A long time ago, when Duane Bellamy was at the height of his brilliant fame, and when I was a little girl, his daughter chanced to be a school-mate of mine for a winter. And one Sunday evening I was invited to their supper-table. I was very much impressed by the momentous occasion which it seemed to me, and I have not forgotten a word he said, nor a gesture he made, nor an expression of his face. I can still see his darkly handsome face, with his glossy black mane, his large bright eyes, his great curling Assyrian beard. And if ever I saw a human being saturated to the bone with satisfaction, it was at that Sunday evening supper. He was acclaimed as the greatest portrait painter in America, and he accepted this well-deserved reputation with no mock modesty. The knowledge of it did not make him coarsely vain or puffed up. It acted on him like a generous wine, made him extravagantly kind and over-flowing with high spirits. His little girl told me that night that her princely father had been known to stop a tired coal-heaver at his work, handhim a twenty-dollar bill and walk on. He was like a great fountain of enjoyment, splashing with its clear waters all who came near it, even the little schoolgirl at the other end of the table.
But there were people he could not help to enjoyment. The name of one of them came up in the conversation that evening: “Poor old Hendricks!” said our host, “what can you do for the poor old chap?Hedoesn’t even know what hit him!”
One of the younger painters there was a protégé of Bellamy’s, admiring him so greatly that his paintings were scarcely to be told from his master’s. He now answered, “Oh, the old Rip Van Winkle! He ought to be told to crawl into his hole and pull it in after him. Making a laughing-stock of himself with those sooty old landscapes of his, year after year.”
Our host took a great draught of the beer in his stein, wiped his great mustache with his fine damask napkin, and turned comfortably in his chair. “Hendrick got me in a tight place the other day,” he began, “At this year’s exhibition he marched me up to one of his bitumen-black, woolly horrors, and said, ‘Now, Bellamy, you’re an honest man. Tell me what it is you youngsters don’t like in that? It looks all right to me. I can’t see why they all jumpon me so. I look at theirs, and then I look at mine.... Ican’tsee what they’re talking about.’”
“Well, for God’s sake, what nerve!” ejaculated the disciple, very much astonished. “What did you say?”
“What could I say?” said Bellamy. “I didn’t want to hurt the old man’s feelings. I hadn’t supposed till then that he’d so much as noticed how people feel about his work. I didn’t try to explain to him, of course. What’s the use? Hecan’tunderstand! If I’d talked to him all day about what we’re after—light, and shimmer, and vibration—he wouldn’t have known what I was talking about. If it wereinhim to understand, he’d die before he’d paint the way he does. So I just patted him on the back and said, ‘Oh, you’re all right, Mr. Hendricks. What makes you think there is anything the matter with your work?’ and pretended that somebody was calling to me from the other side of the gallery.”
He finished his beer at a draught. He thought himself magnificently kind and tolerant. And so did we.
That was a long time ago, thirty years ago, to be exact. The Bellamys took their little girl out of our school that spring, and I saw no more of them. ButI always felt a slight personal interest at the sight of his name in a list of exhibitors, and in picture-galleries always went to look at whichever bright, high-keyed, dashing portrait he was exhibiting that year. Some years ago it began to seem to me that they did not look just the same; and yet when I looked straight at them, I saw that they were, quite miraculously, the same, the old Bellamy flowing brush-work, the masterly rendering of fabrics, the ringing color, the firm drawing, all lighted by that bold flood of sunlight with which he had shocked and enchanted the early American public groping its way out from Munich.
Presently, finding that the impression that they were different persisted, I set myself to analyze it, and found that their altered look came from the altered character of the paintings beside and above them ... and then, as the years went on, below them! For the time came when the annual Bellamy portrait was not in the center of the last gallery, to catch your eye as you entered, but was hung high in one of the side-rooms. It looked very queer and matter-of-fact with its solid surfaces honestly rendered in all their opacity, compared to the odd, subtle, sideways-glancing, arrestingly imaginative canvases about it. They took the eye far below thesurfaces they depicted. They suggested far more than they said. For days afterwards, they haunted you like an unfinished cadence in a poem in a foreign language. The Bellamy canvas was in no unknown language, but in the speech used for the daily order to the grocer; nor was it in the least unfinished. It came finally to seem to me as literal and bald a statement of fact as a time-table.
One day this year, as I hung over an Arthur Davies, a strange, beautiful, white-fleshed, eerie, blonde woman, placed at the side of a luminous canvas, with, so it seemed to me, more pure imaginative beauty than anything since Botticelli, I heard voices behind me. A tall, splendid-looking old man, with a great white beard, fine dark eyes, and the carriage of a king was talking to a younger man, an unimpressive, slight, fair fellow, evidently very ill at ease.
“See here, Brehming, speak out, tell me what it’s all about. I honestly don’t know what you’re driving at, you kids. What’s the matter with good drawing? What do youwantin a painting?” He waved a well-kept hand up towards a canvas above us, “Isn’t there light in that? And space? And interesting composition? And true values?Iought to know a good painting when I see one. What are you boystalking about when you slash at my things so? I’m not sore. Don’t think I’m sore. You’ve a right to your own opinion. Only, for the Lord’s sake, whatisyour opinion?”
He had said he was not sore, but there was a raw note of hurt in his voice, and his eyes rested anxiously on the young man beside him.
The other looked every way except at him and said in a vague, hurried, kindly voice, “Why, Mr. Bellamy, your work is all right, of course. It’s fine. Sure, it’s fine. We all admire it like anything....”
Yes, I did hear that! I heard it just exactly as I’m setting it down.
Students and classifiers of American “types” often say that the grandfathers of the present generation of New Englanders represent the “New England type” much more accurately than their descendants of to-day. Some times I wonder what they mean by “New England type.” Apparently they make the phrase stand for blue-nosed, thin-blooded frigidity of temperament, a pinched, mean, timorous attitude towards human life and human nature, and a cold, calculating capacity to skin other people alive in a bargain. At any rate, the presumption seems to be that whatever else they were, New Englanders were always very much of the same sort.
Here are my two New England grandfathers.
Both of them had identically the same sort of ancestry, plain English people who came to the New World about the middle of the seventeenth century. Certain genealogically-minded members of the two families have gathered reverently together the scant tradition concerning the generations thatbridge the two centuries and a half of life in America; but though I have dutifully plodded through the thick volumes of “family histories” I have never been able to see that any of my forebears did anything more than earn their own livings and keep out of jail.
Younger branches of both families moved up into Vermont, after the end of the French-and-Indian wars and have lived here ever since. Both my grandfathers spent their boyhood on Vermont farms. And there the resemblance ceases.
