I was born in a log cabin. I came to my pioneer mother in one of Wisconsin's bitterest winters.
Twenty-one years later I was sailing for England, the wife of a diplomat who was one of Boston's wealthy and aristocratic sons.
The road between—well, let it speak for itself. Merely to set this story on paper opens old wounds, deep, but mercifully healed these many years. Yet, if other women may find here comfort and illumination and a certain philosophy, I am glad, and I shall feel repaid.
The first thing I remember is being grateful for windows. I was three years old. My mother had set me to play on a mattress carefully placed in the one ray of sunlight streaming through the one glass window of our log cabin. Baby as I was, I had ached in the agonizing cold of a pioneer winter. Lying there, warmed by that blessed sunshine, I was suddenly aware of wonder and joy and gratitude. It was gratitude for glass, which could keep out the biting cold and let in the warm sun.
To this day windows give me pleasure. My father was a school-teacher from New England, where his family had taught the three R's and the American Constitution since the days of Ben Franklin's study club. My mother was the daughter of a hardworking Scotch immigrant. Father's family set store on ancestry. Mother's side was more practical.
The year before my birth these two young people started West in a prairie schooner to stake a homestead claim. Father's sea-man's chest held a dictionary, Bancroft's History of the United States, several books of mathematics, Plutarch's Lives, a history of Massachusetts, a leather-bound file of Civil War records, Thackeray's “Vanity Fair”, Shakespeare in two volumes, and the “Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” My mother took a Bible.
I can still quote pages from every one of those books. Until I was fourteen I saw no others, except a primer, homemade, to teach me my letters. Because “Vanity Fair” contained simpler words than the others, it was given me first; so at the age of seven I was spelling out pages of the immortal Becky.
My mother did not approve, but father laughed and protested that the child might as well begin with good things.
After mother's eighth and last baby, she lay ill for a year. The care of the children fell principally on my young shoulders. One day I found her crying.
“Mary,” she said, with a tenderness that was rare, “if I die, you must take care of all your brothers and sisters. You will be the only woman within eighteen miles.”
I was ten years old.
That night and many other nights I lay awake, trembling at the possibility of being left the only woman within eighteen miles.
But mother did not die. I must have been a sturdy child; for, with the little help father and his homestead partner could spare, I kept that home going until she was strong again.
Every fall the shoemaker made his rounds through the country, reaching our place last, for beyond us lay only virgin forest and wild beasts. His visit thrilled us more than the arrival of any king to-day. We had been cut off from the world for months. The shoemaker brought news from neighbors eighteen, forty, sixty, even a hundred and fifty miles away. Usually he brought a few newspapers too, treasured afterward for months. He remained, a royal guest, for many days, until all the family was shod.
Up to my tenth birthday we could not afford the newspaper subscription. But after that times were a little better, and the Boston Transcript began to come at irregular intervals. It formed our only tie with civilization, except for the occasional purely personal letter from “back home.”
When I was fourteen three tremendous events had marked my life: sunlight through a window-pane; the logrolling on the river when father added two rooms to our cabin; and the night I thought mother would die and leave me the only woman in eighteen miles.
But the fourth event was the most tremendous. One night father hurried in without even waiting to unload or water his team. He seemed excited, and handed my mother a letter. Our Great-Aunt Martha had willed father her household goods and personal belongings and a modest sum that to us was a fortune. Some one back East “awaited his instructions.” Followed many discussions, but in the end my mother gained her way. Great-Aunt Martha's house goods were sold at auction. Father, however, insisted that her “personal belongings” be shipped to Wisconsin.
After a long, long wait, one day father and I rose at daybreak and rode thirty-six miles in a springless wagon, over ranchmen's roads (“the giant's vertebrae,” Jim Hill's men called it) to the nearest express station, returning with a trunk and two packing cases. It was a solemn moment when the first box was opened. Then mother gave a cry of delight. Sheets and bedspreads edged with lace! Real linen pillowcases with crocheted edgings. Soft woolen blankets and bright handmade quilts. Two heavy, lustrous table-cloths and two dozen napkins, one white set hemmed, and one red-and-white, bordered with a soft fringe.
