The rooms at grandfather’s house had been used so long, they were almost human themselves. Each room had a look of its own, when you opened the door, as expressive as a speaking countenance.
“Come in, children dear!” the sunny sitting-room always seemed to say.
“Sit still and don’t talk too much, and don’t handle the things on the tables,” said the large, gleaming, dim-lighted parlors.
“Dear me, what weather this is!” grumbled the poky back entry where the overshoes and waterproofs and wood-boxes were kept.
“There’s a piece—of cake—in the cupboard for you,” quietly ticked the dining-room clock, its large face looking at no one in particular.
But of all the rooms in that house, upstairs or down, not one had the strangeness, the mysterious nod and beck and whisper, of the murky old garret.
“Hark, what was that?” it would seem to creak; and then there was silence. “Hush! I’ll tell you a story,” it sometimes answered.
Some of its stories were true, but I should not like to vouch for all of them.
What a number of queer things it kept hidden away under the eaves that spread wide, a broad-winged cloak of shadows! What a strange eye it had, its one half-moon window peering at you from the high, peaked forehead of the gable.
The garret door was at the far end of the long upper hall; from it the stairs (and how they did creak!) led up directly out of the cheerful daylight into that uncarpeted wilderness where it was always twilight.
It was the younger children’s business to trot on errands, and they were not consulted as to where or when they should go. Grown people seem to forget how early it gets dark up garret in winter, and how far away the house noises sound with all the doors shut between.
When the children were sent up garret for nuts,—for Sunday dessert with mince pie and apples, or to pass around with cider in the evening,—they were careful to leave the stair door open behind them; but there was little comfort in that, for all the people were two flights down and busy with their own concerns.
Downstairs in the bright western chambers nobody thought of its being late, but up garret, under the eaves, it was already night. Thick ice incrusted the half-moon window, curtaining its cold ray that sadly touched an object here and there, and deepened the neighboring gloom.
The autumn nut harvest was spread first upon sheets on the garret floor to dry, and then it was garnered in the big, green bathtub which had stood, since the children could remember, over against the chimney, to the right of the gable window. This tub was for size and weight the father of all bathtubs. It was used for almost anything but the purpose for which it was intended.
In summer, when it was empty, the children played “shipwreck” in it; it was their life-boat, and they were cast away on the high seas. Some rowed for dear life, with umbrellas and walking-sticks, and some made believe to cry and call for help,—for that was their idea of the behavior of a shipwrecked company; and some tramped on the bulging tin bottom of the tub, which yielded and sprang back with a loud thump, like the clank of oars. It was very exciting.
In winter it was the granary. It held bushels and bushels of nuts, and its smooth, out-sloping sides defeated the clever little mice who were always raiding and rummaging among the garret stores.
Well, it seemed a long distance to the timid little errand girl, from the stairs, across the garret floor to that bathtub. “Noiseless as fear in a wide wilderness,” she stepped. Then, what a shock it was, when the first loud handfuls of nuts bumped upon the bottom of the pail! The nuts were pointed and cold as lumps of ice; they hurt the small hands that shoveled them up in haste, and a great many handfuls it took to fill the pail.
Hanging from the beams that divided the main garret from the eaves, dangled a perfectly useless row of old garments that seemed to be there for no purpose but to look dreadful. How they might have appeared in a different light cannot be said; there seemed to be nothing wrong with them when the women took them down at house-cleaning time and shook and beat them about; they were as empty as sacks, every one. But in that dim, furtive light, seen by over-shoulder glimpses they had the semblance of dismal malefactors suffering the penalty of their crimes. Some were hooded and seemed to hang their heads upon their sunken breasts; all were high-shouldered wretches with dangling arms and a shapeless, dreary suggestiveness worse than human. The most objectionable one of the lot was a long, dark weather-cloak, worn “about the twenties,” as old people say. It was of the fashion of that “long red cloak, well brushed and neat,” which we read of in John Gilpin’s famous ride.
But the great-grandfather’s cloak was of a dark green color, and not well brushed. It had a high, majestic velvet collar, hooked with a heavy steel clasp and chain; but for all its respectable and kindly associations, it looked, hanging from the garret rafters, just as much a gallows-bird as any of its ruffian company.
The children could not forgive their great-grandfather for having had such a sinister-looking garment, or for leaving it behind him to hang in the grim old garret and frighten them. Solemn as the garret looked, no doubt this was one of its jokes: to dress itself up in shadows and pretend things to tease the children, as we have known some real persons to do. It certainly was not fair, when they were up there all alone.
