USA > New York > Onondaga County > Syracuse > Sixty-odd, a personal history > Part 20
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For the Easter holiday, the six of us travelled to Dresden, with Mrs. Cabot to chaperon us. The performance of Faust which was given that season meant infinitely more to me, with my better knowledge of German, than the performance I had seen the year before. But even more than the music I enjoyed intensely the com- mon adventures with my five friends; we were responsible to no- body but ourselves, and developed a congenial intimacy which had implications no deeper than that of pleasant companionship. Dur- ing that time lessons were interrupted often by the many diver- sions around us, and I had to make up my work late at night, but somehow did not miss the sleep.
In the spring, life at the Thomas-parsonage was transferred to the Johannesgarten, a great tract of land outside the city where
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hundreds of little gardens were laid out, each surrounded by a wall high enough to insure the privacy of the family who used it. Every pleasant afternoon, when lessons were over, we took the tram and travelled thither, proceeding down the long central avenue to a little gate with a number on it, letting ourselves in with a special key. The Valentiner-Bruhns garden was at least a quarter-of-an-acre in size, two or three great trees at one end shading a small Garten- haus which could hold a dozen people in case of a shower, and had a tiny kitchen with a stove and cooking utensils. Minna, laden with a heavy market-basket, preceded us thither. By four o'clock the family was assembled; the Herr Pastor in the shade, his wife beside him, and a table in front of them set out with coffee-cnps. The boys studied in another corner usually, the little children playing by themselves in a sand-pile; the two girls, with Willi when he was free, played croquet. After our coffee, pretzels and Zwieback there was a half-hour of chatting, and at eight a supper of cold meat and salad in the long-lingering twilight.
The maids went home, taking the little children; the rest of us sat on, on the cool ground, and talked, listened to mingled sounds of music and hilarity which rose from the adjoining gardens; last. of all a bowl of Maitrank, kept cool by being buried in the earth, was brought out and glasses filled. It was white wine, filled with fresh green sprigs of Waldmeister, a wood-plant which gave it a delicately pungent flavor, and was consummately refreshing. The great warm moon came up, and flooded the garden with light; we sat on and on sometimes till the bells of the city sounded their mid- night stroke. Those tranquil evenings have a place in memory like the gatherings on the old stoop at Forty Acres; shut away from the weariness and restlessness of humanity, and from the problems of past and future; the quiet heart of that strenuous Leipzig life.
In July came a journey to Heidelberg, where I went to await the arrival of my friend Lucy, and go, at Dr. Watson's invitation, a month later on a drive through Switzerland and the Engadine. The Cabots and Muirheads went thither also; Felix had gone with his family to travel among the Alps. It was a month of excursions, boating on the Neckar, spending long afternoons in the Castle
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grounds. Old friends turned up and augmented our group. Then came the summons to join the Watsons at Lucerne, leaving Heidel- berg by night just after a dance, with a jovial group in slippers and muslin gowns and evening suits at the station. The next morning, at the Beau Rivage, with the blue lake sparkling and the half circle of hotels, drawn up in line, as it were, to receive the trainfuls of arriv- ing tourists, we had a joyful meeting.
Our drive from Lucerne through Andermatt, Ilanz, Tiefen- kasten, above the St. Gothard tunnel which was then begun, was an interlude of pure happiness. Dr. Watson, Lucy, and a young cousin, Helen Choate of Boston and a rather dolorous French maid, completed the party which set off from Fluelen on Monday morn- ing in a large travelling-carriage drawn by four horses, their harness decorated with red tassels and hung with gentle bells. The de- parture from our lodging-places each morning were moments of intense anticipation; the packing of rugs and alpenstocks, the basket of juicy fruits, the bag of books-we had John Inglesant, I rement- ber, and a couple of French novels and Charles Kingsley's Life, and Yeast, in Tauchnitz paper editions.
Socialism, and the stirrings of labor unrest had had their repre- cussions in America. Letters from my brother in New York had kept me in touch with this, and he was at that moment deeply in- terested in the founding of the Knights of Labor, one of the earlier unions. He had instigated a sympathetic association in the Episco- pal Church, small but valiant, and we were keen for a knowledge of its forerunners in Great Britain, where Charles Kingsley's in- terest in the Chartists had had its influence also. We had both wanted to read his Yeast, published some years earlier, and brought it out in the evenings, discussing as we read.
