Chapter II: The Fourth (4)

“The world,” declared Mrs. Robinson, “is moving with a rather frightening, breath-taking rapidity. Even parents, comparatively young, no longer live the lives of their children. I’m not such an old fool as to believe for a moment that I know what my boys are doing or what my girls are thinking. I used to consider it possible; I now am convinced that it is impossible. Such character as I have developed and solidified, I achieved under circumstances that do not now obtain, although I tried, wrongly perhaps, to keep them up, to prolong them and make them influences in the lives of the beings for whom I am responsible. My greatest claim to modernity consists in the fact that I have gracefully recognized and accepted defeat. My children are my children, but they also are children of a period in the world’s history to which I really do not in a heartfelt way belong. This in many respects is sad, it is even at times horrible. But here we are! What are we going to do about it? Ann Veronica belonged violently to her time. Her father belonged tenaciously to his. To preserve a united family, what, given these conditions, must happen? Simply concessions. To preserve the happy family, Ann must always forfeit some of her intelligence and modernity; Papa and Mamma must always concede to--oh, all sorts of little things (sometimes they are dreadfully big things) that they abominate. Parents and children have to scare up a kind of domestic philosophy and meet one another half way. When they don’t there is no longer a ‘united’ family. There is a drama of some sort and Mr. Wells sits down and writes a story about it. Ann was the kind of offspring who would not concede. Her father was the kind of parent who would not concede. You have seen what happened. I am not so sure that Mr. Wells himself is aware of what is really the lesson of his novel, but it is that sixty rarely has sympathy with and genuine understanding of twenty, and twenty in its heart of hearts looks upon sixty, not as perhaps experienced and wise, but as rather absurd. Concessions! All life is an endless succession of them. If we didn’t at every moment make them, everybody in the world would have to live in absolute solitude, and even then he would have to concede to the forces of nature, the sun and the rain, the cold and the dark, hunger, weariness and sleep.

“Now stop this wrangling, Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones,” the good lady went on, “and both concede a little. You, Mr. Smith, must concede that the book is interesting and written with a skill, a gift for observation and expression possessed by few, although I shall allow you to retain your temperamental bias and consider the story uncalled for and the treatment coarse.

“You, Mr. Jones, must concede that this manner of writing, of depicting life, is an innovation in English; that although you enjoy it, it may not be a wise one; that instead of merely amusing and doing good it may have the power to do harm, and that Mr. Smith is entitled to his opinion even if it doesn’t coincide with yours. There is much to be said in favor of Mr. Smith’s opinion.”

“And what is your opinion, Mrs. Robinson?” I at this point inquired.

“Oh, I haven’t any,” she replied gayly. “A really wise old woman never has.”

HOLIDAYS

With me, at least, holidays finally became an issue that had to be met, faced and, once and for all, disposed of. For years I half-consciously postponed the matter and went through many of the motions supposed to be essential to their respective spirits. On the Fourth of July, for instance, I would try to feel noisily inclined and patriotic, although my patriotism is not of a blatant variety and I had begun to dread noise almost more than I dreaded any other ill to which the human flesh is heir. On Christmas I endeavored, in the most painstaking fashion, to scare up a good-will-to-everybody sensation that I didn’t sincerely possess. On Thanksgiving Day I tried to observe the convention, not of giving thanks, for that has never become a convention, but of pretending that I desired more than usual to eat, which I never did and never do. But, all the while, firecrackers were becoming more and more abhorrent, geniality around the Yule log more of a bore, the sight of excessive food more repulsive, and, finally, I began to realize what was happening to me. Quite simply and naturally and inevitably, darling “was growing old; silver threads among the gold,” and not only silver threads (they are the least of it) but a lot of other things were taking place. It is all very interesting, and one of the most interesting things about it is the incredibly short time in which it seems to happen. Perhaps my memory is extremely erratic; in fact I feel sure it is, for sometimes last week is almost a total blank, whereas twenty and occasionally even thirty (dear Heaven!) years ago are vivid, clear-cut and intelligible. The more ancient date often seems more real and alive than the later. I haven’t the vaguest idea of what I did last Tuesday. There undoubtedly was a last Tuesday, but now, as far as I am concerned, it did not exist, although I am reasonably sure that while it ticked itself away I was clothed and in my right mind. On the other hand, I can most accurately recall, for example, the early morning of the Fourth of July, 1884. How we “conspired at every pore”! I remember going to bed most respectably and innocently at the usual time, waiting until the more mature members of the family were sound asleep and then sneaking down to the drawing-room and dozing restlessly on a sofa until about half-past two <small>A.M.</small> At that weird and ecstatic hour we emerged from a French window, extricated our firecrackers from the little “dog-house” in which we had secreted them and proceeded to make the rest of the night altogether odious. It comes back to me that an accidental spark popped into the ammunition box and, with a heart-rending, rip-snorting crash, flash and agonized detonation, destroyed everything in about one and a half tragic minutes. It was astonishing and glorious while it lasted, but it lasted such a short time that the rest of the night would have been left, so to speak, on our hands, if someone had not reluctantly tiptoed to his house and produced the supply he had been hoarding for the daylight hours. Then, with a huge bonfire, we all but ruined a beautiful elm tree, set fire to the fence, burned great chasms in the wooden sidewalk and had a perfectly delightful time generally.

