USA > New York > Onondaga County > Syracuse > Sixty-odd, a personal history > Part 13
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to have him use the words of men who had, like him, recognized and lived by the same kind of inspiration. It sounded entirely dif- ferent, too, on New England byways; unlike church and the emana- tions from chancels and surplices and Prayer-books with embroid- ered bookmarks. I privately thought it much more the real thing, but it wouldn't have occurred to me to say so. When he repeated passages from Job or Moses or Isaiah, religious ladies would mur- mur an assent and say, "How wonderfully he quotes the Scrip- tures!" But I know that he did it better still when those bits of the Psalms burst forth on a mountain ride and expressed a gladness like that which the seers of centuries past had felt.
The horse worked his way slowly upward, tacking from side to side, and stopping for breath on the "thank you ma'ams." And then after a four hours' ride our road would open unexpectedly into a village street, decorous in Sunday inaction. We drew up in front of a white parsonage near the meetinghouse. The pastor and his wife would come out to meet us and say how glad they were that the preacher had brought his little girl. When I went into the pew belonging to the minister's wife and when she covered her eyes with her hand, sitting upright, I felt I ought to kneel down to show that I was an Episcopalian. Harriet had given me the suggestion. It was much easier to do, too, and less conspicuous in the big pew, so I got down on the carpet and said the Lord's Prayer to myself as being something familiar to everybody and fitting in well.
The hymns were mostly long-metre and sung out of oblong green singing-books in which the four voices were printed in single notes on separate lines. Antioch was a well-known tune. There was seldom an organ in those days, so one heard the clang of a tun- ing-fork and then a subdued, nasal m-m-m-m-m- on different notes as the choir-leader felt for his pitch. Then they burst out, securely, on the familiar high note and descending major scale, in good old musical form, back again to the triumphant tonic:
Joy to the world! the Lord is come, Let earth receive her King. . .
I joined hcartily in this chant of praise and nodded my head as
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others did, swaying gently, in time to the beats. Enthusiasm lifted the flat soles of my "ankle-ties" off the ground with toes firm, bearing me upward in accompaniment to the chorus. The short blue rib- bon streamers on the back of my straw hat flapped to emphasizing nods. I joined in as fervently as if the hymn were sung by the cross- bearing processional choir in the Church of the Advent in Boston. Nothing beautiful in the line of accessories to worship except one vase of many-colored garden flowers; no genuflexions but those dignified, time-marking nods. And yet their God-the God loved by simple New England folk; by pious, shrewd old deacons, by sober women who had lived on lonely hill-farms and worked in the fields, by open-faced young men and girls whose lives would be more eventful than those of their forerunners-that God was immanent and real. In my childhood I made no comparisons but took every variety of worship for granted. Later on it was explained to me that vestments and bending knees, candles and incense, typi- fied the heavenly obeisance to the God of cherubim and seraphim and the saints who rest not day and night singing Holy, Holy, Holy. I understood by the aid of my imagination and paid homage ac- cordingly. But when I was caught up and transported to the village meeting-house on the hills and nodded and swayed to the tune of Antioch, my heart leaped in firm conviction to that Lord: the God of the gentians and the asters, the sunlight above the fogs of earth, the square pew and the tuning-fork.
When there was an extempore prayer, Father was sometimes asked to give it. He made beautiful ones, as long as anybody else's, even if he was a 'piscopalian and accustomed to liturgies. The petitions covered a great deal of ground and all the avenues of Grace. By that time I did not feel any more need of impressing my apostolic upbringing on the minister's wife, so I sat up beside her to look at him as he prayed.
The sernion which followed was listened to intently by the country audience, because they were inured to long discourses. The minister's wife left promptly to attend to the dinner to which we had been invited. Once in a while, when Father had come a great many miles to preach, the people gave him a collation at the par-
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sonage. That was nice; cold hams and jellied meats, spiced cake and sponge cake, pies, preserves, pickles of every variety. It was the largess of rural storerooms and pantries, donated no doubt to symbolize loaves and fishes.
Many of those little New England villages to which we went were miniature seats of culture, with good libraries; one found The Atlantic and Harper's and The North American Review on the tables in their big living rooms with shining floors and braided rugs. The people who gathered there spoke the language of in- formed minds. I heard phrases to which I was accustomed, even if they were beyond my comprehension.
