OUR HILL THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BEQUEST OF Alice R. Hilgard BY JOSEPHINE DASKAM BACON ON OUR HILL THE DOMESTIC ADVENTURERS SMITH COLLEGE STORIES WHOM THE GODS DESTROYED MIDDLE AGED LOVE STORIES SISTER S VOCATION AND OTHER GIRLS STORIES THE IMP AND THE ANGEL FABLES FOR THE FAIR POEMS CHARLES SCRIBNER S SONS ON OUR HILL Our Family looks discreetly away into space while Our Mother buys the stocking toys [Page 118] ON OUR HILL BY JOSEPHINE DASKAM , BACON WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY T. M. AND M. T. BEVANS NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER S SONS 1919 COPYRIGHT, 1918, BT CHARLES SCRIBNER S SONS Published September, 1918 COPYRIGHT, me, 1917, BY THE BUTTERICK PUBLISHING CO. GIFT z. 1J TO ANNE (RESPECTFULLY) TO DEBORAH (ADMIRINGLY) TO SELDEN (ADORINGLY) THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED BY THEIR LOVING MOTHER BEECH HILL, 1918 DEDICATION DEAR ones, for whom your Mother s heart of hearts Like Gaul of old, divides into three parts, Low at your feet this little book she lays, Fond record of your years and nights and days, Your solemn little joys and funny sorrows, Gold yesterdays and rose-colored to-morrows. Oh, Prima, of the blue, accusing eye, Pass all my errors with indulgence by ! Secunda, of your airy, careless grace, Deign in your sunny heart to keep my place ! Tertius, in whose grave smile my lost youth lingers, Let your hands warm at the last my chilling fingers ! When you are old, read here of those dear days When your great glory was your mother s praise, When your worst sorrow was your mother s frown, Her kiss at rising up and lying down The daily bread your aging heart remembers June roses through the snow of your Decembers. Here shall ye live, kept ever young by me ! Though I am old, yet ye shall never be. In these, your pages, laugh eternally! CONTENTS PAGE ONE OF OUR LUNCHEONS 1 WE VISIT THE ZOO 37 THE ROYAL ROAD TO LEARNING 75 HIGH DAYS AND HOLY DAYS 107 A YEAR OF COUSIN QUARTUS 139 EXITS AND ENTRANCES . 179 MAGIC CASEMENTS 221 OUR FIRST FRIENDS 263 PRESTO ! CHANGE ! . , .299 ILLUSTRATIONS Our Family looks discreetly away into space while Our Mother buys the stocking toys Frontispiece PAGE "I m going to wipe my mouth now," says Tertius .... 9 " His house was called Mount Vernon " 29 Secunda executes the most perfect pirouette 31 " I m just licking it to see if it s good for you " 33 "Good-by! Pleasant dreams! " 35 The procession required some time to pass a given point . . 45 "A noble army, men and boys," shout Tertius and his choir 53 Tertius gazes dreamily, contentedly, at the fluffy brown bough of cuddling mites 58 His eyes never leave the admiring eyes of his audience ... 65 The bears depart to the various corners of their den .... 68 The most truly humorous objects on Manhattan Island . . 69 Dancing their hard -learned little dances under the pink apple- blossoms 95 She is tense with pride in her school and her part .... 99 The tree must be filled again for the children in the stable and the cottage . . Facing page 128 Tertius 146 Cousin Quartus 1 47 Our Cousin lay mooning over a book while the old Gloucester hammock rocked, a pirate sloop, in terrific gales ... 151 xi xii ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Between the girls, with a view to increasing his devotional velocity 165 "Whoof, whoof!" Tertius contributes. "Over you go, Quart!" 175 " I will follow! Death to the Saracen!" cries Secunda facing page 196 Prima was little Hans, poor but honest ........ 205 "I m an Arab look! " . . . . . . . . . . . .208 Tertius sits like a statue of victory! 211 Tertius is about to begin. Now he makes a quaint little bow 217 * Perhaps not an?/ more," says Our Mother, and she fell to thinking why this should be 227 ** Is this going to be true," he inquired gravely, " or only just interesting? " 259 Her frilled sunbonnet was of tener over his head than hers . 271 One green paroquet died in circumstances of deepest mystery Facing page 282 They gather the damp and squirming poodle to their smocks, and roll, scattering spray about 295 How disgusting they are like other people s children! . . 309 No last spring s skirts reach her knees 322 Now they are going to see the skeleton of the dinosaurus . . 331 " You can t sit much longer on my lap " 335 ONE OF OUR LUNCHEONS CAKES AND ALE CAKE and lemonade means veranda, Tea and buttered toast means the hall; But if we are eating it together, Then the place matters not at all. Sandwiches and eggs means the lakeside, Sandwiches and fruit means the beach; Let us always go there together, Sharing what we have, each with each. Give thanks in turkey and in pumpkin, Watch how the Christmas pudding flames; Only let us do it all together, Crowning the seasons with our games. Marmalade shall comfort you at breakfast, Peppermints shall soothe with your tea, Chocolates shall draw us all together Will you always eat them with me? ONE OF OUR LUNCHEONS USED to think," Secunda began dreamily, - poising her soup-spoon at a perilous, not to say flighty, angle, her eyes focussed on infinite space, "I used to think that people s bones was like prune-bones. Wasn t that funny?" "Were like prune what on earth do you mean, Kiddie?" Our Governess paused, bafHed. A shade of doubt darkened her round, clear eyes; obviously, one doesn t say "was like prune-bones "; one employs the plural verb. But the ethics of infant correction are complicated. Is it better to present the world with a flawless grammatical sentence whose content is idiotic, or shall we allow failure to convey any sense to one s table- mates to cover syntactical lapses ? Even Britan nia, she who keeps the sun so busily occupied in never setting on her possessions, has omitted this fine distinction from the curriculum with which she provides her exiles to more nasal shores. You mean, all in one piece, lambie?" asked Mother. Amazing woman ! Our Governess never ceased 5 6 ON OUR HILL to marvel at her. There she would sit, paying no attention, apparently, her mind lost in some flight they could none of them fathom. Was she dream ing away from them in that mysterious New York, that swallowed her as the arching vault swallows a comet; or was she thinking with her imaginary characters those beings that never lived till she thought of them; or was she fitting, in efficient fancy, Prima s altered smock-frocks to Secunda s slender shoulders? You never knew. And yet, one allusion from a volatile-minded in fant, impenetrable even to the infant s nursery peers, and she answered it immediately. Far from being dark to her, it was clear, simple, even stimulating. "Yes," said Secunda contentedly, "like prune- bones." "You don t say prune-bones; you say prune- seeds," Prima corrected heavily. "How silly you are, Secunda, anyway! And you re eating your soup from the front again." "Pits, dear, prune-pits," said Our Governess pacifically. "Be careful of your butter, Prima. Mother doesn t like you to spread the whole piece, that way." "It has to be all spread some time, and I don t ONE OF OUR LUNCHEONS 7 get nearly so much on my fingers, that way. What are prune-seeds, anyhow, if they re not prune-pits? Wouldn t you plant one, if you wanted it to grow ? " Prima is a fine child and a credit to her father s family, whom she resembles en masse and in de tail, but her manner (notably on Tuesdays, when they administer the arithmetic tests) is a little trying. "It s quite the same thing, dear, I don t doubt," said Our Governess resignedly. "No. People are not prunes," Tertius declared boomingly. "A prune is a foolish thing to be like. Secunda is an awfully foolish girl." "I didn t say they were!" Secunda s cheeks were crimson, her violet eyes shot sparks, her bronze curls quivered about her ears. "I said I used to think their bones was " " Were, darling " "And, anyhow, they couldn t be. I hope we ll have veal again. What is veal in French, Mother?" "It s veau surely you know that? Really, Prima, you are getting a little tiresome. Why couldn t people s bones, as a matter of fact, be in 8 ON OUR HILL one piece? Of course they re not, but if you are so sure they couldn t be, suppose you tell us why." "Oh, Mother!" "Well, then, say why!" Secunda urged trium phantly, "say why, if you know so much !" "I can perfectly well imagine," Our Mother pur sued thoughtfully, "a sort of pulpy body, all tight around one big central bone ... it might have been that way ... of course. When you come down to it, that s what the spine is. . . ." "I know! I know! You couldn t walk!" Secunda cried. You couldn t walk, don t you see? You d lie there, but you couldn t walk! Isn t that why, Mother?" "Pooh! Anybody knows that," said Prima jealously. (It must be admitted, Prima is a little jealous.) "We don t need you to tell us that!" "Prunes can t walk. We all know that," in toned Tertius. Secunda ground her teeth. Our Mother snatched for her son s hand and kissed it ecstatically. "You beautiful, angel donkey!" she cried. "You adorable rabbit! Have you anything for Mother?" ONE OF OUR LUNCHEONS 11 "Wait till I wipe my mouth," said Tertius gravely. They all waited. "Thank you, precious," Our Mother said, "y u kiss beautifully. But I hope that you re not going to be a stupid man, just because you ll be a bewitching one are you?" "N-no, I don t believe so," he assured her com fortingly. "I ll always be yours, you know." "Oh, how wonderful of you how perfectly wonderful!" she cried, and took to kissing his wrists, so that the waitress couldn t pass the spin ach and the creamed potatoes at all. "Tertius doesn t mean to be half as wonderful as Mother thinks," Prima objected, lifting three pieces of veal off the platter under cover of the kissing. "He always says, I ll always be your own boy, you know, just like that, and smiles, and it only means he doesn t understand what you re saying, half the time!" "All the cleverer of him, in that case," returned Our Mother composedly. "I can t imagine a more generally useful answer for a man under any circumstances can you?" They giggled vaguely. But Prima returned to 12 ON OUR HILL the attack, fortified by a more than adequate mouthful of spinach and creamed potatoes. "Then why did you say you hoped he wasn t going to be a stupid?" she demanded, fixing her round blue eyes implacably upon Our Mother. "Because," answered Our Mother imperturba- bly, "when a gentleman is invited to kiss a lady and replies that he will when he has wiped his mouth, one fears, somehow, for his future success doesn t one?" Here Our Governess choked, then gasped, then spluttered into laughter, and had to drink a great deal of water. "You do say such funny things!" she apolo gized. "Of course she does. She writes books," said Prima instructively. " So you see, Prima, you were wrong two times ! " carolled Secunda joyously. "You were wrong about Tertius being clever and you were wrong about the prune-bones; that makes two." "I w r as not wrong about the prune-bones I was perfectly all right," Prima returned haughtily. "A pit is one thing and a skeleton is another. So there!" "No," and Secunda s eyes deepened; a mystic ONE OF OUR LUNCHEONS 13 tone crept into her voice, a merry chatterbox of a voice, for the most part; "no, Prima, I was right from the first. A pit is the skeleton of a prune, and a skeleton is the pit of a person . . . don t you see? You can say it either way . . ." "Oh ! You can say anything any way !" cried Prima, exasperated, "but that doesn t make you always right, miss ! A bone is a bone " "Joseph was in a pit, but prunes are not people," Tertius chanted warningly. "Secunda is a fool ish girl." "That will do," said Our Mother definitely. "I wish to hear no further conversation about bones. Do you like veal, angel?" "Yes. Is it a little lamb or a little beef?" he asked. " Little Lamb, who made thee ? Dost thou know who made thee ? " Secunda murmured rhythmically. "I ll have some more spinach and some more butter, and some more water, please." "There! You ve slopped it! all because you were staring out of the window and saying poetry ! I think it s too silly of Secunda, Mother. Every time anybody says a word that sounds like a word 14 ON OUR HILL in a poem, she says the poem directly. Little Lamb, who made thee? the idea!" " * Gave thee such a pleasant voice, Making all the vales rejoice/ William Blake. 9 * Secunda went on softly. "Isn t it disgusting, Mother? That poem doesn t mean the veal kind of lamb; it means the real kind of lamb ! Make her stop !" Our Mother smiled curiously. " The veal kind of lamb, and the real kind of lamb, " she repeated gently. "That s just the point. Which should you say was the real kind of lamb, now? The essential lamb, the ding-an- sich ? There s Kant s lamb the transcendental- unity-of -apperception lamb and William Blake s lamb, and the butcher s lamb . . . but that s Plato, darlings, pure Plato!" "All lamb comes onto a plate, by and by," said Tertius oracularly. "Oh, you angel treasure ! You beautiful, beau tiful thing!" Our Mother cried, and kissed the back of his neck violently. "You are a Maeter linck seraph ! You re an Emersonian "But I don t understand," Our Governess in terrupted, wrinkling her white English forehead ONE OF OUR LUNCHEONS 15 conscientiously, "doesn t veal come from a calf, really?" And Our Mother laughed all through the clear ing off and crumbing the table. "When you say things, Miss Paul laughs, and when she says things, you laugh," the Maeterlinck seraph observed mildly. Our Governess turned a lovely pink. "It s not that, really," she explained, "but Mother s mind moves so quickly we seem to be talking about so many different kinds of things, you see . . . one moment it s quite deep, and directly after it seems to be ... almost nonsense ... I think Americans have a different sort of conversation to ours, don t you think?" "Very likely," Our Mother agreed gravely. "It must be the climate." "So changeable I know," murmured Our Gov erness, relieved. "I think, myself, we talk a little like Alice in Wonderland," Our Mother admitted, "but I think most people really do, you know, that have any sense. You only talk like the Rollo Books in the Rollo Books. People don t talk in paragraphs, really." "We re up to paragraphs, now, in English," 16 ON OUR HILL Prima announced. " I got a star for my paragraph that I made. It was a paragraph about Wash ington. I ll tell it to you." " Here ! Here ! Have you guessed the pudding ? " Tertius cried eagerly. "Wait a moment, will you, Lena, till the girls guess ? I guess junket !" "I guess rice oh, you know, anyway ! I take back my guess. You saw it was a glass dish," Secunda shot at him reproachfully. "I didn t see . . . I did not. Guess, Prima!" "Bread, and molasses sauce if you didn t really see, Tertius," Prima added severely. "If you did see, and it is glass, I take back the guess, of course." "You can t take it back can she, Miss Paul? Can she, Mother? You ve guessed, and it is junket, and I win ! That s three for me, because I said custard the other Thursday, and it was custard, and I m ahead !" "You are not! You saw!" "I guessed custard that day, too!" "Children, children!" "My dear young friends," Our Mother began firmly, "utterly aside from the futility of any such conjectures, which are necessarily base less " ONE OF OUR LUNCHEONS 17 A dead silence descends upon the table. How Our Mother knows that this conversational style will instantly quiet the impending storm, no one can tell, but that she does know is evident. She sweeps a rapid glance over them. Secunda is scarlet above her bib, Prima bites a quivering lip, Miss Paul sits stony. Only the Maeterlinck seraph is placid; only his cheeks have not varied from the perfect shell-pink of a healthy five-year-old. Above his white bib with the China blue "Bebe a faim" embroidered across its spinach front, his eyes send forth such a beam of probity and conscious worth that his mother becomes suddenly troubled. No child could be as good as Tertius looks. "Baby," she says abruptly, "who told you the pudding was junket?" "Lena," he answers promptly. "She told me out of the pantry. She was washing something there. I was walking on I was tidying the rho- dendemblums. They spill pod sort of things under the windows, you know." Tertius! You said you didn t see!" Secun da s tones thrill. "Oh, Kiddie, that wasn t right !" Our Governess is genuinely concerned. 18 ON OUR HILL "I took back my guess ages ago. I knew what a sneak Tertius is about puddings. He saw that Thursday custard when he went in for a drink, 7 always thought." Prima is contemptuously virtuous. "You see, Baby," Our Mother begins (really sadly: it is so horrid when they do that sort of thing, you know !), "the girls can t be expected to play with you if you cheat like that. It s beastly . . . boys aren t supposed to do it. You know yourself you did wrong "I m yours, though I m your own boy!" he essays winningly. But, wonder of wonders, no kisses ! He extends his wrists seductively. But all their dimples, all their creases, all their pink-and-white leave her unmoved. In an ecstasy of inspiration he pushes back his sleeves and waggles the veined pearl of his en chanting bare arms at her. To look at them is to devour them, as far as she is concerned, but she only shakes her head and the corners of her mouth turn against him. "I don t love cheats," she says briefly. He gazes wildly around the dining-room; nothing ap pears on the dull gold of the Japanese leather of ONE OF OUR LUNCHEONS 19 the walls to help him, the polished floor winks de rision; the silver on the old sideboard glitters coldly. Suddenly, on the deep window-sill, some thing moves, drags itself along, flutters feebly. His face clears. "But wapsters cheat," he cries triumphantly, "wapsters cheat awfully! One that Miss Paul thought was all died long ago, woke up and stinged her. It crawled right up her and stinged her. It hadn t ought to of, had it, Mother? It was on the retherator "Radiator, Kiddie." That s what I said, raytherator, and she wasn t expecting anything, and it stinged her. Didn t it, Miss Paul?" Tertius always calls wapses wapsters, " says Prima coldly. "I think he s old enough to stop, don t you, Mother?" "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" Secunda s eyes are fixed; her voice is vibrant, mellow, startlingly mature. "Secunda! You shouldn t say that . . ." Our Governess looks, wavering, at Our Mother. "Why not? I think it s lovely. It s in the Bible. Don t you think it s lovely, Mother?" 20 ON OUR HILL "Perfectly lovely, lambie." "Huh! The sting of death doesn t mean the same kind of sting as the sting of a waps," says Prima jealously. You re always doing that- Miss Paul and I think it s silly, don t we, Miss Paul?" "It would be the same, though, if the waps killed you," Secunda persisted softly, not unfas tening her eyes from the casement window "so Faithful went down into the River, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side . . . Oh, Mother, don t you love that part of Pilgrim Progress ?" "I adore it, precious." "It s not proper to talk about at lunch, I think," said Prima. "We re ready for the finger-bowls, Lena, now. Miss Paul doesn t think so, either." Secunda unfastened her eyes with a snap from the casement. "Well, if I can t talk about bones at lunch nor I can t talk about lambs at lunch nor I can t talk about Pilgrim Progress at lunch, what can I talk about? I hate you, Prima!" she exploded. "My dear child!" Our Mother was very much amused and very sorry, and Secunda relented. ONE OF OUR LUNCHEONS 21 "I mean I hate the way she talks," she amended. "And I hate the way you talk," Prima returned calmly. "You don t care what things really mean, Secunda; you know you don t. You only care what they sound like. It s one of your faults." That s what I like things for, because they sound nice," Secunda explained patiently. "I suppose I can, if I like." "You can, but you oughtn t," Prima pursued didactically. " Things aren t said because they sound good. They re said because they re so." "My things aren t." "Saint Paul," suggested Our Mother, "had both ends in view, presumably, in writing his most quoted epistles. And really, Prima, if your sister s selections coincide with those chosen for the Burial Service - "Oh! I ve read that, too!" cried Secunda softly. "I read it in the sermon time. I can t understand him, you know. Why don t priests speak as plain as acting people in Peter Pan/ Mother? I think they should. "It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incor- ruption: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power " 22 ON OUR HILL "Twenty-two horses and one-half of a horse is the power in a Ford car," said Tertius. "I m going to wipe my mouth, now." They pause, involuntarily, to witness the rite. Tertius addressing himself to his table ablutions is perhaps at his best. First he pushes his cuffs back carefully. Then he arranges the glass bowl precisely in the centre of his luncheon doily, pulls it a little nearer, edges it off a bit farther. "I mustn t knock my water-glarss," he mur murs, and invariably, at this point, does so. Everybody gasps. He raises his lovely eyes apologetically ah, who shall ever describe those eyes of Tertius? If you have never seen them, of course you could not try; if you have seen them, of course you would not try ! Wide-spaced, radiant, deep- browed of what shade they may be no one has quite conjectured; so quickly, so utterly they daz zle you. They are certainly not blue; gray is a colorless word for them; hazel is trivial. They are luminous, like dawn skies reflected in a still pool. They have violet shadows and steel undertones. "I tell you the truth," says the little seamstress; "that boy of yours gives me a queer feeling inside ONE OF OUR LUNCHEONS 23 of me when he opens those eyes of his ! Seems s if he knew more n the rest of us !" This haunting mystery of Tertius s eyes so strongly dominates his pictured images that pho tographs fail to indicate, sometimes, his vast bodily structure: his legs, those towers of ivory; his broad back, that an anguished maternal clair voyance strains after, down the shambles of the football-field (great heavens, which would be worse to have him play the horrid game or to have him not want to?), his deep, full chest. What words can ever be found contemptuous enough for that Sister-in-Law who wrote Our Mother : "I wish my little boy had some of the artistic sensibility of those exquisite eyes of your Ter- tius ! I prefer that type, myself; but mine is the husky sort !" The husky sort ! Hers ! Tertius, who weighed fifty pounds at four years ! Tertius, who takes a seven-and-a-quarter in hat sizes at five ! Tertius, who needs only the sleeves slightly shortened at the shoulder in an eight-year-old sailor-suit! (And, mark you, all the stock sizes were enor mously enlarged, a few years ago, and few be the mothers who boast thus to-day.) 24 ON OUR HILL But all this only shows the staggering, the hyp notic effect of his eyes. Now his lashes sweep his flushing cheeks; now he dips his yellow head and buries it, apparently, in the happy finger-bowl; now begins a ritual as if a plump canary should essay a Turkish bath. So intense, so thorough are his purposes that all are swept away on the current of his enthusiasm and draw breath hissingly as he plunges and dis appears, one feels, below the surface. Will he ever emerge? He does emerge, like one of Aphrodite s glisten ing dolphins, feels blindly for the blue-and-white bib, misses it, seizes the skirts of his tunic, warned by his sisters shouts, relinquishes them burrows into the doily under the finger-bowl, which is res cued by Our Governess, and dashes the water from his eyes and hair, smiling adorably. But Prima, released from the spell, fixes the company with a definite eye. "I was going to tell you my paragraph," she says firmly. "I got a gold star for it. It was about Washington. I ll recite it for you now, if you like." "That will be very nice," we murmur, and Prima clears her throat. Her father, her grand- ONE OF OUR LUNCHEONS 25 father, all her uncles and most of her cousins clear their throats with precisely that ancestral into nation. Our Mother never ceases to marvel at these sign-manuals of heredity. Is it an identical larynx, an epiglottal angle fixed in the mould of the genera tions, or a transmissible tendency, merely ? Like the Hapsburg jaw, it triumphs over Time. Daugh ters of Heth unnumbered have diluted, not to say tainted, the pure stream of Prima s paternal an cestry, but failed to invalidate that preparatory cough. If Tertius should marry the daughter of a Bedouin chief, or lead his bride from some igloo of the farthest North, his sons and daughters would doubtless announce their impending dis courses to a waiting world with that same warn ing cough. Our Mother, on hearing it, is thrown sometimes into a muse, and beholds, in fatalistic fancy, the aboriginal forefather of them all, clear ing a portentous throat, brandishing with his skin-draped arm the stone axe-head of his vigorous period, ere it crash down on the docile skull of a prognathous helpmate enjoying in that moment her last taste of conjugal repartee. "Washington," says Prima (and the grand- paternal and the great grand-paternal pulpits rise, 26 ON OUR HILL shadowy, behind her blond head; their texts gleam from her calm blue eye), "was called the Father of his Country." "Oh, we all know that," Secunda darts in flip pantly. " That s no news to anybody." "We all know * Little Lamb, who made thee, too," Prima returns bitterly. "But that s pretty." "So is my paragraph about Washington." "Not to me," says Secunda with her most ex asperating mixture of airiness and frankness. "It is to me," Prima states firmly. "Oh, well, go on, then and get it over," echoes in her tone. The table as a whole feels a guilty sympathy with Secunda s tone, but braces itself politely. "Washington was called the Father of his Country," the paragraphist begins again. "You said that before," Tertius observes criti cally. He is now engaged in washing each stubby pink finger with meticulous care. Seen foreshortened through the glass, his hands are more cherubic than ever, plumper, rosier, more like shells under water in Bermuda . . . "Secunda, dear, can t you be quiet a moment?" ONE OF OUR LUNCHEONS 27 begs Our Governess wearily. "We shall never be done, at this rate. You only put her back." "But she did say it before, and it wasn t me that time it was Tertius," Secunda giggles. "Your eyes were shut, Miss Paul." It seems dreadfully ungrateful to mention it, but one s thoughts do wander, while Prima quotes her own or others deathless prose. Not that she does not quote correctly far from it. But there is a certain relentless detail, a certain how shall I say ? irrefutable, inescapable quality in her dis course that kills the spontaneity one feels should grace an informal luncheon. Then, of course, ten is a terribly accurate age. "Washington was called - Secunda sighs profoundly. Tertius laughs. "Really, dearest," Our Mother protests feebly, "couldn t you begin from there, and go on? I mean ... we all know that first part, now " "We knew it long before," Secunda mutters. "That will do, Secunda. Prima may be a little tiresome, but you are extremely rude. You would be furious if she interrupted you so. I don t wish to hear you speak again. And take your hands out of your finger-bowl at once. Prima, why don t you go on from there?" 28 ON OUR HILL "Because it wouldn t be my paragraph," Prima explains calmly. "I got the star for the whole paragraph, and I want you to hear it that way. A paragraph is - "I am sufficiently acquainted with the mecha nism of the paragraph," says Our Mother. "Let s get on. And please nobody interrupt." "Washington was called the Father of his Country," Prima remarks serenely. "He was a very good man and fought against the Indians. His house was called Mount Vernon, because of the way it was built ..." There is no excuse for Our Mother, for she knows that it is safer to interrupt a dumdum bullet in mid-flight than her eldest daughter. At least, the bullet does not go back and begin over again. But she could not resist Prima s last sen tence, and so she rushed to her doom. "What on earth do you mean, darling?" she gasped. "What I say," Prima returned patiently - "because of the way it was built, and "But why should it be called - "It was George Washington s house," the para- graphist explains gently, "and it was called Mount Vernon, and after that a great many peo- ONE OF OUR LUNCHEONS 29 pie built their houses that way, so as to have them like George Washington s house, and called them Mount Vernon, so that now houses that are built that way are called Mount Vernon, so that ..." It seems that no change in their positions can "His house was called Mount Vernon" ever occur, that they must sit there, bound and stupefied, so long as Prima s relentless voice flows evenly on. Secunda has long since liberated her spirit and is busily forming mathematical combi nations and permutations out of the regular scal lops around the edge of her doily. Tertius rolls his bib into the smallest possible cylinder, pushes it, damp and protesting, into his white napkin- 30 ON OUR HILL ring with the Old English "T" on it, then absent- mindedly jerks it through with his teeth, con fronts it, surprised, rerolls it, and repeats the per formance till Our Governess nervously seizes it and disposes of it elsewhere. "And so that is why I say that it was called Mount Vernon because of the way it was built," concludes Prima, drawing her breath with good reason. "I see," breathes her parent meekly. "Now, darling, I m afraid we haven t time for any more. If you will bring me home the para graph, I ll be delighted to read it." Our Mother rises, and as they struggle out of their seats (Tertius sits on a fat, heavily panelled edition of "Picturesque America," Secunda on a middle-sized, magnificently tooled Ridpath s "His tory of the United States, Volume IV," and Prima has just been graduated from any such infantile underpinning) her first-born plunges around her neck. "I do love you! You are the sweetest thing! I adore that orange-colored tie," she breathes fervently. "And I love you too, beloved," says Our Mother. Really, Prima is a darling. She can t ONE OF OUR LUNCHEONS 31 help lecturing, and she is so affectionate and de pendable. Secunda is a heart-breaker, of course, and no body was ever like that wonderful boy but Secunda executes the most perfect pirouette there s something about Prima. . . . "She s as true as steel, isn t she?" one s friends say. She and her sister each twine about an arm, but Tertius stands stiffly at the door and salutes 32 ON OUR HILL as the ladies pass. He looks like a stray Cupid disguised as a Prussian officer of the day, but fondly imagines himself to be indistinguishable from a butler, and is enthusiastically confirmed in his opinion by all. "The sweets! The sweets!" cries Secunda, and executing the most perfect pirouette imagina ble, she twirls back to the sideboard and drops like a fluttering prima ballerina in front of it. "What a dancer she would make!" murmurs Our Governess. "It is rather unfortunate that all her careers, as prophesied by her friends, concern themselves with footlights," says Our Mother coldly. "Get up, Secunda, and w r alk like a Christian." "Isn t Pavlowa a Christian?" Prima inquires eagerly, "or does she believe in Allah?" "Perhaps she believes in Diana," says Secunda. * Great is Diana of the Ephesians ! There s only that fruit-cake here and Tertius s old chocolate Easter-egg and the salad things. Oh ! onion salt ! Did you know that the cows ate onion-grass, Muddy, and that s why the milk was so nasty when that gentleman that left his shaving-razor asked for a glass of milk?" "The sweets are in that cupboard in the library, ONE OF OUR LUNCHEONS 33 "I m just licking it to see if it s good for you" with the cigarettes," says Our Mother briefly. Like Mr. Pater s Mona Lisa, the corners of her eyelids are a little weary. "I pass the box! I like the boxes gentlemen bring better than the boxes ladies bring there s more chocolate," Prima remarks. "I choose ... I choose ... oh, dear, I don t 34 ON OUR HILL know what I choose! Nooger; or could I have two, if I took those weeny little almonds ? They re more healthy, you know, Muddy !" "You re quite healthy enough," says Our Mother coldly. "I don t know that I d risk any more, Prima, darling!" "Save that gum-drop for me !" Secunda shrieks. "Stop it, Tertius ! You know I can t eat choco lates!" "Oh, I m just licking it, Secunda, to see if it s good for you," the youth replies carelessly. "Then I ll have to have a chocolate!" Our Governess begins a homily, but Our Mother waves it aside impatiently. "Oh, never mind, Miss Paul," she says. "If Secunda washes to have a nasty fever-blister on the left-hand corner of her mouth to-morrow, let her eat the chocolate. Of course, she looks dis gusting, and certainly 7 shan t kiss her, but she s got to work it out for herself she s quite clever enough." "I ll I ll take the gum-drop, Tertius," says Se cunda, with a sigh,"only please don t lick it again !" "Must we sleep till three?" Prima asks casu ally. ("Save that silver paper for me, please, Miss Paul; I m making a crown.") ONE OF OUR LUNCHEONS 35 Prima has asked this question at 1.55 p. M. for five years, every day, though the answer has never " Good-by ! Pleasant dreams ! " varied. The placid persistence of the inquiry speaks volumes as to the ultimate and deserved success of her ancestral Puritans, but it has been 36 ON OUR HILL known to awaken in Our Mother s breast vague hints as to the hectic relief of the less admirable period of the Restoration ! "Good night, my dear," says Our Mother. "Good night, Secunda please don t turn somer saults so near that table; it was your great-grand mother s, and the legs are thinner than yours." "Good night, my heavenly cherub, my pearl of babies, my peach of Paradise ! Never mind, I don t care if it is sticky ! Go up on your toes, now, all of you not like trick elephants !" "Will you be here, when we wake up ?" She has a disconcerting way, Our Mother, of slipping off while one sleeps, you see. "Yes, yes, lambies, I ll be here !" We all throw kisses madly to and from the landing; it is like the departure of the Mauretania. "Good-by ! Good-by ! Pleasant dreams !" Ter- tius calls, confusedly but always politely. Our luncheon is over. WE VISIT THE ZOO A HYMN TO THE ZOO BEHOLD Dame Nature, toiling through the years, Shaping a giant toy-shop for my Dears ! Up through primeval slime vast lizards creep, Grim dinosaurs to thrill their busy sleep. Doubtless at History s dawn that swarming Ark Was saved of God to people us this Park! And Father Noah swam the mounting seas, W T ith monkeys snatched from Wrath, my Dears to please. For them the painted parrakeets were stained, For them the raging elephant was chained, And cruel, tawny tigers to and fro Must glide and slink for Prima loves them so. O, wondrous thought ! Economy divine ! Breathless with awe, I glimpse the great design: That cobras for my boy should leave the Nile, And bears be born, to win Secunda s smile ! WE VISIT THE ZOO UNTIL very recently Tertius was probably the only American of whom it could truth fully be said that he had never travelled above a mile and a half from his ancestral property. He was, of course, only four. Still, in these days of motors and aeroplanes, it is, one feels, a statement worthy of record. They were accomplished, those early journeys, in a donkey-cart. The donkey was driven (one is forced to employ this conventional verb because there is no simple word which describes the proc ess of sitting in a cart attached to a donkey and holding the reins) by Tertius himself, assisted by his nurse. This is to say that Tertius held the slack of the reins the part that dribbles down to the floor of the cart, and the nurse held the tight part the part that stretches to the bit. These reins the nurse grasped in the manner of the lady who drives the red chariot in the final act of any legally conducted circus performance. In fact, Our Nurse would have been a useful model for any of those ladies, whose demeanor 41 42 ON OUR HILL / appears trifling and casual, indeed, compared to Helen s. Stallions from the Russian steppes driven four-in-hand might possibly account for the strained and purposeful expression of her counte nance; and the fact that Punk, a mouse-brown beast of incalculable antiquity, has never been known to exceed his characteristic stroll of two miles an hour, would never could never occur to any one who watched her face on these occasions. Secunda and Tertius sat on either side of her; Prima occupied the other side of the basket cart, offering a running commentary on driving as a fine art. Queen s Barry, a dignified Great Dane, brindled gold and brown like a tiger, followed the cart, and Alexandra, his mate, followed him. They looked like the Eliza-crossing-the-ice part of an "Uncle Tom s Cabin" parade, and once a small boy asked Our Nurse what time did the show begin ! " Country people don t seem to have very much idea of things, I ve noticed," says Our Nurse. "What did you tell the boy?" inquired Our Mother with interest. "Oh, I just said: This donkey has always lived on a private place ! WE VISIT THE ZOO 43 In the winter, when Tertius was nearly four, and thought nothing of tramping three miles, we hitched the donkey to a flexible flyer sled, and Our Mother essayed to break him in to it. Part of the time she sat on the sled and part of the time she sat in the road, but all of the time Tertius laughed. Until you have coasted down a slight descent into the back of a surprised donkey, you are in no position to appreciate the value of shafts as compared to sled ropes. Over and over again, on her way through life, Our Mother has discov ered for herself the real inherent causes that underlie the most common conventions of life on this planet, but never has she made more definite, more decisive discoveries along these lines than on the day when she coasted into Punk. When she had fully made up her mind that the man who invented shafts was more than justified in his invention, Our Mother rolled over a few times in the deep snow by the side of the country road, wrapped the reins firmly around her wrist, got up, and walked beside the apparently humble beast; Prima followed her, explaining clearly and almost unnecessarily just why the thing had hap pened that had happened; Queen s Barry followed 44 ON OUR HILL Prima; Alexandra followed Queen s Barry; Se- cunda followed Alexandra, or rather leaned heavily on her neck, in a spirited imitation of an Alpine traveller being rescued by a St. Bernard; Tertius followed Secunda, dragging a small sled bumpily on one runner by one rope, and a gray cat, very cold, followed Tertius. It will readily be per ceived that the procession required some time to pass a