An Autobiographic Chapter
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHIC CHAPTER
GILBERT was almost six years old when they all—Mother, Olga, and baby—went to live with Garna in her tall white house. And his expanding life leaped to meet the wide world, with its new excitements and pleasures. It was like a rescue, like getting air when one is smothering. Here was space and a new largeness to things. Gilbert was freed forever from the back-street.
Garna's house was ridiculous but it was not despicable. For your meals you went down into a dark basement dining-room, behind a blacker kitchen. And the outhouse, buried in Virginia creepers and trumpet-vine, was down a long path bordered by grape-vines, where you went fearfully at night. Gilbert was afraid of this dark, long after he was old enough to be ashamed that his mother must come with him and stand protectingly outside. In winter, the stars shone at him with icy brilliancy, and the vines made a thick menacing mass around him.
Back of the house was a pump, painted very bright and green, where the water came up cold and sparkling and ran suddenly out of its spout over your shoes unless you were careful. And when they had finished pumping, the well would give a long, deep sigh, whether of fatigue or satisfaction, Gilbert never knew. In the dark kitchen, which you entered down a flight of stone steps, there was another pump, but it brought forth, after long persuasion, only rain-water, which to Gilbert tasted uninteresting, and which he was not allowed to drink, but which they carried in zinc pails up two long spidery flights, and for Aunt Nan's room, three, so that you could wash your face in the morning. Only on wash-day, was that pump interesting when the servant filled great wooden tubs out of it, and created huge foamy waves in them, and beat and rubbed, and then filled long clothes-lines with damp white garments which coiled around you clammily and disgustingly if you ran too close under them when you were playing.
The dining-room always had a musty smell, and was always cold in winter, though the door into the warm kitchen was propped open with a brick. Gilbert would eat his breakfast and run out quickly to warm his hands at the shining black range. In the summer, it was close and stuffy, for it was lighted only by two low windows at the top which were level with the ground and opened into a little depression, so that the shutters would move freely. In the great thunder-storms of summer, this hollow would fill with water, and as Gilbert sat there eating his lunch, thrilling at the loud claps and the darting lightning, the water would begin to stream over the sill and down the walls. Then Annie would have to be hastily called, and, with many ejaculations she would throw her apron over her head, and rush out with a dish-pan to bail out the hollow. Gilbert would stand on a chair and see dimly through rain-streaming panes, this huge slopping figure, throwing pails of water into the path. But ordinarily nothing happened in the dining-room. Sometimes in the summer, an odious snail or two would come out of the walls and leave his track across the worn carpet. In a vast closet were stored rows of jellies which Garna had put up, and which Gilbert and Olga would sometimes get a taste of, for a treat. Behind the dining-room was the cellar, gratefully warm in winter with its glowing furnace, and cool in summer with its whitewashed walls. Gilbert loved to spend long summer afternoons there watching Annie turn the ice-cream freezer, and waiting anxiously until the top was taken off to be tested, and you got a taste of the fresh churned cream, or licked the dasher when it was all over. Or sometimes, in winter while Annie shovelled coal into the furnace, Gilbert stood fearfully by and saw the blackish flame shoot up through the new coal. But on the whole, the basement was not a pleasant place. The furnace, so hot when you stood by it, sent only feeble currents of air up to the little registers that opened into the vast rooms above. And always, the year round, there was that musty dining-room to descend into three times a day, with its old frayed chairs, its uncertain carpet, its stained brown walls.
Nor did the creatures who inhabited the basement attract him. Annie changed her guise, but not her nature. And she scarcely changed her guise. If his mother had ever had a servant in the back-street, Gilbert did not remember it. But in Garna's house one naturally had a servant, and one naturally had a Polish girl. Gilbert did not at first understand what Annie was doing in the kitchen, this queer, whitish young woman with many skirts and vast breasts, who gave a sort of growl-smile when you spoke to her, and always started incontinently, with alacrity, to do something without knowing what it was. Gilbert would come in from the garden into the fragrant kitchen on baking-day to look for cookies, and find his mother moving about, with her serious, anxious expression, while Annie sprawled about, cutting up potatoes, and listened to his mother's earnest expostulations. In a few months there would be another Annie; her mouth was perhaps crookeder and her hair yellower, but she would plunge clumsily about in the same old way, and would take up her education not where the other Annie had left off, but precisely in that brutish ignorance where she had begun. To Gilbert's mother, the living and successive tissue of Annie became the absorption of life, but Gilbert was not absorbed in Annies. They were not pretty, and they had a stale odor which Gilbert avoided when he could. He associated the unpleasantness of this strong, docile creature, relapsed in each transformation to her original brutish ignorance, with the whole unpleasantness of that downstairs floor, the dining-room which remained always the same, whose dull squalor nobody ever did anything to take away, for which Gilbert could not do anything, and for which perhaps nothing could be done.
Upstairs, Gilbert liked Garna's house better. The front parlor was a vast and cavernous room, the mysteries of which Gilbert penetrated only slowly. The back parlor was much more comprehensible. Here the sun shone in, and people sat and lived. When you entered the front parlor, you involuntarily lowered your voice, and you moved around subdued, as if someone had died there. Garna never opened the windows, and the shutters of the bay which looked towards the east were always kept tightly closed. But in the back parlor on bright winter days you sent the shade flying up to the top, and let the sun stream in over the floor all the way to the monster of a horsehair-covered sofa which stretched along the wall.
