Chapter IV: Part 4

I cannot forget the slightest shade of his expression as he stood one day, on the platform of his classroom, chalk in hand, ready to write out an outline on the blackboard, waiting, while the yelling crowd of “_manifestants_,” mostly young men in flowing black neckties, with straggling attempts at beards on their pimply faces, stamped and hooted and shrieked out, “Dirty Jew! What were you paid? Shut up! Shut up! What was your price, dirty Jew?” and other things less printable. And yet, although I can shut my eyes now and see that harsh, big-nosed, deeply-lined old face, with the small, bright eyes under the bristling white eyebrows, I can not think of any words to describe its expression--not scornful, not actively courageous, not resentful, not defiant; rather the quiet, unexcited, waiting look of a man in ordinary talk who waits to go on with what he has to say until a pounding truck of iron rails has time to pass the windows. He stood looking at his assailants, the chalk ready in his bony fingers, and from him emanated so profound a sense of their entire unimportance, of the utterly ephemeral quality of their emotion compared to the life of the consonant he was about to discuss, that little by little they were silenced. Their furious voices flattened out to an occasional scream which sounded foolish even to their own ears. They looked at each other, got up in a disorderly body and stamped out of the room. The last one might have heard Professor Meyer’s high, squeaky voice stating, “Thus in Picardy and in the north of Normandy, Latin _C_ before _a_ did not undergo the change noted in other provinces, and we still find it pronounced....”

The pale, keen seminarists in their long, black gowns, and the American girl, whipped out their notebooks and were at once caught up into the Paul-Meyer world where no storms blew.

When, three or four years after the beginning of this friendship--it was not precisely that, but I cannot think of another name to call it--I made my final choice and stepped out of his safe, windless realm into human life, it was with some apprehension that I went to tell him that I was engaged to be married and would study Philology no more. I might have known better than to be apprehensive. What did he care? What was one more or less among the disciples of Philology, as long as the words were there? Also, he laughingly refused to consider my decision as final. He seemed to stand at the door of Philology, calling after me with perfect good humor, as I walked away, “When you’re tired of all that, come back. I’m always here.”

In the years after this, whenever we passed through Paris I went to see him, stepping back into my girlhood as I stepped over the threshold of the École des Chartes. Professor Meyer was very old now, but showed not the slightest sign of weakness or infirmity. One evening when I went hurriedly to say good-by before we sailed for home, I found him in his study, in that rich, half-basement room, lined with books. The green-shaded lamp burned clear and steady as though there were no wind in the world to shake a flame. The gray, plain, old man looked up from the yellow parchment he was deciphering, and in a sudden gust I had a new revelation of the insatiability of the human heart. I was a complete, fulfilled, vigorous woman, a happy wife, a writer beginning to feel an intoxicating interest in creative work, joyously awaiting the birth of my first child; but I knew for an instant there, the bitterest envy of the lot of the old scholar, half buried though he was in the earth, safe in the infinite security of his active brain.

The last time I saw him was two years later. We had been in Italy and were to pass through Paris on the way home. My little daughter was eighteen months old, a mere baby still, and I wrote Professor Meyer to ask him if he could not for once reverse the usual procedure and come to see me. He answered, setting a day, and informing me that he had been and still was very ill. “I will give you details when I see you.”

When he came into the room I was shocked at his appearance, and horrified when he told me what had happened to him. He had been as usual in the summer, at Oxford, delving in the unclassified treasures of the Bodleian, and had started home. The Channel steamer arrived late at night at Boulogne, and he had chosen to sleep there, instead of taking the night train to Paris.

He had gone to sleep apparently in his usual health, but when he woke up in the morning he had lost his control of words. He could not bring them into the simplest order. He could not command a single one to his use. He could not say who he was, nor where he wanted to go, although he knew these facts perfectly. The moment he tried to speak, there swooped down between him and his meaning, a darkening throng of words. All the words in the world were there, Greek, Sanscrit, Provençal, Italian, Old-French, tearing furiously through his mind. But not the simple words in his own language to say that he was Professor Paul Meyer of the École des Chartes, who wanted to buy a ticket to Paris. He stood there, helpless, facing the staring chambermaids, cut off from them, from every one by this wild, invisible storm. They thought him an idiot, escaped from his friends, and ran away from him. As he told me about it, he looked sick and gray, and the sweat stood out on his forehead.

It had lasted for three days. For three days and three nights he had felt himself drowning in words, words that flooded up about him so that he was fighting for air. Never for an instant was he able to take his attention from their crazy flight through his mind, and never able to stop one long enough to use it. He suffered, suffered more than he had thought any human being could and retain consciousness, had after the first day fallen into a high fever, so that they feared for his life. Hour after hour he had lain on his bed, helpless, trying with all his strength to fight away those words long enough to remember what he wished to say.

And then, on the morning of the fourth day, click! Something snapped into place inside his mind, and there he was, very worn, very weak, but perfectly himself again, Professor Paul Meyer of the École des Chartes. He had reached home safely, though strengthless and exhausted, and the next morning had wakened again to that horror. It had lasted an hour then, but it had come twice since--once as he was lecturing before his class!

