Small Tragedies

I. THE STAGE

I HAVE always been glad that Charles Lamb saw his first play when he was six years old. It was just the right age for one who was to love the drama all his life, and Artaxerxes was just the right beginning for a precocious child who had already ‘dabbled a little’ in ancient history. The splendor of the representation dazzled and bewildered him. ‘No such pleasure,’ he wrote simply and sadly, ‘has since visited me but in dreams.’

I have never met anyone who did not remember his first play unless he were grown-up when he saw it, and such a one has been cheated of his childhood. I was nine years old when my half-brother, stirred by some kindly impulse, took me to East Lynne. Lucille Western, sister to the redoubtable Helen, played Lady Isabel. She had grown immensely fat, which is fatal to sentiment, but which made no shadow of difference to me, as I failed to understand anything that happened on the stage. There was a child who died in a neat little bed, the only comprehensible episode in the play. I have wished all my life that my first experience had been more thrilling, some melodrama full of dangers and deliverance like The Siege of Lucknow, in which I could have lived as Lamb lived in Artaxerxes.

Up to the age of nine the keen stimulus of the drama was lacking in my life. I can remember only that most accomplished magician, Signor Blitz, who seemed to me more than human, and the profound disappointment of General Tom Thumb. I am aware that this famous dwarf was, when young, a very perfect pocket edition of a man, that he won Queen Victoria’s heart, and delighted the Duke of Wellington. But when I saw him he was middle-aged, and had imprudently grown to be over three feet high. I was in the care of my sister, and when we had looked for a long time at the curtain the weary audience began to clap impatiently. My sister, puzzled by what she thought to be applause, said angrily: ‘Whom are they clapping? There is no one on the stage?’ But I, who was ‘up’ in dwarfs, who was well aware that Hop-o’-my-Thumb was the regulation height, and who knew that the original Tom Thumb of King Arthur’s court was slain in an encounter with a spider — I murmured ecstatically: ‘Perhaps he is too small to be seen.’ After which, when four monstrous creatures came forward, bowing and smiling, — Tom Thumb, Mrs. Tom Thumb, Commodore Nutt, and Minnie Warren, — I turned my stricken eyes away. It did not occur to me to measure them by my father and mother; I measured them by myself, and saw nothing to choose between us.

Tom Thumb and East Lynne made but a poor beginning; but no little girl was ever given a better chance to love the stage than I was, and no little girl ever responded more ecstatically. Philadelphia had two theatres: the Arch Street, run by Mrs. John Drew, where she and her company played good English comedies, and where Joseph Jefferson always acted; and the Walnut Street, where the other stars came — Booth first and foremost, but also Forrest, and Fechter, and Charlotte Cushman, and a host of others. I once told John Drew that I had seen his grandmother play Mrs. Malaprop.

‘You mean my mother,’he corrected with flawless but weary civility. ‘It was one of her great parts.’

‘I am aware of that,’ I said, as civil and as weary. ‘I have seen her in it several times. But this night your grandmother, Mrs. Lane, came back to the stage on her eightieth birthday to give a benefitrperformance of Mrs. Malaprop. Your mother played Lydia Languish, and Lizzie Price, Julia. I was always sorry that part was dropped from the play.’

‘Good Lord!’ he said. ‘It sounds like a chapter of Genesis. I was there in a box. But you — were you weaned?’

Because I was sent so often to the play, for which I can never be sufficiently grateful to my parents, I encountered some droll episodes. I was at Booth’s Hamlet on that memorable night when the theatre cat paced sedately after the Ghost along the ramparts of Elsinore. The audience laughed loudly, but I saw nothing laughable in the incident. With whom’should a cat associate if not with a ghost? I was a very backward little girl, and knew nothing about the things with which advanced little girls were supposed to be familiar. But when it came to cats and dwarfs I could have given points to my betters.