What the world calls wealth has come to me in after years. Nothing ever equaled in my eyes the priceless value of Great-Aunt Martha's “personal belongings.”
I was in a seventh heaven of delight. My father picked up the books and began to read, paying no attention to our ecstasies over dresses and ribbons, the boxful of laces, or the little shell-covered case holding a few ornaments in gold and silver and jet.
We women did not stop until we had explored every corner of that trunk and the two packing boxes. Then I picked up a napkin.
“What are these for?” I asked curiously.
My father slammed his book shut. I had never seen such a look on his face.
“How old are you, Mary?” he demanded suddenly.
I told him that I was going on fifteen.
“And you never saw a table napkin?”
His tone was bitter and accusing. I did n't understand—how could I? Father began to talk, his words growing more and more bitter. Mother defended herself hotly. To-day I know that justice was on her side. But in that first adolescent self-consciousness my sympathies were all with father. Mother had neglected us—she had not taught us to use table napkins! Becky Sharp used them. People in history used them. I felt sure that Great-Aunt Martha would have been horrified, even in heaven, to learn I had never even seen a table napkin.
Our parents' quarrel dimmed the ecstasy of the “personal belongings.” From that time we used napkins and a table-cloth on Sundays—that is, when any one remembered it was Sunday.
Great-Aunt Martha's napkins opened up a new world for me, and they strengthened father's determination to give his children an education. The September before I reached seventeen, we persuaded mother to let me go to Madison and study for a half year.
So great was my eagerness to learn from books, that I had given no thought to people. Madison, my first town, showed me that my clothes were homemade and tacky. Other girls wore store shoes and what seemed to me beautifully made dresses. I was a backwoods gawk. I hated myself and our home.
With many cautions, father had intrusted eighty dollars to me for the half year's expenses. I took the money and bought my first pair of buttoned shoes and a store dress with nine gores and stylish mutton-leg sleeves! It was poor stuff, not warm enough for winter, and, together with a new coat and hat, made a large hole in my funds.
I found work in a kindly family, where, in return for taking care of an old lady, I received room and board and two dollars a week. Four hours of my day were left for school.
The following February brought me an appointment as teacher in a district school, at eighteen dollars a month and “turnabout” boarding in farmers' families.
The next two years were spent teaching and attending school in Madison. When I was twenty, a gift from father added to my savings and made possible the realization of one of my dreams. I went East for a special summer course.
No tubes shuttled under the Hudson in those days. From the ferry-boat I was suddenly dazzled with the vision of a towering gold dome rising above the four and five-story structures. The New York World building was then the tallest in the world. To me it was also the most stupendous.
Impulsively I turned to a man leaning on the ferry-boat railing beside me. “Is n't that the most wonderful thing in the world?” I gasped.
“Not quite,” he answered, and looked at me. His look made me uncomfortable. I could have spoken to any stranger in Madison without embarrassment. It took me about twenty years to understand why a plain, middle-aged woman may chat with a strange man anywhere on earth, while the same conversation cheapens a good-looking young girl.
That summer I met my future husband. He was doing research work at Columbia, and we ran across each other constantly in the library. I fairly lived there, for I found myself, for the first time, among a wealth of books, and I read everything—autobiographies, histories, and novels good and bad.
Tom's family and most of his friends were out of town for July and August. I had never met any one like him, and he had never dreamed of any one like me. We were friends in a week and sweethearts in a month.
Instead of joining his family, Tom stayed in New York and showed me the town. He took me to my first plays. Even now I know that “If I Were King” and “The Idol's Eye”, with Frank Daniels, were good.
One day we went driving in an open carriage—his. It was upholstered in soft fawn color, the coachman wore fawn-colored livery, and the horses were beautiful. I was very happy. When we reached my boarding house again, I jumped out. I was used to hopping from spring wagons.
“Please don't do that again, Mary,” reproved Tom, very gently. “You might hurt yourself.” That amused me, until a look from the coachman suddenly conveyed to me that I had made a faux pas. Not long after I hurried off a street car ahead of Tom. This time he said nothing, but I have not forgotten the look on his face.
