The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton

by Robert J. Begiebing

  “The Good Lord must have sent you, is all’s I can say,” she told us. Yet she seemed unnaturally morose for seeing such a Godsend. As I removed my straw sunbonnet, we were ushered into her parlor. The parlor had been darkened, but for three candles and rare threads of sunlight making their way through tiny gaps in the drawn, heavy curtains.

  A man and four children were gathered around the bier of a girl who could have been no more than eleven years of age at the time of her death. The scent of her newly made coffin filled the room. There was such a peacefulness about the corpse and so clearly a childish beauty and innocence remaining, in spite of the pallor and sunken features betokening long illness and death-struggle, that I found tears welling into my eyes.

  Even now it is too painful to dwell upon the stricken family. In short, the mother begged us to take the child’s likeness from her face in death so that they might have a remembrance of her in life. Perhaps struck by my own emotion, the wounded mother said she was sure I was just the lady to capture her daughter’s spirit. They would compensate us, she assured me, in all the provisions we could reasonably require, for of provisions they had a good deal more than coin.

  “We had thought to bury her today,” she told us, “but could not bring ourselves to it yet. Now, you’ve come and I feel it is a sign for us to bury her cast-off husk and remember the life in her, our dear Effie.”

  And so it was that I found myself with easel and palette before the one opened window through which, as I had arranged it, sunlight bathed the body of the deceased. I was, to be sure, stricken by the poignancy of my task, yet I could hardly refuse the poor mother her natural wishes, my only requirement being that she and I alone remain in the room while I worked.

  Even in the severe sweetness of death, the little face seemed lovely. And my imagination seemed to revivify the girl into her brightest intervals of health. It was the face, of course, upon which I devoted my greatest care, filling in rapidly afterward, as was my customary method, the clothing, in this case a spotless linen sleeping gown.

  As I worked I could not help wondering what must have been Effie’s girlish thoughts, sensibilities, and dreams: those hopes instinct with life. The family had gathered her cherished objects about her: a little copy of the American Girl’s Book, her friendship album, and a much-used old copy of The American Toilet (that innocent yoking of the vanities of the dressing table with moral instruction). But it was her childish drawings in pen and crayon which bespoke her love of drawing and coloring. She had chosen familiar objects—birds, efflorescent orchard trees, three colorful butterflies alighting on a gravestone, a white kitten playing with a tuft of Tyrian yarn. Her art-instruction booklets, her scrapbooks full of girlish poems and opinions, aphorisms and prayers, reminded me of my own girlhood.

  Perhaps to relieve my sadness, I recalled my own first book of lessons presented to me by my dear grandmother, and which I believe had belonged to her mother before her—old Peacham’s Graphice or the Most Ancient and Excellent Art of Limning. And I still carried everywhere in my portmanteau, along with my best tin paint box, my old copies of the Progressive Drawing Book and Young Ladies’ Assistant in Drawing and Painting.

  My thoughts also turned to my first teacher in the ornamental arts at Wilmington Seminary for Young Women, Miss Fricke, who taught us to paint from her own work and from nature, in waters and oils. But were it not for my grandmother, some of whose legacy came down to me through my mother and made attendance at the Seminary possible, I never would have met those two artists whose impressions upon me were powerful and who helped me to see what I might innocently dream to be—Mr. Morse, when he was traveling in Strafford County, New Hampshire, and stopped to visit Grandmother, and Mr. Greenwood, whom I later met, also through Grandmother.

  In the poor child lying before me I began to see myself, and all my youthful aspirations flooded back upon me as I worked. Indeed, I suddenly recalled a certain day; I must have been very young, for the image is like a dream to me. I was visiting my grandmother, I believe, at her summer house near Portsmouth. I remember going out of doors, as if stepping into an illuminated hour. I took someone’s hand, perhaps my mother’s or my grandmother’s, and we walked along a hedge-lined drive. Dust, soft yet bright in the sunlight, rose off the ridges smoothed by buggy wheels.

