Basil Ransom lived in New York, rather far to the eastward, and in the
upper reaches of the town; he occupied two small shabby rooms in a
somewhat decayed mansion which stood next to the corner of the Second
Avenue. The corner itself was formed by a considerable grocer's shop,
the near neighbourhood of which was fatal to any pretensions Ransom and
his fellow-lodgers might have had in regard to gentility of situation.
The house had a red, rusty face, and faded green shutters, of which the
slats were limp and at variance with each other. In one of the lower
windows was suspended a fly-blown card, with the words "Table Board"
affixed in letters cut (not very neatly) out of coloured paper, of
graduated tints, and surrounded with a small band of stamped gilt. The
two sides of the shop were protected by an immense pent-house shed,
which projected over a greasy pavement and was supported by wooden posts
fixed in the curbstone. Beneath it, on the dislocated flags, barrels and
baskets were freely and picturesquely grouped; an open cellarway yawned
beneath the feet of those who might pause to gaze too fondly on the
savoury wares displayed in the window; a strong odour of smoked fish,
combined with a fragrance of molasses, hung about the spot; the
pavement, toward the gutters, was fringed with dirty panniers, heaped
with potatoes, carrots, and onions; and a smart, bright waggon, with the
horse detached from the shafts, drawn up on the edge of the abominable
road (it contained holes and ruts a foot deep, and immemorial
accumulations of stagnant mud), imparted an idle, rural, pastoral air to
a scene otherwise perhaps expressive of a rank civilisation. The
establishment was of the kind known to New Yorkers as a Dutch grocery;
and red-faced, yellow-haired, bare-armed vendors might have been
observed to lounge in the doorway. I mention it not on account of any
particular influence it may have had on the life or the thoughts of
Basil Ransom, but for old acquaintance sake and that of local colour;
besides which, a figure is nothing without a setting, and our young man
came and went every day, with rather an indifferent, unperceiving step,
it is true, among the objects I have briefly designated. One of his
rooms was directly above the street-door of the house; such a dormitory,
when it is so exiguous, is called in the nomenclature of New York a
"hall bedroom." The sitting-room, beside it, was slightly larger, and
they both commanded a row of tenements no less degenerate than Ransom's
own habitation--houses built forty years before, and already sere and
superannuated. These were also painted red, and the bricks were
accentuated by a white line; they were garnished, on the first floor,
with balconies covered with small tin roofs, striped in different
colours, and with an elaborate iron lattice-work, which gave them a
repressive, cage-like appearance, and caused them slightly to resemble
the little boxes for peeping unseen into the street, which are a feature
of oriental towns. Such posts of observation commanded a view of the
grocery on the corner, of the relaxed and disjointed roadway, enlivened
at the curbstone with an occasional ash-barrel or with gas-lamps
drooping from the perpendicular, and westward, at the end of the
truncated vista, of the fantastic skeleton of the Elevated Railway,
overhanging the transverse longitudinal street, which it darkened and
smothered with the immeasurable spinal column and myriad clutching paws
of an antediluvian monster. If the opportunity were not denied me here,
I should like to give some account of Basil Ransom's interior, of
certain curious persons of both sexes, for the most part not favourites
of fortune, who had found an obscure asylum there; some picture of the
crumpled little _table d'hôte_, at two dollars and a half a week, where
everything felt sticky, which went forward in the low-ceiled basement,
under the conduct of a couple of shuffling negresses, who mingled in the
conversation and indulged in low, mysterious chuckles when it took a
facetious turn. But we need, in strictness, concern ourselves with it no
further than to gather the implication that the young Mississippian,
even a year and a half after that momentous visit of his to Boston, had
not made his profession very lucrative.
