of the committee.”)
The readers of this narrative will hardly expect any elaborate details
of the educational management of the Apollinean Institute. They cannot
be supposed to take the same interest in its affairs as was shown by
the Annual Committees who reported upon its condition and prospects. As
these Committees were, however, an important part of the mechanism of
the establishment, some general account of their organization and a few
extracts from the Report of the one last appointed may not be out of
place.
Whether Mr. Silas Peckham had some contrivance for packing his
Committees, whether they happened always to be made up of optimists by
nature, whether they were cajoled into good-humor by polite attentions,
or whether they were always really delighted with the wonderful
acquirements of the pupils and the admirable order of the school, it is
certain that their Annual Reports were couched in language which might
warm the heart of the most cold-blooded and calculating father that ever
had a family of daughters to educate. In fact, these Annual Reports were
considered by Mr. Peckham as his most effective advertisements.
The first thing, therefore, was to see that the Committee was made up of
persons known to the public.
Some worn-out politician, in that leisurely and amiable transition-state
which comes between official extinction and the paralysis which will
finish him as soon as his brain gets a little softer, made an admirable
Chairman for Mr. Peckham, when he had the luck to pick up such an
article. Old reputations, like old fashions, are more prized in the
grassy than in the stony districts. An effete celebrity, who would never
be heard of again in the great places until the funeral sermon waked up
his memory for one parting spasm, finds himself in full flavor of renown
a little farther back from the changing winds of the sea-coast. If such
a public character was not to be had, so that there was no chance of
heading the Report with the name of the Honorable Mr. Somebody, the next
best thing was to get the Reverend Dr. Somebody to take that conspicuous
position. Then would follow two or three local worthies with Esquire
after their names. If any stray literary personage from one of the great
cities happened to be within reach, he was pounced upon by Mr. Silas
Peckham. It was a hard case for the poor man, who had travelled a
hundred miles or two to the outside suburbs after peace and unwatered
milk, to be pumped for a speech in this unexpected way. It was harder
still, if he had been induced to venture a few tremulous remarks, to be
obliged to write them out for the “Rockland Weekly Universe,” with the
chance of seeing them used as an advertising certificate as long as he
lived, if he lived as long as the late Dr. Waterhouse did after giving
his certificate in favor of Whitwell's celebrated Cephalic Snuff.
The Report of the last Committee had been signed by the Honorable,
___________late __________ of ___________, as Chairman. (It is with
reluctance that the name and titles are left in blank; but our public
characters are so familiarly known to the whole community that this
reserve becomes necessary.) The other members of the Committee were the
Reverend Mr. Butters, of a neighboring town, who was to make the prayer
before the Exercises of the Exhibition, and two or three notabilities
of Rockland, with geoponic eyes, and glabrous, bumpless foreheads. A few
extracts from the Report are subjoined:
“The Committee have great pleasure in recording their unanimous opinion,
that the Institution was never in so flourishing a condition....
“The health of the pupils is excellent; the admirable quality of food
supplied shows itself in their appearance; their blooming aspect excited
the admiration of the Committee, and bears testimony to the assiduity of
the excellent Matron.
“.... moral and religious condition most encouraging, which they cannot
but attribute to the personal efforts and instruction of the faithful
Principal, who considers religious instruction a solemn duty which he
cannot commit to other people.
“.... great progress in their studies, under the intelligent
superintendence of the accomplished Principal, assisted by Mr. Badger,
[Mr. Langdon's predecessor,] Miss Darley, the lady who superintends
the English branches, Miss Crabs, her assistant and teacher of Modern
Languages, and Mr. Schneider, teacher of French, German, Latin, and
Music....
“Education is the great business of the Institute. Amusements are
objects of a secondary nature; but these are by no means neglected....
“.... English compositions of great originality and beauty, creditable
alike to the head and heart of their accomplished authors.... several
poems of a very high order of merit, which would do honor to the
literature of any age or country.... life-like drawings, showing great
proficiency.... Many converse fluently in various modern languages....
perform the most difficult airs with the skill of professional
musicians....
“.... advantages unsurpassed, if equalled by those of any Institution
in the country, and reflecting the highest honor on the distinguished
Head of the Establishment, SILAS PECKHAM, Esquire, and his admirable
Lady, the MATRON, with their worthy assistants....”
