American nights entertainment
was the strongest way he knew to express himself.” It is not too highly
imaginative, I am sure, to believe that Mr. Stratton also planted slips
and cuttings successfully; but they were slips of his own tenacious
mind and they were planted most successfully in the receptive mind of
his daughter, Gene.
We must note Mr. Stratton rather carefully. “His very first earnings
he spent for a book; when other men rested, he read”--toiling upward
in the night, in that time of Longfellowship, that has since been
abandoned for fifteen minutes a day, in this era of Eliotry. The
memory of Mr. Stratton enabled him to quote paragraphs at a time from
Hume, Macaulay, Gibbon, Prescott and Bancroft--he was perhaps fondest
of history--while as for the Bible, he could repeat it entire, his
daughter says, except for the genealogies, and give chapter and verse.
The genealogies were “a waste of grey matter to learn.” Mrs. Porter
confesses: “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.”
Sermons, lectures, talks on civic improvement and politics, delivered
without thought of personal fatigue or selfish inconvenience at the
end of journeys of many miles were Mark Stratton’s contribution to
the cause of Good. It seems unkind to examine such performances
dispassionately. “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.” Mrs.
Porter keeps a cardinal silk handkerchief that he was carrying when
stricken with apoplexy at the age of seventy-eight. “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.” He used especially to
thrill his young daughter by the story of John Maynard, who piloted a
burning boat to safety while he slowly roasted at the wheel. That he
should tell it was natural, since the telling gave him opportunity to
reproduce, with many inflections, the captain’s cry of “John Maynard!”
and the answer, “Aye, aye, sir!” echoed until it sank to a mere gasp, a
whisper....
iv
Gene Stratton was only a few years old when her mother, who had once
nursed three of the children through typhoid fever, contracting it
herself, broke down. Mrs. Stratton lived for several years, suffering
continually, frequently tortured by pain. The youngest child was
therefore allowed to follow an impulse and escape the training given
her sisters. She followed her father and brothers outdoors, sleeping
on their coats in fence corners, awakening, sometimes, to find shy
creatures peering into her face. “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 made special pets of birds. She had been taught that
they were useful and had “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.”
All this life became a thing of memory just before the mother’s death.
Then they left the farm and went to town, to the city of Wabash, that
Mrs. Stratton might have constant medical attention. The ninety-pound
bit of pink porcelain, plump as a wild partridge, the little Dutch
woman who had borne twelve children and kept a spotless farmhouse and
heaped up good things on the long dinner table, lay with her head on
a pillow, a cinnamon pink or a trillium placed where its fragrance
would reach her with every breath she drew. She was dying. She had
helped Mark Stratton with the bush- and vine-covered fences that crept
around the acres they owned in a strip of gaudy colour; she shared
the achievement of that orchard, lying in a valley, with its square
of apple trees in the centre, so that at the time of blossoming it
appeared as if a great pink-bordered white blanket had been let down
on the earth. To her equally with her husband was due the presence on
shale, which they might have drained, of sheets of blue flag, marigold
and buttercups. All this was going out of her children’s life and
she was going out with it. The youngest child, in particular, had
been leading a harum-scarum existence; if she reported promptly three
times a day when the bell rang at meal times, with enough clothing to
constitute a decent covering, nothing more was asked of her until the
Sabbath. Mary Stratton was perhaps about to be released, to receive
the benefit of a freedom in which, if her hands were not busy, it was
not likely she would be happy or know what to do. Gene Stratton,
whose father permitted his youngest to idolise him, was to be taken
from outdoor freedom, her feet shod, her body restricted by the burden
of Sunday clothing, her active legs stilled to a shuffle beneath the
desk of a close schoolroom, and her mind set to droning over books.
Unfortunately she came to the ordeal with no purely feminine resources
of inattention, preoccupation or indifference. Her father had seen to
that. It was he who was responsible for the child that revelled in
_Paul and Virginia_, _Undine_, _Picciola_, _The Vicar of Wakefield_,
_Pilgrim’s Progress_--“exquisitely expressed and conceived stories”
that “may have done much in forming high conceptions of what really
constitutes literature, and in furthering the lofty ideals instilled by
my parents.” Mrs. Porter adds: “One of these stories formed the basis
of my first publicly recognised literary effort.” She was assigned
to write a class composition on “Mathematical Law.” She postponed,
rebelled, wrote a paper retelling the story of _Picciola_ and in fear
and defiance read it aloud in class. After one page the teacher halted
her while she summoned in the superintendent of city schools to hear
the sixteen foolscap pages from the beginning. “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. Never again
was a subject forced upon me.” She was her father’s daughter, and her
father was Mark Stratton.
