Produced by Olaf Voss, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks, David Widger, and
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SUBURBAN SKETCHES
By William Dean Howells
Author Of “Venetian Life,” “Italian Journeys” Etc.
CONTENTS
MRS. JOHNSON
DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE
A PEDESTRIAN TOUR
BY HORSE-CAR TO BOSTON
A DAY'S PLEASURE
A ROMANCE OF REAL LIFE
SCENE
JUBILEE DAYS
SOME LESSONS FROM THE SCHOOL OF MORALS
FLITTING
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS (not available)
SHE LIGHTED A POTENT PIPE
“BUT I SUPPOSE THIS WINE IS NOT MADE OF GRAPES, SIGNOR?”
LOOKING ABOUT, I SAW TWO WOMEN
THE YOUNG LADY IN BLACK, WHO ALIGHTED AT A MOST ORDINARY LITTLE STREET
THAT SWEET YOUNG BLONDE, WHO ARRIVES BY MOST TRAINS
FRANK AND LUCY STALKED AHEAD, WITH SHAWLS DRAGGING FROM THEIR ARMS
THEY SKIRMISH ABOUT HIM WITH EVERY SORT OF QUERY.
A GAUNT FIGURE OF FORLORN AND CURIOUS SMARTNESS.
THE SPECTACLE AS WE BEHELD IT
VACANT AND CEREMONIOUS ZEAL
MRS. JOHNSON
It was on a morning of the lovely New England May that we left the
horse-car, and, spreading our umbrellas, walked down the street to our
new home in Charlesbridge, through a storm of snow and rain so finely
blent by the influences of this fortunate climate, that no flake knew
itself from its sister drop, or could be better identified by the people
against whom they beat in unison. A vernal gale from the east fanned our
cheeks and pierced our marrow and chilled our blood, while the raw, cold
green of the adventurous grass on the borders of the sopping sidewalks
gave, as it peered through its veil of melting snow and freezing rain,
a peculiar cheerfulness to the landscape. Here and there in the vacant
lots abandoned hoop-skirts defied decay; and near the half-finished
wooden houses, empty mortar-beds, and bits of lath and slate strewn over
the scarred and mutilated ground, added their interest to the scene. A
shaggy drift hung upon the trees before our own house (which had been
built some years earlier), while its swollen eaves wept silently and
incessantly upon the embankments lifting its base several feet above the
common level.
This heavenly weather, which the Pilgrim Fathers, with the idea of
turning their thoughts effectually from earthly pleasures, came so far
to discover, continued with slight amelioration throughout the month of
May and far into June; and it was a matter of constant amazement with
one who had known less austere climates, to behold how vegetable life
struggled with the hostile skies, and, in an atmosphere as chill and
damp as that of a cellar, shot forth the buds and blossoms upon the
pear-trees, called out the sour Puritan courage of the currant-bushes,
taught a reckless native grape-vine to wander and wanton over the
southern side of the fence, and decked the banks with violets as
fearless and as fragile as New England girls; so that about the end of
June, when the heavens relented and the sun blazed out at last, there
was little for him to do but to redden and darken the daring fruits that
had attained almost their full growth without his countenance.
Then, indeed, Charlesbridge appeared to us a kind of Paradise. The wind
blew all day from the southwest, and all day in the grove across the way
the orioles sang to their nestlings. The butcher's wagon rattled merrily
up to our gate every morning; and if we had kept no other reckoning, we
should have known it was Thursday by the grocer. We were living in the
country with the conveniences and luxuries of the city about us. The
house was almost new and in perfect repair; and, better than all, the
kitchen had as yet given no signs of unrest in those volcanic agencies
which are constantly at work there, and which, with sudden explosion,
make Herculaneums and Pompeiis of so many smiling households. Breakfast,
dinner, and tea came up with illusive regularity, and were all the most
perfect of their kind; and we laughed and feasted in our vain security.
We had out from the city to banquet with us the friends we loved, and
we were inexpressibly proud before them of the Help, who first wrought
miracles of cookery in our honor, and then appeared in a clean white
apron, and the glossiest black hair, to wait upon the table. She was
young, and certainly very pretty; she was as gay as a lark, and was
courted by a young man whose clothes would have been a credit, if they
had not been a reproach, to our lowly basement. She joyfully assented to
the idea of staying with us till she married.
In fact, there was much that was extremely pleasant about the little
place when the warm weather came, and it was not wonderful to us that
Jenny was willing to remain. It was very quiet; we called one another
to the window if a large dog went by our door; and whole days passed
without the movement of any wheels but the butcher's upon our street,
which flourished in ragweed and butter-cups and daisies, and in
the autumn burned, like the borders of nearly all the streets in
Charlesbridge, with the pallid azure flame of the succory. The
neighborhood was in all things a frontier between city and country.