We arrived, after crossing the Albula Pass in wind and snow- squalls, at the Hotel Roseg, Pontresina.
Prince and Princess Christian had come to Pontresina in order to be present at the consecration of a newly-finished English Church to which they had contributed, and a choir was in process of for- mation for the service, with Joseph Barnby himself to train it. The Barnbys immediately became our friends. We were asked to join
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the class, and sang lustily on the great day, August 19, which we always commemorate as being an outstanding event in our history. Barnby in E was one of our favorite chants already, and we per- suaded the composer to train us in it that we might use it with greater devotion in time to come.
One night when I was playing the piano for a dance, and running into Chopin polonaises in the intermission, an old gentleman came and leaned on the piano, and asked me where I had studied. After a while he announced himself as the husband of the late Jenny Lind; he was Otto Goldschmidt, who was traveling as tutor for the little sons of Prince and Princess Christian. When in Amer- ica, he had stayed for a time in Northampton, so this common bond resulted in a pleasant supper at his hotel.
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From the land of avalanches and glaciers and deep cold lakes, we went on over the sombre Bernina Pass and dropped down into Italy. Now we were in Catholic country; the country of the saints, of hierarchies, of monasteries and mystics, of miracles, of sacred art. All along our road we came upon wayside reminders of the faith. The crucifixes were poorly carved, and we were sometimes more shocked than moved at their crude pretensions. But here and there a great stark cross, with crown of thorns and nails and ham- iner, standing back on some lone hill-top in relief against the sky, brought to mind the Divine Figure, and we bowed our heads while the driver made a devout sign upon his breast as he held the lines in his left hand. When we had reached the end of a day's jour- ney and came out into the twilight, we often saw the outline of an old village church against the fading sky, and a dim light burning above the head of the priest in the doorway, as he stood holding the bell-rope, while his peasant flock came up the stony path in twos and threes. The three girls would join the kneeling figures within and sometimes wait for the chanting and the Latin petitions and the benediction.
I felt that of the three great European churches I had known, it was the Church of Rome that touched the hearts of humble people by the simplest and most constant reminders of the Holy Presence in their midst. Ever since the early prayers in the haymow, I had been seized at moments with a longing to get out of the ordered, active church life and its obligations, its liturgies, the catechismus to be learned or taught to others, the sermons to be listened to, the truths to be accepted, and the doubts to be com-
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batted, and have a religious holiday among unprivileged people- people for whose spiritual safety one need feel no responsibility.
But then there was Archie, shaming me by his steady persistence in searching for a fundamental truth underlying all faiths; as he expressed it, before accepting the doctrine of one body as yet. He spoke of it as a "weary struggle" and I felt that a study of compara- tive religions such as he was apparently contemplating, would be a matter of years. I had not written to my cousin for some months; I was not sure that I could help him in the best way just then. But if he had been with me in Italy, and Austria, I thought, he would have seen the beauty, and perhaps absorbed the significance, of shrine and symbol, which was needed to offset heavier studies. He had a steady hand, however, on the helm of his own spiritual craft.
We returned to Germany by way of the Austrian Tyrol, pene- trating romantic valleys off the beaten track. Somewhere along the road we came unexpectedly upon Felix and his pretty sister Fanny. It was a pleasant surprise, and Felix was excellent at surprises; al- ways amused, never thrown out of plumb or embarrassed.
I dreaded the return to Leipzig and lessons, after such a luxuri- ous summer.
