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
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