Mine Own Familiar Friend

MY first friend outside the family was Lady Macbeth.

My mother deprecates my choice, and contests my statement. She reminds me of Mother Goose.

I answer that Mother Goose was the friend of all the other children as well; and, besides, she was never exactly outside the family.

If I must have a Shakespearean first friend, my mother suggests Peaseblossom.

Peaseblossom came much later. It is easy to be sure, by all the chronological methods of a big family, always more or less like the negro’s, ‘De fus’ Chuesday after de secon’ big fros’.’ The Shakespeare Club read Midsummer Night’s Dream the second year I was lame — the fall we had the white rabbits. Judy’s rabbit, was Puck and mine was Peaseblossom. And, any way, Peaseblossom was never an intimate friend. He was just a charming acquaintance. I had known Lady Macbeth for years and years before that, ever since the winter before I was four, when the Shakespeare Club read Macbeth.

All the grown people in the family belonged to the Shakespeare Club — papa, mamma, grandpa, both the aunts. Uncle Doug and Cousin Emily. To this day I have never known a club I liked so much; for its single purpose was to bring together, in our little Virginia town, a few congenial people to whom Shakespeare was at once daily bread and festal wine, and who, meeting fortnightly, read a play aloud, by parts assigned beforehand. Naturally, the grown people read the ShakespeareClub play aloud more than once before the meeting; and so it chanced that in the winter I was three, going on four, Lady Macbeth became my friend.

I liked her for several reasons: first, because she had such an interesting way of washing her hands; and since jam and mud pies and other delights make so many a damnèd spot on fat small fingers, it was charming to have such a zestful way of getting them out, or failing, as dramatically, in the attempt.

The second reason is more subtle. It was because Lady Macbeth liked the witches. So, of course, did I. I knew well enough why I liked them. It was because they talked poetry, with most engaging rhymes, while most of the Shakespeare people talked in long, marching lines, to which I listened adoringly, but without the sense of ease I had with the witches’ jingles, which sounded much like those of Mother Goose herself. I did n’t know why Lady Macbeth liked them. Most grown people did n’t. The lady with the chestnuts was mean to them. Even mamma discouraged my chanting of lines like the fascinating ones about the finger. (Part of the charm of that couplet was that it conveyed no flicker of meaning, and part that it might rhyme two ways, so one liked to try the effect repeatedly — ‘babe, drabe’ — ‘bab, drab.’) But mamma urged me to confine my repetition to the big magic of

Looking back, it seems to me rather remarkable testimony to the Shakespearean magic, that it so worked on the sensitive camera of a little girl’s mind, that I realized then, without even the mistiest fragment of real understanding of the plot, that somehow Lady Macbeth and the witches were allies. Certainly, there was no particular precocity involved. My father’s big Gordon setter, Banquo, and the good soldier and most redoubtable ghost were so intermixed in my mind, that I was more than a little afraid of the sweetest-tempered bird-dog that ever let half a dozen children pull the burrs out of his coat; and, to this day, Banquo’s name in the caste brings me a flashlight picture of a beautiful blue-coated huntingdog.

Finally, an element of combativeness entered into that first friendship, as into so many later ones. Hardly anybody liked Lady Macbeth. Most grown people liked Mr. Macbeth better. Grown older, I confess that there are, shall we say, flaws in the character of my Scotch friend; but even now I am unwilling to hear a blanket indictment against her; I found her so companionable then.

The next person for whom I remember feeling just that delightful sense of intimacy, as if we two had a bond that others did not share, was Jack-and-theBean-stalk.

There is no haziness at all about the reason for that. Jack had found, and fearlessly followed, a way to climb up and up into the beautiful deep blue sky that arched above the valley of Virginia, whither I, lying on my back in the deep grass of the orchard, could only follow him with all my longing heart.

It was with exactly the same thrill that in after years I knew Cyrano, and stood, dumbly desiring at his side, as he declared, —

My friendship with King David was on less lofty terms. I loved him, of course, for his courage and generosity; and he too loved the deepness of the sky, though he usually saw it when it was full of stars, and wolves howled scarily, yet somehow musically, far away. But t he personal tie between us was that we both wanted to be good, and made such halting work of it. There were other bonds, too. Most ‘ middle ones ’ in a big family find a familiar ring in the big brothers’ chiding of young boasting. Those older children always seem to ‘ know our pride and the naughtiness of our hearts.’

And then, the youngest son of Jesse had one excruciating experience whose bitterness I only, surely, of all living creatures shared. I had rolled dizzily off the foot-log into the Herrings’s creek, and the beloved grownies at Retirement had dressed me in warm, dry things that had belonged to a bigger little girl. So I knew just how miserably shy the boy David was when they put the big King’s armor on him. No wonder he was ‘ruddy.’ No wonder he begged them to take it off.

My friendship with Dr. Johnson developed, I think, when I was about seven. It might rather be called, indeed, an intimacy than a friendship, for it was based upon a common crime. I never really liked him. I make the declaration with an uncomfortable sense that the eye of A. Edward Newton is upon me — but I never did. He had such an explosive and alarming way of saying ‘Sir,’ or ‘Madam.’ And if you had chanced to say anything with which he did n’t agree, you must have felt annihilated when he boomed his verdict against you.

Nevertheless, there was a definite sense of companionship with the great Doctor — a companionship which grew out of the knowledge that a sin, which I had believed set me apart from all the Christian world beside, was shared by the great lexicographer. This was our guilty secret: I disliked, to the point of fearing, to step on a crack, and Dr. Johnson felt safer if he touched all the lamp-posts. He, too, was ‘an evil and adulterous generation.’ To this day, when I see that great figure rolling down Fleet Street, touching all the posts, I see beside him, her small hand feeling rat her safe and warm in his huge one, though not for worlds would she have spoken, a fat little brown-eyed girl in a hrown-and-white-checked apron, who carefully sets her calfskin shoes clear of every crack — and whether they walk in London or in Harrisonburg, I can’t for the life of me be sure.

