The Cords of Vanity | Page 4

your mother
cried you always cried too, and couldn't stop, not even when you
wanted to, not even when she promised you five cents, and it all made
you horribly uncomfortable.
I knew that the big Bible on the parlor table was God's book. Probably
God read it very often, since anybody would be proud of having written
a book as big as that and would want to look at it every day. So I
tiptoed into the darkened parlor. I use the word advisedly, for there was
not at this period any drawing-room in Lichfield, and besides, a
drawing-room is an entirely different matter.
Everywhere the room was cool, and, since the shades were down, the
outlines of the room's contents were uncomfortably dubious; for just
where the table stood had been, five days ago, a big and oddly-shaped
black box with beautiful silver handles; and Uncle George had lifted
me so that I could see through the pane of glass, which was a part of
this funny box, while an infinity of decorous people rustled and
whispered....
I remember knowing they were "company" and thinking they coughed
and sniffed because they were sorry that my father was dead. In the
light of knowledge latterly acquired, I attribute these actions to the then
prevalent weather, for even now I recall how stiflingly the room smelt
of flowers--particularly of magnolia blossoms--and of rubber and of
wet umbrellas. For my own part, I was not at all sorry, though of course

I pretended to be, since I had always known that as a rule my father
whipped me because he had just quarreled with my mother, and that he
then enjoyed whipping me.
I desired, in fine, that he should stay dead and possess his crown of
glory in Heaven, which was reassuringly remote, and that my mother
should stop crying. So I slipped my note into the Apocrypha....
I felt that somewhere in the room was God and that God was watching
me, but I was not afraid. Yet I entertained, in common with most
children, a nebulous distrust of this mysterious Person, a distrust of
which I was particularly conscious on winter nights when the gas had
been turned down to a blue fleck, and the shadow of the mantelpiece
flickered and plunged on the ceiling, and the clock ticked louder and
louder, in prediction (I suspected) of some terrible event very close at
hand.
Then you remembered such unpleasant matters as Elisha and his bears,
and those poor Egyptian children who had never even spoken to Moses,
and that uncomfortably abstemious lady, in the fat blue-covered
Arabian Nights, who ate nothing but rice, grain by grain--in the
daytime.... And you called Mammy, and said you were very thirsty and
wanted a glass of water, please.
To-day, though, while acutely conscious of that awful inspection, and
painstakingly careful not to look behind me, I was not, after all,
precisely afraid. If God were a bit like other people I knew He would
say, "What an odd child!" and I liked to have people say that. Still,
there was sunlight in the hall, and lots of sunlight, not just long and
dusty shreds of sunlight, and I felt more comfortable when I was back
in the hall.
2--Reading I lay flat upon my stomach, having found that posture most
conformable to the practice of reading, and I considered the cover of
this slim, green book; the name of John Charteris, stamped thereon in
fat-bellied letters of gold, meant less to me than it was destined to
signify thereafter.
A deal of puzzling matter I found in this book, but in my memory,
always, one fantastic passage clung as a burr to sheep's wool. That
fable, too, meant less to me than it was destined to signify thereafter,
when the author of it was used to declare that he had, unwittingly,
written it about me. Then I read again this

Fable of the Foolish Prince "As to all earlier happenings I choose in
this place to be silent. Anterior adventures he had known of the right
princely sort. But concerning his traffic with Schamir, the chief
talisman, and how through its aid he won to the Sun's Sister for a little
while; and concerning his dealings with the handsome Troll-wife (in
which affair the cat he bribed with butter and the elm-tree he had
decked with ribbons helped him); and with that beautiful and dire
Thuringian woman whose soul was a red mouse: we have in this place
naught to do. Besides, the Foolish Prince had put aside such commerce
when the Fairy came to guide him; so he, at least, could not in equity
have grudged the same privilege to his historian.
"Thus, the Fairy leading, the Foolish Prince went skipping along