Life Unveiled, by a Child of the Drumlins — Chapter 2 Part I - The Roof-tree

THE ROOF-TREE

If my father had married a certain sweetheart of his early youth, and Mother a suitor to whom she almost became engaged, what would have become of me?

Should I be I, or would it be One-tenth another to nine-tenths me?

I often asked myself this question.

But after each of my parents had had a preliminary romance, they met at a Methodist prayer-meeting, and each knew from the start what the outcome would be.

Mother was then a school-teacher, Father a dry-goods clerk.

Both were born in log houses; both reared in the frugal way of their times; the snow often blew in on their coverlids through chinks in the logs; they slept in trundle beds; wore homespun clothes and calf-skin shoes, and had their education at the district schools to which they walked through the woods following marked trees.

Born amid the drumlins less than fifty miles apart, all their married lives--more than fifty years together--have been spent in the little village where they met.

In the early years of their marriage Father had a travelling wagon called a “Yankee Notion and Boot and Shoe Store.

” Brother, several years my senior, would tell with pride of Papa’s big wagon and the iron-gray horses.

In girlhood I spent hours upstairs, when supposed to be putting the large closet to rights at the spring housecleaning, sitting on the floor poring over Father’s letters to Mother, written during those years.

How like a romance to find those letters so full of solicitude and love!

--comments on Brother’s baby ways; admonitions to the adopted brother; words of love to Mother--strange to get this glimpse of my parents; to see the young father’s pride in his boy; and to read these unrestrained expressions of devotion!

For the father I knew, though affectionate and kind, was a more staid, reserved person than the one in the letters.

Now the baby boy was grown up, the adopted brother scarcely a memory, and the girl who was not born when the letters were written was reading eagerly the ardent words that had gladdened her mother’s young heart!

The circumstances of my brother’s birth strongly appealed to my imagination: My parents had given up hopes of a child some years before he came.

Father’s health had long been precarious--a persistent cough and exhausting night sweats were wasting him rapidly.

Mother, at his side day and night, facing his approaching death, was facing a hidden dread as well--the fear that she was now to become a mother.

As the weeks passed and the fear became a certainty, she determined to spare Father the knowledge, thinking it would kill him outright.

She almost prayed for his release before the truth must be apparent.

How she dreaded the scrutiny of the Doctor, and Father’s questioning eyes!

How she resorted to evasion, artifice, and concealment!

But one day, suddenly changing her mind, trusting in God to help him bear it, she told Father that the child they had hoped for so long was actually to come.

Instantly he became electrified with the glad tidings.

Summoning unknown funds of strength he cried, “I must live, _I will live_!

” It was a greatly improved patient that the Doctor found the next day, and recovery, though slow, dated from that time.

(It was probably arrested tuberculosis.

) Many years later Father’s health again seemed precarious--dizziness, and numbness of the arms, caused the physician to prophesy approaching paralysis.

I remember this as my first sorrow.

I was perhaps fourteen years old.

When Mother told me what the Doctor had said I flung myself on the bed in a paroxysm of grief.

My Father was going to leave me!

The utter helplessness and wretchedness of us all without him!

It was an hour of agony.

But there stood Mother with her own grief, and mine.

This calmed me.

I must help and comfort her, instead of giving way like this.

The storm passed; but the days, weeks, and months that followed were shadowed by this dread, which, however, proved less well-founded than it had seemed; or else Father’s change in his mode of life effected a decided change in his condition.

Closing out his boot-and-shoe store, and travelling again for the same firm for which he had travelled as a young man, he recuperated markedly.

Now, in his seventy-second year, he is in fair health, alert, enduring, and with keen intellectual vigour--a man of undaunted courage and unconquerable optimism.

I have often wondered how it would seem to have more than one brother and sister; it always seems as if all the love I have went to these two, and that there would have been none left for others; or at least that it would have had to be divided up, leaving each the poorer--one does not have to divide for brother and sister--the love you give a sister is peculiarly hers, the love to a brother peculiarly his, but how is it that large families have enough to go around?

Death has never come nearer to me than when my grandparents were taken.

Not unmindful of this escape, I think of it often now.

Once I thought, “Death can never take away my father and mother, my sister and brother,” but of late I am losing the feeling that none of the calamities of life can come nigh me; and, instead, find myself trying to think what it would be like to live on if one of them were taken.

