A Name for Herself Read online

  “It’s a perfect day, isn’t it? (Mercy! what a hat! Doesn’t the woman know she’s making a fright of herself.) Oh, yes we are all well. How is your little boy? I hope he is recovering nicely from the measles. (It’s to be hoped they’ve taken some of the wickedness out of him. Of all the ill-bred little cubs I know Bobby A. is the worst.) Have you been vaccinated yet? (Catch her! She’s too mean to pay the fee.) Oh, how did you like the Burns concert? I saw you there. (In a dress that she couldn’t possibly have paid for.) Your daughter sang that Scotch song so beautifully. It just brought tears to my eyes. (Kitty A.’s voice is as thin as paper and she is simply too funny for anything when she tries to sing Scotch songs.) How did you like the sermon Sunday? Lovely, wasn’t it. Mr. Goodman is so spiritual. They say he is engaged to a lovely girl in St. John. (There, see her wince. She’s been throwing Kitty at his head ever since he came, poor man.) Oh, yes, Mrs. C. was at Mrs. D.’s afternoon tea. She looked perfectly lovely. She has such perfect taste in dress. (She hates Mrs. C. and can’t bear to have her praised. Her face looks actually green.) Do you go to the rink much this winter. You are such an enthusiastic skater I don’t wonder you enjoy it. (A big clumsy woman like her skating! What a sight she must be! She does try so desperately to appear young, poor soul.) What, you’re not going already. (I’m sure I wish she would go. She is such a bore.) Well, if you must. Now don’t be so long coming back. (I wish there was any chance of it.) The church social Friday night? Oh, yes. I’ll be there in good time. (She needn’t think she’s going to be let run it all her own way this time as she was the last.) Well, good-bye. (Thank goodness, she’s off at last.)”

  Life may be very piquant when thought-reading comes in, but somehow I don’t believe it will be very comfortable.

  A few days ago there appeared in the Echo a paragraph dealing with the comparative charm of words. It showed that the beauty of a word does not, as commonly supposed, consist in a musical combination of sounds, but rather in the ideas connected with the words. This suggested to me another fact I have frequently noticed in my own experience and have also heard others mention it. This is that the beauty of a word – especially a name – is to me very dependent on the way it is spelled. Have you ever noticed this in yourself? For instance the name, Sarah, when spelled with an h I can not abide; but when spelled Sara I think it is beautiful. Catherine, spelled with a C, jars on me; spelled with a K, it is one of my favorite names.170

  The foregoing also reminds me of an interesting little exercise our teacher of philosophy at college gave us. It was in regard to “number forms.” A number form is the arrangement in which the figures, from one to a hundred, present themselves to your mind’s eye. Each member of the class was requested to draw a diagram of her number form on a sheet of paper and compare it with the others.

  The result was decidedly interesting. Scarcely two of the forms were alike. One girl saw the figures stretching out in a straight line on a plane before her. Another saw them in circles of tens – that is, the figures from 1 to 10 were in a circle, then from 10 to 20 and so on. A third saw them in one huge circle of concentric circles with 1 in the centre. Some saw them in squares. Some in two parallel lines of 50’s, or four lines of 25’s. My own number form, when I came to write it out, was so weird and unlike any of the others that I almost felt ashamed of it. There seemed, I thought, something abnormal about it. The other day I came across an old exercise book in which the various “number forms” of my class were copied. The result was a revival of interest in it, and I have been persecuting everybody I have since met with the question, “How do you see figures?”

  We are always being told that the world would be brighter and life more cheerful if we looked for the saving humor in everything. This is undoubtedly true, although from much repetition it has become trite to our ears. There is humor in almost everything, even life’s tragedies, and its saving grace, if we can see it, will do much to lighten the load of too much seriousness.

  Some fortunate people are born with this faculty. But it can be cultivated even in those not naturally so gifted. Of course, it is always easy to see the funny side of other people’s troubles and worries and mistakes. It is not so easy to learn to see it in our own. But it can be done, and the faculty, when once acquired, is invaluable.

