Marm Lisa

Rhoda’s hand went up to an imaginary cap in a gesture of military obedience.  ‘Very well, my general.  I fly to prepare weapons with which to fight Satan.  You, of course, will take her; oh, my dear, I’m almost afraid you oughtn’t!  I choose the bullet-headed blonde twin who says his name is “Lanty,” and reserve for Edith the bursting-with-fat brunette twin who calls herself “Ciffy.”  Edith’s disciplinary powers have been too much vaunted of late; we shall see if Ciffy ruffles her splendid serenity.’

III

A FAMILY POLYGON

Mrs. Grubb’s family circle was really not a circle at all; it was rather a polygon—a curious assemblage of distinct personages.

There was no unity in it, no membership one of another.  It was four ones, not one four.  If some gatherer of statistics had visited the household, he might have described it thus:—

Mrs. S. Cora Grubb, widow, aged forty years.

‘Alisa Bennett, feeble-minded, aged ten or twelve years.

‘Atlantic and Pacific Simonson, twins, aged four years.’

The man of statistics might seek in vain for some principle of attraction or cohesion between these independent elements; but no one who knew Mrs. Grubb would have been astonished at the sort of family that had gathered itself about her.  Queer as it undoubtedly was at this period, it had, at various times, been infinitely queerer.  There was a certain memorable month, shortly after her husband’s decease, when Mrs. Grubb allowed herself to be considered as a compensated hostess, though the terms ‘landlady’ and ‘boarder’ were never uttered in her hearing.  She hired a Chinese cook, who slept at home; cleared out, for the use of Lisa and the twins, a small storeroom in which she commonly kept Eldorado face-powder; and herself occupied a sofa in the apartment of a friend of humanity in the next street.  These arrangements enabled her to admit an experimenter on hypnotism, a mental healer who had been much abused by the orthodox members of her cult, and was evolving a method of her own, an ostensible delegate to an Occidental Conference of Religions, and a lady agent for a flexible celluloid undershirt.  For a few days Mrs. Grubb found the society of these persons very stimulating and agreeable; but before long the hypnotist proved to be an unscrupulous gentleman, who hypnotised the mental healer so that she could not heal, and the Chinese cook so that he could not cook.  When, therefore, the delegate departed suddenly in company with the celluloid-underwear lady, explaining by a hurried postal card that they would ‘remit’ from Chicago, she evicted the other two boarders, and retired again to private life.

This episode was only one of Mrs. Grubb’s many divagations, for she had been a person of advanced ideas from a comparatively early age.  It would seem that she must have inherited a certain number of ‘views,’ because no human being could have amassed, in a quarter of a century, as many as she held at the age of twenty-five.  She had then stood up with Mr. Charles Grubb, before a large assembly, in the presence of which they promised to assume and continue the relation of husband and wife so long as it was mutually agreeable.  As a matter of fact it had not been mutually agreeable to Mr. Grubb more than six months, but such was the nobility of his character that he never disclosed his disappointment nor claimed any immunity from the responsibilities of the marriage state.  Mr. Grubb was a timid, conventional soul, who would have given all the testimony of all the witnesses of his wedding ceremony for the mere presence of a single parson; but he imagined himself in love with Cora Wilkins, and she could neither be wooed nor won by any of the beaten paths that led to other women.  He foolishly thought that the number of her convictions would grow less after she became a wife, little suspecting the fertility of her mind, which put forth a new explanation of the universe every day, like a strawberry plant that devotes itself so exclusively to ‘runners’ that it has little vigour left for producing fruit.

The town in New York where they lived proving to be too small, narrow, and bigoted to hold a developing soul like Mrs. Grubb’s, she persuaded her husband to take passage for California, where the climate might be supposed more favourable to the growth of saving ideas.  Mr. Grubb would, of course, be obliged to relinquish his business, but people could buy and sell anywhere, she thought, and as for her, she wanted nothing but unlimited space in which to expand.