Once when Brother was a lad of perhaps twelve, during an attack of inflammatory rheumatism, his heart acted so badly that Sister and I were sent for in great haste to come home from school.

The attack passed, but after that illness his disposition was altered; he was more irritable, with a temper much like Grandpa’s. He would domineer over us, as big brothers will, speaking sharply over trifles, and he and Sister would quarrel.

I did not quarrel, but would grieve over his harsh tones.

I never could endure angry tones, they always made me shudder.

Noting this susceptibility, Brother was more patient with me than with Sister, who would get miffed easily and talk back.

My tears, which came easily in those days, always melted him.

Consciously or unconsciously, I ruled him to some extent by this weakness.

Once in school a boy whispered maliciously, “Genie, Art is reading a dime novel.

” Now I had never read a dime novel, but having strait-laced notions of how wicked they were, my whole soul rose in denial--_my_ brother do such a thing!

No!

But seeing Arthur bending over his geography with unaccustomed diligence, something in his absorption told me that _what that boy said was true_!

The tears flowed fast.

Ah, the bitterness of that knowledge!

Someone--the same boy, was it?

--told Arthur his little sister was weeping because he was reading a dime novel, and at recess he berated me; I cried the more bitterly; he then consoled me in his half-scolding, half-wheedling way, finally promising not to do it again.

And when he first learned to smoke!

We were skating on the canal at noon-time, I skating with a girl that Arthur was “sweet on.

” Suddenly he skated past us with a braggadocio air, _a cigar in his mouth_!

Carrie and I gave one look at each other, one swift, comprehending look--if Arthur had robbed a bank or stolen a horse we could hardly have felt worse.

We tacitly sat down and took off our skates, and, heavy-hearted, went ’cross-lots to school, the skates dangling from our arms, and the lumps in our throats choking us.

I cannot remember that we talked about it; it was too awful to discuss.

And that defiant look of Arthur’s, how it cut!

Our grief-stricken faces must have worked on his conscience, for in the afternoon a note was passed to me (I’ve no doubt he wrote to Her, too), in which Arthur said: DEAR SISTER,

Why did you leave the ice this noon?

We had a good time.

Then as if in afterthought, Did you feel bad because I was smoking?

I won’t do it again.

Your loving brother, ARTHUR.

He kept his word for a long time; then, whenever he would break it, there would be tears and repentance and fresh promises.

Similar scenes occurred the first time I smelled his breath and learned that he had been drinking.

Heart-breakings, attempted denials, then confessions, promises, struggles to keep them, followed by lapses, penitence, and tears.

“I’ll never do it again, Genie,” used to make my heart bound with hope.

The tears no longer come now.

Something too deep for tears is felt when the poor fellow, thinking he can keep his word this time, says penitently, “I’ve learned my lesson.

I won’t do it again, Genie.

” This weakness of Arthur’s has been almost the only sorrow in our family.

We each react to it in different ways, according to our temperaments.

Father’s watchfulness, and the necessary work and care that are occasioned by this infirmity; his forgiveness, seventy times seven; and his optimism, are his ways of meeting the conditions; Mother suffers, pities him, and prays that with the grace of God he will yet be able to conquer; Sister, seeing the sorrow that follows in the wake of such indulgence, loses patience with a weakness she cannot understand, upbraids him, and chides the rest of us for lenience; yet, in spite of herself, breaks through her resolutions and, in practical ways, dispenses timely aid; and I, knowing it to be a disease, perhaps largely an inheritance, am bound to regard it charitably.

Trying to throw around him what safeguards we can, I am thankful for the periods of well-doing, and can but be merciful when defeat comes.

He tries hard, never stops trying, and suffers keen remorse at times.

It is unspeakably pitiful, and especially in later years, since he has children of his own and sees how they suffer through his infirmity.

Who knows how much inherited tendencies in certain ancestors, the poor state of Father’s and Mother’s health before and at the time of his birth, and that critical illness when a lad, may have had to do with giving him an organization seriously hampered from the beginning?

How can any of us blame another for a given course since, if we were that other, and were confronted with identical conditions, we should have to react to them in the same way?

We make the mistake of saying virtually, “If I were _you_, I would be _I_” whereas, the truth would be, “If I were you, I should _be_ you, and do as _you_ do.

