Chapter VI: Part 6

When we were Seniors there came a wonderful offer from Germany: a very high Government position for Professor Behrens. I heard them discussing this with a certain indecision which I had never heard in their remarks before. They knew very well what was before them in Germany. But, oh, what was about them here! The very servant problem alone made it impossible for civilized beings to organize a livable existence in America. Not to speak of a thousand other, raw, unfinished edges which rasped and fretted them at every turn.

They finally decided to go, but their packing-up was conducted in a very different spirit from the first one I had seen. They had begun to divine that there was, in this business of looking for the ideal country, something more than meets the eye.

I happened to visit them a few years after this, just before I was married, and found them much dissatisfied with European life. Mrs. Behrens was nettled and fretted by the question of social precedence which was, so it seemed to her, constantly used to humiliate her; and the children were stifling in the restricted, fenced-in, tyrannically regulated corner of life which was theirs. Julie took me off for a long walk one afternoon and told me something of her opinion of European young men, especially the officers whom for the most part she met in society, as they were the ones who had most leisure for afternoon and evening parties. “I can just tell you one thing,” she said with a grim accent and a hardset jaw, “I’ll never marry a European, if I die an old maid!”

But later on, when her mother and she were exchanging reminiscences about the difficulties of American housekeeping, Julie cried out, “Oh, I couldn’t keep house in a country where there is no servant class!”

Mrs. Behrens sighed, “Yes, I know, but just remember the bath-rooms, and the vacuum cleaners, and the hot water.”

It seemed to me, as I looked about on their much traveled chairs and tables that I saw them patiently making ready for another journey.

INHERITANCE

One of my mother’s distant cousins was left a widow, years ago with no assets but the house she lived in, a savings-bank account, and a very pretty daughter, then eighteen years old. Cousin Henrietta’s decisions were always prompt. It took her about six weeks to sell the house, draw the money from the savings-bank and take her daughter to Europe. I think her intention probably was to give Ella the benefit of a year’s polish, and bring her back to the home market, her value enhanced by the reputation of her Continental “Education.” But the impossible happened, as energetic women like Cousin Henrietta can occasionally make it happen. Through some chance connection at the pension in Florence, they made the acquaintance of a wealthy, middle-aged Tuscan, not the traditional European nobleman at all, but a swarthy, well-preserved man of the people, risen to wealth by his own exertions. He was presented to Ella and lost his head entirely over her pale blonde prettiness. He was fifty-five. They were married on her nineteenth birthday.

Cousin Henrietta shared their married life with them, of course, although this did not last very long. Signor Cattaneo, as not infrequently happens to elderly husbands of very young wives, tried to renew his youth too rapidly. He danced all one evening with his bride, an exercise which his great bulk made extremely violent for him; stepped out upon a balcony with her, in a cool, damp wind, and died of double pneumonia at the end of a week.

Cousin Henrietta still in charge of affairs, at once brought home to the God’s country of Chicago, the lovely, wealthy little widow. They set up housekeeping on a grand scale with the money which was sent to them every month from the honest, conscientious Tuscan agent in Florence. The agent got it from the honest, conscientious Tuscan peasants, and they got it out of their bodies, sweating and toiling endlessly long hours in all weathers. Ella and Cousin Henrietta had everything they could think of, that money could buy; and presently Ella, wanting something new, bought herself a husband. He did not turn out very well: Ella had done exactly as she pleased for too long to bother with a husband, and after a time they separated, though there was never any legal action taken, since Cousin Henrietta was an extremely orthodox church member, who disapproved of any laxity in the relations between the sexes. Divorce seemed to her such a laxity.

Then Ella wanted to do as other wealthy and fashionable ladies do and learn how to ride. They bought, as usual, the best that money could buy, and this time it was a little too good for Ella; for the high-spirited thorough-bred took fright one day and, disregarding Ella’s amateur efforts to control him, ran away, threw Ella off and broke her poor little neck.

Cousin Henrietta was horrified and scandalized to find that now Ella’s remote but still legal husband would inherit a very large proportion of the Italian property. Her whole soul and being rose up wildly in an understandable and instinctive protest against this iniquity. She simply could not believe that the law would countenance such a barefaced theft of other people’s property. She filled the newspapers and the courts with her clamor and made us all ashamed of the family name. But that was all the good it did her. Ella had not dreamed of making a will; Cousin Henrietta’s son-in-law had no reason to love his wife’s mother, and could see no reason why she had any more right to that fortune than he had. Neither can I, when it comes to that.

Ella’s husband was rather dazed by his good luck and made all haste to marry. But he did not make quite haste enough. That was one of the years when the influenza was going the rounds, and he died of it two days before his wedding, in spite of all the care of three trained nurses and a whole battery of consulting physicians. I never knew what became of his fiancée, but always wondered if she did not perhaps go to live with Cousin Henrietta, as being the only person who would entirely sympathize with her.

