SCENES IN THE GOTHAM CARAVANSARIE.
And all around her, shapes, wizard and brute,
Laughing and wailing, grovelling, serpentine,
Showing tooth, tusk, and venom-bag, and sting!
O, such deformities!
ENDYMION.
In Barclay Street, New York, years ago, flourished, at No. 63,
that famous caravansarie of all the most rabid wild animals on the
Continent, who styled themselves Reformers and New-light People,
Come-outers, Vegetarians, Abolitionists, Amalgamationists, &c. &c.,
well known to fame as the “Graham House.” Here, any fine morning,
at the breakfast-table, you might meet a dozen or so of the most
boisterous of the then existing or embryo Reform notorieties of the
day. Mark, we say _notorieties_, for that is the word.
From the Meglatherium Oracle, whose monstrous head, covered with
a mouldy excrescence, answering for hair, which gave it most the
seeming of a huge swamp-born fungus of a night—who sat bolting his
hard-boiled eggs by the dozen, with bran-bread in proportion, washing
them down with pints of diluted parched-corn coffee—even to the
most meagre, hungry-eyed, and talon-fingered of the soul-starved
World-Reformers, that stooped forward amidst the babble, and, between
huge gulps of hot meal mush, croaked forth his orphic words—they were
all one and alike—the mutterers of myths made yet more misty by their
parrot-mouthings of them!
Here every crude, ungainly crotchet that ever possessed ignorant
and presumptuous brains; here every wild and unbroken hobby that
ever driveller or madman rode, was urged together, pell-mell, in a
loud-voiced gabbling chaos. Here the negro squared his uncouth and
musky-ebon personalities beside the fair, frail form of some lean,
rectangular-figured spinster-devotee of amalgamation from New England.
Here the hollow-eyed bony spectre of an old bran-bread disciple stared,
in the grim ecstacy of anticipation, at the ruddy cheeks of the new
convert opposite, whose lymphatic, well-conditioned corporation
shivered with affright, as he met those ravin-lit eyes, and a vague
sense of their awful meaning first possessed him, as his furtive glance
took in the sterile “spread” upon the table, to which he had been
ostentatiously summoned for “a feast.”
Here some Come-outer Quaker, with what had been, at best, cropped
hair, might be seen with the crop now shaven yet more close to his
bullet-head, in sign of his greater accession in spiritual strength
beyond the heathen he had left behind, sitting side by side with some
New-light or Phalanxterian apostle, with his long, sandy, carroty, or
rather _golden_ locks, as he chooses to style them, cultivated down his
back in a ludicrously impious emulation of the revered “Christ Head” of
the old Italian painters.
Here the blustering peace-man and professed non-resistant, railed
with a noisy insolence, rendered more insufferably insulting in the
precise ratio of exemption from personal accountability claimed by his
pusillanimous doctrines. Here too, a notorious Abolitionist, with his
tallow-skinned and generally-disgusting face, roared through gross lips
his vulgar anathemas against the South, which had foolishly canonised
this soulless and meddlesome _non-resistant_ ruffian, in expressing
their readiness to hang him, should he be caught within their territory.
Here the weak and puling sectary of some milk-and-water creed rolled up
his rheumy eyes amidst the din, and sighed for horror of a “sad, wicked
world.” Here the sharp animal eyes, the cool effrontery and hard-faced
impudence of ignoramus Professors of all sorts of occult sciences,
ologies, and isms, met you, with hungry glances that seemed searching
for “the green” in your eye; and mingled with the whole, a sufficiently
spicy sprinkle of feminine “Professors,” of the same class, whose bold
looks and sensual faces were quite sufficient offsets to the extreme
etherialisation of their spiritualized doctrines.
Here, in a word, the blank and ever-shocking glare of harmless and
positive idiocy absolutely would escape notice at all, or be mistaken
for the solid repose of common sense, in contrast with the unnatural
sultry wildness of the prevailing and predominating expression!
But this menagerie of mad people held caged, in one of its upper rooms,
the object of immediate interest. On entering the apartment, which
was an ordinary boarding-house bedchamber, a scene at once shocking
and startling was presented. A female, seemingly about thirty-three,
was stretched upon a low cot-bed, near the middle of the floor, while
on the bed and upon the floor were scattered napkins, which appeared
deeply saturated with blood, with which the pillow-case and sheet were
also stained. A napkin was pressed with a convulsive clutch of the
hands to her mouth, into which, with a low, suffocating cough, which
now and then broke the silence, she seemed to be throwing up quantities
of blood from what appeared an alarming hemorrhage.