The horse-cars, the type of such civilization--full of imposture,
discomfort, and sublime possibility--as we yet possess, went by the
head of our street, and might, perhaps, be available to one skilled in
calculating the movements of comets; while two minutes' walk would take
us into a wood so wild and thick that no roof was visible through the
trees. We learned, like innocent pastoral people of the golden age, to
know the several voices of the cows pastured in the vacant lots, and,
like engine-drivers of the iron age, to distinguish the different
whistles of the locomotives passing on the neighboring railroad. The
trains shook the house as they thundered along, and at night were a kind
of company, while by day we had the society of the innumerable birds.
Now and then, also, the little ragged boys in charge of the cows--which,
tied by long ropes to trees, forever wound themselves tight up against
the trunks, and had to be unwound with great ado of hooting and
hammering--came and peered lustfully through the gate at our ripening
pears. All round us carpenters were at work building new houses; but so
far from troubling us, the strokes of their hammers fell softly upon the
sense, like one's heart-beats upon one's own consciousness in the lapse
from all fear of pain under the blessed charm of an anaesthetic.
We played a little at gardening, of course, and planted tomatoes,
which the chickens seemed to like, for they ate them up as fast as
they ripened; and we watched with pride the growth of our Lawton
blackberries, which, after attaining the most stalwart proportions, were
still as bitter as the scrubbiest of their savage brethren, and which,
when by advice left on the vines for a week after they turned black,
were silently gorged by secret and gluttonous flocks of robins and
orioles. As for our grapes, the frost cut them off in the hour of their
triumph.
So, as I have hinted, we were not surprised that Jenny should be willing
to remain with us, and were as little prepared for her desertion as for
any other change of our moral state. But one day in September she
came to her nominal mistress with tears in her beautiful eyes and
protestations of unexampled devotion upon her tongue, and said that she
was afraid she must leave us. She liked the place, and she never had
worked for any one that was more of a lady, but she had made up her
mind to go into the city. All this, so far, was quite in the manner
of domestics who, in ghost stories, give warning to the occupants of
haunted houses; and Jenny's mistress listened in suspense for the motive
of her desertion, expecting to hear no less than that it was something
which walked up and down the stairs and dragged iron links after it,
or something that came and groaned at the front door, like populace
dissatisfied with a political candidate. But it was in fact nothing of
this kind; simply, there were no lamps upon our street, and Jenny, after
spending Sunday evening with friends in East Charlesbridge, was always
alarmed, on her return, in walking from the horse-car to our door. The
case was hopeless, and Jenny and our household parted with respect and
regret.
We had not before this thought it a grave disadvantage that our street
was unlighted. Our street was not drained nor graded; no municipal cart
ever came to carry away our ashes; there was not a water-butt within
half a mile to save us from fire, nor more than the one thousandth part
of a policeman to protect us from theft. Yet, as I paid a heavy tax, I
somehow felt that we enjoyed the benefits of city government, and never
looked upon Charlesbridge as in any way undesirable for residence.
But when it became necessary to find help in Jenny's place, the frosty
welcome given to application at the intelligence offices renewed a
painful doubt awakened by her departure. To be sure, the heads of the
offices were polite enough; but when the young housekeeper had stated
her case at the first to which she applied, and the Intelligencer had
called out to the invisible expectants in the adjoining room, “Anny
wan wants to do giner'l housewark in Charlsbrudge?” there came from the
maids invoked so loud, so fierce, so full a “No!” as shook the lady's
heart with an indescribable shame and dread. The name that, with an
innocent pride in its literary and historical associations, she had
written at the heads of her letters, was suddenly become a matter of
reproach to her; and she was almost tempted to conceal thereafter that
she lived in Charlesbridge, and to pretend that she dwelt upon some
wretched little street in Boston. “You see,” said the head of the
office, “the gairls doesn't like to live so far away from the city. Now
if it was on'y in the Port....”
This pen is not graphic enough to give the remote reader an idea of the
affront offered to an inhabitant of Old Charlesbridge in these closing
words. Neither am I of sufficiently tragic mood to report here all the
sufferings undergone by an unhappy family in finding servants, or to
tell how the winter was passed with miserable makeshifts. Alas! is it
not the history of a thousand experiences? Any one who looks upon this
page could match it with a tale as full of heartbreak and disaster,
while I conceive that, in hastening to speak of Mrs. Johnson, I approach
a subject of unique interest.
The winter that ensued after Jenny's departure was the true sister of
the bitter and shrewish spring of the same year. But indeed it is always
with a secret shiver that one must think of winter in our regrettable
climate. It is a terrible potency, robbing us of half our lives, and
threatening or desolating the moiety left us with rheumatisms and
catarrhs. There is a much vaster sum of enjoyment possible to man in the
more generous latitudes; and I have sometimes doubted whether even the
energy characteristic of ours is altogether to be praised, seeing that
it has its spring not so much in pure aspiration as in the instinct of
self-preservation. Egyptian, Greek, Roman energy was an inner impulse;
but ours is too often the sting of cold, the spur of famine. We
must endure our winter, but let us not be guilty of the hypocrisy
of pretending that we like it. Let us caress it with no more vain
compliments, but use it with something of its own rude and savage
sincerity.
