Bernard C. Langdon, a young man attending Medical Lectures at the school
connected with one of our principal colleges, remained after the Lecture
one day and wished to speak with the Professor. He was a student of
mark,--first favorite of his year, as they say of the Derby colts.
There are in every class half a dozen bright faces to which the teacher
naturally, directs his discourse, and by the intermediation of whose
attention he seems to hold that of the mass of listeners. Among these
some one is pretty sure to take the lead, by virtue of a personal
magnetism, or some peculiarity of expression, which places the face in
quick sympathetic relations with the lecturer. This was a young man
with such a face; and I found,--for you have guessed that I was the
“Professor” above-mentioned,--that, when there was anything difficult to
be explained, or when I was bringing out some favorite illustration of a
nice point, (as, for instance; when I compared the cell-growth, by which
Nature builds up a plant or an animal, to the glassblower's similar mode
of beginning,--always with a hollow sphere, or vesicle, whatever he is
going to make,) I naturally looked in his face and gauged my success by
its expression.
It was a handsome face,--a little too pale, perhaps, and would have
borne something more of fulness without becoming heavy. I put the
organization to which it belongs in Section B of Class 1 of my
Anglo-American Anthropology (unpublished). The jaw in this section is
but slightly narrowed,--just enough to make the width of the forehead
tell more decidedly. The moustache often grows vigorously, but the
whiskers are thin. The skin is like that of Jacob, rather than like
Esau's. One string of the animal nature has been taken away, but this
gives only a greater predominance to the intellectual chords. To see
just how the vital energy has been toned down, you must contrast one of
this section with a specimen of Section A of the same class,--say, for
instance, one of the old-fashioned, full-whiskered, red-faced, roaring,
big Commodores of the last generation, whom you remember, at least by
their portraits, in ruffled shirts, looking as hearty as butchers and as
plucky as bull-terriers, with their hair combed straight up from their
foreheads, which were not commonly very high or broad. The special form
of physical life I have been describing gives you a right to expect more
delicate perceptions and a more reflective, nature than you commonly
find in shaggy-throated men, clad in heavy suits of muscles.
The student lingered in the lecture-room, looking all the time as if he
wanted to say something in private, and waiting for two or three others,
who were still hanging about, to be gone.
Something is wrong!--I said to myself, when I noticed his
expression.--Well, Mr. Langdon,--I said to him, when we were alone,--can
I do anything for you to-day?
You can, Sir,--he said.--I am going to leave the class, for the present,
and keep school.
Why, that 's a pity, and you so near graduating! You'd better stay and
finish this course and take your degree in the spring, rather than break
up your whole plan of study.
I can't help myself, Sir,--the young man answered.--There 's trouble at
home, and they cannot keep me here as they have done. So I must look out
for myself for a while. It's what I've done before, and am ready to
do again. I came to ask you for a certificate of my fitness to teach a
common school, or a high school, if you think I am up to that. Are you
willing to give it to me?
Willing? Yes, to be sure,--but I don't want you to go. Stay; we'll make
it easy for you. There's a fund will do something for you, perhaps. Then
you can take both the annual prizes, if you like,--and claim them in
money, if you want that more than medals.
I have thought it all over,--he answered,--and have pretty much made up
my mind to go.
A perfectly gentlemanly young man, of courteous address and mild
utterance, but means at least as much as he says. There are some people
whose rhetoric consists of a slight habitual under-statement. I often
tell Mrs. Professor that one of her “I think it's sos” is worth the
Bible-oath of all the rest of the household that they “know it's so.”
When you find a person a little better than his word, a little more
liberal than his promise, a little more than borne out in his statement
by his facts, a little larger in deed than in speech, you recognize a
kind of eloquence in that person's utterance not laid down in Blair or
Campbell.