The scuttle in the roof was shut, in winter, to keep out the snow. A long ladder led up to it from the middle garret, and close to this ladder stood another uncanny-looking object—the bath-closet.
The family had always been inveterate bathers, but surely this shower bath must have capped the climax of its cold-water experiments.
It was contrived so that a pail of water, carried up by the scuttle ladder and emptied into a tilting vessel on top of the closet, could be made to descend on a sudden in a deluge of large drops upon the head of the person inside. There was no escape for that person; the closet gave him but just room to stand up under the infliction, and once the pail was tilted, the water was bound to come.
The children thought of this machine with shivering and dread. They had heard it said—perhaps in the kitchen—that their little grandmother had “nearly killed herself” in that shower bath, till the doctor forbade her to use it any more.
Its walls were screens of white cotton cloth, showing a mysterious opaque glimmer against the light, also the shadowy outlines of some objects within which the children could not account for. The narrow screen door was always shut, and no child ever dreamed of opening it or of meddling with the secrets of that pale closet. It was enough to have to pass it on lonesome errands, looming like a “sheeted ghost” in the garret’s perpetual twilight.
The garret, like some of the great foreign churches, had a climate of its own; still and dry, but subject to extremes of heat and cold. In summer it was the tropics, in winter the frozen pole.
But it had its milder moods also,—when it was neither hot nor cold, nor light nor dark; when it beamed in mellow half-tones upon its youthful visitors, left off its ugly frightening tricks, told them “once upon a time” stories, and even showed them all its old family keepsakes.
These pleasant times occurred about twice every year, at the spring and fall house-cleaning, when the women with brooms and dust-pans invaded the garret and made a cheerful bustle in that deserted place.
The scuttle hole in the roof was then open, to give light to the cleaners, and a far, bright square of light shone down. It was as if the garret smiled.
All the queer old things, stowed away under the eaves, behind boxes and broken furniture and stoves and rolls of carpets, were dragged forth; and they were as good as new discoveries to the children who had not seen them nor heard their stories since last house-cleaning time.
There was the brass warming-pan, with its shining lid full of holes like a pepper-box. On this warming-pan, as a sort of sled, the children used to ride by turns—one child seated on, or in, the pan, two others dragging it over the floor by the long, dark wood handle.
And there were the pattens “which step-great-grandmother Sheppard brought over from England;” one pair with leather straps and one with straps of cotton velvet, edged with a tarnished gilt embroidery. The straps were meant to lace over a full-grown woman’s instep, but the children managed somehow to keep them on their feet, and they clattered about, on steel-shod soles, with a racket equal to the midnight clatter of Santa Claus’s team of reindeer.
There was a huge muff of dark fur, kept in a tall blue paper bandbox; the children could bury their arms in it up to the shoulder. It had been carried by some lady in the time of short waists and scant skirts and high coat collars; when girls covered their bare arms with long kid gloves and tucked their little slippered toes into fur-lined foot-muffs and went on moonlight sleighing parties, dressed as girls dress nowadays for a dance.
One of these very same foot-muffs (the moths had once got into it) led a sort of at-arm’s-length existence in the garret, neither quite condemned nor yet allowed to mingle with unimpeachable articles of clothing. And there was a “foot-stove” used in old times on long drives in winter or in the cold country meeting-houses. They were indefatigable visitors and meeting-goers,—those old-time Friends. Weather and distance were nothing thought of; and in the most troublous times they could go to and fro in their peaceful character, unmolested and unsuspected, though no doubt they had their sympathies as strong as other people’s.
A china bowl is still shown, in one branch of grandfather’s family, which one of the great-aunts, then a young woman, carried on her saddle-bow through both the British and Continental lines, from her old home on Long Island to her husband’s house on the west bank of the Hudson above West Point.
No traveling member of the society ever thought of “putting-up” for the night anywhere but at a Friend’s house. Journeys were planned in stages from such a Friend’s house to such another one’s, or from meeting to meeting. In days when letter postage was dear and newspapers were almost unknown, such visits were keenly welcome, and were a chief means by which isolated country families kept up their communication with the world.
There were many old-fashioned household utensils in the garret, the use of which had to be explained to the children; and all this was as good as history, and more easily remembered than much that is written in books.
