Martha Everts Holden - A String of Amber Beads
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Martha Everts Holden >> A String of Amber Beads
XXXV.
IF GOD MADE YOU A WILLOW DON'T TRY TO BE A PINE
I wish I could spend a fortnight in a world where folks dared to be
true to themselves; where the conformist was shelved with last year's
calendars, and a man studied out his own route to heaven and had the
courage to walk in it. I would like to dwell with individuals and not
with packs of human cards shuffled together in sets. I would like to
feel my soul kindle into respect for distinct personalities, each one
making his garment after his own measurement, and not trying to fit his
coat after the cut of his neighbor's jacket. I would like to live for
a while with men and women, rather than with human sheep blindly
following a leader. Life is something better than a sheep-path
aimlessly skirting the hills. It is a growth upward through the
infinite blue into heaven. It is the spreading of many and various
branches. If you are a willow, don't attempt to be a pine, and if the
Lord made you to grow like an elm don't pattern yourself after a scrub
oak. The rebuke "what will people say?" should never be applied to the
waywardness of a child. Teach it rather to ask: "How will my own
self-respect stand this test?" Such training will evolve something
rarer in the way of development than a candle-mold or a yard-stick.
XXXVI.
TWO TYPES.
How full the streets are, to be sure! Where do all the folks come from
and where do they stop? Surely there are not roofs enough to cover the
steady stream of humanity that courses through the thoroughfares from
dawn to night time. To one who walks much to and fro in the town there
comes a rare chance to study human types. Books hold nothing within
their covers so grotesque and so pathetic, so inexplicable and so queer
as the folks that jostle one another on the streets! There is the
precise female who nips along in a little apologetic way, as though
there was an impropriety in the very act of locomotion for which she
would fain atone. From the crown of her head to her boot tips she is
proper, stupid and decorous, but too much of her company would prove to
endurance what sultry weather proves to cream. In fact, I think if I
were told I had to live with some of the women I meet on the streets, I
would fall on my hat pin, as the old Romans did upon their swords, as
the pleasanter alternative. There is nothing more charming than a
bright woman, but she must be superior to her own environments and be
able to talk and think about other things than a correct code of
etiquette, her costumes and her domestic concerns.
There is a man I sometimes encounter on the street between whom and
myself there looms a day of bitter reckoning. He wears rubbers if the
day is at all moist, and next to ear muffs, galoshes on an able bodied
man goad me to fury. If the Lord made you a man, be a man and not a
molly-coddle. Soup without meat, bread without salt, pie-crust without
a filling, slack-baked dough, all these are prototypes of the man
without endurance or sufficient stamina to stand getting his delicate
feet dashed with dew, or his shell-like ears nipped by frost.
XXXVII.
A DREAM GARDEN.
Country living is delightful, but, like all other blessings, it has its
alternates of shadow. I used to sit here by my window last April and
gloat over the prospects for the vegetable garden a tramp laid out and
seeded for me in the early spring. What luscious peas were going to
clamber over the trellis along about the middle of July! What golden
squashes were going to nestle in the little hollows! What lusty corn
was going to stride the hillocks! What colonies of beans and beds of
lettuce should fill the spaces, like stars in the wake of a triumphant
moon, and how odorous the breath of the healthful onion should be upon
the midsummer air! But listen. No Assyrian ever yet came down upon
the fold as my neighbor's chickens have descended upon the fair
territory of my garden. As for shooing a chicken off, my dear, when
its gigantic intellect is set upon scratching up a seeded bed, you
might as well attempt to wave back a thunderstorm with a fan.
I have undertaken several difficult things in my life, but never one so
hopeless as convincing a calm and resolute hen that she is an intruder.
I spent one glad summer trying to keep a brood out of a geranium bed,
and had typhoid fever all the fall just from overwork and worry. But
say there had been no chickens to "wear the heart and waste the body,"
how about potato bugs, and caterpillars and huge and gruesome slugs? I
never go out to sprinkle the sad pea vines or pick the drooping lettuce
but what I resolve myself into a magnet to lure the early
vegetable-devouring reptile from its lair. Large 7 by 9 caterpillars
and zebra-striped ladybugs disport themselves on neck and ankle until I
flee the scene.
XXXVIII.
ANYTHING WORSE THAN A BLUE-JAY? HARDLY!
If there is anything worse than a blue-jay, name it. Perhaps a mannish
woman, with a shrill voice and a waspish tongue, is as bad, but she
can't be worse. There are something less than a hundred of these
feathered hornets dwelling in the grove that surrounds my house, and
they began before sunrise to call names and fight clamorous battles.
