A Scarlet Poppy
and
Other Stories
BY
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1894
HARPER’S AMERICAN STORY-TELLERS.
_16mo, Cloth, Ornamental._
THE WATER GHOST, AND OTHERS. By JOHN KENDRICK BANGS. Illustrated. $1
25.
NOWADAYS, AND OTHER STORIES. By GEORGE A. HIBBARD. Illustrated by the
Author. $1 25.
THE STORY OF A STORY, AND OTHER STORIES. By BRANDER MATTHEWS.
Illustrated. $1 25.
THE PRIVATE LIFE. Three Stories. By HENRY JAMES. $1 00.
THE WHEEL OF TIME. Three Stories. By HENRY JAMES. $1 00.
PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK.
_The above works are for sale by all booksellers, or will be sent by
the publisher, postage prepaid, to any part of the United States,
Canada, or Mexico, on receipt of the price._
Copyright, 1894, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
_All rights reserved._
CONTENTS
PAGE
A SCARLET POPPY 1
BEST-LAID SCHEMES 29
AN IDEAL 87
MRS. CLAXTON’S SKELETON 107
THE TRAGIC STORY OF BINNS 175
THE COMPOSITE WIFE 215
MR. VAN NORE’S DAUGHTER-IN-LAW 263
A SCARLET POPPY
A SCARLET POPPY
“It was only a quarter of a dollar, Mark.”
“Only a quarter of a dollar! It isn’t that quarter I complain of; it is
its multiplication. Four of them make a dollar. How often have I told
you, Helena, that the little foxes--”
“Oh, so often that I’d like to be in at the death of them all, and hang
up the last brush on the wall!”
“Very likely. That’s quite in character. I fancy there’d be no wall
to hang it on by that time, though. That’s all,” pushing back his
coffee-cup.
“How perfectly absurd you are, Mark! Because I buy a scarlet paper
poppy with a black curled paper heart, eight inches in diameter, to
hang outside a lamp-shade, and pay twenty-five cents for it, you are
brought to the verge of bankruptcy and I am to be reduced to beggary!”
“It isn’t the poppy at all. It’s--”
“It seems to me that I might commit that extravagance every
day if I wished and not ruin you. Three hundred and sixty-five
quarters--ninety-one dollars a year. How poor you must be if ninety-one
dollars a year can put you into insolvency! But I don’t wish. I--”
“It isn’t the poppy at all”--his face growing purple.
“Oh no, it isn’t the poppy; it’s the twenty-five cents. It isn’t this
poppy; it’s the next one,” clasping her pretty hands behind her head,
as she leaned back in an insolence of attitude.
“It isn’t the poppy at all; it’s the principle,” cried the exasperated
Mr. Dunmore at last, raising his voice so that it could be heard over
his wife’s treble, and over the screaming of the wild March gale
outside.
“Oh, of course,” said his wife then, “if you choose to talk to me in
that tone, it’s the end of argument. I can’t roar, and the strong lungs
have it. But it’s very ungentlemanly and unhandsome. It’s quite as
mean as grudging me the original twenty-five cents for a decoration to
my lamp-shade.”
“Helena, I can’t allow you to go on in this way.”
“You can’t allow me! As if I were going to ask you to allow me! I
should suppose it was time you entered sufficiently into the spirit of
the age, Mark, to know that wives nowadays are not slaves. They are not
allowed or disallowed. And they can spend twenty-five cents without
asking; especially if it’s their own,” added Mrs. Dunmore, with sharp
emphasis, her great blue eyes sparkling in a way that great blue eyes
can on occasion. “Go, lie down, Sauveur!” as the big St. Bernard, aware
that something was wrong, came and laid his nose on her arm.
“Very well, then, Helena,” said Mr. Dunmore, with great severity;
“since you drive me to it--when it _is_ your own.”
“Really?” said the young woman, with a severity quite as cold as his
own. “How long since my own income ceased to be mine? I don’t think
my poor father when he left me my little property ever had an idea
that any one was going to deny its being my own. ‘Free from marital
control,’ he said,” cried Mrs. Dunmore, triumphantly. “‘Free from
marital control,’” she repeated, with force. “Does that mean that you,
or that I, have the spending of it?”
“You, assuredly, Helena,” said Mr. Dunmore, with more calmness. “How
many times this year have you had the spending of it already?”
“I must say, Mr. Dunmore, I fail to understand you.”
“I will enlighten you. When you made your Christmas presents on a
scale entirely incommensurate with our means, and I remonstrated, you
said you were going to pay for them all yourself out of your January
dividends. But when your January dividends came in, the bill for your
new cloak came also and took the whole sum.”
“Most men pay for their wives’ cloaks themselves,” said Mrs. Dunmore,
with some bitterness.
“Not when their wives order four-hundred-dollar cloaks, and they can
only afford one-hundred-dollar ones without running into debt.”
“You have brought me up here into this frigid zone of a climate,
Mr. Dunmore, and I certainly expected before I came to be clothed
sufficiently to meet the rigor of the weather.”
“You are,” said her husband. “And you were before you spent the whole
of your January dividends to pay for a seal-skin cloak. However, that’s
neither here nor there. It became necessary then, after the system of
genteel beggary in our civilization, to make Laura Kerna a wedding
present.”
“We didn’t have any wedding presents ourselves, I suppose!” said the
wife, witheringly.
“And I thought one of the twelve ladles that were given to us would do.”
“The idea! So perfectly disgraceful! Some men haven’t any sentiment,”
addressing the universe.
