[Note: The Table of Contents and the list of illustrations were added
by the transcriber.]
LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE OF POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE
June, 1876.
Vol. XVII, No. 102.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS.
THE CENTURY--ITS FRUITS AND ITS FESTIVAL.
VI.--THE DISPLAY--INTRODUCTORY. [Illustrated]
DOLORES by EMMA LAZARUS.
GLIMPSES OF CONSTANTINOPLE by SHEILA HALE.
CONCLUDING PAPER. [Illustrated]
THEE AND YOU by EDWARD KEARSLEY.
A STORY OF OLD PHILADELPHIA. IN TWO PARTS.--I.
MODERN HUGUENOTS by JAMES M. BRUCE.
BLOOMING by MAURICE THOMPSON.
FELIPA by CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON.
AT CHICKAMAUGA by ROBERT LEWIS KIMBERLY.
THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS by MRS. E. LYNN LINTON.
CHAPTER XXXVII. UNWORTHY.
CHAPTER XXXVIII. BLOTTED OUT.
CHAPTER XXXIX. WINDY BROW.
CHAPTER XL. LOST AND NOW FOUND.
THE ITALIAN MEDIÆVAL WOOD-SCULPTORS by T. ADOLPHUS TROLLOPE.
REST by CHARLOTTE F. BATES.
LETTERS FROM SOUTH AFRICA by LADY BARKER.
OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.
THE CABS OF PARIS by L.H.H.
A NEW MUSEUM AT ROME by T.A.T.
OUR FOREIGN SURNAMES by W.W.C.
THE NEW FRENCH ACADEMICIAN by R.W.
LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
Books Received.
ILLUSTRATIONS
FAÇADE OF THE SPANISH DIVISION, MAIN BUILDING.
FAÇADE OF THE EGYPTIAN DIVISION, MAIN BUILDING.
FAÇADE OF THE SWEDISH DIVISION, MAIN BUILDING.
FAÇADE OF THE BRAZILIAN DIVISION, MAIN BUILDING.
DOM PEDRO, EMPEROR OF BRAZIL.
JAPANESE CARPENTERS.
FAÇADE OF THE DIVISION OF THE NETHERLANDS, MAIN BUILDING.
THE CORLISS ENGINE, FURNISHING MOTIVE-POWER FOR MACHINERY HALL.
INTERIOR OF COOK'S WORLD'S TICKET-OFFICE.
FRENCH RESTAURANT LA FAYETTE.
THE MAMMOTH RODMAN GUN.
SCENE AT ONE OF THE ENTRANCES TO THE GROUNDS--THE TURNSTILE.
SCENE IN A BURIAL-GROUND.
THE SULTAN ABDUL-ASSIZ.
TURKISH COW-CARRIAGE.
ENTERING A MOSQUE.
CASTLE OF EUROPE, ON THE BOSPHORUS.
FORTRESS OF RIVA, AND THE BLACK SEA.
TURKISH QUARTER--STAMBOUL.
OBELISK OF THEODOSIUS.
SHEPHERDS.
LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE
OF
_POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE_.
June, 1876.
THE CENTURY--ITS FRUITS AND ITS FESTIVAL.
VI. THE DISPLAY--INTRODUCTORY.
[Illustration: FAÇADE OF THE SPANISH DIVISION, MAIN BUILDING.]
All things being ready for their reception, how were exhibits,
exhibitors and visitors to be brought to the grounds? To do this with
the extreme of rapidity and cheapness was essential to a full and
satisfactory attendance of both objects and persons. In a large majority
of cases the first consideration with the possessor of any article
deemed worthy of submission to the public eye was the cost and security
of transportation. Objects of art, the most valuable and the most
attractive portion of the display, are not usually very well adapted to
carriage over great distances with frequent transshipments. Porcelain,
glass and statuary are fragile, and paintings liable to injury from
dampness and rough handling; while an antique mosaic, like the
"Carthaginian Lion," a hundred square feet in superficies, might, after
resuscitation from its subterranean sleep of twenty centuries with its
minutest _tessera_ intact and every tint as fresh as the Phoenician
artist left it, suffer irreparable damage from a moment's carelessness
on the voyage to its temporary home in the New World. More solid things
of a very different character, and far less valuable pecuniarily, though
it may be quite as interesting to the promoter of human progress, exact
more or less time and attention to collect and prepare, and that will
not be bestowed upon them without some guarantee of their being safely
and inexpensively transmitted. So to simplify transportation as
practically to place the exposition buildings as nearly as possible at
the door of each exhibitor, student and sight-seer became, therefore, a
controlling problem.
In the solution of it there is no exaggeration in saying that the
Centennial stands more than a quarter of a century in advance of even
the latest of its fellow expositions. At Vienna a river with a few small
steamers below and a tow-path above represented water-carriage. Good
railways came in from every quarter of the compass, but none of them
brought the locomotive to the neighborhood of the grounds. In the matter
of tram-roads for passengers the Viennese distinguished themselves over
the Londoners and Parisians by the possession of _one_. In steam-roads
they had no advantage and no inferiority. At each and all of these
cities the packing-box and the passenger were both confronted by the
vexatious interval between the station and the exposition
building--often the most trying part of the trip. Horsepower was the one
time-honored resource, in '73 as in '51, and in unnumbered years before.
Under the ancient divisions of horse and foot the world and its
_impedimenta_ moved upon Hyde Park, the Champ de Mars and the Prater,
the umbrella and the oil-cloth tilt their only shield against Jupiter
Pluvius, who seemed to take especial pleasure in demonstrating their
failure, nineteen centuries after the contemptuous erasure of him from
the calendar, to escape his power. It was reserved for the Philadelphia
Commission to bring his reign (not the slightest intention of a pun) to
a close. The most delicate silk or gem, and the most delicate wearer of
the same, were enabled to pass under roof from San Francisco into the
Main Building in Fairmount Park, and with a trifling break of twenty
steps at the wharf might do so from the dock at Bremen, Havre or
Liverpool. The hospitable shelter of the great pavilion was thus
extended over the continent and either ocean. The drip of its eaves
pattered into China, the Cape of Good Hope, Germany and Australia. Their
spread became almost that of the welkin.
Let us look somewhat more into the detail of this unique feature of the
American fair.
Within the limits of the United States the transportation question soon
solved itself. Five-sixths of the seventy-four thousand miles of railway
which lead, without interruption of track, to Fairmount Park are of
either one and the same gauge, or so near it as to permit the use
everywhere of the same car, its wheels a little broader than common.
From the other sixth the bodies of the wagons, with their contents, are
transferable by a change of trucks. The expected sixty or eighty
thousand tons of building material and articles for display could thus
be brought to their destination in a far shorter period than that
actually allowed. Liberal arrangements were conceded by the various
lines in regard to charges. Toll was exacted in one direction only,
unsold articles to be returned to the shipper free. As the time for
closing to exhibitors and opening to visitors approached the Centennial
cars became more and more familiar to the rural watcher of the passing
train. They aided to infect him, if free from it before, with the
Centennial craze. Their doors, though sealed, were eloquent, for they
bore in great black letters on staring white muslin the shibboleth of
the day, "1776--International Exhibition--1876." The enthusiasm of those
very hard and unimpressible entities, the railroad companies, thus
manifesting itself in low rates and gratuitous advertising, could not
fail to be contagious. Nor was the service done by the interior lines
wholly domestic. Several large foreign contributions from the Pacific
traversed the continent. The houses and the handicraft of the Mongol
climbed the Sierra Nevada on the magnificent highway his patient labor
had so large a share in constructing. Nineteen cars were freighted with
the rough and unpromising chrysalis that developed into the neat and
elaborate cottage of Japan, and others brought the Chinese display.
Polynesia and Australia adopted the same route in part. The canal
modestly assisted the rail, lines of inland navigation conducting to the
grounds barges of three times the tonnage of the average sea-going craft
of the Revolutionary era. These sluggish and smooth-going vehicles were
employed for the carriage of some of the large plants and trees which
enrich the horticultural department, eight boats being required to
transport from New York a thousand specimens of the Cuban flora sent by
a single exhibitor, M. Lachaume of Havana. Those moisture-loving shrubs,
the brilliant rhododendra collected by English nurserymen from our own
Alleghanies and returned to us wonderfully improved by civilization,
might have been expected also to affect the canal, but they chose, with
British taste, the more rapid rail. They had, in fact, no time to lose,
for their blooming season was close at hand, and their roots must needs
hasten to test the juices of American soil. Japan's miniature garden of
miniature plants, interesting far beyond the proportions of its
dimensions, was perforce dependent on the same means of conveyance.
[Illustration: FAÇADE OF THE EGYPTIAN DIVISION, MAIN BUILDING.]
The locomotive was summoned to the aid of foreign exhibitors on the
Atlantic as on the Pacific side, though to a less striking extent, the
largest steamships being able to lie within three miles of the
exposition buildings. It stood ready on the wharves of the Delaware to
welcome these stately guests from afar, indifferent whether they came in
squadrons or alone. It received on one day, in this vestibule of the
exposition, the Labrador from France and the Donati from Brazil. Dom
Pedro's coffee, sugar and tobacco and the marbles and canvases of the
Société des Beaux-Arts were whisked off in amicable companionship to
their final destination. The solidarity of the nations is in some sort
promoted by this shaking down together of their goods and chattels. It
gives a truly international look to the exposition to see one of
Vernet's battle-pieces or Meissonier's microscopic gems of color jostled
by a package of hides from the Parana or a bale of India-rubber.
Yet more expressive was the medley upon the covered platforms for the
reception of freight. Eleven of these, each one hundred and sixty by
twenty-four feet, admitted of the unloading of fifty-five freight-cars
at once. At this rate there was not left the least room for anxiety as
to the ability of the Commission and its employés to dispose, so far as
their responsibility was concerned, of everything presented for
exhibition within a very few days. The movements of the custom-house
officials, and the arrangements of goods after the passing of that
ordeal, were less rapid, and there seemed some ground for anxiety when
it was found that in the last days of March scarce a tenth of the
catalogued exhibits were on the ground, and for the closing ten days of
the period fixed for the receipt of goods an average of one car-load per
minute of the working hours was the calculated draft on the resources of
the unloading sheds. Home exhibitors, by reason of the very completeness
of their facilities of transport, were the most dilatory. The United
States held back until her guests were served, confident in the abundant
efficiency of the preparations made for bringing the entertainers to
their side. Better thus than that foreigners should have been behind
time.
When the gates of the enclosure were at last shut upon the steam-horse,
a broader and more congenial field of duty opened before him. From the
rôle of dray-horse he passed to that of courser. Marvels from the ends
of the earth he had, with many a pant and heave, forward pull and
backward push, brought together and dumped in their allotted places. Now
it became his task to bear the fiery cross over hill and dale and
gather the clans, men, women and children. The London exhibition of
1851 had 6,170,000 visitors, and that of 1862 had 6,211,103. Paris in
1855 had 4,533,464, and in 1867, 10,200,000. Vienna's exhibition drew
7,254,867. The attendance at London on either occasion was barely double
the number of her population. So it was with Paris at her first display,
though she did much better subsequently. Vienna's was the greatest
success of all, according to this test. The least of all, if we may take
it into the list, was that of New York in 1853. Her people numbered
about the same with the visitors to her Crystal Palace--600,000.
Philadelphia's calculations went far beyond any of these figures, and
she laid her plans accordingly.
Some trainbands from Northern and Southern cities might give their
patriotic furor the bizarre form of a march across country, but the
millions, if they came at all, must come by rail, and the problem was to
multiply the facilities far beyond any previous experience, while
reconciling the maximum of safety, comfort and speed with a reduction of
fares. The arrangements are still to be tested, and are no doubt open to
modification. On one point, however, and this an essential one, we
apprehend no grounds of complaint. There will be no crowding. The train
is practically endless, the word _terminus_ being a misnomer for the
circular system of tracks to which the station (six hundred and fifty by
one hundred feet) at the main entrance of the grounds forms a tangent.
The line of tourists is reeled off like their thread in the hands of
Clotho, the iron shears that snip it at stated intervals being
represented by the unmythical steam-engine. The same modern minister of
the Fates has another shrine not far from the dome of Memorial Hall,
where his acolytes are the officials of the Reading Railroad Company.
Care for the visitor's comfortable locomotion does not end with
depositing him under the reception-verandah. The Commission did not
forget that a pedestrian excursion over fifteen or twenty miles of
aisles might sufficiently fatigue him without the additional trudge from
hall to hall over a surface of four hundred acres under a sun which the
century has certainly not deprived of any mentionable portion of its
heat. Hence, the belt railway, three and a half miles long, with trains
running by incessant schedule--a boon only to be justly appreciated by
those who attended the European expositions or any one of them. His
umbrella and goloshes pocketed in the form of a D.P.C. check, the
visitor, more fortunate than Brummel or Bonaparte, cannot be stopped by
the elements.
[Illustration: FAÇADE OF THE SWEDISH DIVISION, MAIN BUILDING.]
We shall have amply disposed of the subject of transportation when we
add that the neighborhood or city supply to the thirteen entrance-gates
is provided for by steam-roads capable of carrying twenty-four thousand
persons hourly, and tram-roads seating seven thousand, besides an
irregular militia or voltigeur force of light wagons, small steamers and
omnibuses equal to a demand of two or three thousand more in the same
time. It was not deemed likely that Philadelphia would require
conveyance for half of her population every day. Should that supposition
prove erroneous, the excess can fall back upon the safe and inexpensive
vehicle of 1776, 1851, 1867 and 1873--sole leather.
Let us return to our packing-cases, and see where they go. To watch the
gradual dispersal of a congregation to their several places of abode is
always interesting. Especially is it so when those places of retreat
bear the names and fly the flags of the several nations of the globe.
This stout cube of deal, triple-bound with iron, disappears under the
asp and winged sphere of the Pharaohs. That other, big with rich velvets
and broideries, seeks the tricolor of France. Yonder, a wealth of silks
and lacquer finds a resting-place in the carved black-walnut _étagères_
of Japan. Here go, cased in the spoils of the fjelds, toward a pavilion
seventy-five paces long and twenty wide, the bulky contributions of the
Norsemen. Swedish carpentry in perfection offers to a deposit separate
from that of the sister-kingdom a distinct receptacle. Close at hand
stand the antipodes in the pavilion of Chili, that opens its graceful
portal to bales sprinkled mayhap with the ashes of Aconcagua. There
"crashes a sturdy _box_ of stout John Bull;" and Russia, Tunis and
Canada roll into close neighborhood with him and each other. A queer and
not, let us hope, altogether transitory show of international comity is
this. Many a high-sounding, much-heralded and more-debating Peace
Congress has been held with less effect than that conducted by these
humble porters, carpenters and decorators. This one has solidity. Its
elements are palpable. The peoples not only bring their choicest
possessions, but they also set up around them their local habitations.
It is a cosmopolitan town that has sprung into being beneath the great
roof and glitters in the rays of our republican sun. In its
rectangularly-planned streets, alleys and plazas every style of
architecture is represented--domestic, state and ecclesiastical,
ancient, mediæval and modern. The spirit and taste of most of the races
and climes find expression, giving thus the Sydenham and the Hyde Park
palaces in one. The reproductions at the former place were the work of
English hands: those before us are executed, for the most part, by
workmen to whom the originals are native and familiar. In this feature
of the interior of the Main Building we are amply compensated for the
breaking up of the _coup d'oeil_ by a multiplicity of discordant forms.
The space is still so vast as to maintain the effect of unity; and this
notwithstanding the considerable height of some of the national stalls,
that of Spain, for example, sending aloft its trophy of Moorish shields
and its effigy of the world-seeking Genoese to an elevation of forty-six
feet. The Moorish colonnade of the Brazilian pavilion lifts its head in
graceful rivalry of the lofty front reared by the other branch of the
Iberian race. In so vast an expanse this friendly competition of
Spaniards and Portuguese becomes, to the eye, a union of their
pretensions; and a single family of thirty-three millions in Europe and
America combines to present us with two of the handsomest structures in
the hall.
[Illustration: FAÇADE OF THE BRAZILIAN DIVISION, MAIN BUILDING.]
A moderate dip into statistics can no longer be evaded. We must map out
the microcosm, and allot to each sovereign power its quota of the
surface. The great European states which have assumed within the century
the supreme direction of human affairs are assigned a prominent central
position in the Main Building. Great Britain and her Asiatic possessions
occupy just eighty-three feet less than a hundred thousand; her other
colonies, including Canada, 48,150; France and her colonies, 43,314;
Germany, 27,975; Austria, 24,070; Russia, 11,002; Spain, 11,253; Sweden
and Belgium, each 15,358; Norway, 6897; Italy, 8167; Japan, 16,566;
Switzerland, 6646; China, 7504; Brazil, 6397; Egypt, 5146; Mexico, 6504;
Turkey, 4805; Denmark, 1462; and Tunis, 2015. These, with minor
apportionments to Venezuela, the Argentine Confederation, Chili, Peru
and the Orange Free State of South Africa, cover the original area of
the structure, deducting the reservation of 187,705 feet for the United
States, and excluding thirty-eight thousand square feet in the annexes.
France must be credited, in explanation of her comparatively limited
territory under the main roof, with her external pavilions devoted to
bronzes, glass, perfumery and (chief of all) to her magnificent
government exhibit of technical plans, drawings and models in
engineering, civil and military, and architecture. These outside
contributions constitute a link between her more substantial displays
and the five hundred paintings, fifty statues, etc. she places in
Memorial Hall.
In Machinery and Agricultural Halls, respectively, Great Britain has
37,125 and 18,745 feet; Germany, 10,757 and 4875; France, 10,139 and
15,574; Belgium, 9375 and 1851; Canada, 4300 and 10,094; Brazil, 4000
and 4657; Sweden, 3168 and 2603; Spain, 2248 and 5005; Russia, 1500 and
6785; Chili, 480 and 2493; Norway, 360 and 1590. Austria occupies 1536
feet in Mechanical Hall; and in that of Agriculture are the following
additional allotments: Netherlands, 4276; Denmark, 836; Japan, 1665;
Peru, 1632; Liberia, 1536; Siam, 1220; Portugal, 1020.
The foreign contributions in the department of machinery are, it will be
seen, hardly so large as might have been anticipated. When the spacious
annexes are added to the floor of the main hall, the great preponderance
of home exhibitors--five to one in the latter--is shown to be still more
marked. In Agricultural Hall the United States claim less than
two-thirds. The unexpected interest taken in this branch by foreigners
will enhance its prominence and value among the attractions of the
exposition. The collection of tropical products for food and
manufacturing is very complete. The development of the equatorial
regions of the globe has barely commenced. Even our acquaintance with
their natural resources remains but superficial. The country which takes
the lead in utilizing them in its trade and manufactures will gain a
great advantage over its fellows. England's commercial supremacy never
rested more largely on that foundation than now. Brazil, the great power
of South--as the Union is of North--America, possesses nearly half of
the accessible virgin territory of the tropics. Our interest joins hers
in retaining this vast endowment as far as possible for the benefit of
the Western World. A perception of this fact is shown in the exceptional
efforts made by Brazil to be fully represented in all departments of the
exposition, and in the visit to it of her chief magistrate, as we may
properly term her emperor, the only embodiment of hereditary power and
the monarchical principle in a country that enjoys--and has for the half
century since its erection into an independent state maintained--free
institutions.
[Illustration: DOM PEDRO, EMPEROR OF BRAZIL.]
In art domestic exhibits utterly lose their preponderance. Our artists
content themselves with a small fraction of the wall- and floor-space in
Memorial Hall and its northern annex. In extent of both "hanging" and
standing ground they but equal England and France, each occupying
something over twenty thousand square feet. Italy in the æsthetic combat
selects the chisel as her weapon, and takes the floor with a superb
array of marble eloquence, some three hundred pieces of statuary being
contributed by her sculptors. She might in addition set up a colorable
claim to the works executed on her soil or under the teaching of her
schools by artists of other nativities, and thus make, for example, a
sweeping raid into American territory. But she generously leaves to that
division the spoils swept from her coasts by the U.S. ship Franklin,
together with the works bearing her imprint in other sections, satisfied
with the wealth undoubtedly her own, itself but a faint adumbration of
the vast hoard she retains at home. Italy does not view the occasion
from a fine-art standpoint alone. Of her nine hundred and twenty-six
exhibitors, only one-sixth are in this department.
[Illustration: JAPANESE CARPENTERS.]
Nor, on the art side of our own country, must we overlook the Historical
division, the perfecting of which has been a labor of love with Mr.
Etting. He allots space among the old Thirteen, and reserves a place at
the feast of reunion to the mother of that rebellious sisterhood.
Forty acres of "floor-space" _sub Jove_ remained to be awarded to
foreign and domestic claimants. Gardening is one of the fine arts.
Certainly nothing in Memorial Hall can excel its productions in
richness, variety and harmony of color and form. Flower, leaf and tree
are the models of the palette and the crayon. Their marvelous
improvement in variety and splendor is one of the most striking triumphs
of human ingenuity. A few hundred species have been expanded into many
thousand forms, each finer than the parent. It is a new flora created by
civilization, undreamed of by the savage, and voluminous in proportion
to the mental advancement of the races among whom it has sprung up.
Progress writes its record in flowers, and scrawls the autographs of the
nations all over Lansdowne hill. No need of gilded show-cases to set off
the German and Germantown roses, the thirty thousand hyacinths in
another compartment, or the plot of seven hundred and fifty kinds of
trees and shrubs planted by a single American contributor. The Moorish
Kiosque, however, comes in well. The material is genuine Morocco, the
building having been brought over in pieces from the realm of the
Saracens, of "gul in its bloom" and of "Larry O'Rourke"--as Rogers
punned down the poem of his Irish friend.
The nations comfortably installed, we must sketch the tactical system
under which they are drawn up for peaceful contest. The classification
of subjects adopted by the Commission embraces seven departments. Of
these, the Main Building is devoted to I. _Mining and Metallurgy_; II.
_Manufactures_; III. _Education and Science_; Memorial Hall and its
appendages, to IV. _Art_; Machinery Hall, to V. _Machinery_;
Agricultural Hall, to VI. _Agriculture_; and Horticultural Hall and its
parterres, to VII. _Horticulture_. These habitats have, as we have
heretofore seen, proved too contracted for the august and expansive
inmates assigned them. All of the latter have overflowed; mining, for
instance, into the mineral annex of thirty-two thousand square feet and
the great pavilion (a hundred and thirty-five feet square) of Colorado
and Kansas; education into the Swedish and Pennsylvania school-houses
and others already noted; manufactures into breweries, glass-houses,
etc.; and so on with an infinity of irrepressible outgrowths.
[Illustration: FAÇADE OF THE DIVISION OF THE NETHERLANDS, MAIN
BUILDING.]
Department I. is subdivided into classes numbered from 100 to 129, and
embracing the products of mines and the means of extracting and reducing
them. II. extends from Class 200 to Class 296--chemical manufactures,
ceramics, furniture, woven goods of all kinds, jewelry, paper,
stationery, weapons, medical appliances, hardware, vehicles and their
accessories. III. deals with the high province of educational systems,
methods and libraries; institutions and organizations; scientific and
philosophical instruments and methods; engineering, architecture in its
technical and non-æsthetic aspect, maps; physical, moral and social
condition of man. Fifty classes, 300 to 349 inclusive, fence in this
field of pure reason. Department IV., Classes 400-459, covers sculpture,
painting, photography, engraving and lithography, industrial and
architectural designs, ceramic decorations, mosaics, etc. V., Classes
509-599, takes charge of machines and tools for mining, chemistry,
weaving, sewing, printing, working metal, wood and stone; motors;
hydraulic and pneumatic apparatus; railway stock or "plant;" machinery
for preparing agricultural products; "aërial, pneumatic and water
transportation," and "machinery and apparatus especially adapted to the
requirements of the exhibition." VI., Classes 600-699, assembles
arboriculture and forest products, pomology, agricultural products, land
and marine animals, pisciculture and its apparatus, "animal and
vegetable products," textile substances, machines, implements and
products of manufacture, agricultural engineering and administration,
tillage and general management. Under Department VII., Classes 700-739,
come ornamental trees, shrubs and flowers, hothouses and conservatories,
garden tools and contrivances, garden designing, construction and
management.
The accumulated experience of past expositions, seconded by the judgment
and systematic thoroughness apparent in the preparations for the present
one, makes this a good "working" classification. It has done away with
confusion to an extent hardly to have been hoped for, and all the
thousands of objects and subjects have dropped into their places in the
exhibition with the precision of machinery, little adapted as some of
them are to such treatment. Very impalpable and elusive things had to
submit themselves to inspection and analysis, and have their elements
tabulated like a tax bill or a grocery account. All human concerns were
called on to be listed on the muster-roll and stand shoulder to shoulder
on the drill-ground. Some curious comrades appear side by side in the
long line. For example, we read: Class 286, brushes; 295, sleighs; 300,
elementary instruction; 301, academies and high schools, colleges and
universities; 305, libraries, history, etc.; 306, school-books, general
and miscellaneous literature, encyclopædias, newspapers; 311, learned
and scientific associations, artistic, biological, zoological and
medical schools, astronomical observatories; 313, music and the drama.
Then we find, closely sandwiched between, 335--topographical maps,
etc.--and 400--figures in stone, metal, clay or plaster--340, physical
development and condition (of the young of the genus _Homo_); 345,
government and law; 346, benevolence, beginning with hospitals of all
kinds and ending with--in the order we give them--emigrant-aid
societies, treatment of aborigines and prevention of cruelty to animals!
In the last-named subdivision the visitor will be stared out of
countenance by Mr. Bergh's tremendous exposure of "various instruments
used by persons in breaking the law relative to cruelty to animals," the
glittering banner of the S.P.C.A., and its big trophy, eight yards
square, that illuminates the east end of the north avenue of the Main
Building, in opposition to the trophy at the other end of the same
avenue illustrating the history of the American flag. But he will look
in vain for selected specimens of the emigrant-runner, the luxuries of
the steerage and Castle Garden, or for photographs of the well-fed
post-trader and Indian agent, agricultural products from Captain Jack's
lava-bed reservation and jars of semi-putrescent treaty-beef. He will
alight, next door to the penniless immigrant, the red man and the
omnibus-horse, on Class 348, religious organizations and systems,
embracing everything that grows out of man's sense of responsibility to
his Maker. It will perhaps occur to the observer that, though the
juxtaposition is well enough, religion ought to have come in a little
before. His surprise at the power of condensation shown in compressing
eternity into a single class will not be lessened when he passes on to
Class 632, sheep; 634, swine; and 636, dogs and cats!
A glance over the classification-list assists us in recognizing the
advantages of the system of awards framed by the Commission and adopted
after patient study and discussion. It discards the plan--if plan it
could be called--of scattering diplomas and medals of gold, silver and
bronze right and left, after the fashion of largesse at a mediæval
coronation, heretofore followed at international expositions. These
prizes were decided on and assigned by juries whose impartiality--by
reason of the imperfect representation upon them of the nations which
exhibited little in mass or little in certain classes, and also of their
failure to make written reports and thus secure their
responsibility--could not be assured, and whose action, therefore, was
defective in real weight and value. The juries were badly constituted:
they had too much to do of an illusory and useless description, and they
had too little to do that was solid and instructive. Special mentions,
diplomas, half a dozen grades of medals and other honors, formed a
programme too large and complicated to be discriminatingly carried out.
So it happened that to exhibit and to get a distinction of some kind
came, at Vienna, to be almost convertible expressions; and who excelled
in the competition in any of the classes, or who had contributed anything
substantial to the stock of human knowledge or well-being, remained quite
undetermined. What instruction the display could impart was confined to
spectators who studied its specialties for themselves and used their
deductions for their individual advantage, and to those who read the
sufficiently general and cursory reports made to their several
governments by the national commissions. The official awards and reports
of the exposition authorities amounted to little or nothing.
[Illustration: THE CORLISS ENGINE, FURNISHING MOTIVE-POWER FOR MACHINERY
HALL.]
A sharp departure from this practice was decided on at the Centennial.
Two hundred judges, of undoubted character and intelligence and entire
familiarity with the departments assigned to them, were chosen--half by
the foreign bureaus and half by the U.S. Commission. These were made
officers of the exposition itself, and thus separated from external
influences. They were given a reasonable and fixed compensation of one
thousand dollars each for their time and personal expenses. An equal
division of the number of judges between the domestic and foreign sides
gives the latter an excess, measured by the comparative extent of the
display from the two sources. But this is favorable to us, as we shall
be the better for an outside judgment on the merits of both our own and
foreign exhibits. Were it otherwise, the excess of private observers
from this country would counterbalance our deficit in judges. The
foreign jurors have to see for the millions they represent. Our own will
have vast numbers of their constituents on the ground.
Written reports are drawn up by these selected examiners and signed by
the authors. The reports must be "based upon inherent and comparative
merit. The elements of merit shall be held to include considerations
relating to originality, invention, discovery, utility, quality, skill,
workmanship, fitness for the purpose intended, adaptation to public
wants, economy and cost." Each report, upon its completion, is delivered
to the Centennial Commission for award and publication. The award comes
in the shape of a diploma with a bronze medal and a special report of
the judges upon its subject. This report may be published by the
exhibitor if he choose. It will also be used by the Commission in such
manner as may best promote the objects of the exposition. These
documents, well edited and put in popular form, will constitute the most
valuable publication that has been produced by any international
exhibition. To this we may add the special reports to be made by the
State and foreign commissions. These ought, with the light gained by
time, to be at least not inferior to the similar papers scattered
through the bulky records of previous exhibitions. Let us hope that
brevity will rule in the style of all the reports, regular and
irregular. There is a core to every subject, every group of subjects and
every group of groups, however numerous and complex: let all the scribes
labor to find it for us. When we recall the disposition of all
committees to select the member most fecund of words to prepare their
report, we are seized with misgivings--a feeling that becomes oppressive
as we further reflect that the local committee which deliberately
collected and sent for exhibition eighty thousand manuscripts written by
the school-children of a Western city is at large on the exposition
grounds.
