"Clad in Victory"

   Although we claimed the same great-grandfather, my first
meeting with Martha Dickinson Bianchi was accidental.  For
me, it proved a happy and exciting event.  I had not planned
it and I am certain that she was innocent of my existence.
   My grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson Jr., was one of 
the younger brothers of Edward--Emily's father.  The fact
that my grandfather left Amherst when he was barely twenty,
and went to Georgia to try to make his own way in the world,
and that he succeeded there, and only went back to Amherst
on occasional visits, caused him to be something of a stranger
to his own brithplace.  During the War between the States, he
and my own father espoused the cause of hte Secessionists.
That must have created a rift between them and the family in 
Amherst, for I can remember the story being told of my great
uncles in Massachusetts advertising a reward for my father's
capture, "alive or dead."

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   By the time I had heard this story, we were not taking the
consequences of this rather unfriendly advertisement seriously,
of course, as the war was long over, and my father was very
much alive, although he fought through three years of that
bitter conflict.
   The passionate strain in teh Dickinsons which produced the
white heat of Puritanical virtues in New England, made of my
father an enthusiastic and unreconstructed "rebel" in the
Confederate States.
   The only member of the Amherst family who consistently
communicated with our own particular branch was Katherine
Dickinson, sister of Edward and my grandfather, wife of Mr.
Daniel Sweetser, and the mother of Mrs. Edward Winslow of
New York.  "Aunt Katie" was an opulent myth during my
childhood, for she always sent me lovely and mysterious CHrist-
mas boxes each year.  When my father was a small boy, he
often expressed an ardent wish to "marry Aunt Katie", so there
was, at least, this slender thread of love between the political
antagonists in our family.  This slight personal background is
necessary in order to explain my first meeting with my dis-
tinguished cousin, Martha Bianchi.
   A little moire than twenty years ago, while motoring from
Canada to Connecticut, I happened to land in Amherst, quite
casually, and I was anxious to see the house in which my
grandfather was born--the same one in which Emily lived.  I
entered one of the local banks to enquire the way to the Dick-
inson house.
   In the friendly, helpful, New England manner, an elderly
gentleman, with a magnificent white beard, asked me a few
questions, and gradually, between the two of us, we established
teh fact that I was born a Dickinson, but had never been in
Amherst before, and that I had a desire to view, from the out-
side, a building which had exercised a vital influence on my
being to say the least.  The venerable gentleman was more
than kind.  He was interested in my story and insisted upon
telephoning Madame Bianchi, and explaining who I was.  I
was shy of that introduciton, because I had the idea that the

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sudden appearance of a strange relation might prove a great
bore to my cousin.
   However, Martha Bianchi was in a hospitable mood, so that
my reticence melted under her gracious insistence that I come
to her house to meet her.
   The sensation I had as I walked up the path to the Austin
Dickinson residence, and got a slimpse of Emily's house
through the garden, was nothing short of extraordinary.  Al-
though the journey from the gate to the front door consumed
only a few seconds in time, my feelings underwent a minor revo-
lution.  I no longer felt a strange,r but very much at home be-
hind the hedge.  Inside that door I was to meet for the first time
a personage who was to reconstruct for me in a very subtle way
my own background, or at least a very vital section of it.
   Being diluted by descent from the so-called "Cavalier civil-
ization" of Virginia, I can only count that one quarter of my]
heritage is Puritan, but on the pathway to the door which was
to open for me, I was suddenly conscious of holding hands
with reality.
   I felt a rushing like the hurrying up of Time.  My spirit took
a leap in the dark and landed on a friendly shore.  The step
across the threshold made so much difference that the change
held something in it of magic.  I gathered an immediate im-
pression of a tall erect woman, in the middle years of life, full
to the brim of charm and challenge.  It was impossible to miss
in her a breathless quality and the fullness of her extraordi-
nary personality.
   That meeting was followed by others in Paris, London, Italy
and New York.  For several years before she died I made peri-
odical visits to Amherst, in order to reassure myself that she
was there, actually, and because I wished to hold fast to that
thing which had become more deeply important to me because
of her--my own heritage, of which she was the embodiment.
   During our friendship, I did not attempt to penetrate very
far into the mystery of that magical chemistry, nor to break
the spell of the relationship we had established spontaneously.
She became interwoven with early memories of conversations

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which I heard as a child--things my grandmother and parents
had said about Emily and Lavinia, Austin and Uncle Edward.
Emily died just about the time I was born, so that what I
knew about her came to me from the older ones, who had
known her or who had come in contact with Lavinia.  My
grandfather paid occasional visits to his brother Edward, and
memories of sayings, connected with his journeys to Amherst,
almost forgotten, came to life when I saw Martha.  I can re-
member that he said of his brother's household that it was
"a house of high talk and gracious living."  I knew that he
entertained a profound admiration fo rhis brother Edward.
   I think that the Dickinsons have nearly always regarded
life with a "furious" seriousness.  They held high ideals, and
found human performance very disappointing.  Perhaps that
may be said of anyone who is possessed of imagination and a
sense of the fitness of things.
   Weighed against the background of their age and way
of life, considering the stress of those tragic years of conflict,
the story of that Amherst family should be interpreted with
more understanding than most people seem to be capable of
giving it.
   To me, Martha Dickinson Bianchi seemed the epitome of
uncompromising ideals and courage.  She made staunch friends
and bitter enemies as well.  Unlike her aunt Emily, she loved
the world from teh outside, as well as the secret things of the
spirit.  She faced the world without fear, but with a lance to
break against the unseen antagonist, and human tyrannies.
   One of her greatest talents resided in her epigrammatic
speech.  She was one of the most brilliant conversationalists I
ever met.  It was difficult to match her wit, and her flashing
repartee and great high spirit never seeme dto falter.
   I think of her sailing out against hte distant horizon, burn-
ing on her funeral pyre as the old Vikings went to meet their
Tomorrow--victoriously.
   My world appears much more dead for lack of her living in it.
                    Virginia Dickinson Reynolds

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