He had been diligent, he had been ambitious, but he had not yet been
successful. During the few weeks preceding the moment at which we meet
him again, he had even begun to lose faith altogether in his earthly
destiny. It became much of a question with him whether success in any
form was written there; whether for a hungry young Mississippian,
without means, without friends, wanting, too, in the highest energy, the
wisdom of the serpent, personal arts and national prestige, the game of
life was to be won in New York. He had been on the point of giving it up
and returning to the home of his ancestors, where, as he heard from his
mother, there was still just a sufficient supply of hot corn-cake to
support existence. He had never believed much in his luck, but during
the last year it had been guilty of aberrations surprising even to a
constant, an imperturbable, victim of fate. Not only had he not extended
his connexion, but he had lost most of the little business which was an
object of complacency to him a twelvemonth before. He had had none but
small jobs, and he had made a mess of more than one of them. Such
accidents had not had a happy effect upon his reputation; he had been
able to perceive that this fair flower may be nipped when it is so
tender a bud as scarcely to be palpable. He had formed a partnership
with a person who seemed likely to repair some of his deficiencies--a
young man from Rhode Island, acquainted, according to his own
expression, with the inside track. But this gentleman himself, as it
turned out, would have been better for a good deal of remodelling, and
Ransom's principal deficiency, which was, after all, that of cash, was
not less apparent to him after his colleague, prior to a sudden and
unexplained departure for Europe, had drawn the slender accumulations of
the firm out of the bank. Ransom sat for hours in his office, waiting
for clients who either did not come, or, if they did come, did not seem
to find him encouraging, as they usually left him with the remark that
they would think what they would do. They thought to little purpose, and
seldom reappeared, so that at last he began to wonder whether there were
not a prejudice against his Southern complexion. Perhaps they didn't
like the way he spoke. If they could show him a better way, he was
willing to adopt it; but the manner of New York could not be acquired by
precept, and example, somehow, was not in this case contagious. He
wondered whether he were stupid and unskilled, and he was finally
obliged to confess to himself that he was unpractical.
This confession was in itself a proof of the fact, for nothing could be
less fruitful than such a speculation, terminating in such a way. He was
perfectly aware that he cared a great deal for the theory, and so his
visitors must have thought when they found him, with one of his long
legs twisted round the other, reading a volume of De Tocqueville. That
was the land of reading he liked; he had thought a great deal about
social and economical questions, forms of government and the happiness
of peoples. The convictions he had arrived at were not such as mix
gracefully with the time-honoured verities a young lawyer looking out
for business is in the habit of taking for granted; but he had to
reflect that these doctrines would probably not contribute any more to
his prosperity in Mississippi than in New York. Indeed, he scarcely
could think of the country where they would be a particular advantage to
him. It came home to him that his opinions were stiff, whereas in
comparison his effort was lax; and he accordingly began to wonder
whether he might not make a living by his opinions. He had always had a
desire for public life; to cause one's ideas to be embodied in national
conduct appeared to him the highest form of human enjoyment. But there
was little enough that was public in his solitary studies, and he asked
himself what was the use of his having an office at all, and why he
might not as well carry on his profession at the Astor Library, where,
in his spare hours and on chance holidays, he did an immense deal of
suggestive reading. He took copious notes and memoranda, and these
things sometimes shaped themselves in a way that might possibly commend
them to the editors of periodicals. Readers perhaps would come, if
clients didn't; so he produced, with a great deal of labour,
half-a-dozen articles, from which, when they were finished, it seemed to
him that he had omitted all the points he wished most to make, and
addressed them to the powers that preside over weekly and monthly
publications. They were all declined with thanks, and he would have been
forced to believe that the accent of his languid clime brought him luck
as little under the pen as on the lips, had not another explanation been
suggested by one of the more explicit of his oracles, in relation to a
paper on the rights of minorities. This gentleman pointed out that his
doctrines were about three hundred years behind the age; doubtless some
magazine of the sixteenth century would have been very happy to print
them. This threw light on his own suspicion that he was attached to
causes that could only, in the nature of things, be unpopular. The
disagreeable editor was right about his being out of date, only he had
got the time wrong. He had come centuries too soon; he was not too old,
but too new. Such an impression, however, would not have prevented him
from going into politics, if there had been any other way to represent
constituencies than by being elected. People might be found eccentric
enough to vote for him in Mississippi, but meanwhile where should he
find the twenty-dollar greenbacks which it was his ambition to transmit
from time to time to his female relations, confined so constantly to a
farinaceous diet? It came over him with some force that his opinions
would not yield interest, and the evaporation of this pleasing
hypothesis made him feel like a man in an open boat, at sea, who should
just have parted with his last rag of canvas.
I shall not attempt a complete description of Ransom's ill-starred
views, being convinced that the reader will guess them as he goes, for
they had a frolicsome, ingenious way of peeping out of the young man's
conversation. I shall do them sufficient justice in saying that he was
by natural disposition a good deal of a stoic, and that, as the result
of a considerable intellectual experience, he was, in social and
political matters, a reactionary. I suppose he was very conceited, for
he was much addicted to judging his age. He thought it talkative,
querulous, hysterical, maudlin, full of false ideas, of unhealthy germs,
of extravagant, dissipated habits, for which a great reckoning was in
store. He was an immense admirer of the late Thomas Carlyle, and was
very suspicious of the encroachments of modern democracy. I know not
exactly how these queer heresies had planted themselves, but he had a
longish pedigree (it had flowered at one time with English royalists and
cavaliers), and he seemed at moments to be inhabited by some transmitted
spirit of a robust but narrow ancestor, some broad-faced wig-wearer or
sword-bearer, with a more primitive conception of manhood than our
modern temperament appears to require, and a programme of human felicity
much less varied. He liked his pedigree, he revered his forefathers, and
he rather pitied those who might come after him. In saying so, however,
I betray him a little, for he never mentioned such feelings as these.
