Mary Austin - A Woman of Genius

It was Effie who, if we went to the neighbours for a stated visit, kept her eye upon the clock, and if she found us yielding to temptation, was fertile in the invention of counter exploits just as exciting and quite within the parental pale, and when we did fall, had a genius for extrication as great as Forester's for propitiatory behaviour. So it fell out that our piratical descent on Ross's field was our first encounter with an order of things that transcended my mother's personal jurisdiction.

Up to this time contact with our parents' world had got no farther than vainglorious imaginings of our proper entry into it, and now suddenly we found that we were in it, haled there by our own acts in the unhappy quality of offenders. I think this was the first time in my life that I had been glad it was Forester who was the boy and not I who was made to go with my father and Mr. Allingham to Ross's field to point out the damage, for which they paid.

It was this which sealed the enormity of our offence, money was paid for it, and came near to losing its moral point with Forrie, who felt himself immeasurably raised in the estimate of the other boys as a public character. It served, along with my father's anger, which was so new to us, to raise the occasion to a solemn note against which mere switchings were inconsiderable. No doubt my brother has forgotten it by now, along with Effie, who got off with nothing worse than the complicity of having been one of us, but to me the incident takes rank as the beginning of a new kind of Snockertism which was to array itself indefinitely against the forces inappreciably sucking at the bottom of my life.

It was as if, on the very first occasion of my swimming to the surface of my lustrous seas, I was taken with a line at the end of which I was to be played into shoals and shallows, to foul with my flounderings some clear pools and scatter the peace of many smaller fry – I mean the obligation of repute, the necessity of being loyal to what I found in the world because it had been founded in sincerity with pains. For what my father made clear to us as the very crux of our transgression, was that we had discredited our bringing up. Old man Ross could be paid for his vegetables, but there was nothing, I was given to understand, could satisfy our arrears to our parents' honour, which, it transpired, had been appallingly blackened in the event.

Nothing in my whole life has so surprised me as the capacity of this single adventure for involving us in successive coils of turpitude and disaster; though it was not until we followed my father into the best room the next morning after he had seen Mr. Allingham, still rather sick, for the turnips had not agreed with us, that we realized the worst, rounding on us through a stream of dreadful, biting things that, as my father uttered them, seemed to float us clear beyond the pale of sympathy and hope. I remember my father walking up and down with his hands under his coat behind, a short man in my recollection, with a kind of swing in his walk which curiously nobody but myself seems to have noticed, and a sort of electrical flash in his manner which might have come, as in this instance, from our never being brought up before him except when we had done something thoroughly exasperating: I am not sure that I did not tell Ellen McGee, in an attempt to render the magnitude of our going over, that he rated us in full uniform, waving his sword, which at that moment hung with his regimentals over the mantelpiece.

"Good heavens," he said, "you might have been arrested for it – my children — mine – and I thought I could have trusted you. Good heavens!"

Suddenly he reached out as it were over my brother's shoulder, to whom in his capacity as the eldest son most of this tirade was addressed, with a word for me that was to go tearing its way sorely to the seat of memory and consciousness, and, lodging there, become the one point of attachment to support the memory of him beyond his death.

"As for you, Olivia," I started at this, for I had been staying my misery for the moment on a red and black table cover which my mother valued, and I was amazed to find myself still able to hate – "as for you, Olivia May" – he would never allow my name to be shortened in the least – "I am surprised at you."

He had expected better of me then; he had reached beyond my surfaces and divined what I was inarticulately sure of, that I was different – no, not better – but somehow intrinsically different. He was surprised at me; he did not say so much of Forester, and he did say that it was exactly what he had expected of the McGees, but he had had a better opinion of me. I recall a throb of exasperation at his never having told me. I might have lived up to it. But with all the soreness of having dropped short of a possible estimate, that phrase, which might have gone no deeper than his momentary disappointment, is all I have on which to hang the faith that perhaps … perhaps some vision had shaped on his horizon of what I might become. I was never anything to my mother, I know, but a cuckoo's egg dropped in her creditable nest. "But," said my father, "I am surprised at you ."

He was, I believe, one of those men who make a speciality of integrity and of great dependability in public service, which is often brought to answer for the want of private success; an early republican type fast being relegated to small towns and country neighbourhoods. He had a brilliant war record which was partly responsible for his office, and a string of debts pendent from some earlier mercantile enterprise, which, in the occasion they afforded of paying up under circumstances of great stringency, appeared somehow an additional burnish to his name. He was a man everybody liked; that he was extremely gentle and gay in his manner with us on most occasions, I remember very well, and I think he must have had a vein of romance, though I do not know upon what grounds except that among the few books that he left, many were of that character, and from the names of his children, Forester, Olivia May, and Ephemia, called Effie for short, which were certainly not Taylorvillian. Forester grew out of a heroic incident of his soldiering, of which I have forgotten all the particulars except that the other man's name was Forester, and my father's idea of giving it to his son who was born about that time, was that when he should grow up, and be distinguished, the double name of Forester Lattimore should serve at once as a reminder and a certificate of appreciation. I recall that we children, or perhaps it was only I, used to abound in dramatic imaginings of what would happen when this belated recognition took place, though in fact nothing ever came of it, which might have been largely owing to my brother's turning out the least distinguished of men.

Whether if my father had lived he would have remained always as much in the dark as to the private sources of my behaviour, I try not to guess, but this incident picked him out for me among the ruck of fathers as a man distinguished for propriety, produced, in the very moment of pronouncing me unworthy of it, the ideal of a personal standard. If he hadn't up to this time affected greatly my gratitude or affections, he began to shine for me now with some of the precious quality which inheres in dreams. And before the shine had gone off I lost him.

My father's death, which occurred the March following, came suddenly, wholly fortuitous to the outward eye, and I have heard my mother say, in its inconsequence, its failure to line up with any conceivable moral occasion, did much to shake her faith in a controlling Providence; but affects me still as then, as the most incontrovertible of evidences of Powers moving at large among men, occupied with other affairs than ours. A little while ago, as I sat writing here on my veranda, looking riverward, an ant ran across my paper, which I blew out with my breath into space, and I did not look to see what disaster. It reminded me suddenly of the way I felt about my father's taking off. He was, he must have been, in the way of some god that March morning; that is one of the evidences by which you know that there are gods at all. You play happily about their knees, sometimes they play with you, then you stumble against a foot thrust out, or the clamour of your iniquity disturbs their proper meditations, and suddenly you are silenced. My mother was doubtless right; it would have been better if he had stayed with her and the children, certainly happier, but he got in the way of the Powers.