Part 9

There was, further, my mother's youngest sister, who was better than any legend. I would rather have inherited, as I did then, that love-story of hers, than very considerable worldly riches.

Another of my mother's sisters was mistress of a home on Fifth Avenue and of a very lovely country place on the Hudson. She had maids at every hand to wait upon her, and footmen whose eyes looked straight ahead of them, and who wore cockades in their hats. I liked her for herself: her beauty and her spirit and commandingness always stirred me, and she liked and approved of me, besides. Moreover,--let me be frank,--I liked her too, in those days, for the footmen as well. One of my sisters had visited her for nine months, and had, on her return, entirely revolutionized all my ideas of the world.

But that, rather, which confirmed and stablished me and my ideals as on a rock, was the love-story of my youngest aunt.

She and her husband had only the most moderate means. They lived in what I like now to believe must have been a rose-covered cottage. But oh, the love of them! She had a mass of wonderful hair which it seems he loved to unpin at night, to see it fall at either side of her lovely face, down to her knees and beyond; and a tiny foot, whose slipper he would allow no one but himself to put on. All reports of every member of the family agreed: these were a pair of perfect lovers; like "Rose in Bloom" and "Ansal Wajoud"; no harsh word was ever spoken between them; they lived wholly for each other, in a blissful world apart, rich in their own manner; where neither poverty, nor distress, nor discord could find them; and where no hand could ever fall upon the latch to bring them sorrow--save only one.

That hand fell--the hand of him gently termed by Scheherazade and other tale-tellers of the East, "The Terminator of Delights, and Separator of Companions."

She came to be with us the winter that she was widowed. It was thought the change of air, and perhaps the brightness of our household, might be of some little help. We children were admonished to be very gentle--not to be noisy. Superfluous precaution! She was to me sacred!

She used to walk up and down the upper veranda, taking the air slenderly, a light shawl about her shoulders, her tiny foot pausing now and then for greater steadiness, when the wind swayed her frail body too rudely. I have known many faces since then; I never knew one with a lovelier look. Heartbroken though she was, the depth of her love was daily attested, for there never came complaint or bitter word across her lips; and you went to her, without question, for quiet and comfort, as to a sanctuary.

At first, it seems, she had been pitifully rebellious, had longed and prayed to die (we children knew these facts); but, having been denied so much as this, she rose delicately, and lived on worthy of him, binding and unbinding her hair, fastening her little slippers anew for the daily road and routine of life. Sometimes, with tactful or tactless devotion (I do not know to this day which), I would offer to fasten them for her; and she would smile and let me do it, and usually kissed me afterward.

There were years and years when I never saw her. She grew more frail, I am told, and her cheek withered; but to me she was always incomparable, and always "Rose-in-Bloom"; and like Rose-in-Bloom, looking always to one thing only--reunion with her beloved.

"Will fortune, after separation and distance, grant me union with my beloved?" sighs the lover of Rose-in-Bloom. "Close the book of estrangement and efface my trouble? Shall my beloved be my cup-companion once more? Where is Rose-in-Bloom, O King of the Age?"

It might have been her lover who so questioned a mightier king, while she waited far from him, there even in our very house. And the reply of the king in the story would still have been fitting: "By Allah, ye are two sincere lovers; and in the heaven of beauty two shining stars, and your case is wonderful and your affair extraordinary."

* * * * *

It were indeed impossible to explain all that these, the vivid lives of my own, meant to me, and what effect they had on what I like to call my education--how much indeed they were my education.

It is usually assumed that, the sooner we get at books, the sooner we shall become educated. I think it a pale assumption. The order might more happily be reversed. I am convinced that it was mainly by my reading of these men and women, with whom the world of my childhood was peopled and whom the gracious habit of visiting brought within my ken, that I came later to recognize and enjoy the best authors and the best literature. I had known Lear and Othello and Hamlet in my own circle, though without Shakespearean dramatization or language. I have already told you how well I knew "Rose-in-Bloom," so much better than the "Arabian Nights" could ever tell me of her. "The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling" was familiar enough to me. I had had it rolled on me by the author of "Herod and Mariamne." I was continually recognizing in books fragments of life, but glorified by the art of phrase or symbol. When I came one day upon the incomparable scene in Capulet's orchard, and those lines,--

"By yonder blessed moon I swear, That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops,"

was I, do you think, a stranger to it? Had I not in real life heard Miss Lou Brooks sing with a full heart and a quivering voice,--

"The stars shine o'er his pathway!"

