A Daughter of the Middle Border Part 35

A fire was crackling in the new chimney, and in the light of it, at her mother's feet, sat Mary Isabel. In a moment New York and Chicago were remote, almost mythic places. With my child in my arms, listening to Zulime's gossip of the town wherein the simple old-fas.h.i.+oned joys of life still persisted with wholesome effect, I asked myself, "Why struggle? Why travel, when your wife, your babe, and your hearthstone are here?"

"Once I threatened the world with fire, And thrust my fist in the face of wrong, Making my heart a sounding lyre-- Accusing the rulers of earth in song.

Now, counting the world of creeds well lost And recking the greatest book no prize-- Withdrawn from the press and free from the cost Of fame and war--in my baby's eyes-- In the touch of her tiny, slender palm, I find the ease of a warrior's calm."

Calm! Did I say calm? It was the calm of abject slavery. At command of that minute despot I began to toil frenziedly. At her word I read over and over, and over once again, the Rhymes of _Mother Goose_ and the Tales of _Peter Wabbitt_. The _Tin Tan Book_ was her litany, and _Red Riding Hood_ her sweet terror. Her interest in books was insatiate. She loved all verses, all melodies, even those whose words were wholly beyond her understanding, and her rapt eyes, deep and dark, as my mother's had been, gave me such happiness that to write of it fills me with a pang of regret--for that baby is now a woman.

It will not avail my reader to say, "You were but re-enacting the experiences of innumerable other daddies," for this was _my_ child, these were _my_ home and _my_ fire. Without a shred of shame I rejoiced in my subjection then, as I long to recover its contentment now. Life for me was fulfilled. I was doing that which nature and the world required.

Here enters an incongruous fact,--something which I must record with the particularity it deserves. My wife who was accounted a genius, was in truth amazingly "clever" with brush and pencil. Not only had she spent five years in Paris, she had enjoyed several other years of study with her sculptor brother. She could model, she could paint and she could draw,--but--to whom did Mary Isabel turn when she wanted a picture? To her artist mother? Not at all! To me,--to her corn-husker daddy--of course. I was her artist as well as her reader.

To her my hand was a wonder-worker. She was always pleased with what I did. Hour after hour I drew (in amazing outlines) dogs and cows and pigs (pictographs as primitive as those which line the walls of cave dwellings in Arizona) on which she gazed in ecstasy, silent till she suddenly discovered that this effigy meant a cow, then she cried out, "tee dee moomo!" with a joy which afforded me more satisfaction than any acceptance of a story on the part of an editor had ever conveyed. Each scrawl was to her a fresh revelation of the omniscience, the magic of her father--therefore I drew and drew while her recreant mother sat on the other side of the fire and watched us, a wicked smile of amus.e.m.e.nt--and relief--on her lips.

My daughter was preternaturally interested in magazines,--that is to say she was (at a very early age) vitally concerned with the advertising columns, and forced me to spend a great deal of time turning the pages while she discovered and admired the images of shoes, chairs, tables and babies,--especially babies. It rejoiced her to discover in a book the portrait of a desk which was actually standing in the room, and in matching the fact with the artistic reproduction of the fact, she was, no doubt, laying the foundation of an esthetic appreciation of the universe, but I suffered. Only when she was hungry or sleepy did she permit me, her art instructor, to take a vacation.

In the peaceful intervals when she was in her bed, her mother and I discussed the question, "Where shall we make our winter home?"

My plan to take another apartment in New York seemed of a reckless extravagance to Zulime, who argued for Chicago, and in the end we compromised--on Chicago--where her father and brother and sister lived.

November found us settled in a furnished apartment on Jackson Park Avenue, and our Christmas tree was set up there instead of in the Homestead, which was the natural place for it.

Another phase of being Daddy now set in. To me, as a father, the City by the Lake a.s.sumed a new and terrifying aspect. Its dirt, its chill winds, its smoke appeared a pitiless league of forces a.s.saulting the tender form of my daughter. My interest in civic reforms augmented. The problems of street cleaning and sanitary milk delivery approached me from an entirely different angle. My sense of social justice was quickened.

