A Woman of Genius. Mary Hunter Austin
at me with a curious sort of smirk that I was not quite arrived at knowing for the beginning gallantry. He knew perfectly well that I did not come to see Nettie because I was fond of her, but it was yet for me to discover that he thought it was because I was fond of him. I remember I was making a bower in the asparagus bed; I was too old to play in the asparagus bed, but I was making a point of being good enough to do it on Nettie's account, and I had asked Charlie for his knife to cut the stems.
"Come and get it." He was holding it out to me hollowed in his palm; and he would not let go my hand.
"You don't want no knife," he leered sickeningly. "I know what you want." Suddenly I caught sight of Nettie's face with its straight thick plaits of hair and near-sighted eyes narrowed at me behind her glasses, and it struck me all at once that she had never taken my interest in her seriously either.
"Well, what?" I began defensively.
"This!" He thrust out his face toward mine, but I was too quick for him. That was my first sex encounter, and it didn't somehow make it any the less exasperating to realize that what lay behind my sudden interest in Nettie couldn't now be brought forward in extenuation, but I am always glad that I slapped Charlie Gower before the paralyzing sense of being trapped by my own behaviour overtook me. I hadn't found the words yet for the unimagined disgust of the boy's impertinence when, as I was helping to wipe the dishes that evening after supper, I tried to put it to my mother on a new basis which the incident seemed to have created, of our being somehow ranged together against such offences. It was the time for us to have emerged a little from the family relation to the freemasonry of sex, but my mother missed knowing it.
"I am not going to Nettie Gower's any more," I began.
"No?" said my mother; and of course I could not conceive that she had forgotten the confidence in which the connection with Nettie began.
"That Charlie … I just hate him. You know, he thought I was coming to see Nettie because of him."
"Well," said my mother, turning out the dishwater, "perhaps you were."
And that, I think it safe to say, is as near as my family ever came to understanding the processes at work behind the incidents of my growing up. Yet I think my mother very often did know that the key to my behaviour did not lie in the obvious explanation of it; and a sort of aversion toward what was strange, which I have come to think of as growing out of her unsophistication, kept her from admitting it. It was less disconcerting to have my springs of action accounted for on the basis of what Mrs. Allingham would have called "common," than to have it arraigned by her own standard as "queer." There was always in Taylorville a certain caddishness toward innovations of conduct, which we youngsters railed at as countrified, which I now perceive to have been no worse than the instinctive movement to lessen by despising it, the terror, the deep, far-rooted terror of the unknown. The incident served, however, to supersede with resentment the sense of personal definite loss in which it had begun.
Before the year was out I had so far forgotten my father that I saw no resemblance to him in Mr. Gower and would not have recognized it had I met it anywhere, though the want of fathering had its share no doubt in landing me, as I cast about for an appreciable rule to live by, in what I have already described as a superior sort of Snockertism. The immediate step to it was my getting converted. That very winter all Taylorville and the six townships were caught up in one of those acute emotional crises called a Revival. It had begun in the Methodist, and gradually involved the whole number of Protestant churches, and had overflowed into the Congregational building as affording the greatest seating room; by the middle of February it was possible to feel through the whole community the ground swell of its disturbances. Night after night the people poured in to it to be flayed in spirit, striped, agonized, exalted at the hands of a practised evangelist, which they liked; as it had the cachet of being supernaturally good for them, they liked it with a deeper, more soul-stretching enjoyment than the operas, theatres, social adventure of cities, supposing they had been at hand.
It hardly seems possible with all she had to do, and yet I think my mother could not have missed one of those meetings, going regularly with Cousin Judd, who drove in from the farm more times than you would have thought the farm could have spared him, or with Forester, who had been converted the winter before, though I think he must have regretted the smaller occasion. Left at home with Effie who was thought too young to be benefited by the preaching and too old to be laid by in an overcoat on the Sunday-school benches with dozens of others, heavy with sleep and the vitiated air, late, when I had finished my arithmetic and was afraid to go to bed in the empty house, I would open the window a crack toward the blur on the night from the tall, shutterless windows of the church, and catch the faint swell of the hymns and at times the hysteric shout of some sinner "coming through," and I was as drawn to it as any savage to the roll of the medicine drums.
The backwash of this excitement penetrated even to the schoolroom, as from time to time some awed whisper ran of this and that one of our classmates being converted, and walking apart from us with the other saved in a chastened mystery. And finally Pauline Allingham and I talked it over and decided to get converted too. Pauline, I remember, had not been allowed to attend the meetings and considered her spiritual welfare jeopardized in the prohibition. We knew by this time perfectly well what we had to do, and had arranged to get excused from our respective rooms – Pauline was a grade behind me on account of diphtheria the previous winter – and to meet in the abandoned coal-hole between the boys' and girls' basement. Pauline, who had always an aptitude for proselyting, brought another girl from the sixth grade, who was also under conviction – we had the terms very pat – a thin, hatchet-faced girl who joined the Baptist Church and afterward married a minister, so that she might very easily have reckoned the incident at something like its supposititious value in her life. I remember that we knelt down in the dusty coal-hole where the little children used to play I-spy, and prayed by turns for light, aloud at first, and then, as we felt the approach of the compelling mood, silently, as we waited for the moment after which we might rather put it over our classmates on the strength of our salvation.
It came, oh, it came! the sweep up and out, the dizzying lightness – not very different, in fact, from the breathless rush with which on a first night of Magda or Cleopatra I have felt my part meet me as I cross between the wings – the lift, the tremor of passion.
"Oh," I said, "I'm saved! I'm saved! I know it."
"So am I," said Flora Haines. "I was a long time ago, but I didn't like to say anything." And if I hadn't just been converted I should have thought it rather mean of her. In the dusk of the coal-hole we heard Pauline sniffling.
"I suppose it's because I'm so much worse a sinner," she admitted, "but I just can't feel it."
"You must give yourself into the Lord's hands, Pauline dear." Flora Haines had heard the evangelist. I began to offer myself passionately in prayer as a vicarious atonement for Pauline's shortcomings.
"Don't you feel anything?" Flora urged, "not the least thing?"
"Well … sort of … something," Pauline confessed.
"Well, of course, that's it."
"Yes, that's it," I insisted.
"Well, I suppose it is," Pauline gave in, mopping her eyes with her handkerchief, "but it isn't the least like what I expected."
We heard the school clock strike the quarter hour, and got up, brushing our knees rather guiltily. Flora Haines and I were kept in all that afternoon recess for exceeding our excuse, but Pauline saved herself by bursting into tears as soon as she reached her room, and being sent home with a headache.
That was on Thursday, and Saturday afternoon we were all to meet at our house and go together to a great children's meeting, where we were expected to announce that we were saved. Pauline was a little late. I was explaining to Flora Haines that I was to join our church on probation on Sunday, but Flora, being a Baptist, had been put off by her minister until the Revival should be over and he could attend to all the baptisms at once. We naturally expected something similar from Pauline.
"I hardly think," she said, stroking her muff and looking very ladylike, "that I shall take such an important step in life until I am older."
"But," I objected, "how can anything