Chapter I: Part 1

AS A WOMAN THINKS

AS A WOMAN THINKS

BY CORRA HARRIS _Author of “My Book and Heart”_

BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge 1925

COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY CORRA HARRIS

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

CONTENTS

I. INTRODUCTORY 3

II. WHEN I WAS A CHILD 10

III. CHILDREN FROM THE CABIN 17

IV. FEARSOME THOUGHTS 20

V. GREEN-GROWING SCRIPTURES 25

VI. FATHER AND MOTHER 31

VII. MY MOTHER’S GOD 38

VIII. BOOK LEARNING 41

IX. SCHOOL DAYS 47

X. WHAT I READ 52

XI. THE TEACHER I HAD 56

XII. THE ‘REBEL’S’ CHILD 60

XIII. NEW ENGLAND AND THE SOUTH 64

XIV. CERTAIN LIES 68

XV. REPUTATION 72

XVI. ‘BEAUTIFUL AND PRECIOUS’ 75

XVII. THE WORKING OF LOVE 78

XVIII. VENTURES IN SCRIPTURES 82

XIX. THE WISDOM OF THE WORD 90

XX. CONFESSION AND THE CHURCH 96

XXI. LUNDY AND I WALK AND TALK 99

XXII. WE CONSIDER GREEK CULTURE 105

XXIII. THE YEAR IN OXFORD 110

XXIV. HOMELY PLEASURE 118

XXV. LOVE AND AUTHORSHIP 122

XXVI. THE MIND OF THE WRITER 126

XXVII. DO YOU WANT TO WRITE? 132

XXVIII. EXPRESSING ONE’S SELF 138

XXIX. SITTING IN THE PUBLIC EYE 142

XXX. ON LAYING DOWN YOUR LIFE 149

XXXI. YOU MAKE YOURSELF 156

XXXII. THE LADY POLITICIAN 166

XXXIII. LIVING IN A BOOK 172

XXXIV. HAPPINESS 178

XXXV. THE LATTER DAYS 186

XXXVI. WHY WORSHIP EUROPE? 198

XXXVII. THE COUNTRY AND THE TOWN 202

XXXVIII. GARDEN HAPPINESS 207

XXXIX. WAR 220

XL. WIDOWHOOD 228

XLI. ALL SORTS OF MEN 237

XLII. VARIOUS TYPES OF WOMEN 247

XLIII. MERE MIND 256

XLIV. ISN’T LIFE EXCITING ENOUGH? 263

XLV. AS WE SEEM TO OTHERS 270

XLVI. FITTING INTO LIFE 284

XLVII. FACTS AND TRUTHS 290

XLVIII. BOOKS: MY OWN AND OTHERS 294

XLIX. CHANGE AND CONFUSION 304

L. CAN WE BE HAPPY? 309

AS A WOMAN THINKS

I

INTRODUCTORY

This is not a mystical tale, nor a literary interpretation of addled-egg metaphysics. The mind I have has always been laid off sensibly according to the latitudes and longitudes of actual experiences in this present world. I never had an aura, nor the least confidence in the existence of an oversoul. This phrase is the name of a subliminal hysteria, pardonable in poets, but not in prose people with ordinary midget souls. The one I have is no part of the common spiritual vestment. On the contrary, it is an astounding fact too intimately connected with my private consciousness to be exploited in a book, or a street car, or any other public conveyance. I may draw rings around it at a respectful distance before this record ends; I may speculate prudently on souls in general, as one does in futures sometimes; but I shall not risk the presumption of phonographing our immortal part. It is offensive.

The mind is different. This is something no man will deny having, although he may deny his soul. Even if he is pathetically limited mentally, he is the enthusiastic autobiographer of what he thinks. If he has no character, and no energy to achieve, he is the more likely to be the historian, the dramatist, poet and prophet of his mind. He cannot retain it. I have sometimes thought this explains how we came by that safety valve called language. If we should suffer a total aphasia of words, I suppose the human species would explode. The mind develops so much more power in thinking than we can possibly achieve in action.

And to the last, the minds of other men, their secret thoughts, the motives from which their actions spring remain the most interesting things we can find out.

What follows is such a biography; not an analysis, nor a confession, but the drama I have lived in thinking and believing; how the mind I have, determined my conduct, courage, cowardice, and literally created the life I have lived in spite of everything.

This is no vast undertaking like following the trail of a great intellect. I am incapable of measuring the convolutions of such a brain, say, as Herbert Spencer’s. In any case the record would be scientific, not interesting. These people are born bright, but drab, humanly speaking. I am not opposed to them, you understand; they have their place somewhere over our heads, but not in the common life we lead. My justification in choosing a simpler mind to exploit is that most of us have this kind. We have actual experience in living our thoughts; and the way we do it tears mere philosophy to shreds, no matter how well and logically it has been thought out.

