Children of the Market Place

Children of the Market Place

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Children of the Market Place, by Edgar
Lee Masters
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Title: Children of the Market Place
Author: Edgar Lee Masters
Release Date: April 4, 2005 [eBook #15534]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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OF THE MARKET PLACE***
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CHILDREN OF THE MARKET PLACE
by
EDGAR LEE MASTERS
1922

TO GEORGE P. BRETT

CHAPTER I
I was born in London on the eighteenth of June, 1815. The battle of
Waterloo was being fought as I entered this world. Thousands were
giving up their lives at the moment that life was being bestowed upon

me. My father was in that great battle. Would he ever return? My
mother was but eighteen years of age. Anxiety for his safety, the
exhaustion of giving me life prostrated her delicate constitution. She
died as I was being born.
I have always kept her picture beside me. I have always been bound to
her by a tender and mystical love. During all the years of my life my
feeling for her could not have been more intense and personal if I had
had the experience of daily association with her through boyhood and
youth.
What girlish wistfulness and sadness there are in her eyes! What a
gentle smile is upon her lips, as if she would deny the deep foreboding
of a spirit that peered into a perilous future! Her dark hair falls in rich
strands over her forehead in an elfin and elegant disorder. Her slender
throat rises gracefully from an unloosened collar. This picture was
made from a drawing done by a friend of my father's four months
before I was born. My old nurse told me that he was invalided from the
war; that my father had asked him to make the drawing upon his return
to London. Perhaps my father had ominous dreams of her ordeal soon
to be.
They pronounced me a fine boy. I was round faced, round bodied, well
nourished. The nurse read my horoscope in coffee grounds. I was to
become a notable figure in the world. My mother's people took me in
charge, glad to give me a place in their household. Here I was when my
father returned from the war, six months later. He had been wounded in
the battle of Waterloo. He was still weak and ill. I was told these things
by my grandmother in the succeeding years.
When I was four years old my father emigrated to America. I seem to
remember him. I have asked my grandmother if he did not sing "Annie
Laurie"; if he did not dance and fling me toward the ceiling in a riot of
playfulness; if he did not snuggle me under my tender chin and tickle
me with his mustaches. She confirmed these seemingly recollected
episodes. But of his face I have no memory. There is no picture of him.
They told me that he was tall and strong, and ruddy of face; that my
beak nose is like his, my square forehead, my firm chin. After he

reached America he wrote to me. I have the letters yet, written in a
large open hand, characteristic of an adventurous nature. Though he
was my father, he was only a person in the world after all. I was
surrounded by my mother's people. They spoke of him infrequently.
What had he done? Did they disapprove his leaving England? Had he
been kind to my mother? But all the while I had my mother's picture
beside me. And my grandmother spoke to me almost daily of her
gentleness, her high-mindedness, her beauty, and her charm.
I was raised in the English church. I was taught to adore Wellington, to
hate Napoleon as an enemy of liberty, a usurper, a false emperor, a
monster, a murderer. I was sent to Eton and to Oxford. I was
indoctrinated with the idea that there is a moral governance in the
world, that God rules over the affairs of men. I was taught these things,
but I resisted them. I did not rebel so much as my mind naturally
proved impervious to these ideas. I read the Iliad and the Odyssey with
passionate interest. They gave me a panoramic idea of life, men, races,
civilizations. They gave me understanding of Napoleon. What if he had
sold the Louisiana territory to rebel America, and in order