One of them had, apparently, from early childhood, a passion for books and learning and sophistication and cultivation—and gregarious, articulate social existence—and dinner parties and black broadcloth and white linen and good wine—and all the other elements in the sort of life which is not to be found on Vermont farms. The Vermont farm, however, seems to have presented him with some tools for getting what he wanted: a powerful great body, an active mind and an unlimited amount of dynamic energy. He left home at sixteen (this was about 1833) spurred on by the sympathy of a strong-minded mother. I have still in the attic of his old house, the little hair-covered trunk which he tookwith him, and which contained all his worldly possessions.
From that time on, until his old age, he never came home except to rest in the occasional, very brief intervals of incessant and almost appalling activity, both intellectual and physical. With only a little help from his family he earned his way through college, and then put himself through a Theological Seminary in record time. With him, as with other manifestants of the mid-century explosion of energy in America, it was as if the long generations of vegetating country-dwellers had, like other vegetating matter of by-gone ages, turned to rich veins of highly combustible material, which this descendant of theirs mined out, at top speed, and cast by great shovelfuls into the furnace of his personality. He seems always to have been incandescent, the whole six-feet-three of him, with motive-power which he could not, try as he might, use up fast enough to cool off. All his life he burned hot with a vitality at which an ever-widening circle of other human beings, rich and poor, young and old, learned and ignorant, warmed their hands and their hearts. Even the people whom he furiously rubbed the wrong way (he had as many enemies as friends) were stimulated by the friction to a quicker life-pace,a livelier circulation. The temperature in a room rose when he entered it. Even people of sluggish, scholarly, dilettante temperaments, even coldly superior and skeptical people who prided themselves on being too disdainful of life to lift an eyebrow over its issues, soon kindled either to intense exasperation or lively personal affection. In either case, calm and ease and torpidity of life were scorched and shaken. I have often thought with sympathy of the vestrymen in Grandfather’s various parishes.
As a young clergyman he ran one parish after another, with increasing brio. When he settled down in the New York parish where he stayed for most of his life, he was already editing a church-paper and writing innumerable pamphlets, in addition to his regular duties as rector. He now speeded up the staid old parish into new work of all sorts, added one mission chapel after another to the church organization, pushed out the influence of the parish further and further, especially into the outlying regions of the slums, which because of their very discouraging aspect of poverty and foreignness had been till then safe from attempts to improve them.
Of course I knew my grandfather only when he was a very old man, long after he had retired from active life; but I never got from him the slightestimpression that he was what is known as a “religious-minded person” or that all this remarkable expansion of church and mission work came entirely from evangelical fervor. In fact, as I remember Grandfather, you never would dream that he had been a minister at all. My guess is that he developed that church as his contemporaries developed their transcontinental systems of railways, because he was born with a clutch that never slipped, so that all the power he created by his many-cylindered motor was transmitted without loss to the wheels which sent him with extreme rapidity along the road he had chanced to follow.
He not only developed the parish, he developed his own life: he bought books, unendingly bought books, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, French, English. No junk-man who ever lived has been able to free us entirely of this vast accumulation of serious-minded books of research, now quite worthless, all of them, full of the pompous and inaccurate scholarship of his day. He traveled abroad and sprang, tiger-like, upon European culture, with his formidable New-World capacity for the assimilation of Gargantuan meals of solid food. He married “well,” as the saying goes, and gave his son university life and European travel. He lived as he had wanted to live, withfriends and acquaintances in three countries, dressing his vast body in fine broadcloth and white linen; his house was lined with well-bound books; he was a famous talker—in the vein of Dr. Johnson—much sought after for his brilliantly amusing conversation, though at times, I take it, he followed his prototype into rather overpowering monologue; he was a powerful and very fluent public speaker—we have chests and chests full of his sermons still in the attic—and so far as I can gather he no more doubted the ultimately satisfying value of all these things as an integral part of life than Mr. Russel Sage seems to have questioned the ultimately satisfying value of squeezing the last penny of interest out of a loan, or Barnum to have doubted the worthwhileness of running the biggest show on earth.
It would be very unfair to give the impression that his agreeable social life and the possession of objects and books then in fashion made up the whole or even the largest part of his life. It took such a formidable number of elements to satisfy his huge appetite for life and activity, that it would be difficult to catalog them all. Controversy, for instance; he adored pamphleteering, and was known as one of the leading controversialists of his time.He was a heart-felt Low-Churchman and perhaps the real passion of his passionate life was his hot-blooded detestation of formalism in religious beliefs. Infinitely various, and all headlong, were his attacks on High-Churchism, with its rigid orthodoxy, and its fol-de-rols (as he called them) of salvation by incense and candles and twiddling distinctions between green and blue and yellow stoles.
Indeed this shouldering impatience of formal theological points led him late in life, to disagree vigorously with the majority of his parishioners on several questions of doctrine. Refusing to conform to the strict pattern they wished to impose upon him, he blew up with an explosion, shook the dust of his religious vocation off his feet, and retired to the comfortable old house in Vermont, where he spent his old age, living comfortably on his small savings. He took with him all the possessions he had enjoyed so heartily, his many, many books, his substantial furniture, the excellent oil-portrait which had been painted of his vivid, handsome face in middle-life, his gold-headed cane, his great black-silk clerical robes, and fine ecclesiastical linen. When he died, he had never, so far as I know, slept out of an excellent bed a single night in all his life.
* * * * * * *
The other grandfather fared forth at about the same date or a little earlier, and at about the same age; but not in search of well-set dinner-tables nor well-filled libraries, nor the inheritance of culture from past ages. On the contrary, he seems all his life to have been engaged in running away from even the light and sketchy approximation to imprisoning regularity which was shown by the America of that day and the State of his birth. Like an unbroken colt who snorts and wheels and dashes away at the mere sight of some one emerging from the barn with a rope halter, this other farm-boy gave one look at what seemed to him the penitentiary-like pressure of conventional life and ran away with all the speed of what turned out to be a remarkably fleet pair of heels. First, as a lad, he ran away from his perfectly comfortable home, where he had been well cared for, and soundly if plainly educated. Disdaining ... no, more than that, courting hardship, as he always did, he roamed out into the absolute, untrammeled freedom of early frontier life. There he starved and hunted and went in ragged buckskin, and trapped, and moved on, and grew up to a great height and great strength, and was no man’s man to his heart’s content. At some time during this period he acquired, withcharacteristic casual ease, the profession of surveyor, the only one of the trades or professions at which he was willing even to give a glance. There was plenty of unsurveyed land in the States at that time, and all of it in the new, untracked wilderness which he loved.
He seems always to have despised physical comfort as a clumsy trap laid by life to catch you and hold you fast. None of it for him. He hated the very indoor smell of it, as he did the burdening weight of material possessions. A gun (which like other frontiersmen of that day he passionately and personally loved), an ax (with which he could perform almost any feat), the clothes he stood in, the tools of his wildwoods profession, and the world before him, full, intoxicatingly full of untrodden paths leading into bright enticing danger. Prosperity? A home of his own? Above all, regular work? Never, as long as there were squirrels and deer to shoot and logs to make temporary shelters withal!
