produced, in these ladies, some effects doubtless more interesting than
profitable to observe. One of them, whose unhappiness it was to take
the part of _soubrette_ in the Laughable Commedietta preceding the
burlesque, was so ill at ease in drapery, so full of awkward jerks and
twitches, that she seemed quite another being when she came on later
as a radiant young gentleman in pink silk hose, and nothing of feminine
modesty in her dress excepting the very low corsage. A strange and
compassionable satisfaction beamed from her face; it was evident that
this sad business was the poor thing's _forte_. In another company was a
lady who had conquered all the easy attitudes of young men of the second
or third fashion, and who must have been at something of a loss to
identify herself when personating a woman off the stage. But Nature
asserted herself in a way that gave a curious and scarcely explicable
shock in the case of that dancer whose impudent song required the action
of fondling a child, and who rendered the passage with an instinctive
tenderness and grace, all the more pathetic for the profaning boldness
of her super masculine dress or undress. Commonly, however, the members
of these burlesque troupes, though they were not like men, were in most
things as unlike women, and seemed creatures of a kind of alien sex,
parodying both. It was certainly a shocking thing to look at them with
their horrible prettiness, their archness in which was no charm, their
grace which put to shame. Yet whoever beheld these burlesque sisters,
must have fallen into perplexing question in his own mind as to whose
was the wrong involved. It was not the fault of the public--all of us
felt that: was it the fault of the hard-working sisterhood, bred to this
as to any other business, and not necessarily conscious of the
indecorum which pains my reader,--obliged to please somehow, and aiming,
doubtless, at nothing but applause? “La Belle Hélène” suggests the only
reasonable explanation: _“C'est la fatalité_.”
FLITTING
I would not willingly repose upon the friendship of a man whose local
attachments are weak. I should not demand of my intimate that he have a
yearning for the homes of his ancestors, or even the scenes of his own
boyhood; that is not in American nature; on the contrary, he is but a
poor creature who does not hate the village where he was born; yet a
sentiment for the place where one has lived two or three years, the
hotel where one has spent a week, the sleeping car in which one has
ridden from Albany to Buffalo,--so much I should think it well to exact
from my friend in proof of that sensibility and constancy without which
true friendship does not exist. So much I am ready to yield on my
own part to a friend's demand, and I profess to have all the possible
regrets for Benicia Street, now I have left it. Over its deficiencies
I cast a veil of decent oblivion, and shall always try to look upon its
worthy and consoling aspects, which were far the more numerous. It was
never otherwise, I imagine, than an ideal region in very great measure;
and if the reader whom I have sometimes seemed to direct thither,
should seek it out, he would hardly find my Benicia Street by the city
sign-board. Yet this is not wholly because it was an ideal locality, but
because much of its reality has now become merely historical, a portion
of the tragical poetry of the past. Many of the vacant lots abutting
upon Benicia and the intersecting streets flourished up, during the four
years we knew it, into fresh-painted wooden houses, and the time came
to be when one might have looked in vain for the abandoned hoop-skirts
which used to decorate the desirable building-sites. The lessening
pasturage also reduced the herds which formerly fed in the vicinity, and
at last we caught the tinkle of the cow-bells only as the cattle were
driven past to remoter meadows. And one autumn afternoon two laborers,
hired by the city, came and threw up an earthwork on the opposite side
of the street, which they said was a sidewalk, and would add to
the value of property in the neighborhood. Not being dressed with
coal-ashes, however, during the winter, the sidewalk vanished next
summer under a growth of rag-weed, and hid the increased values with
it, and it is now an even question whether this monument of municipal
grandeur will finally be held by Art or resumed by Nature,--who indeed
has a perpetual motherly longing for her own, and may be seen in all
outlying and suburban places, pathetically striving to steal back any
neglected bits of ground and conceal them under her skirts of tattered
and shabby verdure. But whatever is the event of this contest, and
whatever the other changes wrought in the locality, it has not yet been
quite stripped of the characteristic charms which first took our hearts,
and which have been duly celebrated in these pages.