This was a proud fellow, self-trusting, sensitive, with
family-recollections that made him unwilling to accept the kind of aid
which many students would have thankfully welcomed. I knew him too well
to urge him, after the few words which implied that he was determined
to go. Besides, I have great confidence in young men who believe in
themselves, and are accustomed to rely on their own resources from an
early period. When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully,
the World, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to
find it come off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away
timid adventurers. I have seen young men more than once, who came to a
great city without a single friend, support themselves and pay for their
education, lay up money in a few years, grow rich enough to travel, and
establish themselves in life, without ever asking a dollar of any person
which they had not earned. But these are exceptional cases. There are
horse-tamers, born so,--as we all know; there are woman-tamers, who
bewitch the sex as the pied piper bedeviled the children of Hamelin; and
there are world-tamers, who can make any community, even a Yankee one,
get down and let them jump on its back as easily as Mr. Rarey saddled
Cruiser.
Whether Langdon was of this sort or not I could not say positively; but
he had spirit, and, as I have said, a family-pride which would not let
him be dependent. The New England Brahmin caste often gets blended with
connections of political influence or commercial distinction. It is a
charming thing for the scholar, when his fortune carries him in this way
into some of the “old families” who have fine old houses, and city-lots
that have risen in the market, and names written in all the stock-books
of all the dividend-paying companies. His narrow study expands into a
stately library, his books are counted by thousands instead of hundreds,
and his favorites are dressed in gilded calf in place of plebeian
sheepskin or its pauper substitutes of cloth and paper.
The Reverend Jedediah Langdon, grandfather of our young gentleman, had
made an advantageous alliance of this kind. Miss Dorothea Wentworth had
read one of his sermons which had been printed “by request,” and became
deeply interested in the young author, whom she had never seen. Out of
this circumstance grew a correspondence, an interview, a declaration, a
matrimonial alliance, and a family of half a dozen children. Wentworth
Langdon, Esquire, was the oldest of these, and lived in the old
family-mansion. Unfortunately, that principle of the diminution of
estates by division, to which I have referred, rendered it somewhat
difficult to maintain the establishment upon the fractional income
which the proprietor received from his share of the property. Wentworth
Langdon, Esq., represented a certain intermediate condition of life
not at all infrequent in our old families. He was the connecting link
between the generation which lived in ease, and even a kind of state,
upon its own resources, and the new brood, which must live mainly by its
wits or industry, and make itself rich, or shabbily subside into that
lower stratum known to social geologists by a deposit of Kidderminster
carpets and the peculiar aspect of the fossils constituting the family
furniture and wardrobe. This slack-water period of a race, which comes
before the rapid ebb of its prosperity, is familiar to all who live in
cities. There are no more quiet, inoffensive people than these children
of rich families, just above the necessity of active employment, yet
not in a condition to place their own children advantageously, if they
happen to have families. Many of them are content to live unmarried.
Some mend their broken fortunes by prudent alliances, and some leave a
numerous progeny to pass into the obscurity from which their ancestors
emerged; so that you may see on handcarts and cobblers' stalls names
which, a few generations back, were upon parchments with broad seals,
and tombstones with armorial bearings.
In a large city, this class of citizens is familiar to us in the
streets. They are very courteous in their salutations; they have time
enough to bow and take their hats off,--which, of course, no businessman
can afford to do. Their beavers are smoothly brushed, and their
boots well polished; all their appointments are tidy; they look
the respectable walking gentleman to perfection. They are prone to
habits,--they frequent reading-rooms,--insurance-offices,--they walk the
same streets at the same hours,--so that one becomes familiar with their
faces and persons, as a part of the street-furniture.
There is one curious circumstance, that all city-people must have
noticed, which is often illustrated in our experience of the slack-water
gentry. We shall know a certain person by his looks, familiarly, for
years, but never have learned his name. About this person we shall have
accumulated no little circumstantial knowledge;--thus, his face, figure,
gait, his mode of dressing, of saluting, perhaps even of speaking, may
be familiar to us; yet who he is we know not. In another department of
our consciousness, there is a very familiar name, which we have never
found the person to match. We have heard it so often, that it has
idealized itself, and become one of that multitude of permanent shapes
which walk the chambers of the brain in velvet slippers in the company
of Falstaff and Hamlet and General Washington and Mr. Pickwick.
