At the Foot of the Rainbow
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Gene Stratton Porter >> At the Foot of the Rainbow
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13 At the Foot of the Rainbow
by Gene Stratton-Porter
"And the bow shall be set in the cloud; and I will look upon it,
that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and
every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth."
--GENESIS, ix-16.
Contents
I. THE RAT-CATCHERS OF THE WABASH
II. RUBEN O'KHAYAM AND THE MILK PAIL
III. THE FIFTY COONS OF THE CANOPER
IV. WHEN THE KINGFISHER AND THE BLACK BASS CAME HOME
V. WHEN THE RAINBOW SET ITS ARCH IN THE SKY
VI. THE HEART OF MARY MALONE
VII. THE APPLE OF DISCORD BECOMES A JOINTED ROD
VIII. WHEN THE BLACK BASS STRUCK
IX. WHEN JIMMY MALONE CAME TO CONFESSION
X. DANNIE'S RENUNCIATION
XI. THE POT OF GOLD
GENE STRATTON-PORTER
A LITTLE STORY OF HER LIFE AND WORK
For several years Doubleday, Page & Company have been receiving
repeated requests for information about the life and books of
Gene Stratton-Porter. Her fascinating nature work with bird,
flower, and moth, and the natural wonders of the Limberlost
Swamp, made famous as the scene of her nature romances, all have
stirred much curiosity among readers everywhere.
Mrs. Porter did not possess what has been called "an aptitude for
personal publicity." Indeed, up to the present, she has
discouraged quite successfully any attempt to stress the personal
note. It is practically impossible, however, to do the kind of
work she has done--to make genuine contributions to natural
science by her wonderful field work among birds, insects, and
flowers, and then, through her romances, to bring several hundred
thousands of people to love and understand nature in a way they
never did before-- without arousing a legitimate interest in her
own history, her ideals, her methods of work, and all that
underlies the structure of her unusual achievement.
Her publishers have felt the pressure of this growing interest
and it was at their request that she furnished the data for a
biographical sketch that was to be written of her. But when this
actually came to hand, the present compiler found that the author
had told a story so much more interesting than anything he could
write of her, that it became merely a question of how little need
be added.
The following pages are therefore adapted from what might be
styled the personal record of Gene Stratton-Porter. This will
account for the very intimate picture of family life in the
Middle West for some years following the Civil War.
Mark Stratton, the father of Gene Stratton-Porter, described his
wife, at the time of their marriage, as a "ninety-pound bit of
pink porcelain, pink as a wild rose, plump as a partridge,
having a big rope of bright brown hair, never ill a day in her
life, and bearing the loveliest name ever given a woman--Mary."
He further added that "God fashioned her heart to be gracious,
her body to be the mother of children, and as her especial gift
of Grace, he put Flower Magic into her fingers." Mary Stratton
was the mother of twelve lusty babies, all of whom she reared
past eight years of age, losing two a little over that, through
an attack of scarlet fever with whooping cough; too ugly a
combination for even such a wonderful mother as she. With this
brood on her hands she found time to keep an immaculate house, to
set a table renowned in her part of the state, to entertain with
unfailing hospitality all who came to her door, to beautify her
home with such means as she could command, to embroider and
fashion clothing by hand for her children; but her great gift
was conceded by all to be the making of things to grow. At that
she was wonderful. She started dainty little vines and climbing
plants from tiny seeds she found in rice and coffee. Rooted
things she soaked in water, rolled in fine sand, planted
according to habit, and they almost never failed to justify her
expectations. She even grew trees and shrubs from slips and
cuttings no one else would have thought of trying to cultivate,
her last resort being to cut a slip diagonally, insert the lower
end in a small potato, and plant as if rooted. And it nearly
always grew!
There is a shaft of white stone standing at her head in a
cemetery that belonged to her on a corner of her husband's land;
but to Mrs. Porter's mind her mother's real monument is a cedar
of Lebanon which she set in the manner described above. The cedar
tops the brow of a little hill crossing the grounds. She carried
two slips from Ohio, where they were given to her by a man who
had brought the trees as tiny things from the holy Land. She
planted both in this way, one in her dooryard and one in her
cemetery. The tree on the hill stands thirty feet tall now,
topping all others, and has a trunk two feet in circumference.