So the Cattaneo fortune passed to the casual next-of-kin, who happened to be the only nephew of Ella’s husband, a young clerk of twenty. The honest conscientious agent in Florence, who was paid a small annual salary for his services, and who would have died before touching a penny not his, went on administering the Italian estate which was growing steadily in value all the time, and paying more income. He sent that income over to the new name and address in America. He was upheld in his meager, narrow, difficult life by feeling that he was living up to the fine old Tuscan code of honor; and he often told his children, who lacked schooling and opportunities he could have given them if he had had more money, that the best inheritance a father can leave his children is an unblemished name.

The children of Ella’s husband’s nephew have something much more substantial as an inheritance than that. For the young man with a fortune was married by a competent, ambitious girl as soon as he came of age. They have three children, who learned very young how to spend a great deal of money with great speed. The money which the Italian day-laborers and small-farmers earn by patient endurance of hardships, by eating rough, poor, scanty food, by working their pregnant wives to the day before their confinements, by taking their children out of school before they can read, is sent month by month to America and spent in buying a new fur set for Ella’s husband’s nephew’s young-lady daughter, a ten-thousand-dollar racing-car for Ella’s husband’s nephew’s seventeen-year-old son, and to keep Ella’s husband’s nephew from doing anything more strenuous than clipping the end of his cigars.

THIRTY YEARS AFTER

A long time ago, when Duane Bellamy was at the height of his brilliant fame, and when I was a little girl, his daughter chanced to be a school-mate of mine for a winter. And one Sunday evening I was invited to their supper-table. I was very much impressed by the momentous occasion which it seemed to me, and I have not forgotten a word he said, nor a gesture he made, nor an expression of his face. I can still see his darkly handsome face, with his glossy black mane, his large bright eyes, his great curling Assyrian beard. And if ever I saw a human being saturated to the bone with satisfaction, it was at that Sunday evening supper. He was acclaimed as the greatest portrait painter in America, and he accepted this well-deserved reputation with no mock modesty. The knowledge of it did not make him coarsely vain or puffed up. It acted on him like a generous wine, made him extravagantly kind and over-flowing with high spirits. His little girl told me that night that her princely father had been known to stop a tired coal-heaver at his work, hand him a twenty-dollar bill and walk on. He was like a great fountain of enjoyment, splashing with its clear waters all who came near it, even the little schoolgirl at the other end of the table.

But there were people he could not help to enjoyment. The name of one of them came up in the conversation that evening: “Poor old Hendricks!” said our host, “what can you do for the poor old chap? _He_ doesn’t even know what hit him!”

One of the younger painters there was a protégé of Bellamy’s, admiring him so greatly that his paintings were scarcely to be told from his master’s. He now answered, “Oh, the old Rip Van Winkle! He ought to be told to crawl into his hole and pull it in after him. Making a laughing-stock of himself with those sooty old landscapes of his, year after year.”

Our host took a great draught of the beer in his stein, wiped his great mustache with his fine damask napkin, and turned comfortably in his chair. “Hendrick got me in a tight place the other day,” he began, “At this year’s exhibition he marched me up to one of his bitumen-black, woolly horrors, and said, ‘Now, Bellamy, you’re an honest man. Tell me what it is you youngsters don’t like in that? It looks all right to me. I can’t see why they all jump on me so. I look at theirs, and then I look at mine.... I _can’t_ see what they’re talking about.’”

“Well, for God’s sake, what nerve!” ejaculated the disciple, very much astonished. “What did you say?”

“What could I say?” said Bellamy. “I didn’t want to hurt the old man’s feelings. I hadn’t supposed till then that he’d so much as noticed how people feel about his work. I didn’t try to explain to him, of course. What’s the use? He _can’t_ understand! If I’d talked to him all day about what we’re after--light, and shimmer, and vibration--he wouldn’t have known what I was talking about. If it were _in_ him to understand, he’d die before he’d paint the way he does. So I just patted him on the back and said, ‘Oh, you’re all right, Mr. Hendricks. What makes you think there is anything the matter with your work?’ and pretended that somebody was calling to me from the other side of the gallery.”

He finished his beer at a draught. He thought himself magnificently kind and tolerant. And so did we.

That was a long time ago, thirty years ago, to be exact. The Bellamys took their little girl out of our school that spring, and I saw no more of them. But I always felt a slight personal interest at the sight of his name in a list of exhibitors, and in picture-galleries always went to look at whichever bright, high-keyed, dashing portrait he was exhibiting that year. Some years ago it began to seem to me that they did not look just the same; and yet when I looked straight at them, I saw that they were, quite miraculously, the same, the old Bellamy flowing brush-work, the masterly rendering of fabrics, the ringing color, the firm drawing, all lighted by that bold flood of sunlight with which he had shocked and enchanted the early American public groping its way out from Munich.

Presently, finding that the impression that they were different persisted, I set myself to analyze it, and found that their altered look came from the altered character of the paintings beside and above them ... and then, as the years went on, below them! For the time came when the annual Bellamy portrait was not in the center of the last gallery, to catch your eye as you entered, but was hung high in one of the side-rooms. It looked very queer and matter-of-fact with its solid surfaces honestly rendered in all their opacity, compared to the odd, subtle, sideways-glancing, arrestingly imaginative canvases about it. They took the eye far below the surfaces they depicted. They suggested far more than they said. For days afterwards, they haunted you like an unfinished cadence in a poem in a foreign language. The Bellamy canvas was in no unknown language, but in the speech used for the daily order to the grocer; nor was it in the least unfinished. It came finally to seem to me as literal and bald a statement of fact as a time-table.