“And you insisted on nothing less than a gold-mounted vinaigrette.”
“Dear knows she’ll need it, if all husbands are alike.”
“And you would pay for it out of your January dividends,” said her
husband, not noticing her interpolations. “But close upon that came my
birthday, and you wished me to make myself a present of a new watch;
and when I said it was impossible, you said you would pay for it out of
your dividend.”
“If I ever heard of such unparalleled meanness!”
“A little later, when we were getting a fresh carpet for the
drawing-room, and I thought Brussels would do, and you declared for
Wilton, you assured me that you were to pay for that out of your
dividend.”
“Well, if I couldn’t carpet my own house, I wouldn’t twit my wife for
doing it.”
“You said the same about the India rug you ordered home without
consultation, at two hundred and fifty dollars. It is a beauty, of
course; I admit your taste; it is soft as velvet, and colored with
sunbeams. But I knew if I paid for that I must go without paying for
something else; and you said you would pay for it yourself with your
dividend.”
“Pshaw!”
“You must remember that you wanted some moonstones, when they came
into fashion; for luck, you said; and about the same time a tall
piano-lamp; and, not long after, a big Limoges vase; and in spite of my
reluctance--”
“Reluctance!”
“You got them all, and charged them to your dividend again.”
“But, Mark--”
“Pardon me! The next thing that arose was the necessity of educating
that young lad in art; and as I didn’t have that money to spare, you
drew the money from the house-keeping fund, and said you would replace
it from your dividend. Then you started to go down to the city and
attend the Friday afternoon concerts, for which your ticket cost
thirty-five dollars, and that of a companion thirty-five more; and
when you were snowed in on the train, in just such a storm as this, if
there ever was such a storm before, and obliged to have a doctor, and
a set of bills--ever so little ashamed, perhaps, that your folly had
brought about such unlooked-for expense--you said you could settle all
that with your dividend. How many times do you think you have used up
your dividend money already? Do you think, this March morning, there is
twenty-five dollars or twenty-five cents of it left? And don’t you know
that my one wish in life is to keep out of debt, that if I am called
off suddenly there may be something to take care of you with?--you
who spend recklessly many times your own income every year, and would
mine if you could get at it! I shall make a will the next time I go to
town, Helena,” said Mr. Dunmore solemnly, “in which I shall put every
dollar of my property in trust; for you are not fit to be charged with
a bank-note. Money melts out of your hands like morning dew, and you
may be the most beautiful and winning woman in the world, but in money
matters you are a child. You never go into a shop without telling the
dealer how cheap his goods are, and asking him if he can’t take a
little more.”
“I won’t listen to another word you say,” cried Mrs. Helena, springing
to her feet. “I knew you were so careful as to be canny. I never knew
a person with Scotch blood in him that wasn’t. So proud of your Scotch
blood as you are! But I didn’t suppose you looked askance at your
own wife’s doctor’s bills. I’ll pay them myself out of my very next
dividend, that I will! I never imagined you wanted me to stay stived
up in a prison-house, going without pleasure or society. If it costs
you so much more than you can afford to keep me, I can go to my aunt
Potter’s. And I will go, this very day.”
“Hardly,” said Mr. Dunmore, looking out of the window at the storm,
whose clouds of flying snow hid even the great mountain shapes from
view.
“I don’t know why the storm should stop me. It isn’t any colder than
my husband’s heart,” said Mrs. Dunmore. “And I’d as lief hear it now
as hear you. It will be April and spring to-morrow, and no storm to be
seen, but it will always be winter in your heart. You can leave your
money, that you treasure so much more than you do my happiness, where
you please. I don’t want any of it, or anything else that belongs
to you. I wish I was dead and out of your way! You can keep it for
your second wife to spend, if she can get hold of it, which is more
than I can do. I never want to look upon your face again! If there’s
anything in the world detestable to me it’s meanness and stinginess and
parsimony and miserliness and--” And here, words failing her and tears
coming in their stead, Mrs. Dunmore rushed from the room and sought the
seclusion of her bedchamber, where she hid her head in the pillows and
cried herself into hysterics. And Mr. Dunmore, feeling that the house
was far too hot to hold him, strode into the hall, and put on his great
fur overcoat, and buckled the hood about his ears, and slammed the
door behind him, refusing to wait for the stout cob that usually bore
him, and going out afoot into a storm that was no fiercer than the one
raging within him at that moment.
A pretty sort of a home he had! his thoughts ran. The hospitality
of the tempest was gentleness beside it. A shrew and a vixen and a
spendthrift for a wife, who cared nothing for him but what she could
get out of him, and made no acknowledgment of that; who scorned and
flouted and fleered him, had no regard for his feelings, called
him--called him names! What a fool he was to submit to it! Why didn’t
he send her--_why_ didn’t he send her back to her aunt Potter’s, and
sell out, and clear out himself? This life he lived was--it was no use
saying what it was! It was the life to come, and he had been damned
into it! He wished he had never seen her face! What an idiot a man was
to give up his peace, his liberty, his pleasure, his everything, for
the sake of companionship with a woman who thwarted him at every turn,
in his feelings, his wishes, his will, till there was no peace in the
house, and a struggle with the wildest storm that ever blew was rest,
was relief from home and her! And in a white heat of angry commotion he
plunged along, he hardly knew and hardly cared whither, although really
bound for the upper fields, in order to give some directions to the
shepherds of the great sheep farm he carried on. And the wind roared
above him and about him unheeded as, with head bent forward and hands
clenched in his pockets, he labored on; and the snow whirled and fell
and rose again, and built up its fantastic drifts on either side, and,
occupied in his bitter musings, he saw and heard none of it.