The theatre cat had behaved in a seemly manner, and the audience was in fault. But what can be said for the Academy of Music cat that elected to stroll across the stage at the precise moment when Rhadames and Aïda, immured in their living tomb, were rashly expending their last breath in a burst of impassioned song? The cat, unlearned in Egyptian criminology, and ignorant of what had happened, walked straight through the walled-up door, and rubbed itself in friendly fashion against the singers’ legs. They went on singing, probably because the orchestra went on playing; but they might as well have joined in the inextinguishable laughter of the audience.

Seventy years ago, children who had the right kind of parents were better off theatrically than are the children who go to moving pictures to-day. If their pleasure was less frequent, it was more intense and lasting. What did it matter to us that Booth cared nothing for the presentation of his plays? We lived, as we were expected to live, in his parts — in Hamlet, in Iago, in Richelieu. We saw Rip Van Winkle over and over again; it was part of the pleasant ritual of life, and we never knew how poor a drama it was. But the years melt like a thin mist when I recall Jefferson’s wandering glance, his slow speech, his shuffling gait. Whoever fashioned a poor play out of a gallant story, Guy Mannering, has been forgiven and forgotten; but no one who watched Charlotte Cushman, clad in an assortment of rags which no theatrical wardrobe has ever equaled, crooning over Harry Bertram can banish her from his recollections.

The three most beautiful things I have ever seen on the stage were Rignold as Henry V, leading his soldiers to the breach before Harfleur; Maurice Barrymore, flawless as Captain Absolute; and Adelaide Neilson as Juliet, leaning from her balcony in the moonlight and sighing out her imperishable love.

It is because of such memories that the theatre is still to me a place of enchantment. For one mystic moment, when the curtain rises, I am swept from the world of realities, which I do not like, into the world of imaginings. That moment is brief, but it never fails. Moreover, like all good and seasoned playgoers, I have discovered that the worst of dramas will yield you something worth the having; some moment of surprise, perhaps even of delight, some word of subtlety or wisdom. A more fantastic or tiresome play than Barrie’s Mary Rose it would be difficult to imagine. It seemed written with the express design of stretching the patience of an audience as far as it could be made to go. But when the fey daughter returns to the land of mortal men, where she no longer fits into place, it is her own father who says to the wise old Highlander, ’Do you think she should have come back?’ thus voicing the deep distrust of the normal for the abnormal, of people to whom the earth belongs for those who have surrendered their right to it.

Barrie was a genius, and might have been trusted to give us a good moment if we would struggle through a weary hour to reach it; but the moment comes sometimes in plays of a different order which are the very flowering of the commonplace. In the worst I ever saw, a sentimental comedy written by the feebleminded for the feeble-minded, the heroine — a thing of mush and milk — offers to teach a Negro grandmother how to read. The woman, disinclined to learn, says that her ‘old man’ is satisfied with her as she is. ‘But think,’ urges the girl, ‘how much better he might love you if you were a scholar.’ ‘Umph,’ was the amazing answer; ‘I don’t want to be loved more than I is. I’se a busy woman.'

Out of the mouths of fools, no less than out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, may we learn the words of wisdom.

II. SIN

I was twelve years old, and very happy in my convent school. I did not particularly mind studying my lessons, and I sometimes persuaded the less experienced nuns to accept a retentive memory as a substitute for intelligent understanding, with which it has nothing to do. I ‘got along’ with other children, and I enjoyed my friends; and of such simple things is the life of a child composed.

Then came a disturbing letter from my mother, a letter which threatened the heart of my content. It was sensible and reasonable, and it said very plainly and very kindly that I had better not make an especial friend of Lilly Milton; ‘not an exclusive friend,’ wrote my mother, ‘not one whom you would expect to see intimately after you leave school.’

I knew what all that meant. I was as innocent as a kitten; but divorces were not common in those conservative years, and Mrs. Milton had as many to her credit as if she were living — a highly esteemed and popular lady — to-day. I regretted my mother’s tendency to confuse issues with unimportant details (a mistake which grown-up people often made), and I felt sure that if she knew Lilly — who was also as innocent as a kitten, and was blessed with the sweetest temper that God ever gave a little girl — she would be delighted that I had such an excellent friend. So I went on happily enough until ten days later, when Madame Rayburn, a nun for whom I cherished a very warm affection, was talking to me upon a familiar theme — the diverse ways in which I might improve my classwork and my general behavior. The subject did not interest me deeply, — repetition had staled its vivacity, — until my companion said the one thing that had plainly been uppermost in her mind: ‘ And Agnes, how did you come to tell Lilly Milton that your mother did not want you to go with her? I never thought you could have been so deliberately unkind.’