One of them starts the row by crying something in the ear of a
neighbor, which sounds like a challenge blown through a fish horn. At
this the insulted neighbor flops down off the tree where he lives, and
says naughty words very thick and very fast. Then five or six old
ladies poke their heads over the sides of their nests and call
"Police!" A squad of bluecoats comes tearing ever the border and
attacks the original culprit. He whips out his fish horn and summons a
general uprising. Very soon there is a battle royal, to which the old
ladies add zest by squeaking out dire threats in shrill falsetto voices
pitched at high "C." This keeps up until somebody arises and declaims
from my open window, dancing meanwhile in helpless rage, to see how
futile is the voice of august man when blue-jays hold the floor. Talk
about the English sparrow! It is a mild-mannered little gentleman
compared to the noisy jay. Its politeness and amiability are
Chesterfieldan beside the behavior of its handsomely attired but
boorish neighbor. And as for fighting, why, I verily believe a bluejay
in good condition could "do up" John L. Sullivan so quickly the gentle
pugilist would never know what struck him.
XXXIX.
GOOD HEALTH A BLESSING.
What roses are with worms in the bud, such are women without health.
There can be no beauty in unwholesomeness, there can be nothing
attractive in a delicate pallor caused by the disregard of hygiene, or
in a willowy figure, the result of lacing. If I could now and then
thread some particular bead on an electric wire that should tingle and
thrill wherever it touched, or write in a streak of zig-zag light
across the sky, I might, perhaps, compel attention to what I have to
say. There are certain laws of health which, if they only might be
regarded, would make us all as beautiful in outward seeming as we
strive to be, no doubt, in spirit. Ever so pure and lovely a soul in
an unhealthy body is like a bird trying to thrive and sing in an
ill-kept cage, or a flower blooming with a blight set deep within its
withering petals. You or I can serve neither heaven nor mankind
worthily if we disregard the laws of health, and bear about with us a
frail and poorly nurtured body. There are "shut in" spirits, to be
sure, captives from birth to pain, the record of whose patient
endurance of suffering sweetens the world in which they live, as a rose
shut within a dull and prosy book imparts to its pages a fragrance born
of summer and heaven; but such lives are the exception. The true
destiny of the sons and daughters of earth is to grow within the garden
of life as a sapling rather than as a sickly weed, developing timber
rather than pith, and yielding finally to death, the sharp-axed old
woodman, as the tree falls, to pass onward to new opportunities of
power and service. The tree does not decay where it stands, nor does
it often fall because its core is honeycombed by disease. It is cut
down in the meridian of its strength, because somewhere on distant seas
a new ship is to be launched and needs a stalwart mainmast, or a home
is to be builded that needs the fiber of strong and steadfast timber.
So, I think, with men and women, there would not be so much unsightly
growing old, with waning power and wasted faculties, if we attended
more strictly to the laws of health, and when death came to us at last
it should only be because there was need of good timber further on.
XL.
WHY, BLESS MY SOUL! IT REALLY SEEMS TO THINK.
I was watching not long since, a man talking to a bright woman on the
train, and his manner of comporting himself set me to thinking of the
peculiar ways men have of addressing themselves to women. Some talk to
a woman very much as they might talk to the wonderful automaton around
at the museum when it plays a game of chess. "Why, bless my soul, it
really seems to be thinking! What apparent intelligence? What evident
faculty of mental independence! It almost appears to possess the power
of coherent thought!" Others sit in the presence of a woman as though
she was a dish of ice cream. "How sweet." "How refreshing." "How
altogether nice!" Many behave in her company as though she was a
loaded gun, and liable to do mischief, while a very few act as though
she was above the wiles of flattery, and not to be bought for the price
of a new bonnet. Hasten the day, good Lord, when she shall be regarded
as something wiser and nobler than an automaton, less perishable than a
confection, more comforting and peace-producing than a fire-arm, a
veritable comrade for man at his best, not so much prized for the vain
and evanescent charm of her beauty as for the steadfastness and the
incorruptible purity of her soul.
XLI.
TAKE TO DRINK, OF COURSE!