His roamings took him into Ohio, the early river and lake settlements of which were at that time horribly marshy and fever-ridden. There he encountered the lure which brings most young adventurers in under a roof and beside a hearth-fire. He fell inlove. A pretty Vermont girl was visiting some cousins there and had set up a little millinery shop, where she made and sold the scoop-bonnets of the period. Do you see them, the tall, big-boned surveyor, with his magnetic personality, pungent with the odor of freedom, and the pink-cheeked, white-fingered little amateur milliner?
She went back to Vermont to her family, and he followed her. I have often amused myself by walking around over the roads and paths and fields he must have trod during his wooing, and trying to imagine his impatience of the cribbed and cabined superfluity and conventionality of the Vermont life, which looked so primitive and bare to my other grandfather.
He endured it for some months, till his wooing was successful, and, just after her twenty-first birthday, the gentle, home-loving girl put her hand upon his sinewy arm and followed him out into the wilds. This was in 1838 when the wilds were very wild indeed. My great-uncle, who was her little brother at that time conceived a lifelong admiration and affection for the great, strapping, warm-hearted hero who came to take away his big sister. He used to tell me stories of that impetuous wooing, and of the strange impression left on the deeply-rootedmountain-people by the meteor-like appearance and disappearance of this startling, unreliable, dangerously alive personality, living so immorally free from all the rules and possessions and standards which bore them down to the earth, and to which they so tenaciously clung. My great-uncle always ended these stories of his brother-in-law (whom he never saw but on that occasion) by saying, “He was a talented man, with a powerful personality, who could have done anything he chose.” He also told me, “Our minister said of Albert that he was a wild, free son of Nature.” I take it the minister had had some contact with the romantic-school phraseology so much in fashion at that date.
It was a bitterly hard life which the Vermont girl had chosen, full of extravagant hardships and privations of which she could never have dreamed. They lived here and there, always from hand to mouth, always as far beyond the edge of the settlements as it was possible to take a family of young children, for they had five little girls by the time they had been married a decade. Once or twice her husband made an attempt to enter regular life, to run a store in a frontier settlement, to take an everyday job; but these trials never lasted long, and their old life was taken up, log-cabin after log-cabin, rough clearingsin the primeval forest, days when there was nothing but corn-meal in the pantry, long treks in covered wagons to escape from the fever-and-ague which burned and ravaged them; never more possessions than could be drawn by a team of lean horses, ... and always unbroken love and devotion between the two wayfarers. Wherever their caravan halted for a few months was home to the woodsman’s wife, because he was there; his vitality, his free-hearted zest in whatever came to them, bore her along like a tidal wave. And to the end of her days she worshipped the memory of his deep, never-wavering passion for her.
You can imagine that her comfortably well-to-do family thought he took a very queer way to show it, and with Yankee out-spokenness told them both so, as cuttingly as Yankee tongues can speak. Without a hesitation she flung her family ties away along with her love of home, her woman’s love for stability, her mother’s anxiety about her little girls. Not till long after his death did she again resume relations with her family.
Her little girls, never having known any other life, saw nothing unusual in the one they led, especially as their mother, her personality doubled and trebled by the exigencies of her life, stood, somehow,miraculously between them and the most impossible of the hardships to which their father so light-heartedly condemned them. They were always dressed in well-mended garments, they had shoes and stockings, they were clean and cherished, there was always cheer and loving-kindness between their father and mother, and when there was only corn-meal mush for supper, they scarcely noticed it, because of the old songs and stories of which their mother had such a store. My mother sang them to me, and I now sing them to my children, those old folk-songs with which my grandmother charmed away hunger from her little children. They adored their great, rollicking father, always in high spirits, and they preferred the deer-steaks and squirrel stews which were the results of his wonderful marksmanship, to the tough, stringy beef and salt pork which was the diet of the other frontier children. One of my mother’s vivid recollections is of looking out of the window on a snowy day and seeing her stalwart father emerge from the woods into the clearing, carrying ... a very Robin Hood ... a whole deer’s carcass on his broad shoulders. He cast it down before the door and called, like a great boy, for his women-folk to come and admire him! She says she can close her eyes now, see the blood ruddy on thesnow, and her father’s thrown-back head and bright, laughing face.
Of course, when the news of gold in California came, burning-hot like wild-fire from the west, he was one of the first to go. He would be. A distant, uncertain, and dangerous expedition, into unknown country; could he resist such an alluring combination? Of course, he could have resisted it if he had tried; but he did not try. He never tried.
Also, of course, it was really out of the question to transport a wife and five little girls across an untracked continent, full of Indians. He was to go alone, make a brief stay, get the lay of the land, and come back, his pockets full of gold, to take the family out in a ship around the Horn. It was all settled in his mind as if the gold were heavy in his pockets. The separation would be short ... he was sure of it, as he was always sure of whatever would ensure his being free of the slightest constraint.... He moved his family into the nearest settlement, cashed in on everything saleable, added a small sum that had just come to him as his share of his father’s small property, and got together enough to support his family for a year. It took little enough, as they had always lived. And he wouldbe back before the year was out, rolling in gold.
With empty pockets and a high heart he took his gun and his ax, kissed his family good-by and went away planning to live off the country as he traveled, as he always had.
One letter came back from California, the only one he ever wrote, since he had never before been separated from the one human being he had loved. He had had a gloriously adventurous time in getting out there, Indians, drought, snow, heat, grizzly bears—all the regulation accompaniments of the transcontinental trip in 1849. He struck it rich at once, and as one of the first on the ground had a wonderful claim of his own. They would all be rich in no time.
In no time he was dead.
For an interminable period his wife heard nothing, and then, very vaguely, that he had died of “mountain fever.” He had been dead and buried for months before she learned that she was a widow at thirty-two with five helpless little girls and not a penny in the world.
I was crossing the Place de la Concorde, and stopped for an instant, fascinated by the sinister expression of an immense cannon, painted in serpentine streaks and stripes, the muzzle of its tube distorted by an explosion so that a twisted flap of steel hung down like a broken jaw-bone. A hail made me turn around. The elegant old man who was an American correspondent for a New York newspaper, came up with an expression of approval. “Magnificent display, isn’t it?” he said, waving his hand towards the ranks of captured cannon and mitrailleuses, standing thick on the public square. “Why didn’t you bring your children?”
The gulf between his generation and mine yawned deep. I told myself the part of wisdom was to close my lips on what I felt. But the cannon leered at me too insolently, with its torn muzzle.
