Penelope's Postscripts Read online

  Transcribed from the 1915 Hodder and Stoughton edition by David Price,email [email protected]

  [Picture: Book cover]

  Penelope’s Postscripts

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

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  HODDER AND STOUGHTON LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO MCMXV

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  _Printed in Great Britain by Hazell_, _Watson & Viney_, _Ld._, _London and Aylesbury_.

  CONTENTS

  I PAGEPENELOPE IN SWITZERLAND 3 IIPENELOPE IN VENICE 39 IIIPENELOPE’S PRINTS OF WALES 105 IVPENELOPE IN DEVON 119 VPENELOPE AT HOME 165

  IPENELOPE IN SWITZERLAND

  A DAY IN PESTALOZZI-TOWN

  SALEMINA and I were in Geneva. If you had ever travelled through Europewith a charming spinster who never sat down at a Continental _tabled’hôte_ without being asked by an American _vis-à-vis_ whether she wereone of the P.’s of Salem, Massachusetts, you would understand why I callmy friend Salemina. She doesn’t mind it. She knows that I am simplyjealous because I came from a vulgarly large tribe that never had anycoat-of-arms, and whose ancestors always sealed their letters with theirthumb nails.

  Whenever Francesca and I call her “Salemina,” she knows, and we know thatshe knows, that we are seeing a group of noble ancestors in a sort ofhalo over her serene and dignified head, so she remains unruffled underher _petit nom_, inasmuch as the casual public comprehends nothing of itsspurious origin and thinks it was given her by her sponsors in baptism.

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

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

  I, too, am quasi-educational, for I had a few years of experience inmothering and teaching little waifs and strays of the streets before Ibegan to paint pictures. Never shall I regret those nerve-racking,back-breaking, heart-warming, weary, and beautiful years, when, allunconsciously, I was learning to paint children by living with them.Even now the spell still works and it is the curly head, the “shiningmorning face,” the ready tear, the glancing smile of childhood thatenchains 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 theimprovement of one’s mind seems a farce, and the service of humanity, forthe moment, a duty only born of a diseased imagination.

  How can one sit on a vine-embowered balcony facing lovely Lake Geneva andthink about modern problems,—Improved Tenements, Child Labour, SingleTax, 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, andthat presently, after hours or days of patient waiting, he may condescendto unveil himself to your worshipful gaze.

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

  The day before this interview we had sailed to the end of the sapphirelake 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 captivefor so many years, and where Rousseau fixes the catastrophe of hisHéloïse.

  We had just been to Coppet too; Coppet where the Neckers lived and Madamede Staël was born and lived during many years of her life. We hadwandered through the shaded walks of the magnificent château garden, andstrolled along the terrace where the eloquent Corinne had walked with theSchlegels and other famous _habitués_ of her salon. We had visitedCalvin’s house at 11 Rue des Chanoines, Rousseau’s at No. 40 on theGrande 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 rightsto a hearing.

  “Salemina,” said I, as I walked into her room, “this life that we areleading will not do for me any longer. I have been too much immersed inruins. Last night in writing to a friend in New York I uttered the mostdisloyal and incendiary statements. I said that I would rather die thanlive without ruins of some kind; that America was so new, and crude, andspick and span, that it was obnoxious to any æsthetic soul; that ourtendency to erect hideous public buildings and then keep them in repairafterwards would make us the butt of ridicule among future generations.I even proposed the founding of an American Ruin Company, Limited,—inwhich the stockholders should purchase favourably situated bits of landand erect picturesque ruins thereon. To be sure, I said, these ruinswouldn’t have any associations at first, but what of that? We haveplenty of poets and romancers; we could manufacture suitable associationsand fit them to the premises. At first, it is true, they might not firethe imagination; but after a few hundred years, in being crooned bymother to infant and handed down by father to son, they would mellow withage, as all legends do, and they would end by being hallowed by risinggenerations. I do not say they would be absolutely satisfactory fromevery standpoint, but I do say that they would be better than nothing.

  “However,” I continued, “all this was last night, and I have had a changeof heart this morning. Just on the borderland between sleeping andwaking, I had a vision. I remembered that to-day would be Monday the 1stof September; that all over our beloved land schools would be opening andthat your sister pedagogues would be doing your work for you in yourabsence. Also I remembered that I am the dishonourable but HonoraryPresident of a Froebel Society of four hundred members, that it meetsto-morrow, and that I can’t afford to send them a cable.”