In other ways I admitted a change. Something had gone out of my world, or rather something unexpected had come into it. I was no longer whole-hearted in my enjoyment of my Club. My study hours were no longer sacred. My cherub daughter allured. Sometimes as I was dozing in my sleeping car, I heard her chirping voice, "Bappa, come here. I need you." The memory of her small soft body, her trusting eyes, the arch of her brows, made me impatient of my lecture tours. She was my incentive, my chief reason for living and working, and from each of my predatory sorties, I returned to her with a thankfulness which was almost maudlin--in Fuller's eyes. To have her joyous face lifted to mine, to hear her clear voice repeating my mother's songs, restored my faith in the logic of human life. True she interrupted my work and divided my interest, but she also defended me from bitterness and kept me from a darkening outlook on the future. My right to have her could be questioned but my care of her, now that I had her, was a joyous task.

It would not be quite honest in me if I did not admit that this intensity of interest in my daughter took away something from my att.i.tude as a husband, just as Zulime's mother love affected her relations.h.i.+p to me. A new law was at work in both our cases, and I do not question its necessity or its direction. Three is a larger number than two, and if the third number brings something unforeseen into the problem it must be accepted. Mary Isabel strengthened the bond between Zulime and myself, but it altered its character. Whatever it lost in one way it gained in another.

Dear little daughter, how she possessed me! Each day she presented some new trait, some new accomplishment. She had begun to understand that Daddy was a writer and that he must not be disturbed during the morning, but in spite of her best resolutions she often tip-toed to my door to inquire brightly, "Poppie, can I come in? Don't you want me?" Of course I wanted her, and so frequently my work gave place to a romp with her.

In the afternoons I often took her for a walk or to coast on her new sled rejoicing in the picture she made in her red cloak and hood.

In her presence my somber conceptions of life were forgotten. Joyous and vital, knowing nothing of my worries, she comforted me. She was no longer the "baby" she was "Wenona," my first born, and in spirit we were comrades. More and more she absorbed my thought. "Poppie, I love you better than anything," she often said, and the music of her voice misted my eyes and put a lump into my throat.

When summer came and we went back to the Homestead, I taught her to drive Old Smoker, Uncle William's horse. Under my direction she studied the birds and animals. In city and country alike we came together at nightfall, to read or sing or "play circus." I sang to her all the songs my mother had taught me, I danced with her as she grew older, with Zulime playing the tunes for us, "Money Musk" and "The Campbells are Coming." As we walked the streets the trusting cling of her tiny fingers was inexpressibly sweet.

"Poppie, I'm so happy!" she often said to me after she was three, and the ecstasy which showed in her big blue eyes scared me with its intensity for I knew all too well that it could not last. This was her magical time. She was enraptured of the wind and sky and the gra.s.s.

Every fact in nature was a revelation to her.

"Why, Poppie? What does it? What was that noise?" The dandelions, the dead bird, a snake--these were miracles to her--as they once were to me.

She believed in fairies with devotional fervor and I did nothing to shake her faith, on the contrary I would gladly have shared her credence if I could.

Once as we were entering a deep, dark wood, she cautioned me to walk very softly and to speak in a whisper in order that we might catch the Forest Folk at play, and as we trod a specially beautiful forest aisle she cried out, "I _saw_ one, Poppie! Didn't you see that little s.h.i.+ning thing?"

I could only say, "Yes, it _must_ have been a fairy." I would not destroy her illusion.

She inhabited a world of ineffable beauty, a universe in which minute exquisite winged creatures flashed like flakes of fire, through dusky places. She heard their small faint voices in the whisper of the leaves, and every broad toadstool was to her a resting place for weary elfin messengers hurrying on some mission for their queen. Her own imaginings, like her favorite books, were all of magic wands, golden garments and crystal palaces. Sceptered kings, and jeweled princesses trailing robes of satin were the chief actors in her dreams.

I am aware that many educators consider such reading foolish and harmful, but I care nothing for wire-drawn pedagogic theories. That I did nothing to mar the mystical beauty of the world in which my daughter then dwelt, is my present satisfaction, and I shamelessly acknowledge that I experienced keen pangs of regret as her tender illusions, one after another faded into the chill white light of later day. Without actually deceiving her, I permitted her to believe that I too, heard the wondrous voices of t.i.tania and her elves in convention behind the rose bush, or the whispers of gnomes hiding among the cornrows.

Good republican that I was, I listened without reproof to her adoring fealty to Kings and Queens. Her love of Knights and tournaments was openly fostered at my hand. "If she should die out of this, her glorious imaginary world, she shall die happy," was my thought, "and if she lives to look back upon it with a woman's eyes, she shall remember it as a s.h.i.+ning world in which her Daddy was a rough but kindly councillor, a mortal of whom no fairy need have fear."