I refer to these ordinary activities of the American male child only because I feel as if I had been engaging in them yesterday morning instead of twenty-five years ago, and because, in spite of my photographic recollection, so many queer things have taken place. To begin with, whereas I still, in memory, am able to reëxperience the exquisite thrill I had when, at the age of thirteen, I would hold a giant firecracker in my hand until the last advisable fraction of a second. I now have a horror of giant firecrackers, or indeed of anything that noisily explodes with possible dire results. In Mexico, for instance, when my brother and I are making, on mule back, a journey in an isolated part of the country, he always insists on my carrying a revolver in a large, visible holster. Mexicans have a most erroneous idea that with a revolver all Americans have an accurate and deadly aim. My brother considers this a great moral support and declares that the idea ought to be encouraged. Well, I carry the revolver, but I don’t mind confessing that I am much more afraid of it than I am of anything else in Mexico. The dangerous implement keeps bumping against my hip, reminding me that it is there and that it might tear six large holes in me at any moment. It is always an immense relief to arrive somewhere and, in a gingerly fashion, take it off and put it on a table or a bureau. Yet twenty-five years ago, nothing could have made me feel so proud, so brave, so competent to face the entire world as a revolver bumping against my hip. The old feeling for the Fourth of July has simply gone, disappeared, evaporated in some inscrutable fashion. It now has become for me a day of genuine misery, unless I am happy enough to spend it where it is not “observed.” In addition to loathing the noise because I can’t help it, I more and more every year hate it because I am increasingly depressed by the knowledge of all the so easily preventable mutilations with which it is associated; I hate it because of the pain I have known it to inflict upon the sick and dying. Even many of the lower animals of my acquaintance, dogs and horses in particular, regularly once a year spend twenty-four hours of mental and physical agony on the Fourth of July. While trying to reassure an old dog who had crawled under a bed and collapsed with a nervous chill, while trying to calm the uncontrollable terror of a steady, sensible, intelligent horse, I have often fervently wished that there had been no Revolution and that we had remained a British colony.

Thanksgiving Day became a horror of an entirely different kind. As I look back on the evolution of what has finally become my attitude toward holidays, I am convinced that the impulse to my detestation of the well-meant festival was given originally by the annual proclamations of the Presidents of the United States and the governors of the state in which I happened to have been born and brought up. To be President of the United States of America is, we are told, to hold the highest possible public office in the universe, but apparently one of the conditions of election to this exalted estate is that no President shall ever officially write anything for publication that is not obvious, pompous, platitudinous and unreadable. The printed remarks of governors are even, if possible, more so. Reading, once in so often, dear, dead old phrases about the “universal prosperity now existing throughout the length and breadth of this great land,” was, I am sure, what first began to make me realize that Thanksgiving Day is a most dreadful affair.

If the Fourth of July drives one distracted with its fiendish noise, the day of giving thanks has almost the same effect if one pays any special attention to it, by reason of its unnatural quiet. It comes at a dreary time of year when outside there is nothing in particular to do and nowhere in particular to go. One stays in the house and, some time during the day, eats a variety of rather unusual and not necessarily agreeable things one would never think of ordering at a restaurant or a club. Until one has freed oneself from the thralldom of holidays (I have), the semi-historical, semi-culinary torpidity of Thanksgiving Day usually upsets one’s routine, one’s digestion, one’s entire scheme of life. It is as if the Fourth of July had eloped with Christmas and the result of the union had been a kind of illegitimate Sunday.

And then Christmas. As I grow older, its original significance, its reason for being a holiday at all, becomes more full of meaning, more touching, more beautiful. It is not in the least obligatory to be religiously inclined in order to be profoundly moved by the symbolism of its pathos and poetry. The incident stands out, sums up, crystallizes for us, all that in our gentlest and best moods we believe about the great facts of birth, of motherhood, of infancy, of the family relation. It is our standard, our ideal; a serious contemplation of it must arouse in us everything that is most kindly, affectionate, generous, humble. The birth of the Infant Jesus, the attendant circumstances, the general scene and the significance of it all is, I happen to know, one of the few things that can cause a hard-faced, avaricious old billionaire to sink his head on his library table and burst into uncontrollable sobs.

But Christmas itself! I mean the day we have made of it. It is really a terrible day unless, perhaps, you are pretending to relieve it with the children which some of us don’t possess. Just as I can recall delirious Fourths of July, I can recall Christmas days that were a scream of delight from energetic dawn until tired and sleepy midnight. The delicious, exciting smell of the pine tree, the feel of the “excelsior” in which the fragile ornaments were packed, the taste of those red and yellow animals made out of transparent candy, the taste of the little candles (for some strange, youthful reason we always purloined several of the candles and chewed them, even green ones, in secret. I can’t imagine now why they didn’t poison us), the thrilling effect of cotton batting spread on the floor at the tree’s base (there were always, of course, acres of real snow just outside the front door but it quite lacked the power to entrance possessed by a few square feet of cotton batting)--for years I haven’t smelled or tasted or seen any of these things. But how wonderful they used to be. Even the Christmas we spent at the ages of eight and five, in Gibraltar, and where our tree consisted of a small orange tree propped up in a slop jar, was the real thing. Every moment of it returns palpitating with the old Christmas sensation.

