Chapter 12
Section 11 of 1916, First Chapters Collection. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Reading by Matt Perard. 1916, First Chapters Collection by various. Section 11, Grace King, The Pleasant Ways of St. Medard. Chapter 1, Introduction. Do you remember, you who can remember as much
as fifty years ago, when your ears hardly reached above the dinner table? The stories your elders used to tell over the wine and nuts? Stories about their time and their people, their youth and their doings. There, ten, twenty, forty years ago, what stupendous elders they were. Truly to the open eyes of the children looking up to them they were, indeed, as mountains walking or talking. And what stupendous tales they told of those dim prehistoric
ages before our birth. What great things they had done in hunting and fishing, riding and electioneering. Aye, in fighting, too, with the Indians, with the British, in 1812, with the Mexicans, with the Spaniards, when they went filibustering to Cuba, even in the Revolutionary War, and with Napoleon, or escaping from the insurrection of the Negroes in San Domingo. For what they did not of themselves achieve, their fathers and grandfathers achieved, and
it all seemed the same to them and their stories as it did to their listeners. Ah, what fathers and grandfathers they had, and what wonderful men and women they had known. The children who listened then have never met the likes of them in their long life since. Yet heaven knows how patiently they have looked for them, and how gladly they would have welcomed the sight of them. What a pleasant world that was, to be sure, into which we were born fifty years ago in New Orleans.
What a natural, what a simple world. Then there was but one truth, one right, that of Papa, then whom alone the Father in heaven above was greater but heartily more feared. That tall, dignified gentleman to whom his wife said, Sir, and his servants, Master, whose frown was a terror to his children, and his caress an awesome favour, who descended every morning from his silent apartment as from a cloud, to breakfast in majesty alone, to whom there was but one easy
means of approach, one sure intermediary, Mama, whose sweet nature and angelic presence so enfolded the sharp blade of his temper was as safely sheathed in it as his flashing sword in his ebony walking stick. She was so pale and delicate looking in her ruffles and laces, with her mysterious retirements to her apartment, through whose hushed and dimmed atmosphere wherein the furniture took vast and strange proportions, the frightened children at stated intervals were pushed
and jerked by whispering nurses to the great lace-curtained bed, and made to kiss some baby, or other, some loathsome red little baby, it was brought there, we knew, by that hideous wrinkle purveyor of babies, old Madame Bonnet, who had a wart covered with long hairs on her chin, and whose only tooth stuck out from her upper gum, the very image of the evil fairy pictured in the magazine des Enfants, the nursery authority then on fairies. Children would as soon have touched the devil as
her, or her covered basket under the foot of the bed in which she had brought the baby, and so after the Mama had given them some dreggies from the glass bowl on the table at the side of the bed, they would creep out of the room, shrinking as far as possible from the nefarious figure sitting in her low squat chair. And do you remember how those great Papas of ours went to war, and how God did not act towards them as they would have acted towards him, had they been God, and he a southern
gentleman, and how they came back from the war, those that did come back, alas, so thin, dirty, ragged, poor, unlike any Papa's that respectable children had ever seen before? If they had strutted in buskins of yore, as they had been accused of doing by their enemies, rest assured they footed it now in bears' holes. And do you remember what followed? Families unrooted from their past and dragged from country to city, and from city to country, in the attempt to find a foothold,
and the rushing tide of ruin sweeping over their land. Outlawed fathers, traveling off to Egypt, Mexico, South America, in search of a living for wife and children, even into the enemy's own country, some of them with dazzling audacity, changing to the politics or principles as politics were then called of the conquerors, for the chance of sharing in their own spoliation. And these, in memory, seemed always to have traveled the farthest from us. Some fathers of
families, however, did nothing more adventurous than to submit to the will of God and his conditions, assuming him to have been their judge and the arbiter in the war. These merely changed their way of living, to the new conditions, retiring with their families to the outskirts of the city, where houses were cheap, living simple, and the disturbing temptations of society out of the question. These were the ones, in truth, who had the most adventures afterwards in the quest
