by degrees and almost dying away, before a flight of boys came down
the street with the tidings, “They are bringing her--bringing her in a
wagon.”
The contributor knew that she whom they were bringing in the wagon, had
had the poetry of love to her dismal and otherwise squalid death;
but the history was of fancy, not of fact in his mind. Of course, he
reflected, her lot must have been obscure and hard; the aspect of those
concerned about her death implied that. But of her hopes and her fears,
who could tell him anything? To be sure he could imagine the lovers, and
how they first met, and where, and who he was that was doomed to work
her shame and death; but here his fancy came upon something coarse and
common: a man of her own race and grade, handsome after that manner of
beauty which is so much more hateful than ugliness is; or, worse still,
another kind of man whose deceit must have been subtler and wickeder;
but whatever the person, a presence defiant of sympathy or even
interest, and simply horrible. Then there were the details of the
affair, in great degree common to all love affairs, and not varying so
widely in any condition of life; for the passion which is so rich and
infinite to those within its charm, is apt to seem a little tedious
and monotonous in its character, and poor in resources to the cold
looker-on.
Then, finally, there was the crazy purpose and its fulfillment: the
headlong plunge from bank or bridge; the eddy, and the bubbles on the
current that calmed itself above the suicide; the tide that rose and
stretched itself abroad in the sunshine, carrying hither and thither the
burden with which it knew not what to do; the arrest, as by some ghastly
caprice of fate, of the dead girl, in that upright posture, in which she
should meet the quest for her, as it were defiantly.
And now they were bringing her in a wagon.
Involuntarily all stood aside, and waited till the funeral car, which
they saw, should come up toward them through the long vista of the
maple-shaded street, a noiseless riot stirring the legs and arms of the
boys into frantic demonstration, while the women remained quiet with
arms folded or akimbo. Before and behind the wagon, driven slowly,
went a guard of ragged urchins, while on the raised seat above sat
two Americans, unperturbed by anything, and concerned merely with the
business of the affair.
The vehicle was a grocer's cart which had perhaps been pressed into the
service; and inevitably the contributor thought of Zenobia, and of
Miles Coverdale's belief that if she could have foreboded all the
_post-mortem_ ugliness and grotesqueness of suicide, she never would
have drowned herself. This girl, too, had doubtless had her own ideas
of the effect that her death was to make, her conviction that it was to
wring one heart, at least, and to strike awe and pity to every other;
and her woman's soul must have been shocked from death could she have
known in what a ghastly comedy the body she put off was to play a part.
In the bottom of the cart lay something long and straight and terrible,
covered with a red shawl that drooped over the end of the wagon; and
on this thing were piled the baskets in which the grocers had delivered
their orders for sugar and flour, and coffee and tea. As the cart jolted
through their lines, the boys could no longer be restrained; they broke
out with wild yells, and danced madly about it, while the red shawl
hanging from the rigid feet nodded to their frantic mirth; and the sun
dropped its light through the maples and shone bright upon the flooded
date.
JUBILEE DAYS
I believe I have no good reason for including among these suburban
sketches my recollections of the Peace Jubilee, celebrated by a monster
musical entertainment at Boston, in June, 1869; and I do not know if it
will serve as excuse for their intrusion to say that the exhibition was
not urban in character, and that I attended it in a feeling of curiosity
and amusement which the Bostonians did not seem to feel, and which I
suspect was a strictly suburban if not rural sentiment.
I thought, on that Tuesday morning, as our horse-car drew near the Long
Bridge, and we saw the Coliseum spectral through the rain, that Boston
was going to show people representing other parts of the country her
Notion of weather. I looked forward to a forenoon of clammy warmth, and
an afternoon of clammy cold and of east wind, with a misty nightfall
soaking men to the bones. But the day really turned out well enough; it
was showery, but not shrewish, and it smiled pleasantly at sunset, as if
content with the opening ceremonies of the Great Peace Jubilee.
The city, as we entered it, gave due token of excitement, and we felt
the celebration even in the air, which had a holiday quality very
different from that of ordinary workday air. The crowds filled the
decorous streets, and the trim pathways of the Common and the Public
Garden, and flowed in an orderly course towards the vast edifice on the
Back Bay, presenting the interesting points which always distinguish a
crowd come to town from a city crowd. You get so used to the Boston face
and the Boston dress, that a coat from New York or a visage from Chicago
is at once conspicuous to you; and in these people there was not only
this strangeness, but the different oddities that lurk in out-of-way
corners of society everywhere had started suddenly into notice.
