Breckenridge Lansing’s father treated his wife and children with contempt; his son tried to. This view was not universal in those States, but frequent. At the end of the last century the patriarchal age was drawing to a close; its majesty was cracking. We may assume that when a patriarchal order is at its height—or a matriarchal order, also—it has a certain grandeur. It contributes to the even running of society and to harmony in the home. Everyone knows his place. The head of the family is always right. Fatherhood invests him with a more than personal wisdom. His position resembles that of the king who throughout thousands of years of unquestioned and even divine sanction, receives in the cradle the capacities that make for leadership. The doctrine was so deeply instilled that the people regarded the errors, vices, and imbecilities of kings as expressions of God’s will: bad kings were sent for the punishment, instruction, and edification of men. Wives and subjects perpetuated these dispensations. It is when the patriarchal order is undergoing transition—the pendulum swings in eternal oscillation between the male and female poles—that havoc descends upon the state and on the family. Fathers feel the pavement cracking beneath them. For a time they shout, argue, boast, and pour scorn upon the wife of their bosom and the pledges of their love. Abraham did not raise his voice. Women armored themselves as best they could during the transition. Guile is the shield and spear of the oppressed. Slaves cannot revolt without leaders, but slavery is a poor school for leadership. Breckenridge Lansing’s mother was an example of a woman in an age of crumbling patriarchy. Her sons knew no other patterns than a bullying father and a cowed mother.
Eustacia Lansing had been brought up in a matriarchy. She was unable to comprehend the tacit assumptions that shaped family life in Coaltown. She was saved by her gift of humor. A crumbling patriarchy is tragic and very funny.
It is the growing sons who suffer most in the age of transition.
Even in the best of homes, at the best of times, a boy is always in the wrong. Boys are filled with exhausting energies; they enjoy noise; they are (or where would we be?) adventurous and inquiring. They creep out onto ledges and fall into caves and two hundred men spend nights searching for them. They must hurl objects. They particularly cherish small animals and must have them near. A respect for cleanliness is as slowly and painfully acquired as mastery of the violin. They are perpetually famished and can barely be taught to eat decorously (the fork was late appearing in society). They are unable to sit still for more than ten minutes unless they are being told a story about mayhem and sudden death (or where would we be?). They receive several hundred rebukes a day. They rage at the humiliation of being male and not men. They strain to hasten the calendar. They must smoke and swear. Dark warnings are thrown out to them about “impurity” and “filthiness”—interesting occupations which seem to be reserved to adults. They peer into mirrors for the first promise of a beard. No wonder they are happy only among their coevals; they return from their unending games (that resemble warfare) puffed up, it may be, with triumph—late, dirty, or bloody. Few records have reached us of the early years of Richard the Lion-Hearted; the story about George Washington and the cherry tree is not widely believed. Achilles and Jason were brought up by a tutor who was half-man, half-horse. Their education was all in the open air; there must have been a good deal of running involved and very little mystery surrounding the natural functions.
Breckenridge Lansing brought up his son according to a method widely advocated at the time. Its purpose was to “make a man” of him. It consisted of ridiculing the child in public and private on every occasion of his falling short in manly exercise. At five he was thrown into the water and commanded to swim. At six he was invited to play catch with his father (“the best father in the world,” but all fathers are wonderful) on the lawn behind the house. Coordination of hand and eye is not fully developed at six and is further troubled by the boy’s passionate and despairing attempts to be adequate. The genial games ended in tears. At seven he was given a pony; when he had fallen off it for the third time his father sold it. At nine he was introduced to the rifle. At each new trial he was overwhelmed with sneers and his failures were recounted to neighbors and postmen and delivery boys. Eustacia attempted to intervene only to be covered with similar sarcasms. Little Anne endeared herself to her father by shrieking “Sissy! Sissy!” Woeful scenes took place. Félicité paled but did not speak. When George was elected vice-captain of his school’s baseball team—only vice-captain; Roger Ashley was everywhere captain—his father refused to speak to him for three days. Nature came to George’s aid too late. At sixteen he was as tall as his father and far stronger. He was given to murderous rages. The day came when he advanced on his tormentor, holding a chair which he slowly broke in mid-air. From that hour his father loudly washed his hands of him. George was the product of his mother’s mollycoddling. He would never be a Lansing.
His father was right. George was a Sims and a Dutellier and a Creusot. He had his mother’s dark complexion. His schoolmates called him “Nig” until he thrashed it out of them. Miss Dobrey, of the high school, said that he had the “face of an angry lynx.” He collected about him a gang of his friends and called them the “Mohicans.” They became the terror of the town. They altered the signposts on the roads. They set the church bells jangling. They even climbed Herkomer’s Knob and tried to spy on the Sunday-evening services at the Church of the Covenant. They took large allowance of the license accorded at Halloween. Chief Constable Leyendecker called several times at “St. Kitts.” George never finished high school. He was sent away, briefly, to several military academies and preparatory schools.