Father, the responsibility of his sermon over, talked freely to me as the horse took us easily from the hills from the high moments in the uplands we came back to the quiet and content of daily living at Forty Acres."
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Our interest in colleges had centred largely about the Harvard traditions of the family. Grandparents and great-grandparents, uncles and great-uncles, cousins, our brothers and father, had been students or professors there, and we had the sense of proprietorship to which many New Englanders still confess. But a new horizon was opening, and in the neighborhood of Forty Acres itself. For several years people had talked about the will of Sophia Smith, and we had known that the old bridge of which only the pile of boulders in mid-river was left, had crossed directly from the Phelps acres to her father's lands in Hatfield. The white spire of the meetinghouse, beyond which lay the western hills, was a reminder of her Sunday church-observances. Uncle Phelps, the father of the queer sons and builder of the gray house, had drawn up the famous Oliver Smith will, a charity-foundation bequest made by Sophia's uncle. The two men had been neighbors, and crossed the bridge to visit one another. Sophia had longed for an education and left her fortune to make that possible to other girls by the founding of a college.
In that summer of 1875, its first building was being put up, and the architect, Robert Peabody of Boston, was a good friend of our family, having married my older sister's friend and next- door neighbor of Boylston Street days. Mr. Peabody, a tall man with a great charm for young people, stayed at Forty Acres with us while supervising building-operations. There was much inter- esting debate on the subject of women's colleges. President Seelye and the Bishop were also friends, and I think some of my father's antipathy to the college idea was dissipated that summer.
Robert Peabody was anxious to hear more of the prospects and
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plans for Smith College courses, and our evenings were much en- livened by discussions as to the need for the higher education of women. As all the older women of our family had pursued advanced courses of study themselves, it was hard for them to understand that there could be any possible opposition to that; but by conserv- atives it was apparently regarded as the right of the privileged only. The danger of allowing women of the middle and lower classes- and even in our time those social designations were considered arbitrary by the more democratic element-to be taught the clas- sics or advanced science and economics, not to mention civil gov- ernment, was pointed out by a large conservative element. What it might lead to was prophesied grimly, but the beauty of College Hall and the Smith campus won over the inhabitants of the town at least.
We were keenly alive to all the questionings. We had ourselves great curiosity regarding the new college. The conception of Ten- nyson's Princess was the basis of our imagination when we pictured it all, as the green lawns would look, with beautiful dignified women moving about beneath the spreading elms, followed by young disciples in graceful gowns and mortar-boards. It was an intriguing vision. All that women, as queens and saints and writers, had contributed to the world, entered into its prophetic spirit.
There was, however, little discussion of public affairs at Forty Acres. The adults made comments on the daily news as it came in by post, but it seems to me we were on the whole strangely indif- ferent. Happenings in our own country, barring outright disaster, did not touch us much in summer time. Contemporary English his- tory made a greater appeal than that of America, during those par- ticular summers of the seventies. Trollope was somewhat responsi- ble for this. We lived in his England for weeks at a time, through our forenoon gatherings at the East door, and in the political novels of other writers which could be discussed and compared very much as long letters from abroad would have been. Not only Trollope's clerical sketches but the parliamentary ones, each as it was pub- lished, made their characters and backgrounds extremely vivid, and my father's informal, colloquial fashion of reading aloud,
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pausing here and there to enjoy some especially amusing bit, kept our minds occupied with affairs across the sea.
The Springfield Republican supplied the best of material about our own county, and its editor, Samuel Bowles, was a friend of our family; but girls did not read the daily journals regularly then, un- less some very special happenings attracted them. It was looked upon as worse than bad taste to read accounts of crime, unless some prominent trial had stirred general sympathy. We "took in" The Guardian and one or two other British periodicals, and my sister and brother kept track of parliamentary developments. They all held with Cobden and Bright and the Free Trade principle and admired the great minds of Queen Victoria's court. Gladstone and Bismarck each in his own field, were revered as statesmen with whom America's political scramblers were not to be mentioned in the same breath. The summer of the Franco-Prussian war had been intensely interesting to them, and I recollect that even as a small girl I had caught echoes of that and knew the names of the Generals on both sides, and had felt the horrors of the siege of Strasbourg.