I answered, “I’m glad enough when the police seem to be getting the better of a band of ruffianswho’ve been terrorizing the town. But I don’t take the children to see the bloody clubs with which....”
“Oh, come!” said my old friend, genially. “Feminine emotionality! These don’t look much like bloody clubs. They look more like part of a steel-foundry.”
“Every cannon here is wreathed in human viscera, spattered with human brains, and stands in a pool of human blood, if we only had eyes to see!” I said moderately.
“Why, you talk like a pacifist!” said the old gentleman, forgetting his usual politeness to women.
“I thought the unforgivable sin of the Germans was in forcing a war on a world that has outgrown war! If war is so hateful a thing, why complacently lay out to view its hideous instruments of torture?”
“Because,” said my old friend with deep emotion, “because they have been instruments of righteousness!” (For the moment he had forgotten the nationality of the cannon about us.)
“Have they?” I asked. “They’re German cannon, remember.” In spite of my feeling sick, I could not but laugh at the change in his expression. I went on, “Well, even if they had been sacred Allied cannon, they’d be instruments of torture all the same. I thought we were fighting to put such things on thescrap heap. Why don’t we have the decency to hide them from view? We don’t put the offal from our slaughter-houses on public view.”
“Vegetarianism, next?”
“Oh, no, I eat beefsteaks. But I don’t take the children to see the steers killed.”
“Of course, I know,” said my old friend tolerantly, “that women have a traditional right to be illogical, butreally.... Did you, or did you not turn your personal life upside down to do your share in this war? It would give me brain fever to feel two different ways about the same thing.”
“See here,” I put it to him, “a man, crazy-drunk comes roaring down our street. Whowouldn’tfeel two ways about him? I certainly do. First, I know that society has been wrongly organized to permit any boy to grow up crazed with whiskey; and second, I know that my children must be protected, now, at this very minute. Shooting that man dead isn’t going to help the general situation at all. If we are not to have a perpetual procession of crazy-drunk men coming down our street (and our own men among them) we must change the organization of society by long, patient, and constructive efforts. In the meantime with the drunken man pounding on my door, if the police don’t do what is necessary,why, of course, I will throw a dishpan of scalding water down on him. But I wouldn’t spend the rest of my life making speeches about the dishpan.”
My sophisticated old friend had for me the smiling amusement one feels for a bright child talking about what he does not understand. Taking up the sharp ax of Ecclesiastes, he struck a great blow at the root of the matter, “No, my dear girl, no, you don’t. A well-meaning, high-principled woman like you, can do a great deal, but she cannot amputate a vital part of human nature. You can’t make manly, brave men ashamed of war and it’s a lucky thing for you you can’t, for if you did, there would be nobody to stand between you and the bullies. Take it from a man nearly twice your age, that without the soldier in every man (and that means love of force and submission to force—you must swallow that!) there would be no order in the world. You needn’t try to reduce that element of force to mere businesslike police-work. It can’t be done. There would be anarchy in the twinkling of an eye. You won’t believe this, because it doesn’t fit into your womanish, preconceived notions. But it doesn’t make any difference whether you believe it or not. Such are the facts. And all your noble phrases can’t change them.”
I turned and left him. I did not believe a word he said, of course ... but.... Thereisa horrible side to human nature.... Suppose that to hold it in check it might be necessary ...
“Oh, mother, this is Thursday and the merry-go-round in the Parc of the Château is running. Couldn’t you take us?”
We set off, the three of us, hand in hand, crossed the arid, bare Place d’Armes where the great Louis had mustered his troops, hobbled up over the villainous paving-stones of the gray entrance court and came by beautiful leafy avenues to where the primitive circle of wooden horses whirled slowly about, as a one-armed soldier turned the crank. I was left on a bench, with the other waiting mothers, watching our children’s pleasure.
My two were at once in another world—Jimmy’s a mere wide world of enchantment, as befitted his five-year-old ignorance. He swam through the air, a vague smile of beatitude on his lips. Sally sat very straight, one hand on her hip, the other stretched out in a gesture of command. She was perhaps Charlemagne before the defeated Saxons,or possibly Joan of Arc at Orléans. Sally’s class at school begins to have some notions of history.
When the crippled soldier was tired, and we had paid our copper sous, we wandered on, to a bench in front of a statue of mellow marble. Here I sat down while the children ran about, shouting and kicking up the chestnut leaves which laid a carpet of cloth-of-gold under their feet. Their laughter sounded distant in my ears. I was hearing again the cock-sure old voice of the morning.... “Anarchy in a moment if respect for force were eliminated ... you cannot amputate a part of human nature....”
What was my little daughter saying, with her amusing older-sister air of omniscience? “Did you know, Jimmy, that it was a king who had all this made, out of nothing at all. We’ve just had that in school. It was only a bare, sandy plain, and he had all the trees brought here, and the terraces made, and the water brought here.... It cost millions and millions.”
Jimmy looked up in astonishment at the giant oak over him. “Can you carry great big trees like these around with you?” he asked.
“No, gracious, no! It was ever so long ago.They’ve grown up since. They were just scrawny little saplings. They’ve got an old picture at school that shows how it was when he was alive. Awfully ugly!”
“I wouldn’t have liked it then,” said Jimmy.
Sally hooted at his ignorance. “My goodness, you don’t suppose you’d ever have got any chance to play here if you’d lived then. Not much! We never could have got in. They had soldiers at all the gates to keep people out.”
Jimmy’s sense of the probable was outraged. There were some things too tall to be believed, even if Sally did say them. “What was itfor, if nobody was allowed in?”
“It was for the king. Everything was for the king then. And he only let in his own family and his special friends.”
“I should think people would ha’ been mad to see the king hogging everything for himself,” Jimmy said vigorously.
“Oh, they were used to it,” explained Sally. “They thought it had to be that way. All the learned men in those days told them that everything would go to pieces and everybody would rob and murder everybody else if they didn’t have a kingand think they loved him more than anybody else.”
Once more Jimmy’s sense of the probable rose up to protest, “They didn’tlovethat old hog-it-all king!” The little twentieth-century American brain refused to credit this ridiculous and inherently impossible idea.
( ... and yet how many generations of men suffered and died to affirm that idea as the natural and inevitable foundation of society!)
“Well, they thought they had to, and so they thought they did,” said Sally lucidly. “The way we love our governments now. But after a couple of hundred years or so they found out the learned men didn’t know so much, and that it wasn’t having a king that kept folks from robbing and murdering all the time. So they got together and came out here from Paris and took all this away from him. And that’s how we get in to play.”
Jimmy’s fancy was tickled by a new idea. “I bet he’d be surprised if he could see us playing here.”