” But all my life with Brother has not been under a cloud.

He used to let me go fishing with him (though I had to keep very still); sometimes go with him down to the pasture after Grandpa’s cows; and often when he went alone he would bring me back a flower--usually a syringa, “cabbaged” from a bush that overhung a fence we used to pass.

This stolen sweet was precious to me, largely because he gave it, perhaps partly because it was stolen.

One especially joyous memory is that of a visit to a cousin in a neighbouring village, and the happy time we children had there one sunny forenoon.

Three things contributed to our pleasure: Brother and Sister, who usually bickered a lot, were amiable; the spearmint was luxurious and abundant; and we followed a path across a meadow to a spring--little things, simple things, but that particular day with its keen joy of life is a red-letter day in my memory.

That was the one spring of my childhood.

To this day the taste and smell of spearmint bring all this back, and I mentally substitute “spearmint” for Tennyson’s “violet”-- Who can tell Why to smell The violet recalls the dewy prime Of youth and buried time?

The cause is nowhere found in rhyme.

I never go past the little town nowadays without looking longingly at that farm from the car-window and wondering if the spring and the spearmint are still there.

At times I have almost decided to get off the train and seek it, but have never dared--it would be a needless pain to find my one little spring gone dry.

The name of my mother’s rejected suitor was Fairchild.

If she could have overcome a certain inexplicable repugnance and married him, “then I might have been a fair child,” I used to think, with a mental play upon the name; for I knew myself to be a very plain little girl.

I

suffered over this fact; could see myself objectively--greenish-gray eyes, a long nose, a prominent forehead--I hated the sight of my face in the glass, yet would torture myself with scrutinizing it, searching for some redeeming thing, but ending with, “No, there’s nothing, _nothing_ nice about it.

” My facial angle I used to study with a hand-glass, mentally cutting about half an inch from my nose, pinning back my ears, and thinking how nice it would be if the straight uncompromising hair would grow low in ripples on that ugly forehead.

But, opposed to anything artificial, I would, not bang and curl my hair as the others girls did.

Looking at certain girls that I now know were plainer than I, I wondered pitifully if I looked as well as they, afraid of deceiving myself with such cold comfort.

All of which shows how self-engrossed and morbid I was; what capacity for self-torture I developed early.

I was constantly reading of beautiful persons.

I lamented secretly because my mother was not beautiful.

I loved her none the less, but had such a craving for the beautiful, which Fate had cruelly withheld from me and my mother.

I

have often been ashamed of this feeling; it seems as though a child should so love its mother (and such a mother!

) that her face would have to be beautiful to it; but it was not so with me.

And it was one of my bitter childish and girlish griefs that Mother would not take more pains always to appear at her best.

It seems pathetic, how pleased I used to feel when she would wear particularly becoming gowns, or take special pains with dressing her hair.

Unable to overcome this feeling, I have always envied one with a beautiful mother.

My mother’s heart and soul are beautiful, but there was always this yearning for beauty of face as well as of character.

Once, as a child, when impersonating Summer at a school exhibition, crowned with roses and bedecked with garlands of flowers, elated by it all, I sang so much better at the concert than I had at rehearsals as to surprise every one, myself included.

Best of all I overheard someone say that I “really looked pretty”; that she never knew before _that my eyes were black_!

How I treasured that statement, though knowing it was only a temporary condition!

I have no doubt I exaggerated my ugliness somewhat for, in addition to youth and health, I had a clear dark skin, good teeth, unusually fine and abundant hair, and a well-formed body.

The one thing I took pride in was my hair.

It was a pardonable pleasure that I felt in contrasting my long heavy brown braids with the wisps of hair many of the girls had.

But when I was perhaps sixteen, working too hard in school and with my music, my hair came out so rapidly that one day a girl sitting behind me leaned over and whispered, “Why, what has become of your hair?

” Bitter were the tears I shed that night!

“_That_ is going, too!

” I cried in my wretchedness.

But it did not all go; I still had more than the average girl.

Even to-day I sometimes get a sudden sense of that schoolgirl’s pang at the threatened loss of her one beauty.

In babyhood I received a burn the shock of which nearly cut short my life: Tied in a high chair and placed before a stove, I was pushed over by some frozen clothes which a “green” Irish girl had brought in from the yard.

