Part 1

Adventures in Indigence and Other Essays

ADVENTURES IN INDIGENCE

AND

OTHER ESSAYS

BY LAURA SPENCER PORTOR

The Atlantic Monthly Press Boston

COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS, INC.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

CONTENTS

ADVENTURES IN INDIGENCE

I. Musgrove 1

II. The Harp and the Violin 13

III. Major Lobley 25

IV. Mamie Faffelfinger 38

V. The Lure of the "Chiffoneer" 55

VI. Margaret 68

VII. Margharetta 87

VIII. The Powers of the Poor 101

IX. Horatio 114

GUESTS

I. Relations of the Spirit 129

II. Kith and Kin 155

THE DISAPPOINTMENTS AND VICISSITUDES OF MICE 183

BIRTHDAYS AND OTHER EGOTISMS 215

PREFACE

It is doubtful whether the present volume should be looked on as a collection of essays, or might not more aptly be called a book of personal experience. The true essayist offers you fewer doubts and peradventures. He comes with clear philosophies, to which he means to convert you. He is well armed for controversy. He will cite you Scripture, the Decalogue, and the statutes. You will find it difficult to pick a flaw in his argument. Never hope to prove him wrong! He leaves no man reasonable choice but to agree with him. He is a sworn advocate. His essay is his brief. If he be a man of force, his cause is won before the jurymen take their places. Be sure he will prove his point before any just judge. The case, it seems when you come to think upon it later, might almost have gone by default, so little is there any argument left you.

The papers in the present volume are not so forethought, nor are they designed to be so convincing. There is more memory than doctrine in them; more experience than authority, theology, or faith. In them will be found little that is taught by the schools, upheld by the courts, or propounded by the Fathers. Perhaps they contain not so much what I believe, as what, because of persistent personal observation and testing and proving, of my own, I have been at last unable to disbelieve. These papers, in short, deal with none of the usual and traditional theories of life, but rather with life as I have intimately found it and lived it.

It is one thing to uphold loyally an ancient faith which has from the beginning been taught one, or to which one has, on the respected authority of others, been converted; it is a wholly other thing to uphold sincerely, and for what it may be worth, a belief which one has but evolved and tested and proven for one's self. God forbid it should be upheld arrogantly! For, as the first method is calculated to produce devout believers, zealous to convert those whose beliefs differ from their own, so does the other tend, rather, to make devout observers; and as the passionate believer is to the last unable to understand how others could believe differently than he does; the devout observer is eager to mark where and how the observations of others differ from his own, or, it may be, happily coincide with them. He has a persistent desire to know whether, given the same experience and facts, others will approve of his findings.

It is for this reason, no doubt, that I find myself wondering whether the reader of this volume has discovered, as I have,--all tradition, teaching, theory, and articles of faith to the contrary,--indisputable evidence of the mysterious and imponderable powers of the poor. Has Life the Educator revealed herself to another in such a fashion as to me? Have you who read--you also--a secret belief in certain unmistakable superiorities hidden away in the unwritten records and the unadministered laws of lesser creatures than ourselves? Have you, like myself, lost birthdays irretrievably, and found in their place that larger nativity writ in a more universal horoscope?

Though these papers do not claim to be more than personal records of experience and adventure and consequent belief, yet there may be those who will decry the persistent personality, who will condemn the seeming egotism. To these there is recommended--perhaps a little wistfully--the paper, toward the last, which attempts to deal with this rather widespread failing.

L. S. P.

ADVENTURES IN INDIGENCE

I

MUSGROVE

Both Stevenson and Lamb, writing of "Beggars," fall into what I take to be a grave misapprehension. They both write a defense, and constitute themselves advocates. Lamb brilliantly solicits our pity for these "pensioners on our bounty"; Stevenson, though he characteristically makes himself comrade and brother of his client, and presents the "humbuggery" of the accused as a legitimate art, nevertheless thinks himself but too evidently of a higher order, and the better gentleman of the two. Here, and it would seem in spite of himself, are patronage and condescension.

I own that such an attitude shocks me and makes me apprehensive. Were I superstitious, of a certain creed, I should cross myself to ward off calamity; or were I a Greek of the ancient times, I should certainly pour a propitiatory libation to Hermes, god of wayfarers, thieves, vagabonds, mendicants, and the like.

"Poor wretches," indeed! "Pensioners," they! "Ragamuffins! humbugs!" They, with their occult powers! _They_, mind you, needing our advocacy! I could indeed bear a different testimony.