And none of it did Mrs. Helena hear or see, with her head buried in her
pillows, crying now partly with pity of her own wretchedness, partly in
the subsidence of her anger at she hardly knew what, and partly with
the unspent force of her nervous agitation. Occasionally she sat up and
twisted the long coil of her fallen hair, and enjoyed a sensation as if
she were in some manner wringing her hands and tearing her hair. She
called herself the most miserable woman under the sun, condemned to a
living prison, bound to a man who detested her, and whom she--yes, whom
she detested! A man? A brute! Oh, why had she ever given herself up to
such a fate? What was there she had seen in him in the first place?
Why hadn’t she divined his sordid and tyrannical nature then? Why had
she let herself be overcome by his false promises, his smile, his face
that used to seem to her like the face of a god, and now was that of a
satyr--yes, of a satyr! A great bluff wind-blown satyr! How infamously
he had talked to her about her dividend! He grudged her the clothes
she put on; she was a burden to him, and he made her feel it, and,
quite unconscious of the uncommonly congenial feeling in this regard,
she wished she had never laid eyes on him. It was a shame for a man to
treat his wife so! And there was more crying and wringing of hands; and
then the great shoulder of the gale came pushing against the house so
it startled her and made her shudder, and she lay back silent a moment,
and then bunched the pillow about her ears, and in five minutes, worn
out with her temper and her tantrum, was fast asleep.
And Mr. Dunmore, with the gale whistling about his ears, ploughed his
way along the hillside to the upper farms, more to satisfy himself that
the sheep were all folded than for anything else, now and then shaking
the snow from his shoulders as a shaggy dog shakes off water-drops,
and again bending his head and working onward, the new snow already
ankle-deep and drifting wildly with the wind that at every gust seemed
to blow more fiercely. At last he reached the little house of the
shepherds, all glowing with his successful struggle with the storm,
and half forgetful of the rage with which he at first dashed into it;
quite forgetful before his business with the shepherds was entirely
finished, having disburdened his mind of all that had been weighing on
it, feeling in a somewhat forgiving mood towards his irate little wife,
who, after all, was not so much to blame, he said to himself; only a
pretty woman a little spoiled, who liked to have pretty things about
her. He would go into town himself to-morrow, and get her that Royal
Worcester she had been longing for, the poor child! Perhaps he had
been too severe: it was the coffee--strong coffee always did fire up
his nerves. A man was a wretch to talk so to a woman, anyway. And thus
rambling on in his thoughts, he took the path down the hill, hardly
remembering the tempest that hurtled round him, until all at once he
felt as if it were making him its rallying-point, and found that it was
all he could do, by summoning his strength, to stand up against it,
while it sifted its fine icy particles under his coat and in about his
neck and shoulders and ears in a way to make him eager to get out of
its reach. No matter; a storm on the last day of March couldn’t amount
to much, even up in these New Hampshire hills. It would soon blow over.
He would leave the exposed and winding highway, take the short-cut
across the fields and down through the sheltered piece of wood, and so
get home in time for lunch. He rather pictured Helena to himself, as
forgiving as he was, dressed in her pretty tea-gown of green plush and
white and gold, waiting for him at the head of a lunch-table set with
especial nicety.
But Mr. Dunmore made a mistake when he left the open road. Let it wind
about as it would, it had its protected sides and places, and at the
end arrived. But these pathless wastes of the open pastures, snowed
over and utterly unprotected, arrived nowhere. Turning his back once
or twice on some broader pressure of the blast, he failed to orient
himself; he could not see a rod before him for the driving snow; he
ought by this time to be near the end, but there was nothing of the
little piece of wood to be seen or guessed; he attempted to go back
and recover the main road; he paused at length, a mere atom in all
the wide whirl and bluster of the storm, uncertain if the way led to
left or right, before him or behind. He began to feel some slight
apprehension then. He remembered all the dreadful stories he had read
of Highland shepherds and their sheep in mountain snow-storms; and
all at once he saw that he, too, in the bitterest blowing gale of the
winter, had lost his way upon the hill. Very cold and very tired,
half-desperate too, he thought a moment of sitting down to rest.
But that would never do, and he took heart of grace and plodded and
struggled on, only succeeding in making sure that he was going down
the hill and not up, but not at all sure that he was not skirting the
hill to arrive at the stream and the houseless banks of the other side
of the mountain; not at all sure either that in the dizzy blindness of
the snow the next step might not lead him over some precipitous rock
and out into nothingness. He paused to thrill at the thought, and then
he lurched on again. At any rate, his only salvation lay in keeping
in motion; it was of no use to halloo; although he tried it once or
twice, the gale blew his voice back down his throat and made him feel a
more powerless mote than before, and he plunged along conscious that he
must have wandered wide of the mark, and that the day must be drawing
to a close. Helena, in her pretty gown at that pretty luncheon-table,
began to fade out of his mental view. She had waited for him,
doubtless, hoping he would come back in better humor. She had forgiven
him. She would be thinking he was still in a rage with her. She--she
might never know that he had forgiven her.