I say, our last Irish girl went with the last snow, and on one of those
midsummer-like days that sometimes fall in early April to our yet bleak
and desolate zone, our hearts sang of Africa and golden joys. A Libyan
longing took us, and we would have chosen, if we could, to bear a strand
of grotesque beads, or a handful of brazen gauds, and traffic them for
some sable maid with crisped locks, whom, uncoffling from the captive
train beside the desert, we should make to do our general housework
forever, through the right of lawful purchase. But we knew that this was
impossible, and that, if we desired colored help, we must seek it at the
intelligence office, which is in one of those streets chiefly inhabited
by the orphaned children and grandchildren of slavery. To tell the truth
these orphans do not seem to grieve much for their bereavement, but lead
a life of joyous and rather indolent oblivion in their quarter of the
city. They are often to be seen sauntering up and down the street by
which the Charlesbridge cars arrive,--the young with a harmless swagger,
and the old with the generic limp which our Autocrat has already noted
as attending advanced years in their race. They seem the natural
human interest of a street so largely devoted to old clothes; and the
thoughtful may see a felicity in their presence where the pawnbrokers'
windows display the forfeited pledges of improvidence, and subtly remind
us that we have yet to redeem a whole race, pawned in our needy and
reckless national youth, and still held against us by the Uncle of
Injustice, who is also the Father of Lies. How gayly are the young
ladies of this race attired, as they trip up and down the side walks,
and in and out through the pendent garments at the shop doors! They
are the black pansies and marigolds and dark-blooded dahlias among
womankind. They try to assume something of our colder race's demeanor,
but even the passer on the horse-car can see that it is not native with
them, and is better pleased when they forget us, and ungenteelly laugh
in encountering friends, letting their white teeth glitter through the
generous lips that open to their ears. In the streets branching upwards
from this avenue, very little colored men and maids play with broken or
enfeebled toys, or sport on the wooden pavements of the entrances to the
inner courts. Now and then a colored soldier or sailor--looking strange
in his uniform, even after the custom of several years--emerges from
those passages; or, more rarely, a black gentleman, stricken in years,
and cased in shining broadcloth, walks solidly down the brick sidewalk,
cane in hand,--a vision of serene self-complacency, and so plainly the
expression of virtuous public sentiment that the great colored louts,
innocent enough till then in their idleness, are taken with a sudden
sense of depravity, and loaf guiltily up against the house-walls. At
the same moment, perhaps, a young damsel, amorously scuffling with an
admirer through one of the low open windows, suspends the strife,
and bids him, “Go along now, do!” More rarely yet than the gentleman
described, one may see a white girl among the dark neighbors, whose
frowzy head is uncovered, and whose sleeves are rolled up to her elbows,
and who, though no doubt quite at home, looks as strange there as that
pale anomaly which may sometimes be seen among a crew of blackbirds.
An air not so much of decay as of unthrift, and yet hardly of unthrift,
seems to prevail in the neighborhood, which has none of the aggressive
and impudent squalor of an Irish quarter, and none of the surly
wickedness of a low American street. A gayety not born of the things
that bring its serious joy to the true New England heart--a ragged
gayety, which comes of summer in the blood, and not in the pocket or the
conscience, and which affects the countenance and the whole demeanor,
setting the feet to some inward music, and at times bursting into a
line of song or a child-like and irresponsible laugh--gives tone to
the visible life, and wakens a very friendly spirit in the passer, who
somehow thinks there of a milder climate, and is half persuaded that
the orange-peel on the sidewalks came from fruit grown in the soft
atmosphere of those back courts.
It was in this quarter, then, that we heard of Mrs. Johnson; and it was
from a colored boarding-house there that she came out to Charlesbridge
to look at us, bringing her daughter of twelve years with her. She was
a matron of mature age and portly figure, with a complexion like coffee
soothed with the richest cream; and her manners were so full of a
certain tranquillity and grace, that she charmed away all out will to
ask for references. It was only her barbaric laughter and her lawless
eye that betrayed how slightly her New England birth and breeding
covered her ancestral traits, and bridged the gulf of a thousand years
of civilization that lay between her race and ours. But in fact, she was
doubly estranged by descent; for, as we learned later, a sylvan wildness
mixed with that of the desert in her veins: her grandfather was an
Indian, and her ancestors on this side had probably sold their lands for
the same value in trinkets that bought the original African pair on the
other side.