The passion for independent effort characteristic of the American people
led to the supplementing of the official list by sundry volunteer
prizes. These are offered by associations, and in some cases
individuals. They are not all, like the regular awards, purely honorary.
They lean to the pecuniary form, those particularly which are offered in
different branches of agriculture. Competition among poultry-growers,
manufacturers of butter, reaping-and threshing-machines,
cotton-planters, etc. is stimulated by money-prizes reaching in all some
six or eight thousand dollars. Agricultural machinery needs the open
field for its proper testing, and cannot operate satisfactorily in
Machinery Hall. Without a sight of our harvest-fields and
threshing-floors foreigners would carry away an incomplete impression of
our industrial methods, the farm being our great factory. The oar, the
rifle and the racer are as impatient of walls as the plough and its
new-fangled allies. They demand elbow-room for the display of their
powers, and the Commission was fain to let their votaries tempt it to
pass the confines of its territory. The lusty undergraduates of both
sides of Anglo-Saxondom escort it unresistingly down from its airy halls
to the blue bosom of the Schuylkill, while "teams" picked from eighty
English-speaking millions beckon it across the Jerseys to Creedmoor. And
the horse--is he to call in vain? Is a strait-laced negative from the
Commission to echo back his neigh? Is the blood of Eclipse and Godolphin
to stagnate under a ticket in "Class 630, horses, asses and mules"? Why,
the very ponies in front of Memorial Hall pull with extra vim against
their virago jockeys and flap their little brass wings in indignation at
the thought. The thoroughbred will be heard from, and the judges that
sit on him will be "experts in their department."
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF COOK'S WORLD'S TICKET-OFFICE.]
Another specimen of the desert-born, the Western Indian, forms an
exhibit as little suited as the improved Arab horse to discussion and
award at a session fraught with that "calm contemplation and poetic
ease" which ought to mark the deliberations of the judges. How are the
representatives of fifty-three tribes to be put through their paces?
These poor fragments of the ancient population of the Union have, if we
exclude the Cherokees and Choctaws and two or three of the Gila tribes,
literally nothing to show. The latter can present us with a faint trace
of the long-faded civilization of their Aztec kindred, while the former
have only borrowed a few of the rudest arts of the white, and are
protected from extinction merely by the barrier of a frontier more and
more violently assailed each year by the speculator and the settler, and
already passed by the railway. If we cannot exactly say that the Indian,
alone of all the throng at the exhibition, goes home uninformed and
unenlightened, what ideas may reach his mind will be soon smothered out
by the conditions which surround him on the Plains. It is singular that
a population of three or four hundred thousand, far from contemptible
in intellectual power, and belonging to a race which has shown itself
capable of a degree of civilization many of the tribes of the Eastern
continents have never approached, should be so absolutely an industrial
cipher. The African even exports mats, palm-oil and peanuts, but the
Indian exports nothing and produces nothing. He lacks the sense of
property, and has no object of acquisition but scalps. Can the assembled
ingenuity of the nineteenth century, in presence of this mass of waste
human material, devise no means of utilizing it? There stands its
Frankenstein, ready made, perfect in thews and sinews, perfect also in
many of its nobler parts. It is not a creation that is demanded--simply
a remodeling or expansion. For success in this achievement the United
States can afford to offer a pecuniary prize that will throw into the
shade all the other prizes put together. The cost of the Indian bureau
for 1875-76 reached eight millions of dollars. The commission appointed
to treat for the purchase of the Black Hills reports that the feeding
and clothing of the Sioux cost the government thirteen millions during
the past seven years; and that without the smallest benefit to those
spirited savages. Says the report: "They have made no advancement
whatever, but have done absolutely nothing but eat, drink, smoke and
sleep."
Social and political questions like this point to a vast field of
inquiry. For its proper cultivation the exposition provides data
additional to those heretofore available. They should be used as far as
possible upon the spot. At least, they can be examined, collated and
prepared for full employment. To this end, meetings and discussions held
by men qualified by intellect and study to deal with them are the
obvious resort. There is room among the two hundred judges for some such
men, but the juries are little more numerous than is required for the
examination of and report on objects. For more abstract inquiries they
will need recruits. These should be supplied by the leading
philosophical associations of this country and Europe. The governments
have all an interest in enlisting their aid, and the Centennial
Commission has done what in it lay to promote their action. Ethnic
characteristics, history, literature, education, crime, statistics as a
science, hygiene and medicine generally are among the broad themes which
are not apt to be adequately treated by the average committee of
inspection. So with the whole range of the natural sciences.
Dissertations based on the jury reports will doubtless be abundant after
a while, but those reports themselves, being limited in scope, will not
be as satisfactory material as that which philosophic specialists would
themselves extract from direct observation and debate upon the ground.
For the study of the commanding subject of education the provision made
at the present exhibition is exceptionally great. In bulk, and probably
in completeness, it is immeasurably beyond the display made on any
preceding occasion. The building erected by the single State of
Pennsylvania for her educational department covers ten or eleven
thousand square feet, and other States of the Union make corresponding
efforts to show well in the same line. The European nations all manifest
a new interest in this branch, and give it a much more prominent place
in their exhibit than ever before. The school-systems of most of them
are of very recent birth, and do not date back so far as 1851. The
kingdom of Italy did not exist at that time or for many years after, yet
we now see it pressing for a foremost place in the race of popular
education, and multiplying its public schools in the face of all the
troubles attendant upon the erection and organization of a new state.
The historian will find aliment less abundant. A century or two of
Caucasian life in America is but a thing of yesterday to him, and,
though far from uninstructive, is but an offshoot from modern European
annals. For all that, he finds himself on our soil in presence of an
antiquity which remains to be explored, and which clamors to be rescued
from the domain of the pre-historic. It has no literary records beyond
the scant remains of Mexico. It writes itself, nevertheless, strongly
and deeply on the face of the land--in mounds, fortifications and tombs
as distinct, if not so elaborate, as those of Etruria and Cyprus. These
remains show the hand of several successive races. Who they were, what
their traits, whence they came, what their relations with the now
civilized Chinese and Japanese--whom, physically, their descendants so
nearly resemble--are legitimate queries for the historian. Geologically,
America is older than Europe, and was fitted for the home of the red man
before the latter ceased to be the home of the whale. The investigation
of its past, if impossible to be conducted in the light of its own
records or even traditions, is capable of aiding in the verification of
conclusions drawn from those of the Old World. If History, however,
contemptuously relegates the Moundbuilders to the mattock of the
antiquarian, she is still "Philosophy teaching by example." As thus
allied with Philosophy, she finds something to look into at the
Centennial, even though she look obliquely, after the fashion of the
observant Hollanders, who have stuck the reflecting glasses of the Dutch
street-windows into the sides of their compartment in the Main Building,
and squint, without a change of position, upon the United States, Spain,
South America, Egypt, Great Britain and several other countries.
Religion and philanthropy find the field inviting, and their
representatives, individual and associated, are busy in preparing to
till it. The enthusiasm of the leading religious societies took the
concrete shape of statuary. Hence the Catholic Fountain, heretofore
noticed; the Hebrew statue to Religious Liberty, as established in a
land that never had a Ghetto or a Judenstrasse; the Presbyterian figure
of Witherspoon; an Episcopalian of Bishop White; and others under way or
proposed. The temperance movement, too, embodies itself in a fountain
that runs ice-water instead of claret. The less tangible but perhaps
more fruitful form of reunions and discussions must in a greater or less
degree enhance the power for good of these organizations. They are led
by men of mind and energy, seldom averse to enlightenment, and all
professing to seek nothing else. When men of these qualities, aiming at
the same or a like object, meet to compare their respective
admeasurements of its parallax made from as many different points, they
cannot fail to approach accuracy. Faith is a first element in all great
undertakings. It removes mountains at Mont Cenis, as it walked the waves
with Columbus. In our century even faith is progressive, and does not
shrink from elbowing its way through what Bunyan would have styled
Vanity Fair.
Modestly in the rear of the moral reformers, yet not wholly and
uniformly unaggressive, nor guiltless altogether of isms and schisms,
step forward the literary men. As a rule, they do not affect
expositions, or exhibitions of any kind. But one general meeting, with
some minor and informal ones, is on the programme for them. This is
well. The world and the fullness thereof belongs to them, and they may
care to come forward to scan this schedule of their inheritance. We do
not hear of their having combined to put up a pavilion of their own,
like the dairymen and the brewers, "to show the different processes of
manufacture." The pen will be at work here, nevertheless, and has been
from the beginning, before the foundations of the Corliss engine were
laid or the granite of Memorial Hall left the quarry. Without this first
of implements none of the other machinery would ever have moved. The pen
is mightier than the piston. It is the invisible steam that impels all.
[Illustration: FRENCH RESTAURANT LA FAYETTE.]
In a visible form also it is here. The publishers of the London _Punch_
have selected as the most comprehensive motto for the case in which they
exhibit copies of their various publications a sentence from Shakspeare:
"Come and take choice of all my library, and so beguile thy sorrow." We
do not know that to dull his sorrows is all that can be done for man.
Literature assumes to do more than make him forget. The lotos-eater is
not its one hero. School-books, piled aloft "in numbers without number
numberless," may to the man be suggestive of hours without thought and
void of grief, but they certainly are not to the boy. Blue books, ground
out in a thousand bureaus, and contributed in like profusion, may be
pronounced a weariness to the adult flesh, however sweet their ultimate
uses. Unhappy those who wade through them for increasing the happiness
of others! These humble but portly representatives of political
literature are the log-books of the ship of state. They chart and
chronicle the currents and winds along its course, so that from the mass
of chaff a grain of guidance may be painfully winnowed out for the
benefit of its next voyage, or for the voyages of other craft
floundering on the same perilous and baffling sea. Everything comes pat
to a log-book. As endless is the medley of memoranda in blue-books. They
deal, like government itself, with everything. They take up the citizen
on his entry into the cradle, and do not quite drop him at the grave.
How to educate, clothe, feed and doctor him; how to keep him out of
jail, and how, once there, to get him out again with the least possible
moral detriment; how to adjust as lightly as possible to his shoulders
the burden of taxation; how to economize him as food for powder; and how
to free him from the miasm of crowded cities,--are but a small part of
their contents. And the index is growing, if possible, larger, as the
apparatus of government becomes more and more intricate. With such
contributions and credentials do the rulers of the nations enroll
themselves in the guild of authorship. They are proud of them, and
exhibit them in profusion, in whole libraries, rich with gold and the
primary colors.
Expositions, as we have before remarked, come into the same worshipful
guild by right of a special literature they have brought into being.
They come, moreover, into the blue-book range by their bearing upon
certain topics generally assigned to it. It is found, for example, that,
like other great gatherings, they are apt to be followed by a temporary
local increase of crime. The police-records of London show that the
arrests in 1851 outnumbered those of the previous year by 1570, and that
in 1862 the aggregate exceeded by 5043 that of 1861. It will at once
occur that the population of the city was greatly increased on each
occasion, and that the influx of thieves and lawbreakers generally must
have thinned out that class elsewhere, and in that way very probably
reduced, rather than added to, the sum-total of crime, the preventive
arrangements in London having been exceptionally thorough. The drawback
that would consist in an increase of crime is therefore only an apparent
result. An opposite effect cannot but result, if only from the evidence
that so vast and heterogeneous an assemblage can be held without marked
disorder. The police as well as the criminals and the savants of all
nations come together, compare notes and enjoy a common improvement.
[Illustration: THE MAMMOTH RODMAN GUN.]
This is the first opportunity the physicians of Europe have had to
become fully acquainted with the advances in surgery and pathology their
American brethren have the credit of having made within the past few
years. They will find it illustrated in the government buildings and
elsewhere; and they have an ample _quid pro quo_ to offer from their own
researches. The balancing of opinions at the proposed medical congress
and in private intercourse must tend to free medical science from what
remnants of empiricism still disfigure it, to perfect diagnosis and to
trace with precision the operation of all remedial agents. Means remain
to be found of administering the _coup de grâce_ to the few epidemics
which have not yet been extirpated, but linger in a crippled condition.
This will be aided by the illustrations afforded of processes of
draining, ventilation, etc.
Man's health rests in that of his stomach. The food question is a
concern of the physician as well as of the publicist. The race began
life on a vegetable diet, and to that it reverts when compelled by
enfeebled digestion or by the increasing difficulty of providing animal
food for a dense population. But it likes flesh when able to assimilate
it or to procure it, and demands at least the compromise of fish. Hence,
the revived attention to fish-breeding, an art wellnigh forgotten since
the Reformation emptied the carp-ponds of the monks. Maryland, New York
and other States illustrate this device for enhancing the food-supply,
and the aquaria at Agricultural Hall, containing twelve or fifteen
thousand gallons of salt and fresh water, present a congress of the
leaders, gastronomically speaking, of the finny people. The shad remains
not only to be naturalized in Europe, but to be reintroduced to the
water-side dwellers above tide, who once met him regularly at table. He
is joined by delegates from the mountain, the great lakes and the
Pacific coast in the trout, the salmon and the whitefish, and by that
quiet, silent and slow-going cousin of the fraternity, the oyster, most
valuable of all, as possessors of those qualities not unfrequently are.
Europe does not dream, and we ourselves do not realize until we come
carefully to think of it, what the oyster does for us. He sustains the
hardiest part of our coasting marine, paves our best roads, fertilizes
our sands, enlivens all our festivities, and supports an army of
packers, can-makers, etc., cased in whose panoply of tin he traverses
the globe like a mail-clad knight-errant in the cause of commerce and
good eating. Yet he needs protection. All this burden is greater than he
can bear, and it is growing. System and science are invoked to his
rescue ere he go the way of the inland shad and the salmon that became a
drug to the Pilgrim Fathers. It is not easy to frame a medal or diploma
for the fostering of the oyster. More effective is a consideration of
the impending penalty for neglecting to do so. _Ostrea edulis_ is one of
the grand things before which prizes sink into nothingness.
Another of them is that triumph of pure reason, chess, an unadulterated
product of the brain--i.e., of phosphorus--i.e., of fish. Nobody stakes
money on chess or offers a prize to the best player. Honor at that board
is its own reward. So when we are told of the Centennial Chess
Tournament we recognize at once the fitness of the word borrowed from
the chivalric joust. It is the culmination of human strife. The thought,
labor and ardor spread over three hundred and fifty acres sums itself in
that black and white board the size of your handkerchief. War and
statecraft condense themselves into it. Armies and nations move with the
chessman. Sally, leaguer, feint, flank-march, triumphant charge are one
after another rehearsed. There, too, moves the game of politics in plot
and counterplot. It is the climax of the subjective. From those lists
the trumpet-blare, the crowd, the glitter, the banners, "the boast of
heraldry and pomp of power," melt utterly away. To the world-champions
who bend above the little board the big glass houses and all the
treasures stared at by admiring thousands are as naught.
[Illustration: SCENE AT ONE OF THE ENTRANCES TO THE GROUNDS--THE
TURNSTILE.]
But man is an animal, and not by any means of intellect all compact. The
average mortal confesses to a craving for the stimulus of great shows,
of material purposes, substantial objects of study and palpable prizes.
It is so in 1876, as it was in 1776, and as it will be in a long series
of Seventy-sixes.
It is the concrete rather than the abstract which draws him in through
the turnstiles of the exposition enclosure. Separated by the divisions
of those ingeniously-contrived gates into taxed and untaxed spectators,
the masses stream in with small thought of the philosophers or the
chess-players. Their minds are reached, but reached through the eye, and
the first appeal is to that. Each visitor constitutes himself a jury of
one to consider and compare what he sees. The hundreds of thousands of
verdicts so reached will be published only by word of mouth, if
published at all. Their value will be none the less indubitable, though
far from being in all cases the same. The proportion of intelligent
observers will be greater than on like occasions heretofore. So will,
perhaps, be that of solid matter for study, although in some specialties
there may be default. He who enters with the design of self-education
will find the text-books in most branches abundant, wide open before him
and printed in the clearest characters. What shortcomings there may have
been in the selection and arrangement of them he will have, if he can,
himself to remedy. There stands the school, founded and furnished with
great labor. The would-be scholar can only be invited to use it. The
centennial that is to turn out scholars ready-made has not yet rolled
round.
DOLORES.
A light at her feet and a light at her head,
How fast asleep my Dolores lies!
Awaken, my love, for to-morrow we wed--
Uplift the lids of thy beautiful eyes.
Too soon art thou clad in white, my spouse:
Who placed that garland above thy heart
Which shall wreathe to-morrow thy bridal brows?
How quiet and mute and strange thou art!
And hearest thou not my voice that speaks?
And feelest thou not my hot tears flow
As I kiss thine eyes and thy lips and thy cheeks?
Do they not warm thee, my bride of snow?
Thou knowest no grief, though thy love may weep.
A phantom smile, with a faint, wan beam,
Is fixed on thy features sealed in sleep:
Oh tell me the secret bliss of thy dream.
Does it lead to fair meadows with flowering trees,
Where thy sister-angels hail thee their own?
Was not my love to thee dearer than these?
Thine was my world and my heaven in one.
I dare not call thee aloud, nor cry,
Thou art so solemn, so rapt in rest,
But I will whisper: Dolores, 'tis I:
My heart is breaking within my breast.
Never ere now did I speak thy name,
Itself a caress, but the lovelight leapt
Into thine eyes with a kindling flame,
And a ripple of rose o'er thy soft cheek crept.
But now wilt thou stir not for passion or prayer,
And makest no sign of the lips or the eyes,
With a nun's strait band o'er thy bright black hair--
Blind to mine anguish and deaf to my cries.
I stand no more in the waxen-lit room:
I see thee again as I saw thee that day,
In a world of sunshine and springtide bloom,
'Midst the green and white of the budding May.
Now shadow, now shine, as the branches ope,
Flickereth over my love the while:
From her sunny eyes gleams the May-time hope,
And her pure lips dawn in a wistful smile.
As one who waiteth I see her stand,
Who waits though she knows not what nor whom,
With a lilac spray in her slim soft hand:
All the air is sweet with its spicy bloom.
I knew not her secret, though she held mine:
In that golden hour did we each confess;
And her low voice murmured, Yea, I am thine,
And the large world rang with my happiness.
To-morrow shall be the blessedest day
That ever the all-seeing sun espied:
Though thou sleep till the morning's earliest ray,
Yet then thou must waken to be my bride.
Yea, waken, my love, for to-morrow we wed:
Uplift the lids of thy beautiful eyes.
A light at her feet and a light at her head,
How fast asleep my Dolores lies!
EMMA LAZARUS.
GLIMPSES OF CONSTANTINOPLE.
CONCLUDING PAPER.
[Illustration: SCENE IN A BURIAL-GROUND.]
There is a continuous fascination about this old city. The guide-book
says, "A week or ten days are required to see the sights," but though we
make daily expeditions we seem in no danger of exhausting them. Neither
does one have to go far to seek amusement. I never look down into the
street below my windows without being attracted by some object of
interest. The little donkeys with their great panniers of long slim
loaves of bread (oh, tell it not, but I once saw the driver use one as a
stick to belabor the lazy animal with, and then leave it, with two or
three other loaves, at the opposite house, where a pretty Armenian, that
I afterward saw taking the air on the roof with her bright-eyed little
girl, perhaps had it for her breakfast!); the fierce, lawless Turkish
soldiers stalking along, their officers mounted, and looking much better
in their baggy trousers and frock-coats on their fine horses than on
foot; Greek and Armenian ladies in gay European costumes; veiled Turkish
women in their quiet street-dress; close carriages with
gorgeously-dressed beauties from the sultan's harem followed by black
eunuchs on horseback,--these and similar groups in every variety of
costume form a constant stream of strange and picturesque sights.
One morning, attracted by an unusual noise, I looked out and found it
proceeded from a funeral procession. First came a man carrying the lid
of the coffin; then several Greek priests; after them boys in white
robes with lighted candles, followed by choir-boys in similar dresses
who chanted as they walked along. Such sounds! Greek chanting is a
horrible nasal caterwauling. Get a dozen boys to hold their noses, and
then in a high key imitate the gamut performed by several festive cats
as they prowl over the housetops on a quiet night, and you have Greek,
Armenian or Turkish chanting and singing to perfection. There is not the
first conception of music in the souls of these barbarians. Behind this
choir came four men carrying the open coffin. The corpse was that of a
middle-aged man dressed in black clothes, with a red fez cap on the head
and yellow, red and white flowers scattered over the body. The hot sun
shone full on the pinched and shriveled features, and the sight was most
revolting. Several mourners followed the coffin, the ladies in black
clothes, with black lace veils on their heads and their hair much
dressed. The Greeks are obliged to carry their dead in this way,
uncovered, because concealed arms were at one time conveyed in coffins
to their churches, and then used in an uprising against the government.
We witnessed a still more dreadful funeral outside the walls. A party,
evidently of poor people, were approaching an unenclosed cemetery, and
we waited to see the interment. The body, in its usual clothes, was
carried on a board covered by a sheet. When they reached the grave the
women shrieked, wept and kissed the face of the dead man: then his
clothes were taken off, the body wrapped in the sheet and laid in the
grave, which was only two feet deep. The priest broke a bottle of wine
over the head, the earth was loosely thrown in, and the party went away.
There is no more melancholy spot to me than a Turkish cemetery. The
graves are squeezed tightly together, and the headstones, generally in a
tumble-down state, are shaped like a coffin standing on end, or like a
round hitching-post with a fez cap carved on the top. Weeds and rank
wild-flowers cover the ground, and over all sway the dark, stiff
cypresses.
A little way down the street is a Turkish pastry-shop. Lecturers and
writers have from time to time held forth on the enormities of
pie-eating, and given the American people "particular fits" for their
addiction to it. Now, while I fully endorse all I ever heard said on the
subject, I beg leave to remark that the Americans are not the _worst_
offenders in this way. If you want to see pastry, come to
Constantinople: _seeing_ will satisfy you--you won't risk a taste.
Mutton is largely eaten, and the mutton fat is used with flour to make
the crust, which is so rich that the grease fairly oozes out and
"smells to Heaven." Meat-pies are in great demand. The crust is baked
alone in a round flat piece, and laid out on a counter, which is soon
very greasy, ready to be filled. A large dish of hash is also ready, and
when a customer calls the requisite amount of meat is clapped on one
side of the paste, the other half doubled over it, and he departs eating
his halfmoon-shaped pie. On the counters you see displayed large
egg-shaped forms of what look like layers of tallow and cooked meat,
cheesy-looking cakes of many kinds and an endless variety of
confectionery. The sweetmeats are perfection, the fresh Turkish paste
with almonds in it melts in your mouth, and the sherbet, compounded of
the juice of many fruits and flowers and cooled with snow, is the most
delicious drink I ever tasted. There are also many kinds of nice
sweet-cakes; but, on the whole, I should prefer not to board in a
Turkish family or employ a Turkish cook. No wonder the women are pale
and sallow if they indulge much in such food!
Being anxious to see a good display of Turkish rugs, and our party
having some commissions to execute, we sallied forth one afternoon on
this errand. If you intend to visit a Turkish carpet warehouse, and your
purse or your judgment counsels you not to purchase, put yourself under
bonds to that effect before you go; for, unless you possess remarkable
strength of character, the beautiful rugs displayed will prove
irresistible temptations. Near the bazaar in Stamboul is a massive
square stone house, looking like a fortress compared with the buildings
around it. Mosses and weeds crop out of every uneven part of its walls.
A heavy door that might stand a siege admitted us to a small vestibule,
and from this we passed into a paved court with a moss-grown fountain in
the centre. Around this court ran a gallery, its heavy arches and
columns supporting a second, to which we ascended by a broad flight of
steps. A double door admitted us to the wareroom, where, tolerably
secure from fire (the doors alone were of wood), were stored Turkish and
Persian rugs of all sizes and colors. The Turkish were far handsomer
than the Persian, and the colors more brilliant than those I have
usually seen. The attendants unrolled one that they said was a hundred
years old. It had a dusty, faded look, as if it had been in the
warehouse quite that length of time, and made the modern ones seem
brighter by contrast. Several rugs having been selected, we returned to
the office, where a carpet was spread and we were invited to seat
ourselves on it. Coffee was passed around, and we proceeded to bargain
for our goods through our interpreter. The merchant, as usual, asked an
exorbitant price to start with, and we offered what was equally
ridiculous the other way; and so we gradually approached the final
price--he coming gracefully down, and we as affably ascending in the
scale, till a happy medium was reached, and we departed with our
purchases following us on the back of an ammale.
[Illustration: THE SULTAN ABDUL ASSIZ.]
Three days of each week are observed as holy days. Friday is the Turkish
Sabbath, Saturday the Jewish, and the Greeks and Armenians keep Sunday.
The indolent government officials, glad of an excuse to be idle, keep
all three--that is, they refrain from business--so there are only four
days out of the seven in which anything is accomplished.
One of the great sights is to see the sultan go to the mosque; so one
Friday we took a caïque and were rowed up the Bosphorus to Dolma Backté,
and waited on the water opposite the palace. The sultan's caïque was at
the principal entrance on the water-side of the palace, and the steps
and marble pavement were carpeted from the caïque to the door. Presently
all the richly-dressed officers of the household, who were loitering
around, formed on either side the steps, and, bending nearly double,
remained so while the sultan passed down to his caïque. Abdul Assiz is
quite stout and rather short, with a pleasant face and closely-cut
beard. He was dressed in a plain black uniform, his breast covered with
orders. The sultan's caïque was a magnificent barge--white, profusely
ornamented with gilt, and rowed by twenty-four oarsmen dressed in white,
who rose to their feet with each stroke, bowed low, and settled back in
their seats as the stroke was expended. The sultan and grand vizier
seated themselves under the plum-colored velvet canopy, and the caïque
proceeded swiftly toward the mosque, followed by three other caïques
with his attendants. A gun from an iron-clad opposite the palace
announced that the sultan had started. The shore from the palace to the
mosque was lined with soldiers; the bands played; the people cheered;
the ships ran up their flags; all the war-vessels were gay with bunting,
had their yards manned and fired salutes, which were answered by the
shore-batteries. The mosque selected for that day's devotions was in
Tophaneh, near the water. Several regiments were drawn up to receive the
sultan, and an elegant carriage and a superb Arab saddle-horse were in
waiting, so that His Majesty might return to the palace as best suited
his fancy. After an hour spent in devotion the sultan reappeared, and
entering his carriage was driven away. We saw him again on our way
home, when he stopped to call on an Austrian prince staying at the
legation. The street leading up to the embassy was too narrow and steep
for a carriage, so, mounting his horse at the foot, he rode up, passing
very close to us.
[Illustration: TURKISH COW-CARRIAGE.]
In the afternoon we drove to the "Sweet Waters of Europe" to see the
Turkish ladies, who in pleasant weather always go out there in carriages
or by water in caïques. Compared with our parks, with their lovely lakes
and streams and beautiful lawns, the far-famed Sweet Waters of Europe
are only fields with a canal running through them; but here, where this
is the only stream of fresh water near the city, and in a country
destitute of trees, it is a charming place. The stream has been walled
up to the top of its banks, which are from three to six feet above the
water, and there are sunny meadows and fine large trees on each side.
The sultan has a summer palace here with a pretty garden, and the stream
has been dammed up by blocks of white marble cut in scallops like
shells, over which the water falls in a cascade. The road to the Sweet
Waters, with one or two others, was made after the sultan's return from
his European trip, and in anticipation of the empress Eugénie's visit.
European carriages were also introduced at that time. The ladies of the
sultan's harem drive out in very handsome coupés, with coachmen wearing
the sultan's livery, but you more frequently see the queer one-horse
Turkish carriage, and sometimes a "cow-carriage." This last is drawn by
cows or oxen: it is an open wagon, with a white cloth awning ornamented
with gay fringes and tassels. Many people go in caïques, and all carry
bright-colored rugs, which they spread on the grass. There they sit for
several hours and gossip with each other, or take their luncheons and
spend the afternoon. A Turkish woman is never seen to better advantage
than when "made up" for such an excursion. Her house-dress is always
hidden by a large cloak, which comes down to the ground and has loose
sleeves and a cape. The cloak is left open at the neck to show the lace
and necklace worn under it, and is generally made of silk, often of
exquisite shades of pink, blue, purple or any color to suit the taste of
the wearer. A small silk cap, like the low turbans our ladies wore eight
or nine years ago, covers the head, and on it are fastened the most
brilliant jewels--diamond pins, rubies, anything that will flash. The
wearer's complexion is heightened to great brilliancy by toilet arts,
and over all, covering deficiencies, is the yashmak or thin white veil,
which conceals only in part and greatly enhances her beauty. You think
your "dream of fair women" realized, and go home and read _Lalla Rookh_
and rave of Eastern peris. Should some female friend who has visited a
harem and seen these radiant beauties face to face mildly suggest that
paint, powder and the enchantment of distance have in a measure deluded
you, you dismiss the unwelcome information as an invention of the
"green-eyed monster," and, remembering the brilliant beauties who
reclined beside the Sweet Waters or floated by you on the Golden Horn,
cherish the recollection as that of one of the brightest scenes of the
Orient.
