Everybody's Autobiography (20 page)

Naturally Leo and I spent all the money we had on books, I still like that only now I buy only the cheapest detective and adventure stories and then I bought the most expensive history and poetry and literature. As I say incomes are incomes and counting is counting and reading is reading. Why not.

And so our life in California came to an end and we left that is Leo and I left and my sister left. Mike and Simon stayed on.

Years before Leo and I were to go East with my mother. I was about nine then and he eleven. We bought as many books as we could to take along. We bought Jules Verne lots of them and then we did not go my mother went but we did not go but we had already bought the books to read in traveling. There was the Cryptogram and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Children of Captain Grant we had already had that in German, we seemed to have Jules Verne in everything except in French of course I only read him in English and the English at the North Pole and The Mysterious Island we had bought all these for
traveling and Around the World in Eighty Days. You can read a book over and over again until you remember everything and even then you can read it over again if you begin at the beginning. That is very important about reading a book over again you must really begin at the beginning. In that way you can read it over and over again.

I do not know why we did not go East with my mother, I suppose there was something instead we went to Marysville and stayed with the relations of a governess we had then. In The Making of Americans I have told about all the governesses we had and this was the one who finally married a baker. I have written a very good description of her. Marysville was hot and there were mosquitoes and the beds were made of feathers and there were lots of animals. Anyway we came home in the autumn, and when my mother came back she was never well again. Mike was at that time in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins University and he wanted to marry some one there and my mother wanted this to happen she liked anything to happen, but it did not happen and it was then that Mike wrote the poem that Leo and I found and it said that he always had looked at a plot of grass and it had been a plot of grass to him and then he met the one he loved and then when he looked at the plot of grass there were birds and butterflies on the plot of grass and before that there never had been. That was what love was. Then we also found letters he had written or she had and they consisted of a great deal of Latin and hopes of Latin. We enjoyed finding them. This was after Mike came back from the East and he had come out with the G. A. R. celebration, you had cheap tickets if you belonged to that organization. Naturally Mike was much too young for that but he grew a beard to make him look like one. Perhaps he had the right as the son of one, or his uncles may have been of them although as a matter of fact the one who went all through the war fought on the Southern side. My mother used to tell us stories of Baltimore and the Northern
soldiers being stoned as they passed from one station to the other you always had to change in Baltimore. The Civil war seems far away now but then it seemed quite near. If your grandfather was an oldish man when your mother was born and you are the youngest of a number of children it is extraordinary how few generations can cover the history of civilization. Everything is as exciting as it can be but not that.

Any time is the time to make a poem. The snow and sun below.

When they came to see us the relations, from New York and Baltimore and they said they loved to read we were always surprised that they had not read anything. It did not worry us but it surprised us. Nothing about them worried us and that was all about them that surprised us. Really nothing was very surprising or worrying just then. We had no parents and each one of us was where each one was. That was what we were doing.

We all stayed in San Francisco for a year and then we all went somewhere. Bertha and I went to Baltimore and Leo went to Harvard. Mike stayed in San Francisco and so did Simon. Mike said Simon could be a gripman on any car except one of the lines that belonged to their system and Simon was one for years on the California street line, he finally only drove on Sundays and he was even so big he could hardly stand in between where he had to stand and his pockets were always full of candy for any one and cigars for any one and he went on until the fire and after that he gave it up and went fishing, but Mike had also left San Francisco by then he was in Europe then and so Simon was the only one left in California.

When we left San Francisco for Baltimore we left Mike all alone Simon did not count and Mike was alone, later he married but at that time he was alone and he had to save everything for all of us and he did it but he never knew quite how he did it.

Street railroads do not exist any more they have taken the last one off of Paris but then they did exist and we all used them, there
was no other way to go up and down except to walk and in San Francisco and everywhere distances were too long to always walk and horses were slow and street railways were quicker. To be sure street railways once were drawn by horses but except in Baltimore and many other places that was almost over. Anyway in San Francisco there always had been street railways. Then there was the dummy, the dummy had four seats in front almost like a cow catcher and Alice Toklas likes the story of when she and three others were together they were sitting on the front of the dummy, the dummy gave a jerk, it often did, and Ada said I almost fell off the dummy, who almost fell off the dummy said the other three, I almost fell off the dummy said Ada. Alice Toklas still says and who almost fell off the dummy.

Well anyway, when my father came to California he had the money that he had made with his brother in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that is how we all happened to be born there, and then when the sisters-in-law were no longer able to get along together, one brother went to New York and we all went to Europe. My father was interested in everything and when we all came back from Europe we all went out to California. There my father waited a considerable while before he was interested in anything and then he became interested in street railroading. There were at that time several systems which sometimes transferred to another one but each one was by itself and one was called the Union, that was the one that my father came finally to become the vice-president and of course we all heard all about everything the way anybody does without listening, the word franchise was a common word.

Then my father was dead and Mike was doing something, we used to go to see him do it and we knew George Leroy was to help him. George Leroy was the French brother who was not a wicked Frenchman like his brother Eugene. At any rate he was a large and quiet Frenchman and he used to come and sit and neither he nor Mike said anything. That was much later after everything was done
that I saw them sitting that was after Mike was married and everything had been done and I came from the East to California to visit them.

After we went away Mike's troubles really began.

