The Open Question Part 31

n.o.body ever heard of a bill going unpaid or having to be presented twice at Mrs. Gano's door; but Val was very conscious as time went on that her "frocks," as her grandmother called dresses, were old and ugly and out of fas.h.i.+on. They had been lengthened, and turned, and dyed, and when they simply refused to hold together any longer, instead of getting a new one like Julia Otway's, as she had dreamed, Val had the humiliation year by year of wearing her way, moth-like, through her aunt Valeria's entire antiquated wardrobe. There were all kinds of objections to drawing on this family reserve. The things in themselves, to Val's eyes, were hideous, _hideous_--bareges unpleasant to the touch and sight, ugly reps, ancient bayadere silks and flowered organdies that tore if you looked at them hard; and the inhabitants of New Plymouth looked at them very hard indeed, and sometimes rubbed their eyes. Then, as if their being so out of fas.h.i.+on were not cross enough, these fabrics were fabulously precious to her grandmother's heart, and had to be worn, so to speak, with fasting and prayer. Woe to Val if she spilt milk, or dropped maple syrup, on Aunt Valeria's things, for these objectionable garments never to the bitter end became Val's own. The dead woman seemed to stretch a hand out of the grave to keep her hold on them, never for a moment remitting her claim. Spoiling your own pretty blue sash, that your mother had bought in New York, was naughty, but hurting anything of Aunt Valeria's was a crime of darker hue. Each time a new garment was required, Mrs. Gano, with set face and faltering hands, would open Aunt Valeria's trunk, and, with the air of one dealing out purple and fine linen, or like a monarch conferring orders of the Garter and the Cross, she would say to the dark-browed child:

"There! you shall have that!"

And Val would perforce disguise as well as she could her loathing of the gift.

The child's pa.s.sionate hatred of the ugly and uncouth was an unending pain to her. She would shut her eyes tight as she pa.s.sed old Mr.

Thompson, with his great wen, conscious of the same sensation of sickness that would come over her at the malodorous neighborhood of a dead cat. She would jerk her head away in the street as if she had been struck when she met the idiot boy "Jake," more shaken and afraid than if she had seen a ghost. She would grit her teeth morning after morning with unabated rage and detestation as she put on a certain green poplin of Aunt Valeria's, with its pattern of yellow ochre palms. There was something about the sad and faded green of this frock, something about the fat and filthy-colored palms, that made the wearer long to smash everything within her reach. Some of Val's wildest misdeeds could have been traced to that green poplin. While the abhorred garment held together, even her pretty, slim bronze boots were powerless to cheer a heart so deep bowed down.

Emmie's clothes seemed never to wear out; it was part of her almost invariable advantage over Val. Mrs. Gano more than once pointed out that Val succeeded in working her toes through three pairs of boots while Emmie was carefully wearing one.

"Emmie isn't the captain at prisoner's base," the accused would say, in self-defence, "and she doesn't walk miles and miles with father on Sunday afternoons."

Val was very proud of these same walks, even if the conversation did usually begin with:

"Now that you are learning history, no doubt you can tell me what was happening in Paris 273 years ago to-day?" or, "This is the anniversary of a battle that settled the fate of an empire; of course you remember,"

etc.; or that less easily eluded form: "Whose birthday is this?" And while the child, innocent of a notion, seemed to be diving down into profound deeps of information after the required fragment, he would help her on with a hint--"One of the _real_ benefactors of the race; did more for the good of humanity by his discovery than all the saints in the calendar. I recollect speaking of him just a year ago, later in the day than this, about five o'clock, as we stood with Professor Black by the pyrus j.a.ponica."

"Oh yes," Val would cry out with delight at having a "glimmer," though not of what he asked; "I remember perfectly, and I asked you if the pyrus was the kind of burning bush Moses saw."

"_Ex_actly."

And the best feeling prevailed, it not occurring to John Gano that even now his daughter had not the dimmest notion who the great man was who thus unseasonably intruded on their Sunday _tete-a-tete_.

She was very sensitive to his disapproval, and suffered acutely when he showed how he despised a person who forgot the difference between a sycamore and a balsam poplar.

"What's the use of your having eyes if you don't use them?"

And she silently determined to be more observant, and win back her father's respect.