But now the day, aside from its real significance, to which apparently no great attention is paid, has, as far as I am concerned, lost all its old magic and charm. Of late years, when I have been sufficiently foolish to attempt to “make merry” on Christmas, I have found the twenty-fifth of December merely a memory that one can revive, but to which one may not give life or even a very successful, galvanic semblance of life. If, nowadays, I permitted Christmas to make any particular impression on me, which I don’t, it would, I fear, be chiefly an annoying impression that I ought to be spending more money than I can afford in order to give, to persons I take but little interest in, presents they don’t need. At any rate, that is the principal impression I seem to derive from the ante-Christmas conversation of most of my acquaintances who still conventionally observe the day.

In fact, the whole question of holidays had to be met and solved, and I rejoice in the fact that I have at last done it as successfully as have many other much more sensible people. It is the easier to do, I suppose, if circumstances have often necessitated one’s spending the more important days in an environment lacking the slightest suggestion of domesticity. I have spent Christmas in a hotel in Athens, in a hotel in Paris, on shipboard, on a railway train, in the desert of Sahara, in tropical countries where it was all but impossible to recall anything that remotely suggested the annual festival. Once I spent all of Christmas on the back of a lame mule.

This sort of thing, unless one happily possesses a temperament unusually innocent and robust, has but one result: holidays become mere dates on a calendar. They are welcome intruders if one happens to be tied down day after day, as most of us are, to any one exacting and monotonous occupation, but the way to enjoy them, to extract the best from them is, I have found, to ignore them. It is an immeasurable satisfaction when you at last haul down the flag and tell yourself that you don’t in the least care what other people are doing on a certain day; when you finally cast out the disturbing belief that you ought to engage in some irritating or melancholy activity, generally supposed to be in keeping with the occasion. To observe Christmas by not observing it at all but by doing what you really feel like doing on a day of leisure, to dine on bread and butter and a cup of tea on Thanksgiving Day because they are what you most want, to seek on the Fourth of July a locality in which there is absolute quiet, all require some courage and, I regret to say, a certain age, but it is worth it.

SERVANTS

Polite existence seems to be composed, in part, of a warp (or do I, perhaps, mean a woof?) of funny little pretensions and affectations, of rather meaningless standards and conventions, make-believes and poses. The polite world, broadly speaking, always seems to be divided into two classes; those who swallow it all whole, who believe in it, who practice and live up to it, and those who really don’t, but who pretend they do for fear of forfeiting the esteem of the others. We all know persons who quite simply have been born into the world with what might be called aristocratic temperaments and instincts. They do not affect it; they cannot help it; it is innate, and they automatically observe the conventions because they like to, because it is the line of least resistance. On the other hand, no end of us go through almost precisely the same motions, but without conviction, and, when we feel reasonably sure that we sha’n’t be found out, we relax and give a certain amount of free play to what happens to be our natures.

In few human relations does this fact seem to me to be more clearly revealed than in the attitude of the polite toward their servants. There is really, if one pauses to think about it, a tremendous amount of bunkum in the alleged relations between most of one’s acquaintances and the people who attend to their various needs. I don’t say all, because the sincere exceptions at once suggest themselves, but in the case of most I am inclined to believe that the matter is largely regulated by “what other people would think,” rather than by natural promptings--by human spontaneity. How often have I heard a woman or a man scornfully exclaim, “Servant’s gossip!” or, “She’s the sort of woman who listens to her servants!” The first great crime apparently is to take the slightest interest in the point of view, the ideas, the information or the conversation of one’s servants. Conventionally they are, none of them, supposed to have intelligence, integrity or the gift of being agreeable. Of course no end of people converse with their servants incessantly and derive from the proceeding much interest and amusement, but they very rarely admit it, and when they do, it is always in a deprecating, apologetic fashion calculated to impress you with the fact that the incident was quite out of the ordinary--which, secretly, I never believe it is. “Sometimes I let Mary Ann run on. For a maid she is really rather,” etc. For some, to me inscrutable, reason, hardly anybody admits that he ever talks to a servant on a basis of intellectual equality, and furthermore, hardly anybody ever admits, without in some way qualifying the admission, that a servant is good-looking; that he, or she, as the case may be, in different clothes and removed from the yoke of servitude, might be indistinguishable from the persons he serves, and in many instances much more charming in appearance.

