A Woman of Genius

The first thing I was aware of was the sound of Forester blubbering, and then of the place being full of neighbours and my mother sitting by the fire in a chair out of the best room, crying heartily. We flung ourselves upon her, crying too, and were gathered up in a violence of grief and rocking, through which I could hear a great many voices in a kind of frightened and extenuating remonstrance, "Come now, Mrs. Lattimore. Now Sally – there, there – " at every word of which my mother's sobbing broke out afresh. I remember getting done with my crying first and being very hot and uncomfortable and thinking of nothing but how I should wriggle out of her embrace and get away, anywhere to escape from the burden of having to seem to care; and then, but whether it was immediately after I am not sure, going rather heavily upstairs and being overtaken in the middle of it by the dramatic suggestion of myself as an orphan child toiling through the world – I dare say I had read something like that recently – and carrying out the suggestion with an immense effect on Uncle Alva, who happened to be coming down at that moment. And then the insidious spread through all my soul of cold disaster, out of which I found myself unable to rise even to the appearance of how much I cared.

Of all that time my father lay dead in the best room, for by the usual Taylorville procedure the funeral could not take place until the afternoon of the second day, I have only snatches of remembrance: of my being taken in to look at him as he lay in the coffin in a very nice coat which I had never seen him wear, and the sudden conviction I had of its somehow being connected with that mysterious summons which had taken Uncle Alva away from us that morning in the street; of the "sitting up," which was done both nights by groups of neighbours, mostly young; and the festive air it had with the table spread with the best cloth and notable delicacies; and mine and Forester's reprisals against one another as to the impropriety of squabbling over the remains of a layer cake. And particularly of Cousin Judd.

He came about dusk from the farm – he had been sent for – looking shocked, and yet with a kind of enjoyable solemnity, I thought; and the first thing he wished to do was to pray with my poor mother.

"We must submit ourselves to the will of God, Sally," he urged.

"O God! God!" said my mother, walking up and down. "I'm not so sure God had anything to do with it."

"It's a wrong spirit, Sally, a wrong spirit – a spirit of rebellion." My mother began to cry.

"Why couldn't God have left him alone? What had he done that he should be taken away? What have I done – "

"You mustn't take it like this, Sally. Think of your duty to your children. 'The Lord giveth' – "

"Go tell Him to give me back my husband, then – "

Effie and I cowered in our corner between the base burner and the sewing machine; it was terrible to hear them so, quarrelling about God. My mother had her hands to her head as she walked; her figure touched by the firelight, not quite spoiled by childbearing, looked young to me.

"Oh! Oh! Oh!" she cried with every step.

"You mustn't, Sally; you'll be punished for it – "

Cousin Judd shook with excitement; he was bullying her about her Christian submission. I went up to him suddenly and struck him on the arm with my fist.

"You let her alone!" I cried. "Let her alone!"

Somebody spoke out sharply, I think; a hand plucked me from behind – to my amazement my mother's.

"Olivia, Olivia May! I am surprised … and your father not out of the house yet. Go up to your room and see if you can't learn to control yourself!"

After all there was some excuse for Cousin Judd. There was, in the general estimate, something more than fortuitous circumstance that went to my father's taking off. Early in the winter, when work had been stopped on the Zimmern building, there had been a good deal of talk about some local regulations as to the removal of scaffolding and the security of foot passengers. That the contractors had not been brought to book about it was thought to be due to official connivance; my father had written to the paper about it. But the scaffolding had remained until that morning of the high wind, when it came down all together and a bit of the wall with it. That my father should have been passing on his way to the courthouse at the moment, was a leaping together of circumstances that seemed somehow to have raised it to the plane of a moral instance. It provided just that element of the dramatic in human affairs, which somehow wakens the conviction of having always expected it; though it hardly appeared why my father, rather than the contractor or the convincing city official, should have been the victim. If it wasn't an act of Providence, it was so like one that it contributed to bring out to the funeral more people than might otherwise have ventured themselves in such weather.

It was also thought that if anything of that nature could have made up to her, my mother should have found much to console her in the funeral. The Masons took part in it, as also the G. A. R. and the Republican Club, though they might have made a more imposing show of numbers if all the societies had not been so largely composed of the same members. In addition to all this, my mother's crape came quite to the hem of her dress and Effie and I had new hats. I remember those hats very well; they had very tall crowns and narrow brims and velvet trimmings, and we tried them on for Pauline Allingham after we had gone up to bed the night before the funeral. Mrs. Allingham had called and Pauline had been allowed to come up to us. I remember her asking how we felt, and Effie's being as much impressed by the way in which I carried off the situation as if she had not been in the least concerned in it. And then we sat up in bed in our nightgowns and tried on the hats while Pauline walked about to get the effect from both sides, and refrained, in respect to the occasion, from offering any criticism.

It was the evening after the funeral and everybody had gone away but one good neighbour. The room had been set in order while we were away at the cemetery; the lamp was lit and there was a red glow on everything from the deep heart of the base burner. The woman went about softly to set a meal for us, and under the lamp there was a great bowl of quince marmalade which she had brought over neighbourly from her own stores; the colour of it played through the clear glass like a stain upon the white cloth. It happened to have been a favourite dish of my father's.

For the last year it had been a family use, he being delicate in his appetite, to make a point of saving for him anything which he might possibly eat, and taking the greatest satisfaction in his enjoyment. Therefore it came quite natural for me to get a small dish from the cupboard and begin to serve out a portion of Mrs. Mason's preserves for my father. All at once it came over me … the meaning of bereavement; that there was nobody to be done for tenderly; the loss of it … the need of the heart for all its offices of loving … and the unavailing pain.

CHAPTER V

It followed soon on my father's death that we gave up the yellow house with the chocolate trimmings and took another near the high school, and that very summer my mother lengthened my skirts halfway to my shoe tops and began to find fault with my behaviour "for a girl of your age." We saw no more of the McGees after that except as Ellen managed to keep on in the same class at school with me; and Pauline and I found ourselves with a bosom friendship on our hands.

I went on missing my father terribly, but in a child's inarticulate fashion, and it is only lately that I have realized how much of my life went at loose ends for the loss out of it of a man's point of view and the appreciable standards which grow out of his relation to the community. Ever since the Snockerty episode there had been glimmers on my horizon of the sort of rightness owing from a daughter of Henry Lattimore, but now that I had no longer the use of the personal instance, I lost all notion of what those things might be; for though I have often heard my mother spoken of as one of the best women in the world, she was the last to have provided me with a definite pattern of behaviour.

Pauline had struck out a sort of social balance for herself grounded on the fear of what was "common." Her mother had a day at home, from which seemed to flow an orderly perspective of social observances, for which my mother, never having arrived at the pitch of visiting cards, afforded me no criterion whatever.

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 pass when they are by great emotions a little removed from themselves, to kindle in my young mind a realization of the preciousness of passion over all human assets. 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 Japanese pattern upon the gilt ground of the wall paper, against which I had pushed out a kind of shell, 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 passions 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 assurance 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 assurance 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 pass 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 passed 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 glasses, 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 sex 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 sex, 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 classmates 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' basement. Pauline, who had always an aptitude 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 supposititious 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 classmates 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 passion.

"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 passionately 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 Saturday 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 muff 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."