For Mr. Dunmore was now acknowledging to himself what he had only
dimly and unconsciously felt before, that it was doubtful if the night
did not overtake him up here in this pathless wilderness of snow and
wind and fury, and bring death to him upon its wings. But not if he
could help it. His heart beat up strongly with his determination, and
he swung his arms and shook his shoulders, and still waded downward
through the drifts. It was hard to move one foot before the other
in the heavy snow-fall; hard to breathe in the force of the gale;
impossible to hear anything but the resonance of the great gusts
through the thick sky; impossible to see before him, the light growing
less, not with the gale alone now, but with the declining day. Night
was coming on, and he was lost in all the tumult of the tempestuous
elements.
Still he labored along. They were bitter thoughts now in Mr. Dunmore’s
mind. He must keep going. Helena would never know--Helena would always
think--and he so young, so well, so strong, to die like a dog of the
cold--like a beast on the plains. If he could only find himself on
level ground once more; if only the storm would cease roaring; if a
friendly light would shine out anywhere! How trivial here seemed all
the concerns about which he had vexed himself! What mere dust and
ashes! It wasn’t possible he was the man that had those undignified,
those cruel, words with his wife this morning! This morning? Oh,
it seemed a year ago! If he ever reached home again, it would be
another man; he would not suffer the winds of heaven to visit her too
roughly. Then the beads of cold sweat broke out on him an instant to
think that possibly now he should never reach it. His knees trembled;
his feet were like balls of ice; he moved them as if they belonged
to somebody else. Every few steps he stumbled--he fell--and every
time it was harder to rise. At last, utterly helpless, he lay there,
numb, freezing, breathless, hardly conscious, the storm whistling and
screaming over him, the drift covering him. A dull red light swam
across his sight; yes, he thought vaguely, the glow before his eyes of
the blood bursting upon his brain. And yet, he thought again presently,
life reviving within him, was that the way death by freezing came?
This red glow, was it not possibly some lantern, some lamp, with its
little blaze magnified by the driving of the snow? If he could halloo
and make any one hear him--He tried again and again, and yet again; but
his voice fainted, and he fell back, slowly losing consciousness of
all things but that red glow, as it shone and broke and formed again
under the shifting clouds of flying flakes. How soft and rich its ruby
warmth, like the heart of some great flower--of some great poppy! And
then the truth smote the wretched man, smote him with a crueler blow
than any smiting of the storm. He was doomed, he was dying, he was
freezing to death, two rods from his own door!
* * * * *
Tired out with her temper and her tears, Mrs. Helena slept for several
hours the sleep of those whose cause is just, her head buried in the
down, deaf to all the noises of the outside world. When she woke at
last it was some stronger thrust of the turmoil of the tempest that
made her suddenly sit up on the bed and shiver with an indefinable
terror. She hurriedly bathed her face and smoothed her hair, and ran
down-stairs where the maids were, and the cats, and the great St.
Bernard dog, a need of some sort of companionship overpowering her in
this war of the elements.
But the maids were busy, and Sauveur was asleep, and the cat sat on
the window-sill watching the eddying snow in an uncanny way, and the
only thing to reassure her was the portrait of her husband over the
fireplace, the handsome, smiling, loving face, the eager, tender eyes
that seemed to follow her. She looked away angrily, and then she looked
back in spite of herself, and then she fell into her own low chair, and
covered her face with her hands, and tears began to trickle through
her fingers--tears of lonesomeness, of down-heartedness, of--yes, of
repentance, repentance that she could ever have said what she had said
that morning to her husband. How kind he had always been to her! how
indulgent! how fond! And just because he had felt a little captious
and irritated she had insulted and outraged him, and abused him in her
thoughts afterwards, and had let him go off in the storm, thinking
she never wanted to see his face again. She had said--yes, she had
said--she never wanted to see his face again. Oh, what if Fate took
her at her word, and she never did? What sort of a thing would life be
to her without him? What-- But she could not let herself think such
a thought. She ran up-stairs and put on her pretty green gown, and
brushed a fresh curl into her yellow locks, and picked some of her
geraniums to lay on the luncheon-table, and had the fire brightened,
and went to the piano and began to play his favorite love-songs, and
when she ceased the luncheon-time had long passed, and yet her husband
had not come.
It was later than she had thought; it was wearing into the afternoon;
the gale was increasing. If it was like this up here among the hills,
what must it be down on the sea-coast, with the sailors clinging to
the icy shrouds? Ah, what must it be here to any one out on the hills
alone in these blowing clouds of sleet and snow? Her heart stood still
with the thought. Was Mark out yet? No; he had only gone off in a pet;
he had stayed out just to frighten her. Was it possible that he could
do so? For a pause her anger flashed up again; and then with a wild,
stifled cry she began to walk the floor like a wild woman. No; it was
not possible. Mark had always tried to save her from all worriment and
vexation. He would have come back if he had not been hindered. He never
stayed angry an hour. He had gone up the mountain to the shepherds, and
he had become bewildered and had lost his way.
In a heart-beat now, Mrs. Dunmore had the house alarmed, and the
servants sent out in all directions, only to return reporting that it
was out of the question to catch the breath in the wind and snow, and
that Mr. Dunmore must long since have taken shelter somewhere, for no
man alive could undertake to weather such a gale as this. No man alive,
Mrs. Dunmore kept repeating then. Perhaps he was not alive; perhaps he
had gone down under the stress of the mighty blast, and the drifts had
deepened over him--her husband, her darling, her Mark! She sat a little
while looking into the fire stupidly, while a thousand scenes of their
younger days started up before her eyes--summer mornings in the boat
upon the narrow, shadowy river; winter evenings in each other’s arms;
long, slow drives about the flowery country lanes; strolls on starry
nights; the love, the hope, the joy, in those days when they were all
in all to one another, and wanted nothing more; and then she started
and ran to the window and searched the storm, so thick and white as
to be impenetrable; and suddenly now so gray, so dark, in the quick
falling of the night, as to be full of horror.