given point. Persons in motors stopped, peered out of the little window at the back, laughed, rolled on. Strange men on express-carts waved their hands and called out: "Give us a lift, won t you?" Children in tight limousines frantically besought their guardians to let them out to join the expedi tion, wherever bound, regardless of their velvet coats and shiny boots. But all these flashed by like magic-lantern pictures, and were gone, while Our Family trudged onward and onward still, since it was as far to go back as to go around. It seemed to Our Mother that she had walked this walk for years and would continue to walk it for eternities, pushing the donkey with one hand and pulling the sled with the other. But those old days are over now! Tertius is 41 WE VISIT THE ZOO 47 five, and going to the Bronx for his first birthday treat away from home. Our Nurse is gone, Our Governess has come. Tertius boasts laced boots and suits never worn by anybody before him, and Secunda is supposed to be able to do without her nap for once and not be snappish and feel insults where none are intended. Prima has been twice already to the Zoo, and prefers going in the train to going by motor. One meets, she tells us, more people. Behold us, now, about to start ! Is the lunch- basket in? Yes. Are the jerseys in, for coming back in the cool of the day? Yes . . . that is, Prima s and Tertius s are, but Secunda was using hers for an East Indian turban in a coronation scene she was staging, and when she took it off to enact the Prince of Wales lifting his hat to the faithful populace on leaving the Abbey, it fell into an adjacent wheelbarrow and is believed (by Ter tius, who always believes too hastily in the worst) to have been fed to one of the cows. "There, Secunda, what did I tell you? I said at the time: "Be careful about that sweater or you ll lose it. And you weren t careful you never are." No . . . she never is," booms Tertius. "And 48 ONOURHILL maybe the cow will be sick from it, too. Maybe the cow will die." "Oh, be still, both of you!" Secunda cries bit terly. "What if you did say so, Prima? Do I have to listen?" "And maybe - Tertius resumes portentously. " Maybe if the cow dies she won t go to heaven ! " Secunda mimics; "maybe, maybe, maybe ! You re a silly baby !" "Children, children," Our Mother murmurs. ("Is my bag here? Are my cigarettes? This veil doesn t go over this hat get me another, somebody . . . have you all two handkerchiefs? Did you put the cork in the thermos bottle, Lena?") "Please don t talk poetry to Tertius, Secunda dear, you know it always annoys him so," com plains Our Governess. "Can t you really think where you left the jersey? Your memory is so poor. . . ." "Oh, my memory s all right, Miss Paul," Se^ cunda assures her, "only sweaters and things like that, I don t always. I ll be warm enough. Let s start." "Nonsense, Secunda! Go up and get your dancing-school one." WE VISIT THE ZOO 49 " Oh, Mother, that was given down to Tertius ! Don t you remember? The buttonholes over my stomach bursted "Then get Prima s play jersey " "I don t want her to wear my things," Prima complains, "she s so careless." "Prima ! How selfish of you !" "I can t help it. I don t like my sweater used for a turban, nor a game-bag for poor little dead birds to be put into, all bleeding - "Why, you silly, they were not real birds they were only pretend birds! They couldn t hurt your old sweater!" "I don t care. I don t like any kind of birds bleeding I don t like the idea. Find your own sweater." "I think - * says Our Mother, with an icy im personality "I think if you ll excuse me, girls, I ll step out, and Clark can run the car back to the garage. Then you can continue this discus sion which verges more and more on the aca demic under cover, and I ll go in and clear out the sewing-closet." There is a dead silence. Subsequently very subsequently a jersey appears from somewhere; a paper of salt for the eggs is apologetically in- 50 ON OUR HILL serted into one of Our Mother s pockets; the puppy that always follows the car is hastily dragged off, yelping, to be tied; an interviewer who wishes Our Mother s telephone opinion as to the ten best novels with which to be cast on a desert island, is gently discouraged; a gentleman with a cow to buy and two pigs to sell, who sud denly starts up out of the ground from nowhere is with some difficulty assured that neither prop osition meets any instant need of the establish^ ment; a knot is tied in the elastic under Tertius s peach-blossom chin and we are off. Exactly why Tertius should fall into a musical mood and sing "The Son of God goes forth to war" all the way to Yonkers, will never be known. He has a really lovely voice, very pure and full, and when he is alone he sings a great deal. As he can sing (like most children) only when he knows the words, and as he knows about a quarter of the words of the hymn he has selected, it will be quite clear to you that his musical offering entails a certain amount of repetition. This has no terrors for Our Mother, who has been known to sing: "O God, our help in ages past, Our hope for years to come/* WE VISIT THE ZOO 51 during one entire morning; but it affects Secunda s more delicate nerves after the first ten miles, and Prima began arguing against it only two villages away from home. "And anyway, nobody sings hymns in motors," she concludes. "I do," replies Tertius placidly, and continues in a hollow, hooting voice: They met the tyrum s brandy steal, The lion s gory mane " "Not gory mane, glory mane," Prima cor rects. "Hoo ! There s where you re wrong !" Secunda chuckles. "It is gory/ isn t it, Muddy?" "Certainly," Our Mother assures her. (It is extraordinary how one enjoys finding Prima in the wrong ! Probably because she so thoroughly enjoys putting others there.) "It means that the lion s mane was covered with blood." :< That s why I never sing it that way," Prima returns briskly. " Glory is in hymns a good deal, and glory mane is much prettier. I don t like blood." "Then you will be forced to omit a great many 52 ONOURHILL hymns from your repertoire," suggests Our Mother. Our Governess gasps. "Let s begin at the beginning and sing it all straight through," Secunda cries, and, heedless of Prima s obstinate, "I won t; I shall sing, Rise, crowned with light, " the two begin. With set jaw and a firmly concentrated eye (for a high degree of concentration is required in order to sing one hymn correctly, listening care fully at the same time for all the probable inac curacies of a second hymn which is being bellowed angrily into your ear by your brother and sister) Prima lifts her voice a voice of no inconsider able force, by the way, and we dash through the peaceful autumn country, startling the inhabi tants in our flight. "A noble army, men and boys, The matron and the maid," shout Tertius and his choir (Secunda is enacting the part of crucifer in a vested processional, and gazes reverentially at Our Governess s umbrella, held firmly before her; one feels instinctively that she is dressed in a red cassock, with a white cotta, trimmed with openwork and lace, above it). WE VISIT THE ZOO 53 "Demanding life, impatient for the skies" shrills Prima, to the wailing majesty of the Rus sian national anthem. This air inevitably sends Our Mother into a state of vague, melancholy ecstasy, so that she ~ we A noble army, men and boys," shout Tertius and his choir becomes as oblivious of the surrounding facts of life as any of her children. Lost, even as Secunda, in her sacerdotal vision, Our Mother becomes the Czar of all the Russias, bareheaded on her mo tionless steed, while armies upon armies sweep by from the windy steppes, chanting that greatest of anthems. If Our Mother and Secunda were to die in that moment it is quite certain that the souls of a choir-boy and an Emperor would ascend 54 ON OUR HILL to their God from that pandemonium in an auto mobile ! "Oh! Oh! Children! Stop it!" Our Gov erness has succumbed and begins to shake Ter- tius violently, out of whose opened lips sounds pour like water from a garden-hose. "How can you stand it?" She stares wide-eyed at Our Mother, who blinks and sighs deeply. (The armies melt and the roar of their drums is only the noise of the motor going into second speed for a nasty hill just out of Pelham.) "Oh, I don t mind, so long as Secunda keeps on the key," says Our Mother in a matter-of-fact tone. "However, if it annoys you. . . . That s enough now, children; stop, Prima." Instant peace descends. "I certainly never ave seen children like them," murmurs Our Chauffeur. "There s no doubt you were intended to be the mother of a family," breathes Our Governess. "You don t seem to have any nerves, do you?" "Not for hymns," Our Mother explains. "I don t see any objection to noise in the open air." "But two different hymns at the same time," pleads Our Governess. WE VISIT THE ZOO 55 "Hoo! How do you suppose God feels on Sundays, then?" Secunda queries scornfully. "Quite so," Our Mother adds. "But you forget that He is a good way off," Prima begins weightily. . . . "I see Bronx Park! I see Bronx Park!" Ter- tius calls. "Monkeys first!" "No, lions first!" "You know perfectly well we go through the birds. Don t be silly!" "And don t forget about feeding-time, will you, Mother ? I never saw a tiger eat in my life yet ! " "Will they eat natives?" Tertius inquires hum bly. "Oh, you silly! There aren t any natives in Bronx Park. They re in Australia. There can t be natives here, can there, Mother?" "Certainly there can," says Our Mother hastily too hastily. "Any one born in the Bronx would be a native of it." "O-o-h! Then would he be black?" asks Se cunda doubtfully. "Of course. Natives are black. We all know that," says Tertius stodgily. "Not at all. Of course he wouldn t be black. That is," adds Our Mother honestly too hon- 56 ONOURHILL estly --" unless he was going to be black, any way. It s being born there would make him a native, you see." "Goodness!" Secunda marvels, "then Pd have been one if I d been born here? I m very glad I wasn t aren t you, Tertius? Wouldn t you hate to have had that horrid kinky hair?" "You don t understand what Mother means, Kiddie," Our Governess begins, but Tertius shakes his head at her. "I understand a native, Miss Paul you told me about them," he chides her gently, "and now I know they are born up here, too. I suppose they have them born for the tigers?" "There s no use, Miss Paul we ll never get out of this," says Our Mother. "It ll only get worse and worse. If I were you I d let it go for to-day. . . . There s the lion-house, children." We are in the Zoo. We roll up before the beautiful big stone steps, we bounce out, we emerge from our coats. Clark and the lunch-basket will be awaiting us at half past twelve, and there is an hour and a half clear, for the birds, lions, and monkeys. The great question, of course, is, What will Ter tius say? How will he bear himself in the pres- WE VISIT THE ZOO 57 ence of all these wonders? Remember he has never, for all practical purposes of language, left his home. If you had never beheld any fowls of the air beyond the inhabitants of your ancestral poultry-yard, the family canary, and the robin, sparrow, and crow, in the varieties most common to your native land, what would be your demeanor in the presence of a glass cathedral full of painted, twittering feathered people, any one of whom (have you observed that nobody who lives with children calls an animal "which"?), any one of whom, I repeat firmly, if encountered upon your own door-step, would send you into convulsions of admiration ? But it is doubtful if anybody but Lord Byron habitually apostrophized nature. If the rest of us were possessed, like Tertius, of the disposition of an angel, the beauty of a Greuze, the charm of Sir Philip Sidney, and the savoir-faire of Talleyrand, we should probably confront the solar system very much as he confronts the impossibly tinted ob jects that now flutter before his calm vision. He stands before a spray of soft sepia bubbles of feather, pressed against each other on a tipping, swaying twig. They are precisely like a decora tion on a Japanese screen. Everybody else rushes 58 ON OUR HILL from Mexican hornbills, crude, Futurist crea tures, to absinthe-tinted love-birds; from vast, beaked nightmares behind strong bars, to rain bow-stained mites that dart like flames behind the finest wire netting. They cry, "Oh, Mother, see here!" and "Oh, Miss Paul, look at that!" and " Oh, I wish we had those ! " But Tertius gazes dream ily, contentedly, at the fluffy brown bough of cud dling mites before him. "Do you like them es pecially, darling?" asks Our Mother. "I like all of em spe cially," he answers, "don t you?" "Then why don t you hurry and see them, silly ? " Secunda flings at him, rush ing past. "We can t stay here all day. Go and look Tertius gazes dreamily, content- at that big One it s like the edly, at the fluffy brown bough _^ , . < . * . , * , , , of cuddling mites Dodo in Alice - - hurry ! WE VISIT THE ZOO 59 "All right," he says politely. "I will. Which are your favorites, Mother? I think these are mine." "I love anything best that you love best, an gel treasure," the weak-minded woman replies. "Have you anything for me?" Yes. A kiss," says Tertius, and proves it. "Why, Tertius, the birds are nothing noth ing!" Prima warns him. "Wait till you see the sea-lions. Wait till you see the polar bear ! Wait till you see all the - "I am waiting," he replies mildly. "Don t you see me waiting?" "Oh, you are too wonderful !" cries Our Mother. "Would it be too much to ask. . . ." "I have one all ready for you," he assures her with a kind smile. You probably know about the lions? Their heads are carved in stone at all the corners of their house, and they live in spacious caves, with little retiring-rooms and alcoves made of rock, and beautiful sunny verandas, where they lie when the season permits. Their dwellings are many times cleaner and fresher than those of the greater part of their observers can possibly be, and food and drink are served spotlessly and regularly to them 60 ON OUR HILL by respectful attendants. Around their walls run lovely painted friezes, representing in the lion s drawing-room, for instance, palm-trees, and pyra mids, and scenes like the back-drop in "A ida." It is doubtless a great trial to them to entertain, even so slightly as they feel themselves obliged to, the vulgar, huddled crowds of citizens who press about them, shrill-voiced, unwashed, un- leisured, even in their hours of relaxation. To look at Akbar as he lies dreaming, those paws that could crush your ribs into a bleeding mass folded lightly as thistledown before him, is to be ashamed of your silly, tense muscles, your bothered, scurrying mind. His great mane, dense to his waist, shades into ruddy brown, into leaf- brown, into the delicate warm fawn of his smooth body. His profile, the utter perfection of wisdom and pride, makes an humble, stupid thing of a Greek god. (It took more than a god to frighten Hercules when he wore a lion s skin !) His eyes, brown-gold, like the sun striking through a clear brook, are brave, like a child s, but baffled, as a King s eyes must always be. Because, what is the use of being a King even the King of Beasts ? The poorest little squirrel can run about where he likes, and if he starves in the winter or the cat WE VISIT THE ZOO 61 catches him in the summer, at least he ran free while he lived. But a King must belong to the people who stare at him. "Look at him, Muddy make him look at you!" Prima begs. ;< They don t never look at you them cats: you can t make em," a big, slouching boy volun teers. But Our Mother can make them. Nearly al ways, that is. "Akbar!" she calls gently. He twitches his nose, but his topaz eyes never shift. "Akbar ! Akbar, darling ! " The muscles below his ribs quiver under his smooth golden skin, but he will not move his eyes. "Akbar, dear, you must! Look at Mother!" she begs, and he shifts his eyeballs for the fraction of a second, and now he cannot take them away from hers any more. Straight at each other they stare, and he can not look at anything but her. . . . But it is only a woman s victory, at best, for something in his eyes sees her and goes on again, and there is something of him that she can never get. He sees her and yet he overlooks her, and she has mastered what she cannot understand. 62 ON OUR HILL Suddenly his gaze slips off from hers, and he rises, in one liquid, flexible motion, and walks hastily into his inner cave. "What d you know about that?" says the slouching boy. "She made him mad !" Once Our Mother did this to a lady puma, whose pupils dilated more and more, till her eye brows met and her lips flew apart, and she snarled and leaped ! Nobody who saw that look of un quenchable hate will ever forget it. And though people who know us say that if any one should call us on the telephone and tell us that he hap- .petied to have an extra hippopotamus on hand, in case we should care for it, since no one else seemed to need it though, I repeat, these people are certain that Our Mother, in these circumstances, would reply, "Why, how perfectly delightful! Send it straight out!" -yet let no one take ad vantage of this impression to suggest Our Moth er s adding a lady puma to the home circle ! We now approach the monkeys, and Tertius, who had held tightly to any friendly hand that offered, strides along alone, and breathes more freely. Although almost any position one chooses to occupy in the building devoted, according to the WE VISIT THE ZOO 63 catalogue, to Primates, can be made instructive and interesting, few figures stand out so clearly in Our Mother s mind as that of the Black-Faced Chimpanzee. Not only is he exceptionally large and powerful (qualities certain of winning her regard), not only do his deep-set, burning eyes and whole general facial contour give him an in teresting resemblance to some great light of the modern Celtic drama movement; not only does he open his lips to speak, lean forward, catch your passionately interested eye and suddenly shake his head and resume his brooding silence; but there is his perfectly fascinating manner of catch ing hold with one powerful hand of the strong rope depending from the roof of his cage, dashing hurriedly through space by means of it with precisely the air of a commuter just making his train and, dropping quietly to the floor, settling down in a corner and gazing off into space; as though an Indian Mahatma should take the Em pire State Express on an impulse, and then drop off in a vacant lot to meditate before he had reached Troy. However, it is before the cage of the White- Handed Gibbon that the success of the day is achieved. This adroit beast, who has, previous 64 ON OUR HILL to our arrival, been occupied with trivial acrobatic feats, capable of performance by any Primate, casts a quick glance at us, in line before him, springs to one end of a firm horizontal bar about fifteen feet in length, and, grasping it in one of his white hands (except for these, he is merely an or dinary, slightly -more-than-middle-sized Primate) , he glides like a shooting-star across it. Just at the end he shifts his grasp with such incredible swiftness that one can only infer that he has done so, and slides in the opposite direction. Again the lightning shift of muscles, again the skimming flight. His eyes never leave the admiring eyes of his audience; on his long, intelligent face is carved a set smile, changeless, constant, fascinating. After seven of these manoeuvres he drops to his feet and stands, panting slightly, like a slack- wire artist after a grand coup. Secunda bursts into spontaneous applause, and Prima and Tertius join her. After a moment the other children about the cage join in, timidly at first, then with increasing vigor; everybody in the room laughs and looks. It is beyond a doubt the day of the White-Handed Gibbon. But what is this ? The creature is embarrassed ! He turns his head from side to side: one might say that he blushed. He WE VISIT THE ZOO 65 glances restlessly at the audience "What can I do for them?" plainly passes through his mind. His lips part. "Unaccustomed as I am to public His eyes never leave the admiring eyes of his audience speaking - The phrase almost rings through the air ! " Good heavens ! Did no one ever applaud him before?" Our Mother demands, horrified. "Not since I been here, lady," an ancient keeper assures her solemnly. "He s awkward like, I guess." 66 ON OUR HILL Suddenly it comes to him: "They want it again!" He leaps to his bar and twists his wrist so quickly that the movement simply is not, cannot be, seen. Never did the quickness of the hand so deceive the eye. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen ... he moves like a living piston-rod. Twenty- six, twenty-seven. ... "When is a Gibbon not a Gibbon? When he refuses to Decline and Fall," murmurs Our Mother. "Stop him, somebody: it s awful!" Tertius takes this merely hysterical appeal very seriously. Advancing close to the cage, he raises his short arm. " Gibbon . . . stop ! " he says firmly. And the intelligent Primate, now on his thirty-fourth lap, ceases abruptly, and drops to the ground. "A remarkable performance!" says a plump old gentleman in a white waistcoat, bowing po litely to Tertius, the Gibbon, and Our Mother, as if they were a troupe of acrobats. We have but five minutes more before lunch eon. These, by common consent, are devoted to the mandril (you will recall him as the animal who first smelled of a rainbow and then sat down on it so hard that it came off on him) and his WE VISIT THE ZOO 67 cousin who so strongly resembles the late King of Belgium. If any officer of his guard should ever chance to encounter this mandril, I am sure that the astonished Primate would receive an involuntary military salute. Past the baboons, that look like gray French poodles dressed to imi tate monkeys, past the reptiles, where every one but Our Mother takes a hasty look (she has in herited the primal curse and the terror, Our Mother, and leaps away from a coiled garden hose), we file along to the big pavilion where the faithful Clark waits with the big basket. There are ham sandwiches and beef sandwiches and jam sandwiches and sandwiches of orange marmalade. There are hard-boiled eggs and peaches and frosted cakes and sticks of peppermint and wintergreen and cinnamon candy. There is a thermos bottle of lemonade, with nickel cups that disjoint and fall out of themselves, and a kind-hearted manage ment has provided cups of alleged tea for Our Mother. Each person has a colored paper napkin under his food and one for his lap. We waste little time in perfunctory conversation; beyond appor tioning the sandwiches, and worrying over the fate that gives Tertius all the mustard ones, we 68 ON OUR HILL devote ourselves almost exclusively to eating. Every one eats a great deal, but there is still a pasteboard plateful left over, and Our Mother curses the New England soul which will force her to carry this plate about till she can find some The bears depart to the various corners of their den one to eat its contents. We tidy the table, dis pose of the crusts and papers, endeavor in vain to press the pasteboard plateful upon a tableful of Italian feasters, and start off for the bears. These, by a miracle of luck, are being fed, and ours is the felicity of watching a brown and hairy colossus rear himself to his nine feet, and dexter ously catch in his mouth the fish the attendant throws him from a pail. Loaf after loaf after loaf WE VISIT THE ZOO 69 the attendant tosses over the fence, and gravely the bears select each his share and depart to the various corners of their den. One little fellow prefers his moist, and to him belong all those that fall into the pool. Tertius is moved to sing, "Diddle diddle dump- The most truly humorous objects on Manhattan Island ling, my son John," to them, to Prima s embar rassment; but nobody else, the bears included, seems to object, and we pass on to the sea-lions and penguins, perhaps Our Mother s favorites. There are nine penguins, and they are without doubt the nine most truly humorous objects on Manhattan Island, which is saying a great deal Whether they are slipping fussily down the rocks, like fat dowagers at a picnic, or walking pom pously in a line (to get nowhere at all) , like absurd 70 ONOURHILL delegates to something or other, or staring stu pidly at the sea-lions, as though they had never seen them before (though they always live with them), the penguins easily surpass, for pure quali ties of fascination, any creature Our Mother has ever seen. "Do they cost much, I wonder?" she medi tates, and tries to calculate the chances of life to be hoped for by any penguin who should live on a country place with three Great Dane puppies. "And a sea-lion for me !" cries Secunda eagerly. "A barking one, Muddy!" Two sea-lions live in this pool, and all day (per haps all night, too) they flash and dart and shim mer through the water. They do not practise what we call swimming: they set their shoulder to a wave and are driven, like an arrow from a drawn bow, by some uncoiling inner spring. They are motion s self --an almost abstract speed. Pure joy in the exercise of an absolute technic keeps them never quiet; the sensation, so exquisitely effortless, must be a continual temptation to keep on; as they shoot under and emerge and wriggle and blow, they shout and bark without ceasing, because they are so happy and agile, and accom plish so utterly what they feel moved to do. WE VISIT THE ZOO 71 "What animal would you rather be of them all?" Secunda asks dreamily. "A sea-lion," answers Our Mother instantly, and, "So would I," says Tertius. One enraptured drink of ginger ale all round, then a toppling, swaying five minutes on the ele phant. The elephant-driver, when almost tear fully implored by Our Mother to eat the rest of the sandwiches ("It is all home-made bread," she wailed, "and I cannot waste it!"), at last con sented. " Oh, well, I ll take a chance ! " said he. " Come on, George !" Then tickets at ten cents each are purchased, and we patter down the steps, quicker and quicker now, for the time is short, and take, one at a time, a walk upon the fat pony, whose name is Dot. A hasty peep at some conies and rabbits who live down a street of animals leading to a window, from which emerge six or seven feet of giraffe; a surprised view of some extra birds, pelicans, flop ping about a pool, absurd demoiselle cranes walk ing like ballet girls, an angry ostrich and we are at the big steps on the stroke of four, as we planned to be. On the top step Secunda pauses. 72 ON OUR HILL "This is those cranes!" she announces. She lowers her eyelids, extends one foot straight in front of her, assumes a silly smile, and prances along. It is amazing. "Look !" says a woman below, "how that child looks like a bird !" "She looks like a crane, doesn t she?" a man s voice answers. "Do you suppose she intends to?" Secunda giggles. "What do they suppose I intend to look like - a rhinoceros?" she mutters. We sit very quiet in the car. "Will you drive?" asks Our Chauffeur, and Our Mother answers: "When we get through this traffic." She slides under the wheel presently, and from then on, everything is subdued. A long, monoto nous game, in which every cat counts three, every dog two, and every child one, is played for count less miles behind her. Sharp cries of: "Eighty-two!" "Sixty-six, sixty-seven, sixty-eight!" "Was I forty, Miss Paul?" punctuates the gab bling murmur. Even Tertius, disgusted at miss ing four children from his total, and raising a de- WE VISIT THE ZOO 73 fiant shout of " Three Blind Mice," fails to create an enduring diversion. When Secunda wearies, and falls into an impersonation of Rebecca of York about to throw herself from the tower, Prima continues the game alone, playing one side of the road against another, until we swing into our own lane, and Our Mother, with a wail of despair, realizes that she has forgotten to get a start for the hill, and must change her gear sooner than the engine likes. "Now she ll get too hot!" Our Mother moans. "I expect she will," says the chauffeur coldly. We reach the top. We get out stiffly. "Which animal did you like the best the very best of all, precious darling ? " Our Mother asks. Tertius considers. He considers with great care and impartiality. "Come, hurry, dear," says Miss Paul. "I liked ... I liked . . . I ll tell you. I liked the rabbits!" he says. For this we have scoured the fauna of the Orient! This is the child for whom Primates labored and bears from the Caucasus ate fish alive ! "Rabbits!" cries Secunda. 74 ON OUR HILL "Rabbits!" Prima chides. "Well, really, Kiddie, it was hardly worth while taking you!" says Our Governess reproachfully. "Another year you can t expect Mother to bother." His chin shakes a little. He lifts those great, wide eyes to hers: "Can t I? Won t you? "he asks. "You know I liked those brown little birds, too and . . . and one snake, didn t I, Cunda? I told you that snake don t you remember?" Our Mother lifts him, fifty-six pounds of him, and carries him up the stairs. "I will take you to see the rabbits every year, beloved," she says, "if you will only kiss me!" "I ll always do that," he promises "always. I ll do it without rabbits!" And she believes he will. THE ROYAL ROAD TO LEARNING THE VICARIOUS ATONEMENT HOW has my heart with humility burned, When I remember how little I ve learned ! How many dollars for how many days, How many men earned in how many ways? Do I subtract it or do I divide? How many tears have I shamefully cried . . . Now comes the dawn of a wonderful day Prima knows how, and she ll show me the way ! Maine is plum-colored, Nevada is pink. Further than that I have never dared think. Europe and Asia are not the same size, (This I learned lately, with painful surprise.) Where are the Philippines? / never knew, Near to some Isthmus, / thought that they grew . . Peace, troubled spirit, Secunda knows all! Fearless she spins the terrestrial ball. This solid ground that I totter upon, People assure me revolves round the sun. How do we all of us stick in one place? Why don t we tumble at once into space? How do thermometers know when it s hot? Was my great-uncle a monkey or not? Wait I ve a son. He ll explain, beyond doubt, Why the Atlantic can never fall out ! THE ROYAL ROAD TO LEARNING IF people could only be as simple and consistent as the heroines and villains in melodramas ! In those days you knew where you were, so to speak. If a black-eyed lady came out upon the stage in a red dress and smoked a cigarette, there was really no necessity for her looking or wearing or doing anything further. Her life was as an open book before you. The merest child in the audience realized that she had had an uncertain past and would have an only-too-certain future. If, on the other hand, a blonde lady in a white dress emerged from the wings, delicately pressing a handkerchief to her eyes, the situation was equally lucid: you realized instantly that under no circumstances whatever, in this or any other world, could that blonde lady be or do or think anything wrong. Mistaken she might be, injured she almost necessarily must be, but a fault she could never possess. She was the heroine. Which goes to show, if anybody needed to be shown, that people fly to the drama as a relief for 79 80 ON OUR HILL anything they are likely to find in real life: the more different it is, the more they like it. Real ism must always be an academic subject, confined to professors and Russian novelists. I suppose the deep, underlying cause of this to be the fact that real people are so frightfully puz zling that nobody would pay good money to be further puzzled on the stage. We want to be able to understand somebody, and so we hire peo ple to write plays for us, with good people and bad people, and clever people and stupid people, who shall be as easy to understand as fat people and thin people. Now, nobody can be fat and thin at the same time; any one can tell a fat per son from a thin person. But, unfortunately, many people can be clever and stupid at the same time, and almost any one can be and is good and bad at the same time. So how on earth are you going to tell? God has never been willing to label his charac ters he leaves it to the historians. And hu manity, being notoriously impatient and incura bly fond of labels, goes in crowds to weep at "East Lynne" and refuses to find its uncles and aunts dramatic. And if aunts are not dramatic, tell me what is ! ROYAL ROAD TO LEARNING 81 Now women go to the theatre more than men. To follow my theory further, they go there be cause, more than men do, they wish to recuperate themselves with the sight of neat, clear types of character, easy to grasp, and simple to foresee; types they can praise or blame with a clear con science. This they can never do at home, be cause they are constantly confronted with men and children, two classes of human beings who can never be foreseen and can neither be praised nor blamed with impunity. Suppose, for instance, that you were reading about Prima in a book. If you knew that she was blonde and calm and slow and argumenta tive; if the author told you that she was exact and positive, and had to have jokes explained to her, and was otherwise dependable wouldn t you know, without being told, that she was good at mathematics and dates, and poor at art, and would always know where she left her galoshes? But no mother will be surprised to learn that Prima, not being in a book, but an irrational human child, attains with difficulty a rank of fifty-three in mathematics , assigns 1492 as the sailing date of the Mayflower, wabbling between Columbus and Captain John Smith for admiral, 82 ON OUR HILL takes the highest rank in the school in music, and draws and paints charmingly ! And the list of her lost articles of clothing is longer than a laun dry bill, which it strikingly resembles. On the other hand, take Secunda. She is as graceful as a fairy and as flyaway as thistle-down. She loves you when you come and forgets you when you go. Her pretty, pointed fingers drop things clumsily, her easy laughter bubbles into sudden tears. "If she can t do sums," Our Mother says toler antly to the earnest young teacher, "never mind. It s not your fault, you know. She doesn t re member things, you see*. I ve lived a long and useful life without arithmetic (I never knew whether to divide the men into the dollars or the dollars into the days!), and she s obviously such an artistic type. . . ." And Secunda gets ninety odd in arithmetic, and never forgets any facts she reads, and has a stiff hand for the piano, and can t conventionalize a flower design ! And though she leaves her things about, she remembers perfectly where and why she left them, and explains it so entertainingly that everybody laughs and goes and finds them for her. ROYAL ROAD TO LEARNING 83 "But I m sure all your father s family can do arithmetic!" Our Mother wails. "Why can t you, Prirna? What s the good of looking like them and coughing like them, and always being right like them, if you can t do arithmetic?" "But I can," says Prima calmly. "I can do arithmetic. It s only problems I can t do. The real lessons I get all right; it s only men and gal lons and decimals and things like that they mix me up. If they d leave problems out, I could do anything in arithmetic!" "But that s what arithmetic is for to teach you how to do problems. That s the whole point." "But why should I want to? What use will they be to me? Miss Marks says they re to train my mind, but why can t I train my mind in some sensible thing? Nobody ll go around ask ing me questions about galvanized -iron tanks, will they, when I m grown up?" "Give me the book," says Our Mother wearily. "If 60 men can pour 8,794 gallons of water per hour into a galvanized-iron tank - "What is a galvanized-iron tank?" "Why, it s simply a tank that has been . . . Look here, Prima, it doesn t make the least differ- 84 ON OUR HILL ence whether it s galvanized or not. It might be lined with asbestos or red Canton flannel or Eng lish ivy. The point is that it is a tank. They simply wish to know whether you know whether to multiply or divide. Do you?" "Of course. If* it s a large number, I divide it; if it s a sniall number, I multiply." There is a long, pained silence. Finally Our Mother lifts her head and says gently: "Listen to me, dear. If you and Secunda and Tertius can each pour a tooth mug of water in a minute into the bathtub, how many can you pour in two minutes?" "Six." "Very good. Now, how many can you pour in an hour?" "One hundred and eighty." "In a day?" "I d multiply by -- by -- twenty-four. Only, of course, Tertius couldn t sit , up all night." "Very well, then, subtract the night." "For just him?" "For all of you." She tells the answer, after a breathless struggle, and so far as Our Mother is able to judge, it is right. ROYAL ROAD TO LEARNING 85 "Now, supposing the tub is five feet long and -and two feet high and --well, say two feet across, how many cubic feet are in that tub?" "I know; you multiply em all by each other." "Now suppose there is half a pint in every tooth mug, and you pour in a pint and a half every minute for heaven s sake, what are we going to find out?" Our Mother s head swims wildly; there seems to be no limit to the things one could find out if one kept at it ! "It s like cat s-cradle ! " she murmurs. "How much no, how many I mean how long- "How many of us are there?" Secunda volun teers helpfully. "How silly! We know that. There are three of us," Prima declares disgustedly. "Oh, well, that doesn t matter; prob ly the man that wrote the book knows how many of all those things, but you have to find em out. We would be a problem to him, you see," Secunda explains luminously. "I ll bet you would!" says Our Mother inele gantly. "Now, listen, Prima. There must be something an arithmetic would insist upon know- 86 ON OUR HILL ing about all these vital facts. If all the things we have worked out are true, and I firmly believe they are, what is there left to deduce from them ? Let me see. . . . Something like . . . how many tubs you could fill in February in leap-year if you were all twins? I think that s pretty good," ob serves Our Mother with modest pride. "Can you do that, Prima?" "Oh, Mother 1" "It s about as silly as most of em," Secunda remarks impersonally. Tertius raises his hand wildly; he has been taught to do this to avoid interrupting conversa tions, and is extremely proud of it as his one aca demic accomplishment. "I know! I know!" he cries, "I know what Z ddo!" "What, angel?" "Turn on the tap and get through with it!" he crows. Secunda falls into one of those bubbling, chuck ling, clucking fits of mirth that spread hysteria through delighted classrooms; Tertius is snatched violently up to Our Mother s lap, and the