If you are writing the life of a prime minister, you begin by laying the scenes in the times in which he lived. You must set down the kind of king he served, discuss the people and problems that engaged his attention and made him a great man. I am recording the history of a mind as far removed as possible from the grandeur of kings and the policies of prime ministers. But like these more pretentious biographers, I am drawing my scenes in the right place, giving you a glimpse of the summer-minded, slipshod gentlemen who traveled this road, mismanaged their bankrupt fortunes with such humor and courage, because these are my people. There is a fine rich pigment in the quality of these people which imparts that first clear color to the mind, and may account for the bright loom of thought upon which I spun the days of my life with some wit, a certain dexterous sweetness and an awful strength of hope never justified by the facts.

I do not know how it may be with others who have outgrown themselves and become merely the residents of culture and learning, but I experience a sensation of uneasiness when conversing with a man who evades his own personal pronoun. I always change my seat as soon as possible, because he is concealing some one who should be present and apparent if he is talking.

He will never say ‘I think,’ ‘I believe,’ or ‘I know,’ but he will begin with ‘It is said.’ This may be a scholarly affectation of self-effacement, for all I know, but it is neither natural nor sincere.

We are every one born in the first person singular. We live and die feeling that way. Therefore the pronoun ‘I’ is the most honest and revealing word in the English language. It is our obligatory oral signature. It is not an egotistical part of speech, unless you are an egotist, but the born-and-bred name by which every man calls himself. Without this provision, you may say, of nature in him, we should never be able to identify him or know whether he is talking his own truth or his own lies or quoting them from some one else.

This is the reason why certain of my books are written in the first person. They must be. It is my way of writing as other people feel, interpretative. I am being confidential, not boastful, except possibly where we may boast together. I am telling experience common to us as human beings and giving the reader the advantage of keeping his own silence.

The method works. It encourages many to give tongue to their lives and feelings, which is a relief if they have held them in for a long time and never expected to see them said anywhere. Just write the truth of your own heart and you will find out how many men and women have lived that same truth more valiantly than you have without emitting it into copy! I have had to make that humbling revision of my attributes since the publication of ‘My Book and Heart.’ These silent ones who write letters not for publication have found in this volume the witness of their own hearts, a record more intimate and personal to them than if it had been written in the third person, or of one already dead and subject in the very nature of the case to biographical speculations.

The record I am now writing will have no such effect, though it may be equally veracious, because we are further apart in our thoughts than we ever are in our feelings. We may talk much or little, but most of our thinking is done and kept in silence. The human mind is a queer thing. It has more ways of the wild creatures than we have. It never ceases to circle either upon the wing or to prowl in that secret darkness which conceals every man’s mind. It goes off and comes back laden with strange thoughts while you sit gazing with candid eyes into the candid eyes of your companion, whose mind has also been out scouting around and has returned without ever meeting your mind on the way.

I suppose many a man, seated in the possessive case beside some woman, who has a Spencerian countenance and speaks to him in pale blue language of sweetness, would leap for his life if he could see so much as the flash of the thought she is whetting in her neat little head against his peace and happiness. And sometimes if a woman had a look into the mind of her hero she might become an idol breaker in the twinkling of an eye.

But we are not to be judged by what goes on in our minds. One never gets cut in a word or a deed. If all the tools of vengeance forged there were used, this world would be a terrible place. If all the dark thoughts we have were spoken, no man or woman would trust us. But these are the mental vaporings of our lower and meaner natures, conquered in most of us by the moral sense we have acquired which has established better standards.

A wise man can record all he knows of life in one book; but the scriptures of the common man require two books, and maybe a few gospels, as a sort of quotient in the long division of living. For us there would be the book of the heart, where we keep memories, the hopes that failed, our loves and hates, and whatever Beatitude we needed to comfort or praise us, whether it is a friend, a woman, or a bit of the Word. Your wise man takes no account of this copy. In his analysis of the phenomenon of man, the heart is a figure of speech which refers to the reflex action of the emotions. Then there is for us the other record of the mind, quite distinct. It is the place where we keep the law, or break it; the motives which stimulate and control us, and determine our relations to other men--and to God, who we think made us.

This last notion, in my opinion, is a gross exaggeration of the functions of the Almighty. He made what we call mind and we use it to create ourselves. It works one way in this generation and another way in the next generation. Sometimes it is war; then it is religion, art, one kind of science or another; or it may be a magnificent covetousness, practiced under such terms as industrialism, commercialism, or even the League of Nations--always filled with eleemosynary impulses, for conscience’ sake, according to that very shrewd mind he is developing. It is really the sand-pile where the ostrich of him hides its head. It is at last that thing in us which is as easily degraded by a false belief as by the meanest vice. It can exalt a heathen and trap a Christian saint. It is the way of life we choose, right or wrong.