A gentleman, whose neat apparel and fresh benevolent face somehow spoke
“physician!” leaned over the woman, with an expression of anxiety,
which appeared to be subdued by great effort of a trained will. He bent
lower, and in an almost whispered voice, said:
“My dear madam, you _must_ restrain yourself. This hemorrhage continues
beyond the reach of any remedies, so long as you permit this violent
excitement of your maternal feelings to continue. Let me exhort you to
patience—to bear the necessary evils of your unfortunate condition with
more patience!”
The only answer was a slow despairing shake of the head, accompanied
by a deep hysterical groan, which seemed to flood the napkin at her
mouth with a fresh effusion of blood, which now trickled between her
fingers and down upon her breast. The humane physician turned, with
an uncontrollable expression of horrified sympathy and alarm upon his
face, and snatching a clean napkin from the table, gently removed
the saturated cloth from the clutching pressure of her fingers, and
tenderly wiping the blood from her mouth and person, left the clean one
in her grasp.
“Be calm! be calm—I pray you! you must some day escape his
persecutions. You have friends; they will assist you to obtain a
divorce yet, and rescue your child from his clutches. Do, pray now, be
calm!” The voice of the good man trembled with emotion while he spoke,
and the perspiration started from his forehead.
At this instant the door was suddenly thrown open, and a tall, gaunt
man, with a very small round head, leaden eyes, and a wide ungainly
mouth, with a projecting under jaw, singularly expressive of animal
stolidity, paused on the threshold and coolly looked around the room.
The woman sprang forward at the sight, as if to rise, while a fresh
gush of blood poured from her mouth, bedabbling her fingers and the
sheet. The physician instinctively seized her to prevent her rising,
but, resisting the pressure by which he gently strove to restore her
head to the pillow, she retained her half-erect position, and with eyes
that had suddenly become strangely distorted, or awry in their sockets,
she glared towards the intruder for an instant, and then slowly raising
her flickering hand, which dripped with her own blood, she pointed at
him, and muttered, in a sepulchral voice, that, besides, seemed choking:
“That is he! see him! see him! There stands the monster who would rob
me of my babe, as he daily robs me of money.” Here the blood gushed up
again, and she was for a moment suffocated into silence, as the object
of her denunciation stood perfectly unmoved, while a cold smile half
lit his leaden eyes. This seemed to fill the apparently dying woman
with renewed and hysterical life. She raised herself yet more erect,
and still pointing with her bloody, quivering finger, while her head
tossed to and fro, and the distorted eyes glared staringly out before
her, she spoke in a gasping, uncertain way, as if communing with
herself. “The wretch taunts me! my murderer dares to sneer! O God!
must this always continue? must that brute always follow me up and
down in the land, to rob me of the money that I earn—to be my tyrant,
my jailor! He will not give me money to pay postage even, out of that
I earn abundantly, while he is earning nothing. He will not give me
clothes to keep me decent, while I earn enough. He will not give my
child shoes to wear, though he is trying to take her from me!”
“That is a lie, Etherial! you know I gave the child a new pair
yesterday!” gruffly interposed the man at this stage of the deeply
tragic soliloquy, while he stepped forward towards the bed. A choking
scream followed, and the blood was spattered over the spread as she
fell back screaming—
“Take him away! take him away! He is killing me with his brutality!”
and then her head sank in sudden collapse upon the pillow, and the
face, which had heretofore looked singularly natural in color, for one
in such a dreadful strait from hemorrhage, turned livid pale, while the
blood continued to pour upon the pillow from the corners of the relaxed
mouth.
The poor physician, whose frame had been shivering with intense
excitement during this interview, sprang erect, as the form of what
he supposed to be a corpse fell heavily from his arms, and with
the natural indignation of a feeling man, fully roused at what he
considered the murderous brutality of the husband, rushed forward, and
seizing him furiously by the collar, shook and choked him in a perfect
ecstacy of rage, shouting, at the same time—
“Unnatural beast! monster! You have killed that poor child at last!
murdered your own wife, whom you swore to nourish and protect! Infernal
villain! you ought to be drawn and quartered—hanging is too good
for you! You saw the terrible condition of the poor victim of your
brutalities when you came, yet you persisted! In the name of humanity,
I send you hence! Death is too light punishment for you!” and he
hurled the unresisting wretch—who, by this time, had grown perfectly
black in the face under the rough handling of this roused and indeed
infuriate humanity—staggering out of the door—and closing it upon him,
he proceeded to apply such restoratives as on an examination the real
condition of the patient suggested.
