THE MAKING OF AMERICANS (Family Saga). Gertrude Stein
any bad thing happened to them, but yet she had a fierce little temper in her that could be very stubborn when it was well roused inside her and she sometimes had such a sharp angry feeling at some of the ways her husband had of doing, mostly when it concerned his not giving things she thought they needed to the children. But mostly they lived very well together the father and mother and three children, that is when they were young children, later it was harder for them when the father would get his very angry feeling and the mother was a little ailing and the fierce little temper broke into weakness and helplessness inside her and the three big struggling young grown men and women were seeking each one his own freedom and his own beginning. But now as children it was just the little uncomfortable feeling of being ashamed of the queer ways he had of doing that his children had to endure with him, then he was joyous and it was mostly pleasant enough living with him, and the mother was gentle and pleasant then with them and strong enough to support her little temper that could be very stubborn whenever it arose against him.
But even when he was not doing really queer things there was always a marked character about him. It came from inside him, from the strong ways he had of beginning, from the important feeling he had always inside him from his continual thinking and in a different way from that in which all the other people around about him were thinking, and this thinking somehow marked him even when he was just simply walking and then stopping to talk with somebody or just stopping to ask a question of some stranger or to talk about the weather or other just ordinary enough talking, the kind of thing anybody could be saying, and yet the power of being free inside him made him a marked man even then, and nobody could take him to be an ordinary person or ever forget him.
As he would be walking along with a child beside him or several of them behind him, he would stop and sweep the prospect with his cane and begin talking and somebody near him would come to listen. It was just ordinary talking that he would be doing, about the weather or the country or the fruit and it did not seem to have any deep meaning but it was the power and completeness of the identification of this big man with all creation that forced people to think of him. This man was big as all the world in his beginning, it was nothing in him even if he did not always keep going, he had been as big as all the world once in his feeling and that he never could lose with him.
And so he would stand talking and the unhappy uncomfortable child beside him would keep saying, when he was not afraid to break in on him, "Come on papa all those people are looking."
"What!" the father was not listening to him but would keep right on with his talking. The child as much as he dared would twitch or pull at him, "What!" but the father never really heard him and he would go on with the queer ways in him. Slowly his children learned endurance of him. Later in their life they were queer too like him.
Often when he was walking with his children and passed a shop and saw some fruit or cakes or something that pleased him he took it and gave it to his children and they would be most uncomfortable then and say something about not wanting it to him. "What!" and he never listened to them. The children suffered so because they were not sure that the man inside knew that their father would pay him. The father of course always paid for them but there was something in the manner of him that gave one a kind of feeling that he was as big as all the world about him, one included the other in them, the world and him, the earth the sky the people around him the fruit the shops, it was all one and the same, all of it and him, and this kind of a feeling he always gave to them who saw him walking standing thinking talking, that the world was all him, there was no difference in it in him, and the fruit inside or outside him there were no separations of him or from him, and the whole world he lived in always lived inside him.
It was all so simply to him as the world as all him, and it was this that gave him a big freedom and this big important feeling and the big way of beginning and so made a queer man of him, an eccentric from the others around him, and all that stopped it from making a god of him was his way of being impatient inside him and not being very good at keeping going but always making for himself a new beginning.
This large way of him when it made him take up fruit from shops to eat and to give to his children made a very uncomfortable shamed child beside him, and it would be protesting to him, and its father would say, "What," but he never listened to him. The child never did learn that the fruit man would not be worried with him, that they all knew his father and the queer ways of him, and that the father always paid them. The fruit men all knew him and liked the abundant world embracing feeling of him and they liked to see him, but his children never could lose, until they grew up to be queer themselves each one inside him, the uncomfortable feeling that his queer ways gave them.
To him, David Hersland, education was almost the whole of living. In it was always the making of a new beginning, the having ideas, and often changing. And then there were so many ways of considering the question.
There were so many different ways of seeing the meaning of the various parts that made education. There was the health, the mind, the notion of right living, the learning cooking and all useful things that he knew they should know now to be doing, and then there was his system of hardening so that they would be ready to make each one their own beginning; and all these needs for them and the many ways to look at them led to many queer things that his children had to endure from him.
Their education was a mixing of hardening, of forcing themselves into a kind of living as if they were poor people and had no one to do things for them, with a way of being very rich, that is having everything the father ever could imagine would do any good to any one of them.
This made a queer mixture in them. They found it a great trouble to them, this past education, when they first began to be young grown men and women. Later in their living they liked it that they had had such a mixing of being rich and poor, together, in them.
As children they all three had loved very well this kind of living. As I was saying they had their ten acres, with a rose hedge to fence their joys in, in that part of Gossols where no other rich people were living. They had all around them, for them, poor people to know in their daily living, and from them they learned their ways which were queer ways for them who had from their father's fortune a very different kind of position to be natural to them.
In Gossols the Herslands could be freer inside them than if the father had remained with his brothers where the mother had brought them and this freedom he used in the education of his children. They never knew any one of them nor the father who was directing it for them just where their learning was coming from or how it would touch them. Mr. Hersland had all kinds of ways of seeing education. He was fondest of all of the idea of hardening but this was difficult for him to keep steadfast in him with his great interest in every kind of new invention, in wanting that his children should always have anything that could do any good to any one of them.
There was joy in them all in their later living that it had been Gossols where they had had their youthful feeling and later when they learned to know other young grown men and women they loved the freedom that they had inside them, that their father had in his queer way won for them. As I was saying they had ten acres where they had every kind of fruit tree that could be got there to do any growing, and they had cows and dogs and horses and hay making, and the sun in the summer dry and baking, and the wind in the autumn and in the winter the rain beating and then in the spring time the hedge of roses to fence all these joys in.
The mother had always been accustomed to a well to do middle class living, to keeping a good table for her husband and the children, to dressing herself and her children in simple expensive clothing, to have the children get as presents whatever any one of them wanted to have at that time to amuse them. She was a sweet contented little woman who lived in her husband and her children, who could only know well to do middle class living, who never knew what it was her husband and her children were working out inside them and around them. She had strongly inside her the sense of being mistress of the household, the wife of a wealthy and good man and the mother of nice children. When they were little children they liked to cuddle to her when she took them out to visit the rich people who lived in the other part of Gossols. They were all bashful children, living as they did in the part of the town where no rich people were living and so being used to poor queer kind of people and only feeling really at home with them who were not people in the position that their father's