One day this year, as I hung over an Arthur Davies, a strange, beautiful, white-fleshed, eerie, blonde woman, placed at the side of a luminous canvas, with, so it seemed to me, more pure imaginative beauty than anything since Botticelli, I heard voices behind me. A tall, splendid-looking old man, with a great white beard, fine dark eyes, and the carriage of a king was talking to a younger man, an unimpressive, slight, fair fellow, evidently very ill at ease.

“See here, Brehming, speak out, tell me what it’s all about. I honestly don’t know what you’re driving at, you kids. What’s the matter with good drawing? What do you _want_ in a painting?” He waved a well-kept hand up towards a canvas above us, “Isn’t there light in that? And space? And interesting composition? And true values? _I_ ought to know a good painting when I see one. What are you boys talking about when you slash at my things so? I’m not sore. Don’t think I’m sore. You’ve a right to your own opinion. Only, for the Lord’s sake, what _is_ your opinion?”

He had said he was not sore, but there was a raw note of hurt in his voice, and his eyes rested anxiously on the young man beside him.

The other looked every way except at him and said in a vague, hurried, kindly voice, “Why, Mr. Bellamy, your work is all right, of course. It’s fine. Sure, it’s fine. We all admire it like anything....”

Yes, I did hear that! I heard it just exactly as I’m setting it down.

“THE OLD NEW ENGLAND STOCK”

Students and classifiers of American “types” often say that the grandfathers of the present generation of New Englanders represent the “New England type” much more accurately than their descendants of to-day. Some times I wonder what they mean by “New England type.” Apparently they make the phrase stand for blue-nosed, thin-blooded frigidity of temperament, a pinched, mean, timorous attitude towards human life and human nature, and a cold, calculating capacity to skin other people alive in a bargain. At any rate, the presumption seems to be that whatever else they were, New Englanders were always very much of the same sort.

Here are my two New England grandfathers.

Both of them had identically the same sort of ancestry, plain English people who came to the New World about the middle of the seventeenth century. Certain genealogically-minded members of the two families have gathered reverently together the scant tradition concerning the generations that bridge the two centuries and a half of life in America; but though I have dutifully plodded through the thick volumes of “family histories” I have never been able to see that any of my forebears did anything more than earn their own livings and keep out of jail.

Younger branches of both families moved up into Vermont, after the end of the French-and-Indian wars and have lived here ever since. Both my grandfathers spent their boyhood on Vermont farms. And there the resemblance ceases.

One of them had, apparently, from early childhood, a passion for books and learning and sophistication and cultivation--and gregarious, articulate social existence--and dinner parties and black broadcloth and white linen and good wine--and all the other elements in the sort of life which is not to be found on Vermont farms. The Vermont farm, however, seems to have presented him with some tools for getting what he wanted: a powerful great body, an active mind and an unlimited amount of dynamic energy. He left home at sixteen (this was about 1833) spurred on by the sympathy of a strong-minded mother. I have still in the attic of his old house, the little hair-covered trunk which he took with him, and which contained all his worldly possessions.

From that time on, until his old age, he never came home except to rest in the occasional, very brief intervals of incessant and almost appalling activity, both intellectual and physical. With only a little help from his family he earned his way through college, and then put himself through a Theological Seminary in record time. With him, as with other manifestants of the mid-century explosion of energy in America, it was as if the long generations of vegetating country-dwellers had, like other vegetating matter of by-gone ages, turned to rich veins of highly combustible material, which this descendant of theirs mined out, at top speed, and cast by great shovelfuls into the furnace of his personality. He seems always to have been incandescent, the whole six-feet-three of him, with motive-power which he could not, try as he might, use up fast enough to cool off. All his life he burned hot with a vitality at which an ever-widening circle of other human beings, rich and poor, young and old, learned and ignorant, warmed their hands and their hearts. Even the people whom he furiously rubbed the wrong way (he had as many enemies as friends) were stimulated by the friction to a quicker life-pace, a livelier circulation. The temperature in a room rose when he entered it. Even people of sluggish, scholarly, dilettante temperaments, even coldly superior and skeptical people who prided themselves on being too disdainful of life to lift an eyebrow over its issues, soon kindled either to intense exasperation or lively personal affection. In either case, calm and ease and torpidity of life were scorched and shaken. I have often thought with sympathy of the vestrymen in Grandfather’s various parishes.

As a young clergyman he ran one parish after another, with increasing brio. When he settled down in the New York parish where he stayed for most of his life, he was already editing a church-paper and writing innumerable pamphlets, in addition to his regular duties as rector. He now speeded up the staid old parish into new work of all sorts, added one mission chapel after another to the church organization, pushed out the influence of the parish further and further, especially into the outlying regions of the slums, which because of their very discouraging aspect of poverty and foreignness had been till then safe from attempts to improve them.

