Harold had been brought up among the flutter of petticoats. That fact had established his character more conclusively than the subsequent college years. His aunt, born Prewett, had never married. Christened Sarah, she was soon dubbed Sadie; after a trip to Europe she herself had altered this to Sadi. The trip to Europe was responsible for other phenomena: one was the aforementioned Ninon de Lenclos cloak, which was a modification of a model she had observed at a famous Parisian couturiere's; another was a passion for the method of Delsarte, which, for a time, she had contemplated imparting to New York débutantes; a third was an obsession for the Anna Song from Nanon, which had caught her fancy at a performance of the opera she had heard in Munich and which had held it to the present day. Nearly every morning, indeed, it was her custom to seat herself before her old rosewood square piano, with its thin metallic tone, and perform this waltz, somewhat woodenly, singing the words in her bedizened German and, latterly, in a voice which frequently cracked:
Mein liebster Gang,
Mein liebster Gang;
Anna, Dir tönet mein bester Sang,
Mein bester Sang,
Mein bester Sang;
Anna, Annettchen, welch' holder Klang,
Welch' holder Klang,
Welch' holder Klang;
Anna, Dir sing' ich mein Lebelang!
Ja, mein Lebelang!
Long after her visit to Paris, Sadi had succumbed to one more foreign influence. Visiting a New York shop, she had seen a Fortuny gown, one of those crinkly crêpe robes, knotted at the shoulders with cords of gold, hanging straight like a Mother Hubbard, but belted at the waist with an ornate girdle. She had purchased this garment, and since that date she had never worn anything else. For ten years, two or three times a year, a box arrived with a new Fortuny gown; there had been red ones, blue ones, green ones, and brown ones, old gold and old rose, but the model was always exactly the same. Wearing one of these dresses, Sadi drove along the dusty roads in her surrey, as Louise de la Ramé, in white velvet costumes designed by Worth, had driven along the roads of Tuscany.
Sadi was a large woman, with large bones, large hands, large feet, a large nose, and large eyes. She had a large mole on her throat under her large left ear. Her hair remained a deep, glossy black, and probably would so remain until the day of her death, unless she stopped sending to Buffalo for certain bottles. Every morning she curled it, parted it in the centre, and tied it in a knot at the back of her head.
She had no taste for the kind of New York social life which was open to her; she was too exclusive and eccentric a person for that. Her friends were few, and those few were all women. Consequently, after the success of the Ninon de Lenclos cloak, she had retired to one of those old Connecticut farmhouses, boarded with oiled but unpainted and now weather-beaten shingles. The rooms were all on different levels, and the ceilings were so low that, in the ascension and descension of the slight flights of stairs between the chambers, tall people, like Harold and Sadi, familiar though they were with the contours of the place, frequently bumped their heads. There were stone fireplaces in this house, wide enough to burn four-foot logs, and provided with ovens and cranes, and Sadi had scoured the surrounding country, attending auction sales and persuading indigent country-folk that they were tired of their chairs and tables, in order to furnish her home appropriately. Ever since Harold could remember, Persia Blaine, an old Negress, had been a constant servitor. Other servants, all women, had come and gone, but Persia was a fixture.
Sadi professed a love for children and she was not unkind to them, but it cannot be said that she understood them. She was apparently delighted when fate placed Harold in her hands. After he had learned to speak she lavished affection on him in her own way. She talked to him, as she imagined children should be talked to, very deliberately, and in words of one syllable, when she could think of them, but solemnly, and often in the third person. Good little boys, etc. Bad little boys, etc. Bad little boys, it seemed, played with neighbouring farmers' sons. Good little boys stayed at home. Sadi never kept a watch-dog: her mere appearance would have frightened a tramp away, but there were pigs and chickens, and Harold was permitted occasionally to visit the pens and scratch the old sow's back with a corn-cob or a stick. Sadi kept a hired man to look after the live stock, but he was never allowed to come into the house—his meals were all delivered to him in the barn where he lived—and Harold was instructed never to talk with him. This and similar prohibitions might have infuriated another boy, might have stimulated a taste for secret disobedience, but in the make-up of Harold's character there was no curiosity, and little initiative. Further, he was conspicuously lacking in imagination. He was proud, and like most unimaginative people, could be disagreeably obstinate. Auntie Persia, as he called her, was his favourite companion. She told him stories which she had heard as a child on a southern plantation, and she sang him old darkey folksongs. They had a game which they played with a song which began, Come on! It's Sat'day night! Auntie Persia, indeed, understood children. . . .