It will, without doubt, be objected that my childhood was an exceptional one, even for my day; that the average child of the present would certainly have no such characters and types from which to draw knowledge. But this is, I am sure, a false premise. Humanity is a very ancient stuff, and human beings are to be found to-day quite as interesting and vivid as ever human beings were. But there lacks to the modern child the quiet opportunity for knowing and studying humanity at first-hand. In place of long and comfortable and constant visits, we have a kind of motion-picture hospitality soon over, a film on a roll soon spun out; and instead of life with its slower actions and reactions, a startling mere picture of life flashing by.

A short time ago I watched a party of married people and children receive an automobileful of guests at a country house. The guests remained something over twelve hours, which is a long visit in these days.

When they came, it was explained by them how many miles they had come that day and over what roads. An hour was now devoted to getting the dust off and to a change of clothes. After this there was much chatter among host and guests, talk of mutual friends, and much detail as to journeying; what roads had been found good, what ones uncomfortable for speeding, with a comparing of road-maps among the men. Then there was luncheon; after that, siestas; after these, a spin to the polo grounds in the host's "auto"; after this, tea on the country-club veranda, and another spin home. Another half-hour was now again given to the removal of dust, then an hour to an exceptionally well-served supper; more chatter, with rather high laughter; then the summoning of the original "auto"; good-byes, some waving of hands, a little preliminary chugging of the machine; then a speeding away, a vanished thing. Gone in a flash! A clean sheet once more! The moving-picture visit was over; the host and hostess returned to the chairs on their own veranda; the handsome, long-legged bronzed children looked bored; and the _lares_ and _penates_ inside, if there were any, shivered, I am sure, with what "freezings" in the midst of "old December's bareness everywhere."

"And yet this time removed was summer's time." There were in that flashing speeding automobile six people: there was an old gentleman (very trig and alert) who had hunted tigers in India and had buried three wives; there was a woman who was one of the most proud and vain women in the world, as well as one of the most beautiful; there was a man who had carried through a great panic in Wall Street, and who wore an invisible halo of prayers of widows and orphans; there was a middle-aged woman with a broken heart, whose lover had been buried at sea; there was a fresh-looking young girl chained to the rock of modern conventions, and a square-jawed handsome young Perseus, who was in love with her and determined to rescue her and carry her away to dwell with poverty and himself on a claim in eastern Idaho.

Flash, flash! They are moving pictures, they are gone! What might they not have been, what might they not have contributed, very especially to the host's children, in the way of lessons and knowledge and education, had they remained long enough to be guests! What? Education? But the children all go to school, and to the best to be had; and the little one there is just starting in under the Montessori method. You should see how amazingly, from fifty-seven varieties, she can select and grade the different shades and colors.

Madame Montessori recommends that children be under the care of a "directress" (note the name) in the "Houses of Childhood," each day, the day to begin at eight and to last until six, in a schoolroom where the Montessori "method" is practised by means, mainly, of the "didactic material"! The thing revolts me. I do not say, "What time for arithmetic and geography, and the sterner realities of schooling?" No, nor do I complain as does Sir Walter Scott when he touches on Waverley's education, you remember, that "the history of England is now reduced to a game at cards." I say to myself more solemnly, "But what time is left for life? What time for guests?"

They have a great care of children's education nowadays. We were neglected to a higher learning and abandoned to a larger fate. There were guests coming! We made off to don our best dresses and behaviors. We hoped to be worthy the gracious occasion. We meant to try. Life was at the door.

It was not mere shrewdness in St. Paul, surely, when he recommended the Romans so earnestly to be "given to hospitality"; but a wistfulness as well, and a certain longing for a high education to be given unto them; and it was his correspondents' welfare he had in mind, you remember, rather than the welfare of their guests, when he bade the Hebrews that they "be not forgetful to entertain strangers"; for--now note carefully the sequel--"for thereby some have entertained angels unawares."

I have an old friend who is on his way, I am told by those in authority, to be one of our great modern psychologists. He gives anxious thought to the education of his children. Lately, he approached me seriously in the matter of his boy's educational needs. Would I talk them over with him? He wished to consult me. I looked for a careful discussion of "methods," and was ready with all my arguments concerning the Montessori teachings. Instead, he inquired, "Now when will you come and visit us? a real visit, I mean? That is what I wanted to ask you. It is with that that I am most concerned. That is exactly what Jack needs."

I am needed as a guest in their house, for the sake of the children! My heart rises at the thought! Cheered, I seem to see ahead, clearly, a time when, if we do not provide them with guests, we shall think that we have shamefully neglected our children's education; when we will no more deny them visitors, than we would now neglect to have them taught to read.

To love life for ourselves and others; to be forever interested in it; to be loyal to it, and that down to the grave; to dwell helpfully and appreciatively with one's kind; to understand others as generously as is possible to faulty human nature, and to make ourselves understood as much as is consistent with courtesy; these are, I take it, the fine flower of culture; here is all that I would dare call education, or presume to think of permanent importance.