Oh, to think that she, with her sharp tongue, her evil temper, had
shut her husband out into such a wild night as this! How wicked! how
infamous! If he did not come soon her heart would break. If she could
only put her arms round him once again and beg him to forgive her!
Sauveur came and stood with her, gazing as wistfully into the storm,
and whining softly. And the maid lighted the lamp with the red poppy
shade upon it; and then she could see nothing but the flakes sweeping
by the pane, like sparks of fire; and she sank on her knees by the
window, the dog beside her, and knew and felt nothing but blackness.
Suddenly she felt the dog trembling through all his great shaggy frame;
he sat up, his ears pricked and alert, and then all at once he sprang
to the door with a single bound and a sharp cry; and she sprang after
him, calling the maids and the man, and threw wide the door and rushed
out, regardless of all things but the one, the others behind her,
floundering, falling, without breath, up again, on, till the dog’s glad
cry told the story, and among them they had Mr. Dunmore’s shoulders up,
and they dragged him inside the gate and the porch, and shut hard the
door against the storm, and felt ready and willing to faint, but knew
there was no time to do it in.
Mr. Dunmore had his breakfast in bed the next morning, languid, but
uninjured by so much as a serious frost-bite, and feeling supremely
blest among his pillows, with the fire crackling on the hearth, the
flowers blooming in the window, and the storm still roaring on outside,
while his wife fed him with daintiest morsels, and Sauveur now and then
laid a caressing nose on the coverlid.
“To think,” she said, “that I ever could have spoken so to you, my
darling! I must have been out of my head. Oh, I will never spend a cent
again without consulting you first, Mark dear!”
“You never spent a cent too much in all your life, my precious!” he
exclaimed. “Did I say you did? Some evil spirit took possession of me.
It was never I--”
“Just think what you have suffered--oh, just think of it, dearest! And
all for the sake of a red paper poppy! I will go and throw it into the
fire this moment.”
“You will do nothing of the kind,” he cried. “I never in all the world
saw anything so beautiful as that red paper poppy. It was a lucky day
you bought it; it was my preserver and benefactor; it gave me strength
to halloo and be heard. I mean to treasure it all my life, and have it
buried with me at last.”
“And with me too,” she cried, falling on his neck, to the danger of the
breakfast things; “for we will be buried in one grave.”
BEST-LAID SCHEMES
BEST-LAID SCHEMES
Certainly it was a charming home, that in which Mr. Pearmain had
installed his young wife: a stone cottage with mullioned windows from
floor to ceiling, with pointed gables and divers roofs and vanes, and
with an infinitude of prairie-roses and Virginia-creepers planted
beside the walls, to grow in the future till the house should be a
bower. And inside it was what all good house-keepers called fairy-land.
Here Mr. and Mrs. Pearmain had given full scope to their notions, whose
name was legion; not a bit of paint in the house to be cleaned, no
carpets to secrete poison, but hard-wood, inlaid floors and rugs, and
then a conservatory and grapery on a tiny scale, and closets without
counting; while as for the kitchen, the conveniences there were simply
miraculous. And when all this was done and inspected and occupied and
enjoyed, it was no wonder that Mr. and Mrs. Pearmain looked about for
something else on which to expend their whims and vagaries. Their way
of life was so good that it would have been selfishness not to wish
others to share it. Little Harry Pearmain was exactly three years old
when they had fully decided to convert to that way their next neighbor,
but lately arrived, a school-mate of Mrs. Pearmain’s who had married a
dear old friend of Mr. Pearmain’s--little Mrs. Morley, whose black eyes
had a strange sharp snap in them when things displeased her. And it was
one morning when Mrs. Morley had come over to profit by her friend’s
experience in the matter of dainty needle-work that the campaign began.
“I always meant, when I could have things as I chose,” said Mrs.
Pearmain, as they sat and sewed, “to order my table so that not one
ounce of flesh should ever sully it. I don’t proselyte my neighbors;
because I believe in individual liberty; but since you inquire, I will
say that I’ve tried it long enough to feel sure, and as there never
has been a piece of meat cooked in my house, so there never shall be!”
and she nodded her pretty head like a piece of mechanism.
“But what does Mr. Pearmain say?” asked the other.
“Oh, he agrees about it, fortunately, so there is no difficulty there.
In fact, it was Mr. Pearmain’s remarks, before we married, that first
led me to think seriously of the subject. He always used to call it
cannibalism whenever the beef was cut and the blood followed the knife.
And I thought so much of his opinion I began to turn the matter over.”
“Well, I declare! I don’t believe I shall ever think so much of any
man’s opinion,” said Mrs. Morley. “And did Mr. Pearmain’s conviction
really affect your appetite? What an idea! And you ceased eating meat
in consequence of Mr. Pearmain’s conviction?”
“Well, in consequence of my own conviction,” said the priestess. “It
grew disgusting to me. We boarded together, you know, and when my plate
came, and I began to help myself to salt, Mr. Pearmain would glance at
it, and say, ‘Dead flesh.’”
“I should think _that_ would have been disgusting.”
“I did feel vexed a little at first, but presently I was saying the
words to myself. And presently I couldn’t taste it at all.”
“The idea!” said Mrs. Morley, hunting for her lost needle.
