Winifred Margaretta Kirkland

“ I pass by a porch that abuts close upon the road. A door flings open and a man and a woman come out, too temper-tossed to heed me. The woman’s face is set in impotent hate, the man’s mouth is wried with cursing; and the faces are not young, nor the graven bitterness a mere passing blight. Man and wife! Yet they loved once, I suppose, and went driving gayly back from the parson’s, his arm about her ribboned waist, and posies flaunting in her hat and in her cheeks—once!
It is given to us who trudge by in the road beyond the doors to pity often, but to envy rarely. ”

“ The Bishop’s voice was soft with the awe of many years ago. The grandmother flushed, muttering, “She would not have wanted me. She had Dan.”
The Bishop’s eyelids had fallen, quivering, over his eyes. He was far away; again he watched with Annie, with Nan, as he said, “But men cannot understand. God does not mean them to. Such things are a secret between God and women, like the coming of Mary’s little child. Each mother needs a mother then. It was not—it was not till then that I understood how much my Nan had lost when she lost her mother.” ”

“ The fallibility of a woman’s intellect is a little more open to argument, but only a little. I keep to my primary assumption that I am not trying to see further than my nose, or to voice any observations but my own. Among the men and women of history and among those of my vicinity, I cannot see that woman’s brain is the equal of man’s in originality, in concentration, or in power of sustained effort. As a worker, I find that I can write for only a few hours and no more: beyond that limit stands disaster for the woman, and, far more perilous, disaster for the writing. ”

“ Or when I pop up the lid of this uphol-stered bone-box, my body, shall my soul be then and there set free,—escaped, volatile, elemental, as wind or moonshine, having cast from it—one by one as a garment—age, sex, race, creed, and culture? But what if in this off-shedding I strip from me my personality, myself? This involuted wrapping in which I am duly done up and ticketed and passed about among my acquaintance, what if to rend this were to leave me in the shivering nakedness of the impersonal? ”

“ He smiled into her eyes, “For we are great old dreamers, aren’t we, we grandparents?” He raised his hand from the chair-arm, as if it would have pleaded, “But I think each mother needs the grandmother to help her dream. I think she is wanting you now, that Florence out there.”
She faced sharp about, “Florence! Want me!” She looked at him in grim pity at his simplicity. “No, Bishop, Florence don’t want me! No more than I want her! We’re misfits, Florence and me,—worse luck for Dan, and for me, and for the baby, too, now!” ”

“ How stimulating to be a woman! How dull to amble along like a man, with only logic to carry you, and only success to attain!
Poor man is to be pitied not only for the crudity of his mental machinery and the creaking clumsiness of its movement, but for the dullness of the material in which he must work. The truth is that there would be no sex to do the unskilled labor of the world, if women ever once let men be tempted by their superior employments. The surest way of keeping man to his hod-carrying is to let him think that woman spends all her secret hours sobbing for bricks and mortar. ”

“ What mockery to prate of the equality of the sexes when one sex possesses the freedom of uniform, and the other is the slave of ever-varying costume! Think of the great portion of a lifetime we women are condemned to spend merely on keep-ing our sleeves in style! Talk of our playing with scholarship or politics when we are all our days panting disheveled after scampering Dame Fashion, who, all our broken-winded lives, is just a little ahead! Yet dress-reform is the first article in our creed of antipathies, and I, for one, am last of ladies to declare myself a heretic. ”

“ Groups, lightly laughing in the Christmas sun, brushed by the old familiar figure in the cape overcoat, but they seemed strangers. In the sharp daylight after that dusky study, the Bishop trod an unknown street, as wistful and alone as a lost child. Was this his Westbury, where none of this gay Christmas throng gave thought to those swarming tenements at the bending of the river? An old man’s life, what was it, against this hard and happy current? A smile, briefly bitter, darkened the Bishop’s face; he was old and would pass, having given his Westbury nothing! ”

“ Nowadays any soaring talk may be interrupted by a hearty “Whoa, Peggy!” or a “Down, Mac!” It is no poor punctuation, no unworthy anchorage, for people whose feet have often ached from treading the tree-tops.
She has tossed aside her poetry, but will listen to my stories. I am eager to tell her about all the new people in my brain. She brushes the cobwebs from their heads and from mine with all her old acumen, knowing, in all the spacious sanities of the married woman, that I need to write, while I, I know, too, that she need not. ”

“ From head to foot, he felt, all quietly, some stern tension relaxed, and with it there passed away also something of that intensely clear vision he had just experienced. Looking now toward that other chair by the fire, he knew it was no stranger but the old familiar Lucy seated there, his friend, and how tired she looked and white and lonely! He must try to understand. It was very strange to realize it all, but step by step he must try to understand, even though he felt again now suddenly, and far more certainly, the shutting in upon him of the vagueness and dullness of the morning hours. ”

