Life Unveiled, by a Child of the Drumlins — Chapter 5 Part I - As Twig is Bent

“AS TWIG IS BENT” The books one reads in childhood and youth are, of course, among the most potent formative influences of those periods.

My post-Mother-Goose reading consisted largely of the Child’s Bible, later the Bible itself, and the goody-good Sunday-school books, two or three of Miss Alcott’s, and whatever else I could find in my browsings.

How I have cried over the Elsie books and rejoiced over the Gypsy books!

Mad-cap Gypsy Breynton and pious Elsie Dinsmore were real beings to me.

Sunday afternoons I would read by the west window with the door leading upstairs at just a convenient distance, so that when I found my emotions getting the upper hand, I could at one step open the door, slip upstairs and weep in secret over the woes of my little heroines.

I thought the others had no inkling what that sudden plunge meant, but my acute little sister soon learned, and one dreadful Sunday, when I was making a desperate move for the stairway before the torrent should burst, she called out mischievously, “Genie, what are you going upstairs for?

It’s warmer down here.

” “Yes, Eugenia, it is too cold for you to sit upstairs,” Mother intervened.

With this sudden centring of attention on me at such a crucial time, the clouds burst, the situation was revealed, and I was permitted to go up and have it out.

Bitter were my tears.

It was exceedingly painful to be seen thus moved.

Such things should be suffered in secret.

When, shamefaced, I returned to the sitting-room, Sister was not too deep in her book to shoot me a knowing glance, though she had evidently been instructed to hold her peace.

After that I would feel the storm coming afar off.

I learned to rise calmly;

to open the door with less precipitation; sometimes even making an indifferent comment on leaving the room.

So deliberate were my movements, I flattered myself that no one suspected I was withdrawing from the family circle in order to dissolve in tears.

I would even open a bureau drawer in hopes they would hear the sound through the stove-pipe hole and think I had gone up after something.

Oh, the poor, thin artifices of childhood!

Looking back and seeing how pitiful they were, an added tenderness wells up within me for my parents who so wisely and kindly refrained from letting me see that my little devices were so ineffectual.

There was no village library, though a Temperance Club supplied a circulating one of which I availed myself till I learned to use the Academy library.

Then, too, I was a great borrower of books, although we probably had more in our house than the average family in the town;

these I read over and over.

“Robinson Crusoe” and “The Arabian Nights,” I read surreptitiously in school.

I revelled in “The Lady of the Lake,” and “Aurora Leigh.

” I was wont to combine reading and housework to the detriment of the latter.

While ironing sheets and towels I managed to read at the same time, with long waits between the movements of the iron--unless Mother came suddenly into the room, when I started up briskly, sometimes having to fold inside a scorched place where the iron had rested too long.

Many a poem have I committed to memory at the ironing-board.

Father started to buy the American Cyclopædia when I was very young--a big undertaking, for they cost five dollars a volume.

The volumes came slowly, but we rejoiced whenever a new one was added to the row.

It was annoying enough, though, to step up to the book case and find that we had only got to O or P, when we needed volumes containing S or T. As a girl I had a pastime of my own, a kind of mental book-collecting: Going along the streets I would say to myself, “What books will you have from this house?

--you may have any three you choose.

” Then the fun would begin.

At Grandpa’s were “Timothy Titcomb’s Letters,” and “Bitter Sweet,” and a queer little book called “Aristotle’s Masterpiece”; at an uncle’s were Walton’s “Compleat Angler,” “Reveries of a Bachelor,” and “Lewie, or The Bended Twig”; at an aunt’s was “Right and Wrong, or She Told the Truth at Last”--a fascinating big, green-covered book that I used to weep over, pitying the heroine entangled in an intricate web of deceit.

At another aunt’s were “Wells’s Science of Common Things” and “Sexual Science; or Love, its Powers and Uses,” by O. S.

Fowler.

I valued the “Science of Common Things” because it asked and answered questions about a lot of things I thought I ought to know, and did not know, and never could study out, even with the help of physics--always a hard study for me; and I liked the book of Fowler’s because it dealt with the alluring subject in a lofty and, as I thought then, scientific way.

At still another aunt’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” and Byron’s Poems leaned confidingly against each other, except when I disturbed them.

Bunyan was the favourite then, and for that matter is yet.

At the homes of neighbours and friends were many coveted treasures--the Embury Poems, “Physiognomy and Signs of Character” (this I borrowed for months at a time), Moore’s Melodies, Longfellow’s Poems, Shakespeare, “Fern Leaves,” and many more.

I thought one man in town very literary because he had all of E. P.

Roe’s works; at one time “Barriers Burned Away” and “Opening of a Chestnut Bur” seemed wonderful productions, and (I may as well confess it) I adored the novels of Mary Jane Holmes.

Though forbidden to read them, I borrowed them of our slatternly red-haired neighbour, devouring them on the sly.

I read “Darkness and Daylight” twice or thrice, and five or six others by the same author.

The only times I can remember Father’s voice raised in sternness to me were when he caught me absorbed in novels by that wicked Mrs. Holmes.

(Mother told me he himself once sat up all night at a hotel to read “Lena Rivers,” and that he had wanted to name me “Lena.

