Well-Remembered

THE caprice of memory is unduly celebrated. Its reasons are better than ours, if we grade importance and unimportance by any ‘general consensus of opinion’; for we remember what counts to our ownest selves — even though it be but the picture in the bottom of our first porridge bowl.

My memory holds fast — and often has held fast for a lifetime — numbers of the slightest possible transitory contacts with people usually seen but once, and often never seeing me at all. But if I clear my mind of cant, I know it would be strange — and worse — if I forgot one of a long procession of babies, boys, maidens, and plain grown-ups, who all thrilled me more or less in their varying ways; who were all somehow’ ‘significant of much,’ and may mean not the less to me when I can least tell their message.

As you would guess, children outnumber all the rest among these enriching unknowns.

The grimiest city streets are the likeliest places I know for seeing children when they are best worth watching. There are staged continuously the prettiest, the darkest, the most heavenly, and the most humorous bits of the human drama, for there children are always living out their unconscious selves.

But it was in a seashore village that I was blessed with a glimpse of John; and John the Great is in his natural place heading my little string of pearls — pearls I bring, whatever my stringing may do to them.

A son of man built for an Homeric hero was John, going-on-five. Men and women who never in their lives unlimbered to talk about thrills yet thrilled at the sight of John dominating the beach, or the village street, or, above all, the great harbor. He stayed as unself-conscious and single-minded as a bull calf or a baby faun, and paid no more attention to the tributes of all ages and both sexes — for John needed only to be seen, to be known for a masterpiece.

But on the water, alone in a little dory, it might happen that John would wake up to a passing moment’s conscious pleasure in his own prowess.

Black-haired and crop-haired, clothed only enough to pass muster with Mr. Small,—our policeman, — big and simple and strong, John was all of a piece, ‘went together’ like a work of art, from his biceps and his wide straight gaze and the faint dark hairs down his baby spine, to his conduct on all occasions. He was unified like Porthos or Hotspur. Porthos’s well-loved name may turn you to fancying him a little Porthos; but John was not stupid — he was only great. Garibaldi is the only other so harmonious human actuality I have heard of. Let John get far out and alone on the wide water, pulling his oars from those darling square shoulders, and that speck was more royal than the great black-hulled fishing schooners themselves.

Oh, yes; with a glass you could see just how he looked, and many a glass would be turned on him whenever he was out there; Portuguese fishermen and our local ‘old captains’ — all our sea-going population and their women and those descended from the seagoing — have the habit of keeping a glass handy, and it is little they miss of any harbor doings. There is a stage whose continuous performance means things to their very life-cells. But even the dull eyes of summer-folk took note of John when he hitched my dory to his and rowed away with us both. And that is when he took fleeting note of himself. Before he started off with both boats and his passenger, he twisted around far enough to give me half a prideful look — and then back he turned and bent to his oars.

It belonged to his lordly size and noble style to be magnanimous; but what stirred me in his magnanimity to Rupert was something bigger and rarer than magnanimity. Coming ‘down along,’ I saw John and Rupert ahead of me, John frantically dancing with pain, — that must be it, — and that big sneak Rupert watching him from the inner side of somebody’s little white gate. As much as nine years old was Rupert, rightfully distrusted among his mates; and I knew him in very unengaging aspects. John, as he danced, was clapping first this paw and then that to one ear, and kicking out and striking out between whiles toward the safely barricaded and coolly observant Rupert.

Hurrying up, I heard, from John the silent, spurts of what our fishermen technically differentiate as ’language.’ It got no rebuke from me. Without waiting to know more than I saw, I felt for John. Rupert did not mind the language either; nothing about this trouble was any trouble of his. John could n’t and would n’t tell me much — he had other calls on his breath; but he met my good-will by lifting for an instant that comforting paw, and letting me see a shockingly bruised and mashed ear, a hurt that was enough to make a grown man dance. ’He did it,’ came like a curse; and sniffing back the tears, again he danced and again struck out at the criminal.

I turned some language of my own on the inscrutable Rupert, without getting a word or a wince out of him; his highly displeasing air of detachment made him guilty in any case, and I felt it a pious deed to tell him so.

But John had his idea of piety too. John who could not talk to tell me what happened must speak now. ‘Aw — ow — anyhow he did n’t go to do it! ’ And John jerked out his defense of the hated one between dancings and kicks, kicks that gestured his feeling.