Sally dramatized the scene, instantly. “Wouldn’t he though! Suppose he should come walking right down those marble steps with his high wig and his big-buckled shoes, and his clothes all solid gold anddiamonds, and suppose he should walk right up to us and say, ‘You good-for-nothing common-people, what are you doing inMYpark? I’ll have you boiled in oil at once!’”
Jimmy was a little intimidated. He took his big sister’s hand and said in rather a small voice, “What would you say back?”
Sally made a dramatic gesture of scorn. “I’d say, ‘Get away from here, you old King. Don’t you know you’re dead?’ And then, Jimmy, you know ghosts aren’t solid. I’d just draw off and run right through him, gold clothes and diamonds and all, like this.”
She executed a headlong assault on space and came back laughing.
Jimmy, reassured, caught the note, “Yes,” he said swaggering, “I would too, I’d say, ‘You old King, you’re dead!’ and I’d run right through him too.”
It was the most delightful of all the games Sally had invented. They went at it with gusto, their faces rosy and laughing as they took turns in dashing through the non-existent might, majesty, and glory of a dead idea.
It was a game which amused their mother quite as much as the children. I sat watching them at it,till it was time to start home back through the rich magnificence of the old park which had been planted for a king’s pleasure and which throughout the silent, purposeful centuries had grown to beauty for the people.
The black-and-white maid told me I was expected and showed me into the drawing-room to wait. As I waited I looked around at the beautiful room with the leaden depression which such beautiful rooms always produce in me. It was a wonderfully elaborate composition with as many details in it as there are notes on a page of music, and every one of them was correct and accredited. As I stepped in through the door the whole shouted in my ears a pæan of religiously devout acceptance of the fashion then prevailing in interior decoration.
The floor was dully lustrous, avoiding the vulgar shininess of varnish so esteemed a decade or so before. There was a great deal of black in all the fabrics as was then the fashion (now it would be vermilion and verdigris green); chintz curtains with a black background and a splashingly-colored design of wreaths and strange large birds; black satin sofa-pillows, with stiff quilled ruffles in brilliant colors to match the birds. The shades of the electric lights (which were of course designed to make them look like candles) were ornamented with cut-out blacksilhouettes of nude ladies with extremely long legs. The furniture was either all “antique” or had been doctored to look as though it were. A large, dark, carved chest stood against a wall—to contain what it was difficult to conjecture. The chairs had the correct kind of legs and backs and arms, that is, the kind that had not yet been copied sufficiently to spoil it for the discerning taste; and the straight, curiously-shaped table was at least two jumps ahead of anything shown at that time even by the most enterprising department-store. The walls, in accordance with the order of the day, were for the most part smartly and knowingly bare, with a few permissible reproductions of Chinese landscapes; one a tall, narrow study of bamboo shoots, another a long, narrow study of snowy mountains, depicted in three or four lines (this year it would be, I suppose, an 1858 panel by Jolly).
I sat down in what looked like the most comfortable of the distinguished chairs, my feet on one of the correctly Oriental rugs, and looked dispiritedly about me for some sign of living taste in all that tastefully arranged room. There was plenty of taste shown there; but it smelled so of the pages of an expensive magazine printed on highly-glazed paper, that presently, as I sat there, despairing of my race,I felt my own body take on the same flat, two-dimensional unreality. Well, that is the sort of flat and unreal creatures human beings are when it comes to taste, I reflected.
There was not, so far as I could see, one single object in that room (and God knows there were plenty of objects in it!) which rang out with the clear, brave note of a thing chosen because it gives pleasure. Everything about me wore a large, invisible but plainly legible placard, setting forth that it was there because it was “the thing”; and that the instant “the thing” was something else it would be cast out and replaced with something else as meaningless as itself in the life of the owner.
The whole expensive show was perched on the branch of other people’s opinions, and was ready to fall to the ground as soon as that branch waved in the wind of a new fashion. There was not one object which suggested what you might think would be the first, simple, hearty, healthy instinct of prospering humanity, the desire to surround itself with what it likes. No, in its abject consistency, the room shamelessly proclaimed that its ambition was to be well thought of by “people in the know” and not at all to please the family who had paid for it and had to live with it.
Docility in human beings is always a dreadful quality, but docility in matters of taste is shameful. I sighed, and fixed my eyes on what looked like a Chardin. Oh, yes, Chardin was “in” now, I remembered. But an ordinary private family would be as little likely to own a real Chardin as a real Veermeer. I reflected that as soon as it was discovered not to be a genuine one, it would certainly be sent off to the junk shop. And yet it was a delightful canvas, apparently by some one of the period who had absorbed Chardin’s atmosphere and loved it as we do. If it looked so much like a Chardin that only the X-ray could tell the difference, why wasn’t it as good as a Chardin? I fell into a meditation on the hideous ways of collectors of pictures, blasphemers against the Holy Ghost of Art that they are. Ostensibly they buy pictures because they love good paintings (I am not referring to artdealers!). A collector sees a small canvas, said to be a Teniers, and is ready to pay a fantastic price for it, enough to endow a school for all time. Some expert with a chemical test proves that it is not a Teniers. It is the same picture as before, the very same; but now the lover of good art would not hang it on his walls, if it were given to him.
What kind of a race is that to belong to, I askedmyself plaintively. They don’t want beauty, they don’t want art, they haven’t even the plain courage that any dog or monkey has, to want what they want. They want what other people pretend to want.
I got up restlessly, crossed over to the other side of the room, turned my eyes to the side I had left, and was electrified. There in the center of the wall, next to a small reproduction of a Madhu camel-fight, was a large canvas, a solidly painted, honest, dark, sentimental Jules Breton. I gazed at it with profound thankfulness. There was not an extenuating circumstance. It was his usual peasant girl, done with his usual pseudo-realism, with her usual bare feet, every muddy toe conscientiously drawn, and it had darkened to the usual Breton gloom. It swore at the top of its voice at all the knowing, Orientalized, simplified, subtle things about it, and my heart leaped up to hear it swear. For it sounded like a living voice.
Here was something that must have been bought some time ago (for nobody can actually have bought a Breton recently), which must have been hung on the wall when Bretons were in style. But it had not been banished when the style had changed!
And yet the rest of the room told meunmistakably that the owner of that room knew as well as any one else what was now thought of that Breton by people “in the know.”
Well, there was one visitor who appreciated it. Never before had I thought to admire so ardently the dull, faithful, unimaginative surface of a Breton. But I gazed at it with affection. There could be no reason for its presence except that somebody liked it enough to keep it in spite of what other people thought. Well, now—I took heart—maybe the situation wasn’t so desperate as I had thought. Perhaps we may have a live national taste in art, twenty or more generations later on. If there wasanybody not an artist himself, who had the honesty and courage which must be at the foundation of anything alive in artistic taste, why perhaps....
Just then a dreadful possibility came into my mind—perhaps it had been a wedding present from a wealthy uncle not to be offended?
