Part 11

The elderly man beside her added, “You will find many here who will say the same. In the formative period of our town’s history he made an indelible impression for good.”

They took me to his church, where a large bronze tablet set forth his virtues and his influence. They showed me the Ellis Randolph Memorial Library. I was shown the public playground which he conceived a generation before any one else thought of such a thing. But what made the deepest impression on me were the men and women who came to shake my hand because I was Uncle Ellis’ niece, because they wanted to testify to the greatness of his value in their lives. The minister of the town, a white-haired man, told me with a deep note of emotion in his voice, that Dr. Randolph had done more than merely save his life; in his wayward youth he had saved his soul alive. The banker told me that he had heard many celebrated orators, but never any one who could go straight to the heart like Dr. Randolph. “I often tell my wife that she ought to be thankful to Dr. Randolph for a lecture on chivalry to women which he gave to us boys, at an impressionable moment of our lives.”

And the old principal of the school said, “Not a year goes by that I do not thank God for sending that righteous man to be an example to my youth. He left behind him many human monuments to his glory.”

What did I say to them? Oh, I didn’t say anything to them. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

GOD’S COUNTRY

When I was a faculty-child living in a middle-western university town we were all thrilled by the news that the energetic Chancellor of the University had secured as head of the Department of Chemistry a noted European scientist. Although still young he had made a name for himself by some important discoveries in organic chemistry. We talked about those discoveries as fluently, and understood about them as thoroughly as we all now discuss and understand the theories of Professor Einstein.

Professor Behrens was not only a remarkable chemist, so we heard, but a remarkable teacher and a man of wide sympathies and democratic ideals. It was the candid period in American life, when, especially in the west, the word “Europe” was pronounced with a very special intonation, of which Henry James’ wistful admiration was the quintessence. It was the time in American university life when Germany was the goal toward which all our younger scholars ran their fastest race. Yet here was Professor Behrens, leaving a University not only European but German, from which our younger professors were proud to have a Ph.D. and deliberately choosing our new, raw, young institution for the sake of the free, untrammeled, democratic life in America. It went to our heads!

Passages in his letter of acceptance were read to my mother by my father, who had borrowed the letter from the Chancellor. “I have a family of children and as they grow older I am more and more aware of the stifling, airless stagnation of European life. I want them to know something bigger and freer than will ever come to them in this Old World of rigid caste lines and fixed ideas. My wife and I, too, wish to escape from the narrowness of this provincial town where an arrogant young lieutenant swaggering about in his gold-braided white broadcloth uniform is much higher in social rank than the most learned and renowned member of the University faculty; where a rich lumber-merchant, brutal and ignorant, can buy his way into political position and parade about with sash and gold chain and the insignia of the office of Mayor.”

We were all righteously indignant over such elements of life in Europe, and quite exalted in our certainty that the distinguished immigrant would find nothing like that in our midst. The sole and only representative of the military caste was the lieutenant who drilled the university battalion, and he was a most unassuming young American who never on any occasion wore white broadcloth, put on his plain dark-blue uniform as seldom as possible, and for the most part wore a pepper-and-salt business suit and a derby hat. Since there were no trees on the Western plains, there was no equivalent to the iniquitous lumber merchant, the nearest approach being a man who had made a good deal of money out of lucky guesses in real estate. But he would have dropped dead before putting on a sash and a gold chain.

So we awaited the Behrens full of pride and pleasure. When they arrived, everybody in the faculty gave receptions and lunch-parties for them, and all we children rejoiced in the unlimited leavings of fried chicken (it was in September), ice cream, and cake, which were at our disposition after these “functions,” as the Faculty ladies called them. Although surprisingly unceremonious as to table manners, the Behrens were as nice as we expected to find them; and they were evidently delighted with the warm-hearted, open-handed good nature of Americans, by the cordiality of their reception (which seemed quite to amaze them) by the wide-open doors which led anywhere they might wish to go, by the absence of class distinction, and by the generosity with which America supported universities, hospitals, libraries, and public schools. When the University opened, Professor Behrens threw himself into his teaching and soon became one of the favorite professors. He had a song sung about him at the winter concert of the Glee Club; and the Junior year-book was dedicated to him in the spring. By that time the Behrens children, who were in the eighth, fifth, and third grades of my public school were no longer to be distinguished from the rest of us, running and yelling on the hard-beaten earth of the playground, and thoroughly acquainted with duck-on-a-rock, prisoner’s base, and run-sheep-run. Julie and I were classmates in the fifth grade that year, and the next and the next.

But just as we were about to pass together into the exalted rank of the eighth grade, Professor Behrens received a call to be Rector (Julie explained to me that this had nothing to do with a church, but was the same as our Chancellor) of a university in his own country.