He never knew when it might be upon him. As he opened his mouth to speak at any moment, he could not be sure that words would not burst from his command again. Even as he told me this, he glanced at my baby daughter, whom I had brought out to show him. For an instant his face whitened in so terrible a glare of panic that I screamed and clutched his arm. It was over. He was drawing a long breath and wiping his shaking lips with his handkerchief. “For an instant as I looked at her I could not think of the word ‘baby,’” he said pitifully. “It was there, waiting to come on me again.”

It seemed to me that he was not fit to go about the streets alone, and when he started to go away I asked him if he would not like to have me take him home. He hung his proud old head and said nothing. I went to get my hat and as no one happened to be at home with whom to leave the baby, I took her on my arm.

We went silently through the familiar Paris streets, the stooping old man towering on one side of me, the rosy baby heavy on my shoulder. When we reached his door, his concierge saw us and came out to meet us, nodding knowingly to me, and behind his back, tapping her forehead. I took his great bony old hand for a last clasp and said good-by. He went away up the stairs led by the concierge.

Three months after this I read in a newspaper a cabled notice of the death of the distinguished scholar, M. Paul Meyer, founder and for many years head of the École des Chartes. He died, so the notice said, “from an obscure form of aphasia.”

“WHILE ALL THE GODS ...”

“_While all the gods Olympus’ summit crowned,
Looking from high to see the wondrous sight._”
ILIAD, XXII.

I was spading up the earth in the dahlia-bed, when the children came up, a shouting band of them, just out of school, and noticed that the angleworms were “out.” This first, indubitable sign of spring in Vermont always suggests to adolescent Vermonters the first fishing expedition. But ten-year-olds and under think of the early brood of first-hatched chicks.

“Hey, Jimmy, _angleworms_!”

“Carl, run get a can!”

“Here’s a fat one!”

They swooped down on me and squatted along the edge of the spaded earth, pecking and snatching and chattering like a flock of sparrows. As I spaded on, I heard bits of their talk, “Won’t the chicks just love them!” “First worms _those_ chicks ever saw.” “No, Carl, that’s too few, let’s wait till we get a lot. It’s such fun to drop in a whole bunch.” “They _love_ angleworms so!”

Then I heard the inevitable fanciful suggestion from the imaginative one of the group, “I bet we seem to the chicks just like giants ... no, giants are always mean ... like gods.”

They fell on this idea, chattering and snatching, as they had at the worms: “_Let’s_ be gods! I’ll be Jupiter.”

“I want to be Mars.”

“Loki! Loki!”

“I want to be Thor!”

“No, _I_ want to be Thor!”

“I was just going to be Thor, myself!”

Everybody wanted to be Thor, it seemed. They trooped off to the poultry-yard, still disputing the question.

When I passed the brooder-house a little later, a group of exasperated gods hung over the low wire-netting, gesticulating and crying out on the idiocy of chicks. They fell on me for sympathy, and from their babbling account I made out that the chicks had acted just as chicks always act and always have acted from the beginning of time.

The gods had proudly put down in the midst of the little world of their beneficiaries the mass of angleworm wealth which they had gathered with such good intentions of giving pleasure.

“All they had to do was to pitch right in and enjoy themselves,” cried Jupiter, wrathfully.

And what had they done? Well, first of all they had been afraid, running to look at the squirming heap of treasure, peeping shrilly in agitation, and running frantically away with fluttering wings and hearts.

The circle of omnipotents, hanging over the wire-netting had been able to endure this foolishness with an approach to the necessary god-like toleration of the limitations of a lesser race. One of the Thors, it seemed, the six-year-old-one, had tried to hurry up the progress of the race, by catching one of his pin-headed charges and holding him firmly in a benevolent small hand, directly in front of the delicious food, “where he couldn’t _help_ seeing how good it was, seems ’s if,” explained Thor Number Three, to me.

But the chick had, it appeared, been perfectly capable of not seeing how good it was, because his mind was entirely taken up With his terror at being held. He had merely emitted one frenzied screech of horror after another till the other chicks began to run about and screech too, and the older, more experienced gods had sharply told young Thor that he didn’t know so much about this god-business as he thought he did, and that experience had told them the only thing to do was to let the chicks alone till they got used to a new idea. That always took forever, they informed their young colleague.

So after this they had waited and waited and _waited_, while the chicks fluttered, and peeped and ran away from what they really wanted above everything; from what the gods had so kindly put there for them to enjoy.

“Gee _whiz_!” said Mars disdainfully. “Wouldn’t you think they’d know enough for _that_! There was room for every last one of them to stand around the pile, and eat all they wanted, without stirring a toe.”

Finally, one bold adventurer had struck his beak experimentally into the pile, pulled out a tasty piece of meat, and turned aside to gobble it down.

And _then_ what?

Did the other chicks follow his sensible example and begin at last to profit by their opportunity.

“No! no! no!” A chorus of all the gods assured me that nothing like that had happened. Instead, with shrill twitters of excitement, all the twenty or more chicks had thrown themselves on that one, to wrest his bit from him.

