A Woman of Genius Part 2

She had been a farmer's daughter in another part of the state, and had done something for herself in the way of school teaching before she married my father. My grandparents I never saw, but I seem to recall at such public occasions as county fairs and soldiers' reunions, certain tall, farmer-looking men and their badly dressed wives, who called her cousin and were answered by their Christian names, whom I understand to be my mother's relatives without accepting them as mine. They were all soldiers though, the men of our family; you saw it at once in the odd stiffness sitting on their farmer carriage like the firm strokes of a master on a pupil's smudged drawing. I think I got my first notion of the quality of experience in the way they exalted themselves in the memories of marches and battles. There had been a station of the underground railway not ten miles from Taylorville, and there had gone out from the town at the first call, a volunteer company with so many Judds and Wilsons and Lattimores on the roster that it read like the record of a family Bible. They had gone out from, they had come back to, a life as little relieved by adventure as the flat horizon of their corn lands, but in the interim they had stretched themselves, endured, conquered. I have heard political economists of the cross roads account variously for the prosperity of Ohianna in the decade following the civil outbreak, but I have never heard it laid to the revitalizing of our common stock by the shock of its moral strenuosities.

To this day I question whether Cousin Judd got more out of his religion than out of this most unchristian experience, from which he had come back silver tipped as it were, from that emperym into which men pa.s.s when they are by great emotions a little removed from themselves, to kindle in my young mind a realization of the preciousness of pa.s.sion over all human a.s.sets. It came to me, however, in the years between twelve and fifteen that my mother's relations did things with their knives and neglected others with their forks that were not done in circles that by virtue of just such observances, got themselves called Good Society. I was aware of a sort of gracelessness in their vital processes, in much the same way that I knew that the striped and flowered carpet in my mother's best room did not harmonize with the wall paper, and that the curtains went badly with them both. I have to go back to this, and to the fact that my clothes were chosen for wearing qualities rather than becomingness, to account for a behaviour that, as I began to emerge from the illumined mists of play, my mother complained of under the head of my "not taking an interest."

How else was I to protect myself from the thousand inharmonies that chafed against the budding instinct of beauty: the plum-coloured ribbons I was expected to wear with my brown dress, the mottled j.a.panese pattern upon the gilt ground of the wall paper, against which I had pushed out a kind of sh.e.l.l, hung within with the glittering stuff of dreams.

For just about the time I should have been absorbed in Cousin Lydia's beaded dolman and the turning of my mother's one silk, I was regularly victimized by the fits and starts of temperament, instinctive efforts toward the rehearsal of greater pa.s.sions than had appeared above my horizon, flashes of red and blue and gold thrown up on the plain Taylorville surface of my behaviour, with the result of putting me at odds with the Taylorvillians.

It was as if, being required to produce a character, I found myself with samples of a great many sorts on my hands which I kept offering, hopeful that they might be found to match with the acceptable article, which, I may say here, they never did. They were good samples too, considering how young I was, of the Magdas, Ophelias, Antigones I was yet to become, of the great lady, good comrade and lover, but the most I got by it was the suspicion of insincerity and affectation. I sensitively suffered the more from it as I was conscious of the veering of this inward direction, without being able to prove what I was sure of, its relevance to the Shining Destiny toward which I moved. If you ask how this a.s.surance differed from the general human hope of a superior happiness, I can only say that the event has proved it, and as early as I was aware of it, moved me childishly to acts of propitiation. I wanted gratefully to be good, with a goodness acceptable to the Powers from which such a.s.surance flowed, but it was a long time before I could separate my notion of this from my earliest ideal of what would have been suitable behaviour to my father, so that all the upward reach of adolescence was tinged by my sense of loss in him.

