IV
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4. IV
FAME
AS I remember the boys and girls who grew up with me, I think of them as artists, or actors, or travellers, or rich merchants. Each of us, by the time we were half through grammar school, had selected a career. So far as I recollect, this career had very little to do with our abilities. We merely chose something that suited us. Our energy and our vanity crystallised into particular shapes. There was a sort of religion abroad in the West at that time that a person could do almost anything he set out to do. The older people, as well as the children, had an idea that
As for me, I had decided to be an orator.
At the time of making this decision, I was nine years of age, decidedly thin and long drawn out, with two brown braids down my back, and a terrific shyness which I occasionally overcame with such a magnificent splurge that those who were not acquainted with my peculiarities probably thought me a shamefully assertive child.
I based my oratorical aspirations upon my having taken the prize a number of times in Sunday-school for learning the most New Testament verses, and upon the fact that I always could make myself heard to the farthest corner of the room. I also felt that I had a great message to deliver to the world when I got around it, though in this, I was in no way different from several
Meantime I practised terrible vocal exercises, chiefly consisting of a raucous "caw" something like a crow's favourite remark, and advocated by my teacher in elocution for no reason that I can now remember; and I stood before the glass for hours at a time making grimaces so as to acquire the "actor's face," till my frightened little sisters implored me to turn back into myself again.
It was a great day for me when I was asked to participate in the Harvest Home Festival at our church on
This was such an unusual dress and had gone through so many vicissitudes, that I really was devotedly attached to it. It had, in the beginning, belonged to my Aunt Bess, and in the days of its first glory had been a sheer Irish linen lawn, with tiny green harps on it
Aunt Bess, naturally enough, felt irritated, and she gave the goods to mother, saying that she might be able to boil the yellow stains out of it and make me a dress. I had gone about many a time, like love amid the ruins, in the fragments of Aunt Bess's splendour, and I was not happy in the thought of dangling these dimmed reminders of Ireland's past around with me. But mother said she thought I'd have a really truly white Sunday best dress out of it by the time she was
Well, though the dress became something more than familiar to the eyes of my associates, I was so attached to
Ebbs the crimson life-tide fast,
And the dark Plutonian shadows
Gather on the evening blast.
Sometimes I grew so impassioned, so heedless of all save my mimic sorrow
Glorious sorceress of the Nile!
Light the path to Stygian horrors
With the splendour of thy smile.
I wiped dishes to the rhythm of such phrases as "scarred and veteran legions," and laced my shoes to the music of "Though no glittering guards surround me."
Confident that no one could fail to see the beauty of these lines, or the propriety of the identification of myself with Antony, I called upon my Sunday-school teacher, Miss Goss, to report. I never had thought of Miss Goss as a blithe spirit. She was associated in my mind with numerous solemn occasions, and I was surprised to find that on this day she unexpectedly developed a trait
She pulled herself together after a moment or two, and said if I would follow her to the library she thought she could find something — here she hesitated, to conclude with, "more within the understanding of the other children." I saw that she thought my feelings were hurt, and as I passed a mirror I feared she had some reason to think so. My face was uncommonly flushed, and a look of indignation had crept, somehow, even into my braids, which, having been plaited too tightly, stuck out in crooks and kinks from the side of my head. Incidentally, I was horrified to notice how thin I was — thin, even for a dying Antony — and my frock was so outgrown that it hardly
I hated Miss Goss, and must have shown it in my stony stare, for she put her arm around me and said it was a pity I had been to all the trouble to learn a poem which was — well, a trifle too — too old — but that she hoped to find something equally "pretty" for me to speak. At the use of that adjective in connection with William Lytle's lines, I wrenched away from her grasp and stood in what I was pleased to think a haughty calm, awaiting her directions.
She took from the shelves a little volume of Whittier, bound in calf, handling it as tenderly as if it were a priceless possession. Some pressed violets dropped out as she opened it, and she
Lighting all the solemn reevah [river],
And the blessings of the poor,
Wafting to the heavenly shoor [shore].
"I do think," said Miss Goss gently, "that if you tried, my child, you might manage the rhymes just a little better."
"But if you're born in Michigan," I protested, "how can you possibly make 'Eva' rhyme with 'never' and 'believer'?"
"Perhaps it is a little hard," Miss Goss agreed, and still clinging to her Whittier, she exhumed "The Pumpkin,"
When wood grapes were purpling and brown nuts were falling!
When wild, ugly faces we carved in the skin,
Glaring out through the dark with a candle within!
When we laughed round the corn-heap, with hearts all in tune,
Our chair a broad pumpkin — our lantern the moon,
Telling tales of the fairy who travelled like steam
On all sides this poem was considered very fitting, and I went to the festival with that comfortable feeling one has when one is moving with the majority and is wearing one's best clothes.
I sat rigid with expectancy while my schoolmates spoke their "pieces" and sang their songs. With frozen faces they faced each other in dialogues, lost their quavering voices, and stumbled down the stairs in their anguish of spirit. I pitied them, and thought how lucky it was that my memory never failed me, and that my voice carried so well that I could arouse even old Elder Waite from his slumbers.
Then my turn came. My crimps were beautiful; the green harps danced on my freshly-ironed frock, and I had on my new chain and locket. I relied upon a sort of mechanism in me to say:
The vines of the gourd and the rich melon run.
In this seemly manner Whittier's ode to the pumpkin began. I meant to go on to verses which I knew would de-light my audience — to references to the "crook-necks" ripening under the Sep-tember sun; and to Thanksgiving gath-erings at which all smiled at the reun-ion of friends and the bounty of the board.
What moistens the lip and brightens the eye!What calls back the past like the rich pumpkin pie!
I was sure these lines would meet with approval, and having "come down to the popular taste," I was prepared to do my best to please.
After a few seconds, when the golden pumpkins that lined the stage had ceased to dance before my eyes, I thought I ought to begin to "get hold
Bear their eagles high no more;
And my wrecked and scattered galleys
Strew dark Actium's fatal shore.
My tongue seemed frozen, or some kind of a ratchet at the base of it had got out of order. For a moment — a moment can be the little sister of eternity — I could say nothing. Then I
I went to my seat amid what I was pleased to consider "thunders of applause," and by way of acknowledgment, I spoke, with chastened propriety, Whittier's ode to the pumpkin.
I cannot remember whether or not I was scolded. I'm afraid, afterward, some people still laughed. As for me,
IV
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