On this my host and hostess came in. As we talked of the object of my visit (which had nothing to do with art) I was constantly spying on the expression of their eyes, listening half-hopefully, half-despairingly to the sound of their voices, watching feverishly every turn of expression in their kind, honest faces. I had never seen them before that dayand probably shall have no occasion to see them again. But I often think of them and wonder about them. They really looked as though they might be capable of not being ashamed to like a picture no longer in fashion. Perhaps theyhadkept that Breton on their walls out of sheer, honest, brave, artistic integrity....
But the more I think of it, the more unlikely it seems.
b. 1787; m. 1808; d. 1874
Of course I never saw her. She died years before I was born. But she left behind her a portrait so full of her personality that no living figure is more human to me than my great-grandmother.
I do not at all refer to the portrait over the dining-room mantelpiece, showing her as a withered old woman in a frilled cap, which is now the only tangible sign of her existence left in her old home. No; that might have been any withered old woman in a frilled cap.
There is another portrait of my great-grandmother not done on canvas with oils. Here are some of the strokes which one by one, at long intervals, as if casually and by chance, have painted it for me.
When I was about eight years old, I went out one day to watch old Lemuel Hager, who came once a year to mow the grass in the orchard back of the house. As he clinked the whetstone over the ringing steel of his scythe, he looked down at me andremarked: “You favor the Hawley side of the family, don’t you? There’s a look around your mouth sort o’ like Aunt Almera, your grandmother—no—my sakes, you must be her great-granddaughter! Wa’l—think of that! And it don’t seem more’n yesterday I saw her come stepping out same’s you did just now; not so much bigger’n you are this minute, for all she must have been sixty years old then. She always was thelittlestwoman. But for all that she marched up to me, great lummox of a boy, and she said, ‘Is it true, what I hear folks say, Lemuel, that you somehow got out of school without having learned how to read?’ And I says, ‘Why, Mis Canfield, to tell the truth, I never did seem to git the hang of books, and I never could seem to git up no sort of interest in ’em.’
“And she says back, ‘Well, no great boy of eighteen in the townIlive in is a-goin’ to grow up without he knows how to read the Declaration of Independence,’ says she. And she made me stop work for an hour—she paid me just the same for it—took me into the house, and started teaching me.
“Great land of love! if the teacher at school had ’a’ taught me like that, I’d ’a’ been a minister! I felt as though she’d cracked a hole in my head andwas just pouring the l’arning in through a funnel. And ’twa’n’t more’n ten minutes before she found out ’twas my eyes the trouble. I’m terrible near-sighted. Well, that was before the days when everybody wore specs. There wa’n’t no way to git specs for me; but you couldn’t stump Aunt Almera. She just grabbed up a sort of magnifying-glass that she used, she said, for her sewing, now her eyes were kind o’ failing her, and she give it to me. ‘I’ll take bigger stitches,’ says she, laughing; ‘big stitches don’t matter so much as reading for an American citizen.’
“Well, sir, she didn’t forgit me; she kept at me to practice to home with my magnifying-glass, and it was years before I could git by the house without Aunt Almera come out on the porch and hollered to me, that bossy way she had, ‘Lemuel, you come in for a minute and let me hear you read.’ Sometimes it kind o’ madded me, she had such a way o’ thinkin’ she could make everybody stand ’round. And sometimes it made me laugh, she was so old, and not much bigger’n my fist. But, by gol, I l’arned to read, and I have taken a sight of comfort out of it. I don’t never set down in the evening and open up the Necronsett ‘Journal’ without I think of Aunt Almera Canfield.”
One day I was sent over to Mrs. Pratt’s to get some butter, and found it just out of the churn. So I sat down to wait till Mrs. Pratt should work it over, munching on a cookie, and listening to her stream of talk—the chickens, the hail-storm of the other day, had my folks begun to make currant jelly yet? and so on—till she had finished and was shaping the butter into beautiful round pats. “This always puts me in mind of Aunt Almera,” she said, interrupting an account of how the men had chased a woodchuck up atree—who ever heard of such a thing? “Whenever I begin to make the pats, I remember when I was a girl working for her. She kept you right up to the mark, I tell you, and you ought to have seen how she lit into me when she found out some of my butter-pats were just a little over a pound and some a little less. It was when she happened to have too much cream and she was ‘trading in’ the butter at the store. You’d have thought I’d stolen a fifty-cent piece to hear her go on! ‘I sell those for a pound; they’ve got tobea pound,’ says she, the way she always spoke, as though that ended it.
“‘But land sakes, Mis’ Canfield,’ says I, all out o’ patience with her, ‘an ounce or two one way or the other—it’s as likely to be more as less, you know!What difference does it make?Nobodyexpects to make their pats just a pound! How could you?’
“‘How could you? How could you?’ says she. ‘Why, just the way you make anything else the way it ought to be—by keeping at it till itisright. What other way is there?’
“I didn’t think you could do it. Iknewyou couldn’t; but you always had to do the way Mis Canfield said, and so I began grumbling under my breath about high-handed, fussy old women. But she never minded what yousaidabout her, so long as you did your work right. So I fussed and fussed, clipping off a little, and adding on a little, and weighing it between times. It was the awfulest bother you ever saw, because it spoiled the shape of your pat to cut at it so much, and you had to start it over again every time.
“Well, you wouldn’t believe it, how soon I got the hang of it! She’d made me think about it so much, I got interested, and it wasn’t any time at all before I could tell the heft of a pat to within a fraction of an ounce just by the feel of it in my hand. And I never forgot it. You never do forget that kind of thing. I brought up my whole family on that story. ‘Now you do that spelling lesson justexactlyright,’ I’d say to my Lucy, ‘just the way Aunt Almera made me do the butter pats!’”
I was sitting on the steps of the Town Hall, trying to make a willow whistle, when the janitor came along and opened the door. “The Ladies’ Aid are going to have a supper in the downstairs room,” he explained, getting out a broom. I wandered in to visit with him while he swept and dusted the pleasant little community sitting-room where our village social gatherings were held. He moved an armchair and wiped off the frame of the big portrait of Lincoln. “Your great-grandmother gave that, do you know it?” he observed, and then, resting on the broom for a moment and beginning to laugh, “Did you ever hear how Aunt Almera got folks stirred up to do something about this room? Well, ’twas solikeher! The place used to be the awfulest hole you ever saw. Years ago they’d used it to lock up drunks in, or anybody that had to be locked up. Then after the new jail was built the sheriff began to take prisoners down there. But nobody did anything to this room to clean it up or fix it. It belongs to the town, you know, and nobody ever’ll do anything that they think they can put off on the town. The women used to talk a lot about it—what a niceplace ’twould be for socials, and how ’twould keep the boys off the streets, and how they could have chicken suppers here, same as other towns, if this room was fixed up. But whose business was it to fix it up? The town’s of course! And of course nobody ever thinks that he and his folks are all there istothe town. No, they just jawed about it, and kept saying ‘wa’n’t the selectmen shiftless because they didn’t see to it!’ But of course the selectmen didn’t have the money to do anything. Nothing in the law about using tax money to fix up rooms for sociables, is there? And those were awful tight times, when money came hard and every cent of tax money had to be put to some good plain use. So the selectmen saidtheycouldn’t do anything. And nobody else would, because it wasn’t anybody’s business in particular, and nobody wanted to be put upon and made to do more than his share. And the room got dirtier and dirtier, with the lousy old mattress the last drunk had slept on right there on the floor in the corner, and broken chairs and old wooden boxes, and dust and dry leaves that had blown in through the windows when the panes of glass were broken—regular dumping-ground for trash.
