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GALA-DAYS
by
Gail Hamilton
(Mary Abigail Dodge)
1863
CONTENTS
GALA DAYS
A CALL TO MY COUNTRYWOMEN
A SPASM OF SENSE
CAMILLA'S CONCERT
CHERI
SIDE-GLANCES AT HARVARD CLASS-DAY
SUCCESS IN LIFE
HAPPIEST DAYS
GALA-DAYS
PART I
Once there was a great noise in our house,--a thumping and battering
and grating. It was my own self dragging my big trunk down from the
garret. I did it myself because I wanted it done. If I had said,
"Halicarnassus, will you fetch my trunk down?" he would have asked me
what trunk? and what did I want of it? and would not the other one be
better? and couldn't I wait till after dinner?--and so the trunk would
probably have had a three-days journey from garret to basement. Now I
am strong in the wrists and weak in the temper; therefore I used the
one and spared the other, and got the trunk downstairs myself.
Halicarnassus heard the uproar. He must have been deaf not to hear it;
for the old ark banged and bounced, and scraped the paint off the
stairs, and pitched head-foremost into the wall, and gouged out the
plastering, and dented the mop-board, and was the most stupid, awkward,
uncompromising, unmanageable thing I ever got hold of in my life.
By the time I had zigzagged it into the back chamber, Halicarnassus
loomed up the back stairs. I stood hot and panting, with the inside of
my fingers tortured into burning leather, the skin rubbed off three
knuckles, and a bruise on the back of my right hand, where the trunk
had crushed it against a sharp edge of the doorway.
"Now, then?" said Halicarnassus interrogatively.
"To be sure," I replied affirmatively.
He said no more, but went and looked up the garret-stairs. They bore
traces of a severe encounter, that must be confessed.
"Do you wish me to give you a bit of advice?" he asked.
"No!" I answered promptly.
"Well, then, here it is. The next time you design to bring a trunk
down-stairs, you would better cut away the underpinning, and knock out
the beams, and let the garret down into the cellar. It will make less
uproar, and not take so much to repair damages."
He intended to be severe. His words passed by me as the idle wind. I
perched on my trunk, took a pasteboard box-cover and fanned myself. I
was very warm. Halicarnassus sat down on the lowest stair and remained
silent several minutes, expecting a meek explanation, but not getting
it, swallowed a bountiful piece of what is called in homely talk,
"humble-pie," and said,--
"I should like to know what's in the wind now."
I make it a principle always to resent an insult and to welcome
repentance with equal alacrity. If people thrust out their horns at me
wantonly, they very soon run against a stone-wall; but the moment they
show signs of contrition, I soften. It is the best way. Don't insist
that people shall grovel at your feet before you accept their apology.
That is not magnanimous. Let mercy temper justice. It is a hard thing
at best for human nature to go down into the Valley of Humiliation; and
although, when circumstances arise which make it the only fit place for
a person, I insist upon his going, still no sooner does he actually
begin the descent than my sense of justice is appeased, my natural
sweetness of disposition resumes sway, and I trip along by his side
chatting as gaily as if I did not perceive it was the Valley of
Humiliation at all, but fancied it the Delectable Mountains. So, upon
the first symptoms of placability, I answered cordially,--
"Halicarnassus, it has been the ambition of my life to write a book of
travels. But to write a book of travels, one must first have
travelled."
"Not at all," he responded. "With an atlas and an encyclopaedia one
can travel around the world in his arm-chair."
"But one cannot have personal adventures," I said. "You can, indeed,
sit in your arm-chair and describe the crater of Vesuvius; but you
cannot tumble into the crater of Vesuvius from your arm-chair."
"I have never heard that it was necessary to tumble in, in order to
have a good view of the mountain."
"But it s necessary to do it, if one would make a readable book."
"Then I should let the book slide,--rather than slide myself."
"If you would do me the honor to listen," I said, scornful of his
paltry attempt at wit, "you would see that the book is the object of my
travelling. I travel to write. I do not write because I have
travelled. I am not going to subordinate my book to my adventures. My
adventures are going to be arranged beforehand with a view to my book."
"A most original way of getting up a book!"
"Not in the least. It is the most common thing in the world. Look at
our dear British cousins."
"And see them make guys of themselves. They visit a magnificent
country that is trying the experiment of the world, and write about
their shaving-soap and their babies' nurses."
"Just where they are right. Just why I like the race, from Trollope
down. They give you something to take hold of. I tell you,
Halicarnassus, it is the personality of the writer, and not the nature
of the scenery or of the institutions, that makes the interest. It
stands to reason. If it were not so, one book would be all that ever
need be written, and that book would be a census report. For a
republic is a republic, and Niagara is Niagara forever; but tell how
you stood on the chain-bridge at Niagara--if there is one there--and
bought a cake of shaving-soap from a tribe of Indians at a fabulous
price, or how your baby jumped from the arms of the careless nurse into
the Falls, and immediately your own individuality is thrown around the
scenery, and it acquires a human interest. It is always five miles from
one place to another, but that is mere almanac and statistics. Let a
poet walk the five miles, and narrate his experience with birds and
bees and flowers and grasses and water and sky, and it becomes
literature. And let me tell you further, sir, a book of travels is
just as interesting as the person who writes it is interesting. It is
not the countries, but the persons, that are 'shown up.' You go to
France and write a dull book. I go to France and write a lively book.
But France is the same. The difference is in ourselves."
Halicarnassus glowered at me. I think I am not using strained or
extravagant language when I say that he glowered at me. Then he growled
out,--
"So your book of travels is just to put yourself into pickle."
"Say, rather," I answered, with sweet humility,--"say, rather, it is to
shrine myself in amber. As the insignificant fly, encompassed with
molten glory, passes into a crystallized immortality, his own
littleness uplifted into loveliness by the beauty in which he is
imprisoned, so I, wrapped around by the glory of my land, may find
myself niched into a fame which my unattended and naked merit could
never have claimed."
Halicarnassus was a little stunned, but presently recovering himself,
suggested that I had travelled enough already to make out a quite
sizable book.
"Travelled!" I said, looking him steadily in the face,--"travelled! I
went once up to Tudiz huckleberrying; and once, when there was a
freshet, you took a superannuated broom and paddled me around the
orchard in a leaky pig's-trough!"
He could not deny it; so he laughed, and said,--
"Ah, well!--ah, well! Suit yourself. Take your trunk and pitch into
Vesuvius, if you like. I won't stand in your way."
His acquiescence was ungraciously, and I believe I may say ambiguously,
expressed; but it mattered little, for I gathered up my goods and
chattels, strapped them into my trunk, and waited for the summer to
send us on our way rejoicing,--the gentle and gracious young summer,
that had come by the calendar, but had lost her way on the thermometer.
O these delaying Springs, that mock the merry-making of ancestral
England! Is the world grown so old and stricken in years, that, like
King David, it gets no heat? Why loiters, where lingers, the
beautiful, calm-breathing June? Rosebuds are bound in her trailing
hair, and the sweet of her garments always used to waft a scented gale
over the happy hills.
"Here she was wont to go! and here! and here!
Just where the daisies, pinks, and violets grow;
Her treading would not bend a blade of grass,
Or shake the downy blow-ball from his stalk!