The first day that Mrs. Johnson descended into our kitchen, she conjured
from the malicious disorder in which it had been left by the flitting
Irish kobold a dinner that revealed the inspirations of genius, and
was quite different from a dinner of mere routine and laborious talent.
Something original and authentic mingled with the accustomed flavors;
and, though vague reminiscences of canal-boat travel and woodland
camps arose from the relish of certain of the dishes, there was yet the
assurance of such power in the preparation of the whole, that we
knew her to be merely running over the chords of our appetite with
preliminary savors, as a musician acquaints his touch with the keys
of an unfamiliar piano before breaking into brilliant and triumphant
execution. Within a week she had mastered her instrument; and thereafter
there was no faltering in her performances, which she varied constantly,
through inspiration or from suggestion. She was so quick to receive new
ideas in her art, that, when the Roman statuary who stayed a few weeks
with us explained the mystery of various purely Latin dishes, she caught
their principle at once; and visions of the great white cathedral,
the Coliseum, and the “dome of Brunelleschi” floated before us in the
exhalations of the Milanese _risotto_, Roman _stufadino_, and Florentine
_stracotto_ that smoked upon our board. But, after all, it was in
puddings that Mrs. Johnson chiefly excelled. She was one of those
cooks--rare as men of genius in literature--who love their own dishes;
and she had, in her personally child-like simplicity of taste, and the
inherited appetites of her savage forefathers, a dominant passion
for sweets. So far as we could learn, she subsisted principally upon
puddings and tea. Through the same primitive instincts, no doubt, she
loved praise. She openly exulted in our artless flatteries of her skill;
she waited jealously at the head of the kitchen stairs to hear what was
said of her work, especially if there were guests; and she was never too
weary to attempt emprises of cookery.
While engaged in these, she wore a species of sightly handkerchief like
a turban upon her head and about her person those mystical swathings in
which old ladies of the African race delight. But she most pleasured our
sense of beauty and moral fitness when, after the last pan was washed
and the last pot was scraped, she lighted a potent pipe, and, taking her
stand at the kitchen door, laded the soft evening air with its pungent
odors. If we surprised her at these supreme moments, she took the pipe
from her lips, and put it behind her, with a low mellow chuckle, and
a look of half-defiant consciousness; never guessing that none of her
merits took us half so much as the cheerful vice which she only feigned
to conceal.
Some things she could not do so perfectly as cooking, because of her
failing eyesight; and we persuaded her that spectacles would both
become and befriend a lady of her years, and so bought her a pair of
steel-bowed glasses. She wore them in some great emergencies at first,
but had clearly no pride in them. Before long she laid them aside
altogether, and they had passed from our thoughts, when one day we heard
her mellow note of laughter and her daughter's harsher cackle outside
our door, and, opening it, beheld Mrs. Johnson in gold-bowed spectacles
of massive frame. We then learned that their purchase was in fulfillment
of a vow made long ago, in the life-time of Mr. Johnson, that, if ever
she wore glasses, they should be gold-bowed; and I hope the manes of the
dead were half as happy in these votive spectacles as the simple soul
that offered them.
She and her late partner were the parents of eleven children, some of
whom were dead, and some of whom were wanderers in unknown parts. During
his life-time she had kept a little shop in her native town; and it was
only within a few years that she had gone into service. She cherished a
natural haughtiness of spirit, and resented control, although disposed
to do all she could of her own motion. Being told to say when she wanted
an afternoon, she explained that when she wanted an afternoon she always
took it without asking, but always planned so as not to discommode the
ladies with whom she lived. These, she said, had numbered twenty-seven
within three years, which made us doubt the success of her system in all
cases, though she merely held out the fact as an assurance of her faith
in the future, and a proof of the ease with which places were to be
found. She contended, moreover, that a lady who had for thirty years
had a house of her own, was in nowise bound to ask permission to receive
visits from friends where she might be living, but that they ought
freely to come and go like other guests. In this spirit she once invited
her son-in-law, Professor Jones of Providence, to dine with her; and
her defied mistress, on entering the dining-room, found the Professor
at pudding and tea there,--an impressively respectable figure in black
clothes, with a black face rendered yet more effective by a pair of
green goggles. It appeared that this dark professor was a light of
phrenology in Rhode Island, and that he was believed to have uncommon
virtue in his science by reason of being blind as well as black.