“Honest to goodness, they _did_!” Loki affirmed to me, passionately, as if feeling that I could not possibly believe in such unreason if I had not seen it.

The chick with the worm had taken to his heels, unable to swallow his prize because of the hunt against him. Up and down the little world of their yard, he had run frantically, wildly, and silently (because of his mouth being full). And up and down, wildly, frantically and vociferously (their mouths being empty) his fellow-chicks had pursued him, bent on catching him and taking away from him whatever it was he prized enough to try to possess. As he turned and doubled to escape them, they turned and doubled in a pack, slipping, falling, and trampling on each other in their blind fury.

Presently, “What do you _think_!” cried the oldest of the Thors. “He got so rattled that he lost his piece of worm out of his mouth, but the others didn’t give him time to tell them that. Anyhow, they’d yelled and carried on so, they had him up in the air. He didn’t know by that time what he _was_ doing; and he kept on legging it as hard as ever, and they after him.”

By and by, this insane flight and agitation had so exhausted them all that they were staggering feebly on their tiny legs, and unable to emit more than hoarse squawks as they ran. Then, apparently by chance, as he darted zigzag to and fro, he had run under a corner of the brooder. Instantly ... ah-h-h, the grateful warmth and darkness had suggested rest to his weary soul; with a long murmured “che-e-eep” of utter relief, he had settled down against the wall of the brooder to close his eyes. And each of his pursuers, as they dashed in after him, had seized on the Heaven-sent opportunity for rest after the terrible tension of the struggle for existence, imposed on them by a cruel fate, and had with a sigh and a relieved, whispered twitter, given himself over to sleep and dreams.

At the time when I came up, every chick was sound asleep in the brooder, while outside in the middle of their world, lay the untouched pile of angleworms, bare and open to view under the bright spring sky.

“Can you beat it!” said Mars contemptuously.

He turned away from such unimaginable imbecility to a new idea, “Say, kids!” he bellowed, although they were all within touching distance of him, “let's be cops and robbers!”

They flared up like tinder to a spark, “All right! I’ll be Chief of Police!”

“I’ll be a detective!”

“I’ll be the robber captain ... cave’s under the hay, as usual.”

“No, _I_ wanted to be robber captain!”

“No, me, me!”

They all wanted to be robber captain, it seemed. They streamed away to the barn, wrangling over this.

All but one. The youngest Thor, newer than the others to the god-business, still hung over the wire-netting, grieving, “Seems ’s if ... if we could only _tell_ them! They _love_ angleworms so!” he said pityingly. “If I could only think of some way to _teach_ them how to stand around quietly, and each one get all he wanted to. They’d have such a _good_ time!” he yearned over them.

As I said nothing, he asked of the world in general, “Why won’t they? Oh, why _won’t_ they?”

I let fall insidiously, “I wonder how the angleworms like it?” The little god stared at me with startled eyes; and then at the worms. He looked at them as though he saw them for the first time. His tender young face was fairly vacant with his surprise before a new idea.

Then he began slowly to climb over the wire-netting.

When I went back to the dahlia-bed, he was carefully burying the angleworms again.

His young face wore an expression of puzzled bewilderment.

SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

When the elders of our family could think of nothing else to worry about they put in their time to good advantage on little Cousin Maria Pearl Manley. Yes--Maria Pearl--that was really the poor child’s name, given in baptism. You can see that her troubles began early. That name was symbolical of what her life was to be, sharply divided between her mother’s family (they were the ones who insisted on the Maria) and her father’s folks, who stood out for the Pearl. Her father had died before she was born, and her mother lived only a few months after the baby came, and was so mortally ill that no one thought of naming the poor little girl. It was after her mother’s death, when the two hostile families could collect themselves, that the long struggle over the child began by giving her that name.

Thereafter she was Maria for six months of the year, the period when she stayed with the Purdons; and Pearl the other half-year, when she was with her father’s family, the Manleys. “The poor little tyke, not even a fixed name of her own,” my grandmother used to say, pitying the child’s half-yearly oscillations between those two utterly dissimilar houses “where there’s nothing the way it should be in either one!” The circle of compassionate elders used to continue, “Dear, dear! What can the poor little thing ever learn, with such awful examples always before her eyes.”

As I look back now, I must admit that such severe characterizations were really not due to the natural tendency of all elders to be sure that children are being badly brought up. Those two houses which formed the horizon of Maria Pearl’s life were certainly extravagant examples of how not to conduct life. The Purdon grandfather and grandmother and aunt were the strictest kind of church people (the kind who make you want to throw a brick through the church-windows), narrow, self-righteous, Old-Testament folks, who dragged little Maria (the “Pearl” was never pronounced inside their doors) to Church and Sunday-School and prayer-meeting and revivals and missionary meetings, and made her save all her pennies for the heathen. Not that she had very many to save, for the Purdons, although very well-to-do, were stingier than any other family in town. They loved money, it tore at the very fibers of their being to part with it, and they avoided this mental anguish with considerable skill. Although their competent “management” allowed them to live comfortably, there were few occasions which brought them to the point of letting any actual cash out of their hands. The dark, plain, well-fitting garments which clothed little Maria were never bought, but made over out of her grandmother’s clothes; the soap which kept her clothes immaculately clean had cost no money, but was part of the amazing household economies in which old Mrs. Purdon was expert and into which she introduced Maria with conscientious care. The child learned to darn and patch and how to make soap out of left-over bits of fat, and how to use the apple-culls for jelly and how, year after year, to retrim last season’s hat for this.

