FLUTTERBIES.
Mr. Colman and his adopted daughter were fast friends--so fast and so
near that they could talk together about Walter, though but the adoptive
brother of the one, and the real son of the other. Richard had
inherited, apparently, his wife’s love to Molly, and added to it his
own; but their union had its root in the perfect truthfulness of the
two. Real approximation, real union must ever be in proportion to mutual
truthfulness. It was quite after the usual fashion, therefore, between
them, when Molly began, to tell her father about the conversation she
had had with Walter.
“What first made you think, Molly, of such a difference between thoughts
and things?” asked Mr. Colman.
“I know quite well,” answered Molly. “You remember our visit to your old
school-friend, Mr. Dobson?”
“Of course; perfectly.”
Mr. Dobson was a worthy clergyman, doing his weary best in a rural
parish.
“And you remember Mrs. Evermore?”
“Yes.”
“You thought her name a funny one; but you said it ought to have been
_‘Nevermore,’_ because she seemed never to get any further!”
“Come, come, Molly! that won’t do! It was you, not I, that said such a
spiteful thing!” “It was true any way!” answered Molly; “and you agreed
with me; so if I said it first, you said it last! Well, I had to study
this Mrs. Evermore. From morning to night she was evermore on the hunt
after new fancies. She watched for them, stalked them, followed them
like a boy with a butterfly-net She caught them too, of the sort she
wanted, plentifully. But none ever came to anything, so far as I could
see. She never did anything with one of them. Whatever she caught had a
cage to itself, where it sat on ‘the all-alone-stone.’ Every other
moment, while you and Mr. Dobson were talking, she would cry ‘oh! oh!
o--o--oh!’ and pull out her note-book, which was the cork-box in which
she pinned her butterflies. She must have had a whole museum of ideas!
The most accidental resemblance between words would suffice to start
one: after it she would go, catch it, pin it down, and call it a
correspondence. Now and then a very pretty notion would fall to her net,
and often a silly one; but all were equally game to her. I found her
amusing and interesting for two days, but then began to see she only led
nothing nowhere. She was touchy, and jealous, and said things that
disgusted me; never did anything for anybody; and though she hunted
religious ideas most, never seemed to imagine they could have anything
to do with her life. It was only the fineness of a good thought even
that she seemed to prize. She would startle you any moment by an
exclamation of delight at some religious fancy or sentimentality, and
down it most go in her book, but it went no further than her book: she
was just as common as before, vulgar even, in her judgments of motives
and actions. She seemed made for a refined and delicate woman, but not
to take the trouble to be what she was made for. You told me, you know,
that God makes us, but _we_ have to be. She talked about afflictions as
one might of manure: by these afflictions, of which she would complain
bitterly, she was being fashioned for life eternal! It was all the most
dreary, noisome rubbish I had ever come across. I used to lie awake
thinking what could ever rouse such a woman to see that she had to _do_
something; that man nor woman can become anything without having a hand
in the matter. She seemed to expect the spirit of God to work in her
like yeast in flour, although there was not a sign of the dough rising.
That is how I came to see that one may have any number of fine thoughts
and fancies and be nothing the better, any more than the poor woman in
the gospel with her doctors! And when Walter, the next time he came
home, talked as he did about thoughts, and quoted Keats to the same
effect, as if the finest thing in the universe were a fine thought, I
could not bear it, and that made me speak to him as I did.”
“You have made it very clear, Molly; and I quite agree with you: thinks
are of no use except they be turned into things.”
“But perhaps, after all, I may have been unfair to her!” said Molly.
“People are so queer! They seem sometimes to be altogether made up of
odd bits of different people. There’s Aunt Ann now! she would not do a
tradesman out of a ha’penny, but she will cheat at backgammon!”
“I know she will, and that is why I never play with her. It is so seldom
she will give herself any recreation, that it makes me sorry to refuse
her.”
“There is one thing that troubles me,” said Molly, after a little pause.
“What is it, my child? I always like to hear something troubles you, for
then I know you are going to have something. To miss is the preparation
for receiving.”
“I can’t care--much--about poetry--and Walter says such fine things
about it! Walter is no fool!”
“Far from one, I am glad to think!” said Richard, laughing. Molly’s
straightforward, humble confidence, he found as delightful as amusing.
“It seems to me so silly to scoff at things because you can’t go in for
them! I sometimes hear people make insulting remarks about music, and
music I _know_ to be a good and precious and lovely thing. Then I think
with myself, they must be in the same condition with regard to music,
that I am in with regard to poetry. So I take care not to be a fool in
talking about what I don’t know. That I am stupid is no reason for being
a fool. Any one whom God has made stupid, has a right to be stupid, but
no right to call others fool because they are not stupid.”
“I thought you liked poetry, Molly!”
“So I do when you read it, or talk about it. It seems as if you made
your way of it grow my way of it. I hear the poetry and feel your
feeling of it. But when I try to read it myself, then I don’t care for
it. Sometimes I turn it into prose, and then I get a hold of it.”