There were other friends on the Harrisonburg streets; indeed, everybody was a friend to ‘the Captain’s children,’ from the Presbyterian minister himself to Mr. Magallis’s yellow cat. I had a few who were peculiarly my own. One of these was Mr. Adolph Wise, who kept a shoe store five days in the week — five only, for all our shops were closed on Sunday, and on Saturday Mr. Wise read the beautiful Hebrew Scripture in the Synagogue. It made Mr. Wise somehow kin of Isaiah, who, if not precisely a friend, was one of my heroes, like General Stuart.

We children hardly ever went beyond our own hill without some watchful elder. Yet it is among my certain memories that I would stand, a quiet, fascinated child, to hear Mr. Adolph Wise intoning to himself, at a high counter in the back of his store, while his brother sold shoes in the front, sonorous, singing Hebrew words, which I was sure were ‘the same that God spake in the twentieth chapter of Exodus.’

With some critics it may discount the reliability of my memories if I mention that I remember the French Revolution. But for the detail that I know it is n’t true, I would be willing to swear in any court, that I saw the attempted flight of the Queen and that I visited the little Dauphin in prison. I knew him well and loved him dearly, and even now I can see him plain; but his misfortunes set him far apart from a happy, ordinary, little girl, who was interested in every daily detail of life, from the batter cakes at breakfast to the last flicker of firelight. before she fell asleep at night.

The carpenter by the bridge at home is one of t he friends of this, my inner circle, though so far as I remember he spoke to me only once. On that, day he said, calling me by my mother’s name, for he ‘did n’t hold with’ calling little girls by a family name, ‘ Little Nettie, here’s a flower for you. Put it in water. Keep it and watch it, and it will open to the last, bud at. the tip.’ For more than twenty years, as we count time down here, Mr. Bassford has been among the blossoms of Paradise, but none of ‘ t hose eternal flowers’ blooms more lastingly than that pale gold wand of flowers given to a little girl who rolled her hoop across his bridge, oh, years and years ago. Everybody at home had a garden. I had even planted flowers and watched them grow; but I think nobody else in my childhood gave me a cut flower, bidding me ‘keep it and watch.’

That stalk of hollyhock lasted, I think, a little over two weeks, one pale gold rosette growing limp and droopy at twilight every day, another opening every morning — a little smaller, a trifle paler than the earlier ones that had bloomed in the sunshine of Mr. Bassford’s garden. Nature study was not yet upon us in those days, but when I read, afterward, about the flower in the crannied wall, I knew exactly how Tennyson felt when he wrote it. And Tennyson completes the list of these friends of my secret circle.

It is hard to resist telling of other best and dearest people of spirit or of flesh and blood; of the day when the Autocrat made me free of the city of Boston, or of my introduction to English politics by way of Macaulay’s Life and Letters; but by that time an element of conscious selection differentiated those loves from just such hazy, happy bonds as I have talked of here.

It seems hardly fair to leave out the Pilgrim’s Progress people, but they were always rather companions of my pilgrimage than friends of my heart. Agnes Repplier might class the Tinker’s story among ‘Books That Have Hindered Me,’ for my choice of that goody company — with shame I confess it!—was Pliable. Some way his versatility refreshed my soul, while Christian and I plodded on.

Tennyson was not yet Lord Tennyson when first I knew him. I read and chuckled, though resentfully, over ‘Baron Alfred T de T’ long after Lady Clara Vere de Vere was on my calling list. In the fall that I was five, Tennyson came on my horizon. Not dawned: that is not the word. There is a feeling of evening sunshine in that memory. It was the year that I fell out of our apple tree and broke my hip. I remember a good deal of pain, ameliorated by a sense of importance rarely permitted the ‘ middle one,’ in a family of children; but the great event of that year was, and is, that it was then I first met Tennyson. No wonder that, when I read the modem critic’s scorn of the great Victorian, ‘I’d rather be a dog and bay the moon.’

While I do myself the honor of saying that Tennyson was my intimate friend, when I was a little girl, nevertheless, from the first I felt that he was a little aloof, and that I was dignified by that friendship, much as if I had been presented at court — and that, King Arthur’s, not Victoria’s.

Every circumstance of our first meeting was auspicious. Cousin Emily gave me the book, and Cousin Emily was beauty’s very self, with pale-gold hair plaited above her beautiful blueveined temples and white brow. The book was blue and gold; it had no pictures, and it was called Songs from Tennyson. And, crowning joy, it was read to me by the big brother whom I most worshipfully adored. He was ten that summer, and he played on a baseball nine, but he read Songs from Tennyson to me, his five-year-old sister, out in our orchard, under our apple tree. The music of the poems absolutely healed my pain as long as the reading lasted. Perhaps a modern doctor would call it hypnosis. Certainly I neither understood nor wanted to understand the lovely words.

I knew most of the Songs by heart. On wakeful nights, when the splint that held the broken hip grew heavy, I used to recite the ‘Death of the Old Year’ till the bells swung me to sleep. But, whether it celebrated a hunter’s triumph or was addressed to a human ‘old dear,’ I sometimes dreamily wondered, but never cared to inquire. How amazingly is foolishness bound up in the heart of a child!

Gold of the book, on its edges; gold of Cousin Emily’s hair; gold with the green of the apple leaves above me; drifting gold of the maple trees along the road outside; gold in the sunset sky; gold of the hunter’s moon. But why, why is it all Tennyson’s gold?

I have it, oh, I have it.

So, even so, —