If some one laid his mind on the table, so to speak, not as a confession, nor even as a defense, but as a certified human document, it might cast a flicker of light upon dark corners to be turned in the lives of other people. So if I show what a dim thing it was in the beginning, how a child divines peace and happiness without thinking, what a terror thinking became afterwards, how bravely and adventurously my mind guided me, how cunningly it misguided me, what burdensome rewards it earned for me, and what dividends in peace I have lost by following the best Scriptures according to my mind--some of you who read this record may get a hint to watch the thing and control it more wisely than I have controlled mine.

What I shall write will be sown with errors from the point of view of a psychologist, which will be proof to you that it is a veracious record. There may be laws governing mind; but if so, they are like so many other laws we cannot keep and survive. A logical sentence in thinking according to the exigencies of living is bound to be a very short sentence. The longer ones that last through the days of our years contradict much wisdom and a good many Scriptures. But we do get through, and looking back we do see the Word still standing, not changed.

II

WHEN I WAS A CHILD

In the year 1874 there was a road which crossed the State of Georgia. It has disappeared long since, changed by the will of some memory in the hearts of the people. But you may trace it still when the daisies bloom in May. These flowers are not indigenous to this section. Their first seed fell here from the provender fed to Sherman’s cavalry. So, in May, that month of Decoration Days, they bloom again like a long, narrow memorial wreath laid upon the grave of a dead and glorious past. They wind and turn and tumble down many a steep hillside in North Georgia, as this road made its tortuous way among these hills. But when it slipped into the lower, smoother land, it straightened out and lay like a broad red-and-golden ribbon between the great plantations. Farther and farther it stretched until it slid into the city of Augusta and became Green Street--so named, I suppose, because the road that made it came down into the white old town through such a fair and verdant country.

Other roads entered this highway, as smaller streams flow into a broader, swifter river. There were signposts to guide the traveler. I remember one in particular at the entrance of the old Petersburg road, because as a child it seemed to me like a very old man who had been pointing the way a long time and now leaned wearily in the direction indicated. Above a huge fist, rudely drawn, with the forefinger raised, appeared the legend:

‘This is the way to Mill or Ferry,
Go, it, Traveler, Sad or Merry.’

We had sentiment in those days with a lilt to it, and a signpost was as good a place as any to publish it. We were not seeking fame. We were famous enough already. We were surfeited with the terrible distinction of having just concluded a cruel war in glorious defeat. We were some kind of magnificently irresponsible truth but lately crushed to earth, and we were rising again after the grandiloquent manner of our kind, with a beam in our eye and a song on our lips--but not prosperous! It requires more than a century for the phœnix of man to rise above the ashes of war in material things. We arose by a sort of rhythm of the spirit, unencumbered by wealth. The ascent is quicker and less expensive.

Gentlemen in rags traveled this road upon their old raw-boned horses--Don Quixotes, every one, still tilting against the windmills of a graver, saner civilization that had been thrust upon them. They were rumpled, ruddy men who bore themselves with an air and never complained of their poverty after the manner of ignoble men when misfortune overtakes them. They held onto their leisure for a long time as the last asset of a lost fortune, and visited a great deal from one old ramshackle mansion to another. Their laughter was a joyous eruption. They were pedantic with a flourish. They could drop you a long quotation from Faust or Shakespeare without seeming absurd or causing their victims the least embarrassment, such as we feel when a meaner man quotes a Promethean passage. They required these luminous vestments woven by great poets to adorn the qualities they had. Any one of them would have been admired as a character in a book or as the subject of a funeral oration.

The women of this period were strangely lyrical. Never again shall we see so many fine ladies rise with such grace above the inconvenience of poverty. Dressed in a chignon, a curl, and a cotton frock, they ignored all styles and remained the last word in the poetry of fashion. They had swishing silken virtues and conducted themselves after the manner of the heroine in the last chapter of Proverbs.

Eighty miles above Augusta there stood two huge gate-posts, topped with roughly hewed balls. Between them hung the old gray gate of a famous plantation. When the sun was low in the west it shone through these palings like bars of gold as if there might be nothing beyond but space and silence and brightness. Inside, there was a long avenue stretching away through the trees. Far down, there was a high green terrace; above the terrace, an ancient flower garden, bordered with boxwood and spired with the tops of juniper trees. Blossoming boughs waved like flags in the summer wind. All the spaces inside were filled with humbler flowers; phlox and lilies, violets and hyacinths made misty blue veils in the shadows. Long-soled cactus spread like green footprints upon the dark earth--the whole lonely place a wilderness of bloom left to govern itself.

Somewhere behind this garden in those days stood a little house, left over like a poor relation in adversity.

I was born there.

My recollection now is that it was a good little house, with a busy mind and a kind heart inside, where a female child would be taught the Lord’s Prayer at an early age, and how to sew and knit; but it was not, you would have concluded at a glance, the cradle of genius. Very few people make provision beforehand for geniuses in their families. They are like the seed that birds scatter--liable to spring up anywhere, but never to be anticipated. For my part, I doubt if they are born at all, but produce themselves by some chance of circumstances; almost any man or woman is remotely liable to become one.