These I have spoken of are the upper classes from the harems of the
sultan and rich pashas, but those you see constantly on foot in the
streets are the middle and lower classes, and not so attractive. They
have fine eyes, but the yashmaks are thicker, and you feel there is less
beauty hidden under them. The higher the rank the thinner the yashmak is
the rule. They also wear the long cloak, but it is made of black or
colored alpaca or a similar material. Gray is most worn, but black,
brown, yellow, green, blue and scarlet are often seen. The negresses
dress like their mistresses in the street, and if you see a pair of
bright yellow boots under a brilliant scarlet ferraja and an unusually
white yashmak, you will generally find the wearer is a jet-black
negress. Sitting so much in the house _à la Turque_ is not conducive to
grace of motion, nor are loose slippers to well-shaped feet, and I must
confess that a Turkish woman walks like a _goose_, and the size of her
"fairy feet" would rejoice the heart of a leather-dealer.
[Illustration: ENTERING A MOSQUE.]
We have been to see the Howling Dervishes, and I will endeavor to give
you some idea of their performances. Crossing to Scutari in the steam
ferryboat, we walked some distance till we reached the mosque, where the
services were just commencing. The attendant who admitted us intimated
that we must remove our boots and put on the slippers provided. N----
did so, but I objected, and the man was satisfied with my wearing them
over my boots. We were conducted up a steep, ladder-like staircase to a
small gallery, with a low front only a foot high, with no seats but
sheepskins on the floor, where we were expected to curl ourselves up in
Turkish fashion. Both my slippers came off during my climb up stairs,
and were rescued in their downward career by N----, who by dint of much
shuffling managed to keep his on. Below us were seated some thirty or
forty dervishes. The leader repeated portions of the Koran, in which
exercise others occasionally took part in a quiet manner. After a while
they knelt in line opposite their leader and began to chant in louder
tones, occasionally bowing forward full length. Matters down below
progressed slowly at first, and were getting monotonous. One of my feet,
unaccustomed to its novel position, had gone to sleep, and I was in a
cramped state generally. Moreover, we were not the sole occupants of the
gallery: the sheepskins were full of them, and I began to think that if
the dervishes did not soon begin to howl, _I_ should. Some traveler has
said that on the coast of Syria the Arabs have a proverb that the
"sultan of _fleas_ holds his court in Jaffa, and the grand vizier in
Cairo." Certainly some very high dignitary of the realm presides over
Constantinople, and makes his head-quarters in the mosque of the Howling
Dervishes.
[Illustration: CASTLE OF EUROPE, ON THE BOSPHORUS.]
The dervishes now stood up in line, taking hold of hands, and swayed
backward, forward and sideways, with perfect uniformity, wildly
chanting, or rather howling, verses of the Koran, and keeping time with
their movements. They commenced slowly, and increased the rapidity of
their gymnastics as they became more excited and devout. The whole
performance lasted an hour or more, and at the end they naturally seemed
quite exhausted. Then little children were brought in, laid on the
floor, and the head-dervish stepped on their bodies. I suppose he
stepped in such a manner as not to hurt them, as they did not utter a
sound. Perhaps the breath was so squeezed out of them that they could
not. One child was quite a baby, and on this he rested his foot lightly,
leaning his weight on a man's shoulder. I could not find out exactly
what this ceremony signified, but was told it was considered a cure for
sickness, and also a preventive.
We concluded to _do_ the dervishes, and so next day went to see the
spinning ones. They have a much larger and handsomer mosque than their
howling brethren. First they chanted, then they indulged in a "walk
around." Every time they passed the leader, who kept his place at the
head of the room, they bowed profoundly to him, then passed before him,
and, turning on the other side, bowed again. After this interchange of
courtesies had lasted a while, they sailed off around the room, spinning
with the smooth, even motion of a top--arms folded, head on one side and
eyes shut. Sometimes this would be varied by the head being thrown back
and the arms extended. The rapid whirling caused their long green
dresses to spread out like a half-open Japanese umbrella, supposing the
man to be the stick, and they kept it up about thirty minutes to the
inspiring music of what sounded like a drum, horn and tin pan. We
remained to witness the _first set:_ whether they had any more and wound
up with the German, I cannot say. We were tired and went home, satisfied
with what we had seen. I should think they corresponded somewhat with
our Shakers at home, as far as their "muscular Christianity" goes, and
are rather ahead on the dancing question.
One of the prominent objects of interest on the Bosphorus is Roberts
College. It stands on a high hill three hundred feet above the water,
and commands an extensive view up and down the Bosphorus. For seven
years Dr. Hamlin vainly endeavored to obtain permission to build it, and
the order was not given till Farragut's visit. The gallant admiral,
while breakfasting with the grand vizier, inquired what was the reason
the government did not allow Dr. Hamlin to build the college, when the
grand vizier hastily assured him that all obstacles had been removed,
and that the order was even then as good as given. Americans may well be
proud of so fine and well-arranged a building and the able corps of
professors. We visited it in company with Dr. Wood and his agreeable
wife, who are so well known to all who take any interest in our foreign
missions. After going over the college and listening to very creditable
declamations in English from some of the students, we were hospitably
entertained at luncheon by Professor Washburn, who is in charge of the
institution, and his accomplished wife. Within a short distance of the
college is the Castle of Europe, and on the opposite side of the
Bosphorus the Castle of Asia. They were built by Mohammed II. in 1451,
and the Castle of Europe is still in good preservation. It consists of
two large towers and several small ones connected by walls, and is built
of a rough white stone, to which the ivy clings luxuriantly.
A pleasant excursion is to take a little steamer, which runs up the
Bosphorus and back, touching at Beicos (Bey Kos), and visit the Giant
Mountain, from which is a magnificent view of the Black Sea and nearly
the whole length of the Bosphorus. We breakfasted early, but when ready
to start found our guide had disappointed us, and his place was not to
be supplied. The day was perfect, and rather than give up our trip we
determined to go by ourselves, trusting that the success which had
attended similar expeditions without a _commissionnaire_ would not
desert us on this occasion. The sail up on the steamer was charming.
There are many villages on the shores of the Bosphorus, and between
them are scattered palaces and summer residences, the latter often
reminding us of Venetian houses, built directly on the shore with steps
down to the water, and caïques moored at the doors, as the gondolas are
in Venice. The houses are surrounded by beautiful gardens, with a
profusion of flowers blooming on the very edge of the shore, their gay
colors reflected in the waves beneath.
We learned from the captain of the steamer that Giant Mountain was two
and a half miles from the village, with no very well-defined road
leading to it; so on landing at Bey Kos we made inquiries for a guide,
and this time were successful. Horses were also forthcoming, but no
side-saddle. I respectfully declined to follow the example of my Turkish
sisters and mount a gentleman's saddle; neither was I anxious to ride my
Arab steed bareback, so we concluded to try a cow-carriage, and
despatched our guide to hire the only one the place afforded. This
stylish establishment was not to be had; so, having wasted half an hour
in trying to find some conveyance, we gave it up and started on foot;
and were glad afterward that we did so. The road was shaded to the base
of the mountain, and led through a beautiful valley, the fields covered
with wild-flowers. I have never seen such masses of color--an acre
perhaps of bright yellow, perfectly dazzling in the sunlight, then as
large a mass of purple, next to that an immense patch of white daisies,
so thick they looked like snow. The effect of these gay masses, with
intervals of green grass and grain, was very gorgeous. We passed two of
the sultan's palaces, one built in Swiss style. The ascent of Giant
Mountain from the inland side is gradual, while it descends very
abruptly on the water-side. On the top of the mountain are the ruins of
the church of St. Pantaleon, built by Justinian, also a mosque and the
tomb of Joshua: so the Turks affirm. From a rocky platform just below
the mosque there is a magnificent view. Toward the north you look off on
the Black Sea and the old fortress of Riva, which commands the entrance
to the Bosphorus. In front and to the south winds the beautiful
Bosphorus for sixteen miles till it reaches the Sea of Marmora, which
you see far in the distance glittering in the sunlight. You look down on
the decks of the passing vessels, and the large steamers seem like toy
boats as they pass below you. Near the mosque is a remarkable well of
cool water. Shrubs and a few small trees grow on the mountain, and the
ground is covered with quantities of heather, wild-flowers and ivy. We
picked long spikes of white heather in full bloom, and pansies,
polyanthus, the blue iris and many others of our garden flowers. The
country all around Constantinople is very destitute of trees. The woods
were cut down long ago, and the multitudes of sheep, which you see in
large flocks everywhere, crop the young sprouts so they cannot grow up
again.
[Illustration: FORTRESS OF RIVA, AND THE BLACK SEA.]
Returning to Constantinople, our steamer ran close to the European
shore, stopping at the villages on that side. Most of the officers of
these boats are Turks, but they find it necessary to employ European
(generally English) engineers, as the Turks are fatalists and not
reliable. It is said they pay but little attention to their machinery
and boilers, reasoning that if it is the will of Allah that the boiler
blow up, it will certainly do so; if not, all will go right, and why
trouble one's self? Laughable stories are told of the Turkish navy;
e.g., that a certain captain was ordered to take his vessel to Crete,
and after cruising about some time returned, not being able to find the
island. Another captain stopped an English vessel one fine day to ask
where he was, as he had lost his reckoning, although the weather had
been perfectly clear for some time. In the Golden Horn lies an old
four-decker which during the Crimean war was run broadside under a
formidable battery by her awkward crew, who were unable to manage her,
and began in their fright to jump overboard. A French tugboat went to
the rescue and towed her off.
On our way to the hotel we saw the sultan's son, a boy of fifteen. He
was driving in a fine open carriage drawn by a very handsome span of bay
horses, and preceded by four outriders mounted on fine Arabian horses.
Coachman, footman and outriders, in the black livery of the sultan, were
resplendent in gold lace. The harness was of red leather and the
carriage painted of the same bright color. The cushions were of white
silk embroidered with scarlet flowers. It was a dashing equipage, but
seemed better suited to a harem beauty than the dark, Jewish-looking boy
in the awkward uniform of a Turkish general who was its sole occupant.
[Illustration: TURKISH QUARTER--STAMBOUL.]
Yesterday we took our last stroll in Constantinople, crossing the Golden
Horn by the new bridge to Stamboul. This bridge is a busy spot, for
besides the constant throngs that cross and recross, it is the favorite
resort of beggars and dealers in small wares. Many of the ferryboats
also start from here, so that, although long and wide, it is crowded
most of the day. An Englishman who is an officer in the Turkish army
told us of an amusing adventure of his in crossing the bridge. He had
been at the war department, and was told he could have the six months'
pay which was due him if he would take it in piasters. Thankful to get
it, and fearing if he did not take it then in that shape he might have
to wait a good while, he accepted, and the piasters (which are large
copper coins worth about four cents of our money) were placed in bags on
the backs of porters to be taken to a European bank at Pera. As they
were crossing the bridge one of the bags burst open with the weight of
the coins, and a quantity of them were scattered. Of course a first
class scramble ensued, in which the beggars, who are always on hand, and
others reaped quite a harvest, and when the officer got the hole tied
up the ammale found the bag considerably lighter to carry.
Reaching Stamboul, we made our way through the crowded streets, past the
Seraglio gardens and St. Sophia, till we reached the old Hippodrome,
which was modeled after the Circus at Rome. Little remains of its
ancient glory, for the Crusaders carried off most of its works of art.
The granite obelisk of Theodosius and the pillar of Constantine, which
the vandal Turks stripped of its bronze when they first captured the
city, are still left, but the stones are continually falling, and it
will soon be a ruin. The serpentine column consists of three serpents
twisted together: the heads are gone, Mohammed II. having knocked off
one with his battle-axe. A little Turk was taking his riding-lesson on
the level ground of the Hippodrome, and his frisky little black pony
gave the old fellow in attendance plenty of occupation. We watched the
boy for a while, and then, passing on toward the Marmora, took a look at
the "Cistern of the Thousand Columns." A broad flight of steps leads
down to it, and the many tall slender columns of Byzantine architecture
make a perfect wilderness of pillars. Wherever we stood, we seemed
always the centre from which long aisles of columns radiated till they
lost themselves in the darkness. The cistern has long been empty, and is
used as a ropewalk.
The great fire swept a large district of the city here, which has been
but little rebuilt, and the view of the Marmora is very fine. On the
opposite Asiatic shore Mount Olympus, with its snow-crowned summit,
fades away into the blue of the heavens. This is a glorious atmosphere,
at least at this season, the air clear and bracing, the sky a beautiful
blue and the sunsets golden. In winter it is cold, muddy and cheerless,
and in midsummer the simoom which sweeps up the Marmora from Africa and
the Syrian coast renders it very unhealthy for Europeans to remain in
the city. The simoom is exceedingly enervating in its effects, and all
who can spend the summer months on the upper Bosphorus, where the
prevailing winds are from the Black Sea and the air is cool and
healthful. Nearly all the foreign legations except our own have summer
residences there and beautiful grounds.
[Illustration: OBELISK OF THEODOSIUS.]
Following the old aqueduct built by the emperor Hadrian, which still
supplies Stamboul with water, and is exceedingly picturesque with its
high dripping arches covered with luxuriant ivy, we reached the walls
which protected the city on the land-side, and then, threading our way
through the narrow, dirty streets, we returned to the Golden Horn. I do
not wonder, after what I have seen of this part of Stamboul, that the
cholera made such ravages here a few years since. I should think it
would remain a constant scourge. Calling a caïque, we were rowed up the
Golden Horn to the Sweet Waters, but its tide floated only our own boat,
and the banks lacked the attraction of the gay groups which render the
place so lively on Fridays. We were served with coffee by a Turk who
with his little brasier of coals was waiting under a wide-spreading tree
for any chance visitor, and after a short stroll on the bank opposite
the sultan's pretty palace we floated gently down the stream till we
reached the Golden Horn again. On a large meadow near the mouth of the
Sweet Waters some Arabs were camped with an immense flock of sheep. They
had brought them there to shear and wash the wool in the fresh water,
and the ground was covered with large quantities of beautiful long
fleece. The shepherds in their strange mantles and head-dresses looked
very picturesque as they spread the wool and tended their flocks. Our
_caïquegee_, as the oarsman of a caïque is called, ought not to be
overlooked. His costume was in keeping with his pretty caïque, which was
painted a delicate straw-color and had white linen cushions. He was a
tall, finely-built fellow, a Cretan or Bulgarian I should think, for he
looked too wide awake for a Turk. The sun had burned his olive
complexion to the deepest brown, and his black eyes and white teeth when
he smiled lighted up his intelligent face, making him very handsome. He
wore a turban, loose shirt with hanging sleeves and voluminous trousers,
all of snowy whiteness. A blue jacket embroidered with gilt braid was in
readiness to put on when he stopped rowing. It must have taken a ruinous
amount of material to make those trousers. They were full at the waist
and knee, and before seating himself to his oars he gracefully threw the
extra amount of the fullness which drooped behind over the wide seat as
a lady spreads out her overskirt.
[Illustration: SHEPHERDS.]
Last night we bade farewell to the strange old city with its picturesque
sights, its glorious views and the many points of interest we had grown
so familiar with. Our adieus were said, the ammales had taken our
baggage to the steamer, which lay at anchor off Seraglio Point, and
before dark we went on board, ready to sail at an early hour.
The bustle of getting underway at daylight this morning woke me, and I
went on deck in time to take a farewell look. The first rays of the sun
were just touching the top of the Galata Tower and lighting up the dark
cypresses in the palace-grounds above us. The tall minarets and the blue
waves of the Bosphorus caught the golden light, while around Olympus the
rosy tint had not yet faded and the morning mists looked golden in the
sunlight. We rounded Seraglio Point and steamed down the Marmora, passed
the Seven Towers, and slowly the beautiful city faded from our view.
SHEILA HALE.
THEE AND YOU.
A STORY OF OLD PHILADELPHIA. IN TWO PARTS.--I.
Once on a time I was leaning over a book of the costumes of forty years
before, when a little lady said to me, "How ever could they have loved
one another in such queer bonnets?" And now that since then long years
have sped away, and the little critic is, alas! no longer young, haply
her children, looking up at her picture by Sully in a turban and short
waist; may have wondered to hear how in such disguise she too was fatal
to many hearts, and set men by the ears, and was a toast at suppers in
days when the waltz was coming in and the solemn grace of the minuet
lingered in men's manners.
And so it is, that, calling up anew the soft September mornings of which
I would draw a picture before they fade away, with me also, from men's
minds, it is the quaintness of dress which first comes back to me, and I
find myself wondering that in nankeen breeches and swallow-tailed blue
coats with buttons of brass once lived men who, despite gnarled-rimmed
beavers and much wealth of many-folded cravats, loved and were loved as
well and earnestly as we.
I had been brought up in the austere quiet of a small New England town,
where life was sad and manners grave, and when about eighteen served for
a while in the portion of our army then acting in the North. The life of
adventure dissatisfied me with my too quiet home, and when the war ended
I was glad to accept the offer of an uncle in China to enter his
business house. To prepare for this it was decided that I should spend
six months with one of the great East India firms. For this purpose I
came to Philadelphia, and by and by found myself a boarder in an up-town
street, in a curious household ruled over by a lady of the better class
of the people called Friends.
For many days I was a lonely man among the eight or ten people who came
down one by one at early hours to our breakfast-table and ate somewhat
silently and went their several ways. Mostly, we were clerks in the
India houses which founded so many Philadelphia fortunes, but there were
also two or three of whom we knew little, and who went and came as they
liked.
It was a quiet lodging-house, where, because of being on the outskirts
and away from the fashion and stir of the better streets, chiefly those
came who could pay but little, and among them some of the luckless ones
who are always to be found in such groups--stranded folks, who for the
most part have lost hope in life. The quiet, pretty woman who kept the
house was of an ancient Quaker stock which had come over long ago in a
sombre Quaker Mayflower, and had by and by gone to decay, as the best of
families will. When I first saw her and some of her inmates it was on a
pleasant afternoon early in September, and I recall even now the simple
and quiet picture of the little back parlor where I sat down among them
as a new guest. I had been tranquilly greeted, and had slipped away into
a corner behind a table, whence I looked out with some curiosity on the
room and on the dwellers with whom my lot was to be cast for a long
while to come. I was a youth shy with the shyness of my age, but, having
had a share of rough, hardy life, ruddy of visage and full of that
intense desire to know things and people that springs up quickly in
those who have lived in country hamlets far from the stir and bustle of
city life.
The room I looked upon was strange, the people strange. On the floor was
India matting, red and white in little squares. A panel of painted white
wood-work ran around an octagonal chamber, into which stole silently the
evening twilight through open windows and across a long brick-walled
garden-space full of roses and Virginia creepers and odorless
wisterias. Between the windows sat a silent, somewhat stately female,
dressed in gray silk, with a plain frilled cap about the face, and with
long and rather slim arms tightly clad in silk. Her fingers played at
hide-and-seek among some marvelous lace stitches--evidently a woman
whose age had fallen heir to the deft ways of her youth. Over her
against the wall hung a portrait of a girl of twenty, somewhat sober in
dress, with what we should call a Martha Washington cap. It was a
pleasant face, unstirred by any touch of fate, with calm blue eyes
awaiting the future.
The hostess saw, I fancied, my set gaze, and rising came toward me as if
minded to put at ease the new-comer. "Thee does not know our friends?"
she said. "Let me make thee known to them."
I rose quickly and said, "I shall be most glad."
We went over toward the dame between the windows. "Mother," she said,
raising her voice, "this is our new friend, Henry Shelburne, from New
England."
As she spoke I saw the old lady stir and move, and after a moment she
said, "Has he a four-leaved clover?"
"Always that is what she says. Thee will get used to it in time."
"We all do," said a voice at my elbow; and turning I saw a man of about
thirty years, dressed in the plainest-cut Quaker clothes, but with a
contradiction to every tenet of Fox written on his face, where a brow of
gravity for ever read the riot act to eyes that twinkled with
ill-repressed mirth. When I came to know him well, and saw the
preternatural calm of his too quiet lips, I used to imagine that unseen
little demons of ready laughter were for ever twitching at their
corners.
"Mother is very old," said my hostess.
"Awfully old," said my male friend, whose name proved to be Richard
Wholesome.
"Thee might think it sad to see one whose whole language has come to be
just these words, but sometimes she will be glad and say, 'Has thee a
four-leaved clover?' and sometimes she will be ready to cry, and will
say only the same words. But if thee were to say, 'Have a cup of
coffee?' she would but answer, 'Has thee a four-leaved clover?' Does it
not seem strange to thee, and sad? We are used to it, as it might
be--quite used to it. And that above her is her picture as a girl."
"Saves her a deal of talking," said Mr. Wholesome, "and thinking. Any
words would serve her as well. Might have said, 'Topsail halyards,' all
the same."
"Richard!" said Mistress White. Mistress Priscilla White was her name.
"Perchance thee would pardon me," said Mr. Wholesome.
"I wonder," said a third voice in the window, "does the nice old dame
know what color has the clover? and does she remember fields of
clover--pink among the green?"
"Has thee a four-leaved clover?" re-echoed the voice feebly from between
the windows.
The man who was curious as to the dame's remembrances was a small stout
person whose arms and legs did not seem to belong to him, and whose face
was strangely gnarled, like the odd face a boy might carve on a
hickory-nut, but withal a visage pleasant and ruddy.
"That," said Mistress White as he moved away, "is Mr. Schmidt--an old
boarder with some odd ways of his own which we mostly forgive. A good
man if it were not for his pipe," she added demurely--"altogether a good
man."
"With or without his pipe," said Mr. Wholesome.
"Richard!" returned our hostess, with a half smile.
"Without his pipe," he added; and the unseen demons twitched at the
corners of his mouth anew.
Altogether, these seemed to me droll people, they said so little, and,
saving the small German, were so serenely grave. I suppose that first
evening must have made a deep mark on my memory, for to this day I
recall it with the clearness of a picture still before my eyes. Between
the windows sat the old dame with hands quiet on her lap now that the
twilight had grown deeper--a silent, gray Quaker sphinx, with one only
remembrance out of all her seventy years of life. In the open window sat
as in a frame the daughter, a woman of some twenty-five years, rosy yet
as only a Quakeress can be when rebel Nature flaunts on the soft cheek
the colors its owner may not wear on her gray dress. The outline was of
a face clearly cut and noble, as if copied from a Greek gem--a face
filled with a look of constant patience too great perhaps for one
woman's share, with a certain weariness in it also at times, yet
cheerful too, and even almost merry at times--the face of one more
thoughtful of others than herself, and, despite toil and sordid cares, a
gentlewoman, as was plain to see. The shaft of light from the window in
which she sat broadened into the room, and faded to shadow in far
corners among chairs with claw toes and shining mahogany tables--the
furniture of that day, with a certain flavor about it of elegance,
reflecting the primness and solidness of the owners. I wonder if to-day
our furniture represents us too in any wise? At least it will not
through the generations to follow us: of that we may be sure. In the
little garden, with red graveled walks between rows of box, walked to
and fro Mr. Schmidt, smoking his meerschaum--a rare sight in those days,
and almost enough to ensure your being known as odd. He walked about ten
paces, and went and came on the same path, while on the wall above a
large gray cat followed his motions to and fro, as if having some
personal interest in his movements. Against an apricot tree leaned Mr.
Wholesome, watching with gleams of amusement the cat and the man, and
now and then filliping at her a bit of plaster which he pulled from the
wall. Then the cat would start up alert, and the man's face would get to
be quizzically unconscious; after which the cat would settle down and
the game begin anew. By and by I was struck with the broad shoulders and
easy way in which Wholesome carried his head, and the idea came to me
that he had more strength than was needed by a member of the Society of
Friends, or than could well have been acquired with no greater exercise
of the limbs than is sanctioned by its usages. In the garden were also
three elderly men, all of them quiet and clerkly, who sat on and about
the steps of the other window and chatted of the India ships and
cargoes, their talk having a flavor of the spices of Borneo and of
well-sunned madeira. These were servants of the great India houses when
commerce had its nobles and lines were sharply drawn in social life.
I was early in bed, and rising betimes went down to breakfast, which was
a brief meal, this being, as Mr. Wholesome said to me, the short end of
the day. I should here explain that Mr. Wholesome was a junior partner
in the house in which I was to learn the business before going to China.
Thus he was the greatest person by far in our little household, although
on this he did not presume, but seemed to me greatly moved toward jest
and merriment, and to sway to and fro between gayety and sadness, or at
the least gravity, but more toward the latter when Mistress White was
near, she seeming always to be a checking conscience to his mirth.
On this morning, as often after, he desired me to walk with him to our
place of business, of which I was most glad, as I felt shy and lonely.
Walking down Arch street, I was amazed at its cleanliness, and surprised
at the many trees and the unfamiliar figures in Quaker dresses walking
leisurely. But what seemed to me most curious of all were the plain
square meeting-houses of the Friends, looking like the toy houses of
children. I was more painfully impressed by the appearance of the
graves, one so like another, without mark or number, or anything in the
disposition of them to indicate the strength of those ties of kinship
and affection which death had severed. Yet I grew to like this quiet
highway, and when years after I was in Amsterdam the resemblance of its
streets to those of the Friends here at home overcame me with a crowd of
swift-rushing memories. As I walked down of a morning to my work, I
often stopped as I crossed Fifth street to admire the arch of lindens
that barred the view to the westward, or to gaze at the inscription on
the 'Prentices' Library, still plain to see, telling that the building
was erected in the eighth year of the Empire.
One morning Wholesome and I found open the iron grating of Christ Church
graveyard, and passing through its wall of red and black glazed brick,
he turned sharply to the right, and coming to a corner bade me look down
where under a gray plain slab of worn stone rests the body of the
greatest man, as I have ever thought, whom we have been able to claim as
ours. Now a bit of the wall is gone, and through a railing the busy or
idle or curious, as they go by, may look in and see the spot without
entering.
Sometimes, too, we came home together, Wholesome and I, and then I found
he liked to wander and zigzag, not going very far along a street, and
showing fondness for lanes and byways. Often he would turn with me a
moment into the gateway of the University Grammar School on Fourth
street, south of Arch, and had, I thought, great pleasure in seeing the
rough play of the lads. Or often, as we came home at noon, he liked to
turn into Paradise alley, out of Market street, and did this, indeed, so
often that I came to wonder at it, and the more because in an open space
between this alley and Commerce street was the spot where almost every
day the grammar-school boys settled their disputes in the way more
common then than now. When first we chanced on one of these encounters I
was surprised to see Mr. Wholesome look about him as if to be sure that
no one else was near, and then begin to watch the combat with a strange
interest. Indeed, on one occasion he utterly astonished me by taking by
the hand a small boy who had been worsted and leading him with us, as if
he knew the lad, which may well have been. But presently he said,
"Reuben thee said was thy name?"--"Yes, sir," said the lad.--"Well,"
said Mr. Wholesome, after buying him a large and very brown horse
gingerbread, two doughnuts and a small pie, "when you think it worth
while to hit a fellow, never slap his face, because then he will strike
you hard with his fist, which hurts, Reuben. Now, mind: next thee
strikes first with thee fist, my lad, and hard, too." If I had seen our
good Bishop White playing at taws, I could not have been more overcome,
and I dare say my face may have shown it, for, glancing at me, he said
demurely, "Thee has seen in thy lifetime how hard it is to get rid of
what thee liked in thy days of boyhood." After which he added no more in
the way of explanation, but walked along with swift strides and a dark
and troubled face, silent and thoughtful.
Sometimes in the early morning I walked to my place of business with Mr.
Schmidt, who was a man so altogether unlike those about him that I found
in him a new and varied interest. He was a German, and spoke English
with a certain quaintness and with the purity of speech of one who has
learned the tongue from books rather than from men. I learned after a
while that this guess of mine was a good one, and that, having been bred
an artist, he had been put in prison for some political offence, and had
in two years of loneliness learned English from our older authors. When
at last he was set free he took his little property and came away with a
bitter heart to our freer land, where, with what he had and with the
lessons he gave in drawing, he was well able to live the life he liked
in quiet ease and comfort. He was a kindly man in his ways, and in his
talk gently cynical; so that, although you might be quite sure as to
what he would do, you were never as safe as to what he would say;
wherefore to know him a little was to dislike him, but to know him well
was to love him. There was a liking between him and Wholesome, but each
was more or less a source of wonderment to the other. Nor was it long
before I saw that both these men in their way were patient lovers of the
quiet and pretty Quaker dame who ruled over our little household, though
to the elder man, Mr. Schmidt, she was a being at whose feet he laid a
homage which he felt to be hopeless of result, while he was schooled by
sorrowful fortunes to accept the position as one which he hardly even
wished to change.
It was on a warm sunny morning very early, for we were up and away
betimes, that Mr. Schmidt and I and Wholesome took our first walk
together through the old market-sheds. We turned into Market street at
Fourth street, whence the sheds ran downward to the Delaware. The
pictures they gave me to store away in my mind are all of them vivid
enough, but none more so than that which I saw with my two friends on
the first morning when we wandered through them together.
On either side of the street the farmers' wagons stood backed up against
the sidewalk, each making a cheap shop, by which stood the sturdy owners
under the trees, laughing and chaffering with their customers. We
ourselves turned aside and walked down the centre of the street under
the sheds. On either side at the entry of the market odd business was
being plied, the traders being mostly colored women with bright chintz
dresses and richly-colored bandanna handkerchiefs coiled turban-like
above their dark faces. There were rows of roses in red pots, and
venders of marsh calamus, and "Hot corn, sah, smokin' hot," and
"Pepperpot, bery nice," and sellers of horse-radish and
snapping-turtles, and of doughnuts dear to grammar-school lads. Within
the market was a crowd of gentlefolks, followed by their black servants
with baskets--the elderly men in white or gray stockings, with
knee-buckles, the younger in very tight nankeen breeches and pumps,
frilled shirts and ample cravats and long blue swallow-tailed coats with
brass buttons. Ladies whose grandchildren go no more to market were
there in gowns with strangely short waists and broad gypsy-bonnets, with
the flaps tied down by wide ribbons over the ears. It was a busy and
good-humored throng.