papers and erasers fly about the floor, pencil-points snap under his impact. Archimedes would have turned ROYAL ROAD TO LEARNING 87 green with envy at his rival s sensational tri umph. He is presented with a rolled diploma accom panied by a neat speech full of the resounding Latin words nobody ever understands (the diploma is a blank for Our Mother s income tax) ; he has a gold-y medal on an ultramarine ribbon pinned on his blouse (it says Vacation Savings Fund Ball, Executive Committee, all around the edges of it); in short, nothing is spared that could make the occasion memorable. "All the same," says Our Mother, "that prob lem can be worked, Prirna, I m sure of it. Come along." And after a time, and times, and half a time, as it says in the Book of Revelation, the problem is worked, and the tooth mugs are turned into feet and gallons and hours and dollars, and back again into tooth mugs, and Prirna admits that she never understood problems really, before. "If only you could teach me!" she implores adoringly. Our Mother is drawn and gray and all wrinkles. She is perfectly hoarse and quite hollow and empty. Her teeth are broken at the edges, where she has gritted them together, and there is a hor- 88 ON OUR HILL rible dull feeling at the back of her neck, but she is triumphant. It is quite clear that any one can be taught arithmetic if the teacher goes about it in the right way. "No wonder they hate the books," she explains to Miss Paul; "no wonder they can t do the silly problems, when they are worried and misled all the time by a lot of phrases they never meet in life and never will. Why not make problems about velocipedes and bathtubs and roller-skates and rice puddings ? Why drag in travelling sales men s commissions, and six hundredweight of Aus tralian wool seconds, and seventeen cubic yards of Portland cement? I believe that all those tech nical terms confuse the issue and take off just so much nerve energy. Once you learn the theory, then, of course, all those terms don t matter. "Come here, Prima, and see how exactly alike all that galvanized-tank stuff is. Only we ll make it simpler, to begin. "Now: if two men can pour four gallons of water an hour into a galvanized-iron tank, how many can four men pour?" "Two!" says Prima, promptly and brightly. One sees why school-teachers have that bat tered look ! ROYAL ROAD TO LEARNING 89 What is it all about, anyway? I went to school, you went to school. It stands to reason we must have learned something there. What was it? Rhode Island, I know, was yellow, and Maine a deep plum color. We did something we called parsing, a word I always confused with parsnips; we invariably shut our eyes while en gaged in it. It never connected itself in the faint est degree with the English language, in my mind, and never affected my sense of the relations of words. I supposed then as I do now -- that it was an invention of those mysterious beings who plotted against my leisure and filled up my time for reasons of their own. And now, in spite of all the automobiles and aeroplanes and wireless telegraphy that stretch between, here is Prima busily engaged in parsing ! Neither Cubists nor Feminists nor Vers-Librists have affected that ancient and honorable idiocy in the slightest; nor has it affected in the slightest the minds of its practitioners. Every day Prima begins, "Miss Marks she says," and every day Our Mother interrupts, "Miss Marks says! One subject is enough for a sentence, isn t it? That s the use of grammar, you see." 90 ON OUR HILL :< Ye-es," Prima answers vaguely, "only it al ways sounds so much better to me the other way." It is perfectly clear that those ideas they are always harping on in the grammar have nothing to do with human speech in Prima s mind. Had they in yours? Of course, you and I would not say, "Miss Marks she - but why wouldn t we ? Because we neither hear it nor read it, mostly; perhaps, a little, because we studied Latin. They work so hard --the busy, funny, pa thetic little creatures ! What do we know to-day of all they are learning now? Months and sea sons and years of it pass over their defenseless heads, and at last they grow up and become men and women, and learn what love is and what money is, and what will give them indigestion, if they eat it and by that time it doesn t much matter what they eat ! And then, solemnly, they watch their children parsing their way through the years, and scold them severely if they fail to attain a high rank in examinations which would leave any orator or author of my acquaintance without even a credit able passing mark ! ROYAL ROAD TO LEARNING 91 Ah, well, those happy childish days are over, thank heaven, and we can learn what we like. "But why do I have to go?" Prima argues - "why?" "People always send their children to school. Haven t you noticed?" Our Mother replies. Yes, I see they do; but I m asking why they do." Well, I don t know that I ever thought of it before," Our Mother begins recklessly, "but I suppose people send their children for different reasons. Poor people, who have to be at work all the time, send their children to get them out of the way as a matter of fact, they re safer in school, and they learn how to behave better. Stupid people send them so that they won t have to answer all the questions the children would ask. Clever people send them because if they answered all the questions, the children would know as much as they do, very soon, and then how would they keep them down, you see? Whereas in any properly conducted school no child has any time to ask questions that aren t in the book, and none of those answers would ever help the child to get ahead of a sensible, grown-up person. School keeps you from knowing too 92 ON OUR HILL much too soon. It gives us a chance. We keep you there till you re of age, and then we can t, any longer, and you break out and begin to man age everything." "Is that true?" says Prima, frowning. "No, it s a joke, silly!" Secunda cries and laughs consumedly. This really worries Our Mother. "Look here, Secunda, you can t possibly be clever enough to think that s funny !" she threat ens her second daughter. "I don t believe they re giving you enough to do ! Are you studying grammar yet? I think you d better. Tell them I say you appear to me to be coming out of the anaesthetic too soon, and I think you re old enough to parse !" "Grammar! Phe-ew!" Secunda whistles. "I m not nearly to that, Muddy. I m only Lower In termediate; we do littachoor and English. Why do they call it littachoor ?-- it s The Village Blacksmith, really. The muscles of his brawny arms stand out like iron bands, you know. Why do they call that littachoor?" "God knows," Our Mother replies piously. "They always do in schools, I remember." "Miss Marks she " ROYAL ROAD TO LEARNING 93 "Will you say that again, Prima?" "What for? Miss Marks she " "You are too literal, my dear. Miss Marks what?" "Oh! Miss Marks oh, I mean, she says can t I do a little home work, if it s only a half- hour ? Then perhaps you could help me with " "Now, Prima, once for all! If there are two things in the world I m sure of, one is that the plumbing in this house was wrong from the begin ning, and the other is that you will not do any home work ! If you will explain to Miss Marks again for the eighteenth time that you rise at seven, breakfast at half past, practise till eight- thirty, attend school till one, lie down after lunch till three, play out-of-doors till five, practise, and eat supper till six, and then I read to you till quarter of seven, when you go to bed, where does she propose to insert the home work?" Our Mother draws a long breath, which is needed at this point, and grows very red and very firm. "What a child of ten cannot learn in four hours a day it had better not learn at all." Ye-es, but my study periods " " Ah ! There we have it ! You tell Miss Marks 94 ON OUR HILL that if she ll teach you your lessons, I ll hear you recite them with pleasure or Secunda may; she can hold the book as well as anybody else." This, for some reason, is the concluding phrase for Our Mother in any such argument. She considers it unassailable, unanswerable, final. And perhaps it is. But of course they will remember nothing of all this: why should they? Multiplication has been vexation since Noah was a sailor. None of the new psychological ways of learning it can en dear it to youth, and youth knows it, and makes the same faces and the same excuses that Cain and Abel brought to the despairing Eve. And just as it happens now, when the apples were green and hard, poor little Cain insisted that two snakes could only make half as many suggestions as one snake; and by the time the apples were red and soft he triumphantly computed that two cherubim with two flaming swords could guard twice as many gates as one cherub with one flaming sword, and Eve gave him a report card with a hundred written on it, and a big apple. And he never realized, poor child, that if she had never picked it he would never have had to earn it, and went on growing cleverer and cleverer, till he came to a I : ROYAL ROAD TO LEARNING 97 bad end! Because even then, you see, children didn t work out as you might have supposed. But what does it matter about the lessons? You lived through them, and I lived through them ; and really, the teachers must suffer so much more, that any tortures of the parties of the second part must be admitted to be negligible. What they will remember, what they must re member, is surely the winsome picture of those white-clad mites they used to be, funnily plump, funnily bony, wistful under their fillets of rose and blue, dancing their hard-learned little dances with careful seriousness, under the pink apple-blossoms blazing against the blue porcelain of the sky. :< This time," Our Mother promises herself, "I will not be an ass ! This time I will not cry !" And she chats with the mothers, and nods to the teachers, and settles Tertius in one of the tiny chairs arranged in the shade for visiting relatives of his size. "Marching drill by the younger pupils!" is announced, and the tinkling school piano (there must be some depot where they are all bought; they sound so much alike!) strikes up a martial tune, thin and unreal out there under the great turquoise dome. 98 ON OUR HILL They file proudly past, and Our Mother begins to feel those horrid premonitions of excitement that muffle her heart and prickle her eyes. "Now, now - - they are only a pack of brats trying to keep step on uneven grass," she tells herself warningly. You have seen them all be fore. There s not a chance in a hundred they all have pocket-handkerchiefs - And then Secunda swings past, head up, cheeks flaming, her hair standing out like a Bronzino angel s, and Our Mother s chin begins to tremble, and she feels as the man in the barrel must feel when he poises on the brim of Niagara ! "Who is that stunning child with the hair?" says a man s voice. "Look at those cheeks, will you? She s got it in her, all right !" The others are marching, but Secunda is pranc ing. Her whole soul is in this ritual; she is tense with pride in her school and her part. She forges ahead like Joan of Arc, patting out the time with her feet; by twos she marches, by fours, in circles, in squares; as she wheels by Our Family she flashes a grin at them. "Hullo, Tertius!" she calls, and everybody laughs, as everybody always laughs at Secunda. Our Mother stiffens her chin on her son s soft shoulder. ; v 8 ROYAL ROAD TO LEARNING 101 " Cunda s garters show," he observes critically. Of course they do - - they always do. In mo ments of supreme exaltation Secunda s garters, for some mysterious reason, suddenly leap into view, and indiscreet lengths of Hamburg edging lacerate the finer feelings of the more conserva tive members of Our Family. Nobody has ever been able to account for it, and more than one careful person would go to the stake swearing that the child started out sufficiently and mod estly clothed. Our Mother s theory is that she swells in bulk, like the Delphic pythoness, in ex citement, and literally adds a cubit, more or less, to her stature. They stand at attention, their hands raised in salute, and everybody applauds, and Our Mother bites her lip and glares straight ahead of her. At least nothing has splashed on her cheek yet. Why, oh, why, must she feel like this ? "Greek Dance, by the Juniors," is announced, and now Our Mother realizes that there is no more hope. One glance at Prima, and teacupfuls of tears (or so it seems to her enraged fancy) splash and pour and stream down her burning cheeks. For if Secunda, triumphant and seduc tive, thrills her, how could she bear up against 102 ON OUR HILL dear, plump, determined Prima, for whom the mere fact of dancing at all is a triumph ? The flowing draperies that float about her angu lar partner encompass Prima s rounder bulk with firm neatness. An uncompromising blue sash swathes her stomach. Her thick, unrippled hair falls heavily back from her pink-and-white face. Her clear blue eyes seek eagerly through the audi ence, peering earnestly for Her Mother. She is no Joan of Arc, drunk with impersonation, to whom art for art s sake is overwhelmingly enough, but a conscientious little Anglo-Saxon, who has pa tiently toiled at these unnatural attitudes (and learned them, let me tell you !) and wishes to reap the reward of her labors in Her Mother s smile. "I hope you like it, darling," her round blue eyes beseech. "I know it s not the best thing I do, and I m not Greek, really, you know, and I simply cannot keep my toes turned out. And my sash hitches up over my stomach. But I keep the time, don t I ? And I learned the steps before lots of others. And I do it a little better every year are you pleased ? " Our Mother sops her eyes with Tertius s hand kerchief, and swallows violently, and loves Prima more than anything on earth ! ROYAL ROAD TO LEARNING 103 We fall into each other s arms at the end, and it is pleasant to see how every one appreciates what we have accomplished. "She really knows some things awfully well," says the teacher kindly, "and of course, you know, she waltzes beautifully!" Who thinks about the galvanized-iron tank now ? Who bothers about Columbus and the Mayflower? We walk through the rooms where the sewing and the modelling in clay and the conventional ized wild flowers and the stencilling and the car pentry are displayed. Prima has embroidered a glove case in cross-stitch, and modelled a spray of dogwood, and designed a candle-shade in silk, and sewed an apron from hem to buttonhole. Secunda has sawed and nailed and stained a tray for Our Mother, and woven a rattan foot stool for Godmother. "And look at my gold stars for spelling !" The mothers stroll through the rooms, idly pushing the exhibitions about till they find the name they are looking for, when they draw a deep breath, and their eyes shine like people s eyes in the Sistine Chapel. They tell me that all this is going to change, and that the eyes of the New Motherhood are 104 ON OUR HILL going to kindle for the children of the world not merely their own children. They tell me that motherhood, hitherto a local and almost personal matter, has accomplished as little as it has, all these years, for just this narrowing and selfish reason. The new mother will love all children because they are children, not merely a few chil dren because they are hers. A lady on a platform once fixed her eye on me and cried aloud that the modern mother had escaped from the home, and was mothering the community. Of course, from my point of view, she might as well have said that the modern mother had escaped from the lunatic asylum, and was mothering the fishes in the aquarium. Either sentence is sus ceptible of parsing and neither means very much. Because, of course, you cannot mother a normal community any more than you can mother a normal aquarium. In my experience, whenever a mother escapes from the home, it is time for the community to escape from her - - if it can. And I have observed that people who discoursed along those lines either had no children at all, or had children who didn t, to put it mildly, make their remarks appear of any very startling impor tance. After all, it is Mrs. Franklin and Mrs. Hawthorne and Mrs. Lincoln that count in this ROYAL ROAD TO LEARNING 105 connection, isn t it? And one fancies, somehow, that their interest in Ben and Nat and Abe was disgustingly personal and limited. On these gala occasions all the teachers in Our School seek out Tertius and inquire with eager ness when he is coming to school? He is very polite to them all, vanishing into each embrace with scrupulous impartiality, and leaving each lady convinced that it is on her account, and hers alone, that he will finally break from the home circle and take up the academic life. As a matter of fact, Tertius is far from unedu cated. Does he not every day, while Miss Paul looks over casual mending, sit at a little worn brown table he calls his "deks," for half an hour, and write practicable sentences in discarded copy books? Sometimes he writes "the man ran to the pan," and sometimes he writes "the pan ran to the man"; but, in any case, he grunts like an angelic pigling, and hunches his shoulders so that he appears to have no neck. For d s and b s he makes first a round, unpreju diced symbol, and then attaches an upright; if to the left, it is a b; if to the right, ad. A and O he makes in the same way, attaching a sort of tea cup handle to the northeast or southeast corner, according to the vowel. His t s are particularly 106 ON OUR HILL fascinating and individual, inasmuch as he draws the cross stroke first, then transfixes it with a firm, downward drag of a well-licked pencil. But when it is done the page is quite as legible as if you or I had written it in the conventional and stereotyped manner. And when he composes his love-letters, will the lady care, I ask you, how he made the O ? :< They care in Our School, I can tell you !" says Prima warningly. You re supposed to write the school writing. What writing is Tertius sup posed to be learning ? Just his own." "Oh, well, if Mother can read it, it s all right, I suppose, however he does it; the use of writing is so you can read it," Secunda contributes broadly. "Not at all! The use of writing is to write a certain way," Prima persists. "Anybody can just make marks. You might print, counting that way. Isn t that so, Mother?" :e You represent two great cultural methods, of course," says Our Mother thoughtfully. "Each school has its backers. Personally, I ve always agreed with the prayer-book that we brought nothing into this world and it is certain that we can take nothing out of it. Maybe that applies to our education, too." HIGH DAYS AND HOLY DAYS ALL SAINTS SAINT NICHOLAS and Saint Valentine Died long ago. But holly wreaths shall bloom and twine, And lovers write "My heart is thine!" iWhile the tides flow. How long shall reign that risen God? Who of us know? But rabbits, bearing eggs, have trod The immemorial Druid sod, Since trees did grow. On All Souls Eve no homesick sprites Haunt us below; But Jack-o -lantern s winking lights Shall make the children laugh o nights, While the stars glow. Why is it, since from off the earth The Gods must go, The games and gifts that graced their birth, Of little wit, of little worth, Still rule us so? HIGH DAYS AND HOLY DAYS WILL they forget them, I wonder, those sol emn feasts and ceremonies, when they are grown up, and cease to hunt for colored eggs, or thrill at Christmas smells, or blush when the relentless knife crushes down into the birthday cake ? Then it shall be Our Mother s part, who never grows up, to keep those blessed memories green; and if they are destined to be of those who pass sadly out of the meadows of childhood, across the sandy dunes of middle age, where no Easter rab bits run, nor any October witches gambol with black cats; if they are to join that gloomy com pany to whom a pine-tree is as other trees, not star-bearing and odorous of Bethlehem; if they cast in their lot with those dullards whom St. Val entine has scratched from his rosy list of corre spondents - - why, so much the worse for them ! Let them learn by these presents that in their young days they were taught better. When Our Mother was no older than Secunda, 111 ON OUR HILL if indeed she was as old children seem to grow more childish with every decade she was given a thrillingly important part in a Christmas op eretta which took place in a Sunday-school room. Our Mother and another musical infant, robed in clean, silvery nightgowns, kneeled decorously at the knees of a pretend mother she was really a young lady who had never had any children and had not the remotest idea how to get them into the bed when they had finished their prayer and sang "Now I lay me" in six-eight time. When the other infant sang wrong, Our Mother kicked her. Then they pretended to go to sleep, and it grew dark; finally, a great hairy Santa Claus came in, and sang in a loud bass voice, and picked them up out of the bed, and his beard tickled. There was, somehow, connected with this man, a little dark-blue saucer, with two seg ments of a very fat Christmas candy -cane stuck together in it; and now, after all these years, each one of four seasons, with all their months and days and hours, if on a darkened stage, in a tense hush, a large man with a beard ever sings in a bass voice, across the generation that stretches between that nightgowned imp and Our Mother, there blows a faint, far scent of peppermint, and HIGH DAYS AND HOLY DAYS 113 somewhere inside her brain she is aware that the odor comes from two fat segments of striped candy -cane reposing in a little dark-blue saucer ! These things are very wonderful. If Tertius, reading these lines at the age of sixty, shall sup pose that he understands them any better than he does to-day at the age of six, Our Mother s ghost shall dance in and laugh at him. She would so hate to see him making an ass of himself. What smells will they remember ? All children smell their way through the world, and some of them never cease to do so. Our Mother drinks coffee every day of her life; but should she ever pass where freshly made coffee mingles with the smell of pine and hemlock, she hears immediately, as if it were little bells playing, the tune of "Hark, the herald angels sing!" and feels for one impalpable fraction of a second eight years old again, puffed with pride at attending an evening rehearsal of that Christmas operetta ! What finger traces those lines, so remorseless, so ironic, in that soft gray jelly that quivers in that hard, round box, balanced so precariously on the end of your spine? And why does the finger trace such curious, such meaningless runes? If one remembered useful things now, or even epoch- 114 ON OUR HILL making things ! Suppose, for instance, that when you srnelled nasturtiums, hot in the sun, you gasped at the shock of your first appreciation of the fact that two and two make four ! Or sup pose that when you heard cello strings plucked at random in the twilight you remembered again that Columbus discovered America, because that sound and that knowledge came to you together. Or suppose that a crimson sunset recalled to you that a penny saved is a penny earned ? But that is not the way. To smell hot nastur tiums reminds you that you were eating caraway cookies, once, when you smelled them. Soft pluckings of the cello recall the red scarf that some one threw over the canary s cage when your father used to begin to practise; and the flaming sunset is the background for that distant and nameless lady in a white-fringed shawl, who once stroked your head as you stood and stared into the west. It is all very strange. What does Our House smell of to Secunda? Our Mother does not, cannot, know, of course. To her the drawing-room smells of floor polish, the dining-room smells of brass polish, the pantry smells of silver polish, and the back hall smells of shoe polish. But that is because she bought them HIGH DAYS AND HOLY DAYS 115 all and has definite ideas on the subject of their uses, and I doubt if they smell of these things to Secunda. All three have inherited Our Mother s passion ate and mysterious love of rubber in all its forms. Tertius always sniffs his galoshes tenderly before putting them on, Prima once laid a new rubber boot on her pillow for the night, and Secunda used to chew hers, like a puppy ! Rubber balls are in dented with the luxurious nuzzlings of their own ers, and elastic bands have to be jerked from between their protesting teeth. Mounting the rub ber-matted stairs that lead to the dentist, they stop and sniff the air like bloodhounds about to pick up the trail. Our Mother remembers her Aunt s rubber bath-brush that she nearly ate, and shakes a mournful head. "Can t you inherit anything respectable?" she begs them; but here, again, the ways of Nature are inscrutable. Up to the day before Christmas Eve all is calm in Our Family. Packages arrive, all battered through the misleading parcel-post, and are piled in Our Mother s closet; as to Christmas cards, she can never decide. Is it better to hand them out as they come, or to save them for one grand hand- 116 ON OUR HILL ful apiece? Does it dull or whet the edge of appetite to dribble them out? So she piles them on a corner of her big down stairs desk, behind the letter scale, while she is making up her mind, and the parlor-maid packs them away neatly in the pigeonhole labelled " Cir culars, etc.," and they lie there till January, when all the pigeonholes are tidied, and Prima shouts: "Oh, there it is! Prima, from her rector ! I knew it ! I knew I had one ! Secunda said he skipped me because I only put four pennies in my envelope the day I hadn t a five-cent piece, but I knew he didn t! He doesn t keep the money, anyhow. What does he care ? " "Who does get the money?" inquires Tertius. "People that worship statues," Secunda in forms him, "or else the man that plays the organ, most prob ly." "Nonsense! It goes into the church," says Our Mother absently. " Oh, yes with a trowel. And writings. And they stand around and sing." "What do you mean, Kiddie?" asks Our Gov erness, bewildered. "She means laying a corner-stone," Our Mother explains, reading a letter with one hand, as it HIGH DAYS AND HOLY DAYS 117 were, and signing checks with the other. "I m writing, Miss Paul, that we did return those twelve-and-a-half lace boots for Tertius, and we can t help it if they have no record of it. They were so long filling the order, that he grew, in be tween. I cannot understand why it is that they are always out of my children s sizes !" But it is the 23d of December. To-day the Tree came bumping up the stairs to the billiard- room. It is neither large nor small rather large for a small tree, but distinctly small for a large one, if that brings any picture to your mind. We get the school tree, after their Christmas play is over, and armfuls of their long, fragrant wreaths. The old sage-green slip-cover that in May used to go over the big settle in the New York house is draped about the box the tree stands in, and out of the third-floor closet come the deep, fire-hearted balls, the silvery, giant acorns, frosted like Christmas Eve, the mysterious gilt birds with shining wire tails and sapphire and emerald bodies, the yards of gold and silver fluff that settle like moonlighted snow and star clus ters wherever it lies. Out, too, come the funny little battered one-time ornaments that went on Our Mother s tree, long ago. The rope that looked 118 ON OUR HILL like powdered gold then is no more than a dingy, dull cord now; but she and Our Aunty never dress a tree without the ridiculous things, and they have their honored place. Not that they go on to-day. No; this is shop ping day. And note well that while you may go, and wisely, to the city for bows and arrows and roller-skates and Howard Pyle Robin Hoods, the village is the place for Christmas shopping that really counts. There the wreaths lie in glistening piles between the plucked turkeys and the barrel of white grapes in sawdust. Our Mother adds up the windows hastily in her mind. "Heavens! I certainly shan t get all those!" she cries. "Send me, send me - - two dozen !" Now we pause before the five-and-ten-cent shop and Our Family looks discreetly away into space While Our Mother hops out and buys the stocking toys. There is nothing in all the ritual of Christ- mastide to compare with them in interest. Think not, bestower of electric trains that run on the billiard-table, that you can inspire a shriek equal to the shriek that shall greet the three tiny motor cars that will emerge from those three brown stockings on the day after to-morrow ! Dream not for a moment, friend of Our Mother, that the HIGH DAYS AND HOLY DAYS 119 beautiful French picture-book you imported can rouse such peals of laughter as the darky doll, the Indian doll, and the cowboy doll that rest on the three tangerine oranges that are eaten solemnly on this one day in the year ! Three five-cent watches with fobs and chains, three rubber balls, three harmonicas, go into those stockings, with a fig wrapped in paper in each toe, and a candy- cane and a tin trumpet hanging over the edge. Nobody notices the boxes when we start off again, just as nobody has the least idea as to why we stopped in front of the Italian s fruit shop on the corner, though his window bristles with canes. At luncheon comes the question: "Will you dress the tree --or see it?" They hesitate, glance at each other. "Which would you rather, Secunda?" Prima asks doubtfully. "Oh, I don t know - - be surprised, prob ly." "Which would you, Tertius?^ "Oh, surprised, I s pose." This always interests Our Mother. What teaches them such sophistication ? "Which would you, Pri?" "Oh, I think I d like to decorate it up, this year no, I won t. I ll be surprised, too !" 120 ON OUR HILL "Please say, decorate it, Prima; not, decorate it up. " "Oh, well, decorate it, then. But that s not half so nice, Mother. I don t mean just deco rated, exactly; I mean, all decorated up !" In what is it rooted, that insistent demand for the preposition ? Will it ever be bred out of chil dren and peasants? Is it the strongest part of speech, after all dearer than the adjective, more binding than the verb ? Now we are at the afternoon of Christmas Eve. The wreaths, of course, are not nearly enough, and more have been added to the florists red carnation order, also laurel for the jar at the head of the stairs. A boy staggers in with them just in time, and we dash about with our mouths full of pins, while Tertius carries three prickly wreaths on each stiffly outstretched arm, with one balanced on his fluffy, just- washed hair. As everybody who passes him thus adorned is forced to stop and kiss him, and as somebody is always passing him, the traffic in his neighborhood is more or less con gested ! "Quick, light the candles! No, I will not; I simply will not have electric lights ! If somebody is in the room every minute, what in the world HIGH DAYS AND HOLY DAYS 121 can happen ? Anyway, I won t have them !" (It is extraordinary how exactly like other women all women are, at one time or another !) "Do you like it, darling? Do you see the big star ? Where is the paper and pencil for the list ? We mustn t get those New Haven presents mixed again, Miss Paul ! Now, Prima is to read out the names, and Secunda and Tertius may carry them." It is all red ribbon and white tissue-paper from now on. Big, handsome presents are admired by the grown-ups, and foolish, inexpensive ones adored by the children, as usual. Our Godmother sends us the same "Gulliver s Travels" and "Swiss Family Robinson," only this time they are illus trated by an entirely new and costly artist. "There s four Swiss Families," says Secunda stolidly. "By and by there ll be a book-shelf just for the Swiss Families, won t there, Muddy?" "Oh, look at this ! For my dear little nephews and nieces, from their loving Aunt. For gracious sake, how old does she think we are?" A woolly rabbit, a top, and a crocheted doll emerge from a red-and-white box, and Prima sniffs scornfully at the doll with "Dear little Prima" dangling from its knitted jacket. ON OUR HILL "My dear child, there are millions and dozens of you nieces. How can she remember?" "But doesn t she understand that we are grow ing?" asks dear little Prima coldly. (She weighs one hundred pounds.) " That s just what they don t do, as a matter of fact," Our Mother explains. "They just remem ber that you re children." "And we have to write notes for them ! I don t think it s fair ! Secunda, you may write for these." "Oh, no! Let Tertius he can, this year." "I d love to write about em," says Tertius earnestly. "I ll write about all three. I ll take big paper. Do I know her, Mother?" You ll be in heaven very soon if you re not careful, you know," Our Mother warns him. "Haven t you any faults, Tertius? You don t want to be an angel, do you?" "Not if you don t like," he answers carefully. "Then don t act like one. Bring me that big present under the calendar, there. It s for me." Prima wriggles consciously. "Oh, my darling, wonderful girl!" Really, it is quite wonderful. It is just like the dress-hangers you see in Women s Exchanges, all stuffed and sweet-scented and covered with HIGH DAYS AND HOLY DAYS 123 blue-and-white silk, and the pattern is stencilled by Priina herself, and every stitch is hers. "And you thought my lemonade-tray was good, too, didn t you?" asks Secunda. "Secunda, dearest, I am simply knocked speech less by the lemonade- tray !" Mind you, the child sawed it out with a saw, and tacked on the rim and made holes for your hands and stained it ! "And my ink-well?" Tertius begs. "It makes me weep," says Our Mother, and very nearly proves it. The infant shaped it out of clay, and hollowed out the hole for the ink with his delicious, soft little thumb, and made a cover with a knob at the top, and stained it green! The bottom is signed with a large T, just the way Durer signed his things, and it looks like Zuni Indian ware. It shall stand in the cabinet with great-grandmother s sprigged china and all the christening porringers forever. The presents are always very much the same, of course. Except for Our Mother s, who always knows what we really want, and Our Aunty s, who always finds out, the great fun is unwrapping them and reading out importantly to and from 124 ON OUR HILL whom they are. Books are jolly, but if they are any good we have always had them; and people mostly give you "Andersen s Fairy Tales," any way, or "Alice in Wonderland," which in any Christian family are naturally provided, along with your board and lodging. "Have you got that list? Did you put down small note-paper and that speckled frog from - oh, no, the paper cut-out house and that frog? . . . Children, what came with that frog?" Those three sort of handkerchief -boxes." "Prima, please don t say sort of !" "Well, what can I say, then? You can t say rather handkerchief -boxes, can you?" "Exactly. And that shows how foolish it is. Either they are handkerchief-boxes or they are not." "That s what I don t know," Prima cries tri umphantly, "and that s why I say sort of. It s just what I mean !" "We ll go down now and sing," says Our Mother briefly. There simply is no choosing among Christmas hymns; they must all be sung every night during the season. "It came upon the midnight clear" happens to HIGH DAYS AND HOLY DAYS 125 produce the greatest number of thrills per bar for Our Mother, but "Little town of Bethlehem," and "Hark, the herald angels," and "Come, all ye faithful," have their devoted partisans. Can we ever forget the Christmas when Prima, young and innocent then, asked to sing the hymn where they take the Baby Jesus out for his airing? In vain Our Mother sought and sought; she could think of no such sacred melody. "Why, it s like this you know !" Prima cried impatiently at last, and chanted respectfully: "Oh, come, let us outdoor him, Oh, come, let us outdoor him ! " For years after this she sang it that way, pur posely. For just as scientists, probing into that great unknown, our common daily life, proceed by in exorably forcing what we do not yet know into terms of what we do, so those great empiricists of existence whom we call children patch out pain fully their scheme of the universe; they have no other way. Do you realize that they are always doing this, every hour between sunrise and sun set, and for the most part silently? Only now and then do you catch through the trailing clouds 126 ON OUR HILL of glory that mercifully surround their swelling souls some tiny ray of their mental processes, and you think it very amusing. But if you stop to consider you will see that you get only a thou sandth part of these quaint misconceptions which, when I tell you, you accuse me of inventing ! Take Tertius, for example, and his earnest re quest for the "manual-training hymn" ! In what index shall you find it ? But use your fresh ears, not your worn brain, and you will see that he wishes to sing that delightful minor melody: "O come, O come, Emmanuel, And ransom captive Israel! " It is foolish to accuse me of inventing these things. My brain is scribbled all over, like yours, with the complicated connotations of English let ters. "Emmanuel" has to me no remotest con nection with "manual." When Tertius tells me that his favorite character in fiction is "Cock Robinson Crusoe," I can only gasp and marvel at him. But try as I may, I cannot produce a phrase like it; can you? One man could an English man, of the race that we delight to call lacking in a sense of humor, I suppose because they cannot understand our slang. He could think like a HIGH DAYS AND HOLY DAYS 127 child, even like a child in a dream, and he was a professional mathematician ! This is perhaps a little confusing. . . . Our stockings are hung on the nursery fire guard, and at nine o clock or so Our Mother goes in and fills them. Alas for the Christmases when Tertius s stocking was a tiny, ten-inch strip of white ! It is like anybody s stocking now a fig is lost in the toe, and the largest horn sits easily in the top. Heaven knows when they wake before dawn, probably ! But they are as quiet as mice much quieter than any mice Our Mother ever heard, be cause mice are really noisy. They must always come down-stairs and pass Our Mother s door in bedroom slippers or stockings, and this is one of the rules that endear them to guests. From now on things move feverishly. An hour or so after breakfast for the tree toys, a wild dash for church (we must walk the two miles and a half, for the pony went to midnight mass, the old mare to nine o clock, and it is too muddy for the car) after our own short service, a fascinating peep at the Christmas manger in the Catholic Church, where the camels and Joseph and the Star are all wonderfully real, and we 128 ON OUR HILL hurry home to goose and a pudding with an egg shell full of alcohol flaming on its top. No time for a nap, now or, well, on second thoughts, a short one, for Secunda gets a little intolerant without any break in her activities. The tree must be filled again for the children in the stable and the cottage, and the gardener has three babies this year. Each child gets one new toy, and then there are always left-overs and mended things and outgrown amusements that give quite as much pleasure the second time as they did the first. Then there are the gold pieces in little envelopes (Tertius presents them), and fresh candles to light (Secunda collects them from all over the house), and they stand among the hemlock wreaths on top of the bookcase in the big billiard-room. Now the children are here, with a last-minute guest of the gardener s family, for whom Prima performs miracles of rearrangement, without hurt ing anybody s feelings. In such a crisis Prima s calm decision is invaluable. Now the cook comes panting up the stairs, and shows a gratifying ap preciation of the tree; now cottage and stable re turn polite thanks for their Christmas hams; now shy Hungarians and brisk cockneys lean together >. HIGH DAYS AND HOLY DAYS 129 over American electric railways; now Tertius spreads a courtly chair for the chambermaid, and Secunda brings a footstool for the laundress. Count Tolstoy would have doted upon Our Family ! Here is the custard and the frosted cake ! They gather round the billiard-table and eat it eagerly, dressed in red-paper caps from snapping mottoes. By this time it is very gay. The winking candles are soft on their faces. Looking at Our Family s blond and powerful bulk, it is hard to believe that the swarthy generations of Central Europe are likely to overwhelm us ... and yet, will it be a question of man for man? There is the trouble, you see. Just at present Our Mother is even with the gardener s wife, but there are those who think Our Family large and the gardener s wife has only just begun ! The little guest from over the stable finds our treat too simple; and one of the cottage children cannot eat milk. Our Family thriftily eats both portions, and the party closes, having been, on the whole, a success. There is one satisfying thing about the hymns for Easter: they rolf out "Alleluia," with plenty of that liturgical monotony so dear to childhood. 