But my first memories are not of this house, nor even of my father and mother. I had that faint impression of them which grown people have of Providence, to be depended upon, but too far off in consciousness to be cultivated. My measure of relationship at this time was that father was very tall, and mother was much shorter and very slender. I was some kind of a little pinwheel of life revolving away from them.

In these earliest years I must have belonged more particularly to the vegetable kingdom. My first vivid impressions are of being in the open, not doing anything, certainly not thinking. I seem to have grown like the grass on the rim of the green terrace beyond the flower garden for a long time. Father and mother are very sketchy. They appear now in my memory of this period at rare intervals.

I was not sufficiently acquainted with them then to be aware of their anxieties. They belonged to another world. I can barely remember father’s blue gaze following me about, usually with the light of laughter in it. Mother was always busy. She had large gray eyes that caught me up with a glance, washed me like a saucer, set me down again and went on to her next deed with the swiftness of one who wore wings on her feet. This excessive energy may account for the fact that I formed no apron-string attachment to her.

The reputation I had, however, was that of being an extremely affectionate child. This only proves that any record written from memory must be incomplete. I suppose Homer omitted many important historical facts which did not rhyme with those he sang so lustily in his Iliad. Love anchored me so completely later in life, I am rather glad to think that in these first years my affections must have been like those of a busy man for his family, usually latent, but practiced with convincing charm at odd moments. I do not remember ever crying for my mother as other young children do, because I so completely believed in her. She could not forget me or forsake me. So far as I knew then, she would last forever. There was nothing, literally nothing, in my world to worry about. I was already living by faith.

This is the earliest faculty we develop. It is an enduring illusion at which the world and all the vicissitudes of life tear in vain. We replace every hope that fails with another one. We change our standards and our creeds, but we live and die believing in something. It is a medicine we use to ease the mind. I have had so many letters lately from men and women who no longer believe in God. They have fallen over the precipice of rationalism into an awful pit of darkness. But it is perfectly apparent that any one of them would be quick to believe in a man or woman. They are the same old barnacles of faith we all are, who have lost their hold upon the good bottom, raked off by the lives they have lived or the thinking they have practiced. They are the most credulous people in the world. I never knew one who would not trust a convincing rascal. Or he will take to occultism, some spiritual nostrum, as a certain class of people prefer patent medicine for their physical ailments. What I mean is that the power to believe is born in us, and we must exercise it one way or the other, as we breathe to live.

I have a vivid recollection of the child I was then, as one might remember the person he used to be in another life, sitting on the green crown of my world, very pudgy, back hunched, fingers curled in the grass, the hair on my head sticking up like a fine bright fringe, eyes wide and quiet, fixed upon nothing in particular, the groggy little somnambulist of a bright dream.

I remember one of the illusions I had. The big gate at the end of the avenue was the end of my world. I accompanied father and mother through it at rare intervals, but my understanding was that we passed immediately into another world. I shall experience no more tremendous anticipations rising from my dust in the last day than I did then, seated in the bottom of the rickety old buggy, being drawn through the black weather-beaten portals of that gate.

Once in so often I made the journey up there alone to peep through the palings at this neighboring world. My fear was that it might have fallen off or been blown away in a high wind. Being very young and unacquainted with the other stars, I dreaded the possibility of being stuck up against one just outside our big gate; or worse still, finding nothing at all beyond it but emptiness.

There is a grandeur about total ignorance, winged with imagination. Children alone have it. They endure terrors and visions that would drive a sane person mad. They are little Saturns revolving in the incandescent rings of fancy, no substance to their thoughts, no realities in the secret world where they move and believe everything.

III

CHILDREN FROM THE CABIN

The activities of a great plantation went on about me, but I recall none of the clamor of this business; only the ringing of the blacksmith’s hammer on the anvil in the shop under the mulberry trees. The long procession of negroes sitting sidewise on their mules coming up from the fields through the deepening dusk of the evening were a part of the day I lived, like the lengthening shadows of the trees on the grass. The thin curls of smoke that began to hurry out of the tops of the chimneys from the cabins below the avenue used to hang like long lavender scarfs in the air. I remember that from the top of the terrace I could see the negro children milling and playing before these cabin doors. But I never joined them.

There was an invisible mark between me and these little black ones that must not be crossed. The intimate association between white children and negro children has been greatly exaggerated by the sentimental literature of the South written since the Civil War, to appeal, I have always thought, to the imagination of the North, where most of the reading in this country was done after that period. Southern white children of the stock from which I sprang sustained a passionately devoted relation to the old negroes, men and women, who remained attached to our families. This attachment remains unbroken to this day.

But no such ties ever existed between us and the young ones. The basis of mutual affection and confidence had been destroyed before I was born and the doom of the negro sealed, not by the Civil War, but by propaganda that followed it for fifty years. Where enmity is created, justice will never be done. But hate and distrust beget the sense of injustice, which produces every abomination possible between a strong race and a weaker one.