There was money enough for an economical journey and a month or two of idleness afterwards; and as Mrs. Grubb believed everything in the universe was hers, if she only chose to claim it, the question of finances never greatly troubled her.  They sailed for the golden West, then, this ill-assorted couple, accompanied by Mrs. Grubb’s only sister, who had been a wife, was now a widow, and would shortly become a mother.  The interesting event occurred much sooner than had been anticipated.  The ship became the birthplace of the twins, who had been most unwelcome when they were thought about as one, and entirely offensive when found to be two.  The mother did not long survive the shock of her surprise and displeasure, and after naming the babies Atlantic and Pacific, and confiding them distinctly to the care of Mr., not Mrs., Grubb, she died, and was buried at sea, not far from Cape Horn.  Mrs. Cora enjoyed at first the dramatic possibilities of her position on the ship, where the baby orphans found more than one kindly, sentimental woman ready to care for them; but there was no permanent place in her philosophy for a pair of twins who entered existence with a concerted shriek, and continued it for ever afterwards, as if their only purpose in life was to keep the lungs well inflated.  Her supreme wish was to be freed from the carking cares of the flesh, and thus for ever ready to wing her free spirit in the pure ether of speculation.

You would hardly suppose that the obscure spouse of Mrs. Grubb could wash and dress the twins, prepare their breakfast, go to his work, come home and put them to bed, four or five days out of every seven in the week; but that is what he did, accepting it as one phase of the mysterious human comedy (or was it tragedy?) in which he played his humble part.

Mrs. Grubb was no home spirit, no goddess of the hearth.  She graced her family board when no invitation to refresh herself elsewhere had been proffered, and that she generally slept in her own bed is as strong a phrase as can be written on the subject.  If she had been born in Paris, at the proper time, she would have been the leader of a salon; separated from that brilliant destiny by years, by race, and by imperious circumstance, she wielded the same sort of sceptre in her own circumscribed but appreciative sphere.  No social occasion in Eden Place was complete without Mrs. Grubb.  With her (and some light refreshment), a party lacked nothing; without her, even if other conditions were favourable, it seemed a flat, stale, and unprofitable affair.  Like Robin Adair,

‘She made the ball so fine;
She made th’ occasion shine.’

Mrs. Grubb hanging on her front gate, duster in hand (she never conversed quite as well without it, and never did anything else with it), might have been a humble American descendant of Madame de Staël talking on the terrace at Coppet, with the famous sprig of olive in her fingers.  She moved among her subjects like a barouche among express wagons, was heard after them as a song after sermons.  That she did not fulfil the whole duty of woman did not occur to her fascinated constituents.  There was always some duller spirit who could slip in and ‘do the dishes,’ that Mrs. Grubb might grace a conversazione on the steps or at the gate.  She was not one of those napkin people who hide their talents, or who immure their lights under superincumbent bushels.  Whatever was hers was everybody’s, for she dispensed her favours with a liberal hand.  She would never have permitted a child to suffer for lack of food or bed, for she was not at heart an unkind woman.  You could see that by looking at her vague, soft brown eyes,—eyes that never saw practical duties straight in front of them,—liquid, star-gazing, vision-seeing eyes, that could never be focussed on any near object, such as a twin or a cooking-stove.  Individuals never interested her; she cared for nothing but humanity, and humanity writ very large at that, so that once the twins nearly died of scarlatina while Mrs. Grubb was collecting money for the children of the yellow-fever sufferers in the South.

But Providence had an eye for Mr. Grubb’s perplexities.  It does not and cannot always happen, in a world like this, that vice is assisted to shirk, and virtue aideth to do, its duty; but any man as marvellously afflicted as Mr. Grubb is likely to receive not only spiritual consolation, but miraculous aid of some sort.  The spectacle of the worthy creature as he gave the reluctant twins their occasional bath, and fed them on food regularly prescribed by Mrs. Grubb, and almost as regularly rejected by them, would have melted the stoniest heart.  And who was the angel of deliverance?  A little vacant-eyed, half-foolish, almost inarticulate child, whose feeble and sickly mother was dragging out a death-in-life existence in a street near by.  The child saw Mr. Grubb wheeling the twins in a double perambulator: followed them home; came again, and then again, and then again; hung about the door, fell upon a dog that threatened to bite them, and drove it away howling; often stood over the perambulator with a sunshade for three hours at a time, without moving a muscle; and adored Mr. Grubb with a consuming passion.  There was no special reason for this sentiment, but then Alisa Bennett was not quite a reasonable being.  Mr. Grubb had never been adored before in his life; and to say the truth, his personality was not winning.  He had a pink, bald head, pale blue eyes, with blond tufts for eyebrows, and a pointed beard dripping from his chin, which tended to make him look rather like an invalid goat.  But as animals are said to have an eye for spirits, children have an eye for souls, which is far rarer than an eye for beautiful surfaces.

Mr. Grubb began by loathing Alisa, then patiently suffered her, then pitied, then respected, then loved her.  Mrs. Grubb seldom saw her, and objected to nothing by which she herself was relieved of care.  So Lisa grew to be first a familiar figure in the household, and later an indispensable one.

