Mary Stewart Cutting

“ No one could ever have looked less like a possible great singer than I!—a little country girl with a round face and a shabby black hat and jacket. But Mrs. Stanford had friends among great musicians; she took me to the greatest conductor of the day—I have never known any one so much a part of music as he, a man as kind as he was great—and made me sing for him. I was terribly afraid as I began, but as I went on I came suddenly into my other world: I stood with my feet in the fairy ring, singing up to the blue sky above me, and to the Power of which I was a part. ”

“ I knew, that in myself, in spite of love and birth and death, and care and sorrow, and grinding work for all these years, I knew that in myself I was as young as that look in my eyes, as eager for expression as ever, as eager to live my own life as I dreamed it. Even if you're a mother, it's strange how much you keep on being your own self still. ”

“ And though I was a plain little brown, round-cheeked, freckled-face child, I always had a separate life of my own—perhaps set in motion by the daily Bible reading in our household; the magnificent words in it sometimes touch strange chords beyond our knowing. I used to go off by myself with a doll or a book or a bit of sewing for a pretence—so clever children are at hiding themselves!—and sit in the corner of a little wood down the slope with a green "fairy ring" in front of me. ”

“ Isn't it strange, no matter how great, or fortunate, or miserable a woman is, to be beautiful to someone makes such a difference! We want that so much. When Erla stroked my cheek it was as if I had touched the most exquisite chord on the piano and my voice had carried it up to heaven. ”

“ When I could touch the keys of the piano and let my voice blend with them, there would come at strange, unexpected moments that exulting sense of being mysteriously isolated with the Highest, and part of the Highest, and part of the harmony which I had heard even as a little child. ... I have always wondered how people live who have no fairy ring to stand in. ”

“ I made my small body strong; I lived frugally, I bathed, I exercised, I worked with that absolute precision and ardour of routine which alone makes for the highest purpose, the highest power.
There was almost always a disappointment visible in everyone when they first saw me—I was used to that!—and then the sudden, swift attention when I began to sing, and the silence after I had ended. I was to be the greatest singer yet. My masters made only one proviso: I could take no liberties with my voice nor with my strength ”

“ Anything very beautiful could always set my feet, momentarily at least, in the fairy ring. I have often wondered why most people—in cities, at any rate—look at the sky so little, or seem to get so little pleasure from the sight. And at that moment I heard someone in the room below singing—that voice!—I sat up straight and said: "God in heaven, what is that?"
I slid out of my room and down the stairs noiselessly, and through the open doorway of our little parlour I saw my Erla. She was singing from an old English book of songs, open on the piano: "Phyllis has such charming graces." ”

“ She told me every word of praise her masters gave her religiously; she knew that that was what my soul lived on. Erla had all the little ways of love that feed the heart.
It distressed her that I had still to be the wage-earner; I had to keep her purpose inflexibly before her or she would have given up the future many times for the present need. For the rest, we pinched and saved in every way we could. ”

“ Our farm life was the kind that you've always heard about—work not only from morning until night, but almost from morning until morning. Long after even the last of the hired men had been fed and the dishes washed and the fields lay quiet under the moon, there were always "critters" to be seen to, chores done, fires kept up, and endless sewing on my mother's part with her worn and knotted fingers—the thousand and one little ways of toil, beginning again long before daylight ”

“ Erla, though the youngest, was the little mother of the family; she was Jack's companion, her quick perception went ahead of Pauline's slower wit; she took care of me always. She had her father's beauty, his thick, curling dark hair, and his clear complexion; she grew up very tall. But though both Jack and Pauline had sweet voices, Erla never would sing; apart from that she was the most sensitive to music of them all.
We think our children belong to us.—When my pretty, delicate, flower-like Pauline was eighteen, she married a man more than forty who was here on a visit from Denver. ”

“ But she was frightened, you could see her tremble—her voice trembled, too. Erla couldn't sing off the note if she tried, but her voice trembled—it wasn't sure.
I suffered in those moments—that next half hour. ... I couldn't begin to tell you how I suffered! What availed all my life, all thy love, all my struggles, all my prayers if I couldn't help her now? To be a mother, and not to be able to help! It is criminal not to know how to help one's children in their need! ”

“ Pauline was proud of Erla, but she didn't understand. It was natural that mother should look after her girlies. You may think it foolish, as well as strange, that I never asked Pauline for a penny in all those years, either toward Erla's musical education or for my living. I think maybe I have been unjust to Pauline in not asking, in defrauding her of the giving—but I couldn't—I was too proud. Everything was there for her to see if she would have seen it and if she didn't. ...
It is hard for many people to see that others may be in need if they themselves are not. ”

“ When one is timid about playing on any instrument, the consciousness may affect the execution, but the instrument remains the same. With the voice it is different; it is itself the instrument to be affected, to lose its tone, its power with anything that affects the singer. When I sang I forgot myself entirely, whatever voice I had could be counted on without fail, but with Erla it was always the opposite. ”

“ I gave more lessons than ever; I was fortunate in getting pupils. I not only did the cooking and the housework, but I shovelled the snow and tended the furnace and planted and hoed our tiny garden, and I had three children who lived and buried two when they were tiny babies.
I say that I gave lessons at home, charging more for them than before, but I no longer sang in the choir. My voice, my real voice, was gone—you don't have to have a real voice to teach singing! After Pauline's birth I got up too soon and caught cold in some way. ”