What would a man do, I yonder, if things went so irretrievably wrong
with him as they do with some of us women? Why, take to drink, of
course. That is a sovereign consolation I am told for many ills. A
woman has no equivalent for whisky. She must needs clench her hands
and set her teeth and bear her lot. And yet you tell us a man is the
stronger. I tell you, my dear, I know a dozen women who could discount
any soldier that ever fought in the Crimean wars, for downright heroism
and pluck. Where do you find the man who is willing to wear shabby
clothes and old boots and a seedy hat that his boys may go fine as
fiddles? Where do you find a man who will get up cold mornings and
make the fire, tramp to work through snow, pick his way through
flooding rain, weather northeast blasts and go hungry and cold that he
may keep the children together which a bad and wayward mother has
deserted? First thing a man would do in such a case would be to board
the children out with convenient relatives while he looked around for a
divorce and another wife! How long would a man brace up under the
servant question? How long would he endure the insolence and the
flings of cruel and covert enemies because the children needed all he
could give them, and, only along the thorny road of continual
harassment and trial might he attain the earnings needed to render them
happy and comfortable? If a man is insulted he settles the insult with
a blow straight from the shoulder and that is the end of it; he would
never be able to endure, as some women do, a never-ending round of
persecution that would whiten the hairs on a sealskin jacket!
XLII.
A WARNING TO GIRLS.
There is one thing we sometimes see in the face of the young that is
sadder than the ravages of any disease or the disfigurement of any
deformity. Shall I tell you what it is? It is the mark that an impure
thought or an unclean jest leaves behind it. No serpent ever went
gliding through the grass and left the trail of defilement more
palpably in its wake than vulgarity marks the face. You may be ever so
secret in your enjoyment of a shady story, you may hide ever so
cunningly the fact that you carry something in your pocket which you
purpose to show only to a few and which will perhaps start the laugh
that, like a bird of carrion, waits upon impurity and moral corruption
for its choicest feeding, but the mark of what you tell, and what you
do, and what you laugh at, is left behind like a sketch traced in
indelible fluid. There is no beauty that can stand the disfigurement
of such a scar. However bright your eyes, and rosy-red your color, and
soft the contour of lip and cheek, when the relish of an impure jest
creeps in, the comeliness fades and perishes, as lilies in the languor
of a poisonous breath from off the marshes. I beg of you, dear girls,
shun the companion who seeks to foul your soul with an obscene story or
picture, as you would shun the contagion of smallpox. If I had a
daughter who went out into the world to earn her bread, as some of you
do, and any one should seek to corrupt her purity by insidious
advances, I would get down on my knees and pray God, to take her to
himself before her fair, sweet innocence should sully under the breath
of corruption and moral death. Nobody ever went to the devil yet by
one big bound, like a tiger out of a jungle or a trout to the fly; it
is an imperceptible passage down an easy slope, and the first step of
all is sometimes taken when a young girl lends her ears to a smutty
story or a questionable jest. Then let me say again, and I wish I
could borrow Fort Sheridan's bugle to blow it far and wide, that every
girl might hear: Close your ears and harden your hearts against the
insidious advance of evil. Have nothing to do with a desk-mate or with
a comrade who seeks to amuse or entertain you with conversation you
would not care to have "mother" hear, and which you would be sorry to
remember, if this night the death angel came knocking at the door and
summoned your soul away upon its lonely journey to find its God.
XLIII.
A FROG MAY DO WHAT A MAN MAY NOT.
A bull-frog in a malarial pond is expected to croak and make all the
protest he can against his surroundings. But a man! Destined for a
crown and sent upon earth to be educated for the court of the King of
kings! Placed in an emerald world with a hither edge of opaline shadow
and a fine spray of diamond-dust to set it sparkling; with ten million
singing birds to form its orchestra; sunset clouds and sunrise mists to
drape it, and countless flowers to make it sweet while the hand of God
himself upholds it on its way among the clustering stars, what right
has a man to find fault with his surroundings, or lament himself that
all things do not go to suit him here below? When it shall be in order
for the glow-worm to call the midday sun to account, or for the
wood-tick to find fault with the century old oak that protects it; or
for the blue-bird to question the haze on a midsummer horizon because,
forsooth! it is a little off color with his own wings, then it will be
time for man to find fault with the ordering of the seasons and the
allotment of the weather in the world he is allowed to inhabit.
XLIV.
THANKING GOD FOR A GOOD HUSBAND.
About one hour of the twenty-four would perhaps be the proportion of
time a woman ought to spend upon her knees thanking God for a good
husband. When I see the hosts of sorry maids, and women wearing
draggled widow's weeds who fill the ranks of the great army of the
self-supporting; when I see them trooping along in the rain, slipping
along in the mud, leaping for turning bridges, and hanging on to the
straps in horse cars, I feel like sending out a circular to sheltered
and happy wives bidding them be thankful for their lot. To be sure,
one would rather be a scrub-woman or a circus-jumper than be the wife
of some men we wot of, but in the main, a woman well married is like a
jewel well set, or like a light well sheltered from the wind.