“ But as for myself, since I am a woman, and it is ordained of fate that I be forever subdued to what I wear, I shall never, except when I believe myself suitably dressed, be able to look my fellow creature in the eye with the level gaze of conscious equality which alone gains friendship. No woman was ever so proud as not to cringe in an ugly hat. No woman is ever so happy as not to be made unhappy by her clothes. Let the dress reformers prattle to the breezes,—there is no exaltation like that of knowing one’s costume stylish, becoming, and, if possible, expensive. ”

“ The poising of a word on the tip of our pen until the very most genial sunbeam of all shall touch it, the weaving the thread of a golden thought in and out through all the quips and nonsense, the wrapping a whole life experience in the hollow shaft of some light-barbed phrase! The best quality of the humorous essay is that the reader shall smile, not laugh, and, moreover, that he shall remember no one passage at which he smiles: it is far better that he should feel that he has touched a personality tipped with mirth. ”

“ And his failure with Newbold, his failure with Westbury, they were but typical of the failure of his work at large. Of all the gifts of mystery that God gives to man, surely the greatest is the mystery of failure! Wisdom inscrutable that commands work, yet enjoins failure! Mystery of mysteries, that a burning love for that Love Incarnate born at Bethlehem, could not break through the flesh to solace a world a-thirst! The Bishop had loved, yet he had failed to serve. He did not even know how to give peace, as from a chalice, to this harried soul before him. ”

“ She never looks quite like other women, this doctor’s, minister’s, professor’s, writer’s wife. Her eyes have a harassed patience, and her lips a protesting sweetness, for she does not belong to her house, and so she does not belong to herself. When a man’s business-making and a woman’s home-making live under the same roof, they never go along in parallel independence: always the man’s overlaps, invades. ”

“ I am not Westbury. Westbury is the frame; I am the portrait, the portrait of an interesting old woman, interesting to everybody but herself!”
Lucy was an artist, she knew the value of the pause, she knew the value of a shrug, the most delicate perceptible lifting of brows and shoulders, she knew the value of hands, that, out of periods of quiet, flickered now and then, spirit-white against the black shadows of her gown. An artist, she forgot the Bishop while she talked and did not look upon the change that grew upon his face.
“It is very easy to be interesting. ”

“ Of all literary forms the personal essay appears the most artless, a little boat that sails us into pleasant havens, without any sound of machinery and without any chart or compass. To read is as if we overheard some one chatting with that little merry-heart, his own particular Ego. We do not stop to think what childlike simplicities any grown-up must attain before he can hear that fairy divinity, his own Self, speak at all, for the only true tongue in which the Self speaks is joy. Only childlike feet can follow the feet of fairies. ”

“ Having read much, seen much, done much, known much, in her fifty years, she chose to spend the rest with herself, in her home, a home where every chair, book, rug, picture speaks individuality, some quick quaint taste, some humorous little philosophy. It is a house warm with welcome, but genially self-sufficient. Of the three, this lady, wise and gray, is the only one who really sees you, and listens; the other two see only farm. Lady Three is not afraid to live alone with the stars out-of-doors, or alone indoors with her hearth fire. ”

“ I am irrevocably a woman: imitation and emulation are henceforth the distinguishing motives of my costume. Now, first, I look in the glass to see my frock, and then I look a little higher to see that face and that mop of curls I wear, and I wonder what colors best suit them. I look at the eyes, too, and at the secrets they tell me, and I wonder what external clothes and conduct are most becoming to those eyes and to that inner meshed personality they reveal. What is becoming! The word is epitome of all that the grown-up is and the child is not. ”

“ Over our hilly streets slumbers eternal leisure. Whatever it is, Littleville always has time to talk about it. When anything happens we all go running out of our front doors to discuss it, but otherwise our streets are very still: rows of farmhouses planted side by side for sociability, while behind each stretch its acres of stony pasture and half-shorn woodland. At night, silence and darkness settle upon us early. By nine even the hotel has gone to bed, so that it would with difficulty be summoned forth in protesting pajamas if a late traveler should clamor at the door. ”

“ Yet hers is vital poetry, earth-warm and limpid as the song of the meadowlark. Curious how it is men who have best put women into words, men who have made the best bedtime lullabies for children; women have been much too happy to talk about it. Yet a happy woman with the gift of song, if she remembered,—if she could set to music the purring of her kettle on the hob, the lilt of her sewing-machine,—how the sunny words might twinkle on harder, stranger paths! ”