"Ah," said Schmidt, "what color!" and he stood quite wrapped in the joy
it gave him looking at the piles of fruit, where the level morning
sunlight, broken by the moving crowd, fell on great heaps of dark-green
watermelons and rough cantaloupes, and warmed the wealth of peaches
piled on trays backed by red rows of what were then called love-apples,
and are now known as tomatoes; while below the royal yellow of vast
overgrown pumpkins seemed to have set the long summer sunshine in their
golden tints.
"If these were mine," said Schmidt, "I could not for ever sell them.
What pleasure to see them grow and steal to themselves such sweet colors
out of the rainbow which is in the light!"
"Thee would make a poor gardener," said Wholesome, "sitting on thee
fence in the sun and watching thee pumpkins--damn nasty things anyhow!"
I looked up amazed at the oath, but Schmidt did not seem to remark it,
and went on with us, lingering here and there to please himself with the
lovely contrasts of the autumn fruit.
"Curious man is Schmidt," remarked Wholesome as we passed along. "I
could wish thee had seen him when we took him this way first. Old Betsey
yonder sells magnolia flowers in June, and also pond-lilies, which thee
may know as reasonably pleasant things to thee or me; but of a sudden I
find our friend Schmidt kneeling on the pavement with his head over a
tub of these flowers, and every one around much amazed."
"Was it not seemly?" said Schmidt, joining us. "There are who like
music, but to me what music is there like the great attunement of color?
and mayhap no race can in this rise over our black artists hereabout the
market-ends."
"Thee is crazed of many colors," said Wholesome laughing--"a bull of but
one."
Schmidt stopped short in the crowd, to Wholesome's disgust. "What," said
he, quite forgetful of the crowd, "is more cordial than color? This he
recalleth was a woman black as night, with a red turban and a lapful of
magnolias, and to one side red crabs in a basket, and to one side a
tubful of lilies. Moss all about, I remember."
"Come along," said Wholesome. "The man is cracked, and in sunny weather
the crack widens."
And so we went away down street to our several tasks, chatting and
amused.
Those were most happy days for me, and I found at evening one of my
greatest pleasures when Schmidt called for me after our early tea and we
would stroll together down to the Delaware, where the great India ships
lay at wharves covered with casks of madeira and boxes of tea and
spices. Then we would put out in his little rowboat and pull away toward
Jersey, and, after a plunge in the river at Cooper's Point, would lazily
row back again while the spire of Christ Church grew dim against the
fading sunset, and the lights would begin to show here and there in the
long line of sombre houses. By this time we had grown to be sure
friends, and a little help from me at a moment when I chanced to guess
that he wanted money had made the bond yet stronger. So it came that he
talked to me, though I was but a lad, with a curious freedom, which very
soon opened to me a full knowledge of those with whom I lived.
One evening, when we had been drifting silently with the tide, he
suddenly said aloud, "A lion in the fleece of the sheep."
"What?" said I, laughing.
"I was thinking of Wholesome," he replied. "But you do not know him. Yet
he has that in his countenance which would betray a more cunning
creature."
"How so?" I urged, being eager to know more of the man who wore the garb
and tongue of Penn, and could swear roundly when moved.
"If it will amuse," said the German, "I will tell you what it befell me
to hear to-day, being come into the parlor when Mistress White and
Wholesome were in the garden, of themselves lonely."
"Do you mean," said I, "that you listened when they did not know of your
being there?"
"And why not?" he replied. "It did interest me, and to them only good
might come."
"But," said I, "it was not--"
"Well?" he added as I paused. "--'Was not honor,' you were going to say
to me. And why not? I obey my nature, which is more curious than stocked
with honor. I did listen."
"And what did you hear?" said I.
"Ah, hear!" he answered. "What better is the receiver than is the thief?
Well, then, if you will share my stolen goods, you shall know, and I
will tell you as I heard, my memory being good."
"But--" said I.
"Too late you stop me," he added: "you must hear now."
The scene which he went on to sketch was to me strange and curious, nor
could I have thought he could give so perfect a rendering of the
language, and even the accent, of the two speakers. It was a curious
revelation of the man himself, and he seemed to enjoy his power, and yet
to suffer in the telling, without perhaps being fully conscious of it.
The oars dropped from his hands and fell in against the thwarts of the
boat, and he clasped his knees and looked up as he talked, not regarding
at all his single silent listener.
"When this is to be put upon the stage there shall be a garden and two
personages."
"Also," said I, "a jealous listener behind the scenes."
"If you please," he said promptly, and plunged at once into the dialogue
he had overheard:
"'Richard, thee may never again say the words which thee has said to me
to-night. There is, thee knows, that between us which is builded up like
as a wall to keep us the one from the other.'
"'But men and women change, and a wall crumbles, or thee knows it may be
made to. Years have gone away, and the man who stole from thee thy
promise may be dead, for all thee knows.'
"'Hush! thee makes me to see him, and though the dead rise not here, I
am some way assured he is not yet dead, and may come and say to me,
"'Cilla"--that is what he called me--"thee remembers the night and thy
promise, and the lightning all around us, and who took thee to shore
from the wrecked packet on the Bulkhead Bar." The life he saved I
promised.'
"Well, and thee knows--By Heaven! you well enough know who tortured the
life he gave--who robbed you--who grew to be a mean sot, and went away
and left you; and to such you hold, with such keep faith, and wear out
the sweetness of life waiting for him!'
"'Richard!'
"'Have I also not waited, and given up for thee a life, a career--little
to give. I hope thee knows I feel that. Has thee no limit, Priscilla?
Thee knows--God help me! how well you know--I love you. The world, the
old world of war and venture, pulls at me always. Will not you find it
worth while to put out a hand of help? Would it not be God taking your
hand and putting it in mine?'
"'Thee knows I love thee.'
"'And if the devil sent him back to curse you anew--'
"'Shame, Richard! I would say, God, who layeth out for each his way, has
pointed mine.'
"'And I?'
"'Thee would continue in goodness, loving me as a sister hardly tried.'
"'By God! I should go away to sea.'
"'Richard!'
"Which is the last word of this scene," added Schmidt. "You mayhap have
about you punk and flint and steel."
I struck alight in silence, feeling moved by the story of the hurt
hearts of these good people, and wondering at the man and his tale. Then
I said, "Was that all?"
"Could you, if not a boy, ask me to say more of it? Light thy pipe and
hold thy peace. Happy those who think not of women. I, who have for a
hearth-side only the fire of an honest pipe--'Way there, my lad! pull us
in and forget what a loose tongue and a soft summer night have given
thee to hear from a silly old German who is grown weak of head and sore
at soul. How the lights twinkle!"
Had I felt any doubt at all of the truth of his narration I should have
ceased to do so when for the next few days I watched Mr. Wholesome, and
saw him, while off his guard, looking at Mistress White askance with a
certain wistful sadness, as of a great honest dog somehow hurt and
stricken.
When an India ship came in, the great casks of madeira, southside, grape
juice, bual and what not were rolled away into the deep cellars of the
India houses on the wharves, and left to purge their vinous consciences
of such perilous stuff as was shaken up from their depths during the
long homeward voyage. Then, when a couple of months had gone by, it was
a custom for the merchant to summon a few old gentlemen to a solemn
tasting of the wines old and new. Of this, Mr. Wholesome told me one
day, and thought I had better remain to go through the cellars and drive
out the bungs and drop in the testers, and the like. "I will also stay
with thee," he added, "knowing perhaps better than thee the prices."
I learned afterward that Wholesome always stayed on these occasions, and
I had reason to be glad that I too was asked to stay, for, as it
chanced, it gave me a further insight into the character of my friend
the junior partner.
I recall well the long cellar running far back under Water street, with
its rows of great casks, of which Wholesome and I started the bungs
while awaiting the new-comers. Presently came slowly down the
cellar-steps our senior partner in nankeen shanks, silk stockings and
pumps--a frosty-visaged old man, with a nose which had fully earned the
right to be called bottle. Behind him limped our old porter in a blue
check apron. He went round the cellar, and at every second cask, having
lighted a candle, he held it upside down until the grease had fallen
thick on the cask, and then turning the candle stuck it fast in its
little pile of tallow, so that by and by the cellar was pretty well
lighted. Presently, in groups or singly, came old and middle-aged
gentlemen, and with the last our friend Schmidt, who wandered off to a
corner and sat on a barrel-head watching the effects of the mingling of
daylight and candlelight, and amused in his quiet way at the scene and
the intense interest of the chief actors in it, which, like other things
he did not comprehend, had for him the charm of oddness. I went over
and stood by him while the porter dropped the tester-glass into the cool
depths of cask after cask, and solemn counsel was held and grave
decisions reached. I was enchanted with one meagre, little old gentleman
of frail and refined figure, who bent over his wine with closed eyes, as
if to shut out all the sense-impressions he did not need, while the rest
waited to hear what he had to say.
"Needs a milk fining," muttered the old gentleman, with eyes shut as if
in prayer.
"Wants its back broke with a good lot of eggshell," said a short, stout
man with a snuff-colored coat, the collar well up the back of his head.
"Ach!" murmured Schmidt. "The back to be hurt with eggshell! What hath
he of meaning?"
"Pshaw!" said a third: "give it a little rest, and then the white of an
egg to every five gallons. Is it bual?"
"Is it gruel?" said our senior sarcastically.
"Wants age. A good wine for one's grandchildren," murmured my old friend
with shut eyes.
"What is it he calls gruel?" whispered Schmidt. "How nice is a picture
he makes when he shuts his eyes and the light of the candle comes
through the wine, all bright ruby, in the dark here! And ah, what is
that?" for Wholesome, who had been taking his wine in a kindly way, and
having his say with that sense of being always sure which an old taster
affects, glancing out of one of the little barred cellar-windows which
looked out over the wharf, said abruptly, "Ha! ha! that won't do!"
Turning, I saw under the broad-brimmed hat in the clear gray eyes a
sudden sparkle of excitement as he ran hastily up the cellar-stairs.
Seeing that something unusual was afloat, I followed him quickly out on
to the wharf, where presently the cause of his movement was made plain.
Beside the wharf was a large ship, with two planks running down from her
decks to the wharf. Just at the top of the farther one from us a large
black-haired, swarthy man was brutally kicking an aged negro, who was
hastily moving downward, clinging to the hand-rail. Colored folks were
then apt to be old servants--that is to say, friends--and this was our
pensioned porter, Old Tom. I was close behind Wholesome at the door of
the counting-house. I am almost sure he said "Damnation!" At all events,
he threw down his hat, and in a moment was away up the nearer plank to
the ship's deck, followed by me. Meanwhile, however, the black, followed
by his pursuer, had reached the wharf, where the negro, stumbling and
still clinging to the rail, was seized by the man who had struck him. In
the short struggle which ensued the plank was pulled away from the
ship's side, and fell just as Wholesome was about to move down it. He
uttered an oath, caught at a loose rope which hung from a yard, tried it
to see if it was fast, went up it hand over hand a few feet, set a foot
on the bulwarks, and swung himself fiercely back across the ship, and
then, with the force thus gained, flew far in air above the wharf, and
dropping lightly on to a pile of hogs-heads, leapt without a word to the
ground, and struck out with easy power at the man he sought, who fell as
if a butcher's mallet had stunned him--fell, and lay as one dead. The
whole action would have been amazing in any man, but to see a Quaker
thus suddenly shed his false skin and come out the true man he was, was
altogether bewildering--the more so for the easy grace with which the
feat was done. Everybody ran forward, while Wholesome stood a strange
picture, his eyes wide open and his pupils dilated, his face flushed and
lips a little apart, showing his set white teeth while he awaited his
foe. Then, as the man rallied and sat up, staring widely, Wholesome ran
forward and looked at him, waving the crowd aside. In a moment, as the
man rose still bewildered, his gaze fell on Wholesome, and, growing
suddenly white, he sat down on a bundle of staves, saying faintly, "Take
him away! Don't let him come near!"
"Coward!" said I: "one might have guessed that."
"There is to him," said Schmidt at my elbow, "some great mortal fear;
the soul is struck."
"Yes," said Wholesome, "the soul is struck. Some one help him"--for the
man had fallen over in something like a fit--and so saying strode away,
thoughtful and disturbed in face, as one who had seen a ghost.
As he entered the counting-house through the group of dignified old
merchants, who had come out to see what it all meant, one of them said,
"Pretty well for a Quaker, friend Richard!"
Wholesome did not seem to hear him, but walked in, drank a glass of wine
which stood on a table, and sat down silently.
"Not the first feat of that kind he has done," said the elder of the
wine-tasters.
"No," said a sea-captain near by. "He boarded the Penelope in that
fashion during the war, and as he lit on her deck cleared a space with
his cutlass till the boarding-party joined him."
"With his cutlass?" said I. "Then he was not always a Quaker?"
"No," said our senior: "they don't learn these gymnastics at Fourth and
Arch, though perchance the committee may have a word to say about it."
"Quaker or not," said the wine-taster, "I wish any of you had legs as
good or a heart as sound. Very good body, not too old, and none the
worse for a Quaker fining."
"That's the longest sentence I ever heard Wilton speak," said a young
fellow aside to me; "and, by Jove! he is right."
I went back into the counting-house, and was struck with the grim
sadness of face of our junior partner. He had taken up a paper and
affected to be reading, but, as I saw, was staring into space. Our
senior said something to him about Old Tom, but he answered in an absent
way, as one who half hears or half heeds. In a few moments he looked up
at the clock, which was on the stroke of twelve, and seeing me ready,
hat in hand, to return home for our one-o'clock dinner, he gathered
himself up, as it were, limb by limb, and taking his wide-brimmed hat
brushed it absently with his sleeve. Then he looked at it a moment with
a half smile, put it on decisively and went out and away up Arch street
with swifter and swifter strides. By and by he said, "You do not walk as
well as usual."
"But," said I, "no one could keep up with you."
"Do not try to: leave a sore man to nurse his hurts. I suppose you saw
my folly on the wharf--saw how I forgot myself?"
"Ach!" said Schmidt, who had toiled after us hot and red, and who now
slipped his quaint form in between us--"Ach! 'You forgot yourself.' This
say you. I do think you did remember your true self for a time this
morning."
"Hush! I am a man ashamed. Let us talk no more of it. I have ill kept my
faith," returned Wholesome impatiently.
"You may believe God doth not honor an honest man," said Schmidt; "which
is perhaps a God Quaker, not the God I see to myself."
I had so far kept my peace, noting the bitter self-reproach of
Wholesome, and having a lad's shyness before an older man's calamity;
but now I said indignantly, "If it be Friends' creed to see the poor and
old and feeble hurt without raising a hand, let us pray to be saved from
such religion."
"But," said Wholesome, "I should have spoken to him in kindness first.
Now I have only made of him a worse beast, and taught him more hatred.
And he of all men!"
"There is much salvation in some mistakes," said Schmidt smiling.
Just then we were stopped by two middle-aged Friends in drab of orthodox
tint, from which now-a-days Friends have much fallen away into gay
browns and blacks. They asked a question or two about an insurance on
one of our ships; and then the elder said, "Thee hand seems bleeding,
friend Richard;" which was true: he had cut his knuckles on his
opponent's teeth, and around them had wrapped hastily a handkerchief
which showed stains of blood here and there.
"Ach!" said Schmidt, hastening to save his friend annoyance. "He ran
against something.--And how late is it! Let us go."
But Wholesome, who would have no man lie ever so little for his benefit,
said quietly, "I hurt it knocking a man down;" and now for the first
time to-day I observed the old amused look steal over his handsome face
and set it a-twitching with some sense of humor as he saw the shock
which went over the faces of the two elders when we bade them
good-morning and turned away.
Wholesome walked on ahead quickly, and as it seemed plain that he would
be alone, we dropped behind.
"What is all this?" said I. "Does a man grieve thus because he chastises
a scoundrel?"
"No," said Schmidt. "The Friend Wholesome was, as you may never yet
know, an officer of the navy, and when your war being done he comes
here. There is a beautiful woman whom he must fall to loving, and this
with some men being a grave disorder, he must go and spoil a good
natural man with the clothes of a Quaker, seeing that what the woman did
was good in his sight."
"But," said I, "I don't understand."
"No," said he; "yet you have read of Eve and Adam. Sometimes they give
us good apples and sometimes bad. This was a russet, as it were, and at
times the apple disagrees with him for that with the new apple he got
not a new stomach."
I laughed a little, but said, "This is not all. There was something
between him and the man he struck which we do not yet know. Did you see
him?"
"Yes, and before this--last week some time in the market-place. He was
looking at old Dinah's tub of white lilies when I noticed him, and to me
came a curious thinking of how he was so unlike them, many people having
for me flower-likeness, and this man, being of a yellow swarthiness and
squat-browed, 'minded me soon of the toadstool you call a corpse-light."
"Perhaps we shall know some time; but here is home, and will he speak of
it to Mistress White, do you think?"
"Not ever, I suppose," said Schmidt; and we went in.
The sight we saw troubled me. In the little back parlor, at a round
mahogany table with scrolled edges and claw toes, sat facing the light
Mistress White. She was clad in a gray silk with tight sleeves, and her
profusion of rich chestnut hair, with its willful curliness that forbade
it to be smooth on her temples, was coiled in a great knot at the back
of her head. Its double tints and strange changefulness, and the smooth
creamy cheeks with their moving islets of roses that would come and go
at a word, were pretty protests of Nature, I used to think, against the
demure tints of her pearl-gray silken gown. She was looking out into the
garden, quite heedless of the older dame, who sat as her wont was
between the windows, and chirruped now and then, mechanically, "Has thee
a four-leaved clover?" As I learned some time after, one of our older
clerks, perhaps with a little malice of self-comfort at the fall of his
senior's principles, had, on coming home, told her laughingly all the
story of the morning. Perhaps one should be a woman and a Friend to
enter into her feelings. She was tied by a promise and by a sense of
personal pledge to a low and disgraced man, and then coming to love
another despite herself she had grown greatly to honor him. She might
reason as she would that only a sense of right and a yearning for the
fullness of a righteous life had made him give up his profession and
fellows and turn aside to follow the harder creed of Fox, but she well
knew with a woman's keenness of view that she herself had gone for
something in this change; and now, as sometimes before, she reproached
herself with his failures. As we came in she hastily dried her eyes and
went out of the room. At dinner little was said, but in the afternoon
there was a scene of which I came to know all a good while later.
Some of us had gone back to the afternoon work when Mr. Wholesome, who
had lingered behind, strayed thoughtfully into the little back garden.
There under a thin-leaved apricot tree sat Mistress White, very pretty,
with her long fair fingers clasped over a book which lay face down on
her lap. Presently she was aware of Richard Wholesome walking to and fro
and smoking a long-stemmed clay pipe, then, as yet in England, called a
churchwarden. These were two more than commonly good-looking persons,
come of sturdy English breeds, fined down by that in this climate which
has taken the coarseness of line and feature out of so many of our
broods, and has made more than one English painter regret that the
Vandyke faces had crossed the ocean to return no more.
Schmidt and I looked out a moment into the long vista where, between the
rose-boughs bending from either wall under the apricot, we could see the
gray silvery shimmer of the woman's dress, and beyond it, passing to and
fro, the broad shoulders of the ex-captain.
"Come," I said, "walk down with me to the wharf."
"Yet leave me," he returned. "I shall wisely do to sit here on the step
over the council-fire of my pipe. Besides, when there are not markets
and flowers, and only a straight-down, early-afternoon sun, I shall find
it a more noble usage of time to see of my drama another scene. The
actors are good;" and he pointed with his pipe-stem down to the garden.
"And this," he said, "is the mute chorus of the play," indicating a
kitten which had made prey of the grand-dame's ball of worsted, and was
rolling it here and there with delight.
"But," I answered, "it is not right or decent to spy upon others'
actions."
"For right!" he said. "Ach! what I find right to me is my right; and for
decent, I understand you not. But if I tell you what is true, I find my
pleasure to sit here and see the maiden when at times the winds pull up
the curtain of the leaves."
"Well! well!" said I, for most of the time he was not altogether plain
as to what he meant, as when he spoke of the cat as a chorus--"Well!
well! you will go out with me on the water at sundown?"
"That may be," he answered; and I went away.
I have observed since then, in the long life I have lived, that the
passion called love, when it is a hopeless one, acts on men as ferments
do on fluids after their kind--turning some to honest wine and some to
vinegar. With our stout little German all trials seemed to be of the
former use, so that he took no ill from those hurts and bruises which
leave other men sore and tender. Indeed, he talked of Mistress White to
me, or even to Wholesome, whom he much embarrassed, in a calm,
half-amused way, as of a venture which he had made, and, having failed,
found it pleasant to look back upon as an experience not altogether to
be regretted. We none of us knew until much later that it was more than
a mere fancy for a woman who was altogether so sweet and winsome that no
man needed an excuse for loving her. When by and by I also came to love
a good woman, I used to try myself by the measure of this man's lack of
self-love, and wonder how he could have seen with good-will the woman he
cared for come to like another man better. This utter sweetness of soul
has ever been to me a riddle.
An hour passed by, when Schmidt heard a footfall in the room behind him,
and rising saw an old member of the Society of Friends who came at times
to our house, and was indeed trustee for a small estate which belonged
to Mistress White. Nicholas Oldmixon was an overseer in the Fourth
street meeting, and much looked up to among Friends as a prompt and
vigilant guardian of their discipline. Perhaps he would have been
surprised to be told that he had that in his nature which made the post
of official fault-finder agreeable; but so it was, I fancy, and he was
here on such an errand. The asceticism of Friends in those days, and the
extent to which Mr. Oldmixon, like the more strict of his sect, carried
their views as to gravity of manner and the absence of color in dress
and furniture, were especially hateful to Schmidt, who lived and was
happy in a region of color and sentiment and gayety. Both, I doubt not,
were good men, but each was by nature and training altogether unable to
sympathize with the other.
"Good-evening!" said Schmidt, keeping his seat in the low window-sill.
Mr. Oldmixon returned, "Thee is well, I trust?"
"Ach! with such a sun and the last roses, which seem the most sweet, and
these most lovely of fall-flowers, and a good book and a pipe," said
Schmidt, "who will not be well? Have you the honest blessing of being a
smoker?"
"Nay," said the Quaker, with evident guarding of his words. "Thee will
not take it amiss should I say it is a vain waste of time?"
"But," answered Schmidt, "time hath many uses. The one is to be wasted;
and this a pipe mightily helps. I did think once, when I went to
meeting, how much more solemn it would be for each man to have a pipe to
excuse his silence."
"Thee jests idly, I fear," said the Friend, coloring and evidently
holding himself in check. "Is that friend Wholesome in the garden? I
have need to see him."
"Yea," said Schmidt, with a broad smile, "he is yonder under a tree,
like Adam in the garden. Let us take a peep at Paradise."
Mr. Oldmixon held his peace, and walked quietly out of the window and
down the graveled path. There were some who surmised that his years and
his remembrance of the three wives he had outlived did not altogether
suffice to put away from him a strong sentiment of the sweetness of his
ward. Perhaps it was this notion which lit up with mirth the ruddy face
of the German as he walked down the garden behind the slim ascetic
figure of the overseer of meeting in his broad hat and drab clothes. On
the way the German plucked a dozen scarlet roses, a late geranium or two
and a few leaves of motley Poinsetta.
Wholesome paused a moment to greet quietly the new-comer, and
straightway betook himself absently to his walk again to and fro across
the garden. Mistress White would have had the old overseer take her
seat, but this he would not do. He stood a moment near her, as if
irresolute, while Schmidt threw himself down on the sward, and, half
turning over, tossed roses into the gray lap of Mistress White, saying,
"How prettily the God of heaven has dressed them!"
Mistress White took up the flowers, not answering the challenge, but
glancing under her long lashes at the ex-captain, to whom presently the
overseer turned, saying, "Would thee give me a word or two with thee by
ourselves, Richard?"
"There are none in the parlor," said Priscilla, "if thee will talk
there."
"If," said Wholesome, "it be of business, let it wait till to-morrow,
and I will call upon thee: I am not altogether myself to-day."
"Nay," said Nicholas, gathering himself up a little, "thee must know
theeself that I would not come to thee here for business: thee knows my
exactness in such matters."
"And for what, then, are you come?" said Wholesome with unusual
abruptness.
"For speech of that in thee conduct which were better, as between an
elder friend and a younger, to be talked over alone," said Mr. Oldmixon
severely.
Now, Wholesome, though disgusted by his lack of power to keep the silent
pledges he had given when he entered the Society of Friends, was not
dissatisfied with his conduct as he judged it by his own standard of
right. Moreover, like many warm-hearted people, he was quick of temper,
as we have seen. His face flushed, and he paused beside the overseer:
"There are none here who do not know most of what passed this morning;
but as you do not know all, let me advise you to hold your peace and go
your ways, and leave me to such reproach as God may send me."
"If that God send thee any," muttered Schmidt.
But Nicholas Oldmixon was like a war-horse smelling the battle afar off,
and anything like resistance to an overseer in the way of duty roused
him into the sternness which by no means belonged to the office, but
rather to the man. "If," he said, "any in membership with us do
countenance or promote tumults, they shall be dealt with as disorderly
persons. Wherefore did thee give way to rash violence this morning?"
Priscilla grew pale, I think. She said, "Friend Nicholas, thee forgets
the Christian courtesy of our people one to another. Let it rest a
while: friend Richard may come to think better of it by and by."
"And that I trust he may never," muttered Schmidt.
But the overseer was not to be stayed. "Thee would do better to mind the
things of thy house and leave us," he said. "The ways of this young man
have been more than once a scandal, and are like to come before the
preparative meeting to be dealt with."
"Sir," returned Wholesome, approaching him and quite forgetting his
plain speech to make it plainer, "your manners do little credit to your
age or your place. Listen: I told you to speak no more of this matter;"
and he seized him by the lappel of his coat and drew him aside a few
paces. "For your own sake, I mean. Let it die out, with no more of talk
or nonsense."
"For my sake!" exclaimed the overseer; "and why? Most surely thee
forgets theeself."
"For your own sake," said Wholesome, drawing him still farther away, and
bending toward him, so that his words were lost to Schmidt and
Priscilla, "and for your son John's. It was he I struck to-day."
Mr. Oldmixon grew white and staggered as if stricken. "Why did thee not
come and tell me?" he said. "It had been kinder; and where is that
unhappy man?"
"I do not know," returned Wholesome.
"Nevertheless, be it he or another, thee was in the wrong, and I have
done my duty,--God help us all! and is my son yet alive?" and so saying,
he turned away, and without other words walked through the house with
uncertain steps and went down the street, while Wholesome, with softened
face, watched him from the doorstep. Then he went back quietly into the
garden, and turning to Schmidt, said, "Will you oblige me by leaving me
with Mistress White? I will explain to thee by and by."
Schmidt looked up surprised, but seeing how pale and stern he looked,
rose and went into the house. The woman looked up expectant.
"Priscilla, the time has come when thee must choose between me and him."
"He has come back? I knew always he would come."
"Yes, he has come back: I saw him to-day," said Wholesome, "and the John
Oldmixon of to-day is more than ever cruel and brutal. Will thee trust
me to make thee believe that?"
"I believe thee," she returned; "but because he is this and worse, shall
I forget my word or turn aside from that which, if bitter for me, may
save his soul alive?"
"And yet you love me?"
"Have I said so?" she murmured with a half smile.
The young man came closer and seized both hands in his: "Will it not be
a greater sin, loving me, to marry him?"
"But he may never ask me, and then I shall wait, for I had better die
fit in soul to be yours than come to you unworthy of a good man's love."
He dropped her hands and moved slowly away, she watching him with full
eyes. Then he turned and said, "But should he fall--fall as he must--and
come to be what his life will surely make him, a felon whom no woman
could marry--"
"Thee makes duty hard for me, Richard," she answered. "Do not make me
think thee cruel. When in God's good time he shall send me back the
words of promise I wrote when he went away a disgraced man, to whom,
nevertheless I owed my life, then--Oh, Richard, I love thee! Do not hurt
me. Pray for me and him."
"God help us!" he said. "We have great need, to be helped;" and suddenly
leaning over he kissed her forehead for the first time, and went away up
the garden and into the house.
EDWARD KEARSLEY.
MODERN HUGUENOTS.
It demands a good deal of energy, and it involves a little hardship, to
see the Protestant communities of the High Alps of France, but the
picturesque and historic interests of the journey furnish a sufficient
motive and make ample amends. I can think of no route so entirely
unhackneyed to recommend to blasé tourists. The point of departure is
Grenoble, reached in an hour or so from Chambéry, and in itself well
worth turning aside from the Mont Cenis thoroughfare to visit. As far as
Corps the way lies over the beaten track of the Salette pilgrims, of
which the charms are recorded in many a devout description.
It happened to us, however, to get a preliminary glimpse of French
Protestantism in a characteristic, although wholly modern, development
before leaving Grenoble. We applied to the Protestant clergyman there
for information respecting the details of our proposed tour. Pleased
with our project, he told us the story of a mission which he had
established under circumstances altogether unique, and invited us to
join him in paying it a visit. The scene of his enterprise was a sunny
little village lying high among vineyarded hills, and bearing the name
of Notre Dame des Commiers. Owing to its remoteness and insignificance,
the Roman Catholic authorities had never replaced its last priest, who
withdrew during the turmoils of the Revolution. For all their
ecclesiastical needs the people were obliged to descend to the next
village, the curé of which gave them little pastoral care beyond the
thrifty collection of his dues. Learning these facts, our Grenoble
friend determined to take advantage of the situation. He presented
himself in the village and told the people he was willing to become
their pastor. He only asked them to acknowledge the validity of baptism
and marriage performed by him, and to pledge him their support in the
struggle with the priests that would probably ensue. Later, he said, he
hoped to convince them that he taught a better religion than that at the
hands of whose ministers they had suffered such neglect. A majority of
the villagers accepted his proposal, and by a formal act constituted
themselves a Protestant commune. By so doing they were able to secure
recognition by the government as belonging to the National Protestant
Church of France. It was not long before the parishioners grew warmly
attached to their new pastor. His position of assistant at Grenoble
enabled him to assume the sole charge of the enterprise. Week after week
he made the tedious stage-coach journey, walking up the two-mile hill at
the foot of which he had to quit the highway. Often in winter he toiled
for hours through deep snow and faced violent storms in making the
ascent. In the worst weather it sometimes happened that the whole
journey from Grenoble had to be made on foot. For two years he carried
on the work unaided, holding his services in such rude quarters as he
was able to secure. The village is now, after an interval of seven years
since the missionary's first visit, adorned with a pretty chapel and
school-house and provided with a resident minister.