  The light as we neared the harbor grew more intense (it must have been near noonday) and I saw the masts of ships flickering in the June sunlight. It was as if a child had just met the Sun-God, the very flash of His sword rising above the lambent water. It was as if it were the deepest, most secret hour of my childhood, the hour illuminated by hope and penetrated by beauty, the hour opening me to a later vision of myself. “The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child.” But I believe somehow I knew then, if even just below the level of purposeful awareness, what it was I really wanted to do with my life. It did not matter in such a bright hour of childhood that the moment of aspiration was to be submerged beneath the dozen subsequent years. But it mattered now that my aspiration rose up again in the bloom of womanhood and the rigors of self-dependency.

  As I painted Effie, it was as if I knew that a similar fearless hope had once blossomed in her, for but a moment perhaps. And I believe that as a result of this sympathy, my painting went very much to her mother’s satisfaction. I took longer about it than I normally did in those years, which of course meant that I could not expect payment for the true worth of my labors. Yet for the first time since I began to paint for my living I was unperturbed by any worldly considerations.

  Of little Effie’s memorial portrait I can say, at the least, that I have never seen a family more pleased at the likeness of one of its members.

  I ALSO RECALLED frequently others along my way who by example had encouraged me to continue with my new life. All during that time in Worcester, after leaving the Dudleys, Tom and I kept our congenial rooms, from which we would set out for one- or two-day jaunts among the mill villages of the river valley. There were longer journeys as well to the north, particularly to Lowell, where Tom knew one or two people in the textile trade.

  “There are miles of girls in those factories!” he promised me. “Though they put the prettiest inside the rows, nearest the windows.”

  I had always thought of these girls as the very type of a Fate I wished to avoid at any cost, like the equally dreadful Fates of farm labor, penury, or a marriage of pecuniary convenience. Tom took me into these mills on one occasion. The miles of girls astonished me too. And they were surprisingly healthy in appearance, despite their laboring twelve or more hours a day indoors, where they also tended their indoor plants, many of which had been trained to shade sun at the windows. But what I recall most clearly is the weight of sound pressing upon me like water upon one who sinks to the bottom of a lake.

  The air itself completed the sensation of submersion—the stifling scent of copperas, the haze of dust and lint, the taint of perspiration. I became dizzy in this maze of relentless motion and blare of daylight: the great cylinders overhead, the ponderous swinging bars and swift-turning wheels, the whirring spindles of colored thread. The urgent, thunderous monotony of the machines prevailed over every sight, breath, heartbeat, and thought.

  FROM WORCESTER SOUTH to Rhode Island and north to Lowell, we found among these myriads our share of young women for sittings. Indeed, by September of that year Tom and I had all the work we could manage. We might have stayed on indefinitely but for the willfulness of others, yet during many weeks we were happy in our work and life. I found particular pleasure in making the acquaintance of some of these young women. There were three who impressed me especially and whose stories I gathered in conversation as they sat. Each struck me as a lesson on the singularity of persons within the seemingly undistinguished herds of factory hands and shop girls in New England. But more than this, certain of these young women, I began to understand, were not merely bond-slaves to manufacturers and machines, but tokens of a hard-won
mental or pecuniary liberty.

  The most interesting of these was one Caroline Parrie. Her appearance was no more ordinary than her mind, and Tom found her very winning. Her face, if not pretty in the fribbling or catchpenny way, was nonetheless appealing, a graceful expression of her natural dignity and character. Her mind was extraordinarily quick, her whole presence strongly affecting. Her clothes were plain but tended toward those deep greens and subtle reds that set off her own color and demeanor perfectly. At both sittings Tom made certain he appeared at some point.

  She paid for a careful likeness, one with depth and shading, to serve as a memento for her mother and sisters back home in Reston, Vermont, where Miss Parrie had herself been a schoolteacher who provided much of the support for her sisters and young brother after the death of their father. She had established more recently, however, a regimen of laboring in the mills from fall through spring and teaching school near Reston in the summer.