Mrs. Porter's mother was of Dutch extraction, and like all Dutch
women she worked her special magic with bulbs, which she favoured
above other flowers. Tulips, daffodils, star flowers, lilies,
dahlias, little bright hyacinths, that she called "blue bells,"
she dearly loved. From these she distilled exquisite perfume by
putting clusters, & time of perfect bloom, in bowls lined with
freshly made, unsalted butter, covering them closely, and cutting
the few drops of extract thus obtained with alcohol. "She could
do more different things," says the author, "and finish them all
in a greater degree of perfection than any other woman I have
ever known. If I were limited to one adjective in describing her,
`capable' would be the word."
The author's father was descended from a long line of ancestors
of British blood. he was named for, and traced his origin to,
that first Mark Stratton who lived in New York, married the
famous beauty, Anne Hutchinson, and settled on Stratton Island,
afterward corrupted to Staten, according to family tradition.
From that point back for generations across the sea he followed
his line to the family of Strattons of which the Earl of
Northbrooke is the present head. To his British traditions and
the customs of his family, Mark Stratton clung with rigid
tenacity, never swerving from his course a particle under the
influence of environment or association. All his ideas were
clear-cut; no man could influence him against his better
judgment. He believed in God, in courtesy, in honour, and
cleanliness, in beauty, and in education. He used to say that he
would rather see a child of his the author of a book of which he
could be proud, than on the throne of England, which was the
strongest way he knew to express himself. His very first earnings
he spent for a book; when other men rested, he read; all his life
he was a student of extraordinarily tenacious memory. He
especially loved history: Rollands, Wilson's Outlines, Hume,
Macauley, Gibbon, Prescott, and Bancroft, he could quote from all
of them paragraphs at a time contrasting the views of different
writers on a given event, and remembering dates with unfailing
accuracy. "He could repeat the entire Bible," says Mrs.
Stratton-Porter, "giving chapters and verses, save the books of
Generations; these he said `were a waste of gray matter to
learn.' I never knew him to fail in telling where any verse
quoted to him was to be found in the Bible." And she adds: "I was
almost afraid to make these statements, although there are many
living who can corroborate them, until John Muir published the
story of his boyhood days, and in it I found the history of such
rearing as was my father's, told of as the customary thing among
the children of Muir's time; and I have referred many inquirers
as to whether this feat were possible, to the Muir book."
All his life, with no thought of fatigue or of inconvenience to
himself, Mark Stratton travelled miles uncounted to share what he
had learned with those less fortunately situated, by delivering
sermons, lectures, talks on civic improvement and politics. To
him the love of God could be shown so genuinely in no other way
as in the love of his fellowmen. He worshipped beauty: beautiful
faces, souls, hearts, beautiful landscapes, trees, animals,
flowers. He loved colour: rich, bright colour, and every
variation down to the faintest shadings. He was especially fond
of red, and the author carefully keeps a cardinal silk
handkerchief that he was carrying when stricken with apoplexy at
the age of seventy-eight. "It was so like him," she comments, "to
have that scrap of vivid colour in his pocket. He never was too
busy to fertilize a flower bed or to dig holes for the setting of
a tree or bush. A word constantly on his lips was `tidy.' It
applied equally to a woman, a house, a field, or a barn lot. He
had a streak of genius in his make-up: the genius of large
appreciation. Over inspired Biblical passages, over great books,
over sunlit landscapes, over a white violet abloom in deep shade,
over a heroic deed of man, I have seen his brow light up, his
eyes shine."
Mrs. Porter tells us that her father was constantly reading aloud
to his children and to visitors descriptions of the great deeds
of men. Two "hair-raisers" she especially remembers with
increased heart-beats to this day were the story of John Maynard,
who piloted a burning boat to safety while he slowly roasted at
the wheel. She says the old thrill comes back when she recalls
the inflection of her father's voice as he would cry in imitation
of the captain: "John Maynard!" and then give the reply. "Aye,
aye, sir!" His other until it sank to a mere gasp: favourite was
the story of Clemanthe, and her lover's immortal answer to her
question: "Shall we meet again?"