It was when I was about thirteen and had not yet forgotten how my father looked, that I made an important discovery; on the opposite side of the church, and close to the Amen corner, sat a man with something in the cut of his beard, in the swing of his shoulders, at which some dying nerve started suddenly athrob. I must have seen him there a great many times without noticing, and perhaps the likeness was not so much as I had thought, and I had had to wait until my recollection faded to its note of faint suggestion, but from that day I took to going out of my way to school to pa.s.s by Mr. Gower's place of business for the sake of the start of memory that for the moment brought my father near again. I even went so far as to mention to my mother that I liked sitting in church where I could look at Mr. Gower because he reminded me of somebody. We were on our way home on Sunday night--we were always taken to church twice on Sunday--Forester was on ahead with Effie, and just as we came along under the shadow of the spool factory, I had reached up to tuck my hand under my mother's arm and make my timid suggestion.

"Well, somebody who?" said my mother.

"Of my father----"

"Oh," said my mother, "that's just your fancy." But she did not shake off my hand from her arm as was her habit toward proffers of affection, and the moment pa.s.sed for one of confidence between us. I was convinced that she must have taken notice of the likeness for herself. That was in the spring, and all that summer vacation I spent a great deal of time playing with Nettie Gower for the sake of seeing her father come at the gate about five in the afternoon the way mine had done.

Nettie was not an attractive child, and of an age better suited to Effie, who couldn't bear her; the relation, it seemed, wanted an explanation, but it never occurred to me that so long as I withheld my own, another would be found for it. Nettie's brother found it about the time that my friendship with his sister was at its most flourishing. He was no nicer than you would expect a brother of Nettie's to be, though he was good-looking in a red-cheeked way, with a flattened curl in the middle of his forehead, and of late he had taken to hanging about Nettie and me, looking at me with a curious sort of smirk that I was not quite arrived at knowing for the beginning gallantry. He knew perfectly well that I did not come to see Nettie because I was fond of her, but it was yet for me to discover that he thought it was because I was fond of him. I remember I was making a bower in the asparagus bed; I was too old to play in the asparagus bed, but I was making a point of being good enough to do it on Nettie's account, and I had asked Charlie for his knife to cut the stems.

"Come and get it." He was holding it out to me hollowed in his palm; and he would not let go my hand.

"You don't want no knife," he leered sickeningly. "I know what you want." Suddenly I caught sight of Nettie's face with its straight thick plaits of hair and near-sighted eyes narrowed at me behind her gla.s.ses, and it struck me all at once that she had never taken my interest in her seriously either.

"Well, what?" I began defensively.

"This!" He thrust out his face toward mine, but I was too quick for him.

That was my first s.e.x encounter, and it didn't somehow make it any the less exasperating to realize that what lay behind my sudden interest in Nettie couldn't now be brought forward in extenuation, but I am always glad that I slapped Charlie Gower before the paralyzing sense of being trapped by my own behaviour overtook me. I hadn't found the words yet for the unimagined disgust of the boy's impertinence when, as I was helping to wipe the dishes that evening after supper, I tried to put it to my mother on a new basis which the incident seemed to have created, of our being somehow ranged together against such offences. It was the time for us to have emerged a little from the family relation to the freemasonry of s.e.x, but my mother missed knowing it.

"I am not going to Nettie Gower's any more," I began.

"No?" said my mother; and of course I could not conceive that she had forgotten the confidence in which the connection with Nettie began.

"That Charlie ... I just hate him. You know, he thought I was coming to see Nettie because of him."

"Well," said my mother, turning out the dishwater, "perhaps you were."

And that, I think it safe to say, is as near as my family ever came to understanding the processes at work behind the incidents of my growing up. Yet I think my mother very often did know that the key to my behaviour did not lie in the obvious explanation of it; and a sort of aversion toward what was strange, which I have come to think of as growing out of her unsophistication, kept her from admitting it. It was less disconcerting to have my springs of action accounted for on the basis of what Mrs. Allingham would have called "common," than to have it arraigned by her own standard as "queer." There was always in Taylorville a certain caddishness toward innovations of conduct, which we youngsters railed at as countrified, which I now perceive to have been no worse than the instinctive movement to lessen by despising it, the terror, the deep, far-rooted terror of the unknown. The incident served, however, to supersede with resentment the sense of personal definite loss in which it had begun.

