Crucial Instances

The House stood a few yards back from the elm-shaded village street, in that semi-publicity sometimes cited as a democratic protest against old-world standards of domestic exclusiveness.  This candid exposure to the public eye is more probably a result of the gregariousness which, in the New England bosom, oddly coexists with a shrinking from direct social contact; most of the inmates of such houses preferring that furtive intercourse which is the result of observations through shuttered windows and a categorical acquaintance with the neighboring clothes-lines.  The House, however, faced its public with a difference.  For sixty years it had written itself with a capital letter, had self-consciously squared itself in the eye of an admiring nation.  The most searching inroads of village intimacy hardly counted in a household that opened on the universe; and a lady whose door-bell was at any moment liable to be rung by visitors from London or Vienna was not likely to flutter up-stairs when she observed a neighbor “stepping over.”

The solitary inmate of the Anson House owed this induration of the social texture to the most conspicuous accident in her annals:  the fact that she was the only granddaughter of the great Orestes Anson.  She had been born, as it were, into a museum, and cradled in a glass case with a label; the first foundations of her consciousness being built on the rock of her grandfather’s celebrity.  To a little girl who acquires her earliest knowledge of literature through a Reader embellished with fragments of her ancestor’s prose, that personage necessarily fills an heroic space in the foreground of life.  To communicate with one’s past through the impressive medium of print, to have, as it were, a footing in every library in the country, and an acknowledged kinship with that world-diffused clan, the descendants of the great, was to be pledged to a standard of manners that amazingly simplified the lesser relations of life.  The village street on which Paulina Anson’s youth looked out led to all the capitals of Europe; and over the roads of intercommunication unseen caravans bore back to the elm-shaded House the tribute of an admiring world.

Fate seemed to have taken a direct share in fitting Paulina for her part as the custodian of this historic dwelling.  It had long been secretly regarded as a “visitation” by the great man’s family that he had left no son and that his daughters were not “intellectual.”  The ladies themselves were the first to lament their deficiency, to own that nature had denied them the gift of making the most of their opportunities.  A profound veneration for their parent and an unswerving faith in his doctrines had not amended their congenital incapacity to understand what he had written.  Laura, who had her moments of mute rebellion against destiny, had sometimes thought how much easier it would have been if their progenitor had been a poet; for she could recite, with feeling, portions of The Culprit Fay and of the poems of Mrs. Hemans; and Phoebe, who was more conspicuous for memory than imagination, kept an album filled with “selections.”  But the great man was a philosopher; and to both daughters respiration was difficult on the cloudy heights of metaphysic.  The situation would have been intolerable but for the fact that, while Phoebe and Laura were still at school, their father’s fame had passed from the open ground of conjecture to the chill privacy of certitude.  Dr. Anson had in fact achieved one of those anticipated immortalities not uncommon at a time when people were apt to base their literary judgments on their emotions, and when to affect plain food and despise England went a long way toward establishing a man’s intellectual pre-eminence.  Thus, when the daughters were called on to strike a filial attitude about their parent’s pedestal, there was little to do but to pose gracefully and point upward; and there are spines to which the immobility of worship is not a strain.  A legend had by this time crystallized about the great Orestes, and it was of more immediate interest to the public to hear what brand of tea he drank, and whether he took off his boots in the hall, than to rouse the drowsy echo of his dialectic.  A great man never draws so near his public as when it has become unnecessary to read his books and is still interesting to know what he eats for breakfast.

As recorders of their parent’s domestic habits, as pious scavengers of his waste-paper basket, the Misses Anson were unexcelled.  They always had an interesting anecdote to impart to the literary pilgrim, and the tact with which, in later years, they intervened between the public and the growing inaccessibility of its idol, sent away many an enthusiast satisfied to have touched the veil before the sanctuary.  Still it was felt, especially by old Mrs. Anson, who survived her husband for some years, that Phoebe and Laura were not worthy of their privileges.  There had been a third daughter so unworthy of hers that she had married a distant cousin, who had taken her to live in a new Western community where the Works of Orestes Anson had not yet become a part of the civic consciousness; but of this daughter little was said, and she was tacitly understood to be excluded from the family heritage of fame.  In time, however, it appeared that the traditional penny with which she had been cut off had been invested to unexpected advantage; and the interest on it, when she died, returned to the Anson House in the shape of a granddaughter who was at once felt to be what Mrs. Anson called a “compensation.”  It was Mrs. Anson’s firm belief that the remotest operations of nature were governed by the centripetal force of her husband’s greatness and that Paulina’s exceptional intelligence could be explained only on the ground that she was designed to act as the guardian of the family temple.

The House, by the time Paulina came to live in it, had already acquired the publicity of a place of worship; not the perfumed chapel of a romantic idolatry but the cold clean empty meeting-house of ethical enthusiasms.  The ladies lived on its outskirts, as it were, in cells that left the central fane undisturbed.  The very position of the furniture had come to have a ritual significance:  the sparse ornaments were the offerings of kindred intellects, the steel engravings by Raphael Morghen marked the Via Sacra of a European tour, and the black-walnut desk with its bronze inkstand modelled on the Pantheon was the altar of this bleak temple of thought.