This brought me to my feet with a bound. ‘Tell Lilly!’ I cried. ‘You could not have believed such a thing. It was Madame Bouron who told her.’

A silence followed this revelation. The convent discipline was as strict for the nuns as for the pupils, and it was not their custom to criticize their superiors. Madame Bouron was mistress general, ranking next to the august head, and of infinitely more importance to us. She was a cold, severe, sardonic woman, and the general dislike felt for her had shaped itself into a cult. I had accepted this cult in simple good faith, having no personal grudge until she did this dreadful thing; and I may add that it was the eminently unwise custom of reading all the letters written to or by the pupils which stood responsible for the trouble. The order of nuns was a French one, and the habit of surveillance, which did not seem amiss in France, was ill-adapted to America. I had never before wasted a thought upon it. My weekly home letter and the less frequent but more communicative epistles from my mother might have been read in the market place for all I cared, until this miserable episode proved that a bad usage may be trusted to produce, sooner or later, bad results.

It was with visible reluctance that Madame Rayburn said after a long pause: ‘That alters the case. If Madame Bouron told Lilly, she must have had some good reason for doing so.’

‘There was no good reason,’I protested. ‘There could n’t have been. But it does n’t matter. I told Lilly it was n’t so, and she believed me.'

Madame Rayburn stared at me aghast. ‘You told Lilly it was not so?' she repeated.

I nodded. ‘I could not find out for two days what was the matter,’I explained; ‘but I got it out of her at last, and I told her that my mother had never written a line to me about her. And she believed me.'

‘But my dear child,’said the nun, ‘you have told a very grievous lie. What is more, you have borne false witness against your neighbor. When you said to Lilly that your mother had not written that letter, you made her believe that Madame Bouron had lied to he.'

‘She didn’t mind believing that,’I observed cheerfully, ‘ and there was nothing else that I could say to make her feel all righ.'

‘But a lie is a lie,’protested the nun. ’You will have to tell Lilly the truth.'

I said nothing, but my silence was not the silence of acquiescence. Madame Rayburn must have recognized this fact, for she took another line of attack. When she spoke next, it was in a low voice and very earnestly. ‘ Listen to me,’she said. ‘Friday is the first of May. You are going to confession on Thursday. You will tell Father O’Harra the whole story just as you have told it to me, and whatever he bids you do, you must do it. Remember that if you go to confession and do not tell this you will commit the very great sin of sacrilege; and if you do not obey your confessor you will commit the sin of open disobedience to the Church.'

I was more than a little frightened. It seemed to me that for the first time in my life I was confronted by grown-up iniquities to which I had been a stranger. The thought sobered me for two days. On the third I went to confession, and when I had finished with my customary offenses — which, as they seldom varied, were probably as familiar to the priest as they were to me — I told my serious tale. The silence with which it was received bore witness to its seriousness. No question was asked me; I had been too explicit to render questions needful. But after two minutes (which seemed like two hours) of thinking my confessor said: ‘A lie is a lie. It must be retracted. To-morrow you will do one of two things. You will tell your friend the truth, or you will tell Madame Bouron the whole story just as you told it to me. Do you understand.'

‘Yes,’I said in a faint little voice, no louder than a sigh.

‘And you will do as I bid you?'

‘Yes,’I breathed again.

‘Then I will give you absolution, and you may go to Communion. But remember, no later than to-morrow. Believe me, it will get no easier by delay.'

Of that I felt tolerably sure, and it was with the courage of desperation that I knocked the next morning at the door of Madame Bouron’s office. She gave me a glance of wonderment (I had never before paid her a voluntary call), and without pause or preamble I told my tale, told it with such bald uncompromising verity that it sounded worse than ever. She listened at first in amazement, then in anger. ‘So Lilly thinks I lied to her,’ she said at last.