  She either spoke or read five languages and spent most of her few off-hours in reading or composing essays and little poems, many of which may be found in Offerings of Labor, a booklet published twice yearly by mill girls. Our mutual interest in books and her great curiosity about the craft of painting opened our conversations, though at times she was quite beyond me. I found that she had read deeply, even in ethics and philosophy, and that those long hours spent dressing looms in the mills sharpened her memories of home.

  “Yes,” she said in answer to a question, “within the brick walls, in the fatigue of desolate hours, I often recall the green fields, the bright living streams, the hills and mountains and forests.” I now understood that she had quite simply regulated her life both to necessity and self-cultivation. I asked whether she thought the effort required to do so a most extraordinary sort of heroism.

  “It certainly is a labor of love,” she answered and laughed, “but I have found a number of capable young women in the mills, who have become my companions of the mind.”

  Tom, as I said, was so taken with her that I found it painful to watch him as she came and went in our small studio. He called on her, paid respects and the like, but she did not wish, finally, to spend her precious time on such doings. Her feelings about Tom I never knew for certain. But one thing became clear to me: that to establish her pattern of life, as well as to secure her mother and younger brother and sisters, Miss Parrie had come to protect certain renunciations. Her life—poor Tom!—had become a pursuit, whenever practicable, of other passions.

  Such a pattern of life I discovered more than once among these young women during my sojourn in Worcester County. Although no one else struck either Tom or me as having attained Miss Parrie’s quality of mind, my memories of her and several other women served later as beacons of the courage to live independently, even within the awful grip of Necessity. Now locked within my own brick walls, I often recalled especially two sisters who impressed me: the Misses Fiske, Tirzah and Harriet. The Fiske sisters ran their own millinery and tailoring shop. And as befit their business partnership, which they referred to as their sisterhood, I painted them together on a single 18-inch by 15-inch canvas.

  Raised in Sheepsheads Cairn, near Greenville, New Hampshire, they told me while sitting that after attending a female academy they came into Worcester together, worked for others briefly while establishing a modest clientele, and opened their shop as soon as they felt sufficiently established to do so. By the time I met them, they could barely keep up with all the work coming their way, had hired assistants for their busiest seasons, and had purchased a house together, where they lived in their extraordinary state of self-determination.

  “Mother didn’t like it one bit,” Tirzah said the second day they sat demurely before my easel in their dark, unadorned gowns. “Particularly when we left together, you see.”

  “She wished you to contribute to the farm by continuing there?” I asked.

  “And then to our own livelihood by marriage,” Harriet answered. “Especially mother. But father’s farm could barely support themselves and the youngest children, so we unquestionably, it seemed to us, had to find other work. After serving our apprenticeships and working long hours for low pay to the enrichment of others, it seemed a natural enough step, eventually, to devise a means of working instead for ourselves.”

  Harriet, the older, said that she and Tirzah had composed a long and loving letter to answer their mother, to plead their cause. “‘Can so loving a mother really believe that daughters are born to serve family until they marry and serve under the yoke of tippling husbands?’ we asked.”

  “Poor mother,” Tirzah said, laughing gently and smoothing the lap of her dress. “I’m afraid we were rather relentless in that epistle.”

  Tirzah, the younger and shorter of the two, was the prettier, her face more full, her eyes brighter. Harriet, they said, had during her apprenticeship undergone a terrible illness, and there was some shadow of that long struggle lingering in her thin face.

  “And did your poor mother relent?” I asked.

  “For the most part, yes,” Harriet said. “And why should she not, once having thought over our propositions? When we visit now she seems proud of us, and the only concern she expresses is that we might suffer periods of loneliness without husband and children to occupy us. I confess I once had similar thoughts myself.”

  “But we suffer no such episodes,” Tirzah assured me, smiling. “All our days are full, and many delicious. As Miss Taylor at the Academy used to say to us girls, ‘A rich and curious mind is the path to freedom of body and soul.’”