The perusal of this Report did Mr. Bernard more good than a week's
vacation would have done: It gave him such a laugh as he had not had for
a month. The way in which Silas Peckham had made his Committee say what
he wanted them to--for he recognized a number of expressions in the
Report as coming directly from the lips of his principal, and could not
help thinking how cleverly he had forced his phrases, as jugglers do the
particular card they wish their dupe to take--struck him as particularly
neat and pleasing.
He had passed through the sympathetic and emotional stages in his new
experience, and had arrived at the philosophical and practical state,
which takes things coolly, and goes to work to set them right. He had
breadth enough of view to see that there was nothing so very exceptional
in this educational trader's dealings with his subordinates, but he had
also manly feeling enough to attack the particular individual instance
of wrong before him. There are plenty of dealer's in morals, as in
ordinary traffic, who confine themselves to wholesale business. They
leave the small necessity of their next-door neighbor to the retailers,
who are poorer in statistics and general facts, but richer in the
every-day charities. Mr. Bernard felt, at first, as one does who sees a
gray rat steal out of a drain and begin gnawing at the bark of some tree
loaded with fruit or blossoms, which he will soon girdle, if he is let
alone. The first impulse is to murder him with the nearest ragged stone.
Then one remembers that he is a rodent, acting after the law of his
kind, and cools down and is contented to drive him off and guard the
tree against his teeth for the future. As soon as this is done, one can
watch his attempts at mischief with a certain amusement.
This was the kind of process Mr. Bernard had gone through. First, the
indignant surprise of a generous nature, when it comes unexpectedly into
relations with a mean one. Then the impulse of extermination,--a divine
instinct, intended to keep down vermin of all classes to their
working averages in the economy of Nature. Then a return of cheerful
tolerance,--a feeling, that, if the Deity could bear with rats and
sharpers, he could; with a confident trust, that, in the long run,
terriers and honest men would have the upperhand, and a grateful
consciousness that he had been sent just at the right time to come
between a patient victim and the master who held her in peonage.
Having once made up his mind what to do, Mr. Bernard was as good-natured
and hopeful as ever. He had the great advantage, from his professional
training, of knowing how to recognize and deal with the nervous
disturbances to which overtasked women are so liable. He saw well enough
that Helen Darley would certainly kill herself or lose her wits, if he
could not lighten her labors and lift off a large part of her weight
of cares. The worst of it was, that she was one of those women who
naturally overwork themselves, like those horses who will go at the top
of their pace until they drop. Such women are dreadfully unmanageable.
It is as hard reasoning with them as it would have been reasoning with
Io, when she was flying over land and sea, driven by the sting of the
never-sleeping gadfly.
This was a delicate, interesting game that he played. Under one innocent
pretext or another, he invaded this or that special province she had
made her own. He would collect the themes and have them all read and
marked, answer all the puzzling questions in mathematics, make the other
teachers come to him for directions, and in this way gradually took upon
himself not only all the general superintendence that belonged to his
office, but stole away so many of the special duties which might fairly
have belonged to his assistant, that, before she knew it, she was
looking better and feeling more cheerful than for many and many a month
before.
When the nervous energy is depressed by any bodily cause, or
exhausted by overworking, there follow effects which have often
been misinterpreted by moralists, and especially by theologians. The
conscience itself becomes neuralgic, sometimes actually inflamed, so
that the least touch is agony. Of all liars and false accusers, a
sick conscience is the most inventive and indefatigable. The devoted
daughter, wife, mother, whose life has been given to unselfish labors,
who has filled a place which it seems to others only an angel would
make good, reproaches herself with incompetence and neglect of duty. The
humble Christian, who has been a model to others, calls himself a worm
of the dust on one page of his diary, and arraigns himself on the next
for coming short of the perfection of an archangel.
Conscience itself requires a conscience, or nothing can be more
unscrupulous. It told Saul that he did well in persecuting the
Christians. It has goaded countless multitudes of various creeds to
endless forms of self-torture. The cities of India are full of cripples
it has made. The hill-sides of Syria are riddled with holes, where
miserable hermits, whose lives it had palsied, lived and died like the
vermin they harbored. Our libraries are crammed with books written by
spiritual hypochondriacs, who inspected all their moral secretions
a dozen times a day. They are full of interest, but they should be
transferred from the shelf of the theologian to that of the medical man
who makes a study of insanity.