Sometimes the person dies, but the name lives on indefinitely. But now
and then it happens, perhaps after years of this independent existence
of the name and its shadowy image in the brain, on the one part, and the
person and all its real attributes, as we see them daily, on the other,
that some accident reveals their relation, and we find the name we have
carried so long in our memory belongs to the person we have known so
long as a fellow-citizen. Now the slack--water gentry are among the
persons most likely to be the subjects of this curious divorce of title
and reality,--for the reason, that, playing no important part in the
community, there is nothing to tie the floating name to the actual
individual, as is the case with the men who belong in any way to the
public, while yet their names have a certain historical currency, and we
cannot help meeting them, either in their haunts, or going to and from
them.
To this class belonged Wentworth Langdon, Esq. He had been “dead-headed”
into the world some fifty years ago, and had sat with his hands in
his pockets staring at the show ever since. I shall not tell you, for
reasons before hinted, the whole name of the place in which he lived.
I will only point you in the right direction, by saying that there are
three towns lying in a line with each other, as you go “down East,”
each of them with a Port in its name, and each of them having a peculiar
interest which gives it individuality, in addition to the Oriental
character they have in common. I need not tell you that these towns are
Newburyport, Portsmouth, and Portland. The Oriental character they have
in common consists in their large, square, palatial mansions, with sunny
gardens round them. The two first have seen better days. They are in
perfect harmony with the condition of weakened, but not impoverished,
gentility. Each of them is a “paradise of demi-fortunes.” Each of them
is of that intermediate size between a village and a city which any
place has outgrown when the presence of a well-dressed stranger walking
up and down the main street ceases to be a matter of public curiosity
and private speculation, as frequently happens, during the busier months
of the year, in considerable commercial centres like Salem. They both
have grand old recollections to fall back upon,--times when they looked
forward to commercial greatness, and when the portly gentlemen in cocked
hats, who built their now decaying wharves and sent out their ships all
over the world, dreamed that their fast-growing port was to be the Tyre
or the Carthage of the rich British Colony. Great houses, like that once
lived in by Lord Timothy Dexter, in Newburyport, remain as evidence of
the fortunes amassed in these places of old. Other mansions--like the
Rockingham House in Portsmouth (look at the white horse's tail before
you mount the broad staircase)--show that there was not only wealth, but
style and state, in these quiet old towns during the last century. It is
not with any thought of pity or depreciation that we speak of them as in
a certain sense decayed towns; they did not fulfil their early promise
of expansion, but they remain incomparably the most interesting places
of their size in any of the three northernmost New England States. They
have even now prosperity enough to keep them in good condition, and
offer the most attractive residences for quiet families, which, if they
had been English, would have lived in a palazzo at Genoa or Pisa, or
some other Continental Newburyport or Portsmouth.
As for the last of the three Ports, or Portland, it is getting too
prosperous to be as attractive as its less northerly neighbors. Meant
for a fine old town, to ripen like a Cheshire cheese within its walls
of ancient rind, burrowed by crooked alleys and mottled with venerable
mould, it seems likely to sacrifice its mellow future to a vulgar
material prosperity. Still it remains invested with many of its old
charms, as yet, and will forfeit its place among this admirable trio
only when it gets a hotel with unequivocal marks of having been built
and organized in the present century.