I am loath to confess that Mrs. Johnson had not a flattering opinion
of the Caucasian race in all respects. In fact, she had very good
philosophical and Scriptural reasons for looking upon us as an upstart
people of new blood, who had come into their whiteness by no creditable
or pleasant process. The late Mr. Johnson, who had died in the West
Indies, whither he voyaged for his health in quality of cook upon a
Down-East schooner, was a man of letters, and had written a book to
show the superiority of the black over the white branches of the
human family. In this he held that, as all islands have been at their
discovery found peopled by blacks, we must needs believe that humanity
was first created of that color. Mrs. Johnson could not show us her
husband's work (a sole copy in the library of an English gentleman at
Port au Prince is not to be bought for money), but she often developed
its arguments to the lady of the house; and one day, with a great show
of reluctance, and many protests that no personal slight was meant, let
fall the fact that Mr. Johnson believed the white race descended from
Gehazi the leper, upon whom the leprosy of Naaman fell when the latter
returned by Divine favor to his original blackness. “And he went out
from his presence a leper as white as snow,” said Mrs. Johnson,
quoting irrefutable Scripture. “Leprosy, leprosy,” she added
thoughtfully,--“nothing but leprosy bleached you out.”
It seems to me much in her praise that she did not exult in our taint
and degradation, as some white philosophers used to do in the opposite
idea that a part of the human family were cursed to lasting blackness
and slavery in Ham and his children, but even told us of a remarkable
approach to whiteness in many of her own offspring. In a kindred spirit
of charity, no doubt, she refused ever to attend church with people of
her elder and wholesomer blood. When she went to church, she said, she
always went to a white church, though while with us I am bound to say
she never went to any. She professed to read her Bible in her bedroom on
Sundays; but we suspected, from certain sounds and odors which used
to steal out of this sanctuary, that her piety more commonly found
expression in dozing and smoking.
I would not make a wanton jest here of Mrs. Johnson's anxiety to claim
honor for the African color, while denying this color in many of her
own family. It afforded a glimpse of the pain which all her people must
endure, however proudly they hide it or light-heartedly forget it, from
the despite and contumely to which they are guiltlessly born; and when I
thought how irreparable was this disgrace and calamity of a black skin,
and how irreparable it must be for ages yet, in this world where every
other shame and all manner of wilful guilt and wickedness may hope
for covert and pardon, I had little heart to laugh. Indeed, it was so
pathetic to hear this poor old soul talk of her dead and lost ones,
and try, in spite of all Mr. Johnson's theories and her own arrogant
generalizations, to establish their whiteness, that we must have been
very cruel and silly people to turn her sacred fables even into matter
of question. I have no doubt that her Antoinette Anastasia and her
Thomas Jefferson Wilberforce--it is impossible to give a full idea
of the splendor and scope of the baptismal names in Mrs. Johnson's
family--have as light skins and as golden hair in heaven as her reverend
maternal fancy painted for them in our world. There, certainly,
they would not be subject to tanning, which had ruined the delicate
complexion, and had knotted into black woolly tangles the once wavy
blonde locks of our little maid-servant Naomi; and I would fain believe
that Toussaint Washington Johnson, who ran away to sea so many years
ago, has found some fortunate zone where his hair and skin keep the same
sunny and rosy tints they wore to his mother's eyes in infancy. But I
have no means of knowing this, or of telling whether he was the prodigy
of intellect that he was declared to be. Naomi could no more be taken in
proof, of the one assertion than of the other. When she came to us, it
was agreed that she should go to school; but she overruled her mother
in this as in everything else, and never went. Except Sunday-school
lessons, she had no other instruction than that her mistress gave her in
the evenings, when a heavy day's play and the natural influences of the
hour conspired with original causes to render her powerless before words
of one syllable.
The first week of her service she was obedient and faithful to her
duties; but, relaxing in the atmosphere of a house which seems to
demoralize all menials, she shortly fell into disorderly ways of lying
in wait for callers out of doors, and, when people rang, of running up
the front steps, and letting them in from the outside. As the season
expanded, and the fine weather became confirmed, she modified even this
form of service, and spent her time in the fields, appearing at
the house only when nature importunately craved molasses. She had a
parrot-like quickness, so far as music was concerned, and learned from
the Roman statuary to make the groves and half-finished houses resound,
“Camicia rossa,
Ove t' ascondi?
T' appella Italia,--
Tu non respondi!”
She taught the Garibaldi song, moreover, to all the neighboring
children, so that I sometimes wondered if our street were not about to
march upon Rome in a body.
In her untamable disobedience, Naomi alone betrayed her sylvan blood,
for she was in all other respects negro and not Indian. But it was of
her aboriginal ancestry that Mrs. Johnson chiefly boasted,--when not
engaged in argument to maintain the superiority of the African race.
She loved to descant upon it as the cause and explanation of her own
arrogant habit of feeling; and she seemed indeed to have inherited
something of the Indian's hauteur along with the Ethiop's supple cunning
and abundant amiability. She gave many instances in which her pride had
met and overcome the insolence of employers, and the kindly old creature
was by no means singular in her pride of being reputed proud.