I think I began first to know the power of the poor, and to fall under their sway, when I was certainly not more than six years old. It must have been about then that I was learning to sew. This seems to have been a profession to which I was so temperamentally disinclined that my mother, to sweeten the task, was wont during the performance of it to read to me. While I sat on a hassock at her feet scooping an unwilling perpendicular needle in and out of difficult hems, my mother would read from one of many little chap-books and children's tracts, which were kept commonly in a flat wicker darning-basket in her wardrobe; little paper books held over from her own and her mother's childhood. They were illustrated with quaint woodcuts, and the covers of them were colored. I was allowed to choose which one was to be read.

One day--"because the time was ripe," I suppose--I selected a little petunia-colored one, outwardly very pleasing to my fancy. It contained the story and the pictures of a miserable beggar and a haughty and unfeeling little girl. He was in rags, and reclined, from feebleness I fancy, on the pavement; she walked proudly in a full-skirted dress, strapped slippers, and pantalets. She wore a dipping leghorn with streamers. Just over this she carried a most proud parasol; just under it a nose aristocratically, it may even be said unduly, high in the air.

I think I need not dwell on the tale, save to say that it was one of the genus known as "moral." There was only one ending possible to the story: the triumph of humility, the downfall of pride and prosperity; swift and awful retribution falling upon her of the leghorn and pantalets. I believe they allowed her in the last picture a pallet of straw, a ragged petticoat, bare feet, clasped hands, and a prayerful reconciliation with her Maker. The story was rendered distinctly poignant for me by the fact that I possessed a parasol of pink "pinked silk," which was held on Sundays and certain other occasions proudly--it also--over a leghorn with streamers which dipped back and front exactly as did the little girl's in the story. But never, never,--once I had made the acquaintance of that story,--was my nose carried haughtily under it, when by chance I sighted one of that race so numerous and so ancient, so well known and so little known to us all. From that day I began to know the power of the poor.

I can remember delectable candies that I did not buy, delicious soft cocoanut sticks that I never tasted, joys that I relinquished, hopes that I deferred, for the questionable but tyrannous comfort of a penny in an alien tin cup, and the inevitable "God bless you, little lady!" which, remembering her of the leghorn and pantalets, I knew to be of necessity more desirable than the delights I forewent.

There was an old blind man there in my home town, whom I remember very keenly. He used to go up and down, he and his dog, in front of the only caravansary the place boasted,--the Hotel Latonia,--tap-tap, tap-tapping. He had the peculiar stiff, hesitating walk of the blind, the strange expectant upward tilt of the face. He wore across his shoulder a strap on which was fastened a little tin cup.

I used to see the drummers and leisurely men of a certain order, their chairs tilted back against the hotel wall, their heels in the chair-rungs, their hats on the back of their heads, their thumbs in their arm-holes, their cigars tilted indifferently to heaven, and they even cracking their jokes and slapping their knees and roaring with laughter, or perhaps yawning, perfectly unaware of the blind man, it seemed, while he passed by slowly, tap-tap, tap-tapping.

But it was never thus with me. His cane tapped, not only on the pavement, but directly on my heart. You could have heard it, had you put your ear there. It may have seemed that his eyes were turned to the sky. That was but a kind of physical delusion. I knew better. In some occult way they were searching me out and finding me. I can give you no idea of the command of the thing. Perhaps I have no need to. Your own childhood--it is not improbable--may have been under a similar dominion.

If I thought to experiment and withhold my penny, I might escape the blind man for a while: I might elude him, for instance, while the other members of the family and the guests in that old home of my childhood were gay and talkative at the supper-table; or afterward, when laughter and song drowned the lesser sounds; or while I stood safe in the loved shelter of my father's arm, listening to conversations I enjoyed, even though I could not understand them; or while, in the more intimate evenings, he took his flute from its case, screwed its wonderful parts together, and, his fingers rising and falling with magic and precision on the joined wood and ivory, played "Mary of Argyll" until I too heard the mavis singing. But later, later, when I lay alone in my bed in the nursery in the moonlight, or, if it were winter, in the waning firelight and the creeping shadows, then, _then_ there came up the stairs and through the rooms the sound of the blind man's cane, tap-tap, tap-tapping. He had come for his penny. And the next time I saw him, with a chastened spirit and a sense of escape I gave him two.

But my own childish subserviency to the poor did not give me so great a sense of their power as my mother's relation to them. She, it seems, was perpetually at their service. Let them but raise a hand indicating their need ever so slightly, and she moved in quick obedience, although it seemed she too must sometimes have wearied of such service. Guests were many and frequent in that old home, as I have elsewhere told; but these came either by announcement or by invitation; the poor, on the contrary, came unasked, unannounced, and exactly when they chose, as by royal prerogative. Indeed, many a time I have seen my mother excuse herself to a guest, to wait sympathetically upon a man or a woman with a basket,--it might be the queen of the gypsies, with vivid, memorable face; or the Wandering Jew in the very flesh; or it might be Kathleen ni Houlihan herself, all Erin looking out, haunting you, from her tragic old eyes,--offering soap or laces at exorbitant prices, or other less useful wares, tendered for sale and excuse at the kitchen door.