To this mother at forty-six, and this father at fifty, each at
intellectual top-notch, every faculty having been stirred for
years by the dire stress of Civil War, and the period immediately
following, the author was born. From childhood she recalls
"thinking things which she felt should be saved," and frequently
tugging at her mother's skirts and begging her to "set down" what
the child considered stories and poems. Most of these were some
big fact in nature that thrilled her, usually expressed in
Biblical terms; for the Bible was read twice a day before the
family and helpers, and an average of three services were
attended on Sunday.
Mrs. Porter says that her first all-alone effort was printed in
wabbly letters on the fly-leaf of an old grammar. It was
entitled: "Ode to the Moon." "Not," she comments, "that I had an
idea what an `ode' was, other than that I had heard it discussed
in the family together with different forms of poetic expression.
The spelling must have been by proxy: but I did know the words I
used, what they meant, and the idea I was trying to convey.
"No other farm was ever quite so lovely as the one on which I was
born after this father and mother had spent twenty-five years
beautifying it," says the author. It was called "Hopewell" after
the home of some of her father's British ancestors. The natural
location was perfect, the land rolling and hilly, with several
flowing springs and little streams crossing it in three
directions, while plenty of forest still remained. The days of
pioneer struggles were past. The roads were smooth and level as
floors, the house and barn commodious; the family rode abroad in
a double carriage trimmed in patent leather, drawn by a matched
team of gray horses, and sometimes the father "speeded a little"
for the delight of the children. "We had comfortable clothing,"
says Mrs. Porter, "and were getting our joy from life without
that pinch of anxiety which must have existed in the beginning,
although I know that father and mother always held steady, and
took a large measure of joy from life in passing."
Her mother's health, which always had been perfect, broke about
the time of the author's first remembrance due to typhoid fever
contracted after nursing three of her children through it. She
lived for several years, but with continual suffering, amounting
at times to positive torture.
So it happened, that led by impulse and aided by an escape from
the training given her sisters, instead of "sitting on a cushion
and sewing a fine seam"--the threads of the fabric had to be
counted and just so many allowed to each stitch!--this youngest
child of a numerous household spent her waking hours with the
wild. She followed her father and the boys afield, and when tired
out slept on their coats in fence corners, often awaking with shy
creatures peering into her face. She wandered where she pleased,
amusing herself with birds, flowers, insects, and plays she
invented. "By the day," writes the author, "I trotted from one
object which attracted me to another, singing a little song of
made-up phrases about everything I saw while I waded catching
fish, chasing butterflies over clover fields, or following a bird
with a hair in its beak; much of the time I carried the
inevitable baby for a woman-child, frequently improvised from an
ear of corn in the silk, wrapped in catalpa leaf blankets."
She had a corner of the garden under a big Bartlett pear tree for
her very own, and each spring she began by planting radishes and
lettuce when the gardening was done; and before these had time to
sprout she set the same beds full of spring flowers, and so
followed out the season. She made special pets of the birds,
locating nest after nest, and immediately projecting herself into
the daily life of the occupants. "No one," she says, "ever taught
me more than that the birds were useful, a gift of God for our
protection from insect pests on fruit and crops; and a gift of
Grace in their beauty and music, things to be rigidly protected.
From this cue I evolved the idea myself that I must be extremely
careful, for had not my father tied a 'kerchief over my mouth
when he lifted me for a peep into the nest of the humming-bird,
and did he not walk softly and whisper when he approached the
spot? So I stepped lightly, made no noise, and watched until I
knew what a mother bird fed her young before I began dropping
bugs, worms, crumbs, and fruit into little red mouths that opened
at my tap on the nest quite as readily as at the touch of the
feet of the mother bird."
In the nature of this child of the out-of-doors there ran a fibre
of care for wild things. It was instinct with her to go slowly,
to touch lightly, to deal lovingly with every living thing:
flower, moth, bird, or animal. She never gathered great handfuls
of frail wild flowers, carried them an hour and threw them away.
If she picked any, she took only a few, mostly to lay on her
mother's pillow--for she had a habit of drawing comfort from a
cinnamon pink or a trillium laid where its delicate fragrance
reached her with every breath. "I am quite sure," Mrs. Porter
writes, "that I never in my life, in picking flowers, dragged up
the plant by the roots, as I frequently saw other people do. I
was taught from infancy to CUT a bloom I wanted. My regular habit
was to lift one plant of each kind, especially if it were a
species new to me, and set it in my wild-flower garden."