I have not one recollection of having played with a negro child. My only memory lasts because it was striped in with a switch. Susan, a little negro girl, came to the house one day for a pitcher of milk. I took her aside and examined her black kinky wool wrapped in white cotton thread. I did not think much of it and said so.

Mother punished me severely for this. I do not recall the words she used. They were undoubtedly stern and simple, for she had that kind of a vocabulary; but the gist of it was that the quality of a superior was that he never took advantage of an inferior, and that it was ignoble to humiliate one by referring to his natural defects, whether of hair or color. This doctrine steadfastly kept also by my father, in the end cost him a two-thousand-acre cotton plantation. For there were a hundred negroes on the place, and they took every advantage that inferiors can take of a generous superior. The only reason why it has not been equally expensive to me is that I never had so much as a plantation to lose and have dealt with fewer people of this class.

But the impression I received that day concerning my obligations to those less fortunate by nature, as I stood tearfully diminished before mother and still stinging from the duty of her switch, has never left me. And it is now a fact, which I have proved by experience, that it is more enhancing to keep one’s self-respect than to get the advantage of an inferior person in any kind of transaction. After so many years of this kind of noble prancing morally, it produces a certain insolent sense of quality, not justified, of course, by the person you really are, all told. Still, it is a grand feeling and a part of the mind I have finally rounded up out of life.

IV

FEARSOME THOUGHTS

Poetry and superstition were atmospheric conditions of the mind. As a child, I believed in ghosts, spirits, and signs. Knowledge has delivered me, but my instincts never will. I can think of no other reason why I still pass the seventh day of March warily and more innocently than I do my other days. This has been regarded as an ominous day in my family for generations, although I do not recall a single disaster that overtook any of us on this day. I am also at some pains not to see a new moon for the first time through the branches of trees, because mammy often warned me when I was a child that such an indiscretion would be followed by bad luck.

I received constant instructions from the negro servants in the primitive occult sciences, duly proved and illustrated.

There was a tiny sunken grave outlined with white flint stones on the edge of the forest behind the house. Aunt Parthenia, the old black woman who milked the cows, told me that a child had been murdered and buried there. She said the face was very pale, the hair white like wool. It was a small child about my age, and wore a long white gown. Just at dark she said it often climbed a tree and wailed piteously on account of having been murdered. Hidden in the plum bushes near the house, I used to see this thing clinging and swinging in the top of a poplar tree that grew beside the grave. I cannot recall the features of any living person I knew then so vividly as I do the pale, pinched face of that forlorn little ghost. The hair on its head did stand out and glisten in the darkness. And my own hair stood up in delicious fright, listening to its shuddering cries. Years passed before I could believe this was a screech owl screaming.

Somewhere in this same period I met a ghost in the flower garden when I was expecting no such encounter--a crooked woman wrapped in a black shawl. I remember how stiff and ghostly white her hands were. She looked at me and I could not move. After a while mother came and led me back to the house. My legs were trembling with excitement, but I did not tell her what I had seen. I never confided any of my experiences with ghosts to her, feeling somehow that she might disapprove of them. She was particular about the company I kept.

Mother belonged to the old order of saints. She was the kind of Christian who would have died at the stake for a doctrine. She believed in infant baptism because this was one of the doctrines of her church, and made haste to have me baptized before I could hold up my head. She not only believed you must be born again, spiritually speaking, but she had her doubts about your conversion if you did not suffer the birth pangs of repentance at least with groanings and tears. I was too young to think a doubt when she instructed me in the doctrine of damnation. Hell was a very literal pit of fire and brimstone, where the wicked burned forever and the worm never dieth. If she had not included the worm in this picture, I might not have received the reptilian idea of the place, which was particularly abhorrent. One day I met a turtle in the flower garden. The eyes were red. There were red gills under its neck. I fled shrieking, believing it to be some kind of infernal insect that had crawled out of the pit, still hot and malevolent.

At this age I must have been like those birds in the far places that do not fear or fly at the sight of man. I was never afraid of the dark, nor of the considerable number of ghosts I collected under the guidance of Aunt Parthenia.

I also believed in certain animals. The marvelous things I heard about the doings of rabbits, cats, and foxes surpass anything recorded in Æsop’s Fables. There was a donkey on the plantation. I was shy of this beast, not because I was afraid of him, but because he might speak to me. Some native delicacy I had, forbade conversation with an ass. But if our old dog wagged his tail, I understood him. I have always been able to interpret dogs. They have no souls, no minds of their own; but if they associate intimately with human beings, and not with other dogs, they develop a telepathic relation to us that amounts to divination. They understand us and act according to our will and mood, however secret, because they worship us.

I have had fearful thoughts along this line. What if we sustain a similar relation to the Almighty? What if we are simply the tail-wagging medium of infinite mind? Such speculations are no doubt of the devil, but if you have a mind you cannot resist now and then taking an intellectual whiff at your powers and principalities of darkness.