There was one whom I especially remember--Musgrove. He was a fine marquis of a man, was Musgrove, as slender as a fiddle and with as neat a waist. He used to come to the front door and sit by the old hall clock, waiting my mother's pleasure. He had a wife and seven or nine children, and a marvelous multiplicity of woes. There was a generosity and spaciousness about the calamities of Musgrove--something mythopœic, promethean. Tragedies befell him with consistent abundance. Four or five of the seven or nine had broken their arms, almost put out their eyes, or had just escaped by a hair's breadth from permanent blanket-mortgage disability when the floor of the cottage they lived in fell through; or they had been all but carried off wholesale by measles. Once all nine, as I remember it, were poisoned _en gros_ by Sunday-school-picnic ice-cream, which left the children of others untouched. Only myths were comparable. Niobe alone, and she not altogether successfully, could have matched calamities with him.

By and by Time itself, I think, wearied of Musgrove. I think my mother, sympathetic as she was, must have come to think the arrows of outrageous fortune were falling far too thick for likelihood, even on so shining a mark as Musgrove. She came from interviews with him with a kind of gentle weariness. But Musgrove, I am very sure, had an eye for the drama. He knew his exits and his entrances, and I have reason to believe no shade of feeling in my mother's face was lost upon him.

He came one day to say good-bye, his shabbiness heightened, but brightened also, by a red cravat. It was safe now, no doubt, to allow himself this gayety. He knew that my mother would be glad to hear that, through the kindness of someone nearly as kind as herself, he had been able to obtain a position in a large city. He lacked but the money to move. After that--prosperity would be his.

My mother did not deny him his chance, Musgrove himself, you see, having contrived it so that the chance was not without a certain advantage and privilege for her. So he made his fine bow, and he and his fine marquis manners were gone.

I think my mother must have missed him. I know I did. The other pensioners came as regularly as ever--the gypsy with her grimy laces; the Jew with his tins and soap; rheumatic darkies by the dozen, frankly empty-handed; the little girl with the thin legs and with the black shawl pinned over her head and draped down over the shy and empty basket on her arm; and the old German inventor who always brought the tragedy of old and outworn hopes along with some new invention; or, at infrequent intervals, for a touch of color, there came an Italian organ-grinder, and--if the gods were good--a monkey. But there were times when I would have exchanged them all to see Musgrove again, with his fine promethean show of endurance, his incomparable assortment of unthinkable calamities.

Another, it is true, came in his place, but he was of a wholly different type. He had not the old free manner of Musgrove, yet he was strangely appealing, too. He wore a beard and was stooped and spent and submissive, a man broken by fate. He did not complain. He did not wait rather grandly by the hall clock as Musgrove had done; no, but in the kitchen, about breakfast-time, biding the cook's not always cordial pleasure.

In spite of my mother's sympathy,--which should certainly have made amends for any lack of it in the cook,--he had a way of slipping in and out with a little shrinking movement of his body, like the hound that does the same to escape a blow. One would have said that body and soul flinched. He limped stiffly, and seemed always to have come a little dazed from far countries.

My mother took even a very keen interest in him. This man was more difficult to reach, but by that very token seemed no doubt the more worthy. He told no wonderful tales to tax your credulity. His very reticence was moving and hard to endure; the death of nine or seven children would have been less sad. He kept coming for quite a long time. Then the day dawned--a day quite like any other, I suppose, though it should have been dark with cloudy portent--when, by some slight misstep, some trifling but old reference on his part when his mind was off its guard, my mother discovered, as by a sudden lightning flash, that this _was_ Musgrove.

I have known some dramatic moments in my life, but I would not put this low on the list.

He seemed to know for an intense arrested instant that he had spoken a false line, that he had for a miserable moment forgotten his part. He staggered into it again with what I know now was fine courage, and managed in perfect character to get away. I can still see him as he departed, bent and submissive (having most meekly thanked my mother), and not forgetting to limp stiffly, going along under the falling leaves of the grape-arbor, in the autumn sunshine, the shadows of the stripped vines making a strange and moving pattern on his old coat as he went; nor have I failed to see him in all the years since, thus departing,--inevitably, irretrievably,--and have found my heart going many a time along with him.