Over our marvelous meals in marvelous restaurants Tom delighted to get me started about home. Great-Aunt Martha's “personal belongings” amused him hugely. He never tired of the visiting shoemaker, nor of the carpenter who declared indignantly that if we wore decent clothes we wouldn't need our bench seats planed smooth. But some things I never told—about the table napkins, for instance.
We were married in September. Our honeymoon we spent fishing and “roughing it” in the Canadian wilds. I felt at home and blissful. I could cook and fish and make a bed in the open as well as any man. It was heaven; but it left me entirely unprepared for the world I was about to enter.
Not once did Tom say: “Mary, we do this [or that] in our family.” He was too happy, and I suppose he never thought of it. As for me, I wasted no worry on his family. They would be kind and sympathetic and simple, like Tom. They would love me and I would love them.
The day after we returned from Canada to New York I spent looking over Tom's “personal belongings”—as great a revelation as Aunt Martha's. His richly bound books, his beautiful furniture, his pictures—everything was perfect. That night Tom made an announcement: “The family gets home to-night, and they will come to call to-morrow.”
“Why don't we go to the station to meet them?” I suggested.
To-day I appreciate better than I could then the gentle tact with which Tom told me his family was strong on “good form”, and that the husband's family calls on the bride first. My husband's family came, and I realized that I was a mere baby in a new world—a complicated and not very friendly world, at that. Though they never put it into words, they made me understand, in their cruel, polite way, that Tom was the hope of the family, and his sudden marriage to a stranger had been a great shock, if not more.
The beautiful ease of my husband's women-folk filled me with admiration and despair. I felt guilty of something. I was queer. Their voices, the intonation, even the tilt of their chins, seemed to stamp these new “in-laws” as aristocrats of another race. Yet the same old New England stock that sired their ancestors produced my father's fathers.
Theirs had stayed in Boston, and had had time to teach their children grace and refinement and subtleties. Mine fought for their existence in a new country. And when men and women fight for existence life becomes very simple.
I felt only my own misery that day. Now I realize that the meeting between Tom's mother and his wife was a mutual misery. I was crude. No doubt, to her, I seemed even common. With every one except Tom I seemed awkward and stupid. Poor mother-in-law!
When she rose to go, I saw her to her carriage. She was extremely insistent that I should not. But this was Tom's mother, and I was determined to leave no friendly act undone. At home it would have been an offense not to see the company to their wagon. Even in Madison we would have escorted a caller to his carriage.
Again it was the coachman who with one chill look warned me that I had sinned.
Before Tom came home that afternoon he called on his mother, so no explanations from me were necessary. He knew it all, and doubtless much more than had escaped me. Like the princely gentleman he always was, the poor boy tried to soften that after-noon's blows by saying social customs were stupid and artificial and I knew all the important things in life. The other few little things and habits of his world he could easily tell me.
Few—and little! There were thousands, and they loomed bigger each day. Moreover, Tom did not tell me. Either, manlike, he forgot, or he was afraid of hurting my feelings.
One of the few things Tom did tell me I was forever forgetting. Napkins belonged to Sundays at home, and they were not washed often. It was a long-standing habit, to save back-breaking work for mother, to fold my napkin neatly after meals. Unlearning that and acquiring the custom of mussing up one's napkin and leaving it carelessly on the table was the meanest work of my life.
Interesting guests came to Tom's house, and I would grow absorbed in their talk. Not until we were leaving the table would I realize that my napkin lay neatly folded and squared in the midst of casually rumpled heaps.
One night, years later, I sat between Jim Hill and Senator Bailey of Texas at a dinner. Both men folded their napkins. I loved them for it.
During that first year Tom made up a little theater party for a classmate who had just married a Philadelphia girl. With memories of Ben Franklin, William Penn, Liberty Bell, and all the grand old characters of the City of brotherly Love, I looked forward eagerly to making a new friend.
The Philadelphian was even more languid than Tom's mother. She chopped her words and there were no r's in her English. I tried to break the ice by talking of the traditions of her city. She was bored. She knew only Philadelphia's social register. Just to play tit for tat, twice during the evening I quoted from “Julius Caesar”—and scored!