Anne was her father’s favorite and walked the earth with the assurance that such predilection confers. Life presented few obstacles which obstinacy, clamor, and rudeness could not remove. She was all Lansing—an angel of cerulean blue eye, of cornsilk hair, of inborn certitudes. She was a little lady at ten and a formidable matron at thirteen. Her best friend was Constance Ashley—Constance, who came from a home where no voices were ever raised and no claims for privileged attention ever advanced. Children arrive at amnesties that diplomats might envy. Constance made clear the limits beyond which she would not be browbeaten, but the friendship was often in jeopardy.
Félicité’s mother on the island of St. Kitts had enjoyed two half-hours of happiness daily: at dawn before the altar, at midnight above her snowy trousseau. Félicité’s dream was to combine them—she hoped to enter the religious life. She attended the convent school at Fort Barry until she became aware that her presence was necessary in her home. She renounced the joy she felt in the life at St. Joseph’s and entered the high school in Coaltown. She resembled her mother in appearance, though taller; she had none of her mother’s vivacity. She was an exemplary student and would have excelled in schoolwork many times more difficult. At the age when many girls keep diaries and guard them under lock and key, she wrote her diary in Latin. She was an accomplished needlewoman and dressed herself with a taste and distinction that astonished even her mother. It was understood in the family that no one entered Félicité’s room, though the door stood open all day. She would have wished it to be white, but white rooms were labor lost in Coaltown. It was blue, with touches of deep red and purple; it was at once simple and rich. Her skill in embroidery was everywhere present, in curtains, counterpanes, table runners, and antimacassars. She had been enthralled by Miss Doubkov’s icons and had imitated them in her own way. Religious pictures—set on backgrounds of velvet and surrounded with gold lace and colored beads—glowed from the walls. The silks on her prie-dieu changed with the feasts and the seasons. The room was neither a cell nor a chapel—it was a place of waiting and of preparation for great happiness. From time to time in the day’s work, when Félicité was absent, her mother would lean against the door frame gazing into the room. “The children we bring into the world!”
Like her sister, Félicité had been a stormy child. She had won her contained disposition by daily struggle, year a
fter year, winning at the same time a measure of detachment from the “world.” She was moving toward abstraction. She loved her mother. She loved her brother passionately. But these loves were already imbued with the love of the creature which was enjoined upon her. Through these same disciplines she had found her way to a love for her father and younger sister. She had no friends. Félicité was respected, but not liked. During the stormy scenes at “St. Kitts” she never left the room—not when Anne lay rolling and screaming on the hearthrug (“I will not go to bed!” “I will not wear the blue dress!”); not when her father hurled one wounding phrase after another at his wife and son. She seldom spoke; she moved nearer to her mother and brother and listened to her father with unshaken gaze. A man’s severest judges are his children and he knows it—severest of all when they are silent. She stood by her mother, but there was a barrier between them. They sewed together; they read together the classics of French literature; they partook of the sacrament side by side. They were mother and daughter in deep admiration and fellow suffering, but there was no laughter. Eustacia was born with an apprehension of the comical incongruities in life and, for all her trials, found amusement everywhere. It was an element in her nature that she could not share with her older daughter. (George caught—and could return—every inflection of his mother’s wit, rare though the flashes were.) Year after year, before and after her father’s death, Félicité postponed her great decision in order to be of use in the family at “St. Kitts.”
Mother and daughter had more in common, however, than they were fully aware of. Both were journeying; both were waiting; both were straining to understand. They were present at a woeful drama, but they never doubted their prayers and patience and love would yield some enlightenment—for all. We came into the world to learn. They had lived among wonders all their lives. (Hadn’t they, for example, mastered their ugly senseless tempers?) They never doubted that some miracle would arrive.
Fortunately, George had two friends: John Ashley and Olga Doubkov. Ashley “covered” Lansing’s incompetence at the mine by gradually assuming most of the functions of his superior and endeavored to furnish him wholesome occupation by associating him in the experiments and inventions. (At the trial these good offices were variously interpreted; it was charged that he was bent on usurping Lansing’s position, and that in the experiments he made a systematic theft of Lansing’s brilliant ideas.) There was little Ashley could do, however, to correct Lansing’s method of “making a man” out of George. He did what he could. He managed to extract from the boy a succession of plans for his lifework—at twelve he wanted to invent flying machines; at thirteen he wanted to go to Africa to save the lions from extermination; at fourteen he wanted to join a circus. It was early in George’s fifteenth year that an occasion presented itself that greatly advanced the friendship.
The Lansing children were subject to illness and accident. In the early fall of 1900 George suffered a succession of colds and sore throats. It was decided that his tonsils should be trimmed or removed. Lansing directed his wife to take the boy to Dr. Hunter in Fort Barry and pass the nights before and after the operation in the Farmer’s Hotel there. Her daughters went with her, though Félicité spent the nights at the convent school.