My mother, and I with my hand in hers, went back into the quiet comfortable rooms of that old house. But if you suppose we went in any spirit of ascendency, or righteous indignation, or justification, you are indeed mistaken. To be in the right is such an easy, such a pleasant thing; what is difficult and must be tragically difficult to endure is to be artistically, tragically in the wrong. I think it likely that my mother remembered Musgrove, as I have done, through all the years, a little as a survivor might remember one who had gone down before his eyes. It is thus, you see, that Musgrove, bent and always departing, still continues to sway others with his strange powers, as it is fitting, no doubt, that one of his rare genius should do.

II

THE HARP AND THE VIOLIN

Besides those that I have mentioned, there were two especially of that ancient race whose fortunes were bound in with my early memories.

It was upon a day when I was a little more than fourteen that I came to know them. I was alone at home, save for the maids in the house, and was reading at my ease, as I loved to do, in that old verandah that fronted the south. I remember well that the book I read was "Rasselas, or The Happy Valley."

The verandah was deep and long. Beside it ran a brick pavement, delightful in color and texture. Over this, joining the verandah, there curved a latticed grape-arbor of most gracious lines, on which grew, in lovely profusion, a wistaria, a catawba grape-vine, moonflower, and traveler's-joy. When the wistaria, like a spendthrift, had lavished all its purple blossoms, and there were left but green leaves in its treasury, then the grape bloom lifted its fragrance; and when this was spent, the traveler's-joy, as though it had foreseen and saved for the event, flung forth its abundance; and when at last its every petal had fallen and nothing more remained,--for the moonflower had its own prejudice, persistently refused the demands of the sun, and would open its riches only to the moon and the night moths,--then the early autumn sun, feeling through the thinning leaves, hardly expectant, would come upon that best treasure of all, stored long, against this time, in the reddening clusters of the grapes.

All these things lent I cannot say what charm inexhaustible to that old verandah, and made it a place of abiding romance and delight. The pattern of the sunshine and of the moonlight on the floor of it, as they fell through the lattice and the leaves, are things that still haunt my memory with the sense of a lovely security, of a generous abundance, and, as it were, of the lavish inexhaustible liberality of life itself.

There, secure against interruption, I read and pondered, with the imaginative ponderings of fourteen, the strange longings of that Prince who should have been so content in the Happy Valley.

As I read, I was aware of a strange intrusion: a bent form in baggy trousers and rusty coat stooped under the weight of an old and worn harp; behind him, bent also, but by no visible burden, an old man with a violin entered the gateway of the arbor. They came very slowly and deliberately, yet without pause or uncertainty. They did not introduce themselves, being, I knew instantly, quite above such plebeian need. They asked no permission, nor solicited any tolerance. They spoke not a word. It was as if they had long outgrown the need of such earthly trivialities.

He of the rusty coat and baggy trousers, having taken a slow look at the place around,--as though to establish in his mind some mysterious identity,--let the harp slip from his shoulders to the brick pavement, adjusted it there very deliberately, and proceeded to pluck one or two of its strings with testing fingers, still looking around carefully all the while; then he adjusted his camp-stool, seated himself, pulled the worn, yet delicate and feminine instrument toward him, so that her body lay against his shoulder, and put his hands in position to play.

The old violin, more lordly, made no concession whatever to harmony; he tuned or touched not a string, but with a really kingly gesture put his instrument in the worn hollow of his shoulder, laid his head and cheek over against it, as though lending his whole soul to listen, raised the bow, held it for an immortal instant over the strings, and then drew out a long preliminary note--on, on, on, to the very quivering tip of the bow.

My education had not been neglected as to music. There had always been much of it in my home, where flute and voice and harp and violin and piano spoke often, and my home town was near a great musical centre, where, young as I was, I had heard the best that was to be heard. Had I been in a critical mood, I should have noted how badly the long-drawn note was drawn; I can hear still how excruciating it was, how horribly it squawked; but rendered solemn, as I was, by the strangeness of their appearance and their presence, and dimly, dimly aware of their immortal powers, it thrilled me more than I remember those of Sarasate or Ysaye to have done.

The long note at an end, without so much as a consultation of the eyes, they then began. With never a word, only with thrilling tones horribly off the key, the violin spoke, say rather wrung its hands and wailed,--"Oh, don't you remember"--("Oh, yes; I remember!" throbbed and sobbed the harp)--"Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt?"

They played it all through, even to what must have been the "slab of granite so gray," varying all the while from one half to one tone off the key, the old violin lending his ear as attentively all the while to the voice of his instrument as if she spoke with the tongues of angels; his dim veiled eyes fixed on incalculable distances, like those of an eagle in captivity.

The old harp, on the contrary, kept his eyes lowered stubbornly on the vibrating strings; and the harp, as he smote, quivered like some human thing struck upon its remembering heart. From the painfully reminiscent song they leaped without pause into that second most wailful melody in the world,--

Ah, I have sighed to rest me, Deep in the quiet grave,--

and played that on to the end also.