But like the soft west-wind she shot along;
And where she went the flowers took thickest root,
As she had sowed them with her odorous foot."
So sang a rough-handed, silver-voiced, sturdy old fellow, harping
unconsciously the notes of my lament, and the tones of his sorrow wail
through the green boughs today, though he has been lying now these two
hundred years in England's Sleeping Palace, among silent kings and
queens. Fair and fresh and always young is my lost maiden, and
"beautiful exceedingly." Her habit was to wreathe her garland with the
May, and everywhere she found most hearty welcome; but May has come and
gone, and June is still missing. I look longingly afar, but there is
no flutter of her gossamer robes over the distant hills. No white
cloud floats down the blue heavens, a chariot of state, bringing her
royally from the court of the King. The earth is mourning her absence.
A blight has fallen upon the roses, and the leaves are gone gray and
mottled. The buds started up to meet and greet their queen, but her
golden sceptre was not held forth, and they are faint and stunned with
terror. The censer which they would have swung on the breezes, to
gladden her heart, is hidden away out of sight, and their own hearts
are smothered with the incense. The beans and the peas and the
tasselled corn are struck with surprise, as if an eclipse had staggered
them, and are waiting to see what will turn up, determined it shall not
be themselves, unless something happens pretty soon. The tomatoes are
thinking, with homesick regret, of the smiling Italian gardens, where
the sun ripened them to mellow beauty, with many a bold caress, and
they hug their ruddy fruit to their own bosoms, and Frost, the
cormorant, will grab it all, since June disdains the proffered gift,
and will not touch them with her tender lips. The money-plants are
growing pale, and biting off their finger-tips with impatience. The
marigold whispers his suspicion over to the balsam-buds, and neither
ventures to make a move, quite sure there is something wrong. The
scarlet tassel-flower utterly refuses to unfold his brave plumes. The
Zinnias look up a moment, shuddering with cold chills, conclude there
is no good in hurrying, and then just pull their brown blankets around
them, turn over in their beds, and go to sleep again. The
morning-glories rub their eyes, and are but half awake, for all their
royal name. The Canterbury-bells may be chiming velvet peals down in
their dark cathedrals, but no clash nor clangor nor faintest echo
ripples up into my Garden World. Not a bee drones his drowsy song
among the flowers, for there are no flowers there. One venturesome
little phlox dared the cold winds, and popped up his audacious head,
but his pale, puny face shows how near he is to being frozen to death.
The poor birds are shivering in their nests. They sing a little, just
to keep up their spirits, and hop about to preserve their circulation,
and capture a bewildered bug or two, but I don't believe there is an
egg anywhere round. Not only the owl, but the red-breast, and the
oriole, and the blue-jay, for all his feathers, is a-cold. Nothing
flourishes but witch-grass and canker-worms. Where is June?--the
bright and beautiful, the warm and clear and balm-breathing June, with
her matchless, deep, intense sky, and her sunshine, that cleaves into
your heart, and breaks up all the winter there? What are these sleety
fogs about? Go back into the January thaw, where you belong! What
have the chill rains, and the raw winds, and the dismal, leaden clouds,
and all these flannels and furs to do with June, the perfect June of
hope and beauty and utter joy? Where is the June? Has she lost her way
among the narrow, interminable defiles of your crooked old city
streets? Go out and find her! You do not want her there. No blade
nor blossom will spring from your dingy brick, nor your dull, dead
stone, though you prison her there for a thousand years of wandering.
Take her by the hand tenderly, and bid her forth into the waiting
country, which will give her a queenly reception, and laurels worth the
wearing. Have you fallen in love with her--on the Potomac, O soldiers?
Are you wooing her with honeyed words on the bloody soil of Virginia?
Is she tranced by your glittering sword-shine in ransomed Tennessee?
Is she floating on a lotus-leaf in Florida lagoons? Has she drunk
Nepenthe in the orange-groves? Is she chasing golden apples under the
magnolias? Are you toying with the tangles of her hair in the bright
sea-foam? O, rouse her from her trance, loose the fetters from her
lovely limbs, and speed her to our Northern skies, that moan her long
delay.
Or is she frightened by the thunders of the cannonade sounding from
shore to shore, and wakening the wild echoes? Does she fear to breast
our bristling bayonets? Is she stifled by the smoke of powder? Is she
crouching down Caribbean shores, terror-stricken and pallid? Sweet
June, fear not! The flash of loyal steel will only light you along
your Northern road. Beauty and innocence have nothing to dread from the
sword a patriot wields. The storm that rends the heavens will make
earth doubly fair. Your pathway shall lie over Delectable Mountains,
and through vinelands of Beulah. Come quickly, tread softly, and from
your bountiful bosom scatter seeds as you come, that daisies and
violets may softly shine, and sweetly twine with the amaranth and
immortelle that spring already from heroes' hearts buried in soldiers'
graves.
"But there is no use in placarding her," said Halicarnassus. "We shall
have no warm weather till the eclipse is over."
"So ho!" I said. "Having exhausted every other pretext for delay, you
bring out an eclipse! and pray when is this famous affair to come off?"
"Tomorrow if the weather prove favorable, if not, on the first fair
night."
Then indeed I set my house in order. Here was something definite and
trustworthy. First an eclipse, then a book, and yet I pitied the moon
as I walked home that night. She came up the heavens so round and
radiant, so glorious in her majesty, so confident in her strength, so
sure of triumphal march across the shining sky; not knowing that a
great black shadow loomed right athwart her path to swallow her up.
She never dreamed that all her royal beauty should pass behind a pall,
that all her glory should be demeaned by pitiless eclipse, and her dome
of delight become the valley of humiliation! Is there no help? I said.
Can no hand lead her gently another way? Can no voice warn her of the
black shadow that lies in ambuscade? None. Just as the young girl
leaves her tender home, and goes fearless to her future,--to the future
which brings sadness for her smiling, and patience for her hope, and
pain for her bloom, and the cold requital of kindness, or the
unrequital of coldness for her warmth of love, so goes the moon,
unconscious and serene, to meet her fate. But at least I will watch
with her. Trundle up to the window here, old lounge! you are almost as
good as a grandmother. Steady there! broken-legged table. You have
gone limping ever since I knew you; don't fail me tonight. Shine
softly, Kerosena, next of kin to the sun, true monarch of mundane
lights! calmly superior to the flickering of all the fluids, and the
ghastliness of all the gases, though it must be confessed you don't
hold out half as long as you used when first your yellow banner was
unfurled. Shine softly tonight, and light my happy feet through the
Walden woods, along the Walden shores, where a philosopher sits in
solitary state. He shall keep me awake by the Walden shore till the
moon and the shadow meet. How tranquil sits the philosopher, how
grandly rings the man! Here, in his homespun house, the squirrels
click under his feet, the woodchucks devour his beans, and the loon
laughs on the lake. Here rich men come, and cannot hide their lankness
and their poverty. Here poor men come, and their gold shines through
their rags. Hither comes the poet, and the house is too narrow for
their thoughts, and the rough walls ring with lusty laughter. O happy
Walden wood and woodland lake, did you thrill through all your luminous
aisles and all your listening shores for the man that wandered there?
