A New England Girlhood Part 5

"Where congregations ne'er break up, And Sabbaths have no end."

I did not want it to be Sabbath-day always. I was conscious of a pleasure in the thought of games and frolics and coming week-day delights that would flit across my mind even when I was studying my hymns, or trying to listen to the minister. And I did want the congregation to break up some time. Indeed, in those bright spring days, the last hymn in the afternoon always sounded best, because with it came the opening of doors into the outside air, and the pouring in of a mingled scent of sea winds and apple blossoms, like an invitation out into the freedom of the beach, the hillsides, the fields and gardens and orchards. In all this I felt as if I were very wicked. I was afraid that I loved earth better than I did heaven.

Nevertheless I always did welcome that last hymn, announced to be sung "with the Doxology," usually in "long metre," to the tune of "Old Hundred." There were certain mysterious preliminaries,--the rustling of singing-book leaves, the sliding of the short screen-curtains before the singers along by their clinking rings, and now and then a premonitory groan or squeak from ba.s.s-viol or violin, as if the instruments were clearing their throats; and finally the sudden uprising of that long row of heads in the "singing-seats."

My tallest and prettiest grown-up sister, Louise, stood there among them, and of all those girlish, blooming faces I thought hers the very handsomest. But she did not open her lips wide enough to satisfy me. I could not see that she was singing at all.

To stand up there and be one of the choir, seemed to me very little short of promotion to the ranks of cherubim and seraphim. I quite envied that tall, pretty sister of mine. I was sure that I should open my mouth wide, if I could only be in her place. Alas! the years proved that, much as I loved the hymns, there was no music in me to give them voice, except to very indulgent ears.

Some of us must wait for the best human gifts until we come to heavenly places. Our natural desire for musical utterance is perhaps a prophecy that in a perfect world we shall all know how to sing. But it is something to feel music, if we cannot make it. That, in itself, is a kind of unconscious singing.

As I think back to my childhood, it seems to me as if the air was full of hymns, as it was of the fragrance of clover-blossoms, and the songs of bluebirds and robins, and the deep undertone of the sea. And the purity, the calmness, and the coolness of the dear old Sabbath days seems lingering yet in the words of those familiar hymns, whenever I bear them sung. Their melody penetrates deep into my life, a.s.suming me that I have not left the green pastures and the still waters of my childhood very far behind me.

There is something at the heart of a true song or hymn which keeps the heart young that listens. It is like a breeze from the eternal hills; like the west wind of spring, never by a breath less balmy and clear for having poured life into the old generations of earth for thousands of years; a spiritual freshness, which has nothing to do with time or decay.

IV.

NAUGHTY CHILDREN AND FAIRY TALES.

ALTHOUGH the children of an earlier time heard a great deal of theological discussion which meant little or nothing to them, there was one thing that was made clear and emphatic in all the Puritan training: that the heavens and earth stood upon firm foundations--upon the Moral Law as taught in the Old Testament and confirmed by the New. Whatever else we did not understand, we believed that to disobey our parents, to lie or steal, had been forbidden by a Voice which was not to be gainsaid. People who broke or evaded these commands did so willfully, and without excusing themselves, or being excused by others. I think most of us expected the fate of Ananias and Sapphira, if we told what we knew was a falsehood.

There were reckless exceptions, however. A playmate, of whom I was quite fond, was once asked, in my presence, whether she had done something forbidden, which I knew she had been about only a little while before. She answered "No," and without any apparent hesitation.

After the person who made the inquiry had gone, I exclaimed, with horrified wonder, "How could you?"

Her reply was, "Oh, I only kind of said no." What a real lie was to her, if she understood a distinct denial of the truth as only "kind-of"

lying, it perplexed me to imagine. The years proved that this lack of moral perception was characteristic, and nearly spoiled a nature full of beautiful gifts.

I could not deliberately lie, but I had my own temptations, which I did not always successfully resist. I remember the very spot--in a footpath through a green field--where I first met the Eighth Commandment, and felt it looking me full in the face.

I suppose I was five or six years old. I had begun to be trusted with errands; one of them was to go to a farmhouse for a quart of milk every morning, to purchase which I went always to the money-drawer in the shop and took out four cents. We were allowed to take a "small brown"

biscuit, or a date, or a fig, or a "gibraltar," sometimes; but we well understood that we could not help ourselves to money.

Now there was a little painted sugar equestrian in a shop-window down town, which I had seen and set my heart upon. I had learned that its price was two cents; and one morning as I pa.s.sed around the counter with my tin pail I made up my mind to possess myself of that amount. My father's back was turned; he was busy at his desk with account-books and ledgers. I counted out four cents aloud, but took six, and started on my errand with a fascinating picture before me of that pink and green horseback rider as my very own.

