Chapter II: The Fourth (5)

At eleven o’clock we took a dejected orphan-asylum walk about the suburban streets in two long lines led by the older pupils of the more advanced school downstairs and followed by Mrs. White who, by constantly running back and forth in order to satisfy herself that no one was neglecting to “observe nature,” must have covered miles to our blocks. How we all loathed nature! I loved animals and plants, clouds and rain, snow and sunshine then as I do now, but “Nature” was something quite different. I don’t believe we ever knew what it was and probably connected the term in our minds not with the works of God themselves but with the inescapable obligation of perpetually fussing about them. I without doubt would have ended by becoming very fond of the White Maria’s shaggy old ponies, but the labored pretense that we were all dying to bring them a handful of oats for their Thanksgiving dinner and a dozen other pretenses concerning them ended by preventing it. Birds were really wonderful, heavenly creatures to watch and examine, but weeks of prattle about the Christmas present (seeds, bread-crumbs and more oats) of birds we had never seen, merely resulted in a band of ornithological cynics. This fictitious passion for just birds--disembodied, abstract birds, that Mrs. White entirely imagined for us and widely advertised--was taken seriously by our families for years. My grandmother fondly believed in it to the last and almost embittered my young life by bequeathing in her will three beautiful family portraits to my brothers, and to me the “nature lover,” the unwilling product of Mrs. White’s, a set of Audubon!

On our return from the walk Mrs. White inspected our lunch-baskets, confiscating what she considered injurious to our digestions and teeth and allowing us to fortify ourselves against further blesséd play and blesséd work with the remains. I have often wondered what actually became of the cake and candy she daily took from us “for our own good,” and I shouldn’t be surprised if she scattered it along the sidewalk or threw it into passing carriages. It would have been a natural reaction from her incessant official pother about “neatness and thrift,” but at the time we all of course firmly believed that she put the loot away in a pantry and that the whole White family lived on it for weeks.

Almost everything we learned at Mrs. White’s was sure to be incorrect to the point of imbecility. For I don’t know how long after leaving there I took it for granted that a thoughtful Creator had supplied dear Bossy with a “dewlap” in order that she could wipe dry each mouthful of wet grass before eating it.

“When Bossy goes out to the fields in the morning for her breakfast, this long, soft fold you see here under her neck” (pointing to the picture) “swings from side to side brushing away the damp and chilly dew,” Mrs. White had told us, and I need scarcely dwell on the disappointment and sense of injury I experienced when I subsequently sought Bossy in her graminaceous lair and watched her dewlap quite otherwise engaged. But even so, Mrs. White is no more, and anyhow I was always a facile relenter. At times I have been even grateful for Mrs. White’s. There was for instance the mystery of Mary Blake and the mystery of the White Maria. I have often been grateful for them.

Mary Blake was an overgrown girl in the school downstairs. She was a most pervasive lass--“a perfect romp.” We all knew her well. She belonged to a family prominent in our growing town, and although my family and hers were not intimate they no doubt would have thought they were had they unexpectedly met for instance on the spiral stairway of 7 Rue Scribe. There were two sons and four daughters in Mary’s family and none of them was named Jane. This is important. Years elapsed. I had spent considerable time abroad, I had been occupied in growing up, in going to school, in preparing for college. There were still four Blake girls, but my interest in them was vague, collective. Then one day I heard of the marriage of Jane Blake, which surprised me somewhat as there had never been a Jane Blake. This led a short time later to my expressing to Mrs. Blake a belated interest in Mary, at which Mrs. Blake looked mystified for a moment and then said, “I think you must mean Susan.” I didn’t mean Susan but I refrained from saying so, and since then I have been haunted by the mystery of Mary Blake. Apparently there is no Mary Blake and never was one, although in answer to my feverish questionings several persons who were at Mrs. White’s with her have assured me that they remember her perfectly. Every now and then I meet Jane Blake and talk to her, wondering the while if she can be Mary. That she is dark and Mary was blonde is perhaps negligible. Once I sat next to Jane at dinner and when, after a pause in our conversation, I said, “Come, now--aren’t you really your sister who died?” She answered coldly that none of her sisters had ever died and immediately afterward refused to let the servant help her to any more champagne.

The mystery of the White Maria I have never tried to solve. It is enough to know that it was and to wonder if I shall ever again see anything so lovely. The White Maria, as has been mentioned, was a large, square box of black oilcloth. It’s inner surface, however, was white, soiled to a neutral gray. On our outward journeys when I noticed this at all it was only to feel the tragedy of life with a greater intensity. But on the return.... To state in words what we saw when returning gives but little idea of it. We were always tired, silent and a trifle sleepy when we started for home, and we at once leaned back and quietly watched for It. It often appeared but sometimes it refused to show itself for days, and I then used to wonder if I had ever really seen it. The perpetual fascination it had for us was a most complicated one, consisting as it did of the mystery, the beauty, the unreality and the reality of the thing itself, together with the fact that Mrs. White was somehow being thwarted. The black canopy of the White Maria, in a word, sought to imprison us, to impose an impenetrable barrier between us and the outside world, but as we jogged along, the houses, the trees, the horses, the wagons and the people we passed were reproduced in miniature on one of the inside walls. The details were always clear enough to let us know where we were; frequently they were perfect. The little panorama, furthermore, was without color, which gave it an additional, ghostly charm. I have never been hypnotized, but I think in staring at this dreamlike, dissolving procession I used to be very near the hypnotic state. At times when the White Maria drew up at our front door I was asleep and it would take me half an hour or more to get back again into my body--I can remember the sensation even if I can’t describe it. The moving-picture shows of to-day seem to me like a crude and vulgar attempt to recall and commercialize the age when we were mystics and had visions.

THE END