Horsehair made you feel almost as puckery as matting to touch it, and, besides, you could not climb up its slippery sides very easily. And once you were perched up there, you began to slide and slide until you would fall in a heap ignominiously off that ungainly and inhospitable bulk of a sofa. So you would go over and sit at Garna's feet, as she rocked slowly in her great chair, which you must never tip too far back for fear of the grandfather's clock that stood in the corner behind it. The clock had a loud and lovely bell which struck the hours. Gilbert could always tell when it was going to strike, for a minute or two before the hour there was a sharp click. Then a little later would begin a vast rumbling from the very chest of the old clock, as if it were taking a long, deep breath for its pealing song. When Gilbert was in the room, he always stopped and listened for the whole long satisfactory performance. It was slow, it was prepared, it was beautiful, and when Garna got a clock for the dining-room which rattled off a quick little tinkle of a stroke, Gilbert despised it, and would have covered his ears if he had not thought it would be silly.
Upstairs the rooms were just as vast. There was Mother's room, into which the sunlight poured, and which was the warmest in winter, though you took turns rushing to the register to dress where it was warm, before washing in the cold water of the wash-bowl. Just off from Mother's room was a little room, with nothing in it but a huge bed, where Olga and Gilbert slept, and a dresser, in which Gilbert's clothes were kept. On the wall were two old pictures, one representing a donkey in the midst of illimitable and ineffable summer pastures, and marked, "Everything Lovely!" the other showing him in the blizzard before a locked stable-door, with "Nobody loves me!" Against the tall window, at the foot of the bed, were rows and rows of shelves, on which stood flower-pots all winter long, geraniums and begonias, and heliotrope plants, so that they could catch the full warmth of the winter sun and keep green for summer, when Mother took them out of the pot and put them out in rows in the garden again. The window was almost smothered in rich greenery, and sometimes when Gilbert would wake up early on a winter morning, when the light was just beginning to come through the leaves, he would find that the shelves had become a black silhouetted tracery of amazing figures. Queer outlandish heads,—fierce dragomans with pipes in their mouths, Chinamen with queues, policemen with round helmets, or animals like Gilbert had seen at the Zoo— camels with misshapen humps, elephants with long trunks, the head of a lion. It was very startling to wake up, lying on one's back and gazing out where this faint light appeared in the crevices between these weird figures. The pleasant green plants with which they had gone to bed had given place to queer apparitions. Yet they must be plants. But how could plants look so terrifyingly like heads. Everywhere he looked there appeared a bristling, clear shape. The window was a vast tracery of strangeness. Gilbert was never quite sure how real they were, and he was always grateful when the advancing light gradually brought out the greenness of the leaves, and finally threw them into relief, so that the menacing head would finally dissolve into the utterly meaningless juncture of two geranium blossoms, and the elephant trunk became a familiar begonia front. Then he was cheered, and he wondered how he had ever seen anything else. No wildest forcing of his imagination could make him see the things he had seen.
It was in this room that Gilbert's mother put the children to bed every night, and then took out the lamp to her room, leaving the door just slightly ajar, so they would not be afraid. Everything was so cosy and comfortable during the undressing. Then would come the frightening thought, "Perhaps this comforting presence is going to be withdrawn!" For sometimes you would wake up suddenly with a little clutch at the heart. The dim light would be burning through the crack of the door, but there would be a vast stillness. You knew that the house was empty, that somehow it was the middle of a night that would never end, and everybody, Garna, Mother, and Annie, had gone off to some distant muffled cavern and would never come again. Olga, sleeping in a little round ball at your side, her eyes seraphically closed, was of no avail. The light burned steadily on, only deepening the terror of eternity, of being lost. Should you call? What would be the use? They were infinitely far away, in a sort of Buddha-like trance. So you cried a little, and fell off asleep.
Or if you did not go to sleep, you waited dumbly, and, after æons of time, you heard an unmistakable door close softly downstairs, and in a minute Mother was looking in at you, to see if you were safe. And you said, "Mother!" in a half-choking voice, while great waves of relief and happiness surged through you, and you went sound asleep. So Gilbert got in the habit of asking his mother every night whether she was going out. And what assurance and peace there was when she said she was not. He was safe, no matter how long the night lasted.
In Gilbert's new house, you could go upstairs in two ways—the front-stairs, and the back-stairs. The front-stairs were very straight and very long and very steep, and were covered with a thick carpet. They went straight down to a little narrow hall and the front door. The back-stairs were crooked and narrow and covered with oil-cloth. They ran down to a little passageway which connected the back parlour with the "side-door," right at the opening of the dark, steep flight that went down into the dining-room. All these regions and passages in Gilbert's house had names. Gilbert soon learned that he must never go down the front-stairs, but must always use the back ones. But one unfortunate day, his cousin George, who was eight, showed him the delights of sliding down banisters, and Gilbert, although he could never walk down the front-stairs without a feeling of the most awful guilt, let himself be seduced into this new and amazing adventure. The rapturous slide down the long, straight, polished wood was so safe and gave him such a thrill that he tried it again and again. But Olga, who by this time was all of five years old, insisted on riding too, and threatened so instant and tumultuous a devastation of tears, that Gilbert and George, in a panic at being discovered, held her up and, having adjusted her little legs and cautioned her as to the way one let one's fingers slide along the slippery rail, let her go.
