Ravelings

DESPITE long delving in old French memoirs, it is only recently that I have come upon references to a curious mania for parfilant — unraveling. Where that occurred in a narrative, the blind spot in my eye or brain evidently came into action. Since I took to yarning myself, however, I must some time have ‘stayed to look down to Camelot’ with the penalty of catching this glimpse of chivalrous parfilage, until now I resemble nothing so much as Mrs. Hawthorne’s drawing of the Lady of Shalott, twisted and bound and meshed about in ravelings.

In this fashionable folly of the eighteenth century, ladies spent their time in separating from the silk on which it was twisted the gold thread of fabrics, fringes, tassels, and laces. Even the gold ornaments on men’s coats were slyly snipped off and raveled, prompting the humorous Duke of York to the shabby trick of wearing counterfeit glitter. The supreme gallantry of the courtiers of Louis XV seemed to be to make gifts of gold to their lady-loves, fashioned forth in all sorts of forms, — hats, dolls, beds, chairs, mice, whole farmyards of fowl. The pretty trifles were admired for a day, then pitilessly cut up, raveled and sold, though the gold therefrom never amounted to a fourth of the price of the article. The Due de Lauzun gave the Comtesse de Boufflers a harp which had cost more than a thousand pounds. His father, Gontaut, appeared at Chanteloup in a magnificent golden wig. Shouts of laughter greeted the blond Phoebus, and general admiration, after which he laid the wig at the feet of Madame de Choiseul. She in turn donned it, found it ravishing, installed herself at her toilet table, called her coiffeur, who came running and stood transfixed, comb in hand and mouth open, ‘medusaed with surprise.’

Now, what could they have done with all the plebeian yarn from which the gold was untwisted? I have a fancy that some great discarded pile of it furnished forth material for those viragoes of the French Revolution, who knitted, knitted, knitted, while queen and ladies laid their proud heads on the block, raveling out ' their weaved-up follies.’ It was to Madame Defarge that I owed my first nightmare. I had been engrossed in A Tale of Two Cities, reading it surreptitiously behind my schoolbooks and as far as possible into the evening. Then one night Madame took her post at my bedside, knitting, knitting, knitting, with hungry eyes upon me. In desperation I gathered the sheet from under me, wadded it into a ball and flung it at her. It hit a screen which in falling knocked a water pitcher to the floor, at the noise of which, seconded by family voices, Madame Defarge fled my chamber, murdering my sleep nevermore.

Indeed I woo sleep nowadays by conning over knitters, and especially ravelers, I have known. Penelope heads the list,—not only because of Shakespeare’s delicious comment, that all the yarn she spun in her husband’s absence did but fill Ithaca full of moths, but because so much of my own life is like hers, spent in doing and undoing what I would fain never do at all. I muse, too, upon my own mother, who once asked her little girl if she would like to learn to knit. The girl thought not, and the matter was not pressed. Instead, she told me how she herself was given no choice; how her unflinching grandmother used to set, and later scrutinize, the day’s stint, and, finding the least unevenness, pull out the needles and ravel relentlessly. This great-grandmother kept a diary, — still extant, — in which I read that her grandfather as a boy watched from his home in Hadley the smoke of burning Deerfield, after the Indians had fired the village and carried the inhabitants captive into Canada. History knit up with such personal stitches can never be unraveled from one’s memory.

What a different relationship existed between child and guardian, marking the modern milestone, in ‘Oh, Christina.’ The aunt, avid for the child’s culture, promised that a moonlight boat-ride should follow the learning by heart of ‘Lord Ullin’s Daughter.’ Christina did her part, but prayed for good weather, since she could not ‘unlearn her pome.’ In case of disappointment she would fain have done so; not an exclusively youthful attitude. Mrs. Transome, in Felix Holt, liked to insist that work done without her orders should be undone from beginning to end. One wishes she might have had to deal once with the tramp who, after pumping water into a waste trough for ten cents an hour, flung the last bucketful through the screen door of the kitchen, determined that some small part of his task should leave an appreciable result.

There is somet hing in the very sound and motion of raveling that delights the child in me. To get hold of the master thread in a piece of chainstitch machine sewing, and pull and pull, and watch the seam fall apart, is music and pictures to me at one swoop; and I can understand that to ravel parfilage toys and wind up therefrom shining, salable gold was a delectable sensation, a very rhapsody of raveling. Well, I hear the reader say, when the gold is more precious than the fabric, ravel! To unlearn has been the motto of more than one. Alfieri nobly raveled out his twenty-five wasted years, beginning then with the crinkled yarn to knit up a sound fabric of knowledge and useful productiveness. Pater’s and Stevenson s every page was the result of a liberal process of unraveling; and I suppose the very sorrow that ravels out some desire,

And on the same foundation builds a higher,
Hath more than joy for him who acquiesces.

Half the art of knitting seems to be the art of raveling, spending our funny heathen lives pulling out what we have done, in order to start it over, with finer needles and on a larger pattern and with more skilful, patient hands.

What I have no patience with is that passion for raveling which first requires useless toil of other persons. Nor do I believe in raveling out fine material just to prove that while the woof is gold the warp is cheap stuff; such ravelers ought to get only the warp for their pains. And I do not see what possible fun there is in trying to ravel Shakespeare into Bacon; or religion, which ought to unite us, into a tangled heap of discord; or conversation into twaddle; or music into ragtime; or apples of gold into coarse victuals; or the intellectual habits of college days into post-graduate lassitude. I deprecate so using present pleasures as to spoil future ones; I grieve over that laissez faire which lets valued friendships ravel out from mere weight of time and absence and carelessness; I hate the so-called sport which jiggles a neighbor’s elbow as she works and then laughs over the fallen stitch.

Another illuminating fact which I have gleaned is that complicated stitches ravel out just as readily as does plain garter, Marianne standing no whit better chance of remaining intact in the tapestry of life than does plain Mary Ann. Indeed, Mary Ann often knows a commonplace backstitch which locks all raveling. Omar, ‘many a knot unraveled by the road, but not the master knot of human fate.' A simpler knot than human fate baffles me, however. Tell me, dear fellow yarner, why one definition of ravel is to tangle, and the other is to untangle. Do never means undo — or stay — sometimes it does. But tell me, further, why ravel should mean unravel, and unravel should mean ravel. Had the orthographers of old been unraveling ropes of sand till the reversive became the intensive and the intensive the reversive? Or did they all belong to that famous family which spells its name Enraughty and pronounces it Darby?