130 ON OUR HILL "A-a-a-a-a-a-le-lu-u-ia!" chants Tertius lustily; everybody turns and smiles at him. The person (a male, beyond doubt) who ranked pride among the deadly sins could never have been the mother of Tertius ! This year there was a terrible panic about the eggs; they were supposed to have been dyed with dye that comes in packages and at the last mo ment there was no dye ! But, mercifully, the cook was Irish, and she and Our Mother took a little bluing and a little cochineal and a little green and raspberry coloring (it comes in weeny bottles, for fancy afternoon cakes) ; and Our Mother drew out of her rag-bag of a mind the fact that if you boil eggs in onion skins they turn out a rich brown: and Our Governess etched the most wonderful rabbits and chickens in sepia on six special eggs; and we wrapped some in waxed paper and then stencilled initials on them. Then there were four or five bought ones that open, full of sweets, and three incredible life-size ones, solid chocolate; and Secunda s Godmother, who can only be compared with the Godmothers of the fairy-tales, had sent a rare and gorgeous hen nested on almond and jujube eggs; and Prima s Godmother, who has the most delicious fancies, HIGH DAYS AND HOLY DAYS 131 had risked through the express company three tiny glass motor-cars, driven by rabbit chauffeurs, with barley-sugar in the tonneaux. Our Mother s part is always the same: she pro vides the nests (they are the round, woven baskets figs come in) and the guardian bunnies. They are in three sizes. Anybody can keep the tiny ones; the middle size is better left for Secunda, unless she is pretty well ahead; but the larger are sacred to Tertius, and stand, paws up, in what some might consider exposed places. Our Mother dashes out during nap-time and stumbling excitedly over rocks and among the stumps of trees, lays the baskets in cunningly selected nooks. From time to time her heart fails her. "Oh, that s far too hard!" she mutters. "He could never find that !" And she stands a brown ear-pricked bunny in the centre of the lawn, with a bright magenta egg flaming from his basket ! Then she sees in fancy Prirna s scornful eyebrows, and weakly moves it into the hollow where the tether-ball post stood. Then she walks a few paces off, sets her jaw, and fills up the bottom with stones. A mother is indeed a feeble-minded work of God; perhaps that is why hens and cows 132 ON OUR HILL neither of them remarkable for brain power - make such good ones. Of course you will perceive that the problem before us is so to arrange the nests that each per son shall find approximately the same number, gaining the same proportion of plain and fancy eggs, allowing Secunda to find Godmother s (with any kind of verisimilitude), assuring Tertius of his own initial, and last, but far from least, en abling Our Mother to remember where she hid them ! Shall we ever forget the day when, Easter being stormy, the hunt took place in the house, and when the tumult and the shouting, as the poem puts it so neatly, had died, nobody, guests in cluded, could find the finest chocolate egg of all? Our Mother hunted that egg in frenzied night mares for a week ! "But, if you put it somewhere, I should think you could find it," Prima would say, like a Greek chorus. One sees how Electra and Iphigenia and the other fate-driven principals must have gritted their teeth at that chorus ! Weeks and weeks afterward it appeared to our long-blinded eyes, poised in plain sight, far above eye-level, on top of a deep-framed mirror. HIGH DAYS AND HOLY DAYS 133 Now they come out with warning yells, and stalk like head-hunters among the dead leaves of winter and the fallen trees the gardener hasn t "got round to, yet." "Here! Oh, there, Secunda ! Hush! Don t show him. Look around, Tertius ! Oh, see that won derful, wonderful ! Oh, thank you, thank you, Mother ! I know you thought of that !" "I ve got three, and two rabbits !" Tertius puffs. "Oh, wait, wait! Don t see that one, Cunda ! I see it first ! He s just behind that stone. Oh, it s choc lat!" "I have nothing but green. Give me a red for a green, Tertius, will you?" "Oh, no, Secunda, don t ask him that. I say we don t change at all. I make it a rule." "Oh, no - - oh, well, all right. I ll just collect greens, then. Maybe I ll get them all," says Se cunda contentedly. "If anybody offers you a thousand dollars for your disposition, darling, don t take it," Our Mother suggests. "You ll find it awfully useful." "Alleluia! I ve got a split one, full of gum- drops !" crows Tertius and everybody, of course, does the usual thing to him. "You darling rabbit !" coos Our Mother. "You 134 ONOURHILL precious bunny!" She has no more superlative title. If she has never called you her rabbit, she has never really loved you ! "How many had we, Miss Paul ? Three dozen ? No, four?" "I think there were thirty-nine, but of course that isn t counting those colored papier-mache ones. Baby, have you any with pictures?" "My rabbit stepped on this one, I pretty nearly think," he tells us solemnly. "It was this way when I saw it - - really !" "Oh, Tertius, that s not a live " "Be quiet, Prima, instantly!" Curiously enough, Our Mother is angry. Oh, but really angry. There is a strange, cold edge to her voice that chills everybody. Nobody can make you so happy as Our Mother, but nobody can make you so uncomfortable. "Because you have no imagination yourself, Prima, must you interfere with the pleasure of people who have? I d rather you went into the house." Prima s lip quivers, but she bites it, and walks like a drum-major into the house. I am sorry, but these shades of the prison-house close over us sometimes, often when Our Mother has been hap- HIGH D;AYS AND HOLY DAYS 125 piest in our happiness. She is the least little bit like one of those star-filled sky-rockets the higher she shoots, the farther she has to fall. Re member her gently, O blessed Three ! it is not of the Lord alone that it can be said, "whom he loveth he chasteneth!" And when we all go in later and cut the choco late egg to eat with our tea, she kisses Prima and cuddles her, and explains, in the most beautiful English, what she meant which the Lord doesn t by any means always do. Dear Prima ! When she stands by Our Mother, a debutante with a bouquet, will she remember her first evening party? It was a Hallowe en party, at Our School, and Prima was a blonde and blooming witch, an absurd and dimpled witch, with two holes where her top-front-middle teeth should have been, and a mop of red-blond hair no fillet could restrain. She had a long black mus lin robe, covered with white cats wonderful cats, cats Our Governess made and a high- pointed black hat that Our Mother invented out of stiff dress-lining, and a crutch with a black cat on it. She carried a funny little joke-pillow that cried like a cat when you sat on it, and she stayed till nine o clock, and ate ice-cream and lemonade. 136 ON OUR HILL Miss Paul had to sit up for her. (I hope she will forget that she was indisposed in the night !) We had a jack-o -lantern for the nursery-table and Godmother sent us witch hats and broom sticks, and Secunda danced the Highland fling for us, as a special treat. But we all felt a little nervous and edgy, for we realized that Prima had detached herself from our little landlocked flotilla, and was headed for the open water a lonely, little white-sailed adven turer. Our simple, nursery holidays had suffered a sea change ! And Our Mother, in one horrid dramatic mo ment, lived the hour when Prima would be start ing for a symphony concert, and Secunda would be starting for a dance, and Tertius would be starting for a class supper, and for what would she be starting? Her grave ? Oh, well, hardly ! Our Mother has inherited a good constitution. She sniffed. Her bed? But that would be worse, almost, in the circumstances under consideration. She pouted. Then, the only objection to Our Mother s starting for any one of the first three points men tioned would be her inability to arrive at the HIGH DAYS AND HOLY DAYS 137 other two simultaneously. Candor compels her to remind herself that she will probably start for the concert with Prima, go on to Secunda s dance, and end by making a speech to Tertius s class mates some time before breakfast. "It s no use being sentimental, like a person in a book," says Our Mother briskly. "Let s all go with Prima next year what?" We agree with mad enthusiasm. An unbroken phalanx, Our Family shall still confront the holi days ! A YEAR OF COUSIN QUARTUS ET EGO IN ARCADIA . . . HOW will you talk of them, these vanished years, When, old and wise, you sit about the fire, Exchanging memories? Two ancient men, Who have wed, begotten, laid awa^ their dead, Will they remember the pigs, a-grunt in the mud, Whose backs they scratched behind the tennis-court? Two withered dames, soft-chaired before their tea, Will they recall the pony s prancing fury, The bow-and-arrows hidden under the rocks? Or will they prate forced marches, early-to-bed, No sugar on the porridge, French at meals? I cannot know. My heart that beat for you, Ere that you knew this world, will have fall n to dust, Red clay for the Potter when he moulds again. I shall not be. Oh, Children that I loved, Remember gently all those gentle years, For you were happy in them ! Stretch your hands At whiles across the gulf of now-a-days, And clasp the hands that held your hands before, When hands were small and hearts were young together ! A YEAR OF COUSIN QUARTUS TT seemed hardly possible, when the year was A over, that he had come and gone; that the red autumn and the white winter and the green spring had peeped, in turn, over the waiting edge of Our Hill, pretended to come for good, retreated, ap peared again, possessed us, melted imperceptibly away, and swung around again to summer-time ! And yet it was true. We were all one year older. Prima was doing percentage in the yellow arithmetic book; Secunda was promoted to two half -hour practice periods a day; Tertius, that thrice-blessed infant, was supposed to be capable of assuming the responsibility of Dicky, the long- suffering canary spilling a spiral trail of bird seed between the nursery and the children s bath room every Saturday morning when Cousin Quartus left us; and none of these things was so when he came. But of all the changes none is comparable to that which took place in Our Cousin himself. Shall we ever forget him, as he first appeared to our astonished eyes? It was a Fourth of July 143 144 ON OUR HILL week-end, and our guests were enjoying their after- tea cigarettes, idle, relaxed, ready for anything. Prima, Secunda, and Tertius were pottering about vaguely, listening, behind a mask of infantile pre occupation, to grown-up sentences they would bring out afterward with immense effect, hopeful of avoiding that sickening hour of half past six, when Fate withdraws the young person, no matter how well-behaved and charming, from the level of the drawing-room. Suddenly there was a whir, a grind of brakes, a throb that ceased at the door. The door itself was flung wide and there stood in the hall before us a very little boy we had never seen before. Two large, soft, dark eyes beamed mildly out of his pointed face, a round cap much too large for him drooped over his ears. His stiff, straight hair was cropped -- distressingly, to Our Mother s eyes like an older urchin s. His face was one that should have emerged, curly-haired and lace- collared, above a velvet coat; one of his thin little hands should have rested on a deerhound s head. Sir Joshua would have painted him as the "Boy in Brown." But instead of Sir Joshua s velvet and point- lace, a stiff shirt-waist, much too large for his tiny COUSIN QUARTUS 145 shoulders, gave a strange, elderly air to his little body, and flopping khaki knickerbockers, big enough for a Boy Scout, ballooned above his pipe- stem ankles, with a curious Dutch effect. In his hand he carried a diminutive suitcase, and it is thus that he will be forever caparisoned in Our Mother s photographic memory. Verily, if Our Cousin grows and he may quite possibly grow - into an adult so distinguished that future gen erations shall gaze with awe upon his statue in some park, the marble hand grasping the model of the great machine which made him famous in his country s annals, Our Mother, reverently viewing the monument, will never see anything in that marble grasp but a little wicker suitcase ! Crooked under one thin arm he held a book, and advancing to Our Mother, standing amazed in the hall, he presented the volume to her gravely, announcing with the composure of an after-dinner speaker at a public banquet: "How do you do, Aunt Josephine? I am Quartus. I am reading The Wind in the Wil lows, and I have forgotten my Russian oil !" At this the guests coughed and ran like rabbits into different rooms, and the three children sat down backward violently and stared ! Our Mother 146 ON OUR HILL took the book mechanically and held out one hand for the suitcase, which was not relinquished. "Why, Quartus, I am very glad to see you!" she gasped. "Only I didn t ex- ^HB^ P ec t you till next week. What do you do with the oil?" "I eat it. I must have it every day, and you will have to send to Boston. Which of these children is Secunda? The fat one?" "No, the middle-sized one," Our Mother murmured mechan ically. "But we can t have you eating Russian oil every day, Quartus, dear. That s dreadful ! We don t take medicine here." "But 7 do," said Quartus firm ly. "The boy, I know, is Ter- tius. He s quite big, isn t he? All these children are big. I am very tall, myself. My daddy is tall. He is in the navy. This is my ulster. My hair-brushes are in my bag. I have a mechanical toy in my trunk. It is called the E-rec-tor. I will explain it to you. It can lift a weight of a hundred pounds, it says, when Tertius COUSIN QUARTUS 147 it is built. Do you think it will ? First you take the electric battery and attach it - Fascinated, Our Family stared at him. Fas cinated, the visitors crept back and stood in the doors, listen ing. The chauffeur stood like the Wedding Guest he could not choose but hear ! The par lor-maid, rooted to the spot, checked like a pointer. Our Mother, usually as rapid in ac tion as a Gatling gun, wavered helplessly, to the intense de light of everybody. All per ceived that she, too, was hyp notized; that she had failed in her effort to get the suitcase; that she, who loathed mechan ical toys as she loathed lectur ing children, was now to listen to a child placidly lecturing on a mechanical toy ! Then you take the coupling-pins and secure them firmly to the main bars - Oh, that voice of Cousin Quartus ! High and shrill, nasal to a point never yet reached even in Cousin Quartus 148 ON OUR HILL that quintessence of New England, his ancestral tree, penetrating to the farthest recesses of the house, didactic, inescapable, unquenchable ! Un believably drawling, withal, so that each syllable, to be properly represented on paper, should occupy twice its length in vowels. The voice of Cousin Quartus was a perfectly unique sound. But now Our Mother rallied bravely and de tached her will by a supreme effort. "I think we will come up-stairs, now," she said with firmness. "Give Lena your suitcase, Quar tus. Now, children we will show Cousin Quartus the nursery." "And I will tell you about the connecting-pins, as we go," said Cousin Quartus placidly. "It is very in-ter-es-ting. I have explained it to a good many people. What wide stairs these are! I see there is no carpet on them. On all the stairs where I have been there has always been carpet. Did you understand about the E-rec-tor, as far as I had gone?" "And what will she do about that?" the guests inquired gleefully. Even so the surrounding populace smile doubt fully at some expert lion-tamer, as he follows a recent acquisition into the cage ! COUSIN QUARTUS 149 But it was all very simple, really. Our Cousin s was a sweet little nature, docile and biddable. It was not his fault that his lightest utterance had been eagerly received by adults, who had laughed consumedly at his pompous little jokes, listened reverently to his polysyllabic lectures, quoted his wise sayings -- which were not so very wise, after all - - under his observant little nose. A houseful of small people of his own age presented a cynical front to his somewhat long-winded philosophical assaults on their patience. Adults, so unaccus tomed to infantile monologues as to find them frankly impossible, exhumed from his ancestral New England maxims that precious epigram which encourages children to be seen and not heard. Porridge and bread-and-butter and rice pudding loomed large on his hitherto varied bill of fare, and early to bed soothed his nerves beyond belief. Our Mother hid the deforming khaki bloomers in a trunk, and Our Barber in the village trimmed the thatch of hair that soon fell over his ears into a "Dutch cut"; so that when he came down the stairs, hand in hand with Tertius, of a Sunday noon, in a short-waisted, big-buttoned suit like the children who used to romp through the Kate Greenaway books, the guests accused Our Mother 150 ON OUR HILL of importing him for purely decorative purposes, and appreciative artists wanted to paint his pic ture ! Tertius adopted him instantly, and the pair be came inseparable. After all, a little boy is a little boy, and Tertius had always been a sort of beau tiful pendant to the two sisters; now he had a natural mate. "It s really a very good thing for your little boy, isn t it?" people said. "You ought to have another, you know, yourself. Anybody who can have children like that. ..." It is most extraordinary how persons who would never dream of suggesting new methods of arranging one s hair, for instance, or a different color scheme for the garden, have no hesitation in advising one to increase one s family ! But so it is. For a long time Our Cousin kept, perforce, his sedentary habits, and lay mooning over a book in a long chair on the upper veranda, while below him the old Gloucester hammock rocked, a pirate sloop, in terrific gales (Secunda did the howling of the wind and Prima shrieked desperate orders through an old megaphone to Tertius, the bustling and obedient crew), or the rattling roar of their IP? ; \\v - m t- n-- & I I COUSIN QUARTUS 153 roller-skates on the concrete floor deafened all thought on the part of anybody who might be on the upper level. Anybody, that is, but Our Mother, who never notices anything but whining or bullying. For a long time Our Cousin could hardly walk without fatigue to the bottom of Our Hill, greatly to the bewilderment of Tertius, whose fat, dimpled legs had measured the distance to the village and back, a good four miles and a half, when four and a half was the measure of his years. "Oh, come on, Quart! Come on around the Triangle!" Secunda would urge him impatiently. " Don t flop around on your stomach all day !" "I d rather read," Cousin Quartus would reply imperturbably. "This is a ve-ry in-ter-est-ing book, Secunda; it is called The Wind in the Wil lows. Have you read it?" "Mercy, I ve read it long ago! Haven t you finished it yet?" : Ye-es, but I m reading it aga-ain." This went on for a month, till one day Our Mother, ostensibly making out a shopping-list on the veranda, but in reality gazing dreamily at Our View, which has never fully discovered its loveliness to us after all these years, happened to 154 ON OUR HILL lower her eyes to Cousin Quartus and his book. He was just finishing the last page, and as she watched him he flapped it over, turned back to the beginning, and fell upon the first chapter with the same placid interest. "Quartus," said Our Mother abruptly, "how many times have you read that book?" Oh, I do-on t kno-ow. Seven or eight, I "u 99 guess "I think I believe." "I think I believe. I like it. It is very in-ter-est-ing. Have you read it?" "Yes, I have. But I am getting frightfully tired of seeing you read it. Suppose you stop it !" " We-ell. But what shall I read ? " "Go in to the children s book-shelves and pick something out. Anything. And bring that book to me." Our Cousin disentangled himself carefully from the chair and retreated to the library. Our Guest marvelled. "I don t understand your methods with chil dren at all. You seem to keep your hands oft so much it s really quite amazing how you do that ! and then suddenly you jump in and do an arbitrary thing like that! If the child likes COUSIN QUARTUS 155 the book (and really, it shows a remarkable men tal development to pick out a book like that; it wasn t written at all for children!), why not let him ? What is your idea ? " "I never thought he picked that book out, my self," Our Mother replies. "Watch what he does pick out. I don t think he is reading, at all. At least, not what I mean by reading. If it was the Bible and he was Abraham Lincoln . . . but it isn t and he isn t. If he kept it up much longer, he ought to be in an insane asylum, and I should be !" After a certain interval Cousin Quartus emerges from the library with a large, flat, thin volume under his blue-striped arm. His big brown eyes are dancing with laughter. "I have found a lo-ovely book, Aunt Jo-oseph- ine," he cries. "It is ve-ry in-ter-est-ing. Would you like me to read it to you?" "Pray do," says Our Mother. And he begins with many happy giggles: "Said the chicken to the duck, Madam, I admire your pluck. Dive into the brook like you, Chicky would not dare to do. If I stood upon my head In the water, I d be dead! 1 156 ON OUR HILL "Quite so," says Our Mother dryly. "If I stood upon my head In the water, I d be dead !" carols Cousin Quartus. "And so he would, wouldn t he? That s ve-ry funny, isn t it, Aunt Jo-osephine ? If I stood upon my head - "I think we ve got the idea perfectly by now," says Our Mother. "Just read the rest to your self, dear boy." "Well, well!" says Our Guest. "That book should have been weeded out long ago," Our Mother explains. "Somebody sent it for Christmas. But the children like to color the pictures with crayons." "But how did you know all this?" the Guest queries. "Oh, I just felt it, somehow," says Our Mother. "What was the sense, you know? Seven or eight times ! And, if you really want it analyzed, I expect it was this way: he never quoted from the book. Tertius has had Alice in Wonderland for a bed book all this year, and Secunda did last year. They know it by heart. They apply it, in the neatest way, to all the crises of life the way any body does with Alice. Off with his head ! Se- COUSIN QUARTUS 157 cunda will say, if anybody displeases her, and they told me Prima was exactly like the White Queen: she cried before the thing happened ! But Quar- tus never mentioned his book. It was just a habit with him like smoking." How did the change begin in him? It was no more visible to the ordinary eye than the budding of a leaf or the growing stiffness of a puppy s paws. But suddenly he was running across the lawn; all at once he hopped up and down, for no reason at all, when not otherwise engaged. If Tertius issued an absent-minded command and turned away, it was not necessarily carried out, and when he turned to correct Quartus, Quartus kicked him and tussled violently. He still burst into ner vous, squeaky tears; he scratched wickedly, like a squirming kitten; he roamed off by himself and played solitary games, with no exigence of team work. But he did all these things less and less, and by winter-time Prima, with his help, could down the other two and yet feel that the contest had been an equal one. On his little sled he flew fast and far, and his steering was at times admittedly brilliant. While the girls were at school he and Tertius played and played and played. Tertius could not sit still, 158 ON OUR HILL and though Quartus would have liked to, there are no warm corners on Our Hill, and one has to keep moving if only to keep warm. Quartus would come in, red and hungry, and polish off two good platefuls of whatever was on the plate though he was still a bit critical as to puddings, and maintained that he didn t like tapioca. Hard sauce, with nutmeg on the top, he would simply never eat, and would slop a little milk, gloomily, over the groundwork for that usually much-relished dainty. Nobody had ever suggested his taking a nap; when the others retired for their siesta, Our Cousin lay and pondered in a long chair and read - if one could be sure it was reading from his famous book. "I am not a magician," Our Mother would explain modestly, "and bed at half past six is the most I insist on; you have to be used to a nap." But lo, and behold! After six weeks, Our Cousin, of his own free will, suggested going up stairs with the Three ! "I have a feeling that I should go to sleep, too," he vouchsafed; and after that a procession of four, each licking a tiny stick of peppermint or COUSIN QUARTUS 159 cinnamon or wintergreen candy, ascended the stairs, full of luncheon and virtue. The only practical annoyance that ever occurred to Our Mother in connection with Cousin Quartus - greatly to Our Friends surprise, who supposed that four is to three as worry is to peace was in connection with his nightly prayers. You would not, of course, have supposed this, because you think vaguely and in the mass, probably, about the daily calendar of childhood, unless you issue and maintain such a calendar, when you think definitely and in detail. And it is the details, as Lincoln or Euripides or Montaigne says, that count. Consider, now, how it would be. First Tertius emerges from the bathroom, permanently unbut toned, in regard to his back because the but tonholes were weakened when they came down to Secunda - - indescribably fresh and succulent, damp about the neck. Quartus, of course, fol lows him, but owing to the fact that on the boys bath nights the girls take what is broadly described as "a wash," reserving their more vio lent splashing for alternate evenings; owing, also, to the fact that Secunda is as quick as Quartus is slow, and is up on the third floor before his 160 ON OUR HILL clothes are piled on the chair beside his bed, to say nothing of his boots getting into line on the nursery hearth and the assembling of a troop of cavalry for review is child s play to Quar- tus s alignment of his boots ! owing, I say, to these facts, Secunda is ready for her prayers be fore Quartus. And Quartus, to Our Mother s in tense disgust, recites the Lord s Prayer, whereas Tertius still murmurs "Now I lay me" in the softest, most enchanting alto. On these occasions Our Mother cannot help feeling that he is a lucky Deity indeed to whom that cooing petition is ad dressed, and she wonders, jealously, if He knows it. ... Well, after Tertius has been, not sufficiently - for there is no possible repletion of caresses where that practised lover is concerned ! but reason ably kissed, Our Mother mounts the stairs to Se cunda, and listens to her rapturous saga of the day s Robin Hood adventures or the Crusader s feats that fill her play hours. Under her thick bronze waves of hair lies a tiny pine-needle pillow; on one side a featureless flat thing that was once a doll and not an attractive doll, in the least; on the other, what is technically known as "Se- cunda s bed donkey," a wabbly gray creature of COUSIN QUARTUS 161 nameless texture, with one flopping ear. Secunda arranges them mechanically, as you would pack your pillows for the night; there is no sentiment about it, no apparent affection. She never touches them during the day, but woe to the chambermaid who disposes of them out of their owner s reach at five minutes to seven ! "Forever n ever, amen," she concludes, feels for the bed donkey, verifies the faceless doll, puts her cheek on the pine pillow, and abruptly, before one s eyes, ceases to be conscious. She is not there, simply ! Does she leap, instantly, upon an Arab mare and scour the plain with Saladin? Is that gur gling laugh at some joke of Friar Tuck ? Nobody can know. Perhaps, for a time, long, low rollers from those mysterious white tides of oblivion that we call deep sleep wash over her quicksilver brain, blotting out for a little that joyous, elfin thing that is Secunda s self. Perhaps at that age chil dren go back for a little to where they came from and toss stars to each other across the Milky Way for an hour, or a century, or a second, calling to each other bits of celestial gossip through the in finite spaces. Perhaps ... but who can tell? Secunda is asleep. 162 ON OUR HILL Now Our Mother must go down again and re ceive between her spread knees the drawled devo tions of Cousin Quartus. Even at the throne of grace Our Cousin sniffs a mysterious sniff that no handkerchief can assuage, no forethought obvi ate. Moreover, he burrows and nuzzles into Our Mother s lap like a little calf; and this, to one ac customed to three, as it were, carven angels, with clasped palms just touching demure chins, is curi ously nerve-racking. One feels, somehow, like an idol, physically belabored by its desperate devotee ! "Couldn t you, Quartus, dear, couldn t you manage to pray a little more more out in the open, so to speak?" she beseeches him. "This is the way I always do," he says firmly, and literally buries himself in prayer. "And d-deliv-liv-er us from e-e-evil" (sniff) "I mean, from our trespasses. Amen," he sighs, and emerges. "I can say God bless a great many people, if you like," he suggests. "Oh, no. Leave something to Providence; why not?" Our Mother answers hastily, and retires as soon as possible to dress for dinner. And now begins the complication. At seven o clock Our Mother is splashing in the tub, at seven-fifteen she is dressing, and it is at seven- COUSIN QUARTUS 163 fifteen that Prima strolls in, the pinkest of the three. Prima is all white and rose and yellow and blue; her neck is like a china doll s, and her forehead and chin are quite white and melt with delicious pearly shadings into the deep pink of her plump cheeks. "Oh! May I stay? May I see you?" she oreathes. "I love those slippers! One of the girls mother has little tiny diamonds on the heels of hers did you ever? She asked if you did, and I said, No, indeed; w T e didn t care for things so fancy ! "If you upset that bottle, Prima, you simply won t have it when you re eighteen, that s all. They were your grandmother s, and I m saving them for you, but you know how slippery you are. (6 O-oh ! I wonder how I ll feel when my dresses are cut out like that. Do you think I ll look well, Mother?" "Very, I should say; blondes always do." "But my nose! Will it ever be like yours? Secunda says it ll always be funny and well, funny, you know! Will it?" :< You ll probably grow up to it Please don t fiddle with those jet pins, Prima!" 164 ON OUR HILL "But how ll I know what to say? I mean, when I go down to the drawing-room late, and the guests are all there ? You say something and they all laugh. Shall I?" "I wouldn t risk it," says Our Mother conserv atively. "You d better be on time, perhaps!" "Because I m fair not dark, like you? Is it better for fair people?" "There s a great deal in that theory," Our Mother agrees thoughtfully. "It often works out that way. Now, really, Prima, Fvelbeen looking for that white ribbon all this time ! It s my slip per ribbon it s not a fillet. You simply can t wait up, if you are so bothering. You d better come up earlier Saturday nights." "Oh, Mother ! Me ? Before seven ? " Those precious fifteen minutes of seniority are dear to Prima s soul; they elevate her above "the children"; they are the sign-manual and hall-mark of her ten years. "There! There comes somebody, now!" Our Mother observes irrelevantly. "Come on, Prima, I ll hear you now. Did I get any powder on my shoulder, Lena? That must be sunburn." Down drops Our Eldest; not in one continuous, flowing motion, like Secunda, who alights on her Between the girls, with a view to increasing his devotional velocity COUSIN QUARTUS 167 knees like a falling leaf; not with the delicate gravity of Tertius, who makes the statuettes of the Infant Samuel seem frivolous. No, Prima lumbers down, like the baby elephant in the arena, careful of her knees. And while her soft reverence rounds the periods of the great petition, Our Mother leaning over her the while, with respectful and perfectly honest attention, Lena carefully powders the sunburn - one hopes one isn t being too efficient ! A great idea came to Our Mother, after many weeks of Cousin Quartus s burrowings and snif- flings, and she harnessed him into a sort of spike- team between the girls, with a view to increasing his devotional velocity. At first it was rather hopeless; Prima, with set jaw, refused to abate her pace by so much as a millimetre, and our poor Cousin, dropping behind at "daily bread," lost a length by "trespasses," gasped and swallowed too long at "trespass against us," and found himself mumbling "deliver us from evil," with Prima s disgusted, "amen" firmly aimed at one ear, while Secunda bellowed "f r- ever n ever" accusingly into the other! The next evening he strategically omitted all reference to trespasses, employing the time gained by this 168 ON OUR HILL manoeuvre in taking breath for the rest of the prayer, only to be confronted by a scornful Prima and Secunda peony-colored with rage ! "I suppose you have no trespasses," bitingly suggests Our Eldest. "I wouldn t swallow while I prayed, if I was you/ sputters Secunda. "You yawn, yourself, every time, at "tres passes !" retorts Prima. "I do not!" "You do!" "I do- -" "Not another word!" says Our Mother firmly. Quartus, with great cleverness, takes no part in these discussions, but lets the storm rage on over his head ! "It is perfectly disgusting, Prima, when you know what we are doing this for," Our Mother begins. "Surely you might go a little slower." "But I thought it was to teach him to go faster?" Our Mother looks emptily across their heads. Could it ever be possible that she should dislike Prima? It seems so, at this moment. What a disagreeable person he must have been who would rather be right than be president ! Did his mother COUSIN QUARTUS 169 always love him? Of course, in a general way, nor height nor depth nor any other creature can ever separate one from the love of one s mother. If Prima should commit a murder, for example, or run away with the riding-master, it would make no difference. But if she persists in being in the right the literal right in any case, at any cost ? Our Cousin, when he came to us, was an experi enced schoolboy, and great was the doubt in many minds in Our Family Connection when Our Mother issued an ultimatum of "no school!" "He was in the third grade," said some one, "and it seems almost a pity. . . ." "It seems more of a pity to me," Our Mother replied coldly, "that a boy of nearly seven can t walk two miles without lagging and puffing, nor remember a message the length of a flight of stairs, nor scratch his finger without crying, nor throw a ball in front of him without sending it back over one ear!" "Really?" "Really," said Our Mother. "But he is a brave little fellow, we think." "Urn," says Our Mother. "Then he must learn, when Secunda suggests that there are bears 170 ON OUR HILL in the closet from which he s just got out his bath- wrapper, and growls he must learn not to scream for me !" "How will you teach him?" "Advise him to growl back and tell her one of the bears has got out!" And, curiously enough, he did. Our Cousin had a very neat little sense of humor, which made his training amazingly easy, and his quiet little chuckle, when this method of conquering nervous terror was suggested, was good to hear. "I tried it, and it worked," he confided gleefully to Our Mother. "Good for you ! What did Secunda do?" "Oh, she just sort of sniffed and walked off !" Thus Fate sometimes steps in and supports us. Not that his life was easy at first. None of the Three had ever before encountered Our Cousin s curious megalomania, his honest conviction (which had apparently misled many of his relatives) that words were the same as deeds. When he told them that he had been to Newport and Virginia and San Francisco they hooted scornfully and teased him unmercifully for a liar, till they found out, to their chastened amazement, that he had spoken the exact truth. After that, Tertius, who COUSIN QUARTUS 171 had never been farther than the village till he was five, regarded Cousin Quartus with veneration and believed his lightest words. So when he told them, largely, that he could run "any kind of a car," they glared jealously, knocked him down promptly, in their stupid, effi cient, Saxon way, and changed the subject. But it rankled; beyond doubt, it rankled. Ter- tius, after his prayers, stroked his mother s hand, cuddled her a little, and then asked shyly: "Couldn t I run the car? Couldn t Clark teach me? Quart knows how." "Oh, my dear, I hardly think so." "But he does. He said so. And he was on a dreadnought, once. He thinks maybe it was a superdreadnought; but it was a dreadnought, anyhow. All over it, he was." "All over it at once, angel?" "I dunno. Maybe." "Can he run the dreadnought, too?" "Oh, yes," says Tertius, quite simply. "Quart can run any kind of machinery, if he had a big enough motor, he says. I wish I d been to Fran Sanfrisco. Why don t we ever go anywhere?" "Because, dearest, you d never get anywhere," Our Mother answers seriously. "Everywhere you 172 ON OUR HILL got, they d never let you go on any farther. They d keep you there." "Why?" "Because you re so silly and sweet!" "Oh!" Behold us all at the front door. Cousin Quartus is walking wisely around the motor, giving here a knowing pat, there a critical frown. "Shall I advance the spark for you, Clark?" he inquires breezily. "No, thanks; it s quite right as it is, sir," says Clark gravely, with what is fondly believed by all to be a naval salute a ceremony he rarely omits in conversations with Our Cousin. "Oh, all right. I just asked, that s all. That is the dif-fer-ent-ial, down there. Is she working well this morning, Clark?" "Middling. Would you care to have her out for a bit, yourself -- sir?" Prima giggles loudly, Secunda vibrates between scorn and doubt, Tertius is frankly eaten with jealousy. Our Mother advances. "That s a very good idea," she says cordially. "Now, Quartus, since you know so much about this car, hop in and take us all down to the village. Then Clark can put in a little time on the lawn." COUSIN QUARTUS 173 "Oh, Mother ! Do you mean it ? Can he ? " "I don t know," says Our Mother. " That s what we re going to find out. Are you all ready, Quartus?" "Well, er I--er- " Mother, would you dare?" " Me ? Just watch me ! " says Our Mother (who plays a very fair game of poker) , mounting into the tonneau composedly. "The reverse isn t acting very well, Quartus, dear, if you want to use it. Are you ready ? " "Oh, I didn t mean that I do run her, Aunt Jo-o-se-phine," explains Our Cousin, still smiling. "I meant that I can run her !" "Ah," says Our Mother, "but if you can, why not do it?" "We-ell. . . ." The children stand breathless about him. Clark grins sardonically. "I don t mean that I can run her, exactly -- 1 mean that I know how to run her !" "Ah," says Our Mother, again, while the chil dren whoop joyously. "We all know that! Oh, Quartus! O-ho! 0-ho!" "And so he doesn t know a bit more than I 174 ON OUR HILL do!" Tertius cries, and administers a gay slap on the shoulder, under which our poor Cousin crum ples and reels against a pillar. " Tertius! Don t be so rough! I m dis gusted - "Rough!" Prima shouts derisively. "You call that rough ? Heavens ! He barely touched the boy ! If you breathe on Quartus, over he goes !" "Over he goes ! Whoof ! Whoof !" Secunda is inspired to add, and puffs out a blast so startling that Our Cousin, far too open to suggestion, ac tually sways like a reed; whereat Secunda whoops with mirth and turns three somersaults in rapid succession to relieve her feelings. "Whoof, whoof!" Priina cannot refrain from adding. "Whoof, whoof!" Tertius contributes. "Over you go, Quart! Whoof, whoof!" Suddenly pandemonium is let loose. Every body is whoofing and laughing and pushing. Riga, the big mother dog, comes up heavily, approaches Quartus from his utterly unguarded rear, opens her great mouth and sighs windily. "Whoof, whoof!" Quartus heels over like a rabbit, with a terrified squeak, kicking violently. Clark guffaws. Our COUSIN QUARTUS 175 Mother laughs helplessly, tries to catch somebody - anybody and shake it, fails, claps her hands for order, picks up Quartus under one arm, squirm ing and squeaking, and sets him down with em- -s. i "Whoof, whoof !" Tertius contributes. "Over you go, Quart!" phasis on the back seat, slamming the door after her. "Oh, me, me, me! Take me! It s my turn! Wait for me!" "Stop just exactly where you are," says Our Mother, "and listen to me. Not one of you shall go, not one ! You are excessively rude and rough. 