Is it begun? Not yet. The kitchen clock has but just struck eleven,
and my watch lacks ten minutes of that. What if the astronomers made a
mistake in their calculations, and the almanacs are wrong, and the
eclipse shall not come off? Would it be strange? Would it not be
stranger if it were not so? How can a being, standing on one little
ball, spinning forever around and around among millions of other balls
larger and smaller, breathlessly the same endless waltz,--how can he
trace out their paths, and foretell their conjunctions? How can a puny
creature fastened down to one world, able to lift himself but a few
paltry feet above, to dig but a few paltry feet below its surface,
utterly unable to divine what shall happen to himself in the next
moment,--how can he thrust out his hand into inconceivable space, and
anticipate the silent future? How can his feeble eye detect the quiver
of a world? How can his slender strength weigh the mountains in
scales, and the bills in a balance? And yet it is. Wonderful is the
Power that framed all these spheres, and sent them on their great
errands; but more wonderful still the Power that gave to finite mind
its power, to stand on one little point, and sweep the whole circle of
the skies. Almost as marvelous is it that man, being man, can divine
the universe, as that God, being God, could devise it. Cycles of years
go by. Suns and moons and stars tread their mysterious rounds, but
steady eyes are following them into the awful distances, steady hands
are marking their eternal courses. Their multiplied motions shall yet
be resolved into harmony, and so the music of the spheres shall chime
with the angels' song, "Glory to God in the highest!"
Is it begun? Not yet.
No wonder that eclipses were a terror to men before Science came
queening it through the universe, compelling all these fearful sights
and great signs into her triumphal train, and commanding us to be no
longer afraid of our own shadow. The sure and steadfast Moon,
shuddering from the fullness of her splendor into wild and ghostly
darkness, might well wake strange apprehensions. She is reeling in
convulsive agony. She is sickening and swooning in the death-struggle.
The principalities and powers of darkness, the eternal foes of men, are
working their baleful spell with success to cast the sweet Moon from
her path, and force her to work woe and disaster upon the earth. Some
fell monster, roaming through the heavens, seeking whom he may
devour,--some dragon, "monstrous, horrible, and waste," whom no
Redcrosse Knight shall pierce with his trenchand blade, is swallowing
with giant gulps the writhing victim. Blow shrill and loud your bugle
blasts! Beat with fierce clangor your brazen cymbals! Push up wild
shrieks and groans, and horrid cries,
"That all the woods may answer, and your echoes ring,"
and the foul fiend perchance be scared away by deafening din.
O, sad for those who lived before the ghouls were disinherited; for
whom the woods and waters, and the deep places, were peopled with
mighty, mysterious foes; who saw evil spirits in the earth forces, and
turned her gold into consuming fire. For us, later born, Science has
dived into the caverns, and scaled the heights, and fathomed the
depths, forcing from coy yet willing Nature the solution of her own
problems, and showing us everywhere, GOD. We are not children of fate,
trembling at the frown of fairies and witches and gnomes, but the
children of our Father. If we ascend up into heaven, he is there. If
we take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of
the sea, even there shall his hand lead, and his right hand hold.
Is it begun? Not--well, I don't know, though. Something seems to be
happening up in the northwest corner. Certainly, a bit of that round
disk has been shaved off. I will wait five minutes. Yes, the battle
is begun. The shadow advances. The moon yields. But there are
watchers in the heaven as well as in the earth. There is sympathy in
the skies. Up floats an argosy of compassionate clouds, and fling
their fleecy veil around the pallid moon, and bear her softly on their
snowy bosoms. But she moves on, impelled. She sweeps beyond the sad
clouds. Deeper and deeper into the darkness. Closer and closer the
Shadow clutches her in his inexorable arms. Wan and weird becomes her
face, wrathful and wild the astonished winds; and for all her science
and her faith, the Earth trembles in the night, and a hush of awe
quivers through the angry, agitated air. On, still on, till the fair
and smiling moon is but a dull and tawny orb, with no beauty to be
desired; on, still on, till even that cold, coppery light wanes into
sullen darkness. Whether it is a cloud kindly hiding the humbled
queen, or whether the queen is indeed merged in the abyss of the
Shadow, I cannot tell, and it is dismal waiting to see. The wildness is
gone with the moon, and there is nothing left but a dark night. I
wonder how long before she will reappear? Are the people in the moon
staring through an eclipse of the Sun? I should like to see her come
out again, and clothe herself in splendor. I think I will go back to
Walden. Ah! even my philosopher, aping Homer, nods. It shimmers a
little, on the lake, among the mountains--of the moon.
I declare! I believe I have been asleep. What of it? It is just as
well. I have no doubt the moon will come out again all right,--which
is more than I shall do if I go on in this way. I feel already as if
the top of my head was coming off. Once I was very unhappy, and I sat
up all night to make the most of it. It was many hundred years ago,
when I was younger than I am now, and did not know that misery was not
a thing to be caressed and cosseted and coddled, but a thing to be
taken, neck and heels, and turned out doors. So I sat up to revel in
the ecstasy of woe. I went along swimmingly into the little hours, but
by two o'clock there was a great sameness about it, and I grew
desperately sleepy. I was not going to give it up, however, so I
shocked myself into a torpid animation with a cold bath, it being
mid-winter, and betwixt bath and bathos, managed to keep agoing till
daylight. Once since then I was very happy, and could not keep my eyes
shut. Those are the only two times I ever sat up all night, and, on
the whole, I think I will go to bed; wherefore, O people on the earth,
marking eagerly the moon's eclipse, and O people on the moon, crowding
your craggy hills to see an eclipse of the sun, Good night!
Then the lost June came back. Frost melted out of the air, summer
melted in, and my book beckoned me onward with a commanding gesture.
Consequently I took my trunk, Halicarnassus his cane, and we started on
our travels. But the shadow of the eclipse hung over us still. An
evil omen came in the beginning. Just as I was stepping into the car, I
observed a violent smoke issuing from under it. I started back in
alarm.
"They are only getting up steam," said Halicarnassus. "Always do, when
they start."
"I know better!" I answered briskly, for there was no time to be
circumlocutional. "They don't get up steam under the cars."
"Why not? Bet a sixpence you couldn't get Uncle Cain's Dobbin out of
his jog-trot without building a fire under him."
"I know that wheel is on fire," I said, not to be turned from the
direct and certain line of assertion into the winding ways of argument.
"No matter," replied Halicarnassus, conceding everything, "we are
insured."
Upon the strength of which consolatory information I went in. By and by
a man entered and took a seat in front of us. "The box is all afire,"
chuckled he to his neighbor, as if it were a fine joke. By and by
several people who had been looking out of the windows drew in their
heads, went into the next car.
"What do you suppose they did that for?" I asked Halicarnassus.
"More aristocratical. Belong to old families. This is a new car,
don't you see? We are parvenus."
"Nothing of the sort," I rejoined. "This car is on fire, and they have
gone into the next one so as not to be burned up."
"They are not going to write books, and can afford to run away from
adventures."
"But suppose I am burned up in my adventure?"
"Obviously, then, your book will end in smoke."