Somehow I think, as I look back, that in Hadley we have always had a more instinctive international sympathy than in the city; it may be that the closer one gets to elemental processes and beauties, the more deeply one realizes the eternal oneness which brings us under the law that governs them both: an inescapable and universal dependence. Be that as it may, our world had broadened in the early seventies, for 1875 was the year of the Women's Congress at Syra- cuse, and the still more marked mental and social expansion spurred by its meetings.
I realized, that summer that I needed occupation. My brother James, who had graduated from college, was in Scotland on a walk- ing tour, and I found that purely bucolic forms of entertainment now seemed a little dull to the friends who visited me or my sisters. I had always longed for the career of a country schoolmarm, and my little sister was not averse to an experiment. A visit to the haunted room in the south wing gave us an idea; it was just the place for our undertaking. An outside staircase led up to it from the pillared woodshed. There was a row of hooks behind the door,
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and a little platform for a teacher's desk; somebody had left a flat wooden picture-case there. A dormer window let in the morning sun. At one side was a sort of alcove, where an old washbench could be set to accommodate Molly's classes; she was to be the assistant.
We had ambitious plans. The idea was to make every course so interesting that the children would not know they were study- ing. Having no text-books, we invented various expedients. For one thing, reading was to be taught through learning by vote; we were to begin with poetry and teach each child a different poem, making her read it and then memorize it and finally write it out. No pains were to be spared to give each individual the kind of verse which most attracted him or her. We also fitted out a low table for writing-lessons and worked up a grand system of penman- ship intended to supersede the tiresome copy-books of the moment, with their endless pothooks and slants and loops. We made copies in our own not too elegant round hand, on sermon-paper, and presented these to our eager pupils, who worked away at them with tongues out and long indrawings of breath. They were left free to hold their pencils as they chose, I recall; results were the impor- tant thing. Apparently we were really ahead of our time in some of these academic methods, to judge from the similar latitude al- lowed our grandchildren today.
There were nine or ten youngsters, four boys and five or six girls. They came rambling along the road, a picturesque group, every bright morning. When it rained, we harnessed up a farm- horse to the big carryall and fetched them, crowding them in im- possibly. We thought their minds remarkable, and taught them poetry and elocution after our own taste, which was flexible enough to meet theirs; not to mention mathematics, undertaken, I believe, on a system of guesswork!
My creative urge during this period was boundless. Ideas came to me and clamored for expression. I longed to write. I brought out my great-grandmother's journal and pored over the bundle of yellowed sheets written in cramped characters by Betsey Porter when she had been so profoundly stirred by the confession of a young man who had seduced one of the girls in her community.
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The parson's discourse on the subject appeared to have been a solemn one, and the opening roused my interest keenly. I wondered what had brought about the girl's lapse from virtue and yearned to know why the word "fornacation," as Betsey spelled it, was ap- plicable to the "malloncoly instance." I knew, or thought I knew, more about fornication than my great-grandmother. My sister's work in Syracuse had brought many such offenders to the fore, but the details were lacking. Elizabeth Porter, too, had been reserved with regard to her own experiences in love. My own chronicle should be a more personal history of my emotions.
It was intriguing to lay out a schedule for the narration of my own life-history. I invented a form in which to clothe it-a series of letters to an imaginary friend, who would become a real person- ality in this form of "pretend." This ficticious friend was supposed to be a girl older and more staid than the chronicler, living in a re- tired village and with no excitements except those that came to her through the mails. She should be a person of infinite good sense and conscientious habit, something of a mentor but rarely severe. Her name, decided upon in a whimsical mood, was Turnip, expres- sing the homely virtues by which she was known. To this innocuous personality a series of epistles, always phrased as answers to com- munications from her, were to be written. For some time I firmly believed them to be true pictures of my life and actual self. They usually presupposed a lecture or censure in a mild form of some behavior which needed defense or apology. A large part of their content had to do with affairs of the heart; not of my own heart apparently, but the reactions of that organ and my brain to the influence of sundry admirers whose secret passion was mostly a figment of the imagination! It was all very good exercise in compo- sition, written mostly in the style of the late eighteenth-century novel.
