Narrow Lives : Part 2

Girls and Women
by Harriet E. Paine

(Page 16 of 18)

She was determined that her sisters' lives should not be trammeled by her weakness. The fact that she could not go to a place was all the more reason why her sisters should go and tell her about it. One sister was a teacher who at first wished to take the neighboring district school rather than a much finer position in a distant city simply for the sake of being constantly with the beloved invalid. But the latter would not allow this. "I should never be able to go West myself, you know," she said cheerfully, "but if you go and I have your letters every week, I should know exactly what it is like. And you will be so much more entertaining in vacations than if you stay at home."

By the same course of reasoning the sick sister persuaded the teacher to go abroad to study a year when the opportunity came. "The photographs you bring home will mean a great deal more to me than any I could buy," she said. "I should almost feel as if I had seen the pictures themselves." Every letter which came from the absent sister did enclose some imponderable not mounted photograph, with comments. The sister at home, studying these one by one, learned almost more of the meaning of the pictures than the one who saw their visible beauty. One of my friends says, "There is nothing which so destroys the esthetic sense as to see too many beautiful pictures at once." This truth, perhaps, explains why so many people see all the great paintings of the world and yet have so little appreciation of any of them. At all events, our invalid did gain both happiness and spiritual insight from the hints of beauty she found in these humble little photographs.

I have before said that she was not left without companions. She also had friends in the highest sense. Having the leisure to make friendship a chief business of life she was able to be so much to her friends that however busy they might be they could not afford to neglect her. The day of leisurely letter writing seems to have passed by. But she had long hours by herself when she could write out the good and pleasant things she was thinking about. Her letters were lovely, and strong, and helpful, and each was written with such exquisite penmanship, with such easy lines of beauty, that it was like a work of art in itself.

She was not obliged even to forego the happiness of love. She had a young lover at the time her health failed. He would not believe at first that there was no cure for her. Her instinct had been so true that she had chosen a perfectly loyal lover whose love could not be shaken by misfortune. At last he was himself attacked by a terrible disease, and it was seldom possible for the two to meet after that. But they faced their trouble together. They said that if the time should ever come when they could be married they should rejoice; but if it never came they would be all they could to each other. Sometimes even letters were impossible between them, but their perfect reliance upon each other was a constant source of strength and happiness, and their rare interviews were true radiant points in their lives.

Of course no one would think of calling this woman's life a narrow one, and yet the only reason it was not so lay in herself.

I know another woman whose poverty would seem to many people an effectual bar to any breadth of life. As poverty is a relative term, I will state definitely that she receives less than three hundred dollars a year for teaching a difficult village school, and that the whole support of her frail and delicate mother has fallen upon her except that the two together own their heavily mortgaged little home. A servant being out of the question, she rises very early in the morning to do as much of the heavier housework as possible. Her washing, of course, has to be done on Saturday. Some of us in such a case would be content with a low standard of cleanliness - but she has an ideal, and her house and herself fairly sparkle with neatness. Her exquisite cooking is a special grace of economy, for it makes it possible that a frugal table should seem to be richly spread. Of course she and her mother must do their own sewing, and they do it so well that they always have the air of being dressed as ladies, with great simplicity, to be sure, but with excellent taste.

At this point, I fancy my readers will make one of two comments. They will say, "She must have an iron constitution," or "She must spend all her time on material things. She cannot have a moment for books or society or travel."

Now she has not an iron constitution. She suffered in her youth from a wasting disease, and her physician says she was nearer death than any person he ever knew to recover. This disease has left its traces upon her. There is hardly a year when she does not have to be out of school a week or two for illness, and of course sick headaches and trifling ailments of that kind have to be met every few days.

Nor is it true that the daily necessities absorb her whole life. Obviously, she cannot be a great reader, or rather it is fortunate she is not so, for if she spent all her little leisure over books, she would miss much that is inspiring in her life. But she does care for books, and particularly for the best books, though her school education was limited. She reads a tiny daily paper and always takes a leading magazine. She owns Shakespeare and Scott and Shelley, and knows them almost by heart. She borrows the best of her friends' books, and occasionally buys a cheap classic.

She always has some volume of biography or travel from the Public Library, which she reads leisurely with her mother perhaps. It may take her a month to read some little volume of two or three hundred pages - such a volume as Bradford Torrey's "Rambler's Lease," or Dr. Emerson's memoir of his father - and possibly she may not be able in the end to quote any more fluently from these books than another who reads them through in an afternoon, although I think she usually is able, but her advantage is that she thoroughly enjoys the flavor of every sentence; her reading stimulates and encourages her and makes her happy.

She was one of the founders of the Book Club in the village, and as the Public Library grew out of that, there was considerable work to be done by some of the members, and of this she did much more than her share.

She is one of the most active members also of the Reading Club and the Natural History Club, two organizations which combine culture and society quite as effectually as the more ambitious circles in our cities. Her house is always hospitably open to either of these clubs, for she loves society and wishes to make the most of all the intelligent people in the place who belong to one or the other of them. Her sociability, however, carries her farther. She knows everybody in the town well enough for a bow and smile in passing, and that is no small achievement in a modern village where the population is so fluctuating. I would suggest that we try for a moment to recall the difference it makes in the cheerfulness of our day whether all the people we meet have a pleasant word for us or not; and then, I think, we should see that her influence is by no means slight or worthless. Perhaps it is a little candle, but it throws its beams far.

Copyright, 1890 by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., All rights reserved.