Now there was attached to the wall by a bracket a lamp, which Gilbert's legs just cleared, although he was always conscious of a fine potential crash. But as Olga went slipping down the rail, it was inevitable that she should choose just that place to fall off, which Gilbert had all the morning been thrillingly avoiding. She fell floppily into the hall, carrying the lamp-shade with her, and making a crash which brought Mother and Annie from the kitchen and Garna from her room above. Then there were tears and scoldings in a great flood, and a few reluctant whacks; George was sent home, and the banisters were never slidden on again, at least not by Olga. Gilbert used them only as a special treat to himself and only in his most unwatched moments. It was one instance where his fiercely clutching guilt melted away before the thrill of that slide.
Gilbert's house, however, afforded few excitements. Garna's big room you did not often enter, though you might on Sunday while she was putting on her veil and bonnet to take you to church. Gilbert did not care very much how the rest of the family got to church, but it was one of the most important things in his life that he should go with Garna. At nine o'clock the church-bell would begin to ring, gayly, quickly, sometimes the long peals almost falling over each other in their eagerness. Then it would stop, with a final long echo. Now the whole town knew that it was Sunday. Then at ten o'clock the great bell would ring again, not quite so gayly nor so quickly, to let people know that there would be church that day. Then at twenty minutes after ten the bell would begin its real earnestness,—slow and solemn strokes, each one ringing its full sonorous note and dying away before the next one began.
At the first stroke of the ten-o'clock bell, Gilbert would rush to Garna's room, where he would find her putting on her black silk dress and little lace collar. Her black bonnet with its long crêpe veil, which Gilbert soon learned meant that grandfather was dead, would be spread out on the bed. When the last bell began to ring, and Gama had not yet put on her bonnet, an icy fear gripped Gilbert's heart. They would be late! The maddening slowness with which Garna put the last touches to her bonnet used to send Gilbert into a delirium of anxiety. Finally they were out on the elm-shaded streets, Gilbert fairly tugging and straining to get them there before service began. Mother and Olga were: always late, but that was because Olga cried. He could abandon them. He did not know what would happen to Garna and him if they were late, but he felt that it would be something namelessly awful.
But they were never late. They would sit there in the pew several minutes while the organ played and the great bell boomed outside, up in the tower. Then the minister would come in, and a sense of security and peace would steal over Gilbert, listening to the hymn and looking up at Garna, so glossy and placid next him in the pew.
In prayer-time, Gilbert would have liked to put his head down on the pew-rail in front of him, just as Garna and all the other people did, but he could not reach it. So he had to be content with ducking his head into his hand, and holding his eyes very tightly shut until he heard the "Amen" which sent them all upright again. Why people had to conceal their faces while they prayed Gilbert did not know, but it gave him a very solemn feeling to keep his eyes closed, and an even more solemn one to open them surreptitiously and look over the wilderness of bent backs.
The ceiling was very far away, and very blue, with queer indented squares that shot out reddish lines. Out of it came two enormous chandeliers of brass, with a ring of lights around, which were sometimes lighted on a dark day and made a chain of dancing lamplight. There were galleries running down each side of the church, held up by slender white pillars. Outside, just at the top of the pillars, ran a narrow ledge. Gilbert's imagination would perform perilous adventures along that ledge. You would walk along, along, and around the back and up the other side, dizzily perched above the congregation, clinging to the brass rail, and you would come to the choir behind the minister's desk. From the ledge to the choir was a gap of a few feet, but Gilbert saw himself jumping it, and his heart would beat faster. And then he would return painfully, exhilaratedly, around that ledge, holding on so tightly.
When Gilbert got tired of this play he would look up at the strange figures that were fastened to the under side of the ledge. They looked like playing-cards, little square raised blocks marked with black points, at regular intervals down the gallery. Gilbert sometimes imagined that they were really cards, and that a hooded figure moving down the aisles would touch them with a wand, and they would lose their frozen state and fall to the floor. From where Gilbert sat, lines went out from him in all directions: lines of the pews, lines of the aisle ahead which went along under the gallery, angles of the walls, lines of the windows. Sometimes, as his gaze wandered around the church, the line of a pillar would coincide with the line of a window, and Gilbert would hold them there together, getting a sudden satisfaction out of holding them in coincidence, and letting them go reluctantly, only when his eye would mount to the queer people in the gallery, whose bonnets and eyes and noses you could just see over the brass railing.
Sometimes in the summer when Uncle Marcus's family was away, Garna and Gilbert sat in their pew at the back of the gallery, a pew that was as big as a house, with great arm-chairs and cushions for your feet. In front of you was the clock, the face of which you not see, for it looked out straight towards the minister, but whose ticking you could hear. Gilbert felt very public and self-conscious when he sat there, under the high ceiling, with two long arms of the gallery, crowded with its two tiers of people, stretching away on either hand. Yet it was all very august, and religion seemed to have attained its most solemn worthiness when you sat in Uncle Marcus's pew.