“When Connor, the second man, is dressed up, he isn’t a bad-looking man at all. You might almost mistake him for something else,” I have had a fat, coarse-skinned, rich, middle-aged woman half humorously assure me in speaking of one of her footmen, whose mere presence in the room made her entire family appear to be even more common than they actually were. The aristocratic tendency must have been omitted from me, for I have never been able to detect on my part the slightest desire to apologize for either intelligence or beauty wherever I wonderfully discovered it. If it is there, it is there, and instantly recognizable. But in the case of servants, it, for some reason, does not seem to be quite “the thing” to admit it.

Frankly, I like to talk to servants and always do when I feel conversationally inclined, and one of them is available. I extremely enjoy hearing what they have to say about their employment, their wages, their ambitions, the kind of treatment they receive from their employers and the characteristics of their employers. From servants I have learned many curious and amazing things about people I thought I knew tolerably well and really didn’t because I had never been their servant. And I am not in the least ashamed of having learned these things by chatting pleasantly with servants; I am glad of it, for it has added greatly to my understanding of people and life. Nothing is more interesting than the contemplation of our little world from as many different angles as possible. The servant’s angle is one of the most acute. From servants one learns how a striking variety of persons conduct themselves under almost all the circumstances to which human beings are subjected. It is, indeed, from them alone that one can find out about such matters; one’s personal experience, after all, is necessarily limited to so few intimate, human contacts and incidents. To talk frankly with intelligent servants is to receive a great light and to re-awaken the interest in one’s fellow-man that at times has a tendency to doze.

Stewards on ocean steamers invariably repay one with reflections on the world in general for whatever time one spends with them. They see such an unending procession of human beings that, from the remarks of smoking-room stewards, I have felt that, for them, the individual has almost ceased to exist and is instinctively pigeonholed, as a type. They seem to be able to take a man’s measure at a glance, and they usually take it with astonishing accuracy. I don’t mean that their appraisal begins and ends with the probable amount of the gentleman’s tip; they are far from being as avaricious as they are supposed to be. They know whether he will be exigent or easy to please, whether he will have consideration for them, or keep them needlessly running back and forth from a half-consciousness that it is within his right, according to the manner in which the world is arranged, to do so. They know at once whether he will regard them as a mere machine, or a natural enemy, or a servant with several almost human attributes, or a human being who chances, for the time, to be acting in the capacity of one who serves. Those, broadly speaking, are the four ways in which servants are usually looked upon. Personally, I never can quite comprehend the point of view that does not see a servant in the fashion I have mentioned last. And yet, judging from remarks that are made to one by both women and men about their servants, and from the testimony of those engaged in this form of labor, this manner of appreciating the servant class does not seem to be a usual one.

Many persons I know actually employ, in speaking to a servant, an entirely different tone of voice from the one they make use of habitually. In giving an order, or asking a question, the sounds ordinarily produced by their vocal chords undergo a sudden and entire change; they become dry, hard, metallic, and as impersonal as the human voice can sound. It is not that they are angry or irritated, or have hard hearts; it is merely because they are speaking to a servant, and for some reason, altogether obscure to me, this proceeding necessitates a difference in vocal pitch, key and inflection. Several persons of whom I am, for many reasons, extremely fond, have developed this characteristic to such an extent that I have long since avoided dining with them, meeting them in clubs, or, in fact, having any relations with them that involve the presence of a so-called “inferior.” I find it too embarrassing, too mortifying; I always have an all but irresistible desire to exclaim to the patient, well-mannered human being who is endeavoring to make us comfortable: “Please don’t mind him, or feel badly about it. He isn’t at all the insufferable ass he sounds like.” Long observation has convinced me that this fashion--it seems to be more a fashion, after all, than anything else--is not nearly as prevalent in the West as it is in the East. With but few exceptions, the men at the club I most frequent in the West speak to the servants in their ordinary tone of voice; the same natural and courteous tone they would adopt in speaking to anyone else. Just what this proves, I can’t quite make up my mind. It might mean that in the West we are rather more human and kindly, or it might, perhaps, mean that we have not become so accustomed to that unfathomable stratum of the race known as English servants.

English servants in nowise resemble the servants of other countries. The status of everyone of them is definitely fixed; I feel sure it appears somewhere in that unwritten constitution of England about which one hears and reads so much. They seem to be a class apart, a caste. Their outlines are defined with the most absolute exactitude. They never merge or melt or even temporarily fade into other and different outlines. They are what they are, and they know it and accept it. About them has grown up a conventional manner of treating them, of thinking about them, and alluding to them. It isn’t exactly a cruel manner. It is the manner to which I have referred; one from which every personal, sympathetic, genial quality has been carefully eliminated; one in which the necessary words are reduced to their simplest, most direct and unadorned minimum. “Good” English servants not only do not mind this, they are used to it and expect it. The part they play in life includes being verbally kicked for so much a year. It is because of the greater prevalence in the East of English butlers and footmen, I am sometimes inclined to believe, that one more often hears the “correct” tone in speaking to a servant in New York and Boston, than one does in the cities of the West.