Of course I knew my grandfather only when he was a very old man, long after he had retired from active life; but I never got from him the slightest impression that he was what is known as a “religious-minded person” or that all this remarkable expansion of church and mission work came entirely from evangelical fervor. In fact, as I remember Grandfather, you never would dream that he had been a minister at all. My guess is that he developed that church as his contemporaries developed their transcontinental systems of railways, because he was born with a clutch that never slipped, so that all the power he created by his many-cylindered motor was transmitted without loss to the wheels which sent him with extreme rapidity along the road he had chanced to follow.

He not only developed the parish, he developed his own life: he bought books, unendingly bought books, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, French, English. No junk-man who ever lived has been able to free us entirely of this vast accumulation of serious-minded books of research, now quite worthless, all of them, full of the pompous and inaccurate scholarship of his day. He traveled abroad and sprang, tiger-like, upon European culture, with his formidable New-World capacity for the assimilation of Gargantuan meals of solid food. He married “well,” as the saying goes, and gave his son university life and European travel. He lived as he had wanted to live, with friends and acquaintances in three countries, dressing his vast body in fine broadcloth and white linen; his house was lined with well-bound books; he was a famous talker--in the vein of Dr. Johnson--much sought after for his brilliantly amusing conversation, though at times, I take it, he followed his prototype into rather overpowering monologue; he was a powerful and very fluent public speaker--we have chests and chests full of his sermons still in the attic--and so far as I can gather he no more doubted the ultimately satisfying value of all these things as an integral part of life than Mr. Russel Sage seems to have questioned the ultimately satisfying value of squeezing the last penny of interest out of a loan, or Barnum to have doubted the worthwhileness of running the biggest show on earth.

It would be very unfair to give the impression that his agreeable social life and the possession of objects and books then in fashion made up the whole or even the largest part of his life. It took such a formidable number of elements to satisfy his huge appetite for life and activity, that it would be difficult to catalog them all. Controversy, for instance; he adored pamphleteering, and was known as one of the leading controversialists of his time. He was a heart-felt Low-Churchman and perhaps the real passion of his passionate life was his hot-blooded detestation of formalism in religious beliefs. Infinitely various, and all headlong, were his attacks on High-Churchism, with its rigid orthodoxy, and its fol-de-rols (as he called them) of salvation by incense and candles and twiddling distinctions between green and blue and yellow stoles.

Indeed this shouldering impatience of formal theological points led him late in life, to disagree vigorously with the majority of his parishioners on several questions of doctrine. Refusing to conform to the strict pattern they wished to impose upon him, he blew up with an explosion, shook the dust of his religious vocation off his feet, and retired to the comfortable old house in Vermont, where he spent his old age, living comfortably on his small savings. He took with him all the possessions he had enjoyed so heartily, his many, many books, his substantial furniture, the excellent oil-portrait which had been painted of his vivid, handsome face in middle-life, his gold-headed cane, his great black-silk clerical robes, and fine ecclesiastical linen. When he died, he had never, so far as I know, slept out of an excellent bed a single night in all his life.

* * * * * * *

The other grandfather fared forth at about the same date or a little earlier, and at about the same age; but not in search of well-set dinner-tables nor well-filled libraries, nor the inheritance of culture from past ages. On the contrary, he seems all his life to have been engaged in running away from even the light and sketchy approximation to imprisoning regularity which was shown by the America of that day and the State of his birth. Like an unbroken colt who snorts and wheels and dashes away at the mere sight of some one emerging from the barn with a rope halter, this other farm-boy gave one look at what seemed to him the penitentiary-like pressure of conventional life and ran away with all the speed of what turned out to be a remarkably fleet pair of heels. First, as a lad, he ran away from his perfectly comfortable home, where he had been well cared for, and soundly if plainly educated. Disdaining ... no, more than that, courting hardship, as he always did, he roamed out into the absolute, untrammeled freedom of early frontier life. There he starved and hunted and went in ragged buckskin, and trapped, and moved on, and grew up to a great height and great strength, and was no man’s man to his heart’s content. At some time during this period he acquired, with characteristic casual ease, the profession of surveyor, the only one of the trades or professions at which he was willing even to give a glance. There was plenty of unsurveyed land in the States at that time, and all of it in the new, untracked wilderness which he loved.

He seems always to have despised physical comfort as a clumsy trap laid by life to catch you and hold you fast. None of it for him. He hated the very indoor smell of it, as he did the burdening weight of material possessions. A gun (which like other frontiersmen of that day he passionately and personally loved), an ax (with which he could perform almost any feat), the clothes he stood in, the tools of his wildwoods profession, and the world before him, full, intoxicatingly full of untrodden paths leading into bright enticing danger. Prosperity? A home of his own? Above all, regular work? Never, as long as there were squirrels and deer to shoot and logs to make temporary shelters withal!

His roamings took him into Ohio, the early river and lake settlements of which were at that time horribly marshy and fever-ridden. There he encountered the lure which brings most young adventurers in under a roof and beside a hearth-fire. He fell in love. A pretty Vermont girl was visiting some cousins there and had set up a little millinery shop, where she made and sold the scoop-bonnets of the period. Do you see them, the tall, big-boned surveyor, with his magnetic personality, pungent with the odor of freedom, and the pink-cheeked, white-fingered little amateur milliner?