“Well, one morning bright and early—I’ve heard my mother tell about it a thousand times—the firstperson that went by the Town Hall seen the door open and an awful rattling going on. He peeked in, and there was little old Aunt Almera, in a big gingham apron, her white hair sticking out from underneath a towel she’d tied her head up in, cleaning away to beat the band. She looked up, saw him standing and gaping at her, and says, just as though that was what she did every day for a living, ‘Good morning,’ she says. ‘Nice weather, isn’t it?’
“He went away kind of quick, and told about her over in the store, and they looked out, and sure enough out she come, limping along (she had the rheumatismbad) and dragging that old mattress with her. She drug it out in front to a bare place, and poured some kerosene on it and set fire to it; and I guess by that time every family in the street was looking out at her from behind the window-shades. Then she went back in, leaving it there burning up, high and smoky, and in a minute out she came again with her dustpan full of trash. She flung that on the fire as if she’d been waiting all her life to have the chance to get it burned up, and went back for more. And there she was, bobbing back and forth all the fore part of the morning. Folks from the Lower Street that hadn’t heard about it would come up for their mail, and just stop dead,to see the bonfire blazing and Aunt Almera limping out with maybe an old broken box full of junk in her arms. She’d always speak up just as pleasant and gentle to them—thatmade ’em feel queerer than anything else. Aunt Almera talking so mild! ‘Well, folks, how are you this morning?’ she’d say. ‘And how are all the folks at home?’ And thenslosh!would go a pail of dirty water, for as soon as she got it swept out, didn’t she get down on her creaking old marrow-bones and scrub the floor! All that afternoon every time anybody looked out, splash! there’d be Aunt Almera throwing away the water she’d been scrubbing the floor with. Folks felt about as big as a pint-cup by that time, but nobody could think of anything to do or say, for fear of what Aunt Almera might say back at them, and everybody was always kind o’ slow about trying to stop her once she got started on anything. So they just kept indoors and looked at each other like born fools, till Aunt Almera crawled back home. It mighty nigh killed her, that day’s work. She was all crippled up for a fortnight afterwards with rheumatism. But you’d better believe folks stirred around those two weeks, and when she was out and around again there was this room all fixed up just the way ’tis now, with furniture, and the floor painted, andwhite curtains to the windows, and all. Nobody said a word to her about it, and neither did she say a word when she saw it—she never was one to do any crowing over folks—once she’d got her own way.”
The hassocks in our pew began to look shabby, and my aunt brought them home from church to put fresh carpeting on them. They suggested church, of course, and as she worked on them a great many reminiscences came to her mind. Here is one: “I used to love to ride horseback, and grandmother always made father let me, although he was afraid to have me. Well, one summer evening, right after supper I went for a little ride, and didn’t get home till about half-past seven. As I rode into the yard I looked through the open windows, and there was grandmother putting her bonnet on; and it came to me in a flash that I’d promised to go to evening prayers with her. I was a grown-up young lady then, but I was scared! You did what you’d promised grandmother you would, or something happened. So I just fell off my horse, turned him out in the night pasture, saddle and all, and ran into the house. Grandmother was putting on her gloves, and, although she saw me with my great looped-up ridingskirt on and my whip in my hand, she never said a word nor lifted an eyebrow; just went on wetting her fingers and pushing the gloves down on them as though I was ready with my best hat on. That scared me worse than ever. I tore into my room, slipped off my skirt, put on another right over my riding trousers, slammed on a hat, threw a long cape around me, and grabbed my gloves. As the last bell began to ring and grandmother stepped out of the house, I stepped out beside her, all right as to the outer layer, but with the perspiration streaming down my face. I’d hurried so, and those great thick riding trousers were so hot under my woolen skirt! My! I thought I’d die! And it was worse in the church! Over in our dark, close corner pew there wasn’t a breath of air. It must have been a hundred by the thermometer. I was so hot I just had to do something or die! There weren’t but a few people in the church, and nobody anywhere near our corner, and it was as dark as could be, back in our high pew. So when we knelt down for the General Confession I gathered the cape all around me, reached up under my full skirt, unbuttoned those awful riding trousers, and just cautiously slipped them off. My! What a relief it was! Grandmother felt me rustling around and looked over sharp at me, to see what I wasdoing. When she saw the riding trousers, she looked shocked, and frowned; but I guess I must have looked terribly hot and red, so she didn’t say anything.
“Well, I knew it was an awful thing to do in church, and I was so afraid maybe somebodyhadseen me, although old Dr. Skinner, the rector, was the only one high enough up to look over the pew-top, and he was looking at his Prayer Book. But I felt as mean as though he’d been looking right at me. Well, he finally got through the prayers and began on the First Lesson. It was something out of the Old Testament, that part about how the Jews went back and repaired the broken walls of Jerusalem, each one taking a broken place for his special job, and then how they got scared away, all but a few, from the holes in the walls they were trying to fix up. Dr. Skinner always read the Lessons very loud and solemn, as though he were reading them right at somebody, and he’d sort of turn from one to another in the congregation with his forefinger pointed at them, as if he meant that just for them. Whatdoyou suppose I felt like when he turned right towards our corner and leaned ’way over and shook his finger at me, and said in a loud, blaming tone, ‘But Asher continued andabodeinhisbreaches!’ I gave a little gasp, and grandmother turned towards me quick. When she saw the expression on my face (I guess I must have looked funny), she just burst right out into that great laugh of hers—ha! ha! ha! She laughed so she couldn’t stop, and had to actually get up and go out of church, her handkerchief stuffed into her mouth. We could hear her laughing as she went down the walk outside!
“You’d have thought she’d be mortified, wouldn’t you?Iwas mortified almost to death! But she wasn’t a bit. She laughed every time she thought of it, for years after that. It was just like her! She did love a good laugh! Let anything happen that struck her as funny, and she’d laugh, nomatterwhat!”