From morning till night she lived in a close, airless round of intensive housekeeping and thrift. She spread newspapers down over the rugs, so the sun should not fade them; she dried every scrap of orange peel to use as kindling, she saved the dried beef jars to use for jams, she picked berries all day long instead of playing, and then sat up late with Aunt Maria and Grandmother, picking them over and canning them, on the stove in the woodshed, to avoid litter in the kitchen. She always wore gingham aprons, even to school, which no other children did, and she was treated as though she had offended against the Holy Ghost, if she forgot to wash her rubbers and put them in their place in the closet under the stairs. She was rigorously held to a perfect performance of her share of the housework, making up her bed with the fear of the Lord in her poor little heart lest the corners be not square enough, poking desperately at the corner of the windows she washed and polished, and running her finger anxiously over the dishes she wiped to be sure they had that glass-smooth surface which only repeated rinsings in very hot water can give. Then when all was done, her reward was to take her seat in their appallingly neat sitting-room and, to the accompaniment of Aunt Maria’s reading aloud out of a church paper, to set tiny stitches in the stout, unbleached cotton of which her underwear was made. They were really dreadful, the six months she passed with her mother’s people.

But the other half-year was scarcely better, although she might have journeyed to another planet with less change in her surroundings. When the day came, the first of January, for her departure from the Purdon household, her solidly-constructed little trunk was filled with her solidly-constructed little clothes, her hair was once more rebraided to an even harder finish, her face was once more polished with the harsh, home-made soap, and her nails were cut to the quick. “It’s the _last_ time the poor child will have any decent care, till she comes back,” Grandmother Purdon would say bitterly, buttoning up with exactitude the stout, plain warm little coat, and pulling down over Maria’s ears the firmly knit toque of dark-blue wool. They all went down to the station to make sure she took the right train, and put her, each of them separately, in the hands of the Conductor. They kissed her good-by, all but Grandfather, who shook hands with her hard. It was at that moment that Maria’s frozen little heart felt a faint warmth from the great protecting affection they had for her, which underlay the rigor of their training and which they hid with such tragic completeness.

The first day of the arrival at the Manley’s was always a dream of delight! To emerge from the silent rigidity of the Purdon house into the cheerful, easy-going, affectionate noise of the Manley home, to exchange the grim looks of Grandmother Purdon for the exuberant caresses of Grandmother Manley; to leave behind all stringent admonitions to put your wraps on a certain hook, and to be allowed to fling them down on the floor where you stood.... Little Pearl (she was never called Maria by the Manleys) felt herself rebounding into all the sunshine and good-nature, as a rubber ball rebounds from a hard stone wall. She flung herself around Aunt Pearl’s neck, and paid back with interest the “forty thousand kisses” which were the tradition in that home. She flung herself into play with the innumerable little cousins, who cluttered up the floor; for there was always a married aunt or two back home, with her family, while an invisible uncle-by-marriage tried somewhere in a vague distance, to get a hypothetical job. She flung herself into her bed at night joyfully reveling in the fact that its corners were not turned squarely, and that the pillow-case had last seen the wash-tub on about the same date that Aunt Carry’s husband had last had a job. It was a care-free dream to go to bed whenever she pleased--eleven o’clock if that suited her taste--with nobody to tell her to wash, or to brush her teeth, or comb her hair; and to lie there watching Aunt Carry and Aunt Pearl, who always sat up till midnight at least, putting their hair in curl-papers and talking about the way the neighbor next door treated his wife. This was life!

But already the very next morning the dream was not quite so iridescent, as with no one to wake her, she opened her eyes at twenty minutes of nine, and knew that she had to be at school at nine! She sprang up, shivering in the cold room (Grandfather Manley never could manage the furnace, and also there were periods when there was mighty little money to buy coal) and started to claw herself into her clothes. But always just at first she forgot the Manley ways, and neglected to collect everything she had taken off, and put it under her pillow, the only spot in which you could keep things for yourself in that comfortably communistic family. Her shoes were gone, her nice new calf-skin school shoes. She went flying out, comb in hand, tearing at the tangles in her hair, as she went, asking if anybody had seen her shoes. Aunt Carry, still in her nightgown, with a smeary baby in her arms, said, yes, she’d let her Elmer have them to run down to the grocery store to get some bread. Somehow they’d got out of bread and poor Aunt Pearl had had to go off to her work with only some crackers to eat. Surely little Pearl didn’t grudge the loan of her shoes to her cousin. The bread was for all of them, and Elmer couldn’t find his shoes, and anyhow one of them had a big hole in it and the snow was deep.

