Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

“ The music had a curious effect upon her. It was a hitherto unknown influence in her life, and it interpreted her, so to speak, to herself. As she sat on the bed of brown pine needles, under a friendly tree, her head resting against its trunk, her eyes half closed, the tone of Anthony’s violin came like a heavenly message to a tired, despairing soul. Remember that in her secluded existence she had heard only such harmony as Elvira Reynolds evoked from her piano or George Reynolds from his flute, and the Reynolds temperament was distinctly inartistic. ”

“ Lydia felt a little less bitter and hopeless about life when she sat in front of her own open fire, after her usual twilight walk. It was her habit to wander down the wooded road after her simple five-o’clock supper, gathering ferns or goldenrod or frost flowers for her vases; and one night she heard, above the rippling of the river, the strange, sweet, piercing sound of Anthony Croft’s violin.
She drew nearer, and saw a middle-aged man sitting in the kitchen doorway, with a lad of ten or twelve years leaning against his knees. ”

“ The magician who had told her, through his violin, secrets that she had scarcely dreamed of, the wizard who had set her heart to throbbing and aching and longing as it had never throbbed and ached and longed before, the being who had worn a halo of romance and genius to her simple mind, was stone blind! A wave of impetuous anguish, as sharp and passionate as any she had ever felt for her own misfortunes, swept over her soul at the spectacle of the man’s helplessness. ”

“ What wonder if to her the music and the musician became one? It is sometimes a dangerous thing to fuse the man and his talents in this way; but it did no harm here, for Anthony Croft was his music, and the music was Anthony Croft. When he played on his violin, it was as if the miracle of its fashioning were again enacted; as if the bird on the quivering bough, the mellow sunshine streaming through the lattice of green leaves, the tinkle of the woodland stream, spoke in every tone ”

“ Butterfield had had her third stroke of paralysis, and died of a Sunday night. She was all alone in her little cottage on the river bank, with no neighbour nearer than Croft’s, and nobody there but a blind man and a small boy. Everybody had told her it was foolish for a frail old woman of seventy to live alone in a house on the river road, and everybody was pleased, in a discreet and chastened fashion of course, that it had turned out exactly as they had predicted. ”

“ His sensitive hand, that carried a divining rod in every finger-tip, met a vase on the shelf, and, travelling upward, touched a full branch of alder berries tied about with a ribbon. The ribbon would be red; the woman who arranged this room would make no mistake; for in one morning Anthony Croft had penetrated the secret of Lyddy’s true personality, and in a measure had sounded the shallows that led to the depths of her nature. ”

“ These charms would never have been noted by any seeing man in Edgewood, but they were revealed to Anthony Croft while Lyddy, like the good Samaritan, bound up his wounds. It is these saving stars that light the eternal darkness of the blind. ”

“ Forgive me if I am too happy because for one short day I have really helped in a beautiful way, and found a friend who saw, because he was blind, the real me underneath; the me that never was burned by the fire; the me that isn’t disfigured, unless my wicked discontent has done it; the me that has lived on and on and on, starving to death for the friendship and sympathy and love that come to other women. I have spent my forty years in the wilderness, feeding on wrath and bitterness and tears. ”

“ When it says his finger-tips were perfected by delicate rectitude of use, I think it means doing everything as it is done in heaven, and that anybody who wants to make a perfect violin must keep his eye open to all the beautiful things God has made, and his ear open to all the music he has put into the world, and then never let his hands touch a piece of work that is crooked or straggling or false, till, after years and years of rightness, they are fit to make a violin like the squire’s, a violin that can say everything, a violin that an angel wouldn’t be ashamed to play on. ”

“ Here’s your violin and your hat. I’ll call you if you can help or advise me.”
“But I can’t let a stranger come in and do my housework,” he objected. “I can’t, you know, though I appreciate your kindness all the same.”
“I am your nearest neighbour, and your only one, for that matter,” said Lyddy firmly; “it’s nothing more than right that I should look after that sick child, and I must do it. I haven’t got a thing to do in my own house. I am nothing but a poor lonely old maid, who’s been used to children all her life, and likes nothing better than to work over them.” ”