I cannot imagine what I meant to do with him. I knew that his paint was poisonous, and I could not have intended to eat him; there were much better candies in my father's window; he would not sell these dangerous painted toys to children. But the little man was pretty to look at, and I wanted him, and meant to have him. It was just a child's first temptation to get possession of what was not her own,--the same ugly temptation that produces the defaulter, the burglar, and the highway robber, and that made it necessary to declare to every human being the law, "Thou shalt not covet."

As I left the shop, I was conscious of a certain pleasure in the success of my attempt, as any thief might be; and I walked off very fast, clattering the coppers in the tin pail.

When I was fairly through the bars that led into the farmer's field, and n.o.body was in sight, I took out my purloined pennies, and looked at them as they lay in my palm.

Then a strange thing happened. It was a bright morning, but it seemed to me as if the sky grew suddenly dark; and those two pennies began to burn through my hand, to scorch me, as if they were red hot, to my very soul. It was agony to hold them. I laid them down under a tuft of gra.s.s in the footpath, and ran as if I had left a demon behind me. I did my errand, and returning, I looked about in the gra.s.s for the two cents, wondering whether they could make me feel so badly again. But my good angel hid them from me; I never found them.

I was too much of a coward to confess my fault to my father; I had already begun to think of him as "an austere man," like him in the parable of the talents. I should have been a much happier child if I bad confessed, for I had to carry about with me for weeks and months a heavy burden of shame. I thought of myself as a thief, and used to dream of being carried off to jail and condemned to the gallows for my offense: one of my story-books told about a boy who was hanged at Tyburn for stealing, and how was I better than he?

Whatever naughtiness I was guilty of afterwards, I never again wanted to take what belonged to another, whether in the family or out of it. I hated the sight of the little sugar horseback rider from that day, and was thankful enough when some other child had bought him and left his place in the window vacant.

About this time I used to lie awake nights a good deal, wondering what became of infants who were wicked. I had heard it said that all who died in infancy went to heaven, but it was also said that those who sinned could not possibly go to heaven. I understood, from talks I had listened to among older people, that infancy lasted until children were about twelve years of age. Yet here was I, an infant of less than six years, who had committed a sin. I did not know what to do with my own case. I doubted whether it would do any good for me to pray to be forgiven, but I did pray, because I could not help it, though not aloud. I believe I preferred thinking my prayers to saying them, almost always.

Inwardly, I objected to the idea of being an infant; it seemed to me like being nothing in particular--neither a child nor a little girl, neither a baby nor a woman. Having discovered that I was capable of being wicked, I thought it would be better if I could grow up at once, and a.s.sume my own responsibilities. It quite demoralized me when people talked in my presence about "innocent little children."

There was much questioning in those days as to whether fict.i.tious reading was good for children. To "tell a story" was one equivalent expression for lying. But those who came nearest to my child-life recognized the value of truth as impressed through the imagination, and left me in delightful freedom among my fairy-tale books. I think I saw a difference, from the first, between the old poetic legends and a modern lie, especially if this latter was the invention of a fancy as youthful as my own.

I supposed that the beings of those imaginative tales had lived some time, somewhere; perhaps they still existed in foreign countries, which were all a realm of fancy to me. I was certain that they could not inhabit our matter-of-fact neighborhood. I had never heard that any fairies or elves came over with the Pilgrims in the Mayflower. But a little red-haired playmate with whom I became intimate used to take me off with her into the fields, where, sitting, on the edge of a disused cartway fringed with p.u.s.s.y-clover, she poured into my ears the most remarkable narratives of acquaintances she had made with people who lived under the ground close by us, in my father's orchard. Her literal descriptions quite deceived me; I swallowed her stories entire, just as people in the last century did Defoe's account of "The Apparition of Mrs. Veal."

She said that these subterranean people kept house, and that they invited her down to play with their children on Wednesday and Sat.u.r.day afternoons; also that they sometimes left a plate of cakes and tarts for her at their door: she offered to show me the very spot where it was,--under a great apple-tree which my brothers called "the luncheon-tree," because we used to rest and refresh ourselves there, when we helped my father weed his vegetable-garden. But she guarded herself by informing me that it would be impossible for us to open the door ourselves; that it could only be unfastened from the inside. She told me these people's names--a "Mr. Pelican," and a "Mr. Apple-tree Mana.s.seh," who had a very large family of little "Mana.s.sehs." She said that there was a still larger family, some of them probably living just under the spot where we sat, whose surname was "Hokes." (If either of us had been familiar with another word p.r.o.nounced in the same way, though spelled differently, I should since have thought that she was all the time laughing in her sleeve at my easy belief.) These "Hokeses"

were not good-natured people, she added, whispering to me that we must not speak about them aloud, as they had sharp ears, and might overhear us, and do us mischief.