  “It is all true,” said Salemina. “It might have been said more briefly,but it is quite true.”

  “Now, my dear, I am only a painter with an occasional excursion intoeducational fields, but you ought to be gathering stories of knowledge tolay at the feet of the masculine members of your School Board.”

  “I ought, indeed!” sighed Salemina.

  “Then let us begin!” I urged. “I want to be good to-day and you must begood with me. I never can be good alone and neither can you, and youknow it. We will give up the lovely drive in the diligence; the luncheonat the French restaurant and those heavenly little Swiss cakes” (hereSalemina was almost unmanned); “the concert on the great organ and allthe other frivolous things we had intended; and we will make aneducational pilgrimage to Yverdon. You may not remember, my dear,”—thiswas
said severely because I saw that she meditated rebellion and wasgoing to refuse any programme which didn’t include the Swiss cakes,—“youmay not remember that Jean Henri Pestalozzi lived and taught in Yverdon.Your soul is so steeped in illusions; so submerged in the Lethean watersof the past; so emasculated by thrilling legends, paltry titles, andruined castles, that you forget that Pestalozzi was the father of populareducation and the sometime teacher of Froebel, our patron saint. Whenyou return to your adored Boston, your faithful constituents in that andother suburbs of Salem, Massachusetts, will not ask you if you have seenthe Castle of Chillon and the terrace of Corinne, but whether you went toYverdon.”

  Salemina gave one last fond look at the lake and picked up her Baedeker.She searched languidly in the Y’s and presently read in a monotonous,guide-book voice. “Um—um—um—yes, here it is, ‘Yverdon is sixty-one milesfrom Geneva, three hours forty minutes, on the way to Neuchâtel andBâle.’ (Neuchâtel is the cheese place; I’d rather go there and we couldtake a bag of those Swiss cakes.) ‘It is on the southern bank of LakeNeuchâtel at the influx of the Orbe or Thiele. It occupies the site ofthe Roman town of Ebrodunum. The castle dates from the twelfth centuryand was occupied by Pestalozzi as a college.’”

  This was at eight, and at nine, leaving Francesca in bed, we were in thestation at Geneva. Finding that we had time to spare, we went across thestreet and bargained for an _in-transit_ luncheon with one of those dullnative shopkeepers who has no idea of American-French.

  Your American-French, by the way, succeeds well enough so long as youpractise, in the seclusion of your apartment, certain assorted sentenceswhich the phrase-book tells you are likely to be needed. But so far asmy experience goes, it is always the unexpected that happens, and one iseternally falling into difficulties never encountered by any previoustraveller.

  For instance, after purchasing a cold chicken, some French bread, and abit of cheese, we added two bottles of lemonade. We managed to ask for aglass, from which to drink it, but the man named two francs as the price.This was more than Salemina could bear. Her spirit was never dismayed atany extravagance, but it reared its crested head in the presence ofextortion. She waxed wroth. The man stood his ground. After muchcrimination and recrimination I threw myself into the breach.

  “Salemina,” said I, “I wish to remark, first: That we have three minutesto catch the train. Second: That, occupying the position we do inAmerica,—you the member of a School Board and I the Honorary President ofa Froebel Society,—we cannot be seen drinking lemonade from a bottle, ina public railway carriage; it would be too convivial. Third: You do notunderstand this gentleman. You have studied the language longer than I,but I have studied it more lately than you, and I am fresher, muchfresher than you.” (Here Salemina bridled obviously.) “The man is notsaying that two francs is the price of the glass. He says that we canpay him two francs now, and if we will return the glass to-night when wecome home he will give us back one franc fifty centimes. That is fiftycentimes for the rent of the glass, as I understand it.”

  Salemina’s right hand, with the glass in it, dropped nervelessly at herside. “If he uttered one single syllable of all that rigmarole, thenOllendorf is a myth, that’s all I have to say.”

  “The gift of tongues is not vouchsafed to all,” I responded with dignity.“I happen to possess a talent for languages, and I apprehend when I donot comprehend.”

  Salemina was crushed by the weight of my self-respect, and we took thetumbler, and the train.