In talking with the people we found abundant proof that their Protestant
faith is both intelligent and practical. Such of them as were not busy
in the fields surrounded their old pastor with greetings that touchingly
expressed their affection and gratitude, and we, as his friends, had a
share in the demonstration. One stalwart, clear-eyed old woman obliged
us to sit down in front of her chalet, cheerfully explaining that she
had just been burned out, and that the shed in which she had found a
shelter was not fit for us to enter. She would take no refusal of her
offer to fetch us grapes, and ran all the way to and from her vineyard
on the opposite hillside, returning in an incredibly short time,
scarcely out of breath, and carrying a basket heavy with great white
and purple clusters. As she stood watching with delight our appreciation
of her produce--the only sweet and luscious grapes, by the way, that we
found throughout the autumn in that land of vines--she talked frankly of
her religious vicissitudes, summing up as follows: "The priests used to
say to me that I had turned Protestant because that is an easier
religion than the Roman Catholic. But I have not found it so at all. _Il
est beaucoup plus facile de me confesser que de me corriger._" Presently
another woman came up the hill, bending painfully under the weight of
two water-pails hanging from the ends of a yoke that rested on her
shoulders. "Ah," said our hostess, "if they would but let us build the
aqueduct, we should not have that ugly work to do." And then we learned
that among the small minority of Roman Catholics left in the village, to
care for whom, as soon as it was found a wolf had entered the fold, a
priest arrived promptly enough, there prevail the wildest superstitions
concerning the Protestants. Among many improvements introduced by the
latter an aqueduct had been planned to furnish the hamlet with wholesome
water. The project was defeated by the opposition of the Roman
Catholics, who considered it a scheme for poisoning them _en masse_. It
was here that we heard for the first time the epithet Huguenots applied
as a term of reproach and derision to the Protestants. Afterward, in
regions where Protestants have a history of centuries, we found it
commonly used in the same way.
Our visit to Notre Dame des Commiers was like reading a living page of
early Reformation history, and the whole neighborhood made a fitting
stage for such a reproduction. Some six or seven miles from Grenoble we
passed the restored but still, in parts at least, historic château of
Lesdiguières at Vizille. Nearer our mountain-village we stopped to
admire an ivy-covered bit of tower-ruin, associated by a grim tradition
with the same Dauphiné hero. A prisoner confined here by the apostate
constable had, says the legend, a lady true who came every night and
clasped her lover's hand stretched out to her between the bars of his
dungeon window. Lesdiguières discovered the rendezvous, and the spot is
still pointed out where his soldier was stationed one fatal night to
chop off the hand that sought its accustomed pledge. The historical
associations of our excursion were, indeed, somewhat confused, but a
fresh feature was added to its interest by the departure, which we
chanced to witness, of Monsieur Thiers from the Château de Vizille, now
occupied by Casimir Perier, whom the ex-president had been visiting.
The two days' diligence journey from Grenoble to the département des
Hautes-Alpes was over one of those broad macadamized highways which make
driving a luxury in many parts of Europe. If we were more huddled than
in the less-antiquated Swiss diligences, we had the compensation of far
more original fellow-travelers than one is apt to find among the
tourists that monopolize those vehicles. There were generally two or
three priests, half a dozen merry peasants, and a sprinkling of small
officers and country-townspeople, who respectively lost no time in
establishing a pleasant intimacy with their neighbors. The unflagging
chatter, in which all joined vivaciously, and often all at once, was in
striking contrast with the silent gloom which would have enshrouded a
similar party of English or American travelers. It was impossible to
resist the contagion of cheerfulness or to refuse to mingle more or less
in the talk.
On the second evening, having trusted to the map and the very meagre
information supplied by _Murray_, we found ourselves deposited at an
isolated wayside cabaret. It presently transpired that St. Bonnet, where
we expected to pass the Sunday, was some half mile or more off the
high-road on which this was the nearest station. While we waited in a
long, low, dimly-lighted room for the guide we had bespoken, two
gendarmes and a peasant sat listening to, or rather looking at, a vivid
account of some shooting adventure given in extraordinary pantomime by
a deaf and dumb huntsman. In time a withered gnome trundling a
wheelbarrow took possession of us and our light belongings, and led us
forth into the night. We traversed the valley, mounted the hill on the
other side, and at last entered the deeper night of a lampless village,
and began to thread its steep, black streets. The only gleam of light
was at what seemed to be the central fountain. Many women were gathered
there, chatting as they filled their pails or stood with the replenished
vessels poised on their heads. The inn was of a piece with all those at
which we lodged in Dauphiné, deficient in everything for which an inn
exists. The feature of these inns which I remember, I think, with the
least relish was the condition of the floors. It is literally true that
they are never washed. A daily sprinkling is the only cleansing process
they undergo: its effect is to soften the wood until it begins to absorb
a large proportion of the rubbish which is often but never thoroughly
swept up, and grows black and evil-odored. This result is most manifest,
of course, and most offensive in the dining-rooms.
St. Bonnet offered even less than we anticipated of interest. On the
Sunday morning we gladly drove away in such an equipage as the place
afforded to the not very distant village of St. Laurent en Champsaur.
Here we reached our first point in what was fifty years ago the parish
of Felix Neff, and has been for centuries a refuge of Protestantism. It
is a hamlet of stone cottages, lying on a kind of plateau and
overlooking a wide and fertile valley. The surrounding hills, though
mostly bare, were broken and beautified on that still autumn morning
with dim clefts of shadow. The sun was not yet high, and broad masses of
purple fell here and there across the plain and the brawling stream that
divides it, still the Drac, which we had seen an almost stately river
near Grenoble.
Having already learned something of the local habits, we bade our driver
take us to the _temple_. That is the distinctive name of a Protestant
church in these Roman Catholic lands. The morning service was in
progress when we entered the square and austere little chapel. Every pew
was occupied, the men and women taking different sides of the one
stone-paved aisle. A gentle-looking old man was reading from a book with
much clearness and expression, and in a singularly pleasant voice, what
we soon found to be an excellent sermon. At its close a quaint, slow
hymn was sung, and the congregation was dismissed. To our amusement, the
simple folk formed a double line outside the door to inspect us as we
emerged. It was easy to imagine their interest in an apparition so
unusual as foreign visitors, and we submitted to their curious but
entirely respectful scrutiny, wishing that our aspect might give them
half the satisfaction we had in watching their eager faces and noting
their droll costumes. Ludicrously high stocks and "swallow-tail" coats
of brown homespun made the dress of the men different from that of
corresponding rustics in America. The chief peculiarity in the women's
attire was a straw hat, of which the towering crown, decked with huge
bows, and the vast flapping brim, were like an extravagant caricature of
the poke-bonnets of our grandmothers.
As we stood demurely in the midst of the group, the old man who had
read, and who proved to be the schoolmaster, hastened out to greet us.
It was his habit, he said, in the pastor's absence, to conduct the
service. For more than thirty years, although the parish had repeatedly
been for months without a minister, he had not allowed the temple to
remain closed a single Sunday. His wife appeared directly, and both
insisted, with apologies for their peasant fare, that we should stop to
dinner at their house, a few yards from the church. We were in truth
nothing loath to accept the invitation, and found little to excuse in
the savory soup, the fresh-laid eggs and the fruit that composed the
simple feast, while we were scarcely less regaled with the neatness of
the rooms and the spectacle of well-washed floors and spotless though
coarsely-woven linen. But most of all to be enjoyed and remembered was
the peep we got into this good old man's life and history. From his
youth he had been schoolmaster at St. Laurent, and it seemed never to
have occurred to him that he might claim a more distinguished post.
Unconscious of any special self-sacrifice, he told us about his work,
heroic through its quiet faithfulness, in that obscure hamlet. He
enumerated with pride the various pastors and teachers who had been his
scholars--among the former his eldest son, among the latter two of his
daughters. Listening to his talk, we understood the intelligence of
expression in many faces and the large proportion of young men at the
service of the morning.
In our walks about the village after dinner the schoolmaster took us to
see an ancient woman who in her youth had been a catechumen of Felix
Neff. It is curious to find that term, which was applied by the early
Church to candidates for admission, in use now among the Protestants of
France and Italy. With tears in her eyes and an enthusiasm that made her
speech almost incoherent, the grandame talked of "Monsieur Neff," his
courage, his friendliness, how he went among his people like one of
themselves, and what good words he always spoke. As we left St. Laurent
our host and his wife bore us company to the brow of a little hill
whither we had sent on our chaise, and stood there to wave us an adieu
as we descended on the other side. Then we saw them turn back toward the
group of thatched and moss-grown cottages which was all their world.
That evening we reached Gap, the capital of the department of the High
Alps, and once an important Protestant centre. Farel, the French
Reformer of the sixteenth century, was born and for a time preached
here. But since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes until very
lately--during a period, that is, of nearly two hundred years--no
Protestant pastor has been tolerated in the town, and the once numerous
flock was long since dispersed. A Swiss society undertook two or three
years ago a Protestant mission at Gap, and a friend in Geneva had given
us the name of the present evangelist. A humbler or more thankless
charge could scarcely be imagined than such a work in such a place.
There is no nucleus of hereditary Protestants, as in the
mountain-parishes of the department, and at the same time the little
city is so isolated that its people have retained the superstitions and
religious animosities of the Dark Ages. It was therefore with much
compassionate thought of his pitiful case that we sought the
evangelist's house. He was not, however, a man toward whom one could
maintain for a moment that frame of mind. Brisk, cheerful, polished in
manner and with an unsought elegance of dress and carriage, he had not
in the least the air of a despised heretic struggling hopelessly against
social as well as ecclesiastical contempt. Six avowed converts were the
definite results of his work for more than two years. During much of
that time he had been hampered by insuperable difficulties in finding a
place for his service or even a lodging for his family. The latter was
at last provided, as a daring defiance of popular prejudice, by a
landlord who prided himself upon being a _libre penseur_. For his chapel
he secured a disused shop in the front of a bath-house. The proprietress
of the establishment was punished by the priests for her unrighteous
thrift by being refused the sacrament. Her business, too, was for a
while endangered. One instance out of many of the kind of prejudice she
provoked was that of two wealthy and educated ladies, who, as they
entered the bath one day, heard music in the _chapelle évangélique_ and
instantly beat a hurried retreat. They only stopped to explain that all
the world knows the object of Protestant worship is the devil, and they
dare not stay within hearing of the sacrilegious rites. In spite of
multiform discouragements like these, the evangelist and his wife, a
motherly woman of much quiet strength, whose gentleness made sweet a
very homely face, talked of their work and prospects with a
matter-of-course hopefulness which it was not easy to share. Nothing in
their habits, they told us, had more amazed their Roman Catholic
neighbors at first than their lavish use of water. But in that
particular, at least, suspicion had been allayed, their perseverance had
proved the practice harmless, and their example was beginning to find a
few timid imitators.
Our first night after leaving Gap was spent at Embrun. As we approached
the town, which surmounts an extraordinary platform of rock, its walls
looking like part of the smooth, brown tufa precipice that rises
abruptly out of the valley, we seemed to see in its picturesque and
impressive aspect something of the grandeur and gloom of its long
history. The cathedral where so many archbishops have ministered
preserves little trace of its former splendors: even architecturally it
is without attraction.
For the next two days our route continued to lie through the valley,
which we entered upon leaving Gap, of the Durance. It is an apparently
insignificant but treacherous stream, which by repeated floods has
spread ugly devastation over a hill-girdled country that ought to be
smiling with peace and plenty. At Guillestre we came in sight of the
jagged double peak of Mont Pelvoux, and got a magnificent vista toward
the south, ending in the white slopes of some giant of the Cottian Alps.
The Mont Pelvoux and the Pointe des Écrins, the greatest of those
mountains from which the department takes its name, although they appear
on none of the ordinary maps, stand, I believe, only twelfth and
thirteenth in the scale of height among the mountains of Europe. The
explorations of Whymper have introduced them to his readers, but they
still remain almost untrodden by other climbers.
On the second afternoon we reached the lateral valley of Fressinière,
the climax of our journey. There was refreshment for soul as well as
body in the daintily-clean, bare-floored rooms, redolent of apples set
out to dry, into which we were welcomed by Pastor Charpiot and his wife
at Pallons. The village is a mere group of Alpine huts, and the only
chance of shelter was at the presbytery. So much we had little doubt of
finding there, but we counted as little upon the warm and graceful
hospitality which greeted our application. And when our nationality
transpired it added new zest to the good-will of our host and hostess.
We were their first Transatlantic guests.
The valley of Fressinière, at the entrance of which Pallons lies, is the
centre of those special interests which first prompted the pilgrimage I
am recording. With it are specially associated the earliest traditions
of Protestantism in France, and here Felix Neff spent the larger part of
his brief but memorable career as pastor in the High Alps. I suppose the
exact antiquity of the Protestants of Dauphiné is one of the historical
problems that still await their final solution. The older chronicles
provide them with what seems an unbroken line of descent from the second
century, when Irenæus preached in Lyons and Vienne. Christian fugitives
from those cities during the persecution of Marcus Aurelius may, it is
alleged, have taken refuge in the not distant Dauphiné mountains, and
have transmitted to their descendants the primitive faith they had
received. But modern criticism has so seriously undermined, as
practically to have demolished, this imposing genealogical structure. It
is not denied that voices of more or less emphatic protest against Rome
made themselves heard among these mountains and the neighboring Cottian
Alps during the earlier centuries. Can such voices be held to represent
any definitely-organized dissentient body of more remote origin than the
Poor Men of Lyons, led by Peter Waldo in 1172? The latest researches
give an apparently final negative answer to this question. At least,
however, it is beyond dispute that long before the Reformation the
valleys of the High Alps were a retreat for persecuted schismatics whose
opposition to the Romish Church anticipated Protestantism. As early as
the fifteenth century a papal bull denounced as _inveterate_ the
heretics of Dauphiné and Provence, and about the middle of the next
century delegates from those provinces appeared at the first national
Protestant synod in France with the following declaration: "We consent
to merge in the common cause, but we require no Reformation, for our
forefathers and ourselves have ever disclaimed the corruptions of the
churches in communion with Rome." Enough is therefore certain as to the
antecedents of these Protestant mountaineers to surround them with an
entirely peculiar interest. The saddest feature, perhaps, of all their
history is the stunting of mind and character that has resulted from
centuries of oppression. After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes
they were subject to fresh persecution, and until within the present
century they have been denied the privileges of citizenship and forced
to look upon themselves as outcasts. One can only wonder at the degree
of individuality and force which they have still preserved.
Felix Neff, while still a _proposant_, or candidate for the ministry, at
Geneva, was sent to Dauphiné in response to the appeal of two pastors
there for an assistant. Two years later, at the beginning of 1824, in
the twenty-sixth year of his age, he became pastor of the Protestant
churches in the Arvieux section of the High Alps. This was the larger
and by far the more arduous of the two parishes into which the
department was at that time divided. In seventeen or eighteen
widely-scattered villages Neff found the little groups of "Huguenots"
which composed his charge. His official residence, the presbytery, was
at La Chalp, a hamlet above the village of Arvieux and near the border
of Italy. From this point to St. Laurent, the western limit of his
parish, is a journey of sixty miles, including the passage of a
dangerous gorge and the crossing of a difficult snow-pass. St. Véran on
the east was the least remote of his boundaries, but even this is
separated from La Chalp by twelve miles of steep descent and rough
climbing. On the north and the south the extreme points were distant
respectively thirty-three and twenty-miles, and the routes are of the
same character as in the other directions.
These disadvantages, instead of daunting the young pastor, seemed only
to stimulate his ardor. "I am always dreaming of the High Alps," he had
written in 1823, after visiting them for the first time. "I had rather
be stationed there than in places which are under the beautiful sky of
Languedoc. The country bears a strong resemblance to the Alps of
Switzerland. It has their advantages, and even their beauties. It has,
above all, an energetic race of people--intelligent, active, hardy and
patient under fatigue--who offer a better soil for the gospel than the
wealthy and corrupt inhabitants of the plains of the South." The
illusions that mingled with these early impressions were doubtless soon
dispelled. He shows later a perfectly clear perception of the degenerate
condition of his parishioners, but his eagerness to serve them waxes
with his sense of their need. Neff was in modern times their first
regularly-appointed pastor. A son of Oberlin, whose short but devoted
life shows him to have inherited his father's spirit, had once
undertaken the provisional charge of the parish, but only for a few
months. In general, it had had no ministry beyond occasional visits from
the pastor of Orpierre, the other section of the department.
The valley of Fressinière at once attracted Neff's peculiar regard. It
was the part of his parish most difficult of access and most cut off
from any chance of material prosperity. The climate is such that in
unfavorable seasons even rye will not ripen, and the patches of potatoes
straggling forlornly among the rocks often fail to reach maturity. No
other grain or vegetable can be raised. Mould quickly attacks the flour
in this mountain-air, and the year's baking is accordingly done in the
autumn as soon as the rye comes back from the mill. The coarse black
loaves grow perfectly hard in a few weeks, and have to be chopped into
pieces and soaked in hot water before they can be eaten. It is only at
the head of the valley, above the hamlet of Dourmillouse, that any
pastures are found, and many of those are inaccessible to cattle and
scarcely safe for sheep. They are besides so meagre that in dry summers
no hay can be made, and the peasants are forced to sell their beasts at
a loss or else see them die for want of food. The addition of a little
salted meat to the half-grown potatoes and the stony bread is a luxury
of only the most prosperous years. The bald mountain-slopes furnish no
fuel, and it is of course only in the smallest quantities that the
people can afford to buy wood in the valley of the Durance. Their
resource against the winter's cold is moving into their stables, where,
huddled together in a corner cleared for the purpose, they pass four or
five months. The smoky and confined air is a welcome change from the icy
winds outside, and the steaming cattle are a source of grateful warmth.
"This village," Neff writes, about the middle of September, from the
smallest and most destitute of the hamlets of Fressinière, "is squeezed
up in the very narrowest gorge of the valley, and is now buried in snow,
and without the hope of seeing the sun during the rest of the winter.
The houses are low, dark and dirty, and the people themselves seem to be
stupefied with the utter misery of their condition."
Besides the strong appeal thus made to his sympathy, the young pastor
nowhere else felt as in this valley the inspiration of his parish's
history. Dourmillouse especially he regarded as the most staunchly
Protestant of all the villages to which he ministered. "It is
celebrated," he writes, "for the resistance which its inhabitants have
opposed for more than six hundred years to the Church of Rome. They
never bowed their knee before an idol, even when all the inhabitants of
the valley of Queyras" (on the opposite side of the Durance, and
embracing Arvieux, St. Véran and other villages) "dissembled their
faith. The aspect of this desert, both terrible and sublime, which
served as the asylum of truth when almost all the world lay in darkness;
the recollection of the faithful martyrs of old; the deep caverns into
which they withdrew to read the Bible in secret and to worship the
Father of Light in spirit and in truth,--everything tends to elevate my
soul." He spent here the whole of one winter and large portions of
another, and it was here that he gathered his most important schools.
The rest of the field was not, however, neglected. Neff allowed himself
twenty-one days for traversing his parish from end to end, and during
much of the year his rounds succeeded each other with little interval.
He was continually passing from the extreme of heat in sunny valleys to
the arctic cold of snows and glaciers. His lodging on these journeys was
in the huts of the peasants. He shared their coarse and unwholesome
food, often cooked in ill-cleansed copper vessels. He slept in small,
unventilated hovels, a dozen other persons often dividing with him the
scanty space. He did not shrink from even the stables in winter. However
exhausted he might be by hours of toilsome walking, his elastic spirit
quickly revived: all thought of refreshment for himself was secondary to
the spiritual wants he sought to meet in others.
Nor was he content without trying to ameliorate the temporal condition
of his parishioners. By the care of his own garden he sought to teach
them more intelligent and productive methods of agriculture than the
rude processes to which they were accustomed. In the valley of
Fressinière he built an aqueduct for purposes of irrigation, overcoming
prejudice and opposition by beginning the work with his own hands. The
example of Oberlin was constantly before him, and he often expresses his
ambition to be to his people such a guide and helper as the pastor of
Ban de la Roche had been to the peasants of the Vosges.
Neff was not long in discovering that his work must begin with the most
elementary instruction. Generally, the people were ignorant of any
language but their native patois. Up to this period their schoolmasters,
paid at the rate of twenty-five francs a year, had been peasants like
themselves. Their only time for study was such of the year as was not
needed for the tilling of the niggardly soil or spent in the care of the
flocks. And even the little they were able to learn was easily lost on
account of the scarcity of books. Neff first addressed himself to
learning the patois, and then, as he went from village to village, made
ordinary teaching a part of his pastoral functions. At the beginning of
his second winter he resolved to undertake the training of teachers. "I
foresaw," he writes, "that the truth which I had been permitted to
preach would not only not spread, but might even be lost, unless
something should be done to promote its continuance." Accordingly, for
five months he relinquished the more congenial general work of his
parish and devoted himself to a normal school at Dourmillouse. One
reason for planting it there was the inaccessibility of the place and
its consequent freedom from distraction. More than twenty young men from
other villages cheerfully submitted to the long confinement in this
ice-bound fastness, and the people of Dourmillouse were glad to make
room in their huts for the new-comers, and to add to the supplies
brought by them their own scanty stores.
The following winter, his third in the High Alps, Neff again opened this
school, dividing its care, however, with one of his most capable pupils
of the previous year, and paying occasional visits to other parts of his
parish. But now his health, never robust, began to give way under the
incessant strain to which it was subjected. Early in the spring of 1829
he was forced to go to Geneva with the hope of recruiting. There, after
two years of suffering, the details of which are painful beyond
expression, he died at the age of thirty-one.
With our minds full of these memories we set out on the morning after
our arrival at Pallons, with Pastor Charpiot as guide, to explore the
valley of Fressinière and ascend to Dourmillouse. The immediate vicinity
of Pallons is fair and fertile, but a short walk up the course of an
impetuous torrent brought us to a narrow gorge, beyond which we found a
totally different region. Bare slopes of rock that looked grim even in
the sunny morning, and a waste valley-bottom, here of considerable
width, but sterile and bleak, made up the landscape. Its dreariness was
only increased by an occasional chalet standing beside a patch of limp
and discolored potato-vines. As we went on the scene grew more and more
gloomy. The tillage is in cleared spots not so large as the heaps of
stones that surround them, or on bits of practicable soil left by
land-slides in the midst of their hideous débris. The only trees are
dwarfish pollards, reduced to bare trunks with thin tufts of green atop
by the practice of stripping off the sprouts every two or three years to
make fodder for the goats. Midway up the valley we passed the village of
Violins. It seemed mournfully empty, and many of the houses were in
reality deserted. A shy, bright-faced fellow opened the little _temple_
for our inspection, and Pastor Charpiot reminded us how its interior was
not only planned by Neff, but in large measure his actual handiwork.
Half an hour further on our path led us through the hamlet of Minsas,
now entirely abandoned and in ruins. The desolation of the valley here
becomes appalling. On either hand sheer precipices of crumbling rock
rise above steep slopes of gravel and loose stones. The ground is strewn
thick with great boulders, many of which had left traces of their
furious descent before settling, sometimes close beside the path, or
even after crossing it in a final bound. The precipices from which they
had detached themselves are composed of strangely-twisted strata, and
frequently recurring streaks of lurid red give them a fierce and ghastly
aspect. Landslips and torrents of stones are so frequent of late years
that no more attempts are made to clear away the rubbish thus deposited.
Where these scourges have not fallen the sullen stream has carried
devastation. Floods occur every year. That of 1856 wrought a ruin from
which the villages have never rallied. In the whole upper half of the
valley of Fressinière there is not, I suppose, an acre of land capable
of cultivation. In the time of Neff, wretched as its condition must
always have been, the poverty of this region was not so utterly hopeless
as it has since become. The failure of all resources is literally
driving away its inhabitants. Those who remain, as in such cases a
certain proportion cannot help doing, sometimes in bad years pass
three, six, and even nine, months without bread. Their small stock of
potatoes is often exhausted long before it can be replenished. "I am at
a loss," said the pastor, "when we are no longer able to give them aid,
to know how they live. The only semblance of food left to them is soup,
for which, perhaps, they haven't even salt, much less meat or
vegetables. Turbid water--_de l'eau trouble, rien de plus!_"
The valley terminates abruptly at what seems an impassable wall of rock.
Upon nearer approach a zigzag path up its face is discovered. Not far
from the top the narrow way creeps by a ledge which barely affords
foothold across a thread of sparkling foam slipping down a perpendicular
precipice. In winter this passage is sheeted in dangerously unstable
ice, and makes Dourmillouse inaccessible for weeks. Neff gives a
spirited account in his journal of leading out a party of young peasants
by torchlight, armed with axes, to cut a path here on the evening before
some service in which he wished the people of the upper and lower
valleys to unite. Dourmillouse lies on a slope above this difficult
ascent. It is a mere group of rude chalets, like the other villages, but
it has a less miserable air. The land-slides are mostly confined to the
lower valley, and here the scanty Alpine pastures and steep patches of
rye are out of reach of the floods. The people are seldom reduced to
actual want of food, and are esteemed prosperous by their more destitute
neighbors below.
Our first visit was to the old priory in which Neff held his winter
schools. A row of half a dozen trees planted by him in front of the
house now shuts off a good deal of much-needed sunshine, but is
nevertheless carefully cherished as a memorial. Beside the priory stands
the _temple_, once a Roman Catholic church, in which, before the
Revolution, a priest is said to have ministered for twenty-five years
without making a single convert, his own servant constituting his flock.
Presently we went to rest and eat the lunch Pastor Charpiot had brought,
at the house of the local _ancien_, or elder. His wife, a sturdy,
smiling young woman, gave us an eager welcome. Two round-cheeked boys
frisked about their old friend the pastor, and a baby--its spirits quite
unclouded by its austere surroundings--crowed lustily from the cradle in
which, after the fashion of the country, it was tightly strapped. It was
a low, grimy room, with one square bit of a window, and far from clean.
Dr. Gilly, the prim English biographer of Neff, quaintly says:
"Cleanliness is not a virtue which distinguishes any of the people in
these mountains; and, with such a nice sense of moral perception as they
display, and with such strict attention to the duties of religion, it is
astonishing that they have not yet learnt those ablutions in their
persons or habitations which are as necessary to comfort as to health."
I suspect, however, that the nicest "sense of moral perception" in the
world would excuse the omission of a good many "ablutions" in a place
where all the water that is used has to be carried more than a quarter
of a mile up a steep and rough mountain-path from the nearest stream.
And there was one refinement in the rude chalet not always present in
regions far less removed from the centres of civilization: besides the
cloth--so coarse as to be a curiosity--which the woman laid for us over
an end of the unscoured table, she put at each of our places, as a
matter of course, a fresh napkin of the same rude stuff.
I could not sufficiently admire the brave cheerfulness of these simple
folk. Many of the villagers were busy gathering their little stock of
potatoes, and all had something bright to say about their good fortune
in getting them so well grown and safely stored before the frosts. It
was the last week in September, and they thought the winter already
close at hand. There was, too, in spite of a shrinking from strangers
painfully suggestive of tendencies inherited from generations of
persecuted ancestors, a degree of intelligence and self-respect often
wanting among peasants far more favorably circumstanced. And it seemed
to me worthy of remark that in all our walk--notwithstanding the
valley's unexampled poverty--we did not encounter a single beggar.
Before we left Dourmillouse the "elder" appeared, a stalwart young
mountaineer with his gun slung across his shoulder. He had finished his
morning's work in some distant field, and was off for a chamois-hunt
among the rocks and glaciers. As a relic of our visit he gave us a block
of rye bread twenty-two months old, which he chopped off the loaf with a
hatchet.
We had frequent evidence in the course of our excursion that Pastor
Charpiot is a real shepherd to his needy flock. Indeed, he gave to the
walk an intimate and peculiar interest quite apart from its historical
associations. Here he bade us go slowly on while he looked in upon a
sick man, explaining that he had to be doctor as well as minister. Again
he asked us to stop and share with him some of the grapes which a stout
young peasant-woman was bringing on her donkey from the Durance
vineyards, and which had no sweetness save in the good-will that offered
them. For all whom we met he had a cheery greeting or an affectionate
inquiry that showed familiar acquaintance with their concerns; and
occasionally a word or two suggested a truth or hope, aptly illustrated
in some passing incident, no matter how trifling or homely.
A storm was gathering in the mountains as we made our way back to
Pallons through the deepening shadows of the autumn afternoon. Before we
emerged from the desolate valley its gloom had grown almost intolerable;
and yet this was but a suggestion of the winter horrors which the
white-haired pastor at our side had faced for years in his regular
ministrations at the different hamlets we had visited. Speaking of the
five pastors now distributed over the field of which Neff assumed the
whole charge, he said with a modesty that was quite unaffected, "All
five together, we are not worth him alone" (_nous ne le valons pas_).
