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Marm Lisa

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2019
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Mistress Mary had noted the fact that Lisa had refused to sit in an unpainted chair, but had dragged a red one from another room and ensconced herself in it, though it was uncomfortably small.

Now Rhoda was well named, for she was a rose of a girl, with damask cheeks that glowed like two Jacqueminot beauties.  She was much given to aprons of scarlet linen, to collars and belts of red velvet, and she had a general air of being fresh, thoroughly alive, and in a state of dewy and perennial bloom.  Mary was right in her surmise, and whenever she herself was out of Lisa’s sight or reach the child turned to Rhoda instinctively and obeyed her implicitly.

V

HOW THE NEW PLANT GREW

‘Now, Rhoda dear,’ said Mistress Mary one day, when Lisa had become somewhat wonted to her new surroundings, ‘you are to fold your hands respectfully in your lap and I will teach you things,—things which you in your youth and inexperience have not thought about as yet.  The other girls may listen, too, and catch the drippings of my wisdom.  I really know little about the education of defective children, but, thank heaven, I can put two and two together, as Susan Nipper said.  The general plan will be to train Lisa’s hands and speak to her senses in every possible way, since her organs of sense are within your reach, and those of thought are out of it.  The hardest lesson for such a child to learn is the subordination of its erratic will to our normal ones.  Lisa’s attention is the most hopeful thing about her and encourages me more than anything else.  It is not as if there were no mental processes existing; they are there, but in a very enfeebled state.  Of course she should have been under skilled teaching the six years, but, late as it is, we couldn’t think of giving up a child who can talk, use her right hand, dress herself, go upon errands, recognise colours, wash dishes; who is apparently neither vicious nor cunning, but who, on the contrary, has lived four years under the same roof with Mrs. S. Cora Grubb without rebellion or violence or treachery!  Why, dear girls, such a task, if it did not appeal to one on the moral, certainly would on the intellectual, side.  Marm Lisa will teach us more in a year, you may be sure, than we shall teach her.  Let us keep a record of our experiments; drop all materials that seem neither to give her sensations nor wake her discriminative power, and choose others that speak to her more clearly.  Let us watch her closely, both to penetrate the secret of her condition and to protect the other children.  What a joy, what a triumph to say to her some dear day, a few years hence, “You poor, motherless bairn, we have swept away the cobwebs of your dreams, given you back your will, put a clue to things in your hand: now go on and learn to live and be mistress of your own life under God!”’

It was at such a moment, when Mary’s voice trembled, and her eyes shone through a mist of tears like two victorious stars, that a hush fell upon the little group, and the spirit of the eternal child descended like a dove, its pure wings stirring the silence of each woman’s heart.  At such a moment, their daily work, with its round of harsh, unlovely, beautiful, discouraging, hopeful, helpful, heavenly duties, was transfigured, and so were they.  The servant was transformed by the service, and the service by the servant.  They were alone together, each heart knit to all the others by the close bond of a common vocation; and though a heretofore unknown experience, it seemed a natural one when Mistress Mary suddenly bent her head, and said softly:

‘Father in heaven, it is by the vision of Thy relation to us that we can apprehend our relation to these little ones.  As we have accepted that high trust, so make us loyal to it.  When our feet grow weary and our faith grows dim, help us to follow close after the ever perfect One who taught even as we are trying to teach.  He it was whom the common people heard gladly.  He it was who disdained not the use of objects and symbols, remembering it was the childhood of the race.  He it was who spake in parables and stories, laying bare soul of man and heart of nature, and revealing each by divine analogy.  He it was who took the little ones in His arms and blessed them; who set the child in the midst, saying, “Except ye become as one of these.”  May the afterglow of that inspired teaching ever shine upon the path we are treading.  May we bathe our tired spirits in its warmth and glory, and kindle our torches at the splendour of its light.  We remember that He told us to feed His lambs.  Dear Lord, help all the faithful shepherds who care for the ninety-and-nine that lie in the safe cover of the fold; help us, too, for we are the wandering shepherds whose part it is to go out over the bleak hills, up the mountain sides and rocky places, and gather in out of the storm and stress of things all the poor, unshepherded, wee bit lammies that have either wandered forlornly away from shelter, or have been born in the wilderness, and know no other home.  Such an one has just strayed into the fold from the dreary hill-country.  It needs a wiser shepherd than any one of us.  Grant that by gentleness, patience, and insight we may atone somewhat for our lack of wisdom and skill.  We read among Thy mysteries that the divine Child was born of a virgin.  May He be born again and born daily in our hearts, already touched by that remembrance and consecrated by its meaning.  And this we ask for love’s sake.  Amen.’