  It was a cloudless day and a beautiful journey, along the side of thesapphire lake for miles, and always in full view of the gloriousmountains. We arrived at Yverdon about noon, and had eaten our luncheonon the train, so that we should have a long, unbroken afternoon. We leftour books and heavy wraps in the station with the porter, with whom wehad another slight misunderstanding as to general intentions and terms;then we started, Salemina carrying the lemonade glass in her hand, withher guide-book, her red parasol, and her Astrakhan cape. The tumbler wasa good deal of trouble, but her heart was set on returning it safely tothe Geneva pirate; not so much to reclaim the one franc fifty centimes asto decide conclusively whether he had ever proposed such restitution. Iknew her mental processes, so I refused to carry any of her properties;besides, the pirate had used a good many irregular verbs in hisconversation, and upon due reflection I was a trifle nervous about thetrue nature of the bargain.

  The Yverdon station fronted on a great open common dotted with a fewtrees. There were a good many mothers and children sitting on thebenches, and a number of young lads playing ball. The town itself is oneof the quaintest, quietest, and sleepiest in Switzerland. From 1803 to1810 it was a place of pilgrimage for philanthropists from all parts ofEurope; for at that time Pestalozzi was at the zenith of his fame, havingunder him one hundred and sixty-five pupils from Europe and America, andthirty-two adult teachers, who were learning his method.

  But Yverdon has lost its former greatness now! Scarcely any Englishtravellers go there and still fewer Americans. We fancied that there wasnothing extraordinary in our appearance; nevertheless a small crowd ofchildren followed at our heels, and the shopkeepers stood at their opendoors and regarded us with intense interest.

  “No English spoken here, that is evident,” said Salemina ruefully; “butyou have such a gift for languages you can take the command to-day andmake the blunders and bear the jeers of the public. You must find outwhere the new Pestalozzi Monument is,—where the Château is,—where theschools are, and whether visitors are admitted,—whether there is arespectable hotel where we can get dinner,—whether we can get back toGeneva to-night, whether it’s a fast or a slow train, and what time itgets there,—whether the methods of Pestalozzi are stillmaintained,—whether they know anything about Froebel,—whether they knowwhat a kindergarten is, and whether they have one in the village. Someof these questions will be quite difficult even for you.”

  Well, the monument was not difficult to find, at all events. We accostedtwo or three small boys and demanded boldly of one of them, “_Où est lemonument de Pestalozzi_, _s’il vous plaît_?”

  He shrugged his shoulders like an American small boy and said vacantly,“_Je ne sais pas_.”

  “Of course he does know,” said Salemina; “he means to be disagreeable; orelse ‘monument’ isn’t monument.”

  “Well,” I answered, “there is a monument in the distance, and therecannot be two in this village.”

  Sure enough it was the very one we sought. It stands in a little openplace quite “in the business heart of the city,”—as we should say inAmerica, and is an exceedingly fine and impressive bit of sculpture. Thegroup of three figures is in bronze and was done by M. Gruet of Paris.

  The modelling is strong, the expression of Pestalozzi benign and sweet,and the trusting upturned faces of the children equally genuine andattractive.

  One side of the pedestal bears the inscription:—

  _À_ _Pestalozzi_ 1746–1827 _Monument érigé_ _par souscription populaire_ _MDCCCXC_

  On a second side these words are carved in the stone:—

  _Sauveur des Pauvres à Neuhof_ _Père des Orphelins à Stanz_ _Fondateur de l’école_ _populaire à Burgdorf_ _Éducateur de l’humanité_ _à Yverdon_ _Tout pour les autres_, _pour lui_,—_rien_!

  An older monument erected in 1846 by the Canton of Argovia bears thissame inscription, save that it adds, “Preacher to the people in ‘Leonardand Gertrude.’ Man. Christian. Citizen. Blessed be his name!”

  On the third side of the Yverdon Monument is Pestalozzi’s noble speech,fine enough indeed, to be cut in stone:—

 
“_J’ai vécu moi-même_ _comme un mendiant_, _pour apprendre à des_ _mendiants à vivre comme_ _des hommes_.”