“My mother went out too soon to know, and my father never saw one of
my books; but he knew I was boiling and bubbling like a yeast jar in
July over some literary work, and if I timidly slipped to him with a
composition, or a faulty poem, he saw good in it, and made suggestions
for its betterment. When I wanted to express something in colour,
he went to an artist, sketched a design for an easel, personally
superintended the carpenter who built it, and provided tuition. On that
same easel I painted the water colours for _Moths of the Limberlost_,
and one of the most poignant regrets of my life is that he was not
there to see them, and to know that the easel which he built through
his faith in me was finally used in illustrating a book.
“If I thought it was music through which I could express myself, he
paid for lessons and detected hidden ability which should be developed.
Through the days of struggle he stood fast; firm in his belief in me.
He was half the battle. It was he who demanded a physical standard
that developed strength to endure the rigours of scientific field and
darkroom work, and the building of ten books in ten years, five of
which were on nature subjects, having my own illustrations, and five
novels, literally teeming with natural history, true to nature. It was
he who demanded of me from birth the finishing of any task I attempted
and who taught me to cultivate patience to watch and wait, even years,
if necessary, to find and secure the material I wanted. It was he who
daily lived before me the life of exactly such a man as I portrayed in
_The Harvester_, and who constantly used every atom of brain and body
power to help and to encourage all men to do the same.”
No further illumination should be needed on the most extraordinary
personal influence in Mrs. Porter’s life.
v
Gene Stratton was married in 1886, at the age of eighteen, to Charles
Darwin Porter, of Wabash, Indiana. Marriage, a home of her own, and
a daughter were successively brought to bear upon a nature already
powerful; none of them succeeded in eradicating the impress of Mark
Stratton. The new home was a cabin of fourteen rooms (at first),
standing on some fifteen acres near the Limberlost Swamp. The familiar
address runs: “Limberlost Cabin, Rome City, Indiana.” Red, white, pink,
blue, lavender and yellow flower-beds of an acre apiece were laid off
in the deep woods running down the shore of a lake; the cabin stands
in the middle of the yellow bed, a dwelling of large rooms and four
fireplaces, two of which Mrs. Porter built, to a large extent, herself.
One is of pudden stone, red and blue pebbles; another, in the living
room, is constructed of field boulders split to expose their quartz
crystals that sparkle under artificial light. The windows were built
with broad, deep casements especially to furnish feeding-tables for
birds. On the open, cement-floored porch may stand in winter wheat,
apples, cabbage and celery bunches. Chickadees, titmice, nuthatches,
sapsuckers, flickers, song sparrows, jays, cardinals and squirrels come
to the sills to eat the chopped wheat, ground corn and suet put out for
them.
But this is to mix past and the comparative present. It was not long
before Mrs. Porter’s daughter was old enough to go to school. “I knew
how to manage life to make it meet my needs, thanks to even the small
amount I had seen of my mother. I kept a cabin of fourteen rooms and
kept it immaculate. I made most of my daughter’s clothes, I kept a
conservatory in which there bloomed from three to six hundred bulbs
every winter, tended a house of canaries and linnets, and cooked and
washed dishes, besides, three times a day. In my spare time (mark
the word, there was time to spare else the books never would have
been written and the pictures made) I mastered photography ...” but
we need not go with her into the details of this one among many of
her personal triumphs. She was for two years editor of the camera
department of Recreation, for two years on the natural history staff
of Outing, for four years specialist in natural history photography
on the Photographic Times Annual Almanac. She had a dread of failure
and, at first, carried on her special work as secretly as possible.
“My husband owned a drug and book store that carried magazines, but
only a few people in our locality read these, none were interested
in nature photography or natural science; so what I was trying to
do was not realised even by my own family. I did not want to fail
before my man person and my daughter and our respective families.” She
was further afraid of ridicule in a community “where I was already
severely criticised on account of my ideas of housekeeping, dress and