A short and anxious investigation proved it to be rather a state
of syncope than actual death; and, with a full return of all his
professional caution, skill and coolness, he applied himself to the
restoration of his patient, with a heart greatly relieved by the
discovery that the result he so much dreaded was not yet, and hugging
to his kindly breast the consolation “while there is life there is
hope!” He paid no attention to clamorous knocks for admission and
loud-talking excitement, which the violence of the preceding scene had
no doubt caused in alarming the house. In a short time the good doctor
cautiously unbolted the door and came forth from the room, treading
as though on egg-shells. After leaving careful instructions with the
landlady that his patient, who now slept, should under no pretence be
disturbed, most especially by the husband, until his return, as her
present repose might prove a matter of life and death, he left the
house, promising to call again in two hours.
For one hour the woman lay calm and motionless on her gory bed, as if
in catalepsy, when to a low, peculiar knock at the door, she sprang up,
wide awake, and in the apparent full possession of her faculties.
“Who?” she asked, in a quick, firm tone, as she threw the hair back
from her eyes.
To the low response, “I, love!” she stepped quickly from the bed and
snatched a shawl from the back of a chair, and by several rapid sideway
movements of her feet at the same time, thrust the bloody napkins which
strewed the floor beneath the bed, where they would be out of sight,
and by a movement almost as swift, threw a clean “spread” over the
blood-stained pillows and sheet, then drawing her large shawl closely
over the stained dressing-gown in which she had risen, she rushed
first to the glass, and smoothed her hair with an activity that was
positively amazing, and then to the door, which she unbolted on the
inside—showing that she must have risen to bolt it immediately as the
doctor passed out—and admitted a man who was in waiting.
“Ah, my soul’s sister! my Heaven-bride! how is thy spiritual strength
this evening?” and at the same time, as her yielding form sank into his
outspread arms, he pressed her lips with his, adding, “I salute thy
chaste spirit!”
“Brother of my soul, I was weary, but now I am at rest. I was wounded
and fainting by the way, but the good Samaritan has come!” and she
turned her eyes upward to his with a melting expression of confiding
abandon.
“Angel!” accompanied by a closer and convulsive clasp, was the response.
“What do they say of poor me again, to-day, those cruel wicked people
outside?” she asked, with eyes still reverentially upraised to his, as
they moved slowly with clasped arms towards the cot, on the side of
which they sat, she still leaning against his bosom.
“My good sister, they say what evil spirits always prompt men to say of
the good, who, like the Prophets, are sent to be stoned and persecuted
on earth. You should not regard such. There are those who know you in
the spirit, to whom it has been revealed through the spiritual sense,
that you are good and true, as well as in the right, and through such,
you will find strength of the Father.”
“Oh, you are so strong in spiritual mightiness that you do not
sympathise with the weaknesses of we humbler mortals! I wonder, indeed,
how you can forgive them?” and her downcast eyes were furtively raised
to his. The man wore his hair thrown back over his head and behind his
ears. He drew himself up slightly at this, and stroked back his locks,
then placing his hand with patriarchal solemnity upon her bowed head,
proceeded in a somewhat louder tone. “My simple child—my soul-sister, I
should say, you are hardly upon the threshold of the true wisdom. Your
knowledge of the law of spiritual correspondence is yet too incomplete
for you to understand how entirely good has been mistaken for evil, and
evil confounded with good in the world. For instance—it is called evil
by the ignorant world, for a brother man to caress thee in the spirit
as I have caressed thee but now. The imaginations of a world that lieth
in evil are impure. ‘Evil to him who evil thinks!’ The great doctrine
of correspondence teaches that there are two lives—the spiritual and
the animal. The passions of the animal are in the fleshly lusts; those
of the spiritual are in no wise such, they are in the Heavenly sphere,
they are of love and wisdom. Thus, my caress in this Heavenly sphere is
of no sin to thee, for by and through it I convey to you, my spiritual
sister, the strength of love and wisdom for which your heart yearns.
