A Woman of Genius. Mary Hunter Austin
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road, lay the tilled fields of the Ross property, corn and pumpkins and turnips, against which a solemn trespass board advised us. It was that board, no doubt, which led to our always referring to the owner of it as old man Ross, for except as he was a tall, stooping, white-bearded, childless man, I do not know how he had deserved our disrespect. I have suspected since that the trespass sign did not originate wholly in the alleged cantankerousness of farmer Ross, and that the McGees knew more of the taste of his young turnips and roasting ears than they admitted at the time when Snockerty announced to Ellen through the hollow of a dark, gnarly oak at the foot of Hadley's hill, that he would be acceptably served by a feast of green corn and turnips out of Ross's field. This was the first time the idea of such a depredation had occurred to us, I believe, for we were really good children in the main, but I do not think we had any notion of disobeying. Personally I rather delighted in the idea of being compelled to desperate enterprises. I recall the wild freebooting dash, the scramble over the fence, the rustle of the corn full of delicious intimations of ambush and surprise, the real fear of coming suddenly on old man Ross among the rows, where I suspect we did a great deal of damage in the search for ears suitable to roast, and the derisive epithets which we did not spare to fling over our shoulders as we escaped into the brush with our booty. There was a perfect little carnival of wickedness in the safe hollow where we stripped the ears for roasting—fires too were forbidden us—where we dared old man Ross to come on, gave dramatic rehearsals of what we should do to him in that event, and revelled in forbidden manners and interdicted words. I remember the delightful shock of hearing Alfred Allingham declare that he meant to get his belly full of green corn anyway, for belly was a word that no well brought up Taylorville child was expected to use on any occasion; and finally how we all took hands in a wild dance around the fire and over it, crying,
"Snockerty, Snockerty, Snockerty!"
in a sort of savage singsong.
Following on the heels of that, a sort of film came over the performance, an intimation of our disgust in each other at the connivance of wrongdoing. I remember, as we came up through the orchard rather late, this feeling grew upon us: the sense of taint, of cheapness, which swelled into a most abominable conviction of guilt as we discovered old man Ross on the front porch talking to our father. And then with what a heaviness of raw turnips and culpability we huddled in about our mother, going with brisk movements to and fro getting supper, and how she cuffed us out of her way, not knowing in the least what old man Ross had come about. Finally the overwhelming consciousness of publicity swooped down upon us at my father's coming in through the door, very white and angry, wanting to know if this were true that he had heard—and it was the utmost limit of opprobriousness that our father should get to know of our misdeeds at all. Times before, when we downrightly transgressed by eating wild crabs, or taking off our stockings to wade in the brook too early in the season, we bore our mother's strictures according to our several dispositions. Forester, I remember, was troubled with sensibility and used fairly to give us over to wrath by the advertisement of guilty behaviour. He had a vocation for confession, wept copiously under whippings which did him a world of good, and went about for days with a chastened manner which irritated me excessively. I believe now that he was quite sincere in it, but there was a feeling among the rest of us that he carried the admission of culpability too far. Myself, since I never entered on disobedience without having settled with myself that the fun of it would be worth the pains, scorned repentance, and endured correction with a philosophy which got me the reputation of being a hardened and froward child. That we did not, on this basis, get into more serious scrapes was due to Effie, who could never bear any sort of unpleasantness. Parents, if you crossed them, had a way of making things so very unpleasant.
It was Effie who, if we went to the neighbours for a stated visit, kept her eye upon the clock, and if she found us yielding to temptation, was fertile in the invention of counter exploits just as exciting and quite within the parental pale, and when we did fall, had a genius for extrication as great as Forester's for propitiatory behaviour. So it fell out that our piratical descent on Ross's field was our first encounter with an order of things that transcended my mother's personal jurisdiction.
Up to this time contact with our parents' world had got no farther than vainglorious imaginings of our proper entry into it, and now suddenly we found that we were in it, haled there by our own acts in the unhappy quality of offenders. I think this was the first time in my life that I had been glad it was Forester who was the boy and not I who was made to go with my father and Mr. Allingham to Ross's field to point out the damage, for which they paid.
It was this which sealed the enormity of our offence, money was paid for it, and came near to losing its moral point with Forrie, who felt himself immeasurably raised in the estimate of the other boys as a public character. It served, along with my father's anger, which was so new to us, to raise the occasion to a solemn note against which mere switchings were inconsiderable. No doubt my brother has forgotten it by now, along with Effie, who got off with nothing worse than the complicity of having been one of us, but to me the incident takes rank as the beginning of a new kind of Snockertism which was to array itself indefinitely against the forces inappreciably sucking at the bottom of my life.
It was as if, on the very first occasion of my swimming to the surface of my lustrous seas, I was taken with a line at the end of which I was to be played into shoals and shallows, to foul with my flounderings some clear pools and scatter the peace of many smaller fry—I mean the obligation of repute, the necessity of being loyal to what I found in the world because it had been founded in sincerity with pains. For what my father made clear to us as the very crux of our transgression, was that we had discredited our bringing up. Old man Ross could be paid for his vegetables, but there was nothing, I was given to understand, could satisfy our arrears to our parents' honour, which, it transpired, had been appallingly blackened in the event.
Nothing in my whole life has so surprised me as the capacity of this single adventure for involving us in successive coils of turpitude and disaster; though it was not until we followed my father into the best room the next morning after he had seen Mr. Allingham, still rather sick, for the turnips had not agreed with us, that we realized the worst, rounding on us through a stream of dreadful, biting things that, as my father uttered them, seemed to float us clear beyond the pale of sympathy and hope. I remember my father walking up and down with his hands under his coat behind, a short man in my recollection, with a kind of swing in his walk which curiously nobody but myself seems to have noticed, and a sort of electrical flash in his manner which might have come, as in this instance, from our never being brought up before him except when we had done something thoroughly exasperating: I am not sure that I did not tell Ellen McGee, in an attempt to render the magnitude of our going over, that he rated us in full uniform, waving his sword, which at that moment hung with his regimentals over the mantelpiece.
"Good heavens," he said, "you might have been arrested for it—my children—mine—and I thought I could have trusted you. Good heavens!"
Suddenly he reached out as it were over my brother's shoulder, to whom in his capacity as the eldest son most of this tirade was addressed, with a word for me that was to go tearing its way sorely to the seat of memory and consciousness, and, lodging there, become the one point of attachment to support the memory of him beyond his death.
"As for you, Olivia," I started at this, for I had been staying my misery for the moment on a red and black table cover which my mother valued, and I was amazed to find myself still able to hate—"as for you, Olivia May"—he would never allow my name to be shortened in the least—"I am surprised at you."
He had expected better of me then; he had reached beyond my surfaces and divined what I was inarticulately sure of, that I was different—no, not better—but somehow intrinsically different. He was surprised at me; he did not say so much of Forester, and he did say that it was exactly what he had expected of the McGees, but he had had a better opinion of me. I recall a throb of exasperation at his never having told me. I might have lived up to it. But with all the soreness of having dropped short of a possible estimate, that phrase, which might have gone no deeper than his momentary disappointment, is all I have on which to hang the faith that perhaps … perhaps some vision had shaped on his horizon of what I might become. I was never anything to my mother, I know, but a cuckoo's egg dropped in