Long-haired men, popularly supposed to have perished with the
institution of slavery, appeared before me, and men with various causes
and manias looking from their wild eyes confronted each other, let alone
such charlatans as had clothed themselves quaintly or grotesquely to add
a charm to the virtue of whatever nostrum they peddled. It was, however,
for the most part, a remarkably well-dressed crowd; and therein it
probably differed more than in any other respect from the crowd which a
holiday would have assembled in former times. There was little rusticity
to be noted anywhere, and the uncouthness which has already disappeared
from the national face seemed to be passing from the national wardrobe.
Nearly all the visitors seemed to be Americans, but neither the Yankee
type nor the Hoosier was to be found. They were apparently very happy,
too; the ancestral solemnity of the race that amuses itself sadly was
not to be seen in them, and, if they were not making it a duty to be
gay, they were really taking their pleasure in a cheerful spirit.
There was, in fact, something in the sight of the Coliseum, as we
approached it, which was a sufficient cause of elation to whoever is
buoyed up by the flutter of bright flags, and the movement in and about
holiday booths, as I think we all are apt to be. One may not have the
stomach of happier days for the swing or the whirligig; he may not
drink soda-water intemperately; pop-corn may not tempt him, nor
tropical fruits allure; but he beholds them without gloom,--nay, a grin
inevitably lights up his countenance at the sight of a great show of
these amusements and refreshments. And any Bostonian might have
felt proud that morning that his city did not hide the light of her
mercantile merit under a bushel, but blazoned it about on the booths and
walls in every variety of printed and painted advertisement. To the mere
aesthetic observer, these vast placards gave the delight of brilliant
color, and blended prettily enough in effect with the flags; and at
first glance I received quite as much pleasure from the frescoes that
advised me where to buy my summer clothing, as from any bunting I saw.
I had the good fortune on the morning of this first Jubilee day to view
the interior of the Coliseum when there was scarcely anybody there,--a
trifle of ten thousand singers at one end, and a few thousand other
people scattered about over the wide expanses of parquet and galleries.
The decorations within, as without, were a pleasure to the eyes that
love gayety of color; and the interior was certainly magnificent, with
those long lines of white and blue drapery roofing the balconies, the
slim, lofty columns festooned with flags and drooping banners, the arms
of the States decking the fronts of the galleries, and the arabesques of
painted muslin everywhere. I do not know that my taste concerned itself
with the decorations, or that I have any taste in such things; but I
testify that these tints and draperies gave no small part of the
comfort of being where all things conspired for one's pleasure. The airy
amplitude of the building, the perfect order and the perfect freedom
of movement, the ease of access and exit, the completeness of the
arrangements that in the afternoon gave all of us thirty thousand
spectators a chance to behold the great spectacle as well as to hear
the music, were felt, I am sure, as personal favors by every one. These
minor particulars, in fact, served greatly to assist you in identifying
yourself, when the vast hive swarmed with humanity, and you became a
mere sentient atom of the mass.
It was rumored in the morning that the ceremonies were to begin with
prayer by a hundred ministers, but I missed this striking feature of the
exhibition, for I did not arrive in the afternoon till the last speech
was being made by a gentleman whom I saw gesticulating effectively, and
whom I suppose to have been intelligible to a matter of twenty thousand
people in his vicinity, but who was to me, of the remote, outlying
thirty thousand, a voice merely. One word only I caught, and I report
it here that posterity may know as much as we thirty thousand
contemporaries did of
THE PRESIDENT'S SPEECH.
. . . . . . . (_sensation_.) . . . . . . . . . . (_cheers_.). . . .
refinement . . . . . . . . . . (_great applause_.)
I do not know if I shall be able to give an idea of the immensity of
this scene; but if such a reader as has the dimensions of the Coliseum
accurately fixed in his mind will, in imagination, densely hide all that
interminable array of benching in the parquet and the galleries and
the slopes at either end of the edifice with human heads, showing here
crowns, there occiputs, and yonder faces, he will perhaps have some
notion of the spectacle as we beheld it from the northern hill-side.
Some thousands of heads nearest were recognizable as attached by the
usual neck to the customary human body, but for the rest, we seemed
to have entered a world of cherubim. Especially did the multitudinous
singers seated far opposite encourage this illusion; and their
fluttering fans and handkerchiefs wonderfully mocked the movement of
those cravat-like pinions which the fancy attributed to them. They rose
or sank at the wave of the director's baton; and still looked like an
innumerable flock of cherubs drifting over some slope of Paradise, or
settling upon it,--if cherubs _can_ settle.
[Illustration: “The spectacle as we beheld it.”]