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One annual experience always brought a special touch of ro- mance into the last days of summer. The old elm at the farm and the great tulip tree at the Phelps Place have been for a century past, guest-houses for the birds on their way south. We are on some heavenly aerial route which they take unfailingly in September, and have never watched in vain for the visits they made us. They arrive in late afternoon, making the halt in time for settling in and getting an hour's recreation before bedtime. There is a soft whirr, a scattering black cloud which descends in winged precision from the heights, and in an instant the huge tree is alive with twittering, chattering little figures. For all the world like a party of human tourists, they make a grand to-do over the occupation of their quarters, picking out comfortable apartments, no doubt with an eye to the view and the eligibility of certain places for trips to the farmyard which is their principal restaurant. Sometimes the crowd is so great than annexes have to be opened in neighboring maples. A delicious clamor fills the air, with no attempt at bringing order out of chaos. After disposing of their invisible baggage, parties go out for supper and one sees small flocks of them visiting the gran- aries or even flying as far as the cow-pasture, dipping their thirsty bills in the horse-trough and splashing in the pools left from recent rains. We often tried unsuccessfully to count them, and always took account of their species, which was usually the same, the bobolinks of June going away to turn themselves into rice-birds in the swamps of Florida. We wondered if any of them crossed the Caribbean, and loved to imagine their several destinations.
They came back from little trips to see the town, and went to
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bed with the punctuality of chimney-swifts. By dark the great tree was silent, and all night one had the consciousness of tiny feathered things cuddled among the leaves. In the morning they wakened with more joyous twittering. There was a half-hour granted for excur- sions out to breakfast and plenty of time to collect phantom be- longings and dicker with an imaginary landlord. Finally after a quiet moment, there was a simultaneous upward flight. A dark wing-shaped cloud soared, a shadow swept across the dewy grass, then in magnificent flight the company sped southward, leaving us clumsy humans with feet clinging to earth, and spirits, we may believe, crying out in the poet's own ecstasy of longing to follow,
Des ailes! Des ailes! Des ailes!
It was always a disappointment that just as the autumn beauty of the Connecticut Valley was coming to its height, we should be obliged to return to city life.
There had been two Octobers, however, when I stayed at Forty Acres, and of these I must speak. The first was in the summer of 1870, when I had been taken ill with an intestinal disease, and was unable to return with my family to Syracuse. My mother and George stayed with me, and weak as I was, I enjoyed the cold, clear days, and the fall nights when the stars blazed in unearthly splendor, and the mornings when a thin frosty fog covered the valley. George would bring in big logs for the fireplace, and Dr. Bonney would make his daily call, chatting with us for nearly an hour.
The old doctor believed that my disordered digestion could be cured by keeping nourishment at a minimum, so that I lived on a few tablespoons of milk a day, and a beverage called "crust-coffee," made by soaking pieces of toast in hot water and draining them off. On such scanty rations I was sustained until I thought of nothing but eating, and could be diverted only by reading about it. Little Dorrit contained a good many allusions to English relishes and I went over them each day with comfort, from Monsieur Rigaud's veal in savoury jelly, and the little white loaves to the three "kidney ones" with hot gravy poured out of a tin spout for Flora and Mr. F's aunt to consume at the pastry-cook's. I begged bright ribbon-ends
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from the family piece-bag and put them in between the pages to mark those filling descriptions. When hunger became unbearable I would go and dine with the Casbys on soup, fried soles, a butter- boat of shrimp sauce and some potatoes. Toward supper-time the ham and bread and butter which Young John brought in a cabbage leaf to the imprisoned Arthur would seem a royal banquet to my famished imagination. Even the piece of toast-anchovy toast sounded so mysteriously toothsome-which Mr. F's aunt handed to Arthur, saying, "None of your eyes on me! Take thatl" was more satisfying in fancy than crust coffee in the concrete.