There was the old “Dutch oven” that had stood in front of roaring hearth-fires in days when Christmas dinners were cooked without the aid of stoves or ranges. And there were the iron firedogs, the pot-hooks and the crane which were part of the fireplace furniture. And the big wool-wheel for the spinning of yarn, the smaller and lady-like flax-wheel, and the tin candle moulds for the making of tallow candles; and a pleasure it must have been to see the candles “drawn,” when the pure white tallow had set in the slender tubes and taken the shape of them perfectly,—each candle, when drawn out by the wick, as cold and hard and smooth as alabaster. And there was the “baby-jumper” and the wicker “runaround,” to show that babies had always been babies—just the same restless little pets then as now—and that mother’s and nurse’s arms were as apt to get tired.
The garret had kept a faithful family record, and hence it told of sickness and suffering as well as of pleasure and business and life and feasting.
A little old crutch, padded by some woman’s hand with an attempt to make it handsome as well as comfortable, stood against the chimney on the dark side next the eaves. It was short enough for a child of twelve to lean upon. It had seen considerable use, for the brown velvet pad was worn quite thin and gray. Had the little cripple ever walked again? With what feelings did the mother put that crutch away up-garret when it was needed no more? The garret did not say how that story of pain had ended; or whether it was long or short. The children never sought to know. It was one of the questions which they did not ask: they knew very little about pain themselves, and perhaps they did not fully enter into the meaning of that sad little relic.
Still less did they understand the reverence with which the house-cleaning women handled a certain bare wooden frame, neither handsome nor comfortable looking. It had been made to support an invalid in a sitting posture in bed; and the invalid for whom it was provided, in her last days, had suffered much from difficulty of breathing, and had passed many weary hours, sometimes whole nights, supported by this frame. It had for those who knew its use the sacredness of association with that long ordeal of pain, endured with perfect patience and watched over with constant love.
But these were memories which the little children could not share. When their prattling questions touched upon the sore places, the wounds in the family past, they were not answered, or were put aside till some more fitting occasion, or until they were old enough to listen with their hearts.
Under the eaves there was an old green chest whose contents, year after year, the children searched through in the never-failing hope that they should find something which had not been there the year before. There were old account-books with their stories of loss and gain which the children could not read. There were bundles of old letters which they were not allowed to examine. There were “ink-portraits,” family profiles in silhouette, which they thought very funny, especially in the matter of coat collars and “back hair.” There were schoolgirl prizes of fifty years ago; the schoolgirls had grown into grandmammas, and some were dead. There was old-fashioned art-work, paintings on velvet or satin; boxes covered with shells; needlebooks and samplers showing the most exemplary stitches in colors faded by time. There were handsomely bound volumes of “Extracts,” containing poems and long passages of elegant prose copied in pale-brown ink, in the proper penmanship of the time. And there was a roll of steel-plate engravings which had missed the honor of frames; and of these the children’s favorite picture was one called The Wife.
It is some time since I have seen that picture; I may be wrong about some of the details. But as I remember her, the wife was a long-necked lady with very large eyes, dressed in white, with large full sleeves and curls falling against her cheek. She held a feather hand-screen, and she was doing nothing but look beautiful and sweetly attentive to her husband, who was seated on the other side of the table and was reading aloud to her by the light of an old-fashioned astral lamp.
This, of course, was the ideal wife, so thought the little girls. Every other form of wifehood known to them was more or less made up of sewing and housework and everyday clothes. Even in the family past, it had the taint of the Dutch oven and the spinning-wheel and the candle moulds upon it. They looked at their finger-tips; no, it was not likely theirs would ever grow to be long and pointed like hers. The wife no one of them should ever be—only a wife perhaps, with the usual sewing-work, and not enough white dresses to afford to wear one every evening.
It took one day to clean the garret and another to put things away. Winter clothing had to be brushed and packed in the chests where it was kept; the clothes closet had to be cleaned; then its door was closed and locked. The last of the brooms and dust-pans beat a retreat, the stair door was shut, and the dust and the mystery began to gather as before.
But summer, though no foe to dust, was a great scatterer of the garret mysteries. Gay, lightsome summer peeped in at the half-moon window and smiled down from the scuttle in the roof. Warm weather had come, the sash that fitted the gable window was taken out permanently. Outdoor sounds and perfumes floated up. Athwart the sleeping sunbeams golden dust motes quivered, and bees from the garden sailed in and out on murmuring wing.
If a thunderstorm came up suddenly, then there was a fine race up two flights of stairs!—and whoever reached the scuttle ladder first had the first right to climb it, and to pull in the shutter that covered the scuttle hole. There was time, perhaps, for one breathless look down the long slope of bleached shingles,—at the tossing treetops, the meadow grass whipped white, the fountain’s jet of water bending like a flame and falling silent on the grass, the neighbor’s team hurrying homeward, and the dust rising along the steep upward grade of the village road.