Maybe Rupert was guilty of nothing worse than indifference to the torture he had caused; I give up Rupert; but did I ever see a moral triumph I liked better than John’s? I did not. What was there here beyond magnanimity? Fair-mindedness! To see and grant and stand by the innocence of your enemy

— that is a bigger thing than forgiving him.

His the impartial vision of the great That sees not what it seeks, but what it finds.

Fair-mindedness was not an early tribal virtue, alas; and early tribal virtues seem the only ones that men have half-way acquired. We called John primitive, but the nobility that bloomed in him is still so rare, and flowers so slowly, that the white man’s civilization totters to-day for lack of it. Its nations are like shipwrecked folk in an open boat in a storm at sea, and still even the instinct of self-preservation can’t make them stop their mad fighting and greed.

Men rise reluctantly even to admiration for the godly beauty of fair-mindedness. They are still so bovinely muddleheaded that they take it for a sign of coldness, and a sound instinct warns them that heat is life. Was John coldly judicial? What idiocy has married those two words in the habits of language? John’s passion for justice and truth outburned the passions of egotism, and that when egotism, fanned by pain and pugnacity, burned fierce. Fiery judicial — that was John; and enough like him, and the kingdom of Heaven would be close upon us.

The idea of looking ‘at the horizon of circumstance,’ without regard for one’s personal or tribal standing in the midst, scares tribal instincts; but withal, being gregarious and cooperative by nature, men have long been driven earnestly to cultivate certain strictly limited, artificially bounded ideals of fairness; and to hold them up more or less steadily before law-made judges, and more steadily before sportmade judges. So the sporting peoples, above others, have achieved, in spots, a mental honesty far beyond the natural man’s. When once, out of a horse-car window, — yes, young folks, a horsecar it was, — I saw two angry truckmen fighting, I recognized that I was beholding one of the triumphs of civilization. To be sure, civilization was not needed to start them fighting; it was in the way they did it that an iron discipline showed, a mental discipline in fairness and squareness. Perhaps only a woman, who sees fist-fighting hardly twice in a lifetime, could have been so stirred by the miraculous decency of these two raging brutes. When I hurried to talk over with a man the beauty of their fidelity to a code, he looked blank, and opined that I must be wrong as to their possession of a code. So far out of nature had biting and kicking and hitting below the belt come to seem to a member of the New York Athletic Club.

In the boxing nations his sex keep busy clamping down and drying up in our young, our male young, all such spontaneities of nature, while training fists to their high calling. More social than are the birds in teaching merely their own fledglings to fly, this masculine concern about the making of men may crop up any time a man sights small boys — anyone’s small boys; just as any American will go out of his way to teach any child — male or female in these days, thank God! — to throw a ball.

I always love these chance-born pugilistic drills; but the prettiest one I ever saw was on a grubby downtown back street entirely roofed by the Elevated Road. Two ‘ kids,’ breeched, yes, but smaller than the smallest I ever saw selling papers, were idly and foolishly pushing and cuffing each other about the sidewalk. A big boy, twelve or thirteen, comes along, — a stranger lad, a white-faced tenement-house product, like the little ones, — and for the sheer love of God, he stopped in his tracks to give those babies a good boxing-lesson. Properly grateful were the babies, flattered and eager and anxious to learn, of course. All three set to work with the ardent attention that blooms in all of us when education really starts us functioning. Such an intelligent clutch after manhood as they were making there in the twilight of the Elevated Road! The community was bludgeoning the red life out of them with one hand, and what it gave them with the other — was it as vital to them as this boxing-lesson and its like, the services and trainings which, under a splendid racial urge, their kind are always brave set to give each other? If, when my boxers grew bigger, they banded themselves with their kind in wicked gangs, whose the blame for the wickedness, whose the glory for such daring and resource and venturesomeness as keeps us a proud people? We are a little too near a great war for any but the pathological pacifist to go back to foolish prattle about ‘mere animal courage.’

I dare say it was thanks to no labeled uplift work that I once beheld a little Italian bootblack start a fist fight —for cause, his bearing assured me. His tongue still had a foreign twist to it; but he set down his box and attacked an Irish rival in a style that showed excellent manual training — and licked that scion of royalty, too. I thought of the knife his father carried; and after plenty of shame over the way we treat his kind, for once I was a bit cheered for my country.

