tell just what Tony said to you."
"Tony said," began Richard, a little breathless, but resolved, and twisting and braiding his fingers as he spoke, "Tony said, 'You can haveallthe flowers you want,everyday, and I think your mother would like the tomato-plants best.'"
This sudden opera-bouffe turn of affairs really took me off my feet. When I suggested that it was quite certain that Tony would contradict Richard's statement, Margharetta's reply was perfectly consistent. Did I suppose she would take the word of "a no-account Eye-talian" against that of her darling?
So I found myself once more face to facewith that total disregard of fact and probabilities which I had now come to know as one of the leading characteristics of her class. It was for me to remember that miracle waits upon them; that nothing is improbable to them if it but coincide with their desires; that truth shall not serve them unless it goes dressed in their livery. Nothing could be done about the matter. We were at a deadlock. What were mere logic and reason? What are they ever, in the face of a faith chosen and adhered to?
Margharetta stood firm in an unshaken faith in her own, while I departed, to wonder why it is that humanity deports itself as decently as it does, with these dark powers, not only at work in it, but hugely at work in it, all the while.
The days went on. In the course of becoming acquainted with the country, the little Princess and the Dauphin underwent, of course, many tragic adventures. Though they had me so well in command that I ran to do their bidding, or flew to their rescue, at a mere summoning shriek, wind, water, fire, cats, dogs, cows, horses, poison ivy, snapping turtles,and sundry other folk were not so biddable.
This recalcitrancy led to tragedies innumerable. When either or both children were hurt by some fact or reality which by mere royal habit they had haughtily ignored, and when they were beaten in the fray and wounded, Margharetta was as one bereft of her senses. Panic seized her. She flung herself upon my mercy and my intelligence. She wrung her hands. She was distraught. She could do nothing herself for her darlings, but was wild with gratitude, and watched with tragic animal eyes everything that I was able to do for them. How wonderful I was at such moments! How could she ever thank me! Then from my ministrations she would receive into her arms the battered Princess or dilapidated Dauphin, as it might have been from the hands of a relented Providence.
My own glory lasted only during the danger, however. Her darlings secure, she was not long in reascending her throne, and continued to behave with entire consistency as to her probable ancestry. She was the only real queen, with all a queen's regality and insolence,that I have ever dealt with. It is clear to me now that I was hypnotized by her manner to think it a privilege to be of use to her in the calamities of herself and her family. It is true I did at last make a fearful revolutionary stand for liberty, and bundled her and the young Princess of ten and ten thousand and the little prehistoric Dauphin off one day, and began as best I could to reconstruct life; but not before I had come fearfully near, in the Versailles manner in which Margharetta had conducted herself and our kitchen, being a "condition" myself.
It is now five years ago, "of a sunny morning," since they left us, and the post brought me the other day a short letter from Margharetta enclosing a "poem" by her husband, on the death of the little girl. She "wanted me to know." I feel quite sure that the letter was divided between sorrow for her loss and pride in her husband's performance.
The circumstance touched me more than I would have supposed possible. I thought of course of a mother's "bleeding heart." Poor Margharetta, for all her queenliness and all her disregard of fact, brought at last with thehumblest of us to face the one supreme reality; and weaving as best she could some fancy about that, too, and turning away her face from it toward some consolation of reunion which (the verses promised this) was to be given her in another life, and, I doubt not, also toward the pride in this life of being wedded to a man (let us waive the matter of the jail) who could write poetry, and was, some thought, "as great as Shakespeare."