And by no means, I feel sure, can youth be led to all this so readily, so happily, so effectually, as by means of the age-old virtue of hospitality. These things are things which guests bring with them, knowing it not, and bestow on those who are not aware of the bestowal.

And our most advanced ideal, that of "universal brotherhood" and a "federation of the world"--what is this, I ask you, but a glad sharing of life in a society to which all will be welcome, with bread and wine and greeting denied to none, and guest and host fulfilling an equal obligation?

This is the old manner of entertaining, and--I ask your patience--it is God's manner, not less. The gentle sympathy, the unfailing hospitality of my mother,--how gentle and understanding she was of all types which frequented the old house!--her patience and hospitality had in them, I like to think, some resemblance to that larger patience of Him in whose House of Life we do but for a time visit, some of us how gayly, how romantically, some how fretfully and inconsiderately, lingering past our time; some contributing but idle gossip; some lending to the hearth-fires the glow of poetic dreams; some adding truth or dignity of our own; some possessed of foibles and accomplished in failures; some shining with hopes of final successes that shall never be ours. Yet all of us, by the grace of God, and God be thanked, even so, adding somewhat to the meaning of life, edifying when we least know it, teaching when we are wholly unaware; helpful, instructive, even in our blunders, profiting others by the often profitless lessons and fables of our lives; enlightening when we are most ignorant of so doing, and even when our own lives are darkened. In a word, _guests_; and what is of even sweeter import, all of us understood, condoned, valued, pitied, loved, by the Master of the House; welcomed by his world that has long looked for our coming; served by his servants; waited upon by wind and wave and those others who do his bidding; afforded the bread of life to eat, given the wine of life to drink; warmed by the shining, welcoming sun; lighted by no less candles than the stars; and with rest and peace, and a bed at last for every one.

THE DISAPPOINTMENTS AND VICISSITUDES OF MICE

I

There is, I am persuaded, a tendency in many of us to reckon too absorbedly our own difficulties and to give but scant regard to the difficulties of others. This I have observed frequently, not only in our associations with those of our own kind, but very especially in our relations with creatures that we assume to be of a lower order than ourselves.

I believe my own opportunity for observing the difficulties and disappointments of certain members of the animal kingdom to have been somewhat exceptional. It first came to me by way of residence in a very delightful house in the country, in which it was my privilege to live. It is an old house, as age goes in America, eighty or more years having passed over the oldest of its low gables. Before we came to it, the owner had not lived in it for many years. People had camped there from time to time; it had served during one summer as sanctuary to some episcopal nuns, who set up a chapel in one of its twenty-two rooms, and tinkled matins and vespers in and out of its twilit chambers; but they remained a short two months only and then went on again, they and their chanted services, leaving it voiceless and tenantless--tenantless, that is, as to human kind.

When we came to it there were many problems, difficult enough, certainly, to be met before the beautiful old rooms of pleasing and aristocratical proportions could be made comfortable and livable. But I know now that I reckoned these problems far too curiously, and with too scant regard for the far greater difficulties that our advent must have put upon all the shy creature-folk who had up to that time found the old place convenient and habitable enough.

In front of the house a wide brook brawls, or pauses in little pools, to meditate under the hazel light of the birches and maples of a most lovely woodland. Into this woodland the long veranda, running the length of the house, faces directly. It is but a step--say, rather, the mere dip of a wing--from the branches of the trees to the more sheltered safety of those cornices and crevices of pillar and window-frame where nests may be built so commodiously, away from storm and uncertainty of many kinds; so, too, it is but a step, or let us say a mere flying-squirrel-leap, from the drooping wood branches to the mossy veranda roof, and thence a swift squirrel-run, of no distance at all, along the varied eaves, and under them where secret openings offer, and then but a flash of four-footed speed, to the inviting safety and quiet of the old rafter attic--an ideal place to raise baby squirrels.

When we arrived that day, the house was occupied, at its edges and corners, and even between its closed attic shutters, by birds of every householding and houseloving variety; and in between its many walls, and in its upper rooms and closets and air-chambers and low, long attic, by squirrels and chipmunks; and here, there, and everywhere, as we learned later, in all manner of unobservable but plainly audible places, by mice.

At the time I was not aware of the completeness of this occupancy; but looking back now with full knowledge, I have a sense of shame and crudeness as I think what our coming must have meant to all those many denizens of that long, rambling, quiet old mansion. I had then, it must be remembered, not a thought of them. We were reckoning so absorbedly all our own difficulties and discomforts of moving attendant on our arrival, that we gave not so much as a thought to their calamities of withdrawal.