"You should greet these good friends by name when you walk abroad," he would say. "You wouldn't pa.s.s a woman every day in the street, as beautiful as that silver birch, or a man as magnificent as the Otways'

copper beech, without asking his name; and you wouldn't be content with knowing his intimates called him 'John.' 'What family does he belong to?' you'd say. 'What is his history?' Now, here have I taken the pains to introduce you to these desirable acquaintances, and yet you--"

"I shall know 'em next time," she would protest, humbly.

By-and-by her father didn't need to interrupt the main thread of his discourse more than to pause with pointed walking-stick for a second, while his little companion would interpolate briskly: "_Ulmus Americana_," or "_Tilia_." And if, instead of his instantly resuming story or homily, he still stood pointing, she would proceed: "Also commonly called ba.s.s, lime, or linden; bark used for matting and ropes; wood for sounding-boards; sap for sugar, and its charcoal for gunpowder."

He would nod and walk on, finis.h.i.+ng his broken sentence as though nothing had intervened between subject and predicate. Although he was severe with her const.i.tutional forgetfulness of dates, her father, at least, did not obtrude upon her the disgrace of extreme youth. He talked the gravest matters to her with an air of conferring with an equal. They discussed religion with no little openness, and, by dint of diligent inquiry, she heard, amazed, the extent of his unbelief. He had at first meant to be reticent, but as she got older and yet more inquiring, he had said:

"One thing, at least, a child has a right to expect from its parents, and that is truth. I am bound, as I see the matter, to give my child as faithful an account of the world as I am able. I am the traveller coming home, of whom the young one setting forth asks the way. Shall I advise him to go in the wrong direction because the old sign-posts misled _me_?" He would shake his head gloomily, and go on as if communing with his own soul: "Not consciously to mislead, that is the basic human obligation." Then he would look down on a sudden at the little school-girl trotting solemnly along by his side, and resume with a kind of severity: "I don't owe my child money"--he used to revert to this as if it were a sore point--"I don't owe my child worldly position or honors, or houses or lands, but I owe him honesty. I shall never consciously deceive him."

And so Sunday by Sunday she heard the Gospel preached at St. Thomas's in the morning, and in the later day the new tidings of science, and a sort of sublimated socialism, preached among the lanes and hills. She heard the story of the making of the world (not according to Genesis), and was invited to observe in "Nature's Workshop," as her father called the hills, how the making and transforming still went on.

"In these high places," he would say, with enthusiasm, "you may detect Nature in the very act."

Val was shown how busy the little brooks were, and the wide river as well, ever making "sedimentary deposits," still carving out its channel, wearing down the fire-born rock as surely as the chalk cliffs in its "ancient ineradicable inclination to the sea."

She saw for herself how the wind and the weather worked away day and night disintegrating, tearing down, until even to a child it was clear that one day the proud upstanding hills would be brought low, and lay their heads in the plain. There was a tragic element in the story and its ocular proof. It made the solid earth waver under the feet as in an earthquake. Her father had pointed out how even the old Fort that had so stoutly withstood the fierce Red Man could not hold out against this subtler foe. He had shown her where even the great corner-stones were exfoliating; with his finger-tip he could flake off the loosened bits, but regretfully, and only as an object-lesson. No child must lift a finger to help this insidious enemy; and yet, rightly comprehended, Nature and Nature's laws were our best friends, Val was given to understand. It was the theologian who had spoiled man's legitimate satisfaction in the world. Christianity had been the greatest curse of Time (this came as a lightning-flash); Christianity had killed art, discouraged learning, and set back the clock of Progress 2000 years; had turned man's thoughts and energies from the righteous task of making a heaven on earth; had filled him with foreboding, and forbidden him natural joys.

John Gano had no need to tell his daughter not to convey to her grandmother any inkling of this indictment of the holy faith. It was a thrilling secret. To be a sharer in it was a proud distinction which led to Val's being permitted to remain in the room when Professor Black, a contributor to her father's favorite periodical, the _Popular Science Monthly_, came on flying visits, and they sat and talked of these real dark ages of the world--Pliocene, Eocene, and the rest.

Mrs. Gano did not shrink from reading Darwin, and Spencer, and other books her son left about. As time went on she came to entertain the clearest views as to science being the handmaid of religion. In these later days of her own development, she had no quarrel with those "orthodox scientists," who regarded the Mosaic story with respect as "symbolical"--symbolical of what was not inquired. The vaster age of the world, the true story of the rocks, gave Mrs. Gano only a fresh and more pa.s.sionate sense of the wonder and majesty of the ways of G.o.d. She corroborated and supported her new friends among modern historians and men of science as vehemently as of old she had upheld a favorite preacher, poet, or Biblical commentator. She objected vigorously to much she found in Buckle and Lecky, and to certain Germans whose names she disdained to utter, and bestowed her unqualified approval upon some of the lesser lights whose Theism was sound.