The minister was very large and very loud, and he wore a white tie. Gilbert did not altogether like him when he laid his moist and unctuous hand on Gilbert's head, as he sometimes did in Sunday School. For after you had gone to church with Garna, you let her go home, and you stayed to Sunday School. You went into an old brick building, which stood a little distance from the church. The light poured through the big windows, and you could see the lilac-bushes outside. The room swam with very fluffy little girls, but when they had sung several hymns, Gilbert and half a dozen other little boys were shepherded into a corner and sat on their little chairs in a circle around Miss Fogg, while she taught them the lesson for the day. Gilbert always knew his golden text, and he was often the only little boy who did. Miss Fogg would smile at him, which would make him uncomfortable, and he would be glad when they all stood up and marched around the room to drop their pennies into a basket which Miss Fogg held while they sang:
"Hear the pennies dropping,
Listen while they fall,
Every one for Jesus.
He will have them all."
Gilbert did not doubt that Jesus would have them all, and he was not in the least interested in what Jesus did with them when he had them. It was part of the ceremony, to which you resigned yourself unquestioningly, and when the penny-dropping was over, Gilbert ran home as fast as he could go, to the wonderful dinner of roast beef and potatoes that Mother had for them on Sundays.
Sunday School was a neutral, colorless event in his life. Every Sunday as they left the Sunday School, each child would receive a little leaflet; those who had known their golden texts would get a card with a golden star on it. Gilbert always cried a little if he lost his card while running home, and he cherished his leaflet for a day or two. But he never tried to read it, and he soon mislaid his golden star. Good boys, after they had gotten a prodigious number of golden stars, were each supposed to receive as a reward a Bible all of his own. But when Gilbert was seven years old, Garna gave him a beautiful thick black Bible, with his name—Gilbert Shotwell Harden—stamped on the cover in golden letters. Besides, it did not appeal to him to grub along for a prize. Far better to have things, glorious, imposing, come to you out of the blue sky! Once Aunt Shotwell promised him fifty cents if he would learn the Westminster Catechism, but Gilbert never got farther than "The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever." Something obscure, unconscious, revolted in him at the base commerciality of the transaction, and although he did not question that this was the chief end of man indeed, he did not want to be bribed into proclaiming it.
Things were better in the stories he learned from Miss Fogg: that Adam had eaten the apple and been expelled from Eden; that Noah had built and taken his cruise in the ark; that Abraham had offered up Isaac, and Jacob served seven years; that Moses had led the Israelites into the wilderness, and Joshua made the sun stand still; that David should have loved Jonathan and killed Goliath; that Samson should have been shorn of his strength, and Esther gotten Haman hanged higher than the housetops;—all in order to teach little boys and girls to be good, to obey their fathers and mothers and go regularly to church and Sunday School, seemed to Gilbert entirely plausible, at least as it was expounded by the patient and smiling Miss Fogg. He read the stories in his new Bible, but he did not wonder much about them.
Every now and then there was a temperance lesson, when Miss Fogg would horrify the little boys with her pictures of the evils of strong drink. Gilbert had never seen any spirituous liquors, and he could hardly identify them in his mind, but through the vivid and scandalized exhortations of the minister and Miss Fogg, Gilbert conceived liquor as a dark, evil-smelling brew, a sort of religious urine, which foul and wicked men put into their stomachs, so that at once homes were wrecked, and mothers and children brought to abject want. The process by which this result arrived was vague in his mind, but the earliest genuine crime of which he had knowledge and felt with a shuddering realization of the existence of sin was this crime of entering a saloon, or of drinking down wine or beer. One of the golden texts was a special favorite with Gilbert and Olga, and she would declaim it with great éclat, in a broad, free-verse style:
"Wine is a maw-aw-ker,
Strong drink is ray-ay-ging,
And whoever is deceived there-by-y,
Is not—wise!"
But sin, on the whole, was a very vague idea to Gilbert. He early learned that God had sent His Son Jesus down to earth to save us from our sins, and that this was the central fact of life. Garna told him about it, and so did Miss Fogg, when they later had lessons in the New Testament. We must all love God very much, and especially Jesus, who had done so much for us. And in the solemn Sunday afternoons, when Gilbert was told to take his Bible and sit by the window in the back-parlor and read a chapter, he would sometimes wonder if he loved God enough, or if he loved Jesus. God was a majestic old gentleman with a white beard, reclining on white cumulus clouds, and Jesus he knew equally well as a young man in an archaic blue robe, holding a lamb in one arm, and followed by others. He had seen their pictures long ago, and whenever either of them was mentioned, these images popped into his mind, faintly colored by a sense of awe, as in the case of God, and of tenderness, as in the case of Jesus. But did he love them? The pastor was certainly a very poor caricature of God, and yet with his beard and square head and loud words, there must be a faint resemblance. Gilbert certainly did not like him.