“Oh, if you just run the matter over yourself, you won’t be so
scornful, Teresa. If you remember every time you take a bit of mutton
that you are eating death and corruption--”
“Well, I never!” said Mrs. Morley, catching her breath.
“Why, only think of it!” said Mrs. Pearmain, warming at her work. “How
can you expect anybody to be good that is constantly fed and nourished
and kept alive on a lower form of life?”
“But, bless my heart,” cried Mrs. Morley, struggling up from under the
avalanche of words, “vegetables are a lower form of life, and one must
live on something.”
“Vegetables are innocent life, at any rate, with no vile propensities
or impure parts. And, moreover, we are half vegetables ourselves.”
“We? Oh, what in the world do you mean, Emily?” exclaimed Mrs. Morley,
in a terrified manner, as if she had just received a revelation as to
how fearfully she was made.
“Certainly. Didn’t you know that?” said Mrs. Pearmain, with a superior
air. “The movements of our bodies that are voluntary are animal; those
that are involuntary are vegetable, such as the circulation, and all
the processes that go on while we sleep.”
“Isn’t it dreadful?” gasped Mrs. Morley.
“Dreadful? I think it’s beautiful. It’s a sort of union in ourselves
of the three kingdoms--vegetable, animal, and spiritual; for when the
nerves come in and control the great brute muscles--”
“But, really, Emily--”
“Now don’t be silly, Teresa. A woman of your power of mind has only
to look at the thing rationally to feel just as I do. For, as I was
saying, how can those people be good who receive all their increase
from a lower animal form, from brutal instincts and actions--how can
they help receiving those instincts and being tempted to those actions,
and becoming, under the guise of men and women, a baser sort of animals
themselves?”
“I don’t know--perhaps so,” said Mrs. Morley, a little moved, it may
be, by the reference to her power of mind.
“There must be an inherent principle in man that will rise whether or
no, or else we never should have gotten along as far as we have. But it
would be so much faster, so much further, if it wasn’t for this food on
which we sustain our growth. And while we eat it, I don’t see how the
great perfect race can ever come at all. It never will come, Teresa,”
said Mrs. Pearmain, resting on her elbow and looking through her friend
as if to the far-distant future--“it never will come till people cease
to eat flesh, and live on the things that nature provides without pain
or slaughter. To think, every time you sit down to table, that some
creature which enjoyed life has had to give it up for your appetite!
_That_ makes _me_ sick!” said Mrs. Pearmain.
“Well, it’s very wonderful. I never thought of it before. I really will
look it all over. But I don’t see what there is to live on--I should
starve on bread and butter.”
“Butter! We only allow butter as a rarity.”
“Well, milk, then.”
“Milk, indeed! Do you suppose that, while cows are kept in the
unnatural condition in which the milker keeps them, we should drink
their milk? Oh no, indeed, seldom milk, seldom cream, do we touch.”
“My goodness! Then you’ve nothing left but eggs.”
“Well, once in a while an egg; but rarely. I never can get over feeling
that to break an egg is the murder of an innocent.”
“Why, then, you can’t have cake, or--”
“What do you want that for?--unhealthy, indigestible, poisonous--no, we
never have it.”
“Nor doughnuts?”
“Doughnuts!” with ineffable scorn.
“And you can’t have pies?”
“Never. But we have delicious sauces--apple, cranberry, grape, and all
those.”
“But what in wonder do you do when you have company?”
“Oh, you have no idea of how many delicious ways there are in which
the grains can be cooked, or of how many delicious forms of bread
there are. You can get up a perfectly harmonious dinner of the various
vegetables that really leaves you nothing to desire; mushrooms are
as good as steaks; beans can be made to imitate roast beef; and with
fruits and sauces, as I said, there is enough of everything, and those
who want meat needn’t come to us.”
“I should die!”
“Not after you were used to it,” said Mrs. Pearmain, seriously. “You
would learn to like the new way and detest the old.”
“It would set free a great deal of money, to be sure, to be used on
other things,” mused Mrs. Morley.
“Oh, a great deal! And then you would be twice as healthy and strong,
and your children would be an improvement on you. In fact, it is for
the sake of Harry chiefly that we are so strenuous about following up
the matter. It may not make a mighty difference with me, beginning
after twenty, but I expect to see Harry--I can’t help seeing Harry--a
very different person from other people’s boys. And if he could only
find and marry, when he grows up, a woman who had been nourished on the
same sort of food--just think, Teresa, what we might expect of _their_
children! It would be the beginning of a race that would conquer the
world, the beginning of that great perfect race which will do such
wonderful things as pass our comprehension.”
“What makes you talk so ecstatically of that great perfect race, Emily?
How do you know anything about it?”
“Why, don’t geology and those things show us that race after race of
animals has passed away, and only left its bones behind it? And should
we suppose that man would be an exception to the general fate? But as
each race passes, something takes its place a little superior to it,
sprung from it, perhaps; and this great perfect race is to take the
place of man, sprung from man and woman, but from the first man and
woman that ceased to eat death and corruption. Oh, Teresa,” said Mrs.
Pearmain, her cheeks and her eyes glowing, “if it should be your child
and mine!”
The last stroke did the work. Mrs. Morley, it might be said, threw
up the sponge; she was a convert from that moment to Mrs. Pearmain’s
theories. She went through the house that very day; she inquired
into everything; she took notes of everything; she learned how to do
everything; and she went home at night all prepared to convert Mr.