When the new house was chosen, we made preparations to leave the old
one, but preparations so gradual, that, if we had cared much more than
we did, we might have suffered greatly by the prolongation of the
agony. We proposed to ourselves to escape the miseries of moving by
transferring the contents of one room at a time, and if we did not laugh
incredulously at people who said we had better have it over at once and
be done with it, it was because we respected their feelings, and not
because we believed them. We took up one carpet after another; one wall
after another we stripped of its pictures; we sent away all the books
to begin with; and by this subtle and ingenious process, we reduced
ourselves to the discomfort of living in no house at all, as it were,
and of being at home in neither one place nor the other. Yet the logic
of our scheme remained perfect; and I do not regret its failure in
practice, for if we had been ever so loath to quit the old house, its
inhospitable barrenness would finally have hurried us forth. In fact,
does not life itself in some such fashion dismantle its tenement until
it is at last forced out of the uninhabitable place? Are not the poor
little comforts and pleasures and ornaments removed one by one, till
life, if it would be saved, must go too? We took a lesson from the
teachings of mortality, which are so rarely heeded, and we lingered over
our moving. We made the process so gradual, indeed, that I do not feel
myself all gone yet from the familiar work-room, and for aught I can
say, I still write there; and as to the guest-chamber, it is so densely
peopled by those it has lodged that it will never quite be emptied of
them. Friends also are yet in the habit of calling in the parlor, and
talking with us; and will the children never come off the stairs? Does
life, our high exemplar, leave so much behind as we did? Is this what
fills the world with ghosts?
In the getting ready to go, nothing hurt half so much as the sight of
the little girl packing her doll's things for removal. The trousseaux
of all those elegant creatures, the wooden, the waxen, the biscuit, the
india-rubber, were carefully assorted, and arranged in various small
drawers and boxes; their house was thoughtfully put in order and locked
for transportation; their innumerable broken sets of dishes were packed
in paper and set out upon the floor, a heart-breaking little basketful.
Nothing real in this world is so affecting as some image of reality,
and this travesty of our own flitting was almost intolerable. I will not
pretend to sentiment about anything else, for everything else had in it
the element of self-support belonging to all actual afflictions. When
the day of moving finally came, and the furniture wagon, which ought to
have been only a shade less dreadful to us than a hearse, drew up at our
door, our hearts were of a Neronian hardness.
“Were I Diogenes,” says wrathful Charles Lamb in one of his letters, “I
would not move out of a kilderkin into a hogshead, though the first had
nothing but small beer in it, and the second reeked claret.” I fancy
this loathing of the transitionary state came in great part from the
rude and elemental nature of the means of moving in Lamb's day. In
our own time, in Charlesbridge at least, everything is so perfectly
contrived, that it is in some ways a pleasant excitement to move; though
I do not commend the diversion to any but people of entire leisure, for
it cannot be denied that it is, at any rate, an interruption to work.
But little is broken, little is defaced, nothing is heedlessly outraged
or put to shame. Of course there are in every house certain objects of
comfort and even ornament which in a state of repose derive a sort of
dignity from being cracked, or scratched, or organically debilitated,
and give an idea of ancestral possession and of long descent to the
actual owner; and you must not hope that this venerable quality will
survive their public exposure upon the furniture wagon. There it
instantly perishes, like the consequence of some country notable huddled
and hustled about in the graceless and ignorant tumult of a great city.
To tell the truth, the number of things that turn shabby under the
ordeal of moving strikes a pang of unaccustomed poverty to the
heart which, loving all manner of makeshifts, is rich even in its
dilapidations. For the time you feel degraded by the spectacle of that
forlornness, and if you are a man of spirit, you try to sneak out of
association with it in the mind of the passer-by; you keep scrupulously
in-doors, or if a fancied exigency obliges you to go back and forth
between the old house and the new, you seek obscure by-ways remote from
the great street down which the wagon flaunts your ruin and decay,
and time your arrivals and departures so as to have the air of merely
dropping in at either place. This consoles you; but it deceives no one;
for the man who is moving is unmistakably stamped with transition.