I ceased to talk, for I was provoked at his indifference. I leave
every impartial mind to judge for itself whether the circumstances were
such as to warrant composure. To be sure, somebody said the car was to
be left at Jeru; but Jeru was eight miles away, and any quantity of
mischief might be done before we reached it,--if indeed we were not
prevented from reaching it altogether. It was a mere question of
dynamics. Would dry wood be able to hold its own against a raging fire
for half an hour? Of course the conductor thought it would; but even
conductors are not infallible; and you may imagine how comfortable it
was to sit and know that a fire was in full blast beneath you, and to
look down every few minutes expecting to see the flames forking up
under your feet. I confess I was not without something like a hope
that one tongue of the devouring element would flare up far enough to
give Halicarnassus a start; but it did not. No casualty occurred. We
reached Jeru in safety; but that does not prove that there was no
danger, or that indifference was anything but the most foolish
hardihood. If our burning car had been in mid-ocean, serenity would
have been sublimity, but to stay in the midst of peril when two steps
would take one out of it is idiocy. And that there was peril is
conclusively shown by the fact that the very next day the Eastern
Railroad Depot took fire and was burned to the ground. I have in my
own mind no doubt that it was a continuation of the same fire, and if
we had stayed in the car much longer, we should have shared the same
fate.
We found Jeru to be a pleasant city, with only one fault: the
inhabitants will crowd into a car before passengers can get out;
consequently the heads of the two columns collide near the car-door,
and there is a general choke. Otherwise Jeru is a delightful city. It
is famous for its beautiful women. Its railroad-station is a
magnificent piece of architecture. Its men are retired East-India
merchants. Everybody in Jeru is rich and has real estate. The houses
in Jeru are three stories high and face on the Common. People in Jeru
are well-dressed and well-bred, and they all came over in the Mayflower.
We stopped in Jeru five minutes.
When we were ready to continue our travels, Halicarnassus seceded into
the smoking-car, and the engine was shrieking off its inertia, a small
boy, laboring under great agitation, hurried in, darted up to me, and,
thrusting a pinchbeck ring with a pink glass in it into my face,
exclaimed, in a hoarse whisper,--
"A beautiful ring, ma'am! I've just picked it up. Can't stop to find
the owner. Worth a dollar, ma'am; but if you'll give me fifty cents--"
"Boy!"
I rose fiercely, convulsively, in my seat, drew one long breath, but
whether he thought I was going to kill him,--I dare say I looked
it,--or whether he saw a sheriff behind, or a phantom gallows before, I
know not; but without waiting for the thunderbolt to strike, he rushed
from the car as precipitately as he had rushed in. I WAS angry,--not
because I was to have been cheated, for I been repeatedly and
atrociously cheated and only smiled, but because the rascal dared
attempt on me such a threadbare, ragged, shoddy trick as that. Do I
LOOK like a rough-hewn, unseasoned backwoodsman? Have I the air of
never having read a newspaper? Is there a patent innocence of
eye-teeth in my demeanor? O Jeru! Jeru! Somewhere in your virtuous
bosom you are nourishing a viper, for I have felt his fangs. Woe unto
you, if you do not strangle him before he develops into mature
anacondaism! In point of natural history I am not sure that vipers do
grow up anacondas, but for the purposes of moral philosophy the
development theory answers perfectly well.
In Boston we had three hours to spare; so we sent our luggage--that is,
my trunk--to the Worcester Depot, and walked leisurely ourselves. I
had a little shopping to do, to complete my outfit for the journey,--a
very little shopping,--only a nightcap or two. Ordinarily such a thing
is a matter of small moment, but in my case the subject bad swollen
into unnatural dimensions. Nightcaps are not generally considered
healthy,--at least not by physicians. Nature has given to the head its
sufficient and appropriate covering, the hair. Anything more than this
injures the head, by confining the heat, preventing the soothing,
cooling contact of air, and so deranging the circulation of the blood.
Therefore I have always heeded the dictates of Nature, which I have
supposed to be to brush out the hair thoroughly at night and let it
fly. But there are serious disadvantages connected with this course.
For Nature will be sure to whisk the hair away from your ears where you
want it, and into your eyes where you don't want it, besides crowning
you with magnificent disorder in the morning. But as I have always
believed that no evil exists without its remedy, I had long been
exercising my inventive genius in attempts to produce a head-gear which
should at once protect the ears, confine the hair, and let the skull
alone. I regret to say that my experiments were an utter failure,
notwithstanding the amount of science and skill brought to bear upon
them. One idea lay at the basis of all my endeavors. Every
combination, however elaborate or intricate, resolved into its simplest
elements, consisted of a pair of rosettes laterally to keep the ears
warm, a bag posteriorly to put the hair into, and some kind of a string
somewhere to hold the machine together. Every possible shape into
which lace or muslin or sheeting could be cut or plaited or sewed or
twisted, into which crewel or cord could be crocheted or netted or
tatted, I make bold to declare was essayed, until things came to such a
pass that every odd bit of dry good lying round the house was, in the
absence of any positive testimony on the subject, assumed to be one of
my nightcaps; an utterly baseless assumption, because my achievements
never went so far as concrete capuality, but stopped short in the later
stages of abstract idealism. However, prejudice is stronger than
truth; and, as I said, every fragment of every fabric that could not
give an account of itself was charged with being a nightcap till it was
proved to be a dish-cloth or a cart-rope. I at length surrendered at
discretion, and remembered that somewhere in my reading I had met with
exquisite lace caps, and I did not that from the combined fineness and
strength of their material they might answer the purpose, even if in
form they should not be everything that was desirable,--and I
determined to ascertain, if possible, whether such things existed
anywhere out of poetry.
As you perceive, therefore, my Boston shopping was not everyday
trading. It was to mark the abandonment of an old and the inauguration
of a new line of policy. Thus it was with no ordinary interest that I
looked carefully at all the shops, and when I found one that seemed to
hold out a possibility of nightcaps, I went in. Halicarnassus obeyed
the hint which I pricked into him with the point of my parasol, and
stopped outside. The one place in the world where a man has no
business to be is the inside of a dry-goods shop. He never looks and
never is so big and bungling as there. A woman skips from silk to
muslin, from muslin to ribbons, from ribbons to table-cloths, with the
grace and agility of a bird. She glides in and out among crowds of her
sex, steers sweepingly clear of all obstacles, and emerges triumphant.
A man enters, and immediately becomes all boots and elbows. He needs
as much room to turn round in as the English iron-clad Warrior, and it
takes him about as long. He treads on all the flounces, runs against
all the clerks, knocks over all the children, and is generally
underfoot. If he gets an idea into his head, a Nims's battery cannot
dislodge it. You thought of buying a shawl; but a thousand
considerations, in the shape of raglans, cloaks, talmas, and
pea-jackets, induce you to modify your views. He stands by you. He
hears all your inquiries and all the clerk's suggestions. The whole
process of your reasoning is visible to his naked eye. He sees the
sack or visite or cape put upon your shoulders and you walking off in
it, and when you are half-way home, he will mutter, in stupid
amazement, "I thought you were going to buy a shawl!" It is enough to
drive one wild.
No! Halicarnassus is absurd and mulish in many things, but he knows I
will not be hampered with him when I am shopping, and he obeys the
smallest hint, and stops outside.
To be sure he puts my temper on the rack by standing with his hands in
his pockets, or by looking meek, or likely as not peering into the
shop-door after me with great staring eyes and parted lips; and this is
the most provoking of all. If there is anything vulgar, slipshod, and
shiftless, it is a man lounging about with his hands in his pockets.