Then there was a space of silence—one of those silences in which we seem to be caught up into the heart of things, when hidden meanings are revealed, when the soul stretches itself and grows a little.

It was a few minutes later when Rhoda said, ‘I am fired with zeal, I confess it.  Henceforth my single aim shall be to bring Marm Lisa into her lost kingdom and inheritance.  But meanwhile, how, oh how shall I master the hateful preliminaries?  How shall I teach her to lace her shoes and keep them laced, unless I invent a game for it?  How shall I keep her hair from dangling in her eyes, how keep her aprons neat?—though in those respects she is no worse than Pacific Simonson.  I promised her a doll yesterday, and she was remarkably good.  Do you object, Mistress Mary?’

‘I don’t know how much rewards are used in these cases,’ answered Mary, ‘but why do you begin with them when the problem presents no insuperable difficulties as yet?  Whenever she herself, her awkward hands, her weak will, her inattention, her restlessness, give her some task she likes, some pleasure or occupation for which she has shown decided preference, and thus make happiness follow close upon the heels of effort.  We who see more clearly the meaning of life know that this will not always happen, and we can be content to do right for right’s sake.  I don’t object to your putting hosts of slumbering incentives in Lisa’s mind, but a slumbering incentive is not vulgar and debasing, like a bribe.’

A plant might be a feeble and common thing, yet it might grow in beauty and strength in a garden like Mistress Mary’s.  Such soil in the way of surroundings, such patient cultivation of roots and stems, such strengthening of tendrils on all sorts of lovely props, such sunshine of love, such dew of sympathy, such showers of kindness, such favouring breezes of opportunity, such pleasure for a new leaf, joy for a bud, gratitude for a bloom!  What an atmosphere in which to grow towards knowledge and goodness!  Was it any wonder that the little people ‘all in a row’ responded to the genius of Mistress Mary’s influence?  They used to sing a song calleth The Light Bird,’ in which some one, all unknown to the children, would slip into the playground with a bit of broken looking-glass, and suddenly a radiant fluttering disk of light would appear on the wall, and dance up and down, above and below, hither and yon, like a winged sunbeam.  The children held out longing arms, and sang to it coaxingly.  Sometimes it quivered over Mistress Mary’s head, and fired every delicate point of her steel tiara with such splendour that the Irish babies almost felt like crossing themselves.  At such times, those deux petits cœurs secs, Atlantic and Pacific, and all the other full-fledged and half-fledged scape-graces, forgot to be naughty, and the millennium was foreshadowed.  The neophytes declared Mistress Mary a bit of a magician.  Somehow or other, the evil imps in the children shrank away, abashed by the soft surprise of a glance that seemed to hope something better, and the good angels came out of their banishment, unfolded their wings, and sunned themselves in the warmth of her approving smile.  Her spiritual antennæ were so fine, so fine, that they discerned the good in everything; they were feeling now after the soft spot in the rocky heart of Atlantic Simonson; they had not found it yet, but they would—oh, they would in time; for if hope is the lover’s staff, it is no less that of the idealist.

Marm Lisa looked upon the miracles that happened under Mistress Mary’s roof with a sort of dazed wonder, but her intelligence grew a little day by day; and though she sadly taxed everybody’s patience, she infused a new spirit into all the neophytes.

Had not improvement been rapid, their untrained zeal might perhaps have flagged.  Had the mental symptoms, by their obscurity, baffled them or defied them on every side, their lack of systematic, scientific training for such a task might have made them discouraged: but delicate and exacting as the work was, their love and enthusiasm, their insight and patience, their cleverness and ingenuity, triumphed over all obstacles; and luckily for their youth and comparative inexperience, they were rewarded in marvellous measure.