What we had seen that day convinced us that so far at least as concerned
himself his deprecation was unfounded, but in expressing it he echoed
the tone that seemed universal in the High Alps in reference to the
illustrious young pastor. Neff could not, of course, in his short career
accomplish the permanent revolution which he dreamed of and longed for.
At the same time, it cannot be said that his work has perished while not
only pastors but people feel so strongly the inspiration of that heroic
life.
JAMES M. BRUCE.
BLOOMING.
A little seed lay underneath the ground,
While from the south a mild wind-current blew,
And from the tropics to the northward flew
Long, angular lines of wild-fowl with a sound
Of silken wings. About that time the sun
Put forth a shining finger, and did stir
The sleeping soil to effort; whereupon
The seed made roots like webs of gossamer,
Shot up a stem, and flourished leaf and flower.
Now look, O sweet! see what your eyes have done
With just one ray of their mysterious power
Upon the germ of my heart's passion thrown!
Through all my frame steal roots of pure desire:
My dreams are blooms that shake and shine like fire.
MAURICE THOMPSON
FELIPA.
Christine and I found her there. She was a small, dark-skinned,
yellow-eyed child, the offspring of the ocean and the heats, tawny,
lithe and wild, shy yet fearless--not unlike one of the little brown
deer that bounded through the open reaches of the pine barren behind the
house. She did not come to us--we came to her: we loomed into her life
like genii from another world, and she was partly afraid and partly
proud of us. For were we not her guests?--proud thought!--and, better
still, were we not women? "I have only seen three women in all my life,"
said Felipa, inspecting us gravely, "and I like women. I am a woman too,
although these clothes of the son of Pedro make me appear as a boy: I
wear them on account of the boat and the hauling in of the fish. The son
of Pedro being dead at a convenient age, and his clothes fitting me,
what would you have? It was manifestly a chance not to be despised. But
when I am grown I shall wear robes long and beautiful like the
señora's." The little creature was dressed in a boy's suit of dark-blue
linen, much the worse for wear, and torn.
"If you are a girl, why do you not mend your clothes?" I said.
"Do you mend, señora?"
"Certainly: all women sew and mend."
"The other lady?"
Christine laughed as she lay at ease upon the brown carpet of pine
needles, warm and aromatic after the tropic day's sunshine. "The child
has divined me already, Catherine," she said.
Christine was a tall, lissome maid, with an unusually long stretch of
arm, long sloping shoulders and a long fair throat: her straight hair
fell to her knees when unbound, and its clear flaxen hue had not one
shade of gold, as her clear gray eyes had not one shade of blue. Her
small, straight, rose-leaf lips parted over small, dazzlingly white
teeth, and the outline of her face in profile reminded you of an etching
in its distinctness, although it was by no means perfect according to
the rules of art. Still, what a comfort it was, after the blurred
outlines and smudged profiles many of us possess--seen to best
advantage, I think, in church on Sundays, crowned with flower-decked
bonnets, listening calmly serene to favorite ministers, unconscious of
noses! When Christine had finished her laugh--and she never hurried
anything, but took the full taste of it--she stretched out her arm
carelessly and patted Felipa's curly head. The child caught the
descending hand and kissed the long white fingers.
It was a wild place where we were, yet not new or crude--the coast of
Florida, that old-new land, with its deserted plantations, its skies of
Paradise, and its broad wastes open to the changeless sunshine. The old
house stood on the edge of the dry land, where the pine barren ended and
the salt marsh began: in front curved the tide-water river that seemed
ever trying to come up close to the barren and make its acquaintance,
but could not quite succeed, since it must always turn and flee at a
fixed hour, like Cinderella at the ball, leaving not a silver slipper,
but purple driftwood and bright sea-weeds, brought in from the Gulf
Stream outside. A planked platform ran out into the marsh from the edge
of the barren, and at its end the boats were moored; for although at
high tide the river was at our feet, at low tide it was far away out in
the green waste somewhere, and if we wanted it we must go and seek it.
We did not want it, however: we let it glide up to us twice a day with
its fresh salt odors and flotsam of the ocean, and the rest of the time
we wandered over the barrens or lay under the trees looking up into the
wonderful blue above, listening to the winds as they rushed across from
sea to sea. I was an artist, poor and painstaking: Christine was my kind
friend. She had brought me South because my cough was troublesome, and
here because Edward Bowne recommended the place. He and three
fellow-sportsmen were down at the Madre Lagoon, farther south; I thought
it probable we should see him, without his three fellow-sportsmen,
before very long.
"Who were the three women you have seen, Felipa?" said Christine.
"The grandmother, an Indian woman of the Seminoles who comes sometimes
with baskets, and the wife of Miguel of the island. But they are all
old, and their skins are curled: I like better the silver skin of the
señora."
Poor little Felipa lived on the edge of the great salt marsh alone with
her grand-parents, for her mother was dead. The yellow old couple were
slow-witted Minorcans, part pagan, part Catholic, and wholly ignorant:
their minds rarely rose above the level of their orange trees and their
fish-nets. Felipa's father was a Spanish sailor, and as he had died only
the year before, the child's Spanish was fairly correct, and we could
converse with her readily, although we were slow to comprehend the
patois of the old people, which seemed to borrow as much from the
Italian tongue and the Greek as from its mother Spanish. "I know a great
deal," Felipa remarked confidently, "for my father taught me. He had
sailed on the ocean out of sight of land, and he knew many things. These
he taught to me. Do the gracious ladies think there is anything else to
know?"
One of the gracious ladies thought not, decidedly: in answer to my
remonstrance, expressed in English, she said, "Teach a child like that,
and you ruin her."
"Ruin her?"
"Ruin her happiness--the same thing."
Felipa had a dog, a second self--a great gaunt yellow creature of
unknown breed, with crooked legs, big feet and the name Drollo. What
Drollo meant, or whether it was an abbreviation, we never knew, but
there was a certain satisfaction in it, for the dog was droll: the fact
that the Minorcan title, whatever it was, meant nothing of that kind,
made it all the better. We never saw Felipa without Drollo. "They look
a good deal alike," observed Christine--"the same coloring."
"For shame!" I said.
But it was true. The child's bronzed yellow skin and soft eyes were not
unlike the dog's, but her head was crowned with a mass of short black
curls, while Drollo had only his two great flapping ears and his low
smooth head. Give him an inch or two more of skull, and what a creature
a dog would be! For love and faithfulness even now what man can match
him? But, although ugly, Felipa was a picturesque little object always,
whether attired in boy's clothes or in her own forlorn bodice and skirt.
Olive-hued and meagre-faced, lithe and thin, she flew over the pine
barrens like a creature of air, laughing to feel her short curls toss
and her thin childish arms buoyed up on the breeze as she ran, with
Drollo barking behind. For she loved the winds, and always knew when
they were coming--whether down from the north, in from the ocean, or
across from the Gulf of Mexico: she watched for them, sitting in the
doorway, where she could feel their first breath, and she taught us the
signal of the clouds. She was a queer little thing: we used to find her
sometimes dancing alone out on the barren in a circle she had marked out
with pine-cones, and once she confided to us that she talked to the
trees. "They hear," she said in a whisper: "you should see how knowing
they look, and how their leaves listen."
Once we came upon her most secret lair in a dense thicket of
thorn-myrtle and wild smilax, a little bower she had made, where was
hidden a horrible-looking image formed of the rough pieces of
saw-palmetto grubbed up by old Bartolo from his garden. She must have
dragged these fragments thither one by one, and with infinite pains
bound them together with her rude withes of strong marsh-grass, until at
last she had formed a rough trunk with crooked arms and a sort of a
head, the red hairy surface of the palmetto looking not unlike the skin
of some beast, and making the creature all the more grotesque. This
fetich was kept crowned with flowers, and after this we often saw the
child stealing away with Drollo to carry to it portions of her meals or
a new-found treasure--a sea-shell, a broken saucer, or a fragment of
ribbon. The food always mysteriously disappeared, and my suspicion is
that Drollo used to go back secretly in the night and devour it, asking
no questions and telling no lies: it fitted in nicely, however, Drollo
merely performing the ancient part of the priests of Jupiter, men who
have been much admired. "What a little pagan she is!" I said.
"Oh no, it is only her doll," replied Christine.
I tried several times to paint Felipa during these first weeks, but
those eyes of hers always evaded me. They were, as I have said before,
yellow--that is, they were brown with yellow lights--and they stared at
you with the most inflexible openness. The child had the full-curved,
half-open mouth of the tropics, and a low Greek forehead. "Why isn't she
pretty?" I said.
"She is hideous," replied Christine: "look at her elbows."
Now, Felipa's arms _were_ unpleasant; they were brown and lean,
scratched and stained, and they terminated in a pair of determined
little paws that could hold on like grim Death. I shall never forget
coming upon a tableau one day out on the barren--a little Florida cow
and Felipa, she holding on by the horns, and the beast with its small
fore feet stubbornly set in the sand; girl pulling one way, cow the
other; both silent and determined. It was a hard contest, but the girl
won.
"And if you pass over her elbows, there are her feet," continued
Christine languidly. For she was a sybaritic lover of the fine linens of
life, that friend of mine--a pre-Raphaelite lady with clinging draperies
and a mediæval clasp on her belt. Her whole being rebelled against
ugliness, and the mere sight of a sharp-nosed, light-eyed woman on a
cold day made her uncomfortable for hours.
"Have we not feet, too?" I replied sharply.
But I knew what she meant. Bare feet are not pleasant to the eye
now-a-days, whatever they may have been in the days of the ancient
Greeks; and Felipa's little brown insteps were half the time torn or
bruised by the thorns of the chapparal. Besides, there was always the
disagreeable idea that she might step upon something cold and squirming
when she prowled through the thickets knee-deep in the matted grasses.
Snakes abounded, although we never saw them; but Felipa went up to their
very doors, as it were, and rang the bell defiantly.
One day old Grandfather Bartolo took the child with him down to the
coast: she was always wild to go to the beach, where she could gather
shells and sea-beans, and chase the little ocean-birds that ran along
close to the waves with that swift gliding motion of theirs, and where
she could listen to the roar of the breakers. We were several miles up
the river, and to go down to the ocean was quite a voyage to Felipa. She
bade us good-bye joyously; then ran back to hug Christine a second time,
then to the boat again; then back.
"I thought you wanted to go, child?" I said, a little impatiently, for I
was reading aloud, and these small irruptions were disturbing.
"Yes," said Felipa, "I want to go; and still--Perhaps if the gracious
señora would kiss me again--"
Christine only patted her cheek and told her to run away: she obeyed,
but there was a wistful look in her eyes, and even after the boat had
started her face, watching us from the stern, haunted me.
"Now that the little monkey has gone, I may be able at last to catch and
fix a likeness of her," I said: "in this case a recollection is better
than the changing quicksilver reality."
"You take it as a study of ugliness, I suppose?"
"Do not be so hard upon the child, Christine."
"Hard? Why, she adores me," said my friend, going off to her hammock
under the tree.
Several days passed, and the boat returned not. I accomplished a fine
amount of work, and Christine a fine amount of swinging in the hammock
and dreaming. At length one afternoon I gave my final touch, and carried
my sketch over to the pre-Raphaelite lady for criticism. "What do you
see?" I said.
"I see a wild-looking child with yellow eyes, a mat of curly black hair,
a lank little bodice, her two thin brown arms embracing a gaunt old dog
with crooked legs, big feet and turned-in toes."
"Is that all?"
"All."
"You do not see latent beauty, proud courage, and a possible great gulf
of love in that poor wild little face?"
"Nothing of the kind," replied Christine decidedly. "I see an ugly
little girl: that is all."
The next day the boat returned, and brought back five persons--the old
grandfather, Felipa, Drollo, Miguel of the island and--Edward Bowne.
"Already?" I said.
"Tired of the Madre, Kitty: thought I would come up here and see you for
a while. I knew you must be pining for me."
"Certainly," I replied: "do you not see how I have wasted away?"
He drew my arm through his and raced me down the plank-walk toward the
shore, where I arrived laughing and out of breath.
"Where is Christine?" he asked.
I came back into the traces at once: "Over there in the hammock. You
wish to go to the house first, I suppose?"
"Of course not."
"But she did not come to meet you, Edward, although she knew you had
landed."
"Of course not, also."
"I do not understand you two."
"And of course not, a third time," said Edward, looking down at me with
a smile. "What do quiet, peaceful little artists know about war?"
"Is it war?"
"Something very like it, Kitty. What is that you are carrying?"
"Oh! my new sketch. What do you think of it?"
"Good, very good. Some little girl about here, I suppose?"
"Why, it is Felipa!"
"And who is Felipa? Seems to me I have seen that old dog, though."
"Of course you have: he was in the boat with you, and so was Felipa, but
she was dressed in boy's clothes, and that gives her a different look."
"Oh! that boy? I remember him. His name is Philip. He is a funny little
fellow," said Edward calmly.
"Her name is Felipa, and she is not a boy or a funny little fellow at
all," I replied.
"Isn't she? I thought she was both," replied Ned carelessly, and then he
went off toward the hammock. I turned away after noting Christine's cool
greeting, and went back to the boat.
Felipa came bounding to meet me. "What is his name?" she demanded.
"Bowne."
"Buon--Buona: I cannot say it."
"Bowne, child--Edward Bowne."
"Oh! Eduardo: I know that. Eduardo--Eduardo--a name of honey."
She flew off singing the name, followed by Drollo carrying his
mistress's palmetto basket in his big patient mouth; but when I passed
the house a few moments afterward she was singing, or rather talking
volubly of, another name--"Miguel," and "the wife of Miguel," who were
apparently important personages on the canvas of her life. As it
happened, I never really saw that wife of Miguel, who seemingly had no
name of her own; but I imagined her. She lived on a sandbar in the ocean
not far from the mouth of our river; she drove pelicans like ducks with
a long switch, and she had a tame eagle; she had an old horse also, who
dragged the driftwood across the sand on a sledge, and this old horse
seemed like a giant horse always, outlined as he ever was against the
flat bar and the sky. She went out at dawn, and she went out at sunset,
but during the middle of the burning day she sat at home and polished
sea-beans, for which she obtained untold sums: she was very tall, she
was very yellow, and she had but one eye. These items, one by one, had
been dropped by Felipa at various times, and it was with curiosity that
I gazed upon the original Miguel, the possessor of this remarkable
spouse. He was a grave-eyed, yellow man, who said little and thought
less, applying _cui bono?_ to mental much as the city man applies it to
bodily exertion, and therefore achieving, I think, a finer degree of
inanition. The tame eagle, the pelicans, were nothing to him, and when I
saw his lethargic, gentle countenance my own curiosity about them seemed
to die away in haze, as though I had breathed in an invisible opiate. He
came, he went, and that was all: exit Miguel.
Felipa was constantly with us now. She and Drollo followed the three of
us wherever we went--followed the two also whenever I stayed behind to
sketch, as I often stayed, for in those days I was trying to catch the
secret of the barrens: a hopeless effort, I know it now. "Stay with me,
Felipa," I said; for it was natural to suppose that the lovers might
like to be alone. (I call them lovers for want of a better name, but
they were more like haters: however, in such cases it is nearly the same
thing.) And then Christine, hearing this, would immediately call
"Felipa!" and the child would dart after them, happy as a bird. She wore
her boy's suit now all the time, because the señora had said she "looked
well in it." What the señora really said was, that in boy's clothes she
looked less like a grasshopper. But this had been translated as above by
Edward Bowne when Felipa suddenly descended upon him one day and
demanded to be instantly told what the gracious lady was saying about
her; for she seemed to know by intuition when we spoke of her, although
we talked in English and mentioned no names. When told, her small face
beamed, and she kissed Christine's hand joyfully and bounded away.
Christine took out her beautiful handkerchief and wiped the spot.
"Christine," I said, "do you remember the fate of the proud girl who
walked upon bread?"
"You think that I may starve for kisses some time?" said my friend,
going on with the wiping.
"Not while I am alive," called out Edward from behind. His style of
courtship _was_ of the sledge-hammer sort sometimes. But he did not get
much for it on that day; only lofty tolerance, which seemed to amuse him
greatly.
Edward played with Felipa very much as if she was a rubber toy or a
trapeze performer. He held her out at arm's length in mid-air, he poised
her on his shoulder, he tossed her up into the low myrtle trees, and
dangled her by her little belt over the claret-colored pools on the
barren; but he could not frighten her: she only laughed and grew wilder
and wilder, like a squirrel. "She has muscles and nerves of steel," he
said admiringly.
"Do put her down: she is too excitable for such games," I said in
French, for Felipa seemed to divine our English now. "See the color she
has."
For there was a trail of dark red over the child's thin oval cheeks
which made her look strangely unlike herself. As she caught our eyes
fixed upon her she suddenly stopped her climbing and came and sat at
Christine's feet. "Some day I shall wear robes like the señora's," she
said, passing her hand over the soft fabric; "and I think," she added
after some slow consideration, "that my face will be like the señora's
too."
Edward burst out laughing. The little creature stopped abruptly and
scanned his face.
"Do not tease her," I said.
Quick as a flash she veered around upon me. "He does not tease me," she
said angrily in Spanish; "and, besides, what if he does? I like it." She
looked at me with gleaming eyes and stamped her foot.
"What a little tempest!" said Christine.
Then Edward, man-like, began to explain. "You could not look much like
this lady, Felipa," he said, "because you are so dark, you know."
"Am I dark?"
"Very dark; but many people are dark, of course; and for my part I
always liked dark eyes," said this mendacious person.
"Do you like my eyes?" asked Felipa anxiously.
"Indeed I do: they are like the eyes of a dear little calf I once owned
when I was a boy."
The child was satisfied, and went back to her place beside Christine.
"Yes, I shall wear robes like this," she said dreamily, drawing the
flowing drapery over her knees clad in the little linen trousers, and
scanning the effect: "they would trail behind me--so." Her bare feet
peeped out below the hem, and again we all laughed, the little brown
toes looked so comical coming out from the silk and the snowy
embroideries. She came down to reality at once, looked at us, looked at
herself, and for the first time seemed to comprehend the difference.
Then suddenly she threw herself down on the ground like a little animal,
and buried her head in her arms. She would not speak, she would not look
up: she only relaxed one arm a little to take in Drollo, and then lay
motionless. Drollo looked at us out of one eye solemnly from his
uncomfortable position, as much as to say, "No use: leave her to me." So
after a while we went away and left them there.
That evening I heard a low knock at my door. "Come in," I said, and
Felipa entered. I hardly knew her. She was dressed in a flowered muslin
gown which had probably belonged to her mother, and she wore her
grandmother's stockings and large baggy slippers: on her mat of curly
hair was perched a high-crowned, stiff white cap adorned with a ribbon
streamer, and her lank little neck, coming out of the big gown, was
decked with a chain of large sea-beans, like exaggerated lockets. She
carried a Cuban fan in her hand which was as large as a parasol, and
Drollo, walking behind, fairly clanked with the chain of sea-shells
which she had wound around him from head to tail. The droll tableau and
the supreme pride on Felipa's countenance overcame me, and I laughed
aloud. A sudden cloud of rage and disappointment came over the poor
child's face: she threw her cap on the floor and stamped on it; she tore
off her necklace and writhed herself out of her big flowered gown, and
running to Drollo, nearly strangled him in her fierce efforts to drag
off his shell chains. Then, a half-dressed, wild little phantom, she
seized me by the skirts and dragged me toward the looking-glass. "You
are not pretty either," she cried. "Look at yourself! look at yourself!"
"I did not mean to laugh at you, Felipa," I said gently: "I would not
laugh at any one; and it is true I am not pretty, as you say. I can
never be pretty, child; but if you will try to be more gentle, I could
teach you how to dress yourself so that no one would laugh at you again.
I could make you a little bright-barred skirt and a scarlet bodice: you
could help, and that would teach you to sew. But a little girl who wants
all this done for her must be quiet and good."
"I am good," said Felipa--"as good as everything."
The tears still stood in her eyes, but her anger was forgotten: she
improvised a sort of dance around my room, followed by Drollo dragging
his twisted chain, stepping on it with his big feet, and finally winding
himself up into a knot around the chair-legs.
"Couldn't we make Drollo something too? dear old Drollo!" said Felipa,
going to him and squeezing him in an enthusiastic embrace. I used to
wonder how his poor ribs stood it: Felipa used him as a safety-valve for
her impetuous feelings.
She kissed me good-night and then asked for "the other lady."
"Go to bed, child," I said: "I will give her your good-night."
"But I want to kiss her too," said Felipa.
She lingered at the door and would not go; she played with the latch,
and made me nervous with its clicking; at last I ordered her out. But on
opening my door half an hour afterward there she was sitting on the
floor outside in the darkness, she and Drollo, patiently waiting.
Annoyed, but unable to reprove her, I wrapped the child in my shawl and
carried her out into the moonlight, where Christine and Edward were
strolling to and fro under the pines. "She will not go to bed,
Christine, without kissing you," I explained.
"Funny little monkey!" said my lily friend, passively allowing the
embrace.
"Me too," said Edward, bending down. Then I carried my bundle back
satisfied.
The next day Felipa and I in secret began our labors: hers consisted in
worrying me out of my life and spoiling material--mine in keeping my
temper and trying to sew. The result, however, was satisfactory, never
mind how we got there. I led Christine out one afternoon: Edward
followed. "Do you like tableaux?" I said. "There is one I have arranged
for you."
Felipa sat on the edge of the low, square-curbed Spanish well, and
Drollo stood behind her, his great yellow body and solemn head serving
as a background. She wore a brown petticoat barred with bright colors,
and a little scarlet bodice fitting her slender waist closely; a
chemisette of soft cream-color with loose sleeves covered her neck and
arms, and set off the dark hues of her cheeks and eyes; and around her
curly hair a red scarf was twisted, its fringed edges forming a drapery
at the back of the head, which, more than anything else, seemed to bring
out the latent character of her face. Brown moccasins, red stockings and
a quantity of bright beads completed her costume.
"By Jove!" cried Edward, "the little thing is almost pretty."
Felipa understood this, and a great light came into her face: forgetting
her pose, she bounded forward to Christine's side. "I am pretty, then?"
she said with exultation: "I _am_ pretty, then, after all? For now you
yourself have said it--have said it."
"No, Felipa," I interposed, "the gentleman said it." For the child had a
curious habit of confounding the two identities which puzzled me then as
now. But this afternoon, this happy afternoon, she was content, for she
was allowed to sit at Christine's feet and look up into her fair face
unmolested. I was forgotten, as usual.
"It is always so," I said to myself. But cynicism, as Mr. Aldrich says,
is a small brass field-piece that eventually bursts and kills the
artilleryman. I knew this, having been blown up myself more than once;
so I went back to my painting and forgot the world. Our world down there
on the edge of the salt marsh, however, was a small one: when two
persons went out of it there was a vacuum at once.
One morning Felipa came sadly to my side. "They have gone away,'" she
said.
"Yes, child."
"Down to the beach to spend all the day."
"Yes, I know it."
"And without me!"
This was the climax. I looked up. The child's eyes were dry, but there
was a hollow look of disappointment in her face that made her seem old:
it was as though for an instant you caught what her old-woman face would
be half a century on.
"Why did they not take me?" she said. "I am pretty now: she herself said
it."
"They cannot always take you, Felipa," I replied, giving up the point as
to who had said it.
"Why not? I am pretty now: she herself said it," persisted the child.
"In these clothes, you know: she herself said it. The clothes of the son
of Pedro you will never see more: they are burned."
"Burned?"
"Yes, burned," replied Felipa composedly. "I carried them out on the
barren and burned them. Drollo singed his paw. They burned quite nicely.
But they are gone, and I am pretty now, and yet they did not take me!
What shall I do?"
"Take these colors and make me a picture," I suggested. Generally, this
was a prized privilege, but to-day it did not attract: she turned away,
and a few moments after I saw her going down to the end of the plank
walk, where she stood gazing wistfully toward the ocean. There she
stayed all day, going into camp with Drollo, and refusing to come to
dinner in spite of old Dominga's calls and beckonings. At last the
patient old grandmother went down herself to the end of the long plank
walk where they were with some bread and venison on a plate. Felipa ate
but little, but Drollo, after waiting politely until she had finished,
devoured everything that was left in his calmly hungry way, and then sat
back on his haunches with one paw on the plate, as though for the sake
of memory. Drollo's hunger was of the chronic kind: it seemed impossible
either to assuage it or to fill him. There was a gaunt leanness about
him which I am satisfied no amount of food could ever fatten. I think he
knew it too, and that accounted for his resignation. At length, just
before sunset, the boat returned, floating up the river with the tide,
old Bartolo steering and managing the brown sails. Felipa sprang up
joyfully: I thought she would spring into the boat in her eagerness.
What did she receive for her long vigil? A short word or two: that was
all. Christine and Edward had quarreled.
How do lovers quarrel ordinarily? But I should not ask that, for these
were no ordinary lovers: they were decidedly extraordinary.
"You should not submit to her caprices so readily," I said the next day
while strolling on the barren with Edward. (He was not so much cast
down, however, as he might have been.)
"I adore the very ground her foot touches, Kitty."
"I know it. But how will it end?"
"I will tell you: some of these days I shall win her, and then--she will
adore me."
Here Felipa came running after us, and Edward immediately challenged her
to a race: a game of romps began. If Christine had been looking from her
window, she might have thought he was not especially disconsolate over
her absence; but she was not looking. She was never looking out of
anything or for anybody. She was always serenely content where she was.
Edward and Felipa strayed off among the pine trees, and gradually I lost
sight of them. But as I sat sketching an hour afterward Edward came into
view, carrying the child in his arms. I hurried to meet them.
"I shall never forgive myself," he said: "the little thing has fallen
and injured her foot badly, I fear."
"I do not care at all," said Felipa: "I like to have it hurt. It is _my_
foot, isn't it?"
These remarks she threw at me defiantly, as though I had laid claim to
the member in question. I could not help laughing.
"The other lady will not laugh," said the child proudly. And in truth
Christine, most unexpectedly, took up the rôle of nurse. She carried
Felipa to her own room--for we each had a little cell opening out of the
main apartment--and as white-robed Charity she shone with new radiance.
"Shone" is the proper word, for through the open door of the dim cell,
with the dark little face of Felipa on her shoulder, her white robe and
skin seemed fairly to shine, as white lilies shine on a dark night. The
old grandmother left the child in our care and watched our proceedings
wistfully, very much as a dog watches the human hands that extract the
thorn from the swollen foot of her puppy. She was grateful and asked no
questions; in fact, thought was not one of her mental processes. She did
not think much: she only felt. As for Felipa, the child lived in rapture
during those days in spite of her suffering. She scarcely slept at
all--she was too happy: I heard her voice rippling on through the night,
and Christine's low replies. She adored her beautiful nurse.
The fourth day came: Edward Bowne walked into the cell. "Go out and
breathe the fresh air for an hour or two," he said in the tone more of a
command than a request.
"But the child will never consent," replied Christine sweetly.
"Oh yes, she will: I will stay with her," said the young man, lifting
the feverish little head on his arm and passing his hand softly over the
bright eyes.
"Felipa, do you not want me?" said Christine, bending down.
"He stays: it is all the same," murmured the child.
"So it is. Go, Christine," said Edward with a little smile of triumph.
Without a word Christine left the cell. But she did not go to walk: she
came to my room, and throwing herself on my bed fell in a moment into a
deep sleep, the reaction after her three nights of wakefulness. When she
awoke it was long after dark, and I had relieved Edward in his watch.
"You will have to give it up," he said as our lily came forth at last
with sleep-flushed cheeks and starry eyes shielded from the light. "The
spell is broken: we have all been taking care of Felipa, and she likes
one as well as the other."
Which was not true, in my case at least, since Felipa had openly derided
my small strength when I lifted her, and beat off the sponge with which
I attempted to bathe her hot face. "They" used no sponges, she said,
only their nice cool hands; and she wished "they" would come and take
care of her again. But Christine had resigned in toto. If Felipa did not
prefer her to all others, then Felipa could not have her: she was not a
common nurse. And indeed she was not. Her fair beauty, ideal grace,
cooing voice and the strength of her long arms and flexible hands were
like magic to the sick, and--distraction to the well; the well in this
case being Edward Bowne looking in at the door.
"You love them very much, do you not, Felipa?" I said one day when the
child was sitting up for the first time in a cushioned chair.
"Ah, yes: it is so delicious when they carry me," she replied. But it
was Edward who carried her.
"He is very strong," I said.
"Yes, and their long soft hair, with the smell of roses in it too," said
Felipa dreamily. But the hair was Christine's.
"I shall love them for ever, and they will love me for ever," continued
the child. "Drollo too." She patted the dog's head as she spoke, and
then concluded to kiss him on his little inch of forehead: next she
offered him all her medicines and lotions in turn, and he smelled at
them grimly. "He likes to know what I am taking," she explained.
I went on: "You love them, Felipa, and they are fond of you. They will
always remember you, no doubt."
"Remember!" cried Felipa, starting up from her cushions like a
Jack-in-the-box. "They are not going away? Never! never!"
"But of course they must go some time, for--"
But Felipa was gone. Before I could divine her intent she had flung
herself out of her chair down on to the floor, and was crawling on her
hands and knees toward the outer room. I ran after her, but she reached
the door before me, and, dragging her bandaged foot behind her, drew
herself, toward Christine. "You are _not_ going away! You are not! you
are not!" she sobbed, clinging to her skirts.
Christine was reading tranquilly: Edward stood at the outer door mending
his fishing-tackle. The coolness between them remained unwarmed by so
much as a breath. "Run away, child: you disturb me," said Christine,
turning over a leaf. She did not even look at the pathetic little bundle
at her feet. Pathetic little bundles must be taught some time what
ingratitude deserves.
