This escape, so thorough and cleancut, satisfied my mother that the
school was not the place for me, and I was taken back to the village,
the new home adjoining my grandmother's, and handed over to the tender
mercies of tutors again. A new life began for me, a new life in a number
of ways. Although the two houses were connected, and our family could
pass over into grandmother's quarters and _vice versa_, we children were
cautioned to keep on our own side of the fence most of the time.
Nevertheless, our grandmother was almost always accessible, particularly
when her daughter, our noted aunt, was away on a lecturing tour. This
was a great boon in many respects, because our mother was in the city
all day, and we certainly used to get tired of the governess.
This grandmother of mine stands out in my memory of childhood more
distinctly than any other character, except, of course, my mother. She
was one of the most remarkable women it has been my good fortune to know
well. A famous English lady, who visited my aunt years after our
particular family had scattered, insisted on calling my grandmother
"Saint Courageous," and I have always thought that she well deserved
this title. For years, while my aunt was traveling over the country,
lecturing on temperance and woman's rights, my grandmother would live
patiently alone with a Swedish servant, glorying in her daughter's fame
and usefulness, and carefully pasting press notices of her work in a
scrapbook.
My brother, "Rob," was grandmother's pet. He was her son's firstborn and
her first grandchild, and what Rob did, good or bad, found praise and
excuses in her eyes. We other children had to take a back seat, so to
speak, when Rob was at home, but this was only intermittently, after he
undertook to be a civil engineer. When I last saw him he had
experimented with about as many activities as he had lived years, and he
was still very undecided about any one of them. In a way this has been a
family characteristic among us children, at any rate among us boys.
Mother early noticed this tendency, and literally begged of us to let
her see us through college, as did our grandmother, so that, whatever we
undertook later on, we might have educational qualifications for any
opportunity that presented itself. She was doomed to disappointment in
this matter in the case of all four. Each one of us has experimented
with college life, and I, as will be told later on in detail, smuggled
myself into the Berlin University as a student of political economy, but
there is not a diploma to-day among the four of us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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