  However, one should be careful not to go to the other extreme and turn everything into ridicule. Life would then become a farce. Humor is the spiciest condiment in the feast of existence, but too much of it, like too much pepper and salt, will destroy the flavor of the viands. Keep a little on hand – laugh at your mistakes but learn from them, joke over your troubles but gather strength from them, make a jest of your difficulties but overcome them – and life will be worth living.171

  As I said a few paragraphs back the world is certainly not so cruel as it need to be. Recently I read in a newspaper a recipe for crab soup, which Martha Washington used to use, and which she wrote down herself in an old manuscript book which has come down from her descendants.172 The first thing she did was to throw fifteen crabs into boiling water – alive!

  Surely crab soup is not made in that way nowadays. To be sure, lobsters are still boiled alive. But we don’t see it done. They’re dead enough when we buy them.

  Polly went to a party the other night and came home raving about the girdle Gwennie had worn to it.

  “It was perfectly sweet,” said Polly, rapturously. “I mean to get one something the same the minute father pays me my monthly allowance. I spent so much at the whitewear sale the other day that I haven’t a penny to bless myself with now.173 The girdle? Oh, yes! It was of pink panne,174 folded twice around the waist and knotted at the left side into an upstanding bow, with two long ends. These ends were joined together and had as a pendant three roses and their foliage. The centre of the bow was also composed of three roses bunched together. These were jewelled with tiny rhinestone drops.”

  By the way:

  How much do you gain by growling?

  Isn’t nonsense just as good as sense at times?

  Is it fair to have to pay as much for a dozen little eggs as for a dozen big ones?

  Is it any use to expect something for nothing?

  Are there not two kinds of gossip?

  Why don’t reformers reform themselves?

  Is there anything easier to do than ask questions?

  [Garrets and Cheerful People]

  Monday, 3 February 1902

  HALIGONIANS175 HAVE GONE ABOUT THE STREETS OF our city this week humming “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains”176 under their breath and gazing with wistful eyes at the airy spring muslins displayed in some of the shop windows. They do seem satirical, those muslins! But spring is certainly coming sometime, and meanwhile a little frost is healthy, and will teach us to count our blessings. This is what I tell Polly and Theodosia when I hear them growling about the cold snap.

  Very, very often you read in those papers that are so full of good advice, which nobody ever takes, that “we should be always cheerful” – or, if we can’t feel really and truly cheerful, we should at least pretend that we are, and thus by assuming a virtue, although we have it not, contribute largely to the sum total of cheerfulness in the world.

  “Now,” said Theodosia the other evening, as we sat around the table at our fancy work, “I don’t altogether believe in that doctrine, don’t you know. Of course I like cheerfulness when it is genuine, but I don’t like spurious cheerfulness. And I’m not sure that I like people who are always and at every time cheerful either. Sometimes I get into an interesting melancholy mood, and then those professionally cheerful folks jar on it. I’d really like them to be a little bit subdued and sorrowful to harmonize with it. And when I’m ’way ’way down in the depths of the blues and just revelling in despair it never makes me feel any better to have somebody grin cheerfully and tell me to brighten up because things will come out all right some day. I’d sooner have them pat me on the head and say mournfully, ‘You poor little girl; it is a hard old
world for us all by spells, isn’t it?’ Why, the Bible says we ought to weep with those who weep.177 That doesn’t sound as if we had to be cheerful all the time, does it? No, I shall never pretend to be cheerful when I don’t really feel so. I have the right to indulge in a luxury of the dismal dumps now and then. Now, Cynthia, don’t you go and put this in the Echo next week.”

  Not long ago I read an article in some magazine entitled “The Passing of the Garret.” It stated that the old-fashioned garret was rarely to be found nowadays, except perhaps in some equally old-fashioned houses. In up-to-date city houses the garret is now a “sky parlor,” and is as elaborately fitted up as any room in the house.

  That article made me sorry for the children of the next generation. What is childhood without a garret – a great big dusty, shadowy garret, full of cobwebby corners, where ghosts and Indians lurked in a perpetual twilight, with boxes and trunks of cast-off garments to “play grown-up” in, and a perfect treasure trove of old cracked, broken, rusty, moth-eaten odds and ends in every nook?