Though he thought the age too talkative, as I have hinted, he liked to
talk as well as any one; but he could hold his tongue, if that were more
expressive, and he usually did so when his perplexities were greatest.
He had been sitting for several evenings in a beer-cellar, smoking his
pipe with a profundity of reticence. This attitude was so unbroken that
it marked a crisis--the complete, the acute consciousness of his
personal situation. It was the cheapest way he knew of spending an
evening. At this particular establishment the _Schoppen_ were very tall
and the beer was very good; and as the host and most of the guests were
German, and their colloquial tongue was unknown to him, he was not drawn
into any undue expenditure of speech. He watched his smoke and he
thought, thought so hard that at last he appeared to himself to have
exhausted the thinkable. When this moment of combined relief and dismay
arrived (on the last of the evenings that we are concerned with), he
took his way down Third Avenue and reached his humble dwelling. Till
within a short time there had been a resource for him at such an hour
and in such a mood; a little variety-actress, who lived in the house,
and with whom he had established the most cordial relations, was often
having her supper (she took it somewhere, every night, after the
theatre) in the dim, close dining-room, and he used to drop in and talk
to her. But she had lately married, to his great amusement, and her
husband had taken her on a wedding-tour, which was to be at the same
time professional. On this occasion he mounted, with rather a heavy
tread, to his rooms, where (on the rickety writing-table in the parlour)
he found a note from Mrs. Luna. I need not reproduce it _in extenso_; a
pale reflexion of it will serve. She reproached him with neglecting her,
wanted to know what had become of him, whether he had grown too
fashionable for a person who cared only for serious society. She accused
him of having changed, and inquired as to the reason of his coldness.
Was it too much to ask whether he could tell her at least in what manner
she had offended him? She used to think they were so much in
sympathy--he expressed her own ideas about everything so vividly. She
liked intellectual companionship, and she had none now. She hoped very
much he would come and see her--as he used to do six months before--the
following evening; and however much she might have sinned or he might
have altered, she was at least always his affectionate cousin Adeline.
"What the deuce does she want of me now?" It was with this somewhat
ungracious exclamation that he tossed away his cousin Adeline's missive.
The gesture might have indicated that he meant to take no notice of her;
nevertheless, after a day had elapsed, he presented himself before her.
He knew what she wanted of old--that is, a year ago; she had wanted him
to look after her property and to be tutor to her son. He had lent
himself, good-naturedly, to this desire--he was touched by so much
confidence--but the experiment had speedily collapsed. Mrs. Luna's
affairs were in the hands of trustees, who had complete care of them,
and Ransom instantly perceived that his function would be simply to
meddle in things that didn't concern him. The levity with which she had
exposed him to the derision of the lawful guardians of her fortune
opened his eyes to some of the dangers of cousinship; nevertheless he
said to himself that he might turn an honest penny by giving an hour or
two every day to the education of her little boy. But this, too, proved
a brief illusion. Ransom had to find his time in the afternoon; he left
his business at five o'clock and remained with his young kinsman till
the hour of dinner. At the end of a few weeks he thought himself lucky
in retiring without broken shins. That Newton's little nature was
remarkable had often been insisted on by his mother; but it was
remarkable, Ransom saw, for the absence of any of the qualities which
attach a teacher to a pupil. He was in truth an insufferable child,
entertaining for the Latin language a personal, physical hostility,
which expressed itself in convulsions of rage. During these paroxysms he
kicked furiously at every one and everything--at poor "Rannie," at his
mother, at Messrs. Andrews and Stoddard, at the illustrious men of Rome,
at the universe in general, to which, as he lay on his back on the
carpet, he presented a pair of singularly active little heels. Mrs. Luna
had a way of being present at his lessons, and when they passed, as
sooner or later they were sure to, into the stage I have described, she
interceded for her overwrought darling, reminded Ransom that these were
the signs of an exquisite sensibility, begged that the child might be
allowed to rest a little, and spent the remainder of the time in
conversation with the preceptor. It came to seem to him, very soon, that
he was not earning his fee; besides which, it was disagreeable to him to
have pecuniary relations with a lady who had not the art of concealing
from him that she liked to place him under obligations. He resigned his
tutorship, and drew a long breath, having a vague feeling that he had
escaped a danger. He could not have told you exactly what it was, and he
had a certain sentimental, provincial respect for women which even
prevented him from attempting to give a name to it in his own thoughts.