”) Dr. Dio Lewis was born near our village.

One of my schoolmates was related to him (and one to the wicked “Mary Jane”--I, alas!

had no illustrious kin); she lent me two of his books: “Our Girls” and “Chastity.

” I believe I am indebted to them for a wholesome interest in physiology and physical life, and for a sudden turning from forbidden things learned in childhood.

I think it was the reading of them that engendered a repugnance to unchaste thoughts and conversation--a repugnance that the majority of my schoolmates did not have, and that, for a certain period, I did not have, for I engaged in talk and stories and conduct that later made me blush to recall.

After reading Dio Lewis I can remember refusing to stay in the midst of girls who insisted on telling improper stories.

Many a time I have been ridiculed for my uncompromising attitude, and many a time in later years have had to check women in their recitals of such stories, though making both them and myself uncomfortable by a seeming pharisaical attitude.

I would try to lessen the embarrassment by telling them that these things were likely to come unbidden to the mind, polluting by unwelcome, unchaste recollections our sweetest experiences--all of which I learned in the Dio Lewis books.

I recall this man’s once lecturing in our town; he was the first author I had ever seen and I was somewhat disappointed to find him so like other folk.

On that occasion he confessed to some human weaknesses, such as eating pumpkin-pie late at night--he, the High Priest of Hygiene, lightly and shamelessly confessing this, when advice to the contrary had been so clear in his books!

In my ignorance of life I was startled to learn that one could so earnestly preach one thing and so lightly practise the opposite.

I thought him somewhat of a fraud.

I was getting my eyes opened, and the light hurt.

There was a time when I was under the spell of the poems of Emma C.

Embury, whoever she was.

I borrowed a copy of her poems from a neighbour who lent me the poems of Longfellow in quaint thin volumes;

but those of Emma C. Embury--how beautiful they seemed!

Most of them were sad; that was why I liked them: Love’s first step is upon the rose His second finds the thorn, was the burden of one; of another: The gathered rose and the stolen heart Can charm but for a day.

I would improvise tunes to these verses when I could get away by myself, preferably down by the creek in the heart of my big willow;

but if not there, then down in Grandma’s cellar, while she discreetly stayed upstairs, never betraying by word or look her awareness of anything going on below except the tiresome churning, for which she pretended to pity me.

Was she laughing in her sleeve all the time?

It would have hurt to know it then but would be a delight now if I were sure that her hours of toil were lightened by quiet amusement at my expense.

Those sentimental, love-lorn pieces I affected at a time when my days were so full of sunshine that I had to seek artificial gloom.

My greatest favourites among this melancholy poet’s verses were “The Mother,” and “The Lonely One”--long poems, but I believe I could say every word of them now, even without the aid of the churn-dasher.

The first pictured a young mother revelling in the beauty of her baby boy.

Then comes his illness and the harrowing scene as she realizes she is to be bereft.

As I recited the lines, I used to feel her rapt devotion and her piteous grief.

I identified myself with “The Lonely One” in the same way--a love-lorn, unattractive damsel “on whose spirit genius poured its rays,” who lived through the bitterness of seeing her hero marry another, and then, his wife having died, turn to her for comfort, entreating her love, just as Death was about to claim her: She died, Yet as a day of storms will ofttimes sink With a rich burst of sunlight at its close, Thus did the rays of happiness illume Her parting spirit.

By this time my eyes would be suffused and my voice tremulous; but the butter had come, and Grandma would come down-cellar and pour a little cold water into the churn to help the butter “gather”; and despite Emma C.

Embury and her ill-fated maidens, I would drink copiously of that most delicious beverage, butter-milk from Grandma’s little red churn.

It was a heterogeneous lot of books that I read the last four years in school--there was perhaps more system during the last two--and though I had little discrimination myself, I was aggrieved if the interference of parents or teachers took the form of anything more positive than suggestion.

How fascinating I found the historical novels of Louise Mühlbach!

What cared I if they were not reliable as history?

I turned unwillingly from them to Scott at the earnest solicitation of my teachers.

The “Correspondence between Goethe and Bettina” made a deep impression upon me.

I should like to see the identical copy I read; it opened up a new world.

And a translation of Faust by Agnes Swanwick, moved me strangely.

I copied favourite passages from it in a blank book, conning them again and again.

Faust’s apostrophe to the radiant moonlight would put me in an exalted mood whenever I read it, especially the latter part: “Oh!

that I might wander on the mountain tops in thy loved light--hover with spirits around the mountain caves, flit over the fields in thy glimmer, and, disencumbered from all the fumes of knowledge, bathe myself sound in thy dew!

” I copied sentimental passages in German script.

I would have blushed to have it known how much I liked this: His stately step, His noble form;

The smile of his mouth, The power of his eyes, And of his speech the witching flow;

The pressure of his hand, And, Ah, his kiss!

But there was no one in my little world that answered to all these things--somewhere, some day, I might meet such a being.

I was in no hurry.

Enough to know that such things had been and would be again.