The morning after my arrival there, with a gray sky and sodden brown leaves crushed into the muddy sidewalks, was dreary enough; no glowing October foliage, no light and no vision. But at the Bank, "a queer little tomb of a place," as I had once written, was a pile of letters. The first one opened came from Father, written on a late August Sunday at Forty Acres:
Your vivid and stirring descriptions of the Swiss mountains, dear- est Ruth, have awakened my first real longing to see that part of the world, I believe. Very glorious they must be! But, after all, I don't know that I would exchange for all there is in Europe the half-sad and tender joy that comes into my heart in one such day as this, here: a day between summer and autumn; a few faint touches of change on the trees and hills; the splendor of the forenoon tempered now by some soft bars of white cloud and fleecy cornucopias in the West; the pale blue of the northern sky kept clear by a light breath of moist East wind; the ridges of Holyoke so distinct that one can count the pines :- now and then the
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note of a woodpecker and a blue jay and the cawing of a crow; the river still, and the cows, with their pathetic eyes, feeding in the yard! I have just been through the pasture and around behind the hill by the spring, and down to the river-bank. Mary was sitting at the little old library window, Arria in her room; James in the attic overhead. I put in the last "Mayflower" as I used to call it, which I found in the pasture- with love. It would be better if you were here; so much better!
I turned and apostrophized my waiting piano, still shrouded in its summer cover.
"Du," I said sharply, "Thou and I must go to work now, and make all this worth while. I have a debt to pay."
It was now quite settled that I should return to the United States in May, leaving Leipzig at Easter-time. There was much to be done meanwhile; I plunged into my work with turbulent energy. Music came first, and I set to reinforcing my lessons in harmony by means of tutoring, in order to finish the year's work in four months instead of six. With Nan Muirhead and a Swedish girl, I went to ask for organ lessons. Although women had not been allowed in that department, the directorate of the Conservatorium finally yielded, and arranged a class for us under Carl Piutti. I continued my study of Vortrag with Reinecke, and reluctantly gave up my readings with Fräulein Herrnsdorf.
The year 1882 went out with comparative peace in central Europe. For the last time our group of six gathered for a party. At midnight we sang the Sylvesterlied, and drank one another's health in strong punch; then the windows of the apartment were thrown open, and we sat and listened to the choir-boys of the Thomaskirche singing on the balcony of the Rathaus in the square.
On one of the foggiest January days, I received a package from America. It was my purple-bound copy, worn and faded by four years' use, of The Imitation of Christ. Archie had sent it back, as I had asked him to do, to show me that he had found the answer to his questionings in learning and practising the Way of Life that led to Christian faith. I had almost given up expecting that the news would come. He had let me know, a year before, that the doubts he thought banished, had returned. Now he had lived his way
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through them. He said nothing of doctrine, but he told me in a simple, almost blunt phraseology, that it was I, and our talk in the haymow at Hadley, which had given him courage to persevere in his honest quest for a basis of belief. "I hardly dare think," he wrote, "where, or what I should have been but for that. What I know of some men here in college and their state of mind, makes me doubly thankful . . . "
Was it unmixed gladness that I experienced in reading this letter? Else why did I go on hastily to the end, reading over and over its controlled, conventional signature, "With much love I am affectionately yours?" It occurred to me that perhaps he was really the honest one, expressing gratitude but trying to make it clear that that was the limit of his feeling for me. Considerate, of course, but not what I longed for. Could I be certain how much that mutual stirring of emotion four years ago had actually meant? But I glanced down at the old book, and opened it at a page which held a pressed four-leaved clover. Without doubt that was the leaf we had found at our feet on the last Sunday afternoon of our memorable week, walking with Cousin Ellen. It lay between the leaves, and a passage had been marked by a line on the margin.
Nothing is sweeter than love, nothing more courageous, nothing higher, nothing wider, nothing more pleasant, nothing fuller nor better in heaven and earth; because love is born of God, and cannot rest. but in God, above all created things. . ... Love oftentimes know- eth no bounds, but is fervent beyond all measure.
One stroke of a pencil had written the message, after all. The old saint had not known that he was putting words into the mouths of human lovers.
In February Wagner died. In every shop window appeared his portrait, decorated and hung with purple, or busts and memorials and bas-reliefs; sometimes actual effigies. Commemorative services, great masses, finally operas in Zyklus, were given. The musical life of Germany was for a time absorbed in honoring the great com- poser.