He was addicted with the ladies to the old forms of address and of
gallantry; he held that they were delicate, agreeable creatures, whom
Providence had placed under the protection of the bearded sex; and it
was not merely a humorous idea with him that whatever might be the
defects of Southern gentlemen, they were at any rate remarkable for
their chivalry. He was a man who still, in a slangy age, could pronounce
that word with a perfectly serious face.
This boldness did not prevent him from thinking that women were
essentially inferior to men, and infinitely tiresome when they declined
to accept the lot which men had made for them. He had the most definite
notions about their place in nature, in society, and was perfectly easy
in his mind as to whether it excluded them from any proper homage. The
chivalrous man paid that tax with alacrity. He admitted their rights;
these consisted in a standing claim to the generosity and tenderness of
the stronger race. The exercise of such feelings was full of advantage
for both sexes, and they flowed most freely, of course, when women were
gracious and grateful. It may be said that he had a higher conception of
politeness than most of the persons who desired the advent of female
law-makers. When I have added that he hated to see women eager and
argumentative, and thought that their softness and docility were the
inspiration, the opportunity (the highest) of man, I shall have sketched
a state of mind which will doubtless strike many readers as painfully
crude. It had prevented Basil Ransom, at any rate, from putting the dots
on his _i_'s, as the French say, in this gradual discovery that Mrs.
Luna was making love to him. The process went on a long time before he
became aware of it. He had perceived very soon that she was a
tremendously familiar little woman--that she took, more rapidly than he
had ever known, a high degree of intimacy for granted. But as she had
seemed to him neither very fresh nor very beautiful, so he could not
easily have represented to himself why she should take it into her head
to marry (it would never have occurred to him to doubt that she wanted
marriage) an obscure and penniless Mississippian, with womenkind of his
own to provide for. He could not guess that he answered to a certain
secret ideal of Mrs. Luna's, who loved the landed gentry even when
landless, who adored a Southerner under any circumstances, who thought
her kinsman a fine, manly, melancholy, disinterested type, and who was
sure that her views of public matters, the questions of the age, the
vulgar character of modern life, would meet with a perfect response in
his mind. She could see by the way he talked that he was a conservative,
and this was the motto inscribed upon her own silken banner. She took
this unpopular line both by temperament and by reaction from her
sister's "extreme" views, the sight of the dreadful people that they
brought about her. In reality, Olive was distinguished and
discriminating, and Adeline was the dupe of confusions in which the
worse was apt to be mistaken for the better. She talked to Ransom about
the inferiority of republics, the distressing persons she had met abroad
in the legations of the United States, the bad manners of servants and
shopkeepers in that country, the hope she entertained that "the good old
families" would make a stand; but he never suspected that she cultivated
these topics (her treatment of them struck him as highly comical) for
the purpose of leading him to the altar, of beguiling the way. Least of
all could he suppose that she would be indifferent to his want of
income--a point in which he failed to do her justice; for, thinking the
fact that he had remained poor a proof of delicacy in that shopkeeping
age, it gave her much pleasure to reflect that, as Newton's little
property was settled on him (with safeguards which showed how
long-headed poor Mr. Luna had been, and large-hearted, too, since to
what he left _her_ no disagreeable conditions, such as eternal mourning,
for instance, were attached)--that as Newton, I say, enjoyed the
pecuniary independence which befitted his character, her own income was
ample even for two, and she might give herself the luxury of taking a
husband who should owe her something. Basil Ransom did not divine all
this, but he divined that it was not for nothing that Mrs. Luna wrote
him little notes every other day, that she proposed to drive him in the
Park at unnatural hours, and that when he said he had his business to
attend to, she replied: "Oh, a plague on your business! I am sick of
that word--one hears of nothing else in America. There are ways of
getting on without business, if you would only take them!" He seldom
answered her notes, and he disliked extremely the way in which, in spite
of her love of form and order, she attempted to clamber in at the window
of one's house when one had locked the door; so that he began to
interspace his visits considerably, and at last made them very rare.
When I reflect on his habits of almost superstitious politeness to
women, it comes over me that some very strong motive must have operated
to make him give his friendly--his only too friendly--cousin the cold
shoulder. Nevertheless, when he received her reproachful letter (after
it had had time to work a little), he said to himself that he had
perhaps been unjust and even brutal, and as he was easily touched by
remorse of this kind, he took up the broken thread.