“That is about the best and hardest test you could put it to, Molly! But
perhaps you have been trying to like what ought not, because it does not
deserve to be liked. There is much in the shape of poetry that set in
gold and diamonds would be worth nothing.”
“I think the difficulty is in myself. Sometimes I am in the fit mood,
and other times not. A single line will now and then set something
churning, churning in me, so that I can not understand myself. It will
make me think of music, and sunrise, and the wind, and the song of the
lark, and all lovely things. But sometimes prose will serve me the same.
And the next minute, perhaps, either of them will be boring me more than
I can bear! I know it is my own fault, but--”
“Stop there, Molly! It may sometimes be your own fault, but certainly
not always! You are fastidious, little one; and in exquisite things how
can one be too fastidious! When Walter is gone, suppose we read a little
more poetry together?”
Richard Colman had made some money in one of the good farming times, but
of late had not been increasing his store. But he was a man too
genuinely practical to set his mind upon making money.
There are parents who, notwithstanding they have found possession
powerless for their own peace, not the less heap up for the sons coming
after, in the weak but unquestioned fancy that possession will do for
them what it could not do for their fathers and mothers. Richard was
above such stupidity. He had early come to see that the best thing money
could do for his son, was to help in preparing him for some work fit to
employ what faculty had been given him, in accordance with the tastes
also given him. He saw, the last thing a foolish father will see, that
the best a father can do, is to enable his son to earn his livelihood in
the exercise of a genial and righteous labor. He saw that possession
generates artificial and enfeebling wants, overlaying and smothering the
God-given necessities of our nature, whence alone issue golden hopes and
manly endeavors.
He had therefore been in no haste to draw from his son a declaration of
choice as to profession. When every man shall feel in himself a call to
this or that, and scarce needs make a choice, the generations will be
well served; but that is not yet, and what Walter was fit for was not
yet quite manifest. It was only clear to the father that his son must
labor for others with a labor, if possible, whose reflex action should
be life to himself. Agriculture seemed inadequate to the full employment
of the gifts which, whether from paternal partiality or genuine insight,
he believed his son to possess; neither had Walter shown inclination or
aptitude for any department of it. All Richard could do, therefore, was
to give him such preparation as would be fundamentally available for any
superstructure: he might, he hoped, turn to medicine or the law. Partly
for financial reasons, he sent him to Edinburgh.
There Walter neither distinguished nor disgraced himself, and developed
no inclination to one more than another of the careers open to a young
man of education. He read a good deal, however, and showed taste in
literature--was indeed regarded by his companions as an authority in its
more imaginative ranges, and specially in matters belonging to verse,
having an exceptionally fine ear for its vocal delicacies. This is one
of the rarest of gifts; but rarity does not determine value, and Walter
greatly overestimated its relative importance. The consciousness of its
presence had far more than a reasonable share in turning his thoughts to
literature as a profession.
When his bent became apparent, it troubled his father a little. He knew
that to gain the level of excellence at which labor in that calling
insured the merest livelihood, required in most cases a severe struggle;
and for such effort he doubted his son’s capacity, perceiving in him
none of the stoic strength that comes of a high ideal, and can encounter
disappointment, even privation, without injury. Other and deeper dangers
the good parent did not see. He comforted himself that, even if things
went no better than now, he could at least give his son a fair chance of
discovering whether the career would suit him, until he should attain
the material end of it. Long before Miss Hancock’s attack upon his
supposed indifference to his son’s idleness, he had made up his mind to
let him try how far he could go in the way to which he was drawn; and
the next day told his son, to his unspeakable delight, that he was ready
to do what lay in his power to further his desire; that his own earthly
life was precious to him only for the sake of the children he must by
and by leave; and that when he saw him busy, contented, and useful, he
would gladly yield his hold upon it.
Walter’s imagination took fire at the prospect of realizing all he had
longed for but feared to subject to paternal scrutiny, and he was at
once eager to go out into the great unhomely world, in the hope of being
soon regarded by his peers as the possessor of certain gifts and
faculties which had not yet handed in their vouchers to himself. For, as
the conscience of many a man seems never to trouble him until the look
of his neighbors bring their consciences to bear upon his, so the mind
of many a man seems never to satisfy him that he has a gift until other
men grant his possession of it. Around Walter, nevertheless, the world
broke at once into rare bloom. He became like a windy day in the house,
vexing his aunt with his loud, foolish gladness, and causing the wise
heart of Molly many a sudden, chilly foreboding. She knew him better
than his father knew him. His father had not played whole days with him,
and day after day! She knew that happiness made him feel strong for
anything, but that his happiness was easily dashed, and he was then a
rain-wet, wind-beaten butterfly. He had no soul for bad weather. He
could not therefore be kept in wadding, however! He must have his trial;
must, in one way or another, encounter life, and disclose what amount of
the real might be in him--what little, but enlargeable claim he might
have to manhood!