CHAPTER XXVII

ALICE HEGAN RICE

The author of _Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch_ was born in 1870 in a big old country house at Shelbyville, Kentucky, the home of her grandfather, Judge Caldwell. Her name was, indeed, Alice Caldwell Hegan as a girl. It was Alice Hegan when she wrote the very small book which is quite as world famous as _Mr. Dooley_, Mrs. Wiggs’s pleasant contemporary. It became Alice Hegan Rice on December 18, 1902, when the daughter of Samuel W. Hegan and Sallie P. Hegan was married to the poet Cale Young Rice. And they have lived happily ever after. They have traveled the world over together. They rest, between whiles, at a big, columned house in Louisville, Kentucky. There are photographs extant showing them in pleasant idleness on the broad verandas. Mr. Rice writes songs inspired by their travels together which make such books as _Wraiths and Realities_ and songs inspired by their mere happy proximity, making a book such as _Poems to A. H. R._, both published in 1918. Mrs. Rice no longer writes the fortunes of Mrs. Wiggs in disused pages of an old business ledger (for that is how the first draft of _Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch_ was made). But she writes as agreeably as ever. Mostly shorter pieces. She is not really a novelist but a short story writer. Even _Mrs. Wiggs_ was but a long short story.

Hegans have lived in Louisville pretty close to a century--ninety years anyway. Alice Hegan’s girlhood was sheltered by a brick house on Fourth Street. Summers she spent at Judge Caldwell’s house, her birthplace, with a negro nurse and “Aunt Susan” to tell her folk tales, mostly about personable animals, Brer Fox, Brer Rabbit and the rest of the common acquaintance of Southern childhood. Dolls, church, Sunday School, day school at “Miss Hampton’s” in a house once the home of George Keats, brother of the poet; dancing school (“in ruffles and in gorgeous, wide, blue sashes, pink being prohibited as highly unbecoming”); dances at Galt House; “parties,” country dances in Shelbyville--these were the tissue of those youthful days.

School days over, Alice Hegan wanted to go to Paris and study art. There was reason to think that she had a talent, which would justify an expenditure of time and money. She abandoned the idea because, as she says, “I was an only daughter. My father and mother needed me. It wouldn’t have been right for me to go.”

She had, meanwhile, been writing; she had always been writing a little. When she was sixteen the Louisville _Courier-Journal_ had published _The Reveries of a Spinster_, an anonymous companion-piece to _The Reveries of a Bachelor_. The spinster’s reveries brought many letters to the newspaper, letters read with due appreciation by Alice Hegan, author of spinster and reveries both. She had also written a few short stories and had been a contributor to humorous papers.

There was nothing surprising or wholly unpremeditated therefore in the writing of _Mrs. Wiggs_. Alice Hegan and her mother kept a “give-away bag” which went regularly to a “poor but merry and philosophic woman” living in a neglected quarter of Louisville, out near the railroad tracks, in the southern part of the city. This woman was the original of Mrs. Wiggs. “The story was not a ‘just-so story,’” says Margaret Steele Anderson in her over-effusive appreciation of Alice Hegan Rice, “nor was it a photograph, exact from head to toe, but, in truth, a development of the original. The merry woman served as a nucleus; the rest was all Alice Hegan.” To quote further:

“The manuscript was read one rainy Saturday morning to a little group of ardent young women which called itself, with a courage half gay and half ironical, the Authors’ Club of Louisville. At that time it boasted no ‘real author,’ but the following was the roster of the club: Evelyn Snead Barnett, Alice Hegan Rice, Ellen Churchill Semple, George Madden Martin, Annie Fellows Johnston, Frances Caldwell Macaulay, Abbie Meguire Roach, Eva A. Madden, Mary Finley Leonard, Venita Seibert White, Margaret van der Cook and Margaret Anderson. This club meant nothing at the time, but it means, now, such stories as _Mrs. Wiggs_ and _Mr. Opp_, _Emmy Lou_, _The Lady of the Decoration_ and the _Little Colonel_ books. It means also such work as Mrs. Roach’s studies of married life--which rendered a year of _Harper’s_ very memorable--and such achievement in anthropo-geography as has made Ellen Semple a name on two continents and a lecturer at Oxford and Cambridge. To this little club was read this little story--and the club, as a body, became the very figure of laughter, literally holding both its sides.