If you have paws, stow them away; but if you are endowed with hands,
learn to carry them properly, or else cut them off. Nor can I abide a
man's looking as if he were under control. I wish him to BE
submissive, but I don't wish him to LOOK so. He shall do just as he is
bidden, but he shall carry himself like the man and monarch he was made
to be. Let him stay where he is put, yet not as if he were put there,
but as if he had taken his position deliberately. But, of all things,
to have a man act as if he were a clod just emerged for the first time
from his own barnyard! Upon this occasion, however, I was too much
absorbed in my errand to note anybody's demeanor, and I threaded
straightway the crowd of customers, went up to the counter, and
inquired in a clear voice,--
"Have you lace nightcaps?"
The clerk looked at me with a troubled, bewildered glance, and made no
reply. I supposed he had not understood me, and repeated the question.
Then he answered, dubiously,--
"We have breakfast-caps."
It was my turn to look bewildered. What had I to do with
breakfast-caps? What connection was there between my question and his
answer? What field was there for any further inquiry? "Have you
ox-bows?" imagine a farmer to ask. "We have rainbows," says the
shopman. "Have you cameo-pins?" inquires the elegant Mrs. Jenkins.
"We have linchpins." "Have you young apple trees?" asks the
nursery-man. "We have whiffletrees." If I had wanted breakfast-caps,
shouldn't I have asked for breakfast-caps? Or do the Boston people
take their breakfast at one o'clock in the morning? I concluded that
the man was demented, and marched out of the shop. When I laid the
matter before Halicarnassus, the following interesting colloquy took
place.
I. "What do you suppose it meant?"
H. "He took you for a North American Indian."
I. "What do you mean?"
H. "He did not understand your patois."
I. "What patois?"
H. "Your squaw dialect. You should have asked for a bonnet de nuit."
I. "Why?"
H. "People never talk about nightcaps in good society."
I. "Oh!"
I was very warm, and Halicarnassus said he was tired; so he went into a
restaurant and ordered strawberries,--that luscious fruit, quivering on
the border-land of ambrosia and nectar.
"Doubtless," says honest, quaint, delightful Isaac,--and he never spoke
a truer word,--"doubtless God might have made a better berry than a
strawberry, but doubtless God never did."
The bill of fare rated their excellence at fifteen cents.
"Not unreasonable," I pantomimed.
"Not if I pay for them," replied Halicarnassus.
Then we sat and amused ourselves after the usual brilliant fashion of
people who are waiting in hotel parlors, railroad-stations, and
restaurants. We surveyed the gilding and the carpet and the mirrors
and the curtains. We hazarded profound conjectures touching the people
assembled. We studied the bill of fare as if it contained the secret
of our army's delay upon the Potomac, and had just concluded that the
first crop of strawberries was exhausted, and they were waiting for the
second crop to grow, when Hebe hove in sight with her nectared ambrosia
in a pair of cracked, browny-white saucers, with browny-green silver
spoons. I poured out what professed to be cream, but proved very
low-spirited milk, in which a few disheartened strawberries appeared
rari nantes. I looked at them in dismay. Then curiosity smote me, and
I counted them. Just fifteen.
"Cent a piece," said Halicarnassus.
I was not thinking of the cent, but I had promised myself a feast; and
what is a feast, susceptible of enumeration? Cleopatra was right.
"That love"--and the same is true of strawberries--"is beggarly which
can be reckoned." Infinity alone is glory.
"Perhaps the quality will atone for the quantity," said Halicarnassus,
scooping up at least half of his at one "arm-sweep."
"How do they taste?" I asked.
"Rather coppery," he answered.
"It is the spoons!" I exclaimed, in a fright. "They are German silver!
You will be poisoned!" and knocked his out of his hand with such
instinctive, sudden violence that it flew to the other side of the
room, where an old gentleman sat over his newspaper and dinner.
He started, dropped his newspaper, and looked around in a maze.
Halicarnassus behaved beautifully,--I will give him the credit of it.
He went on with my spoon and his strawberries as unconcernedly as if
nothing had happened. I was conscious that I blushed, but my face was
in the shade, and nobody else knew it; and to this day I've no doubt
the old gentleman would have marvelled what sent that mysterious spoon
rattling against his table and whizzing between his boots, had not
Halicarnassus, when the uproar was over, conceived it his duty to go
and pick up the spoon and apologize for the accident, lest the
gentleman should fancy an intentional rudeness. Partly to reward him
for his good behavior, partly because I never did think it worth while
to make two bites of a cherry, and partly because I did not fancy being
poisoned, I gave my fifteen berries to him. He devoured them with
evident relish.
"Does my spoon taste as badly as yours?" I asked.
"My spoon?" inquired he, innocently.
"Yes. You said before that they tasted coppery."
"I don't think," replied this unprincipled man,--"I don't think it was
the flavor of the spoon so much as of the coin which each berry
represented."
If we could only have been at home!
I never made a more unsatisfactory investment in my life than the one I
made in that restaurant. I felt as if I had been swindled, and I said
so to Halicarnassus. He remarked that there was plenty of cream and
sugar. I answered curtly, that the cream was chiefly water, and the
sugar chiefly flour; but if they had been Simon Pure himself, was it
anything but an aggravation of the offence to have them with nothing to
eat them on?
"You might do as they do in France,--carry away what you don't eat,
seeing you pay for it."
"A pocketful of milk and water would be both delightful and
serviceable; but I might take the sugar," I added, with a sudden
thought, upsetting the sugar-bowl into a "Boston Journal" which we had
bought in the train. "I can never use it, but it will be a consolation
to reflect on."
Halicarnassus, who, though fertile in evil conceptions, lacks nerve to
put them into execution, was somewhat startled at this sudden change of
base. He had no idea that I should really act upon his suggestion, but
I did. I bundled the sugar into my pocket with a grim satisfaction;
and Halicarnassus paid his thirty cents, looking--and feeling, as he
afterwards told me--as if a policeman's grip were on his shoulders. If
any restaurant in Boston recollects having been astonished at any time
during the summer of 1862 by an unaccountably empty sugar-bowl, I take
this occasion to explain the phenomenon. I gave the sugar afterwards to
a little beggar-girl, with a dime for a brace of lemons, and shook off
the dust of my feet against Boston at the "B. & W. R. R. D."
Boston is a beautiful city, situated on a peninsula at the head of
Massachusetts Bay. It has three streets: Cornhill, Washington, and
Beacon Streets. It has a Common and a Frog-pond, and many sprightly
squirrels. Its streets are straight, and cross each other like lines
on a chess-board. It has a state-house, which is the finest edifice in
the world or out of it. It has one church, the Old South, which was
built, as its name indicates, before the Proclamation of Emancipation
was issued. It has one bookstore, a lofty and imposing pile, of the
Egyptian style (and date) of architecture, on the corner of Washington
and School Streets. It has one magazine, the "Atlantic Monthly," one
daily newspaper, the "Boston Journal," one religious weekly, the
"Congregationalist," and one orator, whose name is Train, a model of
chaste, compact, and classic elegance. In politics, it was a Webster
Whig, till Whig and Webster both went down, when it fell apart waited
for something to turn up,--which proved to be drafting. Boston is
called the Athens of America. Its men are solid. Its women wear their
bonnets to bed, their nightcaps to breakfast, and talk Greek at dinner.