Meanwhile, Sadi Prewett continued to live her life, which consisted in rising, dressing, eating a hearty country breakfast, playing the Anna Song from Nanon, eating lunch, taking her afternoon drive, taking her tea, eating dinner, sitting for an hour or so before the fire in the winter, or on the lawn in the summer, and then retiririg. These habits were invariable. Other unimportant incidents might be added to her day, however. Sometimes, she read a little, almost always from two little books of poems by Mrs. Hemans and Adah Isaacs Menken. The pale and fragile passion of Mrs. Hemans seemed very moving to her. Tears, indeed, consistently obscured her vision, as she read the lyric narrative of Gertrude von der Wart:
My Rudolph, say not so!
This is no time to quit thy side;
Peace, peace, I cannot go.
Hath the world aught for me to fear,
When death is on thy brow?
The world! what means it—mine is here—
I will not leave thee now.
In Miss Menken's Infelicia, she preferred the opening poem, Resurgam, and it was a very easy matter to persuade her to declaim it aloud:
Dead to you!
Dead to the world!
Dead for ever!
It was one young night in May.
The stars were strangled, and the moon was blind with the flying clouds of a black despair.
Years and years the songless soul waited to drift out beyond the sea of pain where the shapeless life was wrecked.
The red mouth closed down the breath that was hard and fierce.
The mad pulse beat back the baffled life with a low sob.
And so the stark and naked soul unfolded its wings to the dimness of Death!
A lonely, unknown Death.
A Death that left this dumb living body as his endless mark.
And left these golden billows of hair to drown the whiteness of my bosom.
Left these crimson roses gleaming on my forehead to hide the dust of the grave.
And Death left an old light in my eyes, and old music for my tongue, to deceive the crawling worms that would seek my warm flesh.
But the purple wine that I quaff sends no thrill of Love and Song through my empty veins.
Yet my red lips are not pallid and horrified.
Thy kisses are doubtless sweet that throb out an eternal passion for me!
But I feel neither pleasure, passion nor pain.
So I am certainly dead.
Dead in this beauty!
Dead in this velvet and lace!
Dead in these jewels of light!
Dead in the music!
Dead in the dance!
etc.
Occasionally, some acquaintance or friend of an earlier day would spend a few days or a week with her. One lady, especially, who, at the time when Delsarte was fashionable, had taught his method, was often favoured with an invitation, and Sadi would converse with her by the hour about the French Master and his Message, as she called it. Then, if it were summer, robed in Grecian garments cut from pale-green cheese-cloth, they would stand on the grass underneath a spreading crab-apple tree, to avoid the direct rays of the sun, and wave their arms and sway their bodies in a manner calculated to give the butcher's boy fits, whenever he passed the gate and saw them. This picture of his large-boned aunt, formidable in appearance but gentle at heart, and the stout Miss Perkins, who reached about to Sadi's arm-pit, delsarting on the lawn was one of Harold's earliest memories.
Until Harold was seven Sadi had kept him in kilts, although the boys of his epoch were usually put into baby-trousers at the age of two. These kilts and his long curls were frequently the object of attention and scorn from passing lads, who. though not over five, sported long and ragged trousers and flannel shirts and wore their hair clipped and frowzy. These boys went by the house with fishing-rods or, in the fall, with baskets to gather hickory-nuts. When they saw Harold in the yard they yelled, Sissy! and Baby girl! at him until he retreated sobbing to the shelter of Auntie Persia's skirts.
When he was seven, Elliot Sanderson, George Prewett's attorney, arrived, and engaged in a long conference with his aunt, the immediate result of which was the purchase of a few suits proper for a small boy, and a hair-cut. Another result was the subsequent arrival of a tall young man with glasses, solemner, on the whole, than his Aunt Sadi, who was to act, Harold learned, as his tutor. At the age of ten, Harold could read and write and do his sums, and knew something of geography, although it cannot be said that he held imaginatively any real sense of this big world. He himself had never been farther than a neighbouring village, whither he was occasionally permitted to drive with his aunt.