Not that every day was bright and hopeful.  The carefully kept record was black enough on occasions, beginning with the morning when Helen, sitting in the circle, felt a rough hand on her head, and Marm Lisa, without the slightest warning of her intention, snatched Mary’s steel band forcibly from her hair, and, taking it across the room, put it in its accustomed place on its owner’s head.  Everybody was startled, but Mary rose from her chair quietly, and, taking the ornament in one hand and Marm Lisa in the other, she came to Helen’s side.

‘I like to have my shining crown in Miss Helen’s hair,’ she said; ‘it is such pretty, curly hair—stroke it softly, Lisa; she must wear it this morning to please me, and then I will take it again for my own.  Dear Miss Helen, who is so sweet and good to the children, I love her,’ and she kissed her fondly on each cheek.

Marm Lisa did not attempt to rebel but she was sullen, and refused her work when it was offered her later.

Such occurrences were rare, however, for her obliquity always seemed mental rather than moral.

Straws and bright papers, beads and pretty forms to thread on stout laces, were given her to wean her from her favourite but aimless string-play.  There were days of restlessness which she wandered up and down stairs, and could not be kept in her chair nor persuaded to stand in her place in the circle.  There were days, too, when she tore the bright cardboards and glossy weaving-mats that ordinarily gave her such keen pleasure; but this carelessness grew more and more infrequent, until it ceased altogether, so that it had probably come more from her inability to hold and move the materials and needles properly than from a wanton instinct of destruction; for they would often see the tears drop from her eyes upon her clumsy fingers as she strove to make them obey her feeble behests.  At such a moment there was always some one to fling herself with passionate ardour and sympathy into this latest difficulty.  A stouter weaving-needle was invented, and a mat of pretty coloured morocco substituted for the fragile paper; while the poor inert hands were held and coaxed and strengthened every day by finger gymnastics.

As Lisa grew in power Rhoda grew in ingenuity, and failure in any one particular only stimulated her genius of invention the more.  Did she spill paste, mucilage, water on her gingham aprons, and wipe anything and everything on them that came in her way, Rhoda dressed her in daintier ones of white cambric, with a ruffle at the neck and sleeves; the child’s pleasure knew no bounds, and she kept the aprons clean.  With Mrs. Grubb’s permission her hair was cut shorter, and brushed back under a round comb.  No regiment of soldiers could have kept the comb in place.  It was taken away and a blue ribbon substituted.  She untied the ribbon every five minutes for two days, when Mary circumvented her by sewing a blue ribbon on each sleeve.  This seemed to divert her attention from the head-band, and after a week or two she allowed it to remain without interference.  Mary gave her low shoes, hoping that the lessened trouble of lacing them would make the task a possibility.  There was no improvement.  If she laced them, it was only under supervision, and they were always untied within the hour, the dangling laces tripping her awkward feet.  Slippers or old-fashioned shoes with elastic at the side would have been an easy way out of the difficulty, but to Rhoda’s mind that would have been a humiliating confession of failure.  As a last resort she bought brown shoes and brown laces.

‘If these do not succeed,’ she said, ‘I will have red ones made, paint the tips blue, and give her yellow laces; but I will fix her mind on her feet and arouse her pride in them, or die in the attempt.’

This extreme, fortunately, proved unnecessary, since for some unknown reason the brown foot-gear appealed to Marm Lisa, and she kept the laces tied.  The salient peculiarity and encouraging feature of the child’s development was that, save in rare cases, she did not slip back into her old habits when the novelty of the remedy wore off; with her, almost every point gained was a point kept.  It was indeed a high Hill Difficulty that she was climbing—so high that had she realised it she would never have taken the first step of her own unaided will; but now this impelling force behind her was so great, and the visions for ever leading her on were so beautiful, that she ran nor grew weary, she walked yet did not faint.

The other children, even the youngest of them, were more or less interested in the novel enterprise, too, though they scarcely knew the nature of it or how much was at stake.  That a human mind was tottering to its fall, and that Mistress Mary was engaged in preventing it, was beyond their ken.  They could see certain details, however, for they were all one great family of little people, and it was no unaccustomed thing for them to watch a moral conquest, though they had no conception of an intellectual one.

Accordingly, there was a shout of triumph from a corner of the room one morning,—such a shout that seventy or eighty youngsters held their breath to see what was happening.