“But, Aunt Carry, how can I get to school? I’ll be late!”

“Well, gracious, what if you are! Don’t be so fussy! Time was made for slaves!” That was Aunt Carry’s favorite motto, which she was always citing, and for citing which there were plenty of occasions in her life. Little Pearl thought somewhat resentfully, as she rummaged in her trunk for her other shoes, that if Aunt Carry had to enter the school-room late and get scolded, she’d think differently about time! But anyhow it was fun to wear her best shoes if she liked, and to watch their patent leather tips twinkling as she scurried about. They twinkled very fast during that quarter of an hour, as Pearl collected her wraps (her mittens she never did find after that day) and tried to scare up something for breakfast in the disordered kitchen, where the cat, installed on the table, was methodically getting a breakfast by licking the dirty plates clean. Pearl was not so lucky, and had to go off to school with a cracker in one hand and a piece of marshmallow cake in the other. The less said about her hair the better! Grandmother Manley’s “forty thousand kisses” were not quite so wonderful this morning as they had been last night.

At noon Pearl ran home, her stomach in her heels, all one voracious demand for good food. Aunt Carry was crocheting by the window and there was no sign of any lunch. “Mercy me!” cried Grandmother Manley, “Is it noon? Why, how the morning has gone!” And then with the utmost compunction they both rushed out into the kitchen and began to hurry with all their might to get something for Pearl to eat. The kitchen fire was pretty low, and there were no potatoes cooked, and Aunt Carry had forgotten to order any eggs, and the milk bottle had been left outside and was frozen hard. Hurry as they might and apologize to Pearl almost with tears as they did, it was very little that Pearl had eaten when she went back to school, and she knew well enough that they would forget to-morrow, just as they had to-day. No, already Pearl felt that life could not be made _wholly_ out of kisses and good nature. By nightfall, her thin kid shoes were rather scuffed and very wet, with a break in one of the patent leather tips where Cousin Tom had stepped on it, in a scuffle with his brother. Little Pearl nursed her sore toe and broken shoe with a weary feeling.

Always at the end of the six months with the Manleys, Pearl was nearly a nervous wreck. She was behind in her lessons, since there was not a quiet spot in the house to study, and even if there had been you couldn’t escape from the noise of the trombone, which Aunt Carry’s oldest was learning to play; she was underweight and anæemic for lack of regular food and enough sleep ... it wasn’t much use to go to bed when nobody else did, and Aunt Pearl and Aunt Carry always visited in more than audible voices as they put up their hair in curlers; she had nothing to wear (since nothing had been renewed or mended) except a blue silk dress which Grandfather Manley had bought for her in a fit of affection, and some mostly-lace underwear which Aunt Carry had sat up till all hours making for her, so that “she should have something pretty like the other girls!” But for an active little girl, mostly-lace underwear soon was reduced to the quality of mosquito netting; and a blue silk dress in the Manley’s house was first cousin to Sir Walter Raleigh’s cloak in the mud-puddle.

With all the family she had been night after night to the moving pictures and not infrequently was kept up afterwards by the hysterics of little Nelly, Aunt Carry’s nervous, high-strung five-year-old, who saw men with revolvers pointed at her, and desperadoes about to bind and gag her, till Pearl more than half saw them too, and dreamed of them afterwards. She had suffered the terrible humiliation of having the teacher send her home with a note saying that her hair must be washed and kept in better order, a humiliation scarcely lessened by the outraged affection of the Manleys, who had taken her into their loving arms, to moan over their darling’s hurt feelings. She had thereafter made frantic efforts to keep her own hair in order, with what brush and comb she could salvage out of the jetsam in the room which was at once hers and the aunts’ bedroom; but if she complained that her hair-ribbons disappeared, or were crumpled in a corner of the drawer, she was told comfortably, not to be fussy, “For goodness’ sakes, don’t make such a fuss about things! Folks that do never have a minute’s comfort in life, nor nobody else in the house either.”

Yes, it was a rather pale, wild-eyed little Pearl, who on the first day of July scrambled together into her trunk what she could find, put on the hat which had been so bright and pretty when Aunt Pearl gave it to her at Easter, and which now after two months with the Manleys looked like a floor-cloth. She did not put her hands over her ears to deaden a little the volume of noise as they all crowded about her in the station to say their affectionate and vociferous good-byes, but that was only because she did not want to hurt their feelings. The instant she was in the train, she always hid her face in her arms, quivering all over with nervous tension. Oh, the noise the Manleys always made over everything, and the confusion they were always in, when they tried to do anything, colliding with each other, and dropping things, and squealing and screaming! And it was all right for them to be warm-hearted and generous--but when they slathered money on ice-cream, and then didn’t have enough to pay for her ticket, till they’d borrowed it ...!