She could never have been a woman of strong logical faculties, but she
had in some things a very surprising and awful astuteness. She seldom
introduced any purpose directly, but bore all about it and then suddenly
sprung it upon her unprepared antagonist. At other times she obscurely
hinted a reason, and left a conclusion to be inferred; as when she
warded off reproach for some delinquency by saying in a general way that
she had lived with ladies who used to come scolding into the kitchen
after they had taken their bitters. “Quality ladies took their bitters
regular,” she added, to remove any sting of personality from her remark;
for, from many things she had let fall, we knew that she did not regard
us as quality. On the contrary, she often tried to overbear us with the
gentility of her former places; and would tell the lady over whom
she reigned, that she had lived with folks worth their three and
four hundred thousand dollars, who never complained as she did of the
ironing. Yet she had a sufficient regard for the literary occupations
of the family, Mr. Johnson having been an author. She even professed
to have herself written a book, which was still in manuscript, and
preserved somewhere among her best clothes.
It was well, on many accounts, to be in contact with a mind so original
and suggestive as Mrs. Johnson's. We loved to trace its intricate yet
often transparent operations, and were perhaps too fond of explaining
its peculiarities by facts of ancestry,--of finding hints of the Powwow
or the Grand Custom in each grotesque development. We were conscious
of something warmer in this old soul than in ourselves, and something
wilder, and we chose to think it the tropic and the untracked forest.
She had scarcely any being apart from her affection; she had no
morality, but was good because she neither hated nor envied; and she
might have been a saint far more easily than far more civilized people.
There was that also in her sinuous yet malleable nature, so full of
guile and so full of goodness, that reminded us pleasantly of lowly folk
in elder lands, where relaxing oppressions have lifted the restraints of
fear between master and servant, without disturbing the familiarity of
their relation. She advised freely with us upon all household matters,
and took a motherly interest in whatever concerned us. She could be
flattered or caressed into almost any service, but no threat or command
could move her. When she erred, she never acknowledged her wrong in
words, but handsomely expressed her regrets in a pudding, or sent up her
apologies in a favorite dish secretly prepared. We grew so well used to
this form of exculpation, that, whenever Mrs. Johnson took an afternoon
at an inconvenient season, we knew that for a week afterwards we should
be feasted like princes. She owned frankly that she loved us, that she
never had done half so much for people before, and that she never had
been nearly so well suited in any other place; and for a brief and happy
time we thought that we never should part.
One day, however, our dividing destiny appeared in the basement, and was
presented to us as Hippolyto Thucydides, the son of Mrs. Johnson,
who had just arrived on a visit to his mother from the State of New
Hampshire. He was a heavy and loutish youth, standing upon the borders
of boyhood, and looking forward to the future with a vacant and listless
eye. I mean that this was his figurative attitude; his actual manner, as
he lolled upon a chair beside the kitchen window, was so eccentric, that
we felt a little uncertain how to regard him, and Mrs. Johnson openly
described him as peculiar. He was so deeply tanned by the fervid suns
of the New Hampshire winter, and his hair had so far suffered from
the example of the sheep lately under his charge, that he could not be
classed by any stretch of compassion with the blonde and straight-haired
members of Mrs. Johnson's family.
He remained with us all the first day until late in the afternoon, when
his mother took him out to get him a boarding-house. Then he departed
in the van of her and Naomi, pausing at the gate to collect his spirits,
and, after he had sufficiently animated himself by clapping his palms
together, starting off down the street at a hand-gallop, to the manifest
terror of the cows in the pastures, and the confusion of the less
demonstrative people of our household. Other characteristic traits
appeared in Hippolyto Thucydides within no very long period of time, and
he ran away from his lodgings so often during the summer that he might
be said to board round among the outlying corn-fields and turnip-patches
of Charlesbridge. As a check upon this habit, Mrs. Johnson seemed to
have invited him to spend his whole time in our basement; for whenever
we went below we found him there, balanced--perhaps in homage to us,
and perhaps as a token of extreme sensibility in himself--upon the low
window-sill, the bottoms of his boots touching the floor inside, and his
face buried in the grass without.
We could formulate no very tenable objection to all this, and yet
the presence of Thucydides in our kitchen unaccountably oppressed our
imaginations. We beheld him all over the house, a monstrous eidolon,
balanced upon every window-sill; and he certainly attracted unpleasant
notice to our place, no less by his furtive and hang-dog manner
of arrival than by the bold displays with which he celebrated his
departures. We hinted this to Mrs. Johnson, but she could not enter into
our feeling. Indeed, all the wild poetry of her maternal and primitive
nature seemed to cast itself about this hapless boy; and if we had
listened to her we should have believed there was no one so agreeable in
society, or so quick-witted in affairs, as Hippolyto, when he chose. She
used to rehearse us long epics concerning his industry, his courage, and
his talent; and she put fine speeches in his mouth with no more regard
to the truth than if she had been a historian, and not a poet. Perhaps
she believed that he really said and did the things she attributed to
him: it is the destiny of those who repeatedly tell great things either
of themselves or others; and I think we may readily forgive the illusion
to her zeal and fondness. In fact, she was not a wise woman, and she
spoiled her children as if she had been a rich one.
