Chapter V

Madam Black had a French mother and a Russian father, an education partly French, partly English, and an English husband who brought her with him to America on a hunt for Fortune, to be found, presumably, on a tract of Virginia land bought, without seeing it, from an agent. The land proved a heinous disappointment. Mr. Black died. His wife was left with admirable powers and education, but with no money, and in what to her was a foreign country. She must sell, if she could, her poor piece of land. Needing lawyer's advice, she came to the nearest small town to her disastrous, stony mountain-side, and to Major Dallas's office under the court-house oaks. He gave her counsel; she sold the land, though for a tiny sum, and presently moved into the town, to a small, small white house behind syringa and althea bushes. The towns-folks discussed her, her foreign ways, her gestures, her peculiar, stripped, efficient housekeeping. She was a big woman, somewhat gaunt, but supple and powerful, with iron-gray hair, with a beak of a nose, and a mouth beneath, wide and wise and humorous. She spoke in Virginia a beautiful, pure, book English, but thought in three languages.

My aunt Kate, at Major Dallas's instigation, went to see her, liked her, went again, brought her to Flowerfield for two or three days. The children liked her. She had a great store of folk tales of all lands and she told them with the vivid distinction of a good witch. She was capable, as all her friends soon found out, as she herself with honesty acknowledged, of explosions of anger quite alarming to the uninitiated. But these never occurred oftener than once a week. Moreover, they were generously abstract. The individual was only chastised in the whole. The storm cleared the air, and until the next thunder-clap she was as good as sugar--brown sugar, maple sugar. She was a pianist of no mean ability, she had a wide knowledge of letters, she read and spoke English, French, Russian, and German--and she got along well with children.

Major Dallas and Aunt Kate had the same thought. In six months after she had taken the little white house, Madam Black closed it and came to Flowerfield as governess. I don't think anybody ever regretted it. The Dallases and she flowed together with a certain natural grace and strength.

I was nine years old. My mother's life from morn till night was filled with activities. She had a fair Southern education, and a beautiful, strong, lucid mind and heart that made the best of what she had. But she said that she saw that I was going ahead of her. (I could never go ahead of her in the things of truest value.) She taught me for two hours each day, but then things waited for her at the door. I see her now, sitting in a low chair in the flickering green light from the window, reading a letter from Aunt Kate, and then, the letter in her lap, looking at me drawing pictures on my slate. I was copying a ship out of my geography.

Two or three days later she and I took the old red stage at Whitechurch and went for a short visit to Flowerfield. Madam Black was there. My mother liked her, too. In less than a week we were back at Restwell.

I couldn't go to sleep that night. I sat up in my bed and stared at the starry squares that were windows. Then I took it into my head that there were giants in the room and that I had better go down-stairs. Mammy no longer had her bed in the corner, and I made sure through the open door that my mother was not in her room. I stole out of bed and over the cool, dark floor, out of the room and across the landing to the stair and half-way down it. Thence I could see in my grandfather's room, for that door, too, was open. Grandfather and mother and Aunt Sarah were sitting there, talking. I could not hear what they said--only the murmur of one voice, now of another. They looked so earnest! They all sat near the table, where were grandfather's books and papers, where he and my mother went over accounts together. The lamp that stood here made a kind of pale sunlight about them. Grandfather, with his white beard, looked like--like--like King David! This brought forth another imagination. We had a book of fine, tinted prints--_The Women of the Bible_. Mother and Aunt Sarah were sitting there out of this book. I had a curious feeling. The giants were forgotten. I sat on the stairs, holding my feet in my hands. The sensation was of being somewhere outside, looking in upon the world. After a time I started to speak--but they looked so earnest. I turned and without noise went up-stairs and across the upper hall and into bed. Anyhow, the giants were gone. I faced a square of branchy stars. One of them caught and held me ... and then I went to sleep.

The next morning my mother told me that when, in October, I went with Aunt Sarah to Flowerfield, I was not coming back when Aunt Sarah came. I was going to stay with Aunt Kate and Uncle John and go to school to Madam Black, with John and Miriam and Catherine and Lewis. At Christmas I should come home for a week, and in May I should come for the whole summer. And grandfather would see me sometimes at Flowerfield, and mother was certainly coming in the winter. And I was to be her Michael still, and learn, and grow--"grow always more good, more wise, my Treasure, my Blessing--"

It awed me to be leaving home. There was awe, too, in the thought of living at Flowerfield. I moved about, exalted. Space seemed to have enlarged between me and the sky, between me and the horizon. I experienced a desire for solitude. I achieved this on the side porch that gave on the lilac walk, and where there was nothing more disturbing than a procession of young turkeys, in and out of the light and shadow upon the grass. I sat here with my chin on my knees. Really to live--live half the time--at Flowerfield! Restwell was dear--Flowerfield was dear. I figured it out that, after all, a half to each wasn't a bad thing. Everybody at Restwell was going to write to me, and I was going to write to them. My, mother would write every week, and I was to draw pictures for her and send them. I dug out something else. "Every time I think of them I can see them." I shut my eyes. "Now I am thinking of grandfather. I see him. Now I am thinking of mother--"

I tried this with other persons. I was the experimenter, full swing. The going from home fell into the background. Persons and things in Richmond--at Whitechurch--at Flowerfield--I could see them, hear them! The train to Richmond--I could make that so real that I felt the velvet, smelled the coal smoke, found in my body the swaying and jolting, turned a little dizzy.... I left that and sat in Capitol Square, above me, against the blue sky, bronze General Washington. Consciously, with desire and forethought, I walked into the past. There had been a broken bench that we could not use, under the greatest tree, whence one might see General Washington to best advantage. I now mended the bench and sat there. I was on the road to discovery that where there's a will there's a way--to alter anything!