The circus was my daughter's royal tournament, an a.s.semblage of all the kings and queens, knights and fairies of her story books. She hated the clowns but the parade of the warriors and their sovereign exalted her.

The helmeted spearmen, the lithe charioteers, the hooded drivers sitting astride the heads of vast elephants were characters of the Arabian Nights, pa.s.sing veritably before her eyes. The winged dancers of the spectacle came straight from the castle of Queen Mab, the pale acrobats were brothers to Hector and Achilles.

As she watched them pa.s.s she gripped my hand as if to keep touch with reality, her little heart swollen with almost intolerable delight. "It makes me s.h.i.+ver," she whispered, and I understood.

As the last horseman of the procession was pa.s.sing, she asked faintly--"Will it come again, Poppie?"

"Yes, it will come once more," I replied, recalling my own sense of loss when the Grand Entry was over.

As the queen, haughty of glance, superb in her robe of silver once more neared us, indolently swaying to the movement of the elephant, who bore his housings of purple and gold with stately solemnity, my daughter's tiny body quivered with ecstasy and her beautiful eyes dilated with an intensity of admiration, of wors.h.i.+p which made me sad as well as happy, and then just as the resplendent princess was pa.s.sing for the last time, Mary Isabel rose in her place and waving a kiss to her liege lady cried out in tones of poignant love and despair, "Good-by, dear Queen!" and I, holding her tender palpitant figure in my arms, heard in that slender silver-sweet cry the lament of childhood, childhood whose dreams were pa.s.sing never to return.

Chicago did not offer much by way of magnificence but Mary Isabel made the most of what we took her to see. The gold room of the hotel was a part of her imaginary kingdom, conceivably the home of royalty. Standing timidly at the door, she surveyed the golden chairs, the gorgeous ceiling and the deep-toned pictures with a gaze which absorbed every detail. At last she whispered, "Is this the Queen's room?"

"Yes," I replied. "If the Queen should come to Chicago she would live here," and I comforted myself by saying, "You shall have your hour of wonder and romance, even at the expense of a prevarication."

With a sigh she turned away, or rather permitted me to lead her away.

"I'm glad I saw it," she said. "Will the Queen ever come to Chicago again?"

"Yes, next spring she will come again," I answered, thus feeding her illusion without a moment's hesitation or a particle of remorse.

Her love of royal robes, gold chariots and Queens' houses did not prevent her from listening with deep delight while I read _Jock Johnstone, the Tinkler Lad_, or sang _O'er the Hills In Legions, Boys_.

She loved most of the songs I was accustomed to sing but certain of the lines vaguely distressed her. She could not endure the pathos of Nellie Gray.

"Oh, my poor Nellie Gray They have taken you away And I'll never see my darling any more"

put her into deepest anguish.

"_Why_ did they take her away?" she sobbed. "Didn't they _ever_ see her any more?"

Only after I explained that they met "down the river" and were very happy ever afterward, would she permit me to finish the ballad. She was similarly troubled by the words,

"I can hear the children calling I can see their sad tears falling."

"_Why_ are the children calling?" she demanded.

She had a curious horror of anything abnormal. Once I took her to see "Alice in Wonderland" thinking that this would be an enchanting experience for her. Not only was it intolerably repellent to her, it was terrifying, and when the bodies of the characters suddenly lengthened, she sought refuge under the seat. All deformities, grotesqueries were to her horrible, appalling. She refused to look at the actors and at last I took her away.

One afternoon as we were in the garden together she called to me.

"Poppie, see the dead birdie!"

On looking I saw a little dead song sparrow. "It's been here all the night and all the day, Poppie. It fell out of the tree when Eddie shooted it. Put it up in the tree again, Poppie."

She seemed to think that if it were put back into its home it would go on living and singing. I don't know why this should have moved me as it did, but it blurred my eyes for a moment. My little daughter was face to face with the great mystery.

O those magical days! Knowing all too well that they could not last and that to lose any part of them was to be forever cheated, I gave my time to her. Over and over again as I met her deep serene glance, I asked (as other parents have done), "Whence came you? From what dusky night rose your starry eyes? Out of what unillumined void flowered your fairy face?

Can it be, as some have said, that you are only an automaton, a physical reaction?"

She was the future, my father the past. Birth and death, equally inexplicable, were expressed to me in these two beings, so vital to me, so dependent upon me, and beside me, suffering, joying with me, walked the mother with unfaltering steps.