All Kneeling/Chapter 2
On the whole, Christabel approved of her family and her surroundings. The house in which she grew up was small and rather shabby, but carriages with coachmen and footmen stopped at it, bringing hothouse grapes to lie in the fruit-dish on the sideboard, hothouse flowers to fill the vases. And lack of money could be bravely borne, since Aunt Ann and Aunt Deborah sent her to boarding-school, Aunt Lydia helped with her clothes, Aunt Susannah paid for the summer when she and five other high-born maidens of Germantown followed Mrs. Plummer's yearning profile, flat heels, and streaming cock-feathers through Ann Hathaway's garden, the Louvre, and Saint Peter's.
The great-aunts lived on estates with smooth lawns, weeping trees, and formal flower-beds, with names like Shady Lawn and The Cedars—places that looked and sounded like high-class cemeteries, Great-uncle Johnnie said. Surrounded by old family servants, silver, portraits, by tribes of unmarried daughters and widowed daughters-in-law, they made a rich dim background against which Christabel felt herself shining, simple and unspoiled.
The great-uncles were dead long ago, except Uncle Johnnie, who had never married. He had been engaged when he was young to a distant cousin, Ellen Caine, who had jilted him and run away with her brother's tutor. That had hardened him, Christabel feared. Because really Uncle Johnnie was trying, sometimes. He can't be happy, she decided, because real happiness comes only with unselfishness, living for others, and if anyone ever lived for himself, it was Uncle Johnnie. But he had the appearance of enjoying life. He had a notable wine cellar; he had a small glasshouse in which he grew melons at the cost of about forty-five dollars a melon; he had his boots made to order; and he was fond of experiments with port and cheese and time that made his sisters fold their handkerchiefs about their noses. And he had a disquieting way of looking as if some secret joke amused him. Christabel agreed with Aunt Clara, who said it was such a pity for himself that Uncle Johnnie seemed to like to laugh at people instead of with them.
Among the great-aunts and the one great-uncle Christabel felt like a flower in a November garden. But that was the sort of thing one couldn't say about oneself. There were drawbacks to being the only member of the family that poetic description applied to, and the only one who had a poetic imagination.
The great-aunts cherished their treasure, and she loved them in return, finding their absurdity touching, listening to the battles that raged as to whose gardener could grow the best gloxinias, to the battle-cry, "There, Sister Susannah, beat that if thee can!" and melting with an ageless understanding. For they are such children, she thought, only wanting to have the biggest, never really seeing the velvety dark, blue petal curving against the light. But they, too, considered her a child, and sometimes she felt smothered by their solicitude. One day I will get away from it all and live my own life, she promised herself. No matter how hard it is, no matter how much I suffer, I must live. And she had bright pictures of herself living—somewhere, anywhere but in Germantown. She saw firelit faces turned toward her, young painters and writers gathered around her under the snow on a sloping roof. It was more vivid to her than the ballrooms where she danced with Caleb Barnes, 3d, or ate chicken salad with William James Russell, young gentlemen approved of by the aunts, who were, she feared, a tiny bit snobbish. If you only knew how little all this means to me, she would think with secret amusement, accepting a glass of lemonade from Caleb, smiling at William James.
For although she "came out" at a tea at Shady Lawn, carrying first Aunt Deborah's rosebuds frilled with lace, then Aunt Ann's froglike orchids, before she permitted herself Gerald Smith's red roses, although she went to the Assemblies with Uncle Johnnie, and to all the débutante parties, she was not just a society butterfly. She wrote poems, and they were sometimes printed in magazines.
It was through Aunt Susannah that she met Talbot Emery Towne, the president of a small refined publishing company. The three dined together at The Cedars. Christabel, turning her face from Aunt Susannah's withered cheeks and watered silk to Mr. Towne's stock and silvery sideburns, felt herself dewy with youth, tender with compassion toward age. Oh, poor old darlings, she thought, gazing at them from wide eyes whose starriness she felt herself, and hearing vaguely something about literary London. Holding your little shields of memories, pretty speeches, pheasant with bread sauce, tawny port, between you and the Dark Archer who draws near you. Her heart swelled with pity as she answered, sweetly, "Yes, Aunt Susannah," or, "Oh, Mr. Towne, really?"
After dinner she followed Aunt Susannah's instructions and melted into the conservatory. She knew her poems were being shown to the publisher. She stood still, staring at a plant with big heart-shaped leaves, bronze-green, centered and splotched with pink. Her heart thudded as if it would shake her to pieces. But when in answer to, "Christabel, child, where is thee?" she went back to the drawing-room and saw Susannah's beaming face and the bland benevolence of Talbot Emery Towne's, each with a pot of green and pink-splotched leaves floating in the air above it, she knew her poems were as good as published.
The book appeared on a small select spring list: A Pilgrim in Palestine, by Lady Elizabeth Cook-Paynter; I Remember, I Remember, by Canon J. D. R. Wormsley; Ask Me No More, A Novel, by Caroline Trimmingham Wales; The Pot Beneath the Thorn Bush, by Eimar O'Sullivan, Stars and Wild Strawberries, by Christabel Caine
Christabel Caine, Christabel Caine, Stars and Wild Strawberries, by Christabel Caine. She came back to her name in print, over and over again. Christabel Caine
The day the book was published she sat at her desk, surrounded by propped-open copies whose drying ink said "For Aunt Deborah, with her Christabel's love," "Dearest love to Aunt Ann from Christabel," or, full of meaning, "Christabel to Gerald." Now and then she had to dip into a poem—"Cherry Blossoms," "The Old Pain," "Scarlet Slippers"—reading through her own eyes, through Gerald's, through the eyes of the new man at the dinner last night. Then through her own eyes again.