  We sat a long time on the great marble pedestal, gazing into thebenevolent face, and reviewing the simple, self-sacrificing life of thegreat educator, and then started on a tour of inspection. Afterwandering through most of the shops, buying photographs and mementoes,Salemina discovered that she had left the expensive tumbler in one ofthem. After a long discussion as to whether tumbler was masculine orfeminine, and as to whether “_Ai-je laissé un verre ici_?” or “_Est-ceque j’ai laissé un verre ici_?” was the proper query, we retraced oursteps, Salemina asking in one shop, “_Excusez-moi_, _je vous prie_, _maisai-je laissé un verre ici_?”,—and I in the next, “_Je demands pardon_,_Madame_, _est-ce que j’ai laissé un verre dans ce magasin-ci_?—_J’en aiperdu un_, somewhere.” Finally we found it, and in response not to minebut to Salemina’s question, so that she was superior and obnoxious forseveral minutes.

  Our next point of interest was the old castle, which is still a publicschool. Finding the caretaker, we visited first the museum and library—asmall collection of curiosities, books, and mementoes, various portraitsof Pestalozzi and his wife, manuscripts and so forth. The simple-heartedwoman who did the honours was quite overcome by our knowledge of andinterest in her pedagogical hero, but she did not return the compliment.I asked her if the townspeople knew about Friedrich Froebel, but shelooked blank.

  “Froebel? Froebel?” she asked; “_qui est-ce_?”

  “_Mais_, _Madame_,” I said eloquently, “_c’était un grand homme_! _Unhéros_! _Le plus grand élève de Pestalozzi_! _Aussi grand quePestalozzi soi-même_!”

  (“PLUS grand! Why don’t you say _plus grand_?” murmured Saleminaloyally.)

  “_Je ne sais_!” she returned, with an indifferent shrug of the shoulders.“_Je ne sais_! _Il y a des autres_, _je crois_; _mais moi_, _je connaisPestalozzi_, _c’est assez_!”

  All the younger children had gone home, but she took us through the emptyschoolrooms, which were anything but attractive. We found an unhappysmall boy locked in one of them. I slipped behind the concierge to chatwith him, for he was so exactly like all other small boys in disgracethat he made me homesick.

  “_Tu étais méchant_, _n’est ce-pas_?” I whispered consolingly; “_mais tuseras sage demain_, _j’en suis sûre_!”

  I thought this very pretty, but he wriggled from under my benevolenthand, saying “_Va_!” (which I took to be, “Go ’long, you!”) “_je n’étaisméchant aujourd’hui et je ne serai pas sage demain_!”

  I asked the concierge if the general methods of Pestalozzi were stillused in the schools of Yverdon, “_Mais certainement_!” she replied as wewent into a room where twenty to thirty girls of ten years were studying.There were three pleasant windows looking out into the street; theordinary platform and ordinary teacher’s table, with the ordinary teacher(in an extraordinary state of coma) behind it; and rather rude desks andseats for the children, but not a single ornament, picture, map, or caseof objects and specimens around the room. The children were nice, clean,pleasant, stolid little things with braided hair and pinafores. The soledecoration of the apartment was a highly-coloured chart that we hadnoticed on the walls of all the other schoolrooms. Feeling that thismust be a sacred relic, and that it probably illustrated some of thePestalozzian foundation principles, I walked up to it reverently,

  “_Qu’est-ce-que c’est cela_, _Madame_?” I inquired, rather puzzled by itsappearance.

  “_C’est la méthode de Pestalozzi_,” the teacher replied absently.

  I wished that we kindergarten people could get Froebel’s educational ideain such a snug, portable shape, and drew nearer to gaze at it. I cangive you a very complete description of the pictures from memory, as Icopied the titles _verbatim et literatim_. The whole chart was apowerful moral object-lesson on the dangers of incendiarism and the evilsof reckless disobedience. It was printed appropriately in the most luridcolours, and divided into nine tableaux.

  These were named as follows:—

  I—LA VRAIE GAÎTÉ

  Twelve or fifteen boys and girls are playing together so happily andinnocently that their good angels sing for joy.

  II—UNE PROPOSITION FATALE!

  Suddenly “_le petit_ Charles” says to his comrades, “Come! let us build afire!” _Le petit_ Charles is a typical infant villain and is surroundedat once by other incendiary spirits all in accord with his insidiousplans.