Yet the momentary eclipse of these things is not the worst. It _is_
momentary; for if you will but plant them in kindly corners and
favorable exposures of the new house, a mould of respectability will
gradually overspread them again, and they will once more account for
their presence by the air of having been a long time in the family; but
there is danger that in the first moments of mortification you will be
tempted to replace them with new and costly articles. Even the best of
the old things are nothing to boast of in the hard, unpitying light
to which they are exposed, and a difficult and indocile spirit of
extravagance is evoked in the least profuse. Because of this fact alone
I should not commend the diversion of moving save to people of very
ample means as well as perfect leisure; there are more reasons than the
misery of flitting why the dweller in the kilderkin should not covet the
hogshead reeking of claret.
But the grosser misery of moving is, as I have hinted, vastly mitigated
by modern science, and what remains of it one may use himself to with
no tremendous effort. I have found that in the dentist's chair,--that
ironically luxurious seat, cushioned in satirical suggestion of
impossible repose,--after a certain initial period of clawing, filing,
scraping, and punching, one's nerves accommodate themselves to the
torment, and one takes almost an objective interest in the operation of
tooth-filling; and in like manner after two or three wagon-loads of your
household stuff have passed down the public street, and all your morbid
associations with them have been desecrated, you begin almost to like
it. Yet I cannot regard this abandon as a perfectly healthy emotion, and
I do not counsel my reader to mount himself upon the wagon and ride to
and fro even once, for afterwards the remembrance of such an excess will
grieve him.
Of course, I meant to imply by this that moving sometimes comes to an
end, though it is not easy to believe so while moving. The time really
arrives when you sit down in your new house, and amid whatever disorder
take your first meal there. This meal is pretty sure to be that gloomy
tea, that loathly repast of butter and toast, and some kind of cake,
with which the soul of the early-dining American is daily cast down
between the hours of six and seven in the evening; and instinctively
you compare it with the last meal you took in your old house, seeking in
vain to decide whether this is more dispiriting than that. At any rate
that was not at all the meal which the last meal in any house which
has been a home ought to be in fact, and is in books. It was hurriedly
cooked; it was served upon fugitive and irregular crockery; and it was
eaten in deplorable disorder, with the professional movers waiting
for the table outside the dining-room. It ought to have been an act of
serious devotion; it was nothing but an expiation. It should have been a
solemn commemoration of all past dinners in the place, an invocation to
their pleasant apparitions. But I, for my part, could not recall these
at all, though now I think of them with the requisite pathos, and I
know they were perfectly worthy of remembrance. I salute mournfully
the companies that have sat down at dinner there, for they are sadly
scattered now; some beyond seas, some beyond the narrow gulf, so
impassably deeper to our longing and tenderness than the seas. But
more sadly still I hail the host himself, and desire to know of him if
literature was not somehow a gayer science in those days, and if his
peculiar kind of drolling had not rather more heart in it then. In an
odd, not quite expressible fashion, something of him seems dispersed
abroad and perished in the guests he loved. I trust, of course, that all
will be restored to him when he turns--as every man past thirty feels he
may when he likes, and has the time--and resumes his youth. Or if this
feeling is only a part of the great tacit promise of eternity, I am all
the more certain of his getting back his losses.
I say that now these apposite reflections occur to me with a sufficient
ease, but that upon the true occasion for them they were absent.
So, too, at the first meal in the new house, there was none of
that desirable sense of setting up a family altar, but a calamitous
impression of irretrievable upheaval, in honor of which sackcloth and
ashes seemed the only wear. Yet even the next day the Lares and Penates
had regained something of their wonted cheerfulness, and life had begun
again with the first breakfast. In fact, I found myself already so
firmly established that, meeting the furniture cart which had moved me
the day before, I had the face to ask the driver whom they were turning
out of house and home, as if my own flitting were a memory of the
far-off past.
