Julia Ward Howe - Richards Laura E.. Страница 147

Day in, day out, she was the Guter Camerad. The desire not to irritate had become so much a second nature that she was the easiest person in the world to live with. If the domestic calm were disturbed, "Don't say anything!" was her word. "Wait a little!"

She might wake with the deep depression so often mentioned in the Journal. Pausing at her door to listen, one might hear a deep sigh, a plaintive ejaculation; but all this was put out of sight before she left her room, and she came down, as one of the grandchildren put it, "bubbling like a silver tea-kettle."

Then came the daily festival of breakfast, never to be hurried or "scamped." The talk, the letters, some of which we might read to her, together with the newspaper. We see her pressing some tidbit on a child, watching intently the eating of it, then, as the last mouthful disappeared, exclaiming with tragic emphasis, "I wanted it!" Then, at the startled face, would come peals of laughter; she would throw herself back in her chair, cover her face with her hands, and tap the floor with her feet.

"Look at her!" cried Maud. "Rippling with sin!"

How she loved to laugh!

"One day," says a granddaughter, "the house was overflowing with guests, and she asked me to take my nap on her sofa, while she took hers on the bed. We both lay down in peace and tranquillity, but after a while, when she thought I was asleep, I heard her laughing, until she almost wept. Presently she fell asleep, and slept her usual twenty minutes, to wake in the same gales of mirth. She laughed until the bed shook, but softly, trying to choke her laughter, lest I should wake.

"'What is it about?' I asked. 'What is so wonderful and funny?'

"'Oh, my dear,' she said, breaking again into laughter, 'it is nothing! It is the most ridiculous thing! I was only trying to translate "fiddle-de-dee" into Greek!'"

This was in her ninety-second year.

But we are still at the breakfast table. Sometimes there were guests at breakfast, a famous actor, a travelling scholar, caught between other engagements for this one leisure hour.

It was a good deal, perhaps, to ask people to leave a warm hotel on a January morning; but it was warm enough by the soft-coal blaze of the dining-room fire. Over the coffee and rolls, sausages and buckwheat cakes, leisure reigned supreme; not the poet's "retired leisure," but a friendly and laughter-loving deity. Everybody was full of engagements, harried with work, pursued by business and pleasure: no matter! the talk ranged high and far, and the morning was half gone before they separated.

Soon after breakfast came the game of ball, played a deux with daughter or grandchild; the ball was tossed back and forth, the players counting meanwhile up to ten in various languages. She delighted in adding to her vocabulary of numerals, and it was a good day when she mastered those of the Kutch-Kutch Esquimaux.

Then came the walk, gallantly taken in every weather save the very worst. She battled with the west wind, getting the matter over as quickly as might be. "It is for my life!" she would say. But on quiet, sunny days she loved to linger along Commonwealth Avenue, watching the parade of babies and little children, stopping to admire this one or chat with that.

This function accomplished, she went straight to her desk, and "P. T." reigned till noon. It was a less rigorous "P. T." than that of our childhood. She could break off in a moment now, give herself entirely, joyously, to the question of dinner for the expected guest, of dress for the afternoon reception, then drop back into Aristotle or ?schylus with a happy sigh. It was less easy to break off when she was writing; we might be begged for "half a moment," as if our time were fully as precious as her own; but there was none of the distress that interruption brought in earlier years. Perhaps she took her writing less seriously. She often said, "Oh, my dear, I am beginning to realize at last that I shall never write my book now, my Magnum Opus, that was to be so great!"

She practised her scales faithfully every day, through the later years. Then she would play snatches of forgotten operas, and the granddaughter would hear her—if she thought no one was near—singing the brilliant arias in "a sweet thread of a voice."

After her practising, if she were alone, she would sit at the window and play her Twilight Game: counting the "passing," one for a biped, two for a quadruped, ten for a white horse, and so on.

In the evening, before the "Victor" concert, came the reading aloud: this was one of her great pleasures. No history or philosophy for the evening reading; she must have a novel (not a "problem novel"; these she detested!)—a good stirring tale, with plenty of action in it. She thrilled over "With Fire and Sword," "Kim," "The Master of Ballantrae." She could not bear to hear of financial anxieties or of physical suffering. "It gives me a pain in my knee!"

We see her now, sitting a little forward in her straight-backed chair, holding the hand of the reading granddaughter, alert and tense. When a catastrophe appears imminent, "Stop a minute!" she cries. "I cannot bear it!"—and the reader must pause while she gathers courage to face disaster with the hero, or dash with him through peril to safety.

She would almost be sorry when the doorbell announced a visitor; almost, not quite, for flesh and blood were better than fiction. If the caller were a familiar friend, how her face lighted up!

"Oh! now we can have whist!"

The table is brought out, the mother-of-pearl counters (a Cutler relic: we remember that Mr. Ward did not allow cards in his house!), and the order for the rest of the evening is "A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigor of the game!"—

It was a happy day when, as chanced once or twice, Mr. Ernest Schelling, coming on from New York to play with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, offered to come and play to her, "all by herself, whatever she wanted, and for as long as she liked." She never forgot this pleasure, nor the warm kindness of the giver.

One day Mr. Abel Lefranc, the French lecturer of the year at Harvard, came to lunch with her. He apologized for only being able to stay for the luncheon hour, owing to a press of engagements and work that had grown overpowering. He stayed for two hours and a half after luncheon was over, and during all that time the flow of poignant, brilliant talk, a deux, held the third in the little company absorbed. She was entirely at home in French, and the Frenchman talked over the problems of his country as if to a compatriot.

A few days afterwards a Baptist minister from Texas, a powerfully built and handsome man, came to wait on her. He also stayed two hours: and we heard his "Amen!" and "Bless the Lord for that!" and her gentler "Bless the Lord, indeed, my brother!" as their voices, fervent and grave, mingled in talk.

She never tried to be interested in people. She was interested, with every fibre of her being. Little household doings: the economies and efforts of brave young people, she thrilled to them all. Indeed, all human facts roused in her the same absorbed and reverent interest.

These are Boston memories, but those of Oak Glen are no less tender and vivid. There, too, the meals were festivals, the midday dinner being now the chief one, with its following hour on the piazza; "Grandmother" in her hooded chair, with her cross-stitch embroidery or "hooked" rug, daughters and grandchildren gathered round her. Horace and Xenophon were on the little table beside her, but they must wait till she had mixed and enjoyed her "social salad."