Then fell the first great drop—another, and another; the shutter hid the storm-bright square of sky, and down came the rain—trampling on the shingles, drumming in the gutters, drowning the laughing voices below; and suddenly the garret grew cool, and its mellow glow darkened to brown twilight.
Under the gable window there stood for many years a white pine box, with a front that let down on leather hinges. It was very clean inside and faintly odorous. The children called it the bee-box, and they had a story of their own to account for the tradition that this box had once held rich store of honey in the comb.
A queen bee, they said, soaring above the tops of the cherry-trees in swarming-time, had drifted in at the garret window with all the swarm in tow; and where her royal caprice had led them, the faithful workers remained and formed a colony in the bee-box, and, like honest tenants, left a quantity of their sweet wares behind to pay for their winter’s lodging.
There may have been some truth in this story, but the honey was long since gone, and so were the bees. The bee-box, in the children’s time, held only files of old magazines packed away for binding. Of course they never were bound; and the children who used to look at the pictures in them, grew into absent-minded girls with half-lengths of hair falling into their eyes when they stooped too low over their books,—as they always would, to read. The bee-box was crammed till the lid would no longer shut. And now the dusty pages began to gleam and glow, and voices that all the world listened to spoke to those young hearts for the first time in the garret’s stillness.
The rapt young reader, seated on the garret floor, never thought of looking for a date, nor asked, “Who tells this story?” Those voices were as impersonal as the winds and the stars of the summer night.
It might have been twenty years, it might have been but a year before, that Lieutenant Strain led his brave little band into the deadly tropic wilderness of Darien. It is doubtful if those child-readers knew why he was sent, by whom, or what to do. The beginning of the narrative was in a “missing number” of the magazine. It mattered not; they read from the heart, not from the head. It was the toils, the resolves, the sufferings of the men that they cared about,—their characters and conduct under trial. They agonized with “Truxton” over his divided duty, and they wept at his all but dying words:—
“Did I do right, Strain?”
They worshiped, with unquestioning faith, at the shrine of that factitious god of battles, Abbot’s “Napoleon.” With beating hearts and burning cheeks they lived in the tragic realism of “Witching Times.” “Maya, the Princess,” and “The Amber Gods,” “In a Cellar,” “The South Breaker,” stormed their fresh imaginations, and left them feverishly dreaming; and there in the garret’s tropic warmth and stillness they first heard the voice of the great master who gave us Colonel Newcome, and who wrought us to such passionate sympathy with the fortunes of Clive and Ethel. And here, too, the last number was missing, and for a long time the young readers went sorrowing for Clive, and thinking that he and Ethel had been parted all their lives.
These garret readings were frequently a stolen joy, but perhaps “mother” was in the secret of the bee-box, and did not search very closely or call very loud when a girl was missing, about the middle of the warm, midsummer afternoons.
About midsummer the sage was picked and spread upon newspapers upon the garret floor to dry. That was a pleasant task. Children are sensitive to the touch of beauty connected with their labors. Their eyes lingered with delight upon the color, the crêpe-like texture of the fragrant sage, bestrewing the brown garret floor with its delicate life already wilting in the dry, warm air.
“September winds should never blow upon hops,” the saying is; therefore the hops for a whole year’s yeast-making were gathered in the wane of summer; and here, too, was a task that brought its own reward. The hops made a carpet for the garret floor, more beautiful even than the blue-green sage; and as the harvest was much larger, so the fair living carpet spread much wider. It was a sight to see, in the low light of the half-moon window, all the fragile pale green balls, powdered to the heart’s core with gold-colored pollen—a field of beauty spread there for no eye to see. Yet it was not wasted. The children did not speak of what they felt, but nothing that was beautiful, or mysterious, or stimulating to the fancy in those garret days, was ever lost. It is often the slight impressions that, like the “scent of the roses,” wear best and most keenly express the past.
No child ever forgot the physiognomy of those rooms at grandfather’s: the mid-afternoon stillness when the sun shone on the lemon-tree, and its flowers shed their perfume on the warm air of the sitting-room; the peculiar odor of the withering garden when October days were growing chill; the soft rustle of the wind searching among the dead leaves of the arbor; the cider-mill’s drone in the hazy distance; the creaking of the loaded wagons; the bang of the great barn doors when the wind swung them to.
No child of all those who have played in grandfather’s garret ever forgot its stories, its solemn, silent make-believes, the dreams they dreamed there when they were girls, or the books they read.