We had just settled down in old Martin's Restaurant for after-theater supper when two tall gentlemen entered the room.
“There's Tom Platt and Chauncey Depew,” remarked Tom's friend casually.
United States senators are important people in Wisconsin—at least, they were when I was young. If a senator visited our community, everybody turned out. I knew much of both these men, and Tom had often spoken warmly of Depew. As they approached our table, Tom and his friend both stood up. Thrilled, I rose hastily. My eyes were too busy to see Tom's face, and I did not realize until afterward that the only other woman had remained coolly seated.
On our way home, Tom told me, in his gentle way, never to rise from a dining table to acknowledge an introduction even to a woman—or a senator. That night a tormenting devil with the face of the other woman kept me awake. For the first time since my marriage I felt homesick for the prairies.
And then we were invited to visit Tom's Aunt Elizabeth in Boston and meet the whole family. I was sick with dread. I begged Tom to tell me some of the things I should and should not do.
“Be your own sweet self and they 'll love you,” he promised, kissing me. He meant it, dear soul; but I knew better.
From the very first minute, Tom's Aunt Elizabeth made me conscious of her disapproval. In after years I won the old lady's affection and real respect, but I never spent a completely happy hour in her presence.
The night we arrived she gave me a formal dinner. Some dozen additional guests dropped in later, and I was bewildered by new faces and strange names. Later in the evening I noticed a distinguished-looking middle-aged gentleman standing alone just outside the drawing-room door. Hurrying out, I invited him to come in. He inquired courteously if there was anything he could do for me.
“Yes, indeed,” I assured him. “Come in and talk to me.” He looked shy and surprised. I insisted. Then Tom's aunt called me and, drawing me hastily into a corner, demanded why I was inviting a servant into her drawing-room.
“Servant! He looks like a senator,” I protested. “He's dressed exactly like every other man at the party and he looks twice as important as most of them.”
“Didn't you notice he addressed you as 'Madam'?” pursued Aunt Elizabeth.
“But it 's perfectly proper to call a married woman 'Madam.' Foreigners always do,” I defended.
“Can't you tell a servant when you see one?” inquired the old lady icily.
I begged to know how one could. All Boston was summed up in her answer: “You are supposed to know the other people.”
Tom's wife could have drowned in a thimble.
The third day of our visit, we were at the dinner table, when I saw Aunt Elizabeth's face change—for the worse. Her head went up higher and her upper lip drew longer. Finally she turned to me.
“Why do you cut your meat like a dog's dinner?” she snapped.
Tom's protesting exclamation did not stop her.
I laid my knife and fork on my plate and folded my hands in my lap to hide their trembling.
Time may dim many hurts, but with the last flicker of intelligence I shall remember that scene. Even then, in a flash, I saw the symbolism of it.
On one side—rare mahogany, shining silver, deft servants, napkins to rumple, leisure for the niceties of life. On the other hand—a log cabin, my tired mother with new babies always coming, father slaving to homestead a claim and push civilization a little farther over our American continent.
A great tenderness for my parents filled my heart and overflowed in my eyes. I have, I confess, had moments of bitterness toward them. But that was not one of them.
“I think I can tell you,” I answered, as quietly as I could. “It 's very simple. I was the first baby, and mother cut up my food for me. After a while she cut up food for two babies. By the time the third came, I had to do my own cutting. Naturally, I did it just as mother had. Then I began to help cut up food for the other babies. It 's a baby habit. And I must now learn to cut one bite at a time like a civilized grown person.”
Even Aunt Elizabeth was silenced. But Tom rose from the table, swearing. My father would not have permitted a cowpuncher to use such language before my mother. But I loved Tom for it.
However, I did not sleep that night. Next morning Tom's Aunt Elizabeth apologized, and for Back Bay was really unbending.
Some days later we returned to New York, and I thought my troubles were over for a time. But the first night Tom came home full of excitement. He had been appointed to the diplomatic corps, and we were to sail for England within a month!
The news struck chill terror to my heart. With so much still to learn in my native America, what on earth should I do in English society?
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