At last, when we said positively that Thucydides should come to us no
more, and then qualified the prohibition by allowing him to come every
Sunday, she answered that she never would hurt the child's feelings by
telling him not to come where his mother was; that people who did not
love her children did not love her; and that, if Hippy went, she went.
We thought it a master-stroke of firmness to rejoin that Hippolyto must
go in any event; but I am bound to own that he did not go, and that his
mother stayed, and so fed us with every cunning propitiatory dainty,
that we must have been Pagans to renew our threat. In fact, we begged
Mrs. Johnson to go into the country with us, and she, after long
reluctation on Hippy's account, consented, agreeing to send him away to
friends during her absence.
We made every preparation, and on the eve of our departure Mrs. Johnson
went into the city to engage her son's passage to Bangor, while we
awaited her return in untroubled security.
But she did not appear till midnight, and then responded with but a sad
“Well, sah!” to the cheerful “Well, Mrs. Johnson!” that greeted her.
“All right, Mrs. Johnson?”
Mrs. Johnson made a strange noise, half chuckle and half death-rattle,
in her throat. “All wrong, sah. Hippy's off again; and I've been all
over the city after him.”
“Then you can't go with us in the morning?”
“How _can_ I, sah?”
Mrs. Johnson went sadly out of the room. Then she came back to the door
again, and, opening it, uttered, for the first time in our service,
words of apology and regret: “I hope I ha'n't put you out any. I
_wanted_ to go with you, but I ought to _knowed_ I couldn't. All is, I
loved you too much.”
DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE
Vagabonds the world would no doubt call many of my doorstep
acquaintance, and I do not attempt to defend them altogether against
the world, which paints but black and white and in general terms. Yet I
would fain veil what is only half-truth under another name, for I know
that the service of their Gay Science is not one of such disgraceful
ease as we associate with ideas of vagrancy, though I must own that they
lead the life they do because they love it. They always protest that
nothing but their ignorance of our tongue prevents them from practicing
some mechanical trade. “What work could be harder,” they ask, “than
carrying this organ about all day?” but while I answer with honesty that
nothing can be more irksome, I feel that they only pretend a disgust
with it, and that they really like organ-grinding, if for no other
reason than that they are the children of the summer, and it takes them
into the beloved open weather. One of my friends, at least, who in the
warmer months is to all appearance a blithesome troubadour, living
“A merry life in sun and shade,”
as a coal-heaver in winter; and though this more honorable and useful
occupation is doubtless open to him the whole year round, yet he does
not devote himself to it, but prefers with the expanding spring to lay
aside his grimy basket, and, shouldering his organ, to quit the dismal
wharves and carts and cellars, and to wander forth into the suburbs,
with his lazy, soft-eyed boy at his heels, who does nothing with his
tambourine but take up a collection, and who, meeting me the other day
in a chance passage of Ferry Street, knew me, and gave me so much of his
father's personal history.
It was winter even there in Ferry Street, in which so many Italians live
that one might think to find it under a softer sky and in a gentler air,
and which I had always figured in a wide unlikeness to all other streets
in Boston,--with houses stuccoed outside, and with gratings at their
ground-floor windows; with mouldering archways between the buildings,
and at the corners feeble lamps glimmering before pictures of the
Madonna; with weather-beaten shutters flapping overhead, and many
balconies from which hung the linen swathings of young infants, and
love-making maidens furtively lured the velvet-jacketed, leisurely youth
below: a place haunted by windy voices of blessing and cursing, with the
perpetual clack of wooden-heeled shoes upon the stones, and what perfume
from the blossom of vines and almond-trees, mingling with less delicate
smells, the travelled reader pleases to imagine. I do not say that I
found Ferry Street actually different from this vision in most respects;
but as for the vines and almond-trees, they were not in bloom at the
moment of my encounter with the little tambourine-boy. As we stood and
talked, the snow fell as heavily and thickly around us as elsewhere in
Boston. With a vague pain,--the envy of a race toward another born to a
happier clime,--I heard from him that his whole family was going back to
Italy in a month. The father had at last got together money enough, and
the mother, who had long been an invalid, must be taken home; and, so
far as I know, the population of Ferry Street exists but in the hope of
a return, soon or late, to the native or the ancestral land.