She went back to Vermont to her family, and he followed her. I have often amused myself by walking around over the roads and paths and fields he must have trod during his wooing, and trying to imagine his impatience of the cribbed and cabined superfluity and conventionality of the Vermont life, which looked so primitive and bare to my other grandfather.

He endured it for some months, till his wooing was successful, and, just after her twenty-first birthday, the gentle, home-loving girl put her hand upon his sinewy arm and followed him out into the wilds. This was in 1838 when the wilds were very wild indeed. My great-uncle, who was her little brother at that time conceived a lifelong admiration and affection for the great, strapping, warm-hearted hero who came to take away his big sister. He used to tell me stories of that impetuous wooing, and of the strange impression left on the deeply-rooted mountain-people by the meteor-like appearance and disappearance of this startling, unreliable, dangerously alive personality, living so immorally free from all the rules and possessions and standards which bore them down to the earth, and to which they so tenaciously clung. My great-uncle always ended these stories of his brother-in-law (whom he never saw but on that occasion) by saying, “He was a talented man, with a powerful personality, who could have done anything he chose.” He also told me, “Our minister said of Albert that he was a wild, free son of Nature.” I take it the minister had had some contact with the romantic-school phraseology so much in fashion at that date.

It was a bitterly hard life which the Vermont girl had chosen, full of extravagant hardships and privations of which she could never have dreamed. They lived here and there, always from hand to mouth, always as far beyond the edge of the settlements as it was possible to take a family of young children, for they had five little girls by the time they had been married a decade. Once or twice her husband made an attempt to enter regular life, to run a store in a frontier settlement, to take an everyday job; but these trials never lasted long, and their old life was taken up, log-cabin after log-cabin, rough clearings in the primeval forest, days when there was nothing but corn-meal in the pantry, long treks in covered wagons to escape from the fever-and-ague which burned and ravaged them; never more possessions than could be drawn by a team of lean horses, ... and always unbroken love and devotion between the two wayfarers. Wherever their caravan halted for a few months was home to the woodsman’s wife, because he was there; his vitality, his free-hearted zest in whatever came to them, bore her along like a tidal wave. And to the end of her days she worshipped the memory of his deep, never-wavering passion for her.

You can imagine that her comfortably well-to-do family thought he took a very queer way to show it, and with Yankee out-spokenness told them both so, as cuttingly as Yankee tongues can speak. Without a hesitation she flung her family ties away along with her love of home, her woman’s love for stability, her mother’s anxiety about her little girls. Not till long after his death did she again resume relations with her family.

Her little girls, never having known any other life, saw nothing unusual in the one they led, especially as their mother, her personality doubled and trebled by the exigencies of her life, stood, somehow, miraculously between them and the most impossible of the hardships to which their father so light-heartedly condemned them. They were always dressed in well-mended garments, they had shoes and stockings, they were clean and cherished, there was always cheer and loving-kindness between their father and mother, and when there was only corn-meal mush for supper, they scarcely noticed it, because of the old songs and stories of which their mother had such a store. My mother sang them to me, and I now sing them to my children, those old folk-songs with which my grandmother charmed away hunger from her little children. They adored their great, rollicking father, always in high spirits, and they preferred the deer-steaks and squirrel stews which were the results of his wonderful marksmanship, to the tough, stringy beef and salt pork which was the diet of the other frontier children. One of my mother’s vivid recollections is of looking out of the window on a snowy day and seeing her stalwart father emerge from the woods into the clearing, carrying ... a very Robin Hood ... a whole deer’s carcass on his broad shoulders. He cast it down before the door and called, like a great boy, for his women-folk to come and admire him! She says she can close her eyes now, see the blood ruddy on the snow, and her father’s thrown-back head and bright, laughing face.

Of course, when the news of gold in California came, burning-hot like wild-fire from the west, he was one of the first to go. He would be. A distant, uncertain, and dangerous expedition, into unknown country; could he resist such an alluring combination? Of course, he could have resisted it if he had tried; but he did not try. He never tried.

Also, of course, it was really out of the question to transport a wife and five little girls across an untracked continent, full of Indians. He was to go alone, make a brief stay, get the lay of the land, and come back, his pockets full of gold, to take the family out in a ship around the Horn. It was all settled in his mind as if the gold were heavy in his pockets. The separation would be short ... he was sure of it, as he was always sure of whatever would ensure his being free of the slightest constraint.... He moved his family into the nearest settlement, cashed in on everything saleable, added a small sum that had just come to him as his share of his father’s small property, and got together enough to support his family for a year. It took little enough, as they had always lived. And he would be back before the year was out, rolling in gold.

With empty pockets and a high heart he took his gun and his ax, kissed his family good-by and went away planning to live off the country as he traveled, as he always had.

One letter came back from California, the only one he ever wrote, since he had never before been separated from the one human being he had loved. He had had a gloriously adventurous time in getting out there, Indians, drought, snow, heat, grizzly bears--all the regulation accompaniments of the transcontinental trip in 1849. He struck it rich at once, and as one of the first on the ground had a wonderful claim of his own. They would all be rich in no time.

