Laura Spencer Portor

“ Cheered, I seem to see ahead, clearly, a time when, if we do not provide them with guests, we shall think that we have shamefully neglected our children's education; when we will no more deny them visitors, than we would now neglect to have them taught to read.
To love life for ourselves and others; to be forever interested in it; to be loyal to it, and that down to the grave; to dwell helpfully and appreciatively with one's kind; to understand others as generously as is possible to faulty human nature, and to make ourselves understood as much as is consistent with courtesy ”

“ Is it not probable, remembering my own experience, that Musgrove, Mamie, Margaret, and the others had with their very indigence acquired a compensating fortune and, by reason of their very destitution, inherited, as by lofty bequest, the universe? It should not be forgotten, moreover, that I had come to these distinctions only after years of comfortable living, whereas those I have told you of had been born to the purple of their poverty. I, in serving others, have never yet been able to give myself the ample airs of a Margharetta. ”

“ The rue des Petits Champs had innumerable boutiques of all kinds—one given over to nothing, mind you, but honey and gingerbread, like a shop in a fairy tale. If you went across the Place Vendôme and followed the rue Castiglione, you came to the most romantic shops of all, there under the arcades of the rue de Rivoli, beginning with the most delectable pastry shop in the world on the very corner. ”

“ The man with the horn, he who plays always off the key, and always a little ahead of the others, he, it is now mysteriously revealed to you, had meant perhaps, at the very least, to play in an orchestra. And the baggy battered old violin was to have wiped his heated brow with a grand gesture, and bowed condescendingly over his collar to metropolitan audiences, had not his dreams so unaccountably miscarried. And the old thread-bare harp-player, his shabbiness and his bitter face to the contrary notwithstanding, had meant, had really meant, to pluck some sweetness out of life. ”

“ Have they ever felt the persistent appeal of a Margaret, I wonder, or seen her eyes go twenty times a day to them as to one who held her fate in their keeping? I think perhaps they will not have over-heard her say to the pig in a moment of half-gay thankfulness, "Arrah! God save us! are ye glad as ye should be ye're with people that have got a heart?" Or perhaps the provident will scarcely have been vouchsafed a terrible understanding, as I had at that time, of the dark possibilities of life, or have known what it was to wonder where the next meals would come from. ”

“ In my schoolgirl [Pg 25] days I saw Booth in his great parts; but none of these master-scenes and fine harmonies have stirred in me so intolerable an emotion of pity or sense of fatality as an old horn, or harp and violin, grouped on a garish pavement, their lives dedicated to cheap music fearfully off the key.
These are people of power, let appearances be what they may. You may patronize them if you like, and look upon them as the downtrodden and the dregs of existence. I am, indeed, not so hardy. I have read a different fate in their groups and constellations. ”

“ The big Holland secretary, with its bulging sides and secret drawer, was a very piece of romance; the tall clock, with its brass balls and moon face, the old clawfoot mahogany tables, the long scroll sofa, the heavy scroll mahogany sideboard, were as mellow in tone as the old Martin guitar on which men and women, beaux and belles of a past generation, had played; or the harp that stood in a corner, all gold in the afternoon sunlight; or the square Steck piano of the front room, a true grandee in its day. ”

“ The hotel was a small one. Dinner would be served for the hotel guests a trifle earlier, so that they might the sooner leave the way clear for me. This had been proposed by Madame Blet herself, the proprietress, and was intended no doubt for a fine piece of hospitality. For me the strict hotel rules were to be slackened; the fine democracy of hotel life, where one guest is as good as another, if he but pay his account, was to be overruled in my favor; for me the sun was to be advanced, and the moon set at a new pace in the heavens! ”

“ And the third birthday? Perhaps it was then that Life put into my hand a better gift than any—that larger knowledge, which all the coming years were to corroborate, that to have special gifts and benefits for one's self which are not for others, let the glamour be what it may, is after all but froth and disappointment; and that only the blending of one's life with other lives can ever really satisfy the heart. ”

“ The home of my childhood was bare, bare of such things. Neither cubes nor cylinders were there that I remember, nor thermatic tests, nor color-tablets, nor quadrilateral prisms; and yet—
What was there of especial value? There was, first of all, the household. "The household," to quote Emerson further, "is a school of power. There within the door learn the tragi-comedy of human life. Here is the sincere thing, the wondrous composition for which day and night go round. ”

“ Touchstone, Jaques, Amiens, and for the most part all of them, too well acquainted with the rudeness of the world; men who had known but too well the unkindness of man's ingratitude, the feigning of most friendship, the bitterness of benefits forgot. And yet, turn only to that first scene in the forest. If ever I set eyes on independent gentlemen, here they are! And who doubts too, reading of these, that Shakespeare wrote of them out of his own Arden, out of the enrichment of his own poverty, and the splendors of his unsuccessful years! ”

“ Were it not of too great a bulk, the testimony of literature could be brought to corroborate that of history. When you read "The Jolly Beggars," you are informed without squeamishness which is the most free and powerful class in the world; and when you have read that other document by the same hand, "The Twa Dogs," you have perused a fine bit of testimony as to which is the happiest. Or if there lacked these, and there were left us but Arden and its gentle beggars—who could be in doubt? How they triumph over the rich and the successful and lord it felicitously in their poverty! ”

“ He who loves this world, and has found it good on such terms, may be allowed his reasonable preference; he who speaks fondly still of life, who has had such communings, may speak with some authority. Horatio's smile was worth the pleasantness and optimism of a thousand who have never made change with blue fingers, or shrunk from the cut of the cold.
There are those who would patronize and pity such as Horatio. It can only be, then, that they know this world but little, and still childishly count riches to be but money, and poverty to be but lack of it. ”