In October I went to Flowerfield. For the next four years I spent the major part of each year at Flowerfield. I learned there, I grew there, as in a spring season, as in south-by-west zephyrs.

Madam Black taught us in a bare, sunny room, in an ell of Flowerfield house. Outside were turf and a tremendous tulip-tree. Catherine and Lewis had their lessons early, were out and gone by eleven o'clock. John and Miriam and I were her real scholars.

I think that she was a born teacher. Madam Black--Madam Black, I find you in me at many turns--a welcome inflowing!

She had a cosmopolitan mind. She dwelt among ideas, hunted relations, pounced upon likenesses. She was as daring an explorer as ever sailed for the pole. Many a notion that I have watched emerge, in these later days, tentatively, slowly, even now weighed most doubtfully in the general hand, was hers in the 'seventies. She had a way of saying, "I fancy--" and then, from under her eagle nose out of her wide mouth, in her deep, positive voice came "fancies" of an extraordinary viability.

She was a geographer of the first water. With her for cicerone, we saw our earth throughout its structure, as pupils of our age, I am sure, very rarely see it. She had a genius for relating things, for continuities and correspondence, for the stroke of the eye. She ranged like an eagle, swooped and rose like one. The same traits appeared when she taught us history. We got out of "favored" lands and times and "chosen" people--chosen, at least, in any orthodox sense. The cells called Kings and Queens and Important Events and Great Battles ceased to protrude monstrously from the cellular tissue. The emphatic note, "Height of Mount Everest," became but an orderly detail in the passage, "Himalayas," as the Himalayas subordinated themselves to "mountains," and mountains remembered valleys, and both that they were of the lithosphere. When, for reasons, we came to majesties of form and height, to the pictured off, she could well make us see Mount Everest and the Himalayas. She herself knew Alp and Apennine and Caucasus. Remembering, I feel again snowy and deep-chasmed grandeur!

She did with watery surfaces as she did with the solid. No one who went to school to Madam Black might ever, for instance, see Niagara as a giant plunge out of nothing into nothing, nor a strait or channel like a waste snippet of thread. What came before and after, what flowed on the one side and on the other, what to any ranging eagle would be simultaneous, contemporaneous, she saw herself and made her pupil see. Niagara and Gibraltar Strait came into a water symphony that sounded from pole to pole, that ran, like Alpheus, underground, and flew in clouds in the air.

So with tribes, nations, races, species. Hers was a rich and large realism in which abstractions and universals became, as it were, tangible and visible, phenomena like other phenomena--to the born eagle phenomena into which other phenomena were resolved.

She was a bold reader. She had a friend in New York--a man doing some kind of research work--who sent her from time to time great parcels of books, English, French, and German. She used to sink like an eagle into these, to rise with meat in her talons.... These were the years in which, certainly to the mass of the United States, "Darwin" sounded mightily like "Antichrist," Huxley and Haeckel, and all their company, like the Miltonic lesser fallen angels. They were the years when throughout a wide swathe of society _Middlemarch_ was slurred because its author was not married to Lewes; when all French literature was called immoral, when the good died young in Sunday-school books, when Browning was thought unintelligible, when Ingersoll was certainly damned, when architecture and furniture went into a senile doze. Up a long stair from this, it was the period of Dickens and Thackeray, and Lord Tennyson was at his height of fame. But Madam Black belonged to force-lines in the background--reserves in the shadows of the future. She took from books hall-marked "advanced" what suited her, and flew on over the landscape.

Because of her very scope, she had a passion for the single word. Every word opened into the whole scope of things, as back of every facet opens the whole diamond. She had a drill for us that I hold to be a good drill for any. For half an hour each day she gave us words, one at a time, never more than a dozen in the half-hour--nouns and verbs and adjectives, later on, pronoun and adverb, conjunction and preposition. There seemed no lesson about it--we did not then repeat to her what we learned. We simply and quietly, in firelight or sunlight and each for one's self, regarded the word that her deep voice gave out and what it carried. The game was to see what volume was there and what vistas would open. Farmer--soldier--preacher--city--house--tree--sugar--salt--earth, water, fire, and air--working, playing, moving, resting--truth, wisdom, beauty, strength, and courage--moon, earth, and sun--hundreds of words.... To our young strength and powers they expanded as they might. We saw countries within countries. And we learned to pass the first gate of contemplation.

Again, myths. She had here an extraordinary knowledge. I have since learned that there was old scholarship in her blood. She told world-imaginings, world-symbolizations of its own drama, as a woman Homer might. Indian, Chaldean, Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew, Scandinavian--we knew the huge figures, localities, happenings. Moreover, she compared them, linked them for us until there was a great carcanet. It was not given to our years to see what was behind them all. But she told us that there was something behind them all, and that we would find it out for ourselves one day. In the mean time there was huge entertainment! We sat, rapt, before a Demeter-like woman.

She taught us arithmetic, put us into algebra, and the last year we were with her, into geometry. The last named was another strength. We learned to read French as we did English and to speak it fairly. We read German. We had little formal "Science." She taught us the constellations and the simpler sidereal wonders. And we had a clean, straight, honest, lofty physiology with never an organ or function blue-penciled. And here I praise the adult Forths and Dallases who, in a half-century that thought otherwise, said, "Give it to them thus."

Year after year at Flowerfield.... But at last there came letters for Madam Black from Russia. An estate had been settled, there was money--a brother in poor health, in the country near Moscow, longed to see her. Madam Black thought a night, then the next day told us she must go. Flowerfield grieved for that.... It was the springtime. In two weeks she was gone to New York, whence she sailed. For a long time letters from Russia came to Flowerfield. But five years after her going she was killed in a railway accident.