Later on, as we carried the hassocks back to the church and put them in our pew, my aunt said, reflectively, looking round the empty church: “I never come in here that I don’t remember how grandmother used to say the Creed, loud and strong—she always spoke up so clear: ‘From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost: The Holy Catholic Church: The Communion of Saints: The Forgiveness of sins—’ and then she’d stop dead, while everybody went on,‘The Resurrection of the body;’ and then she’d chime in again, ‘And the Life everlasting, Amen.’ You couldn’t help noticing it, she took the greatest pains you should. But if anybody said anything about it she always said that she didn’t believe in the resurrection of the body, and she wasn’t going tosayshe did. Sometimes the ministers would get wrought up, especially the young ones, and one of them went to the bishop about it, but nobody ever did anything. Whatcouldyou do? And grandmother went right on saying the Creed that way to the day of her death.”
On the hundredth anniversary of the organization of our parish there were, of course, great doings in the way of centenary celebrations. Many of the old rectors came back to visit, and to make after-dinner talks and to preach at special services. One of the most interesting of these old men was the Reverend Mr. Jason Gillett, who had been rector for a year shortly after the Civil War, when he was a young man just out of the Theological Seminary. He had since become well-known, one might say famous (in church circles at least) for his sermons of a fervor truly evangelical (so it was said), delivered in avoice noted for its harmony and moving qualities. We had often read about his preaching, in the Church papers. He had brought up from decay several old parishes and had founded one of the finest and most thriving in Chicago.
There was a stir when his return for a day was announced, and the morning when he preached, the church was crowded to the doors. He proved to be a spiritual-faced, white-haired, handsome old man, equipped with fine eyes and beautiful hands as well as his famous voice. He preached a sermon which held every one in the church breathlessly attentive. I noticed that his stole was exquisitely worked in gold thread, and after the service, when the Altar Guild were putting things away, we saw that his surplice was of extremely fine material, with a deep band of embroidery about the hem. “Loving lady-parishioners,” conjectured one of the Guild, holding it up.
“They say the women are always crazy about him, everywhere, and no wonder!” said another. “Such a fascinating, attractive personality.”
“How did you like his sermon?” I asked. Personally I had found it rather too dramatic for my taste. It rubs me the wrong way when I feel thatsomebody is trying to work my feelings up, although I always feel a little ashamed of this natural ungraciousness, which is labeled in the talk of the old people of our locality as “Canfield cussedness.”
One of my companions answered me, “Why, the tears ran right down my cheeks, towards the end of that sermon!”
And another added, “Such a power for good as he has been, all his life. Think of his having begun his wonderful work right here in our little parish.”
The door opened and the preacher himself entered in his black cassock, followed by a group of people. He was a little flushed from the handshaking reception he had been holding in the vestibule and still wore the affable smile which had gone with the handshaking. The men and women who had followed him in were still talking two or three at once, trying to get his attention, still fixing their eyes on him, unwilling to leave him, moved evidently by his mere presence.
“It’s a renewal of my youth to be here again in this dear old parish,” he said genially, using a set of inflections of his fine voice quite different from those of the sermon, “I find it all comes back to me with the utmost freshness. Ah, youth! Youth!”
He broke off to say in still another tone, “I knownone of you will object to my saying also that it is an immense relief to find the parish rid of that detestable incubus Mrs. Almera Canfield. You must all breathe a happier air, since she took her mocking cynicism into another world.”
A quick shifting of eyes, lifted eyebrows, and suppressed smiles told him that he had been indiscreet. He faced the uncomfortable little situation with a well-oiled ease of manner. “Have I offended some one here?” he asked, instantly, turning towards us. Then, seeing by my expression that I was the one involved, he said gallantly, “It’s not possible that so very young a lady can have any connection with a generation so long since passed away.”
“Mrs. Almera Canfield was my great-grandmother,” I said, perhaps rather drily. Not that I cared especially about Great-grandmother, of whom at that time I knew very little, and who seemed as remote from my life as Moses. But that same hateful, contrary streak in my nature was roused to resentment by his apparent assumption that a smile and a word from him could set anything straight.
He found the fact of my relationship and of my knowledge of it very amusing, “Where, oh, where, out of Vermont could you find a modern young person who even knew the name of hergreat-grandmother? I’m sure, my dear, that family loyalties are outlawed by such a long interval of years. And I’m also sure by one look at you, that you are not at all like your great-grandmother.”
He seemed to think, I reflected, that I would be sure to take that as a compliment. She must have been an old Tartar.
I could think of nothing to answer, and he turned away again, to go on chatting with the people who continued to hang on his words, laughing loudly when he said something playful, nodding a grave concurrence in his more seriously expressed opinions, their eyes always fixed on his.
They all moved away, out into the church and down the aisle and I did not see him again till that evening, when, quite unexpectedly, he appeared beside me in the break-up of the company after the large public dinner.
“I feel that I owe you an apology,” he began persuasively and courteously, “for having let slip that chance remark about a relative of yours, even so very far distant. I would not have said it, of course, if I had dreamed that any member of her family....” Up to this point he had used the same sort of voice and tone that he had employed after church that morning, but now he suddenly dropped into anothertone, quite different. I had a divination that it was not only quite different from any inflection he had used, but also not at all what he had had the intention of using. “I try to be fair ... to be tolerant ... to beforgiving, but really I can never forget the....” (it was as if a wave of lava had burst up out of the smiling pleasantness of his agreeable manner) “I simply can’t express to you the blighting, devastating effect she had on me, young, sensitive, emotional and ardent as I was at that time!”
He started at the violence of his own voice and glanced quickly around him as if to see whether any one else had heard it. And then he looked intensely annoyed by his own gesture.
“You are probably assuming that I refer,” he went on more quietly, but still pressingly (it was as if for some reason he quite cared to influence my unimportant opinion), “that I refer to her dictatorial assurance that she knew better than any one else how things ought to be run. Of course you must have heard plenty of stories of her overbearing ways. But that is not the point; no, although she was a hard parishioner on that account for a young clergyman struggling with the administration of his first parish. What came back to me, in a wave of bitterness as I stood up to preach to-day, was theremembrance of the peculiarly corrosive vein of irony, with which she withered and dried to the root any play of poetry or emotion in those about her. So far from feeling any natural, human sympathy with ardent youth, she had a cold intolerance for any nature richer or more warmly colored than her own. She made it her business to drop an acid sneer upon any expression of emotion or any appeal to it; and a life-long practice in that diabolical art had given her a technique of raw, brutal roughness, guaranteed to hamstring any spontaneity of feeling, any warmth of personality. I could quote you dozens of such poisoned shafts of hers.... Here’s one that came into my mind as I stood again in that pulpit, where I first dedicated myself to the service of God.