  I have some very delightful memories of just such a garret in a big country farmhouse, where Polly and Theodosia and I used to spend our vacations. It was a glorious place, that garret! I don’t know that I would enjoy rummaging around in it now, for I remember that it was haunted by spiders and mice – yes, mice! Incredible as it may seem, I was not afraid of mice in those brave old days.

  It was long and roomy – an ideal spot for blindman’s buff, which we played uproariously, first having stationed one of our number at the head of the stairs to warn the blindman if he ventured too near. We could make all the noise we wanted to, and nobody ever said a word. Aunty used to say that if she had not been accustomed to children all her life she would have been frightened to death at the shrieks and screams that used to come echoing down the old garret stairs.

  We loved best to dress up in the cast-off fineries we found up there in boxes and trunks – old dresses and bonnets, and queer old garments long out of fashion. In these we would parade up and down the garret, admiring ourselves in a cracked mirror, with a tarnished gilt frame, that hung on the wall.

  Once Ted found an old high-crowned beaver hat that had been grandfather’s. He put it on, and pulled it right down over his face. After we had laughed enough at it we tried to take it off. It wouldn’t come off. In vain we pulled and tugged and grew tearful. The hat would not budge.

  Ted must have got it off sometime, of course, but I cannot remember how or when or why he has not had to wear it to this day.

  We liked to play Indian there, too. The dark corners behind the trunks made such splendid ambushes – also very good pirate caves. But the garret, while a capital spot in daytime, was not so pleasant when twilight came on. How eerie and spookish it grew then in the dim light! The dried bunches of summer savory and sweet marjoram and thyme that dangled from the rafters filled us with terror. Aunt Harriet’s bags of wool and bundles of rags looked like suspended criminals. The old mirror reflected a strange dim room peopled with phantoms. The mice scurried and squeaked among the boxes. In a chill fear we all crept down the garret stairs and left it behind us until in the cheerful morning sunshine it resumed its normal aspect.

  But the children of the future will have no garret. There will be only a “sky parlor,” and there cannot be Indians and pirates and ghosts, or any of those delightful things, in a “sky parlor.” The future is to be a wonderful age, no doubt. But somehow I’m glad that I was a child before the passing of the garret.

  When Theodosia and I went to the Orpheus concert178 the other evening Polly stayed home and made sachets to perfume her new gown. Polly has a weakness for delicate, elusive scents in all her belongings – just a whiff of sweetness now and then like a hint of a rose garden or a wandering wind from a bank of spring violets.

  Just now she has a new fad, and while Theodosia and I were drinking in the airy fairy179 sounds at the Orpheus Polly was sewing diligently on six neat little squares of silk, making six small bags of them. These she was filling with violet sachet powder when Theo and I got home with our blue noses.

  “I am going to sew a bit of baby ribbon to each,” she explained, “and fasten them all to one long strip of ribbon. This is sown to the skirt band, and the six tiny sachets hang down under the folds of the gown and shake forth their stored-up sweetness at every movement.”

  [A Walk in the Woods]

  Monday, 10 February 1902

  DID YOU EVER WALK THROUGH THE WOODS IN WINTER when a slow twilight was filling them? And if you did, didn’t you admit to yourself that of all the airy fairy places full of weird, elfin grace that you had ever been in, the winter woods at twilight were the most beautiful?

  Theodosia and Polly and I spent a couple of days in a country farmhouse last week and one evening Theodosia and I started out for a woodsy walk. Polly wouldn’t go although we asked her very politely. She said that in the first place she didn’t believe we really wanted her; and in the second she greatly preferred a cosy seat in the ingle nook, a new novel and a plate of our hostess’ delicious home-made “butter scotch,” to wading around lonesome woods in snow to her neck and pretending to enthuse over Rembrandtesque shadows and gloomy copses.180

  So Theodosia and I went alone and a delightful walk we had, despite Polly’s dismal prophecies. We did not have to do any wading around for we were fortunate enough to strike a well-beaten wood-road and we wandered along it and drank in the delicate, elusive beauty around us as from a cup filled with divine enchantment.