Poor Mrs. Bennett finally came to the end of things temporal.  ‘Dying is the first piece of good luck I ever had,’ she said to Mr. Grubb.  ‘If it turns out that I’ve brought a curse upon an innocent creature, I’d rather go and meet my punishment half-way than stay here and see it worked out to the end.’

‘“In my Father’s house are many mansions,”’ stammered Mr. Grubb, who had never before administered spiritual consolation.

She shook her head.  ‘If I can only get rid of this world, it’s all I ask,’ she said; ‘if the other one isn’t any better, why, it can’t be any worse!  Feel under the mattress and you’ll find money enough to last three or four years.  It’s all she’ll ever get, for she hasn’t a soul now to look to for help.  That’s the way we human beings arrange things,—we, or the Lord, or the Evil One, or whoever it is; we bring a puzzle into the world, and then leave it for other people to work out—if they can!  Who’ll work out this one?  Who’ll work out this one?  Perhaps she’ll die before the money’s gone; let’s hope for the best.’

‘Don’t take on like that!’ said Mr. Grubb despairingly,—‘don’t!  Pray for resignation, can’t you?’

‘Pray!’ she exclaimed scornfully.  ‘Thank goodness, I’ve got enough self-respect left not to pray!—Yes, I must pray, I must . . . Oh, God!  I do not ask forgiveness for him or for myself; I only beg that, in some way I cannot see, we may be punished, and she spared!’

And when the stricken soul had fled from her frail body, they who came to prepare her for the grave looked at her face and found it shining with hope.

It was thus that poor little Alisa Bennett assumed maternal responsibilities at the age of ten, and gained her sobriquet of ‘Marm Lisa.’  She grew more human, more tractable, under Mr. Grubb’s fostering care; but that blessed martyr had now been dead two years, and she began to wear her former vacuous look, and to slip back into the past that was still more dreadful than the present.

It seemed to Mrs. Grubb more than strange that she, with her desire for freedom, should be held to earth by three children not flesh of her flesh—and such children.  The father of the twins had been a professional pugilist, but even that fact could never sufficiently account for Pacific Simonson.  She had apparently inherited instincts from tribes of warlike ancestors who skulked behind trees with battle-axes, and no one except her superior in size and courage was safe from her violent hand.  She had little, wicked, dark eyes and crimson, swollen cheeks, while Atlantic had flaxen hair, a low forehead, and a square jaw.  He had not Pacific’s ingenuity in conceiving evil; but when it was once conceived, he had a dogged persistency in carrying it out that made him worthy of his twin.

Yet with all these crosses Mrs. Grubb was moderately cheerful, for her troubles were as nebulous as everything else to her mind.  She intended to invent some feasible plan for her deliverance sooner or later, but she was much more intent upon development than deliverance, and she never seemed to have the leisure to break her shackles.  Nothing really mattered much.  Her body might be occasionally in Eden Place, but her soul was always in a hired hall.  She delighted in joining the New Order of Something,—anything, so long as it was an Order and a new one,—and then going with a selected committee to secure a lodge-room or a hall for meetings.  She liked to walk up the dim aisle with the janitor following after her, and imagine brilliant lights (paid for by collection), a neat table and lamp and pitcher of iced water, and herself in the chair as president or vice-president, secretary or humble trustee.  There was that about her that precluded the possibility of simple membership.  She always rose into office the week after she had joined any society.  If there was no office vacant, then some bold spirit (generally male) would create one, that Mrs. Grubb might not wither in the privacy of the ranks.  Before the charter members had fully learned the alphabet of their order and had gained a thorough understanding of the social revolution it was destined to work, Mrs. Grubb had mastered the whole scheme and was unfolding it before large classes for the study of the higher theory.  The instant she had a tale to tell she presumed the ‘listening earth’ to be ready to hear it.  The new Order became an old one in course of time, and, like the nautilus.  Mrs. Grubb outgrew her shell and built herself a more stately chamber.  Another clue to the universe was soon forthcoming, for all this happened in a city where it is necessary only for a man to open his lips and say, ‘I am a prophet’, and followers flock unto him as many in number as the stars.  She was never disturbed that the last clue had brought her nowhere; she followed the new one as passionately as the old, and told her breathless pupils that their feet must not be weary, for they were treading the path of progress; that these apparently fruitless excursions into the domain of knowledge all served as so many milestones in their glorious ascent of the mountain of truth.