XLV.
JUST A LITTLE TIRED!
What a grubby old stopping place this world is, anyway. How hard we
have to work just to keep the flesh on our bones and that flesh
covered, even with nothing better than homespun. And we are getting a
little tired of it all, aren't we, my dear? Just a little tired of the
treadmill, where, like a sheep in a dairy, we pace our limited beat to
bring a handful of inadequate butter. We have trudged to and fro about
long enough, and have half a mind to throw up the contract with fate.
But hold on a bit. There is something worse than too much work, and
that is idleness. Imagine a sudden hush in all the myriad sounds of
labor. The ceasing of the whirr of countless wheels whereat men stand
day after day through toilful years, fashioning everything from a pin's
head to a ship's mast; the suspended click of millions of sewing
machines, above which bend delicate women stitching their lives into
shirts and garments that find their way onto bargain tables, where rich
women crowd to seize the advantage of the discount. Let all suspended
hammers in the myriad workshops swing into silence and all footsteps
cease their weary plodding to and fro, I think the awful hush would far
transcend the muteness of midnight or that still hour when dawn steals
in among the pallid stars, and on the dim, uncertain shore of time the
tide of man's vitality ebbs faint and low. There is no blight so fell
as the blight of enforced calm. It is in the unworked garden that
weeds grow. It is in the stagnant water that disease germs waken to
horrid life. Ennui palls upon a brave heart. Ennui is like a
long-winded, amiable, but watery-idea'd friend who drops in to see us
and dribbles platitudes until every nerve is tapped. Ennui is like
being forced to drink tepid water or to eat soup without salt. Labor,
on the contrary, is like a friend with grit and tonic in his make-up.
It comes to us as a wind visits the forest, and sets our faculties
stirring as the wind rustles the leaves and sets the wood fragrance
flying. It puts spice in our broth and ice in our drink. It puts a
flavor in life that starts an appetite, or, in other words, awakens
ambition. Although the world is full of toilers it would be worse off
were it full of idlers. Good, hard workers find no time to make
mischief. Your anarchists and your breeders of discord are never found
among busy men; they breed, like mosquitoes, out of stagnant places.
It is the idle man that quickens hatred and contention, as it is the
setting hen and not the scratching one that hatches out the eggs.
XLVI.
PAINTING THE OLD HOMESTEAD.
It had been a battle renewed for more years than there are dandelions
just now in the front yard. Various members of the family had declared
from time to time that if the old house was not painted it would fall
to pieces from sheer mortification at its own disreputable appearance.
"Why, you can put your toothpick right through the rotten shingles,"
cried the doctor. "The only way to save it is to paint it."
Now, I have always been the odd sheep of a highly decorous fold. I
have more love for nature than hard good sense, I am told. So I loathe
paint just as I hate surface manners. I want the true grain all the
way through, be it in boards or people. I love the weather stain on an
old house. I love the mossy touches, the lichen grays and the russet
browns that age imparts to the shingles, and I almost feel like
murdering the paint fiend when he comes around every spring, and
transforms some dear old landmark into a gorgeous "Mrs. Skewton," with
hideous coats and splashy trimmings. But alas for sentiment when the
money bags are against it! Profit before poetry any day in this
nineteenth century, my dear, and so when an interested capitalist came
up from town and gave it as his opinion that the old house would be
worth a third more if put on the market in a terra cotta coat with
sage-green trimmings the day was lost for me. I had to strike my
colors like many another idealist in this practical world. In the
first place, there has been for the last fifteen years or so, a vine
growing all over the old home, catching its lithe tendrils into the
roof and making cathedral lights in all the windows. It has been the
home of generations of robins. It has hung full of purple, bell-shaped
blossoms on coral stems that have attracted a thousand humming birds
and honey bees by their fragrance. It has changed into a veritable
cloth of gold in early September, and in late October has flamed into
scarlet against the gray roof, like a blaze that quivers athwart a
stormy sky. It has been the joy of my life and the inspiration of my
dreams, but it had to come down before the paint-pot! So one night
when I reached home, tired to death with a hand-to-hand encounter with
the demon who gives poor mortals their bread and butter for an
equivalent of flesh and blood and spirit, I noticed that the little
folks greeted me with an air of subdued decorum as though fresh from a
funeral. There were no caperings, no flauntings, no cavortings. Each
young minx had on her Sunday go-to-meeting air, and the boy stood with
his hat on one side of his head, as though for a sixpence he would
fight all creation. Wondering at the change, I happened to look toward
the house, and there it stood in the light of the fading day, like a
poor old woman without a veil to hide her wrinkles! Every window
looked ashamed of itself, and on the ground lay the dear old vine,
prone as a lost reputation.