But more beautiful than any fighting are such juvenal enterprises as you can see along our water fronts in summertime. I have watched one ten-year-old on the North River whom Columbus or Nelson or Stevenson would have been glad to keep an eye on. He had contrived to nail three or four driftwood boards together — ramshackle they looked, but withal he had done no slouch of a job; he was no fool; on his raft he had more or less secured a soapbox, and bare-headed, bare-legged, ragged, and kingly, he mounted that soap-box, and, I give you my word, with a bit of board he paddled himself a fourth of the way to Jersey! The water sloshed all over his raft; but, I repeat, he was no fool; when he got too near the track of the big vessels, he paddled back to shore.

I stayed to see that much, but not long enough to see him land, come down to earth; for long he hung off shore, silent and exalted, not ready to drop to the prose of speech, even though his mates were eagerly waiting for him, with a half-veiled worship that spelled fame. It was a heady draught, that fame, but he had known a headier out there alone on the vast bright river. There was one of the breed who first proved the world was round by sailing round it.

Oh, what is there in our romantic race more blood-stirring and heartwarming than the way boyhood holds to the oldest romance of all, the romance of adventure and danger, the romance of barbarism? If anyone could release in music the emotions of a feeling heart, when even little-mannered French and Italians play Red Indian, you would hear a far-lifting lilt of a tune.

And these barbarians — sometimes they show a little higher than the angels. There was the Boy with the Baby.

It was a sweltering hot summer, long ago. We have not suffered such heat now for many a year. At sunset time, day after day, for near a week, getting out for a breath myself, I passed the Boy with the Baby. Ten or twelve years old he was, and though he could not play, he kept with a dozen rough mates about the same age. The gang preempted a stretch of pavement for their unruly fun, and the wilting law let them make themselves a nuisance. In packs they drove on and off the sidewalk and milled up and down it, and pedestrians betook themselves to the other side of the street.

But threading his way securely among them, went the boy who cradled carefully, carefully in his arms, a silent, motionless, waxen, death-doomed little baby. It was doomed, but, like the mother who sent him there, he yearned to ease it with a breath of that street air, though the heat came up from the softened asphalt as from a stove; he brought it from worse. love curved his arms, and love measured his steps, and the pity that knifes the heart bent his cropped head now and again, to search the baby’s awful and patient mask. But he was a dozen years old, and it was something to watch the other boys play. He could do it only because the other boys, down in their dumb hearts, so felt for him and the baby that they united to work a miracle, a highly troublesome miracle. They made sure that in all that running and pushing and scrimmaging the boy with the baby should not get bumped. They were a committee of the whole, evening after evening, to see that no one forgot, that no one took too big a chance. So up and down, up and down the block he went, as one protected by enchantment, while the others weaved around him and shoved each other and lost points in their game for him, for him and the dying baby — and not one note of conscious righteousness anywhere! They knew babies, those boys; and, alas, dying babies were not strange to them.

There was education for you — made too bitter costly; but though they must pay a shameful excess price, yet the old first discipline still worked, and that care for our young, which first made us human, made them near divine.

Time was when, for exercise in town, I rode a wheel. A ‘strange ingenious compound of dullness and danger,’this activity was made tolerable only by going to Central Park very early on summer mornings. Since then, Central Park has changed as much as I have. Then it was a beautifully cared-for place; Tammany provided an army of voters with work in the Park, and it was such an advantageous way of corruption!

One June day, getting out there close to six o’clock, I seemed to have to myself all that dewy green world, where leaves danced with little wandering winds and the sunlight fell straight across the world and the moving shadows were long. But I was not the only refugee from the stark city-desert. Going between the Mall and the sunken fountain, I saw two dots down there on the fountain’s piazza: a boy as small as even the tenements ever turned loose on the world, and by the hand he held a little sister, smaller yet — his charge. To see them was to feel a little smiling humor warm one’s breast. They looked like those kindly comic pictures of street children which diminish them to the size of a caseknife. All alone out there, they seemed hushed, spellbound with all that beauty. And then I, trundling along unseen above, saw little brother, softly, absently, lift little sister’s hand and kiss it.