IV

MARM LISA IS TRANSPLANTED

It was precisely as Rhoda thought and feared.  The three strange beings who had drifted within Mistress Mary’s reach had proved to belong to her simply because they did not belong to anybody else.  They did not know their names, the streets in which they lived, or anything else about which they were questioned, but she had followed them home to the corner house of Eden Place, although she failed, on the occasion of that first visit, to find Mrs. Grubb within.  There was, however, a very voluble person next door, who supplied a little information and asked considerable more.  Mrs. Sylvester told Mary that Mrs. Grubb was at that moment presiding over a meeting of the Kipling Brothers in Unity Hall, just round the corner.

‘They meet Tuesdays and Thursdays at four o’clock,’ she said, ‘and you’d find it a real treat if you like to step over there.’

‘Thank you, I am rather busy this afternoon,’ replied Mary.

‘Do you wish to leave any name or message?  Did you want a setting?’

‘A sitting?’ asked Mary vaguely.  ‘Oh no, thank you; I merely wished to see Mrs. Grubb—is that the name?’

‘That’s it, and an awful grievance it is to her—Mrs. S. Cora Grubb.  You have seen it in the newspapers, I suppose; she has a half column “ad.” in the Sunday Observer once a month.  Wouldn’t you like your nails attended to?  I have a perfectly splendid manicure stopping with me.’

‘No, thank you.  I hoped to see Mrs. Grubb, to ask if her children can come and spend the morning with me to-morrow.’

‘Oh, that’ll be all right; they’re not her children; she doesn’t care where they go; they stay in the back yard or on the sand-lot most of the time: she’s got something more important to occupy her attention.  Say, I hope you’ll excuse me, but you look a little pale.  If you were intending to get some mental healing from Mrs. Grubb, why, I can do it; she found I had the power, and she’s handed all her healing over to me.  It’s a new method, and is going to supersede all the others, we think.  My hours are from ten to twelve, and two to four, but I could take you evenings, if you’re occupied during the day.  My cures are almost as satisfactory as Mrs. Grubb’s now, though I haven’t been healing but six months last Wednesday.’

‘Fortunately I am very well and strong,’ smiled Mistress Mary.

‘Yes, that’s all right, but you don’t know how soon sickness may overtake you, if you haven’t learned to cast off fear and practise the denials.  Those who are living in error are certain to be affected by it sooner or later, unless they accept the new belief.  Why don’t you have your nails done, now you’re here?  My manicure has the highest kind of a polish,—she uses pumice powder and the rose of Peru lustre; you ought to try her; by taking twenty tickets you get your single treatments for thirty-five cents apiece.  Not this afternoon?  Well, some other time, then.  It will be all right about the children and very good of you to want them.  Of course you can’t teach them anything, if that’s your idea.  Belief in original sin is all against my theories, but I confess I can’t explain the twins without it.  I sometimes wonder I can do any healing with them in the next house throwing off evil influences.  I am treating Lisa by suggestion, but she hasn’t responded any yet.  Call again, won’t you?  Mrs. Grubb is in from seven to eight in the morning, and ten-thirty to eleven-thirty in the evening.  You ought to know her; we think there’s nobody like Mrs. Grubb; she has a wonderful following, and it’s growing all the time; I took this house to be near her.  Good afternoon.  By the way, if you or any of your friends should require any vocal culture, you couldn’t do better than take of Madame Goldmarker in No. 17.  She can make anybody sing, they say.  I’m taking of her right along, and my voice has about doubled in size.  I ought to be leading the Kipling Brothers now, but my patients stayed so late to-day I didn’t get a good start.  Good afternoon.’

The weeks wore on, and the children were old friends when Mary finally made Mrs. Grubb’s acquaintance; but in the somewhat hurried interviews she had with that lady at first, she never seemed able to establish the kind of relation she desired.  The very atmosphere of her house was chaotic, and its equally chaotic mistress showed no sign of seeking advice on any point.