--It was one of the old square palaces of the North, in which Bernard
Langdon, the son of Wentworth, was born. If he had had the luck to be
an only child, he might have lived as his father had done, letting his
meagre competence smoulder on almost without consuming, like the fuel
in an air-tight stove. But after Master Bernard came Miss Dorothea
Elizabeth Wentworth Langdon, and then Master William Pepperell Langdon,
and others, equally well named,--a string of them, looking, when they
stood in a row in prayer-time, as if they would fit a set of Pandean
pipes, of from three feet upward in dimensions. The door of the
air-tight stove has to be opened, under such circumstances, you may well
suppose! So it happened that our young man had been obliged, from an
early period, to do something to support himself, and found himself
stopped short in his studies by the inability of the good people at home
to furnish him the present means of support as a student.
You will understand now why the young man wanted me to give him a
certificate of his fitness to teach, and why I did not choose to urge
him to accept the aid which a meek country-boy from a family without
ante-Revolutionary recollections would have thankfully received. Go he
must,--that was plain enough. He would not be content otherwise. He was
not, however, to give up his studies; and as it is customary to allow
half-time to students engaged in school-keeping,--that is, to count a
year, so employed, if the student also keep on with his professional
studies, as equal to six months of the three years he is expected to
be under an instructor before applying for his degree,--he would not
necessarily lose more than a few months of time. He had a small library
of professional books, which he could take with him.
So he left my teaching and that of my estimable colleagues, carrying
with him my certificate, that Mr. Bernard C. Langdon was a young
gentleman of excellent moral character, of high intelligence and good
education, and that his services would be of great value in any school,
academy, or other institution, where young persons of-either sex were to
be instructed.
I confess, that expression, “either sex,” ran a little thick, as I
may say, from my pen. For, although the young man bore a very fair
character, and there was no special cause for doubting his discretion,
I considered him altogether too good-looking, in the first place, to be
let loose in a roomful of young girls. I didn't want him to fall in love
just then--and if half a dozen girls fell in love with him, as they most
assuredly would, if brought into too near relations with him, why, there
was no telling what gratitude and natural sensibility might bring about.
Certificates are, for the most part, like ostrich-eggs; the giver never
knows what is hatched out of them. But once in a thousand times they
act as curses are said to,--come home to roost. Give them often enough,
until it gets to be a mechanical business, and, some day or other, you
will get caught warranting somebody's ice not to melt in any climate, or
somebody's razors to be safe in the hands of the youngest children.
I had an uneasy feeling, after giving this certificate. It might be all
right enough; but if it happened to end badly, I should always reproach
myself. There was a chance, certainly, that it would lead him or others
into danger or wretchedness. Any one who looked at this young man could
not fail to see that he was capable of fascinating and being fascinated.
Those large, dark eyes of his would sink into the white soul of a
young girl as the black cloth sunk into the snow in Franklin's famous
experiment. Or, on the other hand, if the rays of a passionate nature
should ever be concentrated on them, they would be absorbed into the
very depths of his nature, and then his blood would turn to flame and
burn his life out of him, until his cheeks grew as white as the ashes
that cover a burning coal.
I wish I had not said either sex in my certificate. An academy for young
gentlemen, now; that sounds cool and unimaginative. A boys' school, that
would be a very good place for him;--some of them are pretty rough, but
there is nerve enough in that old Wentworth strain of blood; he can give
any country fellow, of the common stock, twenty pounds, and hit him out
of time in ten minutes. But to send such a young fellow as that out a
girl's-nesting! to give this falcon a free pass into all the dove-cotes!
I was a fool,--that's all.