“The story was published by the Century Company in October, 1901, and that next summer, as somebody put it, every tourist had it, ‘sticking up out of his pocket.’”

There are thousands of stories to illustrate the world conquest of _Mrs. Wiggs_. West Virginia coal miners whose little homes contain no Bible have the book. In a village of Korea there is, or used to be, an old woman, bent continually over her garden, known to the English officers as “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.” In Sidmouth, on the coast of South Devon, England, was another such person. Mr. and Mrs. Rice have had Mrs. Wiggses pointed out to them everywhere--and they have been everywhere--Sicily, China, India, Japan (the poet is a specialist in Orientalism). “In India one Christmas day, after a morning on the Ganges, after hours of Vedic hymns chanted by Brahmin priests and after a terrible vision of the bodies on the burning ghats,” says Margaret Anderson, “Mrs. Rice was suddenly jerked back into modern life by a billboard near Benares. _Mrs. Wiggs_ would be played there that night by an English company!”

Mrs. Rice is a good deal interested in philanthropic work at home. The Rices’ house stands in St. James Court, a place of trees, bushes, wide sweeps of lawn and a playing fountain. The author of _Mrs. Wiggs_ devotes time and personal effort to the Cabbage Patch Settlement and to a woman’s club which is a feature of it. For many years Mrs. Rice was chiefly active in work among boys. At sixteen she founded a club for youngsters which held weekly meetings at her own home.

When writing she works generally in a snug room or den on the second floor of her home, working through the quiet mornings. She contrives somehow to deal with a heavy correspondence and replies with delightful letters to the letters of all kinds--curious, friendly, grateful--that she is constantly receiving.

“Though _Mrs. Wiggs_ has made its author famous,” says Margaret Anderson, “_Mr. Opp_ is Mrs. Rice’s finest piece of work. In the hero of this story, which is a story of Dickensian humor and robustness, we mark a real and very big development--a development, moreover, which is not a thing of violence but proceeds along the lines of the man’s peculiar nature.

“Mrs. Wiggs is fixed, the same at the end of the book as at the opening; but Mr. Opp grows, and the interest of the reader increases with his growth. The story has not been read as _Mrs. Wiggs_ was read, but for imagination, for spirituality, and even for humor, it remains the better book.

“It is, indeed, her most distinct success, for _Lovey Mary_ followed _Mrs. Wiggs_ in general character, while _Sandy_, though wholesome, engaging, and charged to the full with Mrs. Rice’s humor, is not of an equal inspiration. Her story of _Billy-Goat Hill_ shows some excellent and delicate work, the figures of ‘Miss Lady’ and the Doctor recalling those of Annie and her husband in _David Copperfield_, while Connie and Noah Wicker are done with delightful vim and gayety.

“In _The Honorable Percival_ Mrs. Rice has aimed deliberately at the light, the frothy, the effect of touch-and-go, yet here we note especially an increase in her art. The thing is light and sure; it is froth but froth well-made and inviting; it does touch and go, but it touches with a spark and goes vividly.

“It is needless, however, to criticise her stories individually. What we must note of her work is this: It meets the great human need of cheer, it satisfies a great human desire with its wholesome milk of kindness. To make many nations laugh and laugh innocently; to bring entertainment to the sickbed and army trench and throne room and schoolroom; and to the million common houses of a million common people--this is the mission of her books and this their finest achievement.”

Wise and honest words, these, of Margaret Steele Anderson’s. What she has said so well we shall not attempt to better. We shall agree whole-heartedly with her that the best praise was given Alice Hegan Rice “by a very wise old man, who spoke for a great host of readers when he said:

“‘Madam, I salute you! You have done the world a service. You have cheered us, you have made us laugh happily and with courage.’”

BOOKS BY ALICE HEGAN RICE

_Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch_, 1901. _Lovey Mary_, 1903. _Sandy_, 1905. _Captain June_, 1907. _Mr. Opp_, 1909. _A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill_, 1912. _The Honorable Percival._ _Calvary Alley_, 1917. _Miss Mink’s Soldier and Other Stories_, 1918. _Quin_, 1921.

_Published by the Century Company, New York._