  The air was as clear and exhilarating as wine, brimmed here under the spruces with purple gloom and there, where the trees broke away to let in a glimpse of sunset sky, threaded with wonderful tones of cold rose and ethereal crocus and faint apple-green. It was so calm, too, that all the far eventide sounds drifted clearly through it – laughter so distant that it seemed like the mirth of wood-elves, human voices floating up from valleys where home-lights were twinkling out like earth stars, and the fairy-like chime of sleigh-bells in far-off snowy fields.

  In the woods, too, were strange, half-heard sounds – the moan of two crossed branches, the murmurs of the pines, the soft splash of snow that slipped from laden boughs, the indistinct gurgle of a hidden brook, the scamper of some wild creature through the copses and the crisp crunch of the snow beneath our feet. How solemn and duskly beautiful the long forest avenues looked, with their white, untrodden pavements and the high-springing Gothic arch of the trees above. And what wonderful veils of white lace were draped over the shrubs and twigs of the undergrowth!

  Theodosia and I saw nothing living but each other in that stretch of glimmering woods, but here, there and everywhere we saw the traces of wood denizens – the thread-like trail of scampering squirrels, the many tracks of rabbits, and the larger pads of some marauding fox. Perhaps the shy wood-creatures were peeping at us from the shelter of copse and undergrowth, but we could not see them.

  How we enjoyed that walk! And how much good it did us! The blood tingled in our veins; our little private worries drifted from our minds and hearts; life seemed richly worth living. Theodosia looked up at the evening star, glimmering whitely through the boughs of an old pine, and quoted softly:

  “And so in mountain solitudes o’ertaken!

  As by some spell divine,

  Their cares drop from them like the needles shaken

  From out the gusty pine.”181

  When we got home we found that Polly had finished her novel, eaten all the butter scotch and fallen fast asleep, rosy and sweet, in the cosy corner. But we did not envy her – no, indeed. We had been roaming in fairyland and its spell was potent over us still.

  Next day we both had colds.

  One day recently Polly laid down the Echo with a sigh of despair and turned a glance of reproach on me.

  “I do think it’s just too mean of you, Cynthia,” she said, mournfully.

  “Oh, what – what – have I been doing now?” I asked anxiously.

  “Why, you ha
ve something about me every week in the Echo, and – and – it’s always horrid. People will think that I am a cross between an idiot and a b-baby. (Sob). You make me out a f-frivolous, silly c-creature (sob) who thinks of nothing but dress, and – and – flirtation – and all that sort of thing. You do give credit to Theodosia for a little sense now and again, b-but me, never. (Sob). People will think that I n-never had a serious thought in my l-life – and it’s too bad of you, Cynthia.”

  Polly sobbed again. Polly is one of those girls, few and far between, who can look teary and pretty at the same time. Also, she knows it.

  “Don’t let that worry you, my child,” I said, maternally. “In the first place, you’re exaggerating. I never paint you quite so black as all that. And in the second place, people like you ever so much better than if you were a severe, sensible creature – like Theodosia or myself, for instance. You mustn’t mind if I use you as a peg to hang a few morals on once in a while. You are the dainty, feminine little lass who is always popular with everybody. Your little frivolities are harmless and lovable. If you didn’t think a good deal about dress you wouldn’t be half such a pleasure to folks who like to see pretty things. It would be a terrible world, Polly, if everybody were intellectual and serious and in deep deadly earnest. We need people like that – but we need your kind, too, to humanize us. And you have the best of it, too. The other kind exists to think out your problems and fight your battles for you. Your mission is, as Josiah Allen says, ‘to charm and to allure’182 – and to brighten up every corner of the world in which you find yourselves. So don’t cry any more, Polly. It becomes you, but it will produce crow’s-feet if indulged in too often. You’re a dear little soul, Polly, and I couldn’t get along without you.”