Thus—”
As he stooped his head to renew the unresisted caress, the door flew
open again, and the man with the wide mouth, the hideous chin and the
leaden eye, stood again upon the threshold, and as the affrighted pair
looked up they saw he was backed by the curious faces of half-a-dozen
chambermaids, jealous of the honor of the _house_, flanked by the
indignant landlady and a score of prying, curious, sharp-eyed faces,
which might be recognised at a glance as belonging to those pickled
seraphs of reform, known as “free-spoken” spinsters in New England.
“There, they are at it!” shouted the man with the gaping mouth. “I told
you so! I told you that Professor was always kissing her!”
“Yes!”
“There they are, sure enough!”
“I always thought so!”
“The honor of my house!” bristled the landlady, striding forward. “I
did not expect this of you, Professor!”
“Madam!” said the gentleman with his hair behind his ears, striding
forward as he released the suddenly collapsed and seemingly lifeless
form he had just held within his embrace, and which fell back now
heavily upon the pillow-spread, which was instantly discolored by a new
gush of blood from the mouth. “I was administering, with all my zeal,
spiritual comfort to this poor, sick and dying sister, when you burst
in! See her condition now!”
He waved his hand towards the tragic figure. “The Professor” occupied
a parlor on the first floor, beside two bed-rooms adjoining this, and
being on the palmy heights of his renown and plenitude of purse, it was
not convenient for the landlady to quarrel with him at present. “Ah,
if that is the case, Professor, I beg you to pardon us. The husband
of this woman has misrepresented you and your beneficent motives, and
accuses you of all sorts of improprieties. We came up, at his urgency,
to see for ourselves, and the shocking condition in which we find her
now, proves that the ravings of the husband are, as she has always
represented them, insane.”
“I’ve seen you kissing her before!” roared the husband, advancing
threateningly upon the Professor, who, however spiritual in creed, did
not now appear particularly spirited, as he turned very pale, retreated
backwards, and holding up his two trembling hands imploringly,
exclaimed—“Hold! hold! my dear brother! It was a spiritual kiss! I
meant you no harm, nor that angel who lies there dying! Our kiss was
pure and holy as the new snow. Hold him! hold him! Don’t let him hurt
me! I am a non-resistant! I am for peace!”
“Your holy kisses! I don’t believe in your holy kisses!” gnashed the
enraged husband, still following him up with warlike demonstrations;
but here the easily appeased landlady interposed once more, to save the
honor of her house in preventing a fight.
“No blows in my house!” she shrieked, as she threw herself between
the parties. “The Professor is a man of God, and shall not be abused
here; shame on you, Aminadab, with your poor, persecuted wife there,
dying before your face! Everybody will believe what she says about your
persecutions now!”
“Bah, you don’t know that woman! she’s no more dying than you are!”
grunted the fellow, whose wrath fortunately seemed to be of that kind
that a straw might turn it aside. All the women rolled up their eyes
and lifted their two hands at this speech.
“What a brute!”
“The horrid, murdering wretch! and she bleeding at the mouth, and from
the lungs, too!”
“Lord save the poor woman’s soul, with a husband like that!”
And other speeches of like character were ejaculated by all the women
present.
At this moment a fresh effusion of blood, accompanied by a low groan,
from the mouth of the suffering patient, flooded the clean spread with
its purple current, and the horrified females rushed from the room,
screaming—
“He’s killed her at last, poor thing!”
“Where’s the doctor?”
“She’s dying of his brutality—run for the doctor!” At this moment,
with a hasty and heavy step, that gentleman was heard advancing along
the passage, followed by a crowd of pale, frightened-looking women. He
strode into the room.
“What now?—what’s to pay?” and his eye fell on the trembling form of
the brutal husband, who had by no means forgotten the rough handling he
had received, and now skulked and quailed like a whipped cur, as his
eye saw the instant thunder darken on the brow of the doughty doctor.
“You here again—you brutal fellow? I shall instantly bind you over to
keep the peace toward this unfortunate woman, whose life you are daily
endangering by your brutalities. Take yourself off, sir!” Aminadab
waited for no second invitation, but availed himself of the open
doorway.
Without noticing the spiritual professor, who had drawn himself into
as small space as possible in one corner, the good man advanced to the
side of his patient with an anxious, flurried manner.
“What can that besotted wretch have been doing to her again?” and he
gently placed his fingers upon her pulse, and shook his head gravely as
he did so.
“Very low! very low, indeed!—nearly absolute syncope again! This is
horrible! How sorry I am that I was compelled to leave her for a
moment.”