’Yes,’I answered.

‘And suppose I send for her now and undeceive her.’

‘You can’t do that,’I said. ‘I should tell her again my mother did not write the letter, and she would believe me.’

‘If you told another such lie, you would be sent from the school.’

‘If I were sent home, Lilly would believe me. She would believe me all the more.’

The anger died out of Madame Bouron’s eyes, and a look of bewilderment came into them. I am disposed to think that, despite her wide experience as nun and teacher, she had never before encountered an idee fixe, and found out that the pyramids are flexible compared to it. ’You know,’she said uncertainly,

‘ that sooner or later you will have to do as your mother desires.’

I made no answer. The ‘sooner or later’ did not interest me at all. I was living now.

There was another long pause. When Madame Bouron spoke again it was in a grave and low voice. ‘I wish I had said nothing about your mother’s letter,’ she said. ‘ I thought I could settle matters quickly that way, but I was mistaken, and I must take the consequences of my error. You may go now. I will not speak to Lilly, or to anyone else about this affair.’

I did not go. I sat stunned, and asking myself if she knew all that her silence would imply. Children seldom give adults much credit for intelligence. ‘But,’ I began feebly —

‘But me no buts,’she interrupted, rising to her feet. ‘I know what you are going to say; but I have not been the head of a school for years without bearing more than one injustice.’

Now when I heard these words sadly spoken something broke up inside of me. It did not break gently, like the dissolving of a cloud; it broke like the bursting of a dam. Sobs shook my lean little body as though they would have torn it apart. Tears blinded me. With difficulty I gasped out three words. ‘You are good,’ I said.

Madame Bouron propelled me gently to the door, which I could not see because of my tears. ‘ I wish I could say as much for you,’ she answered, ‘but I cannot. You have been very bad. You have been false to your mother, to whom you owe respect and obedience; you have been false to me; and you have been false to God. But you have been true to your friend.’

She put me out of the door, and I stood in the corridor facing the clock. I was still shaken by sobs, but my heart was light as a bird. And, believe it or not, the supreme reason for my happiness was — not that my difficulties were over, though I was glad of that; and not that Lilly was safe from hurt, though I was glad of that; but that Madame Bouron, whom I had thought bad, had proved herself to be, according to the standards of childhood, as good as gold. My joy was like the joy of the blessed saints in Paradise.

III. WHAT CLAIM HAD I?

Apparently none! But the thought of the claim that I should have had turned to bitterness the untroubled current of my days. My mother considered that a sense of ownership was unfit for a child, and that I should accustom myself to parting lightly with my most cherished possessions. Possibly she was right; but there is nothing plainer to the intelligence of children than that, adults do not dream of practising the austerities which they recommend, or which — as in my case — they impose upon the very young. Besides, my mother never knew what were my most cherished possessions. How could she penetrate the silence with which I guarded them, the sacred seclusion with which I cloistered them in her bedroom closet, no spot in the nursery being safe?

They stand out in my memory to-day, as if I had recently parted from them. Two in number, and of surpassing inutility. First and foremost a tiny motherof-pearl shell, mounted on wheels, and drawn by a silver-gilt goat. The extreme fragility of this toy unfitted it for the rough-and-tumble existence of a plaything. I handled it with the utmost precaution, but its beauty ravished my soul every time I took it down from the shelf. How it came into my possession I cannot remember. It seemed unreasonable to me that I should possess such a treasure, and I suppose it was, for one day it disappeared, and with it a humbler and dearer object which I had hoped to keep until I died.

I wonder how many people remember a substance called vegetable ivory, which seventy years ago was peddled through trains where nobody, except an occasional child, wanted it. I traveled more than I should have done, because my father had a mysterious and incurable desire for the companionship of his young children, and frequently took me with him on his business trips. Upon this occasion he met an acquaintance whom he called ‘Judge,’ and the two were deep in conversation when the vegetable-ivory man came around. My father never noticed him; but the Judge, who was looking at me, saw the rapt admiration with which I contemplated the foolish wares, and bought me a little chair, a few inches high, with a crimson velvet seat and a carved vegetable-ivory back.

