A Woman of Genius. Mary Hunter Austin
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prigs of us.
"Mothers," she would say on the rare occasions when she came to call in the beaded dolman and black kid gloves which other Taylorvillians wore only on Sunday, "MOTHERS," with the effect of making it all capitals, "have an inestimable privilege in shaping their children's characters." This was when we had had our faces surreptitiously washed and been brought in for ceremonial inspection; and a little later she would add, with the air of having tactfully conveyed advice under the guise of information, "I always insist"—here Forester would kick me furtively—"insist on having the full confidence of mine," at which point my mother would make excuses to get me out of the room before I, who never could learn that people are not always of the mind they think they are, made embarrassing disclosures.
Up to this time my mother figures chiefly as a woman who tied up our hurts and overruled my father when he tried to beg us off from going to church. I suppose it was the baby always in arms or expected that kept us from romping all over her as we did with my father; and much of her profession of interest in us, which came usually at the end of admonitory occasions, had the cold futility of the family prayers that my mother tried to make appear part of the habitual order when Cousin Judd came to stay with us.
I do not know whether he suspected the hollowness of our morning worship, but I am sure I was never in the least imposed upon by the high moral attitude from which my mother attempted to deal with my misbehaviours. She used to conduct these interviews on the prescription of certain books by the reading of which I was afterward corrupted, on a basis of shocked solemnity that, as she was not without a sense of humour, often broke down under my raw disbelief. Forester, always amenable to suggestion, was sometimes reduced to writhing contrition by these inquisitorial attempts, but I came away from them oftenest not a little embarrassed by her inability to bring anything to pass by them.
I do not think our detachment was greater than is common with young children in families where they are pushed out of their privilege of cuddling as fast as they were in ours. There was thirteen months between Forester and me, another brother, early dead, before Effie, and two that came after. The children who died were always sickly; I think it probable in the country phrase, so appalling in its easy acceptance, my mother had "never seen a well day"; and what was meant to be the joy of loving was utterly swamped for her in its accompanying dread. I seem to have been born into the knowledge that the breast, the lap, and the brooding tenderness were the sole prerogative of babies; it was imperative to your larger estate not to exhibit the weakness of wanting them. There comes back to me in this connection an evening with us three, Forester, Effie and I, squeezed on to the lowest step of the stairs for company, my mother in the dusk, rocking and singing one of those wildly sweet and tragic melodies that the men brought back out of the South as seeds are carried in a sheep's coat. To this day I cannot hear it without a certain swelling to let in the smell of the summer dusk and the flitter of the bats outside and the quaver of my mother's voice. I could see the baby's white gown hanging over her arm—it was the next one after Effie, and already she must have been expecting the next—and the soft screech of the rocker on the deal floor, and all at once I knew, with what certainty it hurts me still to remember, how it felt to be held so close … close … and safe … and the swell of the breast under the song, and the swing of the rocker … knew it as if I had been but that moment dispossessed … and the need … as I know now I have always needed to be so enfolded.
I do not remember just what happened; I seem to have come to from a fit of passionate crying, climbed up out of it by a hand that gripped me by the shoulder and shook me occasionally by way of hastening my composure. I was struggling desperately to get away from it … away from the mother, who held me so to the mother I had just remembered … and there was Jule, the maid, holding up the lamp, ordering me to bed in the dark for having spoiled our quiet evening. Then after what seemed a long time, Effie snuggled up to me under the covers, terrified by my sudden accession of sobs but too loyal to call down the household upon us.
It came back … the need of mothering. There was a time when I had lain abed some days with the measles or whatever. I was small enough, I remember, to lie in the crib bed that was kept downstairs for the prevalent baby … and my mouth was dry with fever. I recall my mother standing over me and my being taken dreadfully with the need of that sustaining bosom, and her stooping to my stretched arms divinely … and then … I asked her to put me down again. I have had drops and sinkings, but nothing to compare with this, for there was nothing there you understand … the release, the comforting … it wasn't there … it was never there at all!
CHAPTER III
But I began to tell you how Ellen McGee and I invented Snockerty and arrived at our first contact with organized society, at least Forrie and Effie and I did, for it led to our being interdicted the society of the McGee children for so long that we forgot to inquire what inconvenience, if any, they suffered on account of it.
You will see for yourself that Ellen must have invented him—where, indeed, should a saint-abhorring, Sunday-schooled Taylorville child get the stuff for it? God we knew, and were greatly bored by His inordinate partiality for the Jews as against all ancient peoples, and by the inquisitorial eye and ear forever at the keyhole of our lives, as Cousin Judd never spared to remind us; and personally I was convinced of a large friendliness brooding over Hadley's pasture, to the sense of which I woke every morning afresh, was called by it, and to it; walking apart from the others, I vaguely prayed. But Snockerty was of the stripe of trolls, leprechauns, pucks, and hobgoblins.
We began, I remember, by thinking of him as resident in an old hollow apple tree, down which, if small trifles were dropped, they fell out of reach and sound. There was the inviting hole, arm high in the apple trunk, into which you popped bright pebbles, bits of glass—and I suppose He might have sprung very naturally from the need of justifying your having parted with something you valued and couldn't get back again, at the prompting of an impulse you did not understand. Very presently the practice grew into the acknowledgment of a personality amenable to our desires.
We took to dropping small belongings in the tree for an omen of the day: whether the spring was full or not, or if we should find any pawpaws in the wood, and drew the augury from anything that happened immediately afterward: say, if the wind ruffled the leaves or if a rabbit ran out of the grass.
It was Ellen who showed the most wit in interpreting the signs and afterward reconciling their inconsistencies, but it was I conceived the notion of propitiating Snockerty, who by this time had come to exercise a marked influence on all our plays, by a species of dramatic entertainment made up of scraps of school exercises, Sunday hymns, recitations, and particularly of improvisations in which Ellen and I vied. There were times when, even in the midst of these ritualistic observances, we would go off at a tangent of normal play, quite oblivious of Snockerty; other times we were so worked upon by our own performance as to make sacrifices of really valuable possessions and variously to afflict ourselves.
It was I, I remember, who scared one of the little Allinghams almost into fits by my rendering in the name of Snockerty of an anathema which I had picked up somewhere, but it was Ellen who contrived to extend His influence over the whole of our territory by finding in every decaying stump and hollow trunk, a means of communication, and deriving therefrom authority for any wild prank that happened to come into her head. It is curious that in all the escapades which were imposed on us in the name of our deity, for which we were duly punished, not one word of the real cause of our outbreaks ever leaked through to our parents. It was the only thing, I believe, the little Allinghams never told their mother, not even when the second youngest in a perfect frenzy of propitiation, made a sacrifice of a handful of his careful curls which I personally hacked off for him with Forester's pocket knife. He lied like a little gentleman and said he had cut them off himself because he was tired of looking like a girl baby.
I think it must have been about the end of Snockerty's second summer that Ellen's wild humour got us all into serious trouble which resulted in my first real contact with authority.
Along the west side of Hadley's pasture,