“ The one sense stricken with death, she poured floods of new life and vigour into the others. Touch became something more than the stupid, empty grasp of things we seeing mortals know, and in place of the two eyes he had lost he now had ten in every finger-tip. As for odours, let other folk be proud of smelling musk and lavender, but let him tell you by a quiver of the nostrils the various kinds of so-called scentless flowers, and let him bend his ear and interpret secrets that the universe is ever whispering to us who are pent in partial deafness because, forsooth, we see. ”

“ She with power—power to make things straight and sunny and wholesome! She able to breathe strength into helplessness, even a consecrated, God-smitten helplessness like his! She not only to be thanked, but envied! ”

“ Nature was stirring everywhere. The seeds were springing in the warm earth. The hens were clucking to their downy chicks just out of the egg. The birds were flying hither and thither in the apple-boughs, and there was one little home of straw so hung that Lyddy could look into it and see the patient mother brooding her nestlings. The sight of her bright eyes, alert for every sign of danger, sent a rush of feeling through Lyddy’s veins that made her long to clasp the tiny feathered mother to her own breast. ”

“ He is as weak as a baby, you know, and can’t sit up in bed: what could he do? I will risk the consequences, if you will!”
There was a note of such amiable and winning sarcasm in all this, such a cheery, invincible courage, such a friendly neighbourliness and co-operation, above all, such a different tone from any he was accustomed to hear in Edgewood, that Anthony Croft felt warmed through to the core. ”

“ I am in hopes, therefore, my dear young pupil, that your violin will occupy your attention at just those very times when, if you were immoral or dissipated, you would be at the grogshop, gaming-table, or among vicious females. Such a use of the violin, notwithstanding the prejudices many hold against it, must contribute to virtue, and furnish abundance of innocent and entirely unobjectionable amusement. ”

“ If any one had ever given him a task in which he could have seen cause working to effect, in which he could have found by personal experiment a single fact that belonged to him, his own by divine right of discovery, he would have counted labour or study all joy.
He was one incarnate Why and How; one brooding wonder and interrogation point. “Why does the sun drive away the stars? Why do the leaves turn red and gold? What makes the seed swell in the earth? From whence comes the life hidden in the egg under the bird’s breast? What holds the moon in the sky? Who regulates her shining? ”

“ If I came from God but only lately, teach me his lessons first, put me into vital relation with life and law, and then give me your dead signs and equivalents for real things, that I may learn more and more, and ever more and ever more. ”

“ I feel that the secret of everything in the world that is beautiful, or true, or terrible, is hidden in the strings of my violin, Davy, but only a master can draw it from captivity.”
“You make stories on your violin, too, uncle Tony, even if the ladies don’t faint away in heaps, and if the kitchen doesn’t look like a battle-field when you’ve finished. I’m glad it doesn’t, for my part, for I should have more housework to do than ever.”
“Poor Davy! you couldn’t hate housework any worse if you were a woman ”

“ In the gentle moods that stole upon her in those summer twilights she became a different woman, softer in her prosperity than she had ever been in her adversity; for some plants only blossom in sunshine. ”

“ This possibility of rare beauty made her scars and burns more pitiful, for if a cheap chromo has a smirch across its face, we think it a matter of no moment, but we deplore the smallest scratch or blur on any work of real art. ”

“ I thank Thee for this home; for the chance of helping another human creature, stricken like myself; for the privilege of ministering to a motherless child. Make me to long only for the beauty of holiness, and to be satisfied if I attain to it. ”

“ It was a dark close, sultry spot, but when he was well seated, and had grown tired of looking at the triangle of black elastic in the teacher’s “congress” shoe, and tired of wishing it was his instead of hers, he would tie one end of a bit of thread to the button of his gingham shirt, and, carrying it round his left ear several times, make believe he was Paganini languishing in prison and playing on a violin with a single string.
As he grew older there was no marked improvement, and Tony Croft was by general assent counted the laziest boy in the village. ”