The under part of my chin rested upon the stove, leaving its imprint, when I was snatched from it.

As I grew up I grieved over the scar thus sustained.

I became morbidly sensitive over it, though consoling myself somewhat that it was not in a more conspicuous place.

I envied children and girls their smooth soft chins.

It seemed to me the sweetest part of a girl’s features--that white, smooth place under the chin.

When a child I would never play “Do you love butter?

” although I liked to see the buttercup’s yellow shadow on the chins of the other girls.

When my turn came I always drew away, painfully embarrassed.

As a young girl I used to think it would be lovely to faint away.

When we “made believe,” I usually chose to be French, to have black eyes and red cheeks, and to faint away on critical occasions.

But after studying physiology and hygiene, and acquiring more sensible views, I scorned these earlier ambitions, and ridiculed the silly girls who pretended to swoon when vaccinated; and who turned pale and asked to leave the room when the skeleton was brought in to the physiology recitations.

There were only eighteen months between my sister’s age and mine, and, although I was the elder, she dominated me.

There was almost no difference in our heights, and not much in our figures.

She had a pretty face with fairer skin and sunnier hair.

Unobserving persons thought we looked alike.

Dressing alike until we were sixteen, we were often asked by strangers if we were twins.

Those who mistook one for the other could not have been very discriminating, for with the marked difference in our natures, there must have been, even in childhood, a corresponding difference in our looks.

I was quiet, shy, and dreamy;

Kate lively, active, outspoken.

She had to take the lead because I would hang back.

In church, when we were little things, she would fix a place for my head on her lap, then pull me down and pet me, whispering to me to keep still and go to sleep; and, although I knew I should have been the one to play that rôle, I would submit, while she carried out to the finish her assumed dignity.

How quick-witted she was!

One summer Father had a certain pear tree that yielded only a few choice pears which he was jealously watching.

We children had been admonished not to touch them.

One day as Father walked around the yard, he hesitated before the ripening pears, then passed on.

We thought him waiting unnecessarily long: one was surely dead ripe.

That afternoon, while he was taking his Sunday nap, Kate picked that pear.

She had just bitten into it as Father appeared.

Putting both hands behind her, she edged backward in the yard till she stood under the astrachan tree, frightened, but “gamey.

” “Katherine, come here,” Father called sternly.

She came slowly, hands behind her and mouth full of the big bite she was vainly trying to swallow.

“What have you in your mouth?

” A gulp, and she said, “Nothing,” opening wide her little mouth.

“Let me see your hand.

” Out from behind her came the right hand.

“Let me see your other hand.

” Back went her right hand, out came her left, the pear still invisible.

“Let me see both hands,” said Father relentlessly.

Quick as thought the little minx lifted her leg and, hands still behind her, thrust the pear between her thighs, and calmly held out both hands.

Father’s anger vanished.

Kate never resorted to deceit, and almost never to untruths, unless hard pressed.

While my own hypocrisies were subtle, hers were palpable.

But I long cherished resentment for one offense--an unusual one with her: Mother had a bed of choice tulips--her special pride, our special temptation.

Kate succumbed one day, picking nearly all of them, and with such short stems they were useless.

Mother’s anger really frightened Kate, who declared, “Genie did it.

” Though denying it, I probably acted guilty, for Mother believed her.

(I always blushed and looked the culprit in school if a general accusation was made;

and if any one rapped on the door and asked if a certain article had been found, I used to feel so uncomfortable it is a wonder I was not accused of having stolen it--self-conscious little snip that I was!

) To punish me for my supposed falsehood Mother put red pepper on my tongue--a practice which a cousin had told her that she followed with her children.

It was terrible, and was all the worse because I was innocent; though I’ve no doubt it was good for me, for I was more given to prevarication than was Sister.

My tendency to exaggerate was the cause of my fibs; they were usually harmless ones; facts never seemed startling enough; I liked to embellish them.

Then, too, I was always making mistakes about quantities or anything with figures or distances, and some of my misstatements should be set down to this weakness rather than to deliberate deception.

In this very matter, years after, when speaking of this red-pepper punishment, I used to say that my mother put a teaspoonful of red pepper on my tongue.

I can’t remember that any one ever questioned or corrected the statement.