“ I loved my little girl—some of those flashes of happiness came to me with her.
A woman I know who isn't married says that women who do not naturally love children often make the best mothers, because they don't take them easily as just children, to be played with and caressed, but because of their own conscious limitations make a real effort to understand and provide for them as little human beings. ”

“ I borrowed the rest—enough to take Erla over, and to begin on—from the grocer in our suburb, now grown to a large place, whose children I once taught, and one of whom had since died. Among all the people I have known in musical circles, or of social prominence, I have never met one who seemed to realize that I ever needed any special help, even when we went through our most crucial seasons of poverty, except this one man. ”

“ The children were his as well as mine—and I had Erla!
No one, except those who have experienced it, knows how strange it is to have one's husband taken away—it seems always the kind of thing that cannot happen, it leaves one lost in the world, with no accredited place. There is no one else with whom one has any right to be first. ”

“ The very idea of singing in public terrified her. "In half a dozen years you may be earning four thousand a month, or even a week, " I told her.
My dear, I found that times were different than when I was a girl; there were so few American-born singers then that one with a real voice had some prominence. I was a rarity; Mrs. Stanford and my dear Master felt that in me they had a concealed treasure. But there are far too few patrons now for the hundreds of girls with voices to exploit; there was nobody to make Erla's way for her but me. ”

“ I couldn't tell it all to my darling Erla, it would hurt her too much. After all, we often tell the deepest things about us only to strangers, because they seem in a way just disembodied interest and sympathy; our friends know us, and the people we are telling about, too well to be able to see clearly. ”

“ Mine were the shoulders to bear them; whether it was right or wrong that the part was mine instead of his was mercifully settled for me by his illness—then it was right. It is terrible to have to see that those we love are in the wrong; no matter how wrong we know ourselves to be in many things, we want them to be perfect. ”

“ And although we were a household brought up in the daily reading of the Bible—perhaps for that very reason, for children who are brought up on the Book get perforce a different outlook on life—I knew perfectly well that we were all encompassed by a great mystery, and that if I had the courage to jump off the cliff I would find out something I could never discover if I lived on top of ground for a thousand years. ”

“ It is my fault, I should have taught her better. Erla was the only one of my children who ever saw—but that is no credit to me; it was a divine quality in herself that I couldn't take away. So much that we lack afterward in our children, it is a strange, self-stabbing sort of comfort to think must be our own fault.
Jack, my poor Jack, never had any business sense; I haven't either, for that matter, I can only work! Jack wanted to leave the position in which he was getting a few dollars a week to go away as a missionary. ”

“ We women, we talk all our days—we talk too much! We are always trying to say something, to get at something; there is so much in us that we never can express, we wonder what use it is, and why the desire is given us.
Those years when Erla and I were alone together we both worked tensely at our different tasks. ”

“ If you once get in the way of earning a living, there is always something you can find to do—you get used to burrowing through any narrow tunnel, mole-like, forcing a further opening as you proceed. In spite of doubts and hesitancies, and obstacles and impossibilities, and the almost constant feeling of failure, I have always managed to keep on.
Before Erla left I knew—though she did not—that one of those periods of wholesale change had begun; the musical society was about to disband ”

“ Death is a concrete thing, it is a tangible and accredited reason for sorrow. Sorrow that comes from God brings its own comfort; it is not like those terrible, self-brought seasons of mental incapacity and depression in which the will becomes flaccid—seasons in which one is ready to snatch at a straw to save oneself from drowning, only that on those occasions there is never even a straw to catch at. ”

“ Mine didn't consist in a daily continuously happy state, such as one reads about and such as is the experience of some sheltered souls. Most of us have to be satisfied with those single brilliant flashes of happiness that leave a reflected glow on the way ahead after they've passed by. ”

“ Those months, those years—they flew; but when the time drew near for her first appearance in grand opera in Milan—when the date was really set—all of a sudden, for the first time in my life, I found I could work no longer. Almost as swiftly as I am telling about it I arranged to leave the house with another woman, and go over myself, without letting Erla know. ”

“ I told you that I had a sister who was a missionary in Japan; well, she managed it that Jack went out there as a lay-helper; she had been writing to him for some time. I believe he has done much good; they say people love him—my little Jack! He sends me enthusiastic letters, occupied entirely with what he is doing. ... There's a sort of excitement in working for people when you're not obliged to do it. So I was left alone with Erla. ”

“ Many a time when I've been as tired out as ever my poor mother was, that effort toward a child has rested me anew, I got back so much more for the little that I gave!—but that's a thing lots of mothers don't know. ”

“ I trained her in the routine that had been mine in Paris, and let no household duties interfere with it, that she might have the highest measure of health and strength with which to back up her voice.
Her greatest stumbling block was her constitutional shyness. To get confidence, and the ease and repose that come from it, was the thing she had to strive most for. There is always something to stand in the way; with me it was always my plainness, my insignificance, my utter lack of any presence. Erla had presence ”

“ It is singular how one may have all the outward manifestations of success, with the knowledge of the same old ache and anxiety, and the same old grinding strain to bear. I still had pupils, but I had begun lately not to get so much for teaching as I used. My methods had grown old-fashioned, I had no time to keep up with the newer music; it took more to live, and there was always something unforeseen to drag back just as one began to get ahead.
The furnishings of my bedroom had never been replenished since my marriage ”