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It was the last month, now, of my work. I had cut down my social activities as much as possible, and so had the two other girls, Nan and Nora. Our party of six held to its Saturday afternoon tramps, and luckily it was a warm spring. The last walks, through the woods beside the Pleisse to suburban villages, with supper at some little inn and possibly a return by boat, were as congenial as ever; other students joined us occasionally. Easter was the twenty- fifth of March that year, and I planned to leave the Tuesday after. Good Friday was as always the solemn day of mourning, with the Passion-music as intense an expression as ever of the people's de- votion; hundreds in the Thomaskirche, quiet in the streets. Easter at the little chapel in the Bach-schule was a bright day; the group of English and American girls had became endeared to one an- other and parting with them would be sorrowful, but that last Sunday service was hearty and the flowers lovely. One hated the kind of goodbyes that came after church, and the sense that most of them were final leave-taking.
The evening was very quiet, and we did not read our usual play. Willi and Helene, the oldest grandchildren, stayed on for a final talk that night. Willi, the tall young Freiwilliger, had been studying English with me and was able to discuss his plans in that language. He was to enter the University, and Helene hoped to teach, but was growing handsome and housewifely and was likely to make a good marriage. The family life had been so interesting and promising that one longed to be able to follow it. The Herr Pastor and his wife were loving in their farewell greetings. They asked for my agreement that I should cable them one word-glückselig was the word agreed upon-when I had arrived in my home and was with my parents again. The picture of their fine old figures standing at the foot of the little winding stairway that night, is still clear, and has kept my faith in the highest type of German character, through any attempt to destroy it.
The thought of home-going made a rhythmic background of joy for my sorrow at leaving Germany, just as the joy of motion in the Mendelssohn violin concerto, which little Geraldine Morgan
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was practising that week to play at the big spring Prüfung in the Gewandhaus, gave place to a motif of poignant regret.
All of my new friends were at the train; they had filled my com- partment with flowers, books and trinkets, and the jollity which fol- lowed was a merciful distraction. Auf Wiedersehen! Komm bald wieder! The train moved out, and a guard shut me in among the roses and green garlands.
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Almost two years later on a winter night a young man and woman were sitting in the parlor of a Young Ladies' Seminary where the Bishop's fourth child had been fulfilling her pledge to teach. It was a spacious room, designed to contribute to the uplift of young-womanhood, with the heavily-upholstered furniture of the period, and long portières hanging from dark wooden rods. Some good old portraits hung upon the walls, with photographs of pil- lared ruins in Rome and Athens, a color-print of one of Alma Tadema's gems and a few etchings. On an easel stood a tall engrav- ing of The Huguenot Lovers, depicting two young people, a soldier and his sweetheart in a chaste parting embrace. A Morris chair stood near the centre-table; a rich Japanese screen partly concealed the two figures seated before an open fire. Ten o'clock had struck; si- lence reigned in the upper stories of the house.
"I can't believe I'm here," said the young man. "Curious that letters had to do it after all."
"Yes; I always felt it would be at Forty Acres."
"And it hasn't happened even yet. We're still saving up."
"I know. How we have kept apart !- and just because we were so shy of one another; shy and sure at the same time, only we didn't realize it."
"Mighty shy, but not consciously sure. We didn't know what to expect of ourselves or of anybody else. We're more or less tied up by conventions."
"It was partly the delay of the boat. In spite of arguing with myself that you mightn't be there, I was sub-consciously expecting you. I never dreamed you were so near me, that evening."
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"I know that, but when I had to go back to Cambridge without seeing you I was horribly cut up, and got more and more doubtful as to what your attitude would be. If I'd only seen you then and there I'd have known in a moment how we stood."
"Naturally! So should I. One can depend upon one's impulses, if nothing else."
"And then you didn't come to Commencement, the dream I'd lived on for four years."
"How could I? No one at home would have seen the slightest ex- cuse for my going away again after just getting home. And it was the same about getting you to Forty Acres; I racked my brain for an excuse, and flunked it out of pure cowardice."
"Then when I came here to see you, with my heart in my mouth, and it was all so formal-like your letters; they had become more and more so."
"Oh, we were absurd! Why do people in love do such things? We didn't even know what to talk about."
"It was really an interposition of Providence that I had to go to the concert in New York. Music has always directed the great events of my life! But you see I only needed a touch or a glance to realize that things were coming right, eventually."