To the birds and flowers the child added moths and butterflies,
because she saw them so frequently, the brilliance of colour in
yard and garden attracting more than could be found elsewhere. So
she grew with the wild, loving, studying, giving all her time. "I
fed butterflies sweetened water and rose leaves inside the screen
of a cellar window," Mrs. Porter tells us; "doctored all the sick
and wounded birds and animals the men brought me from afield;
made pets of the baby squirrels and rabbits they carried in for
my amusement; collected wild flowers; and as I grew older,
gathered arrow points and goose quills for sale in Fort Wayne. So
I had the first money I ever earned."
Her father and mother had strong artistic tendencies, although
they would have scoffed at the idea themselves, yet the manner in
which they laid off their fields, the home they built, the
growing things they preserved, the way they planted, the life
they led, all go to prove exactly that thing. Their bush--and
vine-covered fences crept around the acres they owned in a strip
of gaudy colour; their orchard lay in a valley, a square of apple
trees in the centre widely bordered by peach, so that it appeared
at bloom time like a great pink-bordered white blanket on the
face of earth. Swale they might have drained, and would not, made
sheets of blue flag, marigold and buttercups. From the home you
could not look in any direction without seeing a picture of
beauty.
"Last spring," the author writes in a recent letter, "I went back
with my mind fully made up to buy that land at any reasonable
price, restore it to the exact condition in which I knew it as a
child, and finish my life there. I found that the house had been
burned, killing all the big trees set by my mother's hands
immediately surrounding it. The hills were shorn and ploughed
down, filling and obliterating the creeks and springs. Most of
the forest had been cut, and stood in corn. My old catalpa in the
fence corner beside the road and the Bartlett pear under which I
had my wild-flower garden were all that was left of the dooryard,
while a few gnarled apple trees remained of the orchard, which
had been reset in another place. The garden had been moved, also
the lanes; the one creek remaining out of three crossed the
meadow at the foot of the orchard. It flowed a sickly current
over a dredged bed between bare, straight banks. The whole place
seemed worse than a dilapidated graveyard to me. All my love and
ten times the money I had at command never could have put back
the face of nature as I knew it on that land."
As a child the author had very few books, only three of her own
outside of school books. "The markets did not afford the miracles
common with the children of today," she adds. "Books are now so
numerous, so cheap, and so bewildering in colour and make-up,
that I sometimes think our children are losing their perspective
and caring for none of them as I loved my few plain little ones
filled with short story and poem, almost no illustration. I had a
treasure house in the school books of my elders, especially the
McGuffey series of Readers from One to Six. For pictures I was
driven to the Bible, dictionary, historical works read by my
father, agricultural papers, and medical books about cattle and
sheep.
"Near the time of my mother's passing we moved from Hopewell to
the city of Wabash in order that she might have constant medical
attention, and the younger children better opportunities for
schooling. Here we had magazines and more books in which I was
interested. The one volume in which my heart was enwrapt was a
collection of masterpieces of fiction belonging to my eldest
sister. It contained `Paul and Virginia,' `Undine,' `Picciola,'
`The Vicar of Wakefield,' `Pilgrim's Progress,' and several
others I soon learned by heart, and the reading and rereading of
those exquisitely expressed and conceived stories may have done
much in forming high conceptions of what really constitutes
literature and in furthering the lofty ideals instilled by my
parents. One of these stories formed the basis of my first
publicly recognized literary effort."
Reared by people who constantly pointed out every natural beauty,
using it wherever possible to drive home a precept, the child
lived out-of-doors with the wild almost entirely. If she reported
promptly three times a day when the bell rang at meal time, with
enough clothing to constitute a decent covering, nothing more was
asked until the Sabbath. To be taken from such freedom, her feet
shod, her body restricted by as much clothing as ever had been
worn on Sunday, shut up in a schoolroom, and set to droning over
books, most of which she detested, was the worst punishment ever
inflicted upon her she declares. She hated mathematics in any
form and spent all her time on natural science, language, and
literature. "Friday afternoon," writes Mrs. Porter, "was always
taken up with an exercise called `rhetoricals,' a misnomer as a
rule, but let that pass. Each week pupils of one of the four
years furnished entertainment for the assembled high school and
faculty. Our subjects were always assigned, and we cordially
disliked them. This particular day I was to have a paper on
`Mathematical Law.'
