WHEN I WAS A CHILD

In the year 1874 there was a road which crossed the State of Georgia. It has disappeared long since, changed by the will of some memory in the hearts of the people. But you may trace it still when the daisies bloom in May. These flowers are not indigenous to this section. Their first seed fell here from the provender fed to Sherman’s cavalry. So, in May, that month of Decoration Days, they bloom again like a long, narrow memorial wreath laid upon the grave of a dead and glorious past. They wind and turn and tumble down many a steep hillside in North Georgia, as this road made its tortuous way among these hills. But when it slipped into the lower, smoother land, it straightened out and lay like a broad red-and-golden ribbon between the great plantations. Farther and farther it stretched until it slid into the city of Augusta and became Green Street--so named, I suppose, because the road that made it came down into the white old town through such a fair and verdant country.

Other roads entered this highway, as smaller streams flow into a broader, swifter river. There were signposts to guide the traveler. I remember one in particular at the entrance of the old Petersburg road, because as a child it seemed to me like a very old man who had been pointing the way a long time and now leaned wearily in the direction indicated. Above a huge fist, rudely drawn, with the forefinger raised, appeared the legend:

‘This is the way to Mill or Ferry, Go, it, Traveler, Sad or Merry.’

We had sentiment in those days with a lilt to it, and a signpost was as good a place as any to publish it. We were not seeking fame. We were famous enough already. We were surfeited with the terrible distinction of having just concluded a cruel war in glorious defeat. We were some kind of magnificently irresponsible truth but lately crushed to earth, and we were rising again after the grandiloquent manner of our kind, with a beam in our eye and a song on our lips--but not prosperous! It requires more than a century for the phœnix of man to rise above the ashes of war in material things. We arose by a sort of rhythm of the spirit, unencumbered by wealth. The ascent is quicker and less expensive.

Gentlemen in rags traveled this road upon their old raw-boned horses--Don Quixotes, every one, still tilting against the windmills of a graver, saner civilization that had been thrust upon them. They were rumpled, ruddy men who bore themselves with an air and never complained of their poverty after the manner of ignoble men when misfortune overtakes them. They held onto their leisure for a long time as the last asset of a lost fortune, and visited a great deal from one old ramshackle mansion to another. Their laughter was a joyous eruption. They were pedantic with a flourish. They could drop you a long quotation from Faust or Shakespeare without seeming absurd or causing their victims the least embarrassment, such as we feel when a meaner man quotes a Promethean passage. They required these luminous vestments woven by great poets to adorn the qualities they had. Any one of them would have been admired as a character in a book or as the subject of a funeral oration.

The women of this period were strangely lyrical. Never again shall we see so many fine ladies rise with such grace above the inconvenience of poverty. Dressed in a chignon, a curl, and a cotton frock, they ignored all styles and remained the last word in the poetry of fashion. They had swishing silken virtues and conducted themselves after the manner of the heroine in the last chapter of Proverbs.

Eighty miles above Augusta there stood two huge gate-posts, topped with roughly hewed balls. Between them hung the old gray gate of a famous plantation. When the sun was low in the west it shone through these palings like bars of gold as if there might be nothing beyond but space and silence and brightness. Inside, there was a long avenue stretching away through the trees. Far down, there was a high green terrace; above the terrace, an ancient flower garden, bordered with boxwood and spired with the tops of juniper trees. Blossoming boughs waved like flags in the summer wind. All the spaces inside were filled with humbler flowers; phlox and lilies, violets and hyacinths made misty blue veils in the shadows. Long-soled cactus spread like green footprints upon the dark earth--the whole lonely place a wilderness of bloom left to govern itself.

Somewhere behind this garden in those days stood a little house, left over like a poor relation in adversity.

I was born there.