After weeks upon weeks of torn cards, broken threads, soiled patterns, wrong stitches, weak hand held in place by strong hand, Marm Lisa had sewed without help, and in one lesson, the outline of a huge red apple; and there she stood, offering her finished work to Mistress Mary.  The angels in heaven never rejoiced more greatly over the one repentant sinner than the tired shepherdesses over their one poor ewe lamb, as she stood there with quivering hands and wet eyes, the first sense of conscious victory written on her inscrutable brow, and within the turbid, clouded brain the memory of a long struggle, and a hint, at least, of the glory she had achieved.

Rhoda took the square of neat cardboard with the precious red circle that meant so much, and ran into the playground with it, hugging it to her heart, and crying and laughing over it like a child.

When she came back Mistress Mary put her arm round Lisa’s waist and said to the whole great family: ‘Children, after trying hard, for ever so long, Lisa has sewed this lovely picture all by herself.  There is not a wrong stitch, and one side is as neat as the other.  What shall we say?’

‘Three cheers!  The Chinese must go!’ shouted Pat Higgins, a patriotic person of five years, whose father was an organiser of sand-lot meetings.

All the grown-ups laughed at this unexpected suggestion, but the cheers were given with a good will, and Marm Lisa, her mind stirred to its depths by the unwonted emotion, puzzled out the meaning of them and hid it in her heart.

VI

FROM GRUBB TO BUTTERFLY

The children were all nearly a year older when Mrs. Grubb one day climbed the flight of wooden steps heading to Marm Lisa’s Paradise, and met, as she did so, a procession of Mistress Mary’s neophytes who were wending their way homeward.

The spectacle of a number of persons of either sex, or of both sexes, proceeding in hue or grouped as an audience, acted on Mrs. Grubb precisely as the taste of fresh blood is supposed to act on a tiger in captivity.  At such a moment she had but one impulse, and that was to address the meeting.  The particular subject was not vital, since it was never the subject, but her own desire to talk, that furnished the necessary inspiration.  While she was beginning, ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ in her clear, pheasant voice, her convictions, opinions, views, prejudices, feelings, experiences, all flew from the different corners of what she was pleased to call her brain, and focussed themselves on the point in question.

If the discussion were in a field in which she had made no excursions whatever, that trifling detail did not impose silence upon her.  She simply rose, and said:

‘Ladies and gentlemen, though a stranger in your midst, I feel I must say a word of sympathy to you, and a word of encouragement for your cause.  It is a good and worthy movement, and I honour you for upholding it.  Often and often have I said to my classes, it matters not what face of truth is revealed to you so long as you get a vision that will help you to bless your fellow-men.  To bless your fellow-men is the great task before each and every one of us, and I feel to urge this specially upon occasions like this, when I see a large and influential audience before me.  Says Rudyard Kipling, “I saw a hundred men on the road to Delhi, and they were all my brothers.”  Yes, all our brothers!  The brotherhood of man and the sisterhood of woman, those are the subjects that include all others.  I am glad to have met with you, and to have heard the eloquent words of your speakers.  If any of you would like to know more of my work, I will gladly meet you in Room A at the close of this meeting.’

She then sat down amid applause.  Never did Mrs. S. Cora Grubb cease speaking without at least a ripple of approval that sometimes grew into a positive ovation.  What wonder, then, that she mistook herself for an inspired person?  It was easy to understand her popularity with her fellow-men.  Her eyes were as soft and clear as those of a child, her hair waved prettily off her low, serene brow, her figure was plump and womanly, and when her voice trembled with emotion (which in her was a shallow well very near the surface) the charmingest pink colour came and went in her cheeks.  On such occasions more than one member of the various brotherhoods thought what a cosy wife she would make, if removed from the public arena to the ‘sweet, safe corner of the household fire.’  To be sure, she had not much logic, but plenty of sentiment; rather too great a fondness for humanity, perhaps, but that was because she had no husband and family of her own to absorb her superfluous sympathy and energy.  Mrs. Grubb was not so easily classified as these ‘brothers’ imagined, however, and fortunately for them she had no leanings towards any man’s fireside.  Mr. Grubb had died in the endeavour to understand her, and it is doubtful whether, had he been offered a second life and another opportunity, he would have thought the end justified the means.

