Arlo Bates - The Diary of a Saint

January 1. How beautiful the world is! I might go on to say, and how commonplace this seems written down in a diary; but it is the thing I have been thinking. I have been standing ever so long at the window, and now that the curtains are shut I can see everything still. The moon is shining over the wide white sheets of snow, and the low meadows look far off and enchanted. The outline of the hills is clear against the sky, and the cedars on the lawn are almost green against the whiteness of the ground and the deep, blue-black sky. It is all so lovely that it somehow makes one feel happy and humble both at once.

It is a beautiful world, indeed, and yet last night —

But last night was another year, and the new begins in a better mood. I have shaken off the idiotic mawkishness of last night, and am more like what Father used to tell me to be when I was a mite of a girl: "A cheerful Ruth Privet, as right as a trivet." Though to be sure I do not know what being as right as a trivet is, any more than I did then. Last night, it is true, there were alleviating circumstances that might have been urged. For a week it had been drizzly, unseasonable weather that took all the snap out of a body's mental fibre; Mother had had one of her bad days, when the pain seemed too dreadful to bear, patient angel that she is; Kathie Thurston had been in one of her most despairing fits; and the Old Year looked so dreary behind, the New Year loomed so hopeless before, that there was some excuse for a girl who was tired to the bone with watching and worry if she did not feel exactly cheerful. I cannot allow, though, that it justified her in crying like a watering-pot, and smudging the pages of her diary until the whole thing was blurred like a composition written with tears in a primary school. I certainly cannot let this sort of thing happen again, and I am thoroughly ashamed that it happened once. I will remember that the last day Father lived he said he could trust me to be brave both for Mother and myself; and that I promised, – I promised.

So last night may go, and be forgotten as soon as I can manage to forget it. To-night things are different. There has been a beautiful snow-fall, and the air is so crisp that when I went for a walk at sunset it seemed impossible ever to be sentimentally weak-kneed again; Mother is wonderfully comfortable; and the New Year began with a letter to say that George will be at home to-morrow. Mother is asleep like a child, the fire is in the best of spirits, and does the purring for itself and for Peter, who is napping with content expressed by every hair to the tip of his fluffy white tail. Even Hannah is singing in the kitchen a hymn that she thinks is cheerful, about

"Sa-a-a-acred, high, e-ter-er-er-nal noon."

It is evident that there is every opportunity to take a fresh start, and to conduct myself in the coming year with more self-respect.

So much for New Year resolutions. I do not remember that I ever made one before; and very likely I shall never make one again. Now I must decide something about Kathie. I tried to talk with Mother about her, but Mother got so excited that I saw it would not do, and felt I must work the problem out with pen and paper as if it were a sum in arithmetic. It is not my business to attend to the theological education of the minister's daughter, especially as it is the Methodist minister's daughter, and he, with his whole congregation, thinks it rather doubtful whether it is not sinful for Kathie even to know so dangerous an unbeliever. I sometimes doubt whether my good neighbors in Tuskamuck would regard Tom Paine himself, who, Father used to say, lingers as the arch-heretic for all rural New England, with greater theological horror than they do me. It is fortunate that they do not dislike me personally, and they all loved Father in spite of his heresies. In this case I am not clear, on the other hand, that it is my duty to stand passive and see, without at least protesting, a sensitive, imaginative, delicate child driven to despair by the misery and terror of a creed. If Kathie had not come to me it would be different; but she has come. Time after time this poor little, precocious, morbid creature has run to me in such terror of hell-fire that I verily feared she would end by going frantic. Ten years old, and desperate with conviction of original sin; and this so near the end of the nineteenth century, so-called of grace! Thus far I have contented myself with taking her into my arms, and just loving her into calmness; but she is getting beyond that. She is finding being petted so delightful that she is sure it must be a sin. She is like what I can fancy the most imaginative of the Puritan grandmothers to have been in their passionate childhood, in the days when the only recognized office of the imagination was to picture the terrors of hell. I so long for Father. If he were alive to talk to her, he could say the right word, and settle things. The Bible is very touching in its phrase, "as one whom his mother comforteth," but to me "whom his father comforteth" would have seemed to go even deeper; but then, there is Kathie's father, whose tenderness is killing her. I don't in the least doubt that he suffers as much as she does; but he loves her too much to risk damage to what he calls "her immortal soul." There is always a ring of triumph in his voice when he pronounces the phrase, as if he already were a disembodied spirit dilating in eternal and infinite glory. There is something finely noble in such a superstition.

All this, however, does not bring me nearer to the end of my sum, for the answer of that ought to be what I shall do with Kathie. It would never do to push her into a struggle with the creeds, or to set her to arguing out the impossibility of her theology. She is too young and too morbid, and would end by supposing that in reasoning at all on the matter she had committed the unpardonable sin. Her father would not let her read stories unless they were Sunday-school books. Perhaps she might be allowed some of the more entertaining volumes of history; but she is too young for most of them. She should be reading about Red Riding-hood, and the White Cat, and the whole company of dear creatures immortal in fairy stories. I will look in the library, and see what there may be that would pass the conscientiously searching ordeal of her father's eye. If she can be given anything which will take her mind off of her spiritual condition for a while, that is all that may be done at present. I'll hunt up my old skates for her, too. A little more exercise in the open air will do a good deal for her humanly, and perhaps blow away some of the theology.

Later. Hannah has been in to make her annual attack on my soul. I had almost forgotten her yearly missionary effort, so that when she appeared I said with the utmost cheerfulness and unconcern, "What is it, Hannah?" supposing that she wanted to know something about breakfast. I could see by the instant change in her expression that she regarded this as deliberate levity. She was so full of what she had come to say that it could not occur to her that I did not perceive it too.

Dear old Hannah! her face has always so droll an expression of mingled shyness and determination when, as she once said, she clears her skirts of blood-guiltiness concerning me. She stands in the doorway twisting her apron, and her formula is always the same: —

"Miss Ruth, I thought I'd take the liberty to say a word to you on this New Year's day."

"Yes, Hannah," I always respond, as if we had rehearsed the dialogue. "What is it?"

"It's another year, Miss Ruth, and your peace not made with God."

To me there is something touching in the fidelity with which she clings to the self-imposed performance of this evidently painful duty.