But there are other ways of making servants “know their place” of which we in the West are by no means guiltless. One woman of my acquaintance invariably refuses to engage a maid who possesses that all but indispensable appurtenance known as a “gentleman friend.” Another, for some cryptic reason, never allows a servant to take a trunk upstairs. All trunks must be unpacked and repacked downstairs. I don’t know why; neither do they. It is merely one of her edicts, and it has contributed not a little to the local “servant problem.”

For the employer’s view of the local “servant problem” I have never been able to feel the slightest sympathy, as I can imagine no proposition more naïvely selfish. The problem, as far as I can formulate it, seems to consist of the fact that many persons in the world are disinclined to give up their liberty, and to consecrate their entire lives to the whims and mandates of some tiresome woman who yearns to underpay them. How otherwise admirable women resent having to remunerate their cooks! I know they do, because I have frequently heard them as much as say so. Looked at honestly, the whole problem resolves itself into just this: servants are a luxury. Any one of us could make beds, dust, scrub, wait on the table, open the front door, wash clothes, and cook. (As a matter of fact, I have done, at various times, all of these things with complete success.) But for one reason or another we prefer to have somebody else do them for us. We could do them ourselves, but we desire the luxury of a servant, or of half a dozen servants. Yet most persons seem to be distinctly reluctant to part with the amount of money a servant can once a month command. They complain bitterly that wages are becoming higher. Why shouldn’t wages become higher if parlor maids and cooks can command them? Servants, I repeat, are a luxury. They do something for us that we could do ourselves, but don’t wish to. We deny ourselves other luxuries when we can’t afford them; why not deny ourselves servants if we can’t conveniently pay the wages they are entitled to? It is an odd fact that we don’t. Instead, we pay the wages and then complain and lament and get together and discuss “the servant problem.”

A cook, who had lived for several years with a family of my acquaintance, abruptly left them because another household offered her a dollar a month more. In my opinion, her action was quite right. Why shouldn’t she have done so? A dollar is, after all, a dollar. But the family she left, a kind, almost intelligent family, at that, has never ceased to talk of what they call her “ingratitude.” I confess I am unable to see it. Like millions of other American families, they seem to think that to drudge under the same roof with them was a privilege, but if one pauses to examine the situation, it really wasn’t.

I wish I had space enough in which to recall some of the servants I have known best, beginning, at a very early age, with one German and three French governesses, continuing with dear Mrs. Chester, who took care of my rooms when I was in college, and about whom I have written minutely and affectionately elsewhere; of Miss Shedd, the washwoman, to whom I left in my will the photograph of a Madonna she greatly admired, but who happened to die before I did, recounting, it gave me pleasure to be told, my various virtues in her last delirium; of the Madrassi servant I had in India, who, for no particular reason, used to burst into tears once a week, and declare that I was his “father and mother”; of the Jap, who looked down on me because he was a “Master,” whereas I was only a “Bachelor,” of Arts; of Aunt Nancy, who died last winter, after continuous, unbroken service in our family for seventy-seven years (the last fifteen or twenty years, I confess, did not include occupation other than keeping alive on rye whisky and pipefuls of cut plug tobacco); of the marvelous servant in a popular Paris restaurant, whose only function was “to pacify the guests.” Although dressed as a waiter, he never actually waited. He, instead, drifted about from table to table engaging one in conversation, soothing the complainers, lulling the impatient. He was tall and thin with a long, intelligent nose. Balzac would have immortalized him. He had a genius for tiding over the irritation of red-faced men in a hurry. When he saw that one had almost reached the point of explosion, he would saunter up to the table and begin to talk. In a few seconds the impatient, red-faced man would be proclaiming his opinion on some burning question of the day, and before he had finished, his belated order would be served.

Like everyone else, I have ideas for some five hundred books and fifty plays. One of the books will be called “Servants.”

MRS. WHITE’S

This morning I read in the paper of the death of Mrs. White, and the short, inadequate paragraph startled me, not exactly because Mrs. White was dead, but rather because until yesterday afternoon she was alive. I had assumed that the good lady (how I wish I could remember just when I left off hating her and began to think of her as a good lady!) had died years ago and there was something grotesque and uncanny in her suddenly up and dying again out of a blue sky, so to speak. It was very much as if someone should pop out of an old tomb in a cemetery, take a hasty look around and then pop in again. If I had not long ago ceased to feel bitterly about her, I should have told myself that it was just like Mrs. White, that she was not a sincere woman, that she had never inspired me with confidence. But water has been flowing under the bridge for thirty-two years since my tears used to flow at Mrs. White’s, and it so long ago eroded my bitterness that I now cannot recall when it was I last had any. Had I been asked yesterday how old Mrs. White would be by this time, I should have answered very conservatively for fear of seeming to exaggerate, “About a hundred and ninety-six,” and the paper tells me she “passed away” in her seventy-first year. Good heavens--then when I knew her and regarded her as a senile monster with a gizzard of granite, she must really have been a nice-looking young woman of thirty-eight. How very strange.