Morley, and to give her Louise to be married to Harry--if it happened
to be Louise.
Poor Mr. Morley! He loved his juicy steak; he rolled under his tongue
the sweet morsel of the oyster out of a side bone; he considered
pepper-pot a dish fit for the gods; he was fond of broiled liver and
a rasher of bacon; a cold pickled shoulder of pork he thought good
enough to invite the king to partake. In fact, he was a murderous
cannibal, pure and simple, according to Mrs. Pearmain’s lights, who
enjoyed his dinner without being, as he thought himself--and as we
think, so we are--either exactly an epicure or a glutton.
But it was of no use. When Mrs. Morley unmasked her batteries that
night, and went over Mrs. Pearmain’s plan of campaign, with a whole
added troop of exclamation and emphasis and entreaty and embracing, he
knew he must surrender. He made a faint resistance, but on the whole he
didn’t believe it was to be a permanent affair with his little Teresa;
he didn’t like to deny her anything just now either; it was probably
only an incidental whim that would pass, and so he yielded handsomely,
and promised that she should have her own way. And then the idea of
marrying his girl to Pearmain’s boy was a pleasant one: Pearmain was
rich and generous and good, the friend of years. Yes, he would promise.
“Kiss the book!” cried Mrs. Morley.
“No, I won’t do that,” said he. “I’ll promise, and my word’s as good as
my bond.”
“Well, then, George, you’ve as good as taken an oath, and I expect you
to keep it.”
“I mean to keep it,” he replied--“at least, till you release me.”
“That will be forever, then.” And she plumed herself like Victory just
lit upon a banner.
But it was a dismal breakfast to Mr. Morley next day, when dry toast
preceded oatmeal, and butterless baked potato without salt brought up
the rear; a dismal dinner, when watery squash and lumpy turnip were the
only variation of a table gorgeous with carrots and beets and silver.
“I’ll give my whole mind to it,” said Mrs. Morley, cheerfully. “Mrs.
Pearmain will lend me all her experience, and we shall have it very
palatable yet.” But he hankered after the fleshpots.
It was shortly after the beginning of the new régime that Miss Louise
Morley came into the world, and there was much rejoicing at the
christening, although the christening-cake consisted of a sort of
sweet bread with raisins in it, of which Mr. Morley partook so eagerly
that he made himself ill, and became presently so prostrate that the
doctor, being summoned, ordered--perhaps at his whispered suggestion--a
course of beef-tea.
Mr. Morley attended to that beef-tea himself. He was not going to be
put off with slops and dissolved Liebig; he had pounds of the thick
red steaks laid before him on the slab in the kitchen, where he went,
and fairly gloated over its preparation. But his rapture was of short
duration. Mrs. Pearmain, running over one day on an errand, saw him
whetting his knife, and flourishing it like a savage, and tiptoed away
to find Mrs. Morley. “Oh, my dear,” she said, “you never can see the
evil effects to better advantage. Look at him! That is the very way
the primitive butchering people whetted their knives over a victim’s
throat. Oh, it is dreadful! it makes me shudder. It is like a mania for
blood; it is certainly near insanity; he will be murdering you in your
bed.”
“I am ashamed of you, Emily!” said Mrs. Morley, tartly. “My George,
indeed! Why, the doctor ordered it.”
“But the doctor didn’t order it forever. The very ferocity shows he has
had enough of it. I should take it away and put him on cream-of-tartar
water directly. Don’t be offended, Teresa; I am speaking for his
good--and the children’s. These men--they have to be managed; Mr.
Pearmain is a singular exception.”
Mrs. Morley did not allow her displeasure to overcome her principles;
and when Mrs. Pearmain brought her visit to a close, Mrs. Morley
brought the administration of beef-tea to a close too. For Mr. Morley’s
intention being to be as good as his word, it needed only a little
argument and some tears to convince him that the beef-tea was a breach
of contract.
It would be hard to tell what Mr. Morley suffered in going about his
business in town from day to day for many a month thereafter. The sight
of the wild-duck, hanging, with his wide wings and brilliant breast, at
a poulterer’s door, almost broke his heart; the men who came up out of
the victuallers’ cellars, wiping their mouths, excited in him a feeling
akin to hate; and he had to skip by the kitchens of the Revere House
and the Tremont so rapidly, in order to escape the tempting smells
which they cast forth, that finally he altogether eschewed Bullfinch
Street, and every other that commanded a restaurant kitchen. For Mr.
Morley’s particular vanity, as you know, was that he was a man of his
word.
Every once in a while Mr. Morley made a feeble remonstrance, futile as
feeble; for Mrs. Morley had the whole thing pat now, and was, moreover,
a woman with whom it was idle to argue, for when obliged to abandon
her position logically, she always did physically also, and either
banged out of the room, or else came round where he sat, put an arm
about his neck, and if kisses wouldn’t stop his mouth, stopped it, to
the accompaniment of much laughing and teasing meanwhile, with his
handkerchief.
“A devilish pretty breakfast!” said Mr. Morley once, pushing back his
plate in a pet. “Pea-nuts!”
“I don’t complain of pea-nuts, George,” said Mrs. Morley. “On the
contrary, I am thankful for them. They’re sweet and sound and
well-baked; there are plenty of them. I am sure they are a very
poetical food; and then they’re a national one; we can always think,
you know, when we eat pea-nuts, that we are encouraging the poor
freedmen down in North Carolina.”