This was the state into which too much work and too much responsibility
were bringing Helen Darley, when the new master came and lifted so much
of the burden that was crushing her as must be removed before she could
have a chance to recover her natural elasticity and buoyancy. Many
of the noblest women, suffering like her, but less fortunate in being
relieved at the right moment, die worried out of life by the perpetual
teasing of this inflamed, neuralgic conscience. So subtile is the line
which separates the true and almost angelic sensibility of a healthy,
but exalted nature, from the soreness of a soul which is sympathizing
with a morbid state of the body that it is no wonder they are often
confounded. And thus many good women are suffered to perish by that form
of spontaneous combustion in which the victim goes on toiling day and
night with the hidden fire consuming her, until all at once her cheek
whitens, and, as we look upon her, she drops away, a heap of ashes. The
more they overwork themselves, the more exacting becomes the sense of
duty,--as the draught of the locomotive's furnace blows stronger and
makes the fire burn more fiercely, the faster it spins along the track.
It is not very likely, as was said at the beginning of this chapter,
that we shall trouble ourselves a great deal about the internal affairs
of the Apollinean Institute. These schools are, in the nature of things,
not so very unlike each other as to require a minute description for
each particular one among them. They have all very much the same general
features, pleasing and displeasing. All feeding-establishments have
something odious about them,--from the wretched country-houses where
paupers are farmed out to the lowest bidder, up to the commons-tables
at colleges and even the fashionable boarding-house. A person's appetite
should be at war with no other purse than his own. Young people,
especially, who have a bone-factory at work in them, and have to feed
the living looms of innumerable growing tissues, should be provided
for, if possible, by those who love them like their own flesh and blood.
Elsewhere their appetites will be sure to make them enemies, or, what
are almost as bad, friends whose interests are at variance with the
claims of their exacting necessities and demands.
Besides, all commercial transactions in regard to the most sacred
interests of life are hateful even to those who profit by them. The
clergyman, the physician, the teacher, must be paid; but each of them,
if his duty be performed in the true spirit, can hardly help a shiver
of disgust when money is counted out to him for administering the
consolations of religion, for saving some precious life, for sowing the
seeds of Christian civilization in young ingenuous souls.
And yet all these schools, with their provincial French and their
mechanical accomplishments, with their cheap parade of diplomas and
commencements and other public honors, have an ever fresh interest to
all who see the task they are performing in our new social order. These
girls are not being educated for governesses, or to be exported, with
other manufactured articles, to colonies where there happens to be a
surplus of males. Most of them will be wives, and every American-born
husband is a possible President of these United States. Any one of these
girls may be a four-years' queen. There is no sphere of human activity
so exalted that she may not be called upon to fill it.
But there is another consideration of far higher interest. The education
of our community to all that is beautiful is flowing in mainly through
its women, and that to a considerable extent by the aid of these large
establishments, the least perfect of which do something to stimulate the
higher tastes and partially instruct them. Sometimes there is, perhaps,
reason to fear that girls will be too highly educated for their own
happiness, if they are lifted by their culture out of the range of the
practical and every-day working youth by whom they are surrounded. But
this is a risk we must take. Our young men come into active life so
early, that, if our girls were not educated to something beyond mere
practical duties, our material prosperity would outstrip our culture; as
it often does in large places where money is made too rapidly. This is
the meaning, therefore, of that somewhat ambitious programme common to
most of these large institutions, at which we sometimes smile, perhaps
unwisely or uncharitably.
We shall take it for granted that the routine of instruction went on at
the Apollinean Institute much as it does in other schools of the same
class. People, young or old, are wonderfully different, if we contrast
extremes in pairs. They approach much nearer, if we take them in groups
of twenty. Take two separate hundreds as they come, without choosing,
and you get the gamut of human character in both so completely that you
can strike many chords in each which shall be in perfect unison with
corresponding ones in the other. If we go a step farther, and compare
the population of two villages of the same race and region, there is
such a regularly graduated distribution and parallelism of character,
that it seems as if Nature must turn out human beings in sets like
chessmen.