Well, then there was the re-entrance into the Purdon house, the beautiful, fragrant cleanliness of everything, the dustless order, her own room, with the clean, white sheets, and her own safe closet into which nobody would ever plunge rummaging. And Aunt Maria so quiet and calm, with her nice low voice, and Grandmother Purdon so neat with her white lace collar, and her lovely white hair so well-brushed, and oh, the good things to eat.... To sit down to a well-ordered table, with a well-cooked savory mutton stew, and potatoes neither watery nor underdone, and clear apple jelly quivering in a glass dish! And the clean, clean dishes! Had Maria ever complained of having to rinse the dishes too often! She remembered the dried-on bits of food always to be felt on the Manley plates ...!

The first evening too was always dream-like, the quiet, deft despatching of the dishes, in the kitchen shining with cleanliness, and then all the evening free, and so quiet, so blessedly quiet, with no trombone, and no whoops of chatter or boisterous crying and laughing; no piano banging (except perhaps Aunt Maria softly playing a hymn or two), no children overturning chairs and slamming doors, no one falling up or downstairs, no crash of breaking crockery from the kitchen ... little Maria sat on the well-swept porch behind the well-trained vines and soaked herself in the peace and quiet.

But by the next morning, the shine was a little off. When Aunt Maria came to wake her at half past six, _half past six_ ... why, no one at Grandfather Manley’s thought of stirring till eight! And she was expected to wash and dress ... not a button unbuttoned or a hair out of place under penalty of a long lecture on neatness ... and “do” her room, even to wiping off the woodwork; and make her bed. Heavens! How fussy they were about those old corners! All this before she had a bit of breakfast. Then, breakfast with everybody’s whole soul fixed on the work to be done, and nobody so much as dimly aware that it was a glorious, sunny, windy, summer day outside. Maria’s heart sank, sank, sank, as she drank her perfectly made chocolate, and ate her golden-brown toast, till it struck the dismal level where it usually lived during the Purdon half-year. “Come, Maria, don’t loiter over your food. The only way to get the work done is to go right at it!”

“Oh, Maria, do you call that folding your napkin? I call it crumpling it into a ball.”

“You forgot to put your chair back against the wall, Maria. If we each do faithfully our share of what is to be done, it will be easier for us all.”

“No, the _spoons_ go there ... mercy, no! not the forks!”

“Don’t twitch the curtain so as you go by. It takes all the fresh out of it. I only ironed them yesterday.”

“Why, Maria, whistling! Like a little street boy!”

The July sun might shine and the wind blow outside, inside the house it was always gray, windless November weather. She felt herself curl up like a little autumn leaf, and, with a dry rattle, blow about the rooms before the chill admonitory breath of Grandmother Purdon and Aunt Maria.

Yes, the family elders were right in pitying her, as a child brought up just as badly as it was possible to be; and nobody was surprised or blamed her a bit, when she got out of both families as rapidly and as unceremoniously as she could, by making a very early marriage with an anonymous young man, somebody she had met at a high-school dance. He seemed just like any young man, from the glimpse of him, which was all the family had, before their marriage; but nobody knew a thing about his character or whether he would make a good husband. And, indeed, there was a big doubt in the family mind as to whether Maria Pearl would be any sort of wife or home-maker. How could she have learned anything about rational living, the poor little tyke, hustled from one bad example to another through all the impressionable years of her life? Suppose she kept house like the Manleys! Horrors! Or suppose she took after the Purdons! Her poor husband!

* * * * * * *

Nothing of the sort! There’s not a happier home anywhere in the country than hers, nor a better housekeeper, nor a wiser mother. It’s a perfect treat to visit in her cheerful, sunny, orderly house, or to talk with her well-brought-up, jolly children, or to see her well-fed, satisfied husband. And she herself is a joy to the eye, stout and rosy and calm. She is neither fussy nor slack, neither stingy nor extravagant, neither cold and repressed, nor slushy and sentimental.

How did it happen? Probably Maria Pearl doesn’t know. But I do. And since it has happened, I can see perfectly how inevitable it was. Whenever the routine of her housekeeping begins to set too hard, and she feels like flying at muddy-footed, careless children with the acrimony natural to the good housekeeper, the memory of forlorn little Pearl among the Purdons softens and humanizes her words. And when the balance begins to swing the other way, when she tastes that first delicious, poisonous languor of letting things slide, when her Manley blood comes to the top, she has other memories to steady her. I have seen her sitting at the breakfast table, after the children are off to school, begin to sag in her chair, and reach with an indolent gesture for a tempting novel; and I knew what was in her mind as she sprang up with a start and began briskly to clear off the table and plan the lunch.

ART ATMOSPHERE

My cousin Angelica was one of the advance-guard. She bowed down and worshipped Whistler six months or so before the rest of humanity reached the adoration stage; and when she heard that he had opened a studio for “lady students” available to any one who would pay the entrance-fee--“just like one of the second-raters who teach at Carlorossi’s”--she lost no time in making tracks for the Passage Stanislas, where, if I remember rightly, the Whistler studio was situated.

It was, just as rumor had said, like all other studio-classes of that sort, except that the fee was many times larger; but that was legitimate, Whistler being _the_ thing that winter, and _the_ thing always commanding a high price in the open market.