In no time he was dead.

For an interminable period his wife heard nothing, and then, very vaguely, that he had died of “mountain fever.” He had been dead and buried for months before she learned that she was a widow at thirty-two with five helpless little girls and not a penny in the world.

OCTOBER, 1918

MORNING

I was crossing the Place de la Concorde, and stopped for an instant, fascinated by the sinister expression of an immense cannon, painted in serpentine streaks and stripes, the muzzle of its tube distorted by an explosion so that a twisted flap of steel hung down like a broken jaw-bone. A hail made me turn around. The elegant old man who was an American correspondent for a New York newspaper, came up with an expression of approval. “Magnificent display, isn’t it?” he said, waving his hand towards the ranks of captured cannon and mitrailleuses, standing thick on the public square. “Why didn’t you bring your children?”

The gulf between his generation and mine yawned deep. I told myself the part of wisdom was to close my lips on what I felt. But the cannon leered at me too insolently, with its torn muzzle.

I answered, “I’m glad enough when the police seem to be getting the better of a band of ruffians who’ve been terrorizing the town. But I don’t take the children to see the bloody clubs with which....”

“Oh, come!” said my old friend, genially. “Feminine emotionality! These don’t look much like bloody clubs. They look more like part of a steel-foundry.”

“Every cannon here is wreathed in human viscera, spattered with human brains, and stands in a pool of human blood, if we only had eyes to see!” I said moderately.

“Why, you talk like a pacifist!” said the old gentleman, forgetting his usual politeness to women.

“I thought the unforgivable sin of the Germans was in forcing a war on a world that has outgrown war! If war is so hateful a thing, why complacently lay out to view its hideous instruments of torture?”

“Because,” said my old friend with deep emotion, “because they have been instruments of righteousness!” (For the moment he had forgotten the nationality of the cannon about us.)

“Have they?” I asked. “They’re German cannon, remember.” In spite of my feeling sick, I could not but laugh at the change in his expression. I went on, “Well, even if they had been sacred Allied cannon, they’d be instruments of torture all the same. I thought we were fighting to put such things on the scrap heap. Why don’t we have the decency to hide them from view? We don’t put the offal from our slaughter-houses on public view.”

“Vegetarianism, next?”

“Oh, no, I eat beefsteaks. But I don’t take the children to see the steers killed.”

“Of course, I know,” said my old friend tolerantly, “that women have a traditional right to be illogical, but _really_.... Did you, or did you not turn your personal life upside down to do your share in this war? It would give me brain fever to feel two different ways about the same thing.”

“See here,” I put it to him, “a man, crazy-drunk comes roaring down our street. Who _wouldn’t_ feel two ways about him? I certainly do. First, I know that society has been wrongly organized to permit any boy to grow up crazed with whiskey; and second, I know that my children must be protected, now, at this very minute. Shooting that man dead isn’t going to help the general situation at all. If we are not to have a perpetual procession of crazy-drunk men coming down our street (_and our own men among them_) we must change the organization of society by long, patient, and constructive efforts. In the meantime with the drunken man pounding on my door, if the police don’t do what is necessary, why, of course, I will throw a dishpan of scalding water down on him. But I wouldn’t spend the rest of my life making speeches about the dishpan.”

My sophisticated old friend had for me the smiling amusement one feels for a bright child talking about what he does not understand. Taking up the sharp ax of Ecclesiastes, he struck a great blow at the root of the matter, “No, my dear girl, no, you don’t. A well-meaning, high-principled woman like you, can do a great deal, but she cannot amputate a vital part of human nature. You can’t make manly, brave men ashamed of war and it’s a lucky thing for you you can’t, for if you did, there would be nobody to stand between you and the bullies. Take it from a man nearly twice your age, that without the soldier in every man (and that means love of force and submission to force--you must swallow that!) there would be no order in the world. You needn’t try to reduce that element of force to mere businesslike police-work. It can’t be done. There would be anarchy in the twinkling of an eye. You won’t believe this, because it doesn’t fit into your womanish, preconceived notions. But it doesn’t make any difference whether you believe it or not. Such are the facts. And all your noble phrases can’t change them.”

I turned and left him. I did not believe a word he said, of course ... but.... There _is_ a horrible side to human nature.... Suppose that to hold it in check it might be necessary ...

AFTERNOON

“Oh, mother, this is Thursday and the merry-go-round in the Parc of the Château is running. Couldn’t you take us?”

We set off, the three of us, hand in hand, crossed the arid, bare Place d’Armes where the great Louis had mustered his troops, hobbled up over the villainous paving-stones of the gray entrance court and came by beautiful leafy avenues to where the primitive circle of wooden horses whirled slowly about, as a one-armed soldier turned the crank. I was left on a bench, with the other waiting mothers, watching our children’s pleasure.

My two were at once in another world--Jimmy’s a mere wide world of enchantment, as befitted his five-year-old ignorance. He swam through the air, a vague smile of beatitude on his lips. Sally sat very straight, one hand on her hip, the other stretched out in a gesture of command. She was perhaps Charlemagne before the defeated Saxons, or possibly Joan of Arc at Orléans. Sally’s class at school begins to have some notions of history.