To a child compact of enthusiasms, and accustomed to pasture them on the scanty herbage of a new social soil, the atmosphere of the old house was full of floating nourishment.  In the compressed perspective of Paulina’s outlook it stood for a monument of ruined civilizations, and its white portico opened on legendary distances.  Its very aspect was impressive to eyes that had first surveyed life from the jig-saw “residence” of a raw-edged Western town.  The high-ceilinged rooms, with their panelled walls, their polished mahogany, their portraits of triple-stocked ancestors and of ringleted “females” in crayon, furnished the child with the historic scenery against which a young imagination constructs its vision of the past.  To other eyes the cold spotless thinly-furnished interior might have suggested the shuttered mind of a maiden-lady who associates fresh air and sunlight with dust and discoloration; but it is the eye which supplies the coloring-matter, and Paulina’s brimmed with the richest hues.

Nevertheless, the House did not immediately dominate her.  She had her confused out-reachings toward other centres of sensation, her vague intuition of a heliocentric system; but the attraction of habit, the steady pressure of example, gradually fixed her roving allegiance and she bent her neck to the yoke.  Vanity had a share in her subjugation; for it had early been discovered that she was the only person in the family who could read her grandfather’s works.  The fact that she had perused them with delight at an age when (even presupposing a metaphysical bias) it was impossible for her to understand them, seemed to her aunts and grandmother sure evidence of predestination.  Paulina was to be the interpreter of the oracle, and the philosophic fumes so vertiginous to meaner minds would throw her into the needed condition of clairvoyance.  Nothing could have been more genuine than the emotion on which this theory was based.  Paulina, in fact, delighted in her grandfather’s writings.  His sonorous periods, his mystic vocabulary, his bold flights into the rarefied air of the abstract, were thrilling to a fancy unhampered by the need of definitions.  This purely verbal pleasure was supplemented later by the excitement of gathering up crumbs of meaning from the rhetorical board.  What could have been more stimulating than to construct the theory of a girlish world out of the fragments of this Titanic cosmogony?  Before Paulina’s opinions had reached the stage when ossification sets in their form was fatally predetermined.

The fact that Dr. Anson had died and that his apotheosis had taken place before his young priestess’s induction to the temple, made her ministrations easier and more inspiring.  There were no little personal traits—­such as the great man’s manner of helping himself to salt, or the guttural cluck that started the wheels of speech—­to distract the eye of young veneration from the central fact of his divinity.  A man whom one knows only through a crayon portrait and a dozen yellowing, tomes on free-will and intuition is at least secure from the belittling effects of intimacy.

Paulina thus grew up in a world readjusted to the fact of her grandfather’s greatness; and as each organism draws from its surroundings the kind of nourishment most needful to its growth, so from this somewhat colorless conception she absorbed warmth, brightness and variety.  Paulina was the type of woman who transmutes thought into sensation and nurses a theory in her bosom like a child.

In due course Mrs. Anson “passed away”—­no one died in the Anson vocabulary—­and Paulina became more than ever the foremost figure of the commemorative group.  Laura and Phoebe, content to leave their father’s glory in more competent hands, placidly lapsed into needlework and fiction, and their niece stepped into immediate prominence as the chief “authority” on the great man.  Historians who were “getting up” the period wrote to consult her and to borrow documents; ladies with inexplicable yearnings begged for an interpretation of phrases which had “influenced” them, but which they had not quite understood; critics applied to her to verify some doubtful citation or to decide some disputed point in chronology; and the great tide of thought and investigation kept up a continuous murmur on the quiet shores of her life.

An explorer of another kind disembarked there one day in the shape of a young man to whom Paulina was primarily a kissable girl, with an after-thought in the shape of a grandfather.  From the outset it had been impossible to fix Hewlett Winsloe’s attention on Dr. Anson.  The young man behaved with the innocent profanity of infants sporting on a tomb.  His excuse was that he came from New York, a Cimmerian outskirt which survived in Paulina’s geography only because Dr. Anson had gone there once or twice to lecture.  The curious thing was that she should have thought it worth while to find excuses for young Winsloe.  The fact that she did so had not escaped the attention of the village; but people, after a gasp of awe, said it was the most natural thing in the world that a girl like Paulina Anson should think of marrying.  It would certainly seem a little odd to see a man in the House, but young Winsloe would of course understand that the Doctor’s books were not to be disturbed, and that he must go down to the orchard to smoke—.  The village had barely framed this modus vivendi when it was convulsed by the announcement that young Winsloe declined to live in the House on any terms.  Hang going down to the orchard to smoke!  He meant to take his wife to New York.  The village drew its breath and watched.

Did Persephone, snatched from the warm fields of Enna, peer half-consentingly down the abyss that opened at her feet?  Paulina, it must be owned, hung a moment over the black gulf of temptation.  She would have found it easy to cope with a deliberate disregard of her grandfather’s rights; but young Winsloe’s unconsciousness of that shadowy claim was as much a natural function as the falling of leaves on a grave.  His love was an embodiment of the perpetual renewal which to some tender spirits seems a crueller process than decay.

On women of Paulina’s mould this piety toward implicit demands, toward the ghosts of dead duties walking unappeased among usurping passions, has a stronger hold than any tangible bond.  People said that she gave up young Winsloe because her aunts disapproved of her leaving them; but such disapproval as reached her was an emanation from the walls of the House, from the bare desk, the faded portraits, the dozen yellowing tomes that no hand but hers ever lifted from the shelf.