I think she was hoaxing herself as well as me; it was her way of being a heroine in her own eyes and mine, and she had always the manner of being entirely in earnest.

But she became more and more romantic in her inventions. A distant aristocratic-looking mansion, which we could see half-hidden by trees, across the river, she a.s.sured me was a haunted house, and that she had pa.s.sed many a night there, seeing unaccountable sights, and hearing mysterious sounds. She further announced that she was to be married, some time, to a young man who lived over there. I inferred that the marriage was to take place whenever the ghostly tenants of the house would give their consent. She revealed to me, under promise of strict secrecy, the young man's name. It was "Alonzo."

Not long after I picked up a book which one of my sisters had borrowed, called "Alonzo and Melissa," and I discovered that she had been telling me page after page of "Melissa's" adventures, as if they were her own.

The fading memory I have of the book is that it was a very silly one; and when I discovered that the rest of the romantic occurrences she had related, not in that volume, were to be found in "The Children of the Abbey," I left off listening to her. I do not think I regarded her stories as lies; I only lost my interest in them after I knew that they were all of her own clumsy second-hand making-up, out of the most commonplace material.

My two brothers liked to play upon my credulity. When my brother Ben pointed up to the gilded weather-c.o.c.k on the Old South steeple, and said to me with a very grave face,--

"Did you know that whenever that c.o.c.k crows every rooster in town crows too?" I listened out at the window, and asked,--

"But when will he begin to crow?"

"Oh, roosters crow in the night, sometimes, when you are asleep."

Then my younger brother would break in with a shout of delight at my stupidity:--

"I'll tell you when, goosie!--

'The next day after never; When the dead ducks fly over the river.'"

But this must have been when I was very small; for I remember thinking that "the next day after never" would come some time, in millions of years, perhaps. And how queer it would be to see dead ducks flying through the air!

Witches were seldom spoken of in the presence of us children. We sometimes overheard a s.n.a.t.c.h of a witch-story, told in whispers, by the flickering firelight, just as we were being sent off to bed. But, to the older people, those legends were too much like realities, and they preferred not to repeat them. Indeed, it was over our town that the last black shadow of the dreadful witchcraft delusion had rested.

Mistress Hale's house was just across the burying-ground, and Gallows Hill was only two miles away, beyond the bridge. Yet I never really knew what the "Salem Witchcraft" was until Goodrich's "History of the United States" was put into my hands as a schoolbook, and I read about it there.

Elves and gnomes and air-sprites and genii were no strangers to us, for my sister Emilie--she who heard me say my hymns, and taught me to write--was mistress of an almost limitless fund of imaginative lore.

She was a very Scheherezade of story-tellers, so her younger sisters thought, who listened to her while twilight grew into moonlight, evening after evening, with fascinated wakefulness.

Besides the tales that the child-world of all ages is familiar with,--Red Riding-Hood, the Giant-Killer, Cinderella, Aladdin, the "Sleeping Beauty," and the rest,--she had picked up somewhere most of the folk-stories of Ireland and Scotland, and also the wild legends of Germany, which latter were not then made into the compact volumes known among juvenile readers of to-day as Grimm's "Household Tales."

Her choice was usually judicious; she omitted the ghosts and goblins that would have haunted our dreams; although I was now and then visited by a nightmare-consciousness of being a bewitched princess who must perform some impossible task, such as turning a whole roomful of straws into gold, one by one, or else lose my head. But she blended the humorous with the romantic in her selections, so that we usually dropped to sleep in good spirits, if not with a laugh.

That old story of the fisherman who had done the "Man of the Sea" a favor, and was to be rewarded by having his wish granted, she told in so quaintly realistic a way that I thought it might all have happened on one of the islands out in Ma.s.sachusetts Bay. The fisherman was foolish enough, it seemed, to let his wife do all his wis.h.i.+ng for him; and she, unsatisfied still, though she had been made first an immensely rich woman, and then a great queen, at last sent her husband to ask that they two might be made rulers over the sun, moon, and stars.

As my sister went on with the story, I could see the waves grow black, and could hear the wind mutter and growl, while the fisherman called for the first, second, and then reluctantly, for the third time:--

"O Man of the Sea, Come listen to me!

For Alice my wife, The plague of my life, Has sent me to beg a boon of thee!"