Exquisite? No tenderness of color and curve and perfume can make any flower that blows better than a symbol of that passing caress. How can the world stay so wicked when divinity so haunts us?

But when the world ceases to be wicked, some wonderful throbs will be lost. Heaven will have to pay for its heavenliness by never knowing anything like my Black Tiger Father. He was a Sicilian; and if he were a BlackHander he made that notion look unimportant, probable but insignificant, in the blaze of his own personal power for wickedness.

I am habitually skeptical of timedefying, exclusive, and constant passions. That a creature dependent on food and drink should burn up years in sleepless hopes of revenge, or in yearnings for love, or in dreams of a novel application of hydraulic pressure, does not square with my knowledge of life’s honest carnality. But I once saw a caged leopard, who did indeed seem forever entranced in a dream of murder. A fearful uplift carried him beyond the stale circus smells and his narrow cage and the base crowds, and he sat still, with half-shut eyes, and dreamed of killing, killing us all. But when one certain man came in sight, while the creature never moved, you could see his passion gleam higher.

‘You’d all be safe till he got me,’ was his keeper’s hushed, half-hypnotized reflection; and he was sympathetic enough to hope that the way the beautiful tragic beast ‘was so taken up with his feelings helped him pass away a weary lot of time.’

‘Amen,’ said I.

The leopard, too, is one of the beings I shall not forget.

On one side of his soul the Black Tiger man was own brother to the leopard. It grips the heart to think what cruelties, what wrongs suffered in helplessness, had shaped him. Such hates as his and the leopard’s are born only of helplessness. Now he was out of his terrible, beautiful, peasant-starving Sicily, but his nature was hard-set. He, though, was not all of a piece, like the leopard: below the hate, the core of his being was something never to be seen, never to be guessed, but by the chance that there, on the open Third Avenue car, his own beaut iful little crippled daughter, a child perhaps eight, perhaps ten years old, lay prone like a baby in his arms, the shapely little dark head upon his breast tight clamped in an iron brace.

I guess her age, but she had been born further along than are the offspring of younger, cruder races. She was all Italian, and a racial grace and gayety and play of mind brought out the gracious nature of her. She was wonderful as she lay there — coquetting wit h lowtoned jests and little laughs up into her father’s face. You felt that you could hear his heartstrings crack over her.

I don’t know how he lived at such a tension of devotion. And now this love sharpened his abiding hatred of the world in general. It was bitter as death that we should see his stricken starry One. Yet he must smile down answers to her sallies — anything to give her a moment’s pleasure. And a cruel God added this wrong to the intolerable rest — that from the facing seat we looked on and lived on! We did not need to understand the child’s words, to be spellbound by her; and he drew’ the gaze like a magnet. But, of course, one tore one’s eyes away the best one could — and, beside the child, it was like being forbidden to look at Tomasso Salvini in a greater part than he ever played.

Ah, well, God was better to them both than the father could take in — one puts no such insights into mysteries beyond the light sweet wisdom of that merry, scourged little daughter. But thanks to his love and his pain, the Black Tiger was all alive; more life surged through him there on the Third Avenue car, than suffices to keep many a respectable citizen responsible for his bills for fifty years; and beneath all our babyish illusions about the sweet and the soft, that is what we really want — to live.

A life intense and full enough makes men half grasp a vanishing perception of the meaning of death.

Glad did I live and gladly die, — but there is more there than even the poets have snared in their nets. All is awry in the actual; but look from afar at the plan and there glimmers death’s noble and unfathomable rightness.

With the Dreadful Man we are back in the Bark. The Dreadful Man would hardly get that name from me now; but I was a girl then, and again it was early, so no one else was in sight, and it was too plain that he was going to speak to me.

I had a natural and also a mothertaught trend to friendliness with fellow beings; but the Dreadful Man was an uncouth and dirty young shambler, of a kind whose youth can look alarmingly brutal. I was rowing a boat, and he leaned over a bridge that I must pass under. He looked at me, he waited for me to come near. There was nowhere else to go but under t hat bridge — Oh, well, I could get out of earshot in a moment! I rowed on, my eyes downifixed on some fluffy yellow goslings w ho were riding those waters in the gayest, silliest illusion that they owned the earth. Then came the expected — the unexpected voice, eager, warm, fairly curling in curves of delight, — ‘Laydee, Lay-dee — see them little ducks!’