Not that I think the professional mover expects to be addressed in a
joking mood. I have a fancy that he cultivates a serious spirit himself,
in which he finds it easy to sympathize with any melancholy on the part
of the moving family. There is a slight flavor of undertaking in his
manner, which is nevertheless full of a subdued firmness very consoling
and supporting; though the life that he leads must be a troubled and
uncheerful one, trying alike to the muscles and the nerves. How often
must he have been charged by anxious and fluttered ladies to be very
careful of that basket of china, and those vases! How often must he have
been vexed by the ignorant terrors of gentlemen asking if he thinks
that the library-table, poised upon the top of his load, will hold!
His planning is not infallible, and when he breaks something uncommonly
precious, what does a man of his sensibility do? Is the demolition of
old homes really distressing to him, or is he inwardly buoyed up by
hopes of other and better homes for the people he moves? Can there
be any ideal of moving? Does he, perhaps, feel a pride in an artfully
constructed load, and has he something like an artist's pang in
unloading it? Is there a choice in families to be moved, and are some
worse or better than others? Next to the lawyer and the doctor, it
appears to me that the professional mover holds the most confidential
relations towards his fellow-men. He is let into all manner of little
domestic secrets and subterfuges; I dare say he knows where half the
people in town keep their skeleton, and what manner of skeleton it
is. As for me, when I saw him making towards a certain closet door, I
planted myself firmly against it. He smiled intelligence; he knew the
skeleton was there, and that it would be carried to the new house after
dark.
I began by saying that I should wish my friend to have some sort of
local attachment; but I suppose it must be owned that this sentiment,
like pity, and the modern love-passion, is a thing so largely produced
by culture that nature seems to have little or nothing to do with it.
The first men were homeless wanderers; the patriarchs dwelt in tents,
and shifted their place to follow the pasturage, without a sigh; and for
children--the pre-historic, the antique people, of our day--moving is a
rapture. The last dinner in the old house, the first tea in the new, so
doleful to their elders, are partaken of by them with joyous riot. Their
shrill trebles echo gleefully from the naked walls and floors; they race
up and down the carpetless stairs; they menace the dislocated mirrors
and crockery; through all the chambers of desolation they frolic with
a gayety indomitable save by bodily exhaustion. If the reader is of a
moving family,--and so he is as he is an American,--he can recall
the zest he found during childhood in the moving which had for his
elders--poor victims of a factitious and conventional sentiment!--only
the salt and bitterness of tears. His spirits never fell till the
carpets were down; no sorrow touched him till order returned; if Heaven
so blessed him that his bed was made upon the floor for one night,
the angels visited his dreams. Why, then, is the mature soul, however
sincere and humble, not only grieved but mortified by flitting? Why
cannot one move without feeling the great public eye fixed in pitying
contempt upon him? This sense of abasement seems to be something quite
inseparable from the act, which is often laudable, and in every way wise
and desirable; and he whom it has afflicted is the first to turn,
after his own establishment, and look with scornful compassion upon the
overflowing furniture wagon as it passes. But I imagine that Abraham's
neighbors, when he struck his tent, and packed his parlor and kitchen
furniture upon his camels, and started off with Mrs. Sarah to seek a new
camping-ground, did not smile at the procession, or find it worthy of
ridicule or lament. Nor did Abraham, once settled, and reposing in the
cool of the evening at the door of his tent, gaze sarcastically upon the
moving of any of his brother patriarchs.
To some such philosophical serenity we shall also return, I suppose,
when we have wisely theorized life in our climate, and shall all have
become nomads once more, following June and October up and down and
across the continent, and not suffering the full malice of the winter
and summer anywhere. But as yet, the derision that attaches to moving
attends even the goer-out of town, and the man of many trunks and a
retinue of linen-suited womankind is a pitiable and despicable object
to all the other passengers at the railroad station and on the steamboat
wharf.