When the crippled soldier was tired, and we had paid our copper sous, we wandered on, to a bench in front of a statue of mellow marble. Here I sat down while the children ran about, shouting and kicking up the chestnut leaves which laid a carpet of cloth-of-gold under their feet. Their laughter sounded distant in my ears. I was hearing again the cock-sure old voice of the morning.... “Anarchy in a moment if respect for force were eliminated ... you cannot amputate a part of human nature....”

What was my little daughter saying, with her amusing older-sister air of omniscience? “Did you know, Jimmy, that it was a king who had all this made, out of nothing at all. We’ve just had that in school. It was only a bare, sandy plain, and he had all the trees brought here, and the terraces made, and the water brought here.... It cost millions and millions.”

Jimmy looked up in astonishment at the giant oak over him. “Can you carry great big trees like these around with you?” he asked.

“No, gracious, no! It was ever so long ago. They’ve grown up since. They were just scrawny little saplings. They’ve got an old picture at school that shows how it was when he was alive. Awfully ugly!”

“I wouldn’t have liked it then,” said Jimmy.

Sally hooted at his ignorance. “My goodness, you don’t suppose you’d ever have got any chance to play here if you’d lived then. Not much! We never could have got in. They had soldiers at all the gates to keep people out.”

Jimmy’s sense of the probable was outraged. There were some things too tall to be believed, even if Sally did say them. “What was it _for_, if nobody was allowed in?”

“It was for the king. Everything was for the king then. And he only let in his own family and his special friends.”

“I should think people would ha’ been mad to see the king hogging everything for himself,” Jimmy said vigorously.

“Oh, they were used to it,” explained Sally. “They thought it had to be that way. All the learned men in those days told them that everything would go to pieces and everybody would rob and murder everybody else if they didn’t have a king and think they loved him more than anybody else.”

Once more Jimmy’s sense of the probable rose up to protest, “They didn’t _love_ that old hog-it-all king!” The little twentieth-century American brain refused to credit this ridiculous and inherently impossible idea.

( ... and yet how many generations of men suffered and died to affirm that idea as the natural and inevitable foundation of society!)

“Well, they thought they had to, and so they thought they did,” said Sally lucidly. “The way we love our governments now. But after a couple of hundred years or so they found out the learned men didn’t know so much, and that it wasn’t having a king that kept folks from robbing and murdering all the time. So they got together and came out here from Paris and took all this away from him. And that’s how we get in to play.”

Jimmy’s fancy was tickled by a new idea. “I bet he’d be surprised if he could see us playing here.”

Sally dramatized the scene, instantly. “Wouldn’t he though! Suppose he should come walking right down those marble steps with his high wig and his big-buckled shoes, and his clothes all solid gold and diamonds, and suppose he should walk right up to us and say, ‘You good-for-nothing common-people, what are you doing in MY park? I’ll have you boiled in oil at once!’”

Jimmy was a little intimidated. He took his big sister’s hand and said in rather a small voice, “What would you say back?”

Sally made a dramatic gesture of scorn. “I’d say, ‘Get away from here, you old King. Don’t you know you’re dead?’ And then, Jimmy, you know ghosts aren’t solid. I’d just draw off and run right through him, gold clothes and diamonds and all, like this.”

She executed a headlong assault on space and came back laughing.

Jimmy, reassured, caught the note, “Yes,” he said swaggering, “I would too, I’d say, ‘You old King, you’re dead!’ and I’d run right through him too.”

It was the most delightful of all the games Sally had invented. They went at it with gusto, their faces rosy and laughing as they took turns in dashing through the non-existent might, majesty, and glory of a dead idea.

It was a game which amused their mother quite as much as the children. I sat watching them at it, till it was time to start home back through the rich magnificence of the old park which had been planted for a king’s pleasure and which throughout the silent, purposeful centuries had grown to beauty for the people.

A BRETON AMONG HSÜ HSI

The black-and-white maid told me I was expected and showed me into the drawing-room to wait. As I waited I looked around at the beautiful room with the leaden depression which such beautiful rooms always produce in me. It was a wonderfully elaborate composition with as many details in it as there are notes on a page of music, and every one of them was correct and accredited. As I stepped in through the door the whole shouted in my ears a pæan of religiously devout acceptance of the fashion then prevailing in interior decoration.

The floor was dully lustrous, avoiding the vulgar shininess of varnish so esteemed a decade or so before. There was a great deal of black in all the fabrics as was then the fashion (now it would be vermilion and verdigris green); chintz curtains with a black background and a splashingly-colored design of wreaths and strange large birds; black satin sofa-pillows, with stiff quilled ruffles in brilliant colors to match the birds. The shades of the electric lights (which were of course designed to make them look like candles) were ornamented with cut-out black silhouettes of nude ladies with extremely long legs. The furniture was either all “antique” or had been doctored to look as though it were. A large, dark, carved chest stood against a wall--to contain what it was difficult to conjecture. The chairs had the correct kind of legs and backs and arms, that is, the kind that had not yet been copied sufficiently to spoil it for the discerning taste; and the straight, curiously-shaped table was at least two jumps ahead of anything shown at that time even by the most enterprising department-store. The walls, in accordance with the order of the day, were for the most part smartly and knowingly bare, with a few permissible reproductions of Chinese landscapes; one a tall, narrow study of bamboo shoots, another a long, narrow study of snowy mountains, depicted in three or four lines (this year it would be, I suppose, an 1858 panel by Jolly).