"I put off the work until my paper had been called for several
times, and so came to Thursday night with excuses and not a line.
I was told to bring my work the next morning without fail. I went
home in hot anger. Why in all this beautiful world, would they
not allow me to do something I could do, and let any one of four
members of my class who revelled in mathematics do my subject?
That evening I was distracted. `I can't do a paper on
mathematics, and I won't!' I said stoutly; `but I'll do such a
paper on a subject I can write about as will open their foolish
eyes and make them see how wrong they are.'"
Before me on the table lay the book I loved, the most wonderful
story in which was `Picciola' by Saintine. Instantly I began to
write. Breathlessly I wrote for hours. I exceeded our limit ten
times over. The poor Italian Count, the victim of political
offences, shut by Napoleon from the wonderful grounds, mansion,
and life that were his, restricted to the bare prison walls of
Fenestrella, deprived of books and writing material, his one
interest in life became a sprout of green, sprung, no doubt, from
a seed dropped by a passing bird, between the stone flagging of
the prison yard before his window. With him I had watched over it
through all the years since I first had access to the book; with
him I had prayed for it. I had broken into a cold sweat of fear
when the jailer first menaced it; I had hated the wind that bent
it roughly, and implored the sun. I had sung a paean of joy at
its budding, and worshipped in awe before its thirty perfect
blossoms. The Count had named it `Picciola'--the little one--to
me also it was a personal possession. That night we lived the
life of our `little one' over again, the Count and I, and never
were our anxieties and our joys more poignant.
"Next morning," says Mrs. Porter, "I dared my crowd to see how
long they could remain on the grounds, and yet reach the assembly
room before the last toll of the bell. This scheme worked.
Coming in so late the principal opened exercises without
remembering my paper. Again, at noon, I was as late as I dared
be, and I escaped until near the close of the exercises, through
which I sat in cold fear. When my name was reached at last the
principal looked at me inquiringly and then announced my
inspiring mathematical subject. I arose, walked to the front, and
made my best bow. Then I said: `I waited until yesterday because
I knew absolutely nothing about my subject'--the audience
laughed--`and I could find nothing either here or in the library
at home, so last night I reviewed Saintine's masterpiece,
"Picciola."'
"Then instantly I began to read. I was almost paralyzed at my
audacity, and with each word I expected to hear a terse little
interruption. Imagine my amazement when I heard at the end of the
first page: `Wait a minute!' Of course I waited, and the
principal left the room. A moment later she reappeared
accompanied by the superintendent of the city schools. `Begin
again,' she said. `Take your time.'
"I was too amazed to speak. Then thought came in a rush. My paper
was good. It was as good as I had believed it. It was better than
I had known. I did go on! We took that assembly room and the
corps of teachers into our confidence, the Count and I, and told
them all that was in our hearts about a little flower that sprang
between the paving stones of a prison yard. The Count and I were
free spirits. From the book I had learned that. He got into
political trouble through it, and I had got into mathematical
trouble, and we told our troubles. One instant the room was in
laughter, the next the boys bowed their heads, and the girls who
had forgotten their handkerchiefs cried in their aprons. For
almost sixteen big foolscap pages I held them, and I was eager to
go on and tell them more about it when I reached the last line.
Never again was a subject forced upon me."
After this incident of her schooldays, what had been inclination
before was aroused to determination and the child neglected her
lessons to write. A volume of crude verse fashioned after the
metre of Meredith's "Lucile," a romantic book in rhyme, and two
novels were the fruits of this youthful ardour. Through the
sickness and death of a sister, the author missed the last three
months of school, but, she remarks, "unlike my schoolmates, I
studied harder after leaving school than ever before and in a
manner that did me real good. The most that can be said of what
education I have is that it is the very best kind in the world
for me; the only possible kind that would not ruin a person of my
inclinations. The others of my family had been to college; I
always have been too thankful for words that circumstances
intervened which saved my brain from being run through a groove
in company with dozens of others of widely different tastes and
mentality. What small measure of success I have had has come
through preserving my individual point of view, method of
expression, and following in after life the Spartan regulations
of my girlhood home. Whatever I have been able to do, has been
done through the line of education my father saw fit to give me,
and through his and my mother's methods of rearing me.
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