It must be confessed that the position in which Mr. Bernard now found
himself had a pleasing danger about it which might well justify all the
fears entertained on his account by more experienced friends, when they
learned that he was engaged in a Young Ladies' Seminary. The school
never went on more smoothly than during the first period of his
administration, after he had arranged its duties, and taken his share,
and even more than his share, upon himself. But human nature does not
wait for the diploma of the Apollinean Institute to claim the exercise
of it, instincts and faculties. These young girls saw but little of
the youth of the neighborhood. The mansion-house young men were off at
college or in the cities, or making love to each other's sisters, or
at any rate unavailable for some reason or other. There were a few
“clerks,”--that is, young men who attended shops, commonly called
“stores,”--who were fond of walking by the Institute, when they were off
duty, for the sake of exchanging a word or a glance with any one of
the young ladies they might happen to know, if any such were stirring
abroad: crude young men, mostly, with a great many “Sirs” and “Ma'ams”
in their speech, and with that style of address sometimes acquired in
the retail business, as if the salesman were recommending himself to
a customer, “First-rate family article, Ma'am; warranted to wear a
lifetime; just one yard and three quarters in this pattern, Ma'am;
sha'n't I have the pleasure?” and so forth. If there had been ever so
many of them, and if they had been ever so fascinating, the quarantine
of the Institute was too rigorous to allow any romantic infection to be
introduced from without.
Anybody might see what would happen, with a good-looking, well-dressed,
well-bred young man, who had the authority of a master, it is true, but
the manners of a friend and equal, moving about among these young girls
day after day, his eyes meeting theirs, his breath mingling with theirs,
his voice growing familiar to them, never in any harsh tones, often
soothing, encouraging, always sympathetic, with its male depth and
breadth of sound among the chorus of trebles, as if it were a river in
which a hundred of these little piping streamlets-might lose themselves;
anybody might see what would happen. Young girls wrote home to their
parents that they enjoyed themselves much, this term, at the Institute,
and thought they were making rapid progress in their studies. There was
a great enthusiasm for the young master's reading-classes in English
poetry. Some of the poor little things began to adorn themselves with an
extra ribbon, or a bit of such jewelry as they had before kept for great
occasions. Dear souls! they only half knew what they were doing it for.
Does the bird know why its feathers grow more brilliant and its voice
becomes musical in the pairing season?
And so, in the midst of this quiet inland town, where a mere accident
had placed Mr. Bernard Langdon, there was a concentration of explosive
materials which might at any time change its Arcadian and academic
repose into a scene of dangerous commotion. What said Helen Darley, when
she saw with her woman's glance that more than one girl, when she should
be looking at her book, was looking over it toward the master's desk?
Was her own heart warmed by any livelier feeling than gratitude, as its
life began to flow with fuller pulses, and the morning sky again looked
bright and the flowers recovered their lost fragrance? Was there any
strange, mysterious affinity between the master and the dark girl who
sat by herself? Could she call him at will by looking at him? Could it
be that--? It made her shiver to think of it.--And who was that strange
horseman who passed Mr. Bernard at dusk the other evening, looking
so like Mephistopheles galloping hard to be in season at the witches'
Sabbath-gathering? That must be the cousin of Elsie's who wants to marry
her, they say. A dangerous-looking fellow for a rival, if one took a
fancy to the dark girl! And who is she, and what?--by what demon is she
haunted, by what taint is she blighted, by what curse is she followed,
by what destiny is she marked, that her strange beauty has such a terror
in it, and that hardly one shall dare to love her, and her eye glitters
always, but warms for none?
Some of these questions are ours. Some were Helen Darley's. Some of them
mingled with the dreams of Bernard Langdon, as he slept the night after
meeting the strange horseman. In the morning he happened to be a little
late in entering the schoolroom. There was something between the leaves
of the Virgil which lay upon his desk. He opened it and saw a
freshly gathered mountain-flower. He looked at Elsie, instinctively,
involuntarily. She had another such flower on her breast.
A young girl's graceful compliment,--that is all,--no doubt,--no doubt.
It was odd that the flower should have happened to be laid between the
leaves of the Fourth Book of the “AEneid,” and at this line,
“Incipit effari, mediaque in voce resistit.”
A remembrance of an ancient superstition flashed through the master's
mind, and he determined to try the Sortes Virgilianae. He shut the
volume, and opened it again at a venture.--The story of Laocoon!
He read with a strange feeling of unwilling fascination, from “Horresco
referees” to “Bis medium amplexi,” and flung the book from him, as if
its leaves had been steeped in the subtle poisons that princes die of.