| |
| 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, | 5 |
| 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. | 10 |
| “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. | 15 |
| 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. | 20 |
| 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. | 25 |
| 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. | 30 |
| 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; | 35 |
| 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. | 40 |
| 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 | 45 |
| 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. | 50 |
| 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 | 55 |
| 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 | 60 |
| 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 | 65 |
| 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. | 70 |
| 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. | 75 |
| 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? | 80 |
| 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, | 85 |
| 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 | 90 |
| 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. | 95 |
| 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. | 100 |
| 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 | 105 |
| 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. | 110 |
| 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 | 115 |
| 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 | 120 |
| 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, | 125 |
| Fierce heads looked out; small bodies pivoted. | |
| We rose to go. Sunset blazed on the windows. | |
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