The immensity was quite as striking to the mind as to the eye, and an
absolute democracy was appreciable in it. Not only did all artificial
distinctions cease, but those of nature were practically obliterated,
and you felt for once the full meaning of unanimity. No one was at a
disadvantage; one was as wise, as good, as handsome as another. In most
public assemblages, the foolish eye roves in search of the vanity of
female beauty, and rests upon some lovely visage, or pretty figure;
but here it seemed to matter nothing whether ladies were well or
ill-looking; and one might have been perfectly ascetic without
self-denial. A blue eye or a black,--what of it? A mass of blonde or
chestnut hair, this sort of walking-dress or that,--you might note the
difference casually in a few hundred around you; but a sense of those
myriads of other eyes and chignons and walking-dresses absorbed the
impression in an instant, and left a dim, strange sense of loss, as if
all women had suddenly become Woman. For the time, one would have been
preposterously conceited to have felt his littleness in that crowd; you
never thought of yourself in an individual capacity at all. It was as
if you were a private in an army, or a very ordinary billow of the sea,
feeling the battle or the storm, in a collective sort of way, but unable
to distinguish your sensations from those of the mass. If a rafter had
fallen and crushed you and your unimportant row of people, you could
scarcely have regarded it as a personal calamity, but might have found
it disagreeable as a shock to that great body of humanity. Recall, then,
how astonished you were to be recognized by some one, and to have your
hand shaken in your individual character of Smith. “Smith? My dear
What's-your-name, I am for the present the fifty-thousandth part of an
enormous emotion!”
It was as difficult to distribute the various facts of the whole effect,
as to identify one's self. I had only a public and general consciousness
of the delight given by the harmony of hues in the parquet below; and
concerning the orchestra I had at first no distinct impression save of
the three hundred and thirty violin-bows held erect like standing wheat
at one motion of the director's wand, and then falling as if with the
next he swept them down. Afterwards files of men with horns, and other
files of men with drums and cymbals, discovered themselves; while far
above all, certain laborious figures pumped or ground with incessant
obeisance at the apparatus supplying the organ with wind.
What helped, more than anything else, to restore you your dispersed and
wandering individuality was the singing of Parepa-Rosa, as she triumphed
over the harmonious rivalry of the orchestra. There was something in
the generous amplitude and robust cheerfulness of this great artist that
accorded well with the ideal of the occasion; she was in herself a great
musical festival; and one felt, as she floated down the stage with
her far-spreading white draperies, and swept the audience a colossal
courtesy, that here was the embodied genius of the Jubilee. I do not
trust myself to speak particularly of her singing, for I have the
natural modesty of people who know nothing about music, and I have not
at command the phraseology of those who pretend to understand it; but I
say that her voice filled the whole edifice with delicious melody, that
it soothed and composed and utterly enchanted, that, though two hundred
violins accompanied her, the greater sweetness of her note prevailed
over all, like a mighty will commanding many. What a sublime ovation for
her when a hundred thousand hands thundered their acclaim! A victorious
general, an accepted lover, a successful young author,--these know a
measure of bliss, I dare say; but in one throb, the singer's heart, as
it leaps in exultation at the loud delight of her applausive thousands,
must out-enjoy them all. Let me lay these poor little artificial flowers
of rhetoric at the feet of the divine singer, as a faint token of
gratitude and eloquent intention.
When Parepa (or Prepper, as I have heard her name popularly pronounced)
had sung, the revived consciousness of an individual life rose in
rebellion against the oppression of that dominant vastness. In fact,
human nature can stand only so much of any one thing. To a certain
degree you accept and conceive of facts truthfully, but beyond this a
mere fantasticality rules; and having got enough of grandeur, the senses
played themselves false. That array of fluttering and tuning people on
the southern slope began to look minute, like the myriad heads assembled
in the infinitesimal photograph which you view through one of those
little half-inch lorgnettes; and you had the satisfaction of knowing
that to any lovely infinitesimality yonder you showed no bigger than
a carpet-tack. The whole performance now seemed to be worked by those
tireless figures pumping at the organ, in obedience to signals from
a very alert figure on the platform below. The choral and orchestral
thousands sang and piped and played; and at a given point in the _scena_
from Verdi, a hundred fairies in red shirts marched down through the
sombre mass of puppets and beat upon as many invisible anvils.
This was the stroke of anti-climax; and the droll sound of those anvils,
so far above all the voices and instruments in its pitch, thoroughly
disillusioned you and restored you finally to your proper entity and
proportions. It was the great error of the great Jubilee, and where
almost everything else was noble and impressive,--where the direction
was faultless, and the singing and instrumentation as perfectly
controlled as if they were the result of one volition,--this
anvil-beating was alone ignoble and discordant,--trivial and huge
merely. Not even the artillery accompaniment, in which the cannon were
made to pronounce words of two syllables, was so bad.