176 ON OUR HILL I shall take Quartus for a ride alone. He is a silly little boy to boast about driving the car, because we all know he can t. But that is no reason for knocking him about like a ninepin. And you are very much mistaken, Tertius. I have no doubt he knows a lot more about the car than you do. He knows more about a great many things, in fact, as you may find out, if you live long enough - and let him live long enough ! "Now, Quartus, stop snivelling, and wipe your nose. No, you don t need your admiral s cap. All right, Clark!" "Well, of all the unfair things !" Prima swells with rage. "Just because a boy tumbles down if you say whoof to him, he gets the ride! I must say!" "I s pose Riga is wicked, too; she said whoof the worst of any of us ! " Secunda adds mutinously. "I wish my ankles was weak!" Tertius mur murs, glowering at his beautiful brier-scratched legs. "Be a cry-baby, Tert, and then you ll get rides," Prima suggests bitterly. "Boo-hoo! Boo-hoo!" Secunda improvises, and "Hoo, hoo!" Tertius wails, half in earnest, half laughing. COUSIN QUARTUS 177 "Aunt Jo-o-o-se-phine ! Oh! Aunt Jo-o-o-se- phine ! " Prima mimics, and Riga lifts a mournful, sympathetic howl, that echoes after us down the hill. They are very rude, aren t they?" Our Cousin inquires complacently. They certainly are," Our Mother returns shortly, "but they are very human, Quartus; and if you are going to school next year, my dear boy, you ll have to learn to get used to worse than that, you know." "But Prima won t be there, will she? She teases me the most." "She won t be a patch on what the boys at school will do to you. That s one reason why I don t stop them. You d better get used to it now. Otherwise you ll be dreadfully unhappy. You ve got to learn how to play." "Um. Learn-ing how to pla-ay seems ve-ry much the same thing as learning how to get knocked dow-own, doesn t it?" Quartus observes thoughtfully. "That s the idea exactly." "We-ell, in that case, I ought to be ve-ry clever at it when I go away from here, oughtn t I, Aunt Jo-o-se-phine ? " 178 ON OUR HILL Our Mother laughs abruptly and Cousin Quar- tus adds his jolly chuckle to her mirth. "Do you know, Quartus, you re a pretty good sport, after all !" she says warmly. And after all, isn t he? EXITS AND ENTRANCES OUR ROLES FULL many a part with a doubtful heart, I ve played on our Family Stage; From leading lady to capering clown I ve won your smile and I ve dared your frown, I ve wooed you to mirth and rage. No crowded audience sitting a-stare Held ever a terror for me, For only you three, my dears, I care Just three, my dears, just three ! Often the world has laughed with me, Often I ve made it cry; Sometimes it crowded my booth at the Fair, With flowers and favors to please me there, And sometimes it passed me by. But whether they came or stayed or passed, Or were they many or few, Twas only you, my dears, at the last Just you, my dears, just you ! Some of your parts will break your hearts, Some you can never learn, Often you ll run on the stage too late, Often you ll curse the grim old Fate That called you out of your turn. But villainous black or angel pure, Whichever you have to be, Of me, my dears, you ll always be sure Just me, my dears, just me ! EXITS AND ENTRANCES AS soon as Our Friends learned that Prima * * and Secunda had at last been taken to the theatre they demanded eagerly to know all about it, and Our Mother began as eagerly to tell them; that is to say, she thought she began to tell them. But after she had described the white smocks and the blue beads and the black-and-white check coats with China-blue collars and cuffs, and the little round white hats with blue-velvet bands; after the luncheon (with creamed potatoes) at the Holland House, and Secunda s waiting for every one to pass by on Fifth Avenue before she could cross the pavement to get into the wonderful up stairs part of the bus (woe to the friend who offers a motor, when we come to town !) , after the curtain had really rung up, so to speak, Our Friends began to grow a trifle restless. "But you are only telling how you felt, all the time!" they said. "What did Secunda say? Something killing, we know ! Did she act it all out, afterward?" 183 184 ON OUR HILL Now, as a matter of fact, Our Mother simply can t remember what they said. She doesn t know whether they acted it all out afterward, or not, principally because she never followed them about, in order to find out. Sensible children don t hunt audiences for those things. And the only remarks Secunda made began with "Why." Perhaps an examination for a Beaux Arts de gree, where one must answer offhand any ques tion that any professor of any subject chooses to fire at one, may result in something of the same sort of nervous wear and tear; perhaps a major surgical operation may leave the victim in the same subsequent physical prostration. Our Mother does not know, never having undergone either test. But she knows that she got home very white-faced, with dark circles beneath her eyes, and distinctly recalls that she never came down from her room, once she got up there, but had something sent up on a tray. It all seems very simple now. We trot up to the oculist, and down again for shoes, and in for a look at some pictures, and have lunch, and polish off " A Midsummer Night s Dream" or "The Tempest," and eat an egg sand wich in the train, and think nothing of it. EXITS AND ENTRANCES 185 But those first expeditions ! Our Mother was the only link between those excited, inquiring, eager little niinds and the strange, new world of the street, the restaurant, the theatre. You who take all these for granted, who graduated from these universities of public life long ago, forget that to the fresh mind undulled by use and wont, unstained by contacts innu merable, one thing is as piquant as another. You don t suppose, for instance, that a visitor from Mars or Venus would find the Colosseum or the Dresden Madonna or the Boston Symphony any more interesting than your kitchen or a crayon portrait of your uncle or the piano-tuner at work ? Believe me, he would not. The fact that any body at all existed on this quaint little planet, which he had always regarded as an addition to his evening sky only, would amuse him immensely, and while you were showing him the Brooklyn Bridge he would probably be marvelling at the way in which your ears were set onto your head. So when Our Friends begged Prima to describe her first day in New York, and she replied dreamily that she had creamed potato at the Holland House, they were very much put about, as my Cape Cod grandmother used to say. 186 ON OUR HILL "But . . . but . . . didn t you enjoy the play?" they asked. "Oh, yes. We had little tables, each one to our- self, and great, square napkins. I tucked mine in, but the grown-ups didn t." "What part of the play did you like best?" "I liked all of it pretty well. There was one sort of butler who was at the head; he stood by the door and the other waiting-men obeyed him. It had to be paid, what we ate. Wasn t that funny?" "It s quite clear that she hasn t inherited your imagination," said Our Friends coldly. :< Tell us, Secunda, darling, what did you like best in the play?" "I choosed mashed potato, too," Secunda re plies cheerily, "but I could have choosed sweet, if I d liked. But I took the same as Prima. And ice-cream, of course. We left some money over, on the little silver tray. It was for him. That s called a tip did you know ? I noticed that he did tip the tray, myself, but he didn t spill any off. I love New York, don t you?" "There, there," Our Mother soothes them, "never mind. It s hard lines, but they re honest, you see. You want to know what interests them EXITS AND ENTRANCES 187 (or you think you want to know) and they are telling you what interests them, that s all. You d better ask me what / thought about the play, hadn t you? You ll like it better. You see, I don t like hotel waiters I find their finger-nails dirty and I don t eat mashed potato. It s too fattening. And what I think about tips in this country, I d hate to tell you. So I can put my mind on Maeterlinck. I weep gallons at the Blue Bird, and get all sorts of reactions, just as the author intended I should. But I m trained. I ve been going to school down here in the world a long time." That s all very witty ..." they reply dis contentedly, but it s not at all witty it s sim ply true. What you forget is this, and you are always and forever forgetting it: when you take a six-year- old who has never left the grass and the rocks and the nursery bathtub to see a great parade up Fifth Avenue, you must not be vexed if the infant fails to notice the parade and stares at the crowds on the pavements. Do not ask me if the infant prefers the crowds to the parade, or fails to see that they are two separate things, or thinks the crowd is the parade, for I do not know. What 188 ON OUR HILL is more, if you catechise him I doubt if you will be able to find out. "Peter Pan" was Secunda s introduction to the drama. We had read it and discussed it and Our Mother thought they understood that every thing would come right in the end. Nevertheless, the livid and terrible face of the handless Cap tain Hook was too much for Secunda, and though one kept repeating to her: "It will be all right, darling, no one no one can beat Peter; he will never walk the plank!" her gasps turned to gulps, and the gulps turned to sobs, and her lovely, flushed cheeks were all stained with frightened tears. "I can t bear it any longer!" she burst out, at last, as the pirates backed the brave Peter farther and farther along the deck. Our Mother picked her up like a baby and walked up and down in the little corridor behind the stage-box, where we were one of a happy party, soothing her. "You needn t see any more, dear; don t sob so ! Or you can wait till this act is over, and see the children come home to Mrs. Darling then there won t be any more pirates." "No. I ll go back now. I think I ll have to. I won t cry out loud, Muddy !" EXITS AND ENTRANCES 189 So we went back, and she shuddered on Our Mother s lap, but refused to budge. "Pooh! I knew Peter Pan was all right, all the time!" Prima boasted scornfully, forgetting her brimming eyes, her bitten lip. "And I knew, too," Secunda retorts, "but I got all hot and then I got all cold, and my mouth shook." Our small hosts and hostesses sit stolidly in the box. "It will be all right," Our Mother assures them. "It isn t real, you know." "We know," they reply calmly. "Our govern ess read it to us. We don t mind." Now, which is really to be envied, poor Secunda, happy in her heart-break, or they whom art leaves unshaken? For such tests there are no adequate thermometers. Two years later, discussing these things care lessly around the lunch-table, Our Mother makes a surprising discovery. "Cunda s not such a baby, now," Prima vouch safes patronizingly. "I wasn t, then," says Secunda promptly, "only I was awfly s prised, that was all. I thought they d be parrots on that ship, and they were men. I couldn t get it straight." 190 ON OUR HILL "Parrots? What do you mean, lamb?" "Pirates, you know," she explains. "We hadn t read Treasure Island then, and I didn t know what they were. I thought twould be birds." "For heaven s sake!" "I thought that, too," Prima admits, "but I never said anything when I found out. Red and green, I thought they d be." "Of course. Because there s a parrot-house on every ship," Tertius remarks. "Don t you remem ber the fight in the parrot-house in Treasure Island ? Quart and I often play it. He locks himself into the parrot-house and I try to fight my way in." "Oh, darling, that s the pilot-house I" "Is it?" He looks blankly over his baked potato. Our Mother has a fleeting, amazing glimpse of his poor little confused brain. Did paroquets and gorgeous macaws with indigo tails flash among the cutlasses and the revolvers in his baby vision ? Was it some strange rainbow battle of the birds, half human, half nonsensical, and therefore pow erless to frighten her, that Secunda had expected, those long two years ago? And remember that this little glimpse inco the EXITS AND ENTRANCES 191 chaos of their growing knowledge is only one of a thousand that we never hear of, never dream of. Silently, secretly, they make the hourly adjust ments between their distorted conjectures and things as they are. Silently, secretly, they ponder upon the nightmare uncertainties that chance phrases of ours conjure up before their troubled fancy. Silently, secretly, they disentangle their humiliating mistakes from the underlying facts, and weave them into the groundwork of certain ties that we call knowledge of life. And only once in a long while a bit of wreckage like this parrot complex floats up from the surface of the placid ocean of their unplumbed reserves, their unfath omable discretions. It may be you were in the audience during that wonderful performance at the Hippodrome Se- cunda s first Hippodrome. It was a very ex traordinary affair; great, living, moving pictures of old times long past, old costumes long since abandoned. Out of the vast dimness of the stage there loomed an enormous abbey of the Middle Ages, with hundreds of little nuns running to matins with glowing tapers in their hands. Then, quite simply, from our point of view, Robin Hood and 192 ON OUR HILL his merry men burst into the foreground, and Our Mother caught her breath with joy for Secunda, who had just begun that devotion to the hero of the greenwood that has never waned. "Oh, Prima! It s him!" cried the excited child. "And there s Friar Tuck! There s Will Scarlett ! There s Little John ! " "Sit down, darling other people can t see." "Oh, where s Maid Marian, Muddy? Ah, there she is !" "That child has friends on th stage, huh?" says a massive woman, stuffing chocolate, be side us. "Makes it interesting for her, don t it?" "It does, indeed," Our Mother replies fervently, squeezing Secunda s hand. Friends on the stage! Thrice fortunate child, whose imperishable intimates shall beam on her as softly fifty years hence as to her enraptured eyes they beam to-day ! What will it matter to Secunda that quite other shapely limbs fill out that suit of Lincoln green ? What will she know or care if to-day s Maid Marian be as wrinkled and white-haired as she? (Only . . . could Se cunda ever wrinkle?) Deathless, forever young, Maid Marian of that day shall prance as prettily EXITS AND ENTRANCES 193 before Secunda s pince-nez as she does this after noon before her clear child s vision; so long as tenor voices exist upon the earth one shall be found for Robin. Interesting for her, indeed ! O woman chewing chocolate, you who see only a chorus-girl and a man in a green coat. Friends on the stage, in deed ! Secunda was born into a circle of such friends as you have never imagined, friends who will never fail her till she goes to join them in the great country of Dreams-come-true ! Now, suddenly, in comes a great, illustrious procession court, church, army, and commoners. The queen, draped in seed-pearls, ladies-in-wait ing, whose spread trains call for many pages, jest ers with bladders, bishops in copes. There is a golden blare of trumpets, a hollow rattle of hoofs - "Oh ! Oh ! Oh !" cries Secunda. "It s Rich ard ! It s Coeur-de-Lion! Oh, Prima!" "How do you know? Oh, yes, the fleur-de- lys," says Prima, and Our Mother grasps a hand of each, and promptly becomes a sounding-board of emotion, as wave on wave of their excitement thrills through her. Never imagine yourself to have experienced the real dramatic shiver, the 194 ON OUR HILL true frisson du theatre, poor celibates of this world. You must have sat between your own children, who were only yesterday, in the most absolute physical sense, yourself, sharing your very blood streams, beating with your very heart, to realize the tremor of Art interpreted by their pulses, throbbing against your own. On comes Richard of the Lion Heart, glorious upon his coal-black steed, sitting like a rock above its caracoles and curvets. On come his men-at-arms, with banners and trumpets. Thrones receive the mighty, courtesies sweep the ground, and the jousting begins. Only last week we were reading it and now, here it is, living before us. It seems too much to believe. Great twenty-foot lances batter against shields, the horses reel and plunge ... ah, the White Knight is unhorsed! In his glittering, clanking armor he clatters to the earth. A great sigh bursts from Our Family. "But he didn t really hit him hard; he fell off too easy," Prima criticises. "The horse expected it, too see how still he stands !" "Oh, Prima!" "He was really the best rider. Did you see how he told the horse where to go, just by moving his EXITS AND ENTRANCES 195 wrist? The other man had too much weight in his stirrups." "Oh, that doesn t make any difference," Se- cunda snaps out. "I wish you d keep still, if that s all you have to say !" "Why should I keep still? I have just as much right- "Prima. Not another word." "But haven t I as much " "Prima!" There falls a charged and threatening silence. Suddenly - - what is this ? In sweeps a messen ger, the crowd bubbles and seethes, a murmur grows to a roar. :s The Arabs . . . the Holy Sepulchre . . . dogs of unbelievers. . . . Crusade! Crusade!" Up towers the Lion Heart, up rises his black, mailed hand, out peals his piercing, kingly voice: "My friends, the Saracen dogs have seized the Holy Sepulchre ! They defy our Christian forces ! They defile the sacred places with idolatry ! Can this be?" "No! No! No!" growls the crowd, and "No! No! No!" Secunda gasps with quivering chin. "Who will follow me to Jerusalem to rescue the 196 ON OUR HILL Holy Sepulchre?" rings out that royal barytone. "Who joins me?" There is a rustle, a quick bound. "I ! I !" cries a shrill, sweet voice, and Secunda is standing on her chair, her cheeks scarlet, her blue eyes darting fire, the blue beads shaking on her heaving chest. "7 will follow! Death to the Saracen! 9 We pull her down, somehow, while the blase eyes of the Broadway habitues follow her curi ously, almost stirred from their languor. A faint whisper of interest spreads around us, like ripples from a flung stone. Then, as the scene darkens, the ripples fade out again, and the audience relapses into its accustomed challenging stupor. They go so often, they stare into so many spot-lights ! Now, slowly, the darkness lifts and turns to gray, to pearl. The abbey front dissolves, and a glistening white priest raises his arms below a monster cross outlined in fiery points. A snowy flock of choir-boys swing slow censers about his knees; the giant organ spreads a deep, Gregorian chant above, below, all around us. All sink to the ground in prayer. Waves of harmony shake the air, and the cross, incredibly enormous, bright ens brightens becomes unbearable. " 7 will follow! Death to the Saracen ! " cries Secunda EXITS AND ENTRANCES 197 Ah-h-h ! It is one solid mass of white light ! The organ thunders and pierces and climbs to its ultimate climax. Our Mother finds that one must breathe in order to live, and gasps thirstily (was that her sob, or Secunda s?). As the white cross fades and everything is engulfed in blackness, she realizes that it is not Secunda s face whose twisted mouth and smarting eyes she had somehow known about, but her own. Those are not Prima s cheeks that she is wiping they are her own. It is not the girls who are so tired and want their tea it is Our Mother herself ! "Now you see why people always must carry handkerchiefs," she scolds. "How disgusting of you to use your smock, Secunda ! Prima, one s sleeve is just as bad !" "I--I was going to take my gloves," Prima mumbles humbly, "but but you re wiping your- self on em !" Well, well, what is Art for, anyway? By that blessed arrangement of Providence which allows for every kind of temperament in the same family, we have each one her choice when it comes to methods of dramatic presenta tion. Our first Shakespearian interpretation was in 198 ON OUR HILL terms of the new Russo-German color movement, and Oberon and his attendant fairies dreamed through their Midsummer Night with faces and hands all golden, while Titania slept under a pea cock-blue gauze canopy in the open forest. Se- cunda thought all this very delightful, but to Prima s literal mind it was distressing in the ex treme. "In the first place," she announces didactically, "I don t care for this sort of thing at all. When 7 go to a play, I don t want it to be a cheat; I want the real thing." "Real? Real?" Our Mother echoes vaguely. "But none of this is real, you know." "You don t see what I mean, Mother." (On Prima s tombstone this frequent phrase should be carven: They didnt see what I meant.) "A street can be real, can t it? Well, when the programme says a street in Athens, I think they should make real-er houses not just put a piece of cloth with a few doors and windows just painted on anyhow. Why, when the wind blows, they wave they simply wave !" "Oh, I love that," Secunda cries. "It makes you think of a street in Athens, and that s all you need, Prima." EXITS AND ENTRANCES 199 "It may be all you need; it s not all I need. I call it a cheat. And a silly cheat, because every thing is the wrong color, mostly." "But, niy darling, all the theatre is a cheat " "You don t see what I mean, Mother." "My good child, your mental processes are not so subtle as all that, I assure you. I see perfectly what you mean. Only Secunda and I don t agree with you. You are, as usual, a trifle behind the movement, that s all. You mean that you prefer a rather obvious illusion which deceives nobody, after all. The purely decorative and symbolic doesn t appeal to you; you want real water in the pump." "Yes," says Prima firmly, "I do." "You and Secunda represent two distinct schools: I will take you to Beerbohm Tree s Shakespeare, where the shoe-buckles are museum pieces and the water comes direct from the Grand Canal. Everything is much too heavy to flap in the wind, there." A subdued chuckle from the seats behind re minds Our Mother that some one not of the Hip podrome-audience type is getting more entertain ment than his ticket calls for, and she lowers her voice. 200 ON OUR HILL "And certain stars shot madly from their spheres To hear the sea-maid s music. . . ." "Isn t that lovely, girls?" "Not to me," says Prima promptly. "That s the trouble with Shakespeare plays there s so much talk. Nobody goes about and talks like that. It has nothing to do with the play." "Do you know what I think is the best thing in Shakespeare?" Secunda vouchsafes. "What, darling?" Several people lean forward shamelessly. Our chuckling neighbor behind us says, "Hush!" per fectly clearly to his wife. "I ve noticed that whenever a drunken person comes on, we all laugh, and there usually is a drunken person two, at least after a lot of the pretty talking!" You mean he is better at comedy than trag edy?" Our Mother inquires humbly. "If tragedy is talking long poetry things, yes." That is perfect Shakespearian criticism," says our neighbor, leaning forward. "Please don t try to talk low" (here he calls Our Mother by name). "We knew by the children s names who they must be, from my sister, and now we are sure. Our name is. EXITS AND ENTRANCES 201 He owns more first editions and folios than anybody in this country. We saw the Merchant whetting a Venetian knife on the (doubtless) Venetian sole of his shoe, and agreed that the trial scene was thrilling, but that it was scarcely probable that two such ladylike attorneys as Portia and Nerissa could have de ceived even a Venetian judge. We saw : The Tempest," laboriously reconstructed after a pre sumable sixteenth-century model, and agreed that it was good in spots, but contained many irrele vant scenes. We saw an open-air version of "The Taming of the Shrew," where, with one tin table and two chairs and an amateur cast to support him, a very able actor, assisted by one Will Shake speare, of Avon, so presented Messer Petruchio as to send both children into gales of laughter. The tears of mirth rolled down Secunda s cheeks, and she clapped her hands till the audience shared her enthusiasm, and recalled him again and again. "There must be something in this Shakespeare idea, after all," Our Mother admits, watching Secunda mop her dancing eyes. Of course, we didn t go to these plays with no idea of what we were going to see. No, we read each one absolutely and entirely 202 ON OUR HILL through, taking the parts ourselves, out of three entirely unexpurgated volumes, and if you could have heard Secunda declaim: "The law allows it and the court awards it." If you could have heard her laugh scornfully when Our Mother read: "Mark, Jew! A Daniel come to judgment!" If you could have heard Prima snort when Our Mother exulted: " I thank thee, Jew, for teaching me that word ! . . . " If, I say, you could see how quickly and deeply all the important parts of the play appealed to them, and how much real entertainment they got out of it all, you would not complain that there were no more musical comedies for your children to see. Only, of course, you must help them a little. Probably the little Greeks had to have CEdipus ex plained to them a bit. Nobody has to explain a row of ladies of the chorus, kicking their heels into space, I admit they explain themselves. That is why, one supposes, they don t get into the dic tionaries. But it is doubtful if we should ever have ad- EXITS AND ENTRANCES 203 mired even such obvious affairs as the sunsets and the oceans if the poets and painters had not ex plained them to us, dying in poverty, more often than not, so that we might be the richer. Make no mistake, my friends; beauty can be taught beauty of line and color, beauty of the melody of lutes and trumpets, beauty of the spoken word, the written phrase. And hands that have tried, when they were tiny, to catch for a moment the robe of the fleeing goddess, have learned at least the texture of her garment and will never be deceived by the shoddy of the mills. Nothing could be simpler, Our Friends always suppose, than forecasting the relative abilities of Prima and her sister. They are two such distinct types, you see, and everybody understands, or thinks he understands, the earmarks of that popu lar subject of discussion, the artistic temperament. "Secunda will make a wonderful actress," they say easily. Now, it must be admitted that in her first French play at school, where she was a humble member of the mob in the "Sleeping Beauty in the Wood," Secunda "brought down the house," as they say, at the age of six or so. She sat, sunk 204 ON OUR HILL in the magical hundred years dream, and never raised an eyelid. When the Prince kissed the Prin cess, she lifted her head slowly, yawned, gazed about her, and stared with such convincing sur prise at the cast grouped about her that they were visibly overcome, and one courtier, completely de ceived, shook her violently to wake her ! It is also true that the next year, clad in grayish-green silk "tights," as a glow-worm, her few explosive sen tences provoked the adoring laughter that has al ways been her portion. But to Our Mother s jealous eye it was quite clear that Secunda was not acting she was merely being Secunda - bewitching, graceful, provocative of eye and ges ture, straight and sturdy, a pleasure to behold, for health and symmetry. But she was not acting. And when, in the Christmas play of the follow ing year, Prima, a Dutch peasant boy, led her on as her sister, it was surprisingly clear that Prima was acting. Secunda smiled at the audience, gig gled, was obviously the same little girl one had watched in the dancing class. But Prima was little Hans, poor but honest, kind to lame witches, filled with righteous anger at selfish princesses. That is to say, Prima has a capacity for technic of almost any sort. Secunda looks like a bar of EXITS AND ENTRANCES 205 music, but she plays the piano like any little girl who has been taught to, and cries with rage when she forgets the notes, while from Prima s blunt- Prima was little Hans, poor but honest tipped fingers there fall the most delightful bell- like sounds firm, powerful, convincing. A curi ous emotional quality is communicated to her listeners; the room grows still. I cannot tell you that she feels more than Se- 206 ON OUR HILL cunda, for I am less and less certain, as I grow older, how much anybody feels. Some of us have a greater technic of expression than others. But she has that subtle and unmistakable thing we call "the touch"; that power of using her tiny and immature technic, such as it is, as a vehicle merely, not an end. So that many of our grown up friends, throwing off the fruit of many hours daily practice in octaves and cadences, sound like pianolas beside her. Again, Our Friends look at Secunda s pointed fingers, and say: "There s an artist s hand for you !" But Secunda is a butter-fingers and clumsy with a pencil. Her mind is quick, as lightning is quick, but like the lightning its results are too often merely beautiful and destructive. But Prima s sheet of autumn leaves, drawn and colored from nature for Our Mother s birthday, though they are in the beginning merely carefully accurate, flower into a tawny day-lily, the next year, that gives one a sort of feeling; and by the following summer she has drawn, colored, then conventionalized a design of buttercups that stands framed upon Our Mother s bedroom desk. Some day your bedroom may be hung with her EXITS AND ENTRANCES 207 chintzes. But because her speech is literal and her mind fights each new idea as the Red Indian fights a bathtub, you are all convinced that she has no imagination. You see, unless you are by way of being in the productive line yourself, in which case you realize that it is not in feeling things, but in making other people feel things, that Art consists, and that this means work, if only in those rapid changes in the soul s dressing-room when you jump out of your skin into theirs and then back again; unless, I re peat, you understand what it is to be the world s mirror a self -polished, self -revolving mirror, cun ningly set so that the world may catch in you illuminating glimpses of itself at unexpected an gles; unless you understand that what you call artistic temperament is only a means and not an end, people like Prima will continually surprise you and people like Secunda will continually dis appoint you. Of course, when Secunda throws a striped black- and-white silk petticoat over her head and shoul ders, fastens it with a garter for a headband, tucks her smock into her bloomers, and gallops across the room shouting, "I m an Arab look!" you catch your breath. 208 ON OUR HILL She is an Arab, and you expect a date-palm and a camel to grow into the corner of your bedroom. When she crams a red stocking over her curly "I m an Arab look!" head, so that the toe hangs over her shoulder, and thrusts a great paper-knife into the bloomers, announcing, "I am one of those killing people that jump out suddenly!" you look for the EXITS AND ENTRANCES 209 rest of Carmen s cast to emerge from behind the bureau. When she appears in a green silk jersey jacket, buttoned behind, with the rubber cap from the shower-bath cocked over one ear and a crimson plume stuck into it (oh, heavens, is it pinned into it?), she does not need the cross-bow she has con structed from a crooked bough and an old shoe- lacing. You call out, "Robin Hood," and win a pleased grin. "Prima told me to put it hind side before and make a jerkin. She borrowed the feather from the cook. Pins don t really hurt rubber, do they, Muddy ? Aren t I good ? " "They do. You are." "If I had a dollar n a quarter, I could buy a real bow!" "As long as artists require models you need never suffer for bread," says Our Mother coldly. "Did you have to use a safety-pin?" It was Prima who staged the famous Memorial Day Circus, staged and drilled and costumed it. The invitations, including tickets, five cents each (for the benefit of the American Fund for the French Wounded) , were sent to each bedroom, and one of our two Little Sister Guests painted beauti- 210 ON OUR HILL ful gold horses on the programmes, which sold for three cents more. For days it had been preparing, and nobody had the remotest idea how good it was going to be. There were seven events on the programme - grand entry, clown tricks, tumbling, and acro bats, Indians and cowboys, and at the last- dancing and poetry ! Prima painted Bakst-like spots all over a set of Tertius s pajamas, for one clown suit, and Cousin Quartus had a real Pierrot dress, in yellow and black, of his own. Prima, in her French play cos tume of the King of the Pumpkins, a brilliant orange figure, led the pony, where Secunda sat enthroned, a vision of blush-pink crape paper with a green bud for a cap : the spirit of the rose. The week-end Guests sat on the porch directly in front of the ring, which was the oval entrance drive, feeding quick, brassy records into the phonograph, waiting patiently. When one tall, thin Sister Guest walked slowly around, her shoul ders draped in our best motor rug, and, suddenly, bowing low, shot up into a woman seven feet tall, they applauded wildly. Prima had constructed a framework beneath the rug and a painted face on top, so that the child unfolded like an accordion. EXITS AND ENTRANCES 211 When Cousin Quartus solemnly waddled around the ring, his double-jointed ankles turned inside out, his slender feet pointing every way but the Tertius sits like a statue of victory! right way, we realized that the commercial value of what had hitherto been treated as a disability had been seized with all a Barnum s perspicacity. Now Little Sister Guest and Tertius, two deli cious clowns, drag in the old rocking-horse, and ar range in serious and perfect pantomime the terms ON OUR HILL of a race from tree to tree, one mounted, the other on foot. At a given signal the Little Guest lopes clumsily away, and as soon as her back is turned Tertius slides off the horse, reverses its nose like lightning, to touch the winning tree, and sits like a statue of victory ! The audience claps its hands sore. The beaten clown, after one more attempt, indicates that he will ride, Tertius gravely agrees, and at the signal, speeds like the wind to the oppo site tree, leaving his opponent, who does not know the trick, stupidly rooted to a motionless steed ! It is a real conception, a typical clown act, one we have never seen before. And who invented it ? Who but Prima, the obstinately literal ! Behind the evergreens that mask the kitchen ell and make their greenroom, she stands; hers is the beckon ing finger that calls them back, hers the com manding wave that admits an encore. Now come the acrobats, and Secunda leaps the old garden-bench and revolves in three airy hand springs as she lands, in a curiously effective remi niscence of the sawdust. Now Quartus, gravely grinning, does his famous nineteen consecutive somersaults. Now Indians file around the council-fire (two braves and a squaw in complete war-rig) , and Se- EXITS AND ENTRANCES cunda whoops and pats the green turf and bends amazingly from her supple waist. They flee be hind the Austrian pine, and Prima and Big Sister Guest in cowboy "chaps" and United States khaki scout knowingly among the telltale ashes. "Redskins have been here, Captain," says the cowboy briefly, and the plump and pistolled cap tain mutters: "Yes, but we ll get them!" Bang, bang, bang ! Whoop, whoop ! The red men stagger and fall, their arrows scat tered helplessly beside them. The scout and cap tain shake hands and bow gravely. The audience cheers loudly. "Really, you know, this is extraordinary !" says Our Foreign Guest. "I never enjoyed myself so much in my life! D you mean to say they had no help?" Now there is a long wait. We play Russian music on the phonograph and smoke cigarettes. What is the next ? Ah, yes, "poetry and dancing." They enter solemnly and sit in line on the gar den-bench. Big Sister Guest rises and announces, pale with stage fright: " Abou-ben-Adhem! " 214 ONOURHILL The audience gulps, but controls its countenance. Prima, somewhat flushed, her dancing-school frock imperfectly fastened, twists one leg around the other and proclaims: "The Village Blacksmith!" "Oh, no! Impossible!" somebody murmurs, but Prima moves relentlessly through this depress ing masterpiece, sparing not a line. They prompt each other marvellously. Each child, apparently, is a storehouse of classic doggerel. "Toiling, rejoicing, sorrowing, Onward through life he er Onward through life he . . ." "Goes!" comes a hollow whisper. "Oh, yes, goes. " * Each morning sees some task begun, Each evening sees it close, Something attempted, something done, Has earned a night s repose/ Lord Tennyson!" she concludes breathlessly, and Our Mother be comes frankly hysterical. Now Secunda, who sits side-saddle on the bench, like a Degas ballet dancer, is urged, nay, poked violently, to go on. But she will not. EXITS AND ENTRANCES The real artistic temperament is about to exhibit itself before the interested audience. "Secunda, you must!" "Goon, Cunda!" She twitches her soft pink shoulder; she scowls like a fury. Her abbreviated skirt is petalled like a rose and her pink-silk leg kicks viciously at the actor-manager. The green -and -pink rosebud cap tips over her bronze fluff of hair at an angle to undermine the principles of the most ascetic. "By Jove, is she acting? The little witch!" Our Foreign Guest whispers. "She doesn t have to," says Our Mother. "If that s not a prima donna for you!" ob serves somebody els*e. "Offer her two thousand and a percentage, Prima !" suggests Our Mother cynically. Now a few passionate tears spurt from her angry violet eyes; she will not, she will not, she will not! "Oh, all right," mutters the actor-manager. "Let her alone, the little pig! Come on, Ter- tius." And Tertius arises. A sigh of pleasure exhales from the audience. He is so lovely, the darling thing ! 