‘Marm Lisa could hardly be received in the schools,’ Mary told the listening neophytes one afternoon when they were all together.  ‘There ought of course to be a special place for her and such as she, somewhere, and people are beginning to see and feel the importance of it here; but until the thought and hope become a reality the State will simply put the child in with the idiots and lunatics, to grow more and more wretched, more hopeless, more stupid, until the poor little light is quenched in utter darkness.  There is hope for her now, I am sure of it.  If Mrs. Grubb’s neighbours have told me the truth, any physical malady that may be pursuing her is in its very first stages; for, so far as they know in Eden Place, where one doesn’t look for exact knowledge, to be sure, she has had but two or three attacks (“dizziness” or “faintness” they called them) in as many years.  She was very strange and intractable just before the last one, and much clearer in her mind afterwards.  They think her worse of late, and have advised Mrs. Grubb to send her to an insane asylum if she doesn’t improve.  She would probably have gone there long ago if she had not been such a valuable watch-dog for the twins; but she does not belong there,—we have learned that from the doctors.  They say decisively that she is curable, but that she needs very delicate treatment.  My opinion is that we have a lovely bit of rescue-work sent directly into our hands in the very nick of time.  All those in favour of opening the garden gates a little wider for Marm Lisa respond by saying “Ay!”’

There was a shout from the neophytes that shook the very rafters—such a shout that Lisa shuttled across the room, and, sitting down on a stool at Mistress Mary’s feet, looked up at her with a dull, uncomprehending smile.  Why were those beloved eyes full of tears?  She could not be displeased, for she had been laughing a moment before.  She hardly knew why, but Mistress Mary’s wet eyes tortured her; she made an ejaculation of discomfort and resentment, and taking the corner of her apron wiped her new friend’s face softly, gazing at her with a dumb sorrow until the smile came back; then she took out her string and her doll and played by herself as contentedly as usual.

It was thus that heaven began to dawn on poor Marm Lisa.  At first only a physical heaven: temporary separation from Atlantic and Pacific; a chair to herself in a warm, sunshiny room; beautiful, bright, incomprehensible things hanging on the walls; a soft gingham apron that her clumsy fingers loved to touch; brilliant bits of colour and entrancing waves of sound that roused her sleeping senses to something like pleasure; a smile meeting her eyes when she looked up—oh! she knew a smile—God lets love dwell in these imprisoned spirits!  By-and-by all these new sensations were followed by thoughts, or something akin to them.  Her face wore a brooding, puzzled look, ‘Poor little soul, she is feeling her growing-pains!’ said Mistress Mary.  It was a mind sitting in a dim twilight where everything seems confused.  The physical eye appears to see, but the light never quite pierces the dimness nor reflects its beauty there.  If the ears hear the song of birds, the cooing of babes, the heart-beat in the organ tone, then the swift little messengers that fly hither and thither in my mind and yours, carrying echoes of sweetness unspeakable, tread more slowly here, and never quite reach the spirit in prison.  A spirit in prison, indeed, but with one ray of sunlight shining through the bars,—a vision of duty.  Lisa’s weak memory had lost almost all trace of Mr. Grubb as a person but the old instinct of fidelity was still there in solution, and unconsciously influenced her actions.  The devotion that first possessed her when she beheld the twins as babies in the perambulator still held sway against all their evil actions.  If they plunged into danger she plunged after them without a thought of consequences.  There was, perhaps, no real heroism in this, for she saw no risks and counted no cost: this is what other people said, but Mistress Mary always thought Marm Lisa had in her the stuff out of which heroes and martyrs are made.  She had never walked in life’s sunny places; it had always been the valley of the shadow for her.  She was surrounded by puzzles with never any answer to one of them, but if only she had comprehended the truth, it was these very puzzles that were her salvation.  While her feeble mind stirred, while it wondered, brooded, suffered,—enough it did all these too seldom,—it kept itself alive, even if the life were only like the flickering of a candle.  And now the candle might flicker, but it should never go out altogether, if half a dozen pairs of women’s hands could keep it from extinction; and how patiently they were outstretched to shield the poor apology for a flame, and coax it into burning more brightly!

‘Let the child choose her own special teacher,’ said Mistress Mary; ‘she is sure to have a strong preference.’

‘Then it will be you,’ laughed Helen.

‘Don’t be foolish; it may be any one of us and it will prove nothing in any case, save a fancy that we can direct to good use.  She seldom looks at anybody but you,’ said Edith.

‘That is true,’ replied Mary thoughtfully.  ‘I think she is attracted by this glittering steel thing in my hair.  I am going to weave it into Helen’s curly crop some day, and see whether she misses it or transfers her affection.  I have made up my mind who is the best teacher for her, and whom she will chose.’

Rhoda gave a comical groan.  ‘Don’t say it’s I,’ she pleaded.  ‘I dread it.  Please I am not good enough, I don’t know how; and besides, she gives me the creeps!’

Mistress Mary turned on Rhoda with a reproachful smile, saying, ‘You naughty Rhoda, with the brightest eyes, the swiftest feet, the nimblest fingers, the lightest heart among us all, why do you want to shirk?’