I spent two hours and half in Boston, and I know.
We had a royal progress from Boston to Fontdale. Summer lay on the
shining hills, and scattered benedictions. Plenty smiled up from a
thousand fertile fields. Patient oxen, with their soft, deep eyes,
trod heavily over mines of greater than Indian wealth. Kindly cows
stood in the grateful shade of cathedral elms, and gave thanks to God
in their dumb, fumbling way. Motherly, sleepy, stupid sheep lay on the
plains, little lambs rollicked out their short-lived youth around them,
and no premonition floated over from the adjoining pea-patch, nor any
misgiving of approaching mutton marred their happy heyday. Straight
through the piny forests, straight past the vocal orchards, right in
among the robins and the jays and the startled thrushes, we dashed
inexorable, and made harsh dissonance in the wild-wood orchestra; but
not for that was the music hushed, nor did one color fade. Brooks
leaped in headlong chase down the furrowed sides of gray old rocks, and
glided whispering beneath the sorrowful willows. Old trees renewed
their youth in the slight, tenacious grasp of many a tremulous tendril,
and, leaping lightly above their topmost heights, vine laughed to vine,
swaying dreamily in the summer air; and not a vine nor brook nor hill
nor forest but sent up a sweet-smelling incense to its Maker. Not an
ox or cow or lamb or bird living its own dim life but lent its charm of
unconscious grace to the great picture that unfolded itself mile after
mile, in ever fresher loveliness to ever unsated eyes. Well might the
morning stars sing together, and all the sons of God shout for joy,
when first this grand and perfect world swung free from its moorings,
flung out its spotless banner, and sailed majestic down the thronging
skies. Yet, though but once God spoke the world to life, the miracle
of creation is still incomplete. New every spring-time, fresh every
summer, the earth comes forth as a bride adorned for her husband. Not
only in the dawn of our history, but now in the full brightness of its
noonday, may we hear the voice of the Lord walking in the garden. I
look out upon the gray degraded fields left naked of the snow, and
inwardly ask, Can these dry bones live again? And while the question
is yet trembling on my lips, lo! a Spirit breathes upon the earth, and
beauty thrills into bloom. Who shall lack faith in man's redemption,
when every year the earth is redeemed by unseen hands, and death is
lost in resurrection?
To Fontdale sitting among her beautiful meadows we are borne swiftly
on. There we must tarry for the night, for I will not travel in the
dark when I can help it. I love it. There is no solitude in the
world, or at least I have never felt any, like standing alone in the
doorway of the rear car on a dark night, and rushing on through the
darkness,--darkness, darkness everywhere, and if one could be sure of
rushing on till daylight doth appear! But with the frightful and not
remote possibility of bringing up in a crash and being buried under a
general huddle, one prefers daylight. You may not be able to get out
of the huddle even by daylight; but you will at least know where you
are, if there is anything of you left. So at Fontdale, Halicarnassus
branches off temporarily on a business errand, and I stop for the night
a-cousining.
You object to this? Some people do. For my part, I like it. You say
you will not turn your own house or your friend's house into a hotel.
If people wish to see you, let them come and make a visit; if you wish
to see them, you will go and make them one; but this touch and
go,--what is it worth? O foolish Galatians! much every way. For don't
you see, supposing the people are people you don't like, how much
better it is to have them come and sleep or dine and be gone than to
have them before your face and eyes for a week? An ill that is
temporary is tolerable. You could entertain the Evil One himself, if
you were sure he would go away after dinner. The trouble about him is
not so much that he comes as that he won't go. He hangs around. If
you once open your door to him, there is no getting rid of him; and
some of his followers, it must be confessed, are just like him. You
must resist them both, or they will never flee. But if they do flee
after a day's tarry, do not complain. You protest against turning your
house into a hotel. Why, the hotelry is the least irksome part of the
whole business, when your guests are uninteresting. It is not the
supper or the bed that costs, but keeping people going after supper is
over and before bedtime is come. Never complain, if you have nothing
worse to do than to feed or house your guests for a day or an hour.
On the other hand, if they are people you like, how much better to have
them come so than not to at all! People cannot often make long
visits,--people that are worth anything,--people who use life; and they
are the only ones that are worth anything. And if you cannot get your
good things in the lump, are you going to refuse them altogether? By
no means. You are going to take them by driblets, and if you will only
be sensible and not pout, but keep your tin pan right side up, you will
find that golden showers will drizzle through all your life. So, with
never a nugget in your chest, you shall die rich. If you can stop
over-night with your friend, you have no sand-grain, but a very
respectable boulder. For a night is infinite. Daytime is well enough
for business, but it is little worth for happiness. You sit down to a
book, to a picture, to a friend, and the first you know it is time to
get dinner, or time to eat it, or time for the train, or you must put
out your dried apples, or set the bread to rising, or something breaks
in impertinently and chokes you at flood-tide. But the night has no
end. Everything is done but that which you would be forever doing.
The curtains are drawn, the lamp is lighted and veiled into exquisite
soft shadowiness. All the world is far off. All its din and dole
strike into the bank of darkness that envelops you and are lost to your
tranced sense. In all the world are only your friend and you, and then
you strike out your oars, silver-sounding, into the shoreless night.
But the night comes to an end, you say. No, it does not. It is you
that come to an end. You grow sleepy, clod that you are. But as you
don't think, when you begin, that you ever shall grow sleepy, it is
just the same as if you never did. For you have no foreshadow of an
inevitable termination to your rapture, and so practically your night
has no limit. It is fastened at one end to the sunset, but the other
end floats off into eternity. And there really is no abrupt
termination. You roll down the inclined plane of your social happiness
into the bosom of another happiness,--sleep. Sleep for the sleepy is
bliss just as truly as society to the lonely. What in the distance
would have seemed Purgatory, once reached, is Paradise, and your
happiness is continuous. Just as it is in mending. Short-sighted,
superficial, unreflecting people have a way--which in time fossilizes
into a principle--of mending everything as soon as it comes up from the
wash,--a very unthrifty, uneconomical habit, if you use the words
thrift and economy in the only way in which they ought to be used,
namely, as applied to what is worth economizing. Time, happiness,
life, these are the only things to be thrifty about. But I see people
working and worrying over quince-marmalade and tucked petticoats and
embroidered chair-covers, things that perish with the using and leave
the user worse than they found him. This I call waste and wicked
prodigality. Life is too short to permit us to fret about matters of
no importance. Where these things can minister to the mind and heart,
they are a part of the soul's furniture; but where they only pamper the
appetite or the vanity, or any foolish and hurtful lust, they are
foolish and hurtful. Be thrifty of comfort. Never allow an
opportunity for cheer, for pleasure, for intelligence, for benevolence,
for kind of good, to go unimproved. Consider seriously whether the
syrup of your preserves or juices of your own soul will do the most to
serve your race. It may be that they are compatible,--that the
concoction of the one shall provide the ascending sap of the other; but
if it is not so, if one must be sacrificed, do not hesitate a moment as
to which it shall be. If a peach does not become sweetmeat, it will
become something, it will not stay a withered, unsightly peach; but for
souls there is no transmigration out of fables. Once a soul, forever a
soul,--mean or mighty, shrivelled or full, it is for you to say.
