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WE chanced in
passing by that afternoon
To catch it in a sort of
special picture
Among tar-banded ancient cherry
trees,
Set well back from the road in rank lodged
grass,
The little cottage we were speaking of,
A
front with just a door between two windows,
Fresh
painted by the shower a velvet black.
We paused, the
minister and I, to look.
He made as if to hold it at
arm's length
Or put the leaves aside that framed it
in.
"Pretty," he said. "Come in. No one will care."
The path was a vague parting in the grass
That led us
to a weathered window-sill.
We pressed our faces to
the pane. "You see," he said,
"Everything's as she
left it when she died.
Her sons won't sell the house
or the things in it.
They say they mean to come and
summer here
Where they were boys. They haven't come
this year.
They live so far away--one is out west--
It will be hard for them to keep their word.
Anyway
they won't have the place disturbed."
A buttoned
hair-cloth lounge spread scrolling arms
Under a
crayon portrait on the wall
Done sadly from an old
daguerreotype.
"That was the father as he went to
war.
She always, when she talked about war,
Sooner
or later came and leaned, half knelt
Against the
lounge beside it, though I doubt
If such unlifelike
lines kept power to stir
Anything in her after all
the years.
He fell at Gettysburg or Fredericksburg,
I ought to know--it makes a difference which:
Fredericksburg wasn't Gettysburg, of course.
But what
I'm getting to is how forsaken
A little cottage this
has always seemed;
Since she went more than ever, but
before--
I don't mean altogether by the lives
That
had gone out of it, the father first,
Then the two
sons, till she was left alone.
(Nothing could draw
her after those two sons.
She valued the considerate
neglect
She had at some cost taught them after
years.)
I mean by the world's having passed it by--
As we almost got by this afternoon.
It always seems
to me a sort of mark
To measure how far fifty years
have brought us.
Why not sit down if you are in no
haste?
These doorsteps seldom have a visitor.
The
warping boards pull out their own old nails
With none
to tread and put them in their place.
She had her own
idea of things, the old lady.
And she liked talk. She
had seen Garrison
And Whittier, and had her story of
them.
One wasn't long in learning that she thought
Whatever else the Civil War was for
It wasn't just to
keep the States together,
Nor just to free the
slaves, though it did both.
She wouldn't have
believed those ends enough
To have given outright for
them all she gave.
Her giving somehow touched the
principle
That all men are created free and equal.
And to hear her quaint phrases--so removed
From the
world's view to-day of all those things.
That's a
hard mystery of Jefferson's.
What did he mean? Of
course the easy way
Is to decide it simply isn't
true.
It may not be. I heard a fellow say so.
But
never mind, the Welshman got it planted
Where it will
trouble us a thousand years.
Each age will have to
reconsider it.
You couldn't tell her what the West
was saying,
And what the South to her serene belief.
She had some art of hearing and yet not
Hearing the
latter wisdom of the world.
White was the only race
she ever knew.
Black she had scarcely seen, and
yellow never.
But how could they be made so very
unlike
By the same hand working in the same stuff?
She had supposed the war decided that.
What are you
going to do with such a person?
Strange how such
innocence gets its own way.
I shouldn't be surprised
if in this world
It were the force that would at last
prevail.
Do you know but for her there was a time
When to please younger members of the church,
Or
rather say non-members in the church,
Whom we all
have to think of nowadays,
I would have changed the
Creed a very little?
Not that she ever had to ask me
not to;
It never got so far as that; but the bare
thought
Of her old tremulous bonnet in the pew,
And of her half asleep was too much for me.
Why, I
might wake her up and startle her.
It was the words
'descended into Hades'
That seemed too pagan to our
liberal youth.
You know they suffered from a general
onslaught.
And well, if they weren't true why keep
right on
Saying them like the heathen? We could drop
them.
Only--there was the bonnet in the pew.
Such
a phrase couldn't have meant much to her.
But suppose
she had missed it from the Creed
As a child misses
the unsaid Good-night,
And falls asleep with
heartache--how should I feel?
I'm just as glad she
made me keep hands off,
For, dear me, why abandon a
belief
Merely because it ceases to be true.
Cling
to it long enough, and not a doubt
It will turn true
again, for so it goes.
Most of the change we think we
see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of
favour.
As I sit here, and oftentimes, I wish
I
could be monarch of a desert land
I could devote and
dedicate forever
To the truths we keep coming back
and back to.
So desert it would have to be, so walled
By mountain ranges half in summer snow,
No one would
covet it or think it worth
The pains of conquering to
force change on.
Scattered oases where men dwelt, but
mostly
Sand dunes held loosely in tamarisk
Blown
over and over themselves in idleness.
Sand grains
should sugar in the natal dew
The babe born to the
desert, the sand storm
Retard mid-waste my cowering
caravans--
"There are bees in this wall." He struck
the clapboards,
Fierce heads looked out; small bodies
pivoted.
We rose to go. Sunset blazed on the windows.
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