216 ON OUR HILL The hazel-green suit that Secunda wore as a glow-worm encases his exquisite little body, his baby arms and neck, still (but, oh, for so short a time now!) dimpled, emerge, bare, like rosebuds and sea-shells, soft, like nothing but themselves. His face is perfectly grave and a little pale. "He looks like Parsifal dressed as Nijinsky !" Our Foreign Guest bursts out. His great eyes open wider. He is about to begin. "But what can he recite?" Our Mother babbles nervously. "He doesn t know any poetry !" Now he makes a quaint little bow. "The Twenty-third Psalm" he says gently, "by Tertius!" "Oh, no ! I can t bear it ! It isn t true !" Our Mother gasps. But it is true. " The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want" begins that lovely, soft alto. "He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. ..." Everybody leans forward, breathless. Under the turquoise sky, with great green boughs sway ing high above him, that baby stands in hazel- green tights and recites one of the greatest of the EXITS AND ENTRANCES 219 Psalms of David, with a pure and musical articu lation that brings out every vowel. " Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. . . ." Oh, the dimples in his elbows ! " My cup runneth over. . . ." He is like a Donatello faun --but his voice is the voice of the cherubim. "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever," he concludes, and adds gently: "By Tertius," bowing again his quaint little bow. He has done his best. He has recited the only piece he knows for the Circus. Our Mother weeps and laughs and weeps again, while everybody pats her consolingly. "There, there, he s perfectly wonderful," they say. "Of course, of course!" "D d do you th-think he ll die?" she gulps. "Oh, no, no! He won t die," they soothe her. "Really, I wouldn t have missed that for a hundred dollars ! Aren t children extraordinary things ? You ought to be proud of em, by Jove ! Do you know, I ll never forget this. Haven t you got a camera, somebody?" 220 ON OUR HILL But mothers have no need of cameras. Peas ant or patrician or Queen of Heaven, alike, they keep all these things and ponder them in their hearts ! MAGIC CASEMENTS RESURGAM ENG ago didst thou leave us, Cinderella ! Long ago fled Puss in his Boots, the valiant, Long ago did the Three Bears, faintly growling, Vanish forever ! Far away from us now floats the Little Mermaid, Far away on her icy sledge the Snow Queen, Far away has the Ugly Duckling fluttered, Never returning. Where is Robin s band in the Merrie Greenwood? Where is Richard, the King, the Lion-hearted? Where is Galahad gone and where is Tristan, Lover and martyr? Ah, but who weeps thee now, Pandora, sister? Ah, but who censures Psyche, the goddess driven? Ah, but who thrills at Hercules the hero, Lion-clad victor ! Now we are old, to-day s poor tattlings tempt us; Now we are old, the Gods have lost their glamour; Now we are old . . . oh, Great Ones, never forsake us Keep us in springtime ! MAGIC CASEMENTS "^ INHERE aren t any fairies any more, are -- there?" asks Tertius. "Perhaps not any more," says Our Mother, and she fell to thinking why this should be. Of course, you would not insult us by beginning to talk about X-rays and the telephone and wire less telegraphy. None of these things makes the slightest difference, really. The X-ray is very young, to-day a half-developed magic. She can show us but our skeletons, which we knew all about before; and she hints at our intestines, which we had surmised. By the time we call her in to explore those mysterious miles of our underground factory where health is in process of making or destruction, she can only confirm what we had sadly guessed. Had we been able to keep her out, she need never have come in. Had we sucked in great lungfuls of the clean breath God breathes about this restless planet (do you know what the air is and why ?) , had we pumped it through those red rivers that rush so furiously from top to toe of us, morning, noon, and night (do you know 225 ON OUR HILL what keeps blood flowing?), had we thrilled to that red mystery, the piston of our life, so that it pounded with the majestic beat of nobler and nobler impulse (do you know what makes your heart beat ?) - - the exquisite crash and balance and sway of these extraordinary mechanisms we call our bodies would have been so sweetly tuned and adjusted that the result would require no more dissection than a sunset. What the X-ray fairy is trying to do is to go in a little deeper and show us our ghosts; that is, to prove to the incredulous among us that we have ghosts a fact so well known to our ancestors that they explained it to their babies in nursery -tales ! But Science is so slow, so slow ! Of course, the telephone is very wonderful. It must be, because everybody says so, even the men that invented it. Instead of calling into the next room, "What time is it?" you ring a bell and say: "Will you please give me the time, Central?" And a little dry old voice like a parrot s crackles back at you: "Nine fifty-eight." For years I did this every morning, under the impression that I was getting in this way the superlative, concentrated essence of correct time: time absolute, so to say, where They made it. MAGIC CASEMENTS 229 And then, one day, I found out that Central, on these occasions, consulted a small celluloid alarm- clock on her desk, which she set by guess, when she came into the office, and corrected with the assistance of a speculative office-boy and a Water- bury watch. That is why I always feel that you never know where Science is leading you ! And in the Mid dle Ages they burned scientific men at the stake from much the same impulses of incredulity and irritation ! I sat at an enormous banquet-table in New York once, where we all fitted little black disks to our ears and listened to one of our number who ad dressed a question to some one in San Francisco. For this epoch-making event the wires had been cleared across three thousand miles of space, and no other words but this one man s might travel across the rivers and prairies and mountains and deserts. It was like the red-velvet carpet one spreads before the feet of the kings of the earth. And this is what we heard him say: "Hello, Mr. Smith!" Mr. Smith squeaked back, "Hello!" from San Francisco. "How s the weather out there, Mr. Smith?" 230 ON OUR HILL And Mr. Smith, in a wheezy chirp that sighed through the immemorial redwoods of California and echoed back from the jagged peaks of the Rockies, answered: "Fine!" And I felt that the Ancients in their sculptured tombs were yawning at us. Wireless telegraphy, if you like, begins to look as if it might be really mysterious one day. As long as a thing needs copper wire I refuse to admit that it is anything more than a high-grade adventure. But even wireless telegraphy can only help you to find out what I say. You never can know what I think by it. When the fairy grows up to such point that I cannot conceal my thought from you I will begin to thrill to it; when it can reach out and tap the stored thought of the race, I will stand amazed; when it can tremblingly extend its magic antennae across the crawling fogs of Form and the chilly mists of Time and the empty voids of Space, and tell me if there is anything beyond and hint at what it is then, like the prophets, I will cover my eyes and worship. "How does the mometer know how cold it is?" muses Tertius. MAGIC CASEMENTS 231 "It s the mercury, silly --that sort of little button-thing," Prima informs him. "Mercury is a god," says Secunda, "a Greek god; isn t he, Muddy? Tertius looks puzzled. "Oh, well, God knows everything," he concludes amiably. Long ago it was that we read of the Greek gods, long ago ! Secunda has since gone through Miss Alcoit s harmless tales, which, with the exception of the immortal "Little Women," Our Mother can t read any more. Prima has begun to ask for "something exciting, couldn t we, and not for children?" They pore over stories for girls, which are to be distinguished from each other by the costumes of the girl heroines alone, skipping any poetry that may occur. "But, darlings, all that stuff is just alike," Our Mother complains. "Well, I s pose there aren t so many different things to say about girls, you know," Secunda suggests good-humoredly. "I suppose a good many girls are alike." It seems so long since we sat on the big 232 ON OUR HILL veranda, in the hot, blue afternoons after tea, Prima stretched out rotundly on a chaise-longue, Secunda perched on some projecting corner, Ter- tius musing in his little chair. They used to look like the listening children in expensive illustrated gift -books, their legs were so pink and firm above their white socks, their hair was so fluffy and square-cut around their plump pink cheeks, their eyes so gravely attentive. Our Mother s eyes slip from the page to their faces, from their faces to the great white pillars, so round and pure against the blue. "This is just like Greece, children," she says suddenly. "If the columns were only broken, it might be the Parthenon !" "A great many beautiful things seem to be broken," Secunda murmurs. "I wonder why?" "Oh, prob ly everybody patted them, and so after a while they got worn out," Tertius suggests helpfully. "You pat a kitten a good deal and it gets sick." "And now, a slice of your brown loaf, pray, Mother Bau cis, and a little honey," asked Mercury. Baucis handed the loaf, and though it had been rather a hard and dry loaf when she and her husband ate some at tea-time, it was now as soft and new as if it had just come MAGIC CASEMENTS 233 from the oven. As to the honey, it had become the color of new gold and had the scent of a thousand flowers, and the small grapes in the bunch had grown larger and richer, and each one seemed bursting with a ripe juice. "There ought to be milk and purple grapes and honey here, now," says Our Mother. "Perhaps if there were, with these high white columns and the sky so blue, the gods might come again !" "Read about the wish they made," Secunda begs, and we read: Philemon and Baucis looked at one another, and then I do not know which spoke, but it seemed as if the voice came from them both. "Let us live together while we live, and let us die together, at the same time, for we have always loved one another." Classical scholars assure one that Hawthorne gave a sugary atmosphere to his "Tangle wood Tales," but Our Mother, even when she came to read Greek, in the days when one had time to read Greek, found that it was all as she knew it would be. That violet sea, those white-armed goddesses, the honey and the shepherds and the dryads whose soft breasts were overgrown with cruel bark she learned them all from the "Wonder Book" her mother read to her. But here we find a difference. More than hap- 234 ON OUR HILL piness itself Our Mother loved the pathos of the legends. Beauty, in its depths, must produce sadness, and this sadness is not the sadness of rain-on-a-picnic-day, or your mother s frown, or no-chocolates-in-the-box. No, it is a happy sad ness, a poignant perfection of sadness, a necessary sadness. Lo, and behold, Our Family does not care for these emotions. "If you re going to read about that little Pros erpine that goes down into the ground, I m not going to listen," says Prima, gulping ominously. "I think it s too sorrowful." "But, dearest, it s so lovely!" "I don t see anything lovely about a little girl that can t ever see her mother. It s not fair, just because you eat one little pomegranate seed, never to see your mother!" she bursts out. "And the bull carried little Europa away, too, and she never saw her mother again ! If I wouldn t like a thing to happen to me, I don t care to read about it, myself." It had never occurred to you, perhaps, to re gard the entire mythology of the Greeks from the standpoint of the amount of maternal separation involved, but once considered in that light, the lit- MAGIC CASEMENTS erature of that great people becomes one heart rending series of orphanings. And here again the fairies troubled us. All the beautiful fairy-tales are sad did you realize it? "Blue Beard" and "Cinderella" turn out well, of course, but they are not really beautiful. Hans Andersen, surely one of the great poets of his generation, is as sad as the Greeks. "The Little Mermaid" and "The Snow Queen," still sources of pure and exquisite joy to Our Mother, were really too painful to Our Family; even Se- cunda twisted uneasily in her chair and said she d rather have a little more "Swiss Family Robin son." To Our Mother the vivid colors and won derful deep words of "The Snow Queen," the curious, powerful atmosphere that mixes, as only the Anglo-Saxon can, simple, homely facts of peasant life with the ineffable, jewelled tints of faery, the light that never was (and yet men and women have always known how to paint it !) - to Our Mother, I say, this tale has a beauty too profound for analysis. It is as distinct a thing by itself, as real a thing, as any strain of Chopin or drawing of Diirer or pot of beans baked by a New England wife. Often and often Our Mother has tried, as a 236 ON OUR HILL worker in words, to search into the roots of that wonderful, definite charm, never to be found in French or Italian or Spanish fairy-tales no, nor Russian, either. It is utterly lacking to the Ori ental mind, and perhaps that is why we could never take the "Arabian Nights" seriously in Our Family. They are ingenious and witty and colorful, but we could never thrill to them. It is so difficult to care what happens to any of them, you see, any more than one cares for the fate of chessmen. But poor, poor Little Thumbling! Passed on from Field-Mouse to Mole, working her way so good-temperedly, so patiently, yet never where she would be, never where she can love as she knows how to love oh, even when the beautiful Swallow carries her to the South, and she is to be happy, somehow, it has been a sad little story ! To Our Mother the greens and glooms of the depths beneath the sea were as well known as if she had been born there, for she had lived and loved and died so often with the Little Mermaid! One night her sisters came arm in arm, singing most mournfully as they glided over the water. She beckoned to them and they recognized her and told her how sad she had made them all. After that they visited her every night; MAGIC CASEMENTS 237 and one night she saw far away her old grandmother, who had not been to the surface for many years, and the sea king, with his crown on his head. They stretched out their hands toward her, but did not venture so near land as her sisters. And the frozen mysteries of the North, how well Our Mother understood them ! Had she not trembled on the kindly reindeer straight through Finland and Lapland with the little Gerda, search ing for her Kay, a slave to the wicked, brilliant queen in her icy palace ? "I fancy there is somebody coming behind us," said Gerda, as she felt something sweep past her. Shadows of horses with flying manes and the thin legs of huntsmen, and ladies and gentlemen on horseback seemed to glide past her on the wall. "They are only dreams," said the crow, "they come to fetch the thought of our royal folk to go a-hunting." Our Mother found the Bayeux tapestries in that little picture, and sometimes she thinks that Secunda does, too. And this brings us back to the beginning. Why are there no fairies any more ? This, I think, is the reason: Because nobody can write about them any more. Since Alice the Great walked through her Looking-Glass and into her Wonderland, what chronicler has handed on the sacred torch? 238 ON OUR HILL When Mr. Rudyard Kipling wrote "The Brush wood Boy," I began to think he might have caught the spark, but he never did it again. And to those of us whom Charles Kingsley and George Macdonald and Jean Ingelow led into the mystic country of familiar things made magical by the one, vivid, eerie word that each thing needs, to show us what it really is when it is alone to us, I fear, all the Peter Pans of all the Christmas holidays must creak a little on their canvas wheels. I suppose the northern races are born symbol ists. And no symbol can be quite beautiful or compelling if one perfectly understands it. Take, for example, that lovely play, "The Blue Bird." Monsieur Maeterlinck makes it quite clear that the bluebird is the symbol for happiness, and as no one finds happiness for long on this planet, no one can ever find the bluebird. Q. E. D. There can be no doubt that Monsieur Maeter linck is an artist of a higher degree of technical skill than George Macdonald. But I have never met the child who would thrill to any event in "The Blue Bird" as he will thrill to "The Princess and the Goblin" and "At the Back of the North Wind." MAGIC CASEMENTS 239 "Don t you see the lovely fire of roses white ones amongst them this time?" asked Irene, almost as bewildered as he. "No, I don t," answered Curdie almost sulkily. "Nor the blue bath? Nor the rose-colored counterpane? Nor the beautiful light, like the moon, hanging from the roof?" "You re making game of me, your Royal Highness "Then what do you see?" " I see a big bare garret room like the one in mother s cottage "And what more do you see?" "I see a tub, and a heap of musty straw, and a withered apple, and a ray of sunlight coming through a hole in the middle of the roof, and shining on your head, and making all the place look a curious dusky brown " "But don t you hear my grandmother talking to me?" asked Irene, almost crying. "No, I hear the cooing of a lot of pigeons." I was not always sure what he meant in "The Princess and Curdie." But I felt in the presence of some great universal law, I sensed vast corre spondences between vivid, concrete things of every day and the mighty formulae that rule the worlds as they spin through history. Those north ern seers reach out to truths so misty that one could not grasp them and still be mortal; and yet (and just here is their extraordinary adaptability to childhood) they cloak them in such blunt and 240 ON OUR HILL cheery realism that the most valued maxims of the nursery emerge from their thumbed pages ! The Greek is a fatalist; the Oriental is perforce a cynic, with his fragrant and rainbowed phrases; but the Anglo-Saxon, among mists and moors of the brooding North, persists in the belief that Man shall conquer Fate and that in his bosom is that which shall teach him how. Almost the first book we ever read was "The Princess and the Goblin," and Tertius was too young to listen. We were deeply entertained and yet, through it all, indubitably convinced that truth was the highest chivalry, kindness the only essential weapon, and obedience, unquestioning obedience, the mark of the successful leader. When Our Mother realizes that there are there must be children who have not read "At the Back of the North Wind," she feels that there should be a society founded, with a presi dent and by-laws and a recording secretary, to see that every child under twelve should own a copy. Of course it is doubtless a very good thing to be able to distinguish a red squirrel from a chipmunk. Although, considering the number of human beings who seldom establish very intimate relations with MAGIC CASEMENTS 241 either animal, Our Mother wonders sometimes just why this passionate interest in them and the hedgehog and the kingfisher and the red-breasted something-or-other should be forced down all our children s throats in so much badly written Eng lish. But this may be nothing but jealousy on Our Mother s part, arising from the fact that she has always divided the animals, like Gaul of old, into three parts big ones, middle-sized ones, and little ones. Miss Goldilocks, you may remem ber, used the same method in her studies of the bear family many years ago. In Our Family s nursery university we took a comprehensive course in wolves, under Professor Mowgli, in the "Jungle Books"; mastered Bre r Fox under Uncle Remus, and specialized in dragons and sea-monsters under Perseus, Medea, and Sieg fried. Then we did a little laboratory work at the Zoo in the Bronx Park, polished off with a brief postgraduate visit to the Natural History Museum, and considered ourselves ready to meet the world in general conversation about any ani mal important enough to have got into the story books. When Little Diamond, who drove his father s cab through the dirty London streets and cut ON OUR HILL bread and cheese for his luncheon, was called to his tiny stable window in the crowded mews, to float away through the air with the wonderful North Wind, whose black hair, blown shrieking across the midnight sky, tossed the ships at sea, while her soft breath made the evening primrose nod, she would often drop to the ground with him. She descended on a grassy hillock, in the midst of a wild, furzy common. There was a rabbit-warren underneath, and some of the rabbits came out of their holes, in the moon light, looking very sober and wise, just like patriarchs stand ing in their tent doors and looking about them before going to bed. When they saw North Wind, instead of turning around and vanishing again with a thump of their heels, they cantered slowly up to her and snuffed all about her with their long upper lips, which moved every way at once. That was their way of kissing her; and, as she talked to Diamond, she would every now and then stroke down their furry backs, or lift and play with their long ears. This being its own picture, the illustrator was clever enough to leave it alone, and Our Mother made her own drawings in strokes that memory has held for thirty years. Nobody who followed the little boy on his lonely, fearsome walk along the clerestory ledge of a midnight cathedral, and saw in the old wood cut his small nightgowned figure lying alone under MAGIC CASEMENTS 243 the Gothic arches, could fail to sense the majesty and mystery of those mighty old piles of stone. Now this was the eastern window of the church, and the moon was at that moment just on the edge of the horizon. The next, she was peeping over it. And lo, with the moon, St. John and St. Paul and the rest of them began to dawn in the window in their lovely garments "And how comes he to be lying there, St. Peter?" said one. "I think I saw him a while ago up in the gallery under the Nicodemus window. Perhaps he has fallen down. What do you think, St. Matthew?" "I don t think he could have crept here after falling from such a height What do you say, St. Thomas ? " "Let s go down and look at him." There came a rustling and a chinking, for some time, and then there was a silence, and Diamond felt somehow that all the apostles were standing round him and looking down on him. There is no Italian educator who will ever be born able to convince me that if you give a child enough painted blocks he can learn about Gothic cathedrals by building one after the pattern on the inside of the box ! Of course he will learn how the cathedrals look that he builds; I grant you that. But I think that they built them better in the Middle Ages. And one of the great difficul ties connected with the new cult of reverencing 244 ON OUR HILL the child is that he himself ceases to reverence anything. So that he has no fear, and fear stretches the mind and increases its susceptibility to sensations of every sort. I am willing to go much further than this: I do not believe you will ever make young inventors, even by giving them thousands of pieces of pierced steel that they can build into railroad bridges and revolving wheels. The young Watt used the kitchen teakettle, and Newton, like his Mother Eve before him, learned the mysteries of heaven from an apple. Only the scientists appreciate scientific toys; the child, like the red man of the plains, asks where the horses are that make the engine run, and the only scientific thing he does with his toy engine is to break it to bjts in order to see what makes it go. These things are made for uncles and aunts, a sort of Christmas I. O. IT. which releases them from any further responsibility. Only when the child presents them at the big bank of Middle Age, the tired old cashier shakes his head and coughs dryly and. says: "I regret to have to inform you, sir, or madam, that this account was overdrawn long ago. Have you no finances of your own ? " MAGIC CASEMENTS 245 Then the poor, empty, grown-up child becomes very sad and dull, and grumbles: "I don t see what is the matter and my par ents did everything for me!" Now, I may be all wrong, but I cannot seem to see the elderly people of 1950, let us say, dragging out from forgotten nursery closets the bolts and nuts and dynamos of their childish days and con structing again, with shaking fingers, the suspen sion bridges of their youth. In the first place, un less they were civil engineers, they wouldn t know how to do it, and even if they were, the whole process will undoubtedly be so changed by that time (suspension bridges may be built of alumi num or papier-mache or pontoons of aeroplanes) that the thing will mean no more to them than an arbalest or a testudo means to soldiers to day. And by the same token, I refuse to believe that half a century from now we shall take out from a desk-drawer those sage accounts, disguised in cap sule story form like castor-oil, of how some in structive Uncle Henry or Aunt Matilda led their young relatives through the fields, explaining the difference between chipmunks and red squirrels, and why finches are more likely to lay finches 246 ON OUR HILL eggs than orioles I refuse to believe, I say, that people will have the heart to hand them to their children, much less to take them to some quiet corner and read again themselves. No, they will give their nephews and nieces the corresponding volumes of the new generation, recommended by the obliging Christmas clerk. But they will not have to read them themselves heavens, no ! They can take "The Water Babies" and thrill again, as they did long ago, at the smell of the salt sea and the English hedgerows, and the chill of the great bergs, where Mother Carey s chickens wheel and fly. Down to the sea ! Down to the sea ! With the otter and the eels and the king salmon and the rest, all turning and twisting and streaming along in the spate and swirl. Oh, it is a clean-washed book, and the big- hearted Englishman that thundered it at us left no one to fill his thick-soled fishing-boots. Curiously enough, one of the sweetest, clearest pictures that it brought to Our Mother s childish mind was a little bit that had nothing to do with fairies or water or adventure of any sort. When she thinks of "The Water Babies," she sees what poor, black little chimney-sweep Tom saw through MAGIC CASEMENTS 247 a cleft in the cliff, a thousand feet down Hartover Fell, and scrambled into, all spent and bleeding. And a neat, pretty cottage it was, with clipped yew hedges all round the garden, and yews inside, too, cut into peacocks and trumpets and teapots and all kinds of queer shapes. And out of the open door came a noise like that of the frogs on the Great-A, when they know that it is going to be scorch ing hot to-morrow and how they know that, I don t know, and you don t know, and nobody knows. He came slowly up to the open door, which was all hung round with clematis and roses; and then peeped in, half afraid. And there sat by the empty fireplace, which was filled with a pot of sweet herbs, the nicest old woman that ever was seen, in her red petticoat and short dimity bed-gown and clean white cap, with a black silk handkerchief over it, tied under her chin. At her feet sat the grandfather of all the cats, and opposite her sat, on two benches, twelve or fourteen neat, rosy, chubby children, learning their criss cross-row; and gabble enough they made about it! Such a pleasant cottage it was, with a shiny clean stone floor, and curious old prints on the walls, and an old black oak sideboard full of bright pewter and brass dishes, and a cuckoo clock in the corner, which began shouting as soon as Tom appeared; not that it was frightened at Tom, but that it was just eleven o clock. Will this quiet bit of old England hang in the galleries of Secunda s merry mind, as it hangs, fresh and sweet, in Our Mother s? In her great ON OUR HILL haste she read it to them --too soon, perhaps: they do not seem to remember it so warmly as some of the others. "Robinson Crusoe" we read first, and then "The Swiss Family Robinson," first love of Se- cunda s book-shelf. Seven times she read it through, when she was eight, and Tertius started bravely at it in a two-syllabled edition as his first private literary venture. Like all children, they greatly preferred it to the classic Crusoe model, and Fritz, Ernest, and Jack, those trusty and accomplished youths, were as well known to us as our own house hold. "It was a very useful thing for them that Mrs. Swiss Family seemed to have everything they happened to need, wasn t it?" Tertius was wont to muse, and Secunda, who knew the capacity and contents of the wrecked vessel, that store house of all that humanity could desire for com fortable living, would chuckle wisely. "If she hadn t had em, how could the man tell the story?" she demanded. For years after "Robinson Crusoe," Prima would inquire on the mention of any new story: "Is it one of those I books? I mean, does the MAGIC CASEMENTS 249 one that s supposed to be doing it, tell it? Be cause, if he does, I don t care for it." "How ridiculous, Prima!" "I don t see why. I don t happen to care for them. "I built a stockade--! next made a stout cask falling on my knees, I then - Disgust- ing!" "Goodness, whose knees would he fall on?" Se- cunda gurgles, and she and Tertius convulse Vith laughter. "Not at all. You could say, the man then fell on his knees, couldn t you? I think it s poor taste. But you don t understand." "I do, then. I understand as well as you do, Pri. Oh, Mother, isn t Prima silly ? She always thinks if you don t feel the same way she does, you don t understand!" You don t see what I mean, when I say you don t under - Loud shouts from every one drown this, and Prima colors angrily. :< You re all very rude," she storms and goes with the girls beloved, the "Katy" books, off to another room. They, too, stand the test of time, these whole- 250 ON OUR HILL some, merry, clever stories, and Our Mother never sees one of the volumes without picking it up and dipping into it. Their genial author once told Our Mother of a disconsolate little girl who approached her cottage in the mountains, on a hot summer s day, drag ging a tired puppy behind her. "Are you the lady that wrote the Katy books?" she inquired, with an injured air. : Yes, my dear why ? " : Why don t you write some more?" Because, my child, I couldn t think of any more. Katy grew up, you know, and then she married, and that seemed to be all that could happen to her, you see." "Humph! You might have made her have a baby -- that would be better than nothing !" Did you ever stop to think, when you select books for children, that grown-ups read over and over again the only good ones ? And do you re alize that they are nearly all fairy-tales where the dress and manners and vocabulary can never grow old-fashioned, and that they concern them selves almost exclusively with royalty and peas ants? You see, the middle classes change and develop all sorts of ideas; but we all know what MAGIC CASEMENTS 251 kings and queens should be, and the peasant is eternal. In our country, where there is neither king nor peasant, there are no fairies. There is another fact you must remember when you confront the list of children s books: the good books for children were written, like other good books, by good writers. "Mopsa the Fairy," perhaps of them all the most -completely saturated with mystic, untrans latable atmosphere, is the work of a poet, herself a mystic. It is like old ballads and chiming bells and those purple cities that suddenly appear in the sunset. For Our Mother its spell never fails, and she could not forgive her daughters, who found it too sad. "All those fairy ones are sorrowful," said Se- cunda. "What s the good of it there, if things are sad, like here?" "But who is to tell us where to run?* asked Jack. "Oh," said Mopsa, "some of these people." "I don t see anybody," said Jack, looking about him. Mopsa pointed to a group of stones, and then to another group, and as Jack looked he saw that in shape they were something like people stone people. One stone was a lit tle like an old man with a mantle over him, and he was sit ting on the ground with his knees up nearly to his chin. Another was like a woman with a hood on, and she seemed 252 ON OUR HILL to be leaning her chin on her hand. Close to these stood something ve^y much like a cradle in shape; and beyond were stones that resembled a flock of sheep lying down on the bare sand, with something that reminded Jack of the figure of a man lying asleep near them, with his face to the ground. She and Jack went about among the stones all day, and as the sun got low both the shadows and the blocks them selves became more and more like people, and if you went close you could now see features, very sweet, quiet features, but the eyes were all shut. Mopsa went to the figure that sat by the cradle. It was a stone yet, but when Mopsa laid her little warm hand on its bosom it smiled. "Dear," said Mopsa, "I wish you would wake." A curious little sound was now heard, but the figure did not move, and the apple-woman lifted Mopsa onto the lap of the statue; then she put her arms round its neck, and spoke to it again very distinctly: "Dear, why don t you wake?" "I am not warm," said the figure; and that was quite true, and yet she was not a stone now which reminded one of a woman, but a woman that reminded one of a stone. All the west was very red with the sunset, and the river was red too, and Jack distinctly saw some of the coils of rope glide down from the trees and slip into the water; next he saw the stones that had looked like sheep raise their heads in the twilight and then lift themselves and shake their woolly sides. At that instant the large white moon heaved up her pale face between two dark blue hills, and upon this the statue put out its feet and gently rocked the cradle. MAGIC C A S E M E N T S 253 Those patient stone ones, faintly red in the faint sunset, as Our Mother saw them then and sees them now ! They touched her imagination, as the thought of the Great Pyramids and the Sphinx touched her later. We loved "The Little Lame Prince" one of the saddest of all ! and only blinked a little at the last when the Prince, old now and tired, told the people that he must go. " Remember me sometimes, my people, for I have love B you well. And I am going a long way, and I do not think I shall come back any more." And then he drew out the little shabby bundle, and un rolled it, and set it on the ground, and it was the Wonderful Cloak, and he sailed away on it to the Beautiful Mountains. One of the most interesting points about our reading came out when we had the Greek trage dies. Our Mother tried them, very tentatively, just to see what the three would say. They were translated in prose, and they were severe and brief. After the sacrifice of Iphigenia, Our Mother paused. "Do you care for that?" she asked. "Because if you find it dull or gloomy we needn t go on, you know." 254 ON OUR HILL "Are there more of them?" said Secunda, in awestruck tones. "Could you go on? Would you?" And through those stark and massive sorrows we strode together, never weeping, never even depressed. The terrible tonic quality, the vast justice, the inscrutable fate, flushed their cheeks. "More! More!" they cried, and for a week Our Mother poured Euripides and ^Eschylus into their baby ears. And when Medea the terrible, the desperate, slaughtered and burned her way through the royal household and fled defiant, drawn in her dragon car above the heads of the horrified populace, Secunda raised her finger sol emnly for silence. "Do you know what was the matter with that woman?" she demanded, like a sybil. "No what?" we asked breathlessly. "That woman thought only of herself!" You see, we weep for Undine, but we brace our selves to meet the gods ! One pleasure was theirs that Our Mother never had at their age. A friend sent us that darling of all childhood, "Heidi." We did not know it was a nursery classic, beloved in many lands. The very breath of the Alps blows through the MAGIC CASEMENTS 255 pages; Schwaenli and Baerli, the two friendly goats, gave such spicy flower-filled milk that we longed for wooden bowls and spoons, at least, such as the Aim-Uncle carved for little Heidi, to make more palatable our own domestic product. Her fra grant bed of hay, her neat little wooden stool, the yellow pats of butter and the russet-toasted cheese that she ate, barefooted, on the high, windy hills, all fascinated us so that our own wide-sweeping outlook grew tame and empty. Why had we no goats? No carpenter like the Uncle? "Nothing seems to be interesting here," Prima announced that summer. "I wish I lived in the Alps somewhere or on a plantation." Then," said Secunda thoughtfully, "you might find yourself reading a book about Our Hill, and you d wish you lived here we all know you!" Secunda was not quite seven when Our Mother read "Pilgrim s Progress" to them. With the exception of "Greek Tragedies" they have loved no book better. So afraid were they that some thing might escape them, that once when Our Mother began to murmur rapidly and glance down the page, with a view to easing the situation, they sternly requested her to read more plainly. 