It seemed such an advancement to be promoted from Professor to Chancellor that it was no surprise to have him accept, and to see Mrs. Behrens begin hastily to pack up the family belongings. But what did surprise us was the sudden revelation brought out by this event, of a great home-sickness on the part of the Behrens to get back to a “civilized country.” This was one of the phrases Julie overheard her father saying to her mother, which she repeated to me, and I to my parents. A faculty circle gets its news by about the same channels as an army post or a village sewing circle. So by the time this remark had reached my parents it did not surprise them. The Behrens, although still heartily grateful for all the kindness that had been shown them, although still feeling a lively affection for the good-hearted qualities in American life, could not conceal their immense relief at the prospect of the change. Professor Behrens discussed the question with the open frankness of a scientist before a new phenomenon: “I had no idea, till I had to go without them, how vital to civilization are the finer shades, the polish, the stability, the decorum, which comes only with long life of a society in an old country. I had never thought of them, had always supposed, of course, they were to be found everywhere. It is not that I blame America for not having them ... nothing but time can give them ... but there is no denying that they give a different color to life, the same difference of color there is between camping out in a cave, ever so fine and airy and open a cave, and living in a well-ordered house with the appurtenances of civilization. There is a certain something which springs up from such niceties of life.... I can hardly wait to get home, and give a real dinner with well-trained servants, and cultivated, established guests who have had a social position for so long that it is a part of them. The crudeness, the abruptness, the roughness in human intercourse here! And the total lack on the part of people in the lower classes of any sense of the fitness of things! The _conductor on the street-car_ slapped me on the back the other day!”

So we gave them a grand good-by reception in the gymnasium, and we faculty-children fairly swam in lemonade and wallowed in left-over cake. The faculty presented Professor Behrens with a beautifully bound edition of Emerson, and Mrs. Behrens with a little pearl pendant; and then they went away, and we supposed we would never see them again.

Julie and I corresponded once in a while as children do, the letters growing less frequent as Julie evidently began to forget her English. Mrs. Behrens wrote back a round-robin letter or two to be passed about among her faculty friends, one of them describing the splendid, ceremonious, Old-World way in which Professor Behrens was inducted into his new position. She spoke with special pride of the way in which both the military and municipal authorities of the town had turned out to do him honor, the soldiers, officers, and the Mayor of the town marching at the head of the procession, the latter in his bright sash and gold chain of office. It seemed to us we had heard something about that Mayor before, but we could not remember what it was.

And then Julie forgot her English altogether, and Mrs. Behrens’ letters dwindled and there were none.

I got on through the eighth grade and went into the University prep-school. After three years there, my father was called to a better position in another State University. As we were settling ourselves in the new home, what should we hear but that a distinguished European scientist was about to be added to the faculty, none other than Professor Behrens.

Foreigners, even distinguished ones, were more common in American faculties then than they had been seven years before; there was a large German Department, with many native German instructors; and the University was further east and hence not so open-heartedly welcoming. There was, therefore, no such stir over the newcomers as on their first arrival although every one was very nice to them and the President’s wife had Mrs. Behrens stand by her in the receiving line at the first of the faculty receptions. But the Behrens did not seem to notice that there was anything lacking in their treatment. You never saw people more delighted than they were to be back in America.

“It was worse than I remembered,” Professor Behrens told my father. “After an experience of the free, breezy, self-respecting life in America it was simply unendurable. Suffocating, simply suffocating! With the most ridiculous caste spirit. Rusted to a stand-still with cock-sure conservatism! An instant, hermetic closing up of every pore at any mention of new possibilities for human nature, or for human organizations. And such absurd, stiff, artificial rules of conduct and precedence in society! Let me tell you an episode which will seem almost incredible to you, but which really decided us to come back here. At a garden party my wife ... _my_ wife!... seeing there the wife of the General commanding the troops in the town garrison and knowing her quite well, stepped across the lawn to speak to her, one lady to another. Will you believe it, because she had not waited till the General’s wife had summoned her to her circle, my poor wife received a cold, unrecognizing stare, her outstretched hand was left hanging in the air, and the General’s wife turned her back on her. And when I was furious and protested, I was made uncomfortable, seriously uncomfortable!”

And Mrs. Behrens told my mother she had been horrified by the cold-hearted envy, hatred and meanness which lay underneath the polished manners of many of the people in their circle. “They do not wish you well. They wish you ill. They simply have no conception of the meaning of that American word ‘friendly.’”

Julie was ready for the University, as I was, and we entered the Freshman class together. She was a very pretty girl, one of the brown-haired Teutons, who are so much finer and more neatly finished than the blonde ones, and she had her fair share of popularity. We were taken into the same fraternity, studied together, and were much in each other’s homes. I soon saw that the Behrens home was not altogether a light-hearted one. After the first flush of pleasure at being back had passed, a cloud of depression settled over them. Their sojourn in a more finished and stable, low-toned and nuanced civilization had put them all out of key for the loud-mouthed, cheerful American tune. They found it shrill and noisy, and often stopped their ears against it. Heavens, they had not remembered that American trades-people were so utterly mannerless! Nor that all Americans were so blackly ignorant of the arts! They had no interest in organized athletics, and very soon developed an active hostility for football because of the indisputable fact that the university world was so occupied with it, that nothing serious was done in classes until after Thanksgiving when the last game was played. The Behrens were musical and nobody in the city cared for music except the German-Americans in their shabby quarter at the other end of town, and they were fat grocers, saloon-keepers or foremen in factories, people with whom the Behrens could not dream of associating. They were really very miserable and lonely and disillusioned.

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?”