  “After we lay our day’s work aside,” Harriet added, “we often find time for lectures, papers, meetings, and causes of every kind.”

  “It’s a strange and lovely world,” Tirzah said. “And so much there is to be learned.”

  They both wore their hair as plain as their dresses. But I believe I succeeded in portraying Tirzah’s simple beauty. I also endeavored to capture the more ready, if less serene, smile in Harriet’s thin face, with its almost too-firm chin. And Harriet’s somehow more mischievous eyes, I did my best to express.

  As I painted these two sisters, I found myself speculating that had Tom not suffered so much in his recent failure to win over Miss Parrie, he might have shone his light upon Tirzah. But had he done so, he would most likely have had as little effect in that quarter. Even as spouses are so rarely fit together upon a single canvas, it seemed to me the more suitable, though no one said so, that these two should be portrayed like verso and recto sides of their accounts book, the very book which each sister in this double portrait holds by one hand. The sisters paid me promptly and fully, quite satisfied by their likenesses.

  BY LATE OCTOBER that year our business with the mill hands and shopkeepers began to hang off, so Tom and I started to think of employments for the coming winter. Before we were able to decide to our best advantage, however, we were forced to decamp.

  Perhaps it was the penetrating glance from some pedestrian in the street, or perhaps some stranger’s shadow in a doorway, or perhaps an eye cast in my direction from a passing carriage or cart, or perhaps all of these, but for some time I had a sort of oppressive intuition that I was being watched. Only Mr. Joseph Dudley’s arrival at my studio one afternoon, even while I was engaged with a patron, revealed the true basis of my apprehensions.

  I told him that I was busily employed with a portrait. Mr. Dudley responded that he would be pleased to wait upon me and would return in one hour. When he returned, he laid out for me, while the darkening November afternoon began to enshroud my studio, the results of what must have been assiduous machinations. He had somehow discovered the origins of my and Tom’s arrival in Worcester County. His mission now, it appeared, was to threaten me into submission.

  “Your Uncle Simeon,” he told me in a calm voice, “was much displeased with your … absconding, which he maintains he had every right to consider a betrayal of his long and devoted provision for you as a family member over the years.”<
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  I was so taken aback that I could not speak.

  Mr. Dudley began to pace about the room, handling his watch fob officiously, while he continued and I sat on the chair so recently occupied by my patron.

  “Your uncle further charges that you stole a wagon and a mare from his farm and shamelessly enchanted his nephew (whom he much needed in the growing and harvesting seasons) by the promise of ‘God only knows what Babylonian wantonness and adventure.’”

  I found my tongue and stood up. “Mr Dudley! How dare you come here and voice such lies to me!”

  “Gladly will I leave, Madam, but hear one thing more, in consideration of your own security, for I may yet prove your friend, even as in this instance I am but your enlightening messenger. I report only the words of others.” He reached for his hat and overcoat. “The constabulary are already involved; your uncle alerted the sheriff, and his men pursued your path to the very border. Further, your uncle has hired two stalwarts from Massachusetts to search you out wherever you may be, in order to return you and your brother to justice.

  “No, hear me out but a moment longer.” He held up a thin, white-gloved hand before his face, his hat and coat adjusted in his other arm. “These two have come to my attention in their searchings for you, but I have told them only that father and mother sat for portraits last July; that completing your commissions, you and your brother Tom left together. And this last: I come to offer you not only my continued discretion as to your whereabouts … and any subsequent movements, but to offer protection, and even solicitude.”

  “I need no protection or solicitude from you, Mr. Dudley… .”

  He cut me off: “Don’t answer, please, at this moment, Madam; such sudden news, I realize, needs to be contemplated. I extend my hand to help you,” he continued immediately, “and have no intentions of interfering with your brother in any way. He must decide his fate for himself. But it is for you I fear the worst.”