It was a large, grimly dirty, barn-like room, with a big sky-light towards the north. In it sat some twenty or thirty more-or-less-young ladies, most of them Americans (the fee was really _very_ large) enveloped in voluminous, paint-stained aprons. They sat, as always in such studio-classes, in a circle around a platform, on which stood the model.

Once a week (or was it once a fortnight?) “the Master” drove up in a cab, made his way into the room amid palpable emanations of awe, and going from canvas to canvas shed upon the bowed head of each acolyte a little of the sacred fire of his genius.

My cousin Angelica, like the others, found this a more than satisfactory arrangement and considered that she received full value for her money. We heard little from her that winter but enthusiasm over the Whistler atmosphere and scorn of everything else. In any exhibition she was to be found in ecstasy before some barely visible human visage sunk in the gloom of a dusky corner at twilight, or a floating, whitish blur or two on a dark-blue canvas, which, she told us, represented the new artistic tradition, worth all the other artistic traditions produced since they carried the Cimabue Madonna through the streets--or was that a Giotto?

I was studying philology that year and had no quarrel with Angelica about that sort of thing. For all I cared, she could give her adherence to whichever artistic tradition took her fancy for the moment. But it was occasionally inconvenient to have her so slavishly tied to the studio-class on the days when they expected a criticism. Nothing could have tempted her away from one of those marvelous opportunities to profit by first-hand personal instruction from a first-rate living genius. Even when our one prosperous relative, Uncle Frederick, came through Paris and invited us over to the Right Bank to go to lunch with him at a fearfully expensive restaurant, and to sit in a fearfully expensive loge at the Français afterwards, Angelica had to go first to the studio.

I went with her, so that I could carry her off directly afterwards. This is what I saw and heard in the hour I spent there.

The day was a fine one of sunlight less tempered with gray than most Paris sunshine. The model was a stout, red-haired woman with the milk-white skin of red-haired people. From the great expanse of the skylight, there poured upon her opulent nude body, as smooth and white as a newly peeled almond, a flood of light that was sparkling, in spite of the north exposure. The room rang with the high, clear brightness of that white flesh in that morning light.

Around the model sat the thirty or so disciples of the Master. While I waited for Angelica, I wandered around back of them, glancing at the canvases on their easels.

They had all painted the model the color of an old saddle. From one dim, cavernous sketch after another, a misty, smeary, dark-brown mass looked out waveringly from blue, or brown, or gray twilight. The red head glimmered faintly, attenuated by layers and layers of shadow. The disciples looked up at the gleaming white woman before them, reflecting the daylight as definitely as a sound tooth reflects it, and looked down happily and proudly on their dark, blurred canvases. You could see how pleased they were at the progress they were making. They had caught it, this time, they had caught what was the thing to catch.

“We’ll have some fireworks, all right, when ‘the Master’ gets here,” I thought to myself.

Presently he came. The door swung open, I caught a glimpse of the concierge performing the impossible in the way of holding the door open and effacing herself in one and the same gesture, and in came a dapper, immaculately dressed little old gentleman, with gray gloves and pearl-gray gaiters.

The disciples prostrated themselves, foreheads to the floor (or at least that is the impression they made on me in the first intense emotion of his entrance) and then stiffened to attention before their easels, not to miss a word of the down-dropping pearls and rubies.

The little old gentleman advanced with small, gentlemanly steps to the first of the easels, and contemplated the leather-brown South-Sea-Islander depicted on it. Every one of the students held her breath. So did I.

He looked at it a long time, his face imperturbable. Then with the traditional studio gesture I had seen all my life in studios--outstretched thumb, modeling in the air--he began saying what I had heard all my life in studios, “A little more shadow on the shoulder, I should say. And perhaps.... Yes, go into the modeling of that arm more deeply. On the whole very promising, very interesting.”

He passed on to the next easel. One felt another devout heart turn over with a rustle. “Good! Well _felt_, that knee. But lacking in distinction, perhaps, the treatment of the hair. Go into the modeling of the hands more deeply.”

He passed to the next. And the next. And the next. I heard a murmur of “Very promising ... very interesting ... deeper feeling about ... keep it flat ... subtle ... relations of planes not quite ... very promising ... very interesting.”

In half an hour it was over. He walked neatly back to the door, which the nearest student sprang to open, and with a courteous bow all around he disappeared, his face imperturbable to the last. If he lifted a cynical eyebrow in amusement, it was not till after the door had closed upon him.

Angelica and I were now free to go, and I proceeded to the difficult undertaking of cutting her out from the herd of art-students milling excitedly around and around before the canvases, “Did you hear what he said about my shoulder-blade?” “This was the plane he liked on my back.” “He didn’t object to the treatment of my ...”

The model, however, showed an imperturbability as complete as that of the Master. Like him, she had earned her pay for a morning’s work. As the door had closed on him, she had climbed down off the platform, and she was now calmly pulling her chemise on over her red head.

Angelica was still a little wild-eyed and emotional when we emerged on the street. “Isn’t he _won_derful?” she said, clutching at my arm. “Can’t you understand now what a privilege it is to ...” She took ten minutes to blow off this high-pressure steam and come down to little wandering puffs like, “It _means_ so much to have such precious contacts!” And, “You simply take it in through your _pores_ when you are in the real art atmosphere.”