Negroes do not include fairies among their superstitions; so I was deprived of the lighter, happier comradeship of these gossamer-winged beings. My impression is that they do not last so long, nor are they so sternly stimulating to the imagination as the illusions we have of spirits and ghosts. Even a child discards his fairies at an early age, but mankind never quite escapes the prescience of the supernatural. Wise men as well as fools have been haunted by these uneasy figments. All literature from beginning to end is populated with ghosts and apparitions of the dead. This is testimony accumulated, not about the supernatural, but about what we are. The Lord knew us. This is the reason why heavenly messengers were seen by the naked eye in the Scriptures. Something imprisoned in us responds to that ‘cloud of witnesses,’ and to the Holy Ghost of Jesus Christ. We require such symbolism because we are forever and inalienably kin to spirits. But we never see them.

During the whole of my life I have been subject to these visions. I have had a curious consciousness of not being alone when I was really alone. I have seen a whiteness take shape in impenetrable darkness, heard sounds, had a sense of wings and motion about me in silence and stillness. Maybe this is merely the blind stirring of immortal instinct; but my suspicion is that these ‘presences’ we feel, or think we see, are freaks of memory, subconsciously aroused by the loves or hates we used to have, and that any one with a lively imagination can get himself haunted or blessed by these illusions. I think it is an exercise in supernatural lying which never fully convinces a rational person; therefore, a dangerous diversion to indulge, and bad for the soul. The practice of spiritualism seems to me gross and strangely repulsive, like some kind of abnormal vulgarity. Compare the noble significance of that ‘cloud of witnesses’ mentioned in the Scriptures with the ‘spirit’ conjured up at a psychic séance. The first is designed to inspire faith and courage; the latter merely gratifies your human anxiety or curiosity by informing you that your maiden aunt who died last spring is well and happy!

We must learn; it is inevitable. The time comes when we can no longer avoid the facts accumulated by human experience. I would not go so far as to call this wisdom; much of it is based upon errors of judgment, weakness, and prejudice, but we must master as much of it as possible in order to live sensibly in an erroneous world.

I come now to this momentous period in my own life when the amorphous but still entrancingly immortal faculties I had must be adjusted, according to the mortal mind, to God and man. This is a flighty business when you consider the strange contradictions involved.

V

GREEN-GROWING SCRIPTURES

Father was sensitive to the sublime. The calm mind of the heavens on a clear starlit night could move him to the noblest flights of imagination. He must stretch himself mentally and let out a spark of eloquence or prophecy; it made no difference so long as he relieved the pressure of infinities upon his strident soul.

He had a habit, when I was this very small child, of pacing back and forth in the warm moonlit darkness of summer evenings. I recall myself like a caterpillar sticking to him there. With one bare foot placed upon the toe of each of his dusty boots and my arms clasped about his long legs, I rode backwards; still, the stride was exciting.

One night when we were traveling in this fashion beneath a particularly clear starlit sky, he halted, swung a grand gesture, peered down at me as from a great height.

‘You will live to see airships up there flying like a flock of birds!’ he said.

‘Corra,’ mother interrupted hastily from the porch, ‘come in, wash your feet and go to bed!’

I obeyed, too young to suspect that she was guarding me from what was supposed to be a streak of insanity in father’s family.

It seems that one of his remote ancestors had conceived this same idea of flying through the heavens on his own wing power. He was humored in this hobby until the day he ascended to the roof of his mansion geared up in two huge wings of his own devising and hopped off. He survived only because they did break the force of his fall, but he spent the remaining years of his life in close confinement.

From this time forth some one in each succeeding generation of father’s people had been born with this predilection for flying. Mother was determined it should not be her child in this generation. She was a sensible woman, who had a legitimate imagination and conceived only of incandescent angels being properly endowed with wings.

On the other hand, father had his anxieties. Mother’s Uncle John was an intensely religious man in an age when only preachers were distinguished for their piety in this section, and he was not a preacher. His mind was fixed on the Bible and he read no other book. Father believed he was quite mad on this subject.

I had a rather unusual memory long before I had any of the other intellectual ingredients that go to the making of a mind. When mother began to read Genesis aloud to me, my ear caught the tune of that genealogical chapter which records the generations of Adam with so many repetitions of the word begat.

One day I climbed upon father’s knee and recited too many verses from this chapter to him. I should have let him have them all but for the fact that he interrupted. He exchanged a look with mother.

‘Stop reading that book aloud to her. Remember your Uncle John!’ he said.

Parents are strangely suspicious of what Nature may have done to their children. The first thing they do when one is born is to look him over to be sure he is made up properly, not too long or too short anywhere, and not one-sided. The mother’s travail is never over until she calls out faintly, ‘Doctor, is my child all right?’ and receives the assurance that he is. Then she lets go and fades away into the bliss of motherhood. My parents received the best assurances about me then. Still, as I grew, strangeness of one sort and another showed up in me; then they would hark back, each behind the other, to account for it. It was not the child I was; it was what they knew about themselves which might crop out in me that disturbed them. I suppose all parents suffer from this same sense of ancestral guilt toward their offsprings.