"How can she run, lame as she is?" said Edward from the doorway.
"You are not going away, are you? Tell me you are not," sobbed Felipa in
a passion of tears, beating on the floor with one hand, and with the
other clinging to Christine.
"I am not going," said Edward. "Do not sob so, you poor little thing!"
She crawled to him, and he took her up in his arms and soothed her into
stillness again: then he carried her out on to the barren for a breath
of fresh air.
"It is a most extraordinary thing how that child confounds you two," I
said. "It is a case of color-blindness, as it were--supposing you two
were colors."
"Which we are not," replied Christine carelessly. "Do not stray off into
mysticism, Catherine."
"It is not mysticism: it is a study of character--"
"Where there is no character," replied my friend.
I gave it up, but I said to myself, "Fate, in the next world make me
one of those long, lithe, light-haired women, will you? I want to see
how it feels."
Felipa's foot was well again, and spring had come. Soon we must leave
our lodge on the edge of the pine barren, our outlook over the salt
marsh, our river sweeping up twice a day, bringing in the briny odors of
the ocean: soon we should see no more the eagles far above us or hear
the night-cry of the great owls, and we must go without the little fairy
flowers of the barren, so small that a hundred of them scarcely made a
tangible bouquet, yet what beauty! what sweetness! In my portfolio were
sketches and studies of the barrens, and in my heart were hopes.
Somebody says somewhere, "Hope is more than a blessing: it is a duty and
a virtue." But I fail to appreciate preserved hope--hope put up in cans
and served out in seasons of depression. I like it fresh from the tree.
And so when I hope it _is_ hope, and not that well-dried, monotonous
cheerfulness which makes one long to throw the persistent smilers out of
the window. Felipa danced no more on the barrens; her illness had toned
her excitable nature; she seemed content to sit at our feet while we
talked, looking up dreamily into our faces, but no longer eagerly
endeavoring to comprehend. We were there: that was enough.
"She is growing like a reed," I said: "her illness has left her weak."
"-Minded," suggested Christine, smiling.
At this moment Felipa stroked the lady's white hand tenderly and laid
her brown cheek against it.
"Do you not feel reproached," I said.
"Why? Must we give our love to whoever loves us? A fine parcel of
paupers we should all be, wasting our inheritance in pitiful small
change! Shall I give a thousand beggars a half hour's happiness, or
shall I make one soul rich his whole life long?"
"The latter," remarked Edward, who had come up unobserved.
They gazed at each other unflinchingly. They had come to open battle
during those last days, and I knew that the end was near. Their words
had been cold as ice, cutting as steel, and I said to myself, "At any
moment." There would be a deadly struggle, and then Christine would
yield. Even I comprehended something of what that yielding would be.
There are beautiful velvety panthers in the Asian forests, and in real
life too, sometimes.
"Why do they hate each other so?" Felipa said to me sadly.
"Do they hate each other?"
"Yes, for I feel it here," she answered, touching her breast with a
dramatic little gesture.
"Nonsense! Go and play with your doll, child." For I had made her a
respectable, orderly doll to take the place of the ungainly fetich out
on the barren.
Felipa gave me a look and walked away. A moment afterward she brought
the doll out of the house before my very eyes, and, going down to the
end of the dock, deliberately threw it into the water: the tide was
flowing out, and away went my toy-woman out of sight, out to sea.
"Well!" I said to myself. "What next?"
I had not told Felipa we were going: I thought it best to let it take
her by surprise. I had various small articles of finery ready as
farewell gifts which should act as sponges to absorb her tears. But Fate
took the whole matter out of my hands. This is how it happened. One
evening in the jessamine arbor, in the fragrant darkness of the warm
spring night, the end came: Christine was won. She glided in like a
wraith, and I, divining at once what had happened, followed her into her
little room, where I found her lying on her bed, her hands clasped on
her breast, her eyes open and veiled in soft shadows, her white robe
drenched with dew. I kissed her fondly--I never could help loving her
then or now--and next I went out to find Edward. He had been kind to me
all my poor gray life: should I not go to him now? He was still in the
arbor, and I sat down by his side quietly: I knew that the words would
come in time. They came: what a flood! English was not enough for him.
He poured forth his love in the rich-voweled Spanish tongue also: it
has sounded doubly sweet to me ever since.
"Have you felt the wool of the beaver?
Or swan's down ever?
Or have smelt the bud o' the brier?
Or the nard in the fire?
Or ha' tasted the bag o' the bee?
Oh so white, oh so soft, oh so sweet is she!"
said the young lover again and again; and I, listening there in the dark
fragrant night, with the dew heavy upon me, felt glad that the old
simple-hearted love was not entirely gone from our tired metallic world.
It was late when we returned to the house. After reaching my room I
found that I had left my cloak in the arbor. It was a strong fabric: the
dew could not hurt it, but it could hurt my sketching materials and
various trifles in the wide inside pockets--_objets de luxe_ to me,
souvenirs of happy times, little artistic properties that I hang on the
walls of my poor studio when in the city. I went softly out into the
darkness again and sought the arbor: groping on the ground I found, not
the cloak, but--Felipa! She was crouched under the foliage, face
downward: she would not move or answer.
"What is the matter, child?" I said, but she would not speak. I tried to
draw her from her lair, but she tangled herself stubbornly still farther
among the thorny vines, and I could not move her. I touched her neck: it
was cold. Frightened, I ran back to the house for a candle.
"Go away," she said in a low hoarse voice when I flashed the light over
her. "I know all, and I am going to die. I have eaten the poison things
in your box, and just now a snake came on my neck and I let him. He has
bitten me, I suppose, and I am glad. Go away: I am going to die."
I looked around: there was my color-case rifled and empty, and the other
articles were scattered on the ground. "Good Heavens, child!" I cried,
"what have you eaten?"
"Enough," replied Felipa gloomily. "I knew they were poisons: you told
me so. And I let the snake stay."
By this time the household, aroused by my hurried exit with the candle,
came toward the arbor. The moment Edward appeared Felipa rolled herself
up like a hedgehog again and refused to speak. But the old grandmother
knelt down and drew the little crouching figure into her arms with
gentle tenderness, smoothing its hair and murmuring loving words in her
soft dialect.
"What is it?" said Edward; but even then his eyes were devouring
Christine, who stood in the dark, vine-wreathed doorway like a picture
in a frame. I explained.
Christine smiled softly. "Jealousy," she said in a low voice. "I am not
surprised." And of her own accord she gave back to Edward one of his
looks.
But at the first sound of her voice Felipa had started up: she too saw
the look, and wrenching herself free from old Dominga's arms, she threw
herself at Christine's feet. "Look at _me_ so," she cried--"me too: do
not look at him. He has forgotten poor Felipa: he does not love her any
more. But _you_ do not forget, señora: _you_ love me--_you_ love me. Say
you do or I shall die!"
We were all shocked by the pallor and the wild hungry look of her
uplifted face. Edward bent down and tried to lift her in his arms, but
when she saw him a sudden fierceness came into her eyes: they shot out
yellow light and seemed to narrow to a point of flame. Before we knew it
she had turned, seized something and plunged it into his encircling arm.
It was my little Venetian dagger.
We sprang forward; our dresses were spotted with the fast-flowing blood;
but Edward did not relax his hold on the writhing wild little body he
held until it lay exhausted in his arms. "I am glad I did it," said the
child, looking up into his face with her inflexible eyes. "Put me
down--put me down, I say, by the gracious señora, that I may die with
the trailing of her white robe over me." And the old grandmother with
trembling hands received her and laid her down mutely at Christine's
feet.
* * * * *
Ah, well! Felipa did not die. The poisons wracked but did not kill her,
and the snake must have spared the little thin brown neck so
despairingly offered to him. We went away: there was nothing for us to
do but to go away as quickly as possible and leave her to her kind. To
the silent old grandfather I said, "It will pass: she is but a child."
"She is nearly twelve, señora. Her mother was married at thirteen."
"But she loved them both alike, Bartolo. It is nothing: she does not
know."
"You are right, lady: she does not know," replied the old man slowly;
"but _I_ know. It was two loves, and the stronger thrust the knife."
CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON.
AT CHICKAMAUGA.
It was the cream of army life in Southern Tennessee that we left to go
to Chickamauga. Our brigade had been detached, and lay for some days at
the foot of Waldron's Ridge, which runs parallel to the broad Tennessee
River, and a few miles north of Chattanooga, then the objective point of
the campaign of the Army of the Cumberland under Rosecrans. Of course we
knew that when the movements in progress in the country below were
sufficiently advanced there would probably be lively work in effecting a
passage of the river in the face of the formidable force which was
guarding the ford two or three miles in our front. In fact, for some
days we had been preparing for the effort, and up in a sluggish bayou
the best of our mechanics were industriously at work fashioning a rude
scow out of such material as axes could get from the native forests. In
this craft, if it could be made to float, a select party was to cross
the river some foggy morning, while the enemy were intently watching the
ford below, and then, while the chosen few were being gloriously shot on
the other side, the rest of us were to attempt the waist-deep, crooked
ford.
For the time we were, however, as has been said, enjoying the cream of
army life. The nights were chilly, though the days were hot and the clay
roads dusty. The mornings were glorious with their bracing fresh air,
their blue mists clinging about far-off Lookout Mountain, and even
hiding the top of Waldron's Ridge at our backs, and their bright
sunshine, which came flooding over the distant heights of Georgia and
North Carolina. The wagon-tracks winding among the low, mound-like hills
which filled the valley from the base of the ridge to the river were as
smooth and gravelly as a well-kept private roadway, and an
ambulance-ride along their tortuous courses was a most enjoyable
recreation in those fine September days of 1863. A gallop twenty miles
up the valley to where Minty kept watch and ward upon our flank with his
trusty horsemen; a dinner at that hospitable mess-table, furnished maybe
with a pig which had strayed from its home not wholly through natural
perversity; and then a lively ride back in the early evening,--this,
indeed, was pleasure.
The charm of campaigning is its rapidly-succeeding surprises. The
general of the army may be proceeding regularly in the path he marked
out months before. The corps commanders, and even the chiefs of
division, may sometimes be able to foresee the movements from day to
day. But to their subordinates everything is a surprise: they lie down
at night in delightful uncertainty as to where the next sunset will find
them, and they sit down to a breakfast of hard bread and bacon, relieved
by a little foraging from the country, not sure that their coffee will
cool before the bugle sounds a signal to pack and be off, to Heaven
knows where. We found this charm of surprise, as we had hundreds of
times before in other places, at our camp in the valley of the
Tennessee. The alternating quick and droning notes of "the general" made
us spring up from the mess-table one morning, and in a moment the lazy
encampment was all hurry and bustle. An aide leaped upon his horse at
head-quarters and dashed off on the road to the river, and we saw that
the servants of General Hazen, our brigade commander, were stripping his
baggage of the small impedimenta which accumulate so rapidly even in a
few days of rest, but are abandoned when the army starts on an active
campaign. It was not to be a mere change of camp, evidently, but a final
adieu to the locality and a dash over the Tennessee--if we could make
it.
While some of us were yet sipping our hot coffee, saved out of the
general wreck in packing up, the bugles called "the assembly," and in
ten minutes the brigade was stretching out at a lively rate on the road
the aide had taken. At the river was the detail of mechanics who had
been at work on the scow in the bayou. Their task had been suddenly
abandoned. It was useless: the enemy had left the opposite bank and
fallen back from Chattanooga. The crossing was made, and the brigade
struck out into the country toward Ringgold and the Georgia line. We
belonged to Palmer's division of Crittenden's corps, but we had no idea
where our comrades were. Passing over the uninviting country, and by the
cornfields wasted by Bragg's men that we might not gather the grain, the
brigade fell in with the rest of its division near a lonely grist-mill
at a junction of cross-roads, where a battalion of Southern cavalry had
just galloped in upon an infantry regiment lying under its stacked arms
by the wayside. So the enemy was not entirely out of the country, it
appeared. Still, we saw nothing of him, save in a trifling skirmish the
next day on the road from Ringgold to Gordon's Mills. Near this place,
however, we fell in with General Thomas J. Wood, who had had a little
encounter which convinced him that Bragg's infantry was in force near
by. The gallant old soldier was in something of a passion because the
theories of his superiors did not coincide with his demonstrations, and
of course the demonstrations had to give way in that case.
Passing Gordon's Mills, our division stretched away on the road toward
La Fayette, and after a day's march bivouacked in a wilderness of wood
and on a sluggish stream different enough from the sparkling waters
which came down by the old camp below Waldron's Ridge. McCook's corps,
they said, having crossed the Tennessee below Chattanooga and advanced
southward on the western side of the Lookout range, was to come through
a gap opposite our present position and join us. Then the army, being
together once more, and having gained Chattanooga by McCook's flank
movement, would return to that point. To get Chattanooga was the object
of the campaign, and the movements since we crossed the river were
simply to assure the safe reunion of the several corps.
The idle days wore on until the afternoon of the 18th of September. Then
"the general" was suddenly sounded from brigade head-quarters, the
regimental buglers took up the signal, and in twenty minutes we were on
the road and moving back toward Gordon's Mills and Chattanooga. No
leisurely march this time, however, but a race which tasked even the
legs of the veterans. Two hours of this brought the command to the crest
of a ridge from which, away to the right, a wide expanse of country lay
in view. There was a broad valley running parallel to the road we were
traveling and covered by a dense growth of low oaks, which effectually
hid roads, streams, and even the few lonely habitations of the people.
But, looking from our eminence over the unbroken expanse of tree-tops,
we could see a light yellow snake-like line stretching down the valley.
It was dust from the road on which Bragg's army was hurrying toward the
Rossville Pass, through which was the way to Chattanooga and all our
communications and supplies. The line of dust extended miles down the
valley, far in advance of the point we had reached. The rest of our army
might be ahead of us and ahead of Bragg, or it might be on our left, or
even behind us, for aught we knew, but it was plain enough why we were
making such haste back toward Chattanooga.
The afternoon passed: darkness came, and still the march continued. Late
in the evening we came upon a group of tents by the roadside--Rosecrans's
head-quarters, with Rosecrans himself, and not in the best of humors, as
some of us discovered on riding up to see friends on his staff. In his
petulance and excitability the commanding general forgot to be gentlemanly,
some of them said; and they left him not at all relieved of any doubts they
had concerning our sudden and forced march.
It was long after midnight when we reached Gordon's Mills. Here the road
was full of ambulances, wagons, artillery and infantry, while in the
thickets on the left were heard the confused noises of the bivouac.
There were no fires, which showed that we were supposed to be in the
immediate presence of the enemy, and that our commander did not want his
position revealed by camp-fires. At some distance past the mills
Palmer's division was halted in the road, and the troops were massed by
regiments, and moved some yards into the thicket to pass the few hours
before daylight.
In the morning it was said that Bragg had indeed beaten in the race the
day before, and had halted at night, if he halted at all, much nearer to
the Rossville Pass than we were. The Chickamauga River was supposed to
be between the two armies, but it is a stream which is easily fordable
in many places, and a mile or two below where we lay was a bridge over
which Bragg could cross rapidly with his artillery and trains, and then
strike our road to Rossville ahead of us. A division moved out early in
the day and went off toward this bridge. Soon after there was lively
musketry and some cannonading in that direction. Word came back that the
enemy had crossed the river in force too heavy to be successfully
encountered by our reconnoitering division. Another division followed in
the path of the first, and there was more firing. Finally, General
Palmer moved his division out upon the road, and along it for some
distance toward Rossville, approaching the firing down by the bridge.
Halting near the Widow Glenn's cottage, about which were a little cloud
of cavalry and many officers, we saw that Rosecrans was there, directing
the movements in person. Palmer got his orders quickly. He was to move
down the road toward Rossville to an indicated point, then form his
division _en échelon_ by brigade from the left, and move off the road to
the right and attack. When he struck the enemy's left flank he was to
envelop and crush it. The formation _en échelon_ was to facilitate this
enveloping and crushing.
Moving off the road as ordered, the division passed through several
hundred yards of forest, and came upon a wide open field of lower
ground, through the centre of which ran, parallel to our front, a narrow
belt of timber. The skirmishers passed through this belt and a few yards
beyond, and were then driven back by an overpowering fire from the
enemy's skirmishers. Our main line came up to the timber and passed
through it to the farther side; and then the edge of the forest beyond,
in front, on the right and on the left, was suddenly fringed with a line
of flashing fire, above which rose a thin white smoke. The tremendous
crash of musketry was measured by the deep thunder of artillery farther
back, and soon columns of dense white smoke rising above the tree-tops
indicated the positions of several swift-working batteries. A storm of
bullets whizzed through the ranks of the attacking échelons, while
shrieking shells filled the air with a horrid din, and, bursting
overhead, sent their ragged fragments hurtling down in every direction.
In an instant a hundred gaps were opened in the firm ranks as the men
sank to the ground beneath the smiting lead and iron. In an instant the
gaps were closed, and in another a hundred more were opened. Every yard
of the advance was costing the assailants a full company of men--every
rod at least half a regiment. They wavered, halted and fell back to the
shelter of the narrow belt of timber. The attack had failed, the flank
of the enemy had not been struck.
But the other divisions of the army? Sent in as ours had been, some one
of them must surely strike the opposing flank, unless Bragg's whole army
had crossed the river and was in position before Rosecrans moved.
Palmer's division held its place, fired its sixty rounds of cartridges
into the wood where the unseen foe was, and waited for the attack of the
succeeding division which should strike Bragg's flank. But we waited in
vain. When Rosecrans's last division was forming its échelons it was
itself enveloped on its outer flank by the active foe. Rosecrans's line,
as he formed it a division at a time, had been constantly outflanked.
The battle was a failure thus far. We could all see that, and some of us
saw how nearly it became an irretrievable disaster. Hazen's brigade had
been withdrawn to replenish its ammunition after the attack, and was
lying along the Rossville road. The men were filling their
cartridge-boxes, and the captains were counting their diminished ranks
and noting who were dead and who but wounded. Out at the front the fight
still went on, but in a desultory way. Suddenly there was an ominous
sound in front of Van Cleve's division, which was in the main line next
on the right of Palmer.
Hazen leaped upon his horse. "Now Van Cleve is in for it!" he exclaimed.
"They're coming for him!"
Quickly getting the men under arms, Hazen moved his brigade behind Van
Cleve to act as a support, and awaited the coming attack. It came like a
whirlwind, and Van Cleve's lines were scattered like fallen leaves. On
came the triumphant enemy in heavy masses, while Van Cleve's disordered
horde swept back with it Hazen's supporting regiments. All but one.
Colonel Aquila Wiley of the Forty-first Ohio Infantry, seeing the coming
avalanche of fugitives, broke his line to the rear by companies and
allowed the flying mass to pass through the intervals. Then instantly
reforming his line, Wiley delivered a volley by battalion upon the
advancing foe. The latter, his ranks loose, as usual in a headlong
pursuit, was staggered and stopped in Wiley's front, but pressed forward
on his right, and had got well to his rear in that direction before the
guns of the Forty-first were reloaded. At a double-quick step Wiley
changed front to the rear on his left company, and sent another volley
among the swarming enemy on his right. Twice he repeated this manoeuvre,
and, gaining ground to the rear with each change of front, kept back the
enemy from front and flank until he could take his place in good order
upon a new line on a ridge to the rear.
Meantime, Hazen was not idle. Seeing the inevitable result when Van
Cleve's lines wavered, he dashed down the road to some unemployed
batteries. These he got quickly into position to enfilade the enemy as
he passed over Van Cleve's abandoned ground, and while Wiley with his
Forty-first was striking in front and flank to clear himself of the
surrounding foes, Hazen's batteries were pouring shells at short range
into the well-ordered supporting troops which the enemy was hurrying
forward to improve the success he had gained. Bragg had actually crossed
the Rossville road and cut the Army of the Cumberland in two, with
nothing in the gap but one regiment of three hundred men. But the
enfilading artillery smote asunder the solid ranks which were to follow
up the victory and left their advantage a barren triumph. Night fell and
ended there the first day's battle.
The blessed night! better for the Army of the Cumberland then than
thirty thousand fresh men. Under its sheltering mantle a thousand
necessary things were done. We knew well enough that the struggle must
be renewed in the morning, but we hoped that it would not be taken up on
our side under such disadvantages as had been against us in the day just
closed. So when, some time after dark, an order came to move down the
road to the left, it was gladly obeyed. We were going into position, it
was evident, though where and how none of us could tell in the darkness.
The road and the woods on each side of it were full of troops,
ambulances, ammunition and head-quarter wagons, artillery, and, lastly,
stragglers hunting for their regiments. Now and then a wounded man,
whose hurt did not prevent his walking, came along inquiring for the
hospitals. There were not many of these, however, for the hospital
service was pretty efficient, and the surgeons were located near the
ground where the fighting had been.
Winding about through such surroundings for what seemed a long time, so
slow was the movement and so frequent the halts to allow the
staff-officer who was directing the march to verify the route, Palmer's
division at length stacked arms on a slightly rising ground not many
hundred yards in front of the Rossville road. There were troops to the
left of us, and soon after we halted troops came up on our right. We
knew by this that we were in the main line of battle as it was being
formed for the next day's fight. There were sounds occasionally from the
forest in front which told us that the enemy also was making his
preparations for the morning, and there was moving of troops, wagons,
artillery, stragglers and mounted officers in rear of us almost all
night. Even our troops in line, tired as they were, were not quite
still. The men lay upon the ground and talked of the events of the day.
Company commanders were inquiring the fate of their missing men, and
some of them were even counting up the guns lost by killed and wounded
men, and wondering how they could account for them on their next
ordnance returns. Waking and sleeping by turns, officers and men passed
the chilly night as best they could until it was near the time when the
first gray streaks of dawn should come. Then those who were sleeping
were quietly aroused; the ranks were noiselessly formed; the stacks of
arms were broken; the first sergeants passed along the fronts of their
companies to verify the attendance; and then the men were allowed to
sit down, guns in hand, to await the daybreak and be in instant
readiness for an attack if the enemy should attempt an early surprise.
Daylight came, however, on the memorable 20th of September, and no
attack had been made. The first thought, naturally, after apprehension
of an early attack had gone, was to appease hunger and thirst. But there
was little in the haversacks, and nothing in the canteens. Details of
men were sent for water, and never returned. The enemy had possession of
the springs we had used the day before, and our details walked
unconsciously into his hands. There was not a drop of water on the whole
field, and men and officers resigned themselves to the torments of
thirst, a thousand times worse than the gnawings of hunger. But with
daylight we could at least get some idea of our position. In front was a
dense forest, in which nothing was to be seen except our own skirmishers
a few yards in advance. Just behind us was an oblong open field, three
hundred yards wide and thrice as long. On the other side of this field
ran the Rossville road. Beyond our division, to the left, was Johnson's,
and then Baird's division, the latter forming the extreme left of the
army, and extending off into the woods beyond the lower end of the open
field. To our right--though this we could not see, the line being in a
dense forest--was the division of Reynolds; beyond him was Brannan, and
then came Wood; and so on to the right of the army, in what further
order we did not know. It was evident that the line had been hastily
formed: the divisions had been placed just as they were picked up in the
confusion of the night. No corps was together in the line, but it was
made up of a division from one corps, then a division from another, and
then one from a third corps, and so on. Thus it happened that the four
divisions on the left of the line had with them no corps commander.
In the idle hour after daylight our brigade commander directed the
construction of a barricade of rails and logs, a little more than
knee-high, along the front of his command. Some of the troops on the
left and the right followed the example. The supposition was that the
game would be changed this day, and that we should stand for attack as
the enemy had done the day before. There was no little satisfaction in
thinking that Bragg's men would have a chance to walk up to a fire at
least as murderous as we had faced when attacking them. If the
haversacks were empty and the canteens had gone for water never to
return, the cartridge-boxes were full, and each man had about him an
extra package or two of cartridges.
The morning wore slowly away, and on our part of the line everything was
remarkably quiet. There was some skirmishing toward the right between
eight and nine o'clock, but evidently nothing serious. The barricade was
finished, and there was nothing to do but to lie behind it and wish for
water as the day grew warmer and thirst became more intense.--But what
is that?
There was a sharp rattle of Springfield rifles from Baird's skirmishers,
a third of a mile to our left and hidden from sight by the woods. In a
moment came a crash of musketry which brought every man to his feet.
Baird's skirmishers had been driven in, and his main line had hurled its
thousands of bullets as the attacking enemy came into view. Instantly
the answering fire was given, and then followed the continuous rattling
roar of a fierce general engagement. Wounded men began to come out of
the wood where Baird was as they made their way alone toward the
hospitals or were carried off by the hospital corps. Suddenly, a hundred
men with arms in their hands emerged from the woods into the open field
behind Baird, straggling and without order. These were not wounded men.
No: it was too plain that Baird's division was giving way. A moment
more, and the lower end of the open field was filled with a dense mass
of men as Baird's disordered lines poured forth out of the woods, which
were swarming with the exultant enemy. Through and behind the retreating
mass the mounted officers rode furiously, their swinging sabres
flashing in the sun as they alternately commanded and exhorted their men
to rally and breast the storm of lead which the enemy was hurling upon
them. Then Johnson, whose division was next to Baird's, wheeled a
regiment or two backward and opened fire on the enemy engaged with
Baird. The troops of the latter were not running, but falling back,
firing as they went. Suddenly, one of their colonels seized his
regimental standard from the color-bearer and faced his horse toward the
enemy, holding the flag high above his head. The men began to rally
around this flag, and in a moment an imperfect line had been formed. The
enemy's success was at an end. A moment more, and with a wild cheer
Baird's men dashed forward and drove the enemy from their front.
Meanwhile, we were not idle spectators of all this. At the moment when
Baird's men had been forced into the open field, and it seemed
impossible to re-form them under the fire they were receiving, the
skirmishers in front of Johnson's and Palmer's divisions broke out into
a lively fire and came in at a run. Close behind them were the
rapidly-advancing skirmishers of the enemy. As these came in sight of
our position they took shelter behind trees and waited for their main
force to come up. Soon the woods behind them were filled with the long,
sweeping lines of Bragg's infantry, moving swiftly and steadily up to
the attack. They reached their skirmishers, and as the latter fell in
with the main body the whole broke into the peculiar shrill and fitful
yell of the Southern soldiery, and rushed impetuously upon our line.
From behind its barricade Hazen's brigade gave the yelling assailants
two volleys, by front and rear rank, and then, as the enemy staggered
under the regular blows, the command "Load and fire at will!" rang along
the line. Out burst a swift storm of lead, before which the wasting
ranks of the assailants first wavered, and then stopped to open a rapid
but wild and diminishing fire against the barricade. For a moment or two
their colors waved defiantly at their front as their officers rode
among them in the vain endeavor to hold them to the hopeless effort; and
then they turned and vanished into the deep recesses of the forest
whence they came. Not as they came, however, but as a flying multitude
of panic-stricken men, insensible to authority, conscious only of their
defeat and their peril.
Ah! but this was quite different from yesterday's work, thought the men
of Hazen's brigade. It is one thing to march up to an enemy waiting to
receive you on his chosen ground, and another to lie quietly in position
and let your enemy feel his way up until he is within fair range. This
was the thought after the successful defence: before the fight it is a
question whether it does not require greater steadiness of nerve to wait
inactive for an attack than to rush forward in an onslaught. Officers
and men in Palmer's division were in excellent spirits. They saw that
their comrades on the right and the left had met with equally good
fortune. Johnson's division on one side and Reynolds's on the other
remained as steady as rocks.
It was nearly eleven o'clock, and all had prospered with us thus far.
The enemy was getting his share of bloody repulses, of which we had had
more than enough the day before. The attacks upon our line had begun
upon the left, and were traveling toward our right. The two armies were
thus brought together gradually, something after the manner of
scissor-blades when they are slowly closed. The four divisions on the
left had already successfully withstood the shock, which it was to be
supposed the enemy had made as heavy as possible at that point, since
the left was the vital point of the whole line. Success there would give
him the line of retreat to Chattanooga, with Rosecrans's entire army
shut out. Besides, we knew that the line was stronger toward the right,
where at least two divisions were in reserve. No one apprehended
disaster, therefore, when a long and rapid roll of musketry far to the
right told that the enemy was attacking there. "Brannan and Wood are
attending to 'em now!" said General Palmer, standing in a group of
officers in rear of Hazen's brigade. The talk went on as before--about
the successful defences of the morning, the barricade, Baird's splendid
recovery, etc. But soon everybody was listening anxiously to the sounds
of the battle on the right. The roar of musketry had worked round until
it was behind our right shoulders as we stood facing to our front. There
could be no doubt about it: the line had given way somewhere on the
right, and the enemy was following up. It was not long before stray
bullets were singing behind and among us, flying in a direction parallel
to our line. Then, all in a moment, a battery far to the right and rear
opened a rapid fire, and some of its shells came shrieking into the rear
of Palmer's and Johnson's divisions. Meanwhile, the crash and roar of
battle came nearer and nearer, until the attack struck Reynolds on the
flank and in rear. But he had been forewarned, and his line was swung
backward, at right angles with his original position, to face the attack
from the new direction. Even then he was forced backward until his men
were stretched across the open field in rear of Palmer's division, and
the battle was going on directly behind us. Something--a shell
perhaps--set fire to a log house at the upper end of this field, not
three hundred yards from our brigade. This house had been taken for a
hospital the night before. It was filled with wounded men, too badly
hurt to be taken farther away in the ambulances, and the regular
hospital flag floated above it. This unfortunate house, with its maimed
occupants, was brought between Reynolds's men and the attacking enemy
when the former were driven into the open field; and, despite the
non-combatant flag flying from the gable, it was riddled with shells
from the Southern batteries. I do not charge upon those gunners a
knowledge of the facts here given: their batteries were some distance
away through the forest. However, whether they saw the house and the
flag or not, their fire swept mercilessly through the house, while many
a stout-hearted soldier, knowing what was there, wished that if he were
to be hit at all, he might be struck dead at once, and so avoid such
sickening horrors.
