Mary Austin - A Woman of Genius

I have wondered since to how many young converts in Ohianna that phrase has been handed out and with what blighting consequences.

For a Saviour as I knew Him at thirteen and a half, was a solemn presence that ran in your mind with the bleakness of plain, whitewashed walls and hard benches and a general hush, a vague sensation of your chest being too tight for you, and a little of the feeling you had when you had gone to call at the Allinghams and had forgotten to wipe your feet; and it was manifest if you took that incubus everywhere you went you wouldn't have any fun.

It was fortunate at that time that it was not the desire for entertainment that moved me so much as the need of my youth to serve; the unparented hunger for authority. But with the pressure of that environment, if there had been anybody with the wit to see where my Gift lay, what anybody could have done about it it is difficult to say. When all that Taylorville afforded of the proper food of Gift, brightness, music, and the dance, was of so forlorn a quality, it has been a question if I do not owe the church some thanks for cutting out the possible cheapening of taste and the satisfaction of ill-regulated applause – that is, if Gift can be hurt at all by what happens to the possessor. It can be cramped and enfeebled in expression, rendered tormenting in its passage and futile to the recipient, but to whom it comes its supernal quality rises forever beyond all attainder.

What happened to the actress during all the time I was undertaken by the church to be made into the sort of woman serviceable to Taylorville, was inconsiderable; what grew out of it for Olivia was no small matter, and much of it I lay without bitterness to Cousin Judd, who, from having got himself named adviser in my father's will, was in a position to affect my life to the worse.

And yet, in so far as I am not an unprecedented sport on the family tree, I had more in common with this shrewd-dealing, loud-praying, twice-removed soldier cousin than with any of my kin, though I should hardly say as much to him, for he has never been in a theatre, and if he still considers me a hopeful subject for prayer it is because his Christian duty rises superior to his conviction.

He is pricked out in my earlier recollections by the difficulty he seems to have had in effecting a compromise between the traditional distrustfulness of the Ohianna farmer toward the Powers in general, and particularly of the weather, and his obligation of Christian Joy, and for a curious effect of not belonging to his wife, a large, uninteresting woman with a sense of her own merit which she never succeeded in imposing on anybody but Cousin Judd. She had a keen appreciation of worldly values which led her always to select the best material for her clothes, and another feeling of their expensiveness which resulted in her being always a little belated in the styles. She approved of religion, though not active in it, and in twenty years she and Cousin Judd had arrived at a series of compromises and excuses which enabled her to appear at church one Sunday in five and still keep up the interest of the clergyman and congregation as to why she didn't come the other four.

Whenever the days were short or the roads too heavy, Cousin Judd would put up over night at our house, and I remember how my mother would always be able to say, looking about the empty democrat wagon as though she expected her in ambush somewhere:

"And you didn't bring Lydia?" and Cousin Judd being able to reply to it as if it were something he had expected up till the last moment, and been keenly disappointed:

"Well, no, Liddy ain't feeling quite up to it," which my mother received without skepticism. After this they were free to talk of other things.

What there was between Cousin Judd and me, with due allowance for the years, was the spark, the touch-and-go of vitality that rose in me to a hundred beckonings of running flood and waving boughs – music and movement; and only the moral enthusiasms of war and religion raised through his heavy farmer stuff. We should have loved one another had we known how; as it was, all our intercourse was marked on his part by the gracelessness of rusticity, and by the impertinence of adolescence on mine. I used regularly to receive his pious admonitions with what, for a Taylorville child, was flippancy; nevertheless there were occasions when we had set off of summer Sunday mornings together to early class, when the church was cool and dim and the smell of the honey locusts came in through the window, that I caught the thrill that ran from the pounding of his fist where he prayed at the other end of the long bench; and there was a kind of blessedness shed from him as with closed eyes and lifted chin he swung from peak to peak of the splendid measure of "How Firm a Foundation," that I garnered up and hugged to myself in place of Art and the Joy of Living. All of which was very good for me and might have answered if it had not come into Cousin Judd's head that he ought to overlook my reading.

By this time I had worked through all my father's books and was ready to satisfy the itch of imagination even with the vicious inaccuracies of what was called Christian literature. The trouble all came of course of my not understanding the nature of a lie. Not that I couldn't tell a downright fib if I had to, or haven't on occasion, but a lie is to me just as silly a performance when it is about marriage or work as about the law of gravitation, and when it is presented to me in the form of human behaviour it makes me sick, like the smell of tuberoses in a close room; and I failed utterly to realize then that there are a great many people capable of living sincerely and at the same time blandly misrepresenting the facts of life in the interests of what is called morality. I do not think it probable that Cousin Judd accepted for himself the rule of behaviour prescribed by the books he recommended – I shall not tell you what they were, but if there are any Sunday-school libraries in Ohianna you will find them on the shelves – but I know that he and my mother esteemed them excellent for the young.

So far as they thought of it at all, they believed that in surrounding me with intimations of a life in which there was nothing more important than settling with Deity the minor details of living, and especially how much you would pay to His establishment, they had done their utmost to provide me with a life in which nothing more important could happen. If you were careful about reading the Bible and doing good to people – that is, persuading them to go to church and to leave off swearing – all the more serious details such as making a living, marrying and having children would take care of themselves; and the trouble was, as I have said, that I believed it. And that was how I found myself farthest from Art and Life at the time when I found myself a young lady.

I had to make this discovery for myself, for there were no social occasions in Taylorville to give a term to your advent into the grown-up world, though there was a definite privilege which marked your achievement of it. There was a period prior to this in which you bumped against things you were too old for, and carromed to the things for which you were quite too young, and about the end of your high-school term you had done with hair ribbons and begun to have company on your own account, and the sort of things began to happen which marked the point beyond which if you fell upon disaster it was your own fault. They happened to me.

By dint of my doing her compositions and of her doing my arithmetic, Pauline Allingham and I had managed to keep together all through the high school, and it was in our last year, when we used to put in the long end of the afternoons at Pauline's, playing croquet, that I first took notice of Tommy Bettersworth. The Bettersworth yard abutted on the Allingham's for the space of one woodshed and a horse-chestnut tree, and it was along in October that I began to be aware that it was not altogether the view of the garden that kept Tommy on the woodshed or in the chestnut tree the greater part of the afternoon. It may be that the adventure with Charlie Gower had sharpened my perception, at any rate it had aroused my discretion; I was carefully oblivious to the proximity of Tommy Bettersworth. But there came a day when Pauline was not, when she wanted to tell me something about Flora Haines which she was afraid he might overhear.