John Ashley seldom left Coaltown, but on that Friday—as it happened—he had business in Fort Barry. The negotiation dragged on and required his remaining there overnight. He went to the railroad station and asked Jerry Bilham, the conductor, to tell Coaltown’s stationmaster to inform Mrs. Ashley that he would not be home until the morrow. The Farmer’s Hotel was full, but the great Mr. Corrigan arranged that a cot be set up for him in the pantry. Ashley did not see Mrs. Lansing or her son during the day, but he came upon Anne on the hotel porch and listened to a long self-important explanation of her presence in Fort Barry. Ashley had failed to bring sufficient pocket money to buy his dinner at the hotel; he went to a lunchroom and ordered a bowl of soup. By ten o’clock all were sleeping soundly except Eustacia Lansing and her son. George was tossing and babbling in his sleep. His mother rose, lit the gaslight, and spoke to him.
“George! George, dear! It’s nothing. Hundreds of people have their tonsils taken out every month. You’ll have forgotten all about it in a week. You won’t have sore throats any more.”
“Is it almost morning? What time is it, Mama?”
She told herself it was the break in routine that was unsettling. George had not slept away from his own bed more than eight times in his life—he had been Roger’s guest at “The Elms”; there had been some hunting trips with his father. She had not slept ten times away from “St. Kitts” since her arrival there. She talked of the ice cream the doctor had prescribed for him, of the improvement in his condition for athletics.
They had this secret. She would tell him about the most beautiful island in the world, about the blue sky and water, about how she ran a store when she was only a few years older than he was, about her large handsome laughing mother, fanning herself on the verandah, about her father in his beautiful white uniform, about the young men on the island who were always singing and serenading. She talked of these things with no one else. It was understood that she would someday take him there; he would take her there, in fact. George was devout. He wanted to go to the church; he wanted to kneel at the very spot where she had knelt. From time to time she spoke of his father’s visit to St. Kitts, but George made no comment. He never mentioned his father. She sang a song in her patois and George fell asleep. She moved over to a large wicker chair by the window and looked down at the town square. All was dark.
“Dark as my life,” she thought, but caught herself short. “No! No! My life is hard but not dark. Something’s coming. Something’s unfolding. My mistake is going to be redeemed.” How could she wish her life to have been different, if that difference would remove—would annihilate—her children? “We are our lives. Everything is bound together. No smallest action can be thought other than it is.” She groped among the concepts of necessity and free will. Everything is mysterious, but how unendurable life would be without the mystery. She slipped to her knees and buried her face in her arms on the seat of the chair.
The moon rose.
Toward midnight George gave a loud cry and sprang up in his bed like a leaping fish. “No! No!”
“Sh, George, Mama’s here.”
“Where am I?”
“We’re at Fort Barry. Everything’s all right, dear.”
George began to sob. He shook his head from side to side; he struck it against the bedstead. Anne awoke and chanted, “Crybaby! Sissy!” He refused a glass of water. He struck his mother’s hand from his forehead. Half an hour later he was still weeping as from some bottomless despair. His mother paced to and fro, distraught. She thought of sending for Father Dillon. Suddenly she became aware of the sound of voices in the corridor—some guests were returning to their rooms, shepherded by the great Mr. Corrigan himself.
“Keep your voices down, gentlemen. There are a lot of people sleeping in the house . . . ? Joe! Joe! . . . ? Herb! . . . ? That’s not your room. Come along, here . . . ? Lift your feet, Joe—that’s right!”
Eustacia Lansing dressed and woke Anne. She told her to dress and go downstairs. “Tell Mr. Corrigan that your brother has an attack of nerves. Tell him to wake Mr. Ashley and ask Mr. Ashley to come here to talk to your brother.”
Anne enjoyed her mission and performed it ably. Ashley came to their room.
“It’s nightmares, John. I can’t do anything with him. Dr. Hunt’s taking out his tonsils tomorrow.—Anne, be quiet and get into bed.”
Anne was kneeling on her mother’s bed, hissing, “Sissy! Sissy!”
Ashley crossed the room and sat down beside her. He asked confidentially: “Why do you say that, Anne?”
“Boys don’t cry.”
“I know. That’s what Coaltown thinks.”
“Everybody knows that.”
“Coaltown’s a very small place, Anne. There are millio
ns of people who never heard of Coaltown. There are an awful lot of things that Coaltown doesn’t know. I wouldn’t like to think that you and Constance are just little Coaltown girls that don’t know very much—just little country girls that only think what Coaltown thinks.”
“What do you mean, Mr. Ashley?”
“Didn’t you ever hear that the biggest and strongest men cry sometimes?”
“No . . . ? Papa never cries. Papa says—”
“Abraham Lincoln cried. And King David cried. You know that. And we were just reading aloud the other night about how Achilles cried—you couldn’t find a braver man than Achilles. The book said that great tears fell on his hands. Your brother’s going to be a very strong man and sometimes he’s going to cry.”