I probably told it mostly to children.

It is only within a few years that, telling the story again, my own common sense, so late to develop, showed me that that must have been a gross exaggeration--a teaspoonful of cayenne pepper on a child’s tongue!

--the red pepper had punished one lie that had never been told, but had given rise to one that I had gone on repeating until at last I had sense enough to see that it was too preposterous to be believed!

Similarly in the matter of my weight: I had heard it mentioned--it was probably fifty pounds--but with my usual inaccuracy for figures I solemnly protested that I weighed five pounds, standing my ground even when corrected, till the absurdity of it was shown me.

I remember, too, hearing Mother talking with some women about how young a certain neighbour was when her daughter was born.

In telling the school girls about it later, I announced that Mrs. H---- was only five years older than her daughter Ida.

Shouts of derision greeted my statement, but I was firm.

One big girl called me “little fool,” and I suffered I know not what ridicule.

It was partly an exaggeration, partly ignorance.

Grasping the main fact, that the mother was very young when her child was born, and having forgotten how young, but wanting to make my story worth while, I had resorted to a positive statement which I stoutly maintained.

I could not see why those girls should doubt my word, even if the statement was startling.

_Of course_ it was unusual--that was why I had cited it.

I have a fellow feeling for the Vassar student who, when asked by the resident woman physician what her paternal grandfather died of, and not knowing, but wishing not to seem ignorant, said, “I--I think he died in infancy.

” For years I was not a little given to reporting bright things people might have said, as though they had said them.

It was such fun to embellish commonplace events and comments with additions of my own.

Whenever I would tell these untruths I always had a queer feeling (almost of disappointment) to find that nothing happened to me; that no one questioned them; and that everything went on just as before the lie had slipped off my tongue.

I don’t know whether I expected Ananias’s and Sapphira’s fate, or what, but I expected something, and nothing happened!

This tendency to exaggeration and misstatement, and, on occasion, to deliberate falsehood, I have tried conscientiously to overcome.

In fact, for years I swung far to the other side.

Now, in matters of fact, I think I am more often scrupulously accurate than not.

If I cannot be accurate, I refrain from giving a definite statement.

My special training in later years of course helped in this respect.

But it was earlier, when I became a “Christian,” that this tendency appeared to me in all its heinousness, and in striving to overcome it I became, for a time, almost morbidly conscientious.

One day in school the word “conscientious” came up for discussion.

I

was not present, but learned from one of the girls that “Prof” had spoken out in school freely, using my name as an example of what conscientiousness meant.

But my wise little sister (and how I loved her for it!

), though pleased at the reference to me, went to all the girls she thought likely to mention it to me, and cautioned them not to.

When I learned of it, from one who never could keep a secret, I asked why Sister didn’t want her to tell me.

“Oh, she said it would make you proud, or something like that.

” And she was right.

I was too self-conscious as it was, and vain, in a demure kind of way.

Kate knew my weaknesses.

Sister’s deceits, as I have said, were such funny ones; they never deceived any one--were never really intended to; they were only desperate measures resorted to when in a tight place, their drollery usually serving to protect her from punishment.

As a rule she and Brother managed to quarrel when left to their own devices.

I played the peace-maker between them, and have done it ever since.

One Sunday, when we stayed home from church, they got into a wrangle.

Spiteful words led to threats, and Kate was soon chasing Arthur round the room in childish rage, I trying to intervene.

In the squabble my belt fell off--a black shiny belt with a metal buckle.

As Kate could not reach Arthur, she grabbed up my belt and, brandishing it in the air, chased him, trying to hit him.

Crash!

went the buckle against the rosewood mirror.

When Father and Mother came home and saw that crack in the mirror, they saw also three guilty apprehensive children.

Brother and Sister pitched in, telling about the quarrel, who did this, and who did that.

“I don’t care about who started it, or who kept it up,” said Father, “I want to know who broke that looking-glass--the one to blame for that will be punished.

” “Genie is to blame for it,” Kate promptly rejoined.

Father looked at me in surprise, Arthur opened his mouth in wonderment, while I stood dumb and guilty-looking beyond question.

Then Kate added: “Arthur hit me, and I chased him with the belt, and the buckle broke the glass, _and it was Genie’s belt-buckle_!

”