Part 13

“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

Of course I never saw her. She died years before I was born. But she left behind her a portrait so full of her personality that no living figure is more human to me than my great-grandmother.

I do not at all refer to the portrait over the dining-room mantelpiece, showing her as a withered old woman in a frilled cap, which is now the only tangible sign of her existence left in her old home. No; that might have been any withered old woman in a frilled cap.

There is another portrait of my great-grandmother not done on canvas with oils. Here are some of the strokes which one by one, at long intervals, as if casually and by chance, have painted it for me.

When I was about eight years old, I went out one day to watch old Lemuel Hager, who came once a year to mow the grass in the orchard back of the house. As he clinked the whetstone over the ringing steel of his scythe, he looked down at me and remarked: “You favor the Hawley side of the family, don’t you? There’s a look around your mouth sort o’ like Aunt Almera, your grandmother--no--my sakes, you must be her great-granddaughter! Wa’l--think of that! And it don’t seem more’n yesterday I saw her come stepping out same’s you did just now; not so much bigger’n you are this minute, for all she must have been sixty years old then. She always was the _littlest_ woman. But for all that she marched up to me, great lummox of a boy, and she said, ‘Is it true, what I hear folks say, Lemuel, that you somehow got out of school without having learned how to read?’ And I says, ‘Why, Mis Canfield, to tell the truth, I never did seem to git the hang of books, and I never could seem to git up no sort of interest in ’em.’

“And she says back, ‘Well, no great boy of eighteen in the town _I_ live in is a-goin’ to grow up without he knows how to read the Declaration of Independence,’ says she. And she made me stop work for an hour--she paid me just the same for it--took me into the house, and started teaching me.

“Great land of love! if the teacher at school had ’a’ taught me like that, I’d ’a’ been a minister! I felt as though she’d cracked a hole in my head and was just pouring the l’arning in through a funnel. And ’twa’n’t more’n ten minutes before she found out ’twas my eyes the trouble. I’m terrible near-sighted. Well, that was before the days when everybody wore specs. There wa’n’t no way to git specs for me; but you couldn’t stump Aunt Almera. She just grabbed up a sort of magnifying-glass that she used, she said, for her sewing, now her eyes were kind o’ failing her, and she give it to me. ‘I’ll take bigger stitches,’ says she, laughing; ‘big stitches don’t matter so much as reading for an American citizen.’

“Well, sir, she didn’t forgit me; she kept at me to practice to home with my magnifying-glass, and it was years before I could git by the house without Aunt Almera come out on the porch and hollered to me, that bossy way she had, ‘Lemuel, you come in for a minute and let me hear you read.’ Sometimes it kind o’ madded me, she had such a way o’ thinkin’ she could make everybody stand ’round. And sometimes it made me laugh, she was so old, and not much bigger’n my fist. But, by gol, I l’arned to read, and I have taken a sight of comfort out of it. I don’t never set down in the evening and open up the Necronsett ‘Journal’ without I think of Aunt Almera Canfield.”

One day I was sent over to Mrs. Pratt’s to get some butter, and found it just out of the churn. So I sat down to wait till Mrs. Pratt should work it over, munching on a cookie, and listening to her stream of talk--the chickens, the hail-storm of the other day, had my folks begun to make currant jelly yet? and so on--till she had finished and was shaping the butter into beautiful round pats. “This always puts me in mind of Aunt Almera,” she said, interrupting an account of how the men had chased a woodchuck up a _tree_--who ever heard of such a thing? “Whenever I begin to make the pats, I remember when I was a girl working for her. She kept you right up to the mark, I tell you, and you ought to have seen how she lit into me when she found out some of my butter-pats were just a little over a pound and some a little less. It was when she happened to have too much cream and she was ‘trading in’ the butter at the store. You’d have thought I’d stolen a fifty-cent piece to hear her go on! ‘I sell those for a pound; they’ve got to _be_ a pound,’ says she, the way she always spoke, as though that ended it.

“‘But land sakes, Mis’ Canfield,’ says I, all out o’ patience with her, ‘an ounce or two one way or the other--it’s as likely to be more as less, you know! What difference does it make? _Nobody_ expects to make their pats just a pound! How could you?’

“‘How could you? How could you?’ says she. ‘Why, just the way you make anything else the way it ought to be--by keeping at it till it _is_ right. What other way is there?’

“I didn’t think you could do it. I _knew_ you couldn’t; but you always had to do the way Mis Canfield said, and so I began grumbling under my breath about high-handed, fussy old women. But she never minded what you _said_ about her, so long as you did your work right. So I fussed and fussed, clipping off a little, and adding on a little, and weighing it between times. It was the awfulest bother you ever saw, because it spoiled the shape of your pat to cut at it so much, and you had to start it over again every time.

“Well, you wouldn’t believe it, how soon I got the hang of it! She’d made me think about it so much, I got interested, and it wasn’t any time at all before I could tell the heft of a pat to within a fraction of an ounce just by the feel of it in my hand. And I never forgot it. You never do forget that kind of thing. I brought up my whole family on that story. ‘Now you do that spelling lesson just exactly _right_,’ I’d say to my Lucy, ‘just the way Aunt Almera made me do the butter pats!’”