Before the year was out I had so far forgotten my father that I saw no resemblance to him in Mr. Gower and would not have recognized it had I met it anywhere, though the want of fathering had its share no doubt in landing me, as I cast about for an appreciable rule to live by, in what I have already described as a superior sort of Snockertism. The immediate step to it was my getting converted. That very winter all Taylorville and the six townships were caught up in one of those acute emotional crises called a Revival. It had begun in the Methodist, and gradually involved the whole number of Protestant churches, and had overflowed into the Congregational building as affording the greatest seating room; by the middle of February it was possible to feel through the whole community the ground swell of its disturbances. Night after night the people poured in to it to be flayed in spirit, striped, agonized, exalted at the hands of a practised evangelist, which they _liked_; as it had the cachet of being supernaturally good for them, they liked it with a deeper, more soul-stretching enjoyment than the operas, theatres, social adventure of cities, supposing they had been at hand.

It hardly seems possible with all she had to do, and yet I think my mother could not have missed one of those meetings, going regularly with Cousin Judd, who drove in from the farm more times than you would have thought the farm could have spared him, or with Forester, who had been converted the winter before, though I think he must have regretted the smaller occasion. Left at home with Effie who was thought too young to be benefited by the preaching and too old to be laid by in an overcoat on the Sunday-school benches with dozens of others, heavy with sleep and the vitiated air, late, when I had finished my arithmetic and was afraid to go to bed in the empty house, I would open the window a crack toward the blur on the night from the tall, shutterless windows of the church, and catch the faint swell of the hymns and at times the hysteric shout of some sinner "coming through," and I was as drawn to it as any savage to the roll of the medicine drums.

The backwash of this excitement penetrated even to the schoolroom, as from time to time some awed whisper ran of this and that one of our cla.s.smates being converted, and walking apart from us with the other saved in a chastened mystery. And finally Pauline Allingham and I talked it over and decided to get converted too. Pauline, I remember, had not been allowed to attend the meetings and considered her spiritual welfare jeopardized in the prohibition. We knew by this time perfectly well what we had to do, and had arranged to get excused from our respective rooms--Pauline was a grade behind me on account of diphtheria the previous winter--and to meet in the abandoned coal-hole between the boys' and girls' bas.e.m.e.nt. Pauline, who had always an apt.i.tude for proselyting, brought another girl from the sixth grade, who was also under conviction--we had the terms very pat--a thin, hatchet-faced girl who joined the Baptist Church and afterward married a minister, so that she might very easily have reckoned the incident at something like its supposit.i.tious value in her life. I remember that we knelt down in the dusty coal-hole where the little children used to play I-spy, and prayed by turns for light, aloud at first, and then, as we felt the approach of the compelling mood, silently, as we waited for the moment after which we might rather put it over our cla.s.smates on the strength of our salvation.

It came, oh, it came! the sweep up and out, the dizzying lightness--not very different, in fact, from the breathless rush with which on a first night of _Magda_ or _Cleopatra_ I have felt my part meet me as I cross between the wings--the lift, the tremor of pa.s.sion.

"Oh," I said, "I'm saved! I'm saved! I know it."

"So am I," said Flora Haines. "I was a long time ago, but I didn't like to say anything." And if I hadn't just been converted I should have thought it rather mean of her. In the dusk of the coal-hole we heard Pauline sniffling.

"I suppose it's because I'm so much worse a sinner," she admitted, "but I just can't feel it."

"You must give yourself into the Lord's hands, Pauline dear." Flora Haines had heard the evangelist. I began to offer myself pa.s.sionately in prayer as a vicarious atonement for Pauline's shortcomings.

"Don't you feel anything?" Flora urged, "not the least thing?"

"Well ... sort of ... something," Pauline confessed.

"Well, of course, that's it."

"Yes, that's it," I insisted.

"Well, I suppose it is," Pauline gave in, mopping her eyes with her handkerchief, "but it isn't the least like what I expected."

We heard the school clock strike the quarter hour, and got up, brushing our knees rather guiltily. Flora Haines and I were kept in all that afternoon recess for exceeding our excuse, but Pauline saved herself by bursting into tears as soon as she reached her room, and being sent home with a headache.