Poor little Dreamer!

silly little Dreamer!

and all the time she was pretending, even to herself, that she did not care for love or lovers;

that they were never to be a part of her life; that she never wanted to marry, never would; and that she meant to live a much more serious and useful life than one of mere married happiness.

It was a perverse, contradictory inner and outer life I lived at the ages of sixteen and seventeen, yes, and on into the twenties; no girl ever thought more about love and possible lovers than I, yet I felt they were never to be really for me.

Even my day-dreams had barriers interposed.

I wonder if this is not unusual--do not other dreamers dream things as they want them--when everything can be rose-colour for the mere wishing?

Is it customary, I wonder, to let dark clouds overcast the dream-sky?

As I think of it, I wonder if it was not a kind of prescience of what the reality would be.

Anyhow, as far back as I can remember thinking of these things, mingled with the whims, sentimentalities, and insincerities of the adolescent period, was a conviction of these two things: that love was the greatest, the most wonderful thing in the world, and that there would be some barrier always to my knowing all that it might mean.

Besides the books I read, I can trace other influences that had their part in bending the twig in the way it was to grow.

In the early ’teens Brother and I helped Father in the Post Office, out of school hours, an occupation profitable in many ways.

I had much leisure there for reading, was trained to accuracy and alertness in the office-work, and learned a good deal about human nature.

The requirements furnished a needed corrective to my tendency to dream--I could still dream, but had to _do_, also.

It was a matter of pride between Brother and me to see how rapidly we could distribute the mail; how quickly deliver it when the box-numbers were called out; and how well we could remember just what letters were in the General Delivery.

I was vain, too.

I can remember how gratified I was at occasional words of approbation I heard concerning my efficiency; and when crowds of men and boys would be standing outside waiting for the distribution of the mail while Father, Brother, and I would be darting here and there to put the letters and papers in the boxes, trying at the same time to keep out of one another’s way, I would think with pride that I was helping just as much as the others were; and what a “smart girl” I was to be doing it, too.

My cheeks would flush, and I felt a diminutive sense of power: all these persons waiting for something _we_ were doing; we held in our hands letters fraught with happiness, with disappointment, with sorrow.

I liked to have them crowd around and peer at us through the windows and from the door in the rear that led to the “store”; and when the work was done, and the public was at liberty to inquire for mail, I just doted on reaching through the tiny window and taking in the little green sign bearing the legend, “Distributing the Mail.

” And the self-centred Miss was aware just how her hand and wrist must look as they reached through and lifted the sign from the hook outside the window.

(I forgot in cataloguing my unattractive “points” to mention in extenuation that I did have a pretty arm and hand, and actually discovering the fact myself, took a keen satisfaction in the discovery.

Perhaps this was not all vanity, as I am especially susceptible to beauty of form and line, wherever seen.

) In looking back upon my life it seems to have been a strange, contradictory mixture of sincerity and duplicity.

I longed, passionately longed, for sincerity and openness, anything else tortured me; and yet I can see how influences seemed always at work to foster complexity and duplicity.

To begin with, I was always fond of playing a part.

Beginning as children do, we played at ghosts.

Wrapped in sheets at twilight, we peered into the neighbours’ windows to startle them.

But I soon wanted something less crude.

One day in my early ’teens, dressing as a beggar, I went to the houses in our street asking for “cold pieces.

” At first it was a failure, as either I or the others would giggle and spoil it all.

Finally, stipulating that the others keep out of sight, I went alone to the Widow Earle’s and told a pitiful tale, and the unsuspicious old soul gave me a slice of her new bread, just out of the oven.

Blessing her, I hobbled away, munching the bread under my veil.

Soon we all scampered back in great glee, confessing to the widow, who relished the joke far less than I did the bread--no woman likes to cut into her warm bread, then to find she has been hoodwinked!

No wonder she was cross!

Each time I tried something harder.

One day when visiting in the country, I dressed as a beggar, and going to a neighbour’s, while the good housewife was in the pantry getting me something to eat, stole her spectacles, took my food and went my way.

Returning shortly after, with the other girls, I delivered the spectacles to the incredulous victim of my hoax.

Then, in high feather I tackled a newly married elderly pair at the next farm, concocting my story on the spot and enjoying keenly their gullibility: I was destitute, was journeying afoot to my daughter in a distant town, naming a town on the spur of the moment.

They asked my daughter’s name.

Chancing to give the name of a new girl who had come to school that week, I myself met with a surprise, for the man said, “Why, _I_ know the Godfreys of Groton!

” Quickly I begged him for news of my daughter, and asked about her husband whom I had never seen, catechizing him awhile, so he would let up on me, as their questions were proving quite a tax on my ingenuity.

As I sat there after having lunched on pears and a glass of milk, which the deluded couple had given me, the other girls, impatient at my long stay, came down the road.

The sympathetic farmer by that time was partly hitched up to take me as far on my way as the next village.

As the girls came tentatively into the yard, my unsuspecting victims called out to them to come and have their fortunes told, dilating on the wonderful things I had told them.

(I had done this to pay for my luncheon.

) I don’t recall how the revelation came about, but I soon stood confessed, a sham beggar, while the man and his wife looked sheepishly at me, and at each other, at the mocking girls and the half-harnessed horses.