Penelope’s Postscripts

BY
KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN
AUTHOR OF
“PENELOPE’S EXPERIENCES: ENGLAND, IRELAND,”
“TIMOTHY’S QUEST,” “REBECCA OF SUNNYBROOK FARM,” ETC.

HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON      NEW YORK      TORONTO
MCMXV

Printed in Great Britain by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld.,
London and Aylesbury.

CONTENTS

I
PENELOPE IN SWITZERLAND

A DAY IN PESTALOZZI-TOWN

Salemina and I were in Geneva.  If you had ever travelled through Europe with a charming spinster who never sat down at a Continental table d’hôte without being asked by an American vis-à-vis whether she were one of the P.’s of Salem, Massachusetts, you would understand why I call my friend Salemina.  She doesn’t mind it.  She knows that I am simply jealous because I came from a vulgarly large tribe that never had any coat-of-arms, and whose ancestors always sealed their letters with their thumb nails.

Whenever Francesca and I call her “Salemina,” she knows, and we know that she knows, that we are seeing a group of noble ancestors in a sort of halo over her serene and dignified head, so she remains unruffled under her petit nom, inasmuch as the casual public comprehends nothing of its spurious origin and thinks it was given her by her sponsors in baptism.

Francesca, Salemina, and I have very different backgrounds.  The first-named is an extremely pretty person of large income who is travelling with us simply because her relatives think that she will “see Europe” more advantageously under our chaperonage than if she were accompanied by persons of her own age or “set.”

Salemina is a philanthropist and educator of the first rank, and is collecting all sorts of valuable material to put at the service of her own country when she returns to it, which will not be a moment before her letter of credit is exhausted.

I, too, am quasi-educational, for I had a few years of experience in mothering and teaching little waifs and strays of the streets before I began to paint pictures.  Never shall I regret those nerve-racking, back-breaking, heart-warming, weary, and beautiful years, when, all unconsciously, I was learning to paint children by living with them.  Even now the spell still works and it is the curly head, the “shining morning face,” the ready tear, the glancing smile of childhood that enchains me and gives my brush whatever skill it possesses.

We had not been especially high-minded or educational in Switzerland, Salemina and I.  The worm will turn; and there is a point where the improvement of one’s mind seems a farce, and the service of humanity, for the moment, a duty only born of a diseased imagination.

How can one sit on a vine-embowered balcony facing lovely Lake Geneva and think about modern problems,—Improved Tenements, Child Labour, Single Tax, Sweat Shops, and the Right Training of the Rising Civilization?  Blue Lake Geneva!—blue as a woman’s eye, blue as the vault of heaven, dropped into the lap of the green earth like a great sparkling sapphire!  Mont Blanc you know to be just behind the clouds on the other side, and that presently, after hours or days of patient waiting, he may condescend to unveil himself to your worshipful gaze.

“He is wise in his dignity and reserve,” mused Salemina as we sat on the veranda.  “He is all the more sublime because he withdraws himself from time to time.  In fact, if he didn’t see fit to cover himself occasionally, one could neither eat nor sleep, nor do anything but adore and magnify.”

The day before this interview we had sailed to the end of the sapphire lake and visited the “snow-white battlements” of the Castle of Chillon; seen its “seven pillars of Gothic mould,” and its dungeons deep and old, where poor Bonnivard, Byron’s famous “Prisoner of Chillon,” lay captive for so many years, and where Rousseau fixes the catastrophe of his Héloïse.

We had just been to Coppet too; Coppet where the Neckers lived and Madame de Staël was born and lived during many years of her life.  We had wandered through the shaded walks of the magnificent château garden, and strolled along the terrace where the eloquent Corinne had walked with the Schlegels and other famous habitués of her salon.  We had visited Calvin’s house at 11 Rue des Chanoines, Rousseau’s at No. 40 on the Grande Rue, and Voltaire’s at Ferney.

And so we had been living the past, Salemina and I.  But

“Early one morning,
Just as the day was dawning.”

my slumbering conscience rose in Puritan strength and asserted its rights to a hearing.

“Salemina,” said I, as I walked into her room, “this life that we are leading will not do for me any longer.  I have been too much immersed in ruins.  Last night in writing to a friend in New York I uttered the most disloyal and incendiary statements.  I said that I would rather die than live without ruins of some kind; that America was so new, and crude, and spick and span, that it was obnoxious to any æsthetic soul; that our tendency to erect hideous public buildings and then keep them in repair afterwards would make us the butt of ridicule among future generations.  I even proposed the founding of an American Ruin Company, Limited,—in which the stockholders should purchase favourably situated bits of land and erect