The unexpectedness of the gift, its unlikeness to my home toys, and its immaculate inutility enhanced its value.

I loved that chair as my mother loved her few rare pieces of china. I wonder now why her love for her china did not help her to understand my love for my chair; but, when I was a little girl, parents did not bother about understanding children. They took care of them, taught them odds and ends of things they needed to know, and let them more or less alone; and to be let alone is a very rare privilege to the young. They are naturally secretive, and their little lives are naked to assault. I think my withdrawals were more respected than those of most little girls (my mother was untainted by curiosity); but my possessions, which were lamentably few, were more at the mercy of marauders. I went one day to the closet which was my only haven, and it was, so far as I was concerned, empty. The mother-ofpearl shell, the goat in its rickety harness, and my chair, my perfect and beloved chair, were gone.

I did not see red as a high-tempered child would have done. I saw black. I was bereft, and it did not seem to me that I should ever be even reasonably happy again. I faced my mother with despair in my heart, for I knew I was battling in vain. ‘Where,’ I asked bleakly, ‘is my little chair?’

I gave it and that foolish gilt goat to a bazaar for Saint Vincent’s Asylum,’ said my mother, with the assurance of conscious rectitude which was one of the confusing things about parents. ‘You did not need them. You have plenty of toys.’

‘It was my chair,’ I said.

‘It was yours so long as I permitted you to have it,’ said my mother, who was not the constitutional but rather the benevolent despot type of parent. ‘Now let me hear no more about it. Go play with your big doll.’

‘I loved the little chair,’ I said, ‘and I hate my big doll.’

‘Then,’ returned my mother, assuming offhand the rôle of justice which was the prerogative of parents, ‘I will give your big doll to your sister.’

Something that was between a sob and a laugh escaped from my torn breast. My sister was several years my senior, and a far more intelligent child. Heaven knows how the loathsome objects designated as the ‘big dolls’ had come into our possession (probably through the same sort of bazaar that had robbed me of my chair), but they could never have awakened affection in the heart of any child. They were huge, heavy creatures with stout linen-covered bodies, arms and legs of kid, and wooden heads, their cheeks bright red, their eyes fixed in a meaningless stare, their hair painted in black unlovely curls. The age of realism in dolls was still far off. They were dressed exactly alike in pink tarlatan ball gowns, flounced to the waist, and their petticoats and drawers were finely made and trimmed with lace. Everything they wore was stitched firmly to their bodies, and was never ripped off. They spent their days sitting stiffly side by side, and I hope were more companionable to each other than they ever were to us.

That my sister would assume the parenthood of both these ungainly objects was eminently unlikely, but the subject did not interest me. My doll might be orphaned for all I cared. I had but one thought in the world, and unfortunately could give expression to no other.

‘Can’t my chair be gotten away from the bazaar?’ I asked.

‘No, it cannot,’ said my mother, exasperated beyond the limits of patience. ‘If you were not a selfish little girl, you would be glad to give up something for the orphan babies.’

‘They can have my big doll,’ I said. ‘I want my little chair.’

‘You forget that I have given your big doll to your sister,’ observed my mother. ‘And I don’t mean to hear you say again that you want your little chair. I am tired of it. Go and play with the toys you have, and forget what you have n’t.’

By this time I had ceased to say anything and was crying bitterly. The worst thing about a child’s grief is its sense of permanence. When we are grown, we know that nothing is permanent; but at seven I felt that I should never outlive my loss. And as if this were not enough to darken my days, the sting of injustice was added to the bruise of pain. It was my little chair.

Some half century later I read in Mr. Shane Leslie’s Life of Cardinal Manning this unexpected and conclusive statement of the great churchman: ‘A bazaar would bring dry-rot into the timbers of a mission.’

And, as I read, the ghost of a little girl, long since absorbed into the remorseless years, rose from the past, and with shining face nodded her approbation.