Much more nearly like God was his father's father, whom he had once been taken to see and whom he remembered now as a white-haired, white-bearded man, very solemn, and yet with something cold and repellent about him whenever Gilbert had touched him. Gilbert did not feel that he loved this God, and yet he knew that he ought to, that it was the most important thing in life that he could do. So he would sit there and try to screw his heart into an attitude of loving. He would grow very serious and tighten his muscles, and fix his thoughts on the majesty reclining on the white cloud, and, pretty soon, he would feel that indeed he now loved God, and he would be kept from sin. Jesus, who was tenderer, he might have found easier to love, but for the fact of those lambs. Gilbert had never seen young men carrying lambs, and the picture, whose authenticity he did not question, aroused no emotion within him. But after he had come to love God, he tightened his heart towards the benignant being in the blue robe.
He was always present, because before every meal they would all put down their heads, so that they breathed upon their plates, and they would ask Jesus to bless their food. Sometimes Gilbert would say it, sometimes Olga, and the food unblessed would have tasted bad in their mouths. Gilbert would have had a vague presentiment of something evil. Did Garna and Mother love God? Garna must, because every day she would put on her gold-rimmed spectacles and read a chapter in her Bible, and mother would kneel down with Gilbert and Olga at night while they said their prayers, and often murmur something fervently with them. The prayers, they understood, were addressed directly to God in heaven, and were necessary if you were to show your gratitude to the Heavenly Father and ensure for yourself a peaceful and secure night. You asked God also to bless all those people you were fond of, and you knew that if they should die before they woke, their souls also would be taken to Heaven with yours.
If it was only with painful effort that Gilbert in his early days of church and Sunday School loved God and Jesus, whom did he love? Did he love Mother? He did not know. He loved her very much at night when he felt her protecting presence in the house, but in the daytime she was a strange being who did not seem interested in Gilbert and Olga. She spent most of her time with little brother, or, if he were asleep, she would be lying stretched across the foot of the bed, with her face in her hands. Often there were tears in her eyes, and if Gilbert wanted her to do something for him, she would say piteously that she was not well. There were no more walks on the village green, but this did not make any difference to Gilbert, for the wonderful yard in which Garna's house stood was a region that could never be explored or exhausted.
The one person that Gilbert knew he loved was Garna. You could not always see her, for she would be shut up in her room; but when you were let in, how inexhaustible she was, how comfortable you felt, playing about on the floor while Garna sat always by the window, sewing, always sewing, looking so wise and jolly and good out of her gold-rimmed spectacles. Garna was always the same, and always good to be with and look upon. Gilbert loved to sit in her lap, and touch her hair, brushed to such silky smoothness and parted in the middle. As she bent over, he would run both hands back over it from her forehead, and laugh as she and pretended to arrange it again.
Gilbert liked to have Garna all to himself, and it was fortunate that Olga was not much interested in Garna. She did not seem to half appreciate her or her wonderful room. But once in a while she would take a perverse desire to come in with Gilbert when he went to see Garna. Olga would have to be prevented with all his weight and force. How could he stand so outrageous an invasion of his rights? And Olga would probably hit him, concentrating all her round little pugnacity into one stout blow, and Gilbert would hit back, and Olga would scream, and Mother would come running, and there would be many tears, and Eden would be spoiled, if not altogether denied him, for that afternoon. On the very threshold, Olga, who did not really care to be with Garna, had ruined his day with her! Hateful little Olga! And all the time, Garna would be inside, behind the closed door, serene, unheeding, letting her daughter, Gilbert's mother, settle the whole affair, as far away as if she were in Pampeluna. Gilbert felt the perversity of Fate, the inexorable aloofness of the gods, the fragility of happiness. Going eagerly to taste this sweet exhilaration of an afternoon with Garna, the cup, without any warning whatever, would be fatally dashed from his lips. But he could not have it shared with Olga!
Between Garna's chair and the window was a high, chintz-coloured box which opened into a voluminous cavern of sheets and white things. In the corner just behind Garna's chair was the tall secretary-desk, with its big doors above that opened on shelves full of books, and its heavy writing-lid which folded down and rested horizontally on two supports that pulled out on each side. You could sit on the high chintz-box and write on the secretaire. Gilbert thought this was one of the most satisfactory spots in the whole world. At your right was the window looking down through the black-walnut trees to the street below; just behind you sat Garna, busily knitting or sewing; you had all the flat, shiny surface of the lid to make your puzzles on, or practise or draw on; your legs hung down over the chintz-box, high above the ground; you were shut in to the most delicious privacy. At the back of the secretaire were innumerable compartments and pigeon-holes in which Garna kept her letters and papers; there were old diaries and account-books, which Gilbert puzzled over, and one compartment Garna gave Gilbert for his very own, so that he could keep his pencils and paper there, and anything he chose, safe for ever from the depredations of the marauding Olga, who seemed to Gilbert, whenever he thought of her at all from his safe retreat, as a very imp of lawlessness, of restless and devastating mischief. Sometime, to make Sure that no one interrupted him, he would silently turn the keys in the doors. But Garna did not like that very much, and it was awkward if Mother or Aunt Nan really came and wanted to come in, and Garna had to wonder how the doors could ever have become locked.
