Julia Ward Howe - Richards Laura E. - Страница 154
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As Arthur Dehon Hill, counsel for the Pure Milk Association, led her from the room, he said, "Mrs. Howe, you have saved the day!"
This incident was still in her mind on her ninety-first birthday, a few days later.
"My parlors are full of beautiful flowers and other gifts, interpreted by notes expressive of much affection, and telegrams of the same sort. What dare I ask for more? Only that I may do something in the future to deserve all this love and gratitude. I have intended to deserve it all and more. Yet, when in thought I review my life, I feel the waste and loss of power thro' want of outlook. Like many another young person, I did not know what my really available gifts were. Perhaps the best was a feeling of what I may call 'the sense of the moment,' which led a French friend to say of me: 'Mme. Howe possede le mot a un degre remarquable.' I was often praised for saying 'just the right word,' and I usually did this with a strong feeling that it ought to be said."
Early in June, just as she was preparing for the summer flitting, she had a bad fall, breaking a rib. This delayed the move for a week, no more, the bone knitting easily. She was soon happy among her green trees, her birds singing around her.
The memories of this last summer come flocking in, themselves like bright birds. She was so well, so joyous, giving her lilies with such full hands; it was a golden time.
As the body failed, the mind—or so it seemed to us—grew ever clearer, the veil that shrouds the spirit ever more transparent. She "saw things hidden."
One day a summer neighbor came, bringing her son, a handsome, athletic fellow, smartly dressed, a fine figure of gilded youth. She looked at him a good deal: presently she said suddenly,—
"You write poetry!"
The lad turned crimson: his mother looked dumfounded. It proved that he had lately written a prize poem, and that literature was the goal of his ambition. Another day she found a philosopher hidden in what seemed to the rest of the family merely "a callow boy in pretty white duck clothes." So she plucked out the heart of each man's mystery, but so tenderly that it was yielded gladly, young and old alike feeling themselves understood.
Among the visitors of this summer none was more welcome than her great-grandson, Christopher Birckhead,[152] then an infant in arms. She loved to hold and watch the child, brooding over him with grave tenderness: it was a beautiful and gracious picture of Past and Future.
Maud had just written a book on Sicily, and, as always, our mother read and corrected the galley proofs. She did this with exquisite care and thoughtfulness, never making her suggestions on the proof itself, but on a separate sheet of paper, with the number of the galley, the phrase, and her suggested emendations. This was her invariable custom: the writer must be perfectly free to retain her own phrase, if she preferred it.
Walking tired her that summer, but she was very faithful about it.
"Zacko," she would command John Elliott, "take me for a walk."
The day before she took to her bed, he remembers that she clung to him more than usual and said,—
"It tires me very much." (This after walking twice round the piazza.)
"Once more!" he encouraged.
"No—I have walked all I can to-day."
"Let me take you back to your room this way," he said, leading her back by the piazza. "That makes five times each way!"
She laughed and was pleased to have done this, but he thinks she had a great sense of weakness too.
Her favorite piece on the "Victor" that summer was "The Artillerist's Oath." The music had a gallant ring to it, and there was something heroic about the whole thing, something that suggested the Forlorn Hope—how many of them she had led! When nine o'clock came, she would ask for this piece by the nickname she had given it, taken from one of its odd lines,—
"I'll wed thee in the battle's front!"
While the song was being given, she was all alert and alive, even if she may have been sleepy earlier in the evening. She would get up with a little gesture of courage, and take leave of us, always with a certain ceremony, that was like the withdrawing of royalty. The evening was then over, and we too went to bed!
As we gather up our treasures of this last summer, we remember that several things might have prepared us for what was coming, had not our eyes been holden. She spoke a great deal of old times, the figures of her childhood and girlhood being evidently very near to her. She quoted them often; "My grandma used to say—" She spoke as naturally as the boy in the next room might speak of her.
She would not look in the glass; "I don't like to see my old face!" she said. She could not see the beauty that every one else saw. Yet she kept to the very last a certain tender coquetry. She loved her white dresses, and the flowered silk cloak of that last summer. She chose with care the jewels suited to each costume, the topaz cross for the white, the amethysts for the lilac. She had a great dread of old people's being untidy or unprepossessing in appearance, and never grudged the moments spent in adjusting the right cap and lace collar.
There was an almost unearthly light in her face, a transparency and sweetness that spoke to others more plainly than to us: Hugh Birckhead saw and recognized it as a look he had seen in other faces of saintly age, as their translation approached. But we said joyously to her and to each other, "She will round out the century; we shall all keep the Hundredth Birthday together!" And we and she partly believed it.
The doctor had insisted strongly that she should keep, through the summer at least, the trained nurse who had ministered to her after her fall. She "heard what he said, but it made no difference." In early August she records "a passage at arms with Maud, in which I clearly announced my intention of dispensing with the services of a trained nurse, my good health and simple habits rendering it entirely unnecessary."
She threatened to write to her man of business.
"I would rather die," she said, "than be an old woman with a nurse!"
Maud and Florence wept, argued, implored, but the nurse was dismissed. The Journal acknowledges that "her ministrations and Dr. Cobb's diagnosis have been very beneficial to my bodily health." On the same day she records the visit of a Persian Prince, who had come to this country chiefly to see two persons, the President of the United States and Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. "He also claims to be a reincarnation of some remarkable philosopher; and to be so greatly interested in the cause of Peace that he declines to visit our ships now in the harbor here, to which he has been invited."
Reading Theodore Parker's sermon on "Wisdom and Intellect," she found it so full of notable sayings that she thought "a little familiar book of daily inspiration and aspiration" might be made from his writings: she wrote to Mr. Francis J. Garrison suggesting this, and suggesting also, what had been long in her mind, the collecting and publishing of her "Occasional Poems."
In late September, she was "moved to write one or more open letters on what religion really is, for some one of the women's papers"; and the next day began upon "What is Religion?" or rather, "What Sort of Religion makes Religious Liberty possible?"
A day or two later, she was giving an "offhand talk" on the early recollections of Newport at the Papeterie, and going to an afternoon tea at a musical house, where, after listening to Schumann Romances and Chopin waltzes, and to the "Battle Hymn" on the 'cello, she was moved to give a performance of "Flibbertigibbet." This occasion reminded her happily of her father's house, of Henry "playing tolerably on the 'cello, Marion studying the violin, Bro' Sam's lovely tenor voice."
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