256 ON OUR HILL "But this part is rather dull, she excused her self. "We d rather hear it all," Prima assured her. You might miss out some good bits, you know." "As you wish," said Our Mother, and she read out loud and clear the following sentence: For true justifying faith puts the soul (as sensible of its lost condition by the law) upon flying for refuge unto Christ s righteousness (which righteousness of his is not an act of grace, by which he maketh for justification thy obedience accepted with God, but his personal obedience to the law in doing and suffering for us, what that required at our hands). This righteousness, I say, true faith accepteth. Bunyan, writing in his prison, could not have been more intent than they, watching, from their little chairs, their Mother s moving lips. And when Valiant was summoned ! Then in deed Our Mother wished for a voice of gold and only feared that she could not make them see all that glory. . . . "Then," said he, "I am going to my fathers, and though with great difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrim age, and my courage and skill to him that can get it." When the day that he must go hence was come, many ac companied him to the riverside, into which as he went he MAGIC CASEMENTS 257 said, "Death, where is thy sting?" And as he went down deeper, he said, "Grave, where is thy victory?" So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side. We were a year in reading through the Bible. We alternated it with "Don Quixote," which we liked least of all. I doubt if they ever read it over again by themselves. Prima thought most of the events unlikely and all of the people rather foolish. The New Testament they preferred to the Old, to Our Mother s astonishment; Joseph and Daniel they liked best of the Israelitish heroes. For Moses they conceived a cold dislike shared, undoubtedly, by many of his contemporaries. "Where did he really get those ten command ments?" Prima inquired confidentially. "Of course no stone could stay up in the air, like that, till he came along." "He prob bly wrote them himself," Secunda vouchsafed. "People were always making things in those times, and saying the gods did it." When we came to the Book of Revelation we had been for some time sharing the reading, and it fell to Prima to describe to us that New Jerusalem : For the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. 258 ON OUR HILL Her voice is soft and deep. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. She sees how beautiful it is, and tries to make her vowels as round and pure as the words she reads. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall tnere be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. You must hear these things read by a child to see how mystical, how touching they can be. And there shall be no night there; and they need no can dle, neither light of the sun, for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever. One sees how hundreds of thousands of us mor tals have died happily, with these words in our mouths. Afterward, when Our Mother has patted her eyes, she gets a hymn-book and Secunda reads for us "O Mother dear, Jerusalem." "Now," says Our Mother, "there is the same thing, only in poetry. Which do you like bet ter?" Is this going to be true," he inquired gravely, "or only just interesting? MAGIC CASEMENTS 261 "The Bible!" Secunda shouts, and Prima adds soberly, "Yes, the Bible." "But why? Listen to this: "No earthly cloud enshadows thee, Nor gloom nor darksome night; But every soul shines as the sun, For God Himself gives light." "Isn t that the same thing?" "Well," says Prima, "it s the same, but it s made more tinkly and rhyming, so you can sing it, you see. When you say it more uneven, like the real Bible, it s more beautifuller, I think." "It s more grander, too," Secunda adds. "There s more solemnness. There are some things it s no good to rhyme don t you think so ? " Our Mother, who has been trembling for their answer, kisses them ceremonially and gives them each a large lemon-drop "What are you going to read them next?" asks an interested Godmother. "It doesn t matter," says Our Mother. "They can read what they like now their English style is formed." "But they may forget it " "They won t get a chance," Our Mother assures ONOURHILL her. "We shall read it through every three years." And only last night Tertius held the big book on his new blue trousers and began, in his won derful, cooing contralto: " In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth " Here he paused a moment. "Is this going to be true," he inquired gravely, "or only just interesting?" "My dearest," replied Our Mother, "it must be true, or you wouldn t be reading it, I m sure. And if you read it, it is bound to be interesting !" And from that opinion no amount of Higher Criticism shall ever move her 1 OUR FIRST FRIENDS THE DESCENT OF MAN ENG ago in Jungle-land, I found my cave and homed there, Long ago I planted fire and reaped its scarlet bloom. While I cooked in reindeer-skins, the savage beasties roamed there, Howled behind my door of thorns and tried to force my room. But there was a friendly Dog, who d never, never leave me, He d hunt for me, he d fish for me, he d drive the beasts away, Although I often scolded him, he d rather die than grieve me His honest eyes were Prima s eyes. So she loves dogs to-day ! Long ago in Jungle-land, I had a bird to cheer me, She d sing to me, she d swoop to me, she d drift from bough to bough. But when I would have stroked her close, she never would fly near me, And when I longed to dance with her, she d never teach me how. Often would she roam afar, where I could never follow, I would hear her laugh at night, when all the woods were still. Even so Secunda dances, airy, like a swallow. So she sings at early dawn, a bird upon Our Long ago in Jungle-land, twas I that grew so lonely ! Weeping through the wood I went, stretching empty arms. " If I had a tiny thing, soft, a plaything only ! A frightened thing, a furry thing, a thing to shield from harms !" Then in the leaves among the roots, I found the bunny lying, Its quiet eyes, its velvet fur, its fluffy tail were mine. It burrowed deep into my arms and all my heart ceased crying So Tertius laughs when rabbits leap link in the chain divine. OUR FIRST FRIENDS Mother does not, cannot, know with what pets The Three were wont to play when Barry, who was to be their first companion -Queen s Barry, to give him his full kennel title came to live with her. It seems odd not to know this, but to be per fectly truthful, Our Mother did not know The Three then, for they had not come to live with her, themselves ! Did they coast on moonbeam sleds down the cloud-hills ? Did they swim in those rosy, golden lakes of sunset, where the purple bays and jagged indigo promontories make such fairy islands in the evening west? Secunda must have shot pale arrows at the clustered stars, be sure, for she was vowed to Robin Hood from the first; and Prima must have swam lazily along the Milky Way, teasing the smaller cherubs who would not dare to venture too far from the large planets. Ter- tius, I am afraid, did nothing at all. How should he, when all the saints were kissing him? One is quite certain that St. Peter s keys and 267 268 ON OUR HILL St. Catherine s wheel, and St. Sebastian s arrows (probably the first time he was glad of them, poor creature !) would have furnished the heavenly nursery of Tertius from the beginning- of begin nings. And Michael would have told him of all those furious heavenly conflicts, and proudly re called his bad quarter hour with the Dragon, re paid for it at last, one hopes, by that wonderful, wide-eyed interest with which Tertius must al ways have rewarded such efforts to please him. And the good St. Joseph, beyond any doubt, took him rides upon his donkey . . . the wonder is that Tertius was ever willing to come down to Our Hill ! Secunda, one supposes, sent him word as to the adequate amusements of the place, just as Prima advised her, in her turn, of its possibilities, so that she handed them back their haloes and cloaks with stars, and thanked them for the harps and palms (what a celestial Greenroom that must have been for Secunda!), and pirouetted thrice before the Elders on their Thrones, and flew down. Before Prima came (one pictures her gravely directing the Stork as to approved scientific methods of volplaning, and reasoning with his OUR FIRST FRIENDS 269 hoary prejudices as to the best way of carrying her), before, I say, Prima left the well-schooled seraphim and descended to a wider field for her didactic capacities, Our Mother was wont to take long, musing walks over the mountain trails with Barry, the great tawny Dane, at heel. His mournful eyes, his tiger-striped flanks, his soft, padding steps were early known to Prima, and the first summer of her life he marched beside her perambulator, or lay on the blanket spread on the ground, where she sprawled in the sun. She was always quite fearless with animals, and insisted upon patting everything pattable, and riding everything ridable, while Secunda and Tertius, curiously enough, though perfectly cer tain of their ability to enchain anything human, always shrank a little from dogs and horses, and even mistrusted elephants. (Our Mother never met but one elephant with whom she felt herself unwilling to escape into the desert, and he was chained fore and aft, and lived only in the hope of one day killing his keeper !) By the time Secunda had joined us, Barry had become an excellent nurse-maid. From the first she displayed her passion for costume, and her frilled sunbonnet was oftener over his head than 270 ON OUR HILL hers. For hours and hours, with the persistent patience of infancy, Secunda would endeavor to force his long, supple paws through the tiny em broidered sleeves of her little blue-denim jacket. He weighed one hundred and thirty-seven pounds and she but fifty odd; and, unfortunately, there was no language common to Our Mother, Secunda, and Barry through whose medium any sufficient communication could be established. "Why do you let her annoy you so, my dear?" Our Mother would ask him, and: "Darling, don t you see that his back is too broad for both his arms to go through the sleeves at the same time?" she would beg Secunda. Then Barry would smile seriously, and Secunda would laugh obstinately, and they would try to talk but neither of them knew how ! Since then, Our Mother has observed so many human triangles, baffling any earthly geometry, that have reminded her so irresistibly of those conversational blockades for which there was no interpreter ! When Prima was two and a half, a bold, ex ploring soul her mind was incalculably stronger than her legs Our Mother ordered a roll of chicken-wire, a yard in height, and had it stretched OUR FIRST FRIENDS 271 around a circular space on the lawn, free from stones and shrubs and flower-beds. Stout stakes supported it at proper intervals, a great elm Her frilled sunbonnet was oftener over his head than hers shaded half of it, rugs dotted it at inviting points: an outdoor salon, ceiled with blue and white, carpeted with emerald. Prima was lifted over the edge, early in the morning; Barry leaped 272 ONOURHILL easily after, a silver mug of milk from Cornelia the cow, who grazed within easy eye-range, was administered, and a crust of bread was inserted in one of the openings of the wire, very much as his bit of snowy cuttlefish projects into the canary s cage. Then a few toys were tossed over the edge children who play out-of-doors care very little for toys and everybody went away. Sometimes she tottered back and forth over the clipped turf, gesticulating, babbling quaintly to the birds that often perched on her railing. Sometimes she lay on her back and kicked rhythmi cally into space, sucking her thumb. Sometimes she tore up handfuls of the grass and cast them, with large, sweeping gestures, to the four corners of the world. But always and always she was alone. This seemed to many people astoundingly cruel. It was before the days of Our Hill, which was populated at that time by forty Sicilian peasants, busy at the walls of Our House, and the big lawn where Prima played stretched down to a quiet country road. Often and often kindly passers-by, catching the spot of white that was her dress, so small between the blue of her ceiling and the OUR FIRST FRIENDS 273 green of her floor, would toil up the driveway and ring the bell. "Did you know that there was a child out there -all alone?" they would ask, "a mere baby?" "Oh, that s all right she s in her pen; didn t you see the wire? But thank you, all the same." "A pen ? A pen? But it s all alone alone!" they would gasp reproachfully, and go away, very doubtful. "It does seem as if somebody might be got to play with that child!" they would say sometimes in the little village. All around her, children screamed and scolded and cried, and tired people picked up the toys they threw down, and gave them bits of candy, and brown medicine out of bottles, and spanked them, and rocked them, and talked and talked and talked to them. These children slept when others woke, and woke when others slept; which means, of course, that everybody had to be quiet, in the first case, and couldn t be, in the second. Somebody was saying, "No, no!" to them con stantly or if not, acting in such a way that somebody else must devote a great deal of time to saying it, later ! And yet, although they could all observe that 274 ON OUR HILL Prima never was ill, never was cross, never was bored, never was spanked, never did anything but eat and sleep and laugh in short, they per sisted in pitying her ! And in course of time they pitied Secunda, who lay in her perambulator on the roof of the big veranda, equally placid, equally alone, star ing fascinated at the ceaselessly moving leaves above her. She wove patterns with her tiny fingers in the air, following, Our Mother always thought, the movements of the billowy boughs; she gurgled a sort of Hawaiian recitative while she made these motions, and when she flung her rubber cow over the edge as everybody does, of course, because it is fun to see them bend and grunt and pick it up and shake their fingers at you Our Nurse simply tied the cow with a string to the perambulator, and went away again. Wonderful idea it would never have oc curred to Our Mother ! It seems to her like the egg of Columbus or Newton s apple. But to Helen it was very simple one instance, merely, of an amazing technique, a virtuosity so great that art concealed art, as the classic gentleman so deathlessly phrased it. OUR FIRST FRIENDS 275 Dear Helen --what monument, what testi monial can mothers raise that shall be in any way worthy of such as you? Such loving care, such simple wisdom, such dauntless sacrifice ! All over the world, remember, from the beginning of civili zation, innumerable devoted women have lifted up their hearts, in an Act of Oblation unmatched, in purity, in purpose, in tireless patience, before altars not builded for them, in homes that never can be theirs. Their hearts, oh, happy brides, who forget that they are waiting for you some where, when you shall summon them, their hearts may never thrill, as yours thrill to-night and yet, have they no hearts ? You know it, for you will trust your dearest to them, later. Their hands, their laps, their breasts, must shelter the little twining creatures that will burrow into their very souls have they no souls? You know it, for you and yours lean heavily on them. And yet they know that so surely as they give themselves, hands and feet and heart and brain, to those helpless little conquerors, your children, they know that they are doomed by the very nature of things to be outgrown, outworn. They have but one claim to be remembered in love. "Oughtn t you to put another blanket on the 276 ON OUR HILL baby, Helen?" Our Mother asks; "it s bound to get awfully cold, you know, when the furnace goes down." "Oh, she wouldn t like it now, Mother," says Our Nurse quickly; "it s not good for her to be too warm, now. Later on, I ll change it." "But, Helen, you ll be asleep how will you know?" "Oh, no," Our Nurse answers simply, "these cold nights I always take off one of my own blankets, and then I get so chilled that I wake up and put one on Baby." And Our Mother turned and went away in silence, thinking how justly humanity had left the old religions for a new one founded upon a Woman and a Child. When we came at last to Our Hill we found a wife for Barry, and by the time Tertius had been persuaded to join us, four and five and six massive puppies, in every stage of Great Danehood, jumped on us and knocked us down, unless we took great care. One idle swish of a smooth dark tail can seat an inquiring infant in helpless sur prise upon the ground; and the affectionate on slaughts of a loving brute, impetuously hurling itself on the breast of six feet of unsuspecting OUR FIRST FRIENDS 277 humanity, may well cause even the lords of the earth to totter. Alexandra, when about to present us with her delightful progeny, reverted curiously to type, and escaped from the nursery prepared for her into deep caves in the rocks, where only Our Mother dared follow her. Stalking like a deer- hunter the faint yelps and whines of hungry baby Danes, Our Mother would stagger down the steep hillsides, a swaying basin of bread and milk in one hand, clutching with the other at the roots and stones that steadied her descent. At last before her eyes the long, quivering nose reached out, snuffing; a low growl sent the at tendant coachman back in haste. "No, no, it s all right, dear it s only me. I ve brought you some bread and milk. How many are there?" Alexandra licks Our Mother s fingers, but does not move from the mouth of her cave. "Oh, well, if you won t move, I suppose I ll have to feed you here," and Our Mother, squat ting before the cave, dips up handfuls of the warm mess into Sandra s mouth, till it is all gone. Later we can pack the puppies into a box and drag them in the express-cart up to the stable, 278 ON OUR HILL at what pace their anxious mother shall set, and then we can name them. Dagmar and Wotan and Cnut. . . . We could never understand why people jumped and said "O-o-o-h!" when they dashed around the house in a streaming line. They were all so gentle, really. None of us can remember when we hadn t a donkey. Our first one travelled miles across country to us, romantically led or ridden by Our Uncle, whom every one mistook for a gypsy, so that they offered him food and wanted their for tunes told, and he liked it so much that he very nearly betrayed us, and went away to be one, really ! We could not name him because his christening was a matter of history. His first owner, receiv ing him on a rapturous Fourth of July, paused with a stick of that brown, fungous material con secrated to the lighting of firecrackers, held high in his hand, and looking up to heaven, cried out of a full heart: "Oh, God, I baptize this donkey Punk!" So Donkey Punk, when Prima was three, per haps, founded his dynasty, which photography has preserved forever; and for many years (his own age was lost in antiquity) carried Helen and her babies along the country roads. OUR FIRST FRIENDS 279 Indeed it was he who brought them finally to Our Hill, preceded by Our Mother, driving a skittish horse to a high English cart, perilously poised, herself, on a load of family portraits, goldfish, hat-boxes, currant jelly, and student- lamps. When Punk was tired, he stopped in his tracks until he was rested, and when he thought he had gone far enough, he stopped entirely. Since no one ever knew his thoughts, this made driving him more of an adventure than the uninitiated might suppose. As no one could deal him a blow capable of penetrating his thick hide, he went at his own pace, ohne Hast, ohne Rast, as the poet says, and scornful walking-parties who jeered at him going up-hill, were forced to watch him from be hind, the summit once reached. Sometimes, in deed, an inexplicable speed mania possessed him, and at such times Helen whizzed past like a meteor, clutching the reins with set teeth, while persons of sporting proclivities placed their bets freely. In a word, an animal of temperament. No one had ever dreamed of life without him; he was as much a part of our landscape as the hills or the stone water-tower. So when Clark came in one Easter morning and 80 ON OUR HILL said abruptly to Our Mother, summoned to the pantry: "Punk s gone!" it was a real shock. "Standin up on his feet, too," he went on. "I give him some carrots and his bit o grain larst night, as ever was an now e s gone. Standin on his feet. I don t mind sayin I wiped me eyes!" Our Mother had the breaking of this news, and looked for a sad Easter. But then she said, with a determined cheerfulness: "You know, children, how old Donkey Punk must have been? After a certain number of years even a donkey must die. So he simply went to sleep last night, after a good supper, and this morning he didn t wake. . . ." "Oh," said Secunda thoughtfully, "dead. And on Easter morning well, he would have!" The others nodded their heads thoughtfully, too. Evidently they, too, felt that "he would have." Our Mother stared, began to speak, de cided not to, and left them. What mysterious fitness was it that was so clear to them? Do you know? Because Our Mother does not. He is buried behind the tennis-court, walled in OUR FIRST FRIENDS 281 by four beautiful rectangles of stone that were des tined for door-arches, but turned out to have been imperfectly fitted. Myrtle grows in the corners and English ivy climbs up the warm walls of the buttress behind that supports the court. There was a funeral planned, with "Onward, Christian Soldiers" and a poem, but somehow it drifted in to a picnic, on account of some guests that turned up, and delicious weather and unless you attend to funerals immediately, you must have noticed that they slip out of your life inevitably, and fail of celebration ! Take the green paroquets, for instance. One died, in circumstances of deepest mystery. Stark and stiff he lay, on the white sand of the big brass cage in the dining-room window, and Our Mother, who had noticed him to be particularly argumen tative and aggressive the day before, inclined to believe that the two white Java sparrows and the three gray finches and his little green wife had risen against him and pecked him to death. Every body else was polite but incredulous, and spoke coldly to Caesar, the milk-white cat with beryl eyes, who kept almost ostentatiously away from the dining-room. "Of course," said Prima bitterly, "you won t 282 ON OUR HILL believe it, because you think he is so beautiful ! If anything is beautiful, you think it must be right!" Our Mother stopped eating and stared wanly at her daughter. Why do you what on earth makes you - Prima, how can you ..." she began. Then why haven t you given him away, long before?" the unsparing girl goes on. "What good does he do? There s nothing you can keep, scarcely, that cats don t chase. The way he sits and watches those birds . . . the green one s neck is just broken, that s what it is: he did it with his paw. I call it cruel." It is perfectly true that Caesar loves nobody but himself, and gets so dirty in the coal-cellar that Our Mother has to clean him with corn-meal. But when one imports a cat of his perfections from Massachusetts in a soap-box and up sets the entire American Express System in order to get him delivered on a Sunday, it is unthink able that he should be sacrificed because he has been seen to measure with his limpid, beryl eyes the distance between the glass cabinet, the win dow-ledge, and the big bird-cage. So at this point Our Mother creates a wily diversion. One green paroquet died in circumstances of deepest mystery OUR FIRST FRIENDS 283 "You know, somebody who was here once said that if one of a pair of love-birds died, the other always did, shortly afterward," she suggests. "I think we ought to watch this one very carefully. And then they could be buried together. ..." It is many days later that Our Governess - our new one, who knows so many things that she has never had time to study the workings of a mind like Secunda s approaches Our Mother with an expression of horror. "Could you take the time to come to Secunda s room with me," she says, in tones of violently suppressed emotion, "and tell me what you think can be there? I have thought for some days that there must be some reason for the unspeak ably disagreeable effect - At this point the pretty little chambermaid ap pears suddenly before them, her features con tracted into the same curious expression which has tilted the first envoy s nose. In her hand, ex tended to arm s length, is a small, innocent-look ing pasteboard box. "This I think should not be any longer kept," she begins, and the same violently suppressed emotion thrills her voice, in turn. "I am looking for it often, and now, at last, I find it. Where shall I throw it?" 284 ON OUR HILL A whirling bound, a swishing of short skirts, a furious, scarlet face at the door ! "Give me that ! Prima gave it to you ! Don t you touch that sparrow! I m saving it for the funeral !" "Secunda, dearest, do you mean you can t mean - "Under the stockings it was," adds the little chambermaid. "I had to air the drawer "I have no time! I have no time!" Secunda wails in fury. "How can I get anything done if I have to practise and learn my part in the play, and change my boots all day? That is only a common, little outdoors bird that I found in the road, and I was planning the funeral for Saturday, when I do get a minute, and then, when the paro quet died, I meant to have a really good one, and we could have dressed up ! " (Oh ! Don t throw it away ! Give it to me !) "And then you said the other paroquet might, so I thought it would be more sensible to wait and see, and have it all in one !" "It is an age of efficiency," says Our Mother, shaking her head vaguely. "Open the windows, somebody. "My dear girl, death is one of the things that must be dealt with as it occurs," OUR FIRST FRIENDS 285 "But what can I do? Would you count it exercise* if I had the funeral? I have no time!" "The way to do," says Our Mother, ascending the tripod and becoming the very Pythoness in mid-oracle, "the way to do stop jumping about so, Secunda!--is to bury them, as they die, un officially, and then, in your first free time, have the ceremonies over them all together. I will write you an epitaph." "Oh! Darling!" sighs Secunda, and the cor tege files out, and we open the glass jar of lavender salts. Dicky, the first canary, got very dull and lonely when that exodus from the nursery began, so im perceptibly, so insidiously. First, the breakfast moved down to the dining- room, and after a while an oaken "youth s chair," not the ordinary "high chair" of infancy, followed Tertius, and took the place of the tooled leather volumes that soon showed the wear and tear re sulting from his daily impact. Then, tea proved to be quite practicable, there, and saved some body s pulling up the heavy dumb-waiter to the second floor. Then games of a perfectly adult nature began to be played, and a baize card-table was established in the library; chess was men tioned. One does not play chess in the nursery. 286 ON OUR HILL Maps began to cover the Noah s Ark frieze, and the blackboard hid the aquarium. People who listen to "David Copperfieldj" and Mrs. Ewing do not sit in a nursery for that purpose: they use the library. So that before we realized it, Dicky swung lonely in his cage, and met his friends only when they snatched a little grumbling time to clean it. When the giant brass palace that held the eight wonderful birds came up the hill, Our Mother re membered that Dicky no longer filled the bed room floor with chirps and trills, and that long, liquid note that was his (and our) pride, and sug gested throwing in his lot with the others. "Not if you want him to sing," declared the new chauffeur firmly. "Just as you say, of course, but birds together don t sing. Leave him down with em, but keep him in his cage." "But they sing because they re happy, don t they?" "No, ma am. They sing because they re lonely," said the chauffeur. Our Mother stood, wide-eyed, lost in the idea. "Why, Julius, how perfectly wonderful!" she mused. "Like Heine ! Then it s really true." OUR FIRST FRIENDS 287 "I don t know Heiney," says Julius, "but it s true enough. Did he tell you that?" ;< Auf meinen grossen Schmerzen Mack ich die Kleine LiederJ Our Mother murmurs, "and the nightingale that pressed the thorn into its heart why, all those things are true! " "A nightingale is more of a foreign bird, I guess," says Julius. "I suppose it was after some insects when it happened. Well, do you want em in together?" "Oh, no! Oh, no! Keep him lonely!" Our Mother cries, and gazes at his unconscious little swelling throat thereafter with the pleasant pain that only Art can bring ! But how they die ! One feeds them and washes them, and exercises them, and grooms them for years, and suddenly, like the person in the Bible - they are not. One hopes that some God of Good Beasts takes them to Himself at the last. Our Mother, whose tears flow only for animals and servants, swears at each long good-by that she will never love another; only to lay her bat tered heart between the paws of her next respon sibility ! 288 ON OUR HILL When three beautiful, brave Dane puppies fell, each in his turn, a victim to the dreadful railroad (they could never understand why the puffing black monster refused to move from the rails when they walked there), even Our Mother s optimism bent and broke. "I don t want any more," she said, and dealers tempted her in vain. For weeks no dog disturbed Cornelia browsing in her pasture on the hill, and her granddaughters, Arria and Virginia (Horatia, her daughter, had been Prima s pet, who was wont to feed her from a bucket, so that photo graphs of them looked like French impressionist studies), wandered about with the donkey, un- teased. We had even begun to look a little languidly - into the matter of rabbits, a wide subject, to be approached (quite literally) from many sides. For no one can envisage, even intellectually, one rabbit for any considerable period of time. It is quite certain that few of the ancient Egyptians can have lived in country houses, for instance, or the Lord would never have selected so compara tively innocuous a plague as locusts, in order to achieve the Exodus of the Israelites: He would have indubitably hit upon rabbits. For rabb ts OUR FIRST FRIENDS 289 accrue like the dread unearned increment of Mr. Henry George; they amass themselves like the colossal interest-moneys of the great American captains of finance; they cry out for incarnation even as the legions of the unborn beset the imagi nations of the tortured Mormon prophets. Briefly, a home which includes these gentle beasts can no longer properly be called a home: it is a rabbit- warren. There s no one to break their backs now," we pondered, "and we could extend a wire bar rier two feet below the ground. . . . And Ter- tius has nothing, really, of his very own. . . ." And then came Ninette. A fascinating fluff of inky curls; a pair of melting, beseeching brown eyes; paws that slipped about one s neck; a satin muzzle that cuddled beneath one s ear a baby French poodle ! Her diet, her training, her morals were the passionate problem of every soul upon Our Hill. Hitherto inviolate privacies became her pleasure- grounds; hitherto sacred hours her holiday sea sons. Beds whereon even Tertius might not jump were hers for snoozing; lace pillows that Prima might not pat knew the silky blackness of her ears; mirrors banned to Secunda s moist 290 ON OUR HILL pink fingers were smeared by her inquiring nose. At the anguished cry, "Run! Run! Take Nini out-of-doors!" dig nified dinner-guests tossed aside their dinner- napkins, fled from their lukewarm soup, and pre cipitated themselves, hatless, into the night. Her sobs wrung our hearts; her sulks called forth every alleviating artifice; her growth, that almost hourly miracle, became the chief subject of Our Mother s babblings. To wash and comb her grew from a thrilling privilege into a dread responsibility, and the daily schedule of each infant was based on the margin of time left over from each one s several duties as regarded her. "She s washing the dog; could you not give the message?" resounded monotonously from that terrible convenience, the telephone; and the question as to who should sleep with her, in Our Mother s absence, destroyed what brotherly love adolescence had, up to that point, left unspoiled in the bosom of Tertius. Let others tramp the links; for others the bridle paths, the trout-streams, and the marble swim ming-pools of neighboring estates it is Satur day, and Our Mother is dedicated to soap-suds. OUR FIRST FRIENDS 291 "First I will do Prima and Ninette they take so long to dry," she announces, "but, Secunda and Tertius, you must stay about where you can hear the whistle ! Tertius, bring me the brushes and combs." Prima s tawny mane emerges from the bath- towel; the marble floor is a slippery lake, the bath-spray, pointed to the ceiling, descends in showers along the walls. "I think you ve used the dog-soap on me," she gurgles. "Prima ! How disgusting of you !" "I can t help it I tried to tell you, but you said it would be my own fault if it got in my mouth!