After Professor Black was gone, or that other wise man from the East, the handsome and distinguished-looking editor of the _Engineering and Mining Journal_, Mrs. Gano would agitate the great red rocking-chair into an abortive rock, and lifting her chin with an air of disdain: "Humph!" she would say, "a mighty superior person!" Then, seeing her son would not respond to this obvious irony: "Who is he, to quarrel with the Bridgewater Treatises!"

"Black is too accurate a thinker to accept the theory of design carried to the highest perfection." And, hoping to stem the tide of further objurgation of his friend, he would demolish the _Treatise on the Human Eye_. "So far from its being the nicest adaptation of means to an end, the eye of man is a clumsy and pitiful production."

This was the kind of irreligion that in these days excited Mrs. Gano's ire more than any other. So hot would the argument grow, that sometimes her son would utterly lose sight of his determination never to disturb his mother's faith. He would turn upon her with all the enthusiasm of the pa.s.sionate amateur.

"One glance through the magnifying-gla.s.s at the infinitely superior eye of the common house-fly is enough to--"

"Enough to make any Christian thankful, I should say, that his eyes are what Providence made them."

"The fly's eye is a far finer instrument."

"Humph! A pretty sight we'd be with protruding goggles bigger than all the rest of the face!"

"I a.s.sure you the fly has a beautiful eye! And then the way it is placed! Magnificent! A group of powerful lenses mounted on rods, controlled by delicate muscles that turn the eye about so that without moving his body he can see all round him. _There_ was an invention if you like!"

"I shouldn't have liked it in the least."

"Ah, that's because you don't realize that to examine certain insects through the magnifying-gla.s.s is to dispose at once and forever of the notion than an omnipotent Providence did His level best by man. As a mechanical contrivance the human eye is merely an intricate failure."

Then, perhaps perceiving that these intricate failures in his mother's head were shooting lightnings, he would s.h.i.+eld his audacities behind a foreign authority. "Helmholtz says he would be ashamed of any novice in his laboratory who should design so poor an optical appliance."

"Just like his German impudence! A nation of boors and atheists!"

John Gano would always end by pulling himself up, and accepting these strictures on his authorities and his friends (and by implication on himself) with a silent tolerance.

Val felt a fine superiority in thinking that _she_ understood. The grandmother, who was such an autocrat, and thought so highly of her own judgment, was in reality very bigoted and lamentably behind the age. But Val and her father bore with her, not even exchanging covert glances when, with s.h.i.+ning eyes and sibylline aspect, she would burst into Old Testament denunciation and prophecy. Her father was really a miracle of forbearance. His behavior to his mother, in spite of her shortcomings, was beautiful. He would sit and read Ruskin aloud to her by the hour, and would give her his arm of an evening and slowly pace the gravel paths, instead of going any more interesting and inspiring tramps with his brisker companion along river or over hill.

On the occasions when Val tagged after the pair, she was firmly convinced that the tone of her grandmother's conversation was adjusted to young ears. It made her long to shout out: "Oh, he tells me a great deal more than ever he tells you!"

Mrs. Gano would sometimes interrupt her son with scant ceremony and say, glancing back at the child: "Great is the mystery of G.o.dliness. There is a point at which the finite mind must stop," and so on.

Val's contempt for this was profound; she felt it was not in alignment with what they had been saying before she came up with them. She would slip her hand into her father's, and squeeze it gently, to restore the sense of secret understanding. They would often, when she was there, talk about the stars, perhaps as being "safe ground," if one may so speak of the plains of heaven.

Did John Gano say, dreamily, "The Polar star is dim to-night," she would as likely as not answer with significance: "Is _it_ dim, or our eyes?"

"No fault of our eyes this time, for we can see Mars well enough. He's in a warlike mood to-night, flaming angrily."

Mrs. Gano would pause, and half to herself repeat:

"'The heavens declare the glory of G.o.d, and the firmament showeth His handiwork.'"

"Can you find the Scorpion, little girl?" her father would say.

And if she wasn't quick with eye and answer, her grandmother would stop, lifting her shawled arm with curious unmodern largeness of movement, and point the constellation out, half chanting:

"'By His Spirit He hath garnished the heavens; His hand hath formed the crooked serpent.'"