So young, so touched by the fire. I am dedicated to my work, I have chosen the difficult path, she thought. I have chosen the lonely way. And really Eleanor Atkinson's luncheon, the Palmers' box party at the Mask and Wig, even the walk up the Wissahickon she was going to take with Gerald if it ever stopped raining, were unimportant to her compared with her book.
From her desk drawer she took an old composition book labeled "My Secret Journal," and wrote:
"It's been a wingéd day, because todayThe book
She read this, chewing the end of her pen, and added:
"God, give me a Brave Heart and a Singing Soul—give me courage to follow the Path Difficult."
All right for other girls to care about dresses and men and good times. They were not the dedicated spirits, the children of light. She had explained all this to Gerald; she would explain again. It isn't that I don't like fun, Gerald; it isn't that I don't long to play; but my work must come first. The last time they had had a good talk about her vocation Gerald had said, suddenly, "You have an awfully spiritual expression!"
She went to the mirror now to see if she had. And as she gazed the pure colors and clear outlines blurred, she slipped to her knees, and with uplifted face whispered, "I accept!"
"I can't understand her poems," Uncle Johnnie said to the aunts, flapping the pages this way and that. "What does this part mean, about building a house from the small bleached bones of a little field mouse? What does she mean by tired little tunes?"
"I think they're all lovely, and thee isn't required to understand poetry, Johnnie," Aunt Eliza answered. "Will thee have a cup of tea?"
"A glass of sherry and a biscuit, please. Now look here, Eliza, what's all this about?
(Cold is the white moon's breast),
I will not think of you,
I will sleep and rest."
"Wait until William has brought thy sherry, please!"
"All right now?
I will not call your name,
I float in the sea of sleep.
(God! For those nights of flame!)"
"Thee needn't look at me that way, Johnnie, I didn't write it. Thee knows thee can say things in poetry that wouldn't do in conversation, and I'm sure it's lovely, they're all lovely, only I hope people won't think they mean anything."
"It must have been very hard to find all the rhymes," Aunt Deborah's faint old voice sighed from the fireside chair that held heaped shawls and a clattering cup and saucer.
"Has thee seen these notices of the dear child's book?" Aunt Susannah pulled them from her knitting-bag. "A clipping bureau sends them to me—did thee ever hear of such a thing? Talbot Towne told me about it. 'Exquisite little songs' And here's another: 'Reminiscent of Christina Rossetti' Mm-m! 'Whipped cream and sugared rose leaves' Thee might throw that one in the fire, Johnnie; it's not worth keeping. Here's one that says 'underlying feeling of spirituality.' I'll leave them here so all of thee can read them."
"How many copies has thee bought, Johnnie?" Aunt Ann asked, suspiciously.
"Oh, plenty," Uncle Johnnie answered, finishing his sherry.
"I don't know where mother's going to put them if she buys any more."
"What's that, Clara?" Aunt Deborah quavered.
"I said I didn't know where thee was going to put any more Stars and Wild Strawberries, mother. We have them in the attic and in the china closet—even under my bed. I suppose thee's all in the same fix?"
The aunts nodded. Uncle Johnnie walked over to the fireplace and stood balancing from heels to toes, looking at Ophelia over it, floating in her nightgown through a stew of waterlilies, with ghosts of his sisters moving dimly on the glass that covered the painting. What an absurd picture, he thought, and what an art treasure Eliza considers it. With his back to the room he yawned widely. They're off again, he thought, not troubling to separate the excited soft babble into words. Go it, girls!
"Does thee, Johnnie? Johnnie!"
"I beg your pardon, Ann?"
"Does thee think the child should go to New York? Thee knows her heart's set on it. She says people are too good to her here, that she's smothered in comfort and kindness, that she needs to be lonely in order to write. Wasn't that it, Sister Eliza?"
"Yes, that was it. But she was so sweet. She said she was so afraid we'd think she was ungrateful, or didn't love us enough, but it was just that she loved us all too much and was too happy with us, that it kept her from what she feels is the work she must do."
"She does look on it as a true vocation. Thee knows I was unalterably opposed to the notion at first. We all were, weren't we? And what poor Fred and Amy will do without her I can't imagine. But I'm beginning to think perhaps we ought to let her go."
"What does thee think, Johnnie?"
"I've always thought writing could be done wherever there was a pen and ink and paper, if you had something to say," Uncle Johnnie answered.
Aunt Susannah looked at him and closed her eyes. "Talbot Emery Towne promises to keep an eye on her," she said. "And thee told me thy friend's daughter had rooms in a house where Christabel could live, didn't thee, Clara?"
"Adeline Benjamin's daughter—they're the Benjamins, thee knows, and before she was married she was one of the Boyds. And Christabel and she took to each other when they met. But Fred and Amy thought those rooms were more than they could afford."
"I think it can be managed," Aunt Eliza said, and again the heads nodded, all but Uncle Johnnie's.
"Of course Adeline's daughter is an artist."
"Oh!"
"But still, it's only flowers. I imagine she's a very sweet girl."
"It would be worth more than the extra rent to feel some one was taking care of Christabel."
"I should have thought Christabel could take care of herself," Uncle Johnnie said, and Aunt Ann answered:
"Johnnie, thee always did delight in being perverse."