Money, land, luxury, so far as they are money, land, and luxury, are
worthless. It is only as fast and as far as they are turned into life
that they acquire value.
So you are thriftless when you eagerly seize the first opportunity to
fritter away your time over old clothes. You precipitate yourself
unnecessarily against a disagreeable thing. For you are not going to
put your stockings on. Perhaps you will not need your buttons for a
week, and in a week you may have passed beyond the jurisdiction of
buttons. But even if you should not, let the buttons and the holes
alone all the same. For, first, the pleasant and profitable thing
which you will do instead is a funded capital, which will roll you up a
perpetual interest; and secondly, the disagreeable duty is forever
abolished. I say forever, because, when you have gone without the
button awhile, the inconvenience it occasions will reconcile you to the
necessity of sewing it on,--will even go further, and make it a
positive relief amounting to positive pleasure. Besides, every time
you use it, for a long while after, you will have a delicious sense of
satisfaction, such as accompanies the sudden complete cessation of a
dull, continuous pain. Thus what was at best characterless routine,
and most likely an exasperation, is turned into actual delight, and
adds to the sum of life. This is thrift. This is economy. But, alas!
few people understand the art of living. They strive after system,
wholeness, buttons, and neglect the weightier matters of the higher law.
--I wonder how I got here, or how I am to get back again. I started
for Fontdale, and I find myself in a mending-basket. As I know no good
in tracing the same road back, we may as well strike a bee-line and
begin new at Fontdale.
We stopped at Fontdale a-cousining. I have a veil, a beautiful--HAVE,
did I say? Alas! Troy WAS. But I must not anticipate--a beautiful
veil of brown tissue, none of your woolleny, gruff fabrics, fit only
for penance, but a silken, gossamery cloud, soft as a baby's cheek.
Yet everybody fleers at it. Everybody has a joke about it. Everybody
looks at it, and holds it out at arms' length, and shakes it, and makes
great eyes at it, and says, "What in the world--" and ends with a huge,
bouncing laugh. Why? One is ashamed of human nature at being forced
to confess. Because, to use a Gulliverism, it is longer by the breadth
of my nail than any of its contemporaries. In fact, it is two yards
long. That is all. Halicarnassus fired the first gun at it by saying
that its length was to enable one end of it to remain at home while the
other end went with me, so that neither of us should get lost. This is
an allusion to a habit which I and my property have of finding
ourselves individually and collectively left in the lurch. After this
initial shot, everybody considered himself at liberty to let off his
rusty old blunderbuss, and there was a constant peppering. But my veil
never lowered its colors nor curtailed its resources. Alas! what
ridicule and contumely failed to effect, destiny accomplished.
Softness and plenitude are no shields against the shafts of fate.
I went into the station waiting-room to write a note. I laid my
bonnet, my veil, my packages upon the table. I wrote my note. I went
away. The next morning, when I would have arrayed myself to resume my
journey, there was no veil. I remembered that I had taken it into the
station the night before, and that I had not taken it out. At the
station we inquired of the waiting-woman concerning it. It is as much
as your life is worth to ask these people about lost articles. They
take it for granted at the first blush that you mean to accuse them of
stealing. "Have you seen a brown veil lying about anywhere?" asked
Crene, her sweet bird-voice warbling out from her sweet rose-lips.
"No, I 'a'n't seen nothin' of it," says Gnome, with magnificent
indifference.
"It was lost here last night," continues Crene, in a soliloquizing
undertone, pushing investigating glances beneath the sofas.
"I do' know nothin' about it. _I_ 'a'n't took it"; and the Gnome
tosses her head back defiantly. "I seen the lady when she was
a-writin' of her letter, and when she went out ther' wa'n't nothin'
left on the table but a hangkerchuf, and that wa'n't hern. I do' know
nothin' about it, nor I 'a'n't seen nothin' of it."
O no, my Gnome, you knew nothing of it; you did not take it. But since
no one accused or even suspected you, why could you not have been less
aggressive and more sympathetic in your assertions? But we will plough
no longer in that field. The ploughshare has struck against a rock and
grits, denting its edge in vain. My veil is gone,--my ample, historic,
heroic veil. There is a woman in Fontdale who breathes air filtered
through--I will not say STOLEN tissue, but certainly through tissue
which was obtained without rendering its owner any fair equivalent.
Does not every breeze that softly stirs its fluttering folds say to
her, "O friend, this veil is not yours, not yours," and still
sighingly, "not yours! Up among the northern hills, yonder towards the
sunset, sits the owner, sorrowful, weeping, wailing"? I believe I am
wading out into the Sally Waters of Mother Goosery; but, prose or
poetry, somewhere a woman,--and because nobody of taste could
surreptitiously possess herself of my veil, I have no doubt that she
cut it incontinently into two equal parts, and gave one to her sister,
and there are two women,--nay, since niggardly souls have no sense of
grandeur, and will shave down to microscopic dimensions, it is every
way probable that she divided it into three unequal parts, and took
three quarters of a yard for herself, three quarters for her sister,
and gave the remaining half-yard to her daughter, and that at very
moment there are two women and a little girl taking their walks abroad
under the silken shadows of my veil! And yet there are people who
profess to disbelieve in total depravity.
Nor did the veil walk away alone. My trunk became imbued with the
spirit of adventure, and branched off on its own account up somewhere
into Vermont. I suppose it would have kept on and reached perhaps the
North Pole by this time, had not Crene's dark eyes,--so pretty to look
at that one instinctively feels they ought not to be good for anything,
if a just impartiality is to be maintained, but they are,--had not
Crene's dark eyes seen it tilting into a baggage-crate, and trundling
off towards the Green Mountains, but too late. Of course there was a
formidable hitch in the programme. A court of justice was improvised
on the car-steps. I was the plaintiff, Crene chief evidence,
baggage-master both defendant and examining-counsel. The case did not
admit of a doubt. There was the little insurmountable check, whose
brazen lips could speak no lie.
"Keep hold of that," whispered Crene, and a yoke of oxen could not have
drawn it from me.
"You are sure you had it marked for Fontdale," says Mr. Baggage-master.
I hold the impracticable check before his eyes in silence.
"Yes, well, it must have gone on to Albany."
"But it went away on that track," says Crene.
"Couldn't have gone on that track. Of course they wouldn't have
carried it away over there just to make it go wrong."
For me, I am easily persuaded and dissuaded. If he had told me that it
must have gone in such a direction, that it was a moral and mental
impossibility should have gone in any other, and have it times enough,
with a certain confidence and contempt of any other contingency, I
should gradually have lost faith in my own eyes, and said, "Well, I
suppose it did." But Crene is not to be asserted into yielding one
inch, and insists that the trunk went to Vermont and not to New York,
and is thoroughly unmanageable. The baggage-master, in anguish of
soul, trots out his subordinates, one after another,--
"Is this the man that wheeled the trunk away? Is this? Is this?"
The brawny-armed fellows hang back, and scowl, and muffle words in a
very suspicious manner, and protest they won't be got into a scrape.
But Crene has no scrape for them. She cannot swear to their identity.
She had eyes only for the trunk.
"Well," says Baggage-man, at his wits' end, "you let me take your
check, and I'll send the trunk on by express, when it comes."
I pity him, and relax my clutch.