More than one of my doorstep acquaintance, in fact, seemed to have no
other stock in trade than this fond desire, and to thrive with it in our
sympathetic community. It is scarcely possible but the reader has met
the widow of Giovanni Cascamatto, a Vesuvian lunatic who has long set
fire to their home on the slopes of the volcano, and perished in
the flames. She was our first Italian acquaintance in Charlesbridge,
presenting herself with a little subscription-book which she sent in
for inspection, with a printed certificate to the facts of her history
signed with the somewhat conventionally Saxon names of William Tompkins
and John Johnson. These gentlemen set forth, in terms vaguer than can be
reproduced, that her object in coming to America was to get money to go
back to Italy; and the whole document had so fictitious an air that it
made us doubt even the nationality of the bearer; but we were put to
shame by the decent joy she manifested in an Italian salutation. There
was no longer a question of imposture in anybody's mind; we gladly
paid tribute to her poetic fiction, and she thanked us with a tranquil
courtesy that placed the obligation where it belonged. As she turned to
go with many good wishes, we pressed her to have some dinner, but
she answered with a compliment insurpassably flattering, she had just
dined--in another palace. The truth is, there is not a single palace on
Benicia Street, and our little box of pine and paper would hardly have
passed for a palace on the stage, where these things are often contrived
with great simplicity; but as we had made a little Italy together, she
touched it with the exquisite politeness of her race, and it became
for the instant a lordly mansion, standing on the Chiaja, or the Via
Nuovissima, or the Canalazzo.
I say this woman seemed glad to be greeted in Italian, but not, so far
as I could see, surprised; and altogether the most amazing thing about
my doorstep acquaintance of her nation is, that they are never surprised
to be spoken to in their own tongue, or, if they are, never show it.
A chestnut-roaster, who has sold me twice the chestnuts the same money
would have bought of him in English, has not otherwise recognized the
fact that Tuscan is not the dialect of Charlesbridge, and the mortifying
nonchalance with which my advances have always been received has long
since persuaded me that to the grinder at the gate it is not remarkable
that a man should open the door of his wooden house on Benicia Street,
and welcome him in his native language. After the first shock of this
indifference is past, it is not to be questioned but it flatters with
an illusion, which a stare of amazement would forbid, reducing the
encounter to a vulgar reality at once, and I could almost believe it
in those wily and amiable folk to intend the sweeter effect of their
unconcern, which tacitly implies that there is no other tongue in the
world but Italian, and which makes all the earth and air Italian for the
time. Nothing else could have been the purpose of that image-dealer whom
I saw on a summer's day lying at the foot of one of our meeting-houses,
and doing his best to make it a cathedral, and really giving a sentiment
of medieval art to the noble sculptures of the facade which the
carpenters had just nailed up, freshly painted and newly repaired. This
poet was stretched upon his back, eating, in that convenient posture,
his dinner out of an earthen pot, plucking the viand from it, whatever
it was, with his thumb and fore-finger, and dropping it piecemeal into
his mouth. When the passer asked him “Where are you from?” he held a
morsel in air long enough to answer “Da Lucca, signore,” and then let it
fall into his throat, and sank deeper into a reverie in which that crude
accent even must have sounded like a gossip's or a kinsman's voice, but
never otherwise moved muscle, nor looked to see who passed or lingered.
There could have been little else in his circumstances to remind him of
home, and if he was really in the sort of day-dream attributed to him,
he was wise not to look about him. I have not myself been in Lucca,
but I conceive that its piazza is not like our square, with a pump
and horse-trough in the midst; but that it has probably a fountain and
statuary, though not possibly so magnificent an elm towering above the
bronze or marble groups as spreads its boughs of benison over our pump
and the horse-car switchman, loitering near it to set the switch for the
arriving cars, or lift the brimming buckets to the smoking nostrils of
the horses, while out from the stable comes clanging and banging with
a fresh team that famous African who has turned white, or, if he is
off duty, one of his brethren who has not yet begun to turn.
Figure, besides, an expressman watering his horse at the trough, a
provision-cart backed up against the curb in front of one of the stores,
various people looking from the car-office windows, and a conductor
appearing at the door long enough to call out, “Ready for Boston!”--and
you have a scene of such gayety as Lucca could never have witnessed in
her piazza at high noon on a summer's day. Even our Campo Santo, if the
Lucchese had cared to look round the corner of the meeting-house at its
moss-grown head stones, could have had little to remind him of home,
though it has antiquity and a proper quaintness. But not for him, not
for them of his clime and faith, is the pathos of those simple memorial
slates with their winged skulls, changing upon many later stones, as if
by the softening of creeds and customs, to cherub's heads,--not for him
is the pang I feel because of those who died, in our country's youth
exiles or exiles' children, heirs of the wilderness and toil and
hardship. Could they rise from their restful beds, and look on this
wandering Italian with his plaster statuettes of Apollo, and Canovan
dancers and deities, they would hold his wares little better than Romish
saints and idolatries, and would scarcely have the sentimental interest
in him felt by the modern citizen of Charlesbridge; but I think that
even they must have respected that Lombard scissors-grinder who used to
come to us, and put an edge to all the cutlery in the house.