Understand me, please, I do not venture to affirm that this is really all that took place. I am no art-student and never was. There may have been oceans more. But this is all that I saw.

COLONEL SHAYS

I dare say when you studied American history you read about Shays’ Rebellion, in Massachusetts, and duly learned that it was put down, and the instigators punished. But I am sure that you never knew, and never wondered, what became of Colonel Shays himself, of whom the history books say succinctly, “the leader himself, escaped.”

I have never seen in print anything about the latter part of his life beyond one or two scanty and inaccurate references in one or two out-of-date books of reference; but all the older people in our town were brought up on stories about him, for it was to the valley just over the mountain from us that he fled after his last defeat. And later on, as an old man, he lived for some years in our town, in a house still standing, and told many people what I am going to set down here.

At the time when he made his escape from the officers of the State in Massachusetts, Vermont was, quaintly enough, an independent republic, all by itself, and hence a sufficient refuge for men fleeing from the officers of any State in the Union. Furthermore it was still rather wild, sparsely settled, none too respectful of any authority, and distinctly sympathetic to strangers who came from the east, south, or west over the mountains on the run, with the manner of men escaping from sheriffs. Sheriffs were not popular persons in Vermont in 1787.

But all this did not seem to make it a safe enough refuge to the man with a price set on his head, the man who had risked everything on the boldest of enterprises, and had lost everything. He passed by the rough scattered little hamlets and went into a remote, narrow, dark, high valley, which is to this day a place where a man might hide for years and never be seen. Colonel Shays, traveling at night, on foot, through the forests, came down into the Sandgate valley through the Beartown notch, over the mountains, and not a soul knew that he had come.

He made his first camp, which was also his permanent and last one, since he was never disturbed, high up on a shoulder of the mountain, overlooking the trail for a great distance, and densely surrounded with a thick growth of pine trees. Very cautiously, making no noise, using the ax and knife which were his only tools, he put up a rough shelter, and building a fire only at night in a hollow where rocks masked its flame, began cooking some of the game he caught. He lived in this way, all alone for years and years. Game was abundant; like most men of that time he was an adroit trapper, a good pioneer, and knew how to smoke and preserve the flesh of animals and to save their skins. For the first year he did not dare to let any one know that a man was living there, and literally saw not one soul.

Then one day about a year after he began this life, a little boy going fishing saw a tall, strong, black-haired stranger standing in the trail and holding a large packet of furs. He told the child to take the packet and ask his father for a bushel of seed-corn and a bag of salt. He specified that the man who brought it was to leave it just where they then stood and go away without waiting.

The child’s father was a rough, half-civilized, good-natured trapper, who had had troubles of his own with unreasonable officers of the law in York State. When the child told his story, the father laughed knowingly, took the skins, got the seed-corn and the salt, left them in the place indicated, and kept a neighborly shut mouth. He could not read or write, had never heard of Shays’ Rebellion, and supposed the man in hiding to be in the same situation as himself. Living as he did, it seemed no awful fate to make one’s living out of the woods, and he thought little of the fact that he had a new neighbor.

After this, Colonel Shays began a little cultivation of the ground, in scattered places, hidden behind screens of thick trees, in a few natural clearings in the forest. He used to say that life was infinitely more tolerable to him after the addition to his diet of salt and cereals. After some months he risked a little more, and, buying them with furs worth forty times their value, he secured a few tools and some gunpowder. The transactions were always carried on through the child, the only one to see the fugitive.

Nothing has come down to me of what this terrible dead halt in mid-career, and this grim isolation from the world meant to the active, intelligent, ambitious man at the height of his powers. None of the old people who heard him talk seem to have asked him about this, or to have had any curiosity on the subject. Only the bare facts are known, that he lived thus for many years, till the little boy grew up, till his own hair turned gray and then white, till the few families in that valley were quite used to the knowledge that a queer, harmless old man was living up in the woods near the northern pass of the mountains, miles from any neighbor. Once in a great while, now, some one saw him--a boy fishing, a hunter far on the trail of a deer, or a group of women picking berries. He occasionally exchanged a few words with his neighbors at such times, but he had almost forgotten how to speak aloud. All the stories about him mention the rough, deep, hoarseness of his unused voice.

One day his nearest neighbor, meaning to do him a kindness, told him with a rough good-will that he might as well quit hiding now, “Whatever ’tis you done, ’tis so long past now! And up here ... nobody from your part of the country, wherever ’tis, would ever be coming up here. And if they did they wouldn’t know you. Why, your own mother wouldn’t know you in them clothes, and with that white beard.”

It is said that Colonel Shays on hearing this, drew back and looked down at himself with a strange air of astonishment.

Apparently the advice stuck in his mind, for, some weeks after this, he decided to risk it, and to make the trip to Cambridge, the nearest town to those mountain settlements. Early one morning the people of the Sandgate valley were astonished to see the old man going down the trail of the valley which led into the State road going to Cambridge. Well, that was something to talk about! He was going to town at last like anybody else.