“ The letter-writer is always an observant person. He has the pictorial eye and the pictorial pen. The view framed by his window sash must never grow stale for him, across it the clouds must always roll as if across a painter’s canvas, and its commonplace roof-line must keep always its quaintness and its quirks. Of the groups of people that crowd his day, he must see each as if staged for a play, he must perceive the color of hair and the cut of clothes and the connotation of attitudes as vividly as if he were always seated before a rising curtain. ”

“ As I look back over a long succession of gardeners, I see it, punctuated as it may be here and there by some salient personality, for the most part stretching a weary line of the aged and infirm of mind and body, and I wonder by what survival of the unfittest society devotes to gardening purposes only those already devoted to decrepitude. As a matter of fact, the more one becomes acquainted with the vagaries of growing things, the more one is convinced that it requires nimble wits and supple muscles to subjugate the army of iniquitous vegetables the humblest garden can produce. ”

“ I am half afraid of the woods; they have grown unearthly, so that I start at the eerie thud of the snow that drops from the branches. Gray-white, silent mystery,—and I should never have known or seen it, had I not laughed at life’s wild weather, and trudged forth to it in rubber boots, all alone.
Yet, whatever the shy comradeship of wayside groves, of busy secret streams and homely fields, always the human aspect of the road engages the woman who tramps with joy at the heart. ”

“ If in all women the root of all impulse is to be always making something that shall tangibly shape to the impress of each woman’s separate self, then Lady Three chose neither flowers nor fowls, she chose to create for herself a home. Much-traveled herself, she found her farm far from beaten paths, lost down a grassy lane where a brown brook clatters and chuckles from out a hushed woodland. A business woman, so-called, executive, successful, as any man, she chose, ten years ago, at fifty, her far-off farm. Her lawns are clear of litter as was her desk in her counting-room. ”

“ You can never be very hard on the woman, however fallen, who was once the little Sallie to share her cooky with you at recess; and, however his poor grizzled head be addled now with drink and failure, a man is still the little Joey whose bare feet trod with yours the stubble of forbidden midnight orchards.
All the world looks askance at a gypsy, and we are gypsies, we clericals; yet never gypsies more involuntary, more home-loving at heart. We are pilgrims, never dropping, as we sojourn in parish after parish, the pilgrim cloak of an affable reserve. ”

“ In all this countryside I am the only woman who walks. Highroads and by-paths and woodways are mine alone, for here solitude is safe and cheery for the woman who goes uncompanioned. I pass by unmolested, but not unhailed. Happily, I have reached the age when men greet me with level comrade eyes, and pass me merrily the time of day; at least the genial old codgers of our region do. The men of my home hamlet of Littleville are a bit proud of my pedestrian prowess, and if they meet me wandering far will draw rein to twinkle down and rally me: “Guess you’re lost this time sure, ain’t you?” ”

“ There is something stirring to contemplate in woman’s devotion to dress,—to see how we lay down health and comfort, and clamber up and frizzle for a lifetime on the altar of the æsthetic. That is what our dressing is to us,—an art and an aspiration. If our sex doffed its radiance, and did on “blacks,” what loss to popular culture! What of the universal hunger for color and form if so many curiosities of craft, so many animated works of art no longer whisked about the streets of the world? ”

“ Everybody’s path skirts so many Edens, of the women friends married, and the men friends married. Passing pilgrim-wise, one garners a walletful of reflections. Looking at my friend lying there asleep on brown pine needles, I know, as every woman must know, that she will never again need me in the old way, and, as every woman must be, I am far too glad to be sorry. The question for each of us, man or woman, outside the fence, is, Will he, will she, still come out sometimes into life’s great open and picnic with me? ”

“ The curtains seem exhausted by enforced welcome. The overworked kitchen has not enough pride left to keep its savors to itself. The piano has clattered until it has forgotten it was ever meant for music. The doom of dejection falls upon a boarding-house both without and within, so that one always regrets its entrance into a street cozy with homes. Its windows stare forth so blankly that the homes grow uncomfortable and move away. There is a blur over the face-walls of a boarding-place obliterating the individuality to which every house has a right. ”

“ Most of us would rather select our own tatters than have another’s cast-off splendors thrust upon us. It is no light achievement, the living up to and into other people’s clothes. Clothes acquire so much personality from their first wearer,—adjust themselves to the swell of the chest, the quirk of the elbow, the hitch in the hip-joint,—that the first wearer always wears them, no matter how many times they may be given away. He is always felt to be inside, so that the second wearer’s ego is constantly bruised by the pressure resulting from two gentlemen occupying the same waistcoat. ”