“Oh, hang the freedmen!” groaned Mr. Morley. “How do you expect me to
go in and out of the city every day on such food as this? I’ll have no
strength left in a year--living on husks.”
“Look at those oxen, George, dragging that immense load after them.
There’s strength--and it all comes from husks.”
“I’m not an ox!” roared Mr. Morley.
“No? Anybody’d say you were a Bull of Bashan.”
“Mrs. Morley, can’t you apply a little reason--”
“Not a scrap. Not now. You know this is a subject on which I don’t want
conversation before Louise,” as that little damsel demanded her groats,
and looked with wondering eyes from one to the other. “I don’t want
her ever to hear her diet called in question.”
“Me likes me’s bwekus,” said Miss Louie, with some comprehension of the
coil.
“It’s more than I do,” muttered her father.
“Take some of Louie’s groats, then. Like them, precious?”
“Berry mush,” said Louie, with some point, and pushing the dish towards
her father, with a dim idea that her mother was abusing him.
“I really can’t understand what the difference is between eating these
oats and eating the flesh of the animal that is made out of these oats.”
“A horse’s flesh, for instance. But you wouldn’t eat that if it was set
before you.”
“I don’t know that I shouldn’t,” said Mr. Morley, grimly. “People
who are starving eat anything. People wrecked and on a raft eat each
other,” said he, looking at his wife as if it were not impossible he
should eat her. “Sometimes,” said Mr. Morley, “I feel dangerous.”
“A depraved nature,” said Mrs. Morley. “See what flesh has done for
you,” while he gave a glance at Louie that might have made a weaker
woman shudder.
“She’s fat, isn’t she?” said Mr. Morley, whose mind really seemed now
to run on morbid things, and with the air of one who smacks his lips.
And then, as he caught the chubby hand and carried it to his lips,
Mrs. Morley found herself watching him with a breathless scrutiny--for
it really crossed her mind that Mrs. Pearmain might be right, and Mr.
Morley’s wits might be a little wandering--until he had kissed the
little dimpled fist and laid it down again. “For my part,” said he,
“if I were to have a plate of roast veal set before me (and I used to
despise it)--roast veal, brown, and swimming in gravy--swimming in
gravy,” he repeated, unctuously--“I don’t think I should eat it like a
civilized being--I’ve left off being a civilized being, eating nuts and
prunes and things that don’t require any civilization: a savage never
needed to reach the boiling-point to eat them--I should put my face
down and wallow in it, and eat it like a dog.”
And then Mrs. Morley snatched Louie, and ran out of the room in
virtuous wrath.
Unhappy Mrs. Morley! The path of virtue was a thorny one, but she
persevered in it even with bleeding feet. And if she was not ready
with an answer, she always had what her husband called her knock-down
argument of leaving the room. And she had one last resort, better than
the others, which she used at such times as those when Mr. Morley,
recurring to the charge, wanted her to see that you might scatter
pulverized marble over a soil forever and do it no good; but if you
scattered the pulverized bones of beasts there the harvest became
trebled, plainly showing that matter which had passed through a form
of organized life was superior to that which hadn’t, and that inasmuch
as animals were higher in the scale of organized life than vegetables,
the grain that was converted into beef was nobler food than the grain
that had never known that higher form, and so--Then Mrs. Morley had
ready the best answer of all, and it consisted in simply maintaining
silence so rigorously that nothing short of thumbscrews could extract
a syllable from her, while she looked the serene embodiment of pretty
scorn.
But Nature will take her revenges, and in her own way. One night Mr.
Morley did not return from town. Mrs. Morley sent the carriage to every
train; it came back with nothing but the Skye sitting up on the seat
erect as a shako. Mrs. Morley sent one servant up to the Pearmains’,
and another over to the Farwells’--they knew nothing of Mr. Morley. She
could learn nothing from the train hands; the gentlemen going up and
down every day had not seen Mr. Morley. She telegraphed to the town
station with no better result; she telegraphed to the counting-room,
and received no reply at all. It had never happened before. She was
wild with alarm; lights were dancing about the house till cock-crow;
she walked the floors all night. Mr. Morley had fallen unnoticed in
the dark between the cars, she was sure, and train after train had
rolled over his mangled remains, and her mind could not fix him in any
single spot, so great an extent of surface was he covering. Or else he
had been delayed in the counting-room till dusk, and had been garroted
on his way to the station, and robbed and murdered and tossed up an
alleyway. Or perhaps he had fallen and broken a leg, and, tortured with
pain, lay in the black street at the mercy of passing wheels. Could it
be possible that Mr. Morley had tired of her and her whims, and had
left for parts unknown? Had Mr. Morley’s fancy ever strayed from little
Louie’s mother? She could not say; for the man that hankered after
butcher’s meat as he did was proof against no temptation. And yet--her
George--as he did hanker, how she had made him suffer! If she only had
him there, she would cook the reddest beef in the servants’ larder for
him with her own hands! In a wild whirl her fears and fancies, her
indignation and affection, chased each other up and down in her mind
till day broke. And then, by the common accident of ill-luck, there
was an informal conclave of the neighbors at the front gate, and Mr.
Pearmain, going in, volunteered a journey to town in search of Mr.
Morley, and was welcomed by the wretched wife with bursting tears. “If
I only knew,” she sobbed, “whether he is dead or alive, I could endure
it.”
“There is no need of any alarm of that sort, Teresa,” said Mrs.
Pearmain, who had come down early. “Anybody without much moral force is
sure to be a backslider. Mr. Morley has merely been eating meat, and is
ashamed to face you.”