"I never see such an ill-fired crank in all the days of my life!"
remarked the painter to the new girl, after I had held a brief but
spirited interview with him over the garden fence; "blanked if she
didn't cry because her vine was down!"
XLVII.
THE OLD SITTING-ROOM STOVE.
What is there within the home, during the winter season at least, that
seems so thoroughly to constitute the soul of home as the family-room
stove? It can never be replaced by that ugly hole in the floor which
floods our rooms with furnace heat, with no glow of cheerful firelight,
no flicker of flame or changeful play of shadow out of which to weave
fantastic dreams and fancies. I once watched the dying out of one of
these fires in a great base burner, around which for years a large and
loving family had gathered. The furniture of the home had all been
sold, and the family was about to scatter. The trunks were packed and
gone, the last article removed from the place, and the old stove was
left to burn out its fire at the last, that it, too, might be removed
next morning. And after the evening had come and was far spent, the
last evening wherein any right should remain to us to enter the old
home as its owners and occupants, I took my pass-key and slipped over
from the neighbor's for my final good-bye to the dear old home. The
fire-light, like the glance of a reproachful eye, shone upon me through
the gloom of the deserted parlor. "Have I not warmed you and comforted
you and cheered you with my genial glow?" a voice seemed to say; "and
now you have come to see me die! I am the vital spirit of your home.
I am dying, and nothing can ever reanimate these deserted rooms again
with the dear, the beautiful past."
Like the eye of one who is going down to death, the firelight faded and
finally went out in the pallor of ashes, while I, sitting alone in the
darkness, felt the whole world drearier for a little space for the
final extinguishment of this fire, the death hour of a once happy home.
XLVIII.
A TALK ABOUT DIVORCE.
Somebody asked me the other day if I favored divorce. Like everything
else in the world the matter depends largely upon special circumstance,
but in the main I do not believe in divorce. If husbands and wives
cannot live together without quarreling, let them live apart, but they
have no business to sever the bond that unites them. The promise to
take each other for "better or for worse" must be regarded in both
readings of the clause. If the "worse" comes along we have no right to
ignore it because the "better" has failed. If your husband is a
drunkard, all the more reason for you to stand by him if you are a good
woman. If he is cruel and abusive, you need not put your life in
danger by staying under his roof, but you need not throw him over and
get another husband. If he goes into the gutter, pull him out, and
know that your experience is only a big dose of the "worse" you
promised to take along with the "better." It is the quinine with the
honey, and you have no right to reject it. There are 10,000 things
that work discord in married life that a little tact and forbearance
would dissipate, as a steady wind will blow away gnats. The trouble
with all of us is, we make too much of trifles. We nurse them, and
feed them, and magnify them, until from gnats they grow to be buzzards
with their beaks in our hearts. Not for one sin, nor seven sins, nor
seventy sins, forsake the friend you chose from all the world to make
your own. A good woman will save anything but a liar, and God's grace
is adequate, in time, for even him. I say unto wives, be
large-hearted, wide in your charity, generous, not paltry, nor
exacting, (exaction has murdered more loves than Herod murdered
babies!) companionable, forbearing and true, and stand by your husbands
through everything. And I say unto men, be _men_! Don't choose a
wife, in the first place, for the mere exterior of a pretty face and
form. Be as alert in the choice of a wife as you are in a bargain.
You don't invest in a house just because it looks well, or buy a suit
of clothes at first sight, or dash on change and snatch at the first
deal. After you are once married stand by your choice like a man. If
you must have your beer, don't sneak out of it on a clove and a lie;
carefully weigh the cost, and if you conclude to risk everything for
the gratification of an appetite drink at home and above board, and
don't attempt to deceive your wife with subterfuges and excuses. Don't
run after other women because your wife is not so young as she once
was, or because the bloom is faded a little from the face you once
thought so fair. It is the part of an Indian to retract a gift once
given, or to go back on a bargain. Don't live together if you can't
rise above the level of fighting cats, but be careful how you throw
aside the bonds that God has joined between you. Live the lot you have
chosen as bravely as you can, remembering that the thorn that you have
developed will never change into a rose by mere change of
circumstances. Divorce and the mere shifting of the stage setting will
never make your tragedy over into a vaudeville or a light opera.