In the summer afternoons Garna would take her waist off, and sit sewing in her bare arms. Gilbert liked to lean over and rub his face against the expanse of cool flesh, lay his head on the cool shoulder, and listen to Garna's stories of when she was a little girl. Gilbert learned about her father's house in Burnham, which he should some day see, but it was a long distance from where they lived now; about his mill-pond and his mill, where great mahogany logs that came from the West Indies were sawed up for furniture; about the canal that was dug, when she was a little girl, through their very front yard, and on which they saw the very first boat sail grandly by, the grandfather of those boats that Gilbert had loved to watch from the porch of the house in the back-street, and which he had almost forgotten now that he had come to live with Garna.
So he would lean there against her arm, stroking her plump elbow with its dimples that so fascinated him, and listening to her stories until, in the drowsy summer air, he sank away indistinctly, and knew nothing until he woke up towards supper-time on Garna's high bed. Every now and then, as a great distinction and event, Gilbert would be allowed to sleep with Garna. How different and solemn it was from any other sleep! When Gilbert said good-night to Garna in her big chair in the back-parlour, it was with a "I'm going to sleep with you to-night!" Then he would get, not into the hard little bed with Olga, but into the great feathery soft bed in Garna's room. He would sink off to sleep in billows and oceans of soft pillows and sheets. Along towards morning he would half wake, perhaps, and there would be the huge, comforting, dear presence of Garna filling the bed beside him, as he lay pressed against her warm night-gown. And when he woke again, Mother would be there standing by the side of the bed, and she would whisk him off to her room to be dressed. And life would go on as before.
Aunt Nan seemed to love Garna as much as Gilbert did. And she liked Gilbert. Often, on summer days, she would take him up to her room in the third-story, a region to which Gilbert never ventured alone, for there were queer, pitchy-black closets and alcoves that led far back under the sloping roof, and contained trunks and boxes, in which and behind which you never knew what menacing forces of evil might be hidden. At the top of the stairs was a little hall, lighted by a skylight, through which you saw the blue sky. Aunt Nan's room was shaped like an L, but the ceiling on one side ran down so steeply that Gilbert could stand against the wall and touch the line where it joined the ceiling. Aunt Nan would fix up a pallet on the floor, soft and comfortable, and on hot days Gilbert would roll half-naked on it, while Aunt Nan rubbed his hot arms with a sweet-smelling balsam. Then she would sit and read a great shiny new book, which Gilbert spelled out as "Psychology. James." She had several books on shelves over her desk, and a great bunch of programs stuck together on an iron hook that hung on the wall. In the winter Aunt Nan was not in the house. Mother said she was a teacher, and lived in New York.
Aunt Nan was very tall and very slender and very straight, and she had very black hair that came over her forehead in a kind of bang. She always wore black and white dresses, and she always had a bright fierceness about her that Gilbert liked. She was several years younger than Mother, and she was very proud. There was a stiff exhilaration in her walk and in her laugh that daunted Gilbert a little, but made him like to be with her. Sometimes she would put the tennis-net across the green lawn and play with a neighbor, darting so swiftly, like a long black bird, across the green, hitting the ball so straight and true, and blazing so fiercely with her black eyes when she missed, that Gilbert sat enthralled, motionless, until the set was over and they went in to supper. On those days he would help her mark the court, going to the little barn and watching her fill the marker with white powdery lime, and then helping her push it over the closely-mown grass. The long summer days were full of Aunt Nan. She loved the garden, with its flower-beds, and she loved to see the paths all clipped and weeded and raked. Once a week, a black man would come from somewhere, and spend the whole day with Aunt Nan, mowing the lawn, digging the vegetable garden, and weeding the flowers. That was a glorious day for Gilbert and for Aunt Nan. How much there was to be done! They all seemed to be wrestling with the whole yard, to turn it up, to bring it to a bright, shiny newness. At the end of the day, Gilbert would walk about the garden on the gravelly paths, with Aunt Nan to survey their handiwork. She would be immensely contented. Her bright black eyes would soften; she would be weary and her hands would be dirty, but Gilbert would feel the peace that radiated from her at the sight of this freshly burnished garden. The grass would be smooth like a carpet, the flower-beds and the vegetable-garden all dark and tumbled with their upturned earth. The paths would be straight brown indented tracks, or, where they went around the house, beautifully curved tracks, with the marks of the rake on the fine earth where George had worked it over. During the week the grass would grow longer, the weeds shoot up in the flower-beds, the paths become bedraggled at the edges, the grass grow up rank on the lawns. But soon Saturday would come with George, and the fine renovation would take place all over again.
Aunt Nan was neat and quick in her movements. She had a cold scorn for dirty faces and dirty hands, and Gilbert sometimes became a little weary trying to satisfy her demands. He was always a little intimidated by her, but at the same time fascinated by her vibrancy, her restless passion. He loved to see her coming towards him, because he knew that she would snatch him away to something interesting. But he was a little fearful, too; subdued by that decisiveness that made him realize how little what he wanted would count. She did not kiss or fondle Gilbert much. She would take him on her lap and put her arms around him.
