chamber. The gentle hostess had a baby but a week old, and her boarder’s call was one of neighborly kindness. On the stairs she met Lucy Bragg, a child about my sister’s age—five—a pretty, merry baby, and our only playfellow. My mother’s discipline was never harsh. It was ever effectual, for we seldom disobeyed her. She stopped Lucy on the stairs to warn her not to play near the fire.
We played happily together for an hour or two, before Lucy complained of being cold and went up to the fireplace; stood there for a moment, her back to the fire and hands behind her, prattling with the children at the other end of the room. Suddenly she screamed and darted past us, her clothing on fire.
My mother heard the shrieks from the distant “chamber” on the ground floor, and, without arousing the sleeping patient, slipped noiselessly from the room and ran with all her might toward the stairs. Half-way up she met a child wrapped in flames, which she was beating with her poor little hands while she shrieked for help. My mother flashed by her, escaping harm on the narrow stairway as by a miracle. One glance into her own room showed her that her girls were safe; she tore a blanket from the bed and was back so quickly that she overtook the burning figure on the lowermost stair, and wrapped her in the blanket. Captain Bragg appeared below at the same instant, wound the cover about the frantic, struggling creature, and extinguished the fire.
Little Lucy died that night. Her mother and the baby followed her to the grave in a week.
The tragedy broke up the Bragg household, and we found a temporary home in the family of Mr. Andrew McQuie (pronounced “McWay”), two miles from the store. The McQuies were prosperous planters, and the intimacy begun that winter continued as long as the older members of the clan lived. We girls learned to call her “Grandma,” and never remitted the title and the affection that prompted it.
Our apartments were in the “Office,” a detached brick building in the corner of the house-yard—a common appendage to most plantation-homesteads. At some period of the family history a father or son of the house had practised law or medicine, and used the “office” in that capacity. It never lost the name.
And here, on a windy wintry evening, I awoke to the consciousness of my Individuality.
I do not know how better to express the earliest memory I have of being—and thinking. It was a living demonstration of the great truth shallow thinkers never comprehend—“Cogito, ergo sum.”
I had fallen asleep, tired with play, and lulled into drowsiness by the falling rain outside. I lay among the pillows of the trundle-bed at the back of the room, and, awakening with a cry of fright at finding myself, as I thought, alone, was answered by my mother’s voice.
She sat by the fire in a low rocking-chair, and, guided by her reassuring tone, I tumbled out of bed and ran toward her. In the area lighted by the burning logs, I saw her, as in another sphere. To this hour I recall the impression that she was thinking of something besides myself. Baby as I was, I felt vaguely that she was not “all there,” even when she took me upon her lap. When she said, kindly and in her own sweet way, “Did my little girl think her mother had left her alone in the dark?” she did not withdraw her eyes from the ruddy fire.
Something warned me not to speak again. I leaned my head against her shoulder, and we studied the fire together. Did the intensity of her musing stir my dormant soul into life? I cannot say. Only that I date my conscious personal existence from that mystic hour. The picture is before me to-night, as I hear my daughter singing her boy to sleep in the next room, and the lake-wind rattles the vines about my window. The sough of the heated air over the brands and embers; the slow motion of the rocker as we swayed to and fro; my mother’s thoughtful silence, and my small self, awed into speechlessness by the new thing that had come to me; my pulpy brain interfused with the knowledge that I was a thinking entity, and unable to grapple with the revelation—all this is as distinct as things of yesternight.
I have heard but one experience that resembled this supreme moment of my infancy. My best-beloved tutor related to me when I was twelve years old that he “recollected when he began to think.” The sensation, he said, was as if he were talking to himself and could not stop. I had that day heard the epigrammatic “Cogito, ergo sum,” and I told of my awakening from a mere animal to spiritual and intellectual life.
I do not comprehend the mystery better now than on that never-to-be-forgotten evening. I but know that the miracle was!
IV
A BERSERKER RAGE—A FRIGHT—THE WESTERN FEVER—MONTROSE—A MOTHER REGAINED
Up to this point of my story, what I have written is hearsay. With the awakening recorded in the last chapter, my real reminiscences begin.
The next vivid impression upon my plastic memory has its setting in the McQuie yard. My mother had been to Richmond on a visit and brought back, as a present from a woman who was said to be “good,” a doll for my sister. Perhaps she considered me too young to be intrusted with the keeping of the rare creation of wax and real hair. Perhaps she did not recollect my existence. In either case, as I promptly settled within myself, she was not the good woman of my mother’s painting.
Not that I had ever cared for “dead dolls.” When I could just put the wish into words, my craving was for a “real, live, skin baby that could laugh and talk.” But this specimen was so nearly alive that it opened its eyes when one pulled a wire concealed by the satin petticoat, and shut them at another tweak. Moreover, the (alleged) good woman in the beautiful city I heard as much of as of heaven, had sent my sister the gift, and none to me. Furthermore, and worst of all, my sister paraded the gift before my angry, miserable eyes, and, out of my mother’s hearing, taunted me with the evident fact that “nobody cared for a little girl whose hands were dirty and whose hair was never smooth.” I was barely three years old. My sister was a prodigy of learning in the estimation of our acquaintances, and nearer six than five. I took in the case with extraordinary clearness of judgment and soreness of heart, and meditated revenge.
Watching an opportunity when mother, nurse, and sister were out of the way, I stole into the office-cottage, possessed myself of the hated puppet, who had been put into my bed for an afternoon nap—lying there for all the world like “a sure-enough baby,” with her eyes fast shut—and bore her off behind the house. There I stripped off her gay attire; twisted a string about her neck; contrived—nobody could ever tell how—to fasten one end of the cord to the lowest bough of a peach-tree, armed myself with a stout switch, and lashed every grain of sawdust out of the dangling effigy.
I recollect that my sister, rushing to the scene of action, dared not approach the fury into which I had been transformed, but stood aloof, screaming and wringing her hands. I have no recollection of my mother’s interference, or of the chastisement which, I have been told, was inflicted with the self-same rod that had mangled the detested doll into a shapeless rag. In my berserker rage I probably did not hear scolding or feel stripes.
My father rented the house vacated by the Braggs, finding the daily ride to and from the store too long in the short winter days. Soon after our return to our old quarters, another boy was born to the bereaved parents—my brother Herbert. He was but a few days old when “Grandma” McQuie and her two daughters called to inquire after mother and child, and carried me off with them, I suppose to get me out of the way of nurse and mother. My whole body was a-tingle with excitement when I found myself snugly tucked up in shawls on the back seat of the roomy chariot, beside the dear old lady, and rolling down the road. We had not gone far before she untied and took off my bonnet, and tied over my curly