--! don t care, anyhow--! love the smell. And now I can kiss her more, and I won t get the fleas!" "Now, dry the rest yourself my arms ache. Where s Secunda?" "I wish I didn t have all this hair Secunda has an easy time. Why couldn t mine be wavy ? I m the oldest . . ." "You are also the silliest. Where is your brush?" "She scarcely ever has a brush, generally," says Tertius solemnly. " Cunda has it for a 292 ON OUR MILL currycomb mostly. My comb is rather broke, because I took Ninette s burrs out that day we came across the fields." "I do, then. Tertius, you shouldn t tell lies. Who took Secunda s brush and swept the crumbs off with it ? I notice you never tell those things ! Who used the nail-brush for his hair this very morning?" "Be quiet, Prima. You are all too filthy for words. What is the use of Aunty giving you lovely things with monograms?" "I don t care I d rather not have them. If you have nice things, they re just that much more to bother about. I d rather just be dirty, for now - when I m married, of course it will be different ! " "Bring Secunda," says Our Mother briefly. "Secunda, what have you on your head?" One always gasps at Secunda. It is only a paper lamp-shade, inverted, and those objects on her feet are only rubber boots; but when she puts her hands on her hips, smiles over her shoulder, and says, "I am one of those Russian persons that dance !" one can only gasp again. "So I supposed." "Don t I look nice, Muddy?" "You look, as a matter of fact, perfectly beau- OUR FIRST FRIENDS 293 tiful," says Our Mother wearily, "but what is the use? Nobody in Your Family was ever in the Petrograd corps de ballet, and you d have to enter directly if you intended to take it up. I m sure they wouldn t like it." Volumes might be written on the persistent failure of children to wash their necks. Why is this? Not one but squirms and screams and re sents the process as an intrusion upon his holiest privacy. That narrow belt of deliciously kissable territory is, from the point of view of infancy, as inaccessible, as mysterious as the Pole to Peary, as the Albert Nyanza lakes to Livingstone ! Our Mother is convinced that great Achilles himself went down to his lamented death, vulnerable, alas, not in his heel, but the back of his neck - because Thetis, his mother, could not, for the best of reasons, wash him there ! Now they shriek under the cold spray, now they protrude pink noses from the Turk-like coif of the towel, now they gather the damp and squirm ing poodle to their smocks, and roll, scattering spray about the new-swept bedroom rugs. Now Our Mother, with set teeth, washes the grimy brushes and the toothless ctfmbs they bring her. Why must she do this? There is not there 294 ON OUR HILL has never been any other way. No governess - those high-strung, intellectualized creatures, quivering at the insulting suspicion of menial tasks, uncertain of social status could be asked ; no chambermaid, vowed to ammonia and all al kalies not wisely but too well, should be. If ever lines of powdered footmen fill Our Mother s halls, if ever she has, like the lady in the song, "vassals and serfs at her side," she sees herself still, in prophetic vision, washing the combs and brushes of her princely establishment. "Oh! Nini has got out! She s rolling on the lawn ! Come on, come on !" They are all out together. Our Mother, soaked to the skin, plunges after them. "Come back ! Do you want to get pneumonia all of you?" she shrieks, but they are off be hind the water-tower. "Sit down and rest, why not?" the interested spectator urges; "they re all right. You re more worried about the dog, anyway, / believe!" He means well, but he has never seen the cem etery on the north slope behind the pig-pen, beyond the stable, where a cleared and solemn square receives, one by one, these friends of ours. Dear old Major, our first horse, whose heart OUR FIRST FRIENDS 297 broke after one last furious dash for the train; Barry, head of his dynasty, who had to be helped out of a life that had come to mean only pain to him (those tears still burn Our Mother s eyes !) ; Sandra, his mate, lithe and beautiful, loving, but treacherous at the last; Dicky the First, whom Prima selected on her earliest journey through the city streets who will go next? Kate, the big, gentle mare? Daisy, the grace ful, uncertain little pony, who carries Prima, in full cowboy equipment, careering up the bank and down the hill? Mrs. Rowdy, Punk s successor, with the brown cross stamped forever on her pa tient back relic of the Cross her honored an cestor carried up the slopes of Calvary? Dicky the Second, pouring out of his lonely heart that prize of sorrow song ? Ah, touch us gently, Time ! We know the Gods are laughing at us; we know that Caesar will catch the goldfish, those living jewels that give Our Mother such joy when she dips them into their green, sun-streaked water; we know that Nini will chase Caesar; that Daisy will kick Nini; that Punk will bite at Daisy; that Arria, that haughty Roman matron, will lunge with her horned brow at Punk. 298 ON OUR HILL They must prey forever on each other, as we, their blind and warring masters, preyed from the beginning until now upon our brothers in misery. Do we keep them to remind us of the Pit whence we were digged? Are they the victims of our lust for dominance, or only the outlets for our wells of love, still bubbling, after all the kisses have been paid and all the hearts are broken, or gone to other healing than ours? Do we feel obscurely that they are our only friends, when all is said and done, because they only are uncritical, because they only have failed to let us see that we have some time, somehow, failed them ? God knows. But in their cemetery, pine- walled and ivy-grown, Our Family shall keep their memory ever green. PRESTO ! CHANGE ! AVE ATQUE VALE! OH, once we were so near, so near, But now we drift apart, And we who were so dear, so dear, So linked heart in heart, Begin to walk our separate ways, Unburdened by our yesterdays. We ran along the little years, Together, hand in hand, But now the parting road appears, Alone, all three, you stand. You stretch your hands and smile and call, One path too narrow for us all. Prima must carve her virgin trail, A lonely mountaineer; Before Secunda s feet the vale Spreads flowery and clear; Oh, Tertius, see, my path is wide Walk yet a little by my side! You stretch your hands, and smile and call, But still you run ahead, For Life has spread a feast for all, And Death for each a bed. His life each man must live alone, His heart each child must call his own Hail and farewell ! I bade you in, Now you must find your way. My road droops to the dusk, you win The wonder of the day. But while we wave our hands and smile, We ll love, dears, through the last, long mile PRESTO ! CHANGE ! OUR Mother is still dazed and blinking from the shock of it. It was all so sudden, so without warning, so un like what she had supposed it would be ! Of course one knows that such things happen to other families; they grow up and move away and change, and one doesn t notice it very much. "How plain the Jones child is, with half her teeth missing!" one says, or, "How rough that little Smith boy is growing he was such a beau tiful little boy!" "Oh, well, you have to expect it," somebody else answers philosophically, and we wag our heads in agreement. But not Our Family ! How could it be ? The future stretched ahead in a sort of haze bloomy green in midsummer, snow-powdered in winter, faintly rose-budded and feathery in the spring. The long tea-hour would always linger on the wide veranda; the overlapping, dull blue hills would fold into receding vistas, all the miles away across the glinting Hudson; changeless guests would rave about the gaudy sunsets and the deli- 303 304 ON OUR HILL cate moon-risings, and eternal puppies would lol lop and splurge about the feet of the unwary. And Tertius? Our Mother realizes now that she had inevitably seen him gazing raptly at her over his blue bib with "Bebe a/aim" embroidered on it! Of course she would have told you that she didn t thus see him, and that she knew he would carry disgusting things in his pockets one day, lose his adorable smile, and talk roughly to his sisters. But she would have been speaking academically, by the light of reason, a priori (if that is what a priori means). In her heart she would be seeing him as I tell you smiling over a spoonful of porridge. Even his first going to school made little dif ference; so many of these long-looked-for crises fail to measure up to our expectations. He sim ply started off one morning in the car with Prima and Secunda and a new pencil-box; and though a conscientious governess fairly drove Our Mother into going on the return trip to fetch them and receive, on bended knees, so to speak, his first - his very first utterances, it really wasn t worth the disgusted shock of seeing him prancing about, unguarded, on a much-travelled State road, wait ing for her. PRESTO! CHANGE! 305 "How was it, precious?" she asked at length, and he answered: "Oh, all right," and the incident was closed. Later on, to a persistent "But what did you do? Surely, something happened?" he replied vaguely : "The ladies talked -- that was all." In fact, of all those first four months of his education, only one really glowing detail stands out. Nobody believes, of course, that he said it. They are polite about it, but they believe Our Mother made it up, which she is utterly incapable of having done. It concerned, of course, arithmetic, that terrible acid test of any really efficient education. Why, oh, why, is it so important arithmetic ? And who, oh, who decided, once for all, that it should be? Is it in the Bible? Is it in the Constitu tion ? Though Our Family should speak with the tongues of men and of angels it profiteth them nothing; they rank in those awe-inspiring reports that come in every month as "Culturally very high; low in form" And "form" is arithmetic. It cannot be disguised. "It isn t that I mind adding," Tertius explains. "I can add all right. But I forget to put down 306 ON OUR HILL that little extra one over that the others remem ber. I forget where they put it." "I know," says Our Mother sadly, "I know." "If adding is broad and thin, only two lines of it, you know, I do pretty well," he goes on con fidentially. "I don t care how wide across the page you make it. But those tall thin ones oh, I hate them!" "I hate them too, precious," she comforts him. "Now let s do some. How much is twenty -four and seven?" "Thirty-one," he says promptly. " Good ! Thirty -four and seven ? " "Thirty-nine!" "Oh, darling!" "Forty-three?" "Tertius! Think!" "Forty forty-one!" " Good ! Forty-four and seven ? " "Fifty-one!" "Fourteen and seven?" "Twenty-one!" We keep at it steadily, till even ninety-four and seven has no terrors for us. "Now, you see, darling, how it is how it must be," she concludes triumphantly. "When- PRESTO! CHANGE! 307 ever, wherever, however you get four and seven, it must always be eleven some kind of eleven. They always go together." 4 Yes," he says, convinced, "I see. I see now. And they always are together," he adds lumi nously. "Anyway, don t you know, "If it rains before seven, It clears before eleven"? This he said while walking around the Triangle just in front of the beautiful red-leaved poisoned oak from which Our Mother picked the top branches in the autumn and had to wear gloves for days afterward. She stopped in the road. "Why, Tertius, how wonderfully true!" she gasped, and vague symbolisms, frightening He brew hierarchies of sacred numbers, confused her troubled mind. Is there, perhaps, some deep, mysterious con nection ? They sat down on a sharp, damp rock by the road and kissed each other excitedly. "I like you to be High Culturally," she assured him earnestly. "It s a lot more entertaining, on walks. I don t care about Form." 308 ON OUR HILL "Prima s poor in Attitude, too," he suggested, "and Secunda s only fair in Concentration. What are they?" "Oh, goodness, don t ask me!" she protested. "We didn t have them when I went to school. There was just Deportment." "I suppose you were always good in that?" he asked respectfully. She coughed. "N-not always," she admitted. Well, well, those walks are over now. Shall we ever go round the Triangle again? How funny we must have been with all the animals streaming out behind us and everybody chatting so amiably, and Our Mother, not lecturing like the "Rollo" books, nor gesturing like a traffic policeman, nor scolding like a cross nurse, but just amusing her self and everybody else ! Why did it all stop suddenly? Was it Prima complaining - "Oh, I don t want to --I m tired -- besides, that s a stupid old walk." "It s stupid because you re stupid, Pri," says Secunda snappishly. "I wish you would go, and leave Tertius and me alone, so we can play nicely together. We have a secret society - PRESTO! CHANGE! 309 "Ho ! A great secret ! I read your silly rules. Stop that, miss, or you ll get hurt ! Stop it all right, how do you like it when I do it?" How disgusting they are like other people s children ! Prima is as strong as a young heifer, and a push from her sends her sister, screaming with pain and humiliation, against a sharp book-shelf corner. Tertius appears among them or somebody that 310 ONOURHILL resembles Tertius. For it cannot be his voice that yells: " Shut up ! You did ! I saw you ! " Our Mother listens to them at an impersonal, fatigued distance. How disgusting they are like other people s children ! How tiresome it would be to have to separate them every day ! They are all of them more or less wrong, you see, and yet they are all of them more or less right. If Prima will act so, Secunda must resent it; her resentment is per fectly characteristic, inefficient, righteous in a way, but a little cry-babyish. If she is so un equally downed in the sisterly contest, the merest chivalry demands the entrance of Tertius. And are we to expect the manners of the Roman Forum from him ? Should we look for a legal discussion, a tactful exhibition of diplomatic policies ? Obvi ously not. Like the widow with her mite, he has done what he could. But how different it all is when they are your own ! Our Mother knows perfectly well what she would say to any other mother; she would smile tolerantly and address that mother as follows: "My dear creature, those children are simply PRESTO! CHANGE! 311 healthy - - human and healthy ! If they didn t act like this, you d be sending, by and by, for the doctor. Perhaps, when they join the angels, they may avoid this perfectly normal clash of person alities; but until they do try to keep your hands off them. They re all right." Very wise words, these. But alas, what says Eliphaz the Temanite ? Our Mother realizes now the feelings of Job when that distinctly unsatis factory guest conversed with him: But now it is come upon thee, and thou faintest; it touch- eth thee, and thou art troubled. Gone are the long, quiet mornings when one knew that Robin Hood or Long John Silver or General Washington or William Tell was comfort ably robbing or murdering or crossing the Dela ware or shooting apples somewhere on Our Hill. Two of us can t do it so well," Secunda ex plains, "and Tertius doesn t mind so nice as he used to, anyway. And Prima is so horrid, she won t come with us, and when she does she gets Tertius all excited and fighting. What is there to do, Mother, anyway?" "Where is Prima?" "Oh, she s dawdling about over the register 312 ON OUR HILL somewhere, I s pose. She says it s too cold to stay out and there s nothing to do." "Where is Tertius?" "He s teasing that spotty cat in the garage. I told him you wanted us to keep in the sun and not to spill water around in the harness-room, but he says there s nothing to do in the sun; so what ll 7 do, Mother?" "Really, I hadn t considered it necessary to make a programme," Our Mother answers coldly. "I ve never taken a course of training as play- instructor in a city settlement district. I should suppose that three healthy children could find something to interest them on forty acres of land." "Oh, it s interesting enough," says Secunda vaguely; "but what ll we do 9" (But now it is come upon thee, and thou faintest.) "I m so tired of these old books," Prima grum bles; "they re only meant for children, anyway. Lots of the girls at school read whatever they like, just as you do. Haven t we any good mystery stories ? I like things about detectives myself. I wish we knew a detective. We don t seem to know any very interesting people, it seems to me." " You would be more interesting to some mem bers of your family, at least," Our Mother coun- PRESTO! CHANGE! 313 ters briskly, "if you didn t persist in mixing up your clothes so. Don t you realize, my dear child, that when you wear a khaki middy blouse and a nice brown tie you look very well, and that when you wear the same blouse over a blue skirt, with a green tie around your collar and a brown bow in your hair, you look ridiculous?" "No, I don t," says Prima flatly. "I think it s all right. What s the difference, anyway ? Green and brown are quite pretty, I think." "I always wear my black tie with my blue sailor. That looks nice, doesn t it, Mother?" says Secunda virtuously. "Oh, you! You re perfect, of course! Who got a demerit yesterday because her tie was lost off?" "It was not lost off! Prima, that s a lie ! I knew perfectly well where it was it was tied around the fifth banister from the end, to remind me to go to room five for my French on Thurs days. So there!" "All the worse. Mother can t afford to buy black ties to tie on school banisters. And you needn t swear, miss." "I didn t swear. How can you? I hate you, Prima!" "It s almost as bad as swearing. You needn t 314 ON OUR HILL get all excited about it; you re nearly crying now. That s the way she acts in her music-lesson, Mother; all the girls laugh at her." "Will you either stop this, girls, or leave the room? I can t understand how you can suppose that any grown person can endure such senseless bickering." "But I m not bickering. It s Secunda being tiresome." "I d rather you didn t answer me again, Prima." "All right, but I m not ans - -" "Prima!" Our Mother springs to her feet and claps her hands violently together. Something very like sparks flash from her eyes. It is all rather noisy and horrid, and Prima goes out sullenly, dragging her feet in a heavy, provoking way. The room is full of temper that has been lost in the scuffle, and one feels that Mr. Rollo, senior, would not thus have ended a discussion with Master Rollo, junior. Nor Mr. Swiss Family Robinson, for that matter. One s friends children are often at that stage. (But now ... it toucheth thee, and thou art troubled.) It is necessary to be philosophical here, and Our Mother begins to talk to herself in the man- PRESTO! CHANGE! 315 ner, say, of Epictetus, or the royal philosopher whose meditations have set us such an example in that fashion: You complain of their quarrelling. Well, you cannot, as things are, have much of that to endure, since they are so little in your house. This sounds well and has the further advantage of being true, because from half past eight in the morning until half past five in the afternoon, for five days in the week, the three are now at school. Long hours of unbroken quiet stretch before her; as a matter of fact, there is altogether too much quiet to the square inch ! Particularly is this true in the laundry, for in stance, where, owing to the absence of a laundress -any laundress whatever the resulting quiet is distinctly appalling. How welcome now would be to Our Mother s ear the shrill yelp of the once detested Hungarian babies, who were wont to accompany their mother, the gardener s wife, up the Hill ! But their father, the gardener, quar relled irretrievably with the cook, and their mother, the laundress, quarrelled irrevocably with the wife of the chauffeur (which sounds like one of Prima s French exercises), and all this, though 316 ON OUR HILL utterly immaterial to Our Mother, cannot, un fortunately, be remedied by violent clappings of the hands nor alleviated by philosophy. For ed ucation, however negligible its effects upon the mind may be, is horribly soiling to the garments, and it is clear that three children discolor three times as many clothes as one child, no matter how little arithmetic you may know. And five laundresses were three times as easy to engage two years ago as one laundress this year. This problem is not in the books, because the arithme tic man was never forced to envisage anything so practical; but it is Our Mother s sad and harass ing duty to determine, as he puts it, the answer, and the answer is just as definite and inescapable as any answer in the back of Prima s teacher s book. And as the earnest student finds himself, no matter how temperamentally at variance with his task, more and more expert, as time goes on, more and more inclined to advance the standard of his daring, so Our Mother, after one winter term of isolated and gloomy concentration upon these mysteries, found herself facing problems more and more advanced, more and more star tling, till at last, on the cold and sleety evening of PRESTO! CHANGE! 317 a terrible January day, huddling over a smoky library fire, she listened to the drip of the slushy rain pouring from a rusted gutter, and confronted her final examination-paper on Our Hill: If three servants, arriving at 11 A. M. at a country house containing eighteen rooms, five baths, and three children who spend three-quarters of their time at school, leave the same house at 1 P. M., how long will two servants remain in a city apartment containing six rooms, one bath and one child, who spends seven-eighths of his time at school ? This problem, needless to say, requires a knowl edge of what the algebra book calls Permutations and Combinations. But as this is a subject in which Our Mother excels by nature, she solved it in exactly four minutes, and had all the trunks brought up from the cellar. " Now I s pose Prima ll be contented," Secunda suggests hopefully. "She s always saying she hasn t got any friends her own age, and the girls begin to have fun as soon as she leaves school, and all the parties, and everything. Now she can go with the fourteen-year-old girls, and let me alone for a minute, maybe!" "That is what one hopes," Our Mother replies absently. "Prima, will you please move off that 318 ON OUR HILL pile of undervests? Now, you have four heavy ones, four middle-weight ones, and I can t find but three of those summer ones. I have every body else s Those piles are all wrong," Priina announces heavily. "What do you mean?" It is impossible not to heed her; when she ap plies this Cassandra tone to domestic crises there is only too often something at the bottom of it. You ve forgotten that they ve all been given down once, haven t you? That P really ought to be an S, and Tertius was wearing Secunda s things last year. Don t you remember they had too many of everything, because Tertius didn t grow as much as you expected, and I had nothing at all? I was to have new this spring." "Oh, for heaven s sake!" Our Mother wails, "and we ve used up all the Prima labels !" Panting women, working against time, have been feverishly stitching dreadful red labels with "Prima" and "Secunda" onto stockings and hand kerchiefs and stockings and petticoats and stock ings and wash-cloths and stockings. They write "Prima" in indelible ink on the margins of ga loshes, and carve "Secunda" upon slippery tooth- PRESTO! CHANGE! 319 brushes. In harassed dreams Our Mother tries to engrave the names upon shoe-buttons, as art ists once engraved the Lord s Prayer on cherry stones, and everywhere we go stockings drip down upon us from above and writhe upward from below. Our Mother, Our Governess, and Our Seamstress bump into one another on the stairs, from trying to read, as they run, that terrible list of articles required by Our School: One heavy sweater, one light sweater, one light, plain dress, suitable for evening, which shall not be made of silk, nor be trimmed with silk, nor be lined with silk. These rules ought to be intoned to a Gre gorian plain-song," declares Our Mother crossly, "behind a chancel-rail ! How are Secunda s stock ings coming on?" Four black, four brown, and four white, it says here," Our Governess interprets, carefully consulting the list pinned to her breast. "But is that the maximum or the minimum, do you think? You told me a half dozen of each." "Oh, goodness gracious!" Our Mother replies. The penalty for doing it wrong is probably thirty days on Blackwell s Island ! Remember all those belts and dickies for the sailor suits must be labelled, too. Are their names sewed into their 320 ON OUR HILL Bibles ? Come here, Secunda, I m going to stamp yours on your back!" "There are only two of the girls I wish to room with, and I just know I probably can t," says Prima gloomily. "I don t care for the others much. I wish / was going to New York. Ter- tius has all the luck." You won t be rooming with me, thank good ness," Secunda returns contentedly. "Now I ll be able to keep my bank and my little clock and my china hen in my top drawer, all I like." "Rooming with you! Well, I should certainly hope not ! That s one reason about the only one, too I m glad to go to boarding-school. And you wait till your bureau-drawers have been inspected, miss --then you ll see if you ll be al lowed all that trash in them." "There s no harm in a bank and a china hen- -" "Oh, isn t there?" "You shan t speak so about my hen!" "Oh, shan t I?" "Will you please leave the room, Prima? Se cunda, if you can t control yourself, you had bet ter go to bed and rest. Has Tertius any stock ings at all?" PRESTO! CHANGE! 321 "He has nineteen pairs, but he says they are all too small. He says you took his good ones and gave them to the girls." "If I hear the word stocking once more to day," says Our Mother bitterly, "I shall lie down on the floor and scream ! My whole life seems to centre in these horrible stockings." The plumbing is altered again, in one last, one final effort. All the tinned corn and tinned to matoes and tinned peas are piled into clothes- baskets and pushed under the piano. Caesar, that inscrutable white cat, runs away, and everybody stops packing and labelling stockings and hunts through the woods for him. Winter hats and spring hats and sheet-music and photographs of Our Mother and arctic overshoes and church gloves and play gloves and copies of "Alice in Wonderland" and stockings always stockings! (four pairs of black, four pairs of brown, and four pairs of white) are packed and unpacked and repacked and superpacked. We warm over what was left from yesterday because it is foolish to buy any more meat, since we re going so soon. Prima triumphantly an nounces that she can t practise any more at home, because all the music was sent over to the school, ON OUR HILL and all there appear at luncheon in disgustingly soiled and unmatched garments "to save my others." Secunda seizes this inconvenient (to say the least) occasion to grow immensely, insanely tall; no last spring s skirts reach her knees, her wrists dangle ridiculously from cuffs already "let down" to their last thread of possibility. "They fitted you last week, you dreadful child !" Our Mother cries. "Well, you ll just have to wear them, that s all. I can t help it. You ought to have noticed all these things, Secunda, really. A big girl, ten years old "But how could I know?" "You should have known," Our Mother persists, unreasonably in- Ceasing her anger. "Now you ll have to suffer for it." Secunda lifts her thick-fringed lids and flashes a strange glance at her Mother. "Oh, all right," she says carelessly, and walks away. PRESTO! CHANGE! 323 An unfamiliar contraction of the heart seizes Our Mother. What is this? Not only has she been most unreasonable, but Secunda knows it, judges it, and abandons it. She walks away, not as a baby, not as one who forgets as she turns on a careless heel, but as one human being walks away from another human being to get rid of it. Our Mother rises rather heavily from the lower stair, and follows her. "I don t mean to be cross, dear," she begins. "Of course you can t help growing. If those look too bad, I ll send you up three new ones from town when I get there." And she kisses the back of her daughter s neck. Somehow, Secunda turns her head more than other people in kissing and one doesn t remember her lips, except in laughter. "Oh, all right. I don t mind," she answers, obviously embarrassed. "She is one person, and I am another!" Our Mother realizes suddenly. In books you wander sadly through the rooms in which you have been young and happy and think appropriate thoughts about the trees and the rocks and the rest of it. Our Mother sincerely trusted that she would know enough about writ- 324 ON OUR HILL ing a book to put all that in at this point. But as this is not a real book, but only what we actually did, truth compels the acknowledgment that no body found any time to wander about in the sun set, weeping furtively at well-loved spots. And anyway, when you consider it, the chief associations of familiar and homely objects are rarely sentimental ones. When Our Mother, for instance, resting a moment, gazed pensively out of the big drawing-room windows across thirty- seven miles of uninterrupted landscape, she was not thinking, as the heroine in a book would have been thinking: "Ah, when shall I see these beautiful sunsets again?" No; she was murmuring to herself: "Somebody else can struggle with the window- cleaning problem now, thank heaven!" And, so far as she could judge, very much the same emotions filled the nursery and the kitchen. By a splendid arrangement of Providence, no demon of second sight perched on anybody s shoulder, chuckling prognostications that would have poisoned our foaming cups of the future. No hint reached Our Mother of those New York windows, whose grime increases with the square PRESTO! CHANGE! 325 of the distance from the country; nothing sug gested to Prima that schools as well as homes have rules regarding the driving of nails into bedroom walls; Secunda s gentian eyes were mercifully blinded to the sad picture of an impatient little girl teased by other people s sisters as well as her own; Tertius, in inflated fancy, proudly roller- skating along miles of park asphalt, was blissfully ignorant of that asphalt s tendency to bump and bruise. Even Nini, thrilling to Our Mother s de scription of the jealousy of other black poodles when she should stalk proudly across their field of vision, never dreamed of the leash and the muz zle that were waiting in the little harness-shop around the corner. And Csesar ? White, sinuous Csesar, most beautiful of all yellow-eyed cats, could he have faintly imagined the nerve-racking surprises the city held in store for him ? Impossi ble. "Good-by, dears; I ll look in and see you to morrow. Did Julius kill the broiler for us, Thora ? Tell him I want a jar of cream and some eggs. We ll find room for them somehow. Now, Se- cunda, you re starting off with really clean teeth; please don t make me feel ashamed of you when I see you again ! " 326 ON OUR HILL "No, Mother." A little shadow of doubt clouds Our Mother s mind; perhaps Prima, who would have argued about her teeth at this point, is at least as calcula ble in regard to them as this promptly agreeing young lady ? "No lick-and-a-promise, mind you!" "No, Mother." "Pooh! She says that all right, but she ll never touch em, except at night, when the house mother s watching her!" "I will! You re not telling the truth, Prima! Stop shoving me! They re my teeth, anyway!" "I should hope they were ! Nobody else wants them!" Our Mother stands in the porch with one arm around Tertius and the other hand holding Ni nette s collar. She gazes at them impersonally. Already they are moving in different orbits as far as she is concerned. She is very tired and the silver is yet unpacked. "Dear, dear!" she observes remotely. "How glad I am that / don t keep a Boarding-School for Little Girls ! Carry the young ladies things up stairs, Julius, when you get there, and hurry back. PRESTO! CHANGE! 327 Secunda bursts into rich chuckling. "You said that such a funny way, Muddy!" she crows. Prima bunches her lips. "One more! One more!" she begs, and as Our Mother jumps to the footboard and kisses her again, her dark eyes mist a little at the mist in Prima s blue ones. "I ll write to you, darling," she whispers. "Hold the dog, somebody ! Don t read too much, Secunda. Good-by!" "The pillow-cases won t go into that trunk, after all," comes a voice from the hall, and life hurries on. The girls are gone. Even now we might have squeezed out a few tears if only there had been time to attend to it properly. But, as Tertius put it so well, thing after thing began to happen differently ! Any body who has ever moved will understand this simple explanation, I am sure. Those of us who had intended to motor in to our new home suddenly found it best to take the train. Dicky, for instance, who shrank, huddled on his perch, into the darkest corner of his news paper-darkened cage, and Ninette, who sulked re sentfully in the baggage-car instead of riding down 328 ON OUR HILL in pride beside the chauffeur. But Caesar, that confirmed wanderer, ran away again at the very last minute, and had to come down in an inglori ous waste-basket later, with the goldfish, who travelled in a quart glass preserve- jar in an over coat pocket and arrived just not frozen. Our Mother, who understands the most elusive symp toms of these creatures as few in this generation can hope to understand them, devoted hours to giving them lukewarm salt-water baths, only to snatch them the next day from Caesar s wicked paws. "But I thought you came down for a rest," Our Friends suggest. "It seems to us that you have brought everything but the donkey with you !" The crippled children s home has been the gainer by Our Family s exodus, and now the very guests who watched Prima s baby photographs on her dear donkey s back, may see, any day, as they whirl past in their touring-cars, the patient, hairy little fellow pacing slowly through the institution grounds, giving hours of happiness to little riders not so straight and strong, alas, but no less de lighted than she used to be. Nini you shall hardly recognize if, indeed, she condescends to recognize you. That jolly PRESTO! CHANGE! 329 black whirlwind, from whose curly back you once picked the burrs and brambles after a wild cross country run, paces sedately up the avenue now with a pigskin leash and muzzle. Only her mane is curly; her modishly shaved back is as the back of a Dresden-china lion, even to the tuft on her tail. Fluffy anklets adorn her dainty steps and she wears her city license about her neck as a de butante wears a jewelled locket. And who are these beside her? The elder lady is in pearl-colored spats and re gards the world through a spotted veil; the younger ladies on either side of her walk discreetly in brown buttoned boots and brown stockings, which are not only undarned, but have no need to be darned - - has Nini forgotten the careless sandals that used to trot beside her twinkling legs ? Well- pressed blue-belted coats encompass these younger ladies, and hats of Milan straw ornamented with bunched rosebuds shade their eyes. Their hands are gloved. Does Nini think at all of the torn sweaters and tam-o -shanters stained with brook water that she followed, barking, over the pasture and through the white-birch grove? Now they are going to the National History Museum to see the skeleton of the dinosaurus a monster relic, 330 ON OUR HILL doubtless, and worth the intelligent attention of Easter-holiday visitors, but unlikely to excite un duly the experienced students of the Rembrandts in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the octo pus in the Aquarium. And who is this youth beside them? You re member him in handed-down coats, perhaps ? No more; he sports a tan ulster and a jaunty hat ob viously purchased for himself alone. As he swings along he kindly explains points of city interest to his country sisters, to their unconcealed dissat isfaction. The insides of this boy s hands are hard; the back of his neck, once ambrosial, goal of his mother s eager nozzlings, smells merely now like the back of a little boy s neck nothing more, nothing less. He possesses a hideous gray garment called a football suit; he steals money wherever he finds it (according to his sisters), or picks up such stray coins as he stumbles over (to quote his own words), and buys sweets at school with them. He would sell his Mother s shoes for money to buy sweets. He slips into the little apartment kitchen, bullies the new cook, and runs out with chocolate. When accused of such an action, he denies it. And the purer-browed, the wider-eyed his denial, the more flagrant the offense P R E S T O ! CHANGE ! 331 may be presumed to be. He is reported to have kicked the cook; it is darkly hinted that some member of Our Family has been heard to call the Now they are going to see the skeleton of the tlinosaums boy who carries us up-stairs in the electric lift it seems too dreadful to tell this ! Nobody who lived on Our Hill was ever known to call anybody else a darned old liar ! 332 ON OUR HILL He has had tonsillitis. He has had chicken- pox. He may at any moment have anything. "Tertius says there are six words that can t be said to women/ Prima reports scornfully. "Isn t he silly? I said to him, I suppose you can say them to Mother, can t you? But he said not. Why don t you ask him?" "I shouldn t dream of asking him," says Our Mother shortly. Vainly she ponders over them -- the six words. Across the gulf of them she stares doubtfully at her son. He smiles kindly back at her. Picker- up of unclaimed money (to put it most pleasantly) , kicker of cooks, stealer of sweets, at least he shall preserve the innocence of his women. On the fine-grained ivory of his temple, just where the flush of his cheek meets it, there looms a great, raw scar. "Oh, Tertius! Precious, how did you do it?" "I fell down," he vouchsafes with brevity. "Oh, darling, how horrid! How?" "On the gravel." "You must have been running very hard to skin it so?" "I was." "How did you happen to slip?" PRESTO! CHANGE! 333 "A boy pushed me." "O-oh. Did he get hurt, too?" "He fell on top." "Oh." What difference does it make how old a boy is, once he is as old as that ? At eight in the morning he forges across the street, increasingly scornful of Thora s guiding hand, climbs into the big white school bus, and is swallowed up for the day. Only at tea-time does the returning bus dis gorge him, soiled and fatigued, and for a few mo ments only after tea can the card-table and Our Mother between them prop open his sleepy eyes. Mere crumbs of his daily life fall into her lap: :< To-day we heard a quite nice concert, mostly violins. . . . To-day there was a interesting leck- shure about brown people, far away. . . . To day we had practise football with the middle-school soccer." Feed your goldfish, woman ! Clip your poodle ! Go on committees and boards to prevent different things (or to bring them about) ! So long as you are present to escort your children to the dentist at Easter-time, what more shall any well-con ducted school ask of you? 334 ON OUR HILL Nor is it only our immediate family that has suffered a town change. "Cezar is very difirint," Tertius writes his sis ter. "As soon as we came to N. York he had three kittens. Mother says we have all of us changged but him most of all. He was allways a boy cat untill now. I hope Ninet will never change." After Caesar s metamorphosis, it seemed to Our Mother that she could never feel the same about anything again. "It is easy enough to call him Cleopatra," she scolds nervously, "but what am I to call you, when you keep changing so?" Tertius considers this seriously. "I wouldn t bother to find different names," he says soberly, "because, you see, however much there might be changes to me, I d always have to be your boy. It s not like cats, I don t think." "You re very sweet," she says; "but see how your legs dribble over they go down to the floor. You can t sit much longer on my lap. And Prima, with low heels, is up to my ear. It s no use pretending." "But you don t have to pretend," he persists gently. "Don t you see that the minute I get PRESTO! CHANGE! 335 too big to sit on your lap, you ll be small enough to sit on mine?" "Oh, Tertius!" (Will he always say such darling things ?) "And another thing," he adds cunningly. "I You can t sit much longer on my lap" 336 ON OUR HILL can dance with you, when I m bigger you ll like that, you know." "Oh, Tertius!" "And then, when I m big enough to be married and have babies, you can hold them, if you want to hold something," he concludes. "You seem to have covered all the ground," she sighs contentedly. You do look out for every thing so, Tertius, darling ! You may all grow up, if you like, now, for all of me." But around Our Hill, like the pure air that bathes its dawns and sunsets, the memories of their happy childhood, she is sure, will always float and sing. .-..^. / ^*p^ *P f ENVOI THE PARENT S COMPLEAT APOLOGY I VE taught you what you wouldn t learn, I ve hidden what you would have guessed, I ve spurred you out of happy ease, I ve pinned you down to hated rest. The reason why, you may not know It was because I loved you so ! If I have chid you for your best, If I have praised you for your worst, If where you slighted, I have blessed, If where you labored, I have cursed You will forgive me when you know It was because I loved you so ! Had you a fault that once was mine? That fault, my dears, I d ne er condone ! Should gifts and graces in you shine, I d scorn them if they were my own ! Twas puzzling then, but now you know It was because I loved you so ! Although I thundered in my wrath At all your tiny, childish slips, And haled you into virtue s path, A pensive band, with quivering lips, You will be gentle, dears, I know Because your mother loved you so! LD 21A-50m-8, 57 (C8481slO)476B RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. General Library University of California Berkeley OUR HILL THE DIE HOUSEII I FRANCISCO |