For the second time on that memorable day it looked for a few moments as
if Palmer would have to face his men about and fight to the rear.
Preparations to do this were made on the right of the division, but,
fortunately, the appalling disaster which seemed imminent in the
complete encompassing of the four divisions of the left was averted. The
enemy yielded at last to the stubborn resistance, and Reynolds
re-established his line--not upon the old ground entirely, but to
conform to the altered situation. He was now the right of the army upon
the original field, and four divisions comprised all that was left of
the Army of the Cumberland in the position of the morning.
The divisions of the centre and the right--where were they? Brannan, and
Wood, and Negley, and Davis, and Van Cleve, and gallant Sheridan, who
held stubbornly his division even amid the panic at Stone River--where
were they? And Rosecrans, commander of the army; Thomas, the hero in
every fight; rash McCook and unfortunate Crittenden, chiefs of corps?
Gone with the centre and the right of the army; gone with the reserves
and the artillery; gone with the ammunition-trains; gone with everything
that belonged to the Army of the Cumberland except four divisions of
unconquered soldiers with half-filled cartridge-boxes and with hearts
that knew no fear.
All gone? No! In the hush which came after Reynolds's desperate defence,
and while hearts were yet beating fast from watching the doubtful fight,
there arose far off to the right and rear a roar of musketry, telling
that somewhere in the distance the flags of the Army of the Cumberland
still waved before the foe, as they did with us. Long afterward we knew
that this was Thomas--he who would not leave the field amid the wreck
which surrounded him--Thomas, with his fragments, posted on a commanding
ridge and bravely beating off the thickening foes about him.
The story of the disaster is an old one. It is hardly necessary to tell
how Wood, in the main line on the right of Brannan, received an order
from Rosecrans to support Reynolds, the second division in line to the
left of Wood; how the gallant soldier hesitated to obey an order from
which such disaster might come; how McCook, chief of corps, told Wood
the order was imperative, and promised to put a reserve division into
the line to take his place; how Wood withdrew from the line, as ordered,
at the fatal moment when the enemy was preparing to attack; how the
furious foe pressed through the gap, cut the army in two, struck the
lines to right and left in flank and rear, swept the centre, the right
wing and the reserves off the field, and doubled up and crushed the left
wing as far as Reynolds's division, whose fortune has been told. All
this is familiar enough now, but those who remained on the field in the
four divisions of the left knew nothing of it then. They only knew that
the line was broken beyond Reynolds, and that, although somewhere in the
distance was a force which had not yet fled nor surrendered, they were
left to bear alone the battle against Bragg's victorious army. The odds
were five or six to one--perhaps more, maybe less. It did not matter to
be precise: Bragg had men enough to put a double line of troops entirely
around the four divisions. That was enough.
It was after midday when the disaster was complete and the divisions of
Baird, Johnson, Palmer and Reynolds were able to understand the
situation. I need not recount in detail the repeated attempts of the
enemy to crush the line of the four divisions at one point and another.
If the reader can recall the description of the first attack on Palmer's
division, he will have a very fair example of the work which busied us
at intervals during those long hours. The enemy was, of course, not
unaware of his great success in dividing the army and driving off the
greater part of it; nor was he lacking in efforts to improve the
advantage by destroying the divisions which yet confronted him. Every
attack, however, resulted in failure, and the assailants retired each
time with heavy losses. At length it was evident to us that it had
become difficult to bring even Longstreet's boasted troops up to attacks
which met such sure and bloody repulses. There were but four divisions
against an army, but the four would not be taken or driven.
With hands and faces blackened by the smoke and dust of battle those men
stood devotedly to their posts, their ranks thinned by every assault,
but their aim as fatal as ever. But one dread possessed them: ammunition
ran short, and there were no supplies. In the intervals between the
enemy's assaults the cartridge-boxes of dead comrades along the line and
in the open field, where were the fierce struggles of the morning, were
emptied of their contents to replenish the failing stock of the
survivors. More precious than food and water, though they were sorely
needed, were these inheritances from the dead.
The long afternoon wore slowly away. Night could not come too soon, but
it seemed that never before was it so tardy. Officers and men were
tortured by thirst. Their tongues were swollen and their lips black and
distended, often to bursting. Speech became difficult or absolutely
impossible. Officers mumbled their commands, and prayed silently for
darkness to save them from enforced surrender or flight when the last
cartridge should be spent.
Meantime, the relentless but cautious foe was carefully feeling his way
around the flanks, apparently unwilling to venture boldly into the rear
of the little army which he could not move by attack in front. A group
of officers stood by their horses in rear of Hazen's brigade when the
crack of an Enfield rifle was heard from the woods in rear across the
open field. A bullet came whizzing into the group and killed a colonel's
horse. Other shots followed from the same direction. The woods behind us
were evidently occupied by the enemy's skirmishers. A captain
volunteered to take his company and clear the woods, but ammunition was
too scarce to waste on sharpshooters.
Word came at last, in some way, that Thomas, whose firing we heard far
to the right and rear, was sorely pressed. A consultation was held by
the four division generals. They needed a commander, but who should it
be? Who would take command of that beleaguered force and undertake to
extricate it from its surrounding peril or deliver it over to Thomas?
Would Palmer? No. Would Reynolds? No. The stern duty of fighting their
divisions until they could fight no longer, and doing then whatever
desperate thing might be possible--that they would not fail in; but that
responsibility was as great as they cared to assume. Up came Hazen then.
"I'll take my brigade across that interval," said he, "and find Thomas
if he's there." Palmer objected: it would make a gap in his line; it
would expose one of his brigades to a thousand chances of
destruction--for who could tell what forces of the enemy were in that
interval or watching it?--and finally, it would take away the brigade
which had most ammunition, for Hazen had husbanded his store. But
something must be done. If the four divisions could hold out until
night, somebody must command them and take them out if it could be done.
Thomas was the proper commander, and he was needed. It was agreed that
Hazen should make the attempt.
The brigade was withdrawn from the line which it had faithfully held all
day, and some disposition made to fill the gap. Hazen formed his
regiments in close masses, faced them to the right and rear, covered his
front with a trusty battalion as skirmishers, waved an adieu to the
comrades left behind, and plunged into the unknown forest in the
direction of Thomas's firing. On and on went the brigade and came nearer
and nearer to the ridge which Thomas held. Suddenly, the skirmishers
strike obliquely an opposing line. They brush it away in an instant, but
the warning is not lost. Keep more to the rear: no fighting now, though
you should whip three to one. The fate of the four divisions rests upon
that. With quick and steady tread the regiments move on. They clear the
wood at last, climb the end of a ridge through a field of standing
corn, and burst into an open field at the summit amid the wild cheers of
Thomas's exhausted men, while Thomas himself, beloved of all the army,
rides down to take Hazen by the hand. And not a moment too soon.
Almost at the very instant Thomas's skirmishers along the front of the
ridge broke out into a rattling fire, and were seen falling back. The
enemy was about to make his final effort, and it was to be against the
flank where now lay Hazen's brigade. Quickly deploying his regiments,
Hazen placed them in four lines, closed one upon another, and the men
lay flat upon their faces. The yell of the enemy was heard in the wood
below, and in a moment the declivity in front was covered with the heavy
lines of the assailants. Then the first of Hazen's regiments was brought
to its feet and poured its volley straight into the faces of the
oncoming foe. The next regiment, and the next, and then the last,
followed in quick succession. The echoes of the last volley had hardly
died away before the enemy, who came on so confident and so strong, had
disappeared, crushed and broken, into the forest, leaving the hillside
strewn with his dead and wounded.
So ended the fighting. Night came down and shrouded the fierce
combatants from each other's sight.
The dusky ranks take up the unfamiliar march with faces from the foe.
Their drums are silent, and their bugles voice-less as the spirit-horns
which marshal their heroic dead upon the farther shore. The shadowy
ranks pass on into the night. Bearing their close-furled banners and
their empty guns, they pass on into the sad and silent night of
Chickamauga to await the glorious sun of Mission Ridge.
ROBERT LEWIS KIMBERLY.
NOTE.--The writer is aware that this narrative of the battle of
Chickamauga differs so materially from the commonly-received
impressions of that event that it ought to be supported by more
than his own authority. The reader will observe that the main
narrative is made up of the experiences of one command, that to
which the writer belonged, and of which he can therefore speak
as of things which he saw. For the statements of the general
battle reference is made to official reports, as follows: (1) In
regard to the first day's battle, see report of General W.S.
Rosecrans, which may be found in vol. vii. of Putnam's
_Rebellion Record_, p. 222 and following pages. (2) In regard to
the complete isolation of the four divisions of the left during
the second day, and the final opening of communication with
General Thomas, see General W.B. Hazen's official report on p.
238 of the volume above quoted.
The writer also quotes, by permission, from letters from
Generals Hazen and Thomas J. Wood, addressed to him within the
present year. General Hazen says: "Do not forget about the
length of time Thomas was cut off from us--how we could hear
nothing from him; how neither Reynolds nor Palmer would assume
command," etc. General Wood says, in reference to the great
disaster on the second day: "About 11 A.M. I received the
following order from General Rosecrans: 'The commanding general
directs that you close up on Reynolds as fast as possible, and
support him.' As there was an entire division (Brannan's)
between my division and Reynolds, I could only close upon the
latter and support him by withdrawing my division from line and
passing in rear of Brannan to the rear of Reynolds. This I did.
Of course I knew it was an order involving perhaps the most
momentous consequences, but General McCook concurred with me
that it was so emphatic and positive as to demand instant
obedience. I write you stubborn facts, and you can use them as
such."
General Wood has been so severely criticised for his obedience
to this fatal order that perhaps I should add this further
explanation, contained in the letter from which I have quoted
above: "After the battle was over, and it was apparent that
Rosecrans's ill-considered order had led to a disaster, he
offered as an explanation of it the statement that some
staff-officer had reported to him that Brannan was out of line,
and that he intended I should close to the left on Reynolds, and
that I overlooked this direction to close to the left on
Reynolds. Certainly, I overlooked it, or rather I did not see
it, for it was not there to be seen. On the contrary, I was
ordered to close up on Reynolds, and for a purpose--viz., to
support him. I remark also that it was impossible for any man,
on reading Rosecrans's order to me, to even remotely conjecture
that it was based on the supposition that Brannan was out of
line. He had previously ordered me to rest my left on Brannan's
right, and I had reported to him that I had done so. Colonel
Starling (of Crittenden's staff) testified before the
McCook-Crittenden court of inquiry that he was with Rosecrans at
the time the latter directed the order to be sent to me, and
told him that Brannan was not out of line."
THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS.
BY MRS. E. LYNN LINTON, AUTHOR OF "PATRICIA KEMBALL."
CHAPTER XXXVII.
UNWORTHY.
The storm had passed with the night, and the day was bright and
joyful--almost hard in its brightness and cruel in its joy; for while
the sun was shining overhead and the air was musical with the hum of
insects and the song of birds, the flowers were broken, the tender
plants destroyed, the uncut corn was laid as if a troop of horse had
trampled down the crops, and the woods, like the gardens and the fields,
were wrecked and spoiled. But of all the mourners sighing between earth
and sky, Nature is the one that never repents, and the sun shines out
over the saddest ruin as it shines out over the richest growth, as
careless of the one as of the other.
Edgar came down from the Hill in the sunshine, handsome, strong, jocund
as the day. As he rode through the famous double avenue of chestnuts he
thought, What a glorious day! how clear and full of life after the
storm! but he noted the wreckage too, and was concerned to see how the
trees and fields had suffered. Still, the one would put forth new
branches and fresh leaves next year; and if the other had been roughly
handled, there was yet a salvage to be garnered. The ruin was not
irreparable, and he was in the mood to make the best of things. Do not
the first days of a happy love ever give the happiest kind of philosophy
for man and woman to go on?
And he was happy in his love. Who more so? He was on his way now to Ford
House as a man going to his own, serene and confident of his possession.
He had left his treasure overnight, and he went to take it up again,
sure to find it where he had laid it down. He had no thought of the
thief who might have stolen it in the dark hours, of the rust that might
have cankered it in the chill of the gray morning. He only pictured to
himself its beauty, its sweetness and undimmed radiance--only remembered
that this treasure was his, his own and his only, unshared by any, and
known in its excellence by none before him.
He rode up to the door glad, dominant, assured. Life was very pleasant
to the strong man and ardent lover--the English gentleman with his
happiness in his own keeping, and his future marked out in a clear broad
pathway before him. There was no cloud in his sky, no shadow on his sea:
it was all sunshine and serenity--man the master of his own fate and the
ruler of circumstance--man the supreme over all things, a woman's past
included.
Not seeing Leam in the garden, Edgar rang the bells and was shown into
the drawing-room, where she was sitting alone. The down-drawn blinds had
darkened the room to a pleasant gloom for eyes somewhat overpowered by
the blazing sunshine and the dazzling white clouds flung like heaps of
snow against the hard bright blue of the sky; yet something struck more
chill than restful on the lover as he came through the doorway, little
fanciful or sentimental as he was.
Leam, who had not been in bed through the night, was sitting on the sofa
in the remotest and darkest part of the room. She rose as he
entered--rose only, not coming forward to meet him, but standing in her
place silent, pale, yet calm and collected. She did not look at him, but
neither did she blush nor tremble. There was something statuesque,
almost dead, about her--something that was not the same Leam whom he had
known from the first.
He went up to her, both hands held out. She shrank back and folded hers
in each other, still not looking at him.
"Why, Leam, what is it?" he cried in amazement, pained, shocked at her
action. Was she in her right mind? Had she heard of his former
attentions to Adelaide, divined their ultimate meaning, and been seized
with a mad idea of sacrifice and generosity? It must be with Adelaide,
he thought, rapidly reviewing his past. He was absolutely safe about
Violet Cray, who had never known his name; and those later Indian
affairs were dead and as good as buried. What, then, did it mean?
"No, not till you have heard me," said Leam in a low voice. "And never
after."
"My darling! what is it?" he repeated.
"You must not call me dear names: I am unworthy," said Leam. "No,"
checking him as he would have spoken, smiling with a sense of relief
that her craze--if it was a craze--went to the visionary side of her own
unworthiness, and was not due to any knowledge of his misdemeanors, as
she might think them. "Do not speak. I have to tell you. I had forgotten
it," she went on to say in the same tense, compressed manner--the manner
of one who has a task to get through, and has gathered all her strength
for the effort, leaving none to be squandered in emotion--"I was so
happy in these last days I had forgotten it. Now I have remembered, and
we must part."
Edgar was grieved to see her in such deadly trouble, for it was easy to
see her pain beneath her still exterior, but he was confident, and if
grieved not afraid. Leam's little life, so innocent and uneventful as it
must have been, could hold no such tremendous evil, could have been
smirched with no such damning stain, as that at which she seemed to
hint. Grant even that there had been something more between her and
Alick Corfield than he would quite like to hear--which was his first
thought--still, that more must needs be very little, could but be very
simple. His wife must be spotless--that he knew, and he would marry none
whose past was not as unsullied as new-fallen snow, as unsullied as must
be her future--absolute purity--the unruffled emotions of a maidenhood
undisturbed until now even by dreams, even by visions. He owed it to
himself and his position that his wife, man of many loves as he was,
should be this; but at the worst the childish affection of brother and
sister, which was all that could possibly have been between Leam and
that awkward young gangrel Alick Corfield, could have nothing in it that
he ought to take to heart or that should influence him. Yes, he might
smile and not be afraid. And indeed her delicate conscience was another
grace in his eyes. He loved her more than ever for the honesty that must
confess all its little sins. Sweet Leam! Leam having to confess! Leam!
she who was almost too modest for an ordinary lover's comfort, needing
to be tamed out of her savage bashfulness, not to be reproved for
transgressing the proper reticence of an English maid. It was a pretty
play, but it was only a play.
"Come and sit by me and make full confession, my darling," he said
lovingly.
"I will stand where I am. You sit," said Leam, without looking at him.
He seated himself on the sofa. "And now what has my little culprit to
say for herself?" he asked pleasantly, putting on a playful magisterial
air.
"It is over," said Leam, her hands pressed in each other with so tight a
clasp that the strained knuckles were white and started. "You must not
love me: I cannot be your wife."
"Why?" He showed his square white teeth beneath the golden sweep of his
moustache, his moist red lips parted, always smiling.
"I have done a great crime," said Leam in a low, monotonous voice.
"A crime! That is a large word for a small peccadillo--larger than any
sin of yours merits, my sweetheart."
"You do not know," said Leam with a despairing gesture. "How can you
know when you have not heard?"
"Well, what may be its name?" he asked, willing to humor her.
She paused for a moment: then with a visible effort, drawing in her
breath, she said, in a voice that was unnaturally calm and low, "I
killed madame."
"Leam!" cried Edgar, "how can you talk such nonsense? The thing is
growing beyond a joke. Unsay your words; they are a wrong done to _me_."
He had started to his feet while he spoke, and now stood before her
with a strangely scared and startled face. Naturally, as such a man
would, he was resolute not to accept such a terrible confession, and one
so unlikely, so impossible; but something in the girl's voice and
manner, something in its sad, still reality, seemed to overpower his
determination to find this simply a bad joke which she was playing off
on his credulity. And then the thing fitted only too well. He had heard
half a dozen times of Madame de Montfort's sudden death, and how very
strange it was that the draught which she had taken so often with
impunity before should have been found so laden with prussic acid on the
first night of her homecoming as to kill her in an instant--how strange,
too, that not the strictest search or inquiry could come upon a trace of
such poison bought or possessed by any member of the family, for what
police-officer would look to find a sixty-minim bottle of prussic acid
concealed among the coils of a young girl's hair? And when Leam said in
that quiet if desperate manner that it was she who had killed madame,
her words made the whole mystery clear and solved the as yet unsolved
problem.
Nevertheless, he would not believe her, but said again, passionately,
"Unsay your words, Leam: they offend me."
"I cannot," said Leam.
He laughed scornfully. "Kill Madame de Montfort. Absurd! You could not.
It was impossible for a girl like you to kill any one," he cried in
broken sentences. "How could you do such a thing, Leam, and not be found
out? Silly child! you are raving."
"I put poison into the bottle, and she died," said Leam in a half
whisper.
"Leam! you a murderess!"
She quivered at the word, at the tone of loathing, of abhorrence, of
almost terror, in which he said it, but she held her terrible ground.
She had begun her martyrdom, her agony of atonement for the sake of
truth and love, and she must go through now to the end. "Yes," she said,
"I am a murderess. Now you know all, and why you must not love me."
"I cannot believe you," he pleaded helplessly. "It is too horrible. My
darling, say that you have told me this to try me--that it is not true,
and that you are still my own, my very own, my pure and sinless Leam."
He knelt at her feet, clasping her waist. He was not of those who, like
Alick, could bear the sin of the beloved as the sacrifice of pride, of
self, of soul to that love. He himself might be stained from head to
heel with the soil of sin, but his wife must be, as has been said,
without flaw or blemish, immaculate and free from fault. Any lapse,
involving the loss of repute should it ever be made public, would have
been the death-knell of his hopes, the requiem of his love; but such an
infamy as this! If true it was only too final.
"Oh, no! no! do not do that," cried Leam, trying to unclasp his hands.
"Do not kneel to me. I ought to kneel to you," she added with a little
cry that struck with more than pity to Edgar's heart, and that nearly
broke her down for so much relaxing of the strain, so much yielding to
her grief, as it included.
"Leam, tell me you are joking--tell me that you did not do this awful
thing," he cried again, his handsome face, blanched and drawn, upturned
to her in agony.
She put her hands over her eyes. "I cannot lie to you," she said. "And I
must not degrade you. Do not touch me: I am not good enough to be
touched by you."
He loosened his arms, and she shrank from him almost as if she faded
away.
"Why did you deceive me?" he groaned. "You should not have let me love
you, knowing the truth."
"I did not know that you loved me, or that I loved you, till that
night," she pleaded piteously. "If I had known I would have prevented
it. I have told you as soon as I remembered."
"You have broken my heart," he cried, flinging himself on the sofa, his
face buried in the cushions. And then, strong man as he was, a brave
soldier and an English country gentleman, he burst into a passion of
tears that shook him as the storm had shaken the earth last
night--tears that were the culmination of his agony, not its relief.
Leam stood by him as pale as the shattered lilies in the garden. What
could she do? How could she comfort him? Tainted and dishonored, she
dared not even lay her hand on his--her infamous and murderous hand, and
he so pure and noble! Neither could she pray for him, nor yet for
herself. Pray? to whom? To God? God had turned His face away from her,
even as her lover had now turned away his: He was angry with her, and
still unappeased. She dared not pray to Him, and He would not hear her
if she did. The saints were no longer the familiar and parental deities,
grave and helpful, to whom she could refer all her sorrows and
perplexities, as in earlier times, sure of speedy succor. The teaching
of the later days had destroyed the simple fetichism of childhood; and
now--afraid of God, by whom she was unforgiven; the saints swept out of
her spiritual life like those mist-wreaths of morning which were once
taken for solid towers and impregnable fortresses; the Holy Mother
vanished with the rest; all spiritual help a myth, all spiritual
consolation gone--how could she pray? Lonely as her life had been since
mamma died, it had never been so lonely as now, when she felt that God
had abandoned her, and that she had sacrificed her lover to her sense of
truth and honor and what was due to his nobility.
She stood by him and watched his passionate outburst with anguish
infinitely more intense than his own. To have caused him this sorrow was
worse than to have endured it for herself. There was no sacrifice of
self that she could not have made for his good. Spaniard as she was, she
would have been above jealousy if another woman would have made him
happier than she; and if her death would have given him gain or joy, she
would have died for him as another would have lived. Yet it was she, and
she only, who was causing him this pain, who was destroying his
happiness and breaking his heart.
She dared not speak nor move. It took all the strength she drew from
silence to keep her from breaking into a more terrible storm of grief
than even that into which he had fallen. She dared not make a sign, but
simply stood there, doing her best to bear her heavy burden to the end.
The only feeling that she had for herself was that it was cruel not to
let her die, and why did not mute anguish kill her?
For the rest, she knew that she had done the thing that was right,
however hard. It was not fitting that she should be his wife; and it was
better that he should suffer for the moment than be degraded for all
time by association with one so shameful, so dishonored, as herself.
Presently, Edgar cleared his eyes and lifted up his face. He was angry
with himself for this unmanly burst of feeling, and because angry with
himself disposed for the moment to be hard on her. She was standing
there in exactly the same spot and just the same attitude as before, her
head a little bent, her hands twined in each other, her eyes with the
pleading, frightened look of confession turned timidly to him; but as he
raised himself from the sofa, pushing back his hair and striding to the
window as if to hide the fact of his having shed tears, she turned her
eyes to the floor. She was beginning to feel now that she must not even
look at him. The gulf that separated them, dug by her own ineffaceable
crime, was so deep, the distance so wide!
A painful silence fell between them: then Edgar, not looking at her,
said in a constrained voice, "I will keep your dreadful secret, Leam,
sacredly for ever. You feel sure of that, I hope. But, as you say, we
must part. I do not pretend to be better than other men, but I could not
take as my wife one who had been guilty of such an awful crime as this."
"No," said Leam, her parched lips scarcely able to form a word at all.
"Your secret will be safe with me," he repeated.
She did not reply. In giving up himself she had given up all that made
life lovely, and the refuse might as well go as not.
"But we must part."
"Yes," said Leam.
He turned back to the window, desperately troubled. He did really love
her, passionately, sincerely. He longed at this very moment to take her
in his arms and tell her that he would accept her crime if only he might
have herself. Had he not been the master of the Hill and a Harrowby he
would have done so, but the master of the Hill and the head of the house
of Harrowby had a character to maintain and a social ideal to keep pure.
He could not bring into such a home as his, present to his mother as her
daughter, to his sisters as their sister, a girl who by her own
confession was a murderess--a girl who, if the law had its due, would be
hanged by the neck in the precincts of the county jail till she was
dead. He might have been sinful enough in his own life, in the ordinary
way of men--and truly there were passages in his past that would
scarcely bear the light--but what were the worst of his misdemeanors
compared with this awful crime? No: he must resolutely crush the last
lingering impulse of tenderness, and leave her to work through her own
tribulation, as he also must work through his.
"But we must part," he said for a third time.
Her lips quivered. She did not answer, only bent her head in sign of
acquiescence.
"It is hard to say it, harder still to do; and I who loved you so
dearly!" cried Edgar with the angry despair of a man forced against
himself to give up his desire.
She put up her hands. "Don't!" she said with a sharp cry. "I cannot bear
to hear about your love."
He gave a sudden sob. Her love for him was very precious to him--his for
her very strong.
"Why did you tell me?" he then said. "And yet you did the right thing to
tell me: I was wrong to say that. It was good of you, Leam--noble, like
yourself."
"I love you. That is not being noble," she answered slowly and with
infinite pathos. "I could not have deceived you after I remembered."
"You are too noble to deceive," he said, holding out his hand.
Leam turned away. "I am not fit to touch your hand," she said, the very
pride of contrition in her voice--pride for him, if humiliation for
herself.
"For this once," he pleaded.
"I am unworthy," she answered.
At this moment little Fina came jumping into the room. She had in her
hand a rose-colored scarf that had once been poor madame's, and which
the nurse, turning out an old box of hers, had found and given to the
child.
After she had kissed Edgar, played with his _bréloques_, looked at the
works of his watch, plaited his beard into three strings, and done all
that she generally did in the way of welcome, she shook out the gauze
scarf over her dress.
"This was mamma's--my own mamma's," she said. "Leam will never tell me
about mamma: you tell me, Major Harrowby," coaxingly.
"I cannot: I did not know her," said Edgar in an altered voice, while
Leam looked as if her judgment had come, but bore it as she had borne
all the rest, resolutely.
"I want to hear about mamma, and who killed her," pouted Fina.
"Hush, Fina," said Leam in an agony: "you must not talk."
"You always say that, Leam, when I want to hear about mamma," was the
child's petulant reply.
"Go away now, dear little Fina," said Edgar, who felt all that Leam must
feel at these inopportune words, and who, moreover, weak as he was in
this direction, was longing for one last caress.
"I will go and send her nurse," said Leam, half staggering to the door.
Had anything been wanting to show her the impossibility of their
marriage, this incident of Fina's random but incisive words would have
been enough.
"Leam! not one word more?" he asked as he stood against the door,
holding the handle in his hand.
"No," she said hopelessly. "What words can we have together?"
"And we are parting like this, and for ever?"
"For ever. Yes, it has to be for ever," she answered almost
mechanically.
"Leam, why did you love me?" he cried, taking her hands in his and
keeping them.
"How could I help it? Who would not love you?" she answered.
Again he gave a sudden heavy sob, and again the poor pale, tortured face
reflected the pain it witnessed.
"Good-bye!" she then said, drawing her hands from his. "Remember only,
when you blame me, that I told you, not to let you be degraded. And
forgive me before I die, for I loved you--ah, better than my own life!"
With a sudden impulse she stooped forward, took back his right hand in
both of hers, pressed it to her bosom, kissed it passionately again and
again, then turned with one faint, half-suppressed moan, and left him.
And as he heard her light feet cross the hall, wearily, heavily, as the
feet of a mourner dragging by the grave of the beloved, he knew that his
dream of love was over. But, with the strange satire of the senses in
moments of sorrow, noting ever the most trivial things, Edgar noted
specially the powerful perfume of a spray of lemon-plant which she
bruised as she pressed his hand against her breast.
That evening Edgar Harrowby went down to the rectory. He was strong
enough in physique and in some phases of will, but he was not strong all
through, and he had never been able to face unassisted the first
desolation of a love-disappointment.
Adelaide, in a picturesque dress and her most becoming mood, welcomed
him with careful cordiality as a prodigal whose husks, clinging about
his coat, were to be handled tenderly as if they were pearls. She saw
that something was gravely wrong, and she grasped the line of connection
if she did not understand the issue; but, mindful of the doctrine of
letting well alone--also of that of catching a heart at the rebound--she
made no allusion in the beginning, but let her curiosity gnaw her like
the Spartan boy's fox without making a sign. At last, however, her
curiosity became impatience, and her impatience conquered her reserve.
She was clever in her generation and fairly self-controlled, but she was
only a woman, after all.
"And when did you see that eccentric little lady, Miss Leam?" she asked
with a smile--not a bitter smile, merely one of careless amusement, as
if Leam was acknowledged to be a comical subject of conversation and one
naturally provoking a smile.
"Dear Adelaide," said Edgar, not looking at her, but speaking with
unusual earnestness, "do not speak ill of Leam Dundas--neither to me nor
to any one else. I ask it as a favor."
Adelaide turned pale. "Tell me only one thing, Edgar: are you going to
marry her?" she asked, her manner as earnest as his own, but with a
different meaning.
"No. Marry her? Good God, no!" was his vehement reply. Then more
tenderly: "But for all that do not speak ill of her. Will you promise,
dear, good friend?"
"Yes, I will promise," she answered with what was for her fervor and a
sudden look of intense relief. "I never will again, Edgar; and I am
sorry if I have hurt you at any time by what I may have said. I did not
mean to do so."
"No, I know you did not. I can appreciate your motives, and they were
good," Edgar answered with emotion; and then their two pairs of fine
blue eyes met, and both pairs were moist.
This was just at the moment when Leam, pale, rigid as a statue, thickly
veiled, and holding a box in her hand, met Mr. Gryce in Steel's Wood, he
having gone to catch such rare specimens of sleeping lepidoptera as the
place afforded and his eyes could discern.