"No," whispers Crene; "as long as you have your check, you as good as
have your trunk; but when you give that up, you have nothing. Keep
that till you see your trunk."
My clutch re-tightens.
"At any rate, you can wait till the next train, and see if it doesn't
come back. You'll get to your journey's end just as soon."
"Shall I? Well, I will," compliant as usual.
"No," interposes my good genius again. "Men are always saying that a
woman never goes when she engages to go. She is always a train later
or a train earlier, and you can't meet her."
Pliant to the last touch, I say aloud,--
"No, I must go in this train"; and so I go, trunkless and crestfallen,
to meet Halicarnassus.
It is a dismal day, and Crene, to comfort me, puts into my hands two
books as companions by the way. They are Coventry Patmore's "Angel in
the House," "The Espousals and the Betrothal." I do not approve of
reading in the cars; but without is a dense, white, unvarying fog, and
within my heart it is not clear sunshine. So I turn to my books.
Did any one ever read them before? Somebody wrote a vile review of
them once, and gave the idea of a very puerile, ridiculous,
apron-stringy attempt at poetry. Whoever wrote that notice ought to be
shot, for the books are charming,--pure and homely and householdy, yet
not effeminate. Critics may sneer as much as they choose: it is such
love as Vaughan's that Honorias value. Because a woman's nature is not
proof against deterioration, because a large and long-continued
infusion of gross blood, and perhaps even the monotonous pressure of
rough, pitiless, degrading circumstances, may displace, eat out, rub
off the delicacy of a soul, may change its texture to unnatural
coarseness and scatter ashes for beauty, women do exist, victims rather
than culprits, coarse against their nature, hard, material, grasping,
the saddest sight humanity can see. Such a woman can accept coarse
men. They may come courting on all fours, and she will not be shocked.
But women in the natural state wish men to stand godlike erect, to
tread majestically, and live delicately. Women do not often make an ado
about this. They talk it over among themselves, and take men as they
are. They quietly soften them down, and smooth them out, and polish
them up, and make the best of them, and simply and sedulously shut
their eyes and make believe there isn't any worst, or reason it
away,--a great deal more than I should think they would. But if you
see the qualities that a woman spontaneously loves, the expression, the
tone, the bearing that thoroughly satisfies her self-respect, that not
only secures her acquiescence, but arouses her enthusiasm and commands
her abdication, crucify the flesh, and read Coventry Patmore. Not that
he is the world's great poet, nor Arthur Vaughan the ideal man; but
this I do mean: that the delicacy, the spirituality of his love, the
scrupulous respectfulness of his demeanor, his unfeigned inward
humility, as far removed from servility on the one side as from
assumption on the other, and less the opponent than the offspring of
self-respect, his thorough gentleness, guilelessness, deference, his
manly, unselfish homage, are such qualities, and such alone, as lead
womanhood captive. Listen to me, you rattling, roaring, rollicking
Ralph Roister Doisters, you calm, inevitable Gradgrinds, as smooth, as
sharp, as bright as steel, and as soulless, and you men, whoever,
whatever, and wherever you are, with fibres of rope and nerves of wire,
there is many and many a woman who tolerates you because she finds you,
but there is nothing in her that ever goes out to seek you. Be not
deceived by her placability. "Here he is," she says to herself, "and
something must be done about it. Buried under Ossa and Pelion
somewhere he must be supposed to have a soul, and the sooner he is dug
into the sooner it will be exhumed." So she digs. She would never
have made you, nor of her own free-will elected you; but being made,
such as you are, and on her hands in one way or another, she carves and
chisels, and strives to evoke from the block a breathing statue. She
may succeed so far as that you shall become her Frankenstein, a great,
sad, monstrous, incessant, inevitable caricature of her ideal, the
monument at once of her success and her failure, the object of her
compassion, the intimate sorrow of her soul, a vast and dreadful form
into which her creative power can breathe the breath of life, but not
of sympathy. Perhaps she loves you with a remorseful, pitying,
protesting love, and carries you on her shuddering shoulders to the
grave. Probably, as she is good and wise, you will never find it out.
A limpid brook ripples in beauty and bloom by the side of muddy,
stagnant self-complacence, and you discern no essential difference.
"Water's water," you say, with your broad, stupid generalization, and
go oozing along contentedly through peat-bogs and meadow-ditches,
mounting, perhaps, in moments of inspiration, to the moderate sublimity
of a cranberry-meadow, but subsiding with entire satisfaction into a
muck-puddle: and all the while the little brook that you patronize
when you are full-fed, and snub when you are hungry, and look upon
always,--the little brook is singing its own melody through grove and
orchard and sweet wild-wood,--singing with the birds and the blooms
songs that you cannot hear; but they are heard by the silent stars,
singing on and on into a broader and deeper destiny, till it pours, one
day, its last earthly note, and becomes forevermore the unutterable sea.
And you are nothing but a ditch.
No, my friend, Lucy will drive with you, and to talk to you, and sing
your songs; she will take care of you, and pray for you, and cry when
you go to the war; if she is not your daughter or your sister, she
will, perhaps, in a moment of weakness or insanity, marry you; she will
be a faithful wife, and float you to the end; but if you wish to be her
love, her hero, her ideal, her delight, her spontaneity, her utter rest
and ultimatum, you must attune your soul to fine issues,--you must
bring out the angel in you, and keep the brute under. It is not that
you shall stop making shoes, and begin to write poetry. That is just
as much discrimination as you have. Tell you to be gentle, and you
think we will have you dissolve into milk-and-water; tell you to be
polite, and you infer hypocrisy; to be neat, and you leap over into
dandyism, fancying all the while that bluster is manliness. No, sir.
You may make shoes, you may run engines, you may carry coals; you may
blow the huntsman's horn, hurl the base-ball, follow the plough, smite
the anvil; your face may be brown, your veins knotted, your hands
grimed; and yet you may be a hero. And, on the other hand, you may
write verses and be a clown. It is not necessary to feed on ambrosia
in order to become divine; nor shall one be accursed, though he drink
of the ninefold Styx. The Israelites ate angels' food in the
wilderness, and remained stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and
ears. The white water-lily feeds on slime, and unfolds a heavenly
glory. Come as the June morning comes. It has not picked its way
daintily, passing only among the roses. It has breathed up the whole
earth. It has blown through the fields and barnyards and all the
common places of the land. It has shrunk from nothing. Its purity has
breasted and overborne all things, and so mingled and harmonized all
that it sweeps around your forehead and sinks into your heart as soft
and sweet and pure as the fragrancy of Paradise. So come you, rough
from the world's rough work, all out-door airs blowing around you, and
all your earth-smells clinging to you, but with a fine inward grace, so
strong, so sweet, so salubrious that it meets and masters all things,
blending every faintest or foulest odor of earthliness into the
grateful incense of a pure and lofty life.
Thus I read and mused in the soft summer fog, and the first I knew the
cars had stopped, I was standing on the platform, and Coventry and his
knight were--where? Wandering up and down somewhere among the
Berkshire hills. At some junction of roads, I suppose, I left them on
the cushion, for I have never beheld them since. Tell me, O ye
daughters of Berkshire! have you seen them,--a princely pair, sore
weary in your mountain-land, but regal still, through all their
travel-stain? I pray you, entreat them hospitably, for their mission
is "not of an age, but for all time."