My father had been one of the early ones to believe in consolidation and he had worked out a complete system for the street railroads of San Francisco. But he was a man who frightened any one because he was too impatient to finish what was not yet begun. And so he was vice-president of a small part of the system of San Francisco street railroads. When he was dead naturally what was small was still smaller and everything else was getting bigger. Mike who like his mother's family dislikes responsibility and dislikes business it makes him nervous when anything has to be done knew that it had to be done. Anybody wants to do what Mike wants them to do and so everybody did but what could they do. How it was done nobody ever knew. Mike's own statement was that he knew if it was not done he had us all on his hands because none of us could earn anything not even Simon enough to live on and something had to be done and so although the Southern Pacific street railroads could have had the Mission line for nothing they took it on on an equal footing. Mike persuaded them. Then afterwards when they realized what had been done they were so impressed by him that they made him manager of the whole system and that was frightful for him because it does make him nervous to decide anything besides he likes to be very busy just arranging any little thing, but he was manager for two years and then he decided to either go to Paris or to the country and by that time he did come. When it was all done he said now at last it was satisfactory, we had enough to live on if we lived very quietly and we all did live very quietly until the war began, other things have happened since but we did live very very quietly until the war began.

And so we all left San Francisco, Simon died there still fat and
fishing, and Mike has gone back there again now to bring up a little grandson and Leo is in Florence and I am in Bilignin.

It was in Bilignin that I finally decided to go to America again after years of not having been.

So we were in Bilignin and I was quarreling with Mr. Bradley about lecturing. We were here and we had as a servant an Indo-Chinaman.

One thing I can always remember going back again to East Oakland is wearing gloves and books. Bertha was being put at another school and I went with her and while they were talking to her I was left in the superintendent's room and there was a bookcase there. I was wearing gloves I was just beginning to wear them and I saw a book and I began reading, it was Jane Eyre and I had not read it and I held it tightly and I read it and then suddenly I saw that my thumb had made a black mark on the page I was holding.

I can never touch a book with a glove on and I get very troubled when any one touches a book and they have a glove on. Dirty hands do not dirty a book as much as a glove can.

Knowing so many people is curious and yet everybody knows them. Again and again I have known practically nobody and again and again I have known a great many. Just now here in Bilignin we know a great many a great many more than we know in Paris. This happens again and again.

In East Oakland sometimes we knew a great many and sometimes we did not know any.

It does change very much who you know and when you know them.

In East Oakland we knew the people who lived in the houses near us, the people my father knew knew us but we did not know them their children knew us too but not enough to matter to us or to them. And then we knew others as we had come to know them. You never know just how you will come to know them.
We were in a hotel at Belley and we only knew the people of the hotel and the people from whom we had bought anything. And then one day, we had noticed her several times a very good-looking woman who sat at a table behind us and then being a Frenchwoman one evening she could stand it no longer and she said to us, do you really eat the same fish every evening. Yes we said we did. And I said but you always read a new magazine every evening. Ah yes she said I do. Well we came to know her. Somebody had predicted that we would come to know somebody that summer that had blue eyes and had a garden. And she did she had blue eyes and she had a garden. But a little later and in a simpler manner because we were taken there by some one who had sold us flowers, we met another Frenchwoman and she too had blue eyes and had a garden, so how can you tell what is going to happen.

When we went to live in San Francisco we did not know any one. Naturally everybody we had known in Oakland we did not know any more because we were not in Oakland and in San Francisco we did not know those who knew our father and mother because there was no reason why we should know them even if they wanted to know us and so we did not know any one. Naturally we began to know somebody each one of us naturally would but not very many or very much.

Then we went to Baltimore and there everybody knew us and it did not make any difference about our knowing them since they all knew us.

I have just had a postal card from one of them, I had not seen or heard of him for so many years that there was no use in there having been any years in between. All I knew about him was that he once loaned me five cents because I asked him to pay my car fare and I forgot to pay him back and he never said anything about it but he never forgave me for having forgotten. How did I know that, I do not know but probably somebody told me.

So Baltimore was full of everything which was natural enough
and soon it was natural enough that there were so many and we knew them. Not now but then.

If anything begins then it has begun and if it is begun then it is like that. That is the way it was living in Baltimore and everybody knowing us. Of course they did know us, had not my mother's father and mother well anyway it was a hundred years and my father's people fifty years and so naturally anybody could know us. It was not unnatural and it was not natural, and pretty soon and that is the reason changes in anything are not really exciting pretty soon it was only unnatural if it was natural. I wrote a little story about that when I was at Radcliffe and being still under the influence of George Eliot I called it the Red Deeps.

I was very fond of my aunts and uncles on my mother's side particularly the one named Fanny, Fanny is a nice name, I do not quite know why but it is a nice name.

I was interested in the way she counted, she said the only way that you could save with dignity and then use the money that had accumulated was by counting one one one. You should never say three or even two, you should keep strictly on a basis of one. If you kept counting by ones and had purses in which you kept the separate ones you could always keep everybody well fed and prettily dressed and the furniture renewed whenever the covers grew shabby. And she did. Her husband David Bacharach, was the ugliest man in Baltimore but a pleasant one, he was one of the very early followers of Henry George. I was much pleased on receiving a letter from some one just yesterday about my writing in the Saturday Evening Post about money and they said it would be different if I knew about Henry George. I knew about Henry George. David Bacharach knew all about Henry George every day and any day. I do not think I really am very interested in any of it although I can and do get excited about it. Government is really not interesting, because the reason for it is that it has to go on and if it has to go on then there is no reason for it.