“Is she really in danger, doctor?” asked the spiritual professor,
advancing with recovered assurance.
“Who are you, sir?” he said, looking up sharply. “One of these
officious fools, I suppose?” Then glancing his eye around at the
crowded doorway, he straightened himself hastily, and exclaimed—
“Leave the room, all of you—she must be quiet—I wish to be alone with
my patient! Leave the room, sir, I say!” in a sterner voice, as the
spiritual professor hesitated on his backward retreat.
“I—I—I p-pro-test against the impropriety!” he stammered forth, looking
back at the women, with a very pale face, as he accelerated his
backward movement before the steady stride of the resolute doctor.
“Out with you, sir—I will answer for the proprieties in this case!”
The door was slammed in the ashy face of the spiritual professor, and
securely doubled-locked before the doctor returned to the bedside of
his patient.
The bleeding from the mouth had now ceased. All the usual remedies
in such cases having so far entirely failed, the puzzled doctor had
come to the final conclusion that the hemorrhage—be its seat where it
might—was only to be subdued by a restoration of the patient to the
most perfect repose. Sleep, calm, unbroken sleep, to his sagacious
judgment and sensibilities, seemed to offer the sole alternative to
death. He had been impressed by his patient that her constitutional
tendencies were, by a sad inheritance, towards consumption, and the
loss from the lungs, of such quantities of blood as he had witnessed,
was well calculated to fill his professional mind with horror and
dread. The case had thus appeared to him a fearfully uncertain and
delicate one, and this sense may fully account for the stern and
unusual procedure of turning even the husband out of the room on the
two occasions we have mentioned.
As her physician, he felt himself bound to protect his helpless
patient against those moral causes of irritation which he had been
led to believe existed, not only from her reluctant disclosures,
but from what he had himself witnessed. Believing that her beastly
husband was the chief and immediate cause of this fatal irritation,
he had felt himself justified in his rough course towards him, and
was now fully and resolutely determined to protect what he considered
a death-bed—providentially thrown into his charge—inviolate from
farther annoyance, from whatever quarter, at least so long as he held
the professional responsibility. In this resolute feeling, and as the
day was warm, he threw off his coat, raised all the windows, and sat
himself quietly down beside his patient to watch for results.
The eyes of the kind man very naturally rested upon the object of his
solicitude, and after the first excitement of anxiety was over, and he
had settled calmly into a contemplative mood, he first became conscious
that there was something strangely fascinating in the position of the
nearly inanimate figure. He had never before thought of the being
before him as other than a very plain, but much-afflicted woman, by
whose evident physical calamities, no less than her private sufferings,
he had been strongly interested.
She had told him her own story, and he had believed her, thinking
he saw confirmation enough in the conduct of those she accused of
ill-treatment; but the idea of regarding her as attractive in any
material sense, had never for an instant crossed his pure soul. Now
there was an indescribable something in her attitude, so expressive of
passion, that, in the pulseless silence, he felt himself blush to have
recognised it.
Her arms, which he now remembered to have been _bare_ in all his late
interviews with her, were exquisitely rounded and beautifully white,
and he could not but wonder that he had not before observed the strange
contrast between them and the plain weather-beaten face. They looked
startlingly voluptuous now, contrasted with the pallid cheek which
rested on them, and the glossy folds of dark hair in which they were
entangled. So strikingly indeed was this expression conveyed, that even
the purple stains of blood upon the spread beneath would not divest him
of the dangerous illusion. The good doctor felt the blood mount to his
forehead in the shame of deep humiliation as he recognised in himself
this wandering of thought.
What! could it be that one so habitually pure in feeling as he, could
permit the intrusion at such an hour of impure associations? Such
things were unknown to his life, so disinterested, so spotless, so
humane. What could it be that had caused such feelings to possess him
thus unusually? It could not be possible she was conscious of the
position in which her body was thrown. Was there some strange spell
about this woman—some mysterious power of sphere emanating from that
still form, that crept into his blood and brain with the evil glow of
these unnatural fires?
The poor doctor shuddered as he turned aside from the bed, and, with
a soft step, glided to the window, and there seating himself, strove
to recover the command of his thoughts by distracting them with other
objects in the busy street.
The good man was on grievous terms with himself, as he continued to
beat the devil’s tattoo on the window-sill with his heavy fingers. He
felt alarmed, nay, even guilty. He knew not why. We shall see!