My recollection now is that it was a good little house, with a busy mind and a kind heart inside, where a female child would be taught the Lord’s Prayer at an early age, and how to sew and knit; but it was not, you would have concluded at a glance, the cradle of genius. Very few people make provision beforehand for geniuses in their families. They are like the seed that birds scatter--liable to spring up anywhere, but never to be anticipated. For my part, I doubt if they are born at all, but produce themselves by some chance of circumstances; almost any man or woman is remotely liable to become one.

But my first memories are not of this house, nor even of my father and mother. I had that faint impression of them which grown people have of Providence, to be depended upon, but too far off in consciousness to be cultivated. My measure of relationship at this time was that father was very tall, and mother was much shorter and very slender. I was some kind of a little pinwheel of life revolving away from them.

In these earliest years I must have belonged more particularly to the vegetable kingdom. My first vivid impressions are of being in the open, not doing anything, certainly not thinking. I seem to have grown like the grass on the rim of the green terrace beyond the flower garden for a long time. Father and mother are very sketchy. They appear now in my memory of this period at rare intervals.

I was not sufficiently acquainted with them then to be aware of their anxieties. They belonged to another world. I can barely remember father’s blue gaze following me about, usually with the light of laughter in it. Mother was always busy. She had large gray eyes that caught me up with a glance, washed me like a saucer, set me down again and went on to her next deed with the swiftness of one who wore wings on her feet. This excessive energy may account for the fact that I formed no apron-string attachment to her.

The reputation I had, however, was that of being an extremely affectionate child. This only proves that any record written from memory must be incomplete. I suppose Homer omitted many important historical facts which did not rhyme with those he sang so lustily in his Iliad. Love anchored me so completely later in life, I am rather glad to think that in these first years my affections must have been like those of a busy man for his family, usually latent, but practiced with convincing charm at odd moments. I do not remember ever crying for my mother as other young children do, because I so completely believed in her. She could not forget me or forsake me. So far as I knew then, she would last forever. There was nothing, literally nothing, in my world to worry about. I was already living by faith.

This is the earliest faculty we develop. It is an enduring illusion at which the world and all the vicissitudes of life tear in vain. We replace every hope that fails with another one. We change our standards and our creeds, but we live and die believing in something. It is a medicine we use to ease the mind. I have had so many letters lately from men and women who no longer believe in God. They have fallen over the precipice of rationalism into an awful pit of darkness. But it is perfectly apparent that any one of them would be quick to believe in a man or woman. They are the same old barnacles of faith we all are, who have lost their hold upon the good bottom, raked off by the lives they have lived or the thinking they have practiced. They are the most credulous people in the world. I never knew one who would not trust a convincing rascal. Or he will take to occultism, some spiritual nostrum, as a certain class of people prefer patent medicine for their physical ailments. What I mean is that the power to believe is born in us, and we must exercise it one way or the other, as we breathe to live.

I have a vivid recollection of the child I was then, as one might remember the person he used to be in another life, sitting on the green crown of my world, very pudgy, back hunched, fingers curled in the grass, the hair on my head sticking up like a fine bright fringe, eyes wide and quiet, fixed upon nothing in particular, the groggy little somnambulist of a bright dream.

I remember one of the illusions I had. The big gate at the end of the avenue was the end of my world. I accompanied father and mother through it at rare intervals, but my understanding was that we passed immediately into another world. I shall experience no more tremendous anticipations rising from my dust in the last day than I did then, seated in the bottom of the rickety old buggy, being drawn through the black weather-beaten portals of that gate.

Once in so often I made the journey up there alone to peep through the palings at this neighboring world. My fear was that it might have fallen off or been blown away in a high wind. Being very young and unacquainted with the other stars, I dreaded the possibility of being stuck up against one just outside our big gate; or worse still, finding nothing at all beyond it but emptiness.

There is a grandeur about total ignorance, winged with imagination. Children alone have it. They endure terrors and visions that would drive a sane person mad. They are little Saturns revolving in the incandescent rings of fancy, no substance to their thoughts, no realities in the secret world where they move and believe everything.