There were piles of old bound magazines in the house, Harper's and Godey's and Putnam's, and a few other books besides, left behind by an earlier occupant, Thaddeus of Warsaw and The Scottish Chiefs, Pride and Prejudice, Cranford, Ivanhoe, Pendennis, David Copperfield, The Woman in White, the Poems of Ossian, the Poems of Owen Meredith, The Initials, Charles Auchester, Nothing to Wear, Felix Holt, The Alhambra, Our Old Home, Little Women, Emerson's Essays, the works of Margaret Fuller, Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Pilot, Under Two Flags, Redburn, Two Years Before the Mast, Neighbour Jackwood, and the Poems of James Whitcomb Riley. Harold read all these books, some of them twice.
He suffered from the usual slight childish illnesses, but his constitution was good and he was seldom really sick. When he was twelve, a new tutor arrived. He was slightly older than his predecessor and slightly more solemn. These tutors, it is to be inferred, represented the rather sedate taste of Elliot Sanderson, Esq. Mr. Sanderson had strict orders never to mention Harold's name in his father's presence. See that the boy is educated and keep him out of my sight, were his full instructions. With his new tutor Harold began to study algebra, English literature, history, physics, and botany. It was also during this epoch that he learned to swim. The tutor, unaccountably, was an adept at this art and in a small pond near the house, discreetly screened by hazel-brush and cattails, he imparted his knowledge to Harold, who never took more than a languid interest in study of any kind. Harold also began to ride a kind old horse named President McKinley.
When Harold was fifteen a tailor was sent from New York to take his measurements, and this visit was repeated thereafter at regular intervals. From this time on Harold was much too well-dressed for his environment. When, at last, the boy went to college, he had only come in contact with his Aunt Sadi, Persia Blaine, and the other servants, a few female guests, Elliot Sanderson, his two solemn tutors, and his tailor. It is not astonishing, therefore, that his college years were somewhat of a trial. If Sanderson had sent him to one of the big universities, Yale or Harvard or Princeton, it is possible that the lad might have rubbed up against somebody sufficiently sympathetic or altruistic or merely meddlesome to teach him something of the world. The lawyer, however, uncertain how long his rich client's animosity towards his offspring might continue, thought it wise to seclude the boy in a small and rather poor sectarian college where he would scarcely be likely to meet any one who could establish communication or connections with the outside world. In this respect Sanderson's foresight was splendidly justified.
The boy's obviously superior style of dressing, his diffident manner, his rather obstinate pride, natural enough, considering the circumstances of his bringing-up, almost completely isolated him during his freshman year. He attended his classes and studied. Afternoons, he sometimes went horseback riding. He lived in a poor professor's house where there were no other boys. In his sophomore year he made a friend or two, because in any community, however small, complete isolation is well-nigh impossible. The boys who gravitated towards him, however, were solemn souls, semiostracized, like himself. This little group discussed and settled many of life's greatest problems.
That sex had something to do with life Harold had vaguely gleaned from the naïve books in his aunt's library. His relations with his new friends were too formal and his curiosity too small for him to add anything very tangible to this knowledge. Presently, however, even among the indigent young students about him, he noted signs of depravity. A grocer's daughter became pregnant and a student disappeared. Bottles were smuggled into respectable boarding-houses in defiance of both college rules and United States laws. Once, out riding, he passed a barn and was horrified at the strident sounds of blasphemy and obscene verse which issued from therein.
In his senior year he had achieved a slender philosophy. He accepted, in his modest fashion, the fact that there were unknown sins in the world. He even became a trifle cynical in an humble and apologetic way: he seemed to be so separated from others by his temperament and breeding. More and more he was alone.
There remains to be told one horrible detail which left its scars. I have noted how as a freshman his clothes by themselves would have prevented any successful intercourse with his fellow students. A raucous junior crystallized the feeling of the college when he shouted at Harold one day, Hello, Cloaks and Suits! The badge seemed appropriate: it had a tremendous yogue. He never, indeed, lost it. It covered him. It labelled him. Later, another boy added a refinement to the insult: His father must be in the business! Harold heard it as he passed, cowered and blushed.