for fortune. A living was a fortune then, setting themselves to work in the primitive fashion of their forefathers when they faced a new country and new conditions. But in the wilds of a virgin forest and surrounded by savage Andeans, these had advantages that their descendants learned to envy. The fighting the papas had done in war was nothing to the fighting they did afterwards for bread and meat, and the bitterness of their defeat there was sweetness compared to the
bitterness that came afterwards. Bayonet in hand was easier to them than hat in hand, and the delicate, luxurious mamas who had been so given to the world, reading and weeping over fictional misfortunes. There were some of them who lived to weep for the security of food and shelter once possessed by their slaves. Saddest of all these memories, and not the least to be wondered at, the man who once had the most friends was the one who in need found the fewest. The old friends
to whom we used to listen over the dinner table, who told such fine tales of adventure, courage, gallantry, wit, that we placed them in our hearts second only to our papa and third after God. Do you remember? But who does not remember? How in the struggle for life that followed the tempest of ruin they yielded to the tide of self-interest, veering and swaying from their anchorage, often indeed cutting loose and sailing clear out of sight, leaving their crippled
companions behind to shift for themselves? It was considered lucky when the deserter did not also turn betrayer and come back to act the pirate upon his old comrades. Starvation is a great disaliment of wrentrip, as the shipwrecked have found more than once. Poverty is a land to which no one goes willingly, which all strive instinctively to avoid. There seems to be no rest or ease in it. Who goes there old is buried there. The young spend their lives trying to get out of it,
but the way out of it is narrow and steep like the path to heaven. It almost seems to be the path to heaven, so hard is the struggle to get through it. It is white with the bones of those who have died in it, as the way to Jerusalem was once with the bones of the crusaders. Some giving up the struggle settle there, marry and have children there, little ones who never lose the mark of their nativity. The trampling of the hard-footed necessities has told upon them. Their hearts are
furrowed by the track of hopes passing into disappointments. They know no other land than poverty and are haunted by strange misconceptions of the land of the rich, the people who live in it and the people who get to it. Who of us, who now inherit, want as surely as our fathers did wealth, had not at one time or another made a pilgrimage to that Gibraltar of memory, the home of our childhood, of our Olympian beginnings. Leaving behind us the sordid little rented house in which
care and anxiety have whitened the hair and wrinkled the face, we have threaded the streets to stand on the sidewalk opposite some grim, gaunt, battered old brick mansion, filled with shops below and a mongrel lot of tenants above, trying to fit our past into or upon it. Is that the balcony we ask ourselves, for which our gala days we used to look upon a gala world? Did that grim story hold our nursery, where of mornings we used to lie and watch the
white angels pictured on the blue teeter tester of our bed and once caught them in the act of moving their wings? Was it there when we woke suddenly at night that the awful flickering of the taper in the corner, now brightening, now darkening the room, frightened us, opening and shutting, opening and shutting like the terrible eye of God? Is that the doorway through which our great past made its entrance and exit? Is that the courtyard where our slaves worked for us?
That the building in which they were born to work for us? No, no! To you who have not made that pilgrimage, I say, do not attempt it. You will never find what you see. Thread the way to it, only in memory, if you would find it. And yet, ye who have been in this land, we have described, who have buried some of your old ones there, and it may be some of your young ones who have spent your life trying to get out of it, or helping others dearer than yourself on their way out of it.
What think you of it, after all? What in truth found you there in default of the one? What that sent you there? Love, hope, courage, light in darkness, strength in weakness, fortitude under injustice, self-respect in the face of indignity and humiliation. Did ye not find them growing there, growing naturally, not cultivated artificially, as they are of necessity, and that other and upper land? Was less truth to be met there, or more falsehood from others,
less self-sacrifice, less wifely devotion or family loyalty than in the land of your lost inheritance? Did you find the slim person less charitable than the fat one, the hard under the shabby cloth, less sympathetic than the one under the vine? And, but there is no use to ask it, whatever the land of poverty lacks, it lacks not ideals, the beautiful ones that, as Schiller sings, fly from us one by one with our youthful years, leaving us at last to fare on alone,
without them, to old age. They, as we know, wind their way more fondly down than up the narrow path toward the cradle in the hovel, rather than to the one in the palace. End of Section 11, The Pleasant Ways of St. Medard. Introduction by Grace Kane.