"I had that sense too; it dragged me up from despair a good many times. And when they asked me to meet you at the train that night-actually asked me if I'd mind going over-I had a presenti- ment that the hour had struck. The moment I saw you I knew it. After that, every magnetic exchange was an assurance."
"I know. How jocund we were, without a word of explanation!"
"One thing; I've had enough, please note, of 'due, respective thrift.' I shall spend recklessly hereafter." We both laughed, re- membering the long room and the poetry-book.
"We were infants then. But Father thinks we still are. He's a trifle staggered because he thought I should go farther afield for my love-affairs. It's rather a relief to have it all on a familiar basis like this. Only-those pesky Puritan implications. He sees things in the light of fifty years ago. And somehow he can't disabuse himself of the idea that we're precipitate."
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"Precipitate! When we've waited five whole years to be alone together for even a few minutes! Didn't you tell him that?"
"Of course I did."
"And what did he say?"
"Archie, it was too much. He reminded me that Jacob had served seven years for Rachel."
"Jacob be hanged. We won't let the Old Testament regulate our lives; we're not afraid to be happy! What are the actual condi- tions? I suppose he thought we should expect him to make some."
"Just this. He knows that if we're engaged we shall have to keep it from the public as well as the family till our prospects are a little more settled, and if we wait a little longer you'll actually be in the firm and have plans to announce, which everybody looks for."
"Of course. I suppose practical considerations have to come in, more's the pity. It's a sordid age."
"And you know what a nuisance it is to have to conceal things, maybe lie outright. It would be different if they had any idea how. much we cared, of course."
"Could they have any idea how much? I doubt it, myself."
"They could if they looked back to their own love-affair, but I don't think parents ever do, in these cases. Of course it doesn't seem as if Father did, for he suggests that we wait six months, till you're all started, and then get "betrothed," as he says and publish the fact. Of course that's the conventional method of procedure. We can have the romance to ourselves meantime."
"Having romance to one's self isn't very filling. What is our mutual status supposed to be during the probation?"
"That's amusing too; an understanding! You know-what lots of people have, and carry it through. He says a 'cousinly relation.'"
He groaned. "Whatever that is, I repudiate it. We neither of us have the slightest responsibility for our common ancestors. I hope our children won't either."
"I asked him about letters. He's evidently not anxious to be mandatory, but I thought it might please him to be consulted. He proposed that we 'avoid extreme expressions of love' while still not confessedly engaged."
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We shook with silent laughter.
"His note to me was all one could ask. I'd love him for it even if he weren't your father. He's doing his part. But he thinks of us as inere children."
"I know it. And we're not; not the boy and girl who were so thrilled over our love that summer. It's riper and deeper now. And you are a lawyer, I'm a teacher. We have big separate obligations."
"Of course; life undertook us for years and now we're undertak- ing it."
"And I've one year of my pledge to fulfil. But I can help, you · know, when it comes to making a living. I've got the power to teach; it possesses me. I shall never be able to give it up entirely. The girls are absorbing, splendid creatures when you really know them and watch them. They'd be out of their beds leaning over the stair-rail if they knew what is going on down here, romantic to the last de- gree. Do you know, I've given a recital this month and am arranging for a series of chamber-music concerts here in the school hall next term; quartettes with soloists. We've got to make America far more understanding, and more progressive in musical matters than she has been. I realized abroad how fearfully superficial we are, over here."
"We'll have lots to do together and put our love into it."
"Yes," I flashed. "Yoked in all exercise of noble end."
He reached for my hand. There was much more than surrender in its warm vigor.
"Are you as keen as ever on contemporary poetry?"
"Pretty much, yes. Tennyson and Browning and Matthew Arnold keep up my morale. But when are you going to read me the rest of the Shakespeare sonnets?"
"When we get back to the haymow!"
"There'll be chances to be alone again at Forty Acres! I shall have to give Cousin Ellen an inkling of this. But as to the writing- need there be any bother about those regulations, after all? Lovers have had to do this kind of thing ever since the world began. We can say anything we want in a dialect of our own. Intimations! Be- gin tomorrow."
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