That was on Thursday, and Sat.u.r.day afternoon we were all to meet at our house and go together to a great children's meeting, where we were expected to announce that we were saved. Pauline was a little late. I was explaining to Flora Haines that I was to join our church on probation on Sunday, but Flora, being a Baptist, had been put off by her minister until the Revival should be over and he could attend to all the baptisms at once. We naturally expected something similar from Pauline.

"I hardly think," she said, stroking her m.u.f.f and looking very ladylike, "that I shall take such an important step in life until I am older."

"But," I objected, "how can anything be more important?"

"It's your _soul_, Pauline!" Flora Haines was slightly scandalized.

"That's just the reason; it's so important my mother thinks I ought not to take any steps until I can give it my most mature judgment."

Flora Haines and I looked at one another silently; we might have known Pauline's mother wouldn't let her do anything so common as get converted.

CHAPTER VI

I was duly taken into the church on the following Sabbath, to the great relief of my family, having for once exhibited the normal reaction of a young person in my circ.u.mstances, and though I have laid much to the door of that inst.i.tution of the r.e.t.a.r.ding of my development and the dimming of the delicate surface of happiness, I think now it was not wholly bad for me. If I hadn't up to this time found any way of being good by myself, I was now provided with a criterion of conduct toward which even those who hadn't been able to manage it for themselves, moved a public approbation. I have heard my mother say that even Mr. Farley, the banker, who read books on evolution and was a Freethinker (opprobrious term), had been known to p.r.o.nounce the church an excellent thing for women.

The church left you in no doubt about things. You attended morning and evening service; as soon as you were old enough for it, which was before you were fit, you taught in Sunday school; you waited on table at oyster suppers designed for the raising of the minister's salary, and if you had any talent for it you sang in the choir or recited things at the church sociables. And when you were married and consequently middle-aged, you joined the W. F. M. S. and the Sewing Society.

It was after the incident of the coal-hole that I began to experience this easy irreproachability, and to build out of its ready-to-hand materials a sort of extra self, from which afterward to burst was the bitter wound of life. For my particular church went farther and provided a chart for all the by-lanes of behaviour. "You were never," said the evangelist, whose relish of the situation on the day that a score or so of us had renounced the devil and all his works, gave me a vague sensation of having made a meal and licked his lips over us, "you should never go anywhere that you could not take your Saviour with you," and when I saw Cousin Judd wag at my mother and she smile and pat her hymn book, I was apprised that we had come to the root of the whole matter.

I have wondered since to how many young converts in Ohianna that phrase has been handed out and with what blighting consequences.

For a Saviour as I knew Him at thirteen and a half, was a solemn presence that ran in your mind with the bleakness of plain, whitewashed walls and hard benches and a general hush, a vague sensation of your chest being too tight for you, and a little of the feeling you had when you had gone to call at the Allinghams and had forgotten to wipe your feet; and it was manifest if you took that incubus everywhere you went you wouldn't have any fun.

It was fortunate at that time that it was not the desire for entertainment that moved me so much as the need of my youth to serve; the unparented hunger for authority. But with the pressure of that environment, if there had been anybody with the wit to see where my Gift lay, what anybody could have done about it it is difficult to say. When all that Taylorville afforded of the proper food of Gift, brightness, music, and the dance, was of so forlorn a quality, it has been a question if I do not owe the church some thanks for cutting out the possible cheapening of taste and the satisfaction of ill-regulated applause--that is, if Gift can be hurt at all by what happens to the possessor. It can be cramped and enfeebled in expression, rendered tormenting in its pa.s.sage and futile to the recipient, but to whom it comes its supernal quality rises forever beyond all attainder.

What happened to the actress during all the time I was undertaken by the church to be made into the sort of woman serviceable to Taylorville, was inconsiderable; what grew out of it for Olivia was no small matter, and much of it I lay without bitterness to Cousin Judd, who, from having got himself named adviser in my father's will, was in a position to affect my life to the worse.