The dimensions of this sketch bear so little proportion to those of the
Jubilee, that I must perforce leave most of its features unnoticed; but
I wish to express the sense of enjoyment which prevailed (whenever the
anvils were not beaten) over every other feeling, even over wonder. To
the ear as to the eye it was a delight, and it was an assured success in
the popular affections from the performance of the first piece. For
my own part, if one pleasurable sensation, besides that received from
Parepa's singing, distinguished itself from the rest, it was that given
by the performance of the exquisite Coronation March from Meyerbeer's
“Prophet;” but I say this under protest of the pleasure taken in
the choral rendering of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Closely allying
themselves to these great raptures were the minor joys of wandering
freely about from point to point, of receiving fresh sensations from
the varying lights and aspects in which the novel scene presented itself
with its strange fascinations, and of noting, half consciously, the
incessant movement of the crowd as it revealed itself in changing
effects of color. Then the gay tumult of the fifteen minutes of
intermission between the parts, when all rose with a _susurrus_ of
innumerable silks, and the thousands of pretty singers fluttered
about, and gossiped tremulously and delightedly over the glory of the
performance, revealing themselves as charming feminine personalities,
each with her share in the difficulty and the achievement, each with
her pique or pride, and each her something to tell her friend of the
conduct, agreeable or displeasing, of some particular him! Even the
quick dispersion of the mass at the close was a marvel of orderliness
and grace, as the melting and separating parts, falling asunder,
radiated from the centre, and flowed and rippled rapidly away, and left
the great hall empty and bare at last.
And as you emerged from the building, what bizarre and perverse feeling
was that you knew? Something as if all-out-doors were cramped and
small, and it were better to return to the freedom and amplitude of the
interior?
On the second day, much that was wonderful in a first experience of the
festival was gone; but though the novelty had passed away, the cause for
wonder was even greater. If on the first day the crowd was immense, it
was now something which the imperfect state of the language will not
permit me to describe; perhaps _awful_ will serve the purpose as well as
any other word now in use. As you looked round, from the centre of the
building, on that restless, fanning, fluttering multitude, to right and
left and north and south, all comparisons and similitudes abandoned you.
If you were to write of the scene, you felt that your effort, at the
best, must be a meagre sketch, suggesting something to those who had
seen the fact, but conveying no intelligible impression of it to any
one else. The galleries swarmed, the vast slopes were packed, in the
pampa-like parquet even the aisles were half filled with chairs, while
a cloud of placeless wanderers moved ceaselessly on the borders of the
mass under the balconies.
When that common-looking, uncommon little man whom we have called to
rule over us entered the house, and walked quietly down to his seat in
the centre of it, a wild, inarticulate clamor, like no other noise in
the world, swelled from every side, till General Grant rose and showed
himself, when it grew louder than ever, and then gradully subsided into
silence. Then a voice, which might be uttering some mortal alarm,
broke repeatedly across the stillness from one of the balconies, and a
thousand glasses were leveled in that direction, while everywhere else
the mass hushed itself with a mute sense of peril. The capacity of such
an assemblage for self-destruction was, in fact, but too evident. From
fire, in an edifice of which the sides could be knocked out in a moment,
there could have been little danger; the fabric's strength had been
perfectly tested the day before, and its fall was not to be apprehended;
but we had ourselves greatly to dread. A panic could have been caused by
any mad or wanton person, in which thousands might have been instantly
trampled to death; and it seemed long till that foolish voice was
stilled, and the house lapsed back into tranquillity, and the enjoyment
of the music. In the performance I recall nothing disagreeable, nothing
that to my ignorance seemed imperfect, though I leave it to the wise in
music to say how far the great concert was a success. I saw a flourish
of the director's wand, and I heard the voices or the instruments,
or both, respond, and I knew by my programme that I was enjoying an
unprecedented quantity of Haydn or Handel or Meyerbeer or Rossini or
Mozart, afforded with an unquestionable precision and promptness; but I
own that I liked better to stroll about the three-acre house, and that
for me the music was, at best, only one of the joys of the festival.
There was good hearing outside for those that desired to listen to the
music, with seats to let in the surrounding tents and booths; and there
was unlimited seeing for the mere looker-on. At least fifty thousand
people seemed to have come to the Jubilee with no other purpose than
to gaze upon the outside of the building. The crowd was incomparably
greater than that of the day before; all the main thoroughfares of the
city roared with a tide of feet that swept through the side streets, and
swelled aimlessly up the places, and eddied there, and poured out again
over the pavements. The carriage-ways were packed with every sort of
vehicle, with foot-passengers crowded from the sidewalks, and with
the fragments of the military parade in honor of the President, with
infantry, with straggling cavalrymen, with artillery. All the paths of
the Common and the Garden were filled, and near the Coliseum the throngs
densified on every side into an almost impenetrable mass, that made the
doors of the building difficult to approach and at times inaccessible.