The birds were the first to go. I remember the frightened dart of one of them close to my face when I first stepped from the front hall on to the veranda. Such a frightened whirr and clipping and cutting of the air to get through it and away, as if a panic had seized her. And another on the branches just beyond the veranda, on her way, no doubt, back to her nest on the window-casing, where now she dared not alight. Such incredulous flitting from branch to branch, such twitching of tail and wings, such anxious twitterings and turnings of the head, such bird exclamations! Then she spread her wings and flew away, no doubt to circulate the news. What Huns and Vandals had entered on her possessions and threatened the country of her safety!

I think the first week, certainly the second, at most, saw all the birds gone. The squirrels and chipmunks, too, though they stayed on a trifle later, were not long in departing. There were councils and hurried scamperings, hushed pauses, and now and then--when I got an actual glimpse of one of them--an attitude of intent listening, a tiny paw held dangling in front of a visibly beating heart; then the quick, noiseless drop to all-fours, the drooped tail, the flash of speed; then the leap into leafy invisibility--only the branches left swaying, remembering.

We had an Irish cook, who called all this tribe--red squirrels, gray squirrels, and chipmunks,--indiscriminately "the munks."

"God bless us! Look at the munks, mum! How they do race and carry on!"

She came to me the second morning, after what I take to have been a sleepless night. "Did you hear last night, mum? 'Twas a shame to any decent house. And but for its bein' here in this heathen country, at the back of God's field, and not a Christian locomotive to be had for miles, I'd pack up and be gone before I'd stand another night of their riotin'! I can't stand the rakish things, mum." The last in a high, nervous key.

"What is it you cannot stand?"

"The munks, mum!"

It was she, a devout daughter of the Church, who had said it. I made no amendment; I only, I am sorry to say, offered her as consolation this:--

"Don't worry about them. They will not stay now we are here. They will find other homes for themselves."

Yes, I said just that, and gave it to her for consolation.

II

So much for the birds and squirrels, those altogether shy denizens given to quick abdication. But the mice, being, I suppose, of a somewhat more reasoning and philosophical order, more given to treaty and capitulation, remained, after I know not what cautious considerations and watchful consultations among themselves. That these must have been sufficiently serious, I am convinced, for we heard at first very little indeed of their doings; as if they intended to wait and study this phenomenon of our usurpation before taking any risk with powers so unlikely and unknown.

But as time passed, their attitude toward the heavens and their horoscope must have altered. Doubtless there was some hope that matters were not so bad as the old and experienced among them had prophesied. Appropriately quiet in the day, in the night they began to dare, and to recover what was, I suppose, some of their erstwhile freedom, or old-time happiness. They began cautiously to come and go; to advance creepingly; to explore; to inquire and pry; to examine and study; and I think, no doubt, to report.

The usurpers, it seems, had a strange way of lying quiet at night (of all times!), and pursuing their busy activities in the day, when all good mouse citizens were in bed and asleep! Well, so far so good. Perhaps the mice set this down to a special providence. However that may be, it is certain that they acted on the intelligence; for at night, having now become well informed as to our habits, they began to come and go, if still a little cautiously, yet with more and more freedom.

I used to lie awake listening to them. One would scurry across the floor wildly overhead, forget something, and run back for it. Another, carrying a burden, would in fright or haste drop it, scamper away as if terrified (oh, good gracious!) and then would dare to go back for it, and roll it away soundingly into safety. I am inclined to think that a certain pleasure was attendant on these dangers, and that among them, as among ourselves, the brave were the gay; for there were among them now--oh, bead-eyed, venturesome spirits!--certain delicate squeakings that had all the effect of laughter. I could have sworn their feet tittered; there was--I do assure you I am speaking the truth--something giggling in their gait.

They were not, I am sure, without their Colchases and Cassandras; but, despite these, they began ere long to have certain celebrations. Go to! Let old White-Whiskers, who foretold calamity, take himself off and lie with his nose on his paws! There are better things in the world than prudence!

Celebrations there certainly were, though of what exact kind I am unable to state; weddings, very likely; town meetings, it may be, with the ladies present and welcome; picnics, in all probability; and christenings, I lean to believe, at which I make little doubt they drank deliriously of dandelion wine. One must not demand too curiously where they got it. I really have no idea. I keep my own well corked. I only know that circumstantial evidence is strongly in favor of the belief that they had it, and that in large quantities. How else is it conceivable they could so far forget our presence and their own risk? For I heard them coming home late one night between the rafters, shortly before dawn, in an openly riotous manner. Prudence they had flung to the winds. Their behavior was wholly ramshackle and reckless. Such squeakings! such tumblings and titterings and scramblings as could only have occurred among those totally oblivious to all danger! Such a drunken dropping of acorns and other picnic viands! with little shrieks from the ladies! Too evidently they had determined to eat and drink and be merry, let come what would.

I could not help laughing myself with them, yet I sobered, too, at such recklessness on their part. This was no mere indiscretion; it was sheer folly.