I brooded over the mischief which might come out of these two words
until it seemed to me that they were charged with destiny. I could
hardly sleep for thinking what a train I might have been laying, which
might take a spark any day, and blow up nobody knows whose peace or
prospects. What I dreaded most was one of those miserable matrimonial
misalliances where a young fellow who does not know himself as yet
flings his magnificent future into the checked apron-lap of some
fresh-faced, half-bred country-girl, no more fit to be mated with him
than her father's horse to go in double harness with Flora Temple. To
think of the eagle's wings, being clipped so that he shall never
lift himself over the farm-yard fence! Such things happen, and always
must,--because, as one of us said awhile ago, a man always loves,
a woman, and a woman a man, unless some good reason exists to the
contrary. You think yourself a very fastidious young man, my friend; but
there are probably at least five-thousand young women in these United
States, any one of whom you would certainly marry, if you were thrown
much into her company, and nobody more attractive were near, and she had
no objection. And you, my dear young lady, justly pride yourself on your
discerning delicacy; but if I should say that there are twenty thousand
young men, any one of whom, if he offered his hand and heart under
favorable circumstances, you would
“First endure, then pity, then embrace,”
I should be much more imprudent than I mean to be, and you would, no
doubt, throw down a story in which I hope to interest you.
I had settled it in my mind that this young fellow had a career marked
out for him. He should begin in the natural way, by taking care of poor
patients in one of the public charities, and work his way up to a better
kind of practice,--better, that is, in the vulgar, worldly sense. The
great and good Boerhaave used to say, as I remember very well, that the
poor were his best patients; for God was their paymaster. But everybody
is not as patient as Boerhaave, nor as deserving; so that the rich,
though not, perhaps, the best patients, are good enough for common
practitioners. I suppose Boerhaave put up with them when he could not
get poor ones, as he left his daughter two millions of florins when he
died.
Now if this young man once got into the wide streets, he would sweep
them clear of his rivals of the same standing; and as I was getting
indifferent to business, and old Dr. Kilham was growing careless, and
had once or twice prescribed morphine when he meant quinine, there would
soon be an opening into the Doctor's Paradise,--the streets with only
one side to them. Then I would have him strike a bold stroke,--set up a
nice little coach, and be driven round like a first-class London doctor,
instead of coasting about in a shabby one-horse concern and casting
anchor opposite his patients' doors like a Cape Ann fishing-smack. By
the time he was thirty, he would have knocked the social pawns out of
his way, and be ready to challenge a wife from the row of great pieces
in the background. I would not have a man marry above his level, so as
to become the appendage of a powerful family-connection; but I would not
have him marry until he knew his level,--that is, again, looking at the
matter in a purely worldly point of view, and not taking the sentiments
at all into consideration. But remember, that a young man, using large
endowments wisely and fortunately, may put himself on a level with
the highest in the land in ten brilliant years of spirited, unflagging
labor. And to stand at the very top of your calling in a great city is
something in itself,--that is, if you like money, and influence, and a
seat on the platform at public lectures, and gratuitous tickets to all
sorts of places where you don't want to go, and, what is a good deal
better than any of these things, a sense of power, limited, it may be,
but absolute in its range, so that all the Caesars and Napoleons would
have to stand aside, if they came between you and the exercise of your
special vocation.
That is what I thought this young fellow might have come to; and now I
have let him go off into the country with my certificate, that he is fit
to teach in a school for either sex! Ten to one he will run like a moth
into a candle, right into one of those girls'-nests, and get tangled up
in some sentimental folly or other, and there will be the end of him.
Oh, yes! country doctor,--half a dollar a visit,--drive, drive, drive
all day,--get up at night and harness your own horse,--drive again
ten miles in a snow-storm, shake powders out of two phials, (pulv.
glycyrrhiz., pulv. gum. acac. as partes equates,)--drive back again,
if you don't happen to get stuck in a drift, no home, no peace, no
continuous meals, no unbroken sleep, no Sunday, no holiday, no social
intercourse, but one eternal jog, jog, jog, in a sulky, until you feel
like the mummy of an Indian who had been buried in the sitting posture,
and was dug up a hundred years afterwards! Why did n't I warn him about
love and all that nonsense? Why didn't I tell him he had nothing to do
with it, yet awhile? Why did n't I hold up to him those awful examples
I could have cited, where poor young fellows who could just keep
themselves afloat have hung a matrimonial millstone round their necks,
taking it for a life-preserver? All this of two words in a certificate!