This criticism, however, applies only to the family circle, for Mrs. Grubb in a hall was ever winning, delightful, and persuasive.  If she was illogical, none of her sister-women realised it, for they were pretty much of the same chaotic order of mind, though with this difference: that a certain proportion of them were everywhere seeking reasons for their weariness, their unhappiness, their poverty, their lack of faith and courage, their unsatisfactory husbands and their disappointing children.  These ladies were apt to be a trifle bitter, and much more interested in Equal Suffrage, Temperance, Cremation, and Edenic Diet than in subjects like Palmistry, Telepathy, and Hypnotism, which generally attracted the vague, speculative, feather-headed ones.  These discontented persons were always the most frenzied workers and the most eloquent speakers, and those who were determined to get more rights were mild compared with those who were determined to avenge their wrongs.  There was, of course, no unanimity of belief running through all these Clubs, Classes, Circles, Societies, Orders, Leagues, Chapters, and Unions; but there was one bond of aversion, and that was domestic service of any kind.  That no woman could develop or soar properly, and cook, scrub, sweep, dust, wash dishes, mend, or take care of babies at the same time—to defend this proposition they would cheerfully have gone to the stake.  They were willing to concede all these sordid tasks as an honourable department of woman’s work, but each wanted them to be done by some other woman.

Mrs. Grubb really belonged to neither of these classes.  She was not very keen about more rights, nor very bloodthirsty about her wrongs.  She inhabited a kind of serene twilight, the sort that follows an especially pink sunset.  She was not wholly clear in her mind about anything, but she was entirely hopeful about the world and its disposition to grow and move in ever ascending spirals.  She hated housework as much as any of her followers, although she was seldom allowed to do anything for herself.  ‘I’ll step in and make your beds, Mrs. Grubb; I know you’re tired.’  ‘I’ll sweep the front room, Mrs. Grubb; you give yourself out so, I know you need rest.’  ‘Let me cook your supper while you get up strength for your lecture; there are plenty of people to cook, but there’s only one Mrs. Grubb!’  These were the tender solicitations she was ever receiving.

As for theories, she had small choice.  She had looked into almost every device for increasing the sum of human knowledge and hastening the millennium, and she thought them all more or less valuable.  Her memory, mercifully, was not a retentive one, therefore she remembered little of the beliefs she had outgrown; they never left even a deposit in the stretch of wet sand in which they had written themselves.

She had investigated, or at any rate taught, Delsarte, Physical Culture, Dress-Reform, the Blue-glass Cure, Scientific Physiognomy, Phrenology, Cheiromancy, Astrology, Vegetarianism, Edenic Diet, Single Tax, Evolution, Mental Healing, Christian Science, Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Hypnotism.  All these metamorphoses of thought had Mrs. S. Cora Grubb passed through, and was not yet a finished butterfly.  Some of the ideas she had left far behind, but she still believed in them as fragments of truth suitable for feeble growing souls that could not bear the full light of revelation in one burst.  She held honorary memberships in most of the outgrown societies, attended annual meetings of others, and kept in touch with all the rest by being present at their social reunions.

One of her present enthusiasms was her ‘Kipling Brothers,’ the boys’ band enlisted under the motto, ‘I saw a hundred men on the road to Delhi, and they were all my brothers.’  She believed that there was no salvation for a boy outside of a band.  Banded somehow he must be, then badged, beribboned, bannered, and bye-lawed.  From the moment a boy’s mother had left off her bye-lows, Mrs. Grubb wanted him put under bye-laws.  She often visited Mistress Mary with the idea that some time she could interest her in one of her thousand schemes; but this special call was to see if the older children, whose neat handiwork she had seen and admired, could embroider mottoes on cardboard to adorn the Kipling room at an approaching festival.  She particularly wanted ‘Look not upon the Wine’ done in blood-red upon black, and ‘Shun the Filthy Weed’ in smoke-colour on bright green.  She had in her hand a card with the points for her annual address noted upon it, for this sort of work she ordinarily did in the horse-cars.  These ran:

1st.  Value of individuality.  ‘I saw.’

2nd.  Value of observation.  ‘I saw.’

3rd.  Value of numbers.  ‘I saw a hundred men.’

4th.  Importance of belonging to the male sex.  It was men who were seen on the road.

5th.  What and where is Delhi?

6th.  Description of the road thither.

7th.  Every boy has his Delhi.

8th.  Are you ‘on the road’?

9th.  The brotherhood of man.

10th.  The Kipling Brothers’ Call to Arms.

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