I had been marking that I saw nothing else — the more reason why I should meet his yearning need of communion about the marvel and delightsomeness and funniness of those arrogant swimmers. He was ‘getting’ them better, getting more of the paradisaical joke of them than was any other appreciator of goslings in the world at that minute; and the experience lifted him to the simple brotherly manners of the New Jerusalem or a barroom.

In the Park I once made a friend. For my sins the world rushed in between us, and we knew each other but an hour; but we got to the best that the seers have told about friendship. There are others and others of these cherished unknowns, but none I love like him.

I must have asked his name, but that was so external to our intimacy that I did not remember it when I got home. I had forgotten to come down to that detail. But I can pledge the perfect accuracy of every word I quote from him. I could not do that precisely about any other of such remembered speeches — except the Dreadful Man’s. I made a record of my friend at once, because I wanted to keep the very turns of some of his talk.

I stood on a bridge over the bridlepath looking about.

‘What is it? What you looking at?’ came a friendly little voice at my elbow — friendliness making it eager. A shabby little boy was looking up at me, with dark eyes like those of a faun that had learned to say its prayers.

‘Oh, at everything.’

‘’T is nice, is n’t it?' And he sniffed the spring air and looked about him in the most sympathetic comprehension of why everything was worth looking at.

‘There’s trees here has nuts on,’ — he confided this awesome sweet wonder hushedly, — ‘nuts like you buy.’

When I said I must go on — ‘Which way you going?’ he asked anxiously, and was cast down at the answer — one of us must go East, one West! I, the shallower-hearted, cheerfully proposed to say good-bye, but, God bless him! he found that intolerable; he brightened with his decision that he could get home to West 67th Street by ‘going a piece’ with me toward Fifth Avenue. At. that I rose to the decency of abandoning my goal too, and we went off to see the animals.

That experience brought him to heaving a great sigh of satisfaction. ‘I love animals,’ lie breathed; ‘I mean all animals — even — even a hippopotamus.’

We sat. a while under a beflowered arbor of wistaria, expanding with the same emotions. The perfect blooms were shattering and carpeting the place; I picked some up and we toyed over them together.

‘They walk on ’em, walk right on ’em,’ he plainted, under his breath; and when I said I wished I could carry some home with me, he longed to find a way. He was returning from school, — circuitously, — and turning aside, he surreptitiously searched his lunchbasket for a piece of paper that might help me harvest some of this treasure. But his paper was greasy; you could not give a lady a greasy paper, and his hope passed unmentioned.

We wandered on, and he pointed out, with a connoisseur’s discernment, where the bushes opened underneath and over-roofed the best ‘houses.’ And he was agog with the prideful romance of showing me, hidden away behind a tool house, a little bench, a regular park bench, only way under size, a little boy’s park bench — a profoundly gratifying miracle of a bench. Then he must turn homeward, and I went with him — but the moment of parting drew near.

I begged him to come and see me, and I gave him my card with my address. ‘One Saturday or one Sunday, one of those days,’ he would come; his promises Were murmured while half his attention clung to the care of the card. ‘I must n’t. get it dirty, I must n’t,’ he told himself, and finally hesitatingly wrapped it in a grimy snip of a handkerchief. The Lord knows what far reach of distinction or devotion it symbolized to him; but he found it precious, and in a moment must pull forth the wad and look at it again. Shyly, eyes on me and then askance, ‘ Do you always give these to little boys?’ he asked; and I am glad now that I could emphasize that. I never gave one to a little boy before in my life.

A feeling silence was broken when the 65th Street entrance and our parting came close. ‘The enduring factors of life are deep and trembling things,’ and at last he must loose his heart about them; abrupt and sharply moved was his cry: ‘I get mad at the other boys! The trouble with me is I try to be a better boy than I can be! ’

‘What has friendship so signal as its sublime attraction for whatever virtue is in us!’

No, I never saw him again. Maybe without favoring winds, the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of surfaces would have come between our hearts another time. We had our hour. But I don’t think of him and his nature and his soul less as the years go by, and I wish a too conventional respect for his manhood had not kept me from kissing him. The other boys were not by, and if I had, we should both have been the happier.