My mother finally decided that these Barmecide feasts were making me actually morbid and told the doctor that she felt I could not gain strength without tangible nourishment. So he permitted the hazardous experiment of letting me have a little bird for my dinner. George, who knew just where to find the right sort, went off into the woods with his gun, shot a tiny creature and plucked and dressed it, bringing it up to me himself on a piece of thin buttered toast which was Mother's risk and tasted as if it had been imported from an English fireside. I devoured it with the avidity of a cat eating a mouse, crunching its diminutive bones. That was the beginning of better things. I began to gain and was even pre- sented with a mould of jellied rice made in a wine-glass by the doc- tor's own housekeeper, on which he allowed a few drops of maple syrup. Every morning thereafter my brother went off with his gun, and I learned to tolerate that instrument, listening for the distant shots which assured me my bird. There were lovely partridges scud- ding about in the woods, and now and then golden pheasants would come down near the house and trail their beautiful tail-feathers among the dead leaves. But we could not let them be shot. Finally I was moved into a big chair by the east window in the autumn sun- shine, watching the post-wagon drive the school children to Hadley Academy. One fine day I was wrapped up to take a little drive, and soon, but not too soon for us to finish Little Dorrit, we left the old house to return to the city.
Some years passed before we had a second October holiday in the Connecticut Valley, but it was one of the happiest experiences
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of our older girhood. We drove around the woodroads, gorgeous in all the richness of color that New England air can produce-crimson maples, yellow elins, dark backgrounds of firs, white birch-trunks from which bronze leaves hung and trembled. We climbed up hill, singing as we went, and crowded our swaying wagon with branches of brilliant leaves. There was a pile of orange pumpkins against the gray wall of an old farmhouse, an apple-orchard with heaps of red fruit on its green carpet, a red school-house guarded by two straight, spreading maples, and children smiling from its windows as we drove by. On rainy days we sat by a great fire in the Long Room, and read aloud Evelina from a fat little leather volume, re- flecting that there were many young women like the feckless hero- ine.
In the afternoons, undaunted by a tramp over the high hill, a group of Amherst students came to climb with us to the old quarry, where we found polished chestnuts to roast by the evening fire. They were splendid fellows, every one of whom made his mark in the professional and literary world; Howard Bliss, and Lawrence Abbott were two of them.
There was one delightful day in Amherst, when our two groups met at the Dickinson house. Austin Dickinson was then Treasurer of the college, and his son Ned, a boy of our own age, was living, while his sister Martha, later their Aunt Emily's biographer, was then a schoolgirl. Mrs. Dickinson had the same happy faculty as a hostess that had characterized the entertainers in the family for years; a way of drawing out each guest, making him feel himself not only at home in her house but a contributor to the general enjoy- ment. One might go with one's sole talent in the shape of a well- worn anecdote or joke wrapped as it were in a napkin of oblivion; but it would be called for and somehow the owner would find him- self bringing out in quite fresh form to a sympathetic audience the feeblest wit. The rare test of that sense of humor which can ap- preciate a joke on one's self, was also applied at times, and even sensitive people measured goodnaturedly up to it.
We heard many stories of Aunt Emily and Aunt Lavinia, who were then old ladies living in the mansion next door. Their niece
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and nephew enjoyed them both; Lavinia was spicy and entertain. ing in everyday fashion; Emily, all unconscious of her coming faine, recluse and mystic, still piling up her wondrous undiscovered har- vest of poetry, was the rarer spirit. Of both figures, under the great trees which shaded the common ground of an uncommon family, we had occasional views. Miss Lavinia came to the farm during our summer stays, driving in her little carriage, for all the world like a figure in one of Thackeray's original illustrations; pendant curls, lace shawl falling from her shoulder-blades by some remarkable ar- rangement with the force of gravitation which balanced it impos- sibly and kept its place only through the poise of the old-time "lady of leisure"; those of us who knew that genus knew that the term did not imply wasted hours nor limited capability. Ladies of leisure invariably took time to draw on their gloves with that meticulous fitting of each separate finger which brought about perfect smooth- ness-no flap at the tip-and to tie the bonnet-strings without the suggestion of a knot-loops broad, ends unwrinkled. Emily's white gowns gave her distinction as one dedicated to the spiritual and immortal, but never the air of perpetual mourning; her youthful romance was garlanded with asphodel, not buried under a weeping willow. Ned, an invalid, shut in sometimes for weeks, had some- thing of his Aunt Emily's imaginative intellect, along with the blunt, but kindly critical faculty of his father. Martha, mature be- yond her years, was companionable to old and young, and extremely amusing to her aunts.
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