IV. CRIME

It was at a luncheon of well-behaved but not very animated women, and the youngest and gayest of the guests flung at us an exploding bomb: ’I want to ask you all a question,’ she said, ‘and you must answer it truly. Did any of you ever steal ? ’

There was a gasping silence. The halffed ladies looked at one another, and it was a look of protest; whereupon the youngest and gayest relieved their embarrassment by recounting with much enjoyment her one fall from grace. She had snatched an apple from a stall, and being asked the inevitable question, how had she come by it, had proudly confessed the truth. Whereupon her mother had sent her back in tears to the applewoman to return the fruit, and to confess her theft — a very bitter penalty.

This artless narrative loosened the tongues of other guests who recounted somewhat similar experiences which carried us on to the sweets. Then one of the confessants said, ‘Here is Miss Repplier, who has been silent. I am sure she has never stolen anything.’

There was a polite murmur of acquiescence all around the table, and I tried to meet it wdth a smile of conscious rectitude. But all the time my mind was racing back to an episode of my early childhood which I thought I had forgotten, but which now stood out before me as distinctly as a picture on the wall.

I was seven years old when it happened. My brother was ill, and, to get me out of the way, I had been sent to a fond and foolish aunt in Maryland. I seem to have been the kind of child who was always in the way. I was not easy to obliterate, and no one would have dreamed of calling me helpful. ‘She can’t find anything she is sent for,’ said a truth-telling cousin, sizing up my particular form of uselessness.

I was very happy with my aunt, who never — after one experience — sent me on errands; and during the summer I was taken to see another relative whose husband had a tobacco plantation on the Patapsco. Here the temptation of my life befell me; but it was not really a temptation, because I never recognized it as such. It was a readjustment and no more.

The Negro women were drying peaches in the sun. They had long tables on which to spread the cut-up fruit, and they had also a small whetstone on which to sharpen their knives. The minute I saw that whetstone, I knew that it must belong to me. There was no shadow of doubt or denial in my mind.

I had a penknife that would not cut (only knives that would not cut were ever given to little girls), and I proposed to sharpen it on the whetstone; but this was a minor consideration. There was nothing utilitarian in my overmastering impulse. For the first and last time in my life I had seen something which should have been mine, and which would be mine when I succeeded in circumventing Providence.

The circumvention was simple. I waited until the noon whistle summoned all the workers to dinner. Then I took the whetstone, hid it as best I could in the bodice of my little frock, carried it into the house, and put it in my traveling bag. There at least it was safe from molestation, and my soul was at peace with the world.

Now I knew that it was wrong to steal. I could not read (having no aptitude for my letters), and I had never been to Sunday school; but I had been taught my catechism with rigid precision, and I could recite the Ten Commandments as glibly as any little girl of seven in the country. If I attached no personal significance to them, this may have been because the vocabulary of the First Commandment is calculated to throw a child off the track. I doubt, however, if anyone could have made me attach the stigma of wrongdoing to my theft. It seemed to me simple, natural, and inevitable.

The whetstone was an uneasy possession. It was about six inches long, heavy, rough, and — to me — eminently useless. It had become an object of solicitude rather than of affection, like an adopted child for whom my fancy was spent. I tried sharpening my penknife on it; but that pampered plaything still refused to cut anything tougher than my fingers. When the summer was over, and my father took me — greatly lamenting — back to my proper home, the whetstone accompanied me, packed with other new and undesirable possessions in the bottom of my little trunk. If my mother wondered how I came by it, she asked no questions, but sent it down to the kitchen, where the cook found it of service, and where it continued to be used for as many years as I can remember.

I am aware that this tale is not what it ought to be. It lacks every ingredient that could give it savor or meaning. There was no detection, no restoration, no regret, and no retribution. The whetstone fulfilled its purpose in one house rather than in another. Everything seems to have happened for the best, which is not as it should have been. My untroubled conscience did not even pave the way to further transgressions. It is seventy-two years since I robbed my kind relatives of their property. I have never stolen anything since.