“ It’s a pity she ain’t deef, so ’t she can’t hear his everlastin’ fiddle. She’s lucky to get any kind of a husband; she’s too humbly to choose. I declare, she reminds me of a Jack-o’-lantern, though if you look at the back of her, or see her in meetin’ with a thick veil on, she’s about the best appearin’ woman in Edgewood . . . I never seen anybody stiffen up as Anthony has. He had me make him three white shirts and three gingham ones, with collars and cuffs on all of ’em. It seems as if six shirts at one time must mean something out o’ the common!”
Aunt Hitty was right ”

“ The years of struggle for perfection had not been wasted; and though the eye that once detected the deviation of a hair’s breadth could no longer tell the true from the false, yet nature had been busy with her divine work of compensation. ”

“ Butterfield’s funeral was not only voted an entire success by the villagers, but the seal of professional approval was set upon it by an undertaker from Saco, who declared that Mrs. Tarbox could make a handsome living in the funeral line anywhere. Providence, who always assists those who assist themselves, decreed that the niece Lyddy Ann should not arrive until the aunt was safely buried; so, there being none to resist her right or grudge her the privilege, Aunt Hitty, for the first time in her life, rode in the next buggy to the hearse. ”

“ And this is the way that Lyddy Butterfield came into her kingdom, a little lone brown house on the river’s brim. She had seen it only once before when she had drives, out from Portland, years ago, with her aunt. Mrs. Butterfield lived in Portland, but spent her summers in Edgewood on account of her chickens. She always explained that the country was dreadful dull for her, but good for the hens; they always laid so much better in the winter time. ”

“ Some very excellent Christian people hold a strong prejudice against the violin because they have always known it associated with dancing and dissipation. Let it be understood that your violin is ‘converted,’ and such an objection will no longer lie against it . . . Many delightful hours may be enjoyed by a young man, if he has obtained a respectable knowledge of his instrument, who otherwise would find the time hang heavy on his hands ”

“ It was exasperating to think of the public spirit at Egypt, and contrast it with the state of things at Pleasant River. In Egypt, they had sold the old hearse-house for a sausage-shop, and now they were having “hearse sociables” every month to raise money for a new one.
All these details flew through Aunt Hitty’s mind in fascinating procession. There shouldn’t be “a hitch” anywhere. There had been a hitch at her last funeral, but she had been only an assistant there. ”

“ Si, in his best suit, a broad weed and weepers, drove Cyse Higgins’ black colt, and Aunt Hitty was dressed in deep mourning, with the Widow Buzzell’s crape veil over her face, and in her hand a palm-leaf fan tied with a black ribbon. Her comment to Si, as she went to her virtuous couch that night, was: “It was an awful dry funeral, but that was the only flaw in it. It would ’a’ be’n perfect if there’d be’n anybody to shed tears. I come pretty nigh it myself, though I ain’t no relation, when Elder Weeks said, ‘You’ll go round the house, my sisters, and Mis’ Butterfield won’t be there ”

“ Anthony found that the oldest inhabitant of Pleasant River remembered the stump of the tree, and that the boys used to jump over it and admire its proportions whenever they went fishing at the Point. The wood, therefore, was perhaps eighty or ninety years old. The squire agreed willingly that it should be used to mend the ancient violin, and told Tony he should have what was left for himself. ”

“ On the clock shelf in the sitting-room there is a bottle of sweet spirits of nitre; it’s the only bottle there, so you can’t make any mistake. It will help until the doctor comes. I wonder you didn’t send for him yesterday?”
“Davy wouldn’t have him,” apologised his uncle.
“Wouldn’t he?” inquired Lyddy with cheerful scorn. “He has you under pretty good control, hasn’t he? But children are unmerciful tyrants.” ”