Mother was never like that. She did not seem to know what she wanted. Every incident was a crisis. Gilbert found that he and Olga could resist her by delaying. Dirty faces could be grudgingly and slowly cleaned. One could come in the utmost disapproving reluctance when one was called. Mother was always distressed that you did not obey her; she was always distressed about what to do with you. She would implore you to be good, and you would be good with a certain chilly haughtiness, because it seemed somewhat humiliating to see Mother so distressed and uncertain. Olga did not usually obey, but kicked and screamed. Gilbert soon got the habit of ignoring his mother's expressed desires and wearing out her decisiveness. Then he would be left alone to follow his own desires.
That yard, which Aunt Nan loved so much, was for Gilbert a domain, a principality. It was years before he had really explored it thoroughly or searched out all its delights. At first it was a rich and bountiful collection of all the things that Gilbert had missed in the back-street. He did not know that he had missed them, but now that he had found them, something down very deep in him told that this was what his restlessness and sadness had craved.
You rushed out the side-door—for the front door was just as heavily interdicted as the front stairs—and you tumbled into a bed of myrtles and wistaria which climbed out of the flower-bed in thick stalks and grew steadily over the corner of the house. Across the path were two tall pine trees, whose branches brushed Gilbert's shutter by his bed when the wind blew loud. Beyond the trees lay the green, unbroken lawn, covered with velvety grass that even the lawn-mower could not keep from growing thick and soft like a carpet. The lawn went straight up towards the neighbor's fence, but just before it reached there it turned into a long flower-bed, with rose-bushes and tangled flowery vines that climbed over and pretended that there was no fence there at all. To the right, and up near the street corner of the yard were three more lordly pines set in a triangle, which Gilbert had promptly named "Three Trees Grove." The floor was covered with needles. It was shady and spacious, almost as big as Gilbert's room. It could be turned into a house, or a shop or a church, at a moment's notice. The big trunks stretching up above Gilbert's head gave it an air of delightful majesty, and he coould not play there enough with Olga and Cousin Ethel.
At the other end of the broad lawn were the grape-arbors, six or seven lines of them, where you walked between the overflowing vines and looked longingly at the green bunches which took endless æons, all through the long golden summer, to ripen, while Gilbert went every day to examine them. Behind that was the barn, from which the horses and carriage had vanished, though when Grandfather was alive, Garna told him, they had had their horses and Aunt Nan had ridden one of them, and so had Uncle Rob, who was far off in Texas now. Gilbert could see traces of the carriage road which had led out through the side-gate to the side-street, but which was now all grass-grown. The barn was now full of rakes and hoes and wheel- barrows, but there were deep bins where still remained a peck or two of oats and a measure, and there was a manger which swung back and forth from the stall to the bin, so you could fill it and then turn it in to the horse. Gilbert wished that there were still horses to play with, but it was fun turning the manger and making Olga and Ethel pretend to be horses.
If you went on beyond the barn you came to a clump of currant and gooseberry bushes which ran out in a thin line to the fence, which by this time had lost its rose-bushes and become a prickly tangle of blackberries. Enclosed by the blackberries and the currants was the broad expanse of the vegetable garden, with corn in summer that Gilbert could get quite lost in, and an amazing variety of good vegetables to eat. The vegetable garden ran up to Uncle Marcus’s barn and his garden. Straight down back of Garna's house, through the middle of the yard, ran a path, part way through a grape-arbor of its own, and then past the currant bushes. At the end of the garden it joined a path in Uncle Marcus's yard. Along the foot of the path, where it passed the garden, was a row of rhubarb, and on the other side Aunt Nan's sweet-peas, which she planted every spring. On the other side of the path was an open meadow where the grass was not cut, and where Gilbert sometimes lay on cool summer days and looked up at great white clouds floating past in the blue sky. Nearer the house you came to a wilderness of fruit-trees, pears of all kinds and apples, and as you approached the street the yard broke into flower-beds and shrubs and bushes. Close to the house grew lilies-of-the-valley, and a curious ribbon-grass which Aunt Nan could take between her fingers and blow shrill whistles on. Along the path which went past the dining-room window were beds of pink and white peonies and tall white lilies which had a smell so sweet that Gilbert felt almost faint when he touched them. And along the whole side of the yard was a beautiful japonica-hedge, with its white and red flowers in the spring, which turned into sweetly smelling green balls in the summer. There were great maples interspersed in the hedge, that threw down their keys in the spring. And all along the front of the yard, close to the house, ran a white wooden fence just within which was a line of graceful black-walnut trees, with their thin green clustered leaves and the green nuts which fell in heaps on the ground. Aunt Nan and Gilbert would collect them in sacks and put them in the barn. There they would grow all black, so that you could strip off the covering and find the crinkled nutshell within. Then you cracked them on a stone.