Somewhere in another book I have set down at length the impression made upon me by the story of creation as related in Genesis. Here, following the trail of my mind rather than the emotional effects created upon the life of a child, I pass on with the bare statement that it fitted the mind I had then. And I venture to add that it still spreads amazing and veracious before the mind I have now. It is that book in the Bible most like God. In the others the record is diminished to His dealings with us. There is more room in this first one for seeing just God, is what I mean. The more you live in the open, in remote and quiet places where the evidences still show like green-growing scriptures, the easier it is to believe. For me it will remain to the last my favorite gospel of the goodness and wonders of the Almighty. I do not know why, unless, as life, duty, and conscience pressed hard upon me, these first chapters turned out to be less obligatory than, say, the Ten Commandments. Many a time they have been like great visions in a dark place. It was like seeing original things take shape. I suppose other people have had the same experience; but in this mood the first herbs of the field have been almost visible, in their fresh greenness, through the mists of the first morning of time.

Long afterwards, when I began to write a few scriptures of my own, and must accomplish some feat of imagination to reach what I know, I used to read the first chapter of Genesis as devout Episcopalians read prayers to God from a book. I never caught the rhythm of that great moment when the light was divided from the darkness and the waters from the lands, but hearing the roll and rumble of it has certainly lengthened the stride of my mind.

I had a good deal of the Old Testament imparted to me before I received my other mental training. As far down as I can reach now into the mind I had then, I am a very small human, traveling by speculations through Deuteronomy, Judges, and believing that Second Samuel was Samuel’s son. I am keeping company with the major and minor prophets. I am the little girl who knew Ruth and could see her in the wheat fields, gathering the scattered heads that fell behind the reapers. I was very much attached to her and to David in his youth. But never to the Song of Solomon. Mother always skipped it as ‘unsuitable’ when she read from the Bible. She had a certain look on her face when she would be turning the leaves and came upon this Song, as if she had seen something indelicate, and invariably flirted the page over it hastily as you would cover such a thing. My impression is that she did not think very well of Solomon. To this day I share her prejudices. Too much of his wisdom is derived from the bad end of experience.

But imagine a child’s mind taking shape under these influences. I was haunted by ghosts and fed on the stately Scriptures of the Old Testament. Jerusalem and Nineveh are the first cities I remember hearing about. I was particularly interested in the latter because of the deep-sea disaster which overtook Jonah on his way there. I believed everything, but not with the literal humble mind of the obedient spirit. I have always reserved the right to believe in the Scriptures intelligently. So far as I am able to judge, stupid faith is as dangerous and belittling to the soul as a false doctrine.

This story of Jonah gagged me even at that early age. And to this day I am still wondering if any one saw the whale swallow him, or if it was a mere wave that vomited him upon the shore. Not that I doubt the Scriptures, you understand, but Jonah. What I mean is that in the horror of being cast overboard and drowned, he may honestly have believed he was being swallowed by a great fish, when he was really descending into the bowels of the sea.

The instruction I had from the Old Testament marked my first definite formations mentally. They seemed, as I look back now, to have opened the casements of my mind to more gallant illusions, verified by the angels and prophets who appeared so constantly in these Scriptures. I used to strain myself to see Elijah rising in a chariot of fire. A red cloud in the sunset sky might have convinced me of the repetition of this miracle. I was a small human drop in the eternity of summer days. I had no sense of time. I felt very near the beginning of things. But I was unaffected morally. I went about my business as usual, without a scruple as to what was right or wrong.

VI

FATHER AND MOTHER

I felt a certain silent intimacy with my father. This was due to the fact that we were both highly sensitized emotionally, but not morally. I received the impression that there was more space in father for the practices of a free spirit. It seems to me that we both avoided the house because it was such a good place, ruled by order and righteousness. Nothing could be changed in it, least of all mother, who loved us with a consuming affection. I did not know the name of the sensation at the time, but I always came into it feeling like a prodigal son. I remember some such expression on father’s face shot with humor. I cannot think what we had been doing; probably nothing reprehensible; but I was full of secret stuff not to be exposed to her, because I never could tell what she would approve. Father knew and was silent for the same reason.

She was literally a religious woman. She believed in the Christian religion without tears. She could perform her spiritual duties on a cold collar and keep the Commandments without praying or fasting. I have always thought she might have been a trifle short on the Beatitudes, because she practiced them with less emotion than any other person I have ever known. She had resignation and endurance to a remarkable degree, but she was sublimely deficient in humility. My memory of her, revived by the wit of a mature mind, is that she was admirably conscious of her own worth and standing before the Lord, though I never heard her testify in an experience meeting, which was one of the pious diversions of saints in those days.