This is but one of many ways in which mere tradition oppresses us. I
protest that as moving is now managed in Charlesbridge, there is hardly
any reason why the master or mistress of the household should put hand
to anything; but it is a tradition that they shall dress themselves in
their worst, as for heavy work, and shall go about very shabby for
at least a day before and a day after the transition. It is a kind of
sacrifice, I suppose, to a venerable ideal; and I would never be the
first to omit it. In others I observe that this vacant and ceremonious
zeal is in proportion to an incapacity to do anything that happens
really to be required; and I believe that the truly sage person would
devote moving-day to paying visits of ceremony in his finest clothes.
[Illustration: “Vacant and ceremonious zeal.”]
As to the house which one has left, I think it would be preferable to
have it occupied as soon as possible after one's flitting. Pilgrimages
to the dismantled shrine are certainly to be avoided by the friend of
cheerfulness. A day's absence and emptiness wholly change its character,
though the familiarity continues, with a ghastly difference, as in the
beloved face that the life has left. It is not at all the vacant house
it was when you came first to look at it: for then hopes peopled it, and
now memories. In that golden prime you had long been boarding, and
any place in which you could keep house seemed utterly desirable. How
distinctly you recall that wet day, or that fair day, on which you went
through it and decided that this should be the guest chamber and that
the family room, and what could be done with the little back attic in
a pinch! The children could play in the dining-room; and to be sure the
parlor was rather small if you wanted to have company; but then, who
would ever want to give a party? and besides, the pump in the kitchen
was a compensation for anything. How lightly the dumb waiter ran up and
down,--
“Qual piuma al vento!”
you sang, in very glad-heartedness. Then estimates of the number of
yards of carpeting; and how you could easily save the cost from the
difference between boarding and house-keeping. Adieu, Mrs. Brown!
henceforth let your “desirable apartments, _en suite_ or single,
furnished or unfurnished, to gentlemen only!”--this married pair is
about to escape forever from your extortions.
Well, if the years passed without making us sadder, should we be much
the wiser for their going? Now you know, little couple, that there are
extortions in this wicked world beside Mrs. Brown's; and some other
things. But if you go into the empty house that was lately your home,
you will not, I believe, be haunted by these sordid disappointments, for
the place should evoke other regrets and meditations. Truly, though the
great fear has not come upon you here, in this room you may have known
moments when it seemed very near, and when the quick, fevered breathings
of the little one timed your own heart-beats. To that door, with many
other missives of joy and pain, came haply the dispatch which hurried
you off to face your greatest sorrow--came by night, like a voice of
God, speaking and warning, and making all your work idle and your aims
foolish. These walls have answered, how many times, to your laughter;
they have had friendly ears for the trouble that seemed to grow by
utterance. You have sat upon the threshold so many summer days; so many
winter mornings you have seen the snows drifted high about it; so often
your step has been light and heavy upon it. There is the study, where
your magnificent performances were planned, and your exceeding small
performances were achieved; hither you hurried with the first criticism
of your first book, and read it with the rapture that nothing but
a love-letter and a favorable review can awaken. Out there is the
well-known humble prospect, that was commonly but a vista into
dreamland; on the other hand is the pretty grove,--its leaves now a
little painted with the autumn, and faltering to their fall.
Yes, the place must always be sacred, but painfully sacred; and I say
again one should not go near it unless as a penance. If the reader will
suffer me the confidence, I will own that there is always a pang in the
past which is more than any pleasure it can give, and I believe that
he, if he were perfectly honest,--as Heaven forbid I or any one should
be,--would also confess as much. There is no house to which one would
return, having left it, though it were the hogshead out of which one had
moved into a kilderkin; for those associations whose perishing leaves
us free, and preserves to us what little youth we have, were otherwise
perpetuated to our burden and bondage. Let some one else, who has also
escaped from his past, have your old house; he will find it new and
untroubled by memories, while you, under another roof, enjoy a present
that borders only upon the future.
End of Project Gutenberg's Suburban Sketches, by William Dean Howells