“ MAMIE FAFFELFINGER
The nouveaux pauvres are, I believe, as a rule, fully as awkward with their poverty as the nouveaux riches with their wealth. They have not the true grand manner. They are not a whit more born to the rags than your suddenly prosperous parvenu to the purple. It is difficult to be at ease with them. Their behaviors, their manners, their speech, more often their silences, are forever reminding you of their former mode of living. ”

“ Here is poverty and all the wisdom its hated necessities can teach; here labor drudges, here affections glow, here the secrets of character are told, the guards of man, the guards of woman, the compensations which, like angels of justice, pay every debt; the opium of custom, whereof all drink and many go mad. Here is Economy, and Glee, and Hospitality, and Ceremony, and Frankness, and Calamity, and Death, and Hope."
Didactic material enough, if one chooses to call it that. But, besides all this, there were guests—guests who came and lingered, guests of an almost incredible variety. ”

“ Rather, he was to be found each day undefeated in his impregnable gentleness, that still unfallen province in which he dwelt. His were some incalculable riches of the spirit which Poverty had heaped up and amassed for him through those years when his fingers handled without complaint the miserable pennies; his was some towering strength under the disguise of the weak and broken body; like that Olympian glory fabled inevitably to appear some time, under the mortal humility of gods in exile. ”

“ And if you tell me that none but a sentimentalist would call poverty an enrichment, then I can only assume that you have never been poor; and if you tell me that the high behavior of Horatio is at the best but endurance, even then, could I grant you so much, the argument still would hold. Even so, Horatio endured life with a noble grace, and helped others to do so; even so, he was able still to find pleasure in a fate from which the wealthy would shrink in horror, and lovable traits in one they would have called his bitterest enemy. ”

“ And for philosophy and metaphysic, what had they? In that dim attic world was this perhaps an entire people in its mythopœic age, their gods descending and ascending miraculously, leaving a magenta cheese as incontrovertible evidence, or as unaccountably visiting them with swift and crafty destruction?
I am inclined to think their world is a colored one, fertile in fables. It would not surprise me to find that a small wooden object, known to us of a different development as a mere "mouse-trap," is to them some Dis or Ahriman, a terrible deity of dark powers and multiple personalities. ”

“ Another possession, which I have noted [Pg 112] often among the poor, is that gayety, that lightness of heart, that almost inconsequent gayety, so often seen, amazingly, among them. Where you and I might be crushed by calamity, they can raise their heads and be glad, and that over some trifle. Where you might have gone sad and sober for weeks, Mamie could dance her little ragtime songs; Margaret could be gay with the pig; and Margharetta, fresh from a new downfall, could gather the children of her heart to her as a hen its chickens, and in blissful content think nothing of the morrow. ”

“ But you, Miss Lou Brooks! You, oh, you!—compounded of every creature's best,—could sing the old and simple songs, if you [Pg 141] chose, and very graciously, for any one who asked for them; but better still if, left to your own preference, you could take your seat how languidly at the piano, how gracefully play a prelude in which the white jeweled hands followed each other up and down the keyboard over and under, in what moods and fancies, in what rippling runs and rapid arpeggios; now lighting to flutter in a twinkling trill, with jewel-flash, like whirring hummingbirds ”

“ These are, I believe, no mere extraneous or personal experiences, but are rather of the fine weave and fabric of humanity; and the uneasiness I felt in my complacent little soul, I now believe to have been a stirring of old things, of ancient memories under the moon, which linked my little inconsiderable life, as they link all lives, to Egypt, Nilus, Babylon, and the ages that are not. ”

“ Had I not in real life heard Miss Lou Brooks sing with a full heart and a quivering voice,—
"The stars shine o'er his pathway!"
It will, without doubt, be objected that my childhood was an exceptional one, even for my day; that the average child of the present would certainly have no such characters and types from which to draw knowledge. But this is, I am sure, a false premise. Humanity is a very ancient stuff, and human beings are to be found to-day quite as interesting and vivid as ever human beings were. ”

“ There were only a few, a very few such men and women left then, guests of a twice older generation, visiting still, with a kind of retained graciousness, in the house of life from which they were soon finally to depart. By an enviable fate some six or eight of these men and women belonged to me. An air of grandeur came to the house with them as with the coming of the gods and goddesses in the old days; the human dwellings expanded, and the lintels grew tall. ”

“ I was, as I have told you, indignant as to the cake, and disappointed, no doubt, that there was no happy and devoted family now gathered to hear me sing my gay little song. But to offset these there was a kind of reassurance in the day which I find it difficult to describe very exactly. It was as if, at one and the same time, this were and were not my birthday. It was my day by the calendar, but in no other way. For a birthday is one whose dawn and sunset are one's very own, a day when one's importance is admitted very gladly by a certain intimate circle. ”

“ I would not pretend to be acquainted with mouse literature, but I would venture a wager that their "Arabian Nights" outdoes ours as cheese, chalk. Djinns, genii, and affrites—can it be thought that they lack them? If the unaccountability of the world be, as it would seem to me, the basis of all literature and the origin of all fable, philosophy, entertainment, and speculation, can it be denied that they have extraordinary inducement? ”

“ There is, to the very end, something tinsel and tawdry in the trappings of special privilege. The splendors of the wealthy are but a brief pageant—stage properties, donned for a little while to lend some height and dignity to those of but human stature after all. The beggar who looks on, as did Horatio, at this pageant, without envy, and who, looking on, gives a gentle patronage to the rich, does so not without warrant. The greater splendors and possessions are his own. ”

“ Let be their follies and their mistakes and all their incredible assumptions: who shall declare that poverty has not enriched them likewise? And among them, shall you not find high and royal and single spirits, who, like Horatio, have both known and loved the world and triumphed over it without animosity? To have known and yet to have loved the world! ”