I sat down in what looked like the most comfortable of the distinguished chairs, my feet on one of the correctly Oriental rugs, and looked dispiritedly about me for some sign of living taste in all that tastefully arranged room. There was plenty of taste shown there; but it smelled so of the pages of an expensive magazine printed on highly-glazed paper, that presently, as I sat there, despairing of my race, I felt my own body take on the same flat, two-dimensional unreality. Well, that is the sort of flat and unreal creatures human beings are when it comes to taste, I reflected.

There was not, so far as I could see, one single object in that room (and God knows there were plenty of objects in it!) which rang out with the clear, brave note of a thing chosen because it gives pleasure. Everything about me wore a large, invisible but plainly legible placard, setting forth that it was there because it was “the thing”; and that the instant “the thing” was something else it would be cast out and replaced with something else as meaningless as itself in the life of the owner.

The whole expensive show was perched on the branch of other people’s opinions, and was ready to fall to the ground as soon as that branch waved in the wind of a new fashion. There was not one object which suggested what you might think would be the first, simple, hearty, healthy instinct of prospering humanity, the desire to surround itself with what it likes. No, in its abject consistency, the room shamelessly proclaimed that its ambition was to be well thought of by “people in the know” and not at all to please the family who had paid for it and had to live with it.

Docility in human beings is always a dreadful quality, but docility in matters of taste is shameful. I sighed, and fixed my eyes on what looked like a Chardin. Oh, yes, Chardin was “in” now, I remembered. But an ordinary private family would be as little likely to own a real Chardin as a real Veermeer. I reflected that as soon as it was discovered not to be a genuine one, it would certainly be sent off to the junk shop. And yet it was a delightful canvas, apparently by some one of the period who had absorbed Chardin’s atmosphere and loved it as we do. If it looked so much like a Chardin that only the X-ray could tell the difference, why wasn’t it as good as a Chardin? I fell into a meditation on the hideous ways of collectors of pictures, blasphemers against the Holy Ghost of Art that they are. Ostensibly they buy pictures because they love good paintings (I am not referring to art _dealers_!). A collector sees a small canvas, said to be a Teniers, and is ready to pay a fantastic price for it, enough to endow a school for all time. Some expert with a chemical test proves that it is not a Teniers. It is the same picture as before, the very same; but now the lover of good art would not hang it on his walls, if it were given to him.

What kind of a race is that to belong to, I asked myself plaintively. They don’t want beauty, they don’t want art, they haven’t even the plain courage that any dog or monkey has, to want what they want. They want what other people pretend to want.

I got up restlessly, crossed over to the other side of the room, turned my eyes to the side I had left, and was electrified. There in the center of the wall, next to a small reproduction of a Madhu camel-fight, was a large canvas, a solidly painted, honest, dark, sentimental Jules Breton. I gazed at it with profound thankfulness. There was not an extenuating circumstance. It was his usual peasant girl, done with his usual pseudo-realism, with her usual bare feet, every muddy toe conscientiously drawn, and it had darkened to the usual Breton gloom. It swore at the top of its voice at all the knowing, Orientalized, simplified, subtle things about it, and my heart leaped up to hear it swear. For it sounded like a living voice.

Here was something that must have been bought some time ago (for nobody can actually have bought a Breton recently), which must have been hung on the wall when Bretons were in style. But it had not been banished when the style had changed!

And yet the rest of the room told me unmistakably that the owner of that room knew as well as any one else what was now thought of that Breton by people “in the know.”

Well, there was one visitor who appreciated it. Never before had I thought to admire so ardently the dull, faithful, unimaginative surface of a Breton. But I gazed at it with affection. There could be no reason for its presence except that somebody liked it enough to keep it in spite of what other people thought. Well, now--I took heart--maybe the situation wasn’t so desperate as I had thought. Perhaps we may have a live national taste in art, twenty or more generations later on. If there was _any_body not an artist himself, who had the honesty and courage which must be at the foundation of anything alive in artistic taste, why perhaps....

Just then a dreadful possibility came into my mind--perhaps it had been a wedding present from a wealthy uncle not to be offended?

On this my host and hostess came in. As we talked of the object of my visit (which had nothing to do with art) I was constantly spying on the expression of their eyes, listening half-hopefully, half-despairingly to the sound of their voices, watching feverishly every turn of expression in their kind, honest faces. I had never seen them before that day and probably shall have no occasion to see them again. But I often think of them and wonder about them. They really looked as though they might be capable of not being ashamed to like a picture no longer in fashion. Perhaps they _had_ kept that Breton on their walls out of sheer, honest, brave, artistic integrity....

But the more I think of it, the more unlikely it seems.

ALMERA HAWLEY CANFIELD

b. 1787; m. 1808; d. 1874