Father was spiritually minded, but only intermittently religious, during which periods he far outstripped mother in the bloom and beauty of his virtues. But he frequently fell back into original sin, where he seemed to belong; but was never comfortable, poor soul. He would invariably rise by the means of the most spectacular repentance. I have observed that these acrobatic souls belong to men with more histrionic talent than ordinary saints have. This is the reason why they are more beloved even if they are less dependable. I am certain mother loved father more than she could have loved a better man. It is the quality of goodness in women, not a weakness.

Mother used to pass into silence sometimes. She became inaccessible. No tears, going about her duties with a certain sweet quietness as if she was walking more softly before the Lord than usual and hoped this would do some good.

I still think I was right in my impressions of these periods. My feeling was that something grand was going on. I distinctly felt the presence of God everywhere. My lid came off in this mysteriously electric atmosphere. I suppose it is the same sensation formerly enjoyed by emotional people when they shouted during divine services. I hoped for some change in the methodical routine of things, and did not get it. When the hero of the house fell from grace he disappeared. He was not. But I was quarantined by the tightening of the ligaments of all mother’s virtues and obliged to practice my rectitudes more scrupulously than usual. No escape to the terrace outside. And the house felt like a church--terribly hallowed.

But when father emerged from the dark pit of his transgression, haggard with that look of noble repentance remorse imparts to the male countenance, I beheld him with awe and speechless admiration, having no knowledge of the cause of this moral grandeur or that so much eloquence covered delinquency.

I have a dim candle-lit memory of one of these scenes which took place in mother’s room when I was a very small child. Glowing logs upon the hearth that cast a red radiance over the bare white boards of the floor. A candle lighted upon the candle-stand like the faintest flickering flame in this darkness. Stiff blue calico curtains drawn back from the windows and primly tied. A clear cold night outside and stars shining through the symmetrical angle of these curtains. Mother sitting in her corner, pale as peace and righteousness, hair black and smoothly coiled, skirts arranged just so. Hands folded, her large gray eyes slightly raised, very peaceful, as if she gazed upon her cross and knew she could bear it. I sat in my small split-bottomed chair, hands clasped around the arms of this chair, elbows sticking out, fair hair glowing like the fringe of innocence in this rich darkness, copper-toed shoes shining, head barely high enough above the window-sill to see the stars.

But I was not looking at the stars. I was wearing my church manners and watching mother’s face as one consults the clock when it is time for services to begin. I had been in these family altar services before and knew that one was at hand now because the big Bible lay upon the candle-stand. This Book was never opened except upon great spiritual occasions or when the pastor called. Mother dispensed her daily Scriptures from a smaller, well-worn volume.

There was a step outside, coming with a long crunching stride. The stars twinkled with that giggling sense of humor they may have acquired from watching the doings of men for so many ages. The door was thrust open. A blast of icy wind entered. The flame of the candle flickered, as if this was no place for a good little candle. I vibrated. My dear father, whom I had not seen for days, strode in, you may say, upon this blast. But I restrained my natural affections, as one does when a solemn ceremony is about to begin. Why this ceremony I did not know, but once in so often it had to be performed, because it seemed to greatly enhance father and to refresh and gladden mother.

Father was a pallid and noble figure, somewhat disheveled, like a long-legged eagle that has recently weathered a high wind. He took one sweeping glance around, caught my adoring eyes upturned, and discarded them as a bagatelle in this momentous situation. Mother merely ceased to bat her eyes, gaze still fixed upon her cross. Let the mountains fall upon her, let the waters of all the seas roll over her, she would not be moved except by decent repentance!

Well, he must go through with it as usual, is what I know now father decided after that momentary survey, and kept his pace to the big rickety chair beside the candle-stand. He let himself down into it like a god overtaken in a fault, glanced distastefully at the Bible and emitted the sigh of a bellows. My breast heaved in suspense. I knew that my father would presently become a man of the Lord and open the Book. These were the only occasions when he was associated in my mind with our God. I coveted the experience. What I did not know was that he dreaded the blasphemy demanded of him. He had his feelings and Adam’s modesty when his sin would be dying hard in him. Then some emotion would overcome him; maybe a man’s grateful memories of this invincibly good woman who could not be made to forsake him. What was God’s opinion of him compared to her dear wishes? Such a foolish little she demanded in exchange for all she gave. Something like this I know passed through his mind. Then he would open the Book, turn to the Psalms, taste a few until he struck one with the right note, not too revealing, something vague and nobly sung. That night he read this one:

‘Hear my prayer, O Lord, give ear to my supplications: in thy faithfulness answer me, and in thy righteousness. And enter not into judgment with thy servant.’

He was ever a man quickly moved to the left or right in the moral world. Give him a full glass, a roistering companion, and he could race with the devil himself. Give him the noblest words of penitence and he could produce the accompanying remorseful emotions. He could shrive himself with the dignity and majesty of a saint. So now for the moment he was every whit David broken by his transgression. Grief descended upon him and shook him like a blessing:

‘Hear me speedily, O Lord: my spirit faileth,’ he read on woefully. ‘Hide not thy face from me, lest I be like unto them that go down into the pit.’ And so on until he came to the end.