The yard was wonderful to Gilbert. The winter was one long torpor when, as he played with his blocks in the great stretch of sunlight in Mother's room, the days passed almost in a dream. It was only when spring came, and he could run about and see the buds and the flowers come out one after another, that he felt alive again. And it was good in the endless summer days to have so much to attend to. He could be playing in Three Trees Grove, and yet have running in an undercurrent of his mind the sense of the garden or the japonica hedge, or the manger in the barn. He could go down to the cherry-tree to see if the cherries were ripe, or to the currant-bushes, or he could prick his fingers on the rose-bushes, or get himself stuck in the gum of the pine-trees. The yard was a world, and only very dimly did he imagine anything beyond it. What his mother did in the kitchen or about the house only very dimly concerned him. What they had to live on never entered his mind. His sorrows were concerned almost entirely with the rebellions of Olga, or the calamities of weather which would keep them all home from a walk to the kind lady who lived up the street and gave them cookies when they went to see her. Or the hornets and yellow-jackets. Sometimes on very hot days, when Mother kept them in the darkened back parlor and the big clock ticked menacingly, insistently at them, and Gilbert felt sleepy and could not go to sleep, the tedium vitæ would overwhelm him in a great drenching wave. He was suddenly conscious of time, endlessly flowing and yet somehow dreadfully static. Nothing was ever going to happen again; he was as if alive in a tomb. The flies buzzed; the clock ticked; Mother was taking an exhausted nap; Aunt Nan and Garna were away for a vacation. The world was a great vacuum with nothing to experience and nothing to do.
And if a summer afternoon could produce so appalling a sense of eternity, what must heaven be like, where you went so infallibly when you were dead? Either because lovely Garna and mild Miss Fogg had kept Gilbert from the terrors of hell, or it was his natural ego, it never occurred to him that he was not destined for heaven, or that there was any way of avoiding it. And the thought of eternal life seemed to fuse itself with the long and empty summer afternoon. The tedium vitæ got transmuted into the colossal ennui of heaven. Not as a pearly municipality of golden streets and white-robed choirs did Gilbert imagine heaven, but always in the guise of those white clouds on which God rode. He saw himself clearly, seated infinitely high above the earth, to which he should never be able to come again. Perhaps there was the intimation of a harp, but what seized Gilbert's imagination was the vast emptiness of the space around him, the disorientation of everything. Time and space were no longer fluid and mobile, but frozen; and in the hot, sticky afternoon, his slightly feverish body, all alert and sensitive at every pore of time that dripped past him, would be terribly conscious of this horror that awaited him, of this immobile time in empty space. It was not the dark or stillness that he feared. On the contrary, he saw this future state as floating in the clearest, most luminous light. On certain days, when he happened to look at the sky, he would see just that pale infinite blue into which you could look on and on and never reach the end. When it was really blue or cloudy, it curved comfortingly over you, near and definite like a bowl. But when it was of a certain paleness, the bowl seemed to have been removed and you looked through, out into nothingness. And if in this nothingness there were white majestic clouds floating, that looked solid as if they could bear you away, then over Gilbert would sweep again this ennui of heaven, lost and forgotten perhaps since that last afternoon in the darkened parlor. And a vague feeling of homelessness and of fear would fall upon him. His play would flag until the clouds drifted away again and he forgot that they had come.
The first break in Gilbert's world came when his mother decided that he and Olga ought to go to school. Gilbert was seven years old, and when his mother told him rather worriedly about it, he felt at first rather pleased at the idea of something so important. What would they teach him? Mother said Miss Waldron would teach him. He knew how to read and write and he could spell all the words he wrote. He read all the books he was given and sometimes looked into Hawthorne's Wonder Tales, and read a page or two. When he went back for the book, however, he would forget where he had left off. So he would read a page anywhere. What did it matter? He read his Bible in the same haphazard way. He knew his multiplication table, and he liked to recite it. And he knew all about the calendar and the hymn-book. Most of these things he had known since he was four or five, and what good did they do him?
But in the morning he liked taking Olga by the hand, and leading her out the gate under the big black-walnut trees, and down the street. Mother always kissed them good-bye with such a serious and anxious air that Gilbert felt he was setting out on a genuine mission. At the crossing he would restrain Olga from rushing ahead; then he could carefully look up and down the street to see if there were any horses and wagons coming. Then he would dash across, pulling Olga precipitately behind him. They would go along the upper green, under the great railroad bridge, and come to Miss Waldron's.
To Gilbert the school was an enormous joke. He could not take Miss Waldron seriously. Her tall, bony frame and her sad, fierce eyes touched no springs of affection in him. A lesson or two unlocked all the latent cruelty in him. She was there to teach Gilbert and Olga and the half-dozen other little children who came to the school-room over the kitchen, and she was determined to teach them. She knew that children under seven needed to be taught to read and write and spell and that this was what their parents had sent them to her for. So she gritted her teeth, and came every morning to her hard and bitter work.
But Gilbert by that time had read so many books at home that it seemed absurd that he should be taught to read, and he would rattle through the lesson while the younger children fidgeted and then tried painfully to puzzle it out. Gilbert could spell, too, and he raced through the words, and when he was asked the meaning of words he would say that "retire" meant "go to bed," because he had seen it mean that in a book he had read. And Miss Waldron would say he was a saucy boy, and plead with him to answer nicely. Then he would mimic her, and watch her fight back the temper in her sad, fierce eyes. She would stand him in the corner, with his back to the class, and he would look round and wink at the other children to make them laugh. Miss Waldron's sisters would come up from the kitchen below, where they were baking, and beg Gilbert not to make the teacher so unhappy, and promise him a cookie if he would be good. And Gilbert, drunk with power, would refuse everything, and ride his high horse until the mill-whistles blew twelve o clock and they all went home for the day.