Whenever I begin to think of Mrs. White’s I have an unusually uncontrollable desire to write my memoirs. I’m sure I don’t know why I have always so longed to write my memoirs. Perhaps it is because I know that memoirs, however inane, are the only form of literature that is absolutely sure of getting itself read. Then, too, they must be so easy to produce. They don’t have to be by anybody in particular, and they present no technical difficulties whatever. They have to begin somewhere, but one need never be bothered by wondering how they ought to end. They don’t end, they merely stop. Very often indeed they refuse to do even that. Madame de Genlis, for instance, after minutely covering the ground in her “Souvenirs,” trimmed a new pen and, without pausing to separate herself into chapters or to take breath, dashed off eight obese volumes of “Mémoires.” Like all works of this nature, they are “perfectly fascinating” and are still read, but there is no reason whatever why I shouldn’t produce eight volumes just as twaddlesome. For beyond writing materials and a tireless forearm there are in the manufacture of memoirs only two essentials: one must live during an interesting period of the world’s history and one must from time to time meet, or at the very least see, a variety of well-known persons. These conditions are extremely difficult to avoid. They arise quite naturally after one has taken the first costly and fatally easy step of being born at all. Seventy years afterward every period of the world’s history is intensely interesting and nowadays it is quite impossible for the modest, the retiring, the obscure, to evade the overtures of the celebrated. The manner in which they lie in wait for us unknown ones, hunt us down, in fact, is pathetic but brazen. They infest otherwise restful and pleasant clubs, they pervade dinners, they hang on the edge of evening parties, demanding to be met and talked to when one would rather dance or look on. They are always cropping out or “butting in” to the interruption of one’s satisfactory routine, just as the marvels of the Yellowstone Park impose upon the placid, smiling face of nature. When they happen to be royal, they ruin health-resorts, make good hotels uninhabitable, render null and void the printed schedules of railways. One summer in Paris I spent most of five weeks in vainly endeavoring to dodge the Shah of Persia. I hardly ever went anywhere that he and his gentlemen in waiting didn’t arrive a few minutes later and upset my plans for the day. On account of him a brutal and licentious soldiery has driven me from the Louvre, the Luxembourg and the Pantheon with drawn swords, and shoved me around and around the foyers of most of the music halls, but later on I shall, no doubt, refer to him thus: “When not long afterward I was greatly shocked by the news of this pleasure-loving but beneficent ruler’s assassination, I recalled his vivacious, oriental, if at times somewhat drowsy personality with genuine regret.” (Sunlight and Shadows of My Long Life, Vol. VI, p. 982.) And a year ago in South America, where I naïvely supposed that I should certainly be safe, I had scarcely set foot within the city limits of Buenos Aires before I was, metaphorically speaking, drugged, sandbagged and introduced to Mr. William Jennings Bryan. In his pseudo-presidential frock coat and square-toed kid shoes he looked precisely like a portrait of himself on the front page of _Puck_ after it has been fingered for a week in a barber shop.

“‘Yes,’ he replied with the virile hand grasp that has changed the vote of millions, ‘yes,’ he heartily agreed, ‘the days are hot in South America but the nights are cool, and I always maintain that cool nights are more than half the battle.’ Except for the sorcery of his voice and the poignant pleasure he took in making my acquaintance, I think it was this recurrent note of the man’s wholesome optimism that most profoundly impressed me.” (Shadows and Sunlight of My Short Life, Vol. IX, p. 1024.) I left Buenos Aires at once and went to Montevideo, but literally in less than fifteen minutes after I disembarked and strolled up to the principal Plaza I absent-mindedly followed two fat gentlemen in evening dress (it was three o’clock of a fine afternoon) into a public building of some kind, and immediately found myself eating candied pineapple and drinking Pan-American toasts in warm, sweet champagne, with the President of Uruguay. The distinguished, the celebrated, the notorious, the great--from one’s earliest years it is impossible to elude them.

Presidents! I shall devote sixty-five printed pages to them, beginning with the summer evening when on an errand of mercy (a friend of mine had robbed the till of a grocery store and had sent for me from the police station) I became submerged in a sea of human faces that were waiting for the President and Mrs. Cleveland, and lost in about five minutes a new four-dollar straw hat, a scarf pin, the left sleeve of my coat (an intoxicated patriot pulled it out by the roots and waved it) and nearly, my eager, useful life. For a middle-aged woman clinging to a window below which I was helplessly imbedded suddenly fainted and fell on me. The crowd was so solidly packed that we were unable, for an eternity, to stuff her into an interstice--to restore her right side up to the perpendicular, and all the time we were doing our best to control her arms and legs, and she was kicking noses off with her heels and gouging eyes out with her thumbs, the people in the window were throwing, first glassfuls, then pitcherfuls, and finally pailfuls of water on us, and beseeching with paroxysms of mirth, “Won’t somebody _please_ bring a little water; a lady has fainted.” As for writers, opera-singers, bishops, actors, diplomatists, Napoleons of finance and members of the nobility, they are always scuttling about nowadays. “It were a sorrow to count them.” I shall make them say some of the most surprising things, but in the case of persons who have died I shall write my memoirs conscientiously throughout and record only the remarks they would have enjoyed making but were unable to think of at the time.

My audience at the age of eight with His Holiness Pope Leo XIII, I have always thought would open volume the first most auspiciously. One could draw such a charming little picture of the ivory-white, ethereal old man laying his hand for a moment on my shock of yellow hair and smiling affectionately at my wondering, upturned face. I remember I held the ends of his fingers and was beginning to examine his ring when someone prodded me in the back and in a hoarse, agitated whisper, reminded me to kiss it. I’m sure I could do all sorts of pleasant things with that unearthly smile and tremulous blessing and sunny hair and upturned face, but chronologically Mrs. White’s takes precedence, although even Mrs. White’s is not the incident in my intellectual development that I first remember. Sometime before then the detached, austere figure of a beautiful woman became part of my consciousness and recollection and has marvelously remained so ever since. She was at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 whither I was taken almost in the arms of a fond, and in that instance foolish, grandmother. Gone, gone is the exhibition; I recall nothing of it except a broad, hot walk in a park, bordered by gorgeous flowers. But at the other end of it, no doubt in “Agricultural Hall,” alone on a platform and surrounded by the ingenuous Americans of that day, stood the woman. Jets of ice water played gently upon her soft and gracefully molded limbs, for they were of butter and far from acclimated to the debilitating atmosphere of Philadelphia in July. I loved that oleomarginal morgue and screamed to be taken back to it whenever I was, as I had to be from time to time, forcibly removed. I can’t now remember the appearance at that time of anything or anybody else, even of the grandmother who chaperoned us, but I should instantly recognize the dear, long since melted work of art in any creamery of the world.

Mrs. White’s was a parental mistake. Some children are born without the kindergarten temperament, and when this happens the effort to develop it is usually futile. Not that my mother consciously attempted to do so. A short time ago I asked her why she had been guilty of sending me to Mrs. White’s, of blighting even in the bud an originally fine mind, and she was obliged to confess she didn’t know. There was in the act no high and definite concept of education. I suspect her of motives as mixed as they were worthy. By sending me to Mrs. White’s she could relieve the household of my beloved but exhausting society for hours and hours and hours at a time, she could “help Mrs. White along” and she could give me the opportunity of learning “how to observe.” Mrs. White’s was the first of Froebel’s infantile observatories to make its appearance in our town and strange things were expected of it.

The prospectus said that “the busy baby fingers” were “trained from the first to coördinate and keep pace with the germinating mentality” which, I was to find out, was merely a polite paraphrase of the good old expression “unmitigated hell.” Every morning a dire conveyance locally known as the “White Maria,” drawn by two rusty, long-haired bay ponies and driven by Mr. White who was likewise long-haired, rusty and bay, careened up to our door at half-past eight and shortly afterwards, depending on the length of time it had taken to extricate me from the banisters of the front stairs among which I had entangled my arms and legs and between which I had thrust my head in order to render my removal as difficult and painful as possible for all concerned, my father would emerge from the house flushed, panting but triumphant with me, screaming, kicking but defeated in his arms. He would then transport me, still howling, to the White Maria, thrust me in, slam the door (it opened at the back) and return to exclaim to my mother, “I really don’t see how we can keep this up much longer.” Once inside the White Maria the busy baby fingers began straightway to coördinate and keep pace with the germinating mentality by transforming the dusky interior into a veritable black hole of Calcutta. I slapped faces, pulled hair, kicked shins, threw lunch-baskets on the floor and stamped upon their contents, while the other children, goaded on to madness and piercing shrieks, ran amuck and did the same. Mr. White never interfered with this perambulating inferno both because he was of an incorrigible cheerfulness--the result of a severe sunstroke--and because he couldn’t see it. As one of Mrs. White’s specialties was the observation of nature in all its various, ever pleasing and instructive moods, the superstructure of the White Maria was a kind of limousine of black oilcloth that at any season of the year effectually shut out air, light, the passing landscape and also Mr. White. The “precious freight” (as Mrs. White called us) within could therefore dismember one another undisturbed. After stopping at several more houses to recruit our spent legions we finally arrived at the school, furious, tearful, disheveled, hating life as we have never hated it since, and proceeded at once to praise God in song and thank Him for our manifold and inscrutable blessings.

“Oh, blesséd work,
Oh, blesséd play,
We thank thee for
Another day,”

was the mendacious refrain of every stanza. When sufficiently irritated by anything I can still sometimes remember the tune. Later in the morning we were supplied with round flat disks like poker chips and again burst reluctantly into melody, exclaiming this time, as we shied the disks into a basket on the floor,

“Did you ever, ever play
Skipping pebbles on the bay,
On the [something-or-other] water?”

Just what kind of water it was, I have never been able to recall. The missing adjective has worried me for years. All over the world I have lain awake at night skipping pebbles on the bay for hours and wondering whether the water was “shining” or “glassy” or “rippling” or “placid” or “deep blue.” Metrical exigencies of course insist that the name shall be writ in water of two syllables and I have often cajoled myself into a troubled sleep by almost deciding that this particular water must have been “pretty.” But even “pretty” lacks the certain completely vapid authenticity that ever eludes me.

The blesséd play was ghastly enough but the blesséd work was torture. I was endowed with neither skill nor patience and at that time I could not lose my shyness before strangers except when I lost my temper. The public exhibition of my inability to “coördinate” was a daily anguish, and I do not yet understand how I ever at last achieved the unspeakably hideous mat of magenta and yellow paper that after the death of my grandmother I found spotlessly preserved among her most cherished possessions. But I not only did--I furthermore succeeded after days and days of agony in constructing a useless, wobbly, altogether horrible little house out of wire and dried peas. It was characteristic of Mrs. White to select from the comprehensive inventory of the world’s possible building materials, wire and dried peas.

If Mrs. White had now and then betrayed the impatience, the annoyance, the despair she had every reason to experience over my stupidity and awkwardness, if at the “psychological moment” she had occasionally spoken sharply, blown me up as did the teachers later at the public school, the effect I am convinced would have been definite and salutary. But hers was the haggard benevolence of the child-gardener in its most indestructible form. All day long sweetness and light glared from her eyes like pharos rays that faileth not because they’ve been wound up. There was in the loving expression around her mouth something appallingly inanimate, objective, detachable; one felt that it hadn’t grown there, it had been put. It bore about the same relation to reality as does the art of the confectioner. It lay against her teeth like the thin white icing on a cake, and the hand that itched to box an ear faltered in its flight pausing to caress a curl. It terrified me to realize that the perishable, narrow strips of glazed, colored paper we tried to weave into mats, and the dried peas with which I finally builded better than I knew were, even as the hairs of our heads, all numbered. This was for the purpose of teaching us neatness and thrift--the husbanding of our resources. To crumple the former or scatter the latter was, we knew, a crime, but Mrs. White’s method of calling our attention to it was merely an insult to the intelligence. The punishment was a deliberate misfit, an elaborately artificial evasion of the point at issue. When, for instance, a dried pea would slip through my clumsy fingers and rattle over the uncarpetted floor with what sounded to me like the detonations of artillery, Mrs. White never told me to wake up and be more careful of what I was doing. Instead she would coo like a philandering pigeon and murmur:

“Why, laddie--what would the hungry little birds say if they were to see _all_ that nice food wasted!” When panic-stricken at the number of my crumpled failures I feloniously thrust them into my pocket, she would fish them out with sweet amaze, exclaiming:

“Why, dearie--how did _these_ get here? Does any little girl or boy know how _all_ these poor little strips of paper got into the very bottom of Charlie’s dark pocket?” When, as once in so often happened, I would “all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself and curse my fate,” she never told me to stop at once and behave myself; she would open her eyes to their incredulous roundest, slightly drop her lower jaw, wonderingly scan every face and then purr:

“Why, manny--what’s become of _all_ the smiles?”

There was invariably a reply to these inquiries and it was almost as invariably furnished by one Adelaide Winkle, a dreadful child, but one more sinned against, I now appreciate, than sinning. Forced to the limit in the hothouse of the home, and deeply imbedded in the fertilizing approval of Mrs. White, she was in all our gay little parterre the most brilliant and the most noxious bloom. At the age of seven she already had the executive air of a woman who has long presided over meetings. She also played the piano, danced fancy dances, sang, recited, wore three rings, a necklace and a red plush dress. I hated her, even more if possible than I hated Mrs. White, for she not only kept an eye on my shortcomings, she formulated them into ready words and by request smugly proclaimed them. But it was the manner in which Mrs. White exploited her before strangers that most enraged me. When visitors appeared, as they often did, for a kindergarten under cultivation was a decided novelty, Adelaide was called upon to execute her entire program from A to Izzard. She sang, she elocuted “Bobolink, spink, spank, bobolink,” she played her show piece (“Fairy Chimes”) on the-piano, she withdrew to an adjoining room and tripped coquettishly in again, strewing, like the springtime, an armful of tissue-paper roses, and last of all she gave with experiments a short discourse on geography that brought tears to the eyes of the most criminal. The experiments were evolved in sight of the audience with the aid of a large wooden trayful of sand and a tin dipperful of water. Under Adelaide’s precocious fingers these helpless elements gave a presumably correct rendering of the Book of Genesis in action, becoming at her will a continent, a river, a lake, an island, a peninsula, a mountain. One downward thrust of an unerring thumb upon a soggy peak and lo! the mountain was a volcano which, Adelaide always ended the lecture by informing us, “Spouts when in a state of ac-tiv-it-y, fire, smoke, glow-ing stones and mol-tennn law-vaw.” Powerless to protest, and crushed beneath the weight of my own incompetence, I have sat through the performance of this revolting rite as often as three times in a single morning.

Revenge came slowly. It took nineteen years to arrive, but it arrived. Unduly familiar in childhood with continents and dizzy heights, Adelaide, as she matured, reached out, expanded, longed to become a world-power. At the age of twenty